In the aftermath of 9/11, our intelligence services had to determine who was responsible for the attacks. If you believe their story, it wasn’t all that difficult to figure out. In fact, just a few key pieces of evidence were all they needed. Let me lay them out here, at the beginning.
Two very important pieces of evidence came from the investigation of the African Embassy bombings in 1998. Several hours before the bombs exploded in Kenya and Tanzania, someone sent a fax to an Arab media outlet in London taking responsibility for them. The Brits quickly traced the fax to a number in Baku, Azerbaijan, and they put the number under surveillance. Using that tap, the Brits identified another phone number in Yemen. The phone belonged to the father-in-law of Khalid al-Midhar, who would be one of the five hijackers on Flight 77 that crashed into the Pentagon on September 11, 2001. The Brits, now working with the Americans, put that number under surveillance, too.
A member of the suicide squad called Al-Midhar’s father-in-law from Kenya and said “Tell them that I haven’t started the journey”. The attacker lost his courage seconds before the attack and jumped out of the car which contained the bomb. Shortly thereafter the FBI agents recorded another call. This time it was from a satellite telephone assigned to Osama bin Laden.
The intelligence on the bin Laden call is somewhat shaky. During the 2001 trial of African Embassy bombing suspects, the prosecutor didn’t allege that the conversation was recorded. But he did provide evidence that bin Laden’s satellite phone was used to call both the phone in Yemen and the phone in Azerbaijan.
Four hours later — shortly before the bombs went off — Karas said a call was placed to the same telephone number in Baku from a satellite phone in Afghanistan used by bin Laden and other leaders of al Qaeda, or “the Base,” bin Laden’s alleged network of Islamic extremists.
Records of calls from that satellite telephone also link al Qaeda’s leaders to an outpost in Yemen. And the Yemeni phone, in turn, had received frequent calls from residences in Dar es Salaam and Nairobi, where the embassy bombs were built, Karas explained, establishing an indirect link between the “bomb factories” and bin Laden.
But Karas’s ability to connect bin Laden to the embassy bombings remained indirect and circumstantial, in sharp contrast to forensic and documentary evidence linking three of the four defendants to the bomb plots.
Indeed, after three months of testimony, the only direct statements attributed by the government to bin Laden come from press interviews and “fatwahs,” or religious edicts, he has issued calling on Muslims to drive U.S. troops out of Saudi Arabia and to kill American soldiers and civilians around the world.While prosecutors cited records of telephone numbers in Azerbaijan, Britain and Yemen that were called from al Qaeda’s satellite telephone, the government introduced no evidence that any conversations on that phone — whether involving bin Laden or other leaders — were intercepted.
