dh b7 planes as weapons 1 of 2 fdr- clues pointed to changing terrorist tactics- 5-19-02 wapo 168

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Copyright 2002 The Washington Post

washingtonpost.comThe Washington PostMay 19, 2002 SundayFinal Edition

SECTION: A SECTION; Pg. A09LENGTH: 1560 wordsHEADLINE: Clues Pointed to Changing Terrorist Tactics;Foiled Plots, FBI Data Showed Al Qaeda Groups Might Use Airplanes as MissilesBYLINE: Steve Fainaru, Washington Post Staff WriterDATELINE: NEW Y O R KBODY:

A broad array of signals from foiled plots to FBI field interviews suggested fo r yearsthat al Qaeda-affiliated terrorist groups had considered employing airplanes as missiles andU.S. flight schools as pilot training grounds.The clues included a 1995 plot to blow up 11 American jetliners over the Pacific Ocean, thencrash a light plane into CIA headquarters a suicide mission to have been carried out by aPakistani pilot who had trained at flight schools in North Carolina, Texas and New York.FBI investigators visited two of the flight schools in 1996 after the plot was uncovered in thePhilippines, school operators said. In 1998 and 1999, analysts warned federal officials thatterrorists might crash hijacked aircraft into landmarks such as the Pentagon and the WorldTrade Center. Then, last July, the Italian government closed airspace over Genoa andmounted antiaircraft batteries based on information that Islamic extremists were planning tous e an airplane to kill President Bush."There's a lot of stuff that was out there," said Stephen Gale, a terrorism specialist at theUniversity of Pennsylvania who presented an analysis warning of airborne attacks to FederalAviation Administration security officials in 1998. "The question is in what form it was outthere, who was presenting and collating the information and what was the context in whichthe information was presented to the president."The Bush administration, fending off questions about how it acted on intelligence aboutterrorism before the Sept. 11 attacks, has asserted that although officials receivedgeneralized warnings about hijackings, there was no information indicating terroristsaffiliated with Osama bin Laden might use hijacked airplanes as manually guided weapons.National security adviser Condoleezza Rice said Thursday that an intelligence briefinggiven to Bush on Aug. 6 mentioned hijacking only "in the traditional sense."

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"I don't think anybody could have predicted that these people would take an airplane andslam it into the World Trade Center, take another one and slam it into the Pentagon, thatthey would try to use an airplane as a missile," sh e said.White House spokesman Ari Fleischer described Sept. 11 as "a new type of attack that hadnot been foreseen."Michael E. O'Hanlon, a national security specialist at the Brookings Institution, said hedisagreed with the administration's analysis. The 1995 jetliner bombing plot, he said,signaled that "the traditional hijacking M.O. was not going to be repeated by al Qaeda."The plot was uncovered when a Pakistani national, Abdul Hakim Murad, was discoveredmixing a bomb in his Manila apartment. He later confessed to Philippine authorities that hewas part of a conspiracy to deploy five-man teams to plant bombs on 11 planes operated byUnited, Delta an d Northwest airlines. The plot ha d included a dry run in which a small bombwas exploded under a seat on a Philippine Airlines flight to Tokyo, killing a Japanesebusinessman. It was orchestrated by Ramzi Yousef, who was convicted later of plotting the1993 World Trade Center bombing.As part of "Project Bojinka" Serbo-Croatian fo r "loud bang" Murad was to crash a lightaircraft loaded with explosives into CIA headquarters at Langley, he later told investigators.A U.S. government prosecutor described the entire plot as "one of the most hideous crimesanyone ever conceived" and said if executed to lethal perfection, it would have killed 4,000people.Murad's arrest came 13 days after four members of an Algerian terrorist group linked to alQaeda hijacked an Air France flight as it prepared to leave Algeria fo r Paris. Frenchauthorities learned that the men planned to crash the plane into a Paris landmark such asthe Eiffel Tower; commandos killed the hijackers during a refueling stop before the suicideplot could be carried out.Asked whether the Aug. 6 intelligence briefing with the president had included references tothe CIA plot or the Eiffel Tower, Rice said: "We knew that they had thought about hijackingsin a number of places. But, again, the information . . . was not about those activities."Two senior counter-terrorism officials said U.S. intelligence and law enforcement agenciesha d more warning than Rice acknowledged that al Qaeda might use a hijacked aircraft as aweapon. O ne warning may have come as recently as last July during security precautions fo rthe Genoa summit of the Group of Eight industrial powers, which Bush attended.According to Italy's Deputy Prime Minister Gianfranco Fini, in remarks reported by the Italiannews agency A N S A , Italy told the Americans "that there was the possibility of an attackagainst the U.S. president using an airliner. That 's why w e closed the airspace and installedthe [antiaircraft] missiles" around the meeting site.One knowledgeable U.S. official said there was strong intelligence suggesting al Qaeda'sintention to attack Bush at the summit. There were ambiguous reports, the official said,suggesting the possibility of attack by air or sea.Because of the threat from jetliners, it has been standard operating procedure since theAt lanta Olympics in 1996 to create "no-fly zones" for high-profile occasions designated"National Security Special Events." Others included the 50th anniversary summits of NATOand the United Nations. The no-fly zones are areas of restricted airspace defended by fighterjets and antiaircraft batteries.

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In the spring of 1998, Gale, of the University of Pennsylvania, was part of a three-mangroup that presented a terrorism analysis to FAA security officials. Th e analysis, he said,described two scenarios: one in which terrorists crashed planes into nuclear power plantsalong the East Coast; another in which they comm andeered Federal Express cargo planesand crashed them into the Wo rld Trade Center, the Pentagon, the White House, the Capitol,the Sea rs Tow er and the G olden Gate Bridge. Gale said the ana lysis was based in part on theEiffel Tower threat and a small plane that had crashed onto the White House grounds in1994."You can't protect yourself from meteorites," an FAA official responded, accord ing to Gale."He was saying it's too hard."Th e next year, a report prepared for the National Intelligence Council, an interagency group,by the Federal Research Division, which is part of the Library of Congress, was titled "TheSociology and Psychology of Terrorism: Who Becom es a Terrorist and Why?" In a section onnew terrorist threats, the report noted the Philippines plot and warned: "Suicide bomber(s)belonging to al-Qaida's Martyrdom Battalion could crash-land an aircraft packed with highexplosives (C-4 and semtex) into the Pentagon, the headquarters of the Central IntelligenceAgency (CIA), or the White House."The furor over the government's handling of intelligence before the Sept. 11 attacks wastouched off by disclosure of a classified July memo in which a Phoenix FBI agent wa rned thatbin Laden might be using U.S. aviation schools to train terrorists as pilots. Three days afterthe attacks, FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III described reports that several of the hijackershad received flight training in the United States as "news, quite obviously." He added: "If wehad understood that to be the case, we would have -- perhaps one could have averted this."But after Mu rad's arrest in 1995, FBI agents seized records and conducted interviews atflight schools he attended in New Bern, N.C., and Schenectady, N.Y., instructors at bothflight schools told The W ashingto n Post last S eptember.In addition, in 1998, the FBI visited Airman Flight School of Norman, Okla., to inquire aboutanother al Qaeda operative, Ihab AN Na waw i. Dale Davis, the flight school's director ofoperations, told The Post last year that Nawawi received his commercial pilot's license in theearly 1990s, then traveled to another school in Oklaho ma City to qualify for a rating to flysmall business aircraft.During last year's trial on the 1998 bombings of U.S. embassies in Africa, a witness testifiedthat Nawawi later worked as bin Laden's personal pilot.Two wee ks before the Sept. 11 attacks, the FBI was back to interview Davis and hiscolleagues about another Airman student, Za caria s Moussaoui, who had taken more than 50hours of flying les sons before flunking out. M oussaou i later traveled to a flight school inMinnesota, where he aroused suspicions and was arrested. He is being held on charges ofconspiring with the 19 hijackers to destroy the Wo rld Trade Center and the Pentagon.The Egyptian witness in the embassy bombing trial, Essam al Ridi, also attended flightschool the now-defunct E d Boardman Aviation School in Fort Worth. Al Ridi testified thatin 1993 he bought a used Saber-40 aircraft for $ 210,000 for bin Laden, who wanted theplane to transport Stinger missiles, then flew it from Dallas-Fort Worth International Airportto Khartoum, Sudan.Upon his arrival, al Ridi testified, bin Laden threw a dinner for him at one of his guesthouses. Present were a number of bin Laden's bodyguards toting AK-47 assault rifles.

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"W e just haddinner andchatted and... I gave the keys of the airplane to Osama binLaden," al Ridi testified.Staff writer Barton Gellman and research editor Margot W il liams contributed to this report.LOAD-DATE: May 19, 2002

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