0
WASHINGTON, July 22: Iran probably knew that September 11 hijackers passed through its territory before the deadly strikes on the United States, but likely had no direct role in the attacks, a senior CIA official said.
Acting CIA director John McLaughlin said at the weekend that eight hijackers passed through Iran, confirming leaked accounts of the official report into the 2001 attacks that killed nearly 3,000 people.
"I don't think we know that this was a deliberate Iranian policy," a CIA official told reporters at a briefing on Wednesday ahead of the release on Thursday of the report of the commission investigating the September 11 attacks on New York and Washington.
"We think it is more because they had passports that the Iranians would not stamp for whatever reason," the official said.
Noting Iran's hostility to the Taliban who then ruled Afghanistan and sheltered Al Qaeda, the official said "it's a little difficult to see Iran as an ally of Al Qaeda in that period."
Compared to countries like Egypt or Turkey, the official said Iran's "determination to go after (terrorists) is just not as robust."
Another official said the exact relationship between Iran and the hijackers was "murky," but added: "It's hard to imagine that they were unwitting of these operations.... It's harder to make the leap that they were directing operations."
COMMISSION'S CRITICISM: The official defended CIA against criticism in the commission report and said it had warned of the possibility of terrorists using hijacked planes before the 2001 attacks took place.
"CIA regularly reported on threats to civil aviation including hijacking," the official said.
The report criticized the spy agency, already under fire for its flawed intelligence on Iraq's banned weapons before last year's invasion, for failing to properly understand the threat of the Al Qaeda movement that carried out the attacks.
The strong defence by CIA appeared intended to forestall further criticism of the agency, whose director, George Tenet, resigned in the face of a barrage of complaints about intelligence failures in Iraq and over Sept. 11.
The official said the CIA in 1999 had provided the Federal Aviation Administration with language to use in briefing US airline officials that read: "Osama bin Laden remains interested in targeting US interests including on US territory. He is well prepared to consider kidnappings and hijackings as well as bombings."
"All of those warnings plus other intelligence reports of a similar nature through that period were provided in time to do something about it. It wasn't too late. The industry could have taken countermeasures and so forth. So we were on time and on target with that," he said.
The CIA official spoke on Wednesday on condition his remarks not be published until the report was released.
He disputed the commission's conclusion that Tenet did not develop a management strategy for a war against Islamist terrorism before the Sept. 11 attacks.-AFP/Reuters
