F.B.I. Chief Admits 9/11 Might Have Been Detectable

WASHINGTON, May 29 — The director of the F.B.I., Robert S. Mueller III, acknowledged today for the first time that the attacks of Sept. 11 might have been preventable if officials in his agency had responded differently to all the pieces of information that were available.

As a result, Mr. Mueller said he was beginning an overhaul of the Federal Bureau of Investigation to aim more resources toward what he asserted is now its fundamental mission: the prevention of new terrorist operations. The changes, he said, are designed to bolster the bureau's capability to analyze information about terrorist threats and anticipate possible attacks.

"I cannot say for sure that there wasn't a possibility we could have come across some lead that would have led us to the hijackers," Mr. Mueller told reporters after listing several missed opportunities by officials to discern a pattern of terrorist planning before Sept. 11.

He also said that while there was no specific warning, "that doesn't mean that there weren't red flags out there, that there weren't dots that should have been connected to the extent possible."

He said that the changes he was putting into place, including reassigning hundreds of agents from the war on drugs to the war on terrorism, were designed to produce "a redesigned and refocused F.B.I."

At the heart of the changes, he said, is an effort to strengthen the bureau's analytic capability by creating an Office of Intelligence to coordinate information. More than 400 new analysts would be added to the bureau, both in the field offices and the Washington headquarters, including 25 officers on loan from the Central Intelligence Agency.

"In essence, we need a different approach that puts prevention above all else," he said. "We have to develop the ability to look around the corner."

Mr. Mueller's statements about how the F.B.I. dealt with intelligence reports before Sept. 11 were a sharp turnabout from both the substance and tone of remarks he and other other administration officials made in the weeks after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. As recently as May 8, Mr. Mueller told a Senate hearing that there was nothing the agency could have done to prevent the attacks.

But that stance became increasingly untenable in recent weeks after news reports that two F.B.I. field offices might have had important pieces of information that were never connected by officials at headquarters. Agent Kenneth Williams of the Phoenix office sent a memo on July 10 warning that Osama bin Laden might be sending operatives to American aviation schools to prepare for terrorist operations.

The second piece of intelligence involved Zacarias Moussaoui, a 33-year-old flight student who was arrested in Minneapolis in August on immigration charges after F.B.I. agents were told by a manager at the Pan Am International Flight Academy that he had been acting suspiciously. Agents in the field office wanted headquarters to press for a warrant to allow them to search the computer owned by Mr. Moussaoui, who officials now believe was meant to be the 20th hijacker.

A letter sent to Mr. Mueller on May 21 by Coleen Rowley, a veteran agent and general counsel in the Minneapolis office, seemed to put an end to the bureau's posture that no information was available that could have led to thwarting the terrorist plot.

Ms. Rowley, in an anguished 15-page letter, complained that officials in Washington blocked the field office's request to investigate Mr. Moussaoui further. She charged that an F.B.I. supervisor had played down information obtained from French intelligence authorities that would have helped obtain the needed authorization for the warrant from a special national security court.

More darkly, she said that officials at the bureau were "circling the wagons" and she warned Mr. Mueller he should stop saying no information existed that could have prevented the Sept. 11 tragedies.

Today, Mr. Mueller lauded Ms. Rowley. "Let me take a moment to thank Ms. Rowley for her letter," he said. "It is critically important that I hear criticisms of the organization, including criticisms of me, in order to improve the organization."

Mr. Mueller said the Minneapolis and Phoenix situations should have been handled differently.

The memorandum from Agent Williams, Mr. Mueller said, should have been shared with the C.I.A. In addition, "We should have had mechanisms in place so that something like that goes up to the top, goes up through the organization so that it is evaluated."

Most important, he said the bureau "should have analytical capabilities to put that piece together, with say, Moussaoui." He said that the Moussaoui information and the Phoenix memo went to the same unit at headquarters but no connection was made.

Regarding Mr. Moussaoui, Mr. Mueller complimented the agents in Minneapolis for their work and said that officials at headquarters should have been more supportive of their efforts to obtain search warrants from the special security court.

Mr. Mueller said he had referred the actions of the supervisors to the Justice Department's inspector general.

He disclosed there was another piece of information that was never analyzed in conjunction with the Minneapolis or Phoenix memorandums. In 1998, a bureau pilot taking off from a commercial field in Oklahoma City recorded his suspicions about the behavior of a group of flight students from Middle Eastern nations he encountered there. Mr. Moussaoui had taken flight lessons in nearby Norman, Okla., before he traveled to Minnesota last August. F.B.I. agents learned of that shortly after arresting him on Aug. 15.

In the future, Mr. Mueller said, people will be looking at such memorandums and determining whether they "should be put in a larger matrix from which the intentions of terrorists can be discerned."

He added, "It is critically important that we have that connection of dots that will enable us to prevent the next attack."

After Sept. 11, Attorney General John Ashcroft said repeatedly that he would shift the mission of the Justice Department to preventing another terrorist attack. Mr. Mueller's reorganization plan, some of which has to be approved by Congress, is the first tangible result of that approach.

As he sets about reassigning 400 of the bureau's 11,500 field agents from narcotics investigations to counterterrorism, Mr. Mueller said he was confident that the Drug Enforcement Administration would be able to pick up the slack. The move would reduce agents assigned to narcotics from 2,500 to 2,100, he said.

He said the bureau needed to shift to its new priorities of protecting the United States from terrorist attacks and grapple better with foreign intelligence operations.

Another 59 agents would be reassigned to counterterrorism from white-collar crime investigations and an additional 59 from the violent crimes unit.