25 November 1999

Posted on November 25, 2020December 23, 2020 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)

24 November 1998

Posted on November 24, 2020December 23, 2020 by William Arkin

Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs Martin Indyk wraps up meetings with 16 Iraqi opposition groups in London. The meetings, arranged by the British Foreign Office, seeks to unite the expatriate groups as a viable alternative to Saddam Hussein. The groups pledge to work to indict the Iraqi president for war crimes as one means of uniting Iraqi public opinion against him.

“We are not talking here about the opposition groups being involved in activities that are designed to overthrow violently the regime in Baghdad. We are talking about the opposition groups developing political support for a new Iraq, a new open, democratic Iraq,” the Foreign Office junior minister said.

By late 1998, with much of the White House’s (and the CIA’s) attention shifted to al Qaeda, Iraq had fallen off the radar screen, and with an end to U.N. inspections, there was little new reliable intelligence coming from inside the country. But Congress passed a law allowing President Clinton to spend 93 million dollars helping anti-Saddam groups and the beginning of the end was afoot, particularly in providing an outsize role to the Iraqi exiles, who later would manipulate both the Clinton and Bush administrations with fake intelligence and false promises of support inside the country. Indyk would go on to become ambassador to Israel (1999–2001), a position he also filled from 1995–1997.

23 November 1985

Posted on November 23, 2020December 23, 2020 by William Arkin

An EgyptAir airliner bound from Athens, Greece to Malta and carrying several U.S. citizens was hijacked by the Abu Nidal Organization, a renegade Palestinian faction backed by Libya. Abu Nidal (Sabri Khalil al-Banna) split from the PLO in 1974 and founded the Abu Nidal group. The November 1985 hijacking is considered their first international terrorist attack.

Egyptian commandos attempted to storm the plane, during which the hijackers threw grenades inside the aircraft and 60 of the 95 passengers and crew died in the resulting explosions and fire. The Abu Nidal Organization would go on to carry out a number of particularly brutal international hijackings and attacks.

Abu Nidal was expelled from Libya in 1999 and he ultimately sought refuge in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. He was killed in his Baghdad apartment in August 2002, some say by Iraqi secret police, some say he committed suicide. But the bottom line was that Saddam feared his independence and even possible work with the United States after 9/11, especially as an invasion of Iraq seemed coming.

Abu Nidal was probably the last of the individual charismatic terrorists—à la “Carlos the Jackal”—who could flourish in rogue states and evade international capture. And his organization’s many hijackings also ultimately lead to more and more efforts to secure air travel, a process that obviously didn’t happen until after 9/11.

22 November 1988

Posted on November 22, 2020December 23, 2020 by William Arkin

Northrop’s B-2A “stealth” bomber is rolled out of its hanger at Air Force Plant 42 in Palmdale, California, showcased to the public for the first time.

“We are not just rolling out America’s newest strategic bomber,” said Air Force Secretary Edward C. Aldridge Jr. “We are ushering in a new age of strategic deterrence.” Should deterrence fail, the theory at the time went, the bombers would fly into Soviet airspace undaunted by air defenses, seeking out and destroying surviving nuclear forces.

Of course the B-2 would go on to be used in Kosovo in 1999, where the hyperbole of its prowess—and its ability to evade Serbian air defenses—would match the pretenses of Bill Clinton’s war: bombing with minimum vulnerability of U.S. military personnel. After 9/11, the B-2 would also be extensively used in wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, joining the general bombing campaigns, but never challenged by any air-defense threat. And that’s the thing about the B-2 as it ends in 30-plus year lifespan (to be followed by a new bomber, the B-21)—with satellite-guided bombs and a host of new techniques to disable enemy air defenses, it is an extremely expensive way to bomb, at least with conventional weapons.

21 November 2000

Posted on November 21, 2020December 23, 2020 by William Arkin

Satam Muhammed Abdel Rahman al-Suqami, a 24-year-old Saudi who would end up being one on the musclemen on American Airlines Flight 11 that hit the North Tower of the World Trade Center, gets a visa with an altered passport.

Suqami applied for and received a two-year B-1/B-2 (tourist/business) visa in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia on November 21. After 9/11, the FBI concluded that he had fraudulent travel stamps associated with al Qaeda. In his application, Suqami also left blank the line on which he was asked to supply the name and street address of his present employer. But Suqami raised no suspicions—that was the case with Saudis—and his application was approved the next day.

After 9/11, the FBI also pieced together that in the two years prior to the attacks, Suqami had traveled to Iran, Syria, Jordan, Egypt and Oman, and had taken additional international trips using Bahrain and the UAE as jumping off points.

20 November 1979

Posted on November 20, 2020December 23, 2020 by William Arkin

An obscure but seminal event occurs, when a group of Saudi dissidents—alternately called “Sunni Muslims,” “Muslim fundamentalists,” “Shi’a vermin from Hasa,” and even “foreign agents”—attack the Grand Mosque of Mecca, Islam’s holiest site.

Entering the walls of the mosque, some 200 rebels, mostly Saudis, but including Egyptians, Kuwaitis, Yemenis and Pakistanis take thousands hostage and barricade themselves inside. They call for the overthrow of the pro-Western Saudi government. It is an unprecedented event in Saudi history and the first mega-action by Islamic fundamentalists. And it is a seminal event for a young Osama bin Laden, who was reportedly shocked into a political awakening, one that became even more stark when a month later, the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan, while the standoff between Saudi forces and the hostage takers was still going on.

After two weeks of negotiating, sniping and fighting, Saudi Arabia secretly brought in French counter-terrorism commandos to aid in a final assault on the mosque. The hostage takers and the hostages had moved underground into tunnels and catacombs. Reportedly using chemicals, the combined Saudi and French force mounted a final assault. Some 250 people were killed and 600 were wounded, and the battle left at least 25 Saudi soldiers and more than 100 rebels dead. After it was all over, some 65 rebels were publicly beheaded.

During the siege, thousands of Saudi Shi’a living in the eastern provinces took to the streets, inspired by the Grand Mosque attack. Riots broke out and Aramco facilities were attacked. It took Saudi authorities until mid-January to subdue the uprising.

An interesting outcome of the assault on the Grand Mosque is that the Saudi monarchy adopted conservative Wahhabism as the official ideology of the state, essentially implementing many of the positions of the insurgents. Women are prohibited from driving or appearing on television, music is forbidden, all stores and malls are closed during the five daily prayers. A royal decree also says that there were to be “no limits … put on expenditures for the propagation of Islam.” Saudi Arabia becomes—and is—the problem and the birthplace of 9/11.

19 November 1999

Posted on November 19, 2020December 23, 2020 by William Arkin

FBI Director Louis Freeh announces that he is creating a new “Investigative Services Division” to “coordinate the FBI’s international activities, integrate and substantially strengthen its analytic capabilities, and oversee the Bureau’s crisis management functions.”

The reorganization is the beginning of a long road on the part of the Bureau to build up its intelligence capacities, a shift that did not really occur until after 9/11. The FBI’s importance as an intelligence producer was made all the more central given its role in investigating overseas terrorism strikes and in pursuing terrorist suspects in the United States, particularly in the terrorism expertise of the New York field office. But it saw its collection of information solely as part of building cases for prosecution and the “intelligence” derived was generally not shared with the rest of the government.

The post-9/11 Congressional Joint Inquiry (p. 113) labeled the FBI’s “chronic inability to perform serious intelligence analysis,” even internally, as a problem. There have been many post-9/11 reorganizations of the FBI’s intelligence infrastructure, and field intelligence groups have been created in every field office. But ultimately the greatest impact—two decades later—is the FBI’s domestic intelligence apparatus that is focused on immediate and not “strategic” analysis. Much of that effort has little to do with terrorism, or at least with foreign terrorism.

18 November 1998

Posted on November 18, 2020December 23, 2020 by William Arkin

The CIA issues a compartmented top-secret report, “Further Options Available Against UBL” [Osama bin Laden], outlining covert and military actions that could be taken as a follow-on to the August 1998 cruise missile attacks (that were retaliation for the African embassy bombings).

White House staffers were still arguing for bombing a broad range of sites that would include al Qaeda camps and Taliban facilities in Afghanistan. Beyond air defenses and airfields, the Air Force said there weren’t any easy targets—that is, those which were outside urban areas or whose destruction would have significant effects. And the terrorist camps themselves were spread out and lacked critical facilities. Bomb damage assessments of the August strikes indicated no long-term effect.

According to Age of Sacred Terror (p. 284), national security advisor Sandy Berger was leery of bombing alone, believing that the odds of killing Osama bin Laden were low “and that a failure would make the United States look impotent and its target invincible.”

JCS Chairman Gen. Hugh Shelton presented other military options, but his “$2 billion option” as the White House called it, was seen more as passive-aggressive refusal on the part of the Pentagon to engage in combat, piling on logistical and support requirements that turned every option into a major war. Secretary of Defense William Cohen also insisted that any special operations option—even of a small stealthy raid—include a “force protection” package. Ultimately the discussions fizzled into nothing.

17 November 1998

Posted on November 17, 2020December 23, 2020 by William Arkin

The CIA produces a top-secret intelligence report, “Usama Bin Ladin’s Finances: Some Estimates of Wealth, Income, and Expenditures,” that is unable to estimate the al Qaeda head’s wealth, nor where he was getting money from or how he moved it. The report said that bin Laden was getting financial support from his family in Saudi Arabia and other rich Gulf-based individuals.

In discussing the report, a National Security Council working group on terrorist finances asks the CIA to push again for access to a former al Qaeda official, Madani al Tayyib, who is in Saudi custody. The 9/11 Commission requests that the CIA use its back channels to see “if it is possible to elaborate further on the ties between Usama [sic] bin Ladin and prominent individuals in Saudi Arabia, including especially the Bin Ladin family.” (911 Commission, p. 122).

In September, Vice President Al Gore made a personal appeal to Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah for direct access to al Tayyib. Richard Clarke writes: “Upon learning that much of al Qaeda’s financing came from Saudi Arabia, both from individuals and from quasi-governmental charities, ‘We decided that we needed to have a serious talk with the Saudis as well as with a few of the financial centers in the region. We recognized that the Saudi regime had been largely uncooperative on previous law enforcement-focused investigations of terrorism … so we wanted a different approach … So we asked Vice President Gore to talk to the Crown Prince … We wanted to avoid a typical pattern of Saudi behavior we had seen: achingly slow progress, broken promises, denial, and cooperation limited to specific answers to specific questions … The Saudis protested our focus on continuing contacts between Usama and his wealthy, influential family, who were supposed to have broken off all ties with him. “How can you tell a mother not to call her son,” they asked. (Against all Enemies, pp. 194–195)

The United States never obtained direct access.

16 November 2000

Posted on November 16, 2020December 23, 2020 by William Arkin

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.