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Osama Bin Laden

Though national terrorism chief Richard Clarke and his colleagues had believed for months that something awful was going to happen, they were unable to get the relevant government agencies to respond to what the intelligence was telling them. The CIA was not sharing information with the FBI. Clarke and his team were never told of the cozy relationship between the CIA and the Saudi GID.

There were two Saudi intelligence agents the CIA believed had been successfully placed inside Al Qaeda as double agents. The problem was that neither the CIA nor the GID had properly vetted the men. In fact, they were triple agents — loyal to Osama bin Laden. Saudi intelligence had sent agents Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi to spy on a meeting of top associates of Al Qaeda in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, January 5–8, 2000. “The CIA/Saudi hope was that the Saudis would learn details of bin Laden’s future plans. Instead, plans were finalized and the Saudis learned nothing,” says a CIA terrorism expert who asks that his identity be withheld.

By the time the two Saudi agents entered Malaysia, the CIA was well aware of Khalid al-Mihdhar’s name, passport number, and birth information, since he had a US multiple-entry visa issued in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, that would expire on April 6, 2000. The CIA knew these details because one of its own officers in the Jeddah consulate routinely approved visas for Saudi intelligence operatives as a courtesy. Under normal circumstances, the names of al-Mihdhar and al-Hazmi should have been placed on the State Department, Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), and US Customs watch lists. The two men would have been automatically denied entry into the United States. Because they were perceived as working for a friendly intelligence service, however, the CIA did not pass along the names. If it had, Eric Gill and his colleagues in Newark and Boston might have stood a chance at preventing what was planned for the morning of September 11.

Khalid al-Mihdhar, Nawah al-Hazmi, his brother Salem al-Hazmi, and their colleagues in terror Majed Moqed and Hani Hanjour, were ready. They returned for their last night’s sleep on earth to the Marriott Residence Inn, where they could dream of what awaited them in paradise.

Late on the evening of September 10 Deepthi Suraweers of Gate Gourmet at Dulles removed the catering and food carts from an American Airlines Boeing 757 as the first step in preparing the plane for a morning flight to Los Angeles. The cleaning crew had not yet come on board to clean the aircraft and seal it for the night. To Suraweers everything on board seemed normal.

Aircraft parked at gates at Dulles Airport received no special security. All it took was an airport A pass to get access to an aircraft. Hundreds of Dulles employees as well as airline flight crews had such badges. There were no security cameras capturing images of staff entering and leaving aircraft from inside the gate area or from the tarmac.

At 6:30 am on 9/11, Jaime Ramos and a Gate Gourmet colleague arrived planeside with their catering truck and began loading lunches onto the plane for American Airlines Flight 77. Gate Gourmet, like most other operations at Dulles, relied on foreign-born employees. Everything seemed normal, according to Ramos. The only strange event was that six days earlier, another Gate Gourmet employee, Mohammed B. Elamin, had inexplicably disappeared, leaving his burgundy Volvo, minus license plates, parked in the Gate Gourmet parking lot with a note saying, “Give to charity.” “Foreign nationals working low-wage jobs at Dulles came and went,” according to Ed Nelson.

As Eric Gill went through his morning rituals of getting ready for another workday, his job at Dulles was not on his mind. Instead, Gill was busy helping his kids get ready for school before he and his wife, Roseline, headed for their second jobs, at a nearby Wal-Mart. Gill was pleased to walk outside and be greeted by a perfect late-summer day as he and his wife left for their jobs.

At the Marriott Residence Inn, the three Al Qaeda members had little time for breakfast before their rendezvous with two other team members. Nawaf al-Hazmi drove his 1988 Toyota sedan the short distance from Herndon to Dulles and pulled into row G of the main day parking lot at 7:25 am. The team did not worry about being discovered.They were so confident that they left behind a car full of evidence, including instrument-panel diagrams for a Boeing 757, a box cutter, flight-school manuals, and a piece of paper with “Osama 5895316” written on it. In addition, credit cards, a personal address book, and checkbooks would later assist FBI agents in discovering the conspiracy that they had been missing for so many months.

First to check in at the upstairs ticket counter were Khalid al-Mihdhar and Majed Moqed. Eighteen minutes later the diminutive would-be pilot, Hani Hanjour, and the two brothers, Nawaf and Salem al-Hazmi, checked in.

It did not take long for Hani Hanjour, Khalid al-Mihdhar, and Majed Moqed to be flagged by CAPPS (Computer Assisted Passenger Prescreening System), an FAA-approved automated system administered by the commercial airlines that scores each airline passenger’s profile to identify those who might endanger an aircraft. The system picks out passengers partly on the basis of where they are going and where they are coming from. It also sometimes selects passengers at random. In each case the passengers’ names are matched against a watch list the government supplies the airline security directors, and these passengers are put through further screening. Meanwhile, an American Airlines ticket agent had already become suspicious of the al-Hazmi brothers because of their behavior. One of the brothers had no photo ID and seemed not to understand simple security questions. However, because the watch list was never complete or up to date given squabbling between the FBI and the CIA, the only thing that was done as a result was that the luggage of several members of the Al Qaeda team was held on the ground until the cabin crew confirmed that they had boarded as passengers on Flight 77. As the Dulles Airport closed-circuit camera’s videotape later revealed, all five hijackers passed through the Main Terminal’s West Checkpoint, where the encounter with Eric Gill had taken place the evening before.

Up in Boston two Argenbright competitors went through roughly the same process with two other Al Qaeda teams — with the exception that Logan Airport had no video cameras to record the screening of passengers. Between 6:45 and 7:40 am Mohammed Atta, Abdulaziz al-Omari, Satam al-Suqami, Wail al-Shehri, and Waleed al-Shehri checked in and boarded another American Airlines plane (Flight 11), which was also bound for Los Angeles. The flight was scheduled to depart at 7:45. Across Logan Airport at the United Airlines terminal, Marwan al-Shehhi, joined by Fayez Banihammad, Mohand al-Shehri, Ahmed al-Ghamdi, and Hamza al-Ghamdi, went through security to yet another flight to Los Angeles, United Flight 175.

Like the American Airlines representative at Dulles, United’s representatives at Logan also had problems communicating with the Al Qaeda team. The ticket agent had trouble getting the basic security questions answered. She remembers going over the questions several times. The security checkpoints at Logan for American Flight 11 were operated by Globe Security. At the United gate, the checkpoint was supervised by Huntleigh USA. None of the screening companies involved in the attacks was under US ownership on 9/11.

Mohammed Atta had been targeted by CAPPS in Portland, Maine, on his way to Boston. Three members of his team — Satam al-Suqami, Wail al-Shehri, and Waleed al-Shehri — had their baggage pulled in Boston. Atta’s team was cleared by Huntleigh screeners, however, and got on board. That flight pushed back from the gate at 7:40.

A Screening Checkpoint at Boston Logan International Airport. Taken 2007. Photo by TSA

As at Logan, the Argenbright-managed checkpoint at Newark Liberty International Airport’s United terminal had no video cameras to record the screening of passengers. Between 7:03 and 7:39 am, Saeed al-Ghamdi, Ahmed al-Nami, Ahmad al-Haznawi, and Ziad al-Jarrah checked in at the United Airlines ticket counter for Flight 93 to San Francisco. The Al Qaeda team cleared security without incident, and the four men got on board the jetliner between 7:39 and 7:48, taking their seats in first class. But this team was one man short. Mohamed al-Kahtani had been refused entry into the United States by an Immigration and Naturalization Service agent at Orlando International Airport in August.

Meanwhile, back at Dulles, when Majed Moqed and Khalid al-Mihdhar appeared at the West Checkpoint, both men put their carry-on bags on the belt leading to the X-ray machine and went through the magnetometer. Both set off the magnetometer’s alarm as they walked through. Following procedure, the Argenbright screeners diverted them to a second magnetometer. Al-Mihdhar cleared this machine without setting it off and was waved through the checkpoint. Moqed once again set off the metal detector, and so, as both Argenbright and FAA procedure called for, he was taken out of line and given a personal screening with a hand wand. The screener had to be careful not to use the wand too close to the terminal’s concrete floor, however, or the metal rebar in the floor could cause its alarm to sound. Moqed passed and was cleared to proceed to the midfield terminal to board American Airlines Flight 77. Eight minutes later Hani Hanjour went through screening at the same checkpoint. Hanjour also had two carry-on bags. He passed through the checkpoint without incident. Less than a minute later, Nawaf and Salem al-Hazmi arrived at the checkpoint. Salem al-Hazmi cleared the magnetometer and the carry-on X-ray. His brother Nawaf triggered the alarms for both magnetometers and was subjected to a hand-wand screening. The Argenbright screener also tested the shoulder strap of Nawaf’s carry-on bag with an explosive trace detector. Having passed all tests, Nawaf al-Hazmi was the last member of the Dulles Al Qaeda team to be cleared.

Not a single utility knife or box cutter was detected on any of the hijackers by the Argenbright screening team at Dulles or by the security screeners at Logan or Newark that morning. Later the staff of the 9/11 Commission would report: “Our best working hypothesis is that a number of the hijackers were carrying permissible utility knives or pocket knives.” A member of the 9/11 Commission staff testified that the hijackers had purchased two Leatherman utility knives that were not discovered in the belongings they left behind. The box-cutter theory first emerged because of the box cutter found in the Dulles team’s car. The assumption that the hijackers used knives with blades shorter than four inches emerged because, under the FAA guidelines in force at the time, even if the screeners had discovered such weapons, according to The 9/11 Commission Report, “The item would [have been] returned to the owner and permitted to be carried on the aircraft.”  It is likely that the Dulles hijack team managed to get weapons aboard Flight 77 after the incident with Gill the night before. Did Al Qaeda have cohorts working behind the scenes at the airport with access to the planes? This question has serious implications. There was no shortage of foreign-born Muslims working at Dulles. The passenger screeners at Dulles were 87- percent foreign-born, the majority from Muslim countries.

Illustrating the difficulties this had posed in 1999 Argenbright Security became embroiled in an Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) complaint. The complaint came from a Muslim rights group with ties to organizations that would later be examined for terrorism financing. The formal EEOC complaint was based on Argenbright Security’s refusal to allow female employees to wear traditional Muslim head coverings. United Airlines had received complaints from some passengers uncomfortable with female screeners’ attire in the wake of Al Qaeda’s 1998 embassy bombings in Africa. Seven female screeners refused to change their mode of dress — one of them said, “I’m angry. This is my religion”— and they were dismissed. Four of the seven came from Sudan, a country that was on the State Department’s terrorist list and that provided a haven for Al Qaeda and bin Laden. The other three came from Egypt and Afghanistan, both of which had ties to bin Laden and his cohorts. Egypt was the birthplace of the infamous Muslim Brotherhood, a senior organization to Al Qaeda.

The EEOC complaint was drafted by a lawyer for the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR). CAIR is a controversial group. Soon after Osama bin Laden was named as being behind the African embassy bombings, CAIR protested US retaliatory attacks in Afghanistan and called for the removal of a billboard with bin Laden’s picture and the caption enemy no. 1, which overlooked a well-traveled Los Angeles road. Ironically, CAIR’s executive director, Nihad Awad, stood next to President Bush at the Islamic Center in Washington, where Bush pleaded for Americans to “respect” Muslims and Islam’s teachings of “peace.” Awad was invited by the Bush White House to Bush’s September 20 speech to Congress and was seated near the First Lady.

Congressman David E. Bonior (D-MI), who represents a heavily Arab district, aligned himself with CAIR over the Argenbright complaint. “This incident raises a larger issue: that of widespread and systematic discrimination against Muslims and Arab Americans in airports all across the country,” Bonior said in a March 1999 House speech. Copies of CAIR’s booklet, An Employer’s Guide to Islamic Religious Practices, were available through Bonior’s Michigan office. Bonior also pressed Jane Garvey, FAA director in the Clinton administration, to end all profiling of Arabs and other Muslims at US airports.

A month later, in April 1999, Argenbright Security agreed to settle the case by rehiring the women, giving them back pay and an additional $2,500 each, and agreeing to a sensitivity program on Muslim issues for all employees. Argenbright Security also gave each woman a written apology. As a result of the lawsuit, airline, security, and airport management feared provoking Muslim employees. All seven successful Muslim complainants still worked as Dulles screeners on 9/11.

Several of the women were not content with the written apology or the financial settlement. They wanted Frank Argenbright personally to apologize to them on television. A former FAA inspector at Dulles, Steve Elson, told the conversative WorldNetDaily in 2001, “Airport-security contractors can’t win. On one hand, the government slams them for hiring foreigners. But if they don’t hire them, or [if they] fire them, the government nails them for discrimination . . .”

As for security on board airliners, it was virtually nonexistent. Ironically, it was William Webster — former director first of the FBI, then of the CIA — working as a paid lobbyist for the airline industry, who pressed Congress not to require proposed FAA safeguards in the wake of the December 1989 bombing of Pan Am 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland. The proposed FAA rules would have vastly improved security. Matching baggage with passengers; improved coordination among government agencies; more sophisticated profiling — all the proposed reforms were rejected by Congress. After TWA 800 crashed off Long Island, Vice President Al Gore headed a commission that attempted to revive the rule changes. But when it became clear that that crash was not caused by terrorism, the impetus to improve security collapsed. The airline industry had successfully fought the changes again, arguing that security was the government’s responsibility.

Mohammed Atta (top) and Marwan al-Shehhi (bottom)

Addressing the issue of illegal and expired student visas was probably the biggest step the government could have taken to prevent 9/11. Half a million foreign students were in the United States despite repeated warnings that there was no effective system to track them. The problem was recognized by the FBI and the Justice Department in the late 1990s as the prospect of terrorism finally penetrated the bureaucratic mind-set. Justice asked the Immigration and Naturalization Service to start CIPRIS (Coordinated Interagency Partnership Regulating International Students) to make certain terrorists were not posing as students. The idea was that CIPRIS would issue all foreign students ID cards and put them into a database. CIPRIS would then track a student’s admission and course of study with his or her school, allowing the Treasury Department to determine if tuition and expense money came from Islamic charities or other suspected terrorist funding sources. If a student was not verified as attending the school he or she claimed to attend, the visa would be immediately revoked.

When INS announced the program in Atlanta in 1998, colleges and trade schools bitterly protested having to report on students. The INS immediately cut funding for the program from $11 million to $4 million. The Justice Department still wanted full national implementation by 1999. That’s when the Association of International Educators convinced twenty-one senators to sign a letter that killed the registration program. If the program had been implemented, Hani Hanjour, who entered the country on a student visa in 1997 but never attended school, would have not been allowed back into the United States in 2000. Mohammed Atta and Marwan al-Shehhi had changed their status in the United States from tourist to student, because they knew that student visas were not treated seriously by the INS. When Atta was stopped for a routine traffic check in Broward County, Florida, in April 2001, if CIPRIS had been in operation, he would have been arrested and deported.

Once on their respective aircraft, the Al Qaeda teams quickly defeated what little security was in place. There was no air marshal on any of the four hijacked planes. A Federal Air Marshal program did exist, but it was almost exclusively directed to sensitive international flights and was very small in scope.

The airlines called their last layers of defense “Common Strategy.” Captain Edmond Soliday, who was vice president of safety and security for United Airlines on 9/11, says that the Common Strategy “was based on a false assumption — that the intent was to take the airplane and escape with it or hold it hostage with passengers . . . that’s why small knives were permitted. Law enforcement always envisioned having to storm a parked plane — not deal with a fully loaded and fueled plane being used as a guided missile.” Flight crews were ordered not to be heroes — not to try to stop a hijacker. Every aspect of the strategy was aimed at placating the hijacker and getting the plane down on the ground safely, where it could be stormed by law enforcement teams. In fact flight crews received special training on how to persuade passengers not to be heroes, and on how to identify passengers who might decide to take on a hijacker.

On September 10 the last of the vague warnings reached the airline security officials from the FAA. For Ed Soliday and the other security chiefs at the nation’s airlines, the warnings from US intelligence funneled through the FAA were becoming more frequent. Between April 1, 2001, and September 10, 2001, fifty-two warnings mentioning bin Laden or Al Qaeda had seen sent out. But according to an aviation security chief, these warnings were all but useless, “because they were not specific enough to act on . . . These were cover-your-ass warnings by the government.”

Inside the airlines the one thing that could have helped was being fought by airline management. Putting air marshals on board would have required giving up first-class seats, which was something the major airlines were not willing to do. “The dirty little secret of the airline industry was that these seats almost never sold for their full advertised price and were used to lure corporate clients,” one security official for a major airline says. “Had we encouraged Congress to require the airlines to allow the sky marshals to fly, there would have been some defense. But they had their lobbyists fighting it in Congress and the Office of Management and Budget and tying it up because they were worried about lost revenue.”

All the CIA’s bizarre intelligence alliances, the airline industry’s lobbying and self-interest, and the bureaucratic incompetence of the corporate and government partnership were about to exact a price on the flying public.