189. 9/11: How Much Did the Saudis Know? (Ep 3)

21:08David:And I find that interesting. They actually want to fight the Russians in Chechnya. And this seems to be quite a common theme. 1999, a new Chechen war is broken out, started by Vladimir Putin, of course. And it's interesting, isn't it? People often start with one conflict and then get drawn into something else. And that's true for them.

21:26Gordon:And true for the Hamburg cell. Exactly. Yeah.

21:29David:But they're going to head for Afghanistan because it is that base where people get trained wherever you want to fight. And the Arab fighters in Chechnya are actually turning away potential recruits. No more. No more. We've got enough of them, you know, and they're not necessarily that good.

21:43Gordon:So the brothers will wind up at the Al-Faru camp in Afghanistan near Kandahar. At least seven of The Saudi hijackers are going to train there. And it is geographically one of the closest camps to bin Laden himself. There, the brothers fill out these intake forms. We talked about these in the last episode. It's kind of like, who are you? How did you find us? Your HR application form. Really, it is. It is an Al-Qaeda HR sort of getting to know you form. And these guys, unlike the Hamburg cell, they don't have the set of special skills and kind of the experience in the West that Atta and his guys do, right?

22:21Gordon:So they go through the basic training, rifles, explosives, you know, calisthenics. I mean, I think we all in the months after 9-11 saw the footage of, you know, the jihadis, you know, working on monkey bars in the camps, right? Almost, yeah, weird, I think.

22:37David:But it's part of the indoctrination. It's basic training. It's like basic military training. I mean, they do model themselves on military training. And occasionally bin Laden will appear before them, won't they, to kind of inspire the people and give a speech to kind of encourage them for what they're doing. But there's a lot of people going through the camps at this time. I mean, thousands and thousands.

22:57Gordon:And it's important. I think there's a language that popped up largely after 9-11 to try to explain how people can come to the conclusion that it makes sense to participate in or directly murder innocents as part of jihad. And a lot of the language was focused on brainwashing. And I think it's important. Al-Qaeda wasn't brainwashing people at these camps. They were indoctrinating people and closing off their social circle so that the entirety of the brothers' world as they're in these camps is Al-Qaeda. And so it's this kind of groupthink mentality in which you're not reaching out to loved ones who might reign you in.

23:44Gordon:The world, the way you think about it, the things that become normal and accepted are all dictated by this really... It's cult-like, isn't it? Almost death cult-like.

23:58David:Death cult-like, I think that's right. The figures are astonishing that there's something like 10 ,000 to 20 ,000 jihadists who go through these camps, 1996 to 2001. So a huge amount. Not all of the camps are al-Qaeda because there's kind of Pakistani jihadi camps for Kashmir and places like that. But al-Qaeda seems to be looking for certain kinds of operatives. It's got its own camps, guest houses to look for people. And these brothers, going back to them, they get picked out as potentially useful, don't they, by al-Qaeda?

24:28Gordon:It is interesting to think about how they get picked because bin Laden ends up picking many of them personally. And I think in this case, you know, the Sherry brothers, they haven't traveled in the U.S., for example. So, you know, from a cover standpoint, there may be an odd pick. But it's likely that when they filled out those intake forms, they noted their interest in what they would call a martyrdom operation, which is a suicide operation. KSM will later say, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who's the project manager of the entire 9-11 plot, will later say that this is one of the most important criteria.

25:02Gordon:Because a lot of people coming to these camps are going to look at that on the form and be like, no thanks. But these guys probably clicked it. They have clean records. No jihadist priors. There's no trouble with the police in Saudi. And again, as we talked about, they're Saudis, which means there's a very clear pathway to getting a U.S. visa. So all of that means in this kind of, you know, 99-2000 period when the brothers are at the camp, that they're probably flagged by al-Qaeda human resources as potential operatives for what was then a very compartmented program inside al-Qaeda called the Plains Operation, which will become 9-11.

25:42David:And so that means that at some point in 2000, the brothers are going to meet bin Laden himself. So they are meeting the leader of al-Qaeda. They have been picked out. You could imagine for them this sense that suddenly out of all these hundreds, thousands of jihadists, they are going to be given a special mission. They swear an oath binding them to participate in this operation that's being planned, a suicide operation, because they are going to record martyrdom videos preparing for that moment. But so far, they don't know anything about the specifics or that it's going to involve planes. Let's leave it there and take a break.

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27:55David:Welcome back. Two of the men who are going to be the muscle for 9-11. these two brothers have been selected. What kind of training do they get though?

28:04Gordon:Well, at first they get a pretty simple instruction, which is go back to Saudi Arabia, get a clean passport, very similar to the Hamburg cell guys, and get an American visa. They do this again. It's quite easy. They return home once more, which is probably in December of 2000 to do this. Now it's going to be the last visit home for the brothers. And the next time that their family sees them, it will be when they learn of their involvement in 9-11. So having, in Saudi, having acquired the clean passports and the US visas, the brothers returned to Afghanistan. They're smuggled in and they head to a camp at Al-Matar for more specialized training.

28:45Gordon:Because remember, they've already gone through that -

28:47David:The basic training. But now they're going to get specific training for the plane's operation, which is effectively how to hijack a plane.

28:55Gordon:The head instructor at Al-Matar is a guy named Abu Tarab al-Jordani. Al-Jordani knows the full extent of the plane's operation, but he doesn't tell any of the recruits. And the instruction that the brothers receive is very tailored to the act that they'll commit. So, you know, how do you actually seize a cockpit? How would you get through the door? How would you disarm a potential air marshal that might be on the flight? How do you handle explosives? They do physical conditioning, weightlifting, to prepare to overpower a cabin and flight crew. They learn a few basic English words and phrases. And they practice on the weapons that will ultimately be used to take command of the airliners, which are small knives and box cutters.

29:47Gordon:And under the FAA, the Federal Aviation Administration in the US, under the rules of 2001, knives with blades under four inches can pass legally through airport checkpoints. Kind of seems amazing now. Right. It does. And remember, there were casing of US carriers done in East Asia to work out what these rules were the year prior. So the hijackers can carry these weapons aboard without even needing to hide them. This is also an era where cockpit doors are not locked or reinforced. And the crew is trained, a flight crew is trained to cooperate with hijackers, not to resist them.

30:28David:I mean, this all seems bizarre now, I think, post 9-11. But so much changes after 9-11 in terms of particularly reinforcing those doors, new protocols about how you get through the doors. But at the time, it was amazingly low security, frankly. And they know that and they're going to take advantage of it because you've had all these hijackings. But they've been, as we said before in a previous episode, hijackings were designed to land a plane, to take it over rather than to crash it.

30:56Gordon:Yeah, there was a an FAA doctrine called the common strategy, which governs flight crews at this time. You know, pilots and flight attendants have all been trained on this as part of their work. And it is it's shaped by scores of hijackings that go back to the 60s, predominantly conducted by kind of more leftist Marxist terrorist groups. And the teaching of the common doctrine is accommodate the hijackers, keep everyone calm, land the plane, let authorities negotiate release. And again, we talked about this in an earlier episode that the doctrine really rests on the assumption that hijackers want something.

31:35Gordon:They're going to issue demands. We'll negotiate with them to get you out. It also, frankly, rests on the assumption that the hijackers want to survive. When reinforced doors end up being actually proposed in the U.S. in early 2001, there's this amazing comment from one of the pilots union officials who was involved in the negotiation. And he's like, this is useless because if a hijacker, for example, puts a knife or a gun up to one of the flight attendants, the pilot is going to open the door and give the hijackers control of the plane. Right. Because, again, underlying assumption is, well, they might maybe they're going to take the plane to Cuba or Tunisia or something like that and land it and make and make demands.

32:25Gordon:So, you know, there's also not a real backstop. I mean, we talked about at the Al-Matar camp, these Saudis training to potentially overpower air marshals. There aren't really that many air marshals, right? There's dozens working prior to 9-11, and none of them, crucially, are assigned to domestic flights. Now, in this training, Abutur Abel Giordani realizes, I think, that many of these, most of these guys, haven't really been involved in violence in the past. And so he has them butcher livestock, sheeps and camels with knives to prepare them for the gore and the viscera of what they will be asked to do when they overpower passengers and flight attendants and pilots on the planes.

33:12Gordon:We've talked about how the planes operation is highly compartmented inside Al Qaeda. And Al Qaeda, Abu Tarab, doesn't want any of these recruits, if they're caught later, to be able to, with a lot of specificity and certainty, explain what they're doing. And so they train on other kinds of attacks, you know, truck bombings, for example. So if they're caught, they couldn't point to a single tactic that they were being trained in. So they train at Almatar, again, not knowing what the plan is. Yeah, they haven't been told yet. For a few months until about the spring of 2001.

33:52David:And we should say we focused on two brothers, but others are going to be recruited, the rest of the muscle, and are going to be trained in the same way.

34:00Gordon:And what happens to the brothers is that when they finish their training, they're taken by a trusted courier to a safe house that's used by KSM, project manager in Karachi. The muscle, as we've been calling them, are staged at the safe house in groups of two or three for a few weeks. They're given$10 ,000 for expenses, and then they are sent onward. And they're kind of funneled into KSM's logistics pipeline. From Pakistan, they transit through the UAE, where, again, KSM has facilitators who can arrange plane tickets, travelers' checks, hotels and lodging.

34:39David:They get a bit coached, don't they, in how to live in the West. I mean, the basics, how to kind of order food, how to not stand out too much, because they haven't got much experience with that. I guess Dubai is also a good place to do that because it's got Western elements as well as bits which are maybe close to home for them. So by the spring and summer of 2001, they're trained, they're ready, and they're going to be sent into the United States, but not altogether in ones and twos.

35:07Gordon:There is this, I mean, I guess it's kind of a big question in retrospect, which is how in the world did al-Qaeda manage to get this many people in unnoticed? because across the entirety of the plot, the hijackers will have 25 separate contacts with consular officers that are issuing the visas. There'll be 43 contacts with immigrations and customs officials. And altogether, they'll enter the US successfully 33 times over the roughly two years leading up to the plot through nine different airports.

35:38David:And I guess the answer to that is it's a very different United States from the one today where getting a visa for the US is a lot more complicated, involves a lot more interviews and face-to-face interviews. In those days, pre-9-11, it was much easier to get those visas, and particularly for Saudis. I mean, they'd introduced an express, a visa express program for Saudi citizens specifically to make it easier for them to get into the US.

36:04Gordon:Yeah. So under this program, a Saudi citizen wouldn't even have to physically go to a consulate to get a visa. They could just hand paperwork to one of several approved travel agencies who would then essentially buy the visa for them. I don't think this would have stopped the plot, but it removes a point where a U.S. consular official would have actually looked someone in the eye as part of the process. Now, 14 of the 15 muscle operatives will enter on tourist visas in their true names. From Saudi Arabia, this means an automatic six-month stay, which for most of them will be enough to carry them legally through 9-11.

36:44Gordon:Although important to say, and we'll come back to this, the date for the plot has not yet been chosen. And there's a narrative out there that all of their entry was clean and legal. And when you dig into the 9-11 commission report, it's clear that this is not true. Now, nobody came in on alias documents, right? There are plenty of aliases used across the plot, But their travel documents, their passports are in their true names. Two of them, though, lied outright on their visa applications. Two more violated the terms of their visas. One's inside. One overstayed. And it seems that two of them may have gotten their passports through connections to a relative who is inside the Saudi interior ministry.

37:27Gordon:Again, we're not saying that that's evidence of some kind of Saudi government complicity in the plot, but it's like a family member helping out another family member to get a U.S. visa.

37:35David:And in other cases, some of the passports have been doctored in some way. I mean, Al-Qaeda was able to do that. They ran a kind of operation to be able to do it. So they played around with their passports in order to get in. Yeah.

37:47Gordon:I mean, Al-Qaeda is interesting. They ran a sort of a forgery and documents operation in Afghanistan. So they could do things like, you imagine how it would be helpful, they could remove the stamps that would show that someone had gone to Pakistan or to Afghanistan, as an example. And, you know, in the case of the hijackers, at least two of them probably carried passports that had their entry exit stamps for Afghanistan and Pakistan removed. And we actually know about this because their passports survived 9-11. In some cases, their bags actually didn't get on planes or in the wreckage.

38:25David:So, you know, they've got passports which maybe have some suspicious elements or have been doctored. I mean, some of them do get pulled up for secondary inspection when they come into the United States, when they reach the border, don't they? I think one in Orlando, one of the Saudis is flagged at passport control. He doesn't speak much English. He hasn't got a return ticket. I mean, no US address listed. And, you know, he's only got$500 a month to live on. I mean, that gets him to secondary screening. Nowadays, I mean, that will get you a lot of questions asked. But in these cases, they still get through.

39:00David:Again, it's that understanding this was a different era when controls were much weaker.

39:05Gordon:Yeah, I think, you know, for anyone who has come of age after 9-11, your experience of going through passport control or even just going through security at an airport is very much that it is about security. Right. And border security is kind of seen as a national security issue and, in fact, a counterterrorism issue in many cases. Because prior to 9-11, it's more like when you're going through an airport, it's travel facilitation. It's like, how do you move people through? And so in that case in Orlando, this guy who's initially flagged by one customs official is thinking, hey, this looks a little weird.

39:50Gordon:In secondary, the next officer who looks at him says, well, this guy's a tourist. Yeah, and he goes. Go along. Yeah, it's so different.

39:57David:So I guess all of that means that by the summer of 2001, the muscle are in the United States. And they've got a couple of staging areas where they're going to be based, ready for the call for the operation.

40:11Gordon:Nine of them cluster in South Florida, where, remember, three of the pilots from the Hamburg cell, Atta, Shehi, and Jara, are all staying. Now, these are the pilots and the muscle for the World Trade Center itself and what will be the ultimately doomed flight over Pennsylvania. The brothers that we've been focusing on, Waleed and Weil, are part of this cluster. Waleed appears to have come in the spring 2001, probably around late April, and Weil somewhat later. They reach Miami by early June, and they deposit several thousand dollars into a SunTrust banking account that they open up. And by summertime, they're both settled into this Florida orbit with the others.

40:57Gordon:Nearly all of them get driver's licenses, U.S. driver's licenses.

41:01David:Which are useful, of course, because you can use those as ID to get on planes, domestic flights in the U.S. Correct.

41:06Gordon:And the neighbors who will later recollect the brothers in the wake of 9-11 in an area of Boynton Beach in Florida, they remember Waleed as a very enthusiastic fan of what was then called the Florida Marlins baseball team. You can imagine how you go back to the training they got in Pakistan and Dubai on how you fit in. You could imagine - Go to a sports game. Or saying, look, yeah, or find a local sports team and understand what they're up to and get some of the gear, wear a hat, all this kind of stuff. Which you can understand how immediately an American who might be primed to say, this person doesn't look like they're from here.

41:52Gordon:If he's got a Florida Marlins hat on and he's talking about how he went to one of the games or he's talking about the stats or whatever. Instantly, it's kind of disarming, isn't it? Because you think, oh, you know, he loves it here. There's a separate cluster. So there's a South Florida cluster. There's a separate cluster of six muscle that first settled around Washington, kind of Virginia, which is going to be linked to the other Saudi pilot, Hani Hanjour. Within a few weeks, they relocate to Patterson, New Jersey, which has an Arabic-speaking community. And so they feel more, I think, at home and kind of like they can blend in.

42:30Gordon:They all cram into a single one-room apartment. And this is going to be the team that will end up hitting the Pentagon and a few of the muscle who will be bound for the World Trade Center. Everything's pretty mundane. Mm hmm. They're they're living on these kind of, you know, soulless, sort of anonymous suburban fringes of America. They're very purposefully not doing things that would that would risk scrutiny. Right. They're laying low. Bank accounts open in their own names. They rent, you know, mailboxes and PO boxes. They lease cars, some rent cars and then return the rental and then rent another one.

43:08Gordon:A lot of them join local gyms, you know, probably in part to stay physically conditioned, but also in part to just pass the time. And there's this kind of unresolved question, which I think surrounds the behavior of the hijackers while they're in the States. Because, you know, to this point, we've portrayed most of them as very pious and devout and very committed jihadists. And I do think that's largely true. And I think I mentioned the book, Terry McDermott's book, Perfect Soldiers, which focuses on kind of who were the hijackers and in particular the Hamburg cell. He very much paints this picture.

43:44Gordon:We talked about Muhammad Atta last time. You know, he's he's a very austere, you know, he's practicing a very austere, strict brand of Islam, you know, perfectly halal diet, no pork, no alcohol. while he was in Hamburg. He didn't drink despite the culture being soaked in beer. It is interesting because in the days after 9-11, when we start to see those photos of the hijackers, there's a rush by reporters in the States to try to figure out who they were, how did they live here? And reporters just descend on Florida and New Jersey for material on them. And they come upon some stories that, if true, I think do add some complexity to the picture of who these guys are.

44:32Gordon:There's staff at Shuckham's Raw Bar and Grill, for example, who are going to tell FBI special agents that several of the hijackers were drinkers. They were drinking, they drank rum and they came in and drank rum and cokes, vodkas with orange juice. They played arcade games. They played blackjack. Apparently, they played Trivial Pursuit. That's a weird detail. They would get into arguments over the bar bill. And there were similar vibes in some other FBI interviews with the manager of an establishment called the Pink Pony. I'm not aware of the Pink Pony. Which is, well, that's good, Gordon. It is a strip club in Daytona Beach.

45:09Gordon:and the owner of the Pink Pony said that a group of the hijackers spent a few hundred bucks a piece on lap dances and drinks and then bizarrely left a copy of the Quran behind the bar. Slightly weird.

45:22David:I mean, I guess, I mean, if the stories are true and you put that caveat in there, I guess one of the arguments you sometimes hear is that these are people who think they're going to die in a martyrdom operation and therefore their sins will be forgiven and therefore they can do whatever they want and sin beforehand. Or you could say they're maybe trying to maintain their cover and taking advantage of the fact they can claim to each other we're maintaining our cover while we go and do stuff which we're not allowed to do normally.

45:50Gordon:I have to say I'm inclined to not buy it in these cases, although there is one detail which we'll come to that occurs on the night of September the 10th, which McDermott features in his book that I'm inclined to buy that drifts into this sort of behavior. But I have to say I'm skeptical just because of the group dynamics among them and how, as we talked about, the way you demonstrate fealty to the group and the way you gain status and connection with the group is through piety and devotion to the cause.

46:31David:So they're living here in the United States. One of the questions is how they fund that. Because going back to one of our big overriding questions, which is could the FBI and CIA have spotted and broken a plot like this? one of the things you're often taught is follow the money, look for who's funding a plot and where it comes from. I guess the issue here is it's not actually a very expensive plot, is it? It's not taking that much money for them to come into the United States and live in the United States. This is not requiring them buying a lot of equipment or anything like that.

47:06Gordon:No. It was shocking to me in digging into this to see how cheap 9-11 was. The 9-11 commission estimated that the entire thing cost al-Qaeda somewhere between$400 ,000 and$500 ,000.

47:21David:I mean, that is astonishing. I mean, we talked about the costs to the United States. I mean, beyond even just lives, if you just look at this in monetary terms, I mean, putting aside the awfulness of all the loss of life, but billions, trillions spent in the war on terror. Trillions in the war on terror for something which comes out of half a million dollars of al-Qaeda money for a plot. I mean, astonishing.

47:45Gordon:About 300 ,000 of that seems to have flowed through the hijackers' own US bank accounts. Most of them open bank accounts. The remainder has moved around abroad. And the hijackers were really judicious with the funds, which is part of the reason why I'm not sure I buy these stories about going to strip clubs. Just days before the attack, they wired$26 ,000 in unspent funds back to a facilitator in the UAE. So they're like, they're closing out the books and returning money that they haven't spent. Rather than blowing it. Rather than blowing it somewhere. Yeah, and spending it. You just don't need much money for this.

48:22Gordon:You don't. You don't. Now, okay, it's a small amount, but where did it come from? We talked in our Bin Laden series about how Bin Laden's kind of wealthy, but not as wealthy as most people make him out to be. At this point, he's not bankrolling al-Qaeda from his own funds, right? Al-Qaeda at this time, remember, it is a bureaucracy. It's an organization. And it's a kind of terrorist nonprofit that's operating on a budget of what is probably about$30 million a year, which means, which is insane, that what they were calling the planes operation, which becomes 9-11, cost less than 2 % of al-Qaeda's operating budget in 2000 and 2001.

49:05Gordon:The way al-Qaeda gets money, the way al-Qaeda raises funds for its operating expenses is essentially through two mechanisms. The first one is funds that get diverted from Islamic charities by sympathizers to al-Qaeda. And the second one is a network of facilitators who go out and collect donations from wealthy backers who know who they're supporting. A lot of these Islamic charities where the funds are diverted off, the people who are donating to these charities are not donating to al-Qaeda.

49:34David:They often think they might be donating to refugees, I don't know, Kashmir or Chechnya refugees. It's sometimes that kind of, you know, it's portrayed as that, but the money might be flowing into al-Qaeda.

49:47Gordon:And most of the money really ultimately is coming from this kind of group of rich financiers in the Gulf, and it had been called the golden chain. A lot of these people financed, and organizations financed the Soviet Jihad in the 80s. So it's kind of the same donor culture, the same charities, and it just gets repurposed throughout the 1990s to fund what becomes bin Laden's war against America.

50:14David:Yeah, the golden chain was actually a document, which I think was found in Europe in the 90s, which listed a number of these very wealthy individuals who basically supported al-Qaeda's ideology and decided these are wealthy people from the Gulf. We want to continue to support it and we're going to donate that money.

50:32Gordon:So the way the money gets to the hijackers is also very mundane. It's wire transfers. I'm not trying to hide anything. It's wire transfers from facilitators who are working inside KSM's network in Germany, in the Emirates. Small wire transfers for the most part. So they're not going to raise any red flags. Cash and travelers checks that are just carried in the hijackers' pockets through customs and through the foreign bank accounts that the hijackers kind of true on with their debit cards, ATM cards, once they're in the US. There is a significant paper trail here. It connects the hijackers to the facilitators.

51:13Gordon:But again, the point wasn't to hide anything. They're using the international banking system. They're sending small amounts of money and they're using kind of clean everyday institutions and facilitators. Because, again, the anti kind of the way that the U.S. intelligence community and law enforcement community would have looked at the international financial system back then, they would have said, well, we're trying to find payments that are going for money launders and drug cartels. Right. We're not looking for Saudi individuals.

51:46David:But also you're looking for millions. You're not looking for hundreds or thousands of dollars, which we're talking about because it's such a small amount. Unless you're looking at these individuals, unless you've already identified these individuals as being at risk, the transfers in themselves are not going to get flagged. I mean, I suppose there is a question about when they knew Hazmi and Madar were on the radar of the CIA. The two Saudi operatives. The two Saudi operatives who we talked about last time, why their bank accounts weren't being tracked. But that goes back maybe to the handoff between the CIA and the FBI about these guys and it not having been done properly.

52:21Gordon:Yeah. I mean, Husband and Medar, they open up bank accounts in their true name. So again, had there been an FBI special agent on these guys' case, they could have seen where these transfers are coming from and potentially, and we'll talk more about this later, disrupted the plot or a piece of the plot. But that didn't happen. Now, there's a big question we've been talking really this entire episode about the largely Saudi muscle and the role of Saudi charities and donors and Saudi money in the plot. And so there is a big question that hangs over this, which is what in the world did the government of Saudi Arabia know about this, if anything?

53:03David:And we should say that is the subject of, it's still a subject of controversy and an ongoing massive lawsuit today in the United States by families of victims of 9-11 who are alleging Saudi knowledge or involvement in the 9-11 plot, which Saudi Arabia has obviously denied. Right. Yeah.

53:21Gordon:15 of the 19 are Saudi. Bin Laden's a Saudi. A huge amount of the money and financing for Al Qaeda is coming from Saudi. So it's, you know, it's a reasonable question to ask. I mean, the commission looks at the funding closely and they didn't find any evidence at the time that the Saudi government as an institution or senior Saudi officials individually had funded al-Qaeda. But the commission, you know, in sort of some pretty twisted kind of contorted language, takes some pains not to exclude the likelihood that charities sponsored by the Saudi state had money diverted to al-Qaeda.

54:00David:Or that individuals in Saudi Arabia, rich individuals, were supporting al-Qaeda and parsing money, which we know as part of that funding arrangement was the case.

54:10Gordon:And I think this is the analytical problem that we have even 25 years on in parsing out to what extent the state or individuals who happen to have an official state role or institutions attached to the state may have played some facilitation role in the plot, is that the The line in Saudi between a private donor, a religious institution, and the state is really not clean. It's really, really not clean. And I think a person who embodies that fuzziness is the Saudi we talked about last time, Omar al-Bayoumi, who is a Saudi national. He's in California. Just to remind people, he plays a role in helping the two Saudi operatives, Khaled al-Madar and Nawaf al-Hazmi, get settled in San Diego, in California, in early to mid-2000.

55:11David:He's going to be the guarantor on their property, and he's going to throw parties for them, and he's going to be very involved in effectively supporting them while they're in the United States, two of those hijackers. He is a complicated figure.

55:25Gordon:complicated guy he he's on the payroll of a of a company called irkan which is a subcontractor to a saudi government aviation contractor he doesn't seem to have gone to work a lot and when a supervisor at this company wanted him fired saying this guy's just not here the company was reportedly warned that its contract would be canceled if he was dropped and then in 19 this is happening in the mid to late 1990s. And then in 1999, when another attempt is made to terminate his employment, the director general of Saudi civil aviation itself intervenes personally in a letter and demands that Bayoumi's contract be renewed as quickly as possible.

56:13David:He is also getting large amounts of money sent to him, much larger than, you know, for his regular employment from Saudi Arabia, some of which is, as we said last time, just below the threshold of$10 ,000 where it would get reported and aroused suspicion. All of this suggests that he was more than just an ordinary worker. I think that is the crucial question with him. I think that has then raised the question, well, what was he? And I think even that is not a simple question to answer, is there? Because to me, I don't know what you think, but to me, when you look at his profile and what he was doing it looks to me like he is he is working to some extent covertly on behalf of the saudi state does that mean he's an intelligence agent he's always denied it and the saudis have denied it is he somehow an agent for the religious institutions i think that is quite possible again it goes back to these blurred lines of what he is doing and then what his relationship with the hijackers is, whether that's personal or part of these murky other responsibilities which he could have had and which he denies.

57:25Gordon:Bob Graham, who's a US senator who chairs the congressional inquiry into 9-11, not the 9-11 commission, looked in depth at Bayoumi in the years after 9-11, and he looked at the money. And it's very interesting that after Bayoumi helps Midar and Hasmi get settled in San Diego, his monthly allowance jumps. So it goes up from just under 500 bucks a month to nearly 4 ,000 a month. And it stays there until Hasmi leaves San Diego, right? So it nets him an extra$30 ,000 in exactly the window where he is helping Hasmi and Midar, two of the eventual hijackers, get settled in the States.

58:08David:And I would also credit a recent investigation by the Sunday Times and the Times here in the UK into Albayumi. And if you're wondering why it's a British investigation, it's because Albayumi comes to the UK immediately after helping the hijackers. And he's going to be based in the UK and actually gets arrested in the UK after 9-11 by West Midlands police at the request of US authorities. and then there's the further investigation into him is absolutely fascinating because it's only actually come to light in the last few years partly thanks to this times and sunday times investigation where they've interviewed some of the police detectives and again it raises many more questions because this is when you know later on they're going to discover in a pile of evidence which strangely is not shared details of things like al bayoumi taking videos of the capital building and talking about security, taking notes about flight paths around the United States and some of the kind of weigh stations that he used.

59:07David:I mean, a ton of videos, which again, are, I mean, at the very least suspicious.

59:13Gordon:Oh, they're beyond suspicious.

59:15David:They're beyond suspicious, aren't they? I mean, when you look at the details of that investigation, I mean, I found it really, I think some of it quite shocking.

59:22Gordon:There's a notepad found among Bayomi's things, which has this crude kind of hand-drawn sketch in blue ink of an aircraft. And alongside that are these detailed calculations. It's apparently a set of mathematical equations on the descent of a fast-moving aircraft. And it is a formula that could be used to manually compute an aircraft's descent at a particular rate toward a target without the assistance of GPS, not typically taught in basic flight training, would indicate that he may have been helping Hazmi and Midar, who were struggling in flight training, with some questions around how to fly a plane.

1:00:03David:And he can't explain these notes, really. When you hear the police interrogation reports, he basically struggles to explain.

1:00:11Gordon:He's like, it's a random equation. It's just an equation. And I just think of equations. Yeah, it's just an equation. Yeah. There's also a bunch of videos. I mean, Bayoumi was like the serial videographer, right? even before the era when people had cell phones. One of the films is very bizarre because it's about an hour of detailed footage of him outside the U.S. Capitol. There's close-ups of entrance, the exits, the architectural features, the windows, the surrounding streets, the security. He also refers to something called the plan. On the face of it, you're like, this is a casing video, right?

1:00:50Gordon:He's casing the Capitol. and then providing that video to the would-be hijackers.

1:00:55David:Now, I also find this interesting. When he gets arrested in the UK, he immediately gets quite high-level consular help from the Saudi embassy. But also, one of the things that he's had is there are nearly 100 calls when he's in the US with the Islamic Affairs Department of the Saudi embassy in Washington, D.C. Now, this to me is actually the most interesting detail because it suggests he has a close relationship, not necessarily with the Saudi intelligence service, but with the Islamic Affairs Department. And to me, this is the interesting question. So we should say Saudi Arabia denies any role, Al-Bahimu denies any role in 9-11, but it's this relationship with the Islamic Affairs Department because it goes back to that idea of the complexity of the Saudi state.

1:01:44David:And could there be people who are sympathizers with the al-Qaeda cause or with radical Islamism who are sending money or involved in some way? Now, that is different from him being, if you like, a classic intelligence agent on behalf of the state or the intelligence service. But at least that question is there, I think, and is created by this web of contacts. not necessarily it being Saudi state policy but could it be the individual policy of some people within the Saudi state yeah to support these people now of course there is another explanation of this which is that his job is to help people and Saudi citizens in you know in the United States and he does happen to accidentally meet Hamzi and Midar and you know he's that's his you know And the money and the people are just part of that.

1:02:38David:I'm helpful to people without knowing they're hijackers.

1:02:42Gordon:But wasn't there also an eyewitness account of the very first meeting between Bayoumi and Hazmi and Midar? At this cafe. At this cafe in San Diego where Bayoumi has insisted that this was a chance meeting, right? That he just saw two others. He heard two men speaking Arabic. He could tell they're Saudi. He approaches them. he befriends them. But I think the eyewitness testimony was that he was waiting for them. Yeah.

1:03:11David:And it looked more than accidental. And that so much hinges on that. I mean, so much hinges on that. I mean, look, this is the subject of a massive lawsuit. We're not going to be able to kind of solve it now and give an answer. But I think at the very least, to me, there are questions there. And as I said, it's different from saying the Saudi state did 9-11. But whether there are people associated with the Saudi state who are receiving funds and who are linked to it, that is an open question.

1:03:41Gordon:It is interesting that the 9-11 commission didn't have any... They had Bayoumi's testimony and the commission actually spoke to him, I think, when he'd gone back to... But a lot of this other stuff is new. A lot of this other stuff is new. It was never used in the commission report because the commission ends up kind of waffling on Bayoumi's role in the plot and says, you know, it's certainly possible that he is dissembled about some aspects of his story. But, you know, they say, the commission wrote, we've seen no credible evidence that he believed in violent extremism or knowingly aided extremist groups.

1:04:14Gordon:But again, they didn't have access to any of this material. I think, I think a couple of points, as we close out this question, I think a couple of points that are worth raising. One is I think the idea that the upper echelons of the Saudi state were behind 9-11 or aware of it is insane because it would be the equivalent of regime suicide to be involved at the top. I think that it seems quite plausible, though, given the available evidence around Bayoumi, that he was effectively an al-Qaeda support asset who was already in the States and who was going to help these guys get settled, who didn't actually know specifically what they were doing, but had been tasked to help.

1:05:01Gordon:and because he'd been tasked to help, he was able to lean on friendly officials inside the Islamic Affairs Department in D.C., who also may not have had any idea what was happening, but when someone like Bayoumi with his status reached out and said, I need some more money, they were more than happy to send him more money. I think he probably, to me, and look, I'll label this as total speculation, right? I think he was probably involved. I think he was probably witting that these guys were up to something. And I think he was, he would been tasked to support them in whatever way he could.

1:05:38David:Yeah. And just to close it out, Baham is arrested in the UK after 9-11. He's questioned by British police, but there is a failure from the FBI to share information with the British police, the British police later say, and he's released and he goes on to deny the charges. So there we go. It's a really interesting question, which is, you know, still being litigated, you know, 25 years on, But let's maybe leave it there. The muscle are now in America. The pilots are training. Through it all, Mohammed Atta, the leader of the group really, is moving towards 9-11 itself. And next time, let's look at the final days, the final preparations, and the question about whether the FBI and the CIA could have done more to stop that 9-11 plot coming to fruition.

1:06:24Gordon:And just a reminder, of course, if you want to listen to this entire series right away, you can go and join the Declassified Club at therestisclassified.com. Get early access to all of our series, as well as access to the bonus episodes that we'll be running alongside this series and every other series we do. We have some amazing interviews in particular in this series that we'll be doing with people who are directly involved in the government response to 9-11 and folks who are inside the CIA and with President Bush on that day. We'll see you next time. See you next time.

1:07:27We'll see you next time. through September 7th at Wayfair.com. Wayfair, every style, every home.