![]() ![]() The NSA did not respond to questions about the calls. Agency veterans have said that the NSA didn’t always know what it had, or share what it knew. While a record of the call should have been in NSA files, official investigations had shown it had not shared information about similar calls with the FBI. There is nothing to explain how or when the call made it into the FBI’s ACS system, or what specifically moved agents to begin a review of the files in 2006. There is no clue in the FBI files as to why the March 2 call to the al Qaeda hub remained undiscovered until 2006. intelligence also learned, was married to a man named Khalid - future 9/11 hijacker Khalid al-Mihdhar. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania had called the number before and after the attacks, had proved a vital element linking the attack to al Qaeda. The discovery, for example, that both Osama bin Laden and one of the bombers in the 1998 attacks at U.S. The number became a priority target for the NSA, and its coverage of calls to and from it, reports have said were “cast iron.” The number rang at a house in the Yemeni capital, Sana’a, owned by a man Bin Laden had known since the anti-Soviet war in Afghanistan. Sometime in 1996, the National Security Agency – which intercepts electronic communications worldwide – had identified the number as one that Osama bin Laden called often from his satellite phone in Afghanistan. The call came from a number in Yemen – +9671200578 – that had been used for years before 9/11 as a communications hub for al Qaeda. In October 2006, while reviewing data gathered from its ACS (Automated Case Support) system, FBI agents in San Diego came upon a previously unknown call made on March 2, 2000, while Hazmi and Mihdhar were settling into life in San Diego. 9/11 survivor Sharon Premoli, who was severely injured in the collapse of the WTC’s North Tower, believes that with the story that emerges here, “History is about to be rewritten.” The story that unfolds would appear to negate the 9/11 Commission’s “impression” that “Hazmi and Mihdhar sought out and found” the young men they associated with in San Diego. The discovery of the Yemen call, moreover, resulted in a flurry of analysis and interviews over five years – the results of which are still censored in their entirety from the Encore closing memo. And, the material relating to Thumairy, Bayoumi and the “set up calls,” contains just the kind of “additional information” and “contradicting statements” the FBI’s closing memo suggested it had resolved. The story that emerges from the newly released files, however, appears far from complete. “All leads,” the final memo asserts, “have been completed.” ‘HISTORY…TO BE REWRITTEN’ ![]() The FBI, for its part, officially closed the case file in 2021. Attorneys for the Southern District of New York concluded that there was insufficient evidence to prosecute the three Saudis. In spite of the FBI’s further investigative efforts, U.S. If so, had the trio “wittingly provided such assistance” with the knowledge that the pair “were in the U.S. ![]() Operation Encore was set up in 2007 in part to examine whether three Saudi men – Thumairy, Bayoumi and Musaed al Jarrah, a mid-level official at the Saudi Embassy in Washington – had provided hijackers Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi with assistance when they arrived in California in January 2000. Operation Encore’s existence was first revealed by Florida Bulldog in 2016. Most of the documents, once deemed “state secrets” by the Trump administration, reflect the work of agents involved in Operation Encore, a follow-up investigation to the FBI’s original 9/11 investigation, PENTTBOM. Those contacts, FBI agents came to suspect, were “set up calls” to prepare for the first hijackers’ arrival in the U.S.Įvidence of the relationship among the two Saudis, Fahad al Thumairy and Omar al Bayoumi, and the student, emerges from thousands of pages of FBI files released in recent months under an Executive Order issued by President Biden in September 2021. In the weeks before, two Saudi government employees had repeated telephone contacts with the student. The March calls, never before publicly revealed, were the first to the hub from California. #Cast iron money bank seriesThe analysis shows that on Ma– eighteen months before the 9/11 attacks – the phone of a young Somali/Yemeni student in San Diego exchanged a series of calls with a phone number in Yemen that had also been contacted hundreds of times by bin Laden and other al Qaeda terrorists. A firetruck races toward the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001Īn FBI analysis of phone records, undertaken in 2007 and published by Florida Bulldog for the first time, links the subjects of the Bureau’s probe into the apparent Saudi role in the 9/11 attacks to a key communications hub used by Osama bin Laden. ![]()
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