The FBI declined to tell Congressional investigators or the 9/11 Commission about a mole that the bureau embedded with al Qaeda who secretly met with Osama bin Laden eight years before the 9/11 attacks, NBC News reported. The mole was a Los Angeles-based "driver and confidante" of the "Blind Sheikh," Omar Abdel-Rahman, who is now in prison for his role in the 1993 terror attack plans on New York's World Trade Center. The informant provided information that helped stop an attack planned for Los Angeles in the mid-90's, according to an FBI agent who was in charge of the FBI's LA office at the time. The existence of the mole was first disclosed during the agent's 2010 testimony in support of a lawsuit filed against the FBI by Bassem Youssef, an agent assigned to the terrorism squad in L.A. who had developed and run the mole.
