Anthony Summers - The Eleventh Day

“THE QUESTION,” Michael Hirsh and Michael Isikoff wrote in Newsweek , is in the end “not so much what the President knew and when he knew it. The question is whether the administration was really paying much attention.”

In her testimony to the Commission, Rice rejected any notion that the administration let things slide. “I do not believe there was a lack of high-level attention,” she said. “The President was paying attention to this. How much higher level can you get?”

Lawrence Wilkerson, a trusted aide to Secretary of State Colin Powell, worked with a colleague on the preparation of Rice’s testimony. The job, he said, had been “an appalling enterprise. We would cherry-pick things to make it look like the President had been actually concerned about al Qaeda.… They didn’t give a shit about al Qaeda. They had priorities. The priorities were lower taxes, ballistic missiles, and the defense thereof.”

Commissioner Ben-Veniste, for his part, came away from his work on the Commission drawing the gravest possible conclusion. “There was no question in my mind,” he has written, “that had the President and his National Security Advisor been aggressively attentive to the potential for a domestic terrorist attack, some of the information already in the possession of our intelligence and law enforcement agencies might have been utilized to disrupt the plot.”

TWENTY-EIGHT

H

ELLO

J

ENNY

,

Wie geht’s dir? Mir geht’s gut …

Wie ich Dir letze mal gesagt habe die Erstsemester wird in drei wochen beginn kein Aendrugen!!!!!! …

The start of a coded email message written in broken German that Atta sent to Binalshibh in the third week of August. It is phrased as though it were a letter to his girlfriend Jenny. Translated, the entire message reads:

D

EAR

J

ENNY

,

How are you? I’m fine …

As I told you in my last letter, the first semester starts in three weeks. No changes!!!!!! Everything’s going well. There’s high hope and very strong thoughts for success!!! Two high schools and two universities … Everything is going according plan. This

summer is for sure going to be hot. I want to talk to you about some details. Nineteen certificates for specialized studies and 4 exams.… Regards to your professors …

Until then …

The key part of the message is the reference to “high schools” and “universities.” In an earlier discussion of targeting—Atta and Binalshibh had still been discussing the option of striking the White House—they had used “architecture” to refer to the World Trade Center, “arts” to mean the Pentagon, “law” the Capitol, and “politics” to denote the White House.

The true meaning of the message, Binalshibh would explain in the interview he gave before he was captured, was:

Zero hour is going to be in three weeks’ time. There are no changes. All is well. The brothers have been seeing encouraging visions and dreams. The Twin Towers, the Pentagon and Capitol Hill. Everything is going according to plan. This summer is for sure going to be hot. I want to talk to you about some details. Nineteen hijackers and four targets. Regards to Khalid [KSM]/Osama.

Until we speak.

In the early hours of August 29, in Germany, Binalshibh was woken by the telephone. The caller was Atta, his Egyptian-accented voice instantly recognizable.

Atta had a riddle for Binalshibh, a joke as he put it: “ ‘Two sticks, a dash, and a cake with a stick down’ … What is it?” Binalshibh, half asleep, was stumped for a moment. Then—presumably he was expecting such a call—he figured out the answer. The puzzle, he told Atta, was “sweet.”

“Two sticks” signified “11.” The “dash” was a dash. A “cake with a stick down” was a “9.”

11–9—the way most of the world renders the days of the calendar. Or, as Americans render them:

9/11

The date was set.

• • •

BINALSHIBH PASSED on the date to KSM, and the hijackers’ operation entered its final phase. Everything now depended on Atta’s organizing ability and success in maintaining security. An effort to bring the total number of terrorists up to twenty—four five-man teams, one for each target—had recently risked wrecking the entire endeavor.

In early August, at Orlando, Florida, a U.S. immigration inspector had had his doubts about a newly arrived young Saudi. Standing instructions were to take it easy on Saudis—they were a boost to tourism—but this man had no return ticket and had not filled out customs and immigration forms. The inspector sent the man on for a “secondary,” a grilling that was to last two hours.

The would-be “tourist,” twenty-five-year-old Mohamed el-Kahtani, said that, though he would be staying only a few days, he did not know where he would be going next. He first said that someone due to arrive from abroad would be paying for his onward travel, then that another “someone” was waiting for him in Arrivals. Secondary inspector José Meléndez-Pérez noted, too, that the subject was belligerent.

“He started pointing his finger … Whatever he was saying was in a loud voice—like ‘I am in charge—you’re not going to do anything to me. I am from Saudi Arabia.’ People from Saudi think they are untouchable … He had a deep staring look … [like] ‘If I could grip your heart I would eat it’ … This man intimidated me with his look and his behavior.”

The inspector felt in his gut that Kahtani had evil intent—he thought he might be a hit man—and recommended that he be sent back to Saudi Arabia. This was the one occasion, after a series of inefficiencies involving the terrorists, that an alert INS official had really done his job. KSM was to admit under interrogation that the suspect had indeed been sent to the States to join the terrorist team—to “round out the number of hijackers.”

It is rational to think that, but for the inspector’s acumen, there would have been five rather than four hijackers aboard United Flight 93. With Kahtani’s additional muscle—Meléndez-Pérez remembered him as having looked trim, “like a soldier”—they might have been better able to resist the passengers’ attempt to retake the cockpit. Instead of plunging to the ground in Pennsylvania, Flight 93 might have stayed on course and struck its target in Washington.

There had indeed been a “someone” waiting to meet Kahtani at Orlando. Evidence gathered after 9/11 established to a virtual certainty that Mohamed Atta had been at the airport that day. He did not leave, parking records showed, until it was clear that the new recruit was not going to emerge from Immigration. Had those handling Kahtani taken the investigation of him one step further, had they thought the suspect might be engaged in terrorism, the leader of the operation might himself have come under the microscope. Atta might have been unmasked.

As it was, Atta remained free, putting thousands of miles on rental cars, flying hither and thither, coordinating communications, the whirl of logistics involved in getting nineteen men—most of them with minimal familiarity with the West or the English language—in place and ready for the appointed day.

Most of the time in August, the terrorists stayed in their apartments and motels. They did what in other men would have been everyday activities: in Florida, exercising, two of them, at a Y2 Fitness Center; going shopping—for jewelry at a store called the Piercing Pagoda, for a dress shirt at Surreys Menswear; getting clothes cleaned at a Fort Dixie Laundry.

There were some signs of movement. The men crowded into the apartment in Paterson, New Jersey, moved out, leaving behind a few items of clothing, glasses in the bathroom—and flight manuals. Crowded they remained, though. By late that month five of them were squeezed into one room at the Valencia Motel, a cheap joint in Laurel, Maryland. They seemed rarely to leave the room, opening the door to the maid only to take in fresh towels. Guests who used a next-door room “thought they were gay.”