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
Someone declared war on the United States last week. We just don't know who. President Bush declared war in return. He just couldn't name an enemy. The first major conflict of the new century apparently comes with a unique twist: The adversary doesn't seem to have a border, an army, or a government. Its lone organizing principle is hatred--hatred of America.
And that, apparently, was enough. Enough to choreograph a plan of terror and devastation that fundamentally changes the basic calculus of life for the 285 million people living here, and for the uncounted millions the world over. Nineteen men with a killer's cold heart and a martyr's blind will boarded four commercial aircraft, hijacked them, then sacrificed their lives to kill, in just about an hour, twice the number of people slain at Pearl Harbor.
They did it with an obsessive's sense of patience and calculation, some living in our midst for more than a year, exploiting the most basic American freedoms to their own lethal ends. And they brought the nation's pastimes--baseball, football, and stock trading--to a screaming halt.
We are accustomed to a small measure of fear in our lives--from crime, natural disaster, even homegrown terror, like that at Oklahoma City. But we were not prepared for this. For this heinous combination of skill and blood lust. Until last week, such violence had largely been confined to the heart-rending images from the Middle East, someone else's distant tragedy, and endless strain.
Now, it has come home, testing the strength of the government and the resolve of the people. Three days after the attacks in New York and Washington, four of the five living former presidents sat grim-faced and impassive during a moving prayer service at the National Cathedral. President George W. Bush was there as well, seeking strength in spirit while he prepared to order the American response, a military counterpunch that many expect to be devastating, even disproportionate. "It will end in a way and at an hour," Bush said, "of our choosing."
It was as though the president was using the occasion to start the collective building of a national will for what promises to be a long, embittered, deadly struggle. He invoked Franklin Roosevelt when he spoke of the "warm courage of national unity." The approach seemed to be working. Just hours later, as he stood in the rubble of war-torn Lower Manhattan, the president, speaking on a bullhorn to rescue workers, was greeted with chants of "U.S.A., U.S.A!"
There are plenty of obstacles, however, between talk and action. U.S. officials have singled out a network of Islamic militants, led by Osama bin Laden, as the most likely culprit. Much of the world embraced Bush's vow to hit back and hit back hard. In official declarations, prayer vigils, and E-mails to friends, the world let America know loud and clear that Tuesday's attacks were their tragedy as well. Russian President Vladimir Putin addressed his nation to deplore the "brazen challenge to civilized humanity."
"Target packages." The United States will need that kind of support, and much more, if it is to carry out what some in the Pentagon believe could be a massive and far-flung retaliation. Military sources tell U.S. News that options include everything from deploying ground troops in Afghanistan to invasions of as many as 10 nations sympathetic to the terrorists, principal among them Iraq and Iran. The Pentagon "has the target packages all ready," says a former Pentagon official.
The role of Pakistan, which lies between landlocked Afghanistan and the Indian Ocean, could be critical, though military sources note that U.S. troops have conducted training missions with several countries on Afghanistan's northern border, including Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan.
Already, American diplomats are canvassing allies around the world in search of a response--any response--to the attacks. With Afghanistan an almost certain target, neighboring Pakistan could become a key staging ground. Although no specific requests have been made yet, a Pakistani diplomat says that he expects his country would be likely to grant permission for U.S. overflights in a mission to bomb terrorist camps. But using Pakistan as a staging area for ground troops is less likely. In particular, Pakistan would oppose any military action against the ruling Taliban regime, fearing the resulting anarchy.
Military action on such a broad scale would have breathtaking implications. The warning to the world's more questionable actors would be clear: Cooperate or become a potential target. This is profoundly a time for choosing sides.
And stepping up. At the Pentagon, military planners know that a massive military operation would cleave the international community--not only by ideology, but by faith, as many in the Muslim world would oppose the United States.
But the stakes seem to require nothing less. In the immediate aftermath of the attacks, the need for a show of strength was clear. While flames licked charred husks of the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, President Bush was being shuttled stealthily from Florida to Louisiana to Nebraska before he finally returned to the White House. Some images were downright humbling--and the terrorists, whoever they are, no doubt gloated at them. Members of Congress scurried down the Capitol's stone steps, evacuating after a bomb threat. Military humvees lined the streets of Washington, armed soldiers at the ready. Television cameras trained on scenes from a smoldering Pentagon, and of course, New York in a kind of nuclear winter, transformed by 10,000 tons of ash and soot and outrage. On top of it all, Vice President Dick Cheney was bundled off to Camp David in Maryland so that he and Bush would not be in the same place where terrorists could take them both out. Hardly a comforting thought.
Taken together, it was a picture of massive national unease. Children plaintively questioned parents: Will it happen again? The most honest answer seemed to be "Yes."
Clearly, there were large-scale failures and long-term consequences. How, after all, could the terrorists have infiltrated the country so easily and yet maintained contact with their overseers? How could they have circumvented airport security so easily? And taken over all those planes?
"This is a war." Hard upon such questions, ineluctably, comes the finger-pointing. Current and former senior counterterrorism officials say the United States suffered a major intelligence breakdown. "To be caught completely with our pants down, it is just unbelievable," says Vincent Cannistraro, a former counterterrorism chief at the CIA. He's not alone. "This is a war," adds a senior American counterterrorism official. "Bin Laden and the terrorists have been playing it that way; we haven't. Maybe it's time we start working with the bad guys."
Critics say Washington needs to go "dirty" and develop the kind of human sources who can penetrate terrorist organizations, even if it means using criminals and terrorists, to thwart the growing network of terror operations. Some fear an overreliance on electronic intercepts, eye-in-the-sky satellites, and other technical collection systems. "They are expensive and clean, and when they blow up, there's no blowback, no scandal," says a former CIA hand. "Human operations, by definition, are messy."
But messy isn't allowed any more. In 1995, Washington adopted new rules restricting recruitment of clandestine operatives overseas. The rules require CIA recruiters to identify possible operatives who have committed human-rights abuses. "We only touch nice spies nowadays," groaned one U.S. official. Senior intelligence officials in the Bush administration reject the criticism. "Trust us, we live in the real world, and we know how difficult it is to penetrate terrorism cells," says one official familiar with the CIA's recruitment operations. "You have to deal with people you might not ordinarily want to take home and meet Mom." He adds that there hasn't been a single case in which such an informer had been rejected by top CIA officials.
If the specifics of last week's attack came as a surprise, the general intention didn't. Last month, the CIA issued a secret report to the National Security Council, among other agencies, warning that Islamic militants wanted to attack the United States on its own soil. The agency did not have "a specific time or place," an official familiar with the report says, but there was evidence suggesting that bin Laden was gearing up to strike here. Intelligence officials regularly briefed Congress and senior policymakers in the Bush and Clinton administrations on bin Laden's plans. Equally troubling, U.S. intelligence learned that his network was recruiting and training pilots, sources say. In February, George Tenet, the director of central intelligence, told the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence that "bin Laden has declared all U.S. citizens legitimate targets of attack."
There was no small irony in the fact that the world's remaining military superpower might have been crippled by bin Laden, the wealthy Saudi exile thought to be living in Afghanistan. A man whose personal safety is so compromised that he moves from hut to hut seeking daily refuge, bin Laden now stands as a foe who committed acts of war Moscow never dared in 50 years of Cold War.
If there's one good thing about having an enemy, though, it's his ability to make people pull together. On Capitol Hill last week, Democrats and Republicans quit their partisan bickering and proffered unity of purpose, appropriating more than $40 billion for a military campaign that hasn't even been outlined yet. "This is a moment," said Dick Gephardt, the Democratic leader in the House, "when we've got to trust each other." That's a strong base to start from, but the next steps are anything but clear. Going after bin Laden, after all, is no simple proposition. There is no military or seat of power to destroy. And the hunt in the jagged hills of Afghanistan--presuming that's even where bin Laden is--could be tougher than the failed efforts to track Saddam Hussein in Iraq.
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.
Money men. The more investigators learn about Atta, the more they hope to understand the terrorist conspiracy. The Egyptian national had lived in Hamburg, Germany, before coming to America. Last October, he entered the United States on a tourist visa. Others among the hijackers came from Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates. Almost all traveled on tourist visas, which normally would limit their stays to six months. Sources say that eight or nine of them changed their immigration status while they were here and were granted M-1 "vocational status" visas, permitting them to go to flight school. That meant they had to prove they had the financial means to pay for the lessons, at least $10,000. On September 13, two days after Atta and Shehhi crashed into the twin towers, Immigration and Naturalization Service investigators pulled the immigration documents of all the known hijackers here who had been issued M-1 visas. Law enforcement officials will soon use that data to unravel the riddle of who funded them. Late last week, authorities got their first big break, arresting a man in New York believed to have ties to the hijackers.
Linking the hijackers to bin Laden is critical, but agents also want to identify the operational leaders of the effort, to discover how operatives working in distant sites along the East Coast could coordinate the attack. The perpetrators belonged to at least four separate cells, say law enforcement sources. One of the cells appears to have been located in South Florida. Four of five of those who commandeered United Flight 175 had addresses in Delray Beach. Investigators are also seeking 23 people with addresses in Vero Beach, almost 100 miles to the north. Each team was aided by colleagues who provided logistical support--money, credit cards, and lodging--in Newark, Boston, Virginia, and South Florida. The money would have been no problem for bin Laden. Intelligence officials put his personal fortune at $200 million to $300 million and say he collects millions more each year from supporters. Evidence of all kinds is pouring in. At the Pentagon, searchers recovered both of the "black boxes" (they're actually orange so they can be seen more easily) from the jet that slammed into the building. Investigators also found both of the black boxes from United Airlines Flight 93, which went down near Pittsburgh. At the National Security Agency, the government's secret global eavesdropping service, officials intercepted a telephone call between two known associates of bin Laden talking about hitting U.S. targets.
"Missiles with wings." The operation was nothing if not audacious. The terrorists trained their hit men in American flight schools, paid them enough to live comfortably among middle-class Americans, to stay in nice hotels. Then when their big day came, they hijacked the planes they were on with nothing more than a handful of knives and razors. Once in control, they piloted the fuel-laden planes--"cruise missiles with wings," as one official put it--plunging them into symbols of American money and military might. In all, authorities believe there might have been more operatives than those who died, meaning, of course, that some new terrorist plots may yet be in the offing. "For anyone who thinks this is it," says one U.S. official, "that's not the view of U.S. intelligence."
Which would further add to the din of criticism over the lapses in security and intelligence. To help matters, the CIA plans to bring back some veteran officers to help with the investigation. They include linguists, analysts, and case officers with experience in counterterrorism matters and the Middle East. Some in Congress are already complaining about the low level of intelligence briefings they have received on the attacks. The congressional leadership was taken by military helicopter to safe locations in the hills of Virginia last week for security reasons, an adventure one member described as a "Dr. Strangelove moment." From the helicopter, the leaders of the Congress saw the Pentagon aflame. From the bunker, congressional leaders spoke to Vice President Cheney four times, but not once with the president. Operating from a secure bunker after the initial attacks, Cheney began monitoring the 2,200 flights that were still in the air Tuesday morning. As many as a dozen other planes were feared hijacked.
As haunting as the images from the crumbling World Trade Center towers were, perhaps nothing underscored the sense of vulnerability so much as the scenes of the Pentagon, the symbol of Fortress America, aflame, with people fleeing. And soldiers wounded within. One of them, Charles Lewis, a 30-year-old naval petty officer, found himself balled up in the fetal position after being thrown 15 feet across the room from the force of the blast. "I didn't want to get hit in the head," he said from his hospital bed in suburban Virginia. "At the time of the impact everything went black. There was a moment of silence, then the next thing I heard was everything coming down around me--walls, computer, ceiling. People were screaming and yelling for help. I was just trying to get some bearings . . . thinking about my family and friends."
He had watched the planes crash into the World Trade Center on TV. "A lot of people were commenting that if it can happen there, what is to stop it from happening here or at the White House. No more than 10 minutes later, it happened to us."
Big guys. And his sense of the possible was true. Officials believe that a fourth plane that crashed about 80 miles southeast of Pittsburgh might well have been headed for the White House. On doomed United Flight 93 at least three passengers--Jeremy Glick, Thomas Burnett, and Mark Bingham--decided to fight the hijackers. Glick, 31, who worked in sales for an Internet company, called his wife, Lyzbeth, from his cellphone. "He said there were these bad terrorists and he wanted advice about whether they should rush them or not," says his father-in-law, Richard Makely, who was present during the 15-minute call. Glick's mother-in-law then called state police on a separate line. Glick stood 6-foot-1 and weighed 220 pounds. "There were several other big guys on the plane, and they decided they were going after them," recalls Makely. "He told my daughter he loved her, but he said he was going to go."
On one sun-splashed September morning, the country in a sense was remade. The skyline of New York, an icon of American prowess, was forever changed, and downscaled. The twin towers of the World Trade Center are now consigned to postcard memories in a shockingly short amount of time. And among the thousands of victims were scores of firefighters and rescue workers whose very job was to try to bring about small miracles. But there were only horrors. Even a fire department chaplain, a Roman Catholic priest, was killed while he administered last rites to another victim.
Amid all the devastation, though, there was hope. The nation erupted with patriotism. Flag sales soared. By the tens of thousands, people stood out at 7 p.m. on Friday to light a candle and show the world the nation would not be cowed.
The president was told of the attack in Florida, where he was promoting an education initiative at an elementary school. He was shaking hands in a receiving line. When the first plane struck the World Trade Center, aides thought it might have been an accident. They hastily plugged in a TV. "We watched the second plane hit the building and we told the president," one top aide tells U.S. News. Bush spoke with Cheney and FBI Director Robert Mueller. After those calls, Bush turned to his aides and said: "We're at war."
Rogue aircraft
Four California-bound jetliners were hijacked and steered back toward their targets.
[Map is not available.]
American Airlines 11
Departs Boston 7:59 a.m.
Veers off course 8:29 a.m.
Crashes World Trade Center 8:46 a.m.
United Airlines 93
Departs Newark 8:01 a.m.
Veers off course 9:37 a.m.
Crashes Shanksville 10:10 a.m.
United Airlines 175
Departs Boston 7:58 a.m.
Veers off course 8:47 a.m.
Crashes World Trade Center 9:03 a.m.
American Airlines 77
Departs Boston 8:10 a.m.
Veers off course 9:00 a.m.
Crashes Pentagon 9:40 a.m.
[Map labels] Boston; World Trade Center; Newark; Shanksville; Dulles; Pentagon
Source: Flight Explorer (flight paths)
Words wrapped within words
DECODING
It's too early to know for sure, but some security experts suspect that the U.S. intelligence community might have been tricked by terrorists through the age-old practice of steganography--hiding information within information. In ancient Greece, messengers tattooed information on their foreheads, then grew their hair back to hide the images. They shaved their heads again only when they reached the intended recipient.
Today, Osama bin Laden has reportedly used steganographic software--versions are freely available on the Internet--to communicate with his terrorist cells, planting hidden messages for them on bulletin boards and Web sites.
With Edward T. Pound, David E. Kaplan, Doug S. Pasternak, Chitra Ragavan, Linda Robinson, Angie Cannon, Rick Newman, Mark Mazzetti, Bruce B. Auster, Kevin J. Whitelaw, Gloria Borger, Michael Tackett, Rochelle Sharpe, Ricardo Castillo and Juli Cragg Hilliard
This story appears in the September 24, 2001 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.