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>From http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A53054-2002May21.html
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washingtonpost.com
FBI Pigeonholed Agent's Request
Canvassing of Flight Schools For Al Qaeda Was Rejected
By Dan Eggen
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, May 22, 2002; Page A01
A Phoenix FBI agent's request for a canvass of U.S. flight schools for al Qaeda
terrorists was formally rejected within several weeks of his July 10 memo, after mid-
level officials at FBI headquarters determined they did not have the manpower to
carry out the task, sources familiar with the memo said yesterday.
The request was forwarded to counterterrorism chiefs at FBI headquarters and the
New York field office, but one of the terrorism units in Washington decided by early
August that the document's suggestions were largely unworkable in the midst of
more immediate cases, sources said.
Officials had previously been unclear about when and how the suggestion was
abandoned. But officials now acknowledge that the request was quickly marked
"closed," and plans to pursue it were postponed indefinitely.
The abrupt halt underscores the low priority that FBI officials assigned to thefive-
page memo from Phoenix agent Kenneth Williams, which was not distributed beyond
FBI middle management prior to the Sept. 11 terror attacks and was viewed as
largely speculative by those who reviewed it.
The Phoenix memo is now at the center of heated debate on Capitol Hill about
whether the government misread warning signs about the intentions of Osama bin
Laden's al Qaeda network.
Williams, 41, a former SWAT team leader, joined FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III
yesterday for a classified briefing on the memo before the Senate Judiciary
Committee. He is expected to offer similar testimony as early as today to a joint
House-Senate intelligence committee investigating the events leading up to Sept. 11,
officials said.
The FBI has publicly released only one paragraph of Williams's electronic memo,
which outlined his suggestion that "the FBI should accumulate a listing of civil
aviation universities/ colleges around the country" and "should discuss this matter
with other elements of the U.S. intelligence community."
The Phoenix memo was never shared with the CIA or any other agency, officials
have said. Nor was it given in August to investigators in Minnesota, where alleged
Sept. 11 conspirator Zacarias Moussaoui was first detained after he raised
suspicions at a flight school there.
"Even to this day, no one seems to know who knew what and where critical
information went at FBI headquarters," Sen. Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa) said after
meeting with Mueller and Williams yesterday. "They still don't have answers to . . .
why things fell apart before September 11."
The memo, which updated about a dozen counterterrorism cases that Williams was
working, was approved by Williams's supervisor in Phoenix and transmitted to the
Radical Fundamentalist Unit, or RFU, within the bureau's counterterrorism division.
A copy was sent to the FBI's Osama bin Laden unit, because his name was
mentioned, and an informational copy went to the New York field office, which has
been the center of FBI expertise on terrorism, sources said.
One paragraph in the summary said that eight Arabs who were the subjects of
Williams's investigation were students at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in
Prescott, Ariz., where they were enrolled in courses including pilot training, aircraft
mechanics and security.
Williams suggested that the men, who were under investigation for suspected ties to
terrorists, might be a threat. He asked for an analysis of people coming into the
United States for aviation training and suggested requesting help from the State
Department and the Immigration and Naturalization Service.
RFU analysts decided that resources were stretched too thin at the time to pursue
such a plan. Officials said that the FBI counterterrorism division was swamped with
urgent matters, including a large volume of intelligence reports indicating a possible
attack, and the investigation into the terrorist bombing of the USS Cole in Yemen.
When the memo's existence was revealed two weeks ago, one law enforcement
official suggested that the FBI had been "seriously considering" a plan to pursue
Williams's suggestions at the time of the attacks. But officials now acknowledge that
was not the case.
"The decision was made that this would be taken up at a later time when they got
through the crisis of the moment," one FBI official said. "There had to be some
closure, otherwise it just would remain pending."
The memo was initially categorized as "routine," several sources said, because there
was no imminent threat or crime indicated in the document. The other possible
category is "urgent," officials said.
Associates said Williams is surprised by the furor his memo created. FBI officials,
including Mueller, have noted that none of the subjects named in the memo has
been connected by investigators to the Sept. 11 plot, sources said.
Prior to Sept. 11, the FBI did refer the list of names in the memo to the CIA, which
concluded that none appeared to have ties to al Qaeda, officials have said. But
Williams noted that one of the aviation students was a radical Muslim who had a
picture of bin Laden on his wall, while another had made a phone call to a man linked
to an al Qaeda associate.
Earlier this month, after finally receiving a copy of the memo, the CIA determined that
at least two of the non-flight school students named in the document have ties to al
Qaeda based on intelligence gathered since the attacks.
Neither Mueller nor Attorney General John D. Ashcroft learned of the Phoenix memo
until after the Sept. 11 attacks. White House press secretary Ari Fleischer said that
as of yesterday, President Bush still had not seen it, but was briefed on it "in the
last
week or two.
"I don't think anybody needed a memo after September 11th to know that there were
general suspicions that people were in flight schools," Fleischer said. "Everybody
knew it, as a result of September 11th."
Also yesterday, Ashcroft met for nearly an hour with the four lawmakers heading the
congressional Sept. 11 inquiry, which has been mired in internal squabbling and
hampered by some resistance from agencies. The Justice Department has balked at
turning over some records to Congress because they could be used in future
terrorism prosecutions.
Ashcroft told the lawmakers that the Justice Department has provided 37 of 79
witnesses requested by the committee so far, and that seven more will testify this
week, a department official said. Ashcroft also told the lawmakers that the
department has handed over 9,000 pages of documents, and has made 20,000
more available at a classified location within FBI headquarters, the official said.
"The information we need, we are going to get," House intelligence committee
Chairman Porter J. Goss (R-Fla.) said after meeting with Ashcroft.
Staff writers Mike Allen
and Walter Pincus contributed
to this report.
� 2002 The Washington Post Company
End<{{{
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