This looks like it is going to be an interesting read,but I feel the need to comment before we start because of the subject matter. Any article or book that has such 'inside material' needs to be read with discretion,as it has been my experience throughout my research and reading that more times then not, the author is directing traffic away from what they do not want you to find.In this case here I would suggest that one of the main purposes is to deflect and whitewash the Al Qaeda/ISIS connection to American and Israeli intelligence agencies(CIA,NSA,Mossad). That became my opinion from the time the author spoke about the 'freedom fighters' victory over the Soviet Union, and anger in the Arab world towards the United States, without mentioning a word about Charlie Wilson and his war.
Now to the second point,after reading these first few pages, it is clear to me that there has been a faction within this countries intelligence agencies(CIA/NSA)that has been directing their Arab asset's( Al Qaeda/ISIS)all along from Wilson down through today in 2017. I suspect Hayden and Wilshire are into this up to their eyeballs, along with others in their agencies. It is the only way these 'asset's were able to stay ahead of those who were looking to find them...here is an example with no possible explanation, other then it was intentional on his part....
THE SHADOW FACTORY
The Ultra Secret NSA from 9/11 to the To The Eavesdropping on America
BY JAMES BAMFORD
Introduction
In northern Georgia near the South Carolina border, a few miles from
Leburda’s Grits N’ Gravy and the Cracker Barrel Old Country Store,
one of the most secret facilities in the world is undergoing a major expansion.
When completed, it will likely be the largest eavesdropping
facility ever created, employing more than four thousand civilian and
military “voice interceptors” and other specialists. Run by the ultra-secret
National Security Agency, it is where the agency eavesdrops on the
Middle East and North Africa, thousands of miles away. Inside, behind
barbed-wire fences, heavily armed guards, and cipher-locked doors,
earphone-clad men and women secretly listen in as al-Qaeda members
chat on cell phones along the Afghan border, and to insurgents planning
attacks in Iraq. They also target and record American citizens in
that region, including business people, journalists, and Red Cross workers,
as they engage in intimate conversations with their spouses back
home and discuss confidential matters and business deals. “A lot of
time you could tell they were calling their families,” said one of the
NSA intercept operators who listened in on the Americans, “incredibly
intimate, personal conversations . . . Basically all rules were thrown out
the window, and they would use any excuse to justify a waiver to spy
on Americans.”
By 2008, the NSA had become the largest, most costly, and most technologically
sophisticated spy organization the world has ever known. It
had also become the most intrusive, secretly filtering millions of phone calls and e-mails an hour—international and domestic—through equipment
programmed to watch and listen for hundreds of thousands of names
and phone numbers. To sift through it all, the agency has the world’s
largest collection of data-eating supercomputers. Its newest, code-named
“Black Widow,” is a colossal $17.5 million Cray computer made up of
sixteen tall cabinets crammed with thousands of processors. It is able to
achieve speeds of hundreds of teraflops—hundreds of trillions of operations
a second—and the NSA predicts that it will soon break the petaflop
barrier, plowing through phone calls, e-mails, and other data at more than
a quadrillion operations a second.
In its manic drive for information, the agency requires a city-sized
headquarters complex that consumes so much energy that it is now in
real danger of running out of power and going dark. It has already run
out of space to store all of its data—data in which it is now drowning, according
to the Congressional Research Service. “Whereas some observers
once predicted that the NSA was in danger of becoming proverbially
deaf due to the spreading use of encrypted communications,” the report
said, “it appears that NSA may now be at greater risk of being ‘drowned’
in information.” The report added, “Some intelligence data sources grow
at a rate of four petabytes per month now . . . and the rate of growth is
increasing.” In a year at that rate, the NSA’s massive database would hold
at least 48 petabytes, the equivalent of nearly one billion four-door filing
cabinets full of documents. It would also be equal to about twenty-four
trillion pages of text.
Among the few who know just how much data flows into the NSA
is Eric C. Haseltine. The former head of Disney’s “Imagineering” labs,
Haseltine was appointed as the agency’s associate director for research
in 2002. Two years later he noted that even the NSA’s enormous computer
power has trouble keeping up with the flow. “We in the NSA are
encountering problems with the flood of information that people [in the
outside world] won’t see for a generation or two,” he said. “We’ve been
into the future and we’ve seen the problems” of a “tidal wave” of data.
He added, “We can either be drowned by it or we can get on our surfboard
and surf it and let it propel us. And, of course, that’s what we’re
trying to do.”
If indeed the data flowing into the NSA is what the outside world will see two to four decades from now, the amount of information the agency
is ingesting is truly astronomical. In fact, it may be rapidly moving from
measuring the data by the petabyte to measuring it by the exabyte, which
is 1,000 petabytes. By way of perspective, 200 petabytes is the equivalent
of all printed material. Five exabytes (5,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes),
on the other hand, represents enough information to fill 37,000 new Libraries
of Congress and more than all the words ever printed. This is the
annual equivalent of a thirty-foot stack of books for every man, woman,
and child on the planet.
No longer able to store all the intercepted phone calls and e-mail in
its secret city, the agency has now built a new data warehouse in San
Antonio, Texas. Costing, with renovations, upwards of $130 million, the
470,000-square-foot facility will be almost the size of the Alamodome.
Considering how much data can now be squeezed onto a small flash drive,
the new NSA building may eventually be able to hold all the information
in the world.
The principal end product of all that data and all that processing is a list
of names—the watch list—of people, both American and foreign, thought
to pose a danger to the country. Once containing just twenty names, today
it is made up of an astonishing half a million—and it grows rapidly every
day. Most on the list are neither terrorists nor a danger to the country, and
many are there simply by mistake. Some of the many innocent people on
the list may discover their situation when they are tossed off a plane, as
happened numerous times to Massachusetts senator Ted Kennedy. Others,
however, may never know. Instead, their application for a Small Business
Administration loan may be turned down without their being given
a reason; or the application of a bright son or daughter for admittance
into one of the military academies may be rejected without explanation;
or, because the names are shared with foreign governments, a person
could be turned away after landing in London for a vacation or business
trip without being told why.
Known as the Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment, or T.I.D.E, it
is the mother of all watch lists—the watch list from which all others, including
the Do Not Fly list, are derived. Nevertheless, it sits ingloriously
on a dated and inexpensive Dell laptop in the basement of the National
Counter terrorism Center, maintained by the C.I.A.
In early September 2001 there was no T.I..DE, and the NSA was a little noticed
agency attempting to downsize by a third and searching for a
mission. A few days later it found its new mission—a mission that began
with a phone call intercepted from a house on a dusty backstreet in Yemen.
BOOK ONE
ATTACK
Sanaa
It was late December and Yemen’s capital of Sanaa lay cool beneath the
afternoon sun. A fine powder of reddish sand, blown southward from the
vast Arabian Desert, coated the labyrinth of narrow alleyways that snake
throughout the city. On crowded sidewalks, beneath high walls topped
with shards of broken glass, women in black chadors paraded with men in
drab suit coats and red-and-white checkered scarves that hung loose like
long shawls. It is a city of well-oiled Kalashnikovs and jewel-encrusted
daggers known as jambiyahs; a place where former comrades from the
once Marxist south sit on battered sidewalk chairs chewing qat and puffing
from hookahs with wrinkled imams from the tribal north.
At the northwest edge of the city in Madbah, a cluttered neighborhood
of cinder-block homes and yapping dogs, was a boxy, sand-swept house.
Across the street sat a vacant lot littered with stones, bits of concrete, and
tufts of greenish weeds. Made of cement and surrounded by a black iron
fence, the house had a solid, fortress like appearance. On the flat roof
were three chimneys, one for each floor, and open balconies that were
wide and square, like bull pens at a rodeo; glass arches topped the windows
and doors.
It was the home of Ahmed al-Hada, a middle-aged Yemeni who had
become friends with Osama bin Laden while fighting alongside him
against the Russians in Afghanistan. Hada came from a violent family
tribe based for generations in Dhamar Province, about sixty miles south
of Sanaa. In a valley of squat, mud-brick houses and green terraced farms, the region was sandwiched between two volcanic peaks in the Yemen
Highlands. The area had achieved some fame as a center for the breeding
of thoroughbred horses. It also gained fame for kidnappings.
A devoted follower of bin Laden, Hada offered to turn his house into a
secret operations center for his friend in Afghanistan. While the rugged
Afghan landscape provided bin Laden with security, it was too isolated
and remote to manage the day-to-day logistics for his growing worldwide
terrorist organization. His sole tool of communication was a gray, battery powered
$7,500 Compact-M satellite phone. About the size of a laptop
computer, it could transmit and receive both voice phone calls and fax
messages from virtually anywhere in the world over the Inmarsat satellite
network. His phone number was 00-873-682505331; the 00 meant it was
a satellite call, 873 indicated the phone was in the Indian Ocean area, and
682505331 was his personal number.
Bin Laden needed to set up a separate operations center somewhere
outside Afghanistan, somewhere with access to regular telephone service
and close to major air links. He took Hada up on his offer, and the
house in Yemen quickly became the epicenter of bin Laden’s war against
America, a logistics base to coordinate his attacks, a switchboard to pass
on orders, and a safe house where his field commanders could meet to
discuss and carry out operations. Between 1996 and 1998, bin Laden and
his top aides made a total of 221 calls to the ops center’s phone number,
011-967-1-200-578, using the house to coordinate the 1998 bombings of
the U.S. embassies in East Africa and to plan the attack of the USS Cole
in the port of Aden in 2000.
Also living in the house was Hada’s daughter, Hoda, along with her
husband, Khalid al-Mihdhar. Standing 5'6" and weighing 142 pounds,
Mihdhar had an intelligent face, with a soft, unblemished complexion
and a neatly trimmed mustache. Wearing glasses, he had the appearance
of a young university instructor. But it was war, not tenure, that interested
Mihdhar. He had been training in secret for months to lead a massive
airborne terrorist attack against the U.S. Now he was just waiting for the
phone call to begin the operation.
Khalid al-Mihdhar began life atop Yemen’s searing landscape on May
16, 1975. Shortly thereafter, he and his family moved to the Kingdom
of Saudi Arabia. It was the beginning of the oil boom and the Mihdhars,
like thousands of others in the poverty-racked country, hoped to take advantage of the rivers of petrodollars then flowing into the Kingdom. They
settled in the holy city of Mecca, Khalid’s father was successful, and the
family became Saudi citizens.
For centuries the Mihdhar tribe was prominent in the remote Yemen
provinces that merge invisibly into Saudi Arabia across an endless expanse
of drifting sand dunes. Known as the Empty Quarter, the provinces
are a geographical twilight zone, a void on the map where governments,
borders, and lines of demarcation have scarcely intruded. Horizon to horizon,
there are only the occasional Bedouins who pass like a convoy of
ships on a sea of sand. In the city of Tarim is the al-Mihdhar mosque, with
its strikingly beautiful minaret reaching more than seventeen stories into
the sky, the tallest such structure in southern Arabia. It was built in honor
of the fifteenth-century religious leader Omar al-Mihdhar, the grand patriarch
of the tribe.
When Mihdhar was growing up, one of his neighborhood friends was
Nawaf al-Hazmi, whose father owned a supermarket and a building in
the Nawariya district in northwest Mecca and whose older brother was a
police chief in Jizan, a city in southwest Saudi Arabia across the border
from Yemen. Darker, more muscular, and a year younger than Khalid,
he came from a prominent and financially well-off family of nine sons.
His father, Muhammad Salem al-Hazmi, described both Nawaf and his
younger brother, Salem, as “well-behaved, nice young men who have
been brought up in a family atmosphere free from any social or psychological
problems.” Nevertheless, Nawaf would later complain that his
father once cut him with a knife, which left a long scar on his forearm.
Soon after turning eighteen, Hazmi packed a duffel bag and left for
Afghanistan to learn the art of warfare. But by 1993 the war against the
Soviet occupiers was long over and Osama bin Laden had returned to his
contracting business in Sudan. Undeterred, Hazmi called his family from
Peshawar, Pakistan, near the Afghan border, and told them he was going
to fight in Chechnya. Very concerned, Muhammad al-Hazmi went to Peshawar
to bring his son home. “I went to Peshawar,” he recalled. “I found
him there. He said he was staying in Pakistan as a trader of frankincense
and we returned home together. I asked him to help me in my commercial
ventures, including shops and hotels.” Speaking of his sons, he added, “In
fact, I planned to open branches for them and to find brides for them. But
they did not stay for long.”
Returning to Mecca with his father, Hazmi met with a key al-Qaeda
member and in 1996, bubbling with enthusiasm, convinced Mihdhar to
join him in a new war, this one in Bosnia defending fellow Muslims from
attacks by the Serbs.
What drove Mihdhar, Hazmi, and thousands of others was a burning
need to defend Muslim lands from the West, which had a long history, as
they saw it, of invading and occupying their territory, killing and humiliating
their families, and supporting their corrupt rulers. The victory in
Afghanistan over the Soviets, a superpower, was their first real win and
gave many Muslims across the region a sense of unity, fueling an ideology
that viewed their separate countries as a single Muslim nation—what
they called the “ulema.” An occupation or invasion of one Muslim state
was therefore an aggression against all Muslim states.
Now with the taste of victory over Russia still sweet in their mouths,
adrenaline still pumping through their veins, and a new sense of Muslim
nationalism, many were no longer willing to sit and wait for the next encroachment
on their lands. The West had long waged war on Islam, they
believed; now it was Islam’s time to defend itself and fight back. The time
had come to go on the offensive.
On August 23, 1996, Osama bin Laden issued his call to action: “My
Muslim Brothers of the World,” he said. “Your brothers in Palestine and
in the land of the two Holy Places [Saudi Arabia] are calling upon your
help and asking you to take part in fighting against the enemy—your
enemy and their enemy—the Americans and the Israelis. They are asking
you to do whatever you can, with your own means and ability, to expel the
enemy, humiliated and defeated, out of the sanctities of Islam.”
Turning his attention to the United States, he said, “We hold you
responsible for all of the killings and evictions of the Muslims and the
violation of the sanctities, carried out by your Zionist brothers [Israel]
in Lebanon; you openly supplied them with arms and finance [during
Israel’s bloody Grapes of Wrath invasion]. More than 600,000 Iraqi children
have died due to lack of food and medicine and as a result of the
unjustifiable aggression [the sanctions] imposed on Iraq and its nation.
The children of Iraq are our children. You, the U.S.A., together with the
Saudi regime, are responsible for the shedding of the blood of these innocent
children.”
The charges resonated with Mihdhar and Hazmi, and in about 1997 Hazmi returned to Afghanistan, formally swore his loyalty to bin Laden,
and fought against the Northern Alliance, possibly with his brother, Salem.
Mihdhar followed, and swore his allegiance to the al-Qaeda leader
in 1998. They would become the elite of al-Qaeda, among the first seventeen
to join from the Arabian Peninsula. Bin Laden would call them
“The Founders.” Early on, the al-Qaeda leader had developed a special affection
and trust—almost father-son at times—for Mihdhar. They shared
a common heritage, both sets of ancestors having come from the remote,
desolate Yemeni province of Hadramont.
In the spring of 1999, bin Laden and his operations chief, Khalid
Shaikh Mohammed, worked out a plan to bring their war to the doorstep
of the enemy. Using large commercial airliners, they would in one swoop
bring mass destruction to America’s financial, political, and military centers:
the World Trade Center, the White House, and the Pentagon. During
the meeting, bin Laden told Khalid Shaikh that he wanted Mihdhar and
Hazmi to travel to the U.S., begin pilot training, and lead the operation.
The two were so eager to participate, he said, that they had already obtained
U.S. visas.
That fall, bin Laden began setting the air attack operation in motion by
sending Mihdhar and Hazmi to an elite training course at his Mes Aynak
training facility. But Mihdhar may have been having second thoughts
about the U.S. plot. That fall he learned that his wife, Hoda, was pregnant
with their first child, and he returned to Yemen rather than continue on to
specialized training led by Khalid Shaikh. For Mihdhar, it was a complex
situation in a difficult time. His father-in-law, whose house he shared,
was one of bin Laden’s most loyal supporters and ran his Yemen ops center.
And he himself was one of bin Laden’s favorites and had sworn his
life to him. But all that was before the news of his future child.
Shortly after Hazmi completed Khalid Shaikh’s course, in late December
1999, Mihdhar was at the ops center when he received the phone call
he had been waiting for. He and Hazmi were instructed to leave in a few
days for Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, where their final, fatal mission to the
U.S. would begin. Now Mihdhar had to make a decision.
At that moment, seven time zones and 7,282 miles to the west, the
phone call was captured and recorded by America’s big ear, the ultra-secret
National Security Agency.
Intercept
Michael Vincent Hayden stood at the window of his large corner office
looking west through rimless glasses with rectangular lenses.
Balding, with dark, graying hair cropped close on the sides, he had a
broad globe like forehead, cheeks that were full and friendly, and a slight
chin that quickly disappeared into his neck. At fifty-six, he was in good
shape—stood as straight as a plumb line but carried a slight paunch that
pressed tight against the buttons of his starched, powder-blue shirt. On
each shoulder was a cloth epaulet with three silver stars, the rank of an
air force lieutenant general.
Unrecognizable to most Americans, the man at the window was the
nation’s top electronic spy, overseeing more analysts and operatives than
anyone else in the country and possibly the planet. In addition to people,
he controlled the largest collection of eavesdropping tools the world
had ever known: constellations of billion-dollar satellites that could hear
whispers on a cell phone from more than twenty-two thousand miles in
space; moon like listening posts around the globe with dozens of giant
white orbs containing satellite dishes capable of pulling in tens of millions
of phone calls, e-mail messages, and faxes an hour; and, to sort it
all out, the largest collection of supercomputers on earth. In addition, he
controlled the agency’s own secret military force, the little-known Central
Security Service, with its fleets of ships, submarines, and aircraft that
quietly vacuum the world for telltale voices and data.
The vast and mysterious city stretched out below Hayden was the largest, most powerful, and most intrusive eavesdropping machine ever created.
Made up of tens of thousands of people, more than fifty buildings,
dozens of receiving antennas, and the planet’s most powerful number crunching
supercomputers, it had one overriding goal: access. Access to
billions of private hard-line, cell, and wireless telephone conversations;
text, e-mail, and instant Internet messages; Web-page histories, faxes, and
computer hard drives. Access to any signal or device that might contain
information in any form regardless of protection—firewalls, encryption,
or passwords. Never before in history had a single person controlled so
much secret power to pry into so many private lives.
The NSA was once a backwater agency whose director had to fight to
sit at the same table with the CIA chief, but by the time Hayden arrived
it had become the largest, most expensive, and most technologically advanced
spy organization on the planet. Supplying nearly 80 percent of all
intelligence to the rest of government, it needed an entire city to house
it—a city that, if incorporated, would be one of the largest municipalities
in the state of Maryland. At the same time, it remained nearly as dark and
mysterious as when Harry Truman secretly created it, without the approval—or
even knowledge—of Congress, nearly half a century earlier.
To those who worked there, NSA still stood for No Such Agency and
Never Say Anything. To those on the outside it was virtually invisible,
hidden from the world behind a labyrinth of barbed wire and electrified
fences, massive boulders, motion detectors, hydraulic anti truck devices,
cement barriers, attack dogs, and sub-machine gun–toting commandos in
black ninja outfits nicknamed “Men in Black.”
Inside, upwards of 30,000 employees and contractors traveled over its
32 miles of roads, parked in lots covering 325 acres, and entered one
of more than four dozen buildings containing more than seven million
square feet of floor space. More than 37,000 cars were registered in the
city, and its post office distributed over 70,000 pieces of mail a day. The
secret city’s police force employed more than 700 uniformed officers and
a SWAT team, ranking it among the top 5 percent in the country in terms
of size. Its fire department responded to 168 alarms and 44 automobile
accidents the year before Hayden arrived.
Like a powerful political boss, Hayden oversaw his city from a suite of
offices on the top floor of the agency’s massive headquarters/operations
building, an interconnected maze of over three million square feet that stretched in all directions. The complex is so large that the U.S. Capitol
Building could easily fit inside it—four times over. Modern and boxy, it
has a shiny black-glass exterior that makes it look like a giant Rubik’s
Cube. But hidden beneath the dark reflective finish is the real building, a
skin like cocoon of thick, orange-colored copper shielding to keep all signals—or
any other type of electromagnetic radiation—from ever getting
out. Known by the code name Tempest, this protective technique, used
throughout much of the secret city, was designed to prevent electronic
spies from capturing any escaping emissions. Like a black hole, NSA
pulls in every signal that comes near, but no electron is ever allowed to
escape.
Like the walls, the window through which Hayden was looking that
bright December morning was specially designed to prevent eavesdropping.
Made of two thick, bulletproof-style panes, they contained hair-thin
copper wires to seal in even the faintest electronic whisper. And to prevent
sophisticated laser devices from capturing the telltale vibration of
his voice on the glass, music played between the panes.
But despite the metal walls and unbreakable windows, when Hayden
arrived the NSA’s vast city was a land under siege. Congress was lobbing
mortar rounds. Morale was lower than a buried fiber-optic cable. Senior
managers had become “warlords” and were locked in endless internecine
battles.
Among the agency’s most vocal critics was the conservative Georgia
Republican Bob Barr, who began his government career working for the
CIA. A dapper dresser with a dark-gray mustache, he was also the first
member of Congress to call for the impeachment of President Bill Clinton.
But a desire for privacy and the right to be left alone by the government
was as much a traditional conservative and libertarian value as it
was a core liberal principle. In May 1999, a month after Hayden arrived,
Barr stood on the floor of the House of Representatives and addressed the
issue of the NSA’s spying within the U.S.
Barr pointed a finger at an operation known as Echelon. The program,
he said, “engages in the interception of literally millions of communications
involving United States citizens over satellite transmissions, involving
e-mail transmissions, Internet access, as well as mobile phone
communications and telephone communications. This information apparently
is shared, at least in part, and coordinated, at least in part, with intelligence agencies of four other countries: the UK, Canada, New Zealand,
and Australia.”
The Georgia congressman then proposed legislation requiring the NSA
to turn over to the committee highly secret details about Echelon, including
“the legal standards for interception of communications . . to
or from United States persons.” Congress, Barr said, is “concerned about
the privacy rights of American citizens and whether or not there are constitutional
safeguards being circumvented by the manner in which the
intelligence agencies are intercepting and/or receiving international communications.”
He added, “I ask Members on both sides of the aisle to
support this very straightforward amendment, which not only will help
guarantee the privacy rights for American citizens, but will protect the
oversight responsibilities of the Congress which are now under assault by
these bogus claims that the intelligence communities are making.”
Barr’s amendment to the 2000 Intelligence Authorization Act was
enthusiastically backed by the Republican chairman of the House Permanent
Select Committee on Intelligence, Congressman Porter Goss of
Florida, who would later be picked by President George W. Bush to head
the CIA. “It is intolerable to think of the United States Government, of
big brother, or anybody else invading the privacy of an American citizen
without cause,” he warned. “I believe that the amendment offered by the
gentleman from Georgia (Mr. Barr) will help in that debate, and I am prepared
to accept it.” Goss was also harshly critical of the NSA’s refusal to
turn over Echelon documents and warned that such a denial could “seriously
hobble the legislative oversight process” provided by the Constitution
and would “result in the envelopment of the executive branch in a
cloak of secrecy.” Jumping on the bandwagon, the Republican chairman
of the House Government Reform and Oversight Committee, Dan Burton
of Indiana, then announced he would hold hearings on the NSA’s Project
Echelon.
Spurred on by the House Republicans, newspapers, magazines, and
television shows began reporting the dangers of Echelon and the NSA.
“Is Uncle Sam illicitly reading your e-mail? Listening in on your telephone
calls? Scanning your faxes?” asked ABC News. Even the conservative
Business Week got in on the act with an article titled “They’re
Listening to Your Calls: Echelon Monitors Phones, E-Mail, and Radio
Signals.” Referring to Echelon, the May 1999 article warned: “Run by the super secret National Security Agency, it’s the granddaddy of all
snooping operations. Business and political leaders are waking up to the
alarming potential of this hush-hush system.” The worry about Echelon
became so great among a number of privacy and civil liberties groups that
several organizations got together and created “Jam Echelon Day,” where
the public was invited to flood phone lines and the Internet with words
likely to trigger the NSA’s surveillance system. Among the words were
“CIA,” “NSA,” “assault rifle,” “bomb,” “assassinate,” “Mossad,” and even
“George Bush.”
Overseas, the European Union was alarmed by the potential of Echelon
to spy on private companies throughout Europe and pass the information
back to American competitors. In response, the EU announced it was also
launching a full-scale investigation into the surveillance network. Their
preliminary report, issued by the European Parliament, warned: “All
e-mail, telephone and fax communications are routinely intercepted by
the [NSA], transferring all target information from the European mainland
via the strategic hub of London, then by satellite to Fort Meade
in Maryland.” Among those outraged was Glyn Ford, a British member
of the European Parliament. “Almost by accident we’ve stumbled on to
what we believe is a substantial problem for the 15 member states of the
European Union and their citizens with respect to their human rights,” he
said. “We’re hoping we can use our position to alert other parliaments
and people throughout the EU as to what’s going on. And hopefully that
will lead to a situation where some proper controls are instituted and where these things are done under controlled conditions.”
It was against such a backdrop that the NSA picked up the call to Khalid
al-Mihdhar in late December 1999. By then, the agency had known of
the Yemen ops center and its link to Osama bin Laden and his embassy
bombings in East Africa for more than three years. Earlier in 1999, as bin
Laden was formulating plans for a sea attack in the Yemeni port of Aden
against an American warship and the air attacks in the U.S., an intercept
from the ops center had picked up, among other things, the full name of
Nawaf al-Hazmi.
The new message clearly identified the two people who would be traveling
to Southeast Asia by their first names: “Khalid” and “Nawaf.” Another
name mentioned in the conversation was “Salem,” who analysts
correctly determined was Nawaf’s brother. Yet despite the fact that the agency had had Nawaf’s full name and other details in its database for
nearly a year, no one thought to do a computer search before sending a
report on the new intercept to the CIA and FBI, and the report went out
with first names only. It was a troubling oversight given the importance of
the ops center—the place where they knew bin Laden’s embassy bombing
operation was coordinated—and the fact that three suspected terrorists,
closely linked to bin Laden, were suddenly on the move to another
part of the world.
If the agency had passed the name “Nawaf al-Hazmi” to the State
Department, analysts there would have quickly turned up the fact that
Hazmi—a suspected terrorist—had recently been issued a visa to visit the
United States. They would also have discovered that a visa had been issued
on almost the same day, and in the same place—Jedda—to someone
named Khalid al-Mihdhar. And now the two, along with a third suspected
terrorist, were on the move.
But within the NSA, isolated in its rarefied world of signals and ciphers
at Fort Meade, a universe away from rest of the spy community
in the Washington area, analysts felt it was not their job to research the
suspected terrorists’ identities—unless they were specifically asked. This
despite having what was likely the largest database of intelligence information
on the planet at their fingertips. Part of the reason was hostility
toward their counterparts at the CIA’s Counter terrorism Center (C.T.C) for
treating them not as equals but as subordinates—“like an ATM for signals
intelligence,” said one NSA analyst. They also were angered by the
C.T.C demand that they exclude their own comments on intercept reports
when in fact it was the NSA’s duty to analyze the messages, not just send
out raw transcripts. Finally, NSA analysts complained, if a dispute arose
over the interpretation of an intercept, Director of Central Intelligence
George Tenet would always come down on the side of his own people at
CIA. So in this case, they did the minimum.
The message said that “Nawaf” would fly to Kuala Lumpur on January
2 and that “Khalid” would follow three days later, on January 5, traveling
via Dubai. The NSA noted that the intelligence came from a “suspected
al-Qaida logistics facility” and indicated that “an operational cadre”
made up of “terrorist operatives” was planning an important meeting in
Malaysia. The NSA message added that “Salem may be Nawaf’s younger
brother.”
At the CIA, there was immediate concern within a crowded, windowless
room in the basement of the agency’s New Headquarters Building.
Four stories underground, Room 1W01 had no name on the door but was
known as Alec Station, set up as a “virtual station” and named after the
son of its first chief. Its purpose was to find, track, and capture or kill
Osama bin Laden. It was a bureaucratic subdivision of the agency’s C.T.C,
and its staff, which started out at about a dozen, had doubled by 1999 and
included FBI agents.
Alec Station viewed the move by al-Qaeda to organize a meeting in
Malaysia as both a troubling development and also an opportunity to discover
the group’s next move before it happened. “We knew that some
guys that looked as though they were al-Qaeda-associated were traveling
to KL,” said a senior CIA official, referring to Kuala Lumpur. “We didn’t
know what they were going to do there. We were trying to find that. And
we were concerned that there might be an attack, because it wasn’t just
Mihdhar and Hazmi, it was also ‘eleven young guys’—which was a term
that was used for operatives traveling. We didn’t have the names of the
others, and on Hazmi we only had his first name, ‘Nawaf.’ So the concern
was: What are they doing? Is this a prelude to an attack in KL—what’s
happening here?”
The NSA report wound up in front of a desk officer who began seeing
connections. Because the report originated at the Yemen ops center, the
travelers were likely members of al-Qaeda. The desk officer was then
able to discover Khalid’s last name: al-Mihdhar. With that information,
Alec Station dispatched a cable to CIA stations in the area. Titled “Activities
of Bin Ladin Associate Khalid Revealed,” it warned that “something
nefarious might be afoot” and that “Nawaf’s travel may be in support of
a terrorist mission.”
The first task was to find out exactly who “Nawaf ” and “Khalid alMihdhar”
were, so CIA station chiefs in Pakistan and the United Arab
Emirates got in touch with their counterparts in the local intelligence organizations
and asked them to surreptitiously obtain copies of the men’s
passports as they passed through airport immigration facilities on the way
to Malaysia. But because Hazmi changed his flights at the last minute,
and because the CIA never considered that possibility, he slipped through
the net.
CIA officials had more luck with Mihdhar. As planned, he boarded a plane on January 5 at Sanaa International Airport. Landing in Dubai, he
was in the process of transferring to his flight to Kuala Lumpur when
he was pulled aside by customs officers. At the request of the American
embassy, they took his Saudi passport and secretly photocopied it before
letting him go on his way. U.A.E officials then passed the copy to the CIA
station chief in Dubai, who faxed it on to the CIA’s Alec Station.
What was striking was that Mihdhar’s Saudi passport contained a valid
multi-entry visa for the United States. And his visa application, faxed
from the American embassy in Jedda, Saudi Arabia, showed Mihdhar’s
destination was New York. Doug Miller, one of three FBI employees at
Alec Station, took one look at the faxes and became instantly alarmed. A
possible terrorist, whose travel was arranged by bin Laden’s ops center,
was on his way to a secret al-Qaeda meeting and would soon be heading
for America’s largest city. At 9:30 a.m., Miller started pecking out a
message to alert his superiors at FBI headquarters, who could then put
Mihdhar on a watch list to bar him from entry.
But inexplicably, the message—known as a Central Intelligence Report
(CIR)—was spiked by his CIA boss, Tom Wilshire, the deputy chief
of Alec Station. At about 4:00 p.m., one of the CIA analysts assigned
to the station, a twenty-nine-year-old woman, typed a note onto it: “pls
hold off on CIR for now per Tom Wilshire.” Without Wilshire’s approval,
Miller could not pass on the information, even verbally. He had done everything
by the book. A potential terrorist and member of al-Qaeda was
heading for the U.S., the FBI’s jurisdiction—its turf—and he was putting
the FBI on notice so it could take action. There was no reason to kill the
message.
Miller then told his FBI colleague Mark Rossini what had happened.
Rossini had spent many years working on terrorism cases in the bureau,
from the first World Trade Center bombing to the attacks on the U.S. embassies
in East Africa, and had been assigned to Alec Station for several
years. He was both perplexed and outraged that the CIA would forbid
the bureau’s notification on a matter so important. “Doug came to me
and said, ‘What the fuck?’ ” said Rossini, who took the matter up with
Wilshire’s deputy. (Because she is still actively working for the CIA, her
name cannot be revealed.) “So the next day I went to her and said, ‘What’s
with Doug’s cable? You’ve got to tell the bureau about this.’ She put her
hand on her hip and said, ‘Look, the next attack is going to happen in Southeast Asia—it’s not the FBI’s jurisdiction. When we want the FBI to
know about it, we’ll let them know. But the next bin Laden attack’s going
to happen in Southeast Asia.’ ” It made no sense to Rossini. The potential
terrorists were coming to the U.S.—not to Southeast Asia. Neither Rossini
nor Miller was questioned by the 9/11 Commission.
“They refused to tell us because they didn’t want the FBI . . . muddying
up their operation,” said one of the FBI agents assigned to the station, expressing
his anger. “They didn’t want the bureau meddling in their business—that’s
why they didn’t tell the FBI. Alec Station worked for the
CIA’s C.T.C. They purposely hid from the FBI, purposely refused to tell
the bureau that they were following a man in Malaysia who had a visa to
come to America. The thing was, they didn’t want . . . the FBI running
over their case.”
The person most disliked by CIA officials in Alec Station was John P.
O’Neill, the flashy chief of the FBI’s National Security Division in New
York, both for his style and his expanding turf. In his double-breasted
Valentino suits, O’Neill rubbed shoulders with the media, hung out at
celebrity-filled Manhattan watering holes, and was constantly pushing to
expand the FBI’s presence overseas. “They despised the FBI and they despised
John O’Neill,” said the FBI agent, “because of his personality, because
of his style, because he was John, because they couldn’t be John.”
Having forbidden Miller and Rossini from notifying their headquarters
about Mihdhar’s planned travel to the U.S., the CIA then proceeded to
lose Mihdhar and Hazmi when they took off for a brief visit to Bangkok,
en route to the U.S.
Thus Mihdhar and Hazmi had successfully dodged the intelligence capabilities
of the NSA, CIA, and FBI. There was only one obstacle left:
U.S. passport control. It was the last line of defense between al-Qaeda
and America. But since Alec Station had not bothered to submit Mihdhar’s
name to the State Department for inclusion on its terrorist watch
list—and the NSA had not bothered to look up Hazmi’s last name, let
alone notify the State Department—no one was looking for them. “What
we had was an al-Qaeda guy, all his passport information, and a visa to
the U.S.,” said the senior CIA official, shaking his head slowly back and
forth. “If you look at the State Department standard for watch-listing, that
met it, not a question about that. And we didn’t do that.”
On January 14, the chief of Alec Station told senior CIA officials that the search for Khalid al-Mihdhar and the others was still going strong. In
fact, it had been over for days. The next day, the FBI agent Doug Miller
sent an e-mail to Tom Wilshire asking what happened to his CIR to FBI
headquarters warning of Mihdhar’s plans to travel to the U.S. “Is this a
no-go or should I remake it in some way?” he asked. He never received
a response.
At almost that same moment, Mihdhar and Hazmi’s plane touched
down at Los Angeles International Airport.
Few likely paid much attention to a front-page story in that weekend’s Los Angeles Times: “Some See U.S. As Terrorists’ Next Big Target.” Written by John-Thor Dahlburg, it warned that the U.S. was increasingly “hated by many radical Muslims” and “at the center of this web . . . is Saudi militant Osama bin Laden.” One senior French law enforcement official noted: “Terrorism is like the weather: there are zones of high pressure and low pressure, and they change with time. More and more in the future, the United States is going to be a target that will replace the traditional targets, like France.” The Swiss journalist Richard Labévière agreed and indicated that the U.S., because of its actions in the Middle East, had largely brought the terrorism on itself. “For America,” he cautioned, “the bill is now coming due.”
Waved through immigration with barely a glance, Mihdhar and Hazmi had little interest in the morning papers. Neither knew more than a few words of English and neither had ever spent any time in a Western culture. It is thus highly unlikely that they would have embarked on such an enormously complex and important mission without having first arranged for someone with a good command of English to help them get acclimated. According to new information, it is quite possible that one of Mihdhar’s own clan members had long been planning for their arrival. He may have met them at Los Angeles International Airport, driven them to San Diego, and helped them get settled.
A year and a half before, in the summer of 1998, Mihdhar Mohammad al-Mihdhar Zaid had arrived in Canada from Yemen. Fluent in English, Mihdhar Zaid was born May 8, 1978, in a remote part of South Yemen. Miles from any paved roads, the village of Al Hamra’ was once part of the mini-kingdom of Awsan. Several millennia later it sits forgotten in time on a rocky edge of a dry river valley called Wadi Markha.
Arriving in Ottawa in August 1998, he moved into a small apartment at 1067 Bakerville Drive and signed up for a computer course at Algonquin College, a small school a few blocks away that specialized in business and technology. Mihdhar Zaid was quiet but friendly and wore a short, narrow, neatly trimmed beard that began at his sideburns and circled his chin like a strap. On December 10, four months after arriving, Mihdhar Zaid was finishing his first semester. On a mild Thursday beneath a heavy layer of dark gray clouds in Ottawa, he boarded a red-and-white OC Transpo bus, got off at the American embassy, and walked out with a visitor’s (B-2) visa good for a three-month stay in America. Six days later he boarded a plane for San Diego via Los Angeles.
Now safe in the U.S., Mihdhar Zaid’s next objective was to remain permanently. He destroyed his Yemen passport, changed his name to Mohdar Mohamed Abdoulah, and applied for asylum at a local immigration office. He was from Somalia, he told them, where he had been subject to harsh persecution. Eventually granted asylum, Mihdhar Zaid enrolled in computer studies at a small local school, Grossmont Community College.
Passing through airport immigration control, Mihdhar and Hazmi indicated that they would be staying at the Sheraton Hotel in Los Angeles. But they never showed up. Instead, shortly after arriving—the same day, according to an FBI chronology—they turned up in San Diego. There they quickly became close friends with Mihdhar Zaid, who may have met them at the airport. With the help of Omar al-Bayoumi, a Saudi who came to the United States in 1993 and was also a close friend of Mihdhar Zaid, the two moved into the Parkwood Apartments, Room 152. Bayoumi then hosted a party to introduce them to the local Muslim community. Mihdhar Zaid would later claim that Bayoumi asked him to acclimate Mihdhar and Hazmi to San Diego, but Bayoumi would deny it. It may have been that Mihdhar Zaid asked Bayoumi to introduce the two to the community.
Mihdhar and Hazmi’s new home at the Parkwood Apartments was a two-bedroom flat in a bland, two-story building. It was located at 6401 Mount Ada Road in Clairemont, a section of the city teeming with students and other young Muslims. Nearby was a large Islamic center, a community college, and a row of strip clubs. Inside the apartment, except for a television set, there was little more than bare walls and a carpeted floor. While Hazmi was outgoing, stopping by the rental office in the mornings to say hello to the managers and join them for coffee and cookies, Mihdhar would breeze by.
To get around, the two paid $2,300 cash for a blue 1988 Toyota Corolla, purchased an insurance policy at the Huggy Bear Agency, and obtained California driver’s licenses. But soon the nearly $1,000-a-month rent got too expensive. To help them, Abdussattar Shaikh, a Muslim from India who was a retired San Diego State University English professor and member of the local police commission, offered them a bedroom in his house for free. Mihdhar and Hazmi agreed, but insisted on paying Shaikh $300 a month.
Located in the sleepy, working-class town of Lemon Grove, the house at 8451 Mount Vernon Avenue was perched on a bluff overlooking a valley in east San Diego County. Despite the fact that Shaikh had been a longtime “asset” of the local FBI office, he passed on little but the first names of his two boarders, largely because they never gave any signs of violence or hatred of America. “They never gave me any indication of hate,” said Shaikh. “They never showed any anger, any temper.” Hazmi would often sit silently, lost in thought. “I’d ask him, ‘Is there something bothering you?’ He’d just smile and say, ‘Oh, no, no.’ ”
The one person they did trust with their real feelings right from the beginning was Mihdhar Zaid. He was apparently the only one who knew Mihdhar’s true background—including his involvement with the pro–bin Laden Islamic Army of Aden back in Yemen. Mihdhar Zaid also shared Mihdhar and Hazmi’s anger at the U.S.
During their time in San Diego, Mihdhar Zaid acted as their guide, tutor, trusted confidant, and dining companion. Known as someone “very quick with English” whose conversations were often sprinkled with American colloquialisms, he translated for them and helped them apply for language training and, later, for flight training in Florida. He even took them to the United Airlines ticket counter to help them trade in the unused portions of their round-trip tickets from Kuala Lumpur to Bangkok. To everyone else, the two claimed they had just arrived from Saudi Arabia.
Mihdhar Zaid lived at the Southridge apartments, just a few miles away from Mihdhar and Hazmi, at 7200 Saranac Street in La Mesa. A fashionable bedroom community east of San Diego, it was dotted with picturesque restaurants, quaint antique shops, and trendy tea and coffee houses. But like many other places around the country and around the world, just below its placid surface there was a groundswell of anger and resentment among young, alienated Muslims. And the anger increased every time a U.S. submarine–launched cruise missile was fired toward Baghdad.
In La Mesa, the epicenter for much of that anger was a Texaco gas station on Spring Street near University Avenue, where Mihdhar Zaid worked as assistant manager. Known as Sam’s Star Mart, it had become a hangout for bitter and frustrated young Muslims. Crowded around an outdoor picnic table, they would chat and argue and sip dark coffee. Mihdhar and Hazmi soon became regulars and Hazmi briefly worked the pumps himself, earning six dollars an hour.
Soon frustrated and homesick, their few attempts at flight training a disaster, Hazmi and Mihdhar began spending much of their time calling back to relatives in Yemen and Saudi Arabia, usually on cell phones. Nevertheless, probably out of laziness, they would also occasionally breach security and make calls back home from the landline in their apartment. On March 20, for example, Mihdhar used the cell phone for a sixteen minute call to his home at the ops center in Yemen, probably to check on his then pregnant wife, Hoda, who lived there with her father, Ahmed al-Hada. “Anytime you saw them, they were on their cell phones,” said a former neighbor, Ed Murray. Shaikh, their landlord, also noticed something odd: they would usually go outside when using their cell phones.
They also spent a great deal of time surfing the Web and sending e-mail messages over the Internet using free computers at the San Diego State University library or else borrowing the one owned by their landlord. In March 2000, Mihdhar signed up for WebTV Networks, a service that would let him go online using his television instead of a computer and monitor. His e-mail address was kkhd20002@yahoo.com and Hazmi’s was hzi2002@yahoo.com. It was through e-mail that Mihdhar and Hazmi kept in communication with bin Laden’s operations chief, Khalid Shaikh, in Pakistan.
By March, the NSA had been eavesdropping on their calls for months without passing on their location. They were living in the home of an FBI informant—without the FBI knowing they were there. And the CIA knew that at least Mihdhar was planning to travel to the U.S. Worse, in early March the CIA’s Bangkok station reported to Alec Station that it had identified one of Mihdhar’s traveling companions as Nawaf al-Hazmi. The cable reported that Hazmi had traveled to Bangkok on January 8 and had subsequently traveled on a United Airlines flight to Los Angeles on January 15. It also stated that Mihdhar had likewise arrived in Bangkok on January 8 but that it was unknown if and when he had departed. Given the circumstances, however, traveling with Hazmi to Los Angeles would have been a logical guess—especially since they both had visas issued about the same time from the same place.
Now Alec Station definitely knew that one and possibly two of the suspected terrorists linked to bin Laden’s Yemen ops center had just flown to California following what appeared to be a terrorist summit. Still, Tom Wilshire never notified the FBI. Nor were any of the three FBI agents inside Alec Station even alerted to the cables. While they had access to the system, none had seen the messages. At that moment, Doug Miller’s CIR to FBI Headquarters was still sitting unsent in his computer. At any time, had the FBI been notified, they could have found Hazmi in a matter of seconds. All it would have taken was to call nationwide directory assistance—they would have then discovered both his phone number and address, which were listed in the San Diego phone directory. Similarly, if the NSA had traced any of the incoming calls to the ops center, they would have located two of the callers on California soil.[take a look at this story D.C....https://28pages.org/2015/09/11/former-fbi-agent-mark-rossini-driven-to-expose-cias-911-secret/]
In the NSA’s Ops 2B building, counter terrorism specialists continued reading the cryptic conversations between Mihdhar and the Yemen ops center that had been picked up while targeting the center. But inexplicably, the fact that the calls from Mihdhar had a U.S. country code and a San Diego area code—something that should have been instantly obvious to the NSA’s signals intelligence experts—was never passed on to the FBI, CIA, or anyone else. Overly concerned about being accused of domestic eavesdropping, Hayden made a drastic decision. He secretly pulled the plug on intercepting all international communications to and from the U.S., even those involving terrorism. The ban apparently went even so far as to not reveal the fact that suspected terrorists were present in the U.S. Thus, as analysts and agents searched for Osama bin Laden, they had no idea that his men were already here. [Looks like Wilshire is part of the CIA Faction running Al Qaeda/ISIS/and working with Mossad,which appears to be still in tact here in 2017,if the latest reports are true and I have no reason to doubt them,about evacuating ISIS fighters by flight from Syria.
Rather than the suave, bullet-dodging Bond in Ian Fleming’s thrillers, Michael Vincent Hayden more closely resembled a character out of a John le Carré novel—a wizened, cynical spymaster. He also lacked the background of the stereotypical super-high-tech spy chief. Shortly after his arrival at the NSA, he told his staff that arithmetic had never been his best subject. “I’ll state right up front,” he admitted, “I am not a mathematician or a computer scientist and I won’t pretend to be one. I will be relying heavily on all of you who are.”
Irish through and through, Hayden was born on St. Patrick’s Day, 1945, in a predominantly Catholic blue-collar area of Pittsburgh’s North Side. Known as “the Ward,” the neighborhood was near the confluence of the city’s three great rivers, the Monongahela, the Allegheny, and the Ohio. It was an era of tin lunch buckets, steel-toed boots, and Iron City beer; a place where smoke from coughing funnels painted the sky white and heavy trucks hauling slag and shiny rolls of new steel made the earth tremble. His father, Harry, worked the swing shift at the city’s AllisChalmers plant, applying a welding torch to giant electrical transformers, while his mother, Sadie, stayed home to care for Mike and his brother, Harry III, seventeen years his junior, and his sister, Debby.
The Age of Aquarius dawned during Hayden’s college years, and by 1967, as he was completing his final year, the country was undergoing a seismic shift in social and political attitudes. In January, twenty thousand people jammed into Golden Gate Park to hear Timothy Leary tell the assembled crowd to “turn on, tune in, drop out.” It would be a prelude to the Summer of Love in Haight-Ashbury.
Half the world away, the United States launched a bombing campaign against the North Vietnamese capital of Hanoi as U.S. military presence in the country exploded to nearly half a million troops. That same year more than eleven thousand of them would return in body bags. In April, Martin Luther King Jr. decried “the madness of Vietnam” and said it represented a “malady in the American spirit.” Two months later, on June 1, Vietnam Veterans Against the War was born, and in polls taken that summer, American support for the war fell below 50 percent for the first time. In October, fifty thousand protesters marched across the Potomac to the Pentagon, which was protected by more than twenty-five hundred army troops with bayoneted M-14 rifles. A photograph showing a protester putting a daisy into a police officer’s gun quickly became an iconic symbol of the anti-war movement.
In Washington, the CIA launched Operation Chaos to find a link between antiwar groups and foreign interests. Soon, the program had indexed 300,000 names, built up 13,000 subject files, and intercepted large numbers of letters to and from American citizens. At the same time, the NSA began targeting the telephone calls and telegrams of thousands of Americans involved in peaceful protest activities, including the singer Joan Baez, the baby doctor Benjamin Spock, and the actress Jane Fonda.
But at Duquesne University it was as if the protests over the war and the collapsing social order were taking place in a different dimension of space and time. What became famously known as the “Duquesne weekend” in February 1967 had nothing to do with a student sit-in or a massive rally. It was the coming together of ultraconservative Pentecostals and Charismatics to give birth to the Catholic Charismatic Renewal movement, an evangelical group that promoted, among other things, the speaking in tongues during Catholic religious services. Like many of his religious and conservative classmates, Hayden rejected the antiwar movement and the social revolution and instead would embrace the military.
After receiving his bachelor’s degree in history in 1967, he married Jeanine Carrier, a fellow student from the village of River Grove, Illinois, about a dozen miles from Chicago. He then stayed on at Duquesne for another two years to earn his master’s degree in modern American history, writing his master’s thesis on the effects of the Marshall Plan on post– World War II Europe. As Jeanine typed up and proofread his manuscript, Hayden drove a cab around the city, worked as a bellhop at the exclusive Duquesne Club, and coached football at St. Peter’s. When he graduated in 1969, the war in Vietnam was continuing its slide to disaster and the antiwar movement was growing in strength and power.
As his family prepared to move to nearby Brighton Heights, Hayden joined the air force. “He was so interested in history that I guess he wanted to become part of it,” said his brother, Harry. But instead of combat in Vietnam, the young second lieutenant was sent to America’s heartland: Omaha, Nebraska, home of Offutt Air Base and the Strategic Air Command Headquarters, where he worked as a briefer. Two years later he was assigned to Guam. As chief of current intelligence for the headquarters of the Eighth Air Force, he helped plan massive bombing raids against Vietnam. Beginning in 1975, he spent the rest of the decade in various schools, mostly teaching ROTC at St. Michael’s College in rural Vermont.
In June 1980 Hayden, newly promoted to major, was sent to Osan Air Base in South Korea as chief of intelligence for a tactical fighter wing. Two years later it was back to school and then air attaché in Sofia, Bulgaria. “I’ve crawled in the mud to take pictures of MiG-23s taking off from Bulgarian airfields so I could understand what type of model it was,” said Hayden. From there he moved into a policy job in the Pentagon and then over to the Bush White House in the National Security Council until 1991. After an intelligence assignment at U.S. European Command Headquarters in Germany, he took over the Air Intelligence Agency and became director of the Joint Command and Control Warfare Center at Kelly Air Force Base, Texas. There he became heavily involved in the concept of information warfare. Finally he was assigned as deputy chief of staff for the United Nations Command in South Korea, where he dealt with the issues of missing servicemen from the Korean War.
Hayden was in Seoul, Korea, in late 1998 when he received a call from George Tenet, the director of central intelligence, asking him to come back to Washington for an interview. The meeting took place at the Wye Plantation on the Eastern Shore of Maryland during the Arab-Israeli peace talks. Tenet was there playing an active role but broke away for the interview with Hayden. The CIA chief liked what he heard and Hayden flew back to Korea virtually assured that he had the job as director of the NSA.
Shortly afterward, on a Friday night, he took his wife to the movie theater at Yongsan Army Garrison. Playing was a film he had not heard of called Enemy of the State, in which Will Smith portrays an average citizen caught up in the NSA’s secret eavesdropping net, and Gene Hackman is a retired NSA official worried about the agency’s enormous power. In the opening scene, the NSA’s director of operations, played by Jon Voight, assassinates a congressman who refuses to approve a bill expanding the agency’s power to spy on Americans. Thereafter, agency thugs spend much of the rest of the movie doing their best to kill Smith’s character, who witnessed another NSA assassination.
“Other than the affront to truthfulness, it was an entertaining movie,” Hayden told the author in his NSA office on February 2, 2000. “But I’m not too uncomfortable with a society that makes its boogeymen secrecy and power. That’s really what the movie’s about—it was about the evils of secrecy and power . . . making secrecy and power the boogeymen of political culture, that’s not a bad society.”
As Hayden spoke those words, Mihdhar and Hazmi were moving into Room 152 at the Parkwood Apartments in the Clairemont section of San Diego and establishing communications with bin Laden’s Yemen operations center. Their phone was even listed on page 13 of the 2000–2001 Pacific Bell White Pages: “ALHAZMI Nawaf M 6401 Mount Ada Rd. 858-279-5919.” But Hayden’s decision to secretly turn a deaf ear to nearly all international communications entering and leaving the U.S.—even when they involved known terrorists within the country—would have momentous consequences.
It would also be an area completely unexplored by the 9/11 Commission, which, astonishingly, virtually ignored the NSA in its investigation. “No one from the commission—no one—would drive the twenty-seven miles from downtown Washington north to the headquarters of the NSA, in Fort Meade, Maryland, to review its vast archives of material on alQaeda and terrorist threats,” according to the New York Times reporter Philip Shenon, author of the book The Commission. “There was no problem on the commission’s staff finding people willing, eager, to spend their days at the CIA’s headquarters in Virginia to review its files,” said Shenon. “But no one seemed worried about what the NSA knew.” He added, “For the commission’s staff, Fort Meade might as well have been Kabul.” Shenon interviewed the commission staffer Lorry Fenner, an air force colonel with an intelligence background, who found that both the commissioners and staff “did not understand what the NSA was and what it did.” And because Fenner herself was assigned to other tasks, the NSA completely escaped scrutiny.
Hayden’s decision was based on his concern that the NSA would once again be caught illegally targeting American citizens as happened in the mid-1970's. Back then, many senior officials were read their Miranda rights by FBI agents and came close to being prosecuted. Hayden was also concerned about his agency’s growing image as America’s secret and powerful “boogeyman.” The best way to avoid both outcomes, he believed, was to keep his agency’s operations as far away from U.S. territory as possible. If a terrorist in the U.S. was communicating with his masters in a foreign country, Hayden reasoned, that was the FBI’s responsibility, not his.
But the problem was that Hayden did not coordinate coverage with the bureau either, leaving them largely in the dark and the international circuits to and from the U.S. largely unmonitored. And even had they notified the bureau, the FBI, light-years behind the NSA technologically and with little capacity for translating languages such as Arabic, would not have been able to pick up the slack. Thus, although the NSA picked up conversations between Mihdhar (identified as “Khalid” in NSA intercepts) in San Diego and the ops center in Yemen by targeting the ops center, it never made the effort to reveal where Mihdhar was actually located.
Had the NSA wanted to, it could have easily discovered Mihdhar’s exact location in the U.S. from the technical metadata that preceded the calls—the same information that the telephone companies use to bill their customers. With that, they could have gotten a warrant from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court and begun full-scale targeting of Mihdhar’s international communications—telephone as well as e-mail. All that was required for a F.I.S.A (Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act) application was showing that the targets were likely agents of a foreign terrorist organization, an easy task since both Mihdhar and Hazmi were being directed by bin Laden’s ops center in Yemen.
Hayden’s decision was not made lightly. Almost from the moment he arrived at the NSA, in March 1999, the agency was under siege. As the Cold War ended and the digital age began, the NSA became a convenient target for those fearful of the U.S. government’s growing surveillance capability. At the center of the controversy was Echelon, the agency’s system for eavesdropping on worldwide private communications, which involved sifting through billions of telephone calls and e-mails continuously zipping around the globe.
And as Mihdhar and Hazmi landed in Los Angeles, the NSA’s computerized brain that ran Echelon was on the verge of a devastating aneurysm.
After dinner on Monday, January 24, 2000, a little more than a week after the two arrived in the U.S., Hayden took a seat on his living room couch and flipped on the television. The undefeated Syracuse Orangemen were scheduled to play the University of Connecticut Huskies at the Carrier Dome on nationwide TV, and it was expected to be an exciting game. But just as he sat down, his secure STU-III telephone began buzzing upstairs in his vault like S.C.I.F. Pronounced “skif ” and officially known as a Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility, it was a bug proof room where he could read and store super secret NSA documents and communicate with the agency’s headquarters, about a mile away.
Hayden inserted his black plastic crypto-ignition key into the phone, enabling it to receive information at the highest classification level, and in a small window the words “Top Secret Codeword” appeared. On the other end of the line was the operations center with some very bad news. The NSA, he was told, had just suffered a massive system wide meltdown. “Give me a sense,” he asked. “How many computers are down?” It was the worst possible answer. “All of them,” the operations officer told him. “The whole system is down.” Hayden was in disbelief. Every computer in the agency’s secret city—including those in its two-story supercomputer facility—had suddenly crashed and could not be restarted. While it was 7:00 p.m. in Washington, it was midnight deep within the computers, which operate on Greenwich Mean Time. For some reason, at that moment a piece of software snapped, setting off the enormous shutdown.
“It was the whole net by which we move, use, abuse, process— everything we do with information here at Fort Meade went down,” said Hayden. “Everything on the Fort Meade campus went down. Everything!” There was no way to minimize the problem, Hayden said. “NSA headquarters was brain-dead . . . This was really bad . . . We were dark. Our ability to process information was gone.” Hayden called George Tenet, the director of central intelligence, and then immediately ordered an emergency response. Computer scientists, electrical engineers, mathematicians—anyone who could shed light on the problem was told to report in. But then, adding to the chaos, Washington was suddenly hit by a powerful snowstorm that shut down the entire federal government, including the NSA, for two days.
By Thursday, as snowplows finished clearing the secret city’s 325 acres of parking lots and employees crowded into the seventeen thousand spaces, Hayden wondered how to keep such an enormous disaster secret from foes such as Osama bin Laden, who might seek to take advantage of the agency’s sudden deafness. “I called [NSA director of corporate communications] Bill [Marshall] in here and I said, Bill, I need a concept; we need to communicate this to the work force,” he recalled. “What should we do?” Marshall suggested a town meeting. “And that’s exactly what we did.”
Taking the stage in the William F. Friedman Auditorium, Hayden warned everyone not to breathe a word about the crash. “I said the fact that we’re down is an operational secret. Our adversaries cannot know that our intelligence capabilities have been crippled.” He pulled no punches. “We are the keeper of the nation’s secrets,” he told the code breakers and the intercept operators, the cryptolinguists and the area specialists. “If word of this gets out, we significantly increase the likelihood that Americans will get hurt. Those who would intend our nation and our citizens harm will be emboldened. So this is not the back half of a sentence tonight that begins, ‘Honey, you won’t believe what happened to me at work.’ This is secret. It does not leave the building!”
That night, Hayden and his wife, Jeanine, took a long drive to the Stone Manor, a romantic inn near Frederick, Maryland. It was their thirty second wedding anniversary and he had long ago made the dinner reservations. But on the drive back to Fort Meade, he received a call from his deputy director for technology, Robert Stevens, who said he needed to speak to Hayden on a secure line the minute he arrived home. A short while later, Hayden climbed the stairs to his S.C.I.F and dialed Stevens on his STU-III. Despite the fact that the system was slowly improving, Stevens believed the fix was going in the wrong direction and wanted permission to bring the whole system down once again and start all over. Hayden agreed, but by then the NSA’s customers were becoming hungry for their daily ration of secrets.
Desperate for intelligence, Hayden’s deputy, Barbara McNamara, contacted the agency’s British partner, G.C.H.Q (Government Communications Headquarters). “We actually got in touch with them,” she recalled, “and said: ‘Would you please ensure that the information that you are providing in support of military operations or ongoing world events, crises, conditions, also gets to our customers here in the U.S.?’ ” Meanwhile, on the second floor of the Tordella Supercomputer Building, scientists pulled apart spaghetti-like mazes of multicolored wires, covered desks and floors with unwieldy schematics and wiring diagrams, and probed, millimeter by millimeter, the nervous systems of the computers. The hard work paid off and the cause of the crash was pinpointed to an outdated routing protocol. The solution was a massive hardware and software upgrade.
On Friday, after spending thousands of man-hours and $1.5 million in repairs, the network was patched together. After more than three days, the NSA awoke from its electronic coma, its memory still intact. But like water faucets stuck in the open position, millions of intercepts per hour had continued to pour down from the agency’s satellites during the crash—enough data every three hours to fill the Library of Congress. But instead of being processed and analyzed, they were simply collected in vast memory buffers capable of storing five trillion pages of data.
“We had the ability to store that which we collected over this three and a half day period,” said Hayden. “When we were able to go back and process the information when that capability came back, it took eight to twelve hours to process and analyze the information that we had collected.” Hayden concluded, “The network outage was a wake-up call.” Others familiar with the NSA’s fragile state of technology agreed. “We went deaf for seventy-two hours because of an antiquated system that should have been upgraded years ago,” said Tim Sample, staff director of the House Intelligence Committee.
The next day, as Hayden and his wife went cross-country skiing on the nearby Fort Meade golf course, the supercomputers in the Tordella complex continued crunching through the mountains of backlogged data. Batches of intercepts at last arrived on analysts’ desks. And in the agency’s counter terrorism center, the bin Laden specialists finally began reading the communications between Mihdhar and the Yemen ops center.
Hayden spent much of the spring defending his agency from attacking Republicans. On April 12, 2000, he took the witness chair in an open session of the House Intelligence Committee. It was a rare sight. The last time an NSA director had appeared in such a setting was a quarter of a century before, when another air force general, Lew Allen, squirmed in his seat from hostile questions about decades of illegal spying. Determined not to let that happen to him, Hayden ensured that his agency’s giant ears were pointed as far away from the U.S. as possible. Rather than tens of thousands of targets in the U.S., as some reports had speculated, the NSA was targeting only about three individuals within the country. It was a cautious approach, made necessary because of the enormous focus on the NSA by Hollywood, the media, and Congress. But caution also had its dangers; terrorists might be missed—terrorists like Mihdhar and Hazmi.
Committee chairman Porter Goss, a Republican from Florida, led off the hearing with a bit of humor. “There are concerns that the NSA operates in a very secret environment, without any oversight or legal strictures in place to guide and control their conduct,” he said. “These concerns were dramatized quite notably in the recent film Enemy of the State—a very exciting motion picture. Considering the fact that the character playing me was killed off in the first half hour of the film, I am very pleased to report that the movie was nothing more than a very entertaining work of fiction, and we’d like to keep it that way.”
But Goss quickly got down to why they were there. “Congress imposed the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 upon the NSA and other elements of the intelligence community because the NSA was found during the sixties and seventies to have engaged in indiscriminate electronic surveillance of U.S. persons. This was not a good period. This was not a proper thing.”
Sitting arrow-straight in the witness chair, three silver stars on each shoulder flashing in the television lights, Hayden immediately went on the defensive. “What I’m here to tell you today,” he said, “is that the laws and regulations under which we operate are, one, observed, and two, sufficient for both our conducting our mission and conducting it in a way that protects the rights guaranteed by the Fourth Amendment . . . The law requires us to do everything we can to prevent touching American privacy even at the very front end of that process, in the collection.”
Hayden then addressed the charges that, as he put it, “NSA illegally spies on American persons.” A key issue, he noted, was the definition of “American person.” “We use the phrase within the agency that we protect the rights of American persons. Now, let me define in more detail who is an American person . . . An American person is an American citizen anywhere. An American person is also a permanent resident alien of the United States.” To make his point, Hayden used an example. “Let me put a fine point on this. If, as we are speaking here this afternoon, Osama bin Laden is walking across the Peace Bridge from Niagara Falls, Ontario, to Niagara Falls, New York, as he gets to the New York side, he is an American person. And my agency must respect his rights against unreasonable search and seizure, as provided by the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution.”
It was an ironic example. As Hayden was speaking that afternoon, bin Laden’s men had already arrived. Just two days earlier in San Diego, Hazmi took his first flight lesson. And three days later he would receive a wire transfer of $5,000 from bin Laden’s money man in the United Arab Emirates to continue the lessons.
Hayden’s testimony was deliberately aimed at disarming his critics, but it was also misleading. His hypothetical suggested that NSA eavesdroppers would have to remove their earphones the second bin Laden stepped onto U.S. territory and became a “U.S. person.” In reality, the NSA would be monitoring his every move, before, during, and after his arrival. While he was a foreigner in a foreign country—Canada—the agency would have had no legal problem eavesdropping on him. And as he walked into New York, the agency could have continued monitoring his communications without skipping a beat. F.I.S.A allowed for emergency eavesdropping without a warrant for up to two days. In that time, the agency could have easily obtained a full F.I.S.A warrant to continue the surveillance because of bin Laden’s status as someone associated with a foreign terrorist organization, al-Qaeda.
Another sensitive area Hayden touched on was data mining—obtaining telephone calling records from the phone company—which he said was illegal. “The information you get in your phone bill, if it is about an American person, is beyond my reach. It is protected communication,” he said. “All that comes about by the statutes and laws that are provided to us. They all devolve from the Fourth Amendment, F.I.S.A, Executive Order 12000, which indeed was promulgated in 1981, but has been reviewed by every administration, Democratic and Republican, since that time. And then finally by U.S.S.I.D 18, United States Signals Intelligence Directive 18, which takes the provisions in those broader statutes and executive orders and turns them into a specific cookbook that can be understood by every eighteen- or nineteen-year-old airman, soldier, sailor, or marine who comes to work for the National Security Agency.”
Finally, Hayden brought up one area that appeared to be a giant loophole, if a president wanted to secretly take advantage of it. It was simply to have one of the NSA’s partners in Canada, Britain, or another country eavesdrop on targets beyond the legal reach of the NSA and then pass the information back to the agency. Such an action had been considered in the past. In 1973, for example, the CIA refused to help the NSA illegally eavesdrop on American citizens within the U.S. But according to the NSA’s deputy director at the time, Dr. Louis Tordella, they could have done it using foreigners in a foreign country. Hayden suggested that such activity was not prohibited by federal law. Instead it was prohibited only by presidential executive order, and executive orders can be canceled or changed at the whim of a president. “By executive order,” Hayden said, “it is illegal for us to ask others to do what we cannot do ourselves, and we don’t do it.”
By the end of the hearing, Hayden had succeeded in convincing the committee and much of the public that his agency had not become the Orwellian nightmare portrayed in the movies. There was also little question, however, that all it would take for life to imitate art was a few secret decisions. But as he made his way out of the hearing room on that crisp afternoon in April 2000, the NSA director had no idea that his agency’s greatest threat came not from studio executives in Hollywood, but from a pair of flight students 125 miles farther south in San Diego. “Mike Hayden’s challenge,” noted George Tenet at the hearing, “is not only to manage today, but to get ready for the next century . . . and anticipate how our adversaries will surprise us.”
55
San Diego
When United Airlines Flight 002 pulled up to the jet way at LAX on
January 15, Los Angeles, like the rest of the country, was taking a
nap. The long Martin Luther King weekend looked to be quiet, cool, and
wet. Few likely paid much attention to a front-page story in that weekend’s Los Angeles Times: “Some See U.S. As Terrorists’ Next Big Target.” Written by John-Thor Dahlburg, it warned that the U.S. was increasingly “hated by many radical Muslims” and “at the center of this web . . . is Saudi militant Osama bin Laden.” One senior French law enforcement official noted: “Terrorism is like the weather: there are zones of high pressure and low pressure, and they change with time. More and more in the future, the United States is going to be a target that will replace the traditional targets, like France.” The Swiss journalist Richard Labévière agreed and indicated that the U.S., because of its actions in the Middle East, had largely brought the terrorism on itself. “For America,” he cautioned, “the bill is now coming due.”
Waved through immigration with barely a glance, Mihdhar and Hazmi had little interest in the morning papers. Neither knew more than a few words of English and neither had ever spent any time in a Western culture. It is thus highly unlikely that they would have embarked on such an enormously complex and important mission without having first arranged for someone with a good command of English to help them get acclimated. According to new information, it is quite possible that one of Mihdhar’s own clan members had long been planning for their arrival. He may have met them at Los Angeles International Airport, driven them to San Diego, and helped them get settled.
A year and a half before, in the summer of 1998, Mihdhar Mohammad al-Mihdhar Zaid had arrived in Canada from Yemen. Fluent in English, Mihdhar Zaid was born May 8, 1978, in a remote part of South Yemen. Miles from any paved roads, the village of Al Hamra’ was once part of the mini-kingdom of Awsan. Several millennia later it sits forgotten in time on a rocky edge of a dry river valley called Wadi Markha.
Arriving in Ottawa in August 1998, he moved into a small apartment at 1067 Bakerville Drive and signed up for a computer course at Algonquin College, a small school a few blocks away that specialized in business and technology. Mihdhar Zaid was quiet but friendly and wore a short, narrow, neatly trimmed beard that began at his sideburns and circled his chin like a strap. On December 10, four months after arriving, Mihdhar Zaid was finishing his first semester. On a mild Thursday beneath a heavy layer of dark gray clouds in Ottawa, he boarded a red-and-white OC Transpo bus, got off at the American embassy, and walked out with a visitor’s (B-2) visa good for a three-month stay in America. Six days later he boarded a plane for San Diego via Los Angeles.
Now safe in the U.S., Mihdhar Zaid’s next objective was to remain permanently. He destroyed his Yemen passport, changed his name to Mohdar Mohamed Abdoulah, and applied for asylum at a local immigration office. He was from Somalia, he told them, where he had been subject to harsh persecution. Eventually granted asylum, Mihdhar Zaid enrolled in computer studies at a small local school, Grossmont Community College.
Passing through airport immigration control, Mihdhar and Hazmi indicated that they would be staying at the Sheraton Hotel in Los Angeles. But they never showed up. Instead, shortly after arriving—the same day, according to an FBI chronology—they turned up in San Diego. There they quickly became close friends with Mihdhar Zaid, who may have met them at the airport. With the help of Omar al-Bayoumi, a Saudi who came to the United States in 1993 and was also a close friend of Mihdhar Zaid, the two moved into the Parkwood Apartments, Room 152. Bayoumi then hosted a party to introduce them to the local Muslim community. Mihdhar Zaid would later claim that Bayoumi asked him to acclimate Mihdhar and Hazmi to San Diego, but Bayoumi would deny it. It may have been that Mihdhar Zaid asked Bayoumi to introduce the two to the community.
Mihdhar and Hazmi’s new home at the Parkwood Apartments was a two-bedroom flat in a bland, two-story building. It was located at 6401 Mount Ada Road in Clairemont, a section of the city teeming with students and other young Muslims. Nearby was a large Islamic center, a community college, and a row of strip clubs. Inside the apartment, except for a television set, there was little more than bare walls and a carpeted floor. While Hazmi was outgoing, stopping by the rental office in the mornings to say hello to the managers and join them for coffee and cookies, Mihdhar would breeze by.
To get around, the two paid $2,300 cash for a blue 1988 Toyota Corolla, purchased an insurance policy at the Huggy Bear Agency, and obtained California driver’s licenses. But soon the nearly $1,000-a-month rent got too expensive. To help them, Abdussattar Shaikh, a Muslim from India who was a retired San Diego State University English professor and member of the local police commission, offered them a bedroom in his house for free. Mihdhar and Hazmi agreed, but insisted on paying Shaikh $300 a month.
Located in the sleepy, working-class town of Lemon Grove, the house at 8451 Mount Vernon Avenue was perched on a bluff overlooking a valley in east San Diego County. Despite the fact that Shaikh had been a longtime “asset” of the local FBI office, he passed on little but the first names of his two boarders, largely because they never gave any signs of violence or hatred of America. “They never gave me any indication of hate,” said Shaikh. “They never showed any anger, any temper.” Hazmi would often sit silently, lost in thought. “I’d ask him, ‘Is there something bothering you?’ He’d just smile and say, ‘Oh, no, no.’ ”
The one person they did trust with their real feelings right from the beginning was Mihdhar Zaid. He was apparently the only one who knew Mihdhar’s true background—including his involvement with the pro–bin Laden Islamic Army of Aden back in Yemen. Mihdhar Zaid also shared Mihdhar and Hazmi’s anger at the U.S.
During their time in San Diego, Mihdhar Zaid acted as their guide, tutor, trusted confidant, and dining companion. Known as someone “very quick with English” whose conversations were often sprinkled with American colloquialisms, he translated for them and helped them apply for language training and, later, for flight training in Florida. He even took them to the United Airlines ticket counter to help them trade in the unused portions of their round-trip tickets from Kuala Lumpur to Bangkok. To everyone else, the two claimed they had just arrived from Saudi Arabia.
Mihdhar Zaid lived at the Southridge apartments, just a few miles away from Mihdhar and Hazmi, at 7200 Saranac Street in La Mesa. A fashionable bedroom community east of San Diego, it was dotted with picturesque restaurants, quaint antique shops, and trendy tea and coffee houses. But like many other places around the country and around the world, just below its placid surface there was a groundswell of anger and resentment among young, alienated Muslims. And the anger increased every time a U.S. submarine–launched cruise missile was fired toward Baghdad.
In La Mesa, the epicenter for much of that anger was a Texaco gas station on Spring Street near University Avenue, where Mihdhar Zaid worked as assistant manager. Known as Sam’s Star Mart, it had become a hangout for bitter and frustrated young Muslims. Crowded around an outdoor picnic table, they would chat and argue and sip dark coffee. Mihdhar and Hazmi soon became regulars and Hazmi briefly worked the pumps himself, earning six dollars an hour.
Soon frustrated and homesick, their few attempts at flight training a disaster, Hazmi and Mihdhar began spending much of their time calling back to relatives in Yemen and Saudi Arabia, usually on cell phones. Nevertheless, probably out of laziness, they would also occasionally breach security and make calls back home from the landline in their apartment. On March 20, for example, Mihdhar used the cell phone for a sixteen minute call to his home at the ops center in Yemen, probably to check on his then pregnant wife, Hoda, who lived there with her father, Ahmed al-Hada. “Anytime you saw them, they were on their cell phones,” said a former neighbor, Ed Murray. Shaikh, their landlord, also noticed something odd: they would usually go outside when using their cell phones.
They also spent a great deal of time surfing the Web and sending e-mail messages over the Internet using free computers at the San Diego State University library or else borrowing the one owned by their landlord. In March 2000, Mihdhar signed up for WebTV Networks, a service that would let him go online using his television instead of a computer and monitor. His e-mail address was kkhd20002@yahoo.com and Hazmi’s was hzi2002@yahoo.com. It was through e-mail that Mihdhar and Hazmi kept in communication with bin Laden’s operations chief, Khalid Shaikh, in Pakistan.
By March, the NSA had been eavesdropping on their calls for months without passing on their location. They were living in the home of an FBI informant—without the FBI knowing they were there. And the CIA knew that at least Mihdhar was planning to travel to the U.S. Worse, in early March the CIA’s Bangkok station reported to Alec Station that it had identified one of Mihdhar’s traveling companions as Nawaf al-Hazmi. The cable reported that Hazmi had traveled to Bangkok on January 8 and had subsequently traveled on a United Airlines flight to Los Angeles on January 15. It also stated that Mihdhar had likewise arrived in Bangkok on January 8 but that it was unknown if and when he had departed. Given the circumstances, however, traveling with Hazmi to Los Angeles would have been a logical guess—especially since they both had visas issued about the same time from the same place.
Now Alec Station definitely knew that one and possibly two of the suspected terrorists linked to bin Laden’s Yemen ops center had just flown to California following what appeared to be a terrorist summit. Still, Tom Wilshire never notified the FBI. Nor were any of the three FBI agents inside Alec Station even alerted to the cables. While they had access to the system, none had seen the messages. At that moment, Doug Miller’s CIR to FBI Headquarters was still sitting unsent in his computer. At any time, had the FBI been notified, they could have found Hazmi in a matter of seconds. All it would have taken was to call nationwide directory assistance—they would have then discovered both his phone number and address, which were listed in the San Diego phone directory. Similarly, if the NSA had traced any of the incoming calls to the ops center, they would have located two of the callers on California soil.[take a look at this story D.C....https://28pages.org/2015/09/11/former-fbi-agent-mark-rossini-driven-to-expose-cias-911-secret/]
Deaf
It had been a bitter winter in Maryland, and icy patches of snow had
turned General Mike Hayden’s driveway into a black-and-white checkerboard.
His redbrick house on Fort Meade’s Butler Street, the official
living quarters for the NSA director, had a dignified but tired look about
it. It was in a small, tree-lined enclave reserved for flag-rank officers and
off-limits to anyone else. On military bases, privates live with privates,
majors live with majors, and generals live with generals. Inside was an
eclectic mix of furniture: a shiny black cabinet from Korea, his last post,
in the living room; a long, dark wood table in the dining room that probably
came from a government warehouse; and a bedroom set upstairs that
had banged around the world for a dozen or more years. In the back, protected
by a flimsy carport, was the family’s only car, a dark blue Volvo. In the NSA’s Ops 2B building, counter terrorism specialists continued reading the cryptic conversations between Mihdhar and the Yemen ops center that had been picked up while targeting the center. But inexplicably, the fact that the calls from Mihdhar had a U.S. country code and a San Diego area code—something that should have been instantly obvious to the NSA’s signals intelligence experts—was never passed on to the FBI, CIA, or anyone else. Overly concerned about being accused of domestic eavesdropping, Hayden made a drastic decision. He secretly pulled the plug on intercepting all international communications to and from the U.S., even those involving terrorism. The ban apparently went even so far as to not reveal the fact that suspected terrorists were present in the U.S. Thus, as analysts and agents searched for Osama bin Laden, they had no idea that his men were already here. [Looks like Wilshire is part of the CIA Faction running Al Qaeda/ISIS/and working with Mossad,which appears to be still in tact here in 2017,if the latest reports are true and I have no reason to doubt them,about evacuating ISIS fighters by flight from Syria.
Rather than the suave, bullet-dodging Bond in Ian Fleming’s thrillers, Michael Vincent Hayden more closely resembled a character out of a John le Carré novel—a wizened, cynical spymaster. He also lacked the background of the stereotypical super-high-tech spy chief. Shortly after his arrival at the NSA, he told his staff that arithmetic had never been his best subject. “I’ll state right up front,” he admitted, “I am not a mathematician or a computer scientist and I won’t pretend to be one. I will be relying heavily on all of you who are.”
Irish through and through, Hayden was born on St. Patrick’s Day, 1945, in a predominantly Catholic blue-collar area of Pittsburgh’s North Side. Known as “the Ward,” the neighborhood was near the confluence of the city’s three great rivers, the Monongahela, the Allegheny, and the Ohio. It was an era of tin lunch buckets, steel-toed boots, and Iron City beer; a place where smoke from coughing funnels painted the sky white and heavy trucks hauling slag and shiny rolls of new steel made the earth tremble. His father, Harry, worked the swing shift at the city’s AllisChalmers plant, applying a welding torch to giant electrical transformers, while his mother, Sadie, stayed home to care for Mike and his brother, Harry III, seventeen years his junior, and his sister, Debby.
The Age of Aquarius dawned during Hayden’s college years, and by 1967, as he was completing his final year, the country was undergoing a seismic shift in social and political attitudes. In January, twenty thousand people jammed into Golden Gate Park to hear Timothy Leary tell the assembled crowd to “turn on, tune in, drop out.” It would be a prelude to the Summer of Love in Haight-Ashbury.
Half the world away, the United States launched a bombing campaign against the North Vietnamese capital of Hanoi as U.S. military presence in the country exploded to nearly half a million troops. That same year more than eleven thousand of them would return in body bags. In April, Martin Luther King Jr. decried “the madness of Vietnam” and said it represented a “malady in the American spirit.” Two months later, on June 1, Vietnam Veterans Against the War was born, and in polls taken that summer, American support for the war fell below 50 percent for the first time. In October, fifty thousand protesters marched across the Potomac to the Pentagon, which was protected by more than twenty-five hundred army troops with bayoneted M-14 rifles. A photograph showing a protester putting a daisy into a police officer’s gun quickly became an iconic symbol of the anti-war movement.
In Washington, the CIA launched Operation Chaos to find a link between antiwar groups and foreign interests. Soon, the program had indexed 300,000 names, built up 13,000 subject files, and intercepted large numbers of letters to and from American citizens. At the same time, the NSA began targeting the telephone calls and telegrams of thousands of Americans involved in peaceful protest activities, including the singer Joan Baez, the baby doctor Benjamin Spock, and the actress Jane Fonda.
But at Duquesne University it was as if the protests over the war and the collapsing social order were taking place in a different dimension of space and time. What became famously known as the “Duquesne weekend” in February 1967 had nothing to do with a student sit-in or a massive rally. It was the coming together of ultraconservative Pentecostals and Charismatics to give birth to the Catholic Charismatic Renewal movement, an evangelical group that promoted, among other things, the speaking in tongues during Catholic religious services. Like many of his religious and conservative classmates, Hayden rejected the antiwar movement and the social revolution and instead would embrace the military.
After receiving his bachelor’s degree in history in 1967, he married Jeanine Carrier, a fellow student from the village of River Grove, Illinois, about a dozen miles from Chicago. He then stayed on at Duquesne for another two years to earn his master’s degree in modern American history, writing his master’s thesis on the effects of the Marshall Plan on post– World War II Europe. As Jeanine typed up and proofread his manuscript, Hayden drove a cab around the city, worked as a bellhop at the exclusive Duquesne Club, and coached football at St. Peter’s. When he graduated in 1969, the war in Vietnam was continuing its slide to disaster and the antiwar movement was growing in strength and power.
As his family prepared to move to nearby Brighton Heights, Hayden joined the air force. “He was so interested in history that I guess he wanted to become part of it,” said his brother, Harry. But instead of combat in Vietnam, the young second lieutenant was sent to America’s heartland: Omaha, Nebraska, home of Offutt Air Base and the Strategic Air Command Headquarters, where he worked as a briefer. Two years later he was assigned to Guam. As chief of current intelligence for the headquarters of the Eighth Air Force, he helped plan massive bombing raids against Vietnam. Beginning in 1975, he spent the rest of the decade in various schools, mostly teaching ROTC at St. Michael’s College in rural Vermont.
In June 1980 Hayden, newly promoted to major, was sent to Osan Air Base in South Korea as chief of intelligence for a tactical fighter wing. Two years later it was back to school and then air attaché in Sofia, Bulgaria. “I’ve crawled in the mud to take pictures of MiG-23s taking off from Bulgarian airfields so I could understand what type of model it was,” said Hayden. From there he moved into a policy job in the Pentagon and then over to the Bush White House in the National Security Council until 1991. After an intelligence assignment at U.S. European Command Headquarters in Germany, he took over the Air Intelligence Agency and became director of the Joint Command and Control Warfare Center at Kelly Air Force Base, Texas. There he became heavily involved in the concept of information warfare. Finally he was assigned as deputy chief of staff for the United Nations Command in South Korea, where he dealt with the issues of missing servicemen from the Korean War.
Hayden was in Seoul, Korea, in late 1998 when he received a call from George Tenet, the director of central intelligence, asking him to come back to Washington for an interview. The meeting took place at the Wye Plantation on the Eastern Shore of Maryland during the Arab-Israeli peace talks. Tenet was there playing an active role but broke away for the interview with Hayden. The CIA chief liked what he heard and Hayden flew back to Korea virtually assured that he had the job as director of the NSA.
Shortly afterward, on a Friday night, he took his wife to the movie theater at Yongsan Army Garrison. Playing was a film he had not heard of called Enemy of the State, in which Will Smith portrays an average citizen caught up in the NSA’s secret eavesdropping net, and Gene Hackman is a retired NSA official worried about the agency’s enormous power. In the opening scene, the NSA’s director of operations, played by Jon Voight, assassinates a congressman who refuses to approve a bill expanding the agency’s power to spy on Americans. Thereafter, agency thugs spend much of the rest of the movie doing their best to kill Smith’s character, who witnessed another NSA assassination.
“Other than the affront to truthfulness, it was an entertaining movie,” Hayden told the author in his NSA office on February 2, 2000. “But I’m not too uncomfortable with a society that makes its boogeymen secrecy and power. That’s really what the movie’s about—it was about the evils of secrecy and power . . . making secrecy and power the boogeymen of political culture, that’s not a bad society.”
As Hayden spoke those words, Mihdhar and Hazmi were moving into Room 152 at the Parkwood Apartments in the Clairemont section of San Diego and establishing communications with bin Laden’s Yemen operations center. Their phone was even listed on page 13 of the 2000–2001 Pacific Bell White Pages: “ALHAZMI Nawaf M 6401 Mount Ada Rd. 858-279-5919.” But Hayden’s decision to secretly turn a deaf ear to nearly all international communications entering and leaving the U.S.—even when they involved known terrorists within the country—would have momentous consequences.
It would also be an area completely unexplored by the 9/11 Commission, which, astonishingly, virtually ignored the NSA in its investigation. “No one from the commission—no one—would drive the twenty-seven miles from downtown Washington north to the headquarters of the NSA, in Fort Meade, Maryland, to review its vast archives of material on alQaeda and terrorist threats,” according to the New York Times reporter Philip Shenon, author of the book The Commission. “There was no problem on the commission’s staff finding people willing, eager, to spend their days at the CIA’s headquarters in Virginia to review its files,” said Shenon. “But no one seemed worried about what the NSA knew.” He added, “For the commission’s staff, Fort Meade might as well have been Kabul.” Shenon interviewed the commission staffer Lorry Fenner, an air force colonel with an intelligence background, who found that both the commissioners and staff “did not understand what the NSA was and what it did.” And because Fenner herself was assigned to other tasks, the NSA completely escaped scrutiny.
Hayden’s decision was based on his concern that the NSA would once again be caught illegally targeting American citizens as happened in the mid-1970's. Back then, many senior officials were read their Miranda rights by FBI agents and came close to being prosecuted. Hayden was also concerned about his agency’s growing image as America’s secret and powerful “boogeyman.” The best way to avoid both outcomes, he believed, was to keep his agency’s operations as far away from U.S. territory as possible. If a terrorist in the U.S. was communicating with his masters in a foreign country, Hayden reasoned, that was the FBI’s responsibility, not his.
But the problem was that Hayden did not coordinate coverage with the bureau either, leaving them largely in the dark and the international circuits to and from the U.S. largely unmonitored. And even had they notified the bureau, the FBI, light-years behind the NSA technologically and with little capacity for translating languages such as Arabic, would not have been able to pick up the slack. Thus, although the NSA picked up conversations between Mihdhar (identified as “Khalid” in NSA intercepts) in San Diego and the ops center in Yemen by targeting the ops center, it never made the effort to reveal where Mihdhar was actually located.
Had the NSA wanted to, it could have easily discovered Mihdhar’s exact location in the U.S. from the technical metadata that preceded the calls—the same information that the telephone companies use to bill their customers. With that, they could have gotten a warrant from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court and begun full-scale targeting of Mihdhar’s international communications—telephone as well as e-mail. All that was required for a F.I.S.A (Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act) application was showing that the targets were likely agents of a foreign terrorist organization, an easy task since both Mihdhar and Hazmi were being directed by bin Laden’s ops center in Yemen.
Hayden’s decision was not made lightly. Almost from the moment he arrived at the NSA, in March 1999, the agency was under siege. As the Cold War ended and the digital age began, the NSA became a convenient target for those fearful of the U.S. government’s growing surveillance capability. At the center of the controversy was Echelon, the agency’s system for eavesdropping on worldwide private communications, which involved sifting through billions of telephone calls and e-mails continuously zipping around the globe.
And as Mihdhar and Hazmi landed in Los Angeles, the NSA’s computerized brain that ran Echelon was on the verge of a devastating aneurysm.
After dinner on Monday, January 24, 2000, a little more than a week after the two arrived in the U.S., Hayden took a seat on his living room couch and flipped on the television. The undefeated Syracuse Orangemen were scheduled to play the University of Connecticut Huskies at the Carrier Dome on nationwide TV, and it was expected to be an exciting game. But just as he sat down, his secure STU-III telephone began buzzing upstairs in his vault like S.C.I.F. Pronounced “skif ” and officially known as a Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility, it was a bug proof room where he could read and store super secret NSA documents and communicate with the agency’s headquarters, about a mile away.
Hayden inserted his black plastic crypto-ignition key into the phone, enabling it to receive information at the highest classification level, and in a small window the words “Top Secret Codeword” appeared. On the other end of the line was the operations center with some very bad news. The NSA, he was told, had just suffered a massive system wide meltdown. “Give me a sense,” he asked. “How many computers are down?” It was the worst possible answer. “All of them,” the operations officer told him. “The whole system is down.” Hayden was in disbelief. Every computer in the agency’s secret city—including those in its two-story supercomputer facility—had suddenly crashed and could not be restarted. While it was 7:00 p.m. in Washington, it was midnight deep within the computers, which operate on Greenwich Mean Time. For some reason, at that moment a piece of software snapped, setting off the enormous shutdown.
“It was the whole net by which we move, use, abuse, process— everything we do with information here at Fort Meade went down,” said Hayden. “Everything on the Fort Meade campus went down. Everything!” There was no way to minimize the problem, Hayden said. “NSA headquarters was brain-dead . . . This was really bad . . . We were dark. Our ability to process information was gone.” Hayden called George Tenet, the director of central intelligence, and then immediately ordered an emergency response. Computer scientists, electrical engineers, mathematicians—anyone who could shed light on the problem was told to report in. But then, adding to the chaos, Washington was suddenly hit by a powerful snowstorm that shut down the entire federal government, including the NSA, for two days.
By Thursday, as snowplows finished clearing the secret city’s 325 acres of parking lots and employees crowded into the seventeen thousand spaces, Hayden wondered how to keep such an enormous disaster secret from foes such as Osama bin Laden, who might seek to take advantage of the agency’s sudden deafness. “I called [NSA director of corporate communications] Bill [Marshall] in here and I said, Bill, I need a concept; we need to communicate this to the work force,” he recalled. “What should we do?” Marshall suggested a town meeting. “And that’s exactly what we did.”
Taking the stage in the William F. Friedman Auditorium, Hayden warned everyone not to breathe a word about the crash. “I said the fact that we’re down is an operational secret. Our adversaries cannot know that our intelligence capabilities have been crippled.” He pulled no punches. “We are the keeper of the nation’s secrets,” he told the code breakers and the intercept operators, the cryptolinguists and the area specialists. “If word of this gets out, we significantly increase the likelihood that Americans will get hurt. Those who would intend our nation and our citizens harm will be emboldened. So this is not the back half of a sentence tonight that begins, ‘Honey, you won’t believe what happened to me at work.’ This is secret. It does not leave the building!”
That night, Hayden and his wife, Jeanine, took a long drive to the Stone Manor, a romantic inn near Frederick, Maryland. It was their thirty second wedding anniversary and he had long ago made the dinner reservations. But on the drive back to Fort Meade, he received a call from his deputy director for technology, Robert Stevens, who said he needed to speak to Hayden on a secure line the minute he arrived home. A short while later, Hayden climbed the stairs to his S.C.I.F and dialed Stevens on his STU-III. Despite the fact that the system was slowly improving, Stevens believed the fix was going in the wrong direction and wanted permission to bring the whole system down once again and start all over. Hayden agreed, but by then the NSA’s customers were becoming hungry for their daily ration of secrets.
Desperate for intelligence, Hayden’s deputy, Barbara McNamara, contacted the agency’s British partner, G.C.H.Q (Government Communications Headquarters). “We actually got in touch with them,” she recalled, “and said: ‘Would you please ensure that the information that you are providing in support of military operations or ongoing world events, crises, conditions, also gets to our customers here in the U.S.?’ ” Meanwhile, on the second floor of the Tordella Supercomputer Building, scientists pulled apart spaghetti-like mazes of multicolored wires, covered desks and floors with unwieldy schematics and wiring diagrams, and probed, millimeter by millimeter, the nervous systems of the computers. The hard work paid off and the cause of the crash was pinpointed to an outdated routing protocol. The solution was a massive hardware and software upgrade.
On Friday, after spending thousands of man-hours and $1.5 million in repairs, the network was patched together. After more than three days, the NSA awoke from its electronic coma, its memory still intact. But like water faucets stuck in the open position, millions of intercepts per hour had continued to pour down from the agency’s satellites during the crash—enough data every three hours to fill the Library of Congress. But instead of being processed and analyzed, they were simply collected in vast memory buffers capable of storing five trillion pages of data.
“We had the ability to store that which we collected over this three and a half day period,” said Hayden. “When we were able to go back and process the information when that capability came back, it took eight to twelve hours to process and analyze the information that we had collected.” Hayden concluded, “The network outage was a wake-up call.” Others familiar with the NSA’s fragile state of technology agreed. “We went deaf for seventy-two hours because of an antiquated system that should have been upgraded years ago,” said Tim Sample, staff director of the House Intelligence Committee.
The next day, as Hayden and his wife went cross-country skiing on the nearby Fort Meade golf course, the supercomputers in the Tordella complex continued crunching through the mountains of backlogged data. Batches of intercepts at last arrived on analysts’ desks. And in the agency’s counter terrorism center, the bin Laden specialists finally began reading the communications between Mihdhar and the Yemen ops center.
Hayden spent much of the spring defending his agency from attacking Republicans. On April 12, 2000, he took the witness chair in an open session of the House Intelligence Committee. It was a rare sight. The last time an NSA director had appeared in such a setting was a quarter of a century before, when another air force general, Lew Allen, squirmed in his seat from hostile questions about decades of illegal spying. Determined not to let that happen to him, Hayden ensured that his agency’s giant ears were pointed as far away from the U.S. as possible. Rather than tens of thousands of targets in the U.S., as some reports had speculated, the NSA was targeting only about three individuals within the country. It was a cautious approach, made necessary because of the enormous focus on the NSA by Hollywood, the media, and Congress. But caution also had its dangers; terrorists might be missed—terrorists like Mihdhar and Hazmi.
Committee chairman Porter Goss, a Republican from Florida, led off the hearing with a bit of humor. “There are concerns that the NSA operates in a very secret environment, without any oversight or legal strictures in place to guide and control their conduct,” he said. “These concerns were dramatized quite notably in the recent film Enemy of the State—a very exciting motion picture. Considering the fact that the character playing me was killed off in the first half hour of the film, I am very pleased to report that the movie was nothing more than a very entertaining work of fiction, and we’d like to keep it that way.”
But Goss quickly got down to why they were there. “Congress imposed the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 upon the NSA and other elements of the intelligence community because the NSA was found during the sixties and seventies to have engaged in indiscriminate electronic surveillance of U.S. persons. This was not a good period. This was not a proper thing.”
Sitting arrow-straight in the witness chair, three silver stars on each shoulder flashing in the television lights, Hayden immediately went on the defensive. “What I’m here to tell you today,” he said, “is that the laws and regulations under which we operate are, one, observed, and two, sufficient for both our conducting our mission and conducting it in a way that protects the rights guaranteed by the Fourth Amendment . . . The law requires us to do everything we can to prevent touching American privacy even at the very front end of that process, in the collection.”
Hayden then addressed the charges that, as he put it, “NSA illegally spies on American persons.” A key issue, he noted, was the definition of “American person.” “We use the phrase within the agency that we protect the rights of American persons. Now, let me define in more detail who is an American person . . . An American person is an American citizen anywhere. An American person is also a permanent resident alien of the United States.” To make his point, Hayden used an example. “Let me put a fine point on this. If, as we are speaking here this afternoon, Osama bin Laden is walking across the Peace Bridge from Niagara Falls, Ontario, to Niagara Falls, New York, as he gets to the New York side, he is an American person. And my agency must respect his rights against unreasonable search and seizure, as provided by the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution.”
It was an ironic example. As Hayden was speaking that afternoon, bin Laden’s men had already arrived. Just two days earlier in San Diego, Hazmi took his first flight lesson. And three days later he would receive a wire transfer of $5,000 from bin Laden’s money man in the United Arab Emirates to continue the lessons.
Hayden’s testimony was deliberately aimed at disarming his critics, but it was also misleading. His hypothetical suggested that NSA eavesdroppers would have to remove their earphones the second bin Laden stepped onto U.S. territory and became a “U.S. person.” In reality, the NSA would be monitoring his every move, before, during, and after his arrival. While he was a foreigner in a foreign country—Canada—the agency would have had no legal problem eavesdropping on him. And as he walked into New York, the agency could have continued monitoring his communications without skipping a beat. F.I.S.A allowed for emergency eavesdropping without a warrant for up to two days. In that time, the agency could have easily obtained a full F.I.S.A warrant to continue the surveillance because of bin Laden’s status as someone associated with a foreign terrorist organization, al-Qaeda.
Another sensitive area Hayden touched on was data mining—obtaining telephone calling records from the phone company—which he said was illegal. “The information you get in your phone bill, if it is about an American person, is beyond my reach. It is protected communication,” he said. “All that comes about by the statutes and laws that are provided to us. They all devolve from the Fourth Amendment, F.I.S.A, Executive Order 12000, which indeed was promulgated in 1981, but has been reviewed by every administration, Democratic and Republican, since that time. And then finally by U.S.S.I.D 18, United States Signals Intelligence Directive 18, which takes the provisions in those broader statutes and executive orders and turns them into a specific cookbook that can be understood by every eighteen- or nineteen-year-old airman, soldier, sailor, or marine who comes to work for the National Security Agency.”
Finally, Hayden brought up one area that appeared to be a giant loophole, if a president wanted to secretly take advantage of it. It was simply to have one of the NSA’s partners in Canada, Britain, or another country eavesdrop on targets beyond the legal reach of the NSA and then pass the information back to the agency. Such an action had been considered in the past. In 1973, for example, the CIA refused to help the NSA illegally eavesdrop on American citizens within the U.S. But according to the NSA’s deputy director at the time, Dr. Louis Tordella, they could have done it using foreigners in a foreign country. Hayden suggested that such activity was not prohibited by federal law. Instead it was prohibited only by presidential executive order, and executive orders can be canceled or changed at the whim of a president. “By executive order,” Hayden said, “it is illegal for us to ask others to do what we cannot do ourselves, and we don’t do it.”
By the end of the hearing, Hayden had succeeded in convincing the committee and much of the public that his agency had not become the Orwellian nightmare portrayed in the movies. There was also little question, however, that all it would take for life to imitate art was a few secret decisions. But as he made his way out of the hearing room on that crisp afternoon in April 2000, the NSA director had no idea that his agency’s greatest threat came not from studio executives in Hollywood, but from a pair of flight students 125 miles farther south in San Diego. “Mike Hayden’s challenge,” noted George Tenet at the hearing, “is not only to manage today, but to get ready for the next century . . . and anticipate how our adversaries will surprise us.”
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