188. 9/11: How to Recruit a Hijacker (Ep 2)

16:46David:It's really interesting because what you see, and actually if you look back from the late 70s onwards, the place where people want to go and do jihad changes. So in the 80s, it's Afghanistan. Then you actually get a period in the mid-90s where it's Bosnia and the Bosnian Civil War. And then you get Chechnya in the late 90s when Russia invades this Muslim Republic, formerly part of the Soviet Union. And I mean, later on, we'll see there are other jihadist battlegrounds, but there's always the place people want to go. And at this point - What becomes Iraq. Yeah, and it will become Iraq, Syria, you know, other places as well.

17:23David:But at that point, you're right, it's Chechnya, and that's where they want to go. But because they're put in touch with Al-Qaeda, they're going to end up in Afghanistan. It's kind of by fate, happenstance,

17:35Gordon:that they end up there. Because Ben al-Sheeben Sheehy are on a train in Germany, and they strike up a conversation with somebody on the train. And I think because they're They're bearded Arab men who are in Germany. This other guy looks similar, speaks similarly. And they strike up a conversation about the Chechen jihad with him, as one does, I suppose. And he points them toward a contact. Networks are really important in this story. These kind of social networks that are hard to see from the outside, but when you're inside them are really powerful. That contact that they're put in touch with is linked to Al-Qaeda.

18:17Gordon:And he says, look, Chechnya is kind of hard to get to right now. And in fact, the Arab commander in Chechnya is saying, don't send any more people by the time he gets to 1999. And they are told, well, instead of going to Chechnya, why don't you go to Afghanistan and train? Because this is a period where bin Laden has a sanctuary in Afghanistan. And he's got training camps, yeah. They take this advice, and in late November, maybe early December of 1999, the four of them arrive from Hamburg to the camps in Afghanistan.

18:49David:And of course, this is exactly what Bin Laden and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed want, because they've just started planning the planes operation, which will become 9-11. They're looking for people who can live in the West. And suddenly you've got four people who've come having lived in the West, maybe not the US, but lived in Hamburg, Germany.

19:09Gordon:Yeah, they're educated. They're ideologically committed. They've lived in Europe. So they would have a sense, unlike Midar and Hazmi, the two Saudis who have never had any exposure to the West at all. These are guys who have lived in Hamburg. They have clean passports. They know how to move through airports and visa lines, stuff that seems basic, but that when you're drawing from the recruiting pool of al-Qaeda and the camps in Afghanistan is not the norm. And at this point, the Hamburg cell has walked into really an al-Qaeda bureaucracy and kind of mini statelet in Afghanistan. There's probably more than 50 al-Qaeda-linked camps across Afghanistan in this period.

19:54Gordon:Al-Qaeda is paying monthly salaries. They're doing things like, I mean, they have cost of living. They have budgets for people. They have vacation policies. It's a bureaucracy.

20:05David:It is a bureaucracy. There's paperwork. There's all these things.

20:07Gordon:There's a furniture allowance of$1 ,200.

20:10David:Crazy, isn't it?

20:11Gordon:And in the camps, the recruits, they live in mostly tents. They move through a curriculum that's kind of, I guess, somewhat similar to a military basic training. And bin Laden, classic CEO move, will show up at the camps and do tours and give lectures to kind of rouse the troops.

20:30David:I mean, I've interviewed people who've been to some of these camps and who ended up, you know, turning, changing, you know, becoming agents. And they've talked about how the camps worked. There was this military training because most of the people are just going to go and be fighters. And they're going to go out and fight in maybe Kashmir or maybe in, you know, Chechnya or somewhere else. But then bin Laden and some of his lieutenants are acting as talent scouts. And they are looking for people in the camps who've got particular skills and particular value, finding them, spotting them, and bringing them out.

21:03David:And I guess that's what happens with this group from Hamburg. Yeah, because the planes operation is not something that everybody in the Afghan camps knows about.

21:12Gordon:This is a highly compartmented operation inside al-Qaeda. And at the same time as KSM and bin Laden have this problem with recruits, they have a people problem for the planes operation. these four guys show up and they're giving audiences with bin Laden. They meet with him because they are kind of special. They're coming from Hamburg, right? So they swear by Atte, they swear allegiance to bin Laden and are basically instantly marked for something special. I think it's very interesting that bin Laden pretty much immediately chooses Atte to lead the group. Probably a reflection of the fact that he had been the leader in Hamburg.

21:50Gordon:A bit older. probably the most rigid, most devout of the four, an acknowledgement, I think, also of his leadership capabilities and his status. As we've said, the plan needs pilots. These are guys who are not merely going to die, but first learn how to fly a commercial jet. And on the face of it, these four men from Hamburg can get into the U.S. and go through flight training and do all that. The four guys from Hamburg don't go through the full contingent of al-Qaeda basic training, and they're immediately sort of sequestered into this special compartment for the planes operation, although they don't yet know exactly what it is.

22:29Gordon:They're not fully briefed in. In January of 2000, Atta and bin al-Sheib go to Karachi, Pakistan, to meet with KSM. The two others from Hamburg go home without the Pakistani stop. So already you're seeing that Atta, the leader, goes to meet with KSM, the project manager. With KSM, they figure out a Kamo plan and they are given instructions on how to get home without drawing attention to the Afghanistan-Pakistan trip they've just done.

23:00David:And they do that by you report your passport stolen, don't you? Exactly. Which is a trick that lots of jihadists are taught. So then you can get a new one without the stamps in the passport showing your travel.

23:10Gordon:Exactly. They're also instructed to avoid attention from security services in Europe, in particular the Germans. And we'll talk about this a little bit more, but basically it's like how do you distance yourself from the, frankly, very radical network, the mosque network that you're affiliated with in Hamburg? You need to look separate from that so that you don't come under the eye of the Germans or potentially the Americans. They're instructed to enroll in flight schools and prepare to enter the U.S. All four of these men arrive back in Germany between January and March of the year 2000.

23:48David:And then they do that thing which jihadists are taught to do, which is lower your profile. Yeah. Don't get on the radar of the authorities. So Atta shaves his beard. He puts on Western clothing. He stops attending the mosque he's been going to. All the things that might draw attention to you as a radical. Jara, the earthy Lebanese guy with the girlfriend.

24:10Gordon:Jara is kind of pulled between this extreme of Atta and the group at the mosque and his girlfriend. And his girlfriend will say that when Jara came back from Afghanistan, he goes back to acting like the man she'd first met. because he's lowering his profile. He's trying to make himself look as normal as possible. Shehi goes back to the UAE for a wedding celebration. And a friend who hasn't seen him in a while is shocked that Shehi has shown up clean shaven, acting like his old normal self. Three of them, Atta, Shehi, and Jara, get U.S. visas without any problems. Bin al-Shib, crucially, is a Yemeni.

24:57Gordon:And he can't get a visa. His first two applications in May and June of 2000 are refused on the grounds that he lacks the ties to Germany that would guarantee he'd come back. He'll wind up being rejected four times in all for a visa and kind of settle into a role in Germany as a coordinator who links KSM in Pakistan to the other three members that will settle in the U.S. And those three, Atta, Shehi, and Jara, arrive in the U.S. in May and June of 2000.

25:27David:So this is still a good year before the plot is being executed. So they've got time there because they've got to learn how to fly. That's the crucial thing, isn't it? They've got to learn to get those flying skills up in the United States.

25:40Gordon:Jara had arranged an advance to attend the Florida Flight Training Center in Venice, Florida. And Jara is, again, he's kind of an earthy, charismatic guy. And he settles in quickly. He moves in with instructors from the school. That's a bit weird. I find kind of a testament to maybe how genial he was. He buys a car. Atta and Sheehy leave for the States without having picked a school. Again, they understand that they need to be kind of separate. They don't want to be a cluster. That will potentially draw more attention. So they go to this, Atta and Sheehy leave for the States without having picked a school.

26:16Gordon:They shop around for a bit. They go out and look at the Airman Flight School in Norman, Oklahoma, of all places, apparently decide it's not up to snuff or maybe they don't want to be in Oklahoma. They settle on another school, which is Huffman Aviation in Venice, Florida, which is a different school from Jara, but not far from him. So it has some advantages there. And Atta and Sheehy move fast. They're both taking solo flights by the end of July 2000. They passed the private pilot airman test by the middle of August. They trained through the summer at Huffman. Jara, he's kind of on his own track in Florida, earns a single engine private pilot certificate by early August.

26:54Gordon:So they're moving quickly. Atta is apparently a huge pain in the ass. So he and Sheehy in late September briefly kind of take this little diversion to Jones Aviation in nearby Sarasota, Florida. And the instructor there, who's interviewed later, found them to be aggressive and rude, saying that they would sometimes fight him for the controls. And he watches them and they actually fail what was called the stage one instruments exam in October. And they're obviously furious about this and upset and saying, look, we're in a hurry. We have jobs awaiting us at home. Jara is still in touch with his girlfriend and he's actually going back to Germany occasionally.

27:35Gordon:He goes back and sees her in October of 2000. Throughout the plot, they all exchange hundreds of calls, near constant email. And it's hard to understand. It's hard to understand psychologically. Yeah, it really is. And we'll see this actually as the plot comes closer to fruition because Jara is, I think, the most torn, the most conflicted internally about what he's doing. I think it's worth a moment on a couple elements of the tradecraft here. So Kamo, communications. Bin al-Shib, the fourth member of the Hamburg cell who failed to get a visa, he becomes the link between KSM and Atta. And so what happens and how it works is Atta and Bin al-Sheib will email each other and talk about sensitive subjects using a kind of domestic sounding code, making it sound like they're students chattering on about their coursework and their fields of study.

28:28Gordon:Candidate hijackers they refer to as tourists. And the whole entire operation is spoken to in the context of a wedding. It's language and metaphors around a wedding. Human couriers are used for the most sensitive relays. So there is a KSM has a network of facilitators in the Gulf and in Europe who can, you know, if messages, really sensitive messages need to be passed, bin al-Sheib can meet them and those couriers can then get those messages to KSM in Pakistan and then he can get them to bin Laden in Afghanistan. And in one case, Bin Al-Shim physically travels with the help of one of those couriers to see KSM in Pakistan.

29:09Gordon:Now, on the money side, in some ways, the training, it's not massively expensive, but it's also not cheap. It's not the kind of thing that these, it's not the kind of thing the Hamburg cell can fund from their own bank accounts. And so between June and mid-September of 2000, a nephew of KSM, one of his facilitators, wire Atta and Shehi about$114 ,000 from Dubai in a handful of transfers that are really sized to look unremarkable, be small, and to pass through without notice.

29:46David:And so they're with the men inside the United States and learning how to fly. Let's take a break. And when we come back, we'll look at the last stages of the plot, whether the CIA and FBI could have got into it, and a chance meeting, which still raises questions today about who else might have been involved in 9-11. See you after the break.

30:11David:Welcome back. So we've got Khalid Sheikh Mohammed project managing the planes operation from his safe house in Karachi. And now we've got these three Hamburg cell pilots in flight school in the United States. Bin Laden, the CEO, running things from Afghanistan.

30:28Gordon:There's also those two Saudi operatives, Khalid al-Midar and Nawaf al-Hazmi, who had U.S. visas, were really keen to be involved in an operation, and who had been picked, handpicked personally by bin Laden to participate in the planes operation. This is another stream of the plots, and it's one that is very nearly disrupted. In early January of 2000, there's a kind of al-Qaeda planning summit that occurs in Kuala Lumpur at a condominium overlooking a golf course on the southern edge of the city. It's an important meeting, isn't it?

31:06David:Because some things will be known about this meeting. And this will raise some of the questions about whether the plot could have been disrupted because of who's there. I mean, Kuala Lumpur is an interesting place to go. I guess it's a good meeting point, maybe a place where people can understand the West a little bit. It's a kind of linking place between the Islamic world and the West to some extent.

31:26Gordon:And it's easy to get in if you have a passport from Yemen or Saudi. or the United Arab Emirates, right? It's much easier to get in there than it would be, for example, in Europe. And it's kind of an al-Qaeda on-site in many ways for a group of people who are used to working in a kind of disconnected, remote fashion. A local al-Qaeda affiliate in Kuala Lumpur had arranged for the group's lodging and onward tickets. Now, among the group of men who are arriving in Kuala Lumpur are Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Madar, those two Saudi operatives. They've got their U.S. visas. And for them, this is a participation in this meeting, but it's also a way station for what will become their onward travel to the U.S., to California.

32:17Gordon:There are also these other two Yemenis who have been picked for the plot who are there because, again, at this point, the broader operation includes this plank plank in which airliners will be detonated over the Pacific, which will not come to fruition. Now, one of the Yemenis, a man named Khalad, who was actually involved in the USS coal bombing, is there in part on a medical errand. So bizarrely, he had originally scheduled the trip to be fitted for a new prosthetic leg in Kuala Lumpur. He'd lost his lower leg fighting the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan. And bin Laden suggested he use the visit to case flights while he was there.

32:57Gordon:And this casing is going to pay dividends because Khaled flies to Kuala Lumpur, to Bangkok, to Hong Kong, and back all on U.S. carriers. And he's riding in first class to study the cockpit and how the crew moves. When is the cockpit door open? On one leg, he tucks a box cutter into his toiletries and carries it aboard. Airport security, look at the kit, glance inside, wave him through.

33:25David:In those days, actually getting into a cockpit wasn't as hard as it would be after 9-11. So he's able to understand, A, how accessible the cockpit is, and B, what you can get through security. So this is actually going to be quite important as intelligence for Al-Qaeda in the

33:41Gordon:plot. And throughout the entirety of the plot, there'll be a lot of casing. But this is an early stage of it because you think Al-Qaeda knows, KSM knows, that not only does he need pilots, we'll talk about this more in the next episode, he needs people who will actually take control of the airline. And those people will need weapons. And so this is a very early stage of figuring out what weapon might we use. And in this case, a box cutter really arouses no suspicion from airport security.

34:08David:Now, this Kuala Lumpur meeting is really important because it is something that US intelligence is aware of, that a meeting is taking place of Al-Qaeda operatives in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia in 2000. I mean, this will lead to one of the questions about missed opportunities and missed intelligence, and could 9-11 have been prevented?

34:29Gordon:Yeah, so the original tip-off comes from NSA. It's a signals intelligence tip, because NSA is intercepting communications off of an exchange in Yemen that is often used by al-Qaeda operatives. It's actually a switchboard that has some links to the 1998 embassy bombings, and it shows that several al-Qaeda operatives are planning this travel to Kuala Lumpur in early 2000. The U.S. intelligence community from this signals intelligence really only has first names, but they run down leads and traces and identify one of the Saudis, Khaled al-Madar. They locate him leaving Yemen and transiting Dubai.

35:11Gordon:And in Dubai, his passport is photocopied. And it's here US intelligence first understands a very, very important part of the story, which is that Khaled al-Madar has a US visa. This is January of 2000. An al-Qaeda operative has a US visa and is meeting other al-Qaeda operatives. I think at this point they might not be sure that Khaled al-Madar is an Al-Qaeda operative, but he is linked to a phone exchange that has been used by Al-Qaeda operatives for prior attacks. He's got a U.S. visa and he's heading to Kuala Lumpur. This isn't really missed, but it's mishandled. And we'll come back to that in a bit.

35:55Gordon:And mishandled is perhaps too light a verdict on it. In any case, once Khaled Al-Midar lands, the CIA, working in a liaison capacity with the Malaysian special branch, puts the meeting under surveillance. And the Malaysians, they now have pictures, photography, showing this group of Arab men assembling, essentially. And there are now, I mean, there's surveillance photos of this. But the trail very quickly dissolves because on January 8th, Hazmi and Midar, the two Saudi operatives, abruptly fly to Bangkok. And the surveillance teams in Kuala Lumpur report that they've left. They say they've left on a short flight to Bangkok.

36:38Gordon:But since it happened so quickly, the CIA officers in the station in Kuala Lumpur were too late to pick them up and they vanish into Thailand. So essentially, the station in Kuala Lumpur can't get Bangkok Station up in time to actually find these guys and track them when they land. And so they're lost into the Thai capital. But their names do end up on a Thai watch list, presumably because Bangkok Station goes to the Thai intelligence service and says, you know, keep an eye out for these guys. weeks later the CIA officers in Kuala Lumpur who had sent the cables to Bangkok basically poke Bangkok station and say what's going on had there been any updates and Bangkok station presumably pokes the ties and then in March this bears fruit because the ties report to Bangkok station that one of the men Naaf al-Hazmi had actually left Thailand on January 15th on a United Airlines flight to Los Angeles.

37:41Gordon:And weirdly enough, even though Khalid al-Madar is on that same flight, the Thais don't either know it or report it. But what is known at this point in time, so this is March of 2000, is that Khalid al-Madar has a US visa and that Nawaf al-Hazmi is in the US.

37:59David:Two al-Qaeda operatives, effectively, people linked to al-Qaeda. People linked to al-Qaeda. And this is going to be one of the key questions, And we're going to come back to this in more detail, the question about what is known and what is done with that information and is it properly shared? And is this question mark one of the ways 9-11 could have been spotted? But let's go back to them because this is very interesting. This pair are really at the center of a lot of the questions about the plot. Because Hazmi and Midar land in LA, in California, mid-January 2000. They're actually the first of the hijackers, aren't they, to reach America.

38:37David:And they've now got to embed themselves. And of course, they've not lived in the West. It's unlike the Hamburg cell who have been acclimatized.

38:44Gordon:Well, they don't really speak English. They've never been in the US before. They're in this massive foreign city. They can't really navigate. And it does seem like for the first few weeks, they really struggle. KSM had tried to prepare them for this from Karachi because he had, you know, these are really the first two guys to be involved in the plot, and so KSM had spent some time with them. It seems like KSM had steered them towards San Diego because he had gotten hold of a U.S. phone book and had kind of thumbed through it, apparently at a Karachi flea market, and said, okay, well, we have this phone book.

39:22Gordon:We could do some research on the city. Let's send them to California. KSM instructs them to pose as newly arrived Saudi students and basically to go to local mosques to seek help getting acclimated. Then comes a piece of maybe luck, maybe something else that has been argued about ever since, which is that on the 1st of February, 2000, at a halal restaurant in LA, Midar and Hazmi get into a conversation with another Saudi, a guy named Omar al-Bayoumi.

39:57David:This is the source of much contention. And Omar al-Bayoumi and his story and his relationship with these two hijackers is at the center actually of ongoing litigation, which is taking place in the United States today about a really big question. It's a trillion dollar lawsuit alleging that Saudi Arabia had knowledge or involvement in the 9-11 plot. And effectively, that all turns on this relationship. And to some extent, this one meeting which takes place at this restaurant in L.A. And whether it was chance or whether it was something more. And I think it's really worth understanding it because it is still very contentious and a bit mysterious.

40:45Gordon:So Bayoumi is in the U.S. ostensibly as a business student. He is drawing a salary from a company that's connected to the Saudi Civil Aviation Authority. And he's very active in the local Saudi community. Really, the crucial point here is, did Bayoumi know they were coming? Did he know Midar and Hazmi were coming? and is he involved in basically helping support them in LA, wittingly knowing what they're up to, or is this a meeting that happens by chance because he recognizes two Saudis who are visiting the US and who don't speak English and are sort of adrift?

41:25David:And there's very different accounts of this. I mean, one account has him being in this cafe and overhearing other Saudi voices basically and people speaking arabic and then introducing himself and getting into a conversation and then if you like welcoming them into a community and looking after them the other account which has come through some of the things which have come out only in recent years is the claim that actually he was waiting for them in the restaurant and this was a kind of staged meeting at which he was preparing to organize help for them and you talked about him drawing money but tens of thousands of dollars was coming into his account while he was in the US some of which he couldn't entirely explain large payments into his account sometimes just a couple of dollars below the ten thousand dollar limit where it would lead to investigation or questions because it reaches a threshold and so the claim has always been that Omar al-Bayoumi, and this is an allegation which we should say he denies, is that he was actually an intelligence agent for the Saudi government.

42:40David:And that was his function at that time, that he

42:43Gordon:was - He's like a support asset.

42:45David:He was a support asset, receiving large sums of money from Saudi Arabia and using it to support people. That is the claim. And as I said, it's one he denies. But that's why it's so important to understand whether this is a chance relationship or not. If you like, the one thing we do know for sure, is that having met these two people who are going to hijackers, he really does look after them.

43:06Gordon:Yeah. Well, we should say, I think we'll come back in later episodes to this question of the role or if there was a role of the Saudi state in 9-11. But what is on question, to your point about Bayoumi's relationship with Midar and Hazmi, is that he welcomes them with absolutely open arms. He ends up guaranteeing the lease on their apartment. It's Bayoumi's signature on that lease. He throws a party for them. He throws a party. Introduces them to people. He pays the first few months rent.

43:41David:You could see it as a hospitality to other Saudis in the community, and that is his role. Or you could see it as something else. That is part of the question. And we'll come back to that, I guess, in more detail.

43:53Gordon:And the timing is interesting also because you could also have a situation where Midar and Hazmi have arrived in LA and are really struggling. And through these different sort of networks that Al-Qaeda can tap into, someone says, we need someone to help these guys get settled.

44:13David:Yeah. I mean, maybe we should say that some of the other oddities are that after 9-11, videos will be found of Omar al-Bayoumi having videoed lots of things at the Capitol, Washington, D.C., and have notebooks of his in which there are details of flight routes around the United States. So there are a lot of things which raise questions which he has always denied being involved in 9-11.

44:40Gordon:But Midar and Hosmi, to go back to them, they're not really hiding. They're living in a plane site in San Diego. They open bank accounts. Hosmi actually winds up in the telephone book. It's interesting, isn't it? They take English classes. They try flight training. It's an almost farcical attempt for these two guys to learn how to fly planes. They actually have an Arabic speaking flight instructor, which obviously helps. But the two insist that they want to start on Boeing jets. Not a small plane and not a big plane. A very big plane. And the instructor is like, guys, that's not how this process works.

45:15Gordon:You start on small prop planes and work your way up. So it's immediately like bizarre. Other instructors who work with them remember them as being really poor, inattentive students who just care. And this is, I mean, you know, again, in hindsight, you just think shouldn't alarm bells have been going off. they apparently were only interested in steering a plane in level flight and took no interest whatsoever in takeoffs or landings. But by the end of May 2000, so it's just been a few months in the States, they've given up on flying altogether. And Midar in particular is kind of mentally elsewhere, right?

45:54Gordon:His mind is going to back home. He's got a wife and apparently his first child is born while he's gone. So he's distracted. He leaves. In early June 2000, he closes his bank account. He signs his car over to Hazmi and flies home. And crucially, because Midar had not overstayed his visa, he can return. Hazmi stays, though, and he kind of drifts. Through the fall of 2000, he even, he's given up the flight lessons. He stops trying to learn English. For a few weeks, he actually works at a gas station alongside some of his friends from the mosque. He tells a co-worker that he's looking for a better job.

46:33Gordon:and weirdly lets slip this kind of strange, ominous prediction where he says, you know, one day I'm going to be very famous. And Hazmi is waiting for a replacement pilot, because he's washed out. On December 8th of 2000, a very slight, kind of soft-spoken Saudi named Hani Hanjour arrives in San Diego. Hanjour had first come to the U.S. back in 1991. He'd studied English at the University of Arizona. And then as a teenager in the late 80s, he'd gone to Afghanistan hoping to join the jihad. I mean, like so many other Saudi teenagers. But he'd gotten there too late for the Soviet war. It had ended.

47:13Gordon:And he ends up working for a relief agency. He's rigorously devout. He's a bad pilot, Hani Hanjour. He's rejected by a Saudi flight school. He goes back to the U.S. in 1996. He earns a private pilot's license and then crucially an FAA commercial pilot certificate in April of 1999. Then he goes home to Saudi Arabia. By the spring of 2000, he's come to al-Qaeda's attention because he's told his family that he's going to head off to the UAE for an airline job. But he's actually, like the Hamburg cell, gone off to the camps in Afghanistan where he is, you know, again, we talked about al-Qaeda's bureaucracy.

47:54Gordon:So they have intake forms that are basically like, who are you? How did you find us? What kind of skills do you bring? And he says, well, I'm a trained pilot. And so, again, you think this guy has absolutely dropped into bin Laden and KSM's lap, right? And this has happened just as two Saudis who have been sent to the U.S. to become pilots, Midar and Hazmi, have washed out. And so, Hanjour is identified. And again, he's a Saudi, and he's got experience in the U.S. So, Hanjour is the absolutely perfect candidate, other than the fact that he's a terrible pilot. So Hondra gets sent to Karachi to meet with KSM.

48:35Gordon:He's given the Kamo plan, and then he's sent back to Saudi to get a U.S. student visa. He also enrolls to create a reason to go into the U.S. He enrolls in an English as a second language school in Oakland. He never goes, but that's ostensibly the reason for him to be in the States. And Hazmi will meet him at the airport in California. Within days of Honduras' arrival, the two guys, they leave San Diego. They head toward Arizona, where again, Honduras has, you know, he's got the experience in flight school and he's attended the University of Arizona. And Honduras does more flight training in Arizona on a Boeing 737 simulator at the Pan Am International Flight Academy.

49:20Gordon:The instructors there say, this guy's got terrible English. His flying is well below standard. And he's twice advised to just quit, to give it up.

49:32David:But he sticks it out. So there we've got some of the pilot training going on. Let's go back to this question, though, about what the CIA and the FBI knew about them. Because this issue, particularly of Midar and Hazmi, who are in the United States, they've been spotted as a result of this Kuala Lumpur meeting. They're on the radar to some extent. They've slipped out of direct surveillance, but there's this knowledge that MIDAR has a U.S. visa and that HASMI has come into L.A. So the question here, I think, is why were they not spotted, surveilled during their time in the United States as they're going through this train?

50:20Gordon:Why weren't they put on any number of watch lists that may have prevented them from even getting into the US? It's probably worth going into detail here on what actually happened inside the bureaucracy of the CIA and the FBI. The 9-11 Commission in particular has gone into immense detail.

50:38David:Because this is seen as the point at which the plot could have been disrupted and wasn't.

50:43Gordon:Yeah. So here's what happened. There's an FBI agent detailed to Alex Station, which is that bin Laden hunting unit. at CIA. And again, they're FBI detailees to that unit. He's identified in the commission's notes as Doug M. This FBI special agent drafts a cable to alert FBI headquarters that Midar had a U.S. visa. This is in the spring of 2000. Apparently, a CIA desk officer inside Alex Station instructs Doug not to send the cable to FBI headquarters.

51:17David:And we should explain that obviously the CIA is the Foreign Intelligence Agency, but it's the FBI who would be looking for people who are within the United States. So logically, the issue is the CIA should be informing the FBI about a suspect who's entered into the United States so the FBI can do the investigation. Right.

51:37Gordon:Several hours later on the same day, that same CIA desk officer drafts a cable, which is distributed only within the CIA claiming that the visa information, the information that Khalid al-Madar had a U.S. visa, had been shared with the FBI. Even though it hasn't been? It has not been. Now, this officer later admits to the commission that she had not personally shared it and could not identify who had, and the commission could not find anyone who had actually shared it. So we have this bizarre series of events where the FBI detailee says, okay, this is interesting. This Al-Qaeda-linked guy who's been at this terrorist planning summit has a U.S.

52:18Gordon:visa. He wants to alert FBI headquarters. He's told not to send it. And then several hours later, we have a cable drafted that says, okay, the information has actually been sent.

52:30David:Something weird's going on there. We'll come back to that. We'll come back to that.

52:33Gordon:Now, interestingly, in this period, even though Midar has arrived on the same flight as Nawaf al-Hazmi, it's not clear to the CIA and certainly not the FBI that he's actually in the U.S. and that they're together. But in March, Bangkok Station, the CIA's Bangkok Station, has reported that Hazmi flew to L.A. on the 15th of January. That cable is received at CIA headquarters. No one places Midar or Hazmi on what was called the State Department's tip-off watch list. They don't do that in January when word arrives of Midar's visa or in March when word arrives that Hazmi had a visa and a ticket to LA.

53:16Gordon:The CTC, the Counterterrorism Center desk officer from January, who had been involved in those, you know, that sort of weird cable traffic that doesn't make it to the FBI, seems to have moved on by this point. And this is a very important point. And it sounds minor, but it's crucial. The way that the CIA looks at information, it's different from the FBI. The FBI could have a case where if you have a person of interest, in this case in LA, who might be Al Qaeda linked, you'd have an FBI special agent who's like looking at that person. But in this case, you don't have a CIA, CTC desk officer who's actually like, I'm the Khalid Al-Badar person.

53:59Gordon:So it seems like you have turnover at the desk. And what it means is that none of this information gets to the FBI.

54:09David:That's the crucial point, is that the information about these two individuals is not going from the CIA to the FBI. and the question is why? That's a big question, I think. And I think there are different theories and different answers.

54:24Gordon:One of them, which it's not the direct answer to the question, but it's maybe set some of the tone, is that the CIA and the FBI, the Pheebs, are very different animals. The classic kind of almost cliched way to describe it is that the CIA are robbers and the FBI are cops, right? The CIA is a foreign intelligence organization set up to steal secrets, to run sources inside terrorist networks. The FBI exists to prosecute, to make sure that bad guys are put behind bars. I have a lot of stories from CIA officers and FBI special agents who will actually give you a sense of how much distrust there can be between the two organizations.

55:11Gordon:Where, for example, I remember a CIA colleague of mine saying that there were foreign intelligence services, foreign intelligence services, who he felt closer to and more trust with than he did to the Pheebs.

55:24David:Yeah. And it was worse in the 90s, we should say. Way worse. Yeah. So I think that is one possible answer, which is mistrust, cultural differences. Although arguably the whole point of Alex Station having FBI people there was to get over that. Break those barriers down. Break the barriers down. And I mean, there were legal barriers, the so-called wall, which meant that, you know, law enforcement information used for prosecution wasn't supposed to be kind of contaminated by intelligence information. So, you know, there were lots of structural reasons why sharing wasn't always good. So I guess one theory is bad culture, mistakes, failure to share.

56:04Gordon:Well, it's not one theory. I think it's actually setting up the context for why what seems like a simple handoff in the context of the year 2000 isn't actually that simple or normal. but I don't think it's the proximate explanation for why this was why this information wasn't shared or this weird cable back and forth I mean I think you well a theory on this well I've spoken

56:33David:to people including people who worked at senior levels in counterterrorism in the White House at the time who have a more cynical theory about what went wrong in terms of the CIA their view is that the CIA deliberately didn't share the information because the CIA wanted to pitch to try and recruit those two al-Qaeda operatives or one of them as potentially an agent. And not saying that they did, but the point would be that if you're looking to pitch them, you don't want the FBI getting in the way.

57:09Gordon:Which is a problem with people in the US. With foreign nationals who come to the US, there can be a real turf war over who makes the pitch and how it's run.

57:19David:Because technically, once they're in the US, it's the FBI's terrain, and it should be the FBI who's making the pitch and therefore running them. Not necessarily. Not always. But at least - The FBI would have to, let's say you're going to run the pitch out of the auspices of LA

57:35Gordon:Station. CIA LA Station. CIA's LA Station. You would, I mean, at least today, the way you would do that would be you would have to at minimum de-conflict it with the FBI. The special agent in charge. So they're not doing it as well. Right. So they're not doing it as well. The CIA could still do the pitch. The guy could go abroad and the CIA runs the guy abroad as a typical foreign intelligence case. But you'd at least have to tell the FBI if that happens inside the U.S.

58:05David:And so this is, look, this is a theory and it's definitely, you know, no commission report inquiry has backed up this series. But it's one I've heard from people who were involved in, you know, counterterrorism in 9-11 was that people in the CIA thought we might be able to recruit these people at some point. We don't want the FBI getting in the way. We don't want to have to tell them. So let's not pass details on to the FBI so that we can pitch them either while they're in the US or somewhere else. And after all, we know the CIA wanted to get sources in Al-Qaeda. I mean, that's its job, is if you like to recruit and run those sources.

58:39David:And so that they were trying to keep the FBI away from them. And then, of course, this goes dramatically wrong because they don't recruit them. Or potentially even never attempt it. Or never even attempt it. Which I think is the most likely scenario. The most likely scenario. And then after 9-11, when it turns out these people are involved in terrible terrorist attack, you've got to kind of cover the traces of that. That is, I'm not saying that's what happened. And I'm sure people who worked in the CIA will be writing in and having a go at me about that. I am merely expressing a view that has come to me from people who did work on counterterrorism and who've at least raised that as a possibility.

59:14David:They're not saying it definitely happened, but they're saying that is one explanation other than just a mistake for the failure to hand off the information to the FBI.

59:22Gordon:I don't have any facts to back this up, but I find it very plausible. And the other piece of this is that when you look inside the culture of Alex Station in the late 1990s, early 2000s, there was a deep suspicion of the FBI detailies who were there as spies. From the FBI side. In kind of its darkest way, that they were there to collect information on the CIA for the FBI. If you merge the theory you just gave with the structural and organizational competition and differences between the two agencies and the fact that you did have cases where FBI detailees inside Alex Station were viewed with suspicion.

1:00:03Gordon:To me, it makes a plausible circumstantial case to explain the cable traffic that we just saw, which is weird, where it's like an FBI detailee is saying, oh, wait a minute, this guy has a U.S. visa. I'll tell FBI head office. Right. And then you get this weird spin cycle of, wait a minute, don't send that just yet. And then later on, someone from the CIA says, we already sent it. You get this sense of, we don't, inside Alex Station, they may have not even wanted the FBI detaillees to know that they were keeping this information from the FBI to create the possibility that down the line they could go and try to pitch these guys or recruit them.

1:00:48Gordon:Again, we don't have hard information on this. The commission has not turned any facts up to back this theory up. But based on the circumstantial evidence, it's plausible.

1:00:59David:Yeah. There with the hijackers inside the United States, training to fly planes and not being watched by the FBI or CIA. Let's leave it. And next time we'll come back and look at how the plot, how 9-11 itself unfolds.

1:01:20Gordon:unfolds. And as a reminder, of course, you do not have to wait for those episodes. Go and join the Declassified Club at TheRestIsClassified.com, where you'll get early, instant access to this entire series, as well as the bonuses that were running alongside it, including an absolutely amazing, just eye-opening interview with Michael Murrell, who was President Bush's daily intelligence briefer on the morning of 9-11.

1:01:50Thank you.