'HE'S A SECURITY THREAT'Alhaji Umaru Mutallab, the bombing suspect’s father, had urgently sought help when text messages from his son revealed that he had become a fervent radical.
Spy agencies failed to connect dots on terror suspect
First sign of threat came in Aug., then father’s warning
'HE'S A SECURITY THREAT'Alhaji Umaru Mutallab, the bombing suspect’s father, had urgently sought help when text messages from his son revealed that he had become a fervent radical.
WASHINGTON - The National Security Agency four months ago intercepted conversations among leaders of Al Qaeda in Yemen discussing a plot to use a Nigerian man for a coming terrorist attack, but US spy agencies later failed to combine the intercepts with other information that might have disrupted last week’s attempted airline bombing.
The electronic intercepts were translated and disseminated across classified computer networks, government officials said yesterday. But analysts at the National Counterterrorism Center in Washington did not synthesize the eavesdropping intelligence with information gathered in November when the father of the would-be bomber, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, visited the US Embassy in Nigeria to express concerns about his son’s radicalization.
The father, a wealthy businessman named Alhaji Umaru Mutallab, had urgently sought help from US and Nigerian security officials when cellphone text messages from his son revealed that he was in Yemen and had become a fervent radical.
A family cousin quoted the father warning US officials in Nigeria: “Look at the texts he’s sending. He’s a security threat.’’
The cousin said: “They promised to look into it. They didn’t take him seriously.’’
The new details help fill in the portrait of an intelligence breakdown in the months before Abdulmutallab boarded a plane in Amsterdam with the intent of blowing it up before landing in Detroit.
In some ways, the portrait bears a striking resemblance to the failures before the Sept. 11 attacks, despite the billions of dollars spent over the last eight years to improve the intelligence flow and secret communications across America’s national security apparatus.
One day after President Obama delivered a blistering indictment of “human and systemic failures’’ leading up to the foiled attack, the battle to assign blame escalated yesterday.
Some government officials blamed the National Counterterrorism Center, created in 2004 to foster intelligence sharing and to serve as a clearinghouse for terrorism threats, for failing to piece together information about an impending attack.
Others defended the center, saying that analysts there did not have enough information at their disposal to trigger a broad investigation into Abdulmutallab. They pointed the finger at the CIA, which in November compiled biographical data about Abdulmutallab - including his plans to study Islamic law in Yemen - but did not broadly share the information with other security agencies.
The environment in Washington was further charged by a barrage of partisan attacks revolving around whether Obama bears ultimate responsibility for the security lapse, including a statement by former Vice President Dick Cheney that Obama “pretends’’ that the United States is not at war against terrorists.
A White House official fired back, blaming the Bush administration as having allowed Al Qaeda to thrive while it focused on the Iraq war.
A White House review into the episode is finding that agencies were looking at information in silos without adequately checking other available databases - not because they were reluctant to share, as was the case before Sept. 11, but out of oversight or human error, said a senior administration official familiar with the review.
In interviews yesterday, government officials and others provided an account of how various agencies had gleaned bits and pieces of information about the young Nigerian but failed to pull them together to disrupt his plot. Most of the officials spoke only on the condition that they not be quoted by name.
The first sign of a threat came in August, when the National Security Agency, responsible for electronic eavesdropping around the world, intercepted the Al Qaeda conversations about the mysterious, unidentified Nigerian. That same month, Abdulmutallab arrived in Yemen and he soon began preparing for the Christmas attack. Three months later, in November, Abdulmutallab’s father, a former senior Nigerian government official and prominent banker, became panicked about his son’s turn to radicalism, according to an interview with a family cousin. The father beseeched Nigerian and US officials to intervene before his son did harm, said the cousin, who declined to be identified by name, citing the family’s desire for privacy.
The cousin, who attended a gathering of the family on Sunday shortly after the attempted attack, said that what alarmed Mutallab were the text messages his son had sent from Yemen. He said the son told the father that “he had found a new religion, the real Islam.’’
Mutallab consulted with the onetime national security adviser to Nigeria’s former president. He also approached Nigeria’s National Intelligence Agency. Then he went to the US embassy in Abuja, the cousin said. There, he said, US officials essentially ignored him.
American officials contend that they took the father’s account seriously, but that he never signaled that his son might carry out a terrorist attack. Still, on Nov. 20, based on the father’s meeting, which included the CIA and the State Department, embassy officials wrote a cable called a Visas Viper - government jargon for a warning about terrorism - and sent it to the counterterrorism center.
The cable referred to the father’s statement that his son had fallen under “the influence of religious extremists based in Yemen,’’ a US official said.
The Americans could have revoked Abdulmutallab’s visa, but they chose not to. Some 1,700 visas have been revoked since the Sept. 11 attacks, but that step is almost always taken only after a review by counterterrorism officials in Washington.
© Copyright 2009 Globe Newspaper Company.
