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j
Entry of the 9/11 Hijackers Into the United States
Members of the Commission, your staff has developed initial findings on how the
individuals who carried out the 9/11 attacks entered the United States. We have also
developed initial findings on terrorists who failed in their efforts to enter the United
States. These findings lead us to some tentative judgments on the way the United States
targets the travel of international terrorists.
This staff statement represents the collective effort of several members of our staff.
Susan Ginsburg, Thomas Eldridge, and Janice Kephart-Roberts did most of the
investigative work reflected in this statement.
We were able to build upon a large and strong body of work carried out by many talented
public servants at the Department of State, the Central Intelligence Agency, the former
Immigration and Naturalization Service and the Department of Homeland Security, and
the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The American people should be proud of the many
extraordinary professionals now serving them. To the extent we have criticisms, they are
comments less on the talent available and more on how that talent is used.
As we know from the sizable illegal traffic across our land borders, a terrorist could
attempt to bypass legal procedures and enter the U.S. surreptitiously. None of the 9/11
attackers entered or tried to enter our country this way. So today we will focus on the
hijackers' exploitation of legal entry systems. We have handed out a list of the names of
9/11 attackers to help you follow our discussion.
To break down some of al Qaeda's travel problem, view it from their perspective. For
most international travel, a terrorist has to have a passport. To visit some countries,
terrorists of certain nationalities must obtain a document permitting them to visit - a visa.
Finally the terrorist must actually enter the country and keep from getting detained or
deported by immigration or other law enforcement officials. Let us examine how the
hijackers' navigated these stages.
Passports
Four of the hijackers' passports have survived in whole or in part. Two were recovered
from the crash site of United Airlines Flight 93 in Pennsylvania. One belonged to a
hijacker on American Airlines Flight 11. A passerby picked it up and gave it to an
NYPD detective shortly before the World Trade Center towers collapsed. A fourth
passport was recovered from luggage that did not make it from a Portland flight to
Boston onto the connecting flight, which was American Airlines 11. In addition to these
four, some digital copies of the hijackers' passports were recovered in jfpost-9/
J I
Two of the passports that have survived, those tfSatam al Suqami and Abdul Aziz al
Oman, were clearly doctored. To avoid getting into the classified details, we will just
state that these were "manipulated in a fraudulent manner." They were manipulated in
Other kinds of passport markings can be highly suspicious. To avoid getting into the
classified details, we will just call these "suspicious indicators." Two of the hijackers,
Khalid al Mihdhar and Salem al Hazmi, presented passports that had such suspicious
indicators. Again, we believe that today trained U.S. officials would be able to spot these
indicators and take appropriate action. Eaoh of these twoTirJackers arc known to huve^
possessed at least two passports. All of their known passports had these suspicious
indicators. We have evidence that three other hijackers, Nawafal Hazmi, Ahmed al
Nami, and Ahmad al Haznawi may have presented passports containing these suspicious
indicators. But their passports did not survive the attacks, so we cannot be sure.
There were significant security weaknesses in the Saudi government's issuance of Saudi
passports in the period when the visas to the hijackers were issued. Two of the Saudi 9/11
hijackers may have obtained their passports through patronage connectiono with Saudi
officials:
\r>
We do not yet know the answer to the question whether the knowledge of these particular
clues existed in the intelligence community before 9/1 1 . From the mid-1970s, when
terrorists began to launch attacks in the Middle East and Europe, intelligence and border
authorities knew that terrorists used forged or altered travel documents. By the 1980s the
U.S. government had developed a "Red Book" to guide and train consular, immigration
and customs officers on spotting terrorists. It includes photographs of altered or stolen
passports, and false travel stamps (also known as cachets) used by terrorists.
Unfortunately, to the best of our knowledge, the "Red Book" was last published in 1992.
Although the government also published a Passport Examination Manual, it focuses more
on generic forgery detection and document inspection techniques than the techniques of
particular terrorist groups.
Before 9/11, the FBI and CIA did know that al Qaeda engaged in such practices. They
knew this from training manuals recovered in the mid-1990s, and from tracking and
interrogations of al Qaeda operatives. Some of this knowledge was revealed in individual
criminal cases prosecuted in the U.S. in the 1990s. And yet, between 1992 and September
11, 2001, we have not found any sign that information about al Qaeda or other terrorist
group passport practices was circulated in systematic fashion to the border inspection
service officials who inspected these passports before 9/11.
Visas
The State Department is principally responsible for administering U.S. immigration laws
outside of the United States. A branch of our diplomatic corps, consular officers, issue
several kinds of visas for visitors and for permanent irroriigrants. In 2000, these
diplomats processed about 10 million applications for visitors' visas at over 200 posts
' . . . 4s+Jv\. (s.±.
HAJ« <? _/ |
Before 9-11, visa applicants provided their passport and a photograph. A State '
Department employee checked the passport for any apparent questionable features. A
consular officer could call the applicant in for an interview. The applicant's essential
information went into a State Department database. The information was then checked
"against a large "consular lookout" dataT?ase^ which included a substantial watchlist of
known and suspected terrorists, called TIPOFF.
Our immigration system before 9/11 focused primarily on keeping individuals intending
to immigrate from improperly entering the United States. In the visa process, the most
common form of fraud is to get a visa to visit the U.S. as a tourist and then stay to work
and perhaps become a resident. Consular officers concentrated on interviewing visa
applicants whom they suspected might leave and not return.
Saudi citizens rarely overstayed their visas or tried to work illegally in the U.S. The same
was true for citizens of the United Arab Emirates. So, wkh aomc minor variations, while
consular officials in both countries always screened applicants in IITPOFF, they would
not interview them unless there was something about the applications that seemed
unuaual cy problematic.
Visa applicants from these countries frequently had their applications submitted by third
party facilitators, like travel agencies. In June 2001, the U.S. consular posts in Saudi
Arabia instituted a third party processing program, called Visa Express. It required
applicants to apply through designated travel agencies instead of by mail or in person.
The program was established in part to try to keep crowds of people from congregating
outside the posts, which was a security risk to the posts and to the crowds themselves.
We have found no evidence that the Visa Express program had any effect on the
interview or approval rates for Saudi applicants, or that it reduced the scrutiny given to
their applications. It actually lengthened the processing time.
With the exception of our consulates in Mexico, before 9/11 biometric information - like
a fingerprint - was not routinely collected from visa applicants. Terrorists therefore easily
could exploit opportunities for fraud. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was the chief tactical
planner and coordinator of the 9/11 attacks. Federal authorities in the Southern District
of New York indicted him in 1996. Yet, KSM, as he is known, obtained a visa to visit
the United States on July 23, 2001, about six weeks before the 9/11 attacks. Although he
is not a Saudi citizen and we do not believe he was in Saudi Arabia at the time, he applied
for a visa using a Saudi passport, and an alias, Abdulrahman al Ghamdi. He had
someone else submit his application and a photo —tnk°n nf him in diRruip? - r thrfm2h thr
Visa Express program. There is no evidence that he ever used this visa to enter the
United States.
The 9/11 pilots acquired most of their/isas in the year 2000. The others, with two
exceptions, obtained their visas bety/een the fall of 2000 and June 2001. Beginning in
1997, the 19 hijackers submitted 2^ applications and received 23 visas. Two of these
were issued in Berlin. Two were issued in the United Arab Emirates. The rest were
issued in Saudi Arabia. One of the pilot's applications, that of Hani Hgnjpur in
September 2000, was deniedaomporoHly untiljie^roduced more evidence in support of
his student visa application. It was-fern approved. Except for Hanjour, all the hijackers
sought tourist visas. Qhe$ ^—& -
Of these 24 visa applications, four were destroyed routinely along with other documents
before their significance was known.
To our knowledge, State consular officers followed their standard operating procedures in
every case. They performed a name check using their lookout database, including the
TIPOFF watchlist. At the time these people applied for visas, none of them - or at least
none of the identities given in their passports — were in the database. We will say more
about this in another staff statement later today.
All 20 of these applications were incomplete in some way, in that a data field was left
blank or not answered fully. Such omissions were common. The consular officials
focused on getting the biographical data needed for name checks. They generally did not
think the omitted items were material to a decision about whether to issue the visa.
Three of the 19 hijackers submitted applications that contained false statements that could
have been proven to be false at the time they applied. The applications of Hani Hanjour,
Saeed al Ghamdi, and Khalid al Mihdhar stated that they had not previously applied for a
U.S. visa when, in fact, they had. In Hanjour's case the false statement was made in
conjunction with an earlier visit, in 1997, not his final visa application in 2000. Hanjour
and Mihdhar also made a false statement about whether they had previously traveled to
the United States. Information about these prior applications was retrievable at the Jeddah
post where each applied.
These false statements may have been intentional, to cover up the applicants' travel on
old passports to suspect locations like Afghanistan for terrorist training. On the other
hand, these statements may have been inadvertent. During this period, Saudi citizens
often had their applications filled out and submitted by third parties. Most importantly,
evidence of the prior visas or travel to the U.S. actually would have reduced concern that
the applicants were intending to immigrate, so they had no good reason to deny the visas
or travel.
Al Mihdhar's case is uniquely problematical. He had not been entered into the TIPOFF
watchlist at the time of his second visa application in June 2001. In January 2000 the
American consulate in Jeddah had been asked about Mihdhar's visa status in conjunction
with a then urgent terrorist intelligence investigation and confirmed that this al Qaeda
operative had a U.S. visa. When Mihdhar applied again, although the check against the
worldwide TIPOFF watchlist took place, no system then in place included a notation of
the prior visa status check. (Thus, in effect, the post could not 'remember' relevant
suspicions a year and a half earlier about this same person, who was traveling again with
the same biographical information.
At least two of the hijackers were actually interviewed in person in connection with their
visa applications. Hanjour was interviewed twice. Satam al Suqami was apparently
interviewed in Riyadh. Another hijacker, Ahmed al Nami, was apparently interviewed
briefly, but just to clarify an entry on his application. The three consular officers
involved have some memory of these interviews. All stated that the reason for the
interview had nothing to do with terrorism. They saw nothing suspicious.
At least four patticjpaats in the 9/11 plot trigd^toget visas^^nd failed: Ramzi Binalshibh,
Saeed al Gamdi, Zakariya Essabar, andtfwdul Aziz Ali. This Saeed al Gamdi has a name
similar to the Saeed al Ghamdi who became a hijacker. They are different people.
Ramzi Binalshibh, a Yemeni, apparently intended to train as a pilot along with his
Hamburg friends, Mohammed Atta, Marwan al Shehhi, and ZiadJarrah. Binalshibh
applied for a visa three times in Berlin and once in Yemen. He first applied in Berlin on
the same day as Atta. He was interviewed twice and denied twice. Yemen is a much
poorer country than Saudi Arabia. Both times, consular officers determined he did not
have strong ties to Germany and he might be intending to immigrate unlawfully to the
U.S. Binalshibh tried again in Berlin, this time for a student visa to attend aviation
language school in Florida. He was denied again for lack of adequate documentation and
failure to show sufficient ties to Germany.
Essabar^tfmomccan who may also have intended to be a pilot, tried to get a visa in
Berlinand failed because he failed to demonstrate sufficient ties to Germany, such as a
job or family there. In general, third country visa applicants in Berlin were held to
significantly higher standards in terms of documentation and a required showing of ties
than were Saudi and Emirati citizens applying from their own countries
All Abdul Aziz Alyeff&y be related tc^CEalid Sheikh MohammedxaficTwas heavily involved in
-tke financia^oi<k) of the 9/1 1 plot. He tried to get a U.S/fasa in Dubai about two weeks
before the attacks. His visa application states that he^fntended to enter the U.S. on
September 4, 2001, for one week. As a Pakistanijn a third country, U.S. officials wouM
me aian, <mu ne intending immigrant.
'Y
Entry into and exit from the United States
With a visa, a traveler can travel to a United States port of entry. Upon arrival, the
individual must seek admission into the U.S. from an inspector of what used to be called
the INS, an agency whose personnel now form part of the Department of Homeland
Security. Property being brought into the U.S. is checked by inspectors of the U.S.
Customs Service, whose personnel are now also part of DHS.
The 19 hijackers entered the U.S. a total of 33 times. They arrived through ten different
airports, though more than half came in through Miami, JFK, or Newark. A visitor with a
tourist visa was usually admitted for a stay of six months. All but two of the hijackers
were admitted for such stays. Hanjour had a student visa and was admitted for a stay of
two years, and Suqami who sought and was admitted for a stay of 20 days.
The four pilots passed through INS and Customs inspections a total of 17 times before
9/11. Hanjour came to the U.S. to attend school in three stints during the 1990s. His
final arrival was in December 2000, through the Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky airport.
The other three pilots, Atta, al Shehhi, and Zieid Jarrah, initially came in May thwwgh «vv\0(-
June 2000. They arrived for the last time between May and August 2001. All made a
number of trips abroad during their extended stays in the U.S.
Of the other 15, only Mihdhar entered the U.S., left, and came in again. Nawafal Hazmi
arrived in January 2000 with Mihdhar and stayed. Al Mihdhar left in June 2000 and
returned to the U.S. on July 4, 2001. Ten of the others came in pairs between April and
June 2001. Three more arrived through Miami on May 28.
The INS inspector usually had about one to ops and a half minutes to assess the traveler
and make a decision on admissibility andJ^ngth of stay. For all the entries a primary INS
inspector would work a lane of incoming travelers and check the people and their
passportsTTr^y would try to assess tfre individual's demeanor. No one noted any
anomalies in these passports, despite the fact, we now believe, that at least two and as
many as eight showed evidence of fraudulent manipulation. The inspector would use the
passport data, especially if it was machine readable (and Saudi passports were) to check
various INS and Customs databases. The databases would show the person's
immigration history information, as well as terrorist watchlist and criminal history
information.
Three of the five hijackers who entered the U.S. more than once had violated immigration
law.
Ziad Jarrah entered in June 2000 on a tourist visa and then promptly enrolled in flight
school for six months. He never filed an application to change his immigration status
from tourist to student. Had the INS known he was out of status, they could have denied
him entry on any of the three subsequent occasions he departed and returned while he
was a student.
Marwan al Shehhi came in through Newark in late M^2000, followed a weekjaterby
Mohammed Atta. Both came on tourist visas and s<5on entered flight schcpHn Florida.
In September they did file applications to change their status. Befbf@-97ll, regulations
allowed tourists to change their status at any tfme, so they werj&'mcompliance. But both
overstayed their periods of admission and completed flight'school to obtain commercial
pilot licenses. Atta and al Shehhi then leftjand returned/m January 2001, while their
change in visa status from tourist to student was still pending.
_-
Atta and al Shehhi did get some attentiob when feey said they were coming back to finish
flight school. Primary inspectors noticed^that their story clashed with their attempt to
reenter on tourist visas. The rules required them to get proper student visas while they
had been overseas, since their earlier pending applicationVfor a change of status was
considered abandoned once they left the U.S. Atta and al Shehhi werejreferred by the
primary inspectors to secondary inspection.
At secondary, more experienced inspectors could conduct longer interviews, check more
databases, take fingerprints, examine personal property, and call on other agencies for
help. The inspectors involved state they do not remember these encounters. The reports
indicate that both men repeated their story about still going to flight school and their
pending applications for a change of status. The secondary inspectors admitted Atta and
al Shehhi as tourists.
Customs officers took a second look at two of the hijackers but then admitted them. On
Marwan al Shehhi 's first entry into the U.S. a customs officer referred him to secondary
inspection, completed the inspection, and released him. hi May 2001, Waleed al Shehri
and Satam Suqami departed Florida for the Bahamas but were refused admission. On
their way back to the U.S., a customs officer conducting a pre-clearance in the Bahamas
referred al Shehri to a secondary inspection. Customs then released al Sherhi to return to
the U.S. with Suqami.
We do know of one sucetfss ^ by immigration secondary inspection that affected the 9/1 1
plot. An al Qaeda^Jperative, Mohammed al Kahtani, arrived at Orlando airport on
August 4, 2001 . jpfohammed Atta apparentjff'was waiting there to meet him. Kahtani
encountered an experienced and dedicated inspector, Jose Melendez-Perez. We will hear
his story later this morning.
During their stays in the U.S. at least six of the 9/1 1 hijackers violated immigration laws.
We have noted Jarrah 's failure to adjust his status while he was in flight school and the
violations by Atta and al Shehhi. Hani Hanjour came on a student visa in December
2000 but then did not attendlEnglish language school for which is visa was issued.
Nawafal Hazmi overstayed his term of admission by nine months. Suqami overstayed
his term of admission by four months. None of these violations were detected or acted
upon by INS inspectors or agents.
Two programs might have helped detect such violations. One dealt with violations of
student status. The other dealt with overstays.
National security concerns about foreign students are not new. By the late 1980s the INS
established a Student/School System to track students, but the system did not work. After
the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, when it was discovered that a participant in the
plot had been a student who had overstayed his visa, the Department of Justice asked INS
to devise a better way to track students. INS officials recommended a new student
tracking system and a student ID card that used biometric identifiers.
Congress required the Attorney General to develop an entry-exit system in 1996. The
system's purpose was to improve INS' ability to address illegal migration and overstays
of all types of foreign visitors. By 1998, Congress had appropriated about $40 million to
develop the system. Advocates for border communities, however, were concerned that
an entry-exit system would slow down trade. INS officials decided to forego the system
at the land borders and to only automate the entry process. The automation process was
not successful. The result was that when hijackers Suqami and Nawafal Hazmi
overstayed their visas, the system Congress envisaged did not exist. Moreover, when
federal law enforcement authorities realized in late August 2001 that Hazmi had entered
with Mihdhar in January 2000 at Los Angeles, they could not reliably determine whether
or not Hazmi was still in the United States.
Conclusion
The Director of the FBI testified that "[e]ach of the hijackers ... came easily and lawfully
from abroad." The Director of Central Intelligence described 17 of the 19 hijackers as
"clean." We believe the information we have provided today gives the Commission the
opportunity to reevaluate those statements. Based on our evaluation of the hijackers'
travel documents, the visa process, the entries into the U.S., and the compliance with
immigration law while the attackers were here, we have a few observations, mie 9-11
h i j a csrs^
ke—''^»i--
• Included among them known al Qaeda operatives who could have been
watchlisted;
• Presented passports "manipulated in a fraudulent manner;"
• Presented passports with "suspicious indicators" of extremism;
• Made detectable false statements on their visa applications;
• Were fepeafoHy pulled out of the travel stream and given greater scrutiny by
border officials;
• Made false statements to border officials to gain entry to the U.S.; and
• Violated immigration laws while inside the U.S.
Why weren't they exploited? We do not have all the answers. Certainly neither the State
Department's consular officers nor the INS' inspectors and agents were ever considered
full partners in a national counterterrorism effort. This is exemplified by the fact that tho-
Bureau of Consular^AffairsTBuifrau -otatoo-that before 9/11 they were not informed by
anyone in the State Department or elsewhere that Saudi citizens could be security risks.
Nor were the Consular Affairs bureau or INS given the resources to perform an expanded
. flO ' \\f> mission. Visa applications rose by nearly a third, increasing|2.5 million a yeai1, just— ^w
*«L ^ > between 1998 and and 2001.
2001.Trained
Trained staff
staff did
didnotTife
notTife with
withit.it. In
InJeddah
Jeddah and
andRiyadh,
Riyadh,for
for /
,vv example,
exam each
Ple' eac consular officer
h consular officer had
had responsibility
responsibility for
for processing,
processing, on on average,
average, ab
about
30,000 applications per year and routinely interviewed about 200 people a day.
\^ The INS before 9/11 had about 2,000 agents for interior enforcement. As long as the top
enforcement priorities were removal of criminal aliens and prosecution of employers who
hired illegal aliens, a major counterterrorism effort would not have been possible. This is
not to pass judgment on immigration policy generally. What we can do is highlight the
way those policy choices affected counterterrorism efforts before 9/11, and potentially
affect them today. For our front line border inspection services to have taken a
substantially more proactive role in counterterrorism, their missions would have had to
have been considered integral to our national security strategy and given commensurate
resources.
Today, the level of systematic effort by the intelligence community focused on terrorist
travel is much greater. But terrorist travel intelligence is still seen as a niche effort,
interesting for specialists, but not central to counterterrorism. Nor have policymakers
fully absorbed the information developed by terrorist mobility specialists. It has not been
translated into proposals for new international standards on passport controls, raised
levels of penalties for document forgers, or reinvigorated document screening efforts at
the borders. If we have one conclusion from our work so far, it is that disrupting terrorist
mobility globally is at least as important as disrupting terrorist finance as an integral part
of counterterrorism.
And yet, between 1992 and September 11, 2001, we have not found any sign that c
intelligence, law enforcement, or border inspection services sought tortlevelop,
disseminate, or acquire systematic information about Al Qaeda's or other terrorist
groups' travel and passport practices. Thus, such information was not available to
consular, immigration, or customs officials who examined the hijackers' passports before
9/11.
State Department Comments
On p. 12, in the penultimate paragraph, the draft report states "The 'no fly"
lists did not include the hijackers, even though two of them were already
watch listed in TIPOFF." This seems to be contradicted by the statement in
the draft report "Entry of the 9/11 Hijackers into the United States" at p. 8,
the third paragraph, which states: "One story, which is that some of the
terrorists or would-be hijackers were on a terrorist watchlist, is untrue."
This may be a question of semantics about what does or does not constitute a
"watchlist" but, if so, this should be clarified.
Members of the Commission, your staff has developed initial findings on how the
individuals who carried out the 9/11 attacks entered the United States. We have also
developed initial findings on terrorists who failed in their efforts to enter the United
States. These findings lead us to some tentative judgments on the way the United States
targets the travel of international terrorists.
This staff statement represents the collective effort of several members of our staff.
Susan Ginsburg, Thomas Eldridge, and Janice Kephart-Roberts did most of the
investigative wbrk reflected in this statement.
We were able to build upon a large and strong body of work carried out by many talented
public servants at the Department of State, the Central Intelligence Agency, the former
Immigration and Naturalization Service and the Department of Homeland Security, and
the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The American people should be proud of the many
extraordinary professionals now serving them. To the extent we have criticisms, they are
comments less on the talent available and more on how that talent is used.
As we know from the sizable illegal traffic across our land borders, a terrorist could
attempt to bypass legal procedures and enter the U.S. surreptitiously. None of the 9/11
attackers entered or tried to enter our country this way. So today we will focus on the
hijackers' exploitation of legal entry systems. We have handed out a list of the names of
9/11 attackers to help you follow our discussion.
To break down some of al Qaeda's travel problem, view it from their perspective. For
most international travel, a terrorist has to have a passport. To visit some countries,
terrorists of certain nationalities must obtain a document permitting them to visit - a visa.
Finally the terrorist must actually enter the country and keep from getting detained or
deported by immigration or other law enforcement officials. JLet us examine how the
hijackers' navigated these stages.
Passports
Four of the hijackers' passports have survived in whole or in part. Two were recovered
from the crash site of United Airlines Flight 93 in Pennsylvania. One belonged to a
hijacker on American Airlines Flight 11. A passerby picked it up and gave it to an
NYPD detective shortly before the World Trade Center towers collapsed. A fourth
; passport was recovered from luggage that did not make it from a Portland flight to
\n onto the connecting flight, which was American Airlines 11. In addition to these
; four, some digital copies of the hijackers' passports were recovered hi a post-9/11 raid] [
Two of the passports that have survived, those of Satcm al Suqami and Abdul Aziz al
Omari, were clearly doctored. To avoid getting into the classified details, we will just
state that these were "manipulated in a fraudulent manner." They were manipulated in
Other kinds of passport markings can be highly suspicious. To avoid getting into the
classified details, we will just call these "suspicious indicators." Two of the hijackers,
Khalid al Mihdhar and Salem al Hazmi, presented passports that had such suspicious
indicators. Again, we believe that today/gained U.S. officials would be able to spot thesi
indicators and take appropriate action. JEach of these two hijackers arc known to have
possessed at least two passports. All of their known passports had these suspicious
indicators. We have evidence that three other hijackers, Nawafal Hazmi, Ahmed al
Nami, and Ahmad al Haznawi may have presented passports containing these suspicious
indicators. But their passports did not survive the attacks, so we cannot be sure.
There were significant security weaknesses in the Saudi government's issuance of Saudi
passports in the period when the visas to the hijackers were issued. Two of the Saudi 9/1 1
hijackers may have obtained their passports thruiwli yuiruirage Connections with Saudi
officials.
-
We do not yet know the answer to the question whether the knowledge of these particular /
clues existed in the intelligence community before 9/11. From the mid-1970s, when /
terrorists began to launch attacks in the Middle East and Europe, intelligence and border a
authorities knew that terrorists used forged or altered travel documents. By the 1980s the
U.S. government had developed a "Red Book" to guide and train consular, immigration
and customs officers on spotting terrorists. It includes photographs of altered or stolen
passports, and false travel stamps (also known as cachets) used by terrorists.
Unfortunately, to the best of our knowledge, the "Red Book" was last published in 1992.
Although the government also published a Passport Examination Manual, it focuses more
on generic forgery detection and document inspection techniques than the techniques of
particular terrorist groups. ——'
Before 9/11, the FBI and CIA did know that al Qaeda engaged in such practices. They
knew this from training manuals recovered in the mid-1990s, and from tracking and
interrogations of al Qaeda operatives. Some of this knowledge was revealed in individual
criminal cases prosecuted in the U.S. in the 1990s. And yet, between 1992 and September
11, 2001, we have not found any sign that information about al Qaeda or other terrorist
group passport practices was circulated in systematic fashion to the border inspection
service officials who inspected these passports before 9/11.
Visas
The State Department is principally responsible for administering U.S. immigration laws
outside of the United States. A branch of our diplomatic corps, consular officers, issue
several kinds of visas for visitors and for permanent immigrants. In 2000, these
diplomats processed about 10 million applications for visitors' visas at over 200 posts
overseas.
Before 9-11, visa applicants provided their passport and a photograph. A State
Department employee checked the passport for any apparent questionable features. A
consular officer could call the applicant in for an interview. The applicant's essential
information went into a State Department database. The information was then checked
against a large "consular lookout" database, which included a substantial watchlist of
known and suspected terrorists, called TIPOFF.
Our immigration system before 9/11 focused primarily on keeping individuals intending
to immigrate from improperly entering the United States. In the visa process, the most
common form of fraud is to get a visa to visit the U.S. as a tourist and then stay to work
and perhaps become a resident. Consular officers concentrated on interviewing visa
applicants whom they suspected might leave and not return.
Saudi citizens rarely overstayed their visas or tried to work illegally in the U.S. The same
was true for citizens of the United Arab Emirates. So, with some minor variations, while
consular officials in both countries always screened applicants in TIPOFF, they would
not interview them unless there was something about the applications that seemed
unusual or problematic.
Visa applicants from these countries frequently had their applications submitted by third
party facilitators, like travel agencies. In June 2001, the U.S. consular posts in Saudi
Arabia instituted a third party processing program, called Visa Express. It required
applicants to apply through designated travel agencies instead of by mail or in person.
The program was established in part to try to keep crowds of people from congregating
outside the posts, which was a security risk to the posts and to the crowds themselves.
We have found no evidence that the Visa Express program had any effect on the
interview or approval rates for Saudi applicants, or that it reduced the scrutiny given to
their applications. It actually lengthened the processing time.
With the exception of our consulates in Mexico, before 9/11 biometric information - like
a fingerprint - was not routinely collected from visa applicants. Terrorists therefore easily
could exploit opportunities for fraud. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was the chief tactical
planner and coordinator of the 9/11 attacks. Federal authorities in the Southern District
of New York indicted him in 1996. Yet, KSM, as he is known, obtained a visa to visit
the United States on July 23, 2001, about six weeks before the 9/11 attacks. Although he
is not a Saudi citizen and we do not believe he was in Saudi Arabia at the time, he applied
for a visa using a Saudi passport, and an alias, Abdulrahman al Ghamdi. He had
someone else submit his application and a photo ~ taken of him in disguise — through the
Visa Express program. There is no evidence that he ever used this visa to enter the
United States.
The 9/11 pilots acquired most of their visas in the year 2000. The others, with two
exceptions, obtained their visas between the fall of 2000 and June 2001. Beginning in
1997, the 19 hijackers submitted 24 applications and received 23 visas. Two of these
were issued in Berlin. Two were issued in the United Arab Emirates. The rest were
issued in Saudi Arabia. One of the pilot's applications, that of Hani Hanjour in
September 2000, was denied temporarily until he produced more evidence in support of
his student visa application. It was then approved. Except for Hanjour, all the hijackers
sought tourist visas.
Of these 24 visa applications, four were destroyed routinely along with other documents
before their significance was known.
To our knowledge, State consular officers followed their standard operating procedures in
every case. They performed a name check using their lookout database, including the
TIPOFF watchlist. At the time these people applied for visas, none of them - or at least
none of the identities given in their passports ~ were in the database. We will say more
about this in another staff statement later today.
All 20 of these applications were incomplete in some way, in that a data field was left
blank or not answered fully. Such omissions were common. The consular officials
focused on getting the biographical data needed for name checks. They generally did not
think the omitted items were material to a decision about whether to issue the visa.
Three of the 19 hijackers submitted applications that contained false statements that could
have been proven to be false at the time they applied. The applications of Hani Hanjour,
Saeed al Ghamdi, and Khalid al Mihdhar stated that they had not previously applied for a
U.S. visa when, in fact, they had. In Hanjour'?, case the false statement was made in
conjunction with an earlier visit, in 1997, not his final visa application in 2000. Hanjour
and Mihdhar also made a false statement about whether they had previously traveled to
the United States. Information about these prior applications was retrievable at the Jeddah
post where each applied.
These false statements may have been intentional, to cover up the applicants' travel on
old passports to suspect locations like Afghanistan for terrorist training. On the other
hand, these statements may have been inadvertent. During this period, Saudi citizens
often had their applications filled out and submitted by third parties. Most importantly,
evidence of the prior visas or travel to the U.S. actually would have reduced concern that
the applicants were intending to immigrate, so they had no good reason to deny the visas
or travel.
Al Mihdhar's case is uniquely problematical. He had not been entered into the TIPOFF
watchlist at the time of his second visa application in June 2001. In January 2000 the
American consulate in Jeddah had been asked about Mihdhar's visa status in conjunction
with a then urgent terrorist intelligence investigation and confirmed that this al Qaeda
operative had a U.S. visa. When Mihdhar applied again, although the check against the
worldwide TIPOFF watchlist took place, no system then in place included a notation of
the prior visa status check. Thus, in effect, the post could not 'remember' relevant
suspicions a year and a half earlier about this same person, who was traveling again with
the same biographical information.
At least two of the hijackers were actually interviewed in person in connection with their
visa applications. Hanjour was interviewed twice. Satam al Suqami was apparently
interviewed in Riyadh. Another hijacker, Ahmed al Nami, was apparently interviewed
briefly, but just to clarify an entry on his application. The three consular officers
involved have some memory of these interviews. All stated that the reason for the
interview had nothing to do with terrorism. They saw nothing suspicious.
At least four participants in the 9/11 plot tried to get visas, and failed: Ramzi Binalshibh,
Saeed al Gamdi, Zakariya Essabar, and Abdul Aziz AH. This Saeed al Gamdi has a name
similar to the Saeed al Ghamdi who became a hijacker. They are different people.
Ramzi Binalshibh, a Yemeni, apparently intended to train as a pilot along with his
Hamburg friends, Mohammed Atta, Marwan al Shehhi, and ZiadJarrah. Binalshibh
applied for a visa three times in Berlin and once in Yemen. He first applied in Berlin on
the same day as Atta. He was interviewed twice and denied twice. Yemen is a much
poorer country than Saudi Arabia. Both times, consular officers determined he did not
have strong ties to Germany and he might be intending to immigrate unlawfully to the
U.S. Binalshibh tried again in Berlin, this time for a student visa to attend aviation
language school in Florida. He was denied again for lack of adequate documentation and
failure to show sufficient ties to Germany.
Essabar, a Moroccan who may also have intended to be a pilot, tried to get a visa in
Berlin and failed because he failed to demonstrate sufficient ties to Germany, such as a
job or family there. In general, third country visa applicants in Berlin were held to
significantly higher standards in terms of documentation and a required showing of ties
than were Saudi and Emirati citizens applying from their own countries.
Abdul Aziz Ali may be related to Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and was heavily involved in
the financial side of the 9/11 plot. He tried to get a U.S. visa in Dubai about two weeks
before the attacks. His visa application states that he intended to enter the U.S. on
September 4, 2001, for one week. As a Pakistani in a third country, U.S. officials would
have been dubious from the start, and he was denied as a possible intending immigrant.
Members of the Commission, your staff has developed initial findings onhow the
individuals who carried out the 9/1 1 attacks entered the United States. We hav? also
developed initial findings on terrorists who failed in their efforts to enter the United
States. These findings lead us to some tentative judgments on the way the United States
targets the travel of international terrorists. These findings and judgments may help your C t ft
conduct of today's public hearing and will inform the development of your /
recommendations. /
The findings and judgments I report today are the results of our work so far. We remain
ready to revise our understanding of these topics as our work continues. This staff
statement represents the collective effort of several members of our staff/ Susan
Ginsburg, Thomas Eldridge, and Janice Kephart-Roberts did most of the investigative
work reflected in this statement.
Our staff was fortunate. We could build upon a large and strong body of work carried out
by many talented public servants at the Department of State, the Central Intelligence
Agency, the former Immigration and Naturalization Service and the Department of
Homeland Security, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The American people
should be proud of the many extraordinary professionals now serving them. To the
extent we have criticisms, they are comments less on the talent available and more on
how that talent is used. /
We do not begin with American law or policy. We begin by analyzing the terrorist
enemy. To an international terrorist, few topics are more important than where and how
they travel. Anyone immersed hi the debriefings of al Qaeda terrorists will be struck by
how central this is, how vital to their tradecraft. The ability/to travel and the character of
travel documents is one of the most important factors in operational recruitment,
including the recruitment of the 9/1 1 hijackers. It was a critical, perhaps the most
important, reason for reliance on so many Saudi citizens.
Think about the problem from their perspective. They live in places where they feel
relatively safe or anonymous. When they travel internationally, they must come to the
surface. They must pass, again and again, through porials of one kind or another where
they are examined by government agents. Only when they reach their destination can
they once again disappear into the "ocean." /
Yet, for an international terrorist, travel is essential/ Among the 9/1 1 hijackers it was the
pilots who traveled the most. Among the distant coordinators, Ramzi Binalshibh and
Khalid Sheikh Mohammed moved frequently froiji place to place. So al Qaeda devotes
enormous effort to travel issues. Before 9/1 1 a principal unit of the organization worked
on little else. Al Qaeda terrorists sought to hide their true identities and keep their travel
histories off the record.' They did not want others to know, for 'example, that they had
visited suspect places like Afghanistan.2 They carefully planned how to acquire,
manipulate, and use travel documents like visas and passports.
Ease of entry to a country was, and is, a significant factor in terrorist operational
planning. They research entry rules and border processes to selectvthe best documents
and entry points.
For these reasons we must be cautious in reaching conclusions about how much we know
about the passports or aliases the 9/11 attackers used. That said, four of the hijackers'
passports have survived in whole or in part. Two were recovered from the crash site of
United Airlines Flight 93 in Pennsylvania. One belonged to a hijacker on American
Airlines Flight 11. It fluttered to the street after the plane hit the World Trade Center. A
passerby picked it up and gave it to an NYPD detective shortly before the World Trade
Center towers collapsed. A fourth passport was recovered from luggage that did not
make it from a Portland flight to Boston onto the connecting flight, which was American
Airlines 11. In addition to these four, some copies of passport information were
recovered in a post-9/11 raid) f 3 We have reviewed findings about all of these
documents available from records and experts at the CIA, Department of Homeland
Security's Forensic Document Lab, and FBI.
Let's pause for a moment and consider what this means for counterterrorism. We believe
that the development and analysis of terrorist travel intelligence of all kinds is of the first
importance. It is now s.een as a niche effort, an interesting but not central focus that is
worked on by specialises here and there. Nevertheless, and very fortunately, the level of
systematic intelligence effort on such problems since 9/11 is vastly greater.
We think the conceptual breakthrough has not happened yet at the policy level. The
information developed by terrorist mobility specialists has not been fully absorbed by the
intelligence community as a whole, border inspection authorities, nor incorporated into
problem-solving with foreign governments through bilateral, regional and international
discussions. We hope this statement and the one later today will demonstrate that not
only intelligence, but policy about international travel rules, supporting documentation,
and border management is central to denying access by terrorists to countries that they
have targeted. Ifideed, disrupting terrorist mobility is at least as important as disrupting
terrorist finances, and the opportunities and potential payoffs are probably greater. Its
place in the way we think about counterterrorism should be elevated accordingly.
To break d6wn some of the travel problem, think about three stages. For most
international travel, a terrorist has to have a passport. For some countries, like the United
States, a terrorist also must obtain a document permitting him to visit. This is called a
visa. Finally the terrorist must actually enter the country and keep from getting detained
or deported by immigration or internal security officials.
Some 6f these problems can be evaded if a terrorist bypasses legal procedures and enters
the cpuntry surreptitiously, as do many illegal aliens who enter the United States from
Mexico and Canada. None of the 9/11 attackers entered or tried to enter the country this
way/ though we know terrorists are considering coming through Mexico and some have
entered without inspection from Canada.! ^ I
I jWe will start with passports and identity. We have handed out a list
/ of/the names of 9/lT attackers to help you follow our discussion.
ji. word about passports. While some nations, including our own, dedicate significant
resources to passport security improvements, many nations continue to have weak
passport controls, and msecure travel documents. Cost is a factor. There is no
international forum dedicated solely to improving the security of passports, nor is there a
comprehensive international registry of lost or stolen passports. It is easier to track the
use of a stolen credit card than a stolen passport.
We have seen convincing evidence that two of the hijackers, SatamXal Suqami and Abdul
Aziz al Omari, presented doctored passports.14 To avoid getting into the classified
details, we will just state that these were "manipulated in a fraudulent manner." They
were manipulated in ways we believe trained U.S. officials would be able to spot today as
revealing a direct link to al Qaeda. Since the passports of 15 of the hijackers did not
survive, we cannot make firm factual statements about their documents, But from what
we know about al Qaeda passport practices and information we believe it is possible that
sik more of the hijackers presented passports that had some of these same clue* to their
association with al Qaeda.
Other kinds of passport markings can be highly suspicious. To avoid getting into the
classified details, we will just call these "suspicious indicators." Two of the hijackers,
Khalid al Mihdhar and Salem al Hazmi, presented passports that had such suspicious
indicators.15 Again, we believe that today trained U.S. officials would be able to spot
these indicators and take appropriate action. Each of these two hijackers are known to '""
have possessed at least two passports.16 All of their known passports had these
suspicious indicators. We have evidence that three other hijackers, Nawaf al Hazmi,
Ahmed al Nami; and Ahmad al Haznawi may have presented passports containing these
suspicious indicatorsr^But their passports did not survive the attacks, so we cannot be
sure.
J
_T We now know that there were significant security
\s in the Saudi government's issuance of Saudi passports in the period when the
visas to the hijackers were issued. I9n \~
\y contained no issuing serial / no /
numbers, a weakness that terrorists can manipulate." Saudi passports were therefore
often the passport of choice for al Qaeda terrorists, even those - like Khalid Sheikh
Mohammed - who were not Saudi citizens.
The obvious question is whether all of these characteristic manipulations and indicators
were known to the U.S. government before 9/11. We are sure that word of any such
clues had not been circulated to the border inspection service officials who saw these
\. As to whether the knowledge of these particular clues existed in the
\e community before 9/11, we do not yet know the answer to that question.
;From the mid-1970s, when terrorists began to launch attacks in the Middle East and
Europe, intelligence and border authorities knew that terrorists used forged or altered
travel documents. Before 9/11 the FBI and CIA knew al Qaeda engaged in such
17
18
19
20
21
practices. They knew this from training manuals recovered in the mid-1990s. They
knew this from tracking and interrogating al Qaeda operatives. Some of this knowledge
was revealed in individual criminal cases prosecuted in the U.S. in the 1990s.
By the 1980s the CIA had developed a "Red Book" to guide and train consular, ^3 ^- '
immigration and customs officers on sporting terrorists. It includes photographs of
altered or stolen passports, and false travel stamps (also known as cachets) used by
terrorists. Unfortunately, to the best of our knowledge, the "Red Book" was last
published in 1992. Between 1992 and September 11, 2001, we cannot find evidence of
any centrally coordinated and systematic effort to create and distribute a set of telltale
clues that consular officers or immigration inspectors could use in order to spot al Qaeda
operatives or otherwise exploit al Qaeda's travel vulnerability. If this information had
been developed, the State Department, and the former Immigration and Naturalization
Service (INS) and the Customs Service, whose personnel are now part of DHS, could
have established the capacity for training and alerting their officers in the field. Before
9/11 these agencies' efforts focused mainly on traditional immigration enforcement and
organized visa fraud rings.
Since 9/11 this picture has improved. We have not completed our factual evaluations of
these improvements. The CIA is working aggressively to collect and use intelligence
related to terrorist mobility. The Department of State is incorporating new information
into their processes, as is the Department of Homeland Security. As we finish our
evaluation of these efforts the Commission should consider possible policy
recommendations in this area.
Visas
Before 9/11, and today, the State Department is principally responsible for administering
U.S. immigration laws outside of the United States. A branch of our diplomatic corps,
consular officers, issue several kinds of visas for visitors and for permanent immigrants.
In 2000 these diplomats processed about 10 million applications for visitors' visas at
about 230 posts overseas. The U.S. has agreements with a number of countries in which
their citizens and ours do not need to obtain visas for a visit. None of the 9/11 hijackers
had passports from such countries, although other al Qaeda members have had such
passports.
A visa applicant provides their passport and a photograph. A State Department employee
checks the passport for any apparent questionable features. A Consular Officer could call
the applicant in for an interview. The applicant's essential information goes into a State
database. The information is then checked against a large "consular lookout" database,
which includes a substantial watchlist of known and suspected terrorists called TIPOFF.
Before 9/11, the main focus of the whole immigration system, including the visa process,
was to keep intending immigrants from improperly entering the United States. In the visa
process, the most common form of fraud is to get a visa to visit the U.S. as a tourist and
then stay to work and perhaps become a resident. So consular officers concentrate on
interviewing visa applicants whom they suspect might leave and not come back home.
In Saudi Arabia, before 9-11, Saudi citizens were not seen as "bad risks" for becoming
unlawful immigrants. They rarely overstayed their visas or tried to work illegally in the
U.S. The same was true for citizens of the United Arab Emirates. So, with some minor
variations, diplomats in both countries tended to screen applicants against TIPOFF, but
they would not interview them unless there was something about the applications that
seemed problematic. Visa applicants from these countries frequently had their
applications submitted by third parties, like travel agencies, and often would not fill out
their applications completely, beyond the biographical information needed for name
checks.
The U.S. posts in Saudi Arabia instituted the Visa Express program in June 2001. It had
little effect on visa outcomes. It required applicants to apply through travel agencies
instead of by mail or in person. One reason the program was established was to keep
crowds of people from congregating outside the posts, which was a security risk to the
posts and to the crowds themselves. We have found no evidence that the Visa Express
program had any effect on the interview or approval rates for Saudi applicants, or that it
reduced the scrutiny given to their applications. It actually lengthened the processing
time.
With the exception of Mexico, though, before 9/11, biometric information - like a
fingerprint - was not routinely collected from a visa applicant. Terrorists therefore easily
could exploit opportunities for fraud. We offer one example.
Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was the chief tactical planner and coordinator of the 9/11
attacks. He has a long history of terrorist activity. Before his capture in Pakistan in
March of 2003, he had long been sought by U.S. authorities and was indicted for terrorist
activity by federal authorities in the Southern District of New York in 1996.
Khalid Sheikh Mohammed obtained a visa to visit the United States on July 23, 2001,
about six weeks before the 9/11 attacks. He did so using an alias, Abdulrahman al
Ghamdi. He did so with a Saudi passport, although he is not a Saudi citizen and we do
not believe he was even in Saudi Arabia at the time. He had someone else submit his
application and a photo (taken of him in disguise) through the Visa Express program.22
However, there is no evidence that he ever used this visa to enter the United States.
The hijackers obtained their visas over a ten year period. The terrorist pilots acquired
their visas in the year 2000. The others, with two exceptions, obtained their visas
between the fall of 2000 and June 2001. All told, beginning in 1997, and including
multiple visas, the 19 hijackers submitted 24 applications and received 23 visas. Two of
these were issued in Berlin. Two were issued in the United Arab Emirates. The rest
were issued in Saudi Arabia. One of the pilot's applications, that of Hani Hanjour in
22
FBI summary of Penttbom Investigation, January 31, 2003, p. 65.
September 2000, was denied temporarily until he produced more evidence in support of
his student visa application. It was then approved.
To the best of our knowledge, State consular officers followed their standard operating
procedures in every case. They checked their lookout database, including the TIPOFF
watchlist. At the time they applied for visas, none of these people - or at least none of
the identities given in their passports ~ were in the database. We will say more about this
in another staff statement later today.
Of these 24 visa applications, 4 were destroyed routinely along with other old documents
before their significance was known. We have reviewed the remaining 20. All the
hijackers sought tourist visas except for Hanjour, who obtained a student visa.
All 20 of these applications were incomplete in some way, in that a data field was left
blank or not answered fully. This did not affect the visa adjudication process because the
data left out was the kind of data often left out by applicants. The State officials
generally did not think these items were material to making a decision about whether to
issue the visa. Officials were most concerned about getting the key biographical data
they needed for their name checks.
Three of the 19 hijackers submitted applications that contained false statements that could
have been proven to be false at the time they applied. The applications of Hani Hanjour,
Saeed al Ghamdi, and Khalid al Mihdhar stated that they had not previously applied for a
U.S. visa when, in fact, they had. In Hanjour's case the false statement was made in
conjunction with an earlier visit, in 1997, not his final visa application in 2000. Hanjour
and al Mihdhar also made a false statement about whether they had previously traveled to
the United States.
We do not know whether these false statements were made in furtherance of the terrorist
plot. They might have been trying to hide the fact they had previously traveled using
different passports. But the false statements might have been the result of language
problems or incorrect filling out of the form by a third party facilitator, a common
practice for Saudi citizens.
Had these false statements been discovered and questioned, the three individuals might
have reassured U.S. officials if they had admitted their prior visas and travel, and claimed
the statements were inadvertent or made by a travel agent. Why would this be
reassuring? Because it would have shown they had gone to the U.S. and returned,
reducing any concern that they might be intending immigrants. But the discovery of the
false statements could well have led at least to an interview on this topic. And such an
interview carries with it some small chance that one of the men might have slipped or
revealed some other worrying clue.
Al Mihdhar's case is still more problematical. While it is true he had not been entered
into the TIPOFF watchlist at the time of his second visa application in June 2001, the
post had other sources of derogatory information about him. In January 2000 the
American consulate in Jeddah had been asked about al Mihdhar's visa status in
conjunction with a then urgent terrorist intelligence investigation. U.S. officials at that
consulate and at the Embassy, in Riyadh, responded helpfully. So when al Mihdhar
applied again, the routine check against the worldwide TIPOFF watch list took place.
But no system them in place included a notation of the prior check. Thus, in effect, the
post - as an institution ~ could not 'remember' relevant suspicions a year and a half
earlier about this same person, who was traveling again with the same biographical
information.
At most, two of the hijackers were actually interviewed in person in connection with their
visa applications. Hanjour was interviewed twice. Satam al Suqami was apparently
interviewed in Riyadh. Another hijacker, Ahmed al Nami, was apparently interviewed
briefly, but just to clarify an entry on his application. The three consular officers
involved have some memory of these interviews. All stated that the reason for the
interview had nothing to do with terrorism. None thought that, if they had spent more
time on the interview, they would have come to any different conclusion about the
application. They saw nothing suspicious.
It is worth noting that several participants in the 9/11 plot tried to get visas, and failed.
This has not been publicized before. One story, which is that some of the terrorists or
would-be hijackers were on a terrorist watchlist, is untrue. None of these people were
denied visas on grounds related to terrorism or because their names were on a watchlist.
The participants in the plot who failed to get visas were Ramzi Binalshibh, Saeed al
Gamdi, Zakariya Essabar, and Abdul Aziz Ali. This Saeed al Gamdi has a name similar
to the Saeed al Ghamdi who became a hijacker. They are different people.
The State Department was and is deeply committed to keeping terrorists from getting
visas. The Department, and in particular Consular Affairs working with a little known
official named John Arriza in its Bureau of Intelligence and Research accomplished
groundbreaking work in building and sustaining the TEPOFF watchlist, the only true
terrorist watchlist in the U.S. government before 9/11.
We are troubled, however, that the Department and its Consular Affairs bureau states that
before 9/11 they did not believe that Saudi citizens were security risks. In this matter
they were essentially passive. Our research does not show that anyone formally told the
bureau that Saudi citizens were potential terrorists. So officials did not treat them that
way.
If the Consular Affairs bureau had tried to take more precautions, it would have
encountered some insurmountable budget realities. Visa applications rose by nearly a
third, another 2.5 million a year, just between 1998 and 2001. Trained staff did not rise
with it. The Congress had cut funding for Foreign Service officers during the 1990s,
especially the early 1990s. In Jeddah and Riyadh, for example, each consular officer had
responsibility for processing, on average, about 30,000 applications per year and
routinely interviewed about 200 people a day. When asking the Department of State and
Consular Affairs, indeed all of our border inspection services, to take a more proactive
role as part of our national security team, the budget context must be considered.
With a visa, a traveler can travel to a port of entry into the United States. There,
however, the traveler must seek admission into the U.S. from an inspector of what used to
be called the INS, an agency whose personnel now form part of DHS. We will refer to
INS in describing events before 9/11. The property being brought into the U.S. is
checked by inspectors of the U.S. Customs Service. This agency's personnel are now
also part of DHS.
The 19 hijackers entered the U.S. a total of 33 times. They arrived through ten different
airports, though more than half came in through Miami, JFK, or Newark. A visitor with
the usual tourist visa was usually admitted for a stay of six months. All the hijackers
were admitted for such stays, except one had a student visa and was admitted for a stay of
two years. Another only sought and was admitted for a stay of twenty days.
The four pilots passed through INS and Customs inspections a total of 1 7 times before
9/11. Hanjour attended school in the U.S. in three stints during the 1990s. His final
arrival was in December 2000, through the Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky airport, from
which he made his way to San Diego. The other three pilots, Atta, al Shehhi, and Ziad
Jarrah, initially came in May- June 2000 and arrived for the last time between May and
August 2001 . All made a number of trips abroad during their extended stays in the U.S.
Al Shehhi and Atta usually traveled together.
The other hijackers were less active travelers. Of the other 15, only Mihdar came, left,
and came again. Nawaf al Hazmi came in January 2000 with al Mihdhar and stayed. Al
Mihdhar left in June 2000. Ten of the others came in pairs between April and June 2001 . f V^-^ t ) S
Three more arrived through Miami on May 28. Al Mihdhar returned to the U.S. on July
4,2001.
For all these entries a primary INS inspector would work a lane of incoming travelers and
check the people and their passports. They would try to assess the person's demeanor.
No one noted any anomalies in these passports. The inspector would use the passport .i
data, especially if it was machine readable (and Saudi passports were)_tocheck various i>
INS and Customs databasesr~TKose databases would shTwlflfiee^sonwa* linked to
any prior violations^oi immigration law. ,. .
^ <v %Jv^ r
As mentioned above, 5 of the 19 hijackers entered the U.S. more than once. Sortie of
them had violate^ immigration law, but the INS did not know it.
Ziad Jarrah, who Iater^j3ik»ted United Airlines Flight 93 that crashed in Pennsylvania,
entered in June 2000 on a tourT§t-visa_andthen promptly enrolled in flight school. In
school for six months, he never filed an applfcatieft-to-cri ange-h4s4mmigration status from
tourist to student. Had the INS known he was out of status, they could have denied him _ v^
entry on any of the three subsequent occasions he departed and returned while he was a r> ^
student. /^
Marwan al Shehhi came in through Newark in late May 2000, followed a week later by ^
Mohammed Atta. Both came on tourist visas and soon entered flight school in Florida.
September they did file applications to change their status. Before 9/1 1 regulations
allowed tourists to change their status at any time, so they were legal. But they bo
tly overstayed their authorized periods of admission by at least a month. Attaand al
hehi}} then left and returned in January 2001, still on their tourist visas, because their
applications to change their status were still backlogged for action. But the INS did not
know when they had left the U.S. and therefore did not know about the overstays, so that
subject did not come up when they sought readmission.
10
Atta and al Shehhi did get some attention, though, because they said they were coming
back to finish flight school. This was untrue, since they had finished their prior flight
training and received their commercial pilot licenses the previous month. But their story
clashed with their attempt to reenter on tourist visas. The rules required them to get
proper student visas while they had been overseas. Their earlier pending application for a
change of status was considered abandoned once they left the U.S. Atta and al Shehhi
were referred by the primary inspectors to secondary inspection.
At secondary, more experienced inspectors could conduct longer interviews, check more
databases, take fingerprints, examine personal property, and call on other agencies for
help. The inspectors involved state they do not remember these encounters. The reports
indicate that both men told their story about going to flight school and their pending
applications for a change of status. In this case the secondary inspectors admitted
and al Shehhi as tourists. L.
A hijacker entering the U.S. for the first time, Saeed al Ghamdi, also was referred to
secondary immigration inspection when he arrived in late June 2001 . He had no address
on his 1-94 form. He spoke little English. He had a one-way ticket and about $500. The
inspector wondered whether he was a possible intending immigrant. Al Ghamdi finally
convinced the inspector that he was a tourist and had enough money.
May 2001, two of the hijackers were referred to customs secondary inspection.
Waleed al Shehri and Satam Suqami departed Florida for the Bahamas but were refused
admission. On his way back to the U.S., a customs officer conducting a pre-clearance in
the Bahamas referred al Shehri to a secondary inspection. Customs then released him to
return to the U.S. with Suqami. On Marwan al Shehhi's first entry into the U.S. a customs
officer referred him to secondary inspection, completed the inspection, and released him.
> ^^
We do know of one success by immigration secondary inspection that affected the 9/11
plot. An al Qaeda operative, Mgrnammy d al Kahtani, arrived at Orlando airport on
August 4, 2001. Mohammed Atta was waiting there to meet him. Kahtani was referred
to secondary inspection for reasons similar to the al Ghamdi case mentioned above. He .a
then encountered an experienced and dedicated inspector, Jose Metendez-Perez. We will -
hear his story later this morning. V__[ fox^f (JLA, <^fa t * *\4 (&'
At least six 9/11 hijackers violated immigration laws ounng their stays in the United
States. Earlier we mentioned Ziad Jarrah's failure to adjust his status while he was in
flight school and the violations by Atta and al Shehhi. Hani Hanjour came on a student
visa in December 2000 but then did not attend a school. Nawaf al Hazmi overstayed his
term of admission by nine months. Satam al Suqami overstayed his term of admission by
four months. None of these violations were detected or acted upon by INS inspectors or
agents.
Two programs might have helped detect such violations. One dealt with violations of
student status. The other dealt with overstays. Both programs had stalled during the
1990s.
11
National security concerns about foreign students are not new. By the late 1980s the INS
established a Student/School System to track students, but the system did not work. After
the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, when it was discovered that a participant in the
plot had been a student who had overstayed his visa, the Department of Justice asked INS
to devise a better way to track students. INS officials recommended a new student
tracking system and a student ID card that used biometric identifiers.
In 1996 Congress authorized a system to be installed by 1998, but then did not
appropriate the money to build it. The INS nonetheless scraped together $10 million and
launched a successful pilot program in the Atlanta area in June 1997. It included 21
schools, including a flight school. Officials at the NSC, at CIA, and at FBI were
interested in the project. A year later it was readied for national development.
The education of foreign students is a multibillion dollar business that serves a variety of
academic and commercial interests, as well as important international goals. Advocates
of those interests were troubled by this pilot project to track foreign students, arguing that
it would be burdensome and costly for all involved. In 1998 the testing of the biometric
student ID card was postponed. The project's manager was replaced. The program
stalled. Senators took an interest in repealing the 1996 law and obstructing further INS
funding for it. Thus, when the 9/11 hijackers were entering the U.S. in 2000 and 2001,
there was no student tracking system available to detect those violations of immigration
law.
The INS also began working in the late 1980s on a system to track the entry and exit of
foreign visitors, at the time of the creation of the visa waiver program. In 1996 the
Congress passed a law requiring the Attorney General to develop an automated entry and
exit program to collect records on every alien arriving and departing the United States.
Principally concerned about illegal economic migration across the southern border,
Congress had appropriated $40 million for this program by 1998.
Millions of people cross America's borders. Advocates for border communities were
concerned about the adoption of such an entry-exit tracking system, fearing interference
with trade and routine movement. INS officials decided to forego such a system at the
land borders. They also decided to automate only the entry process, but the first efforts to
automate the 1-94 form were not successful. Hence the program Congress had envisioned
in 1996 did not exist in 2001. It is notable that, in August 2001, once it was realized that
Nawaf al Hazmi also had entered in the United States in January 2000 with Khalid al
Mihdhar, there was no INS system that could determine whether al Hazmi had left or was
still here.
The Department of Homeland Security has recently announced the installation of the first
stage of new entry-exit tracking system, called US VISIT, at airports and some seaports.
We are not yet ready to evaluate the design of this new system.
12
We must also add that any discussion of the enforcement of immigration laws must be
seen in the context of a much larger policy debate about immigration policy. Before 9/11
the INS had about 2,000 agents. The top enforcement priority was to remove aliens with
criminal records from the United States. Absent some other factor, someone's overstay
in the U.S. might not have attracted much enforcement attention, even if a system had
been in place to detect it. Our purpose is not to pass judgments about U.S. immigration
policy. What we can do is highlight, again, the way those policy choices affected the war
on terrorism before 9/11, and can affect the war on terrorism today.
Conclusion
The Director of the FBI testified that "[e]ach of the hijackers ... came easily and lawfully
from abroad." The Director of Central Intelligence described 17 of the 19 hijackers as
"clean." We believe the information we have provided today gives the Commission the
opportunity to reevaluate those statements. We looked at the travel documents that were
being used, the visa process, the entries into the U.S., and the compliance with
immigration law while the attackers were here.
We believe that terrorists are most vulnerable when they move or communicate. The two
vulnerabilities are linked, since a common response to concern about communications is
to travel and meet individuals in person. Problems in traveling, in turn, can lead to risky
communications. This happened in the 9/11 plot, but these vulnerabilities were not fully
exploited by our government.
In this statement and another later today, we hope we have shown that attention to
international rules for legitimate travel is essential for preventing easy mobility by
terrorists. A comprehensive approach to terrorist mobility, from intelligence collection,
to border management and international agreements, will offer excellent opportunities
against the criminal document forgers, clandestine travel facilitators and corrupt passport,
border, and transportation officials who provide the travel infrastructure that enables
terrorists to achieve their global reach.
13
WITHDRAWAL NOTICE
COPIES: 1 PAGES: 3
i ACCESS RESTRICTED i
The item identified below has been withdrawn from this file:
FROM:
TO:
WITHDRAWAL NOTICE
U.S. Immigration
and Customs
Enforcement
Top Smuggling Threats to the United States:
Targets of the NSC Working Group
Mehrzad H. Arbane
Ecuador-based Middle Eastern smuggler, narcotrafficker, and
licensed pilot. Owner of convenience store in Albany, New York,
where patrons were seen celebrating shortly after the World
Trade Center and Pentagon attacks.
Arrested in Ecuador on January 6, 2002.
Emna Laguna
Head of a Nicaragua-based alien smuggling organization responsible
transporting thousands of US-bound undocumented aliens to the US.
The investigation was initiated by INS/Tegucigalpa and worked jointly
with the governments of Nicaragua and Honduras.
Arrested in Nicaragua on December 12, 2002.
Dario Espejo
Mexico-based smuggler who moved US-bound Pakistani nationals,
Syrians, and other nationalities. Used contacts within Mexican
Immigration in Cancun to receive aliens from Havana and Moscow.
Arrested in Houston on April 21, 2002.
C,v Sourced Version
AGENCY COMMENTS: ADDITIONS and [DELETIONS]
Entry of the 9/11 Hij ackers Into the United States
Members of the Commission, your staff has developed initial findings on how the
individuals who carried out the 9/11 attacks entered the United States. We have also
developed initial findings on terrorists who failed in their efforts to enter the United
States. These findings lead us to some tentative judgments on the way the United States
targets the travel of international terrorists. These findings and judgments may help your
conduct of today's public hearing and will inform the development of your
recommendations.
The findings and judgments I report today are the results of our work so far. We remain
ready to revise our understanding of these topics as our work continues. This staff
statement represents the collective effort of several members of our staff. Susan
Ginsburg, Thomas Eldridge, and Janice Kephart-Roberts did most of the investigative
work reflected in this statement.
Our staff was fortunate. We could build upon a large and strong body of work carried out
by many talented public servants at the Department of State, the Central Intelligence
Agency, the former Immigration and Naturalization Service and the Department of
Homeland Security, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The American people
should be proud of the many extraordinary professionals now serving them. To the
extent we have criticisms, they are comments less on the talent available and more on
how that talent is used.
We do not begin with American law or policy. We begin by analyzing the terrorist
enemy. To an international terrorist, few topics are more important than where and how
they travel. Anyone immersed in the debriefings of al Qaeda terrorists will be struck by
how central this is, how vital to their tradecraft. The ability to travel and the character of
travel documents is one of the most important factors in operational recruitment,
including the recruitment of the 9/11 hijackers. It was a critical, perhaps the most
important, reason for reliance on so many Saudi citizens.
Think about the problem from their perspective. They live in places where they feel
relatively safe or anonymous. When they travel internationally, they must come to the
surface. They must pass, again and again, through portals of one kind or another where
they are examined by government agents. Only when they reach their destination can
they once again disappear into the "ocean."
Yet, for an international terrorist, travel is essential. Among the 9/11 hijackers it was the
pilots who traveled the most. Among the distant coordinators, Ramzi Binalshibh and
Khalid Sheikh Mohammed moved frequently from place to place. So al Qaeda devotes
enormous effort to travel issues. Before 9/11 a principal unit of the organization worked
I
Vll Law Enforcement Sensitive
9/11 Closed by Statute
on little else. Al Qaeda terrorists sought to hide their true identities and keep their travel
histories off the record.1 They did not want others to know, for example, that they had
visited suspect places like Afghanistan.2 They carefully planned how to acquire,
manipulate, and use travel documents like visas and passports.
Ease of entry to a country was, and is, a significant factor in terrorist operational
planning. They research entry rules and border processes to select the best documents
and entry points.
For these reasons we must be cautious in reaching conclusions about how much we know
about the passports or aliases the 9/11 attackers used. That said, four of the hijackers'
passports have survived in whole or in part. Two were recovered from the crash site of
United Airlines Flight 93 hi Pennsylvania. One belonged to a hijacker on American
Airlines Flight 11. It fluttered to the street after the plane hit the World Trade Center. A
passerby picked it up and gave it to an NYPD detective shortly before the World Trade
Center towers collapsed. A fourth passport was recovered from luggage that did not
make it from a Portland flight to Boston onto the connecting flight, which was American
Airlines 1 1 . In addition to these four, some copies of passport information were
recovered in a post-9/1 1 raid I I13, We have reviewed findings about all of
these documents available from records and (experts at the CIA, Department of Homeland
Security's Forensic Document Lab, and FBly^ lNy^ p^T «<?\jJHctJl
Let's pause for a moment and consider what this means for counterterrorism. We believe
that the development and analysis of terrorist travel intelligence of all kinds is of the first
importance. It is now seen as a niche effort, an interesting but not central focus that is
worked on by specialists here and there. Nevertheless, and very fortunately, the level of
systematic intelligence effort on such problems since 9/1 1 is vastly greater.
We think the conceptual breakthrough has not happened yet at the policy level. The
information developed by terrorist mobility specialists has not been fully absorbed by the
intelligence community as a whole, border inspection authorities, nor incorporated into
problem-solving with foreign governments through bilateral, regional and international
discussions. We hope this statement and the one later today will demonstrate that not
only intelligence, but policy about international travel rules, supporting documentation,
and border management is central to denying access by terrorists to countries that they
have targeted. Indeed, disrupting terrorist mobility is at least as important as disrupting
terrorist finances, and the opportunities and potential payoffs are probably greater. Its
place in the way we think about counterterrorism should be elevated accordingly.
To break down some of the travel problem, think about three stages. For most
international travel, a terrorist has to have a passport. For some countries, like the United
States, a terrorist also must obtain a document permitting him to visit. This is called a
visa. Finally the terrorist must actually enter the country and keep from getting detained
or deported by immigration or internal security officials.
Some of these problems can be evaded if a terrorist bypasses legal procedures and enters
the country surreptitiously, as do many illegal aliens who enter the United States from
Mexico and Canada. None of the 9/1 1 attackers entered or tried to enter the country this
way, though we know terrorists are considering coming through Mexico and some have
entered without inspection from Canada. [ I
j | We will start with passports and identity. We have handed out a list
of the names of 9/1 1 attackers to help you follow our discussion.
A word about passports. While some nations, including our own, dedicate significant
resources to passport security improvements, many nations continue to have weak
passport controls, and insecure travel documents. Cost is a factor. There is no
international forum dedicated solely to improving the security of passports^nor is there a
'
Aziz al Omari, presented doctored passports.14 To avoid getting into the classified
details, we will just state that these were "manipulated in a fraudulent manner." They
were manipulated in ways we believe trained U.S. officials wpuld be able to spot today as
revealing a direct link to al Qaeda. Since the passports of 15 of the hijackers did not
survive, we cannot make firm factual statements about their documents. But from what
We know about al Qaeda passport practices and information we believe it is possible that
six more of the hijackers presented passports that had some of these same clues to their
association with al Qaeda. \r kinds of passport markings can be highly sus
classified details, we will just call these "suspicious indicators." ;Two of the hijackers,
Khalid al Mihdhar and Salem al Hazmi, presented passports that had such suspicious
indicators.15 Again, we believe that today trained U.S. officials would be able to spot
these indicators and take appropriate action. I bach of these two
hij ackersF II possessed at least two passports.10 (1 I All
of their known passports had these suspicious indicators. We have evidence that three
other hijackers, Nawaf al Hazmi, Ahmed al Nami, and Ahmad al Haznawi may have
presented passports containing these suspicious indicators.17 But their passports did not
survive the attacks, so we cannot be sure.
Two of the Saudi 9/11 hijackers may have obtained their passports)
The obvious question is whether all of these characteristic manipulations and indicators
; were known to the U.S. government before 9/11. We are sure that word of any such
\s had not been circulated to the border inspection service officials who saw these
passports. As to whether the knowledge of these particular clues existed in the
intelligence community before 9/11, we do not yet know the answer to that question.
9/11 Closed by Statute
From the mid-1970s, when terrorists began to launch attacks in the Middle East and
Europe, intelligence and border authorities knew that terrorists used forged or altered
travel documents. Before 9/11 the FBI and CIA knew al Qaeda engaged in such
practices. They knew this from training manuals recovered in the mid-1990s. They
knew this from tracking and interrogating al Qaeda operatives. Some of this knowledge
was revealed in individual criminal cases prosecuted in the U.S. in the 1990s.
By the 1980s the CIA had developed a "Red Book" to guide and train consular,
immigration and customs officers on spotting terrorists. It includes photographs of
altered or stplen passports, and false travel stamps (also known as cachets) used by
terrorists. Unfortunately, to the best of our knowledge, the "Red Book" was last
published in 1992. Between 1992 and September 11, 2001, we cannot find evidence of
any centrally coordinated and systematic effort to create and distribute a set of telltale
clues that consular officers or immigration inspectors could use in order to spot al Qaeda
operatives or otherwise exploit al Qaeda's travel vulnerability. If this information had
been developed, the State Department, and the former Immigration and Naturalization
Service (INS) and the Customs Service, whose personnel are now part of DHS, could
have established the capacity for training and alerting their officers in the field. Before
9/11 these agencies' efforts focused mainly on traditional immigration enforcement and
organized visa fraud rings. 1
Since 9/11 this picture has improved. We have not completed our factual evaluations of
these improvements. The CIA is working aggressively to collect and use intelligence
related to terrorist mobility. The Department of State is incorporating new information
into their processes, as is the Department of Homeland Security. As we finish our
evaluation of these efforts the Commission should consider possible policy
recommendations in this area.
Visas
Before 9/11, and today, the State Department is principajlj^fesponsible for administering
U.S. immigration laws outside of the United States-^Coranch of our diplomatic corps,
consular officers, issue several kinds of visas forXisitors and for permanent immigrants,
hi 2000 these diplomats processed about 10 mimon applications for visitors' visas at
about 230 posts overseas. The U.S. hm ngrsamonto Tilth a number of countriesin "fhi^h
iftir ffitinitnf! anrl niiri Hr> nnt np-eH tr> nhfain visas for a visit, None of the 9/11 hijackers
had passports from such countries, although other al Qaeda members have had such
passports.
A visa applicant provides their passport and a photograph. A State Department employee
checks the passport for any apparent questionable features. A Consular Officer could call
the applicant in for an interview. The applicant's essential information goes into a State
database. The information is then checked against a large "consular lookout" database,
which includes a substantial watchlist of known and suspected terrorists called TIPOFF.
Before 9/11, the main focus of the whole immigHraon system, including the visa process,
was to keep intending immigrants from improperly entering the United States. In the visa
process, the most common form of fraud^sto get a visa to visit the U.S. as a tourist and
then stay to work and perhaps become'a resident. So consular officers concentrate on
interviewing visa applicants whojart'they suspect might leave and not come back home.
In Saudi Arabia, before 9-H^ Saudi citizens were not seen as "bad risks" for becoming c, L-
unlawful immigrants. Jney rarely overstayed their visas or tried to work illegally mjke" .
U.S. The same was/tfue for citizens of the United Arab Emirates. So, wife-aojacrminor
JOBS, diplomats in both countries tended to screen applicants^gainstZTPOFF, but
notJnterview them unless there was something abounhdapplications that
seemed problematic. Visa applicants from these countries frequently had their
applications submitted by third parties, like travel agencies, and often would not fill out
their applications completely, beyond the biographical information needed for name
checks.
The U.S. posts in Saudi Arabia instituted the Visa Express program in June 2001. It had
little effect on visa outcomes. It required applicants to apply through travel agencies
instead of by mail or in person. One reason the program was established was to keep
crowds of people from congregating outside the posts, which was a security risk to die
posts and to the crowds themselves. We have found no evidence that the Visa Express
program had any effect on the interview or approval rates for Saudi applicants, or that it
reduced the scrutiny given to their applications. It actually lengthened the processing
time.
With the exception of Mexico, though, before 9/11, biometric information - like a
fingerprint - was not routinely collected from a visa applicant. Terrorists therefore easily
could exploit opportunities for fraud. We offer one example.
Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was the chief tactical planner and coordinator of the 9/11
attacks. He has a long history of terrorist activity. Before his capture in Pakistan in
March of 2003, he had long been sought by U.S. authorities and was indicted for terrorist
activity by federal authorities in the Southern District of New York in 1996.
Khalid Sheikh Mohammed obtained a visa to visit the United States on July 23,2001,
about six weeks before the 9/11 attacks. He did so using an alias, Abdulrahman al
Ghamdi. He did so with a Saudi passport, although he is not a Saudi citizen and we do
not believe he was even in Saudi Arabia at the time. He had someone else submit his
application and a photo ftnlrrn nf him in rliimiinf^TTnrnn^h the Visa Express program.22
However, there is no evidence that he ever used this visa to enter the United States.
/r
The hijackers obtained their visas over a ten year period) The terrorist pilots acquired
their visas in the year 2000. The others, with two exceptions, obtained their visas
between the fall of 2000 and June 2001. All told, beginning in 1997, and including
g/0 multiple visas, the 19 hijackers submitted 24 applications and received 23 visas. Two of
To the best of our knowledge, State consular officers followed their standard operating
procedures in every case. They checked their lookout database, including the TIPOFF
watchlist. At the time they applied for visas, none of these people - or at least none of
the identities given in their passports ~ were in the database. We will say more about this
in another staff statement later today.
Of these 24 visa applications, 4 were destroyed routinely along with other old documents
before their significance was known. We have reviewed the remaining 20. All the
hijackers sought tourist visas except for Hanjour, who obtained a student visa.
All 20 of these applications were incomplete in some way, in that a data field was left
blank or not answered fully. This did not affect the visa adjudication process because the
data left out was the kind of data often left out by applicants. The State officials
generally did not think these items were material to making a decision about whether to
issue the visa. Officials were most concerned about getting the key biographical data
they needed for their name checks.
Three of the 19 hijackers submitted applications that contained false statements that could
have been proven to be false at the time they applied. The applications of Hani Hanjour,
Saeed al Ghamdi, and Khalid al Mihdhar stated that they had not previously applied for a
U.S. visa when, in fact, they had. In Banjoul's case the false statement was made in
conjunction with an earlier visit, in 1997, not his final visa application in 2000. Hanjour
and al Mihdhar also made a false statement about whether they had previously traveled to
the United States.
We do not know whether these false statements were made in furtherance of the terrorist
plot. They might have been trying to hide the fact they had previously traveled using
different passports. But the false statements might have been the result of language
problems or incorrect filling out of the form by a third party facilitator, a common
practice for Saudi citizens.
Had these false statements been discovered and questioned, the three individuals might
have reassured U.S. officials if they had admitted their prior visas and travel, and claimed
the statements were inadvertent or made by a travel agent. Why would this be
reassuring? Because it would have shown they had gone to the U.S. and returned,
reducing any concern that they might be intending immigrants. But the discovery of the
false statements could well have led at least to an interview on this topic. And such an
interview carries with it some small chance that one of the men might have slipped or
revealed some other worrying clue.
Al Mihdhar's case is still more problematical. While it is true he had not been entered
into the TIPOFF watchlist at the time of his second visa application in June 2001, the
post had other sources of derogatory information about him. In January 2000 the
American consulate in Jeddah had been asked about al Mihdhar's visa status in
conjunction with a then urgent terrorist intelligence investigation. U.S. officials at that
consulate and at the Embassy, in Riyadh, responded helpfully. So when al Mihdhar
applied again, the routine check against the worldwide TIPOFF watch list i
But no system them in place included a notation of the prior check. ^TnusTin effect, the
post - as an institution ~ could not 'remember' relevant suspicions a year and a half
earlier about this same person, who was traveling again with the same biographical
informatior
At most, rtytfof the hijackers were actually interviewed in person in connection with their
visa applications. Hanjour was interviewed twice. Satam al Suqami was apparently
interviewed in Riyadh. Another hijacker, Ahmed al Nami, was apparently interviewed
briefly, but just to clarify an entry on his application. The three consular officers
involved have some memory of these interviews. All stated that the reason for the
interview had nothing to do with terrorism. None thought that, if they had spent more
time on the interview, they would have come to any different conclusion about the
application. They saw nothing suspicious.
It is worth noting that several participants in the 9/11 plot tried to get visas, and failed.
This has not been publicized before. >6ne story, which is that some of the terrorists or
would-be hijackers were on a terrorisfwatchlist, is untrue. None of these people were_
denied visas on grounds related to terrorism or because their names were on a watchlist. \I •
Participants in the plot who failed/toget visas [were] included Ramzi Binalshibh, Saeed
al Gamdi, Zakariya Essabar, andAbdul Aziz Ali. This Saeed al Gamdi has a name
similar to the Saeed al Ghamdi who became a hijacker. They are different people.LINK
TO PLOT NEEDS TO BE DECLASSIFIED./
The State Department was and is deeply committed to keeping terrorists from getting
visas. The Department, and in particular Consular Affairs working with a little known
official named John Arriza in its Bureau of Intelligence and Research accomplished
groundbreaking work in building and sustaining the TIPOFF watchlist, the only true
terrorist watchlist in the U.S. government before 9/11.
We are troubled, however, that the Department and its Consular Affairs bureau states that
before 9/11 they did not believe that Saudi citizens were security risks. In this matter
they were essentially passive. Our research does not show that anyone formally told the
bureau that Saudi citizens were potential terrorists. So officials did not treat them that
way.
If the Consular Affairs bureau had tried to take more precautions, it would have
encountered some insurmountable budget realities. Visa applications rose by nearly a
third, another 2.5 million a year, just between 1998 and 2001. Trained staff did not rise
with it. The Congress had cut funding for Foreign Service officers during the 1990s,
especially the early 1990s. Li Jeddah and Riyadh, for example, each consular officer had
responsibility for processing, on average, about 30,000 applications per year and
routinely interviewed about 200 people a day. When asking the Department of State and
Consular Affairs, indeed all of our border inspection services, to take a more proactive
role as part of our national security team, the budget context must be considered.
With a visa, a traveler can travel to a port of entry into the United States. There,
however, the traveler must seek admission into the U.S. from an inspector of what used to
be called the INS, an agency whose personnel now form part of DHS. We will refer to
INS in describing events before 9/11. The property being brought into the U.S. is
checked by inspectors of the U.S. Customs Service. This agency's personnel are now
also part of DHS.
When flights from abroad arrive at a port of entry in the U.S., the INS guidelines called
for a total processing time of about 20 minutes from point of debarkation. In this time,
the inspector usually had about one to one and a half minutes to size up the person and
make a decision on admissibility and length of stay.
The four pilots passed through INS and Customs inspections a total of 17 times before
9/11. Hanjour attended school in the U.S. in three stints during the 1990s, His final
arrival was in December 2000, through the Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky airport, from
which he made his way to San Diego. The other three pilots, Atta, al Shehhi, and Ziad
Jarrah, initially came in May-June 2000 and arrived for the last time between May and
August 2001. All made a number of trips abroad during their extended stays in the U.S.
A+flfaefahi and Atta Dually travglad toprthrr o
The other hijackers were less active travelers. Of the other 15, only Mihdar came, left,
and came again. Nawaf al Hazmi came in January 2000 with al Mihdhar and stayed. Al
Mihdhar left in June 2000. Ten of the others came in pairs between April and June 2001.
Three more arrived through Miami on May 28. Al Mihdhar returned to the U.S. on July
4,2001.
For all these entries a primary INS inspector would work a lane of incoming travelers and
check the people and their passports. They would try to assess the person's demeanor.
No one noted any anomalies in these passports. The inspector would use the passport
data, especially if it was machine readable (and Saudi passports were) to check various
INS and Customs databases. Those databases would show if the person was linked to
any prior violations of immigration law.
As mentioned above, 5 of the 19 hijackers entered the U.S. more than once. Some of
them had violated immigration law, but the INS did not know it| ~1
1 ' ..,..--""
Ziad Jarrah, who later piloted United Airlines Flight 93 that crashed in Pennsylvania,
entered in June 2000 on a tourist visa and then promptly enrolled in flight school. In
school for six months, he never filed an application to change his immigration status from
tourist to student. Had the INS known he was out of status, they could have denied him
entry on any of the three subsequent occasions he departed and returned while he was a
student.
Marwan al Shehhi came in through Newark in late May 2000, followed a week later by
Mohammed Atta. Both came on tourist visas and soon entered flight school in Florida.
In September they did file applications to change their status. Before 9/11 regulations
Atta and al Shehhi did get some attention, though, because both [they] said they were
coming back to finish flight school. This was untrue, since each [they] had finished his
[their] prior flight training and received a [their] commercial pilot licenses the previous
month. But their story clashed with their attempt to reenter on tourist visas. The rules
required them to get proper student visas while they had been overseas. Their earlier
pending application for a change of status was considered abandoned once they left the
U.S. Atta and al Shehhi were referred by the primary inspectors to secondary inspection.
At secondary, more experienced inspectors could conduct longer interviews, check more
databases, take fingerprints, examine personal property, and call on other agencies for
help. The inspectors involved state they do not remember these encounters. The reports
indicate that both men told their story about going to flight school and their pending
applications for a change of status. In this case the secondary inspectors admitted Atta
and al Shehhi as tourists.
A hijacker who may have been entering the U.S. for the first time, Saeed al Ghamdi, also
was referred to secondary immigration inspection when he arrived in late June 2001. He
had no address on his 1-94 form. He spoke little English. He had a one-way ticket and
about $500. The inspector wondered whether he was a possible intending immigrant. Al
Ghamdi finally convinced the inspector that he was a tourist and had enough money.
In May 2001, two of the hijackers were referred to customs secondary inspection.
Waleed al Shehri and Satam Suqami departed Florida for the Bahamas but were refused
admission. On his way back to the U.S., a customs officer conducting a pre-clearance in
the Bahamas referred al Shehri to a secondary inspection. Customs then released him to
return to the U.S. with Suqami. On Marwan al Shehhi's first entry into the U.S. a customs
officer referred him to secondary inspection, completed the inspection, and released him.
We do know of one success by immigration secondary inspection that affected the 9/11
plot. An al Qaeda operative, Mohammad al Kahtani, arrived at Orlando airport on
August 4,2001. Evidence strongly suggests that Mohammed Atta was waiting there to
meet him. Kahtani was referred to secondary inspection for reasons similar to the al
Ghamdi case mentioned above. He then encountered an experienced and dedicated
inspector, Jose Melendez-Perez. We will hear his story later this morning.
At least six 9/11 hijackers violated immigration laws during their stays in the United
States. Earlier we mentioned Ziad Jarrah's failure to adjust his status while he was in
flight school and the violations by Atta and al Shehhi. Hani Hanjour came on a student
1/isch
visa in December 2000 but then did not attend/f school. Nawaf al Hazmi overstayed his
term of admission by nine months. Satam al Suqami overstayed his term of admission by
four months. None of these violations were detected or acted upon by INS inspectors or
agents.
Two programs might have helped detect such violations. One dealt with violations of
student status. The other dealt with overstays. Both programs had stalled during the
1990s.
National security concerns about foreign students are not new. By the late 1980s the INS
established a Student/School System to track students, but the system did not work. After
the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, when it was discovered that a participant in the
plot had been a student who had overstayed his visa, the Department of Justice asked INS
to devise a better way to track students. INS officials recommended a new student
tracking system and a student ID card that used biometric identifiers.
In 1996 Congress authorized a system to be installed by 1998, but then did not
appropriate the money to build it. The INS nonetheless scraped together $10 million and
launched a successful pilot program in the Atlanta area in June 1997. It included 21
schools, including a flight school. Officials at the NSC, at CIA, and at FBI were
interested in the project. A year later it was readied for national development.
The education of foreign students is a multibillion dollar business that serves a variety of
academic and commercial interests, as well as important international goals. Advocates
of those interests were troubled by this pilot project to track foreign students, arguing that
it would be burdensome and costly for all involved. In 1998 the testing of the biometric
student ID card was postponed. The project's manager was replaced. The program
stalled. Senators took an interest in repealing the 1996 law and obstructing further INS
funding for it. Thus, when the 9/11 hijackers were entering the U.S. in 2000 and 2001,
there was no student tracking system available to detect those violations of immigration
law.
The INS also began working in the late 1980s on a system to track the entry and exit of
foreign visitors, at the time of the creation of the visa waiver program. In 1996 the
Congress passed a law requiring the Attorney General to develop an automated entry and
exit program to collect records on every alien arriving and departing the United States.
Principally concerned about illegal economic migration across the southern border,
Congress had appropriated $40 million for this program by 1998.
Millions of people cross America's borders. Advocates for border communities were
concerned about the adoption of such an entry-exit tracking system, fearing interference
with trade and routine movement. INS officials decided to forego such a system at the
land borders. They also decided to automate only the entry process, but the first efforts to
automate the 1-94 form were not successful. Hence the program Congress had envisioned
in 1996 did not exist in 2001. It is notable that, in August 2001, once it was realized that
Nawaf al Hazmi also had entered in the United States in January 2000 with Khalid al
Mihdhar, there was no INS system that could determine whether al Hazmi had left or was
still here.
The Department of Homeland Security has recently announced the installation of the first
stage of new entry-exit tracking system, called US VISIT, at airports and some seaports.
We are not yet ready to evaluate the design of this new system.
We must also add that any discussion of the enforcement of immigration laws must be
seen in the context of a much larger policy debate about immigration policy. Before 9/11
the INS had about 2,000 agents. The top enforcement priority was to remove aliens with
criminal records from the United States. Absent some other factor, someone's overstay
in the U.S. might not have attracted much enforcement attention, even if a system had
been in place to detect it. Our purpose is not to pass judgments about U.S. immigration
policy. What we can do is highlight, again, the way those policy choices affected the war
on terrorism before 9/1 1 , and can affect the war on terrorism today.
Conclusion
The Director of the FBI testified that a[e]ach of the hijackers . . . came easily and lawfully
from abroad." The Director of Central Intelligence described 17 of the 19 hijackers as
"clean." We believe the information we have provided today gives the Commission the
opportunity to reevaluate those statements. We looked at the travel documents that were
being used, the visa process, the entries into the U.S., and the compliance with
immigration law while the attackers were here.
We believe that terrorists are most vulnerable when they move or communicate. The two
vulnerabilities are linked, since a common response to concern about communications is
to travel and meet individuals in person. Problems in traveling, in turn, can lead to risky
communications. This happened in the 9/11 plot, but these vulnerabilities were not fully
exploited by our government.
^ later today, we hope we have shown that attention to
In this statemfiuLan^-flfiother
internationaisrul^ for legitimate travel is essential for preventing easy mobility by
terrorists. A comprehensive approach to terrorist mobility, from intelligence collection,
to border management and international agreements, will offer excellent opportunities
against the criminal document forgers, clandestine travel facilitators and corrupt passport,
border, and transportation officials who provide the travel infrastructure that enables
terrorists to achieve their global reach.
1.
Members of the Commission, your staff has developed initial findings on how the
individuals who carried out the 9/1 1 attacks entered the United States. We have also
developed initial findings on terrorists who failed in their efforts to enter the United
States. These findings lead us to some tentative judgments on the way the United States
targets the travel of international terrorists.
This staff statement represents the collective effort of several members of our staff.
Susan Ginsburg, Thomas Eldridge, and Janice Kephart-Roberts did most of the
investigative work reflected in this statement.
We were able to build upon a large and strong body of work carried out by many talented
public servants at the Department of State, the Central Intelligence Agency, the former
Immigration and Naturalization Service and the Department of Homeland Security, and
the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The American people should be proud of the many
extraordinary professionals now serving them. To the extent we have criticisms, they are
comments less on the talent available and more on how that talent is used.
As we know from the sizable illegal traffic across our land borders, a terrorist could
attempt to bypass legal procedures and enter the U.S. surreptitiously. None of the 9/1 1
attackers entered or tried to enter our country this way. So today we will focus on the
hijackers' exploitation of legal entry systems. We have handed out a list of the names of
9/11 attackers to help you follow our discussion.
To break down some of al Qaeda's travel problem, view it from their perspective. For
most international travel, a terrorist has to have a passport. To visit some countries,
terrorists of certain nationalities must obtain a document permitting them to visit - a visa.
Finally the terrorist must actually enter the country and keep from getting detained or
deported by immigration or other law enforcement officials. Let us examine how the
hijackers' navigated these stages.
Passports
Four of the hijackers' passports have survived in whole or in part. Two were recovered
from the crash site of United Airlines Flight 93 in Pennsylvania, One belonged to a
hijacker on American Airlines Flight 1 1. A passerby picked it up and gave it to an
NYPD detective shortly before the World Trade Center towers collapsed. A fourth
passport was recovered from luggage that did not make it from a Portland flight to
Boston onto the connecting flight, which was American Airlines 1 1 . In addition to thesg_
four, some digital copies of the hijackers' passports were recovered in gf)ost-9/l 1
Two of the passports that have survived, those of Satam al Suqami and Abdul Aziz al
Oman, were clearly doctored. To avoid getting into the classified details, we will just
state that these were '"manipulated in a fraudulent manner." They were manipulated in
ways that trained U.S. officials would be able to spot today as reveaHhg a direct link to al
Qaeda. Since the passports of 15 of the hijackers did not surviveywe cannot make firm
factual statements about their documents. But from what we know about al Qaeda
passport practices and other information, we believe it is possjole that six more of the
hijackers presented passports that had some of these same cjues to their association with
al Qaeda.
Other kinds of passport markings can be highly suspicj6us. To avoid getting into the
classified details, we will just call these "suspicious indicators." Two of the hijackers,
Khalid al Mihdhar and Salem al Hazmi, presented Passports that had such suspicious
indicators. Again, we believe that today trained y/S.officials would be able to spot these
indicators and take appropriate action. Each of these two hijackers aggJcnown to-fcave-
possessed at least two passports. All of their kriown passports had these suspicious
indicators. We have evidence that three othei/bij ackers, Nawafal Hazmi, Ahmed al
Nami, and Ahmad al Haznawi may have presented passports containing these suspicious
indicators. But their passports did not survive the attacks, so we cannot be sure.
There were significant security weaknesses in the Saudi government's issuance of Saudi
passports in the period when the visas t» the hijackers were issued. Two of the Saudi 9/11
hijackers may have obtained their passports/""' "
We do not yet know the answer to tfte question whether the knowledge of these particular
clues existed in the intelligence community before 9/11. From the mid-1970s, when
terrorists began to launch attacks in the Middle East and Europe, intelligence and border
authorities knew that terrorists used forged or altered travel documents. By the 1980s the
*>* U.S. government had developed ar'Red Book'Vfb guide and tram consular, irrirnlgrarlSn
ana customs officerSjon spotting terrorists. It included photographs of altered or stolen
passports, and false travel stamps (also known as cachets) used by terrorists.
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Although thn ffrvprnmfnt nhn rmMithH a Pnifirtrrt Fyaminarimi Mnmial i^i
en rg ry deteetk>n"diid docmiicul inspection techniques tharrthe techniques
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'
Before 9/11, the FBI and CIA didjEnowtftSTal Qaeda engaged in such practices. They
knew this from ^ningninanualsrecovered in the mid-1990s, and from tracking and
mterrogatioas"oTal Qaeda operatives. Some of this knowledge was revealed in individual «t"
cases prosecuted in the U.S. in the 1990s. And vatt betwpm 199? smc\r
The State Department is principally responsible for administering U.S. immigration laws
outside of the United States. A branch of our diplomatic corps, consular officers, issue
r
several kinds of visas for visitors and for permanent imnligrants. In 2000, these
diplomats processed about 10 million applications fp/visitors' visas at over_200 posts
overseas. \}. •£•
Before 9-11, visa applicants provided their passport and a photograph. A State
Department employee checked the passport for any apparent questionable features. A
consular officer could call the applicant in for an interview. The applicant's essential
information went into a State Department database. The information was then checked
"against a large "consular lookout" database^ which included a substantial watchlist of
known and suspected terrorists, called TIPOFF.
Our immigration system before 9/11 focused primarily on keeping individuals intending
to immigrate from improperly entering the United States. In the visa process, the most
common form of fraud is to get a visa to visit the U.S. as a tourist and then stay to work
and perhaps become a resident. Consular officers concentrated on interviewing visa
applicants whom they suspected might leave and not return.
Saudi citizens rarely overstayed their visas or tried to work illegally in the U.S. The same
was true for citizens of the United Arab Emirates. So, wkh oomc minor variations, while
consular officials in both countries always screened applicants in fTIPOFF, they would CM-IT,
not interview them unless there was something about the applications that seemed
unuaual oy problematic.
Visa applicants from these countries frequently had their applications submitted by third
party facilitators, like travel agencies. In June 2001, the U.S. consular posts in Saudi
Arabia instituted a third party processing program, called Visa Express. It required
applicants to apply through designated travel agencies instead of by mail or in person.
The program was established in part to try to keep crowds of people from congregating
outside the posts, which was a security risk to the posts and to the crowds themselves.
We have found no evidence that the Visa Express program had any effect on the
interview or approval rates for Saudi applicants, or that it reduced the scrutiny given to
their applications. It actually lengthened the processing time.
With the exception of our consulates in Mexico, before 9/1 1 biometric information - like
a fingerprint - was not routinely collected from visa applicants. Terrorists therefore easily
could exploit opportunities for fraud. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was the chief tactical
planner and coordinator of the 9/1 1 attacks. Federal authorities in the Southern District
of New York indicted him in 1996. Yet, KSM, as he is known, obtained a visa to visit
the United States on July 23, 2001, about six weeks before the 9/11 attacks. Although he
is not a Saudi citizen and we do not believe he was in Saudi Arabia at the time, he applied
for a visa using a Saudi passport, and an alias, Abdurrahman al Ghamdi. He had_
someone else submit his application and a photo —taHn nf him in Ihrmrh th°
Visa Express program. There is no evidence that he ever used this visa to enter the
United States.
The 9/11 pilots acquired most of their/nsas in the year 2000. The others, with two
exceptions, obtained their visas between the fall of 2000 and June 2001. Beginning in
1997, the 19 hijackers submitted 24 applications and received 23 visas. Two of these
were issued in Berlin. Two were issued in the United Arab Emirates. The rest were
issued in Saudi Arabia. One o/the pilot's applications, that of Hani Hanjnur in -H\a/v\r 2000, w
his student visa application. It was-thea approved. Except for Hanjour, all the hijackers
sought tourist visas. ^t^ ^—€*_ _
Of these 24 visa applications, four were destroyed routinely along with other documents
before their significance was known.
To our knowledge, State consular officers followed their standard operating procedures in
every case. They performed a name check using their lookout database, including the
TIPOFF watchlist. At the time these people applied for visas, none of them - or at least
none of the identities given in their passports -- were in the database. We will say more
about this in another staff statement later today.
All 20 of these applications were incomplete in some way, in that a data field was left
blank or not answered fully. Such omissions were common. The consular officials
focused on getting the biographical data needed for name checks. They generally did not
think the omitted items were material to a decision about whether to issue the visa.
Three of the 19 hijackers submitted applications that contained false statements that could
have been proven to be false at the time they applied. The applications of Hani Hanjour,
Saeed al Ghamdi, and Khalid al Mihdhar stated that they had not previously applied for a
U.S. visa when, in fact, they had. In Hanjour's case the false statement was made in
conjunction with an earlier visit, in 1997, not his final visa application in 2000. Hanjour
and Mihdhar also made a false statement about whether they had previously traveled to
the United States. Information about these prior applications was retrievable at the Jeddah
post where each applied.
These false statements may have been intentional, to cover up the applicants' travel on
old passports to suspect locations like Afghanistan for terrorist training. On the other
hand, these statements may have been inadvertent. During this period, Saudi citizens
often had their applications filled out and submitted by third parties. Most importantly,
evidence of the prior visas or travel to the U.S. actually would have reduced concern that
the applicants were intending to immigrate, so they had no good reason to deny the visas
or travel.
Al Mihdhar's case is uniquely problematical. He had not been entered into the TIPOFF
watchlist at the time of his second visa application in June 2001. In January 2000 the
American consulate in Jeddah had been asked about Mihdhar's visa status in conjunction
with a then urgent terrorist intelligence investigation and confirmed that this al Qaeda
operative had a U.S. visa. When Mihdhar applied again, although the check against the
worldwide TIPOFF watchlist took place, no system then in place included a notation of
the prior visa status check. (Thus, in effect, the post could not 'remember' relevant
suspicions a year and a half earlier about this same person, who was traveling again with
the same biographical information.
At least two of the hijackers were actually interviewed in person in connection with their
visa applications. Hanjour was interviewed twice. Satam al Suqami was apparently
interviewed in Riyadh. Another hijacker, Ahmed al Nami, was apparently interviewed
briefly, but just to clarify an entry on his application. The three consular officers
involved have some memory of these interviews. All stated that the reason for the
interview had nothing to do with terrorism. They saw nothing suspicious.
At least four participants in the 9/11 plot trie4-toget visas^Snd failed: Ramzi Binalshibh,
Saeed al Gamdi, Zakariya Essabar, andtfwdul Aziz AH. This Saeed al Gamdi has a name
similar to the Saeed al Ghamdi who became a hijacker. They are different people.
Ramzi Binalshibh, a Yemeni, apparently intended to train as a pilot along with his
Hamburg friends, Mohammed Atta, Marwan al Shehhi, and ZiadJarrah. Binalshibh
applied for a visa three times in Berlin and once in Yemen. He first applied in Berlin on
the same day as Atta. He was interviewed twice and denied twice. Yemen is a much
poorer country than Saudi Arabia. Both times, consular officers determined he did not
have strong ties to Germany and he might be intending to immigrate unlawfully to the
U.S. Binalshibh tried again in Berlin, this time for a student visa to attend aviation
language school in Florida. He was denied again for lack of adequate documentation and
failure to show sufficient ties to Germany.
the 9/11 attacks. He is a Saudi and applied for a tourist visa in Jeddah on November 12,
2000, the same date as 9/11 hijacker Ahmad al Haznawi. Haznawi was approved, but al
Gamdi was denied, after an interview with a consular officer, because the consular officer
believed he was an intending immigrant.
WJO/3
Entry into and exit from the United States
With a visa, a traveler can travel to a United States port of entry. Upon arrival, the
individual must seek admission into the U.S. from an inspector of what used to be called
the INS, an agency whose personnel now form part of the Department of Homeland
Security. Property being brought into the U.S. is checked by inspectors of the U.S.
Customs Service, whose personnel are now also part of DHS.
The 19 hijackers entered the U.S. a total of 33 times. They arrived through ten different
airports, though more than half came in through Miami, JFK, or Newark. A visitor with a
tourist visa was usually admitted for a stay of six months. All but two of the hijackers
were admitted for such stays. Hanjour had a student visa and was admitted for a stay of
two years, and Suqami who sought and was admitted for a stay of 20 days.
The four pilots passed through INS and Customs inspections a total of 17 times before
9/11. Hanjour came to the U.S. to attend school in three stints during the 1990s. His
final arrival was in December 2000, through the Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky airport.
The other three pilots, Atta, al Shehhi, and Smd Jarrah, initially came in May tluiimfih o/v&L
June 2000. They arrived for the last time between May and August 2001. All made a
number of trips abroad during their extended stays in the U.S.
Of the other 15, only Mihdhar entered the U.S., left, and came in again. Nawaf al Hazmi
arrived in January 2000 with Mihdhar and stayed. Al Mihdhar left in June 2000 and
returned to the U.S. on July 4, 2001. Ten of the others came in pairs between April and
June 2001. Three more arrived through Miami on May 28.
The INS inspector usually had about one to oj*eand a half minutes to assess the traveler
and make a decision on admissibility and length of stay. For all the entries a primary INS
inspector would work a lane of incomingtravelers and check the people and their
passporfsTTr^y would try to assess ttte individual's demeanor. No one noted any
^ anomalies in these passports, despite the fact, we now believe, that at least two and as
many as eight showed evidence of fraudulent manipulation. The inspector would use the
passport data, especially if it was machine readable (and Saudi passports were) to check
various INS and Customs databases. The databases would show the person's
immigration history information, as well as terrorist watchlist and criminal history
information.
Three of the five hijackers who entered the U.S. more than once had violated immigration
law.
Zia d Jarrah entered in June 2000 on a tourist visa and then promptly enrolled in flight
school for six months. He never filed an application to change his immigration status
from tourist to student. Had the INS known he was out of status, they could have denied
him entry on any of the three subsequent occasions he departed and returned while he
was a student.
Marwan al Shehhi came in through Newark in late MayZOOO, followed a weekjatgfby
Mohammed Atta. Both came on tourist visas and soon entered flight schopMn Florida.
hi September they did file applications to chanaeiheir status. Befope-9/1 1, regulations
allowed tourists to change their status at any Mme, so they wepHfTcompliance. But both
overstayed their periods of admission and completed fliejafschool to obtain commercial
pilot licenses. Atta and al Shehhi then leftand returned /m January 2001, while their
change in visa status from tourist to student was still pending.
_-
Atta and al Shehhi did get some attentioh whenjfeey said they were coming back to finish
flight school. Primary inspectors noticed^that their story clashed with their attempt to
reenter on tourist visas. The rules required them to get proper student visas while they
had been overseas, since their earlier pending applicatior^for a change of status was
considered abandoned once they left the U.S. Atta and al Shehhi wereteferred by the
primary inspectors to secondary inspection.
At secondary, more experienced inspectors could conduct longer interviews, check more
databases, take fingerprints, examine personal property, and call on other agencies for
help. The inspectors involved state they do not remember these encounters. The reports
indicate that both men repeated their story about still going to flight school and their
pending applications for a change of status. The secondary inspectors admitted Atta and
al Shehhi as tourists.
Customs officers took a second look at two of the hijackers but then admitted them. On
Marwan al Shehhi 's first entry into the U.S. a customs officer referred him to secondary
inspection, completed the inspection, and released him. hi May 2001, Waleed al Shehri
and Satam Suqami departed Florida for the Bahamas but were refused admission. On
their way back to the U.S., a customs officer conducting a pre-clearance in the Bahamas
referred al Shehri to a secondary inspection. Customs then released al Sherhi to return to
the U.S. with Suqami.
We do know of one suce€ss ^ by immigration secondary inspection that affected the 9/1 1
plot. An al Qaeda/eperative, Mohammed al Kahtani, arrived at Orlando airport on
August 4, 2001. JMohammed Atta apparentffiwas waiting there to meet him. Kahtani
encountered an experienced and dedicated inspector, Jose Melendez-Perez. We will hear
his story later this morning.
During their stays in the U.S. at least six of the 9/1 1 hijackers violated immigration laws.
We have noted Jarrah 's failure to adjust his status while he was in flight school and the
violations by Atta and al Shehhi. Hani Hanjour came on a student visa in December
2000 but then did not attendTEnglish language school for which is visa was issued.
Nawafal Hazmi overstayed his term of admission by nine months. Suqami overstayed
his term of admission by four months. None of these violations were detected or acted
upon by INS inspectors or agents.
Two programs might have helped detect such violations. One dealt with violations of
student status. The other dealt with overstays.
National security concerns about foreign students are not new. By the late 1980s the INS
established a Student/School System to track students, but the system did not work. After
the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, when it was discovered that a participant in the
plot had been a student who had overstayed his visa, the Department of Justice asked INS
to devise a better way to track students. INS officials recommended a new student
tracking system and a student ID card that used biometric identifiers.
Congress required the Attorney General to develop an entry-exit system in 1996. The
system's purpose was to improve INS' ability to address illegal migration and overstays
of all types of foreign visitors. By 1998, Congress had appropriated about $40 million to
develop the system. Advocates for border communities, however, were concerned that
an entry-exit system would slow down trade. INS officials decided to forego the system
at the land borders and to only automate the entry process. The automation process was
not successful. The result was that when hijackers Suqami and Nawafal Hazmi
overstayed their visas, the system Congress envisaged did not exist. Moreover, when
federal law enforcement authorities realized in late August 2001 that Hazmi had entered
with Mihdhar in January 2000 at Los Angeles, they could not reliably determine whether
or not Hazmi was still in the United States.
Conclusion
The Director of the FBI testified that "[e]ach of the hijackers ... came easily and lawfully
from abroad." The Director of Central Intelligence described 17 of the 19 hijackers as
"clean." We believe the information we have provided today gives the Commission the
opportunity to reevaluate those statements. Based on our evaluation of the hijackers'
travel documents, the visa process, the entries into the U.S., and the compliance with
INDICATORS
C - visa HC - visa
Key: | Possible/Likely
Page 1 of 1
Susan Ginsburg
Susan:
Great job! The statement reads very well. I had a few substantive comments and some minor editorial
suggestions, which I'm relaying to you now at Chris K's request. Please feel free to give a call if any require
further explanation: \A(2/0
' full paragraph: The statements regarding Saudi passport issuance"couTdxwell raise expectations for proof
that's very delicate for us. What is the proof? Do we need to say thte?
, 3nd para: Based on what I know, it's a stretch to label Saeed ("Jihad") AI-Ghamdi a "participant" in the 9/11
suggest rephrasing the sentence to read "At least four individuals implicated in the 9/11 plot. . ."
f5, 4th para, second-to-last sentence: delete "language" from "aviation language school"
. /p.5, 6th para, first sentence: rephrase second half to read:". . . and was heavily involved in financial and logistical
v aspects o f . . . "
some para, last sentence: rephrase last sentence to read, "As a Pakistani visa applicant in a third country, he
\ywouldjiave received greater scrutiny from U.S. officials from the start; in any event, he was deemed a possible
intending immigrant and accordingly was denied a visa." " '
full para: delete "why" between "Suqami" and "sought" in last line
:ull para, 4th sentence: delete "Z/ad" (for consistency) and substitute "and" for "through"
5th full para, third sentence: rephrase to read: "The inspector would try to assess each individual's
V efenryeanor."
y 1/7, 5th para: insert "Flight 93 hijacker" at beginning of first sentence (to distinguish from "Jihad')
1 full para: rephrase last part of final sentence to read "no student tracking system was available . . . ."
pfi 1st para: I'm concerned that the last sentence and bullet points of the paragraph risk overstating the
N^vidence. Of particular concern is the fifth bullet. I suggest changing the lead-in to the bullets to read
"Considered collectively, the 9-11 hijackers . . ." and deleting "repeatedly" from the fifth bullet.
'9, 3rd para: suggested rephrasing of 4th sentence: "This is exemplified by the Bureau of Consular Affairs'
that before 9/11, the bureau was not informed . . . ."
same para, 7th sentence: rephrase to read "Trained staff numbers did not keep pace with the volume increase."
1/23/2004
9/11 Personal Privacy
Susan Ginsburg
From: Pat O'Brien ]. _ .J
Sent: Friday, January 23, 2004 12:55 PM
To: teldridge@9-11Comission.gov; Susan Ginsburg
Cc: Richard M. Kelly; Dan Levin
Subject: RE: comments on entry of 9/1 1 hijacker statement
—Original Message—
From: Pat O'Brien [mailtoC
Sent: Friday, January 23, 2004 12:05 PM
To: teldrklge@9-llCOmmlsslon.gov
Cc: Richard M. Kelly; Dan Levin
Subject: comments on entry of 9/11 hijacker statement
Page 2, Paragraphs 3/4 - While true in general for Al Qaeda operatives, should it be noted that most of the
methods were not known to be utilized by the 9/11 hijackers? Exceptions - Counterfeit travel stamps did
appear in the passports of Satam Al-Suqami and Abdul Aziz Alomari. Also, it is true that the 9/11 hijackers
sought to hide visits to places such as Afghanistan, however they often did so by reporting their old passport
as lost or stolen, and then obtained a new "clean" passport in their true name and date of birth.
age 3, Paragraph 1 - partial copies of hijacker passport information were also obtained from other places
M,g,1 9/11 Law Enforcement Sensitive [.
(Page 6, Paragraph 6 - Not accurate to say that passport photo of KSM was taken "in disguise", as he was in
itional Middle Eastern attire.
age 6, Paragraph 7 - "The hijackers obtained their visas over a ten year period" - While this is true overall,
Hanjour's entries into the U.S. in 1991,1996, and 1997 are not considered "operational".
'age 7, Paragraph 1 (top of page) - Hanjour's first visa application in September 2000 was not "denied ^ \
temporarily", it was denied. Hanjour then re-applied again for a visa after applying to language school in
^ California (which he never attended). This second application was approved. ^y
x yPage>8, Paragraph 2 - First sentence should read "At most, three of the hijackers ...."
\ /
e 8, Paragraph 5 - Full name is AH Abdul Aziz Ali.
'age 8, Paragraph 5 - 3rd sentence - Should read "He apparently intended to train as a pilot long with his
Hamburg friends, Mohammed Atta, Marwan al Shehhi, and Ziad Jarrah." - because Binalshibh had intended
to jfifin Jarrah in flight training at FFTC.
ge 8, Paragraph 5 - 6th sentence - Should read "He first applied in Berlin on or around the same day as
.tta." - there is a question of when then actual application of Atta was submitted.
8, Paragraph 5 - Essabar applied on two separate occasions hi Berlin, 12/12/2000 and 01/28/2001. The
i
first application was denied due to a lack of significant ties to Germany; the second application was never
acted upon. ry& kjy^^. PY^ \ U a
Tage 10, Paragraph 2 - "Al Shehhi and AttatJsually traveled together." - This is maccurate, as Atta and al
'Shehhi rarely travgleeHOgether domestically and never traveled togetHeToveri{eas.-:-~\
Page 11, Paragraph 6 - Should read "Hani Hanjour came on a student visa in December 2000 but then did
not atteoeTms intended school." - Because Hanjour did attend flight training during thatitime.
Department of State Comments Draft Staff Statement
"Entry of the Hijackers Into the United States"
On page 5, in the fourth paragraph, the sentence beginning, "The U.S. has
agreements." There is no legal agreement, but rather an "arrangement" based on
reciprocity - suggest replacement of the word "agreements" with "arrangements."
The same sentence as Comment 2, in the first paragraph under Visas: suggest
replacement of the entire sentence with "U.S. law allows nationals of certain countries
to enter without visas on a reciprocal basis."
n page 6, in the second paragraph, the sentence beginning, "So, with some...":
suggest the sentence read, "So, diplomats in both countries screened applicants
against CLASS, including TIPOFF, but tended not to interview them unless there was
something about their application that seemed problematic." The current phrasing
gives the impression that interviewing officers may not have conducted the required
namecheck, including TIPOFF.
On page 8, in the first paragraph, before the sentence beginning, "Thus, in effect...":
Suggest inserting an addition sentence reading, "Neither the investigating agency nor
the post had made the appropriate lookout entry."
On page 8, in the third paragraph, the sentence beginning, "One story...." This
sentence is misleading when compared with the assertions in "Aviation Security
Systems and the 9/11 Attacks," page 12, and "The Three Hijackers: Identification,
Watchlisting and Tracking," page 9, that the two of the hijackers were entered into
TIPOFF. Recommend clarification that the two hijackers in TIPOFF were entered
after the visas had already been issued to the individuals.
On page 13, in the fourth paragraph, in the first sentence: the term "international
rules," is an unclear concept.
UNCLASSIFIED
immigration law while the attackers were here, we have a few observations./Jhe 9-11
hijackers/ ' 4£>$£
• Included among them known al Qaeda operatives who could have been
watchlisted;
• Presented passports "manipulated in a fraudulent manner;"
• Presented passports with "suspicious indicators" of extremism;
• Made detectable false statements on their visa applications;
• Were repeated^ pulled out of the travel stream and given greater scrutiny by
border officials;
• Made false statements to border officials to gain entry to the U.S.; and
• Violated immigration laws while inside the U.S.
Why weren't they exploited? We do not have all the answers. Certainly neither the State
Department's consular officers nor the INS' inspectors and agents were ever considered
full partners in a national counterterrorism effort. This is exemplified by the fact that tho-
Bureau of Consular^ffairsjTjufoau states-that before 9/11 they were not informed by
anyone in the State Department or elsewhere that Saudi citizens could be security risks.
Nor were the Consular Affairs bureau or INS given the resources to perform an expanded
mission. Visa applications rose by riearjv_a_thrrd. increasing/2.5 milliona yeaf~jcrst ^y
between 1998 and 2001. Trained;staff did nofnfe with it. In Jeddah and Riyadh, for /
example, each consular officer had responsibility for processing, on average, about
30,000 applications per year and routinely interviewed about 200 people a day.
The INS before 9/11 had about 2,000 agents for interior enforcement. As long as the top
enforcement priorities were removal of criminal aliens and prosecution of employers who
hired illegal aliens, a major counterterrorism effort would not have been possible. This is
not to pass judgment on immigration policy generally. What we can do is highlight the
way those policy choices affected counterterrorism efforts before 9/11, and potentially
affect them today. For our front line border inspection services to have taken a
substantially more proactive role in counterterrorism, their missions would have had to
have been considered integral to our national security strategy and given commensurate
resources.
Today, the level of systematic effort by the intelligence community focused on terrorist
travel is much greater. But terrorist travel intelligence is still seen as a niche effort,
interesting for specialists, but not central to counterterrorism. Nor have policymakers
fully absorbed the information developed by terrorist mobility specialists.(JH*as-BGt-hfien
ted into proposals fm new international atandorda on pasgport copplo, raised frfMfla^*
ufpuialliLS fui duiuinuil fuifeuo, or roinvigoratod document oorooning efforts at ' °
the bofdersOtf we have one conclusion from our work so far, it is that disrupting terrorist
mobility globally is at least as important as disrupting terrorist finance as an integral part
of counterterrorism. i_ AZ> At>f\A., ii/\\tn\\M Lf-«f. «/VTP< ri^^nahcn^U&t,
Q/WjJ -ts*JtfC
Sourced Version2 Sources for ?ovt use only, to be taken out of public document
Members of the Commission, your staff has developed initial findings on how the
individuals who carried out the 9/11 attacks entered the United States. We have also
developed initial findings on terrorists who failed in their efforts to enter the United
States. These findings lead us to some tentative judgments on the way the United States
targets the travel of international terrorists.
This staff statement represents the collective effort of several members of our staff.
Susan Ginsburg, Thomas Eldridge, and Janice Kephart-Roberts did most of the
investigative work reflected in this statement.
We were able to build upon a large and strong body of work carried out by many talented
public servants at the Department of State, the Central Intelligence Agency, the former
Immigration and Naturalization Service and the Department of Homeland Security, and
the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The American people should be proud of the many
extraordinary professionals now serving them. To the extent we have criticisms, they are
comments less on the talent available and more on how that talent is used.
As we know from the sizable illegal traffic across our land borders, a terrorist could
attempt to bypass legal procedures and enter the U.S. surreptitiously. None of the 9/11
attackers entered or tried to enter our country this way. So today we will focus on the
hijackers' exploitation of legal entry systems. We have handed out a list of the names of
9/11 attackers to help you follow our discussion.
To break down some of al Qaeda's travel problem, view it from their perspective. For
most international travel, a terrorist has to have a passport. To visit some countries,
terrorists of certain nationalities must obtain a document permitting then to visit - a visa.
Finally the terrorist must actually enter the country and keep from getting detained or
deported by immigration or other law enforcement officials. Let us examine how the
hijackers' navigated these stages.
Passports
Four of the hijackers' passports have survived in whole or in part. Two were recovered
from the crash site of United Airlines Flight 93 in Pennsylvania. One belonged to a
hijacker on American Airlines Flight 11. A passerby picked it up and gave it to an
NYPD detective shortly before the World Trade Center towers collapsed. A fourth
passport was recovered from luggage that did not make it from a Portland flight to
Boston onto the connecting flight, which was American Airlines 11. hi addition to these
four, some digital copies of the hijackers' passports were recovered inaj 1
r r
'L
Other kinds of passport markings can be highly suspicious. To avoid getting into the
classified details, we will just call these "suspicious indicators." Two of the hijackers,
Khalid al Mihdhar and Salem alffazmi, presented passports that had such suspicious
indicators.3 Again, we believe that today trained U.S. officials would be able to spot
these indicators and take appropriate action. Each of these two hijackers are known to
have possessed at least two passports.4 All of their known passports had these suspicious
indicators. We have evidence that three other hijackers, Nawafal Hazmi, Ahmed al
Nami, and Ahmad al Haznawi may have presented passports containing these suspicious
indicators.5 But their passports did not survive the attacks, so we cannot be sure.
There were significant security weaknesses in the Saudi government's issuance of Saudi
passports in the period when the visas to the hijackers were issued. ^
We do not yet know the answer to the question whether the knowledge of these particular
clues existed in the intelligence community before 9/11. From the mid-1970s, when
terrorists began to launch attacks in the Middle East and Europe, intelligence and border
authorities knew that terrorists used forged or altered travel documents. By the 1980s the
U.S. government had developed a "Red Book" to guide and train consular, immigration
and customs officers on spotting terrorists. It includes photographs of altered or stolen
passports, and false travel stamps (also known as cachets) used by terrorists.
Unfortunately, to the best of our knowledge, the "Red Book" was last published in 1992.
Before 9/11, the FBI and CIA did know that al Qaeda engaged in such practices. They
knew this from training manuals recovered in the mid-1990s, and from tracking and
interrogations of al Qaeda operatives. Some of this knowledge was revealed in individual
criminal cases prosecuted in the U.S. in the 1990s. And yet, between 1992 and September
11,2001, we have not found any sign that information about al Qaeda or other terrorist
Visas
The State Department is principally responsible for administering U.S. immigration laws
outside of the United States. A branch of our diplomatic corps, consular officers, issue
several kinds of visas for visitors and for permanent immigrants. In 2000, these
diplomats processed about 10 million applications for visitors' visas at over 200 posts
overseas.
Before 9-11, a visa applicant provided their passport and a photograph. A State
Department employee checked the passport for any apparent questionable features. A
consular officer could call the applicant in for an interview. The applicant's essential
information went into a State database. The infonnation was then checked against a large
"consular lookout" database, which included a substantial watchlist of known and
suspected terrorists, called TIPOFF.
Our immigration system before 9/11 focused primarily on keeping intending immigrants
from improperly entering the United States. In the visa process, the most common form
of fraud is to get a visa to visit the U.S. as a tourist and then stay to work and perhaps
become a resident. Consular officers concentrated on interviewing visa applicants whom
they suspected might leave and not come return.
Saudi citizens rarely overstayed their visas or tried to work illegally in the U.S. The same
was true for citizens of the United Arab Emirates. So, with some minor variations, while
consular officials in both countries always screened applicants in TIPOFF, they would
not interview them unless there was something about the applications that seemed
unusual or problematic.
Visa applicants from these countries frequently had their applications submitted by third
party facilitators, like travel agencies. In June 2001, the U.S. consular posts in Saudi
Arabia instituted a third party processing program, called Visa Express. It required
applicants to apply through designated travel agencies instead of by mail or in person.
The program was established in part to try to keep crowds of people from congregating
outside the posts, which was a security risk to the posts and to the crowds themselves.
We have found no evidence that the Visa Express program had any effect on the
interview or approval rates for Saudi applicants, or that it reduced the scrutiny given to
their applications. It actually lengthened the processing time.
With the exception of our consulates in Mexico, before 9/11 biometric infonnation - like
afingerprint- was not routinely collected from visa applicants. Terrorists therefore easily
could exploit opportunities for fraud. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was the chief tactical
planner and coordinator of the 9/11 attacks. Federal authorities in the Southern District
of New York indicted him in 1996. Yet, KSM, as he known, obtained a visa to visit the
United States on July 23,2001, about six weeks before the 9/11 attacks. Although he is
not a Saudi citizen and we do not believe he was in Saudi Arabia at the time, he applied
for a visa using a Saudi passport, and an alias, Abdulrahman al Ghamdi. He had
someone else submit his application and a photo - taken of him in disguise - through the
Visa Express program.8 There is no evidence that he ever used this visa to enter the
United States. He was captured in Pakistan in 2003.
The 9/11 pilots acquired most of their visas in the year 2000. The others, with two
exceptions, obtained their visas between the fall of 2000 and June 2001. Beginning in
1997, the 19 hijackers submitted 24 applications and received 23 visas. Two of these
were issued in Berlin. Two were issued in the United Arab Emirates. The rest were
issued in Saudi Arabia. One of the pilot's applications, that of Hani Hanjour in
September 2000, was denied temporarily until he produced more evidence hi support of
his student visa application. It was then approved. Except for Hanjour, all the hijackers
sought tourist visas.
Of these 24 visa applications, four were destroyed routinely along with other documents
before their significance was known.
To our knowledge, State consular officers followed then* standard operating procedures in
every case. They performed a name check using their lookout database, including the
TIPOFF watchlist. At the time they applied for visas, none of these people - or at least
none of the identities given in their passports - were in the database. We will say more
about this in another staff statement later today.
All 20 of these applications were incomplete in some way, in that a data field was left
blank or not answered fully. Such omissions were common. The State officials focused
on getting the biographical data needed for name checks. They generally did not think the
omitted items were material to a decision about whether to issue the visa.
Three of the 19 hijackers submitted applications that contained false statements that could
have been proven to be false at the time they applied. The applications of Hani Hanjour,
Saeed al Ghamdi, and Khalid al Mihdhar stated that they had not previously applied for a
U.S. visa when, in fact, they had. In Hanjour's case the false statement was made in
conjunction with an earlier visit, in 1997, not his final visa application in 2000. Hanjour
and al Mihdhar also made a false statement about whether they had previously traveled to
the United States. Information about these prior applications was retrievable at the Jeddah
post where each applied.
These false statements may have been intentional, to cover up for the applicants' travel
on old passports to suspect locations like Afghanistan for terrorist training. On the other
hand, these statements may have been inadvertent During this period, Saudi citizens
often had their applications filled out and submitted by third parties. Most importantly,
evidence of the prior visas or travel to the U.S. actually would have reduced concern that
the applicants were intending immigrants, so they had no good reason to deny the visas or
travel.
At least two of the hijackers were actually interviewed in person in connection with their
visa applications. Hanjour was interviewed twice. Satam al Suqami was apparently
interviewed in Riyadh. Another hijacker, Ahmed al Nami, was apparently interviewed
briefly, but just to clarify an entry on his application. The three consular officers
involved have some memory of these interviews. All stated that the reason for the
interview had nothing to do with terrorism. They saw nothing suspicious.
At least four participants in the 9/11 plot tried to get visas, and failed: Ramzi Binalshibh,
Saeed al Gamdi, Zakariya Essabar, and Abdul Aziz Ali. This Saeed al Gamdi has a name
similar to the Saeed al Ghamdi who became a hijacker. They are different people.
Ramzi Binalshibh, a Yemeni, apparently intended to train as a pilot along with his
Hamburg friends, Mohammed Atta and Marwan al Shehhi. Binalshibh applied for a visa
three times in Berlin and once in Yemen. He first applied in Berlin on the same day as
Atta. He was interviewed twice and denied twice. Yemen is a much poorer country than
Saudi Arabia. Both times, consular officers determined he did not have strong ties to
Germany and he might be intending to immigrate unlawfully to the U.S. Binalshibh tried
again in Berlin, this time for a student visa to attend aviation language school in Florida.
He was denied again for lack of adequate documentation and failure to show sufficient
ties to Germany.
Essabar, a Moroccan who may also have intended to be a pilot, tried to get a visa in
Berlin and failed because he failed to demonstrate sufficient ties to Germany, such as a
job or family there. In general, third country visa applicants hi Berlin were held to
significantly higher standards in terms of documentation and a required showing of ties
than were Saudi and Emirati citizens applying from their own countries.
Abdul Aziz Ali may be related to Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and was heavily involved in
the financial side of the 9/11 plot.9 He tried to get a U.S. visa in Dubai about two weeks
before the attacks. His visa application states that he intended to enter the U.S. on
September 4,2001, for one week. As a Pakistani in a third country, U.S. officials would
have been dubious from the start, and he was denied as a possible intending immigrant.
With a visa, a traveler can travel to a United States port of entry. Upon arrival, the
individual must seek admission into the U.S. from an inspector of what used to be called
the INS, an agency whose personnel now form part of the Department of Homeland
Security. Property being brought into the U.S. is checked by inspectors of the U.S.
Customs Service, whose personnel are now also part of DHS.
The 19 hijackers entered the U.S. a total of 33 times. They arrived through ten different
airports, though more than half came in through Miami, JFK, or Newark. A visitor with a
tourist visa was usually admitted for a stay of six months. All but two of the hijackers
were admitted for such stays. Hanjour had a student visa and was admitted for a stay of
two years, and Suqami who sought and was admitted for a stay of 20 days.
The four pilots passed through INS and Customs inspections a total of 17 times before
9/11. Hanjour came to the U.S. to attend school in three stints during the 1990s. His
final arrival was in December 2000, through the Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky airport.
The other three pilots, Atta, al Shehhi, and ZiadJarrah, initially came in May through
June 2000. They arrived for the last time between May and August 2001. All made a
number of trips abroad during their extended stays in the U.S.
Of the other 15, only Mihdhar entered the U.S., left, and came in again. Nawafal Hazmi
arrived in January 2000 with Mihdhar and stayed. Al Mihdhar left in June 2000 and
returned to the U.S. on July 4,2001. Ten of the others came in pairs between April and
June 2001. Three more arrived through Miami on May 28.
The INS inspector usually had about one to one and a half minutes to assess the traveler
and make a decision on admissibility and length of stay. For all the entries a primary ENS
inspector would work a lane of incoming travelers and check the people and their
passports. They would try to assess the individual's demeanor. No one noted any
anomalies in these passports, despite the fact, we now believe, that at least two and as
many as eight showed evidence of fraudulent manipulation. The inspector would use the
passport data, especially if it was machine readable (and Saudi passports were) to check
various INS and Customs databases. The databases would show the person's
immigration history information, as well as terrorist watchlist and criminal history
information.
Three of the five hijackers who entered the U.S. more than once had violated immigration
law our pilots violated the terms of their admission,
Marwan al Shehhi came in through Newark in late May 2000, followed a week later by
Mohammed Atta. Both came on tourist visas and soon entered flight school in Florida.
In September they did file applications to change their status. Before 9/11, regulations
allowed tourists to change their status at any time, so they were legal. But both
overstayed their periods of admission and completed flight school to obtain commercial
pilot licenses. Atta and al Shehhi then left and returned in January 2001, still on their
tourist visas. Their applications to change their status were still backlogged for action.
Atta and al Shehhi did get some attention when they said they were coming back to finish
flight school. But primary inspectors noticed their story clashed with their attempt to
reenter on tourist visas. The rules required them to get proper student visas while they
had been overseas, since their earlier pending application for a change of status was
considered abandoned once they left the U.S. Atta and al Shehhi were referred by the
primary inspectors to secondary inspection.
At secondary, more experienced inspectors could conduct longer interviews, check more
databases, take fingerprints, examine personal property, and call on other agencies for
help. The inspectors involved state they do not remember these encounters. The reports
indicate that both men repeated their story about still going to flight school and their
pending applications for a change of status. The secondary inspectors admitted Atta and
al Shehhi as tourists.
Customs officers took a second look at two of the hijackers but then admitted them. On
Marwan al Shehhi's first entry into the U.S. a customs officer referred him to secondary
inspection, completed the inspection, and released him. In May 2001, Waleed al Shehri
and Satam Suqami departed Florida for the Bahamas but were refused admission. On
their way back to the U.S., a customs officer conducting a pre-clearance in the Bahamas
referred al Shehri to a secondary inspection. Customs then released al Sherhi to return to
the U.S. with Suqami.
We do know of one success by immigration secondary inspection that affected the 9/11
plot. An al Qaeda operative, Mohammed al Kahtani, arrived at Orlando airport on
August 4, 2001. Mohammed Atta apparently was waiting there to meet him. Kahtani
encountered an experienced and dedicated inspector, Jose Melendez-Perez. We will hear
his story later this morning.
During their stays in the U.S. at least six of the 9/11 hijackers violated immigration laws.
We have noted Jarrah 's failure to adjust his status while he was in flight school and the
violations by Atta and al Shehhi. Hani Hanjour came on a student visa in December
2000 but then did not attend a school. Nawafal Hazmi overstayed his term of admission
by nine months. Suqami overstayed his term of admission by four months. None of
these violations were detected or acted upon by INS inspectors or agents.
Two programs might have helped detect such violations. One dealt with violations of
student status. The other dealt with overstays.
National security concerns about foreign students are not new. By the late 1980s the INS
established a Student/School System to track students, but the system did not work. After
the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, when it was discovered that a participant in the
plot had been a student who had overstayed his visa, the Department of Justice asked INS
to devise a better way to track students. INS officials recommended a new student
tracking system and a student ID card that used biometric identifiers.
Congress required the Attorney General to develop an entry-exit system in 1996. The
system's purpose was to improve INS' ability to address illegal migration and overstays
of all types of foreign visitors. By 1998, Congress had appropriated about $40 million to
develop the system. Advocates for border communities, however, were concerned that
an entry-exit system would slow down trade. INS officials decided to forego the system
at the land borders and to only automate the entry process. The automation process was
not successful. The result was that when hijackers Suqami and Nawafal Hazmi
overstayed their visas, the system Congress envisioned did not exist. Moreover, when
federal law enforcement authorities realized in late August 2001 that Hazmi had entered
with Mihdhar in January 2000 at Los Angeles, they could not reliably determine whether
or not Hazmi was still in the United States.
Conclusion
The Director of the FBI testified that "[e]ach of the hijackers ... came easily and lawfully
from abroad." The Director of Central Intelligence described 17 of the 19 hijackers as
"clean." We believe the information we have provided today gives the Commission the
opportunity to reevaluate those statements. Based on our evaluation of the hijackers'
travel documents, the visa process, the entries into the U.S., and the compliance with
immigration law while the attackers were here, we have a few observations. The 9-11
hijackers:
• Included among them known al Qaeda operatives who could have been
watchlisted;
• Presented passports "manipulated in afraudulentmanner;"
• Presented passports with "suspicious indicators" of extremism;
• Made detectable false statements on their visa applications;
• Were repeatedly pulled out of the travel stream and given greater scrutiny by
border officials;
• Made false statements to border officials to gain entry to the U.S.; and
• Violated immigration laws while inside the U.S.
Why weren't they exploited? We do not have all the answers. Certainly neither the State
Department's consular officers nor the INS' inspectors and agents were ever considered
full partners in a national counterterrorism effort. This is exemplified by the fact that the
Bureau of Consular Affairs bureau states that before 9/11 they were not informed by
anyone in the State Department or elsewhere that Saudi citizens could be security risks.
Nor were the Consular Affairs bureau or INS given the resources to perform an expanded
mission. Visa applications rose by nearly a third, increasing 2.5 million a year, just
between 1998 and 2001. Trained staff did not rise with it. In Jeddah and Riyadh, for
example, each consular officer had responsibility for processing, on average, about
30,000 applications per year and routinely interviewed about 200 people a day.
Similarly, before 9/11 the ENS had about 2,000 agents for interior enforcement. As long
as the top enforcement priorities including removing criminal aliens and prosecuting
employers who hired illegal aliens, a major counterterrorism effort would not have been
possible. For our front line border inspection services to have taken a substantially more
proactive role in counterterrorism, their missions would have had to have been
considered integral to our national security strategy and given commensurate resources.
Today, the level of systematic effort by the intelligence community focused on terrorist
travel is much greater. But terrorist travel intelligence is still seen as a niche effort,
interesting for specialists, but not central to counterterrorism. Nor have policymakers
fully absorbed the information developed by terrorist mobility specialists, and translated
the information into new initiatives. If we have one conclusion from our work so far, it is
that disrupting terrorist mobility globally is at least as important as disrupting terrorist
finances, and the opportunities and potential payoffs are probably greater.
10
Tom: Watson and hearing; Blind Shayk pp
Sam: TS folder; 4th person
Tracy: space
Gordon: reviews and requirements
/Joanne: Burkholder report
Sam: TS folder
Mike: 0
Collection req'ment in 1995 - PDD-35 (Jr\ *^*^
Was this updated (annually or otherwise) under Clinton?
First CT strategy in 1995, FDD 39
Was this ever updated (other than by PDD-62?) by Clinton or by Bush?
Need FDD -35 and travel related collection directives
»
Follow up list
List of improvements
J 1
Midhar's passport
(1-