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.

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).

1 October 1997

Posted on October 1, 2020October 3, 2020 by William Arkin

FBI director Louis Freeh warns that Russian organized crime networks are growing and that they pose a menace to U.S. national security. He says that Russian syndicates are forging ties with the Italian mafia and Colombian drug cartels. Though Freeh would become personally involved in terrorism investigations after the 1996 Khobar Towers attack, 1998 African embassy, and October 2000 USS Cole attacks, his personal focus remains organized crime, and—under Bush administration Attorney General John Ashcroft before 9/11—on pornography.

Freeh would leave office on June 25, 2001 seven years into his ten-year term. The FBI then had an acting director until September 4, when Robert Mueller was confirmed as the sixth director, just a week before 9/11.

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.

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.

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.