Early in September, Peter needed to fly to California on business, so they decided to turn the trip into a family vacation and a visit with Sue’s grandmother and brothers. The weekend before the September 11 flight, Christine told Eunice of her excitement about the upcoming trip, which included plans for an outing to Disneyland. During one phone call, Christine reported to her grandmother that she was going to California to see Mickey Mouse and Pluto. Then Christine expressed an even stronger desire: “I want to go to your house, Namma!”
On the night of September 10, Christine slept in her new big-girl bed with her favorite stuffed animal, Peter Rabbit holding a carrot. Before she left home the next morning, she’d tuck Peter under the covers, to keep him safe until she returned.
Barbara Olson
American Airlines Flight 77
Under the hot lights of the C-SPAN television show Washington Journal,6 host Peter Slen flipped open a copy of Washingtonian magazine for September 2001. The camera zoomed in to a headline, the 100 most powerful women in washington. Then it swung across the set to find conservative firebrand Barbara Olson, her telegenic smile dialed to full blast, her gleaming blond hair draped down the back of her red blazer. Slen asked Barbara: “Why are you listed as an influential political insider?”
Barbara knew perfectly well, but she answered modestly: “I don’t know. That’s where they put me.” She changed the subject to a recent lunch where the magazine’s honorees discussed who might be the first female president. Overwhelmingly, the capital’s most powerful women named Hillary Clinton. Virtually alone in dissent was Barbara, who had just completed her second book lacerating the U.S. senator from New York and former First Lady.
“What does it mean to have influence in this town?” Slen asked. “How do you get it? Is it power, is it position, is it money, is it marriage?”
The question carried a sexist dagger, missed by audience members who didn’t know that Barbara’s husband was among the most powerful lawyers in the country: U.S. Solicitor General Ted Olson, the top legal strategist for the White House. President George W. Bush had given him the job after Olson had argued successfully before the U.S. Supreme Court to end the recount of votes in Florida from the 2000 election, a decision that led to Bush becoming president.
Barbara ignored the jab, replying with a laugh that long work paved the road to influence. She’d grown used to questions about whether a glamorous woman who drove a Jaguar and had a weakness for stiletto heels deserved her place at the center of the political world. But at forty-five,7 having earned a partnership in a prominent law firm, Barbara drew confidence from the knowledge that before marrying Ted, she’d been a professional ballet dancer, worked her way through law school, and prosecuted drug cases in the U.S. attorney’s office in Washington. She’d also served as chief investigative counsel for the U.S. House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.
During her five-year marriage to Ted, his third and her second, Barbara had seen her stock rise further as half of a Washington power couple. They hosted enormous parties for the conservative intelligentsia at their home in Virginia.8 They shared a love for Shakespeare, poetry, the opera, modern art, and their Australian sheepdogs: Reagan, for the president, and Maggie, for British prime minister Margaret Thatcher.
When the C-SPAN show took calls from viewers, Barbara’s partisan nature was on full display. After lavish praise from one caller who loved her bestselling book about Hillary Clinton, Hell to Pay, another caller laced into Barbara for criticizing the Clintons. Weeks earlier, Barbara had apologized in the Washington Post for describing the former president’s late mother as a “barfly who gets used by men.”
The caller scolded her: “Miss Olson, you have to learn how to be more human. You’re a very evil person. . . . You’re not going to survive too long. You got too much hate and the devil in you.”
Barbara smiled through the attack, though not as widely as before. Her blue eyes dimmed momentarily as she blinked away the criticism and the ominous prediction. “Well, we do have a First Amendment,” Olson replied. “Everybody has a right to their own opinion. I don’t have hate in me.”
After the show ended, Barbara rushed on with her life. She needed to pack for a flight to Los Angeles, for her next performance as a face of conservatism: she was booked to appear on Politically Incorrect with Bill Maher. Her flight was set for Monday, September 10.
Barbara decided the schedule didn’t work for her. Though it would require a dash from the airport to Maher’s studio, she decided to push back her flight until the next day. Ted Olson would turn sixty-one years old on Tuesday, September 11. Before flying to California, Barbara wanted to wake up beside him, to wish him a happy birthday.
CeeCee Lyles
United Airlines Flight 93
As midnight approached on Monday, September 10, CeeCee Lyles9 lay on a futon bed in a tiny apartment she shared with four other United Airlines flight attendants near Newark International Airport in New Jersey. She clutched a teddy bear she’d named Lorne and talked on her cellphone to the bear’s namesake, her husband, Lorne Lyles, back home in Florida.
At thirty-three, five foot seven, CeeCee had flashing brown eyes and a love of fine clothes that complemented her athletic figure. Years earlier, Lorne noticed her when each of them was taking a son to baseball practice. He nearly fell out of his car when she walked past. “Man! She is beautiful,”10 he thought.
CeeCee had traveled a winding road to happiness with Lorne, and the cellphone was a lifeline when her work took her away from him. They’d talk for hours, often five or six times a day, sometimes as many as ten to fifteen. The comfort of the other’s voice mattered as much as the subjects: their sons, two each from previous relationships; her work in airports and airplanes; his, as a police officer on the overnight shift in Fort Myers, Florida. Beyond work and kids, they’d talk about bills and chores and missing each other. As Lorne would say, they’d talk and talk, about “everything and nothing.”11
CeeCee had become a United flight attendant less than a year earlier, at Lorne’s urging, after he recognized the emotional toll of her previous jobs, as a corrections officer in Miami and then as a police detective on the streets of Fort Pierce, Florida. When they began dating, Lorne was a police dispatcher in Fort Pierce, so to some extent they’d fallen in love over the airwaves, enchanted by the sound of each other’s voice.
During her six years on the police force, CeeCee had put her good looks to use when she went undercover to portray a prostitute, but she got more satisfaction from helping women and children victimized by crime and drugs. She’d often stop by the Bible Way Soul Saving Station, where her uncle was the pastor, and she became a role model at a Christian women’s shelter founded by two of her aunts. Her kindness had limits, though, replaced by toughness when dealing with criminals. CeeCee excelled in an Advanced Officer Survival course that included hand-to-hand fighting and takedown moves. Before marrying Lorne in May 2000, CeeCee picked up extra shifts and worked second and third jobs to support her sons, Jerome and Jevon, around whom her life revolved. She kept them focused on school, taught them to play baseball, and expected them to fight for loose balls on the basketball court.
Becoming a flight attendant allowed CeeCee to fulfill her dreams of traveling, meeting new people, and trading hardened criminals for the occasional drunken businessman. As a perk of the job, she and her family took sightseeing trips on days off and filled available seats on flights to Indianapolis, where Lorne’s two sons, Justin and Jordan, lived with their mother. They’d done just that the previous weekend, then returned home so CeeCee’s sons could be in school on Monday.
As the summer of 2001 flew past, CeeCee poured out her heart in a letter to the woman who had raised her, Carrie Ross, who was both CeeCee’s adoptive mother and her biological aunt. CeeCee mentioned rough patches of her past, then wrote that she was as happy as she’d ever been. She loved her new job as a flight attendant, and she credited Ross’s love and support for leadi
ng her to this high point in life.
Before flying to Newark on September 10, CeeCee squared away piles of laundry and filled the refrigerator with home-cooked meals. She hated to be away from her family, but she and Lorne didn’t want to uproot from Florida to her airport base in New Jersey. So CeeCee joined a group of her fellow flight attendants, each paying $150 in monthly rent for the Newark crash pad, and bided her time until she’d earn enough seniority to gain greater control over her schedule.
The morning of Monday, September 10, Lorne drove CeeCee to the Fort Myers airport, walked her to her gate, kissed her goodbye, and began a new day of serial phone calls. CeeCee didn’t reach the Newark apartment until eleven that night, and she wouldn’t get much rest. She’d been assigned an early flight out of Newark, an 8:00 a.m. departure to San Francisco. Even as her energy flagged, she didn’t want to stop talking with Lorne.
Two hours into their last call of September 10, which blended into their first call of September 11, CeeCee fell asleep clutching her cellphone and her teddy bear Lorne. The real Lorne hung up, certain that they’d speak again soon.
Major Kevin Nasypany
Northeast Air Defense Sector, Rome, N.Y.
At forty-three, solidly built and colorfully profane, Kevin Nasypany had a name that rhymed with the New Jersey town of Parsippany, a military pilot’s unflappable confidence, and a caterpillar mustache on a Saint Bernard’s face.
On September 10, Nasypany woke with a full plate.12 He and his wife, Dana, had five children, three girls and two boys aged five to nineteen, and Dana was seven months pregnant. They also had a sweet new chocolate lab puppy that Nasypany had judged to be dumber than dirt. Their rambling Victorian house in upstate Waterville, New York, needed paint, the oversized yard needed care, and a half-finished bathroom needed remodeling. Plus, someone needed to close their aboveground pool for the season, a chore that Nasypany loudly proclaimed to be a royal pain in the ass.
To top it off, he had to protect the lives of roughly one hundred million Americans.
Nasypany was a major in the Air National Guard, working as a mission control commander at the Northeast Air Defense Sector, or NEADS (pronounced knee-ads). NEADS was part of the North American Aerospace Defense Command, or NORAD, the military organization with the daunting task of safeguarding the skies over the United States and Canada.
Protection work suited Nasypany, who’d been a leading defenseman13 on his college hockey team. At NEADS, he and his team stood sentry against long-range enemy bombers and intercontinental ballistic missiles sneaking past U.S. air borders, along with a catalog of other airborne dangers such as hijackings. Nasypany had joined NEADS seven years earlier, after an active duty Air Force career during which he earned the radio call sign “Nasty” and spent months aloft in a radar plane over Iraq, Kuwait, and Saudi Arabia during the First Gulf War.
On workdays, Nasypany drove his Nissan Stanza twenty-five miles to NEADS headquarters, a squat aluminum bunker that resembled a UFO from a 1950s sci-fi movie. It was the last operating facility in a military ghost town, on the property of the decommissioned Griffiss Air Force Base in Rome, New York. The obscure location was fitting: in the grand scheme of U.S. military priorities, defending domestic skies had become something of a backwater, staffed largely by part-time pilots and officers in the Air National Guard.
Working eight-hour shifts around the clock, three hundred sixty-five days a year, Nasypany and several hundred military officers, surveillance technicians, communications specialists, and weapons controllers huddled in the green glow of outdated radar and computer screens. Bulky tape recorders preserved their spoken words as they kept a lookout for potential national security threats 14 over Washington, D.C., and twenty-seven states in the Northeast, Mid-Atlantic, and Midwest.
One of the many challenges for Nasypany was to keep his crews sharp amid the daily tedium of a peacetime vigil. Entire shifts would pass with no hint of trouble, which was good for the country but potentially numbing to NEADS crews. Then, perhaps a dozen times a month, an “unknown” would appear on a radar scope, and everyone needed to react smartly and immediately, knowing that a mistake or a delay of even a few minutes theoretically could mean the obliteration of an American city.
In most of those cases, the NEADS crew would quickly identify the mystery radar dots. But three or four times a month, when initial efforts failed, NEADS staffers would carry out the most exciting part of their job: ordering the launch of supersonic military fighter jets to determine who or what had entered American airspace.
Nationally, NORAD and its divisions could immediately call upon fourteen fighter jets, two each at seven bases around the country. Those fighters remained perpetually “on alert,” armed and fueled, pilots ready. The military had many more fighter jets spread among U.S. bases, but time would be needed to round up pilots and load fuel and weapons, and time would be an unaffordable luxury if America came under attack.
During the decade since the fall of the Soviet Union, America’s leaders had behaved as though the airborne threat had nearly disappeared. At fourteen, the number of on-alert fighters nationwide marked a sharp drop15 since the height of the Cold War, when twenty-two military sites, with scores of fighter jets, were always ready to defend against a ballistic missile attack or any other threat to North America. In fact, by the summer of 2001, the number of on-alert fighter jet sites16 throughout the United States had been ordered to be cut from fourteen to only four, to save money, though that order had yet to be carried out.
NEADS directly controlled four of the on-alert fighter jets: two F-15s at Otis Air National Guard Base in Buzzards Bay, Massachusetts, on Cape Cod, and two F-16s at Langley Air Force Base in Hampton, Virginia.
When the fighters launched, time and again the unknown aircraft or mystery radar dot would turn out to be benign: a fish-spotting plane from Canada with faulty electronics, or a passenger jet from Europe whose pilots failed to use proper codes on their cockpit transponder, a device that sends ground radar a wealth of identifying information plus speed and altitude. In NEADS parlance, the end result would be a “friendly” plane that didn’t “squawk,” or properly identify itself by transponder, as a result of human or mechanical error. When the potential threat passed, the NEADS sentinels resumed their watch.
To stay ready for surprise inspections and, above all, a genuine threat by an unknown with nefarious intent, Nasypany and other NEADS officers regularly put their crews through elaborate exercises. They had one planned for September 11, with the impressive name Vigilant Guardian. The drill focused on a simulated attack by Russian bombers, with elaborate secondary scenarios including a mock hijacking by militants determined to force a passenger jet to land on a Caribbean island. Nasypany and some colleagues wanted the exercise to include a plot by terrorists to fly a cargo plane into the United Nations building in New York City, but a military intelligence officer had nixed that idea as too far-fetched to be useful.17
Nasypany spent his September 10 shift preparing for the next day’s exercise, but he also had to carry out a more mundane family responsibility. NEADS allowed tours by civilians, so Boy Scout troops, local politicians, and civic groups regularly clomped around the Operations Room, looking at the radar scopes after classified systems were switched off. In this case, his wife’s sister Becky was visiting the Nasypanys from Kansas, and she’d always been curious about Kevin’s work. He got approval for Becky to witness what she had long imagined to be the exciting world of national security surveillance in action.
As Nasypany toured NEADS with his wife and sister-in-law, disappointment spread across Becky’s face. The nerve center of U.S. air defense didn’t seem much different from the office of the air conditioning manufacturer where she worked.
“It looks like you guys don’t do much,” Becky said. “It’s really quiet in here.”18
Nasypany couldn’t help but smile. A good shift for NEADS, and for the nation, was eight hours of hushed monotony. “Quiet’s a good thing a
round here,” Nasypany told her. “When it starts getting loud, and people start raising their voices, that’s a bad thing.”
Mohamed Atta
American Airlines Flight 11
Ziad Jarrah
United Airlines Flight 93
Inside a third-floor room in a middling Boston hotel, an unremarkable man prepared to move on. He pulled on a polo shirt,19 black on one shoulder and white on the other, and packed a flimsy vinyl Travelpro suitcase20 that resembled the rolling luggage preferred by airline pilots.
If not for the glare of his dark eyes, Mohamed Atta would have been easy to overlook: thirty-three years old, slim, five feet seven, clean-shaven, with brushy black hair, a drooping left eyelid, and a hard-set mouth over a meaty chin. After one night in room 30821 of the Milner Hotel, Atta gathered his belongings before a final move that represented the last steps of a years-long journey that he believed would elevate him from angry obscurity into eternal salvation.
The youngest of three children of a gruff, ambitious lawyer father and a doting stay-at-home mother, Atta spent his early childhood22 in a rural Egyptian community. Atta’s father, also named Mohamed, complained that Atta’s mother pampered their timid son, making him “soft” by raising him like a girl23 alongside his two older sisters. Devout but secular Muslims—as opposed to Islamists, who wanted religion to dominate Egypt’s political, legal, and social spheres—the family moved to Cairo when Atta was ten. While his peers played or watched television, Atta studied and obeyed his elders, a dutiful son determined to satisfy his disciplinarian father and follow the path of his intelligent sisters, on their way to careers as a doctor and a professor.24
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