"Oh, it wasn't careless oversight," Kean replied. "It was purposeful. No question about that in my mind ... In the DNA of these organizations was secrecy."
Mihdhar and Hazmi boarded American Flight 77 at Washington Dulles airport on the morning of Sept. 11. After the plane took off, they joined three other men in commandeering the aircraft and flying it into the Pentagon, killing a total of 184 people.
So how then had George Tenet and those responsible at the CIA managed to get away with misrepresenting the incident as a mistake for so long?
"Tenet was a likable guy," Kean concluded. "He got away with some stuff because people liked him."
"Malfeasance and misfeasance"
In 2009, former White House counterterrorism chief Richard Clarke took the scenario further. In an on-camera interview he suggested that Tenet, once a close friend and colleague, had ordered the withholding of the information about the two al-Qaida operatives from the FBI and from the White House.
Clarke explained why he had come to that remarkable conclusion. Tenet, he said, followed all information about al-Qaida "in microscopic detail" and would call Clarke at the White House several times a day to share "the most trivial of information." In addition, there were terrorism threat meetings held in person every other day.
We must have had dozens, scores of threat committee meetings over the time when they knew these guys had entered the country ... They told us everything except this ... So now the question is, why?
The only explanation Clarke could offer was admittedly speculative: that the CIA may have been running an operation to recruit the two al-Qaida operatives while they were living under their own names in Southern California. This might appear to have been a reasonable thing for the CIA to do. After all, Bill Clinton's White House had long complained to the agency about the lack of penetration agents in al-Qaida.
But if the CIA was following or recruiting or monitoring Mihdhar and Hazmi in the United States, that might well have qualified as operating on U.S. soil, a violation of the agency's charter. Once the two men were identified as hijackers on Flight 77, CIA officials may have begun a coverup of their earlier "malfeasance and misfeasance," as Clarke charges.
His language is blunt, especially for a national security policymaker.
"I am outraged and have been ever since I first learned that the CIA knew these guys were in the country," explained Clarke. "But I believed for the longest time that this was probably one or two low-level CIA people who made the decision not to disseminate the information. Now that I know that 50 CIA officers knew this, and they included all kinds of people who were regularly talking to me, saying I'm pissed doesn't begin to describe it."
Clarke said he assumed that "there was a high-level decision in the CIA ordering people not to share that information." When asked who might have issued such an order, he replied, "I would think it would have been made by the director," referring to Tenet -- although he added that Tenet and others would never admit to the truth today "even if you waterboarded them."
The view from the FBI
We found the same suspicion was also prevalent among FBI counterterrorism agents from the time, particularly those who had worked under a legendary FBI agent named John O'Neill in New York. O'Neill, movingly portrayed in Lawrence Wright's Pulitzer Prize-winning "The Looming Tower," was one of the special agents in charge of counterterrorism in the FBI's New York office. He retired to serve as chief of security at the World Trade Center and was killed in the Sept. 11 attacks, only three weeks after leaving the bureau.
O'Neill's deputy for counterterrorism was Pasquale D'Amuro, who was appointed inspector in charge of the FBI's investigation into the attacks.
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