Under Siege
"This is pure, unadulterated evil."; "There was fire and smoke everywhere. It was surreal."; The terrorists flew on devil's wings in a horrifying moment, singular in history. They changed the course of a presidency, a nation, and, quite likely, the world
But that's just one challenge. The other is investigating the attacks on the Trade Center and the Pentagon, and the hijacking of the fourth jet that crashed in the rural hills of southwestern Pennsylvania, where heroic passengers apparently brought down a flight that might have been targeting the White House. The FBI has dubbed the inquiry Penttbom. One of the best leads so far is an acne-scarred little man named Mohammed Atta. The last day of Atta's life began shortly before the sun rose. At 5:43 a.m., at the near-empty airport in Portland, Maine, the reedy Egyptian bought a one-way ticket to Los Angeles, with a stopover in Boston. Precisely 10 minutes later, wearing a blue shirt and dark trousers, clutching a carry-on purse, Atta and another man walked through the airport's security checkpoint. At 6 a.m., the commuter jet, operated by U.S. Airways, took off for Boston. On board, the men sat one behind the other. At Logan, they didn't have long to wait. American Airlines Flight 11 was among the day's earliest departing flights. Once it was airborne, Atta and four accomplices commandeered the plane, wielding knives and box cutters. The hijackers diverted the jetliner and steered it south, along the Hudson River and over Manhattan. At 8:46 a.m., they rammed the Boeing 767 into the north tower of the World Trade Center, wings banked for maximum destruction.
The main business in the hunt for Atta and the other terrorists now is to discover how their movements were directed and coordinated. Cannistraro, the former counterterrorism chief at the CIA, says U.S. intelligence agencies have identified most of the hijackers as having worked directly for al Qaeda, the shadowy organization led by bin Laden. "The conclusion at the CIA is that it was bin Laden," he said. "[Colin] Powell believes it. The president believes it."
The case is being assembled in increments. Back at Logan Airport, Atta's accomplices left an intriguing clue, a flight-training manual written in Arabic left inside a white, rented Mitsubishi Mirage. And they discovered something else. "[The FBI] found our address," says Dru Voss, a Florida woman who had rented out a room in their home to Atta and another man, Marwan Shehhi. Voss's husband, Charlie, once worked as a bookkeeper at Huffman Aviation, the flight school nearby. Voss said the two men stayed for just a week in July 2000. "They were very sloppy," she says, "so we kicked them out."
Within hours, FBI agents were swarming all over the flight school. There they learned that Atta and his housemate had plunked down almost $20,000 each for flying lessons. Atta resurfaced in Florida in mid-August, at the Palm Beach Flight School in Lantana. There he flew four-seat, single-engine planes for a couple of hours at a time. "Every time he came," says Owen Gassaway Jr., the airport operator there, "he was with a different friend."
One of the friends, his roommate Shehhi, took over the controls of United Airlines Flight 175, the plane that cameras captured crashing into the south tower of the World Trade Center, just 18 minutes after Atta crashed his plane into the north tower.
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