“To Lee, though, it was not a question of altering support for Israel but of merely stating a fact that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was central to the relations between the Islamic world and the United States—and to bin Laden’s ideology and the support he gained throughout the Islamic world for his jihad against America.” The commissioners resolved their differences by settling on vague language that circumvented the issue of motive.
All the evidence, however, indicates that Palestine was the factor that united the conspirators—at every level. Bin Laden, who repeatedly alluded to it, would at one point try to get KSM to bring forward the 9/11 attack date to coincide with a visit to the White House by Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon.
For KSM, concern about Palestine had been a constant ever since his return from college in the United States. He believed a 9/11-style attack would make Americans focus on “the atrocities that America is committing by supporting Israel.” Separately, in captivity, he has claimed responsibility for the planning or execution of seven attacks on buildings, planes, and other targets, either in Israel or because they were Israeli or “Jewish.”
KSM’s nephew Ramzi Yousef, the 1993 Trade Center bomber, said in the only interview he has been allowed that he believed he—and Palestinians—were “entitled to strike U.S. targets because the United States is a partner in the crimes committed in Palestine.… It finances these crimes and supports them with weapons.”
“If you ask anybody,” Yousef’s accomplice Abdul Murad told police in the Philippines, “even if you ask children, they will tell you that the U.S. is supporting Israel and Israel is killing our Muslim brothers in Palestine. The United States is acting like a terrorist, but nobody can see that.”
Palestine was certainly the principal political grievance—the only clearly expressed grievance—driving the young Arabs in Hamburg. As reported earlier in this chapter, Atta regularly sounded off about the Palestine issue. So did Binalshibh, who would speak of a “world Jewish conspiracy.” A woman with whom he had a brief affair recalled how stridently he condemned the United States for its support for Israel. His “great-grandparents, his grandparents, his parents,” he said, “hated the Jews and if he should have children, they would hate them too.”
Shehhi, though generally a cheery fellow, could on occasion appear saturnine. Asked by an acquaintance why he and Atta seemed rarely to laugh, he responded with a question of his own. “How can you laugh,” he wondered, “when people are dying in Palestine?”
Jarrah also felt strongly about the Palestine issue. “He enlightened me,” his lover Aysel Sengün would remember, “about the problems Muslims have in the Middle East. He also spoke about the intifada. I wouldn’t have known what the intifada meant at that time, because I don’t have a political background. When I asked, Ziad explained it was the freedom struggle of the Palestinians against Israel.”
In his set-piece statement in 1998, bin Laden had issued a call to arms. “With God’s permission,” he had said, “we call on everyone who believes in God … to kill the Americans and their allies—civilians and military—is an individual duty incumbent on every Muslim in all countries … in order to liberate the Al Aqsa Mosque [in Jerusalem] … wars are being waged by the Americans for religious and economic purposes, they also serve the interests of the petty Jewish state, diverting attention from its occupation of Jerusalem.”
In October 1999, at the mosque for the marriage of a member of their group, Binalshibh made a speech—political in spite of the happy occasion—that echoed bin Laden. “The problem of Jerusalem is the problem of the Muslim nation … the problem of every Muslim everywhere.… Every Muslim has the aim to free the Islamic soil from the tyrants and oppressors.”
By that fall, Binalshibh and Atta and their group had become closer than ever. They met together, prayed together, did jobs to earn money together, and spent much of their time together at the three-room apartment on Marienstrasse in Harburg that Atta had rented late the previous year. They called it Dar al-Ansar—House of the Followers—entered the name in their phone books, even scrawled it on the monthly rent check. It mirrored, almost exactly, the name of the guesthouse bin Laden had established, long ago, to house recruits in Pakistan.
These were young men who had long talked of martyrdom. “It is the highest thing to do, to die for jihad,” Binalshibh would say. “The mujahideen die peacefully. They die with a smile on their lips, their dead bodies are soft, while bodies of the killed infidels are stiff.” Jarrah, in some ways the odd man out, had declared early on that he was “dissatisfied” with his life, hoped to find some meaning—“not leave Earth in a natural way.”
The notion of dying for the faith was parroted at the mosque all the time. These men, however, were eager not merely to talk but to act. Jarrah left behind clear evidence on that score, evidence that shows he had long since been hanging on bin Laden’s every word.
Hamburger Mietvertrag für Wohnraum
Three years earlier, in his Declaration of “Jihad” against the Americans, bin Laden had spoken of the brave young Muslims who “love death as you love life,” who “have no intent but to enter Paradise by killing you.”
In a note dated October 1999, found among his possessions after 9/11, Jarrah used almost the identical phrase: “The morning will come,” he wrote. “The victors will come, will come. We swear to beat you. The earth will shake beneath your feet.” And then, days later: “I came to you with men who love the death as you love life.… Oh, the smell of Paradise is rising” (authors’ italics).
“Paradise,” Atta and Binalshibh would say, “is overshadowed with swords.” A South African–born Muslim convert who hung out with the group, Shahid Nickels, questioned all the talk about fighting for the cause of Palestine. “Muslims,” he said, “are too weak to do anything against the U.S.A.”
“No, something can be done,” replied Atta. “There are ways. The U.S.A. is not omnipotent.” The exchange took place in November 1999, and—that month and early the next—Atta, Binalshibh, Shehhi, and Jarrah did do something.
They left for bin Laden’s headquarters in Afghanistan.
THE FUTURE HIJACKERS traveled separately, probably for security reasons, to Karachi in Pakistan and on to Kandahar in Afghanistan. There is no doubt they were there. A former bin Laden bodyguard has recalled meeting Atta, Jarrah, and Shehhi. Another jihadi, a man who had also come from Germany, recalled encountering Binalshibh. A handwritten note on Atta was recovered after 9/11 in the bombed-out ruins of a house military chief Mohammed Atef had used.
Apparent proof that the German contingent went to Afghanistan—a link in the chain that the 9/11 Commission did not have—is a videotape reported to be in the hands of the U.S. government. Almost an hour long, it is said to show Atta and Jarrah at Tarnak Farms near Kandahar—the very camp where the CIA had once hoped to have bin Laden kidnapped and spirited away to the United States.
In still photos reportedly taken from the footage, both men are shown neatly bearded and smiling widely—in Atta’s case, an image utterly unlike the grim visage the world was shown after 9/11. Jarrah wears a white robe, apparently over Western clothing, Atta dark trousers and a brown sweater. Atta dons an Afghan-style hat, looks at the camera, takes the hat on and off, then chucks it away. Then he reads to the camera for perhaps ten minutes, to be followed by Jarrah doing likewise.
The video is reportedly silent, but the pair were evidently recording statements to be preserved until after their deaths. The words “al wasiyyah,” Arabic for “will,” can be clearly seen on a paper that Jarrah holds up for the camera before speaking. As he does so, he and Atta both laugh. Then they turn serious as they read out their statements. Clearly recognizable on the tape, seated on the ground among a crowd of about a hundred, is Ramzi Binalshibh.
A segment of the footage depicts the arrival of a very tall, robed figure, surrounded by bodyguards. Bin Laden, of course. If authentic, the videotape is unique evidence of the future hijackers’ presenc
e in Afghanistan.
BOTH KSM and Binalshibh, the sole survivor of the group from Germany, have described the visit to Afghanistan. Except for Shehhi, who left early—he had been suffering from a stomach ailment—they stayed for several weeks, weeks that put them irreversibly on course for 9/11.
For bin Laden, Atef, and KSM, the trio must have seemed, in the true sense of that phrase, sent from God. KSM had only “middling confidence” in Mihdhar and Hazmi, the two remaining pilot hijacker candidates that bin Laden had initially picked. Committed and courageous though they might be, they spoke virtually no English, had no experience of life in the West. The men from Hamburg, by contrast, did have linguistic ability, were far more likely to be able to operate effectively in the United States.
In a series of meetings with bin Laden, Atef, and KSM, the trio took the oath to bin Laden—“I swear allegiance to you and to die in the cause of God”—before learning the nature of the mission. Bin Laden considered appointing Binalshibh leader, then plumped for Atta instead. He was now the emir—commander—of the operation.
Atta was included in the meeting to select targets. Dozens were discussed, with bin Laden emphasizing that he wanted one target to be military, one political, one economic. It was eventually decided that the team “must hit” the Pentagon, the Capitol—“the perceived source of U.S. policy in support of Israel”—and both towers of the World Trade Center.
Atta was free to choose in addition one other potential target—the White House, the Sears Tower in Chicago, or a foreign embassy in Washington. The name of the embassy has not been released, but it was surely that of Israel. Atta himself suggested a strike on a nuclear power station in Pennsylvania—Three Mile Island?—and bin Laden agreed.
After the talking, the training. There was some fieldwork—Jarrah cheerfully endured long hours on guard duty—but KSM thought the military side of things irrelevant. The new recruits learned the tricks of the terrorist trade—how to remove telltale stamps from passports, the importance of secure communications, of keeping phone calls short. With their very specific mission in mind, they also learned how to read airline schedules.
In a real sense, in counterpoint to its eventual success, the 9/11 operation was amateurish. KSM and bin Laden had thought initially that no special skills were needed to be a pilot, that “learning to fly an airplane was much like learning to drive a car … easily accomplished.” Totally wrong, as KSM admitted in captivity.
His maxim, though, that “simplicity was the key to success,” was in many ways probably right. He urged team members “to be normal to the maximum extent possible in their dealings, to keep the tone of their letters educational, social, or commercial.” Though averse to the unnecessary use of codes, he did develop some. If telephone numbers had to be used in correspondence, KSM directed, they were to be rendered so that the real numeral and the coded one totaled ten. His own number in Pakistan—92-300-922-388—thus became 18-700-188-722.
For Atta, some of the preparation for the mission took the form of what to others counts as fun. He was to be seen “playing video games on a PlayStation—flying a plane.” KSM thought Atta “worked hard, and learned quickly.” He gave him sufficient authority to be able to make decisions on his own, to press ahead without having to consult too often. One of the Saudis bin Laden had originally chosen, Nawaf al-Hazmi, was to be his deputy.
Each of the five early team members was honored with a kunyah, an honorific prefaced by Abu—meaning, literally, “father,” though the bearer of the name need not have children. In this case, all the kunyahs harked back to the days of the Prophet. As Binalshibh remembered them: Atta was “Father of the servant of the Beneficent, the Egyptian,” one of the followers to whom the Prophet pledged the certainty of Paradise; Shehhi was Abu’l’Qaqa’a al-Qatari, literally “the sound of clashing swords, from Qatar” (though he was in fact a citizen of the United Arab Emirates); and Jarrah was Abu Tareq al-Lubnani, literally, “Father of the one who knocks at the door, the Lebanese”—probably after an Arab commander celebrated for his conquests in North Africa and southern Spain.
Bin Laden was keen for all the future hijackers to be on their way to the United States as soon as possible—including the two Saudis, Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Mihdhar. Hazmi was to be Rab’iah al Makki, to whom the Prophet promised anything he should ask. Mihdhar was to be Sinan, “the Spear.” They were to be the trailblazers of the 9/11 operation.
AT THE TURN of the year, on the night of the Millennium, President Clinton had watched a fireworks display and hosted a large dinner at the White House. “It was a wonderful evening,” he recalled, “but I was nervous all the time. Our security team had been on high alert for weeks due to numerous intelligence reports that the United States would be hit with several terrorist attacks.… I had been focused intently on bin Laden.”
The Millennium, a cause for celebration for millions, also seemed just the moment the terrorists might strike. On December 6, in Jordan, a group of terrorists had been caught while preparing to bomb a hotel used by American and Israeli tourists. They had been overheard on a telephone intercept talking with bin Laden’s aide Abu Zubaydah.
On December 14, concern about a coming attack on the United States turned to a permanent state of alarm. The driver of a Chrysler sedan, waiting to enter Washington State from a ferry arriving from Canada, caught the attention of an alert Customs officer. There was something about the man. He was fidgeting, sweating profusely, would not look her in the eye. Hidden in the car, officers discovered, were bomb-making materials—RDX and HMTD explosives, chemicals, and Casio watch timing devices.
The man turned out to be Ahmed Ressam, an Algerian who was to admit—much later—that his intended target had been Los Angeles International Airport. The plan, he said, had been to explode the bomb on or about the day of the Millennium. He had learned about explosives in bin Laden’s Afghan training camps, and he, too, had had contact with Abu Zubaydah. He had planned the foiled attack himself, Ressam said, but bin Laden had been “aware” of it.
After the Ressam arrest, and with the Millennium looming, everyone thought there was more to come. A round of frenzied activity began. Clinton rang Pakistan’s President Musharraf to demand that a way be found to stop bin Laden’s operations. National Security Adviser Berger and intelligence chiefs, often with Attorney General Janet Reno present, met almost daily at the White House. A record number of wiretap orders were issued. “Foreign terrorist sleeper cells are present in the U.S.,” counterterrorism coordinator Clarke’s staff warned, “and attacks in the U.S. are likely.”
Berger and Clarke spent the morning of Christmas Day at FBI headquarters and the afternoon at the CIA. Nothing happened. Come the night of the Millennium, thousands of law enforcement agents and military personnel were on duty. FBI director Louis Freeh and Attorney General Reno kept vigil in their offices—Reno would sleep the night on a couch at the Justice Department. In New York’s Times Square, local FBI counterterrorism chief John O’Neill waited for the famous ball to fall at midnight.
The ball fell, and no catastrophe came. “I think we dodged the bullet,” Berger said when he rang Clarke after midnight. Clarke said he would wait three more hours, until New Year’s came in Los Angeles. At 3:00 A.M., when all was still well, he went up to the roof of the White House and “popped open a bottle.”
The FBI told Berger after the Millennium, he was to recall, that al Qaeda did not after all have active cells in the U.S. “They said there might be sleepers, but they had that covered. They were saying this was not a big domestic threat.”
NO ONE THAT New Year’s spoke publicly about a specific danger, that an attack in the United States might come in the shape of airplane hijackings. Many months earlier, however, bin Laden had spoken of just that. “All Islamic military,” he had boasted, “have been mobilized to strike a significant U.S. or Israeli strategic target, to bring down their aircraft and hijack them.”
In 1998, indeed, the White House had quietly
held an exercise involving a scenario in which terrorists flew an explosives-laden jet into a building in Washington. In December that year, the CIA had told Bill Clinton of intelligence suggesting that “bin Laden and his allies are preparing for attack in the U.S., including an aircraft hijacking.”
During 1999, Britain’s foreign intelligence service warned its American counterparts that bin Laden was planning attacks in which airliners could be used in “unconventional ways.” Two U.S. bodies, moreover, produced prophetic warnings.
“America,” the congressionally mandated Commission on National Security forecast in its initial report, “will become increasingly vulnerable to hostile attack on our homeland.… Americans will likely die on American soil, possibly in large numbers.” The same month, a report by the Library of Congress’s Federal Research Division, which had wide circulation within the government, said al Qaeda could be expected to retaliate for the cruise missile attack on bin Laden’s camps.
“Suicide bombers belonging to al Qaeda’s Martyrdom Battalion,” the report went on to say, “could crash-land an aircraft packed with high explosives (C-4 and Semtex) into the Pentagon, the headquarters of the Central Intelligence Agency, or the White House.”
IN NOVEMBER 1999, just months after bin Laden had decided on the 9/11 operation, two young Saudi students had boarded as Coach Class passengers on an America West Flight 90 from Phoenix, Arizona, to Washington, D.C. During the flight, one of them—in the words of a flight attendant—“walked into the First Class section and continued walking towards the cockpit door. He tried to open the door. He was very subtle in his actions.” A passenger in First Class also saw the Arab man “try to get into the cockpit.”