CONNECT THE DOTS: BUSH KNEW WHY THE US KNEW BIN LADEN'S OPERATIVES WERE GOING TO HIT US BUILDINGS WITH AIRLINERS AS WEAPONS, AND WHY CIA DIRECTOR GEORGE TENET HAS NOT BEEN FIRED. PLEASE NOTE REFERENCES TO GEORGE TENET-DAVID BOREN MEETING IN BOTH COLUMNS washingtonpost.com The 'First Rough Draft' By Michael Getler Sunday, May 26, 2002; Page B06 In 1963 the late Philip L. Graham, then the publisher of The Post and the newly acquired Newsweek magazine, gave a speech in which he described the "daily and the weekly grist of journalism" as providing what he called a "first rough draft" of history. It was, and remains, an apt description of the work reporters do, and the information readers, listeners and viewers absorb. That history, he said, is never complete, as more details become known every day. That is what is happening now. A much fuller picture is emerging about what went on inside the White House, FBI, CIA and Federal Aviation Administration before the deadly terrorist attacks of Sept. 11. Disclosures in the past few weeks by The Post, the Associated Press, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, CBS News, Time and Newsweek magazines and others portray a much different, more complicated and more worrisome picture about alertness, coordination and candor at the top of the U.S. government than was the case last fall. What we know now, first from a scoop in U.S. News & World Report and then from a May 3 AP story, is that last July, an alert FBI agent in Phoenix informed FBI headquarters that several Middle Eastern men were training at an Arizona flight school. He speculated that this could be part of an al Qaeda plot and recommended this be discussed within the U.S. intelligence community. It wasn't. On May 15 CBS News reported that early in August President Bush had been briefed by the CIA that terrorists associated with Osama bin Laden had discussed the possibility of hijacking U.S. airliners. Three days later The Post reported that the top-secret CIA memo for that Aug. 6 briefing carried the headline "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S." and said that he and his followers hoped to "bring the fight to America." The New York Times reported on May 21 that both Attorney General John Ashcroft and FBI Director Robert S. Mueller were told a few days after the Sept. 11 attacks about the earlier memo from the FBI agent in Phoenix but that they had not told George W. Bush and his staff about it until recently. Many other stories have run about what was known by the FBI but not by the White House or the airlines, or what was known by the CIA but not by the FBI. Some warnings, we now know, went back well before July. Given the flood of warnings and raw intelligence routinely generated about terrorism, it would be hard to make the case that even if things were better coordinated, the attacks could have been stopped. But the accumulation of missed opportunities is disturbing. Also disturbing is that the administration said nothing publicly about this history of signs and suspicions until forced to respond to press revelations. Previously, the public statements were all similar to what FBI Director Mueller said on Sept. 17: "There were no warning signs that I'm aware of that would indicate this type of operation in the country." Given the administration's penchant for secrecy -- from the energy task force to the war in Afghanistan -- it should not be surprising that a fuller account did not surface on its own. Now the revelations are followed instantaneously by dire warnings of new attacks from Vice President Dick Cheney, FBI chief Mueller and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. One must take these seriously, yet the timing and lack of candor earlier feed suspicions. Among the White House opportunities to reveal more about the pre-attack warnings was an eight-part Post series in January about the immediate post-Sept. 11 period, for which the president was interviewed at length. As some readers have already noted, none of what we've learned about warnings in the past few weeks was revealed then by the president or The Post. But there were some signs. In one segment, CIA Director George Tenet was having breakfast at a hotel on Sept. 11 with former senator David Boren when an aide rushed over to whisper the news to him. "This has bin Laden all over it," Tenet is reported to have said. "I wonder if it has anything to do with this guy taking pilot training?" he was also overheard to say. This is a reference to Zacarias Moussaoui, who had been detained in August after attracting suspicion at a flight school in Minnesota. The Wall Street Journal reported on May 20 that the FBI did not tell the White House about Moussaoui's arrest until after Sept. 11. It did tell the Federal Aviation Administration. But that agency decided against warning the airlines to increase security, the Journal reported. RAY MCGOVERN Signs of attacks well-known June 3, 2002 Miami.com No one wants to believe that the attacks of Sept. 11 could have been prevented, but we do a disservice to our country if we stay in denial. No one wants to believe that President Bush had more forewarning than he acknowledges, but there is strong circumstantial evidence that he did. Reviewing that evidence on May 26, The Washington Post's ombudsman, Michael Getler, alluded to one very telling sign from a conversation between CIA Director George Tenet and former U.S. Sen. David Boren over breakfast on Sept. 11. When an aide rushed up to tell Tenet of the attacks, Tenet's immediate reaction was: ``This has bin Laden all over it. . . . I wonder if it has anything to do with this guy taking pilot training?'' Getler notes that the reference is to Zacarias Moussaoui, the ''20th hijacker,'' who had been taken into custody in Minnesota four weeks before, after attracting suspicion at a flight school there. According to The Wall Street Journal, the FBI did not tell the White House about Moussaoui until after Sept. 11. But it is a safe bet that the CIA's Tenet did. Even before learning about Moussaoui, Tenet's President's Daily Brief of Aug. 6 bore the title ''Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.'' When analysts working in Tenet's Counterterrorist Center were warned about Moussaoui a few weeks before Sept. 11, it is inconceivable that they would not have told Tenet. He is, by law, ''the principal advisor to the president for intelligence matters related to national security,'' and is entitled to ``all intelligence related to the national security, which is collected by any department, agency or other entity of the United States.'' Tenet's people learned about Moussaoui in a back-door message from the FBI Field Office in Minneapolis enlisting the CIA's help in obtaining information on Moussaoui from French intelligence. The French promptly pointed out Moussaoui's affiliations with radical fundamentalist groups and Osama bin Laden. (The French service had been keeping close tabs on the likes of Moussaoui, having foiled a plan by Algerian terrorists to crash an airplane into the Eiffel Tower in 1994.) American officials have acknowledged that they learned in 1996 that a pilot in bin Laden's network, Abdul Hakim Murad, had planned to use the training that he received at U.S. flight schools to carry out a suicide attack on the CIA headquarters or another large federal building in the Washington area. Murad had been captured in the Philippines and was convicted in New York on charges of trying to blow up American jumbo jets over the Pacific. His confession formed the basis for a broader analysis prepared for the CIA in 1999 warning that bin Laden terrorists could hijack a jet and fly it into government buildings like the Pentagon. On May 29, FBI Director Robert Mueller revealed that a May 1998 field report warned that the large number of Middle Eastern men in flight training in Oklahoma ''may be related to planned terrorist activity.'' Moussaoui did his flight training in Oklahoma. On May 23, John Cooley reported in The Christian Science Monitor that, in the weeks before Sept. 11, Jordanian intelligence had warned U.S. counterparts that bin Laden terrorists were planning a major attack using aircraft inside the continental United States. The Jordanians had intercepted a crucial al Qaeda message that dubbed the operation ''the big wedding,'' but it did not identify the timing or the precise targets. As warnings of a major terrorist operation against the United States poured in last summer, we know that George Tenet kept warning everyone who would listen. It seems to me certain that he would have kept the vacationing president up to date, including the fresh information on Moussaoui. And that's probably why Tenet didn't get fired after Sept. 11. Instead, President Bush made an unusual appearance at CIA headquarters on Sept. 26, put his arm around Tenet and said: ``This is my report to the American people. We have the best intelligence possible, thanks to the men and women of the CIA.'' If only he had acted on it. - Ray McGovern, a CIA analyst from 1964 to 1990, regularly reported to the vice president and senior policy-makers on the President's Daily Brief from 1981-85. He now is co-director of the Servant Leadership School, an inner-city outreach ministry in Washington, D.C.              Printer-friendly version Click here to be added to our mailing list.