The CIA is desperate for a win against Al Qaeda – desperate enough, in fact, to abandon airline security in favor of allowing terrorists to fly in the hopes of following them to a solid lead. They have been doing this at Langley since 9/11. It has not paid off. But as a result, airline passengers are being put at risk every day around the world.
Leon Panetta’s cheerleading for a CIA that is fundamentally failing is not helping his agency or keeping the American public safe. I first reported in “Unsafe At Any Altitude” (with Susan Trento, Steerforth 2006) that the CIA was allowing terrorists it wanted to follow to fly in order to track Al Qaeda members. Congressional oversight of the CIA is so lacking that nothing was done about this activity. The reality is that no politician has the courage to take on the agency. And now, like the military, the CIA wants so badly to paint its covert operatives as patriotic, brave men and women that it provides the names and allows coverage of funerals of people who have traditionally – and with good reason – only been stars on a wall.
The politicization of intelligence that began under Henry Kissinger has gotten to the point where any serious examination brings out the cheap defense Panetta used that our successes are secret and only the failures are known to the public.
Nonsense. The CIA’s unquestioning relationships with corrupt intelligence services in Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Pakistan are at the root of our problems. The CIA has no assets who have penetrated Al Qaeda, and allied Middle Eastern and Persian intelligence services are thoroughly penetrated with Al Qaeda members or sympathizers.
Last November after a prominent banker walked into a meeting with the CIA Chief of Station in Nigeria because he feared his son had been radicalized, the State Department should have pulled Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab’s visa. That didn’t happen because the State Department says his name was spelled incorrectly. The truth is the State Department often must defer visa authority to the CIA. For decades, CIA officers have operated under State cover, often as visa officers. For example, at the US consul in Jeddah in the 1980s, a CIA officer made certain known extremists received visas to the United States for training and recruiting to assist the Saudis in the war in Afghanistan against the Soviet Union.
We know that changing a letter of a name is what CIA case officers do if they want to prevent someone from being put on the no-fly list. According to State Department officials, an initial check on Abdulmutallab failed to disclose a multiple-entry US visa because his name was misspelled.
The question of who provided the misspelled name should be a major issue among intelligence officials. The CIA has a history of providing incorrect spellings to avoid having terrorists they are following or other people of interest from being placed on the no-fly list. Since Abdulmutallab’s father met with a top CIA official at the US Embassy in Nigeria, the question is: Did that CIA officer intentionally misspell the name that ended up in the State Department cable? It would not be the first time.
DCBureau is releasing a page from the spring 2006 no-fly list.
One particularly sensitive name was Khalid al-Mihdhar, a Saudi Arabian intelligence agent who the CIA was so convinced had infiltrated Al Qaeda as a Saudi double agent that it never detected he was really a triple agent working against the West. At the behest of the Saudi embassy in Washington, the CIA allowed him (and his cohort Nawaf al-Hazmi) to come into the United States and live openly in San Diego. The monies they lived on came directly from bank accounts controlled by the Saudi Embassy in Washington. In September 2001, just before 9/11, when the departing Chief of Saudi intelligence indicated to the CIA that there was a problem with the Saudi agents, the CIA did not pass on all the information it had on the two men to the FBI. In fact, the agency and the FBI “lost track” of these two Al Qaeda operatives.
Khalid al-Mihdhar helped fly American Airlines Flight 77 into the Pentagon on 9/11. The CIA misspelled his name – the one that appeared on the no-fly list five years after he was supposedly killed in the attack – as “Khalid al Midham.” His name appeared on the list with fourteen of 9/11 hijackers. But it was not an inadvertent error. The CIA had before 2001 classified software from contractor SAIC that would resolve problems with Arab names in database searches. That CIA software was not shared with other intelligence services contributing to the watch lists.
The night before al-Mihdhar and his cohorts took Flight 77 to its doom, they stayed at the same airport hotel with the leading Saudi funder of Islamic causes around the world. After 9/11 that man, Saleh Ibn Abdul Rahman al-Hussyayen, faked a heart attack during an FBI interview. The Bureau had no second chance to talk to him. The Bush White House allowed him to be evacuated to Saudi Arabia where he was promoted to running the holy sites in Mecca. President Obama needs to learn that it is not about connecting the dots but about correcting ongoing intelligence failure. Because if John Brennan did connect the dots, they would lead right to the royal family in Saudi Arabia.
