The Looming Tower (50 page)

Graduates of the second phase could choose to attend the guerrilla warfare school, which also lasted forty-five days. There were specialty camps in hijacking and espionage, and a ten-day course in assassination. One al-Qaeda trainee recorded in his diary that he had learned “shooting the personality and his guard from a motorcycle” on one day and “shooting at two targets in a car from above, front and back” on the next. Another camp specialized in making bombs, and still another, called the Kamikaze Camp, was reserved for suicide bombers, who wore special white or gray clothes and lived alone, speaking to no one.

There was a well-supplied library of military books, including
Revolt,
the autobiography of the Israeli terrorist and eventual prime minister Menachem Begin. Another book, on the establishment of the U.S. Marines Rapid Deployment Force, included a scenario in which a tanker carrying liquefied natural gas would be blown up in the Straits of Hormuz at the mouth of the Persian Gulf, leading to a massive rise in the price of oil. The trainees were captivated by this notion and spent considerable time planning how to pull off such a maneuver. At night they would often watch Hollywood thrillers, looking for tips. The movies of Arnold Schwarzenegger were particular favorites.

Zawahiri was particularly keen on the use of biological and chemical warfare. He noted that “the destructive power of these weapons is no less than nuclear weapons.” He established a program, code-named Zabadi—“curdled milk”—to explore the use of unconventional techniques for mass murder, and he pored over medical journals to research various poisons. “Despite their extreme danger, we only became aware of them when the enemy drew our attention to them by repeatedly expressing concern that they can be produced simply,” he wrote. One of his men, named Abu Khabab, set up a laboratory near Jalalabad, where he experimented on dogs with homemade nerve gas and videotaped their agonizing deaths. It often took them more than five hours to die. Abu Khabab explained to his trainees that humans were much more susceptible, not having as powerful antibodies as the dogs. Zawahiri set up another laboratory near Kandahar, where a Malaysian businessman, Yazid Sufaat, spent months attempting to cultivate biological weapons, particularly anthrax. Sufaat had a degree in chemistry and laboratory science from California State University in Sacramento.

Bin Laden was cool at first to the use of biological or chemical weapons, but he found himself at odds with Abu Hafs, who led the hawks in the al-Qaeda debate about the ethics and consequences of using such indiscriminate agents. Would they be used in Muslim lands? Would civilians be targeted? The doves argued that the use of any weapon of mass destruction would turn the sympathy of the world against the Muslim cause and provoke a massive American response against Afghanistan. Bin Laden clearly preferred nuclear bombs over the alternatives, but that posed additional moral considerations. The hawks pointed out that the Americans had already used the nuclear bomb twice, in Japan, and they were currently using bombs in Iraq that contained depleted uranium. If the United States decided to use nuclear weapons again, who would protect the Muslims? The UN? The Arab rulers? It was up to al-Qaeda to create a weapon that would inoculate the Muslim world against Western imperialism.

W
HAT THE RECRUITS
tended to have in common—besides their urbanity, their cosmopolitan backgrounds, their education, their facility with languages, and their computer skills—was displacement. Most who joined the jihad did so in a country other than the one in which they were reared. They were Algerians living in expatriate enclaves in France, Moroccans in Spain, or Yemenis in Saudi Arabia. Despite their accomplishments, they had little standing in the host societies where they lived. Like Sayyid Qutb, they defined themselves as radical Muslims while living in the West. The Pakistani in London found that he was neither authentically British nor authentically Pakistani; and this feeling of marginality was just as true for Lebanese in Kuwait as it was for Egyptians in Brooklyn. Alone, alienated, and often far from his family, the exile turned to the mosque, where he found companionship and the consolation of religion. Islam provided the element of commonality. It was more than a faith—it was an identity.

The imams naturally responded to the alienation and anger that prompted these men to find a spiritual home. A disproportionate number of new mosques in immigrant communities had been financed by Saudi Arabia and staffed by Wahhabi fundamentalists, many of whom were preaching the glories of jihad. Spurred by the rhetoric and by the legend of the victory against the Soviets, young men made the decision, usually in small groups, to go to Afghanistan.

Such was the case of four young men in Hamburg.

The most prosperous city in Germany, with more millionaires per capita than any other metropolitan area in Europe, Hamburg was, in
1999,
a bourgeois, libertarian stronghold. The city liked to think of itself as more British than German—aloof but polite, patrician but multicultural. It had become a popular destination for foreign students and political refugees, with about
200,000
Muslims among them. Mohammed Atta arrived in the fall of 1992 and enrolled as a graduate student of urban planning at the Technical University of Hamburg-Harburg. Foreign students in Germany could stay as long as they wanted, paid no tuition, and could travel anywhere in the European Union.

The scars of history were easy to detect, not only in the reconstructed portion of the Old City, but also in the laws of the country and the character of the German people. The new Germany had carefully enshrined tolerance in its constitution, including the most openhanded political asylum policy in the world. Acknowledged terrorist groups were allowed to operate legally, raising money and recruits—but only if they were foreign terrorists, not domestic. It was not even against the law to plan a terrorist operation so long as the attack took place outside the country. Naturally, many extremists took advantage of this safe harbor.

In addition to the constitutional barriers that stood in the way of investigating the radical groups, there were internal cautions as well. The country had suffered in the past from xenophobia, racism, and an excess of police power; any action that summoned up such ghosts was taboo. The federal police preferred to concentrate their efforts on native right-wing elements, paying little attention to the foreign groups. Germany feared itself, not others. The unspoken compact that the Germans made with the radical foreign elements inside their country was that if Germans themselves were not attacked, they would be left alone. In recoiling from its own extremist past, Germany inadvertently became the host of a new totalitarian movement.

The radical Islamists had little in common with the Nazi enterprise. Although they would often be accused of being a fascistic cult, the resentment that burned inside the al-Quds mosque, where Atta and his friends gathered, had not been honed into a keen political agenda. But like the Nazis, who were born in the shame of defeat, the radical Islamists shared a fanatical determination to get on top of history after being underfoot for so many generations.

Although Atta had only vaguely socialist ideas of government, he and his circle filled up the disavowed political space that the Nazis left behind. One of Atta’s friends, Munir al-Motassadeq, referred to Hitler as “a good man.” Atta himself often said that the Jews controlled the media, banks, newspapers, and politics from their world headquarters in New York City; moreover, he was convinced that the Jews had planned the wars in Bosnia, Kosovo, and Chechnya as a way of holding back Islam. He believed that Monica Lewinsky was a Jewish agent sent to undermine Clinton, who had become too sympathetic to the Palestinian cause.

The extreme rigidity of character that everyone detected in Atta was a Nazi trait, and no doubt it was reinforced in him by the need to resist the lure of this generous city. The young urban planner must have admired the cleanliness and efficiency of Hamburg, which was so much the opposite of the Cairo where he had grown up. But the odious qualities that Sayyid Qutb had detected in America—its materialism, its licentiousness, its spiritual falsity—were also spectacularly on display in Hamburg, with its clanging casinos, prostitutes in shop windows, and magnificent, empty cathedrals.

During World War II, Hamburg was a great shipbuilding center; the
Bismarck
had been built here, as well as the German U-boat fleet. Naturally it became a prime target of Allied bombing. In July
1943,
Operation Gomorrah—the destruction of Hamburg—was the heaviest aerial bombardment in history until that time. But the attack went far beyond the destruction of the factories and the port. The firestorm created by the day and night attacks killed forty-five thousand people in a deliberate campaign to terrorize the population. Most of the workers in the shipyards occupied row houses in Harburg, across the Elbe River, and the Allied bombing was particularly heavy there. Atta lived in an apartment at 54 Marienstrasse, a reconstructed building on a street that had been almost entirely destroyed by the terror bombings.

Atta was a perfectionist; in his work he was a skilled but not creative draftsman. Physically, there was a feminine quality to his bearing: He was “elegant” and “delicate,” so that his sexual orientation—however unexpressed—was difficult to read. His black eyes were alert and intelligent but betrayed little emotion. “I had a difficult time seeing the difference between his iris and his pupil, which in itself gave him the appearance of being very, very scary,” one of his female colleagues recalled. “He had an unusual habit of, when he’d ask a question, and then he was listening to your response, he pressed his lips together.”

On April
11, 1996,
when Atta was twenty-seven years old, he signed a standardized will he got from the al-Quds mosque. It was the day Israel attacked Lebanon in Operation Grapes of Wrath. According to one of his friends, Atta was enraged, and by filling out his last testament during the attack he was offering his life in response.

Although the sentiments in the will represent the tenets of his community of faith, Atta constantly demonstrated an aversion to women, who in his mind were like Jews in their powerfulness and corruption. The will states: “No pregnant woman or disbelievers should walk in my funeral or ever visit my grave. No woman should ask forgiveness of me. Those who will wash my body should wear gloves so that they do not touch my genitals.” The anger that this statement directs at women and its horror of sexual contact invites the thought that Atta’s turn to terror had as much to do with his own conflicted sexuality as it did with the clash of civilizations.

M
OHAMMED
A
TTA,
Ramzi bin al-Shibh, Marwan al-Shehhi, and Ziad Jarrah, the four friends from Hamburg, arrived in the Khaldan camp in November 1999 for a preliminary training course. They came at a propitious moment.

In the three years since Khaled Sheikh Mohammed had proposed his “planes operation” to bin Laden in a cave in Tora Bora, al-Qaeda had been researching a plan to strike the American homeland. Mohammed envisioned two waves of hijacked planes, five from the East Coast and five from Asia. Nine of the planes would crash into selected targets, such as the CIA, the FBI, and nuclear plants. Khaled Sheikh Mohammed himself would pilot the last plane. He would kill all the men aboard, then make a proclamation condemning American policy in the Middle East; finally, he would land the plane and set the women and children free.

Bin Laden rejected this last conceit, but in the spring of 1999 bin Laden summoned Mohammed back to Kandahar and gave him the go-ahead to put his plan into operation.

A few months later bin Laden, Khaled Sheikh Mohammed, and Abu Hafs gathered in Kandahar to pick potential targets. The three men were the only ones involved. Their goal was not only to inflict symbolic damage. Bin Laden imagined that America—as a political entity—could actually be destroyed. “America is a great power possessed of tremendous military might and a wide-ranging economy,” he later conceded, “but all this is built upon an unstable foundation which can be targeted, with special attention to its obvious weak spots. If it is hit in one hundredth of those spots, God willing, it will stumble, wither away and relinquish world leadership.” Inevitably, he believed, the confederation of states that made up America would dissolve.

It was natural, then, that bin Laden wanted to strike the White House and the U.S. Capitol. He also put the Pentagon on his list. If he succeeded in destroying the American seat of government and the headquarters of its military, the actual dismemberment of the country would not seem such a fantasy. Khaled Sheikh Mohammed nominated the World Trade Center, which his nephew Ramzi Yousef had failed to bring down in the bombing six years earlier. The Sears Tower in Chicago and the Library Tower (now called the U.S. Bank Tower) in Los Angeles were also discussed. Bin Laden decided that the attack on the American cities on the West Coast could wait.

There was little money to work with but plenty of willing martyrs. When the plan merely envisioned blowing up the planes in midair, there was no need for trained pilots, but as the concept evolved and took on the brilliance of its eventual design, it became clear that the planes operation would require a disciplined group with skills that might take years to develop.

Bin Laden assigned four of his most reliable men to be a part of the operation. Yet none of the four men could fly; nor could they speak English, which was required for a pilot’s license. They had no experience living in the West. Mohammed tried to tutor them. He taught them English phrases and collected brochures for flight schools in the United States. They played flight simulator computer games and watched Hollywood movies featuring hijackings, but the gap between the abilities of the men involved and the grandeur of the mission must have been deflating.

Nawaf al-Hazmi was one of those men. He had come to Afghanistan in 1993 when he was seventeen years old. He was strongly built, with a quick and handsome smile. His father was a wealthy grocer in Mecca. His boyhood friend Khaled al-Mihdhar was also from a prominent Meccan family. Following bin Laden’s example, these two rich Saudi boys had fought together in Bosnia and then with the Taliban against the Northern Alliance—the loose group of mujahideen and former Afghan government supporters who were led by Ahmed Shah Massoud. Although he held Saudi citizenship, Mihdhar was originally from Yemen. He married Hoda al-Hada, the sister of one of his Yemeni comrades in arms, and fathered two daughters by her. In fact, it was her family’s phone that the FBI had turned up in the embassy bombings investigation and that would prove so important in understanding the scope of al-Qaeda. The movements of these two men, Hazmi and Mihdhar, offered the most realistic hope for American intelligence to uncover the 9/11 conspiracy.