30 October 2000

Posted on October 30, 2020November 3, 2020 by William Arkin

Sandy Berger passes the baton to Condoleezza Rice

After the attack on the USS Cole, but absent any “proof” of al Qaeda culpability, National Security Advisor Sandy Berger agrees to a State Department proposal making another approach to the Taliban to expel Osama bin Laden from Afghanistan.

U.S. diplomats had already been in touch with Deputy Foreign Minister Abdul Jalil and now Berger orders that the U.S. message to the Taliban “be stern and foreboding.”

Meanwhile, the Clinton administration is also working with the Russian government on new U.N. sanctions against Mullah Omar’s regime.

Between 1998 and 9/11, the United States issued a half dozen threats to the Taliban, both about bin Laden and support for al Qaeda, and to protest the treatment of women. None of the warnings had any effect.

29 October 2000

Posted on October 30, 2020November 3, 2020 by William Arkin

Unknown to U.S. intelligence, Ziad Jarrah (the hijacker pilot of United Airlines flight 93 that crashed in Shanksville, Pennsylvania) returns to the United States from a trip to Germany just two weeks after the bombing of the USS Cole in Yemen. It was the first of five foreign trips he would take during his time in the United States.

It was the first or last time that Jarrah would depart from the United States to see his common law wife, Aysel Senguen. As the most westernized of the hijackers, and also married, Jarrah was relatively invisible to immigration and customs officials. The 9/11 Commission later reported that Jarrah “made hundreds of phone calls to her and communicated frequently by email” during his stay in the United States (911 Commission, p. 224) but because they were in German–and were mostly love letters and other communications dealing with the day-to-day lives of the two–U.S. intelligence never paid attention.

Jarrah flew from Atlanta, Georgia to Frankfurt, Germany on Delta Flight 20 on October 7, just five days before the Cole was attacked. Mohammed Atta (the plot’s emir in the U.S.) worried that given the terrorist attack, he might not be able to return, with intelligence vigilance and police measures being tightened. Jarrah and Aysel went to Paris for a late honeymoon while al Qaeda pondered whether it lost one of its valuable pilots.

Finally, on the 29th, Jarrah arrived back in the United States, flying from Dusseldorf, Germany (Condor Flight 7178) to Frankfurt and on to Tampa, Florida (Lufthansa Flight 223). On a tourist visa, he received a six-month length of stay in the United States. Immigration and customs asked nothing.

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.

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).

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).

9 October 1999

Posted on October 9, 2020October 11, 2020 by William Arkin

A wedding is held, at the Quds mosque in Hamburg, Germany and it’s attended by Mohammed Atta, Marwan al-Shehhi, and Ziad Jarrah: the three pilots who would go on to lead the 9/11 attacks.

A videotape of the October 9, 1999 wedding of Said Bahaji, a German-born Muslim of Moroccan descent, is recovered by German authorities after 9/11. It also depicts Ramzi Binalshibh—now at Guantanamo—giving a speech denouncing Jews as a problem for all Muslims. Binalshibh reads a Palestinian war poem, and al-Shehhi participates in singing a jihadi song. German investigators believe that other men attending were part of the “Hamburg four’s” network of support. Among them was Mohammed Heidar Zammar, another German of Moroccan descent who is believed to have recruited for al Qaeda.

James Bamford writes in Pretext for War (p. 172): “By October 1999 at the latest, the members of the group under Atta’s leadership had decided to participate in jihad through a terrorist attack on America and kill as many people as possible.”

8 October 1999

Posted on October 8, 2020October 10, 2020 by William Arkin

The State Department first designates al Qaeda (al-Qa’ida) a foreign terrorist organization (FTO), the first new such designation of an organization since the list was created two years earlier. It says: “Al-Qaida, led by Usama bin Ladin [sic], was added because it is responsible for several major terrorist attacks, including the August 1998 bombings of the U.S. embassies in Nairobi, Kenya and Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania.”

The FTO designation was created after the Oklahoma City domestic bombing (in the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996) to combat the possibility, as stated by the Congress, that “foreign terrorist organizations, acting through affiliated groups or individuals, raise significant funds within the United States, or use the United States as a conduit for the receipt of funds raised in other nations.”

The initial FTO list was issued in 1997 included 30 organizations, but not al Qaeda. Why it was not included in the original 30 organizations has to do with a formal processes and arcane criteria and definitions that result in a mix of organizations (including, for instance, the IRA) being listed as FTOs.

7 October 2000

Posted on October 7, 2020October 10, 2020 by William Arkin

Ziad Jarrah, the hijacker pilot of United Airlines Flight 93, takes the first of five foreign trips while he is in the United States in preparation for the 9/11 attacks.

He flies from Atlanta to Frankfurt, Germany and then travels on to Bochum, Germany, where he sees his common-law wife Aysel Senguen. The two then travel to Paris for a vacation.

Jarrah, the only Lebanese of the 9/11 hijackers, is also the most cosmopolitan of the 19 men, maintaining a close relationship with a woman, going on vacations, traveling the world. While in the United States, Jarrah makes hundreds of phone calls to Senguen and communicates frequently by email. (911 Commission, p. 224)

During this trip, the Navy destroyer USS Cole is attacked (on October 12) and Mohammed Atta, the leader of the terrorists, was concerned that Jarrah would be stranded overseas when U.S. immigration tightened with the al Qaeda attack.

But when Jarrah returns to the U.S. on October 29, he has no trouble passing through immigration and customs in Tampa, being admitted on a six-month tourist visa, even though he was still in flight school.