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Spy Agencies Failed to Collate Clues on Terror
The National Security Agency four months ago intercepted conversations among leaders of Al Qaeda in Yemen discussing a plot to use a Nigerian man for a coming terrorist attack, but American spy agencies later failed to combine the intercepts with other information that might have disrupted last week’s attempted airline bombing.
The electronic intercepts were translated and disseminated across classified computer networks, government officials said on Wednesday, but analysts at the National Counter Terrorism Center in Washington did not synthesize the eavesdropping intelligence with information gathered in November when the father of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, now accused of the attempted bombing, visited the United States Embassy in Nigeria to express concerns about his son’s radicalization.
The father, a wealthy Nigerian businessman named Alhaji Umaru Mutallab, had urgently sought help from American and Nigerian security officials when cellphone text messages from his son revealed that he was in Yemen and had become a fervent radical.
A family cousin quoted the father as warning officials from the State Department and the Central Intelligence Agency in Nigeria: “Look at the texts he’s sending. He’s a security threat.”
The cousin said: “They promised to look into it. They didn’t take him seriously.”
The new details help fill in the portrait of an intelligence breakdown in the months before Mr. Abdulmutallab boarded a plane in Amsterdam with the intent of blowing it up before landing in Detroit.
In some ways, the portrait bears a striking resemblance to the failures before the Sept. 11 attacks, despite the billions of dollars spent over the last eight years to improve the intelligence flow and secret communications across the United States’ national security apparatus.
One day after President Obama delivered a blistering indictment of “human and systemic failures” leading up to the foiled attack, the battle to assign blame for these failures escalated on Wednesday.
Some government officials blamed the National Counterterrorism Center, created in 2004 to foster intelligence sharing and to serve as a clearinghouse for terrorism threats, as failing to piece together information about an impending attack.
Others defended the center, saying that analysts there did not have enough information at their disposal to prompt a broad investigation into Mr. Abdulmutallab. They pointed the finger at the C.I.A., which in November compiled biographical data about Mr. Abdulmutallab — including his plans to study Islamic law in Yemen — but did not broadly share the information with other security agencies.
The environment in Washington was further charged by a barrage of partisan attacks revolving around whether Mr. Obama bears ultimate responsibility for the security lapse, including a statement by former Vice President Dick Cheney that Mr. Obama “pretends” that the United States is not at war against terrorists.
A White House official fired back, blaming the Bush administration as having allowed Al Qaeda to thrive while it focused on the Iraq war.
A White House review into the episode is finding that agencies were looking at information without adequately checking other available databases — not because they were reluctant to share, as was the case before Sept. 11, but out of oversight or human error, said a senior administration official familiar with the review.
In interviews Wednesday, government officials and others provided an account of how various agencies had gleaned bits and pieces of information about the young Nigerian, but failed to pull them together to disrupt his plot. Most of the officials spoke only on the condition that they not be quoted by name.
The first sign of a threat came in August, when the National Security Agency, responsible for electronic eavesdropping around the world, intercepted the Qaeda conversations about the mysterious, unidentified Nigerian. That same month, Mr. Abdulmutallab arrived in Yemen and apparently soon began preparing for the Christmas Day attack.
Three months later, in November, Mr. Abdulmutallab’s father, a former senior Nigerian government official and a prominent banker, became panicked about his son’s turn to radicalism, according to an interview with a family cousin. The father beseeched Nigerian and American officials to intervene before his son did harm, said the cousin, who declined to be identified by name, citing the family’s desire for privacy.
The cousin, who attended a gathering of the family on Sunday, said that what alarmed Mr. Mutallab were the text messages his son had sent from Yemen. He said the son told the father that “he had found a new religion, the real Islam.” The son also texted that his family “should just forget about him; he’s never coming back,” the cousin recounted.
Mr. Mutallab consulted with the onetime national security adviser to a former Nigerian president. He also approached Nigeria’s National Intelligence Agency. Then he went to the American Embassy in Abuja, the cousin said. There, he said, American officials essentially ignored him.
American officials contend that they took the father’s account seriously, but that he never signaled that his son might carry out a terrorist attack. Still, on Nov. 20, based on the father’s meeting, embassy officials wrote a cable called a Visas Viper — government jargon for a warning about terrorism — and sent it to the counterterrorism center.
The cable referred to the father’s statement that his son had fallen under “the influence of religious extremists based in Yemen,” an American official said.
The Americans could have revoked Mr. Abdulmutallab’s visa, but they chose not to. Some 1,700 visas have been revoked since the Sept. 11 attacks on grounds of suspected terrorist connections, State Department officials said, but that step is almost always taken only after a review by counterterrorism officials in Washington.
Based on the father’s account, C.I.A. officials in Nigeria also prepared a separate report compiling biographical information about Mr. Abdulmutallab, including his educational background and the fact that he was considering pursuing academic studies in Islamic law in Yemen.
That cable was sent to C.I.A. headquarters in Langley, Va., but not disseminated to other intelligence agencies, government officials said on Wednesday.
Some officials criticized the C.I.A. for withholding some of the information about Mr. Abdulmutallab, saying it might have prompted a broader investigation into him and possibly would have led to putting him on a watch list.
One intelligence official said that the C.I.A. should probably have shared the cable, but he said there was nothing that the C.I.A. knew at the time that suggested Mr. Abdulmutallab was planning to carry out a terrorist attack.
“You had a young man who was becoming increasingly pious and was turning his back on his family’s wealthy lifestyle,” the intelligence official said. “That alone makes him neither St. Francis nor a deadeyed killer.
“Every piece of data, of course, looks different when you know the answer, as everyone does now.”
At the counterterrorism center, analysts looked at the cable from the embassy in Nigeria and deliberated over just how severe a threat Mr. Abdulmutallab presented. Sometime during that period, other information began flowing in that terrorist groups might be planning an attack around Christmas. But the intelligence analysts did not connect this to the story of Mr. Abdulmutallab.
There were conflicting reports Wednesday about whether counterterrorism center analysts had at their disposal all of the details of the National Security Agency communications intercepts in August.
What is clear, however, is that the center’s officials concluded that the information they had about Mr. Abdulmutallab was not worrisome enough to do anything more than add his name to the biggest — and least scrutinized — of four intelligence databases. This list includes 550,000 names, and essentially serves as holding area for cases that need more research.
The government chose not to add Mr. Abdulmutallab’s name to a much smaller, more refined watch list that would have required that he be pulled over and patted down before boarding a plane, or blocked entirely from flying to the United States.
On Christmas Eve, Mr. Abdulmutallab flew from Lagos, Nigeria, to Amsterdam.
Had all the clues been assembled, he would by then have been on the no-fly list, which would have barred him from taking his next flight, to the United States.
Even if he had not been placed on that list, American authorities had one final chance to intercede. Before a plane can take off for the United States, details on every passenger are forwarded electronically to the Department of Homeland Security. There is also an electronic summary of each passenger’s airline reservation — which in Mr. Abdulmutallab’s case would most likely have included the fact that his ticket had been bought with cash and that he had not checked any bags.
The Homeland Security Department, with this information, can request that a passenger like Mr. Abdulmutallab get extra scrutiny by airport officials before the plane takes off. But no action was taken, as department officials said they had no reason to believe he presented a threat.
So Mr. Abdulmutallab, after passing through a metal detector that missed his hidden bomb materials, walked onto the Northwest flight, bound for Detroit.
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Sources: NY Times, MSNBC, Newsweek, Google Maps
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