KABUL, 8 September — Just weeks before the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, the United States and the United Nations ignored warnings from a secret Taleban emissary that Osama Bin Laden was planning a huge attack on American soil.
The warnings were delivered by an aide to the then Taleban Foreign Minister, Ahmed Wakil Muttawakil, who was known to be deeply unhappy with the Arab and other foreign militants in Afghanistan.
“The guests are going to destroy the guesthouse,” the minister told his aide, ordering him to alert the UN about what was going to happen. But in a massive failure of US intelligence, the message was disregarded because of what sources describe as “warning fatigue.” At the same time, the FBI and the CIA failed to take seriously warnings that Arab fundamentalist students had enrolled in flight schools across the USA.
Muttawakil’s aide, who has stayed on in Kabul and who has to remain anonymous for his security, described in detail to The Independent how he alerted first the Americans and then the United Nations of the coming calamity of Sept. 11.
He learned in July last year that Bin Laden was planning a “huge attack” on targets inside America, he said. The attacks were imminent and would be so deadly that the United States would react with destructive rage. Muttawakil, now in American custody, believed the Taleban’s protection of Bin Laden and the other Al-Qaeda militants would lead to nothing less than the destruction of Afghanistan by the US military.
Bin Laden had been in Afghanistan since May 1996, bringing his three wives, 13 children and Arab fighters. Over time he became a close ally of the obscurantist Taleban leader Mulla Omar.
Muttawakil learned of the coming attacks on America not from other members of the Taleban leadership, but from the leader of the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, Tahir Yildash. The organization was one of the fundamentalist groups which had found refuge on Afghan soil, lending fighters for the Taleban’s war on the Northern Alliance and benefiting from good relations with Al-Qaeda in its fight against the Uzbek government.
According to the emissary, Muttawakil emerged from a one-to-one meeting with Yildash looking shocked and troubled. Up until then the foreign minister, who had disapproved of the destruction of the Buddhist statues in Bamiyan earlier in the year, had no inkling from others in the Taleban leadership of what Bin Laden was planning.
“At first Muttawakil wouldn’t say why he was so upset,” said the aide. “Then it all came out. Yildash had revealed that Osama Bin Laden was going to launch an attack on the United States. It would take place on American soil and it was imminent. Yildash said Osama hoped to kill thousands of Americans.” At the time, 19 members of Al-Qaeda were already in place in the US waiting to launch what would be the deadliest foreign attack on the American mainland ever.
The emissary went first to the Americans, traveling across the border to meet the consul general, David Katz, in the Pakistani border town of Peshawar in the third week of July 2001. They met in a safe house belonging to an old Mujahedeen leader who has confirmed to The Independent that the meeting took place.
Another US official was also present — possibly from the intelligence services. Katz, who is now working at the American embassy in Eritrea, declined to speak about the meeting.
But other US sources said the warning was not passed upward. One diplomatic source said: “We were hearing a lot of that kind of stuff. When people keep saying the sky’s going to fall in and it doesn’t, a kind of warning fatigue sets in.”
“I actually thought it was all an attempt to rattle us in an attempt to please their funders, to try to get more donations for the cause.”
The Afghan aide did not reveal that the warning was from Muttawakil, a factor that may have led the Americans to down-grade it. “As I recall, I thought he was speaking from his own personal perspective,” said one source.
“It was interesting that he was from the Foreign Affairs Ministry, but he gave no indication this was a message he was carrying,” the source said.
Interviewed by The Independent in Kabul, the Afghan emissary said: “I told Katz they should launch a new Desert Storm — like the campaign to drive Iraq out of Kuwait — but this time they should call it Mountain Storm and they should drive the foreigners out of Afghanistan.
“They also had to stop the Pakistanis supporting the Taleban.” The Taleban emissary said Katz replied that neither action was possible. Nor did Katz pass the warning on to the State Department according to senior US diplomatic sources.
When Muttawakil’s emissary returned to Kabul, the Foreign Minister told him to see United Nations officials, including Dr. Karl Fisher. He took the warning to the Kabul offices of UNSMA, the political wing of the UN. These officials heard him out, but once again did not report the secret Taleban warning to UN headquarters.
A UN official familiar with the warnings said: “He appeared to be speaking in total desperation, asking for a Mountain Storm, he wanted a sort of deus ex machina to solve his country’s problems. But before 9/11, there was just not much hope that Washington would become that engaged in Afghanistan.”
The warning from inside the Taleban was just one more piece of the intelligence jigsaw which was not put in place. Officials in the State Department and in UN headquarters in New York both said they knew nothing about a Taleban warning. But they said they would now be looking into the matter.
Muttawakil is now unavailable for comment — he handed himself in to the Afghan authorities in the former Taleban stronghold of Kandahar in southern Afghanistan last February.
He is reported to be still in American custody there, one of the few senior members of the Taleban regime that the US has managed to arrest. (The Independent)