WASHINGTON – The FBI has located 23 known terrorists – including some linked to al Qaeda – inside the United States since November, a key FBI terror-tracking agent told The Post yesterday.
“They got into the United States undetected,” said Steve McCraw, head of the bureau’s Foreign Terrorist Tracking Network.
The terrorists’ names, locations and other information were given to the FBI’s terrorism task force as soon as possible.
McCraw wouldn’t say if the suspects were under 24-hour surveillance, out of the country, or detained on immigration or material-witness charges.
“The whole point of this is precaution,” he said. “When we provide that information to the FBI [terrorism task force], we’ve plugged that gap.”
McCraw said his team found the terrorists using computer systems from the FBI and other agencies, as well as a variety of commercial data services.
Word of the infiltration of other terrorists came as Congress began hearings – yesterday’s were closed – into what the government knew before Sept. 11.
“In terms of whether the FBI and CIA communicated properly, I think it’s clear that they weren’t, and now we’re addressing that issue,” President Bush said at the National Security Agency, adding he saw no evidence the attacks could have been stopped.
Also yesterday, David Frasca, the mid-level FBI agent blamed for ignoring terror warnings, testified for two hours behind closed doors that he never saw a field agent’s July memo warning of Arabs training at flight schools until after the Sept. 11 tragedy.
Frasca – head of the FBI’s Radical Fundamentalist Unit – insisted he didn’t learn about the Phoenix memo until October, when it was shared with him by Justice Department auditors, sources told The Post.
Critics of the FBI have asked why the warning from the agency’s Phoenix office, delivered by special agent Kenneth Williams in a July 10 memo, did not ring alarm bells at the bureau’s D.C. headquarters.
Williams’ eight-page memo said that Osama bin Laden had sent terrorists to the United States to learn how to fly commercial airliners at American flight schools.
Frasca’s startling story – told before the Senate Judiciary Committee in secret – contradicts reports that he was the Washington lawman who ignored fellow FBI agents’ concerns about possible terrorists.
It was also revealed yesterday that Justice Department Inspector General Glenn Fine was aware of possible Sept. 11 bungles at intelligence agencies as early as October – despite top government officials’ claims that nothing could have been done to prevent the attacks.