On 11 August 2001, Zacarias Moussaoui arrived in Minnesota.
Aged 33, he was born in France to Moroccan, Muslim parents and moved to London in 1992 to study. Not especially religious previously, here he was radicalized. French authorities began monitoring Moussaoui in 1996 and in 1998 and, possibly, 1999, he attended a training camp in Afghanistan run by Al-Qaeda, a terrorist organization headed by a wealthy Saudi named Osama bin Laden.
Bin Laden had declared war on the United States in 1996, giving a long list of reasons, stretching from the presence of American troops in Saudi Arabia all the way back to the Spanish reconquest of Granada in the 15th century. He and his associated Khalid Sheikh Mohammed now had a plan to hijack passenger planes in America and fly them into targeted buildings. “The ruling to kill the Americans and their allies — civilians and military — is an individual duty for every Muslim who can do it in any country in which it is possible to do it,” bin Laden had declared.
In September 2000, Moussaoui visited Malaysia and stayed in a condominium owned by a member of the Islamist terrorist organization Jemaah Islamiyah, where two of the 9/11 hijackers had lived in January. Jemaah Islamiyah provided Moussaoui with $35,000.
On February 23, 2001, Moussaoui arrived at Chicago’s O’Hare airport traveling on his French passport and was admitted for 90 days under the Visa Waiver Program. Moussaoui traveled to Norman, Oklahoma, where he attended flight training courses at Airman Flight School where Mohamed Atta and Marwan al-Shehhi, who piloted planes into the North and South Towers of the World Trade Center, also trained. Despite 57 hours of flying lessons, Moussaoui failed and left without ever having flown solo. On July 10, he put down a $1,500 deposit for flight simulator training at the Pan-Am International Flight Academy in Eagan, Minnesota, and in August he headed north.
On 13 August, Moussaoui paid the $6,800 balance with $100 bills to receive training in a 747-400 simulator, equipment normally used by airline pilots. His questions about aircraft doors and automated flight controls alarmed his instructor, Clarence Prevost, who persuaded managers to contact the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s (FBI) Minneapolis field office on August 15. Agents quickly opened an investigation, interviewed Moussaoui, and concluded that he might be preparing for a terrorist act involving a large aircraft.
On August 16, agents from the FBI and Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) — the precursor to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) — arrested Moussaoui and charged him with an immigration violation for overstaying his 90-day period.
At the time of his arrest, Moussaoui had in his possession a laptop computer, two knives, flight manuals pertaining to Boeing’s 747 aircraft, a flight simulator computer program, fighting gloves and shin guards, and a computer disk with information about crop dusting.
“No one in the U.S. government at that point knew, of course, that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed had planned an attack on the United States and the attack was imminent,” journalist Terry McDermott wrote:
But the government did know somebody from Al Qaeda wanted to do something. Intelligence networks for months had been ablaze with ominous information, hints and suspicions. Throughout the intelligence communities, both in the United States and abroad, there was an air of acute concern, verging on panic in places, that something very bad was about to happen. The signs were there. The world’s intelligence machines produced prodigious amounts of information, so much so that analysts habitually struggled just to keep up with the flow much less take time to consider what was in it. Electronic intercepts, telephone chatter, warnings from foreign services and informers, internal memos-everything pointed in one direction: there was something out there.
Even in this context, Moussaoui’s arrest was deemed significant enough that both FBI director Louis Freeh and Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) director George Tenet were briefed on it.
The Minneapolis FBI office tried to get permission to search Moussaoui’s laptop, sending over 70 emails in a week, but they were turned down, Bureau headquarters believing that there was insufficient probable cause. Minneapolis agents sought a special warrant under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), but this required demonstrating probable cause that Moussaoui was an agent of a foreign power. To establish this, agents sought help from the FBI’s legal attaches in Paris and London and from the CIA. The Paris office provided information from the French linking Moussaoui to a leader of rebel forces in Chechnya. This set off what the 9/11 Commission Report calls “a spirited debate between the Minneapolis Field Office, FBI headquarters, and the CIA” as to whether these constituted links to a “foreign power.” An agent at FBI headquarters complained that the Minneapolis office’s FISA request was couched in a manner intended to get people “spun up.” The Minneapolis agent said that was precisely his intent as he was “trying to keep someone from taking a plane and crashing it into the World Trade Center.” Ultimately, FBI headquarters rejected the FISA request.
Minneapolis agents wanted to warn the Federal Aviation Administration about Moussaoui, but FBI headquarters instructed them not to send the complete report. The Minneapolis office dispatched the case agent in person to fill in what they perceived as blanks.
Minneapolis agent Coleen Rowley made an explicit request for permission to search Moussaoui’s personal rooms, but this, too, was denied. In May 2002, Rowley wrote a 13-page memo to FBI Director Robert Mueller detailing how headquarters mishandled and ignored warnings from Minneapolis field agents regarding Moussaoui prior to the 9/11 attacks.
It is uncertain, however, what the impact on Al-Qaeda’s plot would have been had the permissions to search been granted. They would have found records, at least, of Moussaoui’s dealings with Jemaah Islamiyah and the Al-Qaeda operative Ramzi bin al-Shibh.
Thanks to suspicious instructors and diligent agents of the Minneapolis FBI and INS, Moussaoui was awaiting deportation on the morning of September 11. It remains unclear exactly what his role in the 9/11 attacks was. During legal proceedings against him subsequently, prosecutors alleged that he was going to be Al-Qaeda’s “20th hijacker” after two others, including al-Shibh, were denied visas to enter the United States. The 9/11 Commission later characterized Moussaoui as both an “al-Qaeda mistake” and a “missed opportunity.” In 2006, he was sentenced to life in prison and currently resides at the ADX Florence federal supermax prison in Colorado, the only person ever convicted in an American civilian court of a crime in connection with 9/11.