In the Hall of Fame of missed business opportunities, a special place is reserved for Emmit McHenry.

In 1995, McHenry sold his small company called Network Solutions for $4.7 million to the secretive and powerful San Diego defense giant SAIC.

Five years later, McHenry’s business sold again for $3.5 billion.

Network Solutions (known today as VeriSign) administers a database of 90 million domain names that includes all the dot-coms on the Internet (including this one). This database told your computer where to find the page you are now reading. Without it, there would be no Internet as we know it. No Google. No Amazon.

If you haven’t heard the full story of SAIC and Network Solutions it’s because the full story hasn’t really been told before. SAIC hasn’t exactly tooted its own horn on the whole the Network Solutions saga. Many were outraged that the government had granted the employee-owned company what amounted to a license to print money.

In this 2-part piece by my friend Bruce Bigelow at Xconomy, a local San Diego business website that I have done some work for in the past, got SAIC founder Robert Beyster to tell the story.

In SAIC’s hands, McHenry’s small company turned out to be “unbelievably profitable,” says  Robert Beyster, the scientist who founded and ran SAIC until his ouster from the company in 2004. In fact, thanks to Network Solutions, SAIC may have been making too much money:

X: Why did SAIC decide to do the partial IPO in 1997? Did that turn out to be a smart thing to do? SAIC sold 3.3 million common shares, or a 21 percent-stake in Network Solutions, raising more than $59 million. SAIC retained almost 12 million shares of the stock, which carried preferential rights that basically preserved 96 percent control of the company.

JRB: The value of NSI was becoming so great that we wanted to take some of the profits we had made off the table in case of difficulties later on. (emphasis added)

There were — and still are — many people who think this never should have been allowed. The Internet had its origins in a network created by a research unit at the Pentagon and thus belonged to no one. The National Science Foundation oversaw the domain name registration database, a job that it contracted out to Network Solutions.

If McHenry didn’t realize what he had, SAIC sure did. A few months after SAIC acquired the company, the government amended the terms of Network Solutions’ contract. The amendment allowed SAIC to charge $100 to register a domain name (subsequently lowered). Equally important, the contract amendment allowed SAIC to keep 70 percent of the revenue, and gave the company a monopoly over the business.

This monopoly began to rub people the wrong way, and a spate of lawsuits were filed. So SAIC turned to its friends in Washington, says Mitch Daniels, who engineered the Network Solutions deal:

MD: We spent significant amounts of time and money at NSI educating the public, Congress, and senior government officials about aspects of the business that were really important: the Internet, domain names, Internet security, major policy questions involved with domain names, and keeping the “A” server and the other domain names servers running and secure. From 1995 until 2000, we brought at least one-half of the entire United States Senate and House members as well as senior White House and cabinet-level officials to tour our facilities in Herndon, VA.

Even if McHenry had hung on to the company, he would have been unable to marshal the kind of firepower that SAIC had in Washington. After a court held that Network Solutions was assessing an illegal tax, Congress in 1998 slipped language into an appropriations bill that retroactively made this “fee” legal. (See Thomas v. Network Solutions.) One of SAIC’s lobbyists in 1998, incidentally, was the ethically challenged former San Diego congressman Bill Lowery.

Last month, SAIC moved its headquarters to McLean, Va. At last report, it had annual revenues of more than $10 billion.

As for McHenry, he’s moved on and tries not to dwell on what could have been.

Did the U.S. government consider designating San Diego college student Mohdar Abdullah (left) as an enemy combatant after the 9/11 attacks?

The suggestion appears in one of several 9/11 Commission memoranda that were recently released by the National Archives and that make it clear that U.S. authorities viewed Abdullah as a major threat. An enemy combatant designation would have allowed President Bush to order Abdullah detained indefinitely in Guantanamo or military brig.

Ten days after the attacks, Abdullah was arrested as a material witness to the 9/11 attacks and shipped off to New York. Prosecutors there considered charging him along with Zacarias Moussaoui, who is serving life in prison for conspiring to kill Americans in the 9/11 attacks but ultimately decided not to.

Commission documents show that Abdullah presented a dilemma for the government, which believed that he knew much more about the attacks than he would admit, but lacked sufficient evidence to support a terrorism charge. Abdullah was charged with visa fraud and deported to Yemen in 2004.

“If anyone in San Diego had prior knowledge of the 9/11 attacks it would be Abdullah,” one unnamed FBI agent told the Commission.

Abdullah had befriended the two hijackers when they lived in San Diego in 2000 and admitted helping the two men obtain state identification, contacting flight schools on their behalf and translating for them. Abdullah knew the pair had extremist leanings and sympathized with them, according to the 9/11 Commission’s final report. After Hazmi after he left San Diego, he remained in contact with Hazmi.

For three weeks before the attacks, Abdullah had been acting strangely. Several witnesses described him as nervous, paranoid and anxious. He stopped using the phone and didn’t show up at work or school.

On the morning of Sept. 10 at the Texaco station where Abdullah worked, an FBI source reporting hearing Abdullah saying something like, “It’s finally going to happen.” That night, Abdullah wanted to marry a young woman he had met a few months earlier, according to FBI Special Agent Daniel Gonzales.

Much later, Abdullah’s fellow inmates told the FBI that he had bragged to them of advance knowledge of the attacks, but authorities couldn’t substantiate the reports.

Abdullah denied foreknowledge of the attacks.

Gonzales described Abdullah as “a ‘slick’ and charismatic ‘liar.’” The unnamed San Diego FBI agent described Abdullah as a “goofball” and didn’t think he was a willing facilitator for the hijackers.

In their efforts to deport Abdullah, U.S. authorities were “running against the clock,” Justice Department officials told 9/11 Commission staffers in 2004.

Exactly what this means is unclear. The full explanation remains classified, but there’s no doubt that authorities didn’t want to let Abdullah go.

“The fear was a worst-case scenario where the opportunity to deport disappears, criminal charges do not materialize, and Abdullah succeeds in his habeas petition and is walking the streets,” Jonathan Cohn of the Justice Department told Commission staffers.