Every year, on the morning of September 11, Mark Rossini wakes up with something on his mind that most Americans could never even fathom, let alone live with: Information once in his possession as a former FBI special agent might have prevented the terrorist attacks that killed 3,000 people 14 years ago today.
That year, Rossini and his colleague Doug Miller—an FBI agent who was assigned to the CIA's Alec unit, which was tasked with tracking Osama bin Laden—drafted a memo briefing the higher-ups on what they had learned from the spy agency in the months leading up to the attack. This included the information that a suspected al Qaeda operative named Khalid al-Mihdhar had obtained a US visa and was traveling back and forth between America and the Middle East.
He would later help fly American Airlines Flight 77 into the Pentagon.
But that memo never made it to the FBI. Instead, Miller says a CIA operative told him to "hold off" and that both Miller and Rossini were told not to talk about what they knew with anyone—not even their bosses. They obliged, and that resulting break in communication between the two agencies is frequently cited as the "intelligence failure" that contributed to what happened on that horrific day.
The only logical reason that you can come up with was that the agency was working along with the Saudis in order to recruit somebody in the cell and they didn't want the FBI, in the form of [former Special Agent in Charge] John O'Neill, messing up their operation... Essentially, what I believe is that we had a tacit agreement with the Saudis that if we found their wayward soldiers around the globe, we wouldn't embarrass the Saudis by arresting them—we would send them home for them to be readjusted in society.
There is no way in God's good Earth that the Saudis wanted this to happen. Nobody wanted this to happen. The overarching thing is to not embarrass the kingdom. The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia is our greatest ally in the Middle East for several reasons. First, because of the black ooze that's coming out of the ground there. And more over, we have airbases there; we see them as stable, and they see us as stable. The Chinese don't care about their religion, and the Russians are backing Alawites and Shiites through Assad in Syria. We're the only game in town that respects them and will protect them.
The Former FBI Agent Who Believes He Could Have Prevented 9/11
by John Surico
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