Anthony Summers - The Eleventh Day

Some innocent Arabs suffered humiliation or abuse simply on account of their ethnicity. In Brooklyn and Queens, districts where Arabs had long prospered, they suddenly faced open hostility from passersby. Anyone brown and foreign-looking was vulnerable, even at risk of physical violence. Four days after the attacks, a Sikh American was shot dead outside his convenience store by a man shouting that he was a “patriot.” The previous day, the murdered man had made a donation to a charity for 9/11 victims.

Baseless prejudice aside, anything involving Arabs and air travel now triggered suspicion. An Egyptian pilot at a Manhattan hotel, overheard saying, “The sky’s gonna change,” faced a grueling interrogation. When the ban on civilian air travel was lifted, some passengers found themselves ordered off airliners before takeoff because they fit a profile—they were Arabs. On occasion, such incidents were defensible. For there were grounds for believing that, absent the order to ground all planes on 9/11, there would have been at least one more hijacking.

Several sources told of an incident that occurred at New York’s Kennedy Airport that morning. It began as United Flight 23 waited its turn to take off, when an attendant told pilot Tom Mannello that there was something odd about “four young Arab men sitting in First Class.” Mannello, for the moment busy responding to the decision to ground all planes, took the airliner back to the gate and told all his passengers that they had to leave the aircraft.

“The Muslims wouldn’t disembark at first,” a United official said. “The crew talked to the Muslims but by the time the Kennedy Airport police arrived the individuals had deplaned … they left the airport without being questioned.” The Arabs’ checked baggage, which they never reclaimed, reportedly contained “incriminating” material, including terrorist “instruction sheets.”

One of the known 9/11 hijackers, Khalid al-Mihdhar, had reportedly told a cousin in Saudi Arabia sometime earlier that “five” hijacks were planned for September 11. “We think we had at least another plane that was involved,” NORAD deputy commander Ken Pennie said later. “I don’t know the target or other details. But we were lucky.”

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AROUND 1:00 P.M. on September 11, the President of the United States had a question for his CIA briefer on board Air Force One. “Who,” he asked, “do you think did this?” “There’s no evidence, there’s no data,” briefer Mike Morell replied, “but I would pretty much bet everything I own that the trail will end with al Qaeda and bin Laden.”

In the Middle East as they spoke, some were celebrating. In contrast to most of their governments’ expressions of sympathy, there were Arabs in Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Lebanon who were openly jubilant. In Iraq, President Saddam Hussein said he thought Americans “should feel the pain they have inflicted on other peoples of the world.” In Palestinian refugee camps across the region, men fired assault rifles into the air. People handed out candies to passersby, a tradition at times of joy. In the United Arab Emirates, a caller to a TV station claimed responsibility for the attacks in the name of the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine. A DFLP spokesman swiftly issued a denial, surprising no one. For Arabs, knowledgeable or otherwise, shared the view of Bush’s CIA briefer.

In the Gaza Strip, two men marched through the streets carrying an enormous blowup of Osama bin Laden. Messages circulated on Saudi mobile phones, according to a leading Saudi dissident, reading: “Congratulations.… Our prayers to bin Laden!” “This action,” said Dr. Sayid al-Sharif, an Egyptian surgeon who had once worked with bin Laden in the underground, “is from al Qaeda.”

Osama bin Laden.

Al Qaeda.

The day before the attacks, September 10th, the Congressional Research Service had published its 2001 report on terrorism in the Near East.

“Al Qaeda (Arabic for ‘the base’),” it said, “has evolved from a regional threat to U.S. troops in the Persian Gulf to a global threat to U.S. citizens and national security interests.” It was “a coalition of disparate radical Islamic groups of varying nationalities to work toward common goals—the expulsion of non-Muslim control or influence from Muslim-inhabited lands.” Cells had been identified or suspected in more than thirty-five countries, including the United States. On an activity scale of Low to High, al Qaeda was the only organization rated “Extremely High.”

Osama bin Laden—“Usama bin Ladin” in officialese—got a page to himself in the report. It noted that he was forty-four years old, the seventeenth of twenty sons of a Saudi construction magnate. He “had gained prominence during the Afghan war against the Soviet Union,” after which his “radical Islamic contacts caused him to run afoul of Saudi authorities.… As a result of bin Ladin’s opposition to the ruling Al Saud family, Saudi Arabia revoked his citizenship in 1994 and his family disavowed him, though some of his brothers reportedly have maintained contact with him.…

“In May, 1996, following strong U.S. and Egyptian pressure … he returned to Afghanistan, under protection of the dominant Taliban movement.… Bin Ladin is estimated to have about $300 million in personal financial assets, with which he funds his network of as many as 3,000 Islamic militants.” The report linked the bin Laden network to attacks on U.S. forces in Somalia in 1993 and to a dozen terrorist operations or plots—including the devastating bombing of the U.S. Navy destroyer the USS Cole the previous year. In 1999, it noted, “bin Ladin was placed on the FBI’s ‘Ten Most Wanted’ list, and a $5 million reward is offered for his capture.”

CBS News fingered bin Laden half an hour after the first strike on the World Trade Center. U.S. intelligence, it said, had “for some time been warning that Osama bin Laden has not been heard from … they believed it was only a matter of time.” Half an hour after that, the National Security Agency—which spies on international communications—picked up the first indication that the intelligence had been accurate. A known bin Laden operative, talking on a phone in Afghanistan, was overheard speaking of having heard “good news.” Also intercepted were the words: “We’ve hit the targets.”

Airline computers were by now starting to disgorge printouts of passenger manifests for the hijacked flights. “Although in our collective gut we knew al Qaeda was behind the attacks, we needed proof,” recalled CIA director George Tenet. “So CTC [the Agency’s Counterterrorism Center] requested passenger lists … the initial response from some part of the bureaucracy (which parts since mercifully forgotten) was that manifests could not be shared with CIA. There were privacy issues involved. Some gentle reasoning, and a few four-letter words later, the lists were sprung.”

The manifests satisfied Tenet “beyond a doubt” that al Qaeda was involved. For thousands of FBI agents, they opened the way to a massive investigation that was to last far into the future—but immediately bore fruit.

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THE VERY FIRST LEAD was provided by the two flight attendants who phoned from Flight 11 in those last fraught minutes before the airplane hit the World Trade Center. Betty Ong and Amy Sweeney had between them provided the seat numbers of three of the five hijackers. “We could then go to the manifest,” FBI director Robert Mueller said later, “find out who was sitting in those seats, and immediately conduct an investigation of those individuals, as opposed to taking all the passengers on the plane and going through a process of elimination.”

The three passengers identified by the flight attendants were Satam al-Suqami and two brothers, Wail and Waleed al-Shehri, all Saudis. Among the Anglo, Russian, East European, and Latino names of the eighty-one passengers aboard Flight 11, two other names stood out: Moham—the computer had failed to complete the name “Moham ed ”—Atta, and Abdul al-Omari.