Newsweek Cover: 'What Bush Knew'

-- Phoenix FBI Agent Behind Warning About Arabs at Flight Schools is 'Superstar' Who Found Key Witness in Oklahoma City Bombing; CIA Warns of A 'Series of Explosions Using 'Low Charge' Nuclear Weapons' FBI Forced to Shut Down 10 to 20 Wiretaps of Qaeda-Related Suspects After A Judge Learned of AN Official Who was Misrepresenting Petitions for Taps of Terror Suspects Ashcroft Turned Down Request for Hundreds More Counterintelligence Agents; Treasury Not Hot on Money-Laundering Probes Between June and Sept. 11, As Many As 10-12 FAA Warnings Were Issued to All American Airlines, Major Airports; More Than Two Specifically Mentioned the Possibility of Planes Being Hijacked.

Story Filed: Sunday, May 19, 2002 11:32 AM EST

NEW YORK, May 19, 2002 /PRNewswire via COMTEX/ -- The FBI agent who made the link between Middle Eastern men taking flight lessons at a Phoenix training school and Osama bin Laden's terrorist network was described by one official as a "superstar," Newsweek reports in the May 27 issue (on newsstands Monday, May 20). Kenneth Williams, a family man who coaches Little League, previously tracked down Michael Fortier, Timothy McVeigh's former Army buddy. "Anything he says you can take to the bank," says a former agent.

(Photo: http://www.newscom.com/cgi-bin/prnh/20020519/NYSU011 )

According to the cover story by Senior Editor Michael Hirsh and Investigative Correspondent Michael Isikoff, it was back in July, 2001, that Bill Kurtz, a hard-driven supervisor in the FBI's Phoenix office, was overseeing an investigation at an Arizona flight school and Williams, a sharp, 41-year-old counterterror agent on his team, noticed something odd: a large number of Middle Eastern men were signing up to take courses in how to fly airplanes. The agent's suspicions were raised when he heard that some of the men at local Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University were also asking a lot of questions about airport security.

Kurtz, who had previously worked on the Osama bin Laden unit of the FBI's international terrorism section, was convinced he and his colleagues might have stumbled on a terrorist plot. "He thinks of everything in terms of bin Laden," one colleague recalled. Kurtz's team fired off a lengthy memo raising the possibility that bin Laden might be using U.S. flight schools to infiltrate the country's aviation system. The memo outlined a proposal for the FBI to monitor "civil aviation colleges/universities around the country."

But higher up the FBI ladder, Newsweek reports, an agent's warning is often likely to be dismissed as "chatter." And agents poke fun at the sometimes obsessive quirks of their colleagues. "If a confidential memorandum comes from a guy out in, say Phoenix, the first thing goes up line, 'That's Harry again. He's like a broken clock twice a day,'" one former agent says. Even today, long after 9-11, streams of new threats pass unnoticed through Washington. In recent weeks, for instance, the FBI has gotten specific threats about a car-or-truck bomb attack on an "all-glass" building near the U.S. Capitol, and another threat against a Celebrity cruise ship off Florida. Neither was corroborated or publicized, Hirsh and Isikoff report. Newsweek has also learned of a recent CIA warning of a "series of explosions using 'low charge' nuclear weapons."

While FBI director Robert Mueller is said by associates to be furious over the bureau's internal handling of the Phoenix memo, at the time, little of what the agents in Phoenix reported seemed to make a difference back in Washington. Not only were they not believed, they were ignored altogether. The FBI was concerned about racial profiling. Moreover, it was not used to gathering intelligence, especially domestically, given American sensitivities about intrusive government and civil liberties. And under Attorney General John Ashcroft, the department was being prodded back into its old law-and-order, mindset: violent crime, drugs, child porn, and away from new-fangled concerns like counterterrorism that had become the obsession of the Clintonites. Ashcroft, who has been front and center in beefing up counterterrorism efforts since Sept. 11, turned back a request for hundreds more counterintelligence agents, even as he began, quietly, to take a privately charted jet for his own security reasons, Newsweek reports.

Newsweek has also learned there was one other major complication as America heading into that threat-spiked summer. In Washington, Royce Lamberth, chief judge of the special federal court that reviews national-security wiretaps, erupted in anger when he found that an FBI official was misrepresenting petitions for taps on terror suspects. Lamberth prodded Ashcroft to launch an investigation, which reverberated throughout the bureau. From the summer of 2000 on into the following year, sources said, the FBI was forced to shut down wiretaps of Qaeda-related suspects connected to the 1998 African embassy bombing investigation. "It was a major problem," said one source familiar with the case, who estimated that 10 to 20 Qaeda wiretaps had to be shut down, as well as wiretaps into a separate New York investigation of Hamas. The effect was to stymie terror surveillance at exactly the moment it was needed most: requests from both Phoenix and Minneapolis for wiretaps were turned down.

The attorney general was hardly alone in de-emphasizing terror in the new Bush administration, which was barely six months old. Over at the Pentagon, new Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld elected not to relaunch a surveillance plane that had been tracking bin Laden, and also vetoed a request to plow $800 million more into counterterror by diverting it to missile defense.

And at Treasury, Secretary Paul O'Neill wanted to roll back attempts to track money-laundering and tax havens of the kind used by terrorists. In self-absorbed Washington, the Phoenix memo never made it senior levels. Nor did it get transmitted to the CIA, which has long had a difficult relationship with the FBI

-- and whose director, George Tenet, one of the few Clinton hold-overs, was
issuing so many warnings that bin Laden's global terror network was "the most immediate" threat to Americans that he was hardly heeded any longer. In fact, as early as Jan. 26, 2001 -- six days after Bush took office -- an FBI document shows that authorities believed they had clear evidence linking the October 2000 bombing of the USS Cole to Al Qaeda. Yet the new administration mounted no retaliation of its own.

National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice last week disclosed that during the course of last summer, the Federal Aviation Administration issues several "information circulars" warning the aviation industry of possible terror attacks. Newsweek has now learned that as many as 10 to 12 such warnings were issued to all American airlines and major airports in the period between June 2001 and September 11. According to two sources who have read the warnings, more than two specifically mentioned the possibility of airplanes being hijacked. Together these clues suggest that, at least, U.S. airports should have been on high alert on Sept. 11. They weren't. Indeed, the two airlines involved in the hijackings say they were barely aware of the FAA warnings.

Early efforts by the Bush administration to investigate terror links were marginalized. By the end of the Clinton administration, then-National Security Advisor Sandy Berger had become "totally preoccupied" with fears of a domestic terror attack, a colleague recalls. When in January 2001, Berger gave Rice her handover briefing, he covered the bin Laden threat in detail, and, sources say, warned her: "You will be spending more time on this issue than on any other." Rice was alarmed by what she heard, and asked for a strategic review. But the effort was scarcely mentioned in ensuing months as the administration committed itself to other priorities.


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