60 Minutes II: The Plot

CBS News
October 9, 2002
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2002/10/09/60II/main524947.shtml

Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, who bills himself as the mastermind of Sept. 11, has his own name for the attacks on America: “Holy Tuesday.”

That is among the details emerging from a never-before-seen-in-America interview that Mohammed gave late last spring in Karachi to Al Jazeera reporter Yosri Fouda, 60 Minutes II correspondent Bob Simon reports.

Not only did Fouda interview Mohammed, whose role in the plot only became clear to American intelligence last spring, but he also spoke with Ramzi Binalshibh, Mohamed Atta’s Hamburg roommate who was originally slated to be one of the four pilots leading the attack.

Invited to Karachi by Al Qaeda, Fouda was driven blindfolded – with several changes of cars – to an apartment where he met the two men.

“Immediately Khalid introduces himself as head of the military committee of Al Qaeda,” said Fouda of Mohammed, a Kuwaiti of Pakistani descent who has terrorized Americans since 1993.

According to Khalid, that committee actually was the arm of Al Qaeda that decided to strike America inside America, and also chose the targets that were actually hit on Sept. 11.

As Fouda described it, Osama bin Laden is the chairman of the board, and Khalid Shaikh Mohammed is the CEO, who gets things done.

Unlike Mohammed, Binalshibh was ready to do an interview for broadcast. In it, he said, “I do not regret any of this whatsoever, for this is our path and the end is best for the righteous, Allah willing. We will persevere with this until Allah the Almighty, grants us victory, or takes us to him as martyrs.”

Intelligence sources say Mohammed directed the first World Trade Center bombing, as well as a 1995 plot to down a dozen American airliners in the Pacific and crash a plane into the CIA headquarters. His operative in those plots was his nephew: Ramzi Yousef. But those attacks failed.

When Yousef was captured and jailed, Mohammed needed a new blueprint and a new master terrorist.

“You need a perfectionist if you are playing with America,” Fouda told Simon. “And I think Khalid, for this reason, was lucky to find someone like Atta. With these qualities and at the same time with a lot of black smoke inside him.”

The smoke had not turned black yet when a preppy-looking teen-ager known then as Mohamed El-Amir went to the American University in Cairo to learn English. The smoke started appearing in Hamburg, where the man we know as Mohamed Atta came to study city planning at a technical university. He was becoming increasingly religious and increasingly frustrated: he wanted to go back home to Cairo and get a job but saw few prospects.

Atta grew a beard to show solidarity with Muslim fundamentalists in Egypt. He was looking for a cause, and Khalid Shaikh Mohammed was looking for a candidate. It was a perfect match.

Atta was recruited by Al Qaeda at the Al Quds mosque, hidden in a non-descript building in downtown Hamburg. So was a Yemeni student, Ramzi Binalshibh. In 1998, Atta and Binalshibh became roommates in Hamburg. The cell was forming, and the nucleus was Mohamed Atta.

“This brother was amazing, extremely amazing,” Binalshibh is heard telling Fouda. “I have never come across anyone from among the brothers that I know who was more eager than him to perform the night prayers, to the point where I remember the neighbors complain about his reading of the Koran at night.”

By the end of November 1999, Atta, Binalshibh and two other future pilots were sent to Afghanistan to an elite Al Qaeda camp. Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and his military committee had drawn up a new plan for America.

“The first thing that jumped into their minds, according to Khalid, was striking at a couple of nuclear facilities in America,” said Fouda. “That, according to him, was later taken off the list for fear it might get out hand.”

When he pressed them on this, Fouda said, they said they were unwilling to take that much risk ”for now.”

Instead, the operation would strike at symbols of America's military, political and economic power. When Atta arrived in New York in June 2000, he carried with him a report on potential targets made by reconnaissance teams that had been sent to the U.S. a year earlier.

“The White House, at that time, was on the list,” Fouda said. “But one of the reconnaissance units went back and recommended that it should be taken out of the list for navigation reasons.”

The Capitol took its place. At the top of the list was a site Khalid Shaikh Mohammed wanted to revisit with a vengeance: The Twin Towers. His new plan took elements of the World Trade Center bombing in 1993 and mixed them with the failed '95 operation to use American airliners as weapons.

“He said that during the meeting of his committee,” Fouda reported, “they decided that the goal was to cause as many deaths as possible, to direct a big slap to America on American soil, in front of the world.”

To deliver the slap, terrorists had to learn how to fly. By the summer of 2000, Atta and two of his comrades were looking for flight schools. Binalshibh reveals why they chose Florida.

“The prices in America were convenient and the weather was ideal for more flying hours, especially in the coastal states like Florida,” Binalshibh said. “And the term of study wouldn't take long.”

Binalshibh was supposed to join them, to become one of the four pilots. He applied for a U.S. visa four times, and was turned down four times. Kept off the front line, Binalshibh stayed behind in Hamburg and became the link between Atta in Florida and Khalid Shaikh Mohammed in Afghanistan. Atta often used hard-to-trace Internet chat rooms to send messages to Binalshibh in Hamburg.

Atta posed as a student writing to his girlfriend Jenny, code for Binalshibh. The targets were given code names, too. The Twin Towers were called the "faculty of city planning," Atta's major at the university. Reflecting a hatred of skyscrapers, he decided to make the World Trade Center target his very own.

“It's very ironic, very bitter. And in some ways, of course, very sick,” said Fouda.

Atta and his two comrades had their pilot's licenses. According to Binalshibh, their studies were almost complete: “All that was left for them to do was master flying in simulators of big jumbo jets. Also, to study the security arrangements at the airports, like John Kennedy Airport, for instance.”

In early 2001, a fourth pilot, a Saudi, was found to replace Binalshibh. Then, it was time to choose the hijackers, those who would actually take over the planes.

“About five months before the zero hour, the foot soldiers, or so-called muscles, were chosen,” Fouda said.

Khalid Shaikh Mohammed said his problem was that he had too many volunteers.

Mohammed told Fouda he plucked more than a dozen Saudis out of what he called the Department of Martyrs in Afghanistan. Each recorded a video before leaving for the U.S. The Saudis knew they were going to die; they just didn't know how.

“It was unwise for a brother to know all the details of the operation while he was still in Afghanistan,” Binalshibh was heard saying. “Too much information would be a security disaster.”

As the Saudis were arriving in the U.S. in July, Atta was taking off, flying into Madrid and driving 500 miles to a Spanish coastal resort for a working vacation. Joining him was Binalshibh with a message from Khalid Shaikh Mohammed. The final date for the operation was in Atta's hands. Atta had Shaikh Mohammed's complete trust.

“I think Atta, as far as Khalid is concerned, was the perfect soldier,” said Fouda. “He's highly educated, he's sophisticated. He's very organized."

As the summer wore on, intelligence services around the world detected increased chatter from Al Qaeda.

Just days after Atta returned to the U.S. from Spain, Egyptian intelligence in Cairo says it received a report from one of its operatives in Afghanistan that 20 al Qaeda members had slipped into the U.S. and four of them had received flight training on Cessnas.

To the Egyptians, pilots of small planes didn't sound terribly alarming, but they passed on the message to the CIA anyway, fully expecting Washington to request information. The request never came.

That wouldn't have surprised Mohamed Atta. Binalshibh says Atta had very little respect for the CIA or the FBI: “Mohamed used to belittle the security services and he never used to give them much thought.”

In the States, Atta and pilots Marwan Al-Shehhi and Ziad Jarrah began taking cross-country flights to check things out. They usually treated themselves to first class. The hijackers determined that the best time to attack the cockpit was during the 15 minutes after take off.

“The group storming the cockpit is formed of two persons,” Binalshibh is heard saying. “It would be the nearest group to the cockpit, in order to seize the opportunity when the door is opened and enter into it swiftly, take it over and slaughter those inside completely. And then the brother pilot comes very quickly to assume the rest of the mission and guide the aircraft.”

In August, Atta and the other pilots wanted a closer look at their targets. “This was the phase for studying the targets, whether from the ground or the air, be it from normal travel by plane or by renting planes and flying over these targets from a close range,” Binalshibh said.

Mohamed Atta had rented a plane for a final peek at the World Trade Center. Then, on Aug. 29, the phone rang in Binalshibh's Hamburg apartment at three in the morning.

It was Atta with an important, but cryptic message: ”He said to me, ‘One of my friends related a riddle to me and I cannot solve it, and I called you so that you can solve it for me.’” Binalshibh is heard saying.

Atta goes, “Two sticks, a dash and a cake with a stick down.”

Binalshibh said, “I said to him, ‘Is this the riddle? You wake me from a deep sleep to tell me this riddle? Two sticks and I do not know what?’”

Eventually, Fouda says, Binalshibh realized what Atta meant. So he says to him, “OK. Tell your friend, he has nothing to worry about. It's such a sweet riddle."

Binalshibh explained it: “The two sticks represent the number 11, then the dash, and then the cake from which a stick dangles represents number nine. Thus, the picture becomes complete: the 11th of September.”

Binalshibh left Hamburg on Wednesday, Sept. 5, for Pakistan. From there, he sent a messenger into Afghanistan with news for Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and Osama bin Laden: Tuesday, Sept. 11, would be the day.

In America, Atta, the city planner, was getting ready to destroy a city, getting ready to finish the job Khalid Shaikh Mohammed had started years before.

Even when he saw the carnage, Binalshibh, in Pakistan, felt no remorse: “No sane Muslim doubts that the operations of the blessed day of Tuesday, on the 11th of September in Washington and New York, was one of the glorious days of the Muslims,” he said.

In fact, both Binalshibh and Shaikh Mohammed had hoped for a much higher death toll. Even so, they want history to record what they did accomplish.

Binalshibh gave Fouda a manifesto justifying the attacks in the name of Allah, and asked him to hand it over to the Library of Congress.

Now, it seems, Binalshibh will get all the recognition he wants - in an interrogation room.

His brazenness caught up with him and, on Sept. 11, 2002, his voice on the audiotaped interview was matched to a phone call.

A year to the day after he helped murder thousands, he was captured in Karachi, the same city where he had granted the interview to Fouda.

Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the mastermind, with a $25 million reward on his head, remains at large.

American intelligence sources admitted to 60 Minutes II they've lost his trail. All they have is a chilling question: After orchestrating the '93 World Trade Center bombing and Sept. 11, what's next?

© MMII, CBS Worldwide Inc. All Rights Reserved.

FAIR USE NOTICE: This site contains copyrighted material the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. We are making such material available in our efforts to advance understanding of criminal justice, political, human rights, economic, democracy, scientific, and social justice issues, etc. We believe this constitutes a 'fair use' of any such copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. For more information go to: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond 'fair use', you must obtain permission from the copyright owner.