189. 9/11: How Much Did the Saudis Know? (Ep 3)

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: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠[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.

• 0:25Gordon Corera?

  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 Corera.

• 0:36David McCloskey?

  And I'm David McCloskey.

• 0:37Gordon Corera?

  So so far, David, we have been looking at how the pilots, who are 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 handoff 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 cockpits, to subdue the flight crews and to herd the passengers. And for that, they need muscle.

• 1:22Gordon Corera?

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• 1:29Gordon Corera?

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• 1:32David McCloskey?

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• 2:11David McCloskey?

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• 2:18Gordon Corera?

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• 2:36Speaker 02

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• 5:01Gordon Corera?

  So David, on 9/11, there's going to be four pilots, but 15 foot soldiers. Now, we've already met two of them, Hasmeen 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.

• 5:16David McCloskey?

  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 they're after. And you could think of them as the muscle, but that makes them, I think in your mind, almost seem like they're very physically imposing.

• 5:53Gordon Corera?

  Yeah, like the muscle in the gangster film.

• 5:54David McCloskey?

  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 some 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.

• 6:26Gordon Corera?

  They're willing to use violence, that's the crucial thing.

• 6:29David McCloskey?

  14 of the 15 muscle are going to be Saudis. There's a lone exception from the UAE. And the Saudis don't come from the kingdom kind of broadly. They come from very specific regions.

• 6:43Gordon Corera?

  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?

• 6:59David McCloskey?

  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 US is a lot easier than Yemen or even Pakistan. 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 Baha region of Saudi Arabia.

• 7:40David McCloskey?

  It's an 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 Ameni 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.

• 8:24David McCloskey?

  Their English is rudimentary, and frankly, they 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 Saud, become the ruling family of Saudi Arabia when the kingdom is conquered in the 1930s, and the Wahhabi clerical establishment.

• 9:08David McCloskey?

  And the bargain is basically that the Saud are...

• 9:13David McCloskey?

  Given a blessing by the Wahhabi clerical establishment to rule Saudi. And in exchange, the Al Saud 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.

• 9:55David McCloskey?

  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.

• 10:39David McCloskey?

  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, 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.

• 11:04Gordon Corera?

  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 and other places. And this Saudi Wahhabi ideology spreading quite broadly. And actually, that will be perhaps part of our story is that 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.

• 11:42David McCloskey?

  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 strengthen its legitimacy, both at home and abroad. So 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, the call to prayer goes out. The shops, the offices, the restaurants, everything closes.

• 12:25David McCloskey?

  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 enforcing the strictures of the Wahhabi establishment. The Mutawahin, the Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice, they're patrolling streets, markets. And they have real authority. You know, if you step out of line, if you're not praying,

• 13:07David McCloskey?

  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 have 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.

• 13:52David McCloskey?

  This is an 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 culture or entertainment that isn't religious. I mean, I can remember going through Jeddah. This is decades later, when I'm at the CIA. And when you look at what was available in the Jeddah airport to buy in terms of books, magazines,

• 14:36David McCloskey?

  the shelves would be just unrecognizable to any Western visitor. You know, it's a lot of Korans, Quranic material. I mean, it's not like 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 in this era, but there is one religion, right? There are no churches, there are no temples. There is no non-Muslim worship allowed anywhere.

• 15:16Gordon Corera?

  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.

• 15:30David McCloskey?

  Just being there.

• 15:31Gordon Corera?

  Just being there is a kind of challenge to him in this period in the 90s.

• 15:35David McCloskey?

  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.

• 16:17David McCloskey?

  So when you compare that, that's 18 of your 28 periods during a week are really religiously focused, maybe four hours for math.

• 16:27Gordon Corera?

  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 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.

• 17:11David McCloskey?

  It's worth a moment on this because I think it's so alien to a lot of us. When, if we live in the UK, if we live in the US, 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,

• 17:55David McCloskey?

  what does that even look like? That's a very private affair if you're sort of intellectually detaching.

• 18:01Gordon Corera?

  It's not a public option. 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 the 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 in internal struggle against your enemies. And this call to jihad becomes very powerful in this period

• 18:43Gordon Corera?

  and pushed out, I think, in many of the institutions there, in the mosques and in the Wahhabi mosques.

• 18:49David McCloskey?

  Which are very well-funded.

• 18:50Gordon Corera?

  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.

• 19:15David McCloskey?

  Right.

• 19:15Gordon Corera?

  You know, it's to go to these camps. And that's the key. Bin Laden has 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.

• 19:35David McCloskey?

  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 legitimize 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 Wael Al-Shadri. Wael is born in 1973, so in the year 2000, he's 27.

• 20:17David McCloskey?

  Walid is born in 78, so in 2000, he's 22. They come from Assir, 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 until the point, marriage 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.

• 21:00David McCloskey?

  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, Wile, 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, you know, 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 Wile take a pilgrimage to Medina to cure what's probably depression.

• 21:42David McCloskey?

  And Walid goes, 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 as 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 Wile. 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 Assir.

• 22:23David McCloskey?

  And the two brothers commit themselves and swear binding oaths to participate in jihad somewhere. Wile leads the ceremony and Walid follows. Their jihad at this point, though, is not focused on America.

• 22:35Gordon Corera?

  And I find that interesting. They actually want to fight the Russians in Chechnya. And this seems to be quite a common, you know, theme. 1999, 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, and that's true for them.

• 22:53David McCloskey?

  And true for the, for the Hamburg cell.

• 22:55Gordon Corera?

  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 turning away potential recruits. No more. We've got enough of them, you know, and they're not necessarily that good.

• 23:10David McCloskey?

  So the brothers will wind up at the Al-Farouq 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?

• 23:31Gordon Corera?

  Your HR application form.

• 23:32David McCloskey?

  Really, it is. It is an Al Qaeda HR sort of getting to know you form. And these guys, unlike the Hamburg cell, they don't have the, 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?

• 24:02Gordon Corera?

  Almost, yeah, weird, I think. But, 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, won't they, to kind of inspire the people and, and, and give a speech to kind of encourage them to, for what they're doing. But there's a lot of people going through the camps at this, at this time. I mean, thousands and thousands.

• 24:24David McCloskey?

  And it is important, you know, I think there's a, 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 innocents 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.

• 25:00Gordon Corera?

  Yeah.

• 25:01David McCloskey?

  And so it's this kind of group think mentality in which you're not reaching out to loved ones who might rein you in.

• 25:11Gordon Corera?

  Yep.

• 25:12David McCloskey?

  The world, you know, the way you think about it, the things that become normal and accepted are all dictated by this really...

• 25:21Gordon Corera?

  It's cult-like, isn't it?

• 25:23David McCloskey?

  Almost death cult-like.

• 25:25Gordon Corera?

  Death cult-like, I think that's right. 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?

• 25:55David McCloskey?

  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 US, for example. So, you know, from a cover standpoint, they're maybe 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, but which is a suicide operation. KSM will later say, Kalashik 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. But these guys probably clicked it. They have clean records, right? No jihadist priors, no trouble with the police in Saudi.

• 26:40David McCloskey?

  And again, as we talked about, they're Saudis, which means there's a very clear pathway to getting a US visa. So all of that means in this kind of, you know, 99, 2000 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.

• 27:09Gordon Corera?

  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 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.

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• 29:34Gordon Corera?

  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?

• 29:42David McCloskey?

  Well, at first, they get a pretty simple instruction, which is go back to Saudi Arabia, get a clean passport, very similar to the Hamburg sale 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, in Saudi, having acquired the clean passports and the US visas, the brothers return 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-

• 30:25Gordon Corera?

  The basic training. But now, they're going to get specific training for the plane's operation, which is effectively how to hijack a plane.

• 30:33David McCloskey?

  The head instructor at Al-Matar is a guy named Abu Tarab Al-Jourdani. Al-Jourdani 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.

• 31:17David McCloskey?

  And they practice on the weapons that'll 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 US, under the rules of 2001, knives with blades under four inches can pass legally through airport checkpoints.

• 31:38Gordon Corera?

  This kind of seems amazing now, doesn't it?

• 31:40David McCloskey?

  It does. And remember, there were casing of US 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, the flight crew is trained to cooperate with hijackers, not to resist them.

• 32:07Gordon Corera?

  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.

• 32:34David McCloskey?

  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.

• 33:18David McCloskey?

  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 US 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 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, they might, maybe they're going to take the plane to Cuba or Tunisia or something like that, and land it and make demands.

• 34:03David McCloskey?

  So, you know, there's also not a real backstop. I mean, we talked about at the Al-Matar 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, Abu Tarab Al-Jourdani 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, you know, the viscera of what they will be asked to do

• 34:45David McCloskey?

  when they overpower passengers and flight attendants and pilots on the planes. We've talked about how the plane's 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, 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 Al-Matar, again, not knowing what the plan is.

• 35:26Gordon Corera?

  Yeah, they haven't been told yet.

• 35:27David McCloskey?

  For a few months, until about the spring of 2001.

• 35:30Gordon Corera?

  And we should say, we focused on two brothers, but others are going to be recruited, the rest of the muscle, and are going to be trained in the same way.

• 35:38David McCloskey?

  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.

• 36:17Gordon Corera?

  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 of that. And 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 all together, in ones and twos.

• 36:45David McCloskey?

  There is this, I mean, I guess, you know, it's a 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 altogether, they'll enter the US successfully 33 times over the roughly two years leading up to the plot, through nine different airports.

• 37:16Gordon Corera?

  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 US 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 an express, a visa express program for Saudi citizens specifically to make it easier for them to get into the US.

• 37:42David McCloskey?

  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 US 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.

• 38:27David McCloskey?

  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 aliases used across the plot, but their travel documents, their passports are in their, 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 was inside the Saudi Interior Ministry. Again, we're not saying that that's evidence of some kind of Saudi government complicity in the plot,

• 39:09David McCloskey?

  but it's like a family member helping out another family member to get a US visa.

• 39:13Gordon Corera?

  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.

• 39:25David McCloskey?

  Yeah, I mean, Al Qaeda is interesting. They ran a, you know, sort of a forgery in documents operation in Afghanistan. So they could do things like, you 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.

• 40:03Gordon Corera?

  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, 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.

• 40:43David McCloskey?

  Yeah, I think, you know, for anyone who has come of age after 9/11, your experience of going through passport control or even just going through security in an airport is very much that it is about security, right? And, and border security is, 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? And so in that case, in Orlando, you know, this guy who's initially flagged by, by, you know, one customs official is thinking, hey, this looks a little weird.

• 41:28David McCloskey?

  In secondary, the next officer who looks at him says, well, this guy's a tourist.

• 41:32Gordon Corera?

  Yeah, and he goes.

• 41:33David McCloskey?

  Go, go along.

• 41:34Gordon Corera?

  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.

• 41:48David McCloskey?

  Nine of them cluster in South Florida. Well, remember, three of the pilots from the Hamburg cell, Atta, Shei, 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, Walid and Wile, are part of this cluster. Walid appears to have come in the spring 2001, probably around late April, and Wile somewhat later. They reach Miami by early June and they deposit several thousand dollars into a SunTrust banking account that they open up.

• 42:29David McCloskey?

  And by summertime, they're both settled into this Florida orbit with the others. Nearly all of them get driver's licenses, US driver's licenses.

• 42:38Gordon Corera?

  Which, which are useful, of course, because you can use those as ID to get on planes and domestic flights in the US.

• 42:44David McCloskey?

  Correct. And then 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.

• 43:03Gordon Corera?

  Okay.

• 43:04David McCloskey?

  You can imagine how, you know, you go back to the, the training they got in Pakistan and Dubai on how you fit in. You could imagine someone saying, look, yeah, or where, find a local sports team and understand what they're up to and get some of the gear, wear a hat, all this kind of stuff, which you can, 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, 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.

• 43:46David McCloskey?

  There's a separate cluster of six muscle that first settled around Washington, kind of Virginia, which is going to be linked to the other Saudi pilot, Hani Hanjor. Within a few weeks, they relocate to Patterson, New Jersey, which has an Arabic speaking community. And so they, you know, 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, hitting the Pentagon and a few of the muscle who will be bound for the World Trade Center. Everything's pretty mundane. They're, they're living on these kind of, you know, soulless, sort of anonymous suburban fringes of America.

• 44:29David McCloskey?

  They're very purposefully not doing things that would, 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 rent 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, I do think that's largely true.

• 45:11David McCloskey?

  And I think I mentioned the 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 Mohammed 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, despite 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.

• 45:54Gordon Corera?

  Who they were.

• 45:55David McCloskey?

  Who are they, you know, how do they, how do they live here? And reporters just descend on, you know, Florida and New Jersey for material on them. And, and they come upon some stories that if true, I think do add some complexity to the, to the picture of who these guys are. There's staff at Shuckum's Raw Bar and Grill, for example, who are going to tell FBI special agents that several of the hijackers, you know, were drinkers. They were drinking, they drank rum and, they came in and drank rum and cokes, vodkas with orange juice, they played arcade games, they played blackjack. Apparently they played Trivial Pursuit.

• 46:30Gordon Corera?

  That's a weird detail.

• 46:31David McCloskey?

  They would get into arguments over, over the bar bill. And, you know, there were similar vibes in some other FBI interviews with the manager of an establishment called The Pink Pony.

• 46:40Gordon Corera?

  I'm not aware of The Pink Pony.

• 46:41David McCloskey?

  Which is, well, that's good, Gordon. It is a strip club in Daytona Beach. And the, the owner of The Pink Pony said that a group of the hijackers spent a few hundred bucks apiece on lap dances and drinks and then bizarrely left a copy of the Quran behind the bar.

• 46:59Gordon Corera?

  Slightly weird.

• 47:00David McCloskey?

  Slightly weird.

• 47:01Gordon Corera?

  I mean, I guess, I mean, it's, if, 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.

• 47:28David McCloskey?

  I have to say, I'm inclined to not buy it.

• 47:31Gordon Corera?

  Okay.

• 47:32David McCloskey?

  In, in these cases, although there is one detail which we'll 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. Just because of the group dynamics among them and how, you know, as we talked about, the, 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.

• 48:03Gordon Corera?

  Yeah.

• 48:03David McCloskey?

  I'm, and, and sort of devotion to the cause.

• 48:07Gordon Corera?

  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 the, 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, 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, of equipment or anything like that.

• 48:44David McCloskey?

  No, it was shocking to me. In digging into this to see how cheap nine eleven was. The nine eleven commission estimated that the entire thing cost Al Qaeda somewhere between four hundred thousand and five hundred thousand dollars.

• 48:59Gordon Corera?

  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.

• 49:23David McCloskey?

  About three hundred thousand of that seems to have flowed through the hijackers' own US 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.

• 49:39Gordon Corera?

  That they were dropping money at lap dancing clubs.

• 49:41David McCloskey?

  Going to strip clubs. Just days before the attack, they wired twenty six thousand dollars in unspent funds back to a facilitator in the UAE.

• 49:51Gordon Corera?

  So they're returning the money.

• 49:53David McCloskey?

  They're closing out the books and returning money that they haven't spent.

• 49:56Gordon Corera?

  Rather than blowing it.

• 49:56David McCloskey?

  Rather than blowing it somewhere.

• 49:57Gordon Corera?

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

• 50:00David McCloskey?

  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 is 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, his own funds, right? Al Qaeda at this time, remember, is, it is a bureaucracy. It's an organization. And it's, it's a kind of terrorist nonprofit that's operating on a budget of what is probably about thirty million dollars a year, which means, which is insane, that what they were calling the Plains Operation, which becomes nine eleven, cost less than two percent of Al Qaeda's operating budget in two thousand and two thousand and one.

• 50:43David McCloskey?

  The way Al Qaeda gets money, the way Al Qaeda raises funds for its operating expenses is essentially through 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.

• 51:12Gordon Corera?

  Yeah, they, they often think they might be donating to refugees, I don't know, Kashmir or Chechnya refugees. It's sometimes that kind of, you know, it's, it's portrayed as that, but the money might be flowing into Al Qaeda.

• 51:26David McCloskey?

  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 financed the Soviet Jihad in the eighties. So it's kind of the same donor culture, the same charities. And it just gets repurposed throughout the nineteen nineties to fund what becomes Bin Laden's war against America.

• 51:52Gordon Corera?

  Yeah, the golden chain was actually a document, which I think was founded in, in, in Europe in the, in the nineties, 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.

• 52:10David McCloskey?

  So the way the money gets to the hijackers is also very mundane. It's wire transfers, open, I'm not trying to hide anything. It's wire transfers from facilitators who are working inside KSM's network in Germany, in 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 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 US. There is a significant paper trail here, right? It connects the hijackers to the facilitators. But again, the, the point wasn't to hide anything, right?

• 52:54David McCloskey?

  They're, they're using the international banking system, they're sending small amounts of money. And, and they're, they're using kind of clean, everyday institutions and, and facilitators. Because again, the, the anti kind of, the way that the US 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.

• 53:24Gordon Corera?

  But also, you're looking for millions, 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.

• 53:33David McCloskey?

  Right.

• 53:34Gordon Corera?

  Unless you've already identified these individuals as being at risk, the, 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?

• 53:48David McCloskey?

  The two Saudi operatives.

• 53:49Gordon Corera?

  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, about these guys, not having been done properly.

• 53:59David McCloskey?

  Yeah, I mean, Hasme and Madar, they open up bank accounts in their true names. So again, if, had there been an FBI special agent on, 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 is 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?

• 54:42Gordon Corera?

  And we should say, that is the subject of an, is still a subject of controversy and an ongoing massive lawsuit today in the United States by families of victims of nine eleven who are alleging Saudi knowledge or involvement in the nine eleven plot, which Saudi Arabia has obviously denied.

• 54:59David McCloskey?

  Yeah, fifteen of the nineteen are Saudi. Bin Laden's a Saudi. A huge amount of the money and financing for Al Qaeda is coming from Saudi. So it's, you know, it's, 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, some pretty twisted, kind of contorted language, takes some pains not to exclude the likelihood that charities sponsored by the Saudi state had money diverted to Al Qaeda.

• 55:39Gordon Corera?

  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.

• 55:48David McCloskey?

  And I think this is, this is the analytical problem that we have even twenty five 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.

• 56:16Gordon Corera?

  Yeah.

• 56:17David McCloskey?

  It's, it's really, really not clean. And I think a, a, a person who embodies that fuzziness is the Saudi we talked about last time, Omar Al Bayoumi, who is a Saudi national. He's in California, just to remind people, he, he is, he plays a role in helping the two Saudi operatives, Khalid Al Madar and Nawaf Al Hasme, get settled in San Diego in California in early to mid two thousand.

• 56:49Gordon Corera?

  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. And he is a complicated figure.

• 57:03David McCloskey?

  He's a complicated guy. He, he's on the payroll of a, 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's just not here, the company was reportedly warned that its contract would be canceled if he was dropped. And then in nineteen, this is happening in the mid to late nineteen nineties. And then in nineteen ninety nine, when another attempt is made to terminate his employment, the director general of Saudi Civil Aviation itself intervenes personally in a letter

• 57:47David McCloskey?

  and demands that Bayoumi's contract be renewed as quickly as possible.

• 57:51Gordon Corera?

  He is also getting large amounts of money sent to him, much larger than, you know, for his regular employment, employment from Saudi Arabia, some of which is, as we said last time, just below the threshold of ten thousand dollars where it would get reported and arouse suspicion. All of this suggests that he was more than just an ordinary worker. I think that is the, 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, he is working to some extent covertly

• 58:34Gordon Corera?

  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.

• 59:03David McCloskey?

  Bob Graham, who's a US senator who chairs the congressional inquiry into nine eleven, not the nine eleven commission, looked in depth at Bayoumi and the years after nine eleven and looked at the money. And it's very interesting that after.

• 59:19David McCloskey?

  Bayoumi helps Midar and Hazmi 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 Hazmi leaves San Diego. Right? So he nets him an extra $30,000 in exactly the window where he is helping

• 59:43Gordon Corera?

  Two of the hijackers.

• 59:44David McCloskey?

  Hazmi and Midar, two of the eventual hijackers, get settled in the States.

• 59:46Gordon Corera?

  And I would also credit a recent investigation by the Sunday Times and the Times here in the UK into Al Bayoumi. And if you're wondering why it's a British investigation, it's because Al Bayoumi 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 interviewed some of the police detectives. And again, it raises many more questions because this is when, you know,

• 1:00:28Gordon Corera?

  later on, they're going to discover in a pile of evidence, which strangely is not shared, details of things like Al Bayoumi 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 he used. I mean, a ton of videos, which again are, I mean, at the very least suspicious.

• 1:00:51David McCloskey?

  Oh, they're beyond suspicious.

• 1:00:53Gordon Corera?

  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.

• 1:01:00David McCloskey?

  There's a notepad found among Bayoumi's things, which has this crude kind of hand drawn sketch in blue ink of an aircraft. And alongside 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 Hazmi and Midar, who were struggling in flight training with some questions around how to fly a plane.

• 1:01:41Gordon Corera?

  And he can't explain these notes really. When you hear, you know, when you hear the police interrogation reports, he, he basically struggles to explain.

• 1:01:49David McCloskey?

  He's like, it's a random equation.

• 1:01:51Gordon Corera?

  It's just an equation.

• 1:01:52David McCloskey?

  I just think of equations.

• 1:01:53Gordon Corera?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:53David McCloskey?

  And write them down.

• 1:01:54Gordon Corera?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:55David McCloskey?

  There's, there's also a bunch of videos. I mean, Bayoumi was like the serial videographer, right? Even, even before the era when, when people had, had cell phones. One of the films is very bizarre because it's, it's about an hour of detailed footage of him outside the US 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, it like, on the face of it, you're like, this is a casing video.

• 1:02:27Gordon Corera?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:28David McCloskey?

  He's casing the Capitol and then providing that video to the would be hijackers.

• 1:02:32Gordon Corera?

  Now, I also find this interesting. When he gets arrested in the UK, he, he immediately gets quite high level consular help from the Saudi Embassy. But also, one of the things that he's had is he, there are nearly 100 calls when he's in the US with the Islamic Affairs Department of the Saudi Embassy in Washington DC. Now, this to me is actually the most interesting detail because it suggests he has a close relationship, not necessarily with the Saudi Intelligence Service.

• 1:03:04David McCloskey?

  No, yeah.

• 1:03:05Gordon Corera?

  But with the Islamic Affairs Department. And to me, this is the interesting question. So we should say Saudi Arabia denies any role. Al Bayoumi 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, 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.

• 1:03:48Gordon Corera?

  Not necessarily it being Saudi state policy, but could it be the individual policy of some people within the Saudi state?

• 1:03:55David McCloskey?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:55Gordon Corera?

  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 Hamzeh 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 they're hijackers. But.

• 1:04:21David McCloskey?

  Wasn't there also an eyewitness account of the very first meeting between Bayoumi and Hazmi and Midar?

• 1:04:31Gordon Corera?

  At this cafe?

• 1:04:31David McCloskey?

  At this cafe in San Diego where Bayoumi has insisted that this was a chance meeting. Right? That he just saw two others, he heard two men speaking Arabic. He could tell they're Saudi. He approaches them, he befriends them. But I think the eyewitness testimony was that he was waiting for them.

• 1:04:49Gordon Corera?

  Yeah. And it looked more than accidental.

• 1:04:51David McCloskey?

  Right.

• 1:04:51Gordon Corera?

  And that, so much hinges on that.

• 1:04:53David McCloskey?

  Right.

• 1:04:54Gordon Corera?

  I mean, so much hinges on that. I, 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, that 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, that is an open question.

• 1:05:19David McCloskey?

  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.

• 1:05:29Gordon Corera?

  But all of this other stuff is new.

• 1:05:31David McCloskey?

  A lot of this other stuff is new, was, was never used in the Commission report because the Commission ends up kind of waffling on Bayoumi's role in the plot and, 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.

• 1:05:54Gordon Corera?

  To some of this material.

• 1:05:55David McCloskey?

  Any of this material. I think, I think a couple of points, as many to close out this question, I think a couple of 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.

• 1:06:14Gordon Corera?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:15David McCloskey?

  To be involved at the top.

• 1:06:16Gordon Corera?

  Yeah, I agree.

• 1:06:17David McCloskey?

  Right? 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 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 DC, who also may not have had any idea what was happening. But when someone like Bayoumi with his status reached out and said, I need some more money, they were more than happy to send him more money.

• 1:06:57David McCloskey?

  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 had been tasked to support them in whatever way he could.

• 1:07:16Gordon Corera?

  Yeah. And just to close it out, Bayoumi 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, you know, 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. Mohammed Attar, 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

• 1:07:59Gordon Corera?

  to stop that 9/11 plot coming to fruition.

• 1:08:03David McCloskey?

  And just a reminder, of course, if you want to listen to this entire series right away, you can go and join the Declassified Club at therestisclassified.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.

• 1:08:36Gordon Corera?

  See you next time.

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