How the FBI Let 9/11 Happen

The smoldering gun was right there all the time.

Jeff Taylor from the June 2006 issue

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There is also the bureau’s curious flip-flopping on Moussaoui’s laptop. In late 2001 FBI Director Robert Mueller told prosecutors there was no information on the computer that linked Moussaoui to the September 11 attacks. At that same time, Rolince himself was not convinced Moussaoui was tied to 9/11. “Whoever that fifth person was is probably still alive,” he told reporters at a conference in Europe. “Clearly we are looking into the pool of people who crossed paths with the hijackers.” Only later did that someone become Moussaoui.

While Samit spent three weeks trying to get Washington to act on his fears, future hijacker Hani Hanjour was raising suspicions with his flight training in Phoenix. Margaret Chevrette of the Pan Am International Flight Academy reported her worries to the FAA. Somehow those concerns also made their way to CIA chief Tenet and into CIA memos written in August 2001, but the FBI never acted on them. Yet on September 12, FBI agents interviewed Chevrette for more information on Hanjour, reflecting the fact that another local FBI agent (Arizona-based Kenneth Williams) had notified FBI headquarters of the danger posed by terrorists training at U.S. flight schools.

There were also repeated attempts by the New York City FBI office to follow up on hijackers Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi. Minneapolis, Phoenix, New York—three offices hot on the plot in the days before 9/11. Washington stiffed them all.

Five years later, the bureau still isn’t an effective anti-terrorism agency. Instead it’s morphing into Stasi Lite, keeping tabs on domestic subversives: assorted peaceniks, Communists in Texas, and the League of Women Voters in Michigan, which had the gall to invite a critic of the PATRIOT Act to a panel discussion. This what the FBI is good at, so this is what it does.

Otherwise, the FBI remains unreformed. The same vapid bureaucratic tautology that made Zacarias Moussaoui unimportant because he was not known to be important still holds sway. Don’t be surprised if some other agent is told one day to back off a hunch and get with the program.