The Eleventh Day

Fyfield-Shayler thought Osama’s command of English mediocre, though a person who met him years later found him fluent enough in the language. His science teacher judged him “normal, not excellent.” In arithmetic, he had inherited his father’s flair. According to his son Omar, “No calculator could equal my father’s remarkable ability, even when presented with the most complicated figures.” Given the school’s top national ranking, Fyfield-Shayler thought, Osama was probably “one of the top fifty students” in his age group.

Away from class, he was a boy like other boys. His schoolfriend Khaled Batarfi recalled him taking part in soccer games, near the Pepsi factory. Taller than most of his pals, Osama would “play forward to use his head and put in the goals.” Off the pitch, he and his peers enjoyed watching cowboy and karate movies.

Batarfi recalled an incident when his friend was confronted by a bully. “I pushed him away from Osama, and solved the problem. But then Osama came to me and said, ‘You know, if you waited a few minutes I would have solved the problem peacefully.’ … This was the kind of guy who would always think of solving problems peacefully.”

IN SUMMER during his childhood, Osama traveled to his mother’s seaside home in Syria. There were camping trips, long hikes with a male cousin, and a special friendship with the cousin’s young sister—Najwa. To her he seemed “soft-spoken, serious … delicate but not weak … a mystery—yet we all liked him.” She had these impressions, by her account, before either child turned ten.

By the time Najwa turned thirteen, in 1972, “unanticipated emotions began to swirl” between her and Osama. He seemed “shyer than a virgin under the veil,” said nothing directly to her. Instead he spoke to his mother and the respective parents spoke to each other. There was a wedding and a celebratory dinner—male and female guests carefully segregated, no music, no dancing—when Osama was seventeen and Najwa fifteen.

The teenage husband brought his wife home to Jeddah swathed in black, her face totally veiled. “Osama,” she recalled in a 2009 memoir written with her son Omar, “was so conservative that I would also live in purdah, or isolation, rarely leaving the confines of my new home.” Her husband explained “how important it was for me to live as an obedient Muslim woman.… I never objected because I understood that my husband was an expert regarding our faith.”

It was decided that Najwa would no longer go to school. Instead she sat in the garden reading the Qur’an while Osama went to school. Her husband, she discovered, could recite the sacred texts by heart. Proudly, he took her to pray at the mosque in Mecca that his father had rebuilt. He fit attendance at school, and occasional arduous work for the family construction company, around praying at the mosque several times a day.

Najwa soon had a first baby, to be followed not long after by another. The obedient Muslim wife would bear eleven children over the years. The devout Muslim husband, meanwhile, observed his faith to the letter. Muslims should in principle avoid shaking hands with a person of the opposite sex or of a different religion, but Osama took things further than that. When a woman—his European sister-in-law Carmen bin Ladin—opened the front door of her home unveiled, he averted his gaze and ducked speaking to her. He did not allow Najwa to feed her baby from a bottle, because it had a rubber teat.

His rules extended to male company. Osama slapped one of his own brothers for ogling a female servant. He stared in disapproval when a male friend arrived in shorts, on the way to a soccer game. In the broiling heat of Saudi Arabia, he even urged his brothers not to wear short-sleeved shirts. In Syria, offended by the sound of a woman singing in a sexy voice, he ordered a driver to turn off the car radio.

“Around eighteen or nineteen or so,” his half-brother Yeslam would say of Osama after 9/11, “he was already more religious than the average person or the average member of the family.” Most Westerners might think that comment a gross understatement and dismiss Osama as having been an obsessive, a religious nut. To be super-strict about religion, however, was not—is not—unusual in Saudi Arabia. Far from alienating everyone, Osama’s zealotry earned him respect. “His family revered him for his piety,” his sister-in-law Carmen said. “Never once did I hear anyone murmur that his fervor might be a little excessive.”

Osama would rise to pray even during the night, Batarfi remembered. It was not compulsory for Muslims, but it was “following the example of the Prophet.” When he went on from school to university—he would start but not complete his economics degree—Osama became close to a fellow student named Jamal Khalifa, one day to become his brother-in-law. “I was almost twenty, and he was nineteen,” Khalifa remembered. “We were religious … very conservative; we go to that extreme side.”

Osama no longer watched movies. He did not watch television, except for news programs, and he avoided music with instruments, which some religious advisers deemed sinful. He disapproved of art, so no pictures hung on the walls. He avoided being photographed, though this was a matter on which he was to vacillate.

The shift to the extreme had not happened overnight. Looking back, Najwa remembered how—even while still at school—her husband had regularly gone out at night “for impassioned discussion of political or religious topics.” Even before his marriage, a schoolfriend revealed, Osama and a half dozen other boys had begun studying Islam after school hours, taught by a Syrian teacher on the staff who was a member of the Muslim Brotherhood. It was at his urging that Osama memorized the Qur’an, under his tutelage that Osama and friends themselves began attending secret meetings of the Brotherhood.

In their impressionable teenage years, meanwhile, bin Laden and his contemporaries lived through a decade that destabilized the Arab world. The running sore of Palestine remained a concern for everyone. When Osama watched the news on television, he wept.

At his house, Batarfi recalled, they and their friends would “sing religious chants about Muslim youth and Palestine.” The 1973 war, when Israel managed to beat back invading Arab forces, had been a great humiliation. Saudi Arabia’s participation in the oil embargo that followed, the first use of the oil weapon against the West, had been a temporary consolation.

The year 1979, when Osama turned twenty-two, marked the start of a new century in the Islamic calendar, a time said to herald change.

Sure enough, upheaval piled on upheaval. First, and in the name of Islam, came the toppling of the monarchy in Iran, a monarchy that had long been sustained by the United States. Then, in November, came a bloody event in Saudi Arabia itself, one in which Osama may have played a minor role.

“For forty years,” Osama would say years later, “my father kept on waiting for the appearance of Hazrat Mahdi. He had set aside some twelve million dollars for the Mahdi.” The Mahdi, according to some Islamic texts, is an Islamic Messiah who will return to earth, bring justice in a time of oppression, and establish true Islamic government.

In 1979, a Saudi religious zealot claimed that the Mahdi had arrived—in the shape of his brother-in-law, a university drop-out named al-Qahtani. They and some five hundred heavily armed comrades then committed the unprecedented outrage of seizing the Grand Mosque in Mecca—one of the three holy places that bin Laden Sr. had renovated. They entered the mosque, indeed, through an entrance used by the bin Laden company, which was still completing construction within the complex.

This was more than sacrilege. It was sedition. The zealots accused the Saudi royal house of being pawns of the West, traitors to the faith. The government crushed the insurrection, but only after a bloody standoff that lasted for two weeks. Hundreds died in the battles, and sixty-eight prisoners were later beheaded.

The Mahdi did not survive to be executed. He had believed, until the fatal moment that he discovered otherwise, that he could pick up five live hand grenades and not be harmed.

THE MONTH AFTER the battle at the mosque, forty thousand Soviet troops began pouring into Afghanistan, the vanguard of an army that would eventually become a hundred thousand strong. The invasion marked the start of a savage conflict that would last almost a decade, kill a million Afghans, and drive some five million into exile. Long before it ended, it became a trial of strength between the Soviet Union and the United States—at the time underreported and minimally understood by the American public.

The war got scant attention not least because it did not involve the commitment of American troops. It was, rather, a purposeful, secret war to push back communism. Covertly, the United States committed cash and weaponry on a grand scale, using Afghans and foreign irregulars to do the fighting. Appropriately for a secret war, the conflict was orchestrated by the intelligence agencies of three nations: America, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia.

So it was that, very relevantly for the 9/11 story, the Afghan saga that began in 1979 drew in two men, Osama bin Laden and Abdullah Azzam.

“MY FATHER,” bin Laden would one day tell a visitor, “was very keen that one of his sons should fight against the enemies of Islam. So I am the one son who is acting according to the wishes of his father.”

He had been called, he also believed, by a higher power. “Just remember this,” he was to tell his son Omar. “I was put on this earth by God for a specific reason. My only reason for living is to fight the jihad.… Muslims are the mistreated of the world. It is my mission to make certain that other nations take Islam seriously.”

IN 1979, the day bin Laden would be taken truly seriously was still more than two decades away. It was then, however, that—as his friend Batarfi has said, “the nightmare started.”

EIGHTEEN

ON EVERY LEG OF THE JOURNEY TO 9/11—OVER ALL THE TWENTY-ONE years that followed the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan—there would never be a time when several intelligence agencies were not involved.

Truth for public consumption is not a tool much favored by intelligence services. Those who direct the agencies prefer not to share information at all, except—in principle—with their own governments. It may, on occasion and in democracies, be useful to offer information to others—to investigating commissions, congressional and parliamentary committees, and the like, even to the media—but rarely can it be wholly relied upon.

Only rarely does an intelligence agency reveal facts inimical to its own interests. Most often, intelligence sources share only information that it is useful to share—in other words, self-serving. Such information is not necessarily truthful.

The natural impulse of the general public in the West may be to give credence to accounts provided by “our” intelligence—publicly and officially or through “sources.” Such trust, though, may be misplaced. Like any story told by humans, an account given by an intelligence agency—domestic or foreign—may be only partially true. It may even be an outright lie.

WHAT IS CLEAR is that Saudi Arabia’s intelligence service, the GID, reached out for bin Laden early in the Afghan confrontation with the Soviets—through his former school science teacher, Ahmed Badeeb. Badeeb had kept an eye on his pupil during his days on the school’s religious committee, had liked him, thought him “decent … polite,” and—now that bin Laden was in his early twenties—saw a role for him.

Badeeb had gone up in the world. He was no longer a science teacher but chief of staff to GID’s director, Prince Turki al-Faisal. Turki was in the second year of what was to be a long career as chief of the agency. He was American-educated, a man who could relate easily to his U.S. counterparts. The GID and the CIA liaised closely with each other from the moment he became director—on his terms, not Washington’s.

For the United States, the coming struggle with the Soviets was a pivotal confrontation in the Cold War. For the Saudi government in 1980, it was much more than that. Afghanistan was a fellow Muslim nation overwhelmed by catastrophe. Uncounted numbers of its citizens were swarming into Pakistan as refugees. To bring aid to the Afghans, and being seen to do it, was to aid the cause of Islam.

That aside, it was feared that the Soviet thrust heralded an eventual threat to Saudi Arabia itself. Prince Turki was soon shuttling between Riyadh and Pakistan, networking with Pakistan’s Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence—ISI—triggering a relief effort that was to last far into the future.

On another tack, and in great secrecy, the GID and the CIA worked together to support the Afghan rebels’ fight against the Soviets. Thanks to huge sums of money funneled through a Swiss bank account, modern weaponry began to make the rebels a more viable fighting force.

“When the invasion of Afghanistan started,” bin Laden once said, “I was enraged and went there at once. I arrived within days, before the end of 1979.” At GID headquarters, Prince Turki and his aide Badeeb noted bin Laden’s potential. Youthful though he was, as a member of the bin Laden conglomerate he had clout. He had, above all, religious drive and commitment.

“To confront those Russian infidels,” bin Laden said, “the Saudis chose me as their representative in Afghanistan. When they decided to participate actively in the Islamic resistance they turned to the bin Laden family … which had close links to the royal family. And my family designated me. I installed myself in Pakistan, in the frontier region bordering on Afghanistan. There I received the volunteers who arrived from Saudi Arabia and all the Arab and Muslim countries.”

Prince Turki has admitted having met bin Laden a couple of times in that early period, while avoiding going into detail. His former chief of staff Badeeb has been more forthright. Bin Laden, he has said, “had a strong relation with the Saudi intelligence and with our embassy in Pakistan.… He was our man.… We were happy with him.… He had a good relationship with the ambassador, and with all Saudi ambassadors who served there. At times, the embassy would ask bin Laden for some things and he would respond positively.… The Pakistanis, too, saw in him one who was helping them do what they wanted done there.”

According to one of the most well-informed sources on the conflict, the journalist Ahmed Rashid, Pakistan’s ISI had wanted Turki “to provide a royal prince to lead the Saudi contingent.” In bin Laden, with his family’s links to the Saudi royals, they got the next best thing.

What was required of him in the early 1980s was not to fight but to travel to-and-fro, spread money around, cultivate Afghan contacts, make sure that cash got to the right people. Then his activities became entwined with those of Abdullah Azzam, the jihadist whose lectures he had attended at university. The duty of jihad “will not end with victory in Afghanistan,” Azzam was heard to declare. “Jihad will remain an individual obligation until all other lands that were Muslim are returned to us.”

With Saudi support, Azzam moved full-time to Pakistan, and so eventually did bin Laden—at his mentor’s request. By 1986 they were running the office that processed Arab donations and handled recruits rallying to the cause. Funded with money from Saudi Arabia and the Gulf, and his own wealth, bin Laden ensured that arrivals were housed, cared for if they were sick or wounded, and fed Islamic propaganda.

Newcomers stayed initially at a building called Beit al-Ansar, which translates as Place of the Supporters. That was a reference to an episode in the story of the Prophet Mohammed, but it resonates today in another way. Twelve years later, some of the future 9/11 hijackers would give their apartment that name. Azzam, for his part, toured the United States regularly, raising funds and starting what eventually became a nationwide support system.

At some point, according to a source quoted by Barnett Rubin, now a senior State Department adviser on Pakistan and Afghanistan, the CIA “enlisted” Azzam. Did the Agency have any involvement with bin Laden himself?

The CIA had significantly ratcheted up its support for the anti-Soviet forces by the mid-1980s. U.S. funding, $470 million in 1986, continued to soar, and the agency saw to it that more and better weapons reached the Afghans. Under a supposedly strict, immutable arrangement, however—necessary to the United States to ensure deniability, to Pakistan to retain control—all this assistance was handled by the ISI, Pakistan’s intelligence service. Officials of the day have played down the notion that there was American contact with bin Laden, or anyone else in the field.

Reputable authors have reported how the CIA on occasion circumvented the rules. While the bulk of the mujahideen were trained by Pakistani officers, some of the officers were trained in the States. U.S. and British Special Forces veterans entered Afghanistan and operated alongside the fighters. American cash went to at least one Afghan commander who collaborated with bin Laden.

Other voices claim there was an early link between the CIA and bin Laden himself. Michael Springmann, who in 1986 and 1987 headed the Non-Immigrant Visa Section at the U.S. consulate in Jeddah, said that the CIA forced him against his will to issue visas to people who would otherwise have been ineligible. “What I was protesting was, in reality, an effort to bring recruits, rounded up by [the Agency and] Osama bin Laden, to the U.S. for terrorists training by the CIA. They would then be returned to Afghanistan to fight against the Soviets.”

Simon Reeve, a British author, cited a “former CIA official” as saying that “U.S. emissaries met directly with bin Laden.” According to this source it was bin Laden, acting on advice from Saudi intelligence, who suggested that the mujahideen be supplied with the Stinger missiles that proved devastatingly effective against Soviet airpower.

“Bin Laden,” wrote former British foreign secretary Robin Cook, “was a product of a monumental miscalculation of Western security agencies. Throughout the 80s he was armed by the CIA and funded by the Saudis to wage jihad against the Russian occupation of Afghanistan.”

In a little-known interview, bin Laden himself appeared to offer a revelation. “I created my first camps,” he said in 1995, “where these volunteers underwent training, instructed by Pakistani and American officers [authors’ italics]. The arms were provided by the Americans and the money by the Saudis.”

Then, a year later, bin Laden reversed himself. “Personally,” he said in 1996, “neither I nor my brothers saw evidence of American help.”

Statements by Osama bin Laden—and for that matter those of intelligence officials—rarely contribute much to historical clarity.

THE USE THE GID SAW for bin Laden initially put him nowhere near the combat zone. “The Saudi government,” he would recall, had “officially asked me not to enter Afghanistan, due to how close my family is to the Saudi leadership. They ordered me to stay in Peshawar [Pakistan], because in the event the Russians arrested me that would be a proof of our support for the mujahideen.… I didn’t listen to them, and went into Afghanistan for the first time.”

Quite early in the 1980s, back in Jeddah, Najwa bin Laden heard her husband tell other family members that he had entered the Afghan war zone. He mentioned, too, that he had handled the controls of a helicopter. She began to probe a little but he merely said, “Najwa, stop thinking.” As a dutiful Saudi wife, she knew it was not her place to ask what her husband did outside the home.

Many Arabs who answered the call to jihad never saw actual fighting, but bin Laden saw to it that some of them did. He eventually set up a base at Jaji, ten miles inside Afghanistan and not far from a Soviet base, and called it Maasada, or the Lion’s Den. It was there that he and his Arabs had their baptism of fire.

One of Azzam’s sons recalled how, greenhorn that he was, bin Laden initially reacted to explosions by running away. Soon, however, he and his men gained a reputation for breathtaking bravery in terrifying circumstances—for a reason that Westerners can barely begin to understand. One observer saw a man in tears because he survived an attack. For jihadis, Azzam would say, had a “thirst for martyrdom.” The fact that he himself had not taken part in the fighting earlier, bin Laden said, “requires my own martyrdom in the name of God.”

“As Muslims,” he explained to the British journalist Robert Fisk, “we believe that when we die we go to heaven. Before a battle, God sends us seqina, tranquillity.” “I was so peaceful in my heart,” he said of one experience under bombing in Afghanistan, “that I fell asleep.”

In 1989, after the deaths of more than a million Afghans and some fifteen thousand Soviets, the Russians pulled out of Afghanistan. With the Afghan communist regime still in place, however, the conflict merely entered a new phase. Bin Laden and an Arab force, who took part in an attempt to take the eastern city of Jalalabad, suffered appalling casualties. Their contribution had been botched and ill-planned, but Saudi propaganda mills continued to profile bin Laden as a champion of Islam.

He “took charge of the closest front lines to the enemy,” trumpeted Jihad magazine, “started attacking with every hero that God gave him. Their number increased in view of their desire to take part in the deliverance of Jalalabad under the command of Osama bin Laden.” And: “the land of Jalalabad swallowed one lion after another. Osama had pain every time he said goodbye to one mujahid. And every time he would say goodbye a new rocket would come and take another.”

Bin Laden had for some time been having disagreements with his mentor, Azzam. That year, however, their differences became moot. Azzam and two of his sons were assassinated as they drove to the mosque to pray. Who was behind their murder was never established, let alone the motive. Bin Laden had left for Saudi Arabia a few weeks earlier, to be met with a hero’s welcome.

He was greeted in Jeddah, by one account, by the crown prince himself, Abdullah bin Abdul Aziz. The great and the good of Jeddah feted bin Laden, threw feasts to celebrate his prowess. He gave talks on his experiences at the mosque and in private homes. Bin Laden recordings about the Afghan campaign circulated on audiocassette, and he featured largely in a film that was being made.

Heady stuff for a man who had just turned thirty-two. For a while, to Najwa’s relief, he went back to work for the bin Laden construction company. Since the start of Osama’s involvement in Afghanistan, there had been many changes in their domestic life.

He had taken a second wife, then a third, then a fourth. Though it is proper under religious law to take up to four wives, this had at first troubled Najwa. She reconciled herself to the new arrangements, she said, when her husband explained that “his aim was purely to have many children for Islam.” Religion did dominate bin Laden’s thinking, but—with male acquaintances—he joked about his polygamy. “I have four wives waiting for me,” he would say. “Time for some fun.”

The fun certainly produced his quota of bin Laden children for Islam. There were eleven children by late 1989, and more would follow. A total as of 2001—with one intervening divorce, an annulment, and one more wife along the way—of twenty.

His friend Jamal Khalifa thought bin Laden was good with his children. “I never saw him shouting at his kids, hitting his kids. Even his wives, they never say he has treated them bad … his wives, they like him so much.” As time passed, meanwhile, it became clear that—wealthy though he might be—bin Laden believed that being “a good Muslim” required severe austerity. He decreed, Najwa has said, “that our home furnishings should be plain, our clothes modest in number.” He considered Islamic beliefs to have been “corrupted by modernization,” and forbade his wives to use the air-conditioning or the refrigerator. To ensure a supply of fresh milk, he kept cows.

Bin Laden was more severe with his children than Khalifa saw. “We were allowed to speak in his presence,” recalled his son Omar, “but our voices must be kept low.… We were told that we must not become excited.… We should be serious about everything.… We were not allowed to tell jokes.… He would allow us to smile so long as we did not laugh. If we were to lose control of our emotions and bark a laugh, we must be careful not to expose our eye teeth. I have been in situations where my father actually counted the exposed teeth, reprimanding his sons on the number their merriment revealed.”

The entire family was supposed to “live just as the Prophet had lived, whenever possible.” Unless a family member were to become mortally ill, they were forbidden to use modern medicines. For asthma, which afflicted all the boys, bin Laden insisted on a natural remedy—breathing through a honeycomb rather than using an inhaler. Instead of toys, Omar recalled, “Father would give us some goats to play with, telling us that we needed nothing more than God’s natural gifts to be happy.…

“From the time we were toddlers, he demanded that we be given very little water.… Our father would transport his sons into the dry desert … bin Laden sons must be physically immune to inhospitable desert heat.” Bin Laden was teaching them, Khalifa has said, “how to be a mujahid, trying to bring them up on jihad, on jihad thinking.” He had taken his eldest son, Abdullah, into the Afghan war zone when he was only ten years old.

The “shy” side of bin Laden was no longer so evident. His experience in Afghanistan had given him confidence. At meetings there, speaking clearly in elegant, classical Arabic, “like a university professor,” he had sat at the head of the table handing down decisions. “We will do this,” he would say. “We will do that …”

Canadian journalist David Cobain, who had encountered bin Laden outside Afghanistan, noted his “still, silent intensity,” the way he would sit “gazing unblinkingly at everything.… He had the extraordinary quality of attracting and holding one’s attention inactively, by his presence, by the impression he gave of other-worldliness.”

AS THE STRUGGLE against the Soviets ended, the CIA thought the most radical Islamic groups—backed by Pakistan’s ISI—would be most effective in the effort to remove the residual communist regime. Far from showing gratitude for the U.S. contribution to beating the Soviets, however, the fundamentalists proved virulently anti-American.

Working with the United States, bin Laden was to say, had all along been only a “tactical alliance.” America’s motive in Afghanistan had merely been self-interest. “The United States was not interested in our jihad. It was only afraid that Russia would gain access to warm waters [i.e., the Gulf].… The United States has no principles.

“In our struggle against the communists, our aim was the Islamic revolution, whoever our allies might be.… We got involved as Muslim fighters against Soviet atheism, not as American auxiliaries. The urgent thing was to deal with communism, but the next target was the United States.… I began by allying myself with them, and I finished without them.”

“Every Muslim,” bin Laden was to claim, “hates Americans, hates Jews, and hates Christians. This is a part of our belief and our religion. For as long as I can remember, I have felt tormented and at war, and have felt hatred and animosity for Americans.”

Three firsthand accounts indicate that bin Laden was hostile to Westerners by the time the Soviets left Afghanistan.

Dana Rohrabacher, former Reagan White House aide and future congressman, recalled coming across an unusual encampment near Jalalabad. “We could see these tents, luxurious tents … more like a modern-day camping expedition by some rich people with SUVs than a mujahideen camp.… I was told immediately that that was the camp of the Saudis and that I should keep my mouth shut and no English should be spoken until we were far away … because they said there was a crazy man in that camp who hated Americans, worse than he hated the Soviets.… They said, ‘That man’s name is bin Laden.’ ”

A few months later, two experienced war reporters had separate encounters with bin Laden near Jalalabad. Edward Girardet, a Swiss American with long experience of the conflict, found himself confronted by “a tall, bearded man flanked by armed men,” demanding in English, with a slight American accent, “to know who I was and what I, a kafir [infidel], was doing in Afghanistan. For the next forty-five minutes we had a heated debate about the war, religion, and foreigners. Haughty, self-righteous, and utterly sure of himself, he proceeded to lambast the West for its feebleness and lack of moral conviction.” When Girardet held out his hand to say goodbye, the tall man refused to shake. Instead, he threatened, “If you ever come again, I’ll kill you.”

The BBC reporter John Simpson and his crew also had an unpleasant encounter with the tall, bearded figure. This time, the man actively urged the mujahideen present to kill Simpson and his colleagues. No one obliged—the group around bin Laden included more moderate Afghan fighters. The driver of an ammunition truck, offered $500 to run down the “infidels,” also declined.

The murderous threats aside, Girardet and Simpson both thought there was something peculiar about the man in white. “The best description I can give,” Girardet said, “is that he sort of came across as being a rather spoiled brat, like he was sort of ‘playing at jihad.’ Kind of an ‘I’m here now, look at me,’ sort of thing.”

John Simpson, for his part, witnessed something bizarre. Toward the end of the encounter, when the tall Arab ran off toward the mujahideen sleeping area, the BBC crew followed—only to find their would-be nemesis “lying full-length on a camp-bed, weeping and beating his fists on the pillow.”

Looking back, Simpson vividly remembered how the Arab who wanted him dead had looked at that moment. He remembered especially the eyes: with that “crazy, handsome glitter—the Desert Sheikh meets Hannibal Lecter.”

Only years later, when the news was filled with stories and photographs of bin Laden, did Girardet and Simpson realize just who the menacing Arab had been.

THE MEN AROUND bin Laden had indeed long since deferred to him, as they had to his mentor, Azzam, before his death, as sheikh. Azzam had said jihad needed a “vanguard,” a leadership that would give the dreamed-of future Islamic society a “strong foundation.” The Arabic words he used for “strong foundation” were “al-qaeda al-sulbah.”

A few months later, in 1988, Azzam, bin Laden, and a handful of comrades had discussed plans for how to make progress once the Soviets finally left. Initially, they planned, they would maintain a militia of some three hundred men. Those who enlisted would make a pledge, “so that the word of God will be the highest and his religion victorious.” The camps in which they would train would be “al-qa’ida al’askariyya”—the Military Base.

Those who do not understand Arabic—these authors included—might interpret these utterances as the birth of the dragon that the Western media now calls “al Qaeda.” Not so, recent scholarship suggests. The word does mean “the foundation” or “the base”—and other things, for such is Arabic. More than one future bin Laden militant, though, would say he never heard the name “al Qaeda”—referring to an organization or fighting entity—before 9/11. Bin Laden himself would not refer to “members of al Qaeda” until shortly before 9/11.

“He rang me to explain,” Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi said of a call from bin Laden after the anti-Soviet conflict. “He said al Qaeda was an organization to record the names of the mujahideen and all their contact details: a database.… So wherever jihad needed fighting, in the Philippines or Central Asia or anywhere in the world, you could get in touch with the fighters quickly.”

All the same, a seed had been sown.

The ISI chief of the day, Hamid Gul, was asked in 1989 whether it had not been “playing with fire” to bring in Muslim radicals. “We are fighting a jihad,” Gul replied. “The communists have their international brigades, the West has NATO, why can’t the Muslims unite and form a common front?”

Gul was replaced as head of ISI by Benazir Bhutto, the moderate, Western-educated prime minister who had come to power in Pakistan the previous year. At a private meeting with President George H. W. Bush, she said, “I mentioned that in our common zeal to most effectively combat the Soviets in Afghanistan, our countries had made a strategic decision to empower the most fanatical elements of the mujahideen.… I sadly said to President Bush, ‘Mr. President, I’m afraid we have created a Frankenstein’s monster that could come back to haunt us in the future.’ ”

THE FUTURE CAST of 9/11’s characters was now waiting in the wings. Ayman al-Zawahiri, a doctor by training, led a clique of militant Egyptians in Afghanistan. Though his specialty was eye surgery, he had dealt with every sort of injury and ailment during the conflict—including bin Laden’s chronic low blood pressure. One day, he would become bin Laden’s principal cohort. Bin Laden and Mohammed Atef, who would become his strategist and senior commander, had fought side by side. All three of them knew Omar Abdel Rahman, the incendiary preacher later to be known in the West as the “Blind Sheikh.”

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who would one day claim to have been the principal planner of 9/11, was in his mid-twenties in 1989. Ramzi Yousef, who would lead a first attempt to destroy the World Trade Center, was still at college. Both of them were passionately hostile to the United States because of its support for Israel.

Mohamed Atta, who was to lead the 9/11 hijackers, was just twenty-one and studying architecture at Cairo University. His future fellow “pilots,” Hani Hanjour, Ziad Jarrah, and Marwan al-Shehhi, were seventeen, fourteen, and eleven.

As a little boy, Jarrah had lived near the refugee camp where hundreds of Palestinian refugees had been slaughtered—by Christian militiamen with the knowledge of Israeli commanders—during Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon.

The plight of the Palestinians, the rise and rise of Israel, and America’s consistent support of Israel preoccupied bin Laden from very early on. His mother has recalled him, as a teenager, being “concerned, sad, and frustrated about the situation in Palestine in particular.” It was essential, bin Laden said even then, “to reclaim Palestine.”

By the mid-1980s, bin Laden was already speaking out publicly about boycotting American products. He would not drink Coca-Cola, Pepsi, or 7-Up, or allow his children to drink such beverages. “The Americans take our money,” he recalled saying, “and give it to the Jews so that they can kill our children with it in Palestine.” “Our” children, because Palestinians were fellow Arabs, part of the wider Arab community. He was to raise the Palestine issue and excoriate American support for Israel time and again—until as recently as 2009.

The 1982 Israeli assault on Lebanon, bin Laden said after 9/11, made a lasting impression on him. “America allowed the Israelis to invade Lebanon,” he declared. “They started bombing, killing and wounding many.… I still remember those distressing scenes: blood, torn limbs, women and children massacred.… It was like a crocodile devouring a child, who could do nothing but scream.… The whole world heard and saw what happened, but did nothing.”

It was then, bin Laden asserted, that something like 9/11 first occurred to him. He watched, presumably on television, as Israel bombarded the high-rise apartment blocks that housed many Palestinians in Beirut. “The idea came to me,” he asserted, “when things went just too far with the American-Israeli alliance’s oppression and atrocities against our people in Palestine and Lebanon.… As I looked at those destroyed towers in Lebanon, it occurred to me to punish the oppressor in kind by destroying towers in America, so that it would get a taste of its own medicine.”

“The events of Manhattan,” he would say on an audiotaped message broadcast after 9/11, “were retaliation against the American-Israeli alliance’s aggression against our people in Palestine and Lebanon.”

PERHAPS SO. While he was still the hero home from the war, though, a further grievance against the United States arose on his home territory—one that, for bin Laden and many other Saudis—loomed at least as large as Palestine.

NINETEEN

IN AUGUST 1990, OSAMA BIN LADEN STOCKED UP ON FOOD SUPPLIES, candles, gas masks, and portable communications equipment. In the event of the need for a quick getaway, he had a more powerful engine fitted to the boat he kept at the family marina. At home, he got his sons to help him cover the windows with adhesive tape. The tape, he explained, was in case of bombing, to protect the family from broken glass.

Bombing was a possibility. Saddam Hussein’s army had overrun neighboring Kuwait and appeared poised to push on into Saudi Arabia. Bin Laden despised the Iraqi president, whom he considered an unbeliever. Saddam, he predicted, “will attack Saudi Arabia for possession of the oilfields in the eastern province.”

Oil was what mattered, the one thing that really mattered, to all the nations involved. It was the only reason, certainly, that Saudi Arabia had ever mattered to the Americans. “The defense of Saudi Arabia,” President Franklin Roosevelt had said back in 1943, “is vital to the defense of the United States.” Half a century on and within twenty-four hours of the Iraqi invasion, the first President Bush now made a promise. “If you ask for help from the United States,” he told Saudi ambassador Prince Bandar, “we will go all the way with you.”

Four days later, at King Fahd’s seaside palace in Jeddah, a senior U.S. delegation told the monarch what a request for help would mean. Some 300,000 Iraqi troops and almost three thousand tanks were threatening the border. To drive them back and throw them out of Kuwait, General Norman Schwarzkopf explained, would mean “flooding his airfields, harbors and military bases with tens of thousands more Americans than Saudi Arabia had ever seen.”

To allow a foreign and overwhelmingly Christian army to enter the country—the sacred land of the Prophet—would be seen by much of the Saudi population as heinous sacrilege. Everything in the country, everything, revolved around religion. “This is something that a Westerner will never understand,” one of the royals, Prince Amr, later explained to a foreigner. “Religion is the law.… It is rooted in the history. It is part of the DNA, if you like, of the Saudis.”

At least a third of the Saudi school curriculum was devoted to religious study. Holy writ, children were taught, held that “the last hour won’t come before the Muslims fight the Jews and the Muslims kill them.” This was a land with a religious police, a Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice, empowered to raid people’s homes, make arrests, and use physical force to compel obedience to religious rules. Censors blacked out any part of a foreign newspaper or magazine that contained comment on Saudi Arabia, any reference to Israel—or illustrations that showed even an inch of a woman’s limbs or neck.

This was a land where extremism ruled, from the preposterous to the barbaric: where oil dollars built a concert hall in which no performance was permitted, where Islamic courts ruled against the playing of music on phone recordings; where ownership of a Christian Bible could—and shortly would—lead to public execution by beheading.

According to the incumbent Grand Mufti, the nation’s highest official of religious law, it was “a requirement of Muslims to be hostile to the Jews and the Christians and other polytheists.” “The unbelievers,” he wrote, “are the enemy, do not trust them.”

The notion of inviting in an American army to fight off the Iraqis, then, was unthinkable. At the meeting with the U.S. delegation, the royals present held a brief animated exchange in Arabic. Crown Prince Abdullah urged King Fahd not to make a decision until tribal and religious leaders had been consulted. Fahd, however, had already made up his mind. Better to take a risk domestically than to lose the throne, to lose the entire country, to Saddam Hussein. The king reportedly turned to Dick Cheney—then secretary of defense—and said, “Okay.”

With those two syllables, Fahd had authorized a U.S. military presence that would eventually total half a million men—and not only men. How, in Saudi Arabia, to deal with the problem of female American soldiers—working in the heat—showing their forearms in public? Schwarzkopf promised that no female entertainers would be brought in to entertain the troops—only for the king to complain when CNN ran pictures of soldiers applauding female dancers. Only the dancers’ legs were shown, but that was beyond the pale.

How to deal with Christmas carols in a Saudi war zone? Schwarzkopf solved the problem—more or less—by ensuring that only instrumental versions were broadcast. All Christian and Jewish emblems, he ordered, were to be concealed or removed from uniforms.

Where could Jewish soldiers serving with the U.S. force observe the Sabbath? The Americans told the Saudis they would ferry them to naval ships at sea for the occasion. Senior Saudis, for their part, agreed to turn a blind eye to American soldiers bringing Bibles into the country.

All those issues aside, the military offensive to oust the Iraqis had to be launched before March—the start of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan.

News of the decision to allow in U.S. troops stunned ordinary Saudis. For bin Laden, it came as a cultural thunderbolt. “Pollution,” he said, hung in the air around anyone who was not a Muslim. As a renowned Afghan war hero, with a following of loyal veterans, he fooled himself into thinking he could offer a viable alternative.

Bin Laden obtained meetings with several royals, including Interior Minister Prince Naif and Defense Minister Prince Sultan. An imam present at one of the audiences, Professor Khalil-Khalil, recalled how bin Laden “kept asking the government officials in the room why they had brought the Americans into this war … said he wanted to fight alongside the Saudi army. The Prince asked bin Laden whether or not he had his own army. Bin Laden said that he did, and that he had a 20,000 person standing army, with 40,000 in reserves.” His proposals were militarily preposterous on their face.

Not satisfied with seeing senior ministers, however, bin Laden requested an audience with the king himself. The request went nowhere, not least because bin Laden had said that he “didn’t care about King Fahd, only about Allah.” He was sent on his way with a royal “Don’t call us. We’ll call you.”

Bin Laden personally got away with this. The hundred or so war veterans he had brought into the country, however, and some of his personal staff were arrested. They were released only after bin Laden had made a string of calls to various princes. Unrepentant, he then began speaking out in public, arranging the distribution of flyers and audiotapes that claimed Saudi Arabia was becoming “a colony of America.”

The United States, meanwhile, leading a coalition of troops from thirty-two nations—including Saudi Arabia and several Muslim countries—duly recaptured Kuwait. Iraq was routed, at huge cost in men and matériel, in the brilliant operation remembered as Desert Storm. Even had bin Laden been able to resign himself to a temporary American presence, however, there was now a further affront. After the war, contrary to what he and like-minded objectors had hoped, some five thousand American troops and several bases remained. The American military did not leave Saudi Arabia.

IT WAS, FATEFULLY, bin Laden who departed. The precise reason that he left, and under what conditions, is lost in the fog of conflicting information supplied by Saudi and CIA sources. The shapes in that fog may tell us something.

To at least some in the Saudi government, bin Laden had become a political pest at a difficult time. In the groundswell of protest over the U.S. presence, his very public dissent was galling. So was his attempt to use his veterans for a new jihad, against the communist regime that controlled part of neighboring Yemen. Bin Laden’s passport was reportedly seized, his movements within Saudi Arabia restricted.

Then suddenly, in April 1991, he was cleared to travel. “One day,” his son Omar recalled, “my father disappeared without telling us anything.” He had gone to Pakistan—supposedly to attend an Islamic conference, or look after a business matter. “We didn’t say, ‘Get out!’ ” Prince Bandar has said. “He left because he thought it was getting to the point where what he was saying and doing was not going to be accepted.”

The truth was probably not so simple. The whole purpose of confiscating bin Laden’s passport, after all, had been to prevent him going abroad to make trouble. Why return it? One Saudi intelligence source said bin Laden was told he should leave because “the U.S. government was planning to kill him … so the royal family would do him a favor and get him out of the kingdom for his own protection.” This makes no sense. Bin Laden had as yet perpetrated no crimes against the United States. As yet, Washington had no motive to want him dead.

Accounts vary as to the circumstances of bin Laden’s departure. Former senior CIA officer Michael Scheuer has written that he managed to leave by “using the intervention of his brothers to convince the Saudi officials to let him travel on condition he would return.…” Author Lawrence Wright, for his part, wrote that many “prominent princes and sheikhs” interceded on his behalf. Interior minister Naif authorized the departure, but only after bin Laden signed “a pledge that he would not interfere with the politics of Saudi Arabia or any Arab country.”

Out of the Kingdom, bin Laden would be free to pursue jihad. That, in the context of fighting for Islam, would be very much in line with Saudi foreign policy. If this scenario is accurate, the long-term implications are grave.

Just who did launch bin Laden on his career as international terrorist? In a little noted passage, the 9/11 Commission Report stated as fact that he had gotten out of Saudi Arabia “with help from a dissident member of the royal family.” The Commission had this information from three of bin Laden’s close associates. Some believe that there were dissidents among the royal princes, men who continued to sympathize with bin Laden’s views and to support him for years to come. Until and perhaps even after 9/11.

Troubling clues that raise suspicion as to the true role of the Saudis, and particularly the activity of certain Saudi royals, proliferate throughout this story.

“GO TO SUDAN,” a friend in the government had advised bin Laden. “You can organize a holy war from there.”

An Islamic regime had recently come to power in Sudan, and bin Laden had been buying up land in that desperately poor North African country. So it was, in the summer of 1991, that he made Khartoum his destination. His four wives and their children—fourteen by now—arrived later direct from Saudi Arabia. They were whisked through the airport, ushered into luxury cars, and driven away in style. As a hero of jihad, and a very generous millionaire, bin Laden was the guest of Sudan’s president.

Bin Laden and his family were to stay for five years. They took over several houses in a wealthy suburb of Khartoum, a three-story home and large garden for the wives and children, three houses for the servants and security men, an office, and a guesthouse where bin Laden received visitors. The family dwelling had some European furniture and a profusion of blue cushions laid out Arab-style but not a single picture to decorate the walls.

In this new setting, bin Laden continued to insist on austerity. Modern conveniences were to his mind contrary to Muslim law or just plain extravagant. On a visit to Sudan, the Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi asked him why his robe appeared all wrinkled. “You know how many kilowatts of electricity an iron consumes?” bin Laden asked. “I don’t need an iron. I’m trying to live my life without electricity.” He told his wives not to use the refrigerator, the electric stoves, or—in the searing heat—the air-conditioning.

Bin Laden’s sons attended the best private school in Sudan, while the girls went to no school at all. Instead, they got rudimentary lessons at home, from an aunt. Bin Laden did not approve of formal education for girls. He had more time for his children now, though they might have preferred otherwise. Omar recalled how he and his brothers were punished. “His wooden cane was his favorite weapon.… It was not unusual for the sons of bin Laden to be covered with raised welts on our backs and legs.”

If he thought his sons had defied him, bin Laden could turn apoplectic with rage. Once, when he told Omar to wash an honored guest’s hands—in line with bin Laden’s reading of the correct etiquette—the visitor demurred, saying he would wash himself. Omar handed over the water jug accordingly, only to have his father misconstrue what was happening. “Why do you embarrass me?” he bellowed. “Why should he wash your hands? You are a nobody!” So angry was his father, Omar recalled, that “spit spewed from his mouth.”

Notwithstanding patriarchal explosions, first wife Najwa found a measure of contentment in Sudan. “My husband did not travel so much.… He had arrangements with high officials in the Sudanese government to build roads and factories.… Osama’s favorite undertaking was working the land, growing the best corn and the biggest sunflowers.… Nothing made my husband happier than showing off his huge sunflowers.”

Eighteen months later, in his first interview of substance with a Western journalist, bin Laden described himself as merely an “agriculturalist” and “construction engineer.” Using the bulldozers and other equipment he had once used to build roads for the mujahideen in Afghanistan, he said, he and his men had undertaken a major highway project for the benefit of the Sudanese people.

The reporter, the British Independent’s Robert Fisk, looked carefully at his interviewee. With his high cheekbones and narrowed eyes, resplendent in a gold-fringed robe, he thought bin Laden looked “every inch the mountain warrior of mujahideen legend.” Was there truth to the rumors, Fisk ventured, that he had brought his Arab veterans to the Sudan to train for future jihad? That, bin Laden said, was “the rubbish of the media.”

Bin Laden had not, however, forgotten jihad. Several hundred of his jihadis had indeed migrated to the Sudan. This was a place and a time for training—and hatching plots.

Bin Laden’s mentor, Azzam, had once called for worldwide war to recover all territory that had historically been part of Islam. “Jihad,” he had written, “will remain an individual obligation until all other lands that were Muslim are returned to us … before us lie Palestine, Bokhara [part of Uzbekistan], Lebanon, Chad, Eritrea, Somalia, the Philippines, Burma, Southern Yemen, Tashkent [also in Uzbekistan] and Andalusia [the region of southern Spain that the Arabs had ruled until the late fifteenth century].”

If bin Laden’s ambitions did not reach as far into a fantasy Islamic future as Azzam’s, they were grand nonetheless. The task of the young men who joined jihad, bin Laden was to say, was to struggle in “every place in which non-believers’ injustice is perpetrated against Muslims.” With his approval and often with his funding, terrorism in the cause of Islam was on the rise.

• • •

AT ALMOST EXACTLY the time bin Laden arrived in Sudan, another man began working with a Muslim separatist group in the Philippines. He told his contacts he was an “emissary from bin Laden,” acting on behalf of Blind Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman—by then preaching jihad in the United States. He used many names, but the name by which the self-proclaimed “emissary” is known today is Ramzi Yousef.

Bin Laden was one day to claim he did not know Yousef. Yet the links were there. And soon, Yousef would lead the first attempt to bring down the World Trade Center.

TWENTY

HE WAS IN HIS MID-TWENTIES, LEAN, DIMINUTIVE. HE HAD DEGREES in chemistry and electrical engineering. At college in the United Kingdom, where he had studied, he was thought of as “hard-working, conscientious.” A senior FBI official would one day describe him as “poised, articulate, well-educated.” He spoke not only English but several other languages.

Ramzi Yousef was more political than he was fanatically religious. The Palestinian blood he claimed, he said, made him “Palestinian by choice,” and he believed America’s support for Israel gave all Muslims “the right to regard themselves as in a state of war with the U.S. government.”

It had been the anti-Soviet war in Afghanistan, however, that first brought Yousef to jihad. In the Afghan training camps, during a break from his studies in Britain, he learned about explosives—learned so well, some said, that he rapidly became an instructor. Fellow trainees dubbed him “the Chemist.”

Once America had become the enemy, Yousef’s talent made him a deadly adversary. In midsummer 1992, speaking in code on the phone with a like-thinking friend, he referred to his “chocolate training.” The friend did not at first understand so he said simply, “Boom!,” adding that he was going to work in the United States. The friend got the gist.

In New York two years earlier, Blind Sheikh Rahman had preached the need to “break and destroy the morale of the enemies of Allah.” It should be done, he said, by “exploding the structure of their civilized pillars … the touristic infrastructure which they are proud of, and their high buildings.” He and those around him, an FBI informant recalled, often talked of “targeting American symbols.”

The same month Yousef spoke of a mission to America involving explosives, the Blind Sheikh made a phone call to Pakistan. Within weeks, arriving on September 1, the Chemist and an accomplice flew First Class from Karachi to New York’s Kennedy Airport.

The mission almost failed before it began, when the accomplice was stopped by Immigration. He was found to be carrying a false Swedish passport, a Saudi passport that had been altered, Jordanian and British passports, instructions on document forgery, rubber stamps for altering the seal on Saudi passports—and what turned out to be bomb-making instructions. Yousef also raised suspicions. In addition to an Iraqi passport, which turned out to be phony, he was carrying ID in the name of his traveling companion.

The companion was detained and would later be jailed. Yousef, who requested asylum on the grounds that he was fleeing persecution in Iraq, was admitted to the country pending a hearing. He headed at once, investigators later came to believe, for the Al Khifa center in Brooklyn, a focal point for Arabs bound for and returning from Afghanistan. A contact there took him, at least once, to see Blind Sheikh Rahman, the man who had called for exploding America’s “high buildings.”

Over the months that followed, in various apartments in Jersey City—just across the Hudson River from his target—Yousef the Chemist did the work he had come to do. He and accomplices acquired what he needed: 1,000 pounds of urea, 105 gallons of nitric acid, 60 gallons of sulfuric acid, three tanks of compressed hydrogen. At the apartment where the chemicals were mixed, walls became stained, metal items corroded.

By February 25, 1993, all was ready. Yousef and two accomplices loaded the bomb, packed in four large cardboard boxes, into a rented Econoline van. The cylinders of hydrogen, along with containers of nitroglycerine, blasting caps, and fuses, were laid alongside them.

Just after noon the following day, the bombers parked the van in a garage beneath the North Tower of the World Trade Center. Yousef lit the fuses with a cigarette lighter, closed the doors, and made his escape in a waiting car.

The bomb exploded just before 12:18 P.M. At 1,200 pounds, the FBI would rate it “the largest by weight and by damage of any improvised explosive device that we’ve seen since the inception of forensic explosive identification”—more than sixty years earlier.

A mile away, people thought there had been an earthquake. Beneath the ground—the Trade Center reached seven stories below the surface—the bomb opened a crater four stories deep. Burning cars hung from ruined parking levels “like Christmas tree ornaments.” The explosion devastated an underground train station.

Above the explosion point, the blast rocketed upward, cut power, stopped elevators in mid-journey. One elevator, crammed with schoolchildren, was stranded for five hours. Smoke rose as high as the 82nd floor, and thousands of people rushed for the stairwells. Some crowded around windows as if planning to jump—eerily prefiguring the fatal plunges of almost a decade later.

Miraculously, for all the damage, only six people were killed—even though some hundred thousand people worked in or visited the Trade Center complex on an average weekday. More than a thousand were injured, however, sending more people to the hospital—it is said—than any event on the American mainland since the Civil War.

“If they had found the exact architectural Achilles’ heel,” an FBI explosives specialist said of the tower that was hit, “or if the bomb had been a little bit bigger—not much more, 500 lbs. more—I think it would have brought her down.” Yousef would later tell investigators he had wanted to bring the North Tower crashing down on its twin, killing—he hoped—the quarter of a million people he imagined used the complex each day.

He had arranged for a communiqué to be mailed to the press in the name of the “Liberation Army,” saying that the attack had been carried out in response to “the American political, economical, and military support to Israel.… The American people are responsible for the actions of their government.”

When Yousef learned that the bombing had only partially succeeded, he phoned an accomplice to dictate a new ending to the communiqué. It read: “Our calculations were not very accurate this time. However, we promise you that the next time it will be very precise and the World Trade Center will continue to be one [of] our targets.”

Yousef apparently phoned in the amendment from a First Class lounge at Kennedy Airport. An hour or so later he was gone, safe aboard an airliner bound for Pakistan.

Thanks to brilliant forensic work, most of the accomplices Yousef left behind were swiftly tracked down and jailed. The bomber himself, though identified, remained at large to plot new mayhem. By January 1995, he was back in the Philippines, with a dual focus. He intended a bombing during the visit to the Pacific region by Pope John Paul II, and—most fiendish and complex of all—a series of bombings of American airliners.

The plot against the Pope proved Yousef’s undoing. The plot to bring down U.S. airliners—little understood at the time—was a turning point on the road to 9/11.

ON THE NIGHT of Friday, January 6, 1995, in Manila, smoke was reported billowing out of an apartment building just a block from the papal nunciature, where Pope John Paul would be staying. A patrolman reported that there was nothing to worry about—“Just some Pakistanis,” he said, “playing with firecrackers.”

Unconvinced, senior police inspector Aida Fariscal decided to take a look for herself. Told that the smoke had come from Suite 603 in the apartment building, and that its two tenants had fled during the initial panic, she asked to see inside. The apartment turned out to be crammed with chemicals in plastic containers, cotton soaked in acrid-smelling fluid, funnels, thermometers, fusing systems, electrical wiring, and explosives instructions in Arabic.

As Fariscal and the officers with her stared at their find, the doorman told them that one of the missing tenants had come back to retrieve something that had been left behind. He spotted the police and started running, but was caught and hauled back to headquarters. The man, who claimed he was “Ahmed Saeed,” an innocent tourist, was handed over to agents at a military installation. They were not gentle with him.

According to reporting by two distinguished Filipino reporters, he was tortured over a period of more than two months. “Agents hit him with a chair and a long piece of wood, forced water into his mouth, and crushed lighted cigarettes into his private parts. They dragged him on the floor, from one corner of the interrogation room to the other.… They threatened to rape him.… His ribs were almost [all] broken.”

A partial transcript of one taped session with the prisoner runs as follows:

I

NTERROGATOR:

What will the bomb be made of?

P

RISONER:

That will be nitroglycerine … 5 milliliters of glycerine, 15 of nitrate, and 22.5 of sulphuric acid …

I

NTERROGATOR:

What are your plans?

P

RISONER:

We are planning, I’m planning to explode this airplane. I have planning of of—just, I can’t breathe, I can’t breathe …

I

NTERROGATOR:

What is your plan in America?

P

RISONER:

Killing the people there. Teach them …

I

NTERROGATOR:

What do you do in … going to Singapore?

P

RISONER:

I’ll put the bomb in the United Air …

The captive’s real name was Abdul Murad, and he was the associate in whom Ramzi Yousef had confided before flying to New York to bomb the Trade Center. Torture notwithstanding, the evidence in Manila linked him firmly to the more recent terrorist activity. Extradited to the United States, in the hands of FBI agents, Murad told a cohesive story.

Yousef had told him the previous year, in Pakistan, of wanting “to blow up unnamed American airliners by placing explosives aboard the aircraft.” Training sessions followed, with Murad making notes of formulas and instructions. Then, in December, Yousef had summoned him to the Philippines. They worked on methods of disguise—removal of the obligatory jihadi beard, L’Oréal dye to color the hair, and blue contact lenses—to look “more European.”

They bought Casio watches for use as timing devices to trigger the airliner bombs. Yousef ran live experiments, the first time with a small device planted under a seat in a local movie theater. It worked perfectly, without causing serious injury—because the seat was unoccupied at the time. The second test, however, proved lethal.

In early December, posing as an Italian, Yousef boarded a Philippine Air flight bound for Tokyo with 273 passengers. He had with him one of the modified Casio watches, liquid explosive in a contact lens solution bottle, and minute batteries hidden in the heels of his shoes. He assembled the device in flight, concealed it under the seat cushion of Seat 26K, then left the plane at a scheduled stopover.

Two hours later, the bomb went off in mid-flight. Though it killed the unfortunate passenger in 26K and crippled the aircraft’s controls, the plane landed safely thanks to the skill of its pilots. The operation had proved to Yousef, however, that his devices could work. He now prepared another bomb, intended for an American airplane.

Murad was to plant the bomb this time. He would avoid suspicion by using two carry-on bags, one to smuggle the liquid on board, the second for components. The detonator was to be concealed inside a Parker pen, the bomb placed in a restroom near the cockpit. Murad would escape by leaving the plane at a stopover, as had Yousef previously. The pair expected to “cause the destruction of the plane and the death of everyone on board.”

A date had been picked, a flight chosen—United Airlines Flight 2 from Hong Kong to Los Angeles on January 14. Then on January 6, the plan fell apart—with the telltale smoke emanating from the conspirators’ apartment, the police search that followed, and Murad’s arrest. It was to retrieve Yousef’s laptop computer that Murad had risked trying to return to the apartment. Now the police had it.

A file on the laptop revealed that the plot called for the bombing of not only United Flight 2 but of eleven other American airliners. A number of terrorists, identified on the laptop by pseudonyms, were to transport and plant the devices. Flights targeted included seven operated by United, three by Northwest, and one by Delta. Under the headings “TIMER” and “SETTING,” Yousef had meticulously listed at precisely what time one of his Casio watches was to detonate each individual bomb.

The airlines were alerted, flights diverted and grounded, on orders direct from the Clinton White House. In the sort of security scare not to be seen again until after the Millennium, passengers in the Pacific region were searched, all liquids confiscated, for weeks to come.

Catastrophe had been averted thanks only to Inspector Fariscal’s insistence on entering the apartment that served as Yousef’s bomb factory. Had the plot succeeded, as many as four thousand people could have died—more than the total that were to be lost on 9/11.

The computer file on the plot bore a code name that at first meant nothing to investigators—“BOJINKA.” It appears to be a Serbo-Croatian or Croatian word meaning “loud bang,” “big bang”—or just “boom.” “Boom,” the word Yousef had used two and a half years earlier, in plain English, as verbal code for his coming attack on New York’s World Trade Center.

Exactly a month after the discoveries in Manila, the bomber was finally betrayed and arrested in Pakistan. Extradited to the United States, thanks to a cooperative Prime Minister Bhutto, he faced trial twice—once for the airliner plot, once for the 1993 Trade Center bombing. Found guilty in both cases, Yousef was sentenced to a theoretical 240 years in jail.

“I am a terrorist and I’m proud of it,” he had declared in court. “I support terrorism so long as it is against the United States government and against Israel.” In 1995, on the final stage of his return from Pakistan, a helicopter was used to bring Yousef, shackled and blindfolded, to the Correctional Center in Lower Manhattan. As the helicopter approached the Twin Towers, an FBI agent pulled up the blindfold and pointed. “See,” he said. “You didn’t get them after all.” The prisoner responded with a look and a curt “Not yet.”

When the towers were finally destroyed, on 9/11, Yousef would prostrate himself in his prison cell and give praise to Allah. He had all along accepted responsibility for the 1993 bombing, but on one point he remained evasive. Was he or was he not the mastermind behind the operation? He would say only that Muslim leaders had inspired his work. Which Muslim leaders? He would not say.

AS LATE AS 2004, a former CIA deputy director of intelligence—by then a senior staff member of the 9/11 Commission—would say there was “substantial uncertainty” as to whether Osama bin Laden and his organization had a role in either the Trade Center bombing or the plot to blow up U.S. airliners over the Pacific.

Available information suggests there was in fact a link to bin Laden. Yousef had learned about explosives in bin Laden–funded camps near the Afghan border. In 1991, when he reached the Philippines, he told separatists he was bin Laden’s “emissary.” The separatist with whom he had most contact was funded by bin Laden, had been close to bin Laden during the anti-Soviet conflict. The accomplice who tried to enter the United States with Yousef—but was refused admission—had carried a bomb manual headed “Al Qaeda,” the name for the then-obscure entity headed by bin Laden.

Yousef made a huge number of long-distance calls while preparing to bomb the Trade Center. Checks on the calls after the attack reportedly indicated a link to bin Laden. During Yousef’s stays in Peshawar, over several years, he stayed at the Beit Ashuhada [House of the Martyrs], which bin Laden funded. One of the operatives Yousef used in the Philippines was an Afghanistan veteran whom bin Laden has recalled as a “good friend,” a man who had “fought from the same trenches” with him.

Bin Laden also connected to the Yousef operation through his own brother-in-law. This was his Saudi friend from university days, Jamal Khalifa, who married bin Laden’s sister Shaikha and lived with bin Laden after the wedding. “Imagine how close we are,” Khalifa would say after 9/11. “We never disagreed about anything.”

By the early 1990s, Khalifa had long been active in the Philippines, fronting as a “missionary” or “philanthropist” and setting up charities to support Muslim causes. In 1992, according to an intelligence report, bin Laden himself visited the Philippines to bestow financial largesse.

Behind the facade, Khalifa spread money around in support of antigovernment rebels. By one report, moreover, he and bin Laden personally introduced one leading Filipino rebel leader to explosives expert Ramzi Yousef. Khalifa remained active in the Philippines until late 1994. Then he abruptly left the country, on the heels of a police report on Muslim groups and terrorism.

Just before Christmas that year, on the U.S. West Coast, Khalifa was arrested by FBI agents—at the very time that, back in the Philippines, Yousef was finalizing his plan to bomb eleven American airliners. In the Saudi’s baggage, agents found: a phone book listing a number in Pakistan that Yousef had called from Manila; a beeper number for one of the accomplices Yousef planned to use to plant his bombs on American planes; the address of Yousef’s bomb factory; documents related to explosives and weaponry—and a phone directory entry for Osama bin Laden.

There was more. Khalifa’s business card was found both in Manila—at the apartment of one of Yousef’s accomplices—and in New York in a suitcase belonging to Blind Sheikh Rahman. One of Khalifa’s aliases—he used several—was found on a document belonging to one of Yousef’s accomplices. He would eventually be named as an unindicted co-conspirator in the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center.

Inexplicably, there would not be a single reference to Khalifa in the 9/11 Commission report. Congress’s Joint Inquiry report contained just one, characterizing him as the “alleged financier” of the plot to destroy American airliners. Khalifa would never be charged in the United States with any crime.

RAMZI YOUSEF’S phone directory, meanwhile, also threw up a lead, a major clue that, successfully pursued, could perhaps have prevented the 9/11 catastrophe. The directory contained the name and contact information in Pakistan for one “Zahid Sheikh Mohammed,” brother of a man named “Khalid”—both of them uncles to Yousef.

Zahid’s name remains obscure, while Khalid would for years remain a will-o’-the-wisp, a quarry who would not be run to ground until 2003. Today, however, the name of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed sparks instant recognition.

By his own admission, he was the planner and organizer of many attacks—including 9/11. U.S. investigators have long since dubbed him, simply, KSM.

The information on Ramzi Yousef’s computer implicated KSM in the Manila conspiracies and started the hunt for him. Investigators hurried to Zahid’s home in Pakistan, to find photographs of bin Laden but no sign of either Mohammed brother. Clues proliferated, however, and much later—in captivity—he would fill in missing parts of the jigsaw.

Some of the many phone calls Yousef had made from New York, while planning the 1993 Trade Center bombing, had been to KSM. They had discussed procedures for mixing explosives on the calls, and the older man helped at least once by wiring his nephew money.

In Manila in 1994, KSM was at very least Yousef’s senior accomplice, perhaps the plot’s driving force. While Yousef found modest lodgings, KSM took a condominium at Tiffany Mansions, a rather grand address in an affluent part of town. Perhaps as part of their cover, perhaps by inclination, neither man lived the kind of life required of Islamic fundamentalists.

Some of the detail on the Philippines episode comes from the bar girls and dancers with whom uncle and nephew whiled away their nights—and whom they found useful. KSM bribed one of the girls to open a bank account and to purchase a sophisticated mobile phone. The account and the phone were in her name but for his use, ideal for shady financial transactions and unmonitored communication.

To Abdul Murad, the accomplice seized the night police raided the Manila bomb factory, KSM was “Abdul Majid”—one of his thirty-some aliases. Murad had met him once before in Pakistan, when Yousef was recovering from an injury incurred while handling explosives. Then, Yousef had told him “Majid” was a Saudi in the “electronics business.” His uncle was in fact Kuwaiti-born and in the terrorism business.

In Manila, as final preparations were made to down U.S. airliners, KSM came repeatedly to the bomb factory. With chemicals and electronic components scattered in plain sight, Murad was to say that Mohammed “must have known that something was planned.” “I was responsible,” KSM would one day tell a U.S. military tribunal, “for the planning and surveying needed to execute the Bojinka Operation.”

KSM was to tell the CIA that he thought of something else in Manila, a concept radically different from exploding bombs on airliners—the “idea of using planes as missiles.” One potential target he and Yousef considered at that time was the CIA headquarters in Virginia. Another was the World Trade Center.

What KSM had to say on that, an indication that flying planes into buildings was under discussion long, long before 9/11, is on its own merely interesting. What sparked lasting controversy, though, is the suggestion that U.S. authorities learned early on what the plotters had in mind—and dropped the ball.

A Philippines police document cites Yousef’s accomplice Murad as saying that they discussed a “plan to dive-crash a commercial aircraft at the CIA headquarters in Virginia.… What the subject has in his mind is that he will board any American commercial aircraft, pretending to be an ordinary passenger. Then he will hijack said aircraft, control its cockpit and dive it at the CIA headquarters.”

No suggestion there that the terrorists discussed targets other than the CIA. One of the Philippines police officers who interrogated Murad, however, has claimed otherwise. Colonel Rodolfo Mendoza told CNN that there was also talk of crashing a plane into the Pentagon. The Philippines presidential spokesman, Rigoberto Tiglao, went much further.

“The targets they listed,” he said in 2001, “were CIA headquarters, the Pentagon, TransAmerica [the TransAmerica Tower, in San Francisco], Sears [the Sears Tower, in Chicago], and the World Trade Center.”

Most credible, perhaps, is apparent corroboration from a source who does not cite Murad, whose statements were obtained under torture. Rafael Garcia, the Filipino computer analyst who examined Yousef’s computer, recalls having discovered notes of a plan that called for crashing airliners into “selected targets in the United States.” These included: “the CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia; the World Trade Center in New York; the Sears Tower in Chicago; the TransAmerica Tower in San Francisco; and the White House in Washington DC.”

The 9/11 Commission Report, which quoted none of these statements verbatim, consigned them to an obscure footnote and referred to them as mere “claims.” Its investigation, it stated, found no indication that such information “was written down or disseminated within the U.S. government.”

Congress’s Joint Inquiry Report, however, said the FBI and the CIA did learn what Murad had said about a plan to crash a plane into CIA headquarters. The FBI, the report stated, later “effectively forgot all about it … ignored this early warning sign that terrorists had begun planning to crash aircraft into symbols of American power.”

The Philippines National Police intelligence chief, Robert Delfin, said, “We shared that with the FBI. They may have mislooked [sic], and didn’t appreciate the info coming from the Philippines police.… I believe there was a lapse.”

Colonel Mendoza, who said he personally questioned Murad, insisted that he briefed the U.S. embassy on everything Murad told him. Another lead investigator on the Manila episode, police Colonel—later General—Avelino Razon, immediately called a press conference when news broke of 9/11. “We told the Americans about the plans to turn planes into flying bombs as far back as 1995,” he said. “Why didn’t they pay attention?”

Last word to Inspector Fariscal, the officer who discovered Ramzi Yousef’s bomb factory. “I still don’t understand,” she said after 9/11, “how it could have been allowed to happen.… The FBI knew all about Yousef’s plans.… They’d seen the files.… The CIA had access to everything, too.… This should never have been allowed to happen.”

Prisoner Murad said his principal accomplice planned a second attack on the World Trade Center—as early as 1995

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AFTER THE WORLD TRADE CENTER bombing of 1993, well before the Philippines police discovered the Manila bomb factory, the U.S. Defense Department convened a panel to report on how vulnerable the nation might be to terrorism. Presciently, the group discussed the possibility of an airliner being deliberately flown into a public building.

“Coming down the Potomac in Washington,” panelist Marvin Cetron recalled saying, “you could make a left turn at the Washington Monument and take out the White House, or you could make a right turn and take out the Pentagon.” “Targets such as the World Trade Center,” he wrote the following year, “not only provide the requisite casualties but, because of their symbolic nature, provide more bang for the buck. In order to maximize their odds for success, terrorist groups will likely consider mounting multiple, simultaneous operations with the aim of overtaxing a government’s ability to respond.”

That view did not appear in the published Defense Department report. “It was considered radical thinking,” said Douglas Menarchik, the retired Air Force colonel who ran the study, “a little too scary for the times.”

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who had plotted using planes as missiles to hit targets in the United States, was still at large, still plotting.

TWENTY-ONE

“YOU NEED THE CHARISMATIC DREAMERS LIKE BIN LADEN TO MAKE a movement successful,” a former intelligence analyst was to say. “But you also needed operators like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed who can actually get the job done.” KSM’s confederates dubbed him “Mukhtar”—an Arabic word to denote a leader, a man respected for his brain. The CIA came to consider him the “manager” of the September 11 plot.

He had been born in the mid-1960s in Kuwait, the son of immigrants from Baluchistan, a fiercely independent frontier region of Pakistan. His father was an imam, his mother a woman who got work preparing women’s bodies for burial. The driving force for KSM, though, was the cause of Palestine. Kuwait teemed with Palestinian exiles, and antipathy toward Israel early on became part of KSM’s makeup.

At eighteen, in 1983, Khalid traveled to the United States to study engineering at colleges in North Carolina. A fellow student remembered him as “so, so smart,” focused on getting his degree—though he took part enthusiastically in amateur theater projects. He also spent a lot of time at his prayers, and tended to reproach contemporaries who strayed from the Muslim diet.

KSM disliked the America he saw. The student body of one of the colleges he attended was largely black, and life in the South showed him the face of discrimination. He went back to the Middle East with a degree in mechanical engineering and memories of a country that he deemed “racist and debauched.”

Then, in 1987, he rallied to the fight to oust the Soviets from Afghanistan. At least one other brother, perhaps two—reports differ—were killed during the conflict. This was a family with a long-term commitment to jihad. At least half a dozen other relatives—KSM’s nephew the Trade Center bomber Yousef aside—have been linked to al Qaeda in the years that followed. Most now languish in prison.

In the early 1990s the cause of jihad took KSM across the world, twice to Bosnia, where tens of thousands of Muslims had been slaughtered as the former Yugoslavia collapsed into chaos, to Malaysia, Sudan, China, even Brazil. By late 1994, as he hatched terrorism with Yousef in the Philippines, KSM was nudging thirty. He was short, somewhat overweight, balding, and often—though not always—sported a beard. The beard changed shape from time to time, useful for a man who wanted to confuse pursuers.

Pursuers there were, once Yousef and his would-be bombers had been caught, but KSM made good his escape to the oil-rich Gulf state of Qatar. He found employment there, and powerful support in the shape of Sheikh Abdullah bin Khalid al-Thani, then the minister for religious endowments and Islamic affairs. Sheikh Abdullah had underwritten one of KSM’s visits to Bosnia. Now he reportedly saw to it that the fugitive was protected from the long arm of American justice.

Backed up as they were by the authority of a grand jury indictment, U.S. officials hoped Qatar’s government would assist in getting KSM to America. An FBI team that flew to the region learned, however, that the quarry was gone. According to the Qatar police chief of the day—himself a member of the royal family—KSM had been tipped off to the danger, given temporary refuge at Sheikh Abdullah’s private estate, then assisted in flying out of the country.

There was anger at the FBI and the CIA, and at Bill Clinton’s White House, but no effective follow-up. In spite of the offer of a $5 million reward and an “Armed and Dangerous” lookout notice, KSM remained at large.

Half a decade on, the year before 9/11, U.S. analysts received intelligence on an al Qaeda terrorist named “Khalid al-Shaikh al-Balushi,” (Khalid al-Shaikh from Baluchistan). The possible connection was noted at the CIA—it was common practice to refer to operatives by land of origin—but not pursued.

Two months before 9/11, KSM felt safe enough to apply for a visa to enter the United States, using an alias but his own photograph. The visa was granted the same day—just weeks after the CIA had received a report that he was currently “recruiting persons to travel to the United States to engage in planning terrorist-related activity.”

“Based on our review,” the director of Congress’s Joint Inquiry concluded that U.S. intelligence had “known about this individual since 1995, but did not recognize his growing importance … there was little analytic focus given to him and coordination amongst the intelligence agencies was irregular at best.” An executive summary by the CIA inspector general, grudgingly made public only in 2007, conceded there had been multiple errors, including a “failure to produce any [word redacted] coverage of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed from 1997 to 2001.”

SO IT WAS that KSM continued to range free until long after 9/11. His terrorist career would end only in the early hours of March 1, 2003, when a joint team of Pakistani and American agents cornered him at a middle-class home in the Pakistani city of Rawalpindi. A photograph taken at the scene of the arrest showed the prisoner bleary-eyed and unshaven, wearing an undershirt. “Nothing like James Bond,” CIA director George Tenet noted, and saw to it that that was the image fed to the media.

Accounts differ as to how KSM had been tracked down. Suggestions have included betrayal by an al Qaeda comrade—there was by then a $25 million reward—an intercept by the National Security Agency of one of the terrorist’s rumored ten mobile phones, or information gleaned from a high-level prisoner.

The capture of KSM was “wonderful,” its importance “hard to overstate,” said President Bush’s press secretary. “This,” House Intelligence Committee cochair Porter Goss exalted, “is equal to the liberation of Paris in the Second World War.” “No person other than perhaps Osama bin Laden,” the CIA’s Tenet has said, “was more responsible for the attacks of 9/11 than KSM.”

Sources let it be known that U.S. authorities “began an urgent effort to disorient and ‘break’ Mohammed.” For the first two days in captivity, still in Pakistani custody, KSM had reportedly “crouched on the floor in a trance-like state, reciting verses from the Koran.” He started talking only later, in the hands of the CIA.

The story the 9/11 Commission gave to the public of how the 9/11 plot evolved depended heavily on the accounts provided by KSM—and some other captives—in response to interrogation. The notes in the Commission Report reference his responses to interrogation 211 times. What readers had no way of knowing, though, is that most if not all of those responses were extracted by using measures the Bush Justice Department defined—in the words of a legal opinion provided to the CIA—as “enhanced interrogation techniques.”

Vice President Cheney had hinted right after 9/11 at what was to come. The authorities, he said on Meet the Press, intended to work “sort of the dark side … It’s going to be vital for us to use any means necessary at our disposal … we have to make certain that we have not tied the hands, if you will, of our intelligence communities.”

A year after 9/11, a senior Justice Department official asserted in a memo to White House counsel Alberto Gonzales that “certain acts may be cruel, inhuman, or degrading, but still not produce pain and suffering of the requisite intensity to fall within Section 2340A’s proscription against torture.”

The International Committee of the Red Cross, which monitors the Geneva and U.N. Conventions on the treatment of “prisoners of war,” long asked in vain for access to KSM and thirteen other detainees. When finally allowed to see them in 2006, the Red Cross reported that the prisoners had indeed been subjected to “torture.” Two years later, when its report was leaked, the public learned the details.

Between them, the detainees alleged ill treatment that included “suffocation by water”—better known as waterboarding; prolonged stress standing naked, arms chained above the head for days at a time, often with toilet access denied; beatings and kicking; use of a neck collar to bang the head and body against a wall; confinement in a coffinlike box; enforced nudity for periods up to months; deprivation of sleep by enforcing stress positions, repetitive loud noise or music, or applications of cold water; exposure to cold; threats to harm a detainee’s family; restriction of food; and—serious for Muslim men—forced shaving of the head and beard.

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In the event of being taken prisoner, a captured al Qaeda manual showed, operatives had been advised to “complain of mistreatment … insist on proving that torture was inflicted.” Though alert to false claims, however, the Red Cross was impressed by the consistency of the prisoners’ allegations. A then-secret CIA inspector general’s review, moreover, had acknowledged—even before the Red Cross reported—that “enhanced interrogation techniques” had indeed been used as described by the prisoners.

KSM told the Red Cross that his ill treatment had ranged right across the U.S. inventory of abuse. During his transfer around the planet, he said, “my eyes were covered with a cloth … a suppository was inserted into my rectum.… After arrival my clothes were cut off … photographs taken of me naked … made to stand on tiptoes for about two hours during questioning … the head interrogator (a man) and two female interrogators, plus about ten muscle guys wearing masks … a tube was inserted into my anus and water poured inside.… No toilet access was provided until four hours later.”

At some point, physical coercion was compounded by psychological terror. “If anything else happens in the United States,” KSM was allegedly told, “we’re going to kill your children.” KSM had some reason to fear this was true. His sons Yusuf and Abed, aged nine and seven, had been seized months before his own arrest. It has been claimed by another detainee that at some point even they were tormented—supposedly with insects—to scare the children into blabbing clues to their father’s whereabouts.

Transported to Poland—KSM thought it was Poland because of a label on a water bottle he saw—three interrogators of non-American extraction told KSM they had approval from Washington to give him “a hard time.” He would, they told him, be brought to the “verge of death and back again.”

Waterboarding.

“I would be strapped to a special bed, which could be rotated.… A cloth would be placed over my face. Cold water from a bottle that had been kept in a fridge was then poured onto the cloth by one of the guards so that I could not breathe.… I struggled in the panic of not being able to breathe.… The harshest period of the interrogation was just prior to the end of the first month.… The worst day … my head was banged against the wall so hard that it started to bleed.… Finally I was taken for a session of waterboarding. The torture on that day was finally stopped by the intervention of the doctor.”

The average time the CIA expected a subject to endure—before begging for relief and starting to talk—was fourteen seconds. KSM reportedly lasted as long as two to two and a half minutes before providing information. He was submitted to waterboarding 183 times.

THE WATERBOARD has a long history; it was a torture option for the Spanish Inquisition as early as the fifteenth century. In the twentieth century it was used by the British in the 1930s in Palestine, by the Japanese during World War II, by the North Koreans and by the French—in Algeria—in the 1950s, by the Americans in Vietnam in the 1960s, by the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia and the military regimes in Chile and Argentina in the 1970s.

In 1900, an American judge advocate general declared at an Army major’s court-martial that waterboarding was “in violation of the rules of civilized war.” In the late 1940s, when trying Japanese military personnel who had used waterboarding on American prisoners, the United States deemed them to be war criminals. They were executed.

To the Bush administration in 2006, however, waterboarding had become acceptable. “The United States does not torture,” declared President Bush, conceding that the CIA had used an “alternative set of procedures” on detainees. “I cannot describe the specific methods used,” he added, but the “separate program” was “vital.”

In his 2010 memoir, the former President recalled having been asked by Director Tenet whether he had permission to use waterboarding and other techniques on KSM. “I thought about the 2,973 people stolen from their families by al Qaeda on 9/11,” Bush wrote. “And I thought about my duty to protect the country from another act of terror. ‘Damn right,’ I said.”

As Bush recalled it, when told earlier by legal advisers that certain “enhanced” interrogation techniques were legal, he had rejected two that he felt “went too far.” Waterboarding, though, “did no lasting harm”—according to medical experts consulted by the CIA.

The “separate” interrogation program was essential, he had said in 2006, because it helped “take potential mass murderers off the streets before they were able to kill.” KSM, he said by way of example, had provided information that helped stop a further planned attack on the United States. According to Vice President Cheney, “a great many” attacks had been stopped thanks to information obtained under the program.

Had only conventional interrogation techniques been used on KSM, Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell said in 2008, he “would not have talked to us in a hundred years.” Former CIA director Porter Goss has said the use of “enhanced” techniques produced “provable, extraordinary successes.”

Others did not agree. FBI agents involved in the investigation thought ill treatment achieved little or nothing that skilled conventional questioning could not have achieved. Cheney’s claim that the program obtained hard intelligence was “intensely disputed.” On his first day in office, President Obama banned “alternative procedures.”

Coerced admissions, meanwhile, are probably inadmissible in a court of law. “The use of torture,” said Professor Mark Danner, who was instrumental in publishing the details of the Red Cross report on the prisoners’ treatment, “deprives the society whose laws have been so egregiously violated of the possibility of rendering justice. Torture destroys justice.”

THERE IS SOMETHING else, something especially relevant to the information extracted from Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. “Any piece of intelligence which is obtained under duress,” said Lieutenant General John Kimmons, the Army’s deputy chief of staff for intelligence, “would be of questionable credibility.”

Is that the case with KSM, on whose statements much of the 9/11 Commission Report relies? The prisoner positively spewed information, and that is a part of the problem. At a rough count, he confessed to having carried out or plotted some thirty crimes—more than is plausible, surely, even for a top operative.

Transcripts of interrogation sessions with KSM were reportedly transmitted to Washington accompanied by the warning: “Detainee has been known to withhold information or deliberately mislead.” In a combined confession and boast, the prisoner himself told the Red Cross: “I gave a lot of false information in order to satisfy what I believed the interrogators wished to hear in order to make the ill-treatment stop.… I’m sure that the false information I was forced to invent … wasted a lot of their time and led to several false red-alerts being placed in the U.S.”

A parallel issue is what torture may have done to KSM’s mental condition. His defense attorney at the initial military tribunal proceedings at Guantánamo in 2008, Captain Prescott Prince, thought KSM appeared to have suffered “some level of psychological impairment” as a result of the mistreatment.

When the 9/11 Commission was at work, KSM had yet to admit that he had lied under torture. Nor, at that time, did the Commission know that he or others had been tortured. “We were not aware, but we guessed,” executive director Philip Zelikow has said, “that things like that were going on.”

If Zelikow and senior colleagues guessed it, they seem not to have shared their guess with Commission members. “Never, ever did I imagine that American interrogators were subjecting detainees to waterboarding and other forms of physical torture,” Commissioner Richard Ben-Veniste has said. “No one raised such a possibility at a Commission meeting. In hindsight we were snookered.”

The 9/11 commissioners were not told that “enhanced techniques” were used to interrogate prisoners. The brutal treatment they received taints the prisoners’ admissions

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The commissioners asked the CIA to allow its own staff access to detainees, only to meet with a flat refusal. If security was the issue, they then offered, staff could be taken to the prisoners’ location wearing blindfolds. Could Commission people at least observe CIA interrogation sessions through a one-way observation window? The CIA blocked all such suggestions.

Commission senior adviser Ernest May thought the CIA’s summaries of the results of interrogations “incomplete and poorly written.” “We never,” he wrote later, “had full confidence in the interrogation reports as historical sources.” Former Commission counsel John Farmer warns that, even now, “reliance on KSM’s version of events must be considered carefully.”

The issue was and remains a huge problem, a blemish on the historical record. As the Report was being assembled, the Commission attempted to resolve the concern by inserting a paragraph or two on a page deep in the text—a health warning to the American public about the product of the CIA interrogations.

“Assessing the truth of statements by these witnesses,” it read, “is challenging.… We have evaluated their statements carefully and have attempted to corroborate them with documents and statements of others.”

THERE IS, however, a measure of considerable consolation. Long before they were caught, KSM and a fellow operative freely volunteered much the same version of events to an Arab television journalist. The scoop of a lifetime had come to Yosri Fouda, former BBC journalist and at the time star reporter for the satellite channel Al Jazeera—the way scoops are supposed to come, in a mysterious phone call to his London office.

Seven months after the 9/11 attacks, Fouda found himself listening to an anonymous male voice on the telephone proposing “something special for the first anniversary … exclusive stuff.” Then, four days later, came a fax offering to provide him with “addresses of people” for a proposed documentary. Then another phone call, asking him to fly to Pakistan. Fouda did so, without confiding even in his boss.

After a harrowing process, an internal flight to Karachi, a change of hotels, a journey by car and rickshaw, then—in another car, blindfolded, the final leg—the reporter was ushered into a fourth floor apartment. The blindfold removed, Fouda found himself looking into the eyes of the fugitive who was being hunted more feverishly than anyone in the world except Osama bin Laden.

KSM and Ramzi Binalshibh, a key accomplice, told Fouda their story—the story, at any rate, as they wanted to tell it—over a period of forty-eight hours. “I am the head of the al Qaeda military committee,” KSM said that first night, “and Ramzi is the coordinator of the Holy Tuesday operation. And yes, we did it.”

After prayers together the following morning, the two men shared their version of the preparation and execution of 9/11. Their accounts largely match the version subsequently extracted from KSM by the CIA. Binalshibh pulled from an old suitcase dozens of mementos of the operation: information on Boeing airplanes, a navigation map of the American East Coast, illustrations on “How to perform sudden maneuvers”—a page covered in notations made, Binalshibh said, by the hijackers’ leader, Mohamed Atta.

The interview over, blindfolded again, reporter Fouda was taken back to the airport. He had—and has—no doubt that the men he had met at the safe house in Karachi were who they said they were, that what they told him was credible. The three-page account of Fouda’s work in the London Sunday Times, and his TV documentary, The Road to 11 September, on the Al Jazeera network, caused a sensation on the first anniversary of the attacks.

Unaccountably, 9/11 Commission staff failed to interview Fouda and mentioned his breakthrough interview only in an obscure footnote. It was included, however, in evidence presented during the military tribunal proceedings at Guantánamo. Two distinguished award-winning reporters, The Wall Street Journal’s Ron Suskind and CNN contributor Peter Bergen, who both interviewed Yosri Fouda, found his reporting of the Karachi encounter authentic and compelling.

During the reporter’s meeting with KSM and Binalshibh, a mysterious visitor had arrived, a man who could not be named. He was, Fouda was told, “a close companion of Sheikh Abu Abdullah, God protect him.”

“Abu Abdullah” was one of the several names associates used to refer to Osama bin Laden.

Had al Qaeda been a company in the West, Fouda concluded from what he learned that day, KSM would have been its CEO. The post of chairman belonged to bin Laden.

TWENTY-TWO

AFTER FIRST MEETING TOWARD THE END OF THE ANTI-SOVIET CONFLICT in Afghanistan, Bin Laden and KSM had for years followed separate trajectories. Until the mid-1990s, KSM plotted terror with his nephew Yousef, then traveled the world networking with fellow jihadis. Bin Laden stayed most of the time in Sudan, presenting an innocent face to the world.

To Time magazine’s Scott Macleod, who saw him there, the Saudi seemed “very calm, serene, almost like a holy man. He wanted to show that he was a businessman, and he was a legitimate businessman.” Major road-building projects aside, bin Laden’s enterprises included a trucks and machinery importing company, a tannery, and more than a million acres of farmland. Rumor had it, too, that bin Laden produced a fabulous sum to capitalize a bank.

Bin Laden the tycoon tended his business empire, but bin Laden the jihadi was never far away. To his guesthouse in Khartoum came all manner of men, rich and poor, powerful and humble, all focused on Muslim causes. In 1992, following the collapse of the former Yugoslavia and the beginning of strife between Christians and Muslims, Bosnia became the cause of the moment. The embattled Bosnian regime accepted massive financial support from Saudi Arabia and volunteer fighters, Arab veterans of the war in Afghanistan.

Though bin Laden rarely ventured out of Sudan, he did visit Bosnia. Renate Flottau, of the German magazine Der Spiegel, encountered him, “a tall, striking Arab with piercing eyes and a long black beard,” while waiting in President Alija Izetbegovic’s anteroom. The Arab presented her with his card, but “Osama bin Laden” meant nothing to her then. In passable English, he described eagerly how he was bringing “holy warriors” into the country. The Bosnian president’s staff treated him like a dignitary—bin Laden had reportedly been granted honorary citizenship.

Of the Arabs who rallied to the fight in Bosnia, three were to play key roles in the 9/11 operation. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was in the country twice during the same period. Two others, Saudi fighters, went on to be 9/11 hijackers.

Through bin Laden, massive injections of funds also went to the Muslim separatists in Chechnya. It won him loyalty—there would be dozens of Chechens, it would be reported, among the holdouts who fought on with bin Laden, after 9/11, at Tora Bora.

In Sudan in the early 1990s those who plotted terror found a welcome. There was Ayman al-Zawahiri, the Egyptian doctor turned fundamentalist zealot who had been a close associate in Afghanistan. From Khartoum, he directed bombings and assassinations in his homeland. One attempt came close to killing then-President Hosni Mubarak himself.

There was also a younger man, whose name was never to be as familiar to the public as Zawahiri’s. This was Abu Zubaydah, born in Saudi Arabia to a Palestinian father, still in his early twenties but already proving an effective manager of men and facilities. He was to be a key operative in the lead-up to 9/11.

At meetings in Khartoum, bin Laden sounded off regularly about the target he called the snake. “The snake is America, and we have to stop them. We have to cut their head off and stop what they are doing in the Horn of Africa.”

In late 1992, in the Yemeni city of Aden, bombs exploded outside two hotels housing U.S. troops on their way to join the United Nations relief mission in Somalia—then, as now, a war-torn country on the east coast of Africa. Though botched—no American soldiers were killed—the attack was later linked to bin Laden.

Bin Laden would later claim that his men, fighting alongside Somalis, a year later played a leading role in the disastrous U.S. raid on a Somali warlord’s headquarters. In that bloody fiasco, eighteen American soldiers were killed, seventy-eight wounded, and two Black Hawk helicopters shot down.

For a long time, there were no attacks in bin Laden’s homeland, Saudi Arabia. Then, in 1995, a truck bomb exploded outside a National Guard facility in the capital, Riyadh. Seven were killed and sixty injured, and five of the dead were American Army and civilian trainers.

The only link to bin Laden at the time was that the four men accused of the bombing—who were executed—said they had read his writings on jihad. Information developed later, however, indicated that he supplied money to purchase the explosives, that the munitions were stored in a bin Laden warehouse, then moved onward to Saudi Arabia aboard a bin Laden–owned ship.

The attack, bin Laden has said since, was a noble act that “paved the way for the raising of voices of opposition against the American occupation from within the ruling family.” He urged Saudis to “adopt every tactic to throw the Americans out of our territory.”

Seven months later, a huge bomb exploded outside an American housing complex near Dhahran, in eastern Saudi Arabia. Inside at the time was a large number of troops, many of them personnel serving with the 4404th Fighter Wing at the time patrolling the no-fly zone over Iraq. Nineteen Americans were killed, 372 wounded.

It was the largest terrorist bomb ever to be used against Americans, more powerful than the device used in the 1983 bombing of the Marine barracks in Beirut, or a decade later in the destruction of the Alfred P. Murrah building in Oklahoma City. Who was behind the attack long remained the subject of controversy. A body of evidence indicated that Iran was responsible, but many believe bin Laden was at least complicit.

He had reportedly been in Qatar before the attack, arranging—again—for the purchase and delivery of explosives. In an interview the following year, he said al Qaeda had indeed been involved, that the bombers had been “heroes.”

Even before the bombings in Saudi Arabia, bin Laden’s life as an exile in Sudan had turned sour. The Saudi royals, and his own family, had tried to persuade him to change course. “They called me several times from the Kingdom,” he recalled, “wanting me to return home, to talk about things. I refused.… They told me that the King would like me to act as intermediary between the different factions in Afghanistan. King Fahd himself called to try to win me over.… They sent my brother to try to convince me, but it didn’t work.”

The royals persuaded members of bin Laden’s family—including his mother, his father’s only surviving brother, and the half-brother who now headed the bin Laden company—to visit him in Sudan. “They beseeched him to stop his diatribes against Saudi and the Americans,” a family source told the BBC. “Come back and we’ll give you a responsible job in the company, one of the top five positions.” When that suggestion was rebuffed, the Saudis’ patience ran out.

That, at any rate, was the regime’s official position. In the spring of 1994, the royal family declared bin Laden’s citizenship revoked for “behavior that contradicts the Kingdom’s interests.” His family followed suit with a statement of “condemnation of all acts that Osama bin Laden may have committed.” His share of the family fortune, which had earlier been placed in a trust, was sold off and placed in a frozen account.

Though this sounded draconian, the full picture may have been otherwise. The formal cutoff caused bin Laden only a temporary cash flow problem. Far into the future, he would have huge sums of money at his disposal.

Later, asked whether he had really been disowned, bin Laden would put his hand on his heart. “Blood,” he said, “is thicker than water.” The DGSE, France’s intelligence service, which carefully monitored bin Laden over many years, took the view as late as 2000 that “Osama bin Laden has kept up contact with certain members of the family … even though it has officially said the contrary. One of his brothers would appear to be playing a role of intermediary in his professional contacts and the progress of his business.”

It would be reported as late as 2006 that bin Laden’s half-brother Yeslam had pledged to pay the cost of Osama’s legal defense should he be captured. In the years before 9/11, female relatives were used to keep the money coming, perhaps because women in Saudi Arabia are treated as though they are invisible. “Some female members of bin Laden’s own family have been sending cash from Saudi Arabia to his ‘front’ accounts in the Gulf,” Vincent Cannistraro, former CIA chief of operations and analysis, told a congressional committee after 9/11.

Major funding also came from others. Soon after his funding had officially been cut off, according to the DGSE report, $4.5 million went to bin Laden from “Islamic Non-Governmental Organizations” in the Gulf. Five years later, it was discovered that “at least $3,000,000” believed to be for bin Laden had been funneled through Saudi Arabia’s National Commercial Bank. Those behind the payments, the CIA’s Cannistraro testified, had been “wealthy Saudis.” When the Commercial Bank connection was cut, they switched to “siphoning off funds from their worldwide enterprises in creative and imaginative ways.”

The former head of the DGSE’s Security Intelligence department, Alain Chouet, who had regular access to secret intelligence, has said that considerable evidence “points to a number of private donors in the Arabian Peninsula, as well as to a number of banks and charities with money pumped in from Saudi or Gulf funds.… What was expensive wasn’t the terrorist operations themselves but all that’s required for recruiting terrorists: financing the mosques, the clubs, the imams, the religious schools, the training camps, the maintenance of ‘martyrs’ ’ families.”

Funding for bin Laden’s operational needs—weapons, camps, living expenses, operatives’ travel—never dried up. As a 9/11 Commission report on terrorist financing noted, al Qaeda’s budget in the years before 9/11 amounted to $30 million a year. It was money raised almost entirely from donations, especially from “wealthy Saudi nationals.”

The DGSE’s Alain Chouet dismissed the revocation of bin Laden’s Saudi citizenship as merely a “subterfuge aimed at the gullible—designed to cover a continuing clandestine relationship.” For years to come at least—according to Chouet—the Saudi government covertly manipulated bin Laden to act in its strategic interests, as he once had in the Afghan war against the Soviets.

There is information, to be reported later in these pages, that the “wealthy Saudi nationals” who continued to fund bin Laden included members of the ruling royal family.

• • •

BY EARLY 1996, when U.S. ambassador to Sudan Timothy Carney sat down for talks with Sudanese foreign minister Ali Taha, the bin Laden problem was on the agenda. Washington, which had recently condemned Sudan for its “sponsorship of terror,” claimed that bin Laden was directing and funding a number of terrorist organizations around the world.

Washington wanted Sudan to expel the troublesome exile. But to where? To the United States? What to do with him were he to be flown there? “We couldn’t indict him then,” President Clinton said after 9/11, “because he hadn’t killed anyone in America.” To Saudi Arabia? “We asked Saudi Arabia to take him,” Clinton recalled. “The Saudis didn’t want him back.… They were afraid it was too much of a hot potato.”

Wherever bin Laden was to go, the Clinton White House believed it would be worthwhile just to get him out of Sudan. “My calculation was, ‘It’s going to take him a while to reconstitute,’ ” then–National Security Council counterterrorism director Steven Simon has said, “and that screws him up and buys time.”

Following that line of thinking turned out to be a disastrous mis-judgment. Not to have acted decisively against bin Laden in 1996, President Clinton would say—in private—after 9/11, was “probably the biggest mistake of my presidency.” In Sudan, as former CIA station chief Milton Bearden has said, “perhaps we could have controlled or monitored him more closely, to see what he was doing.”

The United States did not do that. It sat idly by when, in May that year, bin Laden returned to the remote, tragically chaotic country that he knew well and where Washington had virtually no leverage—Afghanistan. Allowing that to happen, the CIA’s Bearden sardonically remarked, was “probably the best move since the Germans put Lenin in a boxcar and sent him to St. Petersburg in 1917.”

“WE WERE WHISKED to a chartered Learjet,” his son Omar has recalled. “My father and his party were treated as dignitaries, with no need for the formalities of passports and customs. Besides my father and me, there were only eight other male passengers. Brother Sayf Adel, my father’s security chief, and Mohammed Atef, my father’s best friend and top commander, were traveling with us.”

The plane passed through Saudi airspace without difficulty, refueled in Iran, and landed at the eastern Afghan city of Jalalabad, near the border with Pakistan. Other members of bin Laden’s family and entourage followed months later, again aboard a chartered jet.

“Our plane had two configurations: with fifty-six passengers and with seventy-nine,” the captain recalled. “They wanted eighty-four. They asked how many extra seats we wanted. They installed the seats overnight.… We flew women, children, clothes, rickshaws, old bikes, mattresses, blankets.”

After a brief stay in Jalalabad courtesy of a local warlord, bin Laden set up base for a while in the mountains at Tora Bora. Family members thought it a desolate place, but he called it “our new home,” was excited to be back at a place he had known while fighting the Soviets.

A major concern, for some time, was how the Taliban—then gaining the upper hand in the civil war—would view his presence. Then their leader, Mullah Omar, sent word that he was welcome. It was by no means religious and ideological compatibility alone that was to ensure bin Laden a lasting welcome. Through him, the 9/11 Commission would calculate, between $10 and $20 million a year was to flow to the Taliban.

Visibly relaxed once he knew he had sanctuary, bin Laden began talking with his son Omar about his “mission in life.” “I was put on this earth by God for a specific reason,” he said. “My only reason for living is to fight the jihad and to make sure there is justice for the Muslims.” He ranted on about America and Israel, and it was evident that there was no limit to what he imagined he could achieve.

“First,” he said with the supreme self-confidence that only boundless faith or delusion can bring, “we obliterate America. By that I don’t mean militarily. We can destroy America from within by making it economically weak, until its markets collapse.… That’s what we did with Russia. When that happens, they will have no interest in supplying Israel with arms.… We only have to be patient.… This is God’s plan.”

The man who voiced this astounding ambition now lived in a makeshift wooden cabin. There bin Laden spent much of his time, reading deeply into his hundreds of books, most of them religious tomes, never far from his prayer beads, his copy of the Qur’an, and a radio that picked up the BBC’s broadcasts from London. At his side, always, was his Kalashnikov assault rifle.

Bin Laden was interested in the techniques of mass communication, the distribution of propaganda by tape cassette and fax machine. He would shortly acquire a state-of-the-art satellite telephone. When the technology became available, his operatives would use the Internet as an everyday tool. Omar noticed that his father now spent much time recording his thoughts on a dictating machine.

The fruit of his latest thinking came in August 1996, with a fax transmission to the office of al-Quds al-Arabi—or The Arab Jerusalem—an Arabic-language newspaper published in London. It was a twelve-thousand-word message from the mountain, in bin Laden’s words from “the summit of the Hindu Kush,” one that at the time got little coverage in the West. Across the Middle East, where hundreds of thousands of copies were distributed in cassette form, it had a major impact.

Lengthy, couched in archaic language, replete with religious references, this was bin Laden’s “Declaration of Jihad against the Americans occupying the Land of the Two Holy Places.”

“Praise be to Allah, we seek his help and ask for his pardon,” the declaration began, then launched into a catalogue of the iniquities imposed on Muslims by “the Zionist-Crusaders alliance.” The greatest of the aggressions, bin Laden wrote, was the presence of the “American invaders” in Saudi Arabia, followed by U.S. exploitation of Arab oil and the “annexing” of Arab land by Israel.

“After Faith,” he went on, “there is no more important duty than pushing the American enemy out of the holy land.” Addressing U.S. Defense Secretary William Perry in person, he warned that his recruits to the cause made formidable enemies. “These youths love death as you love life. They inherit dignity, pride, courage, generosity, truthfulness and sacrifice. They are most effective and steadfast in war.… They have no intent but to enter Paradise by killing you.”

Around the time he issued this proclamation of punishment to come, bin Laden sat down to confer with Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.

WHETHER THE TWO men had seen each other in the recent past remains unclear. According to KSM, he had hoped to meet with bin Laden in Sudan, but settled for seeing his military aide Atef instead. One intelligence lead suggests that he and bin Laden had traveled somewhere together—perhaps on one of the trips they both made to Bosnia. It seems certain, though, that they got together at Tora Bora in mid-1996.

At the meeting, which Atef also attended, KSM came up with a raft of ideas for terrorist attacks, most of them involving airliners. Atef, too, had recently been discussing the idea of attacking aircraft. Terrorist attacks on planes had usually followed a pattern—hijack a plane, have it land in a compliant nation-state, then make demands (often for the release of captured comrades). By the mid-1990s, however, bin Laden operatives had little prospect of finding a “friendly” place to land. For the men meeting at Tora Bora, the focus was simply on destroying planes.

Atef apparently favored finding ways to blow up airliners in mid-air, as in the 1988 downing of Pan Am 103 over Scotland. He and bin Laden listened, however, as KSM proposed a very different concept—using hijacked planes as weapons.

There are two versions of what he suggested. According to KSM himself, the notion he proposed was ambitious in the extreme. Ten planes would be hijacked, on the same day, to be crashed into target buildings on both coasts of the United States. He himself, as commander, would force a landing at an airport, kill all male passengers, then deliver a speech assailing American support for Israel and “repressive” regimes around the world. This, as the 9/11 Commission put it, would have been “theater, a spectacle of destruction with KSM as the self-cast star—the super-terrorist.”

According to another detainee, KSM’s proposal was more modest, a suggestion that the World Trade Center should be targeted again—this time not with a bomb but by small planes packed with explosives. This, the detainee said, prompted bin Laden to suggest a grander vision. “Why do you use an ax,” he supposedly mused, “when you can use a bulldozer?”

KSM thought it was important to target civilian landmarks. Were only military or government buildings hit, he surmised, ordinary Americans “would not focus on the atrocities that America is committing by supporting Israel against the Palestinian people.” The purpose of a further strike on the World Trade Center was to “wake people up.”

KSM’s proposal may have been premature. He got the impression that bin Laden’s priority concern remained the situation in Saudi Arabia. He told KSM he was “not convinced” of the practicality of the planes operation. For now, the discussion went no further.

Nevertheless, a further strike on the World Trade Center apparently remained on the drawing board. Months after the meeting at Tora Bora, a bin Laden operative in Europe traveled to America and shot videotape of various prominent buildings—including the Twin Towers. The footage, seized after 9/11, included shot after shot of the towers, taken from multiple angles.

There were five tapes, with pictures not only of the Trade Center but of the Statue of Liberty, the Brooklyn Bridge, San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge, Chicago’s Sears Tower, and Disneyland.

At his meeting with bin Laden, KSM had suggested sending operatives “to study in the U.S. flight institutes.” Whether or not bin Laden ordered it, it seems that someone in the terrorist milieu was already making such preparations. The FBI had received information that “individuals with terrorist connections had requested and received training in the technical aspects of aviation.”

One such individual was a young Saudi who, after a trip to Arizona to learn English, returned home seeming a “different person.” He grew a full beard, shunned established friends, and spent most of his spare time reading books on religion and aviation. Then, in 1996, he returned to the Grand Canyon State—to learn to fly. The twenty-four-year-old seemed unsure of himself in the cockpit, even frightened, but he was to return again and again to flight school, even after he got his commercial pilot’s license. The Saudi was Hani Hanjour, who in 2001 would fly a hijacked Boeing 757 into the Pentagon.

Mohamed Atta, who was to lead the 9/11 operation, turned twenty-seven the year of the Tora Bora meeting. In Germany, where he was now studying, he struck people—even those familiar with Muslim practices—as religiously obsessed.

IN AFGHANISTAN in 1996 bin Laden had asked the British reporter Robert Fisk to come to see him for a second time—less than three years after their first meeting in Sudan. The Saudi was nearing forty now and visibly aging. His beard was longer and starting to turn gray, the lines around his eyes deeper.

It was night when bin Laden met with the reporter. He talked on and on of how Saudi Arabia had become “an American colony,” of how the “evils” of the Middle East were rooted in the policies of the United States. “Resistance against America will spread in many, many places in Muslim countries,” he said. “We must drive out the Americans.”

In the flickering light of a paraffin lamp, when his interviewee agreed to be photographed, Fisk saw in bin Laden’s face the trace of a smile and what looked like vanity. He thought the man “possessed of that quality which leads men to war: total self-conviction. In the years to come I would see others manifest this dangerous characteristic … but never the fatal self-resolve of Osama bin Laden.”

PART V

PERPETRATORS

TWENTY-THREE

SEVEN THOUSAND MILES AND TWO CONTINENTS AWAY, VERY FEW people had yet sensed the real danger in the man.

According to the then-head of the CIA’s Counterterrorist Center, Winston Wiley, in a recently released 9/11 Commission interview, President Clinton’s administration actually reduced the focus on counterterrorism. Former Clinton officials, and the President himself, have insisted otherwise. One can only report claim and counterclaim, and cite the record.

Two months into the Clinton presidency, in 1993, bin Laden had been characterized in a CIA document as merely an “independent actor who sometimes works with other individuals or governments … to promote militant Islamic causes throughout the region.” What the Agency told the White House ranged from dismissing bin Laden as “a flake” or—closer to reality—as a “terrorist financier,” and the “Ford Foundation” of Sunni Muslim extremism.

In 1995, when the evidence had yet to link bin Laden firmly to any specific attack, a formal Clinton order—aimed at cutting off funding from named terrorist organizations—did not mention him.

In 1995 and 1996, however, the President made nine speeches mentioning terrorism or calling for tough action. He also issued a Presidential Decision Directive—PDD-39—designed to combat terrorism that targeted the United States. It included, for the first time, a provision for what was to become known as rendition, the forcible removal to the United States of captured terrorist suspects. Policy on the subject was henceforth to be coordinated from the White House.

Anthony Lake, Clinton’s first national security adviser, and Richard Clarke—who eventually became national coordinator for counterterrorism—had been badgering the CIA for fuller information on bin Laden. One CIA official recalled having thought that Lake was positively “foaming at the mouth” about him. “It just seemed unlikely to us,” Clarke recalled, “that this man who had his hand in so many seemingly unconnected organizations was just a donor, a philanthropist of terror.”

CIA Director James Woolsey, who ran the agency until 1995, conceded after 9/11 that there was a period in the 1990s when U.S. intelligence was simply “asleep at the wheel.” After the Clinton directive, which called for improving the agencies’ performance, the CIA and the FBI responded.

In early 1996, with Lake’s approval, a small group of CIA officers and analysts were formed into a unit that focused solely on bin Laden. Only a dozen strong at first, its number would in time grow to forty or fifty people—most of them women—supplemented by a small number of FBI employees. The Bureau staffers were there in the name of liaison, but the relationship was less than happy. The CIA attitude toward the FBI contingent was so hostile, one arriving Bureau supervisor thought, that he felt as though he had “walked into a buzz saw.”

That said, the new unit did remarkable work. Working from a base away from CIA headquarters, near a shopping complex, they became passionately committed to the pursuit of bin Laden. They worked inordinate hours, rarely taking a day off, for a zealot of a boss who as often as not turned up for work at four in the morning. This was Michael Scheuer, whose idea the unit had been in the first place.

Reflecting the CIA’s concept of bin Laden as a mere financier, the bureaucracy initially gave the project the acronym CTC-TFL—for Counterterrorism Center–Terrorist Financial Links. Scheuer saw the mission as far broader, more operational, and its function gradually shifted from data gathering to locating bin Laden and planning his capture. He changed the unit’s moniker to “Alec Station,” after one of his children.

Working around the clock, the unit began to get a clearer sense of what confronted them. Bin Laden’s August 1996 “Declaration of Jihad” brought Scheuer up short. “My God,” he thought as he perused the transcript, “it sounds like Thomas Jefferson. There was no ranting in it.… [It] read like our Declaration of Independence—it had that tone. It was a frighteningly reasoned document. These were substantive, tangible issues.”

Scheuer concluded there and then that bin Laden was a “truly dangerous, dangerous man,” and began saying so as often and as loudly as he could. Though for many months to come there were no new terror attacks, bin Laden’s megaphone utterances, in interviews with journalists and in a second formal declaration in February 1998, could not have been clearer.

In the second declaration, presented as a religious ruling and co-signed by Zawahiri and others, he enumerated Muslim grievances and declared the killing of Americans—“civilians and military”—a duty for all Muslims. Time after time, with increasing clarity, he emphasized that civilians were vulnerable. “They chose this government and voted for it despite their knowledge of its crimes in Palestine, Lebanon and Iraq and in other places.” And: “If they are killing our civilians, occupying our lands … and they don’t spare any one of us, why spare any one of them?”

IN THE WAKE of Clinton’s landmark 1996 Presidential Decision, the heads of relevant U.S. agencies—the Counterterrorism Security Group—had been mulling a possible “snatch” operation to capture bin Laden and bring him to the United States. With satellite surveillance as well as human intelligence, the CIA was to some extent able to track his movements.

Some valuable information came from eavesdropping on the Compact-M satellite phone he had purchased in 1996—number 00-873-682505331. Bin Laden was no longer at Tora Bora, but spending most nights with his family at a training camp near Kandahar.

The CIA developed a plan. A team of Afghans working with the Agency would grab bin Laden while he was sleeping, roll him up in a rug, spirit him to a desert airstrip, and bundle him on board a CIA plane. He would be flown to New York aboard a civilian version of a C-130 airplane within which would be a container, inside which would be a dentist’s chair designed for a very tall man.

The chair would be equipped with padded restraints designed to avoid chafing the captive’s skin. In the event bin Laden had to be gagged, the tape used would have just the right amount of adhesive to avoid excessive irritation to his face and beard. There would be a doctor on the plane, with sophisticated medical equipment.

The Agency’s plan was discussed, modified, and remodified. There were rehearsals. Intelligence agency attorneys conferred solemnly about the provisions for bin Laden’s safety after capture. Then, in May 1998, the operation was scrapped.

CIA director Tenet has said he was responsible for the cancellation. The White House’s Richard Clarke has said he thought it “half-assed,” that he seconded the decision. In an internal memo, supposedly written at Tenet’s direction, Alec Station’s Scheuer wrote that the Clinton cabinet had been worried about potential fallout were bin Laden or others to die during the operation.

Scheuer thought the plan had been “perfect,” that it should have gone ahead. According to him, it long remained difficult to persuade either the White House, or his superiors at the CIA, or the Defense Department, of the gravity of the bin Laden threat. “They could not believe that this tall Saudi with a beard, squatting around a campfire, could be a threat to the United States of America.”

For any who could not see the danger, any last illusion was removed just after 3:30 A.M. Washington time on August 7, 1998. At that moment, a two-thousand-pound truck bomb exploded behind the American embassy in the Kenyan capital of Nairobi. Two hundred ninety-one people were killed, forty-four of them embassy employees. The embassy’s city center location compounded the carnage, and some four thousand were injured. The five-story building was damaged beyond repair, an adjacent secretarial school totally destroyed.

Four minutes later at the U.S. embassy in Dar es Salaam, the capital of neighboring Tanzania, a terrorist detonated another truck bomb. Eleven were killed and eighty-five injured—lower casualties than in Nairobi because the building was on the city’s outskirts. The explosion left part of the U.S. embassy roofless and damaged the missions of two other countries.

In terms of overall casualty figures, this had been the worst-ever terrorist attack on Americans. Clues as to who was responsible came fast, and pointed straight to the bin Laden organization. Instead of being blown to pieces, one of two suicide bombers in the Nairobi attack had jumped out and run at the last moment. He had suffered only minor injuries, and was captured within days. It emerged that the bomber was a Saudi, had trained at one of the camps in Afghanistan, and had met with bin Laden several times. He had believed all along that his mission was for bin Laden.

The Saudi gave investigators the number of a telephone outside Kenya that his controllers had told him he could call, and he had called it both the night before and an hour before the bombing. Using his satellite phone, bin Laden had also called the number before and after the attack. The number—967-1-200578—was a crucial lead, one that will become pivotal as this story unfolds.

Of the five men eventually tried and convicted in the United States for the bombings, the reported statement of another man, Saudi-born but of Palestinian origin, said it all. “I did it all for the cause of Islam,” Mohamed Odeh told interrogators. Osama bin Laden “is my leader, and I obey his orders.”

In Afghanistan on the morning of the bombings, bin Laden had been listening intently to the radio. When the news came through, his son Omar thought his father more “excited and happy” than he had ever seen him. “His euphoria spread quickly to his commanders and throughout the ranks, with everyone laughing and congratulating each other.”

A Canadian teenager whose family had joined the jihadis, Abdurahman Khadr, witnessed the jubilation. “The leader of the guesthouse went outside and brought juice for like everybody. Jugs and jugs of juice. He was just giving it out. ‘Celebrate, everybody!’ And people were even making jokes that we should do this more often. You know, we’d get free juice.”

Asked by reporters about the bombings, bin Laden vacillated between obfuscation and claiming credit. “Only God knows the truth,” he would say, while praising the bombers as “real men … Our job is to instigate and by the grace of God we did that.” Nairobi had been picked, he said, because “the greatest CIA center in East Africa is located at this embassy.” American “plots” against countries in the region, he said, had been hatched there.

There appeared to be an opportunity for the United States to retaliate—or, with the niceties of international law in mind—“to respond.” Bin Laden, the CIA learned, was shortly to attend a gathering of several hundred men at one of the training camps. On the day of his visit, it was decided, U.S. vessels—mostly submarines—would fire salvos of Tomahawk cruise missiles at six sites in Afghanistan. The camps aside, missiles would also strike a bin Laden–financed pharmaceutical factory in Sudan. The CIA believed it was producing the ingredients for nerve gas.

On the appointed day, August 20, the go-ahead was given. Security was exceptionally tight, with one significant exception. Because the missiles were to overfly Pakistan, it was deemed necessary to inform the Pakistani military. To avoid provoking an international incident, though, the Pakistan army was to be told—not consulted—and at the very last minute. The vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Joseph Ralston, broke the news to a top Pakistani commander over dinner when the missiles were already on their way.

In Washington, Clinton went on television to tell the nation of the action he had taken. “Our target was terror,” he said. “Our mission was clear: to strike at the network of radical groups affiliated with and funded by Osama bin Laden.”

That was a circumlocution, to avoid mentioning publicly the fact that Clinton had signed memoranda designed to get around the long-standing legal ban on planned assassinations. After Kenya, however, the President was “intently focused,” as he later wrote, “on capturing or killing [bin Laden] and with destroying al Qaeda.”

In that, the U.S. attack failed miserably. The targets were hit and destroyed, and some people were killed at the camp where bin Laden was supposed to be. The man himself, however, remained very much alive. The factory in Sudan was destroyed, but there never was any proof that it had been more than a legitimate plant producing medicines. The CIA’s intelligence had been shaky at best.

The strikes had been expensive in more ways than one. At $750,000 each, just the cost of the sixty-five Tomahawks fired amounted to about $49 million. The embassy bombings in Africa, to which the missiles had responded, are said to have cost around $10,000. Worse by far, the missile strikes and the failure to get bin Laden proved to be a propaganda victory for the intended target. Across the Muslim world, people began sporting Osama bin Laden T-shirts. Bin Laden’s life had been spared, his followers were convinced, thanks to the direct intervention of Allah.

The truth was more mundane, as his son Omar revealed in 2009. Shortly before the strikes, he recalled, his father had received “a highly secret communication.” “He had been forewarned,” former U.S. Defense Secretary William Cohen was to tell 9/11 Commission staff, that “the intelligence [service] in Pakistan had a line in to him.” The tight U.S. security had not been tight enough, a failing that one day in the distant future would be remedied—fatally for the target.

If the name Osama bin Laden had been slow to penetrate the American consciousness, it had now become—as it would remain—a fixture. “In 1996 he was on the radar screen,” said Sandy Berger, who had succeeded Anthony Lake as national security adviser. “In 1998 he was the radar screen.”

Before the embassy bombings, bin Laden had been secretly indicted merely for “conspiracy to attack.” After the bombings, a two-hundred-page public indictment charged him with a litany of alleged crimes. A $5 million reward was offered for information leading to his arrest. The figure would rise to $25 million after 9/11, and was later doubled.

At the CIA after the bombings, combating the bin Laden threat was raised to “Tier 0” priority, one of the very highest levels. “We are at war,” Director Tenet declared in a memo soon after. “I want no resources or people spared in this effort.” President Clinton, for his part, signed a further “lethal force” order designed to ensure it was possible to circumvent the ban on targeted assassination. Nevertheless, and though operations against bin Laden were planned repeatedly during the two years that remained of the Clinton administration, none got the go-ahead.

Since 9/11, there have been bitter recriminations. “Policy makers seemed to want to have things both ways,” Tenet wrote. “They wanted to hit bin Laden but without endangering U.S. troops or putting at significant risk our diplomatic relations.”

In one year alone, former bin Laden unit head Scheuer wrote in 2008, the CIA presented Clinton with “two chances to capture bin Laden and eight chances to kill him using U.S. military air power.” The blame for failing to act on such occasions, according to Scheuer, lay in part with the White House and in part with his own boss. Quoting Clinton aides, he said, “Tenet consistently denigrated the targeting data on bin Laden, causing the President and his team to lose confidence in the hard-won intelligence … it spared him from ever having to explain the awkward fall-out if an attempt to get bin Laden failed.”

Scheuer’s most savage barb, however, was aimed at the President and aides Berger and Clarke. They, Scheuer would have it, “cared little about protecting Americans and were not manly enough to order such an attack, and their moral cowardice resulted in three thousand deaths on 9/11.” The words “moral cowardice,” in the context of Clinton and his people, occur no fewer than six times in Scheuer’s book.

Richard Clarke, for his part, thought the CIA had proved “pathetically unable to accomplish the mission.… I still do not understand why it was impossible for the United States to find a competent group of Afghans, Americans, third-country nationals, or some combination, who could locate bin Laden in Afghanistan and kill him.”

Comments by the former President and Berger on the failure to get bin Laden remain in closed Commission files. As recently as 2006, however, Clinton continued to insist that he “authorized the CIA to get groups together to try to kill him … I tried.” The Commission’s executive director, Philip Zelikow, agreed that one of the President’s secret orders—still withheld today—was indeed a “kill authority.” All the same, the Report noted, Clinton and Berger had worried lest “attacks that missed bin Laden could enhance his stature and win him new recruits.”

Had the world been able to witness the way bin Laden conducted himself in August 1998, when told of the death and damage the missile attacks had caused, his image would surely not have been enhanced.

“My father,” his son Omar recalled, “was struck by the most violent, uncontrollable rage. His face turned red and his eyes flashed as he began rushing about, repeatedly quoting the same verse from the Qur’an, The God kills the ones who attacked! … May God kill the ones who attacked! How could anyone attack Muslims? How could anyone attack Muslims? Why would anyone attack Muslims!’ ”

For a while after the missile attacks, bin Laden went to ground, rarely slept in the same place two nights running. He stopped using his satellite phone, which up to now had been a boon to those tracking him. Within a day of the U.S. onslaught, though, he had his military aide Atef risk a phone call to Abdel Atwan, editor of the London-based newspaper Al-Quds al-Arabi.

Having survived the missile strike, Atef said, bin Laden “wished to send this message to U.S. President Bill Clinton: that he would avenge this attack in a spectacular way and would deal a blow to America that would shake it to its very foundations, a blow it had never experienced before.”

After the attack on the American embassy in Kenya, the bomber who had run for his life at the last moment—and fallen into U.S. hands—had said something both sinister and significant. A senior accomplice, he told his questioners, had confided that al Qaeda also had targets in America. “But things are not ready yet,” the accomplice had added. “We don’t have everything prepared yet.”

NOT READY YET, but the concept was there. In late summer 1998 or soon after, Osama bin Laden summoned Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. Two years after rejecting KSM’s idea of hijacking planes and crashing them into buildings, he now said he thought it “could work.”

KSM, it seems, may have been back in the bin Laden camp for some time. An intelligence report suggests that he may have flown into Kenya, using an alias, before the bombing of the U.S. embassy there. There is a report that, two weeks later, he led a decoy operation designed to conceal bin Laden’s whereabouts when America struck the training camps. It had been the East Africa bombings, KSM would say under interrogation, that persuaded him that bin Laden really was committed to attacking the United States.

The idea of flying hijacked airplanes into U.S. targets, bin Laden said at the renewed discussion, had his people’s “full support.” KSM thought it was probably Mohammed Atef, the military commander, who had led him to change his mind. Asked to run the operation, KSM agreed.

The initial notion was still to seize a number of American airliners and crash them into U.S. targets, so far as possible simultaneously. At a first targeting meeting, bin Laden said his hope was to hit the Pentagon, the White House, and the Capitol in Washington. The World Trade Center, one of KSM’s preferences, was apparently raised later. Bin Laden had several operatives in mind for the hijackings and hoped KSM would come up with others.

Early in 1999, the “military committee” met and agreed once and for all that the project should go ahead. KSM thought it would take about two years to plan and execute. Those in the know began speaking of it as the “planes operation.”

At some point that year, Omar bin Laden was taken aside by Abu Haadi, an aide of his father to whom he was close. Omar, now eighteen, had over a period become disillusioned, and was yearning for a way to get out of Afghanistan. Now Abu Haadi had a warning for him. “I have heard talk,” he said, “that there is something very big in the works. You need to leave.”

The something, he suggested, was “gigantic.”

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

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

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

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

TWENTY-FOUR

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The family tolerated all this until the Ramadan daytime fasting period in early 1993, when Atta’s obsession with religious observance became too much. After trying to put up with his nocturnal activity—hour after hour of cooking and moving about the house—the Michaelses asked him to leave. To their son, who was living at home, he had become “that person”—someone he didn’t want to have anything to do with. Through it all, though, Doris Michaels has recalled, there had been no hint of violence in their student visitor. The problems of the Middle East, he would say, should be resolved peacefully with “words, not weapons.”

When he did move to other accommodations, Atta’s habits and prejudices again led to clashes. No one, least of all Westerners, could fail to notice his religious zeal and aversion to everything to do with female sexuality. His professor, however, who was familiar with Arab culture, thought Atta merely “a dear human being.” He applied himself to his urban engineering and planning course at university, made periodic trips back to the Middle East, and the years slipped by.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• • •

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

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

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

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

“To Lee, though, it was not a question of altering support for Israel but of merely stating a fact that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was central to the relations between the Islamic world and the United States—and to bin Laden’s ideology and the support he gained throughout the Islamic world for his jihad against America.” The commissioners resolved their differences by settling on vague language that circumvented the issue of motive.

All the evidence, however, indicates that Palestine was the factor that united the conspirators—at every level. Bin Laden, who repeatedly alluded to it, would at one point try to get KSM to bring forward the 9/11 attack date to coincide with a visit to the White House by Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon.

For KSM, concern about Palestine had been a constant ever since his return from college in the United States. He believed a 9/11-style attack would make Americans focus on “the atrocities that America is committing by supporting Israel.” Separately, in captivity, he has claimed responsibility for the planning or execution of seven attacks on buildings, planes, and other targets, either in Israel or because they were Israeli or “Jewish.”

KSM’s nephew Ramzi Yousef, the 1993 Trade Center bomber, said in the only interview he has been allowed that he believed he—and Palestinians—were “entitled to strike U.S. targets because the United States is a partner in the crimes committed in Palestine.… It finances these crimes and supports them with weapons.”

“If you ask anybody,” Yousef’s accomplice Abdul Murad told police in the Philippines, “even if you ask children, they will tell you that the U.S. is supporting Israel and Israel is killing our Muslim brothers in Palestine. The United States is acting like a terrorist, but nobody can see that.”

Palestine was certainly the principal political grievance—the only clearly expressed grievance—driving the young Arabs in Hamburg. As reported earlier in this chapter, Atta regularly sounded off about the Palestine issue. So did Binalshibh, who would speak of a “world Jewish conspiracy.” A woman with whom he had a brief affair recalled how stridently he condemned the United States for its support for Israel. His “great-grandparents, his grandparents, his parents,” he said, “hated the Jews and if he should have children, they would hate them too.”

Shehhi, though generally a cheery fellow, could on occasion appear saturnine. Asked by an acquaintance why he and Atta seemed rarely to laugh, he responded with a question of his own. “How can you laugh,” he wondered, “when people are dying in Palestine?”

Jarrah also felt strongly about the Palestine issue. “He enlightened me,” his lover Aysel Sengün would remember, “about the problems Muslims have in the Middle East. He also spoke about the intifada. I wouldn’t have known what the intifada meant at that time, because I don’t have a political background. When I asked, Ziad explained it was the freedom struggle of the Palestinians against Israel.”

In his set-piece statement in 1998, bin Laden had issued a call to arms. “With God’s permission,” he had said, “we call on everyone who believes in God … to kill the Americans and their allies—civilians and military—is an individual duty incumbent on every Muslim in all countries … in order to liberate the Al Aqsa Mosque [in Jerusalem] … wars are being waged by the Americans for religious and economic purposes, they also serve the interests of the petty Jewish state, diverting attention from its occupation of Jerusalem.”

In October 1999, at the mosque for the marriage of a member of their group, Binalshibh made a speech—political in spite of the happy occasion—that echoed bin Laden. “The problem of Jerusalem is the problem of the Muslim nation … the problem of every Muslim everywhere.… Every Muslim has the aim to free the Islamic soil from the tyrants and oppressors.”

By that fall, Binalshibh and Atta and their group had become closer than ever. They met together, prayed together, did jobs to earn money together, and spent much of their time together at the three-room apartment on Marienstrasse in Harburg that Atta had rented late the previous year. They called it Dar al-Ansar—House of the Followers—entered the name in their phone books, even scrawled it on the monthly rent check. It mirrored, almost exactly, the name of the guesthouse bin Laden had established, long ago, to house recruits in Pakistan.

These were young men who had long talked of martyrdom. “It is the highest thing to do, to die for jihad,” Binalshibh would say. “The mujahideen die peacefully. They die with a smile on their lips, their dead bodies are soft, while bodies of the killed infidels are stiff.” Jarrah, in some ways the odd man out, had declared early on that he was “dissatisfied” with his life, hoped to find some meaning—“not leave Earth in a natural way.”

The notion of dying for the faith was parroted at the mosque all the time. These men, however, were eager not merely to talk but to act. Jarrah left behind clear evidence on that score, evidence that shows he had long since been hanging on bin Laden’s every word.

Hamburger Mietvertrag für Wohnraum

Three years earlier, in his Declaration of “Jihad” against the Americans, bin Laden had spoken of the brave young Muslims who “love death as you love life,” who “have no intent but to enter Paradise by killing you.”

In a note dated October 1999, found among his possessions after 9/11, Jarrah used almost the identical phrase: “The morning will come,” he wrote. “The victors will come, will come. We swear to beat you. The earth will shake beneath your feet.” And then, days later: “I came to you with men who love the death as you love life.… Oh, the smell of Paradise is rising” (authors’ italics).

“Paradise,” Atta and Binalshibh would say, “is overshadowed with swords.” A South African–born Muslim convert who hung out with the group, Shahid Nickels, questioned all the talk about fighting for the cause of Palestine. “Muslims,” he said, “are too weak to do anything against the U.S.A.”

“No, something can be done,” replied Atta. “There are ways. The U.S.A. is not omnipotent.” The exchange took place in November 1999, and—that month and early the next—Atta, Binalshibh, Shehhi, and Jarrah did do something.

They left for bin Laden’s headquarters in Afghanistan.

THE FUTURE HIJACKERS traveled separately, probably for security reasons, to Karachi in Pakistan and on to Kandahar in Afghanistan. There is no doubt they were there. A former bin Laden bodyguard has recalled meeting Atta, Jarrah, and Shehhi. Another jihadi, a man who had also come from Germany, recalled encountering Binalshibh. A handwritten note on Atta was recovered after 9/11 in the bombed-out ruins of a house military chief Mohammed Atef had used.

Apparent proof that the German contingent went to Afghanistan—a link in the chain that the 9/11 Commission did not have—is a videotape reported to be in the hands of the U.S. government. Almost an hour long, it is said to show Atta and Jarrah at Tarnak Farms near Kandahar—the very camp where the CIA had once hoped to have bin Laden kidnapped and spirited away to the United States.

In still photos reportedly taken from the footage, both men are shown neatly bearded and smiling widely—in Atta’s case, an image utterly unlike the grim visage the world was shown after 9/11. Jarrah wears a white robe, apparently over Western clothing, Atta dark trousers and a brown sweater. Atta dons an Afghan-style hat, looks at the camera, takes the hat on and off, then chucks it away. Then he reads to the camera for perhaps ten minutes, to be followed by Jarrah doing likewise.

The video is reportedly silent, but the pair were evidently recording statements to be preserved until after their deaths. The words “al wasiyyah,” Arabic for “will,” can be clearly seen on a paper that Jarrah holds up for the camera before speaking. As he does so, he and Atta both laugh. Then they turn serious as they read out their statements. Clearly recognizable on the tape, seated on the ground among a crowd of about a hundred, is Ramzi Binalshibh.

A segment of the footage depicts the arrival of a very tall, robed figure, surrounded by bodyguards. Bin Laden, of course. If authentic, the videotape is unique evidence of the future hijackers’ presence in Afghanistan.

BOTH KSM and Binalshibh, the sole survivor of the group from Germany, have described the visit to Afghanistan. Except for Shehhi, who left early—he had been suffering from a stomach ailment—they stayed for several weeks, weeks that put them irreversibly on course for 9/11.

For bin Laden, Atef, and KSM, the trio must have seemed, in the true sense of that phrase, sent from God. KSM had only “middling confidence” in Mihdhar and Hazmi, the two remaining pilot hijacker candidates that bin Laden had initially picked. Committed and courageous though they might be, they spoke virtually no English, had no experience of life in the West. The men from Hamburg, by contrast, did have linguistic ability, were far more likely to be able to operate effectively in the United States.

In a series of meetings with bin Laden, Atef, and KSM, the trio took the oath to bin Laden—“I swear allegiance to you and to die in the cause of God”—before learning the nature of the mission. Bin Laden considered appointing Binalshibh leader, then plumped for Atta instead. He was now the emir—commander—of the operation.

Atta was included in the meeting to select targets. Dozens were discussed, with bin Laden emphasizing that he wanted one target to be military, one political, one economic. It was eventually decided that the team “must hit” the Pentagon, the Capitol—“the perceived source of U.S. policy in support of Israel”—and both towers of the World Trade Center.

Atta was free to choose in addition one other potential target—the White House, the Sears Tower in Chicago, or a foreign embassy in Washington. The name of the embassy has not been released, but it was surely that of Israel. Atta himself suggested a strike on a nuclear power station in Pennsylvania—Three Mile Island?—and bin Laden agreed.

After the talking, the training. There was some fieldwork—Jarrah cheerfully endured long hours on guard duty—but KSM thought the military side of things irrelevant. The new recruits learned the tricks of the terrorist trade—how to remove telltale stamps from passports, the importance of secure communications, of keeping phone calls short. With their very specific mission in mind, they also learned how to read airline schedules.

In a real sense, in counterpoint to its eventual success, the 9/11 operation was amateurish. KSM and bin Laden had thought initially that no special skills were needed to be a pilot, that “learning to fly an airplane was much like learning to drive a car … easily accomplished.” Totally wrong, as KSM admitted in captivity.

His maxim, though, that “simplicity was the key to success,” was in many ways probably right. He urged team members “to be normal to the maximum extent possible in their dealings, to keep the tone of their letters educational, social, or commercial.” Though averse to the unnecessary use of codes, he did develop some. If telephone numbers had to be used in correspondence, KSM directed, they were to be rendered so that the real numeral and the coded one totaled ten. His own number in Pakistan—92-300-922-388—thus became 18-700-188-722.

For Atta, some of the preparation for the mission took the form of what to others counts as fun. He was to be seen “playing video games on a PlayStation—flying a plane.” KSM thought Atta “worked hard, and learned quickly.” He gave him sufficient authority to be able to make decisions on his own, to press ahead without having to consult too often. One of the Saudis bin Laden had originally chosen, Nawaf al-Hazmi, was to be his deputy.

Each of the five early team members was honored with a kunyah, an honorific prefaced by Abu—meaning, literally, “father,” though the bearer of the name need not have children. In this case, all the kunyahs harked back to the days of the Prophet. As Binalshibh remembered them: Atta was “Father of the servant of the Beneficent, the Egyptian,” one of the followers to whom the Prophet pledged the certainty of Paradise; Shehhi was Abu’l’Qaqa’a al-Qatari, literally “the sound of clashing swords, from Qatar” (though he was in fact a citizen of the United Arab Emirates); and Jarrah was Abu Tareq al-Lubnani, literally, “Father of the one who knocks at the door, the Lebanese”—probably after an Arab commander celebrated for his conquests in North Africa and southern Spain.

Bin Laden was keen for all the future hijackers to be on their way to the United States as soon as possible—including the two Saudis, Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Mihdhar. Hazmi was to be Rab’iah al Makki, to whom the Prophet promised anything he should ask. Mihdhar was to be Sinan, “the Spear.” They were to be the trailblazers of the 9/11 operation.

AT THE TURN of the year, on the night of the Millennium, President Clinton had watched a fireworks display and hosted a large dinner at the White House. “It was a wonderful evening,” he recalled, “but I was nervous all the time. Our security team had been on high alert for weeks due to numerous intelligence reports that the United States would be hit with several terrorist attacks.… I had been focused intently on bin Laden.”

The Millennium, a cause for celebration for millions, also seemed just the moment the terrorists might strike. On December 6, in Jordan, a group of terrorists had been caught while preparing to bomb a hotel used by American and Israeli tourists. They had been overheard on a telephone intercept talking with bin Laden’s aide Abu Zubaydah.

On December 14, concern about a coming attack on the United States turned to a permanent state of alarm. The driver of a Chrysler sedan, waiting to enter Washington State from a ferry arriving from Canada, caught the attention of an alert Customs officer. There was something about the man. He was fidgeting, sweating profusely, would not look her in the eye. Hidden in the car, officers discovered, were bomb-making materials—RDX and HMTD explosives, chemicals, and Casio watch timing devices.

The man turned out to be Ahmed Ressam, an Algerian who was to admit—much later—that his intended target had been Los Angeles International Airport. The plan, he said, had been to explode the bomb on or about the day of the Millennium. He had learned about explosives in bin Laden’s Afghan training camps, and he, too, had had contact with Abu Zubaydah. He had planned the foiled attack himself, Ressam said, but bin Laden had been “aware” of it.

After the Ressam arrest, and with the Millennium looming, everyone thought there was more to come. A round of frenzied activity began. Clinton rang Pakistan’s President Musharraf to demand that a way be found to stop bin Laden’s operations. National Security Adviser Berger and intelligence chiefs, often with Attorney General Janet Reno present, met almost daily at the White House. A record number of wiretap orders were issued. “Foreign terrorist sleeper cells are present in the U.S.,” counterterrorism coordinator Clarke’s staff warned, “and attacks in the U.S. are likely.”

Berger and Clarke spent the morning of Christmas Day at FBI headquarters and the afternoon at the CIA. Nothing happened. Come the night of the Millennium, thousands of law enforcement agents and military personnel were on duty. FBI director Louis Freeh and Attorney General Reno kept vigil in their offices—Reno would sleep the night on a couch at the Justice Department. In New York’s Times Square, local FBI counterterrorism chief John O’Neill waited for the famous ball to fall at midnight.

The ball fell, and no catastrophe came. “I think we dodged the bullet,” Berger said when he rang Clarke after midnight. Clarke said he would wait three more hours, until New Year’s came in Los Angeles. At 3:00 A.M., when all was still well, he went up to the roof of the White House and “popped open a bottle.”

The FBI told Berger after the Millennium, he was to recall, that al Qaeda did not after all have active cells in the U.S. “They said there might be sleepers, but they had that covered. They were saying this was not a big domestic threat.”

NO ONE THAT New Year’s spoke publicly about a specific danger, that an attack in the United States might come in the shape of airplane hijackings. Many months earlier, however, bin Laden had spoken of just that. “All Islamic military,” he had boasted, “have been mobilized to strike a significant U.S. or Israeli strategic target, to bring down their aircraft and hijack them.”

In 1998, indeed, the White House had quietly held an exercise involving a scenario in which terrorists flew an explosives-laden jet into a building in Washington. In December that year, the CIA had told Bill Clinton of intelligence suggesting that “bin Laden and his allies are preparing for attack in the U.S., including an aircraft hijacking.”

During 1999, Britain’s foreign intelligence service warned its American counterparts that bin Laden was planning attacks in which airliners could be used in “unconventional ways.” Two U.S. bodies, moreover, produced prophetic warnings.

“America,” the congressionally mandated Commission on National Security forecast in its initial report, “will become increasingly vulnerable to hostile attack on our homeland.… Americans will likely die on American soil, possibly in large numbers.” The same month, a report by the Library of Congress’s Federal Research Division, which had wide circulation within the government, said al Qaeda could be expected to retaliate for the cruise missile attack on bin Laden’s camps.

“Suicide bombers belonging to al Qaeda’s Martyrdom Battalion,” the report went on to say, “could crash-land an aircraft packed with high explosives (C-4 and Semtex) into the Pentagon, the headquarters of the Central Intelligence Agency, or the White House.”

IN NOVEMBER 1999, just months after bin Laden had decided on the 9/11 operation, two young Saudi students had boarded as Coach Class passengers on an America West Flight 90 from Phoenix, Arizona, to Washington, D.C. During the flight, one of them—in the words of a flight attendant—“walked into the First Class section and continued walking towards the cockpit door. He tried to open the door. He was very subtle in his actions.” A passenger in First Class also saw the Arab man “try to get into the cockpit.”

The cockpit door was locked, and the man claimed he had mistaken it for the lavatory. The behavior of the passenger and his traveling companion had made the flight attendants uneasy, though, and they alerted the captain. At a routine stopover in Ohio, the plane had taxied to a remote parking place and the two men had been taken away in handcuffs. After four hours of interrogation and a search of their baggage, they were eventually allowed to continue their journey.

Since 9/11, the suspicion has strengthened that this had been, as one FBI agent put it, a “casing operation.” It turned out, according to a Commission memorandum, that both the Saudi passengers were “ ‘tied’ to Islamic extremists.” One of those extremist associates, interviewed at home by the FBI before 9/11, had said openly that he thought America a legitimate target. On the wall, in plain sight, was a poster of bin Laden.

Intelligence on the companion of the man who tried the cockpit door indicated that after leaving the United States he received “explosive and car bomb training” in Afghanistan. One of his friends had studied flying in the United States and was arrested after 9/11 along with top bin Laden aide Abu Zubaydah. The traveling companion, moreover, has admitted having met one of the future pilot hijackers.

The America West incident may indeed have been a reconnaissance mission. According to KSM, as many as four bin Laden units made early exploratory trips to the United States.

In 1999, and the previous year, reports reached the FBI that terrorists were planning to send men to learn to fly in the United States. “The purpose of this training was unknown,” the 1999 report said, “but the [terrorist] organization leaders viewed the requirement as ‘particularly important’ and were reported to have approved an open-ended amount of funding to ensure its success.”

The FBI’s Counterterrorism Division responded to the reports by asking field offices to investigate. Congress’s Joint Inquiry, however, found no indication that any investigation was conducted. Paul Kurtz, who at that time was a senior official on the National Security Council, said dealing with the Bureau was “very frustrating,” at some levels “totally infuriating.” Overall, he said, the FBI was a “freaking black hole.”

In November 1999, moreover, when the Bureau’s Counterterrorism Division asked the Immigration and Naturalization Service to share data on relevant arrivals in the country, the INS did not respond to the request.

November was the month of the suspicious incident aboard America West Flight 90. It was also the month that, in Afghanistan, KSM and bin Laden assembled the future hijacker pilots and ordered them to head for the United States. As the FBI and the INS dithered, the enemy was at the gate.

TWENTY-FIVE

HAZMI AND MIHDHAR, BIN LADEN’S FIRST CHOICES FOR THE “PLANES operation,” had undergone months of preparation in Afghanistan. With other select fighters, they had undergone an intensive course at an old Soviet copper mine used as a training camp. It involved endurance exercises, man-to-man combat, and night operations—most of which KSM deemed, reasonably enough, of little use for the challenge awaiting them.

Once in KSM’s hands, the advance guard received tuition in relevant subjects. They perused aviation magazines, were introduced to the mysteries of airline timetables, and viewed flight simulation software. Like Atta, they played computer games involving aviation scenarios. They watched Hollywood movies about hijackings, but with sequences featuring female characters carefully edited out. How instructive that can have been, given the ubiquity of female flight attendants on airliners, remains a question.

Hazmi and Mihdhar, KSM decided, were to stay initially in California. He had yellow and white phone directories, supposedly found in a Karachi market, and tried to teach the men how to use them. The directories would help, KSM thought, in locating apartment rental agencies and language schools—and places to take flying lessons. They also tried to grasp some basic words and phrases in English.

The two young men were coached separately. Mihdhar, who was married to a Yemeni wife, left early. Hazmi trained with the two Yemenis bin Laden had picked but who had been refused U.S. visas. One of them, Walid bin Attash, has recalled talks on choosing the optimal moment to hijack an airplane. They were to take careful note of flight attendants’ and pilots’ movements, the routine attendants followed when taking meals to the cockpit, the comings and goings to the lavatory of the pilots.

Attash was assigned to do a dry run. He flew first to Kuala Lumpur, the capital of Malaysia, a largely Muslim nation that did not require visas for travelers from certain other Muslim states. Then he flew to Bangkok and onward, aboard an American airliner, to Hong Kong. He took the flight to Hong Kong on December 31, 1999, Millennium Eve, the same day on which U.S. officials were beside themselves with worry about a possible bin Laden attack.

Attash learned a good deal from these rehearsal flights. It was not enough, he realized, just to travel First Class. It was important to reserve a seat with a clear view of the cockpit door. Second, he discovered it was possible to board a plane carrying a box cutter or razor knife. Were the knife to trigger a metal detector, he realized, toiletries that came in metallic tubes or containers—like toothpaste or shaving cream—were probably enough to fool inspectors at security checks. In the event of awkward questions, and to account for the box cutter, Attash also carried art supplies. His bag was opened and he was questioned, but the ploy worked every time.

The reconnaissance completed, Attash, Hazmi, and Mihdhar—and several other terrorists—spent a few days at a condominium complex on the outskirts of Kuala Lumpur. Then they traveled on to Bangkok, the last stop for Hazmi and Mihdhar before the real start of the 9/11 mission. On January 15, 2000, the pair boarded a United Airlines flight bound for Los Angeles. Armed with the entry visas obtained the previous year, they had no problem at all at Immigration. They were admitted to the U.S. as “tourists.”

KSM was to claim “no al Qaeda operative or facilitator” was ready and waiting to help the two future hijackers on arrival. The Commission, however—usually careful not to raise doubt where there was none—did not believe him. With reason.

On the routine form they filled out on arrival, Hazmi and Mihdhar stated they would be staying initially at a Sheraton in Los Angeles. Intensive inquiries after 9/11, however, would produce no trace of them there or at any other hotel or motel. Where did they stay?

A driver who said he did chauffeuring work for the Saudi consulate was to give a detailed account of having chauffeured “two Saudis.” Someone else, he indicated, had met them at the airport, then taken them to “an apartment … that had been rented for them” on Sepulveda Boulevard. An imam at the King Fahd mosque, near the consulate, had introduced the driver to the new arrivals. The driver gave them a tour, to the beach at Santa Monica and over to Hollywood. Shown a number of photographs of young Arabs, the driver picked out Hazmi and Mihdhar—only to back off and nervously deny having known them.

Knowing that the pair spoke virtually no English and “barely knew how to function in U.S. society,” KSM has said, he had “instructed” them—unlike the more sophisticated accomplices who were later to arrive from Germany—to feel free to ask for assistance at a local mosque or Islamic center. That is what Hazmi and Mihdhar appear to have done, but they likely had more specific guidance than KSM admitted. Another captured terrorist said KSM was in possession of at least one address in the States, perhaps in California.

If there was such a contact, KSM managed to conceal it. The CIA concluded that his principal goal, even under torture, was to protect sleepers—operatives already in the United States. In doing so, he seems to have sought to lay a false trail. On the one hand he claimed under interrogation that he had shown Hazmi and Mihdhar a phone directory that “possibly” covered Long Beach, near Los Angeles, and that they tried to enroll in various language schools in the L.A. area. On the other hand, he referred to definitely having had directories for San Diego and having noted that there were language schools and flight schools in that city. KSM’s “idea,” he said, was that Hazmi and Mihdhar should base themselves in San Diego.