Alex Station was a CIA unit dedicated to tracking Osama bin Laden, in operation since 1995. John Kiriakou says he served as chief of its counterintelligence branch, though he says he did not have access to the unit’s most closely held files.[1]
Tight security and limited FBI access
Kiriakou says Alex Station kept extremely tight security around its files and, on numerous occasions, limited FBI investigators’ access to information — most significantly regarding future 9/11 hijackers Khaled al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi.[2] He rejects the 9/11 Commission Report’s characterization of the failure to share intelligence about those two men as accidental. As chief of the counterintelligence branch, he says he did not have access to the relevant files himself, and states plainly that the non-cooperation with the FBI was the product of an early, deliberate policy decision rather than an oversight.[1]
The withheld visa and the Malaysia summit
Kiriakou says an Alex Station member, Tom Wilshire, blocked an FBI agent’s effort to notify his superiors that hijacker Khaled al-Mihdhar held a U.S. visa in his passport — and then falsely told the rest of the CIA that the information had in fact been shared with the FBI.[3] Kiriakou says Alex Station also broke CIA protocol by failing to watchlist any of the participants in the Malaysia summit, the meeting at which al-Qaeda devised the September 11 plot.[4]
He attributes these failures to an arrogant belief at the top of Alex Station that the CIA could recruit the future hijackers and turn them into double agents against al-Qaeda, rather than simply informing the FBI so it could arrest them.[5] Asked directly, Kiriakou says he can neither confirm nor deny that Richard Blee was part of Alex Station’s leadership.[6]