The CIA had been monitoring a summit of al-Qaeda leaders in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, which began on 5 January. On 8 January three of the summit attendees, Almihdhar, his partner Nawaf Alhazmi and al-Qaeda leader Khallad bin Attash, left for Bangkok, and Alec Station received a cable from the field reporting this. The CIA claims that its officers in Bangkok could not pick up the surveillance at the airport and that the three men were lost. The next day Alec Station sent a high-priority NIACT (night action) cable urging the station in Bangkok to find them.
Although the other summit attendees had also dispersed at the same time as the three men who flew to Bangkok, on 12 January Blee claimed to his bosses that the surveillance in Kuala Lumpur was continuing. The 9/11 Commission, suggested that Blee “may not have known that in fact Almihdhar and his companions had dispersed and the tracking was falling apart.” The interview of Blee received high-level attention on the commission. It was led by the commission’s executive director Philip Zelikow and two team leaders, Kevin Scheid and Barbara Grewe.
It is unclear how Blee could possibly have been unaware of this, as his unit had previously both received and sent at least one cable stating they had left for Bangkok and he would presumably have asked his subordinates for an update in the four days between the hijackers’ departure from Kuala Lumpur and the 12 January briefing. The commission’s formulation—that Blee “may not have known”—also begs the question: Well, did he know or not? If he did, he withheld key information from his bosses during the high threat period of the millennium alert. If he did not know, it means his subordinates withheld the information from him.
The next day, Bangkok station reported that it could not find the three men. Nevertheless, Blee went back to his superiors on 14 January and told them officials were continuing to track the summit’s attendees, who had now dispersed to various countries. Here, the commission’s report is clear, finding, “there is no evidence of any tracking efforts actually being undertaken by anyone after the Arabs disappeared into Bangkok.”
http://hcgroups.wordpress.com/2009/09/11/identity-of-cia-officer-responsible-for-pre-911-failures-tora-bora-escape-rendition-to-torture-revealed/