N.Y. TIMES
C.I.A. Was Given Data on Hijacker Long Before 9/11
Tue Feb 24 00:17:21 2004
64.140.158.101

C.I.A. Was Given Data on Hijacker Long Before 9/11
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/24/politics/24TERR.html?ei=5062&en=9301b48c937ada12&ex=1078203600&partner=GOOGLE&pagewanted=print&position=

February 24, 2004
C.I.A. Was Given Data on Hijacker Long Before 9/11

By JAMES RISEN and ERIC LICHTBLAU
ASHINGTON, Feb. 23 — American investigators were given the first name
and telephone number of one of the Sept. 11 hijackers two and a half
years before the attacks on New York and Washington, but the United
States appears to have failed to pursue the lead aggressively, American
and German officials say.

The information — the earliest known signal that the United States
received about any of the hijackers — has now become an important
element of an independent commission's investigation into the events of
Sept. 11, 2001, officials said Monday. It is considered particularly
significant because it may have represented a missed opportunity for
American officials to penetrate the Qaeda terror cell in Germany that
was at the heart of the plot. And it came roughly 16 months before the
hijacker showed up at flight schools in the United States.
In March 1999, German intelligence officials gave the Central
Intelligence Agency the first name and telephone number of Marwan
al-Shehhi, and asked the Americans to track him.
The name and phone number in the United Arab Emirates had been obtained
by the Germans by monitoring the telephone of Mohamed Heidar Zammar, an
Islamic extremist in Hamburg who was closely linked to the important
Qaeda plotters who ultimately mastermined the Sept. 11 attacks, German
officials said.

After the Germans passed the information on to the C.I.A., they did not
hear from the Americans about the matter until after Sept. 11, a senior
German intelligence official said. "There was no response" at the time,
the official said. After receiving the tip, the C.I.A. decided that
"Marwan" was probably an associate of Osama bin Laden, but never tracked
him down, American officials say.
The Germans considered the information on Mr. Shehhi particularly
valuable, and the commission is keenly interested in why it apparently
did not lead to greater scrutiny of him.
The information concerning Mr. Shehhi, the man who took over the
controls of United Airlines Flight 175, which flew into the south tower
of the World Trade Center, came months earlier than well-documented tips
about other hijackers, including two who were discovered to have
attended a meeting of extremists in Malaysia in January 2000.

The independent commission investigating the attacks has received
information on the 1999 Shehhi tip, and is actively investigating the
issue, said Philip Zelikow, executive director of the commission.

American intelligence officials and others involved with the matter say
they are uncertain whether Mr. Shehhi's phone was ever monitored.

An American official said: "The Germans did give us the name `Marwan´
and a phone number, but we were unable to come up with anything. It was
an unlisted phone number in the U.A.E., which he was known to use."
The incident is of particular importance because Mr. Shehhi was a
crucial member of the Qaeda cell in Hamburg at the heart of the Sept. 11
plot. Close surveillance of Mr. Shehhi in 1999 might have led
investigators to other plot leaders, including Mohammed Atta, who was
Mr. Shehhi's roommate. A native of the United Arab Emirates, Mr. Shehhi
moved to Germany in 1996 and was almost inseparable from Mr. Atta in
their time there. Both men attended the wedding of a fellow Muslim at a
radical mosque in Hamburg in October 1999 — an event considered an
important gathering for the Sept. 11 hijacking teams just as the
plotting was getting under way. American and European authorities say
that Mr. Shehhi was actively involved in the planning and logistics of
the Sept. 11 plot.

"The Hamburg cell is very important" to the investigation of the Sept.
11 attacks, Mr. Zelikow said. The intelligence on Mr. Shehhi "is an
issue that's obviously of importance to us, and we're investigating it,"
he added.

Asked whether American intelligence officials gave sufficient attention
to the information about Mr. Shehhi, Mr. Zelikow said, "We haven't
reached any conclusions."

The joint Congressional inquiry that investigated the Sept. 11 attacks
was told about the matter by the C.I.A., but only a small part of the
information was declassified and made public in the panel's final report
in December 2002, several officials said. The public report mentioned
only that the C.I.A. had received Mr. Shehhi's first name, but made no
mention that the agency had also obtained his telephone number.

Officials involved with the work of the joint Congressional
investigation made it clear that the publication of a more complete
version of the story was the subject of a declassification dispute with
the C.I.A. A former official involved with the Congressional inquiry
acknowledged that having a telephone number for one of the hijackers was
far more significant than simply having a first name.
Since the Sept. 11 attacks, the C.I.A., F.B.I. and other government
agencies have been heavily criticized for failing to put together
fragmentary pieces of information they received from a wide array of
sources in order to predict or prevent the terrorist plot. The joint
Congressional panel that investigated the attacks concluded that
American authorities "missed opportunities to disrupt the Sept. 11 plot
by denying entry to or detaining would-be hijackers; to at least try to
unravel the plot through surveillance and other investigative work
within the United States; and finally, to generate a heightened state of
alert and thus harden the homeland against attack."
Until now, the most highly scrutinized failure has related to the
C.I.A.'s handling of information about a meeting of extremists in
Malaysia in January 2000 that involved two of the men who would become
hijackers, Khalid al-Midhar and Nawaq Alhazmi. Although the C.I.A.
identified the two men as suspected extremists, the agency did not
request that they be placed on the government's watch lists to keep them
out of the United States until late August 2001. By that time, they were
both already in the country. In addition, while the two men lived in San
Diego, their landlord was an F.B.I. informant, but the bureau did not
learn of their terrorist links from the informant.
But unlike the leads to Mr. Midhar and Mr. Alhazmi in San Diego, the
earlier information about Mr. Shehhi could have taken investigators to
the core of the Qaeda cell at a time when the plot was probably in its
formative stages. According to testimony in Germany in December in a
criminal case related to the Sept. 11 attacks, Mr. Shehhi was one of
only four members of the Hamburg cell who knew about the attacks
beforehand.

Mr. Shehhi and Mr. Atta traveled to Afghanistan in 2000 to train at a
Qaeda camp with several other Sept. 11 plotters. And after returning to
Germany, Mr. Shehhi made an ominous reference to the World Trade Center
to a Hamburg librarian, saying: "There will be thousands of dead. You
will all think of me," German authorities said.
Soon after, Mr. Shehhi, Mr. Atta and another plotter, Ziad al-Jarrah,
began e-mailing several dozen American flight schools from Germany to
inquire about enrollment, and they arrived in the United States later in
2000 to begin flight training.

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company