His maxim, though, that “simplicity was the key to success,” was in many ways probably right. He urged team members “to be normal to the maximum extent possible in their dealings, to keep the tone of their letters educational, social, or commercial.” Though averse to the unnecessary use of codes, he did develop some. If telephone numbers had to be used in correspondence, KSM directed, they were to be rendered so that the real numeral and the coded one totaled ten. His own number in Pakistan—92-300-922-388—thus became 18-700-188-722.
For Atta, some of the preparation for the mission took the form of what to others counts as fun. He was to be seen “playing video games on a PlayStation—flying a plane.” KSM thought Atta “worked hard, and learned quickly.” He gave him sufficient authority to be able to make decisions on his own, to press ahead without having to consult too often. One of the Saudis bin Laden had originally chosen, Nawaf al-Hazmi, was to be his deputy.
Each of the five early team members was honored with a kunyah, an honorific prefaced by Abu—meaning, literally, “father,” though the bearer of the name need not have children. In this case, all the kunyahs harked back to the days of the Prophet. As Binalshibh remembered them: Atta was “Father of the servant of the Beneficent, the Egyptian,” one of the followers to whom the Prophet pledged the certainty of Paradise; Shehhi was Abu’l’Qaqa’a al-Qatari, literally “the sound of clashing swords, from Qatar” (though he was in fact a citizen of the United Arab Emirates); and Jarrah was Abu Tareq al-Lubnani, literally, “Father of the one who knocks at the door, the Lebanese”—probably after an Arab commander celebrated for his conquests in North Africa and southern Spain.
Bin Laden was keen for all the future hijackers to be on their way to the United States as soon as possible—including the two Saudis, Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Mihdhar. Hazmi was to be Rab’iah al Makki, to whom the Prophet promised anything he should ask. Mihdhar was to be Sinan, “the Spear.” They were to be the trailblazers of the 9/11 operation.
AT THE TURN of the year, on the night of the Millennium, President Clinton had watched a fireworks display and hosted a large dinner at the White House. “It was a wonderful evening,” he recalled, “but I was nervous all the time. Our security team had been on high alert for weeks due to numerous intelligence reports that the United States would be hit with several terrorist attacks.… I had been focused intently on bin Laden.”
The Millennium, a cause for celebration for millions, also seemed just the moment the terrorists might strike. On December 6, in Jordan, a group of terrorists had been caught while preparing to bomb a hotel used by American and Israeli tourists. They had been overheard on a telephone intercept talking with bin Laden’s aide Abu Zubaydah.
On December 14, concern about a coming attack on the United States turned to a permanent state of alarm. The driver of a Chrysler sedan, waiting to enter Washington State from a ferry arriving from Canada, caught the attention of an alert Customs officer. There was something about the man. He was fidgeting, sweating profusely, would not look her in the eye. Hidden in the car, officers discovered, were bomb-making materials—RDX and HMTD explosives, chemicals, and Casio watch timing devices.
The man turned out to be Ahmed Ressam, an Algerian who was to admit—much later—that his intended target had been Los Angeles International Airport. The plan, he said, had been to explode the bomb on or about the day of the Millennium. He had learned about explosives in bin Laden’s Afghan training camps, and he, too, had had contact with Abu Zubaydah. He had planned the foiled attack himself, Ressam said, but bin Laden had been “aware” of it.
After the Ressam arrest, and with the Millennium looming, everyone thought there was more to come. A round of frenzied activity began. Clinton rang Pakistan’s President Musharraf to demand that a way be found to stop bin Laden’s operations. National Security Adviser Berger and intelligence chiefs, often with Attorney General Janet Reno present, met almost daily at the White House. A record number of wiretap orders were issued. “Foreign terrorist sleeper cells are present in the U.S.,” counterterrorism coordinator Clarke’s staff warned, “and attacks in the U.S. are likely.”
Berger and Clarke spent the morning of Christmas Day at FBI headquarters and the afternoon at the CIA. Nothing happened. Come the night of the Millennium, thousands of law enforcement agents and military personnel were on duty. FBI director Louis Freeh and Attorney General Reno kept vigil in their offices—Reno would sleep the night on a couch at the Justice Department. In New York’s Times Square, local FBI counterterrorism chief John O’Neill waited for the famous ball to fall at midnight.
The ball fell, and no catastrophe came. “I think we dodged the bullet,” Berger said when he rang Clarke after midnight. Clarke said he would wait three more hours, until New Year’s came in Los Angeles. At 3:00 A.M., when all was still well, he went up to the roof of the White House and “popped open a bottle.”
The FBI told Berger after the Millennium, he was to recall, that al Qaeda did not after all have active cells in the U.S. “They said there might be sleepers, but they had that covered. They were saying this was not a big domestic threat.”
NO ONE THAT New Year’s spoke publicly about a specific danger, that an attack in the United States might come in the shape of airplane hijackings. Many months earlier, however, bin Laden had spoken of just that. “All Islamic military,” he had boasted, “have been mobilized to strike a significant U.S. or Israeli strategic target, to bring down their aircraft and hijack them.”
In 1998, indeed, the White House had quietly held an exercise involving a scenario in which terrorists flew an explosives-laden jet into a building in Washington. In December that year, the CIA had told Bill Clinton of intelligence suggesting that “bin Laden and his allies are preparing for attack in the U.S., including an aircraft hijacking.”
During 1999, Britain’s foreign intelligence service warned its American counterparts that bin Laden was planning attacks in which airliners could be used in “unconventional ways.” Two U.S. bodies, moreover, produced prophetic warnings.
“America,” the congressionally mandated Commission on National Security forecast in its initial report, “will become increasingly vulnerable to hostile attack on our homeland.… Americans will likely die on American soil, possibly in large numbers.” The same month, a report by the Library of Congress’s Federal Research Division, which had wide circulation within the government, said al Qaeda could be expected to retaliate for the cruise missile attack on bin Laden’s camps.
“Suicide bombers belonging to al Qaeda’s Martyrdom Battalion,” the report went on to say, “could crash-land an aircraft packed with high explosives (C-4 and Semtex) into the Pentagon, the headquarters of the Central Intelligence Agency, or the White House.”
IN NOVEMBER 1999, just months after bin Laden had decided on the 9/11 operation, two young Saudi students had boarded as Coach Class passengers on an America West Flight 90 from Phoenix, Arizona, to Washington, D.C. During the flight, one of them—in the words of a flight attendant—“walked into the First Class section and continued walking towards the cockpit door. He tried to open the door. He was very subtle in his actions.” A passenger in First Class also saw the Arab man “try to get into the cockpit.”
The cockpit door was locked, and the man claimed he had mistaken it for the lavatory. The behavior of the passenger and his traveling companion had made the flight attendants uneasy, though, and they alerted the captain. At a routine stopover in Ohio, the plane had taxied to a remote parking place and the two men had been taken away in handcuffs. After four hours of interrogation and a search of their baggage, they were eventually allowed to continue their journey.
Since 9/11, the suspicion has strengthened that this had been, as one FBI agent put it, a “casing operation.” It turned out, according to a Commission memorandum, that both the Saudi passengers were “ ‘tied’ to Islamic extremists.” One of those extremist associates, interviewed at home by the FBI before 9/11, had said openly
that he thought America a legitimate target. On the wall, in plain sight, was a poster of bin Laden.
Intelligence on the companion of the man who tried the cockpit door indicated that after leaving the United States he received “explosive and car bomb training” in Afghanistan. One of his friends had studied flying in the United States and was arrested after 9/11 along with top bin Laden aide Abu Zubaydah. The traveling companion, moreover, has admitted having met one of the future pilot hijackers.
The America West incident may indeed have been a reconnaissance mission. According to KSM, as many as four bin Laden units made early exploratory trips to the United States.
In 1999, and the previous year, reports reached the FBI that terrorists were planning to send men to learn to fly in the United States. “The purpose of this training was unknown,” the 1999 report said, “but the [terrorist] organization leaders viewed the requirement as ‘particularly important’ and were reported to have approved an open-ended amount of funding to ensure its success.”
The FBI’s Counterterrorism Division responded to the reports by asking field offices to investigate. Congress’s Joint Inquiry, however, found no indication that any investigation was conducted. Paul Kurtz, who at that time was a senior official on the National Security Council, said dealing with the Bureau was “very frustrating,” at some levels “totally infuriating.” Overall, he said, the FBI was a “freaking black hole.”
In November 1999, moreover, when the Bureau’s Counterterrorism Division asked the Immigration and Naturalization Service to share data on relevant arrivals in the country, the INS did not respond to the request.
November was the month of the suspicious incident aboard America West Flight 90. It was also the month that, in Afghanistan, KSM and bin Laden assembled the future hijacker pilots and ordered them to head for the United States. As the FBI and the INS dithered, the enemy was at the gate.
TWENTY-FIVE
HAZMI AND MIHDHAR, BIN LADEN’S FIRST CHOICES FOR THE “PLANES operation,” had undergone months of preparation in Afghanistan. With other select fighters, they had undergone an intensive course at an old Soviet copper mine used as a training camp. It involved endurance exercises, man-to-man combat, and night operations—most of which KSM deemed, reasonably enough, of little use for the challenge awaiting them.
Once in KSM’s hands, the advance guard received tuition in relevant subjects. They perused aviation magazines, were introduced to the mysteries of airline timetables, and viewed flight simulation software. Like Atta, they played computer games involving aviation scenarios. They watched Hollywood movies about hijackings, but with sequences featuring female characters carefully edited out. How instructive that can have been, given the ubiquity of female flight attendants on airliners, remains a question.
Hazmi and Mihdhar, KSM decided, were to stay initially in California. He had yellow and white phone directories, supposedly found in a Karachi market, and tried to teach the men how to use them. The directories would help, KSM thought, in locating apartment rental agencies and language schools—and places to take flying lessons. They also tried to grasp some basic words and phrases in English.
The two young men were coached separately. Mihdhar, who was married to a Yemeni wife, left early. Hazmi trained with the two Yemenis bin Laden had picked but who had been refused U.S. visas. One of them, Walid bin Attash, has recalled talks on choosing the optimal moment to hijack an airplane. They were to take careful note of flight attendants’ and pilots’ movements, the routine attendants followed when taking meals to the cockpit, the comings and goings to the lavatory of the pilots.
Attash was assigned to do a dry run. He flew first to Kuala Lumpur, the capital of Malaysia, a largely Muslim nation that did not require visas for travelers from certain other Muslim states. Then he flew to Bangkok and onward, aboard an American airliner, to Hong Kong. He took the flight to Hong Kong on December 31, 1999, Millennium Eve, the same day on which U.S. officials were beside themselves with worry about a possible bin Laden attack.
Attash learned a good deal from these rehearsal flights. It was not enough, he realized, just to travel First Class. It was important to reserve a seat with a clear view of the cockpit door. Second, he discovered it was possible to board a plane carrying a box cutter or razor knife. Were the knife to trigger a metal detector, he realized, toiletries that came in metallic tubes or containers—like toothpaste or shaving cream—were probably enough to fool inspectors at security checks. In the event of awkward questions, and to account for the box cutter, Attash also carried art supplies. His bag was opened and he was questioned, but the ploy worked every time.
The reconnaissance completed, Attash, Hazmi, and Mihdhar—and several other terrorists—spent a few days at a condominium complex on the outskirts of Kuala Lumpur. Then they traveled on to Bangkok, the last stop for Hazmi and Mihdhar before the real start of the 9/11 mission. On January 15, 2000, the pair boarded a United Airlines flight bound for Los Angeles. Armed with the entry visas obtained the previous year, they had no problem at all at Immigration. They were admitted to the U.S. as “tourists.”
KSM was to claim “no al Qaeda operative or facilitator” was ready and waiting to help the two future hijackers on arrival. The Commission, however—usually careful not to raise doubt where there was none—did not believe him. With reason.
On the routine form they filled out on arrival, Hazmi and Mihdhar stated they would be staying initially at a Sheraton in Los Angeles. Intensive inquiries after 9/11, however, would produce no trace of them there or at any other hotel or motel. Where did they stay?
A driver who said he did chauffeuring work for the Saudi consulate was to give a detailed account of having chauffeured “two Saudis.” Someone else, he indicated, had met them at the airport, then taken them to “an apartment … that had been rented for them” on Sepulveda Boulevard. An imam at the King Fahd mosque, near the consulate, had introduced the driver to the new arrivals. The driver gave them a tour, to the beach at Santa Monica and over to Hollywood. Shown a number of photographs of young Arabs, the driver picked out Hazmi and Mihdhar—only to back off and nervously deny having known them.
Knowing that the pair spoke virtually no English and “barely knew how to function in U.S. society,” KSM has said, he had “instructed” them—unlike the more sophisticated accomplices who were later to arrive from Germany—to feel free to ask for assistance at a local mosque or Islamic center. That is what Hazmi and Mihdhar appear to have done, but they likely had more specific guidance than KSM admitted. Another captured terrorist said KSM was in possession of at least one address in the States, perhaps in California.
If there was such a contact, KSM managed to conceal it. The CIA concluded that his principal goal, even under torture, was to protect sleepers—operatives already in the United States. In doing so, he seems to have sought to lay a false trail. On the one hand he claimed under interrogation that he had shown Hazmi and Mihdhar a phone directory that “possibly” covered Long Beach, near Los Angeles, and that they tried to enroll in various language schools in the L.A. area. On the other hand, he referred to definitely having had directories for San Diego and having noted that there were language schools and flight schools in that city. KSM’s “idea,” he said, was that Hazmi and Mihdhar should base themselves in San Diego.
At any rate, whatever guidance they may have received at the Saudi consulate and mosque in Los Angeles, it was to San Diego that they headed. The man who invited them there and arranged housing for them was to become a major focus of the investigation.
Forty-two-year-old Omar al-Bayoumi was a mystery in his own right. According to a rental application form he filled out, he was a student receiving a monthly income from relatives in India. In fact he was an employee of a subsidiary of a contractor for the Saudi Civil Aviation Authority—paid but, as a colleague put it, a “ghost”—not required to work. He had time on his hands, and spent much of it helping to run a mosque near San Diego.
; According to Bayoumi and a companion, they met Hazmi and Mihdhar on February 1, 2000, two weeks after their arrival in the United States. According to the companion, an American Muslim convert named Caysan bin Don, he and Bayoumi drove first to Los Angeles. Bayoumi, he said, met for thirty minutes with a man at the Saudi consulate, then went on to the nearby King Fahd mosque. Bayoumi, for his part, denied that they stopped at the mosque.
Both agreed that they went to eat at the Mediterranean Café, a restaurant that served food suitable for Muslims. As they were waiting to be served, they said, Hazmi and Mihdhar walked in. On hearing them speaking Arabic, Bayoumi invited them to come join them at their table. He did so, according to a Los Angeles Times account, after first dropping a newspaper on the floor and bending to retrieve it.
What led Hazmi and Mihdhar to express interest in moving to San Diego, Bayoumi claimed, was his “description of the weather there.” They duly showed up in the city, sought him out at the Islamic Center, and—with his assistance—moved for a while into the apartment next door to his own.
The way Bayoumi and bin Don told it, it had been pure chance that they met the two future terrorists. There are factors, though, that suggest it did not happen that way: a witness who quoted Bayoumi as saying before going to Los Angeles that he was on his way “to pick up visitors”; phone records that indicate frequent contact between him and the imam said to have arranged for the “two Saudis’ ” car tour around Los Angeles; phone records indicating that Hazmi and Mihdhar used Bayoumi’s cell phone for several weeks; the fact that Bayoumi appeared to have written jihad-type material; that Bayoumi’s salary was approved by the father of a man whose photo was later found in a raid on a terrorist safe house in Afghanistan; and that there was a mark in his passport that investigators associated with possible affiliation to al Qaeda.
The Eleventh Day: The Full Story of 9/11 and Osama bin Laden Page 31
