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CIA Tracked 9/11 Hijacker Months Before Attacks

Aired June 03, 2002 - 13:01   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.
CAROL LIN, CNN ANCHOR: We begin this hour with the revelation that at least one of the 9/11 hijackers was being tracked by the CIA as he entered the United States, but the agency sat on that information for months. On the eve of the closed-door congressional hearings, the top Republican on the Senate Intelligence Committee calls that a massive failure, and says more may still be discovered. A Democratic colleague agrees, hard questions have to be answered.

That work gets under way in earnest tomorrow, but the first few sessions of a joint congressional committee will be off limits to the public. On Thursday, the Senate Judiciary Committee is expected to hear from Minneapolis-based FBI agent Coleen Rowley. She's the one who accuses FBI headquarters of hindering a probe of the only 9/11 suspect currently under indictment, Zacarias Moussaoui.

Joining us now with more on what the CIA knew and what we now know in hindsight is CNN national security correspondent David Ensor. David, more questions than answers these days.

DAVID ENSOR, CNN NATIONAL SECURITY CORRESPONDENT: Well, that is right, Carol, and that will probably be the case for some time, I am afraid.

The new information does not show though that the CIA had enough facts before it to be able to finger two of hijackers back in January of 2000, as "Newsweek" reported. It does, however, appear to show that the CIA lost more than six months before putting the two on a watchlist to be kept out of the United States. The two men, Khalad al-Midar (ph) and Nawaf al-Hazmi (ph), were among those at a meeting in Malaysia in January 2000. They were photographed there, in fact, by Malaysian police.

Then in March of 2000, another nation told the CIA that al-Hazmi had flown from that meeting to Los Angeles, California. In October 2000 came the attack on the USS Cole in Yemen. And in January 2001, officials say, the FBI was able to identify a third man who attended that meeting in Kuala Lumpur, Tawfiq Attash Khallad, as a suspect in the Cole bombing. Now at that point, the CIA or the FBI for that matter could have put al-Midar and al-Hazmi and all the others who attended that meeting in Malaysia on a watchlist to be kept out of this country. But it wasn't done.

And on July 4, al-Midar was able to re-enter the U.S. from a trip outside the country. Only on August 23 of 2001, about six months after the CIA knew the two had met with the suspect in the Cole bombing, where al-Midar and al-Hazmi put on the watchlist by the CIA. And, of course, as we know, less than three weeks later, September 11 came the attacks.

Intelligence officials today are calling this a missed opportunity, but they point out that if the two had been kept out of the U.S., al Qaeda would likely have replaced them. Another would-be hijacker who was on the watchlist and could not get into the U.S. was simply replaced by al Qaeda. "Newsweek," which first reported on the CIA's missing the chance to stop al-Midar and al-Hazmi quotes an unnamed FBI official as saying that if they had had more on the two, then the FBI could have tied all 19 hijackers together into one plot. Senior officials I spoke to today say they do not believe that, but that clearly, the possible implications of the meeting in Malaysia were not fully understood and acted on at the CIA as quickly as they should have been. In the wake of the controversy last week about FBI memos from Phoenix and Minneapolis being ignored by headquarters, this is yet another failure that will be getting attention during this week's closed hearings, Carol.

LIN: David, why wouldn't the CIA, though, at some point have at least notified the FBI or the state department about any of these activities?

ENSOR: The thing you have to understand is that there is a counterterrorism center at the CIA. All the information comes through it. And there are, in fact, representatives of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the FBI, in that counterterrorism center. So, there were officials from a number of different branches of government who had the information.

Should the CIA have put these men on the watchlist and put that out in bold black and white to all the agencies once it knew that they were -- had had a meeting with someone who was a suspect in the Cole investigation? Well, yes, they should have. And it looks like they lost six or seven months. There clearly was a failure here, but perhaps not quite as large as first reported, Carol.

LIN: All right. Thank you very much. Those congressional hearings start tomorrow. David Ensor live in Washington.

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