WASHINGTON — U.S. intelligence had information months before the Sept. 11 attacks that an Al Qaeda operative now seen as the mastermind of the plot was planning to send terrorists to the United States, according to a highly anticipated congressional report.
A year before the attacks, the United States had also intercepted phone calls from one of the hijackers to a suspected terrorist facility in the Middle East, but failed to realize until after Sept. 11 that the calls had come from one of the San Diego-based hijackers, congressional sources said.
The revelations were among more findings released Wednesday by a joint congressional panel that has spent much of the last year investigating Sept. 11 intelligence failures.
The report paints a disturbing portrait of a U.S. spy community too hobbled by Cold War habits and myopic policies to fully comprehend the emerging terrorist threat to the United States. It urged a host of reforms, including the creation of a Cabinet-level intelligence position.
"The intelligence community was not properly postured to meet the threat of global terrorism against the people of the United States," said Sen. Bob Graham (D-Fla.), outgoing chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee.
The report represents the culmination of a high-profile probe in which investigators examined half a million intelligence documents and conducted more than 600 interviews.
But the materials released Wednesday -- including nine pages of findings and 15 pages of recommendations -- represent only a portion of the final product.
The bulk of the 450-page report remains classified, and it is unclear whether lawmakers will succeed in persuading the White House and intelligence agencies to release substantial portions of it to the public.
As a result, much of the information presented Wednesday was in summary form, offering tantalizing glimpses of material uncovered during the investigation, but making it difficult to fully assess the meaning of that material.
Graham and others stressed that there is no evidence that any agency had collected information indicating the time, place and nature of the Sept. 11 attacks.
But through a series of public hearings and sharply worded reports, the congressional inquiry has significantly eroded early claims by intelligence officials that the hijackers' planning was so sophisticated, and the plot so unimaginable, that preventing it would have been almost impossible.
