A 9/11 Story: 6. More Questions than Answers

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1:28It didn't register logically with me. Back in San Diego, FBI special agent Danny Gonzales can't understand it. That wasn't right. Danny is the agent to abandon his family holiday to chase the hijacker's trail in his Hawaiian shirt. His investigation helped put by Yumi into Scotland Yards interrogation room. You bang your head against the wall and say that's not right and that's not the way it should be. What am I not seeing that they're seeing? My Yumi's release is beyond Danny's comprehension or control. But Danny and others can keep investigating by Yumi. It's not over yet. From intrigue on BBC Radio 4, this is a 9-11 story. I'm Jane McMullen. Episode 6. More questions than answers.

2:35It was fun thinking big thoughts and writing long memos about what we would do in the ideal world. Before 9-11 and long before the war on terror, Jeff Brinholth worked in a quiet corner of the US Justice Department. His obscure expertise, prosecuting people who knowingly support terrorist organisations. Oh, non-issue. It's hard to get people interested and it was tough. Then come the attacks. I will say the first 10 years after 9-11 it was really a blur. I was working seven days a week. The Department of Justice launches a deliberate campaign of arrest and attention. It's the war on terror. Jeff's boss, the Attorney General, fails to use every constitutional tool to keep suspected terrorists locked up. Hundreds of people are picked up in the US and around the world. Jeff's looking for any excuse to hold them, not just terrorism charges.

3:39Look at other smaller charges. I was a big champion of that. We called it spitting on the sidewalk. It's an expression that was popular in the Al Capone days where long forcemen said we will get him for spitting on the sidewalk if we have to. Very quickly after 9-11, Jeff hears about Omar Al Bayumi. His name came across as one of the hot possibilities for charges that were under our jurisdiction. And when Bayumi's arrested in the UK, there's a chance to extradite him to the US. My understanding is that there was a big meeting at which the Brits were present. They were imploring us to charge Bayumi with something that would allow them to extradite him to the United States. They wanted very much. As I understand it, word on high came from the highest ranking justice of Victoria in the road. That extradition would not be sought.

4:42The official line is that there's insufficient evidence to seek extradition, but we know officials already had a lot of evidence from Bayumi. Bags of videos, computer hard drives, letters in Arabic. Much of it, they'd not even been through when he was released. So why was Bayumi released? The Department of Justice declined to comment. My theory is that what got Bayumi off was both political and intelligence-driven. Somebody does not want to extradite Bayumi, therefore we're saying these are not extradite-loving. Think of it. Yeah. Think that's right. It's a political decision. It wasn't based on the merits of our charges. If you probably were to ask the prosecutors today, they would not say that Bayumi was innocent. He was involved with 9-11. Then and now, Omar Al-Bayumi denies any connection with 9-11.

5:47Jeff and Danny are not the only ones with questions about Bayumi. In the summer of 2002, Danny's boss, Rick Lambert, gets a call. The FBI director, Robert Mueller, wants to talk about Bayumi. He disclosed that he was going to make a presentation or speech to the joint inquiry at their request, briefing them on what we knew about Omar Al-Bayumi. The joint inquiry, a congressional investigation into how America's intelligence services missed 9-11. Rick flies from San Diego to FBI headquarters in Washington. They said this is what we want you to do. Lay out everything we know about Bayumi. And I was prepared to do that. I had all the facts that we had gathered to that point in time. But inevitably, after you do that, the question is, well, what does it mean? Was the Saudi government complicit or not?

6:5015 months after 9-11 in December 2002, the joint inquiry publishes its final report. There's a whole chapter on possible Saudi connections. Terry Strada can't wait to read it. Since her husband Tom died in the World Trade Center, she's joined a lawsuit to ledging official Saudi links. She wants to know what her government has found out. But the chapter on the kingdom, all 28 pages, is missing, blacked out. It's not like it had been, you know, blacked out here and there. They just removed the entire chapter. The order to remove it came from the Bush administration. In episode 5, we heard how President Bush had looked into Terry's eyes and swore to get the bad guys. Now he says releasing the Saudi chapter could undermine that effort. American intelligence, he says, needs to protect its sources and methods.

7:55But where the president sees operational security, Terry suspects a cover-up. There was definitely a concerted effort by the Bush administration when they excised the 28 pages from the joint inquiry report to keep the American people from understanding the level that the Saudis were involved in 9-11. The 28 pages will remain secret for another 40 in years. Meanwhile, another official account is taking shape. This one will be public. And its conclusion about Omar al-Bayumi will infuriate FBI special agent Danny Gonzalez. July 2004, Washington, DC. Today we present this report and these recommendations to the President of the United States, to the United States Congress.

8:56And American people. Nearly three years after the attacks, America is being handed something it has been waiting for, the official version. This report represents unanimous conclusion of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States. The Commission has broad scope and resources. Its final report, 500 plus pages, is detailed and gripping. And when the FBI is Danny Gonzalez finds what it says about Omar al-Bayumi. You would see the me jumping up in my chair and getting mad and saying, bullshit. The report says, quote, And I and everybody around me in San Diego had a difference of opinion we're not seeing the same thing.

9:57Danny and his colleagues have their own investigation. Their classified reports show they've been questioning and re-questioning people who knew the hijackers and knew Bayumi. One source tells them Bayumi tasked him to help the hijackers. Something Bayumi denies. But it's the 9-11 Commission report which cements the public story around the attacks. It allows many to move on. Inside the FBI, a similar shift is happening. One day you wake up and you come into the office and you're looking around and you're seeing the numbers dwindle. More and more special agents are being reassigned. There are other cases to follow. That was totally off of what should have happened. The whole section of an office should have been sitting with us and you look around and it's like,

10:58hmm, this isn't normal. If it were up to him, every agent would be on this case. This was 9-11. You're still thinking of the victims. You're still thinking of this chorefficatae. You're thinking of the grief and the pain that these families are still going through. The stress isn't just emotional. The caseload doesn't reduce but when the workforce reduces, it all gets placed on one or two people or just the select few of people have to handle the still the work of the caseload that's this gigantic case. It's a lot. Some roadblocks are obvious. A blacked-out chapter, an extradition denied. Others are more subtle. A room that empties. A caseload that does not shrink. And then there are those that are invisible until it is too late.

12:012006, two years since the 9-11 Commission report, Dannees in a helicopter racing to help. It's urgent. This time, it's not the case. It's him. It was a pretty bad when your arm goes numb. And you'd know that it's something serious. Dannees being medevac to hospital. He's been working too hard. The stress and the pressure you're not eating right and you're not sleeping right and you're not taking care of yourself so your immune system deteriorates and then you get sick. 9-11 has been Dannees all-consuming obsession for five years. Late nights, early mornings, missed meals. Now, finally, his body says enough. In the same year, Dannees lands in hospital.

13:05Terry finds herself in one, two. And my whole world stopped. Terry's youngest son, Justin, born four days before 9-11, is now five years old and seriously ill. Doctors find a plum-sized tumor at the base of his brain. He had to have emergency surgery to relieve the pressure in his head. Then there's more surgery and more than a year of chemotherapy. Terry has zero bandwidth to campaign for the 9-11 families. It was unbelievably difficult to go through it without Tom. I needed that second set of ears. I needed his fierceness. He was more than I did. Matter of fact, if he were alive, I'd probably never would have been so outspoken because he would have been doing it all for us. She's spending hours by Justin's bedside in the PICU, the pediatric intensive care unit,

14:06checking that each new shift of nurses knows his case. It was horribly hard and it just gave me a resolve I didn't know I had. She'll need it because when Justin gets better and judges dismiss her lawsuit against three Saudi princes and throw out the wider case against the kingdom, Terry will stop leaving it to the lawyers to fix things. Christmas 1988, a plane takes off from Heathrow Airport. 38 minutes later, everyone on board is dead. Alibian man Abdel Basa Al-Megrahi is convicted of murdering 270 people, but that's not the end of the story. Almost four decades on, fresh evidence and a new trial. I'm Miles Bonner. In this podcast, I'm delving into a world of extremist groups,

15:08the Stereous Intelligence Agents and Global Politics. From Radio 4, this is Intrigue, Locker Bay. Listen first on BBC Sounds. Your network was successfully breached by Conti Team, one of the most notorious gangs of hackers that ever existed. All of your files were encrypted with military-grade algorithms, making outrageous demands. I'm Jeff White and I'll take you inside a business like no other, where cybercriminals piled up the cash until divisions grew and somebody took revenge. Cyberhack season four, the Conti Files, all episodes available now, wherever you get your BBC podcasts. Get more with BBC Podcasts, wherever you listen. Be the first to listen to your favorite shows, like Evil Genius, Good Bad Billionaire and Your Dead To Me,

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