Brian

One of the 9/11 hijackers was listed in the San Diego phone book. Under his real name. And that is the least damning fact in this story. January 5, 2000. Al-Qaeda holds a planning summit in Kuala Lumpur. The CIA knows about it, watches it, and photographs the men walking in. Two of them are Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Mihdhar. The agency has a photocopy of Mihdhar's passport. Stamped inside is a valid multiple-entry visa for the United States. That same morning, an FBI agent detailed to the CIA's bin Laden unit named Doug Miller drafts a cable to FBI headquarters saying exactly that. A CIA supervisor tells him to put it on hold. A week later Miller follows up in writing: "Is this a no go or should I remake it in some way." He never gets an answer. The cable sits in draft until after the towers fall. The Justice Department's inspector general later went looking for someone who could explain why. Nobody could. January 15, 2000. Hazmi and Mihdhar fly United into Los Angeles. In March, CIA officers in Bangkok confirm in a cable that Hazmi boarded that flight to LA. The FBI is still not told. By February they are in San Diego, and they make no effort to hide. Real names on the apartment. Real names on the California driver's licenses, the bank accounts, the credit cards, the used car. They buy phone service and let the company print Hazmi in the local directory. In May they rent a room from a man they met at their mosque. He is an active FBI informant. His handler never learns who is sleeping down the hall. They try flight school that spring and wash out. Their English is too poor to follow the instructor. So the plot brings in a pilot. Hani Hanjour arrives in December 2000. In January and February 2001 his flight school in Phoenix calls the FAA three separate times because something is wrong with him. The manager, Peggy Chevrette, put it plainly: "I couldn't believe he had a commercial license of any kind with the skills that he had." An FAA inspector comes out, verifies the license is genuine, and closes it. Eight months later Hanjour flies American 77 into the Pentagon. July 4, 2001. Mihdhar walks back into the country at JFK. Nobody stops him, because nobody ever put him on a list. July 10. An FBI agent in Phoenix writes a memo warning that bin Laden may be sending men to American flight schools. It dies in the building. August 6. The President's Daily Brief carries the title "Bin Ladin Determined To Strike in US." August 16. Zacarias Moussaoui is arrested in Minnesota. Agents there beg headquarters for a warrant to open his laptop and are refused. August 23. The CIA finally watchlists Hazmi and Mihdhar. Nineteen days left. August 27. A headquarters agent accuses the Minneapolis supervisor of writing his request to get people "spun up." The supervisor answers that yes, he was trying to keep someone from taking a plane and crashing it into the World Trade Center. Headquarters tells him that is not going to happen. Days later, Steve Bongardt, the New York agent running the USS Cole investigation, is told he cannot join the hunt for Mihdhar because his case is criminal and the lead is intelligence. He writes back: someday someone will die, and wall or not, the public will not understand why we were not more effective. The hunt for Mihdhar goes to a new agent on his first counterterrorism case, filed at routine precedence, which gave the office thirty days to respond. He is still checking New York hotel records on the morning of the eleventh. And that morning the system touched them one last time. At Dulles, the screening software flagged Hanjour, Mihdhar, and Moqed. A ticket agent pulled both Hazmi brothers aside because one had no photo ID and could not understand English. The only consequence of being flagged in 2001 was that your checked bag was held until you boarded the plane. They boarded. The bags went with them. Here is the part people get wrong. The Commission found no plot to let it happen, and I have seen nothing that changes that. What it found was worse in a way, because it is so ordinary. A wall between two agencies. A cable left in draft. A lead marked routine. A hundred people each doing the narrow job in front of them, correctly, and nobody holding the whole picture. We know it could be done, because it had been done. In December 1999 a customs inspector in Port Angeles named Diana Dean thought a man coming off the ferry looked nervous. She asked him a few more questions. The trunk was full of explosives meant for LAX. That is the whole answer. Stopping it never required a secret nobody had. It required one person with the standing to be believed.