Jarrah’s course was geared to obtaining a Private Pilot License to fly single-engine aircraft. He already had a handle on the theory, having studied aviation mechanics in Germany, and he made quiet, steady progress. A fellow student, Thorsten Bierman, however, found Jarrah self-centered and uncooperative when they flew together. “He wanted to do everything single-handed.”
Atta and Shehhi had left New York and traveled first to look at a flight school in Norman, Oklahoma, at which one of bin Laden’s personal pilots had once trained to fly. As early as 1998, the FBI’s regional office had been alerted to the large number of Arabs learning to fly in the area.
After a tour of that school, however, Atta and Shehhi decided not to enroll. They made their way instead to Venice, Florida, and Huffman Aviation, just a block from the school where Jarrah was already at work. No reliable source, however, has spoken of seeing Jarrah with Atta and Shehhi in Venice. Their tradecraft was superior to that of the inept fellows who had arrived earlier in California.
Mohamed Atta’s visa, which got him into the United States in spring 2000, was issued without any prior interview. Ziad Jarrah’s charred visa (below) was recovered at the site of the crash of United Flight 93.
Rudi Dekkers, who ran Huffman, would have nothing good to say about Atta. The hijackers’ team leader, he said, “had an attitude, like he was standing above everybody … very, very arrogant.” Shehhi, by contrast, was a “likeable person, he had fun, he was laughing … this is a male environment, so we talk about girls, planes. But Atta was never socializing.”
Their first flying instructor, Mark Mikarts, was at first just a little nonplussed at the sight of Atta. “When you do flight training,” Mikarts said, “you tend to get a little bit dirty—there’s oil and fuel. You’re sweating. He was always immaculately dressed, with the $200 Gucci shoes, silk shirts, double-hemmed pants. He always overdressed.”
Teaching Atta to handle a Cessna 172, meanwhile, turned out to be a nightmare. “Generally,” said Mikarts,
the first five to ten hours is where a student learns to fly by visual references. Using outside visual references, we’d keep the horizon at a certain part of the windshield. He had a very difficult time learning that. He would always over-rotate, or he couldn’t keep the reference.… But he would not listen.… It was like he had to do it his way.
Then finally one day he over-rotated the airplane and I thought, “I’m going to let him do whatever he wants to do. Let’s see what happens.” He pitches the airplane way up.… The engine is screaming. The stall horn is blaring. The air speed’s bleeding away. We’re about to stall and tumble out of the air. I’m saying, “Nose down!” Next time, louder. Third time, I said, “Nose down!” in a rather nasty tone. [Then] I took my hand and shoved the control wheel forward and stamped on the rudder pedal to get it back where it’s supposed to be. We pitched down so abruptly that he popped out of his seat from the negative g’s—hit his head on the ceiling.
He turned his head towards me and gave me a look like, “You infidel …” or something. Like he wanted to kill me. That’s it, we turned back and he went and complained to my chief pilot.… I said, “If he’s going to be that much of a baby about it and not follow instructions, let him go someplace else. Not worth me breaking my neck and you losing an instructor.”
Things were no better in September, when Atta and Shehhi tried another flight school. They failed an instrument rating, argued about how things should be done, even tried to wrest control of the airplane from their instructor. They were asked to leave—and got Huffman to take them back again.
Ann Greaves, a student from England, asked the instructor they shared how the two Arabs were getting on. He replied with “a gesture of the hand. Nothing was said. It was sort of, you know, ‘So so …’ ” The instructor told her that Atta had connections to Saudi royalty, that Shehhi, who seemed to follow behind, was supposedly his bodyguard. Once, when Greaves reached out to retrieve her seat cushion—Atta, who was short and also needed a cushion, had appropriated it—Shehhi rushed to place himself between them. Royalty and their staff, Greaves thought, ought to have better manners.
What led Shehhi to respond the way he did probably had nothing to do with manners—and everything with the fact that Greaves was a woman. Islam dictates that men and women not married or related to each other may not touch, not even to shake hands. Atta abhorred the idea of proximity to women, even after his death. In his will, written long since at the age of twenty-seven, he had stipulated: “I don’t want a pregnant woman or a person who is not clean to come and say goodbye to me … I don’t want women to come to my house to apologize for my death … I don’t want any women to go to my grave at all, during my funeral or on any occasion thereafter.”
In Venice, they all remembered Atta’s hang-up about women. “We had female dispatchers at the flight school,” Mikarts recalled. “He would order them around, tell them this, tell them that. I’d pull him aside and say, ‘I don’t know how you treat women in your country, but you don’t talk to her that way.’ ” Ivan Chirivella, who taught Atta and Shehhi during their brief stint at another school, remembered that they were both “very rude to the female employees.”
The pair were never seen in a woman’s company at the Outlook bar, where flight students gathered at the end of the working day. Lizsa Lehman, who worked there, remembered the two of them well. She liked Shehhi, thought him “fun, inquisitive, friendly,” while Atta rarely exchanged a word with her. He always stood with his back to the bar, Shehhi explained, because he did not approve of female bartenders.
Atta did break one Muslim taboo. If he did deign to address her, Lehman said, it was to utter the words “Bud Light.” There appears to be no truth to allegations made after 9/11 that several of the terrorists, including Atta, drank alcohol to excess. Lehman’s clear memory, though, is that Atta and Shehhi were partial to a beer at the end of the day. “Two, maybe, but they never—ever—overindulged.”
IN EARLY AUGUST, the diligent Ziad Jarrah was awarded his Private Pilot License. In contrast to Atta, the love of a woman was on his mind. He headed back to Germany in the fall to spend several weeks with his girlfriend, Aysel. They went to Paris together, had themselves photographed up the Eiffel Tower. “I love you … don’t worry,” Jarrah wrote when he got back, then indulged himself a little. He bought a red Mitsubishi Eclipse, spent a weekend in the Bahamas. Over Christmas, he took a week-long trip to Lebanon to see his family.
By late December, and in spite of Atta’s obstreperous behavior, both he and Shehhi had qualified to fly not only small private planes but also multi-engine aircraft. Professional, however, the pair were not. The day before Christmas, when their rented plane stalled on the taxiway at Miami Airport, they simply abandoned it and walked away. That fiasco reportedly marked the end of their relationship with Huffman Aviation.
Atta’s mind was racing ahead. Even before receiving his certification, he had sent off for flight deck videos for Boeing airliners. In the last week of December, at a training center near Miami, he and Shehhi paid for six hours on a Boeing 727 simulator. “They just wanted to move around in mid-air,” said the instructor who supervised the session, “not take off or land. I thought it was really odd. I can see now what I was allowing them to do. It’s a terrible thing to live with.”
Some have argued that the hijacking pilots did not have the skills required to pull off the maneuvers performed on 9/11. Given that they would not have to face the complexities of takeoff and landing, though, and given the further practice they were to have in the remaining months, their abilities apparently sufficed for their deadly purpose.
On New Year’s Eve, at another school, Atta and Shehhi trained on a Boeing 767 simulator. It would be a 767, with Atta at the controls, that eight months later crashed into the North Tower of the World Trade Center.
• • •
FAR OFF in Afghanistan, seemingly oblivious to what he was asking of the men he had sent to America, Osama bin L
aden had become impatient. In the fall of 2000, when they were still at flight school, he had pressed KSM to launch the operation. It would be enough, he said, simply to bring airliners down, not necessarily to strike specific targets. This was at the time of the second Palestinian intifada, or uprising, that followed then Israeli opposition leader Ariel Sharon’s provocative visit to Jerusalem’s Temple Mount. Bin Laden, KSM said, wanted to be seen to retaliate against Israel’s principal supporter.
As he would time and again, KSM resisted bin Laden’s pressure. Lack of readiness aside, there was a cogent new reason not to rush matters. A new pilot hijacker candidate had materialized. Twenty-nine-year-old Hani Hanjour, the son of a well-to-do family in the Saudi city of Ta’if, already had flying qualifications. After years of travel back and forth to American flight schools, he had succeeded in getting his commercial pilot’s license. After trying in vain to get work flying for an airline in his own country, however, he had resorted to pretending to his family that he had a job as a pilot in the United Arab Emirates. This was a frustrated young man.
The key to understanding the direction Hanjour now took, though, lies elsewhere. Though described by those who knew him well as “frail,” “quiet,” “a little mouse,” he could show another side. When alcohol was available, this conspirator reportedly went drinking on occasion. Afterward, however, filled with guilt, he would devote an entire day to praying. So moved would he become during prayers that one witness recalled seeing him in tears. Religion figured large for him. Ever since a first trip to Afghanistan at the age of seventeen, he had wanted to make jihad.
In 2000, when Hanjour turned up in one of the Afghan camps and let it be known that he was a qualified pilot, bin Laden’s aide Atef sent him to KSM. KSM saw his potential, gave him a basic briefing on how to act in the field, and dispatched him—equipped with a visa obtained in Saudi Arabia—to join Nawaf al-Hazmi in San Diego. They would not stay there long, but would head off to yet another flight school—in Arizona.
Given Hanjour’s flying experience, KSM thought his target should be the Pentagon—relatively hard to hit because it is only five stories high. On reaching the States, one of Hanjour’s calls would be to a flight school owner he knew from previous visits. He now wanted, he said, to learn how to fly a Boeing 757. The instructor suggested he first get some experience on a smaller business airplane, but Hanjour persisted. “No,” he said, “I want to fly the 757.” On 9/11, he would be aboard the 757 that hit the Pentagon.
The first name “Hani” means “content.” Hanjour liked to say, however, that it meant “warrior,” in line with the name that he—like all the hijackers—had been given before setting off for the States. Bin Laden dubbed him “ ‘Orwah al-Ta’ifi,” after a follower of the Prophet who had died in a shower of arrows in Hanjour’s hometown—giving thanks to God for allowing him martyrdom.
IN OCTOBER 2000, as KSM prepared Hanjour for his mission, Atta and Shehhi were well into their course at Huffman Aviation. They and fellow students had to use a computer provided by the school to prepare for a written test, and people often had to wait their turn. One day, however, as Ann Greaves waited outside for Atta and Shehhi to emerge from the computer room, she realized they were not working on the test at all. She heard hushed voices talking in Arabic, then an outburst of what sounded like delight.
“I went into the room,” she recalled, “and they were hugging each other and sort of slapping each other on the back … I have no way of knowing what it was that made them so happy.” What would certainly have made Atta and Shehhi happy was the news—on the 12th of the month—that came out of Yemen.
At 11:18 A.M. local time that morning, the guided missile destroyer USS Cole was about to complete refueling in the port of Aden. Its captain, Commander Kirk Lippold, was preparing to leave harbor. Small craft had been buzzing around, delivering fresh food, clearing the ship’s garbage. One such boat, carrying two men in Yemeni dress, approached the destroyer, smiled and waved, then stood as if to attention.
“There was a tremendous explosion,” Lippold remembered. “You could feel the entire 8,400 tons of ship violently thrust up and to the right. It seemed to hang in the air for a second before coming back into the water. We rocked from side to side.… Then it was dead quiet and there was a wave of smoke and dust that washed over me.” Moments later, on deck, the captain looked down at the hull of his vessel.
“The best way to describe it,” he said, “would be that it was like someone had taken their fist and literally punched a forty-foot hole all the way in the side of the ship—all the way through, shoving everything out of the way until it came out of the starboard side.… The force of an explosion like that does terrible things to a human body.”
The men in Arab dress in the small boat had detonated a massive, lethal charge of Semtex explosive and the effect on the Cole was devastating. Seventeen of the sailors on deck or below, waiting for chow in the canteen, were killed. Thirty-nine were injured. The average age of the dead was nineteen.
True to previous form, bin Laden would deny that he was behind the bombing, but praise the perpetrators. Later, during the wedding festivities for one of his sons, he would recite a poem he had written:
A destroyer, even the brave might fear …
To her doom she progresses slowly, clothed in a huge illusion,
Awaiting her is a dinghy, bobbing in the waves.
And:
The pieces of the bodies of infidels were flying like dust particles,
Had you seen it with your own eyes you would have been very pleased,
Your heart would have been filled with joy.
In a recruitment video that circulated the following year, bin Laden spelled out his grand theory. “With small means and great faith, we can defeat the mightiest military power of modern times. America is much weaker than it seems.”
SIX DAYS AFTER the bombing of the Cole, President Clinton spoke at a memorial service for the dead. “To those who attacked them we say, you will not find a safe harbor. We will find you. And justice will prevail.”
“Let’s hope we can gather enough intelligence to figure out who did the act,” said George W. Bush, then in the last weeks of his campaign for the presidency. “There must be a consequence.”
A cabinet-level White House meeting after the attack, however, had decided to take no immediate action, to wait for clear evidence as to who was responsible. Michael Sheehan, the State Department representative on the Counterterrorism Security Group, seethed with rage as he talked with Richard Clarke afterward. “What’s it gonna take, Dick?” he exploded. “Who the shit do they think attacked the Cole, fuckin’ Martians? … Does al Qaeda have to attack the Pentagon to get their attention?”
No one doubted bin Laden and his people were behind the bombing. In the final days of the administration, however, and with fresh memories of the failed missile attack following the embassy bombings in Africa, there was going to be no action without clear evidence.
In public and in private, the President had been hot on the issue all year long. Terrorism, Clinton had said in his State of the Union address, would be a “major security threat” far into the future. In February, when sent a memo updating him on efforts to locate bin Laden, he responded with a scrawled note in the margin—“not satisfactory … could surely do better.”
The Air Force had done better. By September, Clarke and others had sat in amazement as an Air Force drone—an unmanned craft named Predator—beamed back pictures taken from the air over Afghanistan. Not merely pictures but, on two occasions, pictures of a tall man in a white robe—surrounded by what appeared to be bodyguards—at one of bin Laden’s camps. The Afghan winter was coming, however, and photography would soon become impossible. Besides, the Predator could not be used to hit bin Laden. It was as yet unarmed.
In late fall, American negotiators were in secret negotiations with the Taliban that reportedly included talk of the possible handover of bin Laden. In December, a U.N. Security C
ouncil resolution called for the Saudi’s extradition. To no avail.
On December 18, CIA director Tenet warned Clinton that there was increased risk of a new bin Laden attack. The best information indicated it would occur abroad, he said, but the United States itself was also vulnerable. Intelligence had been coming in of terrorist plans similar to what was actually being planned.
A Pakistani recently arrived in the States had told the FBI of having been recruited in England, flown to Pakistan, and given training on how to hijack passenger planes. His instructions, he said, had been to join five or six other men—they included trainee hijacking pilots—already in America. On arrival in New York, however, he had gotten cold feet and turned himself in. Though the man passed FBI lie detector tests, no action was taken. He was simply returned to London.
In Italy in August, a bug planted by Italian police had picked up a chilling conversation between a Yemeni just arrived at Bologna airport and a known terrorist operative. Asked how his trip had been, the Yemeni replied that he had been “studying airplanes.” He spoke of a “surprise strike that will come from the other country … one of those strikes that will never be forgotten” engineered by “a madman but a genius … in the future listen to the news and remember these words. We can fight any power using airplanes.”
Such intelligence was routinely shared with other Western intelligence agencies, according to a senior Italian counterterrorism officer interviewed by the authors. How long this fragment of information took to reach American analysts, however, remains unclear.
In September, there was fear of a 9/11-style attack during the Olympic Games in Sydney, Australia. Fighters patrolled overhead, ready to intercept any aircraft that might be used to target the stadium. The principal perceived source of the threat, security chief Paul McKinnon has said, was bin Laden.