It’s Time to Recognize Iran’s Complicity in the 9/11 Attacks

The 9/11 Commission highlighted Iran's complicity in the attacks on pages 240-241 of its final report.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said recently that Iranian assets seized by the U.S. Treasury could be held for the Iranian people or be distributed to victims of Iranian state terrorism.

He mentioned specifically the families of those killed on the USS Cole in 2000. In previous statements, he has mentioned families of those killed by Iran in the Marine Barracks bombing in Beirut in April 1983 and those of sailors killed in recent attacks in and around the Strait of Hormuz.

But he has never referred to the families of those who perished in the September 11, 2001, attacks, even though they account for a majority of claimants to the U.S. Victims of State Sponsored Terrorism Fund (USVSST), which was established by Congress in 2015.

The 9/11 Commission documented Iranian assistance to al-Qaeda on pages 240-241 of its final report, based on information it uncovered at the eleventh hour before publication.

The Commission mentioned “the willingness of Iranian officials to facilitate the travel of al-Qaeda members through Iran, on their way to and from Afghanistan,” including “8 to 10 of the 14 Saudi ‘muscle’ operatives” who made the journey, accompanied by a senior Hezbollah operative, between October 2000 and February 2001.

By traveling through Iran without visa stamps, the Saudis could keep the fresh passports they had acquired through the Visa Express system set up during the Clinton administration clean, thus allaying the suspicions of U.S. Customs officials.

The Commission authors concluded this section with an exhortation. “We believe this topic requires further investigation by the U.S. government.”

And yet, to this day, that investigation was never done—or, if done, it was never made public.

In 2018, a top Iranian official, Mohammad Javad Larijani, publicly acknowledged that Iran had facilitated the travels of the future 9/11 hijackers and said they were “under the complete supervision of Iranian intelligence.” His admission was ignored by the national media.

Vice President Mike Pence was pilloried in the press when he mentioned the Iran connection in a series of tweets following the assassination of Iranian terror master Qassem Soleimani in January 2020.

A headline in The Guardian was typical: “Mike Pence pushes 9/11 conspiracy theories to justify Soleimani killing.”

When I first published an interview with an Iranian defector in 2003 who had personally witnessed the arrival of top al-Qaeda leaders in Iran in the months before the 9/11 attacks, a CIA spokesperson called the defector a “serial fabricator.”

What he didn’t say was that the CIA had debriefed the former Iranian intelligence officer for two days in July 2001 in Baku, Azerbaijan, only to reject his information about a massive impending attack on America against the Pentagon, the White House, the World Trade Center, and CIA headquarters, using civilian airliners as weapons.

When the defector provided the date of the attack—the 20th of the Iranian month of Sharivar—the CIA officer consulted his Persian calendar. “September 10th? Why don’t you come back then when you have more specific information?” he said.

As it turned out, the 20th of Sharivar that year fell on September 11. I published the defector’s story in my 2005 book, Countdown to Crisis: the Coming Nuclear Showdown with Iran.

After that interview, I was contacted by a consortium of law firms led by Tom Mellon, Jr., representing 9/11 victims, who asked me to help them investigate the Iran-9/11 connection. We traveled repeatedly to Europe and the Middle East to take sworn videotaped testimony from multiple defectors from Iranian intelligence organizations, each of whom had specific information about Iran’s involvement with al-Qaeda before, during, or after the 9/11 attacks.

For example, no one has ever explained how the al-Qaeda hijackers went from introductory flight training on single-engine aircraft to being able to successfully fly jumbo jets.

One of our defectors testified that the regime had purchased a Boeing 757-767-777 simulator in Hong Kong and installed it at Doshan-Tappeh airbase in Tehran to train the future hijacker pilots.

We corroborated the name of the purchaser and his front company with an Iranian businessman who even provided audio tapes of the buyer, with whom he had done business in the past.

Similarly, each detail we learned from our defector witnesses we corroborated with testimony from another dozen or so outside terrorism experts, including former intelligence officers and staff members of the 9/11 Commission.

After a seven-year investigation, the attorneys presented our evidence to New York District Court Judge George B. Daniels in May 2011. The judge issued a 53-page Memorandum of Law and Findings of Fact that described in minute detail the Iran-9/11 connection. In October 2012, he ordered the Iranian regime to pay $7 billion in damages to the 9/11 families. The case is Havlish v. bin Laden (SDNY No. 1:2003cv09848)

Since then, the District Court has awarded tens of billions of dollars in judgments by 9/11 plaintiffs against Iran, all based on the Havlish evidence.

And yet, reporters who queried the CIA about the judgment and the investigation were systematically told that it was just a conspiracy theory. Sunni Muslim al-Qaeda had operated alone, without aid from Shiite Iran. And as everyone knows, Sunnis eat Shia for breakfast.

From 2010 through 2016, I was a visiting lecturer at the Pentagon’s Joint Counterintelligence Training Academy (JCITA) in Quantico, Virginia. My students came from every branch of the U.S. intelligence community.

I regularly told the story of the Iranian defector who walked into the U.S. Embassy in Baku, Azerbaijan, in July 2001, and warned the CIA about the impending 9/11 attacks.

One day, not long after the District Court judgment, a middle-aged woman stood at the back during my presentation and came up to me afterwards. She introduced herself as the Iran Cadre Director at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

“For years, we rejected the whole notion of Sunni-Shia cooperation,” she said. “We are now reassessing all our holdings prior to 9/11 to see what we missed.”

Perhaps. But if that quiet re-evaluation actually took place, it never trickled down to the CIA “sources” who regularly steered national media reporters.

Here are just a few of the things our intelligence community “missed” prior to 9/11 and hid from the public for years afterwards.

– Iran began working with al-Qaeda in 1992, when IRGC general Mohammad Bagher Zolghadr led a military training mission to Sudan. Zolghadr is today the top political advisor to Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei.

– In 1993, Iran sent its top terrorist operative, Imad Mughniyeh, to Sudan to forge an alliance with Osama bin Laden.

– Mughniyeh set up training camps for al-Qaeda operatives in Lebanon in 1994 and later built special camps in Iran for al-Qaeda prior to 9/11.

– In the months preceding 9/11, Mughniyeh accompanied top al-Qaeda operatives from Afghanistan to Tehran for meetings with top Iranian regime leaders. He also accompanied the future al-Qaeda muscle hijackers on multiple trips from Damascus and Beirut to Tehran.

– In May 2001, the commander of the IRGC Air Force, Brig. Gen. Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, personally flew the helicopter, taking bin Laden’s deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, from Mashhad to Tehran, to finalize the 9/11 agreement with the Iranian regime. Ghalibaf is the “moderate” parliament speaker who has been Iran’s chief negotiator with the United States in recent months.

– Among the Iranian leaders who greenlit cooperation with al-Qaeda on the 9/11 operation was then Quds Force commander Ahmad Vahidi. Today, Vahidi commands the entire Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, the IRGC.

– The whole 9/11 scenario was not devised by al-Qaeda but was based on a long-standing Iranian intelligence contingency plan, known internally as “Shaitan der atash” (Satan on fire).

For years, I have heard two explanations for why the United States government has refused to recognize Iran’s complicity in the 9/11 attacks.

The first is purely parochial: the CIA was worried that its monumental pre-9/11 errors would come to light and the Agency be punished by Congressional appropriators.

The second is that if the American public knew that Iran was co-responsible with al-Qaeda for the 2,977 deaths that occurred on 9/11, they would demand U.S. military action against Iran.

President Trump has burst that second bubble. The taboo over U.S. military action against Iran has now passed.

It boggles the mind to think that a handful of former CIA officials—perhaps even one or two holdovers—could hold such sway over American public policy as to continue covering up the Iranian connection to 9/11.

It’s time the American public learned the truth—the whole truth—about the Iranian regime’s terror war against America.

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It is, again, time to recall that following 9/11 there was a bill before Congress that was a formal Declaration of War against the Islamic nations involved in the attack.

That bill was never passed.

Thank You.

A fed court in NYC found Iran as in the Govt of Iran, guilty of facilitating terrorist acts and awarded $144 Billion to survivors, Former CIA Director James Woolsey testified as I recall. Material was declassified for his testimony.

To date I do not know if surviving families have received a penny from the Iranian assets frozen because of the dispute of the finding.

Reports of this case still refer to the 911 charges as “ alleged”

Personally I have always believed Iran orchestrated the bombing of PanAm flight 103 through Libyan schtoops because Qadaffi owed them a big favor ( or more)

Thank You.

To date I do not know if surviving families have received a penny from the Iranian assets frozen because of the dispute of the finding.

Reports of this case still refer to the 911 charges as “ alleged”

Personally I have always believed Iran orchestrated the bombing of PanAm flight 103 through Libyan schtoops because Qadaffi owed them a big favor ( or more)

“One day, not long after the District Court judgment, a middle-aged woman stood at the back during my presentation and came up to me afterwards. She introduced herself as the Iran Cadre Director at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.”

What the hell is this? Does Timmerman NOT know her identity?

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