Intelligence analyst: CIA playing game with hijackers

[KJF]

I've just read the new book by John Hughes-Wilson "The Puppet Masters: Spise, Traitors and the Real Forces Behind World Events". Hughes-Wilson was a colonel in British intelligence for several decades and sometimes appears on the BBC.

In a previous book, "Military Intelligence Blunders and Coverups", he expressed some support for a sort-of sub-LIPOP theory: that the US intelligence community knew more about the hijackers than they are letting on, but that the hijackers somehow got away from them. Basically, he can't believe a bunch of known terrorists could swan about the US acting suspiciously for so long.

It seems that he hasn't really changed his mind; while he goes through the interagency problems in US intelligence, he says that "the CIA had obviously known some of the hijackers but appeared to be playing its own game." (p. 404) This is obviously at variance with the official position that the CIA just lost the hijackers and then didn't bother searching for them, even knew it knew one of them had come to the US and another had a US visa.

According to author Lawrence Wright, this theory has some supporters in the FBI. He says:
"There are people in the F.B.I. who believed that the C.I.A. had hoped to recruit, as informers, the two Al Qaeda cell members who arrived in America in 2000. It had nobody inside the Al Qaeda organization, and here were two members of the inner circle, in America."
http://www.newyorker.com/online/content/articles/060710on_onlineonly01

It's hard to say for sure, but my feeling is that Hughes-Wilson and the suspicious FBI agents are not that far from the truth.