The Eleventh Day_ The History and Legacy of 9_11 - Anthony Summers [181]
Hada’s telephone also came to loom large for the FBI. One of the Kenya bombers called the number before and after the 1998 attack on Nairobi, and—once agents learned that the number also took calls from bin Laden’s sat-phone on the day of the bombing and the following day—they had a vital evidentiary link between the East Africa attacks and al Qaeda.
The intercepts of Hada’s phone conversations were a priceless resource, and in 1999 yielded the first factual pointer to the preparations for 9/11. Hada’s daughter, U.S. intelligence learned at some stage, was married to a young man named “Khalid”—full name, as we now know, Khalid al-Mihdhar. In December 1999, crucially, the NSA reported to both the CIA and the FBI that it had intercepted an especially interesting call on the Hada telephone, one that mentioned an upcoming trip by “Khalid” and “Nawaf” to Malaysia.
From the start, CIA officers guessed that this was no innocent excursion. Its purpose, one staffer suspected, was “something more nefarious.” The travel, one cable stated, “may be in support of a terrorist mission.” The men were referred to early on as members of an “operational cadre” or as “terrorist operatives.”
The episode that was eventually to bring the Agency lasting shame began as textbook undercover work. As foreshadowed in an earlier chapter, Mihdhar’s Saudi passport was photographed during the stopover in Dubai—leading to the startling revelation that the terrorist had a visa valid for travel to the United States.
As veteran FBI counterterrorism specialist Jack Cloonan was to say, “This is as good as it gets.… How often do you get into someone’s suitcase and find multiple-entry visas? How often do you know there’s going to be an organizational meeting of al Qaeda anyplace in the world? … This is what you would dream about.”
Intelligence bounty continued to rain down on the CIA following the look inside Mihdhar’s passport. The suspect was tracked as he traveled on to the Malaysian capital, Kuala Lumpur. He was watched, starting on January 5, as he met and talked with fellow suspects—including his associate Nawaf al-Hazmi. Courtesy of Malaysia’s Special Branch, the men were covertly photographed, observed going out to pay phones, surveilled when they went to an Internet café to use the computers. The computers’ hard drives were reportedly examined afterward.
The whirl of suspicious activity was of interest not merely to CIA agents in the field, nor only to CIA headquarters at Langley. For it all occurred in the very first days of January 2000, the post-Millennium moment when Washington was more than usually on the alert—at the highest level—for any clue that might herald a terrorist attack. Regular situation reports went day by day not only to the directors of the CIA and the FBI but also to National Security Adviser Sandy Berger and his staff, who included Richard Clarke, at the White House.
Three days later, on January 8, Mihdhar and two of his comrades—one of them later to be identified as having been Hazmi and the other as senior bin Laden henchman Tawfiq bin Attash—took the brief two-hour flight from Kuala Lumpur to the Thai capital Bangkok. There, according to the CIA, and though communication with a Bangkok hotel was logged on one of the pay phones used by the suspects in Kuala Lumpur, the trail was lost.
Nothing would be known of the operatives’ whereabouts, the available record indicates, until two months later. Only then, according to the known record, did Thai authorities respond to a January CIA request to watch for the suspects’ departure. At last, however, in early March, two Agency stations abroad reported a fresh development. Their message said that Hazmi and an unnamed comrade—only later to be named as Mihdhar—had flown out of Bangkok as long ago as January 15, bound for Los Angeles. The men, the cables noted, were “UBL [bin Laden] associates.”
This was stunning information, information that