Word: memoed
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Phoenix FBI agent Kenneth Williams sends a memo to two units at FBI headquarters in Washington and to the New York field office describing 10 foreign students at aviation schools who are under investigation for ties to Sunni extremists. Williams theorizes that bin Laden could be systematically sending students to study aviation in the U.S. and recommends that agents compile a list of such schools, establish contacts with them, discuss his theory with the rest of the intelligence community and obtain background information on foreign students applying to flight schools...
...specialists in Washington--one in the radical fundamentalists unit, one in a unit dedicated to bin Laden--analyze the memo and consult two other specialists about the legal implications. On Aug. 7 they decide to close the case and come back to it when they have time...
...Three agents in the New York office read the memo but are not asked to take follow-up action. The terrorism unit in New York knows that bin Laden sent employees to U.S. flight schools in the past but believes he just wanted them to fly his private planes...
...investigation of flight schools might have led to one in Florida where an instructor recalled the odd behavior of 9/11 pilots Mohammed Atta and Marwan al-Shehhi or to a California outfit that expelled al-Hazmi and al-Midhar for lack of flight skills and poor English. Had Williams' memo been sent to all FBI field offices, it could have set off alarms at the Minneapolis field office when would-be pilot Zacarias Moussaoui was arrested in August...
...agent Rowley, a TIME Person of the Year in 2002, wrote a memo to FBI headquarters that year accusing the bureau of obstructing measures that might have disrupted the 9/11 attacks. Here she is expressing her personal views, not those...