September 1997: I was a field service technician employed by a Queen's Award winning British engineering export company when I was sent to install some printing machinery for a supposedly new customer in Yemen. The new customer was Khalid Sheikh Mohammed's Pakistani terrorist cell's front company called YemPak, short for Yemen-Pakistan they told me. Their factory was inside an existing customer's headquarters, a very large and secure hilltop compound overlooking Taiz city's eastern entrance. It is 17-miles south of a town called Al Qaidah that I also visited. KSM's hosts and financiers were the British allied, US supplied, multi-billion dollar Hayel Saeed Anam (HSA) Group - now based in Dubai. My employer at the time, operating with a Royal seal of approval, was my parent's company JM Heaford Limited. They came out of retirement to send me to Yemen despite strong government advice against going. US Ambassador to Yemen (1997-01) Barbara Bodine later said:
When I got there in 1997, there was already an Al Qaeda presence. We knew about it. The Yemenis knew about it. Everyone knew about it.... these people were primarily foreign nationals.... warehoused in peripheral areas.
My Yemen visit matched Bodine's description to a tee. It was to a large but empty factory, like a warehouse, that was in a peripheral area - the HSA Group HQ. And it was staffed and guarded almost exclusively by Pakistanis who told me they were there to study at the on site mosque's madrassa. In 1999 CIA operator Gary Harrington said Yemen was Al Qaeda's R&R holiday destination but he still determined it safe for US forces to visit (17-young Americans were killed in Aden harbour in 2000).
During my visit and by arrangement of the HSA Group's managing director Saeed Alrobaidi, aka the Chief, I was vetted over dinner at my hotel by Yousef. The next morning the Chief introduced the Engineer (KSM) before HSA's general manager Mohamed took me to an unscheduled meeting one mile from Al Qaidah town - a recruitment interview I cut short before it'd begun. Those meetings occurred after KSM's Pakistani chemical engineers asked me about visiting New York as tourists. I repeated a warning I'd given to a customer in Toronto on 12 June 1997 after flying there from Boston's Logan airport. I said I expected the 1993 World Trade Center bomb group to try again but next time using a hijacked plane departing Logan as a missile. My advice was visit the Empire State building instead and to resist any hijacking attempts, even highlighting box-cutters as an easily carried and potentially leathal weapon. That is How, Where and When the 9/11 Plot Began, based on my unwitting conversations with members of KSM's terrorist cell who were warehoused and operational in 1997 Taiz.
