Larry Beinhart: Bad Intelligence: America's History of Bungled Spying

[babylonsister]

Bad Intelligence: America's History of Bungled Spying

By Larry Beinhart, AlterNet. Posted November 19, 2007.

Fog Facts special: The spectacular intelligence failures of Bush's Iraq invasion and 9/11 are only the most recent installments in the United States' appalling history of spycraft.


On April 1, 2001, Oklahoma State Trooper C. L. Parkins stopped Nawaf Alhazmi, for speeding.

Alhazmi had a California license. Parkins ran it, as cops always do on a traffic stop. Nothing came back. He wrote Alhazmi two tickets totaling $138 and let him continue on his way.

What makes this event striking is that Alhazmi had been identified by the NSA in 1999 as associated with Al Qaeda. He had also been put on a Saudi terror watch list that year. In January 2000, he was photographed and videotaped at an Al Qaeda meeting in Malaysia. A week later, on Jan, 15, he entered the United States. The CIA knew that he had a valid U.S. visa, and though they missed his arrival, they suspected he was here.

Both the NSA and the CIA knew Alhazmi was a terrorist.

But they failed to put him on U.S. terrorist watch lists. Nor did they alert the FBI, Customs and Immigration, and the host of other American police and enforcement agencies. So when Alhazmi flew to Yemen, because he was homesick, and then back to the United States, in June of 2000, no one stopped him. When he moved into the house of an FBI informant in Los Angeles, no one paid particular attention to him.

In May of 2001, he was attacked. He reported it to the police. Once again, his name didn't connect to anything else. On June 30, 2001, he was involved in a minor traffic accident on the George Washington Bridge.

On Aug. 23, 2001, the Mossad, Israel's intelligence service, gave the names of 19 men who they suspected would be involved in a terrorist attack to the CIA. Alhazmi's name was among them.

Two and a half weeks later -- five months after the traffic stop in Oklahoma -- on Sept. 11, 2001, Alhazmi got on AA No. 77, the one that was flown into the Pentagon.

The failure to detect and to stop the 9/11 attacks are considered the CIA's greatest failure. Certainly their most visible and spectacular.

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