January 2000, Khalid al-Mihdhar obtained a visa to enter the United States. Two days earlier, he had been the subject of a joint CIA-FBI meeting. A CIA analyst present knew that Mihdhar had connections to suspected terrorists, but “as a CIA analyst, he was not authorized to answer FBI questions regarding CIA information.” When, later that summer, the FBI grew suspicious of Mihdhar, internal divisions at the Bureau hampered efforts to locate him, and an interested “criminal” FBI agent assigned to the case of the USS Cole bombing was erroneously told that since he was not an “intelligence” FBI
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