A report by the Daily Telegraph on Sunday said that Israeli intelligence officials had warned their counterparts in the United States last month that large-scale terrorist attacks on highly visible targets on the American mainland were imminent.
The paper said that two senior experts with Mossad, the Israeli military intelligence service, were sent to Washington in August to alert the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) I to the existence of a cell of as many of 200 terrorists said to be preparing a big operation.
"They [the Israeli delegation] had no specific information about what was being planned but linked the plot to Osama bin Laden and told the Americans that there were strong grounds for suspecting Iraqi involvement," said a senior Israeli security official told the paper.
The CIA has said that it had no hard information that would have led to the prevention of the hijacking, but the FBI said it believed that cells operating within America and totaling at least 50 terrorists were behind last week's devastating hijacks.
America's intelligence agencies are being widely blamed for their failure to predict the attacks, or anything like them, and for not discovering any of the terrorist cells before the hijackings on Tuesday, reports said.
Evidence that a clear Israeli warning was delivered to American authorities, but ignored, would be a further blow to the reputation of the CIA, which is under fire for its failure last week, according to the Telegraph.
An administration official in Washington said: "If this is true then the refusal to take it seriously will mean heads will roll. It is quite credible that the CIA might not heed a Mossad warning: it has a history of being overcautious about Israeli information." – Albawaba.com
© 2001 Al Bawaba (www.albawaba.com)
