The Eleventh Day

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.

The National Archives inspector general and others worried about what other documents Berger may have removed from the Archives. Short of a further admission on his part, the director of the Archives’ presidential documents staff conceded, we shall never know. Whatever he took, Farmer pointed out, it made him appear “desperate to prevent the public from seeing certain papers.”

“What information could be so embarrassing,” House Speaker Dennis Hastert asked, “that a man with decades of experience in handling classified documents would risk being caught pilfering our nation’s most sensitive secrets? … Was this a bungled attempt to rewrite history and keep critical information from the 9/11 Commission?”

The question is all the more relevant when one notes that, so far as one can tell, Berger’s focus was on the period right after the CIA’s resolve to “penetrate” bin Laden’s terrorist apparatus, or “recruit” inside it, an aspiration followed in rapid order by the discovery of Khalid al-Mihdhar’s U.S. entry visa—and the highly suspect failure to share that information with the State Department and the FBI.

THOUGH FRAGMENTARY, there are pointers suggesting that the CIA did not promptly drop its coverage of Mihdhar. On January 5, 2000—the day of the discovery of Mihdhar’s visa, and in the same cable that claimed the FBI had been notified—desk officer “Michelle” noted that “we need to continue the effort to identify these travelers and their activities.” As late as February, moreover, a CIA message noted that the Agency was still engaged in an investigation “to determine what the subject is up to.”

Mihdhar was to tell KSM, according to the CIA account of KSM’s interrogation, that he and Hazmi “believed they were surveilled from Thailand to the U.S.” KSM seems to have taken this possibility seriously—sufficiently so, the CIA summary continues, that he “began having doubts whether the two would be able to fulfil their mission.” Later, in 2001, two other members of the hijack team sent word that they thought they, too, had been tailed on a journey within the United States.

The hijackers may have imagined they were being followed. Given their mission, it would have been a natural enough fear. There is another relevant lead, though, that has more substance.

In the early afternoon of September 11, the senior aide to Defense Secretary Rumsfeld penned a very curious handwritten note. Written by Deputy Under Secretary Stephen Cambone at 2:40 P.M., following a phone call between Rumsfeld and Tenet, it appears in a record of the day’s events that was obtained in 2006 under the Freedom of Information Act.

The note reads:

AA 77–3 indiv have been followed since Millennium & Cole

1 guy is assoc of Cole bomber

3 entered US in early July

(2 of 3 pulled aside and interrogated?)

Though somewhat garbled, probably due to the rush of events in those hectic hours, the details more or less fit. Mihdhar, Hazmi, and Hazmi’s brother were hijackers aboard American Flight 77, the airliner that was flown into the Pentagon. Mihdhar had been an associate of USS Cole planner Attash, the most significant of the fellow terrorists with whom he met in Kuala Lumpur. Mihdhar, certainly, had entered the United States—for the second time, after months back in the Middle East—in “early July,” on July 4.

Cambone’s note on three individuals having “been followed” could be interpreted in two ways. Had Tenet meant during his conversation with Secretary Rumsfeld merely to convey the fact that three of the terrorists had at an earlier point come to the notice of the intelligence community? Or had he—conceivably—meant what the note says he said, that the terrorists’ movements had indeed been monitored?

Was it Tenet’s knowledge of some intelligence operation that had targeted Mihdhar and Hazmi—whether in the shape of monitoring them or attempting to recruit them—that led to the director’s flash of recognition and his “Oh, Jesus” exclamation on seeing their names on the Flight 77 manifest?

If an operation had been attempted, contrary to the rules that govern CIA activities, to whom was it entrusted? To try to answer that question is to fumble in the dark. There are pointers, though, in the evidence as to whether any foreign nation-state—other than Afghanistan, where the Taliban played host to bin Laden—had responsibility at any level for the 9/11 attacks.

THIRTY-TWO

AQUESTION THE 9/11 COMMISSION SOUGHT TO ANSWER, ITS CHAIRmen Thomas Kean and Lee Hamilton recalled, was “Had the hijackers received any support from foreign governments?”

“The terrorists do not function in a vacuum,” Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld had told reporters the week after 9/11. They “live and work and function and are fostered and financed and encouraged, if not just tolerated, by a series of countries.… I know a lot, and what I have said, as clearly as I know how, is that states are supporting these people.” Pressed to elaborate, Rumsfeld was silent for a long moment. Then, saying it was “a sensitive matter,” he changed the subject.

Three years later, the 9/11 Commission would consider whether any of three foreign countries in particular might have had a role in 9/11. Two were self-avowed foes of the United States—Iran and Iraq. The third was the country long since billed—by both sides—as a close friend of the United States, Saudi Arabia.

Iran, the Commission found, had long had contacts with al Qaeda and had allowed its operatives—including a number of the future hijackers —to travel freely through its airports. The Commission Report, however, said there was no evidence that Iran “was aware of the planning for what later became the 9/11 attack.” The commissioners urged the government to investigate further.

There is nothing to indicate that federal agencies have probed further. In late May 2011, however, it was reported that a suit filed by lawyers for bereaved U.S. family members would include revealing testimony from three Iranian defectors. Former senior Commission counsel Dietrich Snell was quoted as saying in an affidavit that there was now “convincing evidence the government of Iran provided material support to al Qaeda in the planning and execution of the 9/11 attack.” As this book went to press, however, the evidence could not be evaluated. It had yet to surface, and the three defectors who had testified remained unidentified.

The 9/11 commissioners had stated, meanwhile, that they had seen no “evidence indicating that Iraq cooperated with al Qaeda in developing or carrying out any attacks against the United States.”

By contrast, there was no finding in the 9/11 Commission Report that categorically exonerated America’s “friend” Saudi Arabia—or individuals in Saudi Arabia—from all involvement in the 9/11 plot. The decision as to what to say about Saudi Arabia in the Report had been made amid discord and tension.

Investigators who had probed the Saudi angle believed their work demonstrated a close link between hijackers Mihdhar and Hazmi and the Saudi government. Their written findings reflected that.

Then, late one night, as last-minute changes to the Report were being made, the investigators received alarming news. Senior counsel Snell, their team leader, was at the office, closeted with executive director Zelikow, making major changes to their material and removing key elements.

The lead investigators, Michael Jacobson and Rajesh De, hurried to the office to confront Snell. With lawyerly caution, he said he thought there was insufficient substance to their case against the Saudis. They considered the possibility of resigning, then settled for a compromise. Much of the telling information they had collected was to survive in the Report—but only in tiny print, hidden in the endnotes.

Prince Bandar, then still Saudi ambassador to Washington, expressed delight when the Commission Report was published. “The clear statements by this independent, bipartisan commission,” he declared, “have debunked the myths that have cast fear and doubt over Saudi Arabia.” Quotations from the Report favorable to Saudi Arabia were posted on the embassy’s website and remained there still in early 2011.

Foremost among the quotes Prince Bandar liked was a Commission finding that it had located “no evidence that the Saudi government as an institution or senior Saudi officials individually funded” al Qaeda. The full quote, which was not cited, was less satisfying.

“Saudi Arabia,” the same paragraph said, “has long been considered the primary source of al Qaeda funding,” and—the Report noted—its conclusion “does not exclude the likelihood that charities with significant Saudi government sponsorship diverted funds to al Qaeda … al Qaeda found fertile fund-raising ground in Saudi Arabia.”

Another major passage did not appear on the embassy site. “Saudi Arabia,” it read, “has been a problematic ally in combating Islamic extremism. At the level of high policy, Saudi Arabia’s leaders cooperated with American diplomatic initiatives … before 9/11. At the same time, Saudi Arabia’s society was a place where al Qaeda raised money directly from individuals and through charities … the Ministry of Islamic Affairs … uses zakat [charitable giving, a central tenet of Islam] and government funds to spread Wahhabi beliefs throughout the world.… Some Wahhabi-funded organizations have been exploited by extremists to further their goal of violent jihad against non-Muslims.”

The long official friendship between the United States and Saudi Arabia, the Report said, could not be unconditional. The relationship had to be about more than oil, had to include—this in bold type—“a commitment to fight the violent extremists who foment hatred.”

For a very long time, there had been no such clear commitment on the part of the Saudis. More than seven years before 9/11, the first secretary at the Saudi mission to the United Nations, Mohammed al-Khilewi, had defected to the United States—bringing with him thousands of pages of documents that, he said, showed the regime’s support for terrorism, corruption, and abuse of human rights. At the same time, he addressed a letter to Crown Prince Abdullah, calling for “a move towards democracy.” The Saudi royals, Khilewi said, responded by threatening his life. The U.S. government, however, offered little protection. FBI officials, moreover, declined to accept the documents the defecting diplomat had brought with him.

In support of his claim that Saudi Arabia supported terrorism, Khilewi spoke of an episode relevant to the earliest attempt to bring down the Trade Center’s Twin Towers. “A Saudi citizen carrying a Saudi diplomatic passport,” he said, “gave money to Ramzi Yousef, the mastermind behind the [1993] World Trade Center bombing” when he was in the Philippines. The Saudi relationship with Ramzi Yousef, the defector claimed, “is secret and goes through Saudi intelligence.”

The reference to a Saudi citizen having funded Yousef closely fit the part played by Osama bin Laden’s brother-in-law, Jamal Khalifa. He was active in the Philippines, fronted as a charity organizer at the relevant time, and founded a charity that funded Yousef and KSM during the initial plotting to destroy U.S. airliners. There was telephone traffic between Khalifa’s cell phone and an apartment the conspirators used.

When Khalifa eventually returned to Saudi Arabia in 1995—following detention in the United States and subsequent acquittal on terrorism charges in Jordan—he was, according to CIA bin Laden unit chief Michael Scheuer, met with a limousine and a welcome home from a “high-ranking official.” A Philippines newspaper would report that it had been Prince Sultan, then a deputy prime minister and minister of defense and aviation, today the heir to the Saudi throne, who “allegedly welcomed” Khalifa.

Information obtained by U.S. intelligence in that period, veteran investigative reporter Seymour Hersh has written, had been the very opposite of the 9/11 Commission’s verdict of “no evidence” that senior Saudi officials funded al Qaeda.

“Since 1994 or earlier,” Hersh noted, “the National Security Agency has been collecting electronic intercepts of conversations between members of the Saudi Arabian royal family.… The intercepts depict a regime increasingly corrupt, alienated from the country’s religious rank and file, and so weakened and frightened that it has brokered its future by channeling hundreds of millions of dollars in what amounts to protection money to fundamentalist groups that wish to overthrow it. The intercepts had demonstrated to analysts that by 1996 Saudi money was supporting Osama bin Laden’s al Qaeda.…”

“ ’96 is the key year,” Hersh quoted an intelligence official as saying, “Bin Laden hooked up to all the bad guys—it’s like the Grand Alliance—and had a capability for conducting large-scale operations.” The Saudi regime, the official said, had “gone to the dark side.”

Going to the dark side, by more than one account, began with a deal. In June 1996, while in Paris for the biennial international weapons bazaar, a group of Saudi royals and financiers is said to have gathered at the Royal Monceau hotel near the Saudi embassy. The subject was bin Laden, and what to do about him. After two recent bombings of American targets in Saudi Arabia, one of them just that month, the fear was that the Saudi elite itself would soon be targeted.

At the meeting at the Monceau, French domestic intelligence reportedly learned, it was decided that bin Laden was to be kept at bay by payment of huge sums in protection money. To the tune, one account had it, of hundreds of millions of dollars. The Los Angeles Times was in 2004 to quote 9/11 Commission member Senator Bob Kerrey as saying that officials on the Commission believed Saudi officials had received assurances of safety in return for their generosity, even if there was no hard specific evidence.

In years to come, senior Saudi princes would deride reports of payoffs or simply write them out of the script of history. “It’s a lovely story,” Prince Bandar would say, “but that’s not true.” GID’s Turki, for his part, recalled exchanges with the Taliban about bin Laden in 1996 during which he asked them to “make sure he does not operate against the Kingdom or say anything against the Kingdom.” In 1998—and at the request of the United States—according to Turki, he made two unsuccessful secret visits to try to persuade the Taliban to hand over bin Laden.

Others say Turki actually traveled to Afghanistan in both 1996 and 1998. In sworn statements after 9/11, former Taliban intelligence chief Mohammed Khaksar said that in 1998 the prince sealed a deal under which bin Laden undertook not to attack Saudi targets. In return, Saudi Arabia would provide funds and material assistance to the Taliban, not demand bin Laden’s extradition, and not bring pressure to close down al Qaeda training camps. Saudi businesses, meanwhile, would ensure that money also flowed directly to bin Laden.

Turki would deny after 9/11 that any such deal was done with bin Laden. One account has it, however, that he himself met with bin Laden—his old protégé from the days of the anti-Soviet jihad—during the exchanges that led to the deal. Citing a U.S. intelligence source, the author Simon Reeve reported as much in 1999—well before it became an issue after 9/11.

Whatever the truth about Turki’s role, other Saudi royals may have been involved in a payoff. A former Clinton administration official has claimed—and U.S. intelligence sources concurred—that at least two Saudi princes had been paying, on behalf of the Kingdom, what amounted to protection money since 1995. “The deal was,” the former official said, “they would turn a blind eye to what he was doing elsewhere. ‘You don’t conduct operations here, and we won’t disrupt them elsewhere.’ ”

American and British official sources, speaking later with Simon Henderson—Baker fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy—named the two princes in question. They were, Henderson told the authors, Interior Minister Naif and the minister of defense and aviation, Prince Sultan. The money involved in the alleged payments, according to Henderson’s sources, had amounted to “hundreds of millions of dollars.” It had been “Saudi official money—not their own.”

Unlike other surviving monarchies, the Saudi royal family comprises a vast number of princes—modest estimates put their number at some seven thousand. All are hugely wealthy, though only a much smaller number have real clout. There were Saudi royals, some came to believe, whose relations with bin Laden extended to active friendship.

Four-star General Wayne Downing, who headed the task force that investigated the 1996 bombing in Saudi Arabia, said he learned of princes who went to Afghanistan and fraternized with bin Laden. “They would go out and see Osama, spend some time with him, talk with him—you know—live out in the tents, eat the simple food, engage in falconry … ride horses. And then be able to have the insider secret knowledge that, ‘Yes, we saw Osama, and we talked to him.’ ”

At the State Department, the director of the Office of the Coordinator for Counterterrorism concluded that the relationship with some royals went way beyond recreational pursuits. “We’ve got information about who’s backing bin Laden,” Dick Gannon was saying by 1998, “and in a lot of cases it goes back to the royal family. There are certain factions of the royal family who just don’t like us.”

In the years and months before 9/11, American officials visiting Riyadh usually discovered that it was futile to ask the Saudis for help in fighting terrorism. George Tenet, who had become CIA director during Bill Clinton’s second term, has vividly recalled an audience he was granted by the crown prince’s brother Prince Naif. Naif, who as interior minister oversaw domestic intelligence, began the exchange with “an interminable soliloquy recounting the history of the U.S.-Saudi ‘special’ relationship, including how the Saudis would never, ever keep security-related information from their U.S. allies.”

There came a moment when Tenet had had enough. Breaching royal etiquette, he placed his hand on the prince’s knee, and said, “Your Royal Highness, what do you think it will look like if someday I have to tell the Washington Post that you held out data that might have helped us track down al Qaeda murderers?” Naif’s reaction, Tenet thought, was what looked like “a prolonged state of shock.”

Vice President Al Gore, who saw Crown Prince Abdullah soon afterward, renewed an existing request for access to a captured al Qaeda terrorist, a man known to have information on al Qaeda funding. “The United States,” the 9/11 Commission was to note dourly, “never obtained this access.”

So it went, year after year. Robert Baer, a celebrated former CIA field officer in the Middle East, recalled that Prince Naif “never lifted a finger” to get to the bottom of the 1996 bomb that killed and injured U.S. servicemen in Saudi Arabia. Baer pointed out, too, that it was Naif—in 1999—who released from prison two Saudi clerics long associated with bin Laden’s cause.

Congress’s Joint Inquiry was to note that it had been told “the Saudi government would not cooperate with the United States on matters relating to Osama bin Laden [name and information censored].” Words, perhaps, out of the mouth of Michael Scheuer, former chief of the CIA’s bin Laden unit.

“As one of the unit’s first actions,” Scheuer recalled in 2008, “we requested that the Saudis provide the CIA with basic information about bin Laden. That request remained unfulfilled.” The U.S. government, he bitterly recalled, “publicly supported a brutal, medieval Arab tyranny … and took no action against a government that helped ensure that bin Laden and al Qaeda remained beyond the reach of the United States.” To Scheuer, looking back, America’s supposed ally had in reality been simply a “foreign enemy.”

On a flight home from Saudi Arabia in the late 1990s, FBI director Louis Freeh told counterterrorism chief John O’Neill that he thought the Saudi officials they had met during the trip had been helpful. “You’ve got to be kidding,” retorted O’Neill, a New Jersey native who never minced his words. “They didn’t give us anything. They were just shining sunshine up your ass.”

Several years later, in two long conversations with an investigator for a French intelligence agency, O’Neill was still venting his frustration. “All the answers, all the clues that could enable us to dismantle Osama bin Laden’s organization,” he said, “are in Saudi Arabia.”

The answers and the clues, however, remained out of reach. In part, O’Neill told the Frenchman, because U.S. dependence on Saudi oil meant that Saudi Arabia had “much more leverage on us than we have on the Kingdom.” And, he added, because “high-ranking personalities and families in the Saudi Kingdom” had close ties to bin Laden.

The conversations took place in June and late July of 2001.

A YEAR AFTER 9/11, former Saudi intelligence chief Prince Turki—the longtime head of GID—expounded at length on his service’s relationship with the CIA.

From around 1996, he said, “At the instruction of the senior Saudi leadership, I shared all the intelligence we had collected on bin Laden and al Qaeda with the CIA. And in 1997 the Saudi Minister of Defense, Prince Sultan, established a joint intelligence committee with the United States to share information on terrorism in general and on bin Laden and al Qaeda in particular.”

That the GID and U.S. services had a long if uneasy understanding on sharing intelligence is not at issue. A year after his initial comments, though, by which time he had become ambassador to London, Turki spoke out specifically about 9/11 hijackers Mihdhar and Hazmi.

In late 1999 and early 2000, he said—when Mihdhar and Hazmi were headed for the terrorist meeting in Malaysia—GID had told the CIA that both men were terrorists. “What we told them,” he said, “was these people were on our watchlist from previous activities of al Qaeda, in both the [East Africa] embassy bombings and attempts to smuggle arms into the Kingdom in 1997.”

The Saudi ambassador to the United States, Prince Bandar, had hinted right after 9/11 that the intelligence services had known more about the hijackers in advance than they were publicly admitting. Then, his remarks had gone virtually unnoticed.

In 2007, however, by which time he had risen to become national security adviser to former crown prince—now King—Abdullah, Bandar produced a bombshell. He went much further than had Prince Turki on what—he claimed—GID had passed to the CIA.

“Saudi security,” Bandar said, had been “actively following the movements of most of the terrorists with precision.… If U.S. security authorities had engaged their Saudi counterparts in a serious and credible manner, in my opinion, we would have avoided what happened.”

The same week, speaking not of 9/11 but of the 2005 London Underground train bombings that killed more than fifty people and injured some eight hundred, King Abdullah made astonishing remarks. “We have sent information before the terrorist attacks on Britain,” the king said, “but unfortunately no action was taken … it may have been able to avert the tragedy.”

Such claims might be rejected out of hand, were it not that they came from Saudis at the very top of the power structure. A British government spokesman publicly denied King Abdullah’s remarks, saying that information received from the Saudis had been “not relevant” to the London bombings and could not have been used to prevent the attacks. The comments about Mihdhar and Hazmi led to a mix of denial, rage—and in one case, a curious silence.

“There is not a shred of evidence,” the CIA’s Bill Harlow said of Turki’s 2003 claim, “that Saudi intelligence provided CIA any information about Mihdhar and Hazmi prior to September 11 as they have described.” Harlow said information on the two hijackers-to-be had been passed on only a month after the attacks.

Prince Turki stood by what he had said, while eventually acknowledging that it had not been he himself who had given the information to the Americans. The prince’s former chief analyst, Saeed Badeeb, said it was he who briefed U.S. officials—at one of their regular liaison meetings—warning that Mihdhar and Hazmi were members of al Qaeda.

There was no official reaction to the most stunning allegation of all, Prince Bandar’s claim that the GID had followed most of the future hijackers, that 9/11 could have been averted had U.S. intelligence responded adequately. The following year, the CIA’s earlier bin Laden unit chief Michael Scheuer dismissed the claim—in a book—as a “fabrication.” By failing to respond to it publicly, he wrote, U.S. officialdom had condoned the claim.

Though senior 9/11 Commission staff interviewed Prince Bandar, they did so well before he came out with his claim about the Saudis having followed most of the hijackers “with precision.” The record of what the prince told the Commission—even at that early stage—remains classified on grounds of “national security.”

As interesting, of course, would be to know what former Saudi intelligence chief Prince Turki told the Commission—if indeed he was interviewed. On finding no reference to any Turki contact in listings of Commission documents—even if only referred to as withheld—the authors sent an inquiry to the National Archives. The response was remarkable, one that the experienced archivist with whom we dealt said she had never had to send before.

“I can neither confirm nor deny the existence of a Prince Turki Memorandum for the Record,” the archivist wrote in early 2011. “I’m not allowed to be any clearer.… I can’t tell you, or I’m revealing more than I’m allowed to.… If we have an MFR for Prince Turki, it would also be withheld in full.”

Legal advice to the authors is that the umbrella nature of the withholding—under which the public is not allowed to know whether a document on a subject even exists—is rare. Information about the GID, and what really went on between the Saudi and U.S. intelligence services before 9/11, apparently remains highly sensitive.

WITH THE U.S. authorities blocking access to information, one can but sift the fragments of information that have surfaced. Did the GID “follow” Mihdhar and Hazmi, or indeed any of the terrorists?

A former head of operations and analysis at the CIA Counterterrorist Center, Vincent Cannistraro, has said that—as one might expect—Saudi intelligence had in the past “penetrated al Qaeda several times.” A censored paragraph on Hazmi in Congress’s Joint Inquiry states that the future hijacker

returned to Saudi Arabia in early 1999, where [words withheld], he disclosed information about the East Africa bombings.

Al Mihdhar’s first trip to the Afghanistan training camps was in early 1996. [three lines withheld] In 1998, al Mihdhar traveled to Afghanistan and swore allegiance to Bin Laden.

Hazmi “disclosed information”? To whom—to the GID? That possibility aside, there is a clue in a 9/11 Commission staff report. Mihdhar and Hazmi and Hazmi’s brother “presented with their visa applications passports that contained an indicator of possible terrorist affiliation.”

Depending how one reads a footnote in the Commission Report, all fifteen Saudi hijackers were vulnerable due to the fact or likelihood that their passports “had been manipulated in a fraudulent manner” by al Qaeda. According to the author James Bamford, however, Mihdhar’s two passports “contained a secret coded indicator, placed there by the Saudi government [authors’ emphasis], warning of a possible terrorist affiliation.”

What then of the claims by Princes Turki and Bandar that the Saudis shared information on Mihdhar and Hazmi with the CIA? Two years after the attacks, the authors Joseph and Susan Trento suggested a mind-boggling possible answer to that question. They claimed that a former CIA officer, once based in Saudi Arabia, had told them, “We had been unable to penetrate al Qaeda. The Saudis claimed they had done it successfully. Both Hazmi and Mihdhar were Saudi agents.”

Citing not only that officer but other CIA and GID sources, the Trentos have written that Mihdhar and Hazmi—assumed at the time to be friendly double agents—went to the January meeting of terrorists in Kuala Lumpur “to spy on a meeting of top associates of al Qaeda associates.… The CIA/Saudi hope was that the Saudis would learn details of bin Laden’s future plans.”

As noted earlier, the CIA knew even before Mihdhar reached Kuala Lumpur that he had a multiple-entry visa for the United States—a fact it said it discovered when his passport was photographed en route to Malaysia.

The reason the CIA did not ask the State Department to watchlist Mihdhar and Hazmi, according to the Trento account, was that the men “were perceived as working for a friendly intelligence service”—the GID. In any case, the Trentos quote one of their sources as saying that CIA operations staff allowed names to go forward to the watchlist only with reluctance. “Many terrorists act as assets for our case officers,” the source said. “We do deal with bad guys and, like cops protect snitches, we protect ours … none of those guys is going to show up on the no-fly list.”

The reason the FBI was not told anything about Mihdhar and Hazmi, the Trentos quote a source as telling them, was “because they were Saudi assets operating with CIA knowledge in the United States.”

Then the kicker. According to the Trentos, Mihdhar and Hazmi had not been thoroughly vetted by either the CIA or the GID. “In fact they were triple agents—loyal to Osama bin Laden.” And so it was, months later, that catastrophe followed.

Is this mere disinformation? Early on in his career, Joe Trento worked for the columnist Jack Anderson, famous in his day for breaking big stories, often without naming his sources. He has also worked for CNN. The Trentos have long written on intelligence, and have repeated their claim about the handling of Mihdhar and Hazmi in another book, in a 2010 article, and in a conversation with the authors.

The scenario they paint, though, bumps up against known events and evidence. It seems likely that the Trentos’ intelligence sources fed them morsels of fact mixed in with deliberate disinformation—a common enough ploy. Their account, though, does prompt a much closer look at the interplay between the CIA and the Saudi GID.

The CIA’s own inspector general, reporting in 2005, found that its bin Laden station and “[name redacted] were hostile to each other and working at cross purposes for a number of years before 9/11.” In context, it is clear that the redacted name refers to the GID. Pulitzer-winning New York Times reporter James Risen, who, writing later, revealed that—as early as 1997—Alec Station, the CIA unit that specifically targeted bin Laden, had seen its GID counterparts as a “hostile service.”

The signs were, Risen reported, that intelligence given to the GID about al Qaeda was often passed on to al Qaeda. Once CIA staff shared intercepts with the GID, they found, al Qaeda operatives would abruptly stop using the lines that had been monitored. Congress’s Joint Inquiry Report hinted at the true picture. “On some occasions,” one passage read—followed by several redacted lines—“individuals in some [foreign] liaison services are believed to have cooperated with terrorist groups.”

The legal defense fund of Blind Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman, on trial in the mid-1990s for plotting to bomb New York landmarks, had been supported with GID money. Osama bin Laden himself, who had made his name under GID direction during the anti-Soviet war in Afghanistan, remained a hero for many.

A number of Saudi officials, a friendly intelligence service told the CIA well before 9/11, used bin Laden’s picture as the screen saver on their office computers. Little was to change. Even three years after the attacks—following the shock of serious al Qaeda attacks inside Saudi Arabia, and severe reprisals by the regime—one senior Arab source would still be telling the London Times that Saudi intelligence was “80% sympathetic to al Qaeda.”

In 2001, sympathy for al Qaeda and bin Laden was widespread across the spectrum of Saudi society. It extended, even, to approval of the strikes on America.

THIRTY-THREE

AT FIRST ON SEPTEMBER 11, EARLY ESTIMATES HAD BEEN THAT AS many as tens of thousands might have died in the New York attacks alone. There was a universal sense of catastrophe across the Western world. In Saudi Arabia, as in a number of countries across the region, many expressed delight.

Drivers honked their horns. In Internet cafés, many young men adopted shots of the blazing Twin Towers as screen savers—and restored the photographs if proprietors removed them. Students in class seemed “quite proud.” Some people killed sheep or camels and invited friends to a feast.

Satisfaction over the blow to the United States was not confined to the street. The hostess at a lunch for society women was shocked to hear many of her guests evince the sentiment that, at last, “somebody did something.”

There was a tangible feeling abroad that the attacks had been a good thing, that “someone had stood up to America.” At King Fahd National Guard Hospital in Riyadh, one foreign doctor had a unique insight into the reaction of ordinary patients and medical professionals alike.

Dr. Qanta Ahmed, a British-born Muslim of Pakistani origin, had trained in Britain and the United States. Like millions of others, she had spent the hours after the attacks watching satellite television news in horror, phoning friends in New York to ask if they were safe. On arriving at the hospital next morning, though, what she sensed was an atmosphere of “muted exaltation … relish in the face of destruction.”

On the general medical and surgical wards, nurses told her, Saudi patients had clapped and cheered as TV pictures showed the Twin Towers crumbling. What had outraged one fellow foreigner most, though, was when two Saudi obstetricians sent out to the Diplomat Bakery for cakes—the sort of cakes customarily used at moments of mabrouk, when congratulation or celebration is due. When the cakes arrived, they passed out slices to their colleagues and to the patients who had clapped.

“So, they lost thousands of Americans,” a New York–trained Pakistani doctor said. “They are guessing three thousand right now. Do you have any idea how many people die in Palestine every day, Qanta? The loss of these lives is hardly equal to the daily losses of lives in the Muslim world in past years.”

The mood was pervasive and lasting. Later that week, at the grocery in the hospital complex, the man at the checkout was eager as usual to chat. “This news in New York has been very good, Doctora!” he said. And then: “The Americans deserved it.”

A month later, a survey of educated Saudi professionals found that 95 percent of respondents favored bin Laden’s cause. Asked to comment, Crown Prince Abdullah’s half-brother, Prince Nawwaf bin Abdul Aziz, opined that this reflected the “feelings of the people against the United States … because of its unflinching support for Israel against the Palestinians.”

Several years later, conducting interviews in Saudi Arabia, 9/11 Commission staff interviewed several dozen young to middle-age men said to be “moderates.” “Almost unanimously,” Commission chairmen Kean and Hamilton noted, the men were “harshly critical of the United States.… They did not defend crashing planes into buildings, but they believed strongly that the United States was unfair in its approach to the Middle East, particularly in its support for Israel.

“These feelings were not surprising, but hearing them firsthand from so-called moderates drove home the enormous gap between how we see ourselves and our actions in the Middle East, and how others perceive us.”

AT HIS RESIDENCE outside Washington on the morning of 9/11, Saudi ambassador Prince Bandar had been in his bedroom when the planes hit the Trade Center. He became aware of the first of the crashes, he recalled, when—as he glanced up at one of his ten television screens—he saw flames erupting from the North Tower. Then, when a second plane struck the South Tower, he realized that America was being attacked. He said he had hoped “they were not Arabs.”

“My God,” he said he thought later, on seeing pictures that showed Palestinians apparently celebrating in the street. “The whole impression this nation is going to have of us, the whole world, will be formed in the next two days.”

Each for their own complex mix of reasons, the Saudis and the Bush administration were suddenly struggling to keep the fabled U.S.-Saudi “friendship” from falling apart. Bandar rushed out a statement of condolence. The kingdom, an embassy statement said, “condemned the regrettable and inhuman bombings and attacks which took place today.… Saudi Arabia strongly condemns such acts, which contravene all religious values and human civilized concepts; and extends sincere condolences.”

Behind the political scenery, and on the festering subject of Israel, relations between Riyadh and Washington had very recently become unprecedentedly shaky. Crown Prince Abdullah had long fumed about America’s apparent complacency over the plight of the Palestinians. In the spring, he had pointedly declined an invitation to the White House. Three weeks before 9/11, enraged by television footage of an Israeli soldier putting his boot on the head of a Palestinian woman, he had snapped. His nephew Bandar had been told to deliver an uncompromising message to President Bush.

“I reject this extraordinary, un-American bias whereby the blood of an Israeli child is more expensive and holy than the blood of a Palestinian child.… A time comes when peoples and nations part.… Starting today, you go your way and we will go our way. From now on, we will protect our national interests, regardless of where America’s interests lie in the region.” There was more, much more, and it rocked the Bush administration. The President responded with a placatory letter that seemed to go far toward the Saudi position of endorsing the creation of a viable Palestinian state. As of September 7, it looked as though the situation had stabilized. Then came the shattering events of Tuesday the 11th.

In Riyadh, and within twenty-four hours, Abdullah pulled the lever that gave his nation its only real power, the economic sword it could draw or sheathe at will. He ordered that nine million barrels of oil be dispatched to the United States over the next two weeks. The certainty of supply had the effect, it is said, of averting what had otherwise been a possibility at that time—an oil shortage that would have pushed prices through the roof and caused—on top of the real economic effects of the 9/11 calamity—a major financial crisis.

On the night of Wednesday the 12th, though, a CIA official phoned Ambassador Bandar with the news that fifteen of the hijackers had been Saudis. As Bandar recalled it, he felt the world collapsing around him. “That was a disaster,” Crown Prince Abdullah’s foreign affairs adviser Adel al-Jubeir has said, “because bin Laden, at that moment, had made in the minds of Americans Saudi Arabia into an enemy.”

All over the country, royal and rich Saudis scrambled to get out of the United States and home. These were people used to being able to travel at will, if not aboard their own jet, then by chartered airplane. This was no normal time, however, and U.S. airspace was closed. Seventy-five royals and their entourage, ensconced at that wholly un-Islamic venue, Caesars Palace hotel and casino in Las Vegas, had decamped within hours of the attacks to the Four Seasons. They felt “extremely concerned for their personal safety,” they explained to the local FBI field office, and bodyguards apparently deemed the Four Seasons more secure.

On the other side of the country, Saudis who wished to leave included members of the bin Laden family. One of Osama’s brothers, never named publicly, had hastily called the embassy wanting to know where he could best go to be safe. He was installed in a room at the Watergate Hotel and told to stay there until advised that transportation was available. Across the country, more than twenty bin Laden family members and staff were getting ready to leave.

In Lexington, Kentucky, the thoroughbred racing mecca of America, Prince Ahmed bin Salman—a nephew of King Fahd—had been attending the annual yearling sales. After the attacks, Ahmed began quickly to round up members of his family for a return to Saudi Arabia. He ordered his son and a couple of friends, who were in Florida, to charter a plane and get themselves to Lexington to connect with the plane he was taking home.

Prince Ahmed’s son was at first unable to charter a plane, because U.S. airspace was closed. On September 13, however, he and his group did succeed in getting to Kentucky. They managed it, one of them told the security man hired for the flight, because “his father or his uncle was good friends with George Bush Sr.”

In spite of the fact that it was known that fifteen of those implicated in the attacks had been Saudis, President George W. Bush did not hold the official representative of Saudi Arabia at arm’s length. He kept a scheduled appointment to receive Saudi ambassador Prince Bandar at the White House. The two men, who had known each other for years, reportedly greeted each other with a friendly embrace. They smoked cigars together on the Truman Balcony and conversed, looking relaxed, with Cheney and Rice.

Later that night, Bandar’s assistant rang the FBI’s assistant director for counterterrorism, Dale Watson. He needed help, the assistant said, in getting bin Laden “family members” on a flight out of the country. Watson said Saudi officials should call the White House or the State Department. The request found its way to counterterrorism coordinator Richard Clarke.

The confluence of events—the White House meeting and the subsequent calls—would set off a firestorm of criticism when it became known. A photograph of Bush’s September 13 meeting on the balcony with Prince Bandar was published in a 2006 book by Bob Woodward. When the authors asked for a copy of the photograph before publication of this book, however, the George W. Bush presidential library responded that the former President’s office was “not inclined to release the image from the balcony at this time.”

Had Ambassador Bandar used his influence and connections to whisk Saudi citizens—some of whom had links to Osama bin Laden himself—out of the country? There was speculation, too, that some Saudis were allowed to fly before U.S. airspace reopened, perhaps on the authority of President Bush. Had they, others asked, all been properly investigated before departure?

Richard Clarke, who has acknowledged that he gave the go-ahead for the flights, said he had “no recollection” of having first cleared it with anyone more senior in the administration.

One flight especially queried—on the grounds that it had supposedly occurred before U.S. airspace opened—was the charter flight from Tampa, Florida, to Lexington, Kentucky, on the afternoon of September 13. Contrary to previous reporting, however, FAA and other records show that U.S. airspace had by the time of the plane’s takeoff opened not only to commercial flights but also to charters.

Prince Ahmed and his party would stay on in Kentucky until the weekend, when they left the country aboard a 727 so luxurious that it could accommodate only twenty-six passengers. By then, with the press in full cry over the news that most of the 9/11 hijackers had been Saudi nationals, all or most of the frightened Saudi elite were on their way home.

It may be that none of the flights carrying Saudis occurred contrary to the emergency closure of U.S. airspace. The FBI’s checks on those who boarded the charter flights, though, were less than thorough. The 9/11 Commission found no evidence, for example, that the names of any of some 144 people who departed on charters within days of the airspace reopening had been checked against the State Department’s watchlist. Nor were most of those leaving questioned by the FBI before departure.

The Bureau did speak—albeit, it seems, briefly—with almost all of the bin Laden relatives involved in the exodus, including one of Osama’s nephews, Omar Awadh bin Laden.

Omar had once shared an address in Falls Church, Virginia, with his brother Abdullah bin Laden. The Bureau had briefly investigated Abdullah in the late 1990s because of his role in running a suspect Saudi organization known to preach extreme Islamism. The investigation had been closed after he produced a Saudi diplomatic passport. Questioned after 9/11, his brother Omar said he had had no contact with his uncle Osama and knew none of the Arabs suspected of involvement in the attacks, and he was allowed to go on his way.

An FBI memo written two years after the exodus appears to acknowledge that some of the departing Saudis may have had information pertinent to the investigation. “Although the FBI took all possible steps to prevent any individuals who were involved in or had knowledge of the 9/11/01 attacks from leaving the U.S. before they could be interviewed,” the memo reads, “it is not possible to state conclusively that no such individuals left the U.S. without FBI knowledge.”

It is a point on which the Bureau and the Saudi government seem to agree. Asked on CNN the same year whether he could say unequivocally that no one on the evacuation flights had been involved in 9/11, Saudi embassy information officer Nail al-Jubeir responded by saying he was sure of only two things, that “there is the existence of God, and then we will die at the end of the world. Everything else, we don’t know.”

This was not an answer likely to satisfy anyone in the United States.

EVEN AS THE SAUDI aristocracy fled homeward, the embassy was mounting a propaganda campaign to counter the perception that Saudi Arabia was in any way responsible for 9/11. Millions of dollars—more than $50 million over the next three years—were to flow to public relations firms to restore the country’s image as friend, ally, and Middle East peacemaker. Another firm was paid to get the Saudi message to members of Congress.

Ambassador Bandar got the Saudi line over on Larry King Live. “We feel what happened to the United States—the tragedy and the cowardly attack on the United States—was not against the United States at all. It’s really against all civilized people in the world.… Our role is to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with our friends.”

It had soon become evident that, far from confronting the Saudis, the Bush administration wanted rapprochement. The President invited Crown Prince Abdullah to visit the United States, pressed him to come when he hesitated, and—when he accepted—welcomed him to his Texas ranch in early 2002. Vice President Cheney was there, as were Secretary of State Powell, National Security Adviser Rice, and First Lady Laura Bush. The Saudi foreign minister and Ambassador Bandar, with his wife, Princess Haifa, accompanied the crown prince.

9/11, it seems, barely came up during the discussions. The principal topic was the Saudi concern over Palestine, which had led to such tension the previous summer. Speaking with the press afterward, the President cut off one reporter when he started to raise the subject of the fifteen Saudi hijackers. “Yes, I—the Crown Prince has been very strong in condemning those who committed the murder of U.S. citizens,” Bush said. “We’re constantly working with him and his government on intelligence-sharing and cutting off money … the government has been acting, and I appreciate that very much.”

The President was being economical with the facts. Saudi spokesmen had from early on waxed equivocal as to whether any of the hijackers had even been Saudi nationals. Two days after Ambassador Bandar had been told of the CIA’s estimate that some fifteen of the hijackers were Saudi, his spokesman said the terrorists had probably used stolen identities.

In Saudi Arabia, historian Hatoon al-Fassi has said, “most people were in denial” over the American claim that their compatriots had been responsible. “They thought that, ‘Here’s Americans and the CIA trying to fabricate …’ ” Senior officials encouraged that notion.

“There is no proof or evidence,” claimed Sheikh Saleh al-Sheikh, minister of Islamic affairs, “that Saudis carried out these attacks.” Defense Minister Prince Sultan doubted whether only bin Laden and his followers were responsible, and hinted that “another power with advanced technical expertise” must have been behind 9/11. As of December 2001, Interior Minister Naif—a half-brother to the crown prince—was saying he still did not believe fifteen hijackers had been Saudis.

Not until February 2002 was Naif to acknowledge the truth. “The names we have got confirmed [it],” he then conceded. “Their families have been notified. I believe they were taken advantage of in the name of religion, and regarding certain issues pertaining to the Arab nation, especially the issue of Palestine.”

Sultan and Naif were still not done, however. They began pointing to a familiar enemy. “It is enough to see a number of [U.S.] congressmen wearing Jewish yarmulkes,” Sultan said, “to explain the allegations against us.” In late 2002, Naif blamed the “Zionists,” saying “we put big question marks and ask who committed the events of September 11 and who benefited from them.… I think they [the Zionists] are behind these events.”

As for cooperation over the investigation of 9/11, the Saudis had been less than helpful. “We’re getting zero cooperation,” former CIA counterterrorism chief Cannistraro said a month after the attacks. Requests for name checks and personal information on the hijackers and other suspects were turned down. “They knew that once we started asking for a few traces the list would grow,” a U.S. source said. “It’s better to shut it down right away.” American investigators were not allowed access to the suspects’ families.

Three months after 9/11, a senior Bush administration official was saying that the Saudis were prepared only to “dribble out a morsel of insignificant information one day at a time.” Contrary to what the President would imply after his meeting with the crown prince, moreover, the Saudis reportedly delayed or blocked attempts to track the sources of terrorist funding in their country. “It doesn’t look like they’re doing much,” former FBI assistant director Robert Kallstrom said in spring 2002, “and frankly it’s nothing new.”

AS FOR THE ATTACKS themselves, Saudi Arabia would long remain a black hole for U.S. investigators. Also confronting them, obstruction and obfuscation aside, was the vast cultural gulf and the language gap; pathetically few staff in any agency had fluent Arabic. What they did begin to accumulate, as they looked for a possible umbilical linking the largely Saudi hijacking team to forces in Saudi Arabia, were some fragmentary clues and some suspects.

The suspects were the men believed to have met with or helped Mihdhar and Hazmi when they first arrived in California—as outlined in an earlier chapter. The blur of witness accounts permits the following scenario:

The imam named Fahad al-Thumairy, an accredited diplomat appointed by the Saudi Ministry of Islamic Affairs to liaise with the huge nearby mosque, served at the time at the Saudi consulate in Los Angeles. According to one witness, Thumairy had at the relevant time arranged for two men—whom the witness at first identified from photographs as having been the two future terrorists—to be given a tour of the area by car. A fellow Saudi, a San Diego resident named Omar al-Bayoumi, who was said to have had frequent contact with Thumairy, stated—according to a person interviewed by the FBI—that he was going to Los Angeles “to pick up visitors.”

Bayoumi did make the trip north, accompanied by an American Muslim named Caysan bin Don. On the way there, Bayoumi mentioned that he was accustomed to going to the consulate to obtain religious materials. They did stop at the consulate, where—according to bin Don—a man “in a Western business suit, with a full beard—‘two fists length’ ”—greeted Bayoumi and took him off to talk in an office for a while. Bayoumi emerged some time later, carrying a box of Qur’ans. Bayoumi described the encounter differently, said he was “uncertain” whom he met with and “didn’t really know people in Islamic Affairs.”

After that, the two men have said, they went to a restaurant and—this is the crucial moment in their story—met and talked with the two new arrivals, future hijackers Mihdhar and Hazmi. Was the encounter really, as Bayoumi and bin Don were to tell the FBI, merely a chance encounter? The reported detail, that Bayoumi dropped a newspaper on the floor, bent to retrieve it, and then approached the two terrorists, may—with a bow to espionage cliché—indicate otherwise.

The rest requires no lengthy retelling. Bayoumi urged Mihdhar and Hazmi to come south to San Diego, assisted them in finding accommodations, and stayed in touch. On the day they moved into the apartment they first used, an apartment next door to Bayoumi, there were four calls between his phone and that of Anwar Aulaqi—the local imam, who, as this book goes to print in 2011, is in Yemen, plotting attack after attack on America.

There is another factor in this tangled tale, one that involves money flow—and yet another local Saudi. Bayoumi’s income, paid by a Saudi company—though he did no known work—reportedly increased hugely following the future hijackers’ arrival. Also on the money front, enter another Saudi named Osama Basnan. A three-page section of Congress’s Joint Inquiry Report, containing more lines withheld than released, tells us only that he was a close associate of Bayoumi in San Diego, who at one point lived across the street from Mihdhar and Hazmi.

According to former U.S. senator Bob Graham, cochair of the joint investigation, and to press reports, regular checks paid to Basnan’s wife at some point began flowing from the Basnans to Bayoumi’s wife. The payments, ostensibly made to assist in paying for medical treatment, originated with the Saudi embassy in Washington.

Thumairy, Bayoumi, and Basnan all have suspect backgrounds. Thumairy, who had a reputation as a fundamentalist, was to be refused reentry to the United States—well after 9/11—on the grounds that he “might be connected with terrorist activity.” Bayoumi had first attracted the interest of the FBI years earlier, and the Bureau later learned he had “connections to terrorist elements.” Bayoumi left the country two months before the attacks.

As for Basnan, his name had come up in a counterterrorism inquiry a decade earlier. He had reportedly hosted a party for Blind Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman when he visited the United States, and had once claimed he did more for Islam than Bayoumi ever did. He is said to have celebrated 9/11 as a “wonderful, glorious day.” A partially censored Commission document suggests that—after Mihdhar and Hazmi and the hijacker pilots arrived in the United States to learn to fly—a Basnan associate was in email and phone contact with accused key conspirator Ramzi Binalshibh. A year after 9/11, Basnan was arrested for visa fraud and deported.

Available information suggests two of the trio were employed by or had links to the Saudi regime—Thumairy through his accreditation to the Ministry of Islamic Affairs and Bayoumi through his employment by a company connected to the Saudi Civil Aviation Authority. Several people characterized Bayoumi as a Saudi government agent or spy. The CIA, former senator Graham has said, thought Basnan was also an agent. The senator cited an Agency memo referring to “incontrovertible evidence” of support for the terrorists within the Saudi government.

IN 2003 and 2004, but only following a high-level request from the White House, 9/11 Commission staff were able to make two visits to Saudi Arabia to interview Thumairy, Bayoumi, and Basnan. All interviews were conducted in the presence of officials from Prince Naif’s internal security service.

The U.S. questioners, a recently released Commission memo notes, believed Thumairy was “deceptive during both interviews.… His answers were either inconsistent or at times in direct conflict with information we have from other sources.” Most significantly, he denied knowing Bayoumi, let alone Mihdhar and Hazmi. Shown a photograph of Bayoumi, he did not budge. He knew no one of that name, he said. Then, prompted by a whispered interjection from one of the Saudi officials present, he said he had heard of Bayoumi—but only from 9/11 news coverage.

At a second interview, told by Commission staff that witnesses had spoken of seeing him with Bayoumi, Thumairy said perhaps he had been mistaken for someone else. Perhaps, too, there were people who might “say bad things about him out of jealousy.” Finally told that telephone records showed numerous calls between his phones and Bayoumi’s phones, just before the arrival of Mihdhar and Hazmi in the United States to boot, Thumairy was stumped.

Perhaps, he ventured, his phone number had been allotted to somebody else after he had it? Perhaps the calls had been made by someone else using Bayoumi’s phone? He flailed around in vain for an explanation. Everything Thumairy came up with, his Commission questioners noted, was “implausible.”

Bayoumi, who was interviewed earlier—though not by staff with firsthand experience of the California episode—had made a more favorable impression. He stuck to his story about having met Mihdhar and Hazmi by chance. He said he had rarely seen Mihdhar and Hazmi after they came to San Diego, that they had been his neighbors for only a few days. Bayoumi said he had then decided he did not want to have much to do with them. Commission executive director Zelikow, who was present during the interview, did not think Bayoumi had been a Saudi agent.

The Commission Report, however, was to note that Bayoumi’s passport contained a distinguishing mark that may be acquired by “especially devout Muslims”—or be associated with “adherence to al Qaeda.” Investigators had also turned up something else, something disquieting. Bayoumi’s salary had been approved by a Saudi official whose son’s photograph was later found on a computer disk in Pakistan—a disk that also contained some of the hijackers’ photographs.

The son, Saud al-Rashid, was also produced for interview in Saudi Arabia. He admitted having been in Afghanistan—and to having “cleansed” his passport of the evidence that he had traveled there. He said, though, that he had known nothing of the 9/11 plot. Commission staff who questioned him thought Rashid had been “deceptive.” They noted that he had had “enough time to develop a coherent story … even may have been coached.”

Finally, there was Basnan. The Commission’s interview with him, senior commission counsel Dietrich Snell wrote afterward, established only “the witness’ utter lack of credibility on virtually every material subject.” This assessment was based on “a combination of confrontation, evasiveness, and speechmaking … his repudiation of statements made by him on prior occasions,” and the “inherent incredibility of many of his assertions when viewed in light of the totality of the available evidence.”

Two men did not face Commission questioning in Saudi Arabia. One of them, a Saudi religious official named Saleh al-Hussayen, certainly should have, although his name does not appear in the Commission Report. Hussayen, who was involved in the administration of the Holy Mosques in Mecca and Medina, had been in the States for some three weeks before 9/11. For four days before the attacks, he had stayed at a hotel in Virginia.

Then on September 10, the very eve of the attacks, he had made an unexplained move. With his wife, he had checked into the Marriott Residence Inn in Herndon, Virginia—the very hotel at which Mihdhar and Hazmi were spending their last night alive.

Commission memos, one of them heavily censored, state that FBI agents arrived at Hussayen’s room at the Marriott after midnight on the 11th. As questioning began, however, he began “muttering and drooping his head,” sweating and drooling. Then he fell out of his chair and appeared to lose consciousness for a few moments. Paramedics summoned to the room, and doctors who examined Hussayen at a local hospital, found nothing wrong. An FBI agent said later that the interview had been cut short because—the agent suggested—Hussayen “feigned a seizure.”

Asked by one of the Bureau agents why they had moved to the Marriott, Hussayen’s wife said it was because they had wanted a room with a kitchenette. There was no sign, however, that the kitchenette in the room had been used, and the fridge was empty. Asked whether she thought her husband could have been involved in the 9/11 attacks in any way, the wife replied—oddly, the agents thought—“I don’t know.”

Agents never did obtain an adequate interview with Saleh al-Hussayen. Instead of continuing with his tour of the United States, he flew back to Saudi Arabia—and went on to head the administration of the two Holy Mosques. It remains unknown whether he had contact with Mihdhar and Hazmi on the eve of 9/11, or whether his presence at the Marriott—that night of all nights—was, as Bayoumi claimed of his meeting with the two terrorists, just a matter of chance.

As Hussayen left Virginia for home, other FBI agents in the state were interviewing the imam Anwar Aulaqi. As reported earlier, he did not deny having had contact with Mihdhar and Hazmi in California and later—with Hazmi—in Virginia. He could not deny that his own move from San Diego to the East Coast had paralleled theirs. Yet he made nothing of it—and U.S. authorities apparently pursued the matter no further at that time.

Aulaqi, almost uniquely for a suspect in this story, is American-born, the son of a former minister in the government of Yemen. Hard to credit though it is in light of what we now know of him, he had reportedly preached in the precincts of the U.S. Capitol shortly before 9/11. Not long afterward, moreover, he had lunched at the Pentagon—in an area undamaged by the strike in which his acquaintances Mihdhar and Hazmi had played such a leading role. The reason for the lunch? An outreach effort to ease tensions between Muslim Americans and non-Muslims.

Aulaqi remained in the United States for more than a year before departing, first for Britain and eventually for Yemen. He had been allowed to move about unimpeded, even though the phone number of his Virginia mosque had turned up in Germany in the apartment of 9/11 conspirator Ramzi Binalshibh. Only seven years later, starting in 2009, did he at last begin to become known around the world.

Aulaqi’s name was associated with: the multiple shootings by a U.S. army major at Fort Hood, an almost successful attempt to explode a bomb on an airliner en route to Detroit, a major car bomb scare in Times Square, and a last-minute discovery of concealed explosives on cargo planes destined for the United States.

When Aulaqi’s name began to feature large in the Western press, Yemen’s foreign minister cautioned that—pending real evidence—he should be considered not as a terrorist but as a preacher. Briefed on the intelligence about him, President Obama took a different view. In early 2010, he authorized the CIA and the U.S. military to seek out, capture, or kill the Yemeni—assigning Aulaqi essentially the same status as that assigned at the time to Osama bin Laden.

Commission staff had never had the opportunity to interview Aulaqi. Executive Director Zelikow, however, had long thought he merited more attention. Aulaqi remains, as Zelikow memorably noted when his name finally hit the headlines, “a 9/11 loose end.”

Taken together, the roles and activities of Thumairy, Bayoumi, Basnan, Hussayen, and Aulaqi—and the dubious accounts some them have given of themselves—heightened suspicion that the perpetrators of 9/11 had support and sponsorship from backers never clearly identified.

• • •

CONGRESS’S JOINT INQUIRY, its cochair former senator Bob Graham told the authors, found evidence “that the Saudis were facilitating, assisting, some of the hijackers. And my suspicion is that they were providing some assistance to most if not all of the hijackers.… It’s my opinion that 9/11 could not have occurred but for the existence of an infrastructure of support within the United States. By ‘the Saudis,’ I mean the Saudi government and individual Saudis who are for some purposes dependent on the government—which includes all of the elite in the country.”

Those involved, in Graham’s view, “included the royal family” and “some groups that were close to the royal family.” Was it credible that members of the Saudi royal family would knowingly have facilitated the 9/11 operation? “I think,” the former senator said, “that they did in fact take actions that were complicit with the hijackers.”

9/11 Commission executive director Zelikow—always cautious, and in the view of some of his staff reluctant to chase down the full truth in some areas—also concluded that there was “persuasive evidence of a possible support network” for Mihdhar and Hazmi in San Diego. In his view, though, the Commission “did not find evidence to make the case that it involved ‘Saudi government agents.’ ”

In the alien terrain of the Saudi world, where hard information is so scarce, proof was always going to be a mirage.

AT PAGE 396 of the congressional Joint Inquiry’s report on 9/11, the final section of the body of the Report, a yawning gap appears. All twenty-eight pages of Part Four, entitled “Finding, Discussion and Narrative Regarding Certain Sensitive National Security Matters,” have been redacted. The pages are there but—with the rare exception of an occasional surviving word or fragmentary, meaningless clause—they are entirely blank. While many words or paragraphs were withheld elsewhere in the Report, the decision to censor that entire section caused a furor in 2003.

Inquiries established that, while withholdings were technically the responsibility of the CIA, the Agency would not have obstructed release of most of the twenty-eight pages. The order that they must remain secret had come from President Bush himself.

The start of the final section of the Joint Inquiry’s Report. Its focus is reportedly the matter of support for the hijackers from Saudi Arabia. The material was withheld from the public on the orders of President Bush

.

The Democratic and Republican chairmen of the Joint Committee, Senators Graham and Richard Shelby, felt strongly that the bulk of the withheld material could and should have been made public. So did Representative Nancy Pelosi, the ranking Democrat for the House. “I went back and read every one of those pages thoroughly,” Shelby said. “My judgment is that 95% of that information could be declassified, become uncensored, so the American people would know.”

Know what? “I can’t tell you what’s in those pages,” the Joint Committee’s staff director, Eleanor Hill, was to say. “I can tell you that the chapter deals with information that our Committee found in the CIA and FBI files that was very disturbing. It had to do with sources of foreign support for the hijackers.” The focus of the material, leaks to the press soon established, had been Saudi Arabia.

There were, sources said, additional details about Bayoumi, who had helped Mihdhar and Hazmi in California, and about his associate Basnan. The censored portion of the Report had stated—even then, years before he came to haunt the West as a perennial threat—that Anwar Aulaqi, the imam, had been a “central figure” in a support network for the future hijackers.

There had been, an official let it be known, “very direct, very specific links” with Saudi officials, links that “cannot be passed off as rogue, isolated or coincidental.” The New York Times journalist and author Philip Shenon has written that Senator Graham and his investigators became “convinced that a number of sympathetic Saudi officials, possibly within the Islamic Affairs Ministry, had known that al Qaeda terrorists were entering the United States beginning in 2000 in preparation for some sort of attack. Graham believed the Saudi officials had directed spies operating in the United States to assist them.”

Most serious of all, the information uncovered by the investigation had reportedly drawn “apparent connections between high-level Saudi princes and associates of the hijackers.” Absent release of the censored pages, one can only surmise as to what the connections may have been.

One clue is the first corroboration—in an interview with a former CIA officer for this book—of an allegation relating to the capture in Pakistan, while the Joint Inquiry was at work, of senior bin Laden aide Abu Zubaydah. Many months of interrogation followed, including, from about June or July 2002, no less than eighty-three sessions of waterboarding. Zubaydah was the first al Qaeda prisoner on whom that controversial “enhanced technique” was used.

John Kiriakou, then a CIA operative serving in Pakistan, had played a leading part in the operation that led to Zubaydah’s capture—gravely wounded—in late March. In early fall back in Washington, he informed the authors, he was told by colleagues that cables on the interrogation reported that Zubaydah had come up with the names of several Saudi princes. He “raised their names in sort of a mocking fashion, [indicating] he had the support of the Saudi government.” The CIA followed up by running name traces, Kiriakou said.

Zubaydah had named three princes, but by late July they had all died—within a week of one another. First was Prince Ahmed bin Salman bin Abdul Aziz, the leading figure in the international horse-racing community whose name came up earlier in the authors’ account of Saudis hurrying to get out of the United States after 9/11. Ahmed and a nephew of both then-King Fahd and defense and aviation minister Prince Sultan, died of a heart attack at the age of forty-three, following abdominal surgery, according to the Saudis. Prince Sultan bin Faisal bin Turki bin Abdullah al Saud, also a nephew of the then-king and his defense minister though not a top-rank prince, reportedly died in a car accident. A third prince, Fahd bin Turki bin Saud al-Kabir, a more distant family member whose father was a cousin of Fahd and Sultan, was said to have died “of thirst.”

In his interview for this book, former CIA officer Kiriakou said his colleagues told him they believed that what Zubaydah told them about the princes was true. “We had known for years,” he told the authors, “that Saudi royals—I should say elements of the royal family—were funding al Qaeda.”

In 2003, during the brouhaha about the redacted chapter in the Joint Inquiry Report, Crown Prince Abdullah’s spokesman, Adel al-Jubeir, made a cryptic comment that has never been further explained. The regime’s own probe, he said, had uncovered “wrongdoing by some.” He noted, though, that the royal family had thousands of members, and insisted that the regime itself had no connection to the 9/11 plot.

Joint Inquiry cochair Bob Graham did not share that view. What Zubaydah is reported to have said about the princes, he told the authors, is credible. Graham has said publicly, meanwhile, that the hijackers “received assistance from a foreign government which further facilitated their ability to be so lethal.” The assistance, a very senior Committee source told the authors, “went to major names in the Saudi hierarchy.”

In all, more than forty U.S. senators clamored for the release of the censored pages. Committee cochairs Graham and Shelby aside, they included John Kerry, Joe Lieberman, Charles Schumer, Sam Brownback, Olympia Snowe, and Pat Roberts.

Nothing happened.

Graham, with his long experience in the field as member and cochair not only of the 9/11 probe but of the Intelligence Committee, has continued to voice his anger over the censorship even in retirement. President Bush, he wrote in 2004, had “engaged in a cover-up … to protect not only the agencies that failed but also America’s relationship with the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.… He has done so by misclassifying information on national security data. While the information may be embarrassing or politically damaging, its revelation would not damage national security.”

Graham’s Republican counterpart on Congress’s probe, Senator Shelby, concluded independently that virtually all the censored pages were “being kept secret for reasons other than national security.”

“It was,” Graham thought, “as if the President’s loyalty lay more with Saudi Arabia than with America’s safety.” In Graham’s view, Bush’s role in suppressing important information about 9/11, along with other transgressions, should have led to his impeachment and removal from office.

Within weeks of his inauguration in 2009, Bush’s successor, Barack Obama, made a point of receiving bereaved relatives of 9/11. The widow of one of those who died at the World Trade Center, Kristen Breitweiser, has said that she brought the new President’s attention to the infamous censored section of the Joint Inquiry Report. Obama told her, she said afterward, that he was willing to get the suppressed material released. As of this writing, two years later, the chapter remains classified.

“If the twenty-eight pages were to be made public,” said one of the officials who was privy to them before President Bush ordered their removal, “I have no question that the entire relationship with Saudi Arabia would change overnight.”

THIRTY-FOUR

THE 9/11 COMMISSION REPORT BLURRED THE TRUTH ABOUT THE Saudi role. By the time it was published in July 2004, more than a year had passed since the invasion of Iraq, a country that—the report said—had nothing to do with 9/11.

In the eighteen months before the invasion, however, the Bush administration had persistently seeded the notion that—Saddam Hussein’s other sins aside—there was an Iraqi connection to 9/11. While never alleging a direct Iraqi role, President Bush had linked Hussein’s name to that of bin Laden. Vice President Cheney had gone further, suggesting repeatedly that there had been Iraqi involvement in the attacks.

Polls suggest that the publicity about Iraq’s supposed involvement affected the degree to which the U.S. public came to view Iraq as an enemy deserving retribution. Before the invasion, a Pew Research poll found that 57 percent of those polled believed Hussein had helped the 9/11 terrorists. Forty-four percent of respondents to a Knight-Ridder poll had gained the impression that “most” or “some” of the hijackers had been Iraqi. In fact, none were. In the wake of the invasion, a Washington Post poll found that 69 percent of Americans believed it likely that Saddam Hussein had been personally involved in 9/11.

Of the many reports and rumors circulated alleging an Iraqi role, two dominated. One, which got by far the most exposure, had it that Mohamed Atta had met in spring 2001 in Prague with a named Iraqi intelligence officer. The Iraqi officer later denied it, a fact that on its own might carry no weight. The best evidence, meanwhile, is that Atta was in the United States at the time.

A second allegation, persistently propagated before and after 9/11 by Laurie Mylroie, a scholar associated with the conservative think tank American Enterprise Institute, proposed that Ramzi Yousef—the terrorist responsible for the 1993 World Trade Center bombing—had been an Iraqi agent using a stolen identity. Investigation by others, including the FBI, indicated that the speculation is unsupported by hard evidence.

Mylroie, meanwhile, appeared to believe that Saddam Hussein had been behind multiple terrorist attacks over a ten-year period, from the East Africa embassy bombings to Oklahoma City and 9/11. “My view,” said Vincent Cannistraro, a former head of the CIA’s Counterterrorist Center, “is that Laurie has an obsession with Iraq.” Mylroie’s claim about Yousef nevertheless proved durable.

None of the speculative leads suggesting an Iraqi link to the attacks proved out. “We went back ten years,” said former CIA bin Laden unit chief Michael Scheuer, who looked into the matter at the request of Director Tenet. “We examined about 20,000 documents, probably something along the line of 75,000 pages of information, and there was no connection between [al Qaeda] and Saddam.”

A CIA report entitled “Iraqi Support for Terrorism,” completed in January 2003, was the last in-depth analysis the Agency produced prior to the invasion of Iraq in March. “The Intelligence Community,” it concluded, “has no credible information that Baghdad had foreknowledge of the 11 September attacks or any other al Qaeda strike.”

After exhaustive trawls of the record, official probes have concluded that senior Bush administration officials applied inordinate pressure to try to establish that there was an Iraqi connection to 9/11, and that American torture of al Qaeda prisoners was a result of such pressure. CIA analysts noted that “questions regarding al Qaeda’s ties to the Iraqi regime were among the first presented to senior operational planner Khalid Sheikh Mohammed following his capture.” KSM was one of those most persistently subjected to torture.

The CIA’s Charles Duelfer, who was in charge of interrogations of Iraqi officials after the invasion, recalled being “asked if enhanced measures, such as waterboarding, should be used” on a detainee who had handled contacts with terrorist groups and might have knowledge of links between the Hussein regime and al Qaeda.

The notion was turned down. Duelfer noted, however, that it had come from “some in Washington at very senior levels (not in the CIA)” who thought the detainee’s interrogation had been “too gentle.” Two U.S. intelligence officers, meanwhile, have said flatly that the suggestion came from Vice President Cheney’s office.

“There were two reasons why these interrogations were so persistent and why extreme methods were used,” a former senior intelligence official said in 2009. “The main one is that everyone was worried about some kind of follow-up attack [after 9/11]. But for most of 2002 and into 2003, Cheney and Rumsfeld, especially, were also demanding proof of the links between al Qaeda and Iraq that [former Iraqi exile leader Ahmed] Chalabi and others had told them were there.”

A former U.S. Army psychiatrist, Major Paul Burney, told military investigators that interrogators at the Guantánamo Bay detention center were under “pressure” to produce evidence of ties between al Qaeda and Iraq. “We were not successful,” Burney said in interviews for the Army’s inspector general, but “there was more and more pressure to resort to measures that might produce more immediate results.”

In the absence of evidence, according to the author and Pulitzer winner Ron Suskind, it was in one instance fabricated. Suskind has reported that in fall 2003—when the U.S. administration was still struggling to justify the invasion of Iraq—the White House asked the CIA to collaborate in the forgery of a document stating that hijacker leader Atta had spent time training in Iraq.

The forgery took the form of a purported memo to Saddam Hussein from the former head of the Iraqi intelligence service. The memo was dated two months before 9/11—the actual former intelligence chief was prevailed upon to put his signature to it long after its supposed writing—and it stated that Atta had just spent time training in Iraq “to lead the team which will be responsible for attacking the targets that we have agreed to destroy.”

The story of this fakery raised a brief media storm and a spate of denials. Rebuttals included a carefully phrased statement from Suskind’s primary source, a former head of the CIA’s Near East Division named Rob Richer—to which Suskind responded by publishing a transcript of one of his interviews with Richer.

Another former CIA officer, Philip Giraldi, meanwhile, placed responsibility for the fabrication on the Pentagon’s Office of Special Plans, at the instigation of Vice President Cheney. According to Giraldi, the Pentagon, unlike the CIA, had “no restrictions on it regarding the production of false information to mislead the public” and had “its own false documents center.”

If it happened, the forgery was the most flagrant attempt, in a long line of such maneuvering, to blame 9/11 on Iraq—and it has never been officially investigated.

A former deputy director of the CIA’s Counterterrorist Center, Paul Pillar, has called the case against Iraq “a manufactured issue.”

In 2008, by a bipartisan majority of ten to five, the Senate Intelligence Committee produced its “Report on Whether Public Statements Regarding Iraq by U.S. Government Officials Were Substantiated by Intelligence Information.” “Unfortunately,” said its chairman, John D. Rockefeller,

our Committee has concluded that the administration made significant claims that were not supported by the intelligence. In making the case for war, the administration repeatedly presented intelligence as fact when in reality it was unsubstantiated, contradicted, or even non-existent.

It’s my belief that the Bush administration was fixated on Iraq and used the 9/11 attacks by al Qaeda as justification for overthrowing Saddam Hussein. To accomplish this, top administration officials made repeated statements that falsely linked Iraq and al Qaeda as a single threat and insinuated that Iraq played a role in 9/11. Sadly, the Bush administration led the nation into war under false pretenses.

IN THE SEVEN YEARS since the invasion of Iraq, reputable estimates indicate, more than 4,000 American soldiers have died and 32,000 have suffered serious injury as a result of the invasion and the violence that followed. Some 9,000 Iraqi men in uniform were killed, and 55,000 insurgents. Figures suggest that more than 100,000 civilians died during and following the invasion.

A total of some 168,000 people, then, have died—and tens of thousands have been injured—as the result of an attack on a nation that many Americans had been falsely led to believe bore some if not all of the responsibility for the attacks of September 11.

The 3,000 who died in New York, Washington, and the field in Pennsylvania, the many hundreds who have died since from exposure to the toxins they breathed in at Ground Zero, and all their grieving relatives, deserved better than to have had their tragedy manipulated in such a way.

THIRTY-FIVE

IN THE YEARS THAT THE CONFLICT IN IRAQ HAD THE WORLD’S ATTENTION, the real evidence that linked other nations to Osama bin Laden and 9/11 faded from the public consciousness. This was in part the fault of the 9/11 Commission, which blurred the facts rather than highlighting them. It was, ironically, a former deputy homeland security adviser to President Bush, Richard Falkenrath, who loudly expressed that uncomfortable truth.

The Commission’s Report, Falkenrath wrote, had produced only superficial coverage of the fact that al Qaeda was “led and financed largely by Saudis, with extensive support from Pakistani intelligence.” Saudi Arabia’s murky role has been covered in these pages. The part played by Pakistan—not least given the stunning news that was to break upon the world in spring 2011—deserves equally close scrutiny.

Pakistan has a strong Islamic fundamentalist movement—it was, with Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, one of only three nations that recognized the Taliban. Bin Laden had operated there as early as 1979, with the blessing of Saudi intelligence, in the first phase of the struggle to oust the Soviets from neighboring Afghanistan. The contacts he made were durable. “Pakistani military intelligence,” the Commission Report did note, “probably had advance knowledge of his coming, and its officers may have facilitated his travel” when he returned to Afghanistan in 1996. Pakistan “held the key,” the Report said, to bin Laden’s ability to use Afghanistan as a base from which to mount his war against America.

Time was to show, moreover, that Pakistan itself was central not only to the terrorist chief’s overall activity but also to the 9/11 operation itself. Al Qaeda communications, always vulnerable and often impractical in Afghanistan, for years functioned relatively safely and certainly more efficiently in Pakistan. Pakistan, with its teeming cities and extensive banking system, also offered the facilities the terrorists needed for financial transactions and logistical needs.

As reported in this book, World Trade Center bomber Ramzi Yousef had family roots in Pakistan. He traveled from Pakistan to carry out the 1993 attack, and it was to Pakistan that he ran after the bombing. Yousef would eventually be caught in the capital, Islamabad, in 1995. His bomb-making accomplice Abdul Murad, though seized in the Philippines, had lived in Pakistan.

It was through Pakistan that the future pilot hijackers from Europe made their way to the Afghan training camps, and to their audiences with bin Laden. The first two Saudi operatives inserted into the United States, Mihdhar and Hazmi—and later the muscle hijackers—were briefed for the mission in the anonymity of Karachi, Pakistan’s largest city.

The family of the man who briefed the hijackers and who was to claim he ran the entire operation, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, hailed from Baluchistan, Pakistan’s largest province. Though high on the international “most wanted” list, he operated with impunity largely from Pakistan over the several years devoted to the planning of 9/11. KSM, though in Afghanistan when the date for the attacks was set, then left for Pakistan. He remained there, plotting new terrorist acts, until his capture in 2003—in Rawalpindi, headquarters of the Pakistan military command.

Ramzi Binalshibh, who had functioned in Germany as the cutout between KSM and lead hijacker Atta, ran to Pakistan on the eve of the attacks. In the spring of 2002, at a safe house in Karachi, he and KSM had the effrontery to give a press interview boasting of their part in 9/11. It was in the city’s upmarket Defense Society quarter that he was finally caught later that year. Abu Zubaydah, the first of the big fish to be caught after 9/11, had been seized in Faisalabad a few months earlier.

What bin Laden himself had said about Pakistan two years before 9/11 seemed to speak volumes. “Pakistani people have great love for Islam,” he observed after the U.S. missile attack on his camps in the late summer of 1998, in which seven Pakistanis were killed. “And they always have offered sacrifices for the cause of religion.” Later, in another interview, he explained how he himself had managed to avoid the attack. “We found a sympathetic and generous people in Pakistan … receive[d] information from our beloved ones and helpers of jihad.”

Then again, speaking with Time magazine in January 1999: “As for Pakistan, there are some governmental departments which by the grace of God respond to the Islamic sentiments of the masses. This is reflected in sympathy and cooperation.” The next month, in yet another interview, he praised Pakistan’s military and called on the faithful to support its generals.

“Some governmental departments.” “The generals.” Few doubt that these were allusions to bin Laden’s support from within the Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate, or ISI, Pakistan’s equivalent to the CIA. The links went back to the eighties and probably—some believe certainly—continue to join al Qaeda to elements of the organization today.

PAKISTAN, CHAIRMAN OF the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff Mike Mullen reflected in a recent interview, is “the most complicated country in the world.” The bin Laden/ISI connection had been made during the Afghan war against the Soviets, when the CIA—working with the ISI and Saudi intelligence—spent billions arming and training the disparate groups of fighters. Once the short-term goal of rolling back the Soviets had been achieved, the United States had walked away from Afghanistan. Pakistan had not.

It saw and still sees Afghanistan as strategically crucial, not least on account of an issue of which many members of the public in the West have minimal knowledge or none at all. Pakistan and India have fought three wars in the past half-century over Kashmir, a large disputed territory over which each nation has claims and that each partially controls, and where there is also a homegrown insurgency. Having leverage over Afghanistan, given its geographical position, enabled Pakistan to recruit Afghan and Arab volunteers to join the Kashmir insurgency—and tie down a large part of the Indian army.

The insurgents inserted into Kashmir have by and large been mujahideen, committed to a cause they see as holy. As reported earlier, the man who headed the ISI in 1989, Lieutenant General Hamid Gul, himself saw the conflict as jihad. Osama bin Laden made common cause with Gul and—in the years that followed—with like-minded figures in the ISI. ISI recruits for the fight in Kashmir were trained in bin Laden camps. Bin Laden would still be saying, as late as 2000, “Whatever Pakistan does in the matter of Kashmir, we support it.”

Such action and talk paid off in ways large and small. The ISI at one time even reportedly installed the security system that protected bin Laden in one of the houses he used in Afghanistan.

The tracks of the ISI and al Qaeda converged in other ways. Months after the Taliban had begun hosting bin Laden in 1996, they had been, as Time magazine put it, “shoehorned into power” by the ISI—thus ensuring Pakistan’s influence over most of Afghanistan. The need to keep things that way, and to fend off rebellion on its own border, a Pakistani official told the State Department in 2000, meant that his government would “always” support the Taliban.

So powerful was the ISI in Afghanistan, former U.S. special envoy Peter Tomsen told the 9/11 Commission, that the Taliban “actually were the junior partners in an unholy alliance”—ISI, al Qaeda, and the Taliban. As it grew in influence, the ISI liaised closely with Saudi intelligence—and the Saudis reportedly lined the pockets of senior Pakistani officers with additional cash.

The ISI over the years achieved not only military muscle but massive political influence within Pakistan itself—so much so that some came to characterize it as “the most influential body in Pakistan,” a “shadow government.”

The United States, caught between the constraints of regional power politics and the growing need to deal with bin Laden and al Qaeda, long remained impotent.

By the late nineties, former U.S. ambassador to Pakistan Thomas Simons has recalled, American efforts to bring pressure on the Pakistanis and the Taliban over bin Laden resulted only in “a sense of helplessness.” Concern about the tensions between India and Pakistan loomed larger at the State Department than Islamic extremism—not least after both those nations tested nuclear weapons.

In 1999, then–Pakistani prime minister Nawaz Sharif held out the possibility of working with the CIA to mount a commando operation to capture or kill bin Laden. Nothing came of it, the National Security Agency reported, because the plan was compromised by the ISI. In early 2000, though, after General Pervez Musharraf seized power, Washington made a serious effort to ratchet up the pressure.

President Clinton insisted on making a visit to Islamabad, the first by an American head of state in more than thirty years. He did so in spite of CIA and Secret Service warnings that a trip to Pakistan would endanger his life. Air Force One arrived without him, as a decoy, while he flew in aboard an unmarked jet. At a private meeting with Musharraf, Clinton recalled, he offered the Pakistani leader “the moon … in terms of better relations with the United States, if he’d help us get bin Laden.” Nothing significant came of it. Clinton had avoided pushing too hard about bin Laden at an earlier meeting—because ISI members were in the room.

The following month, when then–ISI director General Mahmoud Ahmed was in Washington, Under Secretary of State Thomas Pickering warned that “people who support those people [bin Laden and al Qaeda] will be treated as our enemies.” Later, at Pakistan’s interior ministry, Pickering confronted a senior Taliban official with evidence of bin Laden’s role in the embassy bombings in East Africa. The official said the evidence was “not persuasive.”

About this same time, Assistant Secretary of State Michael Sheehan suggested giving Pakistan an ultimatum: Work with the United States to capture bin Laden or face a cutoff of vital financial aid. Fears of the possible consequences—that Pakistan might opt out of talks to ensure that it did not share its nuclear know-how with rogue nations—loomed larger than concerns about terrorism. Sheehan’s idea went nowhere.

Come early 2001, the start of the Bush presidency, and his warning memo to Condoleezza Rice about al Qaeda, counterterrorism coordinator Richard Clarke stressed how important it was to have Pakistan’s cooperation. He noted, though, that General Musharraf had spoken of “influential radical elements that would oppose significant Pakistani measures against al Qaeda.” Musharraf had cautioned, too, that the United States should not violate Pakistani airspace when launching strikes within Afghanistan.

Nothing effective was achieved by the Bush administration. At the CIA, director Tenet sensed a “loss of urgency.” It had been obvious for years, he wrote later, that “it would be almost impossible to root out al Qaeda” without Pakistan’s help. The Pakistanis, moreover, “always knew more than they were telling us, and they had been singularly uncooperative.” “We never did the Full Monty with them,” another former senior CIA official has said. “We don’t trust them.… There is always this little dance with them.”

On September 11, however, the dancing and the diplomatic dithering stopped. While no hard evidence would emerge that Pakistan had any foreknowledge of the attacks—let alone an actual role in the plot—Washington now issued a blunt warning. It was then—according to ISI director Ahmed, who was visiting Washington at the time—that U.S. deputy secretary of state Richard Armitage said the United States would bomb Pakistan “back to the Stone Age” should it now fail to go along with seven specific American demands for assistance.

Musharraf weighed up the likely consequences of failure to comply, not the least of them the fact that the U.S. military could pulverize his forces. With a couple of reservations—he says he could not accept the U.S. demands for blanket rights to overfly Pakistan and have the use of all its air bases and port facilities—he cooperated as required. “We have done more than any other country,” the former president has said, “to capture and kill members of al Qaeda, and to destroy its infrastructure in our cities and mountains.” Musharraf’s administration indeed cracked down on extremism, at a terrible cost in human life that persists to this day. In one year alone, 2009, 3,021 Pakistanis died in retaliatory terrorist attacks—approximately the same number as the American dead of 9/11. Musharraf’s army thrust into the tribal badlands near the Afghan border, and some 700 purported al Qaeda operatives were rounded up across Pakistan. As of 2006, according to Musharraf, 369 of them had been handed over to the United States—for millions of dollars in bounty money paid by the CIA.

The former CIA station chief in Islamabad, Robert Grenier, recently confirmed that Pakistani cooperation against al Qaeda did improve vastly after 9/11. The arrests of the three best-known top al Qaeda operatives—Abu Zubaydah, Ramzi Binalshibh, and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed—were, it seems, made by Pakistani intelligence agents and police, in some if not all cases working in collaboration with the Agency.

Former CIA officer John Kiriakou, who was involved in operations on the ground in Pakistan during the relevant period, told the authors that this statement by Musharraf was “generally accurate.” He said, however: “The truth is, we allowed the Pakistanis to believe they were taking the lead. Certainly they were the first through the door, but on those high-profile captures we never told them who the target was. We were afraid they would leak the information to al Qaeda and the target would escape. The information leading to the captures was a hundred percent CIA information. The Pakistanis had no role in the intelligence.”

The biggest name of all, of course, long eluded pursuit. Last on the list of Washington’s post-9/11 demands, as Musharraf recalled it, had been to help “destroy bin Laden.” “We have done everything possible to track down Osama bin Laden,” Musharraf wrote in 2006, “but he has evaded us.”

No one, according to Musharraf, had been more anxious than the Pakistanis to resolve the mystery of bin Laden’s whereabouts. As the months and years passed, however, there were those who believed otherwise.

FROM THE TIME America routed al Qaeda after 9/11, information indicated that the ISI continued to remain in touch with bin Laden or aware of his location. ISI officials, former special envoy Tomsen told the 9/11 Commission, were “still visiting OBL [bin Laden] as late as December 2001”—and continued to know his location thereafter. In 2007 Kathleen McFarland, a former senior Defense Department official, spoke of bin Laden’s presence in Pakistan as a fact. “I’m convinced,” military historian Stephen Tanner told CNN in 2010, “that he is protected by the ISI. I just think it’s impossible after all this time to not know where he is.”

Why would the ISI have allowed bin Laden to enjoy safe haven in Pakistan? The ISI, Tanner thought, would see him as a trump card—leverage over the United States in the power play involved in Pakistan’s ongoing dispute with India.

It went deeper, and further back than that. “You in the West,” the veteran London Sunday Times reporter Christina Lamb has recalled former ISI head General Gul telling her twenty years ago, “think you can use these fundamentalists and abandon them, but it will come back to haunt you.” It was clear to Lamb that “For Gul and his ilk, support for the fundamentalist Afghan groups, and later the Taliban, was not just policy but also ideology.” In spite of the vast sums in U.S. aid doled out to Pakistan, a 2010 poll suggested that a majority of Pakistanis viewed the United States as an enemy.

There was special suspicion of the S Section of the ISI, which is made up of personnel who are officially retired but front for certain ISI operations. S Section, The New York Times has quoted former CIA officials as saying, has been “seen as particularly close to militants.”

In Washington, trust in the Pakistanis had long since plummeted. “They were very hot on the ISI,” said a member of a Pakistani delegation that visited the White House toward the end of the Bush presidency. “When we asked them for more information, Bush laughed and said, ‘When we share information with you guys, the bad guys always run away.’ ”

The lack of trust notwithstanding, policy on Pakistan did not appear to change. Better to do nothing and have some cooperation, the thinking in the new Obama administration seemed to be, than come down hard and get none. In early 2011, on Fox News, former government officials called on the administration to take a tougher line with Pakistan.

Obama had vowed during his campaign for the presidency, “We will kill bin Laden.… That has to be our biggest national security priority.” In office, he made no such public statements. The hunt for bin Laden, meanwhile, seemed to be getting nowhere—and not to be a high priority. In retrospect, though, there was a trickle of fresh information that suggested otherwise.

General David Petraeus, commander of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan, was asked on Meet the Press in 2010 whether it was now less necessary to capture bin Laden. “I think,” he replied, “capturing or killing bin Laden is still a very, very important task for all of those who are engaged in counterterrorism around the world.”

For those who doubted that bin Laden was still alive, late fall 2010 brought two new bin Laden audio messages. There had been intercepts of al Qaeda communications, CIA officials told The New York Times, indicating that he still shaped strategy. Then, within weeks, CNN was quoting a “senior NATO official” as saying that bin Laden and his deputy Zawahiri were believed to be hiding not far from each other in northwest Pakistan, and not “in a cave.” The same day, the New York Daily News quoted a source with “access to all reporting on bin Laden” as having spoken of two “sightings considered credible” in recent years—and even of “a grainy photo of bin Laden inside a truck.” The sources were vague, though, as to where bin Laden might have been. Defense Secretary Robert Gates, for his part, was at pains in an ABC interview to suggest that it had been “years” since any hard intelligence had been received on bin Laden’s likely location.

In late March 2011, out of Hong Kong, came a story suggesting that the CIA had “launched a series of secret operations in the high mountains of the Hindu Kush … consistent reports have established that Osama bin Laden has been on the move through the region in recent weeks.”

It is a fair guess that much if not all of this was disinformation, planted to suggest to the quarry that U.S. intelligence had lost the scent, had no strong lead as to where precisely bin Laden might be, and had no plan for an imminent strike against him.

At 10:24 P.M. on the night of Sunday, May 1, 2011—an improbable hour—this bulletin came over the wires:

Breaking News Alert: White House says Obama to make late-night statement on an undisclosed topic.

Soon after, there was this from

The Washington Post:

Osama bin Laden has been killed in a CIA operation in Pakistan, President Obama will announce from the White House, according to multiple sources.

At 11:35 P.M., the President appeared on television screens across the globe to say:

Tonight I can report to the American people and to the world that the United States has conducted an operation that killed Osama bin Laden, the leader of al Qaeda and a terrorist who’s

responsible for the murder of thousands of innocent men, women and children.…

The images of 9/11 are seared into our national memory.… And yet we know that the worst images are those that were unseen to the world. The empty seat at the dinner table. Children who were forced to grow up without their mother or their father. Parents who would never know the feeling of their child’s embrace. Nearly three thousand citizens taken from us.…

Osama bin Laden avoided capture and escaped across the border into Pakistan.… Shortly after taking office I directed Leon Panetta, the director of the CIA, to make the killing or capture of bin Laden the top priority of the war against al Qaeda.… Then, last August, after years of painstaking work by our intelligence community, I was briefed on a possible lead to bin Laden.… I met repeatedly with my security team as we developed more information about the possibility that we had located bin Laden hiding within a compound deep inside of Pakistan. And finally, last week, I determined that we had enough intelligence to take action.…

Today, at my direction, the United States launched a targeted operation.… A small team of Americans carried out the operation with extraordinary courage.… No Americans were harmed.… After a firefight, they killed Osama bin Laden and took custody of his body.

It was a momentous victory. Jubilant Americans thronged in front of the White House, in Times Square, and at Ground Zero. For many days, there was wall-to-wall coverage in newspapers, television, and radio. The Internet hummed with information.

In its haste to break the news to the world, apparently before personnel involved in the strike against bin Laden had been fully debriefed, U.S. government officials put out information that would turn out to have been inaccurate. An initial claim that bin Laden had used a woman as a human shield, and that she had been shot dead as a result, proved to be unfounded. A woman did die in the assault, but elsewhere in the compound.

Contrary to an early statement giving the impression that bin Laden was armed and died fighting, presidential spokesman Jay Carney later said he had been unarmed. “Resistance,” Carney said, “does not require a firearm.” The al Qaeda leader had been in his nightclothes when confronted, it was reported later, clothing that could conceivably have concealed a weapon or explosives. The U.S. commandos involved, said CIA director Leon Panetta, “had full authority to kill him.”

The rush to get the story out, albeit raw and insufficiently checked, had not been merely for maximum impact. U.S. officials had in part rushed to get their version out, it was reported, “before the Pakistanis pushed theirs.”

The version of events that emerged from Pakistan was indeed different. A twelve-year-old daughter of bin Laden, who survived, was quoted as saying her father had been “captured alive and shot dead by the U.S. Special Forces during the first few minutes … in front of family members.” That provocative quote, significantly, was sourced as coming from “senior Pakistani security officials.”

Pakistan was compromised by the strike, for bin Laden had been living—by all accounts for years, comfortably housed and well protected—in not just any Pakistani city. He had been living in the pleasant town of Abbottabad, where many serving and retired military officers live, and within shouting distance of the nation’s most prestigious military academy—the equivalent of America’s West Point. The ISI also had a presence there.

Officials in Washington did not mince their words when these facts became public. The Pakistanis, CIA director Panetta said, had been either “involved or incompetent.” The President’s counterterrorism advisor, John Brennan, thought it “inconceivable” that bin Laden had not had a “support system” in Abbottabad. On CBS’s 60 Minutes, Obama himself speculated “whether there might have been some people inside of government, people outside of government, [supporting bin Laden] … that’s something we have to investigate, and more importantly the Pakistani government has to investigate.”

Bin Laden, Pakistan’s President Zardari said helplessly, “was not anywhere we had anticipated he would be.” The ISI, long the principal object of U.S. suspicion, denied that it had shielded the terrorist or had known where he was. Former ISI chief Hamid Gul, the veteran supporter of jihad, declared it “a bit amazing” that bin Laden could have been living in Abbottabad incognito.

Bin Laden had been tracked to Abbottabad, U.S. sources revealed as this book went to press, thanks to information on his use of couriers to hand-carry messages to his associates. Unmentioned in the coverage these authors have seen are facts about the link between Abbottabad and al Qaeda that former president Musharraf made public as long ago as 2006—five years before the U.S. caught up with bin Laden and killed him.

Pakistan’s 2005 capture and transfer to U.S. custody of another very senior bin Laden aide—Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s successor, Abu Faraj al-Libi—Musharraf had written, had been achieved after a prolonged pursuit by Pakistani investigators. In the course of the hunt, according to Musharraf, the investigators discovered that Libi used no less than three safe houses—in Abbottabad. Far from being a place where one would not expect a top terrorist to be hiding, it turns out, Abbottabad has a track record for being exactly that.

America’s eventual success in tracking down bin Laden, it is clear from the reporting, grew out of the intelligence gained from Libi back in 2005. It is possible—if the Musharraf account turns out to be accurate, and whatever role Pakistan may have played in the years that followed—that Pakistan deserves at least some of the credit for the outcome in 2011.

According to CIA director Panetta, U.S. authorities gave the Pakistanis no advance notice of the 2011 strike that led to bin Laden’s demise—though the operation involved a highly sensitive incursion, an overflight of Pakistan’s airspace, and action on the ground deep inside Pakistani territory. “It was decided,” Panetta told Time magazine, “that any effort to work with the Pakistanis could jeopardize the mission. They might alert the targets.”

Both U.S. and Pakistani officials, however, initially suggested that Pakistan may have been informed—“a few minutes” in advance. Some sources in the Pakistani capital claimed that they had been cooperating with the United States, and had been keeping the building in Abbottabad under surveillance.

There is another wrinkle, one that may eventually illuminate the truth about the attitude of those in authority in Pakistan—whatever knowledge some Pakistani element may have had of bin Laden’s presence in the town. Ten days after the strike against bin Laden, it was reported that a decade ago—after 9/11—President Bush struck a deal with then–Pakistan president Musharraf. Under the deal, should bin Laden be located inside Pakistan’s borders, the U.S. would be permitted unilaterally to conduct a raid.

“There was an agreement,” a former senior U.S. official was quoted as saying, “that if we knew where Osama was, we were going to come and get him. The Pakistanis would put up a hue and cry, but they wouldn’t stop us.” Musharraf has denied that the reported deal was made. A Pakistani official, however, reportedly offered corroboration for the story. “As far as our American friends are concerned,” he said, “they have just implemented the agreement.”

Pakistan did, sure enough, protest the violation of its sovereignty after bin Laden was killed. Should anything similar occur in the future, Prime Minister Yousaf Gilani said sternly, his country would be within its rights “to retaliate with full force.” That, though, according to the U.S. source of the story, was merely the “public face” of the arrangement. Gilani himself had reportedly long since said of similar possible American action: “I don’t care if they do it, so long as they get the right people. We’ll protest in the National Assembly and then ignore it.”

A full, authoritative account of the painstaking hunt for the world’s most wanted man, and an accurate telling of the circumstances surrounding his bloody end, lies in the future. Meanwhile, the certainty must be that Osama bin Laden is dead.

His cadaver has not been seen publicly—U.S. officials say it was rapidly disposed of at sea following Muslim funeral rites. As of early June 2011, no photographs had been publicly released—President Obama said displaying “trophies” was not his administration’s way. Some members of the Congress, however, are said to have seen photographs and to accept that the face of the dead man depicted resembles that of bin Laden. DNA analysis has established the identification, according to the administration.

In a statement on the websites on which it habitually posted messages, moreover, al Qaeda acknowledged that bin Laden is dead. His blood, it threatened, will not have been spilled in vain. “We will remain, God willing, a curse chasing the Americans and their agents.… Soon, God willing, their happiness will turn to sadness. Their blood will be mingled with their tears.”

AFTERWORD

IN THE TEN YEARS SINCE THE ATTACKS ON THE UNITED STATES—THE last four and more of them dominated for us by the writing of this book—there have been momentous events that grew out of the catastrophe—and resolution of virtually nothing.

“We are sure of our victory against the Americans and Jews, as promised by the Prophet,” bin Laden had said three years before 9/11. In 2009, in a letter to the military judges at Guantánamo, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed said the attack had been “the noblest victory known to history over the forces of oppression and tyranny.”

Victory? Amid all his flowery verbiage, the essential elements of what bin Laden demanded are clear. He called for: the “complete liberation of Palestine”; an end to the American “Crusaders’ occupation of Saudi Arabia”; an end to the U.S. “theft” of Arab oil at “paltry prices”; and the removal of [Arab] governments that “have surrendered to the Jews.”

A decade on, we are witnessing a great upheaval across the Middle East. Two Arab dictatorships have been toppled, six others to one degree or another rocked by rebellion or protest. Oil, which bin Laden had variously said should retail at $144 a barrel and “$100 a barrel at least,” at one point since 2001 peaked at $146. In early spring 2011, it stood at $124.

As for the presence of U.S. forces in Saudi Arabia, all were gone by fall 2003. Only conditional upon a subsequent pullout, reportedly, had Crown Prince Abdullah permitted the use of Saudi bases for the invasion of Iraq. The Palestine issue, though—a constant in bin Laden’s rhetoric from the start and so far as one can tell the primary motivation for KSM and the principal operatives involved in the 9/11 attacks—festers on.

How much the activity of bin Laden and al Qaeda had to do with what has changed is another matter. Though rumors swirl, there is no good evidence that Islamist extremism is playing an important role in the latest turmoil across the region. The price of oil vacillates not so much according to doctrine as according to the law of supply and demand. On the other hand, the threat of more terrorist attacks—in both America and Saudi Arabia—was surely a factor in the decision to remove the U.S. military from Saudi territory.

The decade has seen some American pressure applied to Israel over its persistent occupation of Palestinian territory and its overall treatment of the Palestinians. It has been ineffectual pressure, though, and the United States’ commitment to Israel seems undiminished. Few people, it seems, are even aware that the Palestine issue was a primary motivation for the perpetrators of 9/11.

The true effect of the 2001 onslaught is less what it achieved than what it triggered. Bin Laden and some of those closest to him had fervently hoped to goad the United States into retaliating. “We wanted the United States to attack,” his military chief Mohammed Atef said after an earlier attack. “… They are going to invade Afghanistan … and then we will start holy war against the Americans, exactly like the Soviets.” The notion was that the United States could be bled into defeat, literally and financially, as the Soviets had been in Afghanistan, and bin Laden shared it.

Then there was Iraq. “I am rejoicing,” he said in 2003, “that America has become embroiled in the quagmires of the Tigris and Euphrates. Bush thought that Iraq and its oil would be easy prey, and now here he is, stuck in dire straits.”

A decade after 9/11, even with bin Laden dead we cannot know the end of the story. The invasion of Afghanistan that some al Qaeda leaders had desired brought disruption and death both to the organization and to the country that hosted it. In both Afghanistan and Iraq, however, the United States and its allies remain bogged down—though not necessarily as fatally as bin Laden hoped. Human casualties aside, however, the dollar cost of the “war on terrorism”—Afghanistan, Iraq, and other post-9/11 operations—was as of last year estimated to have been $1.15 trillion. That, a Congressional Research Service report indicated, made it second only to the cost of World War II, even with adjustments for inflation.

A recent Pew Research survey indicated that support for the cause bin Laden and al Qaeda have espoused had faded in the Muslim countries studied. “Brand bin Laden,” a U.S. business journal reported of a previous poll, is “dying fast.” Those fighting terrorism are not banking on it.

National Counterterrorism Center director Michael Leiter believed even before the strike on bin Laden that the greatest terrorist threat to the United States was posed by Anwar Aulaqi—the “spiritual adviser” to two key 9/11 terrorists who professed innocence and ignorance after the attacks, then made a getaway at his leisure.

Aulaqi eventually took refuge in Yemen, where he was still believed to be active as of spring 2011. Days after bin Laden was killed, Aulaqi was targeted by a U.S. drone. He reportedly got away.

AT HOME in recent times, there has been crass posturing and prolonged squabbling, with predictably tragic results.

In Florida, after months of threatening to do so—and after many appeals that he desist, including one by President Obama—the pastor of a fringe church he calls the Dove World Outreach Center burned a copy of the Qur’an. He had earlier held a mockery of a “trial” at which the Muslims’ holy book was found guilty of “crimes against humanity.” A “jury” convened by the pastor, Terry Jones, had chosen burning over three other ways of destroying the sacred text: shredding, drowning, or firing squad.

In Afghanistan, when news of the burning of the Qur’an spread, thousands of protesters took to the streets. Seven United Nations employees were killed, two of them by beheading, when a mob overran one of the organization’s compounds. Violence over three days resulted in further deaths and dozens of injuries. Back in Florida, Jones said that he did not feel responsible, and that the time had come “to hold Islam accountable.”

In New York City, there has been protracted discord over whether a new mosque and Muslim community center should be allowed on a site two blocks from Ground Zero. Its sponsors say it will be a symbol “that will give voice to the silent majority of Muslims who suffer at the hands of extremists.” Opponents say the center would be “sacrilege on sacred ground,” a “gross insult to the memory of those that were killed.” As of the spring of this year, the dispute was unresolved.

So were more melancholy disagreements centered on what really is and always will be hallowed ground—the memorial at Ground Zero, with which we opened this book. Seventy feet below ground, in what will be the September 11 Museum, the steel bases of the Twin Towers stand exposed at the point of bedrock, preserved by order of the federal government. Nearby, sheathed in a climate-controlled covering, will stand the last steel column removed from the debris of the World Trade Center, a column that in the aftermath of 9/11 served as a memorial in and of itself.

The plan, as of this writing, is that the museum will hold something else, the collection of some 9,000 fragments of humanity, the remains of the 1,122 people whose body parts cannot be identified. They would repose, hidden from the public eye yet hauntingly present. The plan’s proponents maintained that the presence of the remains would enhance the sanctity of the memorial, making it a place where generations would come to pay their respects and reflect. Its opponents objected to what is left of their loved ones being turned into what they saw as a lure for tourists. Placement in the museum space, relatives thought, was tantamount to creating “a freak show” put on for “gawkers.”

Two thousand miles away, in Phoenix, Arizona, state senators were voting to remove wording on the city’s 9/11 memorial that they deemed objectionable. A memorial, one senator said, should display only “patriotic, pro-American words.” The inscribed words he and others found upsetting included “VIOLENT ACTS LEADING US TO WAR”; “MIDDLE EAST VIOLENCE MOTIVATES ATTACKS IN US”; “YOU DON’T WIN BATTLES OF TERRORISM WITH MORE BATTLES”; “FEELING OF INVINCIBILITY LOST”; “MUST BOMB BACK”; “FOREIGN-BORN AMERICANS AFRAID”; and “FEAR OF FOREIGNERS.”

The fury that flamed across America after 9/11 was shot through with fear, fear of a foe few citizens could even begin to understand, fear of the unknown, fear that more was coming. Wisdom still holds, as that three-term President told the nation almost eighty years ago, that the only thing to be feared is fear itself. Yet fear, unspoken, remains pervasive, in airports and train stations, in the places where great issues are debated, in the living rooms of families across the nation.

In its fury and its fear, some say, America lost its way. Perhaps it did. On the other hand, the extreme measures its terrorist enemies espouse will lead not to utopia for anyone, only to further horrors. Crammed together on a small planet beset with desperate problems, the more than three hundred million non-Muslim Americans, the world’s 1.65 billion Muslims, and the billions of others of differing religions and none must find other ways to resolve what divides them.

In New York, there has been quibbling over even the quotation from Virgil’s Aeneid chosen for the wall at the Ground Zero memorial behind which the unknown dead would lie. Should the quotation survive the debate, it at least will—however unintentionally—remain valid for both the murdered victims of 9/11 and their murderers. It reads:

“No day shall erase you from the memory of Time.”

For Angela Santore Amicone

and

Chris and Gaye Humphreys

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This is the eighth heavily researched book project we have undertaken. All involved difficult challenges or required us to tackle intractable questions. Sometimes we have managed to answer the questions. Often, we hope, we have managed to clear up historical muddle or confusion. Nothing, however, quite prepared us for the tangle of fact, fallacy, and fantasy that enmesh this dark history.

We were reminded at every step of the way that the story on which we were embarked was freighted with human suffering: that of those who died on September 11 itself, of those killed in earlier and subsequent attacks, and of the more than 100,000 people who have died and continue to die in the ensuing conflicts—and those left grieving across the world.

In this Acknowledgments section of our book, then, we honor first and foremost those who will never be able to read it.

Writing The Eleventh Day has been a task for which we needed more than usual guides to people and places, nations and cultures, that do not readily reveal themselves. Our personal thanks, then, to those we can name: Hugh Bermingham, who has lived and worked in Saudi Arabia for almost thirty years; the author Jean Sasson, who also lived there and who has the trust of the first wife and the fourth son of Osama bin Laden; Flagg Miller, associate professor of religious studies at the University of California at Davis, who has analyzed bin Laden’s writing in unique depth; editor and author Abdel Atwan, who interviewed bin Laden and reads the galloping pulse of history in the Middle East with rare expertise; and Alain Chouet, former head of security intelligence with the DGSE—France’s foreign intelligence service—and an accomplished Arabist in his own right.

Others with a variety of backgrounds shared experience or special knowledge: Captain Anthony Barnes, who on 9/11 was deputy director of presidential contingency planning in the White House Military Office; Jean-Charles Brisard, lead investigator for lawyers representing families bereaved on 9/11, who opened up his vast archive of documents to us; John Farmer, former senior counsel to the 9/11 Commission, now dean of Rutgers University Law School, who was an eminently informative source on the military response to the attacks; former U.S. senator and Florida governor Bob Graham, onetime chairman of the Senate Committee on Intelligence and cochair of the House-Senate Joint Inquiry into intelligence activities before and after September 11, 2001, who gave us time in Florida, Massachusetts, and London, and who champions truth-telling in a milieu where truth is so often a stranger; Simon Henderson, who heads the Gulf and Energy Policy Program at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy; Eleanor Hill, a former Defense Department inspector general and the Joint Committee’s relentless staff director; former FBI intelligence analyst Mike Jacobson, who served with both the Joint Committee and the 9/11 Commission and surfaced facts that others preferred suppressed; Miles Kara, a former career intelligence officer with the U.S. Army, who also served on both official probes—with a special focus on the FAA and NORAD while on the Commission team—and who was endlessly patient and responsive to our queries; Ryan Mackey, research scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and author of a paper on conspiracy theories about 9/11, who applied a “baloney detection kit” to great effect; Sarandis Papadopoulos of the Naval Historical Center, who conducted research and interviews and coauthored the report on the Pentagon attack for the Office of the Secretary of Defense; Mete Sozen, professor of structural engineering at Purdue University in Indiana, who explained in a way we could understand—and believe—how it appeared that American Flight 77 was swallowed up by the Pentagon; teacher and literacy coach Dwana Washington, who vividly described for us the September 11 visit by President Bush to the Emma E. Booker Elementary School in Sarasota, Florida.

Like so much of history, work on this project has been a paper chase. We owe sincere thanks to the National Archives, where the hugely able Kristen Wilhelm handled document applications and dealt with difficult questions with skill and evident integrity—wondrously refreshing for authors inured over the years to sustained obstruction to the public’s right to know. In 2010 and 2011, as we labored on far from Washington, and as tens of thousands of 9/11 Commission documents became available for the first time, we enjoyed the generous collegiate help of Erik Larson. The National Security Archive at George Washington University, which collects and publishes material obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, was often useful.

In Europe, too, we learned much. In Germany, Dr. Manfred Murck, who before 9/11 and since has been deputy chief of Hamburg’s domestic intelligence service, put up with persistent quizzing for longer than we could have expected and, when obliged to limit what he could tell us, was frank about doing so; from Stuttgart, Dr. Herbert Müller, Islamic affairs specialist at the parallel organization in that city, gave ready assistance; Hamburg attorney Udo Jacob helped document the story of the young Islamists who gathered in the cause of jihad before 9/11—and who included several of the 9/11 perpetrators. Without his help we could not have gained admission to Fuhlsbüttel prison to visit Mounir Motassadeq, who is serving fifteen years for his supposed role as accessory to the murders of those aboard the four hijacked airliners on 9/11. Motassadeq, for his part, put up with our questions over a period of hours. It is not clear to us that he is guilty as charged, and should we not return to his case ourselves, we hope other investigators will. Also in Germany, Hans Kippenberg, professor of comparative religious studies at Bremen’s Jacobs University, and Dr. Tilman Seidensticker, professor of Arab and Islamic studies at Jena’s Friedrich Schiller University, helped with interpretation and translation of the hijackers’ “manual” and of Ziad Jarrah’s farewell letter to his Turkish lover.

In Milan, Italy, deputy chief prosecutor and counterterrorism coordinator Armando Spataro gave us a first glimpse of the brutal injustices meted out in the name of the War on Terror; Bruno Megale, deputy head of counterterrorism, described police surveillance operations in northern Italy before 9/11. While we failed to get to Spain, our friend Charles Cardiff’s reading of the Spanish dossier—accumulated by Judge Baltasar Garzón—persuaded us of al Qaeda’s pre-9/11 reach in that country.

The fellow journalists who helped us are too numerous to name. Of their number, we thank especially Thomas Joscelyn, Gerald Posner, Jeffrey Steinberg, and Joseph Trento in the United States; Guillaume Dasquié, Richard Labévière, and Alexandra Richard in France; and Josef Hufelschulte in Germany. Also in Germany, we much appreciated the hard-earned knowledge and professionalism of Dirk Laabs, an all-around reporter and practitioner of the time-honored school of shoe-leather journalism.

Yosri Fouda, the brave reporter who interviewed Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, was helpful to us from Cairo—as was his colleague Nick Fielding, who subsequently worked with him on a book about the experience.

We have on our shelves more than three hundred books that relate one way or another to 9/11, al Qaeda, and the roots from which al Qaeda sprang. Those of Peter Bergen, Steve Coll, Jim Dwyer and Kevin Flynn, former 9/11 Commission senior counsel John Farmer, Yosri Fouda and Nick Fielding, William Langewiesche, Jere Longman, Terry McDermott, Philip Shenon, and Lawrence Wright are essential reading. No one who wishes to explore the intelligence angles should miss the works of J. M. Berger, Peter Lance, and former senior CIA officer Michael Scheuer; Kevin Fenton’s deconstruction of the roles of the CIA, the FBI, and the 9/11 Commission—soon to be published as this book went to press, but kindly made available to us by the author—is valuable and provocative. Paul Thompson’s encyclopedic The Terror Timeline and, above all, his “Complete 9/11 Timeline,” updated regularly on the Net, were indispensable. The author Peter Dale Scott has taken his scalpel to the jugular of the story of President Bush and the aides who surrounded him.

On the “skeptical” front, we thank author Daniel Hopsicker, investigator of the hijackers’ activities in Florida. He introduced us to Venice, shared his time unstintingly, and trusted us down the months—long after it became clear that where he saw conspiracy we saw coincidence or happenstance. There was something to be learned, as in the past, from John Judge, a veteran of alternative history in Washington, D.C.

These days more than ever, nonfiction authors must head down the long research trail on shrunken budgets. It has been all the more rewarding, then, to have the loyalty and commitment of a new colleague. Hannah Cleaver, a Berlin-based journalist with prior expertise and knowledge of the case, made it clear that the story itself and the comradeship were as important to her as professional gain. The inquiring mind of intern Stefani Jackson produced useful research.

The efficient Sinéad Sweeney, in Ireland, has long been far more valuable to us than a mere assistant. Moss McCarthy of LED Technology rescued us from more than one computer crisis. Martina Coonan helped out on the last lap, when every hour was precious. Pauline Lombard and Ann Dalton put up with our demands yet again. We thank, too, Ger Killalea, who keeps the office functioning, and Jason Cairns, who cheerfully turns his hand to anything under the sun.

The Eleventh Day would not exist without the initial interest and backing of our publishers at Random House. Group president Gina Centrello and Ballantine publisher Libby McGuire in New York, and Transworld’s Bill Scott-Kerr in London, kept us going along a bumpy trail.

Our editors, Mark Tavani and Simon Thorogood, were there for us in the final months with skill and good judgment. Where they saw clutter, they pointed the way to clarity. Our agent, Jonathan Lloyd, also reads everything we write with a keen editorial eye—a bonus for us—for he is himself a former publisher. He has steadied us, once again, with his combination of common sense and uncommon good humor.

We thank our good friends and neighbors, who have been endlessly supportive. Our neglected children heroically put up with the neglect—though one has asked, “When are we going to be a family again?”

The Eleventh Day is dedicated to our steadfast friends Chris and Gaye Humphreys—who know why—and to Angela Amicone, who turns ninety-five this year. Angela has been teaching children to read since 1940, and has no intention of giving up now.

Anthony Summers and Robbyn Swan

Ireland, 2011

AP Images

Flight 11 passenger Daniel Lewin, probably the first to die on 9/11.

Marco Greenberg

The Hanson family, passengers on Flight 175. On the phone to his father, Peter Hanson said: “Don’t worry.… If it happens, it’ll be very fast.”

Hanson famly photo

Flight 93 flight attendant CeeCee Lyles’s charred ID card, found after the crash. She had reached her husband to say the passengers were fighting back against the hijackers.

Moussaoui trial exhibit

Zoe Falkenberg, an eight-year-old passenger on Flight 77, and her sister, Dana, are among those remembered at the Pentagon memorial. Dana’s remains were not found.

Mariana Perez

Office workers at windows of the Trade Center’s North Tower. Trapped by fire, many jumped to their deaths.

Jeff Christensen/Reuters

Of those below the points of impact, most made their way to safety.

Shannon Stapleton/Reuters

After the towers collapsed, New Yorkers ran pell-mell, a dust cloud at their heels. Hundreds have died, and many more are sick, from respiratory disease caused by the dust.

AP Images

President Bush is told that a second plane has crashed.

Paul J. Richards/AFP/Getty Images

In the Emergency Operations Center beneath the White House, Vice President Cheney speaks by phone with Bush. To the left of him is National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice. To the left of her, kneeling, is Navy commander Anthony Barnes.

U.S. government

The facade of the Pentagon before it collapsed. Skeptics doubted that it could have swallowed a Boeing 757 airliner.

U.S. government

Wreckage at the Pentagon. Some skeptics suggested that evidence had been planted.

Moussaoui trial exhibit

Flight 93’s Cockpit Voice Recorder—hauntingly, minute by minute, it tracked the progress of the hijacking.

Moussaoui trial exhibit

Investigators search the Pennsylvania field where Flight 93 crashed. In the foreground is the crater.

Tim Shaffer/Reuters

After, in New York.

Doug Kanter/AFP/Getty Images

Nine months later, draped in the flag, the last steel girder is removed from the ruins of the World Trade Center. It stands now in the memorial at Ground Zero.

Peter Morgan/Reuters

Osama bin Laden and his “holy war” against the United States, acclaimed by a crowd in Pakistan after 9/11.

Ruth Fremson

/The New York Times

/Redux Pictures

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed claimed credit for the plot. Ramzi Binalshibh

(below left)

acted as a go-between for the hijackers. Abu Zubaydah

(below right)

, a key al Qaeda logistics man, was gravely wounded during his arrest. How reliable are their confessions, obtained under “enhanced” interrogation?

Heroes to some: a poster produced two years after the attacks, glorifying the hijackers.

Authors’ collection

Mohamed Atta, the hijackers’ leader, and Flight 93 hijacker Ziad Jarrah in Afghanistan preparing to videotape martyrdom statements. The beards came off on their return to Europe.

AP Images

The men believed to have been at the controls of three of the hijacked airliners: Marwan al-Shehhi (top left), Hani Hanjour (right), and Ziad Jarrah, with his lover, Aysel Sengün (bottom), and in the cockpit of a light aircraft—he had recently completed pilot training.

Khalid al-Mihdhar

(above left)

and Nawaf al-Hazmi

(above right)

were the first future hijackers to arrive in the United States. Omar al-Bayoumi

(below left)

, a Saudi living in California who assisted them, said he met them by chance. Did Mohdar Abdullah

(below right)

, who also befriended them, get advance information that an attack was coming?

Anwar Aulaqi, an American-born imam, at a mosque after 9/11. He is characterized as having been a “spiritual adviser” to two future hijackers. Now in Yemen, he is considered a possible successor to bin Laden. The Washington Post/

Getty Images

Saleh al-Hussayen, a Saudi religious official. On the eve of 9/11, he stayed at the same hotel as two lead hijackers.

Saudi Arabian government

Saudi Prince Bandar

(rear left)

meeting at the White House with President Bush, Vice President Cheney, and National Security Adviser Rice, two nights after the attacks.

The White House

The joint chairmen of Congress’s probe, Senators Bob Graham

(center)

and Richard Shelby

(right)

, present their Report in 2003. They pointed out that many pages had been suppressed, on President Bush’s orders. The pages are still suppressed today. The Washington Post/

Getty Images

9/11 Commission members and staff watching video of the Twin Towers burning, at a hearing in 2004.

AP Images

Some of the bereaved who pressed for the creation of the Commission, and closely followed its progress, rejected its findings.

Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty Images

Osama bin Laden, apparently pictured here in hiding in Pakistan, was shot dead by U.S. commandos in May 2011.

AP Images

Americans celebrated the feared terrorist’s death, yet faced an uncertain future.

AP Images

NOTES AND SOURCES

ABBREVIATIONS USED IN NOTES AND SOURCES

AP

Associated Press

BG

Boston Globe

CF

Files of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States, held at the National Archives, Record Group 148. Cited documents are listed here, as they are at the Archives, by folder name, box [B] and team [T] numbers. Many documents were supplied to the authors by an independent researcher, and others obtained on line via

www.scribd.com

or directly from the Archives.

CO

Website of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States, archived at

http://govinfo.library.unt.edu/911/about.html

conv.

conversation

corr.

Authors’ correspondence

CR

Final Report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States, NY: W. W. Norton, 2004

FBI IG

Review of the FBI’s Handling of Intelligence Information Related to the September 11 Attacks, Office of the Inspector General, U.S. Department of Justice, November 2004

FEMA

Federal Emergency Management Agency, U.S. Department of Homeland Security

int.

interview (by authors unless otherwise noted)

INTELWIRE

FBI documents sourced in the notes of the 9/11 Commission Report, obtained by Intelwire under FOIA (Freedom of Information Act) and available on its website,

www.intelwire.com

JI

Joint Inquiry into Intelligence Community Activities Before and After the Terrorist Attacks of September 11, 2001, House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence and Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, 107th Congress, 2nd Session

KSM SUBST

Substitution for the Testimony of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Defense Exhibit 941,

U.S. v. Zacarias Moussaoui

, Cr. No. 01-455-1, U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia

LAT

Los Angeles Times

MFR

Memorandum for the Record of 9/11 Commission staff interviews, available on National Archives website,

http://www.archives.gov/​legislative/​research/9-11/​commission-memoranda.html

NARA

National Archives and Records Administration

NIST

National Institute of Standards and Technology, U.S. Department of Commerce

NTSB

National Transportation Safety Board

NYT

New York Times

OBL

Osama bin Laden

TF

Oral histories of 503 first responders conducted by the Fire Department, City of New York, archived by

The New York Times

at

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/​packages/​html/​nyregion/​20050812_WTC_GRAPHIC/​met_WTC_histories_full_01.html

WP

Washington Post

WSJ

Wall Street Journal

PREFACE

1

memorial:

NY Daily News

, 8/20/01,

NYT

, 6/10/09,

www.wtcsitememorial.org

,

www.national911memorial.org/site

, int. Michael Frazier for National September 11 Memorial and Museum;

2

disease:

AP, 6/24/09.

3

tens of thousands:

Documenting the number of dead in any conflict is difficult, fraught as such figures are with political ramifications. Americans in particular, given the lingering specter of the Vietnam War, are sensitive to rising casualty counts among servicemen and women. Nor does any military readily accept responsibility for civilian casualties. The issue is further complicated by determining which deaths qualify as having been the result of war—does one, for example, include deaths due to disease or starvation—conditions brought about by conflict? In citing the figure of many tens of thousands of dead, the authors have relied on casualty counts from the U.N. Assistance Missions in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the websites

icasualties.org

and

iraqbodycount.org

.

4

graves/remains:

AP, 4/1/09,

www.911research.wtc7.net

,

Israel National News

, 2/1/08,

NYT

, 2/23/08, MFR 03009720;

5

Riches:

NYT

, 11/5/02, 4/21/08,

www.NY1.com

, 4/17/08,

NY Post

, 4/13/02;

6

McIntyre:

AP, 5/19/06,

Independent on Sunday

(U.K.), 10/7/07;

7

Dillard:

Arlington historian Thomas Sherlock to authors, 9/11/09,

WP

, 5/26/07,

NY Observer

, 6/20/04;

8

Breitweiser:

Kristen Breitweiser,

Wake-up Call

, NY: Warner, 2006, Preface, 110, 240.

9

Martin:

WP

, 11/2/06,

Newsweek

, 12/25/06, transcript, 9/12/01, FBI 265D-NY-280350, report, 9/12/01, FBI 265D-NY-280350-CE, courtesy of INTELWIRE. Though Martin suffered serious injuries early in the first hijacking, it is probable that a First Class passenger—Daniel Lewin—was the first to die. See Ch. 1, p. 15.

10 safe to breathe: “EPA’s Response to the World Trade Center Collapse,” Office of the Inspector General, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, 8/21/03, 4;

11 Riches ill: www.NY1.com, 4/17/08, www.sohoblues.com, citing Time; “dead or alive”: CNN, 9/17/01;

12 backtrack: press release, 3/13/02, www.whitehouse.gov;

13 Obama: NY Post, 2/7/09;

14 Zubaydah: NY Daily News, 9/10/06, & see later refs.;

15 Dillard questions: CNN, 3/28/04, ACLU statement, 12/12/08;

16 Breitweiser testimony/questions: testimony, 9/18/02, JI, Breitweiser, 100–, int. Kristen Breitweiser, St. Petersburg Times, 8/12/05;

17 CIA/two hijackers: see later refs.;

18 kept secret: Bob Graham with Jeff Nussbaum, Intelligence Matters, NY: Random House, 2004, 228, 231;

19 Breitweiser/Obama: NYT, 6/24/09;

20 Commission Final Report received: Philip Shenon, The Commission, NY: Twelve, 2008, 415–;

21 Kean/Hamilton: NYT, 12/8/07 & 1/2/08, www.rawstory.com, 12/24/07, International Herald Tribune, 12/8/07;

22 Kerrey: Newsweek, 3/23/09, Air America radio, 3/2/08;

23 Cleland: Salon, 11/21/03, NYT, 10/26/03;

24 “first draft”: CBC transcript, 8/21/06;

25 CBS poll: www.angus-reid.com/polls, www.alternet.com, 9/16/06;

26 Scripps poll: Scripps Howard News Service, 11/23/07;

27 Zogby poll: Zogby International, Aug. 2007;

28 sixteen thousand: Reuters, 9/10/08, www.alternet.com, 9/16/08;

29 Iraq/attacks: NYT/CBS News polls cited at www.angus-reid.com;

30 Angus Reid poll: released 3/17/10, www.angus-reid.com;

31 criticism: (senators) Lincoln Chaffee, Mark Dayton, Mike Gravel, Patrick Leahy, Charles Schumer;

32 (representatives) Dennis Kucinich, Cynthia McKinney, Ron Paul, Curt Weldon;

33 (governor) Jesse Ventura;

34 (deputy attorneys general) Roy Andes, Philip Berg, Donald Bustion;

35 (state legislators) Peter Allen, Peter Espiefs, Karen Johnson, Barbara Richardson, Charles Weed, Suzi Wizowaty;

36 (public officials/​diplomats/​engineers/​officers) see https://patriotsquestion911.com;

37 Texas candidates: “Texas GOP Gubernatorial Candidate Questions Government Involvement in 9/11,” Fox News, 2/12/10, “Shami Questions US Involvement in 9/11 Attack,” KTBS TV, 2/14/10;

38 CIA/FBI: e.g., letter to Congress regarding the 9/11 Commission Report signed by twenty-five military, intelligence, and law enforcement veterans, 9/13/04, National Security Whistleblowers Coalition;

39 Freeh: WSJ, 11/17/05, CNN, 11/30/05;

40 Mondale: int. Minnesota, “We Are C.H.A.N.G.E.,” 2/3/08, www.youtube.com;

41 Clark: This Week with George Stephanopoulos, ABC News, 3/5/06;

42 Graham: ints. Bob Graham, Salon, 9/9/04, Graham with Nussbaum.

43 300,000 pages: corr. Kristen Wilhelm, 2011. Only some 35 percent of the Commission documents held by the National Archives had been reviewed for release as of February 2011. Of the documents reviewed, 15 percent remain classified, largely under national security and privacy restrictions. The remaining 20 percent, some 300,000 documents, are available to researchers.

Part I: ATTACK

CHAPTER 1

1

recognized:

Martin Gilbert,

Israel

, London: Black Swan, 1999, 189;

2

day in 1938:

Robert Lacey,

The Kingdom

, NY: Avon, 1983, 262;

3

40,000 planes:

Jane Garvey testimony,

1/27/04, CO;

4

Rosenzweig/​Mladenik/​Gordenstein/​Theodoridis/​Iskandar/​Filipov:

“DOJ Documents Requests #35–13,” B13, T7, CF, “AAL Misc. Folder—AA11 and AA77,” B18, T7, CF;

5

Cuccinello:

eds.

Der Spiegel

magazine,

Inside 9–11

, NY: St. Martin’s, 2001, 37;

6

Gay:

AP, 9/25/01, Raytheon press release, 9/10/07;

7

Morabito:

Post-Standard

(Syracuse, NY), 10/20/07;

8

Berenson:

Richard Bernstein,

Out of the Blue

, NY: Times Books, 2002, 171;

9

Angell:

People

, 5/17/04;

10 Lewin: BG, 9/12/01.

11 five young men: BG, 9/13/01. Some have raised questions about the identities of the hijackers. The issue will be covered in Ch. 14 and its related notes.

12 Ogonowski: Bernstein, 110–, James Ogonowski remarks at Safety Awards Banquet, 9/11/02, “Ogonowski Legacy,” Public Radio International, 9/13/02.

13 5:00 A.M.: Unless otherwise indicated, all times in this book are rendered as the times in use by civilians on the U.S. East Coast on the day in question (i.e., EDT)—as opposed to the times used by the military or the aviation industry, or in other time zones;

14 McGuinness: website of Cheryl McGuinness (widow), www.beautybeyondtheashes.com;

15 “turn-around”: MFR 04016228, 2/10/04;

16 take off due: CR, 2;

17 cleaners/fuelers: “FBI 302s of Interest Flight 11,” B17, T7, CF, “FBI 302s Arestegui,” B10, T7, CF;

18 flight attendants: “FBI 302s Homer Folder re Kathleen Nicosia,” B10, T7, CF;

19 “organized”: NYT, 12/9/01;

20 backup: “FBI 302s Arestegui,” B10, T7, CF;

21 joked: Cape Cod Times, 9/14/01;

22 sick/standby: “FBI 302s Arestegui,” B10, T7, CF;

23 odd incident: Staff Report, “The Four Flights and Civil Aviation Security,” note 22, CF, MFR 04020636, 2/2/04, MFR 03007050, 8/15/03, Miami Herald, 9/22/01;

24 Filipov/​“suspicious”: “DOJ Documents Requests 35–13,” B13, T7, CF;

25 Howland: “FBI 302s Cockpit and American and Hijacker,” B11, T7, CF;

26 profiling system: CR 4, MFR 04018154, 11/24/03, Staff Report, “The Four Flights and Civil Aviation Security,” 2, 77, CF, John Raidt comments, 1/27/04, CO;

27 crutch: BG, 11/10/01;

28 “sweating bullets”: World Net Daily, 9/21/01;

29 last to board: MFR 04020636, 2/2/04;

30 greeted by Martin/final checks: “FBI 302s Arestegui,” B10, T7, CF;

31 seating: CR, 2, BG, 9/13/01;

32 Sweeney call: NY Observer, 2/15/04, FBI 302 Michael Sweeney, 9/21/01, INTELWIRE;

33 switch off phones: “FBI 302s Arestegui,” B10, T7, CF;

34 pushed back/takeoff: Joseph Gregor, “Air Traffic Control Recording,” NTSB, 12/21/01, CR, 2, 4;

35 “severe clear”: Lynn Spencer, Touching History, NY: Free Press, 2008, 3;

36 air-to-ground exchanges: Gregor, 2–, & see FAA Memo, Full Transcript: Aircraft Accident AA11, New York, NY, 9/11/01, “Boston Center, Shirley Kula,” B3, T8, CF;

37 “a brief unknown sound”: “Summary of Air Traffic Hijack Events, Sept. 11, 2001, FAA,” Report on Investigation of 9/11 Commission Staff Referral, Dept. of Transportation, Office of Inspector General, Appendix 3;

38 Ong to Reservations: quotes attributed to Ong & nature of her call come from FBI 302 of Vanessa Minter, 9/12/01, FBI 302 of Craig Marquis, 9/16/01, & “Charlotte to Director,” FBI 265D-NY-280350-CE, 9/13/01, “Flight Call Notes,” & Transcript of 9/11 Telephone Calls, “AA Phone Calls,” B13, T7, CF, FBI 302 of Nydia Gonzalez, 9/12/01, “FBI 302s—Knife and American Flight 11,” B11, T7, CF, FBI 302 of Winston Sadler, 9/13/01, INTELWIRE, Nydia Gonzalez testimony, 1/27/04, CO.

39 “sterile cockpit”: The interjection appears on the transcript but is only partially audible on the tape version as heard by the authors;

40 Lewin dead?: Lewin was an American-Israeli citizen who as “Daniel Levin” had served in the Israel Defense Forces as a member of Sayeret Matkal—in its Unit 269, which specializes in counterterrorism (FBI 302 of Anne Lewin, 9/21/01, “Flight Calls Notes,” B13, T7, CF, UPI, 3/6/02, ints. Tom Leighton, Marco Greenberg, Ha’aretz, 9/15/06).

41 man in 10B: Ong also identified the passengers in Seats 2A and 2B as hijackers, while her colleague Sweeney—whose call was not recorded—is variously reported as identifying hijackers in 9B, 9C, 9D, 9E, 9G, 10B, and 10C. 2A, 2B, and 10B were indeed the assigned seats of three of the five Arab passengers traveling. (Ong re 2A/2B: Transcripts of 9/11 Telephone Calls, “AA Phone Transcripts,” & Charlotte to Director, FBI 265D-NY-280350-CE, 9/13/01, “Flight Call Notes,” B13, T7, CF; Sweeney re Seats: FBI 302 of Michael Woodward, 9/14/01, & of James Sayer, 9/13/01, “FBI 302s—Olsen,” B10, T7, CF);

42 Sweeney/Woodward call: Quotes attributed to Sweeney & nature of her call come from CR, 453n32, FBI 302 of Michael Woodward, 9/14/01, & of James Sayer, 9/13/01, “FBI 302s—Olsen,” B10, T7, CF, Staff Report, “The Four Flights and Civil Aviation Security,” 14, CF.

43 borrowed card: The calling card was provided to Sweeney by another flight attendant, Sara Low—who also passed information on the hijackers’ seat location to colleagues (NY Observer, 6/20/04, AP 3/5/09, ABC News, 7/18/02).

44 keys: CR, 5, 453n26, FBI 302 of Michael Sweeney, 9/21/01, INTELWIRE, John Farmer, The Ground Truth, NY: Riverhead, 2009, 109;

45 “no warning”: NY Observer, 6/20/04;

46 “refrain”: Staff Report, “The Four Flights and Civil Aviation Security,” 81, CF;

47 not panicky/​“static”: ABC News, 7/18/02.

CHAPTER 2

1

data processor:

(Chuck Allen), eds.

Der Spiegel, Inside 9–11

, 46–;

2

steelworker:

(Joe Libretti), Wayne Barrett and Dan Collins,

Grand Illusion

, NY: Harper, 2006, 245;

3

construction workers/composer:

(Juan Suarez & “Artie” & composer Jim Farmer) Bernstein, 199;

4

student:

9/11: Dust & Deceit at the World Trade Center

, documentary,

www.dust.org

.

5

8:46

A.M.:

8:46

A.M

.

is the generally accepted time of the impact on the North Tower. Scientists measuring seismic data at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory at the New Jersey Palisades, twenty-one miles from New York City, initially—in 2001—calculated the impact time as 8:46:26. In 2005, they adjusted the estimate to 8:46:29. The 9/11 Commission, meanwhile, relied on the flight path study for Flight 11 provided by the NTSB, reckoning the impact time as 8:46:40. (Similar discrepancies appear in times given for the subsequent crash into the South Tower.) While too complex to detail here, several plausible explanations have been offered for this anomaly. Though minimal, the discrepancies have been used by critics of the conventional account to bolster the notion that—in addition to the planes—explosives were used in the attacks on the Twin Towers. The differing timings supplied by the seismic station, the critics claim, reflect explosions in the towers

before

the impact of the airplanes. That theory does not hold, however, because the seismic data reflect only a single event. Had there been first an explosion, then an impact, the seismic instruments would have registered

two

events. They did not (“Seismic Waves Generated by Aircraft Impacts and Building Collapses at World Trade Center,” by Won-Young Kim et al.,

www.ldeo.columbia.edu

, “Federal Building and Fire Safety Investigation of the WTC Disaster,” NCSTAR1–5A, NIST, 22–, CR, 7, 454n39, “Seismic Proof—9/11 Was an Inside Job,” by Craig T. Furlong & Gordon Ross,

www.journalof911studies.com

, “On

Debunking 9/11 Debunking

,” by Ryan Mackey, 5/24/08, 79–, authors’ corr. Dr. Won-Young Kim & NTSB’s Ted Lopatkiewicz, 2009).

6

Rubenfien:

Leo Rubenfien,

Wounded Cities

, Göttingen, Germany: Steidl, 2008, 32–;

7

Naudet:

David Friend,

Watching the World Change

, NY: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2006, 185–;

8

Naudet image:

9/11

, documentary film, Jules & Gedeon Naudet et al., CBS Television, 2002;

9

Allen:

eds.

Der Spiegel

, 48, Chuck Allen profile on

LinkedIn.com

;

10 Gartenberg: WABC (NY), 9/11/01, videotape on www.youtube.com, eds. Der Spiegel, 89;

11 93rd and 99th floors: CR, 285;

12 10,000 gallons: “Visual Evidence, Damage Estimates, and Timeline Analysis, Federal Building and Fire Safety Investigation of the World Trade Center Disaster,” NIST, released April 2005, liii;

13 Fireballs: CR, 285, 292;

14 “The windows”/“I just didn’t”: Friend, 188, Naudet documentary, Jim Dwyer & Kevin Flynn, 102 Minutes, NY: Times Books, 2005, 280;

15 milling around: Brian Jenkins and Frances Edward-Winslow, “Saving City Lifelines: Lessons Learned in the 9/11 Terrorist Attacks,” Mineta Transportation Institute report, 9/03, 11;

16 1,344 souls: NYT, 1/15/04;

17 stairways blocked: CR, 285;

18 Meehan: Dwyer & Flynn, 36, NYT, 9/25/01, www.damianmeehan.org (family website);

19 San Pio Resta: Bernstein, 177;

20 Richards: The Independent (U.K.), 9/24/01, Village Voice, 6/6/02, Art News, 11/01;

21 Fred Alger: NY Sun, 9/11/06;

22 Marsh: Insurance Journal, 9/6/04;

23 “Oh, my God!”: Dwyer & Flynn, 14;

24 remains: ibid., 20;

25 658 people: www.cantor.com/public/charities;

26 Wittenstein: eds. Der Spiegel, 51;

27 Rosenblum: Bernstein, 212;

28 van Auken: CNN, 9/13/01;

29 dead staffer: William Langewiesche, American Ground, NY: North Point, 2002, 134;

30 Windows: ibid., 56–;

31 meetings: Dwyer & Flynn, 11;

32 Risk Waters: ibid., 12, Bernstein, 175;

33 Kane: Dwyer & Flynn, 14;

34 calls/Olender/Heeran: ibid., 38–, 138, 127, 277, James Bamford, A Pretext for War, NY: Doubleday, 2004, 21–, Bernstein, 205–, Times Union (Albany), 8/20/06;

35 Wortley: Dwyer & Flynn, 130;

36 two helicopters: CR, 291–;

37 blocked: Thomas Kean & Lee Hamilton, Without Precedent, NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006, 220, “Crisis Management,” Staff Statement 14, CO, Dwyer & Flynn, 126–41–;

38 cut: MFR 03003644, 7/21/03, CF;

39 “Be advised”: Dwyer & Flynn, 58;

40 “We got jumpers”/too shocking: Friend, 188, 128–, Esquire, 9/03.

41 Reiss: Dwyer & Flynn, 18 & cf. 136–;

42 Naudet: 9/11, documentary;

43 clutching briefcase/skirt: Economist, 5/6/06;

44 burning shirt: Dwyer & Flynn, 32;

45 groups/paratroopers: Friend, 134, int. of Jason Charles, TF, 1/23/02, New Yorker, 9/24/01;

46 Smiouskas: Dwyer & Flynn, 137;

47 “As the debris”: int. Kevin McCabe, TF, 12/13/01;

48 “looked like”: int. Derek Brogan, TF, 12/28/01;

49 “We started”: Bernstein, 5.

50 “Christ!”: “Why No Rooftop Rescues on September 11?,” ABC News, 11/8/01.

CHAPTER 3

1

“We have

some planes”:

ATCR-AA11, 7–.

2

Zalewski/colleagues:

MFR 04016801, 9/22/03, CR, 6. On the second transmission, at 8:24

A.M.

,

the hijacker said: “Nobody move. Everything will be okay. If you try to make any moves you’ll endanger yourself and the airplane. Just stay quiet.” There would also be a third transmission. At 8:33, the hijacker said: “Nobody move, please. We are going back to the airport. Don’t try to make any stupid moves.” Contrary to the notion that this was an inadvertent blunder by the American 11 hijacker, Commission staff member Miles Kara ventures the thought that the transmission was deliberate—a way of letting his accomplice aboard United 175, who could listen in to radio traffic on cabin channel 9, know that the operation had begun. (MFR 04016801, 9/22/03, corr. Miles Kara, 2011.)

3

Horrocks:

www.michaelroberthorrocks.com

;

4

Saracini:

NYT

, 12/31/01;

5

attendants:

CR, 454n41,

www.afanet.org

,

www.airlineride.org

;

6

usual mix:

FBI 302, 10/01/01, “FBI 302s, Arestegui,” B10, T7, CF, Bernstein, 180,

INN.com

, 2/1/08,

The Sun

(Ireland), 9/11/06,

Northeastern University Voice

, 12/11/01;

7

Arabs First or Business:

UA175 manifests, “Flight 175 Misc. Manifest—Check in—Boarding,” B17, T7, CF & Exhibit P200018,

U.S. v. Zacarias Moussaoui

, Cr. No. 01-455-A, U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of VA;

8

boarding card:

FBI 302 re int. of [name redacted], 9/12/01, “Flight 175 Info.,” B16, T7, CF;

9

buy ticket:

FBI 302 re Gail Jawahir, 9/21/01, INTELWIRE;

10 in line: FBI 302 re Mike Castro, 9/15/01, “302s of Interest Flight 175,” B17, T7, CF;

11 Flight 175 course/We figured/suspicious: “Flight Path Study—UA Flight 175,” NTSB, 2/19/02, MFR 04016823, 10/1/03. As noted above, none of the hijacker transmissions from Flight 11 heard by ground control included these precise words;

12 Channel 9: Time, 9/14/01, PRWeek, 3/10/08 & see Farmer, 124, 143;

13 Allentown: MFR 04016828, 10/1/03;

14 Policastro: MFR 04017221, 11/21/03, MFR 04017218, 11/21/03;

15 Hanson: FBI 302 re Lee Hanson, 9/11/01, “FBI 302—Mace and Flight,” B11, T7, CF, Bernstein, 7;

16 “We might”: MFR 04016823, 10/1/03, MFR 04016828, 10/1/03, “Flight Path Study—UA Flight 175,” NTSB, 2/19/02, map;

17 8:58: FBI 302 re [name redacted], 9/28/01, INTELWIRE, NY Daily News, 3/9/04, but see CR, 8;

18 Sweeney: Hyannis News, 9/13/01, Metrowest Daily News, 9/18/01, WP, 9/14/01;

19 Peter Hanson 2nd call: FBI 302 of Lee Hanson, 9/11/01, “FBI 302—Mace and Flight,” B11, T7, CF;

20 “planes, as in plural”: Position 15, Parts 2 & 3, “ATCSCC Tape Transcript,” B1, T8, CF, CR, 23, 460n131;

21 “He’s going in”: WP, 9/17/01;

22 Statue of Liberty: Peter Lance, 1000 Years for Revenge, NY: Regan, 2003, 12;

23 rocked: Bamford, Pretext, 28.

24 Mosiello: int. Steven Mosiello, TF, 10/23/01. Mosiello was one of 503 firefighters, paramedics, and emergency medical technicians who contributed oral history interviews after 9/11. The interviews were released by city authorities—and transcripts were published by The New York Times as “World Trade Center Task Force” interviews—in 2005. They will be cited frequently—sourced as “TF”—in the chapters that follow (NYT, 8/12/08).

25 O’Clery: Conor O’Clery, May You Live in Interesting Times, Dublin: Poolbeg, 2009, 4;

26 Praimnath: NYT, 5/26/02, Staff Statement 13, CO, Dwyer & Flynn, 92;

27 Clark: “A Survivor’s Story,” transcript, PBS Nova, Bernstein, 222, CR, 293, CTV News (Canada), 9/6/02, CNN, 9/9/02;

28 Many others: “Final Report on the Collapse of the World Trade Center,” NCSTAR 1, NIST, 23,41.

CHAPTER 4

1

CNN break:

transcript, 09/11/01,

www.transcripts.cnn.com

, Bamford,

Pretext

, 16;

2

Sawyer/Gibson:

transcript, “ABC News Special Report: Planes Crash into World Trade Center,” 09/11/01, & tape on

www.youtube.com

;

3

“stupidity”:

“Five Years Later: Media Recollections of 9/11,” 9/11/06, citing Dorian Benkoil,

www.mediabistro.com

;

4

pilot drunk:

Dwyer & Flynn, 86;

5

Hayden:

James Bamford,

The Shadow Factory

, NY: Doubleday, 2008, 86.

6

Tenet:

Bob Woodward,

Bush at War

, NY: Simon & Schuster, 2002, 3–. Tenet reversed the sequence of the attacks in his book, inaccurately indicating that the first plane crashed into the South Tower of the Trade Center, the second into the North Tower. What he meant, though, becomes clear as one reads on. (George Tenet with Bill Harlow,

At the Center of the Storm

, NY: HarperCollins, 2007, 161–).

7

Rumsfeld:

int., Larry King show, CNN, 12/6/01, & testimony, 5/23/04,

www.defenselink.mil

, notes of int. Rumsfeld, B7, T2, CF;

8

Clarke:

Richard Clarke,

Against All Enemies

, NY: Free Press, 2004, 1;

9

Cheney:

ibid., 2,

Meet the Press

, NBC, 9/16/01,

WSJ

, 8/15/07;

10 Rice: Newsweek, 12/31/01.

11 Bush in Sarasota: Sarasota Magazine, 11/01. In the early hours of the morning of September 11, a police report shows, a Sudanese man had contacted Sarasota police to say he feared an associate and two companions then visiting Sarasota might pose a threat to the President—who was staying at the Colony resort hotel on nearby Longboat Key. The associate, it was later reported, had links to the Sudanese People’s Liberation Army. Officers and Secret Service agents went to an address on 32nd Street in Sarasota, a law enforcement source told the authors, and found eleven Arab men up and about—“apparently at morning prayer.” One of the men had a card for a resort not far from the President’s—the Longboat Key Club. The men were questioned, held until the President had left, then released. There was nothing to indicate they were linked to the 9/11 plotters, the source told the authors. There appears to be no substance to other reports of threats to the President at Longboat Key (Incident Report, Sarasota Police Dept., 4:07 A.M., 9/11/01, obtained by authors, conv. Monica Yadav, ABC 7 [affiliate], int. Sheriff’s Dept. source, ints. Carroll Mooneyhan, Murf Klauber, Katy Moulton).

12 Draper: Albuquerque Tribune, 9/10/02;

13 Morell: Tenet, 165–.

14 President first learned: At 9:17 that morning, in a conversation live with presenter Peter Jennings, reporter John Cochran stated from Sarasota that as Bush “got out of his hotel suite this morning, was about to leave, reporters saw the White House chief of staff, Andy Card, whisper into his ear. The reporter said to the President, ‘Do you know what’s going on in New York?’ He said he did, and he said he will have something about it later. His first event is [in] about half an hour at an elementary school in Sarasota.” This report has been taken to indicate that President Bush was already aware of the first impact on the Trade Center as he left his hotel. This would be impossible, however, as the President reportedly left his hotel at 8:35, some eleven minutes before the crash of American Flight 11. Bush did tell a reporter he would “talk about it later,” but at a later stage, well into his visit to Booker Elementary, after the second airplane had hit and just before 9:17 when Cochran spoke to Peter Jennings. The authors conclude that, in the rush of unfolding events, Cochran conflated disparate events—perhaps not reporting all of them firsthand (Cochran: “ABC News Special Report: Planes Crash into World Trade Center,” transcript, 9/11/01 & tape on www.youtube.com; 8:35 at hotel: WP, 1/27/02; “talk … later”: ABC News, 6/22/04).

15 Loewer: AP, 11/26/01;

16 Card: Rep. Adam Putnam in GW Hatchet, 4/8/02;

17 “The first report”: Washington Times, 10/7/02;

18 “I thought”: CBS, 9/10/03;

19 “We’re going”: AP, 8/19/02.

20 three alarms: Dwyer & Flynn, 47–;

21 first responders: Staff Statement 13, 14, CO;

22 “twenty-four hours”: int. Richard, World Trade Center Task Force, 10/10/01;

23 Instructions not heard: Staff Statement 13, CO;

24 “no need”: Dwyer & Flynn, 72;

25 9:02: CR, 289;

26 4,000 people: USA Today, 12/20/01;

27 On Channel 5: NYT, 8/27/10;

28 “One plane’s”: Bamford, Pretext, 92, 89;

29 Rumsfeld: Torie Clarke, Lipstick on a Pig, NY: Free Press, 2006, 217–, int. Torie Clarke on WBZ (Boston), 9/16/01, int. Donald Rumsfeld by Alfred Goldberg and Rebecca Cameron, 12/23/02, “Rumsfeld on Intel,” B7, T2, CF;

30 “With all hell”: Tenet, 162;

31 Clarke: Richard Clarke, 1–;

32 “Get ready”: footage of Bush’s visit to Booker Elementary is viewable on www.youtube.com;

33 phonics-based: New Yorker, 7/26/04.

34 picked up readers: The President held his book the correct way up, contrary to persistent claims that he held it upside down. A photograph purporting to show him holding a book upside down—on another occasion—was doctored. In the original AP photograph of that occasion, Bush was clearly holding the book the correct way up (claims: e.g., refs. to the “Pet Goat” story on Google, Jude Cowell blog, 11/19/08, www.judecowell.wordpress.com, Asia Times, 10/30/04; doctored: “Dubya, Willya Turn the Book Over?” 11/16/02, www.wired.com).

35 news coverage: Televisions were available at the school. President Bush would be excoriated, later, for appearing to claim—in Florida in December 2001 and subsequently—that he had seen TV coverage of the first plane hitting the Trade Center. What he said in December was: “And I was sitting outside the classroom waiting to go in [authors’ italics], and I saw an airplane hit the tower—the television was obviously on, and I used to fly myself, and I said, ‘There’s one terrible pilot.’ ” Bush was in error in saying that he saw one of the strikes on TV before entering the classroom. There was no live footage of the first strike on the Trade Center. The footage of Flight 11’s impact, shot by documentary filmmaker Jules Naudet, was on video and not shown until much later. Bush, moreover, would be in the classroom with the schoolchildren—not watching television—when the TV showed live pictures of the second plane flying into the Trade Center. The footage of the second strike, however, was shown again and again in the minutes and hours that followed. What Bush recalled having seen on TV at the school was surely one of the reruns, transmitted after he had left the classroom. A photograph taken at the school features Bush standing near a TV screen—one that appears to show smoke billowing from the Trade Center. Given the tumultuous events that followed on September 11 and later, and given the President’s infamous propensity to muddle his utterances, there is no reason to attach significance to his error in saying he saw one of the strikes on television before entering the classroom (there were TVs: Summers tour of school, int. Dwana Washington; “And I was sitting”: interview George Bush, 12/04/01, www.whitehouse.gov; much later: Paul Thompson, The Terror Timeline, NY: Regan, 2004, 388, & see Friend, 187; photo: AP).

36 Marine: Sarasota Herald-Tribune, 9/10/02.

37 “It took me”/“Captain Loewer says”: AP, 11/26/01.

38 “A second plane”: CR, 38. To calculate the timing of the classroom session and when Bush was informed of the second strike, the authors studied the footage of the session available on YouTube and in the relevant section of Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11, which includes specific time points. The authors’ calculation as to the delay before Bush was told of the second strike—“ninety seconds”—would mean that Card interrupted him somewhat after 9:04—a little earlier than the 9:05 timing cited in the Commission Report. The delay was in any case minimal (Fahrenheit 9/11, Sony Pictures, 2004, CR, 38).

39 Brian Clark: Bernstein, 224–;

40 emergency calls: NY Daily News, 9/30/01.

41 Compton: ABC News, 9/11/02;

42 Daniels: St. Petersburg Times, 9/8/02;

43 Jones-Pinkney/Radkey: AP, 9/11/06;

44 “Can you get”: St. Petersburg Times, 7/4/04;

45 “The Pet Goat”: eds. Siegfried Engelmann & Elaine Bruner, Reading Mastery 2, Storybook 1, NY: McGraw-Hill, 1995;

46 “DON’T SAY”: Washington Times, 10/7/02.

47 Gartenberg/Puma: WABC (NY), 9/11/01, eds. Der Spiegel, 85–, 212–.

48 Flight 77: Farmer, 160–, 186, “Air Traffic Control Recording,” NTSB, 12/21/01, CR, 8–, 24–;

49 “Whose plane”: MFR 04017175, 11/20/03, CF;

50 Ballinger/Boston warned: Staff Report, “The Four Flights and Civil Aviation Security,” 8/26/04, CF, CR, 455n67;

51 Command Center failed: ibid.;

52 Boston advised/NY issued: CR, 23, “Staff Report”;

53 “Beware”: CR, 11. One such message went to Flight 175, which, still unknown to Ballinger, had already crashed;

54 4,546: Pamela Freni, Ground Stop, NY: iUniverse, 2003, 59.

55 May call: Las Vegas to Dallas, 9/12/01, Dallas to Las Vegas, 9/11/01, Dallas to Dallas, 9/11/01, “Misc. Comms from 4 Flights,” B13, T7, CF;

56 mother got through: “Through My Eyes,” by Toni Knisley, submission for National September 11 Memorial & Museum, http://ns11makehistory.appspot.com, MFR 04017206, 11/19/03;

57 some wondered: Farmer, 162;

58 videoconference: CR, 36;

59 “I need”: Stephen Hayes, Cheney, NY: HarperCollins, 2007, 331–;

60 “The Cabinet”: Barton Gellman, Angler, London: Allen Lane, 114.

61 “very aware”: Newsweek, 12/3/01;

62 Cheney/Rice: CR, 39, 463n204, St. Petersburg Times, 9/8/02.

CHAPTER 5

1

Olson calls:

FBI 302 of Lori Keyton, 9/14/01, “Flight Call Notes and 302s,” B13, T7, CF, FBI 302 of Ted Olson, 9/11/01, INTELWIRE, int. Ted Olson on

Larry King Weekend

, CNN, 1/6/02, Farmer, 163;

2

undetected:

Staff Monograph, “The Four Flights and Civil Aviation Security,” 8/26/04, CF;

3

speeding east/notified Reagan/Secret Service:

Flight 77 map and timeline, “Timelines 9-11, 1 of 2,” B20, T7, CF.

4

Ladies and gentlemen:

AP, 9/11/01;

5

“We’re under”:

Clear the Skies

, BBC documentary, 9/1/02.

6

“We’ve got”:

Alfred Goldberg et al.,

Pentagon 9/11

, Washington, D.C.: Office of the Secretary of Defense, 2007, 13;

7

agents acted:

CR, 39–, 464n209, Gellman, 114–, int. of Dick Cheney on

Meet the Press

, NBC, 9/16/01. Questions have been raised about the timing of Cheney’s move from his office to the underground shelter—to be reported in Ch. 13.

8

P-56/O’Brien:

Spencer, 145–;

9

horrified controllers:

ibid., 158,

USA Today

, 8/11/02;

10 fire engine crew: “Arlington County After-Action Report,” www.co.arlington.va.us/fire/edu/about/pdf/after_report.pdf, Annex A, A-4;

11 policeman: Goldberg et al., 13;

12 priest: Penny Schoner, “Analysis of Eyewitness Statements on 9/11, American Airlines Flight 77 Crash into the Pentagon,” www.ratical.org, pt. 8;

13 Anderson/​Benedetto/​Riskus: ibid., pts. 13, 18, 3;

14 “I looked out”: “Personal Experience at the Pentagon on September 11, 2001,” by Penny Elgas, Smithsonian Institution.

15 Jester: Goldberg et al., 151–;

16 Boger: ibid., 27, 64–;

17 Others heard: ibid., 137, 134;

18 fuel/mph/had struck: ibid., 16–;

19 “simply melt”: statement of Penny Elgas, http://americanhistory.si.edu.

20 “I saw”: The source of this quote is blogger Rebecca Gordon, a resident of Virginia, writing as “Skarlet” on www.punkprincess.com (corr. Rebecca Gordon, 2009, column at Gordon’s blog www.meanlouise.com).

21 “I expected”: Christopher Hilton, The Women’s War, Stroud, U.K.: History Press, 2003;

22 impact: Goldberg et al., 17;

23 dead/injured: ibid., 23–, 49, 117–, 123;

24 Morrison/​Cruz/​Kurtz/​Moody/​Gallop: ibid., 28–;

25 Marines: ibid., 53–;

26 firefighters: ibid., 64–, 78–, 93–.

27 CIA briefer/room shaken: interview of Donald Rumsfeld by Alfred Goldberg & Rebecca Cameron, “Rumsfeld on Intel,” B7, T2, CF;

28 left office/“it was dark”: Andrew Cockburn, Rumsfeld, NY: Scribner, 2007, 1–;

29 “hundreds”: int. of Rumsfeld;

30 “people lying”: transcript of Rumsfeld int. for Parade magazine, 10/12/01, www.defenselink.mil & see Donald Rumsfeld, Known and Unknown, NY: Sentinel, 2011, 336–;

31 examined/gurney: Cockburn, 2;

32 photographed: Goldberg et al., photo section 82–;

33 “suit jacket”: Torie Clarke, 221. Victoria “Torie” Clarke, whose timing of 10:15 we have used, took notes of events that day. Rumsfeld himself believed he was back inside the Pentagon from the crash site “shortly before or after 10:00,” and then used the phone before proceeding to the Executive Support Center (took notes: int. of Rumsfeld; “shortly before or after”: testimony of Donald Rumsfeld, 3/23/04, CO).

34 news reached/escort to advise: CR, 39, 463n206;

35 President hurried: Bamford, Pretext, 62;

36 “Sounds like”: CR, 39;

37 “They were taxiing”: int. law enforcement officer, now member of Joint Terrorism Task Force, who asked not to be identified;

38 “like a rocket”: CBS News, 9/10/03;

39 northeast/west: corr. Miles Kara, 2011, Stephen Hayes, 341, St. Petersburg Times, 7/4/04;

40 Instead of returning: CR, 39, 325.

CHAPTER 6

1

Melodie/Leroy Homer:

int. of Melodie Homer on

American Morning

, CNN, 9/11/06, CR, 11, 456n70, FBI 302 of Tara Campbell, “FBI 302s ACARS,” B11, T7, CF;

2

Dahl nonplussed:

CR, 11, 456n70.

3

“Mayday!”/“Ladies and gentlemen”:

“Air Traffic Control Recording,” NTSB, 12/21/01. The hijackers’ transmission is rendered with minor variations—though essentially the same—in the 9/11 Commission Report, the NTSB’s “Air Traffic Control Recording,” and the transcript of the Cockpit Voice Recorder prepared for the trial of Zacarias Moussaoui in 2006. We have used the latter (CR, 12, “Air Traffic Control Recording,” Government Exhibit P200056T 01-455-A [ID], “Transcript of the Flight Voice Recorder for UA Flight 93, Commission Copy,” B17, T7, CF).

4

panting:

Jere Longman,

Among the Heroes

, NY: Perennial, 2003, 70, 83;

5

Some investigators:

CR, 12.

6

Recorder survived:

Every commercial aircraft is required to carry two black boxes that record data about each flight—a Cockpit Voice Recorder (CVR) and a Flight Data Recorder (FDR). Skeptics have raised questions as to the whereabouts of the recorders that were aboard the four flights that crashed on 9/11. Both of Flight 93’s recorders were recovered in readable condition. The CVR for Flight 93 ran on a loop, constantly recording over itself, represented by the thirty-one surviving minutes of sound that we have from inside the cockpit.

The recorders from Flight 77 were found, but only the FDR contained usable data—its CVR was too badly burned to be decipherable.

Both the NTSB and the FBI have said that none of the four recorders from Flights 11 and 175 was located during the cleanup at Ground Zero. A 2003 book reported a claim by former firefighter Nicholas DeMasi to have found three of the four black boxes at Ground Zero during the recovery operation. His account of having found the boxes was corroborated by Mike Bellone, who also worked on the recovery operation. Something that NTSB spokesman Ted Lopatkiewicz told the authors may explain the DeMasi claim. The agency sent several dummy black boxes to Ground Zero, he recalled, specimens to help nonexpert volunteers in the hunt for the real ones. It may be the dummy boxes that DeMasi described (boxes general/re four flights: “Cockpit Voice Recorders & Flight Data Recorders,”

www.ntsb.gov

, CR, 456n76, corr. Ted Lopatkiewicz, 2009; DeMasi: Gail Swanson,

Behind the Scenes at Ground Zero

, NY: TRAC Team, 2003, 108–; Bellone:

CounterPunch

, 12/19/05,

NYDN

, 9/28/05,

NY Post

, 4/5/04, “Black Box Cover-Up,” 12/12/04,

www.AmericanFreePress.net

; FBI/NTSB denied:

CounterPunch

, 12/19/05).

7

partial record:

The authors have drawn on the transcript as released in 2009;

8

Welsh:

CR, 455n62,

NYT

, 3/27/02,

www.unitedheroes.com

;

9

Green:

CR, 455n62.

10 cockpit key/coded knock: Longman, 6. Accounts vary as to whether United attendants carried keys. The FBI was told that “some flight attendants used to carry the cockpit key on their security badge neck chains.” Jere Longman, a New York Times reporter who has written an excellent book on the Flight 93 hijacking, suggests that attendants did not carry keys (FBI 302 of [name redacted], 12/19/01, “FBI 302s Arestegui,” B10, T7, CF, Longman, 6).

11 forty-nine/tough, etc.: ibid., 25–, www.flightattendants.org, Post-Gazette (Pittsburgh), 10/28/01;

12 Green doubled: ibid.;

13 Basmala: “An Exegesis of the Basmala,” http://muslimmatters.org, “Bismillah,” defined at http://wahiduddin.net.

14 voice not heard again: The 9/11 Commission concluded that the voice recorder data indicated that a flight attendant was “killed or otherwise silenced.” United Airlines officials would later tell Deborah Welsh’s husband, Patrick, that an attendant was stabbed early in the hijacking, implying that the victim was his wife (CR, 12, NYT, 3/27/02).

15 “We are going back”: As before, the terrorist’s words were heard not as intended by the passengers but by ground control and by other aircraft.

16 Bradshaw/Starfix: MFR re Richard Belme, 11/21/03, “DOJ Doc. Request 35,” B12, T7, CF, MFR 04020029, 5/13/04, MFR 04017218, 11/21/03, “Ref. Lead Control No. SFA62,” FBI int. of [name redacted], 9/11/01, INTELWIRE, FBI 302s of Richard Belme, Ray Kime, & Andrew Lubkemann, 9/11/01, “Key 302s,” B19, T7, CF. Starfix was the same United facility that had earlier taken a call from an attendant on hijacked Flight 175—see p. 28.

17 “knives were”: Timeline compiled by Joe Vickers, “Timelines 9-11, 2 of 2,” B20, T7, CF.

18 “lying on the floor”: This information derives from accounts of the phone call made from the plane by passenger Todd Beamer, who from 9:43 used a seatback phone to hold a long conversation with Verizon supervisor Lisa Jefferson. Jefferson said afterward that Beamer was being passed information by a flight attendant whose voice sounded “African-American.” Of the two African-American flight attendants on Flight 93, Wanda Green and CeeCee Lyles, the attendant who spoke to Beamer is more likely to have been Lyles—who worked to the rear of the plane (MFR 04020031, 5/11/04, FBI 302 of [name redacted], 9/22/01, INTELWIRE, Lisa Jefferson and Felicia Middlebrooks, Called, Chicago: Northfield, 2006, 36, recording of conversation, 5/10/04, “Flight #93 Calls—Todd Beamer,” B12, T7, CF).

19 Sliney first day: USA Today, 8/12/02;

20 Delta flight: Spencer, 167, MFR 04017314m, 10/2/03, CR, 10, 455n68, 28;

21 bomb/“ground stop”: CR, 25, 28.

22 “Order everyone”: USA Today, 8/12/02. There has been controversy over the origin of this order. Secretary of Transportation Norman Mineta, testifying later to a congressional committee, said he “immediately called the FAA, told them to bring all the planes down.… [It] was the right thing to do.” Bob Woodward and Dan Balz, writing in The Washington Post, attributed the decision to land all planes to Mineta. The book Out of the Blue, by The New York Times’s Richard Bernstein, states that the order was issued by FAA administrator Jane Garvey. Joshua Green, for Slate, reported that the decision was in fact taken by the FAA’s acting deputy administrator, Monte Belger. The 9/11 Commission credited Sliney, citing the Command Center traffic transcript. In an interview with the authors, FAA spokeswoman Laura Brown emphasized that the decision was collaborative—taken not only by Ben Sliney but also by facility manager Linda Schuessler and other senior staff at the Command Center. Schuessler said as much in a 2001 interview (testimony of Norman Mineta, 5/23/03, CO, WP, 1/27/02, Bernstein, 188, Slate, 4/1/02, CR, 29, 461n165, int. Laura Brown, Aviation Week & Space Technology, 12/17/01, see also Freni, 65, testimony of Monte Belger and Ben Sliney, 6/17/04, CO, MFR 04018154, 4/20/04, MFR 04017327, 7/22/03).