Two New FBI Missteps Reported

A top-secret internal document warned the FBI director in the months before Sept. 11 that the bureau faced significant terrorist threats from Middle Eastern groups but lacked the resources to deal with them, The New York Times reported Saturday.

The document provided detailed recommendations and suggested spending increases to address the problem, the Times says.

Despite the assessment, Attorney General John Ashcroft rejected a proposed $58 million increase in financing for the bureau's counterterrorism program last Sept. 10.

The Times quoted an unidentified Justice Department official as saying the document, known as the Director's Report on Terrorism, was not provided to Ashcroft's budget staff.

U.S. News & World Report says the FBI had a chance to infiltrate an Al Qaeda training camp in Afghanistan months before Sept. 11, but top agents responsible for tracking Osama Bin Laden rejected the plan.

The decision by leaders of the Bin Laden unit at FBI headquarters may have wasted a golden opportunity to learn about plans for the strikes on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, according to the magazine.

It said an informant told a bureau field agent that he was invited to attend a commando training course at an Al Qaeda camp in Afghanistan.

The information was relayed to a supervisor, who passed it on to FBI headquarters, where it hit went nowhere, U.S. News says.

A field office communiqué asked the Justice Department to authorize what it described as "otherwise illegal activity" — the informant's participation in terrorist training — sources told the magazine.

But, U.S. News adds, the Bin Laden unit flatly nixed the request.

The FBI wouldn't comment.

The assessment cited by the Times found that nearly every major FBI field office lacked the staff needed to evaluate and deal with the threat posed by al Qaeda.

The FBI on Saturday downplayed the report. "It didn't deal specifically with threats from any particular country or terrorist groups," the official told Reuters.

It "was intended to develop a five-year plan to increase funds for the counterterrorism program to deal with the threat level that was currently available," the official said on condition of anonymity.

"It was a budget document. ... It was not a complete assessment of whether the bureau could thwart terrorism," he said.

He added: "No one is denying there was a threat out there prior to September 11. Look at the USS Cole (which was bombed at a Yemini port in 2000) and the embassy bombings (in Africa in 1998). The potential for terrorism obviously was there."

The U.S. had information that al Qaeda was dangerous, but it came from intercepted phone calls and other communications between Islamic militants in the U.S. and overseas. Investigations of the 1998 bombings of two U.S. embassies in Africa also gave some insights into the organization.

But the FBI was able to do little to follow up on that information, according to the Times.

With little insight into al Qaeda, the FBI did not know how to assess a request by the Phoenix field office to look into a large number of Middle Eastern students taking classes at flight schools.

And FBI headquarters in Washington rejected a request from a Minneapolis office to seek a warrant to search the computer and other belongings of Zacarias Moussaoui, the so-called "twentieth hijacker," who was arrested before the attacks and is being prosecuted in connection with them.

The FBI was suspicious of his flight-training activities last August and he was picked up on an immigration violation.

The top secret assessment was written by Dale Watson, now the FBI's top counterterrorism official, the Times said. He was building on work done in 1998 by Robert Bryant, then the deputy director, who wanted to reorient the bureau to put more emphasis on counterintelligence, the newspaper said.

"In the late 1990s, the world had changed, and Bryant was trying to change the direction of the FBI," an official familiar with the plan told the Times.

"So they began to look at their vulnerabilities. They had the capacity to go after a bank robber, but in the late 1990s, they needed the capacity to get better information collection in order to deal with problems like counterintelligence and terrorism, and Bryant saw that we don't have that capacity," the official said. "Watson was trying to apply that standard to counterterrorism. They were trying to get this issue right."

Separately, a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee wants to hear testimony next week from a Minneapolis FBI agent critical of the bureau headquarters' handling of a terrorism investigation before the Sept. 11 attacks.

Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, said Coleen Rowley can help the panel improve FBI operations and restore public confidence in the bureau by appearing next Thursday.

Rowley wrote a letter last week to FBI Director Robert Mueller criticizing Washington headquarters for refusing to allow Minneapolis agents to step up their investigation of Moussaoui.

Rowley has pledged not to discuss the Moussaoui case, so Grassley said national security concerns should not stand in the way of her testifying.

Minneapolis FBI spokesman Paul McCabe declined to comment on Grassley's request.

The office of Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., the Judiciary Committee chairman, will determine whether to call Rowley as a witness.

The Washington Post reports in its Saturday editions that Rowley will testify Thursday. The Post also says some lawmakers may seek to have her publicly identify bureau officials who hampered the Moussaoui probe.

While the Senate Judiciary Committee meets in open session, the Senate and House intelligence committees will begin joint closed-door hearings on the attacks next Tuesday.

Those hearings will begin with presentations by staffers summarizing what they have learned in their probe of the events leading up to the attacks. Witnesses will appear in open sessions later in June.

Mueller and CIA Director George Tenet are expected to appear in some of the open hearings, which begin June 25.

Ashcroft said he fully supports the FBI director. "Bob Mueller is reforming the FBI" and "Mueller's going to get that done," he said on CNN's "Larry King Live" Friday.

"He's grabbed the agency" and "he has begun to shift the culture," Ashcroft added.

In Holmdel, New Jersey Friday, the administration's top anti-terrorism prosecutor said the U.S. had ample evidence that a devastating terrorist attack on U.S. soil was likely long before Sept. 11.

Assistant Attorney General Michael Chertoff cited nearly a decade's worth of hints that foreign terrorists were targeting Americans, though he did not say there was specific information that could have prevented the attacks.

"As of Sept. 10th, each of us knew everything we needed to know to tell us there was a possibility of what happened on Sept. 11th," Chertoff said Friday during a commencement speech to Seton Hall University Law School graduates.

On Wednesday, FBI Director Robert Mueller said there may have been missed clues before the attacks and suggested that investigators might have uncovered the plot if they had been more diligent about pursuing leads.

Among the warning signs cited by Chertoff: the bombing of the trade center in 1993; a mid-1990s plan in which an Islamic radical was convicted of plotting to blow up jetliners, New York landmarks and assassinate the pope and fly a small plane into a government building; a death sentence pronounced on Americans by Osama bin Laden in the late 1990s; and the failed millennium bombing plot at Los Angeles International Airport.