Did I meet 9/11 terrorists?
I have never told this story before. In 1996 I was the Sales Manager at a tiny retail computer store in Norman, Oklahoma. We had very little staff so I spent most of my time up front doing sales and managing the storefront.
We mostly dealt in custom-built desktop PC’s but I was also trying to introduce state-of-the-art laptops to our product line.
So, one day I had 2 customers come in and order a couple of high-end laptops at $5000 each. They didnt even flinch when I told them the price. They paid by a single check which was a bit unusual for such a big purchase but it cleared so I didnt take much notice.
Afterwards they said they would buy up to a dozen more. This would be a huge sale for us because ours was essentially a mom-and-pop sized store. Even selling the two laptops was exciting, twelve more would be astounding.
The men were in their late 20‘s or early 30‘s, were dark skinned with black hair, brown eyes and I judged them to have middle-eastern accents which was unusual for Oklahoma but not for Norman which is a college town. University of Oklahoma even then had a diverse international base of students from Europe, Asia, Africa and everywhere in between - many a student had shopped at our local PC store which was not far from campus.
But what stuck in my mind at the time, and especially after 9/11, was their stipulation that they would only buy the laptops if we could figure out how to ship them to Afganistan. They went on to explain that they were taking flight school classes in Norman and could not find high end laptops like this in their country.
Honestly, at the time I didnt know anything about Afganistan, its history, people or even recall geographically where Afganistan was located let alone why shipping something there might be a challenge. I was young and inexperienced, myself still attending college at OU but I had shipped computers for people many times before - even to other western countries. So I couldnt see any reason I couldnt ship them to Afganistan and was so hungry to make this sale and make my boss proud (bucking for promotion) that I was very determined to solve this shipping problem.
Quickly I learned that there were export laws governing shipping technology out of the country, especially to certain designated regions in the middle east. After talking to FedEx, UPS, and DHL about shipping options I hit a wall with shipping from the U.S.. However, I came up with a clever workaround - the laptop manufacturer shipped them to us from China (InWin Electronics) so I would instead do a Drop-Shipment directly from China where such export laws don’t apply.
I shared my solution with the customers who had been very patient during those two-weeks while I worked on solving their shipping problem. Unfortunately, at that point they probably realized they could order them directly from a non-US supplier and cut me out of the deal.
I never heard from them again.
Years later, well after 9/11 and the stories of the hijackers attending flight school in Florida and Oklahoma it occurred to me that I may have met two of the hijackers. Further, had I successfully shipped those laptops I could have unknowingly aided those responsible for the atrocities of 9/11.
I will never know the truth. I know in my heart it is not very likely that these two middle-eastern customers were terrorists or even vaguely related to terrorists but I will always wonder...
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