Author: William Arkin

26 October 2000

Posted on by William Arkin

 

The Military Intelligence Board (MIB) meets and discusses the issue of “need to know.”

The board (made up of senior directors of the Defense Department intelligence components) coordinates activities of the defense intelligence community, sets policies, and coordinates allocation of intelligence assets.

According to the Joint Inquiry into Intelligence Community Activities Before and After the Terrorist Attacks of September 11, 2001, a top secret-level Senate Intelligence Committee inquiry, the DIA representative said that most of military intelligence had moved away from “need to know,” the doctrine of restricting the circulation of intelligence, even inside classified systems, to protect “sources and methods” regarding the origins of the intelligence. In most cases, this also facilitated the creation of then emerging networks and information architectures that allowed analysts to openly share information, or at least to query other-agency databanks, to find intelligence hidden within the vast American collection machine.

The board took note of that fundamental difference with the CIA, which adhered to the principle of need to know “as a foundation” and rarely shared raw intelligence with the defense agencies. According to the partially declassified Joint Inquiry, “the DIA attendee concluded that the defense intelligence community would not be able to bridge the gap with CIA on this information sharing issue.”

It was an important pre-9/11 discussion because, after the attacks, the CIA and FBI blamed “The Wall” between intelligence and law enforcement—a Clinton administration rule—that sought not to contaminate investigative material so that it was unusable in a court of law, and also segregated intelligence that could not be divulged in court from influencing an investigation if the intelligence could not be part of grand jury and legal proceedings.

Both agencies used The Wall to justify not sharing, but that was never its intent, particularly when it came to time sensitive information that was immediate use, such as in stopping a terrorist attack. Lost in the post-9/11 blame game was the cultural reason for not sharing.

25 October 2000

Posted on by William Arkin

 

The Washington Times reports that the NSA issued a top-secret intelligence report on the day the destroyer USS Cole was attacked in Yemen—the alert warning that terrorists were planning an attack against the United States in the Middle East. It isn’t the first (or last) time that NSA was implicated in possessing intelligence that provided tactical warning but never got disseminated in time or sent to the right people.

Bill Gertz reports that the NSA report was not dispatched until several hours after the bombing. The report, according to officials who were familiar with the top-secret intelligence, stated that unidentified terrorists were involved in “operational planning” for an attack on U.S. or Israeli personnel or property in the Middle East. One official said the warning was specific as to an attack in Yemen. Rep. Curt Weldon, a Pennsylvania Republican and a senior member of the House Armed Services Committee, agreed that the NSA report was specific. He investigated the NSA warning and later told Gertz that the warning “related specifically to Yemen.” (Breakdown, p. 51)

Is it true? What’s more important is that through 9/11 (and about 9/11) we just don’t know what intelligence NSA possessed or reported because the signals intelligence (SIGINT) agency evades deep scrutiny, even after disasters. And history is distorted, at least U.S. history, by the absence of much information on the substance of intelligence reporting: what the IC knows, what subject matters it collects on, what happens to the intelligence. Intelligence leaders are always ready to boast that intelligence on this and that saved lives, but the substance is really a black hole.

24 October 2000

Posted on by William Arkin
Madeleine Albright visits Kim Jong Il

 

In the category of nothing ever changes… Secretary of State Madeleine Albright concludes a two-day visit to Pyongyang, North Korea, meeting with Kim Jong Il, the father of Kim Jong Un. During the visit, Kim tells her that North Korea would not further test its Taepo Dong-1 long-range missile. In addition to discussing Pyongyang’s indigenous missile production, the talks cover North Korean missile technology exports, and greater nuclear transparency.

On the agenda also are the carrot of the normalization of relations and a possible trip by President Bill Clinton to Pyongyang before he leaves office.

In the final presidential debate of the 2020 election season, former Vice President Joe Biden and President Trump traded barbs over North Korea, Biden criticizing Trump for being too chummy with Kim. Trump shot back that the Obama administration had watched North Korea develop its nuclear weapons and missiles without doing much, failing as well to secure a meeting.

Biden shot back: “We had a good relationship with Hitler before he, in fact, invaded the rest of Europe. The reason [Kim] wouldn’t meet with President Obama is because [Obama] said we’re going to talk about denuclearization.”

Biden and company continue to argue that pursuing denuclearization makes no sense because… because it’s not going to happen. “What has he done?” Biden said of Trump. “He’s legitimized North Korea…” And yet that’s been the American endeavor for decades, and not only that, but backwater North Korea has learned that nuclear weapons earn it a place in American foreign policy—as much an incentive as any other to be a nuclear power.

As for the connection to 9/11, the attacks completely took the American eye off the peninsula and North Korea went on to test its first nuclear device on October 9, 2006, while the Bush administration was amidst the worst phase of violence in Iraq and still aggressively pursuing the war against al Qaeda and the Taliban.

23 October 1983

Posted on by William Arkin
U.S. Marine Corps barracks at the Beirut Airport after a terrorist attack

 

The age of mega terrorism begins in Lebanon. Using massive truck bombs, Hizballah simultaneously attacks the U.S. Marine Corps Barracks at the Beirut Airport and a housing complex for French paratroopers in West Beirut. The blasts kill 241 Marines and 58 French paratroopers.

At approximate 6:22 AM, a large truck laden with explosives equivalent to 12,000 pounds of TNT crashed through barbed wire and concertina fencing of the U.S. compound at Beirut International Airport and detonated at the front entrance to the Marine Battalion Landing Team Headquarters. The truck penetrated the obstacles, passed between guard positions six and seven without being engaged, entered an open gate, passed around one sewer pipe obstacle and between two others, flattened the sergeant-of-the guard booth, and entered the interior of the lobby by passing through the main entrance, and then exploded. The force of the explosion destroyed the building.

FBI forensic laboratory investigators later described the blast as the largest conventional blast ever seen by their community. Just in April, another attack had destroyed the U.S. embassy.

The bombings successfully caused the removal of the multinational force, in particular the U.S. contingent, from Lebanon. The government of Iran and Syria were ultimately implicated in the attack. That’s almost 40 years ago. Some things never change.

George H.W. Bush at the Beirut Airport after a terrorist attack

22 October 2000

Posted on by William Arkin
Ali Abdullah Saleh & George W. Bush

 

The government in Yemen stonewalls after the attack on the USS Cole (see October 12), thereby confusing the collection of “evidence” that al Qaeda is responsible and impeding retaliation. There are many reasons—the election voting standoff between Bush and Gore, an impending change in administrations, disbelief in al Qaeda, and skepticism about the value of cruise missile attacks—that also ultimately stand in the way of an American “response,” but Yemen’s foot-dragging, and even lying, has a major impact.

Within the first weeks after the Cole attack, the Yemenis arrest two key figures in the attack. But they forbid the FBI investigators on the ground from participating in the interrogations. President Clinton, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, and CIA Director George Tenet all intervene to try to help but Yemen doesn’t budge. Ultimately, the 911 Commission concludes that because information from the suspects comes in that is secondhand, the U.S. could not make its own assessment of its reliability (911 Commission, p. 192).

Yemen would continue to be a haven for al Qaeda, even after 9/11. It would take the Arab Spring—and not anything about the American global war on terror—to finally unseat the first and only president of the country, Ali Abdullah Saleh. That has been followed by a never-ending civil war and Saudi (and Gulf state) intervention, turning the country into a humanitarian disaster and a basket case. Saleh was killed by a sniper in December 2017.

21 October 1998

Posted on by William Arkin

 

President Bill Clinton signs Presidential Decision Directive (PDD) 67, Enduring Constitutional Government and Continuity of Government Operations, the first major post-Cold War re-articulation of plans for survival of the presidency and continuity of the federal government.

PDD-67 covers president continuity of government, enduring constitutional government (ECG—which relates to presidential successors outside the executive branch and continuity of Congress and the Supreme Court), and continuity of operations planning (COOP—which applies to the day-to-day business operations of non-national security agencies of the government). PDD-67 states that the purpose of enduring constitutional government (ECG), continuity of government (COG), and continuity of operations (COOP) is to ensure survival of a constitutional form of government and the continuity of essential federal functions. The directive requires every federal department and agency to submit a new COG plan.

PDD-67 replaced the Bush administration’s National Security Directive 69 (NSD-69), Enduring Constitutional Government of 2 June 1992, which in turn succeeded NSD-37, Enduring Constitutional Government, 18 April 1990 and National Security Decision Directive (NSDD) 55, Enduring National Leadership, 14 September 1982.

President Clinton’s new directive moves the COG system further away from sole preparation for nuclear war towards a day-to-day posture that also does not rely upon underground bunkers. But it does “require” evacuation of presidential successors when a continuity event is declared, measures that would be ignored both on 9/11 and during the 2020 Covid-19 pandemic.

20 October 2000

Posted on by William Arkin
Ali Mohammed

 

Ali Mohammed pleads guilty. Surely one of the strangest sub-plots of 9/11.

Mohammed was the only al Qaeda operative known to have successfully infiltrated the U.S. military and intelligence community before 9/11. Along the way, he was an Egyptian Army officer who learned to speak English and Hebrew, attended foreign officer training at Ft. Bragg, was recruited by the CIA, joined Egyptian Islamic Jihad (EIJ) led by Ayman al-Zawahiri, was dropped by the CIA, entered the U.S. despite being on a watchlist and again was engaged by the CIA, married an American woman and moved to California, enlisted in the U.S. Army, joined special forces back at Ft. Bragg, taught Middle East and radicalism courses to the Army, took leave to go and fight in Afghanistan, returned to the Army and secretly trained radicals in New York who were later implicated for the November 1990 assassination of Rabbi Meir Kahane, wrote the al Qaeda training manual “Military Studies in the Jihad Against the Tyrants,” got an honorable discharge from the Army (after all that), joined the Army Reserve, continued work for al Qaeda from his home in Santa Clara, California, became an informant to the FBI, helped Osama bin Laden leave Afghanistan in 1991, worked to settle bin Laden in Sudan, trained al Qaeda recruits, returned to Afghanistan to provide explosives and tradecraft training, helped to set up the al Qaeda cell in Kenya that would blow up the Embassy in 1998, hosted Zawahiri on a fundraising tour of American mosques, continued to work for the FBI, provided Army intelligence with information on camps in Afghanistan, fought with fighters loyal to Farah Aideed in Somalia, scouted targets for bin Laden in Kenya and Tanzania, helped bin Laden move back to Afghanistan, was secretly arrested after the African embassy bombings, and becomes an informant (again) for the government.

In October 2000, Mohamed entered a guilty plea on five counts of conspiracy. Thereafter in custody, Ali Mohammed’s life was a bit of a mystery, supposedly never sentenced and after 9/11, again a source for the CIA and FBI.

19 October 2000

Posted on by William Arkin
Zacarias Moussaoui

 

A Frenchmen named Zacarias Moussaoui (who was arrested on August 16, 2001 in Minnesota and considered by many to be the “20th” 9/11 hijacker) shows up in Malaysia and stays at the same condo that Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi stayed at in January before they flew to the U.S. (At the time, Malaysian police surveilled the condo and shared information with the CIA about the mysterious arrival of two jihadis.)

The CIA had already concluded that the owner of the condo, Yazid Sufaat, was associated with al Qaeda, but the January trip had been forgotten by October and Sufaat was no longer being watched. He provides Moussaoui with fake identification papers in anticipation of his undertaking flight training in Malaysia. According to the 9/11 Commission Report (p. 225), Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM) was dissatisfied with Moussaoui’s own terrorist plotting and recalled him to Pakistan, then directing him to go to the United States for flight training.

Moussaoui then received fake papers from Infocus Tech, a Malaysian company, stating that he was appointed Infocus Tech’s marketing consultant in the United States. He arrives in the U.S. in the beginning of 2001 and starts flight training in Norman, Oklahoma.

Moussaoui was a student at Airman Flight School until May 2001 but he is not believed to ever have actually crossed paths with any of the 9/11 hijackers. His initial arrest a month before 9/11 was for immigration violations, not terrorism related. Had the FBI or the intelligence community (IC) been able to “connect the dots”—al Qaeda connections, training in Afghanistan, direction from KSM, the same condo in Malaysia, flight school in the U.S.—perhaps the 9/11 plot could have been unraveled. The conventional history of 9/11 is that legal constraints impeded the sharing of information and that structural deficiencies in organization were to blame for very narrow mistakes made in Washington and around the IC. The truth is that incompetence, sloth, and disbelief masked the connections, only discovered after 9/11.

18 October 1992

Posted on by William Arkin

 

Osama … we hardly knew you. Osama Bassnan, a Saudi government intelligence officer according to the FBI, throws a Washington, DC party for Omar Abdel Rahman, “the Blind Sheikh,” who is now living in New York. This is four months before the first bombing of the World Trade Center and well before there was much recognition of al Qaeda or Osama bin Laden.

An FBI asset is at the party, and according to the famed “28 pages” (the deleted material from the 9/11 Commission report that is finally released in 2016), Bassnan “made many laudatory remarks … about bin Ladin [sic], referring to Bin Ladin as … the ruler of the Islamic world.” According to the FBI asset, Bassnan spoke of Bin Laden “as if he were a god.” He also stated that he heard that the U.S. government had stopped approving visas for students from the Middle East. He said that such measures were insufficient to stop Islam because there were already “enough Muslims in the United States to destroy the United States and make it an Islamic state within ten to fifteen years.”

In May 1992, according to former Sen. Bob Graham (Intelligence Matters, pp. 24-25), the State Department provided the FBI “with a box of documents recovered from an abandoned car.” In the box are a number of letters addressed to Osama Bassnan, a “Saudi spy … [later] suspected of being groomed to replace [Omar] al-Bayoumi in San Diego.” Graham says “the FBI did not open an investigation,” even after the October party.

Omar al-Bayoumi, another Saudi intelligence officer, “meets” the first two hijackers to enter the United States—Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi—the would be pilots who arrived in Los Angeles and were helped by Bayoumi to settle in in San Diego. Bassnan would go on to live in the same apartment complex at Mihdhar and al-Hazmi. Both Bassnan and Bayoumi would disappear before 9/11, and though Bayoumi was interviewed in Saudi Arabia by Commission staffers, their involvement in 9/11 remained shrouded in secret.

17 October 2000

Posted on by William Arkin
Hamza al Ghamdi

 

Hamza al Ghamdi, a Saudi and one of the “musclemen” on UA Flight 175 that hit the Pentagon, applies for and receives a two-year B-1/B-2 (tourist/business) visa in Saudi Arabia. Typical of the Saudis involved in 9/11, his terrorist background went undetected and he was routinely granted a visa.

9/11 Commission investigators belatedly find out that his application is incomplete. He listed his occupation as “student” but left blank the question asking the street address of his school. The Commission also determines that Ghamdi’s travel patterns indicated that he may have presented a passport containing fraudulent travel stamps associated with al Qaeda when he applied for this visa.

In the investigation, the Commission found out that the State Department consular officer in Riyadh who adjudicated al Ghamdi’s case was not familiar with this kind of passport manipulation. He said that because of the workload, he rarely had time to thumb through passports. Ghamdi was never interviewed, the State Department said, because nothing in his application raised concerns in the mind of the consular officer who adjudicated it and there was no hit in the State Department watchlist (then called the CLASS system).