WASHINGTON - The FBI has taken much of the criticism for missing clues before the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, with detractors citing warnings from two of its own offices hinting at possible assaults by air. But as Congress opens a high-profile investigation on Tuesday, the blame is shifting from the FBI to the Central Intelligence Agency and the nation's other spy agencies.

In what may be the government's most comprehensive investigation of what went wrong on Sept. 11, the Joint Intelligence Committee of the House and Senate will huddle behind closed doors and lawmakers will begin to scrutinize how the intelligence community failed to detect the al-Qaida terrorism plans.

While the attacks exposed a catastrophic failure of specific intelligence, the CIA had largely managed to escape public criticism, until news reports over the weekend disclosed that the CIA discovered in early 2001 that Khalid Almihdhar, who later became one of the Sept. 11 hijackers, was linked to a suspect in the bombing of the USS Cole.

There are conflicting reports as to whether the CIA notified other agencies in a timely manner that Almihdhar might be dangerous. But it is clear that Almihdhar's name - along with that of Almihdhar's associate, Nawaf Alhazmi, who also became a hijacker - was not put on a nationwide terrorist watch list until last August, only weeks before the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

Intelligence experts said such revelations mean the entire U.S. intelligence community will in effect be on trial as the panel launches a probe that will include both closed and public hearings and could last for weeks.

Melvin Goodman, a former CIA analyst and professor of international studies at the National War College, said the FBI is clearly not the only agency to deserve blame for falling down on the job. It is the CIA and not the FBI, after all, that is responsible for gathering clandestine information overseas.

"The FBI is taking the brunt of the criticism, but at least they're stepping up to it," said Goodman. "I don't see anyone at the CIA standing up and saying `We were part of the problem, too.' "

Goodman added: "The FBI is going to look the worst. The CIA performed no better."

Wayne Madsen, a former communications specialist for the National Security Agency, said the CIA, along with other intelligence agencies such as the National Security Agency, bear responsibility for the intelligence lapses. "I don't understand why [CIA director] George Tenet is still there," he said.

Former CIA Director Stansfield Turner noted that the FBI failed to put together clues that in retrospect appear tantalizing, and said the CIA is bound to find itself in the same situation.

"From what we know in Phoenix and the Zacarias Moussaoui case in Minnesota, clearly there were failures to get that information adequately disseminated and correlated," said Turner, who served as CIA chief in the Carter administration. "It now appears there were even more clues around."

Turner was referring to two now well-known FBI missteps.

A memo from an FBI field agent in Phoenix, urging the bureau to conduct a broader investigation into Middle Eastern men who were taking flight classes, was largely ignored by Washington FBI officials.

Moussaoui, the only person charged in the attacks so far, had been investigated by the FBI's Minneapolis office after he raised suspicions at a flight training school. But FBI headquarters in Washington rejected the Minneapolis office's request for more authority to investigate Moussaoui.

The congressional panel's first session, on Tuesday, will be an organizational meeting, and it will hear its first witness - Coffer Black, director of the CIA's counter-terrorism center - Thursday afternoon.

Separately, the Senate Judiciary Committee will hear Thursday from FBI Director Robert Mueller and Coleen Rowley, the Minneapolis agent who wrote Mueller a scathing letter blaming the FBI for rebuffing the field office's request in the Moussaoui case.

President Bush weighed into the controversy Monday, acknowledging a failure in U.S. intelligence before the attacks. He said his administration is committed to closing the gaps to prevent future strikes.

"In this new war against this shadowy enemy, it's very important that we gather as much intelligence as we can," Bush said in a speech in Little Rock, Ark. "We need to know what they're thinking and what they're planning before they do something."

He said the FBI is now emphasizing prevention of future attacks. "So the FBI is changing and they're doing a better job of communicating with the CIA. They're now sharing intelligence," the president said.

The White House declined comment on a report, first published by Newsweek, that the CIA had been tracking Almihdhar and Alhazmi after they attended an al-Qaida meeting in Malaysia in January 2000. The CIA did not prevent the two hijackers from entering the U.S., according to the magazine.

White House spokesman Scott McClellan declined to address the new details. "The Joint Intelligence committees are looking into what information our intelligence and law-enforcement agencies had prior to Sept. 11," he said. "But again, our focus remains on preventing future attacks in America against Americans."

The intelligence committee is coming under criticism from some quarters for being too close to the intelligence community that it is now investigating. For that reason, some members of Congress believe that intelligence lapses should be investigated by an independent commission.

"They're going to cover up on the intelligence side," said Madsen, the former NSA communications specialist.

Because many of the committee's sessions will be closed, Madsen said the public will not know what questions the lawmakers are asking and will not get a clear picture of what went wrong on Sept. 11.

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(Chicago Tribune correspondents Jill Zuckman and Jeff Zeleny contributed to this report.)

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(c) 2002, Chicago Tribune.

Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Information Services.

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