The Looming Tower - Lawrence Wright [175]
That is the moment when Mohammed Atta and his friends first showed up in Afghanistan. Their arrivals were staggered over a two-week period at the end of November, when the leaves were dropping and Ramadan was about to begin. Abu Hafs spotted them immediately: educated, technical men, with English skills ranging from rudimentary to fluent. They did not need to be told how to live in the West. Visas would be no problem. All they needed was to learn how to fly and to be willing to die.
By the time bin al-Shibh arrived, Atta, Jarrah, and Shehhi told him that they had been picked for a secret, undisclosed mission. The four of them were invited to a Ramadan feast with bin Laden himself. They discussed the Taliban, and bin Laden asked about the conditions of Muslims living in Europe. Then he informed them that they would be martyrs.
Their instructions were to return to Germany and apply to flight schools in the United States.
THERE WERE NOW two separate teams on the rapidly changing planes operation, each of which would lead to a major attack. The Hamburg cell reported their passports lost or stolen in order to cover up their trip to Afghanistan. Meantime, the four men who had originally been selected for the planes operation went to Kuala Lumpur. Besides Khaled al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi, there were the two Yemenis: Abu Bara and Tewfiq bin Attash, who adopted the name Khallad.
Khallad was another elusive but highly significant figure in al-Qaeda. He wore a metal prosthesis in place of the right leg he had lost while fighting against Ahmed Shah Massoud’s Northern Alliance. Although he was born in Yemen, he was raised in Saudi Arabia, and he had known bin Laden since he was a child. He had been part of the embassy bombing and the failed attempt to blow up USS The Sullivans in the Aden harbor, and he would be the mastermind behind the bombing of the USS Cole ten months later.
At the end of 1999, Khallad telephoned Midhar and summoned him to a meeting in Kuala Lumpur. It was the only time that members of the two teams would be together. The NSA picked up a conversation from the phone of Mihdhar’s father-in-law, Ahmad al-Hada, in Yemen—the one that al-Qaeda used as a message board—in which the forthcoming meeting in Malaysia was mentioned, along with the full name of Khaled al-Mihdhar and the first names of two other participants: Nawaf and Salem. The NSA had information from the same phone that Nawaf’s last name was Hazmi, although the agency did not check its own database. “Something nefarious might be afoot,” the NSA reported, but it did not pursue the matter further.
The CIA already had the names of Mihdhar and Hazmi, however. Saeed Badeeb, Prince Turki’s chief analyst in Saudi intelligence, had previously alerted his American colleagues that they were members of al-Qaeda in one of the monthly meetings in Riyadh. Armed with this knowledge, the CIA broke into Mihdhar’s hotel room in Dubai, where he had stopped on his way to Malaysia. The American agents photographed his passport, then faxed it to Alex Station. Inside the passport was the critical information that Mihdhar had a multi-entry American visa, due to expire in April. Alec Station notified various intelligence agencies around the world saying “We need to continue the effort to identify these travelers and their activities…to determine if there is any true threat posed.” The same cable said that the FBI had been alerted to the Malaysia meeting and that the bureau had