The Eleventh Day_ The History and Legacy of 9_11 - Anthony Summers [109]
AS LATE AS 2004, a former CIA deputy director of intelligence—by then a senior staff member of the 9/11 Commission—would say there was “substantial uncertainty” as to whether Osama bin Laden and his organization had a role in either the Trade Center bombing or the plot to blow up U.S. airliners over the Pacific.
Available information suggests there was in fact a link to bin Laden. Yousef had learned about explosives in bin Laden–funded camps near the Afghan border. In 1991, when he reached the Philippines, he told separatists he was bin Laden’s “emissary.” The separatist with whom he had most contact was funded by bin Laden, had been close to bin Laden during the anti-Soviet conflict. The accomplice who tried to enter the United States with Yousef—but was refused admission—had carried a bomb manual headed “Al Qaeda,” the name for the then-obscure entity headed by bin Laden.
Yousef made a huge number of long-distance calls while preparing to bomb the Trade Center. Checks on the calls after the attack reportedly indicated a link to bin Laden. During Yousef’s stays in Peshawar, over several years, he stayed at the Beit Ashuhada [House of the Martyrs], which bin Laden funded. One of the operatives Yousef used in the Philippines was an Afghanistan veteran whom bin Laden has recalled as a “good friend,” a man who had “fought from the same trenches” with him.
Bin Laden also connected to the Yousef operation through his own brother-in-law. This was his Saudi friend from university days, Jamal Khalifa, who married bin Laden’s sister Shaikha and lived with bin Laden after the wedding. “Imagine how close we are,” Khalifa would say after 9/11. “We never disagreed about anything.”
By the early 1990s, Khalifa had long been active in the Philippines, fronting as a “missionary” or “philanthropist” and setting up charities to support Muslim causes. In 1992, according to an intelligence report, bin Laden himself visited the Philippines to bestow financial largesse.
Behind the facade, Khalifa spread money around in support of antigovernment rebels. By one report, moreover, he and bin Laden personally introduced one leading Filipino rebel leader to explosives expert Ramzi Yousef. Khalifa remained active in the Philippines until late 1994. Then he abruptly left the country, on the heels of a police report on Muslim groups and terrorism.
Just before Christmas that year, on the U.S. West Coast, Khalifa was arrested by FBI agents—at the very time that, back in the Philippines, Yousef was finalizing his plan to bomb eleven American airliners. In the Saudi’s baggage, agents found: a phone book listing a number in Pakistan that Yousef had called from Manila; a beeper number for one of the accomplices Yousef planned to use to plant his bombs on American planes; the address of Yousef’s bomb factory; documents related to explosives and weaponry—and a phone directory entry for Osama bin Laden.
There was more. Khalifa’s business card was found both in Manila—at the apartment of one of Yousef’s accomplices—and in New York in a suitcase belonging to Blind Sheikh Rahman. One of Khalifa’s aliases—he used several—was found on a document belonging to one of Yousef’s accomplices. He would eventually be named as an unindicted co-conspirator in the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center.
Inexplicably, there would not be a single reference to Khalifa in the 9/11 Commission report. Congress’s Joint Inquiry report contained just one, characterizing him as the “alleged financier” of the plot to destroy American airliners. Khalifa would never be charged in the United States with any crime.
RAMZI YOUSEF’S phone directory, meanwhile, also threw up a lead, a major clue that, successfully pursued, could perhaps have prevented the 9/11 catastrophe. The directory contained the name and contact information in Pakistan for one “Zahid Sheikh Mohammed,” brother of a man named “Khalid”—both of them uncles to Yousef.
Zahid’s name remains obscure, while Khalid