The Eleventh Day

  The cockpit door was locked, and the man claimed he had mistaken it for the lavatory. The behavior of the passenger and his traveling companion had made the flight attendants uneasy, though, and they alerted the captain. At a routine stopover in Ohio, the plane had taxied to a remote parking place and the two men had been taken away in handcuffs. After four hours of interrogation and a search of their baggage, they were eventually allowed to continue their journey.

  Since 9/11, the suspicion has strengthened that this had been, as one FBI agent put it, a “casing operation.” It turned out, according to a Commission memorandum, that both the Saudi passengers were “ ‘tied’ to Islamic extremists.” One of those extremist associates, interviewed at home by the FBI before 9/11, had said openly that he thought America a legitimate target. On the wall, in plain sight, was a poster of bin Laden.

  Intelligence on the companion of the man who tried the cockpit door indicated that after leaving the United States he received “explosive and car bomb training” in Afghanistan. One of his friends had studied flying in the United States and was arrested after 9/11 along with top bin Laden aide Abu Zubaydah. The traveling companion, moreover, has admitted having met one of the future pilot hijackers.

  The America West incident may indeed have been a reconnaissance mission. According to KSM, as many as four bin Laden units made early exploratory trips to the United States.

  In 1999, and the previous year, reports reached the FBI that terrorists were planning to send men to learn to fly in the United States. “The purpose of this training was unknown,” the 1999 report said, “but the [terrorist] organization leaders viewed the requirement as ‘particularly important’ and were reported to have approved an open-ended amount of funding to ensure its success.”

  The FBI’s Counterterrorism Division responded to the reports by asking field offices to investigate. Congress’s Joint Inquiry, however, found no indication that any investigation was conducted. Paul Kurtz, who at that time was a senior official on the National Security Council, said dealing with the Bureau was “very frustrating,” at some levels “totally infuriating.” Overall, he said, the FBI was a “freaking black hole.”

  In November 1999, moreover, when the Bureau’s Counterterrorism Division asked the Immigration and Naturalization Service to share data on relevant arrivals in the country, the INS did not respond to the request.

  November was the month of the suspicious incident aboard America West Flight 90. It was also the month that, in Afghanistan, KSM and bin Laden assembled the future hijacker pilots and ordered them to head for the United States. As the FBI and the INS dithered, the enemy was at the gate.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  HAZMI AND MIHDHAR, BIN LADEN’S FIRST CHOICES FOR THE “PLANES operation,” had undergone months of preparation in Afghanistan. With other select fighters, they had undergone an intensive course at an old Soviet copper mine used as a training camp. It involved endurance exercises, man-to-man combat, and night operations—most of which KSM deemed, reasonably enough, of little use for the challenge awaiting them.

  Once in KSM’s hands, the advance guard received tuition in relevant subjects. They perused aviation magazines, were introduced to the mysteries of airline timetables, and viewed flight simulation software. Like Atta, they played computer games involving aviation scenarios. They watched Hollywood movies about hijackings, but with sequences featuring female characters carefully edited out. How instructive that can have been, given the ubiquity of female flight attendants on airliners, remains a question.

  Hazmi and Mihdhar, KSM decided, were to stay initially in California. He had yellow and white phone directories, supposedly found in a Karachi market, and tried to teach the men how to use them. The directories would help, KSM thought, in locating apartment rental agencies and language schools—and places to take flying lessons. They also tried to grasp some basic words and phrases in English.

  The two young men were coached separately. Mihdhar, who was married to a Yemeni wife, left early. Hazmi trained with the two Yemenis bin Laden had picked but who had been refused U.S. visas. One of them, Walid bin Attash, has recalled talks on choosing the optimal moment to hijack an airplane. They were to take careful note of flight attendants’ and pilots’ movements, the routine attendants followed when taking meals to the cockpit, the comings and goings to the lavatory of the pilots.

  Attash was assigned to do a dry run. He flew first to Kuala Lumpur, the capital of Malaysia, a largely Muslim nation that did not require visas for travelers from certain other Muslim states. Then he flew to Bangkok and onward, aboard an American airliner, to Hong Kong. He took the flight to Hong Kong on December 31, 1999, Millennium Eve, the same day on which U.S. officials were beside themselves with worry about a possible bin Laden attack.

  Attash learned a good deal from these rehearsal flights. It was not enough, he realized, just to travel First Class. It was important to reserve a seat with a clear view of the cockpit door. Second, he discovered it was possible to board a plane carrying a box cutter or razor knife. Were the knife to trigger a metal detector, he realized, toiletries that came in metallic tubes or containers—like toothpaste or shaving cream—were probably enough to fool inspectors at security checks. In the event of awkward questions, and to account for the box cutter, Attash also carried art supplies. His bag was opened and he was questioned, but the ploy worked every time.

  The reconnaissance completed, Attash, Hazmi, and Mihdhar—and several other terrorists—spent a few days at a condominium complex on the outskirts of Kuala Lumpur. Then they traveled on to Bangkok, the last stop for Hazmi and Mihdhar before the real start of the 9/11 mission. On January 15, 2000, the pair boarded a United Airlines flight bound for Los Angeles. Armed with the entry visas obtained the previous year, they had no problem at all at Immigration. They were admitted to the U.S. as “tourists.”

  KSM was to claim “no al Qaeda operative or facilitator” was ready and waiting to help the two future hijackers on arrival. The Commission, however—usually careful not to raise doubt where there was none—did not believe him. With reason.

  On the routine form they filled out on arrival, Hazmi and Mihdhar stated they would be staying initially at a Sheraton in Los Angeles. Intensive inquiries after 9/11, however, would produce no trace of them there or at any other hotel or motel. Where did they stay?

  A driver who said he did chauffeuring work for the Saudi consulate was to give a detailed account of having chauffeured “two Saudis.” Someone else, he indicated, had met them at the airport, then taken them to “an apartment … that had been rented for them” on Sepulveda Boulevard. An imam at the King Fahd mosque, near the consulate, had introduced the driver to the new arrivals. The driver gave them a tour, to the beach at Santa Monica and over to Hollywood. Shown a number of photographs of young Arabs, the driver picked out Hazmi and Mihdhar—only to back off and nervously deny having known them.

  Knowing that the pair spoke virtually no English and “barely knew how to function in U.S. society,” KSM has said, he had “instructed” them—unlike the more sophisticated accomplices who were later to arrive from Germany—to feel free to ask for assistance at a local mosque or Islamic center. That is what Hazmi and Mihdhar appear to have done, but they likely had more specific guidance than KSM admitted. Another captured terrorist said KSM was in possession of at least one address in the States, perhaps in California.

  If there was such a contact, KSM managed to conceal it. The CIA concluded that his principal goal, even under torture, was to protect sleepers—operatives already in the United States. In doing so, he seems to have sought to lay a false trail. On the one hand he claimed under interrogation that he had shown Hazmi and Mihdhar a phone directory that “possibly” covered Long Beach, near Los Angeles, and that they tried to enroll in various language schools in the L.A. area. On the other hand, he referred to definitely having had directories for San Diego and having noted that there were language schools and flight schools in that city. KS
M’s “idea,” he said, was that Hazmi and Mihdhar should base themselves in San Diego.

  At any rate, whatever guidance they may have received at the Saudi consulate and mosque in Los Angeles, it was to San Diego that they headed. The man who invited them there and arranged housing for them was to become a major focus of the investigation.

  Forty-two-year-old Omar al-Bayoumi was a mystery in his own right. According to a rental application form he filled out, he was a student receiving a monthly income from relatives in India. In fact he was an employee of a subsidiary of a contractor for the Saudi Civil Aviation Authority—paid but, as a colleague put it, a “ghost”—not required to work. He had time on his hands, and spent much of it helping to run a mosque near San Diego.

  According to Bayoumi and a companion, they met Hazmi and Mihdhar on February 1, 2000, two weeks after their arrival in the United States. According to the companion, an American Muslim convert named Caysan bin Don, he and Bayoumi drove first to Los Angeles. Bayoumi, he said, met for thirty minutes with a man at the Saudi consulate, then went on to the nearby King Fahd mosque. Bayoumi, for his part, denied that they stopped at the mosque.

  Both agreed that they went to eat at the Mediterranean Café, a restaurant that served food suitable for Muslims. As they were waiting to be served, they said, Hazmi and Mihdhar walked in. On hearing them speaking Arabic, Bayoumi invited them to come join them at their table. He did so, according to a Los Angeles Times account, after first dropping a newspaper on the floor and bending to retrieve it.

  What led Hazmi and Mihdhar to express interest in moving to San Diego, Bayoumi claimed, was his “description of the weather there.” They duly showed up in the city, sought him out at the Islamic Center, and—with his assistance—moved for a while into the apartment next door to his own.

  The way Bayoumi and bin Don told it, it had been pure chance that they met the two future terrorists. There are factors, though, that suggest it did not happen that way: a witness who quoted Bayoumi as saying before going to Los Angeles that he was on his way “to pick up visitors”; phone records that indicate frequent contact between him and the imam said to have arranged for the “two Saudis’ ” car tour around Los Angeles; phone records indicating that Hazmi and Mihdhar used Bayoumi’s cell phone for several weeks; the fact that Bayoumi appeared to have written jihad-type material; that Bayoumi’s salary was approved by the father of a man whose photo was later found in a raid on a terrorist safe house in Afghanistan; and that there was a mark in his passport that investigators associated with possible affiliation to al Qaeda.

  “We do not know,” the 9/11 Commission Report would conclude, “whether the lunch encounter occurred by chance or design.” The staff director of Congress’s Joint Inquiry, Eleanor Hill, told the authors she thought Bayoumi’s story “very suspicious.” An unnamed former senior FBI official who oversaw the Bayoumi investigation was more trenchant. “We firmly believed,” he told Newsweek, “that he had knowledge … and that his meeting with them that day was more than coincidence.”

  The man most likely to have been a primary contact for Hazmi and Mihdhar is a man who has since gained global notoriety—Anwar Aulaqi. American-born Aulaqi, then twenty-nine, was imam at a San Diego mosque familiar to most of the cast of characters mentioned in this chapter. On the day the two terrorists arranged to move in next door to Bayoumi, four phone calls occurred between Bayoumi’s telephone and Aulaqi’s.

  Hazmi and Mihdhar attended the mosque where Aulaqi preached and were seen there in his company. Witnesses told the FBI that the trio had “closed-door meetings.” According to a later landlord, Hazmi said he respected Aulaqi and spoke with him on a regular basis.

  Aulaqi, for his part, admitted to the FBI after 9/11 that he had met Hazmi several times, enough to be able to assess him as a “very calm and extremely nice person.” Congress’s Joint Inquiry Report was to characterize Aulaqi as having been the future hijackers’ “spiritual adviser.”

  In the context of holy war, that is to say a good deal. The following year, the year of 9/11, all three men—Aulaqi and, subsequently, the two terrorists—relocated to the East Coast. Hazmi and one of the hijacking pilots attended his mosque in Virginia. He claimed that he had no contact with them there.

  The Bureau had looked hard at Aulaqi even before the future hijackers came to California, and also while they were there. One lead investigated was the suggestion that he had been contacted by a “possible procurement agent for bin Laden.” There had been nothing, however, to justify prosecuting the imam. The 9/11 Commission described Aulaqi as “potentially significant.”

  By 2011, Aulaqi would have the world’s total attention. At large in Yemen following a brief spell in prison—at the belated request of the United States—the former San Diego imam was suspected of involvement in four serious recent terrorist attacks aimed at the United States. Two had involved attempts to explode bombs on aircraft.

  The chairwoman of the House Subcommittee on Intelligence, Jane Harman, has called Aulaqi “Terrorist No. 1.”

  IN SAN DIEGO in early 2000, Hazmi and Mihdhar appear to have at first sought to pass themselves off as long-stay visitors interested in seeing the sights—as KSM had suggested. Hazmi bought season passes to the San Diego Zoo and SeaWorld. They opened bank accounts, bought a Toyota sedan, obtained driver’s licenses and state IDs. When they moved on from Bayoumi’s apartment complex, to accommodations elsewhere, Hazmi even allowed his name, address, and telephone number to appear in the Pacific Bell phone directory for San Diego.

  Hazmi seems to have been pleasant enough and sociable, and joined a soccer team in San Diego. Mihdhar was a darker, “brooding” character. Early on, told that renting an apartment would involve putting down a deposit, so violently did he fly off the handle that the landlord thought him “psychotic.” Not clever for a terrorist living undercover—it was the kind of thing people remembered.

  A Muslim acquaintance vividly recalled an exchange he had with Mihdhar. When Mihdhar reproached him for watching “immoral” American television, the acquaintance retorted, “If you’re so religious, why don’t you have facial hair?” To which Mihdhar replied meaningfully, “You’ll know someday, brother.”

  Had their tradecraft been better, the two men would not have used long-distance communication as much as they did. KSM, concerned about their ability to function in the West, had told them to contact him with urgent questions. Once they had acquired their own cell phones, however, they often used them to call not KSM but relatives in Saudi Arabia and Yemen. They sent emails—both had addresses on Yahoo.com—using their landlord’s computer and those provided free at San Diego State University.

  Hazmi and Mihdhar failed utterly to live up to bin Laden’s early expectations. Though Hazmi enrolled in English classes, he learned hardly anything. Mihdhar apparently did not even start the course. The pair’s effort to learn to fly, meanwhile, was tardy, short-lived when it did get started, and hopeless.

  More than two months after arriving, the pair attended a one-hour introductory session at a local San Diego flight school. A month later, at another school, they bought equipment and took a few lessons. They said from the start that they wished to fly jets—Boeing airliners—although they had no previous experience. They had no interest in takeoffs or landings. When taken up in a Cessna, one of them began praying loudly.

  “They just didn’t have the aptitude,” instructor Rick Garza would recall. “They had no idea.… They were like Dumb and Dumber.” He told bin Laden’s chosen men that flying was simply not for them. That was the end of that.

  On June 9, less than five months after arriving and soon after hearing that his wife had given birth to their first child, Mihdhar dropped out and flew back to the Middle East. By any standard, it was an unforgivable lapse. When KSM said as much, though, he was overruled by bin Laden. The operatives’ pathetic bumbling, KSM was to tell the CIA, was not really a disaster. His planning was progressive, a step-by-step affair, he said, and the nex
t step had already been taken.

  As Mihdhar left the United States, more competent accomplices arrived.

  ONCE BACK in Germany from Afghanistan, the Hamburg-based conspirators had changed so much as to be unrecognizable. To outward appearances, they were no longer the obvious fundamentalists they had been before leaving. They shed the clothing and the beards that marked them out as Muslim radicals, no longer attended the mosques known as haunts of extremists.

  Atta fired off emails to thirty-one U.S. flight schools. “We are a small group of young men from different Arab countries,” he wrote in March 2000. “We would like to start training for the career of professional pilot.” The future hijackers declared their passports “lost,” received new ones, and applied for visas to enter the United States.

  As a Yemeni with no proof of permanent residence, Ramzi Binalshibh was turned down. His hopes of becoming a pilot hijacker frustrated, he was thenceforth to function as fixer and middle man, liaison to KSM. Binalshibh’s three companions, however, encountered no problems.

  Marwan al-Shehhi flew into New York first, at the end of May 2000, with Atta following soon after. Beyond the fact that they took rooms in the Bronx and Brooklyn, how they spent the month that followed remains a mystery. Atta bought a cell phone and calling card—the first of more than a hundred cards the team was to use during the operation. Ziad Jarrah, the last to arrive, headed straight for a flight school in Florida. He had signed up while still in Germany, having seen its advertisement in a German aviation magazine.

  Florida Flight Training Center, still in business today, sits beside the runway of the airport at Venice, a quiet retirement community on the Gulf Coast near Sarasota. It was a small operation, and Jarrah got on well with the man who ran it. “He was,” Arne Kruithof was to remember ruefully, “the kind of guy who wanted to be loved.… I remember him bringing me a six-pack of beer at home when I hurt my knee one time.” Jarrah himself, Kruithof said, liked an “occasional bottle of Bud.”