New 9/11 Theory: Al Qaeda Sought More U.S. Attackers

Federal officials now believe Al Qaeda was trying to bring additional hijackers into the U.S. a few weeks before the Sept. 11 attacks.

It is unclear whether they were to join the 19 hijackers who carried out the terrorist attack, or if they were meant to mount a second wave of attacks, and thus Al Qaeda was seeking to rush them into place before the expected U.S. security crackdown after Sept. 11, according to three senior law enforcement officials who spoke on condition of anonymity Wednesday.

The attempt by Al Qaeda to bring in additional operatives in August 2001 was disclosed in a footnote in documents filed last week by the Justice Department in the U.S. 4th Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond, Va., in the case of accused Sept. 11 conspirator Zacarias Moussaoui.

The documents, which have been extensively blacked out to protect classified material, reveal that the attempt to augment terrorist ranks in August 2001 “suggests an operation much more in flux” than investigators previously had believed.

An investigation of the Sept. 11 attacks by the House and Senate intelligence committees concluded this year that the pilots and other hijackers who carried out the plot were all in the United States by late June 2001.

The 19 hijackers flew two jetliners into the New York World Trade Center’s twin towers and one jetliner into the Pentagon; A fourth plane crashed in a field in Pennsylvania.

One key unanswered question is why the plane that crashed in Pennsylvania had only four hijackers aboard, while the others had five. That plane crashed after an uprising led by passengers who had learned of the other hijackings through cellphone calls.

Moussaoui is not believed to have been a 20th hijacker. U.S. investigators have suggested that two members of an Al Qaeda cell in Hamburg, Germany, could have served in that role or, alternatively, as a fifth pilot on another plane.

One theory being explored by the FBI and Justice Department is that an Al Qaeda operative now known to investigators had been in the United States but left before he could take part in the Sept. 11 attacks, according to the unnamed officials. The terrorist group could have been attempting, late in the plot, to replace this individual, whom the officials would not identify, or might have been seeking to add personnel to all of the planes.