The Fall Guy

Sorry, J. Edgar, but someone has to take a fall for this and that someone is you.

That seems to be the message. The 9/11 blame game has shifted from the White House to the House that Hoover Built -- the FBI. The top G-man, Robert Mueller III, held a long press conference to announce a dramatic reorganization, in which he acknowledged that the FBI -- which he took over a week before the attacks -- had not effectively handled relevant leads and that it was possible the Bureau might have been able to thwart all or part of Osama bin Laden's Sept. 11 plot had it performed better.

It was a refreshing concession. No spin. Not that Mueller and the Bureau had not tried earlier to cover their backsides. Soon after the attacks, Mueller, who has a reputation in Washington as a stand-up fellow, had said the Bureau received no indication anything of this sort was coming. Then the leaks came.

An FBI agent had been investigating foreign nationals with ties to bin Laden who were attending flight school in Phoenix, and headquarters neglected his recommendations for a wider inquiry. And headquarters hobbled a separate FBI investigation into Zacarias Moussaoui, who had aroused suspicions at a Minnesota aviation school and who later was charged for participating in the 9/11 conspiracy.

Moreover, FBI HQ had not bothered to make a connection between what the agent had found in Phoenix and what other agents had learned in Minnesota. Next, one of the Minnesota agents, Coleen Rowley, wrote a long and passionate letter to Mueller -- which was leaked -- in which she denounced headquarters' mishandling of the Moussaoui matter and claimed a forceful investigation of Moussaoui might have averted some of the tragedy.

In the face of the mounting evidence and Rowley's cri de coeur, Mueller was no longer able to assert that if mistakes were made they had not been decisive errors. So Mueller did what any strategic crisis management consultant would advise: take the hit (that is, confess) and, at the same time, present a let's-get-past-the-recriminations plan for change.

It may work -- though some members of Congress are still aiming to give the FBI a tough time. But what's interesting is that you don't see the CIA or the Defense Department making similar mea culpas. And those guys screwed up as bad as the flatfoots of the FBI.

Take the spies. No one should rap them for not having penetrated al Qaeda's leadership. That may have been too tough a task for anyone. The sin of the CIA -- and other intelligence agencies -- is that it failed to pick up on several signs al Qaeda was interested in a 9/11-like assault.

In recent months, the list of hints has grown. In 1995, a Philippine terrorist linked to al Qaeda told authorities in the Philippines that he and his comrades had considered a plan involving the simultaneous hijacking of airliners and flying a plane into CIA headquarters. That information was shared with the United States.

That same year, Algerian terrorists connected to bin Laden's network hijacked a plane and hoped to pilot it into the Eiffel Tower. (French commandos killed them at a refueling stop.) Non-governmental terrorism experts briefed the Federal Aviation Administration in 1998 about the prospects of terrorist slamming planes into nuclear power plants, the White House, the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and other targets. A 1999 report prepared for the National Intelligence Council noted al Qaeda could try to mount such a strike. In July 2001, the Italian government informed Washington it had reports suggesting bin Laden might use airliners to attack George W. Bush and other world leaders at the G-8 meeting in Genoa.

None of this means an analyst in Langley ought to have been able to declare, "Eureka -- watch out for four hijacked airliners on the morning of Sept. 11." But all of this should have caused the CIA to add the prospect of this type of attack to its information-collection requirements. There is no indication that was done. The Agency was as asleep at the switch as the FBI.