8.2 LATE LEADS-MIHDHAR, MOUSSAOUI, AND KSM
In chapter 6 we discussed how intelligence agencies successfully detected
some of the early travel in the planes operation, picking up the movements of
Khalid al Mihdhar and identifying him, and seeing his travel converge with
someone they perhaps could have identified but did not-Nawaf al Hazmi-as well as
with less easily identifiable people such as Khallad and Abu Bara. These
observations occurred in December 1999 and January 2000.The trail had been lost
in January 2000 without a clear realization that it had been lost, and without
much effort to pick it up again. Nor had the CIA placed Mihdhar on the State
Department's watchlist for suspected terrorists, so that either an embassy or a
port of entry might take note if Mihdhar showed up again.
On four occasions in 2001, the CIA, the FBI, or both had apparent
opportunities to refocus on the significance of Hazmi and Mihdhar and
reinvigorate the search for them. After reviewing those episodes we will turn to
the handling of the Moussaoui case and some late leads regarding Khalid Sheikh
Mohammed.
January 2001: Identification of Khallad
Almost one year after the original trail had been lost in Bangkok, the FBI and
the CIA were working on the investigation of the Cole bombing. They
learned of the link between a captured conspirator and a person called "Khallad."
They also learned that Khallad was a senior security official for Bin Ladin who
had helped direct the bombing (we introduced Khallad in chapter 5, and returned
to his role in the Cole bombing in chapter 6).55
One of the members of the FBI's investigative team in Yemen realized that he
had heard of Khallad before, from a joint FBI/CIA source four months earlier.
The FBI agent obtained from a foreign government a photo of the person believed
to have directed the Cole bombing. It was shown to the source, and he
confirmed that the man in that photograph was the same Khallad he had described.56
In December 2000, on the basis of some links associated with Khalid al
Mihdhar, the CIA's Bin Ladin unit speculated that Khallad and Khalid al Mihdhar
might be one and the same.57
The CIA asked that a Kuala Lumpur surveillance photo of Mihdhar be shown to
the joint source who had identified Khallad. In early January 2001, two
photographs from the Kuala Lumpur meeting were shown to the source. One was a
known photograph of Mihdhar, the other a photograph of a then unknown subject.
The source did not recognize Mihdhar. But he indicated he was 90 percent certain
that the other individual was Khallad.58
This meant that Khallad and Mihdhar were two different people. It also meant
that there was a link between Khallad and Mihdhar, making Mihdhar seem even more
suspicious.59 Yet we found no effort by the CIA to renew the
long-abandoned search for Mihdhar or his travel companions.
In addition, we found that the CIA did not notify the FBI of this
identification. DCI Tenet and Cofer Black testified before Congress's Joint
Inquiry into 9/11 that the FBI had access to this identification from the
beginning. But drawing on an extensive record, including documents that were not
available to the CIA personnel who drafted that testimony, we conclude this was
not the case. The FBI's primary Coleinvestigators had no knowledge that
Khallad had been in Kuala Lumpur with Mihdhar and others until after the
September 11 attacks. Because the FBI had not been informed in January 2000
about Mihdhar's possession of a U.S. visa, it had not then started looking for
him in the United States. Because it did not know of the links between Khallad
and Mihdhar, it did not start looking for him in January 2001.60
This incident is an example of how day-to-day gaps in information sharing can
emerge even when there is mutual goodwill. The information was from a joint
FBI/CIA source who spoke essentially no English and whose languages were not
understood by the FBI agent on the scene overseas. Issues of travel and security
necessarily kept short the amount of time spent with the source. As a result,
the CIA officer usually did not translate either questions or answers for his
FBI colleague and friend.61
For interviews without simultaneous translation, the FBI agent on the scene
received copies of the reports that the CIA disseminated to other agencies
regarding the interviews. But he was not given access to the CIA's internal
operational reports, which contained more detail. It was there-in reporting to
which FBI investigators did not have access-that information regarding the
January 2001 identification of Khallad appeared. The CIA officer does not recall
this particular identification and thus cannot say why it was not shared with
his FBI colleague. He might not have understood the possible significance of the
new identification.62
In June 2000, Mihdhar left California and returned to Yemen. It is possible
that if, in January 2001, the CIA had resumed its search for him, placed him on
the State Department's TIPOFF watchlist, or provided the FBI with the
information, he might have been found-either before or at the time he applied
for a new visa in June 2001, or when he returned to the United States on July 4.
