The Eleventh Day: The Full Story of 9/11 and Osama bin Laden

by Anthony Summers

  In New York City by the spring of 2012, a new tower—officially One World Trade Center, more familiarly Freedom Tower—had risen almost to its zenith. Completed, its spire will be 1,776 feet from the ground, a homage to the year of America’s Declaration of Independence.

  At ground level, there had been protracted discord over numerous issues. Argument swirled around plans to build a new Muslim community center and mosque on a spot only two blocks from the site of the 9/11 attacks. Its sponsors said it would be a symbol “that will give voice to the silent majority of Muslims who suffer at the hands of extremists.” Opponents said the center would be “sacrilege on sacred ground,” a “gross insult to the memory of those that were killed.” It had opened, as of fall 2011, in a temporary building.

  More melancholy disagreements centered on what really is and always will be hallowed ground—the memorial at Ground Zero, with which we opened this book. Seventy feet below ground, in what will be the September 11 Museum, the steel bases of the Twin Towers stand exposed at the point of bedrock, preserved by order of the federal government. Nearby, sheathed in a climate-controlled covering, stands the last steel column removed from the debris of the World Trade Center, a column that in the aftermath of 9/11 served as a memorial in and of itself.

  The plan, as of this writing, is that the museum will hold something else, the collection of some 9,000 fragments of humanity, the remains of the 1,119 people whose body parts cannot be identified. They would repose, hidden from the public eye yet hauntingly present. The plan’s proponents maintained that the presence of the remains would enhance the sanctity of the memorial, making it a place where generations would come to pay their respects and reflect. Its opponents objected to what is left of their loved ones being turned into what they saw as a lure for tourists. Placement in the museum space, relatives thought, was tantamount to creating “a freak show” put on for “gawkers.”

  Two thousand miles away, in Phoenix, Arizona, state senators were voting to remove wording on the city’s 9/11 memorial that they deemed objectionable. A memorial, one senator said, should display only “patriotic, pro-American words.” The inscribed words he and others found upsetting included “VIOLENT ACTS LEADING US TO WAR”; “MIDDLE EAST VIOLENCE MOTIVATES ATTACKS IN US”; “YOU DON’T WIN BATTLES OF TERRORISM WITH MORE BATTLES”; “FEELING OF INVINCIBILITY LOST”; “MUST BOMB BACK”; “FOREIGN-BORN AMERICANS AFRAID”; and “FEAR OF FOREIGNERS.”

  The fury that flamed across America after 9/11 was shot through with fear, fear of a foe few citizens could even begin to understand, fear of the unknown, fear that more was coming. Wisdom still holds, as that three-term President told the nation almost eighty years ago, that the only thing to be feared is fear itself. Yet fear, unspoken, remains pervasive, in airports and train stations, in the places where great issues are debated, in the living rooms of families across the nation.

  In its fury and its fear, some say, America lost its way. Perhaps it did. On the other hand, the extreme measures its terrorist enemies espouse will lead not to utopia for anyone, only to further horrors. Crammed together on a small planet beset with desperate problems, the more than three hundred million non-Muslim Americans, the world’s 1.65 billion Muslims, and the billions of others of differing religions and none must find other ways to resolve what divides them.

  In New York, there was quibbling over even the quotation from Virgil’s Aeneid chosen for the wall at the Ground Zero memorial behind which the unknown dead would lie. Should the quotation survive the debate, it at least will—however unintentionally—remain valid for both the murdered victims of 9/11 and their murderers. It reads:

  “No day shall erase you from the memory of Time.”

  AP Images

  Flight 11 passenger Daniel Lewin, probably the first to die on 9/11. Marco Greenberg

  The Hanson family, passengers on Flight 175. On the phone to his father, Peter Hanson said: “Don’t worry.… If it happens, it’ll be very fast.” Hanson famly photo

  Flight 93 flight attendant CeeCee Lyles’s charred ID card, found after the crash. She had reached her husband to say the passengers were fighting back against the hijackers. Moussaoui trial exhibit

  Zoe Falkenberg, an eight-year-old passenger on Flight 77, and her sister, Dana, are among those remembered at the Pentagon memorial. Dana’s remains were not found. Mariana Perez

  Office workers at windows of the Trade Center’s North Tower. Trapped by fire, many jumped to their deaths. Jeff Christensen/Reuters

  Of those below the points of impact, most made their way to safety. Shannon Stapleton/Reuters

  After the towers collapsed, New Yorkers ran pell-mell, a dust cloud at their heels. Hundreds have died, and many more are sick, from respiratory disease caused by the dust. Paul Hawthorne/​AP/​Press Association Images

  President Bush is told that a second plane has crashed.

  Paul J. Richards/​AFP/​Getty Images

  In the Emergency Operations Center beneath the White House, Vice President Cheney speaks by phone with Bush. To the left of him is National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice. To the left of her, kneeling, is Navy commander Anthony Barnes. Presidential Materials, U.S. National Archives

  The facade of the Pentagon before it collapsed. Skeptics doubted that it could have swallowed a Boeing 757 airliner. U.S. Department of Defense

  Wreckage at the Pentagon. Some skeptics suggested that evidence had been planted. Moussaoui trial exhibit

  Flight 93’s Cockpit Voice Recorder—hauntingly, minute by minute, it tracked the progress of the hijacking. Moussaoui trial exhibit

  Investigators search the Pennsylvania field where Flight 93 crashed. In the foreground is the crater. Tim Shaffer/Reuters

  After, in New York. AFP/Getty Images

  Nine months later, draped in the flag, the last steel girder is removed from the ruins of the World Trade Center. It stands now in the memorial at Ground Zero. Peter Morgan/Reuters

  Osama bin Laden and his “holy war” against the United States, acclaimed by a crowd in Pakistan after 9/11. Ruth Fremson/The New York Times/Redux Pictures

  Khalid Sheikh Mohammed claimed credit for the plot. Ramzi Binalshibh (below left) acted as a go-between for the hijackers. Abu Zubaydah (below right), a key al Qaeda logistics man, was gravely wounded during his arrest. How reliable are their confessions, obtained under “enhanced” interrogation?

  Heroes to some: a poster produced two years after the attacks, glorifying the hijackers. Getty Images

  Mohamed Atta, the hijackers’ leader, and Flight 93 hijacker Ziad Jarrah in Afghanistan preparing to videotape martyrdom statements. The beards came off on their return to Europe. AP photo/Sunday Times

  The men believed to have been at the controls of three of the hijacked airliners: Marwan al-Shehhi

  Hani Hanjour

  Ziad Jarrah, with his lover, Aysel Sengün and in the cockpit of a light aircraft—he had recently completed pilot training.

  Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi were the first future hijackers to arrive in the United States. Omar al-Bayoumi (below), a Saudi living in California who assisted them, said he met them by chance.

  Did Mohdar Abdullah, who also befriended them, get advance information that an attack was coming?

  Anwar Aulaqi, an American-born imam, said to have been a “spiritual adviser” to two future hijackers. In 2011 he was killed in a drone strike in Yemen, where he had allegedly become an al Qaeda leader. The Washington Post/Getty Images

  Saleh al-Hussayen, a Saudi religious official. On the eve of 9/11, he stayed at the same hotel as two lead hijackers. Government of Saudi Arabia

  Saudi Prince Bandar (rear left) meeting at the White House with President Bush, Vice President Cheney, and National Security Adviser Rice, two nights after the attacks. The White House

  The joint chairmen of Congress’s probe, Senators Bob Graham (center) and Richard Shelby (right), with their Report in 2003. They pointed out that many pages had been suppressed, on P
resident Bush’s orders. The pages are still suppressed today. The Washington Post/Getty Images

  9/11 Commission members and staff watching video of the Twin Towers burning, at a hearing in 2004. AP Images

  Some of the bereaved who pressed for the creation of the Commission, and closely followed its progress, rejected its findings. Brendan Smialowski/​AFP/​Getty Images

  Osama bin Laden, apparently pictured here in hiding in Pakistan, was shot dead by U.S. commandos in May 2011. AP Images

  Americans celebrated the feared terrorist’s death in New York City and Washington. Reuters/Eric Thayer/AP Images

  For Angela Santore Amicone

  and

  Chris and Gaye Humphreys

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  This is the eighth heavily researched book project we have undertaken. All involved difficult challenges or required us to tackle intractable questions. Sometimes we have managed to answer the questions. Often, we hope, we have managed to clear up historical muddle or confusion. Nothing, however, quite prepared us for the tangle of fact, fallacy, and fantasy that enmesh this dark history.

  We were reminded at every step of the way that the story on which we were embarked was freighted with human suffering: that of those who died on September 11 itself, of those killed in earlier and subsequent attacks, and of the more than 100,000 people who have died and continue to die in the ensuing conflicts—and those left grieving across the world.

  In this Acknowledgments section of our book, then, we honor first and foremost those who will never be able to read it.

  Writing The Eleventh Day has been a task for which we needed more than usual guides to people and places, nations and cultures, that do not readily reveal themselves. Our personal thanks, then, to those we can name: Hugh Bermingham, who has lived and worked in Saudi Arabia for almost thirty years; the author Jean Sasson, who also lived there and who has the trust of the first wife and the fourth son of Osama bin Laden; Flagg Miller, associate professor of religious studies at the University of California at Davis, who has analyzed bin Laden’s writing in unique depth; editor and author Abdel Atwan, who interviewed bin Laden and reads the galloping pulse of history in the Middle East with rare expertise; and Alain Chouet, former head of security intelligence with the DGSE—France’s foreign intelligence service—and an accomplished Arabist in his own right.

  Others with a variety of backgrounds shared experience or special knowledge: Captain Anthony Barnes, who on 9/11 was deputy director of presidential contingency planning in the White House Military Office; Jean-Charles Brisard, lead investigator for lawyers representing families bereaved on 9/11, who opened up his vast archive of documents to us; Dan Christensen, a veteran Florida investigative reporter, founder of the Broward Bulldog, and a colleague and friend of many years, worked with us with flair and determination on research into possible support for the hijackers in Florida; John Farmer, former senior counsel to the 9/11 Commission, now dean of Rutgers University Law School, who was an eminently informative source on the military response to the attacks; former U.S. senator and Florida governor Bob Graham, onetime chairman of the Senate Committee on Intelligence and cochair of the House-Senate Joint Inquiry into intelligence activities before and after September 11, 2001, who gave us time in Florida, Massachusetts, and London, and who champions truth-telling in a milieu where truth is so often a stranger; Simon Henderson, who heads the Gulf and Energy Policy Program at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy; Eleanor Hill, a former Defense Department inspector general and the Joint Committee’s relentless staff director; former FBI intelligence analyst Mike Jacobson, who served with both the Joint Committee and the 9/11 Commission and surfaced facts that others preferred suppressed; Miles Kara, a former career intelligence officer with the U.S. Army, who also served on both official probes—with a special focus on the FAA and NORAD while on the Commission team—and who was endlessly patient and responsive to our queries; Ryan Mackey, research scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and author of a paper on conspiracy theories about 9/11, who applied a “baloney detection kit” to great effect; Sarandis Papadopoulos of the Naval Historical Center, who conducted research and interviews and coauthored the report on the Pentagon attack for the Office of the Secretary of Defense; Mete Sozen, professor of structural engineering at Purdue University in Indiana, who explained in a way we could understand—and believe—how it appeared that American Flight 77 was swallowed up by the Pentagon; teacher and literacy coach Dwana Washington, who vividly described for us the September 11 visit by President Bush to the Emma E. Booker Elementary School in Sarasota, Florida.

  Like so much of history, work on this project has been a paper chase. We owe sincere thanks to the National Archives, where the hugely able Kristen Wilhelm handled document applications and dealt with difficult questions with skill and evident integrity—wondrously refreshing for authors inured over the years to sustained obstruction to the public’s right to know. In 2010 and 2011, as we labored on far from Washington, and as tens of thousands of 9/11 Commission documents became available for the first time, we enjoyed the generous collegiate help of Erik Larson. The National Security Archive at George Washington University, which collects and publishes material obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, was often useful.

  In Europe, too, we learned much. In Germany, Dr. Manfred Murck, who before 9/11 and since has been deputy chief of Hamburg’s domestic intelligence service, put up with persistent quizzing for longer than we could have expected and, when obliged to limit what he could tell us, was frank about doing so; from Stuttgart, Dr. Herbert Müller, Islamic affairs specialist at the parallel organization in that city, gave ready assistance; Hamburg attorney Udo Jacob helped document the story of the young Islamists who gathered in the cause of jihad before 9/11—and who included several of the 9/11 perpetrators. Without his help we could not have gained admission to Fuhlsbüttel prison to visit Mounir Motassadeq, who is serving fifteen years for his supposed role as accessory to the murders of those aboard the four hijacked airliners on 9/11. Motassadeq, for his part, put up with our questions over a period of hours. It is not clear to us that he is guilty as charged, and should we not return to his case ourselves, we hope other investigators will. Also in Germany, Hans Kippenberg, professor of comparative religious studies at Bremen’s Jacobs University, and Dr. Tilman Seidensticker, professor of Arab and Islamic studies at Jena’s Friedrich Schiller University, helped with interpretation and translation of the hijackers’ “manual” and of Ziad Jarrah’s farewell letter to his Turkish lover.

  In Milan, Italy, deputy chief prosecutor and counterterrorism coordinator Armando Spataro gave us a first glimpse of the brutal injustices meted out in the name of the War on Terror; Bruno Megale, deputy head of counterterrorism, described police surveillance operations in northern Italy before 9/11. While we failed to get to Spain, our friend Charles Cardiff’s reading of the Spanish dossier—accumulated by Judge Baltasar Garzón—persuaded us of al Qaeda’s pre-9/11 reach in that country.

  The fellow journalists who helped us are too numerous to name. Of their number, we thank especially Thomas Joscelyn, Gerald Posner, Jeffrey Steinberg, and Joseph Trento in the United States; Guillaume Dasquié, Richard Labévière, and Alexandra Richard in France; and Josef Hufelschulte in Germany. Also in Germany, we much appreciated the hard-earned knowledge and professionalism of Dirk Laabs, an all-around reporter and practitioner of the time-honored school of shoe-leather journalism.

  Yosri Fouda, the brave reporter who interviewed Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, was helpful to us from Cairo—as was his colleague Nick Fielding, who subsequently worked with him on a book about the experience.

  We have on our shelves more than three hundred books that relate one way or another to 9/11, al Qaeda, and the roots from which al Qaeda sprang. Those of Peter Bergen, Steve Coll, Jim Dwyer and Kevin Flynn, former 9/11 Commission senior counsel John Farmer, Yosri Fouda and Nick Fielding, William Langewiesche, Jere Longman, Terry McD
ermott, Philip Shenon, and Lawrence Wright are essential reading. No one who wishes to explore the intelligence angles should miss the works of J. M. Berger, Peter Lance, and former senior CIA officer Michael Scheuer; Kevin Fenton’s deconstruction of the roles of the CIA, the FBI, and the 9/11 Commission, kindly made available to us by the author before publication, was valuable and provocative. Paul Thompson’s encyclopedic The Terror Timeline and, above all, his “Complete 9/11 Timeline,” updated regularly on the Net, were indispensable. The author Peter Dale Scott has taken his scalpel to the jugular of the story of President Bush and the aides who surrounded him.

  On the “skeptical” front, we thank author Daniel Hopsicker, investigator of the hijackers’ activities in Florida. He introduced us to Venice, shared his time unstintingly, and trusted us down the months—long after it became clear that where he saw conspiracy we saw coincidence or happenstance. There was something to be learned, as in the past, from John Judge, a veteran of alternative history in Washington, D.C.

  These days more than ever, nonfiction authors must head down the long research trail on shrunken budgets. It has been all the more rewarding, then, to have the loyalty and commitment of a new colleague. Hannah Cleaver, a Berlin-based journalist with prior expertise and knowledge of the case, made it clear that the story itself and the comradeship were as important to her as professional gain. The inquiring mind of intern Stefani Jackson produced useful research.