The Administration claimed it was taken by surprise. National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice said, "I don't think anyone could have predicted that these people would take an airplane and slam it into the World Trade Center." Press Secretary Ari Fleischer asserted, "The President did not receive information about the use of airplanes as missiles by suicide bombers. This was a new type of attack that was not foreseen." President Bush issued a written document, stating he had no prior indication that "...terrorists would hijack jets and deliberately crash them."(2)
This consensual message was wildly dishonest. For years U.S. intelligence reports had been warning of bin Laden's intent to strike targets in the U.S., one report mentioning New York and Washington explicitly.(3) The President's daily briefing of December 4, 1998 was entitled, "Bin Laden Preparing to Hijack U.S. Aircraft and Other Attacks."
In January of 2001 the Direction Generale Securite Exterieure, the French intelligence agency, delivered a 5-page memo to Mr. Bill Murray of the CIA's Paris bureau; its title was, "Aircraft hijack plan by radical Islamists."(4)
In early June of 2001 Mr. Kabir Mohabbat, the National Security Council consultant with personal contacts among the Taliban, took a telephone call from one of his contacts:
"We don't know what it is, but something big is about to happen somewhere in the United States. We can't decode the message, but please tell the Americans that something big could happen. It is something so great that no one will be able to repair the damage."
Mohabbat would write later in his memoir, "They asked me to inform the U.S. Government immediately. I had taped the conversation. When I met with Jack [his security agent contact] I gave him a copy of the tape. He immediately informed Washington."(5) (Italics added.)
Mohabbat's message evidently worked its way upward, eventually to the Commander in Chief.
"Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S." was the title of the President's Daily Briefing Mr.
Bush received on August 6. His response to the CIA briefer has become immortalized: "You've covered your ass now," he said, and then spent the rest of the day fishing.(6)
On August 18, two weeks after the briefing, the Bush State Department sent Kabir Mohabbat to Islamabad to talk with the Taliban once more. He expected to receive upon his arrival a message from Washington accepting the Taliban's offer to surrender or assassinate Osama bin Laden. Here, from his memoir, is his description of what took place:(7)
On August 18, 2001, I landed in Islamabad and went to meet with the U.S. officials. When I got to the Embassy, Ron [a CIA agent, instructed to withhold his last name] handed me the same old tragic response. "Kabir, we are sorry. We don't have orders yet."
"The people in Washington told me to go--that they were ready to go," I pleaded.
"Yes, we did want you to come. Please just go one more time to Kabul...and meet with the Taliban and tell them that we need another month."
"...I flew out of Islamabad on September 2, 2001.....in Kabul the Taliban were excited to see me. I told them that I was really sorry but there were still no orders about what to do with bin Laden. The Americans needed another month.
Jalil [one of Mohabbat's Taliban contacts] started laughing and said, "Mr. Mohabbat, that's okay. However much time they want to take, they can take it. But we did warn them. We have warned them!"
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