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CIA's conclusions©Associated PressOctober 18, 2002 A written statement, declassified Thursday, from CIA director George Tenet provides new insight into al-Qaida's preparations for Sept. 11 attacks. Some of its conclusions: In 1996, Osama bin Laden's second-in-command, Mohammed Atef, studied the feasibility of hijacking U.S. planes and destroying them in flight. Tenet suggested he may have been inspired by the 1995 plot to crash a plane into CIA headquarters. The CIA learned this only after Sept. 11. Atef was killed in a U.S. airstrike last November. A top al-Qaida operative, known as Mukthar or Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, has been linked to planning both the Sept. 11 plot and the 1995 plot to crash a plane into CIA headquarters. He's also linked to a key plotter of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. Planning for the attacks began three years before Sept. 11. When one bin Laden associate proposed crashing a small plane, packed with explosives, into the World Trade Center, bin Laden himself suggested using larger planes, according to CIA reports. The three members of the Hamburg, Germany-based cell who became Sept. 11 hijackers -- Mohamed Atta, Marwan al-Shehhi and Ziad Jarrah -- were recruited by Mohammed Haydar Zammar, a Syrian al-Qaida associate in Hamburg. He is now in Syrian custody. Those three were probably brought into the plot during a trip to Afghanistan in late 1999. They, and the other hijackers, were selected by Atef. The CIA has evidence that 18 of the 19 hijackers were in Afghanistan in the years before the attacks, but U.S. intelligence had associated only two with al-Qaida before Sept. 11. Those two veteran al-Qaida operatives, Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi, may have been in the United States on another mission before being brought into the Sept. 11 plot in April 2000. The CIA has no evidence confirming that Atta met with an Iraqi intelligence agent in Prague.
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