magazine published a thoughtful piece by the writer Peggy Noonan. “History,” she wrote,
has handed us one of the easiest rides in all the story of Man. It has handed us a wave of wealth so broad and deep it would be almost disorienting if we thought about it a lot, which we don’t.… How will the future play out? … Something’s up. And deep down, where the body meets the soul, we are fearful.… Everything’s wonderful, but a world is ending and we sense it.… What are the odds it will happen? Put it another way: What are the odds it will not? Low. Non-existent, I think.
When you consider who is gifted and crazed with rage … when you think of the terrorist places and the terrorist countries … who do they hate most? The Great Satan, the United States. What is its most important place? Some would say Washington. I would say the great city of the United States is the great city of the world, the dense 10-mile-long island called Manhattan.…
If someone does the big, terrible thing to New York or Washington, there will be a lot of chaos.… The psychic blow—and that is what it will be as people absorb it, a blow, an insult that reorders and changes—will shift our perspective and priorities, dramatically, and for longer than a while.… We must press government officials to face the big, terrible thing. They know it could happen tomorrow.
TWENTY-FOUR
IN AFGHANISTAN ABOUT THIS TIME, OSAMA BIN LADEN WAS SERIOUSLY injured—horseback riding. “The mighty United States cannot kill me,” he quipped as he lay in bed recovering, “while one little horse nearly killed me. Life is very mysterious.”
The fall curbed his activities for months, but the 9/11 plot advanced. The first hurdle, a major one, was to find suitable candidates to lead the hijack teams. All the terrorists would need visas to enter the United States, and some would require flying skills.
Bin Laden had four men in mind, two Yemenis and two Saudis. It could be difficult for applicants from Yemen to get U.S. visas, not because of concerns about terrorism but because impoverished Yemenis were thought more likely to be would-be immigrants. Bin Laden’s two Yemenis were to apply in vain, leading KSM to suggest dividing the operation into two parts. The Yemenis, he thought, could spearhead a group assigned to U.S. airliners on the Pacific route, not flying planes into targets but exploding them in midair. Bin Laden, however, eventually decided the entire thing was getting too complicated.
For a while, the two Saudis were the only two remaining candidates for the 9/11 operation. Khalid al- Mihdhar, aged about twenty-four, and Nawaf al-Hazmi, a year younger, had grown up in well-to-do families in Mecca, and may have been boyhood friends. Mihdhar, whose family originated in Yemen, was married to a young Yemeni woman whose family was directly involved in terrorism. His wife’s family, as things would turn out, was related to another of the future 9/11 conspirators. Once again, just as Yousef the Chemist was related to KSM, terror ran in the family.
Young as they were, Mihdhar and Hazmi could claim to be veteran jihadis. Both had fought in Bosnia. A Saudi friend, “Jihad Ali” Azzam, had been killed the previous year driving the truck used to bomb the U.S. embassy in Kenya. Inspired by his sacrifice, according to KSM, they, too, yearned to die in a martyrdom operation against an American target. It was easy for them—as Saudis—to acquire U.S. visas, and they did so of their own accord even before traveling to Afghanistan.
Mihdhar and Hazmi had sworn
Little ceremony was involved. A man pledging loyalty would stand with bin Laden and intone: “I swear allegiance to you, to listen and obey, in good times and bad, and to accept the consequences myself. I swear allegiance to you, for
The Saudi pair notwithstanding, there was still a woeful shortage of suitable recruits for the 9/11 project. One day in 1999, Omar bin Laden has recalled, his father held a meeting to impress on his fighters “the joys of martyrdom, how it was the greatest honor for a Muslim to give his life to the cause of Islam.” Osama even called his own sons together to tell them that there was a list on the wall of the mosque “for men who volunteer to be suicide bombers.”
When one of the younger brothers ran off to sign the list, Omar dared to speak out in protest. His father’s retort was brusque. Omar and the other sons, bin Laden said, held “no more a place in my heart than any other man or boy.” “My father,” Omar thought, “hated his enemies more than he loved his sons.”
Few of the fighters who signed up for martyrdom, however, had the qualifications to enter and operate in enemy territory—the alien land of the United States. Perhaps, bin Laden ventured, KSM would locate such candidates in the area he knew well, the Gulf States. The evidence indicates that KSM traveled even further afield that year, to Italy and—on more than one occasion—to Germany. Not just to Germany but to Hamburg, the second largest city in the country, a port teeming with foreigners—including, we now know, three of the future pilot hijackers and a key accomplice.
THE FIRST OF those four Arabs to arrive in Germany is today a household name—more so, bin Laden aside, than anyone involved in 9/11. His name was Mohamed Mohamed el-Amir Awad el-Sayed Atta. His friends knew him as Amir, but in the public memory he is—indelibly—Mohamed Atta.
Egyptian-born, Atta had come to Europe in 1992 at the age of twenty-three, after studying architecture at Cairo University. His father, a lawyer who long worked for EgyptAir, has said that Atta’s mother—from whom he was divorced—“never stopped pampering him,” treated him as if he were a girl. The boy would snuggle up on his mother’s lap, by one report, even in his teens. As a student, a contemporary remembered, he still had “child feelings, innocent, virgin.” He became emotional, according to another, if an insect was killed. Islamic terrorists, Atta said as a young adult, were “brainless, irresponsible.”
The Amirs also had daughters, bright, achieving young women—one qualified as a cardiologist, the other as a professor of geology. Their brother did all right at university, but his father nurtured higher aspirations for him. When he learned about two German teachers, visitors in Cairo for an educational exchange program, he arranged a meeting. The couple, Uwe and Doris Michaels, promptly invited young Atta to come to Hamburg and stay in their home. He had a grasp of German—having done a course in the language in Cairo—and accepted. He flew to Germany, and stayed with the Michaelses for about six months.
The couple rapidly discovered that their houseguest was “exceedingly religious … never missed his five prayer sessions per day.” Atta insisted on preparing his own meals. Impossible to use the family’s pots and pans, he said —they had previously been used to cook pork. The young man, they saw, was also a prude. He left the room while showing a video of his own sister’s wedding—because it included a belly-dancer wearing a flesh-colored gown. If anything even a little risque cropped up on television, he covered his eyes. If his middle-aged hostess failed to wear a blouse that covered her arms, the atmosphere became “unpleasant.”
The family tolerated all this until the Ramadan daytime fasting period in early 1993, when Atta’s obsession with religious observance became too much. After trying to put up with his nocturnal activity—hour after hour of cooking and moving about the house—the Michaelses asked him to leave. To their son, who was living at home, he had become “that person”—someone he didn’t want to have anything to do with. Through it all, though, Doris Michaels has recalled, there had been no hint of violence in their student visitor. The problems of the Middle East, he would say, should be resolved peacefully with “words, not weapons.”
When he did move to other accommodations, Atta’s habits and prejudices again led to clashes. No one, least of all Westerners, could fail to notice his religious zeal and aversion to everything to do with female sexuality. His professor, however, who was familiar with Arab culture, thought Atta merely “a dear human being.” He applied himself to his urban engineering and planning course at university, made periodic trips back to the Middle East, and the years slipped by.
In the fall of 1995, another young Arab arrived in Hamburg by ship. He said his name was Ramzi Omar, claimed to be a Sudanese student, spun a tale about having been imprisoned and tortured at home, and asked for political asylum. That was not his real name, and his story was a fabrication. Even so, “Omar” found a way to
