Al-Qaeda (43 page)

The decision to attack the USA on its home territory (the diplomatic niceties of the sovereignty of individual embassies notwithstanding) rather than abroad appears to have been taken between the end of 1998 (when Abu Doha applied for assistance for Ahmed Ressam) and late 1999 at a series of meetings in Khost, Kandahar, Jalalabad or possibly Kabul. We cannot say with any great certainly who attended these meetings but it appears they included bin Laden himself, al-Zawahiri, Mohammed Atef, Abu Zubaydah, Saif al-Adel and Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, i.e. the key members of the small band constituting the ‘al-Qaeda hardcore’ in Afghanistan at the time.

So far, few details have emerged of the exact planning that went into the 11 September operation. In a discussion with a Saudi cleric recorded in Afghanistan some time after 11 September and released by the American government in early December 2001, bin Laden made clear that he was unaware of the operational details of the plan, though he had knowledge of its broad objectives. He had, he said, used his civil engineering experience to calculate the damage the planes would do when they struck the towers. This is corroborated by the statements made by Ramzi bin al-Shibh, one of the Hamburg cell, when interviewed by an al-Jazeera journalist while in hiding in Karachi in the late summer of 2002.
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Al-Shibh was interviewed with Khalid Shaikh Mohammed. After the fire that had exposed Ramzi Yousef and the Bojinka plot, Shaikh had made his way, possibly via the Su-Casa guesthouse, from the
Philippines to Doha, Qatar, where he had powerful friends in the government. He was a guest of the Qatari minister for religious affairs and spent 1995–6 raising funds among wealthy and devout businessmen in the Gulf. He lived openly and travelled widely. American investigators have tracked his movements through Italy, Egypt, Singapore, Jordan, Thailand and the Philippines.
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When the FBI tried to arrest him in Qatar in 1996, he was tipped off and fled to Afghanistan, about the only place where he knew he would be safe. As noted before, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed is typical of many of the senior activists who emerged after the war against the Soviets. Using his own connections and backers, he tried to build up his own independent operations, only joining forces with bin Laden at a relatively late stage. It is likely that, having collectively taken the broad strategy decision to strike the mainland in late 1999, bin Laden and al-Zawahiri then left lieutenants such as Shaikh or Mohammed Atef to sort out the details, picking and choosing from the plans that were being put to them by volunteers, suggesting others of their own. In his interview with al-Jazeera, Shaikh claimed the idea for an attack using planes as bombs was his own. This is certainly possible given his previous involvement in Ramzi Yousef’s operations in the Philippines, but does not make it any less likely that the Hamburg cell had also evolved a similar plan simultaneously and independently.

One possible scenario, which marries the various conflicting interpretations of the evidence, is that the Hamburg cell, having formulated its idea, approached the ‘al-Qaeda hardcore’ with it at a particularly auspicious time. In late 1999, following the strategy meeting, the group’s senior military planners were trying to sort out the details of a series of attacks on America. Their ideas had so far centred on al-Hazmi and al-Midhar, who may have originally been sent to America to play some kind of role in the Millennium plot, and the arrival of the Hamburg cell members with their own ideas to use planes to attack America was fortuitous for them. Al-Qaeda in Afghanistan had access to cash, expertise, training facilities and leadership capabilities that were beyond Atta and his band. But, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed told al-Jazeera, though al-Qaeda ‘had scores of volunteers… [their] problem at the time was to select suitable people who were familiar with
the West’.
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With Atta and his friends as a nucleus, the plot was expanded. Al-Hazmi and al-Midhar were linked into the new plan but kept apart for clear security reasons. The various teams would only come together at a very late stage.

Bin Laden and his close associates may have been short of ‘suitable volunteers’ but they were not short of funds. Since 11 September, investigators have worked hard to uncover the networks that funded terrorist operations across the world. The picture that emerges is of a vast and complex global network of charities, government aid organizations, private businesses, banks and accounts that are used to raise, hold and transfer cash to fund terrorism. The cash itself comes from a variety of sources. Some is diverted, often with the cognisance and approval of the donors, from collections from congregations in mosques or elsewhere. Giving
zakat
is one of the fundamentals of Islam and very substantial sums are raised in this way. Other funds come in private donations from wealthy individuals: Gulf merchants, Qatari, Emirati or Saudi princes and other sympathizers from all over the world. Once again, sometimes these funds are used for legitimate relief and social work, sometimes for da’wa or proselytization, sometimes they are diverted to buy equipment or facilitate the travel of mujahideen to Kashmir, Chechnya, Bosnia or elsewhere and occasionally they are drawn on, by those with the connections and the credibility, for terrorist actions. Single organizations, such as the Saudi International Islamic Relief Organization, can fulfil all these roles at once.
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The amount of money in the system at any one time, and thus potentially available to fund terrorist operations, is huge. As ever, bin Laden appears as one element among many. Enaam Arnaout, a Syrian currently living in America, is alleged to be one of the key figures in the global network of financing terror though he denies all the charges against him. According to the US government indictment, while working with bin Laden and Azzam in the MAK in Pakistan in the mid 1980s, Arnaout, though serving as a ‘director of communications’ at bin Laden’s ‘Lion’s Den’ training camp, was closest to Hekmatyar’s Hizb-e-Islami, for whom he bought weapons and other material. Much of the money for the purchases was channelled through a charity called the Benevolence International Foundation (BIF), of which Arnaout
was executive director. During the early and mid 1990s, the indictment alleges, Arnaout provided a satellite telephone and organized and funded special training for mujahideen from Hekmatyar’s faction in 1991–2 at a camp near Khost. He also produced fundraising and recruitment videos for the Islamic militants in Bosnia, procured money and equipment for Chechen guerrillas and facilitated the movement of senior militant figures, including men close to bin Laden, around Europe and the Middle East. A ‘list of [BIF’s] wealthy sponsors from Saudi Arabia’ found in Bosnia ‘include[d] references to… bin Laden’ among several others. The sort of sums the BIF was dealing in was revealed by a bank transfer between an account in Switzerland and one in the USA, wired some time between June 2000 and September 2001, for $1,414,406.
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Hundreds of such transactions occur every day and give a useful indication of how much cash there is available. Even if bin Laden had ever received substantial funds from his inheritance they would be dwarfed by the sort of money habitually disbursed by even medium-sized Saudi charities.

The 11 September attacks cost around $500,000. This may have been drawn from funds already hidden in accounts held within the Islamic banking system by associates of bin Laden or may have been raised specifically from one or several individual donors. The money was sent to the hijackers by individuals in Dubai.
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Al-Shehhi, al-Hazmi and al-Midhar were all sent money through the city. In July 2000, shortly after arriving in America, al-Shehhi opened a joint checking account with Atta at SunTrust bank in Florida which, over the next three months, received four money transfers totalling $109,500, considered the ‘primary funding’ for the 11 September operation by the FBI. The transfers were again sent from Dubai. Many of the Muscle appear to have been given cash funds, converted into traveller’s cheques, when they transited Dubai on their way from Saudi Arabia to America. Others simply used foreign checking accounts or credit cards at Saudi Arabian or Emirati banks. Much of the money went through an Emirati who was the only non-Saudi member of the Muscle. The 11 September group does not appear to have used
hawala
, the traditional, untraceable, trust-based banking system.

At the risk of increasing the
dramatis personae
in this chapter beyond
manageable limits, three other individuals must swiftly be mentioned when examining the evolution and execution of the 11 September plot. They are Zacarias Moussaoui, the Frenchman recruited by bin al-Shibh to be a pilot for one hijacked jet when it became apparent that bin al-Shibh himself was not going to get a visa to travel to the USA; Mohammed Hayder al-Zammar, a middle-aged and bombastic Syrianborn Islamic activist and veteran of the war in Afghanistan who appears to have been influential in radicalizing Atta and his young friends in Hamburg; and Abu Qutada, the London-based ideologue, whose work, along with that of Abdallah Azzam was favoured by the Hamburg cell.

Moussaoui, who, were it not for the appalling nature of his ambitions, would be very difficult to take seriously, was arrested after behaving suspiciously at a flight simulator in Minnesota in August 2001. He had failed to learn the requisite skills at his first flight school, where he had registered as Zuleiman Tango Tango, and tried elsewhere. Senior al-Qaeda figures, such as Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, who is thought to have met Moussaoui in Afghanistan, were concerned by the Frenchman’s poor tradecraft and eccentricities and were apparently unsurprised when he was arrested.
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The trip in 2000 was Moussaoui’s second to Afghanistan. In early 1998, he had made his way independently to Khaldan camp.
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Moussaoui, who was born in Narbonne in southern France, appears to have been inducted into radical Islam when he came into contact with Qutada and his circle after moving to London in the early 1990s.
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Though of Moroccan descent, Moussaoui thus became involved in the work of Algerian GIA and GSPC supporters in the UK.

By going through an established group with a local and international agenda, Moussaoui was following a more traditional route to the al-Qaeda hardcore than the members of the Hamburg cell. The latter were not in any way affiliated to extant military organizations. Al-Zammar may have played the familiar ‘older man’ role (as Abderraouf Hannachi had for Ressam, Abu Hosha had for Hijazi, Abu Qutada had for Beghal and Beghal himself had for others), but the members of the Hamburg cell were never inducted into the Algerian, Egyptian, or indeed any other local struggle. Instead they went straight to the al-Qaeda hardcore. From the outset, their targets were America and
other representatives of global kufr, rather than the regimes in their own country. Though Atta loathed Mubarak’s government in Egypt, there is little evidence that the others in the Hamburg cell harboured any great ill will towards the political leaders of their own respective homelands. Their hatred was primarily directed at the West. This mirrors bin Laden’s own ideological and strategic shift and was a radical and important change with profound implications for the future face of modern Islamic militancy.

By the late summer of 2001 the final arrangements for the 11 September attacks were being made. Al-Hazmi and al-Midhar had proved incapable of piloting a hijacked jet so a replacement pilot was found for the San Diego-based cell. This was Hani Hanjour, a rich and weak-willed Saudi who had drifted around the USA and Saudi Arabia for a decade, dreaming of being an airline pilot. Moussaoui, arrested in August, was not replaced, if indeed he was ever going to fly. Atta had spent the previous year travelling around Europe and the USA, managing the operation and coordinating with bin al-Shibh and others. In the last weeks of August, Atta organized the concentration of the teams nearer their targets and conducted last-minute surveillance and research. Towards the end of that month, the nineteen men began moving into a series of motels, hotels and apartments along the length of the American east coast.

At 3am on 29 August, Atta called bin al-Shibh in the Marienstrasse flat in Hamburg to tell him which date had been selected for the attack.
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Over the next few days, around twenty men connected with the hijackers left Hamburg. Several of them remain unidentified. Bin al-Shibh cleared the flat and left too. On 6 September in Afghanistan, bin Laden received notice that the plan was going ahead.
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On the evening of 10 September, all the hijackers were in position. Each group had a copy of a letter, probably dictated to Abdulaziz al-Omari by Atta. ‘When you board the plane,’ the letter said, ‘remember that this is a battle in the sake of God, which is worth the whole world and all that is in it.’ The hijackers were reminded that, as martyrs, they would be rewarded with paradise: ‘And when zero-hour comes, open your chest and welcome death in the cause of God… And let your last words be “There is no god but God and Mohammed is His messenger”.’
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16
The War on Terror

On the horizon the hills were sharp against a pale stormy sky. Beneath them was a huge gravel plain that was blank and grey and featureless but for the odd village of low, flat-roofed houses and an occasional stand of slender ash trees with yellow leaves. In the middle of the plain were Major Garry Green of 45 Royal Marine Commando, two enormous rubber bladders full of aviation fuel, several score British soldiers, five eager if slightly bewildered Afghan coalition fighters, a bearded American special forces man, four huge piles of very large camouflaged boxes and a small pack of journalists.