188. 9/11: How to Recruit a Hijacker (Ep 2)

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: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠[email protected]⁠⁠⁠ 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

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

• 0:03David McCloskey?

  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 therestisclassified.com.

• 0:24Gordon Corera?

  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.

• 0:37David McCloskey?

  And I'm David McCloskey.

• 0:38Gordon Corera?

  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.

• 1:19Gordon Corera?

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• 1:22David McCloskey?

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• 1:34Gordon Corera?

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• 1:45David McCloskey?

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• 2:01David McCloskey?

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• 2:08Gordon Corera?

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• 2:26Gordon Corera?

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• 3:11Gordon Corera?

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• 4:21Gordon Corera?

  So David, let's look at how the idea becomes an actual plan and how people are recruited to carry it out.

• 4:30David McCloskey?

  Well, through the spring of 1999, so after this, this meeting where the Planes 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 kind of 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.

• 5:12David McCloskey?

  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, in 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.

• 5:34Gordon Corera?

  Who could do this.

• 5:35David McCloskey?

  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 Khalid Al-Midar, and the other one is Nawaf Al-Hazmi. And both are apparently so keen to strike the US and are kind of, you know, they've already been in this Al Qaeda pipeline. They already have US visas. Now Saudi Arabia at this time, and even now, of course.

• 6:05Gordon Corera?

  Close ally.

• 6:06David McCloskey?

  It's a close American ally. So for Saudi citizens, US 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, which you think from a, from a project manager's 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 US. Now, these Yemenis are initially selected to participate in an element of the plot, which imagines airliners being detonated, being exploded over the Pacific.

• 6:47Gordon Corera?

  Right.

• 6:48David McCloskey?

  So that 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 US 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 US visas, getting passports, clean passports that allow these operatives to get into the US and cover. Bin Laden and KSM know right away, as they're planning this in the spring of 1999, that they need people who can get into the US, who are not going to attract attention from the police or the FBI, right? They can't have prior jihadist credentials, criminal records.

• 7:32Gordon Corera?

  Yeah.

• 7:33David McCloskey?

  And a subset of them need to learn how to fly planes. And these two Saudi operatives that bin Laden has selected, Midar and Hazmi, 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 US might be challenging.

• 7:55Gordon Corera?

  You can't speak English.

• 7:55David McCloskey?

  You 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, right? 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.

• 8:40David McCloskey?

  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 timetables. 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, 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 for what's to come.

• 9:13Gordon Corera?

  We don't know which movies, do we?

• 9:14David McCloskey?

  No, I mean, it's actually frustrating. I went, I went into this to figure out what films he had looked at. And the sources are maddeningly nonspecific on this. But apparently, KSM edited them down to delete scenes that had uncovered female characters in them.

• 9:30Gordon Corera?

  It's this, I mean, this is a kind of weird thing where he's getting ideas from the Hollywood movies, but he doesn't want that bit of Hollywood.

• 9:35David McCloskey?

  Right. The main problem that KSM has, though, it's not the research piece of it.

• 9:40Gordon Corera?

  It's people.

• 9:41David McCloskey?

  It's people. I don't, he doesn't have recruits that can actually go into the US, train, and live there without attracting attention.

• 9:49Gordon Corera?

  But then in late 1999, they, 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.

• 10:07David McCloskey?

  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 phenomenal book. The center of the Hamburg Cell's world was a very shabby apartment at Merian Straße 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 had 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.

• 10:49David McCloskey?

  Over a two-year period, more than a dozen young Muslim men enlisted 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, from the Islamic world. Their landlord remembers them as very punctual with the rent and dressed like philosophy students.

• 11:08Gordon Corera?

  What does that mean?

• 11:09David McCloskey?

  Not quite sure what that means, sort of maybe shabbily dressed, I don't know.

• 11:12Gordon Corera?

  Yeah.

• 11:13David McCloskey?

  The leader of this group was an Egyptian named Mohamed 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 twenties.

• 11:26Gordon Corera?

  Yeah, a bit older than some of the other people involved, isn't he?

• 11:28David McCloskey?

  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. Mohamed Atta is kind of a disappointment to his very overbearing father. He graduated middle of his class, smart kid, but hadn't risen to the stature that his sisters had.

• 12:12Gordon Corera?

  He also has a problem with women, doesn't he?

• 12:14David McCloskey?

  He does.

• 12:15Gordon Corera?

  He's very 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 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 could get too deep into psychoanalyzing this, but he does seem to fit a certain type, doesn't he, in that way?

• 12:47David McCloskey?

  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, I 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.

• 13:28David McCloskey?

  And, you know, when you look at the different theories of how people actually get radicalized, this social sequestering.

• 13:38Gordon Corera?

  Yeah, group dynamics, groups of friends.

• 13:41David McCloskey?

  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.

• 14:24David McCloskey?

  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.

• 15:08David McCloskey?

  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 years, kind of un-Islamic. And the hatred of women, I think. And I think, you know, that's, putting it strongly, but I think it's right.

• 15:34Gordon Corera?

  Yeah.

• 15:34David McCloskey?

  I think he hates women. He directs that no woman should ever visit his grave.

• 15:41Gordon Corera?

  Wow.

• 15:42David McCloskey?

  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.

• 16:00Gordon Corera?

  I mean, that is weird.

• 16:02David McCloskey?

  He's not a fun guy.

• 16:03Gordon Corera?

  Pious, austere, and, I mean, he will become to some extent a leader of this cell as well. And you can kind of see why, because he's the disciplinarian as well.

• 16:13David McCloskey?

  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.

• 16:38Gordon Corera?

  The extremist.

• 16:39David McCloskey?

  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.

• 16:47Gordon Corera?

  So there are three others that go with him to Afghanistan in late 1999. We should say who those are as well.

• 16:53David McCloskey?

  So one is Marwan Al Shehi. He's an Emirati. He's younger, more easygoing, he's a government scholarship student, will also become a pilot. There's a guy named Ramzi bin Al Sheib. He's a Yemeni, and we'll talk about him. Eventually, he will not get a visa to the US. He's going to become a kind of logistical facilitator for the plot. There's a guy, I found this character very fascinating, Ziyad Jara. He's a Lebanese guy from a secular, pretty comfortable family background, very sociable, kind of an earthy guy.

• 17:28Gordon Corera?

  Very different from Atta, isn't he? Very different from Atta.

• 17:31David McCloskey?

  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. 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

• 18:14David McCloskey?

  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, where's a battlefield where an Islamic army, in their view, is fighting Western infidels? And in 1999, the key battleground is Chechnya.

• 18:42Gordon Corera?

  It's really interesting because what you see, and actually, if you look back 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.

• 19:14David McCloskey?

  It becomes Iraq.

• 19:15Gordon Corera?

  Yeah, and 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.

• 19:28David McCloskey?

  It's kind of by fate, happenstance, that they end up there because Bin Al Sheib and Shehi 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, speaks 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. It's these kind of social networks that are hard to see from the outside, but when you're inside them are really powerful. That contact that they're put in touch with is linked to Al Qaeda.

• 20:13David McCloskey?

  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 he gets 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.

• 20:32Gordon Corera?

  And he's got training camps, yeah.

• 20:33David McCloskey?

  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.

• 20:45Gordon Corera?

  And of course, this is, this is exactly what Bin Laden and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed want. Because you've, they've just started planning the planes operation, which will become nine eleven. 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.

• 21:05David McCloskey?

  Yeah, they're educated, they're ideologically committed, they've lived in Europe, so they would have a sense. Unlike Midar and Hazmi, 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, is not the norm. And at this point, the Hamburg cell 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.

• 21:50David McCloskey?

  Al Qaeda's paying monthly salaries, they're doing things like, I mean, they, they have, you know, cost of living, they have budgets for people, they have, you know, vacation policies.

• 21:59Gordon Corera?

  Yeah, it's a bureaucracy.

• 22:00David McCloskey?

  It is a bureaucracy.

• 22:01Gordon Corera?

  There's paperwork, there's all these things.

• 22:03David McCloskey?

  There's a furniture allowance of $1,200.

• 22:06Gordon Corera?

  Crazy, isn't it?

• 22:06David McCloskey?

  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, will show up at the camps and do tours and give lectures to kind of rouse the troops.

• 22:26Gordon Corera?

  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, and they've talked about how the, 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, and bringing them out. And I guess that's what's happens with this, this group from Hamburg.

• 23:01David McCloskey?

  Yeah, because the planes 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, they are kind of special, they're coming from Hamburg, right? So they swear by Atta, they swear allegiance.

• 23:30Gordon Corera?

  Allegiance, yeah.

• 23:30David McCloskey?

  To Bin Laden and are basically instantly 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.

• 23:45Gordon Corera?

  A bit older.

• 23:46David McCloskey?

  Probably the most rigid, most devout of the four. And acknowledgement, I think, also of his leadership capabilities and his status. As we've said, the plane 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 US 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.

• 24:27David McCloskey?

  In January of 2000, Atta and Bin Al Sheib go to Karachi, Pakistan, to meet with KSM. The two others from Hamburg go home without the Pakistanis stop, right? So already you're seeing that Atta, the leader, goes to meet with KSM, the project manager. With KSM, they figure out a commo plan, and they are given instructions on how to get home without drawing attention to the Afghanistan-Pakistan trip they've just done.

• 24:56Gordon Corera?

  And they do that by, by you report your passport stolen, don't you?

• 24:59David McCloskey?

  Exactly.

• 25:00Gordon Corera?

  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.

• 25:06David McCloskey?

  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, you need to look separate from that, so that you don't come under the eye of the Germans or, or potentially the Americans. They're instructed to enroll in flight schools and prepare to enter the US. All four of these men arrive back in Germany between January and March of the year 2000.

• 25:44Gordon Corera?

  And then they do that thing which jihadists are taught to do, which is lower your profile.

• 25:48David McCloskey?

  Yeah.

• 25:48Gordon Corera?

  Don't, 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, you know, might draw attention to you as a radical.

• 26:01David McCloskey?

  Jara, the

• 26:03Gordon Corera?

  The one with the girlfriend.

• 26:04David McCloskey?

  Earthy 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, he's lowering his profile, he's trying to make himself look as normal as possible. Sheihi goes back to the UAE for a wedding celebration, and a friend who hasn't seen him a while is shocked that Sheihi has shown up clean-shaven, acting like his old, normal self.

• 26:43David McCloskey?

  Three of them, Atta, Sheihi and Jara, get US visas without any problems. Bin Al Sheib, 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 US. And those three, Atta, Sheihi and Jara, arrive in the US in May and June of 2000.

• 27:23Gordon Corera?

  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.

• 27:36David McCloskey?

  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.

• 27:49Gordon Corera?

  That's a bit weird.

• 27:50David McCloskey?

  Which I find kind of a testament to maybe how, how genial he was. He buys a car. Atta and Sheihi leave for the States without having picked a school. Again, there's not, they, they understand that they, they need to be kind of separate, right? They don't want to be a cluster.

• 28:06Gordon Corera?

  Yeah.

• 28:06David McCloskey?

  That will, that will potentially draw more attention. So they go to this, Atta and Sheihi 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 another 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 Sheihi 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, they're moving quickly.

• 28:51David McCloskey?

  Atta is apparently a huge pain in the ass.

• 28:56David McCloskey?

  So he and Shaheen 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 and they actually fail what was called the stage one instruments exam in October. And they're obviously furious about this and upset and saying, look, we're in a 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 all exchange hundreds of calls, near constant email.

• 29:39Gordon Corera?

  It's hard to understand.

• 29:41David McCloskey?

  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 of elements of the tradecraft here. So commo, communications. Bin Al Sheib, the fourth member of the Hamburg cell who failed to get a visa, he becomes that, the link between KSM and Atta. And so what happens and how it works is Atta and Bin Al Sheib will email each other and talk about sensitive subjects using a kind of domestic sounding code, making it sound like they're students chattering on about their coursework and their fields of study.

• 30:24David McCloskey?

  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 Sheib 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 Sheib physically travels with the help of one of those couriers to see KSM in Pakistan.

• 31:05David McCloskey?

  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 that 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 Shaheen about $114,000 from Dubai in a handful of transfers that are really sized to look unremarkable, be small, and to, you know, pass through without notice.

• 31:42Gordon Corera?

  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.

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• 34:31Gordon Corera?

  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.

• 34:47David McCloskey?

  There's also those two Saudi operatives, Khalid Al-Midar and Nawaf Al-Hazmi, who had US visas, were really keen to be involved in an operation, and who had been picked, handpicked 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.

• 35:24Gordon Corera?

  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 Lumpur is an interesting place to go. I guess it's a, 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.

• 35:46David McCloskey?

  And it's easy to get in if you have a passport from Yemen or Saudi.

• 35:52Gordon Corera?

  Yeah.

• 35:53David McCloskey?

  Or the United Arab Emirates, right? It's, it's much easier to get in there than it would be, for example, in Europe.

• 35:58Gordon Corera?

  Yeah.

• 35:59David McCloskey?

  And it's kind of a Al Qaeda onsite 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 Nawaf Al-Hazmi and Khalid Al-Midar, those two Saudi operatives. They've got their US visas, and for them, this is a participation in this meeting, but it's also a waystation for what will become their onward travel to the US, to California. There are also these other two Yemenis who had been picked for the plot, who were there

• 36:41David McCloskey?

  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 Khalid, who's actually involved in the USS Cole 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 Kuala Lumpur. He'd lost his lower leg fighting the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan, and Bin Laden suggested he use the visit to case flights while he was there. And this casing is going to pay dividends because Khalid flies to Kuala Lumpur, to Bangkok,

• 37:23David McCloskey?

  to Hong Kong, and back, all on US carriers. And he's riding in first class to study the cockpit, kind of 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.

• 37:45Gordon Corera?

  In those days, actually, getting into a cockpit wasn't as hard as it would be after nine 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 in the plot.

• 38:01David McCloskey?

  And throughout the entirety of the plot, there'll be a lot of casing.

• 38:05Gordon Corera?

  Yeah.

• 38:06David McCloskey?

  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 in the next episode, he needs people who will actually take control of the airline.

• 38:17Gordon Corera?

  Yeah.

• 38:18David McCloskey?

  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.

• 38:28Gordon Corera?

  Now, this Kuala Lumpur meeting is really important because it is something that US intelligence is aware of, that a meeting is taking place of Al Qaeda operatives in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia in 2000. I mean, this is, this will lead to one of the questions about missed opportunities and missed intelligence and could nine 11 have been prevented?

• 38:49David McCloskey?

  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 US intelligence community from this signals intelligence really only has first names, but they run down leads and traces and identify one of the Saudis, Khalid Al Madar. They locate him leaving Yemen and transiting Dubai.

• 39:31David McCloskey?

  And in Dubai, his passport is photocopied. And it's here, US intelligence first understands a very, very important part of this story, which is that Khalid Al Madar has a US visa. This is January of 2000.

• 39:47Gordon Corera?

  An Al Qaeda operative has a US visa and is meeting other Al Qaeda operatives?

• 39:51David McCloskey?

  I think at this point, they might not be sure that Khalid Al Madar is an Al Qaeda operative.

• 39:55Gordon Corera?

  Okay.

• 39:55David McCloskey?

  But he is linked to a phone exchange.

• 40:00Gordon Corera?

  Right.

• 40:00David McCloskey?

  That has been used by Al Qaeda operatives for prior attacks. He's got a US 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 Khalid Al Madar lands, the CIA, working in a liaison capacity with the Malaysian special branch, puts the meeting under surveillance. And the Malaysians, they now have those 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.

• 40:42David McCloskey?

  But the trail very quickly dissolves because on January 8th, Hasmi and Madar, the two Saudi operatives abruptly fly to Bangkok. And the surveillance teams in Kuala Lumpur report that they've left. They say they've left on a short flight to Bangkok. But since it happened 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

• 41:24David McCloskey?

  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? Have there been any updates? And Bangkok station presumably pokes the Thais. And then in March, this bears fruit because the Thais report to Bangkok station that one of the men, Nawaf Al Hasmi, had actually left Thailand on January 15th on a United Airlines flight to Los Angeles. And weirdly enough, even though Khalid Al Madar is on that same flight, the Thais don't either know it or report it.

• 42:08David McCloskey?

  But what is known at this point in time, so this is March of 2000, is that Khalid Al Madar has a US visa and that Nawaf Al Hasmi is in the US.

• 42:19Gordon Corera?

  Two Al Qaeda operatives, effectively, people linked to Al Qaeda.

• 42:23David McCloskey?

  People linked to Al Qaeda.

• 42:24Gordon Corera?

  Al Qaeda. And this is going to be one of the key questions, and we're going to come back to this.

• 42:28David McCloskey?

  Yeah.

• 42:28Gordon Corera?

  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 nine 11 could have been spotted? But let's, 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 Hasmi and Madar land in LA 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 had been acclimatized.

• 43:04David McCloskey?

  Well, they don't really speak English. They've never been in the US 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, you know, these are the first, really the first two guys to be involved in 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 US phone book and had kind of thumbed through it, apparently at 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. KSM instructs them to pose as newly arrived Saudi students

• 43:49David McCloskey?

  and basically to go to local mosques to seek help getting acclimated. Then comes a piece of maybe luck.

• 43:58Gordon Corera?

  Hmm.

• 43:59David McCloskey?

  Maybe something else that has been argued about ever since, which is that on the first of February 2000, at a halal restaurant in LA, Madar and Hasmi get into a conversation with another Saudi, a guy named Omar Al Bayoumi.

• 44:17Gordon Corera?

  This is the source of much contention. And Omar Al Bayoumi and his story and his relationship with these two hijackers is at the center, 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 nine 11 plot. And effectively, that all turns on this relationship. And to some extent, this one meeting, which takes place at this restaurant in LA, and whether it was chance or whether it was something more. And I think it's really worth understanding it because

• 45:02Gordon Corera?

  it is still very contentious and a bit mysterious.

• 45:05David McCloskey?

  Yeah. So Bayoumi is in the US 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 Madar and Hasmi were coming? And is he involved in basically helping support them in LA, 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 US and who don't speak English and are sort of adrift?

• 45:45Gordon Corera?

  And, and there's very different accounts of 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 organize 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

• 46:30Gordon Corera?

  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 questions because it reaches a threshold. And so the claim has always been that Omar Al Bayoumi, 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.

• 47:04David McCloskey?

  He's like a support asset.

• 47:05Gordon Corera?

  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. If you like, the one thing we do know for sure is that having met these two people who will go on to hijackers, he really does look after them.

• 47:25David McCloskey?

  Yeah. Well, and we should say, I think we'll come back in later episodes to this question of the, the role, or if there was a role of the Saudi state in, in nine 11. But what is on question, to your point about Bayoumi's relationship with Madar and Hasmi, is that he welcomes them with absolutely open arms. He ends up guaranteeing the lease on their apartment. It's, it's Bayoumi's signature on that lease.

• 47:55Gordon Corera?

  He throws a party for them?

• 47:57David McCloskey?

  He throws a party.

• 47:58Gordon Corera?

  Introduced them to people?

• 47:59David McCloskey?

  He pays the first few months rent. It is a very.

• 48:01Gordon Corera?

  You could see it as hospitality. The Saudis in the community, and that is his role, or you could see it as something else. That is, that is part of the question, but yeah, and we'll come back to that, I guess, in more detail.

• 48:13David McCloskey?

  And the, the timing is interesting also because you could also have a situation where Mida and Hasmi have arrived in LA and are really struggling. And through these different sort of networks that Al Qaeda can tap into, someone says, we, we need someone to help these guys get settled.

• 48:32Gordon Corera?

  Yeah, I mean, maybe we should say that some of the other oddities are that after nine 11, videos will be found of Omar al-Baiyumi having videoed lots of things at the Capitol in Washington DC. 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 nine 11.

• 49:00David McCloskey?

  But Mida and Hasmi, to go back to them, they're not really hiding. They're living in a plane site in San Diego. The open bank accounts, Hasmi actually winds up in the telephone book.

• 49:10Gordon Corera?

  Hmm, it's interesting, isn't it?

• 49:11David McCloskey?

  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 insist that they want to start on Boeing jets.

• 49:27Gordon Corera?

  Not a small plane, a big plane.

• 49:30David McCloskey?

  A very big plane, and the instructor is like, uh, 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, you know, again, in hindsight, you just think,

• 49:53David McCloskey?

  shouldn't alarm bells have been going off? They apparently were only interested in steering a plane in 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 Mida 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 Hasmi and flies home. And crucially, because Mida had not overstayed his visa, he can return. Hasmi stays though, and he kind of drifts.

• 50:39David McCloskey?

  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 Hasmi 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 Hanjor arrives in San Diego. Hanjor had first come to the US back in 1991, he'd studied English at the University of Arizona.

• 51:22David McCloskey?

  And then as a teenager in the late eighties, he'd gone to Afghanistan, hoping to join the jihad. Like, 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, Hani Hanjor. He's rejected by a Saudi flight school and he goes back to the US 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,

• 52:08David McCloskey?

  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 Saudis who have been sent to the US to become pilots, Mida and Hasmi, have washed out. And so Hanjor is, is identified, and again, he's a Saudi, which is good, and he's got experience in the US. So Hanjor is the absolutely perfect candidate, other than the fact that he's a terrible pilot.

• 52:51David McCloskey?

  So Hanjor 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 US student visa. He also enrolls to, to create a reason to go into, to the US. He enrolls in an English as a second language school in Oakland. He, 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 Hanjor's arrival, the, the two guys, they 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.

• 53:31David McCloskey?

  And Hanjor 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, he's twice advised to just quit, to give it up. But he sticks it out.

• 53:54Gordon Corera?

  So then 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 Mida 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, that Mida has a US visa and that Hasmi has come into LA. So the question here, I think, is why were they not spotted,

• 54:35Gordon Corera?

  surveilled during their time in the United States as they're going through this train?

• 54:40David McCloskey?

  Why weren't they put on any number of watch lists? That may have prevented them from even getting into the US. It's, it's probably worth going into detail here on what actually happened inside the bureaucracy of the CIA and the FBI. The nine 11 commission in particular has gone into immense detail.

• 54:58Gordon Corera?

  Cause this is seen as the, the, the point at which the plot could have been disrupted and wasn't.

• 55:03David McCloskey?

  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, they're FBI detailies 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 Mida had a US 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.

• 55:37Gordon Corera?

  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 there.

• 55:56David McCloskey?

  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 Khalid Al Madar had a US visa had been shared with the FBI.

• 56:12Gordon Corera?

  Even though it hasn't been.

• 56:14David McCloskey?

  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 US 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.

• 56:49Gordon Corera?

  Something weird's gone on there, we'll come back to that.

• 56:51David McCloskey?

  We'll come back to that. Now, interestingly, in this period, even though Mida has arrived on the same flight as Nawaf al-Hazmi, it's, it's not clear to the CIA and certainly not the FBI that he's actually in the US and that they're together. But in March, Bangkok Station, the CIA's Bangkok Station, has reported that Hasmi flew to LA on the 15th of January. That cable is received at CIA headquarters. No one places Meedar or Hazmi on what was called the State Department's tip-off watch list. They don't do that in January, when word arrives of Meedar's visa, or in March, when word arrives that Hazmi had a visa and a ticket to LA.

• 57:36David McCloskey?

  The CTC, the Counterterrorism Center Desk Officer from January, who had been involved in those, you know, that sort of weird

• 57:43Gordon Corera?

  Cable bits.

• 57:44David McCloskey?

  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's, 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 LA, 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 Khalid Al Madar person, right? So you, you have, and it seems like you have turnover

• 58:22Gordon Corera?

  Yeah.

• 58:23David McCloskey?

  at the desk. And what it means is that none of this information gets to the FBI.

• 58:29Gordon Corera?

  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?

• 58:39David McCloskey?

  That's a big question, I think.

• 58:41Gordon Corera?

  And I think there are different theories and different answers.

• 58:44David McCloskey?

  One of them, which it, it's not the direct answer to the question, but it's maybe set some of the tone, is that the CIA and the FBI, the FIBs, 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. You know, I have a lot of stories from CIA and CIA officers and FBI special agents,

• 59:24David McCloskey?

  who will, they'll actually, I mean, to give you a, 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.

• 59:44Gordon Corera?

  Yeah, and it was worse in the 90s, we should say.

• 59:47David McCloskey?

  Way worse.

• 59:48Gordon Corera?

  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.

• 1:00:01David McCloskey?

  Break those barriers down.

• 1:00:02Gordon Corera?

  Break the 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 good. So I guess one theory is, bad culture, mistakes, failure to share.

• 1:00:24David McCloskey?

  Well, it's not one theory. I think it's actually setting up the context for, for why, what seems like a simple handoff in, 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, you have a theory on this, don't you?

• 1:00:52Gordon Corera?

  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.

• 1:01:29David McCloskey?

  Which is a problem with people in the US. Like with, with foreign nationals who come into the US, there can be a real turf war over who makes the pitch and how it's run.

• 1:01:39Gordon Corera?

  Because technically, if that, once they're in the US, it's the FBI's terrain, and it should be the FBI who's making the pitch and therefore running them.

• 1:01:46David McCloskey?

  Not necessarily.

• 1:01:47Gordon Corera?

  Not, not always, but, but at least.

• 1:01:49David McCloskey?

  The FBI would, would have, you would have to, let's say you're gonna run the pitch out of the auspices of LA Station.

• 1:01:56Gordon Corera?

  CIA LA Station.

• 1:01:57David McCloskey?

  CIA is LA Station. You would, I mean, at least today, the, the, the way you would do that would be, you would have to, at minimum, de-conflict it with the FBI. The special agent in charge.

• 1:02:09Gordon Corera?

  Exactly, so that they, they're not doing it as well.

• 1:02:11David McCloskey?

  Right, so they're not doing it as well. So the CIA could still do the pitch, you know, the guy could go abroad, and you run, and 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.

• 1:02:25Gordon Corera?

  And so this is, look, this is a theory, and, and it's definitely, you know, no in 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 on to 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, is 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, you know, we don't.

• 1:03:07David McCloskey?

  Or potentially even never attempt it.

• 1:03:09Gordon Corera?

  Or never even attempt it.

• 1:03:10David McCloskey?

  Which I think is the most likely scenario.

• 1:03:12Gordon Corera?

  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, 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, 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 failure to hand off the information to the FBI.

• 1:03:42David McCloskey?

  I don't have any facts to back this up, but I find it very plausible.

• 1:03:46Gordon Corera?

  Okay.

• 1:03:46David McCloskey?

  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.

• 1:04:00Gordon Corera?

  From the FBI side.

• 1:04:01David McCloskey?

  To put it in a 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 detailies inside Alex Station 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 detailie is saying, oh, wait a minute, this guy has a US 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.

• 1:04:45David McCloskey?

  And then later on, someone from the CIA says,

• 1:04:48Gordon Corera?

  Oh yeah, we did tell them.

• 1:04:48David McCloskey?

  We already sent it.

• 1:04:50Gordon Corera?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:50David McCloskey?

  You know, you kind of, you get this sense of, we don't, inside Alex Station, they may have not even wanted the FBI detailies 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, to, to back this theory up. But based on the circumstantial evidence, it's plausible.

• 1:05:20Gordon Corera?

  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.

• 1:05:41David McCloskey?

  And as a reminder, of course, you do not have to wait for those episodes. Go and join the Declassified Club at therestisclassified.com, where you will 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 Morell, who was President Bush's daily intelligence briefer on the morning of 9/11.

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