In shift, FBI allows it might have been able to detect terror

The Associated PressWASHINGTON -- FBI Director Robert Mueller said Wednesday there may have been more missed clues before the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, and he suggested for the first time that investigators might have uncovered the plot if they had been more diligent about pursuing leads.

"The jury is still out on all of it," Mueller said, during a wide-ranging, two-hour presentation at FBI headquarters. "Looking at it right now, I can't say for sure it would not have, that there wasn't a possibility that we could have come across some lead that would have led us to the hijackers."

Mueller's remarks came after his announcement of a broad reorganization of the nation's premier law enforcement agency -- changes at least partly in response to criticism of the FBI after the attacks. The director is moving hundreds of agents, mostly from drug investigations, to focus on terrorism and prevent future attacks.

The FBI's new marching orders will focus on terrorists, spies and hackers, in that order.

Mueller's statement on clues represented the first time any senior official in the Bush administration has allowed that counterterrorism investigators might have detected and averted the Sept. 11 hijackings if they had recognized what they were collecting. That question is the focus of a congressional inquiry, and is almost certain to come up next week during Judiciary Committee hearings on the FBI's reorganization plans.

"Putting all the pieces together, who is to say?" Mueller said, though he also noted that those pieces amounted to "snippets in a veritable river of information."

Attorney General John Ashcroft said the time had come to change the "structure, culture and mission" of the agency.

President Bush has bristled over suggestions that the government knew enough to avert the attacks. "Had I known that the enemy was going to use airplanes to kill on that fateful morning, I would have done everything in my power to protect the American people," Bush said earlier this month.

Rep. James Sensenbrenner, R-Wis., chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, praised the reorganization plan, saying it could "substantially improve the FBI's ability to investigate and prevent terrorism."

The FBI disclosed two other clues Wednesday that it said might be relevant to the investigation into the September hijackings. A Middle Eastern country where U.S. shipments are restricted sought unsuccessfully before Sept. 11 to buy a commercial flight simulator, and an FBI pilot in 1998 expressed concerns to a supervisor in Oklahoma City about a number of Arab men seeking flight training.

The FBI would not identify the country that sought to buy the simulator except to say it was not one publicly connected to the September attacks. It said the information was given to the FBI by another U.S. agency that it would not identify.

Asked whether investigators might discover more clues that were already in their possession hinting at suicide hijackings, Mueller said: "There may be others out there."

He also expressed regret about FBI headquarters mishandling a memorandum from its Phoenix office expressing concern about a large number of Arabs seeking pilot, security and airport operations training at one U.S. flight school.

Mueller said Wednesday that mid-level FBI managers should have immediately given the Phoenix memo to top FBI officials, the CIA and FBI agents in local offices who might have recognized the significance of the information.

"There were a number of things that organizationally should have happened," Mueller said. He has asked the Justice Department's inspector general to investigate whether any FBI employees should be punished.

Mueller previously had said that the Phoenix memo was not detailed enough, by itself, to suggest the hijacking plot.

He also disclosed Wednesday that he did not learn about the memo until after Sept. 14, when he had told reporters: "The fact that there were a number of individuals that happened to have received training at flight schools is news, quite obviously. If we had understood that to be the case, we would have -- perhaps one could have averted this."

"I was wrong, and I found out I was wrong afterward," Mueller said Wednesday.

Mueller praised Coleen Rowley, an FBI lawyer in Minnesota who wrote a letter harshly critical of the FBI's handling of its investigation of accused terrorist Zacarias Moussaoui. He described Minnesota agents as being "tremendously aggressive" in arranging for Moussaoui's arrest in August 2001, adding: "We should have been more aggressive here in supporting them."

Mueller did not say whether he believed there was sufficient evidence to search Moussaoui's computer and home -- a central question in FBI's handling of that investigation in the weeks before Sept. 11.

Mueller said Rowley's job was "absolutely not" at risk, and said he wrote a personal letter to her over the weekend. "Look, it's hard to take criticism," Mueller added. "The fact of the matter is, I welcome her criticism."

"It became clearer than ever that we had to fundamentally change," he said.