Enemies: A History of the FBI (67 page)

Fitzgerald and the FBI agents who worked with him in New York all knew that Ali Mohamed was working for al-Qaeda. They decided to arrest him then and there. Two years later, he pleaded guilty in open court to serving as bin Laden’s first deep-penetration agent in America and a key conspirator in the embassy bombings. Then the United States made him vanish; no record of his imprisonment exists. He was an embarrassment to the FBI.

“A
RREST THE EMPEROR
”

After all the trials in
U.S. v. Bin Laden
, eleven of the attackers were still at large—including the lead defendant.

Eleanor Hill, an experienced federal prosecutor serving as staff director for two congressional intelligence committees, asked an FBI agent in New York about the strategy against al-Qaeda. “
It’s like telling the FBI after Pearl Harbor, ‘Go to Tokyo and arrest the emperor,’ ” he said. “The Southern District doesn’t have any cruise missiles.”

Fitzgerald did not want missiles. He wanted a bulldozer to tear down “the Wall.”

The Justice Department had erected the Wall to comply with the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) of 1978. For sixty years before that law, the FBI had wiretapped on orders from the attorney general, or at J. Edgar Hoover’s say-so. For the twenty years since, federal judges who met in secret—the FISA court—oversaw the FBI’s surveillance of suspected spies and terrorists. They legalized the warrantless bugs and taps Hoover once had used at will.

The FBI had been left to decide when to share intelligence with federal prosecutors. But it had mishandled that power more than once. In 1995, new guidelines ordered agents to get advance approval from the Justice Department. The rules were badly written and widely misread. The FBI’s leaders compounded and reinforced their misinterpretation. In the field, and at headquarters, FBI agents working intelligence cases thought they could not talk to outsiders—including other agents working criminal cases.

“
Here were the ground rules,” Fitzgerald said. “We could talk to the FBI agents working the criminal case; we could talk to the New York City Police Department; we could talk to other Federal agencies in the Government, including the intelligence community; we could talk to citizens, foreign police, and foreign intelligence, including spies. We did that. We went overseas to talk to people. We could even talk to Al Qaeda.… But we had a group of people we were not allowed to talk to. And those were the FBI agents across the street in Manhattan working the parallel intelligence investigation. We could not talk to them.”

The Wall was a maze of misunderstandings, created in large measure by the breakdown in communications at Freeh’s FBI. Agents perceived walls where none existed. Their misconceptions had disastrous consequences for the struggle against suspected terrorists.

Louis Freeh reported to Congress that he had reorganized the FBI at the start of 1999. Counterterrorism and counterintelligence were the new top priorities. But his testimony was little more than empty words and wishful thinking.

“
Did we have a war plan?” the FBI counterterrorism chief, Dale Watson, asked rhetorically. “Absolutely, we did not.” He tried to push the Bureau forward. It was like leaning on the great monolith of the Hoover Building and trying to move it off its foundations. He called it “the hardest thing we ever tried to do.”

Watson thought the Bureau’s work in Nairobi had been a breakthrough. The intelligence the agents had gathered had opened up two hundred leads against al-Qaeda. He wanted to focus the FBI on the mission.

On December 4, 1998, the headline on the President’s Daily Brief, the most secret intelligence document in the government of the United States, read: “Bin Ladin Preparing to Hijack US Aircraft and Other Attacks.” It was a secondhand report picked up by the CIA from the Egyptian intelligence service, but no one ever had seen anything like it. “Bin Ladin might implement plans to hijack US aircraft before the beginning of Ramadan on 20 December,” the warning read. “Two members of the operational team had evaded security checks during a recent trial run at an unidentified New York airport.” The imputed motive was freeing the imprisoned bombers of the World Trade Center and the American embassies in Africa.

Clinton’s terrorism czar, Richard Clarke, saw Watson as his best ally at the FBI. In his role as chief of the National Security Council’s counterterrorism group, he told Watson to alert the New York City police and the Federal Aviation Administration about the threat report. New York’s airports went to maximum security.

From that day forward, Watson tried to underscore the urgency of Clarke’s counterterrorism campaign throughout the FBI. He ordered every one of the Bureau’s fifty-six field offices to develop an understanding of the threat. But many if not most remained unaware. He summoned agents from across the country to meet with Clarke. They got the full treatment: Clarke’s portfolio was filled with portents of attacks; his standard briefing covered bacteria, viruses, and cyber warfare on top of more traditional acts of terrorism.

The meeting went down in the annals of the FBI as the “Terrorism for Dummies” seminar.

“
There is a problem convincing people that there is a threat,” Clarke said. “There is disbelief and resistance. Most people don’t understand. C.E.O.’s of big corporations don’t even know what I’m talking about. They think I’m talking about a fourteen-year-old hacking into their Web sites.
I’m talking about people shutting down a city’s electricity, shutting down 911 systems, shutting down telephone networks and transportation systems. You black out a city, people die. Black out lots of cities, lots of people die.” He now envisioned the deaths of hundreds or thousands of Americans at the hands of Islamic terrorists.

Clarke despaired of the FBI’s ability to defend the nation. He nonetheless trusted Dale Watson, the only constant connection between the FBI and the president’s closest aides. They shared reports on every conceivably credible terrorist threat.

The warnings became an alarm that rang throughout the days and nights of 1999. One said al-Qaeda had clandestine cells inside the United States. A second said terrorists were going to assassinate the secretary of state, the secretary of defense, and the director of Central Intelligence. A third said bin Laden was trying to obtain nuclear weapons. They came in a scalding and unceasing stream. No one knew which might be true.

Freeh decided in April 1999 that the best thing to do was to put Osama bin Laden on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list. The Bureau offered a $5 million reward for information leading to his arrest.

Throughout the year, America’s counterterrorism chiefs worked with their allies among intelligence services across the world on the extraordinary rendition of suspected members of al-Qaeda and the Egyptian Islamic Jihad. Elaborate plans to kidnap bin Laden in Afghanistan were disrupted by a military coup in Pakistan. Eighty-seven accused terrorists were secretly detained in places like Albania, Bulgaria, Azerbaijan, and the United Arab Emirates. All were sent to prison in Cairo. At the end of November, the Jordanian intelligence service arrested sixteen men and accused them of being al-Qaeda members plotting to attack Americans. They found two American citizens among the suspects, a fact that riveted the FBI and the CIA. Both men had roots in California. One was a computer engineer in Los Angeles who had worked at a charity organization that was starting to look like an al-Qaeda front.

Then, on December 14, 1999, an alert United States Customs agent in Port Angeles, Washington, stopped a nervous twenty-three-year-old Algerian named Ahmed Ressam who was crossing over from Canada on the last ferry of the evening. He had explosives in his trunk and plans to blow them up at the Los Angeles International Airport. The case galvanized the government into an all-out millennium alert. Watson and the White House
counterterrorism group met around the clock. They sought an extraordinary number of FISA wiretaps; Janet Reno authorized at least one warrantless search on her own authority.

Clarke convened two emergency cabinet meetings. At the second one, on December 22, Louis Freeh made a rare appearance at the White House. Among the group gathered in the subterranean Situation Room were the secretary of defense, the secretary of state, and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The record reflects that Freeh talked about an array of wiretaps and investigations. The FBI was looking at people in Brooklyn who might have known Ahmed Ressam. It was working with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police to check out suspects in Montreal. It was running down an uncorroborated report from a foreign intelligence service about threatened attacks in seven American cities. His rambling presentation was the high point of his cooperation with the White House in the 1990s.

On New Year’s Eve, the leaders of American counterterrorism filled the FBI’s new Strategic Information and Operations Center, a $20 million, forty-thousand-square-foot, thirty-five-room command post at headquarters that served as the bureau’s own situation room. Freeh and Watson stood watch through the night. Three
A.M.
came on the East Coast as midnight struck in California on New Year’s Day. The counterterrorism chiefs exhaled and had a drink.

But for the rest of Freeh’s days in office, the FBI suffered a series of wounds, many self-inflicted, that would scar the United States and American intelligence for years. “
We had neither the will nor the resources to keep up the alert,” Freeh wrote. “That’s what really worried me: not December 31, 1999, but January 1, 2000, and beyond.”

“A
CTION REQUIRED: NONE
”

On January 15, a twenty-four-year-old Saudi, Khalid al-Mihdhar, caught a United Airlines flight from Bangkok to Los Angeles. The CIA had tracked al-Mihdhar for ten days before the flight. The Agency had identified him as an al-Qaeda member, by tracing the telephone number in Yemen that the FBI had obtained from Nairobi, the phone that served as a global switchboard for jihad.

He had left Yemen and checked into a hotel in Dubai, where an intelligence officer copied his Saudi passport and its multiple-entry visa to the
United States. He had flown to Malaysia and met
a chemist known to the CIA. Remarkably, the Agency had photos of the meeting, a conclave of terrorists who had worked from the Mediterranean to the Pacific.

But the CIA did not tell the FBI that al-Mihdhar had a ticket to Los Angeles. Nor did the CIA report that his traveling companion was a known terrorist named Nawaf al-Hazmi. The internal CIA cable on them was stamped
ACTION REQUIRED: NONE
.

Their trail was lost before they cleared the airport immigration desk. The two men settled in San Diego. They used their true names on a rental agreement, their driver’s licenses, and their telephone numbers, listed in public directories. They spent many hours in the company of a gregarious fellow Saudi who was a longtime FBI counterterrorism informant. They soon started taking flying lessons. The informant never notified the FBI.

Throughout January and February, Richard Clarke worked with Dale Watson and his counterparts on twenty-nine proposals to expand the counterterrorism capabilities of the United States. The White House approved every one and asked Congress for $9 billion to support them. The big ideas for the FBI included setting up joint terrorism task forces at every one of the fifty-six field offices, increasing the number of Arabic-speakers, and reporting on wiretaps in real time instead of leaving thousands of hours of tapes unheard.

Watson took these ambitions and expanded them into an enormous initiative he called MAXCAP 2005. The FBI was going to become an intelligence service. Every field office would be staffed, trained, and equipped “
to prevent and effectively respond to acts of terrorism.” The Bureau would collect, analyze, and report strategic, operational, and tactical intelligence. It would finally get online and create a computer system to connect its agents to the world and one another. Thus armed, the FBI would establish sound relationships with the American intelligence community, foreign spy services, state and local law enforcers, military and technology contractors, the Justice Department, and the White House in the war on terror.

Watson asked Congress for $381 million in new funds to hire and train roughly 1,900 new counterterrorism agents, analysts, and linguists. He got enough money for 76 people. He presented his strategy to all the FBI’s special agents in charge in the field. Almost all of them thought it was a pipe dream. He went to the Training Division, where three days of the sixteen-week course for new agents were devoted to national security, counter-terrorism,
and counterintelligence. It would take time to change the traditional curriculum, the trainers told him.

In March and April, as the last year of the Clinton administration began to run out, Attorney General Reno ordered Freeh to fulfill his promises on counterterrorism and counterintelligence in a matter of months. “
Implement a system to ensure the linkage and sharing of intelligence,” she commanded. “Share it internally and then share it securely with other agencies.” She implored him to “utilize intelligence information currently collected and contained in FBI files,” and to use that knowledge “to identify and protect against emerging national security threats.” Reno said she insisted upon these goals because “I kept finding evidence that we didn’t know we had. And I would talk to somebody, and they’d say, ‘Well, just wait till we get automated.’ ” At a minimum, she wanted some assurance that the FBI knew what it had in its own files.

The director swallowed his pride and hired IBM’s network operations chief, Bob Dies, to fix the FBI’s computers. The expert took a long look at the state of the Bureau’s technologies. The average American teenager had more computer power than most FBI agents. The field offices worked with the digital infrastructures of the 1970s. They could not perform a Google search or send e-mails outside their offices. “
You guys aren’t on life support,” Dies told Freeh. “You’re dead.”

The Bureau’s information technology systems had to be overhauled. Freeh and Dies convinced Congress to let the FBI spend $380 million over the next three years to create Trilogy: new computers, servers, and software to let agents read documents, analyze evidence, and communicate with one another and the outside world. Five years, ten project directors, and fifteen IT managers later, the Trilogy program had to be reworked, redesigned, and rebuilt, and the software had to be scrapped. Roughly half the money had been wasted.