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From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Date: April 18, 2007 9:46:03 AM PDT
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Subject: Fwd: 9/11: The French Expected It (and Warned the CIA)
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article17551.htm
*September 11, 2001: The French Knew Much About It*
By Guillaume Dasquié
Le Monde -Monday 16 April 2007
04/17/07 -- "Le Monde" -- It's an impressive mass of documents.
From a distance, one would imagine a doctoral thesis. On closer
inspection: nothing of the kind. Red stamps "Confidential-Defense"
and "Strictly National Usage" on every page. At the top on the
left, a royal blue logo: that of the D.G.S.E., Direction générale
des services extérieurs [General Directorate for Foreign Services],
the French secret services. In total, 328 classified pages. Notes,
reports, syntheses and summaries, maps, graphs, organization
charts, satellite photos. All exclusively devoted to al-Qaeda, its
leaders, its seconds-in-command, its hide-outs and training camps.
Also to its financial supports. Nothing less than the fundamentals
of the D.G.S.E. reports compiled between July 2000 and October
2001. A veritable encyclopedia.
At the end of several months of investigation of this very special
documentation, we contacted D.G.S.E. headquarters. And on April 3,
the present chief of staff, Emmanuel Renoult, received us there,
within the confines of the Tourelles garrison in Paris. After
thumbing through the 328 pages that we set on his desk, he can't
keep himself from deploring such a leak, all the while allowing us
to understand that the packet represents virtually the entirety of
D.G.S.E. production on the subject for this crucial period. On the
other hand, it was impossible to draw the least comment from him on
the substance of the material. Too sensitive.
It's true that these secret services chronicles about al-Qaeda,
with their various revelations, raise many questions. And at first,
a surprise: The high number of notes devoted exclusively to al-
Qaeda's threats against the United States, months before the
suicide attacks in New York and Washington.
Nine whole reports on that subject between September 2000 and
August 2001, including a five-page summary entitled, "Airplane
Hijacking Plans by Radical Islamists," and dated ... January 5,
2001! Eight months before September 11, the D.G.S.E. reports
therein tactical discussions conducted between Osama bin Laden and
his Taliban allies from the beginning of 2000 on the subject of
hijacking American commercial airliners.
Pierre-Antoine Lorenzi, chief of staff to the D.G.S.E. director up
until August 2001, and today the president of a company specialized
in crisis and influence strategies (Serenus Conseil), reviews these
328 pages in front of us and also stops short when he comes to that
memo. He hesitates, takes the time to read it and admits: "I
remember that." "You have to remember," Mr. Lorenzi elaborates,
"that in 2001, hijacking an airplane didn't mean the same thing as
it did after September 11. At the time, it implied forcing a plane
to land at an airport to conduct negotiations. We were used to
dealing with that." A useful perspective to understand why that
January 5 alert didn't provoke any reaction from its recipients:
the pillars of executive power.
As of January 2001, the al-Qaeda leadership nonetheless showed
itself to be transparent to the eyes -- and ears -- of French
spies. The redactors even detailed disagreements among the
terrorists over the practical modalities of the planned hijacking.
They never questioned their intention. Provisionally, the jihadists
favored capturing an airplane between Frankfurt and the United
States. They established a list of seven possible companies. Two
would finally be chosen by the September 11 pirates: American
Airlines and United Airlines. In his introduction, the author of
the memo notes, "According to the Uzbek intelligence services, the
airplane hijacking plan seems to have been discussed at the
beginning of 2000 during a Kabul meeting of representatives from
Osama bin Laden's organization...."
Consequently, Uzbek spies informed French agents. At the time, the
opposition of Muslim fundamentalists to the pro-American regime in
Tashkent united the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, the M.I.O. A
military faction of this group, led by a certain Taher Yudachev,
joined the Afghanistan camps and swore allegiance to Osama bin
Laden, promising him he would export his jihad to Central Asia.
M.I.O. military leaflets and correspondence discovered in al-
Qaeda's Afghan camps attest to that.
Alain Chouet remembers this episode. Until October 2002, he
directed the Security Intelligence Service, a D.G.S.E. subdivision
charged with following terrorist movements. According to him, the
credibility of the Uzbek channel devolves from the alliances formed
by General Rashid Dostom, one of the main Afghan warlords, himself
of Uzbek ethnicity, who was then fighting the Taliban. To please
his protectors in the neighboring Uzbek security services, Dostom
infiltrated some of his men into the heart of the M.I.O., right up
to the command structures of the al-Qaeda camps. That's how he
informed his friends in Tashkent, knowing that the intelligence
would then make its way to Washington, London and Paris.
The formulation of the January 2001 French memorandum clearly
indicates that other sources were corroborating this intelligence
about al-Qaeda's plans. In accordance with a well-oiled machine in
Afghanistan, the D.G.S.E. did not limit itself to exchanges with
friendly foreign secret services. To penetrate the secrets of the
camps, it, on the one hand, manipulated and "turned" young jihad
candidates from the suburbs of Europe's great cities. On the other,
it sent men from Commandant Massoud's Northern Alliance. This,
without even counting satellite telephone intercepts.
An intimate of Pierre Brochand, the present D.G.S.E. boss, assured
us that the service had "an Osama bin Laden cell" from at least
1995. Consequently, the January 5 alert was based on a tried and
tested system. Alain Chouet, after asking that we specify that he
was not expressing himself in the name of French institutions,
remained laconic, but clear: "It is unusual to pass a paper on
without double-checking." All the more so in that the paper in
question follows and precedes many D.G.S.E. reports buttressing the
credibility of Osama bin Laden's warrior incantations.
In its memo, the D.G.S.E. finally deems that al-Qaeda's desire to
execute its act of piracy against an American airplane was
absolutely certain: "During the month of October 2000, Osama bin
Laden attended a meeting in Afghanistan during which the decision
in principle to conduct this operation was sustained." It's January
5, 2001: The dice have been thrown; the French know it.... And they
are not the only ones.
As with all intelligence mentioning risks against American
interests, the memo was passed on to the C.I.A. by the D.G.S.E.'s
service for foreign relations, responsible for cooperation between
allies (since renamed liaisons service). Its first recipient is
Paris C.I.A. Station Head Bill Murray, a French speaker with a John
Wayne physique, since returned to the United States. We were able
to make contact, but Mr. Murray did not want to respond to our
requests. Pierre-Antoine Lorenzi, whose responsibilities at the
D.G.S.E. then covered questions relative to cooperation with
foreign agencies, cannot conceive that the intelligence should not
have been handed over to him. "That is typically the type of
information that is passed along to the C.I.A. It would even have
been a professional error not to have done so."
On the other side of the Atlantic, two former C.I.A. agents who
specialized in al-Qaeda, and whom we solicited, did not remember
any specific alerts sent by the D.G.S.E. Neither Gary Berntsen, a
member of the agency's operations directorate from 1982 to 2005,
nor Michael Scheuer, former head of the bin Laden team at C.I.A.
headquarters, remembered specific intelligence from the D.G.S.E..
In Washington, Congress's commission to investigate September 11,
in its final report published in July 2004, emphasized the
inability of the F.B.I., the C.I.A., and Immigration Services to
aggregate the scattered data concerning certain members of the
September 11 commandos. At no time did the commission mention the
possibility that as of January 2001, the C.I.A. could have passed
intelligence from the French secret services about Osama bin
Laden's tactical choice to organize American airliner hijackings on
to the U.S. government.
Beyond that, the most staggering thing about reading the D.G.S.E.'s
328 pages comes perhaps from the juxtaposition of the memos that
warn of certain threats -- like that of January 2001 -- with those
that describe the organization's operation very early on and in
minute detail. As of July 24, 2000, with the redaction of a 13-page
report entitled "Osama bin Laden's Networks," the gist appears in
black on pale yellow -- the color of D.G.S.E. originals. The
context, anecdotal details, and all strategic aspects related to al-
Qaeda are already there. Quite often, subsequent documents settle
for firming them up. Thus, the theory of bin Laden's death -- which
enjoyed a certain success in September 2006 -- in this memo of July
24, 2000, takes on the intonations of a well-known, but nonetheless
well-founded refrain: "The former Saudi, who has lived for several
years under precarious conditions, unceasingly moving from camp to
camp, also suffers from renal and dorsal problems.... Recurrent
rumors declare his imminent death, but he seems not to have changed
his habits up until now."
On an aerial snapshot taken August 28, 2000, D.G.S.E. agents locate
a key man, very close to Osama bin Laden. His name: Abu Khabab.
This pyrotechnist of Egyptian origin, known for having taught the
science of artisanal explosives to generations of jihadists,
constitutes a theoretically high-priority target. In two
biographical notices about him from October 25, 2000 and January 9,
2001, the D.G.S.E. enumerates the intelligence exchanged with the
Israeli Mossad, the C.I.A., and Egyptian security services about
him. Everything about his trips and his moves was known.
The same thing is true for Omar Chabani, the emir, according to the
D.G.S.E., charged with supervising all the Algerian militants who
came to Afghanistan. Thanks to him, during the year 2001, al-Qaeda
made infrastructures available to the Salafist Group for Preaching
and Combat (S.G.P.C.), the Algerian terrorist movement whose
historic head, Hassan Hattab -- a former bin Laden ally --
subscribed to Algerian President Abdelaziz Bouteflika's national
reconciliation policy in 2006 -- which provoked the ire of the
S.G.P.C.'s younger generations. The latter resumed the armed
struggle that their elders had relinquished the previous October,
proclaiming themselves a new S.G.P.C. -- renamed al-Qaeda for the
Islamic Mahgreb -- which seems to be responsible for the April 11
attacks in Algiers.
On the periphery of the operational aspects of al-Qaeda's workings,
these D.G.S.E. documents propose a second look at its leaders'
political connections. One example: In a February 15, 2001
memorandum devoted in part to the risks of attacks against the
French military base in Djibouti, the authors refer to the presence
of Osama bin Laden's representative for the Horn of Africa, Nidal
Abdul Hay al Mahainy, in the country. The man, who arrived there
May 26, 2000, had met with no less a personage than "the president
of the Djibouti Republic."
But it's Saudi Arabia, above all, that appears as a constant
preoccupation with respect to the sympathy outside Afghanistan from
which Osama bin Laden benefited. The D.G.S.E. reports explore his
relations with the country's businessmen and various organizations.
Certain Saudi personalities have proclaimed their hostility to al-
Qaeda, but, obviously, they have not convinced everyone. Pierre-
Antoine Lorenzi remembers French intelligence officials' frame of
minds well: "The D.G.S.E. had great difficulty definitively
believing that he no longer had any relationship with the Saudi
monarchy because he was proscribed. It was difficult to accept."
The July 24, 2000 memorandum mentions a $2.4 million payment in
favor of the al-Qaeda leader made by the International Islamic
Relief Organization (I.I.R.O.), a structure placed directly under
the trusteeship of the Muslim World League, itself considered a
policy instrument of the Saudi ulemas. It took until August 3,
2006, however, for the I.I.R.O. offices to figure on the American
Treasury Department's official list of organizations financing
terrorism. During the course of that month of July 2000, two years
after the Nairobi and Dar-es-Salam attacks, the authors of this
memo doubted the sincerity of the positions proclaimed by the bin
Laden family itself: "It seems more and more likely that Osama bin
Laden has maintained contact with certain members of his family,
even though the family, which directs one of the biggest public
works companies in the world, has officially disowned him. One of
his brothers seems to play the role of intermediary in his
professional contacts and in the monitoring of his affairs."
According to Mr. Lorenzi, it was the recurrence of these doubts and
more specifically the I.I.R.O.'s ambivalence that would lead the
D.G.S.E. to mobilize along with the Quai d'Orsay in 1999, when
French diplomats proposed an international convention against the
financing of terrorism to the United Nations.
Another memo from the French secret services, dated September 13,
2001, and entitled "Factors in Osama bin Laden's Resources,"
reiterates these suspicions about the Saudi bin Laden Group, the
family empire. It also presents a powerful banker, once close to
the royal family, as the historic architect of a banking system
that "seems to have been used to transfer funds from the Gulf to
the terrorist." An annex to this memorandum of September 13, 2001
lists the assets supposedly under Osama bin Laden's direct control.
Surprise: In the middle of the known structures that the "Sheikh"
managed in Sudan, Yemen, Malaysia, and Bosnia, a hotel situated in
Mecca in Saudi Arabia still figures in 2001.
Alain Chouet expresses real skepticism about the Riyadh
authorities' desire to apprehend Osama bin Laden before September
11: "His forfeiture of Saudi nationality was a farce ... to my
knowledge; no one did anything at all to capture him between 1998
and 2001." As this memorandum from October 2, 2001 attests: "The
departure of Prince Turki al-Faisal, head of the Saudi secret
services: a political eviction" -- reveals the underside of this
spectacular demotion just before September 11. The authors
emphasize "the limits of Saudi influence in Afghanistan.... During
Prince Turki's recent trips to Kandahar, he did not succeed in
convincing his interlocutors to extradite Osama bin Laden."
And six years later? In an ample D.G.S.E. report dated June 6, 2005
that we were able to peruse and entitled "Saudi Arabia, A Kingdom
in Danger?," French agents draw up a more positive report of the
Saudi regime's initiatives against al-Qaeda. Some paragraphs still
betray persistent fears, however. The French secret services are
still anxious about the penchant for holy war shared by several
Saudi doctors of the faith.
This article was first published at: www.trouthout.org
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