From triple agents training terrorists in the mountains of Turkey to the CIA cable that was never sent, this episode examines the context around 9/11 to identify several people and part of the story of how the 9/11 attacks were a Gladio B operation. I focus in on two of the supposed hijackers – Nawaf Al Hazmi and Khalid Al Mihdhar – and their connections to intelligence assets Luai Sakra and Anwar Al Awlaki, and how the CIA’s failure to notify the FBI about them is a strong indication that information was being compartmentalised to enable and protect this black operation.
I also touch on the two sources for the idea that the supposed 9/11 hijackers used box cutters to help take over the planes – phone calls from Barbara Olson to her husband, then Solicitor General Ted Olson, and another triple agent in the form of Ali Mohamed. I round off by looking the CIA’s man on the 9/11 Commission, Michael Hurley, and how his career all but confirms his status as a Gladio B operative.
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There are many ways to approach 9/11, many ways to make the argument that it was a gigantic deception, many ways to interpret this act of state sponsored false flag terrorism. I know for a significant number of you the events of the day itself contain enough evidence, principally the destruction of the three WTC buildings in what appears in every way to be controlled demolition. As I said in the comments section, despite my shock and confusion my brain told me pretty much as soon as I saw the towers go down that they had been blown up. I didn’t really have to be persuaded of that.
And of course, there’s no way a small group of jihadis working out of caves in Afghanistan and via a communications hub in Yemen could get inside those buildings and plant enough explosives or other destructive materials to bring about the total levelling of those three buildings. No way in hell. So even without the question of the planes, were they hijacked and if so how were they hijacked and by whom, let alone the ludicrous lies of the military about their response that morning, even without all that, I know that for many of you, there’s enough evidence. For others I imagine the way the Pentagon told at least three completely distinct versions of events of what they were up to in the skies that morning, combined with this hugely suspicious conjunction of military exercises, strikes you as the behaviour of someone who is guilty, very very guilty.
As I say, I never really needed to be persuaded, so finding out about this stuff through documentaries and books and online research and all the stuff I imagine you all did as well, that didn’t really change my mind about 9/11. What it did was help me understand it, who the likely culprits were and therefore why it happened, what the purpose of it was. Because that is, after all, what is still important now. I feel the technical debates about crash physics, building engineering, the mechanics of demolition, the absence of wreckage in Shanksville – those arguments have been had so many times that inasmuch as they were going to achieve tangible results I think they already have.
As I grew somewhat tired of these arguments and began reading more and more material about the intelligence services and their assets within various branches of this international mujahideen Al Qaeda whatever you call it that we were supposedly fighting, I found a much more satisfying degree of understanding about what the war on terror really is. Satisfying not in the sense of being emotionally content, this stuff still troubles me, but in the sense that I felt I understood the context around 9/11, I could see it as part of a much larger and longer narrative of events.
It was after reading Daniele Ganser’s book on the original Gladio and watching the Allen Francovich BBC three part documentary on Gladio that I was able to grasp a key concept that I imagine many of you have thought about but it is worth articulating again. Many of these intelligence failures that lead up to terrorist attacks are not failures, they are successes. They are the results of successful black operations and the necessary compartmentalising of information that enables such operations.
So when we look at 9/11 and we see things like the FBI investigation into terrorism funding, Vulgar Betrayal, being shut down and Robert Wright being moved onto menial tasks, that’s because it got too close to something the insiders, the Gladio network, the real Al Qaeda, did not want the FBI at large looking into and knowing about.
Likewise the DIA data mining and analysis investigation Able Danger, which stumbled onto two of the three cells that supposedly carried out 9/11. Now, I’m not even convinced that those men were ever even on the planes, let alone hijacked them, so we could rewrite that as two of the three cells were producing patsies who would be blamed for 9/11. In any case, Able Danger was shut down, once again to stop anyone getting too close to assets in the field who needed be left out on the streets so they could play their role.
We saw the exact same thing with 7/7, where every time any of the four alleged suicide bombers turned up in an MI5 investigation, there was always some curious reason why they were never properly targeted, let alone arrested. Information wasn’t shared, photographs were reproduced poorly so informants couldn’t recognise who was in them, databases allegedly weren’t checked or when they were checked mysteriously didn’t come up with information that they should have had, all sorts of absurd stuff. And this didn’t happen once, it happened maybe a dozen times over the years between 9/11 and 7/7. In fact it started even before 9/11.
The particularly obvious example of this happening in the 9/11 backstory is with the two alleged muscle hijackers on flight 77, Nawaf Al Hazmi and Khalid Al Midhar. For our purposes today the story begins in late 1999 when Al Hazmi was one of several supposed 9/11 hijackers who was trained in a camp in Turkey by Luai Sakra. Sakra was a triple agent who worked for Syrian and Turkish intelligence and the CIA. He was, without doubt, a Gladio operative.
Sakra spent much of the mid to late 1990s involved in the Balkans, where NATO were arming and training the Bosnian mujahideen, who then became the Bosnian Muslim army. He set up the local branch of the Services Office for the Mujahideen – an organisation that goes all the way back to the Soviet Afghan War and Operation Cyclone. It is this same organisation that had a branch in New York where the 1993 WTC bombers were recruited and trained, and the whole thing was being run by CIA asset The Blind Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman, alongside Gladio operative Ali Mohamed.
Luai Sakra’s branch of this organisation was, like his training camp, in Turkey, and it helped provide jihadi recruits for the war in Bosnia and then into Kosovo, Albania and so on. As I say, he was then recruited by the CIA around late 1999 – early 2000, at the same time as he’s running this training camp in Turkey. The CIA then passed information to Turkish intelligence which led to him and this group of trainees being picked up and interrogated for a day, and then let go.
Sakra supposedly knew about the 9/11 plot, and warned his Syrian handler the day before the attacks. According to media reports the Syrians didn’t pass this information onto the CIA – bear in mind at this point the Syrian government were quite friendly with the West. George Tenet, the director of the CIA throughout this period, even wrote in his book that, ‘[A] source we were jointly running with a Middle Eastern country went to see his foreign handler and basically told him that something big was about to go down.’
After 9/11 Sakra became a wanted man, and went to ground in Germany before escaping with the help of German intelligence, the BND. A parliamentary inquiry later exonerated the BND of any wrongdoing. Sakra went on to mastermind the 2003 Istanbul bombings which helped sell the Iraq war not particularly to the Turkish public who were very opposed to being involved in that war, but I think mainly to the British public because some of the bombings were on an HSBC bank and the British Consulate. Sakra still wasn’t caught for another two years and when he was finally brought to ground he started talking about how ‘ Al-Qaeda is the name of a secret service operation. The concept “fighting terror” is the background of the “low-intensity-warfare” conducted in the mono-polar world order.’
Meanwhile, Nawaf Al Hazmi, after being trained by Sakra in Turkey, met up with Khalid Al Mihdhar and the two of them went off to Malaysia to attend this Al Qaeda summit. The NSA told the CIA about this ahead of time, and they got local intelligence to monitor the meeting, though it appears the CIA also monitored it themselves separately. Following this meeting Al Hazmi and Al Mihdhar headed for the United States, which the CIA knew about and even drafted a cable to FBI counter-terrorism to tell them so they could keep an eye on these two guys when they entered the country.
But the cable was never sent. And from all reports, even official ones like the 9/11 Commission and the Department of Justice Inspector General’s report say that the information was not sent deliberately. Instead, a cable was circulated within CIA saying that the information had been sent to the FBI, thus discouraging anyone else within the Agency from sending it.
If you read Kevin Fenton’s book Disconnecting the Dots you can find out all the details and even the names of the people involved – Rich Blee and Tom Wilshere being two key CIA officers who we must assume were part of the real 9/11 plot gang. Another great source on this is the podcast Who is Rich Blee, produced by the same people who made Press for Truth. So I’ll play you a clip from that. The whole thing is about 90 minutes long but this is about five minutes:
(clip starts at 9:20)
As a result of all this, Al Hazmi and Al Mihdhar got into the US without any hassle. They settled in San Diego, in an apartment across the road from Omar Al Bayoumi, who claims he met the two completely by coincidence in a restaurant. Al Bayoumi is almost certainly a Saudi government agent. He later introduced the men to FBI informant Abdussattar Shaikh, who became their landlord while Bayoumi continued to help them out.
Meanwhile, a local Imam with a habit of picking up prostitutes near the naval base became their ‘spiritual mentor’. I am of course talking about Anwar Al Awlaki, who was under investigation by the FBI for years both before and after 9/11. This didn’t stop him being in email contact with the FBI and attending a post-9/11 luncheon at the Pentagon. Of course, several years later Awlaki would become the first American citizen to be killed in a drone strike, shortly after publishing an article in the Al Qaeda magazine inspire where he described being approached by the CIA.
In early 2001, when Awlaki switched the West coast for the East and became imam of a mosque in Washington DC, Al Hazmi and Al Mihdhar, now joined by Hani Hanjour, moved to Virginia. That would be just down the road from the CIA and NSA, both of whom knew about these guys from a year earlier when they monitored them going to this Al Qaeda summit in Malaysia. They continued to attend Awlaki’s sermons. After 9/11, he claimed in several meetings with the FBI that he barely knew them, but that didn’t stop him buying airline tickets for them and doing other things that shows they were friends.
A few months later and Al Hazmi and Al Mihdhar, along with Hani Hanjour, allegedly hijacked flight 77, flew it around for a bit before carrying out a highly complicated downward spiral over the most protected airspace in the world before coming in perfectly parallel with the ground right into the side of the Pentagon.
There are many problems I have with this hijacking story, not least of which is that the so called muscle hijackers were relatively small, and aside from the training provided by Luai Sakra did not appear to have any hand to hand combat experience. By contrast the flight crew on flight 77, or at least some of them, were ex military men, tough guys. How did five relatively small, essentially unarmed men take over a plane when they were vastly outnumbered and considerably out muscled?
The official story has an answer for this of course – they had box cutters. But even there we have a huge gaping problem. Not just the absurdity that five skinny little guys could overcome a plane full of people just because they had a few box cutters, but also the question of where did this detail come from? As far as I know, it came from Solicitor General Ted Olson, whose wife Barbara was on Flight 77. Indeed, reports of his wife Barbara calling him from the plane helped to sell the whole notion of hijackers to the public, and this detail that they had box cutters helps us visualise this in our minds, thus making it more convincing.
The problem is that it isn’t at all clear if these phone calls ever took place. If we take the available documentation, which is 302s recording FBI interviews with people in Olson’s office that morning, and 302s of FBI interviews with people at the phone company, and an exhibit from the Zacarias Moussaoui trial detailing calls from the flights, we get a very contradictory story. I will save you the tedium of listening to me go through all the details, but the key one is this. In the exhibit for the Moussaoui trial, if you want to look it up it is exhibit number P200055, it only lists one call from Barbara Olson to the department of Justice from flight 77. It notes that this was an unconnected call and that it lasted 0 seconds. I can’t help but think that 0 seconds isn’t long enough to tell someone that your plane has been hijacked by Arabs wielding box cutters.
The other origin for this information about box cutters is a very curious source indeed, namely, Ali Mohamed. I don’t have the time to get into his story in full, that is a topic for another day, but he is another mid-level operative for the deep state. He lived in America from the mid 1980s until he was arrested in 1998. Ali Mohamed was close friends with both Ayman Zawahiri and Osama Bin Laden, he even trained Bin Laden’s bodyguards. He trained al Qaeda militants in a dozen different countries and he was integral to both the 1993 WTC bombing and the 1998 East African embassy bombings. All this while working as a part time FBI informant, serving in the US Special Forces and working for the CIA.
When 9/11 happened he was in a prison in New York, and he and a bunch of other high-level prisoners were put into lockdown, kept away from TV and other media so they could be interrogated to see if they had genuine information. When Ali Mohamed was asked by the FBI Jack Cloonan about 9/11, he supposedly ‘laid out the plan as though he knew every detail’. Ali described training Al Qaeda members in hijacking techniques and how to smuggle box cutters and utility knives on board. I’ll play for you a short clip from the start of the National Geographic special Triple Cross, which is a misleading puff piece about the Ali Mohamed story but still contains the odd interesting and useful nugget.
The problem with all this is that according to the 9/11 Commission Ali Mohamed was an irrelevance, had little or no contact with the alleged hijackers, and was arrested and in prison before Khalid Sheikh Mohammed supposedly approached Bin Laden with the idea for the 9/11 attack.
So one source for this information is phone calls that the Department of Justice’s evidence says didn’t actually happen. The other source is a triple agent Gladio operative who shouldn’t have been able to know this because he’d been in prison the whole time that 9/11 was being planned, according to the official stories of both 9/11 and Ali Mohamed. Exactly what we make of this is not clear, except that this whole hijacker box cutter story is not only dubious from a practical point of view, it is based on exceptionally weak sources.
So if we put this all together – the CIA deliberately withholding information and apparently ignoring warnings, the presence of not one, not two but three deep state operatives playing different roles in this story, and the extreme implausibility of the overall hijacker narrative particularly when it comes to Flight 77, and what do we have? We have something that looks a lot like Gladio B. We have a group of men who were trained and handled by Luai Sakra and Anwar Al Awlaki, aided by Omar Bayoumi, hidden from the FBI, now dead and blamed for the biggest attack on the Pentagon in its history. Sakra especially, as an agent working for multiple agencies, in Turkey, taking part in NATO operations in the Balkans, he simply has to be a Gladio B operative.
And if all that wasn’t enough, we also have Michael Hurley, the CIA’s man on the 9/11 Commission. Hurley was a 20 year veteran of the CIA who had also worked on the National Security Council. He was still working for the Agency in 2003 when Philip Zelikow appointed him head of the team that were responsible for looking into pre-9/11 counterterrorism policy. So he was a currently serving CIA officer who had served on the NSC who was now being put in charge of investigating the CIA and NSC to see if they had got anything wrong in the run up to 9/11.
He is also attributed with having co-authored the report. I’m not quite sure what that means, because to my knowledge it was Zelikow who wrote the outline of the report – before the investigation had even started, of course – and Zelikow who largely authored the final report. In any case, it was Michael Hurley’s team who were responsible for reading about, for example, the Blind Sheikh and Ali Mohamed and the 93 World Trade Center bombing. If you go to the Scribd site and look up the 9/11 document archive you can find copies typed up notes on books about all this – some of the people on Hurley’s team knew quite a lot of this stuff, enough that it should have made more of an impact on the final report than the odd footnote here or comment there. But of course, it was Hurley’s job to ensure that very little about Ali Mohamed made it into the final report, so he actually did very well at that.
Where this gets really interesting is that before 9/11 Hurley’s work for the CIA and NSC focused on Bosnia and Kosovo, i.e. on the NATO Gladio operation to destroy the former Yugoslavia. And this next bit I’m taking from an online bio I found in an advert for a speech he did at Ohio State University, which says, ‘On 9/11 Michael Hurley volunteered to work in CIA’s Counterterrorist Center and to deploy to Afghanistan. He served three tours in Afghanistan post-9/11, leading Agency employees and Special Forces in southeastern Afghanistan. He was one of the Agency’s lead coordinator on the ground of Operation Anaconda, the largest battle against al Qaeda in the campaign in Afghanistan.’
So this on the ground black ops coordinator who turns up in crucial wars both before and after 9/11, who is also a lawyer, is appointed senior counsel to the 9/11 Commission and ran the team investigating the CIA and the National Security Council. And just for laughs he was then put in charge of the 9/11 Public Disclosure Project, which basically disclosed nothing to the public.
The kicker is that when he was in Afghanistan helping Special Forces teams in their ‘war against Al Qaeda’ he was of course serving under the CIA Kabul Station Chief. Who was Rich Blee, the guy in the CIA’s Bin Laden unit who was integrally involved in making sure the information on Al Hazmi and Al Mihdhar was not passed on to the FBI before 9/11.
So, my best guess is that all these guys – Blee, Wilshere and Hurley at the CIA, Ali Mohamed, Luai Sakra and Anwar Al Awlaki in the field, and whether they realised it or not, Nawaf al Hazmi, Khalid Al Mihdhar and the rest of the alleged 9/11 hijackers – all of them are Gladio, and so this is the story, or at least part of the story, of how 9/11 was a Gladio operation.