Boston Globe Indictment expected in hijackings

Suspect is called would-be pilot; anthrax tie seen to conspiracy

By Kevin Cullen, Globe Staff, 11/7/2001

NEW YORK - A French citizen of Moroccan descent who has been held as a material witness since shortly after the Sept. 11 suicide hijackings will probably become the first person to be indicted on charges that he took part in the conspiracy that led to the attacks on the Pentagon and World Trade Center, according to law enforcement officials involved in the investigation.

Zacarias Moussaoui, 33, avoided the fate of the 19 hijackers only because he had been arrested Aug. 17 on immigration charges in Minnesota, the officials alleged. The officials describe Moussaoui as the least able and discreet of the hijackers who trained as pilots.

He performed badly in training before he aroused suspicion in Minnesota by telling a flight instructor he wanted to learn how to fly a commercial airliner but was not interested in landing or taking off, according to officials close to the FBI task force here that is heading the investigation into the Sept. 11 attacks.

Those officials said it was unclear when the grand jury sitting in New York would be asked to indict Moussaoui, whom some US officials, including Vice President Dick Cheney, have described as ''the 20th hijacker.'' Moussaoui has refused to cooperate with authorities, the officials added.

Contrary to earlier reports, meanwhile, the FBI is leaning toward the theory that the anthrax that has killed four people and infected 13 others in Florida, Washington, D.C., and New York is connected to the Sept. 11 attacks.

In an interview at FBI headquarters here, Assistant FBI Director Barry W. Mawn said laboratory analysis has shown that the anthrax used in the deadly letters was produced in the United States. US officials had previously said the kind of anthrax found in the tainted letters could have been produced in either the United States, Russia, or Iraq.

''It was made here,'' said Mawn, declining to elaborate.

That finding is significant because if Iraq were implicated in aiding and abetting the Sept. 11 attacks or the Qaeda terror network that stands accused of mounting them, the United States could expand its war against Afghanistan's Taliban regime to include attacks on Iraq.

Some officials, including Richard Butler, the former head of the UN weapons inspection program in Iraq, have publicly suggested that Mohamed Atta, who authorities believe was the leader of the hijackers on Sept. 11, could have obtained anthrax from an Iraqi intelligence agent he met in Prague last year.

But Mawn, who is overseeing the investigation, said there is no evidence to support theories that Iraq supplied the anthrax found in the letters tied to the 13 infections and four deaths.

Mawn said the FBI suspects an individual rather than a group is behind the anthrax letters sent to the office of Senator Thomas Daschle and various media outlets.

Mawn said investigators get closer to that individual with every new confirmed report.

''If he continues'' sending letters, Mawn said, ''we will be successful.''

Sitting in his 28th-floor Lower Manhattan office with a view of where the World Trade Towers once stood, Mawn seemed considerably more upbeat than two senior FBI and Justice Department officials who yesterday gave a Senate subcommittee a gloomy assessment of how little the FBI knows about the sender of the anthrax letters.

James Caruso, one of the FBI's senior counterterrorism experts, and James Reynolds, chief of the Justice Department's terrorism and violent crime section, said the 7,000 investigators assigned to the anthrax case nationwide have been hampered by hoaxes and false leads. Both men called for Congress to strengthen laws against hoaxes.

''They are presently out of control,'' Reynolds told a Senate Judiciary subcommittee. ''We very much need a hoax statute to assist in these cases.''

Caruso said the FBI had responded to more than 7,000 suspicious letters, 950 bomb threats, and more than 29,000 telephone calls about suspicious packages.

In an interview with the Globe, Mawn disputed a report two weeks ago in the Washington Post that top FBI and CIA officials had concluded the anthrax letters were probably not connected to the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. But Mawn would not say whether the investigation so far was pointing toward the letters being the work of a domestic terrorist or someone in the United States linked to Al Qaeda.

However, two senior law enforcement officials familiar with the work of the antiterrorism task force said the FBI is leaning toward the theory that the anthrax was obtained in the United States, but was sent by someone who was sympathetic with the Sept. 11 attackers or was a ''sleeper'' connected to Al Qaeda awaiting a signal to begin sending the letters.

An FBI profiler who analyzed three letters - sent to Daschle's office, NBC News, and the New York Post - concluded that whoever wrote the letters had learned English as a second language, law enforcement officials said.

''It's 60-40 [percent] that it's connected to Sept. 11,'' said one federal official.

One theory officials hold is that the Sept. 11 attacks were a signal to begin sending anthrax in the mail.

''It's not [Osama bin Laden] picking up the phone and telling the guy to do it,'' said one official. ''The potential is for a longtime sleeper here, or someone sympathetic to the cause, someone who may have been told to sit tight with his anthrax, that somebody told him, `You'll know when the right time is.' That is very much in keeping with the cell structure'' of Al Qaeda, in which terrorists in the same conspiracy don't know what other conspirators are doing. The cell structure is aimed at guarding against infiltration and informers.

But even the federal officials who said it was more likely the anthrax letters are connected to Sept. 11 than to American right-wing extremists acknowledge that the FBI has not yet identified an individual suspect behind the letters.

Mawn said he could not discuss assertions by some federal officials that a federal grand jury sitting in New York will soon be asked to return charges against Moussaoui.

The officials said that German authorities have told the FBI that Moussaoui received $15,000 in two Western Union transfers from Germany in August, when he had signed up for an $8,000 course at a flight school in Minnesota.

German authorities also told the FBI that they know that Moussaoui had at least one conversation, and possibly more, with the man who rented an apartment in Hamburg to Atta. German police say that apartment became a gathering spot for Islamic extremists in Hamburg.

The FBI believes Moussaoui was supposed to be part of the hijacking team that commandeered United Air Lines Flight 93 out of Newark Airport. That plane crashed in rural Pennsylvania after passengers apparently attacked the hijackers.

This story ran on page A1 of the Boston Globe on 11/7/2001. © Copyright 2001 Globe Newspaper Company.

-- Anonymous, November 07, 2001