FBI Agent's Warnings About Flight Students Went Unheeded Before 9/11

An FBI agent flagged an "inordinate number" of suspicious flight students, guessed their intentions, and made recommendations—but the FBI did none of it. In this series, Newsweek maps the road to 9/11 as it happened 25 years ago, day by day. Yesterday: Field office agents were rebuked for seeking information.

Things work much better when our agencies are communicating HQ to HQ, the CIA said. August 23, 2001: After discovering existing intelligence that no one at the CIA had paid attention to, Margaret Gillespie, the FBI analyst detailed to the bin Laden station at the Counterterrorist Center (CTC), on August 23 requested that Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi be added to the Department of State's watch-list for denying visas to individuals attempting to enter the United States. By now, U.S. Customs and the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) had determined that at least al-Mihdhar was still likely in the United States, and that there was no evidence that al-Hazmi had left. The new flurry of activity prompted FBI headquarters to request that the New York and Los Angeles field offices undertake a search for the men.