A letter to Congress from an FBI lawyer suggests that at least a week before the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, FBI officials in Washington had a broader knowledge of flight training activities by men with terrorist connections than has been previously disclosed.
Coleen Rowley, counsel in the FBI’s Minneapolis field office, states in the letter that her office, which had arrested terror suspect Zacarias Moussaoui on Aug. 16, was notified of another FBI investigation of radical Islamic men in the Phoenix area. At least one of those men would be tied later to a close associate of Osama bin Laden.
The information was relayed to Rowley’s office by FBI headquarters’ Radical Fundamentalist Unit, or RFU, three weeks after Moussaoui’s arrest, according to a government source. The RFU also was the bureau office that received a memo written July 10 by FBI agent Kenneth Williams that described his investigation into flight training by Middle Eastern men in the Phoenix area and his concerns of possible attacks, a government source said.
The FBI has said previously that top officials did not have knowledge of the Phoenix memo and could not have foreseen the events of Sept. 11.
Rowley’s letter, which expresses her frustration that it took three weeks from Moussaoui’s arrest before her office was told of the Phoenix investigation, is the strongest suggestion yet that someone within FBI headquarters had a working knowledge of both cases, and had acted on them together.
In a letter Friday, the leadership of the Senate Judiciary Committee asked FBI Director Robert Mueller to explain the role of the RFU and its head, Supervisory Special Agent David Frasca, “in evaluating the requests from the Minneapolis field office in the Moussaoui case; what connection if any he [Frasca] or others drew between the two ongoing investigations, and whether he or others brought such a connection to attention of high-level FBI officials.”
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Rowley’s complaints and Williams’ memo will be at the center of hearings by a joint House and Senate intelligence panel that is scheduled to convene June 4. The investigation will focus on warning signs, intelligence signals and investigative clues that were missed or ignored leading up to the Sept. 11 attacks, which killed more than 3,000 people.
Congressional leaders on Friday said Rowley’s letter, coupled with Williams’ memo, present strong evidence that the FBI missed key indications that terrorists were preparing an attack on U.S. targets.
“If FBI headquarters is still handling terrorism information like it handled the Moussaoui case, we’re in grave danger,” said Sen. Charles Grassley (R-Iowa). “This was worse than dropping the ball.”
Sen. Bob Graham (D-Fla.), chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said his panel’s investigation is bringing up “additional pieces of information where clues were given as to at least the form that the attack was likely to take, and in some cases, even reference to the targets that ultimately were attacked.”
Mueller orders probe
Mueller has ordered an inspector general’s investigation into Rowley’s charges and has assured Congress that she will be given legal protection under the federal whistle-blower statutes. Mueller has declined, however, to release Rowley’s letter and Williams’ memo.
The director said earlier that the FBI had done all it could in the Moussaoui case before Sept. 11, a statement that government sources say angered Rowley, prompting her to write a letter laying out the problems the Minneapolis office had encountered.
Mueller appeared before Senate and House committees earlier this week to explain the FBI’s failures. During one closed-door session, Mueller acknowledged that he “may not have had all of the facts” about the Moussaoui investigation, according to a source who was present.
The FBI on Friday declined to discuss the contents of Rowley’s letter and the role that the Radical Fundamentalist Unit and Frasca may have played in the Moussaoui and Phoenix investigations.
Broader questions
Harvey Rishikof, a former legal counsel at the FBI, said that singling out Frasca will not help answer questions about the law-enforcement failures that occurred before the attacks.
“This is not a time to pin the tail on the donkey,” Rishikof said. “This is a time to think about the structures embedded in the intelligence community and what kind of changes we need to connect the dots, to use the famous phrase that everybody is using.”
Rowley argues in her letter that her office was trying to connect those dots but that the FBI’s bureaucracy thwarted those efforts, according to a government source who has reviewed the letter.
The letter catalogs the “roadblocks” thrown up during an investigation of Moussaoui, a French citizen of Moroccan descent who was arrested Aug. 16 on an immigration charge. He is facing trial on charges that he was an accomplice to the Sept. 11 hijackers.
Problems with headquarters
A government source who has reviewed Rowley’s letter said it describes how the Minneapolis agents ran afoul of FBI headquarters when they applied for a special national security search warrant to examine the contents of a laptop computer that Moussaoui used.
Such requests must be sent to FBI headquarters, approved by the National Security Legal Unit and then forwarded to a special panel within the Justice Department for approval.
In this case, Rowley wrote, officials at headquarters rewrote the Moussaoui search warrant request, taking out crucial information and altering it to such a degree that the FBI legal unit declined it, the source said.
The agents searched the laptop’s contents only after the Sept. 11 attacks. Ultimately, the FBI found evidence on the computer linking Moussaoui to an Al Qaeda operative in Singapore who, also after the attacks, was tied to at least one of the Sept. 11 conspirators, a source said Friday.