Ahmed Ressam held valuable clue, but no one asked

By Hal Bernton
Seattle Times staff reporter

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Ressam, an Algerian, was caught by an alert U.S. Customs agent on Dec. 14, 1999, in Port Angeles with explosive materials hidden in his rental car. He intended to blow up Los Angeles International Airport at the time of the millennium.

Ressam's arrest was an early warning of al-Qaida's determination to attack inside the United States and helped to create an interlude of several weeks "in which the government as a whole seemed to be acting in concert to deal with the terrorists," the report said.

After the millennium passed, the cooperation and sharing of intelligence among the CIA, FBI and the White House fell apart, the report noted.

After Ressam's conviction on terrorism-related charges in spring 2001, he emerged as a key government informant. His time in Afghanistan terrorist training camps had given him rare insider knowledge of the militant Islamist network, particularly how it used fake identity documents to enable terrorists to travel the world, the report said.

While at the camps, Ressam had contact with a French national named Zacarias Moussaoui, who would later be charged by the Justice Department as a Sept. 11 conspirator.

By August 2001, Moussaoui was in a Minnesota flight school trying to learn how to pilot a Boeing 747, while receiving money from a German-based al-Qaida operative named Ramzi Binalshibh, the report says.

Moussaoui's actions alarmed Minneapolis FBI agents, who suspected his involvement in a terrorist plot. But frustrated FBI officials in Minnesota could not convince higher-ups in Washington, D.C., that he posed a serious threat.

A Minneapolis FBI supervisor, trying to get the attention of a headquarters official, even speculated on the possible nature of a Moussaoui plot, saying he was "trying to keep someone from taking a plane and crashing into the World Trade Center," the report says.

After an Aug. 23, 2001, briefing about the would-be pilot, then-CIA director George Tenet said he could find no apparent connection between Moussaoui and al-Qaida, the report says.

To their frustration, Minneapolis FBI agents were never allowed to apply for special permission to put Moussaoui under surveillance and search his laptop computer.
 
If the FBI agents had run Moussaoui's name and photo by Ressam, however, they probably would have learned of Moussaoui's terrorist ties and obtained the probable cause to break the "logjam" and launch surveillance, the commission concluded. Then "questions should instantly have arisen about a possible plot ... involving piloting airlines, a possibility that had never been seriously analyzed by the intelligence community," the report says.

A full U.S. investigation, fueled by the new information, could conceivably have uncovered Moussaoui's links to the Germany-based Binalshibh and the "core of the 9/11 plot," the report says.

But the case against Moussaoui would not be built until shortly after the Sept. 11 destruction, which took nearly 3,000 lives. FBI agents visited Ressam, then at a SeaTac federal detention center, and showed him Moussaoui's photograph. Ressam said he knew the man from the al-Qaida terrorism camp in the Khalden area of Afghanistan.

Yesterday's report cited information about Ressam from the Seattle Times 2002 series "The Terrorist Within."

The commission cited the few weeks after Ressam's arrest as a remarkable period, with terrorism information freely shared by the FBI and others, filtering down to local airport managers and local police departments.

"The experience showed that the government was capable of mobilizing itself for an alert against terrorism.

"Everyone knew not only of an abstract threat but of at least one terrorist who had been arrested in the United States. Terrorism had a face — that of Ahmed Ressam — and Americans from Vermont to Southern California went on the watch for his like."

But by August 2001, the report notes, agencies had gone back to hoarding intelligence information and they lost their millennium edge.

Hal Bernton: 206-464-2581