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FAA knew of Moussaoui arrest

But federal agency chose not to warn airlines

By Stepehen Power, David S. Cloud and Gary Fields
THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

WASHINGTON, May 20 — A week before the Sept. 11 attack, investigators told the Federal Aviation Administration that student-pilot Zacarias Moussaoui had been arrested and was under investigation as a potential terrorist with a particular interest in flying Boeing 747s. But the agency decided against warning U.S. airlines to increase security.

THE FAA didn’t have enough information at the time to act, officials said. The agency was told by the Federal Bureau of Investigation that Mr. Moussaoui was being investigated after his instructors at a Minnesota flight school reported that he paid in cash to learn to fly Boeing 747s despite having almost no prior flight experience. He’d been taken into custody in August on immigration charges.
“Whatever he was going to do he was going to do it with a 747, and [the FBI] communicated that with the FAA,” a senior law-enforcement official said. “The logic at the time was that he intended to hijack a plane.”
Details of the FAA’s decision against notifying airlines and airports haven’t been made public, but are being scrutinized by congressional investigators examining what the government knew prior to the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon. It comes after disclosures last week that President Bush was advised in August that Osama bin Laden’s al Qaeda organization might be planning a hijacking, and that a separate Phoenix FBI-office memo had warned Arab men enrolled in U.S. flight schools might be al Qaeda followers.
Those disclosures have ignited controversy about whether authorities had enough information to disrupt the attacks — if only they had connected the dots. They are leading to intense debate over appointing a special commission to investigate the handling of intelligence prior to Sept. 11, and raising inquiries about the handling of intelligence now.

RECENT REPORTS ARE SIMILAR
Recent intelligence reports, though vague, are similar to what authorities saw in the summer of 2001, when the CIA suspected al Qaeda was planning something big but never learned what. Just last Thursday, the FBI warned real-estate companies that apartment complexes could become terrorist targets. And the CIA and FBI have been directed to improve how they handle and share information.
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Only after Sept. 11 did officials conclude Mr. Moussaoui had been training to join the hijacking teams. He was indicted in December and pleaded not guilty. The briefing where Mr. Bush heard about hijacking came more than a week before Mr. Moussaoui’s arrest. White House officials say the president and his top advisers didn’t learn about the Moussaoui case before Sept. 11.
But on Sept. 4, the FAA’s liaison to the FBI, Jack Salata, was told FBI officials had detained Mr. Moussaoui on immigration charges, FAA spokesman Scott Brenner said. Mr. Salata, who worked out of FBI headquarters at the time, notified his superiors at the FAA’s Office of Civil Aviation Security that Mr. Moussaoui was in custody and that the FBI was investigating his actions, Mr. Brenner said. Mr. Salata declined to comment.

NOT ENOUGH INFORMATION
Agency officials wouldn’t provide details about what the FBI had told them about the case, but said they determined they didn’t have enough information to warrant issuing an advisory to airlines. “We weren’t told about anything else that would prompt us to take action,” Mr. Brenner said. “The FAA is not an intelligence-gathering agency. It’s a regulatory agency. We rely on the intelligence community to gather information and rely on their advice on whether to issue advisories.” Mr. Brenner wouldn’t discuss the criteria the agency uses in deciding whether to issue such advisories.


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One possible reason FAA officials didn’t advise airlines of the Moussaoui case was that he was in custody and FBI officials hadn’t amassed evidence that he was connected to a larger plot. Still, the decision contrasts with what the FAA did earlier in the summer in response to other information that al Qaeda followers might be involved in planning hijackings.
On June 22, the agency issued a security advisory to U.S. airlines that warned of the potential for hijackings. Citing “unconfirmed reports that American interests may be the target of terrorist threat from extremist groups,” the FAA advised U.S. airlines that the “potential for a terrorist operation, such as an airline hijacking to free terrorists incarcerated in the United States, remains a concern.”
The June warning was issued in response to Central Intelligence Agency reports in the spring of 2001 that suggested the son of Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman, a blind Egyptian cleric imprisoned in the U.S. for his role in plotting to blow up New York landmarks in 1993, had met with Mr. bin Laden to plot ways of securing his father’s release. One idea discussed by the son, Assad Allah Abdel Rahman, was hijacking a Pakistani airliner and holding the passengers to force his release, officials said.
CIA analysts deemed the possibility of the son pulling off a hijacking to be remote. U.S. officials said they were more worried about another idea he was said to have discussed with Mr. bin Laden: Kidnapping a U.S. diplomat in Turkey, India or Indonesia. As a precaution, however, the National Security Council’s counterterrorism coordinator, Richard Clarke, advised the FAA to issue a warning about the hijacking threat, which resulted in the June 22 warning, officials said.

FBI KEPT ARREST CLOSE TO VEST
The FBI didn’t inform Mr. Clarke or other White House officials about the Moussaoui arrest prior to Sept. 11, officials said. Information from the Moussaoui investigation went to an office at FBI’s headquarters that monitors threats from extremists, the same office that had received the memo from the Phoenix FBI office in July, a law-enforcement official said.
One of the agents wrote in the margins of his notes that one possibility was that Mr. Moussaoui was planning to hijack an airplane and fly it into the World Trade Center.

Congressional aides are looking into why the two memos didn’t raise alarms. Some suspect the Phoenix memo could have been used by the FBI to bolster the case for a warrant to search Mr. Moussaoui’s computer. In early September, agents from the FBI’s Minnesota field office asked the Washington headquarters for permission to search the hard drive of Mr. Moussaoui’s computer under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. The agency had received information from French intelligence that Mr. Moussaoui might have associated with members of an Algerian terrorist group and might have traveled to Afghanistan.
Lawyers at FBI headquarters, along with other agency officials, decided there wasn’t sufficient evidence to link Mr. Moussaoui directly to a recognized terrorist group and turned down the request.
Agents working on the Moussaoui case in the FBI’s Minneapolis field office had a “brainstorming session” about his possible intentions, officials said. As part of the flight school’s course work, Mr. Moussaoui had filed a mock flight plan that involved New York’s Kennedy Airport. One of the agents wrote in the margins of his notes that one possibility was that Mr. Moussaoui was planning to hijack an airplane and fly it into the World Trade Center. Those notes were part of an internal report that never left Minnesota, although they are now in the hands of congressional investigators.

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