IN 2003 and 2004, but only following a high-level request from the White House, 9/11 Commission staff were able to make two visits to Saudi Arabia to interview Thumairy, Bayoumi, and Basnan. All interviews were conducted in the presence of officials from Prince Naif’s internal security service.
The U.S. questioners, a recently released Commission memo notes, believed Thumairy was “deceptive during both interviews.… His answers were either inconsistent or at times in direct conflict with information we have from other sources.” Most significantly, he denied knowing Bayoumi, let alone Mihdhar and Hazmi. Shown a photograph of Bayoumi, he did not budge. He knew no one of that name, he said. Then, prompted by a whispered interjection from one of the Saudi officials present, he said he had heard of Bayoumi—but only from 9/11 news coverage.
At a second interview, told by Commission staff that witnesses had spoken of seeing him with Bayoumi, Thumairy said perhaps he had been mistaken for someone else. Perhaps, too, there were people who might “say bad things about him out of jealousy.” Finally told that telephone records showed numerous calls between his phones and Bayoumi’s phones, just before the arrival of Mihdhar and Hazmi in the United States to boot, Thumairy was stumped.
Perhaps, he ventured, his phone number had been allotted to somebody else after he had it? Perhaps the calls had been made by someone else using Bayoumi’s phone? He flailed around in vain for an explanation. Everything Thumairy came up with, his Commission questioners noted, was “implausible.”
Bayoumi, who was interviewed earlier—though not by staff with firsthand experience of the California episode—had made a more favorable impression. He stuck to his story about having met Mihdhar and Hazmi by chance. He said he had rarely seen Mihdhar and Hazmi after they came to San Diego, that they had been his neighbors for only a few days. Bayoumi said he had then decided he did not want to have much to do with them. Commission executive director Zelikow, who was present during the interview, did not think Bayoumi had been a Saudi agent.
The Commission Report, however, was to note that Bayoumi’s passport contained a distinguishing mark that may be acquired by “especially devout Muslims”—or be associated with “adherence to al Qaeda.” Investigators had also turned up something else, something disquieting. Bayoumi’s salary had been approved by a Saudi official whose son’s photograph was later found on a computer disk in Pakistan—a disk that also contained some of the hijackers’ photographs.
The son, Saud al-Rashid, was also produced for interview in Saudi Arabia. He admitted having been in Afghanistan—and to having “cleansed” his passport of the evidence that he had traveled there. He said, though, that he had known nothing of the 9/11 plot. Commission staff who questioned him thought Rashid had been “deceptive.” They noted that he had had “enough time to develop a coherent story … even may have been coached.”
Finally, there was Basnan. The Commission’s interview with him, senior commission counsel Dietrich Snell wrote afterward, established only “the witness’ utter lack of credibility on virtually every material subject.” This assessment was based on “a combination of confrontation, evasiveness, and speechmaking … his repudiation of statements made by him on prior occasions,” and the “inherent incredibility of many of his assertions when viewed in light of the totality of the available evidence.”
Two men did not face Commission questioning in Saudi Arabia. One of them, a Saudi religious official named Saleh al-Hussayen, certainly should have, although his name does not appear in the Commission Report. Hussayen, who was involved in the administration of the Holy Mosques in Mecca and Medina, had been in the States for some three weeks before 9/11. For four days before the attacks, he had stayed at a hotel in Virginia.
Then on September 10, the very eve of the attacks, he had made an unexplained move. With his wife, he had checked into the Marriott Residence Inn in Herndon, Virginia—the very hotel at which Mihdhar and Hazmi were spending their last night alive.
Commission memos, one of them heavily censored, state that FBI agents arrived at Hussayen’s room at the Marriott after midnight on the 11th. As questioning began, however, he began “muttering and drooping his head,” sweating and drooling. Then he fell out of his chair and appeared to lose consciousness for a few moments. Paramedics summoned to the room, and doctors who examined Hussayen at a local hospital, found nothing wrong. An FBI agent said later that the interview had been cut short because—the agent suggested—Hussayen “feigned a seizure.”
Asked by one of the Bureau agents why they had moved to the Marriott, Hussayen’s wife said it was because they had wanted a room with a kitchenette. There was no sign, however, that the kitchenette in the room had been used, and the fridge was empty. Asked whether she thought her husband could have been involved in the 9/11 attacks in any way, the wife replied—oddly, the agents thought—“I don’t know.”
Agents never did obtain an adequate interview with Saleh al-Hussayen. Instead of continuing with his tour of the United States, he flew back to Saudi Arabia—and went on to head the administration of the two Holy Mosques. It remains unknown whether he had contact with Mihdhar and Hazmi on the eve of 9/11, or whether his presence at the Marriott—that night of all nights—was, as Bayoumi claimed of his meeting with the two terrorists, just a matter of chance.
As Hussayen left Virginia for home, other FBI agents in the state were interviewing the imam Anwar Aulaqi. As reported earlier, he did not deny having had contact with Mihdhar and Hazmi in California and later—with Hazmi—in Virginia. He could not deny that his own move from San Diego to the East Coast had paralleled theirs. Yet he made nothing of it—and U.S. authorities apparently pursued the matter no further at that time.
Aulaqi, almost uniquely for a suspect in this story, is American-born, the son of a former minister in the government of Yemen. Hard to credit though it is in light of what we now know of him, he had reportedly preached in the precincts of the U.S. Capitol shortly before 9/11. Not long afterward, moreover, he had lunched at the Pentagon—in an area undamaged by the strike in which his acquaintances Mihdhar and Hazmi had played such a leading role. The reason for the lunch? An outreach effort to ease tensions between Muslim Americans and non-Muslims.
Aulaqi remained in the United States for more than a year before departing, first for Britain and eventually for Yemen. He had been allowed to move about unimpeded, even though the phone number of his Virginia mosque had turned up in Germany in the apartment of 9/11 conspirator Ramzi Binalshibh. Only seven years later, starting in 2009, did he at last begin to become known around the world.
Aulaqi’s name was associated with: the multiple shootings by a U.S. army major at Fort Hood, an almost successful attempt to explode a bomb on an airliner en route to Detroit, a major car bomb scare in Times Square, and a last-minute discovery of concealed explosives on cargo planes destined for the United States.
When Aulaqi’s name began to feature large in the Western press, Yemen’s foreign minister cautioned that—pending real evidence—he should be considered not as a terrorist but as a preacher. Briefed on the intelligence about him, President Obama took a different view. In early 2010, he authorized the CIA and the U.S. military to seek out, capture, or kill the Yemeni—assigning Aulaqi essentially the same status as that assigned at the time to Osama bin Laden.
Commission staff had never had the opportunity to interview Aulaqi. Executive Director Zelikow, however, had long thought he merited more attention. Aulaqi would remain, as Zelikow memorably noted when his name finally hit the headlines, “a 9/11 loose end.”
IN THE FALL of 2011, the authors came upon another loose end, one the FBI has claimed it investigated but discounted and—contrary to its public assertions—appears not to have shared with either of the official investigations. It raises the possibility that—as in California—the 9/11 terrorists may have had a Saudi point of contact in Florida.
A month after the attacks, the senior administrator of a gated community in Sarasota—clos
e to Venice, where Mohamed Atta and two other pilot hijackers had learned to fly—felt it his duty to call the sheriff’s department. The administrator, Larry Berberich, reported what he felt had been a suspicious event. Patrick Gallagher, a resident who shared his concern, had emailed the FBI right after 9/11. They and others had noted the seemingly abrupt departure, shortly before the attacks, of a wealthy Saudi couple who had lived in the community since the mid-nineties.
The Saudis, Abdulaziz al-Hijji, his wife, Anoud, and their young children, who had occupied a luxury home at 4224 Escondito Circle since about 1995, had decamped in August 2001 in what appeared to be great haste. When their empty house was eventually investigated, a counterterrorist officer told us on condition of anonymity, there was “mail on the table, dirty diapers in one of the bathrooms … the toiletries still in place … clothes hanging in the closet … TVs … opulent furniture, equal or greater in value than the house … the pool running.”
Three vehicles sat abandoned in the driveway and garage. Florida Department of Law Enforcement documents we obtained, moreover, state that, as recently as mid-August, the al-Hijjis had “purchased a new vehicle and renewed the registration on several other vehicles.…” It made no sense to the officer who initially investigated. In the words of one of the FDLE reports, the “manner and timing” of the family’s departure was “suspicious.”
It became more than suspicious, the counterterrorist officer—and Berberich—told us, as the investigation proceeded. The license plates of cars entering the community in which the al-Hijjis lived, it emerged, had been routinely photographed by closed-circuit television. Often, especially at night, the gate guards asked to see ID and kept notes of the documents that drivers or passengers produced.
“The registration numbers of the vehicles that had passed through the North Gate in the months before 9/11,” the counterterrorist source said, “coupled with the identification documents shown by incoming drivers on request, showed that Mohamed Atta and several of his fellow hijackers, and another Saudi suspect still at large, had visited 4224 Escondito Circle.”
The visitors, the source said, had included Marwan al-Shehhi, who would be at the controls of the second plane to crash into the World Trade Center, and Ziad Jarrah, who was to commandeer the cockpit of the fourth plane seized. Also in one of the cars bound for the al-Hijji house, he said, was Waleed al-Shehri, a muscle hijacker who was to fly with Atta. The Saudi terrorist suspect still at large said to have visited al-Hijji was Adnan Shukrijumah, who—according to other testimony—associated with Atta in spring 2001. As of this writing, Shukrijumah is still on the FBI’s Most Wanted list.
According to the source, the gate records indicated that the terrorists visited the house on Escondito Circle on multiple occasions. Analysis of incoming and outgoing calls made on the landline at the al-Hijji house, moreover, “lined up with the known suspects.”
Information connecting the terrorists to the house also came in from an unexpected source. Following an appeal to the public for information after 9/11, two female employees at a local pub called the Gingerbread Man told the FBI that they had been at after-hours parties at Escondito Circle. One, who said she attended at least five parties, identified Atta, Shehhi, and Jarrah as having been present. She admitted to having had sexual intercourse with Jarrah.
The second woman said that three other 9/11 terrorists—Waleed and Wail al-Shehri and Satam al-Suqami—as well as Shukrijumah had also been at the house when she was there. She acknowledged having had sex with a number of the men.
FBI agents, the counterterrorist officer said, were informed of the original lead, supplied with the gate records said to have documented the terrorists’ visits to the al-Hijji house, and had interviewed the women who came forward. Inquiries to the FBI by the authors and others, however, have met with a series of denials.
In its most recent statement, while admitting that it had followed up on the information about the al-Hijjis, the Bureau claimed that “there was no connection found to the 9/11 plot.” The statement asserted that all information regarding 9/11 had been passed both to Congress’s Joint Inquiry and to the Commission. Research, however, fails to support that assertion. Checks at the National Archives, which holds copies of records handed over by the FBI, drew a blank. High-level members of both the inquiry and the Commission do not recall having been advised of the Florida episode.
Notably, meanwhile, the FBI has declined to comment on the claim that the al-Hijji house was linked to the terrorists by car registration numbers recorded at the gated community’s entrance.
Bob Graham, the former cochair of Congress’s inquiry, who as a two-time Florida governor had a special interest, has pursued this matter with vigor. As a result, and following meetings at the FBI and the Obama White House, he was given sight of documents bearing a “Secret” classification. One, according to Graham, showed that an FBI agent filed a report “not consistent with the public statements of the FBI that there was no connection between the 9/11 hijackers and the Saudis at the Sarasota home.” The material he saw, Graham added, indicated, too, “that the investigation was not the robust inquiry claimed by the FBI.”
Documents released by the Florida Department of Law Enforcement (FDLE), meanwhile, refer to a 2004 jail interview with an Arab of Lebanese origin named Wissam Hammoud. Hammoud, who is classified as an “International Terrorist Associate,” talked about al-Hijji with an FBI agent and a Sarasota County Sheriff’s Office detective.
Having met al-Hijji through relatives, he said, he had worked out with al-Hijji at a Sarasota gym and played soccer with him at the local Islamic Society. He had stayed away, however, Hammoud told the FBI, when al-Hijji entertained “Saudis” at “parties” at his home because—he said—he himself “did not drink or smoke cannabis.” A Saudi “friend” whom al-Hijji brought to a soccer game, he said, was Shukrijumah, the suspected Atta associate still at large today.
According to Hammoud, “Osama bin Laden was a hero of al-Hijji.” Al-Hijji showed him a “website containing information about bin Laden” and spoke of “going to Afghanistan and becoming a freedom fighter.” He also discussed “taking flight training in Venice,” the town just nineteen miles from Sarasota where Atta and two accomplices learned to fly. He said he believed “al-Hijji had known some of the terrorists from the September 11, 2001, attacks.”
Asked about al-Hijji in 2012, Hammoud repeated what he had told the FBI. His wife and sister-in-law said they, too, had known al-Hijji and his wife and were familiar with elements of Hammoud’s account.
We followed up, meanwhile, on the al-Hijjis’ movements after leaving the United States on the eve of 9/11 and—as law enforcement checks revealed—heading for Saudi Arabia. A lead in an FDLE report indicated that, two years later, they traveled to England. Checks there showed that they stayed briefly in rented accommodation in the southern town of Southampton, then moved on without leaving a forwarding address.
Al-Hijji had told his Southampton landlord that he had a job with Aramco, the Saudi state oil company. It turned out that, as of early 2012, he was indeed working at Aramco’s London office—he apparently held the post of “career counselor”—and living in an apartment in central London. He was asked, in an impromptu, rapidly terminated interview, about the suggestion that Atta and his terrorist comrades had visited his house in Florida. Al-Hijji replied, “Never, never, never …” He said news of the allegation, first published in The Miami Herald, had come as “a shock, I mean really, for all of us. It was a shock to hear these things.”
Later, when al-Hijji agreed to respond to questions by email, he strongly denied having had any involvement with the 9/11 terrorists or having had anything to do with the 9/11 conspiracy. “I have neither relation nor association with any of those bad people and the awful crime they did,” he wrote. “I feel very saddened and oppressed by these false allegations.… We were a young couple living in an association full of seniors and retirees, so possibly you can imagine the gossip.
” The reason he had abandoned his Florida home, he said, had been merely that “we were trying to secure the Aramco job.” The family had left Sarasota, he said, “like any normal people would do.”
Al-Hijji said he had not been questioned by the FBI about the Sarasota matter, although he had made a return visit to the United States in 2005. His wife and mother-in-law, however, were interviewed when they went back to Sarasota to sort out outstanding matters in connection with the house at Escondito Circle. Al-Hijji had “no idea,” he wrote in an email, why his relatives had been interviewed. Asked about parties alleged to have taken place at his house and attended by Saudis, he responded, “No, not true. My friends were very limited and normally I don’t hold parties in the house because I have two little kids.… I was not a frequent [sic] to any bars.” He acknowledged that Wissam Hammoud and his wife had been friends, and that he had attended a gym with Hammoud. He did not respond, however, to a further emailed question asking why Hammoud would have claimed that bin Laden had been al-Hijji’s “hero” and that al-Hijji had wanted to go to Afghanistan and become a “freedom fighter.”
The FBI has said interviews with family members cleared up the case to its satisfaction. As late as 2003, however, a Florida attorney involved in settling issues over the property has said, the FBI asked him to try to convince al-Hijji’s Saudi father-in-law, Esam Ghazzawi—as a co-owner of the house—to return to America to sign documents. Instead, Ghazzawi signed at the American consulate in Beirut.
Esam Ghazzawi had for years been an adviser to Prince Fahd bin Salman, a nephew of Saudi Arabia’s late King Fahd. (As reported on this page, Fahd’s son Prince Sultan bin Fahd was in Florida, not far from Sarasota, at the time of the 9/11 attacks. With his uncle, Prince Ahmed bin Salman, and other Saudis, he left for Saudi Arabia days later.)
The Eleventh Day: The Full Story of 9/11 and Osama bin Laden Page 45