he 19 hijackers who carried out the worst act of terror ever to
occur on U.S. soil worked with little outside help as a single,
integrated group composed of identifiable leaders and shadowy foot
soldiers who prepared for their final day in a tight choreography over
18 months.
An examination of public records and dozens of interviews shatters
the image of the conspiracy that coalesced immediately after the Sept.
11 attacks.
Based on early, flawed information from federal investigators,
initial accounts depicted an operation that was carried out by four
compartmentalized cells of terrorists. And because investigations and
neighbors were confused by similar or falsified Arabic names, reports
emerged that the cells included as many as 10 pilots, who -- with
wives and children -- had blended seamlessly into suburban America.
In fact, it now seems clear that only a single hijacker aboard each
of the four commandeered aircraft knew how to fly a plane. Just two of
the other hijackers -- both linked to terrorist Osama bin Laden -- had
briefly taken flight lessons.
These six men apparently formed the conspiracy's leadership.
Records and interviews show that this core group, often separated by
thousands of miles, remained in the United States the longest and left
behind the most visible tracks that, in retrospect, can be seen as
highly synchronized preparations.
Some of the leaders were educated, worldly and so intimately
connected that three of the four suspected pilots had roomed together
in Germany, where they attended the Technical University of Hamburg.
Sophisticated as they were, the leaders were clumsy enough in their
English and manners that they repeatedly provoked notice and
annoyance, if not outright suspicion, while they were in the United
States.
Helping these leaders was a cadre of 13 Saudi Arabian men, most of
them younger and less educated, many from their country's poorest
regions. These young Saudis left faint appearances in U.S. public
records and seem for the most part to have arrived only in recent
months.
Leader or follower, none of the hijackers brought wives or children
with them. And contrary to early reports, none of the pilots had
worked for Saudi Arabian Airlines.
For the leaders and followers alike, a maze of connections --
including overlapping addresses -- exists among hijackers who ended up
on different flights.
The synchronization of their preparations is evident in the most
basic ingredients of their plot. Seven of the hijackers obtained
Florida driver's licenses within a 15-day span in early summer.
Thirteen purchased airline tickets for their final flights within five
days in late August. And over the course of the summer, a dozen -- who
ultimately ended up spread among the four flights -- moved through
South Florida apartments.
The plot revolved around mundane, perfectly legal details of
everyday life: tourist visas, driver's licenses, apartment leases,
Internet connections, airline tickets, mail boxes and rental cars. The
records left by the hijackers as they carried out those ordinary acts
reveal the footprints of the conspiracy. They detail who did what and
with whom, and they reveal that the hijackers were divided into two
distinct classes.
"There are two groups on each plane: You've got the brains,
who are the pilots and the leaders, and then you have the muscle
coming in later on," said a senior government official.
"They were the ones who held the passengers at bay."
This newer portrait of the conspiracy may yet evolve. The FBI
investigation into the plot is preliminary, and the conspiracy's
precise nature probably will not be understood for years. Only a
fraction of what has been learned about the conspirators by federal
investigators is publicly known. Telephone records and airline
manifests, for example, would be disclosed only in secret before a
grand jury or in a courtroom.
But from the information that is available at the moment, certain
patterns can be gleaned that render a fuller picture of the
conspirators.
In particular, an analysis of the hijackers' visible trails gives
greater clarity to the role of Mohamed Atta, the 33-year-old Egyptian
lawyer's son already identified by a government official as the
"axel" of the plot. He traveled the most, listed the most
addresses, took the most practice flights and had the greatest
interaction with other conspirators. Atta and two of the other
suspected pilots -- Marwan Al-Shehhi and Ziad Samir Jarrah -- belonged
to a radical Islamic student group in Hamburg that investigators
believe may have been a birthplace of the plot.
More broadly, both the leaders and the followers can be seen to
have often deployed in pairs. They came together for crucial tasks,
such as to get new government identification cards that would ease
their passage onto the planes.
The hijackers' behavior reveals certain incongruities. They were
Islamic fundamentalists who nevertheless indulged in Western culture,
from fast food to hard liquor. One spent $4,500 on a single airline
ticket, yet they haggled over bar tabs, car rental fees and apartment
security deposits just days before they would die.
The most basic incongruity, though, is this: The preparations of
the 19 hijackers were imperfect. Some were kicked out of pilot
schools. Some had to pay cash for their plane tickets after their
credit cards were rejected. Two were late for the Boston flight that
would be the first to slam into the World Trade Center. But inexact as
it was, their plot succeeded in claiming more than 6,000 lives.
The Advance
Guard
In November 1999, two Saudi Arabian men moved into a ground-floor
apartment at the Parkwood Apartments, a town house complex near a busy
commercial strip in San Diego. Khalid Almihdhar and Nawaf Alhazmi
struck their neighbors as odd. They had no furniture but often carried
briefcases and seemed to be on their cell phones a lot.
Two months later, investigators believe, Almihdhar and Alhazmi
traveled to Malaysia, where they met with bin Laden operatives who
were later linked to the bombing of the destroyer USS Cole.
By May 2000, they arrived at Sorbi's Flying Club, a small school 20
miles north of San Diego that trains about four dozen pilots a year,
and announced that they wanted to learn to fly Boeing airliners.
Almihdhar and Alhazmi were part of the advance guard.
Their flight lessons began within weeks of the day two of the other
leaders, Atta and Al-Shehhi, a 23-year-old native of the United Arab
Emirates, enrolled in a six-month course at Huffman Aviation, a flying
school in Venice, Fla.
A continent apart, the four men displayed uncanny parallels.
According to former neighbors, landlords and flight instructors, the
California team and the Florida team almost always left their
apartments as a pair. Few people recall ever seeing any of them alone.
Within each pair, one man assumed a more genial, communicative
role, while the other was quieter, brooding. In California, Alhazmi is
remembered as more outgoing. In Florida, waitresses and others
consistently recall Al-Shehhi as friendlier than Atta -- a dour,
arrogant man whose English seemed atrocious at times, but suddenly
could be smooth when he needed a car or hotel room.
These four men traveled often: Al-Shehhi to Morocco and Amsterdam,
Atta twice to Spain.
Neither team took pains to be furtive. Although Atta occasionally
used aliases, all four men gave their real names when they registered
for flight lessons or bought airline tickets -- a violation of a
"terrorist's manual" written for bin Laden's network.
Almihdhar and Alhazmi, in particular, were readily visible within
the local Muslim community. They mingled at the Islamic Center of San
Diego. It was at the center that they bought the blue Corolla they
would ultimately drive across the country and park at Dulles
International Airport on Sept. 11.
Even as they sought to blend into the United States well enough to
complete their tasks, the pairs of men were imperfect chameleons. At
times, they were overeager. They were hindered by faulty English. They
were, on occasion, aggressive, even boorish.
Rick Garza, Sorbi's chief flight instructor at the time, sat
Almihdhar and Alhazmi down after a half-dozen ground lessons and two
flights. "This is not going to work out," he told them.
Their English was terrible, but Garza was more disturbed by a
certain over zealousness. Even though "they had no idea what they
were doing," the instructor said, they insisted on learning to
fly multi-engine planes, at one point offering him extra money if he
would teach them.
In Florida, Atta strived to adapt to U.S. styles, shedding the
flowing beard and tunic he had favored in Germany for a clean-cut
look. But both he and Al-Shehhi, while more successful than the San
Diego pair at acquiring pilots' skills and licenses, could be
similarly off-putting. At Huffman, Atta appropriated the seat cushion
of a fellow student while he flew in the school's Piper Cherokee
Warrior.
Infuriated, the student, Anne Greaves, tried to wrest the cushion
from Atta's grasp. "Marwan lunged, putting his arm quickly
between Atta and myself, to protect him in a way," Greaves said.
"I remember thinking, 'What on Earth could they be frightened
of?' "
Doughnuts by
the Boxful
If the behavior of the first four was conspicuously unpleasant,
they nevertheless were clearly more adept than the young Saudi men who
came in a second wave.
One of these men, who moved early last summer into a shabby
apartment building in Paterson, N.J., once had to ask a neighbor how
to screw in a light bulb.
Among the first to arrive were Hamza Alghamdi, 20, and Mohand
Alshehri, 23, who in January rented a post office box in Delray Beach,
Fla.
Most of the second group of conspirators were from poor families. A
few had enough education to give them skills that would prove handy.
Alshehri, who graduated from a religious high school and dropped out
of Imam Muhammed bin Saud University, was facile enough with computers
that he could use the Internet at a Delray Beach public library.
But these younger men seemed to settle under the wings of a leader
for such basic needs as finding a place to live. Last winter, Hani
Hanjour, another pilot, did the talking when he rented the Paterson
apartment with another young man, even though Hanjour's own English
was poor. In June, Al-Shehhi, by then a licensed pilot who had been in
Florida for at least a year, helped Hamza Alghamdi shop for an
apartment, according to the real estate agent who worked with them.
Unlike the first wave, who focused on the mentally rigorous work of
pilot training, the second wave of young men put time into
strengthening their bodies. In Florida and Maryland, they paid cash to
train with weights in gyms.
In ways that were curiously out of sync with Islamic orthodoxy,
these young men seemed to revel in their brief taste of American life.
They wore shorts and T-shirts. Last month, Majed Moqed, 22, another
hijacker on American Airlines Flight 77, which hit the Pentagon,
stopped into a Beltsville store that rents adult videos. After
scanning the titles, he did not rent any, but he returned at least
once.
Some of the hijackers who passed through New Jersey during the
summer developed the habit of buying doughnuts by the boxful and meals
from a Chinese carryout. Others frequently stopped by a bar at night
for Salem or Parliament cigarettes, Heineken or Budweiser beer.
A Blur of
Motion
New Jersey served as one hub for the conspirators in the days and
nights of summer. South Florida served as the other. Soon, the early
pairs gave way to larger, interlocking groups.
The apartment that Al-Shehhi had helped Hamza Alghamdi to find also
became the home of Saeed Alghamdi and Ahmed Ibrahim A. Al Haznawi.
On Aug. 2, at least five -- and possibly seven -- of the hijackers
went to a Virginia Department of Motor Vehicles office in Arlington,
where they allegedly met a local man who fraudulently helped them
obtain identification cards they could flash at airport counters.
The men who got the IDs that day later would fan out to three of
the four hijacked planes, illustrating the conspiracy's interwoven
nature. The scheme is striking for a second reason: It shows the
amount of calculation behind the plot. The men who got the Virginia
cards included those who would board the flight at nearby Dulles. The
only others who took part in the scam were the two hijackers on other
planes who had not obtained a driver's license in Florida since last
spring.
Such close coordination, visible all along, is particularly evident
as the conspirators purchased their tickets and moved into their final
positions before the attacks. The last weeks of August and first days
of September appear in retrospect as a blur of motion, as hijackers
left apartments, returned rental cars and realigned to join the men
with whom they would board their planes.
Mysteries
That Linger
As more of the conspiracy becomes understood, government sources
now say that the investigation so far suggests the 19 had "no
major help" in the United States. Sources say that the
conspirators were funded with $500,000 from overseas and that the
terrorist mission was planned and launched several years ago in
Germany, with crucial support in Britain, the United Arab Emirates and
Afghanistan.
Of the more than 480 people detained during the last few weeks, a
few have drawn particular attention.
Zacarias Moussaoui was detained Aug. 17 after he caused a scene at
a flight simulator in Minnesota, where he worried his instructors by
baldly saying he wanted to learn how to fly jets but not to land them.
Two Indian men who had gotten off an airplane on Sept. 11 were
arrested on a train in Fort Worth the next day. Accounts differ on
what led to the arrests, but the men were discovered with $5,000 in
cash, hair dye and box-cutter knives similar to ones used by the
hijackers to take control of the planes.
Early last week, Mohammed Abdi, a Somalian working as a security
guard in the District, was detained after authorities found his phone
number written on a map left behind in the blue Corolla by several of
the hijackers in a Dulles parking lot. And Friday, Lotfi Raissi, an
Algerian pilot who had lived in Arizona, was accused in Britain of
training four of the hijackers.
In recent days, the investigation has intensified in Germany as
well, where authorities are seeking people who roomed with the
hijackers from Hamburg or had other ties to them.
Of all the mysteries that linger, a central one surrounds the man
believed to be the fourth hijacker pilot: Hanjour. Unlike the other
three suspected pilots -- Atta, Al-Shehhi and Jarrah, who trained in
Europe -- there is no evidence that Hanjour was radicalized in Islamic
circles within Germany. Unlike the other pair of leaders -- Almihdhar
and Nawaf Alhazmi, who have been linked to bin Laden's network and
settled together in San Diego -- Hanjour did not train to fly with a
partner.
Of all the 19, Hanjour's roots in the United States seem deepest.
The first trace of him in this country dates to 1990, when he appeared
at the University of Arizona in Tucson for an eight-week English
course. Exactly a decade later, he received a student visa by applying
for another English course, this time in Oakland, Calif. He entered
the country but never showed up in class.
In his elusiveness, in his long acquaintance with America, Hanjour
is the only hijacker who fits the profile of what investigators call a
"sleeper," a terrorist who lives inconspicuously in a
country for years before committing his violent act.
It is clear that Hanjour knew the San Diego leadership team. They
were in the city together and, by some accounts, were roommates for a
time. By last spring, he was on the East Coast, helping the younger
group in New Jersey. What is less evident is his exact role in the
conspiracy. Was he dispatched early to prepare the path? Was he taken
into the plot as a pilot after the pair in San Diego proved so inept?
Certainly, Hanjour's own piloting skills were shaky. He took
lessons at a Scottsdale, Ariz., flight school four years ago, but
eventually was asked to leave by instructors who said his skills were
poor and his manner difficult. Just a month ago, instructors at
Freeway Airport in Bowie flew with him and deemed him unfit to rent a
plane by himself.
But on the morning of Sept. 11, as Flight 77 veered off its course
to Los Angeles and streaked toward Washington and the Pentagon,
Hanjour is thought to have been the one who executed what a top
aviation source called "a nice, coordinated turn."