The 9/11 Files: The CIA’s Secret Mission Gone Wrong | Ep 1

For 24 years, you have been told an official story about 9-11. That story is a lie. We are making the case for a real investigation—honest, nonpartisan, not serving foreign powers. We spoke to people who lived this, reviewed primary documents, and found shocking things, including former CIA Director John Brennan’s apparent role in bringing hijackers here and the CIA’s efforts to shield them from the FBI. To tell it, we start at Alec Station, the CIA’s Bin Laden unit.

Before 9-11, what did U.S. intelligence actually know, and how did the real information flow begin?

We had zero sources inside al-Qaeda. The real break came after the 1998 Nairobi embassy bombing. John Anticev interviewed a suspect humanely and got the Hada House number in Sana’a, Yemen—the al-Qaeda switchboard. CIA and NSA had been listening since 1996; the FBI had no clue. From that hub, we learned Khalid al-Mihdhar’s travel to Dubai and Kuala Lumpur.

In Dubai, CIA searched al-Mihdhar’s hotel room, photographed his passport, and found a U.S. visa issued in Jeddah. Court filings say those visas were issued to facilitate a Saudi-CIA spying operation. The Riyadh station chief then was future CIA director John Brennan. CIA tracked al-Mihdhar to a Kuala Lumpur terror summit with Nawaf al-Hazmi.

We saw the Malaysia surveillance cable at Alec Station. FBI agent Doug Miller drafted a Central Intelligence Report to warn the Bureau. CIA analyst Michael Anne Casey blocked it—said it was not an FBI matter and told us to keep quiet. I believed her. I live with that.

Why hide that two known al-Qaeda operatives landed in Los Angeles? Former White House counterterror chief Richard Clarke alleged the CIA was running a false-flag recruitment of the hijackers. George Tenet’s spokesperson denied that. And yet the 9-11 Commission’s executive director, Philip Zelikow, limited investigators and blocked key lines of inquiry at the White House’s behest. SPEAKER_01 briefly adds that Cofer Black wanted sources inside al-Qaeda and could have kept it secret even from other agencies.

CIA’s grand delusion was to recruit from the Malaysia travelers—al-Mihdhar and al-Hazmi—while keeping the FBI at bay. That is why we were told to shut up. They had a duty to protect Americans and failed chasing a fantasy.

The 9-11 Report never addressed a CIA recruitment op. Instead, it waved it away as CIA playing zone defense versus the FBI’s man-to-man, and it did not even press Tenet on Kuala Lumpur or the FBI block. It was not the story they wanted.

That is the crux. No one will answer those questions because they fear the house comes tumbling down.

So how would such a recruitment work? The hijackers lived openly. In California they connected with Omar al-Bayoumi, a Saudi intelligence cutout. CIA could not spy domestically, so it leaned on the Saudi GID as a workaround. Bayoumi moved them to San Diego, cosigned their lease, paid deposits, got bank accounts and driver’s licenses, introduced them to Anwar al-Awlaki. British police later found his notebook with an airplane sketch and flight math; he drew a paycheck as a ghost employee at a Saudi aviation contractor while money flowed via Riggs Bank from the Saudi ambassador’s wife. By using the Saudis, the CIA had cover to push blame toward Riyadh if it blew up. SPEAKER_02 notes the Saudis had flagged certain passports; al-Mihdhar still reentered on July four, 2001 without challenge, despite CIA knowing he attended the Malaysia summit. Most hijacker visas were issued in Jeddah, where John Brennan had run the CIA station. Days before al-Mihdhar reentered, at a joint FBI-CIA USS Cole meeting in New York, an FBI agent was shown his Kuala Lumpur photo; CIA refused to ID him. Meanwhile, the FBI missed that the hijackers briefly lived with an FBI informant; blocked from searching Zacarias Moussaoui’s laptop in August; and an agent in Phoenix warned of al-Qaeda men seeking flight training, but archaic FBI systems and process failures buried it. The Bush administration hid critical details—twenty-eight pages on Southern California were redacted, Zelikow tightly controlled witnesses and access, and Saudi links were buried in footnotes.

The supposed definitive 9-11 Commission report is a lie. The commission was a cover-up. How did the Bush administration hijack it, and what were they hiding? We reveal what we found in the next episode.