Kenneth Williams: Man of the Memo

Sunday, May. 19, 2002 By DAVID SCHWARTZ, ELAINE SHANNON AND MICHAEL WEISSKOPF

Not denying the charges: FBI Director Mueller

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Agents in the field have a nickname for FBI headquarters: "the black hole." And it was into that black hole that Phoenix, Az., agent Kenneth J. Williams last July sent a memo on the danger of al-Qaeda targeting civilian aviation — a memo which sat there unheeded until after September 11. Williams, 42, spent 11 of his 12 years as an agent in the FBI joint terrorism task force known as Squad 16, and he is its most experienced member. And it may have been that experience that led him to conjecture, in his memo, that the activities of suspected al-Qaeda associates he'd monitored at an Arizona flight-training school could fit into a broader pattern.

In the wake of Sept. 11, a different sort of man might have gone public with his memo, holding I-told-you-so press conferences or landing a quick book deal. Not Ken Williams. He simply went back to work, harder than ever, and has steadfastly refused to talk to the press even since the existence of his report was revealed.

In the classified memo he sent to headquarters last July, Williams described his investigation into a number of Arab men suspected of having al-Qaeda connections. A few of them had been attending Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Prescott, Az. According to FBI headquarters officials, Williams's memo posited the theory that Osama bin-Laden's followers might try to infiltrate the international civil aviation industry as pilots, security guards or maintenance personnel. He based this theory not on the testimony of any informant, but on the suspicion that what he had observed in Arizona might form part of a larger pattern, and recommended a national investigation. "Phoenix believes that the FBI should accumulate a listing of civil aviation universities/colleges around the country," Williams wrote. "FBI field offices with these types of schools in their area should establish appropriate liaison. FBI HQ should discuss this matter with other elements of the U.S. intelligence community and task the community for any information that supports Phoenix's suspicions." He also suggested getting visa information on Middle Eastern flight school students.

There were certainly precedents for Williams's suspicion that terrorists would study flying in the U.S. order to infiltrate or attack airports or airplanes — or even to turn airplanes into weapons. The Libyans charged in the Pan Am 103 bombing, for example, had been trained in ground aviation operations at an FAA aviation facility in Oklahoma.

Abdul Hakim Murad, co-conspirator of 1993 World Trade Center bomber Ramzi Yousef, was taught to fly at the Alpha Tango school in Albany, N.Y. Murad told agents from the Joint Terrorism Task Force in New York that he had once considered flying an airplane into a building.

And then there was the report of a group of Algerian terrorists who had planned to crash a plane they'd hijacked into Paris's Eiffel tower in 1994, but were stopped by French commandos storming the plane during a refueling stop in Marseilles.

Williams's memo went to the unit chiefs and analysts in the units tracking radical fundamentalists and the bin-Laden organization at the Counter-Terrorism Division at FBI headquarters, to an analytical shop that worked for the operational unit, the counter-terrorism section at the New York field office, which had the most experience with Al Qaeda investigations, and also to a second field office investigating one of the men mentioned in the memo. But it went unheeded. FBI officials won't say exactly which HQ analysts got the Phoenix memo, but contend they are excellent analysts and are still on the job. Others in the FBI, however, have never given the analysts much respect.

Prior to 9/11, says a retired agent with long headquarters experience, "We had a pathetic level of analytical support where they promoted clerks and secretaries to analytical positions without requiring any kind of training or advance degrees. They didn't know what the hell they were looking at, and they didn't have the understanding to know whether something was a good idea."

After Sept. 11, Williams became the case agent for PENTTBOM, responsible for coordinating the FBI's response to the investigation in Arizona. His job included reviewing leads from in the Phoenix office from other FBI offices as well as from state, federal and local law enforcement agencies, other intelligence agencies and the public. He would then assign leads to agents for follow-up. He personally headed up an investigation that led to the arrest and conviction of Faisal al-Salmi, a Saudi Arabian pilot, who was sentenced to six months in prison for lying to the FBI about his link to Hani Hanjour, one of the hijackers of American Airlines flight 77 that crashed into the Pentagon.

In the al-Salmi trial transcript, Williams related that there were "a couple of thousand" leads related to the investigation in Arizona. He said that the Flight 77 hijackers Hani Hanjour and Nawaf al-Hazmi were almost immediately tied with Arizona following Sept. 11. At the trial, he explained his threshold for evidence, testifying that no lead was considered insignificant. "It's been my past experience that the most smallest bit of information that comes in could turn out later on to be the most important piece of the investigation." He personally took the freshest leads and worked them with his Arabic-speaking partner, George Piro, testifying that, from Sept. 11, he usually arrived at work by 5 a.m. and worked an average of 16- to 18-hour days and didn't take a breather until Thanksgiving Day. He was present for most of a 10-hour interview with Al Salmi, switching off questions with Piro and then turning things over to a forensic interrogator. That interview would be at the heart of the government's case against al-Salmi. At the end of the interrogation, when al-Salmi defiantly told Williams that there was nothing that he or the U.S. could do to him, the agent said that he replied in a frank but business-like way. "I told him that I believed that he was lying to the FBI concerning his knowledge of Hani Hanjour, and that we would be meeting with the United States Attorney's Office concerning this matter."

Williams, says an FBI official in Washington, is "a seasoned counter-terrorism agent with a highly successful career. He did everything right." The unit chiefs who received his memo and didn't send it up the line are no longer in charge of those units, for a variety of reasons.