9/11 Experiments: Collapse vs. Demolition ~ Part 2 of 2
YouTube posted a link to the official 9/11 story that you can use to contrast with the evidence highlighted in this video, then decide for yourself if their story addressed the issue outlined, using the scientific method.
By Jonathan Cole -September 10, 2016
What do you believe? Why do you believe it? Have your beliefs changed over time?
Like most, I had beliefs in childhood that changed as I learned new information, such as my belief in the Tooth Fairy and Santa. But my steadfast belief in America, which I thought was synonymous with truth and justice, endured. When 9/11 happened, I felt justified in the awesome fury of retaliation against those who were blamed, because I believed what we were told. Having received virtually all my information from television and newspapers, I never once questioned the official version for years. After all, not only did I watch the towers fall live on the television, but the information from the experts that very day as to who did it fit perfectly with my core beliefs about America. Later, the scientific explanations as to how those towers fell came from respected sources that I also trusted, such as the National Geographic, and the PBS NOVA program. Their explanation of a natural fire induced collapse fit nicely with my still intact core beliefs about America.
But those beliefs were shaken years later when I received a short video that focused on details of the collapse that were overlooked by my trusted sources. Suddenly, something snapped. Those towers didn’t just “fall down” by gravity alone; those towers were blown up! How could I have been so gullible for so many years? Why didn’t I know about these details, such as the eutectic mixtures, the freefall of building 7, the missing jolt, the iron microspheres and the nanothermite? Any one of them, let alone all, point directly to an intentional demolition rather than a fire-induced natural gravitational “collapse.”
Well it just wasn’t right, and I had to tell others. I now believed that once people were aware of this evidence they would rise up collectively and demand justice. My, how naïve my new belief was! Much to my surprise, rather than provoke interest or outrage, what I mostly got was silence, doubt, or ridicule. I was about as popular as the one that told you that Santa doesn’t really exist.
I began to realize what a firm grip our belief systems have on us, and how loath we are to having those beliefs challenged. For many, it seems far more important to preserve a lifetime of beliefs about one’s country, religious or political views than to peek into any details that go against them. Even in my engineering world, I found it’s ok to study the scientific details of how a bridge or building falls just as long as that building didn’t fall on September 11. There seems to be a deep “disconnect” between what the average person believes and what the evidence says must be true.
So how does one counter this disconnect? Since the media and our institutions could longer be believed, I wanted to use something more credible, something that was independent of what people say. I wanted to use my belief in the fundamental laws of nature. Maybe the best way for me to explain was not telling others, but rather showing others what can or cannot happen by experiment, letting nature do the real talking. Experiment, it turns out, is the key to the scientific method. All the math and computer models in the world, whether by experts or authority, mean nothing if they don’t match a real world experiment.
The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) was tasked with explaining what happened, but they never really told us much about the most important event, the actual collapse of those towers. They decided to stop their voluminous study at “collapse initiation”, leaving the critical mechanism that killed thousands for others to explain.
The PBS NOVA experts told us that it was a floor by floor pancake-type collapse, which they demonstrated using a computer animation. Unfortunately, that animation didn’t quite mesh with what we actually saw that day. So the story changed and the NIST endorsed the “pile driver collapse”, where the smaller “block” of top floors crushed the larger, stronger “block” all the way down to the ground, and then that smaller “block” decided to crush itself back up. Although never observed in the real world, this process was mathematically “proven” in a paper which also has a sketch clearly showing the phenomenon for those of us who may be a little rusty with differential equations.
The primary glitch appears to be with Newton’s 3rd law, which says net forces are equal and opposite. One would think that equal forces should destroy a smaller weaker block well before a larger stronger block. I decided to test Newton’s theory with some simple experiments with falling objects using various materials. Dropping the smaller block onto the larger block, I found that indeed the smaller objects couldn’t destroy any similar larger structure regardless of the material used or how many times I ran the test. That smaller block never even had a chance to make it to the bottom, let alone crush itself back up.
9/11 Experiments: Collapse vs. Demolition: Part 29/11 Experiments: Collapse vs. Demolition ~ Part 2 of 2
Watch this video on YouTube
Another odd thing about the towers fall is that there was no measurable “jolt” or impact when those upper floors fell through the damaged fire zone and presumably “hit” the rest of the undamaged structure below. Rather, those upper floors continued to speed up those first few moments, almost as if they were falling right through all that strong steel and concrete.
Let’s think about this. If you jump into a swimming pool you slow down when you hit the water, right? When we watched Luke Aikins hit the net after his remarkable skydive, he also slowed down. So if the towers’ upper “block” of floors was hypothetically dropped into the ocean or a huge net, shouldn’t it also slow down? Why then did the top section continue to speed up when it hit undamaged steel and concrete below? Shouldn’t there at least have been a significant jolt when the two strong structures collided? Believe it or not that jolt is just not there. It’s missing.
In addition to experimenting with materials and motion, a couple of my experiments had to do with heat and chemical processes. One of the first official studies described unique steel with severe corrosion and intergranular melting containing a eutectic mixture consisting primarily of iron, oxygen and sulfur. No clear explanation for the source of that sulfur was identified and the corrosion and subsequent erosion was considered a most unusual event that baffled fire-wise professors. This was a problem for the official story and was never adequately explained by the NIST. Once again the corporate media came to the rescue, with the BBC stating in no uncertain terms that the source of the sulfur was from the drywall that stewed in the pile for weeks. If that was true then why was it such a mystery, and why do we routinely wrap drywall around steel to protect it from fire?
Believe it or not, the BBC didn’t even conduct a simple experiment to prove their claim. So I did. Confining gypsum drywall, diesel fuel, and aluminum around a steel beam, I burned the setup at similar temperatures for days. The result was that there was no intergranular melting or erosion of steel, just the opposite of what the BBC’s other experts told us.
9/11 Experiments: The Mysterious Eutectic Steel9/11 Experiments: The Mysterious Eutectic Steel
Watch this video on YouTube
A high percentage of iron microspheres and a red grey chip called nanothermite were found in the dust, neither of which should be present in the remains of any office fire. This time the National Geographic conducted an experiment that “proved” that 175 pounds of thermite could not melt a steel column. It therefore concluded that despite the direct evidence, thermitic material could not have been used to help take down the twin towers (even though it had been used in 1935 to take down a World’s Fair tower). Having no experience of this process, I decided to conduct my own experiments using far less thermite (or thermate, which is thermite with some sulfur added) just to see if I could do what the National Geographic experts couldn’t. Sure enough, after a little configuring I found that ordinary thermite could indeed melt and cut steel, contrary to what National Geographic experts told us.
9/11 Experiments: The Great Thermate Debate9/11 Experiments: The Great Thermate Debate
Watch this video on YouTube
Finally, while it was pretty obvious that nature was showing us what didn’t happen to those towers, I wanted to see if I could conduct an experiment to show what could have happened. This time I focused on the fact that the direction of a net force is always in line with a body’s acceleration. Net force direction as well as the sequence of applied forces is also independent of scale. Turning this around, if we observe the direction of accelerating objects then we can also determine the direction and the sequence of the net forces involved. If we can mimic similar accelerations on small objects with known forces, then we can understand the direction and sequence of net forces that also apply to large objects with similar motions.
Constructing various “towers,” I first experimented with the “pancake” and “pile driver” theories but those motions simply didn’t match what was observed when the towers fell. However, using the explosive force from internal firecrackers, we see similar horizontal and downward motions as with the towers’ destruction. This miniature controlled demolition of mine demonstrated that the sequence of motions had to be outward first, followed immediately by the downward motion from gravity. And if the outward motion came first, what force caused that horizontal acceleration? Fire and gravity cannot explain the observed motions and chemical evidence, but internal explosives and incendiaries can.
9/11 Experiments: The Force Behind the Motion9/11 Experiments: The Force Behind the Motion
Watch this video on YouTube
So what do we do? If you honestly believe in truth and justice, it’s imperative to do whatever you can to expose the evidence of what happened to your fellow citizens on 9/11. Speaking up rather than cowering in silence is certainly difficult and unpopular, but it’s what being a patriotic American is supposed to be all about.
Don’t get me wrong, I still believe in America. But the corruption, cronyism and cover-ups in our highest institutions appear epidemic and need to be weeded out if we stand a chance at fixing those problems. The loss of faith in our corporate media, as we catch them time and again in numerous lies, is growing, while belief in all our institutions that ignore the evidence and that cover up those crimes is eroding.
So how do we restore belief in America? We need to start exposing the truth and to let the chips fall where they may. Also, we need to question all official stories about world events happening today, right now, that are used to further political agendas and that are based on little or no real investigation.
Of course, we can just continue to believe whatever we want by ignoring the mountain of uncomfortable evidence, but in so doing, we are demonstrating that our personal beliefs are more important than doing what is right.
Most of us grew up and understood that the Tooth Fairy wasn’t the one who left money under the pillow, and Santa didn’t really deliver those presents, despite what we were told by those we loved and trusted. If you don’t already know by now, those towers didn’t just happen to collapse through fire and gravity alone as we were told. Those towers and the people inside were intentionally blown up.
I believe that truth matters. You can believe it, or not.
Jonathan Cole P.E. is a professional engineer with over 30 years of experience. For years he trusted the official explanations of the 9/11 building collapses until learning of many unexplained details in late 2007. He decided to research further, and conduct experiments to either prove or disprove various claims and theories of the event. His experimental videos can be found on youtube under the name of “physicsandreason” and on the website 911SpeakOut.org.
Editor’s Note: On the 15th anniversary of 9/11 and the 10th anniversary of the Journal of 9/11 Studies, the editors are pleased to announce a new website. The site now allows for easier reading and sharing of content. A new feature of the Journal is an opportunity for invited guest editorials.Also of note are these new letters:Peter Dale Scott Dick Cheney, John Yoo, and COG on 9/11: A letter to readers of the Journal of 9/11 Studies Bob McIlvaineCONNECTING THE DOTS OF 9-11: How I learned that peace may never be achieved Fran ShureWhen Psychologists Torture, Our Heads Spin David Ray GriffinWhy I Wrote Another 9/11 Book Ed CurtainWhy I Don’t Speak of 9/11 Anymore William VealeLegal Action Elizabeth WoodworthAre the Events of 9/11 Still of Central Importance to a Climate-Stricken World? Many thanks to Scott Ford for developing the new site.
See related:
Outside Psychiatrists Shielded Torture Program
Are you a mind-controlled CIA stooge?
Propaganda: We were lied to about 9/11
Former Sen. Bob Graham and others urge the Obama administration to declassify redacted pages of a report that holds 9/11 secrets
2016Apr 10
CORRESPONDENTSteve Kroft
WATCH NOW 60 MINUTES ALL ACCESS SUBSCRIBERS, CLICK HERE
The following script is from “28 Pages” which aired on April 10, 2016. Steve Kroft is the correspondent. Howard Rosenberg and Julie Holstein, producers.
In 10 days, President Obama will visit Saudi Arabia at a time of deep mistrust between the two allies, and lingering doubts about the Saudi commitment to fighting violent Islamic extremism.
It also comes at a time when the White House and intelligence officials are reviewing whether to declassify one of the country’s most sensitive documents — known as the “28 pages.” They have to do with 9/11 and the possible existence of a Saudi support network for the hijackers while they were in the U.S.
For 13 years, the 28 pages have been locked away in a secret vault. Only a small group of people have ever seen them. Tonight, you will hear from some of the people who have read them and believe, along with the families of 9/11 victims that they should be declassified.
Bob Graham: I think it is implausible to believe that 19 people, most of whom didn’t speak English, most of whom had never been in the United States before, many of whom didn’t have a high school education– could’ve carried out such a complicated task without some support from within the United States.https://www.cbsnews.com/embed/video/?
Steve Kroft: And you believe that the 28 pages are crucial to this? Understand…
Bob Graham: I think they are a key part.
Former U.S. Senator Bob Graham has been trying to get the 28 pages released since the day they were classified back in 2003, when he played a major role in the first government investigation into 9/11.
Bob Graham: I remain deeply disturbed by the amount of material that has been censored from this report.
At the time, Graham was chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and co-chair of the bipartisan joint congressional inquiry into intelligence failures surrounding the attacks. The Joint Inquiry reviewed a half a million documents, interviewed hundreds of witnesses and produced an 838 page report — minus the final chapter which was blanked out — excised by the Bush administration for reasons of national security.
Bob Graham won’t discuss the classified information in the 28 pages, he will say only that they outline a network of people that he believes supported the hijackers while they were in the U.S.
Steve Kroft: You believe that support came from Saudi Arabia?
Bob Graham: Substantially.
Steve Kroft: And when we say, “The Saudis,” you mean the government, the–
Bob Graham: I mean–
Steve Kroft: –rich people in the country? Charities–
Bob Graham: All of the above.
Graham and others believe the Saudi role has been soft-pedaled to protect a delicate relationship with a complicated kingdom where the rulers, royalty, riches and religion are all deeply intertwined in its institutions.
Porter Goss, who was Graham’s Republican co-chairman on the House side of the Joint Inquiry, and later director of the CIA, also felt strongly that an uncensored version of the 28 pages should be included in the final report. The two men made their case to the FBI and its then–director Robert Mueller in a face-to-face meeting.
Porter Goss: And they pushed back very hard on the 28 pages and they said, “No, that cannot be unclassified at this time.”
Steve Kroft: Did you happen to ask the FBI director why it was classified?
Porter Goss: We did, in a general way, and the answer was because, “We said so and it needs to be classified.”
Goss says he knew of no reason then and knows of no reason now why the pages need to be classified. They are locked away under the capital in guarded vaults called Sensitive Compartmented Information Facilities, or SCIFs in government jargon. This is as close as we could get with our cameras — a highly restricted area where members of Congress with the proper clearances can read the documents under close supervision. No note-taking allowed.
Tim Roemer: It’s all gotta go up here, Steve.
Tim Roemer, a former Democratic congressman and U.S. ambassador to India, has read the 28 pages multiple times. First as a member of the Joint Inquiry and later as a member of the blue-ribbon 9/11 Commission which picked up where Congress’ investigation left off.
Steve Kroft: How hard is it to actually read these 28 pages?
Tim Roemer: Very hard. These are tough documents to get your eyes on.
Roemer and others who have actually read the 28 pages, describe them as a working draft similar to a grand jury or police report that includes provocative evidence — some verified, and some not. They lay out the possibility of official Saudi assistance for two of the hijackers who settled in Southern California. That information from the 28-pages was turned over to the 9/11 Commission for further investigation. Some of the questions raised were answered in the commission’s final report. Others were not.
Steve Kroft: Is there information in the 28 pages that, if they were declassified, would surprise people?
Tim Roemer: Sure, you’re gonna be surprised by it. And, you’re going to be surprised by some of the answers that are sitting there today in the 9/11 Commission report about what happened in San Diego, and what happened in Los Angeles. And what was the Saudi involvement.
Much of that surprising information is buried in footnotes and appendices of the 9/11 report — part of the official public record, but most of it unknown to the general public. These are some, but not all of the facts:
In January of 2000, the first of the hijackers landed in Los Angeles after attending an al Qaeda summit in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. The two Saudi nationals, Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Mihdhar, arrived with extremely limited language skills and no experience with Western culture. Yet, through an incredible series of circumstances, they managed to get everything they needed, from housing to flight lessons.
Tim Roemer: L.A., San Diego, that’s really you know, the hornet’s nest. That’s really the one that I continue to think about almost on a daily basis.
During their first days in L.A., witnesses place the two future hijackers at the King Fahd mosque in the company of Fahad al-Thumairy, a diplomat at the Saudi consulate known to hold extremist views. Later, 9/11 investigators would find him deceptive and suspicious and in 2003, he would be denied reentry to the United States for having suspected ties to terrorist activity.
Tim Roemer: This is a very interesting person in the whole 9/11 episode of who might’ve helped whom– in Los Angeles and San Diego, with two terrorists who didn’t know their way around.
Phone records show that Thumairy was also in regular contact with this man: Omar al-Bayoumi, a mysterious Saudi who became the hijackers biggest benefactor. He was a ghost employee with a no-show job at a Saudi aviation contractor outside Los Angeles while drawing a paycheck from the Saudi government.
Steve Kroft: You believe Bayoumi was a Saudi agent?
Bob Graham: Yes, and–
Steve Kroft: What makes you believe that?
Bob Graham: –well, for one thing, he’d been listed even before 9/11 in FBI files as being a Saudi agent.
On the morning of February 1, 2000, Bayoumi went to the office of the Saudi consulate where Thumairy worked. He then proceeded to have lunch at a Middle Eastern restaurant on Venice Boulevard where he later claimed he just happened to make the acquaintance of the two future hijackers.
Tim Roemer: Hazmi and Mihdhar magically run into Bayoumi in a restaurant that Bayoumi claims is a coincidence and in one of the biggest cities in the United States.
Steve Kroft: And he decides to befriend them.
Tim Roemer: He decides to not only befriend them but then to help them move to San Diego and get residence.
In San Diego, Bayoumi found them a place to live in his own apartment complex, advanced them the security deposit and cosigned the lease. He even threw them a party and introduced them to other Muslims who would help the hijackers obtain government IDs and enroll in English classes and flight schools. There’s no evidence that Bayoumi or Thumairy knew what the future hijackers were up to, and it is possible that they were just trying to help fellow Muslims.
The very day Bayoumi welcomed the hijackers to San Diego, there were four calls between his cell phone and the imam at a San Diego mosque, Anwar al-Awlaki, a name that should sound familiar.
The American-born Awlaki would be infamous a decade later as al Qaeda’s chief propagandist and top operative in Yemen until he was taken out by a CIA drone. But in January 2001, a year after becoming the hijackers’ spiritual adviser, he left San Diego for Falls Church, Virginia. Months later Hazmi, Mihdhar and three more hijackers would join him there.
Tim Roemer: Those are a lot of coincidences, and that’s a lot of smoke. Is that enough to make you squirm and uncomfortable, and dig harder– and declassify these 28 pages? Absolutely.
Perhaps, no one is more interested in reading the 28 pages than attorneys Jim Kreindler and Sean Carter who represent family members of the 9/11 victims in their lawsuit against the kingdom. Alleging that its’ institutions provided money to al Qaeda knowing that it was waging war against the United States.
Jim Kreindler: What we’re doing in court is developing the story that has to come out. But it’s been difficult for us because for many years, we weren’t getting the kind of openness and cooperation that we think our government owes to the American people, particularly the families of people who were murdered.
The U.S. government has even backed the Saudi position in court–that it can’t be sued because it enjoys sovereign immunity. The 9/11 Commission report says that Saudi Arabia has long been considered the primary source of al Qaeda funding through its’ wealthy citizens and charities with significant government sponsorship. But the sentence that got the most attention when the report came out is this:
“We have found no evidence that the Saudi government as an institution or senior Saudi officials individually funded the organization.”
Attorney Sean carter says it’s the most carefully crafted line in the 9/11 Commission report and the most misunderstood.
Sean Carter: When they say they found no evidence that senior Saudi officials individually funded al Qaeda, they conspicuously leave open the potential that they found evidence that people who were officials that they did not regard as senior officials had done so. That is the essence of the families’ lawsuit. That elements of the government and lower level officials sympathetic to bin Laden’s cause helped al Qaeda carry out the attacks and help sustain the al Qaeda network.
Yet, for more than a decade, the kingdom has maintained that that one sentence exonerated it of any responsibility for 9/11 regardless of what might be in the 28 pages.
Bob Kerrey: It’s not an exoneration. What we said–we did not, with this report, exonerate the Saudis.
Former U.S. Senator Bob Kerrey is another of the 10-member 9/11 Commission who has read the 28 pages and believes they should be declassified. He filed an affidavit in support of the 9/11 families’ lawsuit.
Bob Kerrey: You can’t provide the money for terrorists and then say, “I don’t have anything to do with what they’re doing.”
Steve Kroft: Do you believe that all of the leads that were developed in the 28 pages were answered in the 9/11 report? All the questions?
Bob Kerrey: No. No. In general, the 9/11 Commission did not get every single detail of the conspiracy. We didn’t. We didn’t have the time, we didn’t have the resources. We certainly didn’t pursue the entire line of inquiry in regard to Saudi Arabia.
Steve Kroft: Do you think all of these things in San Diego can be explained as coincidence?
John Lehman: I don’t believe in coincidences.
John Lehman, who was secretary of the Navy in the Reagan administration, says that he and the others make up a solid majority of former 9/11 commissioners who think the 28 pages should be made public.
John Lehman: We’re not a bunch of rubes that rode into Washington for this commission. I mean, we, you know, we’ve seen fire and we’ve seen rain and the politics of national security. We all have dealt for our careers in highly classified and compartmentalized in every aspect of security. We know when something shouldn’t be declassified. An the, this, those 28 pages in no way fall into that category.
Lehman has no doubt that some high Saudi officials knew that assistance was being provided to al Qaeda, but he doesn’t think it was ever official policy. He also doesn’t think that it absolves the Saudis of responsibility.
John Lehman: It was no accident that 15 of the 19 hijackers were Saudis. They all went to Saudi schools. They learned from the time they were first able to go to school of this intolerant brand of Islam.
Lehman is talking about Wahhabism, the ultra conservative, puritanical form of Islam that is rooted here and permeates every facet of society. There is no separation of church and state. After, oil, Wahhabism is one of the kingdom’s biggest exports. Saudi clerics, entrusted with Islam’s holiest shrines have immense power and billions of dollars to spread the faith. Building mosques and religious schools all over the world that have become recruiting grounds for violent extremists. 9/11 Commissioner John Lehman says all of this comes across in the 28 pages.
John Lehman: This is not going to be a smoking gun that is going to cause a huge furor. But it does give a very compact illustration of the kinds of things that went on that would really help the American people to understand why, what, how, how is it that these people are springing up all over the world to go to jihad?
Tim Roemer: Look, the Saudis have even said they’re for declassifying it. We should declassify it. Is it sensitive, Steve? Might it involve opening– a bit, a can of worms, or some snakes crawling out of there? Yes. But I think we need a relationship with the Saudis where both countries are working together to fight against terrorism. And that’s not always been the case.© 2016 CBS Interactive Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Washington, D.C.FBI National Press Office(202) 324-3691
March 25, 2015
Today, the FBI released The FBI: Protecting the Homeland in the 21st Century, the final report of the 9/11 Review Commission. This congressionally mandated review focused on the FBI’s implementation of the recommendations proposed by the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States (the 9/11 Commission).
“I am pleased the Review Commission recognized the significant progress we have made to build a threat-based, intelligence-driven law enforcement and national security organization,” said FBI Director James B. Comey. “I thank the commissioners and their staff for their efforts to help us better serve and protect the American public.”
The FBI asked three experts to lead this review: Edwin “Ed” Meese III, former United States attorney general; Timothy J. Roemer, former congressman and ambassador; and Bruce Hoffman, Georgetown University professor and noted author on terrorism. Over the past 14 months, the Commission visited numerous FBI offices, here and abroad, and—with the full cooperation of the FBI—received more than 60 briefings from FBI personnel in the course of their work. Read full copy of report (pdf) (Note: Link only goes to FBI Main Website Page)
Author: By Abdul Rahman AlmotawaPublication Date: Tue, 2002-12-03 03:00
JEDDAH, 3 December 2002 — Omar Al-Bayoumi, a Saudi who has been accused by American and other Western media outlets of helping two of the Sept. 11 bombers — Khalid Al-Mihdhar and Nawaf Al-Hazmi — has reaffirmed that he and his wife had no connection with checks passed to the hijackers.
In an interview with Asharq Al-Awsat, a sister publication of Arab News, Bayoumi, who holds three master’s degrees from US and British universities, urged the media not to falsely implicate him in the issue because US and British agents cleared him of all wrongdoing more than a year ago.
Asked how he would prove false the claim that he did not bring Mihdhar and Hazmi to the US or pay their house rents during their stay at the Barcode complex in Claremont in San Diego, he said: “I don’t know them. So how can I have paid for them? I don’t have the ability to pay for them because I have my own family and meet my educational expenses. It is unthinkable to even imagine that the two people came to learn English without any money.”
He also pointed out that the complex received only checks not cash. Those who have doubts can meet the complex management and make sure.
He challenged the media to produce the endorsed checks, which they said he allegedly passed to Mihdhar and Hazmi. “The subject of endorsed checks is totally baseless. It’s just falsification and fabrication. If anybody has this check they should produce it to the media and investigators,” Bayoumi said.
He expressed his surprise at Western and even Arab media for running false reports without looking for evidence.Scotland Yard and FBI have cleared Bayoumi of all allegations.
He said the security authorities in the US and Britain questioned him while they were looking for those surrounding the attackers.
He said Hazmi and Mihdhar stayed at Barcode complex (where Bayoumi was also staying) for two weeks. He said most of the people living in that complex have subsequently been questioned.
He commended agents from Scotland Yard for talking to him in a polite and decent way. “They told me that you are wanted for questioning. They inspected everything at my house, even the garden in the backyard where my son used to play basketball, my daughter’s bags (she was only one at that time), my computer, discs, aviation games for children, books, everything,” he stated.
“They collected everything and sent them to the United States, with my knowledge, to be inspected by FBI agents. They kept them there for seven months,” he said, adding that a British officer had accompanied the documents and confirmed what he told the British security authorities was true.
“After the first two days they even changed the word investigation into meeting. I was with them for a week. I told them everything, and gave all the supporting evidence,” he said, adding that he had kept all documents related to his expenditure, education and other matters. “They were surprised to see the organization of my papers and bills. I used to keep even the bills from consumer goods I had bought.”
He said the police had not arrested his wife or any other members of his family — his eldest son, Emad, is 16 years old — and confirmed that all their passports were returned to them after seven months.
He added that the FBI agents were asking him about his stay and the contacts he had had in San Diego.
“They asked me for information related to many people, including my relation with Mihdhar and Hazmi and whether I knew anything what the Sept. 11 suspects were planning to do. I told them the truth. These two Saudi youths (Mihdhar and Hazmi) came to the US in early 2000. They came to learn English as they did not know one word of English. Like other Arabs and Saudis, they wanted to stay at Barcode complex, which is close to the mosque and can accommodate 1,500 worshipers. It was natural that they asked experienced people about the best places for shopping, restaurants and Arab grocery stores. But I found out that that they left the complex when they found it was expensive, after staying there for two weeks. I don’t know where they went,” Bayoumi said.
He said police from Scotland Yard had kept his books and documents for seven months. “This obstructed my doctoral studies,” he explained.
However, he pointed out that he completed his third master’s degree in July this year at a British university. Bayoumi, who returned to the Kingdom about four months ago, still intends to complete his studies to earn a doctorate.
Bayoumi has four sons, 11 brothers and a sister. He went to the US after graduating from King Abdul Aziz University in Jeddah at the end of 1994. He then joined the University of San Diego and studied at other American institutions. He obtained a master’s degree in business administration from California and another master’s in project management. He also began studying at Case Western University in Ohio for a doctoral degree, but the university’s high tuition fee ($28,000) prompted him to look for another university in Britain.
In October 2000, he shifted to Aston University in Birmingham, where he was the head of the Saudi students club.
“Things were going smoothly there until the problems started on Sept. 22, 2001 — 11 days after the Sept. 11 attacks,” he said.
Referring to his efforts to establish a mosque and an Islamic school in San Diego with the help of a Saudi businessman, he said the Madinah Mosque in San Diego was established after they bought a commercial building. A Saudi businessman, a former student in the US, paid $545,000 for the project. He denied reports that he collected money from other people.
“I never thought of collecting money from others,” he added.
Bayoumi said he had only superficial knowledge of Basannan, who is also accused of financing the two terror suspects.
Asked about checks from Princess Haifa, wife of Saudi Ambassador to the US Prince Bandar ibn Sultan, he said that the press reports that he passed the checks from Princess Haifa to the two terror suspects were baseless. “Bring the evidence,” he told the US media. “I challenge anyone to show such an endorsed check. Actually, they are politicizing the whole issue. I have told the investigators everything. Do you think the FBI agents and Scotland Yard would leave me if what the media is spreading was true? I don’t think so. These reporters are fabricating stories to boost circulation and attract public attention,” he added.
Bayoumi said the British police inspected his house while he was planning to vacate it, but told him they were ready to protect him and his family from media harassment.
He said the British policeman who handed over the documents had apologized to him in the name of his government for the trouble he had suffered.
“This is our duty and we have to do that and thanks for bearing with us,” he quoted the officer as saying.
Asked whether Britain had received any request to extradite him to the US, he said the British had told him that he could go to the US as a material witness. “But I refused. They (the British) and the lawyers also refused. Everything was clear for my part,” he said.
He denied a report that he was questioned in Guantanamo. “I was always present at my university office. We meet at the weekend at the Saudi students club in Birmingham. I have traveled only to the US and Britain.”
Bayoumi said most American and Western media reported against him without contacting him or the Cultural Attache at the Saudi Embassy in London. “Most newspapers and television stations were telling lies against me and I was unable to reply to them. I preferred to leave them to tell lies today in the knowledge that I would be correcting them tomorrow.”
He said his problem with the media started in November 2001.
“American journalist Joe Stevens of the Washington Post came to interview me two months after the investigation. It took place at the 11th floor of my university.”
He said the journalist asked him about Saudi Arabia, his studies and his visit to the US.
“When he asked me several questions arrogantly I told him to postpone the interview to another day as I was busy with my doctoral thesis. The head of the department was a witness to that. But the man insisted on asking more questions. Then I told him to go to the Scotland Yard and the Saudi Embassy in London to get the information he wanted. He did not like what I said. The journalist then threatened that he would write a report when he returned to his country and put my name in it.”
He continued: “I have proof of this incident as I have taken a letter from the university on this matter. [Asharq Al-Awsat has received a copy of the letter.] After one or two weeks, the media started writing about me in an exaggerated manner. I believe that that this journalist and his friends in other newspapers and magazines are behind it. They invented the story that I helped the two hijackers to find accommodation, along with other false stories.”
With regard to the alleged report that he arranged a dinner party in honor of Mihdhar and Hazmi, he said he had never held such a party. He said Mihdhar and Hazmi had attended a ceremony they arranged to honor those who sponsored the iftar (break fast) program during Ramadan, as was customary every year.
“I am a social worker and many people know me and many people attend such functions. On that day it was coincidentally held while the two were in town. I have told this matter to the investigators and they have accepted everything.”
Bayoumi said he did not know whether Mihdhar and Hazmi had any friends at the complex or the mosque.
“We deal with people by observing their outward appearance and behavior,” he added.
He said he was considered an ordinary social worker while he was present in San Diego.
“My door was open to everybody. Even some children of American families used to drink milk and juice from us and eat with us and stay with us and pray with my children.”
He said there was no reason to be suspicious about Mihdhar and Hazmi.
He said that he had not helped the two to select the institute in which they would learn English.
“If I had helped them in any form, I would not have been here in Jeddah. I would be questioned by British, American and Saudi investigators. They did not find anything and so why do they want to implicate me? What I told them was that if you want to learn the language you have to mix with the native speakers and study at a reputed school. This is general advice we give to everybody.”
He said the two were his neighbors for two weeks and did not know whether they always prayed at the same mosque.
He said he went to the US to study English. Then he got an opportunity to complete his master’s degree. He bought his computer and books from the US. He refuted reports that the company, which sent him for higher studies, was not on good terms with him because he had extended his stay, adding that he was promoted a month ago.
He said the chancellor of the university had met him at his office and gave him his phone numbers on which he could contact him if he faced any trouble from the media or his colleagues. He also said that the university was proud of people who had his qualities and manners. He said the Saudi Embassy in London had issued special IDs for him and his family while his passports were kept for seven months.
He said his German and Brazilian colleagues had asked him to demand compensation.
He and his wife helped his neighbors. “The door of our house remains open until 11 p.m.,” he added.
By Staff -August 5, 2016
Originally published at the San Diego Reader by H G Reza on 7/27/16
Nearly 15 years after the 9/11 attacks, questions linger about a San Diego man’s ties to two Al-Qaeda terrorists he helped settle in Clairemont as his neighbors who went on to crash a hijacked plane into the Pentagon.
Omar al-Bayoumi met Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Mihdhar under dubious circumstances in a Los Angeles restaurant. Three days later he helped them move into his apartment complex, though he later insisted they were strangers. Bayoumi, married with four children, did not work, yet he seemed not to want for money. He was 42 at the time and claimed to be a student. However, nobody knew where he went to school, and he always seemed to be hanging around the Islamic Center of San Diego on Balboa Avenue, next to the 805 freeway.
Bayoumi usually walked around with a video camera, recording people at the mosque and cultural events. Long before the attacks, local Muslims suspected Bayoumi was a Saudi spy who kept tabs on Saudis living in San Diego; a belief buttressed when his wallet with Saudi government credentials was found in the mosque’s sanctuary. His frequent contacts with the Saudi embassy in Washington and consulate in Los Angeles were also well known.
After the attacks, FBI agents had their own suspicion about Bayoumi: was he an advance man for Hazmi and Mihdhar? So, who is Bayoumi and what was his role in the September 11, 2001, attacks? These questions remain unanswered. The release of the so-called 28 pages by Congress on July 15 offer new tidbits about him that only add to the mystery.Page 1 / 34Zoom 100%
He lived in San Diego on and off for about seven years before moving to England one month before the attacks and now lives in Saudi Arabia.
The newly released document makes up a chapter missing from the 838-page report issued in 2002 by the joint congressional inquiry into intelligence failures leading up to the attacks. The inquiry’s task was to gather information and was not an investigation. President George W. Bush ordered the pages classified on national security grounds. President Obama authorized their release.
Bush’s decision to keep the document secret fueled speculation about Saudi government involvement in the terrorist attacks. However, while it mentions the “substantial assistance” that Bayoumi gave to the hijackers, the pages contain no smoking gun. Follow-up investigations by the FBI and 9/11 Commission were unable to prove that the Saudi government or Saudi citizens named in the document had advanced knowledge of or knowingly assisted the hijackers. Fifteen of the 19 terrorists were Saudis.
Still, investigators uncovered several disturbing coincidences that leave skeptics wondering what the Saudis, including Bayoumi, knew. One 9/11 Commission member called the coincidences “an incredible series of circumstances” that, among other things, allowed Hazmi and Mihdhar to live here unobtrusively. Bayoumi’s association with Hazmi and Mihdhar has been analyzed extensively and remains hotly debated.
Chapter V in the 9/11 Review Commission report notes there is “ongoing internal debate within the FBI” over whether Bayoumi and others gave witting assistance to the hijackers. The review commission was created by Congress to check the FBI’s progress instituting the recommendations of the 9/11 Commission.
Officially, the 9/11 Commission and FBI concluded that the hijackers did not have a support network in the U.S. and any support given to them was unwitting. Both agencies concluded that Bayoumi did not knowingly assist the terrorists. If this is true, then his ties to Hazmi and Mihdhar are intertwined in a series of compelling coincidences.
“The documentary evidence that Bayoumi provided assistance to Hazmi and Mihdhar is solid,” said the declassified document. It notes that he had “far more extensive ties to the Saudi government than previously realized.” The document reported almost 100 phone calls from Bayoumi to Saudi government offices in the U.S. between January (when Hazmi and Mihdhar arrived in Los Angeles) and May 2000.
Before the terrorists arrived here, Bayoumi was getting $465 in monthly Saudi government allowances. In March 2000, one month after Hazmi and Mihdhar moved to Clairemont, his monthly stipend increased to $3700 and remained so until reduced to $3200 in December 2000, when Hazmi left San Diego. Federal investigators suspected that the increase in Bayoumi’s government allowance was intended to assist Hazmi and Mihdhar, but this suspicion was never proven.
Much of what was learned about the attacks was uncovered in San Diego. San Diego County sheriff Bill Gore, head of the local FBI office during 9/11, said, “We know more about [Hazmi and Mihdhar] in San Diego and what they did and where they went from the time they came into the U.S. to the time they flew into the Pentagon than any other hijackers.” But he also added “some things we’ll never know the answer to; one of them being Bayoumi.”
Former Senator Bob Graham (D-FL), co-chair of the joint congressional inquiry, said San Diego provided “the blood sample of 9/11.” “In our understanding of 9/11, San Diego was absolutely critical because we were able to gather so much information there. It was almost analogous to having a physical exam and they draw blood and use a small amount of that fluid to be properly analyzed,” said Graham in a telephone interview.
Bayoumi met Hazmi and Mihdhar on February 1, 2000. He claimed it was a random encounter at the Mediterranean Gourmet restaurant on Venice Boulevard in Los Angeles, and then he invited them to move to San Diego. On February 4 he was helping them apply for an apartment that was one door down from his at the Parkwood Apartments, off Balboa Avenue and a block west of the Islamic Center. Bayoumi told FBI agents in an August 2003 interview in Saudi Arabia that Hazmi and Mihdhar were the only ones he ever helped find an apartment.
The terrorists moved in without furniture. Because they did not have a credit history, Bayoumi co-signed for them and they were allowed to list his address as a previous residence. Bayoumi also helped them open a checking account and drew a cashier’s check for $1500 at a Bank of America on Balboa Avenue in his name to cover their first month’s rent; Bayoumi was promptly reimbursed.
On February 9, five days after the duo moved into the apartment, and again on February 14, Bayoumi’s cell phone was used to call the landlord of an apartment complex on 49th Street, off El Cajon Boulevard. On February 15 the landlord returned a page from Bayoumi’s phone and Hazmi answered. The terrorists complained that rent at the Parkwood was too high. They were looking for a cheaper place to live. (The Parkwood Apartments, at 6401 Mount Ada Road, have since been converted to condominiums and the complex given a new name.)
Graham said congressional investigators were lucky to learn about Bayoumi and the two hijackers before the Bush administration put a lid on the information. “And relative to the situation in San Diego, it was just our good fortune to get there before the cover-up [was] put in place,” said Graham, referring to the sealing of the 28 pages. When asked who ordered the cover-up, he said, “I think it came from the White House.”
Graham is skeptical of U.S. claims that there was no involvement by Saudi government officials in the attacks and that any help that Hazmi and Mihdhar received from local Muslims was unwitting. He told 60 Minutes he believes the terrorists received a substantial amount of support from a Saudi network, including in San Diego. However, the FBI has been unable to find any co-conspirators despite a nearly 15-year-long investigation.
In the telephone interview, Graham said the hijackers could not have succeeded without support from within the U.S. “I think it is highly implausible that these 19 people, most of whom didn’t speak English, had never been in the United States before, weren’t well educated, [alone] could have turned out such a sophisticated plot,” he said.
In one of the many contradictory findings in the investigations, the 9/11 Commission reached the same conclusion. The commission’s report said it was unlikely that Hazmi and Mihdhar “would have come to the U.S. without arranging to receive assistance from one or more individuals informed in advance of their arrival.” But the commission ultimately said investigators found no evidence the terrorists had willing accomplices while in San Diego. Mihdhar lived here four months and Hazmi ten.
Gore said FBI agents began the investigation on the supposition that the terrorists had a local cell supporting them. “That was the whole point of our investigation to see if that network existed. I didn’t see one crucial piece of aid or support that they got here in San Diego that they couldn’t have gotten some other way to further their plan,” he said.
Hazmi and Mihdhar were the first hijackers to settle in the United States, arriving in Los Angeles on January 15, 2000, 21 months before the attacks. They came to California after attending an Al-Qaeda summit in Malaysia. Present at the terrorist gathering in Malaysia was the mastermind of the USS Cole bombing on October 12, 2000, which killed 17 sailors, including one from San Diego. The CIA was aware of the meeting but did not inform the FBI at the time.
The CIA’s failure to notify the FBI quickly about Hazmi and Mihdhar still resonates with Gore and FBI officials. The FBI was faulted for missed opportunities to stop the attacks. Critics noted that Hazmi’s name was in the San Diego phone book. “If the CIA had passed it on in a more timely fashion it wouldn’t have taken a rocket scientist to find the hijackers,” said Gore. “But you can’t find somebody when you’re not looking for him and had no reason to look for him.”
In an October 2003 interview with the 9/11 Commission staff, Bayoumi said the restaurant meeting with Hazmi and Mihdhar in Los Angeles was unplanned and occurred after he stopped at the Saudi consulate, where he went with a non-Arabic-speaking friend. However, Graham doubts that the encounter was happenstance. Graham’s committee was unable to interview Bayoumi.
“There were 134 Middle Eastern restaurants in Los Angeles in January 2000. We asked a statistician to calculate the chance that two pairs of two would end up in the same restaurant at the same hour. As I recall it was something like three million to one the probability of that occurring,” said Graham. The FBI called the meeting suspicious, but officials said there is no evidence that Bayoumi planned the meeting or was directed by anyone at the consulate to meet with the terrorists. Authorities have not determined how Hazmi and Mihdhar, who did not have a car then, got to San Diego from Los Angeles.
A student who met Bayoumi at the Islamic Center said in a 2001 interview that he used to accompany Bayoumi to meetings at the consulate. He recalled Bayoumi telling him in early 2000 that he had to go to Los Angeles to meet some important people who were moving to San Diego but did not invite him. Bayoumi did not say who they were.
The student, who left the U.S. in 2005, said Bayoumi was a father figure who gave him advice about sex and other matters. The two would attend mosque together and frequently drive to Las Vegas to eat and enjoy a stage show. Bayoumi also helped him get a cell phone.
“I found him to be a very wise man who loved poetry. He was a poet who liked to recite love poems. I know people were suspicious of him; thought he was a spy. But I never saw anything unusual in his behavior,” he said in 2001. Fifteen years later he remains loyal to his friend.
“I have no doubt that Bayoumi had no negative involvement (at least intentionally) in any wrong doing during his stay in SD. I hope the documents [28 pages] reveals so, otherwise, I would sincerely regret the day I have know [sic] him,” he said in a recent email. In a later email he opined that the declassified document cleared Bayoumi of charges that he was a Saudi agent and had ties to the terrorist attacks.
About four days after the terrorists moved into their new apartment, Bayoumi organized a dinner party in their home to introduce them to the community. A former Islamic Center administrator who attended the party and had almost daily contact with Bayoumi said it was the only time Bayoumi threw a party for newcomers.
In a December 2002 interview with an Arab newspaper, Bayoumi denied arranging the February 2000 party; instead, he said it was a traditional Ramadan dinner that Hazmi and Mihdhar arranged. However, Ramadan, a monthlong religious observance, ended on December 28 in 2000. The preceding Ramadan began in December 1999 and ended on January 8, 2000, a week before the terrorists’ arrival in Los Angeles.
Bayoumi hosted another dinner party in spring 2000 at a Kurdish mosque in El Cajon where he introduced the terrorists to about 20 men, including Mohdar Abdullah. Abdullah, a San Diego State student at the time, is another controversial figure whom the FBI speculated may have had advanced knowledge of the attacks.
Abdullah, a Yemeni, denied knowing about the attacks in several interviews but admitted being a close friend of Hazmi. “It was a private introduction. I recall Bayoumi telling me, ‘These guys just came from Los Angeles.’ He told them if they needed any help they could ask me. Being a committed Muslim, it’s kind of a moral obligation to help your brothers who are in need. I reacted very normally. I said sure,” said Abdullah in a 2002 jailhouse interview. He was in the U.S. illegally and deported in 2004.
Bayoumi “indicated he drove [Hazmi and Mihdhar] from Los Angeles to San Diego,” said Abdullah. The 9/11 Commission said the terrorists were “possibly” driven to San Diego by Abdullah, but he has repeatedly denied that.
Bayoumi arrived in the United States in 1994 to study English at San Diego State. He claimed to be a student during the entire time he lived here. He told some that he was living off a stipend from his employer, Dallah/Avco Trans Arabia Co., who he said was paying him to study in the U.S. The business is an aviation services company with ties to the Saudi government. He told an apartment manager that he was receiving money from his family and others that he had a government scholarship. He told the Arab newspaper he was a social worker in San Diego.
Bayoumi first appeared on the FBI’s San Diego radar in 1998, when an apartment manager reported suspicious gatherings of Middle Eastern males in his apartment and a suspicious package mailed to him from overseas. Agents opened an inquiry that was closed the following year without action taken. Hazmi told a Saudi college student from La Mesa he believed Bayoumi was a spy and tailing Mihdhar and him when they crossed paths in the restaurant.
In a fall 2001 interview, the student related Hazmi’s account that Bayoumi walked by their table and pretended to drop a newspaper. He then began talking to Hazmi and Mihdhar in Arabic. The student was interviewed with a lawyer present and asked to remain anonymous.
In an October 2003 interview with the 9/11 Commission staff in Saudi Arabia, Bayoumi said that Hazmi’s “description of him as a Saudi spy hurt him very much.” The interview took place in the presence of an agent from the Mabahith, the secret police from the Saudi Ministry of the Interior. Bayoumi said that in the restaurant meeting Hazmi and Mihdhar said they wanted to move to San Diego after hearing his description of the local weather.
The La Mesa student said his uncle gave him some advice before he left for the U.S.; advice generated by Saudi paranoia that everyone is a government informant. The man who goes out of his way to help him in San Diego is the one to be wary of, he warned. The student said when he arrived at the Islamic Center in August 2000, asking for help in finding a place to rent, Bayoumi drove him to the house of Abdussattar Shaikh in Lemon Grove, where he lived for one month. Shaikh took in Muslim boarders and was Bayoumi’s friend. Shaikh said he was an educator and preferred to be called Dr. Shaikh. In 2000 he was a member of the San Diego Police Commission and an FBI informant.
Hazmi and Mihdhar rented rooms in Shaikh’s house after moving out of the Parkwood Apartments in May 2000. In an interview with 9/11 Commission staff, Shaikh said Bayoumi told him he had referred the hijackers to Shaikh’s home, but Shaikh disputed that. The FBI did not learn that the terrorists lived with one of the bureau’s informants until after the attacks.
Despite acknowledging his ties to Hazmi and Mihdhar to the 9/11 Commission and in an August 2003 interview with the FBI in Saudi Arabia, Bayoumi told the Arab newspaper he did not know the two terrorists and did not draw a cashier’s check in his name — for which he was reimbursed — to pay for their first month’s rent. He said he did not know where Hazmi and Mihdhar lived after moving from the apartment, despite telling Shaikh that he suggested they rent from him.
The FBI did not learn about Bayoumi’s association with the hijackers until September 13, 2001, when their names and photos were released. Local Muslims who recognized Hazmi and Mihdhar called the FBI and told agents about Bayoumi. A local religious leader interviewed in 2001 said FBI agents showed him a photo lineup on September 15. The only man he recognized was Bayoumi, and it was clear by the questions the FBI was asking that agents did not know where he was, said the imam.
Two days later, attorney Randall Hamud and a client who knew Bayoumi and the hijackers met voluntarily with the FBI and gave them Bayoumi’s address in Birmingham, England, where he had moved. Hamud’s client told agents that he had agreed to have $5000 wired from the United Arab Emirates to his bank account for Hazmi, thinking he was doing a favor for a fellow Muslim. This information also gave the FBI its first lead that directed U.S. authorities to Ali Abdul Aziz Ali, an Al-Qaeda financier who wired money to the hijackers and made their travel arrangements.
“The FBI thanked us and promised that my client’s name would remain anonymous. Later, we discovered that our information probably enabled the FBI to identify and arrest the financier of the attacks,” said Hamud in a recent interview.
Ali is the nephew of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, better known as KSM and the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks. Both men are at Guantanamo Bay.
On September 21, 2001, four days after Hamud’s client met with the FBI, New Scotland Yard detained Bayoumi at the FBI’s request and held him under the name Abu Imard for seven days. FBI agents were sent to England to question Bayoumi, said Gore.
After the attacks, several Middle-Eastern students who knew the hijackers in San Diego were arrested as material witnesses. By any measure, Bayoumi provided material support to Hazmi and Mihdhar — wittingly or unwittingly. The FBI’s failure to arrest him as a material witness strengthened suspicion in the Muslim community that he was a Saudi agent.
Gore, interviewed in his Kearny Mesa office, said the FBI did not arrest Bayoumi because “we just couldn’t come up with enough to tie him to 9/11 to get him arrested in Great Britain.”
Osama Basnan, another Saudi who lived in the same apartment complex as Bayoumi, was mentioned prominently in the declassified report. Basnan (spelled “Bassnan” in the document) was a suspected Saudi agent and was known as the Saudi mayor of San Diego. He now lives in Saudi Arabia. An FBI report describes Basnan and Bayoumi as the closest of friends and notes there were about 700 phone calls made between the men’s phones in a one-year period. Their wives were also friends. However, in interviews with 9/11 Commission staff, Bayoumi said he did not like Basnan, and Basnan claimed not to know Bayoumi at all. Basnan was interviewed in the presence of three Mabahith agents.
The 9/11 Commission investigator noted Basnan’s numerous contradictory statements and said Basnan had an “utter lack of credibility on virtually every material subject.” For example, it has been documented that in 1992 he hosted a party in Washington for Omar Abdel Rahman, known as “the Blind Sheikh” and spiritual leader of the terrorists who pulled off the 1993 World Trade Center bombings. Basnan claimed he was a victim of mistaken identity. The FBI and 9/11 Commission were unable to connect Basnan to Hazmi and Mihdhar, but the declassified document says he made laudatory comments about Osama bin Laden, speaking of him “as if he were a god” to an FBI informant.
What is indisputable is that Basnan’s wife received $74,000 in monthly checks before the attacks from the wife of Prince Bandar, Saudi ambassador to the U.S. Basnan himself received a $15,000 check from Bandar. Basnan said the money was used to pay for medical services for his wife. FBI agents accounted for all of the money received by Basnan and his wife and none of it was used to help Hazmi and Mihdhar, said Gore. The couple was deported in 2002.
Gore said he is proud of the FBI investigation in San Diego but added that the full story of 9/11 may never be known. He is bothered by what the investigation did not uncover. He calls the unanswered questions mysteries and one is bigger than the others.
“The one that caused the greatest mystery that we would like to resolve — not knowing creates all these conspiracy theories — and that’s Omar al-Bayoumi. We know there was contact [with the terrorists] and he was gone before 9/11. We know he’s lied in certain interviews and public statements. It’s one of those things hanging out there. Although we weren’t able to prove it, I don’t think he was in any way directing or knew about 9/11. [But] you don’t like to have those loose ends. And that’s definitely a loose end,” he said.
See related:
9/11 hijackers were aided by men with extensive Saudi ties.
Why Saudi ties mean US ties.
US Government Protection of Al-Qaeda Terrorists and the US-Saudi Black Hole.
More on the Sarasota – Saudi Connections
By Staff -December 24, 2013
Originally published by The NY Post on 12/19/13
A U.S. appeals court on Thursday revived claims by families of victims of the September 11, 2001, attacks who alleged that Saudi Arabia provided material support to al Qaeda.
Reversing a lower court ruling, the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New York said “the interests of justice” justified reviving the claims, in light of a 2011 decision that allowed similar claims to proceed against Afghanistan.
Circuit Judge Chester Straub wrote for a three-judge panel that it would be “especially anomalous” to treat both sets of plaintiffs differently. He returned the case to U.S. District Judge George Daniels in Manhattan for further proceedings.
The litigation was brought on behalf of families of the nearly 3,000 people killed in the September 11 attacks, as well as insurers that covered losses suffered by building owners and businesses.
Most of the attackers were Saudi nationals who hijacked planes and flew them into the World Trade Center in New York City, the Pentagon in Washington, D.C., and – when passengers revolted – into a field in Pennsylvania.
“This opinion is eminently correct and will give 9/11 victims their day in court,” said Stephen Cozen, a partner at Cozen O’Connor representing the plaintiffs. “The parties will start over, and we are very, very satisfied that we will meet any defenses, both legal and factual, that are raised.”
Cozen said damages could reach tens of billions of dollars.
Michael Kellogg, a partner at Kellogg, Huber, Hansen, Todd, Evans & Figel representing Saudi Arabia, said the country will “seek further review of this erroneous decision,” which he said was “contrary” to settled law.
“It is extremely unfortunate and burdensome that a sovereign nation and ally of the United States will continue to have to litigate this matter more than 10 years after it was filed,” he said in a statement.
The litigation began in 2002. Families of September 11 victims had alleged that Saudi Arabia and a government-affiliated charity knowingly provided funding and other material support to al Qaeda that helped it carry out the attacks.
U.S. District Judge Richard Casey in Manhattan dismissed the claims in 2005, saying Saudi Arabia’s alleged wrongful activity constituted a “discretionary function” entitling it to immunity under the federal Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act.
A 2nd Circuit panel upheld that ruling on different grounds in 2008, but that panel’s interpretation of sovereign immunity law was overruled by a different panel in the Afghanistan case.
The families in the Saudi Arabia case then asked U.S. District Judge George Daniels, who took over their case following Casey’s death in 2007, to vacate the 2005 ruling.
But Daniels refused, saying at a March 2012 hearing that it was “pure speculation” to suggest the results were inconsistent “given the fact that there are different defendants with different sets of allegations regarding their activities.”
Writing for the 2nd Circuit, however, Straub said the new law announced in the Afghanistan case was an “extraordinary” circumstance to justify reviving the Saudi Arabia case.
“The procedural history of this case produced inconsistent results between two sets of plaintiffs suing for damages based on the same incident,” Straub wrote. “It also allowed the district court’s application of the discretionary function limitation to go unreviewed.”
Thursday’s decision was joined by Circuit Judges Jose Cabranes and Ralph Winter. Cabranes was also on the 2008 panel that upheld the dismissal of the Saudi Arabia case, and the 2011 panel that reinstated the Afghanistan case.
The case is In re: Terrorist Attacks on September 11, 2001 (Kingdom of Saudi Arabia et al), 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, Nos. 12-1318, 12-1350, 12-1441, 12-1476, 12-1477 and 12-1519.
By Staff -September 21, 2011
September 21, 2011
SecrecyKills.com [website no longer exists]
Despite threats of prosecution from the CIA, the makers of 9/11: Press For Truth have released their new documentary podcast Who Is Rich Blee?
Two names have been censored after threats of federal prosecution by CIA in an unprecedented use of the Intelligence Identities Protection Act. Where censorship occurs, the names are listed in brackets [].
Who is Richard Blee?Audio Player00:0000:00Use Up/Down Arrow keys to increase or decrease volume.
Two names have been censored after threats of federal prosecution by CIA in an unprecedented use of the Intelligence Identities Protection Act. Where censorship occurs, the names are listed in brackets [].
Premiere date 9.20.2011
The Central Intelligence Agency was created after World War II by President Truman for the express purpose of preventing future Pearl Harbors. A little more than fifty years later, that Agency experienced its greatest failure when an attack on domestic soil killed thousands of Americans. Truman was famous for the sign on his desk that read, “The buck stops here.” Given that the 9/11 attack was attributed to Osama Bin Laden and his Al Qaeda organization, one might argue that the buck stopped at the CIA’s Bin Laden Station – responsible for all matters Al Qaeda-related – and the manager responsible for it, Richard Blee. Yet his first name appears only a handful of times in the various government investigation reports that have followed, and often in ways so obscure that it’s difficult to understand who he was and what he did. His full name never appeared in the mainstream media until one month ago when we released our interview with Richard Clarke to the press and forced the first public statement ever from this man. We’ve titled this investigative podcast “Who Is Rich Blee?” For a decade now, that is a question that hasn’t been so much as asked, much less answered. During the next hour, we’ll get as close as any one has gotten to answering it. It’s a story of secrecy taken to an absurd extreme and the repeated tragic consequences. [intro music]
It was July 2004. The 9/11 Commission had completed its work. The families of the victims filled a cramped hearing room in downtown D.C., about to be the first to read their definitively titled Final Report. Kristen Breitweiser, one of the “Jersey Widows” who has been instrumental in the push to create this blue-ribbon independent investigation, surreptitiously opened her copy directly to a page containing an explosive footnote.
Well, Kristen was the one who turned to footnote 44.
That’s Jersey widow Lorie Van Auken,
Ironically, she was the one who had always been really interested in the Al Hazmi/ Mihdhar story… in following those two hijackers that were on Flight 77, who ended up in San Diego. And she suspected that they had been followed by intelligence services in the United States… And I was sitting next to her, and she turns to me and says “Oh my god, look at this.”
The moment is captured in an iconic New York Times photo. The two women, eyes wide, mouths agape. Kristen later devoted a full chapter of her memoir out of the damning information buried here in the fine print below Chapter Six. Reading that chapter later started us on this investigation.
[RORY: Can you please open up the report and read the page that’s marked?] OK. [Exhale. Page shuffling.] Footnote 44. The CIA cable.
This is the chairman of the 9/11 Commission, Tom Kean, about to read the text of the footnote in question for our colleague Rory O’Connor and myself. It’s three years ago. We’re sitting in his Jersey office, our first interview.
“Activities of Bin Laden Associate Khalid Revealed.” January 4th, 2000. His Saudi passport — which contained a visa for travel to the United States – was photocopied and forwarded to CIA headquarters. This information was not shared with FBI headquarters until August 2001.
An FBI agent detailed to the Bin Laden Unit at CIA attempted to share this information with colleagues at FBI headquarters. A CIA desk officer instructed him not to send the cable with this information. Several hours later, this same desk officer drafted a cable distributed solely within CIA alleging that the visa documents had been shared with the FBI.
She admits she did not personally share the information and cannot identify who told her they had been shared. We were unable to locate anyone who claimed to have shared the information. Contemporaneous documents contradict the claim that they were shared.
In plain English, what it says is that the CIA knew a year and a half before the attacks that a known Al Qaeda bad guy named Khalid Al Mihdhar was likely heading to the United States and didn’t tell FBI or INS. Mihdhar – as we’ll refer to him from here on – would be one of the first two 9/11 hijackers to arrive for the plot, the one reportedly closest to Bin Laden himself.
But that’s not the new part. Michael Isikoff broke that in a 2002 Newsweek cover story: “The Hijackers the CIA Let Escape.”
That story did get a decent amount of traction at the time. I don’t know if it ever really caught on quite the way certainly I hoped it would… That was a pretty stunning intelligence lapse, probably one of the biggest intelligence lapses of our time.
Isikoff had relied for his story on leaks from the first 9/11 investigation, performed by the intelligence committees of Congress. It’s commonly called the Joint Inquiry, or the “JICI,” run by staff director Eleanor Hill.
The story of Mihdhar and Hazmi, which is one we really did develop. This story had not come out until we put it together from the files and our interviews and the work we did…
While developing that story from scratch, they came upon info inside CIA from the year 2000 about Mihdhar’s US visa and his associate Nawaf Al Hazmi’s arrival in Los Angeles. Another Flight 77 hijacker.
There were some people who believed that that information was passed. And we did our best to track that down. The Agency couldn’t come up with anything to confirm it. We couldn’t come up with anything in the FBI to confirm it. Whether they forgot or believed someone else did it, really believed it had been passed.
Hill and her investigator were able to find no evidence to support the CIA’s claim that the information had been shared with the FBI. With so little known at the time, it was easy to accept CIA officers’ claims that this failure was a mistake.
Ya know, it’s a tragic story really, because it’s a lot of people who made the same mistake and unfortunately for the country, it was a terribly costly mistake.
Now, let’s jump forward a couple years, back into that small Commission hearing room. Kristen and Lorie stared transfixed at footnote 44 to Chapter Six, revealing two shocking new pieces of information.
The first new piece: it wasn’t just a failure to pass the information. It was an order by a CIA desk officer not to tell FBI.
The second new piece: that same CIA desk officer misled her own Agency into believing the info had been shared with FBI.
Reading this, the women immediately grasped the significance.
So basically something was goin’ on besides just honest mistakes. Ya know, there was something else goin’ on here. And the footnote 44 is just the little window into some of this story which as you crack it open further and further more heinousness comes pouring in.
In the years that have followed, that window has been opened wider and wider. First by the Justice Department Inspector General’s report. Then by some excellent journalism from authors like Lawrence Wright and James Bamford. And other details divulged by government insiders, including the former CIA Director himself, George Tenet, in his memoir.
What follows may sound very trivial – who read what cable when. Why should we care? Because it turns out these cables and actions we’ll describe were the best chance to stop the 9/11 attacks and save nearly 3,000 lives. In fact, the more we learn, the more remarkable it seems the attacks weren’t stopped.
This podcast is the first of a two-part investigation we call Who Is Rich Blee? I’m Ray Nowosielski. [And I’m John Duffy, and we’re recording this from Austin, Texas.]
For ten years now, Rich Blee has managed to avoid public scrutiny for his actions inside CIA. Secrecy allowed him to escape accountability and move on to other positions at CIA. He was placed in charge of the CIA’s efforts in Afghanistan in December 2001, when Bin Laden escaped from Tora Bora to live in Pakistan, a mistake not rectified until earlier this year.
We’re told Blee and many of his employees you’ll hear about in this story are connected to the controversial renditions and detainee abuses. While he was Station Chief of Kabul, at least one detainee died from being mistreated. After all that, he was even offered a promotion to Baghdad Station Chief during the Iraq War, but instead he opted to retire.
His story will finally be told today, as best as we can lift the veil of secrecy. Secrecy can be found everywhere in this story, causing tragedy, covering up history, preventing accountability, and ultimately allowing additional tragedies. Blee is the face of the story, but the theme can be seen in both those who worked for him and those he reported to at CIA. The theme goes beyond 9/11 too. The lesson is far more timely today than ever before. Government secrecy often does not promote national security, as we’ve all been told. It does not keep us safe. Just the opposite. Secrecy kills.
[intro music]
We completed our documentary “Press For Truth” in 2006, chronicling the struggle of the 9/11 families to push for the Commission. At that time, we hoped to be done with the subject. The event was beginning to fade into history. But the information in footnote 44 stirred us like it had the Jersey Widows. The mystery it presented was too much to ignore.
What you’re listening to was intended to be another theatrical documentary, an atmospheric big budget piece in the style of an Errol Morris flick. After being told by nearly every outfit that funds such things that there was no audience for this subject, we settled on conducting interviews intermittently between other projects and day jobs, largely unfunded.
We got our first interview when my boss Rory O’Connor ran into Tom Kean, chairman of the 9/11 Commission, at one of those rarified Manhattan cocktail parties in 2008. Rory introduced himself as a journalist – he’d produced for 48 Hours and PBS Frontline, among other things.
Having met the former New Jersey governor once before, he asked if Kean remembered him. Kean – keep in mind, the man’s a former politician – responded that of course he remembered him, from their interview a few years back.
Rory had never interviewed him but saw the mistake as an opportunity and quickly asked if he might interview him again, for a new project. And that is how we found ourselves discussing footnote 44 in the offices of the man whose commission we had been so critical of in our first movie.
[RORY: Does this not suggest something more than careless oversight?]
Oh, it wasn’t careless oversight. It was purposeful. No question about that in mind. It was purposeful. But it was purposeful, we believe, because these agencies had been brought up to hold everything tight… The conclusion that we came to was that in the DNA of these organizations was secrecy. And secrecy to the point of ya don’t share it with anybody…
[RORY: Well, beyond not sharing, it was actually lying.]
Yeah. Oh yeah. It’s, it’s – hey, does it surprise you the CIA was brought up to lie?
[RORY: It surprises me that the CIA is lying to the FBI.]
It’s outrageous really. I mean, the idea that that information was left out of something that was so essential for the FBI, whose job it is to work within the United States and track these people. Ya know, it’s one of the most troubling aspects of our entire report, that particular thing.
We did not ask, at the time, why one of the most troubling aspects of his entire report was not included in the body of the Report, but only as a footnote. We regretted that afterward. Had they chosen to tell the Rich Blee story in full, they would have been able to illustrate their finding that secrecy was a root cause of 9/11. Instead, it seemed they had let themselves fall victim to the culture of secrecy.
Ya got a secret, ya keep it. And ya don’t tell anybody.
Some of the people involved in the footnote 44 incident would later tell us they were never even interviewed by the Commission. That along with the wording of the footnote made us suspect that the Commission had relied almost entirely on the ongoing investigation by the Justice Department’s Inspector General for the details of this aspect of their report.
We would not know much of what we know today if not for the Inspector General Report, a heavily redacted unclassified version of which was released a year later. And it should be noted that the report might not exist but for a government whistleblower. They credit prominent FBI whistleblower Coleen Rowley’s concerns raised publicly in May 2002 about Bureau’s handling of certain pre-9/11 info as the impetus for FBI Director Mueller instructing them to investigate.
One year into their investigation, the Justice Department was wrapping up its work when it discovered the title of a document the CIA had not turned over to its investigation. That document was the warning drafted by the FBI agent inside CIA, the footnote 44 warning. This discovery forced the Justice team to delay the completion of their report in order to go back and re-interview the people inside the Al Qaeda office of CIA, something that we’re told they were not happy about, since no one involved had mentioned it to them. Mark Rossini was one of those re-interviewed by the Justice Department’s Inspector General team.
The air in Washington, the feeling, was that somebody’s gonna be made to pay for this… That group of housewives from New Jersey who have been valiantly leading a fight to get to the bottom of this. There was fear of that. There’s no question about it. [Oh yeah?] Well, YEAH. A big fear… So at the time we were told, you have to go speak to DOJ OIG or Joint Congressional Inquiry. And CIA OIG. And you’re offered no protection… You could not have a lawyer present. At all. [Not allowed.] No! No, no right to counsel, with no guarantee that what you said would not be used against you.
[RAY: So that seems to explain why no one who spoke to OIG had any memory of any event that occurred ever. (Laughs.)]
It seems to explain that we were cautious in what we said.
The DOJ OIG – the Justice Department’s Inspector General Report, caught the attention of a British man living in the Czech Republic named Kevin Fenton.
Well there seemed to be information in there which, if you were able to put it together, it would tell you something. You would have a deeper understanding… But partly because of the way it was changed from the classified to the unclassified version, it was all kind of disembodied, and I didn’t really grasp the whole of it.
Fenton has broken more ground on this story than nearly all of our most prominent journalists, though he doesn’t consider himself one.
No, no, no, no, no. Doing the stuff with History Commons, I thought of myself as an amateur contemporary historian.
History Commons bills itself as an open-content participatory journalism web application. Almost every reporter working the terrorism beat has at one time or another turned for research to the site’s 9/11 Timeline, started by Paul Thompson.
So I was reading through the DOJ IG Report, and I thought, I don’t really understand this, but I’m gonna turn it into timeline entries and put it into the History Commons. And I thought, well there’s a tremendous amount of information there. It’s like 400 pages. So I thought, I’ll do it by character.
He noticed that one CIA character, given the bland alias “John,” seemed to come up again and again in the failures.
And previously I’d assumed the intelligence failures before 9/11 were committed by a wide variety of officials. But when I saw that John was involved all the way through. I just thought, this can’t be a coincidence. This John character, he’s gonna be kinda interesting, and we need to focus on him.
Around the same time, John’s alias was ripped away by New Yorker journalist Lawrence Wright, his real name exposed: Tom Wilshere.
Remember, that was at the time of the Valerie Plame affair, when even knowing the names could get you in trouble. And could get my sources in trouble. But I named the names.
Wright’s Pulitzer Prize winning book The Looming Tower serves as an indispensable companion to the Justice Department’s Inspector General Report in understanding the full the story, showed to extend beyond just the footnote 44 incident of January 2000, continuing right on through the Cole bombing investigation by the terrorist squad of the FBI’s New York office –and up to 9/11.
The guys in the I-49 Squad would have a hard time forgiving certain people in the CIA…
The I-49 squad is an unusual combination of prosecutors and FBI investigators working together to combat terrorism, and it increasingly focused on bin Laden in the late 1990s. At the urging of one well-respected senior agent there, Pat D’Amuro, the former squad members cooperated en masse with Wright’s book. It was a deliberate effort to set the record straight five years after the attacks.
I talked to a lot of guys on that squad. And they, they wanted to talk because they felt burned by history. No one had worked harder than those guys to try to stop Al Qaeda. And in many respects they feel that they might have been able to do it if they’d only been given the information.
In 2008, a few months after our interview with the Commission Chairman, the FBI agent at the center of footnote 44, the one who had tried to warn the Bureau, came forward ready to speak to journalist James Bamford, along with another agent, Mark Rossini. But they were denied permission by the new head of FBI Public Affairs, former ABC News reporter John Miller.
We met with him at his office. He said he didn’t want to injure his relationship with the Public Affairs office in CIA. I said, Well who cares? What’s that got to do with anything? It’s the American public paying your salary, the American public that ought to know this information. So who cares if you’re friends with the CIA guy? But the argument didn’t work. So I never got to interview Doug Miller and only got to interview Rossini after he left the FBI.
[DUFFY: He was fired from the FBI, right?]
Yeah, he was fired.
Mark Rossini resigned after being brought up on charges for improperly accessing FBI files in order to help a private detective friend of his actress girlfriend. His nearly-two-decade-long career with the Bureau ended in disgrace, and he was later sentenced to a year’s probation and a $5,000 fine. Rossini’s misfortune became Bamford’s lucky break.
I interviewed him the day after he was fired.
Like Bamford, we received zero cooperation from the US government on this story. Public Affairs offices turned down our interview requests and felt no need to give an explanation. We were told at times that we had to submit Freedom of Information Act requests for information that had once been on agency web sites. The stories you are about to hear could not have been able to be told even a few years ago, when the participants were still employed in government.
[Phone rings.] Hello, this is Mark Rossini. [CHIT CHAT.]
Thanks to an introduction from Bamford, we were speaking to our first insider, an FBI man inside CIA, someone finally in a position to tell what happened.
[DUFFY: That’s the story we’re essentially exploring.]
That’s the story. That’s the 9/11 story.
(music)
I arrived at Alec in January of ’99.
A few months after the US Embassy bombings in 1998, FBI counterterror man John O’Neill hand-picked his friend Rossini to move down from New York City to Langley, Virginia, to be his eyes and ears inside CIA headquarters. This was standard practice, for the FBI to detail counterterror agents to CIA offices and vice versa. It was done to create an environment of cooperation.
If you’ve never heard of FBI man John O’Neill, a good place to begin would be the excellent Frontline special ‘The Man Who Knew’ by Michael Kirk and Jim Gilmore, available at PBS.com. O’Neill has attained a kind of legendary status, doggedly pursuing Al Qaeda at a time when few really understood the threat, only to be killed by them at the World Trade Center.
Thirteen years later, Mark Rossini becomes our eyes and ears into that place and time, our spy within the spy agency.
It was just a nondescript door on a corridor… And when you went through our door, you basically were in another station, Alec Station.
There are some basics you need to know about CIA before we go any further: Every capital city in the world has its own secret CIA station, each made up of around a dozen or more case officers, depending on the importance of the region, reporting to a Chief of Station. These stations fell within the Directorate of Operations, the DO.
All the information pouring in from all those Stations needed to be analyzed and assembled into reports useful to the CIA Director and policymakers in Washington like the White House. That job was done by analysts in the Directorate of Intelligence, the DI.
If you think of it like a high school, then the DO people are the jocks and the DI people are the nerds. Into this mix, during the Reagan era, came the CounterTerrorism Center, the CTC. Technically falling within DO, it straddled both worlds and all regions, acknowledging the transnationality of terrorism.
Alec Station was designed to report directly to the DCI, directly to George. When Tenet created it, it was meant to transcend the politics of DI, DO, and CTC.
But the Station immediately became the baby of its first Chief, a DI guy named Mike Scheuer – he even codenamed it “Alec” after his son — and he filled it starting in 1996 with fellow DI analysts. There were only one or two case officers from the DO.
It was all made up of DI people, analysts that Mike Scheuer had brought over with him… And all of them were his people. They used to refer to them as the Scheuer family, like the Manson family, because they were all fiercely dedicated to him. And all very, very bright people. Very, very bright people.
Opening that unmarked door on the nondescript corridor, Alec Station was an 1800 square foot room, about 60 by 30, filled with around fifty of those analysts working in open cubicles. Rossini’s window looked directly west. He says he could often see the incoming thunderstorms.
And unfortunately, it is in Alec Station where we will find most of the people responsible for the failure to pay proper attention to hijackers Hamzi and Mihdhar – and thus the best chance to stop 9/11 and save nearly 3,000 lives.
We worked in a very small environment. And Al Qaeda being a very small group of people that we were interested in. So it sounds almost far fetched but anything and everything was coordinated between everybody. And you couldn’t look at one subject without being involved with another, or looking in another person’s area.
Not long after Rossini arrived, a young SOO – that’s staff operations officer – named Jennifer Lynn Matthews approached him at lunch.
She was my first friend there. She came up to me after my second week there. We were in line at the cafeteria. She said, ‘OK Rossini, what’d you do wrong?’ See everyone knows that people who get detailed to other agencies made a mistake. They fucked up. I said, ‘I didn’t do a goddamn thing wrong. I have an impeccable record’… I said, ‘I’m O’Neill’s hand-picked guy.’
Each staff operations officer holds what’s called a “ticket” on a particular region or subject. Jen Matthews had the ticket on Southeast Asia, meaning she was in charge of anything Al Qaeda-related that happened in that region.
Rossini also got to know another young staff operations officer, one he did not feel the same kind of instant connection with. A twenty-seven year old woman: [Michael C.].
Well, I mean, she was pleasant enough. [Laughs.] Pleasant enough. But very Agency-centric. Very forceful in her position. A real fighter, in many respects. Comes from a legacy Agency family. Many members of her family had been and perhaps still are in the Agency. A true Agency brat.
[Michael], who Rossini refers to here by her Justice Department Inspector General’s Report alias “Michelle,” shared one of the most important tickets in all of Alec Station with Deputy Chief Tom Wilshere.
Tom is a very intense individual. Very bright. Very hard driven guy. A vociferous reader. And equally fast typer. He types so fast he makes a lot of errors because he’s just so crazy to get his thought out…
Tom Wilshere worked Hezbollah issues for the Agency in the ‘90s and made a lot of allies in the FBI. Rossini thinks he was Scheuer’s Deputy Chief since the start of Alec Station.
Well I know Michelle and Wilshere, they had the proverbial ticket on Yemen. They were the ones most involved with Yemen and the Yemeni cell.
Despite the shared ticket, [Michael]’s direct superior was technically a middle-aged supervisor with red hair named [Frances B.].
The redhead’s job was – she was just a very senior, senior analyst that Scheuer had brought over, that had been a loyalist to Scheuer for many years. She was like the go-to person for all things analytical, writing reports, etc. But she was Michelle’s boss. On paper. But it wouldn’t be unusual for Michelle to go directly to Wilshere. No, not at all.
[RAY: Close with Wilshere?]
Oh very close. Very, very close. Yeah. Very close. Yeah.
Rossini threw himself into his work and minded his own business. He got used to the drive between Washington, D.C., and New York, as he usually worked at least one day a week with the I-49 Squad back at the FBI’s New York branch.
A few months passed. One day, the word came in that Mike Scheuer was suddenly gone. For the first time since its creation three years earlier, the CIA’s bin Laden unit would be getting a new Chief of Station. This time, a DO guy… Richard Earl Blee.
Rich came directly from George’s inner staff. What he did for him on his staff, I don’t know. But when they got rid of Michael Scheuer, that’s when they brought in Blee. April 99.
[music]
The full name and details of this man known only as Richard in government investigation reports remained almost a total mystery until a few new details in 2007 allowed Kevin Fenton to piece it together.
Blee made some enemies at the CIA… And when he came up for the position of Station Chief in Baghdad… Ken Silverstein at Harpers wrote an Internet post about him, and we got some more information from that. And the key thing was that Silverstein wrote that he was the child of a former CIA officer.
And then George Tenet wrote his book 2007, “At the Center of the Storm.” And George Tenet didn’t refer to him as Richard or Rich. He referred to him as Rich B., giving the initial of his real surname. So then, we were looking for somebody named Richard whose surname began with B and who was the child of a controversial former CIA officer. And there are very, very few people who meet that criterion.
The leading candidate became the son of Richard Bissell, the famed architect of the Bay of Pigs invasion. And then, in 2009, 9/11 Commission records began to be released.
We’ve tried to make all that stuff public. At the request of the government, we put a five year seal on most of it… The one thing the Commission felt, and I feel very strongly, is that most government secrets shouldn’t be secrets.
Fenton noticed the hand-written notes on one document.
And it said something like, “Nobody anticipated what Al Qaeda would do. Well, except Clarke, Black, and Blee.” And it just hit me, “Oh, Blee, this must be this Rich B. guy.”
In recent years, the government has tried to claim that even material like this, now in the public domain, is still classified until they say it’s not classified, as we’ve seen most prominently with the WikiLeaks cables. But Fenton stuck his neck out and blogged the name.
Well, I mean, I’ve thought about it a bit, and I think that if someone has done something wrong, then to hell with it… Um, I think if I learned the identity of a CIA officer who hadn’t done anything wrong, then I would keep it secret. Because I’ve got no reason to do that.
We too are choosing to release the names [Frances B.] and [Michael C.] for the first time in this podcast, for the same reasons. We want to emphasize that no source of ours leaked the names to us. As interviewees provided background details about the mysterious unnamed red-head and the young staff operations officer, we were able to use those details in conjunction with Internet searches to hash out likely candidates for their identities.
Then, during interviews with those in a position to know, we would simply mention the names of candidates like Blee, [Frances], and [Michael] in a question. Such as, “Did Rich Blee and George Tenet seem to have a cozy relationship?” All it took was a simple response of “Yes, yes they did,” for us to get our confirmation.
There was a get-to-know period, but I think across the board… Ya know, Rich obviously was a through and through Agency guy, and when he first came on the scene, the loyalty transferred to Rich as well, yeah, they were very loyal to Rich. No question about it. ‘Cos he had come from the 7th floor and his father was an agency legend, so to speak, in the old Soviet espionage days…
It appears Rich was actually born on a CIA assignment, on October 14, 1957, in Pretoria, South Africa, while his father David Blee was there undercover. By that time his forty-one-year-old dad had already spent a decade at the Agency, having first served in the World War II Office of Strategic Services spying on the Japanese and then at the launch of the CIA after the war.
Rich’s mother Margaret had been a school teacher in Venice, California. Born a full four years later than the rest of his four siblings, like an afterthought, he spent his early years attending the American Embassy School in India while his father was Chief of his first Station in New Delhi. David established his reputation when he helped smuggle the dughter of former Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin to asylum in the US, ensuring future promotions. The only known photo of Richard Blee is from a school yearbook during this period, nine years old reading a book with his classmates.
In 1968, Rich’s father was given the entire Middle East to run. The family moved back to the US, to a house in a Bethesda, Maryland, neighborhood literally across the Chesapeake from CIA headquarters.
As Rich grew up, his father David climbed up the CIA ladder. In 1968, David was given the entire Middle East to run. Rich’s CIA career started by 1984, when he was 26 years old, and he worked for the U.S Embassy in the Central African Republic. David Blee was back at headquarters in the role of Deputy Director of CounterIntelligence. He retired the following year.
A couple years later, Rich was in Niger. After that Algeria, age 35, during the bloody civil war between the government and Islamic guerrillas. Around the time George Tenet became Deputy Director at CIA, Rich was appointed to an Iraqi task force to destabilize Saddam Hussein’s government. When President Clinton made Tenet his new CIA Director in July ’97, Tenet brought Rich up to the 7th floor with him – where all the CIA’s top brass had offices – to work as one of his deputies’ executive assistants, just in time for Rich’s 40th birthday. Later that year, on the fiftieth anniversary of the Agency, Rich watched Tenet award his father a medal at a ceremony to honor the Agency’s fifty most important trailblazers.
The day Richard Blee walked into Alec Station, he was 41, five years younger than his father had been when he took his first Chief of Station position.
He came from a legacy family in the Agency, and clearly he carried that gravitas or that weight with that. And having come from the 7th floor, this was a guy who clearly had direct communication to George. And that says a lot about a person who could get things done.
Blee’s arrival at Alec Station in April 1999 was just one part in personnel shake-up that year signaling a shift to a terrorism focus at CIA in the wake of the 1998 US Embassy bombings.
Down a corridor and across the courtyard, in the basement of the newer steel and glass building of CIA, the CounterTerrorist Center was taken over by a man named Cofer Black, another DO guy with a reputation for embracing covert operations.
[RAY: Why were those guys brought into those positions at that period of time?]
Well, because the people who were running the CIA CounterTerrorism Center prior to the change-up were very ineffective. I was complaining about them. I was urging George Tenet to change the leadership at CTC, and he did. We then together developed The Plan.
That’s Richard Clarke. Bill Clinton had recently placed him in a newly-created position, White House Counterterror ‘Tsar,’ technically the highest counterterror post in the US government. Clarke’s previous experience had been in Ronald Reagan’s State Department, then an appointment by the first President Bush to chair the CounterTerrorism Security Group at the National Security Council.
He says the new people at CIA were good choices for what Tenet wanted to do.
When Cofer Black became head of the CounterTerrorism Center at CIA, he was aghast that they didn’t have sources inside Al Qaeda. And moreover, they had never tried to have sources inside Al Qaeda, because they thought it was too hard. So he told me, right after he became director of the CounterTerrorism Center, “I’m gonna try to get sources in Al Qaeda.”
A man with thick horn-rimmed glasses and a scowl whose name sounds like a Harry Potter villain, Black had previously been Chief of Station in the Sudan at the time when Osama Bin Laden was based there.
Cofer Black had a reputation for being hard-charging. He had done a good job in Sudan… Ya know, most CIA agents in those days didn’t like to get their fingers dirty. They liked to work under diplomatic cover in embassies and go to cocktail parties and recruit Soviet spies. Cofer Black had been in the back alleys of Khartoum… And Rich Blee understood how CIA worked because he had been sitting right next to George Tenet as his aide… Certainly George Tenet, certainly Cofer Black, and his top supervisors within the CounterTerror Center – all got it. They understood Al Qaeda was a big threat. They were motivated. And they were really trying hard.
Blee occupied one of the three private offices inside Alec Station, the one right next to Tom Wilshere’s. Mark Rossini says that on Blee’s first week as Chief, he called him in.
Ya know, he and I sat down and, very pleasant. He always treated me very fairly, very nice. And he told me, I want you to be more operational, travel more, do more stuff in the field. I had no problem with that. But O’Neill did not want that. He wanted me to stay there. Because he said if you’re not there, then I don’t know what’s going on… And that led to a confrontation between O’Neill and Blee.
It appears the tensions that existed between Mike Scheuer’s Alec Station and John O’Neill’s New York office would continue under Blee.
(music)
Coming up, now that we know the key players, we can understand who dropped the ball when the CIA discovered Al Qaeda terrorist Khalid al-Mihdhar had a visa to come to the US – and then kept that information from the people who could have stopped him. Rossini is joined by another FBI agent, Doug Miller, and the two find themselves battling with [Michael] about whether then can tell their bosses that Al Qaeda terrorist Mihdhar is heading to the United States. Stick around.
[THEME SONG]
You’re listening to Who Is Rich Blee?, the first of a two-part investigative podcast. I’m John Duffy. [And I’m Ray Nowosielski.]
For Rich Blee’s Alec Station, the new millennium started strong with an exquisitely complex counterterror operation. A young staff operations officer, [Michael], reporting to [Frances] and Tom Wilshere, almost flawlessly coordinates with six CIA Stations, enlisting the help of the local authorities of eight countries to track suspected terrorists across the globe, breaking into a hotel room, secretly copying travel documents, videotaping and photographing meetings, pulling hard drives from Internet cafes, and even attempting to ‘flip’ the terrorists’ hired driver. For his part, Blee gave regular briefings on the progress to his CIA bosses and the White House. It was a spectacular example of modern spycraft that suddenly and inexplicably fizzled out. And no one, we’re told, ever thought about it again.
But before we can get to that, let’s meet Doug Miller.
My colleague Doug Miller, he came over in late spring of ’99. He was from Washington field office, obviously I was from New York. And we got along instantly well. Doug and I to this day are still very close.
We called up Doug Miller at the Buffalo, New York FBI office where he currently works. He sounded freaked to hear from us and asked to call back. A minute later, from another line, he instructed us to go through the media office, though he pointed out they’d turned down the past four or five media requests for him. He said he wished he could speak, as it’s something he feels pretty strongly about, but unless we were in a position to pay his mortgage, send his child to college, then fund his retirement, he simply couldn’t.
He’s very bright. A CPA by training. Great analytical brain. Asks very, very relevant questions. And very dedicated. And an emotional guy. A family man, very close to his parents and sisters and brothers. Just an all around good human being.
Rossini says that while Miller and he were treated like outsiders, the same was not true of a third FBI employee there.
We were the only two FBI agents at Alec Station. There was an FBI analyst from the Washington field office there.
Young FBI analyst Maggie Gillespie had arrived in April ’98, before Rossini.
And the Agency people loved her. Maggie was treated from the beginning like a real CIA employee… I mean, she wrote CIRs. She wrote TDs. She actually got the ticket, if you will, on a case, or a subject, and followed it… She was treated like a full member, whereas Doug and I were not. We were outsiders, and we were always going to be treated as outsiders… Well of course, it was all women too. [Laughs.] Doug and I were like the only two guys there. Really. Besides Rich and Wilshere. We were the only two men.
That year, Rossini says Wilshere and [Michael] took a trip together to Yemen. As Rossini understands it, they went to talk with government authorities about the jihadists they had inside their borders. It seems likely they discussed perhaps the most important source for Al Qaeda intelligence in the US government at that time, a three-story house in a rural area outside Sana’a. This house was an Al-Qaeda communications center operated by a personal friend of Osama bin Laden, a man named Ahmed al-Hada – who also just happens to be Khalid al-Mihdhar’s father-in-law.
The CIA had been aware of calls going into this house since 1996, using a satellite station built specifically for this purpose in Madagascar. Wilshere and [Michael] also received summaries of calls provided by the NSA, monitoring the phone by satellite. The FBI learned about the house two years later during an interrogation of one of the US Embassy bombers. They immediately turned the info over to NSA and CIA, who apparently acted like it was new information.
I mean if ya got one of the guys that’s supposed to blow himself up. And he fails. And he’s calling this number in Sana’a, Yemen. That’s a hot number. I mean that’s a great lead. That’s pretty critical. It’s arguably, in my view, one of the most important leads ever…
Beginning in 1998, Jack Cloonan’s I-49 Squad used NSA surveillance reports on calls to and from the house to map the Al Qaeda network. It is the surveillance of this house that tips off the CIA to Mihdhar’s movements, ultimately allowing them access to his travel documents, and starting a chain of tragic events still murky with deception and intrigue.
(music)
Well that was a very intense, intense period. Working all the time. Never going home.
At the beginning of December, intelligence led the Clinton White House to believe Al Qaeda was coordinating spectacular worldwide attacks for sometime around New Year’s. Twenty-seven men, a number of them American citizens, were arrested in Jordan with several tons of TNT. Shortly thereafter, Ahmed Ressam was caught smuggling explosives across the border into the US from Canada, with the Los Angeles airport as his admitted bombing target.
Given the clear signs of a domestic US aspect of the attacks, Bill Clinton was said to have taken a personal interest. The job of disrupting Al Qaeda was coordinated by his National Security Adviser Sandy Berger and his new counterterror ‘tsar’ Richard Clarke. FBI agents from John O’Neill’s New York office began interrogations of suspects and overseas investigations.
At CIA, Cofer Black’s CounterTerrorist Center and Blee’s Alec Station were keeping their ears to the ground, looking for any small signs of a plot.
We read everything every day. We all scanned the traffic and read the cables… Ya know, the first thing you look at is the title and the station it’s coming in from, and you read it. You see if it’s of any value.
The CounterTerrorist Center and Alec Station were putting any pertinent information into terror threat updates included in Clinton’s daily briefings. CIA Director George Tenet made regular trips to the White House himself, likely with his top Al Qaeda man Rich Blee giving the briefings, as he would later do during the summer of threat before 9/11.
Deputy Chief Tom Wilshere and [Michael] were no doubt keeping close tabs on Al Qaeda’s primary telephone switchboard, the house in Yemen. Two days before New Year’s, the NSA provided a report: “Activities of Bin Laden Associates.” A man named Khalid who was living at the house received a call from a man in Malaysia summoning him and two other men, Nawaf, in Pakistan, and another, Salem, to a meeting in Malaysia’s capital of Kuala Lumpur in the first week of January.
I remember we were all just aware. I can’t say exactly how. It’s just one of those things where you work at a place long enough you know the personalities. We were all just very curious about this summit in Malaysia. Why were these people going there?… But very compartmentalized, and being run by “Michelle.”
[Michael] and her team – which according to Rossini should have included Wilshere, [Frances], and FBI analyst Maggie Gillespie – quickly connected the three travelers to a support element for the US Embassy bombings and agreed that they may be traveling to Kuala Lumpur for something nefarious. Rossini’s friend Jen Matthews, with the Southeast Asia ticket, was kept in the loop. Though not made aware of the Kuala Lumpur activity at the time, FBI agent Jack Cloonan became aware of it not long after. He says knowing about an organizational meeting of Al Qaeda anywhere in the world was rare. It was what counterterror people always dreamed about.
Ya know, the meeting that took place in Kuala Lumpur is, like we like to say now in hindsight, it was the organizational meeting. It might have been the first organizational meeting for, godknows, 9/11 and godknows what else was discussed.
It may seem that we know a lot about the meeting, but there’s a lot we still don’t. More details were known within 24 hours about the operation that reportedly killed Bin Laden in Abbottabad, Pakistan, than are known almost 12 years later about the 9/11 organizational meeting monitored on behalf of CIA.
[RAY: Who are you aware attended the meeting?]
Well, there’s Khalid Al Mihdhar and Nawaf Al Hazmi. There’s a guy or two who are down in Guantanamo Bay now. I’m aware of Khallad Bin Attash. Those are the people in Malaysia.
That’s one of the FBI’s Cole bombing investigators, speaking on background. We need to consider though that he and virtually everyone else we spoke with have had to rely, like the rest of us, on what the CIA says happened at the meeting.
News reports over the years have included other big Al Qaeda figures too.
[RAY: I believe Hambali, Ramzi bin al-Shibh was there, Nashiri…]
[Laughs.] It’s like the Who’s Who… I mean this is like, to put all these players in one location at one point – it’s just hard to believe. I mean, how fortuitous.
And then there’s the mastermind of 9/11, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed – often known by his initials KSM.
No, no, no. KSM was not there.
Everyone we asked said they were certain KSM was not at the meeting because, if he had been, it would have been a big, big deal. There was a two million dollar reward out for his arrest as a co-conspirator in an airplane bombing plot with his nephew, the 1993 World Trade Center bomber Ramzi Yousef.
But when WikiLeaks released those State Department cables – the ones we were never supposed to see but for alleged leaker Private Bradley Manning – there were a batch of documents detailing intelligence of prisoners held in Guantanamo. Hambali’s file states that he facilitated KSM spending a week at a condominium in the Sungai Long district of Kuala Lumpur with future 9/11 hijackers Mihdhar and Hazmi. The Malaysia summit is the only period that appears to fit the timeline for all three men to be in the Sungai Long condo where the summit occurred.
Of course, all these alleged attendees have been down in Guantanamo for years. We could ask them about the Malaysia summit, except the CIA won’t let us. Even the 9/11 Commission wasn’t allowed to.
We felt we got good cooperation from the CIA on all points except one, the detainees. They wouldn’t let us talk to them.
The surveillance photos from the meeting would also tell the story. Where are they? The people we spoke to all seem to have seen the same three or four photos provided by CIA after the attacks.
I remember seeing a bunch of photos. Three, four, five. How many, I don’t recollect… But there could be a lot more… They were pretty good. Some of them were close ups, like they were taken like knee level up into the guy’s face. Whoever took the photos got really close, the ones I saw. I don’t remember seeing any distance photos, but.. I remember they were standing by a tree in a park. I remember one photo was almost like someone walking by with a camera, right two feet from them, taking a picture into his face.
Are we supposed to believe Malaysian intelligence monitored a three day meeting but didn’t shoot more than a roll of film? Media reports say there were many more, and even video footage. Did the Congressional Inquiry or the Commission ever get to see these pictures or video?
FBI manager Jack Cloonan has a source he says filled him in on the meeting.
They were trying to get the Malaysian intelligence service to get into that meeting. They probably wanted to get a mic in there. Maybe CCTV coverage. Most importantly would have been a mic to understand what was going on. What was being said. But that didn’t happen, to the best of my knowledge.
Why didn’t that happen?
It takes months to get an audio operation up. You just can’t do it. You need approvals and equipment.
Bob Baer spent 21 years in the CIA’s DO, considered perhaps the best on the ground field officer in the Middle East according to legendary journalist Seymour Hersh. If you saw the movie Syriana, George Clooney’s character was based on Baer. He retired just before the events detailed here.
I mean ideally you’d like to put audio in a room, but that involves drilling holes and surveilling. It can’t be done overnight. It’s not like 24.
(music)
Perhaps that’s true, if the summit attendees stayed holed up in their condominium for all four days. However, the attendees had two drivers to take them around Kuala Lumpur, and they used them. They ate at restaurants, spent hours at Internet cafes, and some stayed at hotels. They used cell phones and a pay phone located just in front of the condominium complex. Two of them took separate flights out of the country and returned before the summit was over – a golden opportunity to find their full names from flight manifests and immigration stops that apparently was missed.
They were videotaped on the first day of the summit, but only the first day. It has never been explained why the video surveillance stopped. Rossini has said the photos taken outside must have been taken from only a few feet away – certainly close enough to record voices – yet apparently the one day of video did not record any audio. In 2003, the US Treasury Department mentioned in a press release about Hambali that the summit video included footage of hijackers Hazmi and Mihdhar standing next to Hambali. A FBI report from 1999 shows the FBI knew by this time that Hambali was involved in Bojinka, a 1995 plot masterminded by KSM that nearly killed 4,000 people. Malaysian intelligence later claimed they recognized Hambali during the summit since he was a long-time Malaysian resident.
Yet, for all that, the CIA has never said they were able to get the full names of any of the summit attendees at the time. For instance, they say they still didn’t know what Nawaf al-Hazmi’s last name was by the time the summit was over, even though al-Hazmi was traveling using his real name. It is known US intelligence already had photographs of KSM, Hambali, and al-Nashiri before the summit, but supposedly the CIA never recognized any of them.
It wasn’t just that Malaysian intelligence wasn’t able to get audio inside the condominium: either the surveillance was a total disaster, or the CIA hasn’t been honest about what was learned. The summit was considered so important as it was happening that Rich Blee was giving daily updates to cabinet-level officials like the CIA director, FBI director, and the National Security Adviser. But Malaysian officials later claimed they were never given clear instructions, so their agents focused their efforts on monitoring the local hosts instead of the summit attendees. And even though the Malaysians updated the CIA daily, this apparently was never rectified in the four days the summit took place. Author James Bamford has called Alec Station’s handling of the summit surveillance a “train wreck in slow motion.”
We need to jump backward a little here, to Tuesday, a few days before the summit began. While Mihdhar was on his way to the Kuala Lumpur meeting, he had a long layover in Dubai, the United Arab Emirates. When he stepped out of his hotel room at the Nihal Hotel for a while, agents presumably working on orders from [Michael] broke into his room and searched his things. Among them, they found his passport and photocopied it. That according to Lawrence Wright…
All I can tell you is I learned that from someone in a position to know inside Alec Station.
The CIA Station in the United Arab Emirates sent a copy to Alec and Riyadh Station in Saudi Arabia in a cable with a dramatic title: “Activities of Bin Ladin Associate Khalid Revealed.” Mihdhar possesses a visa allowing him entry to the United States.
We asked FBI I-49 Squad supervisor Jack Cloonan how common it was to see a known Al Qaeda terrorist heading toward the US.
That’s what you were always looking for! I mean, that’s what everything was always promulgated on. I mean, you were always looking for the threat to the United States. And who was coming in. We knew from talking to other cooperatives what a price that Bin Laden and Zawahiri put on getting people in Al Qaeda with a US passport and with the ability to travel to the United States.
[RAY: They make it sound like there was so much going on at the time that this was not recognized…]
No, that was the thing going on at the time. That’s the whole point. Yeah, there was a lot going on at the time, but this was it, that was the thing going on at the time that was making us all nervous.
I mean we knew from dealing with Wadih El Hage, dealing with Ihab Ali, dealing with L’Houssaine Kherchtou, with Jamal Ahmed Al-Fadl. Each of them would tell you the value of Al Qaeda getting someone into the United States or somebody with a US passport of visa. This was critical.
The next morning, Wednesday, 6 a.m., a second cable came into CTC and Alec from the CIA Station in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. Deputy Chief Tom Wilshere was among the first to read it.
Well the cable came in. They had gone back to the consulate in Jeddah, pulled his visa papers, and of course attached to the cable were all the information about him and that he had implied that he wished to go to the United States.
FBI agent Doug Miller arrived at work around 9 a.m. and found the two cables waiting for him as he turned on his computer.
Everything is there for everybody to see. Remember, it comes over the system, the electronic cable system. There’s really no restrictions. Everyone has access to everything.
Within fifteen minutes, Miller began writing a warning to the FBI.
And then my colleague Doug Miller took it upon himself to write a CIR, a Central Intelligence Report. To inform the FBI about this meeting in Malaysia, in particular and because one of the people there, a suspected terrorist, had intentions to travel to the US. That was his intent.
The report was addressed to Miller’s boss back at FBI headquarters, Deborah Stafford, the head of the Bureau’s Bin Laden Unit. Rossini also addressed it to his own home FBI office in New York, the domain of John O’Neill.
The message describes Mihdhar’s travel to Malaysia, the links between his home in Yemen and the US Embassy bombings. It explains that photos of the Malaysia meeting have been taken and will be sent to FBI later. And, the coup de grace, that Mihdhar holds a multiple entry visa for the US, where he plans to stay in New York for three months.
Miller requested that Alec Station receive feedback on any intelligence uncovered in the FBI’s investigation. He attached the two CIA cables.
So the way it works over there is you write a communication, and then it goes into an electronic queue to be approved along the line to be released.
At this point, something unusual happened. Normally, according to the Justice IG Report, the drafter, Doug Miller, would himself coordinate the communication in the computer system so that designated persons in charge of approving its release are notified.
But in this case, without Miller notifying anyone, [Michael] accessed his draft report – within less than an hour of his writing it, as if she were on the look-out for it. Wilshere later acknowledged to investigators that this was not standard operating procedure.
About forty-five minutes after [Michael] read Miller’s draft warning to the FBI, the other Deputy Station Chief, the one from FBI headquarters, Ed Goetz, also accessed Miller’s draft warning to FBI. Goetz worked out of the third private office in Alec Station. The funny thing about this is that, at that time, Goetz hadn’t yet opened the two CIA cables about Mihdhar’s US visa. The Justice Department’s Inspector General’s Report noted that Goetz, as Deputy Chief, has the authority himself to immediately release it for electronic dissemination, but he did not.
Another four and a half hours passed. At four p.m., [Michael] reopened the draft message to add a note for Miller: “Pls hold off for now per Tom Wilshere.”
Now here’s another strange thing. According to the Justice Department investigation, which had the ability after the fact to see the precise moment each item was accessed by whom in the computer system, Tom Wilshere never accessed Doug Miller’s draft cable. So how did he know to tell [Michael] to order the draft held off?
It appears that she had been on the look-out for any messages coming from the FBI detailees that morning. Once she saw Miller’s cable, she immediately went to her close colleague Tom Wilshere to discuss it. Perhaps her immediate supervisor [Frances] was in the mix as well? And FBI Deputy Chief Ed Goetz was also let in on the conversation.
Two obvious questions: One. What was their operational plan in withholding Mihdhar’s planned travel to the US from FBI? And two. On whose orders?
[music]
I’m cautious about saying it, because you have to deal with the facts, but I had heard that Blee stopped it from coming over, that Blee and Wilshere had had the conversation and stopped it.
Pat D’Amuro spent much of his twenty-six-year FBI career working counterterrorism. After 9/11, he was appointed Inspector in Charge of the FBI’s investigation into the attacks. By the time he retired from the Bureau, he was Executive Assistant Director for Counterterrorism and Counterintelligence. He wouldn’t share his source on the Blee information, though he said he learned it around the time of the 9/11 Commission hearings, in early 2004.
What I didn’t know was that Blee and Wilshere had had conversations going back to 2000 about not sharing that with FBI HQ and NYFO… I believe they were well aware of it and did not share… and then when they come over were part of the decision-making process at Langley not to share that with FBI.
Later that Wednesday, two more cables came into the CounterTerrorism Center and Alec Station discussing Mihdhar’s visa, now a total of four. At 6:30 p.m., Tom Wilshere re-read the first cable from the United Arab Emirates and then read the second cable from Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.
A half hour later, Wilshere’s subordinate and friend [Michael] sent a lengthy message to several CIA stations around the world. It stated: “We need to continue efforts to identify these travelers and their activities… to determine if there is any true threat posed.”
She then devoted an entire paragraph to Mihdhar, and that paragraph included a statement that misleads the entire CIA: [Michael] asserted that a physical copy of Mihdhar’s travel documents, including a US visa, has been copied and passed to the FBI for further investigation.
When later asked by government investigators who had told her that a physical copy of Mihdhar’s visa was passed, she claimed she could not remember. There was a lot of that going around at the time, including from Rossini and Miller.
But we do know that [Michael]’s immediate supervisor, the red-headed [Frances], later told the Congressional Inquiry that she – [Frances] – was the one who had taken the visa down to FBI headquarters.
As I understand it, she had said that she physically went down to FBI headquarters and hand-delivered the cable and/or spoke to somebody at the FBI, at ITOS, about Malaysia, about the bad guys having come to the US.
When Congressional investigators and FBI personnel inquired into the FBI log books at headquarters, they could find no record of this person’s entry during that time period – or ever.
Everybody at FBI headquarters, even if you’re from another field office, you need to physically put your name on a piece of paper like in a ledger, and there was no record of that person ever – ever – having come to FBI headquarters.
Asked about her misstatement, as we’ll carefully call it, [Frances]’ only subsequent explanation, recounted by an FBI agent to James Bamford, was that she “may have faxed it down – I don’t remember.”
An anonymous source at FBI put it to us like this: She “fuckin’ lied.”
Dale Watson was the top man at counterterror for the FBI at this time, first chief of the newly commissioned CounterTerror Division. Watson was close with George Tenet and Cofer Black after previously being detailed to the CIA’s CounterTerror Center himself. We asked him how the CIA was supposed to update the FBI.
Two ways, probably a cable traffic over to us, and then we had people over at CTC that were embedded there, just as the Agency had people embedded in our Bin Laden Unit, so…
And how often was Watson receiving updates during the Millennium period, when the Malaysia summit took place?
Oh, the Millennium, while it was going on, it was probably every hour on the hour… And at the same time that that happened, the CIA forced a guy to come over to the FBI Counterterrorism Center.
The guy CIA forced into FBI Counterterrorism Center was a CIA CounterTerrorism Center agent still known only as Rob. The Congressional Inquiry said that Rob was assigned there to fix communication problems between the CIA and the FBI.
The same evening that [Michael] was telling the CIA internally that the FBI had been made aware of al-Mihdhar’s visa, Rob was at the FBI updating a supervisor about the Malaysia meeting. The supervisor did not know why Rob briefed him, since he was not Rob’s designated point of contact. He adamantly told the Justice Department investigation that the Mihdhar visa was not mentioned in their conversation.
The next morning, Thursday, Rob briefed a different FBI agent with details on Mihdhar’s travel and the ongoing Malaysia summit. Again, the agent was not Rob’s designated point of contact.
When Rob was emailed by another CIA agent who has been asked by an FBI colleague for an update on Mihdhar, Rob began series of emails explaining that he’d already updated FBI. The last email, which he titled “Malaysia – For the Record,” was CC’d to Tom Wilshere, Maggie Gillespie, and other unknowns at Alec Station. Rob wrote: “In case FBI starts to complain later… below is exactly what I briefed them on.” The email mentions Mihdhar’s transit through Dubai, his arrival in Kuala Lumpur, his activities in Malaysia – everything except his US visa.
The updates that Rob provided Stafford’s employees on Wednesday night and Thursday morning were sent by those men upstairs where they were included in two updates that Thursday to the FBI Director and top FBI officials. These are apparently the only two mentions of Malaysia and Mihdhar’s travel ever found in FBI records. There are NO mentions of his visa to the US, which is the one fact that would have gotten the FBI involved in looking for and stopping him.
The next day, Friday, was the last day of the Millennium threat period, and the last day of the Islamic holy month of Ramadan.
Inside Alec Station, Mark Rossini and Doug Miller find themselves with one less FBI ally, as their Deputy Chief from the Bureau Ed Goetz has been diagnosed with cancer and left the day before.
Eddie basically left January 5th or January 6th… Right on that day. Either a day or two before or right after, Eddie left. So it was just Doug and I… We had no senior Bureau person inside Alec Station. It was just Doug and I.
It had been two days now, and Doug Miller’s draft message to FBI still hadn’t moved. Without Ed Goetz there to help him resolve the problem, Rossini says Miller turned to him.
Obviously me being the more senior agent, Doug comes to me… Just came up to my little cubicle area and said, “Hey, I don’t know what the fuck is goin’ on.” Or words to that effect. Or, “Hey, can you help me out here. I don’t know why this thing isn’t moving.” So I said, “Sure, lemme go talk to Michelle.”
Rossini walked up to [Michael]’s cubicle. Remember, he is calling her by the alias “Michelle” here.
And I say, “Hey, Doug’s cable, what’s goin’ on? It’s not goin’ out the door? Ya gotta send it to the Bureau. It’s not movin’. What’s happenin’?”
Rossini says [Michael]’s reaction was not pleasant.
She got a little heated. She got a little heated… Put her hand on her hip and just said to me, “Listen, it’s not an FBI case. It’s not an FBI matter. When we want the FBI to know, we’ll let them know. And you’re not going to say anything.”
The heated conversation seems to put the lie to her message throughout CIA two days before that the crucial information about the US visa had been shared with FBI.
[DUFFY: If she wrote that that afternoon but then two days later told you, paraphrasing, that ‘when we want the FBI to know, we’ll let them know…’]
We’ll let them know. Right. It’s not an FBI case.
[So clearly her internal cable must have been a lie. She must have known it was a lie.]
Despite the multiple-entry US visa in Mihdhar’s passport, despite the entire threat period they just went through the previous week, and despite the apprehension about Ahmad Ressam and his trunk load of explosives headed for the Los Angeles airport within that same month, [Michael] insisted to Rossini that the next Al Qaeda attack would be in Malaysia. We asked Richard Clarke what she might have been talking about.
[DUFFY: Are you aware of specific intelligence that would have lead him to believe the next attack would be in Malaysia?]
No.
[RAY: There wasn’t a flood of intel coming in on Malaysia during the threat spike?]
No, the only thing we had on Malaysia was that they had the meeting in Malaysia.
[DUFFY: When this meeting was about to happen, was everyone who was being briefed on this meeting, was everyone who was being briefed on this meeting under the impression an attack was going to happen there?]
No.
I think, I can’t prove it, but I think that the belief was that the trip to America was just some kind of a diversion. Some kind of a ruse.
[DUFFY: You felt from what you’d seen and heard at Alec Station that that was a fair assessment, that the next attack would be in Southeast Asia?]
No, I didn’t think it was a fair assessment, but that was her assessment. And it was like, OK, if that’s your posture, if that’s your position – well, I don’t agree with it, because the guy’s got a visa to come to the US. But that was the end of it.
[music]
After his argument with [Michael], Rossini printed a copy of Miller’s draft warning to FBI and put it in a file in his desk, as if he knew it might be important some day. He says to this day he doesn’t know why he did that.
None of the government investigation reports included Rossini’s story about this, probably because he didn’t tell any of them. But it’s supported at least circumstantially by the Justice Department’s Inspector General’s Report, which noted that his computer system showed he accessed Miller’s draft CIR on this Friday.
The day after Rossini’s and [Michael]’s argument, a Saturday, Mihdhar, Hazmi, and Attash left the meeting in Malaysia and flew to Bangkok. We’re told Kuala Lumpur Station cabled Bangkok Station too late. In the words of the Commission, “The travelers disappeared into the streets of Bangkok.”
A week later, Mihdhar and Hazmi would be walking the streets of Los Angeles, flying into the same airport that only weeks before Ahmed Ressam had admitted to intending to blow up with the explosives in his trunk. Former CIA agent Bob Baer…
If it came in too late, then it came in too late. You can’t mobilize a surveillance team at the airport. It doesn’t happen instantaneously. And the CIA doesn’t – you have to go to the local police. These things, unless there’s an international fugitive warrant, it’s hard to get the locals to look at something… It was a fuck up, what can I say. And with 20/20 hindsight, it was a particularly bad fuck up.
If they lost Mihdhar and his companions, so be it. But why had they only attempted to keep tabs on those three terror meeting attendees?
[RAY: We always wondered why they didn’t attempt to follow some of the other people listed as being there.]
How do you know they didn’t follow them?
[DUFFY: Well, we don’t, but…]
I mean, the stated line would be, “Ya know, we didn’t.” I just don’t buy it. And how do you prove a negative?
Richard Clarke told us something similar.
I don’t think we can say what they didn’t do.
In fact, Cloonan’s sources specifically informed him that others besides just Mihdhar, Hazmi, and Attash did get monitored following the meeting.
And then when the meeting splits up, the groups go in two different directions. And I know there was surveillance put on the groups when they leave… I heard that they followed two groups. I thought one group went to Bangkok and I thought another group went some other place. That they followed them. That’s what I was told.
If Cloonan’s source is correct, the CIA would have a lot to answer for. If they had followed Ramzi bin al-Shibh back to Germany, it should have led them to directly to 9/11 hijacker Mohamed Atta’s cell – a cell that was already being investigated and sometimes monitored by the German government. If Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri’s trail had been followed, then why wasn’t the Cole bombing prevented, since he is considered one of the two masterminds of that bombing that took place later in 2000? If Hambali had been followed, that might have uncovered the 9/11 plot. For instance, we now know Hambali was with KSM in Karachi, Pakistan, in the weeks right before 9/11, and he told an al-Qaeda operative to get his traveling done before the day of September 11. And if KSM was at the summit and had been followed… it goes without saying that following the actual 9/11 mastermind was an incredible lost opportunity.
(music)
That Thursday, after losing the terrorists, Bangkok Station sent a cable to the CounterTerrorism Center and Alec Station titled “Efforts to Locate al-Mihdhar.” FBI agent Doug Miller sent an email to Tom Wilshere, attaching his earlier draft warning that had been blocked, and he asked, “Is this a no-go, or should I remake it in some way?” Wilshere never responded.
The following day, Friday, Blee again gave Tenet and Black a briefing. It’s his second briefing on the surveillance operation since losing the two hijackers in Bangkok. A 9/11 Commission staff report said Blee told them that officials were continuing to track the suspicious individuals who had now dispersed to various countries. This, despite the cable from Bangkok Station the previous day saying they could not find the terrorists.
The 9/11 Commission’s executive director, Philip Zelikow, told us in an e-mail that he believed this implied that the person who prepared the slide was not fully up to date on the latest cable, but how could Blee not have been? And how could he have allowed this to go on twice? Zelikow did say the slide also did not include mention of Mihdhar’s US visa.
On Saturday, Mihdhar and Hazmi arrived in the US. Interestingly, the 9/11 Commission has claimed that when Mihdhar met KSM in Afghanistan months later, Mihdhar said that he and Hazmi felt they had been watched and followed on the flight from Bangkok to Los Angeles by unknown individuals. Were they right?
In any case, once the two hijackers were in the US, Blee gave no further incorrect updates about on-going surveillance. We are to believe that Tenet and Black never again asked about any of this.
Jack Cloonan later called the Malaysia summit surveillance opportunity “as good as it gets. … This is what you dream about.” Typically, such surveillance operations are followed by a TD – a Telegraphic Dissemination – which is a summary report to alert the rest of the US intelligence community on what happened. Someone within Alec Station should have written a Telegraphic Dissemination, but no one did. Author James Bamford has called this a “serious blunder.”
And at some point in the months after the summit, the CIA told Malaysian intelligence to stop watching the condominium where the summit had been held, so that’s what the Malaysians did. One Malaysian official later complained to Newsweek, “We couldn’t fathom it, really. There was no show of concern.” In September 2000, Zacarias Moussaoui stayed at that very same condominium and talked to his hosts about getting flight training in the US. Another chance to stop the 9/11 plot was lost.
Also, standard procedure would have been to put the known names of the summit attendees on a US watch list, so they could be discovered and tracked if any of them entered the US. This was not done, not now and not for another year and a half. Bamford calls this “incredible” and says Blee “completely dropped the ball.” There also was an international watch list, and the only possible summit attendee put on it later in the year was KSM.
In February, a foreign government – most likely Thailand – offered to help CIA in the search for Mihdhar in that country, but CIA turned the offer down, saying they were in the middle of an investigation to, quote, “determine what the subject is up to.” The subject, Mihdhar, was living in San Diego, California, by that time.
Finally, on March 5, 2000, a Sunday, the CIA’s Bangkok Station cabled both the CounterTerrorism Center and Alec Station that one of Mihdhar’s traveling companions, Nawaf Al Hazmi, had traveled with another person on a United Airlines flight to Los Angeles on January 15th. They also noted that it is unknown if and when Mihdhar may have departed. This cable is a response to a request from Kuala Lumpur station as to the whereabouts of Khalid al-Mihdhar, so it should have been easy to assume that he was al-Hazmi’s companion – they were sitting next to each other on the plane, and bought their plane tickets using their real names.
The Justice Department’s Inspector General’s Report notes that the three FBI detailees, Mark Rossini, Doug Miller, and Mark Rossini all accessed this cable. Because their investigation pertained to FBI failings, not CIA, it says nothing of [Michael], [Frances], Tom Wilshere, Rich Blee, or Cofer Black in this time frame.
I can’t explain why there was a hold off to tell the Bureau what happened. I can’t explain that… And in particular when it was determined that they did go on to the US. That they did go on to America.
George Tenet himself was asked about this by the Congressional Intelligence Committees in 2002.
GEORGE TENET: The cable that came in from the field at that time was labeled “information only,” and I know that nobody read that cable.
SENATOR LEVIN: But my question is do you know why the FBI was not notified of the fact that an al-Qa’ida operative now was known in March of the year 2000 to have entered the United States? Why did the CIA not specifically notify the FBI?
TENET: Sir, we weren’t aware of it when it came into headquarters. We couldn’t have notified them. Nobody read that cable in the March time frame.
LEVIN: So that the cable that said that al-Hazmi had entered the United States came to your headquarters, nobody read it?
TENET: Yes, sir. It was an information-only cable from the field and nobody read that information-only cable.
Strangely, the Justice Department investigation did not go into an hour-by-hour look at who accessed the March 5 cable in the same way that they did with the Mihdhar visa cables, making it difficult to verify Tenet’s statement. If true, why had so many inside the CounterTerrorism Center and Alec Station paid attention to the visa cables but no one read the one about Hazmi entering the US.?
[RAY: Let me just ask you, in real time, did you read either of those two cables?]
I do have a recollection. My memory is a little fuzzy on that.
[RAY: Do you know for a fact that there were certain individuals within Alec that definitely read that cable in real time?]
Well, I can’t prove that they did or didn’t, but my gut – and remember, you’re talking about the people who have the ticket on the Yemen cell. Of course they would have to know. It’s their ticket. It’s their case.
[RAY: It was a pretty small office right… Are you all poppin’ by each other’s desks from time to time if you need something?]
Yeah, we all know each other, if –
[RAY: So there’s no way that Blee is just off in a bubble somewhere in his back office?]
No, it’s impossible. No, no, no, absolutely not. Everything there is computer driven. Everything is there seen by everybody. Everything comes in. That computer system is unique to anything I’ve ever seen in my life. As far as speed, ability, access.
He’s referring to the CIA’s proprietary Hercules cable system. Rossini told us that they way it’s set up, the incoming cables would have been difficult for Cofer Black or Richard Blee to miss.
It’s right there in your face. You can’t miss it. It’s right there in your face. You can’t miss it. That’s the whole thing.
[RAY: Just as an outsider it seems impossible that someone could run Alec Station and not be aware of these multiple instances of…]
Exactly correct. And particularly something of such importance. Exactly correct.
[RAY: Obviously you weren’t sitting in Blee’s office or Black’s office or Tenet’s office. You can’t know exactly what they read. But, I mean, did at any time in 2000 or 2001 are you aware of any of those three receiving that info?]
Um, no, I could never attest to it, but it would be impossible for them – it would be impossible for Rich Blee or Cofer not to have known about it. George, different story. George encouraged people to work beneath him and do what ya gotta do. But it would be impossible for Blee to say he didn’t know about this. It would be impossible for Cofer to say he didn’t know about it.
(music)
Coming up in the final half hour: President Clinton’s counterterror ‘tsar’ Richard Clarke tells how at the same time Miller and Rossini were being blocked from telling FBI, he believes the CIA Director was ordering that same info kept from the White House. That’s in a minute, when our program continues.
[THEME MUSIC]
You’re listening to the final half hour of Who Is Rich Blee?, the first of a two-part investigative podcast. I’m Ray Nowosielski. [And I’m John Duffy, and we’re coming to you from Austin, Texas.]
Back in August, we sent part of the interview with Richard Clarke that you’re about to hear to the press person at former CIA Director George Tenet’s publisher. Our hope was that he would be moved to set the record straight with an interview of his own. But our assumption was that we would never hear a reply. That’s been mostly the case with former CIA people.
Hi, this is Bill Harlow. I sent you an email yesterday with a statement from George Tenet, Cofer Black, and Rich Blee. Just wanted to make sure you received it…
I have to admit I broke out in a cold sweat. We certainly hadn’t expected that within forty-eight hours the former CIA Director would reach out to the man with the reputation for being hard charging, Cofer Black, and also to our illusive and mysterious subject, Rich Blee. It’s not every day that three former CIA bigwigs who we’re investigating for possible wrongdoing acknowledge that they know we exist. In fact, it’s safe to say that’s never happened to us before.
The three refused to be interviewed, but they provided a one-page Joint Statement. We’ll examine that in a bit. But first, the interview that compelled them to respond…
The 9/11 Commission has gone over all of my e-mails, all of my files… and asked the CIA. The CIA admits they never told us. The CIA admits they never told the FBI, until August of 2001, when they knew about it over twelve months earlier. And it’s not as I originally thought, which is that one lowly CIA analyst got this information and somehow didn’t recognize the significance of it. No, 50 — 5-0 — CIA personnel knew about this.
Clarke says he learned that fact and began to put it all together starting in mid-2007, when Congress forced the CIA to release the Executive Summary of their own Inspector General’s report on 9/11. That redacted summary states: “In the period January through March 2000, some 50 to 60 individuals read one or more of the six Agency cables containing travel information related to these terrorists.” The full report continues to be withheld from the public.
[DUFFY: So you obviously were aware of the Kuala Lumpur meeting as it happened?]
I was aware of the Kuala Lumpur meeting immediately after it happened. I was never informed that anyone at it had come to the United States.
[RAY: When they update you, is it really vague? Is it just “A number of people have–]
You have to understand, the way they update us at the White House is every morning I come in, I turn on my computer, and I get a hundred, a hundred fifty CIA reports. I’m not relying on somebody calling me and telling me things. I get a flood of CIA reports. And I never got a report to that effect.
This was the first we’d heard alleged anywhere of purposeful CIA blocking of this information beyond FBI agents Miller and Rossini. So we asked for more detail on how the White House received reports from CIA.
What happens is when a CIA source reports in to a CIA case officer, the case officer then turns that into a temporary, preliminary report. The preliminary report is then sent into CIA headquarters where a reports officer converts it into English. And then it is automatically disseminated to a list of people. And it comes automatically to me in the White House, to people in the Defense Department, to people in the FBI. You have to intentionally stop it.
[DUFFY: They were stopped from getting to you and stopped from getting to the White House then?]
And stopped from getting to the FBI and the Defense Department… If there was a decision made to stop normal distribution with regard to this case, then people like Tom Wilshere would have known that.
[DUFFY: He reads it multiple times over the course of the next year… On these subsequent times, if he shook something loose, he had the full range of opportunity to alert you?]
He did, but he wouldn’t have to, because unless someone intervened to stop the normal automatic distribution, I would automatically get it.
Former CIA Middle East case officer Bob Baer slightly disputes Clarke’s statement about the cables.
Operational cable doesn’t automatically come to the White House. The decision needs to be made at the desk level… But I’m saying there were a 1000 cables a day that came in about Bin Laden. Or 10,000 for all I know. And you can’t send them all to the White House. There’s a reports officer whose analytical abilities may be good or may not be good. And she or he is the one who decides what to disseminate. And that’s what Clarke saw.
In addition, we had about every other day, a threat committee, where CIA and NSA and FBI and everybody else — DOD — would brief on the latest intelligence. They never briefed us. We must have had dozens, scores of threat committee meetings over the period of time when they knew these guys had entered the country, and they never mentioned it.
Baer does agree with Clarke’s assessment that Rich Blee briefing the White House about the Kuala Lumpur meeting during the Millennium threat period but not mentioning the most stunning detail, the US visa., is suspicious.
That makes it even worse. I mean, if they thought it was important enough to tell the White House about these meetings in Kuala Lumpur, if that was briefed orally, and it all comes down to the US visa, then that’s extremely… If White House people were being briefed on KL but not on the passport, that’s extremely suspic – you need answers.
We asked about [Michael]’s standard operating procedure as the person running the Mihdhar operation.
[RAY: Is she the person who would hold the responsibility if that was not turned into a Telegraphic Dissemination and passed up to the White House at that point?]
Yeah… She then would turn to, or herself would write a memo, to the National Security Council or the White House or in this case Clarke himself. “Richard Clarke, we’ve learned that Mihdhar has a US visa. It was issued on such and such a date in such and such a place. We’ve requested the actual visa application, and here’s what we’re doing about it.” And you put that in a memo and send it to the White House. Probably fax it to Clarke, or maybe you can do it electronically.
But Clarke believes people like [Michael] or Tom Wilshere are small potatoes. Like Pat D’Amuro, he believes this goes straight to the top.
George Tenet followed all of the information about Al Qaeda in microscopic detail. He read raw intelligence reports before analysts in the CounterTerror Center did. And he would pick up the phone and call me at 7:30 in the morning to talk about them. There was no barrier between George Tenet and the CIA information machine when it came to Al Qaeda.
You gotta understand, my relationship with him — we were close friends. He called me several times a day. We shared the most trivial of information with each other. He would regularly call me with raw intelligence and say, “You gotta look at this. This is important.” And then I would call his analysts, five layers down, the people who knew the details, and say, “What do you think about it?”… He was giving me — as was the CIA CounterTerrorism Center — giving me a flood of information all the time… There was not a lack of information sharing between the CIA and me and my stuff… They told us everything accept this.
That means one thing to me: There was an intentional and very high level decision in the CIA not to let the White House know.
[DUFFY: How high level?]
I would think it would have to be made by the Director.
On June 24, 2004, the FBI’s Deputy Director at the time of the footnote 44 incident, Tom Pickard, wrote a letter to the 9/11 Commission. That letter was intended for their eyes only, not the public, but the documents began to be released by the National Archives, and Pickard’s letter came out.
Writing about what he did or did not brief Attorney General John Ashcroft about in the summer of 2001 – and why – he volunteered a strange line of text that seemed to come out of nowhere. Pickard wrote: “I had not told the [Attorney General] about the meeting in Malaysia since I was told by FBI Assistant Director Dale Watson that there was a ‘close hold’ on that info. This means that it was not to be shared with anyone without the explicit approval of the CIA. I then strongly suggested that the [Attorney General] meet with George Tenet to get a full briefing on the matter.”
When Dale Watson agreed to interview with us, we had high hopes that we might finally learn what he had told Pickard about the CIA’s “close hold.”
Close hold what? What did he say?
[RAY: He said a “close hold,” and he put it in parentheses, like it’s an official term or something. Close. Hold.]
Right, I understand what that is.
[RAY: Well what is a “close hold”]
Well, it’s just a term you use for “not to disseminate.” It’s not a classification, but you know, “This is a close hold. Information means ‘Don’t talk about it to anybody.’”… Ya know, I do not know the answer to that… If Pickard says that, I assume, I don’t know where he got that from. I’m not going to dispute and say, “That’s not true.” I don’t recall it.
Did Pickard tell the 9/11 Commission something that was not true about the Malaysia meeting? Only Pickard is in a position to clarify, but he’s ignored our email request for an interview.
[Voicemail message.] This is Greg Miller calling with the Washington Post. I was just hopin’ to get a transcript of the Richard Clarke comments that have surfaced publicly now…
[music]
The Richard Clarke interview and the Joint Statement from George Tenet, Cofer Black, and Rich Blee set up a high-profile he said/she said over two main issues: how high up the information went and who, if anyone, ordered it withheld.
Quite honestly, with my relationship and me being assigned over there, I always took kinda the high road, and I said, ya know somethin’, I don’t believe that… I think it was probably a decision made at the lower level not to tell anybody. And if you’re tryin’ to say that Cofer and Tenet got together to keep us out of it, I don’t necessarily agree with that…
Among FBI counterterror agents from the time, opinions seem to differ slightly depending on whether they worked out of John O’Neill’s New York office or out of headquarters in D.C., like Dale Watson:
Ya know, I know Cofer. I know Tenet. I know those guys very well. And, if that occurred, that had to be down lower in the organizational than those guys. And for somebody to say that there was a conscious effort by those folks to do that, I just don’t believe that. I think if there was some conscious effort, it was probably at the Grade 14 level as we call it in the Bureau or the Grade 13 level not to tell people what was going on.
Pat D’Amuro, on the other hand, doesn’t believe blame rests solely at the level of Blee and Wilshere.
There’s no doubt in my mind that that went up further in the Agency than just those two guys. And why they didn’t send it over. To this day, I don’t know why…
Mike Rolince, the number two counterterror man at FBI at the time, who later worked directly with Tom Wilshere, finally chose not to interview with us after over a year of occasional back and forth e-mails, voice mails, and brief conversations. In response to Clarke’s interview, he e-mailed: “I know many buy into the conspiracy. Based on where I was, who I knew and what I knew, both then and now, I choose not to. I’m not saying I’m right and I’m not saying they are wrong. We may never know. I’ll leave it at that.” Vague, to be sure.
More vague still, upon closer inspection, is the carefully worded Joint Statement from Tenet, Black, and Blee, available in full at our web site SecrecyKills.com. Because of the language chosen, it’s difficult to determine what in fact they are denying.
For instance, they deny only that important information was intentionally withheld about the future hijackers travel – and that only in early 2000. What about the rest of the year and a half prior to 9/11?
They don’t say that they were unaware of the information until after 9/11. They say only that the record shows that they were unaware. Actually, that statement refers to the CIA Director and other senior CIA officials, so it may not include Cofer Black and Rich Blee.
They say Clarke’s speculation – to be included in the next part of this podcast – is utterly without foundation. However, they don’t deny that it is true.
Because so much of their Statement essentially relied on the findings of the 9/11 Commission, we went back to commission co-chair Tom Kean.
They relied on — and they were the ones who were doing it? [Laughs.] And they relied on us?
[Do you remember how high up it got?]
Not that I remember, seven years later…
The Joint Statement ends: “We testified under oath about what we did, what we knew and what we didn’t know, we stand by that testimony.” So the Commission’s opinion on that testimony would seem to be important. Various Commission officials, including the executive director, felt that, in the words of New York Times reporter Phil Shenon, “Tenet simply could not tell the truth to the Commission.”
Kean related one such story, in which Tenet denied, under oath, speaking with President Bush in the entire month of August 2001, a statement that turned out not to be true.
Meetings with the President just don’t slip your mind.
[RORY: Did he misspeak?]
No, I don’t think he misspoke. I think he mislead… Tenet was a likeable guy. He got away with some stuff because people liked him.
Kean suggested we talk to the 9/11 Commission’s executive director Philip Zelikow about how high up in CIA the information went. In Zelikow’s e-mail reply, he stated that without getting back into the old files, his memory on the issue was imprecise. However, “the material was in cable traffic that someone at Blee’s level might have read.”
We also asked the Congressional Inquiry’s staff director Eleanor Hill.
I don’t specifically remember whether Tenet knew that or not but I would assume he probably did, but I don’t know that.
She said she would need to check her files to find out for certain.
We talked to a lot of people inside the CIA and FBI. And we obviously asked the same question you’re asking, which is the common sense question everybody that reads this says, “How could you have made the same mistake so many times? Why did these guys – and nobody reported this?”… We never had anybody say to us, it was intentional or some other nefarious thing going on… I think it’s a valid question, we just never saw anything that confirmed that that was what was happening… I’m not saying it didn’t happen. I’m saying we couldn’t conclude something like that happened unless we had pretty solid proof. And we didn’t have the proof that that happened.”
The people who investigated after the fact believed that there was a problem. Believed they never got to the bottom of it. But, if your theory is right that they were covering it up, they got away with it. Because neither the Congressional investigation nor the 9/11 Commission was able to pin it on them.
(music)
[At this point now, are you pissed? How are you left emotionally by this? Do you feel completely burned? All your efforts out the window?]
I am outraged and have been ever since I first learned that the CIA knew these two guys were in the country. But I believed for the longest time that it was one or two low-level CIA people who made the decision not to disseminate the information. Now that I know that 50 CIA officers knew this, and they included all sorts of CIA people who were regularly talking to me — yeah, saying I’m pissed doesn’t begin to describe it.
Both Clarke and Mark Rossini lost their mutual close friend John O’Neill in the attacks that day. At some time later, Rossini was going through his files when he discovered the print-out he had made of Doug Miller’s draft warning to FBI.
And when I came across a photocopy of Doug’s communication that I had kept in my file… that’s when it, like, hit me… I remember talking to Kenny Maxwell about it.
Ken Maxwell was the manager of I-49 Squad.
And I remember Kenny saying, ‘How could they not fuckin’ tell us about these guys havin’ a visa. How could they not have told us?’ And when Kenny said that, my heart just sank… because it came crashing back on me that I did know. I did know. And I followed the rules. And look what happens, when you follow the rules. And from then on, I didn’t give a shit about the rules anymore.
As he said that, I wondered if that was what caused him to illegally access those files for his girlfriend, the incident that got him fired from the Bureau. I wondered if that was what was making him tell us way more than he should now.
If I could ever take back that. Or if I’d have just said to John, ya know, ‘This thing is happenin’. These guys in Kuala Lumpur. But I didn’t.
But you actually have an honor trail here, ya know what I mean? Those documents, that CIR… that Doug Miller puts together, seconded by Rossini, I mean, that’s unambiguous. That stands on its own. So as long as history is here, we know that the FBI tried to do the right thing, understood the significance of it, understood the nexus in the United States, and for whatever reason, or reasons, the Agency makes the decision – it’s not an oversight, it’s a conscious decision not to share the information… And history will judge them on that. Those people involved in that have a lot to answer for, and they have not adequately answered it in my mind… If you look at this, it’s really just a handful of people. I don’t know how they sleep at night. I really don’t.
What you’re missing here is someone saying, what was the purpose of not telling the FBI. I just don’t understand why they didn’t.
You can’t tell me that you didn’t know about. You can’t tell me that you forgot. You can’t tell me that you spoke to agents – and then they have no recollection of it. You can’t tell me that you sent the information over via couriers, and there’s no record of it. Every place you go, all you can come up with is, “I don’t know.”
One source claimed that after 9/11, [Michael] was quote-unquote “hidden” in Afghanistan to make her more difficult to interview by the subsequent government investigations. When I pointed out that Rich Blee was also sent to Afghanistan three months after the attacks, the source responded, “Yeah, and she went with him.”
We have confirmed that [Frances] is the red-headed CIA employee described in journalist Jane Mayer’s book The Dark Side as having been reprimanded for including herself in the waterboarding of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed when she had not been officially assigned to do so. She was reportedly informed by superiors, “It’s not supposed to be entertainment.”
Jennifer Lynn Matthews was named for accountability in the CIA Inspector General’s Report on 9/11, according to a source who only accessed the portions pertaining to her. Despite this, she was made the Chief of Base in the Afghan city of Khost where she died in the suicide attack on that facility at the end of 2009. A source who had access to that CIA Inspector General’s Report informs us that [Frances] was named for accountability in that incident as well.
If this story feels a bit one-sided, that is the fault of these CIA officials, all of whom were explained what we were learning here and chose not to speak to us.
After they issued us the Joint Statement, we replied to Tenet’s PR man Bill Harlow with a detailed point by point explanation of this story and asked — no begged — that they help us tell an accurate story. We wrote: “If there are simple – even benign or admirable – explanations for those issues, I sincerely wish Mr. Tenet, et al, would break their media silence and simply provide those answers. I want them to realize that their failure to do so only appears to give credence to speculation like that in the Clarke interview.”
Back in 2009, John Duffy and I knocked on the door of Rich Blee’s last known apartment just outside D.C. on his birthday. We figured, who doesn’t answer the door on their birthday?
WOMAN: Hello?
DUFFY: We’re looking for Richard.
It turned out the apartment had been vacated only two months before. Last week, working with Kevin Fenton of History Commons, we were able to figure out Rich Blee’s likely address. Ironically, it’s in Los Angeles, where I lived for the past year, directly behind one of my favorite hang-outs.
When new stuff comes to light, everyone should come back. I hope your documentary does that.
Unfortunately, this is only the beginning of the story. In the second podcast: The men from the meeting Malaysia go on to bomb a Navy ship, the USS Cole, and agents from John O’Neill’s New York office are assigned to investigate. As people in Rich Blee’s Alec Station continue playing games with the information about Mihdhar and others, wrongheaded secrecy becomes obstruction of justice in an FBI investigation.
I have always felt that the CIA was guilty of obstruction in the investigation of the deaths of those seventeen sailors.
And Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer reveals for the first time the role he believes George Tenet and Alec Station may have played in the shut down of the military’s Able Danger program, the one that identified Mihdhar and Hazmi and other hijackers inside the United States that same year.
[RAY: Did they play a big part in the shut down?]
It was not a small part.
Then, in May 2001, Tom Wilshere is detailed – of all places – to the FBI where, after ordering Doug Miller not to send that message, he is made the Bureau’s top CIA liaison for counterterror. Wilshere re-accesses the March 5th cable that month, the one that says Hazmi has entered the United States.
He’s got a lot to answer for in my opinion. This is pretty serious stuff.
Throughout that summer of threat, Wilshere emails back and forth with the people in Alec Station, probably including [Frances], who has been promoted to Wilshere’s position of Deputy Chief, and Blee himself, warning that the men from the Malaysia meeting are major league killers who will likely be involved in the attack that appears to be coming, and Mihdhar should be of great interest given his connection to these people. He asks for permission to tell the FBI, permission apparently not granted.
I always passed things to the FBI if I thought it was of interest. I didn’t ask permission. You had FBI agents in headquarters working in your unit, or they came around, or you called them up on the phone. I mean, that’s the way things are supposed to work.
As the clock ticks down to 9/11, FBI analyst Maggie Gillespie re-discovers the March 5th cable – the same one Rossini says Wilshere and [Michael] must have read back in 2000, the same one Wilshere re-reads in May 2001 – and she finally alerts the FBI to begin a manhunt for Mihdhar and Hazmi in the US. Yet for the following three weeks, even with George Tenet’s hair on fire, no one at CIA places that information into the threat briefings for the White House.
There was not a lack of information sharing. They told us everything, except this.
And after the attacks, secrecy protected Rich Blee, the people who worked for him, and his bosses at CIA, as they went on to be involved in other scandals over the past decade, from the failure to capture Bin Laden in Afghanistan to the bad intelligence that drove America to war in Iraq, from renditions and detainee abuses to Blackwater. And we’ll let you know where they’re all at today.
And we’ll end on one final thought from Richard Clarke.
John Helgerson, the Inspector General of the CIA, wrote a report which we have not been able to see, which has been still withheld from the public, even though there’s no reason not to give it to the public at this point, unless you’re covering your ass… You understand what the conclusion of that Inspector General’s Report? Official reprimands from the Director on down. What do you think it takes for a career CIA officer, like John Helgerson, the Inspector General, to recommend reprimands to the Director? What does it take in terms of malfeasance and misfeasance?… Does it seem like the information that the public knows about is sufficient for a reprimand of the CIA Director?
[THEME SONG]
Kevin Fenton was instrumental in the reporting for today’s program. Read his book on the subject Disconnecting the Dots released this summer, the definitive written account. Paul Thompson and Jon Gold at HistoryCommons.org also helped us – A LOT. Check out their web site’s 9/11 Timeline for more information on this subject than can possibly fit in your brain.
Thanks to Jason Leopold of Truthout, Scott Malone of BlackNET, Sibel Edmonds of Boiling Frogs Post, Ben Wizner of the ACLU’s National Security Project, Coleen Rowley, and Robert Schopmeyer. Google that name and check out his work into this subject.
Special thanks to Bill in Chicago, who funded our initial development on the project back in 2008, and Betsy in Philadelphia who funded our trip to the East Coast in 2009 to interview Richard Clarke and others.
Our consulting producers since the start of the project have been Rory O’Connor and Kyle F. Hence, two very good guys. Rory, who gave me my start, let us use the name of his Emmy-winning media company Globalvision when approaching interviewees, which added a certain clout.
Our directors of photography on the trip to the East Coast were Martina Radwan and Damian Salimeno. Our audio engineer was Patrick Thrasher. Original music written and composed by Ben Johnson. The Blee graphic was designed by Erik Potter, and the web site was created and run by Jon Roberts. Everyone worked almost entirely for free.
Who Is Rich Blee? is released by SecrecyKills.com, with next to no help from the mainstream media and absolutely no assistance from the U.S. government. Quite the opposite, actually.
I’m Ray Nowosielski. [And I’m John Duffy.] Be sure to check back to SecrecyKills.com for regular updates of raw interviews, email exchanges, original writing, and more.
See related:
FBI Agent Mark Rossini: The CIA Could Have Stopped 9/11
Did George Tenet Hide Key 9/11 Info?
By Staff -May 14, 2014
Originally posted at the Herald-tribune by Michael Pollick, last updated 5/14/14
When the FBI investigated a Saudi Arabian family that abruptly left Sarasota weeks before the 9/11 terror attacks, it found “many connections between the (redacted) family and individuals associated with the terrorist attacks on 9/11/01.”
The description, included in documents released Friday as part of a federal lawsuit against the agency, comes as the FBI is working to comply with a federal judge’s order to produce 27 boxes of materials.
To date, the agency said it has moved the boxes to the U.S. Attorney’s office in South Florida, and spent many hours trying to delineate for U.S. District Court Judge William Zloch which documents are top secret by inserting 822 page markers into the boxes.
The agency also explained an earlier discrepancy that resulted in four additional boxes of documents. David M. Hardy, the FBI’s section chief in charge of records management, said the agency used a smaller box size to comply with the order. That and the marker pages resulted in more boxes overall.
“An 80,266 page file was received from Tampa, and the 80,266 page file was produced,” Hardy wrote.
The FBI also shipped a CD copy of all the files to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of Florida on April 29 “and has been advised the Court has received them,” Hardy noted.
As the Herald-Tribune reported previously, negotiations between the Justice Department and the court were to result in the government’s installing a special safe in Judge Zloch’s office capable of handling four FBI boxes simultaneously.
In the four pages of material released Friday, which the FBI had said previously it was unable to find in the case, a July 2002 memo describes a copy of a letter and a list of phone numbers, presumably from the Sarasota house. The actual letter was not among the four pages.
Names and other details from the documents are redacted save for the hand-written name “Esam Ghazzawi” — the wealthy, well-connected Saudi businessman who owned the home in the south Sarasota neighborhood of Prestancia.
For several years before 9/11, the home had been occupied by his daughter, Anoud, and his son-in-law, Abdulaziz Al-Hijji.
The Broward Bulldog news organization of Fort Lauderdale revealed FBI knowledge of connections between the home’s residents and three terrorists who learned to fly at Venice Airport in a story published in 2011.
The connections included telephone calls and license plate numbers associated with the terrorists on cars that visited Prestancia and possibly Ghazzawi’s house.
The Broward Bulldog filed a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit against the Justice Department and the FBI in the fall of 2012, after the FBI dismissed the Bulldog’s report.
The Herald-Tribune has become a “friend of the court” in the ongoing lawsuit, arguing that the public deserves to know what the FBI learned from its investigation of the Prestancia home and any connection its occupants might have to 9/11.
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More on the San Diego – Saudi Connection
By Dan Christensen -August 6, 2014
The Justice Department late Friday made public four new, heavily censored documents confirming that by 2002 the FBI had found “many connections” between 9/11 terrorist figures and the Florida family of “an allegedly wealthy international businessman” with ties to the Saudi Royal family.
“On or about 8/27/01 his family fled their house in Sarasota leaving behind valuable items in a manner indicating they left quickly without prior preparation,” says an FBI “case narrative” written on April 16, 2002.
The name of the international businessman, Esam Ghazzawi, is blanked out in the narrative. Ghazzawi’s name, however, is included on another page – an FBI form that accompanied a letter acquired by FBI agents in Tampa as “evidence” in July 2002. Details about the letter were not released.
The release of Ghazzawi’s name is the first time the government has confirmed Ghazzawi’s involvement in the FBI investigation that lasted until at least 2004, yet was never disclosed to the 9/11 Commission or congressional investigators.
Ghazzawi, adviser to a senior Saudi prince, owned the upscale south Sarasota home where his daughter, Anoud, and her husband, Abdulaziz al-Hijji lived prior to 9/11. Law enforcement sources have said that after 9/11 investigators found evidence – telephone records and photographs of license tags and security gate log books – showing that hijack pilot Mohamed Atta, former Broward resident and fugitive al Qaeda leader Adnan Shukrijumah and other terror suspects had visited the home. The home is about 10 miles from the Venice airport, where Atta and the two other hijack pilots trained.
The four pages were released amid ongoing Freedom of Information litigation brought by BrowardBulldog.org after the FBI declined to release any records about the matter.
In April, Fort Lauderdale U.S. District Judge William J. Zloch ordered the FBI to conduct a thorough search of its records to identify documents about the once secret probe. The judge said the Justice Department had failed to convince him that the FBI’s prior searches had been adequate.
With Friday’s release, a total of 39 pages have been released since the lawsuit was filed in September 2012. That includes four pages that were completely censored.
The FBI withheld certain information from the just-released documents, saying disclosure would constitute “an unwarranted invasion of personal privacy” or reveal techniques and procedures of law enforcement
The four pages released Friday were all declassified shortly before their release.
FBI records chief David M. Hardy said in a declaration under oath that the Bureau has processed the Tampa field office’s complete “sub file” on 9/11 and is in the process of turning it over to the judge as ordered. Hardy said the files consists of 80,266 pages which was divided into 411 “individual documents section” that were burned onto three CDs in a searchable format.
The documents, and parallel hard copies, were provided for Judge Zloch’s private inspection. He will then decide whether any of those documents are releasable under the Freedom of Information Act.
Dan Christensen is the editor of Broward Bulldog. Anthony Summers is co-author with Robbyn Swan of “The Eleventh Day: The Full Story of 9/11 and Osama bin Laden,” published by Ballantine Books, which was a Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for History in 2012.
The following was recorded On November 11, 2014. Former Senator Bob Graham was joined by investigative journalist Dan Christensen of the Broward Bulldog to deliver a thorough account of the untold story behind 9/11 and the ongoing Executive Branch coverup of the truth about who the true sponsors of those attacks were.The Untold Story of 9/11: A Luncheon with Bob Graham
Watch this video on YouTube
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FBI found ‘many connections’ between Sarasota family and 9/11
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| C A on Alternative Media List |
| Wright, Ann Peace A… on Palestine and Israel | |
| mekorganic on Great March of Return |
| Johanna Casiddy on Great March of Return |
