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The attorney general was hardly alone in de-emphasizing terror in the new Bush administration, which was barely six months old. Over at the Pentagon, new Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld elected not to relaunch a surveillance plane that had been tracking bin Laden, and also vetoed a request to plow $800 million more into counterterror by diverting it to missile defense.
And at Treasury, Secretary Paul O'Neill wanted to roll back attempts to track money-laundering and tax havens of the kind used by terrorists. In self-absorbed Washington, the Phoenix memo never made it senior levels. Nor did it get transmitted to the CIA, which has long had a difficult relationship with the FBI
-- and whose director, George Tenet, one of the few Clinton hold-overs, was
issuing so many warnings that bin Laden's global terror network was "the most immediate" threat to Americans that he was hardly heeded any longer. In fact, as early as Jan. 26, 2001 -- six days after Bush took office -- an FBI document shows that authorities believed they had clear evidence linking the October 2000 bombing of the USS Cole to Al Qaeda. Yet the new administration mounted no retaliation of its own.
National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice last week disclosed that during the course of last summer, the Federal Aviation Administration issues several "information circulars" warning the aviation industry of possible terror attacks. Newsweek has now learned that as many as 10 to 12 such warnings were issued to all American airlines and major airports in the period between June 2001 and September 11. According to two sources who have read the warnings, more than two specifically mentioned the possibility of airplanes being hijacked. Together these clues suggest that, at least, U.S. airports should have been on high alert on Sept. 11. They weren't. Indeed, the two airlines involved in the hijackings say they were barely aware of the FAA warnings.
Early efforts by the Bush administration to investigate terror links were marginalized. By the end of the Clinton administration, then-National Security Advisor Sandy Berger had become "totally preoccupied" with fears of a domestic terror attack, a colleague recalls. When in January 2001, Berger gave Rice her handover briefing, he covered the bin Laden threat in detail, and, sources say, warned her: "You will be spending more time on this issue than on any other." Rice was alarmed by what she heard, and asked for a strategic review. But the effort was scarcely mentioned in ensuing months as the administration committed itself to other priorities.
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