| Israeli
security issued urgent warning to CIA
of large-scale terror attacks
By David Wastell in Washington and Philip
Jacobson in Jerusalem
(Filed: 16/09/2001)
ISRAELI intelligence officials say that they
warned
their counterparts in the United States last month
that large-scale terrorist attacks on highly visible
targets on the American mainland were imminent.
The attacks on the World Trade Centre's twin
towers and the Pentagon were humiliating blows to
the intelligence services, which failed to foresee
them, and to the defence forces of the most
powerful nation in the world, which failed to deflect
them.
The Telegraph has learnt that two senior experts
with Mossad, the Israeli military intelligence
service,
were sent to Washington in August to alert the CIA
and FBI to the existence of a cell of as many of 200
terrorists said to be preparing a big operation.
"They had no specific information about what was
being planned but linked the plot to Osama
bin
Laden and told the Americans that there were
strong grounds for suspecting Iraqi involvement,"
said a senior Israeli security official.
The CIA has said that it had no hard information that
would have led to the prevention of the hijacking,
but the FBI said it believed that cells
operating
within America and totalling at least 50 terrorists
were behind last week's devastating hijacks; the
names of new suspects are being added to the list
daily.
America's intelligence agencies are being widely
blamed for their failure to predict the attacks, or
anything like them, and for not discovering any of
the terrorist cells before the hijackings on Tuesday.
Some of those who took part had lived in the US for
months, or even years.
Evidence that a clear Israeli warning was
delivered
to American authorities, but ignored, would be a
further blow to the reputation of the CIA, which is
under fire for its failure last week.
An administration official in Washington said: "If this
is true then the refusal to take it seriously will mean
heads will roll. It is quite credible that the CIA might
not heed a Mossad warning: it has a history of
being
overcautious about Israeli information."
For years, staff at the Pentagon joked that they
worked at "Ground Zero", the spot at which an
incoming nuclear missile aimed at America's defences
would explode. There is even a snack bar of that
name in the central courtyard of the five-sided
building, America's most obvious military bullseye.
This weekend, five days after that target was struck
with devastating effect by a hijacked plane, the
joking has stopped.
It is far from certain that any military commander
would have had the courage to recommend shooting
down a passenger airliner, even in the
unprecedented circumstances of last Tuesday.
For three of the four airliners hijacked last week,
however, the question did not even arise. Two
pairs
of combat fighters were scrambled into action but
did not get near enough to shoot any of them down. (Deborah's
Note: I hope that it wasn't an imposition for our government to
spare four fighters to protect our homeland.)
Norad, the command
headquarters in Colorado
responsible for defending all of North America
from
air attack, was notified of the
first hijack at 8.38am
and six minutes later two F-15 fighter jets were
ordered into the air from Otis airforce base on Cape
Cod.
Before they could take off, however, the first
hijacked airliner crashed into the World Trade
Centre's north tower at 8.46am. Six minutes later
the two military jets were airborne, but when the
second hijacked airliner hit the south tower shortly
after 9am they were still 70 miles from Manhattan.
The only
successful action against the hijackers was
taken by passengers of the fourth airliner,
whose
heroic decision to fight back led to its crashing into
the fields of Pennsylvania.
The reason lies in the strict distinction America
draws between civil and military power, combined
with the fact that until last week nobody had
confronted the possibility that a terrorist hijacker
might turn kamikaze pilot.
Although Norad has its own radar system to track
aircraft over the US, its prime task is to watch for
hostile aircraft approaching America from outside.
"We assume anything originating in US airspace is
friendly," said a spokesman.
For the same reason, the 20
or so American fighter
planes on permanent full alert
in case of a suspect
intruder, were deployed at half a dozen bases in the
likeliest flightpaths of an attack from the former
Soviet Union, several hundred miles from New York
or Washington DC.
All aircraft flying over American airspace are
monitored and controlled by a network of 20
regional Federal Aviation Authority air traffic control
centres, backed up by individual airport control
towers. Military aircraft under Norad control can
intervene with domestic traffic only if called on for
help by their civilian colleagues.
That is what happened on Tuesday, but in no case
was there apparently enough time after the FAA's
warning for fighter planes to reach the hijacked
airliners.
More puzzling, there were 45 minutes
between air
traffic controllers losing contact with the third
airliner, which took off from Dulles airport just
outside Washington, and its crash on to the
Pentagon.
At that point, however, the aircraft was still flying on
its intended course westwards. It may not have
been until later, possibly after a passenger's mobile
phone call to the Justice Department, that the civil
authorities finally twigged what was happening.
It was not the military
but civilian air
traffic
controllers at Washington's Reagan National Airport
- tipped off by their colleagues at Dulles - who
alerted the White House to the fact that an
unauthorised jet was flying at full throttle towards it.
As shaken White House staff began a frantic
evacuation, the aircraft banked, performed a 270
degree turn and sailed past lines of aghast drivers
on expressways to crash explosively into the west
side of the Pentagon.
If the airliner had approached much nearer to the
White House it might have been shot down by the
Secret Service, who are believed to have a battery
of ground-to-air Stinger missiles ready to defend the
president's home.
The Pentagon is not similarly defended. "We are an
open society," said a military official. "We don't have
soldiers positioned on the White House lawn and we
don't have the Pentagon ringed with bunkers and
tanks."
It emerged last night that two F-16 fighters took off
from Langley airforce base in Virginia just two
minutes before the American Airlines Boeing 767
crashed into the Pentagon, again too late to have a
chance of intercepting.
Only the fourth hijacked airliner, which was less than
30 minutes from Washington when it crashed, might
have been successfully intercepted: air traffic
controllers at a regional centre in Nashua, New
Hampshire, told a Boston newspaper that at least
one F-16 fighter was in hot pursuit, and defence
officials confirmed that the fighters already launched
from Langley were on their way to intercept the
flight when passengers apparently took matters
into
their own hands. (What a brave bunch
of Americans. I am so proud of them.)
Deep inside the Pentagon, in the hardened bunkers
of the National Military Joint Intelligence Centre,
senior officials were said to be "stunned" by the
terrorists' achievement.
Within minutes of the attack American forces around
the world were put on one of their highest states of
alert - Defcon 3, just two notches short of all-out
war - and F-16s from Andrews Air Force Base were
in the air over Washington DC.
A flotilla of warships was deployed along the east
coast from bases in Virginia and Florida, with two
aircraft-carriers to help protect the airspace around
New York and Washington DC. Off the west coast, a
further 10 ships put to sea to take up station close
to the shore.
Extra Awacs aerial reconnaissance aircraft were sent
aloft to ensure that nothing other than military
aircraft flew in American airspace - a home-grown
version of the "no-fly zones" enforced for many
years over Iraq. For much of the rest of the week,
the unsettling roar of F-15 and F-16 fighters
patrolling the skies high above America's biggest
cities replaced the usual rumble of commercial
airliners.
On Friday, in a tacit admission that America must in
future be better prepared, Donald Rumsfeld, the
Defence Secretary, announced that fighters were
being put on a 15-minute "strip" alert at 26
bases
nationwide. (Do you mean we have 26 bases
left here in the US after Clinton got through? Surprise!
Surprise!)
There was anger among politicians at what many
saw as the failure of the intelligence services, and
some officials on Capitol Hill began canvassing
support for a move to force George Tenet, the
director of the Central Intelligence Agency,
originally
appointed by Clinton, to step aside.
James Traficant, a Democratic congressman from
Pennsylvania, said that for years Congress had
poured billions of dollars of largely unscrutinised
funding into America's intelligence services, "yet we
learnt of every one of these tragedies from Fox
News and CNN"- two television channels. Senator
Richard Shelby, a Republican member of the Senate
intelligence committee, said it was "a failure of great
dimension".
There are moves to address one severe shortcoming
noted by many critics: the CIA's reliance on
technological rather than "human" means to gather
information, and its weakness as a means of finding
out what Osama bin Laden is up to.
During the Clinton administration,
Congress banned
the CIA from recruiting as a paid informer anyone
with a criminal record or who was guilty of human
rights violations. (I wonder
how the all of the people who died on Tuesday would feel about their
human rights being violated, Mr. Congressmen.) James Woolsey,
another former CIA
director, said: "Inside bin Laden's organization there
are only people who want to be human rights
violators. If you don't recruit them then you don't
recruit anyone."
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