TEN

The Cell in Hamburg

People who knew Mohammed Atta when he began to study engineering at the Technical University of Hamburg in 1992 recall a young man similar to the younger one who studied architecture and engineering in Cairo. He was intense, polite, neatly dressed, distant, narrow in his interests. One lecturer at the university who knew Atta, Alptekin Ozdemir, a Turk who advises foreign students, told a reporter he saw no signs that Atta was “a fanatical Muslim,” at least not in his early German period.

Still, being an alien in an alien country does seem to have induced Atta to be more religiously observant than he had been before. In Cairo, he said his daily prayers, but nobody remembers him going to the mosque. In Hamburg he went often. He drank no alcohol and ate no pork. He checked the ingredients of everything, even medicines, to be sure there wasn’t anything in them that violated the Islamic dietary laws. He scraped icing off of cakes for fear that lard might be an ingredient. He argued about religion with his landlady, who was one of the two people from Germany that his father had had to dinner in Cairo, telling her that the Koran was the only truth.1

Atta at first lived rent-free with his father’s friends, but he moved out after a year and then stayed in university housing for the next several years where, contrary to the impression others had of him as neat and meticulous, his roommates found him slovenly, closed in, and inconsiderate. “We never shared food,” one of them said. “We shared dishes. Mostly, he messed them up and I cleaned them.”2 Atta was cool to the point of hostility to women, including the girlfriend of one of his roommates, who taunted him by putting a reproduction of a Degas nude above the toilet in the bathroom. After three months, Atta asked that she remove it. He was ascetic, uninterested in the pleasures of life, even the small ones, like eating well. He used to prepare a meal consisting of a large mound of boiled and mashed potatoes. He would eat some of it, put the rest in the refrigerator, and then, at another meal, eat some more without heating up the dish. He would walk into the common room of the dormitory without acknowledging anybody’s presence, somewhat the way his father used to ignore his neighbors in Cairo. His fellow high school students back home didn’t like him, and neither did his roommates in Hamburg. There was something oblivious about him, something disconnected, indifferent, so filled with the importance of his own thoughts and activities that those who did not share them scarcely existed.

Hamburg itself is a magnificent European port city, stately, discreet, elegant, a place of old commercial money, prestige hotels, churches with mighty spires, opulent shops. It is also a place with plenty to alienate a religiously conservative person like Atta, lots of sex shops and prostitutes (some of them on the same street as the Al Quds Mosque where Atta often went) and an active homosexual life.

When he first arrived in Germany, Atta’s intention was to study at Hamburg University, the city’s most prestigious institution of higher learning, but his application was turned down. This led Atta’s father, who believed that the rejection was due to racism, to send his son money to mount a discrimination lawsuit. But in the end nothing was done and Atta was accepted at the Technical University, which is across the Elbe River in Harburg, an old industrial suburb that most Hamburgers themselves have never visited. It was where the immigrants, Turkish, African, and Arab, lived, not exactly in a world apart but in a world unincorporated into the German mainstream.

It is no secret that Muslims in Germany receive a chilly reception from some local people, “real Germans” as it were, especially “real Germans” caught up in the anxiety that Germany has too many immigrants. It would have been difficult for Atta, one of just a handful of Arab students at the Technical University, which had about five thousand students altogether, to feel at home. The main Muslim immigrant group in Hamburg is Turkish, and the mosques closest to Atta’s campus were dominated by Turks, who were deemed by many of the Arabs in Hamburg as insufficiently devout and too sympathetic to the United States and Israel. Atta prayed sometimes at the Arabic-language Al Tauhid Mosque, which was the back room of a small shop. The imam who preached there, Ahmed Emam, proclaimed that America was an enemy of Islam and a country “unloved in the world.” After September 11, he was one of those who insisted that the hijackings and the World Trade Center attacks had been carried out by the Jews in a plot to frame the Arabs.

Atta’s main academic interest was urban restoration and renewal, especially the restoration and renewal of ancient Muslim cities, and he had a sympathetic teacher in Dittmar Machule, the dean of the faculty of construction engineering who had a strong interest in the Arab world himself. According to Machule, Atta was a good student, “polite, very religious and with a highly developed critical faculty.” Machule had for years supervised an excavation in northern Syria near Aleppo, and in 1994, Atta visited both the excavation and Aleppo itself, a city dating back to the time of Alexander the Great. He was aggrieved at the modern treatment of Aleppo, where the Syrian government had put in new roads through old neighborhoods.

“That was the only thing I ever saw him get emotional about,” a Syrian engineer, Razan Abdel-Wahab, who works in the Aleppo redevelopment project, said. “He was very angry at the destruction of our old heritage.”3

In 1995, Atta went on a pilgrimage to Mecca. He also returned for a time to Cairo to study urban renovation projects being undertaken near the old city gates, Bab al-Nasr and Bab al-Futuh. As in Aleppo, he became upset over the Cairo projects, feeling that they involved little more than tearing down poor neighborhoods to improve the views for tourists.

“It made him angry,” said Ralph Bodenstein, a German student in the program. “He said it was a completely absurd way to develop the city, to make a Disney World out of it.”

One only gets isolated glimpses of Atta in his Hamburg years coming from the few people who had contact with him. He lived an isolated existence—and those really close to him are not given to talking to foreign reporters—so it is almost impossible to trace his mental trajectory in close detail. But the arc of it is clear. Atta gradually became both more religious and more politically outspoken. He nurtured resentment until it blossomed into a dark fury that led him to want to strike a fantastic blow against his presumed enemies, even if it meant giving up his life in the process. In an early sign of this inclination toward self-sacrifice, he used to tell his friend Bodenstein and another German student, Volker Hauth, who was with him in Cairo, that his increasingly religious outlook would keep him from getting a good job in his country when he finished his studies in Germany. Atta already suspected, in other words, that he had forfeited his career prospects for the sake of his convictions, and, along with his career prospects, the possibility of satisfying his demanding father. Maybe sacrificing himself to a cause was a way of getting Atta senior off his back.

Atta returned to Hamburg in 1996, but Machule says that for the better part of 1997 he didn’t see him at all, and some investigators and journalists have speculated that he went to Afghanistan for military training during this period, presumably, like other young Egyptians at that time, getting indoctrinated into the Al Qaeda point of view. In fact, the various reconstructions of Atta’s movements from 1997 to early 2000, the period just before he arrived in the United States to put the September 11 plot in motion, have been inconsistent and inconclusive. The best evidence is that he probably did go to Afghanistan for several weeks, not during 1997 but later, at the end of 1999 and early 2000. In the months just after the September 11 attacks, reports from Germany said that in late 1999, Atta and two other September 11 conspirators, al-Shehhi and Jarrah, claimed that their passports had been lost and applied for new ones. Investigators have speculated that they wanted to get rid of their old passports to conceal suspicious travel—specifically to Afghanistan—and therefore facilitate their entry into the United States.

Before that, in 1996, Atta went on a second pilgrimage to Mecca, and this seems to have been a transforming experience for him. When he returned, he wore the full beard and long tunic of an orthodox Muslim. He petitioned the university for a prayer room and founded an Islamic student group. “Something changed in him,” Ozdemir, the Turkish student adviser, said. And certainly we know, because of what happened on September 11, that Atta became an extremist, a member of an Al Qaeda cell in Hamburg, and, finally, a suicide terrorist. For such a person to take a trip to Afghanistan for training would not have been surprising.

Still, there is no evidence that Atta had any direct contact with Osama bin Laden, or that he went to Afghanistan in 1997. The hypothesis that he “lost” his passport in 1999 in order to conceal evidence of a trip to Afghanistan is not entirely convincing, if only because when an Arab-Afghan went to Afghanistan, it’s not likely that he had his passport stamped in the way passports are stamped when one goes to other countries. The young men who went to join Al Qaeda in Afghanistan went first to Peshawar in Pakistan and were taken across the porous border into Afghanistan by guides. They didn’t walk up to a recognized border post and show their papers to an immigration official. So even if Atta did go to Afghanistan, the only stamp he would have in his passport would be one to Pakistan, which he may have felt would be of enough interest to an American consulate official to deny him a visa. Certainly the “loss” of Atta’s passport—which became known to German authorities because he, al-Shehhi, and Jarrah applied for new German visas—was aimed at concealing something about him—ditto for al-Shehhi and Jarrah, the other two suspected hijackers who were living in Hamburg at the time. The stamps they wanted to hide might have shown travel to Pakistan, but they might also have indicated visits to Iran or to Iraq. As we will see, there is intriguing, though inconclusive, evidence of a link between Atta and Iraqi intelligence.

In any case, Atta may not have been absent from Hamburg for all of 1997. A report in the Los Angeles Times shows that for much of the year, he lived in a redbrick housing project on an island called Wilhelmsburg in the middle of the Elbe River, a decrepit place whose inhabitants are mostly Turkish immigrants. According to Helga Link, a resident of Wilhelmsburg and a neighbor of Atta, he occupied a third-floor walk-up with a group of other Arab men who talked late into the night and then disappeared during the day. The Los Angeles Times also found indications that Atta taught in a series of seminars organized by the group that had earlier financed his study trip to Cairo, and that his schedule would not have allowed him to leave the Hamburg area for longer than a few weeks at a time.4 Regardless, investigators’ leaks to journalists about the supposed Afghanistan travel of Atta and his two confederates in 1997 and of the “lost” passports of late 1999 were superceded by later briefings, according to which Atta and company went to Afghanistan from late 1999 to early 2000. Indeed, investigators, in asserting that all of the members of the Hamburg cell received training in Afghanistan at that later date, even identified the connecting flight that Atta took from Istanbul to Karachi, on his trip from Hamburg to Afghanistan, Turkish Airlines flight number 1662 on November 29, 1999. This account contradicted earlier ones—since the plotters couldn’t have reported their passports lost in Gemany at the end of 1999 if they were still in Afghanistan in early 2000—but the new information was based on intelligence gleaned during the interrogations of Al Qaeda members captured in the post–September 11 military action in Afghanistan. Moreover, it simply makes sense that Atta and the other members of the Hamburg cell would have gone to Afghanistan shortly before they actually embarked on the airplane hijacking plot. Al Qaeda needed to have an up-close look at the men who were going to carry out its most sensational and ambitious jihadist action ever, and the plotters themselves needed both Al Qaeda’s authorization and help—most important in providing the Saudi foot soldiers who were needed to carry out the highjackings—in order to ensure that the plot would be a success.

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Before that, in 1998, according to the neighbors who identified them for the Los Angeles Times, the Arab men who had stayed in Wilhelmsburg suddenly departed, leaving only their mattresses behind, eleven of them. Whether Atta was among these men or not, he almost certainly moved around that time into an apartment in a faded yellow building on a narrow, sloping street called Marienstrasse near the university in Harburg, again sharing the place with other Arab men. Among these was his inseparable companion Marwan al-Shehhi. According to some reports, Ziad Jar-rah also lived on Marienstrasse, though this is not at all certain. There is much stronger evidence on the presence there of two other Arab men, one named Said Bahaji and the other Ramzi Mohammed Abdullah bin al-Shibh.

The men at Marienstrasse were close and they were busy. Their landlord, Thorsten Albrecht, described how the plotters equipped each of the apartment’s three bedrooms with a table and a computer hooked up to high-speed data lines. They paid their rent on time. They dressed, sometimes in Arab robes, sometimes in somewhat outmoded Western clothes, like beige bell-bottoms. A large number of Arab men visited them. All the evidence indicates that this was the headquarters for the early planning of the September 11 plot.

Strangely, despite his slow absorption into terrorism, Atta did not abandon his other activities. Early in 1999, he reappeared in Machule’s office wanting to resume work on his thesis, telling Machule that he had had some family problems and that’s why he had not been at the university for so long. A year or so later, he turned in a 152-page work on Aleppo, which was accepted with honors. Atta had graduated. In 1999 he also returned home to Cairo where he got engaged to a local girl. The parents of his betrothed insisted that their daughter never leave Egypt, so Atta, presumably having promised that he would return to Cairo when his studies were complete, went back to Hamburg with a wedding in his future. In fact, he never did return to Egypt and there never was a wedding, because, quite clearly, something else was brewing in Atta’s life.

The amazing thing is that Atta and some of the others he lived with in the apartment on Marienstrasse in Harburg were, in 1998 and 1999, actually under surveillance by the German police. This part of the story has to do with a slender dark thread that runs from Atta through the African embassy bombings of 1998 to the well-dispersed international Al Qaeda network. One of the Al Qaeda operatives indicted in the embassy bombings was a man named Mamdouh Mahmud Salim, now in prison in the United States. Salim was in Nairobi in the days leading up to the truck bombing of the American embassy there, but he fled a day or so before the actual attack. A month later he turned up in Munich where he was arrested by the German police acting at the behest of the United States. Salim was extradited and, as of this writing, was being held in Manhattan’s Metropolitan Corrections Center awaiting trial in the 1998 attacks. In 2000, he stabbed a prison guard through the eye with a comb, causing permanent severe brain damage.

The German police, examining Salim’s cell phone, found the name and number of one Mamoun Darkazanli, a dapper Syrian businessman living in Hamburg. It turned out that Darkazanli had power of attorney over Salim’s bank account in Germany and helped him buy radio equipment for Al Qaeda in 1995, so he too seemed to have links to the Al Qaeda network. The German police’s interest in Darkazanli, who attended the Al Quds Mosque, led them to be interested in some of the others who also attended that mosque. One of them was Said Bahaji, an electrical engineer and an associate of Darkazanli who was living at 54 Marienstrasse.

The police surveillance of the Atta–al-Shehhi–Bahaji apartment did not last long and did not produce any startling information. But the Darkazanli-Bahaji connection provides not only indirect evidence that Atta himself had been drawn into the Al Qaeda network by early 1998; it also provides some clues about the way Al Qaeda spreads its tentacles. Darkazanli knew Salim who helped to blow up the American embassy in Nairobi; Bahaji knew Darkazanli; Atta lived with Bahaji. After September 11, Darkazanli was interrogated by German police and his apartment was searched, but he was not arrested. Early in September, according to his father-in-law, Bahaji suddenly decided to go to Pakistan to study computers. He left his wife behind in Hamburg and has not been seen or heard from since.

Al-Shibh moved into the Marienstrasse apartment after Bahaji left to get married. Al-Shibh, a Yemeni who also disappeared after September 11, transferred $2,000 from his account in Hamburg to a bank in Florida in August 2000, and he tried at least five times to get a visa for the United States so he could attend flight training, but he was turned down every time. The FBI assumes that al-Shibh had been designated to be one of the hijackers, the twentieth. This claim is substantiated by a videotape found in an Al Qaeda house in Afghanistan after the American military campaign there. It shows five Al Qaeda operatives, al-Shibh among them, taking a vow of martyrdom. Al-Shibh then, unlike Atta, left traces in Afghanistan. The martyrdom videotape proves that he was trained and indoctrinated at an Al Qaeda camp. Like ‘Owhali, the would-be Nairobi suicide bomber, he was asked to make a statement on videotape that would presumably be used in Al Qaeda propaganda later.

This, in turn, is a clue as to how the September 11 plot took shape. There are those who surmise that Al Qaeda operates like a foundation, funding projects that are brought to its attention by groups or individuals eager to carry out an exploit for jihad, but not necessarily originating them or controlling them or perhaps not even knowing exactly what they are. Al-Shibh’s martyrdom videotape indicates the contrary—that he was dispatched from Afghanistan, like ‘Owhali was to Africa before him, already part of a plan and that plan was well-known and approved by Al Qaeda headquarters in Afghanistan.

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The plan to hijack airplanes and to crash them into the most visible symbols of American prestige and power was, in other words, being hatched in both Afghanistan and Hamburg, where three of the hijackers—Atta, al-Shehhi, and Jarrah—lived, along with a would-be additional hijacker, al-Shibh, who made a martyrdom videotape under Al Qaeda supervision. But, obviously, whatever plans were made in Germany had to be carried out in the United States, and the three men all arrived there in the middle of 2000, about fourteen months before the September 11 plot was actually carried out. Atta himself came on a flight from Prague on June 3, 2000. Why Prague? That, as we will see, relates to one of the most intriguing unsolved mysteries of the entire September 11 plot. On May 30, 2000, Atta flew from Germany to Prague, but, because he had failed to get a visa for the Czech Republic, which is required of Egyptian citizens, he was denied entry and forced to fly straight back to Germany. He then did get a Czech visa, took a bus to Prague, spent one night there, and then flew to the United States, arriving in Newark and giving the Lexington Hotel in New York City as his destination, though, in fact, he never showed up there. After September 11, some Czech newspapers said that on his brief visit in 2000, Atta met with an Iraqi intelligence agent named Ahmed Khalil Ibrahim Samir al-Ani, but Czech officials said they had no evidence of a meeting between the two men at that time.

Four days earlier, Atta’s usually inseparable companion Marwan al-Shehhi flew from Munich to Newark. A few weeks later, on June 27, Jar-rah flew from Munich to Atlanta. Clearly, the three men took care not to enter the United States together, or even from the same points of origin or to the same points of entry, though within weeks, all three of them had set up housekeeping in Florida and begun to take flight lessons at two different flight schools.

Atta, al-Shehhi, and Jarrah represent the leaders of three of the hijacking teams. They are presumed to have piloted three of the commandeered planes. The fourth team arrived separately, trained in separate places, and was made up of men who do not seem to have had any contact with Atta, al-Shehhi, and Jarrah before they were all in place in the United States—or, at least, there is no evidence of any earlier contacts. One of the members of that team was Hani Hanjour, who was, the FBI has concluded, the hijacker-pilot of the fourth plane commandeered on September 11. Two other members of that team were Khalid al-Midhar and Salem Alhamzi. All three of them arrived in the United States even before Atta, al-Shehhi, and Jarrah.

Hani Hanjour seems to have come for the first time as early as 1990. His brother, Abdul Hanjour, a wealthy businessman who traveled frequently between Saudi Arabia and Arizona, brought him along one year. He signed up to study English at the University of Arizona’s Center for English as a Second Language, returned home for a few years, and then came back in 1996 for the purpose—what else?—of learning how to fly. A friend of his brother’s, Susan Khalil, who lived in Florida, helped him apply to school, and eventually he ended up at CRM Airline Training near Phoenix.5

Al-Midhar and Alhamzi had more sinister connections. Indeed, of all of the leaders of the September 11 plot, only they had a clear record of previous links to Al Qaeda. In late 1999 or possibly January 2000, both men were in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, where, the local intelligence service later reported to the United States, they attended a meeting of members of bin Laden’s Southeast Asia branch. Since the September 11 attacks, the size and importance of the Southeast Asia group has become evident. But even earlier, there were signs that Muslim terrorists enjoyed support in Southeast Asia. For one, Ramzi Yousef seems to have counted on drawing from Filipino Muslims in his plot to blow up eleven American airlines crossing the Pacific on the same day While there are no clear indications that Yousef associated with bin Laden earlier, American investigators say that by 1995, when he was living in Manila, he was receiving funds from Mohammed Jamal Khalifa, bin Laden’s brother-in-law, who headed a charitable organization in the Philippines.

Al Qaeda seems also to have had cells operating in Indonesia and Malaysia made up of men grouped around radical Muslim clergy in those countries. After September 11, Singapore police arrested thirteen men who, they said, were members of an extensive Al Qaeda network in Asia—rivaling the network in Europe in its extent and ambitions—that was planning to blow up the embassies of the United States, Israel, Britain, and Australia. So the presence of al-Midhar and Alhamzi among these groups at the end of 1999 signals that they too were already part of the terrorist Islamic International. When on October 12, 2000, an Al Qaeda team blew up the USS Cole, an American destroyer anchored in Aden Harbor, Malaysian intelligence identified one of the men involved in that attack as having attended the Kuala Lumpur meeting with al-Midhar and Alhamzi.

That connection would turn out to be important, for it would provoke a manhunt for al-Midhar and Alhamzi in the United States just weeks before September 11. But that came later. For now, the important thing is that by the end of June 2000, the men who would become the leaders of all four of the September 11 hijack teams were already in place. The next months would see them handling a variety of matters, from learning how to fly airplanes to inquiring about crop-dusting planes to getting photo identifications and driver’s licenses, as the plan discussed in Hamburg (and possibly in Afghanistan) was slowly being implemented in the country of the Great Satan itself.