Alleged 9-11 plotter "had eye on Seattle"

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A revelation yesterday that the initial plot for the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorism attacks included a plan to fly an airliner into the tallest building in Washington state may help explain why Seattle has been mentioned so often in terrorism-intelligence intercepts.

But law-enforcement officials don't believe the new information means Seattle is in any greater danger now of terrorist attack.

"Some of that intelligence and information we've been seeing for a while now makes sense," said Scott Crabtree, the assistant special agent in charge of the Seattle office of the FBI. "We know now that four years ago, the man who planned the 9-11 attacks had his eye on Seattle."

Khalid Shaikh Mohammed is the purported mastermind of the attacks.

A report released yesterday by the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States said Mohammed has told interrogators his initial proposal for the attacks was much broader and included as many as 10 jetliners, and landmarks on both coasts. Targets included the CIA and FBI headquarters, unspecified nuclear-power plants and the "tallest buildings in California and Washington state."

Mohammed was captured in Pakistan in March 2003. He is providing information to U.S. authorities at an undisclosed location. He and another captured al-Qaida operative, Ramzi Binalshibh, are the primary sources for the report released yesterday on the Sept. 11 plot.

City often mentioned

In the months after the attacks, law-enforcement officials in Seattle said the city had come up frequently in communications intercepted from suspected terrorist groups. In March 2002, U.S. forces in Afghanistan found a laptop computer in a cave that contained numerous photographs of Seattle landmarks. Among them, Seattle Police Chief Gil Kerlikowske said, were pictures of the Seattle skyline, taken from Puget Sound, that included the Bank of America Tower.

"Tall buildings have been on our list as potential targets since 9-11," Kerlikowske said. "But we've never had anything this specific before. We've never heard we were on a list."

Mohammed's revelation "is one of a number of reasons that Seattle has the interest of al-Qaida and possibly other groups," U.S. Attorney John McKay said. "And we are more careful because of it."

McKay said he doesn't believe knowledge of Mohammed's early plans would have changed Seattle's terrorism preparedness. "I can't see how we would have done anything differently," he said.

According to the Sept. 11 commission's report, Mohammed and al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden were making a list of targets as early as the spring of 1999 that included those struck on Sept. 11: the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. United Airlines Flight 93, which crashed in a field in rural southwest Pennsylvania, apparently was intended to be crashed into either the Capitol or the White House.

The target list was refined and simplified. But Mohammed said al-Qaida intended a "second wave" of attacks on the West Coast after Sept. 11, according to the report. He identified Zacarias Moussaoui — who was arrested in Minnesota in August 2001 while trying to obtain flight lessons — as someone involved in that plan.

Tallest buildings

The two tallest buildings in Washington and California are also the tallest on the West Coast: the Bank of America Tower in downtown Seattle, at 76 floors and 935 feet, and the U.S. Bank Tower — also known as the Library Tower — in Los Angeles, at 73 floors and 1,018 feet.

The Bank of America Tower was evacuated as a precaution the morning of the Sept. 11 attacks.

Patrick Callahan, a senior vice president for Equity Office Properties, the Chicago-based company that manages the Bank of America Tower, declined to comment on the company's security strategies. Nor would he say whether Equity was told before yesterday that the tower had been in al-Qaida's cross hairs.

Up until yesterday, it was assumed by law enforcement that Seattle kept popping up in terrorist reports because the city was associated with the arrest and prosecution of Ahmed Ressam. Ressam, an al-Qaida-trained Algerian, was arrested in December 1999 coming across the border from Canada with explosives he intended to set off at Los Angeles International Airport.

Now, officials say, it's clear that the association runs deeper.

Kerlikowske said he was surprised by the newest revelation. And Charles Mandigo, the former special agent in charge of the Seattle FBI office, said he knew nothing of Mohammed's statements before he left the bureau last July.

"But there were always rumblings that there were other [terrorists] out there because of Moussaoui," Mandigo said. "But I was not aware that Seattle was part of a bigger plot."

Crabtree, the FBI supervisor who oversees the Joint Terrorism Task Force, said his agents got a hint of the Mohammed information about six months ago. FBI headquarters sent a cryptic query asking what the tallest building in Washington was.

"I guess we now know why," Crabtree said.

Mike Carter: 206-464-3706 or mcarter@seattletimes.com