Scrutiny for agencies over missed chances

WASHINGTON - Beginning in early August, intelligence intercepts from Yemen contained "bits and pieces" of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab's whereabouts, his plans and what he was telling people about his plans, a senior administration official said Thursday.

"At first blush, not all these things appear to be related" to the 23-year-old Nigerian and the attempt to bomb Northwest Airlines Flight 253, the official said, "but we believe they were."

The intercepts are but one example of chances missed by U.S. intelligence and counterterrorism agencies to identify the potential threat in the weeks before the thwarted Christmas Day bombing on a Detroit-bound jet.

Now, in pinpointing government agencies that failed to share or highlight potentially relevant information about Abdulmutallab, agencies under particular scrutiny include the Central Intelligence Agency, the State Department and the National Security Agency, which is in charge of electronic intercepts.

Each had pieces of the puzzle, none of which was considered overly worrisome or immediately actionable - absent the other pieces. The National Counterterrorism Center, created after the Sept. 11 attacks to connect the dots governmentwide, didn't do so. "The right information did not get to the right people," a senior intelligence official said.

Among the failures that officials initially cited, no agency checked to find out whether Abdulmutallab had a valid visa to enter the United States after his father appeared at the U.S. Embassy in Nigeria last month expressing concerns about his son's disappearance and associations in Yemen.

While electronic intercepts from Yemen indicated an unnamed Nigerian was being groomed for an al-Qaida mission, and other communications spoke of a terrorist attack during Christmas, none of that information was flagged in a way that would have linked it to the father's report.