9-11 plan took twisted path

Infighting, improvisation marked scheme hatched in '99

By Douglas Jehl and David Johnston
The New York Times

WASHINGTON -- In early 1999, Osama bin Laden summoned Khalid Shaikh Mohammed to his well-guarded compound in Kandahar, Afghanistan, to confide to the lieutenant that his long-discussed proposal to use aircraft as terror weapons against the United States had the full support of al-Qaida.
That meeting, described for the first time by the independent commission investigating the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, set in motion an extraordinary series of events. But the path from Kandahar to the World Trade Center was anything but a straight line.

Described in vivid detail by two captured al-Qaida operatives who helped plan the attacks, the plot was more troubled and improvisational than had been previously understood.

As late as August 2001, one commission report says, Mohammed fretted about infighting between Mohammed Atta, the mission leader, and a Lebanese pilot, Ziad Jarrah. With his frosted hair and his fondness for Beirut nightclubs, Jarrah seemed so close to choosing a girlfriend over al-Qaida that the plotters scrambled to line up a replacement pilot. But in the end, Jarrah was at the controls of United Flight 93 when it crashed in Pennsylvania.

Of the four al-Qaida operatives first assigned to the plot in 1999, only two ended up among the final 19 hijackers who carried out the attacks. Both of them -- Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi -- washed out as student pilots, and were relegated to lesser roles. To take their place as pilots, Mohammed turned to other recruits spotted at the camps in Afghanistan.

Atta, the Egyptian pilot who was at the center of the core group, did not join the team until after the plot was well under way. The lineup of hijackers was changing throughout the two years of preparations. Meanwhile, an impatient bin Laden began pressing for an attack as early as 2000, even if it meant using untrained pilots to crash into the ground instead of into buildings.

At the start, though, bin Laden and Mohammed envisioned attacks even more audacious than the one that was ultimately carried out, the report said.

Mohammed, the American-educated Kuwaiti from Pakistan who emerges in the commission's account as a main partner of bin Laden's, at one point planned an attack involving 10 planes. Mohammed wanted to hijack the last plane himself, then kill every man on board and land to deliver an anti-American diatribe.

Another version, scrapped in 2000, envisioned near-simultaneous attacks involving aircraft in Southeast Asia and the United States. Still another, discarded only in the summer of 2001, conceived of a second wave of strikes, following those in Washington and New York, that would target skyscrapers in California and Washington state.

The date of the attacks was not settled until mid-August, the report says, and even in the final days, Atta and Ramzi Binalshibh, another top al-Qaida lieutenant, had not decided whether the fourth plane, the one piloted by Jarrah, should aim at the Capitol or the White House.

"In the end," the report said, "the plot proved sufficiently flexible to adapt and evolve as challenges arose."

Bin Laden listened, but did not commit himself. It was the spring of 1996 when Mohammed described his idea of using airplanes for a terror attack in the United States. He sketched out an aerial suicide plot that seemed to come straight from a 1995 plan by Mohammed and others in Manila, Philippines, to blow up 12 U.S. commercial jets over the Pacific Ocean.

Three years later, at their meeting in Kandahar, bin Laden said the plan had al-Qaida's full support. Mohammed and bin Laden chose an initial list of targets. Bin Laden wanted to hit the White House and the Pentagon. Mohammed wanted to strike the World Trade Center. To that list they added the U.S. Capitol, one commission report said.

Bin Laden quickly supplied Mohammed with four recruits to carry out the scheme, drawing from the thousands of young men who trained in his camps a few especially ardent followers whom bin Laden had singled out for martyrdom missions.

The four men were Nawaf al-Hazmi, Khalid al-Mihdhar, Walid Muhammad Salih bin Attash, known as Khallad, and Abu Bara al Taizi. Only Al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar stayed with the suicide attacks to the end.

Intensive training began in the fall of 1999. The recruits took part in an elite course at the Mes Aynak camp in Afghanistan. Mohammed, who had attended college in North Carolina, taught the men English phrases, showed them how to read a telephone book, make flight reservations, use the Internet and encode communications. They played flight simulator games and sifted through airline schedules to determine which flights would be in the air at the same time.

At first, Mohammed ordered Khallad and al Taizi to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, to study airport security and conduct surveillance of U.S. airlines in preparation for a smaller version of the Manila plot. But bin Laden canceled the Southeast Asia plan. Khallad and al Taizi dropped out; instead, Khallad became the mastermind of the October 2000 attack in Yemen on the Navy destroyer Cole. Al-Mihdhar and al-Hazmi were the first hijackers to enter the United States, arriving Jan. 15. 2000.

Separately, in 1999, four other young extremists were making their way from Hamburg, Germany, where they met, to the Afghan camps, as an alternative to an earlier plan to fight against the Russians in Chechnya. The four, Atta, Jarrah, Binalshibh, and Marwan al-Shehhi, seemed ideal for bin Laden: They were Western-educated and held extreme anti-American views. All except Binalshibh would die in the attacks.

In Afghanistan, Atta quickly achieved high status, pledging "bayat" or allegiance to bin Laden, who made him the operation's leader. The two men discussed targets for the attack. One commission report, based on the interrogation of Binalshibh, said the two men identified "the World Trade Center, which represented the U.S. economy; the Pentagon, a symbol of the U.S. military; and the U.S. Capitol, the perceived source of U.S. policy in support of Israel."

By March 2000, the four new al-Qaida recruits were back in Germany researching flight schools. But after learning that pilot training was cheaper and easier in the United States, Atta, al-Shehhi and Jarrah left for the United States. Binalshibh, a Yemeni who tried but failed to enter the country, stayed behind as a link between Mohammed and Atta.

By the fall of 2000, the recruits were training at different aviation schools around the country. But al-Mihdhar and al-Hazmi, the first two hijackers to enter the country, proved to be poor pilots.

Al-Qaida proved adaptable. In place of the two men, bin Laden's scouts recommended Hani Hanjour, who had studied in the United States and had taken flight training in Arizona. He was chosen for the plot in 2000 after he arrived at the Faruq camp in Afghanistan. That December, Hanjour flew to California to join the plot.

With his arrival, the pilots who seized the four planes used in the attack were all in the United States.

As 2001 dawned, all was not well among the pilots.

Jarrah was headed abroad, on the second and third of what would be five foreign trips in 10 months, to see his girlfriend in Germany and his family in Lebanon. Atta and al-Shehhi also left the United States around the New Year, but it was Jarrah, from a wealthy Lebanese family, who seemed to be having second thoughts about the plot.

The report describes Jarrah as a young man who had "studied at private, Christian schools" in Lebanon and "knew the best nightclubs and discos in Beirut, and partied with fellow students in Germany, even drinking beer -- a clear taboo for any religious Muslim." He was very different from the more pious Atta and other pilots, the report says, and during his months of flight training in the United States, he lived separately from and felt isolated by them.

By late July, when Jarrah headed to Germany again, on a one-way ticket purchased by his girlfriend, the daughter of Turkish immigrants, Mohammed and Binalshibh discussed the possibility of replacing him with another man, Zacarias Moussaoui. Only after an emotional conversation in Germany in early August, in which Binalshibh encouraged him "to see the plan through," did Jarrah return to the United States and the al-Qaida team.

In fits and starts, the final lineup for the attacks began taking shape. At one time or another, at least nine candidate hijackers, all Saudis, had been dropped from the plan, the report says. But by late April, the 15 recruits who would serve in supporting roles in the hijackings had begun arriving in the United States. Most of the men were short in stature, slender in build, and between 20 and 28 years old. They would serve as the "muscle," to subdue the crew and passengers as the others flew the planes.

Still, bin Laden was impatient. As early as 2000, just as the pilots were beginning to arrive in the United States, he had been pressing Mohammed to carry out the attacks, to protest harsh treatment by Israel of the Palestinians. It would be sufficient, the al-Qaida leader told Mohammed, if the planes were just crashed into the ground.

At least twice in 2001, bin Laden encouraged attacks as early as May, but Mohammed deflected those requests, the report says, saying the hijackers needed more time to prepare. Sometime in the summer, Mohammed himself quietly set aside his vision of a "second wave" of attacks, in California and Washington state, that would follow those in the East; he was too busy preparing for the main onslaught.

At a meeting in Spain in mid-July, Atta told Binalshibh that he would need an additional six weeks to carry out those strikes, the report said. Not until mid-August did Atta settle on the Sept. 11 date.

Since 1999, when bin Laden gave the go-ahead to the plot, the target list had been whittled down, albeit after much debate. From Boston, two hijacked planes would strike the World Trade Center, a target long favored by Mohammed. From Dulles airport outside Washington, a third plane would hit the Pentagon, a favorite of bin Laden's.

But what of the Capitol and the White House? Both had been on the preliminary list, and bin Laden preferred the White House, a message conveyed to Atta. But the chief hijacker resisted; in the center of Washington, the White House might be difficult to strike; he wanted to hold the Capitol in reserve.

The fourth aircraft, hijacked after takeoff from Newark, N.J., was headed toward Washington when it was forced down by passengers into the Pennsylvania field. "As late as Sept. 9, two days before the attacks," one commission report says, "the conspirators may still have been uncertain about which Washington target they would strike."

In Afghanistan, some of bin Laden's most senior advisers were anxious, the report says. They were concerned that the attack could provoke an armed American response and would also anger Taliban leaders and the Pakistani government, whose good graces had permitted al-Qaida to use Afghanistan as a refuge. But in a dispute over whether to go forward, bin Laden prevailed.

"In his thinking," the report says, "the more al-Qaida did, the more support it would gain."