Part 11 of 11: Wedge From Pearl Harbor to 9/11 How the Secret War Between the FBI & CIA has Endangered National Security The Keys to The Kingdom ... Epilogue

As I was going through this last chapter and then an epic Epilogue, a couple of thoughts occured to me. One was just who turned the FBI into the monster that it has become, particularly evident to us since 2016. It should not surprise anyone that Bill Clinton  is/was behind the heavy hand that the FBI has become. Normally an epilogue is not that long, this one is an exception, but you will understand why this one is, because of where the story ended with The Keys to the Kingdom. The average American cannot grasp just how badly these rogue spies screwed up both the agency and the Bureau. Mark Riebling did a outstanding job tying this all together. We are now 20+ years removed from his last sentence, and these agencies are not an asset to the American people one bit, in fact clearly they view the American people as enemies, both should be dismantled.  I am not sure what the psychopaths have in store for us, and neither do these people, and if they do know, they do not plan on stopping it. I suggest prayer people, because a house divided shall not stand.

..o..

WEDGE FROM PEARL HARBOR TO 9/11 

HOW THE SECRET WAR BETWEEN THE FBI AND CIA 

HAS ENDANGERED NATIONAL SECURITY 

MARK RIEBLING

CHAPTER TWENTY 

THE KEYS TO THE KINGDOM 

AS GATES LEFT LANGLEY in January 1993, there had seemed to be at least the prospect that an Iraq-Gate inquiry might address long-standing interagency gaps. “This is what happened after the Watergate and Church committees—reforms were their true legacy, ” former House Judiciary counsel James H. Rowe told a Harper’s magazine colloquium on the BNL affair. “The most important thing that can come out of this … would be a mandate to create legislation to remedy these interbranch problems.” The hoped-for hearings never materialized, but the general climate still seemed to favor reform. Clinton’s transition team declaimed against turf battles, and it was a true measure of their liberalism that they believed intelligence infighting, like human nature, or government itself, could be overcome, or improved, if only certain “infrastructures” were “reinvented.” Even though foreign policy was not high on the presidential agenda, and even though most members of the new team had previously served in government, especially during the disillusioning Carter years, there was an unmistakable fix-it optimism among Clinton’s national-security “brain trust.” 

A key member of that brain-trust was R. James Woolsey, a balding man with Spock-like ears, who became the new director of CIA. Woolsey was a lawyer and a former Rhodes scholar, but he had also been a consumer of intelligence in four earlier government jobs, including undersecretary of the Navy for President Carter, and as a U.S. arms negotiator in Geneva. A few days before Christmas 1992, after Admiral William J. Crowe turned down offers to run CIA, Woolsey got a call from secretary of state—designate Warren Christopher, whom he’d known for a long time, asking him down to Little Rock to meet the governor. Woolsey caught the next plane out of Washington, and that evening the president elect offered him the DCI job. So Woolsey went to work at Langley, whence he soon saw the post-Cold War world as “a jungle filled with a bewildering variety of poisonous snakes.” 

But Woolsey began by trying to hack through the bureaucratic jungles of Washington, where red tape had always grown like bromeliads along the path of least resistance. An “early item of business, ” as Woolsey promised Congress, was “restructuring the Intelligence Community” to assure that agencies with competing imperatives could cooperate. Although some momentum was lost while Woolsey waited four months for the confirmation of an attorney general, he consulted senior Justice Department and FBI officials, including Sessions, on how “to make changes in the way we look at support to law enforcement.” After all, Woolsey pointed out, “both the BCCI and the BNL scandals are evidence that we are still not to the point where we can do this properly and correctly.” 

In February 1993, Woolsey announced changes under which federal prosecutors could task CIA with collecting intelligence on suspected criminals. By year’s end, his spies had been tasked against the Sicilian Mafia, which was trying to obtain nuclear weapons, and against the Cali cocaine cartel, which was seeking to buy a secure communications satellite. CIA officers even brokered some rather New Age help for the Bureau during the disastrous ATF-FBI siege against cultist David Koresh and his followers in Waco, Texas. On March 17, CIA and FBI officials met in suburban Virginia with Dr. Igor Smirnov of the Moscow Medical Academy, who had been working on a computerized acoustic device designed to plant thoughts in a person’s mind. The Agency had been curious about Smirnov since the mid-1980s, when they learned that the Soviet army’s Special Forces were experimenting with psychotechnologies in the Afghan war. Although FBI interest cooled when Smirnov couldn’t guarantee a risk free situation at Waco, the American agencies still wanted, according to a memo of the proceedings, to “determine whether psycho-correction technologies represent a present or future threat to U.S. national security in situations where inaudible commands might be used to alter behavior.” 

In these and other cases, under Woolsey’s new rules, the Agency could be ordered outright to share more fully any relevant data in its files. Yet the more Woolsey learned about recruiting and running spies, the more he sympathized with his men for sometimes not wanting to share things. Whatever CIA’s image problems with the Congress and the press, a lot of people around the world, especially idealists disgusted by totalitarian regimes, were still willing to take great risks to help the United States— to become CIA assets, agents, spies. Of course there were cases, especially involving drug cartels and terrorists, where the motives people had were not so benign, but the risks—often to the recruiting officer as much as the recruit—made care and caution no less crucial. When the stakes were so high, CIA had a duty to let an agent stay in place, to watch and wait and listen. But the FBI, as always, had an equal duty to probe and pounce and prosecute, and each agency naturally thought its interests trumped the other’s. “What’s involved here is two very useful and I would say extremely important subcultures, ” Woolsey said, “and they do not mesh together easily.” 

It was imperative that they nevertheless be made to mesh, for in 1993 Woolsey’s In box brimmed with threats demanding teamwork. Economic espionage cases soared from ten to five hundred in the nine months ending in April 1993, and traditional spying was troublesome as ever. On tips from CIA, FBI agents flew in March to Liberia and found that secret data about U.S. operations in Somalia had been faxed from Washington; eventually they arrested Dominic Ntube, a Cameroonian émigré, for stealing thousands of classified documents from the State Department and CIA. A martial-arts instructor, Joseph Garfield Brown, was arrested by the FBI for passing classified CIA documents to the Philippine government. Stevan Lalas, a CIA communications officer at the U.S. Embassy in Athens, confessed to passing more than 240 secret documents to Greek military intelligence. Thomas Gerard, a former San Francisco policeman and CIA contract agent, was charged with selling secrets to South Africa. And by early 1993, CIC had isolated a single suspect in its hunt for the high placed mole at Langley. 

IT WAS RICK AMES. By most accounts, he was pinpointed by a new Russian defector. According to other reports, Ames himself raised suspicions by lavish spending, or by repeatedly asking to see intelligence beyond his “compartment” at the CNC. In any case, Ames’ entire life was now assessed through a dark prism of doubt. 

In some ways, he seemed fated to be a spy. He was born on May 26, 1941, just as Ian Fleming was flying to America to help found Central Intelligence. In June 1962 —as the Golitsyn-driven molehunt was in full cry, as Lee Harvey Oswald returned to the U.S. from Russia, and as Yuri Nosenko made his first contact with American intelligence—Ames’ CIA father helped him land a job in Langley, with a Top Secret clearance, before he had even graduated from college. In 1969 he was posted to Ankara, Turkey; in 1976, he worked with the FBI to recruit Soviets in Manhattan; by 1981, he was trying to turn Soviet agents in Mexico City. Here, it seemed, was where things had begun to go wrong. 

In April 1983, Ames recruited a Colombian woman, Maria del Rosario Casas, who was serving in Mexico City as a “cultural affairs” attaché. She became a paid CIA source. Later that year, when Ames was summoned back to Langley as CI officer for the Soviet Europe Division, Maria followed him. That should have attracted suspicion, because the KGB had scored before by dangling women in front of CIA officers in Latin America; Angleton thought that was how they had recruited Philip Agee. But in Ames’ case no one raised objections. Having divorced his first wife, he married Maria on August 10, 1985, just when the Yurchenko-Howard affair was boiling up. The divorce proved costly, and left Ames badly in need of cash. Conveniently enough, the first of what would be many large, unexplained deposits in his Virginia bank account occurred on May 18, 1985—only two months before CIA mole Adolf Tolkachev was arrested in Moscow. Ames had known about Tolkachev, and about most of the other sources that were rolled up. He had also shown a definite “bump” on his 1991 polygraph. 

Despite these suggestive patterns, and despite the 1991 agreement to work together in the molehunt, an indecent interval still passed before the Ames case was passed to the FBI. Even the Bureau’s permanent CIC representative, appointed in 1991 to head the Center’s Soviet and East European counterintelligence group, was kept in the dark for several months. Not until May 12, 1993, was the FBI able to open a formal investigation of Ames. 

When the Ames serial was finally shared, Wiser and other agents at the Washington Field Office were aghast. The Agency had clearly violated the 1988 Sessions Webster Memo of Understanding, which mandated that CIA suspicions be disseminated in a timely fashion. Especially distressing was the refusal to pool Ames’ 1991 polygraph results, for the Bureau now judged that Ames had clearly failed that test. CIA’s secretiveness had meant at least a two-year delay in investigating Ames—and delays could mean blown cases, as the agents well knew from Howard and Bloch. 

Woolsey called Sessions and tried to assure him that there wasn’t anything untoward in CIA’s withholding of the polygraph results. The Agency had not been trying to hide anything from the Bureau, but had merely wanted to wait for something more solid before sharing the highly personal lie-detection data, which included questions about finances and sexuality. CIA had many unresolved internal concerns about the reliability of its polygraphs— not only because bogus foreign agents passed them, but because many loyal Agency people were failing them. A dramatic expansion of polygraph use in the Turner and Casey years had required hiring many young and inexperienced examiners, who obtained an almost 50 percent initial failure rate for veteran officers Most of the failures came on questions about sex or money and were corrected in retesting, and Ames’s lower second-round responses fit that pattern. CIA had thus been hesitant to tar Ames’ reputation by making his polygraph results available to outsiders, particularly at the FBI. 

Sessions’ deputies doubted that explanation, and the Bureau made clear that it expected CIA to cooperate fully with two special agents now assigned to work exclusively on the Ames case at CIC. The Agency obliged by letting the Bureau search Ames’ office at Langley. On June 23, 1993, while Ames was away on official business, Wiser and several other FBI agents, escorted by armed guards from CIA’s Office of Security, entered the “G” level basement at Agency headquarters. They proceeded to Room GVO6, which CIA’s security people unlocked with a duplicate key. The small private office was beige with gray trim, a dropped white ceiling, a computer workstation, and a safe. In the safe were found 144 classified documents, including some Top Secret Codeword materials pertaining to the USSR and Russia. One was a CIA document detailing U.S. knowledge of Soviet nuclear submarines’ anti-tracking abilities. Also found was a top-secret paper, “What Angleton Thought, ” along with two volumes of a “Nosenko/AE Sawdust Study.” Checking with CIA officials, Wiser learned that these papers had no relationship to Ames’ work as counternarcotics officer for the Black Sea region. From his experience in CI, Wiser knew that spies, especially those motivated by financial gain, often retained copies of documents they had transferred to the other side—in essence, keeping the espionage equivalent of a résumé. This could be especially useful in negotiating for more money with a new handler, who might not be fully briefed on what the spy had provided in the past. That was just what Wiser figured had probably occurred after the KGB was transformed into the SVR. 

Wiser now got permission from his superiors to launch a massive operation, code-named “Nightmover, ” against Ames and his wife. Their phones were tapped, their mail was opened, and FBI agents descended on their affluent neighborhood in Arlington, Virginia. Surveillance devices were concealed behind the wooden stockade-style fence that partially bordered the back yard of their brick home. Whenever Ames or his wife left the house in their 1992 Jaguar, their movements were reported by hidden watchers to a fleet of radio-equipped FBI cars. Since Ames, as a professional intelligence officer, was trained to spot surveillance, Wiser thought it unwise to follow him physically during the day, but a homing device was affixed to the underside of his Jaguar. And at night, FBI cars followed him through the shadows. 

WHILE THE BUREAU kept CIA up to date on the Ames case, Woolsey was momentarily more concerned with another threat demanding FBI-CIA teamwork. On New Year’s Day 1993, a collection of Islamic figures, both secular and fundamentalist—including Muammar Qaddafi, Saddam Hussein, and clerics from Iran, Egypt, Algeria, the Sudan, and Afghanistan—had jointly announced a new holy crusade against Christian nations. In the first few months of the year, dozens of American owned oil pipelines in Latin America were demolished by bombers believed to have been backed by Iran. In Egypt, scores of Coptic Christians were brutally murdered, busloads of Western tourists were shot up, and archaeological museums were bombed. In Turkey, a prominent leftist critic of fundamentalism was blown to oblivion when four Iranians booby-trapped his car. A gunman on a motor scooter killed the top Iranian opposition figure in Italy. In Kuwait, eleven Iraqis were arrested for allegedly attempting to assassinate former President Bush during an April visit. In Washington, an Islamic Pakistani immigrant, Mir Amail Kansi, shot to death two CIA officers during morning rush hour outside CIA headquarters, then escaped to Afghanistan. And in New York City, on February 26, Islamic militants bombed the second-tallest building in the world. 

Overseas angles to the World Trade Center case had been developing since roughly 1990, when the victory of CIA-backed guerrillas in Afghanistan posed a “disposal problem” similar to the one created by the defeat of Cuban exiles at Bay of Pigs. Ayatollah Khomeini had predicted that communism’s decline meant the next war was between Christianity and Islam, and guerrilla bases near the Pakistani city of Peshawar, at the Afghan border, offered a convenient staging ground for those who would blow off the hands that once had fed them. When threatened by police, terrorists could disperse by camel tracks and footpaths used by smugglers, and an easy sanctuary was provided in the autonomous Khyber Agency, a tribal territory where police were not allowed. At camps in the Peshawar region, recruits were given Sudanese passports by Iranian agents and transported, usually via Germany, to the Sudan, which had created training bases in a joint venture with Iran. The program was overseen by Mostafa Mir Salim, a former student at Moscow’s Patrice Lumumba University, who had attended Soviet terrorist-training camps in South Yemen, and by Mousavi Khoeniah, another Lumumba graduate, who in the 1970s had carried nearly $400,000 in KGB funds to the Ayatollah to help finance Iran’s revolution. After being tutored by the former KGB terror experts, Islamic Rambos would return to Pakistan and thence, on false documentation, proceed to Egypt, Algeria, or even the United States. 

FBI and CIA had been trying to coordinate in denying visas to some of these would-be terrorists since September 1986, when the agencies joined an Alien Border Control Committee (ABCC). CIA was especially well positioned to assist domestic authorities in immigration matters, because green young officers on their inaugural foreign tours typically served under cover as U.S. consuls, whose duties included issuing visas. But after Agency tips led the Bureau to arrest eight suspected Palestinian terrorists in Los Angeles in early 1987, civil liberties activists pressured the ABCC to drop a plan to systematize use of CIA intelligence in processing visa requests. Congressman Barney Frank then led a successful movement to amend the Immigration and Nationality Act, so that membership in terrorist groups would no longer be sufficient grounds for the denial of visas. Instead, the government would have to show that suspects had actually committed terrorism or other illegal acts. The United States therefore had no obvious grounds for refusing visas to radicals such as Kansi, who had associated with Iranian terrorists in Peshawar, or to blind cleric Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman, leader of the Egyptian Jihad, a group which in 1981 assassinated Egyptian President Anwar Sadat. 

Rahman still might have been denied a visa under a loophole in U.S. immigration law, which allowed the FBI to blackball persons with suspected foreign-intelligence links. In most cases, the Bureau relied on CIA for identification of such connections. As it happened, CIA knew that the sheikh had been on the Iranian intelligence payroll since 1981. Rahman also had at least some indirect connections with CIA—his mosques helped recruit the Agency’s anti-Soviet rebels in Afghanistan— and there would later be rumors, denied by both CIA and Rahman, that the Agency deliberately eased Rahman’s immigration because he was one of their agents. In any event, the CIA officer who processed Rahman’s visa request at Khartoum never warned the FBI. “In the case of Rahman, none of this [exchange of data] really occurred, ” Webster recounted. “His name wasn’t given to the FBI or wasn’t recognized by the FBI, and so no objection was posed, and no vigilance was exercised” 

Rahman entered the U.S. in May 1990 and founded mosques in Brooklyn and New Jersey. He denounced local Muslim grocers for selling beer, demanded the overthrow of Egypt’s secular government, and issued fatwas, or religious edicts, that called for the murder of persons who stood in the way of Islam. After New York police arrested one of Rahman’s followers, EI Sayyid Nosair, in connection with the killing of right-wing Israeli leader Rabbi Meir Kahane in November 1990, the FBI was intrigued to learn that Nosair’s legal bills were paid and his family supported by Rahman, and that Nosair was regularly visited in prison by one of Rahman’s followers, Mohammed Salameh. A CIA name check, requested by Campbell, disclosed that Rahman was on the Agency’s international terrorist list—a fact the Agency had not previously made known to the FBI. 

While the Bureau began investigating Rahman and his followers, Egyptian intelligence repeatedly warned CIA officers in Cairo about a growing Islamic fundamentalist network in the United States, concentrated especially around Rahman’s mosques. Egyptian authorities were confused and upset when the Agency told them it could not monitor the men, since counterterrorism in the U.S. was the province of the FBI. The best that could be managed was a visit to Cairo by several FBI agents on February 6-11, 1993. When the Egyptians repeated their warnings, the FBI agents promised to take action, but cautioned their hosts that because of America’s unique geographic split in CI/CT duties, Rahman’s followers in the U.S. had to be investigated from a law-enforcement standpoint. The Bureau did recruit an agent in Rahman’s entourage—former Egyptian army officer Emad Salem— but his access was limited. Legally, there was little else the FBI could do. Whereas CIA, working overseas, could open mail and tap phones, the FBI had to show that suspects were breaking the law before conducting surveillance. The Egyptians marveled at the absurdity of this, since without surveillance the evidence was unlikely to surface. FBI agents grew testy, saying, “What are we supposed to do: round up all the Islamic fundamentalists in New Jersey?” The Egyptians countered by openly criticizing the U.S. system, which seemed to give suspected terrorists a free hand simply because they crossed from CIA into FBI jurisdiction—a policy which could only encourage such deadly immigration. 

In fact, two more Rahman followers, Mahmad Muhammad Ajaj and Ramzi Ahmed Yousef, had already come to the U.S. from Peshawar in September 1992, with suitcases full of Islamic texts and books on building bombs. Following the World Trade Center bombing, for which both men were indicted, the Bureau realized that some important background information on Ajaj, Youssef, and other Rahman followers had been provided by Egypt well beforehand and was simply sitting in CIA databases. 

IN THE CRISIS ATMOSPHERE after the World Trade Center explosion, American officials suddenly became more enthusiastic about sharing intelligence. The Bureau set up a “hotline” to CIA, and tasked the Agency—under Woolsey’s new rules—with finding out all it could to build a prosecutable case. Langley fed a steady stream of data to the Bureau through Campbell, FBI agents accessed Agency sources in Egypt and Israel, a legal attaché worked with CIA officers to track down the “money trail” in Germany, and Woolsey later said that the two agencies’ post-bombing work was “fully integrated.” But it was duly noted by columnist William Safire that the FBI was only “playing catch-up … utilizing CIA connections in meeting what is belatedly seen as a domestic threat.” 

As in the aftermath of Pearl Harbor, there was a lingering sense that a great tragedy could have been averted if information had been properly centralized. Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak played the role of Dusko Popov, saying that vital information was “exchanged with American intelligence” and that the attack “could have been prevented if you listened to our advice.” Fingers were pointed at the FBI for its alleged failure to pursue hints, including a January 1993 warning from German intelligence, that a terrorist operation was under way. The Bureau took public umbrage at this “Monday morning quarterbacking, ” insisting that neither Germany nor Egypt had offered names or documents. Any specific warnings had, rather, gone to CIA—Which had not only issued Rahman his visa but seemed to have missed a chain of significances. In January 1993, after Saddam, Qaddafi, et al. declared their new holy war, Egypt had advised CIA that Islamic radicals were not merely blustering, and would soon strike against U.S. interests, both abroad and at home. The Agency took the threat seriously enough to warn all U.S. embassies—but not so seriously, it seemed, as to tip the FBI in New York. 

The Agency’s defenders meanwhile faulted the Bureau for failing to analyze evidence seized more than two years before the bombing. Former CTC officer Cannistraro pointed out that some of the same cast of characters implicated in the World Trade Center case had initially come to FBI attention in the Kahane murder probe. Indeed, while searching Nosair’s apartment in 1990, the FBI had obtained evidence that five of the seven extremists later indicted for the bombing were gathering information on bomb design, plotting terrorist acts, and collecting photographs of the World Trade Center. When FBI agents and linguists finally got around to examining and translating Nosair’s papers in March 1993, they were able to thwart a pending plot to blow up New York bridges, bomb the UN, and assassinate U.S. government leaders. But CIA officials believed the documents also should have helped head off the Trade Center attack. “This material described major conspiracies and provided a road map to the bombing of the World Trade Center, ” said one Bureau critic who saw the evidence. The FBI had apparently viewed the matter as a murder inquiry alone, and showed little interest in pursuing a wider, foreign backed conspiracy. The photographs of potential targets were interpreted as tourist snapshots, and other evidence was considered too fragmentary or inconclusive to constitute a warning. The bomb-making manuals, for instance, were explained away when CIA admitted that some of the booklets had originated at Langley, which had provided them to Rahman’s rebels during the Afghan war. 

According to Egyptian authorities, who dealt daily with both agencies after the bombing, Langley’s alleged links to Rahman were soon causing “rifts concerning him [Rahman] between the intelligence service (CIA) and the FBI” Although the Agency denied it, Mubarak and other Egyptian officials insisted that Rahman had helped CIA channel money, men, and guns to the Afghan guerrilla groups even after entering the U.S. in May 1990. But once the FBI linked Rahman to a planned second wave of terror attacks in April 1993, which was to have included blowing up New York bridges, CIA “had to react quickly to protect its man and its agent … [who] had become a source of embarrassment for those who had used him.” The Agency’s alleged attempt to protect its “man” seemed to Egyptian authorities the only possible explanation of why supremely competent U.S. agencies had failed for so long to find or arrest Rahman after the World Trade Center explosion. Egyptians believed very much in the efficacy of “the American cowboy, who shoots one bullet from his gun and kills 10 people, blinks his right eye and 10 women swoon, and blinks his left eye and scores of beauties fall in love with him, ” as one Cairo editorialist wrote. “We will not believe the United States, which, with all its powerful equipment can detect the footsteps of an ant, penetrate walls and roofs, and use audio and video to learn everything that goes on even in underground bedrooms and offices … [did not know] where Shaykh ’Umar ’Abd-al-Rahman was.” Instead, “What happened [in the matter of Rahman’s detainment] is probably a new chapter in the conflict between the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), ” Egypt’s government-run press agency contended. “One party wants to arrest Shaykh ’Umar and the other party doesn’t.” 

• • • 

Amidst all the reports of interagency bungling in the World Trade Center case, congressional critics were demanding that the fractious “intelligence community” get its collective act together. Representative Charles Schumer of New York called for a new mechanism to ensure closer links between FBI agents and CIA officers in foreign capitals. Senator Joseph Biden wanted to know why Woolsey had not done more in terms of “organizationally changing the way in which we coordinate our counterterrorism activities.” Senator Orrin Hatch said angrily, “I want coordinated law enforcement and interdiction efforts, and I want to make sure that they are coordinated in a way that makes sense. And right now, they’re not.” Although the agencies had managed to solve the Trade Center and Pan Am 103 cases after they happened, congressmen asked for better “cooperation and diligence in the often unglamorous work that can prevent these acts … in the first place.” Buck Revell, who had overseen FBI counterterrorism during most of the 1980s, testified that, “unless we find absolute evidence of a conspiracy to commit an illegal act, law enforcement will end up reacting to terrorist acts after the event. Unless we get a handle ultimately on how to stop illegal immigration … the problem is going to get worse.” But Rahman and most of his followers had not entered the country illegally —that was the whole point. Why hadn’t Rahman been denied a visa? “Everything that could have gone wrong did, and it happened over a significant period of time, ” admitted Undersecretary of State Tim Wirth, who now oversaw the visa process. “We have a tendency in our government to neglect the basic bricks and mortar, to neglect the basic foundation, to neglect the processes that make government work.” 

Even William Webster, on whose watch interagency CT had seemed to work so well, pronounced that CIA’s Counterterrorism Center was not a sufficient guarantor of liaison, and proposed creating a CT czar. “I do have the uneasy feeling that it may not be enough to say we cooperate and we coordinate with each other, ” he said. “It might very well be helpful to have … a means of designating the premier terrorist-counter terrorist organization in the country, to have the responsibility for calling the shots.” The former DCI also suggested that the nub of the difficulty in the Trade Center case might have been the so-called “third agency rule, in which a foreign intelligence service will tell—say the CIA—something, but CIA is not privileged then to share it outside its own agency without the permission of the other liaison.” 

Adherence to this rule protected CIA sources when the Agency helped out friends in foreign intelligence services, but the inability to pass hot tips to the FBI “gave everyone a lot of angst.” It had caused Langley to hold back much in Iraq-Gate, and might similarly have caused CIA to sit on some Rahman-related data received from Egyptian intelligence, instead of passing the information to the Bureau. 

Others believed the real problem lay not in getting the Bureau more intelligence, but in making the Bureau more intelligent. Terrorism expert Yonah Alexander assailed the “conceptual bankruptcy” of FBI counterterrorism, echoing Scotty Miler’s lament that post-Angleton decentralization of CI had wrecked the Bureau’s ability to assess foreign-backed terrorism “contextually.” Such views only seemed confirmed in July 1993, when senior FBI analysts declined to analyze CIA claims that two Sudanese intelligence officers, under cover as UN diplomats, had been directing the activities of Rahman’s followers. “We try not to get into the business about motivation, ” a senior FBI intelligence official said. “When we do, given the nature of the evidence, it tends to make us look stupid.” 

BY JULY 19, 1993, a perception of stupidity a the top levels of the FBI was among the factors that led President Clinton to fire its director. The sniping campaign about William Sessions’ “lackluster” leadership had become a steady crossfire during Iraq-Gate, but it actually dated back to fall 1989, when Sessions reshuffled the Bureau’s Intelligence Division in the wake of the Bloch affair. The changes had been seen as an attempt to rein in the Bureau’s counterspies, whom some thought too aggressive; as Sessions put it, “it’s very important that the work that they [Division 5] undertake be well within the mainstream of the FBI.” Sessions had received uniformly good press until the CI purges began, but soon anonymous G-men began pointing to numerous alleged bumblings. Special agents had been aghast when, during an appearance on the television show America’s Most Wanted, Sessions took the dais and obliviously reread the introduction of himself that had just been given by the show’s host. At press conferences he admitted that he did not know what an “indices check” was, didn’t know the FBI was subcontracting out background investigations, and was ignorant about new rules for extracting terrorists overseas. After the World Trade Center explosion, he had seemed distracted, confused about the FBI’s counterterrorism jurisdiction—and stubbornly, stolidly insistent that “there is a very careful and close coordination … with our counterparts in the United States intelligence, ” even though Woolsey, Webster, and everyone else admitted there was not. 

But the kicker had been Sessions’ 1992 move to transfer thirteen hundred G-men out of the Intelligence Division and into more “mainstream” work. The division had been warning Sessions since September 1991 that KGB “reform” was really a sham, that Russian spying was actually on the rise, but Sessions went ahead with the cutbacks. At the time, some FBI counterintelligence officials had been talking to journalist Ron Kessler, who was writing an FBI-sanctioned book about the Bureau. Kessler received detailed allegations about Sessions’ alleged misuse of federal funds for personal purposes, which became the basis for the Justice Department investigation of the director during Iraq-Gate. 

The CI Club meanwhile apparently launched its own investigation into the boss, whose cutbacks were viewed by Bureau hardliners as near-treasonous. Sessions’ wife, Alice, later claimed that the Bureau had bugged their bedroom, and that she found FBI agent Ron McCall in their room fiddling with the mike. Sessions’ meeting with a top KGB official at a performance of the Bolshoi Ballet in Atlantic City, in December 1992, was not exactly smiled upon, and the whole issue of Sessions’ alleged financial improprieties may have been merely a screen for darker doubts. As one intelligence official observed, “counterintelligence investigations always begin with the painstaking study of financial vouchers … aimed at determining whether an agent has received large, unexplained payments or lived an unusually high lifestyle.” 

Clinton officials had been impressed by the way Sessions stood up to CIA in Iraq-Gate, and thought some of the ethics charges against him were probably bogus. But they did not want a director whose own deputies considered him “incompetent” at best, and at worst a security risk. After leaving a meeting with Attorney General Reno on July 17, in which he was told flat out that Clinton would fire him in two days if he did not resign, Sessions tripped on a curb outside the Justice Department, in full view of TV cameras, and broke his elbow. When Clinton did terminate him as promised, Sessions’ son, Lewis, intimated that his father had been “targeted” by “CIA officials who were determined to get even with him” for probing the Agency in Iraq-Gate. 

SESSIONS’ SUCCESSOR, federal judge Louis J. Freeh, was a short, boyish former FBI agent and assistant U.S. attorney who knew firsthand about turf battles, and had a reputation for solving them. As he grew up in a working class neighborhood in Hudson County, New Jersey, it had been Freeh’s dream to work for the FBI. He had joined in 1975 and worked organized crime in Manhattan. He left the Bureau in 1981 to join the Justice Department in New York, where he prosecuted the infamous “pizza connection” case, which at the time was the largest international heroin-trafficking Mafia ring ever broken up by the government. Such cases had taught Freeh the importance of penetrations and intelligence in police work, and during his Senate confirmation hearings he pledged to “improve our [the FBI’s] intelligence capabilities.” His experience had also taught him that bureaucratic infighting was “a great problem.” As a special prosecutor in the investigation of Walter Leroy Moody, Jr., convicted for the 1989 pipe-bomb killing of Alabama federal judge Robert Vance, Freeh had to coordinate more than a dozen federal agencies with overlapping jurisdictions, but did so successfully. As FBI director he would face such overlaps on a daily basis, but vowed to make all the players “work harmoniously towards common objectives.” 

Freeh got a chance to show his stuff just nine days after he succeeded Sessions, when CTC sprang a joint operation to snatch a convicted Palestinian terrorist. A Maltese court had found Omar Mohammed Ali Rezaq guilty in the 1985 hijacking of an Egyptian airliner, in which Americans and Jews were segregated from the other passengers and shot, but Maltese authorities had released Rezaq under pressure from Libya. When CIA sources learned that he was headed for Ghana, Woolsey asked Ghanaian officials to detain him. Extradition plans went awry, however, and on July 26, 1993, Rezaq was put on a flight to Nigeria. But while CIA operatives watched the wanted man quietly from the back of the plane, Freeh got Nigerian permission for an FBI team to nab him in Lagos. When Rezaq landed there he was shoved aboard a Gulfstream-4 jet leased by the Bureau, and the next day he was in a Washington courtroom, wearing a pumpkin orange federal prison jumpsuit. After so many failures earlier in the year, interagency CT seemed on track again. 

Things were trickier in the case of Rick Ames, however. 

AFTER A SHORT PERIOD of sharing in May, CIA had shut off the spigot. Freeh knew that CIA was sensitive about outside investigations of its own people, and that Woolsey worried about exposure of secrets in court, but the Agency was taking things too far. So stingy had they become with CI data that, in late 1993, Freeh closed down the Bureau’s office at CIC in protest, and withdrew the FBI agent heading the Center’s Soviet and East European counterintelligence group. A later review by the Senate Intelligence Committee concluded that the FBI, being denied access to vital documents, justifiably “pulled out because they didn’t have anything to do.” Campbell arranged a December 1993 “peace conference” at Quantico, but the two sides reached no agreement on the sharing of intelligence in criminal cases, and the session broke up testily. 

Surveillance was also a sensitive matter. Too much of it might spook Ames, which was Woolsey’s main fear. Yet too little might leave the FBI without a conclusive case. Freeh was familiar with such problems from his work against the Mafia, and tried to strike a balance by stressing nonintrusive methods of monitoring. One was electronic financial sleuthing, which soon established that Ames had received almost $2.5 million in undeclared, unexplained income since CIA’s operations started going sour in 1985. Another technique was to plant “trapdoor” bugs in Ames’ home and office computers, allowing the FBI to covertly download all data. When such a bug was installed in Ames’ home computer on October 9, one of the files retrieved was an unaddressed letter, dated December 17, 1990, which read, in part: “I did learn that Gtprologue is the cryptonym for the S.C.D. officer I provided you information about earlier.” Wiser shared this item with CIA officials, who told him that Ames had been on the dissemination list for a memo mentioning GT/PROLOGUE just three days before the letter was written. Other files, and tapped telephone conversations, suggested that Ames was still in touch with SVR agents through unreported travel to South America, and that they were still paying him. 

When Freeh discussed the situation with Woolsey in early 1994, it was agreed that the FBI would make a big push to catch Ames in the act of transferring secrets to Yeltsin’s agents. But the closest the FBI came to this was seeing Ames drive by “signal sites, ” which typically allowed a spy to communicate with his handlers without personal contact. On the way home from a parents’ night at their young son’s school, for instance, Ames and his wife detoured into Georgetown, turned slowly and dramatically through a cul-de-sac, then drove straight back to Virginia. Wiser believed that Ames was trying to verify, by checking for such a signal as an upended soda can, that a “dead drop” he had filled had been unloaded by the Russians. 

Freeh pressed Wiser for more damning proof of Ames’ treason, but the Agency was sure they had their man. To Ted Price, the important task now was not to arrest Ames or convict him, but to figure out just how much damage he had done. 

Clearly, he could have done a lot. As Soviet Europe Division CI officer from March 1984 to July 1986, he could have thrown CIA off the scent of some Soviet spies, while warning others, like Howard, that they were under suspicion. As a vetter of Soviet sources, he could have recommended giving bona fides to many bogus agents, including perhaps Yurchenko, while sending as many as ten genuine agents to face firing squads. As a debriefer of Yurchenko, he could have loaded the KGB man with CIA secrets and tipped him to “re-defect.” And as a Courtship officer, authorized to meet with KGB officials in Washington, he would have had an easy means of sending secrets to Moscow. 

While posted in Rome, from August 1986 to mid 1989, Ames would have been able to do less damage, but trouble had still followed him like rain. He was believed to have compromised an East German official, codenamed GT/MOTORBOAT, who met with him and provided classified documents on Eastern European security. At one point, as the official was about to return to Berlin, he promised to meet again with Ames, but he never surfaced, and CIA’s many attempts to recontact him failed. Furthermore, although this might have been just coincidence, it had been Rome Station, on Ames’ watch, that implicated CIA in Iraq-Gate, by withholding documents from Justice and the FBI. Curiously, Ames himself had a BNL-Rome bank account, which between October 1987 and December 1990 received thirteen unexplained infusions, totaling almost $111,000, from a Swiss bank. In this connection, a little-noticed facet of Representative Gonzalez’s Iraq-Gate inquiry—what the Congressman had termed BNL’s “highly intricate, meshed relationship with the Soviet Union”—suddenly seemed more relevant. From electronic intercepts, CIA knew that the Soviets had disbursed $100 million through unreported BNL transactions. Some of this, it seemed, had been used to obtain U.S. technology through third countries, such as Iraq. The possibility arose that Ames had not only received KGB money through the Rome bank, but helped the Soviets illegally obtain Western defense technology. 

After returning to CIA headquarters in 1989, Ames had again had direct access to raw intelligence from human sources in Moscow. As Czech desk chief in the Soviet Europe Division, he knew about GT/PROLOGUE and had access to important details of U.S. negotiating positions. He also controlled CIA’s knowledge about some of the dramatic events in Eastern Europe, just as Golitsyn’s predictions were coming to pass. In that role, Ames could have given the Soviets feedback on how disinformation was being interpreted at CIA, allowing the KGB to tailor it to Agency preconceptions. Just as Ames was leaving Rome in 1989, in fact, the KGB had sent him a nine-page letter asking for feedback on agents supposedly working for CIA, but actually controlled by Moscow. Indeed, since all of CIA’s Moscow sources since 1985 had apparently been known to the Soviets, it was likely that these sources had been used to channel disinformation. Because of this, officials told The New York Times, all reporting from Moscow since 1985—in essence, all CIA intelligence on the USSR since Gorbachev came to power—would have to be considered suspect. 

Nor had the potential damage ended with Ames’ 1991 transfer to the Black Sea desk at CNC. Because CNC was a “brain center, ” Ames could access documents from all other departments at CIA, and, for that matter, all other parts of government. He appeared to have exploited this privilege to obtain secrets that had nothing to do with his real work. As a chain smoker who worked in the basement of CIA’s smoke-free headquarters, he also probably picked up secrets by talking to other smokers during cigarette breaks in a sunlit courtyard. Moreover, Ames still had access to classified cable traffic, and could have compromised communications by giving the Russians plain-text copies, for comparison against the coded versions Moscow received automatically through intercepts. Finally, it might have been significant that Ames’ Black Sea watch included the newly independent Georgian Republic, where CIA station chief Freddie R. Woodruff was assassinated on August 8, 1993. Woodruff had been riding in a car with the chief of the Georgian secret service, whom CIA was tutoring in counterterrorism and counternarcotics. The killers were not caught, but were suspected to have been contracted by Russian military intelligence. Ames had known Woodruffs cover identity and travel plans, and had visited Tbilisi the week before he was killed. It was just one more disaster for CIA in an area under Ames’ purview. 

In sum, the Ames affair seemed to be the most serious spy case in American history. But the FBI had still not caught him in the act of passing secrets, and Ames appeared increasingly nervous about being found out. He had not visited any suspected signal sites since October. Had Ames noticed the FBI surveillance? Or had he been tipped by still another mole in CIA? Woolsey would have liked to play the case out until such questions could be answered. But in January 1994, when Yeltsin’s secret police arrested two Russians who had offered to sell secrets about Moscow’s advanced T-82 tank, Woolsey came under pressure to stanch the losses. And the next month, when Ames scheduled a business-related trip to Russia, the FBI worried that he would take the chance to bolt. On February 21, one day before he was due to fly to Moscow, Ames and his wife were arrested in Arlington. 

When the Ameses were arraigned, the case was presented both as a catastrophe for national security and as a triumph of FBI-CIA cooperation. Freeh said he had enjoyed “CIA’s unwavering assistance every step of the way.” Woolsey said that the arrests showed “how our [CIA] counterintelligence officers and the FBI cooperated over an extended period.” Three out of four sentences in a press release by Attorney General Reno praised the agencies for working together so well on the case. The line was echoed by Wolf Blitzer on CNN, and at a news conference by President Clinton. 

This was just a facade. Within two weeks, intelligence officials on both sides were telling reporters that tensions had persisted after the joint hunt was launched in 1991. The biggest arguments, of course, had been over how to build a criminal case without compromising secret sources. The expulsion of Ames’ Russian handler in Washington, a step recommended to President Clinton by the FBI, also did not please CIA, because it resulted in the retaliatory expulsion of CIA’s Moscow station chief, James L. Morris. And there were suggestions that the Bureau had not shared information which might have implicated Ames much earlier. 

For instance, the FBI had learned through its surveillance of the Soviet Embassy that Ames had scheduled a meeting with a Soviet official on February 14, 1986. Standard procedure was for the FBI to inform CIA of any contact between its officials and any foreign diplomats, so that the Agency could be sure each contact was authorized. After checking with Langley on perhaps hundreds of occasions over two years, however, and finding Ames’ contacts authorized, in each case, through Courtship, the Bureau became slack in checking up on him. As a result, according to CBS News, the Bureau never told CIA about Ames’ February 1986 meeting with the KGB. If they had, they would have found out that Ames had never reported the meeting to his superiors, as he was required to do. Ames might then have been routed out after only one year of apparent treason, instead of nine. The implication was that if the FBI had done its job, CIA could have preserved a whole trove of secrets, and the lives of perhaps a half-dozen spies could have been saved. 

But the Bureau did not think it CIA’s place to make any complaints about liaison. In early March 1994, Bob Bryant, recently promoted from WFQ SAC to director of the FBI’s Intelligence Division, told the Senate Intelligence Committee that CIA had failed to cooperate in nearly a dozen cases since 1991. Some of the incidents were minor, but others—including the failure to disseminate Ames’ damning polygraph results, and the refusal to feed files to the FBI’s man at CIC— symptomized a lack of cooperation in CI generally. Because of the mutual distrust, Bryant said he seriously doubted that many tantalizing leads from the East German Stasi files would ever be turned into espionage prosecutions. Later that month William Sessions, who while in power had always insisted that relations were fine, also conceded that despite agreements reached with three successive DCIs since 1988, “when you got below that top level, the mistrust remained.” And in April, senators received a “snitch fax, ” apparently from an anonymous senior official in CIA’s Operations Directorate, alleging that the Agency was “even now verbally telling its officers not to tell the FBI everything it knows … to even lie to the FBI if necessary to protect CIA’s reputation.” 

Woolsey assured a closed-door Senate hearing that the Agency hadn’t been holding anything back. If the FBI had not seen Ames’ polygraph results early enough, it was their own fault for not asking to see them sooner. Woolsey even denied that Ames had failed those polygraphs, insisting that the Bureau eventually reviewed them and found nothing wrong. He blamed the FBI for whatever friction there was, and cited, among other episodes, the Bureau’s decision to remove its agent from CIC. 

There was one FBI charge, however, to which Woolsey had no reply. The Agency’s poor security, as manifest in the Ames case, had deeply damaged the Bureau’s own ability to conduct counterintelligence. Ames had compromised five Soviet intelligence officers originally recruited by the FBI in Washington, including Martynov and Motorin. Nor was the destruction limited to past operations and agents. Ames had revealed not only what the FBI knew, but how it knew, how it gathered and used counterespionage data, how it tracked foreign intelligence officials in the United States. The FBI’s entire M.O. might now have to be reconceived. That was the FBI’s reward for sharing its cases with CIA, in Courtship. And that was the main reason why, as one congressional staffer said after being briefed by the Bureau, “The FBI is bitter about this case.” 

Woolsey’s people were reportedly “enraged” that the Bureau had made its feelings publicly known, but many FBI agents thought CIA deserved to be held up to ridicule. Perhaps that was the only way to avoid another Ames case—and to force action against other moles who the Bureau suspected still lurked in CIA. Because Ames had easily obtained documents he wasn’t cleared to possess, Bryant and others at the FBI believed that he had probably been assisted by other traitors. As FBI agents began reviewing the old polygraph exams of Ames’ possible helpers, they found anomalies that the Agency should have picked up. The trail led to Helsinki station, and to Steve Weber, a former CIA officer on a shortlist of twenty mole suspects previously developed by CIA, who died of an apparent heart attack while in bed with a woman in February 1993 in Budapest. Weber was a naturalized Czech who had defected to the U.S. in 1957 in Greece and eventually become the number-three man in CIA’s Soviet Europe Division; he had perhaps been a dispatched agent from the start. Two of Weber’s and Ames’ former supervisors in the Operations Directorate, Milton Bearden and Thomas Twetten, had taken early retirement. The April “snitch fax” claimed that Bearden had tipped Ames in 1989 that he was under suspicion, and that CIA counterintelligence had been hurting ever since Angleton’s firing in 1974, when CI “was decentralized, subordinated, and was deliberately designed to cover up and protect double agents and moles.” Because of FBI fears that the Agency was insecure, Freeh even persuaded Attorney General Reno to bar CIA from a direct role in Ames’ interrogation. 

After reaching a plea bargain with the government, Ames told the FBI that he had given the Soviets and Russians “the keys to the kingdom”—the names of all CIA sources known to him. Among the agents he admitted to blowing was Vladimir Potachov, a researcher at Moscow’s Institute for the USA and Canada. In 1986, after he was blown, the KGB had tried to pressure Potachov into a major disinformation operation against the U.S. nuclear arms-control team in Geneva. Orthodox tradecraft taught that the Soviets would only dispatch a controlled agent into an area where they had a mole to give them feedback. Concerned parties therefore drew up a list of persons who had been on the U.S. arms control team at the time. One of the names that turned up on the list was James Woolsey. 

What Philip Parker had termed in 1985 a “healthy paranoia about CIA personnel security, a natural concern, especially where sensitive information and sources had to be shared, ” now deepened into an unhealthy distrust. In this respect, interagency relations were back to the ground zero of summer 1941, when Hoover’s security worries had caused the FBI to withhold Dusko Popov’s questionnaire about Pearl Harbor. 

In march 1994, Security Adviser Anthony Lake asked the National Security Council to review FBI-CIA problems, in the Ames affair and other cases, and determine how to avoid such butter fingering in the future. To perform their survey, NSC staffers had to sift through contradictory stories by FBI and CIA officials over the mismanagement of past CI operations. One participant remarked that the two agencies were “acting like two teenagers and raising incidents that go way back into past history.” 

The NSC eventually sided with the Bureau, concluding that things had broken down mostly because of CIA’s hesitance to fork over facts. By late April the Clinton Administration was therefore weighing an NSC plan to “force” the Agency to alert the FBI in cases of suspected espionage. The plan called for creation of a new National Counterintelligence Center, headed by a senior FBI man but reporting directly to the NSC. The Agency would still conduct its own routine personnel security, and would retain foreign CI. Woolsey would also keep control over the CIC. But CIC’s office in charge of investigating individual spy cases would be run by an FBI agent. 

The NSC plan would mean some real change for the Agency, but Woolsey supported it. That seemed the only way to head off Senate legislation, which he saw as likely to cede virtually all CIA counterintelligence duties to the FBI. 

The Senate Intelligence Committee had begun reviewing FBI-CIA bungling about the same time as the NSC, and by late March had reached the same conclusion. Ames and his wife might have been caught years earlier if CIA had fully complied with the 1988 Sessions-Webster Memo of Understanding, which had set down procedures for keeping the FBI briefed on security problems at Langley. Senator Dennis DeConcini (D-Arizona), who had replaced Boren as committee chairman, was especially galled by CIA’s withholding of Ames’ 1991 polygraph. After reviewing that test, DeConcini’s investigators concluded that Ames had indeed failed it, and that the results should have been shared, as Bureau leakers had alleged. 

“To me, the FBI had the right, the absolute right, to see that [polygraph], not at the discretion of the CIA handing it to them in 1993 but in 1991, ” the senator said. “You’ve got a guy that’s not doing very good [sic] in ’91, and he’s one of the suspects, and you’re losing agents like crazy over in the Soviet Union, and the Cold War is just ending and people are dying over there and you’re paying them money and you can’t figure it out. I think you’d say, ’Now, unless this guy gets an easy 100 percent, just clean, we’re going to take a look at him.’” 

Because of his “mortal horror” at the results of bad liaison in the Ames case, Senator DeConcini drafted the Counterintelligence and Security Enhancements Act of 1994. A key clause stipulated that “The Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation shall have overall responsibility for the conduct of counterintelligence … investigations involving persons in critical intelligence positions.” That meant that the FBI would handle all CIA internal security cases and would have the run of Agency files. CIA would be required to notify FBI about the leak of secrets even before any suspects had emerged. The failure to share vital data would be made a federal felony. 

Woolsey was “unalterably opposed” to the bill. He went directly to Capitol Hill and engaged DeConcini in a shouting match. 

“What you want to do, Senator, is go back to J. Edgar Hoover wanting to control CIA!” 

DeConcIni countered that Woolsey was merely jealous of his turf. If he wouldn’t yield it for the greater good of the country, maybe the President should “get some new people” in Langley. 

That comment hit Woolsey hard, for he was already under fire by anonymous administration officials for his “impossibly tepid” response to the Ames case. Sensing his position eroding, he tried a direct appeal to the public. Lest his opposition to DeConcini bill be misinterpreted as softness against spies, he declared forthrightly on “The Today Show” that CIA had a lot of good live counterespionage leads and was running them through close work with the FBI. “People should not have the impression that the Ames case is the only major counterintelligence case that they’re going to see, ” Woolsey told television audiences on April 19. “They’re going to see a number of these over the years to come. And I think all of us are sad.” 

This remark put Woolsey in a world of trouble. Like Bedell Smith’s 1952 admission that there were probably communist spies in CIA, it created a lot of “buzz, ” especially at the Bureau. FBI officials were furious at Woolsey’s “overstatement, ” which appeared to usurp their power to decide when leads added up to a case. “The Bureau went nuts, ” DeConcini told reporters. “They didn’t know he was going to do this.” 

DeConcini himself turned Woolsey’s words into a rallying point. The next day he hastily called a breakfast meeting with the press, and was a guest on CNN’s “Crossfire.” Counterintelligence probes, he said, should be conducted in total secrecy; it didn’t do any good to give the impression that the government was honeycombed with spies. He called Woolsey’s comments “a diversion to divert attention from his failure to cooperate with the FBI.” 

Matters came to a head on Tuesday, May 3, when Woolsey and Freeh testified jointly at a special public session of DeConcini’s committee. Both men had been up until late the previous night, working with Lake and NSC staffers on the language of an executive order to improve FBI-CIA coordination. Owing to continuing tension between the two agencies, final details of the order were not worked out until near dawn, and President Clinton signed the order only minutes before the start of the Senate hearing. 

Presidential Decision Directive 24, as it was officially known, marked a dramatic victory for the Bureau. “The Chief of the CIA’s Counterintelligence Center Counterespionage Group will be permanently staffed by a senior executive from the FBI, ” PDD-24 stated. The FBI executive would have full access to CIA’s most sensitive counterintelligence data, and would thus be in a position to “fully coordinate the joint efforts of both organizations.” The directive also mandated creation of a new CIA National Counterintelligence Center, to be led by “a senior FBI executive with CI operational and management experience.” Theoretically, CIA’s Counterintelligence Center would still “coordinate all U.S. counterintelligence activities overseas.” But in practice, the FBI would displace the CIA as the lead counterspy agency. The directive was a devastating blow to Woolsey, and a Waterloo in the fortunes of the CIA. 

Both directors, however, put up a united front for the senators, who grilled them for almost eight hours. Both contended that the executive order would go a long way toward preventing future Ames cases, but also warned that DeConcini’s legislation would go too far. Freeh said that “to give the FBI a total counterintelligence responsibility, as outlined in that [bill], would perhaps tip the balance too far away from what I think are the most efficient missions of both agencies.” The FBI, he warned, was not really equipped or trained to conduct CI overseas. Woolsey put more of a point on this by saying that the bill would impede CIA’s traditional intelligence-gathering efforts. 

Echoing OSS/X-2 chief James Murphy’s 1946 views about the inseparability of spying and counterspying, Woolsey noted that “intelligence collection and counterintelligence collection are not only very closely related, often they are the same thing, the same reports.” Since most leads in domestic security cases were developed overseas, from defectors or penetrations, giving the FBI “overall responsibility” for “critical” CI investigations would necessarily involve the Bureau in overseas intelligence collection, which had always been CIA’s bailiwick. In short, the bill “would establish an overseas rivalry between the FBI and the CIA that now, on the whole, does not exist and existed back in the late forties and early fifties. It would take us back to some of the strife of that time.” For that reason, DeConcini legislation was “badly drafted” and “unwise.” 

Those remarks came toward the end of the session, when stomachs were rumbling, necks tired, throats dry, fuses short. DeConcini half-rose in his chair, leaned forward, and began literally to quake in an effort to keep his voice controlled. 

“Those kinds of statements are just the exact posturing that does nothing constructive here! Our investigative agencies seem to be more concerned with protecting their own bureaucratic turf than getting down to the business of catching spies! The nation cannot afford to let this situation continue!” 

DeConcini then adjourned the session. Freeh hung around for a few minutes afterward, and Senator John Warner, co-sponsor of the DeConcini bill, patted him affectionately about the shoulders. Woolsey packed up his attache case and strode briskly from the room, frowning. 

TO A CERTAIN DEGREE, DeConcini was himself posturing, both on the matter of Woolsey’s “careless” remarks about live spy leads and on the deeper issue of his willingness to consider FBI-CIA reform. Woolsey’s statement about pending espionage cases was actually somewhat vague and mild—especially compared with DeConcini own public disclosure, two days later, that CIA had undertaken “a review of all counterespionage employees that were employed in the Eastern European area.” Nor were Woolsey’s remarks any worse than those of then-FBI CI chief Doug Gow, who in 1990 had caused no controversy by saying that many American traitors were going to be uncovered by the Stasi files. And although Woolsey did oppose DeConcini particular prescriptions for FBI-CIA reform, he still had shown more willingness to cooperate with law enforcement than any previous DCI. 

Even before the Ames case broke, according to one official familiar with his efforts, Woolsey had been searching for ways to ease FBI-CIA tensions, “the number one issue” in the intelligence community. Just how difficult a task it was could perhaps be measured by the delays in the issuance of a CIA-Justice Department report on methods of improving interagency cooperation, which Gates had ordered after Iraq-Gate. By May 1994, the report had been through at least eleven drafts, and was eleven months overdue. Nonetheless, while Ames was under surveillance, Woolsey had been working closely with DeConcini himself to attempt some reforms. The core change had been to task CIA in criminal cases, which even DeConcini had admitted was a great leap forward. When Woolsey thus assured Congress in 1993 that he’d “strengthened” the Intelligence Community Management staff, “to help me assess needs and plan resources on an interagency basis, ” DeConcini had expressed full approval. At the same time, Woolsey himself had been the first to admit that “we need to do better in the future.” Just before Christmas 1993, for instance, both agencies were embarrassed by a Justice Department investigation into whether CIA had improperly used the FBI to cover up its connections to a computer-training cult called Finders, which had been accused but acquitted of child abuse. 

But if the Agency was faulted for freezing out law enforcement, in the Finders probe as in the Ames affair,Woolsey was also attacked, especially from the political right, for his proposal to task CIA in criminal cases. Conservatives had not objected when Casey tried to give CIA domestic leeway against communism, but they suddenly became civil libertarians once a Democratic administration wanted to do the same against terrorism and narcotics. In both cases the press was predictably partisan. The Washington Post, which had helped kill the Reagan-era plan with scare headlines about spying on Americans, backed similar measures by the Clintonites (for whom a “victory party” had been held in the home of the Post’s publisher, Katherine Graham). Conversely, the Washington Times, which had always given flattering coverage to Reaganite CI superagency ideas, warned that the Democratic DCI was building, in effect, an American Gestapo. “Without amending the CIA charter, the contemplated partnerships in domestic law enforcement would be illegal, ” the Times sermonized. Woolsey was even attacked, on civil-liberties grounds, for supporting a post-Ames proposal that would allow the Bureau to look into the finances of CIA employees without their consent. 

With the conservative attacks on Woolsey’s reforms, things had effectively come full circle. A wedge had been driven between CIA and FBI on the day William Donovan’s CIA plan was leaked to the right-wing press in February 1945; forty-eight years later, small-government Republicans were still the major obstacle to removing that wedge. Woolsey had to be constantly on guard against the conservatives’ ire. Hence, in one session with Congressmen, he said that “restructuring the Intelligence Community” was his primary goal, yet quickly qualified: “I don’t believe that reorganization in any major sense is what we need.” How the intelligence community could be restructured without being reorganized, he did not say. Publicly, he disavowed the view “that the intelligence community … should regard itself simply as an arm of law enforcement.” Privately, he felt frustrated by what seemed a Catch-22 situation: CIA could be blamed both for cooperating poorly with the FBI and for cooperating too much. Woolsey thus had to admit that DeConcini probably gave the right reply when Pat Buchanan asked him, on “Crossfire, ” “Why haven’t these problems of lack of coordination between the FBI and CIA been solved?” 

“You’ve asked the question that nobody has an answer to, ” the senator said.

EPILOGUE 

ON NOVEMBER II, 1994, two weeks after the first edition of this book was published, I visited CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia. On my way to the Counterintelligence Center, where I was to discuss my findings with the CI staff, I became lost in the beige maze of corridors and wandered, for a long while, unescorted—even though my “Executive Escorted Visitor” badge stated that I must be escorted at all times. I thought about how Aldrich Ames had sometimes been seen in CIA offices where he had no reason to be. I was somewhat surprised, too, that when I left Langley my briefcase was not examined: the sign above the armed guards’ post announced that all bags must be thoroughly searched. I thought about how Ames had walked out with seven pounds of secret documents. 

During my talk with the CI staff, I heard little about spying or counterspying, defectors or double agents, disinformation or deception. Instead, I heard about the Agency’s new focus on “global crime.” Money laundering, alien smuggling, drug running, toxic-waste dumping, computer hacking—these were “the new threats.” I knew that CIA was looking for work, searching for a new vision. But five years after the breach of the Berlin Wall, I had expected some recrudescence of traditional national-security concerns. The shift in focus, the lack of focus, seemed of a piece with the lax security. There might as well have been a billboard above CIA headquarters: “Relax, there’s nothing to worry about.” 

I wondered what was going on at Langley. But not until after September II, 2001, would I have a working hypothesis. To be plain—to risk overstatement, but vouchsafe clarity—this is what I now believe happened. After Ames, the Agency was, in a sense, put out of business. It officially existed, but ran only on federal inertia, like an Amtrak train stopping at a station where there was no longer a town. Its key divisions had been stripped and plundered in a hostile takeover. It no longer had any big secrets to steal. Counterintelligence and counterterrorism, in the conventional senses, no longer existed. The Agency’s work in those areas was merely an adjunct to law enforcement. J. Edgar Hoover’s wraith had finally vanquished Wild Bill Donovan’s. The FBI had won the CIA-FBI war. 

The Molehunt (I) 

When I visited Langley, a CIA-FBI team was still “walking back the cat, ” attempting to assess the damage Ames had done. But after more than two hundred hours of prison interviews with him, the team could not determine how many sources Ames had burned or how many operations he had blown. Ames himself claimed that he could not recall what he gave the Russians, because he was always drunk when he met them; yet he was hardly a credible source, having failed almost every lie-detector test he was given. By fall 1995, the team’s report had been delayed several times, and CIA officials conceded they would probably never “get to the bottom of the case.” More troubling still, a report by CIA’s inspector general questioned the Agency’s ability “to prevent and deter activities such as those engaged in by Ames.” 

Since CIA could not be trusted to reform itself, the task fell to the Bureau. Presidential Decision Directive 24, which made the FBI lead agency for counterespionage, now assumed a. fateful importance. For, even as Freeh publicly celebrated Ames’ capture, invoking it as proof of his agents’ competence, he worried that more spies were at work. Surveillance operations in New York had been compromised. Double agents in Europe were disappearing. The Russians had uncovered a tunnel under their embassy in Washington. Ames had not known about any of those operations; nor had he known about the Felix Bloch case, the compromise of which remained a mystery. One of the FBI’s few extant sources in Russian intelligence spoke cryptically of a spy nicknamed “Diamonds, ” then went silent. Desperate to stanch the bleeding, Freeh huddled with four of his deputies. They all agreed that there must be another Ames in CIA. They would spend the next seven years hunting him. 

FBI agent Edward J. Curran, chief of the counterespionage group at the CIA Counterintelligence Center, became “The Executioner.” He combed a classified database of old CIA polygraph exams, looking for irregularities. Eventually he isolated three hundred suspects (an “A to Z list”). By all accounts, the inquiry soon devolved into inquisition. Curran later conceded that his agents treated CIA officers “like criminals.” One highly decorated station chief was interrogated six hours a day for five days (“By then, you even react to your own name”). It was a vicious and indiscriminate probe—and though conducted by persons viscerally hostile to Angleton’s ideas, it surpassed by magnitudes of indecency the discreetly focused “witch-hunt” Angleton had led. 

CIA officer Robert Baer, who survived the FBI purge and later wrote of it, considered it “almost as destructive to the agency as Ames.” Promising careers were paralyzed; “polygraph limbo” meant no promotions, no overseas missions, no clearances. Seasoned officers were shunted into dead-end jobs, were forced out, or simply quit. The exodus put monolingual novices in vital foreign posts, and sucked the motivation from veterans who remained in the ranks. By 1995, Baer would recall, “The [headquarters] cafeteria was filling up with people who might as well have been marked with scarlet ’A”s’ all of them eating alone.” These innocent but uncleared suspects were known, in the halls of Langley, as “ghosts.” 

Woolsey’s successor, John C. Deutch, found the Agency “a defeated force—like the United States Army after the fall of Saigon.” Senator Warner mused darkly that it if a bill to abolish CIA made the floor, it would receive “not one, not two, but many” votes. For the foreseeable future, even if it survived, the Agency would not be a viable player in the policy arena. And so, as Baer would write, “[t]o appease everyone and atone for our sins, ” policymakers “.turned the CIA over to its worst enemy in Washington—the FBI.” 

The Coup De Bureau 

Between 1994 and 2001, President Clinton issued a slew of directives that expanded the Bureau’s powers and contracted CIA’s. The Ames case accelerated this power shift, and was a partial cause of it. But the FBI’s role broadened also because a decision was made at the policy level, even before the Ames case, to give law enforcement precedence over espionage. 

The shift occurred without public debate; its genesis cannot be definitively traced. Yet the change was afoot by January 1992, when the George H. W. Bush White House asked all security agencies to reassess their “post-Soviet” priorities. At that fateful juncture, the chief of the National Security Threat List Unit, in the FBI’s Intelligence Division, suggested a radical shift in focus. Instead of neutralizing organized secret warfare by states, the counterintelligence community should target criminal acts by “loose networks” of “transnational rogue actors.” The collapse of the Soviet Union, it was foreseen, meant also the loss of the authoritarianism that had “suppressed to a certain level the corruption and lawlessness in that country and its Eastern Bloc neighbors.” These changes, as well as technological revolutions in the transfer of information, goods, and money, would provide a fertile operational field for the “transnational criminal.” The threat list was revised accordingly: three hundred FBI agents were pulled from spy catching and assigned to international crime. 

The FBI agent who revised the threat list, Robert Phillip Hanssen, would later confess to being a Soviet and Russian agent. But by then the new notions about national security had become dogma. In May 1994, taking up the Hanssen Doctrine, Freeh told Congress that Russian organized crime was a major threat to American national security, and that “criminal cartels are now richer and stronger than many nations.” The next year, The New York Times echoed that judgment: “The threats [today] are less nations than gangs. The harm they can do the United States is … a law-enforcement problem.” 

To counter global crime instead of Soviet subversion, the national-security community itself would have to be reinvented. During the Cold War, when the greatest perceived threat was a military one, the Pentagon had been seen as the agency that could best defend America. Now, during globalization, when the nascent danger seemed of a criminal nature, the FBI would be the new Pentagon. Much as the Pentagon had absorbed the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines, National Security Agency, and satellite reconnaissance, so now the Bureau became a bureaucratic Pac-Man, gobbling up national-security functions. PDD-24 was just the start. Presidential Decision Directive 39 (June 21, 1995) made the FBI the “lead” agency for countering terrorism. Freeh was an effective lobbyist for this increasingly ambitious FBI future: Congress rained money on him. Attorney General Janet Reno backed the expansion at the Cabinet level— and in Washington, Cabinet membership was the coin of the realm. Step by step, the Bureau would assume an increasingly dominant position in the national-intelligence empire. 

When Clinton signed PDD-24, the White House claimed the measure would “improve our ability to counter threats to the nation’s security.” Even as the 9/11 hijackers were entering the country on student visas, Reno said: “No ocean is too wide, no distance too far, no time period too long and no effort too great to make those who kill or injure Americans immune from the U.S. justice system.” In fact, the ocean between intelligence and law enforcement was too wide, the distance between FBI and CIA headquarters too far, the lag between the Bureau’s takeover and the Agency’s resurgence too long, the joint effort needed to fuse facts too great, to thwart Al Qaeda. 

The Missing Files 

At 10:30 p.m. on January 6, 1995, a fire led Philippine police to Flat 603 in the Dona Josefa Apartments in Manila. They were on alert for the imminent arrival of Pope John Paul II, and the apartment was located just two hundred yards from the Papal Nunciature. Inside the burning rooms police found a pipe bomb and timer; a demolitions manual, handwritten in Arabic; ecclesiastical robes; a map of the pope’s route; a mixture of crystalline chemicals in the bathroom sink (an attempt to mix explosives had apparently gone wrong); and a Toshiba laptop computer belonging to Ramzi Yousef, the suspected mastermind of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. 

The computer files and hard drive were copied by Filipino authorities and turned over to the CIA station chief in Manila. In March, officers at the agency’s Counterterrorism Center passed the disks to the FBI’s New York Field Office, which was still investigating the World Trade Center attack. The CIA also provided the Bureau with a summary of the disk contents, detailing one of the most brazen terrorist conspiracies of recent times: a three-pronged plot to assassinate the pope in Manila, crash a plane into CIA headquarters, and blow up a dozen American airliners, killing as many as four thousand people. Highlighted by CIA was that one of Youssef's associates—Abdul Hakim Murad—Was an airline pilot who had attended flight schools in the United States. 

Though FBI agents were at first appreciative of the information, they soon noticed something strange about the material. The disks and the hard drive were partially blank. Cyber forensics showed that three separate deletion programs had been used to erase data. CIA officers contended the information was destroyed while Filipino authorities had it. But FBI agents concluded that the files were, in fact, pruned while in custody of CI A. The Bureau demanded a criminal inquiry. The U.S. Attorney’s Office in Manhattan found no evidence of wrongdoing. But FBI agents continued to suspect that CIA had intentionally destroyed evidence. They speculated that the Agency might have had a prior relationship with Yousef, who had fought with the CIA-financed Mujaheddin in Afghanistan in the 1980s. “Someone went to a lot of trouble to destroy that evidence and put a lot of innocent people’s lives at risk in the process, ” a senior agent in the FBI’s New York Field Office griped to Newsday. “You don’t do that, and you don’t break the law, unless there’s something in those files that you desperately want to hide.” 

Yet CIA did not hide clues that led to Yousef. The Agency’s summary memo had stressed that the files contained detailed information about his co-conspirators in the United States and overseas, including their names, addresses, and in some cases even their phone numbers. Though Yousef had disappeared minutes before the raid on his Manila apartment, he was traced to Islamabad, Pakistan, and arrested there on February 7 by FBI agents and Pakistani soldiers. The next day, he was flown Stateside and indicted for his role in the World Trade Center bombing.[ willing to wager those missing files would have shown that mr caveman himself osama bin laden was a CIA asset dc] 

As the Bureau learned more about Yousef and his associates, it became clear that they were obsessed with hijackings and with spectacular attacks against vulnerable targets. During the long flight across the Atlantic, Yousef had bragged about plans for a kamikaze attack on CIA headquarters, using a light aircraft packed with explosives. By midyear, the Bureau had obtained corroborating details from the Philippine police interrogation report of Murad, Yousef’s Manila partner. A secret 1995 FBI intelligence analysis, based on the interrogation report, noted that Murad admitted discussing with Yousef “possibly flying a plane filled with explosives into the CIA building.” In that operation, Murad said, he had hoped to use the training he received at flight schools in the United States. 

The memo made its way to FBI headquarters, where it was filed and forgotten. There was no prospect of prosecution: the plane plots had never materialized, the core of the Yousef cell had been arrested. Both Freeh and Reno were declaring publicly that, under the aggressive leadership of President Clinton, the threat from Islamic terrorism had been neutralized (in 1995, Freeh assured Congress that the country was not “under siege by enemies, domestic or foreign”). The Bureau made no further effort to penetrate Yousef’s circle of unindicted contacts. Not until later would it seem significant that those contacts included a Saudi exile, Osama bin Laden, who had taken care of Yousef financially while he was on the run. 

The Gang of Eight 

On May 10, 1995, John C. Deutch, a fifty-seven-year-old physical-chemistry professor from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, became CIA’s third chief in as many years. During the Kennedy administration, Deutch had been one of Defense Secretary Robert McNamara’s whiz kids; at MIT, he had solved a famous problem in laser physics. Initially, publicly, Deutch vowed to “blast through the cultural and bureaucratic barriers between the CIA and the FBI, ” to terminate “this tussle [that] goes back to the time of Allen Dulles and J. Edgar Hoover.” But eventually, privately, Deutch would conclude that the interagency problems were “probably insoluble.” 

Vowing to build an “entirely new relationship” between the agencies, Deutch launched regular meetings between senior management on both sides. This “Gang of Eight, ” four deputies from each agency, displaced the “arm’s-length attitude” with a kind of fusion. The fusion, however, occurred almost entirely on the Bureau’s terms. The Agency was still on the defensive, because of the Ames case; and a scandal that spring over CIA’s contacts with a Guatemalan officer, implicated in the killing of an American innkeeper, further eroded the Agency’s position. Deutch had little bureaucratic choice but to sign off on a Gang of Eight plan to change the thinking and the behavior of American spies. 

The idea was to make CIA “more accountable” to law enforcement—or, as Deutch put it, more consistent with “American interests and American values.” The Justice Department’s Office of Intelligence Policy Review began to audit CIA’s work, making legal rulings on matters such as the appropriateness of maintaining certain agents. Hundreds of sources were stricken from the payroll. Case officers and station chiefs received new guidelines, forbidding the recruitment of “bad actors.” Where the agency had worked for sixty years in a kind of moral twilight, it would now, as CIA general counsel Jeffrey H. Smith put it, “draw on the experience of the Federal Bureau of Investigation Administration in dealing with informants.” 

But the Bureau had no experience running informants in the “Kalashnikov cultures” of Islamic Eurasia. Penetration of terrorist groups was ipso facto likely to involve a case officer with dubious characters. At the practical ultimate, agents in terror groups sometimes had to be complicit in terrorism themselves, if simply to establish or to keep their covers. To case officers who framed cases in terms of national security, not law, the FBI’s do-good approach went against all best practice. “It was like a cardiologist in California deciding whether a surgeon in New York City could cut a chest open, ” one former officer recalled. What was more, CIA personnel felt they were being judged by a double standard. The Bureau, after all, had a long record of protecting murderers who testified against Mafia bosses. 

The Deutch guidelines shattered whatever motivation remained in the Operations Directorate. By 1996, dozens of agent-handlers, tarnished by Ames and uncleared by Curran, had retired early or resigned. The veteran case officers who remained began to steer clear of sources or operations—especially against high-risk targets like terrorists—rather than hazard FBI probes which could land them in Justice proceedings. American spying became ever more cautious., even namby-pamby. “People weren’t just scared to meet foreigners on their vacations; they were scared to do it in their jobs, ” Baer reflected. After the “human-rights violators” were cashiered, Baer looked for reports on Iranian intelligence, the Pasdaran, and found “nothing—not a single report…. We had voluntarily deafened ourselves and gouged our eyes.” 

As CIA’s reporting on terrorism evaporated, Freeh moved the FBI into the void. On November I, 1995, he teletyped new Guidelines on Domestic Security/Terrorism Investigations to the field offices around the country. Preliminary terrorism inquiries could now include the “development and operation of new sources or informants, ” even “the planting of undercover agents in the [suspected] organization.” His agents, Freeh said, “should now feel comfortable in being more aggressive.” In Phoenix, where the hot, dry climate had long attracted immigrants from the Middle East, a SWAT officer turned-special agent, Kenneth Williams, used the new rules to recruit contacts who might travel abroad and work their way into terror cells. 

This was an invasion of Agency turf—but not a violation of it. On June 21, 1995, the Bureau had scored a second decisive victory over CIA. President Clinton had given the FBI the lead role not just in hunting down spies but in thwarting terrorists. 

Terrorism for Dummies 

The express purpose of Presidential Decision Directive 39, “U.S. Policy on Counterterrorism, ” was to “integrate the roles of all pertinent federal agencies in a comprehensive, pro-active counterterrorism program.” Clinton named the FBI as the “lead” agency in that program—and lest the importance of that distinction be questioned, he specified: “Lead agencies are those that have the most direct role in and responsibility for implementation of U.S. policy [emphasis added].” 

This marked a radical change. Previously, law enforcement agencies had been relegated to observer status at the National Security Council and in its working groups. Now the FBI and the Justice Department would play major policy roles. Congress would direct the attorney general—not the director of Central Intelligence, or even the national-security adviser—to develop a five year plan to coordinate “national policy” and “operational capabilities” to combat terrorism. Freeh would even form a new Counterterrorism Center, patterned on CIA’s, to “coordinate the efforts of various components of the U.S. intelligence community”—a function previously reserved to the director of Central Intelligence. In 1996, the Bureau would add a Threat Assessment and Warning Unit, to assess “domestic and international terrorist threats” [emphasis added]. 

But though the FBI was the best police force in the world, it was not geared to the assessment of international jihad. Asking veterans of bank robbery and child-porn cases to become scholars of comparative religion, to forecast trends in a clash of civilizations, was a form of magical thinking. Bruce Watson, FBI deputy at CIA’s Counterterrorism Center, found himself trying to teach field agents the rudiments of Islamic fundamentalism and Middle Eastern geography, in sessions that became known among some attendees as “Terrorism for Dummies.” Freeh’s own public statements on terrorism would have a Sesame-Street quality: “One of the national security crimes that has become more, prevalent in recent years that is most frightening to all Americans is terrorism…. Some terrorism now comes from abroad. Some terrorism is home-grown̷. Terrorism can be carried out by U.S. citizens or by persons from other countries….” 

In the end, the problem would be not so much bad analysis as the lack of it. Freeh’s deputy Terry Turchie would later tell Congress: “Since 1995 [when it became the lead counterterrorism agency] the FBI has avoided issuing comprehensive assessments estimating the threat against U.S. interests. Given the range of potential threats … from terrorist organizations … such assessments would be inherently too broad-based to provide much practical value.” In other words: the lead agency for counterterrorism would not analyze the terrorist threat. 

Placing the FBI in charge of counterterrorism created a strategic vacuum at the heart of national-security work. The critical stage of intelligence management, the setting of collection priorities, required definition of the probable threat. Lacking any definition more coherent than “the threat of global crime, ” the Bureau could only work case by case. That increased, to a virtual certainty, the odds that the nation would be strategically surprised. As Richard Betts has written: “Surprise can be engendered if collectors focus on the wrong threat. Surprise can also be engendered, however, if collectors focus on all threats equally.” The FBI was listening for everything, and hearing nothing. 

By summer 1995, all the elements required for an intelligence failure were tumbling into place. The CIA was being asked to penetrate terror cells, but had been denied the means of penetration. The FBI was being asked to analyze the terror threat, but lacked the means to analyze. Each side distrusted the other, yet both were expected to work together. The system had achieved a kind of negative perfection. And then Osama bin Laden came on the scene. 

The Riyadh Bombing 

On November 13, 1995, a truck bomb exploded at the perimeter of National Guard headquarters in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, killing five American servicemen. The FBI dispatched an Evidence Response Team. Unattuned to Islamic cultural sensitivities, the agents attempted to remove soil samples to the United States (“the land of the infidel”). The Saudis responded by refusing the agents access to four suspects arrested by security police. Circumstantial evidence—the sophistication of the timer, the force of the blast, similarities to attacks in Beirut— hinted at Iranian sponsorship. But there was, as yet, no awareness of a larger terror offensive. 

Ten days after the Riyadh blast, on November 23, a suicide bomber slammed a pickup truck loaded with explosives into the gate of the Egyptian Embassy in Islamabad, Pakistan, killing fifteen people. Analysts at CIA’s Counterterrorism Center began to see a pattern. They posited that Riyadh and Islamabad were the second and third strikes in a coordinated campaign, which actually began with the attempted assassination of pro Western Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak in June. Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Pakistan were perhaps America’s three closest allies in the Islamic world, and someone was trying to send them a message: the price of cooperation with unbelievers would be paid in blood. Clues as to who that “someone” might be emerged when one of the Riyadh suspects reportedly confessed, before being beheaded, that he had been “influenced” by bin Laden. 

In January 1996, a special Bin Laden Unit was formed in the CTC at Langley. But assessments of bin Laden were soon divided by rival biases. On the law enforcement side, Bruce Watson took the line that bin Laden was a financier and little else, a kind of Gucci terrorist. On the intelligence side, CIA analysts were unearthing contacts between bin Laden and Iran. Baer, especially, suspected the hand of the Pasdaran. But it was at just this juncture that Baer, culling the Directorate of Intelligence database and finding nothing on the Pasdaran, came up against the full effects of Deutch’s decision to “draw on the experience of the Federal Bureau of Investigation Administration in dealing with informants.” 

The consequences of the tilt toward law enforcement began to accumulate. In January 1996, when the Sudan offered to arrest bin Laden and turn him over to the U.S., Clinton was trapped by his own paradigm shift. Because the Justice Department found the evidence against bin Laden insufficient for prosecution, the White House could only decline the Sudanese offer. Bin Laden slithered to safety in Afghanistan. 

Khobar Towers 

On June 25, 1996, a car bomb exploded at the U.S. troop barracks in Khobar, Saudi Arabia, killing nineteen American soldiers. Once more Freeh led FBI agents into the Kingdom, and once more they clashed with the House of Saud. The Bureau’s lack of linguists, its expectation that unveiled female agents should work with Saudi officers, Freeh’s carping that Arab interrogation methods hampered prosecutions under U.S. law—all these factors exacerbated the intercultural tensions. Frozen out again, Freeh’s agents did the best they could. They traced the explosive to Lebanese Hizballah, a creature of Iranian intelligence. But as the FBI’s own Counterterrorism Center came fully online, in July, Bureau analyses lagged CIA’s. When Reno ordered the first formal threat assessment of bin Laden, she judged FBI analysts unqualified to deliver it, and relied instead on Langley. 

In early July, CIA received a burst of reporting on bin Laden. Communications intercepts suggested that he had known in advance of the attacks at both Riyadh and Dhahran. Around the same time, a Sudanese member of bin Laden’s group, Jamal Ahmad al-Fadl, defected to the United States. The U.S. government began referring to bin Laden’s group by the name Fadl used for it: Al Qaeda. 

The war on Al Qaeda would be led by the FBI. Deutch formally ceded precedence to Freeh that fall, in a speech tellingly titled “Fighting Foreign Terrorism: The Integrated Efforts of the Law Enforcement Community.” Yet Deutch also implied that CIA was better at counter terrorism than the Bureau. “CTC knows better than anyone else what is going on in the complex, international world of terrorism, ” he said. “In the fight against terrorists, we are the pointed end of the spear.” The Agency’s submission to the Bureau was thus given a defiant, even militant undertone. Deutch insisted that the CIA and FBI were teaming against terrorists in an “absolutely unprecedented” way. But veterans of bureaucratic Washington were not so sure. Senator Orrin Hatch asked: If the FBI was the “lead agency, ” and CIA was “the pointed end of the spear, ” then who was really in charge? 

Russ Travers, a senior analyst at the Defense Intelligence Agency, was cynical to the point of doomsaying. In early 1997, he published a predictive essay, “The Coming Intelligence Failure, ” in CIA’s in- house journal. “The year is 200, ” Travers began. “Terrorism will have come increasingly to our shores.” Weaving suggestively between the future and present tenses, Travers piled up dark clauses: “The data were there, but we had failed to recognize fully their significance…. No agency was postured to conduct truly integrated analysis…. We are operating on borrowed time…. From the vantage point of 2001, intelligence failure is inevitable.” 

The Molehunt (II) 

By 1997, Currans molehunt had run for three years, and the agent known as “Diamonds” had not been found at Langley. In December 1996, however, working from information provided by a Russian source, the FBI arrested one of its own counterintelligence agents, Earl Edwin Pitts, and charged him with espionage. Pitts confessed to providing the KGB with classified information from 1987 until 1992. Robert Bryant, the Bureau’s deputy director, asked agent Tom Kimmel to conduct a damage assessment of the case. 

Reading through the Bureau’s files on Pitts, Kimmel noticed irregularities in the way the Russians had handled him. The KGB had not tasked him to search out specific secrets, but, rather, seemed content to accept whatever he turned over. That was unlike the Russians, who were usually quite aggressive and focused. The KGB had treated him so casually, Pitts himself said in his prison debriefings, that he had wondered whether he was Moscow’s only mole in the FBI. 

Kimmel recommended to Bryant that the Bureau conduct a full security review. None was conducted. When Kimmel sought access to Curran’s files, which contained clues from Russian sources, he was rebuffed. His inquiry, he was told, might interfere with the molehunt at Langley. 

The East Africa Bombings 

On August 7,1998, at approximately 10:30 a.m. local time, a truck pulled out of the driveway at 43 Runda Estates in Nairobi, Kenya, and prowled cautiously toward the diplomatic quarter of the city. In it rode a young Saudi man, Rashed Daoud al-Owhali, armed with a pistol and homemade stun grenades. At the gates of the U.S. Embassy, al-Owhali jumped out and threw a grenade at a security guard. He then reached for his pistol, intending to open fire, but discovered he had left it in the truck. He fled the scene as the truck exploded, killing 213 people, including twelve U.S. nationals, and injuring more than forty-five hundred. 

Four minutes later, at the U.S. Embassy in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, another truck detonated, killing eleven people and wounding eighty-five. The bombings occurred exactly eight years to the day that U.S. troops, in the campaign to dislodge Saddam Hussein from Kuwait, had arrived in Saudi Arabia. 

Within hours, nearly five hundred FBI agents were on their way to East Africa. Freeh joined them, overseeing the largest overseas criminal probe in American history. The Bureau soon had a break: al-Owhali was seized by Kenyan police in a seedy Nairobi hotel. He confessed to being trained in camps run by Al Qaeda. He also reportedly provided the telephone number of a Qaeda “logistics center” in Yemen. While NSA monitored the line, the supremely cautious Al Qaeda made an inexplicable mistake. A cell-phone call from one of bin Laden’s deputies pinpointed a Qaeda camp at Zhawar, Afghanistan. 

At 10 p.m. on August 20, sixty Tomahawk cruise missiles, fired from warships in the Arabian Sea, obliterated the mud-and-stone barracks at Zhawar. At least twenty-eight people died. At the same time, another barrage of missiles flattened the al-Shifa pharmaceutical plant in Khartoum, which the Clinton administration said was linked to bin Laden and was producing ingredients for the nerve agent VX. Bin Laden himself was unhurt, apparently escaping Zhawar just minutes before the attack. 

“The most powerful army and the world’s most dangerous terrorist organization have declared war against each other, ” a Pakistani intelligence official told the international press. The White House had indeed now turned to the problem of bin Laden in earnest. After the embassy attacks, “terrorism became my number-one priority, ” Clinton’s second-term national-security adviser, Sandy Berger, would recall. Bin Laden’s dark eyes peered out from the FBI’s “Most Wanted” posters. Freeh postponed an inspection tour of FBI offices in Norway, Bulgaria, Ukraine, and Georgia to help manage the international manhunt. 

As the trail cooled, FBI and CIA officials insisted their respective agencies were teaming well. In October 1998, Newsweek even affirmed that “the CIA and FBI, once bitter bureaucratic rivals, ” had “collaborated to roll up bin Laden’s elusive network.” The two agencies purportedly had got his profile “down cold, ” and they had “a message for bin Laden and his fugitive followers: the United States knows who they are and where to find them.” 

But Bruce Watson, now chief of FBI’s CounterTerrorism Center, was worried. He had 2,646 people under him, and none of them knew where bin Laden was. In November 1999, hoping to improve collation of CT data, Watson formed a new Investigative Services Division, described officially as a “center for intelligence analysis, staffed by a core of highly qualified analysts.” The division was headed by Cassandra Chandler, formerly a television news anchor in Baton Rouge. She was given the job of preparing “long-range strategic and tactical analytical products.” Her analysts combed the files. In a folder, in a file, in a storage room, on the first floor of headquarters, was a 1998 report from an FBI pilot, recording his suspicions about some Middle Eastern flight students in Oklahoma City. Chandler’s analysts did not consider the report in their predictive assessments. The report was not passed to Langley. 

In September 1999, on the sixth floor at Langley, CIA chief George J. Tenet’s analysts received a warning from the National Intelligence Council, a CIA-affiliated think tank. The council suggested that Al Qaeda might try to hijack a plane and crash it into a vital federal building in Washington. The report recounted Yousef and Murad’s 1995 plot to fly a light plane into CIA headquarters. “Suicide bomber(s) belonging to al-Qaeda’s Martyrdom Battalion, ” the council wrote, “could crash-land an aircraft packed with high explosives (C-4 and Semtex) into the Pentagon, the headquarters of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), or the White House.” The report was not relayed to the Bureau. 

The Molehunt (III) 

On February 12,1999, during a lull between terrorist attacks, Freeh turned his attention to counterespionage. Tom Kimmel, ushered into Freeh’s seventh-floor conference room, was increasingly convinced someone in the FBI was spying for Russia. 

Based on his review of the operations that had been compromised, Kimmel told Freeh, he did not believe that agent “Diamonds” could be a CIA officer. Though Russian sources had in fact reported that Moscow had a spy in CIA, Kimmel noted that the sources’ credibility hinged on their exposure of low-level agents, who might have been deliberately burned to protect a more important asset. In other words, Kimmel thought the Russians were planting false clues for Curran to follow. Reading those clues in reverse, the trail led back once more to the Bureau. 

Freeh asked supervisors in the National Security Division to evaluate Kimmel’s thesis. They issued a twenty-eight-page analysis, arguing that he had failed to provide hard evidence. In June, a joint FBI-CIA study reaffirmed that “Diamonds” was within Langley. By August, the hunt narrowed to a single suspect, an Operations Directorate veteran who managed “nonofficial cover” agents. He was suspended with pay, and put under surveillance. 

The Malaysia Meeting 

Sixteen months after the East Africa bombings, in December 1999, bin Laden’s deputies were still relaying messages through the logistics center in Yemen. Since Al Qaeda leaders knew that East African cell members had been privy to the number—and since some of those operatives had been captured and interrogated by the FBI —Qaeda’s continued use of the line was unusual. Analysts at the CIA Counterterrorism Center had to consider that bin Laden was using the Yemen connection to disinform and mislead them. Nevertheless, NSA was still monitoring the line. When a call to the number revealed that Qaeda agents would convene in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, at the turn of the year, CIA asked Special Branch, Malaysia’s internal-security service, to monitor the meeting. 

On January 6, 2000, Special Branch set up surveillance near the condominium of Yazid Sufaat, a U.S.-educated microbiologist who supported Al Qaeda. Reviewing video of the comings and goings, CTC analysts identified Khalid Almihdhar and Nawaf Alhazmi, both of whom were listed in CIA files as suspected terrorists. Al Mihdhar had lived with Alhazmi in California, and both had attended flight schools in the United States. 

The Bureau was briefed. On the day of the Malaysia meeting, a CTC officer e-mailed an FBI colleague in the center, alerting him that Al Mihdhar was in Malaysia. The FBI agent typed back that he had briefed the “applicable facts” to another agent at headquarters. Just what those applicable facts included would later become a matter of intense interagency dispute. Watson’s agents would claim that CIA provided Al Mihdar Saudi passport number but failed to note that the two men had visited the United States—or that Al Mihdhar had a multiple-entry visa, which “could” have drawn suspicion. By other accounts, CTC analysts did point up Al Mihdar visa status. In the event, neither agency alerted immigration authorities to watch for Alhazmi or Al Mihdhar. 

On January 15, Alhazmi flew to Los Angeles. In March, reportedly through “a routine report from foreign intelligence service, ” CIA learned that Alhazmi was in America. A month later, the Agency was told that Al Mihdhar had arrived in L.A. on the plane with Alhazmi. By the Agency’s own account, it waited nineteen months, until August 2001, to inform the Bureau that the suspected Qaeda agents were in the United States. By then, they had disappeared. 

The Attack on the USS Cole 

On October 12, 2000, Al Qaeda agents detonated a boatful of explosives portside of the destroyer USS Cole, which was refueling in Aden, Yemen. The explosion killed seventeen American sailors and wounded fortytwo. Freeh led more than one hundred FBI agents into Yemen. A senior CIA counterterrorism expert joined the team as an “access officer, ” plugging the Bureau into the Agency’s network of local contacts. He looked on with chagrin as the agents, operating in an alien environment, offended their Yemeni hosts. The agents were adamant that they should be allowed to interrogate suspects and witnesses directly. The Yemenis took that as a cultural slight. It was Khobar Towers again. 

But the Bureau did work the probe doggedly—and, at least Stateside, with great discretion. Behind the scenes, clues were leading to bin Laden. One of the bombers was identified as a member of Egyptian Islamic Jihad, whose leadership interlocked with Al Qaeda’s. Analysts at CIA’s Counterterrorism Center concluded that the Cole bombers worked out of Qatar, where bin Laden had shipped twenty tons of C-4 plastic explosive from Poland. By December, FBI agents were fixing on Attash Khallad, a fanatical one legged Qaeda operative. 

When CIA officers pulled the file on Khallad, they discovered surveillance photos of him taken at the January meeting in Malaysia. In one of the images, he stood by Khalid Al Mihdhar; it also seemed that he had met with Nawaf Alhazmi. But for reasons that have never become clear, the Agency failed to inform the Bureau, as the Cole probe progressed, that the two men were linked to Khallad-or that they had already entered the United States. “No one picked up on that, ” a CIA official later admitted. 

The Molehunt (IV) 

In November 2000, while Freeh was absorbed in the Cole probe, CIA officers handed Ed Curran a dossier of Russian documents and a plastic trash bag. The documents, which had come courtesy of a CIA mole in Russian intelligence, comprised a copy of the Russian case file on a mole in American intelligence. The bag, said the CIA mole, had been used to deliver top-secret FBI papers to Russian agents. 

Bureau technicians examined the bag for fingerprints. They found some, ran a check, and came back to Curran with a match. When he read the name, he was stunned. The prints belonged not to a CIA officer, but to an FBI counter espionage agent. 

The agent was put under surveillance. On February 18, 2001, he was arrested while placing classified documents under a footbridge in a Virginia park. On February 20, Freeh called a press conference and announced that Robert Hanssen had been arrested as a Russian spy. 

Hanssen, known to colleagues as “Dr. Death” for his dark suits, sallow skin, and glowering stare, had passed secrets to Russia for twenty-one years. In exchange for two Rolex watches, and $600,000 in cash and diamonds, he had handed Moscow at least twenty-six diskettes and six thousand pages of classified information; tipped the KGB that Felix Bloch was being watched; surrendered a full roster of double-agent operations; and burned at least fifty Bureau and MI6 sources. Later it would emerge that Hanssen, while chief of the National Security Threat List Unit in January 1992, had set the FBI’s delusive intelligence priorities for the rest of the decade. Freeh said of the damage: “We believe it was exceptionally grave.” 

At the press conference, Freeh invoked Hanssen’s arrest as proof of an “unprecedented level of trust and cooperation between the CIA and FBI.” Yet the Bureau’s hunt for “Diamonds” had torn Langley apart. And for months after Hanssen’s arrest, the attorney for the suspended CIA officer would complain that the Bureau had failed to exonerate him. Perhaps most gallingly, while CIA officers had been subjected to grueling polygraphs, neither Hanssen nor many other FBI employees had been tested. The wounds would take years to heal. As Baer would trenchantly put it: “While the FBI was tied up eviscerating the CIA, Robert Hanssen was giving away the FBI’s own secrets in trash bags.” 

In the aftermath, Freeh moved to shore up the Bureau’s security. He ordered that the FBI’s “top 500 managers” be polygraphed, and hired a former CIA counterintelligence chief, Paul Redmond, to walk back the cat. The echoes of the post-Ames situation at Langley were duly noted. “The irony is that an FBI counterintelligence expert was sent to the CIA to upgrade its internal security operations after the Ames case, ” Walter Pincus wrote in the Washington Post, “while today a CIA counterintelligence officer has been dispatched to the FBI to do the same thing there.” 

As the Ames affair had done at Langley, so the Hanssen case raised questions about the Bureau’s viability as a national-security institution. A panel headed by William Webster reported that dozens of foreign sources had to be shelved, since “[the sources] fear that information Hanssen passed will lead to their discovery and their handlers can do little to assuage these fears.” Kenneth H. Senser, the FBI’s new assistant director for security, told the Senate Judiciary Committee there was “substantial risk” that another Hanssen could be spying undetected. As Freeh let CIA counterintelligence officers loose in the Bureau, things effectively came full circle. 

The “Hanssen effect” would soon assume a grim historical significance. Until CIA officers could be sure there was not another Hanssen in the Bureau, they would hesitate to share sensitive information. Until Redmond could determine whether the Bureau’s wellsprings were poisoned by disinformation, CIA analysts were loath to integrate FBI data into their reports. At the Bureau, meanwhile, resentment would smolder among agents finally getting a taste of the polygraph medicine from their rivals. And so, in summer 2001, the wedge between CIA and FBI was widening just as it needed to close, just as the enemy was coiling to strike, just as the days dwindled down to another Pearl Harbor. 

Chatter 

In May, the NSA began to intercept communications between Al Qaeda operatives discussing an attack, one that could be larger than any previous operation. One message, describing the scope of the expected devastation, used the word “Hiroshima.” 

The intercepts prompted concern throughout the government. By June, CIA director Tenet was “nearly frantic” about the “chatter” in the system, the discrete yet unspecific indicators that Al Qaeda was up to something. Attorney General John Ashcroft began taking a privately chartered jet for security reasons. Embassies and entire military commands went on highest alert. On July 5, NSC Director for Terrorism Richard Clarke summoned CT officers from a dozen federal agencies to the White House Situation Room, and told them to cancel any vacation plans. “Something really spectacular is going to happen here, and it’s going to happen soon, ” he said. 

While Clarke was briefing the agencies, President Bush was outside, in the White House Rose Garden, introducing the new director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Robert Mueller III, a veteran prosecutor, was replacing Louis Freeh, who had decided to retire for a lucrative private-sector job. Freeh was bequeathing him a vast federal empire, and it would be some weeks before Mueller was ready to rule. Until the second week of September, when’Mueller intended to step in, the Bureau would be in a state of transition. 

The Phoenix Memo 

In Phoenix, during the second week of July, special agent Larry Williams learned that Middle Eastern men were enrolling at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, in the nearby town of Prescott. He wrote up detailed descriptions of the students, noting that one had links to Al Qaeda. Positing that bin Laden’s operatives might be trying to infiltrate the civil-aviation system, Williams proposed an FBI program to monitor “civil aviation colleges/universities around the country.” 

Williams’ five-page memo, which mentioned bin Laden in the first sentence, was sent electronically to headquarters on July 10. It was addressed to David Frasca, chief of the Radical Fundamentalist Unit, but was automatically routed to his subordinates. They never forwarded it to Frasca, or to Mike Rolince, chief of the International Terrorism Section, or to the interagency Counterterrorism Security Group, which had a “threat subgroup” meeting three times a week. Williams’ plan to monitor flight schools was not even considered. 

At least two persons listed in Williams’ memo had been independently identified by the CIA as having links to Al Qaeda. But the Agency did not know they were attending the Prescott flight school, because the memo was not shared with them until May 2002. 

The Crawford Brief 

On Monday, August 6, as the heat in Crawford, Texas, reached a hundred degrees, President Bush sat down at the desk in his ranch office and read a top-secret Daily Brief from CIA. The two page document carried the headline “BIN LADEN DETERMINED TO STRIKE IN UNITED STATES.” 

A few weeks before, Bush had told Tenet: “Give me a sense of what al-Qaeda can do inside the U.S.” CTC had dug into its files. The August 6 brief reviewed bin Laden’s past methods, citing the recent case of Ahmed Ressam, caught smuggling explosives across the Canadian border for a planned attack at Los Angeles International Airport. Referenced also was an unconfirmed 1998 MI6 report indicating that Al Qaeda planned to hijack an airliner and demand the release of Sheikh Rahman. The brief did not mention suicide attacks, but focused, rather, on “hijackings in the traditional sense.” 

In retrospect, the report would be notable not for what was in it, but for what it left out. It did not incorporate Williams’ July 10 memo warning that Al Qaeda agents might be infiltrating flight schools. It did not cite the FBI’s 1995 memo about Murad and Youse’s plans to nosedive a plane into CIA headquarters. It did not consider the 1999 report by CIA’s own National Intelligence Council, which considered airborne suicide attacks at length. Nor was the FBI given the chance to add its own analyses: the brief was not shown to the Bureau. 

Moussaoui 

On August 15, a manager at the Pan Am International Flight Academy in Minneapolis, Minnesota, telephoned the local FBI field office and alleged that a French African Muslim, Zacarias Moussaoui, might be planning a hijacking. During 747 flight-simulator training, he had asked an inordinate number of questions about the locks on cockpit doors. 

The next day, FBI agents detained Moussaoui and held him on immigration charges. He revealed little under interrogation. The Minneapolis Field Office, in order to search Moussaoui notebooks and his laptop computer, asked headquarters to apply for a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act warrant. After three weeks of back and forth, Washington declined the request. Under the strict standards of FISA, lawyers at headquarters argued, the Bureau lacked probable cause. 

Frustrated by the foot-dragging, agents in Minneapolis asked CIA for background on Moussaoui. The Agency relayed a French intelligence report, linking him to Chechen jihadists. FBI Minneapolis counsel Colleen Rowley argued that the report “confirmed [Moussaoui] affiliations with radical fundamentalist Islamic groups and activities connected to Osama bin Laden.” A supervisor at headquarters ruled that the report showed no direct ties between Moussaoui and any officially designated terrorist group. What was more, according to Rowley, headquarters “chastised” the agents for contacting CIA directly, instead of working through FBI-HQ. What really seemed to bother the brass, one FBI man sniped, was that “agents [might] cooperate with the CIA in ways headquarters might not be able to control.” 

By late August, the Minnesota office’s file on Moussaoui, which had been copied to FBI headquarters, found its way to Cassandra Chandler’s shop. Her threat analysts now had three pieces of the flight-school puzzle: the Moussaoui information, the Phoenix memo, and the 1998 Oklahoma City report. No connection was made among them. Neither the Oklahoma nor the Phoenix report was forwarded to the Minnesota agents, who might have used the documents in support of their FISA filing. 

Later, when a FISA warrant was finally issued, Moussaoui’s possessions would yield many clues. Agents would find a computer disk containing data on crop dusting; flight-deck videos from an Ohio store where two other Middle Eastern flight students, Mohamed Atta and Nawaf Alhazmi, had purchased the same equipment; a notebook, correspondence, bank receipts, and two telephone numbers linking Moussaoui to an Al Qaeda cell in Hamburg, Germany; and stationery identifying Moussaoui as a “marketing consultant” for a Malaysian computer company owned by the microbiologist whose condo had hosted Alhazmi, Al Mihdhar, and the one legged Qaeda agent suspected of bombing the Cole. 

But during the second week of September, Moussaoui’s possessions were still neatly piled in an FBI evidence room, his links to Al Qaeda still obscure, his co-conspirators Atta, Alhazmi, and Al Mihdhar still at large. Atta would later be identified as the pilot of American Airlines Flight 11, the first plane to hit the World Trade Center. Al Hazmi and Al Mihdar names would appear on the passenger manifest for American Airlines Flight 77, which crashed into the Pentagon. 

The Molehunt (V) 

On the day Moussaoui was arrested, Neil J. Gallagher, assistant director in charge of the FBI’s National Security Division, composed a formal letter of apology to the CIA officer who had been wrongfully branded a Russian spy. 

“I sincerely regret the adverse impact that this investigation had on you and the members of your family, ” Gallagher wrote. “It was not the intent of the FBI to either discredit you or to cause you or your family any embarrassment. If this has occurred, I am sorry.” 

Twenty-six days later, in a Washington Post article disclosing the molehunt, FBI officials admitted that their seven-year purge of CIA had been a mistake. None of the three hundred suspects was implicated in espionage. Curran, who had retired when CIA fingered Hanssen, admitted that the Bureau’s performance was abysmal. “We just dropped the ball so many times, ” he said. Curran thought the roots of the failure traced back to 1992, when, based on its new threat list, the Bureau had cut back its counterespionage staff. The article did not reveal that the agent who drew up the FBI threat list was the very officer whose treason had spurred the crippling molehunt in CIA … or that those dual disasters, traceable to the same traitor, had ruined the national-security balance that had held since 1947. 

Even so, the disclosure of Gallagher’s apology, and of the Bureau’s incompetence in counterespionage, was damning. As a brilliant, cloudless day dawned in Washington, as the Post flopped down on doorsteps in Arlington and Georgetown, anyone who had a chance to read page A-5 before 8:57 a.m. on September 11,2001, would have learned that the FBI’s dominance of CIA, the triumph of Hoover’s ghost over Donovan’s, the seven years of sleep and drift and delusion, were never necessary at all.

a short afterword can be found at page 894 on the scroll here at the source

https://ia801602.us.archive.org/16/items/WedgeFromPearlHarborTo911HowTheSecretWarBetweenTheFBIAndCIAHasEndangeredNationalSecurity/Wedge%20-%20From%20Pearl%20Harbor%20to%209%3A11%20-%20How%20the%20Secret%20War%20between%20the%20FBI%20and%20CIA%20Has%20Endangered%20National%20Security.pdf