The Eleventh Day

At any rate, whatever guidance they may have received at the Saudi consulate and mosque in Los Angeles, it was to San Diego that they headed. The man who invited them there and arranged housing for them was to become a major focus of the investigation.

Forty-two-year-old Omar al-Bayoumi was a mystery in his own right. According to a rental application form he filled out, he was a student receiving a monthly income from relatives in India. In fact he was an employee of a subsidiary of a contractor for the Saudi Civil Aviation Authority—paid but, as a colleague put it, a “ghost”—not required to work. He had time on his hands, and spent much of it helping to run a mosque near San Diego.

According to Bayoumi and a companion, they met Hazmi and Mihdhar on February 1, 2000, two weeks after their arrival in the United States. According to the companion, an American Muslim convert named Caysan bin Don, he and Bayoumi drove first to Los Angeles. Bayoumi, he said, met for thirty minutes with a man at the Saudi consulate, then went on to the nearby King Fahd mosque. Bayoumi, for his part, denied that they stopped at the mosque.

Both agreed that they went to eat at the Mediterranean Café, a restaurant that served food suitable for Muslims. As they were waiting to be served, they said, Hazmi and Mihdhar walked in. On hearing them speaking Arabic, Bayoumi invited them to come join them at their table. He did so, according to a Los Angeles Times account, after first dropping a newspaper on the floor and bending to retrieve it.

What led Hazmi and Mihdhar to express interest in moving to San Diego, Bayoumi claimed, was his “description of the weather there.” They duly showed up in the city, sought him out at the Islamic Center, and—with his assistance—moved for a while into the apartment next door to his own.

The way Bayoumi and bin Don told it, it had been pure chance that they met the two future terrorists. There are factors, though, that suggest it did not happen that way: a witness who quoted Bayoumi as saying before going to Los Angeles that he was on his way “to pick up visitors”; phone records that indicate frequent contact between him and the imam said to have arranged for the “two Saudis’ ” car tour around Los Angeles; phone records indicating that Hazmi and Mihdhar used Bayoumi’s cell phone for several weeks; the fact that Bayoumi appeared to have written jihad-type material; that Bayoumi’s salary was approved by the father of a man whose photo was later found in a raid on a terrorist safe house in Afghanistan; and that there was a mark in his passport that investigators associated with possible affiliation to al Qaeda.

“We do not know,” the 9/11 Commission Report would conclude, “whether the lunch encounter occurred by chance or design.” The staff director of Congress’s Joint Inquiry, Eleanor Hill, told the authors she thought Bayoumi’s story “very suspicious.” An unnamed former senior FBI official who oversaw the Bayoumi investigation was more trenchant. “We firmly believed,” he told Newsweek, “that he had knowledge … and that his meeting with them that day was more than coincidence.”

The man most likely to have been a primary contact for Hazmi and Mihdhar is a man who has since gained global notoriety—Anwar Aulaqi. American-born Aulaqi, then twenty-nine, was imam at a San Diego mosque familiar to most of the cast of characters mentioned in this chapter. On the day the two terrorists arranged to move in next door to Bayoumi, four phone calls occurred between Bayoumi’s telephone and Aulaqi’s.

Hazmi and Mihdhar attended the mosque where Aulaqi preached and were seen there in his company. Witnesses told the FBI that the trio had “closed-door meetings.” According to a later landlord, Hazmi said he respected Aulaqi and spoke with him on a regular basis.

Aulaqi, for his part, admitted to the FBI after 9/11 that he had met Hazmi several times, enough to be able to assess him as a “very calm and extremely nice person.” Congress’s Joint Inquiry Report was to characterize Aulaqi as having been the future hijackers’ “spiritual adviser.”

In the context of holy war, that is to say a good deal. The following year, the year of 9/11, all three men—Aulaqi and, subsequently, the two terrorists—relocated to the East Coast. Hazmi and one of the hijacking pilots attended his mosque in Virginia. He claimed that he had no contact with them there.

The Bureau had looked hard at Aulaqi even before the future hijackers came to California, and also while they were there. One lead investigated was the suggestion that he had been contacted by a “possible procurement agent for bin Laden.” There had been nothing, however, to justify prosecuting the imam. The 9/11 Commission described Aulaqi as “potentially significant.”

By 2011, Aulaqi would have the world’s total attention. At large in Yemen following a brief spell in prison—at the belated request of the United States—the former San Diego imam was suspected of involvement in four serious recent terrorist attacks aimed at the United States. Two had involved attempts to explode bombs on aircraft.

The chairwoman of the House Subcommittee on Intelligence, Jane Harman, has called Aulaqi “Terrorist No. 1.”

IN SAN DIEGO in early 2000, Hazmi and Mihdhar appear to have at first sought to pass themselves off as long-stay visitors interested in seeing the sights—as KSM had suggested. Hazmi bought season passes to the San Diego Zoo and SeaWorld. They opened bank accounts, bought a Toyota sedan, obtained driver’s licenses and state IDs. When they moved on from Bayoumi’s apartment complex, to accommodations elsewhere, Hazmi even allowed his name, address, and telephone number to appear in the Pacific Bell phone directory for San Diego.

Hazmi seems to have been pleasant enough and sociable, and joined a soccer team in San Diego. Mihdhar was a darker, “brooding” character. Early on, told that renting an apartment would involve putting down a deposit, so violently did he fly off the handle that the landlord thought him “psychotic.” Not clever for a terrorist living undercover—it was the kind of thing people remembered.

A Muslim acquaintance vividly recalled an exchange he had with Mihdhar. When Mihdhar reproached him for watching “immoral” American television, the acquaintance retorted, “If you’re so religious, why don’t you have facial hair?” To which Mihdhar replied meaningfully, “You’ll know someday, brother.”

Had their tradecraft been better, the two men would not have used long-distance communication as much as they did. KSM, concerned about their ability to function in the West, had told them to contact him with urgent questions. Once they had acquired their own cell phones, however, they often used them to call not KSM but relatives in Saudi Arabia and Yemen. They sent emails—both had addresses on Yahoo.com—using their landlord’s computer and those provided free at San Diego State University.

Hazmi and Mihdhar failed utterly to live up to bin Laden’s early expectations. Though Hazmi enrolled in English classes, he learned hardly anything. Mihdhar apparently did not even start the course. The pair’s effort to learn to fly, meanwhile, was tardy, short-lived when it did get started, and hopeless.

More than two months after arriving, the pair attended a one-hour introductory session at a local San Diego flight school. A month later, at another school, they bought equipment and took a few lessons. They said from the start that they wished to fly jets—Boeing airliners—although they had no previous experience. They had no interest in takeoffs or landings. When taken up in a Cessna, one of them began praying loudly.

“They just didn’t have the aptitude,” instructor Rick Garza would recall. “They had no idea.… They were like Dumb and Dumber.” He told bin Laden’s chosen men that flying was simply not for them. That was the end of that.

On June 9, less than five months after arriving and soon after hearing that his wife had given birth to their first child, Mihdhar dropped out and flew back to the Middle East. By any standard, it was an unforgivable lapse. When KSM said as much, though, he was overruled by bin Laden. The operatives’ pathetic bumbling, KSM was to tell the CIA, was not really a disaster. His planning was progressive, a step-by-step affair, he said, and the next step had already been taken.

As Mihdhar left the United States, more competent accomplices arrived.

ONCE BACK in Germany from Afghanistan, the Hamburg-based conspirators had changed so much as to be unrecognizable. To outward appearances, they were no longer the obvious fundamentalists they had been before leaving. They shed the clothing and the beards that marked them out as Muslim radicals, no longer attended the mosques known as haunts of extremists.

Atta fired off emails to thirty-one U.S. flight schools. “We are a small group of young men from different Arab countries,” he wrote in March 2000. “We would like to start training for the career of professional pilot.” The future hijackers declared their passports “lost,” received new ones, and applied for visas to enter the United States.

As a Yemeni with no proof of permanent residence, Ramzi Binalshibh was turned down. His hopes of becoming a pilot hijacker frustrated, he was thenceforth to function as fixer and middle man, liaison to KSM. Binalshibh’s three companions, however, encountered no problems.

Marwan al-Shehhi flew into New York first, at the end of May 2000, with Atta following soon after. Beyond the fact that they took rooms in the Bronx and Brooklyn, how they spent the month that followed remains a mystery. Atta bought a cell phone and calling card—the first of more than a hundred cards the team was to use during the operation. Ziad Jarrah, the last to arrive, headed straight for a flight school in Florida. He had signed up while still in Germany, having seen its advertisement in a German aviation magazine.

Florida Flight Training Center, still in business today, sits beside the runway of the airport at Venice, a quiet retirement community on the Gulf Coast near Sarasota. It was a small operation, and Jarrah got on well with the man who ran it. “He was,” Arne Kruithof was to remember ruefully, “the kind of guy who wanted to be loved.… I remember him bringing me a six-pack of beer at home when I hurt my knee one time.” Jarrah himself, Kruithof said, liked an “occasional bottle of Bud.”

Jarrah’s course was geared to obtaining a Private Pilot License to fly single-engine aircraft. He already had a handle on the theory, having studied aviation mechanics in Germany, and he made quiet, steady progress. A fellow student, Thorsten Bierman, however, found Jarrah self-centered and uncooperative when they flew together. “He wanted to do everything single-handed.”

Atta and Shehhi had left New York and traveled first to look at a flight school in Norman, Oklahoma, at which one of bin Laden’s personal pilots had once trained to fly. As early as 1998, the FBI’s regional office had been alerted to the large number of Arabs learning to fly in the area.

After a tour of that school, however, Atta and Shehhi decided not to enroll. They made their way instead to Venice, Florida, and Huffman Aviation, just a block from the school where Jarrah was already at work. No reliable source, however, has spoken of seeing Jarrah with Atta and Shehhi in Venice. Their tradecraft was superior to that of the inept fellows who had arrived earlier in California.

Mohamed Atta’s visa, which got him into the United States in spring 2000, was issued without any prior interview. Ziad Jarrah’s charred visa

(below)

was recovered at the site of the crash of United Flight 93

.

Rudi Dekkers, who ran Huffman, would have nothing good to say about Atta. The hijackers’ team leader, he said, “had an attitude, like he was standing above everybody … very, very arrogant.” Shehhi, by contrast, was a “likeable person, he had fun, he was laughing … this is a male environment, so we talk about girls, planes. But Atta was never socializing.”

Their first flying instructor, Mark Mikarts, was at first just a little nonplussed at the sight of Atta. “When you do flight training,” Mikarts said, “you tend to get a little bit dirty—there’s oil and fuel. You’re sweating. He was always immaculately dressed, with the $200 Gucci shoes, silk shirts, double-hemmed pants. He always overdressed.”

Teaching Atta to handle a Cessna 172, meanwhile, turned out to be a nightmare. “Generally,” said Mikarts,

the first five to ten hours is where a student learns to fly by visual references. Using outside visual references, we’d keep the horizon at a certain part of the windshield. He had a very difficult time learning that. He would always over-rotate, or he couldn’t keep the reference.… But he would not listen.… It was like he had to do it his way.

Then finally one day he over-rotated the airplane and I thought, “I’m going to let him do whatever he wants to do. Let’s see what happens.” He pitches the airplane way up.… The engine is screaming. The stall horn is blaring. The air speed’s bleeding away. We’re about to stall and tumble out of the air. I’m saying, “Nose down!” Next time, louder. Third time, I said, “Nose down!” in a rather nasty tone. [Then] I took my hand and shoved the control wheel forward and stamped on the rudder pedal to get it back where it’s supposed to be. We pitched down so abruptly that he popped out of his seat from the negative g’s—hit his head on the ceiling.

He turned his head towards me and gave me a look like, “You infidel …” or something. Like he wanted to kill me. That’s it, we turned back and he went and complained to my chief pilot.… I said, “If he’s going to be that much of a baby about it and not follow instructions, let him go someplace else. Not worth me breaking my neck and you losing an instructor.”

Things were no better in September, when Atta and Shehhi tried another flight school. They failed an instrument rating, argued about how things should be done, even tried to wrest control of the airplane from their instructor. They were asked to leave—and got Huffman to take them back again.

Ann Greaves, a student from England, asked the instructor they shared how the two Arabs were getting on. He replied with “a gesture of the hand. Nothing was said. It was sort of, you know, ‘So so …’ ” The instructor told her that Atta had connections to Saudi royalty, that Shehhi, who seemed to follow behind, was supposedly his bodyguard. Once, when Greaves reached out to retrieve her seat cushion—Atta, who was short and also needed a cushion, had appropriated it—Shehhi rushed to place himself between them. Royalty and their staff, Greaves thought, ought to have better manners.

What led Shehhi to respond the way he did probably had nothing to do with manners—and everything with the fact that Greaves was a woman. Islam dictates that men and women not married or related to each other may not touch, not even to shake hands. Atta abhorred the idea of proximity to women, even after his death. In his will, written long since at the age of twenty-seven, he had stipulated: “I don’t want a pregnant woman or a person who is not clean to come and say goodbye to me … I don’t want women to come to my house to apologize for my death … I don’t want any women to go to my grave at all, during my funeral or on any occasion thereafter.”

In Venice, they all remembered Atta’s hang-up about women. “We had female dispatchers at the flight school,” Mikarts recalled. “He would order them around, tell them this, tell them that. I’d pull him aside and say, ‘I don’t know how you treat women in your country, but you don’t talk to her that way.’ ” Ivan Chirivella, who taught Atta and Shehhi during their brief stint at another school, remembered that they were both “very rude to the female employees.”

The pair were never seen in a woman’s company at the Outlook bar, where flight students gathered at the end of the working day. Lizsa Lehman, who worked there, remembered the two of them well. She liked Shehhi, thought him “fun, inquisitive, friendly,” while Atta rarely exchanged a word with her. He always stood with his back to the bar, Shehhi explained, because he did not approve of female bartenders.

Atta did break one Muslim taboo. If he did deign to address her, Lehman said, it was to utter the words “Bud Light.” There appears to be no truth to allegations made after 9/11 that several of the terrorists, including Atta, drank alcohol to excess. Lehman’s clear memory, though, is that Atta and Shehhi were partial to a beer at the end of the day. “Two, maybe, but they never—ever—overindulged.”

IN EARLY AUGUST, the diligent Ziad Jarrah was awarded his Private Pilot License. In contrast to Atta, the love of a woman was on his mind. He headed back to Germany in the fall to spend several weeks with his girlfriend, Aysel. They went to Paris together, had themselves photographed up the Eiffel Tower. “I love you … don’t worry,” Jarrah wrote when he got back, then indulged himself a little. He bought a red Mitsubishi Eclipse, spent a weekend in the Bahamas. Over Christmas, he took a week-long trip to Lebanon to see his family.

By late December, and in spite of Atta’s obstreperous behavior, both he and Shehhi had qualified to fly not only small private planes but also multi-engine aircraft. Professional, however, the pair were not. The day before Christmas, when their rented plane stalled on the taxiway at Miami Airport, they simply abandoned it and walked away. That fiasco reportedly marked the end of their relationship with Huffman Aviation.

Atta’s mind was racing ahead. Even before receiving his certification, he had sent off for flight deck videos for Boeing airliners. In the last week of December, at a training center near Miami, he and Shehhi paid for six hours on a Boeing 727 simulator. “They just wanted to move around in mid-air,” said the instructor who supervised the session, “not take off or land. I thought it was really odd. I can see now what I was allowing them to do. It’s a terrible thing to live with.”

Some have argued that the hijacking pilots did not have the skills required to pull off the maneuvers performed on 9/11. Given that they would not have to face the complexities of takeoff and landing, though, and given the further practice they were to have in the remaining months, their abilities apparently sufficed for their deadly purpose.

On New Year’s Eve, at another school, Atta and Shehhi trained on a Boeing 767 simulator. It would be a 767, with Atta at the controls, that eight months later crashed into the North Tower of the World Trade Center.

• • •

FAR OFF in Afghanistan, seemingly oblivious to what he was asking of the men he had sent to America, Osama bin Laden had become impatient. In the fall of 2000, when they were still at flight school, he had pressed KSM to launch the operation. It would be enough, he said, simply to bring airliners down, not necessarily to strike specific targets. This was at the time of the second Palestinian intifada, or uprising, that followed then Israeli opposition leader Ariel Sharon’s provocative visit to Jerusalem’s Temple Mount. Bin Laden, KSM said, wanted to be seen to retaliate against Israel’s principal supporter.

As he would time and again, KSM resisted bin Laden’s pressure. Lack of readiness aside, there was a cogent new reason not to rush matters. A new pilot hijacker candidate had materialized. Twenty-nine-year-old Hani Hanjour, the son of a well-to-do family in the Saudi city of Ta’if, already had flying qualifications. After years of travel back and forth to American flight schools, he had succeeded in getting his commercial pilot’s license. After trying in vain to get work flying for an airline in his own country, however, he had resorted to pretending to his family that he had a job as a pilot in the United Arab Emirates. This was a frustrated young man.

The key to understanding the direction Hanjour now took, though, lies elsewhere. Though described by those who knew him well as “frail,” “quiet,” “a little mouse,” he could show another side. When alcohol was available, this conspirator reportedly went drinking on occasion. Afterward, however, filled with guilt, he would devote an entire day to praying. So moved would he become during prayers that one witness recalled seeing him in tears. Religion figured large for him. Ever since a first trip to Afghanistan at the age of seventeen, he had wanted to make jihad.

In 2000, when Hanjour turned up in one of the Afghan camps and let it be known that he was a qualified pilot, bin Laden’s aide Atef sent him to KSM. KSM saw his potential, gave him a basic briefing on how to act in the field, and dispatched him—equipped with a visa obtained in Saudi Arabia—to join Nawaf al-Hazmi in San Diego. They would not stay there long, but would head off to yet another flight school—in Arizona.

Given Hanjour’s flying experience, KSM thought his target should be the Pentagon—relatively hard to hit because it is only five stories high. On reaching the States, one of Hanjour’s calls would be to a flight school owner he knew from previous visits. He now wanted, he said, to learn how to fly a Boeing 757. The instructor suggested he first get some experience on a smaller business airplane, but Hanjour persisted. “No,” he said, “I want to fly the 757.” On 9/11, he would be aboard the 757 that hit the Pentagon.

The first name “Hani” means “content.” Hanjour liked to say, however, that it meant “warrior,” in line with the name that he—like all the hijackers—had been given before setting off for the States. Bin Laden dubbed him “ ‘Orwah al-Ta’ifi,” after a follower of the Prophet who had died in a shower of arrows in Hanjour’s hometown—giving thanks to God for allowing him martyrdom.

IN OCTOBER 2000, as KSM prepared Hanjour for his mission, Atta and Shehhi were well into their course at Huffman Aviation. They and fellow students had to use a computer provided by the school to prepare for a written test, and people often had to wait their turn. One day, however, as Ann Greaves waited outside for Atta and Shehhi to emerge from the computer room, she realized they were not working on the test at all. She heard hushed voices talking in Arabic, then an outburst of what sounded like delight.

“I went into the room,” she recalled, “and they were hugging each other and sort of slapping each other on the back … I have no way of knowing what it was that made them so happy.” What would certainly have made Atta and Shehhi happy was the news—on the 12th of the month—that came out of Yemen.

At 11:18 A.M. local time that morning, the guided missile destroyer USS Cole was about to complete refueling in the port of Aden. Its captain, Commander Kirk Lippold, was preparing to leave harbor. Small craft had been buzzing around, delivering fresh food, clearing the ship’s garbage. One such boat, carrying two men in Yemeni dress, approached the destroyer, smiled and waved, then stood as if to attention.

“There was a tremendous explosion,” Lippold remembered. “You could feel the entire 8,400 tons of ship violently thrust up and to the right. It seemed to hang in the air for a second before coming back into the water. We rocked from side to side.… Then it was dead quiet and there was a wave of smoke and dust that washed over me.” Moments later, on deck, the captain looked down at the hull of his vessel.

“The best way to describe it,” he said, “would be that it was like someone had taken their fist and literally punched a forty-foot hole all the way in the side of the ship—all the way through, shoving everything out of the way until it came out of the starboard side.… The force of an explosion like that does terrible things to a human body.”

The men in Arab dress in the small boat had detonated a massive, lethal charge of Semtex explosive and the effect on the Cole was devastating. Seventeen of the sailors on deck or below, waiting for chow in the canteen, were killed. Thirty-nine were injured. The average age of the dead was nineteen.

True to previous form, bin Laden would deny that he was behind the bombing, but praise the perpetrators. Later, during the wedding festivities for one of his sons, he would recite a poem he had written:

A destroyer, even the brave might fear …

To her doom she progresses slowly, clothed in a huge illusion

,

Awaiting her is a dinghy, bobbing in the waves

.

And:

The pieces of the bodies of infidels were flying like dust particles

,

Had you seen it with your own eyes you would have been very pleased

,

Your heart would have been filled with joy

.

In a recruitment video that circulated the following year, bin Laden spelled out his grand theory. “With small means and great faith, we can defeat the mightiest military power of modern times. America is much weaker than it seems.”

SIX DAYS AFTER the bombing of the Cole, President Clinton spoke at a memorial service for the dead. “To those who attacked them we say, you will not find a safe harbor. We will find you. And justice will prevail.”

“Let’s hope we can gather enough intelligence to figure out who did the act,” said George W. Bush, then in the last weeks of his campaign for the presidency. “There must be a consequence.”

A cabinet-level White House meeting after the attack, however, had decided to take no immediate action, to wait for clear evidence as to who was responsible. Michael Sheehan, the State Department representative on the Counterterrorism Security Group, seethed with rage as he talked with Richard Clarke afterward. “What’s it gonna take, Dick?” he exploded. “Who the shit do they think attacked the Cole, fuckin’ Martians? … Does al Qaeda have to attack the Pentagon to get their attention?”

No one doubted bin Laden and his people were behind the bombing. In the final days of the administration, however, and with fresh memories of the failed missile attack following the embassy bombings in Africa, there was going to be no action without clear evidence.

In public and in private, the President had been hot on the issue all year long. Terrorism, Clinton had said in his State of the Union address, would be a “major security threat” far into the future. In February, when sent a memo updating him on efforts to locate bin Laden, he responded with a scrawled note in the margin—“not satisfactory … could surely do better.”

The Air Force had done better. By September, Clarke and others had sat in amazement as an Air Force drone—an unmanned craft named Predator—beamed back pictures taken from the air over Afghanistan. Not merely pictures but, on two occasions, pictures of a tall man in a white robe—surrounded by what appeared to be bodyguards—at one of bin Laden’s camps. The Afghan winter was coming, however, and photography would soon become impossible. Besides, the Predator could not be used to hit bin Laden. It was as yet unarmed.

In late fall, American negotiators were in secret negotiations with the Taliban that reportedly included talk of the possible handover of bin Laden. In December, a U.N. Security Council resolution called for the Saudi’s extradition. To no avail.

On December 18, CIA director Tenet warned Clinton that there was increased risk of a new bin Laden attack. The best information indicated it would occur abroad, he said, but the United States itself was also vulnerable. Intelligence had been coming in of terrorist plans similar to what was actually being planned.

A Pakistani recently arrived in the States had told the FBI of having been recruited in England, flown to Pakistan, and given training on how to hijack passenger planes. His instructions, he said, had been to join five or six other men—they included trainee hijacking pilots—already in America. On arrival in New York, however, he had gotten cold feet and turned himself in. Though the man passed FBI lie detector tests, no action was taken. He was simply returned to London.

In Italy in August, a bug planted by Italian police had picked up a chilling conversation between a Yemeni just arrived at Bologna airport and a known terrorist operative. Asked how his trip had been, the Yemeni replied that he had been “studying airplanes.” He spoke of a “surprise strike that will come from the other country … one of those strikes that will never be forgotten” engineered by “a madman but a genius … in the future listen to the news and remember these words. We can fight any power using airplanes.”

Such intelligence was routinely shared with other Western intelligence agencies, according to a senior Italian counterterrorism officer interviewed by the authors. How long this fragment of information took to reach American analysts, however, remains unclear.

In September, there was fear of a 9/11-style attack during the Olympic Games in Sydney, Australia. Fighters patrolled overhead, ready to intercept any aircraft that might be used to target the stadium. The principal perceived source of the threat, security chief Paul McKinnon has said, was bin Laden.

The FBI and the Federal Aviation Administration, however, downplayed the notion that an attack was possible within the United States. “FBI investigations,” a joint assessment said in December 2000, “do not suggest evidence of plans to target domestic civil aviation.” Further investigation of activity at American flight schools, the Bureau’s headquarters unit told field offices, was “deemed imprudent.”

CIA OFFICIALS had briefed candidate George Bush and his staff on the terrorist threat two months before the election, bluntly warning that “Americans would die in terrorist acts inspired by bin Laden” in the next four years. In late November, after the election but while the result was still being contested, President Clinton authorized the Agency to give Bush the same data he himself was receiving.

The election once settled, Vice President–elect Cheney, Secretary of State–designate Colin Powell, and National Security Adviser–designate Condoleezza Rice received detailed briefings on bin Laden and al Qaeda. “As I briefed Rice,” Clarke recalled, “her facial expression gave me the impression she had never heard the term before.” Asked about that, Rice said acidly that she found it peculiar that Clarke should have been “sitting there reading my body language.” She told the 9/11 Commission that she and colleagues had in fact been quite “cognizant of the group.” Clarke, for his part, claimed most senior officials in the incoming administration did not know what al Qaeda was.

Clinton’s assistant secretary of defense for special operations, Brian Sheridan, told Rice that al Qaeda was “not an amateur-type deal … It’s serious stuff, these guys are not going away.” Rice listened but asked no questions. “I offered to brief anyone, anytime,” Sheridan recalled. No one took him up on the offer.

The Commission on National Security, which had been at work for two and a half years, was about to issue a final report concluding that an attack “on American soil” was likely in the not-too-distant future. “Failure to prevent mass-casualty attacks against the American homeland,” the report said, “will jeopardize not only American lives but U.S. foreign policy writ large. It would undermine support for U.S. international leadership and for many of our personal freedoms, as well.… In the face of this threat, our nation has no coherent or integrated government structures.”

So seriously did Commission members take the threat that they pressed to see Bush and Cheney even before the inauguration. They got no meeting, however, then or later.

Bush, for his part, met with Clinton at the White House. As Clinton was to recall in his 2004 autobiography, he told the incoming president that Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda would be his biggest security problem.

Bush would tell the 9/11 Commission he “did not remember much being said about al Qaeda” during the briefing. In his 2010 memoir, he dealt with the subject by omitting it altogether. According to Clinton, Bush “listened to what I had to say without much comment, then changed the subject.”

TWENTY-SIX

“WE ARE NOT THIS STORY’S AUTHOR,” GEORGE BUSH TOLD THE American people in his inaugural speech on January 20, 2001. God would direct events during his presidency. “An angel,” he declared, citing a statesman of Thomas Jefferson’s day, “still rides in the whirlwind and directs this storm.”

In the months and years since the whirlwind of 9/11, statesmen, intelligence officers, and law enforcement officials have assiduously played the blame game, passed the buck, and—in almost all cases—ducked responsibility. No one, no one at all, would in the end be held to account.

The Clinton administration’s approach, Condoleezza Rice has been quoted as saying, had been “empty rhetoric that made us look feckless.” The former President, for his part, staunchly defended his handling of the terrorist threat. “They ridiculed me for trying,” Clinton said of Bush’s people. “They had eight months to try. They did not try.”

“What we did in the eight months,” Rice riposted, “was at least as aggressive as what the Clinton administration did.… The notion [that] somehow for eight months the Bush administration sat there and didn’t do that is just flatly false.”

Quite early in the presidency, according to Rice, Bush told her: “I’m tired of swatting at flies.… I’m tired of playing defense. I want to play offense. I want to take the fight to the terrorists.” Counterterrorism coordinator Clarke, who was held over from the Clinton administration, recalled being sent a presidential directive to “just solve this problem.”

The record shows, however, that nothing effective was done.

JUST FIVE DAYS after the inauguration, Rice received a memorandum from Clarke headed “Presidential Policy Initiative/Review—the al Qaeda Network.” It had two attachments, a “Strategy for Eliminating the Threat” worked up especially for the transition to the new administration, and an older “Political-Military” plan that had the same aim.

Al Qaeda, the memo stressed, was “not some narrow little terrorist issue.” It was an “active, organized, major force.… We would make a major error if we underestimated the challenge al Qaeda poses.” A meeting of “Principals”—cabinet-level members of the government—Clarke wrote, was “urgently” required. The italicization and the underlining of the word “urgently” are Clarke’s in the original.

Suggestions for action aside, the material said al Qaeda had “multiple, active cells capable of launching military-style, large-scale terrorist operations,” that it appeared sleeper agents were active within the United States. It proposed an increased funding level for CIA activity in Afghanistan. It asked, too, when and how the new administration would respond to the attack on the USS Cole—the indications, by now, were that al Qaeda had indeed been responsible.

Condoleezza Rice would claim in testimony to the 9/11 Commission that “No al Qaeda plan was turned over to the new administration.” Nor, she complained, had there been any recommendation as to what she should do about specific points. The staff director of Congress’s earlier Joint Inquiry into 9/11, Eleanor Hill—a former inspector general at the Defense Department—was shocked to hear Rice say that.

“Having served in government for twenty-some years, I was horrified by that response,” Hill said. “She is the national security adviser. She can’t just sit there and wait.… Her underlings are telling her that she has a problem. It’s her job to be a leader and direct them … not to sit there complacently waiting for someone to tell her, the leader, what to do.”

Within a week of President Bush’s inauguration, counterterrorism coordinator Clarke called for top-level action. By 9/11, eight months later, none had been ordered

.

The Clarke submission had in fact made a series of proposals for action. The pressing request, however, was for the prompt meeting of cabinet-level officials. Far from getting it, Clarke found that he himself was no longer to be a member of the Principals Committee. He was instead to report to a Committee of Deputy Secretaries. There were to be no swift decisions on anything pertinent to dealing with al Qaeda.

Though candidate Bush had declared there should be retaliation for the Cole attack, there would be none. Rice and Bush wanted something more effective, the former national security adviser has said, than a “tit-for-tat” response. By the time the Bush team took over, she added, the attack had become “ancient history.”

As for the deputy secretaries, they did not meet to discuss terrorism for three full months. When al Qaeda was addressed, at the end of April, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz was deprecatory about the “little terrorist in Afghanistan.” “I just don’t understand,” he said, “why we are beginning by talking about this one man bin Laden.”

It was a tetchy, inconclusive meeting, which agreed only on having more papers written and more meetings held. Not until July would the deputies produce the draft of an overall plan for action.

It was not only Clarke sounding the tom-tom of alarm. The former deputy national security adviser, Lieutenant General Donald Kerrick, who stayed on for a few months in 2001, wrote in a memo, “We are going to be struck again.” He received no reply, and would conclude that Bush’s people were “gambling nothing would happen.”

The chairman of the National Commission on Terrorism, Paul Bremer, said in a speech as early as February that the new administration seemed “to be paying no attention to the problem of terrorism. What they will do is stagger along until there’s a major incident and then suddenly say, ‘Oh, my God, shouldn’t we be organized to deal with this?’ That’s too bad. They’ve been given a window of opportunity with very little terrorism now, and they’re not taking advantage of it.”

“The highest priority must invariably be on those things that threaten the lives of Americans or the physical security of the United States,” CIA director Tenet told the Senate Intelligence Committee the same month. “Osama bin Laden and his global network of lieutenants and associates remain the most immediate and serious threat.”

A scoop article in 2007 in France’s newspaper of record, Le Monde, made public a large batch of French intelligence documents. Copies of the documents, which the authors have seen, include a January 2001 report stating that bin Laden and others had been planning an airplane hijacking for the past twelve months.

Seven airlines had been considered as potential targets under the plan as initially discussed, the report said, five American, Air France, and Lufthansa. The U.S. airlines mentioned included American and United, the two airlines that were to be hit on 9/11. According to French intelligence sources, the report was passed on to the CIA at the time.

The CIA and the FBI shared at least the gist of perceived threats with the FAA, the body responsible for supervising the safety of the flying public. Bin Laden or al Qaeda, or both, would be mentioned in more than fifty of about a hundred FAA daily summaries issued between the early spring and September 2001. The FAA took no preventative action, however, ordered no new measures to safeguard cockpit security, did not alert the crews who flew the planes to anything special about the situation.

On most days, at his own request, President Bush met with CIA director Tenet. Every day, too, the President received a CIA briefing known as the PDB—the President’s Daily Brief. Between the inauguration and September 10, bin Laden was mentioned in forty PDBs.

THE TERRORIST OPERATION, of course, continued throughout the period. As Bush prepared for the presidency, Atta had made a brief January trip outside the United States, flying to Europe for a secure meeting with Binalshibh. Each of the hijack pilots, he was able to report, had completed their training and awaited further orders.

Marwan al-Shehhi traveled to Morocco for reasons unknown. Ziad Jarrah reentered the United States—this time accompanied by his lover, Aysel. He introduced her around the flight school in Florida and—equipped as he now was with his new pilot’s license—flew her to Key West and back. Aysel had had her suspicions about what her lover was up to in the United States, had wondered whether he really was learning to fly. Now she believed him.

Any travel outside the United States was a risk for the terrorists, as there was always the possibility that they would not be allowed back in. Jarrah, with his Lebanese passport and a girlfriend on his arm, encountered no problem and was readmitted as a tourist.

Reentry was not so easy for Atta and Shehhi. Atta, whose visa status was out of order, faced the hurdle of seeing two immigration inspectors. He was allowed in as a tourist all the same—a decision that, after 9/11, would be ruled as having been “improper.” Improperly admitted or not, the hijackers’ leader was back in the country.

Shehhi, too, almost blew it. When he was referred to a second inspector—because his visa status also looked dubious—he balked at going to the inspection room. “I thought he would bolt,” the immigration man was to recall. “I told someone in secondary to watch him. He made me remember him. If he had been smart he wouldn’t have done that.” Nevertheless, Shehhi was readmitted.

One after another, the systems designed to protect the United States had failed—and would fail again.

In the weeks that followed, Atta and Shehhi turned up in Florida, in Georgia, possibly in Tennessee, and in Virginia. Their movements in those states remain blurred, their purpose unclear. On several occasions, they rented single-engine airplanes. Witnesses who believed they encountered them would say Atta asked probing questions about a chemical plant, about crop duster planes, about a reservoir near a nuclear facility. KSM had left Atta free to consider optional targets.

The fourth of the future hijacking pilots, Hani Hanjour, stayed put in Arizona, devoting himself to learning more about big airliners at a flight training center. Though not deemed a promising student, he received a training center certificate showing that he had completed sixty hours on a Boeing 737–200 simulator. Hazmi, who never succeeded as a pilot at any level, stayed close to Hanjour. On Hanjour’s behalf presumably, he sent off for videos from Sporty’s Pilot Shop. He received information on Boeing flight systems, and advice on “How an Airline Captain Should Look and Act.”

Following a trip to the Grand Canyon, Hazmi and Hanjour headed for the East Coast—and a vital appointment. In early May they were at Washington’s Dulles Airport to greet two of the “muscle hijackers,” the thirteen additional men trained for the violent, bloody work ahead.

All but one of the new arrivals were Saudis aged between twenty and twenty-eight, from the southwest of their country. None had more than a high school education, an education in which they had been inculcated with authorized government dogma such as “The Hour will not come until Muslims will fight the Jews and Muslims will kill all the Jews.”

Saudi officials, on whom American investigators had to rely after 9/11, said only one of the muscle recruits had held a job. He taught physical education. Some were devout—one had acted as imam at his local mosque—but none had been considered zealots. One had suffered from depression, his brother said, until he consulted a religious adviser. Two, according to the Saudis, had been known to drink alcohol. All wound up in a bin Laden training camp, some of them after starting out with plans to join the jihad in Chechnya.

Osama bin Laden himself picked many of these young men for the 9/11 operation, according to KSM. Size and strength were not a primary qualification—most were no more than five foot seven. What was essential was the readiness to die as a martyr—and the ability to obtain a U.S. visa. Before final training, all the Saudis had been sent home to get one.

In Saudi Arabia, with its special relationship to the United States, getting a visa was astonishingly easy—easier by far than the arduous process that had long been the norm for citizens of friendly Western countries. Visa applications were successful even when not properly filled out, let alone when they were literately presented. One future hijacker described his occupation as “teater.” Two said they were headed for a city named as “Wasantwn” to join an employer or school identified only as “South City.”

Obtaining a visa turned out to be even easier for the last four of the muscle hijackers to apply. Under a new U.S. program named Visa Express, applicants could merely apply through a travel agency, with no need even to appear at the consulate. The in-joke was that “all Saudis had to do was throw their passports over the consulate wall.” The then American consul general in Riyadh, Thomas Furey, told the 9/11 Commission he “did not think Saudis were security risks.”

Now that the recruits had visas in hand, the final phase of training involved hijacking techniques, advice on how to deal with sky marshals, and lessons in killing. The men bound for America were issued Swiss knives. Then, by way of rehearsal for the slaughter of passengers and aircrew, they used them to butcher sheep and camels.

According to KSM, trainees were also obliged to learn about hijacking trains, carrying out truck bombings, and blowing up buildings. This was “to muddy somewhat the real purpose of their training, in case they were caught while in transit to the U.S.” The men were told they were to take part in an airborne suicide operation, KSM said, only when they reached Dubai en route to the United States.

The muscle hijackers arrived during the late spring and early summer, traveling mostly in pairs. Except for one man, who was supposedly on business as “a dealer,” the word often used by Saudi applicants to signify “businessman,” they masqueraded as tourists. Several had unsatisfactory documentation—one called himself by different names on different forms—yet none had real difficulty getting into the United States. The rickety system was failing still.

By prior arrangement with Atta, some flew into Washington or New York, the others into airports in Florida. Atta looked after logistics in the South, while Hazmi—at this stage viewed as second-in-command—made arrangements in the North. With the newcomers came a fresh supply of money to feed and maintain the terrorists as the countdown to 9/11 began.

As had most of those who preceded them, the thirteen had recorded videotaped martyrdom messages in Afghanistan. “We left our families,” one said, “to send a message the color of blood. The message says, ‘Oh Allah, take from our blood today until you are satisfied.’ The message says: ‘The time of humiliation and subjugation is over.’ It is time to kill Americans in their homeland, among their sons and near their forces and intelligence.”

The hijackers’ videotapes would not be released until after 9/11.

WARNINGS THAT something specific was afoot were now reaching the outside world with increasing frequency. Bin Laden’s archenemy in Afghanistan, Ahmed Shah Massoud, the most prominent military figure still undefeated by the Taliban, brought a blunt message with him on a visit to Europe in April.

At a press conference at the European Parliament in Strasbourg, Massoud made a wide-ranging appeal for assistance. “If President Bush doesn’t help us,” he said in response to a reporter’s question on al Qaeda, “then these terrorists will damage the United States and Europe very soon, and it will be too late.” Though the comment received little if any coverage in the media, the CIA was paying close attention. Two agency officers, sent from Washington for the express purpose, had a private meeting with Massoud in France. The full detail of what he told them remains classified, but a heavily redacted intelligence document reveals that he had “gained limited knowledge of the intentions of the Saudi millionaire, bin Laden, and his terrorist organization, al Qaeda, to perform a terrorist act against the U.S., on a scale larger than the 1998 bombing of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania [two lines deleted].”

CIA director Tenet, for his part, has revealed significantly more about Massoud’s warning. He told his Agency visitors that “bin Laden was sending twenty-five operatives to Europe for terrorist activities. The operatives, he said, would be traveling through Iran and Bosnia.” The intelligence was not far off target. “Twenty-five” was close to nineteen, the actual number of terrorists dispatched on the 9/11 mission, and some of them did travel through Iran.

Around the time Massoud talked with the CIA officers, ominous information came in from Cairo. Egyptian intelligence, itself ever alert to the threat from the Muslim Brotherhood—and aware that Ayman al-Zawahiri, the long-distance element of that threat, was in Afghanistan at bin Laden’s side—had managed to penetrate al Qaeda. “We knew that something was going to happen,” President Mubarak would recall, “to the United States, maybe inside the United States, maybe in an airplane, maybe in embassies.” Imprecise though it was, the warning was passed to the CIA’s station in Egypt.

When he addressed a class at the National War College that month, the CIA’s Cofer Black said he believed “something big was coming, and that it would very likely be in the U.S.” He also spoke of his foreboding at a meeting with executives at the FBI Academy at Quantico.

The Bureau’s director, Louis Freeh, raised the subject of terrorism, that same day, with Attorney General John Ashcroft, to be told, according to one account—which has since been denied by a Justice Department spokesperson—that Ashcroft “didn’t want to hear about it.” It was not the last time, reportedly, that the attorney general would speak in that vein.

Exactly what warnings CIA director Tenet personally passed to President Bush, what was in the Daily Briefs the President received, and how he responded, we do not know. With one exception, the Bush administration briefs remain classified. Very similar briefing documents, however, went each morning to other very senior officials. Commission staff who read them learned that, in April and May alone, such senior officials received summaries headed “Bin Laden Planning Multiple Operations,” “Bin Laden Public Profile May Presage Attack,” and “Bin Laden’s Networks’ Plans Advancing.”

That the CIA and other intelligence agencies were getting a stream of intelligence is not surprising. Al Qaeda’s security was constantly being breached, notably by Osama bin Laden himself. His “public profile,” to use the Agency’s wording, reflected in part the fact that the terrorist leader had been making triumphalist speeches to his followers. He was also hopelessly indiscreet.

A young Australian recruit to the cause, David Hicks, got off letter after gushing letter to his mother back home. “They send a lot of spies here,” he wrote in May. “One way to get around [the spies] is to send a letter to ‘Abu Muslim Australia’.… By the way, I have met Osama bin Laden about twenty times, he is a lovely brother.… I will get to meet him again. There is a group of us going.”

A follower who served bin Laden as bodyguard, Shadi Abdalla, would recall his leader boasting of plans to kill thousands of people in the United States. “All the people [in the camp] knew that bin Laden said that there would be something done against America … America was going to be hit.”

Even one of the future hijackers was blabbing. Khalid al-Mihdhar, still in the Middle East following his impetuous return home to see his wife and newborn baby, chattered to a cousin in Saudi Arabia. Five attacks were in the works, he said—close to the eventual total of four—and due by summer’s end. He quoted bin Laden as having said, “I will make it happen even if I do it by myself.”

Bin Laden himself went even further, asking a crowd in one of the camps to pray for “the success of an attack involving twenty martyrs.” Had Ramzi Binalshibh not been refused a visa, and had it not proved impossible to replace him, there would have been twenty hijackers on 9/11.

“It’s time to penetrate America and Israel and hit them where it hurts,” said bin Laden. “Penetrate.”

The Taliban regime, worried in part about the potential consequences, asked bin Laden to moderate his outbursts. Their guest got around that by calling in an MBC—Middle East Broadcasting Corporation—TV reporter and telling him—off camera and off mic—that there would soon be “some news.” Then he sat back as an aide, Atef, said: “In the next few weeks we will carry out a big surprise, and we will strike or attack American and Israeli interests.” Others told the reporter that the “coffin business will increase in the United States.” Asked to confirm the nature of the “news”—again off camera—bin Laden just smiled.

Behind the scenes with KSM, he had again become impatient. He was a man with a penchant that many in his culture shared, for auguries and superstition. At one point that spring, with no more justification than that the number 7 was by tradition auspicious, bin Laden urged KSM to bring forward the hijackings and strike on May 12. That date, he pointed out, would be exactly seven months after the successful attack on the Cole. KSM told him the team was not yet ready.

In mid-June, following reports in the media that Israel’s prime minister Ariel Sharon was within days due to visit President Bush at the White House, bin Laden bombarded KSM with requests for the operation to be activated at once. The MBC television team had been told during their recent visit that the coming strike would be “a big gift for the intifada.”

A strike coinciding with the Sharon trip—not least when Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat had pointedly received no invitation from the White House—must have seemed highly desirable. KSM, however, again persuaded bin Laden that precipitate action would be ill-advised.

All this was terrible tradecraft, amateurish folly that could have doomed the 9/11 plan to failure.

IN WASHINGTON, meanwhile, Richard Clarke still pressed in vain for expeditious action. Fearing that he was becoming “like Captain Ahab with bin Laden as the White Whale,” he had long since thought he should consider finding other work. Yet he was still there at the end of May, still worrying.

A recently released Commission staff note, written following a review of National Security Council files, observes that it was clear that “Clarke was driving process in the new Bush Administration, not Condi Rice or Steve Hadley. Not much was going on at their level against AQ. Highest levels of government were not engaged, were not driving the process.”

“When these attacks occur, as they likely will,” Clarke wrote Rice on May 29, “we will wonder what more we could have done to stop them.”

The following day, Rice asked George Tenet and CIA colleagues to assess the gravity of the danger. On a scale of one to ten, she was told, it rated a seven.

Two weeks later, a report reached the CIA that KSM was “recruiting people to travel to the United States to meet with colleagues already there.” On June 21, with the wave of threat information continuing, the intelligence agencies—and the military in the Middle East—went on high alert. As the month ended, with the July 4 holiday approaching, the National Security Agency intercepted terrorist traffic indicating that something “very, very, very, very big” was imminent. Clarke duly advised Rice.

The holiday passed without incident, but the anxiety remained. On July 10, according to Tenet, his counterterrorism chief, Cofer Black, delivered a threat assessment that made his hair stand on end. With Black and the head of the bin Laden unit at his side, the director rushed immediately to see Rice at the White House. There followed a deeply unsatisfactory encounter—one the 9/11 Commission Report failed to mention.

The CIA chiefs told Rice flatly: “There will be a significant terrorist attack in the coming weeks or months.” The bin Laden unit head went through the bald facts of the intelligence. His colleagues described CIA ploys that might disrupt and delay the attack. Then they urged immediate decisions on measures that would tackle the overall problem. The slow, plodding deliberations of the deputy secretaries were taking too long.

Rice asked Richard Clarke, who was also present, whether he agreed. Clarke, according to Tenet, “put his elbows on his knees and his head fell into his hands and he gave an exasperated yes.” “The President,” Tenet told Rice, “needed to align his policy with the new reality.” Rice assured them that Bush would do that.

She did not convince the deputation from the CIA. According to the Washington Post’s Bob Woodward, writing in 2006, they “felt they were not getting through to Rice. She was polite, but they felt the brush-off.… Rice had seemed focused on other administration priorities, especially the ballistic missile defense system that Bush had campaigned on. She was in a different place.… No immediate action meant great risk.”

In Cofer Black’s view, Woodward wrote, “The decision to just keep planning was a sustained policy failure. Rice and the Bush team had been in hibernation too long.” “Adults,” Black said, “should not have a system like this.”

Black had been sure for months that catastrophe was coming. Sure, too, that as counterterrorist head he would take the flak for it, he had long had his resignation signed and ready in his desk. The bin Laden unit head—his name is still officially withheld—and Michael Scheuer, his predecessor, were also now talking of resigning.

The same day the CIA chiefs tried to get action from the White House, an FBI agent in Arizona sent a memo to a number of headquarters officials, including four members of the Bureau’s own bin Laden unit. Agent Kenneth Williams reported: “The purpose of this communication is to advise the Bureau and New York of the possibility of a coordinated effort by Osama bin Laden to send students to the United States to attend civil aviation universities and colleges. Phoenix has observed an inordinate number of individuals of investigative interest who are attending or who have attended.… These individuals will be in a position in the future to conduct terror activity against civil aviation targets.”

Over eight pages, Williams laid out the reasons for his concern. One man he named was a known contact of bin Laden’s senior accomplice Abu Zubaydah. Another connected to the two Saudis who two years earlier had come under suspicion for their behavior during an America West flight. Investigators were later to conclude that the same man’s associates had included Hani Hanjour—the 9/11 hijacking pilot who had trained in Arizona.

Agent Williams recommended checking on flight schools around the nation. Yet he got no response, and his prescient message received minimal circulation. FBI officials worried that the checks he proposed would risk accusations of “racial profiling.”

Only a week earlier, all FBI regions had been alerted to the terrorist threat and urged to “exercise extreme vigilance.” “I had asked to know if a sparrow fell from a tree,” counterterrorism coordinator Clarke would write long after 9/11. “Somewhere in FBI there was information that strange things had been going on at flight schools.… Red lights and bells should have been going off.”

Had the FBI recipients of Williams’s memo been aware of the attitude of the man who headed the Bush Justice Department, their torpor might have been more understandable. Acting Director Thomas Pickard has said that, following Director Freeh’s resignation that June, he tried repeatedly to get Attorney General Ashcroft to give the terrorist threat his attention. When he approached the subject for the second time, on July 12, Ashcroft abruptly cut him off—as he reportedly had Freeh back in the spring.

“I don’t want to hear about that anymore,” snapped the attorney general, according to Pickard. “There’s nothing I can do about that.” Pickard remonstrated, saying he thought Ashcroft should speak directly with his CIA counterpart, but the attorney general made himself even clearer. “I don’t want you to ever talk to me about al Qaeda, about these threats. I don’t want to hear about al Qaeda anymore.”

“Fishing rod in hand,” CBS News noted two weeks later, “Attorney General John Ashcroft left on a weekend trip to Missouri aboard a chartered government jet.” Asked why he was not using a commercial airline, the Justice Department cited a “threat assessment,” saying he would fly only by private jet for the remainder of his term. Asked whether he knew the nature of the threat, Ashcroft himself responded, “Frankly, I don’t.”

Late on July 20, when President Bush arrived in Italy to attend a G8 summit, antiaircraft guns lined the airport perimeter. He and other leaders slept not on land but on ships at sea. Next day, Bush had an audience with the Pope not at the Vatican but at the papal residence outside Rome. Wherever he went, the airspace was closed and fighters flew cover overhead. Egypt’s President Mubarak, acting on an intelligence briefing, had warned of a possible bin Laden attack using “an airplane stuffed with explosives.”

TWENTY-SEVEN

IN THE UNITED STATES, MEANWHILE, THE TERRORISTS HAD CONTINUED to move toward their goal. On July 4, as Americans celebrated the holiday and security officials fretted, Khalid al-Mihdhar had flown back into JFK Airport—unchallenged. It should not have been that way.

The CIA had identified Mihdhar as a prime suspect eighteen months earlier—it was to emerge after 9/11—when the Saudi flew to join fellow terrorists in Kuala Lumpur. While he was on his way there, during a stopover in Dubai, the local intelligence service broke into his hotel room at the request of the CIA. His passport, which was copied, had given the Agency two superb leads. It now knew not only Mihdhar’s full identity but also the fact that he had a valid entry visa for the United States.

Even so, and although the CIA firmly believed he and his companions in Kuala Lumpur were terrorists, it had not placed Mihdhar on the TIPOFF list of known and suspected terrorists. And it had withheld what it knew from the FBI. The CIA’s handling of its intelligence on Mihdhar—and the almost identical information on the companion with whom he arrived in the States, Nawaf al-Hazmi—had allowed the first of the 9/11 operatives to enter the States under their own names and live openly in California in the months that followed.

The CIA’s action—or failure to take appropriate action—had also allowed Mihdhar to depart freely in mid-2000, when he returned to the Middle East for an extended period. Then in summer 2001, and because the CIA continued to withhold what it knew about him from U.S. Immigration, he had easily obtained yet another entry visa to get back into the country.

So it was, on July 4, that Mihdhar was able to breeze back into America and join his accomplices as they made final preparations for the 9/11 operation. His return brought the hijackers’ numbers up to nineteen, the full complement of those who were to attack on 9/11. Had the CIA’s performance been merely an appalling blunder, as it would later claim? Or, as another theory holds it, does the Agency’s explanation hide an even more disquieting intelligence truth? That possibility will be considered later.

The team was now divided into two groups, north and south. Mihdhar made the short trip to Paterson, New Jersey, where Hazmi, Hanjour, and three of the muscle hijackers were already based. Six of them lived there, crammed into a one-bedroom apartment, during this phase of the operation. The other operatives settled in Florida, mostly around Fort Lauderdale. There are clues to how some of them spent their private time.

Hazmi had earlier been trawling the Internet for a bride. Some Muslims hold that marriage is obligatory under Islam—being married is seen as a central statement of one’s faith. Even Atta, who behaved as though he loathed everything about women, had told his first German hosts that it was difficult for him to be unmarried at the age of twenty-four. Then, he had said he expected to return to Egypt and marry and have children there. When he stayed on in Germany, however, and a fellow student looked for a suitable wife for him, Atta turned out not to be interested.

None of this means that he was not heterosexual. Sexual self-denial can be a feature of the committed jihadi life. One al Qaeda operative, it was recently reported, recommended that his comrades take injections to promote impotence—as he did himself—to avoid being distracted by the female sex.

Marriage had continued to be a goal for Hazmi, though, even when he was in the United States and launched on a mission in which he knew he was going to die. KSM encouraged the aspiration, promising a $700-a-month stipend should he succeed. The hijacker-to-be even advertised for a wife on muslimmarriage.com, letting it be known that he was open to taking a Mexican bride—apparently hoping that a Hispanic woman would at least somewhat fit the bill.

Hazmi apparently lost interest, however, when only one person responded to the post, an Egyptian woman he apparently deemed unsuitable. A morsel of documentary evidence suggests that he fell back on more leisurely pursuits in spring 2001. He went to Walmart and bought fishing equipment.

Over the final months, others—Muslim zealots though they might be, they shared the lusts of ordinary mortals—sampled the offerings of the American sex industry. A witness at Wacko’s strip club in Jacksonville said she recognized Jarrah—from photographs—as having been a customer. On a trip to Nevada, Shehhi reportedly watched lap dancing at the Olympic Garden Topless Cabaret. He also turned up at a video store in Florida, accompanied by one of the muscle hijackers who was to fly with him, and bought $400 worth of pornographic movies and sex toys. In Maryland, where two of the team spent a few days, another of the terrorists returned repeatedly to the Adult Lingerie Center. He purchased nothing, just flipped through the smut on offer, looked “uncomfortable,” and left.

Ziad Jarrah, the only pilot hijacker known to have had a long-term relationship with a woman, went back and forth between the United States and Germany to see his lover, Aysel Sengün. When in the States, he took a series of lessons in one-on-one combat. His trainer was Bert Rodriguez, of the US-1 Fitness Center in Dania, Florida, who had previously taught a Saudi prince’s bodyguard.

Jarrah “was very humble, very quiet … in good shape,” Rodriguez remembered. “Ziad was like Luke Skywalker. You know when Luke walks the invisible path? You have to believe it’s there. And if you do believe, it is there. Ziad believed it.” In four months, he gave Jarrah more than ninety lessons. They discussed fighting with knives. “It’s always good policy to bleed your opponent,” Rodriguez advised. “Try to cut him so that he sees where he’s cut. If you have a choice, cut under the arm.”

Over the months, the evidence would show, several of the hijackers attended fitness classes. Some would buy knives—or utility tools, like box cutters, that would serve their deadly purpose just as well as knives.

Jarrah, who also worked at his flying, went up to Hortman Aviation near Philadelphia hoping to rent a light aircraft. He flew well enough, but proved inept at landing the plane and using the radio. Accompanying him was a man he said was his “uncle,” an older Arab whose identity has never been established. Hortman’s owner would recall that Jarrah wanted to fly the Hudson River Corridor—a congested route known to pilots as a “hallway”—which passed several New York landmarks, including the World Trade Center.

Hani Hanjour, apparently still striving to become a competent pilot, did manage to fly the Hudson Corridor with an instructor. Presumably because he made errors, he was turned down when he asked to fly the route again. Later, however, he had a practice flight that took him near Washington, D.C.—where weeks later he would pilot the 757 that struck the Pentagon.

Four of the hijacker pilots, and one of the muscle men, took time to familiarize themselves with the routine on transcontinental flights within the United States. Shehhi first, then Jarrah, followed by Atta—twice, in his case—muscle hijacker Waleed al-Shehri, Hazmi, and Hanjour all made trips to Las Vegas. All flew First Class aboard Boeing 757s and 767s, the aircraft types that would be downed on 9/11.

THERE WERE GLITCHES. On July 7, an apparently frantic Atta dialed a German cell phone seventy-four times. It had been decided earlier that he and intermediary Binalshibh, who had been in Afghanistan taking instructions from bin Laden, needed to talk at this critical point—and in person—to avoid the risk of a communications intercept. Then, after Atta made contact to say he could not make it to Southeast Asia, they settled on a rendezvous in Europe—though not in Germany. Too many people knew them there, and they feared being seen together.

Last-minute problems disentangled, they arranged to get together in Spain. During a stopover in Zurich Atta bought two knives, perhaps to check that he could get away with taking them on board on the onward leg to Madrid. He and Binalshibh conferred for days when they finally met up.

Binalshibh arrived with the now familiar message. Bin Laden wanted the attacks to go forward as rapidly as possible, and this time not merely because he was impatient. With so many operatives now in holding positions in the United States, he had become understandably anxious about security. Binalshibh also came with a reaffirmation of the preferred targets. All were to be “symbols of America,” the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, the Capitol, and hopefully the White House. Given the option, bin Laden “preferred the White House over the Capitol.”

Atta thought the White House might be too tough a target—he was waiting for an assessment from Hani Hanjour. Were he and Shehhi not able to hit the World Trade Center, he said, they would crash the planes they had hijacked into the streets of Manhattan. Final decisions on targeting, KSM has said since, were left “in the hands of the pilots.”

At Atta’s request, Binalshibh had brought necklaces and bracelets from Southeast Asia. Atta hoped that by wearing them on the day, the hijackers would pass as wealthy Saudis and avoid notice. Binalshibh returned to Germany once their business was done. Once there, as agreed, he organized himself for the communications that would be necessary in the weeks to come.

He obtained two new phones, one for contacts with Atta and the second for liaison with KSM. The evidence would suggest they had agreed on using simple codes for security purposes.

Atta, meanwhile, flew back to the United States, to be admitted yet again without difficulty—in spite of the fact that, given his travel record, he should have faced probing questions.

He returned to what appeared to him to be a crisis in the making. There had been growing tension between himself, the single-minded authoritarian, and Ziad Jarrah. Atta found his fellow pilot’s repeated trips out of the country disquieting. Was a key member of the team about to drop out?

Jarrah may indeed have been wavering between devotion to the cause and the love of a woman. He telephoned Aysel Sengün more than fifty times during the early part of July, then decided to take off for Germany to see her again—without making a return reservation.

Binalshibh, whom Atta had told of his concern during the meeting in Spain, had in turn mentioned it to KSM. KSM responded with alarm. A “divorce,” he said, apparently referring to the difficulties between Atta and Jarrah, would “cost a lot of money.” As though keeping a close eye on him, Atta went to the airport to see Jarrah off when he left for Europe. Binalshibh met him on arrival at Düsseldorf.

During an “emotional” exchange, Binalshibh urged Jarrah not to abandon the mission. Jarrah’s priority, however, appeared to be to get to Aysel as rapidly as possible. The lovers, she would remember, spent almost two weeks with each other. “We spent the entire time together,” she recalled. “I did not study, but spent all the time alone with him.”

In the end, Jarrah’s commitment to the mission proved more potent than the pull of Aysel’s love for him. On August 5, he flew back to Florida and the apartment that he was renting all summer. Outside the house, on a quiet street in Fort Lauderdale, hung a wind chime with the message “This House Is Full of Love.”

Jarrah made an out-of-the-blue call to his former landlady in Germany that month, and surprised her by saying that he was in America learning to fly “big planes.” So he was. Purchases he made included a GPS system, cockpit instrument diagrams for a Boeing 757, and a poster of a 757 cockpit.

In an ideal world, had the law enforcement and intelligence system functioned to perfection, the 9/11 operation might by now have run into problems—for the most mundane of reasons. Mohamed Atta and his second-in-command, Nawaf al-Hazmi, had been noticed, or should have been noticed, or had actually been stopped by the police, many times that year.

It had been routine, when Atta was pulled over for speeding in Florida in July, for the officer who stopped him to run a check on his name. The check should have told him that there was a bench warrant out for Atta’s arrest—he had failed to appear in court in connection with a previous violation. Hazmi, for his part, had been stopped for speeding in April, had possessed the gall to report that he had been attacked by a mugger in May, and had rear-ended a car on the George Washington Bridge in June. His driving, moreover, had also caught the attention of a traffic policeman in New Jersey.

Because the CIA had long since identified Hazmi as a suspected terrorist, because the Agency knew he was likely in the United States, there should long since have been an alert out for him. As there should have been for his comrade Mihdhar, when he slithered back into the country on July 4.

“Every cop on the beat needs to know what we know,” CIA director Tenet was to say. But that would be after the fact of 9/11—when all was lost. The Agency had shared what it knew with no one in law enforcement.

At their meeting in Spain, when Binalshibh told Atta that bin Laden wanted the operation to go forward rapidly, the hijackers’ leader had responded that he was not yet quite ready. He would come up with a date for the attacks, he said, in “five or six weeks.” As the first week of August ended, three of those weeks had passed.

Atta had recently tapped out a message to several associates in Germany. It read: “Salaam! Hasn’t the time come to fear God’s word? Allah. I love you all.”

IN WASHINGTON, warnings of impending attack had been coming in all summer. From France’s intelligence service, the DGSE; from Russian counterintelligence, the FSB; and—again—from Egypt. Citing an operative inside Afghanistan, the Egyptian report indicated that “20 al Qaeda members had slipped into the U.S. and four of them had received flight training.”

The most ominous warning, had it been heeded, reached the State Department from a source uniquely well placed to get wind of what bin Laden was hatching. The Taliban foreign minister, Wakil Muttawakil, had sent an emissary across the border into Pakistan to seek out a U.S. official to whom he could pass information.

Muttawakil, according to the emissary, had learned from the leader of one of the fundamentalist groups working with bin Laden of a coming “huge” attack on the United States. Already worried about the activities of Arab fighters in Afghanistan, the foreign minister now feared they were about to bring disaster down on his country in the shape of American retaliation. “The guests,” as he put it, “are going to destroy the guesthouse.”

So it was, in the third week of July, that the Taliban emissary met at a safe house with David Katz, principal officer of the U.S. consulate in the border town of Peshawar. Also present, reportedly, was a second, unnamed American. The emissary did not reveal exactly who in the Taliban regime had dispatched him on the mission. Muttawakil was taking a great risk in sending the message at all.

The bin Laden attack, the emissary said, “would take place on American soil and it was imminent.… Osama hoped to kill thousands of Americans.… I told Mr. Katz they should launch a new Desert Storm, like the campaign to drive Iraq out of Kuwait, but this time they should call it Mountain Storm and they should drive the foreigners out of Afghanistan.”

According to diplomatic sources quoted in 2002, principal officer Katz—an experienced diplomat—did not pass on the warning to the State Department. “We were hearing a lot of that kind of stuff,” one of the sources said. “When people keep saying the sky’s going to fall in and it doesn’t, a kind of warning fatigue sets in.”

The CIA and counterterrorism coordinator Clarke, fielding incoming intelligence in July, reported up the line that bin Laden’s plans seemed to have been temporarily postponed. One CIA brief for senior officials read: “Bin Laden Plans Delayed but Not Abandoned,” another: “One Bin Laden Operation Delayed. Others Ongoing.” Intelligence on a “near-term” attack had eased, Clarke said in an email to Rice, but it “will still happen.”

New York Times reporter Judith Miller, busy working on a series of articles about al Qaeda, had been finding her Washington contacts unusually open about their worries. Officials, she was to recall, had recently been “very spun-up … I got the sense that part of the reason I was being told of what was going on was that the people in counterterrorism were trying to get word to the President or the senior officials through the press, because they were not able to get listened to themselves.”

The desperately slow progress of the Deputy Secretaries Committee, charged with deciding on a course of action against bin Laden, had been frustrating Clarke all year. In July, however, the deputies had finally decided on what to recommend to cabinet-level officials. “But the Principals’ calendar was full,” Clarke would recall, “and then they went away on vacation, many of them in August, so we couldn’t meet in August.”

PRESIDENT BUSH and Vice President Cheney were among those on vacation. Both, it was reported, planned to spend a good deal of time fishing. Bush was expected to spend the full month on his 1,583-acre ranch in Texas, not returning until Labor Day. “I’m sure,” said his press secretary, “he’ll have friends and family over to the ranch. He’ll do a little policy. He’ll keep up with events.” This would tie with the longest presidential vacation on record in modern times, enjoyed by Richard Nixon, and 55 percent of respondents to a CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll thought that “too much.”

For a president, however, there is no getting away from the CIA’s daily intelligence brief—the PDB. The one Bush received on August 6 was to haunt him for years to come. CBS News would be first to hint at what it contained, in a story almost a year after 9/11. Apparently thanks to a leak, national security correspondent David Martin was to reveal that Bush had been warned that month that “bin Laden’s terrorist network might hijack U.S. passenger planes.”

Bombarded with questions the following day, White House press secretary Ari Fleischer would say the August 6 PDB had been a “very generalized” summary brought to the President in response to an earlier request. In a follow-up, he told reporters the PDB’s heading had read: “Bin Laden Determined to Strike U.S.” Condoleezza Rice, in her own separate briefing, made no reference to the title of the document. She went out of her way, however, to say the PDB had been “not a warning” but “an analytic report that talked about bin Laden’s methods of operation, talked about what he had done historically.” She characterized the document repeatedly as having been “historical,” that day and in the future.

Rice said there had indeed been two references to hijacking in the PDB, but only to “hijacking in the traditional sense … very vague.” No one, she thought, “could have predicted that these people would take an airplane and slam it into the World Trade Center, take another one and slam it into the Pentagon—that they would try to use an airplane as a missile.”

In spite of efforts to slough it off, though, the August 6 PDB became the story that would not go away, the center of a two-year struggle between the Bush administration and panels investigating 9/11. The White House line was that, as the “the most highly sensitized classified document in the government,” the daily briefs had to remain secret. The CIA, for its part, refused even to provide information on the way in which a PDB is prepared.

The nature of the daily briefs was in fact no mystery, for several of those delivered to earlier presidents had been released after they left office. A PDB consists of a series of short articles, enclosed in a leather binder, delivered to the President by his ubiquitous CIA briefer. It has been described as a “top-secret newspaper reporting on current developments around the world” and “a news digest for the very privileged.” A PDB may contain truly secret information, but can as often be less than sensational, even dull.

Congress’s Joint Inquiry was to press in vain for access to all relevant PDBs delivered to both Presidents Bush and Clinton. The 9/11 Commission would return to the fray—not least so as to be seen to have resolved the celebrated question that had once been asked about President Nixon during Watergate: “What did the President know and when did he first know it?” The more the Bush White House stonewalled, however, the more the commissioners pressed their case. “We had to use the equivalent of a blowtorch and pliers,” Commissioner Richard Ben-Veniste recalled.

They did get to the PDBs in the end. The section of the August 6 brief on 9/11, just one and a half pages long, was finally released in April 2004 with redactions only of sources of information. This established a number of things that earlier White House flamming had obscured.

The heading of the August 6 PDB had not read, as Bush’s press secretary had rendered it: “Bin Laden Determined to Strike U.S.” Not quite. Inadvertently or otherwise, the secretary had omitted a single significant two-letter word. The actual title had been “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.” The headline had itself been a clarion message to President Bush that bin Laden intended to attack on the U.S. mainland.

The very first sentence of the PDB, moreover, had told the President—in italicized type—that secret reports, friendly governments, and media coverage had indicated for the past four years that bin Laden wanted to attack within the United States. He had even said, according to an intelligence source—identity redacted—that he wanted to attack “in Washington.”

In another paragraph, the PDB told the President that al Qaeda had personnel in the United States and “apparently maintains a support structure that could aid attacks.” FBI information, the PDB said, “indicates patterns of suspicious activity in this country consistent with preparations for hijackings or other types of attacks, including recent surveillance of federal buildings in New York.”

The day after the release of the PDB, President Bush told reporters that the document had “said nothing about an attack on America. It talked about intentions, about somebody who hated America. Well, we knew that … and as the President, I wanted to know if there was anything, any actionable intelligence. And I looked at the August 6th briefing. I was satisfied that some of the matters were being looked into.” This particular PDB, he said, had been produced for him by the CIA at his own request.

Later the same month, Bush agreed to meet the full 9/11 Commission—on condition Vice President Cheney was also present. They received the commissioners in the Oval Office, seated beneath a portrait of George Washington. They had insisted it be a “private interview,” with no recording made and no stenographer present. We rely, therefore, principally on an account by commissioner Ben-Veniste, drawing on his scribbled notes and published in a 2009 memoir.

Prior to the August 6 PDB, the President said, no one had told him al Qaeda cells were present in the United States. “How was this possible?” Ben-Veniste wrote later. “Richard Clarke had provided this information to Condoleezza Rice, and he had put it in writing.” Indeed he had, on two occasions. Three weeks earlier, Ben-Veniste had asked Rice whether she told the President prior to August 6 of the existence of al Qaeda cells in the United States. After much prevarication, she replied: “I really don’t remember.”

As for the reference in the PDB to recent surveillance of buildings in New York—known to relate to two Yemenis who had been arrested after taking photographs—the President quoted Rice as having told him the pair were just tourists and the matter had been cleared up. If so, that, too, was strange. The FBI had not cleared the matter up satisfactorily. Agents tried in vain to find the man who, using an alias, had asked that the photographs be taken. The unidentified man had wanted them urgently, even asking that they be sent to him by express mail.

What then, Ben-Veniste asked, did the President make of his national security adviser’s claim that nobody could have foreseen terrorists using planes as weapons? How to credit that, in light of the warnings in summer 2001 that the G8 summit in Genoa might be attacked by airborne kamikazes? Had Bush known about the Combat Air Patrol enforced over cities he visited in Italy? Had he known about the Egyptian president’s warning? No, Bush said, he had known nothing about it.

If there had been a “serious concern” in the weeks before 9/11, Bush volunteered, he would have known about it. Ben-Veniste restrained himself from pointing out that the CIA brief of August 6 had been headed “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.” Had the President not rated that as “serious”?

Ben-Veniste asked Bush whether, after receiving the PDB, he had asked National Security Adviser Rice to follow up with the FBI. Had she done so? The President “could not recall.” Nor could he remember whether he or Rice had discussed the PDB with Attorney General Ashcroft.

There is another, bizarre and unresolved, anomaly. Rice—and Bush—have said the national security adviser was not present during the August 6 briefing at the President’s ranch. She was in Washington, she said, more than a thousand miles away. CIA director Tenet, however, told the Commission in a formal letter that Rice was present that day.

Finally, and for a number of reasons, there is doubt as to whether the Agency produced the relevant section of the August 6 PDB because—as Rice indicated and Bush flatly claimed—he had himself “asked for it.”

Had he really requested the briefing? It is reliably reported that, having received it, Bush responded merely with a dismissive “All right. You’ve covered your ass now.” Ben-Veniste has made the reasonable point that if the President himself had called for the briefing, his response would hardly have been so flippant.

The President had indeed asked over the weeks whether available intelligence pointed to an internal threat, Director Tenet was to advise the Commission in a formal letter. But: “There was no formal tasking.”

According to Ben-Veniste’s account, the two analysts who drafted the PDB told him that “none of their superiors had mentioned any request from the President as providing the genesis for the PDB. Rather, said Barbara S. and Dwayne D., they had jumped at the chance to get the President thinking about the possibility that al Qaeda’s anticipated spectacular attack might be directed at the homeland.”

The threat, they thought, had been “current and serious.” CIA officials, sources later told The New York Times’s Philip Shenon, had called for the August 6 brief to get the White House to “pay more attention” to it.

The Agency analysts, Ben-Veniste reflected, “had written a report for the President’s eyes to alert him to the possibility that bin Laden’s words and actions, together with recent investigative clues, pointed to an attack by al Qaeda on the American homeland. Yet the President had done absolutely nothing to follow up.”

WHAT THEN of the time between August 6 and September 11, the precious thirty-six-day window during which the terrorists could conceivably perhaps have been thwarted? There were two major developments in that time, both of which—with adroit handling, hard work, and good luck—might have averted catastrophe.

The first potential break came on August 15, when a manager at the Pan Am International Flight Academy in Minneapolis phoned the local FBI about an odd new student named Zacarias Moussaoui. Thirty-three-year-old Moussaoui, born in France to Moroccan parents, had applied for a course at the school two months earlier, saying in his initial email that his “goal, his dream” was to pilot “one of these Big Bird.” That he as yet had no license to fly even light aircraft appeared to discourage Moussaoui not at all. “I am sure that you can do something,” he had written, “after all we are in AMERICA, and everything is possible.”

It happened on occasion that some dilettante applied to buy training time on Pan Am’s Boeing 747 simulator. Moussaoui himself was to say that the experience would be “a joy ride,” “an ego boosting thing.” The school did not necessarily turn away such aspirants. Moussaoui arrived, paid the balance of the fee—$6,800 in cash he pulled out of a satchel—saying that he wanted to fly a simulated flight from London to New York’s JFK Airport. At his first session he asked a string of questions, about the fuel capacity of a 747, about how to maneuver the plane in flight, about the cockpit control panel—and what damage the airliner would cause were it to collide with something.

Sensing that this student was no mere oddball, that he might have evil intent, the school’s instructors agreed that the FBI should be contacted. The reaction at the Minneapolis field office was prompt and effective. Moussaoui was detained on the ground that his visa had expired, and agents began questioning him and a companion—a Yemeni traveling on a Saudi passport. They learned rapidly that Moussaoui was a Muslim, a fact he had denied to his flight instructor.

The companion, moreover, revealed that the suspect had fundamentalist beliefs, had expressed approval of “martyrs,” and was “preparing himself to fight.” Within the week, French intelligence responded to a request for assistance with “unambiguous” information that Moussaoui had undergone training at an al Qaeda camp in Afghanistan.

One of the Minneapolis agents, a former intelligence officer, felt from early on “convinced … a hundred percent that Moussaoui was a bad actor, was probably a professional mujahideen” involved in a plot. Though he and his colleagues had no way of knowing it at the time, their suspicions were well founded. KSM would one day tell his interrogators that Moussaoui had been slated to lead a second wave of 9/11-type attacks on the United States. In a post-9/11 climate, KSM had assumed, the authorities would be especially leery of those with Middle Eastern identity papers. In those circumstances, and though Moussaoui was a “problematic personality,” his French passport might prove a real advantage. Osama bin Laden, moreover, favored finding a role for him.

Before flying into the States, the evidence would eventually indicate, Moussaoui had met in London with Ramzi Binalshibh. Binalshibh had subsequently wired him a total of $14,000. Binalshibh’s telephone number was listed in one of Moussaoui’s notebooks and on other pieces of paper, and he had called it repeatedly from pay phones in the United States.

In August 2001, however, the agents worrying about Moussaoui knew nothing of the Binalshibh connection, were not free to search the suspect’s possessions. In spite of a series of appeals that grew ever more frantic as the days ticked by—the lead agent wound up sending Washington no fewer than seventy messages—headquarters blocked the Minneapolis request to approve a search warrant.

In late August, in response to a tart comment from headquarters that he was just trying to get people “spun up,” the Minneapolis supervisor agreed that was exactly his intention. He was persisting, he said with unconscious prescience, because he hoped to ensure that Moussaoui did not “take control of a plane and fly it into the World Trade Center.”

“That’s not going to happen,” a headquarters official retorted. “You don’t have enough to show that he is a terrorist.”

THE SECOND DEVELOPMENT, of enormous potential importance, had meanwhile been evolving—and aborting—on the East Coast. The episode centered on the prickly relationship between the FBI and the CIA, a blot on good government since anyone could remember. While in theory the two agencies liaised on counterterrorism, in practice they coexisted at best awkwardly. From early in 2001, according to the sequence of events published in the 9/11 Commission Report, some in the CIA’s bin Laden unit had been looking again at the case of Khalid al-Mihdhar.

New information indicated that Mihdhar, whom the Agency had identified as a terrorist the previous year, who it had known had a visa to enter the United States—yet had failed to share the information with the FBI or Immigration—was linked to bin Laden through his trusted operative Walid bin Attash. Yet still the FBI was kept in the dark about Mihdhar.

In the spring of 2001, a CIA deputy chief working liaison with the Bureau’s terrorism unit in New York—now known to have been Tom Wilshire—reportedly reconsidered the overall picture on Mihdhar. The suspect with a U.S. visa was an associate of Nawaf al-Hazmi, who—the CIA knew—definitely had entered the United States many months earlier. With growing indications that an attack was coming, it is said to have occurred to Wilshire that “Something bad was definitely up.” When he asked a CIA superior for permission to share what he knew with the FBI, however, he got no reply.

In late July, apparently on his own initiative, Wilshire suggested to Margarette Gillespie, an FBI analyst working with the CIA’s bin Laden unit, that she review files on the terrorist meeting in Malaysia back in January 2000—the meeting that had first brought Mihdhar to CIA attention. Gillespie did so, and—piece by piece, week by week—began putting together the alarming facts about Mihdhar, his visa, and his plan to visit the United States.

On August 21, she found out about his accomplice Hazmi’s arrival in the United States. Within twenty-four hours, when she consulted the INS, she made a startling discovery. Not only that Hazmi was probably still in the country, but that Mihdhar had very recently been readmitted. “It all clicked for me,” Gillespie was to recall.

The final days of August were a combination of rational action and bureaucratic confusion. On the 22nd, at Gillespie’s request, the CIA drafted a message asking the FBI, INS, the State Department, and Customs to “watchlist” Mihdhar and Hazmi. The watchlisting, though, applied only to international travel, not to journeys within the United States—and the FAA was not informed at all.

Gillespie’s colleague Dina Corsi, meanwhile, sent an email to the FBI’s I-49 unit—which handled counterterrorism—requesting an investigation to find out whether Mihdhar was in the United States.

At that point the process became tied up in much the same red tape as the push in Minnesota to find out what Moussaoui was up to. Mihdhar could not be pursued as a criminal case, Corsi stipulated, only as an intelligence lead. This was a misinterpretation of the rules, but—even though only one intelligence agent was available—Corsi and a CIA official insisted on the condition. One I-49 agent was angered by their insistence. “If this guy is in the country,” Steve Bongardt said acidly during a call to colleagues on August 28, “it’s not because he’s going to fucking Disneyland!”

Within twenty-four hours, Bongardt’s frustration surfaced again. “Someday,” he wrote in an email, “someone will die … the public will not understand why we were not more effective and throwing every resource we had at certain ‘problems.’ ”

The job of finding Mihdhar, nevertheless, went to an intelligence agent, Robert Fuller, working on his own. Corsi marked the assignment “Routine” because—she would later tell investigators—she “assigned no particular urgency to the matter.” The designation “Routine” gave Fuller thirty days to get under way. It was August 29.

LIKE PRESIDENT BUSH, CIA director Tenet had spent part of August on vacation—again like the President, fishing. By his own account, however, he kept very much abreast of developments. That month, he wrote in 2007, he had directed his counterterrorism unit to review old files—and thus took part of the credit for the “discovery” that Mihdhar and Hazmi might be in the United States.

Tenet, too, had been briefed on the detention of the suspect flight student in Minneapolis. The FBI early on sent fulsome information on Moussaoui to the Agency, and the details went to Tenet on August 23 in the form of a document headed “Islamic Extremist Learns to Fly.” The director’s staff took the matter very seriously, urging that the Bureau give it real attention. “If this guy is let go,” one CIA officer wrote on the 30th to a colleague liaising with the Bureau, “two years from now he will be talking to a control tower while aiming a 747 at the White House.”

Did Tenet share the developments on Mihdhar and Hazmi, and the alert over Moussaoui, with the President? It would seem surprising had he not done so—especially in the month Bush had received a Daily Brief entitled “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.” When the President was asked the question, Commissioner Ben-Veniste recalled, his “brow furrowed.” Bush said he recalled no mention of Moussaoui, that “no one ever told him there was a domestic problem.”

Tenet, for his part, stumbled badly in an appearance before the Commission. He claimed in sworn testimony that he had not seen Bush in August. “I didn’t see the President,” he said. “I was not in briefings with him during this time.… He’s in Texas and I’m either here [in Washington] or on leave [in New Jersey].” “You never get on the phone or in any kind of conference with him to talk,” asked commissioner Tim Roemer, “through the whole month of August?” “In this time period,” replied Tenet, “I’m not talking to him, no.”

It seemed astonishing, and for good reason: it was not true. Hours after Tenet had testified, CIA spokesman Bill Harlow told reporters that the director had in fact briefed the President in person twice in August, at the Texas ranch on August 17 and in Washington on August 31.

Could Tenet possibly have forgotten his one trip to see Bush in August, the very first time he had visited the ranch, in the sweltering heat of Texas? Roemer thought it possible that Tenet had lied.

Writing in 2007, Tenet made no mention of the lapse. Instead, he said he had indeed traveled to Texas, “to make sure the President stayed current on events.” According to the known record, the director would not have known of the Moussaoui and Mihdhar-Hazmi developments on the 17th. Both were well under way, however, by the time he saw the President on the 31st. Would they not have fit within the frame of keeping the President “current on events”? In a private interview, Tenet told the Commission that he did “not recall any discussions with the President of the domestic threat during this period.”

“THE QUESTION,” Michael Hirsh and Michael Isikoff wrote in Newsweek, is in the end “not so much what the President knew and when he knew it. The question is whether the administration was really paying much attention.”

In her testimony to the Commission, Rice rejected any notion that the administration let things slide. “I do not believe there was a lack of high-level attention,” she said. “The President was paying attention to this. How much higher level can you get?”

Lawrence Wilkerson, a trusted aide to Secretary of State Colin Powell, worked with a colleague on the preparation of Rice’s testimony. The job, he said, had been “an appalling enterprise. We would cherry-pick things to make it look like the President had been actually concerned about al Qaeda.… They didn’t give a shit about al Qaeda. They had priorities. The priorities were lower taxes, ballistic missiles, and the defense thereof.”

Commissioner Ben-Veniste, for his part, came away from his work on the Commission drawing the gravest possible conclusion. “There was no question in my mind,” he has written, “that had the President and his National Security Advisor been aggressively attentive to the potential for a domestic terrorist attack, some of the information already in the possession of our intelligence and law enforcement agencies might have been utilized to disrupt the plot.”

TWENTY-EIGHT

H

ELLO

J

ENNY

,

Wie geht’s dir? Mir geht’s gut …

Wie ich Dir letze mal gesagt habe die Erstsemester wird in drei wochen beginn kein Aendrugen!!!!!! …

The start of a coded email message written in broken German that Atta sent to Binalshibh in the third week of August. It is phrased as though it were a letter to his girlfriend Jenny. Translated, the entire message reads:

D

EAR

J

ENNY

,

How are you? I’m fine …

As I told you in my last letter, the first semester starts in three weeks. No changes!!!!!! Everything’s going well. There’s high hope and very strong thoughts for success!!! Two high schools and two universities … Everything is going according plan. This

summer is for sure going to be hot. I want to talk to you about some details. Nineteen certificates for specialized studies and 4 exams.… Regards to your professors …

Until then …

The key part of the message is the reference to “high schools” and “universities.” In an earlier discussion of targeting—Atta and Binalshibh had still been discussing the option of striking the White House—they had used “architecture” to refer to the World Trade Center, “arts” to mean the Pentagon, “law” the Capitol, and “politics” to denote the White House.

The true meaning of the message, Binalshibh would explain in the interview he gave before he was captured, was:

Zero hour is going to be in three weeks’ time. There are no changes. All is well. The brothers have been seeing encouraging visions and dreams. The Twin Towers, the Pentagon and Capitol Hill. Everything is going according to plan. This summer is for sure going to be hot. I want to talk to you about some details. Nineteen hijackers and four targets. Regards to Khalid [KSM]/Osama.

Until we speak.

In the early hours of August 29, in Germany, Binalshibh was woken by the telephone. The caller was Atta, his Egyptian-accented voice instantly recognizable.

Atta had a riddle for Binalshibh, a joke as he put it: “ ‘Two sticks, a dash, and a cake with a stick down’ … What is it?” Binalshibh, half asleep, was stumped for a moment. Then—presumably he was expecting such a call—he figured out the answer. The puzzle, he told Atta, was “sweet.”

“Two sticks” signified “11.” The “dash” was a dash. A “cake with a stick down” was a “9.”

11–9—the way most of the world renders the days of the calendar. Or, as Americans render them:

9/11

The date was set.

• • •

BINALSHIBH PASSED on the date to KSM, and the hijackers’ operation entered its final phase. Everything now depended on Atta’s organizing ability and success in maintaining security. An effort to bring the total number of terrorists up to twenty—four five-man teams, one for each target—had recently risked wrecking the entire endeavor.

In early August, at Orlando, Florida, a U.S. immigration inspector had had his doubts about a newly arrived young Saudi. Standing instructions were to take it easy on Saudis—they were a boost to tourism—but this man had no return ticket and had not filled out customs and immigration forms. The inspector sent the man on for a “secondary,” a grilling that was to last two hours.

The would-be “tourist,” twenty-five-year-old Mohamed el-Kahtani, said that, though he would be staying only a few days, he did not know where he would be going next. He first said that someone due to arrive from abroad would be paying for his onward travel, then that another “someone” was waiting for him in Arrivals. Secondary inspector José Meléndez-Pérez noted, too, that the subject was belligerent.

“He started pointing his finger … Whatever he was saying was in a loud voice—like ‘I am in charge—you’re not going to do anything to me. I am from Saudi Arabia.’ People from Saudi think they are untouchable … He had a deep staring look … [like] ‘If I could grip your heart I would eat it’ … This man intimidated me with his look and his behavior.”

The inspector felt in his gut that Kahtani had evil intent—he thought he might be a hit man—and recommended that he be sent back to Saudi Arabia. This was the one occasion, after a series of inefficiencies involving the terrorists, that an alert INS official had really done his job. KSM was to admit under interrogation that the suspect had indeed been sent to the States to join the terrorist team—to “round out the number of hijackers.”

It is rational to think that, but for the inspector’s acumen, there would have been five rather than four hijackers aboard United Flight 93. With Kahtani’s additional muscle—Meléndez-Pérez remembered him as having looked trim, “like a soldier”—they might have been better able to resist the passengers’ attempt to retake the cockpit. Instead of plunging to the ground in Pennsylvania, Flight 93 might have stayed on course and struck its target in Washington.

There had indeed been a “someone” waiting to meet Kahtani at Orlando. Evidence gathered after 9/11 established to a virtual certainty that Mohamed Atta had been at the airport that day. He did not leave, parking records showed, until it was clear that the new recruit was not going to emerge from Immigration. Had those handling Kahtani taken the investigation of him one step further, had they thought the suspect might be engaged in terrorism, the leader of the operation might himself have come under the microscope. Atta might have been unmasked.

As it was, Atta remained free, putting thousands of miles on rental cars, flying hither and thither, coordinating communications, the whirl of logistics involved in getting nineteen men—most of them with minimal familiarity with the West or the English language—in place and ready for the appointed day.

Most of the time in August, the terrorists stayed in their apartments and motels. They did what in other men would have been everyday activities: in Florida, exercising, two of them, at a Y2 Fitness Center; going shopping—for jewelry at a store called the Piercing Pagoda, for a dress shirt at Surreys Menswear; getting clothes cleaned at a Fort Dixie Laundry.

There were some signs of movement. The men crowded into the apartment in Paterson, New Jersey, moved out, leaving behind a few items of clothing, glasses in the bathroom—and flight manuals. Crowded they remained, though. By late that month five of them were squeezed into one room at the Valencia Motel, a cheap joint in Laurel, Maryland. They seemed rarely to leave the room, opening the door to the maid only to take in fresh towels. Guests who used a next-door room “thought they were gay.”

Mostly, the men avoided attracting attention. An exception was the day at the end of August in Delray Beach, Florida, when a woman named Maria Simpson was startled by two men tugging unceremoniously at the door of her condominium. To her relief it turned out that, without asking permission, they were merely trying to retrieve a towel that had fallen from their balcony on the floor above. Simpson was to recognize them later, when she looked at FBI mug shots, as two of the muscle hijackers who took down United Flight 93. Their faces looked harder in the photographs, she thought, than she remembered them.

There was little about the hijackers—with the exception on occasion of Atta—that struck people as sinister. Richard Surma, who ran the Panther Motel in Fort Lauderdale, rented rooms to groups of them twice in the final weeks. “They looked young,” he recalled, “like they’re trying to make it, like students.”

Brad Warrick, the boss of a rental car company at Pompano Beach, supplied cars several times to Shehhi and Atta. Warrick prided himself on his “gut check,” the eye he ran over new customers to see if they gave him a bad feeling. “Didn’t have it with those guys,” he would remember. “They were just great customers.… They both spoke very well, of course with an accent.… Atta was a very normal, nice guy. Nothing weird about him. Never had an eerie feeling.”

Ziad Jarrah, however, whose resolve had seemed to Atta to be wavering, may have been getting edgy. A man who resembled him, along with a companion, asked to use the Internet at the Longshore Motel in Hollywood, Florida, but left in a huff within hours. Manager Paul Dragomir asked the pair to use the line in his office—he was worried about the bill they might run up—and they had angrily objected. “You don’t understand,” the man he later thought had been Jarrah exclaimed. “We’re on a mission.”

The manager put the “mission” remark out of his mind until after 9/11. Jarrah, if it was Jarrah, may just have been overtired, having trouble with his English. In other ways, though, the operation was less than secure.

Hijacker Nawaf al-Hazmi, the terrorist who spent the longest time in the States, may have been seriously indiscreet—or shared news of what was coming with a loose-lipped associate, not himself one of the hijackers. Investigators came to suspect that in late August, as final preparations for the attacks were being made, Hazmi phoned a Yemeni student friend in San Diego named Mohdar Abdullah.

Abdullah had known Hazmi and Mihdhar early on, had helped them apply for driving lessons and flying lessons. Evidence found later on a computer, moreover, suggested that he in turn was in contact with an activist fervently opposed to U.S. support for Israel. His circle of friends also included another man, himself linked to Hazmi, who had Osama bin Laden propaganda.

When he was detained after the attacks, Abdullah’s belongings were found to include a spiral notebook with references to “planes falling from the sky, mass killings and hijacking.” In late August 2001, about the time of the supposed call from Hazmi, Abdullah reportedly stayed away from work and school, began “acting very strange,” appeared “nervous, paranoid, and anxious.”

In the weeks before the strikes, Atta had his men working on their personal documentation. Some of the terrorists had only passports, and young men with Arab passports might have prompted closer scrutiny at airport security. With the help of individuals prepared to vouch for them—in return for a bribe—several now obtained state IDs.

Even before Atta passed the date of the planned strikes up the line, the terrorists had already begun making airline reservations and purchasing tickets for September 11. Over the phone or using the Internet, sometimes from computers at small-town libraries, on different days and in different places, all would acquire their tickets before the end of the first week of September.

Atta and Mihdhar, perhaps keen to appear to be ordinary travelers, set up frequent flier accounts. The Shehri brothers made reservations, then changed their seat assignments—so as to sit on the side of the First Class aisle that afforded the best view of the cockpit door. Hamzi and his brother Salem ordered special meals suitable for the Muslim diet, meals they knew they would never eat. Perhaps to avoid appearing to be in a group, seven terrorists booked to travel on beyond the destinations of their targeted flights—by which time they would be long dead.

All the flights booked, of course, were for transcontinental flights scheduled to depart in the morning. Transcontinental, in part because they would take off heavily laden with fuel. The more fuel in an airplane’s tanks, the greater the explosive force on impact. In the morning, at a time, Atta thought, when most people in the target buildings would have arrived in their offices.

Key operatives, meanwhile, had shopped around for weapons. Using a Visa card at a Sports Authority store, Shehhi purchased two short black knives, a Cliphanger Viper and an Imperial Tradesman Dual Edge model. Each of the knives had a four-inch-long blade, the maximum length permitted aboard planes under FAA regulations. Fayez Banihammad and Hamza al-Ghamdi, who were to fly with Shehhi, bought a Stanley two-piece snap knife and a Leatherman Wave multi-tool. Nawaf al-Hazmi also picked Leatherman knives.

Atta, who two weeks earlier had purchased two knives in Europe, had been at a Dollar House, looking for box cutters with Hazmi and Jarrah. Days later, at a Lowe’s Home Improvement Warehouse, he, too, picked up a Leatherman. Atta also had a large folding knife, but that would not be carried on board on 9/11.

For the men who had practiced slaughter techniques on sheep and camels, there would be a sufficiency of knives.

ON SEPTEMBER 4, as the hijackers completed their ticketing arrangements, Bush cabinet-level officials—the Principals—convened at the White House for the long-delayed, very first meeting to discuss the bin Laden problem. They had in front of them the draft National Security Presidential Directive the deputies had agreed on before the August vacation. It outlined measures—long-term measures—designed to destroy the terrorists in their Afghan sanctuary.

The State Department had already told the Taliban regime that the United States would hold it responsible, as the host government, for any new bin Laden attack. That line of approach was to be stepped up, along with forging closer links to forces still resisting the Taliban. There was some talk of one day perhaps using U.S. forces on the ground, but nothing decisive.

There was debate at the meeting, but no decision, about use of the Predator, the unmanned drone that had long since proven capable of stunningly clear air-to-ground photography. Prolonged experiment—a model of a house bin Laden was known to frequent was used for target practice—had established that the Predator could be transformed into a pinpoint-accurate, missile-bearing weapon. Were the drone to get bin Laden in its sights, as it had as long ago as fall 2000, there was every likelihood he could be killed almost instantly.

At the September 4 meeting, though, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs General Myers and CIA director Tenet merely dueled over whether handling the Predator should be the mission of the military or of the CIA. “I just couldn’t believe it,” counterterrorism coordinator Clarke remembered. “This is the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs and the Director of the CIA sitting there, both passing the football because neither one of them wanted to go kill bin Laden.” Their argument, apparently, was primarily about which agency was to foot the bill for operating the Predators. All that was resolved was that the CIA should consider using the Predator again for reconnaissance purposes.

As for the directive as a whole, Clarke came away from the meeting as frustrated as ever. All the things he had recommended back in January 2001, he was to tell the Commission, were to get done—after 9/11. “I didn’t really understand,” he said, “why they couldn’t have been done in February.”

Clarke had been trying in vain, his aide Paul Kurtz recalled, to get Bush officials to “grasp the enormity of this new, transnational, networked foe … people thought he was hyping it up.” “It sounds terrible,” Clarke’s then-deputy Roger Cressey recalled, “but we used to say to each other that some people didn’t get it—it was going to take body bags.”

Hours before the September 4 meeting, Clarke had sent National Security Adviser Rice a strongly worded note, with several passages underlined. The real question before the participants that day, he wrote, was: “Are we serious about dealing with the al Qaeda threat? … Is al Qaeda a big deal? … Decision makers should imagine themselves on a future day when the CSG [Counterterrorism Security Group] has not succeeded in stopping al Qaeda attacks and hundreds of Americans lay dead in several countries, including the U.S.… What would those decision makers wish that they had done earlier? That future day could happen at any time … You are left waiting for the big attack, with lots of casualties.”

September 4 ended with the Presidential Directive approved subject to just a few final adjustments by the Deputies Committee. It would be ready for the president’s signature—soon.

A THOUSAND MILES to the south, Atta found time for a matter of financial integrity. He told Binalshibh on September 5 that he and his men had money left over. Since they would soon have no further need of it, it should be reimbursed. For the hijackers, FBI investigators were to conclude, not to have returned remaining funds would have been to die as thieves.

In dribs and drabs over the next few days, by Western Union, bank transfer, and express mail, the terrorist team arranged for some $36,000 to be sent to the accomplice in Dubai who had been handling funds. The entire 9/11 operation, the Commission was to calculate, cost al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden less than $500,000.

Across the world, accomplices and men with guilty knowledge were by now running for safety. The “brothers,” as Binalshibh put it later, “were dispersed.” He himself flew from Germany to Spain, was met by a Saudi who furnished him with a phony passport, then took off on an airborne marathon that took him via Greece, the United Arab Emirates, and Egypt to Pakistan.

Soon after he arrived, Binalshibh would tell his interrogators, a messenger set off overland with a status report for the leadership in Afghanistan. “The message was great news for Sheikh Abu Abdallah,” Binalshibh said, using one of the many names followers used for bin Laden. “May Allah protect him.”

ACCORDING TO a British government source, communications intercepts at this time picked up messages between bin Laden and senior comrades. One of them, probably a contact with KSM in Pakistan, “referred to an incident that would take place in America on or around September 11”—and the repercussions that might follow.

Egyptian intelligence, with its penetration agent inside al Qaeda, received and passed on “information about some people planning an operation in the United States.” “It was one week before,” recalled President Mubarak. “The wheels were going.”

On September 6, oblivious to such specifics, former senator Gary Hart attended a meeting at the White House. Having tried in vain in January to get the Bush administration to pay real attention to the warnings of the Commission on National Security he had cochaired, he had begun to think there was movement at last.

President Bush had said in the spring that he was establishing a new office, supervised by Vice President Cheney and devoted to “preparedness” for all forms of terrorist strikes on American soil. He himself, the President said, would periodically chair meetings to review the office’s work. That had not happened, but now here was Hart at the White House in early September, offering his commission’s expertise to help with the project. Rice, he was to recall, merely “said she would pass on the message.”

Their vacations over, President Bush and CIA director Tenet met six times in the first eight days of September. It is not known what they discussed.

AT AN FBI OFFICE in New York, meanwhile, the lone FBI agent charged with looking for Hazmi and Mihdhar was just getting started. Agent Robert Fuller had not been instructed that the matter was especially urgent, nor that the two men posed a serious threat. On a request form he sent to another agency about Mihdhar, he did not even tick the box to indicate that the subject was wanted in connection with “security/terrorism.”

He did put out some tentative feelers. Mihdhar had written on his most recent immigration form that he planned to stay at a Marriott hotel in New York City. Unsurprisingly, checks showed that no one with his name had registered at any of the six local Marriotts.

Mihdhar and Hazmi had both used their own names while in the States, and several commonly used databases might well have thrown up information on them. By his own account, Fuller did check the National Crime Information Center, the NCIC, credit and motor vehicle records, and—with a colleague’s help—the ChoicePoint service. Whether he in fact trawled all those sources, though, has been questioned.

While Mihdhar had been out of the country for much of the past year, Hazmi had for months been on the East Coast. Had the hunt for him been treated seriously—had his case been given the priority of, say, the search for a wanted bank robber—tracking him would not have been a hopeless quest. Three days before Agent Fuller received his assignment, Hazmi had come to the notice of a traffic policeman while driving a rental car in Totowa, New Jersey. The patrolman had reportedly taken down the license plate and entered it as a matter of routine in the NCIC.

As reported earlier in these pages, moreover, Hazmi had also featured in three other traffic episodes: another recent “query” by police in Hackensack, New Jersey, a collision outside New York City, and a speeding ticket in Oklahoma. He had even filed a police report in Washington, D.C, using his own name, complaining of having been mugged. One or more of this total of five incidents ought to have made it to the NCIC.

All that aside, Hazmi and Mihdhar had for more than eighteen months lived in the United States—in plain sight—leaving a trail of credit card, bank account, telephone, and accommodations records behind them. Yet Agent Fuller turned up nothing on them. Having made a start on September 5, it appears that he then let the matter drop—until the day before the attacks.

• • •

WITH U.S. INTELLIGENCE and law enforcement in a state of paralysis, the terrorists were moving into position. On September 6, if a later FBI analysis is correct, those in Florida held some sort of get-together. According to the manager and bartender at Shuckums, a sports bar in Hollywood, Atta, Shehhi, and a companion spent three hours there relaxing.

There may be truth to the story. Atta and Shehhi were in the state that day, had long been close, and may have chosen to have a last evening together. It may even be true that the man thought to have been Atta, faced with a sizable bill, declared arrogantly that he was an airline pilot and could well afford to pay.

What is less likely is that, as the press first reported, the trio all got drunk on vodka and rum—contrary to the dictates of Islam. Shehhi, known to have enjoyed a beer and knowing that he was not long for this world, may perhaps have downed spirits. For Atta to have gotten inebriated, though, would have been out of character. In a later version of the story, he merely drank cranberry juice and nibbled on chicken wings.

The following day, Friday the 7th, Atta sold his car, a 1989 Pontiac Grand Prix, for $800. Ziad Jarrah sold his, a 1990 Mitsubishi with 97,000 miles on the clock, for $700. They both then headed north, to Baltimore and Newark, respectively. Omari and Suqami, Saudis in their twenties who were to fly with Atta aboard American 11, had arrived earlier at a hotel in Boston. They seized a last opportunity to dally with earthly pleasures.

According to an FBI report, the Sweet Temptations escort agency supplied the two young men with prostitutes that night. Two days later, according to the person who drove her, a woman from another Boston escort service—it advertised escorts for “the most important occasion”—visited one of the terrorists twice in a single day. Four of the men reportedly wanted to indulge, but decided the price for the service—$100 apiece—was too high. One man made do with a pornographic video piped into his hotel room. Another, in New Jersey, paid a dancer $20 to dance for him in a go-go bar.

By early on the 9th, all but one of the terrorists were in hotels in or near Boston, Washington, and New York. Only Marwan al-Shehhi, who had probably helped manage the movement north, remained at the Panther Motel near Fort Lauderdale. Then he in turn flew up to Boston, where two of the hijack crews were gathered. The Panther was a mom-and-pop operation, and owners Richard and Diane Surma themselves cleared up the room Shehhi and his comrades had used.

In the drawer of a dresser, they found a box cutter. In the garbage, there was a tote bag from a flight school containing a German-English dictionary, three martial arts books, Boeing 757 manuals, an eight-inch-thick stack of aeronautical charts, and a protractor. There was also a syringe with an extraordinarily long needle. The Surmas puzzled over these items, then put them aside.

The previous night, on I-95 in Maryland, a state trooper had stopped a man driving at ninety miles per hour. It was Ziad Jarrah in a rental car heading toward Newark, New Jersey, where his hijack crew was billeted. The officer noted that he seemed calm and cooperative, gave him a speeding ticket, and let him go.

Jarrah had his family on his mind, as well as his lover, Aysel Sengün. In the past week alone, he had called his family in Lebanon nine times and Aysel three. There were family matters to discuss with his father. Money his father had recently sent him, $2,000 “for his aeronautical studies,” had arrived safely. Having failed to get back to Lebanon for the recent wedding of one of his sisters, he said, he intended to be home for another family wedding in just two weeks’ time. He would definitely be there, he promised, with Aysel at his side. He had even bought a new suit for the occasion.

Soon after, Jarrah prepared a package for Aysel. He enclosed his FAA Private Pilot License, his pilot logbook, a piece of paper with his own name written over and over, a postcard of a beach—and a four-page handwritten letter. Written in German interspersed with Arabic and Turkish, it read in part:

S

ALAMUALYAKUM

, C

ANIM

, A

YSELIM, [PEACE BE UPON YOU, MY SOUL, MY

A

YSEL]

First, I want you really to believe and be very sure that I love you with all my heart … I love you and I will love you for all eternity; my love, my life, my love, my soul, my heart—are you my heart? I do not want you to be sad. I am still alive somewhere else where you cannot see and hear me, but I will see you … I will wait for you until you come to me. There comes a time for everyone to make a move. I am to blame for giving you so many hopes about marriage, wedding, children, family … I did not flee from you, but did what I was supposed to do. You ought to

be very proud of it, because it is an honor and you will see the outcome and everybody will be glad … Until we meet again, and then we’ll have a beautiful eternal life, where there are no problems and no sorrow, in palaces of gold and silver … I thank you and apologize for the wonderful, hard five years that you have spent with me.

Your patience will be rewarded in Paradise, God willing.

I am your prince and I will come for you.

Goodbye!

Your husband for ever,

Ziad Jarrah

Hijacker Jarrah’s farewell letter to his lover—he misaddressed it.

The letter did not reach Aysel but was returned through the mail, for Jarrah had misaddressed this last sad letter of his short life. It wound up in the hands of the FBI, and she would be told of it only months later. For a while she would hope against hope that Ziad might still be alive, had not after all died on 9/11 and would turn up at her door as he had in the past—with gifts and an apologetic grin.

A packet Khalid al-Mihdhar had hoped would reach his wife, Hoda, in Yemen had also ended up with the FBI. A letter in it, sent with a bank card for an account containing some $10,000, expressed his love for her and their daughter and his desire for her to have the money.

Atta had told the hijackers not to contact their families. He himself, though, apparently placed a call to his father in Cairo on September 9.

In Afghanistan, Osama bin Laden and KSM were taking precautions. KSM crossed over into Pakistan. Bin Laden ordered some followers to disperse, others to stay on high alert. His son Omar had left Afghanistan for good months earlier, disillusioned and following a further warning by the jihadi he trusted that the “big plan” was ongoing, that it was time for him to be “far, far away.” Omar had urged his mother, Najwa, the wife who had borne bin Laden eleven children, to leave as well. “My mother,” he had urged her, “come back to real life.”

Najwa asked her husband for permission to leave, and he agreed on one condition. She was to leave behind several of their sons and daughters, the youngest aged only eight and eleven. On the morning she left, she gave her husband a ring as a remembrance of their long life together. Then, with her two youngest children and a twenty-three-year-old son who was mildly retarded, she climbed into a vehicle to be driven to the border and safety.

Najwa and Osama had been together for almost thirty years, since they were children. Then, he had been the “soft-spoken, serious boy” not yet in his teens. Now, at forty-four, he was the most wanted man in the world, accused of multiple mass murders.

On her way out of Afghanistan, Najwa has said, she prayed for peace.

PART VI

TWENTY-FOUR HOURS

TWENTY-NINE

SEPTEMBER 10, LESS THAN TWENTY-FOUR HOURS BEFORE THE ONSLAUGHT.

In New York, after five days of inaction on the case, the FBI began again the leisurely search for Hazmi and Mihdhar. Having failed to find Mihdhar at any Marriott hotel in Manhattan, Agent Fuller now hoped to find a trace of them in Los Angeles. Both men, immigration records showed, had said when they first arrived eighteen months earlier that they planned to stay at a “Sheraton hotel” in the city. Checking records in Los Angeles was a job for the local field office, so Agent Fuller wrote up a routine request.

The request was not sent, merely drafted, to be transmitted only the following day—September 11. Had anyone looked, and looked in a timely fashion, Hazmi and Mihdhar had left tracks all over the place in California. There was Hazmi’s name, address, and phone number of the day, bold as brass in the 2000–2001 Pacific Bell White Pages directory for San Diego. Better yet, there were their names on bank records, driver’s license and car registration records, which could have enabled investigators to leapfrog onto traffic police records in New Jersey and elsewhere—even to the purchase of tickets for the flight they were soon to hijack.

But these are “what ifs.” The hunt for the two terrorists, if it can be described as a hunt, was all too little too late. So it went, too, with the great lead the FBI had been handed almost a month before in Minneapolis, with the detention of Zacarias Moussaoui, a flight student who—the information they learned led them to believe—might be planning to hijack a Boeing jumbo jet. By September 10, local case agents had been begging headquarters, again and again over a period of three weeks, for clearance to search the prisoner’s belongings. Only to be blocked by headquarters, time and time again, with legal quibbles.

By mid-afternoon on the 10th, in deep despond, the Minneapolis agent running the case in Minneapolis, Harry Samit, shared his feelings about the deadlock with a headquarters official who had shown herself to be sympathetic to his appeals for action. It could even become necessary, he wrote in an email, to set Moussaoui free. The official, Catherine Kiser, emailed back:

H

ARRY

,

Thanks for the update. Very sorry that this matter was handled the way it was, but you fought the good fight. God Help us all if the next terrorist incident involves the same type of plane. take care,

Cathy

Permission to search Moussaoui’s possessions was to be granted only the following day, after the attacks.

It happened that on the 10th, as the Moussaoui probe ran into the ground, Attorney General Ashcroft formally turned down an FBI request for additional funding and agents to fight terrorism—even though the number of agents working on counterterrorism had not increased since 1996. The Bureau of 2001, a new FBI director was to admit months later, was a “very docile, don’t-take-any-risks agency.”

Warnings had meanwhile continued to reach the United States from friendly countries. Just days before the attacks, according to CNN—some weeks earlier in another account—Jordanian intelligence reported having intercepted a terrorist communication that referred to an operation code-named “al Urous al Kabir”: “The Big Wedding.” This was apparently code for a major attack on U.S. territory in which “aircraft would be used.” France had also reportedly passed threat intelligence to the CIA.

Those in the United States still trying to get the attention of the White House included U.S. senator Dianne Feinstein, who served on two committees that dealt with terrorist issues and had gone public with her worries two months earlier. “One of the things that has begun to concern me very much,” she told Wolf Blitzer on CNN, “is as to whether we really have our house in order. Intelligence staff have told me that there is a major probability of a terrorist incident within the next three months.”

So concerned had Feinstein been in July that she contacted Vice President Cheney’s office to urge action on restructuring the counterterrorism effort. On September 10, she tried again. “Despite repeated efforts by myself and staff,” she recalled, “the White House did not address my request. I followed this up … and was told by Scooter Libby [then Cheney’s chief of staff] that it might be another six months before he would be able to review the material. I did not believe we had six months to wait.”

Just overnight, savage news had come out of Afghanistan. The most formidable Afghan military foe of the Taliban—and of Osama bin Laden—Ahmed Shah Massoud, had been assassinated. The killers had posed as Arab television journalists, then detonated a bomb in the camera as the interview began. The “journalists’ ” request to see Massoud, it would later be established, had been written on a computer bin Laden’s people used.

No one doubts that bin Laden ordered the Massoud hit—the widow of one of the assassins was later told as much. Doing away with Massoud, bin Laden well knew, was more than a favor to the Taliban. Were the imminent attack in the United States to succeed, the murder of Massoud would deprive America of its most effective military ally in any attempt to retaliate.

Massoud dead. Massoud, who just months ago had warned CIA agents in private that something was afoot, who had publicly declared, “If President Bush doesn’t help us, then these terrorists will damage the United States and Europe very soon, and it will be too late.”

People with specialist knowledge in America saw the turn things were taking. The legendary counterterrorism chief at the FBI’s New York office, John O’Neill, had warned publicly long ago that religious extremists’ capacity and will to strike on American soil was growing. In mid-August, frustrated and exhausted after heading the probe into the bombing of the USS Cole, he had resigned from the Bureau after thirty years’ service—to become head of security at the World Trade Center.

On the night of September 10, having just moved into his new office in the North Tower, O’Neill told a colleague, “We’re due for something big. I don’t like the way things are lining up in Afghanistan.” He was to die the following morning, assisting in the evacuation of the South Tower.

In Russia, President Vladimir Putin was jolted by the news of Massoud’s murder. “I am very worried,” he told President Bush in a personal phone call on the 10th. “It makes me think something big is going to happen. They’re getting ready to act.”

The chief of the CIA’s bin Laden unit had learned of the assassination within hours in a call from one of Massoud’s aides. CIA officials discussed the development with Bush on the morning of the 10th during his daily briefing, and analyzed the implications. In his 2010 memoir, however, the former President refers neither to the Putin call, nor to the Agency briefing, nor to how he himself reacted to Massoud’s murder at the time.

That day at the White House, at long last, the Deputies Committee tinkered with the Presidential Directive one last time and finalized the plan to eliminate bin Laden and his terrorists over the next three years. The directive, White House chief of staff Andy Card was to say, was “literally headed for the President’s desk. I think, on the 10th or 11th of September.” Condoleezza Rice was to tell Bob Woodward she thought the timing “a little eerie.”

For Bush, September 10 was a day filled largely by meetings with the prime minister of Australia. Then, in early afternoon, he boarded a helicopter at the Pentagon to head for Air Force One and the journey to Florida to publicize his campaign for child literacy. By early evening he was settling in at the Colony Beach and Tennis Resort on Longboat Key, near Sarasota—the ocean to one side, a perfectly groomed golf course to the other. Bush enjoyed a relaxed evening, dined Tex-Mex, on chili con queso, with his brother Jeb and other Republican officials, and went to bed at 10:00.

The President’s public appearance the next morning—reading with second graders at Emma E. Booker Elementary—was, in White House schedulers’ parlance, to be a “soft event.”

At the National Security Agency outside Washington that evening—as yet untranslated—were the texts of two messages intercepted in recent hours between pay phones in Afghanistan and individuals in Saudi Arabia.

The intercepts would not be translated until the following day. Analysts would realize then that a part of the first of the intercepts translated as: “Tomorrow is zero hour.”

The second contained the statement: “The match begins tomorrow.”

TO SOME INTIMATES of the terrorists, the event that was coming was no secret. On the morning of the 10th in California—around noon East Coast time—a group of Arabs gathered at the San Diego gas station where Nawaf al-Hazmi had worked for a while the previous year. It was rare for them to get together in the morning, but six did that day. One, according to a witness interviewed by the FBI, was Mohdar Abdullah, the friend who had helped Hazmi settle in the previous year. The mood was “somewhat celebratory,” and the men gave each other high fives. “It is,” the witness remembered Abdullah saying, “finally going to happen.”

Just outside Washington that afternoon, Hazmi and Mihdhar and the other members of their unit checked into a hotel near Dulles Airport. In and around Boston and Newark, most of their accomplices were in position at their various hotels. In the afternoon, however, the remaining two terrorists—Atta and Abdul Aziz al-Omari—took a car journey north.

They drove from Boston to Portland, Maine, a distance of more than a hundred miles, then checked into a Comfort Inn near the airport. Security camera tapes retrieved later would show that they withdrew a little money from ATMs, and stopped at a gas station and a Walmart—a witness recalled having seen Atta looking at shirts in the men’s department. They had bought a takeout dinner at a Pizza Hut—the pizza boxes, removed from their room the next morning by a maid, would be found in the Dumpster behind the hotel.

Phone records established that Atta made and received a number of telephone calls while in Portland. He called Shehhi’s mobile phone from a pay phone at the Pizza Hut, and ten minutes later called Jarrah at his hotel. The terrorists’ emir was apparently busy organizing to the last, checking that everyone was in place.

Why, though, did Atta go to Portland at all? Neither the 9/11 Commission nor anyone else has ever located evidence that would explain that last-minute journey. Of various hypotheses, two in particular got the authors’ attention. Former Commission staff member Miles Kara, who has continued over the years to study the hijackers’ plan of attack, suggests Atta may have seen the diversion to Portland as his Plan B. Were other hijackers due to leave from Boston stopped for some reason, he and Omari—arriving seemingly independently from Portland—might still succeed alone.

An alternative speculation—made by Mike Rolince, a former FBI assistant director who specialized in counterterrorism—is that Atta went to Portland to meet with someone. But with whom? What could possibly have made the time-consuming diversion necessary on the very eve of the 9/11 operation?

Whatever the reason for the Portland trip, it was a risky expedition. The flight Atta and Omari were to take in the morning, to get back to Boston’s Logan Airport in time for the American Airlines flight they were to hijack, involved a tight connection. Had their plane been just a little late, the leader of the 9/11 gang—the man from whom the others all took their lead—would have blown the plan at the last moment. Portland must have been important.

In Boston, meanwhile, solemn ritual had been under way behind the door of Room 241 of the Days Inn on Soldiers Field Road. It was the ritual called for in the hijackers’ “spiritual manual,” copies of which were to be recovered in Atta’s baggage, Hamzi’s car, and—a partial copy—in the wreckage in Pennsylvania.

A maid admitted to clean the room “noticed large amounts of water and body hair on the floor … all body lotion provided for the room had been used.… Room occupants [had] slept on top of the bed sheets and placed light silk cloth over the pillows.” In the final hours, there was also a great deal of praying to be done.

Pray, remain awake, renew “the mutual pledge to die,” think about God’s blessing—“especially for the martyrs.” Spit on the suitcase, the clothing—the knife. Then, moving through the phases as instructed, prayers on the way to the airport, avoiding any sign of confusion at the airport. Prayers and more prayers.

“Smile in the face of death, young man, for you will soon enter the eternal abode.” Ramzi Binalshibh was to say that, shortly before the end, Atta told him with assurance that their next meeting would be, “God willing, in Paradise.” Binalshibh responded with a request to Atta. “I asked him [that] if he was to see the Prophet Mohammed, peace be upon Him, and reach the highest place in Heaven, he should convey our salaam to Him.”

Atta promised he would do so, then shared something his comrade Marwan al-Shehhi had told him:

“Marwan had a beautiful dream, that he was flying high in the sky surrounded by green birds not from our world, that he was crashing into things, and that he felt so happy.”

Green birds. In a passage in the Qur’an, it is said that in Paradise people “will wear green garments of fine silk.” Green is said to have been the Prophet Mohammed’s favorite color. During the Crusades, to distinguish themselves from the Christians, Arab soldiers wore green into battle.

SEPTEMBER 11,

the way Ramzi Binalshibh would remember that morning:

When the news started and we heard the news of the collision of the first aircraft, as it was wrecking the World Trade Center, guided by our brother Mohamed Atta—may Allah have mercy on his soul—the brothers shouted “Takbir!”—“Allah is Greatest!” … And they prostrated themselves to Allah in gratitude and they wept.

The brothers thought that this was the one and only part of the operation, so we said to them, “Patience, patience!” And suddenly our brother Marwan was wrecking the southern tower of the World Trade Center in a very fierce manner. I mean, in an unimaginable way we were witnessing live on air. We were saying, “Oh, Allah, show us the right way, show the right way” … So the brothers prostrated themselves in thanks to Allah … and they sometimes wept for joy and at other times from sadness for their brothers.…

They thought it was over. We said to them, “Follow the news. The matter is not over yet. Make prayers for your brothers. Pray for them …” Imagine! Within forty-five minutes, in the space of this record time, the [third] aircraft was wrecking the Pentagon building, the building of the American Defense Ministry. The aircraft was guided by our brother Hani Hanjour.… The joy was tremendous.…

Then came the news of the aircraft which was flown by our brother Ziad Jarrah, which was downed in the suburbs of the capital, Washington. At this the brothers shouted “Allah is Greatest!” and they prostrated themselves and embraced.…

It was a sign from Allah for the whole world to see.… Allah the Almighty says: “Did they not travel through the earth and see the end of those before them who did evil. Allah brought utter destruction on them, and similar fates await those who reject Allah.” [Qur’an, Surah 47, Verse 10]. The divine intervention was without a doubt very clear and palpable.… Praise and gratitude be to Allah!

The blessed day of Tuesday, 11 September in Washington and New York was one of the glorious days of the Muslims … it represents a calamitous defeat for the greatest power on earth, America … a fatal blow in her heart, which is filled with animosity and hatred for Islam.… Allah the Almighty has decided to inflict upon her a punishment—to be executed by the hands of this group of believing mujahideen, whom Allah has chosen and ordained for this mighty task. Praise and glory be to Him!

PART VII

UNANSWERED QUESTIONS

THIRTY

THE STORY OF SEPTEMBER 11, 2001—THAT OF THE VICTIMS AND OF the terrorists—is told. The identity of the perpetrators is not in doubt. As told in these pages, the essential elements are as described in the conclusions of the two official inquiries.

There are two areas, though, on which the 9/11 Commission fudged or dodged the issue: the full truth about U.S. and Western intelligence before the attacks; and whether the terrorist operation ten years ago had the support of other nation-states or of powerful individuals within those nation-states. There remain multiple and serious questions and yawning gaps in our knowledge of which the public knows little or nothing.

A case in point, one that we include because it is not covered at all in the Commission Report—and because our interviews indicate that there may possibly be some substance to it—is a report that surfaced seven weeks after the attacks in the leading French newspaper Le Figaro. It was carried by major news agencies and newspapers, denied by the CIA, then forgotten. If the Le Figaro story was correct, U.S. intelligence officials had had a face-to-face meeting with Osama bin Laden in early July 2001, sitting down with a deadly foe, a man wanted for the mass murder of Americans.

According to the report, bin Laden that month traveled secretly from Pakistan to Dubai in the United Arab Emirates, a destination that until 9/11 remained relatively friendly territory for him. He spent several days there reportedly, in private accommodations at the prestigious American Hospital. The ostensible reason for the visit was to undergo medical tests related to his kidney function, long said to have caused him problems. Such tests may have been conducted, but the claim is that he also agreed to meet with a locally based CIA agent and—reportedly—a second official sent in from Washington.

The reporter who originated the story, Alexandra Richard, told the authors that she happened on the story during a visit to the Gulf weeks before 9/11. Checks she made in Dubai, with a senior administrator at the American Hospital, with an airport operative at the point of origin of bin Laden’s alleged journey—Quetta in Pakistan—and with a diplomatic contact she consulted, convinced her that the episode did occur.

The then–head of urology at the hospital, Dr. Terry Callaway, declined to respond to reporter Richard’s questions. Hospital director Bernard Koval was reported as having flatly denied the story.

The authors, however, spoke with Richard’s original source, who said he spoke from firsthand knowledge. The source said he had been present when the local CIA officer involved in the meeting—who, the witnesses interviewed have said, went by the name Larry Mitchell—spoke of the bin Laden visit while out for a social evening with friends. That a professional could have been so loose-lipped seems extraordinary, if not entirely unlikely. It remains conceivable, though, that the bin Laden visit to Dubai did occur. A second kidney specialist, an official source told the authors, described the visit independently, in detail, and at the time. The specialist was able to do so because he, too, was flown to Dubai to contribute to bin Laden’s treatment.

Seeming corroboration of the CIA–bin Laden meeting, meanwhile, came to the authors in a 2009 interview with the official who headed the Security Intelligence department of France’s DGSE, Alain Chouet, who is cited elsewhere in this book.

Did Chouet credit the account of the contact in Dubai? He replied, “Yes.”

Did the DGSE have knowledge at the time that CIA officers met with bin Laden? “Yes,” Chouet said. “Before 9/11,” Chouet observed. “It was not a scoop for us—we weren’t surprised [to learn of it]. We did not consider it something abnormal or outrageous. When someone is threatening you, you try to negotiate. Our own service does it all the time. It is the sort of thing we are paid to do.”

The Dubai episode, Chouet noted, would have occurred “at the time of the Berlin negotiations—through interested parties—between the U.S. and the Taliban. The U.S. was trying to send messages to the Taliban. We didn’t know whether [the meeting with bin Laden] was to threaten or to make a deal.”

There were contacts with the Taliban through intermediaries that July, the latest stage in a long series of approaches. At initial meetings in Europe organized by the United Nations, American emissaries—not speaking officially for the U.S. government—had suggested the possibility of improved relations, cooperation on a strategically important oil pipeline project, and long-term assistance. They had also urged the Taliban to hand over bin Laden.

According to the Le Figaro report, the Dubai contact between bin Laden and U.S. intelligence occurred between July 4 and 14. The final contact, DGSE’s Chouet believes, was on the 13th. According to Chouet, the United States had a twofold approach. At the discussions in Germany, negotiators would both attempt to cool down relations between Washington and the Taliban and ask for the handover of bin Laden. The contact in Dubai, Chouet surmises, was arranged through Saudi Arabia’s intelligence chief, Prince Turki—whose agency had handled bin Laden during the anti-Soviet war in the 1980s.

The hope, Chouet said, was to persuade bin Laden “not to oppose the negotiations in Berlin, and above all to leave Afghanistan and return to Saudi Arabia with a royal pardon—under Turki’s guarantee and control. In exchange, the U.S. would drop efforts to bring him to justice for the attacks in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam and elsewhere in Arabia.”

Chouet believes the overtures to bin Laden were bluntly rebuffed. At the forthcoming U.N.-sponsored meetings in Berlin, between July 17 and 21, former U.S. diplomat Tom Simons pressed even harder for the handover of bin Laden. Should he not be handed over, and should solid evidence establish that the terrorist leader had indeed been behind the attack on the USS Cole, he indicated, the United States could be expected to take military action.

If that was the threat, nothing came of it. After the 9/11 attacks in early fall, of course, there would be no more serious discussion. The Taliban did not give up bin Laden, and were rapidly ousted.

There is nothing in the 9/11 Commission Report about a July meeting with bin Laden in Dubai, but there is what may conceivably be a small clue. At a May 29 meeting with CIA officials, the report notes, National Security Adviser Rice had asked “whether any approach could be made to influence bin Laden.”

The genesis of these straws in the historical wind about a purported meeting between CIA officers and bin Laden in summer 2001 may have been disinformation spread for some political purpose. The 9/11 Commission, though, should have investigated the matter and been seen to have done so.

OTHER PUZZLES remain, some of them with serious implications, as to what Western intelligence services knew about the hijackers before 9/11.

Very soon after 9/11, major newspapers on both sides of the Atlantic ran stories stating that Western intelligence had known about Mohamed Atta for some time. The Chicago Tribune reported as early as September 16 that Atta had been “on a government watchlist of suspected terrorists.” Kate Connolly, a reporter for the British newspaper The Guardian, vividly recalls being told by German officials that operatives “had been trailing Atta for some time, and keeping an eye on the house he lived in on Marienstrasse.”

No evidence was to emerge of Atta having been on a watchlist. It is evident, though, that both German intelligence and the CIA had long been interested not merely in Islamic extremists in Germany but—at one stage—in the men on Marienstrasse. Congress’s Joint Inquiry Report aired a little of this, but the Commission Report virtually ignored the subject.

So far as can be reconstructed, the sequence of events was as follows. Well before the future terrorists rented the Marienstrasse apartment, German intelligence took an interest in two men in particular. The first was Mohammed Zammar, who seemed to be facilitating jihadi travel to Afghanistan. The name of a second man, a Hamburg businessman named Mamoun Darkazanli, came up repeatedly—especially when a card bearing his address was found in the possession of a suspect in the 1998 East Africa embassy bombings. There was intermittent physical surveillance of both men, and Zammar’s telephone was tapped.

It was an incoming call, picked up by the Zammar tap in January 1999, that first drew attention to the apartment on Marienstrasse. A German intelligence report of the call, a copy of which is in the authors’ possession, shows that the name of the person calling Zammar was “Marwan.” The conversation was unexciting, an exchange about Marwan’s studies and a trip Zammar had made. In a second call, a caller looking for Zammar was given the number of the Marienstrasse apartment—76 75 18 30—and the name of one of its tenants, “Mohamed Amir.” On a third call, in September, Zammar sent “Mohamed Amir” his greetings.

Amir, of course, was the last name most used—prior to his departure for the United States—by the man who was to become known to the world as Mohamed Atta.

Those tapped calls are of greatest interest today in the context of the CIA’s performance. The Germans reportedly thought the “Marwan” lead “particularly valuable,” and passed the information about it to the CIA. The caller named “Marwan,” they noted, had been speaking on a mobile phone registered in the United Arab Emirates. According to George Tenet, testifying in 2004 to the Senate Intelligence Committee, the CIA “didn’t sit around” on receipt of this information, but “did some things to go find out some things.”

According to security officials in the UAE, the number could have been identified in a matter of minutes. The “Marwan” on the call is believed to have been UAE citizen Marwan al-Shehhi, who in 2001 was to fly United 175 into the World Trade Center’s South Tower. Was Shehhi’s mobile phone ever monitored by the CIA? Queried on the subject in 2004, U.S. intelligence officials said they were “uncertain.”

The CIA on the ground in Germany did evince major interest in the Hamburg coterie of Islamic extremists. In late 1999, an American official who went by the name of Thomas Volz turned up at the office of the Hamburg state intelligence service—the Landesamt für Verfassungsschutz—with a pressing request.

Though he used the cover of a diplomatic post, Volz was a CIA agent. The Agency believed that Mamoun Darkazanli “had knowledge of an unspecified terrorist plot.” Volz’s hope, he explained, was that the suspect could be “turned,” persuaded to become an informant and pass on information about al Qaeda activities.

The Germans doubted that Darkazanli could be induced to do any such thing. They tried all the same, and failed. Volz, however, repeatedly insisted they try again. So persistent was he, reportedly, that the CIA’s man eventually tried approaching Darkazanli on his own initiative. To German intelligence officials, this was an outrageous intrusion, a violation of Germany’s sovereignty.

All this at the very time, and soon after, that Atta and his comrades—whom Darkazanli knew well—had traveled to Afghanistan, sworn allegiance to bin Laden, and committed to the 9/11 operation. What really came of Volz’s efforts remains unknown.

The 9/11 Commission Report did not mention the Volz episode. The public remains uninformed, moreover, as to what U.S. intelligence may have learned of the hijackers before they left Germany and became operational in the United States.

THE LEAD on Shehhi arising from the Hamburg phone tap aside, there is information suggesting there was early U.S. interest in his accomplice Ziad Jarrah. In late January 2000, on his way back from the future hijackers’ pivotal visit to Afghanistan, Jarrah was stopped for questioning while in transit at Dubai airport.

“It was at the request of the Americans,” a UAE security official was to say after 9/11, “and it was specifically because of Jarrah’s links with Islamic extremists, his contacts with terrorist organizations.” The reason the terrorist was pulled over, reportedly, was “because his name was on a watchlist” provided by the United States.

During his interrogation, astonishingly, Jarrah coolly told his questioners that he had been in Afghanistan and now planned to go to the United States to learn to fly—and to spread the word about Islam.

While the airport interview was still under way, according to the UAE record, the Dubai officials made contact with U.S. representatives. “What happened,” a UAE official elaborated in 2003, “was we called the Americans. We said, ‘We have this guy. What should we do with him?’ … their answer was, ‘Let him go, we’ll track him.’ … They told us to let him go.”

At the relevant date in FBI task force documents on Jarrah, and next to another entry about the terrorist’s UAE stopover, an item has been redacted. The symbol beside the redaction stands for: “Foreign Government Information.”

Was there also interest in Mohamed Atta before his arrival in the United States? Several former members of a secret operation run by the DIA, the U.S. military’s Defense Intelligence Agency, went public four years after 9/11 with a disquieting claim. The names of four of the hijackers-to-be, Atta, Shehhi, Hazmi, and Mihdhar, they claimed, had appeared on the DIA’s radar in early 2000, even before they arrived in the United States.

According to the lieutenant colonel who first made the claim, Anthony Shaffer, the names came up in the course of a highly classified DIA operation code-named Able Danger. He and his staff had carried out “data mining,” under a round-the-clock counterterrorist program Shaffer described as the “use of high-powered software to bore into just about everything: any data that was available—and I mean anything. Open-source Internet data, e-mails believed to be terrorist-related, non-secret government data, commercial records, information on foreign companies, logs of visitors to mosques.”

According to Shaffer, such data also drew on U.S. visa records. If so, and given the reference to information obtained from mosques, it would seem that Able Danger perhaps could have picked up information on the named terrorists—even before they arrived in the United States.

Atta had applied for a U.S. green card in late 1999. Shehhi had gotten his U.S. entry visa by January 2000. Hazmi and Mihdhar had arrived that same month, having applied for and obtained their visas in the summer of 1999. All these documents were in the record.

All the documentary evidence involved, however, was destroyed well before 9/11 because of privacy concerns by Defense Department attorneys. Absent a future discovery of surviving documentary evidence, the Able Danger claims depend entirely on the memories—sometimes rusty memories—of those involved in the operation.

IN GERMANY, and as an outgrowth of surveilling the extremists in Hamburg, a border watch—or Grenzfahndung—was ordered on at least two of the men who frequented the Marienstrasse apartment. The routine was not to arrest listed individuals, but discreetly to note and report their passage across the frontier. It is hard to understand why, if the names of two of the Marienstrasse group were on the list, those of Atta and Shehhi would not have been. If they were under border watch, their departure for the United States ought to have been noted.

German federal officials were unhelpful when approached by the authors for interviews on the subject of either monitoring the terrorists or on the relationship with U.S. agencies before 9/11. “Sadly,” said an official from Germany’s foreign intelligence service, the Bundesnachrichtendienst, “due to considerations of principle, your request cannot be granted. We ask for your understanding.”

The official who was in 2001 and still is deputy chief of Hamburg domestic intelligence, Dr. Manfred Murck, was in general far more cooperative. He had no comment, however, on the subject of collaboration with U.S. intelligence.

The Islamic affairs specialist with the domestic intelligence service in Stuttgart, Dr. Herbert Müller, for his part, offered a small insight into where the Germans’ monitoring of the men at Marienstrasse had led them. “Atta,” he said, “was going through the focus of our colleagues.… He came to their notice.”

Did the Germans share with the United States everything they learned about the future hijackers? “Some countries,” a 9/11 Commission staff statement was to state tartly, “did not support U.S. efforts to collect intelligence information on terrorist cells in their countries.… This was especially true of some of the European services.” Information gathered by Congress’s Joint Inquiry, and what we have of a CIA review, make it clear that there was intermittent friction between the U.S. and German services.

A former senior American diplomat, on the other hand, cast no aspersions on the Germans. “My impression the entire time,” former deputy head of mission in Berlin Michael Polt told the 9/11 Commission, “[was] that our level of interaction with counterterrorism and cooperation with the Germans was extremely high and well coordinated.… And the reason the Germans would want to share those concerns with us [was] because they were expecting from us some information that they could use to go ahead and go after these people.”

For all that, German officials the authors contacted remained either evasive or diplomatic to a fault. Were they concealing the failures of their own intelligence apparatus, or courteously avoiding placing the blame on the ally across the Atlantic?

“They lied to my face for four years, the German secret service,” said Dirk Laabs, a Hamburg author who has reported on the 9/11 story for the Los Angeles Times and the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. “Then I found information that they passed on everything to the CIA.… We only know a little bit of the true story, what really went on.”

The release to the authors in 2011 of a single previously redacted sentence on a 9/11 Commission staff document makes crystal clear what was left fuzzy in the Commission Report. The document summarized the coded conversation between KSM and Binalshibh not long before the attacks—described in an earlier chapter—as to whether lovelorn Ziad Jarrah would stay the course.

The sentence that heads the document’s summary of the exchange, now made public for the first time, reads:

On July 20, 2001, there was a call between

KSM and Binalshibh. They used the codewords

Teresa and Sally

.

The only way the authorities could have known of such a phone call, on a known date and in great detail, was thanks to a telephone intercept. The call was intercepted and recorded while it was in progress.

That certainty leads to a string of further questions.

Which intelligence service tapped the call? The only probable candidates are those of the United States or of Germany. If the intercept was American, which service was responsible? The CIA or the NSA—the National Security Agency? It is the NSA’s mission to spy on international communications, yet its pre-9/11 performance is only minimally reported in the Commission Report.

If the intercept cited above was made in Germany by the Germans, was the take passed to the Americans at the time—or only after 9/11?

The questions do not end there. What other conversations between key 9/11 players were tapped into during the run-up to the attacks? If other conversations were captured, were they all in code that was incomprehensible at the time? Did such intercepts result in any action being taken?

A breakthrough answer on the German intelligence issue came to the authors from a very senior member of the U.S. Congress, a public figure with long experience of intelligence matters, who has held high security clearances, speaking not for attribution.

“We were told by the German intelligence,” the member of Congress said of a visit to Berlin following 9/11, “that they had provided U.S. intelligence agencies with information about persons of interest to them who had been living in Hamburg and who they knew were in, or attempting to get into, the United States. The impression German intelligence gave me was that they felt the action of the U.S. intelligence agencies to their information was dismissive.”

Sour grapes, or an accurate account of the American response to pertinent intelligence?

THIRTY-ONE

THE CIA CERTAINLY HAD KNOWN EARLY ON ABOUT TWO OF THE 9/11 terrorists.

The way it gained that intelligence speaks to the Agency’s operational efficiency, in a brilliant operation a full twenty months before the attacks. Its subsequent performance, however, reflects disastrous inefficiency, perhaps the greatest fiasco in CIA history. Depending on how the evidence is interpreted, it points to something even more culpable.

This is a scenario that began to unravel for the CIA on 9/11 itself, just four hours after the strikes. Soon after 1:00 P.M. that day, at Agency headquarters, an aide hurried to Director Tenet with a handful of papers—the passenger manifests for the four downed airliners. “Two names,” he said, placing a page on the table where the director could see it. “These two we know.”

Tenet looked, then breathed, “There it is. Confirmation. Oh, Jesus …”

A long silence followed. There on the Flight 77 manifest, allocated to Seats 5E and 5F in First Class, were the names of Nawaf al-Hazmi and his brother Salem. Also on the list, near the front of the Coach section at 12B, was Khalid al-Mihdhar’s name.

The names Hazmi and Mihdhar were instantly familiar, Tenet has claimed, because his people had learned only weeks earlier that both men might be in the United States. According to his version of events, the CIA had known of Mihdhar since as early as 1999, had identified him firmly as a terrorist suspect by December that year, had had him followed, discovered he had a valid multiple-entry visa to allow him into the States, and had placed him and comrades—including Hazmi—under surveillance for a few days. Later, in the spring of 2000, the Agency had learned that Hazmi had arrived in California.

Yet, the director had claimed in the wake of 9/11, the CIA had done absolutely nothing about Mihdhar or Hazmi. It had not asked the State Department to watchlist the two terrorists at border points, had not asked the FBI to track them down if they were in the country, until nineteen days before 9/11.

Tenet blamed these omissions solely on calamitous error.

“CIA,” he wrote in 2007, “had multiple opportunities to notice the significant information in our holdings and watchlist al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar. Unfortunately, until August, we missed them all.…

“Yes, people made mistakes; every human interaction was far from where it needed to be. We, the entire government, owed the families of 9/11 better than they got.”

But was it just that CIA “people made mistakes”? Historical mysteries are as often explained by screwups as by darker truths. Nevertheless, senior Commission staff became less than convinced—and not just on the matter of Mihdhar and Hazmi—that Tenet was leveling with them.

When the director was interviewed, in January 2004, on oath, he kept saying “I don’t remember” or “I don’t recall.” Those with courtroom experience among the commissioners reflected that he was “like a grand jury witness who had been too well prepared by a defense lawyer. The witness’s memory was good when it was convenient, bad when it was convenient.”

Executive Director Philip Zelikow was to say later of Tenet, “We just didn’t believe him anymore.” Tenet, for his part, declared himself outraged by the remark, and insisted that he had told the truth about everything.

What is known of the evidence on Hazmi and Mihdhar, however, makes it very hard for anyone to swallow the screwup excuse. Not least because, the CIA version of events suggests, its officials blew the chance to grab the two future hijackers not once, not twice, but time and time again.

This is a puzzle that has confounded official investigators, and reporters and authors, for a full decade now. It will not be solved in these pages, but readers may perhaps see its stark outline, its striking anomalies, its alarming possible implications, more clearly than in the past. To trace the chapter of supposed accidents we must start with a pivotal development that occurred as long as five years before 9/11.

SOMETIME IN 1996, the National Security Agency—which intercepts electronic communications worldwide—had identified a number in Yemen that Osama bin Laden called often from his satellite telephone in Afghanistan. The number, 967-1-200-578, rang at a house in the capital, Sana’a, used by a man he had first known in the days of the anti-Soviet war in Afghanistan. The man’s name was Ahmed al-Hada, and—a great benefit for bin Laden, who in Afghanistan had no access to ordinary communications systems—his house had long served as an al Qaeda “hub,” a link to the wider world.

The NSA did not immediately share this information either with the CIA or with other agencies—a symptom of the interagency disconnect that long plagued U.S. intelligence. The CIA did learn of the intercepts, however, and eventually obtained summaries of intercepted conversations. It was the start of a period of frustratingly sporadic, incomplete access granted by the NSA to material harvested from the hub.

Hada’s telephone also came to loom large for the FBI. One of the Kenya bombers called the number before and after the 1998 attack on Nairobi, and—once agents learned that the number also took calls from bin Laden’s sat-phone on the day of the bombing and the following day—they had a vital evidentiary link between the East Africa attacks and al Qaeda.

The intercepts of Hada’s phone conversations were a priceless resource, and in 1999 yielded the first factual pointer to the preparations for 9/11. Hada’s daughter, U.S. intelligence learned at some stage, was married to a young man named “Khalid”—full name, as we now know, Khalid al-Mihdhar. In December 1999, crucially, the NSA reported to both the CIA and the FBI that it had intercepted an especially interesting call on the Hada telephone, one that mentioned an upcoming trip by “Khalid” and “Nawaf” to Malaysia.

From the start, CIA officers guessed that this was no innocent excursion. Its purpose, one staffer suspected, was “something more nefarious.” The travel, one cable stated, “may be in support of a terrorist mission.” The men were referred to early on as members of an “operational cadre” or as “terrorist operatives.”

The episode that was eventually to bring the Agency lasting shame began as textbook undercover work. As foreshadowed in an earlier chapter, Mihdhar’s Saudi passport was photographed during the stopover in Dubai—leading to the startling revelation that the terrorist had a visa valid for travel to the United States.

As veteran FBI counterterrorism specialist Jack Cloonan was to say, “This is as good as it gets.… How often do you get into someone’s suitcase and find multiple-entry visas? How often do you know there’s going to be an organizational meeting of al Qaeda anyplace in the world? … This is what you would dream about.”

Intelligence bounty continued to rain down on the CIA following the look inside Mihdhar’s passport. The suspect was tracked as he traveled on to the Malaysian capital, Kuala Lumpur. He was watched, starting on January 5, as he met and talked with fellow suspects—including his associate Nawaf al-Hazmi. Courtesy of Malaysia’s Special Branch, the men were covertly photographed, observed going out to pay phones, surveilled when they went to an Internet café to use the computers. The computers’ hard drives were reportedly examined afterward.

The whirl of suspicious activity was of interest not merely to CIA agents in the field, nor only to CIA headquarters at Langley. For it all occurred in the very first days of January 2000, the post-Millennium moment when Washington was more than usually on the alert—at the highest level—for any clue that might herald a terrorist attack. Regular situation reports went day by day not only to the directors of the CIA and the FBI but also to National Security Adviser Sandy Berger and his staff, who included Richard Clarke, at the White House.

Three days later, on January 8, Mihdhar and two of his comrades—one of them later to be identified as having been Hazmi and the other as senior bin Laden henchman Tawfiq bin Attash—took the brief two-hour flight from Kuala Lumpur to the Thai capital Bangkok. There, according to the CIA, and though communication with a Bangkok hotel was logged on one of the pay phones used by the suspects in Kuala Lumpur, the trail was lost.

Nothing would be known of the operatives’ whereabouts, the available record indicates, until two months later. Only then, according to the known record, did Thai authorities respond to a January CIA request to watch for the suspects’ departure. At last, however, in early March, two Agency stations abroad reported a fresh development. Their message said that Hazmi and an unnamed comrade—only later to be named as Mihdhar—had flown out of Bangkok as long ago as January 15, bound for Los Angeles. The men, the cables noted, were “UBL [bin Laden] associates.”

This was stunning information, information that should have triggered an immediate response. Yet, we are asked by the CIA to believe, no one reacted. No one did anything at all. The first cable to arrive with the news was marked “Action Required: None.”

This in spite of the fact that, just before the Millennium, Director Tenet had told all CIA personnel overseas, “The threat could not be more real.… The American people are counting on you and me to take every appropriate step to protect them.”

Tenet’s Counterterrorist Center had circulated an unambiguous instruction just a month before the al Qaeda meeting in Kuala Lumpur. “It is important,” the document had warned, “to flag terrorist personality information in DO [Directorate of Operations] reporting for the [State Department watchlist program] so that potential terrorists may be watchlisted.”

Yet in March 2000, although it had learned that Hazmi, a bin Laden operative, had entered the country, the CIA did not alert the State Department. Nor, back in January, had it alerted State to the fact that Mihdhar had a U.S. entry visa. The Agency was not to request that either man be watchlisted until late August 2001.

While the Kuala Lumpur meeting was still under way, a 9/11 Commission document notes, top FBI officials had been told that the CIA “promised to let FBI know if an FBI angle to the case developed.” The CIA is prohibited from undertaking operations in the United States, and the FBI has responsibility for domestic intelligence and law enforcement.

Even so, with the revelation that Mihdhar had a U.S. visa—very much an FBI angle—the CIA left the Bureau in the dark just as it did the State Department. It certainly should have alerted the FBI the moment it learned that Hazmi had entered the United States. Information that, if shared, may have led to an earlier hunt for Hazmi and Mihdhar.

After 9/11, when its horrendous failure to do any of these things came out, the CIA would attempt to claim that it had not been quite like that. Later investigations by Congress’s Joint Inquiry and the Department of Justice’s inspector general were to produce vestigial portions of emails and cables written right after the discovery that Mihdhar had a U.S. entry visa. The picture that emerged is not immediately clear.

The very day the CIA learned that Mihdhar had a U.S. visa, a CIA bin Laden unit desk officer—identified for security reasons only as “Michelle”—informed colleagues flatly that his travel documents, including the visa, had been copied and passed “to the FBI for further investigation.”

In an email to CIA colleagues the following day, an Agency officer assigned to FBI headquarters—identified as “James”—wrote of having told two senior FBI agents what had been learned of Mihdhar’s activity in Malaysia. He had advised one of them: “as soon as something concrete is developed leading us to the criminal area or to known FBI cases, we will immediately bring FBI into the loop.”

Were one to know only that about the CIA record, it might seem that the FBI was given the crucial visa information. Serious doubt sets in, though, on looking at the wider picture. In an email to CIA colleagues, the Justice Department inspector general discovered, “James” had “stated that he was detailing ‘exactly what [he] briefed [the FBI] on’ in the event the FBI later complained that they were not provided with all of the information about al-Mihdhar. This information did not discuss al-Mihdhar’s passport or U.S. visa [authors’ italics].”

“James,” the inspector general noted, refused to be interviewed.

The inspector general was given access to “Michelle,” the desk officer who had written flatly that Mihdhar’s passport and visa had been passed to the FBI. She prevaricated, however, saying she could not remember how she knew that fact. Her boss, Tom Wilshire, the deputy chief of the CIA’s bin Laden unit, said that for his part he had no knowledge of the “Michelle” cable. He “did not know whether the information had been passed to the FBI.”

Other documents indicate that the opposite was the case, that Wilshire had deliberately ensured that the information would not reach the FBI. This emerged with the inspector general’s discovery of a draft cable—one prepared but never sent—by an FBI agent on attachment to the CIA’s bin Laden unit.

Having had sight of a CIA cable noting that Mihdhar possessed a U.S. visa, Agent Doug Miller had responded swiftly by drafting a Central Intelligence Report, or CIR, addressed to the Bureau’s bin Laden unit and its New York field office. Had the CIR then been sent, the FBI would have learned promptly of Mihdhar’s entry visa.

As regulations required, Agent Miller first submitted the draft to CIA colleagues for clearance. Hours later, though, he received a note from “Michelle” stating: “pls hold off on CIR for now per [Wilshire].”

Perplexed and angry, Miller consulted with Mark Rossini, a fellow FBI agent who was also on attachment to the CIA unit. “Doug came to me and said, ‘What the fuck?,’ ” Rossini recalled. “So the next day I went to [Wilshire’s deputy, identity uncertain] and said, ‘What’s with Doug’s cable? You’ve got to tell the Bureau about this.’ She put her hand on her hip and said, ‘Look, the next attack is going to happen in South East Asia—it’s not the FBI’s jurisdiction. When we want the FBI to know about it, we’ll let them know.’ ”

After eight days, when clearance to send the message still had not come, Agent Miller submitted the draft again directly to CIA deputy unit chief Wilshire along with a note asking: “Is this a no go or should I remake it in some way?” According to the CIA, it was “unable to locate any response to this e-mail.”

Neither Miller nor Rossini was interviewed by 9/11 Commission staff. Wilshire was questioned, the authors established, but the report of his interview is redacted in its entirety.

In July 2001, by which time he had been seconded to the FBI’s bin Laden unit, Wilshire proposed to CIA colleagues that the fact that Mihdhar had a U.S. entry visa should be shared with the FBI. It never happened.

Following a subsequent series of nods and winks from Wilshire, the FBI at last discovered for itself first the fact that Mihdhar had had a U.S. entry visa in 2000, then the fact that he had just very recently returned to the country. Only after that, in late August, did the FBI begin to search for Mihdhar and Hazmi—a search that was to prove inept, lethargic, and ultimately ineffectual.

An eight-member 9/11 Commission team was to reach a damning conclusion about the cable from CIA officer “Michelle” stating that Mihdhar’s travel documents had been passed to the FBI. “The weight of the evidence,” they wrote, “does not support that latter assertion.” The Justice Department inspector general also found, after exhaustive investigation, that the CIA had failed to share with the FBI two vital facts—“that Mihdhar had a U.S. visa and that Hazmi had travelled to Los Angeles.”

In 2007, Congress forced the release of a nineteen-page summary of the CIA’s own long-secret probe of its performance. This, too, acknowledged that Agency staff neither shared what they knew about Mihdhar and Hazmi nor saw to it that they were promptly watchlisted. An accountability board, the summary recommended, should review the work of named officers. George Tenet’s successor as CIA director, Porter Goss, however, declined to hold such a review. There was no question of misconduct, he said. The officers named were “amongst the finest” the Agency had.

THE EXCUSE for such monstrous failures? According to the CIA’s internal report, the bin Laden unit had had an “excessive workload.” Director Tenet claimed in sworn testimony, not once but three times, that he knew “nobody read” the cable that reported Hazmi’s actual arrival in Los Angeles. Wilshire, the officer repeatedly involved, summed up for Congress’s Joint Inquiry: “All the processes that had been put in place,” he said, “all the safeguards, everything else, they failed at every possible opportunity. Nothing went right.”

There are those who think such excuses may be the best the CIA can offer to explain a more compromising truth. “It is clear,” wrote the author Kevin Fenton, an independent researcher who completed a five-year study of the subject in 2011, “that this information was not withheld through a series of bizarre accidents, but intentionally.… Withholding the information about Mihdhar and Hazmi from the FBI makes sense only if the CIA was monitoring the two men in the U.S. itself.”

That notion is not fantasy. The CIA’s own in-house review noted that—had the FBI been told that the two future hijackers were or might be in the country—“good operational follow-through by CIA and FBI might have resulted in surveillance of both Mihdhar and Hazmi. Surveillance, in turn, would have had the potential to yield information on flight training, financing and links to others who were complicit in the 9/11 attacks.”

The CIA kept to itself the fact that it knew long before 9/11 that two of the future hijackers—known to be terrorists—had U.S. visas, and that one had definitely entered the United States

.

If the FBI had known, then–New York Assistant Special Agent in Charge Kenneth Maxwell has said, “We would have been on them like white on snow: physical surveillance, electronic surveillance, a special unit devoted to them.” After 9/11, and when the CIA’s omissions became known, some of Maxwell’s colleagues at the FBI reacted with rage and dark suspicion.

“They purposely hid from the FBI,” one official fulminated, “purposely refused to tell the FBI that they were following a man in Malaysia who had a visa to come to America.… And that’s why September 11 happened.… They have blood on their hands. They have three thousand deaths on their hands.”

Could it be that the CIA concealed what it knew about Mihdhar and Hazmi because officials feared that precipitate action by the FBI would blow a unique lead? Did the Agency want to arrange to monitor the pair’s activity? The CIA’s mandate does not allow it to run operations in the United States, but the prohibition had been broken in the past.

The CIA had on at least one occasion previously aspired to leave an Islamic suspect at large in order to surveil him. When 1993 Trade Center bomber Ramzi Yousef was located in Pakistan two years later, investigative reporter Robert Friedman wrote, the Agency “wanted to continue tracking him.” It “fought with the FBI,” tried to postpone his arrest. On that occasion, the FBI had its way, seized Yousef, and brought him back for trial.

With that rebuff fresh in the institutional memory, did the CIA decide to keep the sensational discovery of Mihdhar’s entry visa to itself? Or did it, as some Bureau agents came to think possible, even hope to recruit the two terrorists as informants?

The speculation is not idle. A heavily redacted congressional document shows that, only weeks before Mihdhar’s visa came to light, top CIA officials had debated the lamentable fact that the Agency had as yet not penetrated al Qaeda: “Without penetrations of OBL organization … [redacted lines] … we need to also recruit sources inside OBL’s organization. Realize that recruiting terrorist sources is difficult … but we must make an attempt.”

The following day, CIA officers went to the White House for a meeting with a select group of top-level National Security Council members. Attendees discussed both the lack of inside information and how essential it was to achieve “penetrations.” Many “unilateral avenues” and “creative attempts” were subsequently to be tried. Material on those attempts in the document has been entirely redacted.

President Clinton himself aside, the senior White House official to whom the CIA reported at that time was National Security Adviser Sandy Berger. After 9/11, while preparing to testify before official inquiries into the attacks, Berger was to commit a crime that destroyed his shining reputation, a folly so bizarre—for a man of his stature—as to be unbelievable were it not true.

On four occasions in 2002 and 2003, Berger would make his way to the National Archives in Washington, the repository of the nation’s most venerated documents—including the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights. This trusted official, alumnus of Cornell and Harvard, former lawyer and aide to public officials, a former deputy director of policy planning at State, had crowned his career by becoming national security adviser during President Clinton’s second term.

It was at Clinton’s request, and in his capacity as one of the very few people allowed access to the former administration’s most secret documents, that Berger went to the Archives to review selected files. Given his seniority, he was received with special courtesy and under rather less than the usual stringent security conditions. All the more astounding then that on his third visit a staff member “saw Mr. Berger bent down, fiddling with something that could have been paper, around his ankle.”

Under cover of asking for privacy to make phone calls, or in the course of uncommonly frequent visits to the lavatory, the former national security adviser was purloining top secret documents, smuggling them out of the building hidden in his clothing, and taking them home. He was caught doing so, publicly exposed, forced to resign from his senior post with the 2004 Democratic campaign for the presidency, charged with taking classified documents, and—a year later—fined $50,000 and sentenced to one hundred hours of community service.

What had possessed Berger? What seemed so compromising to himself or to the Clinton administration—or so essential to be hidden from 9/11 investigators—as to drive him to risk national disgrace?

What is known is that Berger took no fewer than five copies of the Millennium After Action Review, or MAAR, a thirteen-page set of recommendations that had been written in early 2000, focused mostly on countering al Qaeda activity inside the United States. While the MAAR is still classified, it seems somewhat unlikely that it is the item that Berger deemed potential dynamite. It may have been handwritten notes on the copies that he thought potentially explosive, former 9/11 Commission senior counsel John Farmer has surmised. That would account for the former official’s apparently frantic search for additional copies.