A software company called Ptech, founded by a Saudi financier placed on America’s Terrorist List in October 2001, had access to the FAA’s entire computer system for two years before the 9/11 attack.
Last week, when the National 9/11 Commission held hearings on The Aviation Security System and the 9/11 Attack, government and aviation officials described a system unprepared for the events that unfolded on September 11. None of them, however, mentioned security breaches involving “Saudi terrorists in the basement of the FAA.”
Yet that's what happened, according to a high-level risk analyst who had troubling dealings with the firm.
"Ptech had a couple of very troubling client relationships," states risk architect and whistleblower Indira Singh, "one of which was with the FAA. One of the 'persons of interest' in the investigation had a team in the basement of the FAA for two years."
"P-tech worked on a project that revealed all information processes and issues that the FAA had with the National Airspace Systems Agency, NAS," Singh said.
FBI’s role in 9/11 investigation needs investigation
"The project included incident investigation, law enforcement, military aviation systems, highly sensitive information, especially if you wanted to exploit the FAA’s current capabilities and holes… to jam or slow down U.S. military response to a domestic hijacking, for example.”
Just the portion of the story above the waterline and already public record is shocking enough:
Briefly, Saudi “money man” Yasin al-Qadi, named by the Bush Administration as a financial backer of the al-Qaeda terrorist network, had funded a software start-up in Boston named Ptech, reported the Boston Globe over a year ago.
Al-Qadi, a Saudi businessman whose US assets were frozen after the Sept. 11 attacks amid allegations that he has funded terrorist groups, is from Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, where he also headed the Saudi-based Muwafaq (Blessed Relief) Foundation.
Treasury officials allege the “charity” is an al-Qaeda front used to funnel millions of dollars to the terrorist organization, and Al-Qadi was named a Specially Designated Global Terrorist by the United States on October 12, 2001. A US Treasury Department statement stated that "Muwafaq is an Al-Qaeda front that receives funding from wealthy Saudi businessmen"
"Somebody musta paid Osama for the heroin."
But it’s the unreported story that has the potential to lead to the explosive charge that the FBI’s role in the 9/11 investigation itself needs investigation.
Ptech’s customers included sensitive government and intelligence agencies such as the FBI and the Air Force. “But until last fall,” the GLOBE reported on Jan. 22, 2003, “few seemed aware an early financial backer of Ptech was Yasin al-Qadi, a Saudi businessman named as a suspected terrorist financier by the Bush Administration in October 2001.”
Reports of ineptitude at FBI headquarters have already surfaced in numerous places: in Phoenix, Chicago, and Minneapolis, for example. What makes reports of the Boston FBI’s bungled investigation into Ptech different is the unmistakably dark suggestion that this poor performance may have been intentional.
Why would the Boston FBI do such a thing? Maybe because they were shielding a money laundering vehicle, goes the allegation, that was created back in the 1980's as part of the CIA’s program of arming the Afghan mujahedeen.
Can you say BCCI? .
The tale begins almost right after the 9/11 attack, when, in October of 2001, handful of ex-Ptech employees alerted the FBI to evidence indicating that the firm had Saudi terror connections.
Saudi terrorists, Saudi money, and JP Morgan Chase
Almost a year later the Boston FBI had still done nothing about it. They had, in fact, shut down their cursory investigation and taken no action.
Thus Ptech was still operating at the highest levels of American society in the Spring of 2002, when the firm showed up hustling business at the door of Wall Street’s JP Morgan Chase. The question is “why?”
On its surface, the answer appears to be “money.” Lots and lots of Saudi money.
Indira Singh, who later became a whistleblower, was an unwitting eyewitness to the “train wreck.”
“I invited Ptech to come down and give a presentation and a customized demo to JP Morgan Chase,” states Singh, who was a consultant to the bank on “risk architecture,” an arcane software specialty which calculates enterprise risk. In one of the story’s many ironic twists, Singh was at the time designing a system to help JP Morgan Chase detect terrorist money laundering.
When Ptech showed up, Singh quickly realized that she was witnessing her worst fears about compromised security come true. “Within half an hour on the premises, I knew something was up,” she says. “They had almost immediately raised about six of my red flags, to the point where I walked over to my desk and picked up the phone, and began making phone calls.”
She talked with a respected industry figure who had once worked at Ptech. “He was shocked to learn that I had invited Ptech on the premises. He told me the company belonged to Yasin Qadi.”
In the course of what would otherwise have been just another day at the bank, Indira Singh made the amazing discovery that the firm in front of her at the moment was owned by Saudis, including Yasin Qadi, with suspected as well as proven ties to the terrorists who carried out the 9/11 attack.
All this left her feeling more than a little surprised.
'Chief Thug' at J.P. Morgan Chase
Moreover, she learned, Yasin Al-Qadi had been fingered by the Bush Administration in October 2001, over six months before. So how was it that Ptech was still making presentations to top American companies six months later?
The industry source Singh had consulted on Ptech had more bad news than just Yasin Qadi. “There were several people at Ptech who were targets of Operation Greenquest, a Dept of Treasury terrorism investigation,” she told us, “and that the company’s funding vehicle, BMI, was also under investigation. The list just went on and on and on. It was a spider’s web of connections.”
When Singh flew to Washington D.C. to meet some of the ex-Ptech employees to verify their allegations, she received another shock. “I met with five extraordinarily scared people. These people were scared for their lives, and for their families. Some were about to leave the country. They told me, ‘Indira, you don’t know who you’re dealing with.’
Sadly, when she told us what happened next, it came as no surprise: When Singh alerted authorities, and her employer, what she encountered was the inexplicable wrath of a top Wall Street Bank, as well as an official wall of silence at the FBI.
“I took everything I had at that point back to my boss at JP Morgan Chase,” she states. “He didn’t want to deal with it. So I called his boss, because at this point I realized I was sitting on dynamite.”
“The various heads of the security functions at the bank set up an interview with me, and it quickly escalated to the bank’s General Auditor, who introduced himself to me as JP Morgan Chase’s ‘chief thug.’”
We didn’t know banks like JP Morgan had thugs, we said.
“He introduced himself as the General Auditor,” said Singh, “but he said, for the real purposes of what he does at JP Morgan Chase, I am the ‘chief thug.’”
“He basically told me to keep my mouth shut and look the other way, and enjoy a wonderful life here at JP Morgan, and if I didn’t I was out.”
Alerting the bosses at one of America’s largest banks to a terror threat had certainly produced a strange result. Singh had entered a hall of mirrors, especially after she discovered that the terrorist threat was real.
A 'problem' with the Boston FBI
“By that time, I had already talked with my boss’s boss, to whom I had originally gone,” she says. “He told me, it was all true. He said, ‘everything you laid out on the table was true.’”
When attempts to intimidate her into silence failed, she became another American hero speaking out despite the consequences, which will be described in a future report.
After talking to the Boston FBI, Singh said she had been ''shocked'' and ''frustrated'' to learn that the FBI had not alerted any of the government agencies using Ptech software that there were questions about the company's ties to suspected terrorist fund-raisers.
The story is just the latest in a series of embarrassments for the Boston FBI office, including the scandal over the agency's coddling of murderous organized crime informants, which led to an until-now inexplicable threat by President Bush to use “executive privilege” to cloak details about the Boston FBI from Congressional investigators.
Still, when we first heard whistleblower Indira Singh tell her story it sounded so incredible that we would have found it unbelievable…except that we had already encountered stories like it in Venice, of witnesses bullied and intimidated by authorities into silence.
For example, the FBI was all over tenants at the Sandpiper Apartments across the street from the Venice Airport, to keep them from talking about Mohamed Atta’s two-month long ‘shack-up’ with an American girlfriend named Amanda Keller.
In addition to warning Keller not to talk, a warning she took so seriously she left town and disappeared from view, FBI agents bullied and intimidated apartment residents who remembered the pair, and even the apartment manager of the complex, Charles Grapentine, an ex-marine, who told us grimly, "They called me a liar, and told me to keep my mouth shut. Nobody likes to hear that: that they didn't see something they know they saw.”
Atta and Amanda’s next door neighbor, a 50-year old housewife named Stephanie Frederickson, confirmed the apartment manager’s remarks.
"The question they asked was always the same," she told us. "You aren’t saying anything to anybody, are you?"
Now, it seems that FBI agents in Boston were engaged in equally-dubious behavior. Mistakes, malfeasance, and even missed opportunities to avert the Sept 11 attack… There’s been a regular drumbeat of depressing news about the FBI.
Singh told us that disgruntled Boston FBI agents told her privately that their hands were tied on Ptech, because, they said, “Saudis have been given a free pass for 9/11.”
“And that,” says Singh, “is when I began to get really scared.”
NEXT WEEK: PTECH, THE BOSTON FBI, AND THE KAMIKAZE KID
• There's something different about the FBI's Boston office.
• What does the Ptech story have to do with a two-year inquiry of the House Government Reform Committee?
• Hint: the committee’s final report said this about the Boston FBI: “Their conduct must be considered one of the greatest failures in the history of federal law enforcement." • Dark hints about why the Boston FBI’s seeming “incompetence” may have been intentional.
