None of this is pretty. In the immediate aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks, members of the American political establishment stood together, determined to fight the war against terrorism, supporting those in military uniform and the buttoned-down bureaucra ts whose job it was to make sure that something so awful would not happen again. Everyone — inside the Bush Administration as well as outside it — knew there had been massive failures of intelligence in the period before the attacks. But after S ept. 11, the Administration earned a reputation for steely-eyed competence, and its political opponents couched their legitimate criticism in language politer than that to which Washington is accustomed.

That was then. In the past month, a series of disclosures have cast doubt on the most basic abilities of the national-security establishment. The Administration has looked alternately shifty and defensive; Democrats — some of them presidential candid ates-in-waiting — have postured on motormouth TV. And the nation has been forced into a period of painful second-guessing, asking whether Sept. 11 could have been prevented. In August, it turns out, the President was briefed by the CIA on the possibi lity that al-Qaeda, the terrorist network headed by Osama bin Laden, might use hijacked airliners to win concessions from the U.S. Sources tell Time that the briefing, which was first reported by CBS News, was in response to a request by Bush for detailed information on the kind of threat posed by al-Qaeda, not to American interests overseas — which had long preoccupied the spooks — but at home.

During the period in which the brief was prepared, says a senior intelligence official, the CIA came to the conclusion that "al-Qaeda was determined to attack the U.S." After the strike came, White House sources concede, the Administration made a consciou s decision not to disclose the August briefing, hoping that it would be discussed "in context" — and months later — when congressional investigations into the attacks eventually got under way.

And that wasn't the only embarrassing paper kept under wraps. Earlier this month, the Associated Press reported new details from a July 2001 memo by an FBI agent in Phoenix, Ariz., who presciently noted a pattern of Arab men signing up at flight schools. The agent, Kenneth Williams, 42, has spent 11 years working in an FBI antiterrorism task force. He recommended an investigation to determine whether al-Qaeda operatives were training at the schools. He was ignored, and after the existence of the memo beca me known, the FBI insisted that even if it had been acted upon, it would not have led to the detention of the Sept. 11 hijackers. (Only one of them, Hani Hanjour, had trained in Arizona, and did so before Williams focused on flight schools.) But sources t ell Time that at least one of the men Williams had under watch — a Muslim who has now left the U.S. — did indeed have al-Qaeda links. And Williams identified a second pair of suspected Islamic radicals now living in the U.S. as resident aliens, the sources say. They are currently under FBI surveillance.

As if those missed signals weren't enough, last week it was also disclosed that in August, when the U.S. detained Zacarias Moussaoui — a man the French government knew was associated with Islamic extremists and who apparently wanted to learn to fly j umbo jets but not land them, and has since been charged with complicity in the Sept. 11 attacks — the FBI told nobody in the White House's Counterterrorism Security Group. But the CSG, which comes under the aegis of National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, is supposed to coordinate the government's response to terrorist threats.

At high levels of government, the awful possibility is dawning that things could have been different. "If we'd had access to Moussaoui, if we'd had access to the Phoenix memo, could we have broken up the plot?" asks a White House official who works on cou nterterrorism. Then he answers his own question: "We would have taken action, and there's at least a distinct possibility that we may at the very least have delayed it." Bush was outraged at the suggestion that he might have been warned about impending st rikes and failed to act. To ward off Democratic criticism, Vice President Dick Cheney warned against trying to "seek political advantage" from the new revelations; such commentary, he said, "is thoroughly irresponsible and totally unworthy of national lea ders in a time of war." He should have saved his breath; the blame game is under way, long before the lessons of all that happened last summer have been absorbed. And one thing we now know: there is plenty of blame to go around.

George W. Bush, they say, is a quick study, and last summer he needed to be. Threats and warnings of possible terrorist outrages against American interests were howling into Washington like a dirty blizzard. Fighting terrorism hadn't been a top priority i n the early months of the Administration; cutting taxes, building a missile shield and other agenda items had crowded it out. Bush's national-security aides had been warned during the transition that there was an al-Qaeda presence in the U.S., but in the first months of the Administration, says one official, a sense of urgency was lacking: "They were new to this stuff."

By the time Bush left for a month's vacation on his ranch in Crawford, Texas, on Aug. 4, that mood had changed. Where the President goes, the responsibilities of office follow, and so, each morning, Bush sat in the ranch office and received the CIA's Presidential Daily Brief. The brief — or PDB, in Langley-speak — is the CIA's chance to mainline its priorities into the President's thinking. Each day, the PDB is winnowed to a few pages; when the President is in Washington, one of two "briefers" — agency up-and-comers who flesh out the written text — gets to work at 2 a.m. to bone up on background material. The brief itself is delivered at 8 a.m. in front of the President's national-security team. (Sometimes CIA Director George Tenet delivers it himself.) One briefer had moved to Texas for the vacation, and the PDB was transmitted to Crawford over a secure system. At the briefing on Monday, Aug. 6 — a day when the Texas heat would reach 100° — Bush received a 11/2-page document, which, according to Rice, was an "analytic report" on al-Qaeda. Included was a mention that al-Qaeda might be tempted to hijack airliners, perhaps so that they might use hostages to secure the release of an al-Qaeda leader or sympathizer. Rice was not present but discussed the briefing with Bush immediately after it had ended, as she always does.

They had much to talk about. Throughout the summer, top officials had become convinced, with a growing sense of foreboding, that a major operation by al-Qaeda was in the works. For many in the loop, it seemed likely that any attack would be aimed at Ameri cans overseas. But sources tell Time that the Aug. 6 briefing had a very different focus; it was explicitly concerned with terrorism in the homeland. The Aug. 6 briefing had been put together, says one official, because the President had told Tenet, "Give me a sense of what al-Qaeda can do inside the U.S." At a press conference last week, Rice said the brief concentrated on the history and methods of al-Qaeda. Since much of the material in it was a rehash of intelligence dating to 1997 and '98, it is doub tful that it was much use in answering Bush's question.

According to Rice, there was just a sentence or two on hijacking — and the passage did not address the possibility that a hijacked plane would ever be flown into a building. That was the first of four crucial mistakes made last summer. Administration officials insisted all last week that turning a plane into a suicide bomb was something that nobody had contemplated. But that just isn't so. In 1995, authorities in the Philippines scuppered a plan — masterminded by Ramzi Yousef, who had also plott ed the 1993 World Trade Center bombing — for mass hijackings of American planes over the Pacific. Evidence developed during the investigation of Yousef and his partner, Abdul Hakim Murad, uncovered a plan to crash a plane into CIA headquarters in Lan gley, Va. And as long ago as 1994, in an incident that is well known among terrorism experts, French authorities foiled a plot by the Algerian Armed Islamic Group to fly an airliner into the Eiffel Tower. "Since 1994," says a French investigator into al-Q aeda cases, "we should all have been viewing kamikaze acts as a possibility for all terrorist hijackings." But if Rice's account is accurate, nobody significant in the Bush Administration did.

There might have been more discussion of the risks of hijackings in the President's briefing if its writers had known about the Phoenix memo. But they hadn't seen it, nor had anyone in the CIA or the White House. Yet Senator Richard Shelby, the ranking Re publican on the Senate Intelligence Committee, calls the memo, which is said to contain detailed descriptions of named suspects, "one of the most explosive documents I've seen in eight years." The memo, on which the Senate Intelligence Committee was brief ed last November, has now become the focus of a huge political row in Washington. Members of the Senate Judiciary Committee — including Republican Arlen Specter, who had an angry exchange over the memo with FBI Director Robert Mueller on Saturday
51; are desperate to see it, and may yet subpoena it. "The fact that the Phoenix memo died on somebody's desk takes your breath away," says Senator Richard Durbin, a Democratic committee member from Illinois. "They just shuffled it off."

Agent Williams wrote the memo on July 5, detailing his suspicions about some Arabs he had been watching, who he thought were Islamic radicals. Several of the men had enrolled at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Prescott, Ariz. Williams posited that bin Laden's followers might be trying to infiltrate the civil-aviation system as pilots, security guards or other personnel, and he recommended a national program to track suspicious flight-school students. The memo was sent to the counterterrorism divis ion at FBI headquarters in Washington and to two field offices, including the counterterrorism section in New York, which has had long experience in al-Qaeda investigations.

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