The CIA's alleged role in facilitating the 9/11 hijackers' entry into the United States
Tucker Carlson presents Episode 1 of a documentary series examining the events leading up to September 11, 2001.
Summary
Episode 1 of The 9/11 Files opens with the assertion that the official account of the September 11 attacks is false, and that a new, independent investigation is needed. The episode centers on testimony from Mark Rossini, a former FBI agent assigned to the CIA's Alec Station — the agency's dedicated bin Laden unit — who describes how CIA officers actively blocked him and fellow FBI agent Doug Miller from passing critical intelligence to the FBI about two of the future hijackers. The core claim is that the CIA was running a covert recruitment operation targeting the hijackers, and that this operation — not bureaucratic incompetence — explains why the FBI was kept in the dark. The episode further alleges that former CIA station chief in Riyadh, and later CIA Director, John Brennan, played a direct role in issuing visas that facilitated the hijackers' entry into the United States. The 9/11 Commission's final report is characterized as a cover-up, shaped by political interference and deliberate obstruction of investigators.
The episode also details how, just days before al-Mihdhar's return to the United States on July 4th, 2001, the FBI and CIA held a meeting in New York to discuss the USS Cole bombing — in which al-Mihdhar had been involved. At that meeting, an FBI agent was shown a photograph of al-Mihdhar taken at the Kuala Lumpur summit and asked the CIA to identify him, but the Agency again refused. The CIA did not alert the FBI to al-Mihdhar's identity until August 2001, by which point it was too late.
Regarding the recruitment allegation, the transcript presents Rossini's account that former White House counterterrorism official Richard Clarke alleged the CIA was running a false-flag operation to recruit the hijackers as assets — a claim Clarke reportedly made publicly, prompting an angry call from former CIA Director George Tenet, who did not deny it. Tenet's spokesman subsequently denied the claim when contacted for the episode.
Key Takeaways
FULL TRANSCRIPT
Introduction: The Official Narrative Called Into Question
Tucker Carlson: For twenty-four years, politicians, the media, and the intelligence community — here and abroad — have demanded that you believe the official story of September 11th. This is their story for you: terrorists connected to al-Qaeda, known to US intelligence agencies, evaded detection for years while planning the most dangerous and complex terrorist attack in human history. Despite repeated encounters with the FBI, the CIA, law enforcement, airport security, and foreign intelligence, the right information never reached the right officials. The government failed due to a lack of intelligence sharing. That is the story.
That story is a lie.
After nearly twenty-five years, the families of three thousand civilians are still mourning the deaths of their loved ones. And anyone who questions the official narrative is branded a fool, a criminal, a fringe conspiracy theorist, and punished. They have been blacklisted, surveilled, and silenced — while the leaders who failed to protect our country on September 11th used the attacks as a pretext to expand their own power and permanently change the United States.
None of this is speculation. All of it is true.
In this series, you will hear from eyewitnesses: CIA officers and analysts, FBI agents from the bin Laden unit, and the families of victims. All of them have direct knowledge. What they will tell you is that what you have been told about September 11th is not true.
Why are we doing this? Our goal is in part to make the strongest possible case for a real investigation into the events of September 11th. After twenty-five years, a new 9/11 commission — an honest commission, not one guided by partisan political interests, not one serving foreign powers. To conduct this investigation, we spent several months researching what actually happened and speaking to the people who witnessed it. We reviewed thousands of pages of documents — most of them primary sources, but also contemporaneous news reports and declassified government documents.
During this investigation, we arrived at shocking findings — among them, the apparent role of former CIA Director John Brennan in bringing the September 11th hijackers into the United States, and the remarkable efforts of the CIA to protect them from the FBI and law enforcement.
Alec Station and the bin Laden Unit
To tell the story, we must begin before the attacks, going back to Alec Station — the CIA's dedicated bin Laden unit — in 1999.
Mark Rossini: From January 1999 to May 2003, I was the FBI representative on the Joint Terrorism Task Force in New York at the CIA's Alec Station. Before September 11th, there were no sources inside al-Qaeda. None. There was a group of Pashtun tribespeople they called "trod points." These were Pashtun men and women who served tea to bin Laden, and they were the primary source for Pakistani intelligence. Information flowed from the trod points to Pakistani intelligence, then to the CIA, about what was going on inside al-Qaeda. They had all the electronic intercepts, the satellites, the photographs. I remember looking at photos of bin Laden in the courtyard of his home. All of that is fine. But what is going on in his head? What is he saying? What is he doing? They are too far away. They don't care about American law. Death is their goal, not prison. How do you plant a source among them?
Before September 11th, US intelligence was getting most of its information about bin Laden from what was called the Hada switchboard in Sana'a, Yemen. That was a communications hub used by bin Laden and his associates to communicate with each other. The FBI reached the switchboard after the East African embassy bombings in 1998.
How did we officially get to the Hada house in Sana'a, Yemen? Officially, on the radar. Nairobi, 1998. August 7th. John Anticev. Special Agent John Anticev — the greatest agent in the history of the FBI. Better than me, even. John traveled to Nairobi, and one of the survivors — one of the perpetrators who lost his nerve and ran, and lived — his name was Daoud al-Owhali. A Saudi. The Kenyan police picked him up. John flew in from New York. There were already two FBI agents interrogating Daoud, making some progress, but not getting to a real result. John walks in, and the first thing he does is say, "Do you need some water? Do you want something to drink? Have you eaten today? Have you prayed? Are you okay?" "Yes, I'm fine, I'm fine, I'm fine." He said, "Just relax. Let's just talk quietly for a little while." He didn't hit him with a phone book. He didn't waterboard him. He didn't pull out his fingernails. He didn't act like a "tough guy" the way people like Dick Cheney want you to believe. He talked to him like a human being. "Tell me what happened that day. Talk to me. So you went to the hotel and packed your bags? Did you call anyone?" "Yes, yes, yes. I called this number." And he wrote it down, and John was given the number of the Hada house in Sana'a, Yemen — which was al-Qaeda's switchboard, which the FBI had absolutely no idea existed until that moment. The CIA and NSA had been tracking the Nairobi cell since 1996. The FBI did not know.
The Kuala Lumpur Summit and the Blocked Warning
The Hada house was not merely an al-Qaeda communications hub. It was the home of Hammo Khalid al-Mihdhar, who would later become one of the September 11th hijackers. By the end of 1999, through telephone intercepts, the CIA and NSA learned that Khalid al-Mihdhar would travel from there to Dubai, and from there to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, to attend a secret summit to discuss their plans. The summit was a meeting of an operational cadre of al-Qaeda terrorists from around the world. He was going to travel around January 5th, 2000. The NSA had the capability — and perhaps still does — to obtain any airline reservation or its details. We knew his passport, his phone, everything. We knew all the details of his travel and his flights.
Mark Rossini: The CIA arranged that when he arrived in Dubai, he would be subjected to a secondary inspection — not a full interrogation, but talking to him a little. Then he goes to his hotel room and they arrange to search his room and enter it. When they enter, his passport is there. They photograph it and send the photos. And lo and behold, in his passport there is a visa to go to the United States of America, issued by the US consulate in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia.
According to recently released court documents, the visas were issued to facilitate a Saudi operation and a CIA intelligence operation. The CIA station chief in Riyadh at that time was the future Director of the CIA — John Brennan.
The CIA continued tracking al-Mihdhar to Kuala Lumpur, where he met with other al-Qaeda associates, including Nawaf al-Hazmi, a second future September 11th hijacker. He lands in Kuala Lumpur. They task the Malaysian Special Branch with surveillance of this terrorism summit in a park in Kuala Lumpur — tracking them, surveilling them, and so on. That information arrives in a cable from the CIA's Kuala Lumpur station to CIA headquarters, to Alec Station, to the computer screen of me and Agent Doug Miller from the Washington Field Office of the FBI.
You have this cable laying out the Kuala Lumpur meeting, the photographing of his passport in Dubai, and the knowledge of the visa to go to the United States. Doug Miller gets up from his cubicle, comes to my cubicle and says, "Hey, we need to tell the FBI about this." I said, "Doug, you are absolutely right." I'll write the Central Intelligence Report. What is a Central Intelligence Report? It's a report Doug writes, then sends to me to review and approve. It goes to the inbox of Michael Ann Casey, a CIA officer and analyst. It sits in her electronic queue. It doesn't move for a day or two. It should have moved within hours.
I will never forget it — it was like yesterday. I was standing over her. I said, "Hey, Doug's report." This is for the FBI. She said, "No, it's not going." I said, "Why?" "It's not the FBI's business." "What do you mean it's not the FBI's business?" "It's the CIA's business. When we want to tell them, we will. And you don't talk." I said, "Yes, but they got a visa to America." She said, "No, we're handling it. And when we want to tell the FBI, we will." I looked at her — and remember, she stood up, put her hands on her hips, pointing at me. In my naivety, I believed her. I have to live with that every day. That I believed her.
The CIA's Alleged Recruitment Operation
The CIA blocked the information from the FBI, and the hijackers kept moving. On January 8th, 2000, CIA surveillance teams reported that al-Mihdhar had boarded a flight to Bangkok, Thailand, and that a man they knew as al-Hazmi was with him. According to the official account, this is where the trail went cold. The CIA placed their names on a watch list and asked Thai authorities to track them. Three months later, the Thai government responded: al-Hazmi had boarded a United Airlines flight to Los Angeles. Al-Mihdhar was with him. The two hijackers had arrived in the United States.
Mark Rossini: But here is my problem with all of this — with this whole matter and the subsequent September investigation. You have the CIA chasing a man, then two men, around the planet, and then all the way to America. They land in Los Angeles, California, and you don't tell the FBI. But why would the CIA want to conceal the important and dangerous fact that two al-Qaeda terrorists had just landed in California?
According to a document recently submitted to court, former White House counterterrorism official Richard Clarke told government investigators that the CIA was running a false-flag operation to recruit the hijackers. When Cofer Black became head of the CIA's Counterterrorism Center, he was dismayed by the absence of sources inside al-Qaeda. So he said to me, "I'm going to try to get sources inside al-Qaeda." I can understand them saying: we probably need to develop sources inside al-Qaeda, and when we do that, we can't tell anyone.
After Clarke made this allegation publicly, he received an angry call from former CIA Director George Tenet, who did not deny Clarke's claims. However, when we reached out to Tenet, his spokesman denied that the CIA recruited the hijackers, calling it a false rumor and saying it is flatly untrue. He also stated that the 9/11 Commission's Executive Director, Philip Zelikow, blocked the Commission's investigation into the matter at the request of Condoleezza Rice.
The CIA, with its delusional plan, relied on intercepts from the Hada switchboard and psychological analysis of each member of the team. They believed the best approach was perhaps to recruit someone who had come from inside the organization itself. From Malaysia — Khalid al-Mihdhar, and now Nawaf al-Hazmi. We kept the FBI away, because we told Mark Rossini and Doug Miller to shut up completely. So let's just try to infiltrate there. And that is what went wrong. That was the big lie, the big gamble, the biggest delusion. You had a duty to protect Americans and you failed because of your fantasy delusion that you could recruit someone inside the cell.
The official September 11th report does not address the CIA's plan to recruit the hijackers. It is not mentioned. This is likely because the CIA prevented September 11th Commission investigators from speaking to the agents who participated in the operation. Remarkably, the CIA's Director of Operations kept the agent who was attempting to recruit the hijackers — referred to as "VVV" in documents — away from Commission investigators. As a result, the Commission's interpretation of this story was that the CIA made an unintentional mistake. The actual language in the report says the CIA played zone defense and the FBI had a man-to-man approach to counterterrorism. The difference in strategies is given as the reason the CIA did not tell the FBI about the terrorists' arrival on American soil.
Remarkably, Commission investigators never asked then-CIA Director George Tenet about the Kuala Lumpur summit or why the CIA blocked the warning to the FBI. That was not their story. That is the crux of the matter. And that is the truth. And nobody has answered those questions. Nobody has the courage, because they are afraid — because everything will unravel.
The Hijackers in San Diego
So how exactly did the CIA attempt to recruit the September 11th hijackers? One of the remarkable things about their arrival is that they made no attempt to hide. The hijackers used their real names. While in the United States, they operated in plain sight. Al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar lived in San Diego for more than a year before the attacks. They lived openly. In fact, they were so open that al-Hazmi's name, address, and phone number were listed in the San Diego phone directory.
Upon their arrival, the hijackers were met by a Saudi intelligence operative named Omar al-Bayoumi. They met at a restaurant outside Los Angeles. The CIA used the Saudis — in the form of Omar al-Bayoumi — to spy on their behalf and gather intelligence. Before September 11th, the CIA was prohibited from spying domestically. They used Saudi intelligence as a proxy. We will rely on Saudi intelligence — their version of the CIA — through Prince Bandar, through their man Omar al-Bayoumi, to keep us informed about the activities of these terrorists.
Al-Bayoumi's notebook, which was uncovered when British law enforcement raided his home in the United Kingdom, contained a drawing of an airplane and mathematical calculations related to flying it. September 11th Commission investigators never saw this.
At the time, al-Bayoumi held a ghost job at a Saudi aviation contractor called AVCO. Company employees say he was one of approximately fifty ghost employees working there at the time — collecting salaries without showing up to work. According to declassified government documents, a September 11th Commission investigator stated that al-Bayoumi was receiving large sums of money from the Saudi Embassy in Washington before the September 11th attacks, and that the funds were being transferred from accounts at Riggs Bank in Georgetown belonging to Haifa bint Faisal, the wife of the Saudi Ambassador to the United States.
By using the Saudis as a proxy to recruit the September 11th hijackers, the CIA gave itself cover — if things went wrong, they could promote a narrative blaming the Saudi government for the attacks, which is what they did. By all accounts, Omar al-Bayoumi was an employee of the Saudi Embassy in Washington, DC, at their consulate in Los Angeles, California.
Al-Bayoumi persuaded the hijackers to move to San Diego. He helped them find an apartment, co-signed their lease, paid the first month's rent and security deposit, opened bank accounts for them, obtained driver's licenses, and introduced them to other extremists in the area, including cleric Anwar al-Awlaki.
Al-Mihdhar's Return and the USS Cole Connection
Eventually, al-Mihdhar returned to his home in Yemen. Khalid al-Mihdhar leaves America to attend the birth of his daughter, and at that time he loses his passport. His Afghan claim is suspicious. He returns to Jeddah and obtains another passport. And by this time — in fact even before this, as I now understand — the Saudis had identified the terrorists, the hijackers, as potential threats to the Kingdom and placed chips in their passports identifying them as threats.
Al-Mihdhar returned to the United States on July 4th, 2001 — without being stopped or questioned. So this is the Agency's man. They know he came to America and attended a terrorism summit in Malaysia in January 2000. He is allowed to leave and return. Al-Mihdhar was entering and leaving the country freely on a multiple-entry US visa. And according to an FBI agent, he and al-Hazmi were able to obtain their visas from the US Consulate General in Jeddah. The vast majority of the nineteen September 11th hijackers obtained their visas from that same consulate, at the time when John Brennan was running the CIA station there.
Just days before al-Mihdhar's return through JFK Airport in New York, the FBI and CIA held a meeting in New York to discuss the bombing of the USS Cole, in which al-Mihdhar had been involved. Seventeen soldiers were killed aboard the USS Cole. A federal agent was shown a photograph of the man taken at the Kuala Lumpur summit. The agent asked the CIA who the man was, but the Agency again refused to tell them. The Agency did not alert the FBI until August 2001 — and of course by then it was too late.
Other Witnesses and the FBI's Failures
Mark Rossini is not the only witness. Another anonymous FBI agent told investigators that he believed the CIA's operation may have gotten out of control, and that the CIA came to the FBI with limited information to locate the hijackers without revealing the nature or extent of their operation against al-Qaeda. End quote.
Mark Rossini: That is the failure of the September 11th Commission and every other damned commission that came after it. But if the CIA was treating the hijackers as its sources, the FBI failed too. When al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar were in California, they lived in the home of an FBI informant named Abdussattar Shaikh. And yet the FBI never knew about it.
Then, less than a month before the attacks, the FBI opened an investigation into a French-Moroccan citizen named Zacarias Moussaoui. He had just moved to Minneapolis from Oklahoma, where he had resumed flight training. After raising suspicions during training, he was arrested on August 16th and charged with immigration violations. But agents were denied permission to search his laptop and the room where he was staying. His precise connection to the hijacking plot remains unclear to this day, but he received wire transfers from Ramzi bin al-Shibh, who was also sending money to the hijackers.
In July 2001, an FBI agent based in the Phoenix field office sent a memo to headquarters hypothesizing that there might be a coordinated effort by Osama bin Laden to send individuals to the United States for flight training. For some reason, that memo never reached headquarters until after September 11th. Why? Possibly because as late as 2003, the FBI did not have a functional email system. Most case files were not digitized or searchable, and employees did not have internet access. This is true. By September 2001, the computers in the office were so outdated that it took twelve commands to save a document. And in the aftermath of the attack, the FBI distributed photographs of the suspected hijackers by FedEx. They did not have scanners.
The Cover-Up: The 9/11 Commission
The Bush administration deliberately concealed all of this. These details were uncovered during Congress's joint inquiry into the September 11th attacks. When Congress published its report, the twenty-eight pages dealing with the hijackers' presence in Southern California were hidden. Classified. Withheld.
When a man named Philip Zelikow took over as Executive Director of the Commission — a sensitive position — he reached a secret agreement with the White House to prevent his investigators from accessing sensitive records related to the hijackers until the White House had reviewed them first. Government documents show that the Commission investigator assigned to this subject complained that Zelikow, in his words, limited the number of witnesses his investigators were allowed to interview. And just days before the report was published, Dieter Snell, the Commission's senior counsel, attempted to remove most of the details of Saudi cooperation with the hijackers. Some findings were ultimately included, but they were buried in footnotes.
Mark Rossini: The truth is that the official September 11th Commission report — promoted to the American public and the world for decades as the definitive account of what happened that day — is a lie. This September 11th Commission is a cover-up. But how did the Bush administration manage to take over what was presented as an independent commission? And what were they trying to hide? We will reveal what we found in the next episode.