NEW YORK, 12 April 2004 — FBI and CIA Investigators probing the October 2000 terrorist attack against the US Navy destroyer Cole came close to detecting the Sept. 11 hijacked airliners plot, The New York Times reported in yesterday’s editions.
“The lost opportunity, described by the officials for the first time in interviews this week, involved two of the eventual Sept. 11 hijackers, Khalid Al-Midhar and Nawaq Al-Hazmi, who fell under suspicion by the CIA early in 2000 but were not put on a watch list of foreigners barred from entering the United States until August 2001, after they were already here,” The Times reported.
The FBI and the CIA failed to intercept the two men because of internal miscommunications and legal restrictions on the sharing of CIA intelligence information with criminal investigators at the FBI, the newspaper said.
The importance of the two men was misunderstood before the attacks because investigators thought the two were associated with only the Cole bombing,” according to The Times.
Failure to pursue leads about Al-Midhar and Al-Hazmi will be a focus of hearings next week by the 9/11 commission studying the government’s response, commission members told The Times.
The unnamed intelligence officials “now say the evolution of the Cole investigation is critical to understanding the miscues before Sept. 11,” The newspaper reported.
No one at the CIA or FBI knew that Midhar and Al-Hazmi were part of a hijacking plot, but their movements were troubling enough that they could have been placed on a State Department watch list to bar their entry into the United States,” The Times reported.
CIA Director George Tenet told the Sept. 11 commission that his agency did not do so.
“What we were not able to do was focus on Al-Hazmi and Al-Midhar,” said another CIA official. ... We just didn’t get there,” The Times reported.
“On Aug. 23, 2001, the CIA directed the State Department to place them (Al-Midhar and Al-Hazmi) on a watch list that banned them from entry into the United States...,” The Times said.
“On Sept. 11, an FBI agent in New York sent an e-mail message to the FBI’s Los Angeles office asking it to begin a search for Mr. Midhar,” the newspaper said. “By then Mr. Midhar and Mr. Al-Hazmi and two other terrorists had hijacked American Flight 77 and crashed it into the Pentagon.”
