Observations On Aug. 6 Pdb By Historian Tim Naftali

Reading the PDB: Some Intelligence Questions Tim Naftali April 12, 2004 a) The banality of the document suggests that one of the readers of the PDB had asked a question about UBL's interest in attacking targets within the United States and this item was the best the Current Intelligence people at CIA could generate. Otherwise it is hard to explain why this item appeared in the August 6 PDB. It might as easily appeared June 6 or July 6. There is no reference to a new piece of data that acted as a triggering mechanism. Who asked these questions and why? Policymakers don't usually have time to read historical pieces. Was one of the regular readers of the PDB specifically looking for actionable intelligence? Or was this item intended to provide some warning to the President? If it was, then it makes George C. Marshall's 1941 War Warning Message seem brilliant by comparison. b) The almost offhand reference to Ramzi Yousef is intriguing. Did the President already know about the Yousef case? I assume a senior briefer was at Crawford to handle any Presidential questions. But unless this PDB was carelessly put together, the President must have already received a briefing or two on Yousef, who had been rendered and tried by the Clinton administration for the World Trade Center bombing. Is there evidence of these preliminary briefings? As you know FBI investigators learned that Yousef had wanted his accomplice Abdul Hakim Murad to fly a plane, kamikaze-style, into the CIA HQs. What was the President told about Yousef s and therefore Al Qaeda's methods? Did Tenet know this aspect of the Yousef case? c) FBI vs. sleeper cells. Here a comparison to what the USG did during the first Gulf War might be instructive. In 1990 the CIA and FBI disagreed over whether to treat Palestinian (Abu Nidal) sleeper cells as a law enforcement or intelligence problem. There were reportedly 16 Abu Nidal cells around the country. The Palestinians had allied themselves with Saddam Hussein and it was assumed that they would function as the long arm of the Iraqi intelligence service. In anticipation of trouble from these cells, the NSC led an interagency process that drafted contingency plans in late 1990 to increase protection for certain facilities around the United States. And in late January 1991, after the UN deadline had passed, the FBI started arresting members of the Abu Nidal cells. In light of the reference to "70 full field investigations" in the PDB, it would be interesting to determine whether a similar interagency process had begun to designate US facilities for added protection (they could have dusted off the plans for 1991, which probably included the World Trade Center) and to prepare for rolling up these networks at the first signs of trouble. In the Bush 41 administration David Miller, the Director of the Office of Counterterrorism and Narcotics, was the NSC representative in these discussions and presumably Richard Clarke did the same in the Bush 43 administration. But Mueller and Tenet should have known about this, too.

The banality of the PDB item also suggests that there was not as much FISA surveillance of the Al Qaeda cells in 2001 as there had been of the Abu Nidal cells (see US vs. Zein Isa, 1991) in 1991. Had we actually identified them? Perhaps the correct parallel is to the US intelligence community's efforts against Iraqi "cells" at the time of the first Gulf War. In 1990-1991 there was a debate over whether Iraq had sleeper cells here. Apparently the US intelligence community never resolved that question. Perhaps the 70 full-field FBI investigations mentioned in the PDB never identified any real cells, or at least nothing that could get a warrant under FISA.

d) Hijacking and other threats to aviation The FAA has a long history of issuing warnings. Some of these have been useful - the January 1995 warning that led to the capture of Ramzi Yousef- and others have not - the November and Early December 1988 warnings before Pan Am 103. Pursuant to the August 6 PDB, were there any FAA warnings to the airlines that Al Qaeda was trying to hijack a plane? In late 1988 because of evidence of a plan to blow up a US airliner, the CIA's Counterterrorism Center met with security officers of Pan Am, Delta and TWA to discuss the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command group, the terrorist organization that was assumed to be threatening airplanes. Did the CTC give similar briefings to the airline companies in late August 2001 to explain the threat posed by Al Qaeda? If these briefings were not organized by the intelligence community, why were they not? You may find that the FAA and the airlines did not take the threat of hijacking seriously. Since the imposition of 100% checks of passengers and carry-on luggage in 1973, there had been only 2-3 hijackings in the United States. Did the FAA alert say "hijacking" or "attack on planes"? If the FAA mentioned the possibility of bombings of aircraft the airlines and airport managers might have been quite spun up. In 1976 the US government and the airlines decided that it was more cost-effective to take a chance on on-air explosions than to institute 100% screening of checked luggage. This determination was made by an advisory panel set up after the LaGuardia bombing by President Ford. After this review everyone in the airline business understood, if they hadn't before, that checked luggage was the weak link in their security system. After Pan Am 103 blew up, there seems to have been a better international system for spot screening on threatened flights and airports. This is how officials in Bangkok were able to detect Yousef s plot in February 1995. I hope that you can ask Tenet and Mueller/Freeh about their cooperation with the FAA and the airlines in August 2001. This might help establish the role that the information in the August 6 PDB played in the anti-terrorist security system. e) I have heard some FBI grumbling that one of Mueller's first acts as Director was to attempt to reassign some Counterterrorism people to the white collar crime section. I have not been able to corroborate this.