{"id":52747,"date":"2015-01-26T12:00:31","date_gmt":"2015-01-26T12:00:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=52747"},"modified":"2015-05-05T21:26:11","modified_gmt":"2015-05-05T20:26:11","slug":"the-inside-information-that-could-have-stopped-911","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2015\/01\/the-inside-information-that-could-have-stopped-911\/","title":{"rendered":"The Inside Information That Could Have Stopped 9\/11"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"A<\/a>

A minister stands amid the wreckage of the World Trade Center, seemingly dazed from the events of the day on Sept. 11, 2001. Larry Towell\/Magnum<\/p><\/div>\n

14 Jan 2015 – <\/em>Just before Christmas, former FBI special agent Mark Rossini greeted me with his usual good cheer when we met for drinks in a midtown Manhattan restaurant. He told me his life had finally taken a turn for the better. He\u2019s spending most of his time in Switzerland, where he works for a private global corporate-security firm. \u201cLife\u2019s good,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Good, but with a few major changes. Rossini was drinking club soda instead of the expensive cabernets he quaffed when I first knew him as a high-flying FBI official in Washington a decade ago, when he was a special assistant to the bureau\u2019s chief spokesman, John Miller (now with the New York City Police Department). \u201cI\u2019ve cut back,\u201d he said. \u201cFeeling good.\u201d<\/p>\n

But when I ask him how he\u2019s really doing, the light in his eyes dims. \u201cWell, you know, I still miss the job,\u201d he said, shaking his head. A boneheaded move\u2014showing confidential FBI documents to his actress-flame Linda Fiorentino, who said she was researching a script about L.A. wiretapper extraordinaire Anthony Pellicano\u2014cost him his career in 2008 and nearly landed him in jail.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat\u2019s past is past,\u201d he said. But not all of it. He quickly told me of an encounter the day before on a street in Yonkers, where he keeps an apartment. He\u2019d run into a close family friend who\u2019d lost relatives at the World Trade Center on 9\/11. \u201cMark,\u201d she told him, \u201cyou\u2019ve got to get to the bottom of this.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"A<\/a>

Former F.B.I. Agent Mark Rossini leaves U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C. after being sentenced to a year’s probation and a $5,000 fine for his role in illegally accessing F.B.I. documents, May 14, 2009. Ron Sachs\/CNP\/Newscom<\/p><\/div>\n

\u201cShe says that every time I see her,\u201d he said, his mouth turning down. But now, at 53, six years out of the bureau, he\u2019s making a determined effort to do just that\u2014to close some of the gaping holes in the official 9\/11 narrative, which blames the attacks on a vague \u201cintelligence failure.\u201d<\/p>\n

Rossini is well placed to do just that. He\u2019s been at the center of one of the enduring mysteries of 9\/11: Why the CIA refused to share information with the FBI (or any other agency) about the arrival of at least two well-known Al-Qaeda operatives in the United States in 2000, even though the spy agency had been tracking them closely for years.<\/p>\n

That the CIA did block him and Doug Miller, a fellow FBI agent assigned to the \u201cAlec Station,\u201d the cover name for CIA\u2019s Osama bin Laden unit, from notifying bureau headquarters about the terrorists has been told before, most notably in a 2009 Nova <\/em>documentary on PBS, \u201cThe Spy Factory<\/a>.\u201d Rossini and Miller related how they learned earlier from the CIA that one of the terrorists (and future hijacker), Khalid al-Mihdhar, had multi-entry visas on a Saudi passport to enter the United States. When Miller drafted a report for FBI headquarters, a CIA manager in the top-secret unit told him to hold off. Incredulous, Miller and Rossini had to back down. The station\u2019s rules prohibited them from talking to anyone outside their top-secret group.<\/p>\n

All these years later, Rossini still regrets complying with that command. If he had disobeyed the gag order, the nearly 3,000 Americans slaughtered on 9\/11 would probably still be alive. \u201cThis is the pain that never escapes me, that haunts me each and every day of my life,\u201d he wrote in the draft of a book he shared with me. \u201cI feel like I failed, even though I know it was the system and the intelligence community on the whole that failed.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u2018I Finally Broke Down\u2019<\/strong><\/p>\n

The various commissions and internal agency reviews that examined the \u201cintelligence failure\u201d of 9\/11 blamed institutional habits and personal rivalries among CIA, FBI and National Security Agency (NSA) officials for preventing them from sharing information. Out of those reviews came the creation of a new directorate of national intelligence, which stripped the CIA of its coordinating authority. But blaming \u201cthe system\u201d sidesteps the issue of why one CIA officer in particular, Michael Anne Casey, ordered Rossini\u2019s cohort, Miller, not to alert the FBI about al-Mihdhar. Or why the CIA\u2019s Alec Station bosses failed to alert the FBI\u2014or any other law enforcement agency\u2014about the arrival of Nawaf al-Hazmi, another key Al-Qaeda operative (and future hijacker) the agency had been tracking to and from a terrorist summit in Malaysia.<\/p>\n

Because Casey remains undercover at the CIA, Rossini does not name her in his unfinished manuscript. But he wrote, \u201cWhen I confronted this person…she told me that \u2018this was not a matter for the FBI. The next al-Qaeda attack is going to happen in Southeast Asia and their visas for America are just a diversion. You are not to tell the FBI about it. When and if we want the FBI to know about it, we will.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

Rossini recalled going to Miller\u2019s cubicle right after his conversation with Casey. \u201cHe looked at me like I was speaking a foreign language.\u2026 We were both stunned and could not understand why the FBI was not going to be told about this.\u201d<\/p>\n

It remains a mystery. None of the post-9\/11 investigating bodies were able to get to the bottom of it, in part because Rossini and Miller, who continued to work at Alec Station after the attacks, didn\u2019t tell anyone what happened there. When congressional investigators came sniffing around, they kept their mouths shut.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe were told not to say anything to them,\u201d Rossini said. Who told you that? I asked. \u201cThe CIA. I can\u2019t name names. It was just understood in the office that they were not to be trusted, that [the congressional investigators] were trying to pin this on someone, that they were trying to put someone in jail. They said [the investigators] weren\u2019t authorized to know what was going on operationally.\u2026 When we were interviewed, the CIA had a person in the room, monitoring us.\u201d<\/p>\n

As a result, Rossini wasn\u2019t interviewed by the subsequent 9\/11 Commission, either. \u201cBased on that interview, I guess the 9\/11 Commission [which followed up the congressional probe] thought I didn\u2019t have anything worthy to say.\u201d He kept his secret, he said, from the Justice Department\u2019s inspector general as well. \u201cI was still in shock,\u201d he added, and still fearful of violating Alec Station\u2019s demand for omerta<\/em>. Finally, when his own agency\u2014the FBI\u2019s Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR)\u2014came to him in late 2004, after the congressional probe and 9\/11 Commission had issued their reports, he opened up.<\/p>\n

\u201cTape recorders were running. I was sitting right next to Candace Will, associate director of the FBI\u201d in charge of the OPR, Rossini recalled by telephone early this month. \u201cIt\u2019s when I finally broke down and told them what had happened, what I had done, and why. Those tape recordings are the key, that\u2019s what has to be released.\u201d<\/p>\n

The CIA has long insisted it shared intelligence about al-Mihdhar and al-Hazmi with the FBI, but records gathered by the 9\/11 Commission contradict this assertion. Indeed, the panel could find no records supporting the claim of another Alec Station supervisor, Alfreda Bikowsky, that she had hand-carried a report to the FBI.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe FBI is telling the truth,\u201d Philip Zelikow, executive director of the 9\/11 Commission, told Newsweek. As for why the CIA not only failed to share pre-9\/11 information on Al-Qaeda operatives but forbade the FBI agents in Alec Station from sharing it, Zelikow said, \u201cWe don\u2019t know.\u201d<\/p>\n

And He Comes Back…<\/strong><\/p>\n

In such darkness, all sorts of conspiracy theories have flourished, from the absurd \u201ctruther\u201d scenarios about preset charges in the World Trade Center to Israeli or even Bush administration connivance in the attacks. But more substantive theories remain, some deeply disturbing.<\/p>\n

The issue was revived on January 7, when two members of Congress, backed by the co-chairman of the 9\/11 Commission, former Florida Democratic senator Bob Graham, unveiled a resolution calling on the Obama administration to declassify 28 pages of the joint congressional probe dealing with Saudi contacts with and financial support for the hijackers when they were in this country. Saudi officials, Graham says, \u201cknew that people who had a mission for Osama bin Laden were in, or would soon be placed in, the United States. Whether they knew what their assignments were takes the inference too far.\u201d<\/p>\n

Zelikow, who later went on to work for Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, sees the Saudi Embassy\u2019s alleged connections to the hijackers as \u201ca red herring.\u201d But he said there are \u201cloose ends\u201d worth exploring, particularly the hijackers\u2019 movements in the U.S. that brought them close to Yemeni extremist preachers. \u201cThe more interesting story is where they decided to settle and why,\u201d he added.<\/p>\n

\"Richard<\/a>

Richard Clarke, former National Coordinator for Counterterrorism and National Security, is sworn in before the bipartisan September 11 commission, formally known as the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon The U.S., on Capitol Hill, March 24, 2004, in Washington. Mark Wilson\/Getty<\/p><\/div>\n

Now a professor of history at the University of Virginia, Zelikow is likewise skeptical of what former White House counterterrorism adviser Richard A. Clarke said in a startling, videotaped\u00a0interview<\/a> with two freelance journalists in October 2009\u2014remarks that have garnered far less attention than the hijackers\u2019 Saudi connections.<\/p>\n

Clarke recalled that in 1999, the CIA\u2019s Counterterrorism Center had been taken over by Cofer Black and Rich Blee, two \u201chard-charging\u201d covert operations veterans who \u201cunderstood Al-Qaeda was a big threat.\u2026 What I was told at the time,\u201d Clarke told journalists Ray Nowosielski and John Duffy, \u201cwas that they were going to try, for the first time, to get sources on the inside\u201d\u2014to turn one of the terrorists into a double agent.<\/p>\n

Clarke found it odd that when CIA Director George Tenet came to an emergency White House meeting with Black and Blee on July 10, 2001, \u201cthey never mentioned that already two Al-Qaeda terrorists…had entered the United States.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cSo you ask yourself, Why not?\u201d he added. The \u201conly conceivable reason that I\u2019ve been able to come up with\u201d is that they were running an illegal domestic operation to recruit al-Mihdhar or al-Hazmi. And they didn\u2019t want the FBI to barge in on it.<\/p>\n

That would also explain why Alec Station\u2019s Michael Anne Casey forbade Miller and Rossini to tell FBI headquarters about al-Mihdhar\u2019s multi-visa passport to enter the U.S. Rossini believes \u201cthey did\u201d try to recruit al-Mihdhar, who had made prior visits to the U.S. As the former FBI agent pointed out, the NSA had been eavesdropping on a house al-Mihdhar frequented in Yemen. It\u2019s how the CIA learned of the Kuala Lumpur terrorist summit. \u201cHe\u2019s a known terrorist that they follow around the globe,\u201d Rossini said. \u201cHe\u2019s a subject of several cables, he comes to America\u2026and they allow him to leave America and go back to Yemen for the birth of his baby. And he comes back.\u201d<\/p>\n

The CIA didn\u2019t tell the FBI about his presence until midsummer of 2001, after they had lost track of him. \u201cIt just stands to reason that they had some kind of relationship with him\u2014or they tried,\u201d Rossini said. \u201cSo they were following these merry men around for a year or two without telling us, and now all of the sudden, in July 2001, they say, \u2018Please help us find these guys!\u2019 Why then? I can\u2019t prove it, the only reason is, he went south\u2014he told them to go fuck themselves\u2014or stopped responding to their phone calls. They ran a clandestine op in the U.S., and they didn\u2019t want the bureau involved in it.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u2018Lying Pieces of Shit\u2019<\/strong><\/p>\n

A former CIA operations officer who was assigned to Alec Station at the time thinks that both Rossini and Clarke are onto something\u2014but that their theory is a bit off-kilter. \u201cI find that kind of hard to believe, that [al-Mihdhar or al-Hazmi] would be a valid source,\u201d said the former CIA operative, who spent 25 years handling spies in some of the world\u2019s most dangerous places, including the Middle East. \u201cBut then again, the folks that were making a lot of calls at the time there were junior analysts, who had zero general experience and absolutely zero on-the-ground operational experience or any kind of operational training.\u201d<\/p>\n

From the beginning, Alec Station, the operative pointed out, was run by intelligence analysts, many of them like the fictional heroine of Zero Dark Thirty<\/em>, a composite of real-life CIA analysts. Over time, they began fancying themselves as field-savvy, venturing into the operations\u2014sometimes with disastrous consequences.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey had all these analysts coming up with their grand schemes and following targets,\u201d said the former officer, who asked for anonymity in exchange for talking freely about clandestine matters. \u201cBut then they wanted to call the shots on the operational size of things, and that\u2019s where their strengths were not.\u201d It was an Alec Station analyst, Jennifer Matthews, the operative pointed out, who recruited the double agent who killed her and six other CIA personnel on a remote base in Afghanistan on December 2009.<\/p>\n

\u201cTheir definition of a source was very different from what an intelligence officer or case officer or the [directorate of operations] would consider a validated bona fide source,\u201d said the operative. And the Alec Station analysts didn\u2019t much like the wizened older case officers looking over their shoulders. \u201cSometimes I\u2019d propose something and they would warn me off, saying it might compromise somebody they were talking to.\u201d<\/p>\n

But who would they be talking to? Not real terrorists. \u201cI don\u2019t think they ever personally talked to anybody,\u201d the operative said. \u201cThey just worked in their office in tennis shoes….They probably got a source through liaison. So their source [on the hijackers] might have been someone in the Saudi service who said they are talking to somebody, or someone in the Jordanian service who said he was talking to someone. As far I was concerned, they were a bunch of lying pieces of shit. So they could\u2019ve done that.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThat\u201d meaning essentially conjuring up a relationship with al-Mihdhar, perhaps through a very sensitive source in Saudi intelligence, and selling it as something with great potential to their CIA bosses, who were desperate to get something going inside Al-Qaeda. This is essentially what happened with Matthews and her spy Humam al-Balawi, a doctor who claimed to be treating Osama bin Laden\u2019s deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri at his lair in Pakistan. Balawi was served up to Matthews by Jordanian intelligence, the CIA\u2019s closest Middle East partner outside of Israel.<\/p>\n

Top CIA officials were so excited about al-Balawi\u2019s supposed access to Al-Qaeda\u2019s inner circle that they were running down to the White House to give progress reports on him. That is, until he was driven into a CIA base without being searched\u2014on Matthew\u2019s explicit, tragic orders\u2014and blew himself up, killing eight people altogether.<\/p>\n

Waiting for Heads to Roll<\/strong><\/p>\n

All these years later, no one has come up with a plausible explanation for why Alec Station would deny Rossini and Miller the chance to tell the FBI about dangerous Al-Qaeda figures coming into the U.S. \u201cIt\u2019s looney,\u201d said the former Alec Station CIA ops officer.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen the first 9\/11 report came out, I was waiting for heads to roll,\u201d the ops officer said. \u201cBut of course they took out all the important stuff. And all the people who were responsible for not sharing information\u2014their names were taken out. They were commended and moved up.\u201d<\/p>\n

To this day, Rossini can barely contain his fury. Over drinks in New York, he tried to count his blessings. It was Christmas, nearby Rockefeller Center was lit up and beautiful. He was firmly locked into his default mode: big smile, glass raised.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat the hell,\u201d he said, taking a sip of his drink. \u201cI\u2019m gonna tell my story.\u201d<\/p>\n

___________________________<\/p>\n

Jeff Stein is <\/em>Newsweek\u2019s national security correspondent in Washington. He can be reached somewhat confidentially via spytalk@hushmail.com<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

Related:<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

The Saudi Role in Sept. 11 and the Hidden 9\/11 Report Pages<\/a><\/em>
\n Two congressmen want to declassify 28 pages of…<\/em><\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 newsweek.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Former FBI agent Mark Rossini said the CIA prevented him from going to FBI headquarters with the information that two known terrorists, who later went on to carry out the 9\/11 attacks on the World Trade Center, had entered the US.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[65],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-52747","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-anglo-america"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52747","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=52747"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52747\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=52747"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=52747"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=52747"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}