An acrimonious rift opened between the CIA and FBI this week over which agency was more to blame for failing to prevent the September 11 attacks.
An extraordinary finger-pointing battle broke through the usual wall of secrecy surrounding intelligence matters and surfaced in the press, where unnamed officials blamed the CIA for failing to pass on critical information about two al-Qaida suspects the agency tracked from January 2000. They were later among the hijackers behind the September 11 attacks.
CIA officials, also unidentified, retorted in newspapers on Tuesday claiming they had passed along the name and passport number of at least one of the suspects, Khalid al-Midhar, to the FBI in an e-mail message on January 6 2000.
One agency official said the e-mail correspondence proved that “to say we held out information on him is wrong”.
However, other administration officials struck back, defending the FBI and claiming the CIA had failed to pass on crucial details, including the fact that al-Midhar and the other suspect under CIA surveillance, Nawaf al-Hazmi, had flown to the United States and that they were linked to suspects in a previous terrorist attack. Both men helped seize American Airlines flight 77 and fly it into the Pentagon.
President George W Bush on Tuesday dismissed the cycle of recriminations as “typical Washington DC” infighting and claimed that both the CIA and FBI had acted to correct their failings.
“In terms of whether or not the FBI and the CIA were communicating properly, I think it is clear that they weren’t,” Bush said. “Now we’ve addressed that issue and the CIA and the FBI are now in close communications. There’s better sharing of intelligence. And one of the things that is essential to win this war is to have the best intelligence possible and, when we get the best intelligence, to be able to share it throughout our government.”
Bush repeated his insistence that he had “seen no evidence” to suggest the attacks could have been prevented. That claim contradicted the admission last week by the FBI director, Robert Mueller, that the plot might have been pre-empted if important clues had not been missed.
The CIA-FBI row broke just as a congressional intelligence committee began hearings behind closed doors in a soundproof chamber in the roof of the Capitol building, specially insulated against electronic eavesdropping. The 37-member committee will examine a string of reports of opportunities missed by the FBI and CIA to spot the al-Qaida conspiracy.
Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak added to the discomfort of the US intelligence agencies by claiming his government had warned Washington of an imminent attack a week before September 11. He said the information came from an Egyptian secret agent who was in close contact with Osama bin Laden’s organisation, but he admitted that the Egyptians had no details of the plot.