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CNN Live Today

Intelligence Snafu?

Aired June 03, 2002 - 10:02   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.


THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
DARYN KAGAN, CNN ANCHOR: First up this hour on CNN, new charges that a pair of al Qaeda operatives hid in plain site before the hijacking airliner that would slam into the Pentagon. "Newsweek" magazine is reporting that the CIA had closely watched the two men two years before the September 11 attack but that intelligence was not shared with other agencies.

Our national security correspondent David Ensor joins us with details on the story.

David, good morning.

DAVID ENSOR, CNN NATIONAL SECURITY CORRESPONDENT: Good morning, Daryn.

Well U.S. intelligence officials are confirming that the CIA was slow to put two al Qaeda operatives on the watch list to be kept out of the United States, two men who were on Flight 77 that hit the Pentagon on September 11. Those two men, Khalid Almihdhar and Nawaf Alhazmi, were among those at a meeting in Malaysia in January 2000. They were photographed there by Malaysian police. In October 2000, of course, came the attack on the USS Cole in Yemen. And two months later, U.S. intelligence identified one of the men who had attended that meeting in Kuala Lumpur, a man named Tawfiq Attash Khallad, as a suspect in the Cole bombing.

At that point, the CIA could have gone back to reexamine who else was at the meeting in Malaysia. By around March of 2001, officials are telling me they knew Almihdhar and Alhazmi had been at that meeting, but it was not done. And on July 4, Almihdhar was able to re-enter the United States from a trip outside the country. Only on August 23 of 2001 were Almihdhar and Alhazmi put on the watch list by the CIA. Less than three weeks later, of course, came the attacks.

Intelligence officials today are calling it a missed opportunity. But they point out that if the two had been kept out of the United States, al Qaeda would likely have replaced them. It did so in the case of another individual who was kept out.

"Newsweek," which first reported the CIA's missing precious time passing on this information about the two men, quotes an unnamed FBI official as saying, "if they had had the clue, the FBI could have tied all of the 19 hijackers together." Senior officials today say that assertion is, in their view, quite a stretch. But clearly clues were not picked up as quickly as they could have been and were not passed on quickly enough.

So in the wake of the controversy about FBI memos from Phoenix and Minneapolis being ignored by headquarters, this will be another intelligence failure that will be getting attention at this week's closed hearings of the Joint House-Senate Intelligence Committees -- Daryn.

KAGAN: And, David, as those hearings get underway and more embarrassing information comes out, the question in the end is, is there going to be any change and any reform in these intelligence gathering agencies?

ENSOR: There's already quite a lot of change. You saw the announcements last week, of course, about how the FBI is to be reorganized. There have been changes at CIA as well. They clearly feel that they missed an opportunity to perhaps stop at least two of the hijackers and who know -- who knows, the information might have led further than that.

At the same time, they doubt, the officials I have spoken to, that they would have been able to stop the hijacking based on this one piece of information.

KAGAN: David Ensor in Washington. David, thank you very much.

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