Declassified FBI documents show how 9/11 hijackers rented cars, opened bank accounts, dialed from pay phones and even took flying lessons in the months leading up to Sept. 11, 2001.
The failure to stop al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar is also the source of two decades of anguish for Mark Rossini, a former FBI special agent and counter-terror specialist who was part of a team monitoring bin Laden’s al-Qaida network in the months leading up to 9/11.
Rossini said his CIA colleagues told him the arrival of al-Mihdhar and al-Hazmi was not a sign of an attack on America but a diversion. Rossini said the CIA believed — mistakenly — that the next al-Qaida attack would take place in South East Asia, Rossini said. Now Rossini believes the CIA thought it might use al-Mihdhar and al-Hazmi in an ill-conceived plan to infiltrate al-Qaeda.
After 20 years, the CIA has still not explained why it did not pass the information on al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar to the FBI. In mid-July, al-Mihdhar, accompanied by al-Hazmi’s brother, Salem, and another hijacker, Abdulaziz al-Omari, rented a mailbox at a storefront in Paterson. Mary Galligan, a former FBI supervisory agent who directed the bureau’s on-scene investigation of the al-Qaida bombing of the U.S.S. Cole in Yemen in 2000 and went on to lead the post-9/11 tracking of the hijackers that was known as the “Pentbomb” investigation, points out that the hijackers “didn’t commit any criminal acts” until the day they hijacked the jetliners. As a result, she said, the hijackers did not catch the attention of police — or private citizens.
For years, el-Atriss sold the phony IDs openly, mostly to undocumented immigrants from Latin America and Mexico. But just before the 9/11 attacks, he sold IDs to al-Mihdhar and al-Omari. A naturalized U.S. citizen, el-Atriss continually insisted that he was not part of the 9/11 plot and openly condemned the attacks. But he felt he had been unfairly branded as a conspirator because of his unintended connection with the hijackers.
The el-Atriss episode — and its divergent story lines and theories — underscores how unsettled the story of the 9/11 hijackers remains.South Hackensack Police Officer David Agar, then 25, pulled into the parking lot of the Congress Inn as part of a routine patrol. Agar, now 45, and a lieutenant with the Bergen County Prosecutors Office where he oversees intelligence and counter-terror investigations, was looking for suspicious activity.
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