The man who claims to have trained six of the 9/11 hijackers is a paid CIA informant according to Turkish intelligence specialists, who also assert that Al-Qaeda is merely the name of a secret service operation designed to foment a strategy of tension around the world.
In a London Times report, Louai al-Sakka, now incarcerated in a high-security Turkish prison 60 miles east of Istanbul, claims that he trained six of the 9/11 hijackers at a camp in the mountains near Istanbul from 1999-2000.
Sakka was imprisoned in 2005 after being caught making bombs that he planned to use to blow up Israeli vessels.
Sakka asserts that he is a leading Al-Qaeda operative, having directed insurgency attacks in Iraq and also the beheading of Briton Kenneth Bigley in October 2004.
Some of Sakka's account is corroborated by the US government's 9/11 Commission. It found evidence that four of the hijackers – whom Sakka says he trained – had initially intended to go to Chechnya from Turkey but the border into Georgia was closed. Sakka had prepared fake visas for the group's travel to Pakistan and arranged their flights from Istanbul's Ataturk airport. The group of four went to the al-Farouq camp near Kandahar and the other two to Khaldan, near Kabul, an elite camp for Al-Qaeda fighters.
When Moqed and Suqami returned to Turkey, Sakka employed his skills as a forger to scrub out the Pakistani visa stamps from their passports. This would help the Arab men enter the United States without attracting suspicion that they had been to a training camp.
"But, as with many things in the world of Al-Qaeda, there might be smoke and mirrors," reports the Times. "Some experts believe that Sakka could be overstating his importance to the group, possibly to lay a false track for western agencies investigating his terrorist colleagues."
However, when one considers what other experts have said about Sakka, it appears that his intentions towards "western agencies" are anything but deceptive - since Turkish intelligence analysts concluded that Sakka has been a CIA asset all along.
Prominent Turkish newspaper Zaman reported that Sakka was hired as a CIA informant in 2000, after receiving a large sum of money from the agency. This would explain why he was "captured" but then released on two separate occasions by the CIA during the course of 2000.
Sakka was later captured by Turkish intelligence but again ordered to be released after which he moved to Germany to assist the alleged 9/11 hijackers.
Shortly before 9/11, Sakka was allegedly hired by Syrian intelligence - to whom he gave a warning that the attacks were coming on September 10th, 2001.
In his book At the Center of the Storm, former CIA director George Tenet writes, that "a source we were jointly running with a Middle Eastern country went to see his foreign handler and basically told him something big was about to go down."
"This is very likely a reference to Sakra, since no one else comes close to matching the description of telling a Middle Eastern government about the 9/11 attacks one day in advance, not to mention working as an informant for the CIA at the same time. Tenet's revelation strongly supports the notion that Sakra in fact accepted the CIA's offers in 2000 and had been working with the CIA and other intelligence agencies at least through 9/11 ," writes 9/11 researcher Paul Thompson, who was also interviewed for the London Times article.
Were the alleged "interrogations" of Sakka on behalf of the CIA merely a smokescreen to enable instructions to be passed on? This is certainly the view of Turkish intelligence experts, who go further and conclude that "Al-Qaeda" as a whole is merely a front group for western intelligence agencies used to foment a "strategy of tension" around the world.
Is Sakka still in the employ of western intelligence agencies? His apparent effort to plug the holes in the official 9/11 story is fascinating.
According to Sakka, Nawaf al-Hazmi was a veteran operative who went on to pilot the plane that hit the Pentagon. Although this is at odds with the official account, which says the plane was flown by another hijacker, it is plausible and might answer one of the mysteries of 9/11.
The Pentagon plane performed a complex spiral dive into its target. Yet the pilot attributed with flying the plane (Hani Hanjour) "could not fly at all" according to his flight instructors in America. Hazmi, on the other hand, had mixed reviews from his instructors but they did remark on how "adept" he was on his first flight.
Exactly how "adept" one has to be to pull off maneuvers that would be impossible for veteran crack fighter pilots is not explored in the Times report.
