-Caveat Lector-
http://www.gordonthomas.ie/120.html
Could U.S. Intelligence Failure to Act on
September 11 Attacks be because
Mossad was the Prime Source of Warnings?
by
Gordon Thomas
The complex and often uneasy relationship between Israel's
Mossad and the U.S. intelligence community is emerging as a prime reason for
the catastrophic failure of the CIA and FBI to act on advance warnings of an
impending attack on America.
Eight days before the September 11 attack, Egypt's senior
intelligence chief, Omar Suleiman, informed the CIA station chief in Cairo
that "credible sources" had told him that Osama bin-Laden's network was "in
the advanced stages of executing a significant operation against an American
target."
Prior to that, the FBI whistleblower Coleen Rowley had revealed,
there was a similar warning from French intelligence.
Both warnings, Globe-Intel has established, originally came from
Mossad.
The Israeli intelligence service chose to pass on its own
intelligence to Washington through its contacts in French and Egyptian
intelligence agencies because it did not believe its previous warnings on an
impending attack by the bin-Laden network had been taken seriously enough in
Washington.
Part of the reason has already emerged by President Bush
acknowledging for the first time there had been a serious breakdown between
the twin pillars of the U.S. intelligence community - the FBI and CIA.
"In terms of whether or not the FBI and the CIA were
communicating properly, I think it is clear that they weren't," he has said.
Behind this admission is the long-standing suspicion that both
the FBI and CIA have about Mossad and its ongoing activities in the United
States.
Ostensibly, Israel denies it has ever spied on its most powerful
ally. But the reality is otherwise. Both the FBI and CIA regard Mossad as
a clear and present danger to U.S. national security. It places the Israeli
spy agency just below the espionage totem pole that has China's Secret
Intelligence Service at its top.
A full ten months before Mossad started to sound its own
warnings against bin-Laden, senior officials in both the FBI and CIA saw
them as "blowing smoke" to divert attention from Mossad's own activities in
the United States.
Evidence of this may well be contained in the more than 350,000
documents that the CIA has already turned over to the hearings of the Senate
and House of Representatives intelligence committees.
These are now underway in sound-proofed rooms before 37 members
of those committees.
Already, in the atmosphere of leak and counter-leak in
Washington, the consensus is emerging on Capitol Hill that the U.S.
intelligence community had enough data to have been able to prevent the
September 11 attacks.
Richard Shelby, the senior Republican on the Senate intelligence
committee has spoken about "a massive intelligence failure."
A hint of the extent of that failure has come from Egypt's
President Hosni Mubarak. He has spoken of "a secret agent who was in close
contact with the bin-Laden organisation."
Globe-Intel has been told that the "agent" was in fact the
senior Mossad source who tipped off Egypt's intelligence chief, Omar
Suleiman, that an attack on America was coming.
During last year, senior Egyptian officials have told
Globe-Intel there were five separate contacts between Suleiman and his
Mossad counterpart, Efraim Halevy.
Understandably, Israeli government sources in Tel Aviv have
denied such contacts.
But an official close to Mubarak have confirmed that they did
take place.
Mubarak's public statements on the matter - the first ranking
statesman to break cover over the building controversy of
who-knew-what-and-when, will at minimum be seen as clear indications that
there were lapses in the interpretations of both the CIA and FBI.
Coupled to the warnings that Mossad arranged to be passed
through French intelligence and which Coleen Rowley has used to lambaste her
chief, FBI director Robert Mueller, the failure to act assumes frightening
proportions.
The revelations make a mockery of George Tenet's claim that he
was "proud" of the CIA's record. Its embattled director, currently in
Israel trying to broker a doomed peace deal, has found in his absence that
his own staff are admitting to mistakes.
"Part of the problem is that the CIA and FBI are loath to share
vital information with each other, or with other government agencies because
they have this deep-seated fear of compromising their own sources," a senior
State Department analyst told Globe-Intel.
But in the coming days the relationship between Mossad and the
CIA and FBI will become the subject of close scrutiny in the closed hearings
of the intelligence committees picking their way through the mass of
documents now in their possession.
It is beginning to emerge that intelligence relating to
pre-September 11 stopped at the desk of National Security Adviser,
Condoleezza Rice.
The question as to why the President was not fully briefed has
led to others. Had a decision been taken by Rice in consultation with
Secretary of Defense and other high-ranking members of the Bush
Administration to effectively not inform Bush of what was developing because
they did not trust his limited experience in dealing with global terrorism -
or a major threat of any kind?
Officially such a question is dismissed around the White House
as nonsensical. Yet it persists within the State Department - where
Secretary of State Colin Powell remains outside the charmed inner circle
surrounding Bush.
There, senior officials point to the fact that the CIA briefing
to Bush last August, less than a month before the attacks on the World Trade
Center and Pentagon, turned out to be conspicuous by what was not said.
Yet, at that time the CIA knew of the impending threat. There
are other pointers that the President may have been kept out of the loop.
Within his own circle there is a determination to distance him
from taking the advice of his father. President George Bush Snr is seen by
some in the White House as being out of touch with today's world. And that
the advice he proffers his son during their Texas cookouts is out-moded.
All this may go some way to explain why President Bush has now
publicly acknowledged there was an intelligence failure. Much else will
flow from that.
For insights into the world of Israeli intelligence, Gordon Thomas's
Gideon's Spies is the definitive work. It can be purchased through this
site.
<A HREF="http://www.ctrl.org/";>www.ctrl.org</A>
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