Paperback
-
PICK UP IN STORECheck Availability at Nearby Stores
Available within 2 business hours
Related collections and offers
Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780984185856 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Trine Day |
| Publication date: | 06/13/2011 |
| Pages: | 480 |
| Product dimensions: | 8.76(w) x 6.06(h) x 0.92(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Disconnecting the Dots
How CIA and FBI Officials Helped Enable 9/11 and Evaded Government Investigations
By Kevin Fenton
Trine Day LLC
Copyright © 2011 Kevin FentonAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-936296-20-0
CHAPTER 1
The [NSA] refused to exploit the conduit and threatened legal action against the Agency officer who advised of its existence
A history of 9/11 could start in many places, with Osama bin Laden's declaration of jihad against the US in February 1998, with Operation Bojinka, a forerunner of the September 11 plot devised in the mid-1990s, or even earlier, with the start of US funding for the Afghan mujaheddin a few months before the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.
We start with a minor engagement north of Kabul, Afghanistan's capital, in 1996 or 1997, because this is where Ahmed al-Hada's rise to become a top US counterterrorist surveillance target began. To appreciate the position of his son-in-law, Flight 77 hijacker Khalid Almihdhar, in the al-Qaeda hierarchy, to understand what the Alec Station group did — and possibly why they did it — we need to know about al-Hada, because al-Hada's activities form one background against which the events of 9/11 occurred.
Although the relationship between al-Qaeda and the Taliban was not always as close as it has been portrayed, Arab camp commanders close to al-Qaeda did allow their trainees to go and fight in Afghanistan. When the Taliban was pushed back to the edge of Kabul by a Northern Alliance offensive beginning in October 1996, a group of Arab fighters went to strengthen the Taliban's lines. They suffered a major defeat, incurring at least ten fatalities, and the remainder fled to the nearby mountains. This group of six fighters included al-Hada and two others who would later become well known: Mohamed al-Owhali and an operative now known to the world as Azzam.
According to the FBI, in the mountains al-Owhali and his comrades "engaged in severe fighting with his enemies and were able to defend their position and repel the attack." This engagement later became known as the "C" formation battle. The Bureau wrote,
[Al-Owhali's] actions while fighting in the "c" formation battle and while in the mountains earned him significant prominence and honor within his group and in the bin Laden camps. He stated that he had earned such a reputation and loyalty during these struggles that he was allowed to carry his rifle in the camps even around bin Laden.
Al-Owhali and Azzam would use the status they gained in Afghanistan to win a place on the team that in 1998 bombed the US embassy in Nairobi, Kenya, and al-Hada would help them. In fact, al-Hada would be a key link between the bombers in Africa and Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan, even though he soon fell under surveillance by the NSA.
James Bamford, a widely acknowledged expert on the NSA, described how this began:
A devoted follower of bin Laden, al-Hada offered to turn his house [in Sana'a, Yemen,] into a secret operations center for his friend in Afghanistan. While the rugged Afghan landscape provided bin Laden with security, it was too isolated and remote to manage the day-to-day logistics for his growing worldwide terrorist organization. His sole tool of communication was a gray, battery-powered $7,500 Compact-M satellite phone ...
Bin Laden needed to set up a separate operations center somewhere outside Afghanistan, somewhere with access to regular telephone service and close to major air links. He took al-Hada up on his offer, and the house in Yemen quickly became the epicenter of bin Laden's war against America, a logistics base to coordinate his attacks, a switchboard to pass on orders, and a safe house where his field commanders could meet to discuss and carry out operations.
Bin Laden used his last satellite phone from November 1996 until September 1998, when he stopped making calls on it, possibly due to the US missile strikes following the East African embassy bombings. The calls were intercepted by the NSA and tens of thousands of pages of transcripts were produced. According to some reports, the top destination for calls from bin Laden's satellite phone was Britain, bin Laden's center of operations in Europe, where the government often turned a blind eye to, or even encouraged, Islamist militancy. The US had monitored other phones bin Laden used before November 1996. When FBI agents from New York's Joint Terrorism Task Force were allowed to review the files on bin Laden at the CIA's Counterterrorist Center (CTC) in October 1995, they found forty files of material, mostly the result of electronic eavesdropping.
In January 1996, the CIA established its first "virtual" station — assigned an issue, rather than a locale — as the second Clinton administration was venturing boldly into uncharted waters at the "end of history." The station was organized as part of the CTC, and originally assigned to investigate "terrorist financial links," although it soon became the Agency's Osama bin Laden unit. The original chief was Michael Scheuer, an Agency old hand whose zeal in the effort against al-Qaeda earned him enemies as well as friends among his intelligence agency colleagues. He had a son named Alec, and this provided the station with its code name. While various Alec Station personnel and associates are singled out for criticism in this book, Michael Scheuer is not among them.
Yemen was the second most popular destination for calls from bin Laden's phone, although reports conflict over how many times he called it. Exactly how many of these calls went to al-Hada's communications hub in Sana'a (the "Yemen hub") is also unknown, although Los Angeles Times journalist Terry McDermott, who wrote a book about the September 11 attacks, said that it was "dozens," and Bamford wrote that it was over two hundred.
The NSA began monitoring the hub in 1996, probably spurred by bin Laden's first calls to it. As we will see, the phone number was crucial for 9/11, not only because some of the hijackers called it, but because Khalid Almihdhar lived at the hub with his family. Upon learning of the hub, the NSA promptly kept this secret and told none of the other agencies in the intelligence community about it.
Alec Station learned what the NSA was doing by chance in late 1996. Station chief Scheuer later wrote,
From a CIA officer detailed to another Intelligence Community (IC) agency [the NSA] and serving overseas, the bin Laden unit learned of the availability of a communications conduit used by bin Laden and al-Qaeda [the Yemen hub]. The [NSA] refused to exploit the conduit and threatened legal action against the Agency officer who advised of its existence. This officer bravely continued to supply the information; and I asked senior Agency officers to intervene with the [NSA]. There ensued a desultory interagency discussion without resolution.
The NSA did not want the CIA to have the raw intelligence, but agreed to provide summaries of the information. These summaries, which usually came late, were largely useless, and Scheuer knew it. The reason was that al-Qaeda operatives used a simple code system, substituting words like "tourism" and "playing football" for "jihad," and "wedding" for "bombing" or "attack." Scheuer commented,
Over time, if you read enough of these conversations, you first get clued into the fact that maybe "bottle of milk" doesn't mean bottle of milk, and if you follow it long enough, you develop a sense of what they're really talking about. But it's not possible to do unless you have the verbatim transcript.
Therefore, Alec Station and "several other senior CIA officers" requested transcripts rather than summaries. This happened repeatedly over a period of about two years. James Bamford described the situation:
Before 9/11 Scheuer knew how important the house was, he knew NSA was eavesdropping on the house. He went to NSA, went to the head of operations for NSA, and ... Barbara McNamara, and asked for transcripts of the conversations coming into and going out of the house. And the best the NSA would do would be to give them brief summaries every ... once a week or something like that, you know, just a report, not the actual transcripts or anything. And so he got very frustrated, he went back there and they still refused.
He continued:
Eventually the CIA built their own intercept facility in the Indian Ocean area, I think it was on Madagascar, where they were intercepting the same signals. The whole thing was directed at that house, trying to get the signals going in and out of that house, the telephone calls. But because the technology was not as good as NSA's they were only picking up half of the conversations, apparently it was downlink, they weren't able to get the uplink, you need a satellite.
And so the CIA, Mike Scheuer, went back to NSA and said look, you know, we're able to get, you know, half the conversations here, but we still need the other half, and NSA still wouldn't give them the other half. I mean this is absurd, but this is what was going on.
Throughout this book we will encounter officials who fail to recall events they really should remember, and here is the first. 9/11 Commission staffers Lorry Fenner and Gordon Lederman asked Barbara McNamara about the failure to give Scheuer what he wanted. The memo based upon her interview says,
She does not recall being personally [asked] to provide about transcripts or raw data. ... But sharing of raw data is not done routinely by NSA unless they get a specific request for a specific item. She said that she does not remember people asking for raw data, but if they wanted it NSA would have provided it.
To their credit, Fenner and Lederman picked up on this. The memo says,
In response to a specific question, she responded that she has no memory of [Deputy CIA Director General John] Gordon having come to NSA to complain about [the CIA's Counterterrorist Center] not having received transcripts/raw data.
We obviously cannot prove that the meeting did not simply slip McNamara's mind during the interview. Nevertheless, the failure to provide what Scheuer wanted made the NSA look very bad, especially in hindsight, and pretending not to recall it may well have seemed a useful tactic.
While the NSA and CIA were arguing, al-Qaeda's plot to bomb US embassies in East Africa was moving forward, and the Yemen hub was being used as a key support facility. Not only was the NSA not exploiting the intelligence the Yemen hub was generating to thwart the plot, it was preventing Alec Station from doing so as well.
On August 7, 1998, truck bombs severely damaged the US embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, killing over 200, including twelve Americans.
Arabic names are rendered in uniform fashion throughout this book, so bin Laden is always bin Laden and never Binladin, Almihdhar is always Almihdhar, never al-Mihdhar or simply Mihdhar, and so on.
CHAPTER 2One of the most important pieces of information the FBI would ever discover
In April or May of 1998, Mohamed al-Owhali, who had by then been chosen as one of the suicide bombers for the upcoming embassy attacks, was instructed by al-Qaeda to travel to Yemen and was given a false Iraqi passport to do so. He stayed with al-Hada in Sana'a for several weeks, and a call was placed to his parents in Saudi Arabia.
As al-Owhali thought it was too dangerous for him to go to Saudi Arabia, his father came down to the Yemen hub, and al-Hada agreed to relay messages between the two of them so that al-Owhali could communicate with his family. In addition, a false Yemeni passport was obtained for al-Owhali by an al-Qaeda leader named Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri.
Al-Hada then instructed al-Owhali to return to Pakistan, where he made a martyrdom video with another al-Qaeda leader known as Khallad bin Attash. He then traveled to Kenya in early August to carry out his suicide mission. When he got there, one of his main tasks was to get his mind ready for the suicide bombing. This entailed several calls to his old friend al-Hada, the last of which ended just as al-Owhali was about to get in the bomb laden truck and drive to the embassy to blow it up.
These calls were listed in detail at the embassy bombings trial in early 2001. Al-Owhali called the Yemen hub once on August 5, twice on August 6, and again in the morning of August 7, just before the bombing, when he spoke to al-Hada for 20 minutes, 43 seconds. The NSA, which had been monitoring the hub for two years by this point, must have intercepted these calls.
We need to ask what the NSA was doing in all of this. It was already aware of al-Hada's phone, and the volume of traffic between it and bin Laden in Afghanistan indicated its importance. How could the NSA possibly have missed al-Owhali, given that several calls must have mentioned him and his travel arrangements?
The calls al-Owhali made to al-Hada's phone in the days shortly before the bombing were a flashing red arrow pointing to the safe house in Nairobi where the bomb had been built. Yet there is no record of the NSA doing anything about this, and no record of any subsequent investigation of the NSA's inaction.
This was the first time the NSA failed to act on information from the Yemen hub to prevent a terrorist attack against US interests. It would not be the last. The exact same failure — inaction on actionable intelligence from the Yemen hub — happened before the USS Cole bombing in 2000 and before 9/11. According to public information, there was no investigation of this intelligence failure before the embassy bombings. The review after the Cole bombing was extremely cursory at best, and the investigation of the NSA after 9/11 was practically non-existent. Asked if the NSA's inspector general had written a report about the failure before the embassy bombings, James Bamford responded that he had never heard of any such report and that the NSA's inspector general mostly wrote reports about "employee complaints and not about failed policies."
There are some simple questions that need to be asked here. How many calls between the Yemen hub, bin Laden and the bombers in Africa did the NSA intercept, and why did it not do anything about them? There must have been recordings, transcripts of these calls, a whole section at the NSA devoted to monitoring the Yemen hub. What did these people do, who are they, and how did they keep screwing up?
Due to the way the bombing was carried out, al-Owhali survived. However, as he was supposed to have been killed in the attack, there was no extraction plan to get him out of the country. Unfamiliar with the city, he was unable to find the safe house he had stayed at, and returned to the area of the hotel where he had checked in when he first arrived in Kenya.
From the hotel he made a series of calls to al-Hada, telling him to inform bin Attash that he had not died in the attack and that he needed money and documents so that he could flee Kenya. Al-Hada was then called three times by Osama bin Laden or a person using his phone. One call was on August 10 and lasted for 2.7 minutes, and two more were made the next day, both lasting less than a minute.
These calls, which pointed to al-Owhali's location in Kenya, must have been noticed by the NSA — there had, after all, just been a major terrorist attack with 200-plus fatalities, and bin Laden was certainly a significant suspect even at this early stage in the bombings inquiry. Bin Laden called his operations center — the operations center which had previously had heavy contacts with operatives in one of the cities that was attacked — and repeatedly spoke to an operative there. How much more suspicious could it be? Nevertheless, the NSA sat on this information. In fact, there is no mention of the NSA being of any help at all during the investigation.
Despite this, the FBI was able to locate al-Owhali. There are contradictory stories about exactly how he was arrested, but it appears he was finally detained based on a tip from a local who thought him suspicious. However, the Bureau was also trying to trace him based on phone information.
The contradictory stories are interesting in their own right. The initial stories claimed that al-Owhali was arrested based on a tip from a taxi driver who took him to a hotel where he stayed after the bombing; these accounts made no mention of his calls to the Yemen hub. Later accounts, written after the trial in early 2001, mention the hub.
The amount of misinformation, and possibly disinformation, about the embassy bombings is startling. In a 2005 book, former CIA officer Gary Berntsen, who led the Agency team that investigated the bombing in Kenya, even claimed that Hezbollah was initially suspected, and that responsibility could not be pinned on al-Qaeda until August 15, eight days after the attacks. He lists the breaks occurring on this day as the arrest of al-Owhali, which actually happened three days earlier, and the fact of one of his colleagues noticing a newspaper article about the arrest of another of the bombers, Mohammed Saddiq Odeh, in Pakistan.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Disconnecting the Dots by Kevin Fenton. Copyright © 2011 Kevin Fenton. Excerpted by permission of Trine Day LLC.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Prologue-Every place that something could have gone wrong in this over a year and a half, it went wrong 1
Part 1 Sana's, Yemen
1 The [NSA] refused to exploit the conduit and threatened legal action against the Agency officer who advised of its existence 7
2 One of the most important pieces of information the FBI would ever discover 13
3 [Redacted] 22
4 A secret coded indicator placed there by the Saudi government, warning of possible terrorist affiliation 28
Part 2 Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
5 This is not a matter for the FBI 37
6 She stated that she had no recollection 50
7 He did not know why James briefed him about the Almihdhar information 55
8 Something apparently was dropped somewhere and we don't know where that was 59
9 There was pressure on people not to disclose what really happened 62
10 Amongst the finest we have 67
11 It appears Barbara Grewe conducted the interviews with "John" and "Jane" 71
12 Who chaired that meeting? Khalid Shaikh Mohammed chaired that meeting 82
13 There is no evidence of any tracking efforts 97
14 Captain Queeg 106
15 I know nobody read that cable 116
16 AA 77-3 indiv have been followed since Millennium + Cole 127
17 The FBI could have potentially linked them through financial records to the other Flight 77 hijackers 131
Part 3 San Diego
18 Two al-Qaeda guys living in California-are you kidding me? 139
19 [The CIA's Counterterrorist Center] sent one officer to NSA for a brief period of time in 2000, but failed to send others, citing resource constraints 146
20 [As a result, NSA regularly provided information about these targets to the FBI...] 149
21 Neither the contents of the calls nor the physics of the intercepts allowed us to determine that one end of the calls was in the United States 154
22 For the commission's staff, Fort Meade might as well have been Kabul 156
23 SOCOM lawyers would not permit the sharing of the U.S. person information regarding terrorists located domestically due to "fear of potential blowback" 168
Part 4 Aden, Yemen
24 Further connections had been made between Almihdhar and al-Qaeda 177
25 As far as the Cole bombing, a U.S. investigator said the phone was used by the bombers to "put everything together" 180
26 One has also been identified as playing key roles in both the East African Embassy attacks and the USS Cole attack 186
27 This is a high threshold to cross 190
28 Hampered the pursuit of justice in the death of 17 American sailors 193
29 The "Khallad" mentioned by al-Quso could actually be Khalid Almihdhar or one of his associates 201
30 In addition, the cable identified the third traveler as Salah Saeed Mohammed Bin Yousaf 210
31 The number that he called in Yemen to reach Ahmed al-Hada was 9671200578 214
Part 5 Washington and New York
32 He was focused on Malaysia 225
33 "John" asked her to do the research in her free time 230
34 Someone saw something that wasn't there 243
35 Shouting match 248
36 What's the story with the Almihdhar information, when is it going to get passed... when is it going to get passed 256
37 The bad guys were in Yemen on this conversation 259
38 How bad things look in Malaysia 265
39 Major-league killer 270
40 Khalid Midhar should be very high interest anyway 274
41 They're coming here 283
42 The Minneapolis Airplane IV crowd 289
43 I had no idea that the Bureau wasn't aware of what its own people were doing 300
44 Donna was unable to recall how she first discovered the information on the Khallad identification 307
45 If this guy is in the country, it's not because he's going to fucking Disneyland 310
46 Someday someone will die 323
47 He ran into the bathroom and retched 337
48 Searches of readily available databases could have unearthed the driver's licenses, the car registration, and the telephone listing 341
49 Find and kill... Khalid Shaikh Mohammed 356
50 We didn't know they were here until it was too late 365
Epilogue-They were lucky over and over again 370
Appendix A And over again 383
Appendix B Alhazmi and Almihdhar were Saudi agents 387
Documents 393
Bibliography 404
Index 407
Acknowledgements 419