The
history of large-scale terrorist bombings of American
targets prior to 9-11 is instructive. The bombings of
the World Trade Center (1993), the US military residences
at Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia (1996), the US embassies
in Tanzania and Kenya (1998) and the USS Cole in Aden,
Yemen (2000) had a common modus operandi. All four attacks
divided the conspiracy between those who gathered intelligence,
tested the security and set up the operation and those
who placed and detonated the bomb. The former set of
advance men were in each case retracted or escaped,
the second latter conspirators— the bombers—
either were suicidists killed in the attack or left
behind.
Consider the first World Trade Center attack in 1993.
The advance man, and organizer, was a Baluchi operative
named Ramzi Ahmed Yousef. After he arrived in New York,
he recruited a team of expendable conspirators to rent
a van, load a 1,500 pound bomb in it, park it in the
underground garage under the north tower of the World
Trade Center and detonate it. This latter group was
not provided any means of escape and were quickly caught
by the FBI. The only exception was Abdul Rahman Yasin,
who managed to flee to his home country of Iraq after
the FBI mistakenly released him.
Ramzi Yousef was a very different story. He was on a
plane to Asia soon after the bomb exploded. He easily
escaped because an escape route had been prepared for
him. He had his plane ticket, money and, most important,
a false Kuwaiti identity "Abdul Basit Mahmood Abdul
Karim" that he had not previously used in America.
This legend had been intricately constructed, as Laurie
Mylroie documents in her book, Study of Revenge. The
real Abdul Basit Mahmood had vanished during the Iraq
invasion of Kuwait in 1990. Since Kuwait's Interior
Ministry files were in the custody of Iraqi's intelligence
service, it was possible to insert Ramzi Yousef's fingerprints
in Karim's passport application and other records. So
if Yousef's false identity had been checked on his departure
from the US in 1993, it would have been confirmed by
Kuwait's passport records.
After undertaking another bombing assignment in Manila—
the destruction of 11 US trans-Pacific airliners—
which was aborted, he was arrested in Pakistan in 1995
and deported to the US.
The truck bombing of Khobar Towers in 1996 that killed
19 Americans followed a similar pattern. Security camera
tapes, police reports and other evidence showed that
it had been under sophisticated surveillance for nearly
a year before the attack. There were also methodic probes.
In one incident, a car actually tested the strength
of the barrier by slowly ramming it. After the conspirators
had assessed the target, a truck-bomb with 20,000 pounds
of TNT was assembled with explosives imported from abroad.
The team of local Saudis who were recruited to deliver
and detonate the bomb were soon caught and imprisoned
in Saudi Arabia. By that time, the members of advance
team who, according to the Department of Justice, "supported
and supervised the attack," had been retracted
from Saudi Arabia. Subsequently they were identified
as Iranian operatives.
In the case of the near-simultaneous bombing of the
US embassies in Tanzania and Kenya, resulting in 213
deaths, the conspiracy also used a division of labor.
There were teams of bombers in each country, who were
expected to die in the attacks, and advance teams who
left prior to the attacks. Mohamed Sadeek Odeh, who
had help prepare the truck bomb in Kenya, testified
after he was captured in Pakistan, that he had left
Kenya the day before the attack and traveled to Karachi
under an assumed name with a fake passport. So did his
co-conspirator, Fahid Msalam, who purchased equipment
and vehicles for the Tanzania attack (and was never
apprehended). They both were on the same Pakistani International
Airways flight.
The attack on the USS Cole, a US warship in Aden Harbor,
which required long preparation, technical skills with
C-4 shaped-charge explosives and sophisticated operational
intelligence, also used a division of labor. The advance
men had prepared another suicide boat attack ten months
earlier on the American destroyer, USS Sullivans, which
had to be aborted. They then rented a house, built a
fence around it and recruited two suicidists to drive
a fiberglass boat loaded with C-4 next to the USS Cole.
The suicidists died in the attack, while the advance
teams, who according to the Yemen investigation had
been divided into two men cells, escaped. All investigators
found at the house used to stage the attack was several
names on fake identity cards and on documents in homes
and cars, which turned out to be untraceable.
Why wouldn't the 9-11 conspiracy use a similar division
of labor? Like the other attacks, the 9-11 aerial bombing
required two separate missions: 1) advance agents, capable
of conducting months of reconnaissance, probing and
other intelligence-gathering activities for the mission;
and 2) expendable assault teams capable of taking over
Boeing 757s and 767s, navigating them to pre-selected
targets, and crashing the planes into them.
The advance parties' had the task of blending into the
American air- travel scene for a sustained period of
time without drawing attention to themselves or otherwise
arousing suspicions. To do this, they had to be fluent
in English, have sufficient social skills and possess
plausible cover stories that would allow them to ask
questions about airliners and boarding procedures. The
teams began arriving in America more than a year before
the attack and established their residences, bank accounts
and driver licenses. Like the USS Cole reconnaissance
teams in Yemen, they usually operated in pairs. They
enrolled in flight schools which, among other things,
would provide a plausible cover for their interest in
airliners. They acquired flight manuals, diagrams and
videos of the targeted planes from mail order houses,
and booked time on simulators. They traveled back and
forth cross the country as first class passengers on
Boeing 757s and 767s, according to the FBI investigation,
where they could scout the access to cockpits, locate
cockpit keys and observe flight crew behavior after
the planes took off. As first-class passengers with
flight school credentials, they presumably could also
ask questions of the flight crew. In January 2001, members
of these advance teams returned to the United Arab Emirates
and other foreign countries where they could be de-briefed
and then returned to the US.
The groups trained to take control of Boeing airliners
and convert them into flying bombs required a different
set of skills. They had to be able to work together
as a team in rapidly gaining entry to locked cockpits.
They had to have the weapons to overpower the flight
crews before they could give warning of the coordinated
hijackings. They had to take over the flight controls,
turn off the transponder, re-set the coordinates and
then maneuver the airliners to their targets. None of
these skills were taught at the flight schools in Florida,
Arizona, California and Minnesota.
Most of the assault team members who arrived in America
in June and July of 2001 had identities that had been
prepared for them, as had rooms, gym memberships, funding
and other logistics. In late August, nineteen hijackers
were given boarding passes on flights departing from
Logan, Dulles and Newark Airports.
The 9-11 planners did not sacrifice all the conspirators
aboard the planes. A number of those involved in the
advance planning (for example, Ramzi bin al-Sibh, Khalid
Sheikh Mohammed, Zacarias Essabar and Said Bahaji) escaped
to Pakistan prior to the attack.
Some of conspirators doing the reconnaissance work in
America similarly might have been retracted, even if
their names were used to buy the plane tickets (for
the fatal flights) on the Internet. All they would have
had to have done was to give their boarding passes and
fake photo ID to members of the assault team, change
their identities and vanish.
Consider Mohamed Atta, a well-educated architect with
an advanced degree who had traveled in the United States,
Europe and the Middle East. Atta had helped prepare
the attack for 15 months through reconnaissance, logistical
and liaison work. He had flown on numerous first-class
flights on American and United Airlines, attended flight
schools in Florida, cased airports, purchased flight
videos, rented rooms and cars, transferred money and,
in late August, made reservations for American Airlines
Flight 11 that departed from Logan Airport in Boston.
He traveled to Boston on about September 8th. Then,
on or about September 10, 2001, just about ten hours
before the planned hijacking of Flight 11, which was
taking off from Boston, Atta left Boston. Accompanied
by a dark-set man traveling under a stolen identity,
he drove in a rented car to Portland, Maine, and checked
into a motel.
But why? If he had been the designated pilot of the
suicide team that planned to hijack Flight 11 before
8 AM in Boston, he would have made the suicide mission
that had been planned for months contingent on the commuter
flight from Portland not being delayed by poor weather
or other circumstances. It also meant that he had to
go through two security checkpoints— one in Portland,
and a second one in Logan— since the commuter
plane from Portland would arrive at the south side of
Terminal B, which was at that time separated by a parking
lot from American Airlines Flight 11 on the north side.
So, returning to Boston would entail for the mission
an extra search and chance of detection. There is no
actual evidence that he returned: Logan Airport had
no security cameras where he arrived so he was no photographed
there and, though messages were left for him on his
voice mail, he did not retrieve them.
In Portland, Atta allowed himself to be photographed
by a number of security cameras. The last such picture
was at 5:58 AM on September 11th at Portland International
Airport. Later tht day, his suitcase, containing his
will and airplane videos, were recovered in Portland
by the FBI.
He could have flown to Boston and been on the suicide
flight or he could have escaped that morning under a
different identity— and some other conspirator
then could have used his boarding pass to get on Flight
11.
There is no doubt that the 9-11 conspiracy had access
to multiple identities and false documentation. The
dark-set man who accompanied Atta to Portland used the
passport of Abdulaziz Alomari to gain entry to the US
in June 2001. It had been stolen in 1995 in Denver from
the real Abdulaziz Alomari, who was then a Saudi engineer,
studying at the University of Denver and who reported
the identity theft at the time. Other hijackers had
the identities of Saudi who had years earlier gone to
fight in Chechnya, and were presumably killed. So they
could have been of any nationality and have been trained
pilots.
Since the conspiracy had purchased false photo IDs for
boarding the planes, the tickets could have been purchased
under any convenient aliases. By electing to use names
of members of the advanced party who would be sought
by American authorities after the attack, it assured
that they would be presumed dead. Whether they were
actually died aboard the planes or used their presumptive
deaths to mask their escape is not known. |