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.

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.”

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.

24 September 1999

Posted on September 24, 2020September 28, 2020 by William Arkin

Mohammed Atta, a master’s student in Hamburg, terminates his employment with Hayes Computing Services, where he is working part-time. It is part of his process of disengaging from both his employers and university affiliations in anticipation of conducting jihad. At the time, his plan was to travel to Chechnya to fight the Russians.

Around June 1994, Atta took six months off from the architectural and planning consultancy he was working for in Hamburg to make his pilgrimage to Mecca. In 1997, he is believed to have gone to Afghanistan for the first time, having left his consultancy and returning to work in October 1998. He started part-time work with Hayes in August 1998.

In June 1999, Atta presented his final master’s thesis at the University of Hamburg-Harburg. Professors would later say that he was more strident than in earlier days and avoided shaking the hands of his female assessor. He has by then grown the beard of an Islamic holy man.

23 September 1995

Posted on September 23, 2020September 28, 2020 by William Arkin

Ramzi Binalshibh, one of the original “Hamburg four,” and the only one of four to be denied a visa for the United States, first arrives in Germany with a plea for political asylum, claiming illegal detention and torture in his native Sudan.

He is granted asylum in Germany, but in fact, Binalshibh was born in Yemen. That is the reason for his ultimately being denied a visa to the U.S. The poorer Yemenis, in contrast with Saudis and Gulf state nationals, were generally thought to be seeking to come to the United States to illegally emigrate. Denied a visa, from his German base Binalshibh would become the communications link between Mohammed Atta (the leader of the hijackers in the United States) and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (the mastermind of the plot, located in Pakistan). Thus the German location would prove fortuitous, for communications between the U.S. and Germany were not routinely monitored and the German location helped the hijackers evade detection. Binalshibh would ultimately leave Germany on September 5, just days before the 9/11 attacks, traveling to Afghanistan before being captured a year later.

On September 11, 2002, two al Qaeda suspects were killed and five were captured after Pakistani police stormed an apartment in Karachi. Binalshibh is subsequently transported to “black sites” and tortured, eventually moved to Guantanamo Bay, where he is held today.

20 September 2000

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

Mohammed Atta and Marwan al-Shehhi enroll in flight training at Jones Aviation in Sarasota, Florida. It is the second primary flight school, after Huffman Aviation, that they attend. They both fail their first tests and leave the school on October 6.

The 911 Commission will later comment—more than a dozen times—that throughout flight training the two struggled with poor English, failed their instrument rating tests, and scored badly in tests when they ultimately received their initial commercial pilot’s licenses in December 2000, as if any of that somehow made any difference. Perhaps such a record might have provoked school officials to question the Middle East men’s intentions, or even report to authorities, but as a matter of skill, evidently the two flew well enough to achieve their objectives.

19 September 2000

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

Mohammed Atta and Marwan al-Shehhi’s I-539 visa change applications are received by the INS. The I-359 is to extend or change their non-immigrant status from tourist to vocational students (see 15 September).

Atta had applied for and received (in one day) a five-year B-1/B-2 (tourist/business) visa from the U.S. embassy in Berlin, Germany in February. He was never interviewed and because of his German residency and employment status, was treated as a German citizen. Marwan al-Shehhi essentially was treated the same way in his visa application. When the two separately arrived in the United States in June 2000, they were granted six-month customary stays. Although they would change their visa status and leave and return numerous times, neither were ever flagged for closer attention.

17 September 2000

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

The 9/11 hijackers receive their largest transfer of money from overseas: $70,000, wired from the United Arab Emirates. On this day, hijacker pilot Marwan al-Shehhi receives $70,000 from Ali Abdul Aziz Ali, who used the alias “Isam Mansur.” Ali, who would also occasionally use the alias “Isam Mansour,” “Mr. Ali,” and “Hani (Fawaz Trdng),” was the main financial go-between in transferring money to the U.S. for the 9/11 attacks. The transfers were sent from the UAE Exchange Centre located in Bur Dubai, UAE.

At the time, the large transfer did not trigger banking suspicious-activity reports (SARs). Nor did any of the other transfers of money to the hijackers or the “musclemen” get reported. The 19 hijackers would use a variety of means—cash they brought into the U.S., foreign and U.S. bank debit and credit cards, foreign checking accounts from European and Gulf state banks, and traveler’s checks—to finance their activities inside the U.S. The Hamburg three, Mohammed Atta, Marwan al-Shehhi, and Ziad Jarrah all continued to maintain and use their bank accounts in Germany, which also evaded any special attention.

Overall it is estimated that the entire 9/11 operation, including flight training, travel, and more than a year’s residence in the U.S., cost no more than a half a million dollars. In theory, today such large transfers of money would provoke closer government scrutiny, but post-9/11 rules regarding financial reporting of transactions ultimately have more of an impact on white-collar crime than domestic terrorism.

15 September 2000

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

A year before 9/11, Mohammed Atta and Marwan al-Shehhi, the hijacker pilots who will later attack the north and south towers of the World Trade Center, fill out Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) forms to change their visa status from tourists to vocational students.

The two—Atta an Egyptian citizen, and al-Shehhi from the United Arab Emirates—had already been in the United States for three months and had begun flight training, mostly at Huffman Aviation at Venice Municipal Airport in Venice, Florida. Both applications request that their status be maintained until September 1, 2001. The requests show deception in the earlier status, but neither receives additional scrutiny from visa authorities with regard to what they are doing in the United States.