Proof of bin Laden Link Still Isn't Firm As U.S. Attempts to Sway World Opinion
By DAVID S. CLOUD NEIL KING JR., IAN JOHNSON and JAY SOLOMON Staff Reporters of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
WASHINGTON -- By the standards of the Old West, President Bush has good reason to declare Osama bin Laden wanted in last week's terrorist attacks, "dead or alive."
But by 21st-century Western standards of law and international relations, how much actual evidence do investigators have of Mr. bin Laden's involvement? The answer so far -- based on what can be gleaned from public statements and U.S. officials willing to discuss the matter -- is not enough.
An army of investigators in the U.S., Europe, Asia and the Middle East is working feverishly to tie the exiled Saudi Arabian dissident and his Al Qaeda organization more closely to the four airplane hijackings that demolished the World Trade Center, grievously damaged the Pentagon and are believed to have killed more than 5,000 people. The U.S. government is already gearing up for war against an unspecified roster of enemies, and Mr. Bush calls Mr. bin Laden the "prime suspect."
Yet what has emerged publicly to date are largely circumstantial links connecting the 19 alleged hijackers, all now dead, and the world's most notorious criminal suspect. They include:
* The ties of Mohamed Atta, a suspected ring-leader of the assault who was on American Airlines Flight 11 when it slammed into the Trade Center's north tower, to an organization called Egyptian Islamic Jihad. That group works closely with Al Qaeda, the terrorist group Mr. bin Laden finances and directs from his hideout in Afghanistan.
* The presence of one suspected hijacker from the plane that hit the Pentagon, Khalid al-Midhar, in Malaysia in January 2000. There, authorities say, he met with a man tied to the bombing last September of the USS Cole, which Mr. bin Laden's organization is believed to have carried out. Local press reports say Mr. bin Laden's organization maintains a bank account in Malaysia.
* Communications intercepted by intelligence operatives before Tuesday, according to a person familiar with the matter, that suggest some Al Qaeda associates may have had advance knowledge of the attacks. Authorities haven't released any details.
* Reported links between two other suspected hijackers, Ahmed Alghamdi and Satam al Suqami, and a suspected bin Laden operative in the Boston area. But a U.S. official Tuesday cast doubt on that report, saying links with the bin Laden operative hadn't been established.
The fast-moving investigation is constantly accumulating additional information, only fragments of which have become public. A foreign intelligence service told the Central Intelligence Agency over the weekend that Mr. Atta had met with an Iraqi intelligence agent in Europe several months before the hijackings, according to a U.S. official. The CIA hasn't corroborated the report, however, and in any event U.S. investigators don't view such a meeting as proof that Iraq helped direct the terrorists.
If state sponsorship of the attacks were established, it would raise the stakes of pledges by the U.S. to unleash its "full wrath" against those who masterminded the attacks or sheltered those who carried them out.
Other new details emerged Tuesday. An official at SunTrust Bank confirmed at least four suspected hijackers used checking accounts at the bank to purchase their tickets for American Airlines flight 11, which crashed into the Trade Center's north tower last week. The four men -- Mr. Atta, Abdulaziz Alomari, Wail Alshehri, and Waleed Alshehri -- used check cards that allowed them to purchase tickets electronically without having to apply for credit cards.
Investigators believe that suspected hijackers Nawaf Alhazmi and Salem Alhazmi, identified as being on American Airlines Flight 77 when it crashed into the Pentagon, may have purchased their tickets with check cards issued by Dime Bancorp, a major New York-area institution. Dime spokesman Tom Ducca said the company is cooperating "fully" with investigators.
In addition to providing the first step in the money trail, the accounts could also prove useful to investigators in better establishing the hijackers' identities. The FBI is seeking possible surveillance video from SunTrust and Dime of any of the suspects using automated teller machines or visiting the bank offices, people familiar with the matter said.
A senior FBI official also said Tuesday that investigators have seized "hundreds" of e-mails between alleged hijackers and their associates, many of them taken from computers in public libraries. The communications, some in English and others in Arabic, reflect discussions of the planned Sept. 11 hijackings at least 30 days beforehand. The FBI official said the traffic includes messages sent to computers in other countries as well as within the U.S.
A federal grand jury in New York has been convened to hear evidence being collected by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, with help from the CIA and authorities around the world. Attorney General John Ashcroft announced Tuesday that terrorism task forces were being created in all 93 U.S. Attorney's offices around the country.
Among other things, federal investigators are looking into whether additional flights had been targeted for hijacking last week; a Justice official confirmed that one potential case being examined was an American Airlines flight from Newark to Los Angeles that ultimately didn't take off because of mechanical problems. Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Bob Graham of Florida called last week's attacks "part of a larger plan with other terrorism acts" beyond plane hijackings, and a law-enforcement official said authorities were examining Sept. 22 as a possible target date.
At least one potential law-enforcement asset is believed to have perished in last week's attacks: John O'Neill, a celebrated FBI counterterrorism investigator who had retired at age 50 to take a job as head of security at the World Trade Center. Mr. O'Neill was one of the bureau's most experienced agents at running big terrorism investigations. He supervised probes into the bombing of the USS Cole by terrorists in Yemen last year, as well as the deadly attacks on the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998. U.S. officials believe Mr. bin Laden was involved in all three attacks.
The FBI's New York office itself was also adversely affected; its lower Manhattan headquarters had to be evacuated, forcing agents to work from makeshift quarters further uptown in an indoor parking garage. Telephone service and computer access were knocked out in the hours after the bombing. As a result, even FBI headquarters in Washington has had difficulty getting through to New York and took to leaving a phone line permanently open.
In Washington, the FBI's national investigation is being overseen by a man with an unusually strong emotional stake. He is Deputy Director Thomas Pickard, a Queens native who helped supervise the investigation into the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center.
The evidence that has become publicly known so far remains a far cry from the open-and-shut case the U.S. case could rely on the last time it led its allies into war. The troops of Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein invaded the sovereign nation of Kuwait in plain view of the entire world, simplifying the task of then-President George H.W. Bush to lead an international coalition to roll back aggression.
Some senior U.S. lawmakers sound a note of caution about focusing exclusively on Mr. bin Laden. "I think most roads lead to bin Laden, but you can't rule out other possibilities," says Sen. Richard Shelby of Alabama, ranking Republican on the Senate Intelligence Committee.
U.S. officials acknowledge that developing more evidence is critical -- for criminal prosecutions and, more significantly, for rallying international support.
Question of Proof
The question of proof has emerged as a key component as the U.S. attempts to enlist the support of Islamic countries such as Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Jordan as well as far-less-willing countries like Syria. Diplomats across the Arab world say their countries are ready to aid in a crackdown on terrorism, but they won't support indiscriminate attacks on any country such as Iraq without convincing evidence of culpability.
"The issue of proof is no small matter," says one administration official. Afghanistan's ruling Taliban, too, has linked the issue of proof of Mr. bin Laden's involvement to U.S. demands to turn over Mr. bin Laden.
No one contends that the Bush administration must deliver the sort of evidence that would sustain an indictment, much less a conviction in a U.S. court. "The burden here, for our purposes now, is much lower than that," the administration official said. What the U.S. seeks, the official added, is "persuasive evidence that might be just shy of absolute proof."
And senior intelligence officials are confident that they will clear that threshold. "We're not 100% there," an intelligence official said. The official added, in a remark that signals how conventional standards of evidence may not apply in this case, "no information has come up that suggests that bin Laden wasn't involved."
American officials aren't the only ones struggling to prove stronger connections. Though three alleged hijackers are known to have lived in Germany prior to the attacks, thus far German investigators have few clues about the links between them and Mr. bin Laden.
There is only circumstantial evidence linking the three alleged hijackers to the Saudi exile. People from Mr. bin Laden's network, for example, have operated widely in Germany. His finance chief traveled to Germany extensively and had a bank account in Germany before he was arrested in 1998 in Munich. In addition, police last year broke up a major bin Laden operation in Frankfurt that was planning to blow up a cathedral in France.
In the same vein, police in Indonesia, the Philippines, Malaysia and Thailand have detained and questioned several potential suspects but have failed to turn up any hard evidence of links in most of those places. Southeast Asia is home to the world's largest community of Muslims -- numbering more than 210 million -- and governments in the region are anxious to show the U.S. that they're serious about joining the fight against terrorism. In Indonesia, officials said a network of militant Islamic groups potentially linked to Mr. bin Laden has been operating in the country for more than a year, planning attacks against U.S. interests and forging ties to Indonesian groups.
The State Department again closed the embassy in Jakarta last Wednesday, due to what it said was information that "extremist elements" may be planning to target U.S. interests in Indonesia. According to Western officials tracking the incidents, an Islamic group "linked to bin Laden" was involved in the targeting of the embassy. One Western official said that U.S. intelligence had been tracking for months plans to hit American interests in Jakarta, including the embassy itself, the ambassador's residence and the American Club. The suspected terrorists "showed up from outside Indonesia," the official said, and were made up of nationals from the Middle East and North Africa. But it isn't clear to what extent Mr. bin Laden might be involved with such agents. These officials said that Mr. bin Laden has a wide reach in Indonesia. But such characterizations generally mean that neither he nor his immediate aides are believed to be overseeing any specific operation. An official said that, in most cases, "bin Laden-linked" means "a conglomerate of criminals and terrorists" from the Middle East operating within a network.
In the previous attacks linked to Mr. bin Laden, the evidence that the U.S. has mustered is circumstantial or closely held intelligence that rarely gets disclosed publicly. It took years, for example, after the 1993 terrorist attack on the World Trade Center in New York, for investigatorsto develop intelligence information indicating that Mr. bin Laden's organization played a role in training and financing those who carried out the attack.
Other times, the U.S. has missed out on apprehending key suspects, leaving it with lower-level operatives but not following the plot closer to Mr. bin Laden. After the USS Cole was bombed in a Yemen port in late 2000, allegedly by two men in an explosives-laden boat, U.S. officials were able to establish links between the bombers in Yemen and suspected bin Laden sympathizers. But senior U.S. officials say a key suspect, Mohammed Omar al-Harazi, escaped their dragnet, fleeing to Afghanistan. As a result, people involved say, efforts to bring indictments against living perpetrators have stalled.
The 1998 bombing of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania was an exception. The day after the attack, Pakistan security forces had apprehended one of the plotters as he allegedly sought to make his way back to Afghanistan. He quickly confessed under Pakistani questioning. The FBI also knew a lot about the cell in Kenya that had carried out one of the bombings. One of its members was Wadih el Hage, who had been interviewed before the bombings by the FBI and acknowledged that he had been Mr. bin Laden's personal secretary several years earlier. Searches of houses and computers produced documents linking the plotters to known bin Laden operatives, including his military commander, Hafs Al Masri.
All of this added up to a compelling body of evidence that resulted in the conviction earlier this year of four defendants indicted for taking part in the bombing or for conspiring with Mr. bin Laden. Mr. bin Laden remained at large, but the case was one of the few in the last decade in which the links to Mr. bin Laden were firm and the result was clean.
What evidence has been collected pointing to the direct involvement of Al Qaeda in last week's hijackings comes from communications picked up by intelligence agencies in the U.S. and abroad, according to various sources close to the intelligence community. The names and contacts of the 19 men directly tied to the attacks is also yielding fruitful information, they say, but the strongest ties come from intercepts of telephone calls, e-mail traffic and other communications, known as signals intelligence, or "sigint," in the days after Sept. 11.
"There is quite a bit of sigint," said one former intelligence official with close ties to the CIA. "These guys are very tight about operational control before carrying out an attack but amazingly lax about communications afterwards."
Culling Electronic Intercepts
The intercepted communications, some of which were mentioned publicly last week by Sen. Orrin Hatch, evidently included many direct messages between known terrorists in which they shared operational details and reported the success of the mission. U.S. officials say that the National Security Agency, the organization in charge of intercepting foreign communications, is also working frantically to cull through huge electronic files of intercepts picked up in the days and weeks before the attack. Tuesday, a person familiar with the matter said certain conversations had surfaced indicating some purported Al Qaeda associates may have had prior knowledge of the attacks.
A U.S. official said investigators believe that one of the suspected hijackers, Mr. Atta, is associated with the terrorist group Egyptian Islamic Jihad. A U.S. official Monday called the Egyptian group "indistinguishable" from Mr. bin Laden's Al Qaeda. The official said that it appeared Mr. Atta may have drifted into the Al Qaeda orbit after crackdowns in Egypt and elsewhere left Islamic Jihad in tatters and its sympathizers scattered throughout Europe.
Mr. Atta, who went by the name Mohamed El-Amir, studied urban planning in Hamburg Technical University in Germany in the early 1990s. Mr. Atta lived off-campus with his nephew Marwan al-Shehhi, another alleged hijacker. Mr. al-Shehhi carried a passport from the United Arab Emirates, a U.S. official said, and is considered a possible bin Laden sympathizer. Using the name Marwan Lekrab, he took courses at Bonn University in 1997. By 2000, the pair had come in the U.S. and begun taking pilot lessons, according to investigators and flight-school instructors.
Authorities have also linked alleged hijacker Khalid al-Midhar to the bin Laden network. He was seen with several Islamic radicals in Malaysia in early 2000 at a meeting in which participants were videotaped by an intelligence service. U.S. officials say those who attended the Kuala Lumpur meeting included several members of Egyptian Islamic Jihad, as well as a man later implicated in the USS Cole bombing.
Another circumstantial link to Mr. bin Laden is the source of the funds used by the alleged hijackers. Current and former U.S. intelligence officials say that investigators have made headway tracing money used by the hijackers to accounts in the United Arab Emirates, which has been used by bin Laden operatives in the past, the U.S. officials say. Investigators don't believe that the UAE was the source for the money but rather that its lax banking laws made it convenient to use. Money transfers from the UAE accounts began as early as 2000, investigators say.
In the final days before the attack, some of the hijackers were depleting their bank accounts and sending money back to the UAE, investigators believe. They were also calling UAE from their hotels.
Finally, a French-Algerian man in FBI custody, Zaccarias Moussaoui, is believed to have traveled several times to Afghanistan, according to French officials. Any visit to Afghanistan is cause for suspicion, because it is where Mr. bin Laden has been in hiding since 1996. U.S. investigators haven't established that Mr. Moussaoui played a role in the attacks, but they consider him a person of extreme interest. They believe he may have attended a flight school in Oklahoma that was visited by someone with the same name as one of the hijackers.
-- David Rogers, Glenn R. Simpson, James Hookway, Robert Frank, Gary Fields and Leslie Lopez contributed to this story.