Not that the FBI was a model of openness or flexibility. Rather, as journalist Lawrence Wright had once noted, it was “a timid bureaucracy that abhorred powerful individuals; it was known for its brutal treatment of employees who were ambitious, or who fought conventional wisdom.” By spring 2001, the bureau had effectively forced from its ranks New York agent John O’Neill, a flamboyant, ambitious, sometimes reckless figure who had been assailing headquarters for years about Al Qaeda’s intentions. It was also an agency without a permanent chief: Longtime director Louis Freeh had resigned, and the Gore White House was looking for a replacement. (They briefly considered New York mayor Rudy Giuliani, a strong-willed figure with a law enforcement background, but his recent messy separation from his wife and a bout with prostate cancer made that choice problematic. They soon settled on New York City police commissioner Bernard Kerik—with his blue-collar upbringing and military-police background, he seemed a much safer choice.)
There were more missed warning signs. When agents in Phoenix sent headquarters a memo—why, they asked, are so many men of Middle Eastern origin enrolled in flight schools in the U.S.?—the memo never made its way up the chain of command.
And then, in the middle of August, the United States caught a break, when the demands of President Gore and counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke penetrated the bureaucracy and gave the country one last chance.
And they came close, so very close.
* * *
Neila James was beginning to wonder whether she had made the right choice.
It was 2 p.m. on Friday, August 31, and while every corridor of every building in Washington was filled with government workers fleeing for the Labor Day weekend, Neila was at her desk in the cramped burrow she shared with two other employees in the NSC’s Counterterrorism Security Group, facing a small mountain of paper and a computer file jammed with reports from half a dozen agencies. She had drawn the short straw this holiday weekend, consigned to an effort to catch up with the flood of information, most of it useless, about Al Qaeda—rumors, threats, reported movements, hints of something, anything.
It was the last place she would have expected herself to be when she entered Yale Law School in 1998; public interest law was her focus, maybe the environment, perhaps women’s issues. Then, in December 2000, the USS Cole was bombed. One of the victims was her cousin Tom, her favorite relative, with a puckish sense of humor and a talent for the guitar. When she visited him in the hospital—blind, his hands blown away—her anger was visceral, and so was her reaction: I want to find the bastards who did this. Once she set her sights on Richard Clarke’s operation, the strong recommendations of the Yale Law faculty percolated up the transition team, and Neila James signed on to Clarke’s operation. She had no doubt about the importance of the work; everyone in the field was gripped by the certain conviction that something genuinely terrifying was in the works—“another Hiroshima,” one jihadist had boasted on an intercepted phone call. But no one knew what or where or when, which made the meticulous review of every scrap of data necessary, and incredibly frustrating—especially when there was a beach house down in Rehoboth where her friends would be partying away the long weekend. And for the next hour she forced herself to scan every cable, e-mail, and memo, no matter how insignificant it seemed: an overheard conversation in a Hamburg bookstore; surveillance reports on potential homegrown terrorists, frustrated FBI agents in Minnesota, urgently requesting permission to search a computer.
James looked more closely at the request. This may be worth a second look, she thought.
The computer belonged to thirty-three-year-old Zacarias Moussaoui, a French citizen of Moroccan descent who had spent the past six months at flight training schools in Norman, Oklahoma, and now at the Pan Am International Flight Academy, in Eagan, Minnesota. In his application to the school, Moussaoui had written in fractured English, “I would like to fly in a professional-like manner one of the big airliners. I have to make my mind which … the level I would like to access is to be able to take off and land, to handle navigation … ”
Well, he wouldn’t be the first indolent playboy to treat flight training as a sport. But there was something about him—his eagerness to work the flight simulator, his utter lack of even basic aircraft knowledge. His instructors were uneasy enough to contact the FBI. On August 16, 2001, FBI and INS agents arrested Moussaoui for immigration violations. When they found flight simulators, airline schedules, and a raft of other material, they asked FBI headquarters, in Washington, for permission to search Moussaoui’s computer. Headquarters quickly declined the request—not enough probable cause. Seventy messages were sent, more and more urgently asking for permission. Said one exasperated agent, “I’m trying to keep someone from taking a plane and crashing it into the World Trade Center!”
“That’s not going to happen,” came the reply.
It took three minutes for Neila James to print out the key exchanges, race through the corridors of the Counterterrorism Security Group’s headquarters, and burst breathlessly into Richard Clarke’s office, where she found the director shutting down his computer and preparing for a couple of days off during the long weekend.
“Unless you’re about to tell me you’ve found an e-mail detailing an Al Qaeda attack tomorrow afternoon, I’m not interested,” Clarke told her. He and his staff had grown so accustomed to late-breaking crises exploding on the eve of a weekend that they had come to label the lost weekends “the Friday Follies.”
“Yes, you are,” James said.
Clarke snatched the papers out of her hand and glanced at them impatiently. Then he sat down slowly, read for a moment, and picked up the phone to cancel his weekend plans.
Within an hour, a bulletin went out from Clarke to every agency even remotely connected to terrorism and intelligence gathering: Urgent you ask every asset any information RE: Zacarias Moussaoui, training at flight school in minnesota. Report any data … repeat any data … directly to Clarke immediately.
And if there had been time, even a little more time, that request might have changed everything.
But it was Friday afternoon, Labor Day weekend, and the agencies of government, like most of the country, were already shutting down the engines, turning off the lights, and heading to the beach, the mountains, the backyard.
As a result, the FBI agent who had been working with Ahmed Ressam was away for a few days; Ressam, the would-be Millennium bomber at LAX, had been cooperating with the feds for months; he knew about Moussaoui, and the link between Ressam and Moussaoui would have been more than enough to establish probable cause to search his computer; that search, in turn, would have opened up a world of connection between Moussaoui and Al Qaeda. But the agent wouldn’t even see Clarke’s bulletins until Thursday, September 6. He had no reason to think Ressam had any connection to Moussaoui—and wouldn’t learn of that link until late in the afternoon on September 10. He dispatched a message to Clarke’s office, which arrived on the director’s desk fifteen minutes after he had gone home for the night.
Meanwhile, the FBI deputy director who had repeatedly denied the Minnesota office permission to search the computer pushed back hard against Clarke when he was reached over the weekend, raising the specter of racial profiling, lawsuits, and the “wall” (which did not in fact exist) that kept intelligence and criminal agents from communicating with one another.
“Get me a directive from the president or the attorney general and I’ll be happy to give permission,” the deputy director said sternly. But Gore was spending Labor Day in Tennessee, one of his regular visits “back home, where I’ve got some fences to mend.” Once Gore got Clarke’s plea, he talked with Attorney General Jamie Gorelick, who talked to acting director Kelly, who convened a legal team that promised an answer within seventy-two hours. The search of Moussaoui’s computer would not begin until 8 a.m. Central Daylight Time on the morning of Tuesday, September 11.
And because it was Labor Day
weekend, there was no one with real authority at the FAA, no one to respond to Clarke’s new concern; his bulletin about the Moussaoui memo had triggered a note from the Phoenix FBI field office: Nothing about a Moussaoui, but were you made aware of our concern over all those Middle Easterners who seemed to be enrolling in U.S. flight schools? No, he hadn’t been. But the two disparate pieces of information—Moussaoui in Minnesota, other Middle Easterners at flight schools nationwide—seemed to fit. Moreover, the whole intelligence system had been blinking bright red over Fourth of July weekend. Maybe they had focused on the wrong holiday, and maybe the airlines were the target.
But Labor Day passed peacefully. And on Tuesday, September 4, when the top FAA officials learned of Clarke’s concern, there was a giant collective eye-rolling.
First, they said, we haven’t had a U.S. hijacking in eighteen years; second, counterterrorism has received threatening intelligence every holiday, and nothing ever happens. But beyond all of that—what does this guy want us to do? Pull the airlines out of service so we can arm the damn cockpit doors? Hire a few thousand air marshals in the next week? Double down on airport screenings?
“For God’s sake, Dick,” the top FAA security official said in a phone call, “do you happen to know where the President of the United States is going next Tuesday? He’s going to Miami International Airport, to celebrate a historic victory over airline delays. How happy would he be if the day of his speech, we’ve got lines of very unhappy passengers all over CNN? I don’t think so, Dick.”
* * *
As Air Force One flew south this late-summer day, President Gore was looking forward to an increasingly rare event: a full day of good news in the state that had given him the presidency, and that remained the key focus of his team’s political energies.
In Orlando, there would be a speech at Disney World, before a convention of communications-software developers, where Gore would promise continued federal support for the rapid outbuilding of a national broadband network. Maybe the political world was stuck in a world of post offices and touch-tone phones, he thought, but that’s not where we’re heading, and I want the next generation of entrepreneurs to know that I know. In Miami this evening, he would speak at a massive dinner in honor of Jorge Mas Canosa, the late king of the Cuban American community. And then tomorrow, Tuesday, he would be at Miami International Airport, to commemorate the one unalloyed piece of good news he had had in these past troubled months.
The bad news had come in waves. There was the collapse of the dot-com bubble, and then the telecom crash, both beginning months before he had even taken office, the result of events as disparate as a court ruling against Microsoft and a disastrously wrongheaded merger between AOL and Time Warner. Once-mighty companies like WorldCom and Global Crossing disappeared from the face of the earth, while other celebrated companies, like Pets.com, imploded. The giddy sense of effortless enrichment among investors collapsed just as thoroughly.
Worse, the seemingly unending series of interest-rate increases by the Fed had managed to send the broader American economy into recession in March; by June the unemployment rate had jumped to 6.4 percent—the highest in nine years—and late-night comedians were beginning to joke that Al Gore had accomplished in six months what Clinton hadn’t managed in eight years.
“Maybe,” David Letterman cracked, “it’s time to bring back to the White House someone who know how to get things rising again. Anyone have Monica Lewinsky’s phone number?”
Nor was Gore finding any satisfaction in the fight for his legislative programs. The Republican majority in the House was adamantly insisting on applying the entire surplus—still estimated at more than $200 billion—toward a tax cut substantially skewed toward the more affluent taxpayers; Gore’s plan to shore up the Social Security and Medicare trust funds, House Majority Leader Tom DeLay insisted, was “just more proof that the president marches to the beat of socialist drums.” From his own side of the spectrum came more complaints that Gore was abandoning the core concerns of the Democratic Party. Where were the large-scale investments in roads and bridges? Where was the legislation making it easier for workers to unionize their factories and offices? Where was universal health care? For heaven’s sake, there were even rumors that Gore was considering the idea of an individual health mandate, the idea pushed by the right-wing Heritage Foundation.
“I refuse to believe such rumors,” said Senator Hillary Clinton, who had famously drafted a health-care plan as first lady that had gone down in ignominious defeat. “No one who calls himself a Democrat could seriously entertain such a notion.”
The struggling economy and the legislative gridlock had combined to put a serious dent in Gore’s approval ratings. Indeed, a poll release just that morning had shown that if the 2000 election were rerun, Gore and Bush would once again finish in a dead heat. And now there was a new annoyance—right there in the pages of the New Yorker magazine the president held in his lap.
It was a piece by Seymour Hersh, one of the most indefatigable investigative journalists, the man who had exposed the My Lai massacre in South Vietnam back in 1969 and who took special delight in ferreting out discontent in the defense and intelligence arenas. Hersh’s ten-thousand-word article took a skeptical look at the killing of Osama bin Laden, building a brief from dissident Defense Department and CIA officials. Hersh questioned everything, from the president’s constitutional power to order extraterritorial killing to the danger that bin Laden’s death could spark retaliation inside the United States—“blowback,” as they called it in the intelligence community. There was no doubt Hersh’s article would get heavy play on the network newscasts and the next day’s front pages.
And that story would play at a time when fears of a terrorist strike were at a peak. Back in July, Clarke had told Gore flatly that “something really, really spectacular is going to happen here, and it’s going to happen soon.” CIA director Tenet was circulating warnings from the Middle East that “something very, very, very, very big is about to happen.” He had followed Clarke’s urgings, convened two principals meetings in the past three weeks, he was on the phone daily with Tenet and the FBI—Bernie Kerik, the new director, from New York, had been there for a few days now—and he hoped that his insistence would work its way down that sclerotic bureaucracy. Well, Labor Day had come and gone without incident, so maybe there was some breathing room. But that Hersh piece was only likely to feed the classic Washington “cover your ass” mentality.
Which was why the event at the Miami airport the next day was such a welcome relief for the president: a chance to share clearly good news with the country.
It was Gore’s attempt to answer one of the most nettlesome annoyances of middle-class life in the America of 2001: air travel. For millions of middle-class and professional men and women, the simple matter of taking to the skies had become hell on earth. An antiquated air-traffic-control system, overscheduling of flights, and the rush of travelers to enjoy cheap airfares had combined to strangle the system. Some ninety million passengers had suffered delays or cancellations in just the first seven months of 2000.
“I know airline delays may not rank with poverty and pollution and nuclear proliferation,” he told his senior advisors, “but it’s one of those nuisances that can ruin a week. If we could do something to make it better, it would be a huge political plus.”
So on April 15, 2001—a date chosen so he could offer “a small piece of good news from the government to whom you have just sent your taxes”—President Gore had signed off on a simple, highly consequential step. For years, military “air corridors” across the United States had been reserved for use by the Armed Forces. With the Cold War over, with the prospect of combat with any hostile power so remote, the president went to Newark airport on Tax Day to announce that he was opening the two East Coast corridors to commercial travel.
The results were impressive and, by the standards of government actions, swift. By June, when th
e summer travel season began in earnest, flight delays out of the three major New York airports had been cut nearly in half. When thunderstorms erupted, as they sometimes did during summer months, no one could do much about the delays that followed. But on a bright, clear day, it was almost commonplace for flights to depart more or less on schedule. And it was on just such a day that President Gore traveled to Miami to celebrate the achievement. It was a perfect trifecta for the beleaguered president: the use of executive power to achieve a goal that would be directly felt by a critical voting bloc even as the gridlocked legislative process had stalled his agenda; a chance for an appearance in the state that had given him the White House, and would likely be critical again; and an appearance on as perfect a late-summer day as anyone could want, just as the regiments of business travelers would be returning to the skies after the summer vacations. Tuesday, September 11.
There was no way it should have led to the worst day in American history.
September 11, 2001
“I can’t believe it!” First Officer LeRoy Homer said to Jason Dahl, the pilot of the Boeing 757. “Wheels up at 8:10? At Newark? When was the last time we didn’t sit on the tarmac for an hour?”
“Weather’s perfect, for a change,” Captain Dahl said, noting the bright-blue sky, no storms anywhere, and a lot more room for commercial jets to fly, thanks to President Gore’s opening of those military air corridors. Moreover, the FAA was paying special attention to the travels of the president this day; extra air-traffic controllers had been quietly assigned to the nation’s busiest airports, to lessen the risk of embarrassing delays on the morning the president was to celebrate easing the pain of air travelers.
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