WASHINGTON — One day before Sept. 11, U.S. intelligence officials intercepted two messages from Al Qaeda operatives indicating that ''tomorrow is zero day'' and ''the match begins tomorrow,'' but the communications were not translated until after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, Bush administration officials confirmed Wednesday.
The communications, apparently phone calls in Arabic between Al Qaeda operatives, were vacuumed up by the enormously powerful electronic listening posts operated by the National Security Agency, the ultra-secret intelligence-gathering apparatus that is supposed to be the nation's ears around the globe.
But they were not translated until Sept. 12, officials said, prompting a new round of questions on Capitol Hill about whether the U.S. intelligence community missed another warning sign.
Meanwhile, reflecting the continued state of heightened alert since the terrorist attacks, the capital was rattled Wednesday by separate incidents that resulted in brief evacuations of the Federal Reserve and the White House.
One Bush administration official defended the NSA, saying the information could not possibly have prevented the deadly terrorist attacks.
''Obviously, it would have been nice to have it three or four days before'' Sept. 11, said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. But, he added, ''there was no specificity there. It was just a time frame. It didn't tell you where.''
The official also said that in the weeks and months before Sept. 11, the U.S. intelligence community already had a wealth of information that Al Qaeda was planning something, which had led to a heightened state of alert worldwide. But, he said, all indications were that the attack would be overseas, and the vague threat probably would not have resulted in a dramatic increase in domestic security.
''If we had gotten it earlier,'' the official said of the intercepts, ''we would have locked down everything overseas--embassies and military installations--because that's where the threats were coming from.''
James Bamford, an expert on the NSA and author of a current best-seller about the agency, said that if the intercepted communications were between top Al Qaeda leaders, ''I could see where it would be a problem if it took several days to translate that. If it was a lower-level Al Qaeda person on the fifth rung or something, then that's far more forgivable.''
