Fall and Rise: The Story of 9/11. MItchell Zuckoff
as the Planes Operation, the plot was reportedly the brainchild of a longtime terrorist named Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who’d met bin Laden in the 1980s. Mohammed admired the murderous ambitions of his nephew Ramzi Yousef, who carried out the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. After Yousef’s 1995 arrest in Pakistan, as the terrorist was flown by helicopter over Manhattan, a senior FBI agent lifted Yousef’s blindfold and pointed out the World Trade Center’s Twin Towers, aglow in the dark. The agent taunted his prisoner: “Look down there. They’re still standing.” Yousef replied: “They wouldn’t be if I had enough money and explosives.”
Al-Qaeda’s Planes Operation sought to pick up where Yousef left off and to go much further. The plot had several iterations during its years of planning, but as envisioned by Khalid Sheikh Mohammed at least as far back as 1996, jihadists would hijack ten planes and use them to attack targets on the East and West Coasts of the United States. Bin Laden eventually rejected the idea as too complex and unwieldy. He wanted a combination of high impact and high likelihood of success. In a scaled-down version, approved by bin Laden in mid-1999, the plot intended to fulfill the threat of his 1998 fatwa against the United States and its people, and to inspire others to similar action, by striking key symbols of American political, military, and financial might.
Soon after meeting Atta, bin Laden personally chose him as the mission’s tactical commander and provided him with a preliminary list of approved targets. Bin Laden sent the group back to Hamburg with instructions about what to do next. To avoid attracting attention and to appear less radical, Atta shaved his beard, wore Western clothing, and avoided extremist mosques. Next, in March 2000, he emailed thirty-one flight schools in the United States to ask about the costs of training and living accommodations, all of which would secretly be covered by wire transfers from al-Qaeda. Before they applied for visas to the United States, Atta, Shehhi, and Jarrah each claimed that he had lost his passport; their replacements eliminated evidence of potentially suspicious trips to Pakistan and Afghanistan. By late May 2000, all three men had new passports and tourist visas. By late summer they were studying in Florida to be pilots, with Atta and Shehhi at one flight school and Jarrah at another.
Meanwhile, both before and after the Hamburg group began flight school, sixteen other men who’d also pledged their lives to bin Laden and al-Qaeda entered the United States to play roles chosen for them in the Planes Operation. One, a twenty-nine-year-old Saudi named Hani Hanjour, had studied in the United States on and off for nearly a decade and had obtained a commercial pilot certificate in April 1999. While in Arizona, Hanjour fell in with a group of extremists, and by 2000 he was an al-Qaeda recruit in Afghanistan, where his flying and language skills, plus his firsthand knowledge of the United States, made him an ideal candidate in bin Laden’s eyes to join the Planes Operation as a fourth pilot.
Thirteen of the others were between twenty and twenty-eight years old, all from Saudi Arabia except for one, who hailed from the United Arab Emirates. A few had spent time in college, but most lacked higher education, jobs, or prospects. All but one were unmarried. Like the Hamburg group, they’d joined al-Qaeda originally intending to fight in Chechnya. Bin Laden handpicked them for the plot and asked them to swear loyalty for a suicide operation. Although they weren’t especially imposing, most no taller than five foot seven, he wanted them to serve as “muscle” for the men who were training to be pilots. Most returned home to Saudi Arabia to obtain U.S. visas, then returned to Afghanistan for training in close-quarters combat and knife killing skills. They began to arrive in the United States in April 2001, keeping to themselves and generally avoiding trouble.
The other two “muscle” group members originally were supposed to participate in Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s ten-plane plot. Experienced jihadists who’d fought together in Bosnia, Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Mihdhar arrived in California on six-month tourist visas in January 2000, even before the Hamburg group began pilot training. The U.S. intelligence community identified Mihdhar as a member of al-Qaeda before he landed in the United States, and Hazmi had been described as a bin Laden associate. Yet neither was on a terrorist watchlist available to border agents. By contrast, other countries had both Mihdhar and Hazmi on watchlists. Once the two men reached the United States, the CIA withheld from the FBI crucial information about them and their movements. Compounded by what a later investigation would call “individual and systemic failings” by the FBI, the result was a series of missed opportunities.
Once in the United States, the two natives of Mecca, Saudi Arabia, insinuated themselves into the Muslim community of San Diego and received help from fellow Saudis. Originally viewed by bin Laden as potential pilots, neither Mihdhar nor Hazmi had the necessary English language skills. Aptitude and intelligence might have been lacking, too—their flight training stalled after they told an instructor they wanted to learn how to fly a plane but showed no interest in takeoffs or landings.
During the spring and summer of 2001, as part of their final preparations, Atta, Jarrah, and Shehhi took cross-country flights to observe the workings of crews and to determine whether they might smuggle weapons on board. Atta flew to Spain to brief an al-Qaeda planner about the plot, then returned to the United States. Jarrah and Hanjour sought training on how to fly a low-altitude pathway along the Hudson River that passed New York landmarks including the World Trade Center, and they rented small planes for practice flights. “Muscle” group members busied themselves training at gyms.
As months passed, bin Laden became frustrated, pressuring Khalid Sheikh Mohammed to put the Planes Operation into motion. Bin Laden wanted it to be executed in May 2001, marking seven months since the bombing of the USS Cole, and then in June or July, when Israeli opposition party leader Ariel Sharon visited the White House. Each date passed as Atta hesitated to commit on timing until he felt absolutely ready.
Finally, in late August, Atta picked a day just weeks away: the second Tuesday in September. It’s a mystery whether he made a simple logistical choice, based on his expectation that it would be a light travel day, which meant fewer passengers to deal with; whether he saw propaganda value in a date that matched America’s 9-1-1 emergency telephone system; or whether he sought historical revenge by choosing the month and day of the start of the 1683 Battle of Vienna, a humiliating defeat for the Ottoman Empire against Christian forces that began a centuries-long decline of Islamic influence.
Whatever the trigger, Atta and his eighteen associates started buying flight tickets, some by using computers in public libraries. They kept enough money for expenses, then returned much of the rest to al-Qaeda operatives in the United Arab Emirates. All told, the entire plan cost less than half a million dollars.
The members of the Planes Operation broke into three groups of five and one group of four, each led by one of the four men who’d trained as a pilot: Atta, Shehhi, Hanjour, and Jarrah. By the second week of September, all had rented rooms at hotels or motels in or near Boston, Newark, and Washington, D.C.
Atta and the other pilots worked on final details, while some of the others focused on earthly desires. In Boston, “muscle” members Abdulaziz al-Omari and Satam al-Suqami paid for the company of two women from the Sweet Temptations escort service. One spent a hundred dollars on a prostitute two more times in a single day. In New Jersey, another paid twenty dollars for a private dance in the VIP room of a go-go bar, while another contented himself with a pornographic video.
On September 10, when everything and everyone was almost in place, Ziad Jarrah stepped outside a Days Inn in Newark, New Jersey, where he and three “muscle” men had checked in the previous day.
Jarrah’s thoughts wandered to his girlfriend in Germany, a medical student of Turkish heritage named Aysel Sengün. They’d dated for five years, they emailed or spoke by phone almost daily, and she’d visited him in Florida eight months earlier. Jarrah showed off his new skills as a pilot, flying her in a single-engine plane to Key West. They’d discussed a future together, but Sengün’s parents insisted that she marry a fellow Turk. When Jarrah asked for her father’s blessing, the elder Sengün threw Jarrah out of his house. They continued their relationship in secret, and weeks earlier, Jarrah had flown to Germany to see her. Over their years together, she’d watched as the happy-go-lucky man she met grew a beard and criticized her for being insufficiently devout, but more recently Sengün had been seeing what she thought was a return to his easygoing ways. She had no idea