Army reserve Lt. Col. Tony Shaffer says the data-mining project identified Mohammed Atta and three other of the Sept. 11 hijackers as members of an al-Qaida cell more than a year before the attacks.

"I spoke personally to Denny Hastert and to Pete Hoekstra," Shaffer told United Press International. Rep. Hastert, R-Ill., is speaker of the House, and Rep. Hoekstra, R-Mich., is chairman of that chamber's intelligence committee.

"I was given assurances by (them) that this was the right thing to do ... I was given assurances we would not suffer any adverse consequences for bringing this to the attention of the public," Shaffer said, adding that the conversations took place before he and members of the Able Danger team spoke to the media anonymously in the offices of Republican firebrand Rep. Curt Weldon of Pennsylvania, Aug. 8.

Hastert spokesman Ron Bonjean told UPI in an e-mail message Sunday that he had no information about the meeting and had no comment to make. Hoekstra was said by staff to be out of the country.

Shaffer also said he was given what he interpreted as tacit approval from senior Pentagon officials before going on the record to Fox News and the New York Times last week, thus revealing his identity and adding both credibility and a new twist to the story.

Shaffer he said he had met the previous day with Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence Steven Cambone and Lt. Gen. Norton Schwartz, the staff director for outgoing Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Richard Myers.

"They knew that this would be the next logical step," Shaffer said, and did not ask him to refrain from going public. Asked whether he interpreted this as tacit approval, Shaffer said, "Well they are not asking me to stop (talking about the project)... I hope that they approve."

A Pentagon spokesman had no immediate comment.

The news is likely to add to the swirl of controversy surrounding Able Danger, an 18 month-long, highly classified project carried out for the Joint Chiefs of Staff by U.S. Special Operations Command, the existence of which was first revealed by Weldon in a recent book.

Shaffer told UPI that the project was tasked with "developing targeting information for al-Qaida on a global scale," and used data-mining techniques to look for "patterns, associations and linkages" in a huge collection of open source databases to which the team had access.

He said the kinds of information available included travel and immigration records, and information about credit card and telephone use.

"The databases weren't classified, but in some cases, even though they weren't classified, the fact we had access to them, or the way we got it, was secret," he said.

He says that he first became aware of the names of the four hijackers "in the mid-2000 time frame."

"The (Able Danger) team came up with information that these four bad guys were in the United States," he said, adding that for this reason, the intelligence was considered to be significant.

But Shaffer says lawyers from Special Operations Command would not allow the military to develop intelligence operations targeting them, because they were legally in the country.

"They said 'These guys are considered off limits for collection purposes,'" Shaffer recalled, adding that the lawyers had cited the ban on U.S. foreign intelligence agencies spying on U.S. persons - a hazy legal category that many intelligence and other agencies have their own particular definitions of.

The Pentagon says that it is looking into Shaffer's account, but one defense official -- who asked for anonymity because of the ongoing inquiry - said questions had been raised about the scope and breadth of his direct knowledge of Able Danger.

Shaffer said that he was "an operations guy, not an analyst," and that Able Danger was only one of about a dozen projects his unit in the Defense Intelligence Agency provided with what he called "concierge support."

He freely admits he is unfamiliar with the exact details of how the project culled information like Atta's name from its data.

"I was one of the guys looking at the finished data and trying to work out what was actionable ... is this something we need to act on right away?"

Former senior defense official Mark Jacobson told UPI that "There are a lot of unanswered questions" about the project.

"People should be raising their eyebrows," he said. "Why was this kept at a working level? There are so many points (in the story) where the problems should have been kicked upstairs. Who within (the Department of Defense) knew about this?"

Shaffer says he notified his commanding officer of the Special Operations Command decision, and that there was a debate about whether the U.S. person rules should be drawn so widely.

But he said that the information now appears much more significant than it did then. "At the time it didn't seem that important. I took it in stride with the dozens of issues daily raised by the projects I was working with."

"We only realized after the fact what this meant ... We thought they were bad guys, we just didn't know how bad."

Shaffer said that the Tampa, Fla.-based Special Operations Command owned the project and had the ultimate say in what happened to the data. "It was their responsibility to be the steward of this information."

He said that the issue did go "up the chain of command" in Tampa "to the J-3, the director of operations," but that "he said we'd go with what the lawyers recommended."

Military records show that Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Lambert held that post at the time, but no one at Special Operations Command responded to a request for comment over the weekend.

Shaffer says that he himself did not remember the names of Atta and the others immediately after the Sept. 11 attack, until a colleague showed him one of the charts the team had produced in mid-2000.

"I asked her what she was going to do," he recalled, "and she said 'I don't know.'"

Shaffer said she later told him that she had gone with Weldon to the White House, where the congressman gave the chart to deputy national security advisor Steven Hadley.

The White House said it had no comment.

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