Probe at dead end on 9-11 money trail

WASHINGTON – Within hours of the Sept. 11 attacks on New York and Washington, the FBI and CIA, aided by a half-dozen foreign police and intelligence agencies, began following the money.

Nearly three years later, despite the most intensive investigations in the history of those agencies, investigators still do not know who wrote the check for Sept. 11.

“To date, the U.S. government has not been able to determine the origin of the money used for the 9-11 attacks,” according to the bipartisan independent commission that reported Thursday on its 20-month inquiry into the events surrounding Sept. 11, 2001.

Should the financier ever be identified, said one U.S. law-enforcement official who spoke on condition on anonymity, “We’d sure pick him up.”

But barring the capture of a senior al Qaeda leader who knows where the money came from, or a similar breakthrough, that official now doubts the FBI will ever find the source of the $500,000 the bureau estimates paid for history’s deadliest terror attacks.

The conclusion is all the more surprising because the four principal people known to have moved money to the Sept. 11 hijackers have been in U.S. custody for more than a year.

Particularly mystifying is the apparent refusal of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the former al Qaeda commander who orchestrated the Sept. 11 attacks and arranged the financing, to tell his U.S. interrogators of the ultimate source of the money.

As the commission’s report makes clear, since his capture in Rawalpindi, Pakistan, in March of last year, Mohammed, who since has become known as “KSM” in official documents, has talked in surprising detail about the Sept. 11 plot and the innermost workings of al Qaeda.

According to the report, however, KSM claims that nearly all the money for Sept. 11 – between “85 and 95 percent” – came from the “personal fortune” of al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden.

That explanation has been dismissed by the FBI and other investigators, mainly, as the commission notes, because of “substantial evidence to the contrary,” including Mohammed’s previous assertions that bin Laden arrived in Afghanistan in the mid-1990s “with no money.”

Asked whom Mohammed might be protecting and why, the law-enforcement official replied, “That’s a good question.”

The commission’s report punctures a large piece of the bin Laden mythology – that al Qaeda was founded and financed with the benefit of a $300 million inheritance received by bin Laden after the death of his father, an ultra-wealthy Saudi construction magnate.

No such vast fortune evidently existed. Even before being disinherited by his family in 1994, the report said, bin Laden had been receiving only about $1 million a year. While that is “a significant sum to be sure,” it wasn’t enough to underwrite al Qaeda’s estimated $30 million annual operating budget.

The commission concludes that the bulk of al Qaeda’s money came from “corrupt” Islamic charities and wealthy donors in the Persian Gulf, “particularly in Saudi Arabia,” some of whom “surely knew” the destination of their donations.

No individuals are mentioned in the report, and only two charities – the al Wafa Humanitarian Organization and the Saudi-based al Haramain Islamic Foundation, which was dissolved by the Saudi government last month – are noted.

Moreover, the report notes that before Sept. 11, al Qaeda “spent funds as quickly as it received them,” indicating that there was no stockpile of cash in the group’s Kandahar headquarters that could have been given to the hijackers.

Also in U.S. custody is the Sept. 11 bagman, Ali Abdul Aziz Ali, who is Mohammed’s nephew and who, between April 2000 and September 2001, wired at least $119,230 in cash from Dubai to the plot leaders in the United States.

According to the commission and other investigators, Ali received that money from Mohammed in Pakistan and claims to have no knowledge of where it came from originally.

The largest single disbursement, $69,985, was sent by Ali in September 2000 to a Sun Trust Bank account in Florida held jointly by Mohamed Atta and Marwan al-Shehhi, the former Hamburg students believed to have piloted the two planes that struck the World Trade Center.

The wire transfers, the commission said, “were unremarkable and essentially invisible amidst the billions of dollars flowing around the world every day,” and did not attract the notice of the banks that handled them.

Federal laws in effect before Sept. 11 required that banks file a “suspicious activity report” with the Treasury Department when handling a transaction involving more than $5,000 that may reflect criminal activity or money laundering.

Although most were well above that limit, the hijackers’ transactions never generated any such reports. “Nor,” the commission said, “should SARs have been filed” because the transactions “were not extraordinary or remarkable.”

Sun Trust records show, however, that four of the transfers, including the one for nearly $70,000, did trigger internal alerts within the bank during the summer of 2000.

According to a Sun Trust spokesman, the alerts represented “an internal systems message indicating that an additional review of the item is needed.”

Despite the alerts, the spokesman said, Sun Trust never filed any SARs on the hijackers’ account, not because the transactions were not considered noteworthy, but because the names of Atta and al-Shehhi did not appear on government watch lists.

In all, the FBI has tallied about $303,000 that was deposited into the hijackers’ U.S. bank accounts or carried with them into the U.S., including $50,000 in traveler’s checks. The commission reported that the hijackers spent more than $270,000 of that money in the United States.

No records exist of the additional $200,000 the FBI estimates the operation cost al Qaeda.