Anthony Summers - The Eleventh Day

As for the directive as a whole, Clarke came away from the meeting as frustrated as ever. All the things he had recommended back in January 2001, he was to tell the Commission, were to get done—after 9/11. “I didn’t really understand,” he said, “why they couldn’t have been done in February.”

Clarke had been trying in vain, his aide Paul Kurtz recalled, to get Bush officials to “grasp the enormity of this new, transnational, networked foe … people thought he was hyping it up.” “It sounds terrible,” Clarke’s then-deputy Roger Cressey recalled, “but we used to say to each other that some people didn’t get it—it was going to take body bags.”

Hours before the September 4 meeting, Clarke had sent National Security Adviser Rice a strongly worded note, with several passages underlined. The real question before the participants that day, he wrote, was: “Are we serious about dealing with the al Qaeda threat? … Is al Qaeda a big deal? … Decision makers should imagine themselves on a future day when the CSG [Counterterrorism Security Group] has not succeeded in stopping al Qaeda attacks and hundreds of Americans lay dead in several countries, including the U.S.… What would those decision makers wish that they had done earlier? That future day could happen at any time … You are left waiting for the big attack, with lots of casualties.”

September 4 ended with the Presidential Directive approved subject to just a few final adjustments by the Deputies Committee. It would be ready for the president’s signature—soon.

A THOUSAND MILES to the south, Atta found time for a matter of financial integrity. He told Binalshibh on September 5 that he and his men had money left over. Since they would soon have no further need of it, it should be reimbursed. For the hijackers, FBI investigators were to conclude, not to have returned remaining funds would have been to die as thieves.

In dribs and drabs over the next few days, by Western Union, bank transfer, and express mail, the terrorist team arranged for some $36,000 to be sent to the accomplice in Dubai who had been handling funds. The entire 9/11 operation, the Commission was to calculate, cost al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden less than $500,000.

Across the world, accomplices and men with guilty knowledge were by now running for safety. The “brothers,” as Binalshibh put it later, “were dispersed.” He himself flew from Germany to Spain, was met by a Saudi who furnished him with a phony passport, then took off on an airborne marathon that took him via Greece, the United Arab Emirates, and Egypt to Pakistan.

Soon after he arrived, Binalshibh would tell his interrogators, a messenger set off overland with a status report for the leadership in Afghanistan. “The message was great news for Sheikh Abu Abdallah,” Binalshibh said, using one of the many names followers used for bin Laden. “May Allah protect him.”

ACCORDING TO a British government source, communications intercepts at this time picked up messages between bin Laden and senior comrades. One of them, probably a contact with KSM in Pakistan, “referred to an incident that would take place in America on or around September 11”—and the repercussions that might follow.

Egyptian intelligence, with its penetration agent inside al Qaeda, received and passed on “information about some people planning an operation in the United States.” “It was one week before,” recalled President Mubarak. “The wheels were going.”

On September 6, oblivious to such specifics, former senator Gary Hart attended a meeting at the White House. Having tried in vain in January to get the Bush administration to pay real attention to the warnings of the Commission on National Security he had cochaired, he had begun to think there was movement at last.

President Bush had said in the spring that he was establishing a new office, supervised by Vice President Cheney and devoted to “preparedness” for all forms of terrorist strikes on American soil. He himself, the President said, would periodically chair meetings to review the office’s work. That had not happened, but now here was Hart at the White House in early September, offering his commission’s expertise to help with the project. Rice, he was to recall, merely “said she would pass on the message.”

Their vacations over, President Bush and CIA director Tenet met six times in the first eight days of September. It is not known what they discussed.

AT AN FBI OFFICE in New York, meanwhile, the lone FBI agent charged with looking for Hazmi and Mihdhar was just getting started. Agent Robert Fuller had not been instructed that the matter was especially urgent, nor that the two men posed a serious threat. On a request form he sent to another agency about Mihdhar, he did not even tick the box to indicate that the subject was wanted in connection with “security/terrorism.”

He did put out some tentative feelers. Mihdhar had written on his most recent immigration form that he planned to stay at a Marriott hotel in New York City. Unsurprisingly, checks showed that no one with his name had registered at any of the six local Marriotts.

Mihdhar and Hazmi had both used their own names while in the States, and several commonly used databases might well have thrown up information on them. By his own account, Fuller did check the National Crime Information Center, the NCIC, credit and motor vehicle records, and—with a colleague’s help—the ChoicePoint service. Whether he in fact trawled all those sources, though, has been questioned.

While Mihdhar had been out of the country for much of the past year, Hazmi had for months been on the East Coast. Had the hunt for him been treated seriously—had his case been given the priority of, say, the search for a wanted bank robber—tracking him would not have been a hopeless quest. Three days before Agent Fuller received his assignment, Hazmi had come to the notice of a traffic policeman while driving a rental car in Totowa, New Jersey. The patrolman had reportedly taken down the license plate and entered it as a matter of routine in the NCIC.

As reported earlier in these pages, moreover, Hazmi had also featured in three other traffic episodes: another recent “query” by police in Hackensack, New Jersey, a collision outside New York City, and a speeding ticket in Oklahoma. He had even filed a police report in Washington, D.C, using his own name, complaining of having been mugged. One or more of this total of five incidents ought to have made it to the NCIC.

All that aside, Hazmi and Mihdhar had for more than eighteen months lived in the United States—in plain sight—leaving a trail of credit card, bank account, telephone, and accommodations records behind them. Yet Agent Fuller turned up nothing on them. Having made a start on September 5, it appears that he then let the matter drop—until the day before the attacks.

• • •

WITH U.S. INTELLIGENCE and law enforcement in a state of paralysis, the terrorists were moving into position. On September 6, if a later FBI analysis is correct, those in Florida held some sort of get-together. According to the manager and bartender at Shuckums, a sports bar in Hollywood, Atta, Shehhi, and a companion spent three hours there relaxing.

There may be truth to the story. Atta and Shehhi were in the state that day, had long been close, and may have chosen to have a last evening together. It may even be true that the man thought to have been Atta, faced with a sizable bill, declared arrogantly that he was an airline pilot and could well afford to pay.

What is less likely is that, as the press first reported, the trio all got drunk on vodka and rum—contrary to the dictates of Islam. Shehhi, known to have enjoyed a beer and knowing that he was not long for this world, may perhaps have downed spirits. For Atta to have gotten inebriated, though, would have been out of character. In a later version of the story, he merely drank cranberry juice and nibbled on chicken wings.