establish himself in Germany. He finagled phony documentation for himself as a student, then left for his real homeland—Yemen—only to return under his true name, Ramzi Binalshibh.
Though he said he aspired to an economics degree, Binalshibh studied almost not at all. Those who knew him described him as “in love with life … charming … very funny, made lots of jokes.” All the same, he shared Atta’s traits. At classes, he objected to the sight of women wearing blouses that showed cleavage. He thought that “disgusting.” What distracted Binalshibh during math lessons, a fellow student recalled, was reading the Qur’an under the desk. He was more cheerful about his religion than Atta, to be sure, but faith was at the core of his being.
So it was, too, for a newcomer who was to become Atta’s constant companion. Marwan al-Shehhi, just eighteen when he arrived from the United Arab Emirates, was the son of a muezzin—the man who called the faithful to prayer at the mosque in his hometown. In his teen years, before his father’s recent death, he had sometimes had the task of switching on the prayer tape for his father.
Friends would remember Shehhi as “a regular guy,” like Binalshibh “happy … always laughing and telling one joke after another,” “dreamy … slightly spoiled.” Spoiled not least because, after just six months in the military, he had been sent off to study marine engineering in Europe on an army scholarship of $4,000 a month. Happy perhaps, but—an echo of Atta and Binalshibh—he could “explode” with anger on “seeing a male friend looking at a woman.” Shehhi never actually spoke to women unless he had to.
Probably thanks to his father the muezzin, Shehhi could recite Islamic texts on cue. Even at his tender age he yearned for the pleasures of Paradise, imagined himself sitting in the shade on the bank of a broad river flowing with honey. Binalshibh, for his part, would exclaim, “What is this life good for? The Paradise is much nicer.” To these young men, heaven was no distant concept or possible consolation for the inevitability of death, but a real destination of choice.
The fourth man in the group, who arrived the same month as Shehhi, at first seems not to fit the pattern. Ziad Jarrah, who flew in with his cousin, had grown up in cosmopolitan Lebanon. The son of a well-to-do civil servant and a mother who worked as a French teacher, he had interesting relatives. A great-uncle, it would be reported after 9/11, had been recruited by a department of the former East Germany that handled espionage—and by Libyan intelligence. A cousin, according to
If such odd details impinge not at all on Jarrah’s own story, other factors marked him out. Though his family was Sunni Muslim, he had been sent to the best Christian schools. He had regularly skipped prayers, shown no special interest in religion, and was no stranger to alcohol. “Once,” said Salim, the cousin who traveled to Germany with him, “we drank so much beer we couldn’t go straight on a bike.”
Jarrah enjoyed partying, thought the nightclubs in Europe tame compared to what he was used to in Lebanon—and he liked girls. When he met a strikingly lovely young Turkish woman, within weeks of arriving in Germany, he rapidly won her away from a current boyfriend. He and Aysel Sengun became lovers, beginning an on- off affair that was to endure until his death on 9/11.
For all that, and within months of his arrival, the twenty-two-year-old Jarrah also got religion—and a measure of political fervor he had never evinced before. Perhaps someone got to him during an early trip home to Lebanon, for it was when he got back that cousin Salim first noticed him reading a publication about jihad. Perhaps it was the influence of a young imam in Germany—himself a student—who badgered people he knew to attend the mosque, and pressed anyone who would listen to donate to Palestinian causes. The imam was suspected, the CIA would say later, of having “terrorist connections.”
What is clear is that something happened to Jarrah that changed him, changed his directions. Aysel Sengun, herself a Muslim but of moderate bent, was troubled when—as she would tell the police later—he “criticized me for my choice of clothes, which he had not earlier. I was dressing in too revealing a manner for him.… He had also started to grow a full beard.… He started to ask me more and more frequently whether I would not want to pray with him.”
Initially Jarrah had wanted to study dentistry, as did his lover, in the small town of Greifswald. Instead, after just over a year, he switched to an aeronautical engineering course—in Hamburg.
He and Aysel now had to travel to see each other and, when they met, she noticed that he had started talking about jihad. “Someone explained to me,” she said after 9/11, that “jihad in the softer form means to write books, tell people about Islam. But Ziad’s own jihad was more aggressive, the fighting kind.”
Aysel became pregnant at this time, but had an abortion. She felt there were things that were not right about their relationship. She worried about being left with children were her lover to get involved “in a fanatic war.” She was increasingly insecure, uncertain what Jarrah was up to, would surreptitiously comb through his papers looking for clues as to what he was doing. What he was doing was spending time in Hamburg with his future 9/11 accomplices. Their religion was inseparable from their politics. Shehhi, who could afford to live comfortably, moved to a shabby apartment with no television. Asked why, he said he was emulating the simple way the Prophet Mohammed had lived.
Given Atta’s religious zeal, it may have taken little to add political extremism to the mix. Around 1995, reportedly, he spoke of a “leader” who was having a strong influence on his thinking. In the same time frame, a German student friend would recall, he talked angrily about Israel and America’s protection of Israel. He was “always” linking other Muslim issues to “the war going on or the process going on, in Israel and Palestine, which he was very critical of.”
In discussion with others, Atta carried on about the Jews’ control of the banks and the media. These were not original thoughts, would normally have vanished on the air of heated debate in the mosques, apartments, and eating places in which they were voiced. The flame that was to make them combustible was waiting elsewhere, in Afghanistan. In 1998 or 1999—it is still not clear quite when or by whom—the connection was made.
The umbilical to activism for Atta was probably the Muslim Brotherhood, as once it had been for the young Osama bin Laden. For the Brotherhood, religion is indispensable at every level of existence, in government as in personal life. While the Brotherhood officially abjures violence, it makes exceptions—one of them the struggle in Palestine. The engineering department of Cairo University, where Atta first studied, was one of its known recruiting grounds.
Atta was a member of the engineering club, and he took two German friends there on a trip back to Cairo. The Brotherhood’s influence was obvious even to them. In connection with his Hamburg university course, Atta also traveled twice to the Syrian city of Aleppo—where the Brotherhood has deep roots. It may be that he made connections there. Two older men from Aleppo—said to have been members of the Brotherhood and suspected of links to al Qaeda—were to associate with Atta and his little group back in Hamburg.
One of them, Mohammed Zammar, openly enthused about jihad and urged fellow Arabs to support the cause. The other, Mamoun Darkazanli, was filmed attending a wedding ceremony at a Hamburg mosque with the future hijackers. He has dismissed the connection as “coincidence.”
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IN THE WAKE OF 9/11, reporters for
In early 1998, Atta vanished from Hamburg for the best part of three months. When his professor asked where he had been, he claimed he had been in Cairo dealing with a family problem. Pressed, he deflected further questions with, in effect, “Don’t ask.” Soon afterward, he reported his passport lost and obtained a new one—a trick often pulled by those whose passports contain compromising visa stamps.
The speculation is that Atta, and months later Shehhi and Binalshibh, made trips to Afghanistan that year. Whether they did or not, they would certainly have taken note of the statement bin Laden made in February, calling for war on America. In a list of grievances, U.S. support of Israel, and Israel’s occupation of Arab Jerusalem, ranked high. America’s wars, he said, “serve the interests of the petty Jewish state, diverting attention from the occupation of Jerusalem.”
The 9/11 Commission Report was to duck the issue of what motivated the perpetrators of 9/11. Afterward, in a memoir, Chairman Thomas Kean and Vice Chair Lee Hamilton explained that the commissioners had disagreed on the issue. “This was sensitive ground,” they wrote. “Commissioners who argued that al Qaeda was motivated
