The Rest Is Classified - 190. 9/11: Could the Attacks Have Been Prevented? (Ep 4)

Episode Date: September 2, 2026

By July 2001 the plan for 9/11 was almost complete… All that was missing was a day. How do you set the date the world changes? Listen as David and Gordon unpack the night before the 9/11 hijackers carried out their plot. ------------------- THE REST IS CLASSIFIED LIVE 2026 at The Rest Is Fest: Buy your tickets ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠to see David, Gordon and special guest Anthony Scaramucci live on stage at London’s Southbank Centre on 5 September: https://www.southbankcentre.co.uk/whats-on/scaramucci-vs-the-rest-is-classified-team-america/ ------------------- Sign-up for our free newsletter where producer Becki takes you behind the scenes of the show: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://mailchi.mp/goalhanger.com/tric-free-newsletter-sign⁠-up⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ------------------- Join the Declassified Club to go deeper into the world of espionage with exclusive Q&As, interviews with top intelligence insiders, regular livestreams, ad-free listening, early access to episodes and live show tickets, and weekly deep dives into original spy stories. Members also get curated reading lists, special book discounts, prize draws, and access to our private chat community. Just go to ⁠⁠therestisclassified.com⁠ or join on Apple Podcasts. ------------------- Get a 10% discount on business PCs, printers and accessories using the code TRIC10. Visit ⁠⁠⁠⁠https://HP.com/CLASSIFIED⁠⁠⁠⁠ for more information. T&C's apply. ------------------- EXCLUSIVE NordVPN Deal ➼ https://nordvpn.com/restisclassified Upgrade your online protection with an all-in-one security app! It’s risk free with NordVPN’s 30-day money-back guarantee 🌍 ------------------- Email: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠[e-mail]⁠⁠⁠ Instagram: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠@restisclassified⁠ Video Editor: Joe Pettit Social Producer: Emma Jackson Assistant Producer: Alfie Rowe Producer: Becki Hills Head of History: Dom Johnson Exec Producer: Tony Pastor Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

For exclusive interviews, bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to series, first look at live show tickets, a weekly newsletter, and discounted books. Join the Declassified Club at the rest is classified.com. By July 2001, the plan for 9-11 was nearly complete. All that was missing was a day. How do you set the date for the day the world changes? Well, welcome to the rest is classified. I'm Gordon Carrera.

And I'm David McClarsky. And David. This is the fourth of our series on 9-11, and we got to the summer of 2001. The pilots have learned how to fly the muscle, the men who are going to help take over the aircraft, had arrived in the United States. The money, not that much of it was banked. And these 19 hijackers are effectively hiding in plain sight across America. What remained was to turn all of that into an operation with specific planes, specific weapons, and a specific day. This is the episode where the plot becomes a countdown. But first, a word from our sponsors,

HP. This episode is brought to you by HP. In intelligence, you quickly learn that you are only as strong as the network around you. It's rarely a single major event that undermines an operation. It's the gaps between systems. That's where information leaks. It's the same in business. Leaders face a constant battle against strict timelines, mismatch tools, and And the worry, their security isn't as tight as they think it is. Which is why HP approaches technology, not as a collection of gadgets, but as an integrated system. And crucially, that protection is built in at hardware level. It runs quietly in the background, blocking threats without requiring constant specialist oversight.

With the team of business advisors, HP helps businesses of all sizes find technology that fits their needs and budget. To see how HP helps businesses work securely and productively, visit HP.com forward slash classified. Trick listeners also benefit from 10% off HP business technology with the code Trick 10. So David, last time we looked in detail really at the Saudi muscle. This time should we go back to the planning of it, and particularly Mohamed Atta, who's the operational chief for 9-11 on the ground in the United States? Well, we talked about the muscle last time. The muscle can only storm the cockpit or take over the plane.

You need the pilots. And remember that we have four pilots in the U.S. at this point in time. Mahabatah, really the mastermind, the operational plan are inside the U.S. Shehi, Jara, and Hany Hanjur. They're really the most valuable piece of this plot, as seen from KSM's vantage point. the muscle, as we talked about, are mostly lying low. They're opening bank accounts. They're hanging out at the gym, and they're just trying to kind of stay off the radar.

That is in contrast to the pilots who are moving and training in particular at a very frenzied pace. And in particular, Atta, who is the leader. He has a long checklist of stuff that he needs to tick off. He needs to log enough simulator time to feel confident actually flying the plane. However briefly, he's going to pilot it. He needs to be confident. He needs to study how best to board the planes, how to seize the plane in flight. He needs to work through all of that again with the muscle.

Remember, they've had their training at an al-Qaeda camp in Afghanistan. But again, you need to stay fresh. He needs to basically intake and absorb all of the arriving muscle operatives who are trickled in. over the course of the spring and summer of 2001. And crucially, he needs to schedule the attacks. He needs to set a date. He needs to actually get specific flights. And as we'll see, so much of the planning for this is going to rest on the fact that he needs the moment when the planes strike to be as tight as possible.

Because he doesn't want long gaps where there could be a response or planes grounded. So he's got to really time this thing very effectively. Now, for all of these logistics, Mohamed Atta is in touch with Ramsey bin al-Shib, who's kind of the logistical coordinator. Who was going to be part of the plot, but who's being left behind effectively? Correct. And who is serving as the communications and kind of logistical conduit between Muhammad Atta and KSM. So let's go to the pilots. Atta and Shea had earned their FAA licenses, the Federal Aviation Administration, the pilots' licenses effectively, in late 2000.

And they had moved on to practicing on large jet simulators. Because just being able to fly a small plane, which is the stepping stone to learning how to pilot an airline, is not the same. It's not the same. It's a 737. Right. Atta and Shea turned up in a suburb of Atlanta and spend a month renting small planes to fly off and on. They're staying in a discount hotel. Jara, the kind of earthy Lebanese guy, who I think is harboring some doubts about what he's doing and who has a girlfriend back in Germany.

he is still in Florida he keeps taking extra lessons practicing flying into the summer bit of tension with Atta possibly as well seems to seems to be the one maybe least happy about what's happening yeah and I think

Atta who's in charge of this entire group in the States very stern very austere seems to harbor absolutely no doubts about what he's doing but importantly is also needing to keep tabs on everybody to understand if people are dedicated. Because ultimately,

put yourself in the shoes of any one of these men. They don't know the specifics of what they're about to do. But they go to pretty good idea. They understand that in a few months they are going to die. Yeah.

And psychologically, that could be a period, especially since they've come out of these camps, they are still socially isolated in their own little pockets, but they're in the wider world. They could, in theory, get in touch with anybody they might want to

in back home in Saudi. And so Atta, I think, really has to watch his team to see if he's going to get any defectors. And Jarrah, we talked about, had been going to see his girlfriend or he's still in touch with his girlfriend as well. So he's the one who looks most likely to maybe drop out or have an issue. Yeah, he flies back to Germany to see her. Sees her in Lebanon. Jarrah's father has a heart operation in February of 2001, I think, which has rattled him.

And KSM and bin al-Shib, who were both later captured by the U.S., will acknowledge in their detainee reporting, that Jara was probably straining against Atta's authority. And I think KSM in this period, he gets so worried that Jara might withdraw. And remember, Jara isn't a random Saudi muscle. He's one of the pilots. Yeah, he's vital. He is absolutely vital to the plot. So I think KSM grows really worried that Jara might withdraw. And KSM, I think, is so worried that he probably begins to prepare a substitute pilot.

Now, we won't go right now in depth on this thread, but we'll return to it later. What KSM does is he starts funneling $15,000 to someone named Zacharias Musawi. In July, Musawi puts down a deposit for Boeing 747 simulator training in Minnesota. and I think this is essentially a backup plan on KSM's part in case he needs another pilot. Yeah. We'll come back to Masawi later. On July 20th, Jara's girlfriend buys him a one-way ticket from Miami to Dusseldorf, Germany. All four of his previous trips home to see her had been round trip.

This is a one-way ticket. He leaves on July 25th, and Atta himself drives Jara to the airport. which is unusual and had not happened in other cases when Jara had gone home. When Jara is back, he meets bin al-Shib, the logistical coordinator. In Germany. In Germany. And keep in mind, I'm saying a logistical coordinator, these two guys are friends. They've known each other in Hamburg for years.

They're very close. And we don't know exactly what was said in this conversation. But the commission, the 9-11 commission calls it an emotional conversation between Javis. Jara and Bin al-Shib. Which makes it sound like bin al-Shib is convincing Jara to go ahead with it. Maybe that is the moment where Jara maybe reveals his doubts, but he's convinced to go through with it. And he goes back.

He returns to the States, so he buys another one-way ticket and we'll return back to Florida. Hanyan Jor, the Saudi pilot, a bad pilot, by all accounts. He's going to pilot the plane that will hit the Pentagon. Al-Qaeda didn't have a lot of pilots, right? So they had to settle with Hanjur. And his instructor at one of his Arizona flight schools had advised him to quit, watching him on a Boeing 737 simulator, this flight instructor's like, this guy's terrible. Hanjo doesn't stop. He goes to a Phoenix flight school called JetTech.

The staff are so troubled by his poor English because English is the language of international aviation. And Honduras is substandard. And it's so bad, in fact, that they wonder if his FAA pilots licenses has been. forged. They actually call the FAA. And the FAA says, oh, this is, this is real. And maybe this guy just needs a language tutor. So they let it drop. Hanjura spends the summer of 2001 rehearsing for the Pentagon run. And he actually asks to fly the Hudson corridor, which is this kind of low altitude lane that goes up the river, the east river, past the World Trade Center. But he was judged so poor a pilot

that he couldn't do it solo. I think this all raises a really interesting question which is how is it possible with pilots who are either really poor like Handjol or who've had relatively little training that they could be confident they could fly

those jets into a target. And I guess the answer is they don't need to do the hard stuff about flying because the hard bit of flying is taking off a landing. And they're not going to need to do that. They just need to know how to fly it once it's already in the air.

A much more limited skill, which they can learn, even if they're not great or don't have that much time. Yeah. And there's a trained pilot who said that, you know, once you learn the cockpit and how to steer in flight, change heading, speed, altitude, etc., it's really not that hard on a modern airliner. And in many respects, it's actually easier to do those things. once in flight on a modern airliner 737, then it is on a small Cessna, let's say. And as pilot said, you know, pretty much any clear day, if you have a licensed private pilot with a little simulator time,

they'd be able to fly a jet into a large building. And this is the crucial thing. Atta, the other pilots, they are not learning how to take off and land, which is the giveaway that they are doing something very, different and learning something different. I mean, to some extent, you wonder whether this tells you what the plot was, because this is different from another kind of hijacking. It also, you kind of think maybe, I mean, some people did find it a little bit old that this was happening. But I think in the Musawe case, it's like, this guy's showing up and saying,

why is he doing it? I'm not interested in take off or land. Did you show me how to do it in flight? Yeah. And the instructors were like, that's odd. Yeah. But again, you know, it's, in retrospect, you think, well, why didn't someone, say something, but it just, I think at the time, it just kind of looks like odd behavior, you know, it doesn't necessarily look nefarious. So that's the learning how to fly. The next question is, what are their targets and how are they going to decide what flights they're going to take to reach those targets? Yeah, so they're going to end up casing exactly the, type of flight that they're going to hijack. So the three Hamburg cell pilots will each take cross-country

surveillance and casing runs, essentially. Shea flies New York to Las Vegas by way of San Francisco in late May. Jargo's Baltimore to Las Vegas via Los Angeles in early June. And Ata flies Boston to Las Vegas via San Francisco at the end of June. They go on first class and they fly on the exact model object that they intend to hijack on 9-11. And remember, the transcontinental aspect to these flights is really important because it means that those flights will be loaded with fuel. And I don't think, and we'll come back to this in the next episode, I don't think that the hijackers believed that the buildings

would come down. No. But they wanted a fuel bomb. They wanted a fuel bomb. And so to make that bomb as potent as possible, they wanted to be on a plane that had the most fuel. Yeah, which means a long A long flight. And of course, domestic flights, less security. You don't have all the visas and passport things. So they've picked their flights carefully. They're casing this out. And I guess they can work at how to get to the cockpit. They can work out how the crew moves when the doors open. Do the crew take meals into the pilots? All these things are the bits of intelligence they're gathering from these casing flights. And, you know, the target list, I think, is interesting to come back to. Because even in these last months of preparation before the attack, it's not settled. The World Trade Center and the Pentagon are settled. But there's an open question about whether the Capitol or the White House would be hit. So we'll come back to that.

But there's this kind of we're still, I think in Atta's mind, he's not yet sure about the target list. at a headset Hasmi, one of the Saudi operatives, and Hanjur, the pilot, to look at the viability of a strike on the White House. And they rent small planes and flight reconnaissance runs over Washington,

including a flight toward Maryland that lets Hanjur approach Washington airspace. So they're doing the work to case it out. But I think there's on the operational team, a sense of what's possible. And then when you think about all the way in Afghanistan,

bin Laden, there's kind of some, there's going to be some tension over what the target should make. But actually one of the issues at the White House is because it's smaller, isn't it? It's a harder target to hit than something like the Capitol or the Pentagon. Pentecan being one of the biggest office buildings in the world, the World Trade Center. So, yeah, there's issues there. Now, there's a real hinge meeting in July of 2001. This is going to be the last face-to-face meeting between Atta and Bin al-Shib, the logistical coordinator and kind of gateway to KSM. Atta flies to Madrid, Spain on the 8th of July, and then he drives out to meet bin al-Shib, and they spend several days together traveling in towns along the coast.

They had not seen each other since a meeting they had in Berlin in January. And this is where the operation is going to kind of take its final shape. Even getting there to Spain had been tricky. KSM had first sent bin al-Shib to Kuala Lumpur to meet Atta there. Atta can't come. He's tied up. bin al-Shib waits around Atta doesn't show

They cancel and then Atta finally in July had proposed Spain They don't want to meet in Germany Because they've studied together in Hamburg And they're worried they could run into someone they might know And so they want to meet elsewhere Bin El-Lsheb has instructions

From Bin Laden And the instructions Again it's like Bin Laden the CEO You know Get on with it Just get on with it Yeah What is taking so long?

I want to do this ASAP. It's an understandable, I think, concern because bin Laden is thinking, I have 19 operatives in the U.S. The longer it goes, the more risk getting discovered. Exactly. And he wants the White House. And he wants the White House. And bin al-Shab says, look, the boss wants the White House and can you, can you confirm that you can do the White House? And I think this is a great insight into the sort of calculating engineering mind of Muhammad Atta. Terry McDermott in his book, Perfect Soldiers, which focuses to a great extent on Atta, says that Bin Laden's impatience had been a running theme, and Atta just won't be rushed.

Atta's like, oh, no, no, no, there's mechanics to this. We've got to work out what's possible. And KSM seems to back him and say, look, this guy's on the ground. He's the one who's got to make the decisions and run the team. Let's let him make the final decision. He says he needs, you know, five to six weeks. Yeah. He says, I still need time to get the right flights, ensure we've got.

the right targets, ensure everyone's trained. And to your point, Atta says the White House might be too hard. Too loud. It's too small. And again, he's the guy on the ground, you know. He's, what are they going to do? They're not going to fire him. Bizarrely, bin Laden wanted the attack to take place on the seven-month

anniversary of the coal bombing, which seems like kind of a bizarre thing to link it to. And then also, bin Laden had seen that the then-Israelin was making a visit to the White House. So Bin Laden in my thinking, well, maybe I could kill the American president and the Israeli prime minister at the same time. And Atta basically says, and KSM, again, supports him, says, no, no, no, it's not ready yet. Bin Laden even goes to KSM and says, maybe we just blow up the planes, detonate the planes mid-flight. We don't have to crash him in anything. That'll be easier. And KSM, remember who thought of this whole thing? His idea. He's like, no, no, no, we go big. We go big. We want to hit the buildings. Just, just. just be patient. Bin Laden in this period is also like he can't quite, he's so anxious and excited that he can't quite keep the secret to himself. And he starts to go around. He's kind of like dropping little hints in the camps. Yeah. In the Al-Qaeda camps and safe houses and guest houses in Afghanistan saying, you know, there's something big is coming. Yeah. And I think there's an Arab

journalist who interviews him in this period in the summer. And, and, you know, Al-Qaeda's military Chief says, in the next few weeks, we'll carry out a big surprise and we'll strike or attack American and Israeli interests. You know, the coffin business will increase in the United States. I mean, they kind of can't resist boasting about it, even if it's not the specifics, that something is coming. Something is coming. That is, you know, the whispers which are coming out of al-Qaeda at this time. And that brings us back to our other lens on this, which is, you know, what's going on in the US intelligence community? You know, should they, could they pick up on some of these plans, preparations, even discussions

about an attack coming from Al-Qaeda? It's worth setting up the U.S. government and intel context in 2001 because it's a big year. Yeah, new president. New president comes in. George W. Bush comes in January 2001. I mean, I remember this well. Al-Qaeda and terrorism weren't his main priorities in foreign policy. I mean, domestic policy was anyway, George W. Bush more experienced.

in domestic policy, not a big foreign policy president, but also, you know, they were focusing on things like missile defense and relations with Russia. You know, counterterrorism seemed, you know, was not the big focus for this administration. Yeah. But then you've got these, you've got this continuity in some of the intelligence community who are like, we should be worried about al-Qaeda. Yeah. And we need to worry about this.

Which doesn't seem to have bubbled up into policy action in those first few months of 2001. Yeah. Because, you know, we spoke in the first episode of. about the various attempts, and there may have been up to four of them in the late 1990s, to actually go and try to capture or even potentially kill bin Laden. And so there had been this kind of drumbeat of, you know, counterterrorism options. There had been, you know, an effort inside the CIA to actually do something about the CIA's Alex station, this unit that's dedicated to targeting bin Laden.

But, and this is true of any U.S. president. presidential transition, where you have that continuity in the bureaucracy, the policy team comes in and says, well, hold on. We're sort of, A, trying to figure out how this works. Yeah. Because you have, you know, Bush brought in a very experienced national security team, but still, you're taking over the government. But they were experienced from a different age. A lot of them, remember the late 80s, early 90s, Cold War era. This, and I think there was this sense of like, what is this bin Laden al-Qaeda stuff you guys are going on about? I don't think they were quite grasping it. And you get these increased war.

warnings, don't you, from CIA particularly, that something might be up and something might become? Just to put a point on that loss of urgency, the most senior policy planning meeting at the White House is typically known as a PC, a principals committee meeting. There were 33 principals committee meetings held by the Bush administration before the 9-11 attacks. One of them was about al-Qaeda. So it gives you a sense in terms of the time and energy by the top national security

team. It's just not there. George Tenet, who's the CIA director, in March, though, he's, you know, he's banging on about this because he's, he's a holdover from the Clinton presidency, a sort of a fact that seems unthinkable today. Today, yeah. But George Tenet has stayed on. He sends a request to the White White House for greater authorities. But the White House, again, is sort of saying, look, we don't want to run a process, a policy process on counterterrorism right now. We've got other things we're trying to worry about. And they don't say no, but they basically say later. Not yet. And yet there's so much, when you look at the intelligence analysis in 2001, there's a lot of warning. There's a lot of warnings that Al-Qaeda is planning something. April, there's a report,

isn't there? Bin Laden planning multiple operations. May, bin Laden public profile, may presage attack. You know, another one talking about in May about the possibility Al Qaeda might hijack aircraft, but to secure the release of someone from prison. Another one, June, attacks may be imminent. There were these warnings, but they were quite unspecific. I think that's the, to me, the key factor about this is even as the summer goes on, and I think British intelligence as well was picking up indicators, signs, warnings that Al Qaeda was planning something, but a not specific about where, for instance, you know, that it would be in the United States or what or when. And I think the assumption would have been it's going to be another embassy style bombings, you know.

Yeah, like happened in 1998 in Africa, that maybe it's going to be something in the Middle East. July is a big month. So in the same time period where Atta heads to Spain to meet with Ben al-Shib to have one of the kind of final conversations to shape the plot, a lot of this threat reporting dries up. And it seems like there's a kind of operational security that starts to kick in an al-Qaeda where they kind of go quiet in advance of the big attack. On the 10th of July, George Tenet takes the very unusual step of calling George Bush's National Security Advisor, Condoleezza Rice, and says, we need to meet today. Yeah. I need like 15 minutes today. So he goes down to the White House and says, look, there are going to be multiple spectacular attacks.

we probably won't have any warning and the opening line of his briefing is apparently there will be a significant terrorist attack in the coming weeks or months and the head of the counterterrorism center a guy named Koffer Black who's his own colorful

colorful character he says in the meeting because he's the guy there with Tenet he says we need to go on a war footing now and Condi Rice basically says I get it but we're not running a process on these authorities now.

We'll do it, but not now. And I think crucially, it's like, what do you do with this warning? Yeah. You know, I mean, I understand why they give it, but if you can't say where the attack will be, who specifically might be planning it, you know, I think it does become harder to imagine

from a policy standpoint what you do, what you do to stop it. Now, the process does kind of get moving after this, meeting, but it's slow and the crucial authorities to actually go after and kill bin Laden. They won't come until after. And then there is a presidential daily brief in August where there's a line bin Laden determined to strike in US. So it's starting to kind of become clearer that maybe there is something, but determined to strike is different from knowing what the plot is.

And what you get a sense of is the, you know, this is now summer, you know, and the US system is thinking, okay, let's start looking at this in September, basically. You know, that's what the White House is thinking. Okay, okay, okay, you know, maybe we should do something about this, but not yet. I also find it fascinating that PDB, the August 6 PDB, bin Laden determined to strike in U.S., which, by the way, I'm not sure if any other PDB has ever been fully declassified, but this was in its entirety. It was declassified and made it available to the public after 9-11. We spoke in one of our bonus episodes for the series with Michael Morel, who rose eventually to become the deputy director and acting director of the CIA and who was President Bush's PDB briefer, daily intelligence briefing guy on 9-11. And remember, he told us he gave us the context behind this PDB, which is basically the Bush administration was like looking at all this threat reporting and sort of getting confused about what it all meant.

And so Michael tasked this PDB to be created to kind of summarize everything and put it all in one place. So it's not like it was breaking new ground. And it seems like the way it was read by Bush and the people around him were like, got it. This is more or less what you've been telling us for months. Thanks for putting it all in one place. Yeah. And it's a fascinating interview, I should say, with Mike Morrell for our club members, which you can hear alongside this series.

So what you get a sense of is the warnings are growing, but the CIA doesn't have the penetration inside al-Qaeda to know what is coming. And that's the problem. Something is coming, but no one knows quite what or quite when. Tenet has a great phrase in his book that eventually becomes a title of one of the chapters in the 9-11. Commission.

In Tenants account of the summary, he says, look, the system was blinking red. System is blinking red. We know something's coming. We have strategic warning. But what exactly is it? And we have the advantage of looking back at this with hindsight, obviously. But there are little potential clues that maybe, we'll talk about this more in the last episode, maybe could have been pieced together to.

to help disrupt the plot or a part of it. You know, there's one interesting example, which is in May of 2001, when a CIA officer detailed to the FBI goes back into the cable databases to look at the cables that we've been talking about, so many of these episodes, on Khaled al-Madar and Noafal Hasmi, the two al-Qaeda guys who had gotten into the U.S., they'll become part of the muscle for the plot, and they had settled in California in early 2000. And so this CIA officer and another CIA colleague, they go back and they reread these cables, including the ones that show Midar has a U.S. visa and Hasme had traveled to L.A.

And the CIA official who reviewed them essentially takes no action. And he concludes later, he's like, something bad was definitely up. But in his own telling, the CIA is kind of playing what he calls zone defense. and he in particular is focused. He's a guy who's focused on Malaysia. So he's thinking about sort of a geographic context, not a who. And they never, again, they never sort of pull the thread here to figure out of these guys are still in the US or raise it with the FBI. So again, you have another set of people who look at these cables and kind of say, okay, what am I supposed to do with this?

And we will go back and look at the end of the series at that question of intelligence failures. and whether it could have been prevented. One of the astonishing things is that the new national security team, well, not that new by September. They've been in there since January, but the first meeting on Al-Qaeda is going to be on September the 4th, 2001, a week before 9-11 and at it.

I think around that time, White House counter-terrorism coordinator, Richard Clark, who's been banging the drum on this. And also a holdover from the Clinton era. era. He sends a personal note to Condoleezza Rice, the National Security Advisor before the meeting, writing, decision makers should imagine themselves on a future day when hundreds of Americans lay dead in several countries, including the US. What would those decision makers wish that they had done earlier? That future could happen at any time. And so there with, I think,

Washington bracing for something, but not knowing what. Let's take a break. And when we come back, we'll look as the plot moves into its very final stages. So welcome back. We've looked at the warnings inside the US system. But let's go back to the hijackers, David, and their final preparations. Yeah, Mohamed Atta is a kind of human switchboard in August, because he's crisscrossing the country to coordinate with the teams. He's flying up to Newark to meet Hasme and kind of finalize which flights each cell will take.

And again, we talked about this before the break. You know, he's checking in on the men. He's got to figure out, do I have people who are going to bail at the last minute? Do I have defectors here? He's managing the logistics. He's got to look at flight schedules. Crucially, he has to calculate the time from takeoff to target for each of the four planes to make sure that they will strike their targets in quick succession.

Because, and again, you think, you know, logically, if there's a significant gap between... The pilots might... The first tower being hit in the second. It could be warning. It could be warning. Plains get grounded. And the whole thing becomes much less impactful than he wants.

So that's one part of the planning. But what about the date itself, 9-11? How is that chosen? Yeah. So Atta had left Spain and his meeting with Bin al-Shib with some ambiguity around the date. Atta basically said, we need more time. and I will let you know what the date will be. He had told Bin El-Shib he needed five to six weeks.

He seems to be ready a little bit earlier than that, probably a month later, because all 19 of the tickets will be purchased between August the 25th and September the 5th. So in Atta's mind, everything is ready probably by the third week of August. Atta calls Bin al-Shib on this topic in mid-August, and he uses a kind of riddle code to communicate the date. and he says two branches, a slash and a lollipop.

That's weird, isn't it? Yeah. Two branches. 11. 11. 11. Slash in the middle between the day and the month. And a lollipop.

A nine. 11 slash 9. So as not Americans, they're going to give the day and then the month. So that is the 11th day of the ninth month, September 11th. Ben El-Shib calls back to confirm, and then he relays the date to KSM through an old Hamburg associate who probably had no idea what it meant. And soon that date will get to bin Laden. So now as we get into September, the date is set. They're going to purchase the tickets for those specific flights.

And I guess both the pilots and the muscle men will have to get in location for these flights from where they are. Because they're coming, as we said, from different parts of the United States, very carefully selected. So they need to move from their base to where they're going to fly from. So the teams lead Florida and New Jersey, and they start to coalesce around their departure cities. The crews, you know, essentially will converge around the airports that are going to serve their targets. They close bank accounts. They wire unspent money back to facilitators. I think it's worth kind of going through each flight.

as they organize. So there's the team that will hijack United Airlines Flight 175. That's going to depart Boston Logan and target the South Tower of the World Trade Center. This is Shehey's team. Shehey and his four muscle split up between two hotels in Boston. Shehey will meet Atta for a final time on the 9th of September. Otherwise, this crew just sort of keeps to their rooms and waits.

And you can see the even the important, the need for isolation in these last days where I'm sure Atta says keep these guys under control. Under control. Locked away, effectively. Locked away. Yeah. So these guys are the second plane and they're time to hit the South Tower while the

world is watching the North Tower. Next up is American Airlines Flight 7-7. This is going to leave from Dulles, Washington Dulles. It's going to target the Pentagon. This is Hany Hondra's team. Honduran 4th, Mussle had come down out of New Jersey, and they've settled in Laurel, Maryland, which is just outside Washington. And again, they hang out, you know, first week in September. They're in a motel.

They go out pretty much only to go to the gym. And then on their last night, they'll move to a hotel that's just minutes from Dulles Airport itself. There's United Airlines Flight 93. This is departing Newark. It's the fourth plane. This is Jara's team. Now, this is the smallest. There's only three muscle, a sort of fact that may play a role in the fate of this plane.

They have gathered in Newark from their Florida base on September the 7th. Jara himself comes last. Which is interesting, isn't it? We know about him. Yeah. And just after midnight on September 8th, kind of going into the 9th, he's driving north on I-95 through Maryland. And he gets pulled over for speeding. I mean.

And then continues on to join his man. tell. Yeah. So many little what-ifs in the story of just if something, you know, if the glimmer in someone's eyes sort of catches someone the wrong way, could this, you know, whole thing have been unrolled. United 93, that's the plane which was targeting Washington. Yes. Some ambiguity about whether it was definitely targeting the capital. That was, that's the assumption after those discussions about whether it's going to be the capital or the White House. And bin Laden wanted the White House, but probably the capital. Yeah, I'm not sure it was ever settled.

Yeah. What the target would be is in the own kind of code that the teams are using to communicate, Jara's assigned target seems to have been the capital. They used the code word law. Atta has argued for the capital on the grounds that it's easier than the White House. It could have been left up to Jara flying it to work out what he was going to do. What he was going to do. Bin Laden had wanted the White House.

Subsequently, documents that will be captured by the U.S. later point to the White House as the primary. Mary, but I think we actually just don't, don't know. The commission, the 9-11 commission's records show that, I mean, even in an exchange between Atta and Bin al-Ship on September 9th, two days before the attacks, the commission wrote, it still appears as though the White House would be the primary target for the fourth plane and the U.S. Capitol as the alternate. So, a bit of ambiguity. In these same last days, the pilot of that plane, Jara, he's still connected to his

girlfriend. And he had done something, he had actually done something that Atta had forbidden him from doing, which is he sends his girlfriend a farewell letter. And the full text of this letter survives because German investigators got it. And Terry McDermott in his book, Perfect Soldiers, actually reproduces it. Jara wrote it on his last night, on the night of September 10th. And he wrote it at Days Inn in Newark. It's a very disturbing letter.

Because it swings between this kind of love letter to his girlfriend. with whom he's been together for years. And it kind of martyrs justification for what he's about to do, although he's never quite specific about what it is he is doing. It opens up. It says, hello, my dear ISIL, my love, my life, my beloved lady, my heart, you are my life. And he gives these vows that he'll love her until eternity. And then he kind of goes into this euphemistic language where he says,

you don't need to be sad because I'll be living somewhere else, You won't be able to see or hear me, but I will wait for you until you come to me. And then he says, everyone has his time and we'll go then. And then he gives us justification. I did not escape from you, but I did what I was supposed to. You should be very proud of me. It's an honor and you will see the results and everybody will be happy. He feels very different from the other hijackers.

Maybe just because we have this record of him. But, you know, he's clearly trying to communicate something to someone, but without saying at that point being able to give away anything about what his fate is going to be. And he dates the letter, September 11, 2001. So that's three of the flights, isn't it? Let's do the fourth one as well. American Airlines Flight 11. This plane is departing from Boston Logan, and it is targeting the North Tower.

This is the first plane that will hit, and it is piloted by Muhammad Atta. Atta himself has spent the last days before the 11th of September just in a flurry of activity. On September the 7th, he flies from Fort Lauderdale to Baltimore. So kind of check in on the Pentagon team. On the 9th, he goes up to Boston where Chey had arrived. The two men are seen together at the hotel. Then on the 10th, and this is weird, he collects another one of the hijackers, one of the muscle. They drive north to Portland, Maine.

And they spend their last night withdrawing cash from an ATM eating pizza and then stopping at a convenience store before catching a pre-dawn commuter flight that'll take them back to Boston to make Flight 11th. That is weird. Why would you do that? Why would you try and catch, why would you need to catch another flight to do that and risk something being delayed? It's really weird. It's really weird. And I dug into this to try to find an answer and I could not find an explanation. I mean, it makes it sound like they were meeting something or something was going. I mean, you know, it is definitely weird. Now, the two brothers, Wail and Wilead, who we'd, talked about in our last episode. In early September, they even call the airline to shift their

seats to the side of the first class cabin with a clear line to the cockpit, and they're going to sit beside each other on American Airlines Flight 11 in seats 2A and 2B. So as we get to, I guess, the night of September the 10th, just hours before this is going to take place, I mean, do we have a sense of what these men are thinking and what they're doing? I mean, it is worth, I mean, awful as it is, just trying to get into their mindset just for a moment, isn't it? Yeah. I think this is one of the hardest parts of the story for me personally to understand. I mean, even after looking at, you know, jihadi terrorism for years and years.

It just, it still is very hard to grapple with because I think what they believe, what these men believed they were about to do the next morning. was an act of worship. And head to paradise. I mean, in part we know this because of, you know, now a string of decades of testimony from other jihadis who have, you know, attempted to take part of these kind of operations or have told us in martyrdom videos what they intended. But we actually have testimony from the hijackers themselves. I mean, Jara in that letter to his girlfriend, you know, he says, we will live a very nice

and eternal life where there are no problems and no sorrow in castles of gold and silver. before they left Afghanistan, a lot of the muscle also recorded martyrdom videos. You know, one of the men from Assir, this sort of Saudi, you know, provincial backwater, spoke of the act, what he was going to do. It's not death, you know, but a beginning for him, this sort of anticipation of a new life in paradise. And then very interestingly, in the wreckage of 9-11, investigators are going to turn up copies of this kind of handwritten spiritual manual.

And so it's an actual set of instructions on how to prepare yourself. And how to prepare yourself for the last night, the final hours. And it's probably written by this hijacker from Asir. It's a handwritten Arabic document. It's about five pages. And it's this kind of ritualistic guide for your final hours on Earth. The FBI has actually released it publicly after the attacks. The document moves through kind of three phases.

There's the last night. There's the journey to the airport. and then there's the moments on the plane. It's really disturbing because it reads like a kind of sacramental manual. And it has a lot of wedding imagery in it as well. So it's things like, you know, purify your heart and cleanse it of stains. Forget and be oblivious to that thing called the world for the time for playing has passed and the time has arrived for the rendezvous with the eternal truth.

There's no mention of death. Yeah. Really. It's a very worshipful. It really is the wedding imagery as well. It feels like a celebratory act. Yeah. You will begin a happy and contented life and immortal blessing with the prophets.

In other words, you know, this is just the beginning of your new life, as you said, a bit like a wedding. You know, this is the start of your new happier life once you get through this next step, this next, you know, ceremony, which is the, well, the killing of thousands of people. And it prescribes specific scripture, the war chapters of the Quran. It says, read the suras of repentance and the spoils, contemplate their meaning, and the bounties God is prepared and established for the martyrs. And it does go back to what we talked about in a previous episode, which is that these are people, particularly the mussel who've been schooled in a certain worldview. And I think maybe it's hard for us to understand that.

But if that's what they had grown up with, this makes more sense to them in that context of that's what they'd seen and been isolated into. maybe a bit harder to understand with your Jarrahs and your Atters who'd lived in the West and, you know, maybe you'd seen something else. But as we said, they'd isolated themselves mentally, even as they were living in other places to kind of prepare themselves. And it tells each man to spend the night before imploring in prayer for victory and strength. But there's also quite practical suggestions in the manual. So it's not just the spiritual. It's also the practical.

Basically it says, you know, for the jet, here's what you should have. You know, suitcase clothing, knife, tools, identity papers, passport, all your papers, inspect your weapon before setting out. And then there's this instruction to dress like the first Muslims going to war who apparently kind of pulled their clothes tightly about them. And it says, you know, this is the way of your pious ancestors. So it actually says, pull your shoelaces tight. Wear tight socks. You know, there's very specific prescriptions on how they should even even dress for this. And it closes the night's instructions with the morning prayer and ablution.

it basically tells the man, you know, don't leave your apartment without washing for the angels seek forgiveness for you as long as you have prepared ablutions. Now, the document is also, it's very practical, it's spiritual, it's like a liturgy, it's not a political. There's no ideological. There's no like, we hate America because of this or that, or this is why you're doing it, is that. It's purely spiritual and practical. It's very interesting, I think. And I think what has happened here is these, these men feel that they are taking part in a, great religious drama. So the idea that they are murdering thousands of people, which is what they're doing, what they're going to do, it's not even relevant to them, right? This is a path

to paradise for them. The promise that these guys are drawing on it, it doesn't come from the Quran, but it comes from a hadith, a saying attributed to the prophet, which kind of lays out the blessings that are reserved for a martyr. And there's a very interesting book on this by a professor at Rice University named David Cook. It's called martyrdom and Islam. And it's interesting because the modern kind of conception of jihad or a suicide or quote-unquote martyrdom operation is kind of a modern invention. It is a way that I think ideological entrepreneurs inside the sort of jihadist movement like bin Laden have been able to kind of turn the conception of what martyrdom is on its head. Because you think typically the conception would be death in battle.

But what bin Laden and these guys have been able to do is actually construct an ideal. an ideological framework in which committing suicide and killing thousands of people is jihad and is martyrdom. And thus, you get all the benefits of martyrdom from doing this. And the benefits are important to these guys. You're forgiven of your sins at the first flow of your blood. You go straight to paradise, don't you? Yeah.

And it is interesting because you remember we said last time how there were these rumors about how some of the muscle had, you know, been drinking in the States or visiting strip clubs in Daytona Beach. And I kind of, I take the opinion that a lot of that is. Yeah. It's not true. Yeah. There is one piece of this, though, that I do think is quite authoritative. And it comes again out of McDermott's book where he says that some of the Boston muscle on their last night is their way to, you know, they're going to board at Logan Airport the next morning.

they actually phoned around on the night of September 10th trying to arrange for prostitutes before eventually deciding it was too expensive and abandoning it and hiring nobody. And I think you can make sense of that in the context of this belief, which is it doesn't matter what I do tonight because as soon as I die tomorrow, the act of martyrdom is going to get me into paradise and I will be forgiven. It's a fast track. It's a fast track straight there without any kind of intermediate phases. I mean, we sometimes, I mean, we should talk about this, you know, talk about 72 virgins or wives. I mean, that's, I think that's sometimes made a bit more of

in, in Western accounts of this as that's their motivation, because it kind of goes back to, you know, we talked about Atter and this kind of weird sexuality, whether there's some weird sexual motivation to some elements of this. I think it's there in the mix, isn't it, the idea that you're going to, you're going to be, you know, you're going to have all these wives in heaven. But it's not the single motivation. It's not the single motivation, but you can see the desire for extremely sexually repressed young men who have been separate from women their entire lives. You know, you can see the expression of that in phoning around on September 10th trying to find prostitutes.

And I think that the, and I do remember how. actually sitting in a lecture on sort of Salafi jihadist ideology when I was at the CIA and it was given by academics who were on contract with the counterterrorism center. And they made the point that just because in kind of our popular understanding of this, we've overemphasized the sexual component. It doesn't mean it's not there. It's very much there because in this hadith, you were married to 72 wives among what's called the wide-eyed horries, the virgins of paradise.

And so I think these guys are basically, it's part of the package deal. Yeah. Is I'm forgiven of all my sins. And you can imagine how guys who maybe are walking around with a sort of deep kind of scorecard of guilt and shame over sin in their lives. You're saying, well, look, this will be forgiven. Yeah. If I do this. I'm going to live an eternal life in paradise.

And the things that I have sort of abstained from in this life. which I may desperately want, will be given to me. So say all this just to make the point, the disturbing point, I think, for most of our listeners, that the way that we think about what these guys are about to do has no bearing at all on what they thought. They had a completely different way of understanding what they were doing, as disturbing as it is to us. So there we are. It's September the 10th. The tickets are bought, the weapons are packed. The teams are in their hotel rooms near the airport, and they are spiritually prepared.

There have been years of planning, training, money and travel, and it's narrowed to these 19 individuals waiting for the morning of September the 11th, 2001. Let's stop there. Next time, we'll look at the day itself. Just a reminder, of course, you can listen to that episode and the rest of this. series right now by joining the Declassified Club at therestisclassified.com. See you next time. See you next.