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<DIV><FONT size=4>From:<EM> NY Times</EM></FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT size=4></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV>
<DIV class=timestamp>January 17, 2006</DIV>
<DIV class=kicker></DIV>
<H1><NYT_HEADLINE type=" " version="1.0">Spy Agency Data After Sept. 11 Led
F.B.I. to Dead Ends </NYT_HEADLINE></H1><NYT_BYLINE type=" "
version="1.0"></NYT_BYLINE>
<DIV class=byline>By LOWELL BERGMAN, ERIC LICHTBLAU, SCOTT SHANE and DON VAN
NATTA Jr.</DIV><NYT_TEXT></NYT_TEXT>
<DIV id=articleBody>
<P>WASHINGTON, Jan. 16 - In the anxious months after the Sept. 11 attacks, the
National Security Agency began sending a steady stream of telephone numbers,
e-mail addresses and names to the F.B.I. in search of terrorists. The stream
soon became a flood, requiring hundreds of agents to check out thousands of tips
a month.</P>
<P>But virtually all of them, current and former officials say, led to dead ends
or innocent Americans.</P>
<P>F.B.I. officials repeatedly complained to the spy agency that the unfiltered
information was swamping investigators. The spy agency was collecting much of
the data by eavesdropping on some Americans' international communications and
conducting computer searches of phone and Internet traffic. Some F.B.I.
officials and prosecutors also thought the checks, which sometimes involved
interviews by agents, were pointless intrusions on Americans' privacy. </P>
<P>As the bureau was running down those leads, its director, <A
title="More articles about Robert S. Mueller III."
href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/m/robert_s_iii_mueller/index.html?inline=nyt-per">Robert
S. Mueller III</A>, raised concerns about the legal rationale for a program of
eavesdropping without warrants, one government official said. Mr. Mueller asked
senior administration officials about "whether the program had a proper legal
foundation," but deferred to Justice Department legal opinions, the official
said. </P>
<P>President Bush has characterized the eavesdropping program as a "vital tool"
against terrorism; Vice President <A title="More articles about Dick Cheney."
href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/c/dick_cheney/index.html?inline=nyt-per">Dick
Cheney</A> has said it has saved "thousands of lives." </P>
<P>But the results of the program look very different to some officials charged
with tracking terrorism in the United States. More than a dozen current and
former law enforcement and counterterrorism officials, including some in the
small circle who knew of the secret program and how it played out at the F.B.I.,
said the torrent of tips led them to few potential terrorists inside the country
they did not know of from other sources and diverted agents from
counterterrorism work they viewed as more productive.</P>
<P>"We'd chase a number, find it's a schoolteacher with no indication they've
ever been involved in international terrorism - case closed," said one former
F.B.I. official, who was aware of the program and the data it generated for the
bureau. "After you get a thousand numbers and not one is turning up anything,
you get some frustration."</P>
<P>Intelligence officials disagree with any characterization of the program's
results as modest, said Judith A. Emmel, a spokeswoman for the office of the
director of national intelligence. Ms. Emmel cited a statement at a briefing
last month by Gen. Michael V. Hayden, the country's second-ranking intelligence
official and the director of the N.S.A. when the program was started.</P>
<P>"I can say unequivocally that we have gotten information through this program
that would not otherwise have been available," General Hayden said. The White
House and the F.B.I. declined to comment on the program or its results.</P>
<P>The differing views of the value of the N.S.A.'s foray into
intelligence-gathering in the United States may reflect both bureaucratic
rivalry and a culture clash. The N.S.A., an intelligence agency, routinely
collects huge amounts of data from across the globe that may yield only tiny
nuggets of useful information; the F.B.I., while charged with fighting
terrorism, retains the traditions of a law enforcement agency more focused on
solving crimes.</P>
<P>"It isn't at all surprising to me that people not accustomed to doing this
would say, 'Boy, this is an awful lot of work to get a tiny bit of information,'
" said Adm. Bobby R. Inman, a former N.S.A. director. "But the rejoinder to that
is, Have you got anything better?"</P>
<P>Several of the law enforcement officials acknowledged that they might not
know of arrests or intelligence activities overseas that grew out of the
domestic spying program. And because the program was a closely guarded secret,
its role in specific cases may have been disguised or hidden even from key
investigators.</P>
<P>Still, the comments on the N.S.A. program from the law enforcement and
counterterrorism officials, many of them high level, are the first indication
that the program was viewed with skepticism by key figures at the Federal Bureau
of Investigation, the agency responsible for disrupting plots and investigating
terrorism on American soil.</P>
<P>All the officials spoke on condition of anonymity because the program is
classified. It is coming under scrutiny next month in hearings on Capitol Hill,
which were planned after members of Congress raised questions about the legality
of the eavesdropping. The program was disclosed in December by The New York
Times.</P>
<P>The law enforcement and counterterrorism officials said the program had
uncovered no active Qaeda networks inside the United States planning attacks.
"There were no imminent plots - not inside the United States," the former F.B.I.
official said. </P>
<P>Some of the officials said the eavesdropping program might have helped
uncover people with ties to Al Qaeda in Albany; Portland, Ore.; and Minneapolis.
Some of the activities involved recruitment, training or fund-raising. </P>
<P>But, along with several British counterterrorism officials, some of the
officials questioned assertions by the Bush administration that the program was
the key to uncovering a plot to detonate fertilizer bombs in London in 2004. The
F.B.I. and other law enforcement officials also expressed doubts about the
importance of the program's role in another case named by administration
officials as a success in the fight against terrorism, an aborted scheme to
topple the Brooklyn Bridge with a blow torch. </P>
<P>Some officials said that in both cases, they had already learned of the plans
through interrogation of prisoners or other means. </P>
<P>Immediately after the Sept. 11 attacks, the Bush administration pressed the
nation's intelligence agencies and the F.B.I. to move urgently to thwart any
more plots. The N.S.A., whose mission is to spy overseas, began monitoring the
international e-mail messages and phone calls of people inside the United States
who were linked, even indirectly, to suspected Qaeda figures.</P>
<P>Under a presidential order, the agency conducted the domestic eavesdropping
without seeking the warrants ordinarily required from the secret Foreign
Intelligence Surveillance Court, which handles national security matters. The
administration has defended the legality of the program, pointing to what it
says is the president's inherent constitutional power to defend the country and
to legislation passed by Congress after the Sept. 11 attacks.</P>
<P>Administration officials told Mr. Mueller, the F.B.I. director, of the
eavesdropping program, and his agency was enlisted to run down leads from it,
several current and former officials said. </P>
<P>While he and some bureau officials discussed the fact that the program
bypassed the intelligence surveillance court, Mr. Mueller expressed no concerns
about that to them, those officials said. But another government official said
Mr. Mueller had questioned the administration about the legal authority for the
program.</P>
<P>Officials who were briefed on the N.S.A. program said the agency collected
much of the data passed on to the F.B.I. as tips by tracing phone numbers in the
United States called by suspects overseas, and then by following the domestic
numbers to other numbers called. In other cases, lists of phone numbers appeared
to result from the agency's computerized scanning of communications coming into
and going out of the country for names and keywords that might be of interest.
The deliberate blurring of the source of the tips caused some frustration among
those who had to follow up. </P>
<P>F.B.I. field agents, who were not told of the domestic surveillance programs,
complained that they often were given no information about why names or numbers
had come under suspicion. A former senior prosecutor who was familiar with the
eavesdropping programs said intelligence officials turning over the tips "would
always say that we had information whose source we can't share, but it indicates
that this person has been communicating with a suspected Qaeda operative." He
said, "I would always wonder, what does 'suspected' mean?"</P>
<P>"The information was so thin," he said, "and the connections were so remote,
that they never led to anything, and I never heard any follow-up."</P>
<P>In response to the F.B.I. complaints, the N.S.A. eventually began ranking its
tips on a three-point scale, with 3 being the highest priority and 1 the lowest,
the officials said. Some tips were considered so hot that they were carried by
hand to top F.B.I. officials. But in bureau field offices, the N.S.A. material
continued to be viewed as unproductive, prompting agents to joke that a new
bunch of tips meant more "calls to Pizza Hut," one official, who supervised
field agents, said.</P>
<P>The views of some bureau officials about the value of the N.S.A.'s domestic
surveillance offers a revealing glimpse of the difficulties law enforcement and
intelligence agencies have had cooperating since Sept. 11. </P>
<P>The N.S.A., criticized by the national Sept. 11 commission for its "avoidance
of anything domestic" before the attacks, moved aggressively into the domestic
realm after them. But the legal debate over its warrantless eavesdropping has
embroiled the agency in just the kind of controversy its secretive managers
abhor. The F.B.I., meanwhile, has struggled over the last four years to expand
its traditional mission of criminal investigation to meet the larger menace of
terrorism. </P>
<P>Admiral Inman, the former N.S.A. director and deputy director of C.I.A., said
the F.B.I. complaints about thousands of dead-end leads revealed a chasm between
very different disciplines. Signals intelligence, the technical term for
N.S.A.'s communications intercepts, rarely produces "the complete information
you're going to get from a document or a witness" in a traditional F.B.I.
investigation, he said.</P>
<P>Some F.B.I. officials said they were uncomfortable with the expanded domestic
role played by the N.S.A. and other intelligence agencies, saying most
intelligence officers lacked the training needed to safeguard Americans' privacy
and civil rights. They said some protections had to be waived temporarily in the
months after Sept. 11 to detect a feared second wave of attacks, but they
questioned whether emergency procedures like the eavesdropping should become
permanent.</P>
<P>That discomfort may explain why some F.B.I. officials may seek to minimize
the benefits of the N.S.A. program or distance themselves from the agency. "This
wasn't our program," an F.B.I. official said. "It's not our mess, and we're not
going to clean it up."</P>
<P>The N.S.A.'s legal authority for collecting the information it passed to the
F.B.I. is uncertain. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act requires a
warrant for the use of so-called pen register equipment that records American
phone numbers, even if the contents of the calls are not intercepted. But
officials with knowledge of the program said no warrants were sought to collect
the numbers, and it is unclear whether the secret executive order signed by Mr.
President Bush in 2002 to authorize eavesdropping without warrants also covered
the collection of phone numbers and e-mail addresses.</P>
<P>Aside from the director, F.B.I. officials did not question the legal status
of the tips, assuming that N.S.A. lawyers had approved. They were more concerned
about the quality and quantity of the material, which produced "mountains of
paperwork" often more like raw data than conventional investigative leads.</P>
<P>"It affected the F.B.I. in the sense that they had to devote so many
resources to tracking every single one of these leads, and, in my experience,
they were all dry leads," the former senior prosecutor said. "A trained
investigator never would have devoted the resources to take those leads to the
next level, but after 9/11, you had to."</P>
<P>By the administration's account, the N.S.A. eavesdropping helped lead
investigators to Iyman Faris, an Ohio truck driver and friend of <A
title="More articles about Khalid Shaikh Mohammed"
href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/m/khalid_shaikh_mohammed/index.html?inline=nyt-per">Khalid
Shaikh Mohammed</A>, who is believed to be the mastermind of the Sept. 11
attacks. Mr. Faris spoke of toppling the Brooklyn Bridge by taking a torch to
its suspension cables, but concluded that it would not work. He is now serving a
20-year sentence in a federal prison.</P>
<P>But as in the London fertilizer bomb case, some officials with direct
knowledge of the Faris case dispute that the N.S.A. information played a
significant role. </P>
<P>By contrast, different officials agree that the N.S.A.'s domestic operations
played a role in the arrest of an imam and another man in Albany in August 2004
as part of an F.B.I. counterterrorism sting investigation. The men, Yassin Aref,
35, and Mohammed Hossain, 49, are awaiting trial on charges that they attempted
to engineer the sale of missile launchers to an F.B.I. undercover informant.
</P>
<P>In addition, government officials said the N.S.A. eavesdropping program might
have assisted in the investigations of people with suspected Qaeda ties in
Portland and Minneapolis. In the Minneapolis case, charges of supporting
terrorism were filed in 2004 against Mohammed <A
title="More articles about Abdullah."
href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/a/_abdullah/index.html?inline=nyt-per">Abdullah</A>
Warsame, a Canadian citizen. Six people in the Portland case were convicted of
crimes that included money laundering and conspiracy to wage war against the
United States. </P>
<P>Even senior administration officials with access to classified operations
suggest that drawing a clear link between a particular source and the unmasking
of a potential terrorist is not always possible.</P>
<P>When Michael Chertoff, the homeland security secretary, was asked last week
on "The Charlie Rose Show" whether the N.S.A. wiretapping program was important
in deterring terrorism, he said, "I don't know that it's ever possible to
attribute one strand of intelligence from a particular program." </P>
<P>But Mr. Chertoff added, "I can tell you in general the process of doing
whatever you can do technologically to find out what is being said by a known
terrorist to other people, and who that person is communicating with, that is
without a doubt one of the critical tools we've used time and again."
</P><NYT_AUTHOR_ID></NYT_AUTHOR_ID>
<P id=authorId>William K. Rashbaum contributed reporting from New York for this
article.</P></DIV></DIV></BODY></HTML>