Publication: Los Angeles Times
Date: 11/18/2001
Author: Stephen Braun And Judy Pasternak, Times Staff
Writers
Osama bin Laden built a shadow air force to support
his terrorist activities, using Afghanistan's
national airline, a surplus U.S. Air Force jet and
clandestine charters.
Long before suicide teams crashed hijacked airliners into
the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on Sept. 11,
sympathetic foreign officials and wealthy supporters gave
Bin Laden access to planes to help him forge, arm and
transport his terrorist network.
Interviews with more than 50 U.S. diplomatic and security
aides, law enforcement agents, former Afghan civil air
officials, pilots and aviation executives provide a
wealth of new details about how Bin Laden cobbled
together an unconventional air capability.
Through an operative, he bought and refurbished the Air
Force passenger jet in 1992 and had it transported to
Sudan, where he was then based. He shipped men and
materiel on Afghanistan's Ariana
Airways after the Taliban took control of the country in
1996. And when international sanctions hobbled the
airline last year, he turned to covert charters to keep
his terrorist network airborne.
In recent weeks, U.S. bombers pounded a western Afghanistan airfield where four
Ariana airliners were believed to be stored. The attack
was an attempt to deny Bin Laden mobility and prevent his
escape from Afghanistan.
U.S. officials expressed concern that he might have other
aircraft assets concealed in the country. Secretary of
Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld said Bin Laden might try to
flee aboard a "well-hidden helicopter." A
former Afghan civil air official said Taliban leaders had
given Bin Laden regular access to a Russian-made MI-17
helicopter in recent years.
With the Taliban's blessing, Bin Laden effectively had
hijacked Ariana, the national civilian airline of Afghanistan. For four years,
according to former U.S. aides and exiled Afghan
officials, Ariana's passenger and charter flights ferried
Islamic militants, arms, cash and opium through the
United Arab Emirates and Pakistan. Members of Bin Laden's
Al Qaeda terrorist network were provided false Ariana
identification that gave them free run of airports in the
Middle East.
"One airline was servicing Afghanistan
at the time, and that was Ariana," said Steve Simon,
a former senior director for transnational threats at the
National Security Council. "Al Qaeda moved drugs
out, money in and people around on Ariana."
Taliban authorities also opened the country's airstrips
to high-ranking Persian Gulf state officials who
routinely flew in for lavish hunting parties. Sometimes
joined by Bin Laden and Taliban leaders, the dignitaries,
who included several high-ranking officials from Saudi
Arabia and the Emirates--left behind money, vehicles and
equipment with their hosts, according to U.S. and Afghan
accounts.
In buying and renovating the Air Force jet, Bin Laden and
Al Qaeda easily evaded rules governing the sale of U.S.
planes.
The jet, overhauled at Van Nuys Airport in 1992, later
was used to ferry Al Qaeda commanders to East Africa,
where they trained Somali tribesmen for attacks on U.S.
peacekeeping forces. It later crashed on a runway in
Sudan.
Bin Laden's secret purchase capitalized on lax government
oversight and the unwitting aid of Americans who helped
disguise the plane as a civilian jet.
The FBI is reexamining the episode. Concerned that other
terrorists may have attempted to buy planes,
investigators have been looking at several unusual
attempts earlier this year to obtain commercial aircraft,
though they have yet to find any credible links to
terrorists.
"Our sensitivities are so much more finely tuned
now," explained Clive G. Medland, a vice president
of a New York aviation firm whose executives were
questioned by the FBI about an attempt by three
Pakistanis to lease a transport jet earlier this year.
"Everyone's on guard."
An Eager Student Flies the T-39
In mid-December 1992, John Lowrey, a veteran pilot
operating out of a small airfield in Lancaster, took a
client up in a surplus Air Force T-39A jet.
Lowrey's new student was Essam al Ridi, an Egyptian
emigre who showed up in a crisp Northwest Airlink pilot's
uniform. Ridi told Lowrey he was eager to learn to fly
the T-39A because he had just bought a similar jet and
planned to fly it for a family in Cairo.
The T-39s, military versions of the twin-engine
Sabreliner built by North American Rockwell, had been
used by the Air Force since the late 1950s to transport
generals and VIPs. The jet Ridi purchased was being
overhauled at Van Nuys airport, so Lowrey trained the
Egyptian in a borrowed T-39.
Ridi bought the plane from a Southern California broker,
using funds from Al Qaeda to pay for the aircraft and the
repairs. Ridi told Lowrey and Americans working on the
T-39 that he planned to pilot the craft for wealthy
Egyptians.
Ridi was a fast learner. Just weeks after he finished
training, he flew the plane from Van Nuys to Texas. He
then set out in January 1993--not for Cairo, but to the
Sudanese capital of Khartoum. There, in a secluded guest
house, he turned over the plane's keys to its real owner,
Bin Laden, at a dinner attended by men armed with AK47s,
according to Ridi's testimony in a recent federal trial.
Bin Laden was familiar with airplanes. His father, Sheik
Mohammad bin Laden, was the first Saudi permitted by King
Faisal to buy his own plane--a twin-engine Beechcraft; he
died in a jet crash in September 1967.
When Bin Laden went to Afghanistan
to fight the Soviet invaders in the 1980s, he paid for
charter jets to fly in arms for the moujahedeen and for
construction and demolition equipment. After he was
forced to move his budding Al Qaeda organization to Sudan
in 1991, he again used charter flights to move troops and
materiel.
According to Ridi, Bin Laden wanted his own T-39 to fly
U.S.-built, shoulder-fired Stinger missiles from Pakistan
to Sudan. Ridi provided his account of the T-39 sale in
February, during testimony as a federal witness in the
trial of four Al Qaeda terrorists convicted in the 1998
bombings of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.
Air Force officials said they were amazed when they
learned that one of their surplus jets ended up in Bin
Laden's hands. Officials at the U.S. Air Force Museum at
Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Fairborn, Ohio--the
last government facility to own the T-39--said they will
tighten monitoring of future sales and trades.
"I'm sure we're going to be changing our way of
doing business," museum spokesman Christopher McGee
said.
The museum already had toughened its safeguards on
aircraft transactions in 1997, requiring traders to
undergo a "security control check" and win a
clearance certificate by the Defense Logistics Agency.
The rules also required the new owners to notify future
buyers that they would have to obtain an export license
to fly the plane out of the country.
In fact, the museum was scrupulous in its 1989 trade of
the T-39 to a California aircraft broker who later sold
the jet to Ridi. McGee said the transaction was cleared
with an assistant secretary of the Air Force. In a Jan.
12, 1990, deal, broker Ascher Ward was to receive six
T-39s in exchange for a Rapide DH-89A aircraft. The T-39s
were delivered to Ward in March 1990.
Ward sold one of the craft to Ridi in 1992. Ridi later
testified that he paid $210,000--money relayed to him by
one of Bin Laden's aides--but Ward said he received less
than $100,000.
Government officials and aviation workers involved in Bin
Laden's secret purchase of the T-39 say that FBI agents
recently have interviewed them and scanned their records.
So far, authorities have found no evidence that Ridi's
purchase of the T-39 violated U.S. law.
"On an unprecedented scale, we are examining and
reexamining a multitude of areas; looking for suspicious
patterns or activities," FBI Assistant Director John
Collingwood said. "Even legitimate prior activities
that can be predictive are being examined."
Ridi was able to evade the informal honor system that
governs aircraft sales in the U.S.
"The system just isn't built to check out every sale
of an aircraft," said Bill Gardner, president of the
Meridian Aerospace Group, a major commercial jet broker
in Winston-Salem, N.C. "There's really not much
preventing somebody from buying a big old jet transport
and flying it into anything they want to take out."
The FAA typically registers military aircraft purchased
for civil use as "experimental" until they
comply with FAA requirements for airworthiness, agency
spokesman Paul Turk said. Under that status, planes
cannot be used to haul cargo or passengers for hire. Tom
Poborezny, who heads the Experimental Aircraft Assn.,
said that under international air policy, such
experimental aircraft also cannot be flown out of the
U.S. without obtaining diplomatic clearances to land at
foreign airports.
Several Americans who saw Bin Laden's T-39 in Van Nuys
said it was being refitted as a civilian craft. Roy
Silva, who installed new radios in the cockpit, recalled
that before the T-39 was outfitted with new leather seats
and repainted, the word "experimental" was
visible inside the jet's door.
Several weeks later, the insignia was painted over and
"Sabreliner" was stitched into the bulkhead.
Painting out the word "experimental" for a
plane designated as that status is an FAA violation. But
"it's not exactly a capital crime," Turk said.
"There is no task force out there looking for people
who obscure the markings, but if you were caught, you'd
be told to fix it or else."
According to Barrie Towey, an editor at Air-Britain News,
a British plane spotter saw the T-39 in Luton, England,
on Jan. 16, 1993. Ridi flew the T-39 from Fort Worth to
Sault Ste. Marie and Frobisher Bay, Canada; Iceland; Rome
and Cairo before landing in Khartoum.
There, he was invited to dinner with Bin Laden and his
terrorist commanders. The next day, Bin Laden offered
Ridi a job as his personal pilot. The Egyptian turned him
down after he learned his pay would be only $1,200 a
month.
In late 1993, Ridi later testified, he flew the T-39 to
Nairobi, Kenya, dropping off five Al Qaeda commanders.
They were on their way to Somalia to stir up tribal
insurgents against U.S. peacekeeping troops there.
Another federal witness testified that one of the
passengers was Mohammed Atef, Bin Laden's senior
commander who reportedly was killed in an airstrike last
week.
The T-39's third flight was its last. Returning to
Khartoum in 1995, Ridi found the jet sagging in disuse,
its tires melted in the desert heat, vents stuffed with
sand. He overhauled the engine and took it for a test
run, but the jet skidded, crashing into a dune. Panicked,
Ridi fled.
A high-ranking federal official said that six years later
Bin Laden's jet still is in Khartoum, disabled and
landlocked.
Ridi, who has disappeared into the federal witness
protection program, still is listed as the plane's owner
in FAA files.
Overdue, 727 Returns With Surprise Cargo
In October 1996, a month after the Islamic militant
Taliban seized control of Afghanistan,
Ariana officials in the capital of Kabul grew alarmed
about a missing Boeing 727 cargo plane.
The jet had been chartered for a round trip from
Jalalabad to Khartoum by two Sudanese diplomats. It was
to fly to the UAE, then on to Khartoum carrying a load of
fruit and rugs. It was to return a few days later with a
humanitarian cargo of food and medicine.
It took a week before the 727 returned. When the weary
flight crew showed up in Ariana's home office in Kabul,
according to former Afghan civil air officials familiar
with the incident, they offered a strange tale.
In Khartoum, the crew waited three days in a hotel until
Sudanese authorities were ready to load the plane. Back
at the airport, they were stunned to find no cargo but 90
passengers waiting to board. The Sudanese had installed
100 seats in the 727, then herded the passengers
aboard--women veiled in burkas, men in desert robes,
excited children. No travel documents were checked.
Flying into Jalalabad just after midnight, the passengers
were greeted by a dusty convoy of jeeps, vans and trucks.
Many of the drivers carried weapons. Within minutes, the
passengers piled into the vehicles, then disappeared into
the desert night.
According to the crew, the Arab passengers and their
Afghan welcomers worked for Bin Laden.
The ease with which Bin Laden's operatives boarded the
727 was soon replicated on a daily basis. Bin Laden and
his Taliban hosts commandeered the 35-year-old national
air company as their private charter service.
Bin Laden himself had flown out of Khartoum that May. He
disappeared into Afghanistan,
making his way first to Jalalabad, then to Kandahar, the
mountainous southern region home to Taliban leader Mullah
Mohammed Omar and the staging ground for jihad, or holy
war, training camps.
Ariana Airlines became a "key node in Al Qaeda's
infrastructure," a former NSC official said.
"The network used Ariana to move everything that was
useful--money, personnel and materiel."
Schedules previously tightly hewed to by Ariana pilots
suddenly collapsed. Passenger routes to Paris and Beijing
shriveled, replaced by an explosion of cargo runs. Many
of the freight shipments flew in and out of Pakistan and
UAE.
"The planes would come back from the UAE loaded with
weapons," said Julie Sirrs, an Afghanistan
specialist at the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency during
the Clinton administration. "It was mostly Soviet
weapons, small arms--Kalashnikovs [rifles] and RPG-7s
[shoulder-fired antitank rocket launchers]."
Ariana's schedule became "something of a
hit-and-miss proposition," said Simon, the former
NSC official who now is assistant director of the
International Institute for Strategic Studies in London.
"They would take off 30 minutes before schedule.
They canceled flights. It gave them the flexibility they
needed" to move illicit cargo.
U.S. Knew of Al Qaeda Travels
U.S. security officials were aware that Al Qaeda
terrorists flew on Ariana "to the UAE and other
points in the [Persian] Gulf," Simon added.
According to Sirrs, one Yemeni Al Qaeda operative held
prisoner in northern Afghanistan
by the Northern Alliance described flying from Yemen to Afghanistan on Ariana planes in
1997 and 1998.
Some went disguised as Ariana employees. According to an
Afghan civil air expert familiar with Ariana's
operations, Taliban officials set up a false document
mill in 1997 "right at the airport" in Kabul.
The station churned out reams of phony documents,
allowing Islamic militants to travel out of the country
posing as Ariana pilots, flight attendants, mechanics and
clerks.
"They would give the Talib's and Bin Laden's people
Ariana ID cards," the Afghan air expert said.
"So you would have planes going out with 20
mechanics on board. Do you think all those people were
mechanics? That made them crew members. They could get
into any airport they wanted to."
A frequent stop was Sharjah, one of the Emirates. Sharjah
International Airport, former U.S. and Afghan officials
said, became a hub for drug and arms smuggling by Al
Qaeda. The emirate, 20 miles from Dubai, is run by a
fundamentalist Islamic regime. Sharjah's airport is
studded with numerous "fly-by-night" cargo
operations willing to take on any comers, U.S. analysts
said. Some allegedly flew on contracts for Al Qaeda.
The terrorists often relied on an Ariana representative
stationed at the Sharjah airport. The man was a
Taliban-appointed Al Qaeda operative, according to the
Afghan air expert. Since the U.S. began military
operations, the man has not been seen by the Afghan's
Emirate contacts.
An Emirate spokesman insisted that security at UAE
airports is tight. "All our airports are under
strict procedures," said Abdullah Alsadoosi, a UAE
diplomat in Washington. "I don't think smuggling can
go through that."
But a U.S. official said Ariana planes were used to
deliver cash from the Emirates to Al Qaeda operatives in
Pakistan. And officials also say Ariana planes shipped
out large quantities of drugs.
In August 1996, while Afghanistan
still was divided among rival factions, one attempt by
the Taliban to ship opium on an Ariana flight to the UAE
was halted by Ahmed Shah Masoud, the Northern Alliance
leader who was assassinated, presumably by Taliban or Al
Qaeda operatives, just days before the Sept. 11 attacks
in the U.S.
According to the former Afghan air expert, Masoud learned
that Taliban officials had contracted with Ariana for a
one-way charter from Jalalabad to Sharjah. Taliban
officials told the airline the cargo was wood bound for
construction sites in the UAE. Suspicious, Masoud led an
armed band onto the Boeing 727 at the Jalalabad airport
and examined the timber. Inside hollow logs, Masoud's men
found bags of opium.
Those familiar with Ariana's growing abuse by Al Qaeda
and the Taliban say there also are reports suggesting
that the airline might have been used to train Islamic
militants as pilots. According to Afghan sources, Taliban
officials ordered Ariana executives in 1997 to train two
of their men as Boeing 727 pilots.
The men, Afghan air force pilots experienced only in
flying Russian jets, were sent to a Jordanian Airways
flight school that Ariana used to train its own civilian
pilots. According to the Afghan aviation expert, the two
Taliban pilots were "washouts," unable to
master the 727's panel and speak English--the
international language of pilots.
In March 1998, when an Ariana Boeing 727 crashed into a
mountain near Kabul killing 45 people, the airliner
reportedly was flown by two Taliban pilots, the Afghan
expert said.
A security specialist who spent time in Afghanistan also said there were
reports that the Taliban tried to recruit pilots for
$4,000 to $5,000 a month, tax-free, in the northern
region near Uzbekistan. The payments, the specialist
said, reportedly were offered by Al Qaeda.
According to a former NSC official, Ariana's domination
by Al Qaeda and the Taliban was a key basis for the
United Nations' decision in 2000 to impose sanctions on
the Taliban.
When U.S. officials approached the U.N. about imposing
sanctions, they and Russian officials detailed Ariana's
cover role "so people could understand why this was
needed," the former NSC aide said.
After Ariana's foreign flights were shut down, Ariana
charter flights kept moving Al Qaeda cargoes and agents,
former U.S. and Afghan officials said. Islamic militants
often turned to a Lebanese-run charter service flying out
of Sharjah. According to the Afghan aviation expert, the
cargo firm provided mid-size Russian Antonov cargo jets
for charter runs "when they couldn't fly on
Ariana."
For years, Persian Gulf state elites hunted rare birds of
prey, houbara bustards, in the bleak hills surrounding
Kandahar. In the late 1990s, according to former U.S. and
Afghan officials, a number of prominent Persian Gulf
state officials and businessmen flew into Kandahar on
state and private jets for secret hunting expeditions.
For days at a time, the hunters would roam the hills,
releasing falcons trained to catch the bustards. Some
satisfied hunters heaped donations on their Taliban
hosts, officials said--and on Al Qaeda leaders who
occasionally joined them.
Among the reported visitors were high-ranking UAE and
Saudi government ministers. According to U.S. and former
Afghan civil air officials, the hunters included Prince
Turki al Faisal, son of the late Saudi King Faisal. He
headed that nation's intelligence service until late
August, maintaining close ties with Bin Laden and the
Taliban. Another visitor, officials said, was Sheik
Mohammed ibn Rashid al Maktum, the Dubai crown prince and
Emirates defense minister.
Persian Gulf state officials cast doubt on the reports.
"People go hunting in Pakistan. They don't go to Afghanistan," said Adel
al-Jubeir, foreign policy advisor to Saudi Crown Prince
Abdullah. Similarly, the UAE's Alsadoosi said he did
"not recall" any Afghan hunting trips made by
Sheik Mohammed.
Plenty of Supplies Left After Visits
U.S. security sources and former Afghan officials said
they did not know what transpired during the visits by
the two ministers.
But on other occasions, Bin Laden and Omar mingled with
the hunters. Former intelligence official Sirrs said a
Taliban defector who claimed he was a hunting camp guard
described "rich Saudis and top Taliban officials
there." The man also said Bin Laden and Omar went
off to fish together. An Afghan source said the two
militant leaders often fished at a dam west of Kandahar.
Departing, the wealthy visitors often left behind
late-model jeeps, trucks and supplies. "That's one
way the Taliban got their equipment," said Mohammed
Eshaq, who served as Afghanistan's
deputy minister of civil aviation from 1992 to 1994. A
security specialist with experience in Afghanistan said that late-model
pickups left by the sheiks "revolutionized" the
Taliban's troop transport.
"The Taliban could do these hit and runs," the
specialist said. "These are the pickup trucks you
see Taliban soldiers driving around in on the news."
The dignitaries' outbound jets, former U.S. and Afghan
officials suspect, may also have smuggled out Al Qaeda
and Taliban cargo.
"Who knows what came and went on those planes?"
Sirrs said.
U.S. officials are more certain of the fate of Ariana
Airways' fleet of four Boeing 727s.
As U.S. bombers took to the skies over Afghanistan in recent weeks,
Taliban officials reportedly withdrew the jets to hangars
at an airfield near the city of Herat. The move provided
no shelter. U.S. bombers struck at the Herat field
repeatedly in search of "legitimate targets,"
Navy Adm. John D. Stufflebeem said.
Former Afghan civil air officials said Ariana's fleet no
longer exists.
"The [Herat] airport," exulted a former Afghan
civil air official, "is now flattened."
For Further Reading:
Guide to Rugs
& Books
La Miniature En
Orient
Southwest Asia Time
Line
Thanks and best wishes,
J. Barry O'Connell Jr.
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