WASHINGTON — U.S. intelligence squandered its "best chance" to uncover the Sept. 11 plot by missing repeated opportunities to track two San Diego-based hijackers, according to a long-awaited congressional report released Thursday that documents years of intelligence breakdowns and feckless attempts to penetrate or strike Al Qaeda.
The nearly 900-page report provides a sweeping and damning account -- with plentiful new details -- of the U.S. government's counter-terrorism efforts in the years leading up to the Sept. 11 attacks.
It documents covert CIA missions that never got close to their target, portrays the Pentagon as deeply reluctant to launch missions against Osama bin Laden until it was too late, raises new suspicions about possible links between Saudi Arabia's government and some hijackers, and cites chronic breakdowns in the sharing of critical information.
The report discloses top-secret communications intercepts in which at least two of the hijackers were identified and linked to a terrorist facility in the Middle East two years before the attacks -- information collected by the National Security Agency but not shared in time with the FBI or other agencies.
It sheds new light on the hijackers' activities in the United States, undercutting FBI claims that they did nothing to arouse suspicion once they had entered the country.
And the report produces new evidence that the intelligence community had clues years before the attacks that Al Qaeda was interested in hijacking planes in the United States.
One new disclosure points to a December 1998 intelligence report, from an unidentified source, in which an Al Qaeda operative described plans to hijack U.S. aircraft as "proceeding well" and referred to a "dry run" in which two individuals had successfully evaded checkpoints at a New York airport.
A U.S. intelligence official confirmed there was such a report and said it was shared broadly throughout the U.S. government. But he said that it was unsubstantiated and that the CIA and FBI have never confirmed whether there ever was such a "dry run" at the airport.
The congressional report finds that no agency had specific information that would have enabled it to anticipate the Sept. 11 attacks, which killed about 3,000 people. Nevertheless, the report strongly suggests that the attacks might have been prevented.
