21 September 1991

Posted on September 12, 2020September 12, 2020 by William Arkin

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.

20 September 2000

Posted on September 12, 2020September 12, 2020 by William Arkin

Mohammed Atta and Marwan al-Shehhi enroll in flight training at Jones Aviation in Sarasota, Florida. It is the second primary flight school, after Huffman Aviation, that they attend. They both fail their first tests and leave the school on October 6.

The 911 Commission will later comment—more than a dozen times—that throughout flight training the two struggled with poor English, failed their instrument rating tests, and scored badly in tests when they ultimately received their initial commercial pilot’s licenses in December 2000, as if any of that somehow made any difference. Perhaps such a record might have provoked school officials to question the Middle East men’s intentions, or even report to authorities, but as a matter of skill, evidently the two flew well enough to achieve their objectives.

19 September 2000

Posted on September 12, 2020September 12, 2020 by William Arkin

Mohammed Atta and Marwan al-Shehhi’s I-539 visa change applications are received by the INS. The I-359 is to extend or change their non-immigrant status from tourist to vocational students (see 15 September).

Atta had applied for and received (in one day) a five-year B-1/B-2 (tourist/business) visa from the U.S. embassy in Berlin, Germany in February. He was never interviewed and because of his German residency and employment status, was treated as a German citizen. Marwan al-Shehhi essentially was treated the same way in his visa application. When the two separately arrived in the United States in June 2000, they were granted six-month customary stays. Although they would change their visa status and leave and return numerous times, neither were ever flagged for closer attention.

18 September 2000

Posted on September 12, 2020September 12, 2020 by William Arkin

USA Today reports that U.S. intelligence has obtained CD-ROM copies of a six-volume al Qaeda manual, believed to be used to train recruits in Afghanistan and elsewhere. The manual’s 18 chapters contain instructions on everything from basic religious indoctrination, al Qaeda membership criteria, communications and operational tradecraft, security, means of assassination, and evasion of capture and interrogation.

The manual was obtained in a search of the Manchester, U.K. home of Anas al-Libi. Al-Libi, whose real name was Nazih Abdul-Hamed Nabih al-Ruqai’i, was a Libyan indicted in the U.S. for his part in the 1998 African embassy bombings. (He died in January 2015.)

The al Qaeda manual was translated into English by the FBI and was subsequently introduced into evidence as part of the spring 2001 African embassy bombing trials in New York.

17 September 2000

Posted on September 12, 2020September 12, 2020 by William Arkin

The 9/11 hijackers receive their largest transfer of money from overseas: $70,000, wired from the United Arab Emirates. On this day, hijacker pilot Marwan al-Shehhi receives $70,000 from Ali Abdul Aziz Ali, who used the alias “Isam Mansur.” Ali, who would also occasionally use the alias “Isam Mansour,” “Mr. Ali,” and “Hani (Fawaz Trdng),” was the main financial go-between in transferring money to the U.S. for the 9/11 attacks. The transfers were sent from the UAE Exchange Centre located in Bur Dubai, UAE.

At the time, the large transfer did not trigger banking suspicious-activity reports (SARs). Nor did any of the other transfers of money to the hijackers or the “musclemen” get reported. The 19 hijackers would use a variety of means—cash they brought into the U.S., foreign and U.S. bank debit and credit cards, foreign checking accounts from European and Gulf state banks, and traveler’s checks—to finance their activities inside the U.S. The Hamburg three, Mohammed Atta, Marwan al-Shehhi, and Ziad Jarrah all continued to maintain and use their bank accounts in Germany, which also evaded any special attention.

Overall it is estimated that the entire 9/11 operation, including flight training, travel, and more than a year’s residence in the U.S., cost no more than a half a million dollars. In theory, today such large transfers of money would provoke closer government scrutiny, but post-9/11 rules regarding financial reporting of transactions ultimately have more of an impact on white-collar crime than domestic terrorism.

16 September 1920

Posted on September 12, 2020September 12, 2020 by William Arkin

The first American case of a spectacular terrorist attack occurs, nearly a century ago! An unknown man drove a horse-drawn cart to the front of the U.S. Assay Office across from the J. P. Morgan building in the heart of Wall Street in New York City. Minutes later, a bomb exploded, immediately killing 30 and injuring 300, according to most accounts. The carnage is horrific, and the death toll kept rising as the day wore on and more victims succumbed.

A resulting three-year investigation—involving the New York police and fire departments, the predecessor agency of the FBI, and the Secret Service—would largely prove fruitless. A local letter carrier found four crudely spelled and printed flyers from a group calling itself the “American Anarchist Fighters” that demanded the release of Italian political prisoners, but other than that, there was little evidence as to who the perpetrator was. Even to this day, the responsible party remains a mystery.

15 September 2000

Posted on September 12, 2020September 12, 2020 by William Arkin

A year before 9/11, Mohammed Atta and Marwan al-Shehhi, the hijacker pilots who will later attack the north and south towers of the World Trade Center, fill out Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) forms to change their visa status from tourists to vocational students.

The two—Atta an Egyptian citizen, and al-Shehhi from the United Arab Emirates—had already been in the United States for three months and had begun flight training, mostly at Huffman Aviation at Venice Municipal Airport in Venice, Florida. Both applications request that their status be maintained until September 1, 2001. The requests show deception in the earlier status, but neither receives additional scrutiny from visa authorities with regard to what they are doing in the United States.

14 September 1998

Posted on September 12, 2020September 12, 2020 by William Arkin

The United States formally warns the fledgling Taliban regime in Afghanistan (through a diplomatic demarche) that it will hold it responsible for any terrorist attacks perpetrated by al Qaeda—that is, so long as the Taliban continues to provide sanctuary to the group and to Osama bin Laden.

The government in Sudan receives similar warnings.

A month after the twin attacks on U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, U.S. Ambassador to Pakistan William Milam meets with Taliban representatives. They tell him that it “against their culture to expel someone seeking sanctuary but asked what would happen to Bin Ladin [sic] should he be sent to Saudi Arabia.” (911 Commission Report, p. 121) It is neither the first nor the last overtures to the Taliban regime regarding bin Laden. In fact, quite astoundingly, we are still negotiating with them today, despite a 20-year war in Afghanistan.

13 September 1987

Posted on September 12, 2020September 12, 2020 by William Arkin

Fawaz Younis becomes the first suspected foreign terrorist arrested by the FBI for a crime perpetrated against Americans on foreign soil. Younis was implicated in the 1985 hijacking of a Royal Jordanian airliner. After taking the passengers hostage—including two Americans—and making several demands that were not met, the hijackers ordered the plane to land first in Cyprus, then Sicily, and finally in Beirut. There the hijackers released the hostages, held a press conference, blew up the plane on the tarmac, and then successfully fled.

The Bureau made the arrest two years later under the provisions of the Comprehensive Crime Control Act of 1984, which gave the FBI jurisdiction over terrorist acts in which Americans were harmed or taken hostage, no matter where the acts occurred.

Younis was lured to his arrest in an FBI sting called Operation Goldenrod in the eastern Mediterranean Sea. It involved bikini-clad undercover agents, a multi-million-dollar yacht with a fake crew, and a non-existent international drug dealer. Younis was arrested and taken aboard the USS Butte, a Navy munitions ship. He was then transported to the United States on a Navy plane, where he was arraigned, tried, convicted, and sentenced to 30 years in prison. (As a final footnote, Younis was released in 2005 and deported to Lebanon.)

The FBI would go on to investigate al Qaeda terrorist attacks that involved American citizens—including the African embassy bombings in 1998 and the attack on the USS Cole in 2000—certainly establishing expertise (and connections), but ultimately focused on terrorism as a crime to be investigated rather than as an eventuality to be prevented.