Terrorist Signs Were Missed, FBI Chief Says

By ERIC LICHTBLAU and JOSH MEYER

May 30, 2002 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITERS

WASHINGTON — FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III acknowledged Wednesday that in the weeks before Sept. 11 the bureau missed “red flags” in Minnesota and Arizona that could have led investigators to the terrorist hijackers.

Mueller’s sobering concession was at odds with the Bush administration’s previous assertions that authorities could not have done anything to disrupt the attacks. And it came even as the FBI disclosed that it had unearthed two additional memos indicating that authorities may have missed terrorist warning signs.

In a 1998 memo, an FBI pilot in Oklahoma City reported to his supervisor that he was suspicious about the “large numbers” of Middle Eastern men receiving flight training at area airports. The pilot said the “recent phenomenon” could be related to “planned terrorist activity.” The supervisor who received the memo did not report the suspicions to Washington at the time, and the matter was never investigated, a senior FBI official said.

In a second memo, intelligence officials reported that a Middle Eastern nation had tried to buy a flight simulator in violation of U.S. restrictions. FBI officials on Wednesday did not divulge the date of that memo or the country that tried to buy the simulator. They did say that both documents had been forwarded to members of Congress who are examining why the U.S. intelligence community failed to detect the Sept. 11 attacks in advance and whether warnings were missed.

Although FBI officials downplayed the significance of the two new memos, they appear to fit a pattern of what Mueller described as missed opportunities and lax counter-terrorism analysis. Acknowledging that “we must change,” he unveiled an FBI reorganization plan that he said was aimed at developing a more aggressive, proactive approach to pursuing terrorism leads and preventing future attacks.

“There was not a specific warning [before Sept. 11] about an attack on a particular day. But that doesn’t mean that there weren’t red flags out there, there weren’t dots that should have been connected to the extent possible,” a contrite and sometimes defensive Mueller told reporters in an extraordinary two-hour briefing. He acknowledged that he himself had unwittingly misspoken last fall in denying the existence of pre-Sept. 11 warnings.

“The jury’s still out” on whether the FBI could have done anything to detect what was going to happen on Sept. 11, he said. Had the bureau done a better job of following up on leads around the country, he said, “I can’t say for sure that there wasn’t a possibility that we would come across some lead that would have led us to the hijackers.”

The FBI has come under blistering attack in the last several weeks following disclosures that bureau officials in Washington failed to act last summer either on a warning from an agent in Phoenix about suspicious Middle Eastern flight students or on efforts by agents in Minneapolis to get a search warrant for the computer and personal belongings of flight student Zacarias Moussaoui, who was being held on immigration violations.

In a letter to Mueller last week that has stoked the flames, Coleen Rowley, the general counsel for the FBI in Minneapolis, said officials at headquarters had set up a “roadblock” that prevented her office from pursuing suspicions that Moussaoui was a terrorist. Moussaoui, who authorities now think was planning to be the “20th hijacker,” was charged after the attacks with conspiracy and faces the death penalty.

In his briefing Wednesday, Mueller thanked Rowley repeatedly for her critique and said her letter “points squarely to a need for a different approach” toward counter-terrorism.

Mueller, a longtime prosecutor who took over the FBI a week before the attacks, continued to insist that no single episode in Minnesota, Arizona or anywhere else could by itself have led investigators to the Sept. 11 plot. But, he said, “putting all the pieces together over a period of time, who is to say?”

The Phoenix and Minneapolis investigations were both routed through the same FBI office in Washington--the Radical Fundamentalists Unit--but authorities say the unit chief never saw the Phoenix flight-training memo before Sept. 11.

The Phoenix memo, recommending that the FBI canvass flight schools around the country to search for suspicious Middle Eastern students, was remarkably similar to the Oklahoma memo disclosed Wednesday.

That memo, dated May 18, 1998, was titled “Weapons of Mass Destruction.” In it, an FBI pilot in Oklahoma City warned that he had “observed large numbers of Middle Eastern males receiving flight training at Oklahoma airports in recent months.”

The agent, described in the memo as being the chief FBI pilot in the Oklahoma City Division, “states that this is a recent phenomenon and may be related to planned terrorist activity,” said the document, which was released by the FBI late Wednesday after Mueller referred to it in comments to reporters. Before releasing the memo, the bureau removed all names, including that of the pilot.

The agent, the memo added, “speculates that light planes would be an ideal means of spreading chemical or biological agents.”

Despite the title’s reference to mass destruction, the memo was stamped “routine,” and FBI spokesman John Collingwood said it was never sent to Washington for analysis.

Moussaoui attended the Airman Flight School in Norman, about 20 miles from Oklahoma City, early last year but left after having trouble obtaining a private pilot’s license. In August, he traveled to Minnesota, where he aroused suspicion at another flight school when trying to pay cash.

The Norman school has trained an average of 600 pilots, many of them foreigners, each year since 1989.

A Bush administration official who asked not to be identified said the Oklahoma memo was “very troubling” and raised new questions about what the FBI knew before Sept. 11 and what it did with that information. “It goes back to the cultural issue; their mantra was solving crimes that had occurred, not preventing terrorism,” the official said.

Mueller hinted that still more missed warning signs are likely to surface as the FBI continues turning over hundreds of thousands of pages of documents to Congress. And he said the FBI’s failure to piece together the events in Phoenix and Minneapolis--as well as the warning in Oklahoma three years earlier and another one in the Philippines in 1995 concerning the threat of hijackings--reflected inadequate attention to the analysis of terrorist threats.

“Our analytical capability is not where it should be,” he said.

Regarding the Phoenix warning, he said, “We should have had mechanisms in place so something like that goes up to the top.” That warning should have been linked by officials in Washington to the Minnesota concerns that also involved flight schools, he added.

And, he said, “we should have been more aggressive I think here [in Washington] in supporting [the Minneapolis field agents], and in the future I think we will be.”

The reorganization plan announced Wednesday by Mueller and Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft would deploy a permanent staff of more than 3,700 federal, state and local law-enforcement agents, most of them from the FBI, to work on counter-terrorism--an increase of about 70% from pre-Sept. 11 levels.

The plan would also create a new Office of Intelligence to be headed by a CIA analyst, and it would centralize more authority in Washington for counter-terrorism oversight. At the same time, it would give field offices more flexibility and power to initiate investigations and “remove bureaucratic barriers,” Mueller said. Ashcroft is expected to detail new procedures today for loosening the reins on field offices.

The shift at the FBI toward an intelligence-gathering agency in which prevention of terrorist attacks is the top priority will come at the expense of other traditional crime-solving functions of the FBI, officials conceded.

The war on drugs could be the biggest casualty, with 400 agents out of a staff of 2,500 expected to be reassigned to counter-terrorism and related fields. White-collar crime and violent crime will each lose 59 agents, making a total of 518 agents redeployed to the war on terrorism, Mueller said.

Some members of Congress who are pushing for greater reforms at the FBI said Wednesday that they do not believe Mueller’s plan goes far enough in changing a complacent mind-set at the bureau, but the director’s acknowledgment that “red flags” were missed is likely to win a favorable response with Capitol Hill critics.

“It looks like he’s coming clean,” said one congressional aide. “It seems as if the Rowley letter has forced him to change his tune.”

Mueller told reporters that he bears responsibility for putting out erroneous information shortly after Sept. 11 in saying that the FBI had no warnings about a possible attack or about suspicions surrounding flight schools.

Those comments incensed Rowley, prompting her to fire off her letter to Mueller, in which she accused him of skewing the facts.

Mueller said he had not seen the Phoenix memo in September when he denied any previous warnings about flight schools, but he says he now realizes that he was wrong.

“Have I made mistakes? Yes,” he said. But despite Rowley’s charge, Mueller said he never intended to “skew the facts.”