Tag: Mohammed Atta

11 January 2001

Posted on by William Arkin

 

Marwan al-Shehhi (Mohammed Atta’s partner, and the pilot of the plane that would fly into the South Tower of the World Trade Center) takes an unexplained eight-day sojourn to Casablanca, Morocco.

Al-Shehhi flies from Tampa, Florida, to New York on Delta Flight 2522, and then on to Casablanca on Royal Air Maroc Flight 205. His trip followed Atta returning to Florida from his own foreign trip. The 9/11 Commission (Staff Statement 16, p. 7) doesn’t speculate about the reason for al-Shehhi’s trip, but it thought that perhaps he was seeking medical treatment (he is believed to have had cancer). But as a citizen of the UAE, there is no other connection to Morocco, nor are their al Qaeda operatives in the country who are connected to the 9/11 plot. It is possible that he flew the roundabout route to then fly home, but there is no evidence of that.

4 January 2001

Posted on by William Arkin

 

Mohammed Atta and Ziad Jarrah (the pilots who flew the 9/11 planes into the North Tower of the World Trade Center and crashed near Shanksville, Pennsylvania) both fly internationally on the same day (but separately), Atta leaving the United States for the first time since he arrived in June 2000.

Though Khalid Sheikh Mohammed discouraged external travel except for operational purposes, the two were so confident of their operational security that they both left the country soon after receiving their commercial pilot’s licenses.

Atta had overstayed his tourist visa by one month. He flew from Tampa to Madrid, returning on January 10, again gaining entry into the U.S.

Jarrah was already in Lebanon visiting his family. He flew Olympic Airlines from Beirut to Athens; and then from Athens to Dusseldorf, Germany. There he was met by Aysel Senguen, his common law wife, and the two flew from Dusseldorf to Newark, New Jersey, continuing on to Tampa. Senguen, a German national, left the United States on January 15, returning to Germany.

19 December 2000

Posted on by William Arkin

 

Mohammed Atta and Marwan al-Shehhi, the pilots who would hit the North and South towers at the World Trade Center take their commercial pilot license tests at Huffman Aviation in Venice, Florida, completing their initial training. Atta receives a score of 93 in 116 minutes and Shehhi received a score of 73 in 99 minutes. They each receive their FAA temporary airman certificate, qualifying them as “commercial pilots” on December 21.

29 November 1999

Posted on by William Arkin
Khalden terrorist training camp

 

Mohammed Atta travels from Hamburg, Germany to Karachi, Pakistan via Istanbul, spending the night in Turkey. Despite the African embassy bombings in August 1998, American military retaliation, and CIA covert operations, he and his compatriots have no trouble reaching Afghanistan.

Atta is already the leader of the Hamburg Four, and together with Marwan al-Shehhi, Ziad Jarrah, and Ramzi Binalshibh, they travel to Kandahar and then on to Khalden camp, where they meet with the al Qaeda operational commander Abu Hafs (Mohammed Atef) and Osama bin Laden. Abu Hafs spotted them immediately as special, according to various accounts, especially the three who would go on to pilot the 9/11 planes (Atta, al-Shehhi and Jarrah). They were educated, had technical skills, could speak English, and had learned how to live in the West. They also came from countries—Egypt, Lebanon, the United Arab Emirates—where they wouldn’t have trouble obtaining U.S. visas. By the time they leave Afghanistan, they have their broad assignments.

25 November 1999

Posted on by William Arkin

 

The “Hamburg Four” begin their journey to join al Qaeda, ultimately being assigned to Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s “planes operation.”

Ziad Jarrah flies from Hamburg, Germany to Karachi, Pakistan via Istanbul, on Turkish Airlines flight 1662 and the 1056, the first of the “Hamburg Four” to fly to Afghanistan. He stays in Pakistan for two months.

According to the interrogations of Ramzi Binalshibh, one of the four (and now in Guantanamo), sometime in 1999, the four decided to act on their beliefs and to pursue jihad against the Russians in Chechnya. They were advised that it was difficult to get to Chechnya and that they should go to Afghanistan first. The four then traveled separately to Quetta in Pakistan, meeting with a trusted representative, who arranged their passage to Kandahar.

In Afghanistan, the four have an audience with Osama bin Laden and pledge loyalty, knowing that they were volunteering for a martyrdom operation. They were instructed to enroll in flight training. Mohammed Atta was chosen to lead the group, and before they left Afghanistan, he met with bin Laden and received a preliminary list of targets: the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and the U.S. Capitol. (See 911 Commission, p. 166; 911 Commission, Staff Statement 16, p. 3)

16 November 2000

Posted on by William Arkin
1001 Center Road in Venice, Florida

 

Amidst the extended 2000 recount for the presidential election in Florida, Lebanese Ziad Jarrah, the pilot of United Airlines Flight 93 that crashed in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, signs a lease for apartment 106 in the “Falls of Venice,” 1001 Center Road in Venice.

Jarrah had enrolled in a pilot training course at Florida Flight Training Center (FFTC) in Venice in March, entering the U.S. from Munich on June 27. He started flight school the next day, immediately violating his tourist immigration status. Jarrah leases the apartment as Ziad Samir, and on occasion Mohammed Atta and Marwan al-Shehhi also stay in apartment 106. Though the FBI makes a meticulous reconstruction of Jarrah’s purchases, movements and whereabouts from his June 2000 entry to 9/11, where he lived before apartment 106 remains a mystery.

6 November 2000

Posted on by William Arkin
Huffman Aviation in Venice, Florida

 

On Election Eve in the race between George W. Bush and Al Gore, Mohammed Atta and Marwan al-Shehhi take their instrument rating airplane test at Huffman Aviation in Venice, Florida. Atta receives a score of 90 in 122 minutes and al-Shehhi receives a score of 75 in 89 minutes. Two weeks later, they each receive an FAA Temporary Airman Certificate, qualifying them as “private pilots.”

With their temporary licenses, the two were then able to sign out airplanes for solo flights. They did so on a number of occasions, often returning at 2:00 and 3:00 A.M., after logging four or five hours of flying time. They would also begin training simulations to fly larger commercial airliners, though neither would pilot or even co-pilot a commercial jet before September 11.

3 November 1999

Posted on by William Arkin
Anthony Shaffer

Able Danger is born, certainly one of the strangest, over-hyped and forgotten pre-9/11 phantasms of the intelligence community.

U.S. Special Operations Command (SOCOM), nominally engaged in counter-terrorism in a war that is not yet a war, seeks to exploit new datamining techniques to network terrorist organizations. SOCOM contacts the Joint Warfare Analysis Center (JWAC) in Dahlgren, Virginia and the Army’s Information Dominance Center at Ft. Belvoir, Virginia, both of which are pioneers in systems and cyber analysis.

In the words of retired Army Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer (participant, whistleblower, television commentator), JWAC “did not understand the scope of trying to do neural-netting, human factor relationships and looking at linkages. They just didn’t have the capability at the time.” Instead, the Able Danger project partnered with the Army IDC, its own super-secret slush fund for research and development.

Eventually, the Defense Intelligence Agency would take over the Able Danger project and shut it down, mostly because the participants had violated civil liberties rules and collected information on Americans.

But the participants—Shaffer being the most vocal—would claim after 9/11 that there was some nefarious reason for the project to be halted. And not only that, but that Able Danger managed to identify Mohammed Atta and could have prevented the attacks.

It is, in hindsight, an impossibility, for none of Atta’s personal details were known to any agency, and nor was he ever living in Brooklyn, which Shaffer asserts. The whole Able Danger controversy eventually led to Congressional hearings and lots of recriminations, but the real lesson learned—that these boutique and off-the-books projects rarely produce anything, was never learned.

1 November 1998

Posted on by William Arkin
54 Marienstrasse in Hamburg, Germany

 

Mohammed Atta, Said Bahaji and Ramzi Binalshibh move into a four bedroom apartment at 54 Marienstrasse in Hamburg, Germany. It becomes known as the house of martyrs and over the 28 months that Atta’s name is on the lease, 29 Middle Eastern and North African men live in the apartment or register it as their home address.

Up to six men at a time live at the apartment, including other al Qaeda operatives, particularly Atta’s partner Marwan al-Shehhi. Atta, Binalshibh and al-Shehhi (together with a fourth of the “Hamburg Group,” Ziad Jarrah) travel to Afghanistan together to participate in jihad and are recruited for the plane’s operation. Binalshibh would relocate to Berlin after this and become a middle-man to the pilot hijackers in the United States, unable to obtain an American visa.

Marientstrasse would become famous later for the Islamic activity going on under the noses of German authorities. Many of its residents would later be arrested.

29 October 2000

Posted on 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.