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American Morning
Information CIA Had Two 09-11 Hijackers On Radar Almost Two Years Before Attacks
Aired June 03, 2002 - 07:01 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.
PAULA ZAHN, CNN ANCHOR: Up front this morning, new information the CIA had two of the September 11 hijackers on its radar almost two years before the attacks, but failed to hand off the information to other agencies until just weeks before the attacks. The latest report comes as Congress begins hearings into the intelligence failures leading up to 9/11, and CNN national security correspondent, David Ensor, joins us now with more from Washington -- good morning, David.
DAVID ENSOR, CNN NATIONAL SECURITY CORRESPONDENT: Good morning, Paula. Well, this is a new revelation that will be getting a lot of attention at the closed intelligence committee hearings this morning -- this week rather.
Khalid Almihdhar and Nawaf Alhazmi, it was known already that they had attended a meeting in January, 2000 in Kuala Lumpur with other known al Qaeda operatives, and they were watched at the time by Malaysian police, and that certainly Alhazmi went straight to the United States.
But now "Newsweek" adds this element, and that is that the two hijackers left the United States and re-entered it later. This would have been an opportunity for the U.S. to prevent these two from getting into the United States. And if the CIA had passed on that information, in the view of at least one FBI official quoted by "Newsweek" -- quote -- "There is no question we could have tied all 19 hijackers together."
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SEN. DIANNE FEINSTEIN (D), CALIFORNIA: I don't think this is the only revelation that's going to come forward. I suspect there are numbers of bits and pieces. They weren't put together. They either didn't get to the all-source intelligence analysis, or they were missed in the process. But I think we are going to find, when we look at everything, that there was a pattern, that there were several bits and pieces, there were several things that could have been investigated had investigation been looked at as a way to go, which it wasn't.
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ENSOR: Now, last week, the focus was on the FBI, questions raised about the Phoenix memo that an FBI agent wrote to headquarters suggesting that they ought to look into so many Middle Eastern men taking flight training in this country, questions raised about the Minneapolis memo about Zacarias Moussaoui and why headquarters didn't follow up on that.
Now, we have this inquiry that will have to be made by the Congress and others into why the CIA didn't more expeditiously pass on the information it had about at least two of the hijackers, that they had indeed attended a key al Qaeda meeting in Kuala Lumpur in 2000, that they were traveling back to the United States. It wasn't until August 23, not long before the actual event of September 11, that the CIA did pass on the information to the FBI and other agencies. That was not enough time to allow those agencies to follow up the leads and perhaps -- perhaps stop the events of September 11.
It is pointed out by a former CIA director, however, that there were people from the FBI in the counterterrorism center over in Langley at the CIA headquarters. Here is how he put it.
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JAMES WOOLSEY, FORMER CIA DIRECTOR: Well, this breakdown should not have happened. Some breakdowns in communications or absence of communications were required by law before this fall. There was a purpose for keeping the agency and the bureau apart. But this one should not have happened. We don't know yet the details about this, and it will be interesting.
You know, one of the reasons FBI agents were put into the CIA's counterterrorism center some years ago out at Langley was precisely so that they would pick up on things that ought to go to the bureau and to domestic agencies when they came into the CIA. So it's not clear from the initial reports why that didn't happen.
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ENSOR: So this is going to be one of the areas, again, that will have to be looked into very closely by the Joint House-Senate Intelligence Committee. They are starting their closed hearings tomorrow -- Paula.
ZAHN: David, I know that they keep on discussing the big how this information didn't get passed on earlier to the FBI. Is there any explanation so far coming from the CIA for why it wasn't handed over to the FBI earlier?
ENSOR: Well, CIA officials do point out that these two gentlemen, Mr. -- if I can call them that -- Almihdhar and Alhazmi, they were not particularly interesting. They were not suspected of being involved in terrorism until they actually attended that Kuala Lumpur meeting. After that, though, the information should have been passed on. It was one of a lot of screw ups, frankly, communications foul ups in the United States government prior to September 11. This is the kind of thing that the Congress is going to have to look at, and the Congress and the president are going to have to make sure it gets fixed. ZAHN: And some of those congressional hearings get under way tomorrow, and we are told they could last through the duration of the summer -- David Ensor, thanks so much for that update.
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