On 11 August 2001, Zacarias Moussaoui arrived in Minnesota.
Aged 33, he was born in France to Moroccan, Muslim parents and moved to London in 1992 to study. Not especially religious previously, here was radicalized. French authorities began monitoring Moussaoui in 1996 and in 1998 and, possibly, 1999, he attended a training camp in Afghanistan run by Al-Qaeda, a terrorist organization headed by a wealthy Saudi named Osama bin Laden.
Bin Laden had declared war on the United States in 1996, giving a long list of reasons, stretching from the presence of American troops in Saudi Arabia all the way back to the Spanish reconquest of Granada in the 15th century. He now had a plan to hijack passenger planes in America and fly them into targeted buildings. “The ruling to kill the Americans and their allies — civilians and military — is an individual duty for every Muslim who can do it in any country in which it is possible to do it,” bin Laden had declared.
In September 2000, Moussaoui visited Malaysia and stayed in a condominium owned by Yazid Sufaat, a member of the Islamist terrorist organization Jemaah Islamiyah, where two of the 9/11 hijackers had lived in January. Jemaah Islamiyah provided Moussaoui with $35,000.
On February 23, 2001, Moussaoui arrived at Chicago’s O’Hare airport traveling on his French passport and was admitted for 90 days under the Visa Waiver Program.
Moussaoui traveled to Norman, Oklahoma, where he attended flight training courses at Airman Flight School where Mohamed Atta and Marwan al-Shehhi, who piloted planes into the North and South Towers of the World Trade Center also trained. Despite 57 hours of flying lessons, Moussaoui failed and left without ever having flown solo. On July 10, he put down a $1,500 deposit for flight simulator training at the Pan-Am International Flight Academy in Eagan, Minnesota, and in August, he headed north.
On 13 August, Moussaoui paid $6,800 with $100 bills to receive training in a 747-400 simulator, equipment normally used by airline pilots. His questions about aircraft doors and automated flight controls alarmed his instructor, Clarence Prevost, who persuaded managers to contact the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s (FBI) Minneapolis field office on August 15. Agents quickly opened an investigation, interviewed Moussaoui, and concluded that he might be preparing for a terrorist act involving a large aircraft.
On August 16, agents from the FBI and Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) — the precursor to the United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) — arrested Moussaoui and charged him with an immigration violation for overstaying his 90-day period.
At the time of his arrest, Moussaoui had in his possession a laptop computer, two knives, flight manuals pertaining to Boeing’s 747 aircraft, a flight simulator computer program, fighting gloves and shin guards, and a computer disk with information about crop dusting.
Agents were concerned that his flight training had violent intentions, so the Minneapolis bureau tried to get permission to search Moussaoui’s laptop, sending over 70 emails in a week, but they were turned down, Bureau headquarters believing that there was insufficient probable cause. Minneapolis agents sought a special warrant under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), but this required demonstrating probable cause that Moussaoui was an agent of a foreign power. To establish this, agents sought help from the FBI’s legal attaches in Paris and London and from the Central Intelligence Agency. The Paris office provided information from the French linking Moussaoui to a leader of rebel forces in Chechnya. This set off what the 9/11 Commission Report calls “a spirited debate between the Minneapolis Field Office, FBI headquarters, and the CIA” as to whether these constituted links to a “foreign power.” An agent at FBI headquarters complained that the Minneapolis office’s FISA request was couched in a manner intended to get people “spun up.” The Minneapolis agent said that was precisely his intent as he was “trying to keep someone from taking a plane and crashing it into the World Trade Center.” Ultimately, FBI headquarters rejected the FISA request.
Minneapolis agents wanted to warn the Federal Aviation Administration aboutMoussaoui, but FBI headquarters instructed them not to send the complete report. The Minneapolis office dispatched the case agent in person.
Agent Coleen Rowley made an explicit request for permission to search Moussaoui’s personal rooms, but this, too, was denied, FBI headquarters concluding that the legal basis for a criminal or Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrant was insufficient. He was awaiting deportation on the morning of September 11. In May 2002, Rowley wrote a 13-page memo to FBI Director Robert Mueller detailing how headquarters mishandled and ignored warnings from Minneapolis field agents regarding Moussaoui prior to the 9/11 attacks.
It is uncertain, however, what the impact on Al-Qaeda’s plot would have been had the permissions to search been granted.
It remains unclear exactly what Moussaoui’s role in the 9/11 attacks was. During legal proceedings against him following the attacks, prosecutors alleged that he was going to be Al-Qaeda’s “20th hijacker” after two others were denied visas to enter the United States. The 9/11 Commission later characterized Moussaoui as both an “al-Qaeda mistake” and a “missed opportunity.” In 2006, he was sentenced to life in prison and currently resides at the ADX Florence federal supermax prison in Colorado, the only person ever convicted in an American civilian court of a crime in connection with 9/11.
