Fall and Rise

by Mitchell Zuckoff

  Atta graduated in 1990 from Cairo University with a degree in architectural engineering and joined a trade group25 linked to the Muslim Brotherhood, a political group that advocated Islamic rule and demonized the West. But his career hopes were hamstrung because he didn’t earn high enough grades26 to win a place in the university’s prestigious graduate school. At his father’s urging, Atta studied English and German, and a connection through a family friend steered him toward graduate studies in Germany.

  In 1992, at twenty-four, Atta enrolled at the Technical University of Hamburg-Harburg to pursue the German equivalent of a master’s degree in urban planning. Some men in their early twenties from a traditional society might have viewed a cosmopolitan new home as an opportunity to expand their horizons, to explore their interests, or to rebel against a controlling father. Atta took another route, burrowing into his religion and trading his docile ways for fundamentalist fervor aimed at the West.

  He shunned the pulsing social and cultural life of Hamburg, a wealthy city where the sex trade prospered alongside a thriving commercial district. He grew a beard and became a fixture27 in the city’s most radical mosque, called al-Quds, the Arabic name for the city of Jerusalem. Most of the seventy-five thousand Muslims in Hamburg were Turks with moderate beliefs, but al-Quds catered to the small minority of Arabs drawn to extreme interpretations of Islam. The mosque’s location placed the spiritual literally above the worldly: the rooms of the mosque sat atop a body building parlor in a seedy part of the city. Preachers tried to outdo one another in expressions of hatred toward the United States and Israel. Congregants could buy recordings of sermons by popular imams, including one who risked arrest under German antihate laws by declaring that “Christians and Jews should have their throats slit.”28

  By 1998, nearly finished with his studies, Atta had surrounded himself with like-minded men who came to Germany for higher education but retreated into a radically distorted understanding of their religion.

  One close confidant with whom he could engage in endless anti-American rants about the oppression of Muslims was named Marwan al-Shehhi, a native of the United Arab Emirates with an encyclopedic knowledge of Islamic scriptures.29 Ten years younger than Atta, Shehhi struggled in school but flourished as a fundamentalist.

  Another member of Atta’s inner circle was Ziad Jarrah, the only son of a prosperous family from Lebanon. Jarrah seemed an unlikely Islamic firebrand: he attended private Christian schools30 as a boy and later became a sociable, beer-drinking regular at Beirut discos.31 Jarrah found a girlfriend after he arrived in Germany, but later fell harder for the ferocious ideas he heard at al-Quds.

  Along with at least one other member of their circle, the trio of Atta, Shehhi, and Jarrah decided to put their beliefs into action by waging violent jihad among Muslim separatists fighting Russians in Chechnya. While still in Germany, they connected with a recruiter for Osama bin Laden’s terror group, al-Qaeda, who urged them to go first to Afghanistan, where they could receive training at jihadist camps. They reached Afghanistan in late 1999, where they pledged bayat,32 or allegiance, to bin Laden. The three well-educated men quickly drew attention from al-Qaeda’s top leaders, including bin Laden himself. He’d been searching for men exactly like Mohamed Atta, Marwan al-Shehhi, and Ziad Jarrah.

  In the months before the Hamburg group’s arrival in Afghanistan, bin Laden had embraced the idea of a simultaneous suicide hijacking plot33 against the United States, and he needed certain recruits to serve as its key participants: men who possessed English language skills, knowledge of life in the West, and the ability to obtain travel visas to the United States. Known to al-Qaeda as the Planes Operation, the plot was the brainchild of a longtime terrorist named Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who’d met bin Laden34 in the 1980s. Mohammed admired the murderous ambitions of his nephew Ramzi Yousef, who carried out the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. After Yousef’s 1995 arrest in Pakistan, as the terrorist was flown by helicopter over Manhattan, a senior FBI agent lifted Yousef’s blindfold and pointed out the World Trade Center’s Twin Towers, aglow in the dark. The agent taunted his prisoner: “Look down there. They’re still standing.”35 Yousef replied: “They wouldn’t be if I had enough money and explosives.”

  Al-Qaeda’s Planes Operation sought to pick up where Yousef left off and to go much further. The plot had several iterations during its years of planning, but as envisioned by Khalid Sheikh Mohammed at least as far back as 1996, jihadists would hijack ten planes36 and use them to attack targets on the East and West Coasts of the United States. Bin Laden eventually rejected the idea as too complex and unwieldy. He wanted a combination of high impact and high likelihood of success. In a scaled-down version, approved by bin Laden in mid-1999, the plot intended to fulfill the threat of his 1998 fatwa against the United States and its people, and to inspire others to similar action, by striking key symbols of American political, military, and financial might.

  Soon after meeting Atta, bin Laden personally chose him as the mission’s tactical commander37 and provided him with a preliminary list of approved targets. Bin Laden sent the group back to Hamburg with instructions about what to do next. To avoid attracting attention and to appear less radical, Atta shaved his beard, wore Western clothing, and avoided extremist mosques. Next, in March 2000, he emailed thirty-one flight schools38 in the United States to ask about the costs of training and living accommodations, all of which would secretly be covered by wire transfers from al-Qaeda. Before they applied for visas39 to the United States, Atta, Shehhi, and Jarrah each claimed that he had lost his passport; their replacements eliminated evidence of potentially suspicious trips to Pakistan and Afghanistan. By late May 2000, all three men had new passports and tourist visas. By late summer they were studying in Florida to be pilots, with Atta and Shehhi at one flight school and Jarrah at another.

  Meanwhile, both before and after the Hamburg group began flight school, sixteen other men who’d also pledged their lives to bin Laden and al-Qaeda entered the United States to play roles chosen for them in the Planes Operation. One, a twenty-nine-year-old Saudi named Hani Hanjour,40 had studied in the United States on and off for nearly a decade and had obtained a commercial pilot certificate in April 1999. While in Arizona, Hanjour fell in with a group of extremists, and by 2000 he was an al-Qaeda recruit in Afghanistan, where his flying and language skills, plus his firsthand knowledge of the United States, made him an ideal candidate in bin Laden’s eyes to join the Planes Operation as a fourth pilot.

  Thirteen of the others were between twenty and twenty-eight years old, all from Saudi Arabia except for one, who hailed from the United Arab Emirates. A few had spent time in college, but most lacked higher education, jobs, or prospects. All but one were unmarried. Like the Hamburg group, they’d joined al-Qaeda originally intending to fight in Chechnya. Bin Laden handpicked them41 for the plot and asked them to swear loyalty for a suicide operation. Although they weren’t especially imposing,42 most no taller than five foot seven, he wanted them to serve as “muscle” for the men who were training to be pilots. Most returned home to Saudi Arabia to obtain U.S. visas, then returned to Afghanistan for training in close-quarters combat and knife killing skills. They began to arrive in the United States in April 2001, keeping to themselves and generally avoiding trouble.43

  The other two “muscle” group members44 originally were supposed to participate in Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s ten-plane plot. Experienced jihadists45 who’d fought together in Bosnia, Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Mihdhar arrived in California on six-month tourist visas in January 2000, even before the Hamburg group began pilot training. The U.S. intelligence community identified Mihdhar46 as a member of al-Qaeda before he landed in the United States, and Hazmi had been described as a bin Laden associate. Yet neither was on a terrorist watchlist47 available to border agents. By contrast, other countries48 had both Mihdhar and Hazmi on watchlists. Once the two men reached the United States, the CIA withheld from the FBI crucial information about them and t
heir movements. Compounded by what a later investigation would call “individual and systemic failings”49 by the FBI, the result was a series of missed opportunities.

  Once in the United States, the two natives of Mecca, Saudi Arabia, insinuated themselves into the Muslim community of San Diego and received help from fellow Saudis. Originally viewed by bin Laden as potential pilots, neither Mihdhar nor Hazmi had the necessary English language skills. Aptitude and intelligence might have been lacking, too—their flight training stalled after they told an instructor they wanted to learn how to fly a plane but showed no interest in takeoffs or landings.50

  During the spring and summer of 2001, as part of their final preparations, Atta, Jarrah, and Shehhi took cross-country flights51 to observe the workings of crews and to determine whether they might smuggle weapons on board. Atta flew to Spain to brief an al-Qaeda planner about the plot, then returned to the United States. Jarrah and Hanjour sought training on how to fly a low-altitude pathway along the Hudson River that passed New York landmarks including the World Trade Center, and they rented small planes for practice flights. “Muscle” group members busied themselves training at gyms.

  As months passed, bin Laden became frustrated,52 pressuring Khalid Sheikh Mohammed to put the Planes Operation into motion. Bin Laden wanted it to be executed in May 2001, marking seven months since the bombing of the USS Cole, and then in June or July, when Israeli opposition party leader Ariel Sharon visited the White House. Each date passed as Atta hesitated to commit on timing until he felt absolutely ready.

  Finally, in late August, Atta picked a day just weeks away: the second Tuesday in September. It’s a mystery whether he made a simple logistical choice, based on his expectation that it would be a light travel day, which meant fewer passengers to deal with; whether he saw propaganda value in a date that matched America’s 9-1-1 emergency telephone system; or whether he sought historical revenge by choosing the month and day of the start of the 1683 Battle of Vienna,53 a humiliating defeat for the Ottoman Empire against Christian forces that began a centuries-long decline of Islamic influence.

  Whatever the trigger, Atta and his eighteen associates started buying flight tickets, some by using computers in public libraries.54 They kept enough money for expenses, then returned much of the rest to al-Qaeda operatives in the United Arab Emirates. All told, the entire plan cost less than half a million dollars.55

  The members of the Planes Operation broke into three groups of five and one group of four, each led by one of the four men who’d trained as a pilot: Atta, Shehhi, Hanjour, and Jarrah. By the second week of September, all had rented rooms at hotels or motels in or near Boston, Newark, and Washington, D.C.

  Atta and the other pilots worked on final details, while some of the others focused on earthly desires. In Boston, “muscle” members Abdulaziz al-Omari and Satam al-Suqami paid for the company of two women from the Sweet Temptations56 escort service. One spent a hundred dollars on a prostitute two more times in a single day. In New Jersey, another paid twenty dollars for a private dance57 in the VIP room of a go-go bar, while another contented himself with a pornographic video.

  On September 10, when everything and everyone was almost in place, Ziad Jarrah stepped outside a Days Inn in Newark, New Jersey, where he and three “muscle” men had checked in the previous day.

  Jarrah’s thoughts wandered to his girlfriend in Germany, a medical student of Turkish heritage named Aysel Sengün. They’d dated for five years, they emailed or spoke by phone almost daily, and she’d visited him in Florida eight months earlier. Jarrah showed off his new skills as a pilot, flying her in a single-engine plane58 to Key West. They’d discussed a future together, but Sengün’s parents insisted that she marry a fellow Turk. When Jarrah asked for her father’s blessing, the elder Sengün threw Jarrah out59 of his house. They continued their relationship in secret, and weeks earlier, Jarrah had flown to Germany to see her. Over their years together, she’d watched as the happy-go-lucky man she met grew a beard and criticized her for being insufficiently devout, but more recently Sengün had been seeing what she thought was a return to his easygoing ways.

  Jarrah left the Days Inn in a rented car and drove three miles to Elizabeth, New Jersey, to mail a letter60 he wrote that day to Sengün. He placed it in a package along with his private pilot’s license,61 his pilot logbook, and a postcard showing a photo of a beach.

  In a mix of German and Arabic, the letter began with expressions of love and devotion to chabibi, or “darling.” Before signing it “Your man forever,” Jarrah wrote:

  I will wait for you until you come to me. There comes a time for everyone to make a move. . . . You should be very proud of me. It’s an honor, and you will see the results, and everybody will be happy. . . .

  While Jarrah mailed his package, Atta prepared to leave his room at the Boston hotel. Some items in his Travelpro luggage made sense for a devout Muslim who’d received a commercial pilot’s license62 nine months earlier: alongside a Koran and a prayer schedule, he packed videotaped lessons63 on how to fly two types of Boeing jets; a device for determining the effect of a plane’s weight on its range; an electronic flight computer; a procedure manual for flight simulators; and flight planning sheets. Anyone who knew what he had planned would also have noted that he packed a folding knife and a canister of “First Defense” pepper spray. Finally, tucked into the black suitcase was a four-page letter,64 handwritten in Arabic, that charted Atta’s physical and spiritual intentions.

  Divided into three sections, the letter provided detailed instructions65 and exhortations on the subjects of martyrdom and mass murder. It covered demeanor and grooming, battle tactics, and the promise of eternal life in the company of “nymphs.” After formal invocations, “In the name of Allah, the most merciful, the most compassionate,” the first section addressed Atta’s situation at that very moment. Titled “The Last Night,” it began:

  1. Embrace the will to die and renew allegiance. -Shave the extra body hair and wear cologne.

  -Pray.

  2. Familiarize yourself with the plan well from every aspect, and anticipate the reaction and resistance from the enemy.

  3. Read the Al-Tawbah [Repentance], the Anfal chapters [in the Quran], and reflect on their meaning and what Allah has prepared for the believers and the martyrs in Paradise.

  Near the end of the first section, it offered this direction:

  13. Examine your weapon before departure, and it was said before the departure, “Each of you must sharpen his blade and go out and wound his sacrifice.”

  Among the nineteen men with plans to wreak havoc in the next twenty-four hours, at least two others, one in New Jersey and the other outside Washington, had copies of the same letter.66

  Atta left the Milner Hotel and drove a rented blue Nissan Altima to a cheap hotel in the Boston suburb of Newton. There he picked up the man believed to have written,67 or at least copied, the instruction letter: Abdulaziz al-Omari, the same young Saudi who days earlier had ordered prostitutes like delivery pizza.

  Atta and Omari headed toward Interstate 95 for a two-hour drive to Portland, Maine, a trip that could best be described as the first arc of a circular route. They held tickets for a commuter flight that would bring them back to Boston. The flight was scheduled to leave Portland at six o’clock the following morning, September 11.

  Chapter 2

  “He’s NORDO”

  American Airlines Flight 11

  September 11, 2001

  American Airlines pilot John Ogonowski roused himself before dawn on September 11, 2001, moving quietly in the dark to avoid waking his wife, Peg, or their three daughters. He slipped on his uniform and kissed Peg goodbye as she slept.

  As the sun began its rise on that perfect late-summer morning, John stepped out the back door. Coffee would wait until he reached Boston’s Logan International Airport, forty-five minutes away. He climbed into his dirt-caked green Chevy pickup, with hay on the floor and a bumper sticker that read there�
��s no farming without farmers.

  John drove a meandering route as he left the land he loved. He could see the plots he’d set aside for the Cambodian immigrants, plus five acres of ripening pumpkins and ten acres of fodder corn whose stalks would be sold as decorations for Halloween and Thanksgiving. John steered down the long dirt driveway, through the white wooden gate that gave the farm its name. He passed the home of his uncle Al and tooted his horn in a ritual family greeting. It was nearly six o’clock.

  Under sparkling blue skies, John drove southeast toward the airport, ready to take his seat in the cockpit and his place in a vast national air transport system that flew some 1.8 million passengers1 daily, aboard more than twenty-five thousand flights, to and from more than 563 U.S. airports.

  He expected to be home before the weekend, for a family picnic.

  As John Ogonowski neared the airport, Michael Woodward left his sleeping boyfriend at his apartment in Boston’s fashionable Back Bay neighborhood and caught an early train2 for the twenty-minute ride to Logan. More than six feet tall and 200-plus pounds, Michael had a gentle face and a razor wit. Thirty years old, bright and ambitious, he’d risen from ticket agent to flight service manager for American Airlines, a job in which he ensured that planes were properly catered, serviced, and equipped with a full complement of flight attendants.

  A salty breeze from Boston Harbor greeted Michael when he exited the train at the airport station, but that was the last he expected to see of the outdoors until the end of a long day. At 6:45 a.m., dressed in a gray suit and a burgundy tie, Michael walked to his office in the bowels of the airport’s Terminal B, one level below the passenger gates. He wore a serious expression that revealed his discomfort.