By Walter Pincus
The Washington Post
WASHINGTON — The CIA possessed disturbing information about one of the Sept. 11 hijackers months before it previously disclosed and could have used that knowledge to prevent him from renewing his visa to enter the United States prior to the attack on the Pentagon and World Trade Center, a senior administration official said Sunday.
Khalid Almihdhar, who was on Flight 77, which crashed into the Pentagon, could have been put on a watch list earlier, a government official said. The list is used by the government to hold up visa applications or prevent individuals from entering the United States.
The CIA in late 2000 or early 2001 received information from another intelligence service that would have deepened their suspicions about the Yemeni national and likely caused them to decline the visa extension.
It has been previously reported that the CIA knew Almihdhar had attended a January 2000 meeting of suspected terrorists in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, but at that time there was not enough information available to put him on the watch list, used by the State Department and the Immigration and Naturalization Service.
However, the CIA now acknowledges that Almihdhar went from Kuala Lumpur to the United States in January 2000, left in June 2000, and was outside the United States when the CIA counterterrorism center learned that in addition to associating with possible terrorists in Kuala Lumpur, Almihdhar had more than once entered the United States.
Frequent re-entry into the United States is a factor that causes authorities to take a second look at a visa applicant. That, when combined with his attendance at the Kuala Lumpur meeting, would have put him on the watch list and prevented him from getting a new visa in June 2001. There are hundreds of people on this list.
"At best, we could have prevented his return," the senior official said.
Instead, the senior official said, the CIA did not tell other agencies, and it was not until Aug. 23, 2001, that Almihdhar was put on the watch list. By then, the State Department had granted Almihdhar another visa and he re-entered the country on July 4.
Sunday, Attorney General John Ashcroft said that better coordination of such intelligence would not likely have halted last year’s attacks. "The information we now have does not indicate that there was a substantial likelihood of detecting this," he said on ABC’s "This Week."
Nonetheless, there are increasing signs that leaks from the CIA and FBI, other government agencies and Congress raise questions about how much the government knew before the Sept. 11 attacks killed about 3,000 people in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania.
The first full-scale congressional inquiry into the attacks, scheduled to start behind closed doors Tuesday, will seek to determine what U.S. authorities knew about Osama bin Laden’s terrorist network and, perhaps more important, why they didn’t know and do more.
Newsweek reported Sunday that the CIA identified two of the eventual hijackers, Almihdhar and Nawaf Alhazmi, immediately after they attended the Kuala Lumpur meeting. The magazine also reported the CIA did not inform the INS or the FBI of the two alleged terrorists, who flew to the United States after the Malaysia meeting.
It quoted unnamed "U.S. counterterrorism officials" as saying the agency’s failure "may be the most puzzling and devastating intelligence failure in the critical months before September 11."
Last week, the FBI drew heavy criticism for its failure to respond to two memos from its own agents in Phoenix and Minneapolis that sought permission to investigate Islamic fundamentalists who were seeking pilot training, one of whom was Zacarias Moussaoui, who has since been indicted as a conspirator in the attack.
The CIA did not comment on the Newsweek report.
But a senior U.S. intelligence official said Sunday that although the CIA had the names of the attendees, the Malaysia meeting did not take on its own significance until months after the October 2000 bombing of the USS Cole in Yemen. The FBI investigative team in Yemen identified Tawfig bin Attash as one of the leading Cole bombing suspects. Attash had also been at the Malaysia meeting.
Authorities sought to find out who else Attash had met with and Almihdhar and Alhazmi turned up. It was not until Aug. 23, 2001, that the CIA alerted other agencies, including the INS and FBI, about the two, who by then were already in the States.
CIA Director George Tenet ordered a review shortly after the CIA on Aug. 6 gave President Bush an intelligence analysis that discussed possible bin Laden attacks in the United States and mentioned a previous al-Qaida discussion of hijacking a U.S. plane.
He "ordered the counterterrorism center to go back and see if anything could be pieced together from the material received from the FBI on the Cole investigation." Kuala Lumpur photos of bin Attash and Almihdhar were found along with the additional visa information.
Newsweek notes that had Almihdhar and Alhazmi been on the INS watch list in early 2000, the FBI could have kept track of them and identified others "given their frequent contact with at least five other hijackers." The magazine quotes an FBI official as saying, "There’s no question we could have tied all 19 hijackers together."
Talk to us
> Give us your news tips.
> Send us a letter to the editor.
> More Herald contact information.
