Author: William Arkin

15 December 2000

Posted on by William Arkin
King Fahd of Saudi Arabia

 

King Fahd of Saudi Arabia telephones George W. Bush to finally congratulate him on being elected president. The Saudi press release reads:

“Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques King Fahd bin Abdulaziz yesterday telephoned George W. Bush to congratulate him on his election as the 43rd President of the United States of America and wish him every success, stressing the deep-rooted historical relations between the two friendly countries. Deputy Prime Minister and Commander of the National Guard Crown Prince Abdullah bin Abdulaziz made a similar telephone call.

Earlier, King Fahd sent a cable of congratulations to the President-Elect, expressing in his own name and on behalf of the people and government of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia best wishes for continued success and a good leadership of the American people. He confirmed the ties of friendship that bind the two countries and declared that the Saudi leadership looks forward to enhancing these relations for the sake of consolidating the bases of security, stability and peace not only in the Middle East but in the whole world. Crown Prince Abdullah sent a similar cable, as did Second Deputy Prime Minister, Minister of Defense and Aviation and Inspector-Gen Prince Sultan bin Abdulaziz.”

In Khobar, site of the June 1996 bombing of the U.S. military base, a terrorist bomb goes off, severely injuring a British citizen.

14 December 1999

Posted on by William Arkin
Ahmed Ressam

 

Ahmed Ressam, traveling on a Canadian passport under the name of Benni Antoine Noris, is arrested at Port Angeles, Washington at the U.S.-Canadian border. His car contains bomb-making chemicals and detonator components and he is entering the U.S. with the intention of blowing up a bomb at Los Angeles International Airport on New Year’s Eve.

Algerian native Ahmed Ressam is later found to have trained in Afghanistan al Qaeda camps in Khalden and Darunta, receiving instructions on bomb making and probably the Los Angeles assignment. His case involved terrible failures by French and Canadian authorities. Ressam managed to initially fly from France to Montreal using a photo-substituted French passport under another false name, that of Tahar Medijadi. Under questioning in Canada, he admitted that the passport was fraudulent and claimed political asylum. He was released pending a hearing, which he failed to attend. He was then arrested four times for pick-pocketing, usually from tourists, but was never jailed nor deported.

Ressam eventually obtained his genuine Canadian passport through a document vendor who stole a blank baptismal certificate from a Catholic church. He used the passport to travel to Pakistan, and from there to Afghanistan for his training, returning to Canada before attempting to enter the United States.

Though the CIA and others in the Clinton administration would later crow about the capture of Ressam, his arrest in Port Angeles was completely by chance, due to the work of an individual customs agent on the spot (who had never received any terrorist warnings from higher headquarters or Washington).

“In looking back,” George Tenet later wrote, “much more should have been made about the significance of this event. While Ressam’s plot was foiled, his arrest signaled that al Qaeda was coming here.” (At the Center of the Storm, p. 126)

13 December 1998

Posted on by William Arkin

 

FBI director Louis Freeh briefs White House national security advisor Sandy Berger about the conclusion that Iran and Hizballah were behind the terrorist attack at Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia.

According to Freeh, Berger asks, “Who knows about this,” saying the Bureau’s conclusions seem to be hearsay. Later, Berger convenes a meeting including Secretary of Defense William Cohen, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Gen. Henry (Hugh) Shelton, and CIA director George Tenet.

Freeh writes: “I thought that we were meeting to discuss what our next move would be, given the fact that we now had solid evidence that Iranians, with involvement at the highest official levels, had blown up nineteen Americans. But I was wrong. The meeting started with how to deal with the press and Congress, should news of Iranian involvement in the Khobar murders leak outside of the room.”

Freeh says that Shelton invited him to the ‘tank’ at the Pentagon to brief the Joint Chiefs on Iranian sponsorship. There, Marine Corps commandant Chuck Krulak said he would do whatever was necessary to bring the Khobar bombers to justice, “even if that meant taking on the White House.” (My FBI, pp. 29ff) Nothing was really ever done. The Iran connection faded into history.

12 December 2000

Posted on by William Arkin

 

Hani Hanjour and Nawaf al-Hazmi arrive in Mesa, Arizona from San Diego in preparation for Hanjour—the pilot of the plane that hit the Pentagon—to renew his flight certification and practice handling the controls of large commercial airliners.

Hanjour and al-Hazmi rent apartment #10 on 2221 West Farmdale Avenue and Hanjour enrolls in refresher training. They move to apartment #2144, Indian Springs Village, 1031 South Stewart Street in Mesa in January.

Hanjour starts with classroom training at Arizona Aviation and then starts simulator training at Pan Am International Jet Tech through March 2001. The 9/11 Commission later said that flight instructors found his performance to be sub-standard and they discouraged Hanjour from continuing training.

11 December 1994

Posted on by William Arkin
Philippines Air plane

 

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s first international terrorist act is probably carried out when a bomb goes off on a Philippine Airlines flight from Manila to Tokyo, via Mactan–Cebu International Airport. The small bomb is built and planted by Ramzi Yousef, the attacker of the World Trade Center in February 1993.

With false identification papers (he is an internationally-wanted man), Ramzi Yousef boards the flight in Manila. Onboard, sitting in seat 26K, he assembles a small bomb using nitrocellulose explosive that he secreted away in a contact lens cleaner bottle, with a Casio watch as the timer and initiator. He then puts the bomb in the life jacket pouch underneath the seat. When the plane lands in Cebu, Yousef debarks, and Japanese businessman Haruki Ikegami boards the flight and takes his seat. At cruising altitude over the Sea of Japan, the Casio alarm ignites the filament in the bomb and it detonates, killing Ikegami and blowing a hole in the fuselage. The pilot manages to bring the flight down for an emergency landing.

Though most histories credit Yousef with masterminding the plot, new information indicates that the attack on Philippine Airlines flight 434 (a Boeing 747-200 jumbo jet) was conceived and directed by KSM. The 9/11 planes operation then evolves from bombs planted on planes so that they would explode over water to using the planes themselves as missiles to strike objects on land.

10 December 1995

Posted on by William Arkin
John Deutch

 

CIA director John Deutch, brought over from the Pentagon in May to replace James Woolsey, who had resigned during Christmas, insults his own Agency, sort of setting the stage for a rocky tenure and the ascension of George Tenet.

The New York Times quotes Deutch slamming his own people, comparing CIA operations officers to military officers. “They certainly are not as competent, or as understanding of what their relative role is and what their responsibilities are,” Deutch says. Within six month, the rumor mill begins whispering that Deutch—scornful of his own people, aloof and technocratic—would be departing at the end of the year for the top job at the Pentagon (and indeed he stepped down on December 15, a year after he made his remarks.)

George Tenet, then Deutch’s deputy, disingenuously writes later that Deutch “abruptly resigned” when in fact he maneuvered behind the scenes to unseat Deutch and become director. (At the Center of the Storm, p. 5)

Deutch never got the Pentagon job, and in the ultimate act of revenge, CIA counterintelligence goons later pulled the former director’s security clearance for improperly handling classified material on his home computer.

9 December 2000

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Fahd al Quso

 

Another missed opportunity occurs to expose the 9/11 plotters. Fahd al-Quso, an al Qaeda operative, is arrested in Yemen. In addition to being involved in the bombing of the USS Cole in October 2000, al-Quso was at a January 2000 meeting in Malaysia also attended by Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Mihdhar, the San Diego duo who would go on to become hijacker “musclemen” on 9/11.

The FBI tries to get direct access to al-Quso after his arrest but is thwarted by the government of Yemen. (He is finally interrogated days after 9/11 and reveals his presence in Malaysia in January 2000.)

The CIA write in a December 2000 cable it had learned that al-Quso had received $7,000 from someone named Ibrahim, which he delivered to “Khallad” in Southeast Asia. They incorrectly identify this “Khalled” as Khalid al-Mihdhar. Khallad turns out to be Walid Muhammad Salih bin Mubarak bin Attash, currently in Guantanamo detention camp, and a close associate of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.

8 December 2000

Posted on by William Arkin

 

Hani Hanjour, pilot of the plane that attacked the Pentagon, arrives in San Diego, California from Dubai (via Paris and Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky International Airport).

The Saudi is sent to San Diego by al Qaeda to pick up Nawaf al-Hazmi—part of the San Diego duo of Khalid al-Mihdhar and al-Hazmi, the original two planes’ operatives sent to the United States in January 2000. They had been picked as pilots by Osama bin Laden, but neither managed to obtain pilots licenses, and Mihdhar left the U.S. six months later (only to return in July 2001). Nawaf, who could not speak English, needed a chaperone, as Khalid Sheikh Mohammed feared that his closeness to the Muslim community ran the risk of exposing him, not to the FBI but to Saudi intelligence.

Hanjour, the only hijacker/pilot with experience in the United States, then drives with al-Hazmi to Arizona, where he had previously lived, and undertakes additional flight training to brush up on his skills. The two then relocate to Northern Virginia.

7 December 2000

Posted on by William Arkin

 

CIA director George Tenet gives a presentation on “What U.S. Intelligence Does for You” at a town hall in Los Angeles. The Millennium threat scare and the Y2K rollover now behind the threat watchers, Tenet is all swagger and promotion.

“We have, since July 1998,” Tenet boasted, “in partnership with governments around the world, helped deliver to justice more than two dozen terrorists—more than half of whom were linked to Usama bin Laden. These actions have shattered terrorist cells and networks, disrupted terrorist plans, and—in some cases—prevented terrorist attacks from taking place.”

It is a speech that one gets the sense could be delivered any day or any year, that typical happy talk of government which pretends real progress, and even resolution of problems, when in fact there is no true progress towards eliminating terrorism or even diminishing the size of the terrorist armies that would wish us harm.

6 December 1999

Posted on by William Arkin

 

Further increasing the level of anxiety about terrorist attacks during the Millennium transition, Jordanian authorities arrest 16 alleged terrorists who were accused of planning attacks on the John the Baptist’s shrine on the Jordan River and the Radisson SAS hotel in Amman. George Tenet later wrote: “The Jordanian intelligence service, through its able chief, Samikh Battikhi, told us that individuals on the team had direct links to Usama bin Ladin.” (At the Center of the Storm, p. 125)

The CIA Counterterrorist Center circulates an intelligence report, according to Tenet: “accepting the theory that UBL [Osama bin Laden] wants to inflict maximum casualties, cause massive panic, and score a psychological victory, then UBL may be seeking to attack between 5 and 15 targets on the Millennium. Because the U.S. is UBL’s ultimate goal… we must assume that several of these targets will be in the U.S. …”

Over the next weeks, the CIA and allied intelligence services would launch operations in 55 countries against 38 separate targets to disrupt plots in the making and to arrest terrorists under surveillance. But there is no question that once the Millennium passed without incident, the intensity of these efforts would generally decline. And they had little impact on al Qaeda central.

Of note, the same Radisson hotel was one of three hotels in Amman later attacked within a half an hour of each other on the night on November 9, 2005. There, suicide bombers killed over 50 and wounded over 100.