In this series, Newsweek describes the road of 9/11, as it happened 20 years ago, day after day.
exist August 28, this CIA The Counter-Terrorism Center (CTC) received a human intelligence report from the field stating that the nickname “Mukhtar” was related to a person named Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. The name Mukhtar appeared in CIA reports as early as the spring of 2001, and there have been more than one report that people with this name are recruiting and training terrorists to launch attacks in the United States.
At this time, the CIA and FBI Focused on monitoring Khalid al-Mihdhar and figuring out what Zacarias Moussaoui was doing, and also assumed that the mastermind behind the 2001 conspiracy was Abu Zubaydah, but the appearance of the KSM name should have sounded the alarm. He was in January 1996 or 1993 He was prosecuted in the World Trade Center attack and assisted Ramsey Youssef in planning the attack, and even failed to extradite in Qatar that year. In other words, the US intelligence services “know” the existence of KSM and its connection with terrorists.
After escaping from Qatar after extradition in 1996, KSM has been living in Afghanistan and Pakistan. He provided media facilitation for Al Qaeda and became the head of the media committee at the end of 2000. During the 1998 African Embassy attack, the Kenyan authorities reported that in the 1998 African Embassy attack, the CIA had determined that the alias Abdulrahman AA Al-Ghamdi associated with KSM flew to Nairobi a few days before the attack. Therefore, before 9/11, there was a clear connection between KSM and the al-Ghamdi alias and the Mukhtar nickname.
FBI/Getty Images
After this report on Mukhtar appeared, no one at the CIA was connected to another report in June 2001, that KSM himself-in that name-recruited terrorists to the United States. The importance of KSM is also not based on his reported cousins, who were all involved in terrorism: Ramzi Yousef, then detained for his role in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing; Abdul Samad; Abd al-Karim aka (Abu Musab al-Baluchi); Abd al-Mun’im aka (Abu Khalid al-Baluchi); Hashim Abd al-Aziz aka (Shabir); and Ali Abdul Aziz Ali (Ammar al-Baluchi), 9/11 financial agent. The CIA knew that all of these people had connections with Al Qaeda, while Abu Musab and Abu Khalid were known by the CIA to handle logistical and administrative affairs for Al Qaeda.
Only after 9/11 did the German intelligence agency discover that KSM (now the same person as Mukhtar) was communicating with the phone used by Ramzi Bin al-Shibh, and Bin al-Shibh was using the same phone to communicate with Zacarias Moussaoui. All this seems to be a maze of names, but the point is that the intelligence agency has not completed the work of putting the various parts together (the “junction”).
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