French secret services produced nine reports between September 2000 and August 2001 looking at the Al-Qaida threat to the United States, and knew it planned to hijack an aircraft, the French daily Le Monde said on Monday. (Reuters via Ha'aretz).
According to Le Monde:
Hundreds of pages of notes and analyses of the General Directorate for External Security [DGSE, the French agency responsible for military intelligence as well as for strategic information, electronic intelligence, and counterespionage outside the borders of the national territory] show that the Sauudi billionaire Usama Bin Laden and his organization, Al-Qaida, were infiltrated by French spies. According a person close to Pierre Brochand, current director of the DGSE, a cell had been devoted to Ben Laden since 1995. A note of January 5, 2001, transmitted to the chief of the CIA station in Paris provided an alert about "a project to hijack a plane".
The incompetence and mendacity of the Bush administration is limitless.
As Keith Olbermann has said: "It appears now that the operative word in the phrase 'We could not have anticipated' was the word 'we.' . . . During the transition, President Clinton and his national security adviser, Sandy Berger, say they told Bush and his team of the urgency of getting al Qaeda. Three days before President Bush took office, Berger spoke at a passing-the-baton event, which Rice attended."
I'll update as and when I learn more.
UPDATE: According to AP:
Uzbek officials apparently tipped off the French about the plot. Alain Chouet, a former top anti-terrorism official within the DGSE, said that an Afghan warlord from the Uzbek community who was fighting the Taliban at the time had sent men to infiltrate al-Qaida camps — and their information was passed down the chain to Western intelligence officials.
Confirming information in Le Monde, Chouet said such intelligence was likely checked out before it was put into a note. He also said that to the best of his knowledge, "all identified threats, even indirect and minimal ones, were passed in both directions" between the CIA and the CGSE.
hat tip: MKinTN