June 2001:The Meeting in New York
"John's" review of the Kuala Lumpur meeting did set off some
more sharing of information, getting the attention of an FBI analyst whom we
will call "Jane." "Jane" was assigned to the FBI's Cole
investigation. She knew that another terrorist involved in that operation, Fahd
al Quso, had traveled to Bangkok in January 2000 to give money to Khallad.67
"Jane" and the CIA analyst, "Dave," had been working
together on Cole-related issues. Chasing Quso's trail, "Dave"
suggested showing some photographs to FBI agents in New York who were working on
the Cole case and had interviewed Quso.68
"John" gave three Kuala Lumpur surveillance pictures to
"Jane" to show to the New York agents. She was told that one of the
individuals in the photographs was someone named Khalid al Mihdhar. She did not
know why the photographs had been taken or why the Kuala Lumpur travel might be
significant, and she was not told that someone had identified Khallad in the
photographs. When "Jane" did some research in a database for
intelligence reports, Intelink, she found the original NSA reports on the
planning for the meeting. Because the CIA had not disseminated reports on its
tracking of Mihdhar, "Jane" did not pull up any information about
Mihdhar's U.S. visa or about travel to the United States by Hazmi or Mihdhar.69
"Jane," "Dave," and an FBI analyst who was on detail to
the CIA's Bin Ladin unit went to New York on June 11 to meet with the agents
about the Cole case. "Jane" brought the surveillance
pictures. At some point in the meeting she showed the photographs to the agents
and asked whether they recognized Quso in any of them. The agents asked
questions about the photographs- Why were they taken? Why were these people
being followed? Where are the rest of the photographs?70
The only information "Jane" had about the meeting-other than the
photographs-were the NSA reports that she had found on Intelink. These reports,
however, contained caveats that their contents could not be shared with criminal
investigators without the permission of the Justice Department's Office of
Intelligence Policy and Review (OIPR).Therefore "Jane" concluded that
she could not pass on information from those reports to the agents. This
decision was potentially significant, because the signals intelligence she did
not share linked Mihdhar to a suspected terrorist facility in the Middle East.
The agents would have established a link to the suspected facility from their
work on the embassy bombings case. This link would have made them very
interested in learning more about Mihdhar.71 The sad irony is that
the agents who found the source were being kept from obtaining the fruits of
their own work.
"Dave," the CIA analyst, knew more about the Kuala Lumpur meeting.
He knew that Mihdhar possessed a U.S. visa, that his visa application indicated
that he intended to travel to New York, that Hazmi had traveled to Los Angeles,
and that a source had put Mihdhar in the company of Khallad. No one at the
meeting asked him what he knew; he did not volunteer anything. He told
investigators that as a CIA analyst, he was not authorized to answer FBI
questions regarding CIA information. "Jane" said she assumed that if
"Dave" knew the answers to questions, he would have volunteered them.
The New York agents left the meeting without obtaining information that might
have started them looking for Mihdhar.72
Mihdhar had been a weak link in al Qaeda's operational planning. He had left
the United States in June 2000, a mistake KSM realized could endanger the entire
plan-for to continue with the operation, Mihdhar would have to travel to the
United States again. And unlike other operatives, Mihdhar was not
"clean": he had jihadist connections. It was just such connections
that had brought him to the attention of U.S. officials.
Nevertheless, in this case KSM's fears were not realized. Mihdhar received a
new U.S. visa two days after the CIA-FBI meeting in New York. He flew to New
York City on July 4. No one was looking for him.
