266 AMERICAN SPYQaeda operatives in the United States leading up to the 9/11 attacks was
much greater than the nineteen hijackers killed during the attacks. Like any
organized criminal or terrorist organization, al-Qaeda relied on a human
network of coconspirators who could rent vehicles and apartments; case
airports and aircraft, including crew procedures and responses to behav-
iors during specific flights; conduct targeting research; handle finances; and
conduct a host of other logistical support tasks. Following the wildly suc-
cessful 9/11 attacks, these al-Qaeda support personnel inside the United
States went to ground, and many of them undoubtedly left the country.
The day after the FBI’s televised plea for the public’s assistance, an
American friend of mine, who was living in the small, remote Mexican
town where I also live, emailed me to say that a “suspicious” person had
just arrived in our quiet fishing village. My friend “Bob,” who had lived in
the town for twenty years at that point, knew I was somehow connected to
the US government and thought he should pass along the tip.
Baja is my safe zone. I live there because there’s no better place to get
away from my work and the madness of the world in which we live. In Baja,
nobody cares who you are, where you’re from, or what you do, which prob-
ably explains why so many Americans flee the law, their enemies, or former
spouses, and hide out in Baja. For me, this concept is captured beautifully
by George Strait’s music video “The Seashores of Old Mexico.” Baja is a
thousand miles of inhospitable, uninhabited desert, mountains, and beach.
It’s anonymous. It’s also the perfect place for an al-Qaeda operative to lay
low for a while. Unless he picks the wrong place. In which case he’ll stick
out like, well, an Islamic terrorist in a gossipy small town in Baja.
I asked Bob, who ran the town’s local internet café, why he considered
this out-of-town visitor to be suspicious. A regular guy, imbued with a healthy
dose of common sense, Bob said that the man did not fit the profile of our
town’s typical visitors: Americans and Mexicans who come to fish, partici-
pate in the off-road races, eat shrimp and drink tequila, or just enjoy a low-
cost relaxing vacation. The visitor was a young, Middle Eastern–looking
man in his middle to late twenties. “Amin” arrived a day or two after 9/11
in an expensive vehicle with California tags and was living in it on the street,
rather than rent one of the small town’s many cheap hotel rooms. He fre-
quented Bob’s internet café every day and visited Islamic extremist websites.
(Bob helpfully provided me with Amin’s browsing history.) Bob would chat