SEVENTEEN

Like a Knife into a Gift-Wrapped Box

At 5:30 on the morning of September 11, Steve Mosiello and his neighbor and best friend, Peter J. Ganci, the chief of the New York City Fire Department, were sitting in the kitchen of Mosiello’s house in North Massapequa, Long Island. Mosiello, who was Ganci’s executive officer at the Fire Department—meaning that he was his driver, his chief adviser, his aide and protector—happened to live in the house across from Ganci’s, so the two men started most days together, smoking cigarettes (though Ganci had given up smoking a few weeks before) and drinking coffee. At about 6 A.M. on September 11, they began their hour’s drive to the Fire Department headquarters in Brooklyn, having no reason to expect that the day would be much different from any other.

Ganci and Mosiello were like thousands of others that morning, people who went to work early, or who got up to catch early flights from Boston, Newark, and Washington’s Dulles Airport to Los Angeles and San Francisco. No doubt some of these thousands were thinking about what they had to do in the hours that stretched ahead of them, or they had in mind the events that were dominating the news, perhaps the Pete Sampras upset loss at the U.S. Open on Sunday, or the still-unresolved disappearance of Chandra Levy, the special friend of Congressman Gary Condit of California. There was a mayoral primary election scheduled for September 11 in New York, and some people were heading off to vote before they went to work. And surely some of the twenty-six hundred employees of Morgan Stanley who worked in the World Trade Center were buzzing about news of a sex bias suit that was being brought against the company by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.

It was like that insurance company ad playing on television in those days, showing a woman busily getting her kids ready for school in the morning. “She’s not thinking about life insurance,” went the tag line. The people who got up early to go to work or to catch long-distance flights on September 11 weren’t thinking about dying.

Brian Clark, an executive vice-president of Euro Brokers, doesn’t remember what he was thinking about, though he was already beginning to study the question of new quarters for his company, since the lease on the offices on the 84th floor of the south tower in the World Trade Center was going to expire in another couple of years. Clark left his house in Mahwah in suburban New Jersey as he always did, at 6:15. And, also as he always did, he went by car to the Radburn train station in Fairlawn, took the New Jersey Transit train to Hoboken, and transferred to the PATH train with direct service to downtown Manhattan. He went up to his office on the west side of the Trade Center, where he sat with his back to a glorious view of the Hudson River and beyond, and that’s where he was at 8:46 when the universe canted and everything changed.

Rick Rescorla, as we have seen, was up at 4:30 that morning, and Richard A. Penney was on the job by 8 A.M. as always, and Victor Wald took his usual subway from the Upper West Side, and Harry Ramos the train from Newark. The tragedy of September 11 was a tragedy of early risers. Those who stayed in bed remained safe. Khamladai Singh, twenty-five, and her younger brother, Roshan Singh, twenty-one, left their home in Woodhaven, Queens, at 6:20 to take the “A” Train to the World Trade Center. Both worked at Windows on the World at the very top of the north tower, and that morning was going to be a busy one because there was a breakfast for the 135 attendees of the Risk Waters Financial Technology conference. So Roshan got busy right away with the arrangements for an audio-visual presentation that was to be a part of the program, while Khamladai, an assistant banquet manager, waited to greet the guests, who were due to arrive at 8:00. Every day at 8:30, either Khamladai or Roshan made a quick call to their mother, Toolsedai Seepersaud, an accountant who worked two blocks away, just to make sure she had gotten to Manhattan safely, but on this day, Mrs. Seepersaud arrived fifteen minutes late, so she wasn’t at her desk when her children’s call came.

Mychal Judge, known as Father Mike, the beloved chaplain of the New York City Fire Department, parked his car at Engine One, Ladder Company 24, on West Thirty-first Street, and went to his room in the Church of St. Francis of Assisi, just across from the fire station. That was his routine; he stayed there for a while reading, or thinking, or praying, and then, when something happened, a fire, an emergency, an injury, he rushed out to help. He was there when shortly after 8:46, Father Brian Carroll, O.F.M., went up to tell him that a plane had struck the World Trade Center. “I think they need you,” Father Carroll said.

Lauren Manning, forty years old, director of market data sales at Cantor Fitzgerald, had a hectic morning mixing duty and love. She was late for work because she was on the phone with a friend trying to arrange for someone to pick up keys to the country house she and her husband went to on weekends. She was also late for work because she had a hard time that morning tearing herself away from Tyler, her seventeen-month-old son, in the hallway of their Greenwich Village home. Every time she was ready to leave, she couldn’t resist giving him one more hug. Usually she was at her desk by 8:30; but this morning her taxi pulled up to the entrance of the north tower on West Street at about 8:45, maybe a few seconds later, and she was just at the lobby door of the building at 8:46.

Zhanetta Tsoy, the thirty-two-year-old immigrant from Kazakhstan, left her house in Jersey City without breakfast and earlier than she needed to because it was going to be her first day on her new job at Marsh & McLennan. Tsoy and her family, including Sasha Tsoy-Ligay, her four-year-old daughter, had arrived in the United States three weeks earlier, after Zhanetta won a green-card lottery in Kazakhstan that enabled them all to become new immigrants. “We could have gone to California, but she wanted to be in New York,” her husband, Vyacheslav Ligay, twenty-eight, used to say. “She loved the idea of working on top of the world.”1 She didn’t have to be at work until 9:00, but she was on the 93rd floor of the north tower by 8:46 on September 11. It was the first day of the rest of her life, and she wanted to get off to a good start.

Wendy Faulkner, a daughter of missionaries who grew up in Japan and Jamaica, lived in Mason, Ohio, with her husband, Lynn, but she had come to New York on September 10 for meetings at Aon Insurance, whose offices were near the top of the south tower. That night, she had dinner with her two sisters and then she went back to the Marriott Hotel, which was on the Trade Center plaza below and between the north and south towers, where she was staying. Before going to bed, she called her husband, who was also on a business trip. She told him she was looking forward to getting home after her meeting early the next morning.

John and Silvia San Pio Resta, a married couple who worked as traders for Carr Futures, on floor 92 of the north tower, usually took the bus to the train and then the train to the subway, to get to work in lower Manhattan. On this morning, because Sylvia had a doctor’s appointment, they drove to the Bayside Station for the Long Island Railroad line trip to Pennsylvania Station in Manhattan. We don’t know what they talked about as the train rolled through the flat commercial and industrial scenery of Queens. It could have been about recipes, since Silvia was so devoted to cookbooks that she used to read them from cover to cover as if they were novels. More than likely, since they had just been to the doctor, they were talking about the baby they were expecting, their first, and how Silvia felt in her seventh month of pregnancy.

They came from many places that morning and they were going to many places as well. Berinthia Berenson, known as “Berry,” a fifty-three-year-old photographer, was another of the publicly known people caught in the snare of September 11. She was the granddaughter of the fashion designer Elsa Schiaparelli, a more distant descendant of the art critic and collector Bernard Berenson, the sister of the model and actress Marisa Berenson, and the widow of the actor Anthony Perkins. On the morning of September 11, she got up early to catch American Airlines flight 11 to Los Angeles, where she was returning home after spending time at her summer house on Cape Cod.

Mary Alice Wahlstrom, seventy-eight years old, had gone to help her daughter, Carolyn Beug, get her twin granddaughters, Lauren and Lindsey, installed at the Rhode Island School of Design. She and Ms. Beug, a successful music producer from Los Angeles, went to Logan Airport from their hotel in Providence, where they had spent the night, with plans to return together to Beug’s home in Santa Monica.

Jeremy Glick went to Newark Airport, and Yeneneh Betru, just back from Addis Ababa, to Washington Dulles, going standby. Richard Guadagno, thirty-eight, the manager of the Humbolt Bay National Wildlife Refuge in Eureka, California, had spent a few days with his sister and her boyfriend in Vermont and then they all drove to Trenton, New Jersey, for the one hundredth birthday of his grandmother, held in the nursing home where she lived. On the 11th, Jerry Guadagno, Richard’s father, drove him to Newark Airport and dropped him off at the curb, and on the drive out, Richard said he was worried about his father, now seventy-seven, driving back to Trenton by himself in the morning traffic. His father told him that he would be fine, and that he and his wife would come to California in a month to see the home that Richard had built by himself on the Pacific Coast.

Leslie Whittington, Charles Falkenberg, and their two young daughters, Zoe, eight, and Dana, three, had sold their house and were staying at a child-friendly motel near Dulles Airport. This is because they were planning, once they got back from their two-month adventure in Australia, to move into a new house they were buying in Chevy Chase, Maryland. While they were waiting to board American Airlines flight 77 to Los Angeles, on the first leg of their long journey to Australia, Whittington called her mother, Ruth Koch, at home in Athens, Georgia, to say goodbye. “I just told them, ‘Have a wonderful adventure,’” Mrs. Koch said later. They wrote a few postcards to friends, like this one to Sara and Jay Guest, Leslie Whittington’s sister and brother-in-law:

“Well, we’re off to Australia. When we return we will have a new address (as of 11/30): 8034 Glendale Rd. Chevy Chase, MD 20815. We don’t know our phone # yet. While we are in ‘Oz,’ email will work best for contacting us: whittin@georgetown.edu.”

As we’ve seen, John Ogonowski was also up early that morning, driving his pickup from the White Gate Farm to Logan Airport, and so were Mohammed Atta and the other four hijackers of flight 11, for whom everything went without a hitch. Atta and Alomari checked out of the Comfort Inn in Portland, Maine, at 5:33 and drove their rented silver-gray Nissan Altima to Portland International Airport, arriving at 5:40. Three minutes later they checked in at the U.S. Airways counter for their 6 A.M. flight on Colgan Air to Boston. There they were joined by Satam al-Suqami, Waleed Alshehri, and Wail Alshehri, who had all passed through security with no problems.

In the departure lounge they showed their boarding passes to the ticket agent at Gate 26 (who probably smiled at them and wished them a good flight), and walked through the ramp onto the plane, John Ogonowski’s Boeing 767. Also on board were First Officer Thomas McGuinness, nine flight attendants, and seventy-six other passengers.

Flight 11 took off four minutes after schedule at 7:59.

*   *   *

One can imagine the two very different states of mind on that plane and on the other planes hijacked that morning. The passengers would have been reading the morning papers, or looking at the route maps to see which states they would fly over, or listening with half an ear to the announcement they had heard so often before about buckling seat belts and not disabling the smoke detector in the lavatories. It is fair to say that hurtling across the continent inside a winged metal tube at nearly six hundred miles an hour has become so ordinary that passengers don’t think much about how technologically extraordinary it is, or how there are rarely small accidents involving wide-bodied jet planes, only big ones. For the most part, flying is safe. Accidents happen, but accidents can happen anyplace, and, except for moments of turbulence, passengers are far more inclined to a kind of cramped boredom on flights across the country than they are to alertness to danger.

And so, one can imagine the passengers on flight 11, a bit sleepy from their early wakeups gazing at the sky blazing in the east, looking forward perhaps to a snooze on the way to Los Angeles or maybe the new John Grisham novel or electronic solitaire on their laptop computers. And, of course, unknown to them, the five Arab men sitting in seats in the ninth and tenth rows were now face-to-face with the greatest, and the last, moments of their lives. If the five were heeding Atta’s written final instructions, they were engaging in acts of mental discipline and prayer, steeling themselves for the task ahead. Atta understood after the months of preparation that a last-minute panic among his forces could ruin everything, and in anticipation of that possibility he had some psychological and religious reassurance programmed into the fateful day. The final passages of his instructions focused on the very moment when the plane would take off, or as his written guidance put it, “the moment that both groups come together”—both groups being terrorists and their victims. You can see in these sentences the culmination of what must have been months, perhaps years, of indoctrination in the duties and glories of jihad, religious war.

“So remember, as He said in His book, ‘O Lord, pour your patience upon us and make our feet steadfast and give us victory over infidels,’” the instructions continued. “Pray for yourself and all of your brothers that they may be victorious and hit their targets and ask God to grant you martyrdom facing the enemy, not running away from it, and for Him to grant you patience and the feeling that anything that happens to you is for Him.”

The hijackers must have prayed and then they made their move on flight 11 after about fifteen minutes, as the Boeing 767 was nearing the border of Massachusetts and New York. At 8:13, everything was still normal. The Boston controller told Ogonowski to turn twenty degrees to the right, and Ogonowski acknowledged the instruction in the standard fashion, repeating it and the number of his flight.

“Twenty right AAL eleven,” he said.

Those were the last words heard from the captain of flight 11.

“AAL eleven now climb, maintain FL350,” the Boston controller ordered next. FL350 means thirty-five thousand feet.

Flight 11 did not reply.

“AAL eleven climb, maintain FL350,” the controller said again, looking for a reply and not getting one. The time was now 8:14 and 33 seconds, a minute and a half after the routine instruction of 8:13, but it was in that tiny sliver of time that the hijackers seized control of the airplane and transformed it into a guided missile. Boston control tried one more time to get an answer from Captain Ogonowski.

“AAL eleven, ah, the American on the frequency, how do you hear me?” he asked.

This time a controller in Athens, New York, who would have picked up the next segment of the flight, came on the line and identified himself to the controller in Boston.

“I turned American twenty left and I was going to climb him; he will not respond to me now at all,” the Boston controller complained, apparently disconcerted because he said “left” when he should have said “right.”

“Looks like he’s turning right,” the Athens controller said.

“Yeah, I turned him right,” Boston said, acknowledging his mistake.

“I’m not talking to him,” Boston complained again.

“He won’t answer you,” Athens replied. “He’s nordo,” controller’s slang for no radio, not in contact.

At about that time as well, flight 11’s transponder, which emits a signal giving ground control a plane’s coordinates and altitude, was turned off. Not only was the plane “nordo,” but its whereabouts could now only be tracked when the plane came into range of ground radar.

A few minutes later, the controllers discovered what had happened. At 8:24, nine minutes after the plane had been commandeered, AA 11’s radio became active and controllers heard a voice, not Captain Ogonowski’s, probably Mohammed Atta’s, making what sounded like an announcement to the passengers.

“We have some planes,” they heard. “Just stay quiet and you will be OK. We are returning to the airport. Nobody move, everything will be OK. If you try to make any moves, you’ll endanger yourself and the airplane. Just stay quiet.”

Just as Atta had anticipated the psychological needs of the hijackers, he thought of a bit of deception for the passengers, aimed at keeping them in their seats. But in carrying out that part of the plan, he apparently keyed the radio switch rather than the public address system. In any case, hearing his message, Boston flight control now understood what had happened, and it notified other control centers that a hijacking was taking place.

What Boston was soon to learn was that more than one plane was going to suffer the same fate, beginning with United Airlines flight 175, another Boeing 767-200 that took off from Logan Airport at 8:15 bound for Los Angeles. Flight 175 carried fifty-eight passengers and nine crew, including the pilot, Victor J. Saracini, a former navy flyer. Among those on board were Garnet Bailey, fifty-three, the director of scouting for the Los Angeles Kings professional hockey team; Mark Bavis, thirty-one, a Kings scout; Christopher Carstanjen, thirty-three, a computer research specialist at the University of Massachusetts, heading off for a motorcycle trip up the Pacific Coast; Heinrich Kimmig, forty-three, chairman of BCT Technology of Germany; and William Weems, a commercial producer from Marblehead, Massachusetts. Also on board were Marwan al-Shehhi, Fayez Ahmed, Ahmed Alghamdi, Hamza Alghamdi, and Mohand Alshehri.

Flight 175 followed the same flight path that flight 11 had followed fourteen minutes before, heading out of Logan and over Massachusetts just a few degrees south of due west. And, it was probably because of the similarity in their flight paths that, at 8:37, the Boston controller asked Captain Saracini of flight 175 if he could see American Airlines flight 11, now both silent and lost someplace up there in the sky.

“Do you have traffic?” Boston asked. “Look at, uh, your twelve to one o’clock at about, uh, ten miles southbound to see if you can see an American seventy sixty seven out there please.”

“Affirmative,” UA 175 replied. “We have him, uh, he looks, uh, about twenty yeah, about twenty-nine, twenty-eight thousand.”

Boston control told flight 175 to turn thirty degrees to the right, in order to steer clear of what now appeared to be a runaway plane. And then, four minutes later, at 8:41:32, UA 175 reported evidence of what was to be the biggest news of many years:

“We heard a suspicious transmission on our departure out of Boston. Someone keyed the mike and said, ‘Everyone stay in your seats.’”

Just to make sure, UA 175 asked: “Did you copy that?” and the Boston controller indicated that he had heard.

And then flight 175 went silent too. Its transponder was turned off at 8:46:18.

*   *   *

It all happened so quickly. By the time flight 175 was commandeered, the Federal Aviation Administration had notified the North East Air Defense Sector of the North American Aerospace Defense Command, or Norad, of the hijacking of flight 11, and at 8:46, six minutes after the alert, two 1977-vintage F-15 fighter planes, equipped with heat-seeking and radar-guided missiles, were scrambled at the Otis Air National Guard Base at Falmouth, Massachusetts, on Cape Cod, and ordered to fly toward New York. But, as the world knows, 8:46 was also the moment that the ninety-two passengers, crew, and hijackers on American Airlines flight 11 were already playing out the terrible last instants of their lives—in their different ways.

For the hijackers, and especially for Mohammed Atta, it was now that the months of pilot training—and the $1,500 for the use of that flight simulator at SimCenter in Florida—paid off. Whether Atta simply programmed the automatic pilot by feeding in the coordinates of the World Trade Center or whether he piloted the plane by hand, we don’t know. Either would have been pretty easy in that bell-clear weather, even for somebody who had never actually flown a Boeing 767 before. From the New York–Massachusetts border, the plane flew south over the Hudson River Valley, following it all the way down to Manhattan Island, descending to about one thousand feet so as to be at about four-fifths of the way up the target, the north tower of the World Trade Center.

The last instants of the hijackers, or, at least, the last instants of the hijacker-pilot, would have consisted of watching the tower appear to catapult toward them. Inside the cockpit, there would have been tremendous noise, coming from the abnormal degree of wind resistance generated by a plane traveling far faster than a plane should be traveling at such a low altitude. Alarms would have been shrieking too, alarms that go off automatically to alert a pilot that he is going much too fast.

Still, despite all that racket, which might have distracted a less single-minded man, Mohammed Atta experienced no temptation to pull up or to the side and not to become a martyr on that day—or, if he did experience any such temptation, he resisted it. But then Mohammed Atta was not the kind of guy to lose faith at the last minute, and he kept his eyes on the approaching target, banking slightly near the end to stay on course. If he followed the written instructions he distributed to the others, he would have been shouting “Allah’u Akbar,” God Is Great, as that silver, miragelike obelisk hurtled toward him, until, suddenly, he passed—or so he was taught to believe—into paradise, where the promised dark-eyed virgins, seventy of them, were waiting.

On flight 11—and perhaps on all the other flights as well—the attempt had been made by the hijackers to lull the passengers and crew into a false sense of hope, into believing that the plane would land someplace safely and the hijackers would use them as hostages in exchange for the satisfaction of demands—money, or the release of Palestinian prisoners by Israel, or something. They had all read of other hijackings, which often came to more or less happy endings when the hijackers’ demands were met, or when the hijackers gave up, or when commandos stormed the plane. It’s easy to imagine people on the hijacked planes not comprehending that the hijackers were on a suicide mission, spending their last few seconds contemplating their chances, nurturing the hope that somehow it would turn out all right.

Perhaps that is what David Angell of Pasadena, California, executive producer of the TV sitcom Frasier, told his wife, Lynn, as they sat on flight 11. Maybe that was the hope being nourished by the other three married couples on flight 11, Jude and Natalie Larson of Los Angeles, Robert and Jacqueline Norton of Lubec, Maine, and James and Mary Trentini of Everett, Massachusetts, or by Berry Berenson, or Carolyn Beug and her mother, Mary Alice Wahlstrom, traveling together. We’re not sure if the passengers on flight 175 were also reassured by an announcement over the public address system, so we have less to go on in trying to imagine what the computer expert, motorcycle enthusiast, Morris dance–loving Chris Carstanjen was thinking in his last minutes, or William Weems, or the three members of the Hanson family, Peter, Susan, and two-year-old Christine. We do know that Peter called his parents on his cell phone and told them he thought they were going down, so there’s no reason to think that he was fooled. And another passenger on flight 175, Brian Sweeney, thirty-eight, of Barnstable, Massachusetts, left a message for his wife, Julie, just before 9:00 that demonstrated great presence of mind and spiritual generosity, but revealed no illusions:

“Hey Jules, it’s Brian. I’m on a plane and it’s hijacked and it doesn’t look good. I just wanted to let you know that I love you and I hope to see you again. If I don’t, please have fun in life and live your life the best you can. Know that I love you and no matter what, I’ll see you again.”2

And, most dramatically, there was flight attendant Madeline Sweeney’s telephone call to United Airlines ground control at Logan Airport. Cool and collected, she had described what had happened, where the hijackers had been seated, and that they had slashed a passenger and two stewardesses, and then, at the end, suddenly she lost it, screaming: “I see water and buildings. Oh my God! Oh my God!”

Near the end, in other words, when passengers could see that the plane was very low and that New York Harbor and New York City were just below them, it would have been hard for them not to have realized that they were about to die.

Did they experience anything at all as the plane plowed into its target, a monumental physical shock, an instant of searing fiery pain followed by nothingness? Or was death instantaneous and painless? There is no answer to that question.

*   *   *

At 8:50, ground traffic controllers heard an unidentified pilot ask, “Anybody know what that smoke is in lower Manhattan?” And just after that, at about 8:53, with flight 175 already streaking toward the south tower and the control tower’s desperate calls to that flight getting an awful silence, the reality was settling in that a second plane had been taken out of Boston. “We may have a hijack,” a flight controller said. “We have some problems over here right now.”

And, just a couple of minutes after that, it became clear that a third plane had been grabbed. American Airlines flight 77, a Boeing 757 bound for Los Angeles under the command of Captain Charles Burlingame, with First Officer David Charlebois, left Dulles Airport outside of Washington, D.C., at 8:20 and climbed routinely to thirty-five thousand feet. There were four additional crew and fifty-eight passengers on the flight, including three eleven-year-old schoolchildren and teachers on a National Geographic Marine Sanctuary Program field trip to Santa Cruz Island off the coast of southern California. One of the children was Bernard Curtis Brown II, a handsome African-American boy who loved school and was wearing a pair of Air Jordan basketball shoes he had bought for the trip. In addition, Leslie Whittingon and Charles Falkenberg, along with their children, Zoe and Dana, were on board, as was Barbara K. Olson, a television commentator on Fox News, and Yeneneh Betru, going back to his collection of dialysis machines.

At about 8:50, flight 77 became the third plane that morning to stop replying to radio calls. The transponder was turned off six minutes later, after which a controller in Indianapolis repeatedly asked, “American Seventy-seven, Indy radio check, how do you read?” At 9:06, a controller despairingly informed another controller that even American Airlines ground control had no idea where the plane was. “They can’t even get a hold of him,” the controller said. “So there’s no, no radar, uh, no radio communications and no radar.”

Three minutes before that, at 9:03, Marwan al-Shehhi, he of the round, friendly face and spectacles who was the inseparable companion of Mohammed Atta, brought flight 175, traveling at more than five hundred miles an hour, into the south face of the south tower of the World Trade Center. Al-Shehhi had steered his plane southwest across Atta’s vapor trail. He crossed into New Jersey and then made a big turn over the New Jersey–Pennsylvania border so that when he headed toward Manhattan, he was approaching from the southeast. The silver Boeing 767 roared over the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge and the Statue of Liberty; it banked to the left at the very last minute and then disappeared into the south tower between the 78th and 84th floors like a knife hurled into a gift-wrapped box. Immediately afterward a tremendous spume of debris followed by a giant billowing fireball erupted from the tower, just as it had from the north tower seventeen minutes before.

When flight 175 hit its target, the two F-15s flying out of Cape Cod were still seventy-one miles and eight minutes away from Manhattan. It is not clear whether the pilots of those planes had been given orders to shoot down any hijacked passenger planes, but the point is moot. They were too late to stop anything. They were the fighter jets that pedestrians in New York noticed flying over Manhattan in the wake of the crashes, their pilots among the first to get aerial views of the devastation.