The Rest Is Classified - 189. 9/11: How Much Did the Saudis Know? (Ep 3)

Episode Date: August 30, 2026

Fifteen of the nineteen hijackers on 9/11 came from Saudi Arabia, many from a handful of poor remote villages. Who were the men known as ‘the muscle’, and what made them? Listen as David and Gordon explore the alleged Saudi connection to the 9/11 plot. ------------------- THE REST IS CLASSIFIED LIVE 2026 at The Rest Is Fest: Buy your tickets ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠to see David, Gordon and special guest Anthony Scaramucci live on stage at London’s Southbank Centre on 5 September: https://www.southbankcentre.co.uk/whats-on/scaramucci-vs-the-rest-is-classified-team-america/ ------------------- 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. Who were the hijackers behind 9-11? And how did they live, train and move through America undetected? Well, welcome to The Rest Is Classified. I'm Gordon Carrera. And I'm David McCloskey.

So so far, David, we have been looking at. at how the pilots who were going to take part in 9-11 reached America and were learning how to fly, how the CIA had indications, bits of intelligence, about two of them, but how the hand-off to the FBI didn't go as it should have done. And we've looked overall, I think, more at the leadership back in Afghanistan, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed Osama bin Laden,

and the pilots, people like Mohammed Atta from the Hamburg cell. But of course, Al-Qaeda needs more than just pilots to take over that plane. They need people to storm the coppits, to subdue the flight crews, and to herd the passengers. And for that, they need muscle. But before that, a quick word from our sponsors, HP. This episode is brought to you by HP. In intelligence, you quickly learn that you are only as strong as the network around you. It's rarely a single major event that undermines an operation.

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that fits their needs and budget. To see how HP helps businesses work securely and productively, visit HP.com forward slash classified. Trick listeners also benefit from 10% off HP business technology with the code Trick 10. So David, on 9-11, there's going to be four pilots, but 15 foot soldiers. Now, we've already met two of them, Hasme and Midar, who trained briefly to be pilots, but then washed out of flight school. But let's look a bit more deeply at who the others are involved in that. The muscle for the plot are going to be quite young, between 20 and 28, and for the most part, very unremarkable. Mostly unmarried, mostly without work. Most of them don't have education beyond high school.

I think for the recruiters, for KSM and for Bin Laden, young and unattached is very much the mold thereafter. And you can think of them as the muscle, but that makes them, I think in your mind almost seem like they're very physically imposing. Yeah, like the muscle in against the film. Yeah, like a bodyguard or something. And it's really, that's not going to be quite right.

Most of them are not physically imposing. In fact, they're typically between 5-5 and 5-7, and they're really not recruited ultimately for brawn or for certain kind of physical ability, physical strength. But for willingness, ideological dedication. And as we'll see, you know, a few of them are perhaps not quite so devout, but are going to be totally ideologically dedicated. They're willing to use violence. That's the crucial thing. 14 of the 15 muscle are going to be Saudis. There's a loan exception from the UAE.

And the Saudis don't come from the kingdom kind of broadly. They come from very specific regions. And why do we think they were almost all from Saudi? Is it to do with visas and ease of access to the US? Or some people have suggested this was a deliberate attempt to create friction between the US and Saudi Arabia by using Saudi citizens? I'm skeptical of that. I think that's perhaps an added bonus. I do think it's primarily driven by the visa issue. It's just if you're looking at al-Qaeda's recruiting pool, getting people from Saudi into the U.S. is a lot easier than Yemen or somewhere else. I think it also plays into the natural sort of networks that al-Qaeda has for recruitment and the types of people who are, as we'll see, deciding to make this journey from. the Gulf from Saudi into the camps in Afghanistan.

Four of the muscle are going to come from a tribe clustering in and around these kind of small towns of the Baja region of Saudi Arabia. It says isolated, very underdeveloped stretch of Saudi, north of Mecca, not so far from the Red Sea. Five more come from Asir province, which is a very poor and remote region in the southwest, kind of running along the Yemeni border. It's a very weakly policed place. It is very distant from the center of Saudi power, and it's sometimes called the wild frontier. Two of these are brothers, and one actually has a university degree, a wife and a daughter, and we'll meet him later.

So these guys are mostly provincial Saudis, and this will be important for thinking about their cover in the states. Most of these guys don't have experience living in the West at all. Their English is rudimentary, and frankly, they do. don't have much experience, even flying through airports, going through security, being on planes. Most of these guys come to al-Qaeda by way of radical clerics and mosque networks inside Saudi Arabia. And I think it's important to set up their context in Saudi to understand who they are and why they came to participate in the plot. So a brief moment on Saudi. Saudi Arabia is basically governed by a centuries-old bargain between the Aosoud,

become the ruling family of Saudi Arabia when the kingdom is conquered in the 1930s, and the Wahhabi clerical establishment. And the bargain is basically that the Al-Soud are given a blessing by the Wahhabi clerical establishment to rule Saudi. And in exchange, Thou Sadd give the Wahhabi religious establishment a tremendous amount of leeway and control over religious and cultural and social life inside the kingdom itself. The hijackers are, or the would-be hijackers, are born mostly in the mid-70s and early 80s. And we talked about this in the first episode because they are growing up, they're being

raised in a world that is changing tremendously post-1979. 79 is this kind of hinge year in the Middle East, but also in particular in Saudi Arabia. So, you know, we have this turmoil of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 79, the Iranian Revolution, and then most directly for them, the siege of the Grand Mosque in Mecca ends in bloody disaster as this kind of uprising is crushed. And the group that took over the Grand Mosque is essentially a kind of Wahhabi offshoot that is practicing an extremely austere brand of Salafi jihadism. And the al-saud after that siege is over take away a very important lesson, which is going to be important for the lives of the men who are going to hijack the planes on 9-11.

And the lesson the Saudi government takes away is that they will not be outflanked by Sunni radicals at home or the heretical Iranian Shia abroad. And so what it means is that in the 80s and the 90s, in the 90s, 90s as these hijackers are coming of age, the Saudi regime is pouring money into religious schooling, into mosques, and into the clerical establishment in Saudi and abroad. And the abroad bit is also interesting because what you see is the money building big mosques and big networks around the world, including in the UK and Europe in other places and this Saudi Wahhabi ideology spreading quite broadly. And actually that will be perhaps part of our story.

is the influence of some of that money and ideology pushing around the world as well as at home. And that's, I guess, the context for these hijackers who are young men at the time of 9-11 in terms of what they've grown up with is that more extremist brand of the ideology of Islam. They come of age in an era where the Saudi regime has basically doubled down on the Wahhabi clerical establishment in kind of a bid to, to strike. strengthen its legitimacy, both at home and abroad. Since it's worth thinking about how would this practically have been experienced by the men who will hijack the planes. So just walk into their day for a second because these guys are not coming from to the extent that Saudi Arabia in the 70s and 80s has cosmopolitan cities. They're coming from kind of remote outlying areas. The day, their day, is going to be structured around prayer. Five times a day, they call to prayer goes out,

the shops, the offices, the restaurants, everything closes. You know, sometimes even with customers locked inside until the call to prayer passes. Men are expected to pray, break off to pray, ideally at a mosque. You have this kind of religious clock that's governing the time, right? There's the basic, this essence of just how the day progresses is not moving along on a clock that most of us would recognize here. It's moving on on a religious clock. There's religious police that are in force.

the strictures of the Wahhabi establishment called the Muddhawhin, the Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice, the April patrolling streets, markets. And they have real authority. You know, if you step out of line, if you're not praying, you know, if women are not covered appropriately, if they are out in the company of men who may not be related to them, all of this is a criminal offense, essentially, in Saudi at that time. After 79, as these hijackers are coming of age, it really hardens. To the extent there had been women on state television, for example, in Saudi, they go away. Alcohol, always banned, driven further underground. These guys are coming up in a really segregated society, segregated by gender in particular. Schools are segregated by gender. Restaurants, banks, offices.

Women, as we said, need male guardians chaperones to kind of get around. This is at age where women can't drive. You know, the ban is famously lifted in 2018. But as these young men are growing up, women are not operating vehicles. And in public, women are wearing black abaya oftentimes quite often with their face failed. So the world they grow up in is almost entirely male. And there's really very little. or entertainment that isn't religious.

I mean, I could remember going through Jeddah. I mean, this is decades later when I'm at the CIA. And when you look at what was available in the Jetta airport to buy in terms of books, magazines, the shelves would be just unrecognizable to any Western visitor. You know, it's a lot of Qur'an's Quranic material. I mean, it's not like you're, you're, getting normal magazines books, right? And this is in the 2010s. You can imagine how much different it would be when these young men are growing up. You know, there's no cinemas,

there's no concerts, there's no theaters. And I think we all, we probably all know this about Saudi and this era, but there is one religion, right? There are no churches, there are no temples. There is no non-Muslim worship allowed anywhere. Which, of course, going back to bin Laden, that's one of the reasons he hates when American troops come into Saudi Arabia for the first Gulf War after 1990, 1991, because he hates the idea that, you know, Christians are coming here and being inside the Holy Land. Just being there is a kind of challenge to him in this period in the 90s. The calendar and the law are Islamic.

The courts are run by religious judges that apply Sharia and impose punishments accordingly. The schools that these guys would have been brought. up in are absolutely saturated with religious instruction. Roughly a third of the classroom time, and actually when you count the Arabic instruction, which was predominantly studying the Quran and classic religious texts, maybe half of their school time was devoted to religious instruction. So in a Saudi elementary school that these guys would have gone to, maybe nine of the roughly 28 teaching hours went to Islamic studies and another nine to Arabic.

So when you compare that, that's 18 of your 28 periods during a week are really religiously focused, maybe four hours for math. So it's a world of believers and unbelievers and a very closed world. And I mean, Steve Cole says religion in Saudi was like the air. It's all around you. It's in inescapable. And I think this point from Lawrence Wright in his very good book, The Looming Tower, describes this kind of very two-dimensional religious world where you can either get more religious or less religious. You know, everything is kind of within that frame, within that construct.

And I guess for these hijackers, they are the ones becoming more religious. This is their identity. And part of that identity is the call to jihad to get involved in violence and struggle, because that is part of the ideology that is being pushed out in that period. It's worth a moment on this because I think it's so alien to a lot of us. if we live in the UK, if we live in the U.S., if we live in Canada, you know, young people, young men who are teenagers and then become young adults, typically have different ways to sort of experiment with becoming an adult with growing up. You can experiment intellectually. You can change your politics, right? None of these avenues are available to these men. And so the only sort of scale that matters. As you said, is, am I more religious or less religious?

Right? There's no, and even becoming less religious in a place like Saudi, what does that even look like? That's a very private affair if you're sort of intellectually detaching. But it is this point that also at that time, because we've had this 80s growth of a more extremist, austere form of Islam, and you've had this experience in Afghanistan and a call to jihad to get involved in jihad in the 80s. And in the 90s it finds new expression, doesn't it? And it is still there. It's been kind of perpetuated this idea that you should go, you know, jihad means

struggle, but it gets interpreted as fighting, you know, rather than an internal struggle. It is interpreted by some and pushed the idea. It means externally fighting enemies as well as an internal struggle against your enemies. And this call to jihad becomes very powerful in this period. And pushed out, I think, in many of the institutions there, in in the mosques and in the Wahhabi mosques. Which are very well funded. Which are very well funded. And that's true both within Saudi, but also actually in some of those places around the world. And that's, you know, one of the kind of controversies is in the 90s.

This is happening in mosques in the UK, you know, and in other places. And was it being spotted or worried about enough that this was being done and calling people to go out effectively to fight? but the route to fight is through the camps. You know, it's to go to these camps. And that's the key. Bin Laden is established camps where people who want to get involved in jihad, whether it's in fighting in Kashmir against India or whether it's in Chechnya against the Russians, or whether it's in Bosnia against the Serbs.

Afghanistan is the place you go to get trained to do that. And that's where people are going to go. And the way that these young men get involved in these networks begins at home. with clerics, with mosque networks that advocate for that very sort of offensive brand of jihad and legitimate the idea of traveling out to these camps and participating in the fight. Now, most of the men who will become the hijackers, the muscle, break with home in late 99 or early 2000. Let's focus on two who are brothers to personalize the story a bit. And they are Walid and Waila Al-Shari.

Weil is born in 1973, so in the year 2000, he's 27. Walid is born in 78, so in 2000, he's 22. They come from Asir, that poor remote region of Saudi, near the Yemeni border. They are brought up in a very large family, maybe 20 children, very typical religious household in that era. No music, no TV. There's no internet. There's no contact with women outside the family, pretty much in less than up a until the point marriage is, is arranged.

The brothers, interestingly, for the hijackers, they both end up attending a teacher's college, but Walid, who's the younger brother, doesn't finish. And he kind of drifts into an aimlessness that I think a lot of young men can relate to. It's like, what is the purpose of my life and what am I going to do with it? What then happens is his older brother, while, comes undone, the one who finished college. He's five months into a steady teaching job, and it looks like he gets depressed. Family can't quite understand what's happened to him. And, you know, you can imagine how even now it can be hard to grapple with people who,

what do you, how do you label someone who's just sort of having a really, really hard time, right? The family doesn't know what to do about it. And they bring in a Sheikh who's brought to read the Quran over him, and he suggests that while I'll take a pilgrimage to Mississippi. Dina to cure what's probably depression. And Waleed, the younger brother, goes along with him to kind of keep watch. Because you can imagine the family doesn't want this kid who they see is disturbed, making this trip alone.

On this pilgrimage, somewhere in the mosques and the study circles that they'll get involved in, they get a diagnosis for what's eating while. And the answer, because there isn't another answer in Saudi at this time, is religion, more of it. And it's this very, you know, conservative brand of Wahhabi Islam that's going to focus on kind of curing an ailment through jihad. So they have this trip to Medina. They go home back to Asir, and the two brothers commit themselves and swear binding oaths to participate in jihad somewhere. Waya leads the ceremony and Waleed follows. Their jihad at this point, though, is not focused on America. And I find that interesting. They actually want to fight the Russians in Chechnya. And this

seems to be quite a common theme. 1999 and a new Chechen war has 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. And true for the Hamburg cell. Exactly. Yeah. 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. actually turning away potential recruits. No more. We've got enough of them, you know, and they're not necessarily that good. So the brothers will wind up at the Al-Farru 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. Really, it is. It is. In 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? So they go through the basic training. Rifles, explosives, you know, calisthenics. I mean, I think we all in the, you know, months after 9-11 saw the footage of, you know, the jihadis, you know, working on monkey bars in the camps, right?

It's like, yeah, weird, I think. 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, weren'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. 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 innocence 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 brother's world as they're in these camps is al-Qaeda. Yeah. And so it's this kind of group think. mentality in which you're not reaching out to loved ones who might rain you in. Yep. The world, you know, 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. Yeah. Death-cult-like, I think that's right. Yeah. The figures are astonishing that there's something like 10 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? 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 a what they would call a martyrdom operation, which is a suicide operation. KS.M will later say, college 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.

Because a lot of people coming to these camps are going to look at that on the form. and be like, no thanks. Yeah. But these guys probably clicked it. They have clean records, right? No jihadist priors, no trouble with the police and 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, 99,000 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 planes operation, which will become 9-11. 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 partying. 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. Hey, this is Michael and Hannah from Gollhangers. The Rest is Science. This episode is brought to you by Cancer Research UK. When we talk about beating cancer, we often focus a lot on survival.

That can mean overlooking impacts that last long after treatment ends. Yeah, for example, take cancers in children and young people. The treatments themselves can be incredibly harsh. They can cause lifelong side effects like infertility or hearing loss. And Cancer Research UK is working to change that, because young people, they should be able to grow up hearing the voices of the people that they love and living their lives to the fullest. That's right.

And one clinical trial led by Cancer Research UK showed that giving another drug, alongside chemotherapy nearly halved the number of children losing their hearing. And today, the treatment combination is being used by doctors across the world. For more information about Cancer Research UK, their research and breakthroughs and how you can support them, visit cancerresearchuk.org slash rest is science. 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?

Well, at first they get a pretty simple instruction, which is go back to Saudi Arabia, get a clean passport, very similar to the Hamburgssel 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 U.S. visas, the brothers returned to Afghanistan. They're smuggled in and they head to a camp at Al-Matar for more specialized training. Because remember, they've already gone through that basic training. But now they're going to get specific training for the plane's operation, which is effectively how to hijack a plane.

The head instructor at Al-Matar is a guy named Abu Tarab al-Jordani. Alderdani 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. And under the FAA, the Federal Aviation Administration in the U.S., under the rules of 2001, knives with blades under four inches can pass legally through airport checkpoints. Kind of seems amazing now.

It does. And remember, there were casing of U.S. 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. 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, you know, hijackings were designed to land a plane, you know, to take it over rather than to crash it. Yeah, there was 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, right? And again, We talked about this, you know, in an earlier episode that the doctrine really rests on the assumption that hijackers want something. 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, they're 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 a 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, maybe they're going to take the plane to Cuba or Tunisia or something like that and landed and make demands. So, you know, there's also not a real backstop. I mean, we talked about at the Al-Metard 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, Abadir Abad al-Jordani 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. 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, be able to. 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. And we should say we focused on two brothers, but others, but others are, are going to be recruited the rest of the muscle and are going to be trained in the same way. 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 are 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. 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 you can, you know, it's got Western elements as well as bits which are maybe closer 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. 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 immigration and customs officials,

and all together, they'll enter the U.S. successfully 33 times over the roughly two years leading up to the plot through nine different airports. 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 U.S. 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 a visa express program for Saudi citizens specifically to make it easier for them to get into the U.S. 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. 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 alias 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. 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 US visa. 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, I mean, Al-Qaeda is interesting. They ran a, you know, sort of a forgery and documents operation in Afghanistan. So they could do things like, you can imagine how it would be helpful. They could remove, you know, 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.

So, you know, they've got passports which maybe have some suspicious elements who 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. Again, it's that understanding this was a different era when controls were much weaker. Yeah, I think, you know, for anyone who has come of age after 9-11, your experience of going through a passport control or, or even just going through security and 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.

Prior to 9-11, these, you know, it's kind of, it's more like when you're going through an airport, it's travel facilitation. Right? It's like, how do you move people through? Yeah. And so in that case, in Orlando, you know, there's. This guy who's initially flagged by, you know, one customs official is thinking, hey, this looks a little weird. In secondary, the next officer who looks at him says, this guy's a tourist. Yeah, it goes.

Go along. Yeah, it's so different. 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. Nine of them cluster in South Florida, where remember three of the population. 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

Wali and Wael are part of this cluster. Waili appears to have come in the spring, 2001, probably around late April, and while somewhat later. They reached 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. Nearly all of them get driver's licenses, U.S. driver's licenses. Which are useful, of course, because you can use those as ID to get on planes. Correct. Domestic flights in the U.S.

Correct. 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 Walid as a very enthusiastic fan of what was then called the Florida Marlins baseball team. Okay. You can imagine how, you know, you go back to the training they got in Pakistan and Dubai on how you fit in. You could imagine. Go to a sports guy.

Yeah. Or where find a local sports team and understand what they're up to and get some of the gear. wear 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. 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 and kind of Virginia, which is going to be linked to the other

Saudi pilot, Hanjur. 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. 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. 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 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 rents another one. 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 anyway, I think I mentioned the book, 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. 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. You know, while he's, while he was in Hamburg, he didn't drink. He just, like the culture being soaked in beer. it is interesting because in the days after 9-11, when we start to see those photos, you know, of the hijackers, there's a rush by reporters in the states to try to figure out who they were. Who are they living? You know, how do they live here? And reporters just descend on, you know, 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. 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 coax. Vodkas with orange juice. They played arcade games. They played Blackjack. Apparently played trivial pursuit. That's a way of detail. They would get into arguments over over the bar bill. And there were similar vibes in some other FBI interviews with the manager of an establishment called the Pink Puff.

I'm not aware of the pink pony. Which is, well, that's good, Gordon. It is a strip club in Daytona Beach. And the owner of the pink ponies 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. Slightly weird. 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. I have to say, I'm inclined to not buy it in these cases, although there is one detail which will come to that occurs on the night of September the 10th. And, and which McDermott features in his book that I'm inclined to buy that drifts into this sort of behavior. But I'm, I have to say I'm skeptical about it.

Just because of the group dynamics among them and how, you know, as we talked about the sort of the way you demonstrate fealty to the group and the way you gain status and connection with the group is through piety. Yeah. I'm in and sort of devotion to the cause. The Saudi background of these people. 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. 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. 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, you know, putting aside the awfulness of all the loss of life, but, you know, 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. About 300,000 of that seems to have flowed through the hijackers' own U.S. 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 returning the money. And they're closing out the books and returning money that they haven't spent. Rather than blowing it. Rather than blowing it somewhere.

Yeah, yeah, and spending it. You just don't need much money for this. 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 coming. 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,

is 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 $2,000. percent of al-Qaeda's operating budget in 2000 and 2001. The way Al-Qaeda gets money, the way Al-Qaeda raises funds for its operating expenses is essentially there are 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. They often think they might be donating to refugees, I don't know, Kashmir or Chechnya and refugees. It's sometimes that kind of, you know, it's portrayed as that, but the money might be flowing into Al Qaeda. And most of the money really ultimately is coming from this kind of group of rich financiers in the Gulf and it's been called the Golden Chain. A lot of these people financed and organizations finance 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. 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, donate that money. So the way the money gets to the hijackers is also very mundane.

It's wire transfers. I'm trying to hide anything. It's wire transfers from facilitators who are working inside KSM's network in Germany and the Emirates, right? Small wire transfers for the most part, so they're not going to raise any red flags. Cash and Travelers checks, right, that are just carried in the hijackers' pockets. pockets through customs and through the foreign bank accounts that the hijackers kind of true on with their debit cards, right, ATM cards once they're in the U.S. There is a significant paper trail here, right?

It connects the hijackers to the facilitators. But again, the point wasn't to hide anything, right? 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 launderers and drug cartels, right? We're not looking for Saudi tourists. But also, you're getting $8,000.

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, you know, when they knew Hasme and Madar were on the radar of the CIA, why 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, not having been done properly. Yeah, I mean, Husby and Madar, 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, you know, 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? 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 is obviously denied.

Yeah. 15 of the 19 are Saudi. bin Laden's a Saudi. A huge amount of the money in financing for al-Qaeda is coming from Saudi. So it's a reasonable question to ask. Now, 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, some pains not to exclude the likelihood that charities sponsored by the Saudi state had money diverted to al-Qaeda. Or that individuals in Saudi Arabia, rich individuals were supporting al-Qaeda

and passing money, which we know as part of that funding arrangement was the case. 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 line in Saudi between a private donor, a religious institution, and the state is really not clean. Yeah. 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-Bayumi, who is a Saudi national. He's in California. I just to remind people he plays a role in helping the two Saudi operatives, Khaled al-Madar, and the Wafal-Hasmi get settled in San Diego, in California, in early to mid-2000.

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. Right. He is a complicated figure. It's a complicated guy. He's on the payroll of a company called Erkan, 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 is 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 Biomi's contract be renewed as quickly as possible. 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 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.

Bob Graham, who's a U.S. Senator who chairs the congressional inquiry into 9-11, not the 9-11 Commission, looked in depth at Miami in the years after 9-11, and looked at the money. and it's very interesting that after Bayomi helps Midar and Hosmi 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 Hosmi leaves San Diego, right? So he gets him an extra $30,000 in exactly the window where he is helping Hasmean, Midar, two of the eventual hijackers get settled in the States. And I would also credit a recent investigation by the Sunday Times and the Times here in the UK into Albany.

And if you're wondering why it's a British investigation is because Albanymi 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 Albumi taking videos of the Capitol building and talking about security, taking

notes about flight paths around the United States and some of the kind of way stations that are used. I mean, a ton of videos, which again are, I mean, at the very least suspicious. Oh, they're beyond suspicious. 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. There's a notepad found among Biomey's things, which has this crude kind of hand-drawn sketch and blue ink of an aircraft. And alongside that, 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 Hasme and Bidar who were struggling in flight training with some questions around how to fly plane. And he can't explain these notes really. When you hear the police interrogation reports, he basically struggles to explain.

He's like it's a random equation. It's just an equation. Yeah. It's just an equation. Yeah. There's also a bunch of videos. I mean, Bayomi 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. It, like, on the face of it, you're like, this is a casing video, right? He's casing the Capitol and then providing that video to the would-be hijackers. 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 embassy. intelligence service. No, yeah. 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. 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 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 Hamseh and Midar. And, you know, he's, that's his, you know, and the money and the people are just part of that. I'm helpful to people without knowing their hijackers. 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 other, he heard two men speaking Arabic. He can tell they're Saudi. He approaches them. He befriends them. But I think the eyewitness testimony was that he was waiting for them. Yeah. And it looked more than accidental.

Right. And that, so much hinges on that. Right. 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 is 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. Yeah. And 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 by the time. But all 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. But again, they didn't have access to any of this material. I think, I think a couple points is me to close out this question. I think a couple 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. Yeah, I agree. Yeah. 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 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. 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 Bayomi 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 I 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. Yeah. And just to close it out, but Miami 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 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. Mohamed 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. And as a reminder, of course, you want to listen to this entire series right away. You can go and join the Declassified Club at the Rest Is Classified.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 were directly involved in the government response to 9-11 and folks who were inside the CIA and with President Bush on that day. We'll see you next time. See you next time.