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French Spoke of Qaida Plot, Report Says

By Carol Eisenberg, Newsday

April 17, 2007

Apr. 17--French foreign agents who infiltrated Osama bin Laden's network notified the CIA as early as January 2001 that the group was planning to hijack American airliners, the French newspaper Le Monde said yesterday.

But the French spy agency never knew when al-Qaida might strike, or anticipated that the group would use planes as weapons of mass destruction.

The newspaper report, purportedly based on 328 pages of classified documents from France's spy agency, provides nuance, but no new revelations about what the U.S. government knew of bin Laden's intention to attack the United States in the months leading up to Sept. 11, 2001, when 19 hijackers commandeered planes and flew them into the World Trade Center towers and the Pentagon.

Based on the French warnings, U.S. intelligence officials "put out general warning information, but were unable to do anything more with it because it was nonspecific," recalled Rand Beers, a former counterterrorism adviser who served on the National Security Council at the time.

It has been well-documented that in the months before 9/11, U.S. intelligence agencies were deluged with reports, albeit fragmentary and nonspecific ones, that al-Qaida was planning a sensational assault on U.S. interests -- with some of those threat reports related to possible plans to hijack American airliners.

"This corroborates and is consistent with our reports about al-Qaida activities leading up to September 11th," said Timothy Roemer, a Democratic member of the bipartisan 9/11 Commission that wrote a book-length chronology of what agencies knew and when.

Former CIA Director George Tenet "claimed his hair was on fire going into the summer of 2001 because of all the reporting that was out there," Roemer said. "It's also pretty consistent with the problems we found in our intelligence services not sharing information even when they did get it."

Roemer was referring to evidence of missed opportunities, including the CIA's failure to share information with the FBI about two of the terrorists who turned out to be in the country; the FBI's failure to follow up on a warning in July from a Phoenix agent that al-Qaida terrorists might be training at American flight schools and the bureau's failure to grasp the significance of Zacarias Moussaoui, the flight school student arrested in Minnesota and linked later to the 9/11 conspirators.

While Roemer declined to talk about "sources and methods," he said the United States "has, and continues to have a good relationship with foreign intelligence services, particularly the British and the French who have had good information coming out of Afghanistan."

Thomas Kean, the 9/11 Commission chairman and former Republican governor of New Jersey, said he didn't recall hearing about specific reports from the French, but noted: "We said the system was blinking red because of all the reports that were out there. I'd like to see these actual documents before saying whether there's anything new."

Le Monde reported that the French spy agency produced nine reports between September 2000 and August 2001 looking at the al-Qaida threat to the United States, including plans to hijack airliners. One January 2001 document was entitled, "Plan to hijack an aircraft by Islamic radicals," and said the operation had been discussed in Kabul at the start of 2000 by al-Qaida, Taliban and Chechen militants.

CIA spokesman George Little said yesterday the story "merely repeats what the U.S. government knew and reported before September 11 -- that al-Qaida was interested in airliner plots, especially hijackings. The article does not suggest that U.S. or foreign officials had advance knowledge ... Had the details been known, the U.S. government would have acted on them.