The hijacking part of the plan got less attention than the planting of bombs. It required aviators like Japan's kamikaze pilots who were willing to commit suicide. Bin Laden had no such pilots in 1995, but he set out to train young fanatics willing to die for him to fly airliners. Abdul Murad, whose laptop had revealed the plan, admitted that he was being trained for a suicide mission. Bin Laden began training pilots in Afghanistan with the help of an Afghan pilot and a Pakistani general.
Project Bojinka was known to the CIA and the FBI. It was described in court documents in the trial in New York of Ramzi Yousef and Abdul Murad for their participation in the bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993. Since the CIA had been mentioned as one of the targets in Project Bojinka, it should have had an especially strong interest in any evidence that bin Laden was preparing to carry it out. The most obvious indicator, and one that should have been watched most carefully, was the recruitment of young, dedicated followers to learn to fly American airliners. That would require keeping a close watch on flight schools where that training is given.
Foreigners, including many from the Middle East, flock to flight schools in the U.S. Visas are given almost automatically to those who apply to these schools. It is especially easy for those with Saudi Arabian passports. At Huffman Aviation International in Venice, Florida, about 70 percent of the students are foreigners. That is one of the schools where Mohammed Atta, 33, who steered American Airlines flight 11 into the north WTC tower, and Marwan Yousef Alshehhi, who flew United Airlines flight 175 into the south tower were trained. Both had back-grounds that would have sounded an alarm had the CIA checked them.
A Huffman Aviation employee says that if the FBI had informed them that bin Laden had a plan to hijack our airliners and crash them into important buildings and had asked them to report any suspicious students, they would have cooperated. It was news to him that the FBI and CIA knew about this plan. It has been reported that a student who was training on a flight simulator at a Minnesota school wasn't interested in learning how to land a plane. If true, that would surely have been reported if the school had been contacted by the FBI.
Osama bin Laden apparently knew better than the FBI how lax our government was about checking out students who come here for flight training. He took full advantage of it. Now that we have paid a horrendous price for this intelligence failure, the FBI and the CIA are scurrying to learn more about young men from countries where bin Laden's Al Qaeda has support who have taken flight training in recent years. The Washington Post reports that at least 44 of those the FBI wants to question are pilots. As of Sept. 20, we had seen no reports in the papers that had identified more than three of the 19 dead hijackers as pilots. That means that bin Laden still has an ample supply of manpower to continue Project Bojinka. Louis Freeh bears a lot of the blame for this, but he has already resigned. George Tenet, who heads the CIA, should resign or be fired.
