21 October 1998

Posted on October 21, 2020October 30, 2020 by William Arkin

President Bill Clinton signs Presidential Decision Directive (PDD) 67, Enduring Constitutional Government and Continuity of Government Operations, the first major post-Cold War re-articulation of plans for survival of the presidency and continuity of the federal government.

PDD-67 covers president continuity of government, enduring constitutional government (ECG—which relates to presidential successors outside the executive branch and continuity of Congress and the Supreme Court), and continuity of operations planning (COOP—which applies to the day-to-day business operations of non-national security agencies of the government). PDD-67 states that the purpose of enduring constitutional government (ECG), continuity of government (COG), and continuity of operations (COOP) is to ensure survival of a constitutional form of government and the continuity of essential federal functions. The directive requires every federal department and agency to submit a new COG plan.

PDD-67 replaced the Bush administration’s National Security Directive 69 (NSD-69), Enduring Constitutional Government of 2 June 1992, which in turn succeeded NSD-37, Enduring Constitutional Government, 18 April 1990 and National Security Decision Directive (NSDD) 55, Enduring National Leadership, 14 September 1982.

President Clinton’s new directive moves the COG system further away from sole preparation for nuclear war towards a day-to-day posture that also does not rely upon underground bunkers. But it does “require” evacuation of presidential successors when a continuity event is declared, measures that would be ignored both on 9/11 and during the 2020 Covid-19 pandemic.

20 October 2000

Posted on October 20, 2020October 20, 2020 by William Arkin

Ali Mohammed pleads guilty. Surely one of the strangest sub-plots of 9/11.

Mohammed was the only al Qaeda operative known to have successfully infiltrated the U.S. military and intelligence community before 9/11. Along the way, he was an Egyptian Army officer who learned to speak English and Hebrew, attended foreign officer training at Ft. Bragg, was recruited by the CIA, joined Egyptian Islamic Jihad (EIJ) led by Ayman al-Zawahiri, was dropped by the CIA, entered the U.S. despite being on a watchlist and again was engaged by the CIA, married an American woman and moved to California, enlisted in the U.S. Army, joined special forces back at Ft. Bragg, taught Middle East and radicalism courses to the Army, took leave to go and fight in Afghanistan, returned to the Army and secretly trained radicals in New York who were later implicated for the November 1990 assassination of Rabbi Meir Kahane, wrote the al Qaeda training manual “Military Studies in the Jihad Against the Tyrants,” got an honorable discharge from the Army (after all that), joined the Army Reserve, continued work for al Qaeda from his home in Santa Clara, California, became an informant to the FBI, helped Osama bin Laden leave Afghanistan in 1991, worked to settle bin Laden in Sudan, trained al Qaeda recruits, returned to Afghanistan to provide explosives and tradecraft training, helped to set up the al Qaeda cell in Kenya that would blow up the Embassy in 1998, hosted Zawahiri on a fundraising tour of American mosques, continued to work for the FBI, provided Army intelligence with information on camps in Afghanistan, fought with fighters loyal to Farah Aideed in Somalia, scouted targets for bin Laden in Kenya and Tanzania, helped bin Laden move back to Afghanistan, was secretly arrested after the African embassy bombings, and becomes an informant (again) for the government.

In October 2000, Mohamed entered a guilty plea on five counts of conspiracy. Thereafter in custody, Ali Mohammed’s life was a bit of a mystery, supposedly never sentenced and after 9/11, again a source for the CIA and FBI.

19 October 2000

Posted on October 19, 2020October 20, 2020 by William Arkin

A Frenchmen named Zacarias Moussaoui (who was arrested on August 16, 2001 in Minnesota and considered by many to be the “20th” 9/11 hijacker) shows up in Malaysia and stays at the same condo that Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi stayed at in January before they flew to the U.S. (At the time, Malaysian police surveilled the condo and shared information with the CIA about the mysterious arrival of two jihadis.)

The CIA had already concluded that the owner of the condo, Yazid Sufaat, was associated with al Qaeda, but the January trip had been forgotten by October and Sufaat was no longer being watched. He provides Moussaoui with fake identification papers in anticipation of his undertaking flight training in Malaysia. According to the 9/11 Commission Report (p. 225), Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM) was dissatisfied with Moussaoui’s own terrorist plotting and recalled him to Pakistan, then directing him to go to the United States for flight training.

Moussaoui then received fake papers from Infocus Tech, a Malaysian company, stating that he was appointed Infocus Tech’s marketing consultant in the United States. He arrives in the U.S. in the beginning of 2001 and starts flight training in Norman, Oklahoma.

Moussaoui was a student at Airman Flight School until May 2001 but he is not believed to ever have actually crossed paths with any of the 9/11 hijackers. His initial arrest a month before 9/11 was for immigration violations, not terrorism related. Had the FBI or the intelligence community (IC) been able to “connect the dots”—al Qaeda connections, training in Afghanistan, direction from KSM, the same condo in Malaysia, flight school in the U.S.—perhaps the 9/11 plot could have been unraveled. The conventional history of 9/11 is that legal constraints impeded the sharing of information and that structural deficiencies in organization were to blame for very narrow mistakes made in Washington and around the IC. The truth is that incompetence, sloth, and disbelief masked the connections, only discovered after 9/11.

18 October 1992

Posted on October 18, 2020October 20, 2020 by William Arkin

Osama … we hardly knew you. Osama Bassnan, a Saudi government intelligence officer according to the FBI, throws a Washington, DC party for Omar Abdel Rahman, “the Blind Sheikh,” who is now living in New York. This is four months before the first bombing of the World Trade Center and well before there was much recognition of al Qaeda or Osama bin Laden.

An FBI asset is at the party, and according to the famed “28 pages” (the deleted material from the 9/11 Commission report that is finally released in 2016), Bassnan “made many laudatory remarks … about bin Ladin [sic], referring to Bin Ladin as … the ruler of the Islamic world.” According to the FBI asset, Bassnan spoke of Bin Laden “as if he were a god.” He also stated that he heard that the U.S. government had stopped approving visas for students from the Middle East. He said that such measures were insufficient to stop Islam because there were already “enough Muslims in the United States to destroy the United States and make it an Islamic state within ten to fifteen years.”

In May 1992, according to former Sen. Bob Graham (Intelligence Matters, pp. 24-25), the State Department provided the FBI “with a box of documents recovered from an abandoned car.” In the box are a number of letters addressed to Osama Bassnan, a “Saudi spy … [later] suspected of being groomed to replace [Omar] al-Bayoumi in San Diego.” Graham says “the FBI did not open an investigation,” even after the October party.

Omar al-Bayoumi, another Saudi intelligence officer, “meets” the first two hijackers to enter the United States—Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi—the would be pilots who arrived in Los Angeles and were helped by Bayoumi to settle in in San Diego. Bassnan would go on to live in the same apartment complex at Mihdhar and al-Hazmi. Both Bassnan and Bayoumi would disappear before 9/11, and though Bayoumi was interviewed in Saudi Arabia by Commission staffers, their involvement in 9/11 remained shrouded in secret.

17 October 2000

Posted on October 17, 2020October 20, 2020 by William Arkin

Hamza al Ghamdi, a Saudi and one of the “musclemen” on UA Flight 175 that hit the Pentagon, applies for and receives a two-year B-1/B-2 (tourist/business) visa in Saudi Arabia. Typical of the Saudis involved in 9/11, his terrorist background went undetected and he was routinely granted a visa.

9/11 Commission investigators belatedly find out that his application is incomplete. He listed his occupation as “student” but left blank the question asking the street address of his school. The Commission also determines that Ghamdi’s travel patterns indicated that he may have presented a passport containing fraudulent travel stamps associated with al Qaeda when he applied for this visa.

In the investigation, the Commission found out that the State Department consular officer in Riyadh who adjudicated al Ghamdi’s case was not familiar with this kind of passport manipulation. He said that because of the workload, he rarely had time to thumb through passports. Ghamdi was never interviewed, the State Department said, because nothing in his application raised concerns in the mind of the consular officer who adjudicated it and there was no hit in the State Department watchlist (then called the CLASS system).

16 October 2000

Posted on October 16, 2020October 20, 2020 by William Arkin

NSA director Lt. Gen. Michael V. Hayden announces a major reorganization at the upper reaches of his agency. The changes, he says, are designed to enable top managers to focus on reengineering signals intelligence in the face of rapidly changing communications technology, particularly the move from radio wave intercepts to digital intercept and exploitation.

Speaking at a computer security conference in Baltimore, Hayden says that cyberspace had become as important a potential battlefield as any other. He said that digital cyberspace—not just Internet-connected computers and systems but also computer networks—held out as much prospect for offense as well as defense. “It is a place where we must ensure American security as surely as land, sea, air and space,” Hayden said.

Twenty years later, the statement seems both prescient and archaic in that it could be as much said today, with the U.S. government still struggling to establish the capabilities and the rules of the road for intelligence collection and action in cyberspace. But then the reality was that the “retooling” was driven as much by old sources of intercepts drying up, or at least becoming less of a priority than data transiting digital networks.

15 October 1997

Posted on October 15, 2020October 20, 2020 by William Arkin

Max van der Stoel, Special U.N. Rapporteur of Iraqi Human Rights, reports widespread continuing violations of human rights in Iraq, torture and execution, and displacement and retention of political dissidents and ethnic minorities. (U.N., A/52/476, 15 October 1997)

Saddam Hussein was hardly the only one in the Middle East at the time, but a combination of under-the-surface changes highlighted and gave unsettling detail to his rule and the internal situation. Though the human rights community—some in that community—focused on American blame (in the bombing inside Iraq during Desert Storm or the effects of the use depleted uranium), the repression inside the country came as no surprise. But for a U.S. national security system that had ignored Iraq’s domestic situation, all of a sudden there was the “intelligence” that comes in with an intense and intimate presence to support assistance to the Kurds, enforcing the no-fly zones, support for U.N. inspectors and then abundant covert actions. A good part of the U.S. military and intelligence communities were focused on Iraq, with the flow of information to follow.

Finally, as U.S. intelligence used the U.N. presence to increase clandestine spying—particularly eavesdropping from inside Baghdad—the details of Saddam’s absolute rule and nepotism, cruelty and corruption increased. The dynamic was inscrutable: was the intelligence needed to support U.S. policy or did the intelligence drive it? When the Clinton administration finally said that there could be no normalization of relations—even if Iraq eliminated its WMD and satisfied the U.N. inspectors—there was no end game but war.

Van der Stoel shouldn’t be criticized for his report—and nor should the human rights community—but they, too, became agents for inevitable war. And what does it have to do with 9/11? Only that Iraq became dominant and overwhelming as a problem, diverting attention from terrorism, while those drawn to al Qaeda saw the plight of Iraq—they’ve killed one million Iraqi children, Osama bin Laden said many time—as further “proof” of American perfidy and the West’s campaign to destroy the Middle East.

14 October 2000

Posted on October 14, 2020October 20, 2020 by William Arkin

A year before 9/11, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM) is appointed head of all media operations for al Qaeda. Between then and the attacks, he works with London and other Arab-based media in transmitting statements and distributing videos and cassettes.

The 34-year-old Pakistani national, who was raised in Kuwait and went to college in the United States, was by then an experienced operator for Osama bin Laden, having worked in Islamic aid organizations in Pakistan and Afghanistan during and after the Soviet occupation and then playing a hand in various plots, including the 1998 African embassy bombings.

Though indicted for terrorist conspiracy in 1996 by the Southern District of New York (for a plot to blow up American airliners over the Pacific), and even after a failed rendition attempt by the FBI, he is not a household-name terrorist, not even amongst CIA analysts, FBI investigators, or experts. And yet he is now universally accepted to have been the conceiver of the airline plot and the “teacher” of the Hamburg Three (Mohammed Atta, Marwan al-Shehhi, and Ziad Jarrah) with regard to operational security and preparing their year-and-a-half long preparations in the United States.

13 October 2000

Posted on October 13, 2020October 20, 2020 by William Arkin

Vice presidential candidate Dick Cheney urges swift retaliation for the bombing of the USS Cole in Yemen. “Any would-be terrorist out there needs to know that if you’re going to attack, you’ll be hit very hard and very quick. It’s not time for diplomacy and debate. It’s time for action.”

It is tantamount to approval for the Clinton administration to attack al Qaeda, even with an upcoming election.

The October surprise “norm” for a sitting president—if there is one—is to settle (or at least not exacerbate) pending foreign policy complications for an incoming administration, thereby not tilting the election one way or another. Bill Clinton himself inherited a losing hand in both Somalia and Iraq from George Bush the elder. Somalia would end up a disaster for the Clinton team and Iraq of course would dog the White House for the next eight years. And Barack Obama would hesitate to take stronger action against Russia in 2016, not wanting to tilt the election or tie the hands of an incoming Hillary Clinton administration.

Perhaps Cheney’s bluster was just pre-election posturing, but more important, the former secretary of defense believed that the implications of striking at al Qaeda was cost-free, that attacking—“very hard and very quick”—had no implications for blowback on the United States, that an attack on the U.S. itself wasn’t even conceived. Ultimately this belief was as much responsible for the new Bush administration’s slow development of a counter-terrorism policy in the nine months of 2001 before 9/11—that it just didn’t see al Qaeda as more than a run-of-the-mill terrorist organization.

12 October 2000

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

In Aden, a small bomb-laden boat approaches the destroyer USS Cole at midship and the two suicide bombers detonate their explosives, killing 17 sailors and injuring at least 40 others.

The destroyer, en route to the Persian Gulf, was making a prearranged fuel stop, part of a Central Command (CENTCOM) initiative to improve relations with the Yemen government. The blast ripped a hole in the side of the USS Cole approximately 40 feet in diameter. The attack occurs without warning, and the Navy vessel was never warned to expect a terrorist attack.

The subsequent FBI investigation revealed that the USS Cole bombing followed an unsuccessful attempt on January 3, 2000, to bomb another U.S. Navy ship, the USS The Sullivans. In this earlier incident, the boat sank before the explosives could be detonated. The boat and the explosives were salvaged and refitted, and the explosives were tested and reused in the USS Cole attack.

The “story” of the aftermath, favorable to a supposedly do-no-wrong FBI, is later told in Lawrence Wright’s Looming Tower, and the attack becomes an emotional debating point in the Bush-Gore presidential election. The outgoing Clinton administration is reluctant to retaliate against al Qaeda—the clear perpetrator—because an election is just a month away. But the Bush administration also does not take any military action, told by the CIA that it did not have enough “proof” of al Qaeda direction.

Yemeni authorities establish that Tawfiq bin-Atash (known as Khallad), who had been a trainer at an al Qaeda camp in Afghanistan and worked as an Osama bin Laden bodyguard, was not only one of the commanders but that he had been present at the January 2000 meeting of al Qaeda operatives in Malaysia. Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi, the San Diego duo who would go on to be “musclemen” on 9/11, were also present.

According to the 911 Commission Report (p. 191), back in Afghanistan, bin Laden anticipated U.S. military retaliation and ordered the evacuation of al Qaeda installations, fleeing to the desert area near Kabul, then to Khowst and Jalalabad, and eventually back to Kandahar. In Kandahar, he rotated between five to six residences, spending one night at each residence. In addition, he sent his senior advisor, Mohammed Atef, to a different part of Kandahar and his deputy, Ayman al Zawahiri, to Kabul so that all three could not be killed in one attack.

In writing his autobiography, George Tenet says that “neither our intelligence nor the FBI’s criminal investigation could conclusively prove that Usama bin Ladin and his leadership had had authority, direction, and control over the attack. This is a high threshold to cross… What’s important from our perspective at CIA is that the FBI investigation had taken primacy in getting to the bottom of the matter.” (At the Center of the Storm, p. 128).