WASHINGTON — Harry Samit was green. He'd been an FBI agent just two years. He was assigned to a terrorism task force, but in the bureau's field office in Minneapolis -- about the least likely city in America for stumbling across an extremist.
Michael Rolince was a coat-and-tie supervisor at the FBI headquarters in Washington. For nearly 30 years, he'd worked for the bureau, handling organized crime, drugs, intelligence. Now he was running the international terrorism operations section. That made him a regular at classified meetings in the White House Situation Room.
Out in Minneapolis, Samit was tipped that an inexperienced student at a local flight school had plunked down cash to learn to fly jumbo jets. The young agent pounced. The student, a French Muslim, was arrested, and Samit worked desperately to get him to talk.
The matter was duly reported to the terrorism operations center in Washington, but Rolince heard about it in just two brief hallway chats with other bureau officials. The ops center was already tracking 70 threats; only a tiny fraction had anything to do with airplanes. There were at least 100 buildings in New York and Washington alone that Rolince viewed as "logical targets."
Later, when Samit sent Rolince's office a 25-page memo pleading for search warrants, the veteran FBI supervisor didn't even see it.
The time was August 2001, and history was about to drop the hammer. The man Samit collared and tried to warn Rolince and others about was Zacarias Moussaoui, now on trial for his life as the only Sept. 11 conspirator to be prosecuted in the United States. And the story of the new FBI agent and his veteran superior in the weeks before Sept. 11 -- as it is emerging in Moussaoui's sentencing trial -- is more than a tragedy of fumbled opportunities.
And it is a lesson for the future. Much has been done to improve the nation's defenses against terrorism, but the evidence presented over the last several weeks underscores just how daunting the challenge remains. Extracting meaningful clues from the mass of tips and gossip and incomplete information is worse than looking for a needle in a haystack. It's like looking for a particular wisp of hay in that haystack.
Samit and Rolince were hard-working public servants, as were their colleagues. Neither underestimated the threat. Yet both fell short.
