SIXTEEN

The Terrorists Stay One Step Ahead

Nine months after the terrorists’ successful strike of September 11—on May 28, 2002, to be exact—the new director of the FBI, Robert S. Mueller III, held one of the more extraordinary press conferences in the bureau’s history. After denying for months that there would have been any way for American law enforcement or intelligence to have detected the terrorist plot beforehand, he admitted that important clues to the coming disaster were ignored or neglected by the FBI. If those signs had been properly analyzed in the weeks and months leading up to September 11, he said, it is possible—though far from certain—that the FBI might have been able to thwart the attacks altogether.

Mueller’s startling disclosure was followed a week later, on June 6, by a televised address to the nation by President Bush in which he announced major reorganization of the government. Twenty-two federal agencies would be combined into a new cabinet-level Department of Homeland Security with a budget of $37.5 billion, whose task would be to prevent future terrorist attacks against the United States.

These announcements amounted both to an extraordinary admission and to a shift in national priorities. From now on it would be the war against terrorism (rather than the war against drugs or white collar crime) that would most occupy the FBI, the CIA, and other agencies (even though the FBI and CIA were not included in the new department). Terrorism would be treated as not only as the most immediate threat to the security of Americans but as a threat that extended indefinitely into the future. That was the reordering of priorities. The admission was the apparently reluctant response of the Bush administration to an embarrassing series of disclosures in the press that revealed that warnings about a possible looming terrorist attack issued by lower levels of the FBI were ignored by senior levels.

These missed signals, now admitted by Director Mueller, are part of the larger story of September 11, and, indeed, certain missed signals go back to the beginning. We have seen how as early as 1989 the FBI dropped its surveillance of the men who would later bomb the World Trade Center in 1993. More generally, for years American authorities had underestimated both the global reach of Al Qaeda and the growth of its ambitions. The connections that would have outlined the arc of Al Qaeda’s anti-American enterprise, in which the 1993 bombing was the opening salvo in a lethal war of Islamic extremism against the United States, were not drawn.

But the lapses getting most attention at the time of Mueller’s press conference were the ones that took place just before September 11, when the plan of Atta and his commandos was entering its final stages. It was in those final weeks and days that the United States bungled its last good chances of preventing the disaster before it happened, and the unhappy thriller of September 11, in which the evildoers stayed one step ahead of the law, reached its tragic climax.

On August 13, Atta, Hanjour, and Fayez Alhamzi were all in Las Vegas, Nevada, staying at the modest Econo Lodge on the edge of the casino strip where they no doubt discussed the final details of the plan. This way of meeting would fit the modus operandus of the terrorists, which required that they conduct their critically secret business in person and not take any chances with tapped telephones or e-mails. Las Vegas is a place of millions of visitors where nobody is particularly conspicuous. And yet, as with many of the movements of the hijackers, the trips to Las Vegas are also inexplicable, because, except for that one meeting on August 13, members of the September 11 commando team went there when no other members were present.

FBI agents have told reporters that Atta, al-Shehhi, Hanjour, Jarrah, and Alhamzi—all except Alhamzi alleged hijacker-pilots—were in Las Vegas at one time or another but mostly by themselves. Atta himself stayed at the Econo Lodge from June 29 to July 1, and there is no indication that any of his confederates were there at the same time. On that trip, he stayed in a room with one queen-sized bed; on his second trip in mid-August, he specifically asked for a room with two beds. It’s easy to understand why the hijackers would have met in Las Vegas on August 13, a place where people would find nothing strange in the sight of a few Arab student pilots taking a breather. Hanjour and Alhamzi were officers in the West Coast contingent of the September 11 plot and clearly they had a good deal to talk about with Atta, the presumed operational commander of the East Coast contingent. By mid-August, they would have to decide which flights would be hijacked and which team would hit which target; they would have to assign the foot soldiers to the four hijack teams, making sure that everybody had his identification documents in order, coordinating signals in case some emergency, or maybe just bad weather, required a last-minute postponement or cancellation of the plan, moving the West Coast contingent into place in the East.

Why the solo trips? It could be that Atta went to Las Vegas to case out possible terror targets there—maybe a bomb in one of the immense casino-hotels that to a good Muslim fundamentalist would symbolize Western decadence. But by the end of June, it was unlikely that he didn’t already know what the targets were—the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and one more target in Washington. Some journalists have speculated that various members of the team, the hijacker-pilots especially, went to Las Vegas simply to rest from the ardors of planning a terrorist attack, but that too is improbable. Atta and company were not thank-God-it’s-Friday types who worked hard and then played hard. Vacations were not part of the routine. Since news of their visits to Las Vegas became public, the FBI began receiving hundreds of calls from people there saying they had seen one or more of the hijackers—buying incense at a local store, using a computer at a cyber café near the University of Nevada Las Vegas campus, even attending strip clubs, perhaps for a firsthand look at the sexual decadence of the West. One of their predecessors in Islamic fundamentalism, the Islamic Brotherhood founder Sayyid Qutb, had found an American square dance to be sexually immoral—how much more so the strip joint near the Econo Lodge that advertised itself as “home of the $5 lap dance”! Only the sighting of Mohammed Atta spending long hours at a computer at a cyber café has been confirmed, by the fact that the FBI carted off the computer hard drives to read any e-mail messages that might have been archived there, or to see what websites Atta might have logged onto (the FBI has released no information it has found in this way).

But nothing has explained the solo trips to Las Vegas. Perhaps they were for the purpose of meeting with someone other than a known member of the hijack team, a higher-up, an emissary from Al Qaeda. “I don’t know that we’ll ever know,” one FBI agent named Grant Ashley said to the Las Vegas Review-Journal.1

It is worth noting here that much else of what the nineteen men did during this final period, and in earlier periods, is simply unknown. Where did they rehearse the hijackings? How, generally, did they communicate with each other? How did the commanders choose—or have chosen for them—the foot soldiers who arrived during the course of the early summer, and how did they receive information about them? Where did Atta—assuming that he was indeed the operational leader of the plot—receive his instructions and from whom? We know that much of the money came to Atta and Al-Shehhi in the form of remittances from a man named Mustapha Ahmed in the United Arab Emirates, but who is Mustapha Ahmed and where did his money come from? Clearly American investigators believe that the man ultimately behind September 11 was Osama bin Laden, and there is an enormous amount of circumstantial evidence to support that conclusion. But what exactly was the relationship between bin Laden and Atta and how did they communicate, if they did?

It’s like that FBI agent said in Las Vegas—we don’t know, and, given that the nineteen hijackers are dead, we may never know. We do know, however, that by the time the hijacking plot entered its final stages Atta and the others had accomplished their objectives up to that point. They had trained as pilots and assembled a team to carry out the worst attack on the American mainland since the War of 1812 without being detected, without even arousing any suspicions. And they did this despite a couple of close calls, situations where a more in-depth investigation, or more aggressive work by intelligence and law enforcement agencies, would have had a good chance of uncovering the entire plot before it could be implemented.

The first of these situations involved the Moroccan-born French citizen Zacarias Moussaoui, who briefly studied at the Pan Am International Flight Academy just outside of Minneapolis, Minnesota. In the middle of August 2001, the local FBI field office in Minneapolis received a call from a flight instructor at the school warning that Moussaoui might pose a danger to American security. The flight instructor, a former military pilot whose name has not been released, told the FBI that Moussaoui, who had come to the United States via London about a year before, was behaving very suspiciously. He was belligerent; he was evasive when questioned about his background; he seemed unnaturally interested in learning how to fly Boeing 747s even though he was clearly incompetent as a pilot of small single-engine planes. The flight instructor then gave the FBI one of those warnings that might have seemed just rhetorical at the time, but has a retrospectively chilling and prophetic quality to it now.

“Do you realize that a 747 loaded with fuel can be used as a bomb?” he said.

The school had become aware of Moussaoui some time before when he had written an e-mail to the Pan Am International Flight Academy’s main office in Florida expressing, in his imperfect English, a desire to “pilot one of those Big Bird.” The e-mail allowed that Moussaoui’s qualifications “could be better,” but it ended with a patriotic flourish. “I’m sure you can do something,” he wrote. “After all we are in AMERICA, and everything is possible.”

When, on August 13, Moussaoui showed up at the school’s flight training center near Minneapolis, he attracted attention right away. He was in a hurry; he wanted to learn fast; he paid his tuition by pulling a wad of cash, about $6,800, out of a satchel. He asked lots of questions about communicating with the control tower, which is odd for a beginner pilot. It happened that Moussaoui’s second day was the date of the school’s monthly meeting of instructors and administrators, and some people at the meeting had the prescience to wonder aloud if Moussaoui might be a hijacker planning to seize an airliner full of passengers. One of the flight instructors said he had a friend at the local FBI office and would call him. He did, and the next day, August 15, the FBI turned up at the school and, in the course of questioning Moussaoui, discovered that he was technically in violation of his ninety-day visa, so they turned him over to the Immigration and Naturalization Service.

In fact, the immigration violation was just a handy excuse to take Moussaoui away. We know this from a lengthy, angry memo sent to FBI director Robert Mueller in May 2002 by Coleen Rowley, the legal counsel of the Minneapolis office, who detailed several ways in which FBI headquarters in Washington obstructed an investigation of Moussaoui. According to Rowley, the agents who interviewed Moussaoui called her at home late that night to ask her advice about the next step to take. The real reason the agents took Moussaoui into custody, Rowley said, was to eliminate the terrorist threat they already believed he posed. The agents “believed that Moussaoui signalled he had something to hide in the way he refused to allow them to search his computer.”

But Moussaoui’s computer never was searched, at least not until after September 11. FBI headquarters found several ways and several reasons to turn down the urgent, repeated requests made by the Minneapolis field office for a full investigation into Moussaoui, and it was because of this strange obstructionism that the FBI missed its main chance to get information about the September 11 plot before September 11. First, the Minneapolis office requested that Washington open a special investigation of Moussaoui. Following that request, there were at least two secure conference calls among FBI counter-terrorism experts and their counterparts in the CIA and the National Security Agency to discuss the Moussaoui case. Following Moussaoui’s arrest, the FBI representative in Paris had forwarded a classified cable from the French intelligence service saying that Moussaoui was known to have “Islamic extremist beliefs.” In the mid-1990s, according to French intelligence, he was known for urging Muslims in France to heed the call of jihad. He himself seems to have gone several times to Pakistan and Afghanistan and, clearly, the French thought he was dangerous. Confirming the French portrait of Moussaoui was one Hussein al-Attas, a friend who had driven Moussaoui from Oklahoma to Minneapolis and was interviewed by agents in the FBI Minneapolis field office. Al-Attas described Moussaoui as the kind of man who believed it was acceptable to kill civilians who harm Muslims and that he approved of the “martyrs” who did just that.

In 2001, before going to Minnesota, Moussaoui had spent three months attending classes at the Airman Flight School in Norman, Oklahoma, and from there he had called Atta’s friend Ramzi bin al-Shibh in Hamburg. Like Atta’s team members, he signed up at health clubs and kept himself in shape. Like Atta, he made inquiries about crop dusters. Early in August, while still in Oklahoma, he received a wire transfer of about $10,000 from Dusseldorf, Germany, which was presumably the roll of cash he pulled out to pay for his lessons in Minnesota.

All of this, except for the information provided by the French and by al-Attas, was known only later. In Washington, the FBI, unable to determine that Moussaoui represented a threat, declined to take the first step necessary to open a special terrorism investigation, which would have been to ask for a go-ahead from the Justice Department. What the Minneapolis field office wanted was a special warrant to be issued under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978. But the lawyers at bureau headquarters determined that an essential criterion for approving such a warrant was missing—namely evidence that Moussaoui was operating at the behest of an overseas terror group. This led the FBI in Minnesota to try a different line of approach. They asked permission to open an ordinary grand jury criminal investigation, rather than a special terrorist investigation, which would have allowed them to get search warrants to look at the computer and the phone records. This request too was turned down.

Perhaps it should have been, especially if the case of Zacarias Moussaoui was considered by itself, separate from everything else that was available to the FBI. After all, the only information that the FBI field office had on Moussaoui was that he had some extremist beliefs and he seemed a bit strange to instructors at the Pan Am International Flight Academy. He had committed no crimes other than his minor visa offense. There were news reports after September 11 that Moussaoui had aroused suspicion because he only wanted to learn how to maneuver a big plane in flight and showed no interest in landing or taking off, but these reports proved to be untrue; he did seem unduly interested in in-flight procedures, but he also said he wanted to learn to take off and land as well. So while in the wake of September 11 Moussaoui’s behavior seems criminally suspicious, before September 11 it might, taken by itself, quite properly have seemed a slender reed on which to build a full terror investigation.

But the fact is that three weeks before Moussaoui’s arrest in August 2001, the FBI had received a memorandum from an agent in its Phoenix office warning that some of the Middle Easterners attending American flight schools might be terrorists. The agent, Kenneth Williams, was conducting an investigation of several men from the Middle East who were training as pilots in Arizona, and he specifically mentioned Osama bin Laden as one known terrorist who might want to get pilot training for his operatives as a first step in placing them with airlines around the world. The odd thing is that Agent Williams was right, though for the wrong reason—none of the men he was investigating turned out to have anything to do either with terrorism or with bin Laden. But he had the right ideas. He specifically recommended that the FBI examine the visa applications of all the Middle Easterners studying at American flight schools to try to ferret out any terrorists among them.

Williams did not learn three weeks later of the arrest of Moussaoui and the Minneapolis FBI office did not know of Williams’s memo. But here was one agent warning that terrorists might be training at American flight schools and there was Moussaoui who was deemed almost immediately by the FBI agents on the scene to be a likely terrorist. “It is obvious from my firsthand knowledge of the events and the detailed documentation that exists,” Rowley wrote in her memorandum nine months later, “that the agents in Minneapolis who were closest to the action and in the best position to gauge the situation locally did fully appreciate the terrorist risk/danger posed by Moussaoui and his possible coconspirators even prior to September 11th.” Still, the FBI did not conduct the visa examinations suggested by Williams and it put up a series of legalistic roadblocks to a full investigation of Moussaoui. This, of course, is the same FBI that failed to maintain its watch on the men of Al Kifah in Brooklyn way back in 1989. It is the FBI that had years earlier created a special Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda task force to collect and coordinate information on what was deemed to be the most dangerous terrorist organization in the world. But nobody at the FBI, not even the terrorism task force, made the connection between the Phoenix memorandum and the arrest of Moussaoui.

Would it have stopped the attacks of September 11 had the connection been made? Very likely it wouldn’t have, and yet, the possibilities are intriguing. Had the FBI plunged into the Moussaoui matter, it might have found Moussaoui’s calls to al-Shibh in Hamburg, and al-Shibh was well known enough to American intelligence to have been turned down for American visas several times. The FBI might also have found that Moussaoui had downloaded considerable information on crop dusting into his computer. If the FBI had gone to the Airman Flight School in Oklahoma where Moussaoui had studied for three months, perhaps it would have learned about the two other Arab men, Atta and al-Shehhi, who had stopped off there a year earlier. Most intriguing perhaps, the FBI would probably have found out that in October 2000 Moussaoui got a letter from a Malaysian company called Infocus Tech, signed by one Yazid Sufaat, making him the company’s sales representative in the United States and Europe. The letter was apparently intended to give Moussaoui a cover for his travels. If they had known about it, the FBI might also have uncovered evidence that Moussaoui had traveled to Malaysia in October 2000 where, according to the Malaysian police, he met Sufaat. And then, it might have found out that Sufaat was the very man who had hosted a meeting in early January at which Khalid al-Midhar and Nawaf Alhamzi had met with an Al Qaeda operative involved in the attack on the USS Cole in Yemen, which took place on October 12, 2000.

In other words, the FBI would probably have picked up evidence that Moussaoui was part of a larger network connected to Al Qaeda, which might have made the agency and the American government more alert to the possibility of a plot to attack the United States.

But none of this is certain. The only certain things are: 1) that one FBI agent warned that terrorists might be in training in the United States, and 2) that Moussaoui, who probably intended to participate in the September 11 hijackings, was in custody for a month prior to September 11, and no investigation of him was made. He is said to have cheered in his jail cell when he saw television images of the hijacked planes hitting their targets.

*   *   *

As we have seen, Moussaoui shared a Malaysian connection with Khalid al-Midhar and Fayez Alhamzi, and therein lies yet another missed chance to stop the plot before it could be carried out. It will be remembered that Malaysian intelligence had turned over to the United States information that both al-Midhar and Alhamzi, who had arrived in the United States in January on a flight from Bangkok, had been observed at a meeting of suspected terrorists in Kuala Lumpur in December 1999. The CIA learned of that meeting, and of al-Midhar’s and Alhamzi’s presence at it, sometime in 2000. It also learned that both men had made visits to the United States, al-Midhar several times. Then, after October 2000, the CIA learned that one of the men at the Malaysia meeting had been involved in the attack on the USS Cole that month, and that led it for the first time to appreciate the possible importance of al-Midhar and Alhamzi, who seemed likely Al Qaeda operatives, as terrorist threats. Still, for reasons that have not been made public, the CIA passed along no information about either man to the FBI, not even that the two might be in the United States, until August 23, 2001. At that point, the FBI mounted a search for them. An FBI official in San Diego told the Wall Street Journal that his office wasn’t given al-Midhar’s or Alhamzi’s name until after September 11. But the FBI field offices in both Los Angeles and New York, where the two men were deemed most likely to have gone, did conduct searches, checking the registry of every hotel in the two cities in the weeks before September 11.

The strange thing is that al-Midhar and Alhamzi were the least undercover of the nineteen hijackers. They went regularly to the San Diego Islamic Center; al-Midhar used a credit card in his own name; Alhamzi was listed in the San Diego telephone directory. Still, even though they were the targets of a nationwide search, neither man was found. And even though they were suspected terrorists linked to the bombing of the Cole, both men were able to buy airline tickets in their own name, to board their flights, and to carry out their missions without the slightest interference from the law enforcement authorities of the United States.

*   *   *

Sometime in late July or early August, somebody drove the pale blue Toyota Corolla that al-Midhar and Alhamzi had used during their time in San Diego across the country. Eventually, the car was abandoned in the parking lot of Dulles Airport on September 11, but before that it seems to have served a group of the hijackers continuously as they got into their final staging areas. Some of them, including Atta, Al-Shehhi, Jarrah, and several of the foot soldiers, remained in Florida until just days before September 11. But a secondary staging area was Paterson, New Jersey, just over the Hudson River from New York. In this community of some seventy different nationalities and numerous new immigrants a group of Arab men living together and not going to regular jobs would attract very little attention.

There, early in the spring of 2001, Hani Hanjour, who had been part of the California group, signed a lease for a one-bedroom apartment at 486 Union Avenue under the bodega where Ahmed Alghamdi made a daily trip for twenty-five-cent donuts. Hanjour paid $650 a month in what his landlord, Jimi Nouri, called “Franklins,” $100 bills. The apartment was unfurnished and it seems to have remained unfurnished while Hanjour and company lived there. After September 11, neighbors identified a number of other hijackers from their photos as having spent time there, including Salem Alhamzi, Nawaq Alhamzi, Saeed Alghamdi, and Mohammed Atta—five hijackers in all, who were on three of the highjacked planes. The men rented cars in nearby Jersey City; they used Mail Boxes Etc. stores in Wayne and Fort Lee as their addresses. They spoke only to one another, never to their neighbors, who assumed they probably didn’t speak much English. They used to have dinner at the nearby Wo Hop III Restaurant.

What were they doing there? It is noteworthy that of the hijackers recognized in Paterson, only Alghamdi was on flight 93, the plane that left from Newark, a short drive from Paterson, and that was probably piloted by Ziad Jarrah. Could they have been there to survey their main target, the World Trade Center, visible in southern Manhattan from just about any high point in that part of New Jersey? That is possible, but Hanjour, who rented the apartment, is assumed to have piloted the plane that crashed in Pennsylvania, when it was most likely on its way to a target in Washington, D.C., not New York, and the two Alhamzis were on flight 77, which hit the Pentagon. And, besides, casing the World Trade Center from the ground would not have been essential to a plan aimed at hitting the towers from the air. No clear purpose for the men being in Paterson has emerged, except that they all had to be someplace; they probably didn’t want to take the chance of all being together; and polyglot, multicultural Paterson was as good a place as any. And since only one flight, United flight 93, left from a nearby airport, geographic proximity to the field of operations was not a factor.

Meanwhile, by the end of August, the five hijackers of American Airlines flight 77, which left Dulles International Airport bound for Los Angeles, were occupying a single one-bedroom efficiency apartment, room 343, at the Valencia Motel in Laurel, Maryland. Gail North, a fellow resident, remembered the time she was in her car in the parking lot being blocked by the Arab occupants of room 343, who were standing in the way and talking. When she honked her car horn to get by, they didn’t even look up. A twenty-two-year-old unemployed man named Toris Proctor, who lived next door to the men at the Valencia, said that he saw them leave the motel every morning at ten and pile into a pale blue Toyota Corolla parked in the front. Two of them went to a nearby Pizza Time restaurant while three waited for them in the car, and then they would drive away for the day.

This group included al-Midhar, who is likely to have been the highest-ranking Al Qaeda operative among the nineteen hijackers, and, in fact, could be the link between them and Al Qaeda itself. It is even possible that he, rather than Atta, might have masterminded the plot in the United States, a possibility that makes it all the more poignant that the FBI’s search for him in the weeks before September 11 was unsuccessful. After living for some time in San Diego, al-Midhar seems to have gone abroad around the end of October 2000. Then, after a few months away, he returned to the United States, arriving in New York on a flight from Saudi Arabia on July 4, 2001. Al-Midhar is one of several of the hijackers who got drivers’ licenses through a black market in official government-issue identifications that operated out of a parking lot in Arlington, Virginia. By the end of August, he and the other hijackers of flight 77 were living in the Valencia Motel in Laurel, Maryland.

On August 25, al-Midhar became the first of the hijackers to buy his ticket—on American Airlines flight 77, from Dulles International outside of Washington, D.C., to Los Angeles. He made a reservation on American Airline’s on-line site, on which he had registered the day before, getting a frequent flyer number in the process. He picked the ticket up at the Baltimore-Washington International Airport on September 5, and was assigned seat 12B. The next day, August 26, Waleed Alshehri and Wail Alshehri reserved seats on American Airlines flight 11, from Boston to Los Angeles, giving a Florida contact address and being assigned seats 2A and 2B. And the day after that, Fayez Ahmed and Mohand Alshehri, who also gave Florida contact addresses, made electronic ticket reservations for United Airlines flight 175, Boston to Los Angeles.

On August 28, Atta and Abdulaziz Alomari reserved their one-way tickets for flight II. Atta used the American Airlines website and his mileage card, AAdvantage Profile #6H26L04, which he had created three days earlier, listing his address as 3389 Sheridan, Hollywood, Florida. He paid for his own ticket and for Alomari’s on his Visa Card, number 40118008407778, expiration 7/02. He, Ahmed Alghamdi, and Hamza Alghamdi used a computer at the same Kinko’s copy store in Hollywood to buy their tickets.

During these final weeks, the men stayed sharp and in shape and some of them brushed up on their piloting skills. On August 16, only three days after being sighted in Las Vegas, Atta rented a single-engine Piper Archer at the Palm Beach Country Park Airport in Lantana, Florida, presumably to brush up on his airmanship before the big day. An instructor went up with him to make sure he could handle the plane. Then, for three days, the 16th, the 17th, and the 19th, he and three others rented a single-engine plane from Palm Beach Flight Training in Lantana, paying $88 an hour. He told the school’s operators that he wanted to increase his flying time, even though he had already logged three hundred hours and was a certified commercial pilot.

Meanwhile, Hani Hanjour, who seems to have moved back and forth from his base in Paterson to the Washington area, took flying lessons at Freeway Airport in Bowie, Maryland. At the end of August he moved out of the Paterson apartment, and on September 1 he rented room 343 at the Valencia Motel in Laurel, Maryland. The next day he bought a one-week membership at Gold’s Gym on Greenbelt Road. Most of the flight 77 team took out identical one-week memberships, so, presumably, they were all interested in keeping fit for what was to come.

Of all the hijackers, Ziad Jarrah may have moved around the most in the final weeks. Early in July, he extended his membership in the U.S.-1 Fitness Club in Dania, Florida, telling an employee there that he was planning to go back to Germany after his flight training was over. He then did go to Germany for about a week, to visit Aysel Senguen, his Turkish girlfriend. His sister was getting married in Lebanon on August 2, but he didn’t go to the wedding, returning instead to Florida to keep an appointment for his pilot’s certification test, which he passed on July 30. A few weeks later, in Fort Lauderdale, he bought three maps of the northeastern United States from a pilot supply store.2 In the last week of August he was in Laurel, Maryland, renting a room at the Pin-Del Motel. On August 30, he was back in Florida trying to rent a room with Internet access at the Longshore Motel in Hollywood, but he quarreled with the owner about the use of the phone lines and left the same day.

On September 1, a Saturday, he asked his family in Lebanon to send $700, in addition to the allowance of $2,000 a month they sent him for his pilot training, so he could have some “fun.”3 And then, getting closer now, he and his roommate, Ahmed Alhaznawi, went to Passage Tours in Fort Lauderdale and each bought a one-way ticket to Newark for a flight on September 7.

Atta was busy with other things too. In August and early September, he rented cars three times, keeping them for as much as five weeks, from Warrick’s Rent-a-Car in Pompano Beach, driving more than six thousand miles during that time. Months before, he had bought flight deck videos for the Boeing 747, 757, and 767 aircraft, as well as for the Airbus 320. On August 22, Jarrah bought an antenna for a Global Positioning System computer, the highly accurate satellite-connected portable navigation device used by millions in cars, planes, and boats. On August 30, Atta bought a utility tool that contained a knife (the Moussaoui indictment, which contains this information, does not specify what kind of knife it contained or where Atta bought it). Early in September he sent a package and some money to the United Arab Emirates, presumably returning the funds he didn’t use in fomenting the plot.

Then, in the final days, an intricate, choreographed relocation involving all nineteen hijackers took place. As we’ve noted, Jarrah and Alhaznawi bought a ticket from Fort Lauderdale to Newark for September 7, and that indeed is when they and the two other hijackers of the plane that left from Newark arrived there. They seem to have split up, some of them staying at the Marriott Hotel—according to witnesses, they drove up there in a red Mitsubishi Galant, though it is unclear where this car came from—and some of them at a nearby Days Inn.

On September 10, the day before the attacks, one of the hijackers was seen at a go-go bar called Nardone’s in Elizabeth, New Jersey, about two miles from the airport. The man had a beer, said the bar’s owner, Pat Nardone, and then he paid $20 to watch a dancer in the private “VIP” room—where Nardone says he watched him with a security camera. Hotel workers told journalists after September 11 that agents identified three of the hijackers captured on surveillance tapes from cameras at the parking lot and hotel entrance of the Marriott Hotel.

The hijackers of flight 77, including the three members of the California contingent, al-Midhar, Nawaq Alhamzi, and Hani Hanjour, were at the Valencia Motel by early September. Hanjour, though considered to be the hijacker-pilot of flight 77, went three times to a nearby flight center in Bowie, Maryland; each time he failed his test flights and wasn’t allowed to rent a plane. Members of the other two teams, flight 175 and flight 11, both of which left from Boston, seem to have stayed in Florida until at least September 7. One eyewitness, a waitress named Patricia Idrissi at Shuckums Oyster Pub and Seafood Grill in Hollywood, Florida, says that she served drinks to Atta and al-Shehhi there on Friday night, September 7. Atta, she said, drank vodka and al-Shehhi drank rum, but Shuckums’s manager, Anthony Amos, later said that Atta drank cranberry juice, not vodka, and that would be in keeping with his observance of Islam, which forbids alcoholic drinks. Idrissi said that the tab came to $48 and that there was an argument about it. When Amos came over to ask if the men could pay, one of them said, “Of course I can pay. I’m a pilot.” It is possible that Idrissi’s identification of both Atta and al-Shehhi is wrong and that neither man was at the bar that night, though they did have a history of going to bars. Months before, when living in Hamburg, Atta used to hang out at a pool hall called Sharkey’s Billiard Bar, which advertised itself as “the Bar with Mega-Possibilities.”

Meanwhile, the hijackers of flight 11 and flight 175, including Atta and al-Shehhi, were making their way to Boston. Like some of the others, al-Shehhi sent his leftover money to Mustafa Ahmed in the UAE—$5,400 in his case. He and two others checked out of the Panther Hotel in Deerfield Beach, Florida, tossing a flying school tote bag into a Dumpster as they left. Inside were a box cutter knife, aviation maps, martial arts books, a notebook, and a protractor used in navigation.4 Brad Warrick, the owner of the car rental agency that Atta patronized, says that al-Shehhi returned the last car that Atta rented from him on September 9. By the 10th, al-Shehhi had arrived in Boston and was staying at the Milner Hotel downtown.

Atta too was in Boston, probably by September 9, because on the morning of the 10th, he and Alomari drove a rented Nissan Altima to Portland, Maine, about 110 miles to the north, where they checked into the Comfort Inn on Maine Mall Road late in the afternoon. Both men were caught on surveillance cameras at the Key Bank drive-up ATM, and then at a Fast Green ATM in the parking lot of Uno’s Restaurant. They made a quick trip to the Wal-Mart in Scarborough, Maine, and then they seem to have gone to bed.

Why did they make this trip to Portland? There is no answer to that question, though it seems impossible that they would have added that trip to their itinerary without a very good reason. Did they want to begin their travel on September 11 from a city other than Boston, so that they wouldn’t have to board American Airlines flight 11 together with the other three hijackers? But if Atta was concerned that five Arab men boarding the same flight might attract attention, why didn’t he require any of the other hijack teams to take the same precaution? It is, of course, possible that it was Atta’s job to smuggle the weapons to be used in the hijacking onto the flight, and that he had a confederate in Portland to help him get through the security check. Since he would be a transit passenger at Logan, he wouldn’t have had to go through security there. But the hijackers boarded two planes at Logan within fifteen minutes of each other, and Atta had not had any of the hijackers on the other flight come to Portland with him. He was accompanied by Alomari, who was on the same flight as he was. Could he have passed the smuggled weapons on to the hijackers of United flight 175 in the transit lounge itself? Probably not, because the two airlines involved, American and United, do not use the same departure lounge at Logan Airport. The Portland trip remains inexplicable, one of the most puzzling details of the plot.

In any case, what is important is that by the night of September 10, all nineteen men were in their final staging areas—at hotels in Newark, in Maryland, in Boston, and in Portland, Maine. They had their equipment and their instructions. Each man knew what he had to do. This had all been worked out presumably by Atta, in Las Vegas, in Paterson, in Laurel, and in Florida as he put those six thousand miles on his rental car from Warrick’s. The men had a final sheet of instructions provided by Atta that told them what they were supposed to do on their final night on earth. They were to shave excess hair from their bodies. They were to read Al Tawba and Anfal, the traditional war chapters in the Koran, and to reflect on the things that God has promised the martyrs.

“Remind your soul to listen and obey,” the instructions read, “and remember that you will face decisive situations that might prevent you from one hundred percent obedience, so tame your soul, purify, convince it, make it understand, and incite it. God said, ‘Obey God and His messenger, and do not fight among yourselves or else you will fail. And be patient, for God is with the patient.’

“When the confrontation begins,” the instructions continued, “strike like champions who do not want to go back to this world. Shout ‘Allah’u Akbar’ [God is great] because this strikes fear in the hearts of the nonbelievers. God said: ‘Strike above the neck, and strike at all of their extremities.’ Know that the gardens of paradise are waiting for you in all their beauty, and the women of paradise are waiting, calling out, ‘Come hither, friend of God.’ They have dressed in their most beautiful clothing.”

We do not know for sure, but probably the men read those paragraphs and reflected on the magnificent deeds they would accomplish for the sake of God and His glory the next morning and for which they would be rewarded by dark-eyed virgins. It is a vision to fill the heart of a young Islamic extremist, a vision full of vengeance, power, and sex. One can imagine the hijackers’ excitement as they bowed in the direction of Mecca on that last night, pressing their foreheads into the industrial carpeting of various motel rooms from Maine to Maryland in the traditional Muslim act of submission.

Still there was an almost poignant gesture by one of them, Ziad Jarrah, the young Lebanese who had asked his parents for $700 so he could have some fun. Early on the morning of September 11, during what must have been a night of restless sleep, he called his girlfriend in Germany. Later she told police that he sounded normal. He said that he loved her.