The 9/11 Files: The CIA’s Secret Mission Gone Wrong | Ep 1

A former FBI agent who was embedded in the CIA’s Bin Laden unit, Mark Rossini, claims the CIA was fully aware that the 9/11 hijackers were in the United States planning an attack. Rather than inform the FBI, the CIA tried to recruit two of the hijackers for a “false-flag” operation, which quickly spiraled out of control. The failed mission raises urgent questions about government secrecy, intelligence failures, and what really happened before 9/11. We’ve centralized all the evidence, key players, and timeline into this Watch Companion: www.tuckercarlson.com/the-911-files-watch-companion-ep-1. Paid partnerships with: MeriwetherFarms: Visit https://MeriwetherFarms.com/Tucker and use code TUCKER76 for 15% off your first order. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:29Tucker Carlson?

  For 24 years now, politicians, the media, intel agencies in this country and abroad have all demanded that you believe the official story about 9/11. And here’s what it is. They tell you a group of Al Qaeda-affiliated terrorists, many of whom were known to US intel services, somehow managed to evade capture for years as they planned the most significant and elaborate terror attack in human history. We’re told that despite repeated encounters with the FBI, the CIA, local law enforcement, airport security, foreign intel organizations, the right information somehow never made it to the right people. The government failed because it just didn’t have the intelligence it needed.

• 1:14Tucker Carlson?

  That’s the story. That story is a lie. Nearly 25 years later, the families of 3,000 civilians are still mourning the murder of their loved ones. Anyone who doubts the official narrative is cast as a kook, a criminal, a fringe conspiracy theorist, and punished. They’ve been blacklisted and censored and banned, even as the leaders who failed to protect our country on 9/11 use these attacks as a pretense to expand their own powers and permanently transform the United States. None of this is speculation. All of it is true. Over the course of this series, you will hear accounts from people who lived it: CIA officers and analysts who were there, FBI agents from the Bin Laden unit, family members of the victims.

• 2:00Tucker Carlson?

  None of these people are kooks. All of them have firsthand information. What they'll tell you is that what you have been told about September 11th is not true. Why are we doing this? Our purpose is in part to make the strongest possible case for a real investigation into 9/11, 25 years later. A new 9/11 commission. One that is honest. One that is not guided by partisan political interests. One that is not serving foreign powers. To do this investigation, we spent many months looking into what actually happened and speaking to people who saw it. We poured over thousands of pages of documents, mostly primary sources, but also contemporaneous news reports and declassified government documents.

• 2:44Tucker Carlson?

  Over the course of this investigation, we made numerous findings that shocked us. Not least of which, the apparent role that former CIA Director John Brennan played in helping bring the 9/11 hijackers to the United States. And the remarkable lengths the CIA went to to protect the 9/11 hijackers from the FBI and from domestic law enforcement. Telling the full story requires starting before the attacks. Going back to something called Alec Station, that was the CIA's Bin Laden unit in 1999.

• 3:19Speaker 02

  My name is Mark Rossini. I'm a former FBI agent. So from January 1999 to May of 2003, I was the FBI New York Joint Terrorism Task Force representative to Alec Station at CIA Headquarters. Before 9/11, there were no sources in al-Qaeda. None. There was a group of Pashtun caretakers, okay? They called them the Trod Pints. Trod Pints were these Pashtun people that were Bin Laden's tea boys and tea gals, right? And they were the great source of the Pakistani intel service

• 4:01Speaker 02

  that was feeding information from the Trod Pints to the ISI, to the CIA, about what was going on in al-Qaeda. They had all electronic communications, satellite shit in the world, imagery. I remember looking at images of Bin Laden, you know, in his courtyard, all that. Fine. But what's in his head? What's he saying? What's he doing? These people are 10,000 miles away. They don't give a shit about America. Although I don't care about going to jail, they want to die. How are you gonna get a source inside there?

• 4:29Tucker Carlson?

  Before September 11th, US intel services got most of their intelligence on Bin Laden from what was called the Hada Home Switchboard in Sanaa, Yemen. That was a communications hub that Bin Laden and his associates used to communicate with each other. They were, at the time, living in Yemen. The FBI gained access to this after the 1998 embassy bombings in East Africa.

• 4:51Speaker 02

  How did we officially get the Hada Home in Sanaa, Yemen, on the books, on the radar, if you will?

• 5:01Speaker 02

  Nairobi, 1998, August 7th. John Antisef, Special Agent John Antisef, greatest FBI agent ever in the FBI, even better than me. John flies over to Nairobi. And one of the survivors, one of the perpetrators who chickened out and ran and lived, Daoud Rashida Al-Wali, Saudi, he gets captured by the Kenyan police. John flies over from the York, and already there have been two FBI agents interviewing Daoud. They were getting someplace, but they really weren't getting that far, right? John walks in. And first thing he does, he says, "You need some water? You wanna drink? Did you eat today? Did you pray?

• 5:46Speaker 02

  Are you okay?" "Yeah, I'm fine, I'm fine, I'm fine," he said. He said, "Just relax, just, just, just, let's have a chat." He didn't beat him with a phone book, he didn't fucking waterboard him, he didn't pull his fingernails out, he wasn't Mr. Tough Guy, like all these fucking assholes like Dick Cheney wanna believe, right? All pieces of shit. He talked to him, like a human being. "Take me through the day, talk to me." "Well, I went to the hotel, and I got my stuff ready." "And?" "Did you, did you call anybody?" "Yeah, yeah, yeah, I called this number." And he wrote it down. And he gave John the number of the Hada Home in Sanaa, Yemen,

• 6:29Speaker 02

  which was the Al Qaeda switchboard that we in the FBI had no fucking clue existed up until that point.

• 6:38Speaker 02

  CIA and NSA did, because remember, they had been listening to the Nairobi cell and their activity since 1996. We in the FBI didn't know about that number.

• 6:49Tucker Carlson?

  The Hada home wasn't just a communications hub for Al Qaeda. It was the physical home of the father-in-law of Khalid Al-Midhar, one of the future 9/11 hijackers.

• 6:59Speaker 02

  At the end of 1999, listening to that phone is when the CIA learns and the NSA learns that Khalid Al-Midhar is going to be traveling from there to Dubai and then from Dubai onward to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia to meet the summit.

• 7:21Tucker Carlson?

  The summit was a meeting of an operational cadre of Al Qaeda-affiliated terrorists from around the world.

• 7:27Speaker 02

  He was scheduled to travel on or about January 5, 2000. The NSA has the ability, didn't probably still has, to get any plane, airplane reservation at once in the world and know about it, right? We knew his passport number, we had the phone, we had everything. So we knew his travel information, we knew what flights he was taking, we knew what seat he was gonna sit in. The CIA arranges for when he gets to Dubai to be secondary, okay? Not fully questioned, but, you know, talk to him a little bit. And then he goes to his hotel room and they arrange to search his room and go in. And when they go in, his passport is there and they take pictures of it and photocopy it. And they send back the imagery.

• 8:12Speaker 02

  And lo and behold, in his passport is a visa to go to the United States of America, issued out of the American consulate in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia.

• 8:23Tucker Carlson?

  According to one recently released court filings, quote, "The visas were issued to facilitate an operation run by the Saudis and the CIA spying operation." The station chief in Riyadh at the time was future CIA Director John Brennan. The CIA continued tracking Al-Midhar to Kuala Lumpur, where he met up with other Al Qaeda associates, including Nawaf Al-Hazmi, a second future 9/11 hijacker.

• 8:49Speaker 02

  He lands in Kuala Lumpur. They entrust the Malaysia Special Branch Police to surveil this terrorist summit in this park in Kuala Lumpur.

• 9:02Speaker 02

  And so much so to tail them and to surveil them, etc. And that information ends up in a communication from Kuala Lumpur Station CIA to CIA Headquarters to Alex Station to the computer screen of me and Special Agent Doug Miller of Washington Field Office FBI. You have this cable that lays out the meeting Kuala Lumpur, the photocopying of his passport in Dubai, and the learning of the visa to go to United States of America. Doug Miller gets up from his cubicle of power, comes over to my cubicle of power and says, "Hey, we gotta tell the FBI about this."

• 9:46Speaker 02

  I said, "Doug, you damn right." He goes, "I'll write up to CIR." "What is a CIR?" "A CIR is what is a Central Intelligence Report." Doug writes it, he sends it to me. I approve it, and it goes to the desk of Michael Ann Casey, CIA Officer, Analyst.

• 10:06Speaker 02

  And it sits in her queue, her electronic queue, and it doesn't move for like, a day or two. It should move in a fucking few hours. I'll never forget, like it was yesterday, never forget. I'm standing over her, and I said, "Hey, Doug's CIR, she's gotta go to the FBI." He said, "No, it's not." I said, "Well, why not?" She said, "Because it's not FBI, not an FBI matter." "It's not FBI matter." "It's a CIA matter, and when and if we want the FBI to know, we will tell them, and you are not to say anything."

• 10:45Speaker 02

  I said, "But, yeah, but they got a visa to come to the US." Like, she said, "No, we're handling it, and when we want to tell the FBI, we will."

• 10:54Speaker 02

  And I looked at her, and you remember she got up, and she put her hands on her hip, pointing a finger at me.

• 11:00Speaker 02

  Now, in my naivete...

• 11:05Speaker 02

  I believed her. And I have to live with that every day of my life. I had believed her.

• 11:13Tucker Carlson?

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• 12:39Tucker Carlson?

  were moving. On January 8, 2000, CIA surveillance teams reported that Ahmed Har had boarded a flight to Bangkok, Thailand. He was accompanied by a man they identified as Al Hazmi. According to the official account, this is where the trail went cold. The CIA placed their names on a watch list and asked that Thai authorities track their movements. Three months later, the Thai government reported back. Al Hazmi had boarded a United Airlines flight to Los Angeles. Ahmed Har was with him. The two hijackers had arrived in the United States.

• 13:14Speaker 02

  But here's my problem with this whole fucking thing and the whole subsequent investigation of 9/11.

• 13:23Speaker 02

  You have CIA then following one man and then two men all over the planet. And then eventually even to America, right? Landing in Los Angeles, California, and you don't tell the FBI.

• 13:38Tucker Carlson?

  But why would the CIA want to hide the highly relevant and potentially dangerous fact that two known Al Qaeda terrorists had just landed in California? According to a recently released court filing, former White House counterterrorism's Richard Clark told government investigators that the "CIA was running a false flag operation to recruit the hijackers."

• 14:00Speaker 03

  When Kofa Black became the head of the counterterrorism center at CIA, he was aghast that they had no sources in Al Qaeda. So he told me, "I'm going to try to get sources in Al Qaeda." I can understand them possibly saying, "We need to develop sources inside Al Qaeda. When we do that, we can't tell anybody about it."

• 14:26Tucker Carlson?

  After Clark made that claim publicly, he received an angry call from former director of the CIA, George Tenet, who did not deny the allegations made by Mr. Clark. But when we reached out to Tenet, his spokesperson denied that the CIA was recruiting hijackers, calling it "false rumors" and saying, "That's categorically not true." He also recalled that the executive director of the 9/11 Commission, Philip Zelico, blocked the Commission's investigation into the matter at the behest of Condoleezza Rice.

• 14:58Speaker 02

  CIA had this delusional grand plan. So the CIA, with their information that they had from the Hada House and their own psychological analysis of everybody in that team, they figured the best way is maybe to recruit somebody who came over from Malaysia.

• 15:20Speaker 02

  Khalid Al-Midhar and Al-Hazmi. We kept the FBI at bay because we told Mark Rossini and Doug Miller to shut the fuck up. So let's just try to get inside there. And that's what went wrong.

• 15:37Speaker 02

  That was the grand lie, the grand risk, the grand delusion. You had a duty to protect Americans and you failed because of your fucking fantastical delusion that you could recruit somebody inside the cell.

• 15:52Tucker Carlson?

  The official 9/11 report does not address the CIA's plan to recruit the hijackers. It's not even mentioned. It's possible this is because the CIA blocked 9/11 Commission investigators from talking to the agents who participated in the plot. Amazingly, the CIA's Director of Operations kept the CIA operative attempting to recruit the hijackers, referred to as "VVV" in the documents, away from the Commission's investigators. The consequence of this? The Commission's explanation for this story is that the CIA made an honest mistake. The actual language in the report says the CIA played "zone defense" and the FBI had "a man-to-man approach to counterterrorism."

• 16:36Tucker Carlson?

  The difference in strategies is why the CIA didn't tell the FBI that terrorists had arrived on American soil. Incredibly, the Commission investigators didn't ask the CIA Director at the time, George Tenet, about the summit in Kuala Lumpur, or why the CIA had blocked the FBI from being warned. It wasn't the story they wanted.

• 16:59Speaker 02

  And that is the crux of the matter, and that is the truth, and no one has ever answered those questions, no one has the balls to, because they're afraid, because the house will come tumbling down.

• 17:11Tucker Carlson?

  So how exactly did the CIA try to recruit the 9/11 hijackers? Well, one amazing thing about their arrival is that they didn't try to hide. The hijackers used their real names while in the United States, they operated in plain daylight. Al-Hazmi and Al-Midhar lived in San Diego for more than a year before the attacks, they lived openly. In fact, they were so open that Hazmi's name, address, and a home phone number were listed in the San Diego phone book.

• 17:41Tucker Carlson?

  When they arrived, the hijackers encountered a Saudi intel operative called Omar al-Bayoumi. They met at a restaurant outside of Los Angeles.

• 17:50Speaker 02

  The CIA utilized the Saudis in the form of Omar al-Bayoumi to spy for them and to gather intelligence.

• 18:01Tucker Carlson?

  Before 9/11, the CIA was forbidden from engaging in domestic spying. They used the Saudi intelligence as a workaround.

• 18:09Speaker 02

  We'll rely upon the Saudi GID, General Intelligence Directorate, their version of the CIA, via Prince Bandar, via their man Omar al-Bayoumi, to keep us informed as to the activity of these terrorists.

• 18:24Tucker Carlson?

  Bayoumi's notebook, which was uncovered when British law enforcement raided his home in the UK, contained a drawing of an airplane and mathematical calculations related to flying it. The 9/11 Commission investigators never saw this. At the time, al-Bayoumi had a no-show job at a Saudi aviation contractor called AVCO. The company's employees say he was one of roughly 50 ghost employees working there at the time, taking the paycheck but never coming to work. According to declassified government documents, an investigator from the 9/11 Commission said al-Bayoumi was receiving substantial sums of money from the Saudi embassy in Washington prior to the 9/11 attacks, that the money was being funneled from accounts at Riggs

• 19:07Tucker Carlson?

  Bank in Georgetown belonging to Haifa bin Faisal, the wife of the Saudi ambassador to the United States. By using the Saudis as a proxy to recruit the 9/11 hijackers, the CIA gave itself cover. If things went wrong, they could push a narrative that blamed the Saudi government for the attacks, which is what they did.

• 19:26Speaker 02

  For all intents and purposes, Omar al-Bayoumi was an employee of the Saudi Arabian Embassy in Washington, DC, in their consulate in Los Angeles, California.

• 19:35Tucker Carlson?

  al-Bayoumi convinced the hijackers to move to San Diego, helped them find an apartment. He served as a cosigner on the lease to that apartment. He paid their first month's rent and deposit. He got them bank accounts, he got them driver's license. He introduced them to many other radical Muslims in the area, including the cleric Anwar al-Awlaki. Eventually, al-Midhar went home to Yemen.

• 19:58Speaker 02

  Khalid al-Midhar leaves America for his daughter's birth, right? And in that time, he loses his passport.

• 20:08Speaker 02

  He claims he went to Afghanistan. He goes back to Jeddah and gets another passport. And by this time, even prior, as I understand it now, the Saudis had identified the terrorists, the hijackers, as potential threats to the kingdom and had put chips in their passports identifying them as a threat. Al-Midhar comes back to the United States, I believe it was on July 4, 2001. He's allowed back in, not stopped, not questioned. So here's a guy that the CIA

• 20:51Speaker 02

  knew came to America, had been at this terrorist summit meeting in Malaysia in January 2000. He's allowed to leave and come back.

• 21:02Tucker Carlson?

  Midhar was able to exit and enter the country at will because he was issued a multi-visit US visa. According to a summary of an interview with an FBI agent from Alex Station, "Al-Hamsi and Al-Midhar obtained their visas to enter the United States at the American consulate in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. All told, the vast majority of the 1991 hijackers had their visas issued at that consulate in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. At the time, John Brennan was running the CIA station there. Just a few days before Al-Midhar re-entered the country at JFK Airport in New York, the FBI and the CIA held a joint meeting in New York City to discuss the bombing of the USS Cole, which Al-Midhar was involved in.

• 21:45Speaker 04

  ...killed 17 soldiers on the USS Cole.

• 21:48Tucker Carlson?

  An FBI agent was shown a photograph of Al-Midhar taken at the summit in Kuala Lumpur. The agent asked the CIA who this man was, but the CIA once again refused to tell them. It wasn't until August of 2001 that the CIA finally alerted the FBI. And of course, by then, it was too late. It's not just Mark Rossini who testifies to this. Another anonymous FBI agent told investigators that, "He/she believed the CIA's operation may have spun out of control." And that "they," the CIA, "came to the FBI with limited information in an attempt to locate the hijackers without revealing the true nature or extent of their operation against al-Qaeda."

• 22:33Tucker Carlson?

  This is the failure of the 9/11 Commission and every other fucking commission that ever existed after that. But if the CIA was grooming the hijackers as sources, the FBI failed too. When al-Hazmi and al-Mudhar were in California, they lived for a period in the home of an FBI informant called Abdu Satar. And yet somehow, the FBI never learned about this. Then, less than a month before the terror attacks, the FBI began an investigation into a French Moroccan national called Zacharias Massawi. He had just moved to Minneapolis from Oklahoma, where he resumed aviation training. After raising suspicions during training,

• 23:16Tucker Carlson?

  he was arrested on August 16th and charged with immigration violations. But agents were denied permission to search his laptop and the room where he was staying. His exact connection to the hijacking remains unclear even now. But he did receive wire transfers from Ramzi bin al-Shib, who was also sending money to the hijackers. In July 2001, an FBI agent stationed in the Phoenix Field Office sent a memo to headquarters theorizing that there could be "a coordinated effort by Osama bin Laden to send individuals to the United States to receive aviation training." For some reason, this memo was never received by headquarters, not until after 9/11. Why?

• 23:59Tucker Carlson?

  Possibly because, as late as 2003, the FBI didn't have a functioning internal email system. Most case files were not digitized, they weren't searchable, and employees did not have access to the Internet. That's true. By September 2001, the Bureau's computers were so out of date, it took 12 commands simply to save a document. And in the aftermath of the attack, the FBI distributed photographs of the suspected hijackers via express mail. They didn't have scanners. The Bush administration worked hard for us not to know any of this. They hid it. Many of these details were discovered during the Congressional joint inquiry into 9/11.

• 24:39Tucker Carlson?

  But when Congress released its report, the 28 pages dealing with the hijackers' time in Southern California were hidden. They were redacted. When a man called Philip Zelico took over as the Commission's executive director, he reached a secret agreement with the White House to block his investigators from accessing records related to the hijackers until the White House had already screened them. Government documents show that the Commission investigator assigned to this topic complained that, quote, "Zelico limited the number of witnesses the Commission investigators could interview." And just days before the report was released, Dieter Snell, senior counsel to the Commission, attempted to remove most of the details of the Saudi collaboration with the hijackers.

• 25:23Tucker Carlson?

  Some of the findings were included in the end, but they were buried in the footnotes. The truth is, the official 9/11 Commission report, sold to the American public and the world for decades as the definitive account of what happened that day, is a lie. 9/11 Commission, it's a cover-up. But how did the Bush administration manage to hijack what was sold as an independent commission? And what exactly were they trying to hide? We'll reveal what we found in the next episode. Thank you for watching The 9/11 Files. The next episode drops next week, or you can unlock the entire five-part series right

• 26:06Tucker Carlson?

  now, ad-free, by becoming a TCN member. Members also get access to the Watch Companion, a guide to the timeline, the key figures, the primary sources that we went to to bring you this documentary. You can read along as you watch. Join us today at TuckerCarlson.com for the whole series all at once as support our investigative work. We couldn't do any of this without our members. We're grateful for you, so thanks.