This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: A new study from the University of Bath sheds light on critical U.S. intelligence failures ahead of the 9/11 attacks, including evidence that changes how the CIA's repeated failure to share information with the FBI about two hijackers should be understood. The study, "9/11 as a Catastrophic Systems Failure: Reassessing the Unclassified Evidence" by security expert Dr.
Patrick Bury, raises questions about how two hijackers who crashed American Airlines Flight 77 into the Pentagon were missed by the U.S. intelligence system. The work will be published in Intelligence and National Security. Drawing on recently declassified FBI and CIA records, alongside official investigations and court disclosures, it examines evidence concerning Saudi–linked individuals who supported the men in the United States.
Crucially, it asks whether that environment was connected to CIA efforts to gain intelligence access to al-Qaeda. It examines the increasingly plausible possibility that the hijackers—Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi—were initially viewed as potential avenues of intelligence access into al-Qaeda's network rather than as imminent threats to the U.S. homeland. Bury, a former NATO analyst and reader in security at the University of Bath, says, "The evidence shows that future hijackers were known to parts of the intelligence system long before the attacks, yet critical information held by the CIA repeatedly failed to reach the people and organizations that could have acted on it.
The question is why known intelligence did not generate an effective response. "Importantly, we can now see a much denser and more strongly substantiated Saudi–linked facilitation environment around Mihdhar and Hazmi, including individuals with documented or suspected links to Saudi intelligence, than the public record available after the original inquiries could establish." The study—the first systematic academic reassessment to integrate this fuller public record into the wider explanation of the 9/11 intelligence failure—notes that the newly available material does not establish CIA–Saudi operational coordination or Saudi state sponsorship. But it does change the evidentiary context in which longstanding questions about CIA nondisclosure must be assessed.
"It also raises important questions about intelligence handling, threat assessment and the interaction between known intelligence and the support networks that emerged around the men. Combined with organizational dysfunction, overload and liaison sensitivity, these factors helped sustain a pattern in which repeated opportunities for correction were lost," Bury says. The first pattern has been known for years.
As the CIA monitored an important al-Qaeda meeting in Kuala Lumpur in January 2000, it knew future hijacker al-Mihdhar held a valid U.S. visa, but the information was not disseminated through normal intelligence reporting channels. FBI personnel assigned to the CIA's Counterterrorist Center attempted to notify FBI headquarters, but those efforts were blocked. Later, as the FBI investigation of the USS Cole attack increasingly converged on the same network, investigators made repeated requests to the CIA for relevant intelligence, yet the full picture was still not disclosed.
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