The Management of Savagery. Max Blumenthal
wait for some “catastrophic and catalyzing event.”
Two hours’ drive from Kandahar, in the southern Afghan desert city where the Taliban were born and where bin Laden maintained his operational base, a February 2001 wedding ceremony became the stage for bin Laden’s first public appearance in several years. Seated in the shade of palm trees was the Al Qaeda leader’s seventeen-year-old son, Mohammed, his father’s personal protector and likely successor. To his left was Mohammed Atef, an Egyptian comrade of Zawahiri who acted as the chief military strategist of Al Qaeda—the brains behind its operations. To Mohammed’s right sat his father, who smiled proudly as his son prepared to marry Atef’s fourteen-year-old daughter.
Ahmad Zaidan, a correspondent for the Qatari outlet Al Jazeera, was ferried to the wedding with a camera crew in an effort to provide bin Laden with the publicity he had been denied by the Taliban. Zaidan witnessed bin Laden rise before the guests to deliver verses of jihadist poetry: “She sails into the waves flanked by arrogance, haughtiness and false power. To her doom she moves slowly,” the wealthy sheikh exclaimed. “Your brothers in the East readied themselves. And the war camels prepared to move.”
In his verse, bin Laden appeared to be alluding to the October 2000 attack by two Al Qaeda assets on the USS Cole, a naval destroyer stationed in Yemen’s Aden harbor—another daring strike at the strategic point of access for the US military to its bases across the Gulf states. The bombs, detonated from a fiberglass boat piloted by two suicide attackers, had torn a forty-foot hole in the hull of the Cole and caused it to nearly capsize. Seventeen sailors were killed and thirty-eight more wounded, most of them blown apart while taking lunch. “The destroyer represented the West,” bin Laden said. “The small boat represented Muhammad.”
Later, Atef took Zaidan aside to detail Al Qaeda’s plan to drag the West into an endless war. “He was explaining to me what will happen in the coming five years,” Zaidan recalled, “and he said, ‘Look, there are two or three places in the world which are the most suitable places to fight America: Afghanistan, Iraq and Somalia. We are expecting the United States to invade Afghanistan and we are preparing for that. We want the United States to invade Afghanistan.”
The strategy to trigger a series of American interventions and bleed an overstretched empire represented an especially ironic adaptation of Brzezinski’s “Afghan trap.” Bin Laden and his lieutenants reasoned that it would only require a single violent cataclysm to draw the Americans in. His goal was to enact the very thing that the neocon authors of the PNAC’s first letter envisioned: “some catastrophic and catalyzing event.”
Early in 2000, an operation was set into motion to fulfill the American trap. An Al Qaeda operative named Khalid al-Mihdhar was deployed into the faceless suburbs of Southern California alongside his friend, Nawaf al-Hazmi. Both men were sons of Saudi Arabia, products of its Wahhabi-influenced school system, and had followed the jihadi trail through Bosnia and Chechnya during the 1990s. Mihdhar later trained in Afghanistan, likely under the watch of Ali Mohamed. The two landed at Los Angeles International Airport on January 15, 2000, on a flight from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Together, they represented part of the team that would execute what Al Qaeda informally referred to as “the planes operation.”
While the two were in Malaysia, CIA operatives broke into Mihdhar’s hotel room there and photographed his passport. Mihdhar was known to Saudi intelligence as a jihadist and was photographed by Malaysian secret police at a planning meeting for the “planes operation.” Also in attendance at the meeting was Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, widely considered the “mastermind” behind the plot. The photos were immediately shared with the CIA. Two months later, the agency learned that Mihdhar, now a known Al Qaeda member, had traveled to Los Angeles on a multiple-entry visa, and that he was seated next to Hazmi on the flight. Curiously, the CIA refused to supply the information to the FBI.
Why did the agency sit on its hands? Lawrence Wright, one of the leading chroniclers of Al Qaeda’s rise, speculated that, “Mihdhar and Hazmi could have seemed like attractive recruitment possibilities—the CIA was desperate for a source inside Al Qaeda, having failed to penetrate the inner circle or even to place someone in the training camps, even though they were largely open to anyone who showed up.”
Neither Mihdhar nor Hazmi spoke English or were familiar with American culture. When they arrived in Los Angeles, they were met at the airport by Omar Bayoumi, a Saudi civil aviation authority official who did no known work for the bureau—he was a ghost employee. Bayoumi had held a mysterious closed-door meeting at the Saudi consulate just moments before meeting the two men. Though he had never met Mihdhar or Hazmi before, he was clearly acting as their advance man. Upon arrival, the two worshipped at the King Fahad Mosque in Los Angeles, a Saudi-funded institution. There, they met Fahad Al-Thumairy, an accredited Saudi consular official who served as the mosque’s imam. According to an FBI investigation carried out years later, they were “immediately assigned an individual to take care of al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar during their time in the Los Angeles area.” That individual was almost certainly Bayoumi.
In February, Bayoumi took Mihdhar and Hazmi to San Diego, where they co-signed an apartment lease under his name. Neither man had any credit. Bayoumi was able to muster up large amounts of cash to cover his guests’ expenses, far more than any ordinary government worker should have had access to. As soon as he took Mihdhar and Hazmi in his charge, his salary shot up from $500 a month to $3,500. “One of the FBI’s best sources in San Diego informed the bureau that he thought that al-Bayoumi must be an intelligence officer for Saudi Arabia or another foreign power,’’ a heavily redacted congressional investigative committee report later concluded. Bayoumi and Thumairy’s phones registered twenty-one calls between them spanning from Mihdhar and Hazmi’s arrival to May 2000. Bayoumi logged nearly 100 calls to Saudi officials in that period and traveled frequently to Saudi consular offices in Los Angeles and Washington during that time.
At a welcoming party Bayoumi organized for Mihdhar and Hazmi, he introduced them to Anwar al-Awlaki, one of the more notable Muslim religious figures in San Diego. On the day that Bayoumi helped Mihdhar and Hazmi find a local apartment, he logged four calls to al-Awlaki. Al-Awlaki was a charismatic imam from Yemen whose flawless English and engaging style made him a star among many younger Muslims raised in the West. The cleric betrayed little sign of extremism, though he would later turn up in Yemen as top propagandist of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. At the time, Mihdhar and Hazmi each considered him a kind of spiritual advisor, worshipping at his Al-Ribat Al-Islami mosque in La Mesa and meeting in private with him.
It may never be known if al-Awlaki was aware that the two represented the advance team for a handful of operatives preparing a deadly operation. But neighbors of Mihdhar and Hazmi suspected some sort of criminal plot was underway: “There was always a series of cars driving up to the house late at night,” said one neighbor. “Sometimes they were nice cars. Sometimes they had darkened windows. They’d stay about 10 minutes.”
On March 5, 2000, a cable arrived to the CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, alerting the agency to Hazmi’s presence in the United States. It read, “Action Required: None.”
The FBI had eyes and ears on Mihdhar and Hazmi almost as soon as they arrived in California. Indeed, a bureau informant had extensive contacts with the two men, reporting back to his handler about them, but the bureau did nothing. The FBI’s inaction might have been understandable considering the CIA had inexplicably withheld evidence of Mihdhar and Hazmi’s presence at what the agency knew to be a gathering of top Al Qaeda operatives in Kuala Lumpur. It was not until August 2001 that Mihdhar was placed on a terror watch list. By then, the “day of the planes” plot was in its final stages.
The Summer of the Shark
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