COVER UP CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

The major unanswered questions after my first book, 1000 Years For Revenge were directly related to the conduct of Justice Department lawyers like Dietrich “Dieter” Snell in the months between May of 1995, when Col. Rodolfo Mendoza of the Philippines National Police (PNP) turned over his file on al Qaeda terrorist Abdul Hakim Murad to the U.S. Embassy in Manila and September, 1996 when Snell and SDNY U.S. Attorney Mike Garcia successfully convicted Yousef, Murad and Wali Kham Amin Shah in the Bojinka case:

Why was the evidence that Ramzi Yousef’s hatched the 9/11 plot as far back as 1994 in the Philippines, seemingly ignored by the FBI?

Why did the Justice Department narrow the scope of the Bojinka trial of Yousef and two other al Qaeda cohorts  in 1996 – so that the name of the bomb maker’s uncle, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, “the mastermind of 9/11,”  wasn’t mentioned in more than three months of testimony?

Why did the FBI and Justice Department keep the hunt for Khalid Shaikh -- a top al Qaeda operative with direct access to Osama bin Laden,  -- secret for years and fail to utilize the same public hue and cry that had brought his deadly nephew Ramzi to ground?

     If I’d had access to Dieter Snell, when researching that first book I would have asked him directly.  Instead I got a chance to question him on the morning of March 15, 2004 when I was called to the 9/11 Commission’s office at 26 Federal Plaza in Manhattan to “testify.”

    The word “testify” is set in quotes, because when Snell led me into a conference room accompanied by staff member Marco Cordero (an FBI agent on loan to the Commission) there was no stenographer present or any recording device.  Snell sat down at a table across from me, pulled out a small pad and preceded to take notes.  Earlier, my source inside the Commission had warned me about this.

    “People are watching the hearings and thinking that all of the witnesses we talk to are under oath and on the record,” he said. “But it isn’t true. More than 90 per cent of the witness intake comes in ‘informal’ sessions like the one they first had at the White House with Condi Rice.” During these sessions investigators take notes and write up reports that are passed to the Commissioners for review. “But how does the Commission expect to make a complete record of events if it’s so capricious,” asks lawyer and 9/11 widow Kristen Breitweiser. 

      It was Kristen and the other three Jersey girls who first suggested to the Commissioners that they review the findings in my book. In reading a copy of the galley proofs prior to publication, Kristen had pronounced it a “500 page smoking gun.” During the October 14th hearing in Washington, the FSC members passed out copies of the book to the Commissioners and Chairman Tom Kean read it over the Christmas holiday. On January 19th he wrote me to say that he had found the book “helpful in several areas” and referred  the FSC’s request that I testify to Philip Zelikow. The staff director, in turn, put me in touch with Dieter Snell.
    

   Now, in the Commission’s conference room on March 15th as I proceeded to give my “testimony” in the form of the written statement, I stopped periodically to ask Snell some questions.

     “Why did you limit the Bojinka evidence at the trial?” I asked. “Did you know about Col. Mendoza’s revelations? Why did Agent (Frank) Pellegrino testify that he didn’t know Yousef’s partner Murad was being questioned at Camp Crame in Manila until late March of ’95 when he’d been at the base for two months?”

    Each time I asked a question, Snell would smile and say, “That’s classified.” Or “I can’t discuss that.” He was polite and cordial.  At the end of my testimony he said that he would send me a “document” request asking for some of my research material.

     I told him that I would forward what he needed, provided he didn’t ask me to give up confidential sources. That had been one of my prerequisites to “testifying.”

     My other condition had been that my “testimony” become a part of the permanent Commission record. How that would now be accomplished without a stenographer present or a recording, I wasn’t sure.

      On March 17th following  my testimony Snell asked me to send him a series of supporting documents, including the transcript and a videotape of my interview with Col. Mendoza on April 19, 2002 in Pagasinan Province, the Philippines, and various PNP documents.

    

    On April 23rd I assembled the package, but, in the meantime I had received some of the evidence suggestions that the Justice Department and the SDNY office where Snell had worked, had been involved in a cover-up regarding the TWA investigation.

    More than anything else, this new material on the Yousef-Scarpa intelligence pointed up the conflict of investigators like Dieter Snell in acting on behalf of the Commission.

    At that point I had more questions I wanted to ask him. In the course of the Bojinka trial was he aware personally that his co-prosecutor Mike Garcia had received a death threat from Ramzi Yousef? If so, was he aware of the FBI #302’s from the Bureau’s office across Federal Plaza that carried Yousef’s warning? The terrorist had told Scarpa Jr. that if the trial was going against him his cell would set a bomb aboard a plane to effect a mistrial.

      I wondered if Dieter Snell had seen the July 24th, 1996 FBI #302 a week after TWA Flight 800 went down, It read, “SCARPA advised that before the cell rotations MURAD stated that he feels that they may get a mistrial from the publicity surrounding the TWA explosion.”

     More importantly, when FBI ADIC James Kallstrom did a 180 and decided to ignore the evidence of a crime, I wondered if Snell aware of the ensuing DOJ cover-up?

    Since he hadn’t answered any questions at the time of my “testimony,” I assumed that I wouldn’t get anywhere with this new line of inquiry. But, for the sake of avoiding any possible conflict I decided to bypass Snell and send the follow-up material directly to Gov. Kean.

      So on April 23rd I Express Mailed the evidence and a follow up memo to his offices in Drew University in Madison, New Jersey. In the cover letter to Gov. Kean I specifically cited my concerns about Mr. Snell’s potential conflict of interest.

     Five days after my letter  critical of Snell, the New York Times ran a  story which focused on the former prosecutor and quoted him as saying that before 9/11 he observed an incident in which one of Yousef’s WTC bombing conspirators had threatened the Twin Towers:

     “We’re going to get them,” he said. “We’re going to get them.”

     This was frankly a new revelation. No Justice Department official had ever publicly admitted that the Yousef cell had predicted a return to finish the Towers, even though Ramzi’s  partner Murad had told it to Federal prosecutors during an interrogation and we had published the FBI #302 as an appendix to 1000 Years For Revenge. But this was evidence of prior knowledge by a DOJ lawyer of a threat to the WTC years before the 9/11 attacks.

     I wondered if it would show up in the Commission’s final report. It certainly wasn’t in Staff Statement #16 which Dieter Snell read a section of at the hearing on June 16th.

      Weeks after 9/11 Dietrich Snell had granted an interview to Greg B. Smith, the New York Daily News reporter who had first broken the story of the Scarpa-Yousef intelligence initiative.  Under the headline, “On Clinton’s Watch: Feds Nixed Deal For Plane Plot Tipoff,” Smith reported on the early revelation from the Philippines National Police that Yousef’s partner Murad had threatened to crash a small plane into the CIA.

    Asked about it, Snell told Smith, “It was not something that we focused on. It was something that he (Murad) said.”  We took seriously what he was telling us, but what we were focused on was the plot to blow up the 12 airliners.”

    “The whole crux of Bojinka was to have timed explosions and the operatives to be off the flights and escaping,” said Snell at the time. “That’s a fundamental difference between what happened two weeks ago at the World Trade Center and Bojinka.”

    Snell was correct on that point. The 9/11 plot planned by Yousef, KSM and Murad was fundamentally separate from Bojinka as Col. Mendoza had learned. But here in Smith’s story was at least confirmation that Snell had been exposed to the PNP information.

      The story ended this way: “Snell said he had no way to know whether Murad could have provided investigators with information that would be relevant to the probe of the Sept. 11 attack. ‘I think it’s pretty unlikely, but I don’t know,’ hew said. ‘I’d be guessing like everyone else.’”

    Why does any of this matter? Because it’s clear from the way the Commission was staffed and the limited scope of its inquiry which focused on the years from 1998 on – entire areas of culpability by the U.S. Justice Department and the FBI have now been left out of the last official record of the causes behind the 9/11 attacks.