Troubled 9/11 Tales
Near misses and blown opportunities
It was late 1999 when satellites belonging to the supersecret National Security Agency picked up some alarming chatter in Pakistan and Yemen. The talk was among three men who used only their first names: Nawaf, Khalid, and Salem. Intelligence officials quickly concluded the men were plotting "something nefarious." They launched a global search for the trio but never picked up their trail. It wasn't until Sept. 11, 2001, that the feds figured out what the men had been plotting. Khalid Almihdar and the other men, brothers Nawaf and Salem Alhazmi, turned out to be three of the 19 hijackers on 9/11.
Last week, an independent bipartisan commission investigating the attacks revealed a series of failures at virtually every level of the federal security bureaucracies. "There were many opportunities to stop the 9/11 plot," said a commissioner, former Deputy Attorney General Jamie Gorelick. But a colleague, former Washington Sen. Slade Gorton, disagrees. The terrorists, he says, "flat out beat us."
The commission's revelations are part of a more complex picture that has its origins in the first attack on the World Trade Center, the 1993 truck bombing by radical Islamic fundamentalists. FBI agents ultimately arrested the key people responsible and later penetrated another cell of Islamic radicals planning to blow up New York City landmarks. But despite such successes, the insular universe that terrorists inhabit has remained largely impenetrable. Why? A combination of luck--and time. A decade ago, it took the FBI and the New York Police Department just a few days to catch three key coconspirators in the World Trade Center bombing because they had been shadowing the men responsible for five years. Soon after, an FBI informant unearthed another plot by men with ties to the 1993 blast to blow up New York tunnels and bridges, the United Nations, and the FBI's New York office. In 1997, the FBI questioned and placed under surveillance Wadih el-Hage, Osama bin Laden's personal secretary. But it was only after the fact that agents realized Hage was a key planner of the October 1998 bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. Hage and bin Laden's security planners scouted the embassy locations; both had ties to the 1993 bombers as well.
Ties that bind. A review of the major terrorism investigations of the past decade shows that many of the plotters had ties to one another and that federal investigators were repeatedly hanging around in the right investigative neighborhoods watching the right guys. Key intelligence sources directly involved in the embassy bombings gave vital clues that led to that NSA intercept in 1999 of conversations between Almihdar and the Alhazmi brothers. In early January 2000, the three men hooked up with Khallad Bin Attash (aka Walid Attash), the orchestrator of the bombing of the USS Cole nine months later. Attash may have given the men some money to plan the 9/11 attacks--the same attacks that brought investigators full circle back to 1993. The mastermind of 9/11 was a key bin Laden associate, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed. His nephew Ramzi Yousef directed the 1993 World Trade Center attack. Mohammed had given Yousef a measly $600 for the plot. After fleeing the United States, Yousef moved to Manila, where he plotted an attempt on Pope John Paul II's life and the bombings of as many as 12 airliners over the Pacific Ocean. Nearly a decade later, using planes as giant fuel-laden bombs, Yousef's uncle, Mohammed, finished what his nephew had started.
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