The Eleventh Day

become a major focus of the investigation.

Forty-two-year-old Omar al-Bayoumi was a mystery in his own right. According to a rental application form he filled out, he was a student receiving a monthly income from relatives in India. In fact he was an employee of a subsidiary of a contractor for the Saudi Civil Aviation Authority—paid but, as a colleague put it, a “ghost”—not required to work. He had time on his hands, and spent much of it helping to run a mosque near San Diego.

According to Bayoumi and a companion, they met Hazmi and Mihdhar on February 1, 2000, two weeks after their arrival in the United States. According to the companion, an American Muslim convert named Caysan bin Don, he and Bayoumi drove first to Los Angeles. Bayoumi, he said, met for thirty minutes with a man at the Saudi consulate, then went on to the nearby King Fahd mosque. Bayoumi, for his part, denied that they stopped at the mosque.

Both agreed that they went to eat at the Mediterranean Cafe, a restaurant that served food suitable for Muslims. As they were waiting to be served, they said, Hazmi and Mihdhar walked in. On hearing them speaking Arabic, Bayoumi invited them to come join them at their table. He did so, according to a Los Angeles Times account, after first dropping a newspaper on the floor and bending to retrieve it.

What led Hazmi and Mihdhar to express interest in moving to San Diego, Bayoumi claimed, was his “description of the weather there.” They duly showed up in the city, sought him out at the Islamic Center, and— with his assistance—moved for a while into the apartment next door to his own.

The way Bayoumi and bin Don told it, it had been pure chance that they met the two future terrorists. There are factors, though, that suggest it did not happen that way: a witness who quoted Bayoumi as saying before going to Los Angeles that he was on his way “to pick up visitors”; phone records that indicate frequent contact between him and the imam said to have arranged for the “two Saudis’ ” car tour around Los Angeles; phone records indicating that Hazmi and Mihdhar used Bayoumi’s cell phone for several weeks; the fact that Bayoumi appeared to have written jihad-type material; that Bayoumi’s salary was approved by the father of a man whose photo was later found in a raid on a terrorist safe house in Afghanistan; and that there was a mark in his passport that investigators associated with possible affiliation to al Qaeda.

“We do not know,” the 9/11 Commission Report would conclude, “whether the lunch encounter occurred by chance or design.” The staff director of Congress’s Joint Inquiry, Eleanor Hill, told the authors she thought Bayoumi’s story “very suspicious.” An unnamed former senior FBI official who oversaw the Bayoumi investigation was more trenchant. “We firmly believed,” he told Newsweek, “that he had knowledge … and that his meeting with them that day was more than coincidence.”

The man most likely to have been a primary contact for Hazmi and Mihdhar is a man who has since gained global notoriety—Anwar Aulaqi. American-born Aulaqi, then twenty-nine, was imam at a San Diego mosque familiar to most of the cast of characters mentioned in this chapter. On the day the two terrorists arranged to move in next door to Bayoumi, four phone calls occurred between Bayoumi’s telephone and Aulaqi’s.

Hazmi and Mihdhar attended the mosque where Aulaqi preached and were seen there in his company. Witnesses told the FBI that the trio had “closed-door meetings.” According to a later landlord, Hazmi said he respected Aulaqi and spoke with him on a regular basis.

Aulaqi, for his part, admitted to the FBI after 9/11 that he had met Hazmi several times, enough to be able to assess him as a “very calm and extremely nice person.” Congress’s Joint Inquiry Report was to characterize Aulaqi as having been the future hijackers’ “spiritual adviser.”

In the context of holy war, that is to say a good deal. The following year, the year of 9/11, all three men— Aulaqi and, subsequently, the two terrorists—relocated to the East Coast. Hazmi and one of the hijacking pilots attended his mosque in Virginia. He claimed that he had no contact with them there.

The Bureau had looked hard at Aulaqi even before the future hijackers came to California, and also while they were there. One lead investigated was the suggestion that he had been contacted by a “possible procurement agent for bin Laden.” There had been nothing, however, to justify prosecuting the imam. The 9/11 Commission described Aulaqi as “potentially significant.”

By 2011, Aulaqi would have the world’s total attention. At large in Yemen following a brief spell in prison—at the belated request of the United States—the former San Diego imam was suspected of involvement in four serious recent terrorist attacks aimed at the United States. Two had involved attempts to explode bombs on aircraft.

The chairwoman of the House Subcommittee on Intelligence, Jane Harman, has called Aulaqi “Terrorist No. 1.”

IN SAN DIEGO in early 2000, Hazmi and Mihdhar appear to have at first sought to pass themselves off as long-stay visitors interested in seeing the sights—as KSM had suggested. Hazmi bought season passes to the San Diego Zoo and SeaWorld. They opened bank accounts, bought a Toyota sedan, obtained driver’s licenses and state IDs. When they moved on from Bayoumi’s apartment complex, to accommodations elsewhere, Hazmi even allowed his name, address, and telephone number to appear in the Pacific Bell phone directory for San Diego.

Hazmi seems to have been pleasant enough and sociable, and joined a soccer team in San Diego. Mihdhar was a darker, “brooding” character. Early on, told that renting an apartment would involve putting down a deposit, so violently did he fly off the handle that the landlord thought him “psychotic.” Not clever for a terrorist living undercover—it was the kind of thing people remembered.

A Muslim acquaintance vividly recalled an exchange he had with Mihdhar. When Mihdhar reproached him for watching “immoral” American television, the acquaintance retorted, “If you’re so religious, why don’t you have facial hair?” To which Mihdhar replied meaningfully, “You’ll know someday, brother.”

Had their tradecraft been better, the two men would not have used long-distance communication as much as they did. KSM, concerned about their ability to function in the West, had told them to contact him with urgent questions. Once they had acquired their own cell phones, however, they often used them to call not KSM but relatives in Saudi Arabia and Yemen. They sent emails—both had addresses on Yahoo.com—using their landlord’s computer and those provided free at San Diego State University.

Hazmi and Mihdhar failed utterly to live up to bin Laden’s early expectations. Though Hazmi enrolled in English classes, he learned hardly anything. Mihdhar apparently did not even start the course. The pair’s effort to learn to fly, meanwhile, was tardy, short-lived when it did get started, and hopeless.

More than two months after arriving, the pair attended a one-hour introductory session at a local San Diego flight school. A month later, at another school, they bought equipment and took a few lessons. They said from the start that they wished to fly jets—Boeing airliners—although they had no previous experience. They had no interest in takeoffs or landings. When taken up in a Cessna, one of them began praying loudly.

“They just didn’t have the aptitude,” instructor Rick Garza would recall. “They had no idea.… They were like Dumb and Dumber.” He told bin Laden’s chosen men that flying was simply not for them. That was the end of that.

On June 9, less than five months after arriving and soon after hearing that his wife had given birth to their first child, Mihdhar dropped out and flew back to the Middle East. By any standard, it was an unforgivable lapse. When KSM said as much, though, he was overruled by bin Laden. The operatives’ pathetic bumbling, KSM was to tell the CIA, was not really a disaster. His planning was progressive, a step-by-step affair, he said, and the next step had already been taken.

As Mihdhar left the United States, more competent accomplices arrived.

ONCE BACK in Germany from Afghanistan, the Hamburg-based conspirators had changed so much as to be unrecognizable. To outward appearances, they were no longer the obvious fundamentalists they had been before leaving. They shed the clothing and the beards that marked them out as Muslim radicals, no longer attended the mosques known as haunts of extremists.

Atta fired off emails to thirty-one U.S. flight schools. “We are a small group of young men from different Arab countries,” he wrote in March 2000. “We would like to start training for the career of professional pilot.” The future hijackers declared their passports “lost,” received new ones, and applied for visas to enter the United States.

As a Yemeni with no proof of permanent residence, Ramzi Binalshibh was turned down. His hopes of becoming a pilot hijacker frustrated, he was thenceforth to function as fixer and middle man, liaison to KSM. Binalshibh’s three companions, however, encountered no problems.

Marwan al-Shehhi flew into New York first, at the end of May 2000, with Atta following soon after. Beyond