Omens of Terror

WASHINGTON â€”  To explain the worst intelligence disaster since Pearl Harbor, a refrain voiced by officials here is that no one could possibly have foreseen terrorists hijacking a commercial airplane and flying it into a building.

The only difficulty with this explanation is that it isn’t true.

In at least three separate incidents or plots in the past seven years, there were clear threats to use airplanes as flying bombs to target buildings and people. These were known to U.S. intelligence before the Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

In one of these plots, in 1995, a terrorist based in the Philippines, who was a trained pilot, threatened to fly an airplane loaded with chemical weapons into CIA headquarters in Langley, Va. Presumably, this got the attention of someone at the CIA, since the folks who work there, like anyone else, do not want to be blown up.

A year earlier, four gunmen of the Armed Islamic Group, or GIA, in Algeria hijacked a Paris-bound airliner and, as it later developed, planned to crash the plane--after taking on far more jet fuel than necessary--into the Eiffel Tower or blow it up over Paris.

The third incident was much more recent. Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak has said publicly that, on June 13, Egypt learned of a plan by Osama bin Laden, the chief suspect in the Sept. 11 attacks on the U.S., to assassinate President Bush “and other G-8 heads of state during their summit in Italy� in July. A leading French newspaper, Le Figaro, reported that Egyptian intelligence had warned the U.S. that the plan to kill the world leaders in Genoa included “an airplane stuffed with explosives.�

There were other missed signposts, of course. The FBI knew that Middle Eastern visitors were taking flying lessons at U.S. schools, and that one, Habib Zacarias Moussaoui, a French Moroccan, had told his instructors in Minnesota that he was only interested in learning how to steer a passenger jet “horizontally,� not how to take off or land. That triggered an alarm; Moussaoui was investigated by the FBI and has been held on immigration-violation charges since Aug. 17. He was in custody on Sept. 11.

The plot in the Philippines had direct links to the first attack on the World Trade Center in 1993. Aside from the threat to crash a plane into CIA headquarters, the plotters in the Philippines planned to blow up 11 U.S. airliners returning from the Far East within a 48-hour period and kill Pope John Paul II. Such a plot might have seemed too fantastic before Sept. 11; it no longer does.

In 1995, police in the Philippines were worried about threats to the pope from the Abu Sayyaf Islamic organization, regarded as a Bin Laden spinoff. On Jan. 6, a week before the pope’s visit, police responded to a fire in an apartment in Manila. They realized they had stumbled into a bomb factory. The fire had begun when Abdul Hakim Murad, a 26-year-old Pakistani, made the mistake of mixing water with the explosive chemicals in his sink.

He bolted when police arrived but was caught. Murad held a commercial pilot’s license and had tried, unsuccessfully, to get work as an airline pilot in the Middle East. Turned over to Philippine national police and security agents, who brutally interrogated him, he told of the airliner plot, in which his confederates would board planes, plant bombs and then get off after the first leg of the trip. He also said he had planned to crash a plane into CIA headquarters.

Murad’s roommate, Ramzi Ahmed Yousef, and Wali Khan Amin Shah were captured later and eventually convicted of planning to blow up the jetliners. The U.S. prosecutor, Dietrich Snell, said in his closing argument that the plot to plant bombs on a dozen jumbo jets was “one of the most hideous crimes anyone has ever conceived.� Murad’s assertion that he planned to crash a plane into CIA headquarters is in his videotaped statement that is part of the trial record.

In the meantime, Yousef had been indicted as the mastermind of the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center that killed six persons and injured more than 1,000. It was Yousef and a confederate who lit the fuse of the bomb and then drove from the basement garage. Sentenced in 1998 to life plus 240 years for both the jetliner conspiracy and the attack on the trade center, Yousef proclaimed in federal court: “I am a terrorist and I am proud of it.�

In the 1994 hijacking of the Air France jet in Algiers, four men seized control of Flight 8969, a huge Airbus A-300, as it prepared to depart for Paris on Christmas Eve. After killing three passengers, the hijackers forced the plane to land at Marseilles, where it took on 27 tons of fuel, instead of the 10 tons normally needed for the flight to Paris. French commandos stormed the plane on the tarmac and killed all four hijackers, saving the lives of the remaining passengers and crew. French authorities said the aircraft would have been “a flying bomb� had it crashed into the Eiffel Tower or exploded over Paris. In addition to the heavy load of fuel, French authorities discovered 20 sticks of dynamite aboard the plane.

Despite these three documented cases, the administrator of the Federal Aviation Administration, Jane F. Garvey, in testimony before a congressional subcommittee on Sept. 20, said, in alluding to the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, “This was a whole new world for us.� Many other officials have made the same assertion, saying in one form or another that they could never in their wildest imagination have anticipated that airliners would be used as weapons by terrorists.

But a 1993 secret Pentagon panel, reported in the Washington Post last week, considered such a possibility. One of the panel’s leaders, Marvin J. Cetron, recalled telling the participants: “Coming down the Potomac, you could make a left turn at the Washington Monument and take out the White House, or you could make a right turn and take out the Pentagon.�

A draft of the report predicted, accurately: “In the future, horrified civilians will get to watch every step in a terrorist plot. CNN and other networks will certainly air the footage.�

Inside the CIA, there is dismay that the agency was unable to foresee the disaster of Sept. 11. Said one former CIA officer: “The attacks were a terrible embarrassment to me because it is ingrained in us from the start that the whole reason for our existence is to prevent another Pearl Harbor. We are told that over and over.�

On the day the terrorists struck, the dilemma was immediately clear for the Central Intelligence Agency, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the National Security Agency and the other expensive intelligence components of the government, which together spend about $30 billion a year. Was it better to concede that they were caught flat-footed and, therefore, appear ignorant, or better to admit there were clues and warning signs that were not fully analyzed and understood, in which case they would appear incompetent. For the intelligence agencies, it was a dismal choice, with no happy answer.

But to say no one could have anticipated what occurred is simply not credible in the light of the intelligence that was known about the threats to CIA headquarters, the Eiffel Tower and, only three months ago, to the president of the United States.