Pieces Of The 9/11 Puzzle
U.S. spies knew about `Khalid'--but they didn't know he was here
By early 2000, officials at the National Security Agency had struck a virtual gold mine of intelligence on the operations of Osama bin Laden. Eavesdropping on a busy phone line at an al Qaeda safehouse in the dust-blown Yemeni capital of Sana, they discovered what proved to be a vital communications hub for the terrorist network. The NSA--America's top-secret electronic spy agency--listened in as al Qaeda's top lieutenants passed messages between bin Laden and operatives worldwide. Analysts suspected that one caller, a man named Khalid, was part of an al Qaeda "operational cadre."
But it was only after the September 11 attacks that authorities realized just how dangerous Khalid was. He turned out to be Khalid al-Mihdar, one of five hijackers who would perish in the attack on the Pentagon. And what no one knew back in early 2000 was that al-Mihdar was in the United States when he called the house in Yemen. The content of some of his conversations, in fact, was reported to the FBI at the time, but neither the FBI nor the NSA investigated much further, officials now say.
The failure to discover al-Mihdar's presence in America--and perhaps stumble upon the hijacking plot--has emerged as one of the most glaring intelligence lapses preceding the 9/11 attacks. It is also now a central focus of the independent 9/11 commission, which plans to address the larger problem in the handoff of information from the NSA to the FBI in an upcoming public hearing. "This was very damaging," says Eleanor Hill, who directed Congress's earlier probe into 9/11. "The intelligence community was not sufficiently focused on the threat to the United States."
Surprisingly, government agencies often did not--or could not--trace the location of all calls made to and from targeted sites, even such high-value ones as the Yemeni house. The failure to follow up on al-Mihdar's calls to Yemen was discussed in oblique and heavily redacted passages in the joint congressional inquiry released last July, which described communications involving "a suspected terrorist facility in the Middle East." U.S. News has learned that the "facility" was the Yemeni safehouse, which authorities describe as one of the most important sources of hard intelligence about al Qaeda before 9/11. The home belonged to Sameer Mohammed Ahmed al-Hada, an al Qaeda facilitator who was also al-Mihdar's brother-in-law. The FBI obtained al-Hada's phone number from a suspect in the twin 1998 bombings of U.S. embassies in Africa.
Over the next three years, sources say, NSA eavesdroppers mined intelligence that helped authorities foil a series of terrorist plots, including planned attacks on the U.S. Embassy in Paris and the U.S. Consulate in Istanbul, along with an attempted airline hijacking in Africa. The home also served as a planning center for the 2000 attack on the USS Cole in Yemen. Al-Hada was killed two years later when a hand grenade he was carrying exploded as he was being chased by Yemeni police.
Waging war. The matter remains shrouded in secrecy, reflecting broader concerns by authorities over revealing details of America's most sensitive intelligence gathering techniques. How the nation's eavesdroppers work and what they listen to are rarely discussed publicly, but the two 9/11 probes have thrown rare light on the inner workings of U.S. intelligence. The failure to detect al-Mihdar's presence in America, for example, reveals another flaw in America's counterterrorism efforts before 9/11: The intelligence community lacked a coordinated program to monitor contact by people in the United States with suspected terrorists overseas. "We were waging a war," says a counterterrorism official, "and nobody knew it, including the troops."
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