The Watchdogs Didn’t Bark was the last great book on the September 11th 2001 terrorist attacks. In this episode I review the book and analyse some of the events and people it describes, before outlining the only ‘conspiracy theory’ about 9/11 that makes any sense to me.

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In keeping with the last couple of episodes looking back at major terrorist attacks I felt inspired to do this long-overdue podcast on the book The Watchdogs Didn’t Bark, by film makers and journalists John Duffy and Ray Nowosielski. It is perhaps the last great book on 9/11 and I’ve wanted to review and discuss it for a long time, so better late than never.

John and Ray are the guys behind the 2006 documentary 9/11: Press for Truth, one of the more staid and sensible of the wave of independent 9/11 documentaries that came out in the 2000s. After making that film they embarked on a 10-year investigation into what was going on inside the CIA and NSA leading up to the September 11th attacks and the crimes of the early war on terror.

Some of this we covered in ClandesTime 117 where I discussed Kevin Fenton’s book Disconnecting the Dots, but that was a long time ago.  While some of this information will be familiar to you, some of it probably won’t be so hopefully this will be informative and provocative. If it isn’t, and you feel I’m repeating myself, feel free to direct any objections to [email protected], because it’s their fault, not mine.

In essence, this is the most focused and comprehensive book on the question of Khalid al Mihdhar and Nawaf al Hazmi, the first of the supposed 9/11 hijackers to enter the US as part of the Al Qaeda conspiracy. They are tagged as the muscle hijackers on Flight 77, the one that hit the Pentagon that morning. They are also the two about whom the CIA and NSA had the most foreknowledge.

The Watchdogs Didn’t Bark: The Early Years

Chapter 1 of The Watchdogs Didn’t Bark begins the story with John and Ray’s interview with former White House Counter-terrorism Tsar Richard Clarke. Some believe that Clarke was an integral part of the 9/11 conspiracy, others see him as one of the few people who apologised and took any kind of responsibility after the fact. I’m not going to rehash that argument here, simply to note that opinions on him have varied enormously.

What is certain is that Clarke had been waiting for someone to come and ask him the sorts of questions John and Ray asked – about why the CIA, particularly Alec Station, their Bin Laden unit, withheld information from the FBI, the White House and Clarke himself in the years prior to the attacks. Clarke believes that this was entirely deliberate, that the decision to withhold the info went all the way up to the CIA director George Tenet, and that the Agency were trying to recruit Al Mihdhar and Al Hazmi. This is what he told the authors of Watchdogs in that interview, which you can watch in edited form on youtube and he has never backed down from this point of view.

The book then leaps back in time, as Chapter Two outlines the background of three people who joined the CIA at around the same time and went on to play key roles in the unfolding events, namely Jon Kiriakou, Alfreda Frances Bikowsky and Jen Matthews. The latter two worked for Alec Station while Kiriakou was part of the CounterTerrorism Center, initially as an analyst and later as an operations officer. Bikowsky was the protege of Michael Scheuer, the founder and original head of Alec Station. Scheuer gave her the task of recruiting others to fill out the staff at the station – which at that point was in a basement in Langley. Among those she brought in were Jen Matthews, who came from an analysis background but was put in charge of Alec’s operational side. Matthews later died in the attack on the Chapman Base by the triple agent Humam al Balawi, as depicted in Zero Dark Thirty.

Herein lies a significant admission – Alec Station was the first ‘virtual station’ in the CIA’s history, not located inside or near an embassy like most CIA stations, but instead set up without a specific geographic area or country of responsibility. They were focused on Bin Laden and Al Qaeda, an inherently transnational organisation with connections everywhere from the UK to the Philippines. But they weren’t just analysing, looking for leads and connections and trying to figure out where Al Qaeda might strike next, they also had an operational arm that tried to get spies inside the group. It seems this effort failed miserably, despite various foreign spy agencies managing to accomplish this without a dedicated Al Qaeda unit, and despite one American spy (Aukai Collins) offering to go to Afghanistan and infiltrate the training camps. Some blame this failure on Matthews and her lack of operational experience, though I feel there’s probably a better explanation.

Perhaps the most interesting part of chapter 2 is when the authors interviewed Kiriakou and he told them, ‘A CIA psychiatrist told me once that the CIA is interested in hiring people with sociopathic tendencies. Not sociopaths, right, because sociopaths can easily pass a polygraph exam, which makes them impossible to control, because they have no conscience. The CIA wants to hire people who are comfortable working in ethical or moral gray areas. They have a conscience, they can fail a polygraph, but they’re comfortable breaking the law.’

You may be reminded of Chase Brandon in the making of featurette for The Recruit where he talks about a ‘personality conundrum’ that the CIA look for in their real-life recruits, i.e. people with a degree of psychopathy but not full-blown nutcases who might go rogue at any moment. It seems that Alec Station had several such people in key positions, and the general culture there was one of not caring so much about the law, or lying to people, as long as the task at hand got accomplished. Whatever that task actually was.

Meanwhile, at the NSA they were monitoring a telephone at a house in Yemen that would become known as the Al Qaeda communications hub. The house belonged to Ahmed al Hada, and operatives from around the world would call the phone, al Hada would answer, and they would pick up and drop off messages for others when they called in. This helped compartmentalise Al Qaeda operations, as there were no direct calls from, say, the cell in Nairobi that carried out the bombing on the embassy there in the summer of 1998 and the satellite phones being used by Bin Laden and Ayman Al Zawahiri in Afghanistan. Nonetheless, the 1998 embassy bombings were an Al Qaeda operation, directed from Afghanistan and the NSA must have known at least something about them ahead of time.

I have heard varying versions of this story but according to this book the CIA found it impossible to get transcripts of these phone calls through the Hada house in Yemen from the NSA. Even though Al Qaeda were happily attacking US targets around the world, including the World Trade Center in early 1993, the NSA resisted CIA efforts to tap into their wealth of information. So the CIA built their own listening post in the Indian Ocean in 1996, near the island of Madagascar, so they could listen to all these phonecalls themselves. According to the version in Watchdogs this limited the Agency – they could only listen to one side of the calls – but I’ve read other accounts saying that the listening post picked up both sides of the calls, and I’m struggling to understand a) how such technology could only pick up one side of the calls and b) why the CIA would build such a device given its obvious limitations. Tapping a phone isn’t that hard.

Also during this mid-90s period Michael Scheuer became a big advocate of rendition, including so-called extraordinary rendition, i.e. where they kidnapped people and sent them to friendly countries where the security state willingly tortured people (such as Egypt) and have them do the extracting of information. Scheuer’s obsession with Al Qaeda and related groups pushed the CIA to adopt extraordinary rendition as a frequent tactic, and pushed them to focus these efforts on Arab Muslims suspected of being involved in terrorism.

Which begs a few questions for me. 1) If torture works then why didn’t this method yield better results? 2) If torture doesn’t work (which it largely doesn’t) then how much misinformation did extraordinary rendition produce? 3) Was Scheuer a proto-sociopath, like Kiriakou describes? Did he recruit Tom Wilshere and Frances Bikowsky because they shared these personality traits? 4) If Scheuer ran the rendition program from Alec Station, as this book reports, then why has he never been prosecuted either for colluding in torture or for gross negligence in failing to get good information?

In Chapter 3 we’re introduced to Jack Cloonan, an FBI agent working for the I-49 squad out of the New York field office. I-49 were the FBI’s equivalent of Alec Station, dedicated to Bin Laden and Al Qaeda, but they were consistently kept in the dark by both the CIA and the NSA. The squad was headed up, at least from 1995 onwards, by John O’Neill, a man who always wanted to be an FBI agent, having watched the series The F.B.I. when he was a kid.

Cloonan says that despite whatever the CIA and NSA did know and were capturing from the Hada phone in Yemen, the Bureau didn’t know anything about it until after the 1998 embassy bombings in East Africa. The CIA knew about it as much as two years earlier, and they and/or the NSA knew that al Hada was involved in planning the embassy attacks, as was Hada’s son-in-law, Khalid Al Mihdhar. But no one bothered to tell the FBI, even after a walk-in source approached the embassy in Nairobi a year prior to the bombings and said he was part of a gang planning to blow it up.

When John and Ray spoke to Cloonan and told him Scheuer knew about the Hada phone in 1996, he was ‘flabbergasted’ and then replied, ‘If that’s the case, it’s pretty difficult to understand it. It wouldn’t be the first time [the CIA has done this kind of thing]. I would think that would have been pretty significant though, because obviously they are getting data mining off this phone number. Because the telephone number is Khalid al Mihdhar’s telephone number. That’s pretty significant. If they were working on that number for two years prior to the embassy bombings, that information, I would assume, would have been shared with those of us building the case against Bin Laden.’

This is where it gets a little complicated – the NSA don’t tend to share anything with anyone, but there were FBI agents permanently detailed to Alec Station with the aim of them acting as liaisons, helping the flow of information between the two different bodies. These included Dan Coleman, Doug Miller and Mark Rossini. In early 1999, months after the East African embassy bombings, Rossini was called in by John O’Neill and told he was being sent to Alec Station, to replace Dan Coleman.

Let’s stop here and note something I feel is important. Not long after those bombings the US government finally caught up with Ali Mohamed, the triple agent who had been working for the CIA, FBI and US Special Forces (and as a reservist) while training Bin Laden’s bodyguards, training most of the 1993 World Trade Center bombers and setting up the cells that did the 1998 embassy bombings. It was Dan Coleman of the FBI who first interviewed Ali Mohamed after he was arrested, and Coleman wrote up a 302 of his conversations with Ali.

At the White House Richard Clarke was pushing for a shake-up of staff following the embassy bombings, which might explain why Dan Coleman was pulled out of Alec Station and replaced by Mark Rossini. But I wonder whether it’s because the CIA were keeping Ali Mohamed away from the FBI, as they had done for years, and Dan Coleman wasn’t proving much use at bridging the gap between Alec Station and I-49. It’s well known that by this point O’Neill and Scheuer had regular arguments during the White House meetings chaired by Clarke, so I’m guessing this early 1999 switch up was in part motivated by the Ali Mohamed controversy.

The Watchdogs Didn’t Bark: Post-Embassy Bombings

Around the same time that Rossini replaced Coleman as the FBI’s ‘eyes and ears’ inside Alec Station, another shake-up was taking place. Scheuer was removed as the head of Alec, which had nothing to do with the station’s failure to share information with the FBI. Instead, it was because Scheuer had a habit of pissing off his superiors, often ignoring the chain of command and going straight to the director, George Tenet, or to Richard Clarke.

Scheuer demanded action following the embassy bombings, putting together a plan to bomb as many as 10 targets in Afghanistan, believing this would kill Bin Laden and cripple Al Qaeda’s operations. He also wanted to bomb a hunting party that included princes from the United Arab Emirates, also believing Bin Laden would be present. Instead, the White House adopted a ‘two for two’ strategy – hitting two Al Qaeda locations in retribution for the two embassy bombings.

But Scheuer never felt this was enough, kept haranguing Tenet and Clarke to do more, be more aggressive in the fight against Al Qaeda. In the end, he was removed as head of Alec Station because the higher-ups had got sick of his antics, and his obsessive, sometimes argumentative, sometimes condescending attitude.

His replacement, at least nominally, was Rich Blee, the head of CIA operations in that part of the world – the area that includes Afghanistan and Pakistan. However, Blee wasn’t physically present in Alec Station very often, and it was left to the supervisors Frances Bikowsky, Tom Wilshere and Michael Anne Casey to actually run the unit.

The efforts to keep the FBI in the dark about what they were doing continued. One day, Rossini was called into Blee’s office and offered the chance to get out of the windowless office and into field work, which Rossini liked the sound of because he was something of a fifth wheel at Alec – often not even party to certain information, and certainly not able to share it with I-49. However, O’Neill blocked this move, seeing it as another attempt to keep the FBI at arms length and out of the information loop. This led to a confrontation between O’Neill and Blee, which did nothing to improve relations between the Bureau and the Agency.

Towards the end of 1999 the CIA picked up on chatter and phone calls via the Hada house in Yemen referring to an Al Qaeda summit in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. They knew that Khalid al Mihdhar and Nawaf al Hazmi were going to be in attendance, along with other Bin Laden associates, and that al Mihdhar would be travelling via Dubai. Local CIA officers in Dubai broke into his hotel room, searched his luggage and took photos of his passport and travel documents, including a multi-entry US visa. These photos were sent back to Alec Station, but the information was never shared with the FBI. Ditto, upon arrival in Malaysia Khalid al Mihdhar and other attendees at the summit were photographed by Malaysian Special Branch officers, but these photos were not provided to the Bureau.

Why not? It wasn’t for lack of trying. As soon as the intel came in that Khalid was not only attending the Malaysia summit but was likely on his way to America afterwards, the FBI liaisons inside Alec tried to share it. Doug Miller drafted an intelligence cable including all the relevant information, but it was blocked by higher ups. He included information about al Mihdhar’s visa, the photos taken in Malaysia, the links between the Yemen phone and the embassy bombings and al Mihdhar’s attendance at the Malaysia meeting, and attached two CIA cables with full details.

This draft cable was placed into a queue, awaiting the approval of higher ups before being disseminated. Within less than an hour, Casey opened Miller’s draft cable and, presumably, read the contents. Several hours later she blocked it from being sent and added a note, ‘Pls hold off for now per Wilshere’. Wilshere later admitted it was not standard procedure for a supervisor to review a draft cable so quickly, which suggests that Casey was on the lookout for any information about Khalid so that she could stop it from going any further.

It’s also important to note that Wilshere himself never opened this draft cable, so the only way Casey’s note makes sense is if she immediately went to him as soon as she saw it, and added the note hours later after discussing it with him. Other sources say that Wilshere went to Blee to discuss Miller’s draft cable and that the two of them decided to block it from being sent to the FBI.

At around 6:30 that evening Wilshere reviewed all the cables on al Mihdhar, which were still coming in from the field. About half an hour later Casey sent a cable to all the key CIA stations – Dubai, Riyadh, Kuala Lumpur among them – saying that the information had been shared with the FBI, when she was intimately involved in preventing it from being shared. This had the effect of making officers and agents in those countries believe they did not need to share it themselves, and leaving it to Alec Station to deal with. I can only assume this was intentional.

Al Mihdhar and Al Hazmi arrived in the US in January, 2000 via Los Angeles International Airport. By March, and probably much earlier, the CIA knew the pair were in the country but still did nothing to warn the FBI. Officially, they’d lost track of the two in Thailand, and hadn’t watchlisted either man and hence when they arrived no warning lights went off.

The day before their arrival, during the period that the CIA had supposedly lost the pair while they were in Bangkok, Rich Blee briefed his superiors on the Malaysia meeting and efforts to find the various individuals in attendance. He told Cofer Black, the head of CIA CounterTerrorism, and George Tenet about al Mihdhar, al Hazmi and others they’d identified, but seemingly neglected to mention that they might be on their way to the US. Going by the official record, no subsequent briefings on these men took place and neither Black nor Tenet asked for any updates.

On June 10th of 2000, al Mihdhar left the US to return to Yemen via Germany – possibly linking up with the Hamburg Cell that included Mohammed Atta, the alleged ringleader of the hijackers and the pilot of Flight 11, which hit the North Tower, Marwan al Shehhi, the pilot of Flight 175, which hit the South Tower, and Ziad Jarrah, the pilot of Flight 93 which went down in Shanksville. The Hamburg Cell were under close surveillance by German intelligence and several figures considered to be part of the cell, or at least connected to it, were obvious informants or spies. You can read more about this in Der Spiegel’s book Inside 9/11.

In any case, after six months on the West Coast hanging out with Saudi intel agent Omar al Bayoumi Khalid went back to Yemen to see his wife and child, who were still living at the Hada house. Within months the USS Cole, a warship in the port of Aden was bombed, suicide-style, by a small boat packed with explosives. While several purported masterminds have been identified as being behind the bombing, and both the Sudanese and Iranian governments have been blamed for aiding Al Qaeda’s Yemen network, it is still not entirely clear who did what. Khallad (Walid Mohammed Salih bin Roshayed Bin Attash) appears to be a major figure in the planning, he attended the Malaysia summit at the start of the year and travelled with al Mihdhar and al Hazmi to Thailand straight afterwards. It seems likely that al Mihdhar was a part of this attack, was in the country at the time and shortly thereafter left to return to his homeland in Saudi Arabia.

One of the reasons that the USS Cole bombing investigations by the FBI and NCIS weren’t able to quickly identify perpetrators is that they faced constant opposition while in Yemen. CCTV was provided but the key moment showing the explosion had been deleted. They were refused access to many witnesses and suspects by the Yemeni authorities. Members of the Yemeni government protected certain people, while also calling for jihad against America on a semi-regular basis.

We should also acknowledge that John O’Neill wasn’t the most diplomatic of investigators, often antagonising or at least disrespecting the locals and coming across like an American who thought he could do and say as he pleased. While Ali Soufan, a Lebanese American who joined I-49 in 1997, made some headway due to speaking Arabic, he too was seen as an outsider, an interloper. US Ambassador Barbara Bodine eventually got sick of O’Neill’s antics and had him recalled to the US to be rebuked by FBI command, and then refused to let him back into the country.

One thing that really puzzles me about the USS Cole investigation is the Hada phone and the communications hub. Ali Soufan sent cables from Yemen asking for information about the phone and about various figures he suspected were involved in the Cole bombing, and naturally received no response from the CIA. But by this point the FBI knew about the Hada phone, knew it had to be important somehow, knew something about the Malaysia meeting (where it seems the Cole bombing and possibly the 9/11 attacks were planned). I’m not blaming Soufan – he connected the dots and asked the right questions, he was denied the relevant answers.

But why didn’t the FBI try to get arrest warrants for anyone they could connect to that phone? After all, the phone was in Yemen, the bombing was in Yemen. I’m not trying to be rude or orientalist, but there isn’t a lot going on in Yemen – it’s a poor country, doesn’t have a massive population, it seems an obvious connection to make. If you suspect Al Qaeda of doing the Cole bombing then the number called after their previous major attacks, in East Africa (not that far from Yemen, all things considered) would appear a major lead.

OK, so the Bureau were being stymied and stonewalled but I would still expect serious criminal investigators to put together a bit more than they did. I guess that without already knowing the names of Walid Bin Attash, Ahmed al Hada and Khalid al Mihdhar they couldn’t ask the Yemenis to provide these people so the FBI could interview them. Plus, it seems that Bin Attash left Yemen shortly after the bombing, smuggled across the border out in the desert.

The FBI were caught between all sides – the Yemenis generally did not want to help them, the CIA wouldn’t provide them with information even when the FBI directly asked for it, and the NSA weren’t telling anyone anything, even though they potentially had the most valuable information.

The Run-Up to 9/11

Chapters 4 and 5 of The Watchdogs Didn’t Bark cover the summer of 2001, when the system was ‘blinking red’ and people inside Alec Station and the CounterTerrorism Center were getting very worried about what Al Qaeda were up to. But as the book notes, ‘Though Mihdhar had lived at the primary Al Qaeda hub, had been monitored traveling to a terrorist summit, and was actively being discussed with concern inside Alec Station, he had been issued a visa and landed at JFK Airport aboard Saudi Airlines Flight 53 on July 4. The address listed on his visa was, in what he must have thought a cute touch, the Marriott Hotel inside the World Trade Center.’

Around al Mihdhar’s re-arrival in America a few very strange meetings took place. By this time Wilshere had left Alec Station and gone to work for ITOS, the FBI’s international terrorism centre at the Washington field office of the FBI. In mid-May he started looking into the connections between the USS Cole bombing and the Malaysia meeting, asking the CIA for copies of the photos taken of al Mihdhar, al Hazmi and other attendees.

The same day he accessed two of the cables on al Mihdhar from early 2000, as did one of the supervisors at Alec Station (probably Bikowsky or Matthews). They were looking at information showing that Mihdhar, involved in the ‘98 embassy bombings, sometimes living in the house where the Al Qaeda switchboard was, likely involved in the Cole bombing, had a US visa and had travelled to the US with al Hazmi. While Mihdhar had left America about six months after arriving, al Hazmi was still there. Wilshere also noted that Fahd al Quso, who was in custody in Yemen and being interrogated by Ali Soufan and other FBI agents, had travelled to Bangkok shortly before al Mihdhar went to Bangkok after attending the Malaysia summit.

As I’m sure you’ve guessed, they didn’t do very much or tell anyone about all this.

With one exception. Wilshere went down the corridor and spoke to Dina Corsi, an intelligence analyst with the FBI, telling her that the CIA knew that suspects and conspirators in the Cole bombing had been to Malaysia and been photographed. She didn’t immediately inform anyone at I-49, who were investigating the Cole bombing, but instead arranged a very odd meeting that took place on June 11th.

At the meeting in the New York office CTC officers from the CIA met with FBI agents, including some from I-49, where they were supposed to ‘address unresolved issues’ and help generate leads for investigators and analysts from both sides. However, three key figures were not present. 1) Ali Soufan, who was still in Yemen. 2) Mark Rossini, who offered to be part of the meeting as he was the official Alec Station-FBI liaison, but was told he didn’t need to be there. And 3) Tom Wilshere, who set up the meeting in the first place but didn’t attend it himself. Make of that what you will.

Towards the end of the meeting Corsi produced three surveillance photographs from the Malaysia meeting, and asked the FBI agents if they could identify Quso in any of the pictures. The agents present could not identify Quso, but they asked a bunch of questions – who were the men in the pictures? Where and when were the photos taken? Were there more photos? Did the CIA (or Corsi) know anything further about any of the men pictured?

With the meeting devolving into a shouting match Corsi offered up the name of one of the men – Khalid al Mihdhar, while one of the CIA officers, Clarke Shannon (who had been messaging with Wilshere in the weeks before the meeting) said he was travelling on a Saudi passport. That was it. They didn’t say he had a US visa, had come to the country with another known Al Qaeda member, that he had married the daughter of an Al Qaeda member who ran the switchboard, that he was linked to Walid Bin Attash and Fahd al Quso. No date of birth, no passport number, nothing that would help the FBI agents present narrow him down. Despite repeated requests in the following weeks and months, the CIA and Corsi refused to provide the FBI’s criminal investigators with any more information.

So what was the purpose of this meeting? In the book John and Ray call it a ‘fishing expedition’ and suggest the CIA were running ‘spy games’ against the FBI, using one of their own analysts to do it. The correct term for this is a ‘dangle’, where a spy agency dangles something in front of a rival or enemy agency to see how they’ll react, whether it’s a person or a set of photos or a batch of documents or a recorded phonecall. You dangle it out there and see what reaction you get – do they immediately recognise a face, a voice, another tidbit of information? Or are they clueless, caught unawares, unable to identify or contextualise whatever it is that you’re dangling?

Two days after this meeting, al Mihdhar renewed his US visa.

He arrived back in the US on July 4th 2001 and the following day Wilshere sent an email to Alec Station talking about the need to review everything from the Malaysia meeting. Five days later Rich Blee and George Tenet had an unscheduled meeting with National Security Advisor Condi Rice where they tried to impress upon her the urgency of the Al Qaeda issue, with Blee talking about the possibility of multiple, simultaneous attacks within the US. For some reason, neither Blee nor Tenet mentioned al Hazmi or al Mihdhar or their presence inside America.

In early August the President, on holiday at a ranch in Texas, got a briefing from Mike Morrell, the guy who took over as CIA director after Leon Panetta left in the midst of the Abbottabad operation in 2011. The infamous briefing titled ‘Bin Determined to Strike in US’ did not mention al Hazmi, al Mihdhar, the visas, their presence in the US or anything directly related.

None of this makes any sense from the perspective of trying to prevent the attacks. If the CIA and Dina Corsi were trying to stop a forthcoming attack by Al Qaeda then why didn’t they tell the FBI everything they had about the two Al Qaeda members known or believed to be inside America that summer? If Blee and Tenet were trying to impress upon the White House the urgency of the issue then why not mention the two Al Qaeda members known or believed to be inside the US that summer? If the CIA were trying to brief the President to take urgent action against Al Qaeda due to Bin Laden’s determination to strike inside the US then why did their briefing not mention the two Al Qaeda members known or believed to be inside the US that summer?

It is in this light that we have to re-examine Richard Clarke’s hypothesis that he wasn’t told, the White House wasn’t told, the FBI weren’t told, because the CIA were trying to recruit both of these guys, possibly using the Saudis as a cut-out or go between to help get the job done.

On the face of it this is the best explanation any direct insider has offered for the shielding of al Hazmi and al Mihdhar, but these meetings in the summer of 2001 and other events cast a lot of doubt on it. The pair arrived in California in mid-January 2000, and seem to have started living in an apartment rented by Saudi intel agent Omar al Bayoumi before they even met him. Let’s say the CIA deliberately didn’t watchlist them because they wanted the pair to get into the US, making it easier to approach and recruit them. Let’s say Omar al Bayoumi and the other Saudi government agents who helped them at that point were in on it and knew this was an explicit recruitment attempt. In March 50 to 60 people read the information that the pair have arrived in the US, as was predictable given al Mihdhar’s entry visa expired in April. None of them tell anyone, with the possible exception of Blee, Black and Tenet, all of whom are almost certainly among those 50 to 60 people anyway.

This is all consistent with an attempt to recruit the pair in San Diego. But in June 2000 al Mihdhar leaves the US. Had he been recruited by this point in time or not? If not, what happened to the attempted recruitment? Al Hazmi remains in California for the rest of the year, even after the Cole bombing. He meets up with Hani Hanjour, the apparent pilot of Flight 77, and they visit Phoenix, Arizona, among other cities before settling in Falls Church, Virginia.

Who else was in San Diego in early 2000 and in Falls Church in 2001? Anwar al Awlaki. And what else is in the surrounding area? Well, Falls Church is less than 7 miles from CIA headquarters, less than 8 miles from the Pentagon, just 10 miles from FBI headquarters, less than 40 miles from the headquarters of the NRO and the NSA. Falls Church is basically in the middle of the entire US intelligence community – the headquarters of the CIA, FBI, NSA, DIA, Office of Naval Intelligence, the Army’s Intelligence and Security Command, even the headquarters of the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency – all within an hour’s drive or so.

The day before the September 11th attacks al Hazmi, al Mihdhar and Hanjour check into a hotel in Herndon, Virginia. Who else lived in Herndon, Virginia at that time? Chase Brandon.

OK, I’m not suggesting that Brandon was somehow their handler while also being the CIA’s Hollywood liaison, but I’m sure you get my point. If al Hazmi, possibly al Mihdhar and Hanjour too were recruited by Alec Station and the CIA then their movements inside the US make some kind of sense. If they were trying to avoid detection by US intelligence then they really don’t make sense.

In mid-May Tom Wilshere starts sending off emails about al Mihdhar, the Malaysia meeting, the need to review all existing intelligence on this. But the only person inside the FBI he tells, despite working for the FBI, is Dina Corsi. No one at I-49 or anyone else relevant to this apparently urgent threat. Dina Corsi waits a month then meets with the FBI, shows them some photos and gives them al Mihdhar’s name, but doesn’t make out this is urgent or particularly important. If anything, this only adds to the FBI and I-49’s confusion. The White House is not informed about any of this.

Two days later al Mihdhar renews his visa so he can now re-enter the US, and within a couple of weeks he arrives back in the country. Immediately, Wilshere starts emailing people about him, reiterating his demand that all the intel be urgently reviewed. Officially, this review doesn’t take place until late August, but only a few days after Wilshere’s email Tenet and Blee brief Condi Rice, emphasising how urgent the threat is but still not mentioning al Hazmi or al Mihdhar’s presence inside America.

Four weeks later and Morrell briefs the President on Bin Laden’s determination to hit the US, but doesn’t mention al Hazmi or al Mihdhar. Two weeks after this and Maggy Gillespie, of Alec Station, finally reviews all the intel on al Mihdhar and the Malaysia summit, three months after Wilshere first started banging on about it. It is at this point that the FBI are finally told about al Hazmi and al Mihdhar being inside the US, when Dina Corsi phoned up the New York office to tell them. The FBI start an intelligence investigation, rather than a criminal probe to immediately track down these men, because Corsi is an intelligence analyst, not a criminal investigative agent. Still, no one tells the White House or Richard Clarke.

How do we reconcile this with the attempted recruitment? If the pair, or possibly the three if we include Hani Hanjour, were recruited by the CIA by this point then keeping their names from the FBI and the White House makes sense. But if they failed to recruit them then at what moment did they realise this? Mid-August signifies a change, in that they finally told the FBI about them, but not in such a way that it provoked an immediate response. They never told the White House, which is surely what they’d do if they realised their recruitment efforts had failed and these men posed an imminent threat. The White House would likely have called for a full court press to track down these men and stop them doing whatever they might be doing. But they were never told, so that never happened.

We’re left with the possibility that the CIA did recruit these men, with the help of Saudi intelligence, and they still hijacked a plane and flew it into the headquarters of the US military. That doesn’t necessarily mean that this is what the CIA intended, but it’s always possible. The notion that their recruitment efforts were a total failure for over a year and a half, and yet they still didn’t bother to have the FBI pick these guys up just in case they did something unexpected, isn’t plausible to me. Too much time passes, too many opportunities are missed, for this to simply be a failed recruitment operation.

And then we have to look at the people involved – Bikowsky, who went on to champion drone strikes and torture, even making an unscheduled trip to Poland to watch Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (the supposed 9/11 mastermind) getting waterboarded at a black site. Blee – an Agency brat who was promoted immediately after the attacks, just as Bikowsky was. Michael Anne Casey, who became Blee’s deputy in charge of the new station in Afghanistan, a key position in the new War on Terror. Tom Wilshere, who got promoted to be the overall liaison between the CIA and FBI, despite having explicitly prevented the FBI from accessing vital information. When he eventually retired his replacement was Rich Blee, who’d returned from his stint in Afghanistan. Bikowsky would continue to rise within the CIA bureaucracy before eventually marrying Michael Scheuer, the original founder of Alec Station and the man asked to come back and take the lead again post-9/11.

While this isn’t what John and Ray say in their book, the notion that all these people had a vested interest in covering up, lying to investigators to protect their freedom and their careers, and all fit the profile Kiriakou mentioned of having sociopathic tendencies is far more plausible than the notion that the Agency spent a year and a half unsuccessfully trying to recruit two of the 9/11 hijackers.

Then there’s a video I watched recently on youtube on the Real Crime channel (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qn323n2H51g). It’s titled CIA Alec Station: The Real Story Of The Hunt For Osama Bin Laden and was evidently supported by the CIA’s Office of Public Affairs. There are stock shots of Langley, Michael Scheuer and others who worked at Alec Station are interviewed about their work there, the CIA’s logo is frequently present. There’s no way you can even interview former CIA officers about their work for the Agency without getting some kind of approval, otherwise those officers could – like Kiriakou – be prosecuted for leaking classified information.

The video is also grossly inaccurate, making out like Scheuer never left Alec Station, and that the group there were nicknamed the Manson Family due to their obsession with Bin Laden, rather than because it was all women and one bearded guy.

More importantly, the narrative they tell of the pre-9/11 intelligence is misleading in the extreme. Nowhere do they mention the CIA-FBI relationship, the failure to share vital information, the deliberate withholding of information. Instead the failures are blamed on the White House and the CIA higher-ups, unwilling to take Alec Station seriously or take the necessary military steps to kill Bin Laden. They also portray the Agency, and Alec Station in particular, as crucial to eventually tracking down Bin Laden, even though they spent a decade chasing shadows created by their own torture program. And stopped monitoring Bin Laden’s courier at the exact time Bin Laden escaped from Tora Bora at the end of 2001, only to pick back up on him years later whereupon he immediately led them to the compound in Abbottabad. And yes, Alfreda Frances Bikowsky was involved in practically all of this, Rich Blee was involved in most of this.

You can watch the video documentary yourself if you want, but essentially it is nearly 50 minutes of outright lies by Scheuer, an Alec Station analyst called Cindy Storer and another CIA officer named Bruce Riedel. They shift all the blame to other people while being lionised for their work, which did more to facilitate the 9/11 attacks than it did to prevent them.

9/11: A Conspiracy Theory

There is a lot more to The Watchdogs Didn’t Bark, such as Blee becoming head of the CIA station in Los Angeles around the time of Chase Brandon’s retirement. Which is, incidentally and I’m sure completely coincidentally, when the spy drama State of Affairs was developed by two former CIA officers, one of whom was Henry Crumpton, the man working alongside Blee to run the day-to-day of the CIA’s war in Afghanistan.

I don’t want to finish by talking about Hollywood, but instead to offer an explicit conspiracy theory about the September 11th terrorist attacks. It’s a problem for anyone trying to piece together an alternative to the theory that Al Qaeda conspired to carry out the attacks entirely on their own – once you get in the middle of the 9/11 octopus it starts feeling like the tentacles are going off in every direction.

Conventional wisdom among 9/11 truthers is either that the attacks were an ‘inside job’ perpetrated by people within the US government, or that they were an ‘outside job’ perpetrated by people within the Saudi Arabian or Israeli governments. Even the alternative conspiracy theorists still find the need to blame Middle Easterners, such is the conditioning that so many people are subject to and absorb and internalise.

I want to propose something a bit different, something floated by writers like Kevin Fenton and Peter Dale Scott, namely that we may be looking at a Safari Club-style alliance between different intelligence agencies. The original Safari club was a covert agreement between pre-revolutionary Iran, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Morocco, and France, and also involved the United States, South Africa, Rhodesia and Israel. It was formed in the 1970s to carry out covert anti-communist operations in Africa, and among other things led to the 1979 peace agreement between Egypt and Israel.

Leaving aside how most of the 9/11 hijackers were from two members of the Safari Club – Egypt and Saudi Arabia, the only conspiracy theory that adds up to me is something along these lines. After all, Saudi intel agent Omar al Bayoumi hanging out in San Diego with al Hazmi and al Mihdhar has ostensibly nothing to do with Pakistani ISI chief Mahmoud Ahmed ordering $100,000 to be wired to Mohammed Atta. Which in turn has nothing to do with spies like Omar Nasiri (who worked for British and French intelligence) or Aimen Dean, who both warned of the impending attack. And how do they connect with Luai Sakra, another triple agent who warned about the attacks having spent some time training Nawaf al Hazmi prior to the Malaysia summit? And what does this have to do with the DIA program named Able Danger that used big data mining to identify Al Qaeda cells but kept being shut down before its discoveries could lead to actionable intelligence? Let alone the apparent Israeli spy ring in the US prior to 9/11 that, at least according to a Fox News special report, had agents living very close to some of the hijackers? And when we talk about money being wired to Mohammed Atta, which Mohammed Atta are we talking about? The one apparently living at a language school on an Air Force base in Florida? Certainly, it seems that both Atta and Ziad Jarrah had doubles, or were identities being used by multiple people. And what does any of that have to do with NORAD military exercises that closely resembled the attacks, some of which were going on that very morning?

Any coherent and plausible counter-theory or alternative conspiracy theory has to account for most if not all of these things, which transcend multiple continents, over a dozen countries, at least 20 different military branches or intelligence agencies and involve hundreds of people. Even the most prominent and vocal of 9/11 conspiracy theorists haven’t actually done this, at least from what I have seen. They’ve offered analyses, they’ve made fun of the official story, they’ve speculated that this is part of a satanic agenda as part of the masonic numerology whatever the fuck.

As is so often the case in our hypermediated reality, a lot of people devoted enormous amounts of time to trying to prove that certain media was faked or that the planes were holograms or the towers were brought down by UFO space lasers – i.e. they got lost in the day itself, the resemblance of the attacks to numerous Hollywood movies, the difficulties of any event experienced through live media reports. I remember going down this rabbit hole myself and finding it interesting at first but increasingly frustrating as time went on. It became a game of oneupmanship, with each person trying to outdo someone else’s theory and declare that all contrasting theories are disinformation produced by Cass Sunstein.

I don’t know what brought down the World Trade Center buildings, but I do think we can draw a useful distinction between agencies that played an operational role and ones that played a monitoring role. For example, we know that German intelligence were keeping tabs on the Hamburg cell, but there’s no evidence of them getting involved in financing or otherwise facilitating the members of that cell. There is evidence of an Israeli spy ring inside the US prior to the attacks suggesting they were helping monitor some of these hijackers. French intelligence was quite adept at getting spies inside Al Qaeda and related gangs and groups, and while they sometimes sponsored those terrorists there’s nothing pointing in that direction with 9/11. So those three countries, or at least people within the intelligence agencies of those three countries, were likely part of the surveillance of the Al Qaeda 9/11 operation, without playing an active role in carrying out the attacks.

Whereas Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Britain, Turkey and the US all seem to have played their part in actively facilitating the hijackers, protecting them from being interdicted before they could fulfil their necessary roles. Or at least people within the intelligence agencies of those countries. Whether it was visas to enable them to get into a target country, training to help get them ready, money to finance their activities, the careful and selective distribution of information about them or handling them as agents or assets in the field, all five of these countries seem to me to have played an important role.

And since it makes little sense that they’d all be doing these things independently, whether on the monitoring side or the operational side, that only leaves some kind of alliance like the Safari Club. And there are little hints of this, such as the wire transfer to Mohammed Atta. According to the Wall Street Journal it was ordered by ISI general Mahmud Ahmed, who retired shortly after 9/11. He told Al Qaeda bagman Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh to send the money, which he apparently did. Evidently, Omar was working for the ISI, but he was also reported by The Times (the London one, the proper one) as working for MI6 too.

On the morning of September 11th 2001 the ISI general was in D.C., meeting with none other than Porter Goss, the man who would head up the joint intelligence inquiry into 9/11, where much of the al Hazmi, al Mihdhar, Alec Station story first started coming out. It was that inquiry’s report that contained the infamous 28 pages regarding foreign government support for the hijackers, but when those 28 pages were eventually released they mentioned nothing about Pakistan and the ISI, but focused entirely on the Saudi government links. Porter would go on to become head of the CIA in 2004, having worked in covert operations after being recruited in the late 1950s. The man he replaced was, of course, George Tenet.

9/11 is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma, and simplistic ‘inside job’ ‘Saudi Arabia did 9/11’ type analyses don’t do much to embrace or navigate the sheer complexity of such an operation. To paraphrase Joe Pesci in Oliver Stone’s JFK, the hijackers don’t even know, don’t you get it?