By Greg Gordon
WASHINGTON: Two numbers scrawled in a notebook that belonged to terrorism suspect Zacarias Moussaoui could have given the FBI a chance to identify several of the September 11 hijackers before they struck six years ago, according to officials who are familiar with the bureau’s massive investigation of the attacks.
The notebook entries recorded the control numbers for two Western Union wire transfers in which suspected Al Qaeda coordinator Ramzi Binalshibh, using an alias, sent Moussaoui $14,000 from Germany in early August 2001, before he went to a Minnesota flight school to learn to fly a Boeing 747 jumbo jet.
A check of Western Union records probably would have uncovered other wires in the preceding days for similar sums of money to Binalshibh – who’d been turned away at the US border four times because he was a suspected terrorist – from an Al Qaeda paymaster in Dubai. On one of those receipts, the paymaster listed a phone number in the United Arab Emirates that several of the hijackers had called from Florida.
FBI headquarters, however, rejected Minneapolis FBI field agents’ repeated requests for a national security warrant to search Moussaoui’s belongings after he was arrested on August 16, 2001. One agent, Harry Samit, was so convinced that Moussaoui was a terrorist that he sent scores of messages to FBI headquarters pressing for a search warrant.
It’s not clear whether the FBI would have been able to trace the money and telephone calls fast enough to pre-empt the September 11 attacks, but the decision to reject the requests for a warrant meant they never had the chance.
Instead, Moussaoui’s tattered, blue spiral notebook sat in a sealed bag at an immigration office – unopened until after four hijacked jets slammed into New York’s World Trade Center, the Pentagon and the Pennsylvania countryside, killing 2,972 people.
On Monday, FBI spokesman Rich Kolko said the bureau had “worked diligently on the case” but that “the trail of evidence was complex, and additional information was not available until after the 9/11 events.” He declined further comment.
Officials familiar with the September 11 investigation and with the items in Moussaoui’s possession when he was arrested provided McClatchy Newspapers with the most detailed description to date of FBI agents’ pre-September 11 path toward the hijackers. The officials declined to be identified because the decision not to seek the warrant has caused friction and embarrassment within the FBI.
After the attacks, FBI agents traced the wire transfers. In addition to the two numbers for the transfers, a succeeding page in Moussaoui’s notebook contained the words “Western Union.” It also contained a phone number in Hamburg, Germany, that belonged to Ahad Sabet, the stolen identity that Binalshibh used to wire the money.
Investigators following the trail probably would have been quick to discover that Ahad Sabet was an American citizen living in Arizona whose passport and credit cards had been stolen in Spain in 1998, raising a red flag about the source of Moussaoui’s overseas funding.
Former FBI agent Aaron Zebley, testifying at Moussaoui’s trial, said that if Moussaoui had confessed to his role in a suicide hijacking plot, the FBI could have tracked the wire transactions and phone calls quickly before September 11 and identified 11 of the 19 hijackers. He didn’t say how far he thought the bureau might have gotten with a search warrant but without Moussaoui’s co-operation.
FBI Director Robert Mueller said in 2002 that even if the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court had approved a warrant to search Moussaoui’s belongings, he doubted that the bureau could have stopped the attacks.
The September 11 commission concluded that “a maximum US effort to investigate Moussaoui conceivably could have unearthed his connection to Binalshibh,” possibly leading investigators “to the core of the 9/11 plot.” However, the panel said, “it was not an easy trail to find,” and would have required extensive and speedy co-operation from German authorities.
Moussaoui, a Frenchman of Moroccan origins, remains the only person to be convicted in a US court in connection with the terrorist attacks six years ago. He pleaded guilty to six conspiracy counts in April 2005, but while he confessed that he was training to crash a plane into the White House, he denied knowing details of the September 11 plot. – MCT
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