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							A Perfect Soldier
Mohamed Atta, whose hard
gaze has stared from a billion
television screens and
newspaper pages, has
become, for many, the face of
evil incarnate.


      By TERRY McDERMOTT
      Times Staff Writer
      January 27, 2002


     WILHELMSBURG, Germany -- After Mohamed el Amir Atta
disappeared from the Technical University of Hamburg-Harburg in
1997, he turned up here on an island in the middle of the Elbe
River, at a red-brick prewar housing project on a broad, bleak
street that faces a ribbon-wire fence and the Hamburg harbor,
gray and forbidding, beyond.



     Wilhelmsburg is industrial, worn-out, so psychologically
remote that it is sometimes called the Forgotten Island. It's
here but hidden. If you wanted to vanish, to drop off the face of
the world and yet keep the world close at hand, this would be a
place to come to.



     The six-story buildings of the Wilhelmsburg projects
contain hundreds of two- and three-room apartments and nobody
knows how many people. The buildings are filled mainly with
Turks, by far the largest minority group in Germany.



     Atta rented a third-floor, three-room walk-up for $250 a
month. The apartment, neighbors say, was home to a large group of
Arab men who were seldom seen and, until the events of Sept. 11,
not much remembered. Like the island itself, they were here but
hidden, shielded by their otherness.



     The men talked long into the night most nights and
disappeared all day most days, said Helga Link, a neighbor. Link
lived directly beneath Atta's apartment and could hear every
footstep on the wooden floors. She never heard a radio or
television or music. Just the footsteps and voices of men
talking.



     Atta's stay in Wilhelmsburg marked a turning point in his
life. He had until then followed an utterly conventional middle-
class path, a striving, upward arc from boyhood through
prestigious university and into graduate school. When he left, he
turned in directions that people who knew him still can't fathom.



     In the days after Sept. 11, a narrative of the attacks
emerged with remarkable speed. These were hard, dedicated men, we
learned, religious zealots executing a devious plan to strike at
the core of America. Central to the narrative was Atta. In
numerous accounts, he was referred to as the mastermind. Osama
bin Laden was said to be the evil leader who inspired and funded
the plot; Atta was the brilliant acolyte who led a small,
suicidal army in its execution.



     Not much has altered this narrative since. Bin Laden
remains the sinister presence behind the plot, taunting from a
shrinking but thus far unbridgeable distance. The hijackers
remain mute, unknowable ciphers. Atta, whose hard gaze has fumed
from a billion television screens and newspaper pages, has
become, for many, the face of evil incarnate.



     He has become famous. A woman in Finland claims that he was
her virtual lover. A Hamburg shopkeeper claims that she regularly
sold Atta large quantities of mid-priced perfume, for what
purpose no one pretends to know. A genial car repairman says Atta
worked as an intermediary for Arab car-buyers. They liked
Mercedes-Benzes, the repairman says.



     Atta is said to have lived a double life; to have met with
an Iraqi spy in the Czech Republic; to have traveled throughout
Europe conferring with who knows what members of terrorist cells;
to have so excelled in his terrorist training that he was chosen
to form his own cell in Hamburg.
     Some of these stories might be true, but as details of
Atta's life are examined and new ones uncovered, a less
mysterious, more mundane man emerges. It is a man drawn on a
smaller, less epic scale.



     The people who knew Atta best during the past decade--
housemates, roommates, co-workers and classmates--say he was
taciturn, introspective and zealously religious.



     "I'm more fundamental than the fundamentalists," he told
his first Hamburg roommate.



     He was an exceptionally resolute, disciplined, stoic man.
He was--particularly for a university graduate student--
enormously respectful of authority. He did what he was told.
Joerg Lewin, who hired Atta as a draftsman at an urban planning
firm, said Atta did his job with extraordinary single-mindedness.
Although already a trained architect and a prospective city
planner, Atta--in four years at the company--never offered
opinions of the plans he was asked to illustrate. He was assigned
to make maps; he made maps.



     "I think he embodied the idea of drawing," Lewin said. " 'I
am the drawer. I draw.' "



     It's hard to imagine that such a man could acquire the
verve and daring to lead an enterprise as audacious as the
September attacks. Maybe we have misconceived the nature of the
attacks and built the requisite figure to orchestrate them. Maybe
a brilliant general is not what was needed. Maybe the plan wasn't
so much difficult as it was detailed, and what it really required
was somebody with will and steadfastness to see it through.



     That is the Mohamed Atta described by the people who knew
him: a meticulous, dutiful believer, a man who could sublimate
himself, a man who could embody a plan, who could make it his, a
man who could be, as he became, a perfect soldier.
     Kafr el Sheik: A STRICT, AUSTERE FATHER



     The Nile River delta is Egypt's breadbasket. The markets
are full of bananas, oranges, corn, guavas, figs, wheat, rice and
lentils.



     The last village is never out of sight before you come to
the next. Men and animals work fields that are jigsawed across
the land, small and irregularly shaped. Women wear veils or head
scarves; many men wear long cotton tunics.



     Alleys are clogged with cotton bales and rice straw. Ducks
and chickens pick their way through scraps in tiny street-side
pens. The roads are full of pickup trucks, the rare tractor and
donkey carts; uniformed schoolchildren are everywhere. Nokia cell
phone advertisements stand in front of ditches filled with trash,
still water and women bathing and washing dishes.



     Atta was born here in   1968 in the delta province of Kafr el
Sheik. His father, Mohamed   el Amir Awad el Sayed Atta, came from
a tiny provincial village,   and his mother, Bouthayna Mohamed
Mustapha Sheraqi, from the   outskirts of the provincial capital,
also called Kafr el Sheik.



     As is still customary in rural Egypt, his parents met and
married by arrangement of their families. Mohamed el Amir
(neither he nor his son used the name Atta anywhere except on
official documents) was already a lawyer. Bouthayna was just 14,
but as the daughter of a wealthy farming and trading family, she
came from several rungs up the social ladder.



     Mohamed was their last child. Two daughters, Azza and Mona,
preceded him. The father was regarded by his in-laws as austere,
strict and private.
     Nearly all of Egypt's 65 million people are squeezed by the
surrounding deserts into the narrow band of fertile land along
the Nile. The geography forces Egyptian life to be crowded,
communal and shared. To resist takes real effort. Atta's father
was willing to expend it.



     "The father is alone. There are no brothers, one sister
maybe. We never met her," said Hamida Fateh, Atta's aunt on his
mother's side. "Here, the families are all very close. But even
here, the father was separate."



     Fateh's family owns land, an auto parts store and a large
commercial building. But the family lives on a cobbled, dirty
street in a cramped apartment with whitewashed walls, cheap rugs,
stuffed furniture and a television.



     The balcony door is open to let the heat escape. The lace
curtains barely stir. The idea of living behind closed doors here
seems almost as peculiar to Fateh as the idea that the boy who
used to sit here on her sofa flew an airliner into a skyscraper.



     A cousin, Essam Omar Rashad, nodded toward the television
and said that he and Mohamed, as teenagers, would watch it
together. Mohamed, he said, left the room whenever belly dancing
programs--staples of Egyptian broadcasting--came on.



     Outside, the call to afternoon prayer echoes down the
block. You are never out of earshot of the prayer call here.
Fateh wears a head scarf, but more out of habit, she said, than
belief; neither her family nor Atta's was particularly religious.
Fateh studied agricultural engineering at university. We are
educated, secular people, she said, people from the country but
not country people.



     Fateh said Atta's father was always ambitious and focused.
His law practice thrived here, but he was not satisfied. "He
moved to Cairo," Fateh said. "He wanted to be famous."
     Cairo: 'A HOUSE OF STUDY'



     It's early morning on Eldmalsha Street and nothing moves,
or will for a while. Cairo, the capital, is a slow city in the
morning. It's common to find shops not yet open at 11 or noon.
Breakfast is a rumor, and some restaurants start lunch service at
4 p.m.



     Residents see this as proof of their sophistication, a
measure of distance from the villages their ancestors left not
decades but millenniums ago.



     Mohamed Atta spent his adolescence here in Abdin, a cramped
quarter near the old financial and government centers. Much of
the wealth of the city has migrated to newer districts, west
across the Nile and south and east to new suburbs. Old core
neighborhoods like Abdin have been left to crumble.



     Most of the five- and six-story stone apartment buildings
are holdovers from British colonial rule, which didn't end until
independence in 1952. Lobbies are paved with marble and
limestone, remnants of a grander past. Few buildings have
elevators, and stairwells are dark.



     Atta was 9 or 10 years old when the family arrived here.
His father rented a double flat, an entire floor. All three
children got their own rooms. The old apartment, like most
interiors in Cairo, is dim and still, windows covered against the
sun.



     Later, Atta's father bought a vacation home on the
Mediterranean coast, but the family lived frugally in town.
Atta's mother, Bouthayna, did her own cooking and cleaning. The
father drove a used Opel, then a small Fiat sedan.
     When Fateh and her family came to visit Abdin, they found
the father had instilled his ambition in the children.



     "It was a house of study. No playing, no entertainment.
Just study," Fateh said.



     The children weren't allowed to play outside the apartment.
One neighbor said the walk to school had been timed, and if the
children took longer than the allotted few minutes to get home,
they would be asked why.



     "His friends would sit on the corner there, chewing
pistachios, spitting out the shells. Not Mohamed. There was no
hanging around, no friends, very strict rules," said Mohamed
Gamel Khamees, a neighbor who runs an auto repair shop on the
ground floor of the Attas' old building.



     "They came from a village, and they had their own
traditions. They brought them along," Khamees said. "They lived a
closed family life. They were very polite but had little contact
with any others."



     Neighbors laughed at Bouthayna when she pulled a little
handcart behind her to the market. They thought that she was
putting on airs. It didn't matter. The family went its own way.



     The senior Atta, a huskier version of his son, is
unapologetic about his lack of sociability. He's a blustering,
forceful man who delivers speeches more often than answers. "We
are people who keep to ourselves," he said. "We don't mix a lot
with people, and we are all successful."



     Young Mohamed's room looked out the back of the building,
over rooftops and into a tangle of wires and adjacent windows.
Neighbors said Mohamed used his window for clandestine
conversations with neighbor boys. That was playtime.
     Abdin is one of the densest districts in one of the most
densely populated cities on Earth. The street is a place for
entertaining, for sport, for business.



     When visitors come, chairs and a tiny foot-high table are
plopped down in the street. Tea is served.



     A donkey cart loaded with dates rolls by. A sweet potato
salesman pushes his wagon past. In between the tea being poured
and the sugar offered, a man rolls a whetstone by. The cries of
the knife man, the date man and the sweet potato seller bounce
down the stone alleys.



     It is hard to remain closed off here, even harder than in
the delta. Asked if Atta's family ever made exceptions--if, for
example, it shared evening breakfast with neighbors during the
holy month of Ramadan, which in Cairo is a period of daytime
fasting but late-night socializing and celebration--Khamees said
no, the father was a tough man, not given to making exceptions.



     The family, Khamees said, was "like a set of rings
interlocked with one another. They didn't visit and weren't
visited." He paused for a moment and waved a hand at the insects
circling the sugar bowl. He looked up at the apartment.



     "Not even the flies entered there," he said. "Not even the
flies."




     University: LOST IN A SEA OF STUDENTS



     All three children were superior students. Atta followed
his two sisters to Cairo University, one of the most prestigious
colleges in the country. Admission is granted solely on the basis
of national tests.
     The university is mammoth, with 155,000 students and more
than 7,000 teachers. It sprawls across both banks of the Nile,
including an island in between. The campus is so large, some
students drive cars from class to class.



     Degree programs are typically five years. The first year is
a preparatory year, used to direct students into major areas of
study. If you want to study medicine, for example, but your
first-year grades are insufficient, you might find yourself--
without consultation or consent--enrolled in the Department of
Ornamental Horticulture.



     Students are grouped by their names.



     "I found him standing there, staring up at the name sheets
to see where he was assigned," said Mohamed Mokhtar el Rafei. "I
introduced myself. 'I'm Mohamed,' I said. So was he. We looked at
the class sheets. We had three full classes of Mohameds. Oh wow.



     "We used our fathers' names to refer to one another. I was
Rafei. He was always Amir."



     The two became friends. Both excelled in the first year,
1985, and were chosen for engineering, one of the most venerable
and prestigious departments. Within engineering, the highest-
scoring students were assigned to the architecture program. The
two Mohameds, whether they wanted to, would be architects.



     The engineering department had nearly 1,000 teachers. The
size meant tremendous competition and--except for the very best
students--little attention from professors.



     For the first time in his life, Atta did not stand out.
Architecture, more than most creative disciplines, is a blend of
the utterly pragmatic--what do you coat glass with to keep heat
out and let light in?--and the artistic--what should a house say?
Atta shone at analytical subjects, but the curriculum was skewed
toward design.



     "He was a very clever person in mathematics, physical
structures, less good in design and the more artistic aspects,"
Rafei said. "He had been one of the top-ranked students in high
school, and he had a very high rank in his preparatory year. In
our time, though, design was emphasized, and maybe you could say
he couldn't adjust himself to what was needed. In the third year,
when we studied soils, street plans and steel, something more
concrete, he excelled. . . . You would recognize him more as an
engineer than an architect."



     Another classmate recalled that Atta became upset when
things didn't go his way.



     "He was a child," she said. "So like a child that one time
something happened, where he didn't get the grade he wanted, and
he pouted. Somebody said to him, 'You're acting like a child.'
Then he got very, very angry. Proving the point, he really was
like a child. Spoiled."



     But mainly, Atta is remembered as utterly ordinary.
"Mohamed was there, sharing all our fun times. He liked it. He
would tell jokes, laugh. He was one of us," said Waleed Khairy,
another classmate.



     Atta's father often drove him to and from school. This was
not unusual. In fact, unless they move to another city, many
young adults remain in their parents' homes until they marry.
Many 30-year-olds eat dinner at home every night.




     Politics: A GROWING RELIGIOSITY
     Cairo is a plotter's paradise. There is a shortage of jobs
and a surplus of cafes filled with men, idling away days over
sweet Turkish coffee, water pipes, Marlboro Lights and filtered
Cleopatras, filling the narrow, cluttered streets with talk and
soft, smoky haze. Not all the talk is idle chatter.



     Egypt's history for the last half a century is one of
sporadic violence and constant tension between the government and
Islamic activists.



     President Hosni Mubarak came to power in 1981 when his
predecessor, Anwar Sadat, was assassinated by Islamic militants.
Mubarak himself has been the object of three dozen assassination
plots. One of the results is a repressive political system,
democratic in name only. More than half the officially recognized
political parties have at one time or another been barred from
political activity.



     The involvement of religious groups in politics is
forbidden. Members of the strongest, most broadly active Islamic
group--the Muslim Brotherhood--are routinely jailed for violating
this prohibition. The lack of any avenue for legal dissent
criminalizes political opposition and almost ensures that it will
become extreme.



     During Atta's college years, the Muslim Brotherhood
conducted major recruiting campaigns. It called for a return to
basic Islamic principles and warned against the corrupting forces
of modernization and Egypt's tilt toward the United States. Its
campus activism coincided with a period of increasing religiosity
in Egypt generally.



     Atta was neither politically active nor particularly
religious, friends said. His father said he warned his children
away from political involvement. Far from advocating a resistance
to the West, Atta's father insisted that his son, in addition to
his regular classwork, study English and later German.



     He said he wanted his son to match his daughters'
successes. Both had excelled at the university: Azza became a
botany professor, Mona a cardiologist. Atta earned respectable
grades, but they were not good enough for acceptance to Cairo
University's graduate school. His father gave him a 1974 Fiat 128
coupe as a graduation present but insisted that he continue his
studies.



     "My son is a very sensitive man; he is soft and was
extremely attached to his mother. I almost tricked him to go to
Germany to continue his education. Otherwise, he never wanted to
leave Egypt," Atta's father said. "He didn't want to go. By pure
coincidence, a friend of mine had visitors from Germany, two high
school teachers in Hamburg. I invited them to dinner, and Mohamed
was the king of the evening because he spoke German fluently . .
. and three weeks later, Mohamed went to Germany."




     Hamburg: 'I AM GROWN UP NOW'



     When Mohamed Atta, 24 years old and on his own for the
first time, arrived in Hamburg in the summer of 1992, one of the
first things he asked for was the location of the nearest mosque.



     Atta's family was moderately religious but not publicly so.
His father, for example, said he reads the Koran every day, but
none of the family's old neighbors remembered ever seeing the
Attas at the neighborhood mosque. Once in Germany, Atta went
every day.



     Atta lived, rent-free, with the two teachers he had met in
Cairo. The couple had been organizing exchange programs between
Germany and Egypt for several years. They had an extra room in
their small cottage and were happy to help. Atta arrived with a
single suitcase. But in other respects, he carried more baggage
than almost anyone his hosts had ever met.



     In addition to praying at the mosque and observing a strict
Islamic diet--no pork, no alcohol--Atta refrained from the
pleasures young students often sought. He seldom socialized,
never went to clubs or sporting events. Hamburg is a notably
unrepressed city. Sex businesses--theaters, prostitution,
publishing--thrive. For someone who would leave the room when
belly dancers came on television, Hamburg can come on strong.



     Atta's hosts had traveled often to Egypt; they welcomed
cultural differences. The woman initially liked Atta's
seriousness. He was eisern, she said--iron.



     They discussed religion. She knew the Old Testament well
and tried to make the point that the roots of Islam and
Christianity were similar. Mohamed would listen, then reply, yes,
but what is written in the Koran is the truth, the only truth.
They would argue, the woman said, until she left the room
disgusted by his closed-mindedness.



     Atta went to Germany on a tourist visa. He would need a
student visa to attend graduate school but apparently hadn't
understood that he could get it only in Cairo.



     The teachers, on a trip to Cairo to make arrangements for
other students, put through his visa application. When they
returned and told him, he was quite angry.



     "I am grown up now; I can take care of that myself," he
told them.



     "He said that a lot," one of his hosts said. " 'I am abroad
now; I am grown up. Now I can decide on my own.' "



     It seemed silly to resist their help, "but that's the way
he was," she said.
     Atta made few friends. He could be amiable and polite but
never warm. The landlady felt that there was "always a wall
between him and the family."



     She said that eventually she didn't feel comfortable in her
own home. He would glare at her if she walked through the living
room in a sleeveless top. He complained when her adult, unmarried
daughter came to visit and brought along her young daughter. It
was strange, she said. He played with the little girl and
obviously enjoyed it. "He was free. The only time I remember him
to be free," she said. But then he railed against the
licentiousness that produced the child.



     In the spring of 1993, by mutual agreement, Atta moved out
of the little cottage.



     When he had arrived in Hamburg, he intended to enroll for
the fall term in the graduate architecture program at the
University of Applied Sciences. He was denied admission. The
university said the program was full; Atta's father said this was
simple prejudice. Atta sued, the university relented, and he was
quickly admitted. Then, just weeks into his first term, he
abruptly quit and enrolled in an urban planning program at a
different school, the Technical University of Hamburg-Harburg.



     He told his hosts he realized belatedly that the
architecture program would be repetitive of his undergraduate
work in Cairo.



     Technical University is not in Hamburg proper but south of
the Elbe River, in the old industrial suburb of Harburg. The Elbe
forms what planners here call a cultural border. People who live
north of it seldom cross over. Technical University was built
south of that border 20 years ago as an economic development
measure for a declining Rust Belt town. When Atta enrolled, it
had only 5,000 students.



     The planning program, from which he hoped to receive the
German equivalent of a master's degree, was a good fit for Atta,
in line with his analytical ability and meticulousness. It opened
up a field of study that would combine those skills with his
newly evident interest in Islam: the preservation of old Islamic
cities.



     The department was housed in a former police barracks that
was left standing as the new university was built around it.
Fortuitously for Atta, the department's chairman, Dittmar
Machule, was a Mideast specialist. Machule said he sensed in Atta
someone who shared his passion for the old cities of the region.
He described Atta as "tender, sensitive . . . he had deep, dark
eyes. His eyes would speak. You could see the intelligence, the
knowledge, the alertness."



     Hans Harms, another professor, said Atta was "almost shy in
the beginning but engaged. I could see that he was listening,
that what I said as a teacher would influence him." He was
beeindruckt und beeindruckbar, impressed and impressible, Harms
said. Harms and Martin Ebert, a student who took several classes
with Atta, recalled that Atta seldom jumped into discussions. He
would sit and listen, often not saying a word, then come back a
week later with something to offer on the subject.



     Ebert said Atta wasn't much different outside class. He was
careful about what he said, weighing it, never one to get
excited. "I don't think it was possible to have a fight with
him," Ebert said.



     Harmut Kaiser, another classmate, said it was hard to draw
Atta into a political discussion in class. "He wasn't a guy who
acted like he wanted to change the world--unlike a lot of other
students in the group," Kaiser said.



     When students complained about a teacher's idiosyncrasies,
Atta would join in the critique only if he thought a professor
hadn't prepared properly or didn't know the subject. For those
teachers who did, Ebert said, Atta showed a respect bordering on
awe.
     Roommates: POTATOES AND MISS PIGGY



     Atta showed somewhat less respect for his roommates. The
difficulties he experienced when he lived in the small cottage
with the host family repeated themselves in Harburg, where he
moved into a university-subsidized apartment building called
Centrumshaus. Each apartment had two bedrooms, a shared bath and
a kitchen. Atta lived there from 1993 to 1998. He shared the flat
successively with two men.



     In the end, Atta so aggravated both that neither could bear
to be in his company. He seldom washed the dishes, they said,
even if he had borrowed theirs to eat from. He almost never
cleaned the bathroom. If asked, he would do it once, then not
again for months. He left food uncovered in the refrigerator for
weeks, affecting the taste of everything else.



     The roommates grew to dislike Atta himself even more than
the things he did. The two roommates are very dissimilar. The
first is high-strung, anxious, the son of recent immigrants. The
other is laid-back and was chosen by the house manager in the
hope that he could get along with Atta. Both objected to the same
personality trait in Atta: his complete, almost aggressive
insularity.



     Just 5-foot-7 and wiry, Atta nonetheless had a heavy,
foreboding presence. He was slightly awkward, stiff and self-
contained. The now famous face, with its angled planes and low,
dark brow, was more hangdog than menacing but seldom welcoming.



     The men's shared kitchen was compact,   functional, with a
maple table that overlooked the street. It   was a bright, sociable
space, a place to sit for coffee or tea in   the morning. Atta was
often so inwardly focused he would walk in   and out of the room
without acknowledging anyone else in it.



     The first roommate tried early on to loosen Atta up. He
took Atta to a showing of Disney's animated film "The Jungle
Book." Atta became so upset at the crowd's unruliness before the
film began that he seethed in his seat, muttering over and over
in disgust, "Chaos, chaos."



     He didn't speak a word during or after the film, and when
they arrived back at the apartment, he stomped into his bedroom
and slammed the door behind him. Another time, Atta asked the
roommate if he had any light reading material. The roommate gave
Atta a book of absurdist, Monty Python-esque short stories. Atta
took it, then returned it the next morning without a word of
thanks or comment.



     Atta spent very little money on food and very little time
eating. When he did eat, he complained about the necessity of
doing so.



     "He was reluctant to any pleasure," the roommate said. "We
never shared food. We shared dishes. Mostly, he messed them up
and I cleaned them."



     Atta sometimes prepared a meal by boiling potatoes whole,
scraping the skins away, then smashing them into a mound. He
would eat his little potato mountain, without reheating it, for a
week or more, sticking his fork into it and shoving the whole
assembly back into the refrigerator when he finished a meal.



     Each bedroom was furnished with a bed, a desk and shelves.
The only thing Atta added was a slide-projector table that he
used as a bookstand. He kept a Koran on it. Atta prayed five
times a day, fasted on holidays and went to the mosque whenever
he could. When he couldn't make it to a mosque, he prayed in his
room, at work, even in the corner of classrooms.



     Sometimes Atta had a beard. Other times he shaved. He
almost always wore the same clothes: cotton slacks and sweaters.
He never wore shoes in the apartment, changing to a pair of blue
flip-flops as soon as he came home.
     The second roommate said that by the end of three years, he
and Atta were barely speaking. Atta was so intense that the
roommate, out with friends one time, joked that he hoped Atta
wasn't back at the apartment blowing himself up.



     "In the end, I counted the days until Mohamed would leave
the flat for good," he said. Students were allotted up to four
years at Centrumshaus but could extend that to five if they were
near graduation. Atta received the extension, much to the
roommate's dismay.



     The roommate's girlfriend, a frequent visitor, was even
more put off by Atta. He answered questions from her in curt,
clipped tones and would never look her in the eye, she said.



     "It was a good day when Mohamed wasn't home," she said.



     The woman was so offended by Atta's behavior toward women
that she conspired to get even with him. She persuaded her
boyfriend to hang a poster of a Degas nude in the bathroom above
the toilet. The bathroom was small; a person couldn't open its
door and avoid seeing the nude. Atta initially didn't respond to
the provocation. Finally, three months later, he asked that it be
removed.



     Then the girlfriend hung a poster in the kitchen, this one
of the Muppet character Miss Piggy, dressed voluptuously in a
negligee. Atta never said a word.




     Aleppo: IN MOSQUE, A TRANSFORMATION



     Dittmar Machule, the Technical University professor, had
taken a special interest in Atta. Machule is a committed
Orientalist who sees his role at the university as both teacher
and promoter of intercultural communication. When Atta early on
chose the subject that would become the topic of his degree
thesis--preservation of ancient cities in the Middle East--
Machule was pleased.



     "The other Muslim students, when they come to our world,
they had problems with another cultural context," Machule said.
"Either they try to get more and more a part of the Western
culture, or they try to take something of that and this. . . .
With Mohamed, I was somewhat impressed, I must say, with someone
who didn't change, who tried to be as he was before, to try to
learn, but to be who he was.



     "I thought if this young man went back to his mother
country, he could be able to work with the fundamentalist person,
he could work with strong religious people because they believe
in him."



     For years, Machule had supervised a project in northern
Syria, excavating the ruins of an ancient city near Aleppo. In
1994, he invited Atta to visit the site and consider Aleppo as
the place to do fieldwork for his dissertation. Atta was already
planning a summer excursion with other students to Istanbul,
Turkey.



     "I told him, 'Mohamed, try to come over to Syria; it's a
direct bus line to Aleppo.' He arrived in August, early morning,
after three days on a bus. He came with his little suitcase, and
I felt so sorry for him."



     Atta spent time at the excavation site and then went on to
Aleppo. In towns like this throughout the developing world, the
collision of old and new isn't merely theoretical. You can follow
old roads, twisting along lines of elevation and drainage,
through old neighborhoods, dense and jumbled just as they must
have been a thousand years before, then suddenly come upon
something new--a concrete apartment building that looks like it
arrived from Mars or Moscow, or a three-story mini-mall fresh off
the boat from Sherman Oaks.
     Atta focused on a neighborhood called Almadiyeh Square. It,
too, had suffered modern improvements. In the 1970s, the
government dug broad new roads, improving access to and through
the old town. Crews cut part of a road right through Almadiyeh,
tearing down what they needed to, and put up a small building to
sell souvenirs to the tourists the road was intended to carry.



     "That was the only thing I ever saw him get emotional
about. He was very angry at the destruction of our old heritage,"
said Razan Abdel-Wahab, a Syrian engineer who still works at the
Aleppo redevelopment project.



     When Atta returned to Hamburg, he told Machule that he
would make Aleppo the focus of his thesis. He and another
student, Volker Hauth, made a second research trip to Syria at
the end of the year.



     Atta was enlivened by the work, Hauth said.



     On a side trip to Damascus, Syria's capital, Hauth went to
a mosque with Atta. Hauth was a devout Protestant and the two of
them talked about religion often, but Hauth had never seen Atta
in religious circumstances. At the mosque, he was surprised to
see Atta leading prayers.



     Hauth said Atta was self-assured, self-confident and
diplomatic. It was a revelation for Hauth, who knew the dour,
introverted Atta from Hamburg. Here, he was a different person--
looser, more talkative, animated, at times almost playful. It was
as if he had been released, like "a fish in water." He even made
tentative advances to a woman he met in Aleppo. She teased him in
return, calling him an Egyptian pharaoh.



     Atta seemed to have everything going his way. He had gone
to an alien culture, had found work that engaged and challenged
him, and had gained a measure of acceptance and encouragement he
never found at Cairo University.
     As an undergraduate in Cairo, Atta had never talked about
his career, his dreams. Now he spoke of having found a future,
about eventually going back to Egypt--"as an Arab to Arabia," as
he described it to a German colleague, to help build
neighborhoods where people could live better lives.




     Cairo Again: IDEALISM RUNS INTO REALITY



     Much of the political map of Africa has been drawn by
foreign hands. Egypt is the great exception. More than 50
centuries old, it was home to grand civilizations when, as Gernot
Rotter, a prominent Islamic scholar in Germany, puts it, "middle
and northern Europeans were still sitting in trees."



     This is cause for both an abiding pride and an abiding
sense of loss. Both the glory and its passing are nowhere more
evident than in an old section of Cairo known as the Islamic
City, a rich concentration of ancient monuments, modern
marketplaces and medieval architecture.



     In the summer of 1995, Atta and Hauth won a grant from a
German think tank to go to Cairo to study and analyze
redevelopment plans the Egyptian government had devised for the
Islamic City. They were joined on the trip by a third student,
Ralph Bodenstein.



     What the three young architects found appalled them. The
government planned to "restore" the area by removing many of the
people who lived there, evicting the onion and garlic sellers,
repairing the old buildings and bringing in troupes of actors to
play the real people they would displace.



     Bodenstein described what happened: "We had a very critical
discussion with the municipality. They didn't understand our
concerns. They wanted to do their work, dress people in costumes.
They thought it was a good idea and couldn't imagine why we would
object."



     It was Atta's first professional contact with the Egyptian
bureaucracy and it distressed him, Bodenstein said.



     "Mohamed was very, very critical of the planning
administration, the nepotism. He had begun to make inquiries
about getting a job after school, and he had difficulty finding
anything. He did not belong to the network, where jobs were
handed down from one generation to the next, to political allies.
Mohamed was very idealistic, humanistic; he had social ideals to
fulfill."



     Atta's complaints about the difficulty of finding a decent
job were not unique. Egypt's ambitious, virtually free system of
higher education pumps out many more graduates than the economy
can handle. The more education you have, the less likely you are
to find a job. According to one 1998 study, those with graduate
degrees are 32 times more likely to be unemployed than illiterate
people are.



     Bodenstein said Atta's critique of the government grew more
expansive as the study project went on. He said the government's
redevelopment plans would turn the old city into an Islamic
Disneyland. Such Western influences, he said, were the result of
the government's eagerness to be allied with the United States.



     The study project lasted five weeks. Hauth and Bodenstein
returned to Hamburg. Atta stayed on in Cairo and spent time with
his family, which had moved from Abdin west across the river to
Giza. Atta went back to the old neighborhood to visit and have
Khamees check out his car. While they talked, the afternoon call
to prayer sounded. Atta excused himself to answer it. It was the
first time Khamees had ever seen anyone in Atta's family go to
mosque.



     Religion had become a chief focus of Atta's life. With his
father's blessing, and financial assistance, he joined that
year's pilgrimage to Mecca, in Saudi Arabia, an important, often
powerful experience in a Muslim's life. Every believer who is
able is supposed to make the trip at least once. Saudi Arabia
restricts the number of pilgrimage visas, so they are highly
prized. To make the pilgrimage at such a young age--Atta was 27--
was a privilege.



     When Atta returned to Hamburg, Hauth thought he was, if
possible, more quiet, more inward-looking and more fervent. John
Sadiq, a classmate who worked with Atta at a part-time job, saw
the same change. Atta told Hauth that he eventually wanted to
return to Egypt to work as a planner but despaired of the
political situation. "He lived in fear of being criminalized for
his religious beliefs," Hauth said.




     Al Quds: AT LAST, SOME FRIENDS



     Atta never had many German acquaintances, and none who
regarded themselves as close. One reason was Atta's introversion.
Another was his narrow range of interests. He simply wasn't much
fun to talk to unless you wanted to talk about Islam, Cairo or
city planning, not subjects known to foster German friendship.



      During his first four years in Hamburg, Atta worked as a
draftsman at a Hamburg urban planning firm, Plankontor. He was an
excellent employee, said Joerg Lewin, one of the firm's partners.
But not once did Atta socialize with other employees. He stayed
at his drawing table and worked, or knelt beside it and prayed.
Although the firm invited him on annual holiday trips, he never
went.



     He owned almost no books, didn't like food, didn't listen
to music other than religious chants and, as far as anyone knows,
the only movie he ever saw was the one his first Hamburg roommate
dragged him to.
      When Atta had enrolled at Technical University, there were
about 100 "foreign" students in the entire school. More than half
of those weren't really foreigners but ethnic Turks whose
families were longtime residents of Germany. There were only
about 40 "real" foreigners and just a handful of Arabs among
them.



      Atta wouldn't find many cultural soul mates in Harburg.
Where he found them, instead, was in a seedy neighborhood east of
the rail station in downtown Hamburg, at Al Quds mosque. The
biggest, oldest mosques in Hamburg are Persian. Most others,
including those Atta attended in his early years in Hamburg, are
small, neighborhood Turkish congregations. Al Quds is mainly
Arab.



     Al Quds is on Steindamm Street, squeezed between a body-
building parlor and a Turkish coffee shop. The street is best
known for sex shops and drug dealing; you can be propositioned
within sight of the mosque at any hour of the day or night.



     Al Quds is of medium size; it holds at most 150 people. The
walls are white, with Koranic verses painted on them. The carpets
are gray, and the place has a utilitarian feel to it. It is
regarded by German intelligence agencies as the most radical
mosque in Hamburg; in Cairo there might be 1,000 just like it.



     It is the sort of place that was enveloped in cheers when
news of the Sept. 11 attacks broke. On the day the Taliban was
forced to flee Kabul, Afghanistan's capital, the men at Al Quds
screamed and shouted in anger. Many there, including the imam,
Abu Maziad, blame the United States for most that is wrong in the
world and blame Israel and Jews for much else.



     Abu Maziad said Atta began coming to Al Quds in the mid-
1990s. He came often, both for prayers and to talk with friends.
Atta's new Arab friends--men of all ages--called on him
frequently at Centrumshaus, his roommates said. He sometimes
invited groups of them to dinner. He made soup.
     Not long after he returned from Mecca, Atta asked two of
the men from the mosque to witness a will he had written.



     The will, dated March 6, 1996, subsequently turned up in a
suitcase that was left behind when Atta boarded an American
Airlines flight out of Boston 5½ years later. It's an odd
document, a mixture of standard Islamic text and stern orders on
preparations for his burial and who would be allowed to attend
it. In it, Atta dedicates his life and death to Allah and forbids
women to visit his grave. It's difficult to discern the meaning
of the will, but if nothing else it provides an indication of a
young man's growing obsessions and frustrations.




     Marienstrasse: THE HOUSE OF THE FOLLOWERS



     Atta continued to live at the university apartment and
worked at Plankontor until the firm laid him off when business
declined in 1996. Atta hated to lose the job, he told Lewin, but
left gracefully. He sent back money that he thought the firm had
overpaid him on his final paycheck.



     Atta finished his course work the next spring. All he had
left was to write his thesis. Instead, he seemed to vanish. He
had almost no contact with the university for a year beginning
with the fall of 1997.



     He taught a series of seminars put on by the think tank
that had sponsored his research trip to Cairo. The seminars, in
1997 and '98, were for students undertaking similar projects.
Atta wasn't markedly different as a teacher than he was as a
student. He was well-prepared, thorough, unexciting and serious,
said one man who attended two of the four-day meetings. The man,
an Egyptian, said that he was initially excited to meet another
Egyptian so far from home but that Atta, while not hostile,
showed little interest in personal conversation.
     The seminars included evening social events. Atta attended
none of them.



     The Egyptian student said Atta always seemed preoccupied.
There was "a wall" between him and the students, he said.



     Atta took another part-time job, in a warehouse packing
computers for shipment. Unlike the work at Plankontor, this job
had no connection to his city planning career. It did have other
connections, however. At least two of his co-workers are alleged
to have been involved in the planning or execution of the Sept.
11 attacks.



     U.S. investigators think that at some point during this
period, Atta went to Afghanistan for training at a camp run by Al
Qaeda, Bin Laden's terrorist network, but the seminar schedule
didn't permit lengthy absences. His longest absence appears to
have been a couple of months at the beginning of 1998. He told
his roommate at Centrumshaus that he was going on another
pilgrimage. He didn't say where.



     By autumn 1998, Atta finally exhausted his eligibility for
subsidized student housing. He told his house manager, Manfred
Schroeder, that he would take an apartment with friends.
Schroeder was probably the only one sorry to see him leave.



     Schroeder is an older man. He has an air of authority. Not
all the students appreciate it. Atta, though, habitually treated
older men with deference. He sometimes invited Schroeder into his
apartment for tea and chocolate candy, Atta's sole indulgence.



     But he had been at Centrumshaus five years. He had to move.



     He packed his bag and was gone to the Forgotten Island,
Wilhelmsburg. Neighbors said the large group of Arab men stayed
at the housing project there a few months, then disappeared as
quickly as they had arrived, leaving only 11 mattresses behind.
     By November, Atta was back in Harburg. He and two other
men, Ramzi Binalshibh and Said Bahaji, rented a freshly remodeled
apartment on Marienstrasse near the university. The apartment had
three bedrooms, new paint and heating and a great many visitors.
The tenants paid for installation of high-speed computer lines.



     This was, investigators say, the formation of a new Al
Qaeda terrorist cell and a central planning point for what would
turn out to be the Sept. 11 attacks.



     Binalshibh, a Yemeni national, had no apparent means of
support and little interest in school. He attended Hamburg's
University of Applied Sciences for a few months, didn't do well
and quit. Bahaji, a German of Moroccan descent, studied computer
engineering at Technical University. He and Atta petitioned the
school for space to establish a Muslim meeting and prayer room.



     U.S. investigators say Binalshibh intended to join the
hijack teams in the United States. Bahaji is thought to have
provided key technical and logistical support to the teams. Both
men left Germany shortly before the attacks, surfacing briefly in
Pakistan before disappearing again.



     In 1998, Bahaji came under the scrutiny of German police
because of his association with a middle-aged Syrian businessman,
Mamoun Darkazanli, whom he had met at the Al Quds mosque.
Darkazanli had an odd, still-vague association with a man who had
once been a financial officer for Bin Laden.



     Nothing came of the   police surveillance because, an
investigator said later,   "we only knew them as radical Muslims.
That's not a crime. They   might have had contact with followers of
Osama bin Laden. This is   also not a crime."



     Atta, Binalshibh and Bahaji were good tenants, said
Thorsten Albrecht, their landlord. They paid their rent, often
noting on the check that it was from the Dar el Anser, the House
of the Followers.
     Albrecht thought that they looked and acted like philosophy
students. They seemed almost dreamy, preoccupied. They dressed in
clothes that had been out of style for a while. He remembers one
of them wearing beige bell-bottom jeans. They also sometimes wore
traditional Muslim tunics. Neighbors said the flat became a
gathering spot. As in Wilhelmsburg, large numbers of Arab men
visited routinely. Among them were two other alleged Sept. 11
hijackers--Marwan Al-Shehhi and Ziad Samir Jarrah.



     Atta requested a meeting with Dittmar Machule to renew work
on his thesis. Machule said he asked him: "Where have you been,
Mohamed? . . . There is trouble? Problems in the family?"



     "Yes, in the family, at home," Atta told him. "Please
understand, I don't want to talk about this."



     And that was that. Atta began vigorous work on his Aleppo
thesis. He resumed regular meetings with Machule to discuss it
and in June 1999, he turned in a 152-page manuscript. Machule
opened it to find an Arabic inscription and dedication to Allah
on the first page.



     The rest of the work held few surprises. It was a solid,
thorough examination of Aleppo's history, current redevelopment
and a proposal to better integrate the city's past with its
future. Machule judged it to be of high quality intellectually
but uneven in its writing. He asked another professor, Chrilla
Wendt, to work with Atta to polish the thesis before it was
formally submitted.



     They worked together at regular meetings, side by side at a
desk, for six weeks. Wendt knew of Atta's discomfort around women
but said the work went smoothly until, suddenly, Atta told her
that he could no longer stand to be in such close proximity. By
then, the rewriting was nearly done and in August, Atta formally
submitted the thesis. He defended it before the review committee
later in the month and received high marks and congratulations.
     The thesis is a routine piece of urban analysis. The most
interesting thing about it is why Atta chose to finish it at all.
It seems clear in retrospect that Atta was already well down the
road to Sept. 11. He, Al-Shehhi and Jarrah would soon, within
weeks of one another, report their passports stolen, presumably
to obtain new, clean documents without the sort of travel record
that might stop them from getting U.S. visas.



     Maybe the thesis was something Atta set his mind to and did
solely because he wanted to; he was a resolute man. Maybe Machule
is right: He thinks that Atta didn't yet know his fate.



     Machule remembers Atta coming by his office one final time.
Machule was busy with another student and Atta, being Atta,
didn't barge in. He didn't even knock. He just stood at the open
door, hoping to catch Machule's eye. Machule gestured to him to
wait. Atta stood there for 10 minutes. Then he walked away, and
Machule never saw him again.



     At the end of 1999, Atta went home to Cairo, degree in
hand. His father greeted him as a conquering hero.



     "I told him we should look for a wife for him," Atta's
father said. He always had things arranged. This time, he had a
potential bride lined up: "We went to visit a family, and Mohamed
met the daughter and they liked each other. The woman's parents
also liked Mohamed, but their only condition was that their
daughter not leave Cairo. So Mohamed got engaged to her and then
went back to finish his PhD."



     There would be, of course, no marriage, no doctorate.



     By this time, Atta's parents were estranged. There had been
a dispute over arrangements for their older daughter's marriage,
according to Atta's aunt, Hamida Fateh. Atta's father didn't
approve of the groom, who had been selected by Bouthayna's
brothers, Fateh said.
     Bouthayna's health had declined. Atta's visit was a time of
great joy for her, Fateh said. Bouthayna took Atta to Kafr el
Sheik to show him off to her relatives.



        "It made her very, very happy," Fateh said.



     The aunt said Atta told his mother that he didn't want to
leave, didn't want to continue his studies. He wanted to stay in
Cairo and take care of her. He asked if he could.



        "His mother insisted he return to his studies," the aunt
said.



        You need to get a doctorate, she told him. Go to America.




        America: AN IRRECONCILABLE MEMORY



     Most of the north tower of the World Trade Center was air.
All big buildings are, but the trade center was especially so.
The center's chief engineer used to enjoy showing a chart of all
the lightest tall buildings in the world. His were clustered near
the top of the chart. He achieved this extraordinary lightness
mainly by clever design that reduced the amount of steel in the
buildings, creating more space.



     Because they were so light, the main structural concern was
wind. The trade center was designed to withstand gusts of
hurricane force. But the wind isn't pointed, and even hurricanes
don't attack at the speed of a Boeing 767. Eerily, another of the
buildings' engineers had once bragged that they were designed to
withstand the impact of an airliner; people laughed when they
heard that anyone would ever consider such a thing.
     After the unlikely weapon with the unlikely pilot rammed
it, 24,000 gallons of kerosene ignited inside the north tower
with the force of 7 million sticks of dynamite, eventually
buckling columns and collapsing floors, one on top of another,
until the entire building collapsed on itself, along with the
south tower, turning a million tons of glass, stone, steel,
Crane's 24-bond embossed letterhead stationery, janitors' mops,
Italian wool suits, silk ties, Herman Miller chairs and nearly
3,000 people into a seven-story-high stack of rubble.



     In November, on a blustery cold day in northern Germany, a
young woman in Hamburg, the former girlfriend and now wife of one
of Atta's old roommates, talked about an image she couldn't get
out of her head. She said when the bombs started falling in
Afghanistan, she would sit in front of her television, staring in
disbelief, unable to comprehend that the bombs were in a very
real sense put in motion by her husband's old roommate.



     Watching the explosions, she would try to match them, the
war, everything that has gone on in the world since Sept. 11, to
her memory of the slight young man padding around his student
apartment in his shower shoes. It didn't fit. She would ask
herself: All of this because of Mohamed? It's impossible, she
said. Not little Mohamed in his blue flip-flops.



     There is much about Atta we can't now know. But when a
person moves through the world, he leaves a path that can be
traced, however faint parts of it may be. Down in the Atta
traces, the image that lingers is of a man who was far too small
to accomplish the huge thing he did. This was a man too timid
even to knock on a professor's open office door. There is
something deeply unsatisfying about this. We want our monsters to
be monstrous. We expect them to be somehow equal to their crimes.
More than anything, we want them to be extraordinary, to allow us
to think the horrible thing itself is unlikely to be repeated.



     When we go looking for people capable of inflicting such
great destruction, the last thing we expect to find is little
Mohamed in his blue flip-flops.



                                _ _ _
The Plot
How terrorists hatched a
simple plan to use planes as
bombs.

By TERRY McDERMOTT
Times Staff Writer

September 1, 2002


A decade ago, a cadre of freelance terrorists planned an
improbable day of horror in which they would blow up a dozen U.S.
airliners, killing, if the men were lucky and good, several
thousand people. This plan was foiled and most of the men caught,
but one key figure escaped, and the idea went with him. He was
something of a ghost, eluding investigators for years, just
beyond vision and reach, forever a step ahead. He fled to
Afghanistan, where he became a key Al Qaeda agent.

He brought with him the idea of using airplanes as weapons. The
leaders of Al Qaeda liked the idea and made it their own.

A small group of men spread across the globe was assigned the
task, and last September they killed more than 3,000 people in
New York and Pennsylvania and at the Pentagon. In the first weeks
following the attacks, authorities loudly and frequently blamed
Osama bin Laden and his organization, Al Qaeda. Since then,
however, authorities have been reluctant to say much of anything
about the details, in large part because they do not know them.

Enough is known, however, to describe how the plan to fly
airplanes into buildings came into being, how it was elaborated
upon and how it succeeded.

The story begins in Manila, Christmastime, 1994.

For most of a month, the men with the chemical burns and the
misshapen fingers carted boxes and bottles through the terrazzo
lobby of the Josefa, up six flights and down the hall to the shut
door of Apartment 603, a furnished studio with kitchenette, dark
parquet floors, off-white walls and a shuttered window
overlooking President Quirino Avenue.

It was the window that worried the cops.

In normal years, Christmas in Manila is a prolonged celebration.
That December, though, arrived in a meaner season. A typhoon had
barreled through mid-month, ripping out trees and power lines
and, for the authorities, sharpening the edge on an already
anxious time.

Pope John Paul II had announced a five-day January visit. There
were substantial fears within the country's intelligence
community that increasingly violent Islamic activists would try
to kill him.

The national police had just completed a 182-page catalog of
terrorist activity throughout the island nation. It had been a
horrible year: More than 50 incidents and 101 deaths, with Roman
Catholic priests among the frequent targets. The terrorists were
based on the southern island of Mindanao, but bombs had already
exploded in Manila on Metro trains, at a Wendy's hamburger stand
and a local movie theater. Another had blown a hole in an
airliner.

The pope was a complication the cops didn't need. They increased
surveillance and put local officials on high alert. That's where
the window on the sixth floor of the Josefa came in. The
apartment is but a quarter-mile from the Vatican ambassador's
residence, where the pope would stay. The window looks directly
down onto a busy street that the papal entourage would use.

The story has been told for years that on the night of Jan. 6, a
week before the pope's arrival, the men in 603 accidentally
started a fire in the kitchenette, and fled as it set off alarms.
Firefighters and police rushed to the scene. They discovered the
fire had subsided without assistance and prepared to call it a
night until one suspicious police officer insisted on taking a
look in the room. Inside, she found the place littered with
beakers, funnels, cotton batting, cans of gasoline and a pair of
king-size Welch's grape juice bottles filled with what turned out
to be liquid nitroglycerin.

The truth about that night and the fire, officials say now, is a
bit more complicated.

Manila is a sprawling mess of a metropolis, divided into
districts called baranguays. Local politics operate like a turn-
of-the-century American patronage machine: Each baranguay has a
chief who delivers neighborhood complaints up the line and
municipal favors down it. They keep their eyes open.

The Josefa is in the Malate baranguay. Apolinario Medenilla was
the machine's man in Malate. He came around to have a look.

The Josefa is a drab, water-stained stucco, half-hotel, half-
apartment house, with groaning air conditioners and a transient
clientele. It rents rooms by the day, week or month. Next to it
is a ragtag slum of tin-can squatter shacks, dusty pawnshops and
two-stool cafes. Manila Bay is half a mile west, and cargo ship
crewing agencies have offices in the slum, making it a place of
constant movement.

The men in 603 had rented the room for a month and were so
secretive they wouldn't let the maid in to change the sheets. It
wasn't that they seemed averse to women, as some Muslim visitors
were. They paid considerable attention to the city's salacious
nightlife, coming and going at all hours, not always
unaccompanied. And then there was the puzzle of all those boxes
carted through the lobby. Manila is a tropical city, a steam
room. Labor is cheap and people don't exert themselves if it can
be avoided. Hauling heavy cartons is not typical tourist
behavior. Medenilla passed the information on to police, who
shared his suspicions.

Government officials now say police, worried about the pope's
imminent arrival, started the fire that set off the alarm at the
Josefa. When it sounded, the occupants ran out, the cops walked
in and looked around. They then left and hunted down a search
warrant. Even at that, according to police records, they had to
ask 11 judges before they found one who would sign it.

Whatever the method of discovery, the police hit an intelligence
gold mine.

The evidence filled three police vans. There were priests' robes
and collars, Bibles, crucifixes and maps of the pope's
prospective travels; chemistry textbooks and chemicals--acids and
nitrates by the gallon, one finished pipe bomb and another
waiting to be packed; there were a dozen passports and as many
Casio watches, apparently to be used as timers; soldering irons,
switches and loops of electrical wire.

The men in 603 were professional terrorists. They had stocked a
bomb factory and left behind evidence they intended to use it.

One of them, a Pakistani named Ramzi Yousef, was among the most
wanted men on Earth--the key suspect in the 1993 truck bombing of
the World Trade Center in New York. They had come to Manila with
enough new plans to make New York seem like a warm-up act. The
plans were left behind on a Toshiba laptop. They included a plot
to assassinate the pope and another audacious scheme to board a
dozen American jumbo jets, place homemade bombs aboard them and
blow them up over the Pacific. Yet another plan on the computer
called for the terrorists to dive-bomb an airplane into CIA
headquarters.

Through a combination of luck and international cooperation, the
two men in 603 and an accomplice were captured within a year.
Interrogations revealed there were still more plans and more men,
men who have yet to be found. An investigator described the cell
as part of "a strong network, continuously hatching plots." One
of the unfound men, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, was a particular
mystery. Nobody was quite certain who he was. Even his name was
suspect. There are now more than a dozen aliases attributed to
him.

It turned out he had been living in Manila for most of a year. He
told people he was a Saudi businessman. He stayed in a fancy
apartment in a nicer part of town, across the street from the
country's future president. He drove his own car. He took diving
lessons. He patronized go-go bars and karaoke clubs and held
meetings at plush hotels. He tipped well. He was flashy--once
renting a helicopter just to impress a girlfriend by hovering
over her office, calling on his cell phone and telling her to
wave.

Still, police had little idea what his connection to the bombers
might be.

Then came Sept. 11 and one of the most intensive police and
intelligence investigations in history. In the course of it,
apparitions of Mohammed kept emerging from the mists of
information. By this summer, American investigators had concluded
Mohammed was a principal planner of the September attacks. The
idea to kill thousands of Americans last fall by turning
airliners into bombs might well have been his.

Filipino investigators came to a similar conclusion. The idea to
kill thousands of Americans by blowing up airplanes in 1995 was
probably Mohammed's as well, and Sept. 11 its fulfillment.

Much had happened between the two plots. What the investigator
had said about the Manila cell could easily be applied to all of
Osama bin Laden's Al Qaeda in the intervening years: Foremost, it
was a network continuously hatching plots.

Whatever Al Qaeda's circumstances, successes or lack thereof, one
thing that never changed was that the plots just kept coming:
ships in Yemen, embassies in Africa, an airport in Los Angeles, a
cathedral in France, a subway in Singapore. As the plots
multiplied, Khalid Mohammed kept reappearing.

Over the years, many of the plots seemed ill-conceived ideas
pursued by ill-equipped or unprepared men. Ramzi Yousef,
convicted of the first attack on the World Trade Center and the
plot to blow up airliners, complained to investigators that if
he'd had enough money, he'd have toppled the trade center towers
back in 1993.

It took time, but by the autumn of 2001, money was no longer a
problem. Khalid Mohammed and his cohorts eliminated that and
every other obstacle. Rather than rely on casual collections of
hapless men patching together whatever foolhardy scheme they lit
upon, they drew new men from three continents into their plot--
diverse men, including an architect, an aerospace engineer, a
patent medicine salesman, a computer programmer, sons of the
Saudi middle class and an itinerant Yemeni who lived for two
years in a cramped government barracks so uninviting authorities
called it a container.

The organization was patient. While the men from around the globe
were assembled and prepared, it went on doing what it otherwise
did--churning out ideas for new and imaginative ways to kill.

By the time they were done, the old idea, the one with the
airplanes, turned out to be the best--or worst--of them all.



Fighters Without a War



Al Qaeda was born in the course of a 10-year resistance to the
Soviet Union's 1979 invasion of Afghanistan. The war against the
Soviets became a worldwide rallying cry of radical Islam and,
more, a forum for action. Tens of thousands of young men from
throughout Islam answered the call to arms. The war's end
presented a predicament: What would these so-called Afghan Arabs
do now?

Fundamentalist Islam is viewed as a threat in much of the Muslim
world. Many moujahedeen came home to inhospitable regimes. One of
them later described the group as lost, without purpose "except
to carry out the jihad."

One such man and his wife arrived at a compound of migrant
quarters in tiny Kampung Sungai Manggis, south of Kuala Lumpur,
Malaysia, in early April 1991. He was short, stout, bearded and
wearing a skullcap; she, even shorter, and completely covered in
dark dress and full veil. The couple were strangers to Mior
Mohamad Yuhana, the man who owned the migrant shacks, but they
came recommended by a local man, and Mior thought they looked
kindly.

The visitor said his name was Hambali, he was Indonesian and was
moving to Malaysia so that he might practice Islam more freely.
Mior told him he didn't care about that. Stay out of trouble, pay
the rent and we'll be fine, he said. He led them to a tiny wooden
shack, about the size of a one-car garage, with weathered siding,
bare concrete floors and a single lightbulb inside.

Hambali grew up in the volcanic highlands of west Java and
attended an Islamic boarding school and university. He answered
the call to jihad and spent three years fighting in Afghanistan.
Hambali and his wife arrived in Sungai Manggis with the clothes
they wore and a single bag each.

"They cooked and ate, slept on the floor," Mior said.

Sungai Manggis is just minutes from the western Malaysian coast,
and from there an hour by boat across the Strait of Malacca to
Indonesia. It is a well-traveled path for poor Indonesians, who
come for work. But Sungai Manggis is not a place to get rich.

The area is blanketed with overgrown rubber plantations,
abandoned when the fickle world market moved on. The landscape is
green and tangled, the earth a deep orange clay that clings as
dust in the morning and mud after the heavy midday rains. The
hills are empty as yet of the Western-style subdivisions of the
capital, but the bulldozers are coming. The area is being pulled
into the sprawling compass of Kuala Lumpur.

Roadside stands are piled high with mangoes, pineapple, durian
and--an indication of the oncoming march of the suburbs--sacks of
used golf balls.

Hambali did odd jobs and soon began showing up outside the gold-
domed mosque on the southern edge of the nearby market town of
Banting, selling kebabs out of a tri-shaw cart. His wife, joined
by her mother, was seldom seen beyond the rented shack.

Hambali switched from kebabs to patent medicines and began
traveling, on business, he said, disappearing for weeks at a
time. At home, he received what became a steady stream of
visitors, Mior said. They spoke English and Arabic and sometimes
carried Duty Free shopping bags. The men were "in their late 20s
or early 30s. They looked tough. I remembered thinking at that
time they would make good footballers," Mior said.

Hambali prospered. Soon, he was driving a red Proton hatchback
and juggling calls on a pair of cell phones. Many of those calls,
investigators later determined, were made to a man who had
recently arrived in Manila, Osama bin Laden's brother-in-law.

Joining the Jihad

When the Soviets left Afghanistan, the country descended into
gruesome civil war. With shifting alliances of tribes, warlords
and religious sects, a network of camps, schools and supply
routes that Bin Laden had helped establish along the Pakistani
border was busier than ever.

Ramzi Yousef was one of the mujahedeen who returned to the
region. Yousef was born and raised in Kuwait, where his parents
were among thousands of Pakistanis drawn to the oil-rich kingdom.
Yousef had first come to the camps on a break from college in
Wales in 1988. He returned in 1991, after receiving an associate
degree in electrical engineering. He later told investigators he
spent six months training in the camps. He was so adept at bomb-
making that he was known to trainees as "the chemist."

After his training, Yousef began recruiting the motley crew with
which he would attack the United States.

Yousef later told investigators his principal goal was the
liberation of Palestine, a political rather than religious
motive. A boyhood friend, Abdul Hakim Murad, said that what
Yousef really wanted to do was kill a lot of Jews. He didn't care
how or where.

Yousef arrived in New York in the fall of 1992 wearing a three-
colored silk suit and carrying an Iraqi passport with no entry
visa. He claimed to be seeking political asylum. He was given two
options--arrest or deportation. He chose arrest and was then
immediately released on his own recognizance because, an INS
agent later testified, "There was a lack of detention space."

Yousef moved into a Jersey City, N.J., apartment and started
scouting targets. He spent time driving around Brooklyn because
he had been told Jews lived there. Murad, according to
transcripts of police interrogations, had earlier suggested to
Yousef that many Jews worked at the World Trade Center and that
maybe he should consider the site as a target.

Five months later, a bomb Yousef built for $3,000 blew up in the
basement of the trade center's north tower, killing six, injuring
about 1,000 and causing $300 million in damage. It was less than
Yousef intended. He wanted the bomb to topple the north tower
onto the south and release a cyanide cloud into the complex's
ventilation system.

Collaborators were arrested and Yousef's role discovered. An
international manhunt followed, with a reward of $2 million for
his capture. Yousef disappeared for a time into the lawless
western Pakistani province of Baluchistan, where he had
relatives. He soon reemerged as a man about town in Peshawar and
Karachi, a kind of folk hero much sought after among people who
wanted to blow things up.

His boyhood friend Murad was living in Karachi. He had recently
returned from the U.S., where he had earned a commercial pilot's
license. Yousef came to see him. He talked, Murad said, about the
need for good Muslims to give their lives, if needed, to the
struggle. They talked about potential targets: Benazir Bhutto,
then the prime minister of Pakistan; nuclear power stations; a
government official in Iran; the U.S. Consulate there in Karachi
and a variety of other U.S. government buildings. There was a
plan to assassinate President Clinton.

"If you ask anybody," Murad said later, "even if you ask
children, they will tell you that the U.S. is supporting Israel
and Israel is killing our Muslim brothers in Palestine."

Murad proposed packing an airplane full of explosives and dive-
bombing into the Pentagon or CIA headquarters. Yousef said it was
worth considering.

He took Murad to meet a man interested in such things. He said
his name was Abdul Magid. He was a Saudi import-export
businessman, he said.

His real name, police later determined, was Khalid Shaikh
Mohammed. He wasn't Saudi, but like Yousef a Baluchi, born and
raised by expatriates in Kuwait. He is thought to be Yousef's
uncle.

Foreign workers flooded the Gulf states in the 1970s and '80s.
The oil economy couldn't have functioned without them, but they
were not encouraged to think of it as home. In Kuwait, they are
referred to as bidoon, translated as "without," as in without
citizenship.

Like Yousef, Mohammed had gone abroad to study engineering. He
enrolled at a two-year college in North Carolina in 1984. After
college, he came home to Pakistan and joined what appears to have
been the family business--jihad. A Kuwaiti newspaper has reported
that he went to work as secretary to an Afghan warlord. It is
likely his older brother Zayed arranged the job.

Zayed was a Pakistani representative of Mercy International, a
Saudi-funded relief organization. The Kuwaiti government this
summer said Zayed was a full-fledged member of Al Qaeda.

Murad said his first meeting with Magid/Mohammed was at
Mohammed's Karachi apartment. He said Mohammed was very
interested in learning everything he could about pilot training:
how long it took, how expensive it was and who could qualify for
it.

Yousef took Murad to see Mohammed a second time. Again, Murad
said, Mohammed talked almost exclusively about flying.

By now, Yousef had persuaded Murad to join the cause. The two of
them moved to an open-air compound where Yousef taught Murad to
build bombs. Making chocolate, Yousef called it. In one practice
session, a detonator exploded in Yousef's face. Yousef lost
partial sight in one eye, Murad said.
As Yousef recuperated, Mohammed showed up out of nowhere, Murad
said, to pay the bills.

Eluding Capture

Khalid Mohammed, Yousef and a third plotter, Wali Shah Khan,
arrived in the Philippines in early 1994. Khan had stopped en
route in Kuala Lumpur, where he and Hambali, the Indonesia patent
medicine salesman, incorporated an export company called
Konsojaya. Its real purpose, police say now, was to serve as a
financial conduit for the plotters.

In Manila, the trio acted like anything but Islamic terrorists.
All had local girlfriends. They hung out at karaoke bars and
strip clubs.

Yousef and Mohammed, just weeks before they intended to blow up
the pope, went on holiday to a coastal resort, where they took
scuba-diving lessons.

Yousef's friend Murad joined them just before Christmas. The
plans for the airplane plot--which they code-named Bojinka,
Serbo-Croatian for explosion--called for men to board flights in
Asia that had intermediate stops before heading across the
Pacific. They would plant Yousef's bombs on the planes, disembark
at the intermediate stop and do the same thing on another flight.
The bombs' timers would be set so that all the bombs would go off
more or less simultaneously.

Yousef did a trial run Dec. 9, planting a small version of his
bomb on a Philippine Airlines flight to Tokyo. It exploded,
killing one man. It would have caused the plane to crash if not
for what were described as heroic efforts by the pilot.

That was the end of it, though. Police intelligence and fears for
the pope's safety led to the fire alarm and discovery of the bomb
factory.

Murad was caught that night when Yousef sent him back to the
apartment to get Yousef's Toshiba laptop. Yousef walked off into
the night. He made his way via Thailand to Pakistan. He was
betrayed there by a man he tried to recruit and captured in a
raid by U.S. agents and Pakistani security forces at a small
hotel in Islamabad.

When Khan was arrested seven months later, just one of the known
Manila plotters remained at large--Khalid Shaikh Mohammed.

Authorities think now he stayed for some days, perhaps weeks, in
Manila, then made his way to Doha, Qatar, where he apparently
enjoyed the patronage of a high-ranking member of the government.
One of Mohammed's brothers had attended university in Doha in the
1980s and became a much respected teacher. He reformed a network
of social clubs that had previously been disreputable and made
them a key feature in Doha's social and religious life. Many
people there still speak fondly of the brother, and this
apparently helped Mohammed settle quickly into Qatar society.

Mohammed was a kind of happy networker, said Khaled Mahmoud, an
acquaintance.

"He knew your name the second time you met him and remembered
things about you from previous conversations," Mahmoud said.

Mahmoud recalls running into Mohammed at the mosque. They chatted
for perhaps 30 minutes, during which they were repeatedly
interrupted by people coming up to say hello to the short,
slightly plump, slightly balding young Mohammed.

Mohammed is said to have been funny and charming, an image that
fits with the evidence of him as Manila raconteur. His very
public lifestyle caught up with him in 1996. U.S. investigators
identified him as their Manila suspect, and FBI Director Louis J.
Freeh sent a letter to the Qatar government asking for permission
to send a team after Mohammed. The government agreed and the team
moved in, according to Robert Baer, a retired CIA officer. Baer
said his account of the attempted capture was given to him later
by the head of Qatar's national police, who told him he was
ordered by a member of the Qatar ruling family to provide
Mohammed and four other men with blank passports. The police
chief said the other men included top Bin Laden aides Ayman
Zawahiri and Mohammed Atif.

By the time the FBI team arrived, Mohammed and the others were
gone.

American officials decline to speak about the escape, except to
say that cooperation between Qatar and the U.S. is excellent now.

U.S. officials think Mohammed moved to Afghanistan, where he went
to work for Al Qaeda.

In discussions of terrorism at the time, Bin Laden's name was
mentioned in passing, if at all. That was about to change.

In late 1995, a National Guard post in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, had
been bombed, and five Americans were killed.

The U.S. had begun to suspect that Bin Laden was training and
dispatching terrorists from his base in Sudan. When they
pressured the Sudanese to expel him, there were not many places
he could go. Of these, Afghanistan was the most likely.
In May 1996, Bin Laden and an entourage of 150 men, women and
children arrived by C-130 transport plane in Kandahar.

In June, a fuel truck exploded at a U.S. Marine barracks in
Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, killing 19.

Bin Laden did not claim responsibility for the attacks, but he
conspicuously praised them.

In August, Bin Laden issued from his new home in the Afghan
mountains a declaration of war against the United States.

Taliban leaders welcomed Bin Laden. He repaid the favor by
furnishing them fighters and money. The moujahedeen training
camps were rejuvenated by Bin Laden's presence.

In 1998, Bin Laden issued a second declaration of war against the
U.S. and announced a merger of his Al Qaeda with organizations
from Pakistan, Egypt and across Africa. The merger brought
experienced fighters and strategists under Bin Laden's banner.

The new organization declared: "To kill Americans and their
allies, both civil and military, is an individual duty of every
Muslim who is able, in any country where this is possible."

It was a call for a new generation of jihadists.

A Place of Comfort and Hate

On a typically gray, damp day in Hamburg, when steel-hard winds
blow down from the Baltic and the city grows dark and the evening
cool turns cold, the thing that is noticed first when men come
out of the weather into Al Quds mosque is the warmth they bring
with them. A hand is clasped; bearded cheeks brush one against
another; shoulders are squeezed; smiles, soft words and quiet
laughter are shared.

Al Quds occupies a warren of sparsely decorated rooms upstairs
from a downscale gym. It sits in a poorer quarter of Germany's
richest city, on a hard, seamy street just east of Hauptbahnhof,
the city's main rail station. The location, amid but removed from
the drug dealers and hookers on Steindamm Street below, is
perfect: Rent is cheap and the train station makes Al Quds
accessible from all points on the Hamburg map.

The men come to evening prayer from across the city and from
across the Arab world. Hamburg has a sizable Muslim population,
about 5% of its almost 2 million people, and mosques are spread
throughout the city to serve them. The overwhelming majority are
Turks, but Al Quds is not a Turkish mosque.
There is within Islam, as they say, only one God and God is
great, but any religion that requires its faithful to pray five
times a day can expect them to exercise some discretion in
determining where and with whom those prayers are said. Mosques,
like churches in Christendom, segregate themselves by ethnicity,
economics and scriptural interpretation. The version presented at
Al Quds is Arab, dispossessed and harsh, which fit exactly the
world view of certain Muslims in the 1990s.

"The Jews and Crusaders must have their throats slit," is the way
one Al Quds preacher put it. This was for most of the decade not
an unusual formulation.

A match had been struck in Afghanistan, and Islam was aflame. Al
Quds was distinctive in Hamburg but no different from thousands
of other mosques around the world--from San Diego to Jakarta to
London--where a new radical Islam was nursed to a fire, and the
fire fed.

There are two smaller, mostly Arab mosques very near Al Quds, and
members of what later came to be called the Hamburg terrorist
cell sometimes worshiped at those as well. But investigators
think it was within Al Quds' plain rooms that a group of like-
minded young men found one another and, for many of them, a
calling.

The group was small--investigators think fewer than 20 people. It
produced three of the Sept. 11 pilots--Mohamed Atta, Marwan Al-
Shehhi and Ziad Samir Jarrah. Two other men apparently wanted to
join them--Ramzi bin al-Shibh and Zakariya Essabar, both of whom
were denied U.S. visas. When the pilots left for the United
States, Bin al-Shibh became the key contact--and a conduit for
money--back in Germany. Essabar, Bin al-Shibh and a roommate of
Atta, Said Bahaji, all fled Germany before the attacks and remain
fugitives.

The men of the Hamburg cell came from different backgrounds and
countries but in ways were strikingly similar. Many were
physically slight, men the size of boys; most were from the
fringes of whatever society they came from and whatever schools
they attended. All but one enrolled in college and many did not
fit well into German life. Several had never before expressed
much interest in religion or politics.

The men came to Germany at different times and to different
cities over five years, beginning in the summer of 1992 when
Atta, then 24, arrived from Egypt. He eventually enrolled at the
Technical University of Hamburg-Harburg, studying urban planning.

Atta lived as a strict Muslim from the time of his arrival in
Hamburg. He fasted during Ramadan and observed dietary
prohibitions carefully. He prayed five times a day. He visited
mosques when his schedule permitted; otherwise, he prayed
wherever he was--at home, school or work.

During his first years in Hamburg, Atta gave no sign of being
anything other than an exceptionally disciplined student. He went
to class, did his work and prayed. A roommate took him to a movie
once. Atta hated it and they never went again. He made few
friends. He generally ate alone and, his roommates said, not with
any joy.

"I remember," a roommate said, "sitting down at the table and
Mohamed sighing, 'This is boring. Eating is boring.' He said it
wasn't just that he wanted different food, it was just the act of
eating."

He was an oddly self-contained man, the roommate said, "reluctant
to any pleasure."

It is not certain when Atta started going to Al Quds, but a
friend recalls meeting him there soon after the mosque opened in
1993. He went to mosque daily and sometimes returned to his room
in the evening with Arab friends.

Foreign undergraduates must demonstrate German language
competence before being admitted to university. When the other
members of the cell began to arrive in Germany in 1994, they all
enrolled in language programs, most of them in smaller cities
around Germany.

When Said Bahaji came to Hamburg at the beginning of 1995, it was
a homecoming of sorts. His Moroccan father and German mother met
and married in Germany, and Bahaji was born there in 1975. The
family moved to Morocco when he was 9. He came back for college.

He enrolled in the electrical engineering program at the
technical university in 1996. He lived at a student home and
spent weekends with his aunt Barbara Arens, a graphic designer
with whom Bahaji shared an affinity for computers. He called her
his "high-tech aunt." He had been secular, she said, until
introduced to radical Islam by fellow students. Arens eventually
kicked him out of the house.

Ramzi bin al-Shibh came to Germany not as a student, but, using
the name Ramzi Omar, by claiming to be a political refugee from
Sudan.

No one knows exactly when he arrived in the country. He made an
asylum claim in 1995, which was denied; he appealed and was
assigned to what the Germans call a container camp north of
Hamburg. The camp in the little town of Kummerfeld is a single
building about the size and shape of a ship container. The
container is divided into three sleeping rooms, one bathroom and
one kitchen. It's cramped, drafty and unpleasant. Container
residents were paid a modest monthly stipend. They were
encouraged but not required to find work. Typically for Germany's
modern bureaucracy, as long as they showed up for weekly roll
calls, they were free to come and go as they pleased.

Bin al-Shibh's asylum appeal was eventually denied. The judge in
the case said he doubted Bin al-Shibh was even Sudanese, much
less fleeing persecution. The judge was right. Bin al-Shibh was
born in Yemen, in the mountain valley region of Hadramaut, the
ancestral home of Osama bin Laden.

The dismissal of the claim had little effect. Bin al-Shibh had
already returned to Yemen, then, using his real name, he received
a German visa and reentered the country legally.

Marwan al-Shehhi came from a small town north of Dubai in the
United Arab Emirates. His father was a Muslim cleric, and the son
has been described as an especially devout Muslim. He enrolled in
a language institute in Bonn in February 1996. He boarded with a
local family. He took language classes for more than two years
before he demonstrated sufficient competence to enroll in
university.

He didn't move permanently to Hamburg until 1999.

This seems to some investigators quite late for someone who would
play such a key role in the plot. Al-Shehhi had spent several
months in 1998 in Hamburg, trying to pass his language exams.
Presumably, had he passed in Hamburg in 1998, he would have
stayed. He didn't, however, and had to move back to Bonn.

Just after Al-Shehhi left, a Pakistani student named Atif bin
Mansour arrived in Hamburg. Early the next year, Mansour, whose
name has never been released by German authorities, was Atta's
co-applicant for a room for a new Islamic study group at the
technical university. Mansour was a pilot on leave from the
Pakistani Air Force. This in itself is intriguing--a Pakistani
pilot? Investigators acknowledge they haven't figured out
Mansour's role in the plot, if any. The German Federal Bureau of
Criminal Investigations said he remains "a very interesting
figure."

Mansour's brother, also in the Pakistani armed forces, was killed
in battle that spring of 1999. Mansour rushed home to be with his
family and never came back. Not long after, Al-Shehhi returned to
Hamburg. It is as if they replaced one another.

Ziad Samir Jarrah came from a well-known and secular family in
Lebanon. He moved to Greifswald, in the former East Germany, in
the spring of 1996 to begin college. Almost immediately, Jarrah
met a medical student, a woman named Aysel Senguen, and within
the year they were living together and plotting their escape from
Greifswald.

Jarrah moved to Hamburg in 1997, enrolling in the aeronautical
engineering department at the University of Applied Sciences. The
summer after he started classes, he worked in the paint shop of
the Volkswagen factory in Wolfsburg. He was there at the same
time, apparently on the same shift, as a young Moroccan student,
Zakariya Essabar, who, that fall, also moved to Hamburg and
enrolled at Applied Sciences.

The Big Man

Bernhard Falk, vice president of the German investigative agency,
said the recruiting of men to join the jihad seldom occurred in
the open. It was "in the backrooms, in closed circles. Only
there, they preach hate and anti-Western sermons, and say what
they really think. And there, the radicals try to convince
certain people to go to Afghanistan."

There were notable exceptions to this. One man everyone within Al
Quds knew was a big, beefy, bearded middle-aged fellow named
Mohammed Haydar Zammar. He was an auto mechanic who had been
unemployed for years. He, his wife and six children survived on
welfare payments.

Zammar's bluster matched his size. In almost any discussion, his
was the loudest voice and most radical view. He was well-known in
many of the city's mosques as an advocate of jihad; though he
spoke of serious things, he was not always regarded seriously.

The president of the neighboring Muhadjirin mosque said Zammar
was "like a little boy" who talked too much.

Even Zammar's brother said, "His tongue was his problem."

Zammar was familiar to authorities too, because of his
boisterousness and because he was apparently an acquaintance of a
man arrested as a suspected Al Qaeda agent in 1998, charged with
complicity in the bombing of two U.S. embassies in Africa.

In part because of Zammar's outspokenness, authorities tend to
discount his role in the Sept. 11 plot. They concluded no one
would entrust information to a braggart like him. It is clear,
though, that Zammar knew the men in the Hamburg cell, in
particular Said Bahaji. In part because of the acquaintance,
German police in 1998 performed what they describe as limited
surveillance on Bahaji.

Bahaji at the time was living with Atta and Bin al-Shibh. Nothing
came of the surveillance and it was discontinued.
In Germany in the 1990s, the threat of terrorism of any sort
seemed distant. The last real threats had come from the political
left, in the Red Army Faction, successor to the 1970s Baader-
Meinhof gang. But that threat ended years before. The class
struggle was history.

The only thing young Germans, Generation Golf, as they were
called, shared with the Maoists was an affinity for black
turtlenecks. Rather than rejecting the status quo, they wanted
what their parents had and worried they might not be able to get
it. Germany might have been the safest place in Europe to
establish an Al Qaeda cell.

One measure of the seriousness with which Germany viewed the
threat of terrorism from within its fast-growing Muslim
population is the distribution of counter-terrorism resources. In
Hamburg, authorities had one man assigned part-time to monitor
radical Islam. That's half a man to watch 80,000 people.

Law enforcement authorities say they viewed men such as Zammar as
individuals, not connected to any formal networks.

"We only knew them as radical Muslims. This is not a crime," one
investigator said. "They might have had contact with followers of
Osama bin Laden. This is also not a crime."

There were, however, fundamentalist recruiting networks. In some
instances, these networks overlapped with--and took advantage of-
-a missionary sect of Muslims called the Tabligh.

The Tabligh proselytizes throughout the world. It professes to be
peaceful, but intelligence services throughout the Mideast say
the group was hijacked by organizations, such as Al Qaeda, to
recruit moujahedeen.

Zammar was a Tabligh, according to his brother. He had traveled
to Pakistan at the group's invitation some years ago and joined,
he said.

Since Zammar no longer worked, religion became almost a full-time
job. To recruit people for jihad was not unusual, or illegal. For
more than a decade, thousands of men throughout Western Europe
went to Afghanistan, Bosnia or Chechnya to fight or, more
usually, as a sort of baptism to the broad goals of radical
Islam. It became, within that world, an almost hip thing to do.

That was part of the ingenuity of the Sept. 11 plot. Much of it
could be put into place without crimes being committed. Those
would come later.

The Soft Man
German law enforcement officials think the recruitment of the
Hamburg cell probably didn't take place until 1998. The officials
claim, without describing it, to have one solid piece of evidence
from that period that indicates Atta played an unspecified lead
role.

These officials describe the most likely recruitment process as
being less formal than has generally been reported. They think
there might have been several steps in the process: first, a
soft, mainly religious recruitment, drawing the men into a deeper
commitment to their religion; second, an urging or outright
invitation to go to Afghanistan to see what it was like; third,
at the camps, a harder recruitment for those, perhaps few, deemed
worthy of joining Al Qaeda; and finally, a selection process for
specific missions.

They think Zammar would have contributed to the second stage,
acting as a sort of travel agent for people who wanted to go to
Afghanistan.

A principal candidate for the first-stage recruiter is a Hamburg
postal worker named Mohammed bin Nasser Belfas.

He was born in Indonesia and spent part of his childhood in
Yemen. He went to university in Cairo. Belfas came to Germany on
a six-month tourist visa in 1972. He stayed 13 years before he
was discovered and jailed. When he was released, the Germans
tried to deport him. But there was no place to deport him to. He
was stateless. The Germans relented and allowed him to stay. He
was granted citizenship in 2000.

Belfas works the night shift at a suburban postal facility. He is
almost constantly in the company of young men. He is quite well-
known among Muslims. Friends say he is a lay missionary who has
made it his task--one called it a mission--to unite the various
ethnicities and sects of Muslims in Germany. He speaks German,
Arabic, Indonesian and English.

He travels the country, paying particular attention to college
towns, where he will speak to any group no matter how small. He
is, in every sense, a recruiter, whether he knows it or not.

For several years, Belfas has conducted regular study meetings at
his apartment. Mohamed Atta and Marwan Al-Shehhi were regular
members of the study group. Atta, one attendee said, acted almost
as Belfas' deputy.

Once, said Volker Harum Bruhn, a member of the group, they
watched a CNN newscast on suicide bombers in Israel. Part of the
program told the story of a bomber who set off his charge
prematurely, injuring only himself. He was rushed to an Israeli
hospital unconscious. He awoke on the operating table, looked up
and said: "Is this heaven?"

The doctor asked whether the bomber thought there were Jews in
heaven.

The bomber replied, "No."

"Then," the doctor said, "I guess you're not in heaven."

This cracked everybody up, Bruhn said, even Atta, who didn't
laugh much.

Joined Together

Atta left Hamburg over the winter holiday, as he usually did, in
1997. This time, he didn't return for three months. He told his
roommate he had been on a pilgrimage to Mecca. He had been to
Mecca 18 months earlier and it would be unlikely for a student--
even one so devout--to go twice so quickly or stay so long.

It was the biggest gap in his schedule since he had come to
Hamburg and the first opportunity he would have had to go to
camps in Afghanistan.

After he returned in the spring of 1998, almost everything the
core members of the group did, they did with others in the group.
That spring, Bin al-Shibh left the container camp and lived for a
time with Belfas. That summer, Atta, Bin al-Shibh, Al-Shehhi and
Belfas worked in a computer warehouse together, packing boxes.
Authorities say they don't know quite what to make of this. The
man who owns the company said he hired students when he had extra
work. It is normal summer work for students, but Belfas? Even the
man who owned the company thought it odd that a middle-aged night
postal worker would spend his days in a computer warehouse.

Atta left the student house at the end of summer. He and a group
of men--nobody knows how many--moved for a couple months into a
project flat on a cold stretch of road on an island in the Elbe
River. They had no furniture, only mattresses. Neighbors said
they were out of the house all day and they talked long into most
nights.

In the winter, Atta, Bin al-Shibh and Bahaji moved into a neat,
newly refurbished three-bedroom apartment at Marienstrasse 54,
near the university.

Some investigators theorize the men in the Hamburg cell might
have been recruited by Al Qaeda scouts in the smaller German
towns where many lived, then sent to Hamburg. As possible
evidence of this, they cite the fact that several of the cities
where the hijackers lived--even small towns such as Greifswald
and Muenster--had well-known radical preachers.

The biggest argument against the "sending theory" is that it
assumes there was some sort of control center in Hamburg,
operating for many years, and authorities have no evidence of
this. German officials, in fact, think the planning and control
for Sept. 11 occurred almost entirely in Afghanistan.

The simplest explanation of the movement of the members of the
Hamburg cell is that it was completely natural. Most Arab
students--not just those who become terrorists--leave the smaller
college towns after they pass language tests and most of them
head for Berlin, Hamburg or Frankfurt. These are the largest
cities in Germany and the cities with the largest Islamic
populations.

However they arrived, by the end of 1998, all of the men in the
Hamburg cell except Al-Shehhi were in Hamburg and ready.

Mohammed's Plan

Given his taste for the high life and pretty girls, Khalid Shaikh
Mohammed can't have enjoyed Afghanistan much under the
puritanical Taliban. He seems to have gotten away often.

European intelligence experts say in 1996 and '97 he spent time
in the Czech Republic capital of Prague, a key crossroads then
for questionable men and dirty money.

American intelligence officials say he was in Germany in 1999.
The Americans speculate that Mohammed was there to meet with the
Hamburg cell.

He is thought to have made repeated visits to Southeast Asia--
Malaysia and the Philippines. Once, in 1999, Philippine
intelligence officials say, the FBI tipped them Mohammed was back
to visit an old girlfriend. He vanished before agents arrived to
arrest him.

American officials have told Italian authorities they suspect
Mohammed was in Rome for as long as three weeks in 2000. Others
say he played a central role that year in organizing the bombing
of the U.S. destroyer Cole in Yemen.

Finally, this summer--even after Sept. 11--a report circulated in
Manila that Mohammed was back in town to see a girlfriend yet
again. Police found only a rumor and no man to back it up.

It is uncertain when Mohammed first proposed the Sept. 11
airliner attacks on the United States, but captured Al Qaeda
officers have told interrogators it was in fact Mohammed's idea,
according to a U.S. intelligence official. American officials
think Mohammed brought the airliner idea to the Al Qaeda
hierarchy, which approved it and gave Mohammed and perhaps
another Bin Laden lieutenant, Abu Zubeida, who ran the training
camps, responsibility to manage it.

Mohammed wouldn't need bombs this time. The airplanes would
become the bombs. What he would need instead were pilots.
Zubeida's camps would be a good place to find them.

This operation was different from previous Al Qaeda plots: It was
of a grander scale, more ambitious and expensive. It seems to
have been more closely controlled. The men seem to have been more
carefully chosen, more cosmopolitan and technically proficient.

German investigators think the men were already committed to Al
Qaeda by the time of Mohammed's 1999 visit to Germany, although
Atta for one seemed to retain doubts.

Throughout 1999, Atta regularly attended Belfas' Islamic study
group. After one of these meetings, Atta asked to see Volker
Harum Bruhn privately. At that meeting, Bruhn said Atta warned
him strongly to stay away from Islamic extremists, to follow the
Koran strictly but to live a careful life.

Later in the year, after Atta finally received his master's
degree in October, he went home to Cairo one last time. While
there, according to his aunt, he asked his mother, who was ill,
whether he could remain in Egypt permanently, to begin a career
and care for her.

She insisted he continue his education, to go on to a doctoral
program in the United States. He did, of course, go to the United
States, but the next step in his education was in Afghanistan.

Officials with the German federal police say they have uncovered
airline data that indicate Atta, Al-Shehhi and Jarrah--three
Sept. 11 pilots--and Bin al-Shibh, who applied for flight school
but was never able to get a U.S. visa, all flew to Pakistan in
November. They went from there to an Al Qaeda training camp near
Kandahar.

Al-Shehhi, who was paid a $2,000-per-month stipend from the
United Arab Emirates Army the entire time he was in Germany,
withdrew $6,000 from his bank account to pay for the tickets.
They flew separately, with at least some of them using aliases
through Istanbul to Karachi. The timing of the meeting suggests
this could have been when they committed to the mission and were
told it would involve learning to fly airplanes.

Building a Terror Business
Khalid   Shaikh Mohammed wasn't the only one who got away after the
failed   Manila bomb plot. Hambali, the Indonesian businessman,
didn't   just elude capture; he eluded detection. Authorities
didn't   even know he was involved.

He remained in his little hut along Manggis River Village Road
and, security officials now say, began constructing a regional
network. Two other Indonesian fundamentalists lived in the
village for much of the same time Hambali did. Together, the
three embarked on a long, patient recruiting process. The other
men preached frequently at mosques. Hambali spoke only to small
groups in private.

One follower later told police what was most impressive about
Hambali was "his quiet and humble manners." He made a regular
circuit of small prayer groups; he raised money and insisted that
jihad was the answer. Malaysian police say they have since
arrested several men whom Hambali sent to Afghanistan for
training; several bombing plots have been attributed to his
network.

At the time, no one paid any attention.

One of Hambali's disciples was Yazid Sufaat, a former Malaysian
army captain and Cal State Sacramento graduate. Sufaat and his
wife, also a Sacramento alumnus, had prospered after their return
to Kuala Lumpur. She owned a computer services firm; he did drug
testing for the government.

They lived with their young children in a small row house in a
middle-class Kuala Lumpur suburb. It is not lavish; the house has
the decaying look of many things in the tropics, where time, heat
and humidity conquer all. But the couple were able to buy a
weekend getaway at a new condominium complex in the hills out of
town. The development advertises "city living, country style."
With its Jack Nicklaus-designed golf course, sports clubs, foot
reflexology and postpartum slimming classes, the development
could be in Orange County.

One notable difference was that Sufaat frequently lent the condo
to Afghan war veterans who came to town to get artificial limbs.
It probably didn't seem all that unusual then, in early January
2000, when a small group of Arabs, one missing a leg, showed up
at the condominium.

The one-legged man was Tawfiq bin Atash, for many years a
personal aide to Osama bin Laden. With him were two men who would
become Sept. 11 hijackers: Khalid Almihdhar and Nawaf Alhazmi. At
least two other men attended, one of whom has been identified,
tentatively, as Ramzi bin al-Shibh from Hamburg.
The men were followed at the request of the CIA. The Americans
had intercepted a telephone call to Yemen in which Almihdhar
detailed arrangements for the trip. The Americans didn't know
Almihdhar, but they knew the number he called was used as a
dispatch center for Al Qaeda. Bin Laden had called it dozens of
times over a period of years in the late 1990s, according to
court records.

The CIA asked the Malaysians to monitor the Kuala Lumpur meeting.
The Malaysians photographed the men going in and out of the
condo.

It was not until much later that CIA analysts figured out who the
men in the photos were. Atash was determined to have been one of
the coordinators of the October 2000 attack in Yemen on the
destroyer Cole. Yemeni authorities say Almihdhar also helped
prepare the attack.

Bin al-Shibh has not been positively identified from the
photographs. German police, however, say they have credit card
receipts that indicate Bin al-Shibh was in Malaysia at the same
time.

Sufaat, who has been   arrested, told Malaysian officials he
allowed the condo to   be used at Hambali's request and had no idea
who the men were. He   said he does not know whether Hambali
attended the meeting   but said Hambali has his own key to the
condo.

Investigators do not know who else the men might have met while
in Kuala Lumpur. They do know that Malaysia was a frequent haunt
of one of Hambali's old business partners, Khalid Shaikh
Mohammed. It would have made sense for him to be there, but no
one knows whether he was.

The meeting occurred in early January 2000, just after a series
of planned Al Qaeda millennium attacks failed. Intelligence
officials believe the men met to discuss new attacks: the Cole
and, given the timing, Sept. 11.

On Jan. 8, the men left Kuala Lumpur.

On Jan. 15, Almihdhar and Alhazmi arrived in Los Angeles.

On Jan. 18, in the United Arab Emirates, Marwan Al-Shehhi, using
a brand-new passport, became the first of the Hamburg cell to
apply for and receive a U.S. visa.

In March, Mohamed Atta began e-mailing 31 flight schools in the
United States.

In May, Atta, also using a new passport, received his U.S. visa.
By the end of June, Al-Shehhi, Atta and Jarrah were all in the
United States, looking for flight schools.

R&R in San Diego

It's not clear when Omar Al-Bayoumi arrived in San Diego, who he
was, whom he worked for, why he came or why he left. What is
clear is that he had more to do with two men who later ended up
aboard American Airlines Flight 77 on Sept. 11 than anyone else
in town.

Al-Bayoumi appears to have arrived in San Diego in 1995. He lived
with his wife and four children at a suburban apartment complex.
He told people he was a student of international business, but it
seemed unlikely because he was already 40 years old and he never
went to school. He didn't work, either. He explained that by
telling some people he received a monthly stipend from his former
employer, an aviation company in his native Saudi Arabia, and
telling others he had a Saudi government scholarship.

Al-Bayoumi almost always carried a video camera and taped
everything. He spent a lot of time at the Islamic Center of San
Diego, which is the hub of the city's multiethnic Muslim
population. He paid particular attention to newcomers and could
be counted on to help them find housing and get settled.

In late 1999, he brought to town two young Saudi students and
asked people to help them settle in. They hardly spoke English
and would need help getting Social Security cards, driver's
licenses and bank accounts.

The two men Al-Bayoumi brought to San Diego were Almihdhar and
Alhazmi.

Alhazmi later told a friend he and Almihdhar met Al-Bayoumi at a
Los Angeles restaurant, when Al-Bayoumi overheard them speaking
Arabic and introduced himself. Al-Bayoumi learned they were new
to the area and offered to drive them to San Diego and help them
get settled.

They took him up on the offer, Alhazmi said. Al-Bayoumi brought
them to the Parkwood Apartments, got them a room and even paid
the rent for the first couple of months.

He threw them a welcome party. Al-Bayoumi told people they were
in San Diego to learn English, although, like him, no one can
remember either of them ever going to a single class. Alhazmi
spent a lot of time at the San Diego State library, surfing the
Web.
Alhazmi signed a six-month lease. And despite the fact that Al-
Bayoumi paid the first two months' rent, they complained that
they couldn't afford the place. They moved out, taking a room in
the house of a retired professor. In the spring, Alhazmi told a
friend he was having $5,000 wired to him from Saudi Arabia, but
he had no account. He asked whether the money could be sent to
the friend's account. The friend agreed, but when the money
arrived it was from the United Arab Emirates, not Saudi Arabia,
and the sender was identified only as Ali.

The money was intended for flight lessons, which both Alhazmi and
Almihdhar said they wanted to take. Another friend took them to
Montgomery Field, north of San Diego, and arranged for them to
start lessons. They took one and quit.

"The first day they came in here, they said they want to fly
Boeings," recalled Fereidoun "Fred" Sorbi, the instructor. "We
said you have to start slower. You can't just jump right into
Boeings."

Acquaintances said the pair seemed to regard their time in
California almost as R&R. Alhazmi had season passes to Sea World
and the San Diego Zoo. They bought a Toyota sedan and liked to
make the run up to Las Vegas. In town, they hung out at
Cheetah's, a nude bar near the Islamic Center.

The center itself is hardly a haven for radical Islam. It is
multiethnic and promotes assimilation. All the signs in the
building are in English. In 2000, a group of men showed up and
passed out literature praising Bin Laden. Center officials
confiscated the leaflets and told the men to leave and not come
back.

Almihdhar left San Diego in June 2000. Alhazmi stayed until
December. He took a job for a few weeks, washing cars at a Texaco
station. The station was owned by two Palestinians and was a
hangout for Arab men, who sat outside at a picnic table, talking
and drinking coffee. Alhazmi hung out with them even when he
wasn't working. He talked often, friends said, about Muslims
being treated unfairly around the world.

He did not tell his San Diego friends that he had left Saudi
Arabia three years earlier to go to Chechnya to fight, which is
what his family says now.

In December, another young Saudi arrived. Alhazmi introduced him
as Hani. The man was apparently Hani Hanjour, a Saudi who had
spent most of three years in Arizona in the late 1990s, training
at various flight schools. He was by every account a horrible
flight student, but eventually in 1999 managed to obtain a
commercial license, after which he returned to Saudi Arabia. Now
back in the U.S., he and Alhazmi went off to fly airplanes in
Arizona.

On the Move

The core of men involved in the Sept. 11 attacks did an enormous
amount of traveling. Much of 2000 and 2001 is a blur of movement.
They put thousands of miles on rental cars. They spent thousands
of dollars on plane tickets.

Atta and Al-Shehhi each made at least two separate transatlantic
trips. Ziad Samir Jarrah arrived in the U.S. for flight training
in late June 2000. In the next 13 months, he left the country
five times.

On Oct. 20, 2000, one of the odder trips occurred. Mohammed
Belfas, Atta's Hamburg mentor, accompanied Agus Budiman, a young
architecture student he had known for years, from Germany to the
United States.

Belfas later said he simply wanted to see the United States. He
and Budiman flew to Washington, D.C. Budiman--like Belfas, an
Indonesian--had been coming to the United States for years. He
had family in the Washington suburbs, and even had a Virginia
driver's license, and now wanted to move permanently to the U.S.

While here, Belfas occasionally accompanied Budiman to his job as
a driver for Take-Out Taxi restaurant delivery service.

Belfas offered to help drive the delivery car if Budiman would
help him get a U.S. driver's license. Budiman told Belfas he
didn't need an American license. Belfas insisted, saying he
wanted the license as a souvenir.

On Nov. 4, Belfas and Budiman made the first of two trips to the
Department of Motor Vehicles office in downtown Arlington, Va. On
the first trip, Belfas received a Virginia identification card
after he and Budiman swore that Belfas lived in Arlington. When
they went back two days later, they got his driver's license,
using the ID card as proof of residence.

That's all there was to it. Belfas had his souvenir, if that's
what it was. Within the week, he returned to Germany.

In the summer of 2001, as they too neared the ends of their stay
in the U.S., seven of the 19 hijackers visited the same office to
get IDs or driver's licenses in exactly the same way. They didn't
need Budiman. They paid other men to sign on their behalf.

They used the IDs to make purchasing airline tickets and boarding
planes simpler.
The Saudis

Of all the hijackers, Khalid Almihdhar is the one who seems to
have the broadest contacts with Al Qaeda. He appears to be the
son-in-law of a well-known Yemeni Al Qaeda figure and is believed
to have had a role in the Cole bombing.

Almihdhar left the U.S. in the summer of 2000 and did not return
until July 4, 2001, by which time 12 other young Saudi men and
one from the United Arab Emirates had arrived at various
locations on the East Coast.

Less is known about these late-arriving men, in part because
Saudi Arabia has barred most reporters from the country. For
months after the attacks, the Saudi government denied even that
the men were Saudi citizens.

Most of the men were from the southwestern provinces of Saudi
Arabia. Most were from relatively well-off but not wealthy
families. Two-thirds of them told their families they were
leaving to join the jihad. Several mentioned wanting to fight in
Chechnya. Several left with friends or relatives.

It is not known who recruited them for the Sept. 11 plot, but
those who went for training in the Afghan camps could easily have
been recruited there. Almihdhar's absence from the U.S. for the
entire time during which they were presumably recruited suggests
he might have played some role in recruiting them.

In one sense, it isn't surprising that so many Saudis would be
among the attackers: It is easier for Saudis to get American
visas.

From the beginning, too, Saudis were the largest national group
among the Afghan Arabs. Bin Laden obviously is Saudi and so were
many of the financial backers of the moujahedeen and, later, the
Taliban.

The relief groups and charities that have been among the most
prominent supporters of the Taliban and have been implicated in
various Al Qaeda plots are either based in Saudi Arabia or derive
much of their support from there.

Khalid Shaikh Mohammed's brother ran one such agency.

A Meeting on the Coast

Two months before he made history, Atta made one last overseas
trip. On July 8, he flew from Miami to Madrid. The next day, Atta
rented a silver Hyundai and set off for Tarragona, an eight-hour
drive. It was his second trip to Spain that year. This time, he
spent 11 days. For most of that time, Atta's former roommate
Ramzi bin al-Shibh was also in Spain, in the same region.

Bin al-Shibh checked into the Hotel Monica in Cambrils. Atta
stayed in a hotel in Tarragona 15 minutes away.

The next day, Bin al-Shibh checked out without breakfast and
disappeared for five days. Atta too largely dropped off the
screen. Most investigators suspect the two came not to meet just
one another, but also with someone else--an operational commander
such as Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, or a courier relaying
instructions. Perhaps, some suspect, this was when the final
details of the plot were set--the date of the attack, maybe, or
who would go on which airplanes. A meeting could have taken place
in a safe house provided by a local network.

This theory is consistent with the length of time they stayed and
with their disappearance for the bulk of it. But in Spain, as
elsewhere, despite months of investigation, the plotters left
more unknowns than answers.

Another theory is the meeting concerned finding a replacement
pilot for Bin al-Shibh, who despite four applications was unable
to get a U.S. visa. The replacement, according to this theory,
was Zacarias Moussaoui, a muscular, angry French Moroccan veteran
of the Afghan camps and Chechnya.

Moussaoui is the only man charged by the United States with
involvement in the Sept. 11 plot. The logic of the U.S.
indictment of Moussaoui is that because Bin al-Shibh could not
get into the United States, the hijackers were one man short of
the four teams of five designated to commandeer the planes; Bin
al-Shibh brought in Moussaoui as a late replacement, prosecutors
allege.

On July 10, the day after Atta and Bin al-Shibh arrived in Spain,
Moussaoui paid the Pan Am International Flight Academy in
Minnesota for a flight simulator course, according to the
indictment. He was still in Norman, Okla., where he had washed
out of a course earlier in the year. He made another payment to
the Minnesota school July 11.

Bin al-Shibh returned to Hamburg on July 20. On July 29 and Aug.
2, Moussaoui made several calls to a number in Dusseldorf,
Germany. Bin al-Shibh received wire payments totaling $15,000
from the suspected 9/11 paymaster in United Arab Emirates on July
30 and 31 in Hamburg, then wired $14,000 to Moussaoui on Aug. 1
and Aug. 3.

A week later, Moussaoui left Oklahoma for Minnesota, where he
paid approximately $6,300 in cash to the Pan Am International
Flight Academy on Aug. 10 and started his course. He quickly
attracted suspicion, resulting in his arrest on Aug. 17. Some
investigators suspect his arrest set the attacks in motion,
perhaps prematurely.

Final Flights

Not long after Atta returned to the United States from Spain, he
made a quick trip to Las Vegas, his second of the summer. He
stayed, as usual, in a cheap motel off the Strip. At least two
other hijackers were in town at the same time--Alhazmi and
Hanjour.

Like much else about the plot, no one knows whether they met, or
if they did, why. Alhazmi and Hanjour by that point were living
in New Jersey. Atta had bought his Madrid air ticket the previous
month near the same New Jersey town where Hanjour and Alhazmi
were living. They could easily have met in New Jersey. Las Vegas
wasn't convenient. So why go there a month before the attacks?

It could well be they were in Las Vegas to meet someone else,
just as in Spain. Las Vegas certainly seems like Khalid Shaikh
Mohammed's kind of town.

The next month, in effect, the last month, has been well-
documented. The Saudis were integrated with the Hamburg cell.
They moved in varying combinations up and down the East Coast.
They worked out at gyms and reserved and purchased air tickets.

In Europe, the remaining members of the Hamburg cell were making
preparations as well. Three months before Sept. 11, Said Bahaji
told his employers at the computer company he would be quitting
his job in the fall. He had accepted an internship in Pakistan,
he told them, and would be moving. His employers say he was an
exceptional worker. They were sorry to see him go.

He told his family the same thing. His aunt Barbara Arens heard
about the internship, and she says now that she didn't believe a
word of it. She says she even went to the police before Sept. 11
to try to get them to do something. Like what, they asked.

Bahaji left Hamburg on Sept. 4, flew to Karachi via Istanbul and
disappeared. German agents later determined two other passengers
on the same flight stayed in the same room with Bahaji at the
Embassy Hotel in Karachi. They were traveling with false
identification papers. Zakariya Essabar disappeared from Hamburg
at the same time. Investigators think he might have been one of
the men with Bahaji. They don't know who the third man might have
been.

Ramzi bin al-Shibh returned to Spain on Sept. 5, flying from
Dusseldorf. He stayed at a private home in the Madrid area,
investigators say. He did not use his return ticket to Germany
and is presumed to have made his way to Afghanistan.

All the while, it was later determined, FBI agents were trying
unsuccessfully to get a look at Zacarias Moussaoui's computer.
Other agents were searching for Alhazmi and Almihdhar after
having been belatedly notified by the CIA that the two men were
known to have associated with terrorist suspects.

There was in the intelligence community a general air of concern,
verging on panic, that something very bad was about to happen.
The signs were there. The intelligence machine produced enormous
amounts of information and people were beginning to make sense of
it. Electronic intercepts, telephone chatter, warnings from
foreign services, internal memos--everything pointed in one
direction. There was something out there.

In retrospect, the information makes the Sept. 11 attacks seem
inevitable. Unfortunately, retrospective analysis is useful in
understanding the past, not changing it, or even guaranteeing the
future will be different. For now, one thing has not changed
whatsoever:

U.S. agents have been chasing the specter of Khalid Shaikh
Mohammed since 1994. They've come close to catching him at least
twice, but every time he managed to slip away, to stay a step
ahead of his pursuers.

This spring, with the Afghan war fought and resolutely won, with
many key Al Qaeda operatives dead or captured, with the
organization flushed from its hide-outs, on the run and in some
disarray, a truck bomb exploded outside a synagogue in Tunisia,
killing 19 people. Al Qaeda?

Before the attack, one of the bombers called a cell phone
belonging, it is thought, to Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, who some
believe has assumed a more central role in the organization and
who, whatever his role, remains, still, a step ahead.
The Plots and Designs of Al Qaeda's Engineer
Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the man believed to be behind 9/11, hides in
plain sight -- and narrowly escapes capture in Pakistan.
By Terry McDermott, Josh Meyer and Patrick J. McDonnell

Times Staff Writers

December 22, 2002

KARACHI, Pakistan -- Senior Pakistani and American intelligence
officials say the operational commander of Al Qaeda, the man
believed to have planned the Sept. 11 attacks on the United
States, narrowly avoided capture during a raid in which
authorities took his two young sons into custody.

It was one of at least half a dozen missed opportunities over
eight years to seize Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, who is described by
intelligence analysts on three continents as the man most
responsible for Al Qaeda's continuing terrorist attacks.

Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence agency has had Mohammed's
two sons, ages 7 and 9, in custody since September. One senior
American investigator said authorities believe that they might
have come "within moments" of capturing Mohammed in the raid at a
Karachi apartment.

In family photos seized at the apartment, Mohammed is pictured
playing with the boys.

Pakistani intelligence officials said that in recent months they
have seen persistent evidence that Mohammed -- even on the run --
has been aggressively directing Al Qaeda terrorist cells.

"Despite being so much in danger, he has not gone into
hibernation," one senior Pakistani official said. "He is trying
to protect what they have. He would like to consolidate first and
then rebuild on the same edifice. And he is doing that. He
remains active."

Mohammed has been linked to attacks against the United States as
far back as 1993, but his importance in the Al Qaeda structure
became clear only after Sept. 11 last year, U.S. officials say.
Now, some officials say, stopping Mohammed is as important as
capturing Osama bin Laden is, perhaps even more so.

Mohammed, believed to be 37, has traveled the world as one of the
chief managers of the Al Qaeda network, using Egyptian, Qatari,
Saudi, British and Kuwaiti identities. He is said to speak Arabic
with a Kuwaiti accent and to be fluent in Urdu, the principal
language of Pakistan, and English, acquired in part as he studied
for his mechanical engineering degree at a university in North
Carolina.

Although born in Kuwait, he is a Pakistani national whose family
is from Baluchistan, an area that straddles Pakistan's borders
with Iran and Afghanistan. He has used more than three dozen
aliases, including one -- Mukhtar al Baluchi -- that honors this
tribal heritage.

Mohammed has been operating out of Karachi on and off for a
decade. He communicates with Al Qaeda cells around the world by
courier, e-mail, coded telephone conversations and shortwave
radio; German intelligence agents say that when he has been
forced to retreat to rural hide-outs he sends his messages by
donkey.

Even during the U.S. bombing campaign against Al Qaeda in
Afghanistan late last year, Mohammed continued to plan, staff and
direct new terrorist attacks, according to intelligence documents
made available to The Times. The documents detail Mohammed's
orchestration of a bombing campaign in Southeast Asia.

Mohammed the Pakistani, as the Asian bombers knew him, housed a
young Canadian recruit for weeks in his Karachi apartment,
personally instructing him on communication protocols -- e-mail
passwords, telephone codes. He then sent him off to coordinate
and finance the bomb squads. With just a few days' notice,
Mohammed was able to deliver $50,000 to the recruit to pay for
bomb-making materials. The money was delivered in packs of $100
bills at a shopping mall in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, according to
the intelligence documents.

That plot was foiled, but Mohammed's intimate involvement in it
underscores his leadership in building regional terrorist
networks. One network linked to Al Qaeda is allegedly behind the
October bombing in Bali, Indonesia, in which nearly 200 people
died.
It is the same role that American investigators believe he played
not just in Asia but also around the world: If Bin Laden has been
the architect of Al Qaeda, Mohammed has been its engineer. Al
Qaeda members in custody have told their interrogators that
Mohammed had operational cells in place in the United States
after the Sept. 11 attacks and that he was the principal
proponent within Al Qaeda of developing radioactive "dirty
bombs," according to European intelligence officers.

The FBI acknowledges that it underestimated Mohammed's
significance for years, a senior agency official said. "He was
under everybody's radar. We don't know how he did it. We wish we
knew.... He's the guy nobody ever heard of. The others had egos.
He didn't."

Mohammed's persistence has earned the grudging admiration of some
investigators, who marvel at his uncanny ability to stay one step
ahead of unprecedented dragnets. In Pakistan, where the FBI
believes Mohammed is still hiding, those attempts have involved a
small army of agents from the military, police and multiple
countries and intelligence agencies.

"The way he is managing their affairs, the way he is controlling
things, he is not an ordinary man," said one top Pakistani
intelligence official. "He is very sharp and brave -- an unusual
combination."

Sometimes Mohammed's escapes have been abetted by the caution of
his pursuers. In one instance, in 1996, U.S. intelligence had
determined that Mohammed was in Doha, Qatar. Some American
officials wanted to organize what they call a "snatch and grab,"
essentially a commando raid, to seize him.

"Good intel had placed him in Qatar. This was, 'Oh my God! This
bastard is in Doha -- let's get him," said one person involved in
the investigation.

This plan was defeated when high-level managers complained during
a White House meeting that it was too risky and might result in
American deaths, according to two people involved in the
decision. They said this failure to act decisively characterized
the U.S. government's lack of a serious approach to terrorism
before the Sept. 11 attacks.

"Look at what has happened in the last six years -- you would
have to assume that he played a role in everything from that
point on. We absolutely believe that," said Neil Herman, a former
top FBI counter-terrorism officer. "He is right there. He is a
common denominator. If he had been caught in 1996, who knows what
could have been prevented."
Pakistani and American officials say catching Mohammed now could
turn the tide in the war on terrorism. The senior Pakistani
intelligence official said: "If you catch Khalid Shaikh at this
point, you will break the backbone of the entire network."

Almost every Al Qaeda suspect whom the Pakistanis have arrested
since last year has had some connection to Mohammed, authorities
say. Many of those arrested have no links to one another, but
they all know Mohammed.

Even those investigators who have been most involved in the hunt
for Mohammed say they know very little about him. In the small,
closed world of international counter-terrorism, he has become a
mythic figure -- a ghost in the machine -- whose vague presence
lurks behind innumerable plots but never comes completely into
view.



Kuwait: Oil Town

Khalid Shaikh Mohammed was born in 1965, according to records,
and reared in Fahaheel, a busy oil settlement south of Kuwait
City, on the road to Saudi Arabia. The town was historically part
of a sleepy agricultural zone on the edge of an oasis, a
traditional site of palm and vegetable cultivation. Older
Kuwaitis recall driving the route from Kuwait City through miles
of desert, with the occasional vehicle, camel and Bedouin tent as
the only landmarks.

That changed with the explosive growth of the petroleum business.
By the late 1950s, Fahaheel boomed with a jaunty, cosmopolitan
rhythm all its own. Palestinians, Lebanese, Syrians, Egyptians,
Jordanians -- even the British and Americans -- were drawn here
by the oil. Almost none of them were able to become Kuwaiti
citizens, no matter how long they stayed, creating an enduring
anxiety among many of the overseas workers. Even now, a majority
of Kuwait's 2 million people are noncitizens.

Mohammed attended high school at a three-story, 1960s-style brick
all-boys school that housed as many as 1,200 students. Fahaheel
teachers and alumni said they recall him as a studious youth who
concentrated on science. School was, and is, a serious thing in
Kuwait: Schoolboys wear white shirts and gray slacks and the
headmaster walks around with a bamboo cane, to be used on
obstreperous students.

Mohammed's oldest brother, Zahed Shaikh, attended Kuwait
University in the 1980s and was a leader of the Muslim
Brotherhood -- a militant pan-Arab organization that functioned
as an underground opposition throughout the region. A man who
knew the family said a group called the Islamic Assn. of
Palestinian Students was also formed on campus then; one of its
leaders went on to become head of the political bureau of the
militant Islamic group Hamas. This was the initial politicization
of Mohammed, the friend said.

Much of the Middle East, following the devastating Arab loss to
Israel in the 1967 war and the death of Egyptian President Gamal
Abdel Nasser -- failed champion of the drive for a secular and
united Arab world -- embarked on a gradual but inexorable turn
toward religion, leading up to the Islamic Revolution in Iran.
Analysts say it seemed that the secular path had been exposed as
lacking, and religion was an alternative source of identity and
regional esteem.

"It was like a huge vacuum, and nobody was able to fill this
vacuum better than the rising Islamists," said Shafeeq Ghabra, a
political scientist in Kuwait.

The Kuwaiti government acknowledges that Mohammed was born in
Kuwait, but that is about as far as the authorities will go in
admitting any relationship with him.

"Just because he lived in Kuwait, or may have been more here,
doesn't mean that this man is a Kuwaiti," Foreign Ministry
Undersecretary Khalid al Jarallah said recently. "He is
definitely not a Kuwaiti."

The Pakistani government also seeks to disown Mohammed, even
though his first known passport was issued by Pakistan.

"Why do the Kuwaitis want to shift the blame to us?" said
Muhammad Khalid, head of chancery at the Pakistani Embassy in
Kuwait City.

Although much remains murky about Mohammed's background, it seems
clear that his parents came from Baluchistan, which encompasses
great swaths of southwestern Pakistan, southern Iran and
Afghanistan. As avid coastal traders, the Baluchis have an
extended history throughout the Gulf. Generations ago, area
sheiks brought in fearsome Baluchi tribesmen to serve as palace
guards.

Mohammed's parents had religious callings, according to local
press reports. His father, Shaikh Mohammed Ali Doustin Baluchi,
who died decades ago, according to Mohammed's acquaintances, has
been described as a former imam, or preacher, at a mosque in the
sprawling Ahmadi municipality. Mohammed's mother, Halema, was
said to have worked cleaning women's bodies for burial. This is
considered a prestigious job in Islam, however ill-paid.

Mohammed is one of at least five siblings -- four boys and a
girl. The brothers' names -- Khalid (meaning man of eternal
life); Zahed (pious); Abed (worshiper) and Aref (knowledgeable) -
- reflect the family's religious orientation.

What little is known about the sister includes one compelling
piece of information: She is thought to be the mother of Abdul
Karim Basit, better known as Ramzi Ahmed Yousef, the man
convicted of masterminding the 1993 bombing of the World Trade
Center in New York.



Chowan College: Abbie Dahbies

Mohammed's first extended encounter with the West occurred at
Chowan College, a tiny Baptist school nestled among the cotton
farms, tobacco patches and thick forests of eastern North
Carolina, just south of the Virginia line.

The school was founded in 1848 as a refuge of learning for proper
Southern women. Later, it became a two-year junior college, a
place where young adults could gain an academic foothold. Its
entry standards were liberal, but its values were bedrock and its
leafy setting in isolated Murfreesboro, with no bars and a single
pizza shop, pretty much ensured that everyone remained on the
straight and narrow. Generations of small-town ministers,
teachers and other community mainstays passed through Chowan's
colonnaded facade.

After World War II, the school's missionary alumni began
referring students from overseas. Dominating the international
contingent by the 1980s were Middle Eastern men.

Chowan did not require the standardized English proficiency exam
then widely mandated for international students, a fact that
spread through the global academic network. Foreign enrollees
often spent a semester or two at Chowan, improved their English
and then transferred to four-year universities.

Mohammed applied to Chowan as a Pakistani citizen shortly after
graduating from Fahaheel Secondary in 1983, according to college
records. He told school administrators that he had heard of the
college from a friend in Kuwait. His bill -- $2,245 for the
spring semester -- was paid in full the day of matriculation,
Jan. 10, 1984. He told fellow students that his father was dead
and that his brothers picked up the tab.

"He took his studies seriously and was a very good Muslim," said
Badawi Hindieh, a Palestinian from Fahaheel who attended Chowan
at the same time.

Acquaintances knew him as Khalid Shaikh, a name that stuck in
people's minds. Mohammed, acquaintances said, was culturally
integrated into Arab and Kuwaiti society and could have passed as
a Kuwaiti Arab.

"Khalid Shaikh spoke very good Arabic, like a Kuwaiti, but
introduced himself as a Pakistani," Hindieh said. "We knew he was
Baluchi."

Later in life, as Mohammed used multiple identities and moved
from the Gulf to Afghanistan, the West and beyond, this ability
to immerse in varying cultures would serve him well.

By 1984, about 50 of the 650 or so male students at Chowan were
Middle Easterners, including a sizable contingent from Fahaheel
and elsewhere in Kuwait. The local boys had a name for them:
"Abbie Dahbies."

The Arab students were frequent recipients of anti-Iranian
epithets in the years after the 1979 takeover of the U.S. Embassy
in Tehran. The foreigners were sometimes viewed as cliquish.

"They seemed to be praying all the time," recalled John Franklin
Timberlake, a 1984 Chowan graduate, now a police officer in
Murfreesboro. "Just chanting, like. We never understood a word of
it. Sometimes we'd come home late on a weekend night, maybe after
we'd had a few beers, and they'd still be praying."

At Chowan, Mohammed embarked on a pre-engineering curriculum --
popular among the foreigners.

"He was a good student -- a bit better than a B-type student,"
Garth D. Faile, chairman of the science department, said in an
interview this fall.

Mohammed, like every student, was required to attend a once-a-
week chapel service based on Christian doctrine.

One large bloc of Middle Easterners lived in Parker Hall, a brick
tower overlooking the campus' Lake Vann, a restful crescent of
water frequented by migrating birds and couples holding hands.

Groups of Arab students would gather in a fifth-floor dorm room
and follow a kind of ritual: boil a chicken, share it with rice
among all present, pray and commence intense discussions, before
praying anew.

In the Middle Eastern tradition, they would leave their shoes in
the corridor. Some U.S. students could not resist the temptation:
The footwear sometimes ended up in the lake. Another prank
involved filling 55-gallon garbage containers with water and
propping the vessels against the doors of the "Abbie Dahbies,"
knocking and running away. When the door opened, water flooded
the room.
The hijinks did not appear to discourage the visitors, many of
whom remained in the States and completed their degrees. Years
later, one alumnus interviewed at his office in Kuwait City
recalled his time at Chowan with great affection, remembering in
particular the becalmed lake -- an extravagance for Arabs reared
in parched latitudes.

"In a place like Chowan, some students became more insular --
speaking only to Arab students, while others tried to mix with
the Americans," he recalled. "I tried to mix, but others did it
differently."

Mohammed completed his semester at Chowan and moved on.



Greensboro: The Mullahs

In summer 1984, Mohammed enrolled as an engineering major at
North Carolina Agricultural & Technical State University in
Greensboro, a historically black college on the Piedmont plain in
the central part of the state.

On Feb. 1, 1960, students at A&T -- whose most famous graduate is
Jesse Jackson -- staged the first lunch-counter sit-in at a
downtown Greensboro Woolworth's, a galvanizing action that spread
throughout the South.

College abroad was a rite of passage for legions of Middle
Eastern students -- overwhelmingly men. Typically, this was their
initial long-term exposure to Western life. Some left appalled at
what they witnessed. Others ate it up.

"We were all excited about going to the States," said Khalil A.
Abdullah, a 1987 A&T graduate. "In high school we had seen all
the movies, heard the music. We wondered so much about it."

In Greensboro, Mohammed was part of the large Middle Eastern bloc
in the university's expansive engineering department -- a natural
major for Kuwaitis and others from oil-producing nations. By all
accounts, there were three distinct student groups at the school:
African Americans (by far the largest group), white Americans and
Middle Easterners.

"It wasn't like there was tension or anything, but that's just
the way it was," said Winfred S. Kenner, who studied mechanical
engineering at the sprawling, tree-lined campus east of downtown.

The Middle Easterners tended to live off campus in anonymous
complexes like the Yorktown and the Colonial, seldom ate in the
cafeteria and skipped organized events. While "Aggies" trundled
off in merry droves to Saturday football games, the foreign
students arranged soccer matches in the park. They socialized
mainly with one another.

"It was the college life: We used to get together three, four
times a week, watch the games, chat, drink, you know," said Sami
Zitawi, a Kuwaiti native who recalled large get-togethers of
Arabs on Friday, the Muslim holy day. "We used to go to the
farmers, buy a lamb or a goat. Butcher it with a knife.... Every
Friday night someone would have a big dinner: 15, 20, 25
students."

Political discussions inevitably occurred. The year before
Mohammed's arrival, students in Greensboro marched in protest of
the 1982 massacres of Palestinians at refugee camps in Lebanon --
though the Arab visitors learned to mute their criticisms.

The Middle Eastern students were far from a monolith. Differences
in politics, culture and, especially, in the practice of Islam
tore at regional solidarity.

"Basically, what you saw was a micro-society of our home,"
explained Mahmood Zubaid, a Kuwaiti architectural engineer.
"Everybody fit in where they felt most comfortable."

A social barrier separated the elite scholarship boys like Zubaid
and students like Mohammed, the Baluchi, and the Palestinians,
reliant on their families or smaller grants for tuition and
living expenses. But religion was the real dividing line.

Wherever large concentrations of Middle Eastern students gathered
on Western campuses, graduates say, groups of religious
conservatives sprung up. These self-appointed moral overseers
endeavored to ensure adherence to Koranic values and avoidance of
wine, women, drugs and other vices. They grew beards as religious
statements and prayed five times a day, typically in makeshift
mosques in apartments or university-provided centers. And they
actively recruited fellow students.

"We called them the mullahs," recalled Waleed M. Qimlass, a 1980s
A&T graduate who now directs environmental affairs for Kuwait
City. "Basically, the students at Greensboro were divided into
the mullahs and the non-mullahs."

At A&T, several Arab graduates say, Mohammed was among the
mullahs. Even back at Chowan, one student recalled, Mohammed had
reproached him for eating pork.

There was plenty at A&T for Mohammed and other true believers to
be distressed about. Some Arab students drank, flirted and
frequented clubs -- indulging in hedonistic pursuits absent back
home. A few motored about the expansive campus in Porsches and
Mercedeses.

The party crowd attempted to keep their indiscretions private,
fearing that word might get back to their families. But the
mullahs took notice and exercised pressure both intense and
subtle.

Islamists at Greensboro and other U.S. universities made a point
of seeking out newly arrived Arab students at airports. Qimlass
recalled how three "guys with beards" intercepted him and a
friend as the two Kuwaitis waited for their luggage at the
airport in Tulsa, Okla., where Qimlass studied before
transferring to A&T. The trio immediately ushered the two
arriving Kuwaiti students to a kind of rooming house that doubled
as a mosque, reproaching a fatigued Qimlass when he lighted up a
cigarette.

If they missed new arrivals at the airport, the bearded ones
would seek them out on campus. Their advances were sometimes
rejected but often welcomed among vulnerable newcomers who were
homesick and out of place.

"Your first day in Greensboro, you didn't know anybody, maybe
your English is not so good, and they met you at the airport and
helped you get started," Zubaid said.

One former Kuwaiti student wasn't so thrilled: He would place a
bottle of Johnnie Walker on his table whenever the mullahs came
by, like a cross proffered to Dracula.

The disproportionate influence of religious students overseas has
long troubled Arab capitals. The region's mostly autocratic
rulers aren't keen to subsidize the training of would-be
ayatollahs who would return and espouse revolt. Nor did the
prospect of religious indoctrination abroad thrill secular
parents seeking to broaden their children's horizons.

"Pre-Sept. 11, I knew many mothers here who worried about their
children going to America and coming back very radical in their
thinking as Islamists," said Ghabra, the political scientist at
Kuwait University.

The Kuwaiti government would disperse U.S.-based scholarship
students if fears emerged that any kind of religious-political
cabal was gaining traction, according to several former students.
The precise reason remains unexplained but, in the late 1980s,
the steady stream of Kuwaitis attending North Carolina
Agricultural & Technical State University dwindled. Few Arab
students attend the school today.
In the aftermath of Sept. 11, the religious recruitment
inevitably takes on a sinister slant. Yet former A&T students
stress that the Muslim evangelizing there was largely spiritual
and cultural, common enough throughout the Islamic world, where
communal prayer is encouraged.

Students who recall Mohammed invariably describe a studious and
private devotee of the library and Allah, but friendly enough in
a casual way and capable of a laugh.

"All anyone knows about him is that he was in the mosque all the
time," said Faisal Munifi, who studied mechanical engineering at
the same time.

"He very much kept to himself," said Zitawi, now a gas station
owner in the Greensboro area. "We'd see each other at the Burger
King for coffee or lunch. That was our hangout.... He was always
polite. He wasn't a funny guy, but when he's talking to you, you
feel like he's smiling. He wasn't rude or anything."

Nor did Mohammed spout anti-Western or anti-American rhetoric.
"Something must have happened later that caused that feeling,"
said Hindieh, who knew Mohammed at both Chowan and Greensboro. "I
never remember him saying anything like that."

There is an unmistakable similarity between descriptions of
Mohammed and the later accounts of the men, like Mohamed Atta, he
sent to attack the United States: all Western-educated scions of
middle-class Arab families; dedicated young men from discerning
backgrounds who came to embrace a volatile creed of religion,
politics and resentment.

By the end of 1986, after just 2 1/2 years, Mohammed had
completed his work. He graduated Dec. 18, one of 28 mechanical
engineering graduates, almost a third of them Middle Easterners.
As at Chowan, there is no photo of him in the yearbook.

None of almost a dozen faculty members in the department from
that era recalled Mohammed. For most of his classmates and
teachers, the future terrorist mastermind with a $25-million
price on his head did not cast a long shadow, if any at all.



Peshawar: The Call

Jihad, Abdullah Azzam wrote, is the way of everlasting glory, and
the only way to get there is behind the barrel of a gun. "Jihad
and the rifle alone: no negotiations, no conferences and no
dialogues," he said.
Azzam, more than any man, created the modern notion of a Muslim's
duty to wage war against all comers in order to reestablish the
reign of Islam on Earth. It is a duty, he said, that commands all
Muslims to its banner.

Azzam was born in the West Bank in 1941, land later occupied by
Israel. He answered his first call to battle with the Palestinian
resistance there, which he criticized because it was, he said,
mere politics insufficiently rooted in Islam.

He departed for Cairo and an academic career, then left that when
the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in 1979. He was among the
first of the Afghan Arabs to arrive in Peshawar, Pakistan, in an
upland basin ringed by hills that rise into mountains north and
west en route to the Khyber Pass and Afghanistan.

Peshawar, capital   of Pakistan's unruly Northwest Frontier
Province, has for   centuries been an international crossroads for
traders, warriors   and rough statesmen. In the 1980s, Azzam made
it the capital of   the Afghan resistance and the destination for
tens of thousands   of Muslims who joined the holy war.

Saudi Arabia's national airline offered special jihad fares. Arab
governments sent emissaries and opened offices for dozens of
state-sponsored charities to assist the fighters.

For a decade, parts of Peshawar were transformed into a sort of
Little Mecca.

"It was a bustling Arab town -- Arab restaurants, bazaars,
bakeries. During the jihad there were Arab newspapers and
magazines published here. There were men in kaffiyeh, women fully
covered in black," said Rahimullah Yusufzai, a Pakistani
journalist who became a leading chronicler of the Afghan wars.

It was, said Gen. Hamid Gul, who formerly headed Pakistan's
Inter-Services Intelligence, "the first international brigade of
the modern time."

Among those who answered Azzam's call was a former student, Osama
bin Laden. Azzam's intellectual fervor and Bin Laden's bank book
combined in an organization that eventually became Al Qaeda.

The Saudi government sent dozens of missionaries and millions of
dollars. The United States funneled arms and more millions
through Peshawar.

Gun violence had been a way of life and death in the region long
before the Soviet war. As one Pushtun saying puts it: A man's
jewelry is his gun. But there had never been anything on this
scale before.
Pakistani intelligence, the ISI, was installed as executor of
American and Saudi interests. The service created a new logistics
operation just to distribute the flood of armaments. Convoys of
10-ton trucks filled with rifles, machine guns, grenade launchers
and antiaircraft missiles were sent out daily on the cross-
country trip from the docks in Karachi to Peshawar and the Afghan
interior beyond.

"The original jihadis started in old Peshawar with very little
money, in the pre-Saudi, pre-CIA days," Yusufzai said. "Later,
they all rented places in University Town, the most expensive
neighborhood in Peshawar."

The Arab neighborhoods in University Town were, oddly, the most
westernized in the city. Old Peshawar is a crooked tangle of
alleys and bazaars rich with the smells, smoke and people of
Central Asia. A thick haze of exhaust, dust and brick kiln smoke
lies over it.

University Town is clean and rectangular, laid out on a grid
filled with walled compounds of big three-story stucco houses
that would be at home in Orange County. The new villas were
filled by the Arabs and an even larger militia of camp followers.
Armies used to be trailed by merchants of flesh and other
entertainments; modern armies, even ragtag agglomerations like
the moujahedeen, are as likely to be followed by a social worker
as a streetwalker. The Afghan wars, because of the international
nature of their combatants and finances, were the apotheosis of
this.

The biggest industry in Peshawar in the '80s and '90s, after the
arms trade, was good works. More than 150 charities, development
and refugee care organizations opened offices.

There was plenty to do. Afghanistan at the time of the Russian
invasion had a population of 15 million. Over a decade, that
would shrink by almost half. Many fled through the mountain
passes to Pakistan.

One of the largest aid agencies was a Kuwaiti charity called
Lajnat al Dawa al Islamia, the Committee for Islamic Appeal. The
charity at one point had more than 1,000 employees in Pakistan
and was spending $4 million a year in the region. Its regional
manager was Zahed Shaikh -- Khalid Shaikh Mohammed's older
brother.

As head of one of the largest charities in town, Zahed became a
figure of importance. He knew local diplomats, the Afghan
warlords; when Pakistani politicians came to town, he shared the
dais with them.
After college in North Carolina, Khalid, according to Kuwaiti
authorities, never returned home. Instead, he joined his big
brother in Peshawar. Another brother, Abed, a schoolteacher, left
his job in the Gulf emirate of Qatar and came east too. A man who
knew all three said Zahed, the eldest, was the coolest head of
the trio; Abed was more militant and Khalid tended to follow him.

At the center of the Afghan resistance movement in Peshawar was
Pushtun warlord Abdul Rasul Sayyaf, who had been a junior
lecturer at Kabul University and was known as the Professor. He
had been schooled in Cairo and spoke fluent Arabic. He became the
favored recipient of money from the Saudi and American
governments.

The money funded his army, a political party, a newspaper, a huge
refugee camp and a college called the University of Dawa al
Jihad, which means Convert and Struggle.

The university became known as a place you could learn darker
trades than mathematics -- bomb-making, for example. A student
once described it to U.S. journalist Mary Anne Weaver as an
Islamic Sandhurst, likening it to the famous British military
academy. For a time, the college also had as many as 1,000
students studying engineering, medical technology and literature.

The abandoned school sits behind high mud walls amid the
sprawling Jalozai refugee camp, which today has more than 200,000
residents and is less an encampment than a city. Pakistanis
marvel at the ingenuity of the Afghans, who have built a thriving
local economy that includes the manufacture of pottery, textile
and latticed wooden roofs that are exported back to Afghanistan
where timber to make such things is scarce. There's even a
carwash.

By 1989, Mohammed had gone to work at Sayyaf's university, a
friend said. He taught there and worked weekends at the refugee
camp. The three Baluchi brothers became part of the small, semi-
permanent Arab community that included Azzam, Islamic Jihad
founder Ayman Zawahiri and Bin Laden, who came and went with his
wives and children in his own airplane. Most of the Arabs in town
worshiped at a small mosque on a dead-end alley called Arbat
Road, across the street from Zahed's office.

It was a different world then, said one man who was part of the
scene. Everyone had the same goal: to oust the Soviets. Everyone
knew one another, prayed and socialized together, and even went
to the jihad training camps together.

Victory over the Soviets, who withdrew in 1989, should have been
the crowning achievement of the jihad. But the various Afghan
factions, deprived of a common enemy, began fighting one another.
American support disappeared with the end of the Soviet campaign.
Many felt that the U.S. actively opposed the establishment of an
Islamic government in Kabul after the Soviet withdrawal. This
was, to some, the cruelest cut of all.

Azzam, the heart of the Arab jihadi resistance, and two young
sons were murdered by a bomb on the street outside the mosque in
1989. That same spring, Khalid's brother, Abed, also was killed
by a bomb.

The political and religious climate changed in Peshawar, and
resentment of the American abandonment festered. Bin Laden
replaced Azzam as head of the Arab moujahedeen and began
preaching hatred against the U.S.

Then came the 1990 Iraqi invasion of Kuwait and the American-led
counterattack, which deepened divisions in the Arab world. Bin
Laden, for one, was furious that the Saudi royal family allowed
the U.S. to base its soldiers in the kingdom, violating what he
felt was a Koranic dictate to keep infidels out of the holy land.

Most of the moujahedeen who had gathered in Pakistan went home,
warriors without a war. Those who stayed changed perceptibly.
Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and his circle changed with the times, one
friend said.

"In 1991-92, their whereabouts, their meetings, their thoughts,
it became more secret," he said. "The hatred for Americans -- it
was among every Arab who came to Afghanistan."



Karachi: The Next War

Peshawar in the jihad years was said to have more spies, secret
agents and freelance schemers per capita than any city in the
world. Conversations dripped intrigue and purpose. Among the
plotters was Khalid Shaikh Mohammed's nephew, Ramzi Yousef.

Like Khalid, Yousef had left Fahaheel and Kuwait for college --
in his case, to study electrical engineering in Wales. He first
visited Peshawar on a summer break in 1988 and then returned in
1991. He would become the first of the next-generation jihadis to
carry the fight beyond Afghanistan.

It has never been clear who, if anyone, recruited Yousef, but at
some point over the next year he began to make plans to attack.
He asked a boyhood friend who was studying at flight schools in
the U.S. to suggest potential targets. The friend suggested the
World Trade Center, and by the fall of 1992 Yousef was in New
York, assembling a team to bomb the twin towers.
American investigators say that Mohammed in late 1992 wired
several hundred dollars to Yousef, so he knew at least where
Yousef was; investigators believe that he also knew what Yousef
was doing.

Mohammed moved his base of operations to Karachi, the metropolis
of Pakistan's southern seaboard, with direct flights throughout
the Gulf, to Europe, to Southeast Asia, to Africa and the
Americas. It is Pakistan's most cosmopolitan city, if also its
most violent.

In 1995 alone, there were 1,742 slayings, most of them the result
of sectarian political rivalries that made parts of the city the
exclusive property of one political party or another. These
districts are called "no-go areas"; even police have abandoned
any pretext of controlling what goes on within them.

Mohammed lived off and on in Karachi, using the city as a base
from which to travel the globe. He began using the first of
dozens of aliases, often posing as a Gulf businessman. At various
times he told people that he was a holy-water salesman, an
electronics importer and a Saudi oil sheik.

When Yousef returned to Pakistan in 1993 after the first World
Trade Center bombing, he and Mohammed began assembling a team to
broaden the battleground. By 1994, both men were spending months
at a time in the Philippines and Malaysia, meeting like-minded
men.

The events they planned were, in what would become a Mohammed
signature, perversely spectacular: They would assassinate the
pope, perhaps the American president, and in a stunning finale
would blow up a dozen American airliners over the Pacific.

The plans were thwarted when bomb-making chemicals were ignited
in a Manila apartment, leading to the discovery of their plots
and the eventual arrest of fellow plotters. Yousef fled, just as
he had after the first World Trade Center bombing, back to
Pakistan. Mohammed had been careful; none of the other plotters
even knew his name. It would be months before authorities figured
out who he was and many years and thousands of deaths before they
realized his significance.



Qatar: Slipping Away

Yousef wasn't so careful. Some of the other plotters had known
him for years; one told police that Yousef was the same man who
had planned the Trade Center bombing. A worldwide manhunt ensued
and within months Yousef's whereabouts were betrayed. American
and Pakistani agents stormed a hotel room in Islamabad, the
Pakistani capital, in February 1995 and hauled Yousef away,
kicking and screaming. At least that's what another guest told a
reporter.

"It was like a hurricane, a big panic," the guest said. "He was
shouting: 'Why are you taking me? I am innocent! Show me papers
if you are going to arrest me! Who are you?' No one listened to
him. They took him without his shoes. His eyes were blindfolded,
his head was covered, his arms and legs were tied."

The man giving this account identified himself as a Karachi
businessman. He was registered under the name Khalid Shaikh. It
was, American authorities eventually came to believe, Mohammed,
hiding in plain sight.

Mohammed's caution -- he used three aliases on the Manila plot
alone -- had paid off. He was still an unknown. That was about to
end.

Yousef never gave up any valuable information. But investigators
had recovered his laptop computer in Manila and a treasure trove
of leads. The computer files included a letter seeking money for
the plots. It was addressed to a potential donor, one who the
letter-writer apparently felt was shirking his duty.

"Fear Allah, Mr. Siddiqui, there is a day of judgment," the
letter said.

It was signed Khalid Shaikh.

"We knew there was another person involved ... but he was very
mysterious and we didn't know who he was," said Herman, who led
the FBI investigation of the Manila plot. "He basically eluded
us."

The evidence they did have led investigators back to Peshawar and
the circle of friends and acquaintances there. Zahed Shaikh --
Mohammed's brother -- was scrutinized, and although there was
never a formal accusation lodged against him, he disappeared from
Peshawar.

Investigators say Mohammed spent the next year building and
maintaining a fund-raising network in the Persian Gulf.

"Throughout the region, there was this classic sort of money
collector -- the guy who was hanging out at the mosque, checking
out the scene, basically casing the mark, who would invariably be
some old guy with lots of money. A religious guy, probably. The
collector would come up alongside him, make his pitch very
persistently and the mark would write him a check," said one
American official, who worked in the Gulf throughout the 1990s.
"Khalid Shaikh Mohammed was a collector, a guy who would collect
the money from the street collectors.... A guy in the Philippines
would call a guy in Dubai who would call Khalid Shaikh Mohammed.
It would be a chain of telephone calls, and Khalid would send the
money."

American understanding of Islamic terrorism then was still
inchoate. Even Bin Laden was seen as just another guy with bad
ideas and a lot of money. Al Qaeda was barely on the screen.
Potential state-sponsored terrorism was deemed more dangerous, so
more attention was given to Iran, which had become the chief
international proponent of Islamist goals.

Mohammed lived openly in the Gulf. "He wasn't even using an
alias," said one official. American agents tracked him to Italy,
Egypt, Singapore, Jordan, Thailand, the Philippines and Qatar. In
Qatar, American officials say, he stayed as the guest of a member
of the country's ruling family, Abdullah ibn Khalid al Thani, who
was then the country's minister of religious affairs.

"Abdullah ibn Khalid had a farm outside" Doha, said one American
official. "A lot of these guys had what were basically
gentlemen's truck farms. It was a hobby. Grow cabbages, raise
ducks. So he has this farm and he always had a lot of people
around, the house was always overstaffed, a lot of unemployed
Afghan Arabs.... There were always these guys hanging around and
maybe a couple of Kalashnikovs in the corner."

American   intelligence figured out that one of the guys on the
farm was   Mohammed. About the same time, a grand jury in New York
indicted   Mohammed for the Manila airliner plot and a debate
occurred   on what, exactly, to do about it.

FBI Director Louis J. Freeh met with Qatari officials seeking
permission to arrest him. One FBI official said months passed
without approval, even though Qatar acknowledged that Mohammed,
whom agents had begun referring to as KSM, was there. At one
point, according to documents obtained by The Times, Qatar told
the U.S. that it feared Mohammed was constructing an explosive
device. They also said he possessed more than 20 different
passports; still, they delayed granting the U.S. permission to
arrest him.

Some officials strongly felt that the U.S. should act as quickly
and with as much force as necessary to capture Mohammed. Others
were more wary. A meeting was called in Washington in early 1996.
Caution prevailed.

"That D.C. meeting ... struck me as one of the great lessons in
politics," said one person who attended the meeting. "Here was
this opportunity to get this bad guy, and we didn't do it. The
Qatar government had no interest in screwing up its fragile
relationship with us. If we had gone in and nabbed this guy, or
just cut his head off, the Qatari government would not have
complained a bit.

"Everyone around the table for their own reasons refused to go
after someone who fundamentally threatened American interests....
The FBI can't go anywhere overseas without the CIA providing the
intel, the [Department of Defense] providing the logistics and
military muscle in the event we have to shoot our way in. And
none of that happened."

Another person at the meeting said the real obstacle was the
Pentagon, which feared another "Black Hawk Down" debacle similar
to the one in Somalia in 1993 and insisted that a raid would
require hundreds, if not thousands, of troops.

In the end, rather than sending a kidnapping squad, Freeh sent a
letter to Qatar's government. By the time permission was granted
and American agents went to Doha, Mohammed was gone.

"We reached out to every one of our friends out there to try and
get him," recalls one senior Justice Department official. "But he
just kind of slipped off the screen."



Afghanistan: Regrouping

Being on the run did not mean that Mohammed was out of
commission.

He left Qatar about the same time Bin Laden was making common
cause with the newly emergent Taliban in Afghanistan, who in
exchange for his assistance gave him a secure base from which to
operate.

A pair of attacks in Saudi Arabia marked the beginning of a new
jihad, Bin Laden told British journalist Robert Fisk in 1996. He
began expanding the reach of Al Qaeda across the world.
Investigators now suspect that Mohammed was the key man in that
effort.

While Bin Laden and the men previously identified as his main
deputies -- Zawahiri, Mohammed Atef and Abu Zubeida -- spent the
bulk of their time in Afghanistan and Pakistan consolidating and
rebuilding their training camps, Mohammed traveled the globe,
searching out allies and recruits, and assembling what now seems
like an omnipresent worldwide network.

"He was building a terrorism business. He was one of the key
lieutenants in the entire Al Qaeda structure," said the FBI's
Herman.
Investigators suspect that Mohammed developed direct personal
relationships with several of the men who became Al Qaeda's top
regional operatives.

His trail wound through Europe, Africa, the Gulf, Southeast Asia
and even South America, according to investigators in Malaysia
where Mohammed, traveling under an Egyptian passport, obtained a
Brazilian visa.

At times, said one senior U.S. counter-terrorism official,
Mohammed would travel to other countries to personally establish
terrorist cells and provide them with plans for attack, money,
manpower and logistical support. Other times, he would operate at
a higher level, overseeing senior Al Qaeda commanders who led the
attacks.

The official said Mohammed is believed to have been actively
involved in the bombing of two U.S. embassies in Africa that
killed 224 people in 1998, the bombing of the Cole in the Yemeni
port of Aden in 2000, which killed 17 sailors and nearly sank the
$1-billion U.S. warship, and many other attacks.

"There is a clear operational link between him and the execution
of most, if not all, of the Al Qaeda plots over the past five
years," the official said.

American investigators acknowledge that this evaluation of
Mohammed as a central figure in Al Qaeda is largely
retrospective. It wasn't until after Sept. 11 that his larger
role became apparent.

"He popped up post 9/11 and then, looking back, we saw that he
was the Zelig of Al Qaeda, involved in a lot of other things,"
one investigator said.



Sept. 11

One of the hallmarks of Al Qaeda is its breadth, the dispersion
of its resources. So, for example, parts of the network could be
preparing to attack American warships in Yemen, others to bomb
civilian targets in Europe and Asia, even as the larger
organization was already planning Sept. 11.

In an interview with Al Jazeera television, recorded in May this
year, Mohammed described himself as the head of Al Qaeda's
military committee. He said that "about 2 1/2years prior to the
holy raids on Washington and New York, the military committee
held a meeting during which we decided to start planning for a
martyrdom operation inside America."
That would date the inception of the plot to early 1999. Later
that same year, the men who would execute it were chosen, he
said. German intelligence agencies believe that Mohammed first
came into contact with these men when they visited Al Qaeda camps
in Afghanistan.

Several of the men were students in Hamburg, Germany, part of a
small group of devout Muslims who were growing increasingly
restive over the plight of the Islamic world.

They were largely middle class, some well educated, not
dispossessed in any apparent way. One was an urban planner and
architect, one an aeronautical engineering student and one a
prospective marine engineering student. Mohammed, a mechanical
engineering graduate, chose other engineers for Al Qaeda's
riskiest undertaking. They were, like him, devout but at home in
the West, adept at languages and technically inclined.

The rest of the hijacking crews were made up of two veteran Al
Qaeda operatives, a replacement pilot and a group of young Gulf
Arab volunteers, chosen from what Mohammed described as "a big
excess of brothers who were filled with desire for martyrdom,"
whose job was mainly to effect the physical takeover of the
airliners.

As Sept. 11 approached, intelligence agents in the West were
nearly beside themselves with anxiety. They knew something was
going to happen, but they couldn't figure out what. Mohammed was
already moving on. He spent the weeks before Sept. 11 instructing
a new Canadian recruit on communications protocols. He was
sending the recruit to Southeast Asia to coordinate a bombing
campaign in the Philippines and Singapore. The only
acknowledgment that something big was afoot was his suggestion
that the recruit should probably leave Pakistan before Sept. 11.

It is that sort of unrelenting focus that makes Mohammed such a
feared figure among those who pursue him. He simply does not
stop.

In the months after Sept. 11, investigators think that Mohammed
was moving back and forth between Pakistan and Afghanistan. One
Afghan general, Ziaudeen Deldar, said intelligence reports
indicate that "Khalid the Baluchi" was among hundreds of Al Qaeda
fighters who escaped on foot to Pakistan from a camp near Shahi
Kot in southeastern Afghanistan last spring when American forces
launched Operation Anaconda -- an attempt, they said, to finish
off Al Qaeda.

Instead, the Americans faced considerably more resistance than
anticipated and backed off. The grasp of the anaconda relaxed and
the prey, including Mohammed, slipped away. Weeks later, Al Qaeda
operatives blew up   a truck outside a synagogue in Tunisia,
killing 19 people.   In the days leading up to the attack,
investigators say,   one of the bombers was in frequent telephone
contact with a man   in Karachi -- Mohammed.

Mohammed was accompanied at the Al Jazeera interview by Ramzi
Binalshibh, another Hamburg man who had wanted to become one of
the suicide pilots but who tried and failed four times to obtain
a U.S. visa. Binalshibh instead became Mohammed's field
coordinator for the plot.

It's noteworthy that in the interview, Mohammed let Binalshibh do
most of the talking. Even in granting an interview, the purpose
of which ostensibly was to reveal, he exposed almost nothing.



Karachi: Behind Walls

Karachi is a reasonably modern, at times almost ordinary, place.
Kids on bikes pass by on their way to school. Boys and girls
giggle in one another's presence and listen to music that offends
their parents' ears. Young hipsters scout the latest boutiques
and restaurants with cool, enigmatic one-word names. Okra is one
of the latest.

The city is by many measures a mess. It hasn't had a
comprehensive development plan since the 1920s, the air is foul,
but cars are smaller and traffic manageable. Important people
ride Toyota Corollas to work, some with chauffeurs and
bodyguards.

It has some of the vanity and swagger of cities accustomed to
dominating their surroundings. It is in love with the myth of
itself as a place of danger and deception.

So maybe it is not surprising how many people here can tell you
where Khalid Shaikh Mohammed is, would be or has recently been.
For a ghost, he has made many appearances. You can, in a couple
of weeks, collect half a dozen addresses and a great many more
stories.

The stories start in the Defense Housing Society, a large, newer
group of neighborhoods between the old city center and the sea.
It was at a Defense apartment building that a big shootout
occurred in September. Defense -- it's named for its developer,
army officers -- contains many of the finer districts in the
city. Benazir Bhutto, the former prime minister, lives in one of
them, a leafy area of big homes and older-model Mercedeses.

The shootout was just beyond the better neighborhoods, in a
commercial-industrial tract full of five- and six-story
buildings, most with low-rent light industrial tenants: textile
plants, zipper and button factories and small machine shops. The
streets are paved, but the buildings are separated by bare dirt
and are shuttered in the front with metal roll-up doors. The
night before, when police arrived, the streets were empty and
dark.

Nothing happened that night. The police or, rather, the
authorities -- there were more intelligence agents and army
special forces than there were cops -- waited. This is the sort
of thing that spawns rumors. Why did they wait? The simplest
explanation, the one authorities give, is of course not trusted,
but it is the one that makes sense. They waited because they
didn't know what else to do. They didn't know what or who to
expect and waited to see.

People would like to believe the opposite: that authorities knew
everything and waited because that would confuse things
afterward; that they waited to give the people they had come to
get time to escape; that they waited because this is Karachi and
nobody knows why they waited.

This is what happens in a place where everything has been secret
for so long. And it is one of the reasons Karachi is such a great
place to hide: Who couldn't hide in a place where everything is
hidden?

Khalid Shaikh Mohammed first came here to live and do business a
decade ago, assembling money and people for plots that would
occur everywhere in the world but here. An early co-conspirator
said he first met Mohammed in an Arab neighborhood full of money
changers and bucket shops. A man who was captured in another plot
had a phone number for Mohammed that was traced to the other end
of town, a middle-class preserve of single-family homes of clean
modern lines behind pale stucco walls.

The walls, actually, are the one thing many of the neighborhoods
have in common. Karachi is a city of walls.

Another address is in the neighborhood where Ramzi Yousef's in-
laws lived, a cramped, dense place where the food stalls are full
of root vegetables and the women wear the richly embroidered
dresses favored by Baluchis. At least 10% of Karachi's 12 million
people are from Baluchistan, the next province to the northwest,
and there is a constant traffic to and from the rural precincts,
and from there to Iran and Afghanistan. It's where Mohammed's
people came from.

A man claimed that he met Mohammed and his family across the
marsh flats in the mud huts of another neighborhood this past
spring. Mohammed was posing as a spiritual advisor, a holy man on
the run from Arab agents who didn't like his brand of Islam. The
story seemed preposterous, but police acknowledge that they
received a tip from another source and searched the same
neighborhood extensively.

The part about there being a family turned out to have some
basis. The police and the agents and the army all gathered for
the big shootout in Defense because of the family. Earlier that
day, acting on a tip, the police raided an apartment a couple of
miles away. Pakistini authorities say they had information, based
on utility records, that a senior Al Qaeda leader might be there.
Instead, they found three children, two women and a man.

One of the women was a caretaker, and one child was hers. The
other woman was a "foster mother" of sorts to the other two
children, and the man her companion. The two boys, ages 7 and 9,
were named Omar and Abdullah. Pakistani and American officials
believe that their father is Khalid Shaikh Mohammed.

American authorities say the house contained photographs of
Mohammed with the children; there was also evidence of another
woman, thought to be Mohammed's wife. It seemed a happy, playful
group, a senior FBI investigator said. Some thought that they
might have missed Mohammed by mere minutes, so when the people
they captured told them about a group of Arabs living at another
address in Defense, the authorities called up reserves and
hurried across town.

"Our officers moved immediately," said a senior Pakistani
official. "No, we didn't know that he was there. But from the
interviews and surveillance we knew there was something big going
on. The number of people there, the weapons, the intelligence we
gathered. "

After morning prayers, they found the caretaker, who told them
that the entire top floor was filled with Arabs. They'd been
there for two months, he said, and overpaid on the rent. The
authorities went in, and all hell broke loose. They were fired on
immediately, the Pakistani official said. "Then it was a free-
for-all. We fired at the windowpanes, put in tear gas and stormed
them."

Hundreds of rounds and two dead men later, the authorities
secured the building. They searched room by room and in a storage
space under a stairwell found the would-be Sept. 11 pilot Ramzi
Binalshibh.

Afterward, and still, Karachi was thick with rumor. Mohammed was
dead, was captured, was there and got away, was there and was
allowed to get away.

The police are about the only ones who claim not to know how near
they were to catching him that morning. They think that they were
close, but they don't really know. They are, as they've been for
a decade, still looking and they're not quite sure who it is
they're trying to find.

They're hesitant to talk about it much, but intelligence officers
acknowledge that they have interrogated Khalid Shaikh Mohammed's
two young sons. Not surprisingly, the boys haven't had much to
say. Not even his children know much about the man who engineered
Sept. 11.
Prelude to 9/11: A Hijacker's Love, Lies
Aysel Senguen saw her
fiancé fall into radical Islam.
She knew something was
wrong but had no idea what
lay ahead.


By Dirk Laabs and Terry McDermott

Special to The Times

January 27 2003

HAMBURG, Germany -- The letter from the dead man did not surface
for months after it was sent, after, presumably, Aysel Senguen
had enough time to fully absorb the grim deeds and suicide death
of her fiancé, Ziad Jarrah.

Ziad sent the letter and a package of personal belongings to
Aysel from the United States on Sept. 10, 2001, a day before he
and three comrades hijacked United Airlines Flight 93, set it on
a heading for Washington, D.C., and, finally, rather than allow a
passenger revolt to rescue the airplane, purposely pitched it
nose first from 40,000 feet into a pasture in Stony Creek
Township, Pa.

By the time the letter was revealed in November 2001, Aysel knew
others thought the evidence overwhelming that Ziad had been at
the controls of that airliner, that he was a critical component
in the deadliest terrorist attack in history. She nonetheless
believed, she told investigators, that he was alive; that he
would one day come back; that he would, as he had before, show up
at her door with gifts and a sheepish grin, telling her not to
worry, that there had been problems but now everything was fine
and they would have the life they had planned.

There was something about Ziad Jarrah that made a lot of people
hope, if not actually conclude, that Aysel was right and the
investigators wrong — that some horrible mistake had been made
and he wasn't a mass murderer.

Then came the letter, which postal officials said was
misaddressed and lost in the mail for weeks.
"I did not escape from you but I did what I was supposed to do
and you should be very proud of me," Ziad wrote. "Remember always
who you are and what you are. Head up. The victors never have
their heads down!"

He was gone, he said. "Everyone has his time."

Ziad apologized for feeding Aysel's dreams of a wedding and
children and a normal life. He called her, as he frequently did
in his letters, "chabibi" — darling.

"I am what you wished for," he said.

For many who held out hope, the letter erased it. Not Aysel. She
ignored the dark passages and chose to believe the part where he
promised to "always be your man," the part where he said, "I love
you from all my heart. You should not have any doubts about that.
I love you and I will always love you, until eternity," the part
where he promised that one day they would live in a place "where
there are no problems, and no sorrow, in castles of gold and
silver."

Of course, Aysel didn't believe the evidence. She believed what
lovers always believe: She believed in Ziad.

Aysel Senguen was for five years — almost from the day they met
in Germany in the spring of 1996 — in love with Ziad Jarrah. For
much of that time, they fought, as lovers will, about their
differences, about what she described as his secrets.

Aysel watched as Ziad turned toward a harsh interpretation of
Islam and joined a group of like-minded young men in steadfast
commitment to wage holy war. She knew that something had gone
horribly wrong. And she was hardly alone.

Evidence now being used to prosecute a member of the Hamburg
group that produced three of the Sept. 11 suicide pilots makes
clear that the views of Jarrah and the group were well known to
relatives, friends, casual acquaintances and, notably, to police
and intelligence officials.

The evidence, much of it not previously disclosed, includes
interviews with close associates of the hijackers, wiretaps,
extensive correspondence between Aysel and Ziad, correspondence
among other hijackers and between them and friends, financial
records and eyewitness accounts from informants in Germany and at
Al Qaeda training camps in Afghanistan. The accounts and
quotations in this report, unless otherwise attributed, are
derived from that evidence.

The evidence presents a new view of the Hamburg cell. So public
were the beliefs of the hijackers and their associates that the
often stated notion that they were a cell of secret "sleeper
agents" of the Al Qaeda terrorist network seems almost opposite
the truth.

The group was far larger than previously described, including at
least several dozen men. Almost everyone who had significant
contact with them knew that the men professed a personal
commitment to holy war and spent years trying to determine how
best to wage it. Casual acquaintances were sometimes frightened
by the group's beliefs. A member of the congregation at the Al
Quds mosque in Hamburg brought his father to a worship service,
and the older man was so unnerved by what was a routine day at
the mosque that he warned his son never to return. Others fled
town to avoid the group.

Members of the group hectored acquaintances to join the cause, at
one point physically beating one man because they declared him
insufficiently devout. They pressured other men to grow beards,
to dress in a prescribed manner and to make their wives convert
to Islam.

Intelligence officials from the United States and Germany were
well aware of the radical nature of the group. A CIA agent was so
agitated about the group's activities that German authorities at
one point told him that they would throw him out of the country
if he continued to make a nuisance of himself by demanding the
Germans do something.

Members of the group and others they were in frequent contact
with were under regular surveillance. Some of them, including the
man suspected of bringing the group into contact with Al Qaeda,
had been watched since at least 1998.

Jarrah, for example, was in regular contact with at least five
people who were being watched by intelligence organizations.
Jarrah himself was interrogated in January 2000 in the United
Arab Emirates because he had copied a page from the Koran into
his passport.

Many people suspected that something was seriously wrong. They
saw much — and did nothing. No one saw more than Aysel.

Greifswald

Ziad Jarrah was the middle child and only son in a prosperous,
industrious family in Beirut. His parents drove fashionable
Mercedes automobiles, owned a condominium in Beirut and a
vacation home in Lebanon's countryside. The family was secular
Muslim, and Ziad attended private Christian schools — a mark of
affluence, not religious inclination.
He had a tough time in school, at one point apparently flunking
out of high school. He was, according to some published reports,
more interested in girls than studies. He eventually earned a
high school diploma and was given the choice of attending
university abroad in two places the Jarrahs had relatives —
Toronto, or Greifswald, Germany, a tiny northeastern backwater on
the Baltic coast.

Going to Canada would have required Ziad to marry a cousin as
part of the deal. He chose Germany. He and another cousin, Salim,
arrived in Greifswald in the spring of 1996, not long after a
vivacious young woman named Aysel Senguen enrolled there in the
college of dental medicine.

They met within a month of Ziad's arrival, on the day he moved
into his student quarters at the University of Greifswald. Aysel
lived just down the hall. She was the daughter of conservative,
working-class Turkish immigrants to southern Germany and had been
in Greifswald for a semester.

She already had a boyfriend, but Ziad must have seemed an answer
to many dreams: a big-city boy with an easy smile, like her a
moderate Muslim who enjoyed a good time. She wondered about
potential problems, confiding to her sister that Arab men could
be domineering, but she took the leap.

She dumped the boyfriend. She and Ziad became a couple. They
cooked meals together; she helped him learn German. Bleary-eyed
photographs from the time — including one of Ziad lighting a
water pipe — indicate that they did their share of partying.

Not everybody joined in. One man Ziad later grew close to,
Abdulrachman Makhadi, one of Aysel's fellow dentistry students,
must have frowned on their behavior. Makhadi, a Yemeni, was known
around campus as the self-appointed enforcer of Muslim doctrine;
he governed — harshly, some say — from a small concrete-block
mosque that locals referred to as "the Box." Inside it, Makhadi
preached a strict interpretation of Islam and collected money for
the Palestinian militant group Hamas.

Ziad went home for the winter holiday after his first semester
and upon his return seemed changed from the happy-go-lucky
playboy. His cousin, Salim, noticed that he began reading radical
Islamist publications.

A friend of Aysel's told investigators that in early 1997, Ziad
talked about being "dissatisfied with his life up till now." The
friend said Ziad wanted to make a mark in life and "didn't want
to leave Earth in a natural way."

There is no indication of what lay behind the change. Salim
Jarrah said once that his cousin was like a tree without roots;
Greifswald was not a place for an Arab to grow them. The city is
a dim, almost medieval place that seems decades behind the rest
of Germany. Fashions in clothing, even today, seem stuck in 1987,
and the city has for years had a large population of neo-Nazi
skinheads. It is not exactly a welcoming place for foreigners.

Makhadi, who disclaims anything but the slightest acquaintance
with Ziad Jarrah, seems the likeliest candidate to have
influenced him. Investigators about that time had begun
monitoring Makhadi, whom they classified as "an endangerer" of
other Muslims, but they say they have no real idea what, if
anything, happened.

Ziad's new piety caused problems with Aysel almost immediately.
He criticized her choice of friends, the way she dressed and what
she drank.

Aysel and Ziad were in many ways dissimilar. He was quiet and
withdrawn. She talked all the time about everything to whomever
would listen. "That's my way. That's how I am. I tackle problems
through conversations," she said later.

Throughout the relationship, according to their correspondence,
she railed at Ziad for not telling her more, for not sharing more
of himself. Ziad responded that he told her what he felt she
needed to know.

At some level, she must have understood what Ziad was going
through. She had earlier experienced an identity crisis of her
own. She told investigators that after high school her parents
had sent her to Turkey, apparently an attempt to ground her in
her heritage. It backfired. She attempted suicide. "I was in a
cultural conflict," she said.

"When he asked me to change, I sometimes said, 'OK, you are
right,' but I didn't do anything. I know that kind of culture —
that's not so different with Turks."

One thing they agreed on 100% was getting out of Greifswald. Ziad
had upon his arrival enrolled, as foreign students are required
to do, in preparatory German classes. He was due to complete
those within the year, and in the spring of 1997 he began to
apply for regular university admission. He wanted to study dental
medicine like Aysel and he applied at medical schools around the
country.

Later, out of the blue, she said, he also applied to the
biochemistry program at Greifswald, probably as a fallback
position, and to study aeronautical engineering in Hamburg. She
told investigators that he went to Hamburg because it was the
only place he was accepted.
Maybe this is what Ziad told her, but according to records, it
was untrue. He was accepted into a medical school in western
Germany, the science program in Greifswald and at Hamburg, which
is the one he chose.

Hamburg

Ziad moved to Hamburg and enrolled at the University of Applied
Sciences, which was then home to a group of young, tough Moroccan
students who were regarded as the hardest of the hard-core
Islamists at the city's radical Al Quds mosque. Ziad quickly
befriended the group.

The Moroccans, many of whom worked together at an outdoor supply
shop, always sat in the same place at Al Quds, in a corner on the
right side. They monitored relationships of their friends. One
man told investigators that he was called repeatedly by one of
the Moroccans, Zakariya Essabar, who just months before had been
the best man at his wedding.

Essabar asks: When will your German wife convert to Islam?

Never, the man says.

Essabar calls to ask the same question again and again. Then,
after a period of months without contact, they talk.

Essabar asks: What about your wife? Did she convert?

No, the man says. Where can I reach you?

Essabar replies: You can't reach me anymore.

In the beginning, Ziad returned to Greifswald every other
weekend. He sometimes rode the train with Makhadi, who had an
internship in Hamburg. They had earlier made other trips from
Greifswald, including at least one to the western town of Aachen,
which for more than a decade had been a center of radical Islam
in Europe. Ziad befriended the second in command at the Muenster
Islamic Center, which was run by a man who had fled Egypt under
suspicion of a political murder.

Ziad also met a Yemeni named Ramzi Binalshibh, a regular at Al
Quds, and through him a group of multinational Arab men just then
beginning to figure out how they could contribute to the jihad.
This group was based across town at the Technical University of
Hamburg-Harburg. A series of apartments shared by the Harburg men
became a kind of floating headquarters for young jihadis.

The Harburg group was connected to others of similar intent
throughout Europe and the Middle East. They had access to
criminal enterprises that could and did furnish false
identification for some group members.

The man chiefly responsible for making connections among this
mosaic of activists, militants and sympathizers was Binalshibh,
now suspected of being a field coordinator of the Sept. 11 plot.
Binalshibh traveled constantly, meeting fellow believers from the
Netherlands, Kosovo, Afghanistan and the Persian Gulf.

At trial and in other interrogations, witnesses repeatedly
described Binalshibh — not Mohamed Atta — as the group's most
respected and charismatic figure.

Atta has typically been described as the leader of the group.
Part of the reason authorities first thought that Atta was the
leader stems from early confusion about Atta's name. He rarely
used his full name, which includes seven distinct components of
which Atta is the last. He never used Atta except on official
documents. He was known by almost everyone as Mohamed el-Amir, or
simply El-Amir, which means "leader" in Arabic. Investigators
apparently mistook these references as an indication of respect.

Some members of the group barely knew Atta; all knew Binalshibh,
who worked nearly full time on his religious-political
activities. He had lived in Germany since at least 1995 and never
held a regular job or attended school more than a couple of days
at a time. He seldom had a fixed address. All he needed, a friend
said, was a mattress and a corner in which to put it.

Binalshibh and Atta regularly lectured and recruited at several
mosques in Hamburg, although not always with great success. Atta,
in particular, had such a stern vision of Islam that he drove
people away. One young recruit described attending Atta's study
group for two years. Over time, it included dozens of members,
but by the time Atta left town for good in 2000, the recruit
said, the group had dwindled to the point that Atta "was sitting
there almost alone."

Binalshibh was dreamily romantic about jihad. "It is the highest
thing to do, to die for the jihad," he told friends. "The
moujahedeen die peacefully. They die with a smile on their lips,
their dead bodies are soft, while the bodies of the killed
infidels are stiff."

A spirit of easy brotherhood prevailed within the Harburg group.
However extreme its aims, it was a kindred community. The men
shared apartments, bank accounts and cars. The group members
strictly observed the tenets of their religion: They prayed five
times a day, maintained strict Islamic diets and even debated the
proper length of their beards. They talked endlessly about the
damage done by Jews, including their assumption that Israel had
conspired with Monica Lewinsky to bring down President Clinton.
For entertainment, they watched battlefield videos and sang songs
about martyrdom.

Aysel's Dilemma

Ziad's family members in Lebanon grew concerned about him. They
sent emissaries to talk to him, threatened to cut off his monthly
stipend, and, according to investigators, his father once feigned
a heart attack in hopes that Ziad would come home. It didn't
work. He grew more and more involved with his new friends.

He saw Aysel less. She visited Hamburg a few times but felt
unwelcome; on at least one occasion, Ziad abandoned her in his
room to spend time with his friends, whom she never met. She was
angry, but Ziad said that where he went, women were not allowed.

Aysel later told investigators that she first heard Ziad talk
about jihad just after he moved to Hamburg in late 1997.

"I didn't know what it means," she said. "I asked Arab friends
about the meaning. Somebody explained to me that the word 'jihad'
in the softer form means to write books, tell people about Islam.
But Ziad's own jihad was more aggressive, the fighting kind,
giving oneself up for the religion."

The couple broke up and reconciled over and over. Aysel became
pregnant.

She aborted the pregnancy, she told investigators, because of the
uncertainty of their relationship. She later apologized to Ziad
by mail:

"I had to think about our baby today," she wrote. "I am sorry
about everything I did to you."

Around that time, Aysel told a friend: "I don't want to be left
behind with the children, because my husband moved into a fanatic
war." Aysel at one point contemplated moving back with her
parents in Stuttgart. She transferred instead to Bochum, in coal
country near Düesseldorf. Theoretically, it was more convenient
to Hamburg, but Ziad's visits remained irregular. Aysel would be
beside herself with loneliness and her inability to track him
down. Once, in desperation, Aysel wrote him:

"Again you haven't been reachable. I left a message for you to
call me back. Since you haven't done so, I assume you haven't
been home at all. I couldn't sleep last night and I thought for a
long, long time. What is love for you? ... I want to tell you
what love is for me: To take the other as he is, to share
everything with him you have (mentally and physically,
materially, in all areas of life), to do something for the other
you wouldn't do for yourself, to be there for the other
(especially in bad times).

"I will fight for you. I am willing to live with you in Lebanon
even if you say you wouldn't live in Turkey, because it isn't
your home, and I don't accept the point of view 'the wife has to
live where the man wants her to, because he is responsible,'
because this is written nowhere in the Koran, that this has to be
that way, and I don't believe that God made this religion for
men. I think in the Koran everything is taken care of for
marriage and it's not in the hand of the man. Islam offers equal
rights for men and women, maybe it grants even more rights to the
women than you know."

Once, she said later, she told Ziad, "I do not cover myself for
you; if I choose to do so myself it's for God or for my faith."

When Ziad was out of touch, Aysel would try to track him down,
calling all the numbers she had for friends in Hamburg. When that
produced nothing, she combed through old telephone bills for
calls Ziad made from her flat when he visited. She called every
number she didn't know, demanding that someone tell her where he
was.

It was a fruitless battle. For the first two years in Hamburg,
Ziad maintained nominal commitment to Aysel and studied in
school. Gradually, Ziad drifted further away from her and deeper
into his own war.

He told her that he was ashamed of her. Aysel's roommates say the
criticism sometimes grew violent. Once, she told them, he hit
her; another time, she said, he threatened her with much worse:
"Today I am sitting here with you and tomorrow I will kill you."

Talks Heating Up

As time went on, discussions in the Harburg group intensified
although, witnesses said later, they were unfocused. One week the
members were intent on fighting in Kosovo, the next in Chechnya.
They wanted to fight; they didn't know which war.

In 1998, Binalshibh, Atta and a newcomer, Marwan Al-Shehhi,
became the first of the group to take concrete action toward
joining the jihad. They quietly left Hamburg, apparently for the
Afghan training camps. When they returned, they were more fervent
than ever and encouraged others to follow their example.

The pace had quickened in the broader jihad community too. That
spring, Osama bin Laden had issued his call for direct action
against the United States. In the summer, two American embassies
in East Africa were attacked with truck bombs. It was as if a
battle horn had sounded. The war was on.
Everything seemed to take on a new urgency. The group members
moved in and out of flats. They began physical fitness training.
One of them, Said Bahaji, joined the German army, then left after
completing his basic combat training. He could have avoided
service altogether, but he apparently wanted the training.

Atta, for one, had executed a last will years earlier. Others
downloaded templates for jihad wills from the Internet and
followed suit. One man instructed his survivors to pay all his
debts to Muslims but withhold all money from Christians and Jews.

Their living arrangements became increasingly fluid. One insider
later told investigators that the group members always looked as
if they were ready to leave at a moment's notice.

They tidied up personal affairs, assigning power of attorney and
control of bank accounts to friends. They rushed to finish school
courses or gave up all pretense of trying. Three members of the
group married in a period of six months.

They included Ziad Jarrah, who married Aysel in a spring 1999
ceremony at a mosque in Hamburg. It must have been a desultory
affair, done to appease Ziad's friends. It was never registered
with the state, and Aysel said later that she never considered it
a real wedding. Aysel did, however, insist on a contract before
the wedding that specified she could continue her studies. Ziad
later sought to renege on this and asked her to quit, but she
appealed to the imam who performed their wedding ceremony and he
upheld her position.

In any event, they broke up again within weeks of the wedding,
and then, as usual, made up.

In May, after they reunited, Ziad wrote this e-mail: "It's me
again. How is my darling? All I can say for me is I miss you very
very much. Meow. I want to cuddle. I love you."

By summer, they were apart again.

"I thought it is forever, and he probably, too, but we got back
together on the telephone after two weeks," she said.

Back in Bochum that fall, a friend called Aysel, warning that
Ziad was up to something, that he might be headed for
Afghanistan. The friend said Ziad's family in Beirut was frantic.
Where was Ziad?

Aysel visited him in Hamburg. Ziad had been talking lately about
Chechnya, she said. He seemed weighed down; she suspected he was
about to make a decision. He quit going to classes. He told her
that he was going home to Lebanon for a while, clear his head and
figure out what to do with his life. He was even more withdrawn
than usual. "That scared me," she said.

Notes in Ziad's handwriting, dated just before Aysel's visit and
later discovered by investigators, gave an indication of what was
on his mind: One entry read: "The morning will come. The victors
will come, will come. We swear to beat you. The earth will shake
underneath your feet." And a week later: "I came to you with men
who love the death just as you love life.... The moujahedeen give
their money for the weapons, food and journeys to win and to die
for Allah's cause but the unhappy ones will be killed. Oh, the
smell of paradise is rising."

When Ziad took Aysel to catch the train back to Bochum, she was
filled with dread.

Aysel knew that wherever he was going, it probably wasn't
Lebanon, the destination he had given her. She repeatedly called
Hamburg trying to find out where he was. This must have set off
alarms in the network.

Mounir Motassadeq, a Moroccan now on trial in Hamburg for
allegedly providing logistical support for the Sept. 11 plotters,
testified that he was contacted by Binalshibh, who asked him to
call Aysel and calm her down. Motassadeq did as he was asked. A
couple of weeks later, a letter for Aysel arrived with a Yemeni
postmark and a stranger's handwriting on the envelope. Inside was
a letter from Ziad.

The letter, she said later, advised her that he was well. It said
that "I shouldn't worry and that he wants to have a child. The
special thing about the word 'child' was that he wrote it in
several different languages. He also wrote that he missed me."

"I was incredibly happy with that letter because now I knew he
was alive. I told his parents at once. I had received a sign of
life."

A week later, Ziad called.

"He told me he would be home soon. But I can't recall the exact
content of the conversation because I was so excited," she said.

Then one day in February 2000, there he was, Aysel said, standing
at her door: Cleanshaven, neatly dressed — the Ziad she knew from
the first weeks in Greifswald, the man she fell in love in. He
has jewelry, honey, shoes, a skirt for her.

"And of course I asked the question, 'Where have you been?' And I
did not ask it once. I asked it a lot of times. The only answer I
got was, 'Don't ask me.' Later he would say, 'Don't ask me, it's
better for you.' That sort of irritated me, so I asked, 'Why was
it better for me?' I would not receive an answer.

"At some point, I just told myself, 'It's OK,' and I was content
with the situation. Basically I was happy that he was here and
that his Sturm und Drang — that's how I interpreted this time —
was over."

That night, as Ziad slept in her bed, Aysel lifted the blankets
and carefully examined his body, looking for bruises or scars.
There were none. He looked fit, athletic. He's OK, Aysel thought.
He's back, and everything is going to be like it was in the
beginning.

Flight Plans

For a while, it was. Ziad seemed more relaxed about his religion,
more moderate. He spoke a little of Pakistan, but mainly about
the landscape and how differently and simply people lived. He
never said a word about being in Afghanistan or what he'd done
there. He told Aysel that he had decided what to do with his
life: He wanted to become a pilot.

Immediately, Aysel began making plans, imagining their life:
Another year in Germany for training, then children, some time in
Turkey. If Ziad wanted to leave Germany, he could work for the
Turkish airlines and she could work as a dentist. Then they could
move on to Beirut if he wanted.

The two of them together, plotting and dreaming just as they had
in Greifswald, only now instead of universities they were looking
for flight schools. They contacted those schools near Bochum. But
Ziad took off on his own some days. He went to Hamburg, Berlin.
He visited a cousin he hadn't seen in years who worked as an
engineer at a nuclear power plant. And one day, while he was
gone, Aysel came home to find a message on the answering machine,
indicating that Ziad had contacted a flight school in Florida.

Aysel was furious. This was more like the old Ziad than she had
bargained for — lying, hiding information. When he came home, he
had an explanation, as usual: It's the best training and, more to
the point, the fastest. He can earn his license faster in the
U.S. than anywhere else. Besides, he said, I have to get away
from my old friends. This is the only way to do it.

Aysel put her doubts aside. She acquiesced. Not long after, she
e-mailed a friend: "I know he did some bull .... I know more than
he thinks I know."

What Aysel didn't know was that some of Ziad's old friends would
be in the U.S. with him, or that he had told a cousin he thought
it would be great to be a Muslim martyr and a plot had been set
in motion to achieve that end.

Jarrah, Atta and Al-Shehhi arrived in Florida in the summer of
2000. Binalshibh and Essabar tried to join them but repeatedly
failed to obtain visas. Binalshibh became the key contact between
the pilots — the hit teams, as they called them — and the plot's
principal planner, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, and the rest of the Al
Qaeda hierarchy.

During the next year, Aysel and Ziad replayed their relationship.
Aysel was inquisitive. Ziad was evasive. She couldn't find him.
They fought. They made up. He came to visit. He left. In total,
he returned to Germany six times while he was in the U.S. She
visited him once in Florida. He flew her down to the Keys and
showed her how he trained in a Boeing simulator.

He told her not   to tell friends where he was. She agreed, but
when asked, she   said, "of course I never stick to that. If
somebody called   and asked his whereabouts, I give them an answer.
I told him too,   and he is very angry."

They talked or e-mailed almost every day.

Aysel wrote Ziad in late October:

"Please, I ask you please call me. Just give me a short call so I
know that you're all right. I'm angry that you don't think about
me and that I wait for a message here and have to think about you
all the time. Can you think about me once and try to pretend to
be me. You're taking so many risks and I know a lot even though
you don't tell it. It's no surprise that I'm afraid for you,
right?

"I love you.

"Your Aysel."

Ziad responded:

"I arrived well. I'm sorry I haven't sent you a message for a
long time. I did get your letter and I found it super sweet. And
full of understanding and compassion. It's not about trust. I
love you, Aysel, and don't worry."

Ziad's father had a heart bypass operation a month later, in
February 2001. Ziad went home to Beirut for a month to be with
him. He stopped in Bochum on his way back to the U.S.

He seemed to recommit himself, Aysel said later.
"He was really moved, and said, he, Ziad, wants [us] to have
children soon, so his father could see them before he dies."

Later, after Ziad returned to the U.S. and still couldn't set a
date for when his training would end, Aysel grew angry again
because she didn't see "any progress." Ziad, as always, had an
excuse. Aysel, as always, accepted it. In part, their
relationship was constructed on her capacity to believe Ziad's
lies, even those that seemed preposterous.

Once, Ziad showed her a picture of him on one of his trips in a
commercial airliner. She asked why he was sitting in business
class. The flight attendant made me, he said, because I am
Lebanese, and they wanted me where they could keep an eye on me.

This seems close to what Aysel had wanted too — Ziad in a place
where she could keep an eye on him. But even when he was within
sight — in the same room or the same bed — Aysel saw only so far.
Ziad made it hard to look too deeply, but Aysel seemed to blind
herself too.

She saw Ziad descend almost every step of the way into the Sept.
11 plot. Even today she can recount the steps, but, she says, she
still doesn't know quite where he was going.

The Destination

Ziad's quick training course in the U.S. stretched out beyond a
year. Every time he came home, Aysel thought it was for good. She
booked his flights home and unless told otherwise booked one-way
fares. Then he'd show up carrying only hand luggage, and she
would know that he wasn't staying this time, either.

Finally, on Sept. 10, 2001, Ziad packed up his things, wrote
Aysel the final letter declaring his pride and devotion and
dreams of castles in the sky and put them all in the mail.

The next morning, very early his time, he called her. She had
complained often that even when he did call, the conversations
were brief, sometimes cut off when his prepaid calling cards ran
out of time. This conversation was abrupt even by those
standards.

Three times, quickly, he told her he loved her. Then Ziad told
Aysel goodbye.