Mossad Warned U.S. of Imminent Attack

Report: Israelis Did Not Know Specifics, but Linked Plot to bin Laden

by Janet Hunter
The Ottawa Citizen
September 17, 2001

 

U.S. intelligence had a strong recent warning from a foreign spy service that terrorist attacks on the U.S. were imminent and several "red flag" warnings also went up before the assaults on the World Trade Center and Pentagon last Tuesday.

Two senior experts with Mossad, the Israeli military intelligence service, went 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, The Sunday Telegraph reported.

The newspaper quotes an unidentified senior Israeli security official as saying the agents did not know the plot specifics, but they linked it to Osama bin Laden and suspected Iraqi involvement.

U.S. investigators have said they suspect cells comprised of at least 50 supporters affiliated with terrorist organizations had been operating in the United States. A former Israeli agent told the Glasgow Sunday Mail that such a non-specific warning should at least have increased security in the U.S., although the U.S. has a history of taking a skeptical view of Mossad information.

The agent drew a parallel with the Pan Am Flight 103 bombing over Lockerbie in 1988, which killed 259 people. U.S. intelligence said initially that they had no warnings of the bombing, a statement that turned out to be false. In that case, at least one warning, received by the U.S. Embassy in Helsinki, specifically mentioned that a Pan Am flight from Frankfurt would be targeted, and yet security was not increased.

Earlier this month, the U.S. Embassy in Japan alerted U.S. intelligence that it had received a warning of a major attack on U.S. military targets, the Glasgow newspaper also reported.

The CIA has repeatedly said it had no hard information that would have led to the prevention of the hijackings.

Despite denying they had specific warnings about Tuesday's attacks, the CIA and the FBI are being taken to task by critics who counter that they should have known what was coming. As high-profile critics such as former president George Bush, himself a former CIA director, said the agency relies too heavily on high-tech surveillance, and avoids "unsavoury" informants inside foreign terrorist organizations, at the cost of useful intelligence gathering.

During the administration of former president Bill Clinton, Congress banned the CIA from recruiting as a paid informer anyone with a criminal record or who was guilty of human rights violations.

Though the FBI has reportedly been searching for several weeks for two of the men suspected of crashing an airliner into the Pentagon for questioning in the investigation of the bombing of the USS Cole in Yemen, many of the suicide-hijackers had lived undetected in the U.S. for months or years.

Khalid al-Midhar, who appears in a secret videotape made last year at a meeting with a prime suspect in the Cole bombing in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, and his associate Nawaq Alhamzi are believed to have been aboard the American Airlines Boeing 757 that crashed into the Pentagon.

Officials said this constitutes a clear link between Mr. bin Laden and the hijack bombings at the Pentagon and New York's World Trade Center.

Another bin Laden sympathizer was reported to have been taken into custody last month after entering the U.S. using false documents. He was reported to have been carrying aeronautical charts and manuals on how to fly Boeing 757s.

German and FBI agents have also questioned an Iranian man in prison in Hanover who warned last week that the world order would come under threat from a terror attack.

But prosecutors said the man, awaiting deportation from Germany, did not know about the U.S. attacks in advance and knew no one involved in the planning. The man had been allowed to telephone the White House last week and made a total of 14 calls to U.S. authorities. He reportedly had said the attack would come this week.

In another report yesterday, a man in the Cayman Islands was said to have contacted American authorities in late August saying he overheard three Afghan men in a bar discussing planned attacks on the U.S.

 

© Copyright 2001

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