Terrorist Signs Were Missed, FBI Chief Says
Intelligence: As more "red flags" come to light, Mueller disagrees with Bush team's assertions that nothing
could have prevented attacks.
By ERIC LICHTBLAU and JOSH MEYER, Times Staff Writers
WASHINGTON -- FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III acknowledged
Wednesday that in the weeks before Sept. 11 the bureau missed "red
flags" in Minnesota and Arizona that could have led investigators to the
terrorist hijackers.
Mueller's sobering concession was at odds with the Bush
administration's previous assertions that authorities could not have done
anything to disrupt the attacks. And it came even as the FBI disclosed
that it had unearthed two additional memos indicating that authorities
may have missed terrorist warning signs.
In a 1998 memo,
an FBI pilot in
Oklahoma City
reported to his
supervisor that he
was suspicious
about the "large
numbers" of
Middle Eastern
men receiving flight
training at area
airports. The pilot
said the "recent
phenomenon"
could be related to
"planned terrorist
activity." The supervisor who received the memo did not report the
suspicions to Washington at the time, and the matter was never
investigated, a senior FBI official said.
In a second memo, intelligence officials reported that a Middle Eastern
nation had tried to buy a flight simulator in violation of U.S. restrictions.
FBI officials on Wednesday did not divulge the date of that memo or the
country that tried to buy the simulator. They did say that both documents
had been forwarded to members of Congress who are examining why
the U.S. intelligence community failed to detect the Sept. 11 attacks in
advance and whether warnings were missed.
Although FBI officials downplayed the significance of the two new
memos, they appear to fit a pattern of what Mueller described as missed
opportunities and lax counter-terrorism analysis. Acknowledging that
"we must change," he unveiled an FBI reorganization plan that he said
was aimed at developing a more aggressive, proactive approach to
pursuing terrorism leads and preventing future attacks.
"There was not a specific warning [before Sept. 11] about an attack on
a particular day. But that doesn't mean that there weren't red flags out
there, there weren't dots that should have been connected to the extent
possible," a contrite and sometimes defensive Mueller told reporters in
an extraordinary two-hour briefing. He acknowledged that he himself had unwittingly misspoken last
fall in denying the existence of pre-Sept. 11 warnings.
"The jury's still out" on whether the FBI could have done anything to detect what was going to
happen on Sept. 11, he said. Had the bureau done a better job of following up on leads around the
country, he said, "I can't say for sure that there wasn't a possibility that we would come across some
lead that would have led us to the hijackers."
The FBI has come under blistering attack in the last several weeks following disclosures that bureau
officials in Washington failed to act last summer either on a warning from an agent in Phoenix about
suspicious Middle Eastern flight students or on efforts by agents in Minneapolis to get a search
warrant for the computer and personal belongings of flight student Zacarias Moussaoui, who was
being held on immigration violations.
In a letter to Mueller last week that has stoked the flames, Coleen Rowley, the general counsel for
the FBI in Minneapolis, said officials at headquarters had set up a "roadblock" that prevented her
office from pursuing suspicions that Moussaoui was a terrorist. Moussaoui, who authorities now
think was planning to be the "20th hijacker," was charged after the attacks with conspiracy and
faces the death penalty.
In his briefing Wednesday, Mueller thanked Rowley repeatedly for her critique and said her letter
"points squarely to a need for a different approach" toward counter-terrorism.
Mueller, a longtime prosecutor who took over the FBI a week before the attacks, continued to
insist that no single episode in Minnesota, Arizona or anywhere else could by itself have led
investigators to the Sept. 11 plot. But, he said, "putting all the pieces together over a period of time,
who is to say?"
The Phoenix and Minneapolis investigations were both routed through the same FBI office in
Washington—the Radical Fundamentalists Unit—but authorities say the unit chief never saw the
Phoenix flight-training memo before Sept. 11.
The Phoenix memo, recommending that the FBI canvass flight schools around the country to search
for suspicious Middle Eastern students, was remarkably similar to the Oklahoma memo disclosed
Wednesday.
That memo, dated May 18, 1998, was titled "Weapons of Mass Destruction." In it, an FBI pilot in
Oklahoma City warned that he had "observed large numbers of Middle Eastern males receiving
flight training at Oklahoma airports in recent months."
The agent, described in the memo as being the chief FBI pilot in the Oklahoma City Division, "states
that this is a recent phenomenon and may be related to planned terrorist activity," said the
document, which was released by the FBI late Wednesday after Mueller referred to it in comments
to reporters. Before releasing the memo, the bureau removed all names, including that of the pilot.
The agent, the memo added, "speculates that light planes would be an ideal means of spreading
chemical or biological agents."
Despite the title's reference to mass destruction, the memo was stamped "routine," and FBI
spokesman John Collingwood said it was never sent to Washington for analysis.
Moussaoui attended the Airman Flight School in Norman, about 20 miles from Oklahoma City,
early last year but left after having trouble obtaining a private pilot's license. In August, he traveled to
Minnesota, where he aroused suspicion at another flight school when trying to pay cash.
The Norman school has trained an average of 600 pilots, many of them foreigners, each year since
1989.
A Bush administration official who asked not to be identified said the Oklahoma memo was "very
troubling" and raised new questions about what the FBI knew before Sept. 11 and what it did with
that information. "It goes back to the cultural issue; their mantra was solving crimes that had
occurred, not preventing terrorism," the official said.
Mueller hinted that still more missed warning signs are likely to surface as the FBI continues turning
over hundreds of thousands of pages of documents to Congress. And he said the FBI's failure to
piece together the events in Phoenix and Minneapolis—as well as the warning in Oklahoma three
years earlier and another one in the Philippines in 1995 concerning the threat of
hijackings—reflected inadequate attention to the analysis of terrorist threats.
"Our analytical capability is not where it should be," he said.
Regarding the Phoenix warning, he said, "We should have had mechanisms in place so something
like that goes up to the top." That warning should have been linked by officials in Washington to the
Minnesota concerns that also involved flight schools, he added.
And, he said, "we should have been more aggressive I think here [in Washington] in supporting [the
Minneapolis field agents], and in the future I think we will be."
The reorganization plan announced Wednesday by Mueller and Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft would
deploy a permanent staff of more than 3,700 federal, state and local law-enforcement agents, most
of them from the FBI, to work on counter-terrorism—an increase of about 70% from pre-Sept. 11
levels.
The plan would also create a new Office of Intelligence to be headed by a CIA analyst, and it
would centralize more authority in Washington for counter-terrorism oversight. At the same time, it
would give field offices more flexibility and power to initiate investigations and "remove bureaucratic
barriers," Mueller said. Ashcroft is expected to detail new procedures today for loosening the reins
on field offices.
The shift at the FBI toward an intelligence-gathering agency in which prevention of terrorist attacks
is the top priority will come at the expense of other traditional crime-solving functions of the FBI,
officials conceded.
The war on drugs could be the biggest casualty, with 400 agents out of a staff of 2,500 expected to
be reassigned to counter-terrorism and related fields. White-collar crime and violent crime will each
lose 59 agents, making a total of 518 agents redeployed to the war on terrorism, Mueller said.
Some members of Congress who are pushing for greater reforms at the FBI said Wednesday that
they do not believe Mueller's plan goes far enough in changing a complacent mind-set at the bureau,
but the director's acknowledgment that "red flags" were missed is likely to win a favorable response
with Capitol Hill critics.
"It looks like he's coming clean," said one congressional aide. "It seems as if the Rowley letter has
forced him to change his tune."
Mueller told reporters that he bears responsibility for putting out erroneous information shortly after
Sept. 11 in saying that the FBI had no warnings about a possible attack or about suspicions
surrounding flight schools.
Those comments incensed Rowley, prompting her to fire off her letter to Mueller, in which she
accused him of skewing the facts.
Mueller said he had not seen the Phoenix memo in September when he denied any previous
warnings about flight schools, but he says he now realizes that he was wrong.
"Have I made mistakes? Yes," he said. But despite Rowley's charge, Mueller said he never intended
to "skew the facts."
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