call "Dave," to figure out what these cables meant. "John" was aware of how
dangerous Khallad was--at one point calling him a "major league killer." He
concluded that "something bad was definitely up." Despite the U.S. links evi-
dent in this traffic, "John" made no effort to determine whether any of these
individuals was in the United States. He did not raise that possibility with his
FBI counterpart. He was focused on Malaysia.
trast, he told us, the FBI tends to play "man-to-man."
when the trail went cold after the Kuala Lumpur meeting in January 2000, the
desk officer moved on to different things. By the time the March 2000 cable
arrived with information that one of the travelers had flown to Los Angeles,
the case officer was no longer responsible for follow-up.While several individ-
uals at the Bin Ladin unit opened the cable when it arrived in March 2000, no
action was taken.
and the FBI's man-to-man approach might have been productive.
"John's" review of the Kuala Lumpur meeting did set off some more shar-
ing of information, getting the attention of an FBI analyst whom we will call
"Jane." "Jane" was assigned to the FBI's Cole investigation. She knew that
another terrorist involved in that operation, Fahd al Quso, had traveled to
Bangkok in January 2000 to give money to Khallad.
graphs to FBI agents in New York who were working on the Cole case and had
interviewed Quso.
graphs was someone named Khalid al Mihdhar. She did not know why the
photographs had been taken or why the Kuala Lumpur travel might be signif-
icant, and she was not told that someone had identified Khallad in the photo-
graphs. When "Jane" did some research in a database for intelligence reports,
Intelink, she found the original NSA reports on the planning for the meeting.
Because the CIA had not disseminated reports on its tracking of Mihdhar,
"Jane" did not pull up any information about Mihdhar's U.S. visa or about travel
to the United States by Hazmi or Mihdhar.