by Daniel Klaidman and Mark Hosenball
Newsweek
November 11, 2001, November 19, 2001 issue

On the surveillance video, he looked like any Saudi businessman, dressed in traditional white robes and headdress. On Sept. 8, three days before the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks, Mustafa Ahmed walked into a Federal Express office in Dubai to retrieve a package mailed from Hollywood, Fla. The sender was Mohamed Atta, the man investigators believe to be the lead hijacker. In the days before the attacks, Newsweek has learned, Atta and the other hijackers were in constant contact with Ahmed, wiring money to him and placing many calls to his phone in the United Arab Emirates. The last calls were made just hours before the 19 men boarded their flights. Later that day Ahmed himself took a flight, to Pakistan. He hasn't been seen since.

Investigators tracking Osama bin Laden had long suspected that Ahmed, a 33-year-old Saudi, had close connections to bin Laden's network, Al Qaeda. But his exact role was unclear. In the weeks following the attacks, the Feds concluded he was the operation's paymaster -- the "financial guru," in the words of one top FBI official, who sent money to the hijackers for living expenses, flight-school tuition and plane tickets. But law-enforcement sources tell Newsweek that they now believe Ahmed may have played a far more central role than they first realized. Ahmed is bin Laden's "chief financial officer," says one official. As the Feds traced bin Laden's worldwide money trail, Ahmed's name kept popping up on documents and bank records. Investigators have also linked him to a key component of Al Qaeda's operation: Saudi charities that the Feds believe secretly funnel millions of dollars to fund bin Laden's operatives.

The paper trail that first led investigators into Ahmed's shadowy financial world began at the bottom of a motel trash can. On the night of Sept. 10, Atta hunkered down in room 233 at the Comfort Inn in Portland, Maine. The next morning he would take a flight to Boston's Logan airport. At the motel, Atta tore up a FedEx Air Waybill and threw it away. Days later, federal agents searching the motel found the receipt, from a package mailed in Florida, where Atta and several other hijackers had lived until days before the bombing. It was addressed to "Almohtaram," Arabic for "The Respected One" -- the honorific the terrorists gave to Ahmed.

Investigators believe they sealed the connection when they got hold of the video of Ahmed picking up the package. In the weeks that followed, Ahmed's role came into focus. The Feds suspect that he and other operatives of Al Qaeda wired large sums of money into the terrorists' accounts at the SunTrust Bank in Florida earlier this year. Ahmed also got them Visa cards, which several of the hijackers used to buy airline tickets over the Internet. A day or two before the attacks, Ahmed received at least $18,260 in wire and bank transfers from the hijackers -- the "leftover change," as one official put it.

Then Irish police raided the Dublin offices of the Islamic Relief Agency, a Saudi-backed charity previously linked to bin Laden's 1998 bombings of two American embassies in Africa. The office was run by Ibrahim Buisir, a Libyan suspected to be a bin Laden operative. Two documents discovered in the Dublin search referred to Ahmed -- a clue, investigators say, that he was high up in Al Qaeda. (Buisir couldn't be reached for comment but has previously called himself "innocent.")

The raid was also an embarrassing reminder that the Saudi regime has sometimes turned a blind eye to terrorism. In the 1980s the Saudi government, with the help of wealthy families, created a network of religious charities with the aim of spreading their orthodox brand of fundamentalist Islam around the world. But over the years the charities were subverted by Al Qaeda and other extremist groups, and they are now clandestinely used to finance terrorism.

Law-enforcement agencies around the world are on the lookout for Ahmed. But he has eluded the dragnet so far. On Sept. 13 he used a debit card six consecutive times at a bank-teller machine in Karachi, Pakistan. With that, Osama bin Laden's CFO took the money and ran.

© 2001 Newsweek, Inc.

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