Plots shouldn't have been news to FBI, CIA

April 14, 2004

Memo to John Kerry: When you are president (a prospect that seems increasingly likely), you might want to spend more time watching CNN and less time reading your presidential daily briefings.

For judging by the Aug. 6, 2001, PDB just declassified by the White House, you'll get more insight from newspapers, magazines and TV than you will from the CIA.

Richard Ben-Veniste, one of the 10 members of the commission investigating Sept. 11, pronounced himself shocked by the headline from the PDB, "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in the U.S."

"That's an important piece of new information," he said.

Ben-Veniste was being either deliberately obtuse or, more likely, nakedly partisan when he spoke these words. There was nothing new in the PDB. In fact, the most shocking thing about the briefing is just how obvious and chewed over it was, recounting what was well known but providing little thought about what was to come next.

Indeed, my first reaction after reading the PDB was, "A newspaper reporter could have written this." And checking back, I found some had - and done a better job of it.

The PDB is a short memorandum - just the thing for the disengaged president described by former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill - written in the clear-speak, active-verb style perfected many years ago by the General Accounting Office. The title of the PDB accurately reflected its contents: a belief that Osama bin Laden intended to attack on U.S. soil.

And how did the writers of the document know this? Well, they probably saw it on TV.

Remember back, if you would, to the months leading up to the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

Osama bin Laden was constantly in the news. In May of that year, four al-Qaeda operatives were found guilty of the 1998 bombing of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. Bin Laden was on the FBI's 10 Most Wanted list and the United States had been mounting an increasingly aggressive effort to persuade Taliban-controlled Afghanistan to turn him over.

Nor was bin Laden backing off. To the contrary, his rhetoric in early summer became increasingly strident. He told Saudi TV reporter Bakr Atiani, "There would be attacks against American and Israeli facilities." In a June video to his followers, bin Laden urged them to "slay the United States and Israel," promising "blood, blood and destruction." On June 25, CNN interviewed terrorism expert Frank Cilluffo who, reacting to bin Laden's TV appearance, said, "And as far as bin Laden's concerned, it seems that everything is fair game." That included George W. Bush, by the way. Mideast specialist Steven Emerson told reporters, "I expect that bin Laden would consider any U.S. official, including the president, a target."

And to drive the point home, Reuters bluntly headlined a July 12 story, "Terrorist Attack on U.S. Soil Predicted." It quoted FBI assistant director Dale Watson saying, "We are headed for an incident inside the United States." At the time, the FBI was tracking 257 domestic threats, and "the No. 1 threat was from exiled Saudi dissident Osama bin Laden."

There was good reason to fear an attack within the United States. Bin Laden, after all, had tried to do it before: the narrowly averted millennium bombing of Los Angeles International Airport.

Three men were convicted in the summer of 2001 for that attempted attack. Ahmed Ressam - the bomber who was stopped by an alert border guard - had been trained in Afghanistan at al-Qaeda camps. "He told jurors about at least eight other trained jihad fighters involved in the plot who have never been charged, and of efforts by Islamic militant leaders to train and send other guerrillas into the United States," reported the L.A. Times in July. Ressam testified, "his colleagues are intent on exporting violence to U.S. soil," the Times reported in a separate story. It anonymously quoted a U.S. intelligence official who, reacting to the Ressam trial, said, "We've suspected for some time that al-Qaeda has tried to establish cells in the United States. This confirms that they are trying to establish a presence inside the U.S."

Given all this, why today's surprise over a presidential briefing in August 2001 that proclaims bin Laden was "determined to strike in the U.S.?" That was clearly known. Rather, the surprise should be that the obvious follow-up questions were unanswered. Did he have the capabilities in place to mount an operation? When would he do it? And, of course, how would he do it?

Sure, it's easy to assign blame to President Bush. Yet a fair reading of the PDB suggests that this was a failure not of political leadership but of intelligence, a point underscored by yesterday's harsh criticism of the FBI by the 9/11 commission. For all of its vaunted technology, the U.S. intelligence apparatus apparently knew about as much as did the well-informed reader. That should disturb us - and it's a problem that won't be fixed by an election.

Talk back to Tom Keane at tomkeane@tomkeane.com.