Newsday.com - The Dots Were There, But Weren't Connected

Orignal URL http://www.newsday.com/news/local/newyork/ny-bush0518.story

Newsday.com (quoting Washington Post, 17 May 2002 - colour text highlighting by nlpwessex)

The Dots Were There, But Weren't Connected
By Tim Phelps
Washington Bureau Chief

May 18, 2002

Washington - The concept of al-Qaida terrorists hijacking an airplane and using it as a missile was so far-fetched before Sept. 11 as to have been unimaginable, the Bush administration said Thursday.

But six years earlier in the Philippines, in a case closely monitored by the FBI and the CIA, a plot by al-Qaida operatives to crash an explosives-laden plane into the CIA headquarters, the Pentagon or some skyscrapers was uncovered by local police in the high-profile case that led to the conviction of Ramzi Yousef, the mastermind behind the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.

And if those agencies had forgotten that early warning, a detailed study of terrorism by researchers at the Library of Congress in 1999 and submitted to the CIA might have reminded them.

"Suicide bomber(s) belonging to al-Qaida's Martyrdom Battalion could crash-land an aircraft packed with high explosives (C-4 and semtex) into the Pentagon, the headquarters of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), or the White House," the 150-page report said in September 1999. "Ramzi Yousef had planned to do this against the CIA headquarters."

While these scenarios refer to stolen small planes, not hijacked airliners, some terrorism experts say the concept is similar enough that if this and all the other information available to law enforcement in the weeks and months before Sept. 11 were put together it might have had a serious impact on the plot.

"You probably would not have forestalled 9/11 [completely] but you might have taken action that would have affected 9/11," said Vincent Cannistraro, former CIA counterterrorism chief. "Maybe people with box cutters wouldn't have gotten on planes."

Just two months before the Sept. 11 hijackings, Washington was on the highest possible alert for terrorism, according to National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice. In fact, indications of a large-scale al-Qaida attack had started to appear in April and May, Rice said. By early July they had built to a crescendo.

"Something really spectacular is going to happen here, and it's going to happen soon," Richard Clarke, the government's top counterterrorism official told key officials of all pertinent agencies on July 5, The Washington Post reported Friday. He told other officials involved with counterterrorism to cancel vacations, put off traveling and to beef up plans for rapid response teams, the Post said.

On July 5, the same day as Clark's alarming warning to the FBI and other agencies, FBI headquarters in Washington received its own warning from an agent in Phoenix that al-Qaida could be using U.S. flight schools to train terrorist pilots. According to officials, this information was not distributed to other agencies.

By August, the intense al-Qaida "chatter" monitored by electronic eavesdropping had all but disappeared. In retrospect that may have been a result of al-Qaida hunkering down for the final assault, but in Washington the tension rapidly dissipated. President George W. Bush left for Texas on a month-long vacation - the duration of which raised eyebrows at the time.

On Aug. 6 Bush received a CIA briefing in Texas that mentioned the possibility of al-Qaida hijacking U.S. airplanes.

Bush spokesman Ari Fleisher said Friday that no alarms were set off at that point connecting that warning with the Library of Congress report, essentially because that report was not taken seriously. "It's an unclassified document that's been available on the Web for years....And it gets into how terrorists think. I don't think it's a surprise to anybody that terrorists think in evil ways, in unimaginable ways, and it describes several of the ways."

Not even on Aug. 15, when Zacarias Moussaoui, a French-Algerian who had trained at a flight school and who was later charged in the Sept. 11 conspiracy was arrested, did the alarms go off.

Melvin Goodman, who was a CIA analyst for 20 years, said the newly released information shows the success of intelligence gathering but a failure of analysis.

"It's like a mosaic: You collect all of the stones, but you do have to form the picture and step back from the picture to see it," said Goodman, now a professor at the National War College in Washington. "I think they've lost their ability to do strategic analysis."

Thomas Frank in the Washington Bureau contributed to this story. Copyright © 2002, Newsday, Inc.