The Eleventh Day

agency had handled bin Laden during the anti-Soviet war in the 1980s.

The hope, Chouet said, was to persuade bin Laden “not to oppose the negotiations in Berlin, and above all to leave Afghanistan and return to Saudi Arabia with a royal pardon—under Turki’s guarantee and control. In exchange, the U.S. would drop efforts to bring him to justice for the attacks in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam and elsewhere in Arabia.”

Chouet believes the overtures to bin Laden were bluntly rebuffed. At the forthcoming U.N.-sponsored meetings in Berlin, between July 17 and 21, former U.S. diplomat Tom Simons pressed even harder for the handover of bin Laden. Should he not be handed over, and should solid evidence establish that the terrorist leader had indeed been behind the attack on the USS Cole, he indicated, the United States could be expected to take military action.

If that was the threat, nothing came of it. After the 9/11 attacks in early fall, of course, there would be no more serious discussion. The Taliban did not give up bin Laden, and were rapidly ousted.

There is nothing in the 9/11 Commission Report about a July meeting with bin Laden in Dubai, but there is what may conceivably be a small clue. At a May 29 meeting with CIA officials, the report notes, National Security Adviser Rice had asked “whether any approach could be made to influence bin Laden.”

The genesis of these straws in the historical wind about a purported meeting between CIA officers and bin Laden in summer 2001 may have been disinformation spread for some political purpose. The 9/11 Commission, though, should have investigated the matter and been seen to have done so.

OTHER PUZZLES remain, some of them with serious implications, as to what Western intelligence services knew about the hijackers before 9/11.

Very soon after 9/11, major newspapers on both sides of the Atlantic ran stories stating that Western intelligence had known about Mohamed Atta for some time. The Chicago Tribune reported as early as September 16 that Atta had been “on a government watchlist of suspected terrorists.” Kate Connolly, a reporter for the British newspaper The Guardian, vividly recalls being told by German officials that operatives “had been trailing Atta for some time, and keeping an eye on the house he lived in on Marienstrasse.”

No evidence was to emerge of Atta having been on a watchlist. It is evident, though, that both German intelligence and the CIA had long been interested not merely in Islamic extremists in Germany but—at one stage— in the men on Marienstrasse. Congress’s Joint Inquiry Report aired a little of this, but the Commission Report virtually ignored the subject.

So far as can be reconstructed, the sequence of events was as follows. Well before the future terrorists rented the Marienstrasse apartment, German intelligence took an interest in two men in particular. The first was Mohammed Zammar, who seemed to be facilitating jihadi travel to Afghanistan. The name of a second man, a Hamburg businessman named Mamoun Darkazanli, came up repeatedly—especially when a card bearing his address was found in the possession of a suspect in the 1998 East Africa embassy bombings. There was intermittent physical surveillance of both men, and Zammar’s telephone was tapped.

It was an incoming call, picked up by the Zammar tap in January 1999, that first drew attention to the apartment on Marienstrasse. A German intelligence report of the call, a copy of which is in the authors’ possession, shows that the name of the person calling Zammar was “Marwan.” The conversation was unexciting, an exchange about Marwan’s studies and a trip Zammar had made. In a second call, a caller looking for Zammar was given the number of the Marienstrasse apartment—76 75 18 30—and the name of one of its tenants, “Mohamed Amir.” On a third call, in September, Zammar sent “Mohamed Amir” his greetings.

Amir, of course, was the last name most used—prior to his departure for the United States—by the man who was to become known to the world as Mohamed Atta.

Those tapped calls are of greatest interest today in the context of the CIA’s performance. The Germans reportedly thought the “Marwan” lead “particularly valuable,” and passed the information about it to the CIA. The caller named “Marwan,” they noted, had been speaking on a mobile phone registered in the United Arab Emirates. According to George Tenet, testifying in 2004 to the Senate Intelligence Committee, the CIA “didn’t sit around” on receipt of this information, but “did some things to go find out some things.”

According to security officials in the UAE, the number could have been identified in a matter of minutes. The “Marwan” on the call is believed to have been UAE citizen Marwan al-Shehhi, who in 2001 was to fly United 175 into the World Trade Center’s South Tower. Was Shehhi’s mobile phone ever monitored by the CIA? Queried on the subject in 2004, U.S. intelligence officials said they were “uncertain.”

The CIA on the ground in Germany did evince major interest in the Hamburg coterie of Islamic extremists. In late 1999, an American official who went by the name of Thomas Volz turned up at the office of the Hamburg state intelligence service—the Landesamt fur Verfassungsschutz—with a pressing request.

Though he used the cover of a diplomatic post, Volz was a CIA agent. The Agency believed that Mamoun Darkazanli “had knowledge of an unspecified terrorist plot.” Volz’s hope, he explained, was that the suspect could be “turned,” persuaded to become an informant and pass on information about al Qaeda activities.

The Germans doubted that Darkazanli could be induced to do any such thing. They tried all the same, and failed. Volz, however, repeatedly insisted they try again. So persistent was he, reportedly, that the CIA’s man eventually tried approaching Darkazanli on his own initiative. To German intelligence officials, this was an outrageous intrusion, a violation of Germany’s sovereignty.

All this at the very time, and soon after, that Atta and his comrades—whom Darkazanli knew well—had traveled to Afghanistan, sworn allegiance to bin Laden, and committed to the 9/11 operation. What really came of Volz’s efforts remains unknown.

The 9/11 Commission Report did not mention the Volz episode. The public remains uninformed, moreover, as to what U.S. intelligence may have learned of the hijackers before they left Germany and became operational in the United States.

THE LEAD on Shehhi arising from the Hamburg phone tap aside, there is information suggesting there was early U.S. interest in his accomplice Ziad Jarrah. In late January 2000, on his way back from the future hijackers’ pivotal visit to Afghanistan, Jarrah was stopped for questioning while in transit at Dubai airport.

“It was at the request of the Americans,” a UAE security official was to say after 9/11, “and it was specifically because of Jarrah’s links with Islamic extremists, his contacts with terrorist organizations.” The reason the terrorist was pulled over, reportedly, was “because his name was on a watchlist” provided by the United States.

During his interrogation, astonishingly, Jarrah coolly told his questioners that he had been in Afghanistan and now planned to go to the United States to learn to fly—and to spread the word about Islam.

While the airport interview was still under way, according to the UAE record, the Dubai officials made contact with U.S. representatives. “What happened,” a UAE official elaborated in 2003, “was we called the Americans. We said, ‘We have this guy. What should we do with him?’ … their answer was, ‘Let him go, we’ll track him.’ … They told us to let him go.”

At the relevant date in FBI task force documents on Jarrah, and next to another entry about the terrorist’s UAE stopover, an item has been redacted. The symbol beside the redaction stands for: “Foreign Government Information.”

Was there also interest in Mohamed Atta before his arrival in the United States? Several former members of a secret operation run by the DIA, the U.S. military’s Defense Intelligence Agency, went public four years after 9/11 with a disquieting claim. The names of four of the hijackers-to-be, Atta, Shehhi, Hazmi, and Mihdhar, they claimed, had appeared on the DIA’s radar in early 2000, even before they arrived in the United States.

According to the lieutenant colonel who first made the claim, Anthony Shaffer, the names came up in the course of a highly classified DIA operation code-named Able Danger. He and his staff had carried out “data mining,” under a round-the-clock counterterrorist program Shaffer described as the “use of high-powered software to bore into just about everything: any data that was available—and I mean anything. Open-source Internet data, e-mails believed to be terrorist-related, non-secret government data, commercial records, information on foreign companies, logs of visitors to mosques.”

According to Shaffer, such data also drew on U.S. visa records. If so, and given the reference to information