Washington ? Both the CIA and FBI knew as early as January 2000 that one of the eventual Sept. 11 hijackers would be attending a meeting of suspected al-Qaida members, a CIA official said in the latest revelation amid growing evidence of intelligence failures.

Word that the agencies had reason to be suspicious of Khalid Almihdhar emerged as the Senate and House intelligence committees vowed to dig into what went wrong before the terrorist attacks.

“We will certainly be able to improve the capabilities that we have to focus more on the threats that actually exist,” Rep. Porter Goss, chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, said Tuesday on NBC television’s “Today” show.

“That’s going to happen, but Americans are always going to have to have a little vigilance,” he said.

“It’s uncomfortable to know that we are the target and that people want to hurt us just because of who we are. But, in fact, they do so even though the national government and local and state governments will do their best to put up the best possible defenses and the best warnings we can,” Goss said. “American citizens need to know what’s going on in this world of terrorism so they can take individual steps and make individual decisions about their own lives.”

Meeting in soundproofed, secure rooms at the Capitol, lawmakers will take stock of an intelligence community that overlooked clues and didn’t always share information it had about the hijackers. The closed door hearings begin Tuesday before going public June 25.

The intense scrutiny has led to fingerpointing between the CIA and FBI.

Over the weekend, government sources said the CIA had important information in early 2000 about two of the future hijackers, Almihdhar and Nawaf Alhazmi, both of whom attended a mid-January 2000 meeting in Malaysia.

Responding to the disclosure, a CIA official, speaking Monday on condition of anonymity, disputed reports that the agency had kept that information from the FBI. The CIA official said two FBI officials were briefed on Almihdhar.

Neither agency gave the information enough significance to alert authorities to watch for Almihdhar or Alhazmi at U.S. points of entry until three weeks before the attacks, when the CIA, alerted to a large al-Qaida operation in the offing, added the two men to a watch list that INS and State officials use. By this time, however, they were already in the country.

Almihdhar, in fact, already had been in and out of the United States several times. The U.S. government had given him a multiple entry visa enabling him the freedom to come and go as he pleased. Both hijackers were aboard American Airlines Flight 77 that crashed into the Pentagon.

FBI officials declined comment Monday night, saying Director Robert Mueller was not interested in engaging in fingerpointing.

In other developments:

_Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak said in a New York Times interview for Tuesday editions that his country’s intelligence service warned U.S. officials about a week before the Sept. 11 attacks that al-Qaida was in the advance stages of an attack on an unspecified American target. The Times quoted a senior U.S. intelligence official, however, as denying any such information was passed on to the CIA. The White House press office declined comment when contacted by The Associated Press.

_Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said Osama bin Laden does not seem to be formally directing al-Qaida, although the terror organization remains active worldwide. “My guess is, if he were active, we would know it _ we would have some visible sense of it,” he said in Tuesday editions of The Washington Post. Rumsfeld was leaving Tuesday for Europe and the Gulf to discuss the war on terrorism and other issues. He also planned to visit India and Pakistan.

“What we want to learn is all the information that the agencies had or didn’t have and whether they disseminated it,” said Sen. Richard Shelby, the ranking Republican on the Senate Intelligence Committee.

Despite the array of problems that have already come to light, “this is just the beginning,” said Shelby, the committee’s vice chairman.

Another early clue pointing to one of the hijackers’ alleged accomplices emerged on the eve of the congressional hearings.

The CIA received vague intelligence about Zacarias Moussaoui in the spring of 2001, but from an informant who knew the Frenchman only by an alias and the CIA didn’t link the two names until well after Sept. 11.

Moussaoui was arrested at a Minnesota flight school the month before the Sept. 11 suicide attacks.

An intelligence official said that in April 2001 a CIA informant mentioned a man he had met in 1997 during a gathering of Islamic extremists. In early 2002, the source recognized Moussaoui from pictures he had seen on television.

The FBI’s handling of Moussaoui will be the focus of a hearing Thursday by the Senate Judiciary Committee when Minnesota FBI agent Coleen Rowley testifies. The FBI whistleblower says FBI headquarters ignored her office’s pleas to aggressively investigate Moussaoui following his arrest last August.

In addition, the FBI has been criticized for failing to link Moussaoui and the warnings of a Phoenix field agent that Middle Eastern men were training at American flight schools.

The former head of CIA counterterrorism, Cofer Black, probably will be the first witness of the intelligence hearings, this Thursday.

The CIA’s counterterrorism center will be an early focus of the intelligence panels’ inquiry.

Set up in the mid-1980s, the No. 2 official at the CIA’s counterterrorism center, located at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, is an FBI official. The No. 2 official at the FBI’s counterterrorism operation at Washington headquarters is a CIA official.

“Turf jurisdiction has always been a problem, but we were led to believe as far as the FBI and CIA were concerned, that had been resolved,” said Rep. Saxby Chambliss, a Georgia Republican.