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].”
CIA director Tenet, for his part, has revealed significantly more about Massoud’s warning. He told his Agency visitors that “
bin Laden was sending twenty-five operatives to Europe for terrorist activities. The operatives, he said, would be traveling through Iran and Bosnia.” The intelligence was not far off target. “Twenty-five” was close to nineteen, the actual number of terrorists dispatched on the 9/11 mission, and some of them did travel through Iran.
Around the time Massoud talked with the CIA officers, ominous information came in from Cairo. Egyptian intelligence, itself ever alert to the threat from the Muslim Brotherhood—and aware that Ayman al-Zawahiri, the long-distance element of that threat, was in Afghanistan at bin Laden’s side—had managed to penetrate al Qaeda. “We knew that something was going to happen,” President Mubarak would recall, “to the United States, maybe inside the United States, maybe in an airplane, maybe in embassies.” Imprecise though it was, the warning was passed to the CIA’s station in Egypt.
When he addressed a class at the National War College that month, the CIA’s Cofer Black said he believed “something big was coming, and that it would very likely be in the U.S.” He also spoke of his foreboding at a meeting with executives at the FBI Academy at Quantico.
The Bureau’s director, Louis Freeh, raised the subject of terrorism, that same day, with Attorney General John Ashcroft, to be told, according to one account—which has since been denied by a Justice Department spokesperson—that Ashcroft “didn’t want to hear about it.” It was not the last time, reportedly, that the attorney general would speak in that vein.
Exactly what warnings CIA director Tenet personally passed to President Bush, what was in the Daily Briefs the President received, and how he responded, we do not know. With one exception, the Bush administration briefs remain classified. Very similar briefing documents, however, went each morning to other very senior officials. Commission staff who read them learned that, in April and May alone, such senior officials received summaries headed “Bin Laden Planning Multiple Operations,” “Bin Laden Public Profile May Presage Attack,” and “Bin Laden’s Networks’ Plans Advancing.”
That the CIA and other intelligence agencies were getting a stream of intelligence is not surprising. Al Qaeda’s security was constantly being breached, notably by Osama bin Laden himself. His “public profile,” to use the Agency’s wording, reflected in part the fact that the terrorist leader had been making triumphalist speeches to his followers. He was also hopelessly indiscreet.
A young Australian recruit to the cause, David Hicks, got off letter after gushing letter to his mother back home. “They send a lot of spies here,” he wrote in May. “One way to get around [the spies] is to send a letter to ‘Abu Muslim Australia’…. By the way, I have met Osama bin Laden about twenty times, he is a lovely brother.… I will get to meet him again. There is a group of us going.”
A follower who served bin Laden as bodyguard, Shadi Abdalla, would recall his leader boasting of plans to kill thousands of people in the United States. “All the people [in the camp] knew that bin Laden said that there would be something done against America … America was going to be hit.”
Even one of the future hijackers was blabbing. Khalid al-Mihdhar, still in the Middle East following his impetuous return home to see his wife and newborn baby, chattered to a cousin in Saudi Arabia. Five attacks were in the works, he said—close to the eventual total of four—and due by summer’s end. He quoted bin Laden as having said, “I will make it happen even if I do it by myself.”
Bin Laden himself went even further, asking a crowd in one of the camps to pray for “the success of an attack involving twenty martyrs.” Had Ramzi Binalshibh not been refused a visa, and had it not proved impossible to replace him, there would have been twenty hijackers on 9/11.
“It’s time to penetrate America and Israel and hit them where it hurts,” said bin Laden. “Penetrate.”
The Taliban regime, worried in part about the potential consequences, asked bin Laden to moderate his outbursts. Their guest got around that by calling in an MBC—Middle East Broadcasting Corporation—TV reporter and telling him—off camera and off mic—that there would soon be “some news.” Then he sat back as an aide, Atef, said: “In the next few weeks we will carry out a big surprise, and we will strike or attack American and Israeli interests.” Others told the reporter that the “coffin business will increase in the United States.” Asked to confirm the nature of the “news”—again off camera—bin Laden just smiled.
Behind the scenes with KSM, he had again become impatient. He was a man with a penchant that many in his culture shared, for auguries and superstition. At one point that spring, with no more justification than that the number 7 was by tradition auspicious, bin Laden urged KSM to bring forward the hijackings and strike on May 12. That date, he pointed out, would be exactly seven months after the successful attack on the Cole. KSM told him the team was not yet ready.
In mid-June, following reports in the media that Israel’s prime minister Ariel Sharon was within days due to visit President Bush at the White House, bin Laden bombarded KSM with requests for the operation to be activated at once. The MBC television team had been told during their recent visit that the coming strike would be “a big gift for the intifada.”
A strike coinciding with the Sharon trip—not least when Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat had pointedly received no invitation from the White House—must have seemed highly desirable. KSM, however, again persuaded bin Laden that precipitate action would be ill-advised.
All this was terrible tradecraft, amateurish folly that could have doomed the 9/11 plan to failure.
IN WASHINGTON, meanwhile, Richard Clarke still pressed in vain for expeditious action. Fearing that he was becoming “like Captain Ahab with bin Laden as the White Whale,” he had long since thought he should consider finding other work. Yet he was still there at the end of May, still worrying.
A recently released Commission staff note, written following a review of National Security Council files, observes that it was clear that “Clarke was driving process in the new Bush Administration, not Condi Rice or Steve Hadley. Not much was going on at their level against AQ. Highest levels of government were not engaged, were not driving the process.”
“When these attacks occur, as they likely will,” Clarke wrote Rice on May 29, “we will wonder what more we could have done to stop them.”
The following day, Rice asked George Tenet and CIA colleagues to assess the gravity of the danger. On a scale of one to ten, she was told, it rated a seven.
Two weeks later, a report reached the CIA that KSM was “recruiting people to travel to the United States to meet with colleagues already there.” On June 21, with the wave of threat information continuing, the intelligence agencies—and the military in the Middle East—went on high alert. As the month ended, with the July 4 holiday approaching, the National Security Agency intercepted terrorist traffic indicating that something “very, very, very, very big” was imminent. Clarke duly advised Rice.
The holiday passed without incident, but the anxiety remained. On July 10, according to Tenet, his counterterrorism chief, Cofer Black, delivered a threat assessment that made his hair stand on end. With Black and the head of the bin Laden unit at his side, the director rushed immediately to see Rice at the White House. There followed a deeply unsatisfactory encounter—one the 9/11 Commission Report failed to mention.
The CIA chiefs told Rice flatly: “There will be a significant terrorist attack in the coming weeks or months.” The bin Laden unit head went through the bald facts of the intelligence. His colleagues described CIA ploys that might disrupt and delay the attack. Then they urged immediate decisions on measures that would tackle the overall problem. The slow, plodding deliberations of the deputy secretaries were taking too long.
Rice asked Richard Clarke, who was also present, whether he agreed. Clarke, according to Tenet, “put his elbows on his knees and his head fell into his hands and he gave an exasperated yes.” “The President,” Tenet told Rice, “needed to align his policy with the new reality.” Rice assured them t
hat Bush would do that.
She did not convince the deputation from the CIA. According to the Washington Post’s Bob Woodward, writing in 2006, they “felt they were not getting through to Rice. She was polite, but they felt the brush-off.… Rice had seemed focused on other administration priorities, especially the ballistic missile defense system that Bush had campaigned on. She was in a different place.… No immediate action meant great risk.”
In Cofer Black’s view, Woodward wrote, “The decision to just keep planning was a sustained policy failure. Rice and the Bush team had been in hibernation too long.” “Adults,” Black said, “should not have a system like this.”
Black had been sure for months that catastrophe was coming. Sure, too, that as counterterrorist head he would take the flak for it, he had long had his resignation signed and ready in his desk. The bin Laden unit head—his name is still officially withheld—and Michael Scheuer, his predecessor, were also now talking of resigning.
The same day the CIA chiefs tried to get action from the White House, an FBI agent in Arizona sent a memo to a number of headquarters officials, including four members of the Bureau’s own bin Laden unit. Agent Kenneth Williams reported: “The purpose of this communication is to advise the Bureau and New York of the possibility of a coordinated effort by Osama bin Laden to send students to the United States to attend civil aviation universities and colleges. Phoenix has observed an inordinate number of individuals of investigative interest who are attending or who have attended.… These individuals will be in a position in the future to conduct terror activity against civil aviation targets.”
Over eight pages, Williams laid out the reasons for his concern. One man he named was a known contact of bin Laden’s senior accomplice Abu Zubaydah. Another connected to the two Saudis who two years earlier had come under suspicion for their behavior during an America West flight. Investigators were later to conclude that the same man’s associates had included Hani Hanjour—the 9/11 hijacking pilot who had trained in Arizona.
The Eleventh Day: The Full Story of 9/11 and Osama bin Laden Page 34