Return to Transcripts main page

CNN Live Today

CIA Tracked Terrorists Years Before 9/11

Aired June 03, 2002 - 11:00   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: Back here in the United States, a "Newsweek" magazine report saying that two years before September 11 -- two years -- the CIA had been tracking two of the eventual hijackers. But the spy agency did not share what it knew with domestic investigators.

Our national correspondent David Ensor is live in Washington with more -- David, hello.

DAVID ENSOR, CNN NATIONAL SECURITY CORRESPONDENT: Hello, Daryn.

Well, that story is a little bit overwritten. Let me take you through the timeline. U.S. intelligence officials confirm 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 September 11.

Those two men, Khalid Almihdhar and Nawaf Alhazmi, were among those at a meeting in Malaysia in January of 2000. They were photographed there by police. Then, in October 2000, 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 (ph), as a suspect in the Cole bombing.

Now, at that point, the CIA could have gone back to reexamine who else was at the meeting in Malaysia. And by around March of 2001, officials say they had other information that allowed them to know that Almihdhar/Alhazmi had been at that meeting. But it was not done. And on July 4, Almihdhar was able to reenter the United States from a trip outside the country.

Only on August 23rd of 2001, where Almihdhar and Alhazmi put on the watch list by the CIA. And that, of course, was only less than three weeks before the attacks of September 11.

Intelligence officials today are calling this 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 put on the watch list.

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

In the wake of the controversy about FBI memos from Phoenix and Minneapolis that we've talked about last week, this will be another failure getting attention at this week's closed hearings of the Joint House Intelligence Committees -- Daryn.

KAGAN: David, when we had a chance to talk last hour, you said that there already are changes going underway in both the FBI and CIA, but what kind of changes have taken place that would assure or maybe indicate that something like this would not happen today?

ENSOR: You know, you can't assure it. But there have been changes in the amount of communication between the FBI and CIA. We now see the White House announced that the FBI director and the CIA director are often together briefing the president early in the morning each day.

So they are communicating a lot better than they were before September 11. There have been other steps taken. And of course, there are FBI agents in the counterterrorism center at CIA. But that was true before. In fact, they could have had this information as well as the CIA because they had the people there.

The problem is knowing which are the right clues and putting them all together. And that's where the work needs to be done.

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

TO ORDER A VIDEO OF THIS TRANSCRIPT, PLEASE CALL 800-CNN-NEWS OR USE OUR SECURE ONLINE ORDER FORM LOCATED AT www.fdch.com