The Eleventh Day

Former Air Force Lieutenant Colonel Karen Kwiatkowski, who was at the Pentagon when it was hit on 9/11, later went public with a lengthy essay expressing her suspicions. “There was a dearth of visible debris on the relatively unmarked lawn, where I stood only minutes after the impact,” she wrote. “There was no sign of the kind of damage to the Pentagon structure one would expect from the impact of a large airliner.… It was, however, exactly what one would expect if a missile had struck the Pentagon.”

From French author Thierry Meyssan to Lieutenant Colonel Kwiatkowski, that is the notion that has proved durable among the doubters. The Pentagon was hit not by an airliner but by a missile.

The perceived Pentagon mysteries have given the skeptics free rein. A group calling itself Citizen Investigation Team claimed in 2010 to have “proof” that “the plane that was seen flying low over Arlington on 9/11/01 did not in fact hit the Pentagon.” Rather, it pulled up and flew over it at the last moment—all part, the authors would have us believe, of a “skilfully executed deception.”

Only a tiny community of believers, perhaps, credit such bizarre hypotheses So influential have the skeptics proven, however, above all but not only thanks to the Internet, that many people are at least somewhat hooked.

The authors’ contacts during the more than four years of work on this book—including both professional and social conversations with hundreds of people—seemed to confirm that many citizens, and not only young people, doubt that they have been given the full picture of what occurred on 9/11.

Such widespread doubt demands corroboration based on solid evidence—or rebuttal.

ELEVEN

THERE HAVE BEEN THREE MAIN OFFICIAL REPORTS ON THE NEW YORK collapses. First, the World Trade Center Building Performance Study, compiled in 2002 by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the Structural Engineering Institute of the American Society of Civil Engineers, and other bodies. Second, there was the far more thorough—248 pages coupled to forty-two companion reports—2005 report by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). There is also the institute’s eighty-eight-page report on the collapse of Trade Center Building 7, issued in 2008.

More than two hundred technical specialists, eighty-five from NIST and the others from the private sector and the academic world, worked on the institute’s report on the Trade Center. Its conclusion as to why the towers collapsed in essence differed from FEMA’s earlier finding only in the detail of its analysis.

The impact of the planes, NIST’s experts said, severed steel support columns and dislodged fireproofing—a vital factor—and started fires that reached temperatures as high as 1,000 degrees Celsius. The intense heat had the effect of weakening floors to the point where they sagged and pulled inward until outer columns—on the south face of the North Tower and the east face of the South Tower—in turn bowed inward.

That is the process, according to the NIST, that led the towers to collapse. The institute found “no corroborating evidence” for theories that the towers were brought down by controlled demolition using explosives planted in advance. It said that even the perception that the towers “pancaked,” as a cursory look at video footage might suggest—and as is associated with films of demolition using explosives—is inaccurate. NIST’s reading of the evidence, moreover, is that there was no failure of the floors—falling down one upon another one by one—but rather that the inward bowing, as described in the previous paragraph, initiated collapse.

What ammunition do the conspiracy theorists have to challenge the NIST account, and what is it worth? We came across a study of just that, dedicated solely to Professor Griffin’s criticism of the NIST reports on the Trade Center, and written by a NASA research scientist named Ryan Mackey—in language anyone can understand. In his analysis of Griffin’s work, Mackey applies what the astrophysicist Carl Sagan called a “baloney detection kit.”

Vital tools in the kit include independent confirmation of the facts, not confining oneself at the outset to a single hypothesis, and adherence to Occam’s Razor—the principle that precedence should be given to the simpler of competing theories.

The approach of Professor Griffin, the conspiracy author who presents himself as reasoned and judicious, in Mackey’s view “violates every single tenet” of the baloney detection kit. Mackey demonstrates as much, successfully in our view, over some three hundred pages. Errors made by Griffin regarding the NIST report, Mackey writes, “are so numerous and substantial as to discourage further analysis of his claims.” Here, large and small, are examples of Griffin’s claims, Mackey’s rebuttals, and on occasion points of our own.

Contrary to the NIST’s finding that fires so weakened the Twin Towers as to cause their collapse, Griffin has claimed that the fires were not especially hot, that there was no evidence that the heat was “breaking windows.” In fact, video and photographs show hundreds of windows broken, with either flame or smoke visible.

Griffin, who on the one hand argues that the fires in the Twin Towers were not hot enough to fatally weaken the steel columns, on the other hand asserts that molten steel was seen. For steel to have melted, he writes, “would be very strong evidence” that the columns were in fact “cut by explosives.”

There is in fact no good evidence—evidence, as distinct from verbal eyewitness recollections—that any steel, as distinct from other metals like aluminum, melted. According to Mackey, moreover, explosives, “particularly those used in real controlled demolitions, do not melt steel. They destroy steel through impulse.”

One possible scenario, Mackey writes, might support steel having melted at the very moment of collapse. That, he says, would fit not with the use of explosives but of “high-temperature incendiaries,” such as thermite—the presence of which has been postulated by skeptic Dr. Steven Jones.

Jones has claimed to have discovered “thermitic” material in four samples of dust from Lower Manhattan. There are multiple problems with Jones’s assertion, however, the first of them a problem that requires no scientific knowledge.

In all criminal investigations, a key factor is what detectives call the “chain of evidence” or “chain of custody.” To be truly useful, evidence must have been handled with extreme care, to obviate questions as to its authenticity or origins. Dr. Jones’s samples of dust emerged five years after 9/11, following an appeal by him for dust that might have been preserved.

One handful of dust reportedly came from a citizen who scooped it up on 9/11 from a handrail near the end of the Brooklyn Bridge, then preserved it in a plastic bag. Another was reportedly found the following day on a pile of laundry near an apartment window. Of the two other samples, both also picked up in Manhattan apartments, one had lain unretrieved—exposed to other particles entering through broken windows—for about a week.

To a detective—and in this case a scientist is indeed a sort of detective—such samples are interesting but much less than reliable. In a criminal case—and were the samples of, say, bloodstains containing DNA—they would be laughed out of court. There is no true chain of evidence in any of these instances.

Even were the provenance of the dust well established, moreover, some fellow scientists reject Jones’s claim to have identified the incendiary thermite. Elements in the samples are as likely, they say, to have come from material one would expect to find in dust from the Trade Center—like paint.

There is disapproval, too, of the way Jones’s thermite conclusions—grave, were they to be taken seriously—have been presented. The findings have not been subjected to peer review, the process under which a scholarly work is subjected to scrutiny by other experts in the same field. While most scientists consider peer review essential, Jones’s thoughts on thermite seem first to have appeared in a paper he posted on a university website, then in the Journal of 9/11 Studies. The website of the Journal, of which Jones is coeditor, claims that it is “peer-reviewed.” Fellow scientist Ryan Mackey dismisses that assertion as a “masquerade … cargo-cult science.”

Thermite aside, Griffin and like-minded theorists espouse the idea that explosives of some sort were used to bring down the towers. They base their suspicion to a great degree on what witnesses said they saw and heard—understandably, or so one might think.

Wall Street Journal reporter John Bussey, for example, reported in a Pulitzer-winning article that from the Journal building near the South Tower he “heard metallic crashes and looked up out of the office window to see what seemed like perfectly synchronized explosions coming from each floor.… One after another, from top to bottom, with a fraction of a second between, the floors blew to pieces.”

Bussey later recalled having seen “individual floors, one after the other exploding outward.” “I thought to myself, ‘My God, they’re going to bring the building down.’ And they, whoever they were, had set charges.” “It just descended like a timed explosion,” said Beth Fertig of WNYC Radio, “like when they are deliberately bringing a building down.”

The skeptics also pounced early on what Van Romero of the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology—unlike the reporters an expert on explosives—told the Albuquerque Journal on the day of the attacks. “My opinion is, based on the videotapes,” he said, “that after the airplanes hit the World Trade Center there were some explosive devices inside the buildings that caused the towers to collapse.”

Ten days later, however, Romero reversed himself. It had initially looked to him as though explosives triggered the collapses, he said, but a further look at the videotapes led him to agree with colleagues that—essentially as the NIST would conclude four years later—the buildings fell because fire weakened their steel structures.

There’s the nub. So many people, with less expertise in explosives than Romero or none at all, merely said what they thought they saw and heard. “Then we heard a loud explosion or what sounded like a loud explosion,” Fire battalion chief John Sudnik recalled, “and looked up and I saw Tower Two start coming down.” “First I thought it was an explosion,” said firefighter Timothy Julian. “I thought maybe there was a bomb on the plane, but delayed type of thing, you know, secondary device.”

“There was what appeared to be at first an explosion,” said Chief Frank Cruthers, also describing the collapse of the South Tower. “It appeared at the very top, simultaneously from all four sides, materials shot out horizontally. And then there seemed to be a momentary delay before you could see the beginning of the collapse.”

“The lowest floor of fire in the South Tower actually looked like someone had planted explosives around it,” said battalion chief Brian Dixon. “Everything blew out … I thought, ‘Jeez, this looks like an explosion up there.’ ”

Dr. Griffin seized on these accounts and more. On occasion, however, he was less than professorial in his editing. Griffin omitted, for example, what battalion chief Dixon said in his very next sentence, after recalling that he thought he was witnessing an “explosion.” He had continued, “I guess in some sense of time we looked at it and realized, ‘No, actually it just collapsed.’ That’s what blew out the windows, not that there was an explosion there.”

Without having done a statistical study of the some five hundred formal interviews conducted with 9/11 emergency workers, it appears to the authors that the vast majority of them referred not to apparent explosions—as in detonations—but usually more vaguely, to loud bangs, thunder, rumbling, booms, or trainlike sounds.

There may even have been some actual explosions, but not ones indicating deliberate demolition. “You heard nothing but explosions all day,” firefighter Salvatore Torcivia remembered. “The fires, the jet fuel burning. The nearby buildings had air conditioning and refrigerator units—they were all exploding from the super heat. It sounded like bombs going off. I believe the Secret Service had their armory in one of the towers. That stuff, ordnance, was going off.”

After an analysis of Griffin’s eye and ear witnesses to explosion, his critic Ryan Mackey notes that all were nonexperts, “relaying their impressions of a horrifically chaotic and deadly experience.” There is no good reason to consider the witnesses’ words evidence of the use of explosives.

To believe explosives were involved, moreover, one would have to account for how they were planted—in multiple locations—in advance of the attacks. Griffin states that demolition of the Twin Towers would have required more explosive than did that in 2000 of the Seattle Kingdome stadium—at the time the largest structure ever brought down by controlled implosion.

His tormentor Mackey, calculating that this would have meant bringing more than 60,000 kilograms of explosive into each tower, notes that the professor “produced no explanation of how such a staggering amount of explosives could have been smuggled into the Towers without detection, how it could have been placed without being seen, how many individuals would have been required to plant it all.”

The 2005 report of the National Institute of Standards and Technology summed up the matter. Its experts had found no evidence, the report said, “for alternative hypotheses suggesting that the WTC towers were brought down by controlled demolition using explosives.”

The authors have seen nothing, in all the verbiage of the skeptical literature, to persuade us otherwise.

IN 2010, Dr. Griffin came out with yet another book, on what he described as “The Official Account’s Achilles’ Heel.” The “smoking gun” that he and others see is the collapse on the evening of September 11 of the forty-seven-story World Trade Center Building 7.

Though not struck by an airplane, Building 7 was catastrophically damaged by chunks of debris from the collapsing North Tower, caught fire, and burned all day. When it in turn fell, WTC 7 became the first known instance in the world of a tall, modern, steel-reinforced building brought down apparently as a result of fire.

It was, The New York Times reported later, “a mystery that under normal circumstances would probably have captured the attention of the city and the world”—had its collapse not been eclipsed by that of the Twin Towers themselves. The Times said engineers expected to spend months piecing together the “disturbing puzzle.” In the event, it took the NIST’s experts seven years.

According to the NIST, in its 2008 report, WTC 7 was brought down by “fire-induced progressive collapse,” a chain of events technically unlike those in the Twin Towers, beginning with the failure of one key structural column. The NIST “found no evidence supporting the existence of a blast event.”

There has long been witness testimony militating against the notion that the WTC 7 collapse was triggered by explosions. Fire Department interviewees recalled having anticipated the collapse of WTC 7 from early in the afternoon of September 11. Frank Fellini, a senior chief, said the building was a “major concern” because of the hit it took from the fall of the North Tower. “When it fell, it ripped steel out from between the third and sixth floors … We were concerned that the fires on several floors and the missing steel would result in the building collapsing. So for the next five or six hours we kept firefighters from working anywhere near that building.”

“Early on,” Deputy Chief Peter Hayden said, “we saw a bulge in the southwest corner … a visible bulge, it ran up about three floors … by about 2 o’clock in the afternoon we realized this thing was going to collapse.”

Daniel Nigro, who succeeded as head of the department following the death of Chief Ganci, said he personally ordered a collapse zone cleared around the building three hours before the building tumbled, at 5:20 P.M.

Conspiracy theories on the fate of WTC 7, Nigro wrote in 2007, “are without merit.”

ON, THEN, to the idea that the Pentagon was hit not by American Flight 77 but by a missile. Food for that thought has been photographs taken after the initial explosion—and before the collapse of a major portion of the facade more than half an hour later. The pictures appear to doubters to show a hole, amidst the smoke, only some eighteen feet wide.

A Boeing 757 like American’s Flight 77 has a wingspan of 124 feet 6 inches and a tail 44 feet 6 inches tall. “How could such a big airplane have created such a small hole?” asked Dr. Griffin. The missile theory, he thought, “fits the physical evidence much better.”

The apparent size of the hole does at first glance seem odd. It seems curious, too, that photographs do not show sizable airplane debris scattered around outside the building. To draw conclusions from those visual oddities, however, is to ignore the mass of eyewitness testimony from people who saw a low-flying airliner roar toward the Pentagon. It is to reject a wealth of other evidence and to spurn the opinion of technical experts.

As in New York, no formal National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) accident investigation report was issued on the Pentagon crash, because the disaster was treated from the start as a crime scene. There could and probably should have been one, not least because—unlike the scene in the aftermath of the New York attacks—there was initially a crash site that air transport investigators could have examined. Both the remains of the airplane and rubble from the building collapse, however, were removed early on—the airplane debris reportedly to an FBI warehouse—for storage as evidence.

The nearest thing to an investigative probe into the Pentagon strike is the 2003 report by a team from the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE). Its title, “The Pentagon Building Performance Report,” reflects the group’s brief—to focus on the damage done to the nation’s defense headquarters. The seven-month probe, however, inevitably also involved close study of the crash itself, and the resulting report reflects absolutely no doubt that the catastrophe was caused by an airliner.

To say otherwise, says Professor Mete Sozen, a member of the ASCE team, is “hogwash.” “To look at only the photograph of what some people see as the ‘small’ entry hole in the facade,” Sozen told the authors in 2010, “is to see only part of the reality. Much of the facade is obscured by smoke in the photos, and our work—judging by the locations of broken or heavily damaged columns in the wall—showed that the real damage consisted of a ragged series of holes stretching to a width of some ninety feet.”

Why, then, do the photographs taken before the facade’s collapse not show more clearly the virtually wingtip-to-wingtip entry gashes seen when similar planes hit the World Trade Center on 9/11?

Another, long-ago, New York City plane crash may offer an insight. A plane that smashed into the Empire State Building in dense fog in 1945—a B-25 bomber with a sixty-five-foot wingspan—created a hole only twenty feet wide. The Empire State is a reinforced masonry structure, as is the Pentagon—which was built during World War II. The walls of both make substantial obstacles, more substantial than the relatively fragile glass and steel sides of the Twin Towers.

Here is what the ASCE team’s Sozen, professor of structural engineering at Purdue University in Indiana, believes happened to the Boeing that smashed into the Pentagon:

Think of the external shell of the plane as a sausage skin, and the function of the structural frame as being mainly to contain the internal pressure at altitude. The plane’s structure doesn’t have much strength. What creates the power generated on impact is what we call its “mass and velocity.” And much of the mass in the case of a Boeing 757–200 is in the fuel-filled wings.

On September 11, the Boeing was reported to have approached the Pentagon flying very low, just a few feet off the ground, at some 530 mph. Eyewitnesses said the right engine hit a portable generator on the ground outside, the left engine a steam vault. Then the nose cone hit the limestone facade, and the facade’s columns cut into the fuselage. The right wingtip, which hit next, would have been cut by the columns. But when parts of the fuel-filled wing close to the fuselage impacted—given the speed at which it was traveling and its greater mass—it was the

columns

that would have been destroyed or badly damaged. The same series of events would have happened when the left wing impacted (though in reverse order because of the angle at which the plane hit the building). That is why the gash in the facade of the building was not as wide as the wingspan of the airplane.

By the time the aircraft’s mass had penetrated the building—by about its own length—it had been transformed into a violent flow of small and large projectiles of solid and fluid that ricocheted off the internal parts of the building. The ensuing fire, we concluded, devoured the flammable part of the airplane’s debris inside the building. The Boeing’s tall tail and rudder assembly would have been shattered when it impacted with the edges of building slabs on the upper levels.

That may seem a compelling, credible explanation of what befell Flight 77. The skeptics, however, have long made much of the supposed lack of debris at the crash site. Photographs published in “Pentagon 9/11,” the account of the day’s events by the Defense Department’s Historical Office, however, do depict some debris outside the building: mangled pieces of metal, one clearly marked “AA,” for American Airlines, another evidently a part of the fuselage bearing part of the airline’s livery, and smaller material—fragments rather than chunks.

The ubiquitous Griffin has suggested that evidence may have been “planted.” Dr. Fetzer, cofounder of Scholars for 9/11 Truth, went further and suggested how the planting may have been achieved. “Don’t be taken in,” he said. “Debris begins to show up on the completely clean lawn in short order, which might have been dropped from a C-130 … or placed there by men in suits who were photographed carrying debris with them.”

Preposterous. Reports, and photographs taken before removal by the FBI, reflect the finding of significant remains of the aircraft inside the building: seats, including one from the cockpit still attached to a piece of floor, cockpit circuitry, pieces of Rolls-Royce turbofan engines, landing gear, pieces of the nose gear, a wheel hub, a piece of the nose cone, a piece “the size of a refrigerator,” a tire. Some parts, reportedly, bore Boeing part numbers consistent with the airplane that crashed.

Try telling Tamara “T” Carter that the debris at the Pentagon was planted. Carter, herself an American Airlines flight attendant, went to the scene two days later as a volunteer to serve refreshments to the cleanup crews. She has recalled seeing recognizable parts of a plane, the internal American upholstery with which she was familiar—and body parts. She and family members were also shown photographs of items that they might recognize, jewelry, clothing, and the like. “I’m here to tell you,” she said a year later, “that my friend’s arm with a bracelet exactly like this”—Carter held up a bracelet—“was found. We buried it in Washington, D.C.”

The friend, a close friend, had been fellow flight attendant Renee May, who on 9/11 got through by phone from Flight 77 to alert authorities to the hijacking. To Carter, who knew all the crew members killed that day, the loss was personal. “I saw pieces of our American Airlines 757,” she said. “If anyone thinks the plane did not go in there, then what happened to all my friends and where did all those body parts come from? Every crew member’s body was found.”

A random check supports this. Renee May’s ashes were divided between her parents, who scattered them on the sea off San Diego, and her fiancé on the East Coast. Fellow flight attendants, married couple Kenneth and Jennifer Lewis, were interred in Virginia. Another colleague, Michele Heidenberger, was buried in Maryland. Their captain, Charles Burlingame, lies in Arlington Cemetery.

Such facts, in the view of the authors, render the claims voiced by the skeptics outrageous, cruel insults to the memory of the dead. Human remains were painstakingly collected and identified for all but five of Flight 77’s sixty-four passengers and crew, and for all of the 125 people killed at the Pentagon. Have the “no-planers” seen the horrific photographs of bodies and body parts at the Pentagon, as carbonized and petrified in death as the victims of the eruption that destroyed Pompeii? No retrieval of human remains was more poignant than that of one of the children on board.

“A stillness fell over the recovery workers as a child’s pajamas were pulled from the debris,” recalled Lieutenant Colonel William Lee, a chaplain. A Barbie doll was pulled out next, followed by the foot of a child—probably part of the torn remains of eight-year-old Zoe Falkenberg, who had been traveling on the plane with her parents and little sister, Dana. Dana, aged three, was one of the five victims for whom remains were not identified.

In light of such realities, Griffin’s musings—along with those of others, such as Professor Dewdney and a woman named Laura Knight-Jadczyk, who runs an Internet site called “The Cassiopaean Experiment”—might be thought to sink to the level of obscenity. The professor expressed doubt that “the bodies of the crew and passengers were really found in the Pentagon wreckage. “For all we know,” he opined, “human remains from two different sites could have been combined by FBI and military personnel.”

So it goes, in the face of all the evidence. Griffin, Dewdney, and Knight-Jadczyk have insisted for years that phone calls reportedly made from the hijacked planes—including Flight 77—are fabrications. His research, Dewdney wrote, showed that technologically, “cell phone calls alleged to have been made by passengers were essentially impossible” in 2001.

The suggestion is that the two conversations said to have been conducted from Flight 77—by flight attendant Renee May to her mother and by Barbara Olson to her husband, Theodore, the solicitor general—are official concoctions.

The issue of whether it was possible to make cell phone calls from airliners at the time turns out to be irrelevant. Detailed AT&T records now available make it clear that Mrs. Olson and May used seatback phones, not cell phones.

In a fatuous, callous account, Knight-Jadczyk suggests that Barbara Olson did not die on Flight 77, but may “have had a little plastic surgery and is waiting for Ted on that nice Caribbean island they have always wanted to retire to.”

Theologian Griffin, who likes to write and talk about “voice transformers” and “voice morphing,” techniques of flawlessly imitating voices that he thinks may have been used by the authorities on 9/11, does not emerge as having any consideration for the bereaved. Theodore Olson’s account of having received calls from his wife on the morning of 9/11, he alleged, was only a claim.

“Either Ted Olson lied or else he, like many other people that day, was fooled by fake calls.” The notion that the solicitor general told the truth, he said, “is based on the assumption that his wife Barbara Olson really died, and that he truly loved her.”

The remains of Olson’s wife, Barbara, were found in the ruins of the Pentagon, scattered in three separate locations. “It took a long time to provide an identification,” her husband has said. “But finally they did release the remains of Barbara. And she’s buried up in Door County, Wisconsin … because she loved that place so much. And she’s there now.”

Absent evidence for his claim about the Olson calls, Griffin resorted to innuendo. One “cannot ignore the fact,” he wrote, “that the information about Barbara came from Ted Olson, that he was working for the Bush-Cheney administration.” It is the notion on which Griffin and the rest harp over and over—in his words that there is “overwhelming” supporting evidence that 9/11 was “an inside job.” There was “a prima facie case for assuming that the Bush administration was involved.”

THE SKEPTICS MAKE much of a document issued exactly a year before the attacks by the Project for the New American Century, a right-wing group that included men soon to hold senior posts in the Bush administration—Cheney, Rumsfeld, Lewis “Scooter” Libby, Paul Wolfowitz, and George Bush’s brother Jeb, the governor of Florida.

The paper, entitled “Rebuilding America’s Defenses,” envisaged the removal of “regional aggressors” in the Middle East, and a continuing U.S. military presence in the Persian Gulf—“unquestioned military pre-eminence.” Achieving such ambitions would be a lengthy process, the document noted, “absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event—like a new Pearl Harbor.”

The luminaries of the New American Century group, all now appointed to positions in the new administration, got their catalyzing event within eight months. In a diary entry on the night of the attacks, President Bush reportedly called 9/11 “the Pearl Harbor of the 21st century.” Later, he would draw the parallel to 1941 in public. The catastrophe of September 11 did predispose the American public for great military initiatives abroad, wars in Afghanistan and in Iraq—to topple regional aggressor Saddam Hussein.

The skeptics do not believe the September 11 attacks occurred by happenstance. They infer, rather, that those around Bush who yearned for “unquestioned military pre-eminence” must have been involved in 9/11. “Who benefits?” asked Griffin. “Who had the motive? Who had the means? Who had the opportunity? Certainly the U.S. government benefited immensely from 9/11 and cannot therefore be dropped from any rational list of suspect organizations.”

MIHOP—Made It Happen On Purpose—adherents suggest that 9/11 was a false flag operation, a fabrication to justify foreign wars, and rattle off a string of supposed precedents. They cite U.S. provocation as having triggered the Mexican-American War of 1846, resulting in the acquisition of vast new territories from Texas to California. They point to the mysterious sinking of the battleship Maine in 1898. Though perhaps just a tragic accident, the sinking was used to justify the ensuing war with Spain—leading to U.S. dominance over the Philippines, Guam, and Puerto Rico.

MIHOP disciples also recall the argument that the orthodox history of Pearl Harbor itself is incorrect, that—though President Franklin Roosevelt had prior intelligence of a coming attack—he took no preemptive action. Roosevelt’s motive? According to revisionist theory, he needed the day of Japanese “infamy” to ensure support for taking America into the war.

MIHOP people cite, too, the Gulf of Tonkin incident during Lyndon Johnson’s presidency. Exposés have shown that the administration greatly exaggerated the facts about skirmishes in the gulf between North Vietnamese and U.S. ships in 1964. The inflated story was used, all the same, as pivotal justification for committing the United States to war in Vietnam.

Those who think the false flag ploy may apply to 9/11 also pounced, within days of the attacks, on an authentic recent revelation. Documents made public just months earlier showed that, back in 1962, the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff had worked up plans to stage phony acts of terrorism—including the staged downing of a U.S. airliner—that could be blamed on Fidel Castro.

The object, then, had been to provoke an American invasion of Cuba and—though the project never got beyond the planning stage—news of its existence led to fevered speculation among 9/11 skeptics. “We must wonder,” one Web theorist wrote, “if the inexplicable intelligence and defense failures [surrounding 9/11] claimed by U.S. government agencies are simply part of some elaborate cover story.”

Wonder one may, but the authors have seen not a jot of evidence that anything like a false flag scenario was used on 9/11. Nor, after more than four years’ research, have we encountered a shred of real information indicating that the Bush administration was complicit in 9/11. Subjected to any serious probing, the suspicions raised by Professor Griffin and his fellow “truthers” simply vanish on the wind.

The investigative writer David Corn, a longtime Washington editor of The Nation, was on many matters a harsh critic of the President and those around him. As a serious investigative writer who specialized in intelligence coverage, though, he had no time for the skeptics’ fancies. “I won’t argue,” he wrote six months after 9/11,

that the U.S. government does not engage in brutal, murderous skulduggery from time to time. But the notion that the U.S. government either detected the attacks but allowed them to occur, or worse, conspired to kill thousands of Americans … is absurd.

Would George W. Bush take the chance of being branded the most evil president of all time by countenancing such wrongdoing? Aren’t these conspiracy theories too silly to address? … Would U.S. officials be capable of such a foul deed? Capable, as in able to pull it off and willing to do so. Simply put, the spies and the special agents are not good enough, evil enough, or gutsy enough.… That conclusion is based partly

on, dare I say it, common sense, but also on years spent covering national security matters.…

Such a plot … would require dozens (or scores or hundreds) of individuals to attempt such a scheme. They would have to work together, and trust one another not to blow their part or reveal the conspiracy.…

This is as foul as it gets—to kill thousands of Americans, including Pentagon employees.… (The sacrificial lambs could have included White House staff or members of Congress, had the fourth plane not crashed in Pennsylvania.) This is a Hollywood-level of dastardliness, James Bond (or Dr. Evil) material.… There is plenty to get outraged about without becoming obsessed with

X Files

–like nonsense.

Corn’s piece attracted a howl of rage on the Internet from the busy scribblers he had characterized as “silly.” Eight years of scribbling and talk show jawing later, though, their theories still look silly.

THERE IS NO REASON to doubt that a team of terrorists targeted four airliners on September 11. No reason to doubt that the doomed planes stood at their assigned gates, that passengers boarded, that the aircraft took off, for some time flew their allotted flight paths, were hijacked, and then—except for one that crashed following a brave attempt at resistance by its passengers—crashed into targeted buildings in New York and Washington. There is no good reason to suspect that the collapse of the Twin Towers and nearby buildings, and the resulting deaths, were caused by anything other than the inferno started by the planes’ impact. There is no reason, either, to suspect that the damage and death at the Pentagon was caused by anything other than the plane striking the building.

The facts are fulsomely documented in the material available to the public—not just the 9/11 Commission Report but the reams of supporting documentation and the reports supplied by other agencies. The thousands of pages include: interviews of airline ground staff on duty that day, interviews with crews’ families, flight path studies prepared by the National Transportation Safety Board, Air Traffic Control recordings—transcripts of verbatim exchanges between controllers and pilots—accompanying reports prepared by NTSB specialists, radar data studies, the transcript of the one Cockpit Voice Recorder recovered in usable condition, the two Flight Data Recorders recovered, and interviews and transcripts of staff of the FAA Air Traffic Control Centers involved on the day.

All that material is now available, part of the approximately 300,000 pages released by the National Archives—with national security and privacy-related redactions—since 2009. The authors have read as much of it as was feasible, and it provides no support for the naysayers.

The legacy of the spurious doubts, though, has been that far too little attention has been given to the very real omissions and distortions in the official reporting. The conspiracy theorizing in which the skeptics indulged, David Corn has rightly said, “distracts people from the actual malfeasance, mistakes and misdeeds of the U.S. government and the intelligence community.”

There were certainly mistakes, and there may have been wrongdoing.

TWELVE

ALMOST THREE YEARS AFTER THE ATTACKS, IN 2004, THE EXECUTIVE director of the 9/11 Commission—then in the final weeks of its work—dictated a memo. It was addressed to the inquiry’s chairman and vice chairman, and it posed a very sensitive question. “How,” Philip Zelikow wanted to know, “should the Commission handle evidence of possible false statements by U.S. officials?”

“Team 8,” he reported, “has found evidence suggesting that one or more USAF officers—and possibly FAA officials—must have known their version was false, before and after it was briefed to and relied upon by the White House, presented to the nation, and presented to us.… The argument is not over details; it is about the fundamental way the story was presented. It is the most serious issue of truth/falsity in accounts to us that we have encountered so far.”

The “story” that so provoked the Commission was the military and FAA version of their response to the 9/11 attacks, a response that failed utterly to thwart the terrorists’ operation. The Commission’s belief that it had been deceived would be lost in the diplomatic language of its final Report. Zelikow’s memo on the subject would be withheld until 2009. The Commission’s chairman, former New Jersey governor Thomas Kean, and the vice chairman, former congressman Lee Hamilton, however, gave a sense of their frustration in their later joint memoir. The military’s statements, they declared, were “not forthright or accurate.” To another commissioner, former congressman Tim Roemer, they were, quite simply, “false.”

Former New Jersey attorney general John Farmer, who went on to become a senior counsel on the Commission, led Team 8’s probe of the military’s performance. He was shocked by the “deception,” and explained why in a complex, mesmerizing account of his findings.

Farmer questioned not only how the military and the FAA had functioned on 9/11, but also the actions of the President and the Vice President. In his view, “The perpetuation of the untrue official version remains a betrayal of every citizen who demanded a truthful answer to the simple question: What happened?”

TO ESTABLISH WHAT did happen, investigators found themselves plunging into a labyrinth of facts and factoids. Early official statements, made within days of the attacks, were clearly inconsistent.

Two days after the attacks, Air Force general Richard Myers testified to the Senate Armed Services Committee. Though the hearing had been scheduled before 9/11, questioning turned naturally to the crisis of the moment. For an officer of distinction, about to become chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Myers seemed confused as to when fighters had gone up to attempt to intercept the hijacked planes. Memory, he said vaguely, told him that fighters had been launched to intercept Flight 93, the plane that crashed before reaching a target. “I mean,” he said, “we had gotten somebody close to it, as I recall. I’ll have to check it out.”

Twenty-four hours later, on the Friday, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz seemed to confirm it. “We responded awfully quickly, I might say, on Tuesday,” he said in a nationally broadcast interview, “and in fact we were already tracking in on that plane that crashed in Pennsylvania. I think it was the heroism of the passengers on board that brought it down, but the Air Force was in a position to do so if we had had to … it’s the President’s decision on whether to take an action as fateful as that.”

The same day, though, another senior officer flatly contradicted Wolfowitz. Major General Paul Weaver, commander of the Air National Guard, gave reporters a detailed timeline of the military’s reaction. According to him, no airplanes had been scrambled to chase Flight 93. “There was no notification for us to launch airplanes … We weren’t even close.”

What, moreover, asked Weaver, could a fighter pilot have done had he intercepted one of the hijacked airliners? “You’re not going to get an American pilot shooting down an American airliner. We don’t have permission to do that.” The only person who could grant such permission was the President, the general pointed out, leaving the impression that Bush had not done so.

By week’s end, however, that notion was turned on its head. Vice President Cheney, speaking on NBC’s Meet the Press, said that George W. Bush had indeed made the “toughest decision”—to shoot down a civilian airliner if necessary. Fighter pilots, he asserted, had been authorized to “take out” any plane that failed to obey instructions to move away from Washington.

In spite of denials by General Myers and others, there were people who thought United 93 might in fact have been shot down. Bush himself had asked Cheney, “Did we shoot it down, or did it crash?” “It’s my understanding,” Cheney had told Defense Secretary Rumsfeld, that “they’ve already taken a couple of aircraft out.” Transportation Secretary Norman Mineta, who was with the Vice President at the White House, recalled thinking, “Oh, my God, did we shoot it down?”

At one base, a crewman saw a fighter returning without missiles, surmised that it had shot down Flight 93—then learned that the plane had never been loaded with missiles in the first place. One F-16 pilot who flew that day heard that the aircraft had been downed—only to be told that the report was incorrect. Rumors would still be circulating years later.

In the absence of good evidence to the contrary, though, few now credit the notion that any pilot shot down an airliner filled with helpless civilians on September 11. No pilot would have fired without authorization, could not have done so without fellow officers, radio operators, and others being aware of it. There was no way such an action could have been kept secret.

Shoot-down aside, the statements by the military and political leadership raised a host of questions. Had fighters really gone up in time to intercept any of the hijacked planes? If they did get up in time, what had they been expected to do? Could they—would they—have shot a plane down? If pilots were cleared to shoot, was the order given in the way the Vice President described? If so, when did he issue the order and when did it reach military commanders?

Getting clear answers to these questions at first seemed a manageable task. Why would it not be, given that the military, the FAA, and the White House all kept logs and records and taped hours of phone and radio exchanges? The law establishing the Commission “required” those involved to produce all records on request. In the event, though, investigators were thwarted by delayed responses, irritating conditions, and actual obstruction.

The FAA said it had produced all relevant material, only for Commission staff to discover that was not true. It had failed to provide a large number of tapes and transcripts. What the Department of Defense and NORAD—North American Aerospace Defense Command—provided was, in the words of one Commission staff member, “incomplete, late, and inadequate to our purposes.”

While key sources stalled, Commission investigators puzzled over further versions of what supposedly happened on 9/11—according to NORAD. Colonel William Scott suggested that fighters had been scrambled at 9:25 A.M., flying from Langley Air Force Base in Virginia to intercept the third hijacked plane, Flight 77, before it could reach Washington. Radar data, however, showed the fighters had headed away from Washington. As for the fourth plane, United 93, Scott appeared to corroborate the notion that the military had had notice of Flight 93’s hijacking as early as 9:16, forty-seven minutes before it crashed at 10:03.

The senior officer who supervised NORAD’s efforts on 9/11, Air Force Major General Larry Arnold, appeared to second what Scott had said about Flight 77—but in a very different context. “9:24,” he said, “was the first time we had been advised of American 77 as a possible hijacked airplane. Our focus—you have got to remember that there’s a lot of other things going on simultaneously here—was on United 93, which was being pointed out to us very aggressively, I might say, by the FAA.” According to the general, fighters had been launched out of the base at Langley to “put them over the top of Washington, D.C., not in response to American Airlines 77, but really to put them in position in case United 93 were to head that way.”

There had been time to intercept Flight 93, Arnold indicated. The “awful decision” to shoot the plane down had been obviated only by the bravery of its passengers in storming the cockpit, and the ensuing crash. In one breath, however, General Arnold appeared to say that his airmen could have shot down planes as of 9:25, when all civilian airplanes were ordered to land, in another that shoot-down authority was not forthcoming until about 10:08, five minutes after the crash of Flight 93.

John Farmer and the Commission’s Team 8 grew ever more leery of information offered by the military. Farmer stumbled on proof positive, too, that NORAD was failing to provide vital tapes. It took pressure at the very top, and a subpoena, to get them released. The more material team members obtained, the more they boggled in astonishment. Farmer heard one of his staffers, an Annapolis graduate named Kevin Schaeffer, muttering, “Whiskey tango foxtrot, man. Whiskey tango foxtrot.” That phrase, Schaeffer and a colleague explained to Farmer, was a “military euphemism for ‘What the fuck!’ ”

As the Commission zeroed in on the truth behind the military’s failures, the phrase was used often.

THE MOST POWERFUL military nation on the planet had been ill-prepared and ill-equipped to confront the attacks. Time was, at the height of the Cold War, when NORAD could have called on more than a hundred squadrons of fighter aircraft to defend the continental United States. By September 2001, however, with the Soviet threat perceived as minimal—bordering on nonexistent—the number had dwindled to a token force of just fourteen “alert” planes based at seven widely scattered bases. Only four of those fighters were based in the Northeast Air Defense Sector—NEADS—which covered the geographical area in which the hijackings took place.

Practice runs aside, moreover, the airplanes had never been scrambled to confront an enemy. They were used to intercept civilian aircraft that strayed off course, suspected drug traffickers, planes that failed to file a proper flight plan. Hijackings were rare, and countermeasures were based on the concept of hijacking as it had almost always been carried out since the 1960s—the temporary seizure of an airliner, followed by a safe landing and the release of passengers and crew. FAA security had recently noted the possibility that suicidal terrorists might use a plane as a weapon—but only in passing, without putting new security measures in place.

The cumbersome protocol in place to deal with a hijacking involved circuitous reporting, up through the FAA and on to the Pentagon, all the way up to the office of the defense secretary. At the end of the process, if approval was granted, NORAD would launch fighters. The pilots’ mission would then be to identify and discreetly follow the airplane until it landed. Nothing in their training or experience foresaw a need to shoot down an airliner.

On September 11, faced with swift-moving, complex information about multiple hijackings, the FAA was overwhelmed. The internal communications mix—multiple Air Traffic Control Centers, Eastern Region Administration, a command center in Herndon, Virginia, an operations center and FAA headquarters in Washington—proved too muddled to be effective.

There was some confusion over operational language. At the FAA, a “primary target” denoted a radar return. At NORAD, it meant a search target. In FAA parlance, to speak of a plane’s “coast mode” was to project its direction based on its last known appearance on radar. On 9/11, one NEADS staff technician interpreted the word “coast” as meaning that one of the hijacked flights was following the coastline, the eastern seaboard. One senior FAA controller admitted having not even known, on September 11, what NORAD was.

NORAD, for its part, ran into problems when units not designated for defense were called in. Such units had different training, different regulations and equipment, used a different communications net. In one area, NORAD fighter pilots found themselves unable to communicate with airmen from other units. Of three relevant radio frequencies, none worked.

Transcripts of FAA and NEADS conversations, when finally obtained by the Commission, were found to feature exchanges like this:

NEADS

VOICE:

In that book … we used to have a book with numbers [Dial tone]

NEADS

IDENTIFICATION TECHNICIAN:

Wrong one [Beeps] I can’t get ahold of Cleveland. [Sigh] [Dial tone, dialing, busy signal]

… still busy. Boston’s the only one that passed this information. Washington [Center] doesn’t know shit …

FAA B

OSTON

C

ENTER:

… We have an F-15 holding … He’s in the air … he’s waiting to get directions …

NEADS

IDENTIFICATION TECHNICIAN:

Stand by—stand by one. Weapons? I need somebody up here that …

And so on. One NEADS technician would keep saying of Washington air traffic control, “Washington [Center] has no clue … no friggin’ … they didn’t know what the hell was going on … What the fuck is this about?” A staffer at the FAA’s Command Center, speaking on the tactical net, summed up the situation in four words: “It’s chaos out there.”

“The challenge in relating the history of one of the most chaotic days in our history,” a Commission analyst wrote at one point in an internal document, “is to avoid replicating that chaos in writing about it.” So copious is the material, so labyrinthine the twists and turns it reflects, that a lengthy treatise would barely do it justice. Miles Kara, a member of the team that analyzed the military’s failures—himself a former Army intelligence officer—was still producing learned essays on the subject as late as 2011. The Commission’s basic findings, however, were in essence straightforward, and—based on the incontrovertible evidence of the tapes and logs—revelatory.

THE NERVE CENTER for the military on September 11 was an unprepossessing aluminum bunker, the last functional building on an otherwise abandoned Air Force base in upstate New York. From the outside, only antennas betrayed its possible importance. Inside, technicians manned rows of antiquated computers and radar screens. They did not, though, expect to have a quiet day on September 11. Their commander, Colonel Robert Marr, moreover, expected to have to respond to a hijacking.

A simulated hijacking. For the Northeast Air Defense Sector’s headquarters was gearing up for its part in the latest phase of Vigilant Guardian, one of several large-scale annual exercises. This one, old-fashioned in that it tested military preparedness for an attack by Russian bombers, included a scenario in which an enemy would seize an airliner and fly it to an unnamed Caribbean island.

At 8:30 that morning, the exercise proper had not yet got under way. The colonel was munching apple fritters. His mission control commander, Major Kevin Nasypany, was away from the ops floor—in his words, “on the shitter.” The general to whom they answered, Larry Arnold, was at NORAD’s regional command center in Florida.

On the ops floor at NEADS, Master Sergeant Maureen Dooley, Technical Sergeant Shelley Watson, and Senior Airman Stacia Rountree were chatting about furniture at the mall—wondering whether an ottoman and a love seat were on sale. To be sure, the orders for the day’s training exercise provided for the team to be capable of responding to a “Real World Unknown,” but no one expected much to happen.

Then the unknown arrived, in the form of a call from FAA controller Joe Cooper, at Boston Center, to Sergeant Jeremy Powell. It was 8:38.

C

OOPER:

Hi, Boston Center TMU [Traffic Management Unit]. We have a problem here. We have a hijacked aircraft headed towards New York, and we need you guys to, we need someone to scramble some F-16s or something up there, help us out.

S

GT

. J

EREMY

P

OWELL:

Is this real-world or exercise?

C

OOPER:

No, this is not an exercise, not a test.

The sergeant, and the women who moments earlier had been discussing home furnishings, needed some persuading. Fazed by the advent of real-life excitement, Shelley Watson even exclaimed, “Cool!” A moment later, after an “Oh, shit,” she was all business. “We need call-sign, type aircraft. Have you got souls on board, and all that information? … a destination?” Boston Center could say only that the airplane seized was American 11—as would become clear, the first of the four hijacks. No one could have imagined the destination its hijackers had in mind.

By 8:41, Colonel Marr had ordered the two alert jets at Otis Air National Guard Base, on Cape Cod, to battle stations. At 8:46, having conferred with General Arnold, he ordered them into the air—to no avail. Absent any detailed data, they were assigned merely to fly to military-controlled airspace off the Long Island coast. In the same minute, 153 miles away, American 11 smashed into the North Tower of the World Trade Center.

The NEADS technicians, who had glanced up at a TV monitor, saw the tower in flames. “Oh, God,” one technician said quietly. “Oh, my God …” A colleague at her side cried, “God save New York.”

FAA controllers had meanwhile lost contact with the second hijacked plane, United 175. “It’s escalating big, big time,” New York Center manager Peter Mulligan told colleagues in Washington. “We need to get the military involved.” The military was involved, in the shape of the two NEADS fighters, but impotent.

The Air Force knew nothing of the second hijack until 9:03, the very minute that Flight 175 hit the South Tower. News of that strike reached the Otis pilots Lieutenant Colonel Timothy Duffy and Major Dan Nash while they were still holding off the coast of Long Island.

Five minutes after the second strike, NEADS mission commander Nasypany ordered his fighters to head for Manhattan. Now, though, there was no suspect airliner in New York airspace to intercept. When the pilots began to fly a Combat Air Patrol over Manhattan, as soon they did, there was no enemy to combat. As catastrophe overwhelmed the city, they could only watch from high above. “I thought,” Nash remembered, “it was the start of World War III.”

The Air Force officers and the FAA controllers rapidly began to fear—correctly—that they had seen only the start of something, that there were more strikes to come. Where might they come from? It was perhaps no coincidence, they figured, that both the planes so far hijacked had started their journeys from Logan Airport. “We don’t know how many guys are out of Boston,” mused mission commander Nasypany. “Could be just these two—could be more.” An FAA manager voiced the same thought. “Listen,” he said, “both of these aircraft departed Boston. Both were 76s, both heading to LA.”

“We need to do more than fuck with this,” Nasypany told Colonel Marr, urging him to scramble the other alert fighters available to them—at the Langley base, three hundred miles south of New York. Marr agreed at first only to put Langley on standby. Then, at 9:21, came a call with information that changed the colonel’s mind—and later led to lasting controversy.

The caller was Colin Scoggins, an FAA controller at Boston Center who—in part because of his own previous military service—had special responsibility for liaison with the Air Force. On the phone to NEADS, he shared stunning news:

S

COGGINS:

Military, Boston. I just had a report that American 11 is still in the air, and it’s on its way towards—heading towards Washington.

NEADS: OK. American 11 is still in the air?

S

COGGINS:

Yes … It was evidently another aircraft that hit the tower … This is a report in from Washington Center. You might want to get someone on another phone talking to Washington Center.

One of the technicians did check with Washington, more than once—only to be told that they knew nothing about American 11 still being airborne. “First I heard of that,” said one supervisor. The source could not be Washington Center, another said. He added, correctly, that “American 11 is the airplane, we’re under the premise, that has already crashed into the World Trade Center.” Scoggins, however, insisted that he had heard “from Washington” that American 11 was still in the air, going “southwest.”

After Flight 11’s transponder was switched off, FAA controllers at New York Center had entered a new “track” for the flight into the system in order to alert other controllers to the airliner’s projected southerly direction. The track remained in the system for a while even after the real Flight 11 had crashed into the Trade Center. 9/11 Commission staff conjectured that it was that track, and emerging information about the loss of Flight 77, that sparked the rumor that Flight 11 was still airborne.

Scoggins never has been able to recall his source of the erroneous information—only that he picked it up while “listening on a Telcon with some people at Washington HQ, and other facilities as well, but I don’t know who they were.”

The information was a red herring. In the chaos of the moment, however, no one knew for certain that it was Flight 11—as opposed to some other aircraft—that had hit the North Tower. If it had not, and if hijackers were taking the captured plane southwest—as Scoggins suggested—their target had to be Washington, D.C. The realization galvanized NEADS.

“Shit!” exclaimed Nasypany. Then, “OK. American Airlines is still airborne, 11, the first guy. He’s heading toward Washington. OK. I think we need to scramble Langley right now … Head them towards the Washington area.”

So it was that at 9:30, chasing a plane that did not exist, three more Air National Guard fighters raced into the air—three, not just the two on alert duty, because NEADS had asked for every plane available. If a hijacked airliner was headed for Washington, Nasypany figured, he would send the fighters to the north of the capital, and block its way. NEADS duly ordered a course that would take them there, but the order was not followed. The tower at the base sent the fighters in another direction—east, out over the Atlantic. Where they were of no use at all.

Chaos prevailed. Four minutes into the fighters’ flight, at 9:34, NEADS finally learned something American Airlines had known for more than half an hour and FAA controllers had known for even longer. “Let me tell you this,” said Cary Johnson, the Washington Center operations manager. “We’ve been looking. We also lost American 77 … Indianapolis Center was working this guy … They lost contact with him … And they don’t have any idea where he is.”

Two minutes later, at 9:36, Scoggins came up on the phone again. “Latest report,” he said. “Aircraft VFR [Visual Flight Rules, meaning the plane was not under the direction of Air Traffic Control], six miles southeast of the White House … We’re not sure who it is.” NEADS technician Stacia Rountree dialed Washington, only to be told, “It’s probably just a rumor.” This time, though, Scoggins’s information was accurate. The plane maneuvering near the nation’s capital was no phantom Flight 11. It was the very real, hijacked, American 77—lining up to strike.

In the NEADS bunker, mission commander Nasypany had no way of knowing that. What he knew, thought he knew, was that his Langley fighters were by now close to Washington, well positioned for an intercept. “Get your fighters there as soon as possible,” he ordered.

Two minutes later, at 9:38, the major asked where the fighters were and learned that they were out over the ocean, 150 miles from where they were needed. Nasypany hoped against hope there was still time to respond. He urged them to fly supersonic—“I don’t care how many windows you break.” And, in frustration, “Why’d they go there? Goddammit! … OK, push ’em back!”

Too late, far too late. Even before Nasypany asked the whereabouts of his fighters, American 77 had scythed into the Pentagon.

Then, and even before the devastating news reached NEADS, Colin Scoggins was back on the phone again from Boston Center—this time with information as misleading as had been his report that Flight 11 was still airborne. “Delta 1989,” he said, “presently due south of Cleveland … Heading westbound.” Delta 1989 was a Boeing 767, like the first two planes seized, and like them it had left from Boston. “And is this one a hijack, sir?” asked Airman Rountree. “We believe it is,” Scoggins replied.

They believed wrong. Boston Center speculated that Delta 1989 was a hijack because it fit the pattern. It had departed Boston at about the same time as the first two hijacked planes. Like them it was a 767, heavily laden with fuel for a flight across the continent. Unlike them, however, it was experiencing no problems at all—until the false alarm.

NEADS promptly began tracking the Delta plane—easy enough to do because as a legitimate flight it was transmitting routine locator signals. It was the only airplane the military was able to tail electronically that day for any useful period of time. On seeing that Delta 1989 was over Ohio, NEADS sent a warning to the FAA’s Cleveland Center. For the airliner’s pilots, already jolted out of their routine by what little they had learned of the attacks, hours of puzzlement and worry began.

First came a text message, instructing Captain Paul Werner to “land immediately” in Cleveland. When the captain sent a simple acknowledgment, back came a second message reading, “Confirm landing in Cleveland. Use correct phraseology.” A perplexed Werner tried again—more wordily, but still too casually for Cleveland. Phrases like “confirmed hijack” and “supposedly has a bomb on board” began flying across the ether. Information from Delta 1989, a controller would report, was “really unreliable and shaky.”

By 9:45, only six minutes after his initial warning, Scoggins was saying the plane “might not be a hijack … we’re just not sure.” By then, though, the Air Force was busy trying to get fighters to the scene, Cleveland airport was in a state approaching panic, and 1989’s pilots feared they might have a bomb on board.

“I understand,” Cleveland control radioed Captain Werner meaningfully, “you’re a trip today,” The word “trip” was an established code for hijack, and Werner assured control he was not—only to be asked twice more. Once on the ground, at 10:18, he was ordered to taxi to the “bomb area,” far from the passenger terminal. Passengers and crew would not be allowed to disembark for another two hours, and then under the wary eyes of gun-toting FBI agents and a SWAT team in full body armor.

It had all been, a Cleveland controller would recall, like a “scene out of a bad movie.” Even before the innocent Delta 1989 landed, however, the latest phase of the aviation nightmare had become real-life horror—for Cleveland, for the Air Force team in its bunker, and, for the fourth time that day, for the nation. At 10:07, a phone call between the FAA’s Cleveland Center and NEADS produced a revelation.

FAA:

I believe I was the one talking about that Delta

1989 … Well, disregard that. Did you? …

NEADS: What we found out was that he was

not

a confirmed hijack.

FAA: I don’t want to even worry about that right now. We got a United 93 out here. Are you aware of

that

?

NEADS was completely unaware. During the wild-goose chase after Delta 1989, NEADS had been told nothing of the very real hijacking, also over Ohio, of United 93. An FAA controller had heard screams from Flight 93’s cockpit, followed by a hijacker’s announcement about a “bomb on board,” some seven minutes before Scoggins alerted NEADS to the imagined problem aboard Flight 1989.

The controller had reported the new hijack promptly, and word had been passed to FAA headquarters. Cleveland control then came up again, purposefully asking whether the military had been alerted. A quarter of an hour later, nevertheless, the following pathetic exchange took place:

FAA C

OMMAND

C

ENTER:

Uh, do we want to think, uh, about scrambling aircraft?

FAA H

EADQUARTERS:

Uh, God, I don’t know.

FAA C

OMMAND

C

ENTER:

Uh, that’s a decision somebody is going to have to make, probably in the next ten minutes.

FAA H

EADQUARTERS:

Uh, you know, everybody just left the room.

Five minutes after that, at 9:53 and as United 93’s passengers prepared to attack their captors, an FAA staffer reported that—almost twenty minutes after word of the hijack had reached the agency’s headquarters—senior FAA executive Monte Belger and a colleague were discussing whether to ask for fighters to be scrambled. Belger would tell the 9/11 Commission that he “does not believe the conversation occurred.”

At 10:03, ten minutes after the reported discussion, a full half an hour after FAA headquarters learned of the hijack, United 93’s passengers and crew all died when the airliner plunged into the ground in Pennsylvania. NEADS knew nothing at all of the airliner’s plight until several minutes later—and were then given only vague, out-of-date information.

“In a day when we were already frustrated,” the FAA’s Colin Scoggins recalled, “we were always a day late and a dollar short. We just could never catch up.”

THAT, THE LOGS and documents clearly show, is the true story of the effort to defend America on 9/11. Why, then, did senior military and political men say otherwise? Why, within days, did General Myers and Paul Wolfowitz suggest that fighters had been in pursuit of Flight 93 and would have been able to bring it down? Why did senior officers, and in particular General Arnold—who had been in charge at the NORAD command center in Florida on the day—make similar claims to the 9/11 Commission?

“We believe,” Arnold wrote as late as 2008, “we could have shot down the last of the hijacked aircraft, United 93, had it continued toward Washington, D.C.” It was a statement founded on sand, one that airbrushed out of history the inconvenient facts of the general’s previous claims. Four months after the attacks, he asserted that NORAD had already been “watching United Flight 93 wander around Ohio” at the time the Trade Center’s South Tower was hit. That strike had occurred at 9:03, twenty-five minutes before Flight 93 had even been attacked.

Two years later, as noted earlier, Arnold would claim that NORAD’s focus had been on Flight 93 by 9:24—when the hijack “was being pointed out to us very aggressively, I might say, by the FAA.” This assertion also suggested a magical feat by the military, that the Air Force had been concentrating on United 93 before the plane was seized. The documented reality—damning to the FAA—is that no one at the agency reported the hijack to NORAD in any way, let alone “aggressively,” until after it crashed.

General Arnold would eventually concede that his testimony had been inaccurate. What he, General Myers, and Deputy Defense Secretary Wolfowitz had said about Flight 93 had been nonsensical—though just how nonsensical would emerge only after the disentangling by Commission staff of a maze of logs and tapes—a prodigious task.

Why the officers initially told inaccurate stories is rather clear. In the fuzzy immediate aftermath of 9/11, before the facts and the timings could be analyzed, they conflated the flap over Delta 1989, the hijack that never was, with the very real hijack of Flight 93. That does not explain, however, why they continued to perpetuate the fiction long afterward, when there had been ample time to check the facts.

Former Commission analyst Miles Kara has likened NORAD’s account to an attempt to solve a Sudoku puzzle—fated to fail if a single early mistake is made. He put the inaccurate story down to shoddy staff work and repeated misreadings of the logs.

Commission general counsel Daniel Marcus, though, pointed to disquieting discrepancies, including the “suspicious” omission of key times from an FAA document, the alteration of a NORAD press release, and a disputed claim about the reason for a supposed tape malfunction. Referring the matter to the inspectors general of both the Department of Defense and the Department of Transportation, he raised the possibility that the FAA and Air Force accounts were “knowingly false.”

NORAD’s commander-in-chief, General Ralph Eberhart, for his part, had assured the Commission he and his fellow officers “didn’t get together and decide that we were going to cover for anybody or take a bullet for anybody.”

Senator Mark Dayton, speaking at a hearing on the Commission’s work, would have none of it. “NORAD’s public chronology,” he declared, “covered up … They lied to the American people, they lied to Congress, and they lied to your 9/11 Commission, to create a false impression of competence, communication, coordination, and protection of the American people … For almost three years now NORAD officials and FAA officials have been able to hide their critical failures, that left this country defenseless during two of the worst hours in our history.”

The senator called on President Bush to fire “whoever at FAA or NORAD, or anywhere else who betrayed the public trust by not telling us the truth. And then he should clear up a few discrepancies of his own.”

“At some level of the government, at some point in time …,” Commission counsel John Farmer has written, “there was a decision not to tell the truth about what happened.” The troubling questions about the way the government really functioned on 9/11, Farmer made clear, also involved the White House.

THIRTEEN

WHILE THE FIRE AND SMOKE OF THE ATTACKS WERE STILL IN THE AIR, top Bush administration officials had hurried out statements on a highly sensitive issue—the decision made on 9/11 to shoot down civilian airliners if they appeared to threaten Washington. Who issued that momentous order, and when?

First there had been the flat statement by Deputy Defense Secretary Wolfowitz that—had United 93 not crashed—Air Force pilots had been poised to shoot it down. Next, on the Sunday, had come Vice President Cheney’s account, in a Meet the Press interview, of how the shooting down of hijacked airliners had been authorized. Cheney said the “horrendous decision” had been made—with his wholehearted agreement—by the President himself. There had been moments, he said, when he thought a shoot-down might be necessary.

Bush took the decision during one of their phone calls that day, Cheney told Newsweek’s Evan Thomas. “I recommended to the President that we authorize … I said, ‘We’ve got to give the pilots rules of engagement, and I recommend we authorize them to shoot.’ We talked about it briefly, and he said, ‘OK, I’ll sign up to that.’ He made the decision.”

Bush himself, speaking with The Washington Post’s Bob Woodward, said Cheney had indeed suggested that he issue the order. His response, as he remembered it, had been monosyllabic. Just “You bet.” Later still, speaking with the 9/11 commissioners, Bush recalled having discussed the matter in a call made to him by Cheney, and “emphasized” that it was he who authorized the shoot-down of hijacked aircraft.

By the time the President wrote his 2010 memoir, that call from the Vice President had become a call he made to Cheney. Bush’s monosyllabic authorization, moreover, had transmogrified into a well thought-out plan.

“I called Dick Cheney as Air Force One climbed rapidly to forty-five thousand feet …,” the President wrote. “He had been taken to the underground Presidential Emergency Operations Center—the PEOC—when the Secret Service thought a plane might be coming at the White House. I told him that I would make decisions from the air and count on him to implement them on the ground.

“Two big decisions came quickly. The military had dispatched Combat Air Patrols—teams of fighter aircraft assigned to intercept unresponsive airplanes—over Washington and New York.… We needed to clarify the rules of engagement. I told Dick that our pilots should contact suspicious planes and try to get them to land peacefully. If that failed, they had my authority to shoot them down.”

It would have been unthinkable for the U.S. military to down a civilian airliner without a clear order from the President, as commander-in-chief. In his absence, the authority belonged to the secretary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld. “The operational chain of command,” relevant law decreed, ran “from the President to the Secretary of Defense,” and on through the chairman of the Joint Chiefs to individual commanders. The Vice President was not in the chain of command.

The generals understood that. In an earlier exercise, one that postulated a suicide mission involving a jet aimed at Washington, they had said shooting it down would require an “executive” order. The defense secretary’s authority, General Arnold told the Commission, was necessary to shoot down even a “derelict balloon.” Only the President, he thought, had the authority to shoot down a civilian airliner.

The Commission made no overt statement as to whether it believed Cheney’s assertion—that he recommended and Bush decided. Shown the final draft of the Report’s passage on the shoot-down decision, however, Cheney was furious. For all its careful language, the Report dropped a clear hint that its staff had found Cheney’s account—and Bush’s—less than convincing.

“We just didn’t believe it,” general counsel Daniel Marcus declared long afterward. “The official version,” John Farmer would say, “insisted that President Bush had issued an authorization to shoot down hijacked commercial flights, and that that order had been processed through the chain of command and passed to the fighters. This was untrue.”

Why might a phony scenario have been created? “The administration version,” Farmer noted, “implied, where it did not state explicitly, that the chain of command had been functioning on 9/11, and that the critical decisions had been made by the appropriate top officials.… None of this captures how things actually unfolded on the day.”

THE POTENTIAL NEED to shoot down an airliner occurred to the man in the hot seat at NEADS, Major Nasypany, as early as 9:20 on 9/11—after two successful terrorist strikes and the realization that there might be more to come. “My recommendation if we have to take anybody out, large aircraft,” he was taped saying, “we use AIM-9s [heat-seeking air-to-air missiles] in the face.” Nasypany began asking his team whether they could countenance such an act. Everyone knew, though, that a shoot-down would require authorization from the top.

“I don’t know,” said Technical Sergeant Watson, on the line to the FAA, “but somebody’s gotta get the President going.” “I’m amazed,” responded the operations manager at New York Center, “that we’re not at a higher level of Defcon readiness already.”

It was 9:30 by then. The President had yet to leave the school in Florida. Defense Secretary Rumsfeld, whose responsibility it was to set Defcon—the forces’ Defense Condition, or military alert status—knew of the New York attacks but had so far taken no action. A few minutes later, when the Pentagon was hit at 9:37, that key figure in the chain of command would head off to view the damage—and have no contact with the President or Vice President until after 10:00.

Staff at the National Military Command Center, whose task it was to connect the President and the defense secretary to those charged with carrying out their orders, looked for Rumsfeld in vain. It was “outrageous,” an unnamed senior White House official would later complain, for the man responsible for the nation’s defense to have been “out of touch” at such a time.

Official reports disagree on what Rumsfeld did after leaving the scene of the crash and before his reappearance at the Pentagon’s Executive Support Center around 10:15. Rumsfeld said in his Commission testimony that he had “one or more calls in my office, one of which I believe was with the President.” The Defense Department’s own report, however, states that he “tried without success to telephone the President.”

When the President and Rumsfeld did finally speak, according to the secretary’s communications assistant, the conversation covered only such questions as “Are you okay?” and “Is the Pentagon still intact?” The Commission decided that it was “a brief call, in which the subject of shoot-down authority was not discussed.”

Rumsfeld was still “just gaining situational awareness”—as he put it—as late as 10:35, when he finally joined a conference call that included Vice President Cheney. Shoot-down authority had already been issued, Cheney said, and—as the transcript of the conversation makes clear—that was news to the defense secretary:

C

HENEY:

There’s been at least three instances here where we’ve had reports of aircraft approaching Washington—a couple were confirmed hijack. And, pursuant to the President’s instructions, I gave authorization for them to be taken out … [Long pause] Hello?

R

UMSFELD:

Yes, I understand. Who did you give that direction to?

C

HENEY:

It was passed from here through the [Operations] Center at the White House, from the PEOC [shelter beneath the White House].

R

UMSFELD:

OK, let me ask the question here. Has that directive been transmitted to the aircraft?

C

HENEY:

Yes, it has.

R

UMSFELD:

So we’ve got a couple of aircraft up there that have those instructions at this present time?

C

HENEY:

That is correct. And it’s my understanding they’ve already taken a couple of aircraft out.

Later, interviewed for his own department’s report, Rumsfeld was asked whether shoot-down authorization “had come from the Vice President.” “Technically,” he replied, “it couldn’t. Because the Vice President is not in the chain of command. The President and he were talking, and the President and I were talking, and the Vice President and I were talking. Clearly he was involved in the process.”

That fuzzy answer was of no use in establishing when and by whom the shoot-down authority was issued. Rumsfeld’s public testimony to the 9/11 Commission was no more useful. The record of what he told staff in closed session is still withheld, and his 2011 memoir added no substantive detail.

The White House itself ought to have been the best source of information on communications between Bush and Cheney, but the White House proved unhelpful. Though the Commission did manage to get clearance to interview a few of the staff members who had been around the President and Vice President that morning, what they learned on the shoot-down issue was of virtually no use.

“Very little new information has been gained in the five White House meetings conducted thus far,” a frustrated staffer noted in the final months of the Commission’s work. “To a person, no one has any recollection of the circumstances and details surrounding the authorization to shoot down commercial aircraft.… Our sense is that the White House will take the position that it is not possible to reconstruct—with any degree of accuracy or reliability—what went on that morning.”

Investigators also asked for interviews with relevant Secret Service agents, but the White House stalled. Then it offered limited access to some of them, with an attorney present. It was next to impossible, the staffer reported, to probe beyond the vague stories told by Bush and Cheney in their media interviews.

Faced with this obstruction, the Commission team concentrated on the paper trail. The White House famously keeps track of all high-level communications, maintains records of phone calls, logs of Secret Service operations, logs kept by military officers, a Situation Room log, a log of activity in the Presidential Emergency Operations Center—PEOC—the bunker in the bowels of the White House where Cheney spent much of the day on September 11, and logs kept aboard Air Force One. For the day of 9/11, there were also notes kept by individuals: President Bush’s press secretary, Vice President Cheney’s chief of staff, and his wife, Lynne Cheney.

Once again, however, the investigators found themselves stalled. White House personnel sought to limit the Commission’s access to the contemporary record, while simultaneously insisting it was unreliable. Undeterred, Commission staff built a chronology as best they could from available logs and from what witness testimony they did manage to obtain.

The record, such as we have it, does not support the Bush/Cheney version of events, that the President gave Cheney shoot-down authorization during a phone conversation sometime soon after 10:00 A.M., after Cheney’s arrival in the underground bunker.

The Bush/Cheney version, with its implication of the requisite line of command—Bush granted authority, Cheney transmitted it—does not mesh with events as they unfolded.

The emergency teleconferences that morning—one in the White House Situation Room, one at the Pentagon, another at the FAA—overlapped with one another, making for confusion rather than clarity. To participate in one, senior staff would temporarily have to drop out of another. The conference in the Situation Room—below the West Wing—was not linked to the part of the Pentagon dealing with the crisis, nor was it adequately linked to the Vice President in the PEOC, beneath the East Wing. “In my mind,” one witness recalled of the teleconferences, “they were competing venues for command and control and decision-making.”

It was not only the teleconferences that added to the fog. Some were to recall having seen staff members with a phone to each ear, reliance on runners to convey messages, and the use of personal cell phones to complete calls when landlines were unavailable. The cell phone system itself was at times overwhelmed.

Alerted to an aircraft approaching the city, just before Flight 77 struck the Pentagon, the Secret Service had hustled the Vice President toward the PEOC. Cheney had been logged in there at 9:58, having paused en route to use a phone in an adjacent passageway—and was to remain in the PEOC’s conference room thenceforth.

It was from the PEOC, within moments of his arrival there, that the Vice President supposedly had his exchange with Bush about shoot-down authority. Yet, though many other key events of that morning are reflected in the contemporary record, there is no documentary evidence of the call. It is especially perplexing, moreover, that—assuming there was such a call and assuming the President did give shoot-down authority—the Vice President made no immediate move to pass on the order.

What the record does show occurred, at about the time the Cheney-Bush call is supposed to have been made, is that staff in the Situation Room received reports that further aircraft were missing, were told that a Combat Air Patrol had been established over Washington, and began attempting to reach the President.

At 10:03, in the Situation Room, NSC staffer Paul Kurtz made a note as follows: “asking Prez authority to shoot down a/c [aircraft].” That attempt to reach Bush, however, was apparently unsuccessful. The evidence is that calls reached not the President but only those with the Vice President in the PEOC. The weight of the written and spoken evidence indicates that it was beween 10:10 and 10:20—on being told of the progress of a suspect airplane supposedly headed for the Washington area—that Cheney twice rapped out a shoot-down order.

The Vice President’s wife, Lynne, who was in the PEOC and not far from her husband, recorded some of the exchange about shoot-down authority in notes she made that morning.

Mrs. Cheney noted at “10:10”:

Aircraft coming in from 80 miles out

Dick asked? Scramble fighters?

Navy commander Anthony Barnes, the senior military officer on duty in the PEOC that morning, told the authors in 2010, “A call comes into the PEOC. I’m talking to a general on a secure line. He asks for permission to engage confirmed terrorists on board commercial airplanes. I went into the conference room and I posed this question to the Vice President exactly the way it was posed to me. I received permission.” Cheney’s chief of staff, Scooter Libby, has recalled in an interview that the Vice President, asked whether fighters had authority to engage, barely paused before responding simply, “Yes.”

At 10:12, Mrs. Cheney noted:

60 miles out—confirmed JOC [the Secret Service’s Joint Operations Center]

hijacked aircraft

fighters cleared to engage

The Vice President’s wife would recall feeling “a sort of chill up my spine, that this is the kind of things you only read about in novels … We had to shoot down those planes if they didn’t divert.”

“I asked for confirmation on what I was being allowed to pass back to the general,” Barnes recalled. “It was twice. I said it the first time and he answered straight up.… It wasn’t indiscriminately: ‘Splat everything airborne!’ It was ‘If you can confirm there’s another terrorist aircraft inbound, permission is granted to take it out.’ … I went back to the phone and said to the general, ‘The Vice President has authorized you to engage confirmed terrorist aboard commercial aircraft.’ ”

At 10:14, a lieutenant colonel at the White House passed word to the Pentagon that the Vice President had “confirmed” fighters were “cleared to engage the inbound aircraft if they could verify that the aircraft was hijacked.” It was, another officer said, a “pin-drop moment.”

A Libby note, timed as “10:15–18,” read:

Aircraft 60 miles out, confirmed as hijack—engage? VP: Yes. JB: Get President and confirm engage order

The initials “JB” referred to Joshua Bolten, the White House deputy chief of staff—who was also with the Vice President in the bunker. He suggested that Cheney call Bush, he told the Commission, because he “wanted to make sure the President was told that the Vice President had executed the order. He said he had not heard any prior discussion on the subject with the President.”

Nor had press secretary Ari Fleischer, who was at Bush’s side aboard Air Force One and keeping a record of everything that was said—at the President’s request. His notes up to that point—like those of Scooter Libby and Lynne Cheney at the White House—contain no reference to any conversation with Cheney about shoot-down authorization. They do show, however, that at 10:20—two minutes after a formally logged call from the Vice President—Bush told Fleischer that “he had authorized a shoot-down if necessary.”

• • •

OTHER INFORMATION, reportable in detail now thanks to recent document releases, further suggests that the Vice President may have authorized the shooting down of suspect airliners without the President’s say-so. It involves exchanges between Secret Service agents at the White House and Air National Guard officers at Andrews Air Force Base, just ten miles southeast of Washington. Though not an “alert” base, its units proudly styled themselves the “Capital Guardians.”

Unlike the President—in his role as commander-in-chief—and those in the military chain of command, the Secret Service was not primarily concerned with countering the terrorist attacks. Its priority was the protection of the President and Vice President and those in the line of succession. On September 11, that meant trying to protect Air Force One and the White House itself from attack. On 9/11, according to Commission staff member Miles Kara, the missions of the military leadership—from the President as commander-in-chief on down—and the Secret Service were at times “mutually exclusive.”

A Secret Service agent and his FAA liaison had, early on, after the two attacks on New York, discussed the need to get fighters over Washington. Once the Pentagon had been hit, the phones began ringing at Andrews. Brigadier General David Wherley, the National Guard commander at the base, arrived at a run to learn that Secret Service agent Ken Beauchamp had rung with the message, “Get anything you can airborne.”

When he got back to Beauchamp, Wherley was helpful but cautious. He asked to speak with “someone a little higher up the food chain,” and was passed first to another agent, Nelson Garabito. Garabito told him, “It’s coming direct from the Vice President.” Still not satisfied, the general then spoke with the agent in charge of the Presidential Protective Division, Rebecca Ediger. Ediger repeated the request—Wherley told the 9/11 Commission—“speaking for the Vice President.”

The general asked to speak direct to Cheney, but Ediger said the Vice President was on another line. Wherley “wasn’t going to get to talk to anyone he felt comfortable getting the order from,” he realized. So he made do with Agent Ediger—and an “unidentified male voice who took the phone from Ediger” and asked him to “put aircraft over DC with orders to intercept any aircraft that approached within twenty miles and turn that aircraft around. If the aircraft would not change course, the interceptor should use ‘any force necessary’ to keep that aircraft from crashing into a building.” Wherley felt the instructions were “understandable enough.”

When did the Secret Service pass on this purported order from the Vice President? Of the various documents released, one heavily redacted Secret Service memo—dated less than a month after 9/11—is tantalizing. It states that:

After the crash at the Pentagon, Commander [Anthony Barnes of the White House Military Office] in the PEOC advised … that the Vice President had authorized them to engage any other

suspect aircraft.… It was at about this time, I began fielding calls from Andrews Air Force Base. I first got a call from [several words redacted]. I verified that they had been requested to do so with the PEOC. When I conveyed this to [words redacted] I told him the Vice President [words redacted] Commander [Barnes] was more than a little incredulous. He had me tell the General to get it from the NMCC [National Military Command Center].

While Barnes cannot today pin down at what time this exchange took place, an Andrews control tower transcript shows that, beginning at about 10:04, a controller began repeatedly transmitting a warning that unauthorized flights entering the closed airspace around Washington would be shot down. Though one cannot be conclusive, the genesis of the warning was likely an instruction passed from the Secret Service.

Cheney would later tell the 9/11 Commission that he had not even been “aware that that fighters had been scrambled out of Andrews at the request of the Secret Service and outside the military chain of command.” The Wall Street Journal, however, has reported conflicting claims. While White House officials said the Secret Service “acted on its own,” the Secret Service issued a statement denying that it did so. To the contrary, the Journal reported, senior agents insisted that “the agents’ actions on September 11 had been ordered by the Vice President.”

Did Cheney give a shoot-down order on his own initiative, before consulting the President? The available evidence suggests he may have. To have done so, moreover, would certainly have been more sensible than sinister. At a moment the capital seemed to be in imminent peril, the two men properly heading the chain of command were out of touch—the secretary of defense away from his post and the President only intermittently in contact because of shaky communications. Many might think that Cheney, on the spot and capable, would have been justified in short-circuiting the system.

If he did so, and had he and the President soon acknowledged as much, it would have been pointless to blame the Vice President. If he did so and then persistently told a false story, however—and if the eventual release of all the records were to prove it—history will be less generous.

WHOEVER REALLY ISSUED the shoot-down order, it came too late to have any effect on events. At Andrews, General Wherley had no immediate way to respond to it—no planes were ready to take off, let alone planes armed and ready. He had, moreover, come away from his exchanges with the Secret Service less than certain about the Vice President’s order. He sent up the first plane available, an unarmed F-16 summoned back from a training exercise, to “check out” the situation over Washington—with no explicit instructions. Four more fighters took off a little later, one pair also without armament, the other—at 11:12 and after a rushed loading process—fully armed with heat-seeking missiles. Their instructions were to fly “weapons free,” which left the decision to fire up to the pilots.

Even then, an hour or more after the shoot-down order came to him via the Secret Service, General Wherley still felt “uncomfortable with the situation.” He did not receive formal, detailed rules of engagement from the Defense Department until long after the real action was over, five hours after the start of the attacks.

The vice presidential authorization to shoot down airliners, meanwhile, had made its way down the designated chain of command from the Pentagon to NEADS, NORAD’s Northeast Air Defense Sector—the nerve center for the two “alert” bases, as distinct from General Wherley’s outfit at Andrews—by 10:31. When the harried men in the NEADS bunker received the order, however, they hesitated:

M

AJOR

S

TEVE

O

VENS:

You need to read this … The Region Commander has declared that we can shoot down aircraft that

do not respond to our direction … Did you copy that?

M

AJOR

J

AMES

F

OX, WEAPONS DIRECTOR [A MOMENT LATER]:

DO [Director of Operations] is saying “No.”

O

VENS:

No? … Foxy, you got a conflict on that direction?

F

OX:

Right now, no, but …

O

VENS:

OK? OK, you read that from the Vice President, right? … Vice President has cleared us …

F

OX [READING]:

… to intercept traffic … shoot them down if they do not respond.

NEADS’s Robert Marr, and Major Nasypany commanding the fighters from Otis and Langley, were unsure of the order’s ramifications, did not know quite how to proceed. No new order was sent to the pilots at that point. General Eberhart, moreover, in overall command of NORAD, directed that pilots should not shoot until satisfied that a “hostile act” was being committed.

Not until 10:53 did Nasypany order that his pilots be sent the following tentative message:

Any track of interest that’s headed toward the major cities you will I.D. If you cannot divert them away from the major cities you are to confirm with me first. Most likely you will get clearance to shoot.

THE STORIES TOLD by Cheney, Deputy Defense Secretary Wolfowitz, the FAA, and the military all seemed to fit neatly together after 9/11. Yet they distorted historical truths. The Air Force would not, as Wolfowitz claimed, have been in a position to shoot down United 93, because—had it not crashed—the hijacked airplane would have reached Washington before any fighter pilot in the air received a shoot-down order. The military and FAA versions were similarly misleading or inaccurate—so arousing the Commission’s suspicions that it referred the matter to their respective inspectors general for further investigation.

The FAA’s acting deputy administrator, Monte Belger, told the 9/11 Commission that his officials reacted quickly, “in my opinion professionally,” on September 11. This in spite of the fact that for a full half hour—in a crisis when every moment counted—the agency failed to alert the military to the plight of Flight 93.

“In my opinion,” NORAD’s General Myers was to say in his prepared statement, “lines of authority, communication and command were clear; and the Commander in Chief and Secretary of Defense conveyed clear guidance to the appropriate military commanders.”

That was the message they all wanted the world to hear—that the men who held power in America had been on top of the situation. What is clear, in fact, John Farmer pointed out in 2009, is that “the top officials were talking mainly to themselves. They were an echo chamber. They were of little or no assistance to the people on the ground attempting to manage the crisis.” A thoroughgoing analysis, in Farmer’s view, “would have exposed the reality that national leadership was irrelevant during those critical moments.”

The testimony offered after 9/11, Farmer wrote,

was not simply wrong about facts; it was wrong in a way that misrepresented the competence and relevance of the chain of command to the response.… It was difficult to decide which was the more disturbing possibility. To believe that the errors in fact were simply inadvertent would be to believe that senior military and civilian officials were willing to testify in great detail and with assurance … without bothering to make sure that what they were saying was accurate. Given the significance of 9/11 in our history, this would amount to an egregious breach of the public trust. If it were true, however, that the story was at some level coordinated and was knowingly false, that would be an egregious deception.

“History,” Farmer wrote later in his book, “should record that, whether through unprecedented administrative incompetence or orchestrated mendacity, the American people were misled about the nation’s response to the 9/11 attacks.”

PART III

AMERICA RESPONDS

FOURTEEN

AMERICANS KNEW, INSTANTLY ASSUMED THEY KNEW, WHO HAD attacked them on 9/11. The Arabs.

As soon as news of the attacks broke, before anything was known of the attackers, a woman phoned the FBI to report an experience she had had the previous evening. She had spotted a diary in a garbage can at Chicago’s Midway Airport, she said, and the final entry had read: “Allah will be served.” That, she thought, seemed sinister.

On an airliner en route to Australia, a flight attendant had kept an eye on a “Middle Eastern male passenger” who was busy on his laptop. Its screen carried a picture of a Boeing 747 and then, suddenly, the words “Mission failed.” The attendant hurried to tell the captain. He in turn alerted the airline and the flight was diverted to the nearest airport—where it emerged that the swarthy passenger was from not the Middle East but Guatemala. The “suspicious” activity had been a video game.

In the turmoil at the Trade Center, even before the second tower fell, a New York fire chief witnessed what was almost certainly the first arrest of the day. As he led his men down to safety, Richard Picciotto remembered, he had come across a cluster of firemen and a police officer engaged in an encounter with “a middle-aged Middle Eastern man.”

The guy was dressed in a nice suit and carrying a nice briefcase, and as I pulled close to the commotion I could see there had been something of a struggle.… One of the firemen on the floor had grown concerned at the man’s sudden appearance; the firefighter had once been a police detective, and he felt there was something fishy about this guy, something about his still being on such a high floor.

All kinds of speculation had been bouncing around on our radios regarding responsibility for these terrorist attacks, and the sight of a transparently Middle Eastern individual was suspicious … plus he had a briefcase, which could have contained a bomb … the “suspect” was in handcuffs and crying uncontrollably. He was claiming innocence of any wrongdoing.… In all likelihood, this guy was guilty of nothing more than foolishness and slowfootedness, but here we were, escorting him down as he cried and as we fought back our own terrors.… It was little over an hour since the first attacks, and already we were running scared.

The Arab with the briefcase would neither be charged with anything nor heard of again. If he was roughly interrogated, though, if he was even held in jail for some time, he was one of many. Some five thousand foreign nationals, most of them of Arab descent, were taken into custody at some point in the two years after the attacks.

According to a Department of Justice inspector general’s report, detainees picked up after 9/11 “remained in custody—many in extremely restrictive conditions of confinement—for weeks and months with no clearance investigations being conducted.… Those conditions included ‘lock down’ for at least 23 hours per day; escorts that included a ‘4-man hold’ with handcuffs, leg irons, and heavy chains any time the detainees were moved … the evidence indicates a pattern of physical and verbal abuse by some correctional officers.” None of those arrested in the United States was to be linked to the attacks, and only one man would be convicted of terrorism offenses. In the words of immigration commissioner James Ziglar, the period after 9/11 was “a moment of national hysteria.”

Some innocent Arabs suffered humiliation or abuse simply on account of their ethnicity. In Brooklyn and Queens, districts where Arabs had long prospered, they suddenly faced open hostility from passersby. Anyone brown and foreign-looking was vulnerable, even at risk of physical violence. Four days after the attacks, a Sikh American was shot dead outside his convenience store by a man shouting that he was a “patriot.” The previous day, the murdered man had made a donation to a charity for 9/11 victims.

Baseless prejudice aside, anything involving Arabs and air travel now triggered suspicion. An Egyptian pilot at a Manhattan hotel, overheard saying, “The sky’s gonna change,” faced a grueling interrogation. When the ban on civilian air travel was lifted, some passengers found themselves ordered off airliners before takeoff because they fit a profile—they were Arabs. On occasion, such incidents were defensible. For there were grounds for believing that, absent the order to ground all planes on 9/11, there would have been at least one more hijacking.

Several sources told of an incident that occurred at New York’s Kennedy Airport that morning. It began as United Flight 23 waited its turn to take off, when an attendant told pilot Tom Mannello that there was something odd about “four young Arab men sitting in First Class.” Mannello, for the moment busy responding to the decision to ground all planes, took the airliner back to the gate and told all his passengers that they had to leave the aircraft.

“The Muslims wouldn’t disembark at first,” a United official said. “The crew talked to the Muslims but by the time the Kennedy Airport police arrived the individuals had deplaned … they left the airport without being questioned.” The Arabs’ checked baggage, which they never reclaimed, reportedly contained “incriminating” material, including terrorist “instruction sheets.”

One of the known 9/11 hijackers, Khalid al-Mihdhar, had reportedly told a cousin in Saudi Arabia sometime earlier that “five” hijacks were planned for September 11. “We think we had at least another plane that was involved,” NORAD deputy commander Ken Pennie said later. “I don’t know the target or other details. But we were lucky.”

• • •

AROUND 1:00 P.M. on September 11, the President of the United States had a question for his CIA briefer on board Air Force One. “Who,” he asked, “do you think did this?” “There’s no evidence, there’s no data,” briefer Mike Morell replied, “but I would pretty much bet everything I own that the trail will end with al Qaeda and bin Laden.”

In the Middle East as they spoke, some were celebrating. In contrast to most of their governments’ expressions of sympathy, there were Arabs in Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Lebanon who were openly jubilant. In Iraq, President Saddam Hussein said he thought Americans “should feel the pain they have inflicted on other peoples of the world.” In Palestinian refugee camps across the region, men fired assault rifles into the air. People handed out candies to passersby, a tradition at times of joy. In the United Arab Emirates, a caller to a TV station claimed responsibility for the attacks in the name of the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine. A DFLP spokesman swiftly issued a denial, surprising no one. For Arabs, knowledgeable or otherwise, shared the view of Bush’s CIA briefer.

In the Gaza Strip, two men marched through the streets carrying an enormous blowup of Osama bin Laden. Messages circulated on Saudi mobile phones, according to a leading Saudi dissident, reading: “Congratulations.… Our prayers to bin Laden!” “This action,” said Dr. Sayid al-Sharif, an Egyptian surgeon who had once worked with bin Laden in the underground, “is from al Qaeda.”

Osama bin Laden.

Al Qaeda.

The day before the attacks, September 10th, the Congressional Research Service had published its 2001 report on terrorism in the Near East.

“Al Qaeda (Arabic for ‘the base’),” it said, “has evolved from a regional threat to U.S. troops in the Persian Gulf to a global threat to U.S. citizens and national security interests.” It was “a coalition of disparate radical Islamic groups of varying nationalities to work toward common goals—the expulsion of non-Muslim control or influence from Muslim-inhabited lands.” Cells had been identified or suspected in more than thirty-five countries, including the United States. On an activity scale of Low to High, al Qaeda was the only organization rated “Extremely High.”

Osama bin Laden—“Usama bin Ladin” in officialese—got a page to himself in the report. It noted that he was forty-four years old, the seventeenth of twenty sons of a Saudi construction magnate. He “had gained prominence during the Afghan war against the Soviet Union,” after which his “radical Islamic contacts caused him to run afoul of Saudi authorities.… As a result of bin Ladin’s opposition to the ruling Al Saud family, Saudi Arabia revoked his citizenship in 1994 and his family disavowed him, though some of his brothers reportedly have maintained contact with him.…

“In May, 1996, following strong U.S. and Egyptian pressure … he returned to Afghanistan, under protection of the dominant Taliban movement.… Bin Ladin is estimated to have about $300 million in personal financial assets, with which he funds his network of as many as 3,000 Islamic militants.” The report linked the bin Laden network to attacks on U.S. forces in Somalia in 1993 and to a dozen terrorist operations or plots—including the devastating bombing of the U.S. Navy destroyer the USS Cole the previous year. In 1999, it noted, “bin Ladin was placed on the FBI’s ‘Ten Most Wanted’ list, and a $5 million reward is offered for his capture.”

CBS News fingered bin Laden half an hour after the first strike on the World Trade Center. U.S. intelligence, it said, had “for some time been warning that Osama bin Laden has not been heard from … they believed it was only a matter of time.” Half an hour after that, the National Security Agency—which spies on international communications—picked up the first indication that the intelligence had been accurate. A known bin Laden operative, talking on a phone in Afghanistan, was overheard speaking of having heard “good news.” Also intercepted were the words: “We’ve hit the targets.”

Airline computers were by now starting to disgorge printouts of passenger manifests for the hijacked flights. “Although in our collective gut we knew al Qaeda was behind the attacks, we needed proof,” recalled CIA director George Tenet. “So CTC [the Agency’s Counterterrorism Center] requested passenger lists … the initial response from some part of the bureaucracy (which parts since mercifully forgotten) was that manifests could not be shared with CIA. There were privacy issues involved. Some gentle reasoning, and a few four-letter words later, the lists were sprung.”

The manifests satisfied Tenet “beyond a doubt” that al Qaeda was involved. For thousands of FBI agents, they opened the way to a massive investigation that was to last far into the future—but immediately bore fruit.

• • •

THE VERY FIRST LEAD was provided by the two flight attendants who phoned from Flight 11 in those last fraught minutes before the airplane hit the World Trade Center. Betty Ong and Amy Sweeney had between them provided the seat numbers of three of the five hijackers. “We could then go to the manifest,” FBI director Robert Mueller said later, “find out who was sitting in those seats, and immediately conduct an investigation of those individuals, as opposed to taking all the passengers on the plane and going through a process of elimination.”

The three passengers identified by the flight attendants were Satam al-Suqami and two brothers, Wail and Waleed al-Shehri, all Saudis. Among the Anglo, Russian, East European, and Latino names of the eighty-one passengers aboard Flight 11, two other names stood out: Moham—the computer had failed to complete the name “Mohamed”—Atta, and Abdul al-Omari.

A bright U.S. Airways employee in Portland, Maine, was already focusing on passengers Atta and Omari. On learning of the Trade Center crashes—two crashes at the same location in seventeen minutes had to be terrorism—security coordinator Diane Graney pulled the records to see if any passengers had left Portland for Boston that morning on the first leg of a longer journey. There were those two same names: Atta and Omari, booked to fly on to Los Angeles aboard American Flight 11.

Graney talked with the customer service representative who had checked in the two men. He remembered them, remembered that Omari had seemed not to know any English, that he had kept quiet and tagged along behind Atta. He remembered that, told he would have to check in again at Boston, Atta had “clenched his jaw … looked like he was about to get mad.” He remembered, too, that Atta had checked two bags. Graney called her manager, and together they called corporate security.

Before 6:00 A.M., it would emerge, a security camera at Portland airport had recorded the pair, Atta in a blue shirt and dark pants, Omari in lighter clothing, retrieving hand baggage from the X-ray machine at the security point. Nothing about their demeanor, nothing in the expressions on their faces, had betrayed what they were about to do.

It would be a long time before the pieces of the jigsaw would be found and seen to make sense. From Portland, it would be discovered, Atta had called two key fellow conspirators; Marwan al-Shehhi, a citizen of the United Arab Emirates, whose name appeared on the manifest of United Airlines Flight 175, the second plane hijacked; and a Lebanese man named Ziad Jarrah, who had flown on Flight 93, the fourth plane hijacked.

The Nissan rental car Atta had used, found where he had left it in the parking lot, contained a rental agreement in Atta’s name, maps of Boston and Maine, fingerprints and hairs—and a Chips Ahoy! cookie package. At other airports, however, and in other hotels and parking lots, there would be evidential treasure.

At Boston’s Logan Airport, where two of the hijacker teams had boarded their target airliners, the FBI found two cars, a blue Hyundai Accent and a white Mitsubishi Mirage. The Hyundai had been rented in the name of “Fayez Ahmed,” the two first names of Flight 175 hijacker Banihammad, from the United Arab Emirates. Phone records linked him, too, to Atta—they had spoken three times early on 9/11. Hotel stationery left in the Hyundai identified one of the Boston area hotels the hijackers had used, the Milner on South Charles Street. Banihammad had been ticketed for overstaying his time on a parking meter across the street from the hotel.

The white Mitsubishi at Logan was found rapidly, thanks to the man who had pulled up alongside and—as described earlier—reported the strange behavior of the three Arabs seated in it. The car had been rented by Flight 11 hijacker Wail al-Shehri, who had on the eve of the hijackings shared Room 433 at the Park Inn Motel near the airport with his brother Waleed and Satam al-Suqami. One of them, agents concluded, had slept in the bathtub.

Two comrades, Hamza and Ahmed al-Ghamdi—members of the same Saudi tribe but apparently not brothers—had stayed first at the upmarket Charles Hotel, just behind the John F. Kennedy School of Government, found it too pricey, and moved to a Days Inn. The Ghamdis were truly parsimonious. They tipped the driver of the cab that took them to the airport, on the way to hijack Flight 175, just 15 cents.

The contents of the cars at the airports and the hotel rooms, and the contacts the hijackers made, revealed an unexpected side of the Arabs—unexpected, that is, in supposed Muslim zealots. Muslims living according to their religious tenets are forbidden to engage in zināa—premarital sex or adultery. Even masturbation is harām—forbidden—except in certain circumstances. Anecdotal evidence suggests that some of the future hijackers respected these rules. In one of the rooms they had used at a seaside motel in Florida, a witness was to recall, two of the men draped towels over pictures on the wall of women in bathing suits. These were all young men, however—most of them in their twenties—and probably knew they were soon to die.

English-language reading the hijackers left behind ranged from what the FBI inventory calls “romance-type” books to an old copy of Penthouse, found under a bed. Among the toiletries found in one of the cars were a dozen Trojan condoms. It would turn out that several of the terrorists had sought out prostitutes in their last days alive.

Many other, evidentially significant, clues came out of Boston. From tracking the phone records, it early on began to look as though Atta had headed the operation in the field. In both Portland and Boston, agents got started on a key element in the case—the money trail. A FedEx bill in a trash can, calls to the United Arab Emirates, calls to Western Union, an attempt to send money from a TravelX office—all were clues that contributed to understanding how the 9/11 attacks had been funded. Much of the money had come through two key contacts in the Emirates and—faithful to the Muslim precept that prohibits squandering wealth—the men about to die were returning what was left over.

There were ominous indications, too, that the hijackers had had associates in the United States. Agents puzzled over a strange incident involving a hotel room the hijackers had used. “A maid at the Park Inn,” an FBI report noted, advised “that an Arabic male answered the door of the room at approximately 11:00 a.m. on the morning of 9/11/01. The man asked her to come back later to clean because someone in the room was sleeping.” Who was the unknown Arab still in a hijacker’s room more than two hours after the hijackers had carried out their mission and gone to their deaths? And if there was a second man in the room, who was he? Were fellow terrorists, “sleepers,” at large in the United States?

In one of the hijackers’ cars, agents found a piece of paper with a name and a phone number, 589-5316, and—scrawled on a map in yellow highlighter—a second name and two numbers, 703–519–1947 and 703–514–1947. The names related to men who could be traced—leading to manhunts, arrests, and protracted investigations.

Washington’s Dulles Airport, where the five American 77 hijackers had boarded, was replete with clues. Security camera pictures, and a detailed account by a security guard, seemed to indicate that several of the terrorists had reconnoitered a secure area of the airport the evening before the attacks. They may, too, have had the use of an electronic pass—another indication that the hijackers may have had accomplices.

There were major finds in the blue, California-registered Toyota Corolla found parked at Dulles. The vehicle was registered to Flight 77 hijack suspect Nawaf al-Hazmi, yet another Saudi, and he (and perhaps another man) had left their personal belongings in the vehicle. There was clothing—T-shirts, pants, shorts, belts, socks, and briefs. There were toiletries—Nivea cream, Dry Idea deodorant, Dr. Scholl’s foot powder, Breath Remedy tongue spray, and Kleenex tissues. There was a broken pair of sunglasses, a hairbrush, an electric razor, no fewer than three alarm clocks, a compact disk entitled The Holy Qur’an, and worry beads.

As well as the bric-a-brac of daily life, though, there was also investigative treasure: fragments of torn paper relating to Flight 77, which, reassembled, revealed handwritten notes; a receipt for a driver’s license issued to Hazmi in San Diego, banking information for him and fellow Saudi Hani Hanjour—another Flight 77 suspect—and a doctor’s prescription written for Hazmi’s Saudi comrade Khalid al-Mihdhar. There were mailbox receipts; a flyer for a library in Alexandria, Virginia; addresses in Virginia, Maryland, New Jersey, and Arizona; and a hand-drawn map pointing to an address in a suburb of San Diego.

Also, and this was a key to a whole world of information that would keep agents swarming across the country for months, here were the first traces of the suspects’ involvement in aviation: Hanjour’s ID card for the Pan Am International Flight Academy in Phoenix; a receipt from Caldwell Flight Academy in Fairfield, New Jersey; and four color diagrams of the instrument panels in a Boeing 757, the type of airliner that Nawaf al-Hazmi and his brother Salem, Hanjour, Mihdhar, and Majed Moqed—yet another Saudi—had boarded on 9/11.

There would be much more. Two duffel bags left at the Ayah Islamic Center in Laurel, Maryland—apparently by Hazmi and Mihdhar—contained pilot logbooks, evidence that they had attended a flight school as early as 2000, receipts for aviation headsets, and a chart kit. In the rental car at Portland Airport there was an Arabic-language flight manual and the name of another flight school, Huffman Aviation in Venice, Florida. Boeing 757 manuals would also be found at a motel the terrorists had used in Florida.

Even as news of the attacks was breaking, people at Huffman Aviation remembered their encounters with Atta and Shehhi. “Everybody was gathered around the hotel lobby television,” said Mark Mikarts, a former Huffman instructor who had taught the pair, “and lo and behold there’s Mohamed Atta’s picture and Marwan al-Shehhi’s picture up on the TV screen. I felt myself just pooling into a puddle … I was speechless, aghast. I just could not believe that these were the people I had sat next to, had given primary instruction to.”

In southern England, former Huffman student pilot Ann Greaves recognized Atta’s picture the moment it was shown on television. “It was the sort of face that once you’d seen it you would never forget it,” she remembered. “His bearing was that of someone very much in command.”

Rudi Dekkers, the Dutchman who ran Huffman, was soon besieged by journalists from around the world. He said he had assumed Atta and Shehhi had been at the school, like his many other foreign students, just to get their pilot’s licenses. There had been no reason to inquire about their longer term plans.

BY MIDNIGHT on September 11, agents had evidence that appeared to dispel any doubt as to the suspects’ guilt and what their purpose had been—in Mohamed Atta’s luggage. Atta and Omari had checked two suitcases when they arrived at Portland Airport, a green one and a black pull-along. When they made their connection to American 11 at Boston, however, the suitcases did not. The baggage reached the plane too late to be loaded. Atta, already on board and waiting for takeoff, had apparently been concerned about the bags—a flight attendant, presumably at his behest, had asked ground staff whether the bags safely made the transfer. If Atta did worry that the suitcases would be found later and searched, he worried with good reason.

Atta’s pull-along bag turned out to be a window on his life—and on the nature of the 9/11 attacks. It contained his Egyptian passport and ID, which revealed his full name, a report card from the Faculty of Engineering at Cairo University, and an addressed envelope indicating that he had lived in Germany. There were videotapes of Boeing 747 and 757 operating procedures, flight simulator information, and a flight computer in a case. A copy of the Qur’an, a prayer schedule, and Atta’s will—written and signed when he was only twenty-seven—revealed him to be intensely religious.

The significance of all that, however, paled beside that of another document. Seventeen days after the attacks, the FBI released four pages of Arabic script that had also been found in Atta’s bag. Further copies were recovered, moreover, one in the car Hazmi abandoned at Dulles Airport, another—apparently a remnant—at the United 93 crash scene in Pennsylvania. Neither the 9/11 Commission Report nor a Commission staff document—released later—even mentions the find. An obscure footnote lists the various other contents of the retrieved baggage, but not the document.

The omission is extraordinary, unconscionable, for the telltale pages were important evidence. Scholars who have translated and analyzed them have described them as nothing less than a “Spiritual Manual” or “Handbook” for the 9/11 attacks. Intensely religious in tone from beginning to end, the document is a mix of counsel, comfort, inspiration, and practical instruction—complex in many ways, replete with references obscure to the non-Muslim Westerner—but its thrust is clear. The pages offered the hijackers detailed advice on how to prepare for the attacks—and for death.

The manual opens with instructions for its readers’ “Last Night,” a time to stay awake, to meditate, pray, renew the “mutual pledge to die,” to contemplate “the eternal blessing God has prepared for the believers, especially for the martyrs.”

As physical preparation, readers were reminded of the importance of “shaving off excess hair from the body and perfuming oneself” and “Performing the greater ritual ablution [washing thoroughly].” The manual urged the old custom of nafth—spitting—to bring protection. Readers were to spit on “the suitcase, the clothing, the knife … equipment … ID … tdh [probably an abbreviation of tadh-kira, ticket] … passport … all your papers.” “Each one of you must sharpen his knife.”

The car journey to the “m” [the abbreviation, probably, of matar, airport] was to include further prayers, the prayer for travel, the prayer for arriving. Then the prayer: “O God, protect us from them … O God, we throw you against their throats and we seek refuge in you from their evil … Those who are enchanted by Western civilization are people who have drunk their love and reverence with cold water … Therefore do not fear them; but fear you Me, if you are believers” [Qur’an 3:175].

The “Spiritual Manual,” apparently written to steel the resolve of the hijackers for the 9/11 attack

.

Readers were to recite repeatedly the first part of the Islamic creed, lā ilāha illā llāh—“There is no god but God.” Care was to be taken, however, to appear to be silent, to ensure that “nobody takes notice.” “Don’t show signs of confusion or tension, but be happy, cheerful, bright and confident, because you carry out an action that God loves and approves … Smile in the face of death, young man, for you will soon enter the eternal abode.

“When you board the ‘t’ [the abbreviation, probably, for tā’ira airplane],” the manual continued, “proceed with the prayer … and consider that it is a raid on the path [of God] … When the ‘t’ begins to move slightly and heads for the ‘q’ [perhaps standing for the Arabic word for ‘takeoff position,’ or perhaps for Qiblah, the direction of Mecca, toward which the planes did point once diverted], recite the prayer of travel because you are traveling to God the Most High, for you are traveling to Allah … This is the moment of the encounter of the two camps. Recite prayers … ‘Our Lord, pour out upon us patience, and make firm our feet, and give us aid against the people of the unbelievers.’

“Pray for victory, assistance and the hitting of the target for yourself and for all your brothers, and don’t be afraid. And ask God to grant you martyrdom … In close combat, strike firmly like heroes who do not wish to return to this world. Exclaim loudly Allāhu akbar, because the exclaiming of Allāhu akbar strikes fear into the unbelievers’ hearts … the heavenly virgins are calling you, saying, ‘O friend of God, come!’

“And when God grants any of you a slaughter,” the text counseled, “you should dedicate it to your father and mother.”

Those to be killed were the passengers and crews of the airliners. The Arabic word used for “slaughter” in the text is dhabaha—the word used for the cutting of an animal’s throat.

“If everything has come off well, each of you is to pat his apartment brother on the shoulder. And in the m [airport] and in the t [plane] and in the k [perhaps the abbreviation for kābīna—cockpit] (each of you) should remind him that this operation is for the sake of God.…

“When the true promise and zero hour approaches,” the manual’s readers were told, “tear open your clothing and bare your chest, welcoming death on the path of God. Always mind God, either by ending with the ritual prayer—if this is possible—starting it seconds before the target, or let your last words be, ‘There is no God but God, and Muhammed is his Prophet.’ After that, God willing, the meeting in the highest Paradise will follow.”

So powerful is this document, so revelatory of the planning for the 9/11 hijackings—and the religious mind-set that drove them—it seems incomprehensible that the official U.S. account did not mention it at all. Professor Hans Kippenberg, coauthor of the most thorough study of the hijackers’ manual, has a theory.

“To those who investigated the events of September 11,” said Kippenberg, who is professor of Comparative Religious Studies at Jacobs University in Bremen, Germany,

the terrorists were people without any conscience or moral compass, intentionally attacking civilians. In fact, far from being devoid of morality, the terrorists had an excess of it. They sought to bring summary justice to bear on those who—the way they saw it—inflicted injustice on their people.

Civilians did die in the process. But the real targets, in the hijackers’ minds, were the power centers of the United States: the financial hub by striking New York’s Trade Center, the military hub by hitting the Pentagon, and—if as many think the plane that crashed in open country was meant to hit the Capitol or the White House—the heart of political power. I don’t think the Americans could quite handle the concept that the attackers went ahead with what they did impelled by what they believed their religion required. No one who reads the hijackers’ “manual,” though, can do so without seeing that it, certainly, is totally driven by faith.

ALL OTHER EVIDENCE ASIDE, the “Spiritual Manual” must surely close off all doubt as to whether Atta and his comrades committed the hijacking. How the attacks were planned, and who was behind them, was another question. Was Osama bin Laden the éminence grise of 9/11, as President Bush’s advisers had promptly told him?

In the days and weeks after 9/11, the man himself issued a string of denials, equivocations, and lofty comments. “We believe,” bin Laden said the very day after in a message sent through an associate, “what happened in Washington and elsewhere against Americans, it was punishment from Almighty Allah. And they were good people who have done it. We agree with them.” According to the go-between, bin Laden had “thanked Almighty Allah and bowed before him” on hearing the news, but had “no information or knowledge about the attack.”

Four days later, on the Qatar-based television channel Al Jazeera, an announcer read out a first-person statement from the exiled Saudi: “I would like to assure the world that I did not plan the recent attacks, which seem to have been planned by people for personal reasons,” it said. “I have been living in the Islamic emirate of Afghanistan and following its leader’s rules. The current leader does not allow me to exercise such operations.” A spokesman for the Taliban regime, for its part, said it accepted bin Laden’s denial.

Late in September, he denied it yet again. “As a Muslim,” he told a Pakistani newspaper, “I try my best to avoid telling a lie. I had no knowledge of these attacks.… Islam strictly forbids causing harm to innocent women, children and other people … even in battle.… We are against the American system, not against its people.”

A few weeks later, though, the denial was blurred, the outright rejection of killing civilians dissipated. “Whenever we kill their civilians,” he told Al Jazeera, “the whole world yells at us from East to West.… I say to those who talk about the innocents in America, they haven’t tasted yet the heat of the loss of children and they haven’t seen the look on the faces of the children in Palestine and elsewhere.… Who says our blood isn’t blood and their blood is blood?”

For bin Laden, the 9/11 hijackers were heroes. “As concerns [America’s] description of these attacks as terrorist acts,” he said, “that description is wrong. These young men, for whom God has created a path, have shifted the battle to the heart of the United States.… We implore God to accept those brothers within the ranks of the martyrs, and to admit them to the highest levels of Paradise.… They have done this because of our words—and we have previously incited and roused them to action—in self-defense, defense of our brothers and sons in Palestine and in order to free our holy sanctuaries. If inciting for these reasons is terrorism, and if killing those that kill our sons is terrorism, then let history witness that we are terrorists.”

Three weeks after 9/11, a single intelligence report—leaked to the media—seemed to speak as loud as the man’s own denials. On the very eve of the attacks, The New York Times and NBC News reported, bin Laden had made a telephone call to his mother, Allia. He had always spoken affectionately of her, and she for her part had visited him in Afghanistan. She was on vacation in Syria in early September, and reportedly hoped he might be able to join her there. In the phone call, though, bin Laden said he would not be joining her.

“In two days,” he reportedly told his mother, “you’re going to hear big news.” After the big news broke, he added, “You’re not going to hear from me for a long time.”

The story seemed loaded with sinister implication, but was it true? NBC could quote only “sources” who said the information—apparently gleaned by electronic eavesdropping—came from “a foreign intelligence service.”

Just weeks later, in a rare interview, bin Laden’s mother said the story was false. Her son had not risked phoning for the past six years. “I would never disavow him,” she went on. “Osama has always been a good son to me … very kind, very considerate and very sweet … I love him and care about him.” Allia was convinced, she said, that bin Laden was not responsible for 9/11.

In November, two months after the attacks, bin Laden gave the Pakistani newspaperman Hamid Mir a lengthy interview—one of only two interviews he granted in the past decade. He had talked with Mir twice before, seemed to think his reporting had been fair, and arranged for the journalist to be brought to him—trussed up and blindfolded during a lengthy jeep ride—at a secret hideout.

Bin Laden responded to most of the journalist’s forty prepared questions, but on occasion made it clear he did not wish to go on the record. “I asked Osama whether he had done 9/11,” Mir said in 2009, “and he asked me to turn off my recording machine. Then he said, ‘Yes.’ But when I turned on my machine again, he said, ‘No.’ ”

FIFTEEN

THE TRUTH OFFICIALDOM GAVE US, THAT YOUNG MEN LOYAL TO al Qaeda and bin Laden were responsible for carrying out the attacks, is not the full story. The 9/11 Commission varnished the story for public consumption, spared the American people knowledge of troubling factors and issues—perhaps because they were highly sensitive, perhaps because pursuit of them involved banging on doors that seemed best left closed, perhaps simply because they remained unresolved.

The Nation’s David Corn, rightly dismissive of most of the skeptics’ ramblings, has made the point that serious matters have yet to be explained. “Without conspiracy theories,” he wrote, “there is much to wonder about September 11th … Official answers ought not to be absorbed automatically without questions.” Others agreed that what Corn saw as the failings of the U.S. government and the intelligence community should be exposed—and this well after publication of the 9/11 Commission Report.

No one at all, reportedly, has been held accountable for the mis-steps that preceded the September 11 attacks. There were no known dismissals, demotions, or even formal reprimands—at any level in the government or in government agencies. “No one has taken the fall for the failure to prevent attacks that killed 2,819 people,” former Bush White House aide Richard Falkenrath noted following publication of the Report. “They could perhaps have been prevented … the starting point in any after the fact analysis should always be the concept of personal responsibility.”

“Why did 9/11 happen on George Bush’s watch,” Senator Patrick Leahy asked in 2006, “when he had clear warnings that it was going to happen? Why did they allow it to happen?” Just what the President and his senior aides had been told, when they had been told it, and how they responded, had long been a vexatious issue. Why did CIA director Tenet tell the Commission that he had not briefed Bush in August 2001, only for it to emerge that he in fact saw him twice?

The previous month, according to Tenet, he and top aides had met with National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice to deliver a dire warning that a major al Qaeda attack was imminent. According to one of America’s most distinguished reporters, she responded by giving them the “brush-off.” Rice said she could not recall the meeting. The record shows the 9/11 Commission was told of the meeting, but there was no mention of it in the 9/11 Commission Report. Why not?

“As each day goes by,” Senator Max Cleland had said shortly before resigning as a member of the 9/11 Commission, “we learn that this government knew a whole lot more about these terrorists before September 11 than it ever admitted.” Such doubts proved durable.

The agency most directly responsible for protecting the almost two million people who took flights every day in the States, the Federal Aviation Administration, seems to have been at best ineffectual, at worst fatally irresponsible, in the months and years before the attacks. The 9/11 Commission heard shocking testimony, which went unmentioned in its Report, from an experienced FAA team leader whose job it was to conduct undercover tests on airport security.

After September 11, said Bogdan Dzakovic, “officials from FAA as well as other government agencies made defensive statements such as, ‘How could we have known this was going to happen?’ The truth is, they did know.… FAA very deliberately orchestrated a dangerous facade of security.… They knew how vulnerable aviation security was. They knew the terrorist threat was rising, but gambled nothing would happen if we kept the vulnerability secret and didn’t disrupt the airline industry. Our country lost that bet.”

In the spring and summer of 2001, half of the FAA’s daily summaries had mentioned bin Laden or al Qaeda. In July, it had “encouraged” all airlines to “exercise prudence and demonstrate a high degree of alertness.” There was little or no real drive to ensure that better security was enforced, however, no sense of urgency at the level that mattered.

The US Airways ticket taker who checked in Atta and Omari in Portland for the first leg of their journey, Michael Touhey, would recall having had a “bad feeling” about them. They arrived just minutes before departure and carried expensive one-way, first-class tickets—though most business travelers fly round-trip. Had he received instructions to be more vigilant, he said later, he thought he would have acted differently. He might have ordered a search of the men’s bags, which could have turned up suspicious items. There had been no such instructions, however, and Touhey let the men go on their way.

“I’ve been with American for twenty-nine years,” said Rosemary Dillard, whose husband died aboard Flight 77. “My job was supervision over all the flight attendants who flew out of National, Baltimore or Dulles. In the summer of 2001, we had absolutely no warnings about any threats of hijacking or terrorism, from the airline or from the FAA.” A key part of the FAA’s mandate is to keep air travelers safe, and in that it signally failed.

The intelligence agencies failed, too, in ways that could perhaps have changed the course of history. The CIA and the FBI were both at fault, in part because of sheer inefficiency. The most scathing criticism of the FBI has come from insiders.

“September the 11th,” said FBI agent Robert Wright, who had long been assigned to a Terrorism Task Force in Chicago, “is a direct result of the incompetence of the FBI’s International Terrorism Unit. No doubt about that.… You can’t know the things I know and not go public.” Wright was joined in his protest—over the bungled handling of a counterterrorist operation two years earlier—by a fellow agent and a former assistant U.S. attorney.

In July 2001, exactly two months before the attack, an FBI agent in Phoenix had reported his suspicion that it was “more than a coincidence that subjects who are supporters of [bin Laden] are attending civil aviation universities/colleges in the state of Arizona.… Phoenix believes that it is highly probable that [bin Laden] has an established support network in place in Arizona.” The memo recommended checks on flight schools and on the visa details of foreign students attending them, not only in Arizona but around the country.

After 9/11, the agent’s apprehension was proven to have been entirely justified. One of the four hijacker pilots had indeed trained in Arizona, the other three at Florida flight schools. Two others, already known to the CIA as terrorist suspects, had for a while taken flight training in California. FBI headquarters, however, had virtually ignored the agent’s prescient memo. No effective action was taken or planned.

Another, even more glaring FBI failure occurred just before the attacks, when agents in the Minneapolis field office reported their grave concern about a then-obscure French Moroccan flight student named Zacarias Moussaoui. The flight school at which he was studying had reported that he was behaving suspiciously, and a check with French intelligence revealed that he had links to extremism.

The Minneapolis agents, who wanted clearance to search the suspect’s baggage, were rebuffed time and time again with legalistic objections sent from headquarters. Only on September 11, after the strikes on the Trade Center, was the search warrant approved. Moussaoui is now serving a life sentence for conspiracy to commit acts of terror and air piracy. Evidence found in his belongings and detainee statements would link Moussaoui to two of the most significant of the 9/11 conspirators.

Information that emerged in 2005 suggested that the Defense Intelligence Agency had failed to inform the FBI of intelligence on four of the future hijackers, including their leader, Mohamed Atta, when it was obtained in early 2000. The lead, provided by a U.S. Army officer, and initially supported by several other members of the DIA operation concerned, went nowhere. The Defense Department refused to allow those involved to testify to a Senate committee, and relevant documents have been destroyed. The Bush White House had allegedly been briefed on the matter within weeks of 9/11, as—much later—9/11 Commission staff had been. The episode went unmentioned, however, in the 9/11 Commission Report.

And then there is the CIA. The month before 9/11, the Agency’s inspector general produced a report lauding the CIA’s Counterterrorist Center as a “well-managed component that successfully carries out the Agency’s responsibilities to collect and analyze intelligence on international terrorism.” In 2007, however, and then only when Congress demanded it, the Agency belatedly produced an accountability review admitting that—before 9/11—the Counterterrorist Center had been “not used effectively.”

It got worse. Most of those in the unit responsible for bin Laden, the inspector general reported, had not had “the operational experience, expertise and training necessary to accomplish their mission.” There had been “no examination of the potential for terrorists to use aircraft as weapons,” “no comprehensive analysis that put into context the threats received in the spring and summer of 2001.”

Senator Bob Graham, who in 2001 was chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee—and later chaired the House-Senate Joint Inquiry into the intelligence community’s pre-9/11 failures—has cited a dozen “points at which the plot could have been discovered and potentially thwarted.” “Both the CIA and the FBI,” he wrote, “had information that they withheld from one another and from state and local law enforcement and that, if shared, would have cracked the terrorists’ plot.”

One item the CIA withheld from the FBI has never been satisfactorily explained. Agency officials had to admit—initially on the afternoon of 9/11 to a reportedly irritated President Bush—that the CIA had known a great deal about two of the future hijackers for the best part of two years. They had known the men’s names, where they came from, the fact that they were al Qaeda operatives, that they had visas to enter the United States—and that one of them certainly, perhaps both, had long since actually arrived in the United States.

Why did the CIA hold this knowledge close, purposefully avoiding sharing it with the FBI and U.S. Immigration until just before the attacks? The CIA has attempted to explain the lapse as incompetence—human error. The complex available information on the subject, however, may suggest a different truth. Some at the FBI came to suspect that the Agency held what it knew close because it had hopes of turning the two terrorists, in effect recruiting them.

Or did the CIA contemplate keeping the men under surveillance following their arrival in the United States? Absent special clearance at presidential level, it would have been unlawful for the Agency to do that. Domestic surveillance is properly a task for the FBI. Alternatively, could it be that the CIA relied on an information flow from another, foreign, intelligence organization? If so, which organization?

One candidate, some might think, is the Israeli Mossad, a service uniquely committed to and experienced in countering Arab terrorism. Fragments of information suggest Mossad may indeed have had an interest in the 9/11 plotters before the attacks. Another candidate, though few would have thought it, is the General Intelligence Department—or GID—the intelligence service of Saudi Arabia. The Saudi element of the 9/11 story is multifaceted, complete with internal contradictions—and highly disquieting.

Saudi Arabia: leading supplier of oil to the United States in 2001, with reserves expected to last until close to the end of the century, a nation that has spent billions on American weaponry, in many ways America’s most powerful Arab friend in the Middle East—and the birthplace of Osama bin Laden and fifteen of the nineteen 9/11 hijackers.

Though bin Laden was an exile, a self-declared foe of the regime, disowned in public statements by the Saudi royals and by his plutocrat brothers, many believed that was only part of the story—that powerful elements in his homeland had never ceased to support his campaign against the West in the name of Islam.

The Saudi GID, said since 9/11 to have fed information on the future hijackers to its counterparts in Washington, had long been regarded by the CIA’s bin Laden specialists as a “hostile service.” If the GID did share information, was it genuine? Or was it, by design, bogus and misleading?

The Saudi factor is one of the wild cards in the 9/11 investigation. Suspicion that Saudi Arabia had supported the hijack operation was rife for a while after 9/11, then faded—not so much because there was no evidence but because the suspicion was snuffed out. The possibility of Saudi involvement, a vital issue, will be a major focus in the closing chapters of this book.

In the immediate aftermath of September 11, only those in the inner councils of government and the intelligence services were mulling the deeper questions. The loud public call was for hitting back, striking those believed to have been the organizers, those who had been in direct command, hard and swiftly.

SIXTEEN

ON SEPTEMBER 14, 2001, THREE DAYS AFTER THE ATTACKS, THE words marching across the great, glittering signboard in Times Square had read: “BUSH CALLS UP 50,000 RESERVISTS.” President Bush’s motorcade drove past the sign that evening at the end of a day of prolonged high emotion—a memorial service at the National Cathedral in Washington, a visit to the pulverized ruins of the World Trade Center in New York, and a gut-wrenching two hours talking with relatives of the hundreds of firefighters and police who were missing and believed dead.

“After all the sadness and the hugging and the love and the families,” the President’s aide Ari Fleischer recalled thinking as the White House motorcade rolled down 42nd Street, “you could just feel the winds of war were blowing.”

The way America would react to the al Qaeda assault had rapidly become clear. Evident within forty-five minutes of the first strike on the World Trade Center, when Bush spoke to the nation from the schoolroom in Florida, promising to “hunt down and to find those folks who committed this act.” Evident two hours later at an Air Force base in Louisiana, away from the microphones, when he told aides, “We’re gonna get the bastards.” Evident in everything he said thereafter, in private or in public.

The vast majority of the American people agreed that there must be severe retribution. The symbol of their resolve appeared within eight hours of 9/11, when a firefighter named Dan McWilliams took a national flag from a yacht moored in the Hudson nearby and—helped by fellow firemen—raised it high in the rubble at Ground Zero. The photographer who snapped them doing it realized instantly how the image would resonate. Right down to the angle of the flag as it went up, it resembled the raising of the Stars and Stripes by U.S. Marines during the battle of Iwo Jima in World War II.

At a memorial service on the 14th, with four U.S. presidents in the congregation, the National Cathedral reverberated to the roar of almost a thousand people singing “The Battle Hymn of the Republic”: “He hath loosed the fateful lightning of His terrible swift sword … the watch fires of a hundred circling camps … the trumpet that shall never call retreat … Let us die to make men free.”

The September 11 onslaught had been an act of war, and the response was to be war. Many tens of thousands—the vast majority of them not Americans—were to die or be wounded in what Bush described as the coming “monumental struggle between good and evil.” He made clear from the start that bin Laden and his followers would not be the only targets. Speechwriter Michael Gerson, briefed on the message the President wanted to convey in his address to the nation on the night of 9/11, has recalled writing in a draft that the United States would “make no distinction between those who planned these acts and those who permitted or tolerated or encouraged them.”

Bush insisted that the language be clearer. In the final, amended version, he said the U.S. would “make no distinction between those who planned these acts and those who harbor them.” Within an hour of the television appearance, he was discussing what that would mean with his war council—by now comprising Cheney, Rumsfeld, Secretary of State Colin Powell, Tenet, Rice, Richard Clarke, FBI director Robert Mueller, Attorney General John Ashcroft, key generals, and a few others.

In Afghanistan, by contrast, Taliban foreign minister Wakil Muttawakil had been asked whether he was certain bin Laden had not been involved in the attacks. “Naturally,” he said. Were his government’s restrictions on bin Laden’s military activity on Afghan soil still in force? “Naturally,” he said, and played down the likelihood of U.S. retaliation against Afghanistan.

Seven thousand miles away, though, the talk in the Situation Room at the White House was uncompromising. The Taliban were soon to propose trying bin Laden in Afghanistan or handing him over for trial in another Muslim country, but America was to turn a deaf ear. “We’re not only going to strike the rattlesnake,” Bush said at this time. “We’re going to strike the rancher.”

The administration never even considered negotiating with the Taliban, Rice said later. Washington would eventually issue a formal ultimatum—promptly rejected—demanding that Afghanistan hand over the Saudi exile, or “share in his fate.”

The posture of Afghanistan’s neighbor Pakistan—with its schizophrenic mix of ties to the Taliban, dependence on Washington, and divided religious and tribal loyalties—would now be pivotal. As Secretary of State Powell would recall it, Pakistan’s president, Pervez Musharraf, “had to be told in no uncertain terms that it was time to choose sides.” The way Musharraf remembered it being reported to him, those terms included being told that “if we chose the terrorists, then we should be prepared to be bombed back to the Stone Age.” He bent to almost all the American demands for cooperation.

There were voices in Washington raising the notion of retaliation against nations other than Afghanistan. “Need to move swiftly,” Rumsfeld’s aide Stephen Cambone, noting the defense secretary’s comments on the afternoon of 9/11, had jotted: “Near term target needs—go massive—sweep it all up … need to do so to get anything useful … thing[s] related or not.” “I know a lot,” Rumsfeld would say publicly within days, “and what I have said, as clearly as I know how, is that states are supporting these people.”

That first night at Bush’s war council, the 9/11 Commission determined, Rumsfeld had “urged the President and the principals to think broadly about who might have harbored the attackers, including Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Sudan, and Iran.” Though bin Laden was a Saudi and most of the hijackers Saudis, the possibility of that country’s involvement was apparently not raised.

It was then, though, that Rumsfeld jumped at what he saw as the need to “do Iraq.” “Everyone looked at him,” Richard Clarke recalled. “At least I looked at him and Powell looked at him, like, ‘What the hell are you talking about?’ And he said—I’ll never forget this—‘There just aren’t enough targets in Afghanistan. We need to bomb something else to prove that we’re, you know, big and strong and not going to be pushed around by these kind of attacks.’ And I made the point certainly that night, and I think Powell acknowledged it, that Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11.

“That didn’t seem to faze Rumsfeld.… It shouldn’t have come as a surprise. It really didn’t, because from the first weeks of the administration they were talking about Iraq. I just found it a little disgusting that they were talking about it while the bodies were still burning in the Pentagon and at the World Trade Center.”

President Bush kept the immediate focus on bin Laden and Afghanistan, but he did not ignore Rumsfeld. On the evening of the 12th, Clarke recalled, Bush quietly took aside his counterterrorism coordinator and a few colleagues to say, “Look … I want you, as soon as you can, to go back over everything, everything. See if Saddam did this. See if he’s linked in any way … Just look. I want to know any shred.”

“Absolutely, we will look … again,” Clarke responded. “But, you know, we have looked several times for state sponsorship of al Qaeda and not found any real linkages to Iraq. Iran plays a little, as does Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia, Yemen.”

Bush looked irritated. He replied, “Look into Iraq, Saddam,” and walked away. Clarke’s people would report that there was no evidence of cooperation between al Qaeda and Iraq. Pressure on the President to act against Iraq, however, continued. His formal order for military action against terrorism, a week after 9/11, would include an instruction to the Defense Department to prepare a contingency plan for strikes against Iraq—and perhaps the occupation of its oilfields.

THE WEEKEND FOLLOWING the attacks, after the frenzy of the first fearful days, Bush flew his war council to the presidential retreat at Camp David. Their deliberations began, as always during his presidency, with a moment of devotion. The meeting the day before, the Friday, had opened with a prayer spoken by Defense Secretary Rumsfeld. He had asked the Lord for “patience to measure our lust for action,” for resolve and patience. In the wooded peace of Camp David, nevertheless, the debate focused on the storm of violence that was coming.

Across the vast table from the President, CIA director Tenet and his counterterrorism chief Cofer Black briefed their colleagues on the Agency’s plan for “Destroying International Terrorism.” They described what they called the “Initial Hook,” an operation designed to trap al Qaeda inside Afghanistan and destroy it. It was to be achieved by a numerically small CIA paramilitary component and U.S. Special Forces, working with Afghan forces that had long been fighting the Taliban. The chairman of the Joint Chiefs, General Hugh Shelton, outlined the crucial bomb and missile strikes that would precede and support the operation. “When we’re through with them,” Black had assured Bush, the al Qaeda terrorists would “have flies walking across their eyeballs.”

The war planners dined that evening on what the President called “comfort food,” fried chicken and mashed potatoes. Afterward, Attorney General Ashcroft accompanied Condoleezza Rice on the piano as she sang “Amazing Grace.” Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill sat in an armchair in the corner perusing the briefing documents the CIA had brought along that day. He read of measures to track and cut off the flow of money to terrorists, his special interest—and of draconian measures of a different sort.

The CIA proposed the creation of Agency teams to hunt down, capture, and kill terrorists around the world. It would have the authority to “render” those captured to the United States or to other countries for interrogation—effectively establishing a secret prison system. It would also be authorized to assassinate targeted terrorists. Two days later, the President signed a secret Memorandum of Notification, empowering the Agency to take such measures without the prior approval of the White House or any other branch of the executive.

Bush was by now referring to the coming fight as a “war on terrorism.” By the following week, when he addressed a joint session of Congress, it had become the “war on terror”—the label for the conflict that was to endure until the end of his presidency.

So far as Osama bin Laden personally was concerned, the White House set the tone. “I want justice,” the President told reporters on September 17, “and there’s an old poster out West, I recall, that said, ‘WANTED—DEAD OR ALIVE.’ ” Vice President Cheney said on television that he would accept bin Laden’s “head on a platter.” If he intended this figuratively, others did not.

Three days later, the CIA’s Cofer Black gathered the team that was to spearhead the covert operation in Afghanistan. He dispensed with any notion of taking the terrorist leader alive. “Gentlemen, I want to give you your marching orders and I want to make them very clear. I have discussed this with the President, and he is in full agreement.… I don’t want bin Laden and his thugs captured. I want them dead. Alive and in prison here in the United States, they’ll become a symbol, a rallying point.… They must be killed. I want to see photos of their heads on pikes. I want bin Laden’s head shipped back in a box filled with dry ice. I want to be able to show bin Laden’s head to the President. I promised him I would do that.”

“The mission is straightforward,” Black told a colleague at headquarters. “We locate the enemy wherever they are across the planet. We find them and we kill them.”

In the field, three men led the operations that targeted bin Laden, two veteran CIA officers, and a Special Forces officer with the unit popularly known as Delta Force. Their teams in the early months numbered only some seventy men, including a dozen Green Berets, Air Force tacticians, communications experts, and a small group of elite British commandos.

Asked by his wife why he was accepting the mission—he was on the verge of retirement—the CIA’s Gary Schroen had picked up a newspaper with a picture of a Manhattan firefighter, his arm at the salute, tears running down his cheeks. “This is why I’m going,” he said. “We all feel the pain.… Everyone wants to strike back.” Schroen’s successor, Gary Berntsen, told that some Afghan officers favored negotiating with al Qaeda, would merely snap, “Tell them your commander is from New York. I want them all dead!”

The U.S. generals’ requirement, recalled Dalton Fury, the major in command of the military component, was a little less exorbitant than the demand for bin Laden’s head in a box. “A cloudy photograph would do, or a smudged fingerprint. A clump of hair or even a drop of blood. Or perhaps a severed finger wrapped in plastic. Basically, we were told to go into harm’s way and prove to the world that bin Laden had been neutralized, as in ‘terminated with extreme prejudice.’ In plain English: stone-cold dead.”

The first CIA team was on the ground in Afghanistan just two weeks after 9/11, armed with not only their weapons but $3 million in $100 bills. “Money,” Schroen has wearily noted, “is the lubricant that makes things happen in Afghanistan.” The cash, lugged around in duffel bags, was used mostly to grease the palms of anti-Taliban warlords. For a mission that targeted the Taliban as much as bin Laden, buying their loyalty was essential. Brilliant American management of the warlords and their forces, combined with devastating use of airpower, would defeat and decimate the Taliban soldiers—though they were often valiant fighters—in little more than two months. Getting Osama bin Laden was another matter altogether.

He had continued to address the world as he had for years, by videotape. On October 7, the day of the first U.S. airstrikes, the terrorist leader was all defiance—and lauding the 9/11 attacks. “God has struck America at its Achilles’ heel and destroyed its greatest buildings,” he said. “What America is tasting today is but a fraction of what we [Arabs] have tasted for decades.… So when God Almighty granted success to one of the vanguard groups of Islam, He opened the way.… I pray to God Almighty to lift them up to the highest Paradise.”

A few days earlier, in a letter to Taliban leader Mullah Omar that was to be retrieved later, bin Laden forecast that the coming U.S. campaign in Afghanistan would cause “great long-term economic burdens … force America to resort to the former Soviet Union’s only option: withdrawal from Afghanistan.” Two weeks on, with the bombing continuing, the Taliban’s military commander—a longtime bin Laden ally—claimed his soldiers were holding their ground. Bin Laden was “safe and sound … in good spirits.”

Thus far, the CIA team had only poor intelligence on bin Laden’s whereabouts. There were attempts to persuade them that he had left the country soon after 9/11. Other reports put him either in the capital, Kabul, or at Jalalabad, nearer to the border with Pakistan. He was indeed in Kabul, or was there in early November, when he gave the first of his two post-9/11 interviews. Bin Laden was still talking tough, but his situation had clearly changed. He was in the capital that day to pay tribute to two comrades who had been killed, one of them his military chief—and close friend—Mohammed Atef. Enemy forces were closing on Kabul, and would take the city within the week.

Bin Laden did now head for Jalalabad, some ninety miles to the east. He and a large group of fighters were seen arriving in a convoy of white Toyota trucks. American bombs were already falling on the city, and their stay was brief. Dressed in the camouflage jacket familiar to Western television viewers, their leader appeared at the Saudi-funded Institute for Islamic Studies and addressed those brave enough to come to listen. “God is with us, and we shall win the war,” he reportedly said. “Your Arab brothers will lead the way.… May God grant me the opportunity to see you and meet you again.”

Bin Laden, said to have been upset, apparently spoke of wanting to stay and fight. He was dissuaded. The convoy left soon afterward, a Jalalabad witness later told the BBC, and it now consisted of as many as three hundred vehicles filled with tall, thin Saudis, muscular men who said they were from Egypt, and blacks who may have been from Sudan. They were, he said, “good Muslims, carrying the Qur’an in one hand and their Kalashnikov in the other.” Bin Laden and his close companions, seated in the third vehicle, had covered their faces. At least one of those in the group said they were on their way “to their base at Tora Bora.”

Tora Bora, which translates as “Black Widow,” lies almost sixteen thousand feet above sea level on Towr Ghar—the “Black Dust”—a series of rocky ridges and peaks, ten precipitous miles from the border of Pakistan’s Tribal Areas. A legend now, it was at the time a media fantasy. By November 27, a British newspaper was reporting that it was a “purpose-built guerrilla lair … 350 yards beneath a solid mountain. There are small rooms and big rooms, and the wall and floor are cemented.… It has its own ventilation system and its own power, created by a hydro-electric generator … driven by water from the peaks of the mountains.”

The reality was far more primitive. Bin Laden’s first wife, who had spent time there, remembered a place with no electricity and no running water, where life was hard at the best of times. In early December of 2001, in the icy Afghan winter, it became a desolate killing ground.

From their base at an abandoned schoolhouse, the pursuing Americans struggled with multiple obstacles. Tora Bora is not one place but a series of natural ramparts and cave complexes, a frustratingly difficult place to attack. Afghan generals, whose troops were key to the mission, were often intransigent, rarely dependable, and partial to negotiating with an al Qaeda enemy that the Delta Force and CIA commanders wanted only to destroy. The Afghan inhabitants of the mountains were at best uncertain sources of information. The Americans could dole out cellophane-wrapped cash from duffel bags, but these were people who had enjoyed bin Laden’s largesse for years. Some locals had named their sons Osama, in his honor.

Berntsen, heading the CIA detachment, encountered reluctance when he begged for more U.S. military support. The operation to hunt down bin Laden, the team was told, was “flawed,” too high-risk, and the reluctance to commit American ground forces was only going to get worse. What the United States could and did promptly deliver was the bludgeon of pulverizing airpower. Often guided by forward observation teams, waves of bombers flew from bases in the United States and carriers in the Persian Gulf to bombard the al Qaeda positions. AC-130 Spectre gunships, with their lethal firepower, pounded them by night.

The Americans became sure their quarry was there. A Lebanese-born former Marine with the CIA group, who had fluent Arabic and knew bin Laden’s voice from tapes and intercepts, made a discovery on the morning of December 5. In the wreckage of a bombed encampment, he found a working radio clutched in the hand of a dead fighter. It was tuned to the al Qaeda frequency and soon, amidst the to-and-fro between harried men calling for water and supplies, he heard the familiar voice urging his followers to fight on.

On the 7th, a source who had been in among the enemy reported having encountered an “extremely tall” Arab—bin Laden was between six foot four and six foot six—near some large cave entrances. Berntsen called for the dropping of a BLU-82, the largest nonnuclear bomb in the U.S. arsenal, an eight-ton weapon the size of a Volkswagen Beetle. Used earlier to break Taliban lines on the plains, its primary target now was to be a single man in the mountains.

In the early morning of the 9th, CIA and Delta Force operatives watched through binoculars as an MC-130 airplane delivered the BLU-82. B-52s followed minutes later, dropping bombs guided by GPS. A desperate fighter was soon heard on a radio intercept saying, “Cave too hot. Can’t reach others.” There were calls for the “truck to move wounded.” Another fighter, captured later, would speak of a “hideous” explosion that had vaporized men even deep inside the caves.

Decimated but not yet finally broken, the defenders held out a few days longer. Intercepts picked up an al Qaeda commander giving movement orders, ordering up land mines, exhorting his men to “victory or death.” There was talk of “Father” moving to a different tunnel. Then, on the afternoon of December 13, Delta Force’s Major Fury and his men listened to a voice they were sure was that of bin Laden. “His Arabic prose sounded beautiful, soothing, and peaceful,” Fury recalled. “I paraphrase him … ‘Our prayers have not been answered. Times are dire.… Things might have been different.… I’m sorry for getting you into this battle. If you can no longer resist, you may surrender with my blessing.’ ”

According to the ex-Marine expert at recognizing the Saudi’s voice, bin Laden then gathered his men around him in prayer. There was the sound of mules, used for transport in the high mountains, and people moving around. Then silence.

BY THE TIME the bombing and the shooting stopped, Tora Bora was devastated, a wasteland of shattered rocks and broken trees. The detritus of war: spent ammunition, bloody bandages, torn fragments of documents in Arabic script—and not a trace of Osama bin Laden.

Had he died in the onslaught from the air? Or, in Fury’s words, had a bomb “punched his ticket to Paradise”? Troops flown in months later by helicopter found the cave entrances impenetrably blocked by tons of rubble. Exhumations at a fighters’ graveyard turned up nothing that was identifiable with bin Laden.

Long since convinced that their quarry escaped, those who risked their lives to kill him cast bitter blame on those from whom they had taken their orders. The Delta Force operatives, Fury said, had not been allowed to engage in “real war fighting.” Had they been, he thought, things could have turned out differently. Being held back had been like “working in an invisible cage.”

The CIA’s Gary Berntsen had in vain requested a force of eight hundred U.S. troops—to block the “back door,” the mountain escape route to Pakistan. “We need Rangers [Special Operations combat troops] now!” he had begged with increasing urgency. “The opportunity to get bin Laden and his men is slipping away!” He had been rebuffed every time.

Why were the troops refused, and who was responsible for the refusal? Military decisions were transmitted by the generals, directly to Berntsen by the officer commanding Joint Special Operations Command, Major General Dell Dailey, who in turn answered to General Tommy Franks, commander-in-chief at U.S. Central Command, the man running the Afghanistan operation.

“We have not said,” Franks remarked at a press briefing just before the fighting at Tora Bora, “that Osama bin Laden is a target of this effort.” It was a strange comment, even taking into account security considerations, given what Fury and Berntsen have said of the explicit orders they had been given. In a 2004 memoir, Franks skirted any discussion of the decision not to use U.S. troops to trap bin Laden. As recently as 2009, the general said he had doubted whether bin Laden was even at Tora Bora. Notwithstanding the certainty expressed by the CIA and Delta Force commanders on the spot, he claimed the intelligence had been “conflicting.”

Delta Force’s Major Fury placed responsibility elsewhere. “The generals,” he said, “were not operating alone. Civilian political figures were also at the control panel.… I was not in those air-conditioned rooms with leather chairs when they came up with some of the strangest decisions I have ever encountered.… At times, we were micro-managed by higher-ups unknown, even to the point of being ordered to send the exact grid coordinates of our teams back to various folks in Washington.”

The two civilian higher-ups involved with Franks in the decision making were Defense Secretary Rumsfeld and the man ultimately responsible as commander-in-chief, President Bush. Bush, who six days after 9/11 had indicated that he wanted bin Laden “dead or alive.”

The President “never took his eye off the ball when it came to bin Laden,” according to General Franks. Through October and into November, Bush had appeared still keen to “get” bin Laden. In late November, at a CIA briefing, he was told Tora Bora had become the focus, that Afghan forces were inadequate to do the job, that U.S. troops were required. “We’re going to lose our prey if we’re not careful,” the CIA briefer warned. The President seemed surprised. In Afghanistan in early December, shortly before the massive BLU-82 bomb was unleashed on Tora Bora, those heading the fight in the field were told that POTUS had been personally “asking for details.”

According to CIA sources, Bush would reportedly remain “obsessed” with the hunt for bin Laden even months after Tora Bora. In public, though, far from talking of getting him dead or alive, he seemed to downgrade his importance. “Terror’s bigger than one person,” the President said in March 2002. “He’s a person who has been marginalized.… I don’t know where he is. Nor, you know, I just don’t spend that much time on him really, to be honest with you.… I truly am not that concerned about him.”

THE RECORD, PERHAPS, explains the sea change in the priority given to the hunt for Osama bin Laden. On November 21, a couple of weeks before the final battles in the mountains and bin Laden’s disappearance, the President had taken Rumsfeld aside for a conversation that he insisted must remain secret. He wanted a war plan for Iraq, and insisted that General Franks get working on it immediately.

Franks, already up to his eyes dealing with the conflict in Afghanistan, could barely believe what he was hearing. “Goddamn!” he exclaimed to a fellow general. “What the fuck are they talking about?” From then on, not least in early December, when there were repeated appeals for U.S. troops to block bin Laden’s escape route, the general was constantly plagued with requests for plans as to how to attack Iraq. At a crucial stage of the Tora Bora episode, Bush’s primary focus had begun to shift—and a shift in the commander-in-chief’s focus meant distracting the attention of his overworked general from developments in Afghanistan.

FOR A LONG TIME, for almost three years, Osama bin Laden remained neither dead nor a prisoner—the options the President of the United States had initially contemplated—but an elusive, at times illusory, ghost.

A story in the Pakistan Observer, published on December 25, quoted a Taliban official as saying the fugitive had died “a natural and quiet death” of “serious complications in the lungs.” He had supposedly been buried with military honors, according to his faith, in an unmarked grave. The story was clearly inaccurate—and perhaps a diversionary tactic, given that he in fact survived. A story that bin Laden made his escape after suffering a wound to the shoulder seems entirely possible.

Reports that became available in 2011, meanwhile, offer two versions of his escape. One holds that he headed north, to a remote part of Afghanistan, and remained there for months. The other suggests that, just as the CIA’s man at Tora Bora had feared he would, he escaped over the snow-covered passes to Pakistan with the assistance of a Pakistani militant commander.

While the force guarding the border was commanded by a Pakistan army general, most of the troops involved were drawn from tribes in the region who answered to tribal chiefs, most of whom bin Laden had cultivated and who to one degree or another approved his cause.

Good evidence that he had survived came gradually: a handwritten letter, scanned and posted on islamonline.net in August 2002; weeks later, another letter; an audiotape, followed by two others in 2003—one of them, triumphal in tone, describing how “the forces of faith” had beaten back “the evil forces of materialism” at Tora Bora; in October 2003 a videotape urging on the fighters resisting the American occupation of Iraq, encouraging the people of Palestine to continue their struggle; in 2004 three further audiotapes and—on October 29, days before the U.S. presidential election—a videotape addressed to the American people.

Bin Laden wished to tell Americans, he said, how “to avoid another Manhattan.” September 11 had been a response to the United States’ “great injustices”—especially in Iraq and Israel. He invoked God’s blessing on “the nineteen” [there had been nineteen hijackers on 9/11], and openly admitted his personal involvement. “We agreed with the general commander Mohamed Atta, may God bless his soul, to carry out all operations within twenty minutes, before Bush and his administration could be aware of them.”

Until he saw that videotape, the former Delta Force commander at Tora Bora had not been sure what to think. Some had believed the previous bin Laden tapes authentic. Some had suspected they were fakes. Fury had preferred to think them fakes, until he saw the fall 2004 appearance.

“I knew immediately that the tape was the real thing. His posture, the voice, his thin body, and the aged beard that seemed frosted of snow were unmistakeable. Unfortunately, the man was still alive.”

Not long before, far off in Afghanistan, a local militiaman named Faqir Shah had accompanied reporter Tim McGirk back to Tora Bora. “This was where Osama lived,” Shah said as they walked the shattered battlefield. “We fought al Qaeda here for two weeks in the snow.… See that hole? An American soldier tossed a piece of concrete in there from the World Trade Center, because he thought al Qaeda was all finished.…

“I didn’t think so.”

PART IV

PLOTTERS

SEVENTEEN

TWO DECADES EARLIER, WHEN THE TWIN TOWERS OF THE WORLD Trade Center had been a relatively new phenomenon—years before the earliest official concern that they would make a prime target for terrorists—an improbably tall young Saudi, still in his early twenties, had flown into the United States with his pregnant wife and two infant children. His visit, in 1979, passed without notice, for he was neither famous nor infamous.

Osama bin Laden’s activity in America appeared entirely peaceful. The fact that he came at all was not firmly established until 2009, when his wife Najwa—nine babies later and separated from her husband by force of circumstance—published a memoir. She recalled having thought that Americans in general were “gentle and nice … easy to deal with.… My husband and I did not hate America, yet we did not love it.”

An incident on the final day of their stay, as the family sat in an airport departure lounge, showed Najwa how little some Americans knew of other cultures. “I saw an American man gawking at me … jaw dropped open in surprise, curious eyes growing as large as bugs popping from his skull.… I knew without asking that his unwelcome attention had been snagged by my black Saudi costume … face veil, head scarf, and abaya.… That man gave us a good laugh.”

Bin Laden had been busy during the trip, but Najwa was the good Arab wife. “Since my husband’s business was not my business, I did not ask questions.” She asked no questions when bin Laden took off for Los Angeles for a week to talk with unknown men. Nor did she press for details when he said he was meeting—elsewhere—with “a man by the name of Abdullah Azzam.”

By mentioning Azzam, bin Laden had provided a first pointer to the direction his life was going to take. Azzam lectured and led prayers in the mosque at King Abdul Aziz University in the Saudi city of Jeddah, where bin Laden was a third-year student of economics and management. Often described as a “cleric” or “scholar,” Azzam was more than that. A Palestinian, whose village had been overrun by the Israelis in the Six Day War, he was on his way to becoming the “Emir of Jihad.”

“Jihad” is a religious duty for Muslims. It can be interpreted in several ways—its basic sense is “struggle,” or “striving”—but what Azzam meant by it was very clear. He preached the need for jihad to liberate Muslim lands from foreign occupation. “Humanity,” he was to say, “is being ruled by Jews and Christians. The Americans, the British, and others. And behind them, the fingers of world Jewry.”

In the late 1970s Azzam, an imposing figure and a fine speaker, was raging especially about Egyptian president Anwar al-Sadat’s peacemaking visit to Israeli-occupied Jerusalem, a visit that millions in the Middle East saw not as statesmanship but betrayal.

With Azzam at Abdul Aziz University was Mohammed Qutb, brother of a writer and thinker who in death, following his execution in Egypt, became the guiding light of Islamic extremism. Sayid Qutb had been the leading voice of the Muslim Brotherhood, deplored the corruption of secular regimes in the Middle East, and advocated using violence to remove them. He excoriated Western society as he had seen it in the United States and poured verbal vitriol on the Jews and Zionism. Osama bin Laden read Sayid Qutb, and attended his brother’s lectures.

Azzam and Qutb were free to spread their message at will in the Saudi Arabia of the 1970s, and what they said about Israel accorded perfectly with Saudi doctrine. For all his anti-Zionist speechifying, moreover, the United States welcomed Azzam. From 1979, the year the young bin Laden met with him in the States, he was perceived as an ally in a common cause, the struggle to expel Soviet forces from Afghanistan. For both Saudi intelligence—the GID—and the CIA, Azzam was useful, a man to manipulate.

An irony, then, that—after 9/11—Azzam’s name would be joined to that of Osama bin Laden. The dedication to a so-called Encyclopedia of Jihad, a sort of how-to manual for terrorists in eleven volumes, would read: “To our much loved brother Abu Abdullah Osama bin Laden, who shared in the jihad of Sheikh Abdullah Azzam … Who has committed himself every day to jihad.”

Azzam, bin Laden himself would say, was “a man worth a nation.” For he, with bin Laden and a few comrades, was to found a movement that would shake the Western world and change history: al Qaeda.

In 1979, when the preacher from Palestine and the Saudi economics student got together in Indiana, the seeds were being sown. For the student, then and for the rest of his life, the driving force was always religion.

“GOD ALMIGHTY was gracious enough for me to be born to Muslim parents in the Arabian Peninsula in al-Malazz neighborhood, in al-Riyadh, in 1377 hegira …”

Bin Laden, perorating—he was always long-winded—on his early life and parentage. The year of his birth, 1377 hegira, is the Muslim calendar’s rendering of the year most of the world refers to as 1957. The actual birthday appears to have been February 15.

Nineteen fifty-seven was the year that President Dwight Eisenhower took office for a second term, and that a rebel named Fidel Castro—previously rumored to have been killed—surfaced to fight on against the Cuban government. The nations of Western Europe began forming a unified economic bloc. The Soviet Union launched the Sputnik satellite into orbit and began catching up with U.S. missile technology.

The Saudi newborn’s full name was Osama bin Mohammed bin Awad bin Aboud bin Laden al-Qatani—“bin” meaning “son of.” He would one day tell his own children that “al-Qatani,” which denotes those who trace their ancestry to Yemen, was their true family name. “Osama” means “Lion,” apt for a man who came to see himself as a warrior.

“I was named,” bin Laden himself said, “after one of the venerable Companions of the Prophet, Osama bin-Zeid … He was someone whom the Prophet, God’s peace and blessings be upon him, has loved and has loved his father before him.” That Osama was an Islamic hero, a commander said to have defeated a Roman army.

“My father was born in Hadramaut,” bin Laden said in 1999. “He went to work in Hejaz at an early age, more than seventy years ago. Then God blessed him and bestowed on him an honor that no other contractor has known. He built the holy Mecca mosque where the holy Ka’bah is located and at the same time, because of God’s blessings to him, he built the Holy Mosque in Medina.… [Then] the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem.… It is not a secret that he was one of the founders of the infrastructure of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.”

The father, Mohamed bin Laden, had been a legend in his time. The Hadramaut was a sparsely populated region of what is now Yemen, which borders on Saudi Arabia, and the young Mohamed made his way the thousand miles to Jeddah penniless and hungry. He started out portering for pilgrims, moved on to lowly work in the construction trade, worked incessantly, thrived as a manager, and eventually—though almost illiterate, he had a phenomenal memory for facts and figures—rose to become a fabulously wealthy construction magnate.

The key to the rise of bin Laden Sr. was the patronage of the all-powerful Saudi elite, the rulers of a land that emerged from obscurity to gilded affluence in the space of a few decades. He hit his prime just as American money for Saudi oil began to bring the royal princes unparalleled riches. From the reign of King Abdul Aziz in the 1930s to that of King Faisal in the 1960s, he built palaces, roads across the desert, reservoirs, power stations. He catered to every royal whim, from providing the ramp that delivered the wheelchair-bound Abdul Aziz to his throne room to—a measure of his wealth—bailing out Faisal when the royal coffers ran dry for a while.

Nothing enhanced bin Laden Sr.’s prestige so much as his work on Islam’s religious sites. “Religion in Saudi Arabia is like gravity,” bin Laden family biographer Steve Coll has written. “It explained the order of objects and the trajectory of lives. The Qur’an was the kingdom’s constitution and the basis of all its laws. The kingdom … evolved into the most devout society on earth.”

Religion and Saudi royalty are inseparable. The Saud family had gained power in the eighteenth century thanks to a deal with a reformist preacher named Mohammed ibn Abdul Wahhab. He and his followers insisted on the most austere interpretation of Islam, banned the arts, music and dancing, celebration of holidays, and memorials to the dead.

The author Stephen Schwartz has defined Wahhabism as a “form of fascism” built on “a paramilitary political structure comparable to the Bolsheviks and Nazis” and “a monopoly of wealth by the elite, backed by extreme repression and a taste for bloodshed.” In Saudi Arabia, someone who had lived there for many years told the authors, “Everything comes down to money. The extent of the greed is beyond the understanding of the ordinary Westerner.”

Under the extreme form of shari’a—Islamic law—applied in today’s Saudi Arabia, theft may be punished by amputation of a hand. Public beheading remains the designated penalty for murder, drug trafficking, rape, and adultery. In some cases a beheading is followed by crucifixion of the body, and placing of the head upon a pole. Human rights are severely limited. Women cannot attend university, have bank accounts, or take employment without permission of a male relative.

The Yemeni immigrant Mohamed bin Laden had no quarrel with Saudi ways. A devout Muslim himself, he would invite prominent clerics to his home to debate religion. His renovations and innovations at the three holy shrines of Medina, Mecca, and the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem—before the Israeli occupation of 1967—earned him high honors in Saudi Arabia. He was appointed a minister of state by royal decree, and the letter appointing him to the Jerusalem work styled him “Your highness, Sheikh Mohamed bin Laden.”

Mohamed’s son Osama was the eighteenth of some two dozen sons sired by his series of some twenty-two wives. He was the product of a short-lived marriage to a Syrian girl named Allia who was fourteen years old to her husband’s forty-nine. In the year Allia gave birth to Osama, her new husband fathered seven children.

Even by Saudi standards, Mohamed behaved bizarrely in the marital home. According to Osama, his mother confided that he had had “a shocking habit of asking his wives to take off their veils and stand in a line, sending for his male servants to look upon their faces … like harlots on view … and point out his most beautiful wife.” Allia asked for a divorce, for reasons unknown, and went on to marry one of her husband’s employees. Osama, who lived principally with her from then on, is said by his son Omar—one of the children of his first wife, Najwa—to have loved his mother “more than he loved his wives, his siblings, or his children.”

Mohamed, Osama was to tell his own family, would usually summon his sons to see him as a group, and only a few times a year. “In my whole life,” Osama said, “I only saw your grandfather five times … brief meetings, all but one with my large clan of brothers.”

Mohamed had a strict rule, Osama told Omar, that “when he met with his sons, we must stand in a very straight line, organized according to height, rather than age.… Before I became a teenager, I was not the tallest … [One day] two of my older brothers, taller than me, locked me between them.… Your grandfather noticed. Furious, he marched to stand in front of me and without one word of warning struck me across the face with his strongest force.… I’ve never forgotten the pain.” “Most of us were afraid of him,” said Yeslam, one of Osama’s half-brothers.

Bin Laden Sr. believed that Palestine belonged to the Arabs, not the Jews, and was accordingly “very, very, very anti-Israel, anti-Jewish.” In June 1967, when Israel seized East Jerusalem and King Faisal made bellicose noises, Mohamed suggested a contribution he could make. He would, he said, convert the 250 bulldozers he used in his building operations into army tanks.

Three months later, Osama’s father was dead. Ten thousand people reportedly attended the ceremonies that followed his death in an airplane crash. His myriad sons and daughters and wives, separated according to sex of course, gathered for the days of mourning. King Faisal, who said his protégé had been his “right arm,” declared that he would henceforth act as father to the bin Laden children.

This was not only because the king had held the dead man in great affection. The bin Laden companies were important to ongoing government operations, and Faisal decreed that they must continue to function. The overall value of Mohamed’s estate was in the region of $150 million, almost a billion dollars at 2010 values. His children, the sons as stipulated by law entitled to twice as much as the daughters, all instantly became millionaires.

The son named Osama, still in the care of his doting mother, was ten at the time. His most recent memory of his father was of a patriarch who—in spite of the boy’s tender age—had recently given him a car as a present. Though of course not allowed to drive it, he remained crazy about cars for years to come.

The sparse memories of Osama’s early life, however, recall a child who was “shy … aloof … gentle … polite … obedient … quiet, to the point of timidity.” Briefly, before his father’s death, he had been sent as a boarder to a Quaker school in Beirut. Not long afterward, back in his homeland, he began the first of eight years at a school for the Saudi elite founded by the king himself. An Englishman who taught there, Brian Fyfield-Shayler, remembered a pupil who was “extraordinarily courteous … not pushy in any way … pleasant, charming, ordinary, not very exceptional.”