Late 1990s: CIA and German Police Foil Airplane Bomb Plot by Al-Qaeda in Northern Germany

Journalist Seymour Hersh will write in the New Yorker in 2002, “In the late nineteen-nineties, the CIA obtained reliable information indicating that an al-Qaeda network based in northern Germany had penetrated airport security in Amsterdam and was planning to attack American passenger planes by planting bombs in the cargo, a former security official told me.” The CIA, working with German police, stage a series of successful preemptive raids and foil the plot. The former official says, “The Germans rousted a lot of people.” The CIA and FAA work closely together and “the incident was kept secret.” [New Yorker, 5/27/2002] Nothing has been revealed about this incident except for the short mention in the New Yorker, but it would seem probable that there would have been some connection to the Hamburg al-Qaeda cell involved in 9/11, since it seems to be the primary al-Qaeda cell in northern Germany. The cell had connections to other al-Qaeda cells in Germany and Europe, and some of the Hamburg hijackers even held a mysterious meeting in Amsterdam in 1999 (see Mid-June 1999). But what opportunities the CIA and German government may have had to learn about the Hamburg cell while foiling this plot is not known.