communications were regarded as insecure, al Qaeda relied even more heavily
on couriers.
country issues under its security committee. The office was located at the
Kandahar airport and was managed by Atef. The committee altered papers,
including passports, visas, and identification cards.
ing. To this end, al Qaeda required jihadists to turn in their passports before
going to the front lines in Afghanistan. If they were killed, their passports were
recycled for use.
substituting photos and erasing and adding travel cachets, were also taught.
Manuals demonstrating the technique for "cleaning" visas were reportedly cir-
culated among operatives. Mohamed Atta and Zakariya Essabar were reported
to have been trained in passport alteration.
adjustments in the field. It was well-known, for example, that if a Saudi trav-
eled to Afghanistan via Pakistan, then on his return to Saudi Arabia his pass-
port, bearing a Pakistani stamp, would be confiscated. So operatives either
erased the Pakistani visas from their passports or traveled through Iran, which
did not stamp visas directly into passports.
attack on America. The 9/11 plotters eventually spent somewhere between
$400,000 and $500,000 to plan and conduct their attack. Consistent with the
importance of the project, al Qaeda funded the plotters. KSM provided his
operatives with nearly all the money they needed to travel to the United States,
train, and live. The plotters' tradecraft was not especially sophisticated, but it
was good enough.They moved, stored, and spent their money in ordinary ways,
easily defeating the detection mechanisms in place at the time.
Qaeda financed itself during the period leading up to 9/11.
As we explained in chapter 2, Bin Ladin did not fund al Qaeda through a
personal fortune and a network of businesses in Sudan. Instead, al Qaeda
relied primarily on a fund-raising network developed over time. The CIA