The Rest Is Classified - 188. 9/11: How to Recruit a Hijacker (Ep 2)

Episode Date: August 26, 2026

What kind of men do you recruit to fly planes into skyscrapers? And as the 9/11 plot developed, why didn’t the CIA spot what was coming? Listen as David and Gordon chart the mission to recruit the attackers for the 9/11 attacks. ------------------- THE REST IS CLASSIFIED LIVE 2026 at The Rest Is Fest: Buy your tickets ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ to see David and Gordon live on stage at London’s Southbank Centre on 4 September: ⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.southbankcentre.co.uk/whats-on/the-rest-is-classified-live/⁠⁠⁠⁠ ------------------- Sign-up for our free newsletter where producer Becki takes you behind the scenes of the show: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://mailchi.mp/goalhanger.com/tric-free-newsletter-sign⁠-up⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ------------------- Join the Declassified Club to go deeper into the world of espionage with exclusive Q&As, interviews with top intelligence insiders, regular livestreams, ad-free listening, early access to episodes and live show tickets, and weekly deep dives into original spy stories. Members also get curated reading lists, special book discounts, prize draws, and access to our private chat community. Just go to ⁠⁠therestisclassified.com⁠ or join on Apple Podcasts. ------------------- Get a 10% discount on business PCs, printers and accessories using the code TRIC10. Visit ⁠⁠⁠⁠https://HP.com/CLASSIFIED⁠⁠⁠⁠ for more information. T&C's apply. ------------------- EXCLUSIVE NordVPN Deal ➼ https://nordvpn.com/restisclassified Upgrade your online protection with an all-in-one security app! It’s risk free with NordVPN’s 30-day money-back guarantee 🌍 ------------------- Email: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠[e-mail]⁠⁠⁠ Instagram: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠@restisclassified⁠ Video Editor: Joe Pettit Social Producer: Emma Jackson Assistant Producer: Alfie Rowe Producer: Becki Hills Head of History: Dom Johnson Exec Producer: Tony Pastor Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

For exclusive interviews, bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to series, first look at live show tickets, a weekly newsletter, and discounted books. Join the Declassified Club at the rest isclassified.com. What kind of men do you recruit to fly planes into skyscrapers? And as the 9-11 plot developed, why didn't the CIA spot what was coming? Well, welcome to the rest is classified. I'm Gordon Carrera. And I'm David McCloskey.

And David, this is the second. of our series looking at 9-11, and we ended last time with Osama bin Laden, leader of al-Qaeda in Afghanistan, and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, KSM, having come to him with this idea for what is going to be called the planes operation, the idea of flying planes into buildings in the United States and it being approved by Osama bin Laden, although at that point it is just an idea rather than a plan. But first, before we get into the details of how that plan comes to fruition, let's hear a word from our sponsors at HP. This episode is brought to you by HP. In intelligence, you quickly learn that you are only as strong

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Two and five Canadians will hear the words you have cancer. That's why Every step and dollar raised matters. On September 19th, join thousands in Toronto for the Princess Margaret Cancer Foundation Walk. Challenge yourself, friends, and family to walk 21 kilometers in support of life-saving research. Together, we can carry the fire and help create a world free from the fear of cancer. Register today at pmcfwalk.ca.ca. So, David, let's look at how the idea becomes an actual plan and how how, how it's people are recruited to carry it out. Well, through the spring of 1999, so after this meeting,

where the plane's operation is approved, bin Laden, KSM, and bin Laden's military chief meet repeatedly at a compound outside of Kandahar, Afghanistan to bring this idea to shape it into an actual workable plan. And there's a clear division of labor from the get-go. bin Laden is the CEO, right? He's the commander of the operation. KSM, who brought the idea to bin Laden, is the project manager.

He's the one who's going to run the plot day to day. He's going to manage the recruiting, the travel, the training, the timing. But even though bin Laden is the CEO, he's a details guy. He's a micromanager, frankly, and he's very hands-on. And I think in a way, you know, almost in a business context, you could imagine a great idea coming to a CEO and a CEO saying, oh, you know what, I've actually already got a couple guys who I know who you KSM might want to, you know, let's allocate them to this project.

And bin Laden handpicks the first two operatives personally. They're both Saudis. One of them is named Khaled al-Midhar, and the other one is Nohaf al-Hasmi. And both are apparently so keen to strike the U.S. And they've already been in this al-Qaeda pipeline. They already have U.S. visas. Now, Saudi Arabia at this time, and even now, of course, it's a close American ally.

So for Saudi citizens, U.S. visas are relatively easy to get. And seen from bin Laden's perspective, this makes Saudi operatives ideal for a plot to put men on American soil. Now, KSM has never met them, but you think from a project manager standpoint is not ideal because KSM would probably rather pick his own team. Bin Laden suggests two other operatives, both are Yemenis, and it is much harder for Yemeni citizens to get into the U.S. Now, these Yemenis are initially selected to participate in an element of the plot, which imagines airliners being detonated, being exploded over the Pacific, right? So the plot kind of starts

off in a more complicated way and gets narrowed down. That is eventually going to be abandoned because these Yemeni operatives cannot actually get U.S. visas. Problems are going to loom from the get go, logistical problems, two in particular that are going to shape the entire plot. And that is documents, getting U.S. visas, getting passports, clean passports that allow these operatives to get into the U.S. and cover. Bin Laden and KSM know right away, as they're planning the this in the spring of 1999, that they need people who can get into the U.S., who are not going to attract attention from the police or the FBI. They can't have prior jihadist credentials, criminal records, and a subset of them need to learn

how to fly planes. And these two Saudi operatives that bin Laden has selected, Midar and Hasmi, have what I would describe as some fatal limitations here. They have no real exposure to the West, which means that, you know, for example, going to flight school in the U.S. might be challenging. You can't speak English. Yeah, can't speak English. So it's going to be tricky to learn how to fly a plane.

And I think, you know, again, in the description of the plot as a sort of a business enterprise or project, a lot of what you would do early on is find the right people. So a lot of the emphasis early on for KSM and bin Laden is recruiting. the team. KSM, again, is the project manager. Through the spring of 1999, he's doing a lot of the daily work. And a lot of the work resembles that of a quartermaster or a research analyst in this stage. He's working for the most part. I mean, he's shuttling back and forth between Pakistan and Afghanistan, meeting with bin Laden, meeting with al-Qaeda's military chief. But KSM is largely working out of a safe house, which he's rented with money from al-Qaeda, in Karachi, Pakistan. KSM is doing things like collecting Western aviation magazines, looking at airline time tables.

He's gathering flight school brochures. He's gathering telephone directories from American cities, including San Diego and Long Beach. He's running internet searches on flight schools. He buys flight simulator software and actually looks at a few Hollywood movies that depict hijackings, which are kind of study aids. We don't know which movies, do we? It's actually frustrating. I went into this to figure out what films he had looked at, and the sources are maddeningly non-specific on this. But apparently, KSM edited them down to delete scenes that had uncovered female characters in them.

It's this, I mean, it's a kind of weird thing where he's getting ideas from the Hollywood movies, but he doesn't want that bit of Hollywood. Right. The main problem that KSM has, though, it's not the research piece of it. It's people. It's people. It doesn't have recruits that can actually go into the. the U.S. train and live there without attracting attention. But then in late 1999, they get a break, don't they, Al-Qaeda?

Because four young men arrive at the Al-Qaeda camps in Afghanistan. I mean, just by chance at that moment, they've all come at that point from Hamburg in Germany, and they're going to be crucial. And these four men will become known as the Hamburg cell. Absolute credit here to Terry McDermott's book, Perfect Soldiers, which, goes into incredibly rich detail about who these men were. Absolutely a phenomenal book. The center of the Hamburg sells world was a very shabby apartment at Merrien Strauss of 54, which is a refurbished flat on this treeless street, just a few minutes walk from the Technical

University in Hamburg where two of them were enrolled. They actually called the place, their apartment, Dar al-Anzar, the House of the Followers. So it's a very religiously devout network of young men who were living in Hamburg over a two-year period, more than a dozen young Muslim men listed at their address kind of drifting in and out. So it's kind of this halfway house for students in Hamburg who are coming from the Islamic world. Their landlord remembers them as very punctual with the rent and dressed like philosophy students. I'm not quite sure what that means. Sort of maybe shabbily dressed. I don't know. The leader of this group was an Egyptian named Muhammad Atta,

who is an absolutely crucial character in this story. Atta is 31 by the time he goes to Afghanistan, so he's in his late 20s. Yeah, a bit older than some of the other people involved, isn't it? Yeah. He's an urban planning student, a professor who supervised his thesis, which he wrote on the old city of Aleppo in Syria,

and which the thesis was dedicated to Allah, remembers Atta as a very meticulous, intelligent young man. and he has come out of a middle-class family in Cairo. His sisters are very high-achieving, very intelligent women. They've become a doctor and a professor. Mahabhadatah is kind of a disappointment to his very overbearing father. He graduated in middle of his class. Smart kid, but hadn't risen to the stature that his sisters had.

He also has a problem with women, doesn't he? He's very kind of prudish, he leaves the room when there's belly dancing on Egyptian television. There is this, I mean, people try and psychoanalyze Atta particularly, but as an emblematic of a certain kind of jihadist, the frustrated individual who's not achieved what he was expected to achieve, who is blaming it on women and blaming it on the West. And he seems to fit that mold. Now, you know, you can get too deep into psychoanalyzing this. But he does seem to fit a certain type, doesn't he, in that way? You know, Atta's thesis on the old city of Aleppo was apparently quite good but not well written. And the professor overseeing the thesis said, there's a female professor here you should work with to help you actually polish it up.

So it'll be much better. And Atta works with this female professor over the course of several weeks to do just that and announces afterward that he can't bear. to be in such close physical proximity to her. So he's got this, you know, don't want to psychoanalyze him too much, but there's a very weird relationship with women. He grows more radicalized the longer he stays in Germany. And, you know, when you look at the different theories of how people actually get radicalized, this social sequestering.

Yeah, group dynamics. Group dynamics. Groups of friends. Yeah. Really important. He's in Hamburg, Germany, right? He's in the West. But his world in Hamburg is this very small subset of other very devout Muslim men who are all feeding off of each other and kind of radicalizing each other.

And he doesn't really socialize outside of that group. They are attached to a mosque in Hamburg, but it's a really small group. And Atta himself, he's quite a dour character. He's introverted. He's really humorless. He's exacting almost to the point, and meticulous, almost to the point of self-punishment. So there's this very fascinating story that he was doing some work for an urban planning firm in Hamburg while he was at school there.

And the firm lays him off eventually. And he actually sent back some of his salary because he felt that the firm had overpaid him. So very meticulous guy. And he's so severe that he's actually written up a will at the age of 28. Now, it's not uncommon among devout young Muslim men to do this, but I think the will and the specifics in the will really give a window, really give us a window into Atta's worldview and his mindset. There's a theme of austerity and control. For example, he says he wants to be dressed in three plain white cloths, nothing silky, nothing costly. He wants his body facing Mecca to be laid on its right side.

He wants dust thrown on him three times. He forbids weeping or wailing as an ignorant thing to do. He wants the funeral to be quiet, hurried, rejects any folk customs of memorializing the dead at 40 days or a year is kind of un-Islamic. And the hatred of women, I think. And I think that's putting it strongly, but I think it's right. Yeah. I think he hates women. He directs that no woman should ever visit his grave.

Wow. at all during my funeral or on any occasion thereafter. No pregnant woman or person who is not clean should come near to say goodbye. No women should come to his house to mourn him. And in one deal that has been made quite famous, whoever washes his corpse near his genitals must wear gloves so as not to touch them. I mean, that is weird. This is not a fun guy.

Pious, austere. And I mean, he will become some extent a leader of this cell as well. And you can kind of see why because he's the, he's the, he's the, disciplinarian as well. Yeah, you know, it's interesting in other, you know, I think about social groups in school, for example, where oftentimes the person who's in charge will have the most athletic prowess. It would be due to physicality. Or, you know, in other groups it could be who's the most intellectual, who's the most intelligent. I think in the world that the Hamburg cell is occupying, the person who is the most pious and devout becomes the leader.

The extreme. Who can push it to the furthest extreme? That is the person who sort of sets the boundaries of acceptable behavior and then pulls everyone that direction. So there are three others that go with him to Afghanistan in late 1999. We should say who those are as well. So one is Marwan al-Shehi. He's an Emirati. He's younger, more easygoing.

He's a government scholarship student and also become a pilot. There's a guy named Ramsey bin al-Shib. He's a Yemeni. And we'll talk about him. He eventually will not get a visa to the U.S. he's going to become a kind of logistical facilitator for the plot. There's a guy that I've done this character very fascinating. Ziajarra.

He's a Lebanese guy from a secular, pretty comfortable family background, very sociable, kind of an earthy guy. Very different from Atta, isn't he? Very different from Atta. He's like the polar opposite of Atta. He has a German-Turkish girlfriend. And he comes from, again, a really well-off Lebanese family. He's been educated in Christian schools.

and he will keep dating his girlfriend, telephoning her and writing even as the plot goes on. So this group, they pray together, they eat together, they kind of harden one another, and they're pouring over during this period when they're in Hamburg, they're pouring over religious texts, they're passing around videotaped sermons by radical preachers.

The Islam is seen in Hamburg at this time. It's not particularly large, right? It is a small, tight group of people and there's a Syrian German in this network who is believed to have steered the four men toward al-Qaeda. But it's kind of an accident that they wind up in Afghanistan because like so many other would-be jihadists in this period, the focus actually isn't on the United States.

The focus is, well, where's a battlefield where an Islamic army in their view is fighting Western infidels And in 1999, the key battleground is Chechnya. It's really interesting because what you see, and actually if you look back in 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, it will become Iraq. Syria, you know, other places as well. 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, that they end up there. Because bin al-Shieb and Shahi are on a train in Germany. and they strike up a conversation with somebody on the train. And I think because they're bearded Arab men who are in Germany, this other guy looks similar, speak 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, when you're inside them are really powerful. That contact that they're put in touch with is linked to al-Qaeda. 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 you get 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.

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. Yeah, they're educated. They're ideologically committed. They've lived in Europe. So they would have a sense, unlike Midar and Hasmi, 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 sale 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. Al-Qaeda's paying monthly salaries. They're doing things like, I mean, they have, you know, cost of living. They have budgets for people. They have, you know, vacation policies. It's a bureaucracy. It is a bureaucracy. There's paperwork.

There's all these things. There's a furniture allowance of 1,200. dollars. Crazy, isn't it? 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. 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, and they've talked about how that 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. And I guess that's what happens with this group from Hamburg. Yeah, because the plane's operation is not something that everybody in the Afghan camps knows about. 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 given audiences with bin Laden. They meet with them because they are kind of special. They're coming from Hamburg, right? So they swear byatt. They swear allegiance to bin Laden and are basically instant. marked for something special. I think it's very interesting that bin Laden pretty much immediately chooses Atta to lead the

group, probably a reflection of the fact that he had been the leader in Hamburg, Beauda, probably the most rigid, most devout of the four, and 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. They're not fully briefed in. In January of 2000, Atta and bin al-Shib go to Karachi, Pakistan, to meet with K. 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 comma plan, and they are given instructions on how to get home without drawing attention to the Afghanistan-Pakistan trip they've just done. 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. Exactly. They're also instructed to avoid attention from security services in Europe, right? 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. And then they do that thing which jihadists are taught to do, which is lower your profile. 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. attention to you as a radical. Jara, the first of the Lebanese guy with the girlfriend, 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, and it goes back to the UAE for a wedding celebration, and a friend who hasn't seen him a while is shocked that Shehey 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, 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 and 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. 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. Jara had arranged in 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 Jolla. genial he was. He buys a car. Atta and Sheahee leave for the states without having picked a school.

Again, there's not, they understand that they need to be kind of separate, right? They don't want to be a cluster. Yeah. That will potentially draw more attention. So they go to this, Atta and Sheahe leave for the states without having picked a school. 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, it's not up to snuff, or maybe they don't want to be in Oklahoma. They settle on a school, which is Huffman Aviation in Venice, Florida, which is a different school from Jara, but not far from him, so has some advantages there. And Atta and Shehi move fast. They're both taking solo flights by the end of July, 2000. They pass the private pilot airman test by the middle of

August. They train 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. So they're moving quickly. Atta is apparently a huge pain in the ass. So he and Shea He 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. They actually fail what was called the Stage 1 Instruments exam in October. And they're obviously furious about this and upset and saying, look, we're in 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. He goes back and sees her in October of 2000. Throughout the plot, they'll exchange hundreds of calls near constant email. And it's hard to understand. It's hard to understand psychologically. 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 trade craft here. So, Camo, communications. Bin al-Shib, the fourth member of the Hamburg cell who failed to get a visa, he becomes that the link between KSM and Atta. So what happens and how it works is Atta and Bin al-Shib will email each other and talk about sensitive subjects using a kind of domestic sounding code, making it sound like the their students chattering on about their coursework and their fields of study.

Candidate hijackers, they refer to as tourists. And the whole entire operation is spoken to in the context of a wedding. It's the 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-Shib 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-Shib physically travels with the help of one of those couriers to see KSM in Pakistan. 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. And so there 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. Two and five Canadians will hear the words, you have cancer. That's why every step and dollar raised matters. On September 19th, join thousands in Toronto for the Princess Margaret Cancer Foundation Walk. Challenge yourself, friends and family to walk 21 kilometers in support of life-saving research. Together, we can carry the fire and help create a world free from the fear of cancer.

Register today at pmcf walk.ca.ca. 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. There's also those two Saudi operatives, Khaled al-Midhar and the Wafal-Hasmi, who had U.S. visas, were really keen to be involved in an operation and who had been picked, hand-picked, 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? 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 Lump 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. 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. Yeah. 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 Nau-Fal-Hasmi and Khaled 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.

There are also these other two Yemenis who had been picked for the plot who were there because, again, at this point, the broader operation includes this 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 qualitative. in Kuala Lumpur. He'd lost his lower leg fighting the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan. And bin Laden suggested he used the visit to case flights

while he was there. And this casing is going to pay dividends. Because Kallad 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, 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. 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 and the plot. And throughout the entirety of the plot, there will 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 than 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. Now, this Kuala Lumpur meeting is really important because it is something that U.S. intelligence is aware of, that a meeting is taking. place of al-Qaeda operatives in Kuala, Lumpa, Malaysia in 2000. I mean, this is, this will lead to one of the questions about missed opportunities and missed intelligence and could 9-11 have been prevented. 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. and in Dubai, his passport is photocopied.

And it's here, U.S. intelligence first understands a very, very important part of this story, which is that Khaled al-Madar has a U.S. visa. This is January of 2000. An al-Qaeda operative has a U.S. 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's... 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. And mishandled is perhaps too light a verdict on it. In any case, once Kaladamadar lands, the CIA working in a liaison capacity with the Malaysian special branch, puts the meeting under surveillance. and the Malaysians, they now have, there's pictures, you know, photography showing this group of Arab men, you know, 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 have left. They say they left on a short flight to Bangkok. But since it happens 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. It had 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, Noah Falhazmi, had actually left. Thailand on January 15th on a United Airlines flight to Los Angeles. And weirdly enough, even though Khaled al-Madar is on that same flight, the Thais don't

either know it or reporting. But what is known at this point in time, so this is March of 2000, is that Khaled al-Madar has a U.S. and that Noaafal-Hasmi is in the U.S. To al-Qaeda operatives, effectively. People link to al-Qaeda. People link 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 Hasme and Midar land in L.A., in California, mid-January, 2000. They're actually the first of the hijackers, aren't they, to reach America? 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. Well, they don't really speak English. They've never been in the U.S. 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,

these are really the first two guys to be involved in the, 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 had a Karachi flea market, and said, okay, well, we have this phone book. We could do some research on the city. Let's send them, let's send them to California. KS.m 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 L.A. Midar and Hazmi get into a conversation with another Saudi, a guy named Omar al-Bayumi. This is the source of much contention. and Omar al-Bayumi and his story and his relationship with these two hijackers is at the centre 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. Yeah, 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 Hasmi were coming? And is he involved in basically helping support them in L.A., 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 U.S.

and who don't speak English and are sort of a drift? And there's very different accounts to 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 organise 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 $10,000 limit where it would lead to investigation or question. because it reaches a threshold. And so the claim has always been that Omar al-Bayumi, and this is an allegation which we should say he denies, is that he was actually an intelligence agent for the Saudi government. And that was his function at that time, that he was... He's like a support asset.

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. 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.

Yeah. Well, and 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 Miami's relationship with Midar and Hasmi 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. Introduce them to people. He pays the first few months rent. 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. And the timing is interesting also because you could also have a situation where Midar and Hasmi have arrived in L.A. 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. 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-Baiumi having videoed. lots of things at the capital in 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. But Midar and Hosme, to go back to them, they're not really hiding. They're living in a plan site in San Diego. The open bank accounts, Hosme actually winds up in the telephone book. It's interesting, isn't it? Yeah. 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 insists 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. 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, again, in hindsight, you just think shouldn't alarm bells have been going off. They apparently were only interested in steering a plane and 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? 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 Hosmi and flies home. And crucially, because Midar had not overstayed his visa, he can return. Hosmi 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 coworker that he's looking for a better job.

And weirdly, let's slip this kind of strange, ominous prediction where he says, you know, one day I'm going to be very famous. And Hasme 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 Hanjur arrives in San Diego. Hanjur 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. And he ends up working for a relief agency. He's rigorously devout. He's a bad pilot, Honey Hanjur. 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. 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 south. Saudis who have been sent to the U.S. to become pilots, Midar and Hasmi, have washed out. And so Hanjor is identified.

And again, he's a Saudi, which is good. And he's got experience in the U.S. So Hanjor is the absolutely perfect candidate other than the fact that he's a terrible pilot. So Hanjur gets sent to Karachi to meet with KSM. 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 Hasmi will meet him at the airport in California. Within days of Hondra's arrival, the two guys leave San Diego, they head toward Arizona, where again, Hanjor has, you know, he's got the experience in flight school and he's attended the University of Arizona. and Hondur does more flight training in Arizona on a Boeing 737 simulator at the Pan Am International Flight Academy. 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. 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 Hasmi, who are in the United States, you know, 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, you know, direct surveillance, but there's this knowledge that Midar has a US visa

and that Hasme 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? Why weren't they put on any number of watch lists that may have prevented them from even getting into the U.S.? 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. Because this is seen as the point of which the plot could have been disrupted and wasn't. 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, there are 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. 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. 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 Kaladamadar 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. 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. Yeah, something weird's going on there. We'll come back to that. We'll come back to that.

Now, interestingly in this period, even though Midar has arrived on the same flight as Noafal Hazmi, it's not clear to the CIA and certainly not the FBI. They're actually in the U.S. and that they're together. But in March, Bangkok Station, the CIA is Bangkok Station, has reported that Hasmi flew to L.A. on the 15th of January. That cable is received at CIA headquarters. no one places Midar or Hasmi on what was called the State Department's tip-off watch list. They don't do that in January when word arrives of Medar's visa or in March when word arrives that Hasmi had a visa and a ticket to L.A. 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 L.A. who might be Al-Qaeda linked, you'd have an FBI special agent who's like looking at that person, right? But in this case, you don't have a CIA CTC desk officer who's actually like, I'm the-assigned to that person. person, right? So you have any, it seems like you have turnover at the desk. And what it means is that none of this information gets to the FBI. 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. One of them, which it's not the direct answer to the question, but,

but it's maybe set some of the tone, is that the CIA and the FBI, the Feebs, 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 and CIA officers and FBI special agents who will, they'll actually, I mean, to give you a sense of how much distrust there can be between the two organizations, 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 FIBS. 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. 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. is good. So I guess one theory is bad culture, mistakes, failure to share. 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 have a theory on this, don't you? Well, I've spoken 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.

Which is a problem with people in the U.S. Like with foreign nationals who come to the U.S., there can be a real turf war over who makes the pitch and how it's run. Because technically, if that once they're in the U.S., it's the FBI's terrain and it should be the FBIs. who's making the pitch and therefore running them. Not always. But at least the FBI would have, you would have to, let's say you're going to run the pitch out of the auspices of LA Station. CIA L.A. L.A. Station. You would, I mean, at least today, the way you would do that would be you would have to at minimum

deconflict it with the FBI. So that the special agent in charge. They're not doing it as well. Right. So they're not doing it as well. The CIA could still do the pitch, you know, the guy can go abroad and you run, in 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 US. And so this is, look, this is a theory and it's definitely, you know, no commission report

inquiry has backed up this theory. But it's one I've heard from people who were involved in, you know, counterterrorism and 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 onto 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, as if you like to recruit and run those sources. 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. 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. They're not saying it definitely happened. But they're saying that is one explanation other than just a mistake for the to hand off the information to the FBI. I don't have any facts to back this up, but I find it very plausible. Okay. 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. To put it 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 Alexation were viewed with suspicion. 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. Yeah.

You know, you kind of, you get this sense of we don't inside Alex station, they may have not even wanted the FBI detailees 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. 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. 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. And as a reminder, of course, you do not have to wait for those episodes. Go and join the Declassified Club at the Rest Is Classified.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 Morel, who was President Bush's daily intelligence briefer on the morning of night 11th.

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