Month: September 2020

30 September 2000

Posted on by William Arkin
Predator RQ-1 drone

 

The Taliban issue a press statement saying that an unknown aircraft was seen over Kandahar. CIA-operated Predator drones had started flights over Afghanistan on September 7, flying from an airfield in Uzbekistan.

The satellite-equipped, bulbous-nosed RQ-1 Predator (an enhanced version of the CIA’s Gnat-750) was a newer innovation that allowed the drone to fly beyond the line of sight of ground stations controlling the drones. A year after the satellite-version was introduced, the drone made its first combat debut in hostile airspace, flying near-daily reconnaissance missions over former Yugoslavia (Serbia and Kosovo), then flying from an airfield in Albania.

In December 1998, the CIA first proposed a covert action to use an armed Predator to assassinate Osama bin Laden. Director George Tenet thought the program too risky to be approved on his authority alone and he brought it before the NSC for discussion. The Council gave a go-ahead for development of the capability, but the White House decided to retain control over authorizations for any lethal strikes. Predator development continued to move forward. Flights over Afghanistan are only occasional in September 2000 as the testing program to fire a Hellfire missile from the drone moves forward under Air Force aegis in Nevada. Despite the conclusion that the Predator spotted bin Laden in its first flights (see September 28), the 12-flight covert action is terminated before the end of the year. Predators would not return to the skies of Afghanistan until after 9/11.

29 September 2000

Posted on by William Arkin
Osama bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri, and Rifa'i Ahmed Taha

 

Osama bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri, and Rifa’i Ahmed Taha appear on Al Jazeera with the son of Omar Abdel Rahman, the Egyptian “the blind Sheikh,” calling for his release from American prison. The Blind Sheikh’s 1995 trial involved a group of New York-based terrorists in the so-called “Landmarks” case (or the “Days of Terror”), plans to blow up the Holland and Lincoln Tunnels and other New York landmarks. The Egyptian was found guilty and sentenced to life in prison under the rarely used Sedition Act of 1918.

The Al Jazeera video, aired numerous times starting on September 21, is believed to have been filmed sometime in the spring of 2000. It includes a direct warning by Zawahiri. “Enough of words,” he says, “it is time to take action against the iniquitous and faithless force which has spread troops through Egypt, Yemen and Saudi Arabia.”

By 2000, the al Qaeda leader and the two leaders of Egyptian Islamic Jihad (EIJ)—Zawahiri and Taha—are practically joined as one, and the leadership of al Qaeda is dominated by Egyptians. But bin Laden’s influence should not be underestimated. By all accounts, he was successful in getting Zawahiri and the EIJ to focus away from attacks on the Cairo regime and more on international (that is, American) targets. Two weeks after Al Jazeera airs this video, the Navy destroyer USS Cole is attacked in Yemen.

Zawahiri would go on to lead the last remnants of al Qaeda with the killing of bin Laden in 2011. Taha was reported killed in a US drone strike in Syria in 2016.

28 September 2000

Posted on by William Arkin
Tarnak Farm

 

A mythical pre-9/11 event gains traction, after the first two missions of an unarmed Predator reconnaissance drone are flown over Afghanistan on September 7 and 8. In review of the videos of the flights, the CIA comes to believe that Predator drones captured images of Osama bin Laden, “a tall man dressed in white robes,” during the overflights.

The 9/11 commission says that the conclusion was made after-the-fact. The drone imaged Tarnak Farms in Kandahar, a former Soviet agricultural collective taken over by al Qaeda. “A group of 10 people gathered around him [the tall man] were apparently paying their respects for a minute or two,” the report says.

CIA director George Tenet sends the video to the White House. White House terrorism specialist Richard Clarke wrote to national security advisor Sandy Berger that there was a “very high probability” bin Laden had been located. President Clinton is then shown the video. It is a mythical event, and not provable one way or another; bin Laden is never to be sighted again in Afghanistan, not before or after 9/11. The lore associated with locating bin Laden fed acceleration of an armed version of the Predator drone and a year of covert action to come up with various schemes to capture or assassinate him while at his Tarnak Farms residence east of the city.

27 September 1996

Posted on by William Arkin

 

At Hurghada, a Red Sea resort in Egypt, two German tourists and two Egyptian nationals are killed as part of Ayman al-Zawahiri’s campaign against tourism.

On September 30, 1992, almost four years earlier, the Egyptian Islamic Group warned tourists not to enter Qena province, the location of some of Egypt’s most famous Pharaonic temples. The following day, terrorists opened fire on a Nile boat carrying over 100 German tourists, injuring three of the Egyptian crew. Between October 1, 1992 and the Hurghada attack, there were 18 additional attacks on tourism, most claimed by Zawahiri’s Egyptian Islamic Jihad (EIJ).

Egyptian police cracked down on the Islamists and increased security around tourist sites. By the end of 1997, after a brutal terrorist attack in Luxor that killed 62 tourists, the campaign of terrorism directed at tourist sites ended. Zawahiri and the EIJ had by then begun to harmonize their attacks with al Qaeda’s global (and American) focus.

Terrorism directed at tourists was also nonexistent for seven years—until 2004, when Egyptian Red Sea villages where Israeli tourists dominated were attacked, killing 34 persons, mostly Israeli visitors. There has been a steady campaign of tourist attacks in Egypt since.

26 September 1996

Posted on by William Arkin
map of opposition groups in Afghanistan

 

Afghan military commander and politician Ahmad Shah Massoud abandons Kabul and flees to the Panjshir Valley in the face of overwhelming Taliban forces, which had entered the Afghan capital city from the south.

Massoud had been a powerful mujahedin commander during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan and was a leader of the so-called “Northern Alliance,” the United Islamic Front for the Salvation of Afghanistan.

The Alliance formed after the southern-dominated Taliban took over control of most of the country. Massoud’s forces were mostly Tajiks but included other non-Pashtun ethnic groups by 2001. Two days before 9/11, on September 9, Massoud was assassinated by a pair of journalists who blew themselves up during an interview. They are presumed to have been al Qaeda operatives.

25 September 2000

Posted on by William Arkin

 

Hani Hanjour, the pilot of the United Airlines plane that hit the Pentagon, returns to the American consulate in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia and makes a second application for an American student visa. An earlier visa application (on September 10) had been denied because, though Hanjour applied for a B-1/B-2 business/tourist visa, he stated that he intended to attend school.

The consulate told him he’d have to reapply. This time, Hanjour states a desire to attend English language school at the ELS Language Center in Oakland, California.

The 911 Commission found that Hanjour had been issued an F (student) visa in Kingdom of Saudi Arabia passport #C241922. But a complete search of his records indicated that he had already received an approved change of status to attend this same English language school in 1996. That earlier approval of visa status was granted by the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) while Hanjour was earlier in the United States. In these days before computer networks and information sharing, the consulate had no record of the earlier application (a likely cause for disqualification if he was deemed to have shown deception).

24 September 1999

Posted on by William Arkin

 

Mohammed Atta, a master’s student in Hamburg, terminates his employment with Hayes Computing Services, where he is working part-time. It is part of his process of disengaging from both his employers and university affiliations in anticipation of conducting jihad. At the time, his plan was to travel to Chechnya to fight the Russians.

Around June 1994, Atta took six months off from the architectural and planning consultancy he was working for in Hamburg to make his pilgrimage to Mecca. In 1997, he is believed to have gone to Afghanistan for the first time, having left his consultancy and returning to work in October 1998. He started part-time work with Hayes in August 1998.

In June 1999, Atta presented his final master’s thesis at the University of Hamburg-Harburg. Professors would later say that he was more strident than in earlier days and avoided shaking the hands of his female assessor. He has by then grown the beard of an Islamic holy man.

23 September 1995

Posted on by William Arkin
Ramzi Binalshibh

 

Ramzi Binalshibh, one of the original “Hamburg four,” and the only one of four to be denied a visa for the United States, first arrives in Germany with a plea for political asylum, claiming illegal detention and torture in his native Sudan.

He is granted asylum in Germany, but in fact, Binalshibh was born in Yemen. That is the reason for his ultimately being denied a visa to the U.S. The poorer Yemenis, in contrast with Saudis and Gulf state nationals, were generally thought to be seeking to come to the United States to illegally emigrate. Denied a visa, from his German base Binalshibh would become the communications link between Mohammed Atta (the leader of the hijackers in the United States) and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (the mastermind of the plot, located in Pakistan). Thus the German location would prove fortuitous, for communications between the U.S. and Germany were not routinely monitored and the German location helped the hijackers evade detection. Binalshibh would ultimately leave Germany on September 5, just days before the 9/11 attacks, traveling to Afghanistan before being captured a year later.

On September 11, 2002, two al Qaeda suspects were killed and five were captured after Pakistani police stormed an apartment in Karachi. Binalshibh is subsequently transported to “black sites” and tortured, eventually moved to Guantanamo Bay, where he is held today.

22 September 1998

Posted on by William Arkin
Mullah Omar: Qandahar centric; controls military and funds; close ties to UBL and ISID; increasingly suspicious of Rabbani's supporters; key supporters—Foreigh Minister, Governor of Herat, Governor of Mazar-e Sharif

 

Three years before 9/11, the Taliban diplomatic envoy is expelled from Saudi Arabia over the refusal of the government in Kandahar to hand over Osama Bin Laden.

After the African embassy bombings in August 1998, Washington sought Saudi Arabia’s help in forging a break between the Taliban and bin Laden, specifically in getting Mullah Omar to eject bin Laden from the country.

Prince Turki bin Faisal (also known as Turki al-Faisal)—head of Saudi intelligence and bin Laden’s earlier sponsor during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan—went to Afghanistan to meet with Omar, head of the Taliban. The meeting is the stuff of legend, the powerful Saudi prince being not just rebuffed and insulted, but treated with less than princely dignity, and leaving in a swirl of robes.

When the Taliban ambassador was expelled from Riyadh, Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah happened to be in the United States on a visit and met at the White House with President Clinton and Vice President Al Gore. He reported on the earlier Turki visit to Afghanistan and expressed Saudi frustration with the unorthodox regime. Saudi Arabia wouldn’t formally break off diplomatic relations with the Taliban until September 25, 2001.

21 September 1991

Posted on by William Arkin
Hani Hanjour

 

Saudi citizen Hani Hanjour, who would pilot the hijacked United Airlines plane into the Pentagon, is issued a visa in Jeddah for travel to the United States to attend flight training, a decade before 9/11. He is the first 9/11 hijacker known to visit the U.S.

In November 1997, he again applied for and received an American visa, unrelated to the terrorist attacks. To the question of whether he had ever applied for a U.S. visa before, he answers “no.” He also answers “no” to the question, “Have you ever been in the U.S.A.?”

The 9/11 Commission stated that it was “difficult to establish the intent behind these false statements.” The Commission speculated that they may have been made inadvertently by a travel agent who filled out the form on Hanjour’s behalf. Still, they concluded that it was “perplexing” that Hanjour might try to hide previous travel to the U.S. because it actually works in his favor—that is, that he was not seeking to clandestinely relocate to the U.S. After 9/11, obviously the criteria for issuing visas to Arab men was changed.