FBI Informant Spills Guts

- The Last Crusade On the eighth anniversary of 9/11, an FBI informant who infiltrated U.S. terrorist cells, says the FBI missed a chance to stop the al Qaeda plot because they focused more on undercover stings than on the man who would later become known as 9/11 ringleader Mohammed Atta and Adnan el Shukrujumah, one of Atta’s key associates.

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Former undercover operative Elie Assaad, a 36-year-old Catholic native of Lebanon who pretended to be a Muslim extemist, says he spotted and became suspicious of Atta and Shukrujumah in early 2001, when he was sent by the FBI to infiltrate a small mosque in Broward County, Florida. “There was something wrong with these guys,” Assaad told Brian Ross of ABC News. According to Assaad, Gulshair Shukrujumah, Adnan’s father who served as the imam at the radical mosque, invited the undercover FBI operative to meet him at his home, but the FBI told him to stay away. Instead of allowing the meeting, Assad says the FBI assigned him to a sting operation, thereby ending any hope of infiltrating the real al Qaeda terrorists. Former national security official Richard Clarke, now an ABC News consultant, says the case is “yet another example of the way the system broke down prior to 9/11.” “If the system had worked,” Clarke insists, “we might have been able to identify these people before the attacks.” Assaad, who posed as a personal representative of Osama bin Laden, says he’s a “million percent positive” the 9/11 attacks could have been stopped if the FBI had gone after Atta and Shukrujumah. Atta was killed when he piloted American Airlines Flight 11 into the World Trade Center, but Adnan el-Shukrujama remains at large. Shukrujumah remains the most wanted al-Qaeda operative in the western hemisphere. The FBI has labelled him a “one-man terror cell” – - a terrorist trained not only to build radiological weapons and to maintain tactical nukes but also to detonate such devices within major American cities without a logistical backup crew. The U.S. Justice Department has posted a $5 million reward for any information leading to Shukrujumah’s arrest.