The CIA and/or NSA very likely knew that the 9/11 terrorists were in the US, learning to fly airliners. Not long after 9/11, there were reports that Mossad agents (the "art students", as I recall) had been tailing the 9/11 terrorists. Almost all of whom were Saudis. But I've seen no credible reports that any of them knew what was planned.
> The CIA and/or NSA very likely knew that the 9/11 terrorists were in the US, learning to fly airliners.
Has there ever been an explanation why the hijackers risked conspicuously attending flight schools under the noses of the US authorities, rather than, say, absolutely any other country in the world?
Terrorists tend to be stupid. Honestly. Look at Richard Reid, the shoe bomber. The guy goes to the airplane bathroom to prepare his shoe bomb, then he returns to his seat, covers himself with a blanket, and tries to detonate the bomb by lighting the fuse with matches. People next to him notice this easily and maul him. Plot over. So, ummm, why not just detonate the thing while locked in the bathroom??? The guys in flight school just got lucky for the most part, but you're right that it was a strange decision.
Yeah, I've always thought it was insane that for an operation as huge as 9/11 they'd do something as risky as train in the US itself. Rather than venture into conspiracy land (nothing against conspiracies in general; they're often entertaining and, depending on the subject and degree, are not necessarily invalid), I wondered if there were plausible explanations for it.
I can buy the idea that they either didn't think the possible risks through, or just believed they could get away with it long enough to pull off the attack. And also that they may have thought they could learn more about US aviation policy or protocol in the US than elsewhere.
I was sceptical about it being because there are more flight schools in the US, because AIUI they only acquired limited training anyway, which they could have received anywhere. But whatever competence and training they ended up with, they probably at least intended to get as much as possible, and train in bigger, more appropriate aircraft, so that is possibly a factor too.
When you only have a small explosive, you want to detonate it as close to the wing as possible, as this is the weakest spot on the plane - you're basically hoping for the wing to fall off, or at least sever the connections to the control surfaces. Even with a decent hole in the fuselage, there is a very good chance of landing the plane safely as long as the wings stay on.
To be clear, the wingbox is, by far, the strongest part of a plane, but it's the most devastating if you can compromise it. (And its primary design goal isn't to account for explosive loads coming from the fuse.)
Not only that, but for the plot to work, the hijackers had to start from within the US. Implanting them in the US long before the attacks made it easier for them to reliably get to their target airports the day of the attack.
In a sense, the comment upthread litigates the whole idea of a "sleeper cell."
It's cheaper in the US than pretty much anywhere else, and there are large numbers becoming pilots, so more noise to hide in. It might be cheaper to train is some weird and wonderful corners of the world, but they'd have been far more noticeable.
>Has there ever been an explanation why the hijackers risked conspicuously attending flight schools under the noses of the US authorities, rather than, say, absolutely any other country in the world?
Because there are more flight schools in the US than anywhere else, and if you want to do some flying in US airspace, those are in the best position to teach how it works, what controls there are, how to avoid them, etc.
The NSA also had a tap on the Yemeni safe house where the attackers were calling to coordinate.
The hijackers even stayed in Laurel, Maryland, from which you can literally see Alpha and Bravo.
Yet the 9/11 commission only spent three visits and a paltry amount of time up at Fort Meade and NBP, anecdotally because the commute to the Fort is too long.
So did the NSA know what the attackers were going to do?
I find it very hard to imagine that the NSA and/or CIA would have let the attacks happen, even to protect key assets and methods. Maybe they had compromised some Mossad communication channel. Or maybe they had a double agent. But what would have been worth the risk to DC and NYC?
To an extent, as with all big data systems, massive collection of data has both opportunities and risks. The risk in overcollection (e.g., the NSA type programs) is that you collect so much damn information that you are either behind in analyzing it or flat out never get there [1-2]. Combine that with (as others have noted) the lack of translators and you get what you got [3]. The old maxim* that not all data is information (DIKW) heavily applies here [4]. This whole phenomenon becomes especially problematic when you are spending all that time energy and money largely trying to predict 'black swan' events using what has happened before as what to look for in the future (e.g., the TSA as a whole or the NSA still focusing on cold war languages pre-9/11 [3]).
More likely, they had taps but did not know what they were talking about. It was widely reported that, pre-9/11, Arabic translators were scarce in most Western intelligence services including the US, since their traditional focus were Russian, Eastern-European languages, and Chinese. You just need basic informal codes for most logistic purposes (which would be mostly "I've done this, I've done that" to confirm timings and prepare the next steps, rather than "I will hijack a plane and crash it into NYC" which would have been agreed beforehand) to make it very difficult for people who might not know all the intricacies and slang of regional Arabic varieties.
So the NSA might have known these people were learning to fly and maybe even preparing a hijack, but until 9/11 this was not dramatic -- if and when the hijack happened, they would have been expected to fly to Cuba or something and then dealt with. Pre-9/11, airplane hijacks had become rare since their '80s and '70s heydays, maybe there was some complacency (as in "yeah these guys will never manage it, and even if they do, we'll likely get most passengers back safely anyway, let them play"). Or at least that's what a sharp Occam's razor would suggest.
Old style hijack had become rare because police forces around the world made sure that you couldn't come out a winner, you typically get killed. Hijacker are at a disadvantage: limited resources, stuck in a small space easy to surround.
The fact that the 9/11 highjackers had planned to die as part of the hijack was a game changer.
Exactly. A 9/11 style attack is also a single time event. Now that passengers know the outcome, they simply will not let it happen again. The only possible method would be to turn an existing pilot into a suicide killer.
The reinforced doors they introduced after 9/11 make this strategy particularly good. The passengers can't do anything if the pilot decides that he has a death wish.
An example of such would be the Germanwings Flight 9525 crash from May 2015, where the copilot locked the cockpit door after the pilot left for a bathroom break and then flew into a mountain.
Crashing highjacked planes was a known scenario. In fact, FOX broadcast a fictionalized scenario where a commercial airliner was highjacked and set on a crash course with the WTC about six months before 9/11/01.
Tom Clancy's wrote a fictional book about lone mentally disturbed Japanese pilot flying a plane into the pentagon. I read it that book maybe a few weeks before 9/11. Was shocked that the US intelligence didnt see something like this happening when a fiction author did.
Edit: the author of your link addresses the episode in the comments section, "The Lone Gunmen Pilot Episode", and says that the article you linked was only focused on things "in production" when the attack occurred.
Wow, I had forgotten that series (X-Files spinoff).
Vince Gilligan was an Executive Producer.
The actor playing the father, George Coe, was one of the original Not Ready for Prime Time Players on SNL, then later played Ben Cheviot on "Max Headroom".
I agree that it is extremely unlikely they let it happen. I think if all the documents are ever declassified it will be a case study in the breakdown of communications in a large organization. There was office politics (FBI vs. NSA vs. CIA), no overall coordination, and plain incompetence to name a few things that were wrong.
We see this all the time in large companies now, the difference is that rarely do people die as a consequence. Maybe the NASA Challenger accident is a comparable organizational breakdown.
>I think if all the documents are ever declassified it will be a case study in the breakdown of communications in a large organization.
I have always been curious about this as an organizational phenomenon. What percentage of documents are classified for actual security reasons as opposed to things like embarrassing the country or allies, covering up misconduct or outright illegal conduct, or just as the default reaction. Study would be impossible/impractical even with access, but it sure would be interesting.
> Indeed, some of the C.I.A.’s best information about Al Qaeda came from the F.B.I. In 1998, F.B.I. investigators found an essential clue—a phone number in Yemen that functioned as a virtual switchboard for the terror network. The bombers in East Africa called that number before and after the attacks; so did Osama bin Laden. The number belonged to a jihadi named Ahmed al-Hada. By combing through the records of all the calls made to and from that number, F.B.I. investigators constructed a map of Al Qaeda’s global organization. The phone line was monitored as soon as it was discovered. But the C.I.A., as the primary organization for gathering foreign intelligence, had jurisdiction over conversations on the Hada phone, and did not provide the F.B.I. with the information it was getting about Al Qaeda’s plans.
So was the NSA also monitoring the Hada phone? Or maybe providing technical support for the CIA?
There's a good reason for lack of sharing as both Aldrich Ames (CIA) and Robert Hanssen (FBI) ended up providing much more sensitive information to the adversary than their rank qualified them for.
The agencies seem to be on the cycle of high compartmentalization -> criticism for lack of sharing -> low compartmentalization -> major spy scandal -> high compartmentalization.
Those guys committed treason by sharing with the Soviets. I don't see how that's relevant. The reason for the wall is because they have conflicting mandates.
The natural response of each agency to prevent such massive information losses in the future is to limit the amount of information available, make it accessible only on the need-to-know basis, and introduce bureaucracy into the information retrieval process by keeping the logs and requiring sign-offs.
Well, some of those pages have been leaked by the German Federal Intelligence Agency (BND), because some of the attackers lived in Germany before and it was a priority for them.
Funnily, one of the attackers used to have a small internet cafe in my city before he learned to fly an airplane.
And yes, those pages might be very interesting.