2 Saudi Nationals Eyed In Plot to Slay Prez / Computer file found: killpresidentbush.exe

Two key witnesses in the terror attack probe were found with a computer file labeled "killpresidentbush.exe" and documents linked to a money launderer for Osama Bin Laden, sources told the Daily News.

The witnesses were identified as Saudi nationals who tried to board a flight from Kennedy Airport to Los Angeles two days after the Sept. 11 World Trade Center attack, a source familiar with the federal investigation confirmed. Their names remain secret.

The two are among a group of 10 material witnesses now in custody in the FBI's probe of the attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

The two men showed up at Kennedy Airport on Sept. 13 seeking to board a Los Angeles-bound flight with tickets dated Sept. 11, the day of the attack.

Authorities at the airport grew suspicious because their tickets were backdated and because all four of the flights that were hijacked flew out of Eastern airports and were bound for the West Coast.

The Daily News has learned that authorities found two pieces of evidence that prosecutors believed could link the two Saudis to the terror plot.

One of the men had a computer file labeled "killpresidentbush.exe," said a source familiar with the investigation.

The other man had documents with references to a man the FBI has identified as a money launderer for Bin Laden, the Saudi millionaire who has called for Muslims to attack American civilians.

The "killpresidentbush" reference was of particular significance because of death threats that were made against the President on Sept. 11 — the day of the attacks.

The White House revealed afterward it had received information that the terrorists' ultimate goal was to kill President Bush.

A death threat was called in to the White House that morning, saying the plotters were out to get Air Force One. The caller provided secret information that caused grave concern about the President's safety.

In fact, the threat was taken so seriously, White House officials say, that Bush crisscrossed the country in Air Force One, going from Florida to Louisiana to Nebraska before returning to the White House.

In addition, it is believed the hijacked plane that crashed in Pennsylvania may have been on the way to attack the White House or Air Force One.

The FBI and Manhattan U.S. Attorney Mary Jo White wouldn't comment on the status of the investigation yesterday.

The number of material witnesses grew this week from four to 10 as the New York-based Joint Terrorist Task Force fanned out across the globe chasing thousands of leads — and seeking more than 200 individuals for questioning.

So far, more than 80 individuals have been detained, including 35 who are being held on noncriminal immigration violations.

The task force has focused much of its energy on the 10 material witnesses in custody because agents believe each has pertinent information regarding the terrorism hijack plot.

In other developments, federal authorities here arrested a Middle Eastern man yesterday with fake pilot documents who arrived at Kennedy Airport on Wednesday on a flight from Spain.

Wael Abdel Rahman Kishk had a bogus pilot's certificate from Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, which has been linked to at least one of the 19 suspected hijackers.

Agents also found two fake Federal Aviation Administration medical certificates pilots must possess to fly and an Egypt Airlines pilot's shirt, according to a complaint filed by Acting Brooklyn U.S. Attorney Alan Vinegrad.

Under questioning, Kishk admitted he wasn't a pilot and had the documents and shirt "to impress his friends," the complaint alleged.

Kishk was held without bail. Assistant U.S. Attorney Catherine Friesen would not say if Kishk is linked to the terror probe.

Public defender Michael Schneider said Kishk denies having any connection to the terror attack and insists that he was coming to the U.S. to attend college.

The FBI also has turned to unusual sources in its quest for those responsible for last week's attacks.

A lawyer says the bureau is trying to talk with Ramzi Yousef, an admitted terrorist convicted of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.

Bernard Kleinman said he has been barred from speaking with his client, who is jailed for life in the Supermax prison in Florence, Colo.

This week, Kleinman said he asked a Second Circuit U.S. appeals judge to allow him a telephone conversation with Yousef. The judge has not ruled on the request.

They have programming skills...read this.

Digital moles in White House?

Terrorists had top-secret presidential codes --------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Editor's note: DEBKAfile's electronic news publication is a news-cum-analysis live wire, online round the clock seven days a week. A weekly edition,DEBKA-Net-Weekly, is now available through WorldNetDaily.com. Drawing on DEBKAfile's unique sources, analytical talents and forward-looking insights, it is presented as a compact, intelligence-angled weekly package. It is available as a direct e-mail feed or via the Internet.

"Air Force One is next," read the message received by the U.S. Secret Service at 9 a.m. Sept. 11, after two hijacked planes struck the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York.

Three minutes later, Secret Service agents grabbed Vice President Dick Cheney from his seat opposite a television set in the White House and hustled him down to the president's emergency operations center, a bunker built to withstand a nuclear blast.

The terrorists' message threatening Air Force One was transmitted in that day's top-secret White House code words. As the clock ticked away, the Secret Service reached a frightening conclusion: The terrorists had obtained the White House code and a whole set of top-secret signals.

This made it possible for a hostile force to pinpoint the exact position of Air Force One, its destination and its classified procedures. In fact, the hijackers were picking up and deciphering the presidential plane's incoming and outgoing transmissions.

The discovery shocked everyone in the president's emergency operations center – Cheney, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice and Transportation Secretary Norman Mineta. Their first question was: How did the terrorists access top-secret White House codes and procedures? Is there a mole, or more than one enemy spy in the White House, the Secret Service, the FBI, the CIA or the Federal Aviation Administration?

In the week after the attacks in New York and Washington, more hair-raising facts emerged. The terrorists had also obtained the code groups of the National Security Agency and were able to penetrate the NSA's state-of-the-art electronic surveillance systems. Indeed, they seemed to have at their disposal an electronic capability that was more sophisticated than that of the NSA.

This startling observation came as no surprise to those tracking the globe-spanning investments of Saudi Arabia's bin Laden family and those of its exiled son, Osama, in some of the world's biggest and most advanced satellite and telecommunications companies. World Space Communication is one of the known bin Laden assets. U.S. counter-terrorism agencies, including the NSA, have been tracking World Space Communication's activities for the past five years. Some of the company's satellites are far more advanced than the NSA's own eyes in the sky.

Bin Laden also has the NSA beat on the employment front, hiring the best computer experts on the market. One such is Nabil Khan Kani, a Syrian who lived in Barcelona with his Spanish wife, Jenna Florine, in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

No one ever suspected what the amiable Syrian was really up to until January 2000, when FBI agents found two apartments he used thousands of miles from Barcelona, in the Bab el-Shabaa district of Saana, Yemen. The apartments served as transit points for Egyptians suspected of operational links with the Egyptian Islamic Jihad and Algerians connected with the Armed Islamic Group, or GIA. There, investigators turned up nine fake identity cards in different names, all with Kani's photo, Spanish, Italian, French and Sudanese passports, likewise with the same photo but in different names, and two pistols fitted with silencers.

Kani must have used yet another alias for his getaway. His whereabouts are unknown to this day. Computer and terrorism experts suggest that the missing Syrian computer whiz was the author of the technology known as steganography, as first described in the Washington Post yesterday. This technology enables users to bypass electronic monitoring by hiding messages randomly in seemingly innocent digital files, such as music files, those of the popular online marketplace eBay, pornographic files or even e-mail headers. Scrambled with the help of basic encryption tools, they can only be read by those with a "key." These messages leave no trace of their presence.

U.S. intelligence has been unable to trace their authors and recipients in the three years since first detecting evidence of their existence in the files of the bin Laden organization. U.S. agencies now believe that the attacks in New York and Washington were coordinated through those encrypted electronic messages, which were opened by "key" holders.

They also believe that terrorists are in possession of all or part of the codes used by the Drug Enforcement Administration, the National Reconnaissance Office, Air Force Intelligence, Army Intelligence, Naval Intelligence, Marine Corps Intelligence and the intelligence offices of the State Department and Department of Energy.

Intelligence and counter-terror sources report that, while rescuers in New York and Washington were sifting through rubble inch by inch, US government experts were changing codes one-by-one – and in even more difficult, replacing procedures and methods of encryption. The nagging question of a mole in the highest reaches of the U.S. government and intelligence community – with direct or indirect links with bin Laden – remains. Since no single individual has access to every top-level code at any given time – a single mole would not answer the case; it would have to a large, widely spread number. U.S. experts do not believe bin Laden was capable of infiltrating double agents into the heart of the U.S. administration on a large scale. They are looking elsewhere, instead, at a country with a very well-oiled intelligence apparatus – Iraq.

This theory was argued by an authoritative voice, former CIA Director James Woolsey, in a New Republic article reprinted by London's Daily Telegraph on Sept. 17. He refers to a book called "Study of Revenge: Saddam Hussein's Unfinished War Against America," by Laurie Mylroie, which quotes a senior FBI investigator on the problematical identity of Ramzi Yousef, perpetrator of the first attempt to blow up the World Trade Center in 1993.

For that deed, a U.S. federal court in New York sentenced Yousef Jan. 8, 1998, to 240 years in solitary confinement. He was also indicted for conspiring to hijack 12 U.S. and Asian commercial aircraft on their way to the United States and blow them up over New York. It was claimed that the name Ramzi Yousef was an alias for his real identity, which was a Pakistani called Abdul Basit Karim.

However, the FBI investigator cited in the book said that Basit was not his real identity either; Yousef was actually an Iraqi army agent who stole Basit's identity. Basit and family were resident in Kuwait when Iraq overran the oil emirate in 1990. The Iraqis moved the family to Baghdad with other hostages. Some returned home, but the Basits were never heard of again, probably murdered for the sake of disguising Ramzi Yousef.

The former CIA director's advice is this: Iraq was involved in the first attack on the World Trade Center. Baghdad is therefore the place to look for the conspirators behind the second.

Intelligence sources can disclose that Woolsey's conclusion does not rest exclusively on the Mylroie book. While pointing the finger at Iraqi intelligence, he assigns Baghdad with no more than a partial role both in the1993 World Trade Center bombing and also in last week's suicide attack on its twin towers. His conclusions are based on a CIA investigation opened during his tenure as CIA director from 1993-1995.

Evidence kept in a personal dossier codenamed KG-84-HJ established Iraqi complicity in the 1993 attack. It also contains the first serious evaluations and theories regarding the identity of the high-placed penetration agents in the White House and at the heart of U.S. intelligence.

They appear to be the very moles who made those vital coded signals available to the kamikaze terrorists Sept. 11.

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