Today is the 24th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, the basic history of which should need no elaboration. The deeper history of the event, what led to it, and what came afterward, is another matter.
Some of this complicated history is explored in the InfluenceWatch profile of the FBI:
9/11 and Al Qaeda Investigations
According to an August 2021, 20-year remembrance analysis produced by the FBI, the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, created what was a still-open investigation and the largest, most-ambitious investigation in the Bureau’s history. More than 7,000 FBI employees, including more than 4,000 special agents, were involved in the initial 2001 probe. More than 1,000 of these FBI staffers, pulled from almost every FBI field office, worked recovery and crime-scene investigation at the destroyed World Trade Center site in Manhattan.
The Bureau stated the main objectives were to “identify the attackers and prevent another incident.” The FBI reported that “within hours” investigators had begun to identify the 19 suspected hijackers of the four airliners.
Subsequent investigations revealed deficiencies in the Bureau’s ability to interdict terrorist attacks. As late as July 26, 2001, an FBI counterterrorism official told a U.S. House committee that “FBI investigation and analysis indicates that the threat of terrorism in the United States is low.”
In his book, Broken: The Troubled Past and Uncertain Future of the FBI, FBI historian Richard Gid Powers wrote: “The 9/11 failures of the Bureau were the result of decisions so wrongheaded as to seem incredible to anyone hearing about them for the first time—decisions, however, that were not only predictable but almost inevitable, when viewed against the turbulent history of the FBI.”
Powers noted multiple warnings available to the Bureau in the summer of 2001 that should have been interpreted as “smoking guns” of the impending attack, concluding that “the full picture of how the FBI mishandled the pre-9/11 investigation would be so devastating as to raise the question of whether the FBI would—or should—be allowed to continue in its role as the nation’s primary defender against the threat of terrorist attack.”
The FBI’s centennial history characterized the pre-9/11 period as a “failure of imagination” that demonstrated the Bureau “needed to become adept at preventing terrorist attacks, not just investigating them after the fact.”
Turning to specific details of the FBI’s terrorism fighting capabilities, the Bureau history stated the following:
But, over the years, the FBI had often focused on making quick arrests rather than turning suspects into opportunities to collect every scrap of information about a threat…on developing comprehensive cases rather than on making prevention the overarching prime directive behind all cases. Because of longstanding neglect of information technology, the Bureau lacked the capacity to “know what it knows”—to turn all the bits of intelligence streaming in from around the world into meaningful assessments and actionable information. And it wasn’t generating nearly enough quality analysis or sharing information as much as it could both inside and outside its own walls.
Previous al-Qaeda attacks
Al-Qaeda founder Osama bin Laden was a well-known terrorist threat almost nine years before the September 11, 2001, attacks against the United States. In June 1999, he was placed on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list, with a $25 million reward offered by the State Department for “information leading directly to the apprehension or conviction.” By that point, al-Qaeda had successfully attacked two American targets, killed hundreds of people, and had planned more than a dozen other known assaults against Americans.
In a previous attempt to destroy the World Trade Center in February 1993, the terrorist group detonated a truck bomb underneath the building complex. The extensive damage killed six and injured 1,000 people. One of the bombers was captured while trying to claim the rental deposit on the truck he had used for the attack. From this arrest, the FBI was able to round up more accomplices and learned they had planned additional assaults against other major New York City landmarks. Another architect of the World Trade Center assault was captured two years later in Pakistan, and the FBI learned he had also plotted the coordinated bombing of more than 12 U.S. airliners.
In January 1995, after the police in the Philippines found an al-Qaeda bomb lab, the FBI learned of the terror group’s plans to kill then-Pope John Paul II, attack the American and Israeli embassies in the Philippines, and fly a hijacked airliner into CIA headquarters.
In August 1998, al-Qaeda terrorists bombed U.S. embassy buildings in Tanzania and Kenya, killing 200 and injuring 4,500 others.
In October 2000, al-Qaeda launched a direct attack on the U.S. Navy in Yemen by driving a small boat with a bomb into the USS Cole. The assault killed 19 American sailors, injured 40 others, and disabled the warship.
The “Phoenix Memo”
Chapter 8 of the Final Report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, better known as the 9/11 Commission Report, was titled “THE SYSTEM WAS BLINKING RED.” It recounted a series of events and clues in the months before September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks that could or should have been interpreted as warnings of the assault to come.
A memo providing warnings and recommendations from an agent in the Phoenix FBI office was briefly summarized:
In July 2001, an FBI agent in the Phoenix field office sent a memo to FBI headquarters and to two agents on international terrorism squads in the New York Field Office, advising of the “possibility of a coordinated effort by Usama Bin Ladin” to send students to the United States to attend civil aviation schools. The agent based his theory on the “inordinate number of individuals of investigative interest” attending such schools in Arizona.
The agent made four recommendations to FBI headquarters: to compile a list of civil aviation schools, establish liaison with those schools, discuss his theories about Bin Ladin with the intelligence community, and seek authority to obtain visa information on persons applying to flight schools. His recommendations were not acted on. His memo was forwarded to one field office. Managers of the Usama Bin Ladin unit and the Radical Fundamentalist unit at FBI headquarters were addressees, but they did not even see the memo until after September 11. No managers at headquarters saw the memo before September 11, and the New York Field Office took no action.
As its author told investigators, the Phoenix memo was not an alert about suicide pilots. His worry was more about a Pan Am Flight 103 scenario in which explosives were placed on an aircraft. The memo’s references to aviation training were broad, including aeronautical engineering. If the memo had been distributed in a timely fashion and its recommendations acted on promptly, we do not believe it would have uncovered the plot. It might well, however, have sensitized the FBI so that it might have taken the Moussaoui matter more seriously the next month.
Zacarias Moussaoui investigation
On August 16, 2001, less than a month before the 9/11 attacks occurred, agents from the FBI office in Minneapolis, Minnesota, arrested al-Qaeda operative Zacarias Moussaoui for an immigration violation. Agent Harry Samit had learned the Moroccan citizen was learning to fly a Boeing 747 and that he also had connections to the terror group.
In the weeks leading up to 9/11, Samit and his FBI compatriots in Minnesota repeatedly asked Bureau headquarters to help them obtain a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrant to search Moussaoui’s residence and computer. Their requests were repeatedly rebuffed.
One memo from Minneapolis to the FBI headquarters explained the desire of the Minneapolis agents to get the headquarters team “spun up” about the Moussaoui case so that he “did not take control of a plane and fly it into the World Trade Center.” Headquarters responded: “That’s not going to happen. We don’t know he’s a terrorist. You don’t have enough to show he is a terrorist.” 11
After the 9/11 attacks occurred, it became clear that Moussaoui had been part of the plot and that a more-thorough investigation might have prevented the attacks. In a debriefing by the Department of Justice after the attacks occurred, Agent Samit accused officials at FBI headquarters of “criminal negligence.” 139
Additionally, according to a New York Times report, one of Samit’s fellow agents in the Minneapolis FBI office sent a letter directly to then-FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III in 2002 “bitterly criticizing the performance of F.B.I. headquarters agents in handling the Moussaoui case.” 139
A Times account from the terrorist’s 2006 trial reports Samit provided dozens of unheeded warnings to FBI headquarters over in the weeks after he arrested Moussaoui:
Gripping testimony came from Mr. Samit, who arrested Mr. Moussaoui on Aug. 16 and quickly became convinced that he was a terrorist who knew about an imminent hijacking plot. Mr. Samit said that he had sent about 70 warning messages about Mr. Moussaoui, but that they had produced no results.
On August 17, Agent Samit sent an email to FBI headquarters regarding Moussaoui’s flight training: “His excuse is weak, he just wants to learn how to do it. … That’s pretty ominous and obviously suggests some sort of hijacking plan.” Samit testified that over many interrogations with the suspect, Moussaoui’s desire to return to the flight training was a “constant theme during our interviews.”
In an August 18 memo to FBI headquarters, Samit referenced Osama bin Laden three times and discussed Moussaoui’s fondness for becoming a martyr, warning that he “believes it is acceptable to kill civilians.”
On August 31, Samit drafted a threat assessment on behalf of the Minneapolis FBI office, stating its concern that Moussaoui and “others not yet known” were “preparing to seize 747s.” The draft was not sent to FBI headquarters because Samit was informed by headquarters officials that they would forward a warning of his concerns to the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). No such warning was sent.
On September 5, Samit sent his own warning directly to the FAA. He also contacted FBI officials working with the CIA’s counterterrorism office, still looking for support to obtain a FISA search warrant.
On September 10, Samit received what was ultimately his last rejection for a search warrant, wherein he was informed that the “FBI does not have a dog in this fight” and told to send the Moussaoui case to what was then the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service. In an email to a sympathetic FBI colleague, Samit wrote: “At this point I am so desperate to get into his computer, I’ll take anything.” The other FBI agent responded: “God help us all if the next terrorist attacks involves the same type of plane.”
The New York Times report summarized Samit’s concern that the decisions of his superiors were “motivated principally by a need to protect their careers” and that his testimony at the Moussaoui trial “added a wealth of detail to the notion that officials at the Federal Bureau of Investigation played down, ignored and purposely mischaracterized the increasingly dire warnings from field agents in the Minneapolis office that they had a terrorist on their hands.”
