The Eleventh Day

by Anthony Summers

  The something, he suggested, was “gigantic.”

  AT ABOUT THE TIME bin Laden summoned KSM, in the United States Forbes magazine published a thoughtful piece by the writer Peggy Noonan. “History,” she wrote,

  has handed us one of the easiest rides in all the story of Man. It has handed us a wave of wealth so broad and deep it would be almost disorienting if we thought about it a lot, which we don’t.… How will the future play out? … Something’s up. And deep down, where the body meets the soul, we are fearful.… Everything’s wonderful, but a world is ending and we sense it.… What are the odds it will happen? Put it another way: What are the odds it will not? Low. Non-existent, I think.

  When you consider who is gifted and crazed with rage … when you think of the terrorist places and the terrorist countries … who do they hate most? The Great Satan, the United States. What is its most important place? Some would say Washington. I would say the great city of the United States is the great city of the world, the dense 10-mile-long island called Manhattan.…

  If someone does the big, terrible thing to New York or Washington, there will be a lot of chaos.… The psychic blow—and that is what it will be as people absorb it, a blow, an insult that reorders and changes—will shift our perspective and priorities, dramatically, and for longer than a while.… We must press government officials to face the big, terrible thing. They know it could happen tomorrow.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  IN AFGHANISTAN ABOUT THIS TIME, OSAMA BIN LADEN WAS SERIOUSLY injured—horseback riding. “The mighty United States cannot kill me,” he quipped as he lay in bed recovering, “while one little horse nearly killed me. Life is very mysterious.”

  The fall curbed his activities for months, but the 9/11 plot advanced. The first hurdle, a major one, was to find suitable candidates to lead the hijack teams. All the terrorists would need visas to enter the United States, and some would require flying skills.

  Bin Laden had four men in mind, two Yemenis and two Saudis. It could be difficult for applicants from Yemen to get U.S. visas, not because of concerns about terrorism but because impoverished Yemenis were thought more likely to be would-be immigrants. Bin Laden’s two Yemenis were to apply in vain, leading KSM to suggest dividing the operation into two parts. The Yemenis, he thought, could spearhead a group assigned to U.S. airliners on the Pacific route, not flying planes into targets but exploding them in midair. Bin Laden, however, eventually decided the entire thing was getting too complicated.

  For a while, the two Saudis were the only two remaining candidates for the 9/11 operation. Khalid al-Mihdhar, aged about twenty-four, and Nawaf al-Hazmi, a year younger, had grown up in well-to-do families in Mecca, and may have been boyhood friends. Mihdhar, whose family originated in Yemen, was married to a young Yemeni woman whose family was directly involved in terrorism. His wife’s family, as things would turn out, was related to another of the future 9/11 conspirators. Once again, just as Yousef the Chemist was related to KSM, terror ran in the family.

  Young as they were, Mihdhar and Hazmi could claim to be veteran jihadis. Both had fought in Bosnia. A Saudi friend, “Jihad Ali” Azzam, had been killed the previous year driving the truck used to bomb the U.S. embassy in Kenya. Inspired by his sacrifice, according to KSM, they, too, yearned to die in a martyrdom operation against an American target. It was easy for them—as Saudis—to acquire U.S. visas, and they did so of their own accord even before traveling to Afghanistan.

  Mihdhar and Hazmi had sworn bayat—the oath of loyalty to bin Laden—on previous visits. KSM, who himself put off taking the oath because he wanted to retain a measure of independence, later described the procedure to CIA interrogators.

  Little ceremony was involved. A man pledging loyalty would stand with bin Laden and intone: “I swear allegiance to you, to listen and obey, in good times and bad, and to accept the consequences myself. I swear allegiance to you, for jihad and hijrah [redemption] … I swear allegiance to you and to die in the cause of God.” A shake of the hand with bin Laden, and the oath was done. More than as a promise to any mortal, it was seen as a man’s commitment to his God.

  The Saudi pair notwithstanding, there was still a woeful shortage of suitable recruits for the 9/11 project. One day in 1999, Omar bin Laden has recalled, his father held a meeting to impress on his fighters “the joys of martyrdom, how it was the greatest honor for a Muslim to give his life to the cause of Islam.” Osama even called his own sons together to tell them that there was a list on the wall of the mosque “for men who volunteer to be suicide bombers.”

  When one of the younger brothers ran off to sign the list, Omar dared to speak out in protest. His father’s retort was brusque. Omar and the other sons, bin Laden said, held “no more a place in my heart than any other man or boy.” “My father,” Omar thought, “hated his enemies more than he loved his sons.”

  Few of the fighters who signed up for martyrdom, however, had the qualifications to enter and operate in enemy territory—the alien land of the United States. Perhaps, bin Laden ventured, KSM would locate such candidates in the area he knew well, the Gulf States. The evidence indicates that KSM traveled even further afield that year, to Italy and—on more than one occasion—to Germany. Not just to Germany but to Hamburg, the second largest city in the country, a port teeming with foreigners—including, we now know, three of the future pilot hijackers and a key accomplice.

  THE FIRST OF those four Arabs to arrive in Germany is today a household name—more so, bin Laden aside, than anyone involved in 9/11. His name was Mohamed Mohamed el-Amir Awad el-Sayed Atta. His friends knew him as Amir, but in the public memory he is—indelibly—Mohamed Atta.

  Egyptian-born, Atta had come to Europe in 1992 at the age of twenty-three, after studying architecture at Cairo University. His father, a lawyer who long worked for EgyptAir, has said that Atta’s mother—from whom he was divorced—“never stopped pampering him,” treated him as if he were a girl. The boy would snuggle up on his mother’s lap, by one report, even in his teens. As a student, a contemporary remembered, he still had “child feelings, innocent, virgin.” He became emotional, according to another, if an insect was killed. Islamic terrorists, Atta said as a young adult, were “brainless, irresponsible.”

  The Amirs also had daughters, bright, achieving young women—one qualified as a cardiologist, the other as a professor of geology. Their brother did all right at university, but his father nurtured higher aspirations for him. When he learned about two German teachers, visitors in Cairo for an educational exchange program, he arranged a meeting. The couple, Uwe and Doris Michaels, promptly invited young Atta to come to Hamburg and stay in their home. He had a grasp of German—having done a course in the language in Cairo—and accepted. He flew to Germany, and stayed with the Michaelses for about six months.

  The couple rapidly discovered that their houseguest was “exceedingly religious … never missed his five prayer sessions per day.” Atta insisted on preparing his own meals. Impossible to use the family’s pots and pans, he said—they had previously been used to cook pork. The young man, they saw, was also a prude. He left the room while showing a video of his own sister’s wedding—because it included a belly-dancer wearing a flesh-colored gown. If anything even a little risqué cropped up on television, he covered his eyes. If his middle-aged hostess failed to wear a blouse that covered her arms, the atmosphere became “unpleasant.”

  The family tolerated all this until the Ramadan daytime fasting period in early 1993, when Atta’s obsession with religious observance became too much. After trying to put up with his nocturnal activity—hour after hour of cooking and moving about the house—the Michaelses asked him to leave. To their son, who was living at home, he had become “that person”—someone he didn’t want to have anything to do with. Through it all, though, Doris Michaels has recalled, there had been no hint of violence in their student visitor. The problems of the Middle East, he would say, should be resolved peacefully with “words, not weapons.”
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  When he did move to other accommodations, Atta’s habits and prejudices again led to clashes. No one, least of all Westerners, could fail to notice his religious zeal and aversion to everything to do with female sexuality. His professor, however, who was familiar with Arab culture, thought Atta merely “a dear human being.” He applied himself to his urban engineering and planning course at university, made periodic trips back to the Middle East, and the years slipped by.

  In the fall of 1995, another young Arab arrived in Hamburg by ship. He said his name was Ramzi Omar, claimed to be a Sudanese student, spun a tale about having been imprisoned and tortured at home, and asked for political asylum. That was not his real name, and his story was a fabrication. Even so, “Omar” found a way to establish himself in Germany. He finagled phony documentation for himself as a student, then left for his real homeland—Yemen—only to return under his true name, Ramzi Binalshibh.

  Though he said he aspired to an economics degree, Binalshibh studied almost not at all. Those who knew him described him as “in love with life … charming … very funny, made lots of jokes.” All the same, he shared Atta’s traits. At classes, he objected to the sight of women wearing blouses that showed cleavage. He thought that “disgusting.” What distracted Binalshibh during math lessons, a fellow student recalled, was reading the Qur’an under the desk. He was more cheerful about his religion than Atta, to be sure, but faith was at the core of his being.

  So it was, too, for a newcomer who was to become Atta’s constant companion. Marwan al-Shehhi, just eighteen when he arrived from the United Arab Emirates, was the son of a muezzin—the man who called the faithful to prayer at the mosque in his hometown. In his teen years, before his father’s recent death, he had sometimes had the task of switching on the prayer tape for his father.

  Friends would remember Shehhi as “a regular guy,” like Binalshibh “happy … always laughing and telling one joke after another,” “dreamy … slightly spoiled.” Spoiled not least because, after just six months in the military, he had been sent off to study marine engineering in Europe on an army scholarship of $4,000 a month. Happy perhaps, but—an echo of Atta and Binalshibh—he could “explode” with anger on “seeing a male friend looking at a woman.” Shehhi never actually spoke to women unless he had to.

  Probably thanks to his father the muezzin, Shehhi could recite Islamic texts on cue. Even at his tender age he yearned for the pleasures of Paradise, imagined himself sitting in the shade on the bank of a broad river flowing with honey. Binalshibh, for his part, would exclaim, “What is this life good for? The Paradise is much nicer.” To these young men, heaven was no distant concept or possible consolation for the inevitability of death, but a real destination of choice.

  The fourth man in the group, who arrived the same month as Shehhi, at first seems not to fit the pattern. Ziad Jarrah, who flew in with his cousin, had grown up in cosmopolitan Lebanon. The son of a well-to-do civil servant and a mother who worked as a French teacher, he had interesting relatives. A great-uncle, it would be reported after 9/11, had been recruited by a department of the former East Germany that handled espionage—and by Libyan intelligence. A cousin, according to The New York Times in 2009, confessed to having long spied for Israel—while posing as a supporter of the Palestinian cause.

  If such odd details impinge not at all on Jarrah’s own story, other factors marked him out. Though his family was Sunni Muslim, he had been sent to the best Christian schools. He had regularly skipped prayers, shown no special interest in religion, and was no stranger to alcohol. “Once,” said Salim, the cousin who traveled to Germany with him, “we drank so much beer we couldn’t go straight on a bike.”

  Jarrah enjoyed partying, thought the nightclubs in Europe tame compared to what he was used to in Lebanon—and he liked girls. When he met a strikingly lovely young Turkish woman, within weeks of arriving in Germany, he rapidly won her away from a current boyfriend. He and Aysel Sengün became lovers, beginning an on-off affair that was to endure until his death on 9/11.

  For all that, and within months of his arrival, the twenty-two-year-old Jarrah also got religion—and a measure of political fervor he had never evinced before. Perhaps someone got to him during an early trip home to Lebanon, for it was when he got back that cousin Salim first noticed him reading a publication about jihad. Perhaps it was the influence of a young imam in Germany—himself a student—who badgered people he knew to attend the mosque, and pressed anyone who would listen to donate to Palestinian causes. The imam was suspected, the CIA would say later, of having “terrorist connections.”

  What is clear is that something happened to Jarrah that changed him, changed his directions. Aysel Sengün, herself a Muslim but of moderate bent, was troubled when—as she would tell the police later—he “criticized me for my choice of clothes, which he had not earlier. I was dressing in too revealing a manner for him.… He had also started to grow a full beard.… He started to ask me more and more frequently whether I would not want to pray with him.”

  Initially Jarrah had wanted to study dentistry, as did his lover, in the small town of Greifswald. Instead, after just over a year, he switched to an aeronautical engineering course—in Hamburg.

  He and Aysel now had to travel to see each other and, when they met, she noticed that he had started talking about jihad. “Someone explained to me,” she said after 9/11, that “jihad in the softer form means to write books, tell people about Islam. But Ziad’s own jihad was more aggressive, the fighting kind.”

  Aysel became pregnant at this time, but had an abortion. She felt there were things that were not right about their relationship. She worried about being left with children were her lover to get involved “in a fanatic war.” She was increasingly insecure, uncertain what Jarrah was up to, would surreptitiously comb through his papers looking for clues as to what he was doing. What he was doing was spending time in Hamburg with his future 9/11 accomplices. Their religion was inseparable from their politics. Shehhi, who could afford to live comfortably, moved to a shabby apartment with no television. Asked why, he said he was emulating the simple way the Prophet Mohammed had lived.

  Given Atta’s religious zeal, it may have taken little to add political extremism to the mix. Around 1995, reportedly, he spoke of a “leader” who was having a strong influence on his thinking. In the same time frame, a German student friend would recall, he talked angrily about Israel and America’s protection of Israel. He was “always” linking other Muslim issues to “the war going on or the process going on, in Israel and Palestine, which he was very critical of.”

  In discussion with others, Atta carried on about the Jews’ control of the banks and the media. These were not original thoughts, would normally have vanished on the air of heated debate in the mosques, apartments, and eating places in which they were voiced. The flame that was to make them combustible was waiting elsewhere, in Afghanistan. In 1998 or 1999—it is still not clear quite when or by whom—the connection was made.

  The umbilical to activism for Atta was probably the Muslim Brotherhood, as once it had been for the young Osama bin Laden. For the Brotherhood, religion is indispensable at every level of existence, in government as in personal life. While the Brotherhood officially abjures violence, it makes exceptions—one of them the struggle in Palestine. The engineering department of Cairo University, where Atta first studied, was one of its known recruiting grounds.

  Atta was a member of the engineering club, and he took two German friends there on a trip back to Cairo. The Brotherhood’s influence was obvious even to them. In connection with his Hamburg university course, Atta also traveled twice to the Syrian city of Aleppo—where the Brotherhood has deep roots. It may be that he made connections there. Two older men from Aleppo—said to have been members of the Brotherhood and suspected of links to al Qaeda—were to associate with Atta and his little group back in Hamburg.

  One of them, Mohammed Zammar, openly enthused about jihad and urged fellow Arabs to su
pport the cause. The other, Mamoun Darkazanli, was filmed attending a wedding ceremony at a Hamburg mosque with the future hijackers. He has dismissed the connection as “coincidence.”

  • • •

  IN THE WAKE OF 9/11, reporters for Der Spiegel magazine would discover boxes of books and documents in a room that had been used by an Islamic study group Atta started at college. In one of the books, a volume on jihad, was what amounted to an invitation. “Osama bin Laden,” it read, “has said: ‘I will pay for the ticket and trip for every Arab and his family who wants to come to jihad.’ ” Twice in two years, Atta took a trip—to somewhere.

  In early 1998, Atta vanished from Hamburg for the best part of three months. When his professor asked where he had been, he claimed he had been in Cairo dealing with a family problem. Pressed, he deflected further questions with, in effect, “Don’t ask.” Soon afterward, he reported his passport lost and obtained a new one—a trick often pulled by those whose passports contain compromising visa stamps.

  The speculation is that Atta, and months later Shehhi and Binalshibh, made trips to Afghanistan that year. Whether they did or not, they would certainly have taken note of the statement bin Laden made in February, calling for war on America. In a list of grievances, U.S. support of Israel, and Israel’s occupation of Arab Jerusalem, ranked high. America’s wars, he said, “serve the interests of the petty Jewish state, diverting attention from the occupation of Jerusalem.”

  The 9/11 Commission Report was to duck the issue of what motivated the perpetrators of 9/11. Afterward, in a memoir, Chairman Thomas Kean and Vice Chair Lee Hamilton explained that the commissioners had disagreed on the issue. “This was sensitive ground,” they wrote. “Commissioners who argued that al Qaeda was motivated primarily by a religious ideology—and not by opposition to American policies—rejected mentioning the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in the Report. In their view, listing U.S. support for Israel as a root cause of al Qaeda’s opposition to the United States indicated that the United States should reassess that policy.