Since all the participants in the September 11 attack were killed, and the investigators currently do not have any decisive evidence regarding collaborators, all that is left for them is to reconstruct the actions of the hijackers in America with the help of documentation left over from mobile phone calls, credit card transactions, and withdrawals from automatic bank machines. an island
Don Van Natta and Keith Czarnyk New York Times
The "American Airlines" plane, on flight number 11, stood in line for takeoff at Logan International Airport; Passengers had already been told to turn off personal electronic devices when Mohammed Atta, in seat 8D in business class, dialed his cell phone for the last time. He called the cell phone of Marwan Al-Sheikhi, who was sitting in seat 6C on another "American Airlines" plane, flight 175, which was also about to take off from the same runway.
The conversation between the two - who had such a close relationship that they called each other "cousin" - lasted less than a minute, enough time according to the investigators for them to signal to each other that the plan was progressing as planned. That simple communication was the culmination of months of careful planning and coordination that on September 11 turned into the worst terrorist attack in history.
Since all the suspects were killed, and the investigators currently do not have any decisive evidence regarding the collaborators, all that is left for them is to reconstruct the story of the act with the help of documentation left over from the activities of the kidnappers in America, such as recording mobile phone calls, credit card transactions, calls via the Internet and withdrawals of funds from automatic bank machines .
The picture that emerges, after almost two months of investigation, is of a group that acted in perfect coordination, as one body. The researchers divide the hijackers into three groups: the first includes Ata, who is considered the mastermind behind the conspiracy, and three other leaders, who are the ones who chose the dates of the attack and flew the planes; In the second circle, an assisting team consisting of three people who helped with the logistics of renting apartments, obtaining driver's licenses and transferring money to the hijacking teams of the four planes; Below them are 12 soldiers, "muscles", whose main role was to restrain the flight attendants and passengers while their leaders take control of the airplane's steering wheel.
The leaders learned their roles perfectly: they knew exactly when each of the planes would reach its cruising altitude - the moment when, according to the investigators, the hijackers broke into the cockpit armed with Japanese knives and confronted the pilots. The coordination was so perfect that each of the four hijacking teams had their own bank account, and the credit cards of all the team members had the same personal code. The smallest mistake could cause great frustration: More than once last summer in Florida, when the money transfers didn't go through on the scheduled date, security cameras captured the faces of some of the kidnappers, staring intently at the screens of the ATMs.
The hijackers made true technophilic use of the Internet, chat rooms and e-mail. But when it came to the most critical media, they did what the "al-Qaeda" instruction book for carrying out terrorist acts told them: they met face to face. They chose as a meeting place a city that has been used by generations of conference participants in America - Las Vegas, the place where, according to the researchers, the most critical plans were made.
But unlike regular conventioneers, who flock to glitzy casino hotels, the team leaders and their logistics people stayed at the seedy, seedy end of Las Vegas, in a cheap hotel that promised there would be no surveillance cameras. They stayed there for a very short period of time, and apparently did not visit the casino or any other sin vendor in America's Sin City.
^^pornography and drinking^^
Investigators now claim that most of the 19 hijackers, perhaps even all, spent some time in Osama bin Laden's training camps in Afghanistan. Some of the 11/XNUMX attack soldiers met there. And like Ata and the other pilots, the "muscle" men did not fit the usual profile of suicide bombers: desperate and poor young men. All but one were of Saudi origin, relatively well-off and educated. While the leaders gave the impression of Muslim fanatics, the muscle men were far from it: they often indulged in the pleasures of pornography and drinking to the brim.
There are many other things that are unknown to researchers. For example, despite their estimate that the total cost of the conspiracy was about half a million dollars, there is evidence that only half of the amount came from the Al-Qaeda organization. According to one of the senior researchers, they know where the leaders met, but not what information was exchanged in those meetings; In the hundreds of e-mail messages seized from computers in Florida and Las Vegas, no "conclusive proof" or reference to the September 11 attacks was found.
The researchers say that they are not sure how the soldiers were recruited, and they do not know what those people were thinking, how the story will end, and if they were aware that they were going to die. "They literally followed the book," said a senior government official. "The operation had all the hallmarks of al-Qaeda activity. It was well organized, and was very far from a half-baked operation. They had such good coordination, excellent communication that was hard to follow, and a good and simple plan. Someone prepared well here."
According to the researchers, the most likely assessment is that the operation operated in a "concession-granting" method, and that the leaders acted closely to al-Qaeda's terrorist operations manual. According to them, the idea came up for the first time at least two years ago, in Hamburg, Germany.
Three of those who later became leaders and pilots - Atta, Sheikhi and Ziad Jarrah - were members of a terrorist cell that operated in Hamburg. Three other members, suspected of belonging to the same cell, escaped in early September and are now wanted as collaborators. Senior officials in the law enforcement authorities claim that the masterminds of the plot from Hamburg received the blessing - and what is more important, the funding - of the al-Qaeda organization, although the investigators claim that they do not know who in Osama bin Laden's organization approved the operation. Some officials say they suspect it was bin Laden himself, and investigators also said his three top aides were involved in the plot. "They met with someone else who made all the decisions", in Germany, said one of the senior officials. "But we don't know who that person was."
In January 2000, Sheikha and Ata received visas to enter the United States; Jarrah arrived in June of that year. Another pilot, Hani Hanjur, has lived in Southern California since 1996, and two of the logistics people, Nawak al-Hazmi and Khaled al-Midhar, moved to San Diego in 1999. Investigators are not sure how the connection between the Hamburg and California groups came about, but the evidence suggests that there was It's through al-Qaeda pipelines. According to the researchers, they were able to connect Al-Midahar to the attack on the American destroyer "Col", and it is possible that he is also connected to the attacks on the United States embassies in East Africa.
Funding for the operations began to flow in the summer of 2000 to the "Sun Trust Bank" and "Century Bank" branches in Florida. Ata received a little more than one hundred thousand dollars, Sheikha a little less than that. According to senior FBI officials, about half of the half million dollars used to finance the operation was sent by an important operative in bin Laden's organization, Mustafa Ahmed, from the United Arab Emirates, and the rest came mostly from Germany. However, according to one of the officials, the authorities suspect that the money trail leads to Pakistan. According to the travel records of the two, each of them left the borders of the United States several times in 2000 and the beginning of 2001 to Spain, Prague, Bangkok and Saudi Arabia. Ata traveled seven times; Five Sheikhs. In the United States, everyone began to learn to fly, in Phoenix, San Diego and South Florida.
In the spring of 2001, those defined by the researchers as the "muscle men" began to arrive from Saudi Arabia. The Saudi government, hurt by reports that most of the hijackers received entry visas in Saudi Arabia, initially claimed that the hijackers used fake IDs stolen from innocent citizens. But the FBI claims that the identity of the 19 hijackers has been verified, and that 15 of them were Saudis.
While the Saudi government restricted the steps of FBI investigators and journalists and prevented them from interviewing the families of the kidnappers, some of the families of the ordinary soldiers were interviewed by Arab newspapers. They said that their sons left in the last year and a half. Some said that they left with the aim of finding religious direction, going on a pilgrimage, or joining the jihad in Chechnya. According to one researcher, there is evidence that these men spent at least a year in al-Qaeda training camps.
The family of one of them, Mukhaled al-Shahri, said that he studied for one semester at an Islamic university in Abha in Saudi Arabia. The father of two others, Wail Walid al-Sharhari, said they attended a teacher's seminary. Another, Ahmed al-Nami, studied law in Abha. Reports in Arab newspapers indicate that the man identified by the FBI as the third logistics man, Majed Mokad, studied at the University of Riyadh, in the Faculty of Administration and Economics.
^^In a shabby room in Las Vegas^^
Most of them came from poor villages where fundamentalism thrives, but their families seem to belong to the upper class. Their ancestors were religious leaders, school principals, shop owners and businessmen. None of them had visited the United States before, and some of them spoke almost no English. From the moment they arrived, the logistics people helped them assimilate into American life. Hani Hanjur helped several of them rent an apartment in Patterson, New Jersey. Others moved through an apartment in Delray Beach, Florida. Midhar has helped others obtain illegal driver's licenses and identification cards in Virginia.
It seems that the leaders and logistics people "made friends" with their junior partners. When Ahmed Al-Khaznawi suffered from an ulcer on his leg, Jarrah took him to a hospital in Palm Beach, Florida. Ata and Sheikhi initially lived together in Florida; Then Sheikhi moved in with Faiz Ahmed, Atta moved in with Abd Aziz al-Omari, the kidnapper who arrived last in the United States.
Most of the 19 hijackers obtained social security numbers, which allowed them to open bank accounts and hold credit cards. They appeared, according to the FBI, to have acted completely independently, without receiving any or only minimal assistance from a support network in the United States. Investigators suspect the help came from financiers in the United Arab Emirates as well as Germany and Afghanistan.
Al-Qaeda's manual describes the three stages of any operation: research, planning and execution. "In order to find out any unexpected factor that could harm the operation", it says, "it is necessary, before carrying out the operation, to carry out rehearsals in a place similar to that of the real operation". Therefore, from the beginning of May, the leaders and logistics people began to fly test flights from coast to coast, even though they had never flown the routes of the same airlines that would later hijack their planes.
According to senior investigators, despite the explanation that some of the kidnappers met many times in South Florida and Patterson, they are convinced that the important planning was mostly done in the same shabby hotel room in Las Vegas. The researchers add that they can only verify one overlapping visit to Las Vegas, on August 13 and 14, but they say the picture is not yet complete. Lotfi Raisi, an Algerian who apparently helped train the pilots, traveled from Phoenix to Las Vegas at least once last summer and the hijackers may have done the same. Al-Hazmi and Hanjur arrived there together and seem to have spent all their time together; Ata was alone most of the time, sitting in an internet cafe called "Cyberzone".
According to the researchers, it is not clear why the conspirators chose Las Vegas. "They may have assumed that it would be easier to blend in there," one of them said. The men apparently acted according to the guidebook's instructions: "Meet in a place that provides good cover."
It is not unusual for criminals to launder money in Las Vegas casinos, but the surveillance cameras show no sign of the kidnappers. Based on this and interviews they conducted, FBI investigators concluded that the kidnappers were not gambling. The investigators also did not find any evidence that a local terrorist cell was established there.
There was only one curious exception to their pattern of behavior, on the last flight from Las Vegas east. On flights in the months of May, June and July, the hijackers purchased direct round trip tickets. But on that last flight, they purchased one-way tickets to different destinations, with stopovers. And they also flew in passenger class, not first class as they always used to.
The investigators estimate that after completing the test flights, the hijackers wanted to save costs. They may have wanted to see if they could buy one-way plane tickets without attracting attention - which they did the next two weeks when they bought plane tickets for 11/XNUMX.
^^The "muscles" probably didn't know^^
Those return flights placed the men at a point from which they could carry out the plot. Khanjur and al-Hamzi flew to Baltimore, where they were soon joined by their soldiers in nearby Laurel. From there, on the morning of September 11, they went to Dulles International Airport, where they boarded American Airlines flight number 77. Ata flew from Las Vegas to Fort Lauderdale, Florida, near where most of the "muscle men" lived.
Investigators saw an increase in the number of cell phone calls made between the 19 kidnappers in those last few weeks. The hijackers bought plane tickets, with each team choosing almost the same seats on the planes. The group from Florida moved north to Boston; The group from New Jersey left the apartment in Patterson.
On September 10, Atta and Al-Omari traveled from Boston to Portland, Maine. Why Portland? Again, it may just be a matter of protocol: the guidebook warns against traveling in large groups and suggests joining at a "secondary station", so as not to attract attention. The next morning, they were almost late for their connecting flight from Boston's Logan Airport, boarding the plane a few minutes before takeoff.
As the hijackers probably learned from the test flights, the planes reach cruising altitude after about forty minutes. The hijackers, who were hardly interested in their studies in the take-off and landing rigs, began their work.
Four of the five hijackers on American Airlines Flight 77, the plane that crashed into the Pentagon, assisted in logistics or are considered by investigators to be leaders. The assumption is that some of the logistics people, including Midhar, were equipped with Japanese knives and also served as "muscle men".
The plane, apparently piloted by Hanjur, began to swing wildly in the air. It is possible that a fight broke out with the pilots, but according to the researchers it is likely that this was due to Hanjur's poor flying skills; His teachers at the flight school said he was a bad student.
Based on a cell phone call from one of the planes, the FBI believes that the musclemen began moving the passengers to the rear of the planes and forced the pilots out of the cockpit, saying that it was a normal hijacking and if their demands were met the crew and passengers would be released unharmed.
The muscle men may have believed it too. Some researchers point out that in the photos taken on the eve of the flight at the automatic bank machines in Portland, Al-Omari can be seen grinning, a facial expression suitable for a petty thief about to embark on a theft spree.
One of the FBI investigators said that it appears that the prayer pages found at the crash sites were adapted to the common soldiers because they preached to be strong in prison - in contrast to the four pages of instructions and prayers found in Atta's suitcase, which made it clear that he believed he was on his way to eternal paradise.
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