As American Airlines Flight 11 hit the World Trade Center’s North Tower and United Airlines Flight 175 sliced through Tower Two, three people who had never met had their day of reckoning. For years, they had been strangely bound on a collision course: a female FBI agent, an FDNY fire marshal, and the bomb-making terrorist an American judge once called “an apostle of evil.”1 Now their paths had crossed in the greatest mass murder on American ground. Their fate might have been altered if the nation’s primary law enforcement agency had simply done its job. But in a devastating series of missteps, the FBI failed—and its negligence is a metaphor for the danger America continues to face.
This is the story of how the FBI was a hair’s breadth away from catching the most dangerous man on earth, and blew it. It was a failure that allowed Osama bin Laden’s chief bomb maker to inflict two devastating strikes on our country: the World Trade Center bombing in 1993, and the attacks of September 11, 2001. The terrorist, Ramzi Ahmed Yousef, had set his deadly plan into motion years before, and the FBI had dozens of chances along the way to stop it. But like others, the warnings of Fire Marshal Ronald Bucca and the Bureau’s own Special Agent Nancy Floyd were ignored. What’s worse, Floyd’s experience in New York was appallingly similar to the stonewalling encountered by FBI agents in Phoenix and Minneapolis. Ronnie Bucca’s efforts were thwarted because he lacked direct access to FBI investigators, who turned him away repeatedly; Nancy Floyd, who was working inside the Bureau, shouldn’t have had the same problem, but she did—and the Bureau superiors who dismissed her concerns missed an opportunity to bring down the plot years before it was realized.
Since 9/11, the FBI has made significant gains against Osama bin Laden and his al Qaeda terror network. The biggest “get” came in early March 2003 with the arrest of Ramzi Yousef’s uncle Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, who helped his nephew plan the strikes on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. There was some hope that Operation Iraqi Freedom might uncover links to al Qaeda and put the terror network on the run. But even after the fall of Baghdad, Osama bin Laden’s cohorts responded with a stunning series of attacks that demonstrated the abiding power of their network.2
In early May a top al Qaeda commander, believed to have masterminded the bombing of the U.S.S. Cole, was captured; two of his coconspirators were later indicted.3 But arrests have been made in the past, and FBI predictions of victory over al Qaeda have proven premature. At least three times since 1989, Justice Department officials assumed that the conviction of prominent al Qaeda members had diminished the threat.4 Each time, however, the danger to America increased exponentially.
The title of this book is drawn from an old expression in the Baluchistan no-man’s-land of Pakistan, the homeland of Ramzi Yousef: “If it takes me ten centuries to kill my enemy, I will wait a thousand years for revenge.” That pledge underscores the years of planning that went into the 9/11 attacks, and the long-term war that lies ahead. The shock troops of al Qaeda have something Americans don’t—time. Time to dig in. Time to wait us out. Time to pick the next target. The odds are that between the date of this book’s publication and the date that you read it, another major loss of human life will have taken place somewhere at the hands of bin Laden’s network.
This is the work of a single investigative reporter. It was written in the spirit of Justice Benjamin Cardozo, who believed that “sunlight is the best disinfectant.”
In examining the intelligence failures leading up to 9/11, at least two books have focused on the role played by the CIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), and the National Security Agency (NSA).5 Another examined the FBI, but told only part of the story.6
This book focuses exclusively on the Bureau, because it was the one U.S. law enforcement agency that had the responsibility and the knowledge to stop both attacks on the Trade Center. Further, the FBI’s continuing job of containing the al Qaeda threat is key to the safety of us all.
An attempt by a Joint Senate-House Committee to get at the truth behind 9/11 was limited. The committee, known as the Joint Inquiry, restricted itself to an examination of the intelligence agencies, and left out major components of the government, including the executive branch. After a ten-month investigation, the panel issued twenty-six pages of public “Findings” and “Recommendations,” but its full report remained classified for months. While citing multiple acts of negligence by the FBI and the CIA, the Joint Inquiry stopped far short of assessing blame. Its report was considered so restrictive that Republican senator Richard Shelby, vice chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, issued his own eighty-four-page minority report chiding the overall Joint Inquiry for its failure to “assess accountability.”7 Later, senator Bob Graham, a Democratic candidate for president and a member of the original investigation, charged that the Bush administration’s apparent unwillingness to declassify the Joint Inquiry’s full report amounted to a “cover-up.”8 By July 24, the Administration had negotiated a deal with the Joint Inquiry staff to release a heavily redacted version of the 858-page report. But an entire 27-page section dealing with possible Saudi ties to the 9/11 attacks was left blank. One congressional investigator described the report as “a scathing indictment of the FBI…an agency that doesn’t have a clue about terrorism.”9 The final report was so incomplete that its co-chairman, Rep. Porter J. Goss (DFL), admitted, “I can tell you right now that I don’t know exactly how the plot was hatched. I don’t know the where, the when, and the why and the who…. That’s after two years of trying.”10
In 2002, having given up hope that Congress would get to the truth, the organized families of 9/11 victims called for the creation of an independent panel, similar in scope to the Warren Commission established in 1964 to investigate the assassination of President Kennedy.11
After fighting creation of such a commission through the summer and fall of 2002, the White House changed tack in September and agreed to an eleventh-hour compromise with Congress. The deal allowed President Bush to name the commission’s chairman and cochairman.12 But the first two appointees, Henry Kissinger and former Democratic senator George Mitchell, resigned within days, citing potential conflicts of interest.13 In late December the president appointed former New Jersey governor Tom Kean to head the panel, but as hearings got under way in March 2003 serious questions were raised about whether the commission had the proper funding to do the job.14 Any probative findings relating to 9/11 aren’t expected until May 2004, and in its first report, issued July 8, 2003, commission staffers complained that their work was being hampered by the failure of the executive branch (particularly the Pentagon and the Justice Department) to quickly respond in the production of documents and testimony.15
The attacks of September 11 represented the greatest failure of intelligence since the Trojan horse. Each of the nation’s spy agencies was responsible in part, but after an eighteen-month investigation, the evidence presented in this book shows that the FBI in particular had multiple opportunities to stop the devastation of 9/11 and simply failed to follow through. At first glance, the long road to 9/11 is a tangled conspiracy populated by Islamic shadow figures with multiple aliases. To the Westerner the task of untangling the web can be daunting. It’s a labyrinth that stretches for a dozen years across four continents. But the story snaps into focus when one hones in on the real “ground zero,” the FBI’s New York office—specifically the NYPD-FBI Joint Terrorist Task Force (JTTF). Simply put, the Bureau’s failure to stop 9/11 was directly linked to the inability of JTTF agents and detectives to contain the cell surrounding a blind old man: Egyptian cleric Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman.
The so-called blind Sheikh, spiritual leader of two Egyptian hate groups, remains an ominous presence throughout this story, from the bloody East Side Manhattan murder of right-wing Jewish rabbi Meier Kahane in 1990, up through the moment the nineteen hijackers boarded the American and United flights on the morning of September 11. The Bureau’s initial failure to capture Abdel Rahman’s followers as they built the Trade Center bomb resulted in the escape of master bomb maker Ramzi Yousef. We now know that as far back as 1994, in Manila, Yousef and his uncle Khalid Shaikh Mohammed had begun to plot the hijacked-airliners-suicide scenario that culminated on 9/11. Yet even after Yousef’s capture in 1995, the FBI failed to follow up on key evidence from the Philippines that al Qaeda operatives were training at that moment in U.S. flight schools. One Saudi pilot who began flight lessons in Arizona in 1996 went on to hijack American Airlines Flight 77 and fly it into the Pentagon on September 11.
Then in 1996, having lost Yousef once, the Bureau and federal prosecutors became so concerned that he would promote terror from inside his jail cell in Manhattan, that they recruited the son of a Mafia capo in a desperate attempt to stop him. Perhaps most disturbing, in 1999 the FBI’s New York office dismissed probative evidence that an Egyptian-American FDNY employee who was a close confidant of Sheikh Rahman’s had obtained blueprints of the World Trade Center, prior to the 1993 bombing.
Examined in light of what the FBI knew about bin Laden’s stated intent to make war on U.S. citizens, a full investigation of this man might well have focused the hunt on the al Qaeda cell then working in Hamburg, Germany, to perfect Yousef’s 9/11 plan. Evidence now shows that the release of Sheikh Rahman, jailed by the Feds in 1993, was a key goal of Osama bin Laden in launching the September 11 attacks.
Parts of that story have already been told. But this investigation found that the origin of the FBI failure stretches back more than a decade. Previously secret files unearthed in the Philippines and interviews with key intelligence operatives there show that Yousef’s suicide hijacking plot was a virtual blueprint of the September 11 attacks. Thus, it can be fairly argued that if the FBI had done its job in the fall of 1992 and apprehended Yousef before he set the Trade Center bomb, they might have prevented the tragedy of 9/11.
President Ronald Reagan’s CIA director William Casey likened intelligence gathering to the process of building a mosaic. There were thousands of pieces of intel, he observed—little pieces of broken glass consisting of ELINT (electronic intelligence), PHOTINT (spy-satellite imagery), COMINT (communication intercepts), and HUMINT (from on-the-ground spies).16 Policy could never depend exclusively on any given piece of the mosaic, Casey argued; only by standing back and viewing the assembled pieces together could one get a clear picture of the truth.
In the FBI’s attempt to assemble the mosaic on Osama bin Laden, significant pieces of the puzzle were lost, ignored, or minimized in the twelve years between the time the Bureau’s New York office first began surveilling members of the blind Sheikh’s cell and the moment American Airlines Flight 11 finally slammed into the North Tower. As this book will demonstrate, the weight of the blame sits with the FBI’s middle and upper management, which thwarted the efforts of street agents like Nancy Floyd and spurned the outside input of capable investigators like Ronnie Bucca. Further, many of the same SACs and ASACS who were responsible for these failures have advanced in the FBI hierarchy or been rewarded in other ways.
On February 26, 2003, Coleen Rowley, the Minneapolis agent celebrated in December as one of Time magazine’s “Persons of the Year,” sent a second warning to FBI director Robert S. Mueller. In the letter Rowley alleged that the Bureau was continuing to mishandle counterterrorism investigations. She predicted that the FBI would be unable to “stem the flood of terrorism that will likely head our way” after the invasion of Iraq.17 While the capture of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed promises to yield considerable intelligence, the threat from the worldwide network of cells he directed remains significant!18
In May 2002, Director Mueller announced a restructuring of the Bureau’s counterterrorism program, but there are ongoing doubts about whether reforms can be implemented soon enough to forestall the next disaster.
The growing scandal surrounding the misinformation communicated by the Bush Administration prior to the invasion of Iraq is further proof of the urgent need for honest and precise intelligence in the ongoing war on terror. Given the emerging guerrilla war in Iraq and the continued instability in that country, the danger to America from radical Islam may be more acute than ever.
In examining the intelligence failures that led up to America’s first pre-emptive war, two central questions continue to haunt us: how did 9/11 happen, and can it happen again?
It’s my hope that, through the stories of Special Agent Floyd and Fire Marshal Bucca, the reader will come to understand the human price of our government’s negligence—and from that, true reform will come.
—Peter Lance, August 2003