"I learned that the Al Qaida Cole attack was not exactly a hugely efficient
operation, and I learned later on that there had been an earlier attempt to take
out the Cole or another American ship that had floundered badly because of poor
Al Qaida training. Because of incidents like that -- you know, overloading a
dinghy that was supposed to go have gone out to the ship and blow it up, so that
the dinghy would sink -- people tended to discount Al Qaida. They said, 'Oh,
they are just a bunch of amateurs." But I'd never thought that. I never believed
that. And the people I was covering didn't think that …

"I had begun to hear rumors about intensified intercepts and tapping of
telephones. But that was just vaguest kind of rumors in the street, indicators …
I remember the weekend before July 4, 2001, in particular, because for some
reason the people who were worried about Al Qaida believed that was the weekend
that there was going to be an attack on the United States or on a major American
target somewhere. It was going to be a large, well-coordinated attack. Because
of the July 4 holiday, this was an ideal opportunistic target and date for Al
Qaida.

My sources also told me at that time that there had been a lot of chatter
overheard -- I didn't know specifically what that meant -- but a lot of talk
about an impending attack at one time or another. And the intelligence community
seemed to believe that at least a part of the attack was going to come on July
4. So I remember that, for a lot of my sources, this was going to be a 'lost'
weekend. Everybody was going to be working; nobody was going to take time off.
And that was bad news for me, because it meant I was also going to be on
stand-by, and I would be working too."

"The people in the counter-terrorism (CT) office were very worried about
attacks here in the United States, and that was, it struck me, another debate in
the intelligence community. Because a lot of intelligence people did not believe
that Al Qaida had the ability to strike within the United States. The CT people
thought they were wrong. But I got the sense at that time that the
counter-terrorism people in the White House were viewed as extremist on these
views.

"Everyone in Washington was very spun-up in the CT world at that time. I
think everybody knew that an attack was coming -- everyone who followed this.
But you know you can only 'cry wolf' within a newspaper or, I imagine, within an
intelligence agency, so many times before people start saying there he goes --
or there she goes -- again!

"Even that weekend, there was lot else going on. There was always a lot
going on at the White House, so to a certain extent, there was that kind of 'cry
wolf' problem. But I got the sense that part of the reason that I was being told
of what was going on was that the people in counter-terrorism were trying to get
the word to the president or the senior officials through the press, because
they were not able to get listened to themselves.

"Sometimes, you wonder about why people tell you things and why people … we
always wonder why people leak things, but that's a very common motivation in
Washington. I remember once when I was a reporter in Egypt, and someone from the agency gave me very good material on terrorism and local Islamic
groups.

"I said, 'Why are you doing this? Why are you giving this to me?' and he
said, 'I just can't get my headquarters to pay attention to me, but I know that
if it's from the New York Times, they're going to give it a good read and ask me
questions about it.' And there's also this genuine concern about how, if
only the president shared the sense of panic and concern that they did, more would be done to try and protect the country."

"This was a case wherein some serious preparations were made in terms of
getting the message out and responding, because at the end of that week, there
was a sigh of relief. As somebody metaphorically put it: 'They uncorked the
White House champagne' that weekend because nothing had happened. We got through the weekend … nothing had happened.

"But I did manage to have a conversation with a source that weekend.
The person told me that there was some concern about an intercept that had been
picked up. The incident that had gotten everyone's attention was a conversation
between two members of Al Qaida. And they had been talking to one another,
supposedly expressing disappointment that the United States had not chosen to
retaliate more seriously against what had happened to the Cole. And one Al Qaida
operative was overheard saying to the other, 'Don't worry; we're planning
something so big now that the U.S. will have to respond.'

"And I was obviously floored by that information. I thought it was a very
good story: (1) the source was impeccable; (2) the information was specific,
tying Al Qaida operatives to, at least, knowledge of the attack on the Cole; and
(3) they were warning that something big was coming, to which the United States
would have to respond. This struck me as a major page one-potential
story."