Sent: Monday,
September 17, 2001 7:54 PM
Subject: The new breed of terrorist part
1
The New Breed of Terrorist
An exclusive look at the lives of the men
behind the strike. Now dozens of
their associates may be at large in the
U.S. What will come next?
BY JOHANNA MCGEARY AND DAVID VAN BIEMA
It was so ordinary at the time, so
ominous in hindsight. An American
Airlines
agent at Dulles Airport in Virginia
looked up as two polite young men of Arab
origin handed over their tickets. Odd:
they were waiting in the coach-class
line, dressed in inexpensive clothes, but
their tickets were first class,one
way. Prepaid at $2,400 each. "Oil
money," thought the agent. Such
passengers
are common at Dulles, but these two
looked a bit young: one, around 20,spoke
a little English; his brother, even
younger, spoke none. And they seemed
awfully thin, almost underfed. The agent
saw they had ordered special Muslim
meals, but so had some others on the
flight. The brothers gave the right
answers to standard security questions
and had valid IDs, one of them a
proper-looking Commonwealth of
Massachusetts driver's license. The agent
wasn't in a rush and laughed to himself
that the two brothers were such
infrequent flyers they didn't know they
could check in at the empty
first-class counter. But the two were
patient, pleasant, low key. There was
really nothing to trigger alarms as the
brothers and three other passengers
of Arab ethnicity boarded American
Airlines Flight 77 for Los Angeles.
The two brothers were Nawaq Alhamzi and
Salem Alhamzi, who knew they were
going to die that morning. They were two
of the 19 men who hijacked four
planes and turned them into deadly
missiles last Tuesday, shocking the world
with their new technique for terror. But
they were only the visible agents of
the conspiracy. As investigators and
intelligence services worldwide raced to
trace their movements and feverishly
searched for other plots, it became
increasingly apparent that the 19 were
merely soldiers, p art of a terrible
new army that owes its allegiance to a
cause, not a country. There were other
hands on the control sticks of those
planes: the masterminds who dreamed up
the plot and who saw it through to
catastrophic conclusion. The goal of the
new war on terrorism is not only to
arrest perps and break up plots but also
to trace those lines of responsibility as
far as they go, to prove moral
responsibility for terrorist acts on the
part of any world leaders who encourage
them.
President Bush sounded the battle call
last week for a war to be waged on a
thousand fronts. The sprawling
investigation now under way will help the
White House shape a response: not only an
attack of retribution against those
who plotted this massacre but also a long
line of moves designed to forestall
future attacks. "This is a conflict
without battlefields or beachheads, a
conflict with opponents who believe they
are invisible. Yet they are
mistaken. They will be exposed," the
President said last Saturday. "We
will
smoke them out of their holes."
Secretary of State Colin Powell spread
the
word worldwide: You are with us or you
are against us.
At the FBI, they're calling the
investigation Penttbom, for Pentagon Twin
Towers Bombing, and running the probe
from inside the agency's high-tech
Special Information and Operations
Center, a 40,000-sq.-ft. command post in
Washington where FBI Deputy Director Tom
Pickard supervises the 4,000 agents
and 3,000 analysts and support people
working the case. Pickard's team had
received 46,125 tips by last Saturday,
which they were farming out to field
offices and 31 other agencies working
with them on the case. Pickard, 51, a
native of Queens, faces the colossal task
of shaping the information into a
portrait of a criminal organization
ingeniously designed to avoid detection.
FBI agents are delving into the training
logs and financial records of four
Florida flight schools and others around
the U.S., compiling a list of other
pilots who could form the nucleus of
fresh hijack teams that might be
scrambling for jet seats even no w. A
U.S. intelligence official told Time he
believes some 30 terror operatives were
deployed on the Sept. 11 mission.
"There's more," says the
official. "More than we have
accounted for." And the
hit squads were backed, officials now
believe, by a network of financial,
informational and logistical support.
"There's a concern that there's a
substantial infrastructure scattered
around the country, in Detroit, Florida
and Boston, for example," the
intelligence official told Time.
U.S. security agencies must unravel a
conspiracy that stretches back years
and across continents. Israel's Mossad,
experts in this sort of thing,
estimate that it took at least two years
and 100 people to pull it off.
Someone thought long and hard how to do
it, then found willing fanatics to
carry it out. They carried different
passports—Saudi Arabia, the United
Arab
Emirates, Lebanon—and perhaps
pledged fealty to different radical
factions.
What brought them together was first a
hatred of America for causing their
resentments and frustrations, and then
someone who knew how to transform
their rage into bloody results. Osama bin
Laden may be the top general in
charge, but who are the field
lieutenants? Even usually placid FBI
officers
called their search squads
"frenzied" as they hunted last
week for shadow
figures who might be involved. To
underscore the broad reach, at New York's
Kennedy Airport Thursday, 10 people were
questioned, and one was eventually
held as a material witness.
The West had developed a fairly
well-defined profile of the typical
suicidal
terrorist. That man would be young, 18 to
24, born in poverty, a victim of
some personal tragedy, a despairing
zealot with nothing to lose. He would be
fanatic in behavior and belief: stern,
moralistic, teetotaling. The status of
shahid, or holy martyr, would solve his
earthly issues in paradise, and
someone would give money to his family on
earth. If he hailed from the rebel
training camps of Afghanistan, where the
cult of jihad gets its earthly
gunmen, he would be fundamentalist in his
faith, ignorant of the outside
world, immersed in a life of religious
devotion and guerrilla instruction. He
would speak not in casual conversation
but in scripture. An intense,
carefully nurtured fanaticism would
replace any natura l instinct for
self-preservation.
But the 19 men who carried out last
Tuesday's attacks were different. They
did their most important training right
here, among us. They were
"sleepers,"
unusually purposeful men, living ordinary
lives as they prepared for
extraordinary deeds; they had plenty of
time to change their minds if they
had wanted to. They lived by the
terrorist handbook cited in the East
Africa
embassy-bombings trial: "When you're
in the outer world, you have to act like
them, dress like them, behave like
them." They were older& #151;
one age 33,
several in their late 20s—educated,
technically skilled people who could have
enjoyed solid middle-class lives. Some
left wives and children behind. Yet
even more ardently than their young
predecessors, these men made common cause
with each other out of some profound
hatred for America. Investigators don't
know yet if they were recruited or they
volunteered, but their need to do
violence to the enemy and their
unflinching will to carry the plan
through
over months, even years, brings a
terrible new dimension to the dynamics of
terrorism.
It is one of the truisms of the modern
airline industry that the U.S. trains
many of the world's pilots. The backs of
international pilot magazines are
crammed with ads for flight schools in
Florida, California and Arizona.
"Three hundred sunny days a
year," some of them proclaim, an
enticement to
students in a hurry to build up the
hundreds of hours of basic prop-plane
time needed before moving on to jet
training and potentially lucrative
careers. If Harvard, Yale and M.I.T. draw
the world's future biochemists,
these small four-and five-plane aviation
schools attract the globe's future
pilots. Huffman Aviation, tucked on
Florida's Gulf Coast between Tampa and
Fort Myers, is just such a place. The
weather is good. Gas and airplane
rentals are cheap—you can fly a
Cessna 150 single-engine plane for $55 an
hour, 40% less than what you might pa y
in a big city. The airport cafe is
open, serving hot, cheap food with
aviation nicknames like "Emergency
Descent," a bacon cheeseburger.
For the better part of the past year, as
the U.S. elected a new President and
pondered the Internet bust, Mohamed Atta
and Marwan Al-Shehhi spent their
days buzzing up and down the Florida
coast in small Cessnas, building time.
Their training began in ear nest in July.
They were quiet and private. For a
week or two they leased a room—$17 a
night—from Charlie Voss, a
bookkeeper
at Huffman. But Voss's wife did not like
their slovenly habits. In the
morning they would pad from the shower
with wet hair and snap their heads
around. "You've been here long
enough, and you need to find a
place," Charlie
told the two. "Go to it."
They seemed to be in a rush to fly the
big planes. Long before they were
really ready, before they had the 1,000
or so hours any airline would demand
of a future jet pilot, they invested in
expensive time in a training device.
The 727 full-motion simulator is a
multimillion-dollar contraption that
twists and bucks and turns on hydraulic
pistons like a Disney ride. But the
technology is good enough that airline
pilots use simulators regularly to
train for emergencies that are too
dangerous to practice in a real plane: a
double-engine failure or a fire on
takeoff. For $1,500, Atta and Al-Shehhi
bought six hours of simulator time from
Henry George, who owns the SimCenter
School in Opa-Locka. He led them through
a few basic maneuvers: climbs,
descents, turns. It wasn't much, but it
was enough to give a beginner pilot a
realistic sensation of how to handle a
three-engine jet airliner. And enough,
later, to break George's heart. "To
think that I helped in any way their
terrible cause, that my skills were used
f or such a terrible deed," he says.
Al-Shehhi was on board United Flight
175 and was probably the pilot of the
airliner as it smashed into the side of
the World Trade Center's south tower.
Atta was on American Flight 11, which had
hit the north tower 21 minutes earlier.
They were not, it seems, alone in their
training. Waleed Alshehri, in his
mid-20s, had graduated in 1997 with a
degree in aeronautical science and a
commercial pilot's license from the
prestigious Embry-Riddle Aeronautical
University in Daytona Beach, Fla., where
nearly a quarter of all commercial
pilots train. He surely knew how to fly
the large aircraft the terrorists
planned to ram into their targets. He was
on American Flight 11 with Atta.
Abdulaziz Alomari told his Vero Beach
landlord in July 2000 th at he was a
Saudi commercial pilot when he moved in
with a wife and three kids. He was
then taking classes at FlightSafety
Academy, often patronized by employees
from Saudi Arabian Airlines. He too would
have had the rudimentary skills
needed to steer an airliner. Says a
neighbor: "My kids played with his
kids.
I'm stunned." He was aboard Flight
11 as well. Of the five hijackers on
board, four were U.S.-trained pilots.
As far back as 1996, at least two other
men were following a similar course.
Hani Hanjour, another of the eventual
hijackers, was working with a CRM
Airline Training Center in Scottsdale,
Ariz. By 1999 Hanjour had accumulated
enough hours—250—to fly with an
FAA examiner for his commercial pilot's
license. It was awarded and issued that
same year. His address: a post-office
box in Saudi Arabia, though for much of
the past year he had lived with two
other men, Nawaq Alhamzi and Khalid
Al-Midhar in a San Diego apartment
complex.
They were a quiet lot. "I saw them
watching and playing flight-simulator
games when I was walking my dog at 10 or
11 at night. They would leave the
front door open," recalls Ed Murray,
who lived across from them. It was the
closest contact anyone at the complex had
with the three. "Anytime you saw
them, they were on their cell phones.
What I found strange was that they
always kept to themselves. Even if
someone got in the pool, they got
out."
Another neighbor, Nancy Coker, 36, saw
them getting into limos late at night,
even though the car that neighbors said
they drove was a gray Toyota Camry,
early '90s vintage. "A week ago, I
was coming home between 12 and 1 a.m.
from
a club. I saw a limo pick them up. It
wasn't the first time. In this
neighborhood you notice stuff like that.
In the past couple of months, I have seen
this happen at least two or three
times." Last week Hanjour was
theprobable pilot when American Airlines
Flight 77 flew into the Pentagon with
Alhamzi and Al-Midhar aboard.
Hollywood, Fla., is an overlooked burg
outshone by Miami on one side and Fort
Lauderdale on the other, trying to grab
some limelight with a string of sushi
and blues restaurants. One such
establishment is Shuckums Oyster Pub and
Seafood Grill, a music showcase with the
requisite life-size shark mounted on
an ocean-colored wall. It was at
Shuckums, on Sept. 8, that Mohamed Atta
and
Marwan Al-Shehhi did some premass
murder tippling. Atta drank vodka and
orange juice, while Al-Shehhi preferred
rum and cokes, five drinks apiece.
"They were wasted," the
bartender recalled, and Atta objected to
the $48
bill. Tony Amos, the manager, asked if
they were short the cash. "No,"
said
Atta. "I have plenty of money. I'm a
pilot." And he hauled a wad of $50
and
$100 bills from his pocket, eventually
leaving a $3 tip.
Atta and Al-Shehhi, his close companion,
are the two hijackers the
investigation has been most successful in
profiling. Before journeying to
Florida, Atta studied for several years
at Germany's Technical University of
Hamburg-Harburg and shared an apartment
with Al-Shehhi. According to German
chief prosecutor Kay Nehm, they were
linked with a group formed with the
"aim
of carrying out serious crimes, together
with other Islamic extremist groups
abroad, to attack the U.S. in a
spectacular way through the destruction
of
symbolic buildings."
There, in a 780-sq.-ft. apartment in a
working-class district, they appear to
have lived a life involving deepening
Islamic practice and community. They
had frequent visitors, sometimes as many
as 20 at a time, witnesses told the
New York Times. The group left their
shoes at the door and could frequently
be heard reciting from the Koran. They
wore traditional Islamic garb, at
least some of the time. The men often sat
in circles on the floor praying, a
neighbor reported. When they caught her
watching, they installed blinds. They
spoke good German. One neighbor
complained about loud Arabic music.
Despite
Nehm's claims, the German sojourn has the
feel of a somewhat more relaxed
period, of working toward a goal that was
not yet imminent.
Some of the future hijackers developed a
connection with Portland, Maine,
that investigators are still puzzling
over. Getting to and from that city has
become easier in the past few years as
the big airlines have laid on
small-jet routes to link it to Boston and
other Northeastern hubs. The
Portland airport still has just one
security checkpoint, which has a
surveillance camera pointed at it. On
Tuesday, shortly before 6 a.m., the
camera captured an image of Mohamed Atta
and Abdulaziz Alomari clearing
security in the quiet airport for a US
Airways flight to Boston. "In the
photo, Atta has a ticket in his hand and
a small shoulder bag," says Michael
Chitwood, who runs Portland's 155-man
police department. Both men were
dressed in Western garb.
They evidently arrived in Boston the
previous Sunday, drove back to Portland
and then flew again to Boston. But this
would have increased their exposure
to airline security, which they had to
clear once in Portland and again in
Boston, since US Airways an d American
Airlines operate from opposite ends of
the terminal. Yet, says Chitwood,
"if these guys carried out this
attack the
way they did, they had a reason to be up
here, but who the hell knows what it
is?" The movements, however, suggest
a group of hijackers quite familiar with
airport and immigration security, men who
had figured out how to move in and
around the U.S. without attracting
notice. This is especially remarkable
since several of them, sources t ell
Time, were already on FBI watch lists.
Toward the end of 1999, the CIA received
sketchy information connecting two
of the dead hijackers—Khalid
Al-Midhar and Nawaq Alhamzi—to bin
Laden's
organization.
Officials tell Time the CIA information
was considered too vague to pass
along, but by this summer those
suspicions had firmed up. There was no
indication of the plot they had in mind,
but there were strong hints of links
to bin Laden associates, including a
connection to a suspect in the bombing
of the U. S. S. Cole, enough to
raise a flag in the CIA database. A U.S.
official deep in the investigation says
it has now been determined from
Immigration and Naturalization Service
records that Al-Midhar and Alhamzi
visited the U.S. briefly in 200 0. They
returned in July 2001, giving
"Marriott in New York City" as
their destination. On Aug. 23, the CIA
passed
their names to the FBI and the ins for
inclusion on the U.S. watch list, and
FBI agents searched the country for the
two. But they had left addresses that
turned out to be useless, and the FBI
never found them until they crashed
into the Pentagon. Only afterward did the
FBI turn up the address for
Al-Midhar in the Claremont area of San
Diego.
The suicide squads seem to have regularly
used their own names, or at least
consistent noms de guerre, when they
enrolled in flight school, rented
apartments, bought cars. Police have
impounded cars they used and searched
apartments up and down the American East
Coast and in Germany, hauling off
bags of potential evidence. In Florida,
the FBI picked up a discarded tote
bag at the Panther Motel, where Al-Shehhi
stayed during the past two weeks.
Its contents: maps, flight manuals and
martial-arts books.
Some of the men seemed to use the same
Visa card, on which they rang up
substantial charges, and gave the same
Mail Boxes Etc. addresses, especially
toward the last days of their lives. On
attack day, four to seven
cross-country tickets were billed to the
same card. The same card number
showed up on the rental contract for a
car the hijackers left at Logan
Airport and for a Boston hotel room some
slept in. The pile of credit-card
receipts, rental-car contracts, hotel
bills and airline tickets tracks their
movements as they eventually made their
way from Florida to three chosen
airports. By then, the ones determined to
die didn't seem to care whether
they left a trail, but investigators say
the paperwork also opens useful
leads in new directions.
Investigators don't know how much the
suicide pilots knew about their
confederates before they gathered Tuesday
morning at their assigned
planes—or if they knew others would
undertake similar missions. But
preliminary
information suggests that the cells
followed classic bin Laden practice: over
time, cell members built up a small local
support network to collect
information, rent houses, buy equipment
for the "sleeper" operatives
while
they waited to be activated. As happened
with the East Africa embassy
bombings, agents think only a few
superior handlers—a Commander X or
two—sent perhaps by HQ at the
penultimate moment, knew how the final
pieces
were meant to fit together. They're the
ones Washington desperately wants to
find, because they might provide the
definitive link to bin Laden and
interdict more terrorist acts.
But there are plenty of clues to retrace
the steps of the hijackers in their
final days and hours. Boston seems to
have served as a forward staging area,
a big city where the terrorists could
vanish in the large Arab population.
Three times last month Atta rented cars
from Warrick's Rent-a-Car in Pompano
Beach and checked one back in with 2,000
miles on the odometer. He brought
the last one back Sept. 9. Parking-lot
cameras picked up a white Mitsubishi
sedan leased from an Alamo franchise that
had gone in and out of Boston's
Logan Airport five times between Sept. 5
and Sept. 11.
Someone, maybe Atta, was meticulously
casing the airport, checking plane
schedules, looking for half-empty
flights, testing security measures. He
and
his accomplices obviously learned a great
deal about airline schedules,
aircraft capabilities and fuel lo ads,
perhaps even seat configurations. The
car was found there again Tuesday night,
containing a "ramp pass" to
enter
restricted areas of Logan Airport. Maybe
that someone was reconnoitering with
accomplices who worked on the planes, who
could plant weapons onboard. Monday
night, some of the Boston suicide squads
collected at the Park Inn in
suburban Chestnut Hill. By Wednesday
dozens of police in bulletproof vests
descended on Room 432 to collect and
remove evidence.
When the four cells arrived at their
takeoff airports on Tuesday morning,
they no longer needed the karate and
flight manuals investigators would later
discover. Two teams of five rendezvoused
at Boston's Logan, a third group of
four at Newark and the last five men at
Dulles, with their knives and their
box cutters either stashed in their
shoulder bags or perhaps already
concealed onboard. Wail Alshehri, Waleed
Alshehri, Mohamed Atta, Abdulaziz
Alomari and Satam Al Suqami boarded
American Airlines 11 and drove it square
into the World Trade north tower at 8:45
a.m. A few minutes later, Marwan
Al-Shehhi, Fayez Ahmed, Mohald Alshehri,
Hamza Alghamdi and Ahmed Alghamdi
departed on United Airlines 175 and
rammed it through the corner of World
Trade south tower 21 minutes later.
Khalid Al-Midhar, Majed Moqed, Nawaq
Alhamzi, Hani Hanjour and Salem Alhamzi
embarked on American Flight 77 out of
Dulles and swung it around to smash into
the Pentagon at 9:40 a.m. The
cockpit voice recorder that might have
clarified whether this plane intended
to take out the White House or the
Capitol was found too badly damaged to
provide any information. Only the
kamikazes who got on United 93 in Newark
were thwarted, after determined
passengers decided to die "doing
something
abo ut it" rather than let the
terrorists crash the plane into their
apparent Washington target.
what we know now is only the surface. The
unidentified support structure
worries intelligence officials just as
much. Officials want to know too the
whereabouts of others from the Muslim
world who enrolled at the same flight
schools, trained with the kamikazes and
perhaps connected to field supporters
of the operation. More than 100 names of
acquaintances of the hijackers have
been forwarded to 18,000 law-enforcement
agencies in the U.S. and 20 overseas
FBI offices in hopes that a few will help
identify terrorists still living.
Some raw intelligence led to speculations
there might be a phase-two
operation, maybe involving car bombs.
Some leads suggest a fifth suicide
effort was aborted when its target air
flight to L.A. was canceled in the
wake of the other terrorists' successes.
What we still need to know is the deeper
connections: the radical
affiliations of the hijackers and the
links that connect those 19 dedicated
death seekers to the men who ordered them
to do it, and the men who would
like to emulate them. Their personal
agendas are less important than who
recruited them, financed them, oversaw
their mission. As Secretary of State
Colin Powell said Wednesday, "When
you are attacked by a terrorist and you
know who the terrorist is and you can
fingerprint it back to the cause of the
terror, you should respond." Now the
public tips and paper trails, worldwide
investigation and local canvassing need
to hunt down that fingerprint.
Nearly everyone in Washington has all but
concluded the whorls and ridges
belong to bin Laden. President Bush named
him the "prime suspect" on
Saturday. When you look at the point of
this attack, who better does it
serve? The faceless enemy needs no claim
of responsibility to get his message
across; he has no agenda that can be met.
What he wants is to make a
statement: to carry out attacks to prove
that he can. What better recruiting
poster than that searing image of a plane
shearing through the south tower:
it tells the faithful, Look at me, look
what we can do, join me.
The U.S. will have to keep cool in the
coming days as it proceeds to give
life to Bush's vow of war on terrorism.
It may lift our hearts now to pledge
an end to it, but heartache and
heartbreak lie ahead in what promises to
be a
long, painful struggle to prevail.
"You will be asked for your
strength,
because the course to victory may be
long," said Bush last week. Even if
bin
Laden worked "alone" this time,
he is not alone in his enmity. His ideas
and
thousands of men like him are still out
there.
Reported by Carole Buia/New York,
Teresa Brumback and Elaine Shannon/
Washington, Jeanne DeQuine/Miami, Yvette
C. Hammett/Vero Beach, Broward
Liston/ Daytona Beach, Rochelle
Renford/Venice, Jill Underwood/San Diego,
Eric Francis/Boston and Kathie
Klarreich/Coral Springs
Click to make comments or ask questions about
anything on this website.
To contact the
editor, click here: editor@rogueforum.com
|
Home Page 
