A week after the September 11th attacks, FBI Special Agent Jack Cloonan flew back from Yemen to New York where convicted al Qaeda spy Ali Mohamed had been brought up from custodial witness protection in Florida to the M.C.C. (federal jail) in Lower Manhattan.
Rushing from the airport and desperate to learn what Ali might have known about the attacks that killed 2,976, Cloonan got to the prison around 11:00 p.m.
“I walked in and I had him pulled out,” Cloonan said in an interview for my Ali Mohamed biography Triple Cross. “I said, ‘How’d they do it?’ and he wrote the whole thing out—the attack, as if he knew every detail of it. He [had] conducted training for Al Qaeda on how to hijack a plane.
“’This is how you get a box cutter on board. You take the knife, you remove the blade and you wrap it in [redacted] and put it in your carry-on luggage.’ They’d read the FAA regulations. They knew four inches wouldn’t go through. ‘This is how you position yourself,’ he said. ‘I taught people how to sit in first class. You sit here and some sit here.’ He wrote the whole thing out.”
On 9/11 the hijackers who flew AA Flight 77 into the Pentagon were reported to have used box cutters. Three of the muscle hijackers who stormed the cockpit and took that plane were Khalid al-Midhar and the al-Hazmi brothers, Nawaf and Salim. Later it was revealed that Khalid and Salim had obtained their fake ID’s (used to board the plane) at Sphinx Trading, the same tiny Jersey City Mailbox store that had been on Patrick Fitzgerald’s radar since the 1995 “Day of Terror” trial. (see Part I)- (Highlight ‘Part I’: link to part I)
As bin Laden’s trusted security advisor Ali Mohamed almost certainly knew of the planes-as-missiles operation that KSM was executing by 1998. Khalid Sheikh’s nephew, Ramzi Yousef, had conceived the plot in Manila in 1994; the year Ali stayed in bin Laden’s own house in Khartoum as he trained his bodyguards. By 1997 Mohamed was living part time in Kenya with Wadih El-Hage, bin Laden’s personal secretary. Read more
His name is Ali Abdel Saoud Mohamed, aka Ali Amirki or “Ali the American,” the ex-Egyptian Army officer who penetrated the CIA (briefly) in 1984, the John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center at Fort Bragg from 1987 to 1989 and the FBI where he served as an informant from the early 1990’s, interacting with top federal prosecutors and Special Agents as he trained the cell responsible for the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and “Day of Terror” plots. Earlier he moved Osama bin Laden’s entourage from Afghanistan to Khartoum, set up the al Qaeda training camps in the Sudan, trained the Saudi billionaire’s own personal bodyguard and later served as the principal plotter in al Qaeda’s five year mission to blow up the U.S. Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.
