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The Commandos in America

One of the reasons for supposing that Mohammed Atta was the mastermind of the September 11 operation is that soon after arriving in the United States, he and al-Shehhi began receiving substantial sums of money in bank transfers, which he must have parceled out to his coconspirators so they could pay for their expenses. Between June 29 and September 18, 2000, a total of $114,230 was wired to Atta and al-Shehhi in five separate transfers, all of them from a bank in the United Arab Republic to the Sun Trust Bank, where Atta and al-Shehhi had an account.

But Atta had other things to do as well. Most important, he and the other plot leaders had to learn how to fly the airplanes they would commandeer. To do so, they enrolled at American flight schools, in Florida, Arizona, California, and Oklahoma. In May 2000, al-Midhar and Alhamzi—the two who had arrived on the West Coast from Bangkok in January—were settling into life in southern California. Indeed they alone among the hijackers integrated themselves into a local community. They went to the San Diego Islamic Center, the region’s biggest mosque, and there Alhamzi met Abdusattar Shaikh, a retired English professor from San Diego State University and a member of the local police commission. Shaikh rented Alhamzi a room in his house in San Diego’s Lemon Grove neighborhood. He observed that his tenant was devout, spending his spare time reading books on Islam and visiting Islamic web-sites on the Internet, including, it would seem, an electronic marriage bureau. One of Alhamzi’s messages read: “Saudi businessman looking for a bride who would like to live in this country and Saudi Arabia.”1 This seems like a strange thing to do for a man who was part of a martyrdom operation. Maybe Alhamzi just needed to cling to a sense of normal life; maybe he didn’t know at the time that his mission was one in which he would be expected to lose his life. A less likely possibility is that he didn’t yet know that there was going to be a mission. According to Shaikh, Alhamzi got responses from two Egyptian women. It is not known if he answered them.

Soon after they arrived in San Diego, al-Midhar and Alhamzi showed up at a place called Sorbi’s Flying Club near San Diego, saying that they had never flown before and they wanted to learn how to fly Boeings. Their instructor, Fereidoun “Fred” Sorbi, later recounted how he told them that, no, you don’t jump right into Boeings. Instead, he gave them an initial lesson on a single-engine Cessna or Piper Cub, and he remembers that when one of the men was at the controls to effect a landing, the other man prayed loudly.2 They didn’t last long at that school though. Another instructor, Rick Garza, asked them to leave after giving them a few ground lessons and two practice flights.

“They had no idea what they were doing,” he said, adding that the two offered him extra money if he would teach them to fly multiengine planes.3 He didn’t, and there is no record that they received flight training elsewhere.

Hani Hanjour, on the other hand, who was on the same hijacked plane as al-Midhar and Alhamzi, American Airlines flight 77, got a pilot’s license in 1999 after several years of lackadaisical study at several flight schools in Arizona. At the CRM Airline Training Center in Scottsdale he often cut class and never showed much passion, said Paul V. Blair, the center’s controller. Only a month before September 11, he went to a private airport in Maryland to rent a plane there, but he failed his test flight and the rental request was denied. Still, in April 1999 he did get a Federal Aviation Administration license for multiengine planes, and in June 2001 he seemed to be brushing up when he spent time on a simulator at the Sawyer School of Aviation in Phoenix. Most likely, shaky as he was, Hanjour was the pilot-hijacker of flight 77.

Meanwhile, Ziad Jarrah, one of the men who came from Hamburg, was living in a seedy, palm-fringed complex of single-story adobe apartments in Hollywood, Florida. He drove a red Mitsubishi Eclipse, which, according to one neighbor, “stood out.” He told his landlord that he was taking flying lessons, and indeed he was, taking six months of lessons at the Florida Flight Training Center in Venice, Florida, and in July 2001 he earned a certification for single-engine planes.

As for Atta and al-Shehhi, they visited the Airman Flight School in Norman, Oklahoma, soon after they arrived in the United States, but they decided not to study there, going instead to Florida. They trained first at Huffman Aviation, also in Venice, and they lived in a little pink house in Nokomis, a nearby town. They drove a red Pontiac, wore polo shirts and khaki pants, and paid their instructor $10,000 in cash each for four months. Like Jarrah, they got certified in single-engine planes.

“They spoke quite good English,” their instructor, Rudi Dekkers, said. “They were by themselves, not hanging out with other students. Most of our students from other countries go to bars and take their times. They were strange birds.”

They were strange enough, not doing some of the elementary things that you’d think people on a mission like theirs would do, and that created some temporary problems for them. At one flight school, Jones Aviation in Sarasota, their instructor asked them to leave after just three weeks because of what he described as their poor attitudes. Their initial landlord and landlady in Nokomis, Charles and Dru Voss, kicked them out in less time than that, only one week. The complaint was that they left their beds unmade and a lot of water in the bathroom after showering. Mrs. Voss’s annoyance is reminiscent of the complaint of one of Atta’s German roommates, that he was inconsiderate and slovenly. He dirtied the dishes but never washed them. And then there was the weird incident in which Atta and al-Shehhi stalled their rented Piper Warrior on a runway at Miami International Airport. Rather than radio for help and wait for the plane to be towed away, they simply turned off the lights and walked away, leaving the plane where it was.

Flying a single-engine plane is a prerequisite for flying commercial jetliners, but it is not training to do so. To get more advanced training, Atta and al-Shehhi moved in December 2000 to southeast Florida and trained on the jet airline simulator at SimCenter Aviation in Opa-Locka, paying $1,500 apiece and, according to their instructor, Henry George, spending most of their time practicing maneuvers and turns (though they practiced take offs and landings as well). During this time, Atta and al-Shehhi, inseparable as always, lived in several rental apartments in several places, Delray Beach, Coral Springs, and Hollywood. Atta carried a briefcase, Nancy Adams, a neighbor at his Delray Beach home, the Hamlet Country Club, said.

Given what happened on September 11, it seems safe to assume that during their time in Florida and California, all of the leaders of the September 11 plot knew exactly what they were training for, that the plot was already fully formed when they took their aviation lessons. But maybe it wasn’t. There are strange inconsistencies in the trajectory of Atta in particular, events that are difficult to explain—unless, in fact, the exact plot carried out was formed only in the late months of their American sojourn. There are certainly signs that when the men arrived in 2000, they knew they were going to carry out a terrorist assault on the United States, but they might not have known until much later exactly what kind of assault.

In January, Atta went on the first of two trips he made to Spain, spending about four days there and leaving almost no known trace. Presumably he did not go out of an interest to visit the Alhambra before he died; he went because he needed to see somebody in Spain who could help him with his plans to launch an attack in the United States. Spain, as we will see later, was an important European center for Muslim extremists from Egypt and Algeria. In addition, it was a country where considerable fund-raising was done for Al Qaeda by Arab businessmen with European connections, and it is very likely that Atta’s trip to Spain is related to them. In any case, when he came back to Florida, he began making inquiries about crop-dusting planes. In February he asked about crop dusters at the Municipal Airport in Belle Glade, Florida, home of the South Florida Crop Care Company’s hangar. According to James Lester, who cleans and loads crop dusters, Atta asked him how much fuel and chemicals the planes could hold, even asking if he could sit in the cockpit of one of the planes. Later he made at least two inquiries about getting government loans to buy a crop duster.

One such inquiry showed him at his most belligerent and strange. He went to a Department of Agriculture loan officer in Florida named Johnell Bryant and demanded a $650,000 loan to buy a twin-engine crop duster with a very large tank. When Bryant turned him down, she later said on ABC News, he asked her what kept him from slitting her throat and stealing the money out of the safe behind her desk. Then he threw a wad of money on the table, trying to buy an aerial picture of Washington, D.C., that hung in her office. According to Bryant, he even spoke glowingly about Osama bin Laden.

This interest in crop dusters was not short-lived and it was not confined to Atta. In June, Zacarias Moussaoui, a Moroccan-born French citizen living in the United States, downloaded crop-duster information on his computer and asked about starting a crop-dusting company in Oklahoma. Moussaoui, who was arrested in August when the flight school he was attending became suspicious of his interest in flying Boeing jetliners, is believed by prosecutors to have been intended as a substitute hijacker, the missing twentieth man. It will be remembered that a friend of Atta’s in Germany, Ramzi bin al-Shibh, applied several times for visas to the United States but was turned down. Presumably, al-Shibh was part of the original hijacker team and Moussaoui, who took pilot training in Oklahoma, was designated as his replacement. Now he, like Atta, was asking about crop dusters. Could it be that two of the intended hijackers were asking questions about crop dusters out of a casual and unimportant interest? According to J. D. Lee, general manager of Florida Crop Care, Atta was asking about crop dusting until just a few days before September 11.

It is possible that Lee got the date of his last inquiries wrong, since it would seem that Atta would have been far too busy with the final details of the September 11 plan to be looking into crop dusting that late. Still, these inquiries about crops dusters suggest that as of March 2001 or so, Atta was still not sure what sort of attack he would carry out, and one plan he was considering involved the use of crop dusters to spray deadly chemical or biological agents over a densely populated district—perhaps several crop dusters piloted by several terrorists on the same day. He might have killed more than a few thousand people that way.

Atta made at least two, possibly three, trips to Europe after his crop-dusting inquiries, and, given his single-mindedness and the importance of his mission in America, it is difficult to believe that any of these trips was unrelated to the September 11 plot. There are reports that in March 2001, he was in Hamburg with al-Shehhi, and that together they moved out of the Marienstrasse apartment. It is also around that time, after his trip to Florida in any case, that he made his crop-dusting inquiries. And then, on April 8, according to Stanislav Gross, the Czech interior minister, Atta met with the Iraqi intelligence agent, Ahmed Khalil Ibrahim Samir al-Ani, the same man who Czech officials said he did not meet with on his trip to Prague the year before.

Atta, as we have seen, was also in Prague on his way to the United States in June 2000, and there has never been any information to explain that itinerary. And even the announcement, made in a press conference at the highest levels of the Czech government, that Atta met with al-Ani on his second trip to Prague has come to seem unreliable, and certainly unconfirmed by many experts. After Gross’s announcement that a meeting definitely took place, Czech president Vaclav Havel said that there was a 70 percent chance that the two men met during Atta’s April 2001 stay in Prague. Havel did not say how that 70 percent figure was calculated, but there were reports in Prague that al-Ani had a used-car business and met with a dealer from Germany who bore a striking resemblance to Atta, so perhaps Czech intelligence confused the two men. Other Czech officials said that the Mohammed Atta who came to Prague was actually a Pakistani businessman who just happened to have the same name as the Mohammed Atta who was an international terrorist. On the other hand, responding to these doubts about his initial declaration, Czech interior minister Gross issued a statement saying: “BIS guarantees the information, so we stick by that information.”

What, if such a meeting did take place, fourteen weeks before September 11, would it have meant? One possibility is that Atta and al-Ani talked about Atta’s investigation into using crop dusters to mount a terrorist attack on the United States. Certainly all the evidence indicates that Iraq possesses the chemical or biological agents that Atta would have needed had the crop-duster plan been carried out. Osama bin Laden most likely did not have those agents. But Atta might have been a kind of independent contractor working two angles at the same time. He would have been in touch with Al Qaeda for one type of operation even while asking Iraq for the wherewithal to murder thousands of Americans in a chemical or biological attack. If Atta did make such a proposal, it seems that al-Ani turned him down, and it would have been then that Atta embarked definitively on his other plan, to hijack airplanes and use them to hit American targets.

There is another possibility: that Iraq provided some services to Atta and Al Qaeda in connection with September 11, even as the attack remained mainly under Al Qaeda’s supervision. Senior Iraqi defectors—in reports confirmed both by American intelligence officials and by United Nations weapons inspectors—have spoken of the existence of a training camp southeast of Baghdad called Salmon Pak where, among other things, terrorists from countries like Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Algeria, Egypt, and Morocco have trained in the techniques of airplane hijackings. One former captain in the Iraqi army, Sabah Khodada, who now lives in Texas, said on a Frontline television documentary that he worked for eight years at Salmon Pak, describing it as a highly secret installation that brought Arabs from Persian Gulf countries, including Saudi Arabia, and trained them “on assassinations, kidnapping, hijacking of airplanes, hijacking of buses, hijacking of trains, and all other kinds of operations related to terrorism.” James Woolsey, a former director of Central Intelligence in the Clinton administration, has said that satellite photographs show a Soviet-built passenger jet on the ground at Salmon Pak that could be used in such training. Could it be that the September 11 hijackers may have been dispatched to Iraq to carry out dress rehearsals for the seizure of American passenger planes?

Probably not, in large part because in the months since September 11, more and more doubt has been cast on the accuracy of the BIS allegation about the supposed meeting between Atta and al-Ani. It turned out, for example, that the BIS source was a single Arab informant whose identification of Atta was never confirmed by Czech intelligence. The FBI meanwhile provided information that Atta was in Virginia during the first week of April 2001. There are no records showing that he left the United States around the time that his supposed meeting with al-Ani took place—in contrast with Atta’s trips to Spain where such records do exist. A year after September 11, the New York Times reported that President Havel had phoned President Bush in Washington and told him that there was no proof that the Atta–al-Ani meeting took place. Complicating matters, the Czech presidential spokesman, Ladislav Spacek, denied that Havel had done any such thing, but Spacek did confirm that, in Havel’s view, no evidence of an Atta–al-Ani meeting existed. In all probability, the initial Czech statement—which had gained credibility when the Czech prime minister Milos Zeman told Secretary of State Colin Powell about it—represented the premature release of unverified information. If the supposed meeting could be proved to have taken place, it would have demonstrated a likely Iraqi involvement in September 11, and, no doubt, there were, and are, many in Washington, who would love for such a connection to be established. But in the absence of any strong proof, the theory slowly faded from public view.

And as that happened, the possibility of getting some answers to the remaining questions about the September 11 plot faded too. One of them involves the training in hijackings that would need at some point to have taken place. There has been no information in the wake of September 11 that the men practiced hijackings while they were in the United States, no indication that they had at their disposal mock-ups of passenger aircraft interiors where they could have gone through dress rehearsals. It is possible, of course, that they dispensed with such rehearsals, and simply made their plans on the basis of what they knew of the interiors of Boeing 767s from having been passengers on them. But it would seem more likely that the hijackers would have preferred to do some serious practice. We know that the curriculum at Al Qaeda terrorist training camps included hijackings, and very likely the hijacking rehearsals were conducted, with Atta and the other hijack leaders present at one of Osama bin Laden’s lairs in Afghanistan. It is also conceivable that the men who carried out the hijackings of September 11 were trained at Salmon Pak but, as we have seen, there are no reliable indications that Iraq played any role at all in the September 11 plot. Afghanistan remains the most plausible site for any practical training that took place.

While Atta may not have gone to Prague at all in 2001, there is no doubt that after April the planning for September 11 reached a new stage. Most important, it was during the late spring and summer of 2001 that the second wave of hijackers, the foot soldiers from Saudi Arabia, began arriving in the United States, and Atta and al-Shehhi got busy helping them to settle in. They flew in from different destinations, Hong Kong, Zurich, and London, but the commonest point of origin was London on flights that originated in Dubai, which would be a normal transit point if the men had originated their journeys in Afghanistan. The normal route would first have taken them across the border to Peshawar and then, most likely, to Karachi, where they could have gotten flights to London, via Dubai. Most of them flew straight to Miami International Airport, where they were absorbed into the polyglot, multicultural, transient culture of South Florida. In April and May of 2001, nine bank accounts later associated with hijackers were opened at Sun Trust branches in Florida. Seven hijackers got Florida driver’s licenses within a fifteen-day period in early summer.4 They shared apartments in Delray Beach, Hollywood, and Boynton Beach. In May, al-Shehhi’s cell phone records show that he made a large number of calls to rental agents, motels, apartments, and the Palm Beach driver’s license office. In June, a Florida rental agent, Gloria Irish, remembered she helped Marwan al-Shehhi and Hamza Alghamdi find apartments. She recalled that al-Shehhi, who was smiling and friendly, did the talking while Alghamdi stared sullenly at her. Al-Shehhi told Irish that he was doing pilot training and wanted a three-month lease. In July and August, Atta made numerous visits to a small mailing business in Punta Gorda, Florida, where he bought many $100 and $200 money orders.

Then, on July 18, Atta left the United States again, flying to Spain. He stayed about ten days, putting twelve hundred miles on a car he rented in Madrid, possibly driving to Salou, where, possibly, he met with members of the groups Anathema and Exile or the Group for Preaching and Combat, both of which are gathering points, respectively, for Egyptians and Algerians in exile in Europe. After September 11, European police made arrests in England, Belgium, and Spain of members of these groups. In one case, several men picked up by French police are believed to have been in the advanced stages of a plot to conduct a suicide bombing against the American embassy in Paris; one of the bombers was a well-known Tunisian, Nizar Trabelsi, who played soccer for a German team. In Spain after September 11, the police rounded up six Algerian members of the Group for Preaching and Combat who, the police said, were linked to Trabelsi. The Egyptian group Anathema and Exile is also known to its members as Vanguards of the Conquest or the New Jihad Group, and its leader is believed to be Ayman Zawahiri, the powerful Egyptian in bin Laden’s organization. The Algerian Group for Preaching and Combat is believed to have its own organization and leadership but to have close ties with Al Qaeda.

It is unlikely that Atta would have traveled to Spain less than two months before September 11 unless there was something connected with the plot that needed to be taken care of there. One strong possibility is that Atta went to Spain to get money. American investigators, as we have seen, have traced something over $100,000 wired to Atta and al-Shehhi in the United States from a bank in the United Arab Emirates. But Atta would surely have needed much more than that—indeed, investigators have estimated the total cost of his operation at between $200,000 and $500,000. Several months after September 11, Spanish police arrested a Syrian-born real-estate entrepreneur in Madrid named Mohammed Galeb Kalaje Zouaydi and charged him with channeling funds to several terrorist organizations, including the Hamburg cell of Al Qaeda.

One of the people, the Spanish police said, who received funds from Zouaydi was Mamoun Darkazanli, the Syrian businessman in Hamburg who was close to Atta’s roommates in the Marienstrasse apartment in Frankfurt.5 Subsequently, the Spanish police traced Ramzi bin al-Shibh, the Atta roommate who was turned down several times for visas to the United States, in Salou at the time that Atta visited there. Again, and as is so often the case in this shadowy affair, we have no proof that Atta was in Spain to meet either Zouaydi or al-Shibh. Still, the presence of all of these men in the same country, each with his connections to Al Qaeda or to the September 11 plot, is enormously suggestive. And if, as the Spanish police said, Zouaydi was a terrorist financier, what more promising person for Atta to see than him?

And then, there is the possibility that Atta went to Spain to get a kind of final go-ahead for September 11, an approval passed along indirectly from Al Qaeda itself. We know from a later videotape of bin Laden procured by American intelligence during the war in Afghanistan that bin Laden knew details of the September 11 plan, including the choice of the World Trade Center as the main target. Bin Laden’s patient construction of a truly global network, a kind of terrorist multinational conglomerate with branches and associates from Malaysia to Spain seems to come into play here. Was it during Atta’s two trips to Spain that he made his connections with the conglomerate? Was it in Spain that bin Laden, or perhaps Zawahiri, used intermediaries to pass a message on to Atta that Al Qaeda sanctioned the September 11 plan? Could the approval and the money have come as part of the same package?

Again, we may never know the answers to these questions for certain, but that reconstruction of events seems to account for the known facts and for the timing of key events—Atta’s meetings in Spain, the crop-duster inquiries, the arrival of the second wave of hijackers, and bin Laden’s foreknowledge of the nature of the attacks. This reconstruction also fits another key ingredient in the Al Qaeda modus operandus, which is that, following the cruise-missile attacks on its camps in Afghanistan in 1998, it avoided telephonic and electronic communication, preferring to do its business in person or via couriers. Atta would surely have wanted to avoid ruining his plan by having some crucial message intercepted by American or European intelligence—just as the members of the Nairobi cell, suspecting, correctly, that American intelligence was tapping their telephones, still managed to pull off their bombing of the African embassies without being detected beforehand.

In any event, it seems close to a certainty that when Atta returned from Spain to Florida in the middle of July, there was no longer any doubt about what he was going to do. The plan, approved and financed and furnished with a team of trusted commandos, was now fully operational.