A new book claims that bureau infighting between the FBI and the CIA let leader of the 7/7 gang slip through their fingers
IT WAS time for FBI agent Dan Coleman to go home.
And it wasn't because he was exhausted, which he was. Or because there was nothing left for him to do as FBI's al-Qaeda expert, the first case agent in New York on the 1993 World Trade Centre bombings and the man, it was often said, “who introduced bin Laden to America”. As the bureau’s special emissary without portfolio to the CIA and elsewhere in the US Government — as someone who knew what bits of information would actually be important in the battle against al-Qaeda — there was still plenty to do.
No he decided one night in mid-February 2003, that he had get home — immediately! — because of his tooth.
Or the lack of a tooth. It had been pulled, a wisdom tooth, on February 13 and he wasn’t healing. A “dry socket” is what the dentist called it when he went back a few days after the extraction. The gap in his gums wouldn’t fuse and scab, the way it usually works. So it had to be packed with gauze while the rest of his body was packed with Percoset.
But, now, five days later, on Friday night, as the digital clock screamed 2am, the drugs were turning against him. He was in some sort of narcotic, pain-addled swirl, pacing the one bedroom rental — a madman in briefs.
Then it came, a mystical, saving revelation. He had to get home. And then back to an old dentist near his home in New Jersey. He’d know what to do.
The roads were clear in the middle of the night — no one in either direction at 4am on the Jersey Turnpike. So he could drive in the only way that brought him a modicum of relief: head out the window, mouth open.
What followed were three weeks of dental hell. Getting the tooth packed every other day. Trying out new painkillers. Ranting around the house, driving his wife, Maureen, insane.
“Can you go back in, to do anything,” she asked one morning.
“Thure, there plenty I kud thu,” he said, through the gauze. “Thertainly.”
Being stationed at FBI’s headquarters in Washington since just after 9/11 meant that there wasn’t a whole lot to return to in New York. He didn’t really work there anymore.
But he drove his black FBI-issued Oldsmobile from Jersey through the Holland Tunnel to the enormous nondescript FBI office in southern Manhattan — a building in plain clothes — and into the underground garage. His parking spot was gone. No spots, anywhere. The guy who introduced bin Laden to America — thirty years with the bureau, and he’s doing quarters at a meter.
The office had changed. Offices do, quickly, with so much happening. But, it was nice to be back. Coleman’s a hero up here. John O'Neill, the FBI’s obstreperous al-Qaeda hunter, died in the 9/11 attacks. But Dan was still around.
And, drug-addled, the big guy walked right into a brewing storm.
Joe Billy, the head of the FBI’s New York office, was on the horns of a dilemma and wondering what to do. The CIA New York station had called. Someone was coming to town from overseas. A bad guy from England. CIA would send over the need to know information — guy’s name, arrival flight, photo. FBI’s job was to follow him. Period.
There had been similar directives of late from CIA. Someone’s coming, tail him. Easy to say, hard to do. Once a suspect gets to America it’s much more difficult to stick with them than the CIA, or others across the government, understand. In fact, over the past 18 months FBI had lost a few.
Joe Billy argued with the CIA’s station chief, a woman. “Look, you say, ‘Here’s some basic information — stick by him.’ It’s not that simple. At very least, we need a lot more before we say ‘yes’. Who is he? What have you got on him?”
CIA was generally the “originator” of actionable information. Often, it actually came from the eavesdropping capabilities of the National Security Agency, through to the CIA, though the agency would rather not admit that. The FBI, in any event, was far downstream — there, it seemed, at CIA’s convenience. It was a frustrating position for Billy. FBI wasn’t just a hound dog: here’s the scent, stay with him. They were being asked to do a tough, high-risk surveillance job — of a type they’d tried before with uneven results — and they needed to be brought into the control room. “Need to know” needed to be replaced by full disclosure.
In any event, that was the FBI’s position: an ultimatum. The CIA station chief hung up and called the huge CIA Counter-Terrorist Centre in Langley, Virginia, the nexus of America’s global struggle against terrorism. She was, after all, following their orders. A CTC manager, a fierce spiky-haired woman, answered the phone, and blew up. “This was the breaking-down of established walls between the agency and the bureau,” she ranted. What other departments in the government are told about key intelligence was the decision of the “originator” — the CIA. But FBI wasn’t budging. After heated consultations with other bosses in Langley, the file on the British suspect was sent to FBI’s New York Office.
And directly to Dan Coleman. He and one of Joe Billy’s deputies went through the file. There were several NSA cables of phonecalls and emails.
It was a file that reveals the nature of the NSA’s expansion of power under George W. Bush. The suspect was a British citizen. He was in touch with American citizens. There were also e-mails between American citizens. All of it was in a package, cable after cable, no warrants of any kind.
One of the Americans was Ahmed Omar Abu Ali — a northern Virginia resident, just 21, who was the valedictorian of the Islamic Saudi Academy in Alexandria, Virginia. Ali, who had already travelled abroad to various Arab countries and then returned to Virginia, was of interest to the US He was smart. He was a leader. He was bent on action. Other cables involved Islamic radicals from Brooklyn, including other US citizens, who communicated with Ali.
The name of the British citizen was Mohammad Sidique Khan.
Khan, Ali and others exchanged e-mails discussing Khan’s upcoming trip to the US and plans for various violent activities. They included a desire to “blow up synagogues on the East Coast”. Other records showed that Khan had been to the US at least three times in the past two years, meeting with fellow radicals.
Dan read the cables intently. “This is a very dangerous character,” he told colleagues at FBI. “We and the Brits should be all over this guy. But we have to do it right. Unless we have some co-ordinated effort between us and CIA to handle him — arrest him on some charge that’ll stick, or work close, co-ordinated surveillance on him and all the people he’s in contact with over here when he comes, we just can’t take the risk. Let’s say he goes and blows up a temple in Washington. You going to explain to the President that we knew what he was going to do and we let him into the country anyway?”
What happened next speaks volumes about the War on Terror, and the perils of a war being fought — in America and abroad — by competing bureaucracies. Coleman is a case agent, a guy who has spent countless hours, face to face, with violent Islamic radicals. He knows many varieties of them, knows their habits, inclinations, profiles — and knows one when he sees one. Guys like Coleman, with this level of first-hand experience, usually don’t get to be bosses in a bureaucracy. They don’t suffer fools well. They know right answers because they’ve earned their insights the hard way, hour by hour, day and night. Of course, all that subtly undercuts the authority of any bureaucratic boss, who has to manage to stay in charge — and justify his or her elevated salary, position and power — even though they generally haven’t been on the harrowing front lines or, at least, not lately. The response, by the boss, is to fight battles on behalf of his or her troops against the bosses of other departments and their white-collar armies. Discussing these matters of process, the way large organisations function, causes heads to nod. But in a battle so reliant on who knows what, and what they decide to do inside vast bureaucracies, process matters. Bad process, poor communication, institutional self-protection, isn’t merely fodder for some government report that will never be read. It causes deaths.
Dan Coleman’s assessment was passed, hurriedly, to Joe Billy, who called back the CIA New York station. Billy’s focus was on the interdepartmental conflict. He echoed Dan’s concern but didn’t say much about swiftly launching an ambitious, joint FBI-CIA effort to track the incoming Brit. The discussion was about who’d ultimately be responsible for Khan, and who would take the fall if he did anything. “We’d be wide open on this one,” he told the CIA’s New York chief. If Khan managed to do some damage, “everyone — including Langley — will blame FBI. It ain’t gonna happen.”
They had to make a decision. Khan, according to the sigint, was due to fly to the US the following afternoon. After a few more calls between FBI and CIA — tense exchanges that went all the way to top bosses in Washington — Khan was put on a no-fly list. Essentially, inaction. A default.
The next day he arrived at Heathrow for his flight to the US. At the ticket counter, he was informed that the US had a problem with him. He was on a no-fly list. He wouldn’t be going anywhere. Befuddled, and alerted for the first time that he was known to US authorities, Khan quietly returned to his home in Leeds. He knew, now, that he’d have to keep an especially low profile, not do anything that would arouse suspicion, and not talk on phones or send e-mails that might be traceable. All of this was very valuable information to a young man bent on destruction.
US intelligence and law enforcement officials — and British officials, who were told of Khan’s plans and the default decision to put him on a no-fly list — might have selected from a wide array of options. Arrest Khan upon his arrival at Kennedy airport. Follow Khan intensively, with a multidepartmental effort, involving FBI, CIA and NSA, that would involve — as one CIA official described it — a sophisticated surveillance effort and “brush-bys”.
That meant agents from CIA and FBI in disguise would squeeze on to a subway next to Khan, or into a nearby booth at some diner, a swirl of costumed bodies augmented by round-the-clock electronic surveillance. Wherever he went, he’d be passed hand to hand. He might have then lit up avenues to various American counterparts — jihadists in the US with destructive intent.
Instead, Mohammed Siddique Khan returned to his job as a schoolteacher in Leeds, worked intently with three young Muslim men he recruited and, on July 7, 2005, masterminded a series of terrorist attacks in London subways that killed 52, injured 700, and brought England to its knees.
THE TIMETABLE
Friends in Leeds recall Mohammad Sidique Khan as a teenager returning from a family holiday from the US wearing a cowboy hat and handcarved leather boots and saying he wanted to live in America as he loved the lifestyle there
Intelligence agents concede they have at best a “patchy” record of his travels abroad and suspect he may have made more trips to Pakistan than they have discovered
In 2001, Khan married Hasina Patel. In January and February 2002, he went to Saudi Arabia on a Haj pilgrimage, and again at the beginning of 2003, when he took his wife. The couple are said to have visited Jordan and Jerusalem on a brief sightseeing trip. The Official Account of the London bombings said “There is no evidence of anything suspicious on either of these visits”
April 2003: a camping trip in Wales with Shehzad Tanweer and other friends from the Beeston area in Yorkshire
July 2003 visits Pakistan where he reportedly linked up with US based extremists and others at a training camp run by the Kashmiri separatist group, Laksha e Taiba, which has close links with al-Qaeda
November 19, 2004 to February 8, 2005 Khan and Tanweer fly to Karachi airport on a Turkish Airlines flight, TK 1056. During their trip they visited Lahore and Faisalabad
June 4 2005 The pair are joined by other friends on a white water rafting trip in Bala, North Wales
Feb 19, 2003, Israeli sources claim that Khan visited the country for one night and left the following day. The Israeli authorities play down reports he helped plan a suicide attack in April 2004 on a bar in Tel Aviv by two British extremists. UK intelligence agencies deny reports Khan travelled to the Far East to meet al-Qaeda sympathisers there ahead of the Bali bombing.
THE ERRORS
Three of the four suicide bombers who killed 52 people in London last July were known in some form to MI5 but the security service had failed to follow up the leads. Mohammad Sidique Khan had come to the attention of MI5 on five occasions in the previous two years but had never been pursued as a serious suspect.
Khan and Shehzad Tanweer had come to the attention of MI5 on several occasions in connection with other inquiries. They were not followed up because they were seen as peripheral figures Jermaine Lindsay’s phone number was also found on MI5 files after July 7, but it was only possible to identify it as his after the attacks in London.
Lack of co-operation with foreign intelligence services and inadequate intelligence coverage in countries such as Pakistan where terrorists were being trained.
There was also a lack of communication between police, Special Branch units and MI5 and other agencies
RON SUSKIND
Born: New York 1959
Started as journalist in 1983
Worked on The Wall Street Journal from 1993 to 2000
Regular contributor to Esquire and New York Times magazine
The author of A Hope in the Unseen, An American Odyssey from the Inner City to the Ivy League.
The book was launched by a series in The Wall Street Journal that won him the 1995 Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing
January 2004 wrote The Price of Loyalty studying the files of former Treasury secretary Paul H. O’Neill
He is a distinguished visiting scholar at Dartmouth College
© Ron Suskind 2006. Extracted from The One Percent Doctrine, to be published by Simon & Schuster on June 20 at £18.99. Copies can be ordered for £16.99 with free delivery from The Times BooksFirst on 0870 160 8080
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