The Hijackers We Let Escape

Kuala Lumpur is an easy choice if you're looking to lie low. Clean and modern, with reliable telephones, banks and Internet service, the Malaysian city is a painless flight from most world capitals--and Muslim visitors don't need visas to enter the Islamic country. That may explain why Al Qaeda chose the sprawling metropolis for a secret planning summit in early January 2000. Tucked away in a posh suburban condominium overlooking a Jack Nicklaus-designed golf course, nearly a dozen of Osama bin Laden's trusted followers, posing as tourists, plotted future terrorist strikes against the United States.

At the time, the men had no idea that they were being closely watched--or that the CIA already knew some of their names. A few days earlier, U.S. intelligence had gotten wind of the Qaeda gathering. Special Branch, Malaysia's security service, agreed to follow and photograph the suspected terrorists. They snapped pictures of the men sightseeing and ducking into cybercafes to check Arabic Web sites.

What happened next, some U.S. counterterrorism officials say, may be the most puzzling, and devastating, intelligence failure in the critical months before September 11. A few days after the Kuala Lumpur meeting, NEWSWEEK has learned, the CIA tracked one of the terrorists, Nawaf Alhazmi, as he flew from the meeting to Los Angeles. Agents discovered that another of the men, Khalid Almihdhar, had already obtained a multiple-entry visa that allowed him to enter and leave the United States as he pleased. (They later learned that he had in fact arrived in the United States on the same flight as Alhazmi.)

Yet astonishingly, the CIA did nothing with this information. Agency officials didn't tell the INS, which could have turned them away at the border, nor did they notify the FBI, which could have covertly tracked them to find out their mission. Instead, during the year and nine months after the CIA identified them as terrorists, Alhazmi and Almihdhar lived openly in the United States, using their real names, obtaining driver's licenses, opening bank accounts and enrolling in flight schools--until the morning of September 11, when they walked aboard American Airlines Flight 77 and crashed it into the Pentagon.

Until now, the many questions about intelligence shortcomings leading up to the attacks have focused on the FBI's clear failure to connect various vague clues that might have put them on the trail of the terrorists. Last week, in the aftermath of Minnesota agent Coleen Rowley's scathing letter ripping the FBI for ignoring warnings from the field, Director Robert Mueller announced a series of reforms aimed at modernizing the bureau.

All along, however, the CIA's Counterterrorism Center--base camp for the agency's war on bin Laden--was sitting on information that could have led federal agents right to the terrorists' doorstep. Almihdhar and Alhazmi, parading across America in plain sight, could not have been easier to find. NEWSWEEK has learned that when Almihdhar's visa expired, the State Department, not knowing any better, simply issued him a new one in June 2001--even though by then the CIA had linked him to one of the suspected bombers of the USS Cole in October 2000. The two terrorists' frequent meetings with the other September 11 perpetrators could have provided federal agents with a road map to the entire cast of 9-11 hijackers. But the FBI didn't know it was supposed to be looking for them until three weeks before the strikes, when CIA Director George Tenet, worried an attack was imminent, ordered agency analysts to review their files. It was only then, on Aug. 23, 2001, that the agency sent out an all-points bulletin, launching law-enforcement agents on a frantic and futile search for the two men. Why didn't the CIA share its information sooner? "We could have done a lot better, that's for sure," one top intelligence official told NEWSWEEK.