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.
| Was it just the one? Or was it on a list of about 1200 names and phone numbers? |
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.
| What data accompanied the name? Was there anything to bump it up in priority? |
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 militant in Hamburg who was closely linked to the important Qaeda plotters who ultimately mastermined the Sept. 11 attacks. 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. "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.
| Not a particularly common name, but try tracking down someone by his first name sometime. Not easily done. Try "Bernardo" or "Alcir" or "Heriberto." |
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.
| My guess is the reasons had something to do with the three questions above... |
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 militants 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.
| That's cuz hindsight is really, really good, and there might be a few wounded to shoot... |
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."
| UAE's not a backwater, so there are lots of people with telephones. So the phone number goes on a bingo list for coverage by a great radio Hoover in the sky. Something may or may not come out of an effort to copy it. The alternative is to sneak a gremmy in to put a tap on the phone's landline connection. Today we might well do that. 16 months before 9-11 we probably weren't putting a lot of bugs on private phones in other people's countries. |
"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."
| I'd guess it got the same amount of attention every other lead got. Read up on intel "grass," for instance in the events leading up to Pearl Harbor. Basically, data of potential value gets overlooked because it's buried in junk data. |
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.
| But it would have been even better to have an idea who the hell he was. |
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