It was almost an afterthought. On March 1, 2003, the War On Terror had finally served up the alleged paymaster of 9/11 -- a shadowy Saudi by the name of Mustafa Ahmed al-Hisawi. Yet his arrest just happened to coincide with the capture of a much bigger fish -- the reported 9/11 mastermind himself, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed -- thus relegating Mustafa Ahmed to the footnote section of the "official" 9/11 Legend. But there was another, more explosive side to this tale. Only seventeen months before, a former London schoolboy by the name of Omar Saeed Sheikh was first exposed as the 9/11 paymaster, acting under the authority of a Pakistani general who was in Washington D.C. on September 11, meeting with the very two lawmakers who would subsequently preside over the "official" 9/11 congressional inquiry. Omar Saeed, as reported back then by CNN, was acting under the alias of . . . Mustafa Ahmed. So where is Omar now? Sitting in a Pakistani prison, awaiting his execution for the kidnapping of Daniel Pearl -- while another man fills the shoes of his pseudonym. What follows is a reconstruction of one of the most extensive disinformation campaigns in history, and the chronicle of a legend that may now shine a devastating spotlight on some of the cliques behind 9/11 -- and the FBI Director covering the paper trails.

"The hijackers left no paper trail," proclaimed FBI Director Robert Mueller on April 30, 2002. "In our investigation, we have not uncovered a single piece of paper . . . that mentioned any aspect of the Sept. 11 plot." Yet in the weeks immediately following September 11, Mueller and his FBI had left the public with a very different impression -- an impression that conjured the vision of truckloads of paper documents pointing any number of ways to the culpability of Osama Bin Laden for the events of 9/11. For one, there was the infamous handwritten "checklist" found not only in hijacker Mohamed Atta's abandoned luggage, but also in the car rented in hijacker al-Hazmi's name, discovered at Dulles Airport, and which included lofty Arabic prayers alongside last minute reminders to bring "knives, your will, IDs, your passport, all your papers." But more importantly, the treasure trove in al-Hazmi's glove compartment yielded a paper trail that led all the way to London -- and to the arrest of a potentially major suspect.

On September 30, 2001, as reported in the Telegraph by David Bamber, British prosecutor Arvinda Sambir announced that authorities had arrested Lotfi Raissi, whose name was found in al-Hazmi's rental. A further search of Raissi's apartment had yielded up a video clip starring Raissi with alleged hijacker Hani Hanjour -- all in all, another circumstantial slam-dunk in the snowballing case against al-Qaida. Or was it? For by April of 2002 -- when Mueller made his "paper trail" declaration -- Raissi would go free for want of evidence.

As we will shortly see, Raissi was being set up to play his part in a prearranged drama, one in which a definitive money trail leading to al-Qaida would be announced just in time for the October 7, 2001 launch into Afghanistan. Yet a brief, almost innocuous, article in the October 9 Times of India would lay havoc to this plan, necessitating a massive cover-up and a search for an alternative smoking gun that would unveil itself before a skeptical world audience on December 13, 2001 as the Official Bin Laden Videotape Confession.

An essential player in that original plan was Omar Saeed Sheikh (hereafter Omar Saeed), a 27 year-old London-born man of Pakistani parentage who had attended the London School of Economics before answering the call of militancy, heading off to Bosnia, and from there, to Pakistan, where he would make his "bones" in a 1994 kidnapping, serving time in an Indian prison until being bartered out for hostages in a 1999 airplane hijacking. Packing a lifetime into the next two years, Omar Saeed caught the eye of the so-called militant faction of Pakistan's ISI (the Pakistani CIA), rounding out his curricular vitae by tinkering around with the al-Qaida computer network in Afghanistan.

Omar Saeed made his public post-9/11 debut on September 23, 2001, on the very same day that his pseudonym, Mustafa Ahmad, made its own post-9/11 debut through President Bush's Global Terrorist Executive Order, in which a "Shaykh Sai'id (aka Mustafa Muhammad Ahmad)" was mentioned as a financial operative in al-Qaida, among a list of 27 individuals and entities slated to have their assets frozen. On September 23, Nick Fielding of The Sunday Times reported: "British officials have now asked India for legal assistance in seeking the whereabouts of Omar [Saeed] Sheikh. British security services confirmed this weekend that they wanted him for questioning."

A week later, on September 30, 2001, we found out why, when David Bamber of the Telegraph reported: "Police also believe that . . . Omar [Saeed] Sheikh, who is British, trained the terrorists in hijacking techniques." As Bamber implied, Omar Saeed was working in cahoots with Lotfi Raissi, who was just recently arrested and charged with training the hijacker pilots. In other words, in less than three weeks after 9/11, authorities were closing in on Raissi and Omar Saeed, the alleged trainers of the alleged hijackers.

Now all that remained was to furnish a "smoking gun" link to al-Qaida by way of a money trail, all in time for the planned October 7 invasion of Afghanistan. On the very day that the Telegraph outed Raissi and Omar Saeed as the 9/11 trainers, ABC News This Week announced that a $100,000 money trail had been traced in Florida from hijacker Atta to "people linked to Osama bin Laden."

The very next day, on October 1, Judith Miller of the New York Times reported that hijacker Atta received money from someone using the alias "Mustafa Ahmad". Five days later, on October 6, Maria Ressa of CNN, quoting terrorism expert Magnus Ranstorp, officially unveiled Omar Saeed as the pseudonymous 9/11 money man: "He [Omar Saeed] is . . . linked to the financial network feeding bin Laden's assets, so therefore he's quite an important person . . . because he transfers money between various operatives, and he's a node between al Qaeda and foot soldiers on the ground." Ressa went on to report: "Because investigators have now determined that [Omar Saeed] and Mustafa Muhammad Ahmad [the pseudonym] are the same person, it provides another key link to bin Laden as the mastermind of the overall [9/11] plot."

Two days later, on October 8, Ressa revisited the story, this time connecting Omar Saeed to an October 1 attack on the provincial legislature in Kashmir -- an incident that led Pakistan and India closer to the brink. October 8, incidentally, was also one of the very last times that CNN touched upon Omar Saeed -- at least until he bobbed up a few months later, on February 6, as the FBI's main suspect in the kidnapping of Daniel Pearl. Yet by then, CNN -- and Maria Ressa -- was stricken by a curious case of amnesia, neglecting to mention that Saeed was previously outed by them as the 9/11 bag-man. Why this sudden silence? And, more to the point, why did Omar Saeed virtually drop off CNN's radar after October 8?

Perhaps the answer lies in an October 9 bombshell, courtesy of the Times of India:

"While the Pakistani Inter Services Public Relations claimed that former ISI [Pakistani intelligence] director-general Lt-Gen Mahmud Ahmad sought retirement after being superseded on Monday, the truth is more shocking. Top sources confirmed here on Tuesday that the general lost his job because of the "evidence" India produced to show his links to one of the suicide bombers that wrecked the World Trade Center. The U.S. authorities sought his removal after confirming the fact that $100,000 were wired to WTC hijacker Mohammed Atta from Pakistan by [Omar Saeed] at the instance of General Mahmud [Ahmad]."

In short, the Times of India revealed that Omar Saeed was acting under the direct orders of the head of Pakistani intelligence and not Osama bin Laden. That in itself could perhaps have been explained away, as it was widely acknowledged that Islamic elements in the ISI were sympathetic to the Taliban and their al-Qaida guests. Yet tracing the "smoking gun" money trail to General Ahmad created an entirely new smoking gun that led straight back to Washington, D.C. -- for General Ahmad had already been reported as having breakfast in the nation's capital with Senator Bob Graham and Representative Porter Goss on the morning of September 11 (Both Graham and Goss would go on to co-chair the joint Senate-House 9/11 inquiry). In fact, as early as September 9 -- two days before 9/11, for those who didn't notice -- Karachi News had weighed in with the following observation:

"ISI Chief Lt-Gen [Mahmud Ahmad's] week-long presence in Washington has triggered speculation about the agenda of his mysterious meetings at the Pentagon and National Security Council. . . What added interest to his visit is the history of such visits. Last time Ziauddin Butt, [General Ahmad's] predecessor, was here during Nawaz Sharif's government, the domestic politics turned topsy-turvy within days. That this is not the first visit by [General Ahmad] in the last three months shows the urgency of the ongoing parleys."

If ever there was a paper trail leading to the 9/11conspirators, these articles provided the print-smeared paving. Taken together, they would conjure up the following plausible scenario: Omar Saeed, acting under the direction of General Ahmad and the ISI, had provided money and "training" (as reported in the Telegraph) to the hijackers while "false-flagging" himself to the hijackers as an operative of al-Qaida. The General, on the other hand, may have represented himself to Omar Saeed as acting exclusively under ISI authority, when in fact he was acting under the direction of his American-Anglo handlers. With Omar Saeed seeding the "legend" of a bona fide money trail leading back to bin Laden, the stage would then be set for Omar Saeed to take the fall as the main patsy providing the smoking gun of al-Qaida complicity for 9/11. Yet at some point, this carefully enacted "legend" began to unravel once Indian intelligence was able to establish (or just mischievously leaked) Saeed's link with General Ahmad, forcing a reluctant FBI - or, alternatively, a cooperative element in the FBI outside of the hermetically compartmentalized loop -- to go along and confirm the findings.

Naturally, in the light of the Times of India's Oct. 9 bombshell, somebody would have to organize a prophylactic strategy of damage control. Yet where the original money trail "legend" was carefully, even artfully, crafted, the efforts to perform a partial-birth abortion on it were piecemeal, ill-considered, and -- most damaging of all- worked to highlight the participation of individual accessories in the cover-up campaign.

A comprehensive cover-up strategy would entail four objectives: i) explaining General Ahmad's "sudden retirement"; ii) gradually minimizing the money trail story while subtly transforming it; iii) providing a new "smoking gun"; and iv) carving out an alternative "legend" for Omar Saeed while finding an alternative paymaster. Of the four objectives, the last one would turn out to be the most convoluted.

Meanwhile, the mainstream media -- except for a brief mention by the Wall Street Journal - would largely ignore the October 9 Times of India item. General Ahmad's "sudden dismissal" was accounted for by TIME and The Washington Post as being due to his "pro-Taliban" loyalties -- leaving out any mention of an al-Qaida or money trail connection. With General Ahmad thus safely "out of sight", he was also presumably "out of mind." Omar Saeed, on the other hand, represented a trickier problem, as the authorities and the mainstream media -- CNN at least -- had already gone on record as fingering him as the 9/11 paymaster. Moreover, Omar Saeed had originally been set up to be a major player in the overall 9/11 "legend".

As we will see, many of the players in this carefully plotted, decade-long "legend" -- Ramzi Yousef, Mohamed Atta, Ramzi Binalshibh (or bin al-shibh), Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, Zacarias Moussaoui, and the paymaster role -- were intricately interconnected in a web of activities and unfolding revelations. With the definitive identification of a paymaster now put on hold, the full crystallization of the Official 9/11 Legend would also have to await a more opportune time. In the short term, Omar Saeed would have to disappear, yet due to his prior exposure in the media, and in view of his deep involvement with many of the other players in the legend, his role in all this would ultimately have to be accounted for. And so, Omar Saeed would need to be reintegrated back into the 9/11 picture by way of an alternative legend, most of which would play itself out after September 11.

As for the formerly snowballing money trail story, post-October 9, it was gradually being ushered to a slow death of irrelevance, awaiting its temporary replacement with a new "smoking gun." In the meantime, the "Mustafa Ahmad" pseudonym was being passed on to a new owner -- or a number of alternative ones, depending on which media outlet was offering whichever version. In some reports, the paymaster alias would be tagged to an Egyptian "Shayk Saiid". In its November 11, 2001 issue, Newsweek bequeathed the alias to a 33 year-old Saudi named "Shaikh Saiid," who was apparently caught on surveillance video picking up a package in Dubai mailed by hijacker Mohammed Atta. On December 18, 2001, the Associated Press added further details, revealing that "Shaikh Saiid" was also the alias for bin Laden's brother-in-law, Sa'd al-Sharif. Both items, taken together, would mean that we would have an actual video of bin Laden's brother-in-law picking up a package from one of the hijackers -- a smoking gun if ever there was one, and just one more example of the incredible carelessness by which these throwaway details were revealed as "evidence." In any case, the original smoking gun -- the money trail story -- was officially supplanted earlier in that week, on December 13, 2001, with the worldwide release of the Official Bin Laden Videotape Confession.

Now all that remained was to properly dispose of the Omar Saeed "legend." Whether a new "legend" was being crafted for Saeed right after October 9, or considerably later, is a fact that may never be known with certainty. What we do know, however, is that Saeed was later linked to a December 13, 2001 suicide attack on the Indian Parliament in addition to a January 22, 2002 attack on the American Cultural Center in Calcutta.

In fact, January 22, 2002 was a key date for the plan to carve out a new "legend" for Omar Saeed. As we will see, FBI Director Robert Mueller just happened to be on scene in India, awaiting his crucial role in the unfolding drama -- just one day before Daniel Pearl disappeared off the streets of Karachi.

Enter Daniel Pearl

We may never know the true motivation that set Daniel Pearl on a quest that would ultimately lead to his grisly demise. However, thanks to an invaluable article by Robert Sam Anson in the August 2002 issue of Vanity Fair, we do know which key player was involved in guiding him on his quest for knowledge.

Mansoor Ijaz is not a man widely known outside his circle, but his intimate connections run deep in Washington's power circles. A counter-terror expert, a member of the Council On Foreign Relations, a Fox News analyst, as well as a business partner of former CIA Director James Woolsey, Ijaz is represented by the public relations firm of Benador Associates, whose client list reads like a "who's who" of the propaganda heavy-hitters who were pushing for a war in Iraq -- Richard Perle (former Chairman of the Defense Policy Board), Woolsey (also a member of the Defense Policy Board), Iraqi scientist ( and chronicler of Saddam's weapons program) Khidir Khamza, former Washington Times publisher (and UPI chief) Arnaud De Borchgrave, anti-Saddam author Laurie Mylroie, Harvard professor/CIA associate Richard Pipes (mentor of Mylroie, and father of Daniel Pipes), and Frank Gaffney, president of the hard-right Center For Security Policy (of which Perle and Woolsey are on the advisory council).

The interlocking relationships of members of this clique -- or "crew", in the parlance of organized crime -- is indeed a testament to the power of networking, yet the astonishing scope of their most recent activities -- both in the lead-up to and aftermath of 9/11 -- is perhaps indicative of a more covertly sinister tint in the psychological makeup of some members of the political "power elite."

Ijaz's frequent writing partner, James Woolsey, for example, was one of just 17 participants in a July 2001 bio-warfare exercise dubbed "Dark Winter," a simulation of a mass smallpox attack, co-sponsored by the ANSER Institute of Homeland Security and the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS). Among the other participants was Benador client Arnaud De Borchgrave and New York Times journalist Judith Miller, who had co-authored a book with Benador client Mylroie in the early `90's. Mylroie's book - an attempt at linking Iraq to 9/11 -- was released just weeks after September 11 with a foreword written by James Woolsey. Around the same time, Judith Miller had just launched her own well-publicized book on the germ warfare threat -- within a week or two of her own well-publicized role as one of the very few recipients of an "anthrax" mailing (which turned out not to be anthrax).

As for the anthrax threat, a major principal in the company that holds the exclusive license for the anthrax vaccine is former Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff William Crowe, whose business associate in the consulting firm Global Options is -- you guessed it -- James Woolsey.

As for the present smallpox threat, the man charged with overseeing President Bush's mass vaccination policy was another "Dark Winter" alumnus, Jerry Hauer. Hauer, a former director of Kroll Associates -- the security firm at the helm when the Twin Towers fell -- is also the man who personally pulled strings in order to get senior FBI official John O'Neill his job as head of security at the World Trade Center. O'Neill, who had left a 30-year career in the FBI only two weeks before September 11, had perished in the rubble of the Twin Towers on his very first day at the post. Incidentally, O'Neill just happened to have been the main FBI official in charge of investigating all things bin Laden.

Given the above social contacts, from Daniel Pearl's point of view, Mansoor Ijaz was indeed the man to meet. "He [Pearl] wanted me to introduce him to people who could open doors for him," explained Ijaz in Vanity Fair. One of those doors opened to Khalid Khawaja, a former ISI agent whose militant credentials included a longstanding friendship with Osama bin Laden. But Khawaja was a liberal militant, counting among his acquaintances both Ijaz and Woolsey, with whom he carried on a lengthy correspondence.

With Ijaz's letter of reference in hand, Pearl established contact with Khawaja in Pakistan. As reported by Arshad Sharif in a February 14, 2002 item from Dawn, "Khawaja claimed that he introduced Mr. Pearl to his contacts and arranged interviews with Taliban diplomats and other people." According to the "official" record of Pearl's journalistic quest, he was on the trail of Richard Reid, otherwise known as the "shoe bomber." According to Anson, Pearl believed that Reid was a follower of Sheikh Mubarak Ali Shah Gilani, "a leader of an obscure Muslim militant group named Jamaat ul-Fuqra."

As Khawaja spins the tale, when Pearl asked for an introduction to Gilani in early January, Khawaja's militant toes went cold. With Khawaja now purportedly out of the picture, Pearl was left to scrounge up his own contacts. Eventually, Pearl found a "connected" militant who went by the name of Chaudry Bashir -- but who was, in actual fact, Omar Saeed clothed in yet another alias. Or so that is the "official" version. If true, our man Saeed had his terrorist appointment book just about crammed with militant activities at the time, for he was, according to Indian intelligence, intimately involved with the man who took responsibility for the terrorist attack in Calcutta on January 22, 2002 -- just one day before Pearl's disappearance.

On that very day, a militant/gangster by the name of Aftab Ansari called in his claim of responsibility for the carnage. As for his connection with Omar Saeed, here is how the Times of India reported it on January 22:

"[Indian] CBI Director P C Sharma told visiting FBI Chief Robert S Mueller that Ansari, who claimed responsibility for [today's Calcutta] attack, had taken a ransom of Rs 37.5 million to free shoe baron Parthapratim Roy Burman through hawala channels to Dubai, CBI sources said. Out of this amount, Omar [Saeed] . . . had sent $100,000 to Atta through telegraphic transfer, CBI sources said."

What was going on here? Apparently, the January 22 Calcutta incident was the trigger for an update on the "legend" of 9/11 -- and FBI Director Mueller was on scene to play his part in the unfolding drama. Within hours of the January 22 attack, the Indian Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) was circulating news that the main suspect in the Calcutta attack, Ansari, had sent money to Omar Saeed, who then sent it on to Mohamed Atta in preparation for the September 11 attacks. No mention was made of the previously reported involvement of the chief of Pakistani intelligence. In fact, The Times of India would, within the next few weeks, back away from its October 9 article linking Omar Saeed to the Pakistani General -- perhaps at the behest of Indian intelligence. The 9/11 money, in the CBI's new version, came from an August 2001 kidnapping masterminded by Ansari and Asif Reza Khan. Unfortunately, Khan was not around by this time to confirm it, as he had already been killed in what was believed to be a staged shootout with Indian police several weeks earlier.

The story at this point gets a bit murky, as it becomes difficult to distinguish fact from disinformation, but what is clear is the very real perception of a well-timed and coordinated set-up. The next day -- on January 23, 2002 -- Daniel Pearl disappeared off the streets of Karachi, Pakistan after setting up an appointment to meet Omar Saeed, alias "Bashir", for the first time. Meanwhile, on that very day, Aftab Ansari was arrested by UAE authorities at Dubai International Airport while attempting to board a plane bound for Islamabad. Also on the very day of Pearl's disappearance, the Los Angeles Times reinstated Omar Saeed back into "mainstream" view by citing a report by India Today, which mentioned the new Saeed/Ansari/9/11 Money Trail connection. The British Independent, on January 24, also gave voice to the Saeed revelations stemming from the Indian CBI, throwing in, for good measure, an extensive biography of Omar Saeed. This was followed by a January 27 item in the Telegraph that also touched upon Saeed's link to the Calcutta attack.

Why was Omar Saeed suddenly being "resurrected" worldwide within hours of the January 22 attack, after being mostly forgotten after October 9? It should be pointed out that Saeed's purported links to the Pearl kidnapping were not yet "known" until February 5, 2002. In that light, Robert Mueller's subsequent travel itinerary bears closer scrutiny. As reported by the Los Angeles Times on January 23, "FBI Director Mueller said Tuesday (i.e. January 22) that Indian authorities provided leads in the search for Al Qaeda members and cells, based on arrests in India." There was no word from Mueller, however, on his reported discussions with the CBI Chief concerning the 9/11 money trail.

The very next day -- January 23 -- Mueller was in Pakistan, just in time for the Pearl kidnapping by Omar Saeed. Of course, Mueller could not have known by then that the person who was mentioned to him the day before as being the 9/11 paymaster would be involved in the Pearl kidnapping the very next day. One might even chalk it up to coincidence -- or maybe not. On January 24, Mueller reportedly took up the matter of Omar Saeed with Pakistan President Musharraf. Was he discussing CBI Chief Sharma's revelations about Omar Saeed and the 9/11 money trail? As later revealed by an "anonymous" Bush administration official, Mueller was formally requesting the extradition of Omar Saeed -- for a 1994 kidnapping of an American tourist.

What, according to the "mainstream" media, prompted this sudden, rather overdue, request? According to the February 24, 2002 issue of Newsweek, Saeed was "secretly" indicted back in November 2001 for that obscure kidnapping. As reported by CNN on February 28, 2002: "Justice Department officials won't say what prompted that indictment, which came more than six years after the incident." It also came several weeks after Saeed was first outed as the 9/11 paymaster.

The possibility also exists that the November 2001 "secret" indictment was a late February fiction meant to explain Mueller's sudden interest in Omar Saeed. For good measure, timed with the Newsweek revelation, Wendy Chamberlin, the U.S. ambassador to Pakistan, revealed to CBS News that she had preceded Mueller's request with an informal approach to Musharraf concerning Saeed's extradition a few months before. The reader would be cautioned as to drawing any firm conclusions as to the true nature of the "secret" November indictment. Instead, one should focus on the compelling circumstantial evidence of a disinformation campaign that appears to be organized around a number of conveniently timed set-ups. According to CNN, Mueller was also the one who first informed Musharraf of the Pearl kidnapping. So, to recap: only two days after the Times of India reported Mueller's discussions with the CBI concerning the Omar Saeed link to 9/11, Mueller reportedly discussed Omar Saeed only in connection with an obscure 1994 kidnapping, while broaching a new kidnapping that occurred the day before, which, in a matter of weeks, would publicly be linked to . . . Omar Saeed.

Incidentally, the FBI also happened to be instrumental in coordinating Saeed's eventual capture as the Pearl kidnap mastermind. As the "official" story had it soon after Saeed's "official" arrest on February 12, the case was solved when the authorities successfully traced a series of e-mails back to one of Saeed's alleged accomplices, who then confessed that he was only acting under Saeed's orders. The government's case, as reported by Zarar Khan of the Associated Press on July 1, 2002, "rests heavily on technical FBI evidence, which traced the e-mails to fellow defendant Fahad Naseem."

Mueller, incidentally, also played a crucial role in arranging for the deportation of Aftab Ansari from the UAE to India. Ansari, by reason of the Calcutta bombing, was delivered to Indian custody on February 9, just three days before Omar Saeed was "officially" arrested for the Pearl kidnapping. In short, these two purported 9/11 partners had been arrested separately in the same week of February for crimes they had separately committed in the same week of January.

Meanwhile, Daniel Pearl's chaperone, the "militant" Khalid Khawaja, was beginning to feel the heat due to his involvement in managing Pearl's appointment book. For a presumed partisan of bin Laden, Khawaja seemed to be unduly concerned about the bad press that Pearl's disappearance was garnering him. According to a February 15, 2002 article in Dawn by Arshad Sharif: " Khawaja said it was on the intervention of [Mansoor] Ijaz that Newsweek toned down its article which was allegedly raising an accusing finger on him." In a typical example of post-9/11 news management, Khawaja -- presumed friend of Osama bin Laden -- shared his correspondence from editor Gretel Kovach of Newsweek:

"If it is of any consolation, you may have read in the e-mails I sent Mansoor that the Newsweek article would have been much stronger in pointing the finger at you as the person who led Danny into trouble. Thankfully, I spoke with Mansoor and was able to offer a contrary account -- that you refused Danny's request, and that others tricked him into thinking he could meet Gilani."

Mansoor Ijaz -- fellow propagandist and business partner of the ubiquitous James Woolsey -- wasn't exactly a disinterested party in the matter, for if it was Khawaja who had led Pearl to his ultimate fate, so, too, by association, would suspicion lie with Ijaz, who had sent Pearl on to Khawaja.

Meanwhile, Omar Saeed appeared to be at the very broiling geo-political center of the Pakistan-India stand-off. With Indian authorities publicly highlighting Omar Saeed as the poster boy of Pakistani terrorism, using him as a cudgel to prod the reluctant Americans into action against the Pakistani ISI, one could read Mueller's trip to the region as an effort to broker the competing interests of these incompatible allies in the so-called War on Terror. Publicly, Mueller was in India on January 22 as part of a U.S.-Indo Working Group on Counter-Terrorism. But as we do not have access to the minutes of those meetings, we might surmise that, behind closed doors, Mueller was negotiating with his Indian counterparts the final dispensation of Omar Saeed within the overall 9/11 Legend. Not that negotiations were going particularly smoothly -- as evidenced by the upsurge in daring attacks against Indian interests in the few months previous. Yet it seems that a quid-pro-quo had been worked out along the following lines: the Indian authorities would excise the ISI Chief from their version of 9/11 and instead splice in a less incriminating "gangster" from Dubai as the partner of paymaster Omar Saeed. In return, the Americans would redouble their efforts in moving against terror groups based out of Pakistan.

Mueller, for his part, would deal with this new version of the Omar Saeed/Money Trail Story in the same manner that he dealt with the older version -- by ignoring it. With the Indian CBI now circulating this new version of the Omar Saeed/ Money Trail Story to various mainstream Western newspapers in the wake of the January 22 Calcutta attack, Mueller would publicly go on record as reserving judgment as to the true culprits and motives behind that incident -- while assisting India behind-the-scenes in arranging for the deportation and arrest of Aftab Ansari. And while the Indian press was widely presenting the Calcutta attack as an Ansari/ISI production, according to the January 23, 2002 Indian Express, the Indian government was backing down on pushing an ISI link to Calcutta after consultation with the U.S. government. Why the apparent U.S. squeamishness concerning the ISI in regards to the Calcutta attack? Perhaps due to its proximity to the latest Omar Saeed/Ansari/Money Trail Story being marketed by the Indians -- for if the American aim was to gradually erase Omar Saeed from the 9/11 paymaster role and place him in a post-9/11 context, Omar Saeed would have to come by his ISI connections through a different route, one that would in fact distance him from his reported role on September 11. In other words, the Americans would need to muddy the waters over Omar Saeed and the role of the 9/11 paymaster.

It wouldn't be easy. As reported by Paul Sperry of WorldNetDaily on January 30, 2002 (i.e. one week before Omar Saeed was first outed as a suspect in the Pearl kidnapping):

"India's Central Bureau of Investigation is turning up evidence that is proving inconvenient for the Bush administration as it tries to maintain its shaky alliance with Pakistan. As administration officials, led by State Secretary Colin Powell, praise Pakistan for its help in the war on terrorism, FBI agents responding to Indian leads are quietly investigating Pakistan-based terrorist groups connected to al-Qaida and the Sept. 11 hijacking."

In other words, India was apparently putting the screws to the Americans. If the Americans, for purely pragmatic reasons, had opted to cozy up to the Musharraf regime, India needed insurance to hedge against the possibility that its strategic interests would be harmed through this likely temporary alliance. In that context, it would be somewhat naive to assume that India just happened to "discover" the Omar Saeed/ ISI Chief/ 9/11 connection through one of those ubiquitous cell phone "intercepts" -- for as early as September 23, 2001, the British government was reported as seeking India's help in locating Omar Saeed. Moreover, in view of the fact that the Mustafa Ahmad paymaster alias also made its debut on that very day through Bush's Global Terrorist Executive Order, there is perhaps another plausible explanation for India's apparent obsession with Omar Saeed and his activities.

Flashback: Assembling The Legend

As we shall see, the various elements of the 9/11 Legend were assembled with the help of a number of international players. Through the Pakistani ISI (an organization, in fact, with close historical ties to the CIA and British intelligence), the Taliban were armed and installed as the resident overlords of Afghanistan. Under the watchful eye of German intelligence, lead hijacker Mohamed Atta would set up his Hamburg "cell" of conspirators, sharing a flat with senior al-Qaida operative Ramzi Binalshibh. Through French authorities, particularly with the assistance of Judge Jean-Louis Bruguiere (a friend of John O'Neill), Zacarias Moussaoui (arrested August 2001) and senior Al-Qaida leader Abu Zubaydah (the first "big fish" captured in March 2002) would work their way into the official 9/11 Legend. By way of Spanish Police Chief Juan Cotino (who was also a senior figure in Europol), other al-Qaida cells were discovered as further proof of bin Laden's global reach. In fact, as the 9/11 Legend would have it, Mohamed Atta had rendezvoused with Ramzi Binalshibh in Spain sometime in July 2001, where the two presumably made final preparations for September 11. Around the same time, the FBI's lead point man on al-Qaida, John O'Neill, was in Madrid to discuss counter-terror issues with Police Chief Cotino. Thereafter, O'Neill made his last public appearance (before his retirement the next month) at a counter-terror conference held at a three-star hotel in the Spanish resort town of Salou -- coincidentally, only a few days before Mohammed Atta had checked into the very same hotel in his last international trip before September 11 (a curious fact reported in John Miller's book "The Cell"). Atta's previous trip to Madrid had been in January 2001, within days of the very first Europol Conference On Terrorism, also held in Madrid.

Finally, the United Kingdom served as a major transit point, educational center, and source of "evidence" pointing to the hijackers and various al-Qaida operatives -- most notably, Omar Saeed, Zacarias Moussaoui, and Richard Reid, the so-called "shoe bomber." Thus, the very countries that were so prominent in furnishing the various elements of the 9/11 Legend -- "burnishing" it with a globalized gloss -- also happened to be the same countries that served as senior partners in the War On Terror.

The fact that France and Germany have since headed up opposition to the War In Iraq should not be taken as an irreconcilable contradiction in this regard. Rather, just the opposite. As we shall see, a strategy to cast doubt on the War In Iraq -- fuelled by elements in the CIA and some of the more vociferous supporters of the War On Terror - has actually worked to strengthen the credibility of the overall 9/11 Legend. In counter-point to that strategy lies a fall-back option that "localizes" any potential conspiracy to a "rogue" clique of "hawks" holding President Bush in their ideological sway -- the markedly Jewish and pro-Israeli neo-conservatives, an apparent CIA "cut-out" helmed by Richard Mellon Scaife during the Clinton years, then by Richard Cheney in the early months after 9/11 before he mostly disappeared from public view along with his defibrillator, and most famously now, by Richard Perle (a product of the RAND Corporation).

As I argued previously in The Propaganda Preparation For 9/11, the Saudis, Pakistanis, and Israelis were set up as the primary alternate foreign patsies to divert attention from the far more plausible (and obvious) involvement of the U.S./U.K./E.U., the very alliance which now spearheads the War On Terror even as it choreographs the Official 9/11 Legend. As we shall see, with the relatively recent prominence of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed as 9/11 mastermind, Iraq now takes its place as a plausible patsy (particularly since Colin Powell's introduction of a new al-Qaeda leader by the name of Abu Musab Zarqawi, a Baghdad-based Palestinian whose legend and motives will no doubt grow out of the recently completed War In Iraq). With regard to the Saudis, their actual involvement was more indirect -- as they financed the various Pakistani madrassas (Muslim yeshivas) that served as a farming system for the hordes of wild-eyed Wahhabi idealists looking to set up camp in Afghanistan. Still, their domination of the Middle East media served to give an impression -- to Western eyes - that bin Laden was more intimately known among the Arab/Muslim masses than he was by an insular clique in the Western security establishment.

Heading up that clique was Richard A. Clarke, who joined the National Security Council under the first President Bush, and stayed there under Clinton. As reported by Lawrence Wright in The New Yorker, "In the web of federal agencies concerned with terror, Clarke was the spider." Tim Weiner of the New York Times wrote of Clarke on February 1, 1999: "He has placed proteges in key diplomatic and intelligence positions, creating a network of loyalty and solidifying his power."

It was Clarke who, together with John O'Neill, "discovered" bin Laden as a global terrorist mastermind. Here, as reported by Lawrence Wright in The New Yorker, was Clarke's version of his discovery: "We'd [O'Neill and I] see CIA reports that referred to `financier Osama bin Laden' and we'd ask ourselves, `Who the hell is he?' The more we drilled down, the more we realized he was not just a financier -- he was the leader. John said, `We've got to get this guy. He's building a network. Everything leads back to him.' Gradually the CIA came along with us."

Presumably, Clarke had help in marketing bin Laden -- for bin Laden himself would soon enough make his high profile media debut as the declared enemy of American interests the world over, thereby giving the world's only superpower a plausibly sophisticated foe who would overshadow the efforts of one Muslim fanatic (Ramzi Yousef, World Trade Center `93) or one right-wing nutcase (Timothy McVeigh, Oklahoma `95). Meanwhile, the gregarious John O'Neill would make the global rounds, liaising with various counterparts as he shadowed the presumed activities of Osama bin Laden. In other words, if one were theoretically to posit the type of operatives who would be most suited to running a highly compartmentalized "op" to develop a global legend of Osama bin Laden, one could find no more conveniently placed men than Richard Clarke and John O'Neill. Where Clarke would manage the national security rank-and-file through his network of loyalists, O'Neill would be the globetrotter, coordinating the unfolding legend through his counterparts in various countries.

In short, Clarke and O'Neill would theoretically be conducting their activities in "plain sight." Under the cover of counter-terrorism, O'Neill would be building a terror legend fit for the New World Order -- in the same manner that Oliver North in the `80s employed the cover of counter-terrorism to conduct, on behalf of Vice-President Bush, the illegal arms dealing operations popularly known as Iran-Contra (for which North took a decidedly light rap as the designated patsy). The main difference would be that where North would eventually be tagged as the moron of Iran-Contra, O'Neill would take his place as the martyr of 9/11.

In the few months leading up to September 11, O'Neill -- for the first time in his 30-year career with the FBI -- would make the headlines in two separate scandals. The first, reported in July 2001, concerned O'Neill's dispute with Ambassador Barbara Bodine in Yemen, where O'Neill was reportedly pursuing al-Qaida links to the U.S.S. Cole bombing. As the story had it, O'Neill was too much the cowboy for Bodine's tastes, and so she summarily banned him from returning to Yemen. The second scandal, reported in August 2001, concerned a briefcase of classified documents that O'Neill had misplaced during a convention in Tampa. Considering the resolution of the latter scandal -- the documents were found, "untouched," a couple hours later -- it seemed much ado about nothing. Yet in the light of O'Neill's subsequent death as head of security for the World Trade Center on September 11, the scandals began to take on a more suspicious tint. Was O'Neill digging too deep? A maverick who stepped on too many feet in his efforts to bulldog his way through the hierarchy? Put bluntly, had the maverick been taken down a notch by a bloated bureaucracy beholden to a "cover-your-ass" ethic? As Richard Clarke, Jerry Hauer, John Miller, Chris Isham, and O'Neill's friends/colleagues at Kroll Associates would spin it, O'Neill's was the lone voice shouting in the wilderness, warning all who would listen about the approaching bin Laden threat before falling himself, "ironically", at the hands of bin Laden.

It was an ingenious cover story -- for if O'Neill was a crucial operative in assembling the al-Qaida elements that fed into the 9/11 Legend, then O'Neill's crystallized role as official 9/11 martyr would forever obscure the trail to September 11, and, by extension, leave his most intimate comrades and contacts out of the suspect category. In short, it would be like reconstructing the murder of Nicole Simpson without O.J. in the tale. With O'Neill cast as martyr, 9/11 critics would now be left with a mishmash of innuendos and bits and pieces of shadowy conspiracies: Israeli spy rings that trail off into the ether of Fox News; passenger lists with missing hijackers; and abandoned "put" options. If the shadowy conspiracy had a face, it was in the image of either Dick Cheney or Richard Perle. But then again, who marketed them as the latest powers behind the throne? Where were the folks who brought us BCCI, Iran-Contra, and the Warren Commission? Where were James Baker, Zbigniew Brzezinski, David Rockefeller, Kissinger?

Assembling The 9/11 Counter-Legends (or, Stacking Your Patsies)

The events of September 11 gave birth to three parallel threads -- or counter-legends -- pointing the way to the culpability of three possible foreign suspects, or patsies - namely, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and Israel. Of the three, the Saudis were the patsies of choice for the mainstream "critics", who were a motley assortment of neo-cons, FBI investigators, or "retired" national security types opposed to the war in Iraq. The Pakistan/ISI thread to 9/11 flared up most noticeably in the events surrounding the death of Daniel Pearl and the alleged involvement of Omar Saeed Sheikh -- events which were used, in fact, to smother the Pakistani/ISI connection to the 9/11 money trail. As regards Israel, the most radical opponents of the War On Terror were nursed on the twin threads of an Israeli spy ring and a neo-con cabal supposedly at the helm of the Bush Administration.

It was not by accident that these three countries were chosen to play the role of second-tier patsies -- for each of them contained insular cliques of operatives which had played seminal roles in the covert arms and drug trade -- in cahoots with their more senior Anglo-American handlers -- throughout the Reagan-Bush years. Moreover, these countries would make useful patsies for the very reason that they were essentially outside the "established" -- i.e. Euro-American -- ring of nations. In other words, if insular cliques of criminal operatives were to be ferreted out of Germany, France, or Italy, no one would think to brand these nations wholesale with the mark of Cain. The same could not be said of Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and Israel, whose very security -- physical, political, and economic -- would be staked to the publicized activities of their own respective political/criminal cliques.

Moreover, much of the political and corporate elites within these countries were integrally networked with their American counterparts -- indeed, largely subservient to them -- to such a degree that they would also serve as useful proxies in building their own counter-legends under Anglo-Euro-American supervision. In the early stages of the 9/11 Legend, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan were employed as the central bases for building up a terrorist home front within the borders of Afghanistan. As for Israel -- despite its aforementioned spy ring and its supposedly allied neo-con "cabal" -- its most direct and public contribution to the 9/11 Legend in fact occurred after 9/11, with the November 2002 coordinated attack on an Israeli-owned hotel and airliner in Kenya -- an attack for which Israeli investigators now marshaled evidence as proof of Osama bin Laden's opening shot against the State of Israel (which was more likely Israel's "buy-in" in return for a promised attack on the Saddam Hussein regime).

Thus, evidence could be amassed to cast aspersions on the activities of each of these three countries, depending on the intended audience. On another level, political elites within these countries could be assured that any aspersions would be relegated to insular "rogue" cliques. In the case of Saudi Arabia, a few princes of the Saudi royal family were thus eliminated within days of one another in 2002. In the case of Pakistan, "rogue" elements within the ISI were publicly purged in the months after 9/11. Yet in the case of Israel, its apparent "buy-in" through the 2002 Kenya attack served to strengthen, rather than weaken, the thread connecting Israel as a possible 9/11 culprit. If, in the context of this article, this would appear to be a short-sighted strategy by Israeli political elites, one can only surmise that these elites were blinded -- or assured -- by an apparent post-9/11 geo-strategic shift in favor of Israeli interests (i.e. an attack on Iraq) in conjunction with a publicly affirmed surge in influence among its supposed neo-con allies.

With three alternative counter-legends in place to co-exist with the Official (i.e. mainstream) 9/11 Legend, the stage was thereby set to muddy the real trail leading to the events of September 11. With the participation of a global network of well-connected spinmeisters - both passive and active -- each of the 9/11 threads could thus be nurtured through a series of carefully calibrated revelations.

Of all the 9/11 spinmeisters, one of the most effective -- and therefore damaging -- was Jean-Charles Brisard, co-author with Guillaume Dasquie of The Forbidden Truth. Brisard burst on to the mainstream scene shortly after September 11 as one of the first "credible" critics of 9/11, weaving a trail of seemingly incriminating red herrings that will, in all probability, tie up a number of otherwise industrious conspiracy researchers for decades. In Brisard and Dasquie's version of 9/11, the main protectors of al-Qaida were the Saudis, who in turn were protected by greedy oil interests which sought -- through the State Department -- to obstruct any investigations that might unsettle their Saudi business associates. To nail down the point, Brisard recounted his summer 2001 meeting with John O'Neill, in which a frustrated, scandal-ridden O'Neill purportedly confided to Brisard that the "answer" to the al-Qaida riddle lay in Saudi Arabia. For good measure, Brisard had the well-timed implosion of Enron as a backdrop for his revelation, implicating this now-dead shell of a corporation in a stubborn push for an oil pipeline through Afghanistan (though senior Enron exec -- and CIA offspring -- Frank Wisner, Jr., was, as it happens, also one of the 17 elite "players" in the aforementioned "Dark Winter" exercise).

Through Brisard (in addition to Pakistani Foreign Minister Niaz Naik), we learned that the U.S. had made plans as early as June of 2001 to invade Afghanistan by October of that year. During that summer, as Brisard chronicled it, a number of nations -- including Iran, Russia, and India -- got together for a four-day conference in Berlin, where the dispute with the Taliban was broached by U.S. diplomats. The U.S. demanded that the Taliban hand over bin Laden (in addition to negotiating for pipeline rights). Otherwise, the Americans threatened to blanket Afghanistan with "a carpet of bombs."

Brisard's initial theory, then, was that this threat prompted bin Laden to launch a pre-emptive attack against the very nation that was now placing him in imminent peril. Brisard also seemed to implicate Bush, Sr. by way of his Carlyle Group interests. But in the end, as Brisard essentially kept bin Laden in place as the sole 9/11 culprit, the aspersions cast on the Bushes, the State Department, "oil interests", et al, would not amount to much -- at least from a legal standpoint. At most, these parties could be judged as too blinded by greed to recognize -- and pre-empt -- the very real threat from al-Qaida. However you clothed Brisard's revelations, the "official" 9/11 Legend remained in place. Al-Qaida was still the defendant (albeit with a new excuse), O'Neill was still a martyr (albeit with a new Saudi gripe), and the Saudis were still suspicious (albeit with possibly a new gripe against Brisard). Brisard, incidentally, also happened to have written -- for French intelligence -- the first comprehensive report on the financial structure of al-Qaida, a copy of which was furnished to the Bush administration. Thus do national security types and their 9/11 critics have a deeper understanding of the 9/11 Legend courtesy of the efforts of Jean-Charles Brisard.

Brisard's co-author, Guillaume Dasquie, also comes by his own intelligence connections, by way of his role as editor of Intelligence Online. It was through Dasquie's efforts that Intelligence Online, in March 2002, announced that it had come into possession of a 61-page "secret" DEA report on a large Israeli spy ring of "art students" who were casing federal buildings several months before September 11. The "leaking" of this document, in conjunction with Carl Cameron's December 2001 Fox News report on the spy ring, ignited an online firestorm among 9/11 critics -- pointing the way, for some, to the Israelis as the main operative agents behind September 11.

Yet, as we shall see, in the campaign to paint Israel as the main suspect, here was a case of mostly right wing sources doling out the goods for largely left wing consumption (with the obvious exception of Justin Raimondo, a political supporter of, and former speechwriter for, Pat Buchanan). Thus, while the likes of Stephen Emerson, Daniel Pipes, and John Loftus were doing the lecture circuit at Jewish Community Centers across North America, regaling this influential community with insinuations of possible Saudi and/or Iraqi involvement in 9/11, a more covert -- and subtle -- plan was afoot to plant the seeds of a new Jewish neocon/Zionist conspiracy among the left wing (i.e. the traditional foothold of the bulk of the American Jewish community).

This relatively recent campaign to subvert the left with visions of a Jewish neocon/Zionist conspiracy dovetailed nicely with a more longstanding covert campaign -- dating back more than thirty years -- to build up a small but powerful right wing contingent of Jews to wean the rest from their knee-jerk liberalism (and thereby sap the strength and vigor of the traditional Democrat wing). The species of the Jewish "neo" conservative is best represented by Irving Kristol, a self-admitted former Trotskyite who had been a member of the "left-wing" Congress of Cultural Freedom (later exposed as a CIA front) before making a "sudden" right turn in the late sixties, bringing along with him a few other like-minded "disillusioned" Jews from CIA-funded "leftist" groups. The typical neo-conservative was "neo" in the sense that he would continue to hold liberal social values while espousing hard right (i.e. pro-corporate) economic views and a hawkish foreign policy -- pretty much the course that American society has taken in the thirty-odd years since Kristol made his ideological "shift."

Though the history is far more complex and detailed than indicated above, the crux of the point is this: in order to neutralize the influential American Jewish community on the subject of civil rights and domestic dissent (where they historically predominated), it was not sufficient only to wean the Jews from the left, but to turn the left against the Jews by now slurring them as right wing, Zionist "imperialists" (best exemplified by Richard Perle, who is actually more a product of the national security community than of the Jewish community).

In concert with this strategy was a plan -- also dating back more than thirty years -- to wean the South from the Democrats by promoting a fundamentalist Christianity that grew in counter-point to the overall loosening social values. The typical fundamentalist Christian Republican would hold conservative social views while espousing hard right (i.e. pro-corporate) economic views and a hawkish foreign policy (best exemplified by John Ashcroft, who is actually more a product of a deeply cynical political community than of the community of belief).

With that background in mind, we may now touch upon the national security/conservative clique which has furnished most of the information concerning Israeli perfidy and 9/11. For our purposes, the story begins on May 7, 1997, when Nora Boustany of The Washington Post first broached the existence of Mega, a suspected code name for a suspected Israeli mole within the upper echelons of the Clinton government. As reported by Boustany, the National Security Agency had intercepted a request from a Mossad operative to view a diplomatic letter from Yasser Arafat. When the operative was heard to ask his superior for the assistance of someone or something called Mega, he received the reply, "We don't use Mega for this."

The story, in fact, broke on the very day when South Korean spy Robert C. Kim was scheduled to deliver a guilty plea after a plea bargain -- a similar bargain that was, in fact, dishonored in the case of convicted Israeli spy Jonathan Pollard in the mid-80's. Kim, like Pollard, had worked in the Office of Naval Intelligence, though Pollard had worked in the counter-terrorism section. A week before the Mega story broke -- on April 30, 1997 -- Pollard had petitioned the Israeli High Court to compel the Israeli government to reveal what it knew about his case. If a battle was brewing between Pollard supporters (Likud/ neocon elements) and opponents (the Bush/ Baker clique/ Woolsey/the national intelligence apparatus), the May 7 Mega leak by way of the National Security Agency seemed to head it off, publicly raising the specter of yet another Israeli mole. And then the story ultimately went cold, with no official resolution and -- most crucially -- no hard details by which to flesh out this possible mole hunt.

Yet Jeffrey Steinberg of Lyndon LaRouche's Executive Intelligence Review has attempted to draw a line between this morsel of an item and a Mega Group that was mentioned by Lisa Miller in the Wall Street Journal on May 4, 1998. In Steinberg's telling, the Mega Group is, in fact, the shadowy Mega from the Boustany article. As Steinberg put it, the Mega Group - a select group of Jewish billionaires including Bronfman, Steinhardt, Spielberg, Tisch, and others -- had come together to influence U.S. security policy toward Israel. Yet that was a disingenous -- and I dare say, dishonest -- reading of the Miller article. In other words -- and this was very clear from the Miller article -- their main concern was assimilation and philanthropy, not Israeli national security issues, as Steinberg had reported. But Steinberg's technique was all too typical -- mischievously weaving two totally disconnected items so as to give the impression that he was uncovering bona fide evidence of a fully known Jewish/Israeli conspiracy.

Yet taking the thread of a burgeoning Israeli spy conspiracy further, in May 2000, J. Michael Waller and Paul M. Rodriguez of Insight magazine (the sister publication of the ultra-right wing Washington Times, which is in turn owned by the Moonies) broke the story that the Israelis had possibly compromised U.S. government phone lines, giving them access to sensitive information. Carl Cameron of Fox News followed this up on May 5, 2000 by reporting on the investigation into the Israeli-founded company AMDOCS, describing "an alleged penetration of U.S. government phone systems."

This thread was also taken up by Gordon Thomas, the MI5 (British intelligence) connected editor of the website Globe-Intel. Thomas, in his book, Gideon's Spies, broached the subject of the Israeli infiltration of the Clinton White House by way of the Mega mole. He also had alleged that the Mossad had a possible role in the death of Princess Diana; that the Mossad tapped Monica Lewinsky's phone in order to pick up her conversations with President Clinton; and that the Israelis stole the sophisticated PROMIS software, which eventually ended up in the possession of Osama bin Laden. Incidentally, Gordon Thomas holds himself out as a friend and intimate confidant of Mossad insiders. We shall return to Thomas shortly, for he -- like Brisard and Dasquie -- has also played a significant part in lining up new alternate 9/11 suspects (most recently China, in his book Seeds of Fire).

Picking up the thread, in March 2001 -- significantly, several months before September 11 -- the U.S. National Counterintelligence Center sent out an advisory for federal employees to be aware that a number of young Israelis were approaching federal agents at their offices and at their residences throughout the country, passing themselves off as art students looking to sell their work -- but more peculiarly, identifying themselves as Israeli art students, thereby "red-flagging" themselves for the benefit of the National Counterintelligence Center. A few months after September 11, Carl Cameron -- in December of 2001 -- once more visited the issue of Israeli penetration, this time naming a second Israeli company, Comverse Infosys, as having access to nearly all wiretaps placed by U.S. law enforcement. As part of a four-part series for Fox News, Cameron also cited a "secret" DEA report that chronicled the actions of the aforementioned Israeli "art student" spy ring. Soon after a transcript of Cameron's report was uploaded on the Fox News website, it was taken offline and purged from the archives -- a presumed cover-up that actually raised far more suspicions over Israeli/Jewish influence than the report itself.

Perhaps that was the intended effect -- as the purpose would be to "red flag" this item for an "alternative" online audience, not for the mainstream couch potatoes who were wedded to the Official 9/11 Legend in any case. Was Cameron simply a dedicated journalist who was muzzled by his conservative, pro-Israeli, employers at Fox? Or was he rather a passive disinformation asset, coyly nursing the Israeli thread when told to do so? On May 13, 2002, with government warnings of a follow-up terrorist attack seeding the media zeitgeist, Cameron red-flagged the Israelis once more, this time reporting that a rental truck with traces of TNT was pulled over near an army base in the State of Washington. Once again, suspicious Israelis were discovered as occupants, and once again, the news suspiciously disappeared from the airwaves.

There was a curious parallel to the manner by which various Israelis tended to be "pulled over" in the Israeli/9/11 Counter-Legend as opposed to the manner by which various al-Qaida operatives tended to incriminate themselves through those fortuitous cell phone and email "intercepts" in the al-Qaida/9/11 Legend. On June 23, 2002, ABC News picked up the earlier story of five "suspicious" Israelis celebrating on the roof of their van in the wake of September 11. When the police had pulled them over and searched the contents of the van, sure enough, they found . . . box cutters. And just as sure enough, this story also "suspiciously" vanished without a follow-up. It is also a curious fact that former CIA counterterror chief/ABC News consultant Vincent Cannistraro lent his own spin on that report. As I had pointed out in The Propaganda Preparation For 9/11, and as I will show further in this article, Cannistraro has "spun" a great deal of information on the 9/11 Legend.

While the spy ring story has been neglected by much of the mainstream media, it nevertheless remains in the background, ready to be "mainstreamed" if or when the "official" 9/11 Legend begins to show cracks (or if the resident Israeli government proves to be troublesome). As I have pointed out, much of the first-hand revelations of Israeli penetrations have come not from alternative sources, but from well-established, "credible" conservative sources highly placed within the intelligence apparatus. While Daniel Pipes (CFR member and former Defense Department employee) made a disingenuous attempt at discrediting the spy ring story, the actual DEA report that was acquired by Dasquie's Intelligence Online was confirmed as authentic on February 25, 2002 by Will Glaspy of the DEA's public affairs bureau. Moreover, according to a May 5, 2002 report in Le Monde, Cameron's four-part Fox broadcast was shown and cleared with the CIA, FBI, and NSA before its airing. Clearly, somebody high up wants this out in the ether.

Yet it is a curious fact that some of this information comes from sources which are traditionally known to be friendly to Israeli interests. For instance, J. Michael Waller, who wrote the Insight piece with Paul M. Rodriguez, is a member of the right wing, pro-Israel Center For Security Policy, which, according to the Center's own site, includes an "extraordinary number of members of the Center's National Security Advisory Council" in the top echelons of the Bush Administration. Waller, incidentally, also wrote an Insight piece entitled "Preparing For The Next Pearl Harbor Attack" -- just a few months before 9/11 -- in which he described the plan for a Homeland Security Agency, as recommended by the Hart-Rudman Commission report (yes, they had the "homeland security" blueprint in place several months before 9/11).

As for Waller's associate, Paul M. Rodriguez -- the managing editor of Insight -- has had a history of printing incriminating items that don't quite circulate yet get the point across all the same. One particularly creepy example concerns an Insight piece that Rodriguez wrote in 1989, reporting on a pedophile ring in the nation's capital, linking one of its participants to Donald Gregg, a senior aide to President Bush. Since then, Gregg has served as Ambassador to South Korea and as head of the Korea Society. This might have something to do with the fact that the Moonies, owner of Insight, have been rumored to be a front for the South Korean CIA. Incidentally, since President George H.W. Bush has left office, he has put in a considerable number of appearances at Moonie functions.

As for Gordon Thomas of Globe-Intel, it turns out that he has been a major contributor to the Israel/9/11/ Counter-Legend in addition to his other contributions to Israeli legends. Perchance he had come by this good fortune through his father-in-law, a former MI5 British intelligence operative who had introduced Thomas to so many of his intelligence contacts. Adding his own "insider" gloss to the spy ring tale, Thomas is a source for the claim that Israel sent out spies to infiltrate al-Qaida in the U.S., writing that Israel sent warnings about the impending attacks to the Bush administration through French and German intelligence.

In his May 21, 2002 article for Globe-Intel, Thomas -- in a Mossad "insider" scoop -- revealed that Israeli Prime Minister Sharon in fact authorized a "leak" of documents showing that Bush was warned by Israel of the approaching al-Qaida threat by virtue of Israel's comprehensive infiltration of al-Qaida cells on American soil. In other words, Sharon wanted to prove to Bush (and to Globe-Intel readers?) that his Mossad agents -- art students, perhaps? -- had learned of 9/11 over coffee with Mohammed Atta. As Thomas put it: "Sharon's reaction is a calculated response to growing claims that Mossad has been running spy operations in the United States . . ." A calculated response? Either Thomas is serving us up some fairly heavy British intelligence disinformation (false-flagged as a Mossad scoop), or he's implying that Sharon was on some pretty serious weed at the time -- for insisting with documented proof that, yes, his own agents did in fact illegally spy on U.S. territory, and what's more, did lunch with the 9/11 hijackers. Yet given Thomas' record of pinning likely British intelligence "hits" on the Mossad -- Princess Diana, Robert Maxwell, etc. -- I'm willing to bet that the former is the case.

In that context, it is perhaps curious that Thomas -- like Brisard -- has chosen to use John O'Neill, this time in order to weave a counter-legend of Israel at the center of a global criminal network. In his latest book on Robert Maxwell, Thomas alleges that Maxwell was an Israeli "super-spy" who, in the words of John O'Neill, "was at the heart of the global criminal network." Thomas writes that O'Neill's contribution to the book was "enormous" -- which is indeed interesting, as the book covers much of the corruption wrought through the British/C.I.A./BCCI networks, though Thomas employs O'Neill to "spin" the global corruption instead as the joint work of Israel (via Maxwell) and Russian criminal gangs.

Thomas' fellow Globe-Intel editors are also an interesting bunch. One fellow editor, the British Sunday Express correspondent Yvonne Ridley, had made her own entry into the 9/11 Legend as a high-profile captive of the Taliban. Ridley, who claimed that the British government were inciting the Taliban to kill her by implying that she was their covert agent, was fortunately released by her captors on October 8, 2001, just one day after the invasion of Afghanistan had begun. Given such a grave accusation, one wonders why she would subsequently take up office space with an MI5 "groupie" (Thomas) -- unless, of course, she had now established her bona fides as a "credible" source of disinformation.

Rounding out the Globe-Intel editorial group is terrorism expert Martin Dillon, who wrote a well-circulated tribute to his friend John O'Neill, substantiating the official legend that O'Neill was "frustrated" by State Department efforts to block his pursuit of bin Laden.

In reading the detailed revelations of Brisard, Dasquie, and Thomas, one enters the proverbial hall of mirrors, where subtle truths reflect back upon themselves as half-lies, and perceptions splinter amid a cascade of contradictions. Such is the world of the disinformation operative. As a first defense, all you need to know is when you're in it, not particularly what's in it.

Still, a more curious case is that of John Loftus, a long-standing Catholic friend of the Jews who had served in the Justice Department's Nazi-hunting unit, where he had discovered -- through CIA archives -- the depth of the CIA program to smuggle in Nazi war criminals through "ratlines" to the United States after the Second World War. In his book, The Secret War Against The Jews, Loftus documented in painful detail the anti-Semitic history of the powerful Anglo-American "Establishment", the Wasp clique which, through their oil and industrial holdings, has had a stranglehold on American foreign -- and military -- policy for close to a century. Loftus, clearly intimate with a great many operatives in the intelligence community -- whom he refers to as the "old spies" -- had posited that the Jews were repeatedly used as pawns and scapegoats in the grand match played out by these men on the geopolitical chessboard. Loftus' reading of this Establishment -- which encompasses the likes of the Rockefellers, the Dulles brothers, the Bakers, and the Bushes - dovetails nicely with the writings of scholars like Peter Dale Scott (whose personal integrity and research skills are beyond question). In other words, Loftus knows who is the real power behind the throne.

Yet in the light of 9/11, it appears that Loftus has put on his blinders, going out on the lecture circuit and offering the warmed-over neo-conservative view that September 11 was essentially the work of wicked Saudis intent on destabilizing the West by priming the terror pumps with their oil wealth. More ominously, Loftus was offering his audiences a neocon bird's eye view into the near future (courtesy of his military contacts out of MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa) -- a future in which a liberated Iraq would be turned over to a compliant Hashemite monarchy (now resident in Jordan), and then on to Saudi Arabia, where the Saudis would be booted and replaced by compliant Hashemite monarchs in a new Hashemite Arabia. And as for the West Bank Palestinians -- well, they would be handed over to the custody of the compliant Jordanian Hashemites. As for Loftus, he was making his own contribution by heading up a class action lawsuit on behalf of the families of 9/11 against those ruthless Saudi financiers. And, as an aside, he was assuring his mostly Jewish audience that George W. Bush is, at root, a decent fellow.

In short, Loftus was propagandizing his audience toward a highly selective reading of 9/11. Gone were the ominous shadows of BCCI and Iran-Contra, casting their pall over the credibility of those powerful politicians feeding us their take on a new world order. More than anyone (this writer included), Loftus should have been able to detect a high-level disinformation campaign to set up "the Jews" and "the Zionists" as the main evil conspirators behind 9/11. Yet ironically, here was Loftus casting his lot in with those very neo-conservatives who will one day serve as the showcase exhibits for what is sure to be the latest entry in an updated blood libel. From the Crucifixion, to the Rothschilds, and on to the Twin Towers, the Jews were being set up once more to play their historical role as punch toys to smokescreen a powerful oligarchy.

The set-up was on two fronts -- foreign and domestic. On the domestic front, the neo-conservatives headed by Dick Cheney and Richard Perle -widely dubbed by the mainstream press as the "hawks" -- were being marketed as the true ideological powers behind the Bush administration. Their patchwork of inter-connected think tanks -- Center for Security Policy, Project for A New American Century (PNAC), Center For Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), American Enterprise Institute (AEI) - were deeply involved in sending out various "experts" to explain the War On Terrorism in a mainstream forum, thereby setting out the parameters of debate (in addition to the parameters of the perceived threat).

But did these neo-conservatives constitute a mere "rogue element" -- an insular "cabal" of pro-Zionist conservatives holding a largely naive President Bush in their sway (as Lyndon LaRouche and the folks at Executive Intelligence Review would have us believe)? Or rather, were they just a group "cut-out" for other, more powerful interests -- in other words, the public face that would skew the ultimate responsibility, letting the true masterminds off the hook while the "cut-out" proxies would double as potential patsies?

It had certainly been the case during the Clinton era, when Richard Mellon Scaife's organization took center stage as the most vociferous entity in attacking the integrity of President Clinton. Thus, while Scaife's cronies made sure that all eyes were focused on Whitewater, Lewinsky, Foster, et al, the mainstream focus was kept far from the infinitely more nefarious, and damaging, scandal that was known by the four-letter word Mena, the crucial transit point in Arkansas which, under Governor Clinton, had served to sustain the arms/drug dealing operations that were fed through Iran-Contra and laundered through BCCI. Thus, with Whitewater as the Scaife-funded public face of the Starr inquiry into Clinton, those Clinton associates who could really provide the dirt on the Clinton/Mena connection were being "purged" in plain sight -- through various prosecutions, accidents, murders, or well-timed heart attacks (in the case of Jim MacDougall). Meanwhile, all eyes were directed to the curious stain on the blue dress. Once Clinton was safely out of office (and a leash presumably was no longer needed), Scaife disappeared from public view as suddenly as he entered it -- to be replaced by Dick Cheney, Richard Perle, and their coalition of fundamentalist Christian/Jewish Zionists.

On the foreign front, journalists like Globe-Intel's Thomas laid the groundwork for a future expose of Israeli complicity. An example of the subtlety of this effort: in his May 21, 2002 piece on the Israeli spy ring, Thomas mentioned that the Mossad sent its agents trailing the hijackers to New York, Florida, and -- very significantly - the Netherlands (in particular, to the Schipol Airport). Whether Thomas here was a witting or unwitting agent of disinformation cannot be ascertained, but clearly somebody knew the crucial importance of including the Netherlands on the Mossad infiltration itinerary -- for it was an Israeli-founded company, ICTS, which, through its subsidiary, Huntleigh, handled passenger screening for one of the airliners out of Boston's Logan Airport on September 11. And, as it so happened, ICTS was based out of the Netherlands. As we shall see, the security companies would theoretically be the ideal operative agents for ensuring that the September 11 "op" would go off without a hitch. Thus, an Israeli connection on this front would be a key factor in a counter-legend placing the State of Israel -- as opposed to individual Jews and/or Israeli operatives -- front and center as the main perpetrator of 9/11.

Securing The Plot -- The Lead-Up To 9/11

In the immediate aftermath of September 11, the mainstream newspapers were replete with items implicating Argenbright security (which was charged with overall security at Logan Airport) with lax procedures, thereby largely giving a "free pass" to the two companies that actually handled passenger screening for the hijacked planes out of Logan.

Besides Huntleigh, the other security company at Logan screening passengers was Burns Security, through its subsidiary, Globe Security. Burns Security, the former employer of Timothy McVeigh and suspected al-Qaida member Mohamed Abdi (connected by authorities to attempted "millennial" bomber Ahmed Ressam), also happened to make the news in the most high profile incident preceding September 11. Just a few days before the Twin Towers came down, a disgruntled Burns security guard by the name of Joseph Ferguson went on a murderous rampage, killing, among several others, his supervisor at Burns -- a Ukrainian immigrant by the name of Nikolay Popovich, in the Sacramento suburb of Rancho Cordova. Before Ferguson turned his gun on himself, he claimed that he was inspired to follow in the footsteps of Timothy McVeigh and Nikolay Soltys, a Ukrainian immigrant who, only a couple weeks before Ferguson, had went on his own mass murder rampage in the suburb of Rancho Cordova. In Ferguson's home, authorities found right wing militia literature, particularly that of the World Church of the Creator. The Ferguson episode also caused a temporary disruption in Burns' West Coast operations, forcing many of its employees to steer clear of work, out of harm's way, until Ferguson could be apprehended.

A post-script on Nikolay Soltys, the Sacramento mass murderer who inspired Ferguson's rampage: on February 12, 2002, Soltys' lawyer, Tommy Clinkenbeard, revealed in an Associated Press article that a Sacramento County social services agency was tracking Soltys before the slayings, and that Clinkenbeard was barred by court order from seeing all of Soltys' social services records, which were sealed. Clinkenbeard said that he intended to subpoena those records, but Soltys was found hanging in his jail cell the very next day. His cell had been under 24-hour surveillance.

What, if any, was the connection here to September 11? Were these copy-cat mass murder episodes just a random occurrence -- or perhaps indicative of a far more murky, complex drama playing out just below the surface? Yet none of this would have merited any notice in chronicling the Legend of 9/11, had there not been a crucial Burns/Al-Qaida/Right Wing Militia/Sacramento nexus in the millennial lead-up to 9/11.

In the weeks leading up to January 1, 2000, the news media were swamped with speculations of impending catastrophe. We had already experienced the domestic terror wrought by Timothy McVeigh (representing the right wing militia set) and Ted Kaczynski alias the "Unabomber" (representing the lone wacko set). Now we were told to expect an apocalyptic meltdown of our technological infrastructure by way of the Y2K "bug", or, alternatively, an attack by America's self-declared Number One Enemy -- Osama bin Laden. The expected catastrophe came 21 months later than expected, with the blow struck in New York City.

Yet according to the Official 9/11 Legend, the expected millennial catastrophe was actually averted two weeks before the new year, with the arrest in Seattle of al-Qaida operative Ahmed Ressam. Ressam, as was later discovered, was on his way to mastermind a massive terror attack on the West Coast -- at Los Angeles International Airport, a facility secured through the services of Burns Security. After September 11, authorities arrested a former Burns security guard named Mohamed Abdi in Washington, D.C., on the pretext that he was connected to Ressam.

Ten days before Ressam was arrested -- on December 4, 1999 -- two right wing "militiamen" were arrested on charges of plotting to blow up, on the new year, a Suburban Propane facility at Elk Grove near Sacramento. It was thought that had they succeeded, hundreds of casualties might have resulted. It is thus on the West Coast, in the lead-up to the millennial new year, that we have the convergence of a pre-existing domestic threat (i.e. the militias stoked through the legends of Waco and Ruby Ridge) and a pre-existing foreign threat (i.e. the bin Laden minions stoked through the legends of Gulf War `91 and World Trade Center `93). As we shall see later in this article, these two threats had actually converged for the first time back in April 1995, with Timothy McVeigh's destruction of the FBI Murrah building in Oklahoma.

Sacramento, though by no means the only West Coast city with an alleged al-Qaida connection, did seem to have a magnetic pull for this type of convergence. An al-Qaida graduate of Cal State, Sacramento, Raed Hijazi, was charged with plotting to blow up a Jordanian hotel on the millennial new year, while another al-Qaida operative, Ali A. Mohamed -- a former Sacramento resident who was also a U.S. Army sergeant in Fort Bragg, N.C. -- had pleaded guilty to the 1998 U.S. embassy bombings in Africa (the bombings that had garnered bin Laden his most widespread notice up until the U.S.S. Cole attack in October 2000). On the domestic terror front, Sacramento was also the scene of the notorious racist attacks on local synagogues by the Williams brothers.

In The Propaganda Preparation For 9/11, I posited the existence of two key domestic operative cliques -- one based in New York City and the other in Florida (particularly in Tampa, by MacDill Air Force base). But the crucial question is this: was a West Coast operative clique also to play a role on September 11 -- and if so, then at what point was the West Coast aspect of these operations scotched?

Alternatively, perhaps the West Coast millennial operations were a bluff -- a diversion meant to take the exclusive focus off of New York, and perhaps lay the psychological groundwork for the eventual assignment of blame for 9/11. Toward that end, the pre-millennial Ahmed Ressam episode was a key pivot point in the Official 9/11 Legend, as Ressam provided the crucial links to the networks that the authorities would later use in constructing the case against al-Qaida for the September 11 attacks. It was through Ressam that authorities allegedly got a peek at the upper structures of al-Qaida, with Ressam detailing the operational role of senior al-Qaida man Abu Zubaydah (subsequently the first "big fish" caught in the War On Terror in March 2002). The Ressam episode also provided a close-up view as to how those all-important connections were made, and, most importantly, by whom.

As chronicled in a multi-part Seattle Times investigation, The Terrorist Within, by Hal Bernton, immediately after Ressam was arrested on December 14, 1999, John O'Neill called up the Seattle-based FBI agent assigned to the investigation, Fred Humphries, and hooked Humphries up with O'Neill's friend, the powerful French anti-terror prosecutor, Jean-Louis Bruguiere. Humphries, who seemed to be "out of the loop" as regards the complexities of the terror networks, was taken by the hand by Bruguiere, and pointed in the "right" direction -- that is, toward the evidence showing the full depth of Ressam's connections. On the very night that Humphries first met up with Bruguiere in New York City, O'Neill orchestrated a four-alarm, razzle-dazzle show of FBI authority that could not have failed to make an impression on the novice agent Humphries:

"That evening, O'Neill took them out on the town, requisitioning a SWAT team for security and roaring off in a black SUV, lights flashing and sirens echoing along Manhattan's skyscraper canyons.

At Cité, a fashionable steakhouse, the SWAT team checked for danger, then set up a guard post outside while the trio dined in style."

Thereafter, Bruguiere led Humphries to his associates in the Canadian intelligence service, who furnished Humphries with the evidence of Ressam's Montreal "cell." Then Bruguiere provided Humphries and his assistant a refresher course in the Terror Story, bringing them to Paris where they could likewise be fed the latest information from the "official" French intelligence dossiers. Back stateside, Bruguiere kept on with the Ressam case, furnishing the prosecution -- and the media -- his expert take on Ressam's fit in the overall al-Qaida puzzle.

To the casual observer, there is absolutely nothing nefarious in any of this. It would make sense that a highly esteemed international expert and prosecutor of terror would be so intimately involved in such an important case. Yet, as in so much of this tale, it is the overall context that one must consider when evaluating the specific elements of the 9/11 Legend. Proceeding on the hypothesis that O'Neill would theoretically be the most well-placed operative to assemble the various global elements implicating al-Qaida in 9/11 -- and in view of the fact that O'Neill was at the improbable center of far too many coincidences -- one could judge O'Neill's involvement here in the Ressam episode as one plausible example by which O'Neill (along with his colleague, Bruguiere) could use his authority and prestige in order to "structure" an investigation in a certain direction. In this respect, Humphries would be playing the role of any number of people in his position -- trusting in the expert opinion of a superior authority, and honestly taking his leads where directed. In such a manner do literally thousands of decent law enforcement folk become party to a set-up managed by the few in the upper echelons, reinforcing among one another the perception that the truth is known among a wide swath of their colleagues -- a "herd mentality" that is as prevalent in the realm of law enforcement as it is in government and media.

If Bruguiere had given Humphries the initial impression that Humphries was receiving a fully independent assessment from the Canadian intelligence service, well, that wasn't exactly the case either. As chronicled in Bernton's Seattle Times investigation, only a few years before -- back in the summer of 1996 -- it was Bruguiere who had first contacted the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS), informing them of his belief that "terrorists had formed a `cell' in Montreal. In particular, Bruguiere told CSIS, watch for a man named Fateh Kamel."

Bruguiere led the skeptical Canadians to an apartment he dubbed the "appartement de conspiracie", among whose occupants was the aforementioned Fateh Kamel and his protege, Ahmed Ressam. At Bruguiere's urging, the Canadians proceeded to monitor the apartment for a period of two years, amassing a "400-page file on the men who came and went from the apartment." Though impressively thick, the file contained little more than the macho rantings of men whom the Canadians considered to be petty thieves and immigrant visa violators at the worst. All the same, Ressam's voice made it on to the "record" in "nearly 400 wire-tapped conversations." Once the Canadians ended their fruitless two-year surveillance in 1998, Ressam was off to Afghanistan -- the finishing school for his terrorist education. The Canadians had apparently lost interest, and subsequently, the denizens of the "appartement de conspiracie" had moved on.

Phase Two: almost one year later, in February 1999, Ressam returned to Montreal, now presumably indoctrinated and trained in the al-Qaida brand of covert terror. In one of those recurring synchronicities we tend to find popping up in the Legend of 9/11, Bruguiere -- after more than two years of laying low -- decided that now was the time to make his move on the aforementioned Fateh Kamel, who he just happened to find in Jordan, and subsequently prodded the Jordanians to arrest him and extradite him to France to face charges of abetting terror. As chronicled in the Seattle Times investigation, Bruguiere made his next move several weeks later -- requesting that the Canadians question Kamel's former apartment mates in Montreal, among them the newly returned Ressam.

Now, pay special attention to the timing: Ressam, upon his recent return to Montreal, moved into a new apartment on Sherbrooke Avenue. The Canadians, however, showed up at the old "appartement de conspiracie", now bereft of its alleged conspirators, who had moved on in the past year. Bruguiere continued to harangue the Canadians. A few months later, they finally tracked down the address of Ressam's Sherbrooke Avenue lodgings. Only problem was, Ressam was no longer officially lodging there. In the interim, he had moved on to another apartment on Rue du Fort (what may, in retrospect, be considered as a "safe house" in more ways than one). However, Ressam "occasionally spent the night at his old apartment on Sherbrooke, where his friends still lived." As happenstance would have it, on one of those overnight stays, at the tender hour of a quarter past six in the morning, the Canadian authorities showed up in the foyer of the building and dialed up Ressam's old apartment, waiting to be "buzzed in." Bruguiere had been given the heads-up for this raid, though he did not join in. Here is what happened next, as chronicled by the Seattle Times: "At the sound of the bell, Ressam bolted from the apartment and out a back door into an alley. The door was unguarded. He got away."

Nevertheless, the Canadians did find inside the "dingy apartment" some photographs of the aforementioned Fateh Kamel, along with a conveniently placed black address book left in Ressam's presumably abandoned knapsack, which contained the phone number of Abu Zubaydah (relatively unknown by then) and the address for Evergro Products, an agricultural-supply store in British Columbia (later to be tagged as Exhibit A for the prosecution). As reported in the Seattle Times, it was all pretty much Greek to the Canadian corporal who led the raid, and who subsequently "made a copy of the book and sent it off to Bruguiere in Paris to figure out."

And where did Ressam run off to? Back to his Rue du Fort apartment (or "safe house"), where he reportedly proceeded that night to plan his explosive attack on the Los Angeles International Airport in the weeks ahead. Oddly, it did not occur to him that the authorities might also track him down to this apartment as well (from the perspective of a man who was apparently alert enough -- and prescient -- to bolt from his overnight lodgings at the first toll of a bell in the wee hours of dawn). But as fate -- or perhaps Bruguiere? - would have it, the authorities would not pick up on Ressam's trail again until that designated day in December 1999 when he was pulled over with the "smoking gun" explosives at customs in Seattle.

On that fateful day, Ressam had almost gone out of his way to draw suspicion on himself, as reported in the Seattle Times:

"Driving through the island city of Victoria to get to Seattle from mainland Canada was a bizarre choice -- understandable for a tourist, maybe, but not for a business trip."

Even so, Ressam's car was allowed on to the ferry to Seattle. Stateside, with his car the last in line off the ferry at customs, Ressam put on a sweaty, "jittery" show for the benefit of the discerning customs inspector, who this time got the message and proceeded to do a standard search of Ressam's car. The rest, as they say, is history. By the time agent Humphries was handed the case, the Canadians now had a fully documented dossier on Ressam waiting for him.

Though the Seattle Times investigation kept fairly close to the contours of the Official 9/11 Legend, the obvious anomalies in a simple reading of the Ressam episode fairly scream out for more attention. Was this all a well-timed set-up, orchestrated by Bruguiere, using the unwitting Canadian authorities -- and, subsequently, Agent Humphries - to give the general impression that Ressam's activities were being ferreted out by a virtual army of independent investigators? In short, through just the prism of the Ressam episode, might we detect the inner workings of a covert legend-in-progress?

Backdrop -- Detecting The Puppet Masters

With the above-stated hypothesis in mind, one should perhaps cast a discerning eye toward those manning the counter-terror posts in Los Angeles today - for an important element in John O'Neill's New York circle has recently relocated to the West Coast. In particular, O'Neill's friend, John Miller, has left a lucrative job at ABC News in order to work under William Bratton in the Los Angeles counter-terror office. Miller, some might recall, was one of the very few Americans to conduct a face-to-face interview with bin Laden before September 11. Before he had come aboard as a correspondent for ABC News, Miller had worked under Bratton in the NYPD. Bratton, through his acquaintance with O'Neill's friend Jerry Hauer, has also had intimate business dealings with Kroll Associates, the World Trade Center security firm which hired O'Neill.

It is, in fact, security firms like Kroll Associates, Burns Security, Teg, Wackenhut, and their ilk that should garner our interest at least as much as the web of conservative think tanks that have welded in place the parameters of "mainstream" debate -- for it is through these very firms that the former stars of law enforcement have gone through the revolving door into the lucrative private sector. It is a world where former military types mix with various operatives of the CIA, FBI, DEA and any number of alphabet soup agencies charged with the security of our nation.

Moreover, the top people in the private security sector have the authority, prestige, and, most importantly, the skill to carry out -- successfully and below the radar -- the kinds of domestic operations that have been pegged as the province of shaggy al-Qaida operatives. Who, after all, could best ensure that 19 terrorists would be able to make it aboard four separate flights without any real danger of detection? And who, after all, would be best placed to ensure a complete and successful implosion of not just the two Twin Towers, but the neighboring building -- 7 World Trade Center -- which housed a bio-warfare "command and control bunker" under the direction of Jerry Hauer?

With that in mind, we get a bit closer to the "how" of 9/11 -- an important consideration in analyzing the Legend of 9/11. A good part of the early work on that legend had been accomplished through the offices of Michael Cherkasky, the managing director of Kroll Associates -- in his capacity as a prosecutor working in the New York office of Robert Morgenthau. Cherkasky had worked on the case arising out of the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993, which had established Ramzi Yousef as the terrorist mastermind behind the attack. Cherkasky had also worked on the John Gotti and BCCI criminal cases, two cases that would not, at first glance, seem to be related, much less to the events of September 11.

Yet there is a curious continuity here -- one that highlights the global infrastructure that has made 9/11 such a successful worldwide "op", with a legend whose global parameters defy the perceptions of even the most dogged investigators. As Peter Dale Scott has argued in great and persuasive detail, the "deep political structure" of American society -- and I would argue that this now applies globally -- is permeated by an interwoven nexus between political/corporate elites and an organized criminal subculture, whereby certain political or business arrangements are made in an extra-legal sphere, beyond the reach of sanction or salience. Although this dual-purpose netherworld has been with us for over a century -- and roughly parallels the rise of an American industrial "Establishment" of which the Bushes and Rockefellers are most representative -- for our purposes, we will date the true globalization of this "deep political structure" with the creation of the Bank of Credit and Commerce International, better known as BCCI.

The story goes that BCCI was founded by Pakistani financier Aga Hassan Abedi. In truth, it was mostly a British intelligence operation using Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates as fronts, while C.I.A. elements allied with George H. W. Bush used the banking network to conduct a number of under-the-table operations throughout the `80's. Before it went under, BCCI served as the cardiovascular system for a global criminal milieu, its laundered arteries servicing the needs of various drug lords, arms dealers, fraudsters, dictators, corrupt politicians, terrorists, and intelligence agencies seeking loose cash for their extra-legal activities.

In short, BCCI was Disneyworld for the New World Order of political/corporate crime. With ample supplies of heroin leaving Afghanistan and heading stateside throughout the `80's, there were ample funds left to underwrite the activities of Osama bin Laden and his mujaheddin, ensconced in a battle to oust the Soviet occupation forces from their midst. And with cocaine coming stateside by way of Colombia, a little pocket money could be set aside to furnish the Nicaraguan Contras with their own anti-Soviet toys.

Could it, then, perhaps have been nothing more than a coincidence that a brother-in-law of Osama bin Laden, Khalid bin Mahfouz, was reported in the early 90's to own a 20% stake in BCCI -- and that bin Mahfouz, as reported by the Houston Chronicle on June 4, 1992, had intimate business dealings with James Bath, the personal representative of bin Laden brother Salim who had invested $50,000 in George W. Bush's company, Arbusto? Bin Mahfouz, incidentally, had taken over Salim bin Laden's interest in the Houston Gulf Airport after Salim met his demise in an airplane crash over Houston in 1988 (the same year that Iran-Contra witness, and Israeli counter-terror coordinator, Amiram Nir met his own fortuitous demise by airplane over Mexico, thus denying Congress one witness who could testify to Vice-President Bush's personal involvement in the scandal).

In the decadent 80's, Bush friend and C.I.A. asset Manuel Noriega served as a critical conduit for the drug transit through Panama. Meanwhile, C.I. A. asset Saddam Hussein played the essential role of wearing down the Iranian Revolution by throwing waves of Iraqi young men at waves of Iranian young men, costing over a million lives, though earning billions for a voracious world arms industry. As for John Gotti, on June 21, 1991, former C.I.A. agent Richard Brenneke gave a sworn deposition before Congressman William Alexander, fingering Gotti as an active detergent in "laundering" the C.I.A. drug shipments coming into the Mena Airport in Arkansas.

As history has shown, being a friend and/or C.I.A. asset of George H. W. Bush can be an uncertain proposition. One by one, once these psychopathic proxies had served their purpose, they were "taken out". In the case of Noriega and Gotti, they were silenced through the capable tools of the American justice system. And overseeing the prosecutions -- Noriega, Gotti, and BCCI - happened to be a man who would, years later, be entrusted with overseeing the investigation into the causes of 9/11 -- Robert S. Mueller III.

In the case of BCCI, Mueller had steered the case along the manageable "official" contours, away from the seamier aspects of American foreign policy, ensuring that the domestic aspect of this worldwide fraud would only singe the toes of two well-connected, designated patsies -- Clark Clifford and Robert Altman. And while Morgenthau's New York office had indeed pushed the envelope in investigating BCCI, as always, the essential integrity -- the goodness - of the American political/intelligence apparatus was left intact.

The real scandal of BCCI, however, was not simply that it was a worldwide Ponzi scheme defrauding its investors of billions -- for that is the "limited", official version -- but that, in the context of 9/11, it provides a glaring spotlight on the very networks most intimately connected with the corruption. BCCI, the brainchild of British intelligence, was the ideal tool by which a supra-national network of compromised politicians and corrupt officials would "play ball", fattened up with a stream of capital furnished through the fruits of drugs, arms, and terrorism.

As Oliver North had pioneered the use of the counter-terrorism office in dealing with narco-terrorists like Monzer al-Kassar (connected to the Pan Am explosion over Lockerbie), would it be such a stretch to posit that the counter-terror apparatus -- this time under Richard Clarke and John O'Neill -- was once again being employed to "work" the corrupt networks wrought by BCCI? Can it be a mere coincidence that the arteries of the bin Laden strain of terrorism were fed not by Iran or Syria -- the "traditional" sponsors of the more low-key types of terrorism in the `80's -- but rather by those very countries that have long served as agents and proxies of their American-Anglo cohorts in crime: Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and the United Arab Emirates (i.e. the principal countries fronting for BCCI)? Could it be that the mutually corrupt global relationships wrought by BCCI persist to this day, with a bevy of compromised political officials standing ready to make their contribution to the New World Order -- and perhaps scam some extra pocket change on the side?

As they say -- follow the money. And where are the big movers and shakers of 9/11 -- those who are interpreting the threat for you -- putting their money? In vaccines, pharmaceuticals, bio-tech, utilities, security consulting, and surveillance technologies. In other words, they are shifting their money toward those burgeoning industries where they can simply legislate the market need -- the favored modus operandi of the "Establishment" captains of industry who had formerly used their clout in the political sector to secure their all-important interests in the oil and banking sectors.

And what of FBI Director Robert Mueller? Was it a coincidence that he was consistently chosen to oversee cases in which the whole bloody mess -- Gotti, BCCI, Noriega et al -- had threatened to spill over the "officially" designated sides? Was it a result of happenstance that Mueller officially had taken up his job as FBI Director only one week before September 11? Is it Mueller's job to cover the paper trails -- or just cover them up?

Polishing The Legend: A New 9/11 Mastermind

With the foregoing background in mind, we are now in a position to chronicle and analyze the final crystallization of the 9/11 Legend. On February 12, 2002, Omar Saeed Sheikh was "officially" arrested by the Pakistani police for the kidnapping of Daniel Pearl after unofficially being held in ISI custody for a week. With Omar Saeed now back as a world headliner, his updated terror resume was also making the rounds: jailed for a 1994 kidnapping, bartered out for a 1999 hijacking, headed up an ISI-linked terror group (the Jaish-e-Mohammed) responsible for a number of high-profile attacks on Indian interests in recent months, and -- almost as an afterthought -- sending $100,000 along to Mohamed Atta before September 11.

Not that the newspapers were really pushing a 9/11 connection with the Pearl kidnapping. In fact, of those few news sources that offhandedly did mention that Saeed had been a 9/11 paymaster -- for example, TIME and the Associated Press in February - there was no mention at all of an incriminating connection with the Pakistani ISI Chief. Meanwhile, other journalists would mention Omar Saeed's links to al-Qaida or the ISI, yet neglect to connect him in any manner to 9/11. A particularly egregious example of this omission concerned Maria Ressa of CNN, who, only months before, had definitively identified Omar Saeed as the 9/11 paymaster acting under the alias "Mustafa Ahmad." Yet by the time of her July 7, 2002 article on Saeed, she was curiously silent on the question of Saeed's alleged paymaster role with al-Qaida, reporting instead that "Al Qaeda funded the [1999 Indian Airlines] hijacking operation" which resulted in Omar Saeed's release from prison. For good measure, her July 7 piece also mentioned the fact that bin Laden was active in supporting terror groups in Kashmir (a cause which bin Laden had, in fact, only formally adopted on October 14, 2001 -- that is, a mere five days after the incriminating October 9 Times of India article). In view of the fact that Omar Saeed now was widely being marketed as an ISI-connected terrorist leader active in Kashmir, he would find an alternative bin Laden link (and cover story), courtesy of Maria Ressa and colleagues.

As for the Times of India, only one day after Saeed's "official" arrest, they were now explicitly backtracking on their October 9 revelation linking Omar Saeed to the ISI Chief. Instead, they were going full-on with the Saeed/Ansari route to the money trail.

And what of that money trail? Was it a dead issue by the time of Saeed's arrest for the Pearl kidnapping? Not exactly. In fact, the mainstream media seemed to adopt -- or was passively used to employ -- an extremely subtle technique to obfuscate the whole issue. Here is how it worked in the aftermath of Omar Saeed's arrest: where an article now mentioned Saeed's link to the $100,000 transaction, the usual detail provided was the fact that such money was sent through "hawala channels", a phrase that would point more curious researchers to the Saeed/Ansari thread that had briefly made headlines with the January 22 Calcutta attack. Those articles, however, would tellingly omit the "Mustafa Ahmad" alias from the details.

At around this time, articles that briefly touched upon a paymaster by the name of "Mustafa Ahmad" would reveal nothing about the man, except for the fact that he was still "at large." Prior to the January 22 Calcutta attack, there was another thread of articles which pushed the "Mustafa Ahmad = Shaikh Saiid = Sa'd al-Sharif" angle, culminating in the December 18, 2001 Associated Press article which had identified the 9/11 paymaster as bin Laden's Saudi brother-in-law and financial chief. In light of the recent arrest of the now "official" 9/11 paymaster, Mustafa Ahmed al-Hisawi, it is possible to perceive another thread of articles -- a thread that arose full-blown, in fact, from the Zacarias Moussaoui indictment, which was unsealed December 11, 2001.

As will become clear, the Zacarias Moussaoui indictment was a crucial pivot point in the unfolding 9/11 Legend, locking down the money trail story with a firm delineation of details. When Moussaoui first made the news, in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, he was touted as the possible "twentieth hijacker" who just wasn't able to get up to bat. In fact, by September 11, Moussaoui was already in detention, on suspicion of being connected to al-Qaida. As the story goes, suspicions were aroused when Moussaoui had made inquiries at a flight school. Known to French intelligence as a suspicious character, Moussaoui was promptly investigated by the FBI office out of Minnesota. He was then arrested and detained in August 2001. As the 9/11 Legend has it, by the time of the September 11 attacks, the Minnesota office was still scrambling for a warrant to check Moussaoui's hard drive for incriminating material. The implied moral of the Moussaoui Tale was this -- if not for the undue concern over civil rights and due process, the FBI might have been able to ferret out Moussaoui's true role, and thus avert the 9/11 tragedy. The Moussaoui Tale also had the added bonus of seeming to be an incriminating aspect of the 9/11 Legend, thereby garnering it a dollop of credibility even as it mostly functioned to shore up the evidence pointing to al-Qaida complicity for 9/11. In the same manner through which Brisard had offered up his own "mainstream" criticisms, the Moussaoui Tale was just another example of a red herring news item offered up as an "incriminating" detail, keeping the guilt balanced squarely on the toga-clad shoulders of bin Laden.

The unsealed December 2001 Moussaoui indictment also set out two "unindicted co-conspirators" who had yet to play their final roles in the unfolding 9/11 Legend - Ramzi Binalshibh and Mustafa Ahmed al-hawsawi (the "official" paymaster). Binalshibh was hijacker Mohammed Atta's roommate in Hamburg, and the senior operative directly linking Atta to al-Qaida. According to the Moussaoui indictment, Binalshibh was also a "paymaster," allegedly transferring funds to Moussaoui. As we will see, the Moussaoui indictment had lain the groundwork for the eventual Khalid Shaikh Mohammed/ Ramzi Binalshibh/ Mustafa Ahmed nexus that really gets rolling in June 2002, when Khalid is first introduced as the 9/11 "mastermind", then proceeds through Binalshibh's choreographed arrest in September 2002, and culminates with the simultaneous arrest of Khalid and Mustafa Ahmed in March 2003. Further, we will see how FBI Director Mueller uses the details in the Moussaoui indictment to explicitly pair up Khalid and Mustafa Ahmed -- a full nine months before these characters end up sharing news space for their own simultaneously choreographed apprehensions.

If, up until the March 2003 arrest of the "official" 9/11 paymaster, the mainstream news media seemed to be going with obscure, conflicting versions of the paymaster role, the Moussaoui indictment exhibited no such confusion. Where "federal", "intelligence", or "law enforcement" officials were variously reported as identifying the paymaster as either Omar Saeed or bin Laden's brother-in-law (among others), the Moussaoui indictment way back in December 2001 -- though well after the controversial Oct. 9 Times of India -- gave the impression that the paymaster role was a settled fact. And the "settled fact" was: the man providing and receiving back funds under the alias of "Mustafa Ahmad" was actually a flesh and blood 33-year old Saudi named Mustafa Ahmed Alhawsawi (or al-Hisawi, depending on the news source).

And sure enough, a bit too far below the radar to really attract notice, there existed a thread of articles that referenced the Money Trail Story by means of a paymaster named Mustafa Ahmed al-Hawsawi. In this particular thread of articles, where Hisawi was spelled out as Hawsawi, there was absolutely no doubt as to the mind-numbing details of the 9/11 money transactions -- perhaps because they were lifted bodily from the Moussaoui indictments which, in retrospect, may now be considered as the first book of Scripture in the 9/11 Legend. As early as three months after the fall of the Twin Towers, it was all known -- the full details, the money trail, the essential players, and their roles - and the eventual arrests of Khalid, Binalshibh, and Mustafa Ahmed would merely serve to cast an official imprimatur on the unsealed word of the Book of Moussaoui.

Perhaps the obvious extended public obfuscation over the paymaster role -- long after it was definitively revealed in the Moussaoui indictment -- was intended until such time as the fates of Omar Saeed, Binalshibh, and Mustafa Ahmed could be settled. Or, quite possibly, the December 2001 Moussaoui indictment was only officially adopted on the fly - perhaps as late as June 2002, when a decision was made to introduce Khalid Shaikh Mohammed as the 9/11 mastermind.

Of the various pivot points in the unfolding 9/11 Legend, the time period of June 4-5 2002 was among the most significant. While, at this point, the new and improved Omar Saeed Legend was fully crystallized for the history books -- though he had as yet to be convicted for the Pearl kidnapping -- the early summer of 2002 was a time for tying up loose ends in the 9/11 Legend, wrapping it up for the history books, and getting on with reaping the benefits of September 11 -- a new legal infrastructure (i.e. police state) for the American people and a geopolitical grab at some prime Central Asian resources (with perhaps a plan for world population reduction by way of the related germ threat).

And, indeed, it was a busy week. The Joint House-Senate Committee looking into 9/11 was getting up to gear, and first up was Coleen Rowley, the FBI counsel who had been widely hailed as a "courageous" whistleblower. Only a month earlier, the media was reporting how Rowley had sent FBI Director Mueller a memo questioning his version of the Moussaoui incident. As Rowley had framed it, the Minnesota FBI office had been repeatedly obstructed in its efforts to obtain a warrant for accessing Moussaoui's hard drive, and she cast the blame on the "higher-ups" in the Washington office. In the lead-up to the hearings, the media was "pre-selling" Rowley's scheduled appearance as a brewing scandal, with intimations that perhaps some damaging revelations would be aired before the probing audience of the nation's esteemed lawmakers. As a ratings booster, the marketing plan was a bona fide success, with millions of viewers tuning in to hear Rowley offer her "stunning" indictment of a pre-9/11 bureaucracy plagued by "antiquated" computer hardware and a bloated managerial structure. Prodded by her approving Senatorial inquisitors, Rowley offered her helpful recommendations in making America a more efficient police state -- all in all, an extended advertisement for the Patriot Act and the inevitable Homeland Security apparatus. For all the smoke and mirrors, Rowley in the end was just one more "credible" witness for the prosecution -- a media-certified "whistleblower" who adhered to the central contours of the Official 9/11 Legend.

Around the same time that the joint Senate-House Inquiry was proceeding under the co-chairmanship of Bob Graham and Porter Goss (the September 11 breakfast partners of Omar Saeed's reported ISI "handler"), Khalid Shaikh Mohammed was formally introduced as the operative mastermind behind 9/11. John J. Lumpkin of the Associated Press wrote the definitive article here, courtesy of the revelations of an anonymous "top U.S. counterterrorism official." As we will see, Lumpkin will play a crucial role in tying up the loose ends of the paymaster story -- or rather, "muddying the waters" for any future investigators. Lumpkin's article (the June 4 or June 5 2002 version) was largely posted verbatim on the CBS and Fox websites, with each of these sites giving the impression that the news was actually ferreted out by their own reporters, acknowledging only that the Associated Press had merely "contributed" to the report. In the case of CBS' June 5 item, they largely cut-and- pasted in Lumpkin's article after a brief paragraph suggesting that this was all being reported by CBS News correspondent Jim Stewart -- in other words, suggesting that the reader was mostly perusing the words of Stewart, not Lumpkin. Did Lumpkin take offense at this? Or did Lumpkin himself merely affix his own byline to an item that was likely nothing more than an official press release from the National Security Council? The article itself reads like government "talking points" for the unfolding 9/11 Legend. Moreover, it highlights the degree to which the "mainstream" news media is managed, centralized, and strategically compartmentalized to give the misleading impression that a widely circulated fact is "known" among a large body of "independent" journalists -- when, in actual fact, they merely cite the same government press releases.

Lumpkin's key June article -- or "press release" -- served as a guidepost as to how the unfolding 9/11 Legend would finally crystallize. As reported by Lumpkin, in the same article where Khalid was introduced as the new 9/11 mastermind, he was also "accused of working with Ramzi Yousef in the first bombing of the World Trade Center [in `93]" in addition to working with Yousef on a 1995 plot (code-named Bojinka) to bomb a dozen airliners headed to the United States. But most significantly, Lumpkin's article referenced the 9/11 paymaster, now identified as "Shaikh Saiid al-Sharif, also known as Mustafa Ahmed al-Hisawi, who is bin Laden's financial chief." Gone was any mention of a Shaikh Saiid alias Sa'd al-Sharif, bin Laden's brother-in law, as reported by the Associated Press back in December 2001. Now, in Lumpkin's June 5, 2002 version, Shaikh Saiid had been spliced together with al-Sharif, creating a Shaikh Saiid al-Sharif, the "financial chief" -- tossing out the Sa'd portion of Sharif's name and any suggestion that bin Laden's brother-in-law had anything to do with this.

It was not by accident that the 9/11 paymaster -- now officially dubbed as Mustafa Ahmed al-Hisawi - was mentioned in an article introducing Khalid as the mastermind. As it turned out, about the same time that Lumpkin's article was making the rounds, Robert Mueller was making a statement before the Senate-House Committee, narrating the full details of the money trail story (as set out in the Moussaoui indictment), but this time adding the role of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, who, according to Mueller's statement, shared a credit card with Mustafa Ahmed "Alhawsawi."

Thus, Mueller inserted Khalid into the Money Trail Story by way of a direct connection with the "Mustafa Ahmad" alias. And now, thanks to Lumpkin, "Mustafa Ahmad" was not to be thought of as simply a convenient pseudonym, but rather as a real person, bin Laden's bona fide "financial chief." Omar Saeed was now fully excised out of the Money Trail Story, which, as of June 2002, was officially and unambiguously adopting the Hisawi (or Hawsawi) thread as the way to go. Still, the Omar Saeed thread would linger on past Saeed's July 15, 2002 conviction and death sentence, with Robert Sam Anson of Vanity Fair mentioning Saeed's $100,000 transaction, along with his association with Aftab Ansari. As a textbook example of "muddying the waters", all contingencies -- or threads -- were accounted for. Now all that remained was for Lumpkin to smooth over the apparent contradictions, which he would do -- twice more -- for the record before Mustafa Ahmed's conveniently timed arrest in March 2003.

Once Lumpkin's June 2002 article on Khalid was out, further incriminating details were coming out fast and furious. According to CBS News, U.S. officials now had "evidence" that Khalid had met with "some of the 9/11 hijackers at their Hamburg, Germany apartment in 1999." Presumably, Ramzi Binalshibh -- Mohammed Atta's Hamburg roommate who was also thought to be a potential "twentieth hijacker" -- was among them. Lumpkin's key June article also mentioned Binalshibh as part of Atta's Hamburg "cell." And as Binalshibh was paired with Mustafa Ahmed as an "unindicted co-conspirator" in the Moussaoui indictment, we have perhaps an indication that Khalid, Binalshibh, and Mustafa Ahmed were part of a concerted strategy touched off in early June 2002 to bring this phase of the 9/11 Legend to a close. Conveniently timed for release on the very next day -- June 6, 2002 -- further news followed that, according to National Security Agency intercepts, Khalid was heard talking on the telephone with hijacker Mohammed Atta. Moreover, for the very first time, authorities were now reporting that Khalid was actually the uncle of Ramzi Yousef. In other words, when the nephew failed to bring down the Towers in `93, the uncle took up the slack in `01.

Perhaps it was this sort of conceptually artistic symmetry that made Khalid so attractive as the designated mastermind. Through Khalid, one had a direct connection to the first World Trade Center attack, providing a smoking gun continuity leading directly to al-Qaida. Prior to Khalid's June 2002 public promotion, he was lurking on the official terror lists merely as an indicted conspirator in the 1995 Bojinka plot masterminded by Ramzi Yousef. Thus, while Khalid had not previously been directly connected to the 9/11 plot, he did make the "most wanted" cut based on his alleged 1995 collaboration with Yousef. With that in mind, one can almost picture sitting in with the members of the National Security Council on a balmy Spring morning in late May 2002, leafing through their photo albums as they argued over the most appropriate candidate to close off the official 9/11 Legend. As it turned out, they chose the guy with the unibrow and the hair shirt.

What was the official reason for revealing the role of Khalid at this point in time? According to CBS News, it was senior al-Qaida figure Abu Zubaydah (captured a few months previously) who had "fingered [Khalid] as the mastermind behind the Sept. 11 attacks." Abu Zubaydah, the first "big fish" captured in the War On Terror, had previously -- and conveniently -- been fingered as a major al-Qaida player by Ahmed Ressam. Moreover, thanks again to John O'Neill's friend, Jean-Louis Bruguiere, Zubaydah's role in al-Qaida was fully delineated through Bruguiere's interviews with al-Qaida operative Djamel Begal, who purportedly had been part of a plot to bomb the U.S. Embassy in Paris prior to September 11.

As we will see, once Ramzi Binalshibh's number comes up for apprehension (in September 2002), followed by the capture of Khalid and Mustafa Ahmed in March 2003, another version will be offered for the timing of Khalid's introduction as 9/11 mastermind. But first, we should take note of James Risen's June 5, 2002 article for the New York Times, in which Risen reported that the authorities "had begun to suspect soon after the [Sept. 11] attacks that [Khalid] had some role in the hijackings. But in the next months, a detailed financial investigation of the money trail from the plot led officials to believe that he had a more prominent role than previously suspected." In other words, as Risen had framed it, Khalid had first garnered notice for 9/11 by way of his connection to the money trail. Was this a retrospective addition into the record? -- for Khalid most certainly did not make it into the Money Trail Story as of December 2001, when pretty much all the details of the money trail were crystallized within the Moussaoui indictment. On the other hand, there is a possibility that Khalid was intended from the very beginning to be featured as the 9/11 mastermind, yet perhaps he could not be safely inserted back into the Legend by way of the money trail until that nasty confusion over the "Mustafa Ahmad" alias was resolved.

To construct a viable Legend, it is not always a simple matter of outright fabrication -- for then it would be a logistical nightmare in keeping an army of otherwise honest investigators from ascertaining the true physical facts. Rather -- in terms of covert operations -- a Legend works best when all its elements are actually played out, with real operatives making real transactions, leaving a trail of evidence that can -- with assistance from apparent insiders like Bruguiere -- help those investigators outside "the loop" to come to the desired conclusions. This would explain the apparent difficulty in fabricating an alternative Legend for Omar Saeed as paymaster -- as his real role in 9/11 was already physically seeded into so many elements of the Legend as planned. If Omar Saeed Sheikh had actually played out the role as paymaster, then he would be physically linked to Binalshibh and Atta, who were essential elements in the Legend as it was played out.

Moreover, if Khalid was originally part of that Legend, his inclusion in the money trail aspect of that Legend would be problematic so long as Omar Saeed was being linked back to the ISI Chief (who in turn links back to Washington, D.C.). Furthermore, in order to ensure that all "insiders" were equally blackmailable -- that is, no one party could use its inside knowledge to bring down another -- the senior participants would each run their respective operatives in the Legend. Thus, insider elements within the U.K., France, Germany, Spain, and others would each run their own agent, committing to the Legend and thus staking their credibility on the viability of that Legend.

In this respect, we could imagine Binalshibh and Atta as being "handled" by elements in German intelligence (with the assistance of federal German prosecutor Kay Nehm, perhaps), while French intelligence (in conjunction with Bruguiere, perhaps) would "handle" operatives such as Ressam or Zubaydah. As for the U.K., it is likely that Omar Saeed was their agent, for the obvious reason that Saeed's ideological transformation began t