From Breakdown: How America's Intelligence Failures Led to September 11

by Bill Gertz
August 25, 2002
[excerpt, pages 55 through 58]

 

What did matter to Baer was how a vindictive CIA bureaucracy ignored his post employment intelligence on al Qaeda terrorists. The story begins on a cold night in December 1997, somewhere near the Syrian-Lebanese border. Baer was meeting with a former chief of police of Qatar who had been exiled for antigovernment activities. The Qatari told him that his government had uncovered a cell of al Qaeda operatives working in the Persian Gulf sheikhdom and that two of the terrorists, Shawaqi Islambuli and Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, were identified as experts in airplane hijackings. They were also linked to al Qaeda terrorist Ramzi Yousef, who was wanted by the FBI in connection with an airline bombing. The FBI contacted the Qatari government, which agreed to turn the terrorists over to the FBI, who duly sent a team. When the FBI agents arrived in Doha, the capital, the Qatari authorities sent them to a hotel and told them to wait, because, Baer told me, the Qataris wanted to "put the handcuffs on. The Qataris say 'We'll go get the guy.' They come back twenty-four hours later and say, 'Geesh, the house is empty.' They went in the house. It had obviously been ransacked, cleared of the documents." The Qatari related the story to Baer in the desert that night. It exposed how the Doha government was working against U.S. efforts to get Islamic terrorists.

According to the Qatari exile, the Doha government minister in charge of religious affairs had arranged for the two terrorists to flee the country. The men were provided with passports and travel expenses and sent to Prague, in the Czech Republic. The ringleader, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, then set up shop using the name Mustaf Nasir. In effect, a member of the Qatari government protected two Islamic terrorists and then exported key members of an al Qaeda cell to Europe, where they could continue to carry out operations in secret.

Baer, who had left the CIA at the time of the meeting, recognized an important piece of intelligence that could be useful in stopping the al Qaeda network. "I'm not in the business but this is interesting because here's a local country in the Gulf, one of our allies, covering up bin Laden terrorism in '95, '96," Baer said. The CIA veteran did the right thing. He sent an E-Mail to a friend at the CIA who forwarded it to the Counterterrorist Center. "Of course nobody called me back. Nobody sent me an E-mail. There was just no interest. So I'm out of the business, and I shut my mouth. I don't know what's going on."

Baer had no explanation for why the CIA failed to act on the intelligence of Qatari support for Islamic terrorists. But he figured out what happened. "I'm in Beirut; I'm the only one meeting people like this," he says. "I don't work for the CIA anymore. I send it to my friend; they send it to the CTC, but the mentality is that, 'Well, Bob Baer is out and he left in a huff; even though he got an intelligence medal, we're not going to listen to him."

The source of the intelligence did not fare well. Apparently he got burned, as they say in the spy business. The man disappeared and was presumed kidnapped by the Qataris. Did the CIA turn on the source to protect its relationship with the Qatari government? The answer is probably yes.

The politics of Qatar and Washington are complex and the intelligence linking the government to bin Laden was ignored because of U.S. military concerns. The Pentagon operates a secret airbase known as A1 Adid that could be used for future military operations against Iraq. The A1 Adid airbase in Qatar is one of the largest secret airbases in the Gulf region. It has storage facilities for one hundred warplanes and a fifteen-thousand-foot runway that is capable of handling the largest U.S. bombers, like the B-52 and the B-1. The airbase was built at a cost of $1.5 billion and was begun following an agreement reached with the Qatari government after an April 2000 visit by then defense secretary William Cohen. Qatar also is used to house U.S. military "pre-positioned" equipment, enough for a heavy brigade of several thousand troops.

Baer continued to gather extremely valuable intelligence that was ignored. In the summer of 2001, Baer and another former CIA officer obtained a gold mine of intelligence from Qatar: a list of some six hundred people who were known Islamic extremists linked to bin Laden and operating inside Saudi Arabia and Yemen. The new intelligence also revealed that Yemen was covering up information on the October 2000 bombing of the USS Cole in Aden harbor. According to the intelligence information, a Saudi merchant family had funded the Cole bombing, and al Qaeda was planning" a spectacular operation," Baer said.

Baer then met with a Saudi official in Switzerland and gave the list of names, contained on a computer printout, to the official. The Saudi official never got back to Baer. The list contained the names of ten al Qaeda members living in Qatar who, after September 11, would be placed on the FBI's list of most wanted terrorists.

Baer also provided the list to a senior CIA officer, who passed it along to the Counterterrorist Center. In addition, Baer faxed his new information about the Cole bombing and the Yemeni government cover-up to the CIA-to no avail. "The CIA turned off free leads and information only because it did not like the source," Baer said, referring to himself.

 

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