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The language was identified as Baluchi and was transcribed as, "What had to be done has been done, TWA 800" (last two words unintelligible).
The person who contacted me last week is a retired NSA employee whom, for shorthand, we will call Susan, not her real name. I do, however, have that name, and her bona fides check out. Susan "absolutely" confirms the content of the translated sentence. She did not hear about it second-hand. She saw it. Where she differs from the letter writer is in her assertion that the NSA does have Baluchi translators, who were not at all pleased to be bypassed on so critical a missive. Susan suggested that the reason for laundering this communiqué through the DLI was to protect NSA's sources and methods.
As originally unearthed by investigators Angela Clemente and Stephen Dresch and reported by Peter Lance, a former correspondent for ABC News and a five-time Emmy winner, the "What had to be done" communication came from Ramzi Yousef as passed through his New York City jail mate, Gregory Scarpa Jr., a second-generation FBI informant.
In the summer of 1996, Yousef, the mastermind of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, was being held for trial in New York for the notorious Bojinka plot, his plan to blow up a dozen American commercial airliners over the Pacific and/or to attack America using planes as bombs, either of which he was scarily capable of executing. Yousef used Scarpa's connections to pass information to the outside world little knowing that Scarpa was routing much of it through his own FBI handlers.
Some of that information had to do with Yousef's ongoing plans to destroy a 747. Yousef told Scarpa that if there were to be a terrorist attack on such a plane during his Bojinka trial, it would surely prejudice the jurors against him, and Yousef would ask for a mistrial on those very grounds. The morning after the TWA Flight 800 crash, Yousef, representing himself, made just such a request.
Yousef was part of the larger al-Qaida network, its evil genius. His uncle, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, with whom Yousef communicated from his jail cell, coordinated the 9-11 plot. And Yousef talked often to Scarpa about Osama bin Laden also under the code name, as Scarpa heard it, of "Bojinga."