The Feds first stumbled on the number shortly after the 1998 U.S. Embassy bombings in East Africa. A bin Laden operative, who backed out of the mission, was arrested and interrogated by the FBI. He admitted that he had been given a contact number in case anything went wrong. That information led investigators to a bomb factory in Nairobi run by a high-ranking Qaeda member–an important break in the case. And, it turned out, a series of calls had been made from bin Laden’s personal satellite phone to the same number.
The mysterious Yemeni phone number popped up again soon after the October 2000 attack on the USS Cole, in which 17 U.S. servicemen were killed. By then, the Feds had linked the number to a Qaeda “logistics center” in Sanaa, Yemen, and concluded it was being used to coordinate bin Laden’s terrorist operations.
After September 11, the FBI made another key break: the number was listed to Ahmed al Hada, father-in-law of Khalid Almihdhar, a lead hijacker on American Airlines Flight 77, which crashed into the Pentagon.
