By Anthony C Heaford, 08 July 2021 - Edited 26 August 

Al Qaeda in Yemen

EVERYONE knew al Qaeda were in Yemen, according to ex-US ambassador to Yemen (1997-01) Barbara Bodine. Bodine characterised al Qaeda's presence as “warehousing foreign nationals in peripheral areas”. 

After the US African Embassy bombings in August 1998 the first Intel elicited by the FBI from a captured surviving attacker was a contact telephone number in Yemen’s capital Sanaa, as depicted in the The Looming Tower TV series.

The CIA concluded that telephone number in Yemen was al Qaeda’s global telephone exchange rather than a liason point to the commanders and terrorist cells based in Yemen. The captured attacker was a British born Arab of Saudi decent, but still the USA bombed a Sudanese pharmaceutical company in retaliation for the 1998 African embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania.

Al Qaeda and the CIA in Yemen

Few knew the USA was supporting al Qaeda in 1990’s Yemen until CIA contractor Billy Waugh made these confessions in his 2004 autobiography ‘Hunting the Jackal’  that is:

and

The Historycommons.org 9/11 data base records that based on Waugh’s career with the CIA his training of al Qaeda fighters in Yemen must take place between 1989 and 2001. I suspect it was around 1993, after Osama bin Laden was exiled to Sudan in Summer 1991 and prior to the 1994 Yemen civil War;

Al Qaeda, the CIA and the US Embassy in Yemen

Given EVERYONE'S knowledge of al Qaeda’s presence in Yemen in the mid-1990s it seems odd that the US embassy in Yemen would source industrial quantities of tolulene, the key chemical component of TNT explosives for an ill defined end customer in Yemen. But that's what they did on 06 and 13 August 1996. The Hayel Saeed Anam Group requested the US embassy source one year’s supply of the explosive chemicals for unspecified third-party end users, and the embassy obliged, publishing that request under “Export Opportunities”.

So in 1996 the US embassy in Yemen was irrefutably involved in the supply of TNT component chemicals to the Hayel Saeed Anam Group, and in 2001 the Hayel Saeed Anam Group was implicated in the US Treasury’s and UN’s listings of financiers of terrorism, with documented HSA Group terror funding links going back to 1982.

I know that in September 1997 I visited the same address those explosive chemicals were destined for, the Hayel Saeed Anam Group headquarter’s compound at PO Box 5302 Taiz Yemen.  

I was on a business trip I now believe was setup by CIA contractor Dave Dean, my employer’s (my family’s business) salesman and an ex-Special Forces associate of Billy Waugh. As well as being introduced to “the Engineer” (Khalid Sheik Mohammed) when in Yemen, I met two Pakistani chemistry graduates working for him, in a warehouse in a peripheral area, as per Barbara Bodine’s description of al Qaeda's 1997 presence in Yemen. 

I strongly suspect that TNT used in the August 1998 US embassy bombings was manufactured in the factory I visited in 1997, at PO Box 5302. I also suspect the chemicals were supplied via my work colleague in the printing industry, Dave Dean. Dave’s business, Dean Printing Systems, is listed as supplying printing equipment, electronics and industrial chemicals.

Al Qaeda, the CIA, the US Embassy and me in Yemen

I knew Dave Dean through my Father and his printing machinery business; Dave was his US sales agent. My first formal job aged eighteen was collecting Dave Dean from Manchester airport and taking him to trade show in Birmingham where my Father’s company was exhibiting. Dave told me he was new to printing machinery sales and that his specialist knowledge was of [explosive] chemicals and electronics [switches]. 

My elder brother was driving; he worked for my Father and for Dean too. With some prompting from my brother Dave told me about his brief military career. He said it ended during a Special Forces training HALO (High Altitude Low Opening) parachute accident in Vietnam, sometime after the 1969 battle of Hamburger Hill where Dean fought. He was medically discharged after his parachuting accident and said he spent the rest of the Vietnam War running a go-go bar besides the massive US Clark airforce base in the Philippines.

I’d thought little of those tales till December 2019 when I was reading about CIA contractor Billy Waugh’s military career. In 1971/72 Waugh was part of the MACV-SOG - the Military Assistance Command Vietnam Studies and Observation Group. Waugh was running a HALO parachuting courses in-country, in Vietnam. That coincided with when Dave told me he’d been injured during such training. That was it - I'd found a definite link between Dave Dean and Billy Waugh, a CIA contractor who admits training al Qaeda in 1990s Yemen.

Dean and Waugh were both medically discharged from the military about the same time, c.1972. - the same time the Studies and Observation Group was disbanded. Waugh has detailed his subsequent career as a CIA contractor. The CIA used Clark airforce base extensively at this time, for training Hmong guerrilla soldiers and for Air America activities, coinciding with when Dean said he was there running a go-go bar for US forces. 

Now my 1997 meetings with al Qaeda and Khalid Sheikh Moahmmed in Yemen were no longer a just a bizarre quirk of fate but a direct consequence of someone else's Machiavellian plans. The US and British security services had used my Father's export business as a front for their activities and they had all used me as their patsy, sending me to Yemen to help setup Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s printing factory front company in September 1997. 

Dean wasn't present at the April 1997 machine sale in Chicago to al Qaeda’s fianciers, the Hayel Saeed Anam Group, but he was close enough to have played a directing role. He and the company owner, my Father, were sat in a cafe overlooking the exhibition hall, watching events unfold from above so to speak. Dean also declined the commission he was owed for the machine sale on his territory, worth several thousand dollars. 

My brother installed the first printing machine sold to this customer Yemen in 1993, a principle reason why I think Billy Waugh began working with al Qaeda in Yemen around 1993.

The US embassy’s contact for the purchase of explosive chemicals was the Hayel Saeed Anam Group General Manager, Mohamad A Salem. The Hayel Saeed Anam Group General Manager who was my guide during my visit there was call Mohamad, as shown in this photo. I guess they are the same men.