THREE

“We’re Due for Something”

Rick Rescorla got up at 4:30 on the morning of September 11, 2001, as he always did, and his wife, Susan, remembers that he was unusually playful that morning, singing and dancing and making jokes as he came out of the bathroom. Rick and Susan were planning a trip to Italy for the wedding of one of Mrs. Rescorla’s daughters by another marriage, and Rick would have preferred sleeping a little later and then taking a day or so to help Susan pack their bags. But he was vice president in charge of security for the giant investment banking and stock brokerage firm Morgan Stanley, and a man he had recently hired was himself out of the country, so Rescorla planned to go into work every day that week.

As usual, he took the 6:10 train at Convent Station near his home in Morristown, New Jersey, to Hoboken where he switched to the PATH train to lower Manhattan, and he would have been in his office in the south tower of the Trade Center shortly after 7:00. We don’t know exactly what he had in store for that day, what meetings with his staff he meant to hold to discuss what plans for the security drills he routinely imposed on Morgan Stanley’s always busy employees, and which he did not allow them to ignore. We do know that it was the Rescorlas’ custom to talk on the phone around 8:00 every morning and when they did on September 11, Susan told Rick that he had been incredibly funny, more than usually good-humored that morning, and that was in its way a sign for both of them of how good their lives were turning out. Rick and Susan had only met in 1988 and both of them had failed marriages behind them—Rick one and Susan two—but with each other they felt that they had finally found a kind of stable and untarnished happiness. Less than an hour after their regular morning call—at forty-six minutes and a few seconds after 8 A.M.—the north tower of the World Trade Center was struck by the hijacked American Airlines flight 11, and Rick began doing for real what he had practiced doing many times in the past several years, evacuating Morgan Stanley’s twenty-six hundred south tower employees to safety.

It is a safe bet that Rescorla, though a man of the world and professionally interested in terrorism, was among the many millions of Americans who, whether in 1979 or 2001, had never heard of Abdullah Azzam or any of the members of his circle—and that is in its way an emblem of how unsuspecting Americans were about the plots being hatched against them. Certainly, it can be said without any doubt at all that Rescorla, like 250 million of his fellow American citizens, including the local police and every special agent in the intelligence and terrorism divisions of the FBI, was unaware of a young man named Mohammed Atta, thirty-three years old on September 11, and just twelve in 1979, when he was getting adjusted to the routines of the big city of Cairo after a childhood in an agricultural village.

Eventually the grown-up Atta would lead the attack in which Rescorla would be murdered. But that is the way with modern warfare and especially terrorism. It involves groups of people that not only do not know each other, but that, in a more humanely logical world, would have nothing at all to do with each other’s lives or misfortunes. Whatever it is that drove Mohammed Atta to become a suicide terrorist, Rick Rescorla had nothing to do with it. He was free of any responsibility, even the most indirect responsibility, for Mohammed Atta’s frustrations and anger. But history would decree that they would meet and that they would die, together as it were.

To know the lives of these two men, beginning in the 1980s when the underlying protagonists of this story begin to act, is to see the crazy, senseless, and tragic coming together of two worlds that, by every tenet of reasonableness, should never have met.

*   *   *

Around the time that Abdullah Azzam was creating the Office of Services, Rick Rescorla had seen more military action than practically all of the members of the Islamic jihad combined. The most conspicuous emblem of Rescorla’s career is the photograph on the dust jacket of the book We Were Soldiers Once … And Young, the best-selling account by Harold G. Moore and Joe Galloway of the battle of the Ia Drang Valley in 1965, in which 3,561 Vietnamese and 305 Americans were killed. Rescorla is the soldier depicted on the dust jacket of that book. He is shown in full combat gear, helmet on his head, M-16 rifle with bayonet fixed, looking warily but unflinchingly around him. He explained, in an interview he did in 1998 for a documentary filmmaker, Robert Edwards, that he and his Bravo Company had just finished a harrowing all-night battle with North Vietnamese regulars, and they had gone out for a final sweep of the field—just as he was later to make a final sweep of the south tower of the World Trade Center to make sure nobody had been left behind in his evacuation of Morgan Stanley’s nineteen floors of offices. A few minutes later, an enemy soldier lying in the grass and apparently playing dead began firing at Rescorla with a machine gun.

“I don’t know how he didn’t hit me,” Rescorla says in the interview. “He was only about seven yards away.” Rescorla fell to his right and turned to his radioman, Sam Fantino, who threw him a grenade. Rescorla pulled the pin and threw it over the elephant grass, and, he believes, killed the machine gunner.

Rescorla fought bravely at Ia Drang and in other battles of the Vietnam War, where he developed a reputation for extreme coolness under fire. Thirty-six years later in the south tower of the World Trade Center, he was again professionally cool as the world was literally tumbling down around him. But while Rescorla in 1965 survived the battle of Ia Drang, a conspicuously dangerous place, he was killed in supposedly safe lower Manhattan in 2001.

He was born Cyril Richard Rescorla in 1939 in a town called Hayle on the north coast of Cornwall, England. He grew up in his grandparents’ home, since his mother had had him out of wedlock. In fact, as he was growing up, he was told that his grandparents were his parents and that his mother was his older sister.1 Rescorla never knew his father, or even who he was. The name Rescorla was his mother’s and his grandfather’s.

Perhaps it was the awkwardness of coming from unconventional circumstances that pushed Rescorla when still very young to an especially risk-filled life, perhaps it was something else. But whatever the deep psychological reasons, by the time he was twenty-four, he had had several postings in several widely scattered locations. He was a paratrooper in the British army and an intelligence officer in Cyprus, where his job was to coordinate with regular Cypriote forces in their efforts to suppress the terrorist group EOKA, which was seeking to make the island a part of Greece. He was then a colonial policeman in British-run Northern Rhodesia—now the country of Zambia—and after that, he even served a stint as a detective with Scotland Yard, but he was bored by the routines of law enforcement, especially the requirement that he spend most of his time sitting at a desk. And so, in 1963, as his closest army friend, Daniel J. Hill, put it, “He decided he needed another adventure.” He went to the United States, because he was a paratrooper and he felt the Americans were the best paratroopers in the world. He joined the army. By 1965 he had finished Officers Candidate School at Fort Dix in New Jersey, and in the fall of that year he was off to Vietnam.

“Rescorla was a rifle platoon leader sent in to reinforce me during the battle of Ia Drang,” General Moore, the main author of We Were Soldiers Once … And Young, recalled. “I remember on the night of November 15, Rescorla, myself, a medical aide named Thomas Burlaw, and others were trapped in a foxhole as machine gun fire was piercing through my command post. We lost a lot of men during this battle, and unfortunately, my radio guy was shot in the head right next to me, and then Burlaw also fell. I remember Rescorla holding Burlaw in his arm, trying to comfort him during one hell of a time. He was superbly cool and inspiring on the battlefield.

“Later that night, it was around 1:30 A.M., we were still heavily attacked. And you know what Rescorla did?” Moore continued. “He sang to all the men. I was about a hundred yards away and I hear in the distance, someone singing. I remember asking myself, ‘What the hell is that?’ He seems to sing when people are in need of a calm leader.”

Rescorla was indeed famous for breaking out in Cornish ballads during moments of stress—and, according to some reports, he did so again on September 11 inside the stairwells of the south tower. But singing was not all he did. There is another Vietnam-era story about him. He was sharpening his Bowie knife when an argument between two American soldiers erupted nearby and suddenly one of them was brandishing a .45 pistol. Rescorla walked between the two men. “Put. Down. The. Gun,” he said, and, when the angry soldier did so, Rescorla returned to sharpening his knife.2

During the battle of Ia Drang, which was fought in the Central Highlands of South Vietnam near the border with Laos, American troops under General (then Lieutenant Colonel) Moore were attacked by North Vietnamese regulars at a point called X-ray, where the American helicopters had landed. On that first night, the Americans took heavy losses with one company almost entirely knocked out, and Rescorla led a replacement platoon on the American periphery with the job of holding the ground against further assaults. The next morning, his Bravo Company beat back four attacks, killing some two hundred Vietnamese troops with minimum losses on the American side.

“He pushed you, pushed you, pushed you,” said Fantino, who remained a friend in the years since the war. “He made you go that extra mile, like at night. He would get us to clean our weapons with blindfolds on. He knew the physical and mental training was very important out there. And some of us used to joke that we were more scared of Rick than the enemy.

“But there was this other side to Rick,” Fantino said, “and you saw this side during the war, when he used to sing to us in the foxholes when all you’re worried about is how to find a rock big enough to crawl under. And the letters he used to send to the families that lost their sons. He was a literary man, and he was sensitive.”

Maybe it was the training in alertness that you get as an infantry lieutenant; maybe it was just a character trait, for the necessities of his later career as a corporate security officer for several large financial institutions, but all during the 1990s, Rescorla saw something terrible coming. His friends still feel their neck hairs standing on end as they remember one instance in particular. During a reunion of veterans of the battle of Ia Drang, Rescorla predicted that the next national security threat would be of a massive plane strike at an American national monument or tall building. And in his interview with Robert Edwards, videotaped in 1998, he predicts that terrorism rather than conventional war will be the great challenge facing the United States in the years ahead.

“Hunting down terrorists—this will be the nature of war in the future, not great battlefields, not great tanks rolling,” he says.

But that came later. In the 1980s, after his decade or so of dangerous living as a soldier in both the British and American armies, Rescorla was settling into family life, a career, sedentariness, pursuing literary and musical interests, writing a screenplay, furthering his education. He married Elizabeth Nathan, a special-needs teacher who was born in Texas but raised in Mexico, in 1972. His son, Trevor, was born in 1976 and his daughter, Kimberly, two years later. He stayed for several years in the Oklahoma National Guard where, among other things, he was an instructor in hand-to-hand combat. But he was not one of those guys who are unable to let the war go and to forge another life. Elizabeth remembers that he kept his Vietnam War medals—a silver star, a purple heart, and a bronze star—in a tin can in the attic.

“The war was part of my life,” he used to say. “It’s not my life.”3

Rescorla went to college in Oklahoma on the GI bill and then completed law school, also in Oklahoma. He had a brief career teaching criminal justice at the University of South Carolina law school, and then he went into corporate security, a more lucrative field for which his military experience eminently qualified him. He worked in Chicago at Continental Bank and then, in 1984, he moved to New York to begin working for Dean Witter, with an office in the World Trade Center. And it was there that he saw something coming, right there in the twin towers, where it not only happened but happened in the way he predicted. In 1990, he and his friend Daniel Hill toured the Trade Center together.

“When we went into the basement, we both agreed that was the weakest spot,” Hill recalled. “We even figured out where to put any vehicles that could carry in bombs. And the place where we figured was the most vulnerable. It ended up being only fifty feet away from where the truck was parked in the 1993 bombing.”

Rescorla presented an analysis to Dean Witter in which he stressed the Trade Center’s vulnerabilities and called for tightened security, but, according to Hill, these recommendations were ignored. Later Rescorla’s analysis became an element in a lawsuit filed by Dean Witter against the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, accusing it of negligence and holding it responsible for damages suffered in the 1993 terror attack. The suit is still pending, but Rescorla is one of the people for whom the 1993 attack was a lesson. If he was famous in Vietnam for singing to scared, weary troops in foxholes, he became famous at Morgan Stanley for not allowing anybody to sit at their desks during the evacuation drills he ran. Once, during a drill, frustrated by what he saw as the complacency of many employees to those drills, he jumped on a table and shouted: “What do you want me to do to get your attention, drop my pants?”

“He’s a big guy,” recalls Ihab Dana, a security director at Morgan Stanley who was Rescorla’s chief assistant, “but he was a teddy bear. He may be physically intimidating, but when you sat down to talk to him he was very charming.”

“We did a risk assessment every day,” Dana continued. “And Rick would often say, ‘We’re due for something.’” He believed that the dozen or so men who were convicted in the 1993 Trade Center attack were what he would call “tools” and that the more powerful figures who commanded them had never been found.

And yet, while he was attuned to danger, Rescorla, according to his friends, spent the years when Osama bin Laden was gearing up for war, dealing with family problems, honing his skills as a writer, doing nothing more physically dangerous than coaching a kids’ soccer team or boxing with Trevor in the basement of their suburban New Jersey house. The bad thing in his life was his marriage to Elizabeth, which went sour. Friends say that the two just grew apart; they don’t provide details. In any case, Elizabeth and Rick were separated in the mid-1980s and divorced. His friends say that that was a very hard and lonely time for Rick, at least until a few years later when, jogging near his home, he met a divorced mother of three named Susan Greer, and the two were married in February 1999.

By all accounts, Rescorla always remained an active man, almost compulsively so. He once wrote a screenplay about the World War II infantry hero Audie Murphy. He read a great deal and loved to quote poetry. He carved wooden ducks. He did yoga. He was the kind of man who shoveled his neighbor’s driveway after it snowed. He sang songs and danced jigs for the amusement of Susan, his new wife, when they got up before 5:00 every morning. He went out for ice cream for his staff on hot summer days. But in 1994, when he was fifty-five, he learned that he had prostate cancer, and, while it went into remission after treatment, it worried him. He dwelled on it, seeing it as a kind of proof of the fragility of things, even for a strapping survivor like himself. As he approached his sixtieth birthday in 1999 and then passed it, he had the thoughts of mortality that afflict most people of a certain age, and he talked about them in the way of an ex-soldier.

“I last saw Rick in April,” Hill said, meaning April 2001. “We talked about how old we were getting, and our illnesses—Rick with prostate cancer and me with two heart attacks. He said, ‘Will you look at us. We’re all buggered up and are now old men. Guys like us need to die in battle. That’s the way we’re supposed to go.’”

*   *   *

The obvious question about Mohammed Atta is what led him to kill himself so that others would also die. Or, to put this another way, what made him so furious? Where did he acquire the conviction that to become a martyr while in the act of mass murder would be doing God’s work, would bring him eternal glory?

Many answers to those questions have been offered up. The strictness of Atta’s father has been cited; so has the paucity of economic opportunities for the well-educated sons of such fathers and the absence of legal, legitimate avenues of protest and anger at the desperate poverty of so many Middle Eastern countries.

And then, of course, there was a climate of opinion in the Arab world that began to take shape in the 1980s—a climate that men like Abdullah Azzam, Ayman Zawahiri, and Omar Abdel Rahman both reflected and helped to create. There was a weird, perverse, radical utopianism in the air, fueled by the paranoid conviction that evil enemies, what they referred to as “Jews and Crusaders” especially but Muslim heretics also, lurked everywhere. Those susceptible to that utopianism and that paranoia banded together; they talked mostly to themselves; they formed a society apart with its own values and idols. When Arabs like Atta went to Germany to study, they found common ground in their belief in the surrounding evil and in the possibility of paradise through martyrdom. And they were powerfully encouraged in this by local imams who preached sermons of hatred against the Jews, the Crusaders, the heretics, and who invoked the demagogic authority of sheiks from Egypt and Saudi Arabia, some of them blind men supposedly imbued with brilliant interior visions, who called on all Muslims to slaughter the infidel.

The strange thing, however, is the absence of any evidence that the young Atta, the boy in a Nile Delta village, the adolescent and young man in Cairo, even the student in his early years in Germany, was susceptible to that kind of appeal. In the wake of September 11, journalists from around the world visited the scenes of Atta’s early years, talking to his relatives, his friends, his father, and his teachers, and, while they have found a strangely reclusive, serious, intelligent, and meticulous young man, they have found very little to prefigure the suicide terrorist that he would become later.

“It’s hard to imagine that such a man could acquire the verve and daring to lead an enterprise as audacious as the September attacks,” one journalist, Terry McDermott of the Los Angeles Times, wrote. “Maybe we have misconceived the nature of the attacks and build the requisite figure to orchestrate them. Maybe a brilliant general is not what is needed. Maybe the plan wasn’t so much difficult as it was detailed, and what it really required was somebody with will and steadfastness to see it through.”4

Young Mohammed Atta, a bright boy by all indications, was born in an agricultural village called Kafr el Sheik in the north of Egypt. His relatives to this day remember his family, especially his father, Mohammed al-Amir Awad el Sayed Atta, being disdainful of ordinary local people and burning with the ambition to achieve something bigger and grander than could be achieved in a provincial farming settlement lost in the unchanging, overcrowded Nile Delta. And that is why, these relatives say, that when young Atta was nine or ten, the father, a lawyer with a good practice, took the family to a crowded, dilapidated district of Cairo called Abdin. The adolescent Mohammed, as he faced life in the big city, was expected to be ambitious himself. He worked hard at school. He didn’t play with the neighborhood children, or, indeed, do anything that would divert him from the important, successful life his father wanted for him.

The Atta family lived in a large, dark apartment in Abdin, a neighborhood of a kind of shabby gentility whose once grand stone apartment buildings have fallen into disrepair. It is the kind of place where midlevel government bureaucrats once lived well on their salaries of $100 a month but now find themselves in a vortex of downward mobility, working second and third jobs to survive. There, the Atta family, more prosperous than others around them, was as aloof and as superior as they had been in Kafr el Sheik. People in Abdin talk of Atta senior as an arrogant man who often passed without a word or a glance at his neighbors.

He was also in his way a modern man. He had the same ambitions for his two daughters as for his only son, Mohammed, sending them all to the same schools and demanding that they work hard and spend no time dallying on the streets. He used to complain that his wife pampered all of the children, especially Mohammed. She treated him like a girl, the father told the reporters who came to see him after September 11. “He was so gentle,” the father said of his son. “I used to tell him, ‘Toughen up, boy!’”

Mohammed, who was the youngest child, went to school and worked. He didn’t hang around with other young boys “chewing pistachios, spitting out the shells,” as one neighbor put it.5 In a high school classroom of twenty-six students—who were grouped together by name, so that boys named Mohammed were put together—the young Atta concentrated on doing his father’s bidding, living up to his expectations.

“I never saw him playing,” one classmate, Mohammed Hassan Attiya, said. “We did not like him very much, and I think he wanted to play with the rest of the boys, but his family, and I think his father, wanted him to always perform in school in an excellent way.”

Mohammed’s father seems a psychologist’s nightmare, not just coldly, rigidly, and imperiously judgmental, but also utterly unself-aware. There is a smothered sort of fury in the remarks he casually made to journalists that dehumanizes others, makes them not just worthless in his world but almost nonexistent. “We are people who keep to ourselves” is one remark attributed to him. “We don’t mix a lot with people, and we are all successful.” He expresses this same idea in different ways, and the message he would have conveyed to a child by these words is: “Don’t so much care about people as disdain them, regard them as unworthy of your attention.” “We keep our doors closed,” he said, “and that is why my two daughters and my son are academically and morally excellent.”

Mohammed went to Cairo University, a huge rambling institution where students are assigned to subjects on the basis of test results, not individual preference. Atta’s sisters went there too, one of them becoming a botanist, the other a cardiologist. Mohammed was assigned to study architecture in the engineering department, a subject reserved for some of the highest-scoring students. He didn’t do brilliantly, but he did well. There are signs that, like his father, Mohammed thought himself morally excellent, or, at least, observant of a strict code of morality. One friend said that when he watched television, he used to walk out of the room when a belly-dancing program came on the air. His father said that he began to pray regularly when he was twelve or thirteen, so, clearly, he experienced a strong religious impulse, but he was not a religious radical. He refused to play in a basketball league because it was sponsored by the Islamic Brotherhood, Egypt’s largest Islamic party.

Egypt itself was a troubled society. President Anwar Sadat had been assassinated in 1981, and the government’s harsh crackdown on Islamic fundamentalism took place in the years after that. Sheltered though he may have been, Atta would surely have felt the turmoil of the street and the disillusionment of his middle-class fellow students who, even after their professional training at Cairo University, often couldn’t get jobs. The Muslim Brotherhood recruited actively at Cairo University, including in the engineering department, and, although Mohammed refused to join, he would have heard its appeal and its rhetoric about the Jews and the Crusaders and the Zionists and the heretics and the need to fight back with a purified, revivified Islam. At the time, preachers like Omar Abdel Rahman attracted devoted followings and the audiotapes of Abdullah Azzam, recorded in Peshawar, made the rounds of mosques and associations. Some young men of around Atta’s age were heeding his call to do jihad in Afghanistan.

It is of course possible that Atta, in his quiet way, absorbed some of the religious and political fanaticism in the air. His father denies it, saying that when it came to politics, his son was a “donkey.” But during his conversations with Western reporters, the father issued streams of invective against Israel and of the West for its moral decadence, so Atta might well have picked up some of the impotent anger that affected much of the Muslim world from his father. Still, none of young Atta’s friends or relatives remember him belonging to organizations or even expressing strong political opinions. And even though he was dubious about the moral worth of the West, the elder Atta encouraged his son to study German and English, and, when his years at Cairo University were finished, not to study sharia like Abdullah Azzam had done at Al Azhar University, but to go to some reputable place in Europe for advanced training in engineering and architecture.

“I told him I needed to hear the word ‘doctor’ in front of his name,” his father said. “We told him, ‘Your sisters are doctors and their husbands are doctors and you are the man of the family.’”

Atta senior says that young Mohammed was attached to his mother and uninterested in studying abroad, and he was lucky enough to get work with a German company in Cairo. One night, Mohammed’s father invited two visitors from Germany to dinner, and Mohammed spoke to them in his fluent German. He won a scholarship to study at the Hamburg Technical University, convinced, it seems, by his father’s argument that an advanced degree from a European university would pay large dividends later. He went to the German consulate in Cairo and picked up a visa to Germany, and by 1991, a year after graduating from Cairo University, he arrived in Hamburg. He studied engineering there. He answered a classified ad and was hired part-time at an urban planning firm Plankontor, where his diligence and the careful elegance of his drawings made a good impression.

Everything seemed fine to those who met him. But they weren’t fine. If they had been fine, recent history would have been different.