Mfr Nara- T1a- Team 1a Meeting- 12-1-03- 01066

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Meeting of Team la: Dieter Snell with Chris Kojm and Vice-Chairman December 1, 2003

Hamilton

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Notes Taken by Ben Rhodes: Mandate: Leeasked about the Team's focus. Dieter Snell said they are focused specifically on the plot: if the case was being prosecuted and he was representing the government, how would he write a summation. Lee said that many people are looking to the Commission to tell the story - there is a heavy burden to get it straight, and to be forthright about the conflict. Progress: Lee asked what progress the Team has made. Dieter said they are investigating and have not started writing. In addition to the basic narrative there is some more classified information they are working with. Lee asked what the Team needs from the Commission. Dieter said they need a sense of the areas of paramount interest to the Commission. There are a lot of theories out there; the Team cannot refute all of them. Dieter doesn't want to miss something that is of interest to a particular Commissioner. Lee said the Commission will need help in grasping the areas - perhaps a memo should be prepared presenting the key issues and concerns. The Commission has been absorbed by access questions and is just now shifting to substance. Deadline: Lee asked about the deadline. Dieter said the Team would make it in some fashion. The question was how good a job could they do with the enormous volume of material they are working with. They would do a better job with another six months, but would need to know of an extension soon for it to make a difference. Motivations: Lee asked what motivated the hijackers. Dieter said we won't ever get a clear answer, though detainee interviews have been helpful. His general impression is that they had a fervent conviction that they were defending Islam against the u.S. Lee asked if this was anti-Americanism. Dieter said yes, the hijackers saw an inherent hostility from the u.S. towards Islam and, specifically, the Arab world. Lee asked ifit was our policies that they hated. Dieter said the Israeli-Palestinian question always comes up. Lee asked about the troop presence in Saudi Arabia. Dieter said yes, but less so .; at a certain point these issues were used by UBL as a way to get people ginned up. Profiles: Lee asked about the profile of the hijackers, specifically the plotters - were they intelligent, middle-class? Dieter said yes - they all had at least high-school educations, and the leaders were university trained in fields like engineering and urban planning. Lee asked if there was individual humiliation in their backgrounds that would have engendered resentment. Dieter said he saw no signs of this. Khalid Sheik Mohammed studied in North Carolina, but there is nothing to suggest hostility growing out of that experience. Islam: Lee asked if the hijackers represented a branch or sect of Islam. Dieter said no, though the three pilots who lived in Hamburg all attended the same mosque. Lee asked if the hijackers were particularly religious. Dieter said no, a number of them were actually latecomers who became more religious as they were drawn further into al Qaeda.

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Recruitment: Lee asked about the braintrust - was it Khalid Sheik Mohammed? Dieter said yes, he was very important in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Lee asked if he was the recruiter. Dieter said no, he was the recipient of operatives who had already been recruited. It is not clear how each was recruited. It is clear that they went to Afghanistan and were selected by UBL and others. Lee asked if the hijackers met UBL. Dieter said the process was that they would go to Afghanistan, train in the camps, and certain "trainers" would recognize their potential and take them to meet UBL, who is good at discerning the worth of recruits. Once selected by UBL, they were sent to meet with KSM who had to take what was given to him. KSM then served as the organizer or architect. Lee summarized: UBL was the inspiration; KSM was the operational planner. Al Qaeda: Lee asked if these people would identify themselves as "members of al Qaeda." Dieter said he is not sure. Moussaoui has, but Dieter feels al Qaeda is a construct imposed by history. He is not sure how formal it is as an organization. Lee asked Dieter: what does al Qaeda mean to you? Dieter defined it as such: a group headquartered in Afghanistan working under UBL to fight the West (specifically the U.S.), which is an outgrowth of the jihad against the Soviets. Dieter noted that the Saudis refer to the Soviet war as "the good jihad." Literally, al Qaeda means "the base." The earliest reference to it is apparently on the cover of training manuals seized from one of the plotters of the first WTC bombing the books were seized by Customs.in 1992-3, and date from 1988-89. Team 1 is working extensively on these issues.

Financing: Lee asked about financing - did these people arrive with cash or were funds wired to them? Dieter said most money for the pilots was wire-transferred, much of it from the UAE. Lee asked if the UAE has been cooperative. Dieter said it is his sense that they have cooperated, but it is hard to trace the money beyond the UAE. Team 4 is working on this issue in detail. State-Sponsorship: Lee asked about"state-sponsorship. Dieter said he didn't think that was the case. There is a lot of speculation about Iraq and the Prague meeting with Mohammed Atta. The FBI has expended a lot of energy on this and cannot confirm either way. Plot: Dieter said three of the pilots - including Atta - were in Hamburg. Atta arrived in the early 1990's and was there for a number of years. Lee asked when it became a suicide operation. Dieter said the al Qaeda "party-line" is that in the summer of 1999 this was decided in Hamburg. Atta and others were interested in going to Chechnya; instead of Chechnya they were told to go to Afghanistan. Lee asked when the plot hatched. Dieter . said this is not exactly clear - his best guess is the fall of 1999. There was training; they met UBL; they were directed to go to the U.S. to become pilots and attack America. The details are not clear. Dieter is concerned that detainee information is filtered. Interrogators are understandably focused upon current threats and history takes a backseat. Also, the Team cannot see detainees directly, and cannot assess the credibility of the information. Pilots; Lee asked about the pilots. Dieter went through them: 1) Atta- Egyptian, received a Master's in Urban Planning; 2) Alshehri - Saudi.took an army scholarship to Hamburg,

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Atta was possibly his mentor; 3) Jarrah - Lebanese, also did graduate work in Germany, spent time in Dusseldorf; 4) Hanjour - Saudi, was a pilot before the plot. United States: Lee asked about the environment in the U.S. - did people know in mosques? Or were these lone operators? Dieter said this was difficult to assess. For instance, two hijackers were trained as soldiers and commandos, but when they stepped off an airplane in early 2000 at LAX they spoke no English and had never been in the West. They were in L.A. for two weeks and then went to San Diego. Dieter is interested in those two weeks - points of entry are when they are at their most vulnerable. How did they get a toehold? People may have helped them because they were fellow Muslims without knowing the specifics of their plot. Perhaps people thought they were just training to become pilots in Chechnya. These two hijackers washed out in pilot school and went back to Yemen. They returned on July 4, 2001, and we could not get them. Dieter said all the hijackers entered the U.S. separately. Team 5 is working on the specifics of their entry. Some were on student visas; some on tourist visas. Some came in the early 1990s before returning to Saudi Arabia and Afghanistan, and then returned to the U.S. in early 2001. The remaining supporting cast started to arrive in Apri12001. Meeting: Lee asked if all the pilots ever got together in the U.S. Dieter said no. Some took test flights in the summer of2001, likely casing procedures on flights from the East Coast to L.A. and San Francisco. They took disparate itineraries. As many as three may have met in Las Vegas. Dieter recounted the deployment bases. Atta left from Portland, Maine, on the morning of 9/11. It is not clear why he did this instead of Boston. Operation: Dieter commented upon the operation. There were five hijackers on three of the flights, and four on the flight that crashed in Pennsylvania. Dieter finds it remarkable that they gained cockpit entry and controlled passengers even though none were physically imposing - the tallest was probably 5'8, and weight averaged 120-130Ibs. There are conflicting stories as to how they entered the cockpit. There is indication that fake bombs were used, certainly force. Pilots don't just abandon their cockpits. Each of the planes had specific targets, with the fourth likely being the Capitol. There was initial speculation surrounding the White House, but the planning indicates that the Capitol was the target. Why We Failed: Lee asked why we failed to prevent this. Dieter said it was a failure of mindset - by the agencies involved and the American public. We were too wedded to the paradigm of getting hijackers on the ground. Otherwise the public could have prevented these (as with the shoe-bomber). It is remarkable that the hijackers were 4 for 4 - it was only after the paradigm was shattered (eg. the passengers knew the plane was to be used as a missile) that passengers took action and a plane was crashed. Lee asked if the government could have done more. Dieter said yes, but the truth is we never caught a break. For instance the weather - ifit was foggy instead of clear they would not have hit those targets. But our biggest failure was not thinking beyond precedent and historical teaching. We failed to recognize how much we were hated, and how much could be accomplished by a small, disciplined group of men with a good plan.

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Discipline: Dieter added that we never penetrated the gaps in part because nothing ever leaked. Law enforcement depends upon people talking; these people didn't talk. Some drank, but only for cover. It is not clear that all 19 hijackers knew the details of the plot in advance. But by the time they got on the planes they knew. They didn't make reservations until August or early September; they were remarkably confident considering that they could not have known the weather that far in advance. We heard a lot of talk overseas, but we couldn't place it here. We presumed it was about an operation abroad, perhaps in the Gulf.

Commission: Lee said the Team should let he and Chairman Kean know about their direction soon - are they getting the job done? Is there a trade-off in quality in order to get the job done on time? What are the major obstacles to their work? Lee asked about subpoenas. Dieter said he didn't think they needed one. DoD has reached its deadline, and the Team will soon know if they got what they needed.

Detainees: Dieter reiterated that he is concerned about the quality of detainee info from CIA and DoD: can we do better? Can the Team hear directly from detainees? Dieter feels there are questions not being asked. He is concerned about the dichotomy between focusing on the current threat versus history. He has submitted questions to ask, but wishes the pace of getting answers to the Commission was as fast as it is for review teams at CIA and FBI. Lee told Chris Kojm that the Commission should make this known to Undersecretary Cambone. Lee recounted how forward-leaning Secretary Rumsfeld was in their meeting. Lee suggested a memo to CIA outlining concerns. Response on timeliness has not been satisfactory. Lee said there might need to be a letter, call, and/or meeting with Director Tenet. This meeting would have to be ASAP, and there should be a memo with the Commission's key points so Lee can go down the line with Tenet as he did with Rumsfeld.

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