Author: William Arkin

26 September 1996

Posted on by William Arkin
map of opposition groups in Afghanistan

 

Afghan military commander and politician Ahmad Shah Massoud abandons Kabul and flees to the Panjshir Valley in the face of overwhelming Taliban forces, which had entered the Afghan capital city from the south.

Massoud had been a powerful mujahedin commander during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan and was a leader of the so-called “Northern Alliance,” the United Islamic Front for the Salvation of Afghanistan.

The Alliance formed after the southern-dominated Taliban took over control of most of the country. Massoud’s forces were mostly Tajiks but included other non-Pashtun ethnic groups by 2001. Two days before 9/11, on September 9, Massoud was assassinated by a pair of journalists who blew themselves up during an interview. They are presumed to have been al Qaeda operatives.

25 September 2000

Posted on by William Arkin

 

Hani Hanjour, the pilot of the United Airlines plane that hit the Pentagon, returns to the American consulate in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia and makes a second application for an American student visa. An earlier visa application (on September 10) had been denied because, though Hanjour applied for a B-1/B-2 business/tourist visa, he stated that he intended to attend school.

The consulate told him he’d have to reapply. This time, Hanjour states a desire to attend English language school at the ELS Language Center in Oakland, California.

The 911 Commission found that Hanjour had been issued an F (student) visa in Kingdom of Saudi Arabia passport #C241922. But a complete search of his records indicated that he had already received an approved change of status to attend this same English language school in 1996. That earlier approval of visa status was granted by the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) while Hanjour was earlier in the United States. In these days before computer networks and information sharing, the consulate had no record of the earlier application (a likely cause for disqualification if he was deemed to have shown deception).

24 September 1999

Posted on 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 by William Arkin
Ramzi Binalshibh

 

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.

22 September 1998

Posted on by William Arkin
Mullah Omar: Qandahar centric; controls military and funds; close ties to UBL and ISID; increasingly suspicious of Rabbani's supporters; key supporters—Foreigh Minister, Governor of Herat, Governor of Mazar-e Sharif

 

Three years before 9/11, the Taliban diplomatic envoy is expelled from Saudi Arabia over the refusal of the government in Kandahar to hand over Osama Bin Laden.

After the African embassy bombings in August 1998, Washington sought Saudi Arabia’s help in forging a break between the Taliban and bin Laden, specifically in getting Mullah Omar to eject bin Laden from the country.

Prince Turki bin Faisal (also known as Turki al-Faisal)—head of Saudi intelligence and bin Laden’s earlier sponsor during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan—went to Afghanistan to meet with Omar, head of the Taliban. The meeting is the stuff of legend, the powerful Saudi prince being not just rebuffed and insulted, but treated with less than princely dignity, and leaving in a swirl of robes.

When the Taliban ambassador was expelled from Riyadh, Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah happened to be in the United States on a visit and met at the White House with President Clinton and Vice President Al Gore. He reported on the earlier Turki visit to Afghanistan and expressed Saudi frustration with the unorthodox regime. Saudi Arabia wouldn’t formally break off diplomatic relations with the Taliban until September 25, 2001.

21 September 1991

Posted on by William Arkin
Hani Hanjour

 

Saudi citizen Hani Hanjour, who would pilot the hijacked United Airlines plane into the Pentagon, is issued a visa in Jeddah for travel to the United States to attend flight training, a decade before 9/11. He is the first 9/11 hijacker known to visit the U.S.

In November 1997, he again applied for and received an American visa, unrelated to the terrorist attacks. To the question of whether he had ever applied for a U.S. visa before, he answers “no.” He also answers “no” to the question, “Have you ever been in the U.S.A.?”

The 9/11 Commission stated that it was “difficult to establish the intent behind these false statements.” The Commission speculated that they may have been made inadvertently by a travel agent who filled out the form on Hanjour’s behalf. Still, they concluded that it was “perplexing” that Hanjour might try to hide previous travel to the U.S. because it actually works in his favor—that is, that he was not seeking to clandestinely relocate to the U.S. After 9/11, obviously the criteria for issuing visas to Arab men was changed.

20 September 2000

Posted on 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 by William Arkin
Mohammed Atta

 

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.

18 September 2000

Posted on 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.

17 September 2000

Posted on by William Arkin
Ali Abdul Aziz Ali

 

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.