The CIA has long insisted it shared intelligence about al-Mihdhar and al-Hazmi with the FBI, but records gathered by the 9/11 Commission contradict this assertion. Those tape recordings are the key, that's what has to be released." "It's when I finally broke down and told them what had happened, what I had done, and why. I was sitting right next to Candace Will, associate director of the FBI" in charge of the OPR, Rossini recalled by telephone early this month. Pedestrians react to the World Trade Center collapse on Sept. Finally, when his own agency-the FBI's Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR)-came to him in late 2004, after the congressional probe and 9/11 Commission had issued their reports, he opened up. "I was still in shock," he added, and still fearful of violating Alec Station's demand for omerta. "Based on that interview, I guess the 9/11 Commission thought I didn't have anything worthy to say." He kept his secret, he said, from the Justice Department's inspector general as well. They said weren't authorized to know what was going on operationally.… When we were interviewed, the CIA had a person in the room, monitoring us."Īs a result, Rossini wasn't interviewed by the subsequent 9/11 Commission, either. It was just understood in the office that they were not to be trusted, that were trying to pin this on someone, that they were trying to put someone in jail. "We were told not to say anything to them," Rossini said. When congressional investigators came sniffing around, they kept their mouths shut. None of the post-9/11 investigating bodies were able to get to the bottom of it, in part because Rossini and Miller, who continued to work at Alec Station after the attacks, didn't tell anyone what happened there. "He looked at me like I was speaking a foreign language.… We were both stunned and could not understand why the FBI was not going to be told about this." Rossini recalled going to Miller's cubicle right after his conversation with Casey. When and if we want the FBI to know about it, we will.'" The next al-Qaeda attack is going to happen in Southeast Asia and their visas for America are just a diversion. But he wrote, "When I confronted this person.she told me that 'this was not a matter for the FBI. FBIīecause Casey remains undercover at the CIA, Rossini does not name her in his unfinished manuscript. Nawaf Al-Hamzi was one of the five hijackers of American Airlines Flight 77 that crashed into the Pentagon on Sept. Or why the CIA's Alec Station bosses failed to alert the FBI-or any other law enforcement agency-about the arrival of Nawaf al-Hazmi, another key Al-Qaeda operative (and future hijacker) the agency had been tracking to and from a terrorist summit in Malaysia. But blaming "the system" sidesteps the issue of why one CIA officer in particular, Michael Anne Casey, ordered Rossini's cohort, Miller, not to alert the FBI about al-Mihdhar. Out of those reviews came the creation of a new directorate of national intelligence, which stripped the CIA of its coordinating authority. The various commissions and internal agency reviews that examined the "intelligence failure" of 9/11 blamed institutional habits and personal rivalries among CIA, FBI and National Security Agency (NSA) officials for preventing them from sharing information. "I feel like I failed, even though I know it was the system and the intelligence community on the whole that failed." "This is the pain that never escapes me, that haunts me each and every day of my life," he wrote in the draft of a book he shared with me. If he had disobeyed the gag order, the nearly 3,000 Americans slaughtered on 9/11 would probably still be alive. FBIĪll these years later, Rossini still regrets complying with that command. Khalid Almihdhar was one of the hijackers of American Airlines Flight 77 that crashed into the Pentagon on Sept. The station's rules prohibited them from talking to anyone outside their top-secret group. Incredulous, Miller and Rossini had to back down. When Miller drafted a report for FBI headquarters, a CIA manager in the top-secret unit told him to hold off. That the CIA did block him and Doug Miller, a fellow FBI agent assigned to the "Alec Station," the cover name for CIA's Osama bin Laden unit, from notifying bureau headquarters about the terrorists has been told before, most notably in a 2009 Nova documentary on PBS, " The Spy Factory." Rossini and Miller related how they learned earlier from the CIA that one of the terrorists (and future hijacker), Khalid al-Mihdhar, had multi-entry visas on a Saudi passport to enter the United States. He's been at the center of one of the enduring mysteries of 9/11: Why the CIA refused to share information with the FBI (or any other agency) about the arrival of at least two well-known Al-Qaeda operatives in the United States in 2000, even though the spy agency had been tracking them closely for years.
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