Terrorism101 Home Page : Articles & Links : Debka - How Much Did US Presidents Know about Terror?
Location: http://www.Debka.com
Posted: May 17, 18, and 19, 2002
Debka: How Much Did US Presidents Know about Terror?
Part 1 (May 17, 2002)
On January 8, 1998, 33 months before the September 11 disasters, Islamic fundamentalist Ramzi Yousuf was sentenced by a Manhattan court to 240 years solitary confinement, a $4.5 m fine and $250 m in restitution for perpetrating the first terrorist attack on New York's World Trade Center in February 1993. Six Americans died in that attack and more than a thousand were injured. Yousef, today 32, continues to languish in a special penal installation in Manhattan together with some of his accomplices. The best known is the "Blind Sheikh" Abdul Rahman, who as a hard-core member of the violent Egyptian Jihad Islami, was a co-planner of the assassination of President Anwar Sadat in October 1981 in Cairo.
The trial records shed instructive light on al Qaeda's objectives and methods:
1. Yousuf regarded his mission as a fiasco. The location of the truck he drove into the parking area underneath one of the towers - and the size of the explosive charge it carried - were mathematically calculated to force one of the two towers to lean over and slam into the second one. This one blast was to have brought the two towers crashing down, killing many thousands of Americans.
2. One year later, Yousuf, still at large, was in the Philippines. He was part of a group that plotted the hijack from Far Eastern airfields of 12 Boeing 747 airliners bound for the US. They were to be blown up over 12 American cities, including New York and Washington. At least 4,000 people aboard those flights would have died, not counting the casualties on the ground.
That revelation alone indicated extensive forward planning: aviation training had been organized for tens of terrorists to fly large airliners into American airspace and blow them up over predetermined targets, one of them New York.
These two revelations were on the court record seven and eight years before Osama bin Laden's suicide hijackers hit New York and Washington.
Therefore, the US president's national security adviser Condoleezza Rice was only technically correct when she stressed at her meeting with the press on Thursday, May 16, that there was no way anyone could have predicted that international terrorists would use hijacked planes as missiles and attack the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. She added that the briefing received by the president "mentioned hijacking, but hijacking in the traditional sense
the most likely thing was that they would take over an airliner, holding passengers and demand the release of one of their operatives. And the blind sheikh was mentioned by name..."
At the same time, when all the information accumulated by US and foreign intelligence agencies over the preceding seven years is put together, it is hard to believe that none of the security and political professionals missed the warning signals marking out the road to September 11, 2001.
Ever since the Yousuf trial, Osama bin Laden and his al Qaeda network were known to be plotting mischief against America, targeting the World Trade as its outstanding emblem; known to be training pilots for suicide missions in America. Yet White House spokesman Ari Fleischer, who spoke to the media several hours before Rice, insisted the information received in the White House in August 2001, one month before the attacks, was generalized and non-specific.
Facing a barrage of questions, he said "The president did not receive information about the use of airplanes as missiles by suicide bombers. This was a new type of attack that had not been foreseen. As a result, a series of changes and improvements have been made in the way the United States deals with a terrorist threat."
He rebuked one questioner: "...you are using the post-September 11th knowledge of what a hijacking could be and applying it to August, prior to September 11th."
In answer to another question, Fleischer quoted from a speech made in April at Duke University by Jim Pavitt, deputy director of operations for the CIA:
"We had very, very good intelligence on the general structure and strategies of the al Qaeda terrorist organization. We knew and were warned that al Qaeda was planning a major strike.
We never found the tactical intelligence, never uncovered the specifics that could have stopped those tragic strikes
The terror cells that we're going up against are typically small, and all terrorist personnel in those cells, participating in those cells, perpetrating the acts of terror all those personnel were carefully screened. The number of personnel who knew vital information targets, timing, the exact methods to be used had to be smaller still."
Fleischer clearly drew on the words of this senior CIA officer to support his contention that all terror warnings are general by definition because the United States has never come up with tactical intelligence on al Qaeda. Without such intelligence, the president cannot be expected to "connect the dots", the fragments of data provided by intelligence bodies, into pinpointed, comprehensive advance knowledge, when that data is too general even for the CIA to construe al Qaeda's methods of operation.
Whatever is expected of the president in the way of tactical predictions, the arguments voiced by Fleischer - and through him by Pavitt - betray one basic fact: to this day, eight months after the traumas of 9/11, the United States remains vulnerable to al Qaeda terrorist assaults, prevented by lack of tactical intelligence from building up a complete tactical picture of the enemy. This is still truefive months after the United States brought down the Taliban regime in Afghanistan and stripped al Qaeda of its main territorial base, a situation that poses two questions:
A. Why is the United States, despite having the most powerful, sophisticated and affluent intelligence bodies in the world, whose annual budget runs into $30b, short of the tactical intelligence necessary for waging a war on terror?
B. How come that a terrorist organization with a hard core numbering no more than 3,000-5,000 members commands better tactical intelligence than the United States as well as a counterintelligence capability effective enough to fend off hostile penetration?
CIA officer Pavitt explained the two anomalies by the theory that al Qaeda cells are extremely small, hinting at its ultra-tight compartmentalization and a degree of ethnic and religious homogeneity that makes their ranks virtually impermeable.
That theory was one of the first casualties of the Afghanistan War, where fighters of many nations, including Americans, British, Frenchmen and Russians, were found to be fighting with al Qaeda. The American John Walker awaits trial at a detention facility in Alexandria, Washington DC, while diverse nationals are held at the Camp X-Ray center in Guantanamo.
In other words, had US intelligence wanted to plant undercover agents in the Islamic terror network, it would not have been impossible.
Part 2 (May 18, 2002)
The most striking living proof that American double agents can be planted in the al Qaeda terror network is not to be found in Guantanamo or in East Afghanistan, which US, Australia, Norwegian, New Zealand and British Royal Marine troops are currently scouring for al Qaeda and Taliban pockets. That proof is to be found in Manhattan, not far from the ruins of the World Trade Center, in a cell of a jail that also holds Ramzi Yousuf and the Blind Sheikh Rahman referred to by Condoleezza Rice.
He is an Egyptian with US citizenship called Ali Muhammad.
Although the US media have poured out many words on this man the most extensive report appeared in the New York Times on June 5, 1999 the American public knows very little about him.
Very briefly, in the 1970s, Ali Muhammad was an Egyptian military intelligence officer who as part of his duties cultivated close relations with Egyptian radical Muslim elements. After President Anwar Sadat was murdered, Muhammad turned out to have been well acquainted with the plot's conspirators and assassins, including the Blind Sheikh.
In September 1985, Muhammad wangled admission into the United States over a CIA veto. After running him as a double agent for four years, the CIA and FBI decided to oppose his entry to the US. Nonetheless, the Egyptian ex-intelligence officer gained entrance. In fact, he was quickly accepted in the US army, where he carved out one of the most bizarre military careers in that army's history.
From Fort Bragg, although only a sergeant, he came and went as he pleased, his commanders reporting they had no control over his movements. During his disappearances, he sometimes traveled to Afghanistan and fought the Russian army alongside the Afghan mujaheddin; at others, he stayed in New York and drilled Muslim terrorist groups, some of whose members later took part in the first attack on the Twin Towers in 1993.
In November 1989, after being awarded American citizenship again over CIA objections - Ali Muhammad resigned from the US army and devoted himself full time to al Qaeda, as one of Osama bin Laden's senior operations officers.
In past reports, DEBKAfile and DEBKA-Net-Weeklyhave cited their Intelligence and counter-terror sources on bin Laden and al Qaeda operations in which Muhammad was actively involved:
1. The 1993 attack, the first, on the World Trade Center
2. The planning for the 12-airliner hijack in the Far East. Had this attack come off, a dozen airliners would have blown up over twelve American cities, including New York and Washington.
3. The 1993 Mogadishu battle, the first confrontation between al Qaeda soldiers, who fought alongside Somali insurgents, and US special forces. It ended in the worst US military defeat after Vietnam.
4. The 1993-1994 wholesale transfer of the al Qaeda network's operational headquarters from Afghanistan to Sudan. Bin Laden was located there up until 1996, when he returned to Afghanistan.
It is a little known fact that the al Qaeda move to Sudan was tacitly encouraged by the Clinton administration, Saudi Arabia and Egypt, who calculated that close Saudi and Egyptian intelligence surveillance would keep the Saudi-born Islamic fundamentalist under control.
They miscalculated badly. Instead of letting his wings be clipped, bin Laden used his three years in East Africa to spread them far and wide through the Arabian peninsula, Ethiopia and Somalia, with the following results:
A. The network's undercover terror cells proliferated, dispersed widely around the Arabian Peninsula, the Horn of Africa, Eastern Africa and the Balkans primarily Bosnia, Kosovo and Macedonia. His organization joined forces with the regional and local networks of the Egyptian Jihad Islami headed by Dr. Ayman Zuwahri, to form the deadliest, widest-reaching terror organization ever known.
B. These joint cells carried out the abortive 1995 assassination attempt on the life of Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak in Addis Ababa; the 1996 Khobar Towers blast in which 18 US troops were killed and 500 injured, and the devastating strikes against US East African embassies in Nairobi and Daar es-Salaam, that left 234 victims dead and more than 5000 injured.
Another of their joint endeavors was the ramming of the USS Cole on 12 October2000, in Aden Harbor. Nineteen US servicemen died and hundreds were injured.
One fine day after the embassies attack, Ali Muhammad turned himself in to the US authorities voluntarily, demanding only a guarantee that he would not face the death sentence.
Ali Muhammad's history demonstrates that US intelligence bodies employed, collaborated with and maintained some level of operational relations with at least one central al Qaeda figure. For at least seven years from 1991 to 1998, the Egyptian terrorist was bin Laden's operational right hand.
That being so, how could Jim Pavitt claim in a lecture last April at Duke University quoted at length by the White House spokesman Ari Fleischer on April 17 that the CIA had never had any tactical intelligence on the Islamic networks? This claim in no way supports Fleischer's argument that the administration lacked the equipment for "connecting the dots" into an operationally viable picture.
DEBKAfile's counter terror and counterintelligence experts raise a couple more questions:
It stands to reason that Ali Muhammad was not the only Middle Eastern fundamentalist to be admitted to the US army; he must have been one of a group activated according to some concept. But who activated them? Who allowed them to enter the United States and who had enough clout to overrule a CIA veto? Who decided to place this Egyptian Muslim in a US special forces facility? And on whose authority was this Egyptian member of a US special forces unit allowed to travel freely round the world, including Afghanistan, and back, without once being detained at any American airport?
The answer is not to be found in any Afghan cave or Sudanese desert. Only someone in high governmental authority in the United States or some western capital fits the bill. And whoever they were, Muhammad's activators, must have been in a position to access advance information on forthcoming major terrorist strikes in or against the United States.
Since the furor broke over the degree of President George W. Bush's foreknowledge prior to the 9/11 attacks, the US media has been swamped with an abundance of leaks demonstrating that the FBI and CIA, as far back as 1995 at least, were in on al Qaeda's ambition to stage a large-scale terror attack in the United States, by crashing explosives-packed airliners on the White House, the Pentagon and other US government buildings.
That information had clearly reached the desks of US intelligence chiefs.
Now we also know that it had reached the ear of the US president. Yet no hint of the advancing peril was vouchsafed to hundreds of millions of Americans.
Who decided to keep it from the general public? And why?
Part 3 (May 19, 2002)
Three separate episodes over two decades, presented here for the first time by the intelligence and terrorism experts of DEBKAfile and DEBKA-Net-Weekly, demonstrate that the malaise afflicting US intelligence is long-standing. It has not been cauterized by the periodic excision of individual double spies and traitors. These clandestine bodies remain tightly closed to outside scrutiny and a law unto themselves when it comes to cleaning out the stables. It is no accident that the alerts prior to the 9/11 attacks and the fresh warnings this week of a second-wave al Qaeda attack on America are diffuse and described as no better than "chattering".
The lax response of which the Bush administration is accused comes under the traditional hands-off attitude of American presidents towards the hot potato of intelligence and its ingrained habit of murkiness and mystification.
This habit, traditionally exploited by internal enemies, including al Qaeda's secret helpers, no longer fits the needs of the hour. A healthier openness is necessary to fight global terror. Terrorism at home, in particular, cannot be fought without public vigilance and the public will not be vigilant if it is uninformed.
EpisodeOne: 1981 Assassination of Egyptian President Sadat
In April 1981, six months before he was murdered, Egyptian president Anwar Sadat arrived in Washington for formal talks on topics familiar to contemporary readers: Egyptian-Israeli relations, the Palestinian and other Arab issues. His true object was to present President Ronald Reagan and CIA director William Casey the documents, tapes and film footage gathered by Egyptian military intelligence, documenting secret operational conclaves among radical Islamic Egyptian military officers plotting his assassination. One of the conspirators was the Blind Sheikh Abdul Rahman. Calling itself Taqfir al-Hijra, its group's members belong today to the Egyptian Jihad Islami and al Qaeda.
Sadat appealed to the Americans for help against the conspirators.
Soon after he left the US capital, a flow of innuendo reached the world media implying the Egyptian president was laboring under severe strain that impaired his judgment. The next rumors prepared the public mind to regard Sadat as falling prey to delusions of persecution.
Six months later, on October 6, 191, Sadat was murdered by the very same extremist Muslim conspirators he feared and whose names he brought to Washington.
DEBKAfile and DEBKA-Net-Weekly reveal here for the first time that the Egyptian military intelligence officer who handed Sadat the documents and tapes recording the conspiracy was none other than Ali Muhammad (whose strange career as an American Green Beret, Osama bin Laden's senior operations officer and present location in a Manhattan jail, is detailed in Part Two of this series).
The campaign to discredit the Egyptian president and his proofs of a plot against his life was orchestrated by CIA officer Aldrich Hazen Ames, who was sentenced 15 years later to life imprisonment for spying for Moscow from 1985. According to DEBKAfile, Ames began serving the Russians much earlier probably in 1971 or 1972, and he was well acquainted with Ali Muhammad.
Episode Two: Sequel to the 1993 Battle of Mogadishu
The calamitous 1993 battle between American special forces and the Somali General Farrah Aidid's renegade militia left two lingering problems in its wake:
1. The US military command, before sending the troops into battle, appeared to have been ignorant of the fact that al Qaeda and Egyptian Jihad Islami operatives on the spot were looking after the arms and training needs of Aidid's force, as well as supplying him with fighting strength.
2. The well-laid ambush in which the American force was cornered indicated that, unlike the Americans, the rebel Aidid had advance intelligence on US military security and movements.
Hypothetically, an Ali Muhammad, or one of his ilk planted inside American military units, could have fed this vital information to the enemy. But that is not what happened.
On February 21, 1994, Aldrich Ames was arrested in Washington for spying for Moscow. Five days later, a CIA unit was flown into Mogadishu and broke into UN offices there. They knew exactly where to look for the secret papers handed to Aidid with the signaling codes and operational plans of the US units who went into battle against him. Their instructions were to locate the documents and destroy them on the spot, which they did. The raiding party also found that those secret plans had reached the rebel Somali general by a circuitous route: an American traitor had handed them to his contact at UN headquarters in New York, who sent it on to Mogadishu.
Ames was not the only American double agent with undercover contacts at UN headquarters in New York. Philip Robert Hanssen, Earl Pitts and Kim Roberts were also discovered to have accomplices inside the world body. Many CIA and FBI officers are convinced that Ames and Hanssen betrayed the American battle plans and codes in Somalia; they also know the name of the enemy agent at UN Headquarters who took receipt of the stolen information.
Episode Three: 1996 Ethiopian Airways Hijack
Very little was made in America and Europe of the hijack of Ethiopian Airways Flight 961, that took off from Addis Ababa for Nairobi on November 23, 1996, and never arrived. Had that incident been fully exposed and investigated, subsequent calamities might have been averted.
Immediately after takeoff, the flight was commandeered by a group of what were later described as drunken, dissident Ethiopian students. The couple of lines given the incident in the world media described the plane as making a forced landing for lack of fuel in the Indian Ocean, 450 meters from the Comoro Islands. Of the 175 passengers and crew aboard, 127 were said to have died in the crash-landing and 48 were injured, most seriously. One curious fact emerged from an Agence France Presse report. None of the 48 passengers who survived and had seen the hijackers, variously reported as between 8 and 12, identified any of them among the dead and wounded. It was as though the ground had swallowed them up.
However, for years after the event, DEBKAfile's terror experts kept their ears to the ground and eventually made some discoveries:
A. Far from being misguided Ethiopian students, the hijackers were well-trained al Qaeda and Egyptian Jihad Islami terrorists.
B. The passengers included the American consul in Bombay and his wife, as well as a senior CIA officer called Leslie Ann Shedd who, although only 28, was one of the great talents of the organization. Also aboard were seven senior directors of the Israeli Aviation Industries with bodyguards, the head of Ukraine military intelligence and the deputy commander of the Ukrainian air force. This group was on its way to a secret meeting at the King David Hotel in Jerusalem.
C. The hijackers took over the controls of the airliner early on in the attack an early precursor of Islamic hijackers as trained pilots.
One of the terrorists' first actions was to separate the CIA agent, the Israelis and the Ukrainians from the other passengers. In the exchange of fire between the hijackers and the Israeli security men, Leslie Ann Shedd and all the IAI directors were shot dead together with the Ukrainian intelligence chief. The deputy air force commander and one Israeli guard survived with serious injuries.
D. The landing in waters off the picturesque Indian Ocean Comoro Islands, just 500 yards from Galawa Beach resort on the northern tip of Grande Comore Island, was carefully planned in advance. Waiting ashore was a group of al Qaeda helpers led by Abdallah Muhamed Fazul, Osama bin Laden's chief operations officer in East Africa. This group used fishing boats for a feigned rescue of the passengers. In fact they only carried off the hijackers, removing every trace left by the operation including the dead and wounded assailants.
The United States, Britain, France, Israel, Ethiopia and the Ukraine quickly joined forces to clamp a heavy curtain of secrecy down over the episode, as a result of which no serious investigation took place. No one therefore identified the hands behind the hijacking, discovered how they obtained the extremely sensitive intelligence on the movements of an American secret agent and senior officers of Israeli aviation manufacturing, or how they knew about the Ukrainian commanders aboard the plane.
Two years later, after two US embassies were attacked in Kenya and Tanzania, the American inquiry led to a lead-character seen last on the Comoro Islands the same Abdallah Muhamed Fazul. Only then was he identified as chief of al Qaeda's East African region command center in Moroni, capital of this Indian Ocean island republic.
But by then it was too late. In September 1998, when an FBI special team obtained permission from the Comoran government to inspect Fazul's home, the bird had flown, leaving only computers. The flight was precipitate, indicating he had been tipped off about the American searchers on his tail.
Already then it must have been obvious that a thorough inquiry into the Ethiopian Airways attack and the murder of a CIA officer might have led the US inquiry much sooner to Fazul and the chance of breaking up his networks before they could prepare for their next operation in East Africa. The same hand that blocked publication of the airline hijack appears also to have blocked the inquiry.
The rising peril from al Qaeda and its component bodies was recognized well before September 2001. Between 1997 and 1999, concerned individuals, many of them non-Americans, approached members of the Clinton administration, the White House, the CIA, the FBI to warn them that the internal situation in US intelligence services makes it possible for Islamic extremist terror groups to operate inside America. Unfortunately, those warnings fell on deaf ears.
As for the Bush administration, even now, members of his administration and the US intelligence community continue to argue they cannot "connect the dots" for lack of tactical intelligence. But, by the same token, al Qaeda - no supermen - could not wage terror in America or fight in Afghanistan without tactical or other intelligence.
So where do bin Laden's followers get it from?
Probably from the same sources that tipped off Aidid in Mogadishu and the Ethiopian hijackers in Addis Ababa, who blocked the information Anwar Sadat sought to convey to President Reagan and who are still present, they or their successors, under cover inside the American intelligence community.
That is why America, though fighting terror around the world from Afghanistan and the Philippines to the Republic of Georgia remains prey to the menace of terror described by vice president Dick Cheney as more serious than the 9/ll atrocities. Without turning its intelligence agencies inside out, America has scant chance of beating this global bane.
Terrorism101 Home Page : Articles & Links : Debka - How Much Did US Presidents Know about Terror?
|
|