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 Council 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.
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 t
he 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.
The Eleventh Day: The Full Story of 9/11 and Osama bin Laden Page 33