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Significantly, this information had been provided to the FBI without the restrictive caveats placed on NSA reports and other intelligence information.
As a result, if Mihdhar had been found, he could have been arrested and charged with a criminal violation based on the false statements on his visa application.
However, the FBI did not seem to notice this when deciding whether to use criminal or intelligence resources to locate Mihdhar.
Individual performance This section summarizes the performance of individual FBI employees in the Hazmi and Mihdhar matter.
While none of them committed misconduct, we believe that several FBI employees did not perform their duties as well as they could have and should have.
We address in turn the FBI employees involved in each of the five lost opportunities.
In this section, we do not discuss the performance of individual CIA employees.
However, we believe that a significant cause of the failures in the sharing of information regarding the Hazmi and Mihdhar case is attributable to the actions of the CIA employees.
It is the responsibility of the CIA OIG to assess the accountability of the actions of CIA employees.
Dwight In January 2000, intelligence information was developed about Hazmi, Mihdhar, and [INFORMATION REDACTED] meeting in Malaysia.
Dwight, an FBI detailee to the CTC�s Bin Laden Unit, read the CIA cables about the Malaysia meeting.
The cables indicated that Mihdhar had a U.S. visa and that he listed New York on the visa application as his intended destination.
Dwight recognized the significance of this information to the FBI and drafted a CIR to pass this information to the FBI.
Unfortunately, his draft CIR was never sent.
A notation added to the CIR suggested that it was held at the request of the CIA�s Deputy Chief of the Bin Laden Unit.
Several FBI detailees accessed the CIR, and Dwight inquired about it again five days later, asking the Deputy Chief in an e-mail whether it was going to be sent or whether he needed to �remake� it in some way.
We found no response to his e-mail, and none of the participants, including Dwight and the Deputy Chief, said they remembered this CIR at all.
We believe the primary responsibility for the failure to pass this information rests with the CIA.
The evidence indicates that the CIA did not provide permission for the CIR to be sent.209 However, we also believe that Dwight should have followed up as much as necessary to ensure that the information was sent to the FBI.
Although we found evidence that he inquired once about the disposition of the CIR, we found no additional evidence that he continued to follow up to ensure that the information was sent.
If Dwight was stymied in his attempt to learn about the disposition of the cable, or if the CIA gave no reasonable explanation for why the information was not being sent, he could have brought this issue to the attention of another supervisor in the CTC.
In our view, Dwight took the commendable initiative to draft the CIR to share the information with the FBI, but did not follow through adequately to ensure that it was sent, and the information in the CIR was not provided to the FBI until shortly before the September 11 attacks.
Malcolm Malcolm was a New York FBI agent detailed for several years to the CTC.
He told the OIG that he understood his role at the CTC was, among other things, to be the �eyes and ears� of the New York Field Office.
We do not believe that he performed this role sufficiently.
He acknowledged to the OIG that one of his duties was �to monitor� New York Field Office cases, but he said he read only the cables that he thought were �interesting,� generally based solely on his review of the cable subject line.
In addition, while he said his role was to �facilitate inquiries of mutual interest,� the only example he could provide was his acting as a liaison for FBI offices around the country by following up on tracing requests and reporting on their status.
This was not very onerous or substantive.
We believe that FBI management is primarily responsible for failing to provide the FBI detailees to the CTC, including Malcolm, with clear duties, direction, and supervision.
But we believe Malcolm should have done more and taken more initiative in performing his duties at the CTC.
Stan For several months in 2000, Hazmi and Mihdhar lived as boarders in the house of an FBI informational asset.
The asset briefly mentioned the two boarders to his FBI control agent, who we call �Stan.� Stan did not document this information, seek to learn the boarders� full identities, or conduct any checks on them.
No FBI policy required Stan to seek or document this type of information from the asset, and we found differences among the other FBI agents who we interviewed about whether they would have sought such information from an asset.
While Stan did not violate any specific FBI policy, we believe it would have been a better and more prudent practice for him to have sought at least minimal information from his asset about the boarders living with him.
The asset knew little about the boarders, and the boarders could have compromised information provided by the asset to the FBI.
Moreover, FBI policy required Stan to continually evaluate the asset�s credibility and provide a yearly evaluation report on the asset.
Stan�s yearly report on this asset was minimal, with a bare attestation of the asset�s bona fides.
It contained no indication of what evidence Stan had used to make these attestations.
While we do not suggest that Stan had to conduct extensive reviews of everyone living with the asset, Stan�s actions in following up on this information were not particularly thorough or aggressive.
Max In January 2001, a joint FBI/CIA source identified Khallad [INFORMATION REDACTED].
Because the FBI ALAT who was involved in the handling of the source, Max, was unable to speak any of the joint source�s languages, a CIA employee conducted the debriefings of the source, including the debriefing in which the source identified Khallad.
We concluded that Max was not informed of the source�s identification of Khallad [INFORMATION REDACTED], either at the time of the identification or afterwards.
Although CIA cables covering the debriefing described the identification of Khallad, these were not shared with Max.
Instead, he saw CIA TDs that did not contain the information about the identification.
CIA documents do not indicate that the ALAT was informed of the identification, and no other evidence indicates that the ALAT knew.
We found that the ALAT included detailed descriptions in his reports of other information from the source, which indicates he was not provided the information about the identification of Khallad.
We also found that the New York FBI agents who interviewed the source in February 2001 were not informed of the identification of Khallad.
In sum, we believe the ALAT did not learn about the source�s identification, not that he knew about identification but failed to share this information with others.
We believe that, as the ALAT, Max should have been more familiar with the CIA�s reporting process.
He was not aware that the CIA�s TDs contained only a part of the information obtained during the source debriefings.
Although our review revealed that many FBI employees operated with misunderstandings about the ways the CIA recorded and reported intelligence information, a significant function of the ALAT position is to interact with the CIA.
Had he recognized that he could not rely on TDs for full reporting about the source�s information, he could have asked his CIA counterpart directly for any additional information from the source, and the ALAT may have learned about the identification of Khallad.
In addition, given Max�s concern that he provide FBI Headquarters with all of the information reported by the source, it would have been prudent for him to consult with the CIA case officer and ask sufficient questions to ensure that he had received all of the information.
We found no indication that he did so.
Donna Donna, the FBI analyst who worked on the investigation of the Cole attacks, planned a June 11, 2001, meeting with the Cole investigators and CIA employees to discuss information relating to the Cole investigation.
She deserves credit for organizing this meeting and seeking to share intelligence information with the Cole investigators.
However, we fault her performance in two respects.
First, we found that the meeting was poorly planned, and Donna did not clearly communicate the purpose of the meeting to the participants.
Donna also failed to obtain significant information prior to the meeting that could have been shared with the investigators [INFORMATION REDACTED].
After the meeting, although Donna devoted a significant amount of time to the Cole investigations, she did little specific follow-up to provide answers to the investigators about their logical questions regarding [INFORMATION REDACTED].
We believe she did not do all she could have to acquire that information for the New York agents, even though she had said that she would as a result of their discussion at the June 11 meeting.
As a result, the FBI missed another opportunity to focus on Mihdhar and Hazmi earlier than it did.
When Donna finally learned from Mary on August 22, 2001, that Hazmi and Mihdhar were in the United States, Donna quickly and appropriately took steps to have the FBI open an investigation to locate them.
She personally called the New York Bin Laden intelligence agent and told him about the matter.
This was an unusual step to call the agent directly, and it suggested that the investigation should be given some priority.
However, when she sent the EC to New York, she designated the EC as having a routine precedence.
Donna�s actions indicated some urgency in the need for the investigation yet the subsequent EC did not convey any urgency.
The New York Field Office assigned the case immediately, and the agent began working on the case within two business days of the assignment.
If the EC had conveyed urgency, the FBI New York Field Office might have assigned additional or more experienced agents to locate Mihdhar and Hazmi and initiated the search sooner.
Rob We believe that Rob, as Donna�s supervisor, is also responsible for Donna�s failures.
While the FBI at the time permitted IOSs to make significant decisions, often with little supervisory input, we believe that as a supervisor, he should have ensured that she was handling the June 11 meeting appropriately and, if necessary, become involved with the planning or execution of the meeting.
Although Donna often traveled to New York to work on the Cole investigation, the June 11 meeting involved the CIA and an AUSA, which should have led to more supervisory involvement in the purpose, agenda, and outcome of the meeting.
But Rob had little supervisory involvement with it, either before or after the meeting.
In addition, although Donna drafted the EC requesting the investigation of Mihdhar, the EC was ultimately approved and sent by Rob.
Therefore, we believe he also bears some responsibility for failing to ensure that the appropriate precedence level was used on the EC.
Richard We do not fault Richard for his limited investigation, which was still in the nascent stages by the time of the September 11 attacks.
As we described above, Richard took logical steps to try to locate Mihdhar and Hazmi, such as completing a lookout for Mihdhar with the INS, requesting local criminal history checks, checking with New York hotels about Hazmi and Mihdhar, and conducting commercial database checks on them.
However, there were many more investigative steps that could have been pursued, in New York and elsewhere, had the investigation been assigned greater priority and had the FBI provided more resources to this investigation.
The FBI was not close to locating Hazmi and Mihdhar when they participated in the September 11 attacks.
We believe that the FBI in New York should have assigned the matter more priority than it did.
Mary Mary was assigned by her CIA managers in May 2001 with finding and reviewing the CIA cables relating to the Malaysia meetings and their potential connection to the Cole attack.
Mary did not find the relevant CIA cable traffic until late July and mid-August 2001.
She told the OIG that she did not have time to focus on this assignment until then.
Upon discovering on August 21 that Hazmi and Mihdhar had traveled to the United States, she immediately passed this information to the FBI.
We recognize that the disparate pieces of information about the Malaysia meetings were not easy to connect and that the task of developing patterns from seemingly unrelated information was complex.
Yet we question the amount of time that elapsed between Mary�s assignment and her discovery of the important information.
As we discussed previously, however, Mary�s assignments were directed and controlled by her managers in the CTC.
We, therefore, leave this issue to the CIA OIG for its consideration.
V.
OIG conclusions In sum, we found individual and systemic failings in the FBI�s handling of information regarding the Hazmi and Mihdhar matter.
The FBI had at least five opportunities to learn about their presence in the United States and to seek to find them before September 11, 2001.
Much of the cause for these lost opportunities involved systemic problems.
We found information sharing problems between the CIA and the FBI and systemic problems within the FBI related to counterterrorism investigations.
The systemic problems included inadequate oversight and guidance provided to FBI detailees at the CIA, the FBI employees� lack of understanding of CIA procedures, the inconsistent documentation of intelligence information received informally by the FBI, the lack of priority given to counterterrorism investigations by the FBI before September 11, and the effect of the wall on FBI criminal investigations.
Our review also found that the CIA did not provide information to the FBI about Hazmi and Mihdhar when it should have and we believe the CIA shares significant responsibility for the breakdown in the Hazmi and Mihdhar case.
However, the FBI also failed to fully exploit the information that was made available to them.
In addition, the FBI did not assign sufficient priority to the investigation when it learned in August 2001 that Hazmi and Mihdhar were in the in the United States.
While we do not know what would have happened had the FBI learned sooner or pursued its investigation more aggressively, the FBI lost several important opportunities to find Hazmi and Mihdhar before the September 11 attacks.
Footnotes Hazmi had also traveled to and attended the January 2000 meetings in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.
As noted previously, on October 12, 2000, two terrorist operatives in an explosive-laden boat committed a suicide attack on the U.S.S. Cole naval destroyer during a brief refueling stop at the port in Aden, Yemen.