claims to have been closest with Saeed al Ghamdi, whom he convinced to
become a martyr and whom he asked to recruit a friend, Ahmed al Ghamdi,
to the same cause. Although Khallad claims not to recall everyone from this
group who was later chosen for the 9/11 operation, he says they also included
Suqami,Waleed and Wail al Shehri, Omari, Nami, Hamza al Ghamdi, Salem al
Hazmi, and Moqed.
Afghanistan, a recruit would fill out an application with standard questions, such
as,What brought you to Afghanistan? How did you travel here? How did you
hear about us? What attracted you to the cause? What is your educational back-
ground? Where have you worked before? Applications were valuable for deter-
mining the potential of new arrivals, for filtering out potential spies from
among them, and for identifying recruits with special skills. For instance, as
pointed out earlier, Hani Hanjour noted his pilot training. Prospective opera-
tives also were asked whether they were prepared to serve as suicide operatives;
those who answered in the affirmative were interviewed by senior al Qaeda
lieutenant Muhammad Atef.
had preeminence in selecting the planes operation participants. The second
most important criterion was demonstrable patience, Khallad says, because the
planning for such attacks could take years.
operatives before 9/11. But KSM asserts that young mujahideen with clean
records were chosen to avoid raising alerts during travel.The al Qaeda train-
ing camp head mentioned above adds that operatives with no prior involve-
ment in activities likely to be known to international security agencies were
purposefully selected for the 9/11 attacks.
weapons, explosives, and topography. Recruits learned discipline and military
life.They were subjected to artificial stresses to measure their psychological fit-
ness and commitment to jihad.At least seven of the Saudi muscle hijackers took
this basic training regime at the al Faruq camp near Kandahar.This particular
camp appears to have been the preferred location for vetting and training
the potential muscle hijackers because of its proximity to Bin Ladin and
senior al Qaeda leadership.Two others--Suqami and Moqed--trained at Khal-
dan, another large basic training facility located near Kabul, where Mihdhar had
trained in the mid-1990s.