Prior to that trial, Fitzgerald and McCarthy compiled a list of 172 un-indicted co-conspirators which included bin Laden and his brother in law Mohammed Jamal Khalifa.
In a November 17th, 2006 piece for The Huffington Post, I made the case that if the Feds, under Fitzgerald (then head of the Organized Crime and Terrorism Unit in the SDNY) had applied just a portion of the energy monitoring Sphinx that they had used on their around-the-clock surveillance of John Gotti's social club in Little Italy, the Towers might still be standing in Lower Manhattan.
Why? Because al-Midhar and al-Hazmi two of the muscle hijackers who flew AA #77 into the Pentagon on 9/11 not only had mailboxes at Sphinx but they got the fake ID's they used to board that flight from Mohammed El-Attriss, Sphinx's co-founder and partner of Sphinx with Waleed al Noor.
The Feds had been onto Sphinx Trading since 1990 when the killer of Rabbi Meier Kahane (El Sayyid Nosair) was found to have kept a mailbox there.
By 2001, Fitzgerald was the effective "general" directing the Justice Department's "war on terror." By simply connecting those three dots: from Nosiar to al Noor to El Attriss, the Feds could have been into the "planes operation" executed on 9/11 in July two months earlier.
AL QAEDA'S MASTER SPY
But perhaps the revelation in Triple Cross most embarrassing to Patrick Fitzgerald related to another name on that list of 172, No 109: Ali A. Mohamed, the al Qaeda master spy who became the central focus of my book.
Not only did the ex-Egyptian army major succeed in scamming the CIA in Hamburg in 1984, but he slipped past a Watch List, seduced a U.S. woman on a TWA flight from Athens to JFK in 1985, married her at a drive-through wedding chapel in Reno, Nevada, then set up a sleeper cell at her home in Silicon Valley.
Months later he enlisted in the U.S. Army where astonishingly he succeeded in getting himself posted to the JFK Special Warfare School at Fort Bragg, the highly secure facility where elite Green Beret and Delta Force Officers trained.
20 years ago this week, Ali, known to his radical Islamic bothers as "Ali Amiriki," ("Ali the American") was driving up to New York City were he trained the al Qaeda cell members later convicted in the 1993 WTC, bombing, the Kahane murder and the "Day of Terror" plot (prosecuted by Fitzgerald and McCarthy) whose cell members intended to blow up the bridges and tunnels into Manhattan. Perhaps more astonishing was the fact (as documented in Triple Cross) that the FBI's Special Operations Group (SOG) had them under surveillance at the time.
From January 1996 as I document in Triple Cross, Fitzgerald was effectively directing Squad 1-49 (the bin Laden Squad) in the FBI's NYO -- seeking to get an indictment of Osama bin Laden. One of the lead agents from Jack Cloonan whose job it was to go back and discover who Ali Mohamed really was.
As Cloonan started peeling back the layers of Mohamed's triple sting of the CIA, DIA (at Bragg) and the FBI (where he'd become an informant from 1992 on) his jaw began to drop at Ali's cold blooded boldness and success.
And as I documented in the book, two of the principal Feds that "Ali Amiriki" snookered were Andy McCarthy and Patrick Fitzgerald himself.
In 1994, prepping for the "Day of Terror" trial, McCarthy actually flew to California and met Ali face to face; withdrawing back to New York after Mohamed lied and told him that he was running a scuba diving business in Kenya.
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