Revealed: The Taliban minister, the US envoy and the warning of
September 11 that was ignored
By
Kate Clark in Kabul
07 September 2002
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Weeks before the terrorist attacks on 11
September, the United States and the United Nations ignored warnings from a
secret Taliban emissary that Osama bin Laden was planning a huge attack on
American soil.
The warnings were delivered by an aide of
Wakil Ahmed Muttawakil, the Taliban Foreign Minister at the time, who was
known to be deeply unhappy with the foreign militants in Afghanistan,
including Arabs.
Mr Muttawakil, now in American custody,
believed the Taliban's protection of Mr bin Laden and the other al-Qa'ida
militants would lead to nothing less than the destruction of Afghanistan by
the US military. He told his aide: "The guests are going to destroy
the guesthouse."
The minister then ordered him to alert the US
and the UN about what was going to happen. But in a massive failure of
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 Islamic fundamentalist students had
enrolled in flight schools across the US.
Mr 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 11 September.
The minister learnt in July last year that Mr
bin Laden was planning a "huge attack" on targets inside America,
the aide said. The attacks were imminent and would be so deadly the United
States would react with destructive rage.
Mr 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 Taliban leader Mullah
Mohammed Omar.
Mr Muttawakil learnt of the coming attacks on
America not from other members of the Taliban leadership, but from the
leader of the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, Tahir Yildash. The
organisation was one of the fundamentalist groups that had found refuge on
Afghan soil, lending fighters for the Taliban's war on the Northern
Alliance and benefiting from good relations with al-Qa'ida in its fight
against the Uzbek government.
According to the emissary, Mr Muttawakil
emerged from a one-to-one meeting with Mr Yildash looking shocked and
troubled. Until then, the Foreign Minister, who had disapproved of the
destruction of the Buddhist statues in Bamian earlier in the year, had no
inkling from others in the Taliban leadership of what Mr 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-Qa'ida were in
situ in the US waiting to launch what would be the deadliest foreign attack
on the American mainland.
The emissary went first to the Americans,
travelling 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 safehouse belonging to an old mujahedin leader who has confirmed to The
Independent that the meeting took place.
Another US official was also present
possibly from the intelligence services. Mr Katz, who now works at the
American embassy in Eritrea, declined to talk about the meeting. But other
US sources said the warning was not passed on.
A 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 in the Gulf, to try to get more donations for the
cause."
The Afghan aide did not reveal that the
warning was from Mr Muttawakil, a factor that might have led the Americans
to down-grade it. "As I recall, I thought he was speaking from his own
personal perspective," one source said. "It was interesting that
he was from the Foreign Affairs Ministry, but he gave no indication this
was a message he was carrying."
Interviewed by The Independent in
Kabul, the Afghan emissary said: "I told Mr 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 Taliban."
The Taliban emissary said Mr Katz replied
that neither action was possible. Nor did Mr Katz pass the warning on to
the State Department, according to senior US diplomatic sources.
When Mr Muttawakil's emissary returned to
Kabul, the Foreign Minister told him to see UN officials. He took the
warning to the Kabul offices of UNSMA, the political wing of the UN. These
officials heard him out, but again did not report the secret Taliban
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."
Officials in the State Department and in UN
headquarters in New York said they knew nothing about a Taliban warning.
But they said they would now be looking into the matter.
Mr Muttawakil is now unavailable for comment:
he handed himself in to the Afghan authorities in the former Taliban
stronghold of Kandahar in southern Afghanistan last February. He is
reported to be in American custody there, one of the few senior members of
the Taliban regime the US has managed to arrest.
As America steadily broke the Taliban's
military machine last autumn, there were no Taliban defections. Apart from
Mr Mutawakil's one vain attempt to warn the world, the Taliban remained
absolutely loyal to their leader's vision.
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