Missed chance on way to 9/11

NORRISTOWN - Two years before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, U.S. intelligence officials linked Mohammed Atta to al-Qaida, and discovered he and two others were in Brooklyn. They wanted to mount a surveillance operation to track them.

But when officials asked Special Operations Command (SOCOM) to advise FBI agents of the "Able Danger" operation, the legal counsel shot down the plan, according to U.S. Rep. Curt Weldon, R-7th Dist., dumbfounding those managing the covert effort.

Atta was one of four hijackers aboard American Airlines Flight 11. Being the only terrorist onboard who was trained to fly a jet, according to the Sept. 11 Commission Report, he was likely at the cockpit controls when the airliner slammed into the North Tower of the World Trade Center at 8:46 a.m. that morning.

If the government had been able to arrest Atta in 1999, when the Egyptian was staying in Brooklyn, the deadly terrorist attacks might have been prevented - or at least disrupted.

"But (intelligence officials) were told that, because the men had green cards, they couldn't touch them," Weldon said in an interview in Washington, D.C., Monday.

Before 2001, possessing a green card gave foreign nationals the same eavesdropping protection as American citizens.

According to the congressman, SOCOM had advised the FBI during the law enforcement agency's ill-fated siege of the Branch Davidian compound, in Waco, Texas, in 1993, that resulted in more than 80 deaths after Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms agents raided the compound.

Following the fiery debacle, all the federal participants in the siege, including SOCOM, were harshly criticized.

Fear of suffering the fallout if "Able Danger" backfired, Weldon said, explains SOCOM's reluctance to assist the FBI.

"There was a lot of concern about repercussions, and the lawyers told special operations to back off," he said.

A small group of intelligence employees ran "Able Danger" from the fall of 1999 until February 2001 - just seven months before the terrorist attacks - when the operation was axed.

To link Atta to al-Qaida, the operation's information technology specialists used data mining and fusion techniques to search terabyte-sized data sets from open sources - such as travel manifests, bank transactions, hotel records, credit applications - and compared this material with classified information.

During the operation's life cycle, the group sought help from the CIA. But getting the intelligence agency to share information is like pulling teeth, Weldon said. The agency is notorious for its reluctance to cooperate with other government or intelligence agencies.

"The CIA was constantly balking the whole way," he said. "The agency doesn't like anyone on its turf."

Even after the Sept. 11 Commission declared sharing an imperative to prevent future terrorist attacks, the CIA is still as guarded and arrogant as ever nearly four years after the attacks, Weldon writes in his new book, "Countdown to Terror: The top-secret information that could prevent the next terrorist attack on America ... and how the CIA has ignored it." The book is critical of the CIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) and National Security Agency (NSA) for not doing enough to protect the country against the next attack.

Weldon is vice chairman of the Homeland Security Committee and the House Armed Services Committee.

In the book, the House Republican blasts the CIA for discounting information from an Iranian expatriate, "Ali," living in Paris who Weldon has met with since 2003 and claims is a reliable source. One CIA agent even warned Weldon to stop working with Ali.
The CIA has denounced "Countdown to Terror."

As proof of Ali's intelligence value, Weldon credits him for alerting the U.S. about Iran's advanced nuclear program and cooperation with North Korea on nuclear technology, Iranian support of Muqtada al Sadr's insurgents in Iraq, and a plot in Canada to fly a hijacked airliner into the Seabrook Nuclear Reactor in New Hampshire.

The book's title refers to Ali's unsettling warning that Muslim extremists are planning a massive attack on the U.S., dubbed "the twelfth imam" operation, that is envisioned to be grander than the Sept. 11 terrorism.

Since 1999, Weldon has called for fusing the government's 33 classified intelligence systems so agencies could share information and stay on top of terrorist plots. With help from intelligence allies, he proposed the creation of a National Operations and Analysis Hub (NOAH) for this effort.

He became aware of the tremendous intelligence collaboration possibilities after visiting the Army's Land Information Warfare Assistance Center, in Fort Belvoir, Va., he said, where massive amounts of data was mined and fused to profile emerging threats.

In 2004, President Bush established the National Counterterrorism Center to integrate all intelligence the U.S. possesses on terrorism and counter-terrorism.

But some warn about being overzealous about sharing sensitive material. Former CIA Director James Woolsey warns that sharing information widely across intelligence organizations can have negative consequences for national security.

"Sharing is not an unadulterated virtue," he said in a telephone interview Saturday. "I think it's a very bad idea."

The treacheries of the CIA's Aldridge Ames and FBI's Mark Hansen in the 1990s are two cautionary examples, he said, of damage individuals can do with access to too much sensitive intelligence. Both sold secrets to the Soviets, compromising national security and causing the deaths of sources.

"The idea is to share in a limited fashion," he said. "But it has to be controlled and carefully managed."

Though some find Weldon's hard-charging style abrasive, ignoring an intelligence source like Ali may be as grave a mistake as failing to act against a known terrorist staying in New York, Woolsey said. In the foreword for Weldon's book, he credits him for marching "toward the loudest sound of gunfire" in his effort to reform the intelligence process.

SOCOM officials did not respond to requests for interviews Saturday.

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