FBI agent warned of terror plans to attack towers

A MINNEAPOLIS FBI supervisor said in a pre-September 11 conversation with headquarters that he wanted to prevent suspiciousstudent pilot Zacarias Moussaoui from flying a plane into the World Trade Center, a congressional investigator testified yesterday.

The supervisor said he had no reason to believe Moussaoui was planning such an attack.

He made the remark in a frustrated attempt to convince headquarters that a special search warrant was needed to search Moussaoui's computer, investigator Eleanor Hill told a House-Senate committee investigating the September 11 attacks.

Moussaoui is accused of conspiring with the September 11 hijackers to commit terrorism.

The supervisor told the committee staff he was "trying to get people at FBI headquarters 'spun up' because he was trying to make sure that Moussaoui 'did not take control of a plane and fly it into the World Trade Center,'" Ms Hill testified.

Hill said the headquarters agent responded, "That's not going to happen. We don't know he's a terrorist. You don't have enough to show he is a terrorist."

The headquarters agent told the investigators he did not recall the conversation.

Ms Hill also said that a July 2001 memo by an FBI agent warning that Osama bin Laden might send terrorists to the United States for flight training was disregarded by headquarters, which was unaware officials previously tried to identify Middle Eastern flight students in this country.

The investigator said the failure to connect the so-called Phoenix memo with the arrest of Moussaoui a month later and a general increase of terrorist alerts represented major intelligence failings before the September 11 attacks.

"No one will ever know whether a greater focus on the connection between these events would have led to the unraveling of the September 11 plot," Ms Hill said.

"But clearly, it might have drawn greater attention to the possibility of a terrorist attack in the United States, generated a heightened state of alert regarding such attacks and prompted more aggressive investigation and intelligence gathering," she said in a report for the House and Senate intelligence committees.

The committees looked into the handling of the Phoenix memo and the Moussaoui case as it held its fourth public hearing into the September 11 attacks.

The Phoenix-based agent, Kenneth Williams, wrote a memo to his superiors in Washington two months before the attacks, suggesting that terrorists might be learning to fly commercial jetliners at US flight schools. He asked for a check of flight schools, but no checks were made.