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Agent alleges FBI stalled pre-9/11 inquiry
HQ was a 'roadblock' in Moussaoui investigation, she says
Friday, May 24, 2002
WASHINGTON -- An FBI agent accused her Washington headquarters of erecting a "roadblock" to the pre-Sept. 11 investigation of terrorism defendant Zacarias Moussaoui. Her letter immediately prompted an internal investigation.
Agent Coleen Rowley, a lawyer in the Minnesota office that arrested Moussaoui last August, divulged in her letter that local agents became so frustrated with FBI headquarters that they broke from their chain of command and notified the CIA about the suspect before Sept. 11.
The local agents were reprimanded for doing so, Rowley alleged in a letter to FBI Director Robert Mueller that also was sent Tuesday to the Senate Intelligence Committee.
"When, in a desperate 11th-hour measure to bypass the FBI HQ roadblock, the Minneapolis division undertook to directly notify the CIA's counterterrorist center, FBI HQ personnel chastised the Minneapolis agents for making the direct notification without their approval," she wrote in the 13-page letter, excerpts of which were obtained by The Associated Press.
Mueller immediately referred the matter to the Justice Department's internal investigator, acknowledging his agency needed a "different approach" to fighting terrorism.
A spokesman for Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Bob Graham, D-Fla., said a House-Senate committee investigating intelligence failures also has begun a formal investigation of Rowley's allegations.
Moussaoui, a French citizen of Moroccan descent, was arrested by agents in Minneapolis on Aug. 16 on immigration charges after employees at a flight school told the FBI that he was acting suspiciously and had paid $8,000 in cash for flight simulator training.
He was indicted in Virginia on charges connected with the Sept. 11 attacks, and federal prosecutors accuse him of being the so-called 20th hijacker.
He is the only person charged as an accomplice with Osama bin Laden and the 19 hijackers in the suicide hijackings.
Prosecutors are seeking the death penalty against him.
Prompted by Rowley's disclosures, government officials confirmed last night that the CIA received at least two pre-Sept. 11 contacts from the FBI concerning Moussaoui.
In mid-August, the FBI told CIA of concerns Moussaoui might be a terrorist, and the CIA checked its own files and found nothing on him. CIA also made a routine request from foreign governments that yielded intelligence from France that Moussaoui was a known Islamic extremist, the officials said.
The second contact came in late August, when FBI agents in Minnesota told CIA officers they were seeking a warrant on Moussaoui, the officials said.
Government officials familiar with Rowley's letter, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said the agent alleged FBI headquarters did not fully appreciate the terrorist threat Moussaoui posed and hindered local agent's efforts to get warrants to gather more evidence.
"The agents in Minneapolis who were closest to the action, and in the best position to gauge the situation locally, did fully appreciate the terrorist risk/danger posed by Moussaoui and the possible co-conspirators even prior to Sept. 11," Rowley wrote at one point.
Mueller yesterday discussed the allegations and other terrorism issues with senators in a closed-door session.
"I immediately referred this matter out of the FBI to the inspector general for investigation," Mueller said in a statement. "I respect that process and all the independence and protections it affords."
"I am convinced that a different approach is required," the director added. "New strategies, new technologies, new analytical capacities and a different culture makes us an agency that is changing post-Sept. 11."
Senators reacted sternly to the latest controversy to strike the FBI, which also failed last summer to heed another agent's warning in Phoenix that Arab students were training at U.S. aviation schools and schools nationwide needed to be checked.
"While I'm shocked at the seriousness of these allegations, this kind of problem from headquarters is no surprise," said Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, a frequent FBI critic. "The FBI for too long has discouraged agents from using anything besides outdated tactics from the era of chasing Bonnie and Clyde."
Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., co-sponsor of legislation for an independent investigation, said the problems the FBI's Minnesota office experienced were "not an intelligence failure per se. It's the way the FBI works.
"There will be more," McCain predicted.
A Senate source, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said congressional investigators interviewed Rowley on Wednesday.
Officials familiar with Rowley's allegations said the agent alleged that the bureau made a series of mistakes last summer when agents became suspicious of Moussaoui and arrested him after he sought flight training at a Minnesota flight school.
The officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said some of the allegations involve how the bureau handled efforts to get a special national security warrant and a regular search warrant to gather evidence against Moussaoui. Those warrants were not granted before Sept. 11, but afterward FBI agents found evidence allegedly linking Moussaoui to the suicide hijackings.
As the chief principal legal assistant in the Minnesota FBI office, Rowley would have been central to the discussions around the warrants, the officials said.
In her letter, Rowley attacked Mueller's assertions that no information was available that would have enabled the FBI to have predicted or thwarted the hijackings, officials said.
Rowley wrote that Mueller's statements to Congress and to the public about the attacks were incomplete, officials who have seen the letter told The New York Times.
She also asserted that Mueller played down important warning signs of a pattern developing that the FBI failed to spot, including the July 10 memo from an agent in Phoenix about al-Qaida flight training. Taken together, the evidence should have alerted FBI headquarters that bin Laden's followers were planning a strike in the United States, Rowley contended.
Mueller did not become FBI director until September, arriving just before the hijackings.
He was not at the FBI when Moussaoui was arrested. Rowley's complaints focus on his statements after the attacks.
Rowley has sought whistle-blower status at the FBI to protect her from possible reprisals.
The FBI is exempt from the federal whistle-blower protection law, which shields government employees who reveal misdeeds in their agencies from retaliation by their superiors.
Last November, Mueller advised agents that they would be offered similar protection, provided they made their complaints internally.
This report includes information from The New York Times.
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