Question:
What warning, if any, did the CIA receive from the
National Reconnaissance Office concerning Arabs training
on the fuselage of a passenger airliner at a terrorist
training camp prior to September 11th, 2001?
Answer:
After Sabah Khalifa Khodada Alami, an Iraqi military
officer, defected from Iraq in 1999 to Turkey. He now
lives in Fort Worth, Texas. When he was debriefed, he
described his training mission at Salman Pak, a military
base about 21 miles from Baghdad that had been used
for the testing of secret weapons, including chemical
biological warfare agents, and paramilitary training
for covert actions. Captain Sabah Khalifa Khodada Alami
said that as late as 1998 he trained an elite commando
team, Fedayeen Saddam, in airline hijacking and sabotage.
Through a translator, Mr. Alami described, according
to the Wall street Journal, a daily regimen of exercises
on kidnapping, assassination, and -- using a Boeing
707 parked inside the complex -- how to hijack a plane
or bus without weapons. He said that a separate group
of non-Iraqis were being similarly trained by Saddam's
intelligence service, the mukhabarat. Asked about the
plane by an interviewer for Front Line, he said "Yes,
there's a real whole 707 plane, a whole real plane,
standing in the middle of the training area in this
camp."
Subsequently, a second Iraqi defector, a former intelligence
officer who defected in early 2001 , described "Islamicists"
training on a Boeing 707 parked in Salman Pak from about
1995 to as recently as September 2000. Neither defector
said any efforts were made to hide or conceal the Boeing
from satellite photography. And, according to Front
Line, a former U.N. inspector who worked for the United
Nations said that he saw the fuselage of an airliner
at Salman Pak which was smaller than a Boeing. Whatever
manufacture and size , there is agreement such a plane
was in the Salman Pak complex.
During this period, the base at Salman Pak was under
surveillance of US KH-11 reconnaissance satellites which
were providing intelligence on Iraq's possible weapons
of mass destruction, including chemical and biological
warfare equipment, to the CIA. The information about
Salman Pak was also used publically by UNSCOM, the UN
agency charged with monitoring Iraq's disposal of such
weapons. Since Salman Pak was systematically photographed,
if the defectors' accounts are accurate, the Boeing
707 would also have been routinely photographed between
1995 and 2000 many times. Given that Salman Pak was
not an air base, a Boeing 707 on the ground there would
have stood out like a sore thumb. It is also possible
that the Arabs training on it were recognizable (unless
training was only at night or they wore masks). After
September 11th, a private US satellite photo company,
Space Imaging, went through its archives and found a
photo that included a plane parked in the Salman Pak
compound.
The National Reconnaissance Office collates, analyzes
and distributes the intelligence gleaned from satellite
imagery in Iraq. If it had pictures of an airliner,
Boeing or whatever kind, permanently stationed inside
the Salmon Pak complex, it is reasonable to assume that
they would not have withheld them from the CIA. If so,
the CIA had photographic evidence confirming defectors
claims that Iraq was practicing, if not preparing, covert
actions against a Boeing prior to September 11th.
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