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8.2 LATE LEADS--MIHDHAR, MOUSSAOUI, AND KSM
In chapter 6 we discussed how intelligence agencies successfully detected some
of the early travel in the planes operation, picking up the movements of Khalid
al Mihdhar and identifying him, and seeing his travel converge with someone
they perhaps could have identified but did not--Nawaf al Hazmi--as well as with
less easily identifiable people such as Khallad and Abu Bara.These observations
occurred in December 1999 and January 2000.The trail had been lost in Janu-
ary 2000 without a clear realization that it had been lost,and without much effort
to pick it up again. Nor had the CIA placed Mihdhar on the State Department's
watchlist for suspected terrorists, so that either an embassy or a port of entry
might take note if Mihdhar showed up again.
On four occasions in 2001, the CIA, the FBI, or both had apparent oppor-
tunities to refocus on the significance of Hazmi and Mihdhar and reinvigorate
the search for them. After reviewing those episodes we will turn to the han-
dling of the Moussaoui case and some late leads regarding Khalid Sheikh
Mohammed.
January 2001: Identification of Khallad
Almost one year after the original trail had been lost in Bangkok, the FBI and
the CIA were working on the investigation of the Cole bombing.They learned
of the link between a captured conspirator and a person called "Khallad."They
also learned that Khallad was a senior security official for Bin Ladin who had
helped direct the bombing (we introduced Khallad in chapter 5, and returned
to his role in the Cole bombing in chapter 6).
55
One of the members of the FBI's investigative team in Yemen realized that
he had heard of Khallad before, from a joint FBI/CIA source four months ear-
lier.The FBI agent obtained from a foreign government a photo of the person
believed to have directed the Cole bombing. It was shown to the source, and
he confirmed that the man in that photograph was the same Khallad he had
described.
56
In December 2000, on the basis of some links associated with Khalid al
Mihdhar, the CIA's Bin Ladin unit speculated that Khallad and Khalid al Mihd-
har might be one and the same.
57
The CIA asked that a Kuala Lumpur surveillance photo of Mihdhar be
shown to the joint source who had identified Khallad. In early January 2001,
two photographs from the Kuala Lumpur meeting were shown to the source.
One was a known photograph of Mihdhar, the other a photograph of a then
unknown subject.The source did not recognize Mihdhar. But he indicated he
was 90 percent certain that the other individual was Khallad.
58
This meant that Khallad and Mihdhar were two different people. It also
meant that there was a link between Khallad and Mihdhar, making Mihdhar
seem even more suspicious.
59
Yet we found no effort by the CIA to renew the
long-abandoned search for Mihdhar or his travel companions.
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Final 8-9.5pp 7/17/04 1:24 PM Page 266