Updated at 5 p.m. ET: The CIA foiled a plot by al-Qaida's affiliate in Yemen to bomb a U.S.-bound airliner this month, senior U.S. officials told NBC News.

Officials said the plot involved a bomb that improved on the one that had been sewn into the underpants of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, who failed in a plot to blow up a Detroit-bound airliner on Christmas Day 2009. That device did not detonate.

This bomb had a more refined detonation mechanism and was "totally non-metallic," which officials told NBC News would have made it more difficult to detect by traditional screening processes.

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A U.S. counterterrorism official told NBC News there were “refinements on reliability” in particular that made this bomb more sophisticated and more likely to explode.

In addition to being a threat to commercial planes, the official said this type of bomb could be used in crowded places, on other transportation systems or for assassinations.

The official noted that the bomb “was never near a plane” and “never posed a risk.” The plot was disrupted well before it threatened Americans or U.S. allies, the official added.

The U.S. received the device last month. The FBI is currently conducting technical and forensics analyses on it. 

The official would not specify which international security service provided the intelligence that led to the unraveling of the plot, as there is concern about retaliatory attacks against U.S. targets inside Yemen.

Counterterror officials deem the thwarted plot a "success story," NBC News reported. The FBI said in a statement that the successful operation was the "result of close cooperation with our security and intelligence partners overseas."

Related: More than 30 Yemeni troops killed in militant attack

According to The Associated Press, the would-be suicide bomber was instructed to buy a ticket on the airliner of his choosing and decide the timing of the attack.

The U.S. official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitive nature of the case, said the individual is not a threat but would not say where he is located. He did not provide information about the individual’s nationality or age.

It's unclear who built the bomb, but the device does bear similarities to other explosive devices built by master bomb-maker Ibrahim al-Asiri. However, Asiri may not have been directly involved in this plot. 

Related: Reports: Al-Qaida leader wanted in USS Cole bombing killed in Yemen airstrike

According to one official, there is "evidence that Asiri has passed along his bomb-making knowledge to others." The official would not say whether Asiri or an apprentice were involved in this plot.

In an exclusive meeting, a senior U.S. intelligence official told NBC News that Asiri posed the single most dangerous threat to the United States. 

According to the official, Asiri is the most capable of carrying out al-Qaida’s threat to launch a significant terrorist attack to kill Americans inside the United States.

Asiri designed the first underwear bomb that failed over Detroit and he was also the maker of the printer ink cartridge bombs that were discovered before they were shipped to the United States.

The senior official said counter-terrorism officials were seriously troubled by the ink cartridge bombs because they were "particularly sophisticated."

Related: Al-Qaida kidnapped Iranian envoy in bid to free bin Laden kin, colleagues
Related: Bin Laden fretted about al-Qaida affiliates' missteps, letters show
Related: Bin Laden in hiding: Hatching horrific plots despite crippling attacks on al-Qaida

Asiri has also implanted a bomb inside his brother in a failed attempt to assassinate Prince Mohammed bin Nayef, the Saudi deputy interior minister. The minister survived, but Asiri’s brother did not.

Asiri is not just a bomb maker but has also taken to “training the trainers,” sharing his skills with others. Officials believe he is responsible for this bomb, the one sewn into Abdulmutallab’s underwear and the one used during the attempted assassination attempt of Nayef. As director of Saudi counterterrorism, Nayef is one of the United States’ most trusted allies in the fight against al-Qaida.

For each bomb, officials are seeing a new level of refinement and sophistication.

The U.S. counterterrorism official said the thwarted attack and the recent drone death of Fahd al-Quso, an FBI “most-wanted terrorist,” was a “one-two body blow” to al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula, which U.S. officials have recently described as the most aggressive of the al-Qaida franchises. 

They also believe that al-Quso, director of external communications for the franchise, would have had to approve the planned May attack.

Officials also say the plot had no apparent ties to the anniversary of the killing of bin Laden. One official told NBC News the timing was coincidental.

A White House statement said President Obama was told of the plot in April. 

"The disruption of this IED (improvised explosive device) plot underscores the necessity of remaining vigilant against terrorism here and abroad," the statement read.

Reporting by NBC News' Jim Miklaszewski and Robert Windrem and The Associated Press is included in this report. 

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Al-Qaida and Iran had a “highly antagonistic” relationship in the years before Osama bin Laden’s death, with Iran jailing top al-Qaida officials and the terrorist organization responding by kidnapping an Iranian diplomat and threatening other violent measures to get them released, according to documents released Thursday by the U.S. government.

The feud between al-Qaida and Tehran was documented in several of the 17 letters retrieved from bin Laden’s compound in Pakistan and released by the Army’s Countering Terrorism Center at the West Point military academy in New York. While much reporting  on the documents focused on squabbling and worse between bin Laden and al-Qaida affiliates, the friction between Iran and al-Qaida  is noteworthy because it flies in the face of the view held by some U.S. conservatives that the two have worked together against U.S. interests.

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The discussion in the letters, written between September 2006 and April 2011, relates to al-Qaida’s decision to send some of its top leaders – and members of bin Laden’s family — to Iran following the collapse of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan late in 2001.

Operational personnel, including Khalid Sheik Mohammed and Ramzi bin al Shibh, both part of the planning for the September 11 attacks, were dispatched to Pakistani cities, where they were later grabbed in joint US-Pakistani operations.  But the terror group’s Management Council. which handled military, security and financial affairs, among other things, were sent to Iran, where it was hoped the Iranian government would “leave them alone,” the West Point analysis of the materials said.

 “Al-Qaida did not appear to have looked to Iran from the perspective that ‘the enemy of my (American) enemy is my friend,’” it said, “but the group might have hoped that ‘the enemy of my (American) enemy would leave me alone.’”

Instead, the Iranians immediately moved to detain them and in some cases deport them to their countries of origin, the report stated.  In fact, al-Qaida believed the decision to detain and deport was taken by the Islamic Republic under pressure from the United States.  At the time, the U.S. and Iran were engaged in a number of back channel discussions on al-Qaida, according to officials from both countries.

Many of the top al-Qaida leaders languished in Iranian custody for months and years. U.S. officials admit that prior to the Abbottabad raid, they had little understanding of the circumstances of their detention -- whether it was house arrest or imprisonment. Iranian officials had always insisted the al-Qaidaofficials and their families were “in jail,” as one high ranking Iranian official told NBC News several years ago, but many U.S. officials did not believe such assurances.

The materials released Thursday, however, indicate that the al-Qaida leaders were imprisoned and held in harsh conditions.  In a letter to bin Laden, Atiyah Abd al-Rahman, essentially his chief of staff, recalled Sa’ad bin Laden, the al-Qaida leader’s son, telling him “the truths of what was happening, that they had repeatedly asked to leave Iran but they were beaten and suppressed.” The elder bin Laden, in one of his last letters to Atiyah, who is generally referred to by his first name, said that Sa’ad’s letter should be added to the group’s archives “in view of the important information it reveals about the truth of the Iranian regime.”

Negotiations for release of the prisoners ebbed and flowed, with some pleas sent directly from al-Qaida to Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Sayyad Ali Khamenei.  At one point, late in 2008, al-Qaida decided to take other measures. An Iranian diplomat, the commercial counselor at the Iranian consulate in Peshawar, Pakistan, Hesmatollah Atharzadeh-Nyaki,  was kidnapped by al-Qaida operatives in November of that year. At the same time, al-Qaida apparently made other threats against Iranian interests.

Atiyah, who was reportedly killed by a U.S. drone strike in 2011, boasted to bin Laden that the diplomat’s kidnapping had a chilling effect on the Iranians, whom he referred to as “criminals” and portrayed as being afraid of al-Qaida.  

“We believe that our efforts, which included escalating a politicaland media campaign, the threats we made, the kidnapping of their friend the commercial counselor in the Iranian Consulate in Peshawar, and other reasons that scared them based on what they saw (we are capable of), to be among the reasons that led them to expedite (the release of these prisoners),” Atiyah wrote.

Still, things did not move as fast as bin Laden had hoped. He pressed Atiyah repeatedly in the letters to get his family released.  

"In the second half of 2010,” the West Point analysis said, “bin Ladin asked Atiyah to correspond with the Iranians (not clear if directly or indirectly) to tell them that ‘they promised that upon releasing their captive, they would release my family, which includes my daughter Fatima, who (should naturally stay in the company of) her husband,’” who was a top al-Qaida fighter.  

Ultimately, Iran did release some of the bin Laden family and some fighters,  some in the weeks before Bin Laden was killed. But they retained others, perhaps as hostages.  Atharzadeh-Nyaki, the Iranian diplomat, was finally released unharmed in March 2010.

A call to the Iranian Mission to the United Nations by NBC News on Thursday for comment was not returned.

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Throughout the negotiation process, Atiyah  expressed anger and frustration at the Iranians, writing at one point,  “The criminals did not send us any letter, nor did they send us a message through any of the brothers (they released)! Such behavior is of course not unusual for them; indeed, it is typical of their mindset and method. They do not wish to appear to be negotiating with us or responding to our pressures, as if to suggest that their actions are purely one-sided and based on their own initiative.”

The West Point analysis notes that the Iranians’ rationale in keeping the al-Qaida officials  prisoner for so long remains unclear, but suggests two possibilities:  to keep al-Qaida from carrying attacks in Iran or against Iranian assets overseas or as bargaining chips in negotiations with the United States.

In fact, U.S. and Iranian officials have told NBC News that third parties approached the U.S. in the years after 9-11 to offer a deal in which al-Qaida personnel  would be traded for leaders of the People’s Mujahedin of Iran who were in U.S. custody in Iraq.  The U.S., both sides report, declined.

Robert Windrem is a senior investigative producer for NBC News.

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In letters from his hideout in Pakistan written in the five years before his death, Osama bin Laden fretted about dysfunction among the far-flung affiliate organizations in his terrorist network, according to documents seized during the U.S. military’s raid on his compound that that were released on Thursday. 

Seventeen declassified letters seized in last year's raid on bin Laden's compound by U.S. Navy SEALs were posted online Thursday by the U.S. Army's Combating Terrorism Center, accompanying its analysis of their contents titled, "Letters from Abbottabad: Bin Ladin Sidelined?" The letters -- 175 pages in Arabic -- probably represent only a small fraction of materials taken from the compound, the center’s distinguished chair, retired Gen. John Abizaid, said in a note published with the translations.

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U.S. intelligence analysts have spent countless hours poring over the vast stash of computerized and paper data seized during the raid that killed bin Laden, as NBC News’ Jim Miklaszewski and Robert Windrem reported earlier this week.

But the letters released Thursday, which were written between September 2006 and April 2011, add new nuances to the previous reports. 

Among other things, they show the al-Qaida founder was troubled by the actions of other Islamist groups that aligned themselves with his terrorist network.

As Associated Press reporter Kimberly Dozier puts it:

The documents show dark days for al-Qaida and its hunkered-down leader after years of attacks by the United States and what bin Laden saw as bumbling within his own organization and its terrorist allies.

The so-called affiliate organizations – including al-Qaida in Iraq, al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula; the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (Student Movement of Pakistan); and the Somalia-based Harakat al-Shabaab al-Mujahideen – were of particular concern to bin Laden. 

In the words of the report’s authors: 

Rather than a source of strength, bin Ladin was burdened by what he viewed as the incompetence of the “affiliates,” including their lack of political acumen to win public support, their media campaigns and their poorly planned operations which resulted in the unnecessary deaths of thousands of Muslims. 

"I plan to release a statement that we are starting a new phase to correct (the mistakes) we made," bin Laden wrote in 2010. "In doing so, we shall reclaim, God willing, the trust of a large segment of those who lost their trust in the jihadis."

Nothing in the papers points directly to al-Qaida sympathizers in Pakistan's government. Bin Laden described "trusted Pakistani brothers" but didn't identify any Pakistani government or military officials who might have been aware of or complicit in his hiding in Abbottabad. 

Watch World News videos on msnbc.com

The letters also indicate that American Adam Gadahn played a much greater role in al-Qaida than has been acknowledged by U.S. authorities, who have often dismissed him as a propagandist and spokesman. In fact, Gadahn appeared to act as an adviser to bin Laden and in one letter urged that al-Qaida disassociate itself from al-Qaida in Iraq. 

One letter also outlined Gadahn’s views of U.S. news organizations as part of a discussion of how al-Qaida might go about publicizing the 10^th anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks on the U.S.

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He indicated a particular dislike of Fox News, writing, “Let her die in her anger”; said MSNBC-TV appeared to be “good and neutral a bit,” while complaining about the firing of Keith Olbermann; said CNN appeared to be aligned with the U.S. government but was better in its Arabic reports; and made flattering comments about CBS and ABC.

NBC News senior investigative producer Robert Windrem contributed to this report.

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ABBOTTABAD, Pakistan -- A year after Osama bin Laden was found and killed in Pakistan, one key question has yet to be answered: how did the world's most wanted man manage to move and live, undetected, in this country for so long?

Journalists, analysts, and others have been working to fill in the narrative holes over the last 12 months. Leaked and strategically released nuggets of information have helped to paint a vague picture of what life was like inside the Abbottabad compound where bin Laden spent his final years, living with three of his wives, and several children and grandchildren. We've learned of the austere conditions inside the home, the restricted lifestyle led by all inside, and the discipline with which the head of al-Qaida communicated with a trusted few. But the crucial questions -- how he got to that compound in the first place and who helped him to do so -- remain unanswered.

Kamran Bokhari, vice-president for Middle Eastern and South Asian Affairs at Stratfor, a global intelligence company, believes the idea that bin Laden moved around without a network of individuals organizing his transportation and logistics is simply not possible.

"If you're a six-foot-five Arab, and the most wanted man on the planet, you can't just walk into a place like Pakistan without support," Bokhari said. "So what's the nature of that support?"

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U.S. officials publicly state they have no evidence that any Pakistani institutional leaders had any knowledge of bin Laden's presence here, nor played any role in helping to move him. Privately, however, some admit that the deep mistrust between the two nations has led to strong, lingering suspicions within many in the U.S. that Pakistan's premier intelligence agency -- Inter-Services Intelligence, or the ISI -- must have known, at some level.

"There are deep suspicions on both sides," says retired General Mahmud Ali Durrani, a former national security advisor and ambassador to the United States. "I think the biggest concern in the U.S., if I put it in a phrase, is that Pakistan is hunting with the hounds and running with the hares. That is the perception."

Panetta recalls nail-biting moments of bin Laden raid

That perception has not been helped by what seem to be Pakistan's action priorities over the last year. The prevailing public dialogue among military and government officials in the immediate raid aftermath focused on how the U.S. had managed to breach Pakistan's borders, not how bin Laden had. The Pakistani doctor who ran a fake vaccination program in Abbottabad for the CIA in an effort to secure DNA samples from inside the bin Laden compound was swiftly tracked down, arrested, and remains in detention, possibly to stand trial for treason. Authorities quietly began work after dark to demolish the compound in February, keeping press behind a security cordon half a mile away, and after a year in custody, the widows and their families were shuttled out of their house in the dead of night and deported to Saudi Arabia.

Pakistan did immediately launch a formal commission with wide-reaching powers soon after the raid, pledging to investigate both the U.S. border breach and bin Laden's presence here. The Abbottabad Commission, as it's come to be known here, has enjoyed unparalleled access to anyone and everyone associated directly or peripherally with either issue, interviewing over 100 witnesses over the last year, including bin Laden's widows, the detained doctor who worked for the CIA, and high-level Pakistani officials.  But there is no working deadline and expectations vary as to how blunt and definitive an account commission members will be able to put forth.

"Given how previous commissions in Pakistan have behaved, I'm not really hopeful that much will come out of this," Bokhari said. "This is not like the 9/11 Commission or anything similar elsewhere in other countries where there's a process and transparency and rule of law."

'Embarrassment'
Durrani, who's been in touch with members of the commission, says the length of time it's taken for them to compile findings speaks to their determination to fulfill their mandate to the best of their ability.

"If the report comes out tomorrow and it's a whitewash, then people will ask -- what have you done?" Durrani said. "They [the commission members] are keen to get to the bottom of this, to find out what happened, why it happened, who's at fault, and what needs to be done so we don't have such embarrassment and such issues in the future."

Driving the investigators' query is a widely-held belief here in Pakistan that bin Laden was never here at all -- that the entire raid was an effort by the U.S. to defame and destabilize Pakistan's security establishment. Residents of Abbottabad with whom NBC News spoke reiterated that skepticism, saying they don't believe the U.S. claim that bin Laden was living in their midst, particularly in the absence of any evidence of his death.

Low expectations
Commission members have been reluctant to speak with the media until their findings are complete, but the head of the commission, retired Supreme Court Judge Javed Iqbal, confirmed to NBC News that one of the key issues his team is investigating is whether bin Laden was ever really here at all.

PhotoBlog: Abbottabad -- One year after Osama bin Laden raid

Despite low expectations for the pending report, Bokhari admits the commission is tasked with an enormously difficult job, one that will have repercussions for generations to come in the form of Pakistan's official narrative of this historic event.

"This is the biggest event in recent history since the fall of the Soviet Union -- 9/11 and its impact, the killing of Osama bin Laden -- so I'm not surprised it's taken them this long to come up with a report," Bokhari said. "It may take decades before anybody can actually come up with a comprehensive view of what was really happening."

 

The few specifics that have emerged from Pakistan in the last year in effect lead to more questions officials here must attempt to answer, through the commission or otherwise.

The U.S. moved quickly on the message-control front after the Abbottabad raid, releasing selective video clips and pieces of information from the "treasure trove" of evidence seized from bin Laden's compound. An NBC News team was given an exclusive briefing by a senior U.S. counterterrorism official on currently classified intelligence from the raid, including details of the role bin Laden played in al-Qaida from his hideout in Pakistan, who he was in touch with, and more on the life he lived within that compound. Those details will air on Discovery Channel on Tuesday as part of a one-hour special on the anniversary of the U.S. raid.

But the details from within Pakistan have been few and far between. A rare piece of evidence -- a confidential interrogation report of bin Laden's youngest wife, Amal, obtained by NBC News -- did reveal some surprising details about the family's life on the run after the attacks of September 11.

According to the report, Amal told investigators that the family scattered after 9/11, bouncing from house to house and place to place in Pakistan. In her complicated timeline, she moved across multiple residences in the southern mega-city of Karachi, then moved on to Peshawar to link up with her husband. From there, the family moved to Swat, then to Haripur, and finally settled in the Abbottabad home for about six years until the U.S. raid that killed her husband.

"These people are fanatics. They're ideological but keep in mind that they are also very professional at what they do," Bokhari explained. "They're in a business where if you make a small error in judgment it can easily translate to death for many people. There are people waiting for you to make a mistake. You have to be highly disciplined."

Co-conspirators?
But the pace of movement believed to have been followed by bin Laden and his family -- traversing entire provinces in Pakistan, and including rural, tribal, settled, and urban areas while remaining completely undetected -- would be difficult without some sort of network of support. Current and former Pakistani officials and analysts have offered up the possibility of "rogue or retired" elements from within Pakistan's military or intelligence establishment as possible facilitators or co-conspirators helping to hide bin Laden.

The nature of Pakistan's retired uniformed corps, many of whom stay involved with the work of the agencies long after they leave as the new leadership continues to make use of their experience and contacts, albeit in unofficial capacities and with limited authority. As the largest employer in Pakistan, it follows that the Pakistan army also has the largest pool of retirees, some of whom spent significant time working closely with and gaining the trust of jihadi groups in the 1980s and 1990s.

"If it's a retired network of people, what I call the 'Pakistani Blackwater,' that's not that bad. It's bad, but not that bad," Bokhari said. "But if it's someone who's serving, or more than one person, then [Pakistan's leaders] have a leak in [their] system and that's terrifying. Anyone who's a very nationalistic, Pakistani leader who doesn't want al-Qaida or the CIA to be able to get into their house will want to get to the bottom of that."

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As potentially worrying or damaging as some of the information in the commission's report may be for Pakistan's institutions, it is also widely believed that the organizations cannot survive without taking a hard look at their own potential faults, and admitting mistakes where they did occur. The military and intelligence establishments were already raked over the coals by the government and media after last year's raid in Abbottabad, and are now under the highest level of scrutiny in the country's history.

A failure, at this point, to produce a credible, official version of events will only damage Pakistan, according to Durrani.

"Pakistan wants to move forwards not backwards. They have to get to the bottom of this, in their own interest," he says. "If they don't, it will be another major issue buried in the sands of history. And people will forever be looking for answers."

NBC's Fakhar Rehman contributed to this report from Abbottabad.

The war against al-Qaida is at a “critical moment” as the “much weaker” terrorist group looks to regroup in Africa, according to the author of a new report.

Valentina Soria, a counterterrorism research analyst at U.K. think-tank RUSI, told msnbc.com by telephone that the network had been damaged by the death of Osama bin Laden and other leading figures.

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Her report, titled “Global Jihad Sustained Through Africa,” which was published at 7 p.m. ET Tuesday, said al-Qaida’s leadership was looking for partnerships with like-minded organizations in parts of Africa – such as al-Shabab and al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb -- to “regroup and re-energize itself.”

West 'unsighted' by shift
Soria told msnbc.com that the war on terror was at a key point, as while al-Qaida was weaker, Western counterterrorism officials had been “unsighted” by the apparent shift to Africa.

“I think it’s certainly an important junction, a critical moment because obviously counterterrorism operations in Afghanistan and Pakistan … and Yemen have been quite successful in decapitating the organization [al-Qaida], a lot of important figures have been removed,” Soria said.

“There is no doubt the organization is much weaker than it was a few years ago,” she added.

The report said that “despite greater co-operation, there seems to be an unresolved tension between transnational aims of al-Qaida-core and the local grievances of African partners.”

It added it was unclear whether al-Qaida was making a “conscious effort” to regroup in the Horn of Africa and sub-Saharan Africa or if this was the result of “displacement” and cooperation on an “ad hoc basis.”

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Islamist militant group al-Shabab, which operates in Somalia, has merged with al-Qaida’s core group, a move “officially endorsed” by al-Qaida’s leader Ayman al-Zawahiri in February of this year.

'Arc of regional instability'
The report noted that U.S. counterterrorism officials had been voicing concern about the prospect of al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb, which is based in Algeria, using local instability and weak or absent government to expand its zone of influence.

“If correct, this assessment would raise the worrying prospect of an arc of regional instability encompassing the whole Sahara-Sahel strip and extending to east Africa, which the now weakened al-Qaida-core could well exploit to regroup, reorganize and reinvigorate its terrorist campaign in the West,” the report said.

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 “[Al-Qaida] appears to be adopting a strategy of ‘going native,’ which implies seizing upon and exploiting local grievances with the ultimate aim of securing a stable foothold in volatile countries,” the report said.

The report said that counterterrorism officials “privately acknowledge that they are unsighted” and are “working hard to understand how far the jihadist challenge may be migrating” to Somalia, Kenya, north Nigeria and parts of West Africa.

“From West to East Africa, across the Sub-Saharan region, we may well be witnessing a new phase of decisive developments that could trigger further turmoil,” the report said.

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The FBI mishandled its investigation of the travel of a Saudi prince and his companions out of Florida within days of the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, new interviews, 9/11 Commission documents and FBI files reveal. And its detailed report on the matter, drawn up for members of Congress and President George W. Bush, was inaccurate.

The new reporting springs from suspicions that a well-connected Saudi living in Sarasota, Fla., may have associated with the 9/11 hijackers. Former U.S. Sen. Bob Graham, who co-chaired Congress’ Joint Inquiry into 9/11, has suggested that the FBI’s investigation of the Sarasota matter “was not the robust inquiry claimed by the FBI. An important investigative lead was not pursued and unsubstantiated statements were accepted as fact.”

These concerns have led to a re-examination of the efforts to get out of the U.S. immediately following the 9/11 attacks by a Saudi royal, Prince Sultan bin Fahd, and several companions.  Their travel began in Tampa, a short drive from Sarasota.

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The review of how the FBI dealt with and reported on the travel of the Florida-based Saudis, and their subsequent departure from the United States with other Saudis, shows that the FBI failed to interview principal witnesses; relied on erroneous second-hand information; misinterpreted the orders under which the FAA managed the closure and subsequent reopening of U.S. airspace after the 9/11 attacks; misreported the means of travel; and even got Prince Sultan’s identity wrong.

The FAA grounded all flights less than an hour after the Sept. 11, 2001, strikes on the World Trade Center, and reopened U.S. airspace to commercial and charter air traffic only at 11 a.m. ET on Sept. 13. By then, with Saudi-born Osama bin Laden fingered as the principal suspect in the attacks and 15 of the 19 hijackers identified as Saudi citizens, panicked Saudis were doing their utmost to get out of the country.

Sometime on the day following the attacks, Prince Sultan, a grandnephew of the late King Fahd and a student at the University of Tampa’s American Language Academy, began trying to leave Florida, according to 9/11 Commission files. He did so on the instructions of his uncle, Prince Ahmed bin Salman, a Saudi media baron and fabulously wealthy racehorse owner who was in Lexington, Ky. for the annual yearling sales. According to a Lexington police officer – his name is redacted in FBI documents –  who coordinated security for the younger prince’s travel from Tampa, Ahmed told Sultan to get to Lexington and join him on a flight out of the U.S. 

Reportedly scared by what he considered a hostile atmosphere in the wake of the attacks, Sultan requested and received a guard detail from the Tampa Police Department. A Tampa police officer, John Solomon, later told the 9/11 Commission that he contacted Dan Grossi, a former policeman turned private investigator, to accompany the Saudis on the planned flight to Lexington. Grossi, in turn, contracted retired FBI agent Emanuel “Manny” Perez, to partner with him on the assignment.

The closure of U.S. airspace, meanwhile, led briefly to talk of Prince Sultan and his companions instead making the 700-mile journey to Lexington by car. But an FAA Notice to Airmen – a “NOTAM” – that U.S. airspace would reopen to domestic commercial and charter flights at 11 a.m. ET on Sept. 13, cleared them to fly, FAA records show.

At about 4:30 p.m. that afternoon, Grossi met the prince and his party of four – later named as Fahad al-Zied, Ahmed al-Hazmi (the fact that this is the same last name as two of the 9-11 hijackers may well be mere coincidence) and Talal al-Mejrad, son of a Saudi army officer – at Raytheon Services, away from the main Tampa airport terminal. With the Saudis and the security men on board, a cream-colored Lear Jet supplied by the Fort Lauderdale charter company Hop-A-Jet lifted off at 4:37, FAA records and Tampa Airport data show.

Prince looked 'like a kid who was scared'
Perez, the security man, said that only on landing around 6 p.m. at Lexington’s Blue Grass Airport did he realize the flight had been very sensitive – that one of his passengers was a Saudi royal. They were greeted, he recalled in an interview, by a phalanx of security men and a flurry of hand-kissing for young Prince Sultan, who was then in his early 20s.

Lt. Mark Barnard of the Lexington Police Department, who worked liaison at the Kentucky end, would later tell the 9/11 Commission that the prince seemed to him just  “like a kid who was scared,” escorted the young Saudi and his companions to his uncle Prince Ahmed’s hotel, and the two princes and twelve companions left three days later aboard a chartered Boeing 727 en route to Saudi Arabia. 

Two years after 9/11, in a Vanity Fair story titled “Saving the Saudis,” author Craig Unger raised numerous questions about the role the FBI had played in facilitating that and various other flights involved in the panicky Saudi exodus from the United States. The article obscured the facts on the travel from Tampa, unfortunately, with a claim that the flight had been allowed to take place “when U.S. citizens were still restricted from flying.” In fact, as the FAA record makes clear, the flight took place several hours after the FAA had opened airspace to charter flights. 

In the wake of the Vanity Fair story, when U.S. Sens. Dianne Feinstein and John Kyl raised questions, the FBI prepared a 40-page response for the senators and the White House addressing all Saudi travel out of the U.S. after 9/11. What it reported on the Tampa-Lexington flight, however, was not true.

Instead of just noting that the FAA record showed the travel occurred after U.S. airspace was reopened, the FBI said Sultan and his three companions “had arrived in Lexington from Tampa by car.”

“The four individuals,” the report went on, “had disobeyed the Prince [Ahmed] by traveling by car instead of by jet as the Prince had instructed them.” 

FBI insistent: 'No flights arrived'
The FBI insisted that “No flights arrived” in Lexington on the day in question. The assertion that there had been an incoming flight from Tampa, the FBI claimed, had been “perpetuated” by “hired security personnel” – a clear reference to the Saudis’ escorts, former policeman Grossi and former FBI agent Perez. “One of the members of the private protection detail,” the bureau’s response claimed, “had confidentially told FBI agents in Kentucky the truth about how they arrived in Lexington.” 

A 9/11 Commission analysis and FBI documents, however, show  that the FBI’s inquiry into the Tampa flight had relied on a lone source, a  Lexington police officer whose name is also redacted in the released documents. He had merely “hemmed and hawed” when an FBI agent doubted his belief that the Saudis had traveled by air – then suggested the men had in reality traveled by car. The police officer, however, had no first-hand knowledge of the event. The FBI did not at the time interview Grossi or Perez, the security escorts who had flown with the Saudis from Tampa. It interviewed Perez only years later and has never interviewed Grossi.

An FBI departmental memo dated 2003, meanwhile, shows why the bureau was reluctant to believe there had been a flight from Tampa. Having failed to check aviation records that would have shown when exactly the men had flown, it believed “such a flight on 9/13/2001 would have been in violation of the Federal Aviation Administration’s flight ban.”

As early as four days after the flight, however, the bureau had had good reason to realize that the flight had occurred. Other FBI documents, obtained by the public interest group Judicial Watch, make clear that one of the bureau’s own agents in Lexington had the information as early as Sept. 17. That fact, it seems, was filed and forgotten. 

The now-retired FBI special agent-in-charge in Tampa, Robert Chiaradio, did not respond to a request for an interview. His counterpart in Lexington, retired Supervisor Robert Foster, agreed last month to discuss these events by email. Of Prince Sultan and his party’s travel from Tampa, Foster said, “We didn’t question the passengers about how they arrived in Lexington.” His agents’ assignment, Foster said, was to identify each passenger leaving the U.S. and “determine if they were on any watch or no fly list prior to their boarding.” 

Watch lists aside, the security check was complicated, Foster wrote, because Prince Ahmed had “given an interview to a local TV station attesting to the fact that he was a cousin of Osama bin Laden.” There is no known evidence that Ahmed was in any way related to bin Laden, and no such interview has ever surfaced. If he did make that comment, however, one would have expected it to have alerted the FBI at both local and headquarters level. Apparently it did not. “We did not interview him,” Foster said in his email last month, “I did not investigate his claim to be related to bin Laden. … I did furnish this information to FBI HQ. I do not recall having discussions with FBI HQ regarding not allowing him to leave the U.S.” 

The 9/11 Commission later established that none of the 14 Saudis who left for home from Kentucky was interviewed by the FBI before they were allowed to depart. According to the files, moreover, the bureau did not even figure out who Prince Sultan actually was. A Tampa police document had his name correctly as “Sultan bin Fahd,” which  translates as “Sultan son of Fahd,” one of the king’s nephews. Yet FBI documents repeatedly described Sultan as the son of Prince Ahmed, who was his uncle.

Related stories:

Saudi who left Fla. before 9/11 considered bin Laden a 'hero,' informant told FBI in '04

Classified documents contradict FBI on post-9/11 probe of Saudis, ex-senator says

Asked to comment on the catalog of apparent errors and omissions reported in this article, FBI spokesperson Kathleen Wright said on Tuesday that the matter was complex and “would be reviewed  for consideration of a response.”

A senior bin Laden aide now in Guantanamo, Abu Zubaydah, is said by sources – including John Kiriakou, the former CIA officer who led his capture, who said he got his information from CIA documents and colleagues –  to have stated under questioning that al-Qaida had been in contact with Prince Ahmed before 9/11. The prisoner, Kiriakou said, raised the names of Ahmed and two other royals as if to indicate “he had the support of the Saudi government.”

(Kiriakou was indicted in January, accused of disclosing classified information about Zubaydah to reporters. The complaint against Kiriakou also alleged that, when submitting the manuscript for his memoir, he lied to the CIA's Publication Review Board.)

There is a link, too, between Prince Sultan and the post-9/11 investigation in Sarasota. Esam Ghazzawi, a longtime adviser to Sultan’s father, Prince Fahd, owned the Sarasota home suspected of having been visited on multiple occasions by hijack leader Mohamed Atta and several of his accomplices. 

Prince Ahmed died aged 43 in July, 2002, in circumstances that remain unclear. Prince Fahd, 46, had pre-deceased him, dying seven weeks before 9/11. A 2009 report described Prince Sultan as having become chairman of Eirad, a Saudi holding company.

Robbyn Swan is co-author, with Anthony Summers, of "The Eleventh Day: The Full Story of 9/11 & Osama bin Laden."

Former Florida Sen. Bob Graham, who co-chaired Congress’ Joint Inquiry into the 9/11 terrorist attacks, has seen two classified FBI documents that he says are at odds with the bureau’s public statements that there was no connection between the hijackers and Saudis then living in Sarasota, Fla. 

“There are significant inconsistencies between the public statements of the FBI in September and what I read in the classified documents,” Graham said. 

“One document adds to the evidence that the investigation was not the robust inquiry claimed by the FBI,” Graham said. “An important investigative lead was not pursued and unsubstantiated statements were accepted as truth.” 

Whether the 9/11 hijackers acted alone, or whether they had support within the U.S., remains an unanswered question -- one that began to be asked as soon as it became known that 15 of the 19 hijackers were Saudi citizens. It was underlined when Congress’s bipartisan inquiry released its public report in July 2003. The final 28 pages, regarding possible foreign support for the terrorists, were censored in their entirety -- on President George W. Bush’s instructions.

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Graham said the two classified FBI documents that he saw, dated 2002 and 2003, were prepared by an agent who participated in the Sarasota investigation. He said the agent suggested that another federal agency be asked to join the investigation, but that the idea was “rejected.”

Graham attempted in recent weeks to contact the agent, he said, only to find the man had been instructed by FBI headquarters not to talk. 

FBI: 'No credible evidence'
The FBI-led investigation a decade ago focused on Abdulaziz al-Hijji and his wife, Anoud, who moved out of their home in the upscale, gated community of Prestancia, near Sarasota, and left the country in the weeks before 9/11. The couple left behind three cars and numerous personal belongings, such as furnishings, clothes, medicine and food, according to law enforcement records. After the 9/11 attacks, a concerned neighbor contacted the FBI. 

Analysis of Prestancia gatehouse visitor logs and photographs of license tags showed that vehicles driven by several of the future hijackers had visited the al-Hijji home at 4224 Escondito Circle, according to a counterterrorism officer and former Prestancia administrator Larry Berberich. If that did occur, it will feed into suspicions that the hijackers had Saudi support -- a suspicion held by some official investigators but played down by the 9/11 Commission.

Al-Hijji, who now lives and works in London, recently called 9/11 “a crime against the USA and all humankind” and said he was “saddened and oppressed by these false allegations.” He also said it was “not true” that Mohamed Atta and other 9/11 hijackers visited him at his Sarasota home. 

The FBI has backed up al-Hijji. After initially declining to comment, the bureau confirmed that it did investigate but said it found nothing sinister. Agents, however, have refused to answer reporters’ specific questions about its investigation or its findings about the Prestancia gate records. 

The FBI reiterated its position in a Feb. 7 letter that denied a Freedom of Information Act request seeking records from its Sarasota probe. The denial said their release “could constitute an unwarranted invasion of personal privacy.” 

“At no time during the course of its investigation of the attacks, known as the PENTTBOM investigation, did the FBI develop credible evidence that connected the address at 4224 Escondito Circle, Sarasota, Florida, to any of the 9/11 hijackers,” wrote records section chief David M. Hardy. 

Newly released Florida Department of Law Enforcement documents, however, state that an informant told the FBI in 2004 that al-Hijji had considered Osama bin Laden a “hero” and may have known some of the hijackers. The informant, Wissam Hammoud, also said al-Hijji once introduced him to Adnan El Shukrijumah, an ex-Broward County resident and suspected al-Qaida operative on the FBI’s Most Wanted list. 

Last September, FBI spokesmen also disputed Graham’s assertion that Congress was never told about the Sarasota investigation. 

That prompted Graham to ask the FBI for assistance in locating in the National Archives the Sarasota-related files that were allegedly turned over to Congress. Instead, after what Graham said were two months in which the FBI was “either unwilling or unable” to help find the records, the bureau suddenly turned over two documents to the Senate Intelligence Committee, which Graham once headed and where he still has access. It is those documents that Graham has said are inconsistent with the FBI denials. 

Meeting abruptly canceled
Graham shared this development with the Obama White House, which responded by setting up a meeting between Graham and FBI Deputy Director Sean Joyce. According to the former senator, Joyce told Graham he “didn’t want to talk” about the Sarasota episode. Graham said he was assured, however, that he would shortly be shown material that supported the FBI’s denials, and a further meeting was arranged with an FBI aide. 

In December, Graham said, the scheduled meeting was abruptly canceled and he was told he would be allowed no further access to FBI information about Sarasota. 

Graham believes the joint congressional inquiry into the 9/11 attacks was not the only national investigative body kept in the dark about Sarasota. He said the co-chairs of the later 9/11 Commission, Republican Thomas Kean and Democrat Lee Hamilton, have told him they also were unaware of it. 

Kean, a former New Jersey governor, told Graham the commission would have “worked it hard,” because the hypothesis that the hijackers completed the planning alone was “implausible,” the former senator said.

Kean did not return several phone messages seeking comment. But Hamilton, a former Indiana congressman, confirmed this month that he learned nothing about the Sarasota matter while serving as vice-chair of the 9/11 commission. 

Graham sees the information now emerging about Sarasota as ominously similar to discoveries his inquiry made in California. Leads there indicated that the first two hijackers to reach the U.S., Saudis Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi, received help first from a diplomat at the Saudi consulate in Los Angeles and then from two other Saudis, one of whom helped al-Mihdhar and al-Hazmi find a place to live. Multiple sources told investigators they believed both the latter Saudis had been Saudi government agents. 

Later, when 9/11 Commission staff gained limited access to these individuals in Saudi Arabia, the aides’ reaction was caustic. One memo described the testimony of one of them as “deceptive ... inconsistent ... implausible.” The testimony of another displayed an “utter lack of credibility,” it said. 

Graham is troubled by what he sees as FBI headquarters’ apparent effort to conceal information, including the fact that al-Mihdhar and al-Hazmi lived for months in California in the home of a paid FBI informant. Even when that emerged, the FBI denied his inquiry access to the informant. Graham wonders if that was merely because of the bureau’s embarrassment, or because the informant knew something that “would be even more damaging were it revealed.” 

The newly surfaced FDLE documents containing informant Hammoud’s troubling 2004 information about al-Hijji have reinforced Graham’s concerns because they conflict with the FBI’s public statements. 

Hammoud’s statement that al-Hijji introduced him to Saudi terror suspect Shukrijumah is consistent with the report that Prestancia gate logs showed Shukrijumah had visited the al-Hijji house – and buttresses longstanding official suspicion that he was linked to the hijackers. When Mohamed Atta visited a federal immigration office in Miami to discuss a visa problem in May 2001, a 9/11 Commission footnote reports, a man who closely resembled Shukrijumah accompanied him. 

Related story: Saudi who left Fla. before 9/11 considered bin Laden a 'hero,' informant told FBI in '04

Graham sees what he believes to be the suppression of evidence pointing to Saudi support for the 9/11 hijackers as arising from the perceived advantages to the West, at the time and now, of keeping Saudi Arabia happy. 

In late December, the U.S. announced a new $30 billion defense deal with the Saudis. 

“This agreement serves to reinforce the strong enduring relationship between the United States and Saudi Arabia,” said U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for Political-Military Affairs Andrew Shapiro. “It demonstrates the U.S. commitment to a strong Saudi defense capability as a key component to regional security.” 

Graham said he was taken aback by that announcement.

“I think that in the period immediately after 9/11 the FBI was under instructions from the Bush White House not to discuss anything that could be embarrassing to the Saudis,” he said. “It is more inexplicable why the Obama administration has been reticent to pursue the question of Saudi involvement. For both administrations, there was and continues to be an obligation to inform the American people through truthful information.”                                                                                                                           

Anthony Summers is co-author, with Robbyn Swan, of “The Eleventh Day: The Full Story of 9/11 & Osama bin Laden.” Dan Christensen edits the Miami-area investigative Website Broward Bulldog, in which this article first appeared. 

A Saudi man who triggered an FBI investigation after he and his family left their Sarasota, Fla., area home and moved overseas two weeks before 9/11 considered Osama bin Laden a “hero” and may have known some of the hijackers, an informant told the FBI in 2004. 

The informant also told authorities that the Saudi, Abdulazziz al-Hijji, once introduced him to Adnan El Shukrijumah -- another former Florida resident and suspected top al-Qaida operative who today has a $5 million bounty on his head. 

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The FBI and the Sarasota County Sheriff’s Office interviewed the informant, Wissam Taysir Hammoud, at the Hillsborough County Jail on April 7, 2004. The Miami-based investigative website Broward Bulldog obtained Florida Department of Law Enforcement reports about the interview and the investigation using the state’s public records law.

Hammoud, 46, who once owned a cell phone business in Sarasota, is serving 21 years in prison after pleading guilty in 2005 in federal court in Tampa to weapons violations and attempting to kill a federal agent and a witness in an earlier case against him. The U.S. Bureau of Prisons classifies him as an “International Terrorist Associate,” court records show.

Al-Hijji’s name made headlines in September 2011 when The Miami Herald reported on a counterterrorism source’s disclosure of a previously unknown FBI-led probe that followed the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on New York and Washington -- one that pointed to a possible Saudi support operation for the hijackers in Florida. 

A decade after the nation’s worst terrorist attack, which claimed the lives of 3,000 people, al-Hijji has now been found to be living in London, where he works for Aramco Overseas, the European subsidiary of Saudi Aramco, Saudi Arabia’s state oil company. His job title is career counselor. 

'I love the USA'
In an email to London’s Daily Telegraph, which worked on the story with these reporters, al-Hijji acknowledged Hammoud had been his friend, but strongly denied any involvement in the 9/11 plot. 

“I have neither relation nor association with any of those bad people/criminals and the awful crime they did. 9/11 is a crime against the USA and all humankind and I’m very saddened and oppressed by these false allegations,” al-Hijji said. “I love the USA, my kids were born there, I went to college and university there, I spent a good time of my life there and I love it.” 

Al-Hijji’s account is supported by the FBI, which has stated “At no time… did the FBI develop evidence that connected the family members to any of the 9/11 hijackers… and there was no connection to the 9/11 plot.” In response to a Freedom of Information Act request, the FBI repeated this denial as recently as last month. 

In a brief interview outside his office, Al-Hijji also said he did not know Shukrijumah, the alleged al-Qaida operative. “The name doesn’t ring a bell,” he said. 

While living in Florida, al-Hijji attended Manatee Community College (now the State College of Florida Manatee-Sarasota) and, from January 2000 until April 2001, the University of South Florida. He earned a bachelor’s degree with a major in management information systems in August 2001. 

Hasty departure denied
In the weeks before 9/11, al-Hijji -- then 27 -- and his wife, Anoud, daughter of an adviser to a member of the Saudi royal family, departed their home at 4224 Escondito Circle in the upscale gated community of Prestancia and returned to Saudi Arabia.

They left behind three cars and “numerous personal belongings including food, medicine, bills, baby clothing, etc,” according to the Flordia Department of Law Enforcement documents, which state the family departed on Aug. 27, 2001. 

Al-Hijji denied having abandoned his home in haste, explaining: “No, no, no. Absolutely not true. We were trying to secure the (Aramco) job. It was a good opportunity.” He said his wife and children followed him out to Saudi Arabia a few weeks after he left Sarasota. 

After the 9/11 attacks, an alarmed neighbor contacted the FBI. When several weeks passed without action, Prestanica resident and administrator Larry Berberich alerted local law enforcement. Authorities, including the FBI, moved in. 

The investigation led to a stunning development, according to Berberich and a counterterrorism officer, who spoke on condition of anonymity. 

“The car registration numbers of vehicles that had passed through the Prestancia community’s North Gate in the months before 9/11, coupled with the identification documents shown by incoming drivers on request, showed that Mohamed Atta and several of his fellow hijackers – and another Saudi terror suspect still at large – had visited 4224 Escondito Circle on multiple occasions,” the source said. 

The others included Marwan al-Shehhi, who plowed a United Airlines jet into the World Trade Center’s South Tower; Ziad Jarrah, who crashed another United jet into a Pennsylvania field; and Walid al-Shehri, who flew with Atta on the first plane to strike the World Trade Center. Also identified as having visited: Saudi-born fugitive Adnan Shukrijumah. 

The source said law enforcement “also conducted a link analysis that tracked phone calls – based on dates, times and length of phone conversations to and from the Escondito house – dating back more than a year before 9/11. And the phone traffic also connected with the 9/11 terrorists – though less directly than the gate logs did.” 

Former U.S. Sen. Bob Graham, the Florida Democrat who co-chaired Congress’s bipartisan joint inquiry into the 2001 terrorist attacks, called news of the Sarasota investigation the “most important” development on the background to the 9/11 plot in years. He added that Congress should have been told about it. 

Investigation found no links, FBI says
Soon after the story broke, however, the FBI poured cold water on it. It acknowledged that there had been an investigation, but said it found no connection to the 9/11 plot. It declined to explain. 

The FBI reiterated that position in a letter this month denying a Freedom of Information Act request for records of its investigation. 

The Florida Department of Law Enforcement records suggest such a finding may have been wrong.  One report indicates that what informant Hammoud said during the 2004 interview was treated seriously, “The following information, in particular the information by Wissam Hammoud, is being followed up on internationally,” it said. 

The FDLE reports buttress key elements of the story, while providing new details.

Hammoud, who said he met al-Hijji through relatives, said the two men worked out together at Shapes Fitness in Sarasota and played soccer at the local Islamic Society.

He told the FBI that al-Hijji was “very well-schooled in Islam” and that “Osama bin Laden was a hero of al-Hijji.” He added that al-Hijji showed him a “website containing information about bin Laden,” and spoke of “going to Afghanistan and becoming a freedom fighter.” Al-Hijji also tried to recruit him, Hammoud said. 

According to Hammoud, al-Hijji also talked of “taking flight training in Venice (Fla.)” He said he believed “al-Hijji had known some of the terrorists from the September 11, 2001 attacks” who were students at an airport there.

Hammoud said al-Hijji “entertained Saudis at his residence” at “parties,” but that he himself did not stay for because – unlike al-Hijji as he remembered him – he “did not drink or smoke cannabis.”

Hammoud also identified Shukrijumah, the alleged al-Qaida operative who also lived in Florida at the time, as a “friend” of al-Hijii’s whom he brought to a soccer game at the Sarasota mosque in 2000 or 2001.

Hammoud’s wife and sister-in-law confirmed during recent interviews that they too knew the al-Hijjis and were familiar with basic elements of Hammoud’s account.

Mrs. Hammoud, who asked that her full name not be used, said she got the impression from comments al-Hijji made that he was “anti-American.” Hammoud himself, speaking from prison in recent days, said al-Hijji “had a lot of hatred towards everyone in America.” He said he had thought al-Hijji was “nuts” when he asked him to go fight in Afghanistan.

A quiet family life asserted
Al-Hijji, while confirming he used to work out with Hammoud, described his life in Sarasota as quiet, centered on his wife and children. 

“My friends were very limited,” he explained. “Normally, I don’t hold parties in the house because I have little kids. I was not a frequent[er] to any bars.” 

Prison officials have put Hammoud under heightened security measures due to his classification as a terrorist associate. Court records state the classification is based on what authorities said was Hammoud’s “support and membership” in a “Palestinian-related terrorist organization.” 

Hammoud denies involvement with the group and has sought -- so far unsuccessfully -- a court order to overturn that classification. While representing himself, he filed documents that reveal a history of mental problems caused by a serious brain injury he suffered in a car accident in 1990. 

After Hammoud’s first conviction in 2002 for selling illegal weapons to an undercover federal agent, an FBI agent wrote: “Hammoud is now claiming diminished capacity because of an auto accident in an effort to be sentenced to less time. …There is speculation on the part of law enforcement that this was merely an attempt to gain sympathy from the sentencing judge.”

Hammoud was found to be competent by a judge before he was allowed to plead guilty to more serious charges arising from his 2004 arrest. The guilty plea and sentence were later upheld on appeal. 

Hammoud’s lawyer, Matthew Farmer, would not comment. But his appellate attorney, Tampa’s Bruce Howie, remembers his former client as “not delusional or wacky. ... I think he has his share of paranoia. But he’s not a liar. He didn’t make it up as he went along.” 

For his part, Hammoud has named several FBI agents that he claims to have dealt with while attempting to assist the government in its fight against terrorism. 

And Hammoud’s current attorney, Detroit’s Sanford Schulman, said FBI agents have met with Hammoud on multiple occasions. 

“There have been about 10 different agents, and that’s just the ones that I’ve been involved with. They were not two-minute meetings either,” said Schulman, who did not attend but was notified of the meetings.

Hammoud may have known more than is revealed in the new FDLE documents.  A Sarasota Herald-Tribune story about him based on an FBI agent’s affidavit filed at the time of Hammoud’s arrest in January 2004 has this ominous reference: 

“In September 2001, the Florida Department of Law Enforcement interviewed Hammoud because someone had anonymously called saying Hammoud had made a comment that the Oklahoma bombing was going to be small compared with what was coming.” 

In a recent email, Hammoud denied having made such a remark.

Anthony Summers is the co-author, with Robbyn Swan, of “The Eleventh Day: The Full Story of 9/11 & Osama bin Laden.” Dan Christensen edits the Broward Bulldog. This article first appeared in the Broward Bulldog.

Coming Tuesday:Former U.S. Sen. Bob Graham of Florida says classified documents contradict FBI statements.

 

An al-Qaida propaganda outlet has released a new video featuring al-Qaida leader Ayman al-Zawahiri and the leader of Somalia’s Harakat al-Shabaab al-Mujahideen, apparently indicating that the latter group has been formally incorporated into the umbrella terror organization. 

The video distributed by al-Qaida’s “As-Sahab Media” shows al-Zawahiri, who ascended to al-Qaida's top post after the death of Osama bin Laden in May 2011, addressing the camera. Al-Shabaab leader, Mukhtar Abu az-Zubeir is shown in a photo and heard offering a “bayat,” or oath of allegiance, to al-Zawahiri.

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Evan Kohlmann, an NBC News terrorism analyst, said the two men are not seen together in the tape and that it appears al Zawahiri and az-Zubeir recorded their comments separately and that they were then were edited together. 

According to a translation provided by Kohlmann, al-Zawahiri said in the tape, "Today I bring glad tidings to our Muslim Ummah (community), happy tidings that please the believers and displeases the crusaders, which is the joining of Shabaab al-Mujahideen in Somalia to Qaida't al-Jihad in support of the Jihad unity in the face of the Zionist-crusader campaign and their helpers of cooperatives traitor rulers who brought in the crusader invasive forces to their countries." 

Car bomb attack in Somali capital kills 8

The implications of a formal link between al-Shabaab and al-Qaida would be worrisome, considering that as many as 50 American citizens are believed to be members of al-Shabaab in Somalia and at least three are known to have carried out suicide bombings inside that east African nation.  (In addition, another 150 Europeans and others who wouldn't require a visa to enter the U.S. belong to al-Shabaab.) 

It also may indicate that al-Qaida, decimated by predator drone attacks and the Osama Bin Laden raid, is seeking new recruits for its operations.  

This is the first video of al-Zawahiri in more than two months. In the last video, issued on Dec. 1, boasted that al-Qaida had seized aid worker Warren Weinstein, a 70-year-old American, in Lahore, Pakistan, last August. There's been no further word on whether Weinstein remains alive since then.

 

By Robert Windrem
NBC News

With the successful Predator attack on al-Qaida operative Aslam Awan inside Pakistan, al-Qaida has lost, in the words of a senior U.S. official last night, "a senior external operations planner who was working on attacks against the West. His death reduces al-Qaida's thinning bench of another operative devoted to plotting the death of innocent civilians."

Awan is believed to have been somewhat close to Ayman al Zawahiri, the leader of al-Qaida since shortly after Osama Bbn Laden's death on May 1. Although U.S. officials would not place a number on Awan's rank within al-Qaida, he was believed to have been involved in planning attacks, putting him in the high command.

But what of Zawahiri? The U.S. pursuit of him remains a high priority. (And his killing or capture would be regarded as a political coup for the Obama administration in a campaign year.) The U.S. has targeted Zawahiri five times by his own count, going back to the days after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

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A U.S. counterterrorism official tells NBC News that there's limited information on the status of U.S. planning against Zawahiri. "It's certainly not impossible" for an attack on Zawahiri to be attempted. "But he has clearly hung very low since May, with fundamentally no communications," said the official.

Evan Kohlmann, MSNBC analyst and counterterrorism consultant, reports that since bin Laden's death, al-Qaida's media arm has released eight recordings of al-Zawahiri, not all of which can be easily dated. At least one and possibly two of them were probably recorded prior to bin Laden being killed, then released after his death. The most recent one came out on December 1. In that video, Zawahiri boasted that al-Qaida had seized aid worker Warren Weinstein, a 70-year-old American, in Lahore last August. There's been no proof of life regarding Weinstein since then.

Those recordings are often hand-carried through a network of couriers to ensure Zawahiri's security.

From the archives: Bin Laden dead: Who will lead al-Qaeda?

We have an excerpt from a new book published Tuesday about the war on terror, "Wanted Women: Faith, Lies, and the War on Terror: The Lives of Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Aafia Siddiqui," by Deborah Scroggins.

"Wanted Women" tells the story of two extraordinary women catapulted to fame by the war on terror. Ayaan Hirsi Ali is the Somali-born activist and author of the bestselling autobiography "Infidel," whose life was threatened for her criticism of Islam. Aafia Siddiqui is a Pakistani neuroscientist and mother of three serving an 86-year prison sentence for firing on United States personnel who came to question her in Afghanistan. Siddiqui disappeared in 2003, shortly after the FBI listed her as wanted for questioning about her ties to al-Qaeda. Many Pakistanis believe she was kidnapped and spent the missing years leading up to her capture in 2008 in a secret US or Pakistani prison. But as author Deborah Scroggins describes in this excerpt from her new book, CIA officials say that they were still hunting for Siddiqui during that period.

An excerpt from Chapter 5 of "Wanted Women":

To the outside world, Aafia seemed forgotten. Many wondered by the end of 2005 if she was locked in a secret CIA prison. But the silver-haired former head of the weapons of mass destruction unit at the Counterterrorist Center at the CIA, Rolf Mowatt-Larssen, told me after he retired that, far from being under arrest, Aafia remained for him the stuff of nightmares.

Mowatt-Larssen had a special deck of fifty-two playing cards made up. Each carried the face of a suspected terrorist he feared might be planning the next big attack. Aafia was the queen of spades, the only woman in the deck. Mowatt-Larssen wouldn’t have put her at the top of his list of potential mass murderers, but he couldn’t rule her out. She was his wild card.

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As an intelligence officer, Mowatt-Larssen tried to put himself in the place of al-Qaeda’s leaders and to think as they would. He believed that they had been close, several times, to obtaining weap­ons that could have caused huge casualties. In 2003, for example, the CIA heard that al-Qaeda had devised a small handheld weapon that could disperse hydrogen cyanide throughout an enclosed area, killing dozens or even hundreds of people. Al-Qaeda called it the mubtakkar, Arabic for “invention.” Around the time KSM was cap­tured and Aafia went missing, the United States received information that an al-Qaeda cell in Bahrain had been ready to mount a mubtakkar attack on New York City’s subways but that Zawahiri had canceled the plan. Why did he cancel? Mowatt-Larssen feared that al-Qaeda’s number two had pulled back to work on a more spectacular strike.

The group’s biological and chemical weapons expert, an Egyptian named Abu Khabab al-Masri, was still at large.

Mowatt-Larssen believed that if al-Qaeda used Aafia properly, she could be of huge value. His hope was that, whether because she was a woman or because her bossy manner got on the nerves of its male leaders, al-Qaeda wouldn’t be able to exploit her full potential.

It wasn’t Aafia’s prowess as a scientist that worried Mowatt-Larssen the most. The FBI had gone through her records from MIT and Brandeis. She had not taken any notably advanced biology and chemistry courses, and there was no obvious application to jihad in her neuroscience Ph.D. What set her apart in his eyes was her combination of high intelligence (including general scientific know-how), religious zeal, and years of experience in the United States. “So far they have had very few people who have been able to come to the U.S. and thrive,” he said. “Aafia is different. She knows about U.S. immigration procedures and visas. She knows how to enroll in American educational institutions. She can open bank accounts and transfer money. She knows how things work here. She could have been very useful to them simply for her understanding of the U.S.”

Mowatt-Larssen and his team had not forgotten the documents found in the Qadoos house at the time of KSM’s arrest. They had shown that Abu Khabab al-Masri, the Egyptian weapons expert, was ready to produce botulinum, salmonella, and cyanide, and was close to producing anthrax. They believed Aafia had a connection both to the Qadoos family and to Amir Aziz, the Lahore orthopedic surgeon who had been accused of helping al-Qaeda obtain anthrax. They also thought she was better equipped than any of them to be creative in using such poisons against the United States. “She had the imagi­nation to come up with the next 9/11,” Mowatt-Larssen said. “The question was whether they would listen to her.”

He felt they might take some of her suggestions but might leave her out of the loop when it came to operational planning. He had heard what detainees such as Aafia’s second husband, Ali, had said about her. (Alas, the reports of these interrogations are still deeply secret.) Even with the hardest core of al-Qaeda operatives, she had a reputation for being headstrong. “I remember thinking at the time, ‘She must drive them crazy,’” Mowatt-Larsson told me. But he couldn’t be sure. The CIA had never pinned down her exact role. They just knew that “she was always in the picture. Connections between her and other people the FBI was looking at surfaced in just about every al-Qaeda investigation with a U.S. angle. She was always on our radar.”

At the U.S. Embassy in Islamabad, Aafia’s name was prominent on a different list, another former official in the Bush administration told me. This was a list of suspected al-Qaeda terrorists whom the U.S. government had authorized the CIA to “kill or capture” on sight. Once again, Aafia wasn’t at the top of the list. But she was on it and she stayed there.

Unfortunately from the U.S. point of view, the CIA could not easily operate by itself in Pakistan. Thus, when it came to finding Aafia or anyone else on the list, it usually had to rely on the ISI. And most of the time the ISI gave the Americans nothing. Despite the millions of dollars in rewards that Washington was offering, the ISI seldom, on its own initiative, arrested even foreign al-Qaeda sus­pects, much less Pakistanis.

So the CIA wasn’t surprised that its Pakistani counterparts showed little interest in finding a fellow Pakistani who was also a woman. “Everyone has patrons and protectors,” Mowatt-Larssen said. And Aafia, as a female and a member of a respected Deobandi family, was even more sheltered than most from the prying of U.S. investigators.

The Americans tried to escape their dependence on Pakistani intelligence by playing from an American strength: technology. The phones and e-mails of Pakistanis suspected of links to people on the target list were tapped by the National Security Agency. Ismat and Fowzia no doubt fell into that suspect category, as did some senior politicians and generals who the United States believed were shield­ing militants. The former official in the Bush administration said that if the Americans happened to overhear the whereabouts of one of their targets, they would go to President Musharraf with the in­formation. They would ask him for permission to capture the person and take “lethal action” if they failed to capture him.

But Musharraf didn’t always agree. If he didn’t want to go along, he might say, and in some cases he might be telling the truth, that the targeted person was actually an ISI asset whom the Pakistanis were using to infiltrate al-Qaeda. (Later it would be widely rumored that the ISI used Aafia to gather information on militant circles.) In that case, the United States refrained from action. In the years before the Americans began using drones to attack suspected mili­tants (and eventually a Navy SEAL team to kill Osama bin Laden) in Pakistan, there was nothing else they could do.

But I have yet to find a source who recalls any such discussion of Aafia. She seemed to have disappeared into thin air.

Excerpt from "Wanted Women: Faith, Lies, and the War on Terror: The Lives of Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Aafia Siddiqui," (c) Deborah Scroggins.  Printed courtesy of Harper, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.

Deborah Scroggins' book "Emma’s War" was translated into ten languages and won the Ridenhour Truth-Telling Prize.

Scroggins has written for The Sunday Times Magazine, The Nation, Vogue, Granta, and many other publications.

She won two Overseas Press Club awards and a Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award as a foreign correspondent for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. She lives with her family in Massachusetts.