with Atta at the controls, that eight months later crashed into the North Tower of the World Trade Center.
• • •
FAR OFF in Afghanistan, seemingly oblivious to what he was asking of the men he had sent to America, Osama bin Laden had become impatient. In the fall of 2000, when they were still at flight school, he had pressed KSM to launch the operation. It would be enough, he said, simply to bring airliners down, not necessarily to strike specific targets. This was at the time of the second Palestinian intifada, or uprising, that followed then Israeli opposition leader Ariel Sharon’s provocative visit to Jerusalem’s Temple Mount. Bin Laden, KSM said, wanted to be seen to retaliate against Israel’s principal supporter.
As he would time and again, KSM resisted bin Laden’s pressure. Lack of readiness aside, there was a cogent new reason not to rush matters. A new pilot hijacker candidate had materialized. Twenty-nine-year-old Hani Hanjour, the son of a well-to-do family in the Saudi city of Ta’if, already had flying qualifications. After years of travel back and forth to American flight schools, he had succeeded in getting his commercial pilot’s license. After trying in vain to get work flying for an airline in his own country, however, he had resorted to pretending to his family that he had a job as a pilot in the United Arab Emirates. This was a frustrated young man.
The key to understanding the direction Hanjour now took, though, lies elsewhere. Though described by those who knew him well as “frail,” “quiet,” “a little mouse,” he could show another side. When alcohol was available, this conspirator reportedly went drinking on occasion. Afterward, however, filled with guilt, he would devote an entire day to praying. So moved would he become during prayers that one witness recalled seeing him in tears. Religion figured large for him. Ever since a first trip to Afghanistan at the age of seventeen, he had wanted to make jihad.
In 2000, when Hanjour turned up in one of the Afghan camps and let it be known that he was a qualified pilot, bin Laden’s aide Atef sent him to KSM. KSM saw his potential, gave him a basic briefing on how to act in the field, and dispatched him—equipped with a visa obtained in Saudi Arabia—to join Nawaf al-Hazmi in San Diego. They would not stay there long, but would head off to yet another flight school—in Arizona.
Given Hanjour’s flying experience, KSM thought his target should be the Pentagon—relatively hard to hit because it is only five stories high. On reaching the States, one of Hanjour’s calls would be to a flight school owner he knew from previous visits. He now wanted, he said, to learn how to fly a Boeing 757. The instructor suggested he first get some experience on a smaller business airplane, but Hanjour persisted. “No,” he said, “I want to fly the 757.” On 9/11, he would be aboard the 757 that hit the Pentagon.
The first name “Hani” means “content.” Hanjour liked to say, however, that it meant “warrior,” in line with the name that he—like all the hijackers—had been given before setting off for the States. Bin Laden dubbed him
IN OCTOBER 2000, as KSM prepared Hanjour for his mission, Atta and Shehhi were well into their course at Huffman Aviation. They and fellow students had to use a computer provided by the school to prepare for a written test, and people often had to wait their turn. One day, however, as Ann Greaves waited outside for Atta and Shehhi to emerge from the computer room, she realized they were not working on the test at all. She heard hushed voices talking in Arabic, then an outburst of what sounded like delight.
“I went into the room,” she recalled, “and they were hugging each other and sort of slapping each other on the back … I have no way of knowing what it was that made them so happy.” What would certainly have made Atta and Shehhi happy was the news—on the 12th of the month—that came out of Yemen.
At 11:18 A.M. local time that morning, the guided missile destroyer USS
“There was a tremendous explosion,” Lippold remembered. “You could feel the entire 8,400 tons of ship violently thrust up and to the right. It seemed to hang in the air for a second before coming back into the water. We rocked from side to side.… Then it was dead quiet and there was a wave of smoke and dust that washed over me.” Moments later, on deck, the captain looked down at the hull of his vessel.
“The best way to describe it,” he said, “would be that it was like someone had taken their fist and literally punched a forty-foot hole all the way in the side of the ship—all the way through, shoving everything out of the way until it came out of the starboard side.… The force of an explosion like that does terrible things to a human body.”
The men in Arab dress in the small boat had detonated a massive, lethal charge of Semtex explosive and the effect on the
True to previous form, bin Laden would deny that he was behind the bombing, but praise the perpetrators. Later, during the wedding festivities for one of his sons, he would recite a poem he had written:
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And:
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In a recruitment video that circulated the following year, bin Laden spelled out his grand theory. “With small means and great faith, we can defeat the mightiest military power of modern times. America is much weaker than it seems.”
SIX DAYS AFTER the bombing of the
“Let’s hope we can gather enough intelligence to figure out who did the act,” said George W. Bush, then in the last weeks of his campaign for the presidency. “There must be a consequence.”
A cabinet-level White House meeting after the attack, however, had decided to take no immediate action, to wait for clear evidence as to who was responsible. Michael Sheehan, the State Department representative on the Counterterrorism Security Group, seethed with rage as he talked with Richard Clarke afterward. “What’s it gonna take, Dick?” he exploded. “Who the shit do they think attacked the
No one doubted bin Laden and his people were behind the bombing. In the final days of the administration, however, and with fresh memories of the failed missile attack following the embassy bombings in Africa, there was going to be no action without clear evidence.
In public and in private, the President had been hot on the issue all year long. Terrorism, Clinton had said in his State of the Union address, would be a “major security threat” far into the future. In February, when sent a memo updating him on efforts to locate bin Laden, he responded with a scrawled note in the margin—“not satisfactory … could surely do better.”
The Air Force had done better. By September, Clarke and others had sat in amazement as an Air Force drone—an unmanned craft named Predator—beamed back pictures taken from the air over Afghanistan. Not merely pictures but, on two occasions, pictures of a tall man in a white robe—surrounded by what appeared to be bodyguards—at one of bin Laden’s camps. The Afghan winter was coming, however, and photography would soon become impossible. Besides, the Predator could not be used to hit bin Laden. It was as yet unarmed.
In late fall, American negotiators were in secret negotiations with the Taliban that reportedly included talk of the possible handover of bin Laden. In December, a U.N. Security Council resolution called for the Saudi’s
