Report: FBI Steps Up 9-11 Leaks Probe
The FBI, intensifying its investigation of leaks of intelligence related to the Sept. 11 attacks, is asking senators to turn over information on their contacts with reporters, The Washington Post reports in its Saturday editions.
The bureau is seeking phone records, appointment calendars and schedules from 17 senators, the newspaper says. Agents want to find out how some highly classified information that had been given to senators wound up in the media.
In an Aug. 7 memo passed to the senators through the Senate general counsel's office, according to the Post, the FBI asked all members of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence to collect and turn over records from June 18 and 19, 2002. Those are the days of and after a classified hearing in which the director of the National Security Agency, Lt. Gen. Michael V. Hayden, spoke to lawmakers about two highly sensitive messages that hinted at an impending action that the agency intercepted on the eve of Sept. 11 but did not translate until Sept. 12.
The request suggests that the FBI is now focusing on the handful of senior senators who are members of a Senate-House panel investigating Sept. 11 and attend most classified meetings and read all the most sensitive intelligence agency communications. A similar request did not go to House intelligence committee members, the Post says.
The request also represents a much more intrusive probe of lawmakers' activities, and comes at a time when some legal experts and members of Congress are already disgruntled that an executive branch agency, such as the FBI -- headed by a political appointee -- is probing the actions of legislators whose job it is to oversee FBI and intelligence agencies, the Post points out.
The FBI declined to comment to the Post. Most senators are away for the August recess, but Sen. Bob Graham (D-Fla.), who heads the Senate Intelligence Committee, told the Post through a spokesman that he is cooperating with the investigation and has asked staff members to gather the requested records.
In recent weeks, FBI agents finished questioning nearly 100 people, including all 37 members of separate House and Senate intelligence committees and some 60 staff members, the Post reports. At the conclusion of their interviews with members and staff, FBI agents typically asked them if they would be willing to take polygraph tests. Most declined.
Requesting calendars, phone logs and schedules over a two-day period "has much more of a fishing-around feel to it, trying to find out which senators are talking to the media," Charles Tiefer, a University of Baltimore law professor and former House deputy general counsel, is quoted by the Post as saying. "That might frighten senators out of the business of telling the public [through the media] what they need to know."
Some officials generally involved in the probe believe that quashing the release of information to the public about embarrassing or sensitive information related to the Sept. 11 attacks was exactly what the administration intended when it sent Vice President Cheney to chastise committee members for unauthorized leaks that end up in news reports, the Post reports.
Others say that although references to the intercepts had been in print before, the specific words in messages, which might be code words, were never released. Those code words, U.S. intelligence officials said, could well have tipped off the individuals targeted and dried up a source of valuable information, the Post adds.
On June 19, CNN reported the contents of two messages based on NSA intercepts. The Arabic-language messages said, "The match is about to begin," and "Tomorrow is zero hour." Other news outlets, including CBSNews.com, also reported on the intercepts.
The NSA, based at Fort Meade, is one of the government's most secretive intelligence agencies. Much of its information carries a higher classification than other sorts of intelligence. It is illegal to release classified information.
For that reason alone, other legal experts knowledgeable about executive-legislative branch relations said that, in a case like this, "criminal matters trump everything else."
Neither congressional historians nor legal experts could recall any situation in which the FBI was probing a leak of classified information in this way, the Post says.