The FBI and the Federal Aviation Administration, however, downplayed the notion that an attack was possible within the United States. “FBI investigations,” a joint assessment said in December 2000, “do not suggest evidence of plans to target domestic civil aviation.” Further investigation of activity at American flight schools, the Bureau’s headquarters unit told field offices, was “deemed imprudent.”
CIA OFFICIALS had briefed candidate George Bush and his staff on the terrorist threat two months before the election, bluntly warning that “Americans would die in terrorist acts inspired by bin Laden” in the next four years. In late November, after the election but while the result was still being contested, President Clinton authorized the Agency to give Bush the same data he himself was receiving.
The election once settled, Vice President–elect Cheney, Secretary of State–designate Colin Powell, and National Security Adviser–designate Condoleezza Rice received detailed briefings on bin Laden and al Qaeda. “As I briefed Rice,” Clarke recalled, “her facial expression gave me the impression she had never heard the term before.” Asked about that, Rice said acidly that she found it peculiar that Clarke should have been “sitting there reading my body language.” She told the 9/11 Commission that she and colleagues had in fact been quite “cognizant of the group.” Clarke, for his part, claimed most senior officials in the incoming administration did not know what al Qaeda was.
Clinton’s assistant secretary of defense for special operations, Brian Sheridan, told Rice that al Qaeda was “not an amateur-type deal … It’s serious stuff, these guys are not going away.” Rice listened but asked no questions. “I offered to brief anyone, anytime,” Sheridan recalled. No one took him up on the offer.
The Commission on National Security, which had been at work for two and a half years, was about to issue a final report concluding that an attack “on American soil” was likely in the not-too-distant future. “Failure to prevent mass-casualty attacks against the American homeland,” the report said, “will jeopardize not only American lives but U.S. foreign policy writ large. It would undermine support for U.S. international leadership and for many of our personal freedoms, as well.… In the face of this threat, our nation has no coherent or integrated government structures.”
So seriously did Commission members take the threat that they pressed to see Bush and Cheney even before the inauguration. They got no meeting, however, then or later.
Bush, for his part, met with Clinton at the White House. As Clinton was to recall in his 2004 autobiography, he told the incoming president that Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda would be his biggest security problem.
Bush would tell the 9/11 Commission he “did not remember much being said about al Qaeda” during the briefing. In his 2010 memoir, he dealt with the subject by omitting it altogether. According to Clinton, Bush “listened to what I had to say without much comment, then changed the subject.”
TWENTY-SIX
“WE ARE NOT THIS STORY’S AUTHOR,” GEORGE BUSH TOLD THE American people in his inaugural speech on January 20, 2001. God would direct events during his presidency. “An angel,” he declared, citing a statesman of Thomas Jefferson’s day, “still rides in the whirlwind and directs this storm.”
In the months and years since the whirlwind of 9/11, statesmen, intelligence officers, and law enforcement officials have assiduously played the blame game, passed the buck, and—in almost all cases—ducked responsibility. No one, no one at all, would in the end be held to account.
The Clinton administration’s approach, Condoleezza Rice has been quoted as saying, had been “empty rhetoric that made us look feckless.” The former President, for his part, staunchly defended his handling of the terrorist threat. “They ridiculed me for trying,” Clinton said of Bush’s people. “They had eight months to try. They did not try.”
“What we did in the eight months,” Rice riposted, “was at least as aggressive as what the Clinton administration did.… The notion [that] somehow for eight months the Bush administration sat there and didn’t do that is just flatly false.”
Quite early in the presidency, according to Rice, Bush told her: “I’m tired of swatting at flies.… I’m tired of playing defense. I want to play offense. I want to take the fight to the terrorists.” Counterterrorism coordinator Clarke, who was held over from the Clinton administration, recalled being sent a presidential directive to “just solve this problem.”
The record shows, however, that nothing effective was done.
JUST FIVE DAYS after the inauguration, Rice received a memorandum from Clarke headed “Presidential Policy Initiative/Review—the al Qaeda Network.” It had two attachments, a “Strategy for Eliminating the Threat” worked up especially for the transition to the new administration, and an older “Political-Military” plan that had the same aim.
Al Qaeda, the memo stressed, was “not some narrow little terrorist issue.” It was an “active, organized, major force.… We would make a major error if we underestimated the challenge al Qaeda poses.” A meeting of “Principals”—cabinet-level members of the government—Clarke wrote, was “urgently” required. The italicization and the underlining of the word “urgently” are Clarke’s in the original.
Suggestions for action aside, the material said al Qaeda had “multiple, active cells capable of launching military-style, large-scale terrorist operations,” that it appeared sleeper agents were active within the United States. It proposed an increased funding level for CIA activity in Afghanistan. It asked, too, when and how the new administration would respond to the attack on the USS Cole—the indications, by now, were that al Qaeda had indeed been responsible.
Condoleezza Rice would claim in testimony to the 9/11 Commission that “No al Qaeda plan was turned over to the new administration.” Nor, she complained, had there been any recommendation as to what she should do about specific points. The staff director of Congress’s earlier Joint Inquiry into 9/11, Eleanor Hill—a former inspector general at the Defense Department—was shocked to hear Rice say that.
“Having served in government for twenty-some years, I was horrified by that response,” Hill said. “She is the national security adviser. She can’t just sit there and wait.… Her underlings are telling her that she has a problem. It’s her job to be a leader and direct them … not to sit there complacently waiting for someone to tell her, the leader, what to do.”
Within a week of President Bush’s inauguration, counterterrorism coordinator Clarke called for top-level action. By 9/11, eight months later, none had been ordered.
The Clarke submission had in fact made a series of proposals for action. The pressing request, however, was for the prompt meeting of cabinet-level officials. Far from getting it, Clarke found that he himself was no longer to be a member of the Principals Committee. He was instead to report to a Committee of Deputy Secretaries. There were to be no swift decisions on anything pertinent to dealing with al Qaeda.
Though candidate Bush had declared there should be retaliation for the Cole attack, there would be none. Rice and Bush wanted something more effective, the former national security adviser has said, than a “tit-for-tat” response. By the time the Bush team took over, she added, the attack had become “ancient history.”
As for the deputy secretaries, they did not meet to discuss terrorism for three full months. When al Qaeda was addressed, at the end of April, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz was deprecatory about the “little terrorist in Afghanistan.” “I just don’t understand,” he said, “why we are beginning by talking about this one man bin Laden.”
It was a tetchy, inconclusive meeting, which agreed only on having more papers written and more meetings held. Not until July would the deputies produce the draft of an overall plan for action.
It was not only Clarke sounding the tom-tom of alarm. The former deputy national security adviser, Lieutenant General Donald Kerrick, who stayed on for a few months in 2001, wrote in a memo, “We are going to be struck again.�
�� He received no reply, and would conclude that Bush’s people were “gambling nothing would happen.”
The chairman of the National Commission on Terrorism, Paul Bremer, said in a speech as early as February that the new administration seemed “to be paying no attention to the problem of terrorism. What they will do is stagger along until there’s a major incident and then suddenly say, ‘Oh, my God, shouldn’t we be organized to deal with this?’ That’s too bad. They’ve been given a window of opportunity with very little terrorism now, and they’re not taking advantage of it.”
“The highest priority must invariably be on those things that threaten the lives of Americans or the physical security of the United States,” CIA director Tenet told the Senate Intelligence Committee the same month. “Osama bin Laden and his global network of lieutenants and associates remain the most immediate and serious threat.”
A scoop article in 2007 in France’s newspaper of record, Le Monde, made public a large batch of French intelligence documents. Copies of the documents, which the authors have seen, include a January 2001 report stating that bin Laden and others had been planning an airplane hijacking for the past twelve months.
Seven airlines had been considered as potential targets under the plan as initially discussed, the report said, five American, Air France, and Lufthansa. The U.S. airlines mentioned included American and United, the two airlines that were to be hit on 9/11. According to French intelligence sources, the report was passed on to the CIA at the time.
The CIA and the FBI shared at least the gist of perceived threats with the FAA, the body responsible for supervising the safety of the flying public. Bin Laden or al Qaeda, or both, would be mentioned in more than fifty of about a hundred FAA daily summaries issued between the early spring and September 2001. The FAA took no preventative action, however, ordered no new measures to safeguard cockpit security, did not alert the crews who flew the planes to anything special about the situation.
On most days, at his own request, President Bush met with CIA director Tenet. Every day, too, the President received a CIA briefing known as the PDB—the President’s Daily Brief. Between the inauguration and September 10, bin Laden was mentioned in forty PDBs.
THE TERRORIST OPERATION, of course, continued throughout the period. As Bush prepared for the presidency, Atta had made a brief January trip outside the United States, flying to Europe for a secure meeting with Binalshibh. Each of the hijack pilots, he was able to report, had completed their training and awaited further orders.
Marwan al-Shehhi traveled to Morocco for reasons unknown. Ziad Jarrah reentered the United States—this time accompanied by his lover, Aysel. He introduced her around the flight school in Florida and—equipped as he now was with his new pilot’s license—flew her to Key West and back. Aysel had had her suspicions about what her lover was up to in the United States, had wondered whether he really was learning to fly. Now she believed him.
Any travel outside the United States was a risk for the terrorists, as there was always the possibility that they would not be allowed back in. Jarrah, with his Lebanese passport and a girlfriend on his arm, encountered no problem and was readmitted as a tourist.
Reentry was not so easy for Atta and Shehhi. Atta, whose visa status was out of order, faced the hurdle of seeing two immigration inspectors. He was allowed in as a tourist all the same—a decision that, after 9/11, would be ruled as having been “improper.” Improperly admitted or not, the hijackers’ leader was back in the country.
Shehhi, too, almost blew it. When he was referred to a second inspector—because his visa status also looked dubious—he balked at going to the inspection room. “I thought he would bolt,” the immigration man was to recall. “I told someone in secondary to watch him. He made me remember him. If he had been smart he wouldn’t have done that.” Nevertheless, Shehhi was readmitted.
One after another, the systems designed to protect the United States had failed—and would fail again.
In the weeks that followed, Atta and Shehhi turned up in Florida, in Georgia, possibly in Tennessee, and in Virginia. Their movements in those states remain blurred, their purpose unclear. On several occasions, they rented single-engine airplanes. Witnesses who believed they encountered them would say Atta asked probing questions about a chemical plant, about crop duster planes, about a reservoir near a nuclear facility. KSM had left Atta free to consider optional targets.
The fourth of the future hijacking pilots, Hani Hanjour, stayed put in Arizona, devoting himself to learning more about big airliners at a flight training center. Though not deemed a promising student, he received a training center certificate showing that he had completed sixty hours on a Boeing 737–200 simulator. Hazmi, who never succeeded as a pilot at any level, stayed close to Hanjour. On Hanjour’s behalf presumably, he sent off for videos from Sporty’s Pilot Shop. He received information on Boeing flight systems, and advice on “How an Airline Captain Should Look and Act.”
Following a trip to the Grand Canyon, Hazmi and Hanjour headed for the East Coast—and a vital appointment. In early May they were at Washington’s Dulles Airport to greet two of the “muscle hijackers,” the thirteen additional men trained for the violent, bloody work ahead.
All but one of the new arrivals were Saudis aged between twenty and twenty-eight, from the southwest of their country. None had more than a high school education, an education in which they had been inculcated with authorized government dogma such as “The Hour will not come until Muslims will fight the Jews and Muslims will kill all the Jews.”
Saudi officials, on whom American investigators had to rely after 9/11, said only one of the muscle recruits had held a job. He taught physical education. Some were devout—one had acted as imam at his local mosque—but none had been considered zealots. One had suffered from depression, his brother said, until he consulted a religious adviser. Two, according to the Saudis, had been known to drink alcohol. All wound up in a bin Laden training camp, some of them after starting out with plans to join the jihad in Chechnya.
Osama bin Laden himself picked many of these young men for the 9/11 operation, according to KSM. Size and strength were not a primary qualification—most were no more than five foot seven. What was essential was the readiness to die as a martyr—and the ability to obtain a U.S. visa. Before final training, all the Saudis had been sent home to get one.
In Saudi Arabia, with its special relationship to the United States, getting a visa was astonishingly easy—easier by far than the arduous process that had long been the norm for citizens of friendly Western countries. Visa applications were successful even when not properly filled out, let alone when they were literately presented. One future hijacker described his occupation as “teater.” Two said they were headed for a city named as “Wasantwn” to join an employer or school identified only as “South City.”
Obtaining a visa turned out to be even easier for the last four of the muscle hijackers to apply. Under a new U.S. program named Visa Express, applicants could merely apply through a travel agency, with no need even to appear at the consulate. The in-joke was that “all Saudis had to do was throw their passports over the consulate wall.” The then American consul general in Riyadh, Thomas Furey, told the 9/11 Commission he “did not think Saudis were security risks.”
Now that the recruits had visas in hand, the final phase of training involved hijacking techniques, advice on how to deal with sky marshals, and lessons in killing. The men bound for America were issued Swiss knives. Then, by way of rehearsal for the slaughter of passengers and aircrew, they used them to butcher sheep and camels.
According to KSM, trainees were also obliged to learn about hijacking trains, carrying out truck bombings, and blowing up buildings. This was “to muddy somewhat the real purpose of their training, in case they were caught while in transit to the U.S.” The men were told they were to take part in an airborne suicide operation, KSM said, only when they reached Dubai en route to the United States.
; The muscle hijackers arrived during the late spring and early summer, traveling mostly in pairs. Except for one man, who was supposedly on business as “a dealer,” the word often used by Saudi applicants to signify “businessman,” they masqueraded as tourists. Several had unsatisfactory documentation—one called himself by different names on different forms—yet none had real difficulty getting into the United States. The rickety system was failing still.
By prior arrangement with Atta, some flew into Washington or New York, the others into airports in Florida. Atta looked after logistics in the South, while Hazmi—at this stage viewed as second-in-command—made arrangements in the North. With the newcomers came a fresh supply of money to feed and maintain the terrorists as the countdown to 9/11 began.
As had most of those who preceded them, the thirteen had recorded videotaped martyrdom messages in Afghanistan. “We left our families,” one said, “to send a message the color of blood. The message says, ‘Oh Allah, take from our blood today until you are satisfied.’ The message says: ‘The time of humiliation and subjugation is over.’ It is time to kill Americans in their homeland, among their sons and near their forces and intelligence.”
The hijackers’ videotapes would not be released until after 9/11.
WARNINGS THAT something specific was afoot were now reaching the outside world with increasing frequency. Bin Laden’s archenemy in Afghanistan, Ahmed Shah Massoud, the most prominent military figure still undefeated by the Taliban, brought a blunt message with him on a visit to Europe in April.
At a press conference at the European Parliament in Strasbourg, Massoud made a wide-ranging appeal for assistance. “If President Bush doesn’t help us,” he said in response to a reporter’s question on al Qaeda, “then these terrorists will damage the United States and Europe very soon, and it will be too late.” Though the comment received little if any coverage in the media, the CIA was paying close attention. Two agency officers, sent from Washington for the express purpose, had a private meeting with Massoud in France. The full detail of what he told them remains classified, but a heavily redacted intelligence document reveals that he had “gained limited knowledge of the intentions of the Saudi millionaire, bin Laden, and his terrorist organization, al Qaeda, to perform a terrorist act against the U.S., on a scale larger than the 1998 bombing of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania [two lines deleted].”
The Eleventh Day Page 33