Anthony Summers - The Eleventh Day

And then there is the CIA. The month before 9/11, the Agency’s inspector general produced a report lauding the CIA’s Counterterrorist Center as a “well-managed component that successfully carries out the Agency’s responsibilities to collect and analyze intelligence on international terrorism.” In 2007, however, and then only when Congress demanded it, the Agency belatedly produced an accountability review admitting that—before 9/11—the Counterterrorist Center had been “not used effectively.”

It got worse. Most of those in the unit responsible for bin Laden, the inspector general reported, had not had “the operational experience, expertise and training necessary to accomplish their mission.” There had been “no examination of the potential for terrorists to use aircraft as weapons,” “no comprehensive analysis that put into context the threats received in the spring and summer of 2001.”

Senator Bob Graham, who in 2001 was chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee—and later chaired the House-Senate Joint Inquiry into the intelligence community’s pre-9/11 failures—has cited a dozen “points at which the plot could have been discovered and potentially thwarted.” “Both the CIA and the FBI,” he wrote, “had information that they withheld from one another and from state and local law enforcement and that, if shared, would have cracked the terrorists’ plot.”

One item the CIA withheld from the FBI has never been satisfactorily explained. Agency officials had to admit—initially on the afternoon of 9/11 to a reportedly irritated President Bush—that the CIA had known a great deal about two of the future hijackers for the best part of two years. They had known the men’s names, where they came from, the fact that they were al Qaeda operatives, that they had visas to enter the United States—and that one of them certainly, perhaps both, had long since actually arrived in the United States.

Why did the CIA hold this knowledge close, purposefully avoiding sharing it with the FBI and U.S. Immigration until just before the attacks? The CIA has attempted to explain the lapse as incompetence—human error. The complex available information on the subject, however, may suggest a different truth. Some at the FBI came to suspect that the Agency held what it knew close because it had hopes of turning the two terrorists, in effect recruiting them.

Or did the CIA contemplate keeping the men under surveillance following their arrival in the United States? Absent special clearance at presidential level, it would have been unlawful for the Agency to do that. Domestic surveillance is properly a task for the FBI. Alternatively, could it be that the CIA relied on an information flow from another, foreign, intelligence organization? If so, which organization?

One candidate, some might think, is the Israeli Mossad, a service uniquely committed to and experienced in countering Arab terrorism. Fragments of information suggest Mossad may indeed have had an interest in the 9/11 plotters before the attacks. Another candidate, though few would have thought it, is the General Intelligence Department—or GID—the intelligence service of Saudi Arabia. The Saudi element of the 9/11 story is multifaceted, complete with internal contradictions—and highly disquieting.

Saudi Arabia: leading supplier of oil to the United States in 2001, with reserves expected to last until close to the end of the century, a nation that has spent billions on American weaponry, in many ways America’s most powerful Arab friend in the Middle East—and the birthplace of Osama bin Laden and fifteen of the nineteen 9/11 hijackers.

Though bin Laden was an exile, a self-declared foe of the regime, disowned in public statements by the Saudi royals and by his plutocrat brothers, many believed that was only part of the story—that powerful elements in his homeland had never ceased to support his campaign against the West in the name of Islam.

The Saudi GID, said since 9/11 to have fed information on the future hijackers to its counterparts in Washington, had long been regarded by the CIA’s bin Laden specialists as a “hostile service.” If the GID did share information, was it genuine? Or was it, by design, bogus and misleading?

The Saudi factor is one of the wild cards in the 9/11 investigation. Suspicion that Saudi Arabia had supported the hijack operation was rife for a while after 9/11, then faded—not so much because there was no evidence but because the suspicion was snuffed out. The possibility of Saudi involvement, a vital issue, will be a major focus in the closing chapters of this book.

In the immediate aftermath of September 11, only those in the inner councils of government and the intelligence services were mulling the deeper questions. The loud public call was for hitting back, striking those believed to have been the organizers, those who had been in direct command, hard and swiftly.

SIXTEEN

ON SEPTEMBER 14, 2001, THREE DAYS AFTER THE ATTACKS, THE words marching across the great, glittering signboard in Times Square had read: “BUSH CALLS UP 50,000 RESERVISTS.” President Bush’s motorcade drove past the sign that evening at the end of a day of prolonged high emotion—a memorial service at the National Cathedral in Washington, a visit to the pulverized ruins of the World Trade Center in New York, and a gut-wrenching two hours talking with relatives of the hundreds of firefighters and police who were missing and believed dead.

“After all the sadness and the hugging and the love and the families,” the President’s aide Ari Fleischer recalled thinking as the White House motorcade rolled down 42nd Street, “you could just feel the winds of war were blowing.”

The way America would react to the al Qaeda assault had rapidly become clear. Evident within forty-five minutes of the first strike on the World Trade Center, when Bush spoke to the nation from the schoolroom in Florida, promising to “hunt down and to find those folks who committed this act.” Evident two hours later at an Air Force base in Louisiana, away from the microphones, when he told aides, “We’re gonna get the bastards.” Evident in everything he said thereafter, in private or in public.

The vast majority of the American people agreed that there must be severe retribution. The symbol of their resolve appeared within eight hours of 9/11, when a firefighter named Dan McWilliams took a national flag from a yacht moored in the Hudson nearby and—helped by fellow firemen—raised it high in the rubble at Ground Zero. The photographer who snapped them doing it realized instantly how the image would resonate. Right down to the angle of the flag as it went up, it resembled the raising of the Stars and Stripes by U.S. Marines during the battle of Iwo Jima in World War II.

At a memorial service on the 14th, with four U.S. presidents in the congregation, the National Cathedral reverberated to the roar of almost a thousand people singing “The Battle Hymn of the Republic”: “He hath loosed the fateful lightning of His terrible swift sword … the watch fires of a hundred circling camps … the trumpet that shall never call retreat … Let us die to make men free.”

The September 11 onslaught had been an act of war, and the response was to be war. Many tens of thousands—the vast majority of them not Americans—were to die or be wounded in what Bush described as the coming “monumental struggle between good and evil.” He made clear from the start that bin Laden and his followers would not be the only targets. Speechwriter Michael Gerson, briefed on the message the President wanted to convey in his address to the nation on the night of 9/11, has recalled writing in a draft that the United States would “make no distinction between those who planned these acts and those who permitted or tolerated or encouraged them.”