WASHINGTON — A chilling new detail of U.S. intelligence failures emerged Thursday, when the Justice Department disclosed that about 20 months before the Sept. 11 attacks, a CIA official had blocked a memo intended to alert the FBI that two known Al Qaeda operatives had entered the country.
The two men were among the 19 hijackers who crashed airliners into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and a field in Pennsylvania.
For The Record
Los Angeles Times Wednesday June 15, 2005 Home Edition Main News Part A Page 2 National Desk 3 inches; 102 words Type of Material: Correction
Justice Department report -- An article in Friday's Section A about a Justice Department report on FBI intelligence lapses before the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks incorrectly said former CIA Director George J. Tenet commented on the report by attributing "the CIA's failure to turn over information about [two hijackers] to his agents' being overwhelmed, exhausted and understaffed." Tenet did not speak to The Times or make any public statements in response to the report. The article referred to previous congressional testimony in which Tenet had cited exhaustion and understaffing, as well as poor training and uneven standards, as contributing to agency lapses.
If the FBI had received the official communique from the CIA's special Osama bin Laden unit when it was ready for transmittal in January 2000, its agents likely could have tracked down the men, according to U.S. intelligence officials familiar with a newly declassified report of the Justice Department's inspector general.
Officials involved in the case of alleged would-be hijacker Zacarias Moussaoui had attempted to block release of the report, asserting that it would compromise the outcome of his case. But Inspector General Glenn A. Fine went to court and won release of the report after deleting the section on Moussaoui.
The report does not draw major new conclusions or disclose significant new episodes about the months and years leading up to Sept. 11. Rather, it fills in blanks and provides new details about previously known matters -- notably the failure to learn sooner about Nawaf Alhazmi and Khalid Almihdhar, the so-called San Diego hijackers.
An 18-month delay in the CIA's handing over of information about the two hijackers to the FBI and other domestic law enforcement agencies had been well-publicized. But the report's conclusion that an agent had written a memo specifically designed for transmittal to the FBI to alert the bureau to the men's presence -- and that a supervisor deliberately had prevented it from being sent -- is new.
The reason the CIA official, identified by the fictitious name "John," put a hold on the communique remains a mystery, the report said. It said the officials involved didn't recall the incident. Even when the author of the memo followed up a week later with an e-mail asking if it had been sent to the FBI, nothing was done.
The memo was written by an FBI agent on assignment to the CIA's special Bin Laden unit. According to the report, rather than send his memo directly to the FBI, he sent it to the deputy chief of the CIA unit because only supervisors were authorized to send such memos to the FBI.
