S
ALAMUALYAKUM
, C
ANIM
, A
YSELIM, [PEACE BE UPON YOU, MY SOUL, MY
A
YSEL]
First, I want you really to believe and be very sure that I love you with all my heart … I love you and I will love you for all eternity; my love, my life, my love, my soul, my heart—are you my heart? I do not want you to be sad. I am still alive somewhere else where you cannot see and hear me, but I will see you … I will wait for you until you come to me. There comes a time for everyone to make a move. I am to blame for giving you so many hopes about marriage, wedding, children, family … I did not flee from you, but did what I was supposed to do. You ought to
be very proud of it, because it is an honor and you will see the outcome and everybody will be glad … Until we meet again, and then we’ll have a beautiful eternal life, where there are no problems and no sorrow, in palaces of gold and silver … I thank you and apologize for the wonderful, hard five years that you have spent with me.
Your patience will be rewarded in Paradise, God willing.
I am your prince and I will come for you.
Goodbye!
Your husband for ever,
Ziad Jarrah
The letter did not reach Aysel but was returned through the mail, for Jarrah had misaddressed this last sad letter of his short life. It wound up in the hands of the FBI, and she would be told of it only months later. For a while she would hope against hope that Ziad might still be alive, had not after all died on 9/11 and would turn up at her door as he had in the past—with gifts and an apologetic grin.
A packet Khalid al-Mihdhar had hoped would reach his wife, Hoda, in Yemen had also ended up with the FBI. A letter in it, sent with a bank card for an account containing some $10,000, expressed his love for her and their daughter and his desire for her to have the money.
Atta had told the hijackers not to contact their families. He himself, though, apparently placed a call to his father in Cairo on September 9.
In Afghanistan, Osama bin Laden and KSM were taking precautions. KSM crossed over into Pakistan. Bin Laden ordered some followers to disperse, others to stay on high alert. His son Omar had left Afghanistan for good months earlier, disillusioned and following a further warning by the jihadi he trusted that the “big plan” was ongoing, that it was time for him to be “far, far away.” Omar had urged his mother, Najwa, the wife who had borne bin Laden eleven children, to leave as well. “My mother,” he had urged her, “come back to real life.”
Najwa asked her husband for permission to leave, and he agreed on one condition. She was to leave behind several of their sons and daughters, the youngest aged only eight and eleven. On the morning she left, she gave her husband a ring as a remembrance of their long life together. Then, with her two youngest children and a twenty- three-year-old son who was mildly retarded, she climbed into a vehicle to be driven to the border and safety.
Najwa and Osama had been together for almost thirty years, since they were children. Then, he had been the “soft-spoken, serious boy” not yet in his teens. Now, at forty-four, he was the most wanted man in the world, accused of multiple mass murders.
On her way out of Afghanistan, Najwa has said, she prayed for peace.
PART VI
TWENTY-FOUR HOURS
TWENTY-NINE
SEPTEMBER 10, LESS THAN TWENTY-FOUR HOURS BEFORE THE ONSLAUGHT.
In New York, after five days of inaction on the case, the FBI began again the leisurely search for Hazmi and Mihdhar. Having failed to find Mihdhar at any Marriott hotel in Manhattan, Agent Fuller now hoped to find a trace of them in Los Angeles. Both men, immigration records showed, had said when they first arrived eighteen months earlier that they planned to stay at a “Sheraton hotel” in the city. Checking records in Los Angeles was a job for the local field office, so Agent Fuller wrote up a routine request.
The request was not sent, merely drafted, to be transmitted only the following day—September 11. Had anyone looked, and looked in a timely fashion, Hazmi and Mihdhar had left tracks all over the place in California. There was Hazmi’s name, address, and phone number of the day, bold as brass in the 2000–2001 Pacific Bell White Pages directory for San Diego. Better yet, there were their names on bank records, driver’s license and car registration records, which could have enabled investigators to leapfrog onto traffic police records in New Jersey and elsewhere—even to the purchase of tickets for the flight they were soon to hijack.
But these are “what ifs.” The hunt for the two terrorists, if it can be described as a hunt, was all too little too late. So it went, too, with the great lead the FBI had been handed almost a month before in Minneapolis, with the detention of Zacarias Moussaoui, a flight student who—the information they learned led them to believe—might be planning to hijack a Boeing jumbo jet. By September 10, local case agents had been begging headquarters, again and again over a period of three weeks, for clearance to search the prisoner’s belongings. Only to be blocked by headquarters, time and time again, with legal quibbles.
By mid-afternoon on the 10th, in deep despond, the Minneapolis agent running the case in Minneapolis, Harry Samit, shared his feelings about the deadlock with a headquarters official who had shown herself to be sympathetic to his appeals for action. It could even become necessary, he wrote in an email, to set Moussaoui free. The official, Catherine Kiser, emailed back:
H
ARRY
,
Thanks for the update. Very sorry that this matter was handled the way it was, but you fought the good fight. God Help us all if the next terrorist incident involves the same type of plane. take care,
Cathy
Permission to search Moussaoui’s possessions was to be granted only the following day, after the attacks.
It happened that on the 10th, as the Moussaoui probe ran into the ground, Attorney General Ashcroft formally turned down an FBI request for additional funding and agents to fight terrorism—even though the number of agents working on counterterrorism had not increased since 1996. The Bureau of 2001, a new FBI director was to admit months later, was a “very docile, don’t-take-any-risks agency.”
Warnings had meanwhile continued to reach the United States from friendly countries. Just days before the attacks, according to CNN—some weeks earlier in another account—Jordanian intelligence reported having intercepted a terrorist communication that referred to an operation code-named “al Urous al Kabir”: “The Big Wedding.” This was apparently code for a major attack on U.S. territory in which “aircraft would be used.” France had also reportedly passed threat intelligence to the CIA.
Those in the United States still trying to get the attention of the White House included U.S. senator Dianne Feinstein, who served on two committees that dealt with terrorist issues and had gone public with her worries two months earlier. “One of the things that has begun to concern me very much,” she told Wolf Blitzer on CNN, “is as to
