The job of finding Mihdhar, nevertheless, went to an intelligence agent, Robert Fuller, working on his own. Corsi marked the assignment “Routine” because—she would later tell investigators—she “assigned no particular urgency to the matter.” The designation “Routine” gave Fuller thirty days to get under way. It was August 29.
LIKE PRESIDENT BUSH, CIA director Tenet had spent part of August on vacation—again like the President, fishing. By his own account, however, he kept very much abreast of developments. That month, he wrote in 2007, he had directed his counterterrorism unit to review old files—and thus took part of the credit for the “discovery” that Mihdhar and Hazmi might be in the United States.
Tenet, too, had been briefed on the detention of the suspect flight student in Minneapolis. The FBI early on sent fulsome information on Moussaoui to the Agency, and the details went to Tenet on August 23 in the form of a document headed “Islamic Extremist Learns to Fly.” The director’s staff took the matter very seriously, urging that the Bureau give it real attention. “If this guy is let go,” one CIA officer wrote on the 30th to a colleague liaising with the Bureau, “two years from now he will be talking to a control tower while aiming a 747 at the White House.”
Did Tenet share the developments on Mihdhar and Hazmi, and the alert over Moussaoui, with the President? It would seem surprising had he not done so—especially in the month Bush had received a Daily Brief entitled “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.” When the President was asked the question, Commissioner Ben-Veniste recalled, his “brow furrowed.” Bush said he recalled no mention of Moussaoui, that “no one ever told him there was a domestic problem.”
Tenet, for his part, stumbled badly in an appearance before the Commission. He claimed in sworn testimony that he had not seen Bush in August. “I didn’t see the President,” he said. “I was not in briefings with him during this time.… He’s in Texas and I’m either here [in Washington] or on leave [in New Jersey].” “You never get on the phone or in any kind of conference with him to talk,” asked commissioner Tim Roemer, “through the whole month of August?” “In this time period,” replied Tenet, “I’m not talking to him, no.”
It seemed astonishing, and for good reason: it was not true. Hours after Tenet had testified, CIA spokesman Bill Harlow told reporters that the director had in fact briefed the President in person twice in August, at the Texas ranch on August 17 and in Washington on August 31.
Could Tenet possibly have forgotten his one trip to see Bush in August, the very first time he had visited the ranch, in the sweltering heat of Texas? Roemer thought it possible that Tenet had lied.
Writing in 2007, Tenet made no mention of the lapse. Instead, he said he had indeed traveled to Texas, “to make sure the President stayed current on events.” According to the known record, the director would not have known of the Moussaoui and Mihdhar-Hazmi developments on the 17th. Both were well under way, however, by the time he saw the President on the 31st. Would they not have fit within the frame of keeping the President “current on events”? In a private interview, Tenet told the Commission that he did “not recall any discussions with the President of the domestic threat during this period.”
“THE QUESTION,” Michael Hirsh and Michael Isikoff wrote in Newsweek, is in the end “not so much what the President knew and when he knew it. The question is whether the administration was really paying much attention.”
In her testimony to the Commission, Rice rejected any notion that the administration let things slide. “I do not believe there was a lack of high-level attention,” she said. “The President was paying attention to this. How much higher level can you get?”
Lawrence Wilkerson, a trusted aide to Secretary of State Colin Powell, worked with a colleague on the preparation of Rice’s testimony. The job, he said, had been “an appalling enterprise. We would cherry-pick things to make it look like the President had been actually concerned about al Qaeda.… They didn’t give a shit about al Qaeda. They had priorities. The priorities were lower taxes, ballistic missiles, and the defense thereof.”
Commissioner Ben-Veniste, for his part, came away from his work on the Commission drawing the gravest possible conclusion. “There was no question in my mind,” he has written, “that had the President and his National Security Advisor been aggressively attentive to the potential for a domestic terrorist attack, some of the information already in the possession of our intelligence and law enforcement agencies might have been utilized to disrupt the plot.”
TWENTY-EIGHT
HELLO JENNY,
Wie geht’s dir? Mir geht’s gut …
Wie ich Dir letze mal gesagt habe die Erstsemester wird in drei wochen beginn kein Aendrugen!!!!!! …
The start of a coded email message written in broken German that Atta sent to Binalshibh in the third week of August. It is phrased as though it were a letter to his girlfriend Jenny. Translated, the entire message reads:
DEAR JENNY,
How are you? I’m fine …
As I told you in my last letter, the first semester starts in three weeks. No changes!!!!!! Everything’s going well. There’s high hope and very strong thoughts for success!!! Two high schools and two universities … Everything is going according plan. This summer is for sure going to be hot. I want to talk to you about some details. Nineteen certificates for specialized studies and 4 exams.… Regards to your professors … Until then …
The key part of the message is the reference to “high schools” and “universities.” In an earlier discussion of targeting—Atta and Binalshibh had still been discussing the option of striking the White House—they had used “architecture” to refer to the World Trade Center, “arts” to mean the Pentagon, “law” the Capitol, and “politics” to denote the White House.
The true meaning of the message, Binalshibh would explain in the interview he gave before he was captured, was:
Zero hour is going to be in three weeks’ time. There are no changes. All is well. The brothers have been seeing encouraging visions and dreams. The Twin Towers, the Pentagon and Capitol Hill. Everything is going according to plan. This summer is for sure going to be hot. I want to talk to you about some details. Nineteen hijackers and four targets. Regards to Khalid [KSM]/Osama.
Until we speak.
In the early hours of August 29, in Germany, Binalshibh was woken by the telephone. The caller was Atta, his Egyptian-accented voice instantly recognizable.
Atta had a riddle for Binalshibh, a joke as he put it: “ ‘Two sticks, a dash, and a cake with a stick down’ … What is it?” Binalshibh, half asleep, was stumped for a moment. Then—presumably he was expecting such a call—he figured out the answer. The puzzle, he told Atta, was “sweet.”
“Two sticks” signified “11.” The “dash” was a dash. A “cake with a stick down” was a “9.”
11–9—the way most of the world renders the days of the calendar. Or, as Americans render them:
9/11
The date was set.
• • •
BINALSHIBH PASSED on the date to KSM, and the hijackers’ operation entered its final phase. Everything now depended on Atta’s organizing ability and success in maintaining security. An effort to bring the total number of terrorists up to twenty—four five-man teams, one for each target—had recently risked wrecking the entire endeavor.
In early August, at Orlando, Florida, a U.S. immigration inspector had had his doubts about a newly arrived young Saudi. Standing instructions were to take it easy on Saudis—they were a boost to tourism—but this man had no return ticket and had not filled out customs and immigration forms. The inspector sent the man on for a “secondary,” a grilling that was to last two hours.
The would-be “tourist,” twenty-five-year-old Mohamed el-Kahtani, said that, though he would be staying only a few days, he did not know where he would be going next. He first said that someone due to arrive from abroad would be paying for his onward travel, then that another “someone�
� was waiting for him in Arrivals. Secondary inspector José Meléndez-Pérez noted, too, that the subject was belligerent.
“He started pointing his finger … Whatever he was saying was in a loud voice—like ‘I am in charge—you’re not going to do anything to me. I am from Saudi Arabia.’ People from Saudi think they are untouchable … He had a deep staring look … [like] ‘If I could grip your heart I would eat it’ … This man intimidated me with his look and his behavior.”
The inspector felt in his gut that Kahtani had evil intent—he thought he might be a hit man—and recommended that he be sent back to Saudi Arabia. This was the one occasion, after a series of inefficiencies involving the terrorists, that an alert INS official had really done his job. KSM was to admit under interrogation that the suspect had indeed been sent to the States to join the terrorist team—to “round out the number of hijackers.”
It is rational to think that, but for the inspector’s acumen, there would have been five rather than four hijackers aboard United Flight 93. With Kahtani’s additional muscle—Meléndez-Pérez remembered him as having looked trim, “like a soldier”—they might have been better able to resist the passengers’ attempt to retake the cockpit. Instead of plunging to the ground in Pennsylvania, Flight 93 might have stayed on course and struck its target in Washington.
There had indeed been a “someone” waiting to meet Kahtani at Orlando. Evidence gathered after 9/11 established to a virtual certainty that Mohamed Atta had been at the airport that day. He did not leave, parking records showed, until it was clear that the new recruit was not going to emerge from Immigration. Had those handling Kahtani taken the investigation of him one step further, had they thought the suspect might be engaged in terrorism, the leader of the operation might himself have come under the microscope. Atta might have been unmasked.
As it was, Atta remained free, putting thousands of miles on rental cars, flying hither and thither, coordinating communications, the whirl of logistics involved in getting nineteen men—most of them with minimal familiarity with the West or the English language—in place and ready for the appointed day.
Most of the time in August, the terrorists stayed in their apartments and motels. They did what in other men would have been everyday activities: in Florida, exercising, two of them, at a Y2 Fitness Center; going shopping—for jewelry at a store called the Piercing Pagoda, for a dress shirt at Surreys Menswear; getting clothes cleaned at a Fort Dixie Laundry.
There were some signs of movement. The men crowded into the apartment in Paterson, New Jersey, moved out, leaving behind a few items of clothing, glasses in the bathroom—and flight manuals. Crowded they remained, though. By late that month five of them were squeezed into one room at the Valencia Motel, a cheap joint in Laurel, Maryland. They seemed rarely to leave the room, opening the door to the maid only to take in fresh towels. Guests who used a next-door room “thought they were gay.”
Mostly, the men avoided attracting attention. An exception was the day at the end of August in Delray Beach, Florida, when a woman named Maria Simpson was startled by two men tugging unceremoniously at the door of her condominium. To her relief it turned out that, without asking permission, they were merely trying to retrieve a towel that had fallen from their balcony on the floor above. Simpson was to recognize them later, when she looked at FBI mug shots, as two of the muscle hijackers who took down United Flight 93. Their faces looked harder in the photographs, she thought, than she remembered them.
There was little about the hijackers—with the exception on occasion of Atta—that struck people as sinister. Richard Surma, who ran the Panther Motel in Fort Lauderdale, rented rooms to groups of them twice in the final weeks. “They looked young,” he recalled, “like they’re trying to make it, like students.”
Brad Warrick, the boss of a rental car company at Pompano Beach, supplied cars several times to Shehhi and Atta. Warrick prided himself on his “gut check,” the eye he ran over new customers to see if they gave him a bad feeling. “Didn’t have it with those guys,” he would remember. “They were just great customers.… They both spoke very well, of course with an accent.… Atta was a very normal, nice guy. Nothing weird about him. Never had an eerie feeling.”
Ziad Jarrah, however, whose resolve had seemed to Atta to be wavering, may have been getting edgy. A man who resembled him, along with a companion, asked to use the Internet at the Longshore Motel in Hollywood, Florida, but left in a huff within hours. Manager Paul Dragomir asked the pair to use the line in his office—he was worried about the bill they might run up—and they had angrily objected. “You don’t understand,” the man he later thought had been Jarrah exclaimed. “We’re on a mission.”
The manager put the “mission” remark out of his mind until after 9/11. Jarrah, if it was Jarrah, may just have been overtired, having trouble with his English. In other ways, though, the operation was less than secure.
Hijacker Nawaf al-Hazmi, the terrorist who spent the longest time in the States, may have been seriously indiscreet—or shared news of what was coming with a loose-lipped associate, not himself one of the hijackers. Investigators came to suspect that in late August, as final preparations for the attacks were being made, Hazmi phoned a Yemeni student friend in San Diego named Mohdar Abdullah.
Abdullah had known Hazmi and Mihdhar early on, had helped them apply for driving lessons and flying lessons. Evidence found later on a computer, moreover, suggested that he in turn was in contact with an activist fervently opposed to U.S. support for Israel. His circle of friends also included another man, himself linked to Hazmi, who had Osama bin Laden propaganda.
When he was detained after the attacks, Abdullah’s belongings were found to include a spiral notebook with references to “planes falling from the sky, mass killings and hijacking.” In late August 2001, about the time of the supposed call from Hazmi, Abdullah reportedly stayed away from work and school, began “acting very strange,” appeared “nervous, paranoid, and anxious.”
In the weeks before the strikes, Atta had his men working on their personal documentation. Some of the terrorists had only passports, and young men with Arab passports might have prompted closer scrutiny at airport security. With the help of individuals prepared to vouch for them—in return for a bribe—several now obtained state IDs.
Even before Atta passed the date of the planned strikes up the line, the terrorists had already begun making airline reservations and purchasing tickets for September 11. Over the phone or using the Internet, sometimes from computers at small-town libraries, on different days and in different places, all would acquire their tickets before the end of the first week of September.
Atta and Mihdhar, perhaps keen to appear to be ordinary travelers, set up frequent flier accounts. The Shehri brothers made reservations, then changed their seat assignments—so as to sit on the side of the First Class aisle that afforded the best view of the cockpit door. Hamzi and his brother Salem ordered special meals suitable for the Muslim diet, meals they knew they would never eat. Perhaps to avoid appearing to be in a group, seven terrorists booked to travel on beyond the destinations of their targeted flights—by which time they would be long dead.
All the flights booked, of course, were for transcontinental flights scheduled to depart in the morning. Transcontinental, in part because they would take off heavily laden with fuel. The more fuel in an airplane’s tanks, the greater the explosive force on impact. In the morning, at a time, Atta thought, when most people in the target buildings would have arrived in their offices.
Key operatives, meanwhile, had shopped around for weapons. Using a Visa card at a Sports Authority store, Shehhi purchased two short black knives, a Cliphanger Viper and an Imperial Tradesman Dual Edge model. Each of the knives had a four-inch-long blade, the maximum length permitted aboard planes under FAA regulations. Fayez Banihammad and Hamza al-Ghamdi, who were to fly with Shehhi, bought a Stanley two-piece snap knife and a Leatherman Wave multi-tool. Nawaf al-Hazmi also picked Leatherman
knives.
Atta, who two weeks earlier had purchased two knives in Europe, had been at a Dollar House, looking for box cutters with Hazmi and Jarrah. Days later, at a Lowe’s Home Improvement Warehouse, he, too, picked up a Leatherman. Atta also had a large folding knife, but that would not be carried on board on 9/11.
For the men who had practiced slaughter techniques on sheep and camels, there would be a sufficiency of knives.
ON SEPTEMBER 4, as the hijackers completed their ticketing arrangements, Bush cabinet-level officials—the Principals—convened at the White House for the long-delayed, very first meeting to discuss the bin Laden problem. They had in front of them the draft National Security Presidential Directive the deputies had agreed on before the August vacation. It outlined measures—long-term measures—designed to destroy the terrorists in their Afghan sanctuary.
The State Department had already told the Taliban regime that the United States would hold it responsible, as the host government, for any new bin Laden attack. That line of approach was to be stepped up, along with forging closer links to forces still resisting the Taliban. There was some talk of one day perhaps using U.S. forces on the ground, but nothing decisive.
There was debate at the meeting, but no decision, about use of the Predator, the unmanned drone that had long since proven capable of stunningly clear air-to-ground photography. Prolonged experiment—a model of a house bin Laden was known to frequent was used for target practice—had established that the Predator could be transformed into a pinpoint-accurate, missile-bearing weapon. Were the drone to get bin Laden in its sights, as it had as long ago as fall 2000, there was every likelihood he could be killed almost instantly.
The Eleventh Day: The Full Story of 9/11 and Osama bin Laden Page 37