However fevered the analysis of the Williams memo is now, it didn't get much attention when it was written. Last July, FBI headquarters wasn't concentrating on an attack within the U.S. "Nobody was looking domestically," says a recently retired FBI official. "We didn't think they had the people to mount an operation here."

That was the third huge mistake — and a somewhat baffling conclusion to draw, given the evidence at hand. In spring of 2001, Ahmed Ressam, the "millennium bomber," was on trial in Los Angeles, charged with being part of a plot to bomb Los Angeles International Airport and other locations at the end of 1999. In her press conference last week, Rice conceded that in 2001 the FBI "was involved in a number of investigations of potential al-Qaeda personnel operating in the United States."

But investigators had some reasons for being preoccupied with attacks and threats outside the U.S. Al-Qaeda's most notorious blows against American interests had taken place in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam, the sites of the 1998 embassy bombings, and in Yemen, where the U.S.S. Cole was bombed in October 2000. And in the first half of last year, the CSG monitored information suggesting the likelihood of another attack overseas. In June 2001, the State Department issued a worldwide caution warning American citizens of possible attacks. That month, says a recently retired senior FBI official, "we were constantly worried that something was going to happen. Our best guesstimate was something in Southeast Asia." A French investigator involved in al-Qaeda cases confirms the thought. "The prevailing logic from around 1998," he says, "was that al-Qaeda and bin Laden had very openly designated America as its prime target — but it was a target that it preferred to attack outside the U.S."

By July the level of noise about terrorism from intelligence sources around the world was deafening. The CSG, then chaired by Richard Clarke, a Clinton Administration holdover who was consumed with terrorist threats to the point of obsession, was meeting almost every day. A specific threat was received on the life of Bush, who was due to visit Genoa, Italy, for a G-8 summit that month. Roland Jacquard, a leading French expert on terrorism, says that when Russian and Western intelligence agencies compared notes before the summit, they were stunned to find they all had information indicating that a strike was in the offing. When the Genoa summit passed without incident, says a French official, attention turned to the possibility of attacks on U.S. bases in Belgium and Turkey. Then, at the end of July, Djamel Beghal, a Franco-Algerian al-Qaeda associate, was picked up in Dubai on his way from Afghanistan back to Europe. Beghal started talking and implicated a network of al-Qaeda operatives in Europe, who, he said, were planning to blow up the American embassy in Paris. (Beghal, who has since been extradited to France, has said his confession was coerced.) "We shared everything we knew with the Americans," says a French justice official.

They may have shared too much. At least in France, investigators now acknowledge that al-Qaeda may have been involved in a massive feint to Europe while the real attack was always planned for the U.S. "People were convinced that Europe remained the theater for Islamic terrorists," says Jacquard. "It's anyone's guess whether that was a technique to get people looking in the wrong place. But that's what happened."

By the beginning of August, the President had made his request for a briefing on domestic threats. One of them was about to be uncovered. And therein lay the fourth mistake. On Aug. 16, Moussaoui was arrested in Minnesota for an immigration violation, just a day after the staff at the flight school where he was training told the FBI of their suspicions about him. The Minnesotans weren't alone; when American officials checked with their French counterparts, they discovered that Moussaoui had long been suspected of mixing in extremist circles. (The Zelig of modern terrorism, Moussaoui has been associated with al-Qaeda networks everywhere from London to Malaysia.) The FBI started urgently investigating Moussaoui's past; agents in Minneapolis sought a national-security warrant to search his computer files but were turned down by lawyers at FBI headquarters who said they didn't have sufficient evidence that he belonged to a terrorist group. Immediately after Moussaoui's arrest, agents twice visited the Airman Flight School in Norman, Okla., where he had studied before heading to Minnesota; two of the Sept. 11 hijackers had visited Norman in July 2000. The FBI did inform the CIA of Moussaoui's arrest, and the CIA ran checks on him while asking foreign intelligence services for information. But neither the FBI nor the CIA ever informed the counterterrorism group in the White House. "Do you think," says a White House antiterrorism official, "that if Dick Clarke had known that the FBI had in custody a foreigner who couldn't speak English, who was trying to fly a plane in midair, he wouldn't have done something?"

Since at least two of the four failures — those involving Moussaoui and the Phoenix memo — can be laid at the door of the FBI, the bureau is feeling the heat. "The FBI has a long pattern of not sharing information with others," says a former Clinton Administration official. "Now it's not even sharing the information with itself." Mueller, who knew about the Phoenix memo shortly after Sept. 11, plainly did not anticipate the criticism it would engender. Since it became public, officials have defensively pointed out that if the bureau had tried to track down all Muslim flight-school attendees, it would have been accused of racial profiling. White House officials defend Mueller; he is "tenacious about changing things," says one, who admits, "You can't change a culture that's 60 years in the making overnight." But on Capitol Hill the bureau is running out of friends. "I have no doubt that the FBI needs reform," said Senate Republican leader Trent Lott last week.

Yet when the blame gets assigned, as it will now that a joint congressional investigation into Sept. 11 is getting down to work, the FBI won't monopolize it. The ugly truth is that nine months after huge weaknesses in the national security system were revealed, they remain unaddressed. In Washington, says a senior Clinton Administration official, "information just moves through stovepipes," never getting pooled by different agencies until it is too late. The intelligence services were built to fight the cold war, not an enemy that flits from Afghan caves to apartments in London. The division between domestic and international security made sense when the former was concerned with what criminals did and the latter with foreign countries. But some criminals are now as powerful as countries, and some countries are run by criminals.

Nine months ago, the appointment of Tom Ridge as Homeland Security czar was billed as the shake-up Washington needed. So far, he has been more of a mild foot stamp than an earthquake. Instead of real reform, the Administration has resorted to its usual mode: attempting to control warring satrapies from the White House. The remarkable aspect of last week's events in Washington was the unintended revelation that Rice is the true manager of counterterrorism policy. In the past, the National Security Council got into trouble when it adopted an operational role rather than one of analysis (think Oliver North), and for Bush this identification of one of his closest advisers with the operational failures of counterterrorism policy could yet be politically troubling.

Among his supporters, however, the President still rides high. Bush's simple, passionate argument — that he would never have sat idly if he had known what was coming on Sept. 11 — helped stiffen spines. Republicans pointed out that members of congressional intelligence committees get the same information the President receives in his PDB and yet had not made a fuss about the Aug. 6 briefing. That claim was disputed; Tom Daschle, the Democrat's leader in the Senate, insisted the Senate and the Administration did not have "identical information" about al-Qaeda threats.

In a sense, the spat over who got what version of which memo epitomizes Washington at its worst. The capital at its best would appreciate that the most important question isn't what Bush (or anyone else) knew before Sept. 11; it is what the Administration and Congress have and have not done to fix a broken system. But November and the midterm elections, you may have noticed, are only six months away. Washington is reverting to form.

— Reported by Massimo Calabresi, James Carney, Michael Duffy, Elaine Shannon, Douglas Waller and Michael Weisskopf/Washington, David Schwartz/ Phoenix, Bruce Crumley/Paris and J.F.O. McAllister/London

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