The next day Almihdhar and Alhazmi were placed on the TIPOFF watchlist, alerting INS in case they tried to enter the country. By then, they had already been here for nearly two years, and September 11 was only eighteen days away.
In all, the nineteen hijackers entered the United States a total of thirty-three times, through more than ten different airports, without ever being stopped or detained. “The innovation Al Qaeda introduced is ‘clean operatives,’” said Doris Meissner, Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) commissioner up until 2000, “who can go through immigration controls undetected.” That is because they had no criminal records, no known terrorist connections, and had not been identified by intelligence methods for special scrutiny. She added in January 2004, “Even under the best immigration controls, most of the September 11 terrorists would still be admitted to the United States today.”
On August 28, the department’s Bureau of Diplomatic Security was contacted and asked to supply the FBI with visa information, but was not asked to help locate the suspected terrorists. Nor was any other information provided that might have indicated that there was a high priority or an imminent danger. It was simply routine, one of about fifty a day it normally receives. The INS therefore never bothered to search its database and simply provided the FBI with the address listed on Almihdhar’s immigration form.
Like the CIA and FBI, the NSA was also desperately trying to find terrorists during the summer of 2001. By then, life had become considerably more difficult for the agency than it had been during the Cold War. Everything had changed. Instead of a stationary target, Al Qaeda was in constant motion around the world, with no uniforms or diplomatic passports to help keep track of them.
Unlike the old Soviet Union, with its fixed army, navy, and air force bases, bin Laden spent much of his time living in caves, and his training camps could easily be abandoned and reestablished somewhere else almost overnight. Where the Russians were always talking, Al Qaeda seldom communicated electronically, and when they did it was often with a phone card and a random phone, or an e-mail sent from a public library or Internet café. For their most important information, however, Al Qaeda preferred messengers over transmitters. And while NSA was overflowing with people who spoke Russian and the various Slavic dialects, those completely fluent in Hazzar, Urdu, Pashto, Uzbek, Dari, Farsi, Tagalog, and even Arabic—the languages of their new targets—were negligible. There were not many colleges teaching courses in such subjects and priming the pump.
A focal point for the terrorist warnings that summer was the National Security Agency’s National Security Operations Center, which was at the very heart of the agency’s worldwide eavesdropping activities. Located in Room 3E099 on the third floor of OPS 1, the windowless, war room–like command center was manned round-the-clock by five rotating teams of civilians and military personnel. Waist-high cubicles separated target areas, such as transnational and regional threats; large video screens covered the walls; and computer monitors glowed like electronic candles in the dim light. On the top of the wall, clocks ticked off time in such places as Bosnia, Moscow, and Iraq. Red lights began flashing the moment a visitor without the proper security clearances entered the room.
In addition to the spike in worrisome communications traffic, many of the messages indicated that bin Laden and Al Qaeda intended to strike against American interests in the very near future. In May, intelligence was received that supporters of bin Laden were planning to carry out a terrorist operation within the United States using high explosives. They were planning to enter, said the report, via Canada, the longest undefended border in the world.
“Throughout the summer of 2001,” said NSA Director Michael V. Hayden, “we had more than thirty warnings that something was imminent.” But the “chatter,” as it is called, contained no details on exactly what, where, when, or how an attack might take place. Most often it consisted of intercepts of terrorists overheard talking to each other in general terms about the impact that an attack might have—hundreds killed, for example—without mentioning the precise target or date of the attack.
Some within the intelligence community were startled at the sudden increase in chatter, calling it “unprecedented.” “The chatter level went way off the charts,” said Porter J. Goss. In June, the intelligence community issued a terrorist threat advisory warning U.S. government agencies that there was a high probability of an imminent terrorist attack against U.S. interests by bin Laden’s organization. “Sunni extremists associated with Al Qaeda are most likely to attempt spectacular attacks resulting in numerous casualties,” it said.
Possible locations for the attacks included the Arabian Peninsula, Israel, and Italy. Similar reports indicated that Al Qaeda expected near-term attacks to have dramatic consequences on governments or cause major casualties. But these reports, like the dozens of others obtained during the summer, were vague in terms of timing, locations, and means.
According to a senior intelligence official who is among those charged with determining the causes of the September 11 attacks and the American intelligence community’s response, the conflict between Israel and Palestine was always at the heart. “It’s central,” he said. “It’s not the only thing, but it’s the central thing.”
As warning messages flashed out of NSA to the White House at the end of August, no one noticed a small group of Middle Eastern men checking into the nearby eighty-room Valencia Motel. Located in the NSA “company town” of Laurel, Maryland, it was just a few miles away from the agency’s front gate. Moving into Room 343, a small living room–kitchenette suite, was Khalid Almihdhar and his team of terrorists as they began the final preparations for their attacks.
Never disguising their presence, they checked in using their real names, paid the weekly rent of $308 with a credit card, ate at a local pizza parlor, visited an adult bookstore, shopped at the Giant supermarket, washed their clothes at the Sunshine Laundry, and bought weekly memberships at Gold’s Gym in nearby Greenbelt. Team member Hani Hanjour, who had a pilot’s license, went up with instructors several times at the nearby Freeway Airport in Bowie, and both Mohamed Atta and Ziad Jarrah, the student from war-torn Beirut, came to visit.
As millions of intercepted communications from around the world funneled into the agency’s giant satellite dishes, Almihdhar was communicating with Atta and Khalid Shaikh Mohammed back in Afghanistan at the local Kinko’s, a few miles away, through simple Internet chat groups. None of the hijackers had their own computers. They also used the Internet on local computers to buy their seats on Flight 77, listing their real names, and then simply went to Baltimore-Washington International Airport to pick them up.
They used 133 different prepaid calling cards to call from various pay phones, cell phones, and landlines. For more than a year, the NSA had occasionally picked up Almihdhar’s phone calls to the Al Qaeda safe house in Yemen, never knowing that his calls were coming from the United States—or possibly even the same town.
On the afternoon of September 10, they checked out of the Valencia and piled into their blue Toyota Corolla with California license plates, registered to Almihdhar. Merging into the southbound traffic on Route 1, much of it homeward-bound NSA employees, they headed for the Marriott Residence Inn in Herndon, near Dulles International Airport. The next day, September 11, they had an early-morning plane to catch, American Airlines Flight 77, which would have as its final destination the south wall of the Pentagon.
Also on September 10, NSA’s vacuum cleaner swept in two more messages culled from that day’s electronic haystack. The first contained the phrase “The match begins tomorrow,” and the second said “Tomorrow is zero hour.” But even though they came from suspected Al Qaeda locations in Afghanistan, no one would translate them until September 12.
PART III
DECEPTION
CHAPTER 10
SITUATION ROOM
In the onyx darkness, George W. Bush switched on the brass sidelight next to his bed. The soft glow gave the President’s bedroom the feel of an old but formal country inn, the kind that might be found in Williamsburg or Newport during the season. Pale-cream wallpaper overlaid with a diagonal pattern of blue and pink bunches of flowers; Early American wooden chairs decorated with whimsical, chip-carved lunettes; a scorched fireplace beneath a milky-white mantel; scrollwork made of Italian Carrera marble.
Behind heavy drapes, a pair of floor-to-ceiling windows looked through the towering southern magnolias, planted in 1830 by President Andrew Jackson in memory of his wife, Rachel, and across President’s Park to the Washington Monument. Brightly lit against the early-morning light, the obelisk had the appearance of a spaceship about to rise. A spidery, antique chandelier of cut glass and gilded metal hung in the center of the room. On the floor near the bed, Barney, the family’s Scottish terrier pup, lay like a small sack of coal. It was Tuesday, January 30, 2001, and George W. Bush had been president for ten days.
He strode quietly past the bedroom’s walk-in closet and out to the West Sitting Hall where, four decades earlier, Jackie Kennedy answered correspondence with swirling penmanship on her father’s French Empire desk. Passing through the eight-foot wooden doors into the cavernous Center Hall, he turned left into the small family elevator. Inside, columns carved in the old mahogany walls framed mirrors on three sides to reduce the feeling of claustrophobia. Hidden behind the elevator was a private circular stairway he sometimes used.
When the doors slid open at the basement level, the President crossed the Diplomatic Reception Room, encircled by Jean Zuber et Cie’s pastoral scenes of North America. On the South Grounds, he stepped into the presidential limousine for the short ride to Fort Lesley J. McNair in southwest Washington for his morning jog.
Secluded away on the point of land where the Anacostia River merges into the Washington Channel, the old redbrick Army post offered privacy, security, and space—twenty-eight acres—for presidential runs. The old fort was originally constructed in 1791 to protect the nation’s new capital city from invasion, but it failed when the British attacked in 1814. Washington was devastated; the White House was turned into cinders and Fort McNair was leveled. But thoughts of an attack on the nation and failed defenses were probably a long way from the mind of George W. Bush as he sprinted beside the neoclassic National War College in the cold morning air.
Back at the White House, a Secret Service agent nodded as the President, accompanied by Spot, stepped into the Oval Office. The small black and white English Springer spaniel was born in his father’s White House a dozen years earlier. Just as Spot follows George W. Bush into the nation’s most powerful office each morning, her mother, Millie, followed his father into the same place.
Bush crossed the Reagan-era ivory, beige, and terra-cotta rug. It had replaced Bill Clinton’s royal blue oval carpet on the morning of the inauguration. From the beginning, Bush made it clear he wanted nothing left from the previous administration. Bold colors were out, peaches and cream were in. Workers lugged away the plush red and cream silk-covered sofas and replaced them with beige couches. The medallions and busts of Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry S Truman were returned to a dark basement storage room and the walls and tables were filled with family photos and rough-hewn artwork from Texas. On the north wall was one of the President’s favorite paintings, Tom Lea’s 1954 oil on canvas, “Rio Grande,” borrowed from the El Paso Museum of Art. “Bush’s taste in office decor is respectable Middle America,” said one observer. The new style and decor “imply respectable, white, middle-aged, middle-class values. No perverts or radicals here.”
Assassination, the fate of his alter ego William McKinley, was a topic that haunted George W. Bush since long before he became president. Not the possibility of his own violent death, but the assassination attempt against his father by Iraqi President Saddam Hussein shortly after the elder Bush lost the presidency.
In fact, if the intelligence George W. was given was correct, he might have lost nearly his entire immediate family, including his father, mother, wife, and two brothers. Just as he sought to avenge his father’s political loss, he would one day go after the man accused of attempting to murder his father and the rest of his family. “After all,” he would later comment, when speaking of the Iraqi leader at a Houston fundraiser, “this is the guy who tried to kill my dad.”
The drama began in mid-April 1993 as much of the country was focused on the tense standoff in Waco, Texas, between Branch Davidian cult leader David Koresh and federal law-enforcement agents. About the same time that the FBI was flying two senior military officers to Waco to assess the situation, a few hundred miles to the south, in Houston, George H. W. Bush was quietly boarding a chartered Kuwaiti Airlines 747 for a trip to the Middle East. A private citizen for the first time in more than a decade, the former president was being thanked and embraced by the Kuwaiti government, which hailed him as a liberating hero for forcing Iraq out of their country.
As the giant plane took off from Houston’s Ellington Field on April 14, the only passengers were former President Bush, his wife Barbara, their two sons Marvin and Neil, his wife Sharon, and Laura Bush. Her husband, George W. Bush, who had always avoided foreign travel, stayed home to oversee his interest in the Texas Rangers baseball team and to make preparations for his run for the governorship. Several hours into the flight, the plane landed in Washington, D.C., to pick up former Secretary of State James Baker, former Treasury Secretary Nicholas Brady, and former White House Chief of Staff John Sununu. Once again airborne, the group toasted their reunion and looked forward to three days of victory celebrations.