The Baltimore Sun June 20, 2002
NSA read warnings for Sept. 11 a day later
By Laura Sullivan and Ariel Sabar
WASHINGTON - The National Security Agency intercepted two brief messages on Sept. 10 that warned that some kind of event would happen the next day, but the agency did not translate the messages until Sept. 12, a senior intelligence official said yesterday.
The messages said in Arabic: "The match begins tomorrow," and "Tomorrow is zero" day. They were detected by the Fort Meade spy agency as its satellites and computers eavesdropped on phone calls and electronic messages worldwide.
Intelligence officials cautioned, however, that the messages were so vague that even if the NSA had translated them before the attacks Sept. 11, authorities would not have been able to prevent the terrorist strikes. The messages, they said, offered no clues as to the site, time or nature of any attack.
The messages were among a flood of information that pours into the agency, much of which amounts to a haze of meaningless communications, the senior intelligence official said.
"'The match begins tomorrow' certainly can imply a lot of things," the official said. "Were these messages actionable? No. We often get messages like these. But without other pieces of information, we can't put it together."
The intercepted messages were the subject of closed-door testimony yesterday before the House and Senate intelligence committees, which are jointly investigating the attacks.
Though the FBI and CIA have absorbed most of the criticism for U.S. intelligence lapses, congressional reports have asserted that budget cuts and bureaucratic obstacles had for years damaged the NSA's ability to fight terrorism.
An intelligence official said yesterday that the NSA did not know the source of the messages at the time of the translation and that even now, officials are "not 100 percent" sure of the speaker's identity. The messages, officials said, were translated a day after the attacks as part of the normal analysis of intercepted communications.
"There's all kinds of messages NSA gets every day that are suspicious or that could mean something," said James Bamford, the author of two books on the spy agency. "I think it's a gun, but not necessarily a smoking gun."
Tim Brown, a senior analyst at Globalsecurity.org, a Washington-based police group, suggested that for the agency to try to pinpoint certain vague messages as being particularly significant is "like drinking water through a fire hydrant."
"The volume they get is horrendous," he said. "NSA has no problem collecting information. The problem is translating and analyzing it with enough time to use it."
John M. McConnell, the NSA's director from 1992 to 1996, said the agency can intercept and translate foreign communications in minutes - if focused on a specific target.
Otherwise, he said, the likelihood of isolating a sketchy if potentially serious threat from all the data the agency collects is "one in a million, one in 10 million, one in 100 million."
Over the past two years and especially since the attacks, Congress has increased the agency's budget to update its computers, hire analysts and train new linguists - key elements in the agency's work that were especially damaged by budget cuts after the Cold War.
"Of course NSA needs more resources," said Sen. Barbara A. Mikulski, a Maryland Democrat on the Intelligence Committee. "They are our ears on the world. That's why Congress has already increased its budget, and we need to do more."
Sun staff writer Tom Bowman contributed to this article.
Copyright © 2002, The Baltimore Sun
