THE SHADOW FACTORY
The Ultra Secret NSA from 9/11 to the To The Eavesdropping on America
BY JAMES BAMFORD
Mesa
The Ultra Secret NSA from 9/11 to the To The Eavesdropping on America
BY JAMES BAMFORD
Mesa
Bored with life in San Diego, Mihdhar was getting anxious about his
wife, Hoda, whom he would call often. Then in late May he learned
that he had just become a father for the first time and he made the decision
to return to Yemen and see his new daughter. Notified of this decision,
Khalid Shaikh was infuriated. Not only was his soldier planning to
go AWOL in the middle of the operation, Mihdhar’s partner would be
left abandoned in San Diego. Mihdhar, who barely knew Khalid Shaikh
but was very close to bin Laden, ignored his demands to remain. Besides,
he told him, there would be no problem in returning since he had not
overstayed his visa. In a mad rush, Mihdhar pulled all $4,888.69 from his
bank account and gave it to Hazmi, transferred the Toyota’s registration
to him as well, and then made plane reservations.
On June 9, Mihdhar piled his bags in the back of the Toyota and set off
for Los Angeles with Hazmi driving and Mihdhar Zaid giving directions.
After spending the night at a motel, the next morning they drove to Los
Angeles International Airport. At the time, the idea of hijacking a plane
from there was still being considered as part of the ultimate operation.
Thus, soon after entering the terminal the three began casing it out. One
stood near the security area with a video camera and slowly began turning
in a circle to capture the entire panorama.
At 2:15 p.m., Mihdhar boarded Lufthansa Airlines Flight 457 for
Frankfurt, where he would change for Flight 636 to Kuwait and then on
to Sanaa, where Hoda and his new baby daughter were waiting.
Abandoned by his friend Khalid, Hazmi remained in San Diego like
a jilted lover. By December 2000, he had been there almost a year. As
Mihdhar saw his new baby in Sanaa, took part in the bombing of the USS
Cole in Aden, and was busy in Saudi Arabia recruiting a dozen or more
soldiers for the operation, Hazmi spent his days in his small Lemon Grove
room. During the day he would surf the Internet on his landlord’s computer
following the news of fighting in Chechnya and Bosnia, call home
and send e-mails, pump gas with Mihdhar Zaid at Sam’s Star Mart—and
wait. He had long ago given up any idea of becoming a pilot and had even
stopped taking English lessons. But he continually received messages
from Khalid Shaikh—and later from Tawfiq bin Attash, another top bin
Laden lieutenant—that the operation was still going forward and that he
would soon receive a new partner.
Six months earlier, at the start of the summer, the man picked to run
the operation, Mohamed Atta, arrived on the East Coast and began flight
training with a number of his associates. For bin Laden, it was good fortune
falling in his lap. At the same time that it seemed neither Mihdhar
nor Hazmi were going to become pilots, Atta and a number of his friends
applied to join al-Qaeda. Fluent in English, well educated, and with a
technical background, Atta seemed the perfect candidate to take over the
operation. While Mihdhar recruited the soldiers in Saudi Arabia, Hazmi
would become Atta’s deputy—as soon as they found him a partner.
Finally, as the early snows of winter pushed deep across the country,
Hazmi received the e-mail from Tawfiq bin Attash that he had been waiting
for, and a few weeks later, on December 8, Delta Airlines Flight 43
from Paris touched down at Cincinnati’s international airport. On board
was Hani Hanjour, a quiet, determined twenty-nine-year-old on a stopover
from Dubai to San Diego. Medium height and weight with short
black hair and dark, soulful eyes, he was returning to a place very familiar
to him, a place where he had once lived with a family in Florida, studied
English in California, and earned his commercial pilot’s license in Arizona.
Hanjour was born in 1972 into a prominent family of landowners and
food supply merchants. The middle child of seven, he lived in a sprawling
two-story villa on a tree-lined street in Al Faisaliyah, an upscale neighborhood
in Saudi Arabia’s summer capital, Taif. For many Saudis, Taif is
a place to escape to, a cool mountain refuge a mile above the sweltering streets of Mecca. Set in a hollow between granite hills rising from the
eastern slope of the Hejaz, it is also a city where the old and new have
achieved a degree of harmony. Ultramodern marble and glass government
offices tower over old mud homes with wooden louver windows
and carved wooden doors. Elsewhere are pink palaces and the Corniche,
a road that spirals down the sheer cliffs of the Taif escarpment to the fiery
sandbox below.
Like the rest of the operatives, Hanjour was a member of the first generation
of Muslims to witness the successful defeat of an invading Western
superpower, shoved back across its border like a bully pushed out of
a school yard. Growing up, their heroes were the men who at last stood
up to the West, drew a line in the sand along the Afghan border, and then
succeeded with little more than dented Kalashnikovs and worn sandals. [They pushed back the communist Soviets,not a Western super power.and lets not forget how they pushed back,with CIA supplied missiles,nice try DC]
By the time Hanjour reached his teenage years, in the late 1980's, he
was off to Afghanistan to join in the fight. But by then the Soviets had
been defeated and he instead spent six weeks working for a relief agency.
His battle would have to wait for another time and place.
Following the war in Afghanistan, buoyed by the victory over the
mighty Soviet empire, many in Hanjour’s generation turned their attention
to another superpower with a long and unsavory history in the Middle
East: the United States. The list of grievances was long. There was
the CIA’s coup that overthrew Iran’s democratically elected leader and
replaced him with the brutal quarter-century reign of the Shah and his Savak
secret police. Then there was the unstinting support, backed by cash
and carrier strike forces, for the region’s most despised and corrupt dictators.
And then the harsh sanctions imposed on Iraq that had no effect on
Saddam Hussein but brought death and illness to hundreds of thousands
of the young and poor. And finally it was America’s iron-fisted support
for Israel’s half century of humiliation, oppression, and occupation of the
Palestinians as well as its wars, occupation, and massacres in Lebanon.
For Atta, the breaking point came in April 1996 with the start of Israel’s
massive bombardment of Beirut and Arab villages in southern Lebanon
in an attempt to end the shelling of northern Israel by Hezbollah.
In the southern Lebanese town of Qana, the attack turned horrific, and
while largely ignored by the American press, it made the front pages of
newspapers throughout Europe and the Middle East. “It was a massacre,”
said a front-page story in London’s Independent. “Israel’s slaughter of civilians in this terrible 10-day offensive—206 by last night—has been
so cavalier, so ferocious, that not a Lebanese will forgive this massacre.”
Even some in the Israeli press were harshly critical of the attack. Arieh
Shavit, a columnist for the Israeli daily newspaper Ha’aretz, noted:
“How easily we killed them [in Qana] without shedding a tear. We did
not denounce the crime, did not arrange for a legal clarification, because
this time we tried to deny the abominable horror and move on.” And
the international edition of Time magazine noted, “Around the Middle
East . . . Qana is already a byword for martyrdom.”
For Atta, Israel’s Grapes of Wrath invasion was the final shove, pushing
him over the edge. He was “enraged,” said his friend and fellow student
Ralph Bodenstein. Shortly after the invasion began, Mohamed Atta
walked to the al-Quds mosque in Hamburg, Germany, with several of his
friends and signed his last will and testament, naming it his “Death Certificate.”
He was twenty-seven years old. According to one of his friends,
by signing the will during the attack he was offering his life as a response
to Israel’s invasion. All that was left was to find the right target.
For millions throughout the region, their emotions had been deprived
of expression for decades. Afghanistan showed them there was an alternative.
To Hanjour, Atta, Mihdhar, Hazmi, and the rest, the United States
was their generation’s Soviet Union, and they dedicated their lives to continuing
where the last generation left off. As America bombed Berlin and
Tokyo during its great war, they would bomb New York and Washington
during theirs.
It was dark when Delta Flight 1661 passed over Balboa Park and finally
touched down on Lindbergh Field in San Diego. For Hani Hanjour,
it was the end of a long journey, but it was also a journey to the end.
There, happy to greet him, was Nawaf al-Hazmi, who after six long
months finally had a new partner, a new companion, someone who knew
his secret. His time in purgatory was over; the operation was again moving
forward. They were also both in a hurry. Now as second in command
under Atta, Hazmi was concerned because the soldiers Mihdhar was recruiting
and preparing would start arriving on the East Coast in the spring
and they had to be there to handle them. And Hanjour, the last of the
pilots to arrive—half a year after the others—knew he needed to catch
up very fast on his flying and was eager to get back to Arizona for a few
months of practice.
Within a day, and with little time to rest from his exhausting flight,
Hanjour climbed into Hazmi’s aging blue Corolla—now packed with all
his belongings—as they prepared for a long cross-country odyssey. But
first Hazmi made a last trip back to his rooming house in Lemon Grove
to bid farewell to his friend and landlord, Abdussattar Shaikh. Introducing
Hanjour simply as “Hani,” Hazmi told Shaikh that they were headed
north to San Jose to take flying lessons and that he would stay in touch,
and he promised to return soon. Next they stopped by Sam’s Star Mart,
where Hazmi now introduced Hanjour as a “longtime friend from Saudi
Arabia.” After he said his good-byes to Mihdhar Zaid and the rest of the
crowd, they were off.
On December 12, they pulled into Mesa, Arizona, where Hanjour was
going to begin his training on multi-engine aircraft. At Jet Tech, a company
in nearby Phoenix that offered instruction using a highly sophisticated
Boeing 737-200 simulator, Hanjour couldn’t wait to get started.
Strapped in his pilot’s seat, he perfected his turns, his control, and his stabilization.
Pushing the throttles fully forward, he also perfected his speed
and his aim as he prepared for his first multi-engine solo, and his last.
Thinthread
Far away from Hayden’s modern suite high atop Ops 2B, Rich Taylor’s
ornate, wood-paneled office was almost a museum piece. Located on
the second floor of Ops 1, it was in the agency’s original A-shaped building,
now the home of its signals intelligence directorate. When the agency
first moved to Fort Meade in the late 1950's, at a time when even its name
was top secret, it was the office of the director. A few years later, during
the Cuban missile crisis, it was where many intercepts of both the Russian
naval forces and the Cuban missile crews were read.
As the NSA’s deputy director for operations, Taylor was Hayden’s
electronic spymaster. A native of Kentucky and a 1969 graduate of the
Air Force Academy, Rich Taylor spent five years in the air force before
signing on with the NSA as a program manager in the agency’s research
and engineering organization. From then on he spent nearly his entire
career involved with the NSA’s satellite eavesdropping program, from
design of the spacecraft during several years at the National Reconnaissance
Office to analysis as the manager of the overhead systems division
within the operations division. He then became the executive director,
the agency’s number three position. But the choice job in the agency had
always been the chief of the operation directorate, where all the action
happened—which Taylor took over in November 1997.
Frustrated by the agency’s lumbering bureaucracy, Taylor sent a long
and secret memorandum to Hayden within weeks of the general’s arrival
outlining his view on fixing the agency’s growing problems. “We need help,” he wrote. “The first and most important issue for NSA/C.S.S
[Central Security Service] is to reform our management and leadership
system . . . we have good people in a flawed system.” Next, he said, was
“strengthening and leveraging our strategic alliances,” in other words,
working more closely with the CIA and the NSA’s foreign partners, such
as G.C.H.Q.
The problem with the foreign partners, Taylor complained, was the NSA’s tendency to leave them in the dust both operationally and technologically. “The U.S. maintains the lead, both in technology and operational readiness,” he said. “We bring our partners along.” By not helping them keep up, Taylor suggested, the NSA might one day lose their cooperation. Finally, because so much of the NSA’s success in the age of the computer depended on getting secret access to foreign machines, databases, and software—with the help of the CIA’s clandestine officers—it was more important than ever to closely merge the two disciplines. “Our relationship with CIA is absolutely vital to our future success,” he wrote. “It is essential that NSA and CIA put our relationship on a sound basis.”
Before Hayden arrived, Taylor had been tackling the issue of how best to reduce the ocean of intercepts flowing into the agency and at the same time have the ability to trace back the suspicious calls to the U.S., including those from Yemen, without violating the law. Code-named Thinthread, the project was intended to develop complex digital filters to sift through the Nile-size rivers of phone calls, e-mail, faxes, and other communications signals channeled into the agency by satellites and ground stations. Made up of diabolically complex mathematical algorithms and protocols, these filters would isolate and trap the key conversations and messages while discarding the rest, unheard and unread.
The system was designed for intercepting communications within or between foreign countries. But Thinthread also had a unique component that allowed the agency to trace signals back to the United States without violating the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. That law forbade monitoring communications to or from individuals in the U.S. without a warrant. The catch-22 was that to get a warrant the agency needed probable cause, but without being able to intercept the message and follow it to its U.S. destination there was no way of knowing to whom or where it was going. And without that information, there was no way to apply for a warrant.
The idea behind Thinthread was that the agency would automatically encrypt the body of all the messages and phone calls entering and leaving the U.S., thereby protecting the privacy of the content. All that would be visible would be the “externals,” the exact destination or origin of the communications. As a further safety check, Thinthread also employed an automated auditing system to ensure that analysts were not abusing the system and “peeking” at the contents.
With such a system, the agency would be able to see the links between suspected targets overseas and destinations in the U.S. without the ability to read the contents of the communications. And if a pattern began to emerge—such as frequent calls and e-mails from the Yemen ops center to several phone numbers and computers in San Diego—that would be enough to show probable cause that the people in San Diego were agents of a foreign terrorist organization. With that, the agency could then obtain a F.I.S.A warrant to identify the individuals, decrypt the contents of the communications, and begin reading and listening to the complete messages and phone calls. At the same time, the FBI could begin its own investigation on the ground. The system would also allow the agency to target those communications that simply transited through the U.S., such as an e-mail from Frankfurt to Mexico City via the Internet hub in Miami.
Tests of the program throughout 1998 proved very successful and Taylor advocated for its full implementation. But when Hayden arrived the following March he flatly opposed it. His opposition was largely based on objections by his legal staff, who felt the program pushed the agency too close to the edge. Hayden also had a personal desire to avoid even the appearance of eavesdropping on Americans in America, which he considered the FBI’s responsibility. Instead of Thinthread, he came up with a different concept to help with the information overload problem. Code-named Trailblazer, the project, like Thinthread, attacked the massive data flowing into the agency with a combination of powerful computers and complex filtering software. But where Thinthread encrypted all traffic entering, leaving, or transiting the U.S.—thus allowing the NSA to analyze where it came from and where it was going without violating the law—Trailblazer offered no such protection.
By the fall of 2000, the battle between Thinthread and Trailblazer culminated in a “very emotional debate” between Taylor and Hayden, with the director siding with the lawyers. Taylor, pushed out of his position by Hayden, then decided to leave the agency altogether at the end of December, the same month that the NSA released a request for proposals to defense contractors to begin bidding to work on Trailblazer.
Hayden knew the agency was in trouble. “We are digging out of a deep hole,” he said. “NSA downsized about one-third of its manpower and about the same proportion of its budget in the decade of the 1990's. That is the same decade when packetized communications—the e-communications we have all become familiar with—surpassed traditional communications. That is the same decade when mobile cell phones increased from 16 million to 741 million—an increase of nearly fifty times. That is the same decade when Internet users went from about 4 million to 361 million—an increase of over ninety times. Half as many landlines were laid in the last six years of the 1990's as in the whole previous history of the world. In that same decade of the 1990's, international telephone traffic went from 38 billion minutes to over 100 billion.”
Out of those 100 billion minutes, however, the NSA needed only a few dozen to discover and stop bin Laden’s planned air attack—and those few dozen were sitting nearby in a cavernous tape library collecting dust.
As Hanjour trained in the simulator, Hazmi was busy with research. He sent away to Sporty’s Pilot Shop in Batavia, Ohio, for training videos for Boeing 747-200, Boeing 747-400, and Boeing 777-200 flight decks, as well as a video titled “How an Airline Captain Should Look and Act.” But both he and Hanjour were now anxious to get to the East Coast as soon as possible. Hazmi needed to begin making preparations for the cadre of soldiers his friend Khalid al-Mihdhar would soon be sending his way. At the same time, Hanjour would be able to get in some additional flying time on smaller aircraft at local airports. Getting ready for the trip, Hazmi drove down to Wide World of Maps in Phoenix and purchased a National Geographic road atlas, a Unique Media map of the United States and another of New York City, and a world aeronautical chart covering the northeast portion of the United States.
Around dawn on Sunday, April 1, they departed Mesa in their battered blue 1988 Toyota Corolla, packed with wrinkled shirts, blue jeans, and flight videos. The two turned onto I-40, the 2,400-mile highway that wraps the country’s heartland in a ribbon of asphalt. For Hazmi and Hanjour, it was a road to war, a payback for treating their lands as little more than gas stations for road-hogging S.U.V's and targets for military firepower. To them, it would become a road to redemption.
Because it was Sunday, they were able to make good time as they dashed through New Mexico and then into the northern tip of Texas, zipping past miles of monotonous scrub plains and farmlands. When they crossed into Oklahoma at about 5:30 p.m., the sun was beginning to set behind them, and the road ahead grew dark as Hazmi cruised along at about eighty-five miles per hour. Approaching Elk City, they tripped the radar in the car of C.L. Parkins, an Oklahoma Highway Patrol trooper. Parkins stayed with them for a dozen minutes; then at 6:06 p.m. he pulled Hazmi over. “I asked him to come back to my car and he sat there, and I visited with him a little bit,” Parkins recalled. Hazmi appeared calm and collected and Parkins thought he spoke English well. “We did our normal checks—check to see if the vehicle’s stolen, check to see if he’s wanted, if his driver’s license status is valid—try and see if there’s anything we need to look further into.”
Apparently, no one was looking for him—not the NSA, CIA, or FBI, or the State Department. Thus, said Parkins, “we didn’t see anything to go any further with the contact . . . I wrote him a ticket for speeding and the seat belt.” Hazmi promptly mailed in his tickets with money orders covering the $138 in fines to the Washita County court clerk and the matter was quickly forgotten.
Hazmi and Hanjour were lucky; America’s intelligence system was broken. Six year earlier another Oklahoma Highway Patrol trooper, Charles Hanger, made a similar routine stop not far away and arrested Tim McVeigh less than two hours after he blew up the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City. Although at the time no one knew he was responsible, McVeigh was put in jail for carrying an unregistered handgun. Two days later, before McVeigh made bail, the FBI named him as a chief suspect and immediately flashed his name to law enforcement organizations around the country. As a result of the quick actions by FBI and police, McVeigh never got away.
Back on I-40, Hazmi pressed ahead. In some ways, the car’s occupants were a study in contrasts. Hanjour was dour, secretive, often unapproachable, with a tendency to cut Hazmi off when he thought his partner was becoming too open with strangers. He could sit for hours in the car without speaking, his hat pulled tight on his head. Hazmi was the extrovert, outgoing, made friends easily. He liked to wear colorful shirts, have a coffee with friends, laugh. More puzzled than annoyed, he would always ask why when Hanjour cut him off.
As the odometer spun, there would be no stopping at motels, just catnaps at rest stops. The soldiers would be coming soon and Hazmi needed to find a place to put them up where they could blend into the background. It was also essential to get them some type of ID, perhaps even driver’s licenses, so they would have no problem boarding the planes.
Two days after they left Mesa they reached Front Royal, Virginia, on
the outskirts of Washington. Hazmi got gas and Hanjour withdrew $100
from a cash machine with his Citibank card. It was an easy way to get
access to the $11,000 deposited into his U.A.E Citibank account by bin
Laden’s money man in Dubai. Hanjour also had another $9,600 in a Saudi
British bank account. Back on the road, they continued for another hour
to the Hillwood Motor Lodge, a decaying relic of the 1950's awaiting the
wrecker’s ball, just off Sleepy Hollow Road in the busy Seven Corners
section of Falls Church, Virginia, a suburb of Washington.
On May 2, Hazmi and Hanjour drove their blue Toyota Corolla to Washington’s Dulles Airport to meet United Flight 925 from London, arriving at 7:40 p.m. On board were the first two members of Hazmi’s crew, Majed Moqed, a law student at King Saud University in Riyadh, and Ahmed al-Ghamdi, a university student in Mecca who grew up in a prominent family in the southern Saudi city of Beljurashi. They had flown into Britain on Emirates Airlines Flight 1 from Dubai. Hazmi was no doubt happy to have some additional friendly faces around. On the previous evening he had been mugged in front of his apartment by a man who had been hanging around his place for several weeks. He immediately called the police and when the Fairfax County officers showed up, he gave his full name and his current address. No one, however, was ever arrested.
The arrival of the two soldiers put more pressure on Hazmi to quickly find a good location near New York City for the other members of his crew as they began arriving. To help them out, Eyad al Rababah, someone they met at a local mosque, suggested that the pair consider Paterson, New Jersey, and agreed to take them there and show them around. “It was somebody asking you for a favor, and you don’t lose anything by saying yes,” he said. Still, Rababah thought it was odd that while they professed to be practicing Muslims, he never saw them engaged in prayer. “Even in the mosque, I never saw them praying,” he said. Then when he showed up at their apartment for the trip he received another surprise: instead of two there were now four of them. On the morning of May 8, Rababah headed north with Hanjour seated next to him in his Honda Civic, and Hazmi followed behind in the Toyota Corolla with Moqed and Ghamdi.
Seven hours later they pulled into Rababah’s new hometown of Bridgeport, Connecticut, where he got them registered at the nearby Fairfield Motor Inn and took them on brief tour of Paterson, about ninety minutes away, and to dinner there at a Chinese restaurant. After returning them to the hotel, Rababah said good-bye and left Hazmi and his crew to make their decision. They got right to business, making over seventy-five local phone calls to area flight schools and real estate firms. Joe Macy, owner of the inn, recalled that his guests “behaved very gentle-like.”
For Hazmi and Hanjour, Paterson seemed just the place to disappear. An old, gray industrial town of 170,000 residents, it contained thousands of new immigrants attracted by the low cost of housing and, for some without the right papers, the promise of anonymity. Begun in 1792 as a sketch on the drawing board of Alexander Hamilton, two hundred years later the city’s eight square miles contained seventy-two distinct nationalities, a polyglot of cultures and languages, colors and hair styles, smells, sounds, and tastes. The two liked the gritty, blue-collar neighborhoods of African Americans and Hispanics. Also nearby was a growing Middle Eastern community and just twenty miles northwest was New York City.
For $650 a month, they rented a one-room apartment at the top of an aging three-story redbrick building at 486 Union Avenue. With graffiti on the white door and pried-open mailboxes in the hallway, it sat on a shabby block in Totowa, next to Paterson. Down the street was St. Mary’s, a Romanesque, ochre-colored church decorated with pots filled with yellow mums. It had been built a century before, when the area was predominantly German and then Irish. Newly arrived Hispanic families now filled the pews and overflowed onto the sidewalk on Sundays. Nearby was Inner City Blues, a clothing store selling hip-hop Phat Farm sweatshirts, and across the street was a storefront converted into an Islamic mission where Muslim men, mostly from Bangladesh, kneeled for afternoon prayer.
Moving into Apartment R3 on May 21, Hazmi, Hanjour, Moqed, and Ghamdi attracted little attention. But Jamie Diaz, who lived one floor below, noticed that they only brought with them two carry-on bags and a dark green garbage bag stuffed with clothing. They had no furniture for the unfurnished apartment and their only major purchase was a used air conditioner for thirty dollars. Nevertheless, for the next three months, as the dreary flat became the operations center and living quarters for Hazmi’s growing crew, he and the others blended in with little difficulty.
Dressed in jeans, shirts, and sometimes sandals, they would walk beneath the yellow awning of the bodega on the first floor to buy water, soda, juice, bread, toilet paper, napkins, and individually wrapped doughnuts—sometimes half a dozen at a time—or load up with Chinese food in brown stapled bags from the nearby Wo Hop III restaurant. Hanjour and Ghamdi would frequently stop in El Fogon, a Mexican restaurant a few doors down Union Street, where owner Modesta Gomez would sell them packs of Salem or Parliament cigarettes and Budweiser beer.
Totowa also had the advantage of being between two local airports with flight schools, each only about a fifteen-minute drive, and Hanjour was eager to climb back into the cockpit. On the very day they moved into their new apartment, Hanjour drove the eight miles to Air Fleet Training Systems in Teterboro, New Jersey, where he started receiving ground instruction. His goal was to fly solo along the Hudson Corridor, a low altitude “hallway” along the Hudson River that passes such New York landmarks as the World Trade Center. But heavy traffic in the area can make the corridor a dangerous route for pilots with insufficient experience. Over the next few weeks he would fly along the corridor with an instructor and eventually do a solo run. He then switched to Caldwell Flight Academy eight miles in the opposite direction in Fairfield, New Jersey, where they permitted him to rent aircraft, and for much of June, Hanjour continued to improve his flying skills.
Now certain of his decision to complete his mission, Hanjour decided to make a final phone call to his family back in Saudi Arabia so they would not become suspicious. Telling his mother he was calling from a pay phone in the United Arab Emirates, where they believed he had gone in 1999 to find a pilot’s job, he said he would telephone again when he had his own number. He might, he added, return home for a visit in about a month.
With Hazmi now settled in Totowa and Atta living in Florida, the two decided it was time for their first summit meeting to coordinate the various attacks. It would also be their first face-to-face meeting. Until then, both communicated via cell phones and e-mail, using public computers at libraries, Internet cafe's, or Kinko’s. When Atta arrived in June 2000, he went into Manhattan and purchased a Motorola “flip” cell phone plus a fifty-dollar prepaid calling card from Datavision Computer on Fifth Avenue. The number, 646-479-0432, was activated the next day, and Atta quickly used it to call back to the Middle East more than a dozen times.
After about a month he got rid of what was, in essence, a throwaway
phone. From then on he primarily relied on more secure untraceable
calling cards, bought for cash at grocery stores and pharmacies, and pay
phones when calling back to the Middle East. Thus, while in New Jersey
to meet with Hazmi, Atta called his sister in the Middle East from a pay
phone at the busy Cibao grocery store on Union Avenue in Paterson. He
then made several other calls to the U.A.E from a wall phone near a stack
of tires at Happy’s Garage in Elmwood Park. In all, the group used at
least 133 different prepaid calling cards, defeating the NSA’s ability to
track them.
When communicating with each other, Hazmi and Atta would always talk in coded language, but there was only so much they could discuss in such a limited way. So both had hoped to get together in April when Hazmi first arrived in Virginia, but they just could not find the time. Finally, on June 19, Hazmi went to Newark International Airport and boarded Continental Airlines Flight 1471 for Miami.
Around the same time, bin Laden decided to put the United States and Israel on notice about his planned attack, as he had done prior to previous attacks. In June, Bakr Atyani, the Pakistan bureau chief for the London-based MBC-TV network, received an unusual message asking if he would like to interview Osama bin Laden. The Arabic-language network was widely watched throughout the Middle East and the Islamabad-based journalist had reported on both bin Laden and the Taliban in the past.
Atyani agreed, and on June 21 he drove to Chaman, a dusty Pakistani frontier town just across from Afghanistan.
Eighty miles from Quetta, with its cool air scented with jasmine, Chaman was reached by a road that cuts through a low, wide desert plain of sun-bleached bluffs, sandy dunes, and deep gullies. It then climbs sharply up the eight-thousand-foot Khojak Pass, finally reaching the border post situated at the crest and often hidden in a shroud of sandstorms. There Atyani was placed in a car with blackened windows and driven for hours over a rock-strewn road with near-meteor-size potholes toward Kandahar—and then three hours more into the desert, past slowly moving waves of sand.
The final destination was a mud-walled room in a remote compound. Atyani was greeted by bin Laden, who rose from a series of low silky cushions splashed with color. Also greeting him was bin Laden’s deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, and his military chief, Muhammad Atef, who Atyani thought was “a very sharp person.” After a mensaf—an Arabian dish of rice and meat—bin Laden said that because of an agreement with the Taliban, he would not give any press statements. Then he added, “You are here because there is some material which we are going to give you and some news.”
Then Muhammad Atef gave Atyani the news in the form of a stark warning. “The coming weeks will hold important surprises that will target American and Israeli interests in the world,” he said. Atyani knew that meant a coming attack. “I am 100 percent sure of this, and it was absolutely clear they had brought me there to hear this message,” he later said. He then asked bin Laden to confirm the message but, in keeping with his agreement with the Taliban, he just smiled off camera. Bin Laden seemed “happy with the talk of his aides,” said Atyani.
Atef indicated that he was aware of the consequences of such an action. “We are expecting an American strike,” he said. But the men in the camps were able to “dismantle their equipment and move to other hideouts in less than half an hour,” he added. Jamal Ismail, another journalist working as a television correspondent in Pakistan at the time, recalled that some bin Laden aides informed Atyani unofficially that they hoped the attack would be of great assistance to the Palestinians in their struggle against Israel. “We have big plans for the Intifada,” they said. “We are going to strike against American interests more than the Cole.”
The “chatter” and bin Laden’s warning hit Hayden like a thunderclap. He knew that shortly before the embassy bombings, bin Laden had allowed in a reporter from ABC News and offered a similar warning, which was also followed by a great deal of chatter from target areas. But now bin Laden’s warning was crystal clear to anyone who listened to it: he was intending “to penetrate America” and hit it “where it hurts most”— likely Washington and New York. As the NSA sent reports of the chatter throughout the national security community, red alerts began flashing.
At the State Department, a “Worldwide Caution” was issued regarding the risk of terrorist attack and specifically mentioning groups linked with bin Laden and al-Qaeda; U.S. military forces throughout the Persian Gulf were placed on a heightened state of alert; a Marine Corps contingent in Jordan cut short its training session and returned to its ships; the U.S. Fifth Fleet sent its ships out to sea from ports in Bahrain.
While worrisome signals had been arriving for weeks, the red flag went up on Thursday, June 21. Top-secret intercepts of confidential messages exchanged between the reporter Bakr Atyani in Islamabad and M.B.C-TV in London, likely picked up by G.C.H.Q—Britain’s NSA—revealed bin Laden’s latest dire warning. NSA analysts were well aware that similar warnings had preceded the attacks on both the U.S. embassies in East Africa and the USS Cole.
Immediately the agency flashed major alerts about “U.B.L”—Usama bin Laden—throughout the national security community. The U.S. Central Command raised the force protection condition level for U.S. troops in six countries to Delta, the highest possible level. A U.S. Marine Corps exercise in Jordan was halted. U.S. embassies in the Persian Gulf conducted an emergency security review, and the embassy in Yemen was closed. The State Department’s Foreign Emergency Support Teams were readied to move on four hours’ notice and kept up the terrorism alert posture on a “rolling twenty-four-hour basis.”
On Friday, the CIA sent out a cable to all its stations. “Threat U.B.L Attack Against US Interests Next 24-48 Hours,” it said. The same day the FBI issued its own warning to its field offices in its daily “UBL/Radical Fundamentalist Threat Update.” More CIA warnings continued on Saturday. “Bin Ladin Attacks May Be Imminent,” said one. “Possible Threat of Imminent Attack from Sunni Extremists,” said another.
On Sunday, June 24, Bakr Atyani’s report on MBC-TV finally aired,
triggering a cacophony of chatter throughout the Middle East. On Monday,
the warnings throughout Washington continued: “Bin Ladin and Associates
Making Near-Term Threats,” said a CIA cable. It reported multiple
attacks planned over the coming days, including a “severe blow” against
U.S. and Israeli “interests” during the next two weeks. And at the White
House, longtime National Security Council counter terrorism coordinator
Richard Clarke sent a Terrorism Threat Update to National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice indicating the possibility of near-term “spectacular”
terrorist attacks resulting in numerous casualties. He also said
that six separate intelligence reports showed al-Qaeda personnel warning
of a pending attack.
Clarke believed that the detailed threats contained in the intercepts were far too sophisticated to be merely a psychological operation to keep the United States on edge, a view with which the CIA agreed. The intercepts were incredibly consistent: the attacks would be calamitous, causing the world to be in turmoil, and would consist of possible multiple—but not necessarily simultaneous—attacks.
On Thursday, June 28, Clarke wrote to Rice that the pattern of al Qaeda activity indicating attack planning over the past six weeks “had reached a crescendo.” “A series of new reports continue to convince me and analysts at State, CIA, D.I.A [Defense Intelligence Agency], and NSA that a major terrorist attack or series of attacks is likely in July,” he noted. Finally, two days later the headline of a briefing to top officials pulled no punches: “Bin Laden Planning High-Profile Attacks.” The report stated that bin Laden’s operatives expected near-term attacks to have dramatic consequences “of catastrophic proportions.”
At the NSA, where intercepts containing frightening new threats appeared almost every three days, the tension seldom let up for Mike Hayden. “Throughout the summer,” said Hayden, “we had more than thirty warnings that something was imminent.” But the questions were always the same—where, when, and how?
For the American intelligence community, it was yet another humiliating blunder. Once again, the U.S. embassy in Jedda, Saudi Arabia, issued Mihdhar a B-1/ B-2 (tourist/business) visa. And once again he was able to enter the U.S. and disappear, just as he had done more than a year and a half earlier. In all that time, his name had never been placed on a watch list. Prior to obtaining the visa, Mihdhar had obtained a new “clean” passport, but like the previous document it also contained a secret coded indicator, placed there by the Saudi government, warning of a possible terrorist affiliation. U.S. passport control officers, however, had no knowledge that such a code system existed. In addition, his visa application contained at least one false statement, indicating that he had never traveled to the U.S. before. And his passport was technically invalid since it had no expiration date (apparently an accident) —a fact the inspector at JFK failed to notice that could have triggered closer scrutiny or even barred him from entry.
That evening, Hazmi drove Atta to Newark International Airport for his 6:30 p.m. Delta flight back to Fort Lauderdale, where his crew had been enjoying a few days off. While Wail al-Shehri was driving through Lion Country Safari, his brother Waleed al-Shehri and Satam al-Suqami were working out at Body Perfect Fitness Center, and Marwan al-Shehhi was purchasing pornographic videos at Video Outlet in Deerfield Beach, where he became a regular customer.
A few days later, with the complete team now assembled in the U.S., Atta boarded Swissair Flight 117 from Miami to Zurich, where he would change planes for Madrid. He was traveling to Spain for a summit with Ramzi Binalshibh, his former roommate and the man who was helping bin Laden and Khalid Shaikh Mohammed coordinate the operation from his base in Germany. Making use of his two-and-a-half-hour layover, he withdrew 1,700 Swiss francs from an ATM, bought a box of Swiss chocolates, and began looking for sharp knives in the duty-free store. One that caught his eye was a red Swiss Army Camper Knife that featured a large blade, a sharp, jagged saw, and nearly a dozen other attachments. The other was a Swiss Army Soldier’s Knife, which also had a large stainless steel blade but was more compact. Atta took both of them. He then telephoned Marwan al-Shehhi back in Florida and learned that Binalshibh, in Hamburg, had been unable get a ticket to Madrid because of the holiday travel season. The only thing available was a ticket the next day to the small Catalan city of Reus on Spain’s Costa Dorada, its Gold Coast. Atta figured the easiest thing would be to simply drive there to meet him. At a computer stand in the airport, he logged on to Travelocity and reserved a car in Madrid from July 9th to the 16th.
Atta landed at Madrid-Barajas Airport in the early afternoon on July 8, too late to leave on the long drive, so after using a public Internet terminal he stopped at a small airport travel kiosk to find a hotel. What he wanted, he told the woman at the counter, was the hotel that was cheapest and closest to the airport. The travel agent called the Diana Cazadora, a threestar hotel near the cargo terminal, confirmed the reservation, and showed Atta where to wait for the minibus. After checking into Room 111, he called Binalshibh to confirm that everything was still on schedule for the meeting the next day. Then the following morning he paid cash for the hotel room, slid behind the wheel of a silver Hyundai Accent rented from the SIXT agency next door, and got started on the three-hundred-mile trip to the Mediterranean shoreline.
At 7:00 p.m., the small Aero Lloyd plane carrying Binalshibh pulled into the Reus Airport, a single terminal ringed by olive groves. There to greet him was Mohamed Atta. The two then drove to the tiny seaside village of Cambrils on the southern outskirts of Salou. By the time they arrived, the exodus of tourists from the town’s long, honey-colored beaches was over and the sidewalk cafes were starting to buzz. It was a good place to become invisible in plain sight, lost among the constantly changing faces, like cards in a shuffle. Arriving without reservations, Atta and Binalshibh found a space at the four-star Hotel Monica, overlooking six miles of gentle surf, and they checked into Room 412.
Despite the carefree nature of the venue, their week long series of meetings was deadly serious. Binalshibh told Atta that bin Laden wanted the attacks carried out as soon as possible because he was concerned about the large number of operatives in the U.S. at the same time. But Atta said he was still unable to provide an exact date for the attacks because he was too busy organizing the arriving soldiers. In addition, he still needed to coordinate the timing of the flights so that the crashes would occur simultaneously. Atta said he needed about five to six more weeks before he could provide an accurate attack date.
In whispered talk in their room and along the beach, Binalshibh told Atta that bin Laden wanted the date of the attack kept from the other operatives until the last minute and that Atta was to provide Binalshibh with advance notice of at least a week or two. In that way Binalshibh could travel to Afghanistan and report the date personally to bin Laden. Turning to targets, Binalshibh reminded Atta that one of bin Laden’s chief aims was to destroy the White House. Atta said its low position surrounded by taller buildings made it a difficult target, but he had asked Hazmi and Hanjour to evaluate its feasibility and was awaiting their answer. He explained that Hanjour had been assigned the Pentagon and he and Hazmi had rented small aircraft and flown reconnaissance flights near the building.
With regard to the rest of the targets, Ziad Jarrah would crash into the Capitol and both he—Atta—and Marwan al-Shehhi would hit the World Trade Center. In the event a pilot could not reach his intended target, he was to crash the plane wherever he could. Atta said that if he was unable to strike the World Trade Center, his plan was to crash his jet directly into the streets of New York. Each pilot, he said, had volunteered for his assigned target, and the assignments were subject to change.
A few days after they arrived, they were told the hotel was fully committed
for the rest of the week and they would have to find a new place
to stay. Climbing into the silver Hyundai, they drove a few miles up the
coast toward Tarragona and turned onto the Via Augusta and into the
Hotel Sant Jordi, a small, amiable establishment near the sandy shore of
Playa Sabinosa. The hotel had space and the clerk handed Atta the keys
to Room 206.
Turning to the mechanics of the hijackings, Atta said he, Shehhi, and Jarrah had encountered no problems carrying box cutters on cross-country surveillance flights. During those flights, he said, the best time to storm the cockpit was about ten to fifteen minutes after takeoff, when the cockpit doors typically were opened for the first time. Because he was confident that the doors would be open, he said, he had not planned for any contingency actions, such as using a hostage or claiming to have a bomb. In looking for planes, Atta said he wanted to select aircraft departing on long flights because they would be full of fuel, and that he wanted to hijack Boeing aircraft because he believed them easier to fly than the Airbus, which he understood had an autopilot feature that did not allow them to be crashed into the ground.
Finally, Atta confirmed that all the soldiers had arrived in the United States without incident. He said he planned to divide them into teams according to their English-speaking abilities, and in that way they would be able to assist one another before the operation. Each team would also be able to command the passengers in English. One problem Atta brought up was the desire by some of the pilots and soldiers to contact their families to say good-bye, something he had forbidden.
Before they parted, Atta expressed his concern about his communications being intercepted. To help reduce the threat, he instructed Binalshibh to obtain new telephones as soon as he returned to Germany. One phone would be used to contact him in America and the other would be used to speak with the leaders in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Binalshibh then gave Atta eight necklaces and eight bracelets that Atta had asked him to buy when he was recently in Bangkok. He believed that if the hijackers were clean shaven and well dressed, others would simply stereotype them as wealthy Saudis and give them less notice.
By the time they were finished it was Monday, July 16, and Atta drove Binalshibh back to the Reus Airport for his Aero Lloyd flight back to Hamburg. It would be the last time they would ever see each other. Five years earlier, as Israel began its bloody Grapes of Wrath invasion of Lebanon with American support, Atta had signed his last will and testament vowing revenge. It was time for the endgame.
It was the second time bin Laden exploded over Israel and ordered the immediate launch of the attack. The first time was in October 2000, while Atta and the other pilots were still undergoing flight training. The trigger that time was the killing of twelve-year-old Mohammed al-Dura, a Palestinian boy in Gaza who was shot by Israeli troops when gunfire broke out between the Israeli forces and Palestinian civilians. The entire event was captured by a French television camera crew and then broadcast around the globe, setting off a firestorm throughout the Middle East. The news also quickly reached Afghanistan, sending bin Laden over the top. As an act of revenge, he ordered Khalid Shaikh to immediately launch the attack in the U.S., even though none of the pilots had yet been trained. He argued that now was the time to make their point, and it would be enough for them to hijack the planes and then simply crash them into the ground, killing everyone on board, rather than fly them into specific targets. Khalid Shaikh, however, was not willing to throw away years of planning and work for a quick moment of revenge, and he talked bin Laden into keeping the original timetable.
Now, as a result of the Sharon visit to the Bush White House and the snub to Arafat, bin Laden was again on the warpath. His order this time was so serious that a general warning went out through his training camps in Afghanistan. His al-Farooq camp suddenly went on a high state of alert, and trainees began practicing evacuation drills. At the moment their commanders gave the order, they would run to the gates of the compound and into the mountains where they would remain until it was safe to return. Al-Qaeda members dispersed with their families, security was increased, and bin Laden moved to a safe location. But in the end, Khalid Shaikh once again succeeded in keeping the air attacks in the U.S. on track, arguing that the teams were not ready, and the alert was called off.
As the alert was taking place, Khalid al-Mihdhar was in Saudi Arabia, having flown there from Sanaa on May 26 to spend about a month taking care of some final details. While there, he told his cousin in Mecca about the coming attacks in the U.S. He said that five were planned and that they had originally been scheduled for May and then July (because of Sharon) and finally September. “I will make it happen even if I do it by myself,” he quoted his mentor, bin Laden. Finally, Mihdhar asked his cousin to watch over his home and family because he had a job to do.
At the end of July, the NSA issued a report noting that the spike in intelligence about a near-term al-Qaeda attack had stopped, and Hayden breathed a sigh of relief. At the White House, Richard Clarke passed the report on to Condoleezza Rice and her deputy, Stephen Hadley, warning that the attack had just been postponed for a few months “but will still happen.”
A few days later, on August 1, the FBI issued an advisory that although most of the reporting indicated a potential for attacks on U.S. interests abroad, the possibility of an attack within the United States could not be discounted. The CIA brought the same issue to the president’s attention five days later when it included a report in its President’s Daily Brief (P.D.B) titled “Bin Ladin Determined to Strike in U.S.” It was the thirty sixth time so far that year that bin Laden or al-Qaeda had been discussed in a P.D.B.
In the August 6 brief, the CIA noted that bin Laden had warned that “his followers would follow the example of World Trade Center bomber Ramzi Yousef ” and “bring the fighting to America.” Also, after the U.S. missile strikes on his base in Afghanistan in 1998, bin Laden “told followers he wanted to retaliate in Washington.” At another point the document discussed a 1998 report indicating that bin Laden “wanted to hijack a U.S. aircraft to gain the release of ‘Blind Shaykh’ Umar Abd al-Rahman and other U.S.-held extremists.” Finally, the P.D.B noted that “FBI information since that time indicates patterns of suspicious activity in this country consistent with preparations for hijackings or other types of attacks, including recent surveillance of federal buildings in New York.” Despite the wake-up call, the president showed little interest.
As the lights flashed and the sirens wailed from the tops of the spy factories, some of the analysts and operatives inside began attempting to put the pieces together. At the CIA, Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi had never been far from the thoughts of Tom Wilshire, the deputy chief of Alec Station. In January 2000 he had spiked the message drafted by Doug Miller, one of the FBI agents assigned to the station, alerting his headquarters to Mihdhar’s U.S. visa and New York travel plans. Wilshire also never alerted the State Department, which would have put Mihdhar on a watch list and stopped him at the border. Then, when Wilshire learned in March 2000 that Hazmi had actually flown to Los Angeles two months earlier, he again failed to notify the FBI or even the agents working for him in his office.
In May, Tom Wilshire was transferred to FBI headquarters as the CIA’s chief liaison to the bureau’s counter terrorism division. Soon after he arrived, he began focusing closely on the Kuala Lumpur meeting out of concern that al-Qaeda might next target a location in Southeast Asia. Shortly before Wilshire left Alec Station, Margarette Gillespie began “getting up to speed” on the Malaysia meeting, too. An F.B.I I.O.S (intelligence operations specialist) detailed to Alec Station as a desk officer, she had been asked to help Wilshire on the project in her spare time. That meant reading all the relevant cable traffic and reviewing the stack of memos and e-mail messages previously sent.
Looking for something but unsure of just what, on May 15 Wilshire downloaded the March 2000 cable indicating that Mihdhar and Hazmi had traveled from Malaysia to Bangkok on January 8, 2000. From there, according to the cable, Hazmi flew to Los Angeles a week later. Considering how concerned Wilshire was about the meeting, it seems astonishing that he would not be interested in why Hazmi might have flown to Los Angeles and what he was doing in the U.S. And yet there is no evidence that he was.
To help him unravel the mysteries surrounding the meeting in Kuala Lumpur, Wilshire turned to Dina Corsi, one of the FBI’s intelligence operations specialists at headquarters. Because the information gathered by the FBI’s criminal investigators would be used to prosecute people and put them in jail, or even execute them, they needed to show to a court a high degree of likelihood—“probable cause”—that the target of their investigation was involved in criminal activity. Only after that burden was met would a judge in a criminal court issue a warrant authorizing electronic surveillance or a physical search.
Signals intelligence specialists at the NSA, on the other hand, looked for information not to put someone in jail but to discover threats from foreign governments or foreign terrorist organizations. As a result, their requirements for obtaining an eavesdropping warrant—known as a F.I.S.A warrant—were much less stringent. Instead of criminal courts, attorneys from the Justice Department representing the NSA would appear before the highly secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. There, rather than demonstrate that their target was involved in criminal activity, all they would have to show is that he or she was connected in some way to a foreign government or foreign terrorist organization and that useful intelligence would result from the eavesdropping. The burden was lower because the consequences were fewer; privacy would be breached but no one would be going to jail.
The worry had always been that overeager criminal investigators, hoping to get a tap on a suspect with little or no probable cause, would simply apply for a F.I.S.A warrant by showing some nebulous foreign connection—for example, that the person works for a company headquartered in London. They would then be able to, in essence, go on a fishing expedition by listening in on the person’s communications for three months, hoping to find something—anything—in that time. The Constitution, under the Fourth Amendment, protects against such unreasonable searches.
To keep the two types of eavesdropping activities—intelligence and criminal—completely separate, an artificial “wall” was created. This was designed to prohibit those monitoring private conversations with much easier F.I.S.A warrants from “cheating” by passing their result “over the transom” to criminal investigators, who required a much tougher probable cause standard for a criminal warrant.
Beginning in October 2000, as a result of extremely sloppy and questionable work by the F.B.I, the F.I.S.A court ordered the wall between the F.B.I’s criminal investigators and the N.S.A’s eavesdroppers heightened considerably. The court found errors in approximately one hundred applications for F.I.S.A warrants, mostly in affidavits submitted by F.B.I supervisory special agents. The errors involved both omission of information and misrepresentations about criminal investigations of F.I.S.A targets. In addition, instead of having separate criminal and intelligence squads working on separate criminal and intelligence investigations, FBI agents were constantly moving back and forth between groups. This was exactly what was prohibited.
To remedy the situation, the F.I.S.A court issued a new order. It now required that anyone who reviewed F.I.S.A material, such as transcripts of the N.S.A’s F.I.S.A authorized domestic electronic surveillance, sign a certification acknowledging that the court’s approval was required before the information could be shared with criminal investigators.
The F.B.I then decided to allow only agents and analysts assigned to intelligence duties access to F.I.S.A materials, not the criminal investigators. At the N.S.A, Hayden had looked at the new requirements with anguish. From then on, before the agency could send intercept reports to the F.B.I, it would first have to review the documents, determine whether any of the information in them came from F.I.S.A surveillance, and then include a warning notice, or “caveat.” Still, because the agency only had a few—less than half a dozen—F.I.S.A-authorized domestic surveillance targets at the time, the additional work would be minimal. All that needed to be done was to put a warning notice on those limited intercepts while leaving the thousands of others unchanged.
The NSA soon discovered a drastic way around the minor inconvenience. Instead of simply placing the warning notice, or caveat, on just the data from the F.I.S.A-authorized targets, it would put the notice on all counter terrorism-related intelligence provided to the FBI. The caveat, in the form of a computerized “stamp,” read:
Except for information reflecting a direct threat to life, neither this product nor any information contained in this product may be disseminated to U.S. criminal investigators or prosecutors without prior approval of NSA. All subsequent product which contains information obtained or derived from this product must bear this caveat.
Contact the Office of General Counsel of N.S.A for guidance concerning this caveat. This shifted the burden from the N.S.A to the F.B.I. From then on, everything pumped out of the N.S.A that related to terrorism would contain the caveat, even though just a minute fraction of the N.S.A’s counter terrorism related intercepts came from F.I.S.A surveillance.
For the F.B.I, the N.S.A’s policy was a nightmare. Before any information from an N.S.A report was passed from the intelligence side to the criminal side it would first have to be routed back to the N.S.A and then approved by the agency’s general counsel, a process that could take up to five days. It was a very onerous task and one that largely fell on the backs of the bureau’s cadre of analysts, the intelligence operations specialists such as Dina Corsi.
Unlike the special agents, who traditionally entered the bureau as lawyers, C.P.A's, or ex-military, the I.O.S's came from a wide variety of backgrounds. Some entered from graduate schools where they had specialized in area studies or international relations. Others, like Corsi, rose from within the administrative side of the bureau. Arriving as a clerk in 1988 while attending college, Corsi graduated in 1995 and entered the bureau’s language training program. Emerging as a Russian language specialist, she worked on foreign counterintelligence issues and then switched to intelligence work on counter terrorism cases, becoming an I.O.S in 2000. Since then she had worked in the bureau’s bin Laden unit, focusing primarily on the investigation into the Cole bombing—a bombing in which they now believed Mihdhar was involved.
Throughout the summer, Mihdhar continued to be a key focus for Maggie Gillespie at Alec Station and Dina Corsi at F.B.I headquarters, and they often e-mailed each other or met in Washington. On August 7, Corsi asked Gillespie for a copy of the flight manifest for Mihdhar’s January 2000 trip to Malaysia. “I plan to write something up, but perhaps we should schedule another sit down to compare notes on both sides,” Corsi wrote. “Let me know.” “Okay, all sounds good,” replied Gillespie.
Given the high level of N.S.A intercepts and bin Laden’s warning, by then the head of the C.I.A’s Counter terrorism Center, Cofer Black, feared an attack was imminent. On August 15, he concluded a briefing to the Department of Defense’s Annual Convention on Counter terrorism with the comment, “We are going to be struck soon, many Americans are going to die, and it could be in the U.S.”
Six days later, on August 21, Gillespie was scanning through CIA cables at Alec Station when she suddenly stopped. It was the March cable indicating that Hazmi had flown to the U.S. and entered Los Angeles. It was a breathtaking moment. Suddenly “it all clicked for me,” she said. One of the possible terrorists she had been tracking for months on the other side of the world might be just on the other side of the continent. With her adrenaline pumping, Gillespie checked with Customs and discovered that Mihdhar had also entered the U.S.—just weeks before, on July 4—and had not departed. A pair of suspected terrorists were loose somewhere in the U.S.
With everything again on track, the planning shifted into overdrive.
A week after returning from Spain, Atta flew to Newark, where Hazmi
picked him up in his blue Toyota Corolla and took him to the King’s
Inn in Wayne, New Jersey, a nondescript, two-story transient way station.
Atta paid $69.90 in advance in cash and checked into Room 230, a few
doors down from Khalid al-Mihdhar. He was there to fill them in on the
meeting with Binalshibh and to coordinate the next few weeks. Ever concerned
about the N.S.A, when he had to make an overseas call, he would
duck into Tony’s Hair Stylist or Julian’s Hardware and use the pay phone
and an AT&T prepaid calling card.
By now the teams had chosen their targets, and Hanjour, Hazmi and his brother Salem, Mihdhar, and Majed Moqed volunteered to attack the Pentagon, the five-sided heart of America’s war machine. A week before, Hanjour and Hazmi had rented a plane at Caldwell Flight Academy, a few miles away in Fairfield, New Jersey. On their first surveillance flight over the Washington area, they flew down to a suburban airfield in Gaithersburg, Maryland, a route that would have allowed them to see from the air many of the capital’s landmarks.
While Atta decided to hit the North Tower of the World Trade Center and Marwan al-Shehhi volunteered to crash into the South Tower, there was still some disagreement over the target for the fourth pilot, Ziad Jarrah. In a series of e-mails, Atta and Binalshibh discussed the matter. But to hide their true meaning from the N.S.A or any other intelligence agency that might be intercepting the messages, they used coded language. They pretended to be students discussing various fields of study: “architecture” referred to the World Trade Center, “arts” the Pentagon, “law” the Capitol, and “politics” the White House. Once again Binalshibh reminded Atta that bin Laden wanted to hit the White House.
And once again Atta cautioned that such an action would be difficult. But when Binalshibh persisted, Atta agreed to include the White House but suggested they keep the Capitol Building as an alternate target in case the White House proved too difficult. Planning for maximum casualties among senators and members of Congress, Atta also suggested that the attacks not happen until after the first week in September, when Congress reconvened.
For months Binalshibh had been communicating bin Laden’s impatience and his desire for a date for the operation, and by mid-August, Atta was ready to give it to him. Again to defeat any NSA analyst who might be listening, he used a riddle to convey the date to Binalshibh, a riddle containing two branches, a slash, and a lollipop. In other words 11/9, the European way of writing 9/11. Just to be sure before he passed the message on to Khalid Shaikh, who would then pass it on to bin Laden, Binalshibh called Atta back to confirm the date.
With the date now set in stone, Atta again flew up to Newark to meet with Hazmi and begin coordinating the complex task of picking just the right seats on just the right flights on just the right type of aircraft at just the right times. He wanted the attacks to happen with maximum explosive power, in the morning when most people were at work, and as simultaneously as possible. Once officials in Washington began to understand what was happening, Atta knew, they would immediately make every effort to ground all aircraft. Timing would be everything.
It was just after ten on a warm and muggy late-summer evening when Atta stepped off Spirit Airlines Flight 460 at Newark. The next day, Friday, he briefed Hazmi and Mihdhar on the dates and they discussed flights and schedules. Then on Saturday, August 25, they were finally ready to start booking the September 11 flights. In this new type of war in which cheap motels are used as barracks and commercial jets become powerful weapons, public libraries and Internet cafes are quickly transformed into communications centers. Thus, Mihdhar and Majed Moqed drove ten minutes from Totowa to William Paterson University, a state school on 370 wooded acres in Wayne.
Cutting across the campus, they entered the squat, concrete-block David and Lorraine Cheng Library, a state-of-the-art building with high ceilings, colorful abstract art on the wall, and, in the Electronic Resource Center, a bank of thirty-six computers open to the public free of charge. Mihdhar logged on to his e-mail account, kkhd20002@yahoo.com, pulled up Travelocity.com, and began looking for a morning nonstop flight on American Airlines from Washington’s Dulles Airport to Los Angeles on September 11. The best flight was 77, which departed at 8:10 and used the same equipment in which they had conducted their surveillance trip. Mihdhar then logged on to AA.com, the airline’s Web page, and booked two seats in coach, 12A and 12B, using Moqed’s Visa card.
To keep from looking suspicious, the group logged on to the Internet at computers in a variety of locations around the area. That same afternoon, Atta went to Yuricom, Inc., a small computer repair shop on Main Street in Fort Lee, New Jersey, and searched on Travelocity for 8:00 a.m. flights on September 11 from Boston to Los Angeles and from Dulles to Los Angeles, both for two people. A few doors down the street was The Web Station, where the day before Mihdhar had opened an American Airlines Advantage account, enabling him to book and pay for a flight online. On Sunday, Atta and Mihdhar were back at the keyboard searching for flights on Travelocity, this time at Cyber Café on West Main Street in Fort Lee. Atta made his final decision and purchased two tickets.
But despite Atta’s focus on tight security, that weekend Hazmi may have telephoned his old friend from San Diego, Mihdhar Zaid, who helped Hazmi and Mihdhar get settled when they arrived. Beginning around August 25, according to his friends, Mihdhar Zaid began acting strangely and he stopped making phone calls from his telephone. Others in the group that hung out at Sam’s Star Mart, the Texaco gas station where Mihdhar Zaid and Hazmi worked, may also have received word that something big would happen soon.
Later, in October, after Mihdhar Zaid was arrested on immigration charges, several fellow inmates claimed he bragged that he knew both Hazmi and Mihdhar were planning a terrorist attack. According to one inmate, Mihdhar Zaid claimed someone had notified him that Hazmi and Mihdhar would be arriving in Los Angeles with plans to carry out an attack. Mihdhar Zaid also allegedly said that he had driven the two from Los Angeles to San Diego. As new information came up years later, the FBI would begin taking a second look at Mihdhar Zaid, but by then he had already been deported back to Yemen.
On Monday, August 27, Hazmi drove Atta to their new staging area in Laurel, Maryland.
Later that day, the two rushed over to Wilshire’s FBI office and gave him the news. But it was like a rerun of an old movie. He apparently made no mention of the fact that he had known most of the details for a year and a half or more and actively kept the information secret from the bureau. All agreed that an intelligence investigation to locate Mihdhar should be started immediately. Back at Alec Station, Gillespie asked another CIA official to draft a message to the State Department, I.N.S, Customs, and the FBI requesting the placement of Mihdhar and Hazmi on U.S. watch lists.
On August 23, Corsi contacted the State Department to get a copy of Mihdhar’s most recent visa application from the U.S. Consulate in Jedda, Saudi Arabia. Later, after obtaining permission to open an intelligence investigation into Khalid M. Mihdhar, she called the New York agent on the bin Laden squad to give him a “heads up” alert that the paperwork would soon be coming. She was eager for the case to get under way before Mihdhar left the country. Finally, she called Wilshire and told him she had found another link in Malaysia between Mihdhar and the Cole bombing. “I am still looking at intel,” she said, “but I think we have more of a definitive connection to the Cole here than we thought.” 74
Corsi was also hoping to help the criminal investigators working on the Cole bombing by getting them details on the highly secret link between Mihdhar and bin Laden’s Yemen ops center. But the only place to obtain such permission was the NSA, and on Monday, August 27, she sent over the urgent request.
That afternoon, Hayden must have been shocked. He had at last discovered that Mihdhar, whose conversations they had been recording for the past eighteen months, along with his partner, Hazmi, had been living in the country, on and off, for much of that time. He approved Corsi’s request immediately, and must have known how difficult it would be to now find them. They could be almost anywhere.
At that moment, Hayden could have almost seen Atta, Mihdhar, Hazmi, and the others from his eighth-floor window. That same afternoon, the hijackers were having their penultimate summit meeting at their new base, the Valencia Motel in Laurel, Maryland, a shabby truck stop just two miles away from Hayden’s office.
That Monday afternoon, August 27, Ziad Jarrah flew into Baltimore-Washington
International Airport from Fort Lauderdale and joined Atta,
Hazmi and his brother Salem, Hanjour, Moqed, and Mihdhar. It was a major
operational meeting and the group was spread out among three hotels
in Laurel: the Turf, the Pin-Del, and the Valencia. In the afternoon Hazmi
went to the local Kinko’s store in Laurel, logged on to Travelocity, and
purchased his and Salem’s tickets for September 11 on American Flight
77 to Los Angeles. Then at about 2:30 he went to the Target store on Fort
Meade Road and purchased a Leatherman Wave folding tool knife. A fat
hunk of stainless steel, it contained two knives, two wire cutters, a saw, a
scissors, and an assortment of other sharp instruments.
Over the next two weeks, the terrorists and the eavesdroppers would coexist in the NSA’s close-knit community like unseeing ghosts. Together, they would eat gooey cheese at Pizza Time, pump iron at Gold’s Gym, and squeeze tomatoes at Safeway. For eighteen months, since the agency first identified Mihdhar and Hazmi as likely al-Qaeda terrorists, NSA analysts had been listening to their phone calls and reading their e-mail; now they were in touching distance. Registered under their real names, they ate, sweated, and banked alongside their pursuers. Like neighbors, they shopped at J.C. Penney and Wal-Mart, bought groceries at Giant Foods, dined at the Food Factory, and banked at the First Union National Bank and the Dime Savings Bank.
Hazmi’s entire team, all five, would consolidate into Room 343 of the Valencia Motel. A $308-a-week suite, with two beds, a small living room, and a kitchenette, it was a crossroads for truckers, transients, budget travelers, and welfare recipients placed there by the state. Every morning and night, thousands of NSA employees would pass Hazmi’s blue Toyota Corolla with its California tags, parked in front of his room, as they crawled in heavy traffic down Route 1, the main drag through town to the NSA.
Despite the significance of the investigation, an FBI analyst simply gave the hunt for the suspected terrorists a “routine” precedence, the lowest of three, and on Thursday, August 30, a novice FBI intelligence agent transferred to the FBI’s bin Laden unit just weeks before was assigned to it. It was Special Agent Rob Fuller’s first intelligence investigation. He had graduated from the FBI Academy in June 2000 and over the past year had worked briefly on an applicant squad, a drug squad, and a surveillance squad.
The day Fuller was assigned the case, Mihdhar, Hazmi, and Hanjour were back in Totowa closing the lease on their top-floor apartment. Hanjour picked up their security deposit from owner Jimi Nouri, who never bothered to check the apartment for damage “because [Hanjour] was a gentleman,” he said. They then lugged out the same two suitcases and garbage bag stuffed with clothing they brought with them more than three months before. “They left as quietly as they came in,” said neighbor Giselle Diaz.
Because Fuller was busy with other cases, he was not able to even pick up the Mihdhar/Hazmi case folder until Tuesday, September 4, when he completed a lookout request on Mihdhar for the INS. But instead of checking off the box on the form indicating he was wanted for “security/ terrorism,” and was to be considered “armed and dangerous,” he mistakenly checked the “witness” box. He also contacted a Customs Service representative and verified that they too had a lookout for Mihdhar. He then requested a local criminal history check on Mihdhar through the New York City Police Department. Eventually, Fuller also noticed Hazmi’s name on the investigative order, so he did the same checks on him.
As the F.B.I’s search began, the hijackers were having a leisurely day in Laurel. Mihdhar was shopping at The Shoe Department for a pair of Timberland shoes and several MUDD Ripstop Cargo bags; Hazmi was nearby buying an ID bracelet at the Gold Valley jewelry store; and Hanjour was at the local D.M.V office getting a new Maryland ID with the address 14625 Baltimore Avenue in Laurel, the location of the group’s mail drop. Later, Mihdhar, Hanjour, and Salem al-Hazmi went for a workout at Gold’s Gym.
On Wednesday, Fuller requested a criminal history check and a search of motor vehicle records for any information on Mihdhar and Hazmi. He then contacted the Marriott hotels in the New York area since Mihdhar had listed on his customs form that his destination was the New York Marriott at the World Trade Center. But the six Marriotts he contacted all said Mihdhar had never registered as a guest. Fuller then conducted a Choicepoint search, which checks a variety of public records, but turned up nothing. At 10:17 a.m., Mihdhar and Moqed were at the American Airlines ticket counter at Baltimore-Washington International Airport. Counting out hundred-dollar bills, they were paying $2,300 for their tickets on Flight 77 on September 11 from Dulles to Los Angeles.
By Friday, September 7, every check had thus far turned up zero. That day, Atta sold his 1986 Pontiac Grand Prix to Sun Auto Leasing in Fort Lauderdale for $800 and then again flew up to Baltimore-Washington International Airport for a final coordination conference with Hazmi in Laurel. One of the key details was to close out all remaining bank accounts and send the remaining money back to bin Laden’s bankers in the U.A.E. On Saturday, Hazmi, Mihdhar, and Hanjour emptied their accounts and gave the cash to Atta. Then, while many NSA employees were doing their weekly grocery shopping, he went to the Giant store in Laurel and, via Western Union, wired $5,000 to the Wall Street Exchange Center in Dubai. He then went to a nearby Safeway and wired an additional $2,860.
For the meeting, Ziad Jarrah had driven down to Laurel from the Marriott Hotel at Newark International Airport, the staging area for his flight into the White House. That night they went to dinner at their favorite restaurant, the Food Factory, an inexpensive eatery specializing in kebabs and Afghan and Pakistani cuisine. With the twangy sounds of the sitar and the rhythmic beat of the tabla playing in the background, Mihdhar paid the $54.82 tab. It was past eleven when Jarrah left the Valencia and headed back to Newark. In a hurry after the long day, he leaned heavily on the accelerator as he sped through Maryland on Route 95. Then a few minutes past midnight, just across the Susquehanna River Bridge in the small town of Port Deposit, Jarrah saw a red light flashing in his rear view mirror and he pulled over. After everything, he must have thought, on the eve of the mission, trouble.
Stepping out of his patrol car, Maryland state trooper Joseph Catalano walked up to the passenger window of Jarrah’s red Mitsubishi Galant. “How are you doing today?” he asked and then brusquely told him he was clocked at ninety in a sixty-five-mile-per-hour zone. “Can I see your license and registration, please?” He then checked Jarrah’s Virginia driver’s license, which gave a phony address, 6601 Quicksilver Drive, Springfield, Virginia. It was a parking lot near the Springfield Mall. “You still live in Springfield, on Quicksilver Drive?” Jarrah calmly said, “Yes.” A few minutes later, after checking that the car was not stolen, Catalano returned to the passenger window and handed Jarrah a ticket. “Okay, sir, ninety miles an hour in a sixty-five zone is a two-hundred-seventy dollar fine. I need your signature down here at the bottom,” he said. “You are free to go.” Jarrah said nothing, turned on his left-hand blinker, and pulled back into traffic. Seven minutes after it began, the last opportunity to stop the plot was over. Catalano would later say that Jarrah was extremely calm and cooperative throughout the stop.
On Sunday, Atta flew to Boston as the four teams consolidated at their staging areas. Hanjour’s Pentagon crew was in Laurel, and Jarrah’s White House team was in Newark. But because both Twin Tower attacks were to originate from Boston’s Logan International Airport, Atta was likely worried about the image of ten Arabs, most of whom spoke little English, suddenly showing up at the same time at Logan for two flights. He therefore searched for the closest airport to Boston with a flight early enough to connect to American Flight 11, which was due to depart Logan for Los Angeles at 7:45 a.m. What he came up with was Portland, Maine. Thus, instead of leaving from Boston, on Monday he and Abdulaziz al-Omari would drive to Portland and catch U.S. Airways Flight 5930, operated by Colgan Air, departing for Boston at 6:00 a.m. Tuesday.
After Atta left Laurel, Hazmi and Mihdhar began planning a final celebratory meal for their crew. Hazmi went to the Giant supermarket in Laurel and bought $158.14 worth of groceries, and Mihdhar went back later for another $57.60. That night at the Valencia, behind the door to Room 343, the five men cooked over a small stove and ate in the crowded kitchenette. For all, like the other members of the cabal, it was the end of their journey, a journey from different places over different roads but with the same final destination.
Early Monday morning, Mihdhar, Hazmi, and the others loaded up their beat-up Toyota Corolla as a conga line of NSA employees, heading in to work, passed slowly by a few feet away on Route 1. By then, the agency’s secret city was already buzzing. At 7:15 a.m. Hayden, swiveling in his high-back, padded maroon chair, focused his attention on one of the two television sets in his office. It was time for his private intelligence briefing, broadcast from the agency’s war-room-like National Security Operations Center. On this day, the topic was suicide bombers; Ahmed Shah Massoud, forty-eight, a key rebel leader fighting the Taliban in Afghanistan, had been assassinated. The chief suspect was Osama bin Laden.
Following the televised briefing, Hayden convened his “Breakfast Club,” as he called it. “A stand-up meeting in here with just my personal staff,” Hayden said, “public affairs, inspector general, lawyers, each of the key components represented. It’s real quick. Literally a stand-up, everyone’s standing, including me. The room is about a third full. We’ll go quickly around—hot news of the day.” By Monday, few items were hotter than bin Laden. The previous week, the FBI had notified him that Mihdhar and Hazmi were loose somewhere in the country, and now bin Laden and the Taliban appeared to be launching a new war in Afghanistan.
Later that day, two intercepts were received that may have referred to the attack either on Massoud or on America. One said, “Tomorrow is zero hour,” and the other said, “The match begins tomorrow.” They were between targeted pay phones in a highly dangerous area of Afghanistan and people in Saudi Arabia. But despite the importance of their points of origin, they sat unread throughout the day.
At the time, Mihdhar and Hazmi were a few miles down the road, checking out of Room 343 at the Valencia Motel. In a series of deposits to his First Union National Bank account that morning, Mihdhar deposited nearly $10,000 in cash and traveler’s checks. They then went to Mail Boxes, Etc. in Laurel, where Hazmi mailed a package addressed to their financial contact in Dubai. Among the items inside was a handwritten letter in Arabic from Mihdhar to his wife in which he expressed his deep love for her and their daughter and his desire for her to have the money in the account. His bank card and PIN were included with the letter.
Hazmi may also have called his old friends back at the Sam’s Star Mart Texaco station to give them a heads up about the attack. Early on Monday morning, Mihdhar Zaid and a number of others began behaving suspiciously. One allegedly said, “It is finally going to happen,” as the others celebrated by giving each other high fives.
While Hazmi and his crew were in Laurel tying up loose ends, FBI special agent Rob Fuller was hoping to find the two in Los Angeles, where they had first landed a year and a half earlier, claiming to stay at the Sheraton Hotel. Fuller drafted a memo for the F.B.I’s Los Angeles field office asking them to begin a search of Sheraton Hotel records concerning any stays by Mihdhar and Hazmi in early 2000. He also requested that the Los Angeles office check United Airlines and Lufthansa Airlines records for any payment or other information concerning Mihdhar and Hazmi.
At three o’clock, Hazmi checked the group into Room 122 at the Marriott
Residence Inn at 315 Elden Street in Herndon, Virginia, where they
would spend their last night. The hotel had two advantages; it was a short
drive to the airport and it contained a Gold’s Gym.
But at 6:22 a.m., as they checked out of the Marriott Residence Inn in Herndon, that was exactly what Hazmi and his crew had in mind that day. A few minutes later he climbed behind the wheel of his Toyota Corolla one last time for the short drive to Dulles International Airport. Like Hazmi, who was wearing a neatly pressed blue oxford shirt and tan khaki pants, the crew all dressed casually but conservatively. With no mustaches or beards and their hair neatly trimmed, they might have been going to a Rotary Club meeting.
Arriving at the Dulles parking garage, the team separated into groups of no more than two and entered the American Airlines ticket area, where Mihdhar and Hazmi faced their final security hurdle. Having evaded the CIA, NSA, FBI, INS, State Department, and assorted other intelligence and security organizations for close to two years, now they just needed to get through airport security and they were free to carry out their deadly mission. At 7:15, Mihdhar and Majed Moqed presented their Virginia ID cards, fraudulently arranged in the parking lot of a 7-Eleven, to the American Airlines ticket agent at the check-in counter.
By now, with numerous domestic flights behind them, including dress rehearsal practice missions, they knew how the system worked—as well as where it didn’t. At the time, the principal tool to screen for potential terrorists was a program known as the computer-assisted passenger pre-screening system (C.A.P.P.S). Used by all airlines, the program was designed to identify the most questionable passengers—those who purchased their tickets with cash, for example, or purchased one-way tickets.
Once selected by the computer, a passenger’s checked baggage would be screened for explosives and held off the plane until the passenger boarded. The procedure was to avoid the problem of passengers checking luggage containing explosives and then not boarding the plane. If a person boarded the plane, the theory went, the odds are they would not have a bomb in their bag. However, neither those selected nor their carry-on luggage would be subject to additional scrutiny in the security checkpoint area. The program also contained the names of potential terrorists, who would be flagged at the counter, denied a ticket, and possibly arrested.
Both Mihdhar and Moqed were flagged by C.A.P.P.S, but since Mihdhar had no checked luggage and Moqed wasn’t carrying any explosives, the procedures had no effect on their mission. Also, at the time, there were only twenty names of potential terrorists in the computer database—none belonging to any of the nineteen hijackers.
Within the next twenty minutes the Hazmi brothers and Hanjour would also check in. Hanjour, arriving at the counter by himself, was also flagged by C.A.P.P.S, and the Hazmi brothers were flagged by the American Airlines ticket agent because one of them had no photo identification and could not understand English, and because the agent found both to be suspicious. But, again, because Hanjour had only carry-on luggage, and no one was carrying any explosives anyway, the selection process proved useless. Ahead lay the final barrier: the security screening checkpoint.
After a quick shower, Mike Hayden climbed into his Volvo and drove the three miles across Fort Meade to the NSA’s Ops 2B building, arriving about 6:50. With only one vehicle in the family, his wife or son would often drop him off and then keep the car. Entering the lobby, he slipped his blue security badge into the CONFIRM card reader, pushed through the turnstile, and turned the key in the lock of his private elevator. On the eighth floor he walked past a receptionist and walls lined with large framed pictures of antenna-covered listening posts, then took a left through an unmarked wooden door and entered his spacious corner office.
Taking a seat in his maroon leather chair, Hayden was surrounded by the accouterments of power, knickknacks and souvenirs of a long air force career. On his walnut desk was a pen holder from his days as the number two commander in Korea, a notepad printed with the word DIRECTOR, and a Brookstone world clock. On a table behind him, next to his NSA flag, sat two computers, one for classified and the other for unclassified work. The table also contained a series of telephones. One was for internal calls; another, the STU-III, was used for secure, highly secret external calls; a black “executive phone” connected him to other senior officials; and a white phone could put him through instantly to Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. No phones, however, connected him directly to the White House.
At about 7:15 Hayden began looking over his schedule for the day—a schedule he knew would be made more complicated by Rumsfeld’s declaration of war on Pentagon bureaucracy. There would be calls for more cuts to his already depleted budget, reduced by 32 percent over the past decade.[That number right there got just what it needed from that days events,points to motive,as well as profiting in the ensuring 17 years. D.C]
Three minutes later, Mihdhar and Moqed entered Dulles Airport’s west security screening checkpoint, where they placed their carry-on bags on the belt of the X-ray machine and proceeded through the arched magnetometer. Both set off the alarm, and they were directed to a second metal detector. Mihdhar did not trigger the alarm and was permitted through the checkpoint. After Moqed set it off, a screener quickly passed a wand around him and he was allowed to pass.
At 7:35, Hani Hanjour placed two carry-on bags on the belt and proceeded, without alarm, through the magnetometer. A short time later, Nawaf and Salem al-Hazmi entered the same checkpoint. Salem cleared the metal detector and was permitted through, but Nawaf set off the alarms for both the first and the second metal detectors. In his pocket or in his hand luggage he had the heavy Leatherman multi tool utility knife he had purchased at the Laurel Target store. But at the time, as they knew from their test flights, such a knife was permitted to be carried on board as long as the blade was less than four inches. A screener waved a wand over Nawaf and, as with Moqed, let him go without ever bothering to check what set off the alarm. A minute later another screener swiped Nawaf’s over-the-shoulder carry-on bag with an explosive trace detector, producing negative results. The last security barrier had been successfully breached.
The drab waiting area for American Flight 77 to Los Angeles was uncrowded; Tuesdays were generally among the slowest flying days of the week. At 7:50 Mihdhar walked down the Jetway with a black bag slung over his shoulder, wheeling a black carry-on behind him. He and Moqed entered the fuselage of the silver Boeing 757-223 and took seats 12A and 12B in coach, with Mihdhar in the center and Moqed at the window. In their section of the plane the flight was barely a quarter full, with just 43 of the 154 seats occupied.
A few minutes after Mihdhar, Hanjour walked on with a black bag draped over the shoulder of his white shirt and another, larger one in his hand. A flight attendant directed him to the left into first class and he took seat 1B, on the aisle directly in front of the cockpit door. The Hazmi brothers followed and took seats 5E and 5F on the right side of the first-class cabin, and at 8:16, the wide-body jet began to taxi away from the terminal.
At 8:00, as he did every Tuesday and Thursday, Mike Hayden took the elevator down to the third floor and walked across to the National Security Operations Center in Ops 1 for his regular morning meeting with his senior staff. “It’s something I started here because I wanted the seniors to get a sense of the ops tempo,” he said. Among the more worrisome items the ops officer brought up that morning was the assassination of Massoud. The action seemed to have touched off a new offensive by the Taliban against Massoud’s Northern Alliance forces. Also, although the White House was cautiously avoiding discussing whether Massoud was dead because of some conflicting reports from his group, intelligence reports were indicating that Massoud had died on a helicopter en route to Dushanbe, the capital of neighboring Tajikistan.
Then there was the usual assortment of other items—in the Middle East, Israeli tanks ringing the West Bank city of Jenin began shelling Palestinian security positions just outside town; in Istanbul, Turkey, a female suicide bomber killed two police officers and injured at least twenty other people. About seven minutes after the briefing began it was over. “I keep beating them to keep it shorter,” Hayden said. Following the ops briefing, the group moved into the small conference room next door for a quick staff meeting. “By eight or eight thirty we’ve kind of gotten the burst communications and now you’re into your work schedule.”
“American 77, Dulles tower,” said the controller. “Runway three zero, taxi into position and hold. You’ll be holding for landing traffic one left and for wake turbulence spacing behind the DC-10.” Seated in the front row, Hanjour kept his eyes focused on the cockpit door. As soon as it opened— when the flight attendants brought the flight crew their breakfast, or one of the crew members left to use a rest room—it would be time to make their move.
At 8:20, American Airlines Flight 77 nosed upward into a cloudless, Tiffany-blue sky.
Following the ops briefing, Hayden returned to his office for a meeting with a small number of senior officials. A few minutes after it began, about 8:48, he was standing a few feet from his desk, behind a tall wooden speaker’s table, when his executive assistant, Cindy Farkus, walked in. A plane had just crashed into the World Trade Center, she said. “The immediate image I had was a light plane, off course, bad flying,” said Hayden, who glanced at CNN just as they began showing scenes from Mohamed Atta’s attack on the North Tower. “I thought that was a big fire for a small plane,” he said, and then continued with his meeting.
At about that same moment aboard Flight 77, Hazmi and his crew sprang into action. They had trained the scenario many times: they would pull out their knives and box cutters and take command of the aircraft, ordering the crew to relinquish their aircraft, leave it on autopilot, and move to the back of the plane with the passengers. Then as Hazmi, Mihdhar, and the rest cleared out the cockpit, first class, and the front of coach, Hanjour would walk into the cockpit with the case he brought onboard containing maps, charts, and flying aids.
The entire operation appears to have worked like clockwork. At 8:50:48, Indianapolis Control transmitted the navigation message “American 77 cleared direct um Falmouth,” and the crew responded three seconds later, “uh direct Falmouth American 77 thank you.” Less than four minutes later, at 8:54, Hanjour was at the controls as the plane made its first deviation from its assigned course by turning slightly to the south. And two minutes later the transponder was switched off, causing the aircraft to disappear from primary radar.
With the transponder switched off, the plane had become virtually invisible to the controller on the ground who had been tracking the flight. Desperate to find it, he began searching along its projected flight path and the airspace to the southwest where it had started to turn. But there was nothing there. He tried the radios, calling the aircraft directly, then the airline. Again there was nothing. Indianapolis Control then made the first of ten unsuccessful attempts over the next six and a half minutes to contact the aircraft via radio. Finally, shortly after 8:56, the controllers agreed to “sterilize the air space” along the flight’s projected westerly route so that other planes would not be affected by Flight 77.
By 9:00 a.m., Hanjour had turned to the east and had begun to descend. Five minutes later the plane’s blip again appeared on the radar scopes of Indianapolis Control, but well east of where it should have been, leading to great confusion, including thoughts that the plane might already have crashed. After another seven minutes, Hanjour leveled off at twenty-five thousand feet and made a slight course change to the east-northeast. “You guys never been able to raise him at all?” asked a radar operator at Indianapolis Control. “No,” said the air traffic controller. “We called the company. They can’t even get a hold of him, so there’s no, no, uh, no radio communications and no radar.”
NEXT
Pentagon 105
The problem with the foreign partners, Taylor complained, was the NSA’s tendency to leave them in the dust both operationally and technologically. “The U.S. maintains the lead, both in technology and operational readiness,” he said. “We bring our partners along.” By not helping them keep up, Taylor suggested, the NSA might one day lose their cooperation. Finally, because so much of the NSA’s success in the age of the computer depended on getting secret access to foreign machines, databases, and software—with the help of the CIA’s clandestine officers—it was more important than ever to closely merge the two disciplines. “Our relationship with CIA is absolutely vital to our future success,” he wrote. “It is essential that NSA and CIA put our relationship on a sound basis.”
Before Hayden arrived, Taylor had been tackling the issue of how best to reduce the ocean of intercepts flowing into the agency and at the same time have the ability to trace back the suspicious calls to the U.S., including those from Yemen, without violating the law. Code-named Thinthread, the project was intended to develop complex digital filters to sift through the Nile-size rivers of phone calls, e-mail, faxes, and other communications signals channeled into the agency by satellites and ground stations. Made up of diabolically complex mathematical algorithms and protocols, these filters would isolate and trap the key conversations and messages while discarding the rest, unheard and unread.
The system was designed for intercepting communications within or between foreign countries. But Thinthread also had a unique component that allowed the agency to trace signals back to the United States without violating the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. That law forbade monitoring communications to or from individuals in the U.S. without a warrant. The catch-22 was that to get a warrant the agency needed probable cause, but without being able to intercept the message and follow it to its U.S. destination there was no way of knowing to whom or where it was going. And without that information, there was no way to apply for a warrant.
The idea behind Thinthread was that the agency would automatically encrypt the body of all the messages and phone calls entering and leaving the U.S., thereby protecting the privacy of the content. All that would be visible would be the “externals,” the exact destination or origin of the communications. As a further safety check, Thinthread also employed an automated auditing system to ensure that analysts were not abusing the system and “peeking” at the contents.
With such a system, the agency would be able to see the links between suspected targets overseas and destinations in the U.S. without the ability to read the contents of the communications. And if a pattern began to emerge—such as frequent calls and e-mails from the Yemen ops center to several phone numbers and computers in San Diego—that would be enough to show probable cause that the people in San Diego were agents of a foreign terrorist organization. With that, the agency could then obtain a F.I.S.A warrant to identify the individuals, decrypt the contents of the communications, and begin reading and listening to the complete messages and phone calls. At the same time, the FBI could begin its own investigation on the ground. The system would also allow the agency to target those communications that simply transited through the U.S., such as an e-mail from Frankfurt to Mexico City via the Internet hub in Miami.
Tests of the program throughout 1998 proved very successful and Taylor advocated for its full implementation. But when Hayden arrived the following March he flatly opposed it. His opposition was largely based on objections by his legal staff, who felt the program pushed the agency too close to the edge. Hayden also had a personal desire to avoid even the appearance of eavesdropping on Americans in America, which he considered the FBI’s responsibility. Instead of Thinthread, he came up with a different concept to help with the information overload problem. Code-named Trailblazer, the project, like Thinthread, attacked the massive data flowing into the agency with a combination of powerful computers and complex filtering software. But where Thinthread encrypted all traffic entering, leaving, or transiting the U.S.—thus allowing the NSA to analyze where it came from and where it was going without violating the law—Trailblazer offered no such protection.
By the fall of 2000, the battle between Thinthread and Trailblazer culminated in a “very emotional debate” between Taylor and Hayden, with the director siding with the lawyers. Taylor, pushed out of his position by Hayden, then decided to leave the agency altogether at the end of December, the same month that the NSA released a request for proposals to defense contractors to begin bidding to work on Trailblazer.
Hayden knew the agency was in trouble. “We are digging out of a deep hole,” he said. “NSA downsized about one-third of its manpower and about the same proportion of its budget in the decade of the 1990's. That is the same decade when packetized communications—the e-communications we have all become familiar with—surpassed traditional communications. That is the same decade when mobile cell phones increased from 16 million to 741 million—an increase of nearly fifty times. That is the same decade when Internet users went from about 4 million to 361 million—an increase of over ninety times. Half as many landlines were laid in the last six years of the 1990's as in the whole previous history of the world. In that same decade of the 1990's, international telephone traffic went from 38 billion minutes to over 100 billion.”
Out of those 100 billion minutes, however, the NSA needed only a few dozen to discover and stop bin Laden’s planned air attack—and those few dozen were sitting nearby in a cavernous tape library collecting dust.
Totowa
On February 21, 2001, Hani Hanjour was awarded his certificate for completing
sixty hours of Boeing 737-200 Systems Ground Training. At Jet
Tech in Phoenix, he underwent lengthy sessions in the company’s Boeing
737-200 simulator at $250 an hour, as well as classroom study. Although
his performance sheet has no check marks in the box opposite “Taxi,” it
does contain a large check opposite “Steep Turns,” which, for Hanjour, was
far more of a priority. In his final evaluation, his instructor noted that “Hani
absorbed a great deal of information and is very intelligent,” but, he concluded,
“he will need much more experience flying smaller a/c [aircraft]
before he is ready to master large jets.” With his commercial pilot’s license
in his pocket and advanced training in flying a passenger jetliner, Hanjour
was now up to speed with the other three pilots. To celebrate, he and Hazmi
drove to the Grand Canyon for some sightseeing. As Hanjour trained in the simulator, Hazmi was busy with research. He sent away to Sporty’s Pilot Shop in Batavia, Ohio, for training videos for Boeing 747-200, Boeing 747-400, and Boeing 777-200 flight decks, as well as a video titled “How an Airline Captain Should Look and Act.” But both he and Hanjour were now anxious to get to the East Coast as soon as possible. Hazmi needed to begin making preparations for the cadre of soldiers his friend Khalid al-Mihdhar would soon be sending his way. At the same time, Hanjour would be able to get in some additional flying time on smaller aircraft at local airports. Getting ready for the trip, Hazmi drove down to Wide World of Maps in Phoenix and purchased a National Geographic road atlas, a Unique Media map of the United States and another of New York City, and a world aeronautical chart covering the northeast portion of the United States.
Around dawn on Sunday, April 1, they departed Mesa in their battered blue 1988 Toyota Corolla, packed with wrinkled shirts, blue jeans, and flight videos. The two turned onto I-40, the 2,400-mile highway that wraps the country’s heartland in a ribbon of asphalt. For Hazmi and Hanjour, it was a road to war, a payback for treating their lands as little more than gas stations for road-hogging S.U.V's and targets for military firepower. To them, it would become a road to redemption.
Because it was Sunday, they were able to make good time as they dashed through New Mexico and then into the northern tip of Texas, zipping past miles of monotonous scrub plains and farmlands. When they crossed into Oklahoma at about 5:30 p.m., the sun was beginning to set behind them, and the road ahead grew dark as Hazmi cruised along at about eighty-five miles per hour. Approaching Elk City, they tripped the radar in the car of C.L. Parkins, an Oklahoma Highway Patrol trooper. Parkins stayed with them for a dozen minutes; then at 6:06 p.m. he pulled Hazmi over. “I asked him to come back to my car and he sat there, and I visited with him a little bit,” Parkins recalled. Hazmi appeared calm and collected and Parkins thought he spoke English well. “We did our normal checks—check to see if the vehicle’s stolen, check to see if he’s wanted, if his driver’s license status is valid—try and see if there’s anything we need to look further into.”
Apparently, no one was looking for him—not the NSA, CIA, or FBI, or the State Department. Thus, said Parkins, “we didn’t see anything to go any further with the contact . . . I wrote him a ticket for speeding and the seat belt.” Hazmi promptly mailed in his tickets with money orders covering the $138 in fines to the Washita County court clerk and the matter was quickly forgotten.
Hazmi and Hanjour were lucky; America’s intelligence system was broken. Six year earlier another Oklahoma Highway Patrol trooper, Charles Hanger, made a similar routine stop not far away and arrested Tim McVeigh less than two hours after he blew up the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City. Although at the time no one knew he was responsible, McVeigh was put in jail for carrying an unregistered handgun. Two days later, before McVeigh made bail, the FBI named him as a chief suspect and immediately flashed his name to law enforcement organizations around the country. As a result of the quick actions by FBI and police, McVeigh never got away.
Back on I-40, Hazmi pressed ahead. In some ways, the car’s occupants were a study in contrasts. Hanjour was dour, secretive, often unapproachable, with a tendency to cut Hazmi off when he thought his partner was becoming too open with strangers. He could sit for hours in the car without speaking, his hat pulled tight on his head. Hazmi was the extrovert, outgoing, made friends easily. He liked to wear colorful shirts, have a coffee with friends, laugh. More puzzled than annoyed, he would always ask why when Hanjour cut him off.
As the odometer spun, there would be no stopping at motels, just catnaps at rest stops. The soldiers would be coming soon and Hazmi needed to find a place to put them up where they could blend into the background. It was also essential to get them some type of ID, perhaps even driver’s licenses, so they would have no problem boarding the planes.
On May 2, Hazmi and Hanjour drove their blue Toyota Corolla to Washington’s Dulles Airport to meet United Flight 925 from London, arriving at 7:40 p.m. On board were the first two members of Hazmi’s crew, Majed Moqed, a law student at King Saud University in Riyadh, and Ahmed al-Ghamdi, a university student in Mecca who grew up in a prominent family in the southern Saudi city of Beljurashi. They had flown into Britain on Emirates Airlines Flight 1 from Dubai. Hazmi was no doubt happy to have some additional friendly faces around. On the previous evening he had been mugged in front of his apartment by a man who had been hanging around his place for several weeks. He immediately called the police and when the Fairfax County officers showed up, he gave his full name and his current address. No one, however, was ever arrested.
The arrival of the two soldiers put more pressure on Hazmi to quickly find a good location near New York City for the other members of his crew as they began arriving. To help them out, Eyad al Rababah, someone they met at a local mosque, suggested that the pair consider Paterson, New Jersey, and agreed to take them there and show them around. “It was somebody asking you for a favor, and you don’t lose anything by saying yes,” he said. Still, Rababah thought it was odd that while they professed to be practicing Muslims, he never saw them engaged in prayer. “Even in the mosque, I never saw them praying,” he said. Then when he showed up at their apartment for the trip he received another surprise: instead of two there were now four of them. On the morning of May 8, Rababah headed north with Hanjour seated next to him in his Honda Civic, and Hazmi followed behind in the Toyota Corolla with Moqed and Ghamdi.
Seven hours later they pulled into Rababah’s new hometown of Bridgeport, Connecticut, where he got them registered at the nearby Fairfield Motor Inn and took them on brief tour of Paterson, about ninety minutes away, and to dinner there at a Chinese restaurant. After returning them to the hotel, Rababah said good-bye and left Hazmi and his crew to make their decision. They got right to business, making over seventy-five local phone calls to area flight schools and real estate firms. Joe Macy, owner of the inn, recalled that his guests “behaved very gentle-like.”
For Hazmi and Hanjour, Paterson seemed just the place to disappear. An old, gray industrial town of 170,000 residents, it contained thousands of new immigrants attracted by the low cost of housing and, for some without the right papers, the promise of anonymity. Begun in 1792 as a sketch on the drawing board of Alexander Hamilton, two hundred years later the city’s eight square miles contained seventy-two distinct nationalities, a polyglot of cultures and languages, colors and hair styles, smells, sounds, and tastes. The two liked the gritty, blue-collar neighborhoods of African Americans and Hispanics. Also nearby was a growing Middle Eastern community and just twenty miles northwest was New York City.
For $650 a month, they rented a one-room apartment at the top of an aging three-story redbrick building at 486 Union Avenue. With graffiti on the white door and pried-open mailboxes in the hallway, it sat on a shabby block in Totowa, next to Paterson. Down the street was St. Mary’s, a Romanesque, ochre-colored church decorated with pots filled with yellow mums. It had been built a century before, when the area was predominantly German and then Irish. Newly arrived Hispanic families now filled the pews and overflowed onto the sidewalk on Sundays. Nearby was Inner City Blues, a clothing store selling hip-hop Phat Farm sweatshirts, and across the street was a storefront converted into an Islamic mission where Muslim men, mostly from Bangladesh, kneeled for afternoon prayer.
Moving into Apartment R3 on May 21, Hazmi, Hanjour, Moqed, and Ghamdi attracted little attention. But Jamie Diaz, who lived one floor below, noticed that they only brought with them two carry-on bags and a dark green garbage bag stuffed with clothing. They had no furniture for the unfurnished apartment and their only major purchase was a used air conditioner for thirty dollars. Nevertheless, for the next three months, as the dreary flat became the operations center and living quarters for Hazmi’s growing crew, he and the others blended in with little difficulty.
Dressed in jeans, shirts, and sometimes sandals, they would walk beneath the yellow awning of the bodega on the first floor to buy water, soda, juice, bread, toilet paper, napkins, and individually wrapped doughnuts—sometimes half a dozen at a time—or load up with Chinese food in brown stapled bags from the nearby Wo Hop III restaurant. Hanjour and Ghamdi would frequently stop in El Fogon, a Mexican restaurant a few doors down Union Street, where owner Modesta Gomez would sell them packs of Salem or Parliament cigarettes and Budweiser beer.
Totowa also had the advantage of being between two local airports with flight schools, each only about a fifteen-minute drive, and Hanjour was eager to climb back into the cockpit. On the very day they moved into their new apartment, Hanjour drove the eight miles to Air Fleet Training Systems in Teterboro, New Jersey, where he started receiving ground instruction. His goal was to fly solo along the Hudson Corridor, a low altitude “hallway” along the Hudson River that passes such New York landmarks as the World Trade Center. But heavy traffic in the area can make the corridor a dangerous route for pilots with insufficient experience. Over the next few weeks he would fly along the corridor with an instructor and eventually do a solo run. He then switched to Caldwell Flight Academy eight miles in the opposite direction in Fairfield, New Jersey, where they permitted him to rent aircraft, and for much of June, Hanjour continued to improve his flying skills.
Now certain of his decision to complete his mission, Hanjour decided to make a final phone call to his family back in Saudi Arabia so they would not become suspicious. Telling his mother he was calling from a pay phone in the United Arab Emirates, where they believed he had gone in 1999 to find a pilot’s job, he said he would telephone again when he had his own number. He might, he added, return home for a visit in about a month.
With Hazmi now settled in Totowa and Atta living in Florida, the two decided it was time for their first summit meeting to coordinate the various attacks. It would also be their first face-to-face meeting. Until then, both communicated via cell phones and e-mail, using public computers at libraries, Internet cafe's, or Kinko’s. When Atta arrived in June 2000, he went into Manhattan and purchased a Motorola “flip” cell phone plus a fifty-dollar prepaid calling card from Datavision Computer on Fifth Avenue. The number, 646-479-0432, was activated the next day, and Atta quickly used it to call back to the Middle East more than a dozen times.
When communicating with each other, Hazmi and Atta would always talk in coded language, but there was only so much they could discuss in such a limited way. So both had hoped to get together in April when Hazmi first arrived in Virginia, but they just could not find the time. Finally, on June 19, Hazmi went to Newark International Airport and boarded Continental Airlines Flight 1471 for Miami.
Around the same time, bin Laden decided to put the United States and Israel on notice about his planned attack, as he had done prior to previous attacks. In June, Bakr Atyani, the Pakistan bureau chief for the London-based MBC-TV network, received an unusual message asking if he would like to interview Osama bin Laden. The Arabic-language network was widely watched throughout the Middle East and the Islamabad-based journalist had reported on both bin Laden and the Taliban in the past.
Atyani agreed, and on June 21 he drove to Chaman, a dusty Pakistani frontier town just across from Afghanistan.
Eighty miles from Quetta, with its cool air scented with jasmine, Chaman was reached by a road that cuts through a low, wide desert plain of sun-bleached bluffs, sandy dunes, and deep gullies. It then climbs sharply up the eight-thousand-foot Khojak Pass, finally reaching the border post situated at the crest and often hidden in a shroud of sandstorms. There Atyani was placed in a car with blackened windows and driven for hours over a rock-strewn road with near-meteor-size potholes toward Kandahar—and then three hours more into the desert, past slowly moving waves of sand.
The final destination was a mud-walled room in a remote compound. Atyani was greeted by bin Laden, who rose from a series of low silky cushions splashed with color. Also greeting him was bin Laden’s deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, and his military chief, Muhammad Atef, who Atyani thought was “a very sharp person.” After a mensaf—an Arabian dish of rice and meat—bin Laden said that because of an agreement with the Taliban, he would not give any press statements. Then he added, “You are here because there is some material which we are going to give you and some news.”
Then Muhammad Atef gave Atyani the news in the form of a stark warning. “The coming weeks will hold important surprises that will target American and Israeli interests in the world,” he said. Atyani knew that meant a coming attack. “I am 100 percent sure of this, and it was absolutely clear they had brought me there to hear this message,” he later said. He then asked bin Laden to confirm the message but, in keeping with his agreement with the Taliban, he just smiled off camera. Bin Laden seemed “happy with the talk of his aides,” said Atyani.
Atef indicated that he was aware of the consequences of such an action. “We are expecting an American strike,” he said. But the men in the camps were able to “dismantle their equipment and move to other hideouts in less than half an hour,” he added. Jamal Ismail, another journalist working as a television correspondent in Pakistan at the time, recalled that some bin Laden aides informed Atyani unofficially that they hoped the attack would be of great assistance to the Palestinians in their struggle against Israel. “We have big plans for the Intifada,” they said. “We are going to strike against American interests more than the Cole.”
Chatter
In late June, the NSA suddenly picked up a large number of very worrisome
intercepts, filled with talk of attacks, throughout the Middle East.
“Unbelievable news coming in weeks,” said one intercept. “Big event—
there will be a very, very, very, very big uproar,” said another. “There
will be attacks in the near future,” said a third. At the same time, bin
Laden also released an al-Qaeda-made videotape that opened with shots
of the USS Cole shortly after its attack by suicide bombers eight months
earlier and included shots of terrorist training exercises. Bin Laden then
declared: “To all the mujahideen, your brothers in Palestine are waiting
for you; it’s time to penetrate America and Israel and hit them where it
hurts most.” The “chatter” and bin Laden’s warning hit Hayden like a thunderclap. He knew that shortly before the embassy bombings, bin Laden had allowed in a reporter from ABC News and offered a similar warning, which was also followed by a great deal of chatter from target areas. But now bin Laden’s warning was crystal clear to anyone who listened to it: he was intending “to penetrate America” and hit it “where it hurts most”— likely Washington and New York. As the NSA sent reports of the chatter throughout the national security community, red alerts began flashing.
At the State Department, a “Worldwide Caution” was issued regarding the risk of terrorist attack and specifically mentioning groups linked with bin Laden and al-Qaeda; U.S. military forces throughout the Persian Gulf were placed on a heightened state of alert; a Marine Corps contingent in Jordan cut short its training session and returned to its ships; the U.S. Fifth Fleet sent its ships out to sea from ports in Bahrain.
While worrisome signals had been arriving for weeks, the red flag went up on Thursday, June 21. Top-secret intercepts of confidential messages exchanged between the reporter Bakr Atyani in Islamabad and M.B.C-TV in London, likely picked up by G.C.H.Q—Britain’s NSA—revealed bin Laden’s latest dire warning. NSA analysts were well aware that similar warnings had preceded the attacks on both the U.S. embassies in East Africa and the USS Cole.
Immediately the agency flashed major alerts about “U.B.L”—Usama bin Laden—throughout the national security community. The U.S. Central Command raised the force protection condition level for U.S. troops in six countries to Delta, the highest possible level. A U.S. Marine Corps exercise in Jordan was halted. U.S. embassies in the Persian Gulf conducted an emergency security review, and the embassy in Yemen was closed. The State Department’s Foreign Emergency Support Teams were readied to move on four hours’ notice and kept up the terrorism alert posture on a “rolling twenty-four-hour basis.”
On Friday, the CIA sent out a cable to all its stations. “Threat U.B.L Attack Against US Interests Next 24-48 Hours,” it said. The same day the FBI issued its own warning to its field offices in its daily “UBL/Radical Fundamentalist Threat Update.” More CIA warnings continued on Saturday. “Bin Ladin Attacks May Be Imminent,” said one. “Possible Threat of Imminent Attack from Sunni Extremists,” said another.
Clarke believed that the detailed threats contained in the intercepts were far too sophisticated to be merely a psychological operation to keep the United States on edge, a view with which the CIA agreed. The intercepts were incredibly consistent: the attacks would be calamitous, causing the world to be in turmoil, and would consist of possible multiple—but not necessarily simultaneous—attacks.
On Thursday, June 28, Clarke wrote to Rice that the pattern of al Qaeda activity indicating attack planning over the past six weeks “had reached a crescendo.” “A series of new reports continue to convince me and analysts at State, CIA, D.I.A [Defense Intelligence Agency], and NSA that a major terrorist attack or series of attacks is likely in July,” he noted. Finally, two days later the headline of a briefing to top officials pulled no punches: “Bin Laden Planning High-Profile Attacks.” The report stated that bin Laden’s operatives expected near-term attacks to have dramatic consequences “of catastrophic proportions.”
At the NSA, where intercepts containing frightening new threats appeared almost every three days, the tension seldom let up for Mike Hayden. “Throughout the summer,” said Hayden, “we had more than thirty warnings that something was imminent.” But the questions were always the same—where, when, and how?
Cambrils
For Hazmi, the Fourth of July would be a reunion. Stepping off Saudi
Arabian Airlines Flight 53 at JFK that morning was his old buddy and
partner Khalid al-Mihdhar. Now that all of the soldiers were in the U.S.,
it was time for Mihdhar to rejoin Hazmi and his crew. With no problems
going through passport control, Mihdhar may have enjoyed the irony of
arriving on the day America celebrated its independence, casting off its
British shackles. He had come to help break his lands free of America’s
shackles. In another touch of irony, Mihdhar listed as his U.S. address
the Marriott Hotel at the World Trade Center. In fact, Hazmi would put
him up at the Quality Hotel Eastside, a low-cost hotel a few blocks from
another skyscraper, the Empire State Building. For the American intelligence community, it was yet another humiliating blunder. Once again, the U.S. embassy in Jedda, Saudi Arabia, issued Mihdhar a B-1/ B-2 (tourist/business) visa. And once again he was able to enter the U.S. and disappear, just as he had done more than a year and a half earlier. In all that time, his name had never been placed on a watch list. Prior to obtaining the visa, Mihdhar had obtained a new “clean” passport, but like the previous document it also contained a secret coded indicator, placed there by the Saudi government, warning of a possible terrorist affiliation. U.S. passport control officers, however, had no knowledge that such a code system existed. In addition, his visa application contained at least one false statement, indicating that he had never traveled to the U.S. before. And his passport was technically invalid since it had no expiration date (apparently an accident) —a fact the inspector at JFK failed to notice that could have triggered closer scrutiny or even barred him from entry.
That evening, Hazmi drove Atta to Newark International Airport for his 6:30 p.m. Delta flight back to Fort Lauderdale, where his crew had been enjoying a few days off. While Wail al-Shehri was driving through Lion Country Safari, his brother Waleed al-Shehri and Satam al-Suqami were working out at Body Perfect Fitness Center, and Marwan al-Shehhi was purchasing pornographic videos at Video Outlet in Deerfield Beach, where he became a regular customer.
A few days later, with the complete team now assembled in the U.S., Atta boarded Swissair Flight 117 from Miami to Zurich, where he would change planes for Madrid. He was traveling to Spain for a summit with Ramzi Binalshibh, his former roommate and the man who was helping bin Laden and Khalid Shaikh Mohammed coordinate the operation from his base in Germany. Making use of his two-and-a-half-hour layover, he withdrew 1,700 Swiss francs from an ATM, bought a box of Swiss chocolates, and began looking for sharp knives in the duty-free store. One that caught his eye was a red Swiss Army Camper Knife that featured a large blade, a sharp, jagged saw, and nearly a dozen other attachments. The other was a Swiss Army Soldier’s Knife, which also had a large stainless steel blade but was more compact. Atta took both of them. He then telephoned Marwan al-Shehhi back in Florida and learned that Binalshibh, in Hamburg, had been unable get a ticket to Madrid because of the holiday travel season. The only thing available was a ticket the next day to the small Catalan city of Reus on Spain’s Costa Dorada, its Gold Coast. Atta figured the easiest thing would be to simply drive there to meet him. At a computer stand in the airport, he logged on to Travelocity and reserved a car in Madrid from July 9th to the 16th.
Atta landed at Madrid-Barajas Airport in the early afternoon on July 8, too late to leave on the long drive, so after using a public Internet terminal he stopped at a small airport travel kiosk to find a hotel. What he wanted, he told the woman at the counter, was the hotel that was cheapest and closest to the airport. The travel agent called the Diana Cazadora, a threestar hotel near the cargo terminal, confirmed the reservation, and showed Atta where to wait for the minibus. After checking into Room 111, he called Binalshibh to confirm that everything was still on schedule for the meeting the next day. Then the following morning he paid cash for the hotel room, slid behind the wheel of a silver Hyundai Accent rented from the SIXT agency next door, and got started on the three-hundred-mile trip to the Mediterranean shoreline.
At 7:00 p.m., the small Aero Lloyd plane carrying Binalshibh pulled into the Reus Airport, a single terminal ringed by olive groves. There to greet him was Mohamed Atta. The two then drove to the tiny seaside village of Cambrils on the southern outskirts of Salou. By the time they arrived, the exodus of tourists from the town’s long, honey-colored beaches was over and the sidewalk cafes were starting to buzz. It was a good place to become invisible in plain sight, lost among the constantly changing faces, like cards in a shuffle. Arriving without reservations, Atta and Binalshibh found a space at the four-star Hotel Monica, overlooking six miles of gentle surf, and they checked into Room 412.
Despite the carefree nature of the venue, their week long series of meetings was deadly serious. Binalshibh told Atta that bin Laden wanted the attacks carried out as soon as possible because he was concerned about the large number of operatives in the U.S. at the same time. But Atta said he was still unable to provide an exact date for the attacks because he was too busy organizing the arriving soldiers. In addition, he still needed to coordinate the timing of the flights so that the crashes would occur simultaneously. Atta said he needed about five to six more weeks before he could provide an accurate attack date.
In whispered talk in their room and along the beach, Binalshibh told Atta that bin Laden wanted the date of the attack kept from the other operatives until the last minute and that Atta was to provide Binalshibh with advance notice of at least a week or two. In that way Binalshibh could travel to Afghanistan and report the date personally to bin Laden. Turning to targets, Binalshibh reminded Atta that one of bin Laden’s chief aims was to destroy the White House. Atta said its low position surrounded by taller buildings made it a difficult target, but he had asked Hazmi and Hanjour to evaluate its feasibility and was awaiting their answer. He explained that Hanjour had been assigned the Pentagon and he and Hazmi had rented small aircraft and flown reconnaissance flights near the building.
With regard to the rest of the targets, Ziad Jarrah would crash into the Capitol and both he—Atta—and Marwan al-Shehhi would hit the World Trade Center. In the event a pilot could not reach his intended target, he was to crash the plane wherever he could. Atta said that if he was unable to strike the World Trade Center, his plan was to crash his jet directly into the streets of New York. Each pilot, he said, had volunteered for his assigned target, and the assignments were subject to change.
Turning to the mechanics of the hijackings, Atta said he, Shehhi, and Jarrah had encountered no problems carrying box cutters on cross-country surveillance flights. During those flights, he said, the best time to storm the cockpit was about ten to fifteen minutes after takeoff, when the cockpit doors typically were opened for the first time. Because he was confident that the doors would be open, he said, he had not planned for any contingency actions, such as using a hostage or claiming to have a bomb. In looking for planes, Atta said he wanted to select aircraft departing on long flights because they would be full of fuel, and that he wanted to hijack Boeing aircraft because he believed them easier to fly than the Airbus, which he understood had an autopilot feature that did not allow them to be crashed into the ground.
Finally, Atta confirmed that all the soldiers had arrived in the United States without incident. He said he planned to divide them into teams according to their English-speaking abilities, and in that way they would be able to assist one another before the operation. Each team would also be able to command the passengers in English. One problem Atta brought up was the desire by some of the pilots and soldiers to contact their families to say good-bye, something he had forbidden.
Before they parted, Atta expressed his concern about his communications being intercepted. To help reduce the threat, he instructed Binalshibh to obtain new telephones as soon as he returned to Germany. One phone would be used to contact him in America and the other would be used to speak with the leaders in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Binalshibh then gave Atta eight necklaces and eight bracelets that Atta had asked him to buy when he was recently in Bangkok. He believed that if the hijackers were clean shaven and well dressed, others would simply stereotype them as wealthy Saudis and give them less notice.
By the time they were finished it was Monday, July 16, and Atta drove Binalshibh back to the Reus Airport for his Aero Lloyd flight back to Hamburg. It would be the last time they would ever see each other. Five years earlier, as Israel began its bloody Grapes of Wrath invasion of Lebanon with American support, Atta had signed his last will and testament vowing revenge. It was time for the endgame.
Warning
If June was a bad month for Mike Hayden, July was even worse; the chatter
was indicating that an attack could happen any day. What caused the
sudden spike in warning indicators was the news on June 20 that President
Bush had invited Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon to the White
House—their second meeting—while at the same time once again snubbing
Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat. There were few people on earth bin
Laden detested more than Ariel Sharon, and as a result he sent a strongly
worded letter to Khalid Shaikh Mohammed ordering that the attack take
place in July as a statement of support for the Palestinians. It was the second time bin Laden exploded over Israel and ordered the immediate launch of the attack. The first time was in October 2000, while Atta and the other pilots were still undergoing flight training. The trigger that time was the killing of twelve-year-old Mohammed al-Dura, a Palestinian boy in Gaza who was shot by Israeli troops when gunfire broke out between the Israeli forces and Palestinian civilians. The entire event was captured by a French television camera crew and then broadcast around the globe, setting off a firestorm throughout the Middle East. The news also quickly reached Afghanistan, sending bin Laden over the top. As an act of revenge, he ordered Khalid Shaikh to immediately launch the attack in the U.S., even though none of the pilots had yet been trained. He argued that now was the time to make their point, and it would be enough for them to hijack the planes and then simply crash them into the ground, killing everyone on board, rather than fly them into specific targets. Khalid Shaikh, however, was not willing to throw away years of planning and work for a quick moment of revenge, and he talked bin Laden into keeping the original timetable.
Now, as a result of the Sharon visit to the Bush White House and the snub to Arafat, bin Laden was again on the warpath. His order this time was so serious that a general warning went out through his training camps in Afghanistan. His al-Farooq camp suddenly went on a high state of alert, and trainees began practicing evacuation drills. At the moment their commanders gave the order, they would run to the gates of the compound and into the mountains where they would remain until it was safe to return. Al-Qaeda members dispersed with their families, security was increased, and bin Laden moved to a safe location. But in the end, Khalid Shaikh once again succeeded in keeping the air attacks in the U.S. on track, arguing that the teams were not ready, and the alert was called off.
As the alert was taking place, Khalid al-Mihdhar was in Saudi Arabia, having flown there from Sanaa on May 26 to spend about a month taking care of some final details. While there, he told his cousin in Mecca about the coming attacks in the U.S. He said that five were planned and that they had originally been scheduled for May and then July (because of Sharon) and finally September. “I will make it happen even if I do it by myself,” he quoted his mentor, bin Laden. Finally, Mihdhar asked his cousin to watch over his home and family because he had a job to do.
At the end of July, the NSA issued a report noting that the spike in intelligence about a near-term al-Qaeda attack had stopped, and Hayden breathed a sigh of relief. At the White House, Richard Clarke passed the report on to Condoleezza Rice and her deputy, Stephen Hadley, warning that the attack had just been postponed for a few months “but will still happen.”
A few days later, on August 1, the FBI issued an advisory that although most of the reporting indicated a potential for attacks on U.S. interests abroad, the possibility of an attack within the United States could not be discounted. The CIA brought the same issue to the president’s attention five days later when it included a report in its President’s Daily Brief (P.D.B) titled “Bin Ladin Determined to Strike in U.S.” It was the thirty sixth time so far that year that bin Laden or al-Qaeda had been discussed in a P.D.B.
In the August 6 brief, the CIA noted that bin Laden had warned that “his followers would follow the example of World Trade Center bomber Ramzi Yousef ” and “bring the fighting to America.” Also, after the U.S. missile strikes on his base in Afghanistan in 1998, bin Laden “told followers he wanted to retaliate in Washington.” At another point the document discussed a 1998 report indicating that bin Laden “wanted to hijack a U.S. aircraft to gain the release of ‘Blind Shaykh’ Umar Abd al-Rahman and other U.S.-held extremists.” Finally, the P.D.B noted that “FBI information since that time indicates patterns of suspicious activity in this country consistent with preparations for hijackings or other types of attacks, including recent surveillance of federal buildings in New York.” Despite the wake-up call, the president showed little interest.
As the lights flashed and the sirens wailed from the tops of the spy factories, some of the analysts and operatives inside began attempting to put the pieces together. At the CIA, Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi had never been far from the thoughts of Tom Wilshire, the deputy chief of Alec Station. In January 2000 he had spiked the message drafted by Doug Miller, one of the FBI agents assigned to the station, alerting his headquarters to Mihdhar’s U.S. visa and New York travel plans. Wilshire also never alerted the State Department, which would have put Mihdhar on a watch list and stopped him at the border. Then, when Wilshire learned in March 2000 that Hazmi had actually flown to Los Angeles two months earlier, he again failed to notify the FBI or even the agents working for him in his office.
In May, Tom Wilshire was transferred to FBI headquarters as the CIA’s chief liaison to the bureau’s counter terrorism division. Soon after he arrived, he began focusing closely on the Kuala Lumpur meeting out of concern that al-Qaeda might next target a location in Southeast Asia. Shortly before Wilshire left Alec Station, Margarette Gillespie began “getting up to speed” on the Malaysia meeting, too. An F.B.I I.O.S (intelligence operations specialist) detailed to Alec Station as a desk officer, she had been asked to help Wilshire on the project in her spare time. That meant reading all the relevant cable traffic and reviewing the stack of memos and e-mail messages previously sent.
Looking for something but unsure of just what, on May 15 Wilshire downloaded the March 2000 cable indicating that Mihdhar and Hazmi had traveled from Malaysia to Bangkok on January 8, 2000. From there, according to the cable, Hazmi flew to Los Angeles a week later. Considering how concerned Wilshire was about the meeting, it seems astonishing that he would not be interested in why Hazmi might have flown to Los Angeles and what he was doing in the U.S. And yet there is no evidence that he was.
To help him unravel the mysteries surrounding the meeting in Kuala Lumpur, Wilshire turned to Dina Corsi, one of the FBI’s intelligence operations specialists at headquarters. Because the information gathered by the FBI’s criminal investigators would be used to prosecute people and put them in jail, or even execute them, they needed to show to a court a high degree of likelihood—“probable cause”—that the target of their investigation was involved in criminal activity. Only after that burden was met would a judge in a criminal court issue a warrant authorizing electronic surveillance or a physical search.
Signals intelligence specialists at the NSA, on the other hand, looked for information not to put someone in jail but to discover threats from foreign governments or foreign terrorist organizations. As a result, their requirements for obtaining an eavesdropping warrant—known as a F.I.S.A warrant—were much less stringent. Instead of criminal courts, attorneys from the Justice Department representing the NSA would appear before the highly secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. There, rather than demonstrate that their target was involved in criminal activity, all they would have to show is that he or she was connected in some way to a foreign government or foreign terrorist organization and that useful intelligence would result from the eavesdropping. The burden was lower because the consequences were fewer; privacy would be breached but no one would be going to jail.
The worry had always been that overeager criminal investigators, hoping to get a tap on a suspect with little or no probable cause, would simply apply for a F.I.S.A warrant by showing some nebulous foreign connection—for example, that the person works for a company headquartered in London. They would then be able to, in essence, go on a fishing expedition by listening in on the person’s communications for three months, hoping to find something—anything—in that time. The Constitution, under the Fourth Amendment, protects against such unreasonable searches.
To keep the two types of eavesdropping activities—intelligence and criminal—completely separate, an artificial “wall” was created. This was designed to prohibit those monitoring private conversations with much easier F.I.S.A warrants from “cheating” by passing their result “over the transom” to criminal investigators, who required a much tougher probable cause standard for a criminal warrant.
Beginning in October 2000, as a result of extremely sloppy and questionable work by the F.B.I, the F.I.S.A court ordered the wall between the F.B.I’s criminal investigators and the N.S.A’s eavesdroppers heightened considerably. The court found errors in approximately one hundred applications for F.I.S.A warrants, mostly in affidavits submitted by F.B.I supervisory special agents. The errors involved both omission of information and misrepresentations about criminal investigations of F.I.S.A targets. In addition, instead of having separate criminal and intelligence squads working on separate criminal and intelligence investigations, FBI agents were constantly moving back and forth between groups. This was exactly what was prohibited.
To remedy the situation, the F.I.S.A court issued a new order. It now required that anyone who reviewed F.I.S.A material, such as transcripts of the N.S.A’s F.I.S.A authorized domestic electronic surveillance, sign a certification acknowledging that the court’s approval was required before the information could be shared with criminal investigators.
The F.B.I then decided to allow only agents and analysts assigned to intelligence duties access to F.I.S.A materials, not the criminal investigators. At the N.S.A, Hayden had looked at the new requirements with anguish. From then on, before the agency could send intercept reports to the F.B.I, it would first have to review the documents, determine whether any of the information in them came from F.I.S.A surveillance, and then include a warning notice, or “caveat.” Still, because the agency only had a few—less than half a dozen—F.I.S.A-authorized domestic surveillance targets at the time, the additional work would be minimal. All that needed to be done was to put a warning notice on those limited intercepts while leaving the thousands of others unchanged.
The NSA soon discovered a drastic way around the minor inconvenience. Instead of simply placing the warning notice, or caveat, on just the data from the F.I.S.A-authorized targets, it would put the notice on all counter terrorism-related intelligence provided to the FBI. The caveat, in the form of a computerized “stamp,” read:
Except for information reflecting a direct threat to life, neither this product nor any information contained in this product may be disseminated to U.S. criminal investigators or prosecutors without prior approval of NSA. All subsequent product which contains information obtained or derived from this product must bear this caveat.
Contact the Office of General Counsel of N.S.A for guidance concerning this caveat. This shifted the burden from the N.S.A to the F.B.I. From then on, everything pumped out of the N.S.A that related to terrorism would contain the caveat, even though just a minute fraction of the N.S.A’s counter terrorism related intercepts came from F.I.S.A surveillance.
For the F.B.I, the N.S.A’s policy was a nightmare. Before any information from an N.S.A report was passed from the intelligence side to the criminal side it would first have to be routed back to the N.S.A and then approved by the agency’s general counsel, a process that could take up to five days. It was a very onerous task and one that largely fell on the backs of the bureau’s cadre of analysts, the intelligence operations specialists such as Dina Corsi.
Unlike the special agents, who traditionally entered the bureau as lawyers, C.P.A's, or ex-military, the I.O.S's came from a wide variety of backgrounds. Some entered from graduate schools where they had specialized in area studies or international relations. Others, like Corsi, rose from within the administrative side of the bureau. Arriving as a clerk in 1988 while attending college, Corsi graduated in 1995 and entered the bureau’s language training program. Emerging as a Russian language specialist, she worked on foreign counterintelligence issues and then switched to intelligence work on counter terrorism cases, becoming an I.O.S in 2000. Since then she had worked in the bureau’s bin Laden unit, focusing primarily on the investigation into the Cole bombing—a bombing in which they now believed Mihdhar was involved.
Throughout the summer, Mihdhar continued to be a key focus for Maggie Gillespie at Alec Station and Dina Corsi at F.B.I headquarters, and they often e-mailed each other or met in Washington. On August 7, Corsi asked Gillespie for a copy of the flight manifest for Mihdhar’s January 2000 trip to Malaysia. “I plan to write something up, but perhaps we should schedule another sit down to compare notes on both sides,” Corsi wrote. “Let me know.” “Okay, all sounds good,” replied Gillespie.
Given the high level of N.S.A intercepts and bin Laden’s warning, by then the head of the C.I.A’s Counter terrorism Center, Cofer Black, feared an attack was imminent. On August 15, he concluded a briefing to the Department of Defense’s Annual Convention on Counter terrorism with the comment, “We are going to be struck soon, many Americans are going to die, and it could be in the U.S.”
Six days later, on August 21, Gillespie was scanning through CIA cables at Alec Station when she suddenly stopped. It was the March cable indicating that Hazmi had flown to the U.S. and entered Los Angeles. It was a breathtaking moment. Suddenly “it all clicked for me,” she said. One of the possible terrorists she had been tracking for months on the other side of the world might be just on the other side of the continent. With her adrenaline pumping, Gillespie checked with Customs and discovered that Mihdhar had also entered the U.S.—just weeks before, on July 4—and had not departed. A pair of suspected terrorists were loose somewhere in the U.S.
Fort Lee
Back in Germany, Ramzi Binalshibh followed Atta’s instructions. He
purchased two phones, one with which to keep in touch with Atta
and another to communicate with everyone else. If the NSA picked up
the calls from Binalshibh to the Middle East, Atta believed, they would
not be able to link the number to calls from Binalshibh to Atta. To further
obscure the nature of the communications and frustrate any interception,
the group had worked out a series of code words, and using those terms,
Binalshibh passed on to Khalid Shaikh the highlights of the meeting. By now the teams had chosen their targets, and Hanjour, Hazmi and his brother Salem, Mihdhar, and Majed Moqed volunteered to attack the Pentagon, the five-sided heart of America’s war machine. A week before, Hanjour and Hazmi had rented a plane at Caldwell Flight Academy, a few miles away in Fairfield, New Jersey. On their first surveillance flight over the Washington area, they flew down to a suburban airfield in Gaithersburg, Maryland, a route that would have allowed them to see from the air many of the capital’s landmarks.
While Atta decided to hit the North Tower of the World Trade Center and Marwan al-Shehhi volunteered to crash into the South Tower, there was still some disagreement over the target for the fourth pilot, Ziad Jarrah. In a series of e-mails, Atta and Binalshibh discussed the matter. But to hide their true meaning from the N.S.A or any other intelligence agency that might be intercepting the messages, they used coded language. They pretended to be students discussing various fields of study: “architecture” referred to the World Trade Center, “arts” the Pentagon, “law” the Capitol, and “politics” the White House. Once again Binalshibh reminded Atta that bin Laden wanted to hit the White House.
And once again Atta cautioned that such an action would be difficult. But when Binalshibh persisted, Atta agreed to include the White House but suggested they keep the Capitol Building as an alternate target in case the White House proved too difficult. Planning for maximum casualties among senators and members of Congress, Atta also suggested that the attacks not happen until after the first week in September, when Congress reconvened.
For months Binalshibh had been communicating bin Laden’s impatience and his desire for a date for the operation, and by mid-August, Atta was ready to give it to him. Again to defeat any NSA analyst who might be listening, he used a riddle to convey the date to Binalshibh, a riddle containing two branches, a slash, and a lollipop. In other words 11/9, the European way of writing 9/11. Just to be sure before he passed the message on to Khalid Shaikh, who would then pass it on to bin Laden, Binalshibh called Atta back to confirm the date.
With the date now set in stone, Atta again flew up to Newark to meet with Hazmi and begin coordinating the complex task of picking just the right seats on just the right flights on just the right type of aircraft at just the right times. He wanted the attacks to happen with maximum explosive power, in the morning when most people were at work, and as simultaneously as possible. Once officials in Washington began to understand what was happening, Atta knew, they would immediately make every effort to ground all aircraft. Timing would be everything.
It was just after ten on a warm and muggy late-summer evening when Atta stepped off Spirit Airlines Flight 460 at Newark. The next day, Friday, he briefed Hazmi and Mihdhar on the dates and they discussed flights and schedules. Then on Saturday, August 25, they were finally ready to start booking the September 11 flights. In this new type of war in which cheap motels are used as barracks and commercial jets become powerful weapons, public libraries and Internet cafes are quickly transformed into communications centers. Thus, Mihdhar and Majed Moqed drove ten minutes from Totowa to William Paterson University, a state school on 370 wooded acres in Wayne.
Cutting across the campus, they entered the squat, concrete-block David and Lorraine Cheng Library, a state-of-the-art building with high ceilings, colorful abstract art on the wall, and, in the Electronic Resource Center, a bank of thirty-six computers open to the public free of charge. Mihdhar logged on to his e-mail account, kkhd20002@yahoo.com, pulled up Travelocity.com, and began looking for a morning nonstop flight on American Airlines from Washington’s Dulles Airport to Los Angeles on September 11. The best flight was 77, which departed at 8:10 and used the same equipment in which they had conducted their surveillance trip. Mihdhar then logged on to AA.com, the airline’s Web page, and booked two seats in coach, 12A and 12B, using Moqed’s Visa card.
To keep from looking suspicious, the group logged on to the Internet at computers in a variety of locations around the area. That same afternoon, Atta went to Yuricom, Inc., a small computer repair shop on Main Street in Fort Lee, New Jersey, and searched on Travelocity for 8:00 a.m. flights on September 11 from Boston to Los Angeles and from Dulles to Los Angeles, both for two people. A few doors down the street was The Web Station, where the day before Mihdhar had opened an American Airlines Advantage account, enabling him to book and pay for a flight online. On Sunday, Atta and Mihdhar were back at the keyboard searching for flights on Travelocity, this time at Cyber Café on West Main Street in Fort Lee. Atta made his final decision and purchased two tickets.
But despite Atta’s focus on tight security, that weekend Hazmi may have telephoned his old friend from San Diego, Mihdhar Zaid, who helped Hazmi and Mihdhar get settled when they arrived. Beginning around August 25, according to his friends, Mihdhar Zaid began acting strangely and he stopped making phone calls from his telephone. Others in the group that hung out at Sam’s Star Mart, the Texaco gas station where Mihdhar Zaid and Hazmi worked, may also have received word that something big would happen soon.
Later, in October, after Mihdhar Zaid was arrested on immigration charges, several fellow inmates claimed he bragged that he knew both Hazmi and Mihdhar were planning a terrorist attack. According to one inmate, Mihdhar Zaid claimed someone had notified him that Hazmi and Mihdhar would be arriving in Los Angeles with plans to carry out an attack. Mihdhar Zaid also allegedly said that he had driven the two from Los Angeles to San Diego. As new information came up years later, the FBI would begin taking a second look at Mihdhar Zaid, but by then he had already been deported back to Yemen.
On Monday, August 27, Hazmi drove Atta to their new staging area in Laurel, Maryland.
Discovery
Gillespie could hardly wait to tell Corsi the news of her discovery, that
both Mihdhar and Hazmi were somewhere in the U.S. On Wednesday,
August 22, the two met in the F.B.I’s tan, fortress like headquarters. Corsi
was stunned. She then discovered that Mihdhar and Hazmi had flown into
Los Angeles together on January 15, 2000, listing their destination in the
city as the Sheraton Hotel. A check with the I.N.S revealed that Mihdhar
had departed from Los Angeles on June 10, 2000, aboard Lufthansa
Airlines, but no departure record could be found for Hazmi. Corsi thus
assumed that Hazmi had departed at the same time. But Hazmi had never
left. The data flowed in quickly now. Another I.N.S message indicated that
when Mihdhar reentered the U.S. on July 4, he had come in through New
York and listed his destination as the Marriott Hotel in New York City, the
one at the World Trade Center. Later that day, the two rushed over to Wilshire’s FBI office and gave him the news. But it was like a rerun of an old movie. He apparently made no mention of the fact that he had known most of the details for a year and a half or more and actively kept the information secret from the bureau. All agreed that an intelligence investigation to locate Mihdhar should be started immediately. Back at Alec Station, Gillespie asked another CIA official to draft a message to the State Department, I.N.S, Customs, and the FBI requesting the placement of Mihdhar and Hazmi on U.S. watch lists.
On August 23, Corsi contacted the State Department to get a copy of Mihdhar’s most recent visa application from the U.S. Consulate in Jedda, Saudi Arabia. Later, after obtaining permission to open an intelligence investigation into Khalid M. Mihdhar, she called the New York agent on the bin Laden squad to give him a “heads up” alert that the paperwork would soon be coming. She was eager for the case to get under way before Mihdhar left the country. Finally, she called Wilshire and told him she had found another link in Malaysia between Mihdhar and the Cole bombing. “I am still looking at intel,” she said, “but I think we have more of a definitive connection to the Cole here than we thought.” 74
Corsi was also hoping to help the criminal investigators working on the Cole bombing by getting them details on the highly secret link between Mihdhar and bin Laden’s Yemen ops center. But the only place to obtain such permission was the NSA, and on Monday, August 27, she sent over the urgent request.
That afternoon, Hayden must have been shocked. He had at last discovered that Mihdhar, whose conversations they had been recording for the past eighteen months, along with his partner, Hazmi, had been living in the country, on and off, for much of that time. He approved Corsi’s request immediately, and must have known how difficult it would be to now find them. They could be almost anywhere.
At that moment, Hayden could have almost seen Atta, Mihdhar, Hazmi, and the others from his eighth-floor window. That same afternoon, the hijackers were having their penultimate summit meeting at their new base, the Valencia Motel in Laurel, Maryland, a shabby truck stop just two miles away from Hayden’s office.
Laurel
It was the ultimate irony. At long last, the hunter and the hunted were
now living next door to each other—without either knowing of the other’s
presence. For years Laurel had been the agency’s “company town.”
Since the NSA first moved to the area in the late 1950's, Laurel had served
as its bedroom community. As the agency grew, so did Laurel. It was
where nearly everyone seemed to work simply for “the government,” or
“the Department of Defense.” Merchants and neighbors understood the
code; whenever they heard the phrase they knew that it meant the NSA
and that they should inquire no further. Over the next two weeks, the terrorists and the eavesdroppers would coexist in the NSA’s close-knit community like unseeing ghosts. Together, they would eat gooey cheese at Pizza Time, pump iron at Gold’s Gym, and squeeze tomatoes at Safeway. For eighteen months, since the agency first identified Mihdhar and Hazmi as likely al-Qaeda terrorists, NSA analysts had been listening to their phone calls and reading their e-mail; now they were in touching distance. Registered under their real names, they ate, sweated, and banked alongside their pursuers. Like neighbors, they shopped at J.C. Penney and Wal-Mart, bought groceries at Giant Foods, dined at the Food Factory, and banked at the First Union National Bank and the Dime Savings Bank.
Hazmi’s entire team, all five, would consolidate into Room 343 of the Valencia Motel. A $308-a-week suite, with two beds, a small living room, and a kitchenette, it was a crossroads for truckers, transients, budget travelers, and welfare recipients placed there by the state. Every morning and night, thousands of NSA employees would pass Hazmi’s blue Toyota Corolla with its California tags, parked in front of his room, as they crawled in heavy traffic down Route 1, the main drag through town to the NSA.
Despite the significance of the investigation, an FBI analyst simply gave the hunt for the suspected terrorists a “routine” precedence, the lowest of three, and on Thursday, August 30, a novice FBI intelligence agent transferred to the FBI’s bin Laden unit just weeks before was assigned to it. It was Special Agent Rob Fuller’s first intelligence investigation. He had graduated from the FBI Academy in June 2000 and over the past year had worked briefly on an applicant squad, a drug squad, and a surveillance squad.
The day Fuller was assigned the case, Mihdhar, Hazmi, and Hanjour were back in Totowa closing the lease on their top-floor apartment. Hanjour picked up their security deposit from owner Jimi Nouri, who never bothered to check the apartment for damage “because [Hanjour] was a gentleman,” he said. They then lugged out the same two suitcases and garbage bag stuffed with clothing they brought with them more than three months before. “They left as quietly as they came in,” said neighbor Giselle Diaz.
Because Fuller was busy with other cases, he was not able to even pick up the Mihdhar/Hazmi case folder until Tuesday, September 4, when he completed a lookout request on Mihdhar for the INS. But instead of checking off the box on the form indicating he was wanted for “security/ terrorism,” and was to be considered “armed and dangerous,” he mistakenly checked the “witness” box. He also contacted a Customs Service representative and verified that they too had a lookout for Mihdhar. He then requested a local criminal history check on Mihdhar through the New York City Police Department. Eventually, Fuller also noticed Hazmi’s name on the investigative order, so he did the same checks on him.
As the F.B.I’s search began, the hijackers were having a leisurely day in Laurel. Mihdhar was shopping at The Shoe Department for a pair of Timberland shoes and several MUDD Ripstop Cargo bags; Hazmi was nearby buying an ID bracelet at the Gold Valley jewelry store; and Hanjour was at the local D.M.V office getting a new Maryland ID with the address 14625 Baltimore Avenue in Laurel, the location of the group’s mail drop. Later, Mihdhar, Hanjour, and Salem al-Hazmi went for a workout at Gold’s Gym.
On Wednesday, Fuller requested a criminal history check and a search of motor vehicle records for any information on Mihdhar and Hazmi. He then contacted the Marriott hotels in the New York area since Mihdhar had listed on his customs form that his destination was the New York Marriott at the World Trade Center. But the six Marriotts he contacted all said Mihdhar had never registered as a guest. Fuller then conducted a Choicepoint search, which checks a variety of public records, but turned up nothing. At 10:17 a.m., Mihdhar and Moqed were at the American Airlines ticket counter at Baltimore-Washington International Airport. Counting out hundred-dollar bills, they were paying $2,300 for their tickets on Flight 77 on September 11 from Dulles to Los Angeles.
By Friday, September 7, every check had thus far turned up zero. That day, Atta sold his 1986 Pontiac Grand Prix to Sun Auto Leasing in Fort Lauderdale for $800 and then again flew up to Baltimore-Washington International Airport for a final coordination conference with Hazmi in Laurel. One of the key details was to close out all remaining bank accounts and send the remaining money back to bin Laden’s bankers in the U.A.E. On Saturday, Hazmi, Mihdhar, and Hanjour emptied their accounts and gave the cash to Atta. Then, while many NSA employees were doing their weekly grocery shopping, he went to the Giant store in Laurel and, via Western Union, wired $5,000 to the Wall Street Exchange Center in Dubai. He then went to a nearby Safeway and wired an additional $2,860.
For the meeting, Ziad Jarrah had driven down to Laurel from the Marriott Hotel at Newark International Airport, the staging area for his flight into the White House. That night they went to dinner at their favorite restaurant, the Food Factory, an inexpensive eatery specializing in kebabs and Afghan and Pakistani cuisine. With the twangy sounds of the sitar and the rhythmic beat of the tabla playing in the background, Mihdhar paid the $54.82 tab. It was past eleven when Jarrah left the Valencia and headed back to Newark. In a hurry after the long day, he leaned heavily on the accelerator as he sped through Maryland on Route 95. Then a few minutes past midnight, just across the Susquehanna River Bridge in the small town of Port Deposit, Jarrah saw a red light flashing in his rear view mirror and he pulled over. After everything, he must have thought, on the eve of the mission, trouble.
Stepping out of his patrol car, Maryland state trooper Joseph Catalano walked up to the passenger window of Jarrah’s red Mitsubishi Galant. “How are you doing today?” he asked and then brusquely told him he was clocked at ninety in a sixty-five-mile-per-hour zone. “Can I see your license and registration, please?” He then checked Jarrah’s Virginia driver’s license, which gave a phony address, 6601 Quicksilver Drive, Springfield, Virginia. It was a parking lot near the Springfield Mall. “You still live in Springfield, on Quicksilver Drive?” Jarrah calmly said, “Yes.” A few minutes later, after checking that the car was not stolen, Catalano returned to the passenger window and handed Jarrah a ticket. “Okay, sir, ninety miles an hour in a sixty-five zone is a two-hundred-seventy dollar fine. I need your signature down here at the bottom,” he said. “You are free to go.” Jarrah said nothing, turned on his left-hand blinker, and pulled back into traffic. Seven minutes after it began, the last opportunity to stop the plot was over. Catalano would later say that Jarrah was extremely calm and cooperative throughout the stop.
On Sunday, Atta flew to Boston as the four teams consolidated at their staging areas. Hanjour’s Pentagon crew was in Laurel, and Jarrah’s White House team was in Newark. But because both Twin Tower attacks were to originate from Boston’s Logan International Airport, Atta was likely worried about the image of ten Arabs, most of whom spoke little English, suddenly showing up at the same time at Logan for two flights. He therefore searched for the closest airport to Boston with a flight early enough to connect to American Flight 11, which was due to depart Logan for Los Angeles at 7:45 a.m. What he came up with was Portland, Maine. Thus, instead of leaving from Boston, on Monday he and Abdulaziz al-Omari would drive to Portland and catch U.S. Airways Flight 5930, operated by Colgan Air, departing for Boston at 6:00 a.m. Tuesday.
After Atta left Laurel, Hazmi and Mihdhar began planning a final celebratory meal for their crew. Hazmi went to the Giant supermarket in Laurel and bought $158.14 worth of groceries, and Mihdhar went back later for another $57.60. That night at the Valencia, behind the door to Room 343, the five men cooked over a small stove and ate in the crowded kitchenette. For all, like the other members of the cabal, it was the end of their journey, a journey from different places over different roads but with the same final destination.
Early Monday morning, Mihdhar, Hazmi, and the others loaded up their beat-up Toyota Corolla as a conga line of NSA employees, heading in to work, passed slowly by a few feet away on Route 1. By then, the agency’s secret city was already buzzing. At 7:15 a.m. Hayden, swiveling in his high-back, padded maroon chair, focused his attention on one of the two television sets in his office. It was time for his private intelligence briefing, broadcast from the agency’s war-room-like National Security Operations Center. On this day, the topic was suicide bombers; Ahmed Shah Massoud, forty-eight, a key rebel leader fighting the Taliban in Afghanistan, had been assassinated. The chief suspect was Osama bin Laden.
Following the televised briefing, Hayden convened his “Breakfast Club,” as he called it. “A stand-up meeting in here with just my personal staff,” Hayden said, “public affairs, inspector general, lawyers, each of the key components represented. It’s real quick. Literally a stand-up, everyone’s standing, including me. The room is about a third full. We’ll go quickly around—hot news of the day.” By Monday, few items were hotter than bin Laden. The previous week, the FBI had notified him that Mihdhar and Hazmi were loose somewhere in the country, and now bin Laden and the Taliban appeared to be launching a new war in Afghanistan.
Later that day, two intercepts were received that may have referred to the attack either on Massoud or on America. One said, “Tomorrow is zero hour,” and the other said, “The match begins tomorrow.” They were between targeted pay phones in a highly dangerous area of Afghanistan and people in Saudi Arabia. But despite the importance of their points of origin, they sat unread throughout the day.
At the time, Mihdhar and Hazmi were a few miles down the road, checking out of Room 343 at the Valencia Motel. In a series of deposits to his First Union National Bank account that morning, Mihdhar deposited nearly $10,000 in cash and traveler’s checks. They then went to Mail Boxes, Etc. in Laurel, where Hazmi mailed a package addressed to their financial contact in Dubai. Among the items inside was a handwritten letter in Arabic from Mihdhar to his wife in which he expressed his deep love for her and their daughter and his desire for her to have the money in the account. His bank card and PIN were included with the letter.
Hazmi may also have called his old friends back at the Sam’s Star Mart Texaco station to give them a heads up about the attack. Early on Monday morning, Mihdhar Zaid and a number of others began behaving suspiciously. One allegedly said, “It is finally going to happen,” as the others celebrated by giving each other high fives.
While Hazmi and his crew were in Laurel tying up loose ends, FBI special agent Rob Fuller was hoping to find the two in Los Angeles, where they had first landed a year and a half earlier, claiming to stay at the Sheraton Hotel. Fuller drafted a memo for the F.B.I’s Los Angeles field office asking them to begin a search of Sheraton Hotel records concerning any stays by Mihdhar and Hazmi in early 2000. He also requested that the Los Angeles office check United Airlines and Lufthansa Airlines records for any payment or other information concerning Mihdhar and Hazmi.
Surprise
The clock radio went off at 5:45 a.m., an hour before sunrise. “Defense
secretary Donald Rumsfeld says he can trim a billion dollars or more
in Pentagon operating costs by reducing waste and inefficiency.” Host
Bob Edwards was introducing a story about military spending on National
Public Radio’s popular Morning Edition program. “In a speech
yesterday, Rumsfeld told Defense Department workers that he’s declaring
war on bureaucracy.” As he usually did, Mike Hayden lay in bed, eyes
closed in the darkness, until after the six o’clock news summary. It was
Tuesday, September 11, and the Pentagon had just declared war on itself.
“Some might ask how in the world could the secretary of defense attack
the Pentagon in front of its people,” Rumsfeld asked rhetorically. “To
them I reply, ‘I have no desire to attack the Pentagon.’ ” But at 6:22 a.m., as they checked out of the Marriott Residence Inn in Herndon, that was exactly what Hazmi and his crew had in mind that day. A few minutes later he climbed behind the wheel of his Toyota Corolla one last time for the short drive to Dulles International Airport. Like Hazmi, who was wearing a neatly pressed blue oxford shirt and tan khaki pants, the crew all dressed casually but conservatively. With no mustaches or beards and their hair neatly trimmed, they might have been going to a Rotary Club meeting.
Arriving at the Dulles parking garage, the team separated into groups of no more than two and entered the American Airlines ticket area, where Mihdhar and Hazmi faced their final security hurdle. Having evaded the CIA, NSA, FBI, INS, State Department, and assorted other intelligence and security organizations for close to two years, now they just needed to get through airport security and they were free to carry out their deadly mission. At 7:15, Mihdhar and Majed Moqed presented their Virginia ID cards, fraudulently arranged in the parking lot of a 7-Eleven, to the American Airlines ticket agent at the check-in counter.
By now, with numerous domestic flights behind them, including dress rehearsal practice missions, they knew how the system worked—as well as where it didn’t. At the time, the principal tool to screen for potential terrorists was a program known as the computer-assisted passenger pre-screening system (C.A.P.P.S). Used by all airlines, the program was designed to identify the most questionable passengers—those who purchased their tickets with cash, for example, or purchased one-way tickets.
Once selected by the computer, a passenger’s checked baggage would be screened for explosives and held off the plane until the passenger boarded. The procedure was to avoid the problem of passengers checking luggage containing explosives and then not boarding the plane. If a person boarded the plane, the theory went, the odds are they would not have a bomb in their bag. However, neither those selected nor their carry-on luggage would be subject to additional scrutiny in the security checkpoint area. The program also contained the names of potential terrorists, who would be flagged at the counter, denied a ticket, and possibly arrested.
Both Mihdhar and Moqed were flagged by C.A.P.P.S, but since Mihdhar had no checked luggage and Moqed wasn’t carrying any explosives, the procedures had no effect on their mission. Also, at the time, there were only twenty names of potential terrorists in the computer database—none belonging to any of the nineteen hijackers.
Within the next twenty minutes the Hazmi brothers and Hanjour would also check in. Hanjour, arriving at the counter by himself, was also flagged by C.A.P.P.S, and the Hazmi brothers were flagged by the American Airlines ticket agent because one of them had no photo identification and could not understand English, and because the agent found both to be suspicious. But, again, because Hanjour had only carry-on luggage, and no one was carrying any explosives anyway, the selection process proved useless. Ahead lay the final barrier: the security screening checkpoint.
After a quick shower, Mike Hayden climbed into his Volvo and drove the three miles across Fort Meade to the NSA’s Ops 2B building, arriving about 6:50. With only one vehicle in the family, his wife or son would often drop him off and then keep the car. Entering the lobby, he slipped his blue security badge into the CONFIRM card reader, pushed through the turnstile, and turned the key in the lock of his private elevator. On the eighth floor he walked past a receptionist and walls lined with large framed pictures of antenna-covered listening posts, then took a left through an unmarked wooden door and entered his spacious corner office.
Taking a seat in his maroon leather chair, Hayden was surrounded by the accouterments of power, knickknacks and souvenirs of a long air force career. On his walnut desk was a pen holder from his days as the number two commander in Korea, a notepad printed with the word DIRECTOR, and a Brookstone world clock. On a table behind him, next to his NSA flag, sat two computers, one for classified and the other for unclassified work. The table also contained a series of telephones. One was for internal calls; another, the STU-III, was used for secure, highly secret external calls; a black “executive phone” connected him to other senior officials; and a white phone could put him through instantly to Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. No phones, however, connected him directly to the White House.
At about 7:15 Hayden began looking over his schedule for the day—a schedule he knew would be made more complicated by Rumsfeld’s declaration of war on Pentagon bureaucracy. There would be calls for more cuts to his already depleted budget, reduced by 32 percent over the past decade.[That number right there got just what it needed from that days events,points to motive,as well as profiting in the ensuring 17 years. D.C]
Three minutes later, Mihdhar and Moqed entered Dulles Airport’s west security screening checkpoint, where they placed their carry-on bags on the belt of the X-ray machine and proceeded through the arched magnetometer. Both set off the alarm, and they were directed to a second metal detector. Mihdhar did not trigger the alarm and was permitted through the checkpoint. After Moqed set it off, a screener quickly passed a wand around him and he was allowed to pass.
At 7:35, Hani Hanjour placed two carry-on bags on the belt and proceeded, without alarm, through the magnetometer. A short time later, Nawaf and Salem al-Hazmi entered the same checkpoint. Salem cleared the metal detector and was permitted through, but Nawaf set off the alarms for both the first and the second metal detectors. In his pocket or in his hand luggage he had the heavy Leatherman multi tool utility knife he had purchased at the Laurel Target store. But at the time, as they knew from their test flights, such a knife was permitted to be carried on board as long as the blade was less than four inches. A screener waved a wand over Nawaf and, as with Moqed, let him go without ever bothering to check what set off the alarm. A minute later another screener swiped Nawaf’s over-the-shoulder carry-on bag with an explosive trace detector, producing negative results. The last security barrier had been successfully breached.
The drab waiting area for American Flight 77 to Los Angeles was uncrowded; Tuesdays were generally among the slowest flying days of the week. At 7:50 Mihdhar walked down the Jetway with a black bag slung over his shoulder, wheeling a black carry-on behind him. He and Moqed entered the fuselage of the silver Boeing 757-223 and took seats 12A and 12B in coach, with Mihdhar in the center and Moqed at the window. In their section of the plane the flight was barely a quarter full, with just 43 of the 154 seats occupied.
A few minutes after Mihdhar, Hanjour walked on with a black bag draped over the shoulder of his white shirt and another, larger one in his hand. A flight attendant directed him to the left into first class and he took seat 1B, on the aisle directly in front of the cockpit door. The Hazmi brothers followed and took seats 5E and 5F on the right side of the first-class cabin, and at 8:16, the wide-body jet began to taxi away from the terminal.
At 8:00, as he did every Tuesday and Thursday, Mike Hayden took the elevator down to the third floor and walked across to the National Security Operations Center in Ops 1 for his regular morning meeting with his senior staff. “It’s something I started here because I wanted the seniors to get a sense of the ops tempo,” he said. Among the more worrisome items the ops officer brought up that morning was the assassination of Massoud. The action seemed to have touched off a new offensive by the Taliban against Massoud’s Northern Alliance forces. Also, although the White House was cautiously avoiding discussing whether Massoud was dead because of some conflicting reports from his group, intelligence reports were indicating that Massoud had died on a helicopter en route to Dushanbe, the capital of neighboring Tajikistan.
Then there was the usual assortment of other items—in the Middle East, Israeli tanks ringing the West Bank city of Jenin began shelling Palestinian security positions just outside town; in Istanbul, Turkey, a female suicide bomber killed two police officers and injured at least twenty other people. About seven minutes after the briefing began it was over. “I keep beating them to keep it shorter,” Hayden said. Following the ops briefing, the group moved into the small conference room next door for a quick staff meeting. “By eight or eight thirty we’ve kind of gotten the burst communications and now you’re into your work schedule.”
“American 77, Dulles tower,” said the controller. “Runway three zero, taxi into position and hold. You’ll be holding for landing traffic one left and for wake turbulence spacing behind the DC-10.” Seated in the front row, Hanjour kept his eyes focused on the cockpit door. As soon as it opened— when the flight attendants brought the flight crew their breakfast, or one of the crew members left to use a rest room—it would be time to make their move.
At 8:20, American Airlines Flight 77 nosed upward into a cloudless, Tiffany-blue sky.
Following the ops briefing, Hayden returned to his office for a meeting with a small number of senior officials. A few minutes after it began, about 8:48, he was standing a few feet from his desk, behind a tall wooden speaker’s table, when his executive assistant, Cindy Farkus, walked in. A plane had just crashed into the World Trade Center, she said. “The immediate image I had was a light plane, off course, bad flying,” said Hayden, who glanced at CNN just as they began showing scenes from Mohamed Atta’s attack on the North Tower. “I thought that was a big fire for a small plane,” he said, and then continued with his meeting.
At about that same moment aboard Flight 77, Hazmi and his crew sprang into action. They had trained the scenario many times: they would pull out their knives and box cutters and take command of the aircraft, ordering the crew to relinquish their aircraft, leave it on autopilot, and move to the back of the plane with the passengers. Then as Hazmi, Mihdhar, and the rest cleared out the cockpit, first class, and the front of coach, Hanjour would walk into the cockpit with the case he brought onboard containing maps, charts, and flying aids.
The entire operation appears to have worked like clockwork. At 8:50:48, Indianapolis Control transmitted the navigation message “American 77 cleared direct um Falmouth,” and the crew responded three seconds later, “uh direct Falmouth American 77 thank you.” Less than four minutes later, at 8:54, Hanjour was at the controls as the plane made its first deviation from its assigned course by turning slightly to the south. And two minutes later the transponder was switched off, causing the aircraft to disappear from primary radar.
With the transponder switched off, the plane had become virtually invisible to the controller on the ground who had been tracking the flight. Desperate to find it, he began searching along its projected flight path and the airspace to the southwest where it had started to turn. But there was nothing there. He tried the radios, calling the aircraft directly, then the airline. Again there was nothing. Indianapolis Control then made the first of ten unsuccessful attempts over the next six and a half minutes to contact the aircraft via radio. Finally, shortly after 8:56, the controllers agreed to “sterilize the air space” along the flight’s projected westerly route so that other planes would not be affected by Flight 77.
By 9:00 a.m., Hanjour had turned to the east and had begun to descend. Five minutes later the plane’s blip again appeared on the radar scopes of Indianapolis Control, but well east of where it should have been, leading to great confusion, including thoughts that the plane might already have crashed. After another seven minutes, Hanjour leveled off at twenty-five thousand feet and made a slight course change to the east-northeast. “You guys never been able to raise him at all?” asked a radar operator at Indianapolis Control. “No,” said the air traffic controller. “We called the company. They can’t even get a hold of him, so there’s no, no, uh, no radio communications and no radar.”
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