Bogus analysis led to terror alert in Dec.  2003

Lisa Myers Senior investigative correspondent • Profile

WASHINGTON - Christmas 2003 became a season of terror after the federal government raised the terror alert level from yellow to orange, grimly citing credible intelligence of another assault on the United States.

"These credible sources," announced then-Secretary of Homeland Security Tom Ridge, "suggest the possibility of attacks against the homeland around the holiday season and beyond."

For weeks, America was on edge as security operations went into high gear. Almost 30 international flights were canceled, inconveniencing passengers flying Air France, British Air, Continental and Aero Mexico.

But senior U.S. officials now tell NBC News that the key piece of information that triggered the holiday alert was a bizarre CIA analysis, which turned out to be all wrong.

CIA analysts mistakenly thought they'd discovered a mother lode of secret al-Qaida messages. They thought they had found secret messages on Al-Jazeera, the Arabic-language television news channel, hidden in the moving text at the bottom of the screen, known as the "crawl," where news headlines are summarized.

‘Steganography’ suspected
U.S. officials tell NBC News that CIA experts — technicians working for the Directorate of Science and Technology — thought they had found numbers embedded in the crawl signaling upcoming attacks; dates and flight numbers, and geographic coordinates for targets, including the White House, Seattle's Space Needle, even the tiny town of Tappahanock, Va. What the analysts thought they had found was something called "steganography" — messages hidden inside a video image.

President Bush and Ridge were briefed on the Al-Jazeera analysis, U.S. intelligence sources say.

In an exclusive interview with NBC News, Ridge defended the government's actions, although he called the intelligence analysis "bizarre, unique, unorthodox, unprecedented."

"Maybe that's very much the reason that you'd be worried about it, because you hadn't seen it before," recalls Ridge.

He says the administration had to take the suspected terror messages seriously, although "speaking for myself I've got to admit to wondering whether or not it was credible."

Was he himself skeptical?

"Yeah, we weren't certain," says Ridge. "Still, in the context of everything else (intelligence chatter and a terror attack in Saudi Arabia), we could not set it aside and dismiss it as not credible."

So the United States raised the alert level and canceled flights.

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