20th Annaversary of the fairytale of Big Lies

[Peter Lemkin]

Blee’s Origin Story
To begin unraveling the details of the CIA’s actions in the months and years leading up to the 9/11 attacks, it is worth delving into Richard Blee’s past. Though there is very little publicly known, he seems to have joined the Agency as something of a legacy admission. Mark Rossini, an FBI agent who worked in Alec Station while Blee was its chief, described Blee as someone who “came from a legacy family in the Agency, and clearly he carried that gravitas.”[30]
David Blee [Source: stanfordmag.org]
His father, David Blee, was a legendary officer within the agency. Along with CIA Director William Colby, Blee the elder was responsible for the ouster of the storied and wildly paranoid counterintelligence chief James Angleton in 1974. Also among Blee’s successes was the defection of Joseph Stalin’s daughter, Svetlana Alliluyeva while Blee was New Delhi Chief of Station. In 1971, he was promoted to Soviet Bureau chief. By the time David Blee retired in 1985, he had Angleton’s old job as the head of counterintelligence.[31]
Richard Blee’s early activities in the agency are largely absent from the public record. We know that, by the time he was 26, he was active in the Central African Republic before being posted to Niger, and later to Algeria. By the mid-1990s, Blee was assigned to a task force that was working to destabilize the government of Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein.[32]
Richard Blee center with Ahmad Shah Massoud and CIA agent David Tyson in the Panjshir Valley in October 1999. [Source: twitter.com]
Immediately prior to becoming Alec Station chief in 1999, Blee was a “fast-track executive assistant from the seventh floor,” a position which Steve Coll describes as “a traditional breeding ground of CIA leadership.”[33] According to John Duffy and Ray Nowosielski, George Tenet brought Blee with him to the seventh floor when he was appointed CIA Director.[34]
7th floor in CIA’s Langley headquarters. [Source: sott.net]
Tenet apparently continued to find Blee useful. By mid-1999, he had appointed Blee to head Alec Station, formally known as the Bin Laden Issue Station, the agency’s hub for everything related to al-Qaeda.[35] While at Alec Station, Blee and Tenet continued to have a close relationship; FBI agent Mark Rossini described Blee as “a guy who clearly had direct communication to George.”[36]
Blee and Black at Alec Station
By the time of his appointment to Alec Station in 1999, Blee had begun to take an interest in Central Asia. As U.S. firms invested billions in Central Asian hydrocarbons, U.S. military and intelligence penetration of the region continued apace.
George Tenet had appointed Cofer Black to run the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center at around the time that Blee was appointed to run its Alec Station component.[37] Together, Blee and Black worked to create secret liaison agreements between the government of Uzbekistan and the CIA.[38]
Cofer Black [Source: wikipedia.org]
These were later expanded to include the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan.[39] Blee seems to have been quite keen on expanding the relationship between the CIA and the Northern Alliance, led by Ahmed Shah Massoud. In October of 1999, Blee lobbied for an expanded CIA-Northern Alliance partnership,[40] and he revisited the issue after the USS Cole bombing in October 2000.[41] As Peter Dale Scott and Aaron Good have noted, Massoud’s own opposition to a U.S. invasion may have resulted in his murder two days before the 9/11 attacks.[42]
Ahmed Shah Massoud with Gulbuddin Hekmatyar after signing a peace agreement in late 1990s. [Source: rawa.org]
In the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, expanded U.S. involvement in Central Asia seemed all but a given. Blee himself seems to have been rewarded for his efforts in advocating for increased CIA activity in the region, becoming Kabul Chief of Station.[43] But before returning to his Central Asia focus, Blee took a detour that would implicate him in efforts by many in the CIA and other agencies which, collectively, served to “allow the [9/11] attacks to go forward.”[44]
Who Knew What When?
Detailing the suspicious actions taken by Richard Blee and his subordinates before the 9/11 attacks would fill a book, and in fact Kevin Fenton has written that book. Most notably, Fenton documents an explosive series of events which demonstrates Blee’s role in preventing the activities of key 9/11 plotters from being discovered by the FBI or by senior members of the Clinton and Bush administrations. In particular, Blee’s statements to Condoleezza Rice and Richard Clarke are so out of step with what he knew about the activities of certain key al Qaeda members at the time that, clearly, the most plausible conclusion is that Blee intended to mislead them.
The story begins in January 2000 with Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi in Dubai. Later to become infamous for their alleged role in flying American 77 into the Pentagon, the two were transiting on their way to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, for a summit with other al-Qaeda members. Following a tip received from the NSA, the CIA discovered al-Mihdhar’s passport had a U.S. visa which was set to expire in just a few months, and which he had not yet used.[45]

• Khalid al-Mihdhar [Source: wikipedia.org]
  
• Nawaf al-Hazmi [Source: wikipedia.org]
  

When this information was passed to Alec Station, Doug Miller, an FBI agent assigned to the unit, understood its importance. He drafted a cable to be sent to the Bureau, warning them that al-Mihdhar may soon be visiting the U.S.
This cable was blocked by Blee’s deputy, Tom Wilshire. As Fenton notes, had the FBI been aware that al-Mihdhar planned to enter the U.S. soon, they would have been able to surveil him, not least because he began living with an FBI informant named Abdussattar Shaikh in May of 2000.[46]
Abdussattar Shaikh [Source: historycommons.org]
On March 5, 2000, the Bangkok CIA station, responding to an inquiry from the Malaysia station about al-Mihdhar’s travels, sent a cable which indicated that al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar had traveled to the U.S.[47] Despite claims to the contrary from CIA Director Tenet, this memo was read widely within the agency, including by Blee’s deputy Tom Wilshire on May 15, 2001.[48]
In May 2001, Blee began briefing key members of the Bush administration’s national security team, including National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke, and others. In a meeting on June 28, 2001, Blee told Rice and others that “Osama bin Laden will launch a significant terrorist attack against the U.S. and/or Israeli interests in the coming weeks.”[49]

• Richard Clarke [Source: salon.com]
  
• Condi Rice [Source: wikipedia.org]
  

On July 10, Blee delivered the line he is perhaps most famous for, saying to Rice and Tenet, “there will be significant terrorist attacks against the United States in the coming weeks or months. The attacks will be spectacular.”[50]
Then, beginning on July 5, 2001, Wilshire sent several cables which Richard Blee, among others, received. In a July 23 cable, Wilshire explained that “Khalid Midhar [sic] should be [of] very high interest anyway, given his connection to the [redacted].” At this stage, Wilshire certainly was aware that al-Mihdhar and al-Hazmi were likely already in the U.S.
He had blocked one cable which included this information in January 2000, and in May 2001 he read the March 5, 2000, Bangkok cable detailing al-Hazmi’s and al-Mihdhar’s travel to the U.S.[51] Still, he asked managers at the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center, Blee among them, for permission to pass this and related information to the FBI. Wilshire did not receive this permission, and he did not pass any information on to anyone in a position to surveil or detain either of the men.[52]
When Blee received this information detailing a known al-Qaeda suspect whom Blee’s own subordinates already knew to be inside the U.S., he did not take any steps to relay it to Rice, the FBI, or anyone else in a position to apprehend or surveil al-Mihdhar. At some point in late July, Blee met with CIA Director Tenet and other deputies, relaying to them that, “They’re coming here.”[53] If he did say this, he concealed what he knew very well—that “they” were, in fact, already here.