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First published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2019

FIRST EDITION

© Mitchell Zuckoff 2019

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The Impossible Dream (The Quest)

From Man of La Mancha

Lyric by Joe Darion

Music by Mitch Leigh

Copyright © 1965 Andrew Scott Music and Helena Music Corp.

Copyright Renewed

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CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

Maps

Introduction “The Darkness of Ignorance”

Prologue “A Clear Declaration of War”

PART I FALL FROM THE SKY

Chapter 1 “Quiet’s a Good Thing”

Chapter 2 “He’s NORDO”

Chapter 3 “A Beautiful Day to Fly”

Chapter 4 “I Think We’re Being Hijacked”

Chapter 5 “Don’t Worry, Dad”

Chapter 6 “The Start of World War III”

Chapter 7 “Beware Any Cockpit Intrusion”

Chapter 8 “America Is Under Attack”

Chapter 9 “Make Him Brave”

Chapter 10 “Let’s Roll”

PART II FALL TO THE GROUND

Chapter 11 “We Need You”

Chapter 12 “How Lucky Am I?”

Chapter 13 “God Save Me!”

Chapter 14 “We’ll Be Brothers for Life”

Chapter 15 “They’re Trying to Kill Us, Boys”

Chapter 16 “They Done Blowed Up the Pentagon”

Chapter 17 “I Think Those Buildings Are Going Down”

Chapter 18 “To Run, Where the Brave Dare Not Go”

Chapter 19 “Remember This Name”

Chapter 20 “This Is Your Plane Crash”

Chapter 21 “Mayday, Mayday, Mayday!”

PART III RISE FROM THE ASHES

Chapter 22 “Your Sister and Niece Will Never Be Lonely”

Appendix 1 The Fallen

Appendix 2 Timeline of Key Events on September 11, 2001

Acknowledgments

Notes

Select Bibliography

List of Searchable Terms

About the Author

Also by Mitchell Zuckoff

About the Publisher

DEDICATION

For my children—

and everyone else’s

EPIGRAPH

The ravages of many a forest fire of a bygone age may be read today in the scars left in the tree itself. The exact year that the fire occurred and some idea of its intensity are recorded in the wood, oftentimes grown over with living tissue and hid from the casual observer.

—FOREST PATHOLOGIST J. S. BOYCE, 1921

MAPS

INTRODUCTION

“The Darkness of Ignorance”

ON OCTOBER 28, 1886, PRESIDENT GROVER CLEVELAND SAILED TO A teardrop-shaped island in New York Harbor to formally accept France’s gift of the Statue of Liberty. Under leaden skies and a veil of mist, the president ended his speech with a tribute to the copper-clad lady’s torch and her symbolic power: “A stream of light shall pierce the darkness of ignorance and men’s oppression until Liberty shall enlighten the world.”

Dignitaries pounded ceremonial last rivets as warship cannons boomed. Across the water in Lower Manhattan, revelers erupted in celebration. Cobblestone streets pulsed with braying horses, throbbing drums, and blooming flower carts. Brass bands marched like front-bound soldiers, and children scrambled up lampposts to avoid being trampled.

Out-of-towners drawn to the spectacle tilted their heads to gawk at the impossibly tall buildings that loomed over them. Amused by these sky-eyed rubes, an office boy in a high tower felt seized by a raffish idea. He opened a window and tossed out long ribbons of the narrow paper tape that normally recorded the drunkard’s walk of stock prices. His pals followed suit.

“In a moment, the air was white with curling streamers,” a reporter for the New York Times observed. “Hundreds caught in the meshes of electric wires and made a snowy canopy, and others floated downward and were caught by the crowd.”

The fun was contagious. Serious men of finance became boys again, pressing against office windows to unspool paper onto the crowd. “There was seemingly no end to it,” the Times reporter wrote. “Every window appeared to be a paper mill spouting out squirming lines of tape. Such was Wall Street’s novel celebration.”

With that, the ticker-tape parade was born.

During the next one hundred fifteen years, countless tons of celebratory confetti sailed from high-rise windows onto a stretch of Lower Broadway that became known as the Canyon of Heroes. Paper blizzards honored more than two hundred explorers and presidents, war heroes and athletes, astronauts and religious figures, luminaries from Einstein to Earhart, Churchill to Kennedy, Mandela to the Mets.

Then came September 11, 2001.

Torn open, aflame, weakening from within, the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center spewed paper like blood from an arterial wound. Legal documents and employee reviews. Pay stubs, birthday cards, takeout menus. Timesheets and blueprints, photographs and calendars, crayon drawings and love notes. Some in full, some in tatters, some in flames. A single scrap from the South Tower, tossed like a bottled message from a sinking ship, captured the day’s horror. In a scrawled hand, next to a bloody fingerprint, the note read:

84th floor

west office

12 People trapped

After the paper came the people. After the people came the buildings. After the buildings came the wars. The ashes cooled, but not the anguish. For years, New Yorkers couldn’t stomach a ticker-tape parade, especially so near the hallowed hole renamed Ground Zero. Yet with time, the unthinkable often becomes acceptable.

In February 2008, the underdog New York Giants won the Super Bowl. Tens of thousands of football fans gathered to celebrate, just blocks from where steel beams rose for a dazzling “Freedom Tower” at One World Trade Center, an audacious middle finger to America’s enemies, taller and bolder than the boxy twins whose sanctified footprints the new building overlooked. As the victorious Giants rolled past, their joyful supporters danced in the streets as thirty-six tons of shredded paper fluttered down upon them.

Measured in ticker tape, the return to “normal” took less than seven years.

WITH TIME, NEWS becomes history. And history, it’s been said, is what happened to other people. For anyone who lived through September 11, time might dull the anger and grief that followed the death and destruction caused when terrorists turned four commercial passenger jets into guided missiles. But the memories won’t die. The pain of the deadliest terrorist attacks in American history cut too deep, leaving knots of psychic scars that make each day an experience of before and after, of adapting to a world changed physically by every security checkpoint and psychologically by every mention of the “homeland,” a word seldom used in the United States prior to the events now known as 9/11. (The month-and-day abbreviation became the universal shorthand for the attacks largely because the digits corresponded to the nation’s 9-1-1 emergency call system; there’s no evidence the terrorists chose the date for that reason.)

Already an entire generation has no direct memory of 9/11, despite its daily effects on their lives. The historian Ian W. Toll described this progression in relation to another shocking enemy assault that also led to war: the raid on Pearl Harbor, sixty years earlier. “The passage of time strips away the searing immediacy of the surprise attack and envelops it in layers of exposition and retrospective judgment,” Toll wrote. “Hindsight furnishes us with perspective on the crisis, but it also undercuts our ability to empathize with the immediate concerns of those who suffered through it.” He quoted John H. McGoran, a sailor on the doomed battleship USS California: “If you didn’t go through it, there are no words that can adequately describe it; if you were there, then no words are necessary.”

Even if words might fail, they’re the best hope to delay the descent of 9/11 into the well of history. That is the purpose of this book. The approach is to recount the chaotic day as a narrative in three parts: events in the air, on the ground, and in the aftermath, focusing on individuals whose actions and experiences range from heroic to heartbreaking to homicidal. For every account included here, a thousand others are equally important. I’ve tried to choose stories that reveal the depth and breadth of the day without turning this into an encyclopedia. The goal is to provide a fresh perspective among readers for whom the attacks remain “news,” and to create something like memories for everyone else.

Another hope is more intimate: to attach names to some of the people directly affected by these events. Of the nearly three thousand men, women, and children killed on 9/11, arguably none can be considered a household name. The best “known” victim might be the so-called Falling Man, photographed plummeting from the North Tower of the World Trade Center. Yet even he remains nameless to most people, an anonymous icon.

THIS BOOK HAS its roots in the day itself. On September 11, 2001, as a reporter for the Boston Globe, I wrote the lead news story about the attacks, with contributions from several dozen colleagues. The work was at once historic and local: both hijacked planes that struck the Twin Towers took flight from Boston’s Logan International Airport. Five days later, with help from four reporters, I published a narrative called “Six Lives” that became the scale model for this book. It wove the stories of six people affected by, responsible for, or otherwise connected to the hijacking of American Airlines Flight 11 and the North Tower calamity. As we explained at the time, the story was designed to reveal “a nation’s shared experience, as told through their memories and the memories of their loved ones. It also creates a memorial to all those who were killed, and provides a record for all who lived.”

Several years ago, I discussed “Six Lives” at Boston University, where I teach journalism and where at least twenty-eight 9/11 victims earned degrees. Talking afterward with my friend and agent Richard Abate, we feared that many of my students, as well as several of our own children, felt little or no personal connection to 9/11. To some it seemed as distant as World War I. That realization triggered an idea: I could expand “Six Lives” to cover not only the first flight and the first tower, but all four flights and their unscheduled destinations, along with the ripples of physical and emotional effects. Time would serve not as an eraser but as an ally, yielding information and perspective collected in the years since 9/11 to deepen the account while keeping it accessible and truthful.

Speaking of truth, this book follows strict rules of narrative nonfiction. It takes no license with facts, quotes, characters, or chronologies. Descriptions of events and individuals rely on firsthand or authoritative accounts, checked for accuracy and cited in the endnotes where appropriate. All references to thoughts and emotions come from the individual in whose mind they arose, either from interviews, first-person reports, or other primary sources.

The attacks of 9/11 are among the most heavily covered events in history. It shouldn’t be surprising, then, that some individuals featured in this book have had their stories told elsewhere. Several are subjects of entire books, among them Rick Rescorla, Welles Crowther, Father Mychal Judge, former FBI counterterrorism chief John O’Neill, and several heroes of United Flight 93. Some accounts included here rely on testimony from the 2006 trial of al-Qaeda member Zacarias Moussaoui, who pleaded guilty to being involved in the 9/11 plot. Overall, I mined information from government documents, law enforcement reports, trial transcripts, books, periodicals, documentaries, and broadcast and online works from reputable sources, credited where appropriate. Mainly, I relied on my own interviews with survivors, family and friends of the lost, witnesses, emergency responders, government officials, scholars, and military men and women.

Despite my efforts, and despite years of investigations, unanswered questions remain. Certain details and timeline elements are vague or in dispute. I have pointed out some of those gaps and disagreements in the text or in the notes. I have not included unfounded allegations or pseudoscience from the cottage industry of 9/11 conspiracy theorists. Facts are stubborn and powerful: this is a true story.

THE ESSENTIAL JOB of journalism, from daily reporting to narrative history, is to answer six fundamental questions: who, what, where, when, why, and how. Motivation being the great mystery of human existence, the most elusive is usually “why.” As in: “Why did terrorists who claimed to be acting on behalf of Islam hijack commercial airliners to crash them into U.S. civilian and government targets on 9/11?”

By focusing primarily on the day itself, I’ve left deep exploration of that question to others. Readers inclined toward further pursuit of “why” should seek out additional works. Three worth reading are Steve Coll’s excellent Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001; Terry McDermott’s Perfect Soldiers: The 9/11 Hijackers: Who They Were, Why They Did It; and Lawrence Wright’s Pulitzer Prize–winning book The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11.

Wright traced the forces, philosophers, and practitioners of the 9/11 brand of jihad, an Arabic word that translates as “struggle.” His accomplishment cannot be reduced to a few lines, but he masterfully examined the mindset of those responsible for the attacks:

Christianity—especially the evangelizing American variety—and Islam were obviously competitive faiths. Viewed through the eyes of men who were spiritually anchored in the seventh century, Christianity was not just a rival, it was the archenemy. To them the Crusades were a continual historical process that would never be resolved until the final victory of Islam.

Wright also provided insight into the men who carried out the hijackings:

Radicalism usually prospers in the gap between rising expectations and declining opportunities… . Anger, resentment, and humiliation spurred young Arabs to search for dramatic remedies. Martyrdom promised such young men an ideal alternative to a life that was so sparing in its rewards. A glorious death beckoned to the sinner, who would be forgiven, it is said, with the first spurt of blood, and he would behold his place in Paradise even before his death.

Of the other exceptional books about 9/11, including those cited in the Select Bibliography, several deserve acknowledgment: The Ground Truth: The Untold Story of America Under Attack on 9/11 by John Farmer, senior counsel to the 9/11 Commission, distills how government and military officials served (and misled) the public; The Eleventh Day: The Full Story of 9/11, by Anthony Summers and Robbyn Swan, is an impressive synthesis of information about these events; and 102 Minutes, by Jim Dwyer and Kevin Flynn of the New York Times, lives up to its subtitle: The Unforgettable Story of the Fight to Survive inside the Twin Towers. The 9/11 Commission’s final report is an essential resource, as are the commission’s voluminous staff statements, hearing transcripts, and monographs. I benefited greatly from the work of former 9/11 Commission investigator Miles Kara, who maintains the insightful website “9-11 Revisited,” at www.oredigger61.org.

In the pages ahead, my goal is to fulfill the promise I made in 2001 with “Six Lives”: to create a memorial to all those who were killed and to provide a record for all who survived. Plus one more: to build understanding among those who follow.

—Mitchell Zuckoff, Boston

PROLOGUE

“A Clear Declaration of War”

THIS BOOK COULD BEGIN NEARLY FOUR DECADES BEFORE 9/11, IN 1966, with Egypt’s execution of a fanatically anti-Western author named Sayyid Qutb, whose writings inspired two generations of Islamist terror groups. Or further back in time, to 1918, with the defeat of the last great Muslim empire, the Ottoman sultanate. Or even further, to 1798, the year Napoleon Bonaparte occupied Egypt. Or seven hundred years before that, with the start of the Crusades. Or five hundred years before that, when Muslims believe the first verses of the Quran were revealed to the Prophet Muhammad. Or more than two thousand years earlier, with the birth of Abraham.

When it comes to historical storytelling, it’s impossible for one volume to capture everything that came before. Yet a story must start somewhere. In this case, consider a relatively recent date: February 23, 1998. On that day, a shadowy forty-year-old Islamic militant named Osama bin Laden issued a fatwa, a furious religious decree. His edict declared war on the United States and all its citizens, wherever they or their interests could be found.

Faxed to an Arabic newspaper in London, the fatwa was signed by bin Laden, a Saudi heir to a construction fortune who was living in Afghanistan, and three other belligerent Islamic leaders, from Egypt, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. Their declaration invoked a militant interpretation of jihad that they said obligated every Muslim to violently defend holy lands against enemies. Two years earlier, bin Laden had issued a narrower fatwa, aimed at military targets, that called for the removal of American troops from Saudi Arabia: “[E]xpel the enemy, humiliated and defeated, out of the sanctities of Islam.” The new fatwa went much further.

In florid language, the February 1998 fatwa asserted that three primary offenses justified a declaration of global war: (1) the presence of American military forces on the holiest lands of Islam, the Arabian Peninsula; (2) the U.S.-led war in Iraq; and (3) the United States’ support of Israel, in particular its control of Jerusalem. “All of these crimes and sins committed by the Americans,” the statement said, “are a clear declaration of war on Allah, his messenger, and Muslims.” In response, bin Laden and his cohort issued a command: “The ruling to kill the Americans and their allies—civilians and military—is an individual duty for every Muslim who can do it in any country in which it is possible to do it… . We—with Allah’s help—call on every Muslim who believes in Allah and wishes to be rewarded to comply with Allah’s order to kill the Americans and plunder their money wherever and whenever they find it.”

By the time he released his more strident fatwa, the bearded, lanky bin Laden was no stranger to American intelligence agencies. Between 1996 and 1997, U.S. officials learned that he headed his own terrorist group and was involved in a 1992 attack on a hotel in Yemen that housed U.S. military personnel. They also discovered that bin Laden had played a role in the “Black Hawk Down” shootdown of U.S. Army helicopters in Somalia in 1993 and had possibly orchestrated a 1995 car bombing in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, that killed five Americans working with the Saudi National Guard. After the fatwa, bin Laden’s threat profile rose dramatically among U.S. officials, especially when, six months later, sources blamed him for the nearly simultaneous bombings of American embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, in neighboring Tanzania, which killed more than two hundred people. In response to those bombings, President Bill Clinton authorized an attack using Tomahawk missiles aimed at six sites in Afghanistan. American officials believed that bin Laden would be at one of the target locations, but he had left hours earlier, apparently tipped off by Pakistani officials.

Bin Laden remained a focus of kill or capture discussions, even as a federal grand jury in New York indicted him in absentia in 1998 for conspiracy to attack U.S. defense installations. The U.S. intelligence community formally described his terror group, called al-Qaeda, or “the Base,” in 1999, fully eleven years after its formation. The attention only emboldened him. Bin Laden struck again in October 2000, when a small boat loaded with explosives tore a hole in a U.S. Navy destroyer, the USS Cole, as it refueled off the coast of Yemen. The blast killed seventeen crew members and injured dozens more.

Yet even as they tried to keep tabs on bin Laden, even as warning signals became sirens, American political and intelligence leaders never fully grasped how determined he was to execute his fatwa with mass murder inside the United States. Despite solid clues—which intensified during the summer of 2001—and sincere investigative efforts by a small number of individuals, overall the U.S. government response to bin Laden was characterized by missed connections, squandered opportunities, and overlooked signs of impending disaster. An intelligence-gathering structure built to monitor Russian men with bad suits and nuclear warheads didn’t know what to make of a fanatical Saudi in flowing robes issuing fatwas by fax machine.

Even discounting for hindsight, overwhelming evidence shows that the U.S. government’s failure to anticipate the attacks of 9/11 was as widespread as it was ultimately devastating. Scores of examples prove that point, but consider one. Several months before 9/11, the head of analysis for the U.S. government’s Counterterrorism Center wrote: “It would be a mistake to redefine counterterrorism as a task of dealing with ‘catastrophic,’ ‘grand,’ or ‘super’ terrorism, when in fact most of these labels do not represent most of the terrorism that the United States is likely to face or most of the costs that terrorism imposes on U.S. interests.” Those very labels—“catastrophic,” “grand,” “super-terrorism”—were in fact the perfect descriptions of what was about to happen.

WHILE GOVERNMENT AND intelligence officials tried to get a handle on bin Laden before and after his February 1998 fatwa, average Americans remained largely ignorant of him and his followers. For one thing, there was bin Laden’s country of residence. Among journalists, Afghanistan had long been shorthand for any subject too far away for many Americans to care about.

When bin Laden’s name did appear in the American media, journalists focused mainly on his wealth. Usually he’d be described something like this: “[A] multimillionaire Saudi dissident whom the State Department has labeled ‘one of the most significant financial sponsors of Islamic extremist activities in the world today.’” Rarely did news accounts suggest that he might pose a direct threat to the United States as a terrorist leader, although a 1997 article in the New York Times tiptoed in that direction, noting that “recent reports” indicated that bin Laden had paid for a house in Pakistan that sheltered the mastermind of a 1993 World Trade Center truck bombing that killed six people and injured more than a thousand. But in general, at the time of the fatwa it would have been easy for a well-read American to claim little knowledge and less concern about bin Laden. Before he issued his declaration of war, his name had appeared in a grand total of fifteen articles in the New York Times, sometimes only in passing. Most other American news organizations mentioned him less, if at all.

Even bin Laden’s February 1998 fatwa against Americans passed unnoticed by most U.S. news organizations. The first clear reference in the Times came nearly six months later, as an offhand line in a story about a search for suspects in the bombings of the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania: “Earlier this year, Mr. bin Laden and a group of extremist Muslim clerics called on their followers to kill Americans.” The story quickly moved on, mentioning only that bin Laden was the prime suspect in the 1996 bombing of Khobar Towers, an apartment complex in Saudi Arabia, that killed nineteen American airmen. However, a New York Times article in 1999 about the embassy bombings reversed course, sharply downplaying the apparent threat he posed. The story read, in part:

In their war against Mr. bin Laden, American officials portray him as the world’s most dangerous terrorist. But reporters for The New York Times and the PBS program “Frontline,” working in cooperation, have found him to be less a commander of terrorists than an inspiration for them. Enemies and supporters, from members of the Saudi opposition to present and former American intelligence officials, say he may not be as globally powerful as some American officials have asserted.

Yet in the years before 9/11, a few journalists offered darker perspectives about bin Laden’s potential ability to violently carry out his fatwa. The Washington Post reporter Walter Pincus wrote a pointed story two days after bin Laden’s 1998 declaration of war that cited a CIA memo that said U.S. intelligence officials took the threat seriously. Another prescient outlier was ABC’s John Miller, who interviewed bin Laden in May 1998 at a training camp in Afghanistan. In the interview, bin Laden repeated his fatwa and said he would not distinguish between civilian and military targets. Writing about it later, Miller ruefully acknowledged that his interview barely registered with the public: “[W]e had our little story, and a few weeks later, in a few minutes of footage, Osama bin Laden would say ‘hi’ to America. Not many people would pay attention. Just another Arab terrorist.”

One scholar who took serious note of the fatwa was Bernard Lewis, an eminent if controversial intellectual who studied relations between Islam and the West and coined the phrase “clash of civilizations.” Writing in 1998 in Foreign Affairs magazine, Lewis concluded:

To most Americans, the declaration [by bin Laden] is a travesty, a gross distortion of the nature and purpose of the American presence in Arabia. They should also know that for many—perhaps most—Muslims, the declaration is an equally grotesque travesty of the nature of Islam and even of its doctrine of jihad… . At no point do the basic texts of Islam enjoin terrorism and murder. At no point do they even consider the random slaughter of uninvolved bystanders. Nevertheless, some Muslims are ready to approve, and a few of them to apply, the declaration’s extreme interpretation of their religion. Terrorism requires only a few.

Lewis’s warning went largely unheeded.

In the summer of 2001, not everyone in the United States felt confident in the state of the nation, but many relished, or took for granted, the privileges of life in the last superpower at the dawn of the twenty-first century. They had enjoyed the longest uninterrupted economic boom in the nation’s history, and the spread of American culture, political ideas, and business interests to the world’s farthest reaches seemed destined to continue indefinitely. Almost none lost sleep over threats emanating from a cave in Afghanistan. A Gallup poll taken on September 10, 2001, found that fewer than 1 percent of Americans considered terrorism to be the nation’s No. 1 concern.

But they didn’t know that a countdown had already begun. Nineteen bin Laden devotees, radicalized young Arab men living in the United States, awoke on September 11, 2001, determined to fulfill the fatwa. In twenty-four hours, the poll results would change, along with everything else.

CHAPTER 1

“QUIET’S A GOOD THING”

September 10, 2001

CAPTAIN JOHN OGONOWSKI

American Airlines Flight 11

“Dad, I need help with my math!”

John Ogonowski’s eldest daughter, Laura, called out to her father the second he stepped inside his family’s farmhouse in rural Dracut, Massachusetts.

“Laura!” yelled her mother, Margaret “Peg” Ogonowski, in response. “Let him walk in the door!”

Fifty years old, six feet tall and country-boy handsome, John gazed at his wife and sixteen-year-old daughter. His smile etched deep crinkles in the ruddy skin around his blue eyes. Dinner hour was near, and Peg suspected that John felt equal parts tired and happy to be home. As darkness fell on September 10, 2001, he’d just driven from Boston’s Logan International Airport after piloting an American Airlines flight from Los Angeles. A day earlier, he’d flown west on American Flight 11, a daily nonstop from Boston to Los Angeles.

After twenty-three years as a commercial pilot, John’s normal routine upon returning home was to go directly to the master bedroom and strip out of his navy-blue captain’s uniform with the silver stripes on the sleeves. He’d pull on grease-stained jeans and a work shirt, then head to the enormous barn on the family’s 130-acre farm, located thirty miles north of Boston, near the New Hampshire border. Quiet by nature, content working with his calloused hands, John inhaled the perfume of fresh hay bales and unwound by tackling one of the endless jobs that came with being a farmer who also flew jets.

But on this day, to Peg’s surprise, John broke his routine. Changing clothes and doing chores would wait. Still in uniform, he sat at the kitchen counter with Laura and her geometry problems. “Let’s remember,” he often told his girls, “math is fun.” They’d roll their eyes, but they liked to hear him say it.

Homework finished, the family enjoyed a dinner of chicken cutlets, capped by John’s favorite dessert, ice cream. Also at dinner that night were Peg’s parents, visiting from New York; his father’s brother Al, who lived nearby; and their younger daughters Caroline, fourteen, and Mary, eleven.

At one point, Peg noticed something missing from John’s uniform shirt. “Did you go to work without your epaulets?” she asked. “I had to stop for gas,” John said. He’d removed the shoulder decorations so he wouldn’t look showy, like one of those pilots who seemed to expect the world to salute them.

John’s modesty and quiet confidence had attracted Peg nineteen years earlier, when she was a junior flight attendant for American. John had joined the airline as a flight engineer after serving in the Air Force during the Vietnam War, when he flew C-141 transport planes back and forth across the Pacific. Some of his return flights bore flag-draped coffins. In his early years at American, John was a rare bird: an unmarried pilot, easy on the eyes, respectful to all. On a flight out of Phoenix, a savvy senior flight attendant urged Peg to speak with him. When they landed in Boston he got her number.

They were married in less than a year. By the end of the decade John had been promoted to captain, Peg had risen in seniority, and they had three daughters. All that, plus their White Gate Farm, growing hay and picking fruit from three hundred blueberry bushes and an orchard of a hundred fifty peach trees John planted himself. Every spring, they put in pumpkins and corn to sell at John’s parents’ farm a couple of miles down the road, where he’d learned to drive a tractor at the age of eight. Peg often joked that the classic John Deere in their barn was her pilot husband’s other jet.

John and Peg continued to work for American Airlines throughout their marriage, with John flying a dozen days a month and Peg working about the same. They alternated flight schedules so one or the other could be with the girls. When that failed, their families pitched in. John had spent a chunk of his career flying international routes, but the overnight flights wore him down, and he’d recently been recertified on the Boeing 767, the wide-bodied pride of American’s domestic fleet. Lately he’d been flying regularly on the Boston–Los Angeles route, often on Flight 11, which Peg had flown hundreds of times as well.

John was scheduled to fly again the next morning, another six-hour trip to California, but he decided he didn’t want to leave home so soon after returning from the West Coast. Also, federal agriculture officials and a team from Tufts University were coming to the farm in the morning to discuss a program John felt passionate about. He and Peg had set aside a dozen acres to allow Cambodian immigrant farmers to grow bok choy, water spinach, pigweed, and other traditional Asian vegetables, to sell at markets and to feed their families. John plowed for the immigrants and rarely collected the two-hundred-dollar monthly rent. He built greenhouses for early spring planting, provided water from the farm’s pond, and taught the new Americans about New England’s unforgiving soil, crop-killing pests, and short planting season. Soon the Ogonowskis’ White Gate Farm was designated the first “mentor farm” for immigrants. When a reporter stopped by, John heaped credit on the Cambodians: “These guys are putting more care and attention into their one acre than most Yankee farmers put into their entire hundred acres.”

After dinner, John went to the desktop computer in the TV room. He logged in to the American Airlines scheduling system, hoping that another pilot wanted to pick up an extra trip. A match would turn John’s onscreen schedule green, allowing him to stay on the farm on September 11. He tried several times, with the same result each time.

“I’m just getting red lights,” he told Peg.

The farm tour would go on without him, while once again John would serve as captain of American Airlines Flight 11, nonstop from Boston to Los Angeles.

PETER, SUE KIM, AND CHRISTINE HANSON

United Airlines Flight 175

In 1989, a vibrant young woman slalomed through a house party, weaving through the crowd to avoid a determined young man with red dreadlocks, freckles, and a closet stuffed with tie-dyed T-shirts. Peter Hanson was cute, but Sue Kim wasn’t interested in a latter-day hippie desperate to convince her that the music of the Grateful Dead was comparable to the work of Mozart.

This sort of thing happened often to Sue, a first-generation Korean American. It made sense that a curious, intense man like Peter would meet her at a party and be smitten by her intelligence and effervescence. Sue’s easy laugh made people imagine that she’d lived a charmed life. But she hadn’t.

When Sue was two, her overworked parents sent her from their Los Angeles home to live with her grandmother in Korea. She returned to the United States four years later and learned that she had two younger brothers, who hadn’t been sent away from their parents. Her mother died when Sue was fifteen, and she helped to raise her brothers. Later her father committed suicide after being diagnosed with cancer. Beneath her placid surface, Sue craved the bonds of a secure family.

After the house party, Peter engineered ways to see Sue again while he pursued a master’s degree in business administration. When Peter thought that he’d gained romantic traction, he cut off his dreadlocks, stuffed them in a bag, and gave them to his mother, Eunice. She understood: Peter wanted to show Sue he’d be good marriage material. It marked a sharp turn toward responsibility for the free-spirited twenty-three-year-old. His parents worried that perhaps he wasn’t quite ready for marriage, but he couldn’t wait.

“If I don’t nab her now, she won’t be there,” Peter told his mother. Eunice accompanied him on a shopping trip for an engagement ring. Sue said yes, accepting not only Peter but also his devotion to the Grateful Dead. Their wedding bands were antiques, handed down from the parents of Peter’s father, Lee.

Peter earned an MBA from Boston University and became vice president of sales for a Massachusetts computer software company. He stayed close with his parents, with whom he’d traveled the world as a boy and occasionally enjoyed his favorite band’s contact-high concerts. Even as he accepted adult responsibilities, Peter remained a prankster. One day while answering phones at the local Conservation Commission office where she worked, Eunice heard a stern male voice demanding permission to build a structure next to a pond on his property. Eunice calmly explained the review process and the permits needed, but the caller raged about his rights as a landowner. As the rant wore on, Eunice realized it was Peter.

Meanwhile, Sue developed into an impressive academic scientist. She’d worked her way through a biology degree at the University of California, Berkeley, then moved to Boston for a master’s degree in medical sciences. With Peter’s encouragement, Sue pursued a PhD in immunology, working with specially bred mice to explore the role of certain molecules in asthma and AIDS. Sue was scheduled to defend her dissertation that fall, but approval was a foregone conclusion. Her doctoral adviser envisioned Sue joining the faculty at Boston University.

Peter and Sue juggled their professional lives with taking care of their daughter, Christine, who was born in February 1999. She looked like Sue in miniature, a hug magnet with Peter’s love of music. Christine’s middle name was Lee, for her paternal grandfather. Quietly, Sue stocked up on pregnancy tests, hoping to give Christine a little brother and Peter’s parents a grandson.

Lee and Eunice visited often from their Connecticut home. When Eunice arrived one day with a broken foot, Christine yelled, “I help you, Namma! Wait here!” She ran upstairs and returned with a colorful Band-Aid she applied to Eunice’s cast. Lee found joy in watching Christine work with Peter in the yard. The little girl promised the young trees that she and her daddy would help them grow big and strong. When they said grace before meals, Christine insisted on a song from a television show about Barney the purple dinosaur: “I love you, you love me, we’re a happy family. With a great big hug, and a kiss from me to you, won’t you say you love me too?” If her grandparents missed a word, Christine made them start over.

Early in September, Peter needed to fly to California on business, so they decided to turn the trip into a family vacation and a visit with Sue’s grandmother and brothers. The weekend before the September 11 flight, Christine told Eunice of her excitement about the upcoming trip, which included plans for an outing to Disneyland. During one phone call, Christine reported to her grandmother that she was going to California to see Mickey Mouse and Pluto. Then Christine expressed an even stronger desire: “I want to go to your house, Namma!”

On the night of September 10, Christine slept in her new big-girl bed with her favorite stuffed animal, Peter Rabbit holding a carrot. Before she left home the next morning, she’d tuck Peter under the covers, to keep him safe until she returned.

BARBARA OLSON

American Airlines Flight 77

Under the hot lights of the C-SPAN television show Washington Journal, host Peter Slen flipped open a copy of Washingtonian magazine for September 2001. The camera zoomed in to a headline, THE 100 MOST POWERFUL WOMEN IN WASHINGTON. Then it swung across the set to find conservative firebrand Barbara Olson, her telegenic smile dialed to full blast, her gleaming blond hair draped down the back of her red blazer. Slen asked Barbara: “Why are you listed as an influential political insider?”

Barbara knew perfectly well, but she answered modestly: “I don’t know. That’s where they put me.” She changed the subject to a recent lunch where the magazine’s honorees discussed who might be the first female president. Overwhelmingly, the capital’s most powerful women named Hillary Clinton. Virtually alone in dissent was Barbara, who had just completed her second book lacerating the U.S. senator from New York and former First Lady.

“What does it mean to have influence in this town?” Slen asked. “How do you get it? Is it power, is it position, is it money, is it marriage?”

The question carried a sexist dagger, missed by audience members who didn’t know that Barbara’s husband was among the most powerful lawyers in the country: U.S. Solicitor General Ted Olson, the top legal strategist for the White House. President George W. Bush had given him the job after Olson had argued successfully before the U.S. Supreme Court to end the recount of votes in Florida from the 2000 election, a decision that led to Bush becoming president.

Barbara ignored the jab, replying with a laugh that long work paved the road to influence. She’d grown used to questions about whether a glamorous woman who drove a Jaguar and had a weakness for stiletto heels deserved her place at the center of the political world. But at forty-five, having earned a partnership in a prominent law firm, Barbara drew confidence from the knowledge that before marrying Ted, she’d been a professional ballet dancer, worked her way through law school, and prosecuted drug cases in the U.S. attorney’s office in Washington. She’d also served as chief investigative counsel for the U.S. House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.

During her five-year marriage to Ted, his third and her second, Barbara had seen her stock rise further as half of a Washington power couple. They hosted enormous parties for the conservative intelligentsia at their home in Virginia. They shared a love for Shakespeare, poetry, the opera, modern art, and their Australian sheepdogs: Reagan, for the president, and Maggie, for British prime minister Margaret Thatcher.

When the C-SPAN show took calls from viewers, Barbara’s partisan nature was on full display. After lavish praise from one caller who loved her bestselling book about Hillary Clinton, Hell to Pay, another caller laced into Barbara for criticizing the Clintons. Weeks earlier, Barbara had apologized in the Washington Post for describing the former president’s late mother as a “barfly who gets used by men.”

The caller scolded her: “Miss Olson, you have to learn how to be more human. You’re a very evil person… . You’re not going to survive too long. You got too much hate and the devil in you.”

Barbara smiled through the attack, though not as widely as before. Her blue eyes dimmed momentarily as she blinked away the criticism and the ominous prediction. “Well, we do have a First Amendment,” Olson replied. “Everybody has a right to their own opinion. I don’t have hate in me.”

After the show ended, Barbara rushed on with her life. She needed to pack for a flight to Los Angeles, for her next performance as a face of conservatism: she was booked to appear on Politically Incorrect with Bill Maher. Her flight was set for Monday, September 10.

Barbara decided the schedule didn’t work for her. Though it would require a dash from the airport to Maher’s studio, she decided to push back her flight until the next day. Ted Olson would turn sixty-one years old on Tuesday, September 11. Before flying to California, Barbara wanted to wake up beside him, to wish him a happy birthday.

CEECEE LYLES

United Airlines Flight 93

As midnight approached on Monday, September 10, CeeCee Lyles lay on a futon bed in a tiny apartment she shared with four other United Airlines flight attendants near Newark International Airport in New Jersey. She clutched a teddy bear she’d named Lorne and talked on her cellphone to the bear’s namesake, her husband, Lorne Lyles, back home in Florida.

At thirty-three, five foot seven, CeeCee had flashing brown eyes and a love of fine clothes that complemented her athletic figure. Years earlier, Lorne noticed her when each of them was taking a son to baseball practice. He nearly fell out of his car when she walked past. “Man! She is beautiful,” he thought.

CeeCee had traveled a winding road to happiness with Lorne, and the cellphone was a lifeline when her work took her away from him. They’d talk for hours, often five or six times a day, sometimes as many as ten to fifteen. The comfort of the other’s voice mattered as much as the subjects: their sons, two each from previous relationships; her work in airports and airplanes; his, as a police officer on the overnight shift in Fort Myers, Florida. Beyond work and kids, they’d talk about bills and chores and missing each other. As Lorne would say, they’d talk and talk, about “everything and nothing.”

CeeCee had become a United flight attendant less than a year earlier, at Lorne’s urging, after he recognized the emotional toll of her previous jobs, as a corrections officer in Miami and then as a police detective on the streets of Fort Pierce, Florida. When they began dating, Lorne was a police dispatcher in Fort Pierce, so to some extent they’d fallen in love over the airwaves, enchanted by the sound of each other’s voice.

During her six years on the police force, CeeCee had put her good looks to use when she went undercover to portray a prostitute, but she got more satisfaction from helping women and children victimized by crime and drugs. She’d often stop by the Bible Way Soul Saving Station, where her uncle was the pastor, and she became a role model at a Christian women’s shelter founded by two of her aunts. Her kindness had limits, though, replaced by toughness when dealing with criminals. CeeCee excelled in an Advanced Officer Survival course that included hand-to-hand fighting and takedown moves. Before marrying Lorne in May 2000, CeeCee picked up extra shifts and worked second and third jobs to support her sons, Jerome and Jevon, around whom her life revolved. She kept them focused on school, taught them to play baseball, and expected them to fight for loose balls on the basketball court.

Becoming a flight attendant allowed CeeCee to fulfill her dreams of traveling, meeting new people, and trading hardened criminals for the occasional drunken businessman. As a perk of the job, she and her family took sightseeing trips on days off and filled available seats on flights to Indianapolis, where Lorne’s two sons, Justin and Jordan, lived with their mother. They’d done just that the previous weekend, then returned home so CeeCee’s sons could be in school on Monday.

As the summer of 2001 flew past, CeeCee poured out her heart in a letter to the woman who had raised her, Carrie Ross, who was both CeeCee’s adoptive mother and her biological aunt. CeeCee mentioned rough patches of her past, then wrote that she was as happy as she’d ever been. She loved her new job as a flight attendant, and she credited Ross’s love and support for leading her to this high point in life.

Before flying to Newark on September 10, CeeCee squared away piles of laundry and filled the refrigerator with home-cooked meals. She hated to be away from her family, but she and Lorne didn’t want to uproot from Florida to her airport base in New Jersey. So CeeCee joined a group of her fellow flight attendants, each paying $150 in monthly rent for the Newark crash pad, and bided her time until she’d earn enough seniority to gain greater control over her schedule.

The morning of Monday, September 10, Lorne drove CeeCee to the Fort Myers airport, walked her to her gate, kissed her goodbye, and began a new day of serial phone calls. CeeCee didn’t reach the Newark apartment until eleven that night, and she wouldn’t get much rest. She’d been assigned an early flight out of Newark, an 8:00 a.m. departure to San Francisco. Even as her energy flagged, she didn’t want to stop talking with Lorne.

Two hours into their last call of September 10, which blended into their first call of September 11, CeeCee fell asleep clutching her cellphone and her teddy bear Lorne. The real Lorne hung up, certain that they’d speak again soon.

MAJOR KEVIN NASYPANY

Northeast Air Defense Sector, Rome, N.Y.

At forty-three, solidly built and colorfully profane, Kevin Nasypany had a name that rhymed with the New Jersey town of Parsippany, a military pilot’s unflappable confidence, and a caterpillar mustache on a Saint Bernard’s face.

On September 10, Nasypany woke with a full plate. He and his wife, Dana, had five children, three girls and two boys aged five to nineteen, and Dana was seven months pregnant. They also had a sweet new chocolate lab puppy that Nasypany had judged to be dumber than dirt. Their rambling Victorian house in upstate Waterville, New York, needed paint, the oversized yard needed care, and a half-finished bathroom needed remodeling. Plus, someone needed to close their aboveground pool for the season, a chore that Nasypany loudly proclaimed to be a royal pain in the ass.

To top it off, he had to protect the lives of roughly one hundred million Americans.

Nasypany was a major in the Air National Guard, working as a mission control commander at the Northeast Air Defense Sector, or NEADS (pronounced knee-ads). NEADS was part of the North American Aerospace Defense Command, or NORAD, the military organization with the daunting task of safeguarding the skies over the United States and Canada.

Protection work suited Nasypany, who’d been a leading defenseman on his college hockey team. At NEADS, he and his team stood sentry against long-range enemy bombers and intercontinental ballistic missiles sneaking past U.S. air borders, along with a catalog of other airborne dangers such as hijackings. Nasypany had joined NEADS seven years earlier, after an active duty Air Force career during which he earned the radio call sign “Nasty” and spent months aloft in a radar plane over Iraq, Kuwait, and Saudi Arabia during the First Gulf War.

On workdays, Nasypany drove his Nissan Stanza twenty-five miles to NEADS headquarters, a squat aluminum bunker that resembled a UFO from a 1950s sci-fi movie. It was the last operating facility in a military ghost town, on the property of the decommissioned Griffiss Air Force Base in Rome, New York. The obscure location was fitting: in the grand scheme of U.S. military priorities, defending domestic skies had become something of a backwater, staffed largely by part-time pilots and officers in the Air National Guard.

Working eight-hour shifts around the clock, three hundred sixty-five days a year, Nasypany and several hundred military officers, surveillance technicians, communications specialists, and weapons controllers huddled in the green glow of outdated radar and computer screens. Bulky tape recorders preserved their spoken words as they kept a lookout for potential national security threats over Washington, D.C., and twenty-seven states in the Northeast, Mid-Atlantic, and Midwest.

One of the many challenges for Nasypany was to keep his crews sharp amid the daily tedium of a peacetime vigil. Entire shifts would pass with no hint of trouble, which was good for the country but potentially numbing to NEADS crews. Then, perhaps a dozen times a month, an “unknown” would appear on a radar scope, and everyone needed to react smartly and immediately, knowing that a mistake or a delay of even a few minutes theoretically could mean the obliteration of an American city.

In most of those cases, the NEADS crew would quickly identify the mystery radar dots. But three or four times a month, when initial efforts failed, NEADS staffers would carry out the most exciting part of their job: ordering the launch of supersonic military fighter jets to determine who or what had entered American airspace.

Nationally, NORAD and its divisions could immediately call upon fourteen fighter jets, two each at seven bases around the country. Those fighters remained perpetually “on alert,” armed and fueled, pilots ready. The military had many more fighter jets spread among U.S. bases, but time would be needed to round up pilots and load fuel and weapons, and time would be an unaffordable luxury if America came under attack.

During the decade since the fall of the Soviet Union, America’s leaders had behaved as though the airborne threat had nearly disappeared. At fourteen, the number of on-alert fighters nationwide marked a sharp drop since the height of the Cold War, when twenty-two military sites, with scores of fighter jets, were always ready to defend against a ballistic missile attack or any other threat to North America. In fact, by the summer of 2001, the number of on-alert fighter jet sites throughout the United States had been ordered to be cut from fourteen to only four, to save money, though that order had yet to be carried out.

NEADS directly controlled four of the on-alert fighter jets: two F-15s at Otis Air National Guard Base in Buzzards Bay, Massachusetts, on Cape Cod, and two F-16s at Langley Air Force Base in Hampton, Virginia.

When the fighters launched, time and again the unknown aircraft or mystery radar dot would turn out to be benign: a fish-spotting plane from Canada with faulty electronics, or a passenger jet from Europe whose pilots failed to use proper codes on their cockpit transponder, a device that sends ground radar a wealth of identifying information plus speed and altitude. In NEADS parlance, the end result would be a “friendly” plane that didn’t “squawk,” or properly identify itself by transponder, as a result of human or mechanical error. When the potential threat passed, the NEADS sentinels resumed their watch.

To stay ready for surprise inspections and, above all, a genuine threat by an unknown with nefarious intent, Nasypany and other NEADS officers regularly put their crews through elaborate exercises. They had one planned for September 11, with the impressive name Vigilant Guardian. The drill focused on a simulated attack by Russian bombers, with elaborate secondary scenarios including a mock hijacking by militants determined to force a passenger jet to land on a Caribbean island. Nasypany and some colleagues wanted the exercise to include a plot by terrorists to fly a cargo plane into the United Nations building in New York City, but a military intelligence officer had nixed that idea as too far-fetched to be useful.

Nasypany spent his September 10 shift preparing for the next day’s exercise, but he also had to carry out a more mundane family responsibility. NEADS allowed tours by civilians, so Boy Scout troops, local politicians, and civic groups regularly clomped around the Operations Room, looking at the radar scopes after classified systems were switched off. In this case, his wife’s sister Becky was visiting the Nasypanys from Kansas, and she’d always been curious about Kevin’s work. He got approval for Becky to witness what she had long imagined to be the exciting world of national security surveillance in action.

As Nasypany toured NEADS with his wife and sister-in-law, disappointment spread across Becky’s face. The nerve center of U.S. air defense didn’t seem much different from the office of the air conditioning manufacturer where she worked.

“It looks like you guys don’t do much,” Becky said. “It’s really quiet in here.”

Nasypany couldn’t help but smile. A good shift for NEADS, and for the nation, was eight hours of hushed monotony. “Quiet’s a good thing around here,” Nasypany told her. “When it starts getting loud, and people start raising their voices, that’s a bad thing.”

MOHAMED ATTA

American Airlines Flight 11

ZIAD JARRAH

United Airlines Flight 93

Inside a third-floor room in a middling Boston hotel, an unremarkable man prepared to move on. He pulled on a polo shirt, black on one shoulder and white on the other, and packed a flimsy vinyl Travelpro suitcase that resembled the rolling luggage preferred by airline pilots.

If not for the glare of his dark eyes, Mohamed Atta would have been easy to overlook: thirty-three years old, slim, five feet seven, clean-shaven, with brushy black hair, a drooping left eyelid, and a hard-set mouth over a meaty chin. After one night in room 308 of the Milner Hotel, Atta gathered his belongings before a final move that represented the last steps of a years-long journey that he believed would elevate him from angry obscurity into eternal salvation.

The youngest of three children of a gruff, ambitious lawyer father and a doting stay-at-home mother, Atta spent his early childhood in a rural Egyptian community. Atta’s father, also named Mohamed, complained that Atta’s mother pampered their timid son, making him “soft” by raising him like a girl alongside his two older sisters. Devout but secular Muslims—as opposed to Islamists, who wanted religion to dominate Egypt’s political, legal, and social spheres—the family moved to Cairo when Atta was ten. While his peers played or watched television, Atta studied and obeyed his elders, a dutiful son determined to satisfy his disciplinarian father and follow the path of his intelligent sisters, on their way to careers as a doctor and a professor.

Atta graduated in 1990 from Cairo University with a degree in architectural engineering and joined a trade group linked to the Muslim Brotherhood, a political group that advocated Islamic rule and demonized the West. But his career hopes were hamstrung because he didn’t earn high enough grades to win a place in the university’s prestigious graduate school. At his father’s urging, Atta studied English and German, and a connection through a family friend steered him toward graduate studies in Germany.

In 1992, at twenty-four, Atta enrolled at the Technical University of Hamburg-Harburg to pursue the German equivalent of a master’s degree in urban planning. Some men in their early twenties from a traditional society might have viewed a cosmopolitan new home as an opportunity to expand their horizons, to explore their interests, or to rebel against a controlling father. Atta took another route, burrowing into his religion and trading his docile ways for fundamentalist fervor aimed at the West.

He shunned the pulsing social and cultural life of Hamburg, a wealthy city where the sex trade prospered alongside a thriving commercial district. He grew a beard and became a fixture in the city’s most radical mosque, called al-Quds, the Arabic name for the city of Jerusalem. Most of the seventy-five thousand Muslims in Hamburg were Turks with moderate beliefs, but al-Quds catered to the small minority of Arabs drawn to extreme interpretations of Islam. The mosque’s location placed the spiritual literally above the worldly: the rooms of the mosque sat atop a body building parlor in a seedy part of the city. Preachers tried to outdo one another in expressions of hatred toward the United States and Israel. Congregants could buy recordings of sermons by popular imams, including one who risked arrest under German antihate laws by declaring that “Christians and Jews should have their throats slit.”

By 1998, nearly finished with his studies, Atta had surrounded himself with like-minded men who came to Germany for higher education but retreated into a radically distorted understanding of their religion.

One close confidant with whom he could engage in endless anti-American rants about the oppression of Muslims was named Marwan al-Shehhi, a native of the United Arab Emirates with an encyclopedic knowledge of Islamic scriptures. Ten years younger than Atta, Shehhi struggled in school but flourished as a fundamentalist.

Another member of Atta’s inner circle was Ziad Jarrah, the only son of a prosperous family from Lebanon. Jarrah seemed an unlikely Islamic firebrand: he attended private Christian schools as a boy and later became a sociable, beer-drinking regular at Beirut discos. Jarrah found a girlfriend after he arrived in Germany, but later fell harder for the ferocious ideas he heard at al-Quds.

Along with at least one other member of their circle, the trio of Atta, Shehhi, and Jarrah decided to put their beliefs into action by waging violent jihad among Muslim separatists fighting Russians in Chechnya. While still in Germany, they connected with a recruiter for Osama bin Laden’s terror group, al-Qaeda, who urged them to go first to Afghanistan, where they could receive training at jihadist camps. They reached Afghanistan in late 1999, where they pledged bayat, or allegiance, to bin Laden. The three well-educated men quickly drew attention from al-Qaeda’s top leaders, including bin Laden himself. He’d been searching for men exactly like Mohamed Atta, Marwan al-Shehhi, and Ziad Jarrah.

In the months before the Hamburg group’s arrival in Afghanistan, bin Laden had embraced the idea of a simultaneous suicide hijacking plot against the United States, and he needed certain recruits to serve as its key participants: men who possessed English language skills, knowledge of life in the West, and the ability to obtain travel visas to the United States. Known to al-Qaeda as the Planes Operation, the plot was reportedly the brainchild of a longtime terrorist named Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who’d met bin Laden in the 1980s. Mohammed admired the murderous ambitions of his nephew Ramzi Yousef, who carried out the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. After Yousef’s 1995 arrest in Pakistan, as the terrorist was flown by helicopter over Manhattan, a senior FBI agent lifted Yousef’s blindfold and pointed out the World Trade Center’s Twin Towers, aglow in the dark. The agent taunted his prisoner: “Look down there. They’re still standing.” Yousef replied: “They wouldn’t be if I had enough money and explosives.”

Al-Qaeda’s Planes Operation sought to pick up where Yousef left off and to go much further. The plot had several iterations during its years of planning, but as envisioned by Khalid Sheikh Mohammed at least as far back as 1996, jihadists would hijack ten planes and use them to attack targets on the East and West Coasts of the United States. Bin Laden eventually rejected the idea as too complex and unwieldy. He wanted a combination of high impact and high likelihood of success. In a scaled-down version, approved by bin Laden in mid-1999, the plot intended to fulfill the threat of his 1998 fatwa against the United States and its people, and to inspire others to similar action, by striking key symbols of American political, military, and financial might.

Soon after meeting Atta, bin Laden personally chose him as the mission’s tactical commander and provided him with a preliminary list of approved targets. Bin Laden sent the group back to Hamburg with instructions about what to do next. To avoid attracting attention and to appear less radical, Atta shaved his beard, wore Western clothing, and avoided extremist mosques. Next, in March 2000, he emailed thirty-one flight schools in the United States to ask about the costs of training and living accommodations, all of which would secretly be covered by wire transfers from al-Qaeda. Before they applied for visas to the United States, Atta, Shehhi, and Jarrah each claimed that he had lost his passport; their replacements eliminated evidence of potentially suspicious trips to Pakistan and Afghanistan. By late May 2000, all three men had new passports and tourist visas. By late summer they were studying in Florida to be pilots, with Atta and Shehhi at one flight school and Jarrah at another.

Meanwhile, both before and after the Hamburg group began flight school, sixteen other men who’d also pledged their lives to bin Laden and al-Qaeda entered the United States to play roles chosen for them in the Planes Operation. One, a twenty-nine-year-old Saudi named Hani Hanjour, had studied in the United States on and off for nearly a decade and had obtained a commercial pilot certificate in April 1999. While in Arizona, Hanjour fell in with a group of extremists, and by 2000 he was an al-Qaeda recruit in Afghanistan, where his flying and language skills, plus his firsthand knowledge of the United States, made him an ideal candidate in bin Laden’s eyes to join the Planes Operation as a fourth pilot.

Thirteen of the others were between twenty and twenty-eight years old, all from Saudi Arabia except for one, who hailed from the United Arab Emirates. A few had spent time in college, but most lacked higher education, jobs, or prospects. All but one were unmarried. Like the Hamburg group, they’d joined al-Qaeda originally intending to fight in Chechnya. Bin Laden handpicked them for the plot and asked them to swear loyalty for a suicide operation. Although they weren’t especially imposing, most no taller than five foot seven, he wanted them to serve as “muscle” for the men who were training to be pilots. Most returned home to Saudi Arabia to obtain U.S. visas, then returned to Afghanistan for training in close-quarters combat and knife killing skills. They began to arrive in the United States in April 2001, keeping to themselves and generally avoiding trouble.

The other two “muscle” group members originally were supposed to participate in Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s ten-plane plot. Experienced jihadists who’d fought together in Bosnia, Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Mihdhar arrived in California on six-month tourist visas in January 2000, even before the Hamburg group began pilot training. The U.S. intelligence community identified Mihdhar as a member of al-Qaeda before he landed in the United States, and Hazmi had been described as a bin Laden associate. Yet neither was on a terrorist watchlist available to border agents. By contrast, other countries had both Mihdhar and Hazmi on watchlists. Once the two men reached the United States, the CIA withheld from the FBI crucial information about them and their movements. Compounded by what a later investigation would call “individual and systemic failings” by the FBI, the result was a series of missed opportunities.

Once in the United States, the two natives of Mecca, Saudi Arabia, insinuated themselves into the Muslim community of San Diego and received help from fellow Saudis. Originally viewed by bin Laden as potential pilots, neither Mihdhar nor Hazmi had the necessary English language skills. Aptitude and intelligence might have been lacking, too—their flight training stalled after they told an instructor they wanted to learn how to fly a plane but showed no interest in takeoffs or landings.

During the spring and summer of 2001, as part of their final preparations, Atta, Jarrah, and Shehhi took cross-country flights to observe the workings of crews and to determine whether they might smuggle weapons on board. Atta flew to Spain to brief an al-Qaeda planner about the plot, then returned to the United States. Jarrah and Hanjour sought training on how to fly a low-altitude pathway along the Hudson River that passed New York landmarks including the World Trade Center, and they rented small planes for practice flights. “Muscle” group members busied themselves training at gyms.

As months passed, bin Laden became frustrated, pressuring Khalid Sheikh Mohammed to put the Planes Operation into motion. Bin Laden wanted it to be executed in May 2001, marking seven months since the bombing of the USS Cole, and then in June or July, when Israeli opposition party leader Ariel Sharon visited the White House. Each date passed as Atta hesitated to commit on timing until he felt absolutely ready.

Finally, in late August, Atta picked a day just weeks away: the second Tuesday in September. It’s a mystery whether he made a simple logistical choice, based on his expectation that it would be a light travel day, which meant fewer passengers to deal with; whether he saw propaganda value in a date that matched America’s 9-1-1 emergency telephone system; or whether he sought historical revenge by choosing the month and day of the start of the 1683 Battle of Vienna, a humiliating defeat for the Ottoman Empire against Christian forces that began a centuries-long decline of Islamic influence.

Whatever the trigger, Atta and his eighteen associates started buying flight tickets, some by using computers in public libraries. They kept enough money for expenses, then returned much of the rest to al-Qaeda operatives in the United Arab Emirates. All told, the entire plan cost less than half a million dollars.

The members of the Planes Operation broke into three groups of five and one group of four, each led by one of the four men who’d trained as a pilot: Atta, Shehhi, Hanjour, and Jarrah. By the second week of September, all had rented rooms at hotels or motels in or near Boston, Newark, and Washington, D.C.

Atta and the other pilots worked on final details, while some of the others focused on earthly desires. In Boston, “muscle” members Abdulaziz al-Omari and Satam al-Suqami paid for the company of two women from the Sweet Temptations escort service. One spent a hundred dollars on a prostitute two more times in a single day. In New Jersey, another paid twenty dollars for a private dance in the VIP room of a go-go bar, while another contented himself with a pornographic video.

On September 10, when everything and everyone was almost in place, Ziad Jarrah stepped outside a Days Inn in Newark, New Jersey, where he and three “muscle” men had checked in the previous day.

Jarrah’s thoughts wandered to his girlfriend in Germany, a medical student of Turkish heritage named Aysel Sengün. They’d dated for five years, they emailed or spoke by phone almost daily, and she’d visited him in Florida eight months earlier. Jarrah showed off his new skills as a pilot, flying her in a single-engine plane to Key West. They’d discussed a future together, but Sengün’s parents insisted that she marry a fellow Turk. When Jarrah asked for her father’s blessing, the elder Sengün threw Jarrah out of his house. They continued their relationship in secret, and weeks earlier, Jarrah had flown to Germany to see her. Over their years together, she’d watched as the happy-go-lucky man she met grew a beard and criticized her for being insufficiently devout, but more recently Sengün had been seeing what she thought was a return to his easygoing ways. She had no idea what he would do.

Jarrah left the Days Inn in a rented car and drove three miles to Elizabeth, New Jersey, to mail a letter he wrote that day to Sengün. He placed it in a package along with his private pilot’s license, his pilot logbook, and a postcard showing a photo of a beach.

In a mix of German and Arabic, the letter began with expressions of love and devotion to chabibi, or “darling.” Before signing it “Your man forever,” Jarrah wrote:

I will wait for you until you come to me. There comes a time for everyone to make a move… . You should be very proud of me. It’s an honor, and you will see the results, and everybody will be happy… .

While Jarrah mailed his package, Atta prepared to leave his room at the Boston hotel. Some items in his Travelpro luggage made sense for a devout Muslim who’d received a commercial pilot’s license nine months earlier: alongside a Koran and a prayer schedule, he packed videotaped lessons on how to fly two types of Boeing jets; a device for determining the effect of a plane’s weight on its range; an electronic flight computer; a procedure manual for flight simulators; and flight planning sheets. Anyone who knew what he had planned would also have noted that he packed a folding knife and a canister of “First Defense” pepper spray. Finally, tucked into the black suitcase was a four-page letter, handwritten in Arabic, that charted Atta’s physical and spiritual intentions.

Divided into three sections, the letter provided detailed instructions and exhortations on the subjects of martyrdom and mass murder. It covered demeanor and grooming, battle tactics, and the promise of eternal life in the company of “nymphs.” After formal invocations, “In the name of Allah, the most merciful, the most compassionate,” the first section addressed Atta’s situation at that very moment. Titled “The Last Night,” it began:

1 Embrace the will to die and renew allegiance. -Shave the extra body hair and wear cologne. -Pray.

2 Familiarize yourself with the plan well from every aspect, and anticipate the reaction and resistance from the enemy.

3 Read the Al-Tawbah [Repentance], the Anfal chapters [in the Quran], and reflect on their meaning and what Allah has prepared for the believers and the martyrs in Paradise.

Near the end of the first section, it offered this direction:

1 13. Examine your weapon before departure, and it was said before the departure, “Each of you must sharpen his blade and go out and wound his sacrifice.”

Among the nineteen men with plans to wreak havoc in the next twenty-four hours, at least two others, one in New Jersey and the other outside Washington, had copies of the same letter.

Atta left the Milner Hotel and drove a rented blue Nissan Altima to a cheap hotel in the Boston suburb of Newton. There he picked up the man believed to have written, or at least copied, the instruction letter: Abdulaziz al-Omari, the same young Saudi who days earlier had ordered prostitutes like delivery pizza.

Atta and Omari headed toward Interstate 95 for a two-hour drive to Portland, Maine, a trip that could best be described as the first arc of a circular route. They held tickets for a commuter flight that would bring them back to Boston. The flight was scheduled to leave Portland at six o’clock the following morning, September 11.

CHAPTER 2

“HE’S NORDO”

American Airlines Flight 11

September 11, 2001

AMERICAN AIRLINES PILOT JOHN OGONOWSKI ROUSED HIMSELF BEFORE dawn on September 11, 2001, moving quietly in the dark to avoid waking his wife, Peg, or their three daughters. He slipped on his uniform and kissed Peg goodbye as she slept.

As the sun began its rise on that perfect late-summer morning, John stepped out the back door. Coffee would wait until he reached Boston’s Logan International Airport, forty-five minutes away. He climbed into his dirt-caked green Chevy pickup, with hay on the floor and a bumper sticker that read THERE’S NO FARMING WITHOUT FARMERS.

John drove a meandering route as he left the land he loved. He could see the plots he’d set aside for the Cambodian immigrants, plus five acres of ripening pumpkins and ten acres of fodder corn whose stalks would be sold as decorations for Halloween and Thanksgiving. John steered down the long dirt driveway, through the white wooden gate that gave the farm its name. He passed the home of his uncle Al and tooted his horn in a ritual family greeting. It was nearly six o’clock.

Under sparkling blue skies, John drove southeast toward the airport, ready to take his seat in the cockpit and his place in a vast national air transport system that flew some 1.8 million passengers daily, aboard more than twenty-five thousand flights, to and from more than 563 U.S. airports.

He expected to be home before the weekend, for a family picnic.

AS JOHN OGONOWSKI neared the airport, Michael Woodward left his sleeping boyfriend at his apartment in Boston’s fashionable Back Bay neighborhood and caught an early train for the twenty-minute ride to Logan. More than six feet tall and 200-plus pounds, Michael had a gentle face and a razor wit. Thirty years old, bright and ambitious, he’d risen from ticket agent to flight service manager for American Airlines, a job in which he ensured that planes were properly catered, serviced, and equipped with a full complement of flight attendants.

A salty breeze from Boston Harbor greeted Michael when he exited the train at the airport station, but that was the last he expected to see of the outdoors until the end of a long day. At 6:45 a.m., dressed in a gray suit and a burgundy tie, Michael walked to his office in the bowels of the airport’s Terminal B, one level below the passenger gates. He wore a serious expression that revealed his discomfort.

Michael remained friends with many of the more than two hundred flight attendants he supervised, and now he had to scold one to get to work on time, keep her uniform blouse properly buttoned, and generally clean up her act or risk being fired. He called her into his office, took a deep breath, and delivered the reprimand. She accepted the criticism and Michael relaxed, confident that he had completed the worst part of his September 11 workday.

Outside Michael’s office, flight attendants milled around a no-frills lounge where airline employees grabbed coffee and signed in by computer before flights. Michael brightened when he saw Betty Ong, a fourteen-year veteran of American Airlines whose friends called her Bee, sitting at a desk in the lounge, enjoying a few minutes of quiet before work.

Tall and willowy, forty-five years old, with shoulder-length black hair, Betty had grown up the youngest of four children in San Francisco’s Chinatown, where her parents ran a deli. Betty loved Chinese opera, carousel horses, Nat King Cole music, and collecting Beanie Babies; she also excelled at sports. Betty walked with a lively hop in her step and had a high-pitched laugh that brought joy to her friends. She ended calls: “I love you lots!” After countless flights together, she’d grown friendly with pilot John Ogonowski and his flight attendant wife, Peg, who often drove Betty home from Logan Airport to her townhouse in suburban Andover, Massachusetts, not far from the Ogonowskis’ farm. Single after a breakup, between flights Betty acted like a big sister to children who lived in her neighborhood and took elderly friends to doctors’ appointments. Betty had returned to Boston the previous day on a flight from San Jose, California. Now she was back at work, piling up extra trips before a Hawaiian vacation later in the week with her older sister, Cathie.

Michael scanned the room and saw Kathleen “Kathy” Nicosia, a green-eyed, no-nonsense senior flight attendant whom he’d taken to dinner recently in San Francisco. Kathy had spent thirty-two of her fifty-four years working the skies, and she’d developed a healthy skepticism about managers, a skepticism that somehow didn’t include Michael. He walked over and she gave him a hug. A whiff of her perfume lingered after Kathy and Betty headed upstairs to the passenger gates.

AROUND 7:15 A.M., on the tarmac outside the terminal at Gate 32, Logan Airport ground crew member Shawn Trotman raised his fuel nozzle and inserted it into an adapter underneath a wing of a wide-bodied Boeing 767. The silver plane had rolled into place a little more than an hour earlier, after an overnight flight from San Francisco. It stretched 180 feet long, with red, white, and blue stripes from nose to tail. The word “American” spanned the top of the first-class windows. Bold red and blue A’s, separated by a stylized blue eagle, adorned a flaglike vertical stabilizer on the tail.

The work done, Trotman snapped shut the fueling panel. The plane’s two enormous wing tanks sloshed with highly combustible Jet A fuel—essentially kerosene refined to burn more efficiently—for the six-hour flight across the country. Trotman had filled the wings with fuel weighing 76,400 pounds, about the same weight as a forty-foot fire truck.

As Trotman moved on to another plane, the ground crew finished loading luggage and delivering catering supplies. While they worked, John Ogonowski walked under the plane to inspect the landing gear, part of a pilot’s routine preflight check.

Meanwhile, inside the 767, flight attendant Madeline “Amy” Sweeney was upset. Blond and blue-eyed, thirty-five years old, Amy had recently returned to work after spending the summer at home with her two young children. This would be the first day she wouldn’t be on hand to guide her five-year-old daughter Anna onto the bus to kindergarten. Amy used her cellphone to call her husband, Mike, who comforted her by saying she’d have plenty of days ahead to see their kids off to school.

AMY SWEENEY, BETTY Ong, and Kathy Nicosia were three of the nine flight attendants, eight women and one man, who’d be working with Captain John Ogonowski and First Officer Thomas McGuinness Jr., a former Navy fighter pilot. They were the eleven crew members of American Airlines Flight 11, a daily nonstop flight to Los Angeles with a scheduled 7:45 a.m. departure.

Boarding moved smoothly, a process made easier by the wide-bodied plane’s two aisles between seats and a light load of passengers. The youngest passenger through the cabin door was twenty-year-old Candace Lee Williams of Danbury, Connecticut, a Northeastern University student and aspiring stockbroker en route to visit her college roommate in California. The oldest was eighty-five-year-old Robert Norton, a retiree from Lubec, Maine, heading west with his wife, Jacqueline, to attend her son’s wedding.

Daniel Lee from Van Nuys, California, a roadie for the Backstreet Boys, had slipped away from the pop group’s tour and bought a ticket on Flight 11 so he could be home for the birth of his second child. Cora Hidalgo Holland of Sudbury, Massachusetts, needed to interview health aides for her elderly mother in San Bernardino, California. Actress and photographer Berry Berenson, widow of the actor Anthony Perkins, was headed home to Los Angeles after a vacation on Cape Cod.

Also on board was seventy-year-old electronics consultant Alexander Filipov of Concord, Massachusetts, a gregarious, insatiably curious father of three. He knew how to say “Do you like Chinese food?” in more than a dozen languages, which enabled Filipov to strike up conversations with foreigners on business trips like this one. Nearby, missing his wife, Prasanna, after a three-week work trip, Los Angeles computer technician Pendyala “Vamsi” Vamsikrishna called home and left a message saying he’d be there for lunch.

As boarding continued, thirty-year-old Tara Creamer walked down the aisle and slid into window seat 33J. Tara was a woman who didn’t rattle easily. Years earlier, on a first date, on Valentine’s Day no less, a fellow college student took her to dinner at a red sauce Italian dive called Spaghetti Freddy’s, then to the cannibal-versus-serial-killer movie The Silence of the Lambs. She married him.

Tara had met John Creamer at the University of Massachusetts Amherst when she was a vivacious, curly-haired brunette sophomore. John was a shy, blue-eyed football lineman for the UMass Minutemen, named for the Revolutionary War patriots. Tara lived on a dorm floor near some of John’s friends, so he hung around her hallway long enough for her to notice him. After that first date of pasta and fava beans, they were a couple.

Both twenty-three when they wed, Tara and John had scraped together a down payment for a sweet yellow Cape Cod–style house with a screened porch in Worcester, Massachusetts, not far from where John’s parents lived. They renovated it themselves after long days of work. After one seemingly endless paint-and-wallpaper binge, John lost patience. While he stewed, Tara, several months pregnant, calmly went to their unfinished basement, carrying a wide brush dripping white paint. On a rough gray wall, she painted “Tara s John.” The tension passed, but the sign and the sentiment endured. At night, they slept under a maroon, pink, and white quilt made by Tara’s aunt, with a design of interlocking circles that symbolized their wedding rings. Written on the soft cloth were the words “Made with Love for Tara and John,” and their wedding date, August 13, 1994.

Their son, Colin, arrived in 1997, followed three years later by a daughter, Nora. A fashion merchandising major in college, Tara became a planning manager at TJX Companies in Framingham, Massachusetts, parent firm of the big-box retailer T.J.Maxx. She sang to Colin and Nora on the way to work and spent lunch hours with them in an onsite company daycare center. Tara meticulously updated their milestone books, recording first crawls and first steps, first teeth and first words. When a company supervisor urged Tara to get into the habit of working late, Tara declined. Time with her children came first.

Tara and John never traveled together by air in the years after Colin’s birth. She worried about leaving him, and then both Colin and Nora, in the event of a crash. Tara’s mother died of cancer in 1995, and the loss still ached. But in May 2001, one of John’s closest friends invited them to his wedding in Florida. Before the trip, Tara went on a planning spree, arranging insurance, guardians, and family finances, just in case. She also took the opportunity to explain the concept of death to Colin. He had only one grandmother, Tara told him, because the other one, her mother, was an angel in heaven, looking after him. Colin seemed to understand, but Tara couldn’t be sure.

By late summer 2001, Nora had celebrated her first birthday, and Tara was ready to resume traveling for work. On this trip, Tara had the option of staying in California through the weekend to see a close friend, but she scheduled a red-eye return so she’d be home Friday morning. Packed and ready the night before Flight 11, Tara completed one last task before bed. Fulfilling her self-appointed role as family planning manager, she typed a detailed memo for John. Titled “Normal Daily Schedule,” it was a mother’s guide to caring for their children. It began: “Wake Colin up around 7–7:15. Let him watch a little cartoons (Channel 52). Nora—if she is not up by 7:30—wake her up. Just change her and give her milk in a sippy cup!”

In the seat next to Tara was auburn-haired Neilie Anne Heffernan Casey of Wellesley, Massachusetts, also a TJX Companies planning manager. Two days earlier, Neilie and her husband, Mike, had run a 5K race to raise money for breast cancer research. They ran pushing a stroller with their six-month-old daughter, Riley. In nearby rows were five of their TJX colleagues, also headed to California on business: Christine Barbuto, Linda George, Lisa Fenn Gordenstein, Robin Kaplan, and Susan MacKay.

Susan’s husband, Doug, was an FAA air traffic controller. He’d switched his schedule to an early shift that day so he could attend a nighttime school event for their eight-year-old daughter and make dinner for their thirteen-year-old son. When he got to work, Doug planned to radio American Flight 11’s cockpit to ask Captain John Ogonowski to surprise Susan by saying hi for him.

IN A WIDE leather seat in the first row of first class sat financier David Retik of Needham, Massachusetts, a practical-joking, fly-fishing family man whose wife, Susan, was seven months pregnant with their third child. His colleagues considered David a rare bird: a venture capitalist whom everyone liked. On his drive to the airport, David had spotted a familiar car on the Massachusetts Turnpike. He sped up, pulled alongside, and waved to his surprised father, a doctor on his way to work.

Next to David sat travel industry consultant Richard Ross, whose family in Newton, Massachusetts, counted on him to spontaneously break into Sinatra songs; to raise money for brain cancer research; and to be chronically late. He held true to form this morning, as the last passenger to arrive for Flight 11. A flustered Richard told a gate agent that terrible traffic had made this the worst day of his life. Another agent took pity and upgraded him from business to first class.

One row behind David and Richard sat retired ballet dancer and philanthropist Sonia Puopolo of Dover, Massachusetts, looking elegant with a camel-colored pashmina scarf draped over her blazer. Her luggage bulged with baby pictures and childhood mementos for a visit to her Los Angeles-based son Mark Anthony, whom she called Mookie. A wealthy patron of the arts and Democratic Party politicians, Sonia wore a distinctive wedding band with diamonds embedded in golden columns. The bejeweled shafts looked like the support pillars of a landmark building in miniature.

Nineteen passengers settled into business class, including Paige Farley-Hackel, of Newton, Massachusetts, in window seat 7A. A glamorous spiritual adviser and budding radio host, every night Paige left a five-item “gratitude list” for her husband, Allan, with items that ranged from “justice” to “skinny dipping” to “our happy marriage” to “airplanes.” Paige’s appreciation lists also included the names Ruth and Juliana: her closest friend, Ruth Clifford McCourt, and Ruth’s four-year-old daughter, Juliana, who was Paige’s goddaughter. Paige and Ruth had met years earlier, at a day spa Ruth owned before her marriage, and they considered each other kindred spirits. That morning, a driver delivered all three to Logan Airport after a night in Paige and Allan’s home. Paige, Ruth, and Juliana had planned the trip to California together, but Ruth had mileage points for free tickets on United Airlines. She and Juliana booked a separate flight on United that left Boston at nearly the same time as American Flight 11. When both planes landed in Los Angeles, they planned to drive together to La Jolla for several days at the Center for Well Being, run by Deepak Chopra. Then they intended to reward Juliana with a trip to Disneyland before flying back to Boston.

Behind Paige, bound for home in Pasadena, California, sat humanitarian Lynn Angell and her husband of thirty years, David Angell. David was an award-winning television creator and executive producer of the sitcom Frasier who’d won two Emmys as a writer for Cheers. (By coincidence, in an episode David cowrote for Frasier, a stranger left a telephone message for the title character saying that she’d soon arrive on “American Flight 11.”)

Behind the Angells, in seat 9B, sat a young man with thinning hair in Nike sneakers, jeans, and a green T-shirt who was a star of the new computer age. Daniel Lewin of Cambridge, Massachusetts, had built a business and a fortune before his thirtieth birthday by coinventing a way for the Internet to handle enormous spikes in traffic. But at the moment, Daniel was mired in a rough patch. He was flying west to a computer conference and to sign a $400 million deal he hoped would save his company, Akamai Technologies. Daniel had already seen his formerly billion-dollar fortune plummet as Akamai’s stock fell to about three dollars a share, down from a hundred times that price two years earlier. His brilliant math mind notwithstanding, Daniel defied computer nerd stereotypes: the broad-shouldered, motorcycle-riding Internet visionary had won the weightlifting title Mr. Teenage Israel and spent four years as a commando in the Israeli military.

FLIGHT 11 ALSO carried five passengers from the Middle East with no plans to reach Los Angeles. Two were Egypt-born Mohamed Atta and Saudi Arabian native Abdulaziz al-Omari, who had taken that curiously roundabout route to Flight 11. On the evening of September 10 they had driven a rented car from Boston to a Comfort Inn motel in Portland, Maine. There they visited a Pizza Hut, a Walmart, a gas station, and two ATM machines. Before dawn on September 11, they drove to the Portland International Jetport for a US Airways commuter flight back to Boston.

It was something of a mystery why Atta and Omari went to Portland only to fly back to Boston the morning of September 11. One possibility was that they thought they’d seem less suspicious that way than if they drove to Logan Airport and arrived there at the same time as a large group of other Middle Eastern men. It’s also possible that they expected to be subject to less stringent security screening at a smaller airport in Maine.

Once at the Portland airport, Atta checked two suitcases: his black rolling Travelpro and a green rolling bag that apparently belonged to Omari. The green suitcase contained innocuous items including Omari’s Saudi passport and his checkbook, an Arabic-to-English dictionary, three English grammar books, a handkerchief, a twenty-dollar bill, Brylcreem antidandruff hair treatment, and a bottle of perfume.

At the Portland ticket counter, Atta asked an agent for his boarding pass for their next flight, departing Boston: American Flight 11. The agent told Atta he’d have to check in a second time when he reached Logan. Atta clenched his jaw and appeared on the verge of anger. He told the agent that he’d been assured he’d have “one-step check-in.” The agent didn’t budge or rise to Atta’s hostility. He simply told Atta that he’d better hurry if he didn’t want to miss the flight. Although Atta still looked cross, he and Omari left the ticket counter for the Portland airport’s security checkpoint.

At 5:45 a.m., Atta and Omari walked without incident through the metal detector, which was calibrated to detect the amount of metal in a gun or a large knife. Their black carry-on shoulder bags traveled down the moving belt and passed cleanly through the X-ray machine. Omari also carried a smaller black case that looked like a camera bag, which also didn’t raise alarms. Atta wore a stern expression and clothes that resembled a pilot’s uniform: dark blue collared shirt and dark pants. Omari wore a cream-colored shirt and khaki pants. After clearing security, Atta and Omari sat in the last row of the small commuter jet for the short flight to Boston.

Meanwhile, Atta’s checked bags were selected for added security screening, mainly to ensure that they didn’t contain explosives. The selection was made by a program implemented in 1997 called the Computer Assisted Passenger Prescreening System, or CAPPS, which used an algorithm of classified factors, weighted by a computerized formula. The system also selected some passengers on each flight at random, to minimize complaints about discrimination based on race, ethnicity, or national origin and to prevent terrorists from learning ways to avoid being chosen. The very design of the system, which targeted only passengers who checked bags, reflected the Federal Aviation Administration’s woefully mistaken belief in the summer of 2001 that hijackings were a thing of the past and that sabotage, in the form of a bomb sneaked onto a plane in the luggage of a passenger who didn’t board, represented the greatest threat to air travel. It’s unclear what led the FAA to that conclusion, especially because sixty-four hijackings had occurred worldwide between 1996 and 2001 versus only three cases of sabotage.

The Portland jetport didn’t have explosive detection equipment, and the bags weren’t opened and searched. Under FAA security rules, the only requirement was that the bags be held off the plane until the person who had checked them boarded. After Atta boarded, the ground crew tossed his checked suitcases into the small plane’s luggage compartment.

Under previous, stricter airport security rules, abandoned by the FAA several years earlier, passengers whose bags were selected for explosive screening would also undergo a body pat-down and a thorough search of their carry-on bags. But those measures took time, and the FAA had come under harsh criticism for long airport lines, which led to costly and frustrating delays and declines in on-time arrivals. As a result, those pat-down and bag search rules were eliminated. No one patted down Atta or Omari or searched their carry-on bags.

It’s unclear what effect those added security measures might have had on Atta and Omari’s plans. During the two previous months, Atta had purchased two Swiss Army knives and a Leatherman multitool with a short knife. During his trip to Spain earlier in the summer, Atta reported to his al-Qaeda contact that he and two fellow pilot trainees, Marwan al-Shehhi and Ziad Jarrah, had been able to carry box cutters onto planes during their test flights. It’s unknown whether Atta or Omari carried those or other weapons through security in Portland or Boston on September 11, but even if they had, it might not have mattered to ground screeners. Federal rules in place in the summer of 2001 allowed airline passengers to carry knives with blades shorter than four inches. Although security screeners had discretion to confiscate short-bladed knives using “common sense,” government studies showed persistent gaps in the performance of low-wage human screeners. They worked for the airlines and consequently were encouraged to keep security lines short and fast-moving. Screeners were supposed to conduct “random and continuous” checks of carry-on bags, but in practice that rarely happened.

Gaps in airport security went deeper than screening rules and personnel. For instance, once a would-be hijacker passed the security checkpoint, he had every reason to think he was in the clear, with no worries about being confronted on a domestic flight by an armed air marshal. In 2001, the FAA employed only thirty-three such marshals, a sharp drop from the 1970s, and they were assigned exclusively to international flights considered to be high risk. That was the case despite a statement published by the FAA just eight weeks before September 11 in the Federal Register: “Terrorism can occur anytime, anywhere in the United States. Members of foreign terrorist groups, representatives from state sponsors of terrorism and radical fundamentalist elements from many nations are present in the United States. Thus, an increasing threat to civil aviation from both foreign sources and potential domestic ones exists and needs to be prevented and countered.”

THE US AIRWAYS flight from Portland landed in Boston at 6:45 a.m., leaving Atta and Omari plenty of time to catch American Flight 11 to Los Angeles, departing from Terminal B. They passed through security screening at Logan Airport, again without incident. Within minutes of arriving in Boston, Atta received a call on his cellphone from a pay phone in Logan’s nearby Terminal C, which served planes from United Airlines, among others. The caller was a key collaborator in Atta’s deadly plan.

The two men waited at Gate 32 with other passengers, but before boarding Flight 11, Atta had a strange interaction. First Officer Lynn Howland had just arrived in Boston after copiloting the red-eye flight from San Francisco on the plane that would be redesignated American Flight 11. As she walked off the 767 and entered the passenger lounge, a man she didn’t know approached her and asked if she’d be flying the plane back across the country. Based on his clothing, he looked like a pilot hoping to catch a ride to Los Angeles on an available jump seat.

“No, I just brought the aircraft in,” Howland told him.

The man abruptly turned his back and walked away. Later she identified him as Mohamed Atta.

As he boarded Flight 11, Atta asked a gate agent whether the two bags he’d checked earlier in Portland had been loaded onto the plane. Atta had reason for concern about his suitcase, especially if someone familiar with Arabic decided to search it prior to Flight 11’s takeoff. Inside his black rolling Travelpro bag was the handwritten instruction letter about how to prepare spiritually and logistically to hijack a plane. Even without knowledge of Arabic, a sharp screener might have grown suspicious when he or she noticed the videotaped lessons on flying Boeing jets, the other pilot gear, the folding knife, and the canister of “First Defense” pepper spray. To track down Atta’s bags, the gate agent called Flight 11’s ground crew chief, Donald Bennett. He reported that the two bags had arrived, but too late. His crew had already loaded and locked the big jet’s luggage compartment, and the airline’s desire for on-time departures prohibited reopening it so close to takeoff. Because the bags had previously passed through security, no one had reason to inspect them just because they arrived late. Atta and Omari’s bags got new tags, for a later flight to Los Angeles.

At 7:39 a.m., Atta and Omari stepped aboard and found seats 8D and 8G, the middle pair of Flight 11’s two-two-two business cabin seat configuration.

Already seated were Saudi Arabian brothers Wail and Waleed al-Shehri, in seats 2A and 2B, in the first row of first class. The plane didn’t have a Row 1, so those seats placed them directly behind the cockpit. Their checked bags were selected for explosives screening at Logan, just as Atta’s and Omari’s had been in Portland. No explosives were found, and the bags were loaded aboard Flight 11. Under the new FAA rules, just like Atta and Omari, neither Shehri brother had to undergo an added personal screening such as a pat-down or carry-on search for weapons or contraband.

The fifth member of their group, Saudi native Satam al-Suqami, didn’t undergo added screening, either. Shortly after Atta and Omari boarded, Suqami made his way to seat 10B, on an aisle in business class.

The five men had chosen their seats aboard Flight 11 in a way that gave them access to the aisles and placed all of them close to the cockpit. By chance, Suqami’s seat in business class put him directly behind tech entrepreneur and former Israeli commando Daniel Lewin.

FLIGHT 11 HAD a capacity of 158 passengers, but as the crew prepared for takeoff, only 81 seats were filled: 9 passengers in first class, 19 in business class, and 53 in coach.

Shortly before takeoff, American Airlines flight service manager Michael Woodward walked aboard for a final check.

In first class he found Karen Martin, the Number One, or head flight attendant, who was known for running an especially tight ship. Tall and blond, forty years old and fiercely competitive, Karen was described by friends as “Type A-plus.” Nearby stood thirty-eight-year-old Barbara “Bobbi” Arestegui, the Number Five attendant, petite and patient, known for her ability to calm even the most difficult passenger.

Michael asked if they were ready to go.

“Yep, everything’s fine,” Karen Martin said. Michael spotted his friend Kathy Nicosia, the Number Two attendant, and waved.

Before he left, Michael scanned down the aisle, almost out of habit, to see if the attendants had closed all the overhead bins. As he looked through the business section, Michael locked eyes with the passenger in seat 8D. A chill passed through him, a queasy gut feeling he couldn’t quite place and couldn’t shake. Something about Mohamed Atta’s brooding look seemed wrong. But the flight was already behind schedule, and Michael wouldn’t challenge a passenger simply for glaring at him. He turned and stepped off Flight 11, and a gate agent closed the door behind him.

Buttoned up and ready to go, crew and passengers aboard Flight 11 began the usual drill: seats upright, belts fastened, tray tables secured into place, cellphones switched off. Flight attendants buckled into jump seats. Its wings loaded with fuel, the Boeing 767 rolled back from Gate 32. Inside their locked cockpit, Captain John Ogonowski and First Officer Thomas McGuinness Jr. taxied the silver jet away from the terminal.

Cleared for takeoff, they turned onto Logan’s Runway 4R and checked the wind speed and air traffic. They took flight at 7:59 a.m., becoming one of the roughly forty-five hundred passenger and general aviation planes that would be airborne all across the United States by late morning.

Moments after takeoff, the pilots made a U-turn over Boston Harbor and pointed the plane west, flying through clear skies several miles above the wide asphalt ribbon of the Massachusetts Turnpike, headed toward the New York border.

DURING THE FIRST fourteen minutes of Flight 11, pilots John Ogonowski and Tom McGuinness followed instructions from an FAA air traffic controller on the ground and eased the 767 up to 26,000 feet, just under its initial cruising altitude of 29,000 feet. They spoke nineteen times with air traffic control during the first minutes of the flight, all brief, routine exchanges, automatically recorded on the ground, mostly polite hellos and instructions about headings and altitude.

The smell of fresh-brewed coffee wafted through the cabin as flight attendants waited for the pilots to switch off the Fasten Seatbelt signs. First-class passengers would soon enjoy “silver service,” provided by Karen Martin and Bobbi Arestegui, with white tablecloths for continental breakfast. Business passengers would receive similar but less fancy options from attendants Sara Low and Jean Rogér, with help from Dianne Snyder. Muffins, juice, and coffee would have to sustain passengers in coach, served by Betty Ong and Amy Sweeney, with Karen Nicosia working in the rear galley. The lone male attendant, Jeffrey Collman, would help in coach or first class as needed. Regardless of seating class, everyone on board would be invited to watch comedian Eddie Murphy talk to animals during the in-flight movie, Dr. Dolittle 2.

Fifteen minutes into the flight, shortly before 8:14 a.m., the pilots verbally confirmed a radioed request from an air traffic controller named Peter Zalewski to make a 20-degree right turn. The plane turned. Sixteen seconds later, Zalewski instructed Flight 11 to climb to a cruising altitude of 35,000 feet. The plane climbed, but only to 29,000 feet. No one in the cockpit replied to Zalewski’s order. Ten seconds passed.

Zalewski tried again. Soft-spoken, forty-three years old, after nineteen years with the FAA, Zalewski had grown accustomed to the relentless pressure of air traffic control. He spent his days in a darkened, windowless room at an FAA facility in Nashua, New Hampshire, known as Boston Center, one of twenty-two regional air traffic control centers nationwide. A simplified way to describe the job done by Zalewski and the 260 other controllers at Boston Center would be to call it flight separation, or doing everything necessary to keep airplanes a safe distance from one another. Zalewski’s assignment called for him to keep watch on his radar screen, or “scope,” for planes flying above 20,000 feet in a defined area west of Boston. When they left his geographic sector, they became another FAA controller’s responsibility.

When Zalewski received no reply from the pilots of Flight 11, he wondered if John Ogonowski and Tom McGuinness weren’t paying attention, or perhaps had a problem with the radio frequency. But he didn’t have much time to let the problem sort itself out. He began to grow concerned that, at its current altitude and position, Flight 11 might be on a collision course with planes flying inbound toward Logan. Zalewski checked his equipment, tried the radio frequency Flight 11 used when it first took off, then used an emergency frequency to hail the plane. Still he heard nothing in response.

“He’s NORDO,” Zalewski told a colleague, using controller lingo for “no radio.” That could mean trouble, but this sort of thing happened often enough that it didn’t immediately merit emergency action. Usually it resulted from distracted pilots or technical problems that could be handled with a variety of remedies. Still, silent planes represented potential problems for controllers trying to maintain separation. As one of Zalewski’s colleagues tracked Flight 11 on radar, moving other planes out of the way, Zalewski tried repeatedly to reach the Flight 11 pilots.

8:14:08 a.m.: “American Eleven, Boston.”

Fifteen seconds later, he called out the same message.

Ten seconds later: “American one-one … how do you hear me?”

Four more tries in the next two minutes. Nothing.

8:17:05 a.m.: “American Eleven, American one-one, Boston.”

At one second before 8:18 a.m., flight controllers at Boston Center heard a brief, unknown sound on the radio frequency used by Flight 11 and other nearby flights. They didn’t know where it came from, and they couldn’t be certain, but it sounded like a scream.

ZALEWSKI TRIED AGAIN. And again. And again. Still NORDO.

Another Boston Center controller asked a different American Airlines pilot, on a plane inbound to Boston from Seattle, to try to hail Flight 11, but that didn’t work, either. That pilot reported Flight 11’s failure to respond to an American Airlines dispatcher who oversaw transatlantic flights at the airline’s operations center in Fort Worth, Texas.

Then things literally took a turn for the worse.

Watching on radar, Zalewski saw Flight 11 turn abruptly to the northwest, deviating from its assigned route, heading toward Albany, New York. Again, Boston Center controllers moved away planes in its path, all the way from the ground up to 35,000 feet, just in case. This was strange and troubling, but sometimes technology failed, and still neither Zalewski nor anyone else at Boston Center considered it a reason to declare an emergency.

Then, at 8:21 a.m., twenty-two minutes after takeoff, someone in the cockpit switched off Flight 11’s transponder. Transponders were required for all planes that fly above 10,000 feet, and it would be hard to imagine any reason a pilot of Flight 11 would purposely turn it off.

Without a working transponder, controllers could still see Flight 11 as a dot on their primary radar scopes, but they could only guess at its speed. They also had no idea of its altitude, and it would be easy to “lose” the plane amid the constant ebb and flow of air traffic. Seven minutes had passed since the pilots’ last radio transmission, after which they failed to answer multiple calls from Zalewski in air traffic control and from other planes. The 767 had veered off course and failed to climb to its assigned altitude. Now it had no working transponder. All signs pointed to a crisis of electrical, mechanical, or human origin, but Zalewski still couldn’t be sure.

Zalewski turned to a Boston Center supervisor and said quietly: “Would you please come over here? I think something is seriously wrong with this plane.”

But he refused to think the worst without more evidence. When the supervisor asked if he thought the plane had been hijacked, Zalewski replied: “Absolutely not. No way.” Perhaps it was wishful thinking, but it remained possible in Zalewski’s mind that an extraordinarily rare combination of mechanical and technical problems had unleashed havoc aboard Flight 11.

Zalewski’s mindset had roots in his training. FAA controllers were taught to anticipate a specific sign or communication from a plane before declaring a hijacking in progress. A pilot might surreptitiously key in the transponder code “7500,” a universal distress signal, which would automatically flash the word HIJACK on the flight controller’s green-tinted radar screen. If the problem was mechanical, a pilot could key in “7600” for a malfunctioning transponder, or “7700” for an emergency. Otherwise, a pilot under duress could speak the seemingly innocuous word “trip” during a radio call when describing a flight’s course. An air traffic controller would instantly understand from that code word that a hijacker was on board. Boston Center had heard or seen no verbal or electronic tipoffs of a hostile takeover of Flight 11.

But all that training revolved around certain narrow expectations about how hijackings transpired, based on decades of hard-earned experience. Above all, those expectations relied on an assumption that one or both of the pilots, John Ogonowski and Tom McGuinness, would remain at the controls.

The idea that hijackers might incapacitate or eliminate the pilots and fly a Boeing 767 themselves didn’t register in the minds of Boston Center controllers. To them, the old rules still applied. Zalewski kept trying to hail the plane.

CHAPTER 3

“A BEAUTIFUL DAY TO FLY”

United Airlines Flight 175

LEE AND EUNICE HANSON SAT IN THE KITCHEN OF THEIR BARN-RED home in Easton, Connecticut, nestled on a winding country road past fruit farms and signs offering fresh eggs and fresh manure. As they ate breakfast, the Hansons talked about their bubbly two-and-a-half-year-old granddaughter, Christine, who that morning was taking her first airplane flight. Christine would be flying from Boston to Los Angeles with her parents, Peter and Sue Kim, Lee and Eunice’s son and daughter-in-law, aboard United Flight 175. Lee and Eunice spent the morning watching the clock and imagining each step along the young family’s journey, turning routine stages of the trip into exciting milestones, as only loving grandparents could.

“Boy, have they got a beautiful day to fly!”

“They’re probably in the tunnel on the way to the airport!”

“I bet they’re boarding!”

Peter, Sue, and Christine were due home in five days, after which they planned to visit Eunice and Lee for a friend’s wedding. As soon as the trio walked through the door, Lee and Eunice intended to quiz them for a minute-by-minute account of their California adventure.

The Hansons didn’t know it, but that morning’s flight path for United Flight 175 crossed the sky directly northwest of their property. If they had stepped away from breakfast, walked outside to their wooden back deck, and looked above the trees on their three sylvan acres, they might have spotted a tiny dot in the morning sky that was their family’s plane. Lee and Eunice could have waved goodbye.

UNITED FLIGHT 175 was the fraternal twin of American Flight 11: a wide-bodied Boeing 767, bound for Los Angeles, fully loaded with fuel and partly filled with passengers. The two planes left the ground fifteen minutes apart.

Minutes after its 8:14 a.m. takeoff, United Flight 175 crossed the Massachusetts border and cruised smoothly in the thin air nearly six miles above northwestern Connecticut. The blue skies ahead were “severe clear,” with unlimited visibility, as Captain Victor Saracini gazed through the cockpit window.

Saracini, a former Navy pilot, had earned a reputation as the “Forrest Gump Captain” for entertaining delayed passengers with long passages of memorized movie dialogue. Alongside him sat First Officer Michael Horrocks, a former Marine Corps pilot who called home before the flight to urge his nine-year-old daughter to get up for school. “I love you up to the moon and back,” he told her. With that, she rose from bed.

The calm in the cockpit was broken when, more than twenty minutes after takeoff, a Boston Center air traffic controller working alongside Peter Zalewski asked the Flight 175 pilots to scour the skies for the unresponsive American Flight 11. Saracini and Horrocks’s initial hunt for the American plane failed, but after a second request from air traffic control, at 8:38 a.m., the United pilots spotted the silver 767 five to ten miles away, two to three thousand feet below them.

They reported their discovery, then followed the controller’s instructions to ease their jet 30 degrees to the right, to keep away from the American Airlines plane. Whatever was happening aboard Flight 11, Boston Center controllers continued to want other planes to give it wide berth.

Saracini and Horrocks acknowledged the controller’s orders and turned Flight 175 to veer away from Flight 11. As they did, something nagged at the United pilots. They didn’t mention it to their Boston Center air traffic controllers, but shortly after taking flight, Saracini and Horrocks had heard a strange and troubling transmission on a radio frequency they shared with nearby planes, including Flight 11.

LIKE AMERICAN FLIGHT 11, United Flight 175 had lots of empty seats, flying at about one-third capacity. The fifty-six passengers were in the hands of nine crew members: the two pilots plus seven flight attendants. Perhaps the biggest difference between the United and American flights to Los Angeles on the morning of September 11 was the sounds inside the cabins: only adults boarded Flight 11, while the high-pitched voices of young children rang through United 175.

Heading home to California from a vacation on Cape Cod, three-year-old David Gamboa Brandhorst, who had a cleft chin and a deep love of Legos, sat in business class Row 8 between his fathers. To his left sat his serious “Papa,” Daniel Brandhorst, a lawyer and accountant. To his right sat his happy-go-lucky “Daddy,” Ronald Gamboa, manager of a Gap store in Santa Monica.

Nestled in 26A and 26B of coach were Ruth Clifford McCourt and her four-year-old daughter, Juliana. They’d driven to the airport and spent the previous night with Ruth’s best friend and Juliana’s godmother, Paige Farley-Hackel, who was heading to Los Angeles aboard American Flight 11. Blond and big-eyed, with porcelain skin, Juliana loved creatures large and small. She’d tell anyone who’d listen that she had recently learned to ride a pony. That day she’d smuggled aboard an unticketed passenger: a green praying mantis she’d found in the garden of her family’s Connecticut home. It resided in an ornate little cage on Juliana’s lap, her companion for when they reached California. Her mother, Ruth, a striking woman who spoke with a trace of her native Ireland, carried a special item, too: a papal coin from her wedding at the Vatican, tucked safely into her Hermès wallet.

The third little passenger of Flight 175 sat in Row 19: Lee and Eunice Hanson’s granddaughter, Christine Lee Hanson, flanked by Peter and Sue. Surrounding the Hansons and the other families on United Flight 175 were a mix of business and pleasure travelers.

The Reverend Francis Grogan, heading west to visit his sister, occupied a first-class seat with a ticket given to him by a friend. After serving as a sonar expert on a Navy destroyer during World War II, Father Grogan had traded conflict for conciliation. He spent his life as a teacher, a chaplain, and a parish priest.

In business class sat former pro hockey player Garnet “Ace” Bailey, a fierce competitor who spent ten seasons in the National Hockey League and won two Stanley Cups with the Boston Bruins in the 1970s. Hardly a delicate ice dancer, Bailey served a total of eleven hours in the penalty box during his bruising NHL career. At fifty-three, still tough, Ace Bailey had become director of scouting for the Los Angeles Kings of the NHL. He’d also cemented a relationship as friend and mentor to hockey legend Wayne Gretzky, in part by helping Gretzky to overcome his fear of flying. When Ace wasn’t on the road, he treated his wife, Kathy, and son, Todd, to a dish he called “Bailey-baisse,” a medley of sautéed meats baked with onions and tomatoes. A few rows back, in coach, sat the Kings’ amateur scout, Mark Bavis, a former hockey standout at Boston University. Training camp would soon begin, and Bailey and Bavis were needed on the ice in Los Angeles.

Retired nurse Touri Bolourchi expected to be home in Beverly Hills by the afternoon, after visiting her daughter and grandsons in Boston. An Iranian-born Muslim, she’d fled to the United States two decades earlier when the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini closed the schools. Touri added to Flight 175’s international mix: also aboard were three German businessmen, an Israeli woman, and a British man.

Among the crew members were two flight attendants in love: Michael Tarrou, a part-time musician, and Amy King, a onetime homecoming queen. They’d recently moved in together, and they had arranged to work the same flight so they could spend time together during a layover. All signs pointed to marriage.

Two other flight attendants had recently switched careers: Alfred Marchand had turned in his badge and gun as a police officer to become a flight attendant a year earlier; and Robert Fangman had begun flying for United just eight months earlier. He gave up half his income and a job he hated, as a cellphone salesman, to follow his dream of international travel.

Airplanes bring together people from different worlds and worldviews. On Flight 175, that held true for two strangers, Robert LeBlanc and Brian “Moose” Sweeney, one old, one young, one a pacifist, the other a U.S. Navy veteran of the Iraq War who considered himself a warrior and imagined himself to be the descendant of Vikings. The two men sat in window seats on opposite sides of the coach cabin.

THE PREVIOUS DAY, with many miles ahead on a seven-hour drive, Robert LeBlanc gripped the steering wheel of his Audi sedan and prepared to pop the question. He was seventy years old, spry and fit, a snowy beard and tanned, craggy face giving him the look of an arctic explorer.

After a weekend visiting Rochester, New York, Bob and his driving companion were headed home to the little town of Lee, New Hampshire. A retired professor, Bob would be leaving before dawn the next day, September 11, for a geography conference on the West Coast. Now he’d reached a decision: he knew how he wanted to spend his remaining seasons, and with whom. He turned toward the woman he loved.

“I have a ten-year plan,” Bob said. “I know you might not be ready, but I want you with me.”

Sitting in the passenger seat, Andrea LeBlanc understood what Bob was asking. After all, she’d been married to him for twenty-eight years. Bob hoped Andrea would dramatically scale back her busy veterinary practice so they could travel the world together. Bob’s ten-year plan involved “hard” trips to developing countries at the farthest corners of the globe, after which they’d ideally spend a decade visiting the “easy places.” That is, if Andrea would agree.

Bob was asking a lot, and he knew it. Along with raising their children—two from her first marriage, three from Bob’s—Andrea’s Oyster River Veterinary Hospital had been her life’s work. Nearly fourteen years his junior, Andrea would have to choose between spending the bulk of her time with her four-legged patients or with her best friend. As they drove, Bob’s question hung in the air long enough for Andrea to consider the man she loved and the life they shared.

Born in 1930, Bob grew up in the French Canadian neighborhood of Nashua, New Hampshire, at the time a spent mill city. A restless boy, he often rode his bicycle downtown to see trains pull in from Montreal. Bob grew fascinated by why people lived where they lived, and how their physical world shaped their culture, from language to music, religion to livelihood, relationships to diet.

After high school, Bob enlisted in the Air Force. After a flirtation with geology at the University of New Hampshire, he earned a doctorate in cultural geography from the University of Minnesota. Then Bob returned to UNH as a professor and remained there for thirty-five years, until he retired in 1999. Along the way, he developed a reputation as a gifted teacher, frugal toward himself and generous toward others; a master cook who loved candlelit dinners; and a passionate traveler whose been-almost-everywhere map included Nepal, Bhutan, China, Morocco, Peru, South Africa, Botswana, Namibia, and Burma.

On a 1999 trip to Java, Bob led Andrea to the world’s largest Buddhist temple, called Borobudur. While he explored, Andrea set off in search of a rare bas-relief panel that depicted the Buddha among animals. Ten Muslim teenagers followed her, inching closer in the hope of practicing their English. Eager to return to quiet contemplation and her search for the sculpture, she made a suggestion.

“Go look for a man with a white beard,” Andrea told them. “That’s my husband. He’d love to talk with you.”

Forty minutes later, as she neared an exit, she heard gales of laughter: Bob was leading an impromptu class, asking questions, drawing his new friends into his sphere. Andrea snapped a photograph of the Muslim teens squeezed against a smiling Bob.

Two years earlier, in Chiapas, Mexico, they had watched as leftist Zapatista revolutionaries marched through the streets. Andrea asked Bob what drove the young men to take up arms. “When people aren’t heard long enough,” he said, “they’ll resort to violence.”

During their just-completed weekend in Rochester, Andrea and her daughter Nissa had wandered around a craft fair. Andrea said: “It’s just so strange. I cannot even imagine being any happier.”

“That is so weird,” Nissa said, stopping in her tracks. “Dad said the same thing to me last night.”

In the car, drawing closer to home, Bob waited as Andrea weighed his question about their future travels together. Reflecting on the man behind the wheel, Andrea felt that he had given her so much, asking relatively little in return. She turned to Bob with her answer: “Okay, I’ll do it.”

Bob woke before dawn to catch United Flight 175. As he left their bedroom, he promised Andrea that he’d call her that night. He put a copy of his California itinerary on the refrigerator, alongside newspaper clippings of recipes he intended to try. As he moved through the house, Bob looked sharp, his thick white hair freshly cut by Andrea the night before. On his desk were plans for no fewer than five trips, starting in ten days with leading a group of older travelers to Argentina, followed by jaunts to India and Norway.

Waiting outside at 5 a.m. to drive him to Logan Airport was Bob’s daughter Carolyn. On the way, they became so lost in conversation they almost missed the exit. Bob loved airports the way some children love construction sites. Happy, he bounded into Terminal C, holding a boarding pass for seat 16G.

ON THE OTHER side of the aisle, the self-described warrior in 15A was named Brian David “Moose” Sweeney (no relation to Flight 11 flight attendant Amy Sweeney).

Brian grew up in the little Massachusetts town of Spencer, where nothing much had happened since Elias Howe perfected the sewing machine there in 1846. He earned a football scholarship to Boston University, where opposing players noticed his bright blue eyes just before they saw stars. Known as Sweenz to his friends, Brian and a fellow lineman shared another nickname: the Twin Towers.

After college, Brian searched fruitlessly for a challenge, until he saw an air show display by F-14 fighter jets. He enlisted in the Navy and graduated at the top of his class to become a naval aviator. Brian served in the Persian Gulf War, enforcing the “no-fly zones” in Iraq, then taught at the Navy Fighter Weapons School, better known by its movie title name, Top Gun. He convinced himself that generations earlier, Norse warrior blood had mixed with his Irish heritage, so he fashioned a two-bladed battle-ax and a Viking helmet, complete with horns. He wore it on Halloween and whenever the mood struck.

While teaching at the Top Gun school, Brian twisted his neck during a flight maneuver and shattered two cervical disks, leaving him partially paralyzed while in midair. The military crash-and-burn team rushed out, but it left empty-handed when Brian somehow landed safely. Brian loved the Navy, but after surgery he faced an agonizing choice between a desk job and an honorable discharge. His commanding officer told him: “You have the heart of a warrior and the soul of a poet. You’ve proven your mettle as a warrior, now go find your spirit.” Brian stayed close to military service by working as an aeronautical systems consultant for defense contracting companies.

In 1998, Brian strolled into a snooty Philadelphia bar crawling with Wall Street types in custom suits. At six feet three and a rugged 225 pounds, wearing jeans, a denim shirt, hiking boots, and a baseball cap, Brian stood out like a linebacker among jockeys. A fit, pretty young woman named Julie spotted him from across the bar. She told her friend: “That’s the kind of guy that I can marry and sit in front of a fireplace in the Poconos with, and be happy.” The attraction was mutual.

Brian handed her a business card that read LT. BRIAN “MOOSE” SWEENEY—INSTRUCTOR, TOP GUN FIGHTER WEAPONS SCHOOL, MIRAMAR, CALIF. Julie thought it was a gag he used to impress women in bars. It was real, if somewhat dated. Julie was, in fact, impressed, and seven months later she became Mrs. Brian Sweeney.

By the summer of 2001, Brian and Julie had bought a house in Barnstable on Cape Cod, where she’d been hired as a high school health teacher. They had two dogs, and their talks about parenthood had grown more frequent. More than two years into their marriage, the twenty-nine-year-old Julie remained awestruck by her thirty-eight-year-old husband. She admired his self-confidence; she loved how this large and powerful man had a gentle voice that calmed her; she treasured the way he made her feel safe; she marveled at the practical intelligence that enabled him to build a house, while his spiritual side gave him peaceful assurance about an afterlife.

During the weeks before September 11, they’d talked about death. Brian told Julie that if he died, she should throw a party. “You celebrate life,” he said. “You invite all my friends and you drink Captain Morgan and you live. And if you find somebody, you remarry. I won’t be angry or jealous or whatever.”

Julie looked straight back at him and said: “Well, listen, if I ever die, you are not to do any of that. You are not to find anybody else.”

Brian laughed. “Someday you’ll figure that out.”

Brian traveled to California for work one week per month, regularly aboard United Flight 175. He’d normally be gone Monday through Friday, but he’d decided to extend his summer weekend and instead leave on Tuesday, September 11.

The night before the flight, they ate Chinese food, then Brian gave himself a haircut before starting to pack. Several weeks earlier, Brian found a photograph of Julie when she was five years old, with wet hair and a goofy smile. “This is the sweetest picture I’ve ever seen of you,” Brian told her when he discovered it. While Brian packed, Julie sneaked the photo into his suitcase, so he’d find it again when he reached California.

The morning of September 11, Julie drove Brian to the Cape Cod airport in Hyannis for a connecting flight to Boston. He was dressed in the same “Sweeney uniform” of jeans, denim shirt, work boots, and baseball cap he’d worn when they met. Brian kissed Julie, then surprised her with news that he’d be back a day early, so they could spend the last summer weekend together.

AMID THE FAMILIES, business travelers, and tourists were five Middle Eastern men who fit none of those categories. They selected seats almost exactly in the pattern Mohamed Atta and his four collaborators used aboard American Flight 11. Once again, the tactical arrangement placed members of their group close to the cockpit, while others could cover both aisles if anyone came forward to challenge them from the rear of the plane.

The first two to board United Flight 175 were Fayez Banihammad, of the United Arab Emirates, and Mohand al-Shehri, from Saudi Arabia, who sat in first-class seats 2A and 2B. Four weeks earlier, Banihammad had bought a multitool with a short blade, called a Stanley Two-Piece Snap-Knife Set.

Next came Marwan al-Shehhi, the native of the United Arab Emirates who’d met Atta and Jarrah in Hamburg and traveled with them to the al-Qaeda camps in Afghanistan and then to Florida for flight training. Nine months earlier, Shehhi had received his FAA commercial pilot certificate at the same flight school, on the same day, as Atta, who sometimes referred to Shehhi as his “cousin.” On the same day as Banihammad’s knife purchase, in the same city, Shehhi had bought two short-bladed knives, one called a Cliphanger Viper and the other called an Imperial Tradesman Dual Edge.

Shehhi seemed the most likely person to have made the 6:52 a.m. call to Atta’s cellphone. The call was made from Logan’s Terminal C, from a pay phone located between the security screening checkpoint and the departure gate for Flight 175. Based on location and timing, the three-minute call to Atta might have been a final confirmation that they were ready to move forward with their plan.

When he reached the plane, Shehhi sat in the middle of business class, in seat 6C, just as Atta had chosen a seat in the middle of business class on Flight 11.

The last two to board Flight 175, Ahmed al-Ghamdi and Hamza al-Ghamdi, possibly cousins, came from the same small town in Saudi Arabia. Hamza al-Ghamdi had purchased a Leatherman Wave multitool the same day and in the same city where Banihammad and Shehhi had purchased their knives. Whether they carried those particular knives aboard Flight 175 isn’t known.

Hamza al-Ghamdi apparently took to heart the instruction in the handwritten Arabic letter to “wear cologne.” Earlier that morning, his overbearing fragrance had made a lasting, unpleasant impression on the desk clerk when he checked out of the off-brand Days Hotel, a few miles from the airport. He made no better impression on the cabdriver who drove them to the airport when he left a fifteen-cent tip.

Upon their arrival at Logan’s United Airlines ticket counter shortly before 7 a.m., the Ghamdis had seemed confused. One told a customer service agent that he thought he needed to buy a ticket for the flight, not realizing that he already had one. Both had limited English skills, so they had difficulty answering standard security questions about unattended bags and dangerous items. The customer service agent repeated the questions slowly, and the Ghamdis eventually gave acceptable answers. Aboard Flight 175, the Ghamdis sat together in the last row of business class, in the center two seats, 9C and 9D.

None of the five men or their luggage was chosen by the computerized system or by airport workers for additional security screenings.

CHAPTER 4

“I THINK WE’RE BEING HIJACKED”

American Airlines Flight 11

WHEN AMERICAN FLIGHT 11 TOOK OFF, FLIGHT ATTENDANT BETTY “Bee” Ong sat buckled into a jump seat in the tail section, on the left side of the plane, ready to begin her onboard routine. From that vantage point, she had a direct view up an aisle through coach and business into first class.

Less than twenty minutes after takeoff, just as she normally would have begun serving passengers breakfast, Betty witnessed the reason why Flight 11 changed direction without authorization, why someone switched off the transponder, why the cockpit stopped communicating with air traffic controller Peter Zalewski at the FAA’s Boston Center, and why it didn’t answer calls from other planes.

At 8:19 a.m., six minutes after Flight 11 pilots John Ogonowski and Tom McGuinness stopped responding to Zalewski’s calls, Betty grabbed an AT&T telephone called an Airfone, built into the 767. Airfones were common on cross-country flights in 2001, and many planes had an Airfone, for use by passengers with credit cards, on the back of every middle seat in coach. Betty dialed a toll-free reservations number for American Airlines, a number she often used to help passengers make connecting flights. The call went through to the airline’s Southeastern Reservations Office in central North Carolina, where a reservations agent named Vanessa Minter answered.

“I think we’re being hijacked,” Betty said, her voice calm but fearful.

Vanessa Minter asked Betty to hold. She searched for an emergency button on her phone but couldn’t find one. Instead, she speed-dialed the American Airlines international resolution desk on the other side of her office and told agent Winston Sadler what Betty had said. Sadler jumped onto the call and pressed an emergency button on his phone. That allowed the airline’s call system to record about four minutes of what would be a more than twenty-five-minute call from Betty that would provide crucial information about what occurred and who was responsible. Sadler also sent an alarm that notified Nydia Gonzalez, the reservations office supervisor, who also joined the call.

“Um, the cockpit’s not answering,” Betty said. “Somebody’s stabbed in business class, and, um, I think there is Mace—that we can’t breathe. I don’t know, I think we’re getting hijacked.”

For employees of a call center who normally helped stranded travelers find new flights, Betty’s call was beyond shocking. After some confusion about who Betty was and what flight she was on, during which the airline employees asked Betty to repeat herself several times, eventually they understood that Betty was the Number Three flight attendant on American Airlines Flight 11. Once that was established, Betty stammered at times as she did her best to describe a bloody, chaotic scene.

“Our, our Number One got stabbed. Our purser is stabbed. Ah, nobody knows who stabbed who and we can’t even get up to business class right now because nobody can breathe. Our Number One is, is stabbed right now. And our Number Five. Our first-class passenger that, ah, first, ah, class galley flight attendant and our purser has been stabbed and we can’t get to the cockpit, the door won’t open. Hello?”

She remained polite and self-possessed, even as her throat tightened with fear. Betty repeated herself several more times in response to the questions of reservation office employees.

Supervisor Nydia Gonzalez asked if Betty heard any announcements from the cockpit, and Betty said there had been none.

Two minutes into Betty’s call, at 8:21 a.m., Gonzalez called Craig Marquis, the manager on duty at American Airlines’ operations control headquarters in Fort Worth, Texas, to report an emergency aboard Flight 11, with stabbings and an unresponsive cockpit.

Meanwhile, Betty turned to other flight attendants clustered around her at the back of the plane: “Can anybody get up to the cockpit? Can anybody get up to the cockpit?” Then she returned to the call: “We can’t even get into the cockpit. We don’t know who’s up there.”

At that point, reservations agent Winston Sadler displayed the widely held but tragically mistaken belief that only the airline’s pilots could fly a Boeing 767. “Well,” Sadler told Betty, “if they were shrewd”—meaning the original crew—“they would keep the door closed and …”

Betty: “I’m sorry?”

Sadler: “Well, would they not maintain a sterile cockpit?”

Betty: “I think the guys [hijackers] are up there. They might have gone there, jammed their way up there, or something. Nobody can call the cockpit. We can’t even get inside.”

Sadler went silent.

Betty: “Is anybody still there?”

Sadler: “Yes, we’re still here.”

Betty: “Okay. I’m staying on the line as well.”

Sadler: “Okay.”

Nydia Gonzalez returned to the call. After asking Betty to repeat herself several times, Gonzalez asked: “Have you guys called anyone else?”

“No,” Betty answered. “Somebody’s calling medical and we can’t get a doc—”

The tape ended, but the call continued for more than twenty minutes as Nydia Gonzalez and Vanessa Minter took notes and relayed information from Betty to Craig Marquis at the airline’s control headquarters in Fort Worth. Throughout, Gonzalez reassured Betty, urging her to stay calm and telling her she was doing a wonderful job.

“Betty, how are you holding up, honey?” Gonzalez asked. “Okay. You’re gonna be fine… . Relax, honey. Betty, Betty.”

Several times Betty reported that the plane was flying erratically, almost turning sideways.

“Please pray for us,” Betty asked. “Oh God … oh God.”

EVEN AS HIS anxiety rose about American Flight 11, Boston Center air traffic controller Peter Zalewski knew nothing about Betty Ong’s anguished, ongoing call. No one from American Airlines’ Fort Worth operations control headquarters relayed information to the FAA’s Command Center in Herndon, Virginia, to FAA headquarters in Washington, or to anyone else. As minutes passed and commandeered Flight 11 flew west across Massachusetts and over New York, communications among the airline, the FAA, and U.S. military officials were sporadic at best, incomplete or nonexistent at worst.

Adding to the stress, Zalewski couldn’t devote his entire attention to the troubled American Airlines flight. Other planes continued to take off from Logan Airport and enter Zalewski’s assigned geographic sector. One of those flights was United Airlines Flight 175. For eleven minutes, an unusually long time, Zalewski had no contact with Flight 11.

Then, at 8:24 a.m., five minutes after the start of Betty Ong’s ongoing call to American Airlines’ reservations center, Zalewski heard three strange clicks on the radio frequency assigned to Flight 11 and numerous other flights in his sector.

“Is that American Eleven, trying to call?” Zalewski asked.

Five seconds passed. Then Zalewski heard an unknown male voice with a vaguely Middle Eastern accent. Zalewski handled a great deal of international air traffic, so an Arab pilot’s voice wasn’t entirely unexpected. The unknown man’s radio message wasn’t clear, and Zalewski didn’t comprehend it.

Unknown at that point to anyone at Boston Center, the foreign-sounding man, almost spitting his words directly into the microphone, had said: “We have some planes. Just stay quiet, and we’ll be okay. We are returning to the airport.”

The comment apparently wasn’t intended for Zalewski or other FAA ground controllers. Rather, it sounded like a message from the cockpit intended to pacify Flight 11’s passengers and crew, none of whom heard it. The person in the pilot’s seat—almost certainly Mohamed Atta—keyed the mic in a way that transmitted the message to air traffic control on the ground, as well as to other planes using the same radio frequency, and not to passengers and crew in the cabin behind him. To have been heard inside the plane, the hijacker-pilot would have needed to flip a switch on the cockpit radio panel.

At a time when every piece of information counted, and every minute was crucial, the fact that Zalewski couldn’t quite hear that chilling message marked a major misfortune on a day filled with them. The first sentence of the hijackers’ first cockpit transmission at 8:24:38 a.m. not only announced the terror aboard American Flight 11, it included a seemingly unintentional warning about an unknown number of similar, related plots already in motion, but not yet activated, on other early-morning transcontinental flights. Whoever was flying Flight 11 didn’t simply say that he and his fellow hijackers had seized control of that plane. He said: “We have some planes.”

If the message had been caught immediately, the plural use of “planes” conceivably might have prompted Zalewski and other air traffic controllers to warn other pilots to enforce heightened cockpit security. Those pilots, in turn, might have told flight attendants to be on guard for trouble. But that’s a best-case scenario. It’s also possible that the comment would have been overlooked or dismissed as an empty boast or downplayed as a misstatement by a hijacker with limited English skills. There was no way to know, because Zalewski couldn’t catch it.

Zalewski answered: “And, uh, who’s trying to call me here? … American Eleven, are you trying to call?”

Seconds later, Zalewski heard another communication from the cockpit, also apparently intended for the passengers and crew of Flight 11: “Nobody move. Everything will be okay. If you try to make any moves, you will injure yourselves and the airplane. Just stay quiet.”

Zalewski heard that message loud and clear. He screamed for his supervisor, Jon Schippani: “Jon, get over here right now!”

Zalewski announced to the room of flight controllers that Flight 11 had been hijacked. Feeling ignored, as though not everyone at Boston Center appreciated the urgency, Zalewski flipped a switch to allow all the air traffic controllers around him to hear all radio communications with Flight 11. He handed off his other flights to fellow controllers. All the while, Zalewski wondered what essential information he might have missed in the first radio transmission. On the verge of panic, Zalewski turned to another Boston Center employee, a quality assurance supervisor named Bob Jones.

“Someone has to pull these fucking tapes—right now!” Zalewski told Jones.

Jones rushed to the basement to find the recording on the center’s old-fashioned reel-to-reel recording machines so he could decipher the hijacker’s first message.

Zalewski’s first thought was that the hijackers of Flight 11 might make a U-turn and return to Logan Airport, putting the plane dangerously in the path of departing westbound flights. But the radicals in the cockpit had another destination in mind.

The Boeing 767 turned sharply south over Albany, New York. Its flight path followed the Hudson River Valley in the general direction of New York City at a speed of perhaps 600 miles per hour. Even if the plane slowed somewhat, it could fly from Albany to Manhattan in as little as twenty minutes.

Between 8:25 and 8:32 a.m., Boston Center managers alerted their superiors within the FAA that American Flight 11 had been hijacked and was heading toward New York City. Zalewski felt what he could only describe as terror.

Yet just as American Airlines employees failed to immediately pass along information from Betty Ong’s call, more than twelve minutes passed before anyone at Boston Center or the FAA called the U.S. military for help.

One explanation for the delay was a hardwired belief among airline, government, and many military officials that hijackings followed a set pattern, in which military reaction time wasn’t the most important factor. The established playbook for hijackings went something like this: Driven by financial or political motives, such as seeking asylum, ransom, or the release of prisoners, hijackers took control of a passenger plane. Once in command, they used the radio to announce their intentions to government officials or media on the ground. They ordered the airline’s pilots to fly toward a new destination, using threats to passengers and crews as leverage. Eventually the hijackers ordered the pilots to land so they could refuel, escape, arrange for their demands to be met, or some combination. Under those circumstances, the appropriate, measured response from ground-based authorities was to clear other planes from the hijacked plane’s path and to seek a peaceful resolution that would protect innocent victims.

If the takeover of Flight 11 followed that “traditional” hijacking approach, a delay of a few minutes when sharing information shouldn’t have been a significant problem. There would have been plenty of time to seek military help or assistance from the FAA once the hijackers issued demands and announced a destination. But this hijacking didn’t follow “normal” rules. No demands were forthcoming, and no one in contact with Flight 11 anticipated that hijackers might kill or incapacitate the pilots and fly the plane.

Meanwhile, American Airlines employees at the airline’s control center in Texas tried multiple times, including at 8:23 a.m. and 8:25 a.m., to reach the original Flight 11 pilots. They used a dedicated messaging system that linked the ground and the cockpit, known as the Aircraft Communications Addressing and Reporting System, or ACARS.

“Plz contact Boston Center ASAP,” one ACARS message read. “They have lost radio contact and your transponder signal.”

Flight 11 didn’t reply.

AS FLIGHT 11 flew erratically through the sky, flight attendant Amy Sweeney sat in a rear jump seat next to Betty Ong. Amy had called her husband an hour earlier, upset about missing their daughter’s sendoff to kindergarten. Now she tried to call the American Airlines flight services office in Boston with horrific news.

After two failed tries, Amy sought help from fellow flight attendant Sara Low, a high-spirited, athletic young woman with a pixie haircut who’d left a job at her father’s Arkansas mining company to satisfy her desire for adventure. Sara gave Amy a calling card number that allowed her to charge the call to Sara’s parents.

On her third try, at 8:25 a.m., Amy got through to Boston and reported that someone was hurt on what she mistakenly called Flight 12, an error that Betty also made early in her call.

A manager on duty, Evelyn “Evy” Nunez, asked for more details. “What, what, what? … Who’s hurt? … What?” She got some information, but the call was cut off. Overhearing the loud conversation, flight services manager Michael Woodward asked what was happening. Nunez said she’d received a strange call about a stabbing on Flight 12.

The report was confusing, so Michael and another Boston-based American Airlines employee ran upstairs to Logan’s Terminal B gates to see if there was maybe a case of “air rage” on a parked plane, or a violent person wandering drunk in the terminal. But all was quiet, and all morning flights had already left. Then it dawned on him.

“Wait a minute,” Michael told his colleague. “Flight 12 comes in at night. It hasn’t even left Los Angeles yet.”

They rushed back to the office, where Michael learned that another emergency call had come in. This time they quickly understood that the caller was flight attendant Amy Sweeney, whom Michael had known for a decade. He’d seen off Flight 11 less than a half hour earlier, after that disturbing moment when he locked eyes with Mohamed Atta.

Michael took over the call.

“Amy, sweetie, what’s going on?” he asked.

In a tightly controlled voice, Amy answered: “Listen to me very, very carefully.”

Michael grabbed a pad of paper to take notes.

AT 8:29 A.M., a half hour after takeoff, American Flight 11 turned south-southeast, putting it more directly on a route to Manhattan. The 767 climbed to 30,400 feet. Two minutes after adjusting course, it descended to 29,000 feet.

One second before 8:34 a.m., air traffic controllers at Boston Center heard a third disturbing transmission from the cockpit, a lie apparently intended for the passengers and crew but never heard by them: “Nobody move, please. We are going back to the airport. Don’t try to make any stupid moves.”

Controllers at Boston Center fell silent. Then they decided to do something: FAA air traffic control managers called in the military.

Normally, if the system had worked as designed, top officials at the FAA in Washington would contact the Pentagon’s National Military Command Center, which in turn would call the North American Aerospace Defense Command, or NORAD, the military organization responsible for protecting the skies over the United States and Canada. NORAD, in turn, would ask approval from the Secretary of Defense to use military jets to intervene in the hijacking of a commercial passenger jet. None of that was necessarily a smooth or rapid process.

Boston Center controllers concluded that it would take too long to bob and weave through the FAA bureaucracy, to get approval from someone in the Defense Department, to scramble fighter planes to chase Flight 11. They knew it wasn’t correct protocol, but they took matters into their own hands. First, they called their colleagues at an air traffic control facility on Cape Cod and asked them to place a direct call seeking help from fighter jets stationed at Otis Air National Guard Base. Then they concluded that even that wasn’t enough. As Flight 11 streaked toward Manhattan, Boston Center air traffic controllers urgently wanted to get the military involved. At the very least, the military might have better luck tracking the hijacked plane; some Boston Center controllers knew that the military had radar that could reveal a plane’s altitude even with its transponder turned off.

They tried to call a NORAD military alert site in Atlantic City, unaware that it had been shut down as part of the post–Cold War cuts in rapid air defense. Then, at 8:37 a.m., three minutes after first seeking help through controllers on Cape Cod, a supervisor at Boston Center named Dan Bueno called the Otis Air National Guard base directly. At roughly the same time, a Boston Center air traffic controller named Joseph Cooper called NORAD’s Northeast Air Defense Sector, or NEADS, in Rome, New York. That’s where Major Kevin Nasypany had arrived earlier that morning expecting to put his team through the training exercise called Vigilant Guardian.

A few seconds before 8:38 a.m., Cooper made the first direct notification of a crisis on board American Flight 11 to the U.S. military: “[W]e have a problem here,” Cooper said. “We have a hijacked aircraft headed towards New York, and we need you guys to, we need someone to scramble some F-16s or something up there. Help us out.”

“Is this real-world, or exercise?” asked NEADS Technical Sergeant Jeremy Powell. Powell’s question reflected the fact that he knew Vigilant Guardian was planned for later in the day, and he wondered if it had begun early.

“No,” Cooper answered, “this is not an exercise, not a test.”

The air traffic controllers’ calls to the military sent the nation’s air defense system into high gear. But it did so outside of normal operating procedures, with delayed or at times nonexistent communications with the FAA, and without anything remotely resembling a well-defined response plan. Nasypany and his team at NEADS would have to rely on training and instinct, reacting moment by moment and making it up as they went along.

WHEN JOSEPH COOPER of the FAA’s Boston Center called for military help with Flight 11, Nasypany wasn’t on the NEADS Operations Floor among the radar scopes. When no one could find him, a voice boomed over the loudspeaker: “Major Nasypany, you’re needed in Ops, pronto!”

The hijacking of Flight 11 surprised America’s airline, air traffic, airport security, political, intelligence, and military communities. But it literally caught Nasypany with his pants down. Roused by the public address announcement, he zippered his flight suit and rushed from the men’s room to the war room: the NEADS Operations Floor, or Ops, a dimly lit hall with four rows of radar and communications work stations that faced several fifteen-foot wall-mounted screens. A glassed-in command area called the Battle Cab watched over the men and women scanning the electronic sky for danger.

When Nasypany reached the Ops floor, he felt annoyed by his team’s talk of a hijacking. Nasypany thought that someone had prematurely triggered the Vigilant Guardian exercise. He growled at no one in particular, “The hijack’s not supposed to be for another hour!”

Nasypany quickly discovered that the hijacking of American Airlines Flight 11 was “real-world,” and that Cooper had skipped protocol and called NEADS directly for help. Hijackings were on Nasypany’s list of potential threats, but they weren’t a top priority in his normal routine. Later, when one of his subordinates seemed on the verge of falling apart under the stress of the day’s events, Nasypany tried to lighten the mood by publicly admitting that he’d been “on the shitter” when summoned by the loudspeaker. At a more reflective moment, Nasypany confessed that he’d remember that announcement for the rest of his life.

IMMEDIATELY AFTER COOPER’S call for help, a young NEADS identification technician named Shelley Watson spoke with Boston Center’s military liaison, Colin Scoggins. Watson quizzed Scoggins for whatever information he possessed about Flight 11, a rushed conversation that revealed how little the air traffic controllers on the ground knew about what was happening in the air.

Watson: “Type of aircraft?”

Scoggins: “It’s a—American Eleven.”

Watson: “American Eleven?”

Scoggins: “Type aircraft is a 767 …”

Watson: “And tail number, do you know that?”

Scoggins: “I, I don’t know—hold on.”

Scoggins turned to air traffic supervisor Dan Bueno to ask for more information, including the number of “souls on board.” But Bueno didn’t know either.

Scoggins: “No, we—we don’t have any of that information.”

Watson: “You don’t have any of that?”

Scoggins explained that someone had turned off the cockpit transponder, so they didn’t have the usual tracking information. Boston Center could see Flight 11 only on what was called primary radar, which made it difficult to keep track of it among the constellations of radar dots representing the many planes in the sky.

Watson: “And you don’t know where he’s coming from or destination?”

Scoggins: “No idea. He took off out of Boston originally, heading for, ah, Los Angeles.”

NASYPANY QUICKLY RECEIVED authorization from his boss, Colonel Robert Marr, to prepare to launch the two F-15 fighter jets on alert at Otis on Cape Cod, roughly one hundred fifty miles from New York City.

The call from NEADS triggered a piercing klaxon alarm at Otis, and a voice blared on the public address system: “Alpha kilo one and two, battle stations.” The on-alert fighter pilots, Lieutenant Colonel Timothy Duffy and Major Daniel Nash, ran into a locker room to pull on their G-suits and grab their helmets. Then they sprinted to a Ford pickup and raced a half mile to the hangar housing their F-15s, strapped in, and waited for further orders.

At a top speed of more than twice the speed of sound, an F-15 Eagle fighter jet could reach New York from Cape Cod in ten minutes. But the F-15s from Otis were fourteen years old and loaded with extra fuel tanks, so it would take them perhaps twice as long. And they weren’t going anywhere until Duffy and Nash received orders to scramble, or launch.

If orders did come, based on expectations of a “traditional” hijacking, the fighter pilots would try to quickly locate the commandeered plane. Then they would act only as military escorts, with orders to “follow the flight, report anything unusual, and aid search and rescue in the event of an emergency.” While following the flight, Duffy and Nash would be expected to position their F-15s five miles directly behind the hijacked plane, to monitor its flight path until, presumably, the hijackers ordered the pilots to land. Under the most extreme circumstances envisioned, the fighter pilots might be ordered to fly close alongside, to force a hijacked plane to descend safely to the ground.

But with Flight 11’s transponder turned off, the F-15 pilots would have problems doing any of that. No one knew exactly where to send the fighter jets. Although military radar could track a plane with its transponder off, military air controllers needed to locate it first and mark its coordinates. As minutes ticked by, controllers working for Major Nasypany at NEADS searched their radar screens in a frustrating attempt to find the hijacked passenger jet.

Complicating matters, the FAA and NEADS used different radar setups to track planes. In key respects, they spoke what amounted to different controller languages. At one point during the search, a civilian air traffic controller from New York Center told a NEADS weapons controller that his radar showed Flight 11 “tracking coast.” To an FAA controller, the phrase described a computer projection of a flight path for a plane that didn’t appear on radar. But that wasn’t a term used by military controllers. NEADS controllers thought “tracking coast” meant that Flight 11 was flying along the East Coast.

“I don’t know where I’m scrambling these guys to,” complained Major James Fox, a NEADS weapons officer whose job was to direct the Otis fighters from the ground. “I need a direction, a destination.”

Nasypany gave Fox a general location, just north of New York City. That way, until someone located the hijacked plane, the fighter jets would be in the general vicinity of Flight 11.

Meanwhile, Colonel Marr called NORAD’s command center in Florida to speak with Major General Larry Arnold, the commanding general of the First Air Force. Marr asked permission to scramble the fighters without going through the usual complex Defense Department channels and without clear orders about how to engage the plane.

Arnold made a series of quick calculations. Hijackers had seized control of a passenger jet headed toward New York. They’d made the plane almost invisible to radar by turning off its transponder. They wouldn’t answer radio calls and showed no sign of landing safely or making demands. This didn’t seem like a traditional hijacking, though he couldn’t be sure. He wouldn’t wait to find out—they’d worry about getting permission later.

Arnold told Marr: “[G]o ahead and scramble the airplanes.”

UNDER THE HIJACKERS’ command, American Flight 11 adjusted its route again, turning more directly to the south. The plane slowed and began a sharp but controlled descent, dropping at a rate of 3,200 feet per minute.

With its transponder switched off, Flight 11 remained largely a mystery to air traffic controllers. If they could see it at all, it appeared as little more than a green blip on their screens. Trying to determine its speed and altitude, they sought help from other pilots. When Flight 11 turned to the south and began to descend, a controller from Boston Center named John Hartling called a nearby plane that had taken off from Boston minutes after Flight 11 and was headed in the same general direction. That plane was United Airlines Flight 175.

Hartling asked the United 175 pilots if they could see American Flight 11 through their cockpit windshield.

At first the sky looked empty, so Hartling asked again.

“Okay, United 175, do you have him at your twelve o’clock now, and five, ten miles [ahead]?”

“Affirmative,” answered Captain Victor Saracini. “We have him, uh, he looks, ah, about twenty, uh, yeah, about twenty-nine, twenty-eight thousand [feet].”

Hartling instructed United 175 to turn right: “I want to keep you away from this traffic.”

Saracini and his first officer, Michael Horrocks, banked the plane to the right, as told. They didn’t ask why, and Hartling didn’t tell them.

As far as anyone knew, the only action needed to keep United Flight 175 and every other plane safe would be separation—that is, steering them away from hijacked American Flight 11. No one had yet deciphered the first sentence of the hijackers’ first radio transmission from Flight 11: “We have some planes.” No one imagined that more than one flight might soon be in danger.

The concept of more than one hijacking simultaneously and in coordination wasn’t on anyone’s radar, literally or figuratively. Years had passed since the last hijacking of a U.S. air carrier, and coordinated multiple hijackings had never happened in the United States. Almost no one in the FAA, the airlines, or the military had dealt with such a scenario or considered it a likely threat. The last organized multiple hijackings anywhere in the world had occurred more than three decades earlier, in September 1970, when Palestinian militants demanding the release of prisoners in Israel seized five passenger jets bound from European cities to New York and London. They diverted three planes to a Jordanian desert and one to Cairo. The crew and passengers of the fifth jet, from the Israeli airline El Al, subdued the hijackers, killing one, and regained control of their plane. No passengers or crew members aboard those hijacked planes died.

AS FLIGHT 11 bore down on New York City, flight attendants Betty Ong and Amy Sweeney sat side by side in the back of the plane. During separate, overlapping calls, they provided a chilling account of the crisis around them. The calls alone were acts of extraordinary bravery. Flight attendants were trained to anticipate that hijackers might have “sleeper” comrades embedded among the passengers, waiting to attack anyone who posed a threat or disobeyed commands.

Just as the military operated under certain expectations about how hijackings played out, aircrews were taught that they should refrain from trying to negotiate with or overpower hijackers, to avoid making things worse. Under a program known as the Common Strategy, crews were told to focus on attempts to “resolve hijackings peacefully” and to get the plane and its passengers on the ground safely. The counterstrategy to a hijacking also called for delays, and if that didn’t work, cooperation and accommodation when necessary. In these scenarios, “suicide wasn’t in the game plan,” as one study phrased it. Neither was a hijacker piloting the plane. Further, no one considered the possibility that a hijacked airplane would attempt to disappear from radar by someone in the cockpit turning off a transponder.

Still operating under the old set of beliefs, some air traffic controllers predicted that Flight 11 would land at John F. Kennedy International Airport in Queens, New York, although at least one put his money on the plane making a run for Cuba. But the old playbook on hijackings had become dangerously obsolete. That was clear as soon as Betty Ong and Amy Sweeney revealed details of a precise, multilayered plot aboard Flight 11.

AFTER THE LAST routine contact between pilots John Ogonowski and Tom McGuinness and Boston Center’s Peter Zalewski at 8:13 a.m., Atta and his men pounced. Based on the timing, about fifteen minutes into the flight, they might have used a predetermined signal: when the pilots turned off the Fasten Seatbelt signs.

One or more of the hijackers, possibly the brothers Wail and Waleed al-Shehri, who were sitting in the first row of first class, sprayed Mace or pepper spray to create confusion and force passengers and flight attendants away from the cockpit door.

Using weapons smuggled aboard, perhaps the short-bladed knives bought in the months before September 11, they stabbed or slashed first-class flight attendants Karen Martin and Bobbi Arestegui. Amy Sweeney told Michael Woodward in Boston that Karen was critically injured and being given oxygen. Betty Ong told Nydia Gonzalez in Fort Worth that Karen was down on the floor in bad shape. Both said Bobbi Arestegui was hurt but not as seriously as Karen. They didn’t say what kind of knives or weapons the hijackers used. Neither indicated that the terrorists had guns or other weapons.

All nine flight attendants had keys to the cockpit, but it’s not clear how the hijackers gained entry—Atta and his crew might have attacked Karen and Bobbi to steal their keys, or the hijackers might have gotten into the cockpit another way. When the plane dipped and pitched erratically, Betty suspected that a hijacker was already in control. She said she thought they had “jammed the way up there.” In fact, the cockpit doors were relatively flimsy and weren’t strong enough to prevent forced entry. Another possibility was that the hijackers stabbed the first-class flight attendants to induce the pilots to open the cockpit door. Or maybe it was even simpler: In September 2001, one key opened the cockpit doors of all Boeing planes. Maybe the hijackers brought a key on board with them.

Whichever way Atta and the others gained access, no one who knew John Ogonowski, the Vietnam veteran who farmed when he wasn’t flying, or Tom McGuinness, the former Navy pilot, would believe that either went down quietly. Possible evidence of that came during Betty Ong’s call. She said she heard loud arguing after the hijackers entered the cockpit. If Ogonowski and McGuinness were in their seats, low and strapped in, they would have been at a distinct disadvantage against knife-wielding attackers coming at them from behind with the element of surprise.

As the only hijacker with pilot training, Mohamed Atta almost certainly took control of the plane after the hijackers killed or disabled the pilots. He spoke English fluently, so he likely made the radio transmissions heard by Peter Zalewski in Boston Center. It’s also possible that Atta’s seatmate, Abdulaziz al-Omari, accompanied him into the cockpit.

Betty Ong reported to Nydia Gonzalez that a passenger’s throat had been slashed and that the man appeared to be dead. On her call to Michael Woodward, Amy Sweeney said the passenger was in first class. Betty told Nydia Gonzalez the passenger’s name was “Levin or Lewis” and that he’d been seated in business class seat 9B. In her first, brief call, Amy identified the attacker as the passenger who’d been seated in 10B.

Nydia Gonzalez tried to confirm the killer’s identity. She asked Betty: “Okay, you said Tom Sukani?”—a name phonetically similar to that of “muscle” hijacker Satam al-Suqami. “Okay—okay, and he was in 10B. Okay, okay, so he’s one of the persons that are in the cockpit. And as far as weapons, all they have are just knives?”

Based on Betty and Amy’s calls, it’s possible that the brilliant computer entrepreneur and former Israeli commando Daniel Lewin saw the hijackers attack the flight attendants and heroically leapt into action. But unknown to Lewin, seated directly behind him was the fifth hijacker, Satam al-Suqami, whose name Nydia Gonzalez heard as “Tom Sukani.” In that scenario, when Lewin rose to fight back, Suqami slit his throat, making Lewin perhaps the first casualty of 9/11. Another possibility was that the hijackers had planned all along to begin the takeover by attacking crew members and at least one passenger, to frighten the rest into compliance. In that scenario, Lewin would have been an unwitting victim who happened to be sitting in the targeted seat.

Amy told Michael Woodward the three hijackers in business class were Middle Eastern and gave him their seat numbers, key pieces of evidence to identify the terrorists. Betty identified the seat numbers of the two hijackers in first class, the Shehri brothers.

Amy told Michael she saw one of the hijackers with a device with red and yellow wires that appeared to be a bomb. He wrote “#cockpit bomb” on his notepad. Betty didn’t mention a bomb, and no one knew if whatever Amy saw was real or a decoy.

On their separate calls, the two flight attendants said they didn’t know whether coach passengers fully understood the peril. Amy told Michael that she believed the coach passengers thought the problem was a routine medical emergency in the front section of the plane. First-class passengers were herded into coach, but in the uproar, it wasn’t clear whether former ballet dancer Sonia Puopolo, business consultant Richard Ross, venture capitalist David Retik, or anyone else who’d been up front mentioned the violence they’d seen.

Amy told Michael that in addition to Betty, the flight attendants who weren’t injured—Kathy Nicosia, Sara Low, Dianne Snyder, Jeffrey Collman, and Jean Rogér—kept working throughout the crisis, helping passengers and finding medical supplies.

Betty and Amy relayed all the information they could, as quickly and completely as they could, for as long as they could. At 8:43 a.m., roughly a half hour after the hijacking began, Flight 11 changed course again, to the south-southwest. The move put the Boeing 767, still heavy with fuel, on a direct course for Lower Manhattan, the heart of America’s financial community.

At the American Airlines center in Fort Worth, Nydia Gonzalez begged for information: “What’s going on, Betty? … Betty, talk to me… . Betty, are you there? … Betty?”

Betty didn’t answer.

Nydia turned to her colleagues: “Do you think we lost her? Okay, so we’ll like—we’ll stay open.”

Then Nydia Gonzalez added an unintentionally haunting coda to Betty Ong’s bravery: “We—I think we might have lost her.”

AROUND THE SAME time, Amy Sweeney told Michael Woodward: “Something is wrong. We’re in a rapid descent… . We are all over the place.” Another American Airlines employee who overheard the call said she heard Amy scream.

Michael tried his best to calm Amy. He told her to look out the window and tell him what she saw. “We are flying low,” she said. Amy told Michael she saw water and buildings. “We are flying very, very low. We are flying way too low!”

Amy paused. Powerless on the other end of the phone, Amy’s colleague and friend Michael Woodward waited, every second stretching into a lifetime. Less than an hour earlier, he’d stood inside the plane, locked eyes with Mohamed Atta, and waved goodbye to his friends.

Michael heard Amy’s last words, before the call dissolved into static: “Oh my God!—We are way too low!”

UNDER THE COMMAND and control of fanatics bent on murder and determined to commit suicide, American Airlines Flight 11 had been transformed from a passenger jet into a guided missile. Atta’s radio transmissions about returning to the airport and everything being okay were elements of a cruel ruse to pacify passengers and to prevent an uprising against his outnumbered men. He had played on old beliefs about how hijackings occurred and were usually resolved without violence. Even though his lies weren’t heard by Flight 11’s passengers, the radio calls and the hijackers’ advance training and in-flight actions revealed a carefully calibrated plan built on surprise, violence, trickery, and a studied understanding of their targets, all to achieve a barbaric goal.

The Boeing 767 that was American Airlines Flight 11 completed an unapproved, L-shaped path through bright blue skies that covered roughly three hundred miles from Boston, west to Albany, then south over the streets of Manhattan. At the last millisecond of its trip, at a speed estimated at 440 miles per hour, the silver plane’s nose touched the glass and steel of the north face of the 96th floor of the North Tower of the World Trade Center.

TJX planning manager Tara Creamer’s instructions to her husband, John, on how to care for their children would need to last a lifetime.

Cambodian farmers who relied on John Ogonowski would have to find a new teacher and patron. His wife and daughters would be set adrift without their anchor.

Amy Sweeney’s children would have to get to school, and through life, without her.

Betty Ong’s elderly friends would need new rides to doctors’ appointments. Her sister Cathie would never again hear her say “I love you lots.”

Robert Norton’s stepson would have to get married without him.

Daniel Lee’s soon-to-be-born daughter would spend her entire life without him.

Daniel Lewin’s family and his company would have to forge new paths without his genius or his guidance.

Someone else would have to find a health aide for Cora Hidalgo Holland’s mother.

Susan MacKay’s air traffic controller husband, Doug, who planned to have John Ogonowski say hi for him, would have to live with the knowledge that Susan passed through airspace over the Hudson River Valley that he normally controlled.

Dozens of children would grow up without a mother or a father, an aunt or uncle, a grandmother or grandfather. Parents would grow old without a daughter or a son; husbands, wives, and partners would be forced to carry on alone. Grief would grip untold families, friends, colleagues, and strangers, wounded by the deaths of seventy-six passengers and eleven crew members, all murdered by five al-Qaeda hijackers aboard American Airlines Flight 11.

The time of their deaths was 8:46:25 a.m.

More than six minutes later, the two F-15 fighter jets from Otis took flight. They soared south toward New York in pursuit of a passenger jet that no longer existed.

But something terrible was happening on another passenger plane also bound from Boston to Los Angeles.

CHAPTER 5

“DON’T WORRY, DAD”

United Airlines Flight 175

TWENTY-FIVE MINUTES AFTER TAKEOFF FROM LOGAN, WHILE AMERICAN Flight 11 was still airborne, United Flight 175 reached the crystal-blue skies over upstate New York.

With the passage of time and distance came a transfer of ground control from Boston Center to a similar FAA facility called New York Center, located in a sleepy suburb on Long Island. New York Center’s radar scopes covered some of the world’s busiest skies: air traffic over the New York metro area and parts of Pennsylvania.

With the handoff of the flight from Peter Zalewski in Boston Center to his colleagues in New York Center came a new radio frequency for the pilots of Flight 175. At 8:41 a.m., several minutes after being instructed to veer away from Flight 11, they used that new frequency to report the disturbing radio communication they’d heard earlier.

“Yeah. We figured we’d wait to go to your center,” said Captain Victor Saracini. “We heard a suspicious transmission on our departure out of Boston. Ah, with someone, ah, it sounded like someone keyed the mic and said, ah, ‘Everyone, ah, stay in your seats.’”

Saracini didn’t say exactly when he heard the message, and he didn’t know its source among the multiple planes that used the same frequency. The words he used didn’t precisely fit any of the three accidental transmissions believed to be from Mohamed Atta from Flight 11’s cockpit.

Saracini might have been referring to Atta’s second message: “Nobody move. Everything will be okay. If you try to make any moves, you will injure yourselves and the airplane. Just stay quiet.” But the fact that Saracini heard only one message made it more likely to have been the hijacker’s third and last transmission. Otherwise, Saracini presumably would have mentioned one or both of the earlier threatening calls. The third call began at one second before 8:34 a.m.: “Nobody move, please. We are going back to the airport. Don’t try to make any stupid moves.”

Saracini didn’t say why he waited to report the message, but one logical explanation would be that he assumed that the controllers at Boston Center already knew about it because they used the same frequency. Once Flight 175 passed to New York Center and changed radio frequencies, Saracini presumably wanted to be certain that his new ground controller knew about it, too. If so, Saracini showed good foresight: Flight 175’s air traffic controller in New York Center was Dave Bottiglia, who hadn’t yet heard anything about the chaos unfolding aboard American Flight 11 as it raced toward New York City.

“Oh, okay,” Bottiglia answered. “I’ll pass that along over here.”

Under normal circumstances, an official at the FAA would share a report of a suspicious cockpit communication with airline officials, in this case the United Airlines System Operations Control center, just outside Chicago. But no one from Boston Center or New York Center did so. Bottiglia could have remedied that, but other worries suddenly demanded his full attention.

Moments after Bottiglia heard from Saracini, another New York Center flight controller walked over and showed Bottiglia a point, or “target,” on his radar screen.

“You see this target here?” the controller asked. “This is American Eleven. Boston Center thinks it’s a hijack.”

Now Dave Bottiglia had responsibility for both American Airlines Flight 11 and United Airlines Flight 175. Having been made aware that Flight 11 was racing toward Manhattan, descending rapidly with its transponder turned off and someone in the cockpit making threats, Bottiglia did his best to keep track of the American Airlines plane.

THE FIRST OUTWARD sign of trouble aboard United Airlines Flight 175 came at 8:47 a.m., about one minute after Flight 11 hit the World Trade Center’s North Tower.

Someone in the United plane’s cockpit changed the plane’s transponder code twice within a minute. Bottiglia didn’t notice because he was furiously searching for American Flight 11, which by then no longer existed.

Three minutes later, at 8:50 a.m., the pilot of a Delta Air Lines flight radioed Bottiglia to let him know about “a lot of smoke in Lower Manhattan.” The pilot said it looked as if the World Trade Center was on fire. Bottiglia acknowledged the call as he continued to search his screen for missing Flight 11.

Meanwhile, United Flight 175 remained on a southwesterly route, crossing over New Jersey and then over Pennsylvania. At 8:51 a.m., roughly four minutes after someone switched the assigned transponder code, Bottiglia noticed the change. He radioed the plane to order the pilots to return to their proper code but received no reply.

Whoever sat at the controls of Flight 175 did something else: the pilot changed altitude without approval, climbing several thousand feet, then plunging into a steep descent.

For New York Center controllers watching on radar screens in darkened rooms many miles away, pieces of a horrifying puzzle began to fall into place. First, American Flight 11 vanished as it descended toward Manhattan, and soon after, a Delta pilot reported a fire at the World Trade Center. Now United Flight 175 had changed its altitude and transponder code. The cockpit failed to respond to radio calls shortly after Captain Victor Saracini radioed his report about the suspicious message.

Flight controllers are trained to use logic and reason and not to jump to conclusions. Dave Bottiglia felt in his gut that these abnormal events were related, though he wouldn’t yet call them elements of a coordinated, nearly simultaneous hijacking plot.

Bottiglia tried to focus his attention on United Flight 175 and, if he could find it again, American Flight 11. He began to move all other flights in his sector out of the way of Flight 175’s self-assigned path, and he continued his attempts to reach the United pilots. Five times he called them, with no reply.

His voice starting to shake, Bottiglia turned to a flight control colleague in New York Center. Bottiglia asked him to watch all the other planes in his sector: “Please just take everything and don’t ask any questions.”

AT 8:52 A.M., the phone rang in Lee and Eunice Hanson’s cozy kitchen in Easton, Connecticut. Lee answered and heard the voice of their son Peter, talking quietly, his tone somber.

“Dad, we are on the airplane. It’s being hijacked,” Peter said.

Lee couldn’t process what his son was telling him. He hoped it was a joke, like the prank call Peter made years earlier to Eunice at the conservation commission.

“What are you talking about?” Lee answered. “C’mon, don’t scare everybody.”

“No, it’s true,” Peter said. He spoke in a soft, clear voice. The longer Peter spoke, the more his father heard tremors of nerves, the clearer it became that Peter wasn’t joking.

“I think they’ve taken over the cockpit… . An attendant has been stabbed … and someone else up front may have been killed. The plane is making strange moves. Call United Airlines… . Tell them it’s Flight 175, Boston to L.A.”

Lee asked about Christine and Sue, and Peter told him they were okay. All the passengers had crowded together in the rear of the plane. “It’s very tight here, Dad.”

“I’m going to hang up,” Peter said. “Call United Airlines.”

Lee repeatedly tried the airline, but the line was busy. He called the Easton Police Department, told an officer what Peter said, and asked the officer to call United and to contact the town’s police chief. Shortly after, Lee called back to make sure the police had reached the airline. This time an officer told him: “Gee, Mr. Hanson, a plane has hit the World Trade Tower. You should turn the television on.”

Lee and Eunice turned to CNN.

His son’s voice echoed in Lee’s mind. He shared what he knew with Eunice, who could barely breathe. Lee felt an urge to call Peter on his cellphone, but he stopped himself, fearing that a ringing phone might endanger everyone on board.

Distraught, in shock and disbelief, Lee and Eunice stared at the horrendous scenes on television.

CNN ANCHOR CAROL LIN broke into the cable network’s morning news report shortly before 8:49 a.m., several minutes before the Hansons tuned in. The screen filled with horrifying images of the North Tower, its top floors engulfed in fire and smoke.

“This just in,” Lin said. “You are looking at obviously a very disturbing live shot there. That is the World Trade Center, and we have unconfirmed reports this morning that a plane has crashed into one of the towers of the World Trade Center. CNN Center right now is just beginning to work on this story, obviously calling our sources and trying to figure out exactly what happened. But clearly, something relatively devastating is happening this morning there on the south end of the island of Manhattan.”

From that moment, the global audience expanded exponentially, as seemingly everyone watching rushed to a phone to tell someone else: “Turn on CNN.”

Live on the air, Lin and her viewers heard a first-person account via telephone from CNN’s vice president of finance, Sean Murtagh, who’d been in a meeting on the 21st floor of a building facing the World Trade Center. Murtagh was conscripted by circumstance into working as a reporter: “I just witnessed a plane that appeared to be cruising at slightly lower than normal altitude over New York City, and it appears to have crashed into—I don’t know which tower it is—but it hit directly in the middle of one of the World Trade Center towers.”

Lin: “Sean, what kind of plane was it? Was it a small plane, a jet?”

Murtagh: “It was a jet. It looked like a two-engine jet, maybe a 737.”

Lin: “You are talking about a large passenger commercial jet.”

Murtagh: “A large passenger commercial jet.”

They discussed Murtagh’s location and other details. Then Lin asked a question that suggested she suspected that the crash was caused by a mechanical failure: “Did you see any smoke, any flames coming out of engines of that plane?”

“No, I did not,” Murtagh answered. “The plane just was coming in low, and the wingtips tilted back and forth, and it flattened out. It looks like it hit at a slight angle into the World Trade Center. I can see flames coming out of the side of the building, and smoke continues to billow.”

Other than the exact model of the plane, CNN immediately got the basics right about Flight 11’s crash, although they didn’t yet know the flight number or much else. But several other early media reports suggested that it might have been a small commuter plane. As every broadcast and print newsroom leapt onto the story, early speculation raged that the crash was an accident, caused by a lost or inexperienced pilot. Americans old enough to remember perhaps flashed back to July 28, 1945, when a B-25 bomber lost in morning fog crashed into the Empire State Building, killing three crew members and eleven others.

Confusion reigned in the government as well, including at the FAA and the FBI, as officials struggled to confirm that a plane had in fact hit the North Tower. Others questioned whether it wasn’t a plane at all, but a bomb more powerful than the one driven by truck into an underground World Trade Center garage in February 1993.

One example of the confusion: Around 8:55 a.m., the flight control manager at New York Center tried to notify regional FAA officials that United Flight 175 had apparently been hijacked. But the regional FAA officials refused to be disturbed. They were too busy discussing the hijacking of American Flight 11, which they didn’t realize had scythed into the North Tower almost ten minutes earlier.

During the first frenzied minutes before and after 9 a.m. on September 11, only a few people recognized the enormity of the unfolding catastrophe. Tragically, some of those who best understood key pieces of the crisis were inside American Flight 11 before it crashed and United Flight 175 as it sped toward New York City.

AT NEARLY THE same time as Peter Hanson called his parents’ Connecticut home, a telephone rang at a United Airlines facility in San Francisco where in-flight crews called to report minor maintenance problems. Flight attendants knew they could dial “f-i-x,” using the corresponding numbers on the keypad, 3-4-9, and automatically be connected to the airline’s maintenance center.

From an Airfone near the rear of Flight 175, a male flight attendant, believed to be former cellphone salesman Robert Fangman, reported details of the hijacking to a maintenance worker. The information dovetailed with the report Peter Hanson gave his father. The flight attendant said that both pilots of United Flight 175 had been killed, a flight attendant had been stabbed, and hijackers were probably flying the plane.

The unrecorded call cut off after about two minutes. The United maintenance worker and a colleague tried to recontact the flight using the ACARS digital message system linked to the cockpit: “I heard of a reported incident aboard your [aircraft],” they wrote. “Plz verify all is normal.”

They received no reply. Minutes passed before someone from the San Francisco maintenance center reported the call to United headquarters in Chicago.

Not every attempt to sound the alarm or to reach loved ones from Flight 175 proved successful. Between 8:52 a.m. and 8:59 a.m., former pro hockey player Garnet “Ace” Bailey tried four times to call his wife, Kathy, on her business and home phones. The calls dropped or didn’t connect. He never got through.

FLIGHT 175 COMPLETED a fishhook turn over Allentown, Pennsylvania, banking to the left and descending as it crossed back over New Jersey, and headed toward New York City. The pilot almost certainly was Marwan al-Shehhi, the companion of Mohamed Atta and the only one of the five Flight 175 hijackers trained to fly a passenger jet.

Nothing was safe in their path. A New York Center controller watched as the United plane turned toward a Delta 737 flying southwest at 28,000 feet.

“Traffic two o’clock! Ten miles,” the controller warned the Delta pilots. “I think he’s been hijacked. I don’t know his intentions. Take any evasive action necessary.”

The Delta flight ducked away from United 175, but soon after, the hijacked plane put itself on a collision course with a US Airways flight. An alarm sounded in the US Airways cockpit, and the pilots dived to avoid a midair crash.

AFTER DROPPING HER husband, Brian “Moose” Sweeney, at the Hyannis airport, Julie Sweeney got ready for her fifth day of work as a high school health teacher on Cape Cod. She’d already left for work when the phone rang in the home she shared with the former Navy F-14 pilot, Top Gun instructor, “Twin Tower” college football player, and costume-party Viking.

Brian’s call, at shortly before 8:59 a.m., went to their answering machine.

He spoke in a calm, serious tone, and his message echoed what he’d told Julie weeks earlier about how he wanted her to “celebrate life” if anything happened to him:

“Jules, this is Brian. Listen, I’m on an airplane that’s been hijacked. If things don’t go well, and it’s not looking good, I just want you to know I absolutely love you. I want you to do good, go have a good time. Same to my parents and everybody. And I just totally love you, and [anticipating heaven or an afterlife] I’ll see you when you get there. ’Bye, babe. Hope I’ll call you.”

Brian hung up. Then he punched in the numbers for another telephone call.

AS LOUISE SWEENEY prepared to leave home to run errands, the phone rang. She picked up to hear her son’s voice: “Mom, It’s Brian. I’m on a hijacked plane and it doesn’t look good. I called to say I love you and I love my family.”

Brian told his mother that he didn’t know who the hijackers were. Calling from the rear of the plane, he said he thought they might come back, so he might have to hang up quickly. He told her he believed that they might be flying somewhere over Ohio. Brian said he and other passengers might storm the cockpit.

Louise knew her son, and she recognized how he sounded when he became “pissed off.” He had that tone.

Before ending the call, Brian told her, “Remember Crossing Over. Don’t forget Crossing Over.”

Louise remembered, and she wouldn’t forget. As Flight 175 streamed toward New York City, descending by the second, flying erratically, the original pilots apparently dead and a flight attendant wounded, Brian tried to comfort his mother. Crossing Over was a book and television program featuring a self-professed psychic named John Edward, who claimed to communicate with the dead. Brian wanted his mother to know that somehow, someday, he would see her again.

Now Brian had to go.

“They are coming back,” he said. Brian told his mother goodbye as he hung up.

Louise Sweeney turned on the television.

AT NINE O’CLOCK, Peter Hanson called his parents’ home a second time from Flight 175.

“It’s getting bad, Dad,” Peter told his father, Lee. “A stewardess was stabbed. They seem to have knives and Mace.”

“They said they have a bomb. It’s getting very bad on the plane. Passengers are throwing up and getting sick.”

“The plane is making jerky movements. I don’t think the pilot is flying the plane. I think we are going down.”

“I think they intend to go to Chicago or someplace and fly into a building.”

Peter’s description of the hijackers’ weapons, claims, and tactics echoed the calls only minutes earlier from Betty Ong and Amy Sweeney on Flight 11.

Then, just as Brian Sweeney had tried to reassure his wife and mother, Peter Hanson sought to comfort his father: “Don’t worry, Dad. If it happens, it’ll be very fast.”

AT 9:01 A.M., as United Flight 175 rapidly descended, Peter Mulligan, a flight control manager at New York Center, told the FAA Command Center in Virginia: “We have several situations going on here. It’s escalating big, big time. We need to get the military involved with us.”

As it barreled toward the World Trade Center, already the scene of disaster from Flight 11’s crash, United Flight 175 looked as though it might hit the Statue of Liberty.

Air traffic controllers stared rapt at their screens, even as they continued to warn other nearby planes. Everything in their long years of training and experience channeled their minds toward the hope and expectation that hijacked planes would land and passengers would be held hostage until demands were met, or until the military either forced the hijackers to surrender or killed them. To the very last moments, some controllers held tight to the notion that the pilots were racing toward the nearest airport, beset by a routine mechanical or electrical emergency.

Reality overtook that fantasy.

United Airlines Flight 175 flew low and fast, banking toward the southern twin of the burning North Tower of the World Trade Center. Flight controllers, airline officials, government and military experts, and everyone else would need to accept a new script for hijackings, one that featured a multipronged murder-suicide plot designed to maximize civilian casualties and terrorize survivors through the destruction of physical and symbolic pillars of America’s power.

The evidence flashed on the air traffic controllers’ radar screens.

“No!” a New York controller shouted. “He’s not going to land. He’s going in!”

FROM THE BACK of the plane, with his wife and daughter pressed against him, Peter Hanson spoke his final words to his father: “Oh my God… . Oh my God, oh my God.”

Lee Hanson heard a woman shriek.

AT THAT MOMENT, a battalion of television and still cameras on the ground and in helicopters trained their lenses on Lower Manhattan. Every network joined CNN live on the air, yet still almost no one knew what was happening or what kind of planes were involved.

On ABC’s Good Morning America, the smoke-obscured North Tower filled the screen while hosts Diane Sawyer and Charles Gibson interviewed reporter Don Dahler on the scene. As Dahler described scores of fire crews and other first responders rushing toward the World Trade Center, a Boeing 767 zoomed into view on the right side of the screen.

At 9:03:11 a.m., Lee and Eunice Hanson, Louise Sweeney, and millions of others became witnesses to murder. They watched live on television as United Flight 175, traveling between 540 and 587 miles per hour, slammed on an angle into the 77th through 85th floors of the South Tower of the World Trade Center. A bright orange fireball exploded. The building rocked and belched smoke, glass, steel, and debris. The plane and everyone inside it disappeared forever.

In her kitchen, Eunice Hanson screamed.

In her television studio in New York, Diane Sawyer gasped, “Oh my God.”

“That looks like a second plane,” her colleague Charles Gibson said.

“That just exploded!” said reporter Don Dahler, still on the phone to the studio, his location preventing him from seeing the crash.

Gibson composed himself. On some level, every professional broadcaster feared becoming known for a histrionic narration of a terrible event, like the radio reporter who nearly fell apart while witnessing the crash of the German airship Hindenburg in 1937.

“We just saw another plane coming in from the side,” Gibson said soberly. “So this looks like it is some sort of a concerted effort to attack the World Trade Center that is under way.”

After replaying the video to be certain about what they’d seen, Gibson’s voice went slack.

“Oh, this is terrifying… . Awful.”

Sawyer spoke for Eunice and Lee Hanson, Louise Sweeney, and countless others who saw United Flight 175’s final seconds. “To watch powerless,” she said, “is a horror.”

THE TOLL WAS incalculable, just as it had been less than seventeen minutes earlier from the crash of American Flight 11. The immediate victims of United Flight 175 were two pilots, seven crew members, and fifty-one passengers, including three small children. All of them slaughtered in public view, preserved on film, by five al-Qaeda terrorists.

Two-year-old Christine Hanson and four-year-old Juliana McCourt would never visit Disneyland. Neither they nor David Gamboa-Brandhorst would know first days of school, first loves, or any other milestone, from triumph to heartbreak, of a full life. Andrea LeBlanc would never again travel the world with her gregarious, pacifist husband, Bob. Julie Sweeney wouldn’t bear children, grow old, and feel safe with her confident warrior husband, Brian.

Delayed passengers wouldn’t hear recitals of Forrest Gump dialogue from Captain Victor Saracini. First Officer Michael Horrocks’s daughter wouldn’t rise from bed with the promise that her daddy loved her to the moon. Ace Bailey and Mark Bavis would never again share their gifts with young hockey players or with their own families.

Retired nurse Touri Bolourchi, who’d fled Iran and the Ayatollah Khomeini, wouldn’t see her grandsons grow up as Americans. The Reverend Francis Grogan, who survived World War II on a Navy destroyer, would never again see his sister or comfort his flock. Flight attendants Alfred Marchand and Robert Fangman, who’d changed careers to fly, wouldn’t see the world or their loving families. Flight attendants Michael Tarrou and Amy King would never marry.

Lee and Eunice Hanson would never see Peter and Sue Kim fulfill their professional promise or expand their loving family with more children. Christine would never again visit “Namma’s house” or insist that her grandparents sing the correct words to Barney’s “I love you” song.

And still the day had just begun.

AT ALMOST PRECISELY the same time as United Flight 175 hit the South Tower, a Boston Center flight control manager named Terry Biggio reported to a New England FAA official that his team had deciphered the hijacker’s first accidental radio transmission from American Flight 11, spoken nearly forty minutes earlier.

Biggio said: “I’m gonna reconfirm with, with downstairs, but the, as far as the tape … [He] seemed to think the guy said that ‘We have planes.’ Now I don’t know if it was because it was the accent, or if there’s more than one, but I’m gonna … reconfirm that for you, and I’ll get back to you real quick. Okay?”

To be certain the message came across loud and clear, Biggio repeated himself and emphasized: “Planes, as in plural.”

Unknown to Biggio, during the previous ten minutes strange and suddenly familiar events had begun aboard a third transcontinental passenger jet.

CHAPTER 6

“THE START OF WORLD WAR III”

American Airlines Flight 77

AFTER A CELEBRATORY DINNER THE NIGHT BEFORE, BARBARA OLSON woke beside her husband, Ted, on his birthday, just as she’d planned. The lawyer, author, and conservative activist got ready for an early flight to Los Angeles, where she was to appear on that night’s edition of Politically Incorrect with Bill Maher.

Before leaving her Virginia home for Dulles International Airport, before Flight 11 or Flight 175 met their fiery ends, Barbara placed a note on Ted’s pillow: “I love you. When you read this, I will be thinking of you and I will be back on Friday.”

AS THE MORNING progressed, the defenders of American airspace were forced to rely almost as much at times on television news updates as on their radar scopes and official reports. From their limited vantage point inside the NEADS bunker in upstate New York, Major Kevin Nasypany, Colonel Robert Marr, and their team struggled to make sense of confusing, conflicting, inaccurate, and occasionally devastating information about events in New York and whether more threats loomed.

When a NEADS technician saw the burning North Tower on television shortly before nine, those images marked the first notice anyone there received about what had happened. The technician gasped, “Oh God!” Her colleague answered, “God save New York.”

A report soon reached them that the plane was a Boeing 737, perhaps as a result of the CNN broadcast that mentioned that model. Otherwise, the plane that struck the North Tower appeared to match the Boeing 767 passenger jet they’d been trying without luck to find: American Flight 11. The NEADS team still hadn’t heard about United Flight 175 or any other hijacked planes. When they confirmed that the North Tower crash involved Flight 11, that presumably would mean the end of NEADS mission. NEADS staffers asked Nasypany what he wanted to do with the two F-15s they’d scrambled from the Otis base on Cape Cod.

Unsure whether the CNN report and other information they’d received was accurate, concerned that the plane they sought was a Boeing 767, not a 737, and lacking official confirmation, Nasypany continued to play defense. “Send ’em to New York City still,” he ordered. “Continue! Go!”

A NEADS identification technician, Senior Airman Stacia Rountree, sought more information about the crashed plane from the FAA Boston Center’s military liaison, Colin Scoggins. The call initially seemed to confirm the loss of Flight 11, but soon it did the opposite, increasing confusion about which plane had struck the tower.

Scoggins: “Yeah, he crashed into the World Trade Center.”

Rountree: “That is the aircraft that crashed into the World Trade Center?”

Scoggins: “Yup. Disregard the tail number [for American Flight 11].”

Rountree: “Disregard the tail number? He did crash into the World Trade Center?”

Scoggins: “That, that’s what we believe, yes.”

Another NEADS technician interrupted, saying that the military hadn’t received official confirmation that the North Tower crash involved American Flight 11. Media reports still mentioned a small Cessna that had supposedly gotten lost over Manhattan. To top it off, American Airlines officials had yet to confirm to anyone that Flight 11 had even been hijacked, much less that it had crashed. Rountree’s supervisor, a no-nonsense master sergeant named Maureen “Mo” Dooley, took over the call.

Dooley: “We need to have—are you giving confirmation that American 11 was the one?”

Scoggins: “No, we’re not gonna confirm that at this time. We just know an aircraft crashed in and—”

On the other hand, Scoggins acknowledged, that didn’t mean they had any idea where to find American Flight 11. Dooley asked him: “[I]s anyone up there tracking primary [radar] on this guy still?”

Scoggins replied: “No. The last [radar sighting] we have was about fifteen miles east of JFK [Airport], or eight miles east of JFK was our last primary hit. He did slow down in speed. The primary that we had, it slowed down below, around to three hundred knots.”

Dooley: “And then you lost ’em?”

Scoggins: “Yeah, and then we lost ’em.”

With incomplete information, Nasypany couldn’t rule out the possibility that American Flight 11, with a hijacker at the controls, remained airborne and hiding from radar with its transponder off, somewhere over one of the most heavily populated areas of the United States. Meanwhile, Nasypany and the NEADS team didn’t learn about United Flight 175 until 9:03 a.m.

Rountree cried out: “They have a second possible hijack!”

But again, just as with Flight 11, the notification came far too late. At almost that exact moment, Flight 175 smashed into the South Tower. Colonel Marr and others at NEADS watched it live on CNN. The two F-15 fighter jets from Otis still hadn’t reached New York.

America’s air defense system couldn’t stop those crashes, but Nasypany still wanted the F-15s in the sky over New York. The United States had just experienced its first simultaneous multiple hijackings, and no one could say whether the terrorists had more planned. As he prowled the room at NEADS, bottling his frustration while he pressured, calmed, and cajoled his team, Nasypany hadn’t yet heard Mohamed Atta’s ominous statement, “We have some planes.” But he didn’t need to.

“We’ve already had two,” Nasypany thought. “Why not more?”

EARLIER THAT MORNING at Dulles International Airport outside Washington, D.C., before either Flight 11 or Flight 175 was hijacked, passengers walked calmly onto the sparsely filled American Airlines Flight 77. The plane was a Boeing 757, a single-aisle passenger jet smaller and slimmer than the wide-bodied 767, but nonetheless a large plane suited to transcontinental flights. Bound nonstop for Los Angeles, Flight 77’s fuel weighed just under 50,000 pounds, more than a fully loaded city bus.

Two Flight 77 passengers, one in first class, the other in coach, represented the two distinct worlds of Washington, D.C. One, Barbara Olson, enjoyed great celebrity and clout as a member of the capital’s ruling elite. The other embodied great possibility.

Bernard C. Brown II stepped aboard Flight 77 with a complete set of useful tools: looks, brains, charisma, an eye for sharp clothes, and a fair shot at fulfilling his dream of becoming either a professional basketball player or a scientist. But Bernard was still only eleven, which meant that his nimble mind sometimes wandered to subjects other than school.

Fifth grade had gone well, and Bernard’s parents and teachers wanted him to remain on a high-achieving trajectory at the Leckie Elementary School in the southwest corner of Washington, D.C., near what was known as Bolling Air Force Base. Some students at Leckie lived in a homeless shelter, but Bernard was among the fortunate ones: he lived in military housing with his younger sister, his mother, Sinita, and his father, Bernard Brown Sr., a chief petty officer in the Navy who worked at the Pentagon. The two men of the family were known as Big Bernard and Little Bernard.

As the new school year began, Little Bernard’s fifth-grade teacher successfully urged her best friend at Leckie, sixth-grade teacher Hilda Taylor, to pick Bernard to join her for a special treat: a four-day trip to study marine biology at a sanctuary off the California coast. A native of Sierra Leone, Hilda Taylor believed that American children needed to look beyond their borders to gain a deeper understanding of the wider world. With that goal in mind she’d become involved with the National Geographic Society, which sponsored the trip.

Two National Geographic staff members also found seats aboard Flight 77, along with two other pairs from Washington schools: teacher James Debeuneure and eleven-year-old Rodney Dickens, and teacher Sarah Clark and eleven-year-old Asia Cottom.

Bernard had been nervous about his first flight, but he felt reassured by Big Bernard, who coached his precocious son in basketball and life. For added confidence, and to stay true to his alternate career choice, Little Bernard marched down the aisle toward seat 20E wearing a new pair of Air Jordan sneakers.

BARBARA OLSON, BERNARD BROWN II, and the National Geographic group were among the fifty-eight passengers who filed through the door onto Flight 77, less than one-third the plane’s capacity. They ranged across every age, stage, and station in life.

In the seat next to Bernard was Mari-Rae Sopper, who before boarding wrote an email to family and friends with the subject line “New Job New City New State New Life.” Thirty-five years old, she’d quit working as a lawyer to head west for her dream job: women’s gymnastics coach at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Five foot two, so determined that even her mother called her bullheaded, Mari-Rae had been an All-American gymnast at Iowa State University. She upended her life and accepted the coaching job even though she knew the school intended to phase out women’s gymnastics after one year. Mari-Rae had a stubborn plan: she intended to persuade her new bosses to reverse the decision and continue the women’s gymnastics program.

Scrambling into four seats of Row 23 were economist Leslie Whittington, her husband, Charles Falkenberg, and their daughters, Zoe and Dana, about to begin a two-month adventure in Australia. An associate dean and associate professor of public policy at Georgetown University, Leslie had accepted a visiting fellowship at Australian National University in Canberra. Along with teaching, the trip would allow her to test theories for a book she was writing about women, work, and families. A computer engineer and scientist, Charles took a leave from his work developing software that organized and managed scientific data. Earlier in his career, he developed a software system for researchers in Alaska trying to measure impacts of the Exxon Valdez oil spill. At eight, Zoe was a Girl Scout, a swim team member, a ballet student, an actress in school musicals, and a devoted reader of the Harry Potter books. At three, curly-haired, irrepressible Dana found comfort in her stuffed lamb and joy in stories about princesses. (She regularly dressed as one.)

A married couple occupied the other two seats in Row 23: quiet, retired chemist Yugang Zheng and his outgoing, retired pediatrician wife, Shuying Yang. They were on their way home to China after a nearly yearlong visit with their daughter, a medical student and cancer researcher at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. They’d just returned from a week of sightseeing, hiking, and swimming in Maine and had delayed their flight to spend one more day with their daughter and her husband. As a wedding gift, they’d given the young couple a statue of the goddess of compassion, Bodhisattva Guanyin, who hears the cries of the world and brings care to those in need.

In the row in front of them, Retired Rear Admiral Wilson “Bud” Flagg and Darlene “Dee” Flagg had plans for a family gathering in California. Both sixty-two, the high school sweethearts had recently celebrated their fortieth wedding anniversary and Bud’s fortieth reunion at the U.S. Naval Academy. One story that made the rounds at the reunion explained how Bud had stopped his classmates from raiding his stash of Dee’s cookies: he substituted a batch he’d baked with laxatives. (It was a lesson he didn’t have to teach twice.) Bud served three tours as a fighter pilot in Southeast Asia during the Vietnam War. Later, he had a dual career as a pilot for American Airlines and an officer in the Naval Reserve. The Flaggs had two sons and four grandchildren, and together they ran a Virginia cattle farm.

In a window seat seven rows away sat Dr. Yeneneh Betru. He’d moved to the United States from Ethiopia as a teenager in order to fulfill a promise to his grandmother that he would become a doctor and cure whatever ailed her. Soft-spoken but determined, thirty-five years old, Yeneneh traveled throughout the United States training other doctors in the care of hospitalized patients, while spending his personal time and money assembling equipment to create the first public kidney dialysis center in Addis Ababa.

In 5B of business class sat a man known for his dapper clothes and mastery of dominoes and whist: Eddie Dillard. At fifty-four, Eddie had retired four years earlier from a career as a district manager for the tobacco company Philip Morris. Since then, he’d transformed into a savvy real estate investor. He was flying to California to work on a rental property he owned with his wife, Rosemary, an American Airlines base manager at Reagan National Airport in Washington.

In first class, newlyweds Zandra and Robert Riis Ploger III buckled into second-row seats on the first leg of a two-week honeymoon to Hawaii. Despite previous marriages and four grown children between them, Zandra and Robert acted like teenagers, holding hands and exchanging pet names: Pretty for her, Love for him. He was a systems architect at Lockheed Martin, she was a manager at IBM. Both were dedicated fans of Star Trek.

Predictably for a flight from Washington, spread throughout the cabin were passengers with connections to the government and the military. Bryan Jack was a PhD numbers cruncher for the Defense Department who’d won the department’s Exceptional Service Medal twice in the past three years. William Caswell was a physicist with a PhD from Princeton who served in the Army during Vietnam and now worked for the Navy as a civilian. Both men were on official business trips that took them away from their offices in the Pentagon.

Dr. Paul Ambrose was a fellow at the Department of Health and Human Services, on his way to California for a conference on how to prevent youth obesity; Charles Droz was a retired lieutenant commander in the Navy who’d built a career in computer technology; Dong Chul Lee spent eighteen years working for the U.S. Air Force and the National Security Agency before taking an engineering job with Boeing; consultant Richard Gabriel had lost a leg in battle during the Vietnam War; and John Yamnicky Sr. was a barrel-chested retired Navy captain who flew fighter jets in Korea and on three tours in Vietnam.

In the cockpit, Captain Charles “Chic” Burlingame formerly flew F-4 Phantom fighters as a medal-winning pilot and honors graduate of the Navy’s “Top Gun” school. Married to an American Airlines flight attendant, Chic Burlingame was an Eagle Scout, an Annapolis graduate, a father, a grandfather, and a stepfather of two. He was one day shy of fifty-two. Tucked in his wallet was a laminated prayer card from his mother’s funeral, ten months earlier, with part of a poem: “I am the soft stars that shine at night. Do not stand at my grave and cry; I am not there, I did not die.” Joining him at the controls was First Officer David Charlebois, a young pilot dedicated to his partner. Together they enjoyed their row house in Washington, D.C., and the border collie he’d rescued when it was a puppy.

Strapped into a jump seat in the back of the plane was senior flight attendant Michele Heidenberger, wife of a US Airways pilot and mother of two, who’d been flying for thirty-one years. Before takeoff she called her husband, Thomas, to make sure their fourteen-year-old son was awake and had packed a lunch for school.

Serving first class, flight attendant Renée May was an artist who knitted blankets for her friends and had recently accepted her boyfriend’s proposal. At thirty-nine, Renée had learned only a day earlier that she was seven weeks pregnant. After landing in Los Angeles, she planned to hop a quick flight to visit her parents in Las Vegas. She’d spoken with them twice in the past two days but had told them only that she had big news to share.

Also working the flight was a couple whose friends called them Kennifer. Married for eight years, flight attendants Ken and Jennifer Lewis normally flew separately, but they used their seniority to mesh their schedules so they could vacation when they reached Los Angeles, their favorite city. A magnet on their refrigerator read HAPPINESS IS BEING MARRIED TO YOUR BEST FRIEND. When they were home, in the foothills of Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains, Ken and Jennifer liked to drag lawn chairs to the end of their driveway, trailed by their five cats. As night fell, they would gaze at the stars.

ALSO ON BOARD were five young Saudi Arabian zealots who’d pledged their lives to al-Qaeda. Like their collaborators on American Flight 11 and United Flight 175, the men chose seats strategically, clustered toward the front of the plane.

Unlike their associates aboard the other two flights, three of the al-Qaeda members on American Flight 77 nearly had their plans foiled by airport security.

At 7:18 a.m., Majed Moqed and Khalid al-Mihdhar set off alarms when they walked through a Dulles Airport metal detector. Security workers sent them to a second metal detector. Mihdhar passed, but Moqed failed again. A private security officer hired by a contractor for United Airlines scanned Moqed with a metal detection wand and sent him on his way. Neither was patted down.

Almost twenty minutes later, Nawaf al-Hazmi set off alarms at both metal detectors at the same security checkpoint. Two weeks earlier, he’d purchased Leatherman multitool knives, and a security video showed that he had an unidentified item clipped onto his rear pants pocket. A security officer hand-wanded Hazmi and swiped his shoulder bag with an explosive trace detector. No one patted him down, and he walked on toward Flight 77 with his brother, Salem al-Hazmi.

All five were chosen for another security screening, three by the CAPPS computer algorithm and two, the Hazmi brothers, because an airline customer service representative judged them to be suspicious. One, apparently Salem al-Hazmi, offered an identification card without a photograph and didn’t seem to understand English. The airline worker who checked them in thought he seemed anxious or excited.

In the end, the selection of all five men for a second layer of security screening proved meaningless. Just as with their collaborators, it only meant that their checked bags were held off the plane until after they boarded.

Hani Hanjour, who’d trained as a pilot, took seat 1B in first class. Four rows back in the same cabin, in seats 5E and 5F, sat the Hazmi brothers. They were the only two passengers on Flight 77 to request special meals: the Hindu option, with no pork.

On the opposite side of the plane, in coach seat 12A sat Majed Moqed. Next to him, in 12B, was Khalid al-Mihdhar, slim and dark-haired, a man who U.S. intelligence officials had known for several years was a member of al-Qaeda, yet who traveled under his real name.

AMERICAN AIRLINES FLIGHT 77 pushed back from Dulles Gate D-26 at 8:09 a.m. It was airborne eleven minutes later.

At that moment, United Flight 175 had been in flight for six minutes, with no signs of trouble. American Flight 11 had already stopped communicating with air traffic controllers, and soon after, flight attendant Betty Ong began her distress call to American Airlines.

THREE MINUTES INTO their flight from Cape Cod to New York in pursuit of American Flight 11, Otis F-15 pilots Tim Duffy and Dan Nash learned that the World Trade Center had been struck by a plane, presumably the one they were supposed to find. They saw rising smoke from more than a hundred miles away. The clouds of smoke intensified minutes later with the strike on the South Tower.

As the fighter pilots approached a crime scene of almost unimaginable proportions, NEADS Major Kevin Nasypany ordered them to fly in a holding pattern in military-controlled airspace off Long Island. That way, they’d stay clear of scores of passenger planes that still flew nearby.

At 9:05 a.m., two minutes after the crash of United Flight 175, FAA controllers issued an order that barred all nonmilitary aircraft from taking off, landing, or flying through New York Center’s airspace until further notice. Meanwhile, Boston Center had stopped all departures from its airports. Soon after, all departures were stopped nationwide for planes heading toward or through New York or Boston airspace.

Around the same time, fearing more hijackings, the operations manager at Boston Center told the controllers he supervised to warn airborne pilots by radio to heighten security, with the aim of preventing potential intruders from gaining access to cockpits. He urged the national FAA operations center in Virginia to issue a similar cockpit safety notice nationwide, but there’s no evidence that that happened.

As the NEADS team absorbed news of the second crash into the World Trade Center, a technician uttered an offhand comment charged with insight: “This is a new type of war, that’s what it is.”

At first, almost no one could fathom the idea of terrorist hijackers who’d been trained as pilots at U.S. flight schools. Several technicians at NEADS held on to the idea that the original pilots had somehow remained at the controls, flying under duress from the terrorists and unable to use their transponders to issue an alert, or “squawk,” using the universal hijacking code 7500.

“We have smart terrorists today,” a NEADS surveillance officer said. “They’re not giving them [the pilots] a chance to squawk.”

Shortly before 9:08 a.m., five minutes after the South Tower explosion, Nasypany decided that he wanted the Otis fighter jets to be ready for whatever might come next from the terrorists. No simulations, exercises, or history had prepared any of them for this, and other than Boston Center’s unapproved calls to NEADS, the FAA still had yet to make contact with the military. Nasypany improvised.

“We need to talk to FAA,” Nasypany told his team. “We need to tell ’em if this stuff is gonna keep on going, we need to take those fighters, put ’em over Manhattan. That’s the best thing, that’s the best play right now. So, coordinate with the FAA. Tell ’em if there’s more out there, which we don’t know, let’s get ’em over Manhattan. At least we got some kind of play.”

Nasypany wanted to launch two more fighter jets, the pair of on-alert F-16s ready and waiting at Langley Air Force Base in Virginia. The fighters were part of the North Dakota Air National Guard’s 119th Fighter Wing, nicknamed the Happy Hooligans.

But Colonel Marr rejected that plan. He wanted the Langley fighters to remain on the ground, on runway alert. With only four ready-to-launch fighter jets in his arsenal, the colonel didn’t want all of them to run out of fuel at the same time. Unaware that airborne fuel tankers would have been available, Marr thought that putting the Langley fighters in the air might leave the skies relatively unprotected if something else happened in the huge area of sky that NEADS was sworn to protect.

Nasypany’s mind kept churning. Two suicide hijackers in fuel-laden jets had slammed into the North and South Towers of the World Trade Center, both of which burned on television screens all around him. They’d killed everyone on board and an unknown number of people in the buildings. Nasypany had positioned two F-15s in the sky over New York, and it remained anyone’s guess if they’d soon be chasing other hijacked planes with similar deadly intentions.

“We need to do more than fuck with this,” Nasypany declared.

Nasypany wondered aloud how he and his team would respond if the nation’s military commanders, starting with the president of the United States, gave a shoot-down order for a plane filled with civilians. He asked members of his staff how they would react to such an order. As they scrambled to absorb the moral and practical implications, Nasypany focused on the weaponry they would use, if necessary.

“My recommendation,” Nasypany told his team, “if we have to take anybody out, large aircraft, we use AIM-9s in the face.”

The AIM-9 is a short-range, air-to-air missile known as the Sidewinder, with a twenty-pound warhead and an infrared guidance system that locks onto its target. Each fully armed F-16 fighter carried six of them, while each F-15 carried two Sidewinders and two larger missiles called Sparrows.

Nasypany made the comment with the professional air of a military airman who might receive a wrenching command. Then he paused a moment, as though unsettled, and added more obliquely, “If need be …”

The potential need to shoot down a commercial airliner filled with innocent men, women, and children remained unresolved. A short time later, a female NEADS staffer said to no one in particular: “Oh God, they better call the president.”

Another staffer said: “Believe me, he knows.”

In fact, President George W. Bush had learned about the World Trade Center crashes only minutes earlier, and no discussions had yet taken place about what action the military should take if more terrorists turned passenger jets into weapons of mass destruction.

Still, at NEADS they wanted to be ready. On Nasypany’s orders, Otis F-15 fighter pilots Duffy and Nash left their holding pattern and established a CAP, or Combat Air Patrol, over Manhattan. A staffer from NEADS radioed Duffy to ask if he’d have a problem with an order to shoot down a hijacked passenger jet. Having seen the destruction already caused by suicide hijackers, Duffy answered flatly: “No.”

Nash looked down from his cramped cockpit at the burning towers. Thick black smoke spiraled upward to space. Nash thought: “That was the start of World War III.”

If Nash was correct, the next battle had already begun, and the battlefield would be Washington, D.C.

THE SKIES WERE blue, the air was smooth, and all was normal during the first half hour of American Flight 77’s voyage west.

Shortly after the flight took off from Dulles, before the hijackings of Flight 11 or Flight 175 were known beyond a tiny circle of people, an FAA flight controller at the Washington Center, Danielle O’Brien, made a routine handoff of Flight 77 to a colleague at the FAA’s Indianapolis Center. For reasons she couldn’t explain and would never fully understand, O’Brien didn’t use one of her normal sendoffs to the pilots: “Good day,” or “Have a nice flight.” Instead she told them, “Good luck.”

Indianapolis Center air traffic controllers managed separation in the airspace over 73,000 square miles of the Midwest, including parts of Kentucky, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Tennessee, Virginia, and West Virginia. When initially under the control of Indianapolis Center, Flight 77’s pilots climbed, as instructed, to 35,000 feet and turned right 10 degrees. At just before 8:51 a.m., five minutes after the crash of Flight 11, the pilots acknowledged routine navigational instructions from Indianapolis controller Chuck Thomas, an eleven-year FAA veteran who tracked the flight along with fourteen other planes in his sector.

Focused on their work, neither Thomas nor the other controllers in Indianapolis Center had seen television reports about the crash of American Flight 11. They also had no knowledge of the then ongoing crisis aboard United Flight 175.

From the perspective of Chuck Thomas and other controllers in Indianapolis Center, all of them unaware of the emerging pattern of suicide hijackings, American Flight 77 began behaving in strange and unexpected ways starting at 8:54 a.m. First, the plane made an unauthorized turn to the southwest. Three minutes later, someone turned off its transponder and the plane disappeared from Thomas’s radar screen.

Concerned, but with no reason to fear the worst, Thomas searched for Flight 77 on his screen along its projected flight path to the west and to the southwest, the direction in which he had seen it turn. Nothing.

“American Seventy-Seven, Indy,” Thomas called over the radio. He tried five more times over the next two minutes, starting at 8:56 a.m. No reply.

Thomas called American Airlines for help in contacting Flight 77 pilots Chic Burlingame and David Charlebois in the cockpit, but the airline’s dispatchers also couldn’t reach them by radio. Airline officials sent a text message to the cockpit instructing the pilots to contact Indianapolis Center air traffic controllers. That went unanswered, too.

Thomas and other controllers spread word throughout Indianapolis Center that they had lost contact with Flight 77. As a precaution, they agreed to “sterilize the airspace,” moving other planes out of the way of Flight 77’s projected westerly path. But its failure to respond and the loss of its transponder signal made the controllers doubt the plane was still airborne. Still in the dark about what had happened in New York, they suspected that Flight 77 had experienced a catastrophic electrical or mechanical failure and that the plane had crashed. Controllers tried to call the flight for several more minutes but heard only silence. They made a final radio call to Flight 77 at shortly after 9:03 a.m.—coincidentally, at almost the exact moment United Flight 175 hit the South Tower.

Meanwhile, a conference call about the hijackings of American Flight 11 and United Flight 175 among air traffic controllers in the Boston, New York, and Cleveland centers didn’t include Indianapolis Center. The reason was at once straightforward and tragically wrongheaded: no one thought a hijacked plane was headed that way, so the FAA didn’t want to distract them from their work.

At 9:08 a.m., more than twenty minutes after American Flight 11 had hit the North Tower, Indianapolis controllers remained unable to find Flight 77 on radar or raise the cockpit by radio. They called the West Virginia State Police, Air Force Search and Rescue in Langley, Virginia, and the FAA’s Great Lakes Regional Office to alert them to the possible crash of Flight 77. They considered a downed plane the most likely outcome; in an information vacuum about the other incidents, nothing of what the Indianapolis controllers saw fitted their expectations or training about a “traditional” hijacking.

But in fact, American Flight 77 was still airborne.

Someone in the cockpit had made a hairpin turn over Ohio. As a result, Indianapolis air traffic controllers were looking for the plane in exactly the wrong direction. While they searched to the west and southwest, because that’s where the plane had been heading, Flight 77 now pointed east.

Its autopilot was set for a new course: to Reagan National Airport, in the heart of Washington, D.C.

CHAPTER 7

“BEWARE ANY COCKPIT INTRUSION”

United Airlines Flight 93

UNITED AIRLINES FLIGHT ATTENDANT CEECEE LYLES’S CELLPHONE rang before 5 a.m. as she slept on the futon in her crash pad apartment in Newark, New Jersey. Only a few hours had passed since she fell asleep midconversation with her husband, Lorne. Now he called to wake her up, so she wouldn’t miss her flight. As soon as she opened her eyes, they resumed their seemingly endless, “everything and nothing” phone conversation.

As CeeCee got ready for work, she quizzed Lorne about his overnight shift as a Fort Myers, Florida, police officer. She dawdled in the bathroom, fixing her hair and perfecting her makeup before donning her navy-blue uniform. Three minutes before an airport bus made its 6:15 a.m. stop at the apartment building, a flight attendant she roomed with called out: “Girl, you’re going to miss that shuttle!”

CeeCee grabbed her bags and bolted out the door. She and Lorne kept talking on her ride to Newark International Airport, reviewing what bills and chores he should handle while she traveled. They talked until her seven o’clock briefing with fellow flight attendants at the United Airlines operations center, located beneath baggage claim in Terminal A. They resumed talking at 7:20 a.m. and continued their conversation until CeeCee reached the security checkpoint. They talked again as she walked through the terminal to United Flight 93, a Boeing 757 parked at Gate 17A.

CeeCee told Lorne she expected an easy day. The nonstop flight to San Francisco had been assigned five flight attendants, she told him, despite a sparsely filled cabin. First class would have ten passengers and coach would have only twenty-seven, which meant that four out of every five seats on Flight 93 would be empty.

Work had begun and CeeCee said goodbye. Lorne told her he loved her and to call when she landed.

THROUGHOUT THE MORNING, as minutes ticked past and the terror swelled, only the hijackers and their al-Qaeda bosses knew how many planes they intended to seize. It could be two, ten, or more. But from the terrorists’ perspective, the first hour of their attack went like clockwork: so far, they’d hijacked three planes, two of which had struck their targets in New York and the third was under their control, coursing toward Washington, D.C.

Those results were the fruits of a poisoned tree. After months of research and reconnaissance led by Mohamed Atta, the hijackers had guessed correctly about how their victims in the air and their enemies on the ground would and wouldn’t react to a hostile airborne takeover. During the first three hijackings, fifteen terrorists had used planning, training, subterfuge, and deadly violence to exploit preconceived notions and gaping weaknesses they’d identified in U.S. airline security, all in service to Osama bin Laden’s 1998 declaration of war against the United States and its people.

The hijackers on American Flight 11, United Flight 175, and American Flight 77 had boarded without incident, despite their apparent possession of short-bladed knives, not to mention previous travels and associations that should have been flaming red flags. They’d swiftly gained access to cockpits and replaced pilots with men who’d trained to fly jets expressly for the purpose of becoming martyrs. “Muscle” hijackers spread fear by attacking several crew members and passengers. They herded the rest to each plane’s rear section to keep them out of the way. Claims about bombs, whether true or (more likely) false, confused and frightened passengers and crew members into obedience, perhaps with the exception of former Israeli commando Danny Lewin on Flight 11, whose throat was apparently slashed by the hijacker who sat behind him. Announcements from terrorist pilots in the cockpits, even if not all were heard by passengers and crew members, were lies designed to trick their hostages into believing that these were “ordinary” hijackings, with political or monetary goals, and that no one else would be hurt if the terrorists were allowed to fly to their chosen destination and if authorities on the ground satisfied their demands.

During the first three flights, the tightly choreographed strategy worked. And one of the most important elements was timing.

The plan to use the hijacked planes as weapons of mass destruction depended on the hijackers’ ability to commandeer and maintain control of fuel-heavy transcontinental flights that took off within a few minutes of one another. That narrow window maximized the element of surprise, which the hijackers understood or hoped would lead to a chaotic response, too late to stop them from reaching their intended targets. Conversely, delays would increase the chance that they’d be stopped on the ground by a shutdown of air traffic, confronted in the air by fighter jets, or challenged on board by passengers and crew members who might discover that other hijackings hadn’t ended with safe landings and the release of innocents.

Just as Atta intended, American Flight 11 and United Flight 175 took off from Boston’s Logan Airport only fifteen minutes apart, at 7:59 a.m. and 8:14 a.m. respectively, each fourteen minutes after its scheduled departure time. American Flight 77 left Washington’s Dulles Airport at 8:20 a.m., ten minutes after its scheduled departure. In fact, all three planes could be described as being on schedule. Departure times typically specified when a plane was supposed to leave the gate, before taxiing and takeoff. Considering the long delays that often dogged air travel, time had been on the hijackers’ side. So far.

A fourth transcontinental flight, scheduled to depart at 8:00 a.m. from another airport in the Northeast, didn’t get off the ground as quickly. And that made all the difference.

THE PASSENGERS OF that flight, United Flight 93, swiftly boarded the lightly booked plane.

Mark “Mickey” Rothenberg always flew first class, thanks to his bulging frequent flier account from far-flung business trips. Trim, fifty-two years old, a husband and father of two, Rothenberg was a devotee of black cashmere sweaters, a pack-a-day smoker, and a math whiz. He settled into seat 5B for the first leg of a business trip to Taiwan for his import business.

Around him was a collection of strangers with a great many similarities, young and young-in-spirit men and women, many of whom had been shaped by sports in their youths and who channeled their competitive fires into successful careers.

Directly in front of Mickey sat thirty-eight-year-old Thomas E. Burnett Jr., tall and square-jawed, who’d parlayed a sharp mind and a knack for sales into a job as chief operating officer of a company that manufactured heart pumps for patients awaiting transplants. Analytical and ambitious, a former high school quarterback, Tom originally booked a later flight, but he’d switched onto Flight 93 to get home sooner to his wife, Deena, a former flight attendant, and their three young daughters.

Across the aisle in 4D was Mark Bingham, a goateed, thirty-one-year-old public relations executive. Six foot four and more than 200 pounds, Mark ran with the bulls in Pamplona and dressed as what he described as a “transvestite lumberjack” for Halloween. During college, he played on national championship rugby teams at the University of California, Berkeley. He still loved the bone-crushing game: he cofounded a gay-inclusive team called the San Francisco Fog. Mark’s toughness extended beyond the field. Six years earlier, two muggers, one with a gun, demanded cash and watches from Mark and his then partner. Mark jumped the armed mugger, who smashed him on the head with the gun, drawing blood. Mark knocked away the gun and the muggers fled. United flights felt like homecomings for Mark: his mother and his aunt were United flight attendants. Headed to California for the wedding of a fraternity brother who happened to be a Muslim, Mark overslept and nearly missed Flight 93—a kindly gate agent had opened the jetway door and let him board.

In a small-world coincidence, six rows back sat Todd Beamer, who graduated one year ahead of Mark Bingham from the same high school in Los Gatos, California. Although both were schoolboy athletes, Todd spent only his senior year there, and it’s unknown whether he and Mark knew each other at school or recognized each other on the plane. Todd had a boyish face, a warm smile, and a drive for success that made him an ace salesman for computer software maker Oracle Corp. When he wasn’t working, Todd devoted himself to teaching Sunday school, playing in a church softball league, and above all, spending time with his pregnant wife, Lisa, and their two young sons. At his church men’s group, Todd was studying a book called A Life of Integrity.

In a window seat one row back sat an affable thirty-one-year-old man with curly hair, sympathetic eyes, and the thickly muscled shoulders of a powerful athlete. Jeremy Glick worked as a sales rep for a web management company, but he looked as though he’d be more comfortable in a weight room. Jeremy carried 220 pounds on his six-foot frame and held a black belt in judo. In college, he showed up alone, without a coach or a team, to a national collegiate judo championship—and he won. Jeremy and his wife, Lyz, were high school sweethearts; she had given birth three months earlier to a daughter they named Emerson, after Jeremy’s favorite poet, Ralph Waldo Emerson. They called her Emmy. Jeremy reluctantly tore himself away from home for a business trip to California. A fire on September 10 at the Newark airport forced him to switch his plans to Flight 93.

In the next row, Louis “Joey” Nacke II packed almost 200 solid pounds onto his five-foot-nine frame. Joey had a taste for wine and cigars and sported a Superman logo tattoo on his left shoulder. At forty-two, with a new wife and two teenage sons from a previous marriage, Joey ran a distribution center for K-B Toys.

A few rows back sat Toshiya Kuge, an angular twenty-year-old who played linebacker for his college football team in his native Japan. Returning home after his second visit to the United States, Toshiya had spent two weeks sightseeing and sharpening his English language skills, part of his plan to earn a master’s degree in engineering from an American university.

Not as young as the others, William Cashman was as tough as almost any of them: at sixty, wiry and strong, he was an ironworker who’d helped to build New York’s World Trade Center. He studied martial arts and, in his youth, served as an Army paratrooper in the 101st Airborne Division. His friend Patrick “Joe” Driscoll, a retired software executive seated beside him, had spent four years on a Navy destroyer during the Korean War. Together they planned to test themselves hiking in Yosemite National Park.

Others aboard Flight 93 represented a cross-section of American life, ranging in age from twenty to seventy-nine. The oldest was Hilda Marcin, a retired bookkeeper and teacher’s aide traveling to California to move in with her daughter. Flying home after visiting friends in New Jersey, the youngest passenger was Deora Bodley, a junior at Santa Clara University who dreamed of becoming a child psychologist. U.S. Census workers Marion Britton and Waleska Martinez were heading west for a conference. Computer engineer Edward Felt was rushing to San Francisco on a last-minute business trip. Attorney and engineer Linda Gronlund and her boyfriend, computer software designer Joseph DeLuca, were going to California’s wine country to celebrate Linda’s forty-seventh birthday.

Donald and Jean Peterson, the only married couple on the plane, were, like Cashman and Driscoll, headed to Yosemite National Park, for a vacation with Jean’s parents and her brother. They originally held tickets for a later flight but arrived early at Newark and were given seats on Flight 93. A retired electric company executive, Don counseled men struggling with alcohol and drug dependency. Packed among his belongings was a Bible in which he’d tucked a handwritten list of the names of men he was praying for.

Donald Greene, an experienced pilot who worked as an executive in an aircraft instrument company, planned to join his brothers at Lake Tahoe for a hiking and biking trip. He’d packed his gear in a green duffel bag adorned with the words “Courageous Challenge.” Honor Elizabeth “Lizz” Wainio was a district manager in the retail arm of the Discovery Channel Stores, heading west on business. Andrew “Sonny” Garcia—who had worked as an air traffic controller years earlier with the California National Guard—was going home after a meeting for his industrial supply business. Richard Guadagno, a biologist who’d studied close-quarters fighting as part of his training as a federal law enforcement officer, was returning to his job as manager of the Humboldt Bay National Wildlife Refuge in Eureka, California, after celebrating his grandmother’s hundredth birthday.

At thirty-eight, expecting her first child, Lauren Grandcolas was an advertising executive and aspiring author, returning home to California from a memorial service for her grandmother. Retired bartender John Talignani was traveling west to support his family after the death of his stepson, who’d been killed in a car crash on his honeymoon. A cane and a mobility scooter hadn’t stopped Colleen Fraser from becoming a fierce advocate for the disabled and helping to draft the Americans with Disabilities Act. When Congress debated the bill, Colleen commandeered a paratransit bus and drove fellow activists to Washington to lobby senators. She was on hand when President George H. W. Bush signed the bill into law.

The thirty-seven passengers on Flight 93 would be cared for by CeeCee Lyles and four others: chief flight attendant Deborah Welsh, who loved exotic places and donated extra airline meals to homeless people in her Manhattan neighborhood; Lorraine Bay, an easygoing veteran of thirty-seven years in the sky who mentored younger flight attendants; Sandra Bradshaw, who’d cut back on her schedule to spend more time with her two toddlers, her stepdaughter, and her husband, Phil, a pilot for US Airways; and Wanda Green, who served as a deacon in her church, was a single mother to her daughter and son, and nearly thirty years earlier had become one of United’s first African American flight attendants.

Pilot Jason Dahl learned to fly at thirteen and rose swiftly at United to become a “standards” pilot who trained and tested his fellow pilots. When his son Matt’s sixth-grade class went to Washington, D.C., Jason arranged to fly the plane, to make sure they arrived safely. Whenever he flew, Jason carried a small box of rocks, a treasured keepsake from Matt. Jason planned to be home in Colorado on Friday for his wedding anniversary. He had a cascade of surprises planned for his wife, Sandy, a United flight attendant, starting with a baby grand piano programmed with their wedding song. He’d also arranged a manicure, a pedicure, and massage; after that, he planned to prepare a gourmet dinner for Sandy and sixteen of their friends. Then they’d fly to London.

Jason had never flown with his copilot, LeRoy Homer Jr., but they were cut from the same cloth. LeRoy had filled his boyhood bedroom with model planes and started flying lessons at fifteen. He had graduated from the Air Force Academy, served in Operation Desert Shield and Operation Desert Storm against Iraq, and flown humanitarian missions in Somalia. Thirty-six, soft-spoken and charming, LeRoy had served as a major in the U.S. Air Force Reserves. He traveled regularly with his wife, Melodie, a nurse he’d met through mutual friends, but they’d scaled back their adventures since the birth of their daughter, Laurel, eleven months earlier. Inscribed inside his wedding band was part of a Bible verse on life’s blessings: faith, hope, and love. The inscription was the next line, “And the greatest of these is love.”

SEATED IN FIRST class, four men from the Middle East—three from Saudi Arabia and one from Lebanon—had murder and martyrdom in mind. All four had checked out of the Newark airport’s Days Inn that morning and had passed through security without incident. The CAPPS security system selected one, Ahmed al-Haznawi, for additional screening. Following the same steps as the screeners at Logan and Dulles airports, Newark’s security staff checked his suitcase for explosives, didn’t find any, and held it off the flight until Haznawi boarded.

Ziad Jarrah, the onetime Lebanese disco habitué who became part of Atta’s extremist Hamburg crew and trained as a pilot, sat in seat 1B, closest to the cockpit.

Before boarding the plane, Jarrah made five telephone calls to Lebanon, one to France, and one to his girlfriend, Aysel Sengün, in Germany, to whom he’d sent a farewell letter and a package of mementos a day earlier. She was in the hospital after having her tonsils removed. The connection was clear, the conversation banal. Sengün heard no noises in the background, and she detected nothing strange or suspicious about the call. He asked how she was doing, then told her, “I love you.”

Sengün asked, “What’s up?” Jarrah said “I love you” again, then hung up.

Ahmed al-Haznawi sat in the last row of first class, in seat 6B, directly behind glassware importer and consultant Mickey Rothenberg. Saeed al-Ghamdi and Ahmed al-Nami sat in 3D and 3C. At least one of the four men possessed the terrorist instruction sheet that began with “The Last Night,” tucked into either his carry-on or his checked luggage. Among the commands for the last phase, once they boarded the plane, were the following:

Pray that you and all your brothers will conquer, win, and hit the target without fear. Ask Allah to bless you with martyrdom, and welcome it with planning, patience, and care… .

When the storming begins, strike like heroes who are determined not to return to this world. Glorify [Allah—that is, cry “Allah is Great”], because this cry will strike terror in the hearts of the infidels. He said, “Strike above the necks. Strike all mortals.” And know that paradise has been adorned for you with the sweetest things. The nymphs, wearing their finest, are calling out to you, “Come hither, followers of Allah!”

If the group of terrorists on United Flight 93 tried to follow the pattern of their collaborators aboard Flights 11, 175, and 77, they were clearly one hijacker short. A Saudi man who authorities later suspected was supposed to have been the twentieth hijacker had landed a month earlier at Florida’s Orlando International Airport, arriving on a flight from London. He landed with no return ticket or hotel reservations, carried $2,800 in cash and no credit cards, spoke no English, and claimed he didn’t know his next destination after he intended to spend six days in the United States. He grew angry when questioned by an alert immigrations inspector named José E. Melendez-Perez, who suspected that the man was trying to immigrate illegally. Melendez-Perez thought the Saudi fit the profile of a “hit man.” He consulted with supervisors, then forced the man onto a flight to Dubai, via London.

Waiting in vain that day at the Orlando airport was Mohamed Atta.

AT 8:00 A.M., Flight 93’s scheduled departure time, the 757 pushed back from the Newark gate, but it didn’t get far. It fell into a tarmac conga line with perhaps fifteen other planes, stopping and starting, slowly taxiing toward the runway. Passengers in first class drank juice, while those in coach went thirsty. Ten, twenty, forty minutes crawled past.

A few seconds before 8:42 a.m., pilots Jason Dahl and LeRoy Homer Jr. heard the command from the tower: “United Ninety-Three … cleared for takeoff.”

Nearly a half hour had elapsed since the start of the hijacking of American Flight 11. Betty Ong and Amy Sweeney had already called American Airlines offices in North Carolina and Boston and had provided information about the hijackers’ identities and tactics. Major Kevin Nasypany’s team at NEADS had been notified about Flight 11 five minutes earlier. The F-15s at Otis Air Force Base had been ordered to battle stations less than a minute before. The pilots of United Flight 175 had just notified air traffic control about a strange radio transmission they had heard from Flight 11.

At the World Trade Center in New York, a businessman from New Jersey named Ron Clifford straightened his yellow tie and pushed through the revolving doors leading to the lobby of the North Tower. If United Flight 93’s runway delay had lasted a little longer, the pilots, flight attendants, and passengers aboard that plane might have seen American Airlines Flight 11 zooming through cloudless blue skies toward the very tower, only fourteen miles to the northeast, where Ron awaited what he thought would be the most important meeting of his career.

It’s also possible that if Flight 93 had been delayed a bit longer, it would have been caught in a “ground stop” and would never have taken off at all.

AS UNITED FLIGHT 93 took flight and headed west, the men and women on board were in a kind of suspended animation, unaware that the world had already changed.

At 8:52 a.m., ten minutes after Flight 93 became airborne, a male flight attendant aboard United Flight 175 called the airline’s maintenance center to report the murder of both pilots, the stabbing of a flight attendant, and his belief that hijackers were flying the plane. Ten minutes passed, then a maintenance supervisor called United’s operations center in Chicago to report the hijacking of Flight 175. After initial confusion about whether the report actually involved American Flight 11, United’s managers spread word up their chain of command to United’s chief operating officer, Andy Studdert, and the company’s chief executive, James Goodwin. It took another thirty minutes to activate a crisis center at United’s Chicago headquarters.

Beginning at 9:03 a.m., several United flight dispatchers used the cockpit email system called ACARS to inform pilots that planes had crashed into the World Trade Center. But those messages didn’t include specifics about hijackings, warnings to enhance cockpit security, or suggestions about other precautions.

At 9:08 a.m., United Airlines flight dispatchers based at the company’s operations headquarters in Chicago sent messages to transcontinental planes waiting to take off, informing crew that a ground stop had been placed on commercial flights at airports around New York.

Still no one sent word to Flight 93 or other vulnerable flights already in the air.

By 9:15 a.m., as the Twin Towers burned, Flight 93 had spent more than ten minutes at its cruising altitude of 35,000 feet. Flight attendants would have begun cabin service. Pilots Jason Dahl and LeRoy Homer Jr. engaged the 757’s autopilot as they flew west over Pennsylvania. All seemed normal.

They remained oblivious to the hijackings and suicide-murder crashes of American Flight 11 and United Flight 175 by men from the Middle East who sat in first class and business, who killed passengers and crew members, who forced their way into cockpits and took control. No one told them that a hijacker on Flight 11 had said “planes,” plural. They also hadn’t been told about the disappearance of American Flight 77, which had occurred roughly twenty minutes earlier. During communications with ground controllers, the Flight 93 pilots’ biggest worry seemed to be some light chop and a headwind that might hinder their plan to make up for the ground delay and land in San Francisco close to their scheduled arrival time of 11:14 a.m.

During fourteen routine communications from FAA ground controllers in the first minutes of Flight 93’s journey, no one mentioned to Jason Dahl or LeRoy Homer Jr. the crisis affecting at least three other westbound transcontinental flights, the fighter jets patrolling the sky over New York City, or the possibility that other commercial flights might be victimized.

Then, almost simultaneously, worry struck two individuals on the ground who had personal connections to the pilots of Flight 93. Both tried to reach the men in the cockpit.

MELODIE HOMER HEARD her alarm early that morning, then fell back asleep. As always when he flew, her husband, LeRoy, had laid out his uniform the night before, with his epaulets and ID in his pockets, so he could dress silently in the bathroom without waking her. Before he left for the ninety-minute drive from their southern New Jersey home to the Newark airport, LeRoy whispered that he was leaving. He said he’d call when he landed and that he loved her.

Later that morning, after dropping off their infant daughter at a neighbor’s house, Melodie returned home and turned on the television as she made breakfast. She watched, stunned, as a plane crashed into the World Trade Center’s South Tower. As her mind reeled, through her shock Melodie vaguely heard a newscaster say something about a possible problem with air traffic control. She grabbed a sheet of paper from the refrigerator with LeRoy’s flight information and called the United Airlines flight operations office at New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport, which handled all New York–area flights for the airline. She told a receptionist that LeRoy was the first officer on Flight 93, and that she worried whether he was all right. After a short hold, the receptionist returned and assured her, “I promise you, everything is okay.”

Melodie sobbed with relief. The receptionist thoughtfully asked if she wanted to send LeRoy a message through the Aircraft Communications Addressing and Reporting System, or ACARS. Melodie took several deep breaths. Her voice cracking, she asked that the message to her husband read, “Just wanted to make sure you’re okay.”

As sent by Tara Campbell, a United flight operations service representative, the message read: “LeRoy, Melody [sic] wants to make sure you are O.K.! Send me back a message.”

Melodie’s message reached Flight 93 at 9:22 a.m., the same time as either Jason or LeRoy casually complained about the headwinds to an air traffic controller.

ACARS messages generally arrive in the cockpit in one of two ways: either an indicator light flashes MSG, to alert pilots to a digital message on their screens, or a hard copy automatically prints out at a console between the pilots’ seats. Airline dispatchers can also alert pilots with a bell that chimes when an electronic ACARS message arrives. Campbell had the ability only to send Melodie’s message to the Flight 93 cockpit printer.

Personal messages were unusual on the ACARS system, yet despite the request that he reply, LeRoy didn’t do so. It’s possible that neither he nor Jason noticed the message, as they carried out routine duties. When she didn’t hear back, Tara Campbell sent Melodie’s message to the cockpit printer a second time, and then a third. There was still no response.

There might have been a benign if multifaceted explanation why LeRoy didn’t answer: not having been warned about multiple hijackings that had begun roughly an hour earlier; unaware of the World Trade Center crashes that had begun more than a half hour earlier; uninformed about the burning towers that Melodie had seen on television; not knowing that another transcontinental flight had disappeared from radar—without all this information, it’s possible that LeRoy couldn’t imagine why his wife was worried. With blue skies ahead and a job to do, perhaps he didn’t see a reason to reply immediately.

While she waited, Melodie held tight to the receptionist’s promise that “everything is okay.”

AT NEARLY THE same time, without direction from airline officials, the FAA, or anyone else, one midlevel United Airlines employee felt stirred by the same cautious impulse that seized Melodie Homer.

At sixty-two, balding and ruddy-cheeked, a hobby sailor in his free time, Ed Ballinger had started working for United Airlines in 1958 as a teenage weather clerk. Forty-three years later, he’d risen to transcontinental dispatcher in the airline’s Chicago operations headquarters. Ballinger wasn’t scheduled to work September 11, but he owed his employer a day, so he arrived at eight o’clock Eastern time and began his shift.

Ballinger’s job at United called for him to monitor the progress of flights assigned to him, to inform pilots of safety information, and to cancel or redirect flights that he and the pilots believed couldn’t operate without undue risk. He based his decisions on a company-wide priority list called the Rule of Five: Safety, Service, Profitability, Integrity, and Responsibility to the Passenger.

When he arrived at work, Ballinger harked back to his first job at United and took note of the perfect weather across the United States for the sixteen flights he’d track. Two of those were United 175 from Boston and United 93 from Newark.

Unlike FAA air traffic controllers, Ballinger normally didn’t use radar to track his flights; he followed their progress with a computer system that anticipated where a plane presumably would be along its route based on its flight plan. He focused much of his time on reviewing preflight plans such as fuel load and flight path before approving takeoffs, while keeping track of real and potential delays. Once flights were in the air, United pilots primarily communicated with FAA controllers. Ballinger and other dispatchers couldn’t monitor radio calls between flights and the FAA, so to a large degree he remained in the dark, too.

Sometimes even Ballinger’s fellow United Airlines employees weren’t much help, either. When a flight attendant aboard Flight 175, believed to be Robert Fangman, reported the plane’s hijacking to the United maintenance center in San Francisco, roughly ten minutes passed before that information reached Ballinger in Chicago. Immediately, Ballinger sent a carefully worded, purposely vague ACARS message to the United Flight 175 cockpit: “How is the ride. Any thing [sic] dispatch can do for you.”

If Flight 175 pilots Victor Saracini and Michael Horrocks had been at the controls under duress from hijackers, they might have signaled trouble, perhaps by using the hijack code word “trip.” But based on the telephone calls from United 175’s passengers and crew, the pilots almost certainly were already dead. Either way, they would soon be. Ballinger sent that message at 9:03 a.m., at almost the precise moment that Flight 175 plowed into the South Tower.

Five minutes later, Ballinger learned about the ground stop around New York City, so he sent messages to a half dozen United planes at New York–area airports, telling them to stay put.

As information churned around United’s headquarters, Ballinger pieced together what he knew: two planes had hit the World Trade Center; Flight 175 had been hijacked; and the FAA had ordered a ground stop. The first priority on United’s Rule of Five rang clear in his mind: safety. He needed to spread the word, by alerting “his” pilots to the violent cockpit takeover tactics hijackers had used aboard Flight 175.

At 9:19 a.m., Ballinger hurriedly began to send ACARS messages to his flights, one after another, first to planes that hadn’t yet taken off, and then in order of departure time: “Beware any cockpit introusion [sic]. Two aircraft in NY, hit Trade C[e]nter Builds.” Ballinger sent the message in batches, to several flights at a time. One message went to Flight 175, which had crashed twenty minutes earlier. In the heat of the moment, Ballinger sent the message despite already knowing that Flight 175 had been hijacked; he didn’t yet know that it was the plane that had hit the South Tower.

Ballinger’s ACARS messages marked the first direct warnings of danger to planes by United Airlines or American Airlines, or from air traffic control, for that matter. To be certain that his warnings reached the pilots, Ballinger sent them as both digital messages, with a chime, and as printed-out text messages. He knew that every cockpit contained a fire ax, located behind the first officer’s seat. Ballinger expected pilots who received his message to move the hammer-sized weapon to the floor near their feet, for easy access, to defend their planes, their lives, and the innocents on board.

Shortly before he sent the warning to Flight 93, Ballinger received a happy-go-lucky ACARS message from Captain Jason Dahl: “Good morning … Nice clb [climb] outta EWR [Newark Airport].” Jason commented about the sights from the cockpit and the weather, then signed off with his initial, J.

After Ballinger began notifying his flights to guard their cockpits, United’s air traffic control coordinator sent his own message of warning to the airline’s dispatchers: “There may be [additional] hijackings in progress. You may want to advise your [flights] to stay on alert and shut down all cockpit access [inflight].” Ballinger didn’t notice the message; he was already too busy contacting his flights.

While Ballinger progressed through his list, Melodie Homer’s ACARS message reached the Flight 93 cockpit first. One minute later, at 9:23 a.m., Ballinger sent Jason Dahl and LeRoy Homer Jr. his cautionary message to “beware.”

Less than a minute later, Ballinger and other dispatchers received word from United’s chief operating officer, Andy Studdert, that “Flt 175–11 [denoting the date] BOS/LAX has been involved in an accident at New York.”

Either before they received Ballinger’s warning or before they read it, Jason Dahl or LeRoy Homer Jr. checked in with a routine altitude and weather report to an air traffic controller at the FAA’s Cleveland Center: “Morning Cleveland, United Ninety-Three with you at three-five-oh [thirty-five thousand feet], intermittent light chop.” The controller didn’t reply; he was busy rerouting planes affected by the ground stop. At 9:25 a.m., Flight 93 checked in again with Cleveland Center. This time the controller answered, but still he didn’t warn them.

One minute later, at 9:26 a.m., Ed Ballinger’s intrusion warning registered with the pilots of Flight 93. Jason Dahl’s chatty messaging tone changed. He wrote a hasty, misspelled ACARS reply: “Ed cofirm latest mssg plz—Jason.”

In a stressful atmosphere, it wouldn’t have been hard to overlook the “plz” in Jason Dahl’s reply and focus instead on the misspelled word “confirm.” That was especially true for Ballinger, as he kept track of fifteen flights after having just learned from one of United’s top officials that the sixteenth plane on his roster, United Flight 175, had crashed in New York. Without the word “plz,” the response from Flight 93 pilot Jason Dahl could easily read as a simple acknowledgment of a message received—“Ed cofirm latest mssg”—as opposed to a worried request for more information.

Ballinger didn’t immediately reply to Flight 93. In the meantime, at 9:27 a.m., the pilots responded to a routine radio call from a Cleveland air traffic controller, who told them to watch for another plane twelve miles away and two thousand feet above them.

“Negative contact,” Jason Dahl replied. “We’re looking.”

Seconds later, at 9:28 a.m., every missed opportunity, every minute of delay in the spread of information and warning, every bit of bad luck and timing, coalesced in the cockpit of United Flight 93. The terrorists’ element of surprise remained intact, and Melodie Homer’s and Ed Ballinger’s worst fears came true.

CHAPTER 8

“AMERICA IS UNDER ATTACK”

American Airlines Flight 77

EVEN AFTER TWO HIJACKED JETS STRUCK THE WORLD TRADE CENTER, even as concern mounted among Indianapolis Center controllers about strange behavior by American Airlines Flight 77, no one from the FAA informed the U.S. military that a plane that took off from Dulles Airport had stopped communicating by radio and had disappeared from radar screens after someone turned off its cockpit transponder.

Meanwhile, based on a combination of wrong and misleading information, Major Kevin Nasypany’s team at NEADS began to chase a different plane, a phantom jet that no longer existed, supposedly heading south from New York toward the nation’s capital: American Airlines Flight 11, which had crashed more than a half hour earlier.

The after-it-crashed search for American Flight 11 represented a striking illustration of the confusion and failed communication between the United States’ air traffic control system and the nation’s military during the chaotic first hour after al-Qaeda hijackers executed a plan of unanticipated complexity. Whether by design, chance, or a combination of both, the terrorists’ simultaneous multiple hijackings vividly and fatally exposed vulnerabilities of America’s national defense system on a scale unseen in the sixty years since Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor.

The boondoggle search for Flight 11 kicked into gear when NEADS Master Sergeant Maureen “Mo” Dooley fielded a call from the FAA’s Boston military liaison, Colin Scoggins. He’d just taken part in a frenzied conference call with FAA headquarters in Washington and several regional air traffic control centers about the hijackings.

During that FAA conference call, Scoggins heard someone—he wasn’t sure who—say that American Airlines Flight 11 remained aloft, flying south. If true, that meant some other plane had struck the North Tower of the World Trade Center. Scoggins consulted with a supervisor, then passed the information to Mo Dooley at NEADS in a phone call at 9:21 a.m., roughly thirty-five minutes after Flight 11 had in fact crashed.

“I just had a report that American 11 is still in the air,” Scoggins told Dooley, “and it’s on its way towards, heading toward Washington.”

Dooley: “Okay, American Eleven is still in the air?”

Scoggins: “Yes.”

Dooley: “On its way toward Washington?”

Scoggins: “That was another, it was evidently another aircraft that hit the tower. That’s the latest report we have.”

Dooley: “Okay.”

Scoggins: “I’m going to try to confirm an ID for you, but I would assume he’s somewhere over, uh, either New Jersey or somewhere farther south.”

The confusion quickly deepened.

Dooley: “Okay. So, American Eleven isn’t the hijack at all then, right?”

Scoggins: “No, he is a hijack.”

Dooley: “He, American Eleven is a hijack?”

Scoggins: “Yes.”

Dooley: “And he’s heading into Washington?”

Scoggins: “This could be a third aircraft.”

Dooley pulled away from the call and yelled to Nasypany: “Another hijack! It’s headed towards Washington!”

“Shit!” Nasypany answered. “Give me a location.”

Two hijacked planes had already crashed into buildings in New York. Hearing this new report of a possible third hijacked plane, Nasypany wanted to throw all available assets toward preventing a catastrophe in the nation’s capital.

“Okay,” he told his team, “American Airlines is still airborne—Eleven, the first guy. He’s heading towards Washington. Okay, I think we need to scramble Langley right now. And I’m, I’m gonna take the fighters from Otis and try to chase this guy down if I can find him.”

Colonel Robert Marr at NEADS approved Nasypany’s plan to launch more fighters. The two F-16s from Langley and an unarmed training jet scrambled into the air.

As they focused on an airliner that no longer existed, neither Nasypany nor anyone else in the U.S. military knew that a different disaster was developing. A third passenger jet had in fact been hijacked: American Airlines Flight 77 out of Dulles Airport.

AROUND 8:51 A.M., the five Saudi Arabian men aboard Flight 77 executed their plan. They used swift, coordinated takeover methods similar to those used during the previous half hour on Flight 11 and Flight 175.

Twenty minutes later, the phone rang in the Las Vegas home of Ron and Nancy May. Nancy was getting ready for work as an admissions clerk at a community college and she missed the call. The phone rang again a minute later, and this time Nancy May heard the voice of her flight attendant daughter, Renée. They’d last spoken two days earlier, and Renée and Ron had talked the previous day. Renée had sounded happy on both of those calls.

Now Renée sounded serious. She calmly, but erroneously, told her mother that six men had hijacked her flight and forced “us” to the rear of the plane. Renée didn’t say how she arrived at the number six, and she didn’t explain whether the people crowded together were crew members, passengers, or both. She didn’t know the fate of the pilots. Renée told her mother the flight information and gave Nancy three telephone numbers to call American Airlines.

“I love you, Mom,” Renée said. The line went dead.

Nancy yelled upstairs for Ron. Using one of the numbers from Renée, Nancy reached Patty Carson, an American Airlines flight services employee at Reagan National Airport in Washington, who had just returned to her desk from a staff lounge where she watched on television as United Flight 175 exploded into the South Tower. When Nancy relayed Renée’s hijacking message, along with Renée’s flight number and employee identification number, Patty Carson seemed confused. She told Nancy that she didn’t think the plane that struck the World Trade Center was an American Airlines jet.

“No, no,” Nancy May interrupted. “We are talking about Flight 77, in the air.” She told Carson that Renée had said “We are being hijacked and held hostage.”

Ron May took the phone and told Carson that since Renée had just called, it stood to reason that she couldn’t have been in a plane that crashed into the World Trade Center.

Carson took the Mays’ telephone number and promised to call back as soon as she knew anything. After speaking with Carson, Nancy and Ron May tried to call Renée on her cellphone but the call didn’t connect. They turned on the television, hoping for news.

When she hung up with Ron and Nancy May, Carson learned that she had to evacuate the airport, a precaution prompted by reports of hijackings. On her way out of the building, Carson described the call to a flight services manager, Toni Knisley, who called her boss, American Airlines base manager Rosemary Dillard. At first there was some confusion about which plane Renée was on. When they confirmed it was American Flight 77, Rosemary Dillard stumbled backward into a chair. That morning, she’d raced to Dulles Airport with her husband, Eddie, the sharp-dressing, dominoes-playing real estate investor who was going to California to work on a property they owned. She’d kissed him goodbye and told him to come home soon.

Eddie was aboard hijacked Flight 77.

INSIDE THE U.S. DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE building in Washington, a telephone rang in a fifth-floor office near a mural that depicted a robed figure protecting a cowering man from a lynch mob. Secretary Lori Keyton answered and heard the voice of an operator ask her to accept an emergency collect call from Barbara Olson.

Keyton accepted the charges, and Barbara calmed herself enough to choke out the words: “Can you tell Ted …”

Keyton cut her off and rushed into the ornate office of the U.S. solicitor general.

“Barbara is on the line and she’s in a panic,” Keyton told Ted Olson.

When Barbara reached him from Flight 77, Ted Olson was watching television, viewing a replay of a still unidentified passenger jet hitting the South Tower. When he heard that Barbara was on the phone, Olson’s first thought was relief. It meant that Barbara wasn’t on either of the planes that had crashed. Then he picked up the call.

“Ted,” she said, “my plane’s been hijacked.”

Barbara told him the hijackers had knives and box cutters. Olson asked if they knew that she was talking on the phone, and she answered that they didn’t. She said they’d ordered the passengers to the back of the plane. The call cut off.

Unlike callers from the previous two hijacked planes, neither Barbara Olson nor Renée May mentioned violence against the pilots or anyone else, nor the use of Mace or the threat of a bomb.

Ted Olson tried his direct line to Attorney General John Ashcroft, but Ashcroft was on a flight to Wisconsin. He called the Justice Department’s Command Center and reported the hijacking. For some unexplained reason, Olson’s call didn’t trigger notification of the U.S. military. Olson asked that a security officer come immediately to his office, to offer suggestions if Barbara called again. Before the officer arrived, the phone rang.

Barbara told Ted that “the pilot” had announced that the plane had been hijacked, but it wasn’t clear if she knew whether the speaker on the intercom was one of the hijackers or the original cockpit crew. She might have been operating under the old “rules” and believed the terrorists were forcing the legitimate pilots to do their bidding. Barbara said the plane was flying over houses. Another passenger told her they were headed northeast.

“What can I tell the pilot?” Barbara asked Ted. “What can I do? How can I stop this?”

Ted wasn’t sure how to answer. He decided that he had to tell Barbara about the other two hijackings and crashes at the World Trade Center. Flight 77 seemed bound for the same fate; the question was where the hijackers intended to crash. Barbara absorbed the news quietly and stoically, though Ted wondered if she’d been shocked into silence.

They expressed their feelings for each other. Each reassured the other that it wasn’t over yet, the plane was still aloft, and everything would work out. Even as he said the words, Ted Olson didn’t believe them. He suspected that neither did Barbara.

The call abruptly ended.

AT THAT MOMENT, no one at the FAA had any idea what was happening aboard American Flight 77, or where it was.

Shortly after nine, controllers at Indianapolis Center began spreading word that Flight 77 had disappeared from their screens. At 9:09 a.m., controllers at Indianapolis Center reported the loss of contact with the plane to the FAA regional center. Fully fifteen minutes later, a regional FAA official relayed that information to FAA headquarters in Washington.

By 9:20 a.m., after the distress calls from Renée May and Barbara Olson and nearly twenty-five minutes after someone turned off the transponder on Flight 77, Indianapolis controllers finally learned that two other passenger jets had been hijacked. At that point, they doubted their initial assumptions about a crash. They and their FAA supervisors began to consider the evidence that a third passenger plane had been hijacked.

Overall, confusion and uncertainty were almost universal during the first hour after the hijackings, extending far beyond the FAA. At 9:10 a.m., a United dispatch manager wrote in a logbook: “At that point a second aircraft had hit the WTC, but we didn’t know it was our United flight.” As late as 9:20 a.m., dispatchers from United Airlines and American Airlines were still trying to confirm whose planes had hit the World Trade Center. During one phone call, an American Airlines official said he thought both planes belonged to his airline, while a United official said he believed that the second plane was Flight 175. He reached that conclusion in part because enlarged slow-motion images on CNN showed the plane that flew into the South Tower didn’t have American Airlines’ shiny metallic skin.

In fairness to FAA and airline officials, these were extraordinarily fast-moving events for which they had never trained. Also, the officials were hamstrung by a mix of incorrect or fragmentary information, as well as by a false sense of security that developed during the years since a U.S. air carrier had been hijacked or bombed. Just four years earlier, a presidential commission on air safety chaired by Vice President Al Gore focused on the dangers of sabotage and explosives aboard commercial airplanes. It also raised the possibility that terrorists might use surface-to-air missiles, and it cited concerns about lax screening of items airline passengers might carry onto planes. The commission’s final report never mentioned a risk of suicide hijackings.

Ultimately, though, the FAA bore responsibility as the government agency with a duty to protect airline passengers from piracy and sabotage. Despite that mission, the FAA had significant gaps in domestic intelligence and multiple blind spots. Some of this was attributable to a lack of communication, and perhaps a lack of respect, from federal intelligence-gathering agencies. On September 11, 2001, the FAA’s “no-fly list” included a grand total of twelve names. By contrast, the State Department’s so-called TIPOFF terrorist watchlist included sixty thousand names. Yet the FAA’s head of civil aviation security didn’t even know that the State Department list existed. Two names on that State Department list were Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Mihdhar, both on board Flight 77. That wasn’t the only example of other federal agencies’ not sharing information about potential threats with the FAA.

Earlier in the summer, an FBI agent in Phoenix named Kenneth Williams had written a memo to his superiors in Washington expressing concern about Middle Eastern men with ties to extremists receiving flight training in the United States. Williams’s memo presciently warned about the “possibility of a coordinated effort by [O]sama bin Laden” to send would-be terrorists to U.S. flight schools to become pilots to serve al-Qaeda. Among other recommendations, he urged the FBI to monitor civil aviation schools and seek authority to obtain visa information about foreign students attending them. The FBI neither acted on the memo nor shared it with the FAA. The FBI took a similar approach in the case of a French national named Zacarias Moussaoui who’d been receiving flight training in Minneapolis. Moussaoui was arrested less than a month before September 11 for overstaying his visa, and an FBI agent concluded that he was “an Islamic extremist preparing for some future act in furtherance of radical fundamentalist goals.” The agent believed that Moussaoui’s flight training played a role in those plans. On August 24, eighteen days before the attacks, the CIA described him as a possible “suicide hijacker.” But when the FBI told the FAA and other agencies about Moussaoui on September 4, its summary didn’t mention the agent’s belief that Moussaoui planned to hijack a plane.

In the summer of 2001, the FAA seemed to ignore even its own recent security briefings. A few months before September 11, an FAA briefing to airport security officials considered the desirability of suicide hijackings from a terrorist perspective: “A domestic hijacking would likely result in a greater number of American hostages but would be operationally more difficult. We don’t rule it out… . If, however, the intent of the hijacker is not to exchange hostages for prisoners, but to commit suicide in a spectacular explosion, a domestic hijacking would probably be preferable.”

Now that scenario had come to pass, and the FAA found itself unaware and unprepared.

THE FAA’S INDIANAPOLIS Center controllers continued to search their radar screens to the west and southwest along Flight 77’s projected path, having missed the plane’s sharp turn back to the east. Although the plane had disappeared from radar at 8:56 a.m., it actually reappeared at 9:05 a.m. But because some controllers had stopped looking when they thought it crashed, and some looked in the wrong direction, they never saw it return to their radar screens. Neither Indianapolis Center controllers nor their bosses at the FAA command center issued an “all-points bulletin” for other air traffic control centers to look for the missing plane.

American Airlines Flight 77 traveled undetected for thirty-six minutes.

The plane’s new flight path pointed it on a direct course for Washington, D.C. But yet again, no one told the U.S. military, this time about a threat to the nation’s capital.

BY 9:25 A.M., even as American Flight 77 remained missing and a mystery, one top FAA official grasped the severity and growing scope of the crisis.

At the agency’s operations center in Herndon, Virginia, FAA national operations manager Ben Sliney knew about the North Tower crash and had seen United Flight 175 hit the South Tower on CNN some twenty minutes earlier. He worried about the disappearance of Flight 77 and feared that more hijackings might be under way. Sliney also had heard about Mohamed Atta’s “We have some planes” remark. He felt haunted by the question of how high the hijacking total might eventually reach. He couldn’t undo what already happened, but Sliney hoped that he might help prevent the next attack.

Fifty-five years old, with a shock of white hair, an Air Force veteran and a lawyer by training, Sliney concluded that he had both the authority and the responsibility to take drastic action. Accordingly, he declared a “nationwide ground stop,” the first order of its kind in U.S. aviation history, which prevented all commercial and private aircraft from taking off anywhere in the United States.

Making Sliney’s order even more remarkable, he had only recently returned to the FAA after several years in a private law practice. The morning of September 11 was Sliney’s first shift on his first day in his new job as the FAA’s National Operations Manager, boss of the agency’s command center.

MEANWHILE, BETWEEN ABOUT 9:23 and 9:28 a.m., American Flight 77 dropped from an altitude of 25,000 feet to about 7,000 feet as it continued on its undetected eastward path. By about 9:29 a.m., while controllers fruitlessly searched the Midwest, the Boeing 757 was almost on the East Coast, about thirty-eight miles west of the Pentagon, the physical and symbolic heart of the U.S. military, located a short hop across the Potomac River from Washington, D.C.

Hani Hanjour—or whoever was in the cockpit—disengaged the autopilot destination that he’d previously set to Reagan National Airport and took manual control of the plane.

AS AMERICAN FLIGHT 77 approached the prohibited airspace of the nation’s capital, confusion about the plane spread further through the U.S. government.

At 9:31 a.m., an agent from the FBI office in Boston called the FAA seeking information on the planes that had hit the World Trade Center.

An FAA official told him: “We have two reports, preliminary information, ah, believe to be American Airlines Flight 77 and Flight 11, collided with World Trade Center. Also, a preliminary report, ah, United Airlines Flight 175 off radar. Ah, no further information.”

AT 9:32 A.M., air traffic controllers at Dulles airport saw a green dot on their radar screens that no one expected, traveling eastbound at the surprisingly fast speed of about 500 miles per hour.

Among those who noticed the unidentified aircraft was Danielle O’Brien, the air traffic controller who for some reason had wished Flight 77’s pilots “good luck” when she handed them off an hour earlier. From its speed and how it turned and slashed across the sky, she and other controllers initially thought the object on their radar was a nimble military jet.

O’Brien slid to her left and pointed it out to the controller next to her, her fiancé, Tom Howell, who recognized it as a threat. “Oh my God,” Howell said. He yelled to the room: “We’ve got a target headed right for the White House!”

A Dulles manager called the FAA’s control center and controllers at Reagan airport in Washington to warn them. Still no one from the FAA called NEADS or anyone else in the military’s air defense system. An FAA supervisor at Dulles, John Hendershot, used a dedicated phone line to alert the Secret Service of the incoming danger. He told the men and women who protect the president and the vice president: “We have an unidentified, very fast-moving aircraft inbound toward your vicinity, eight miles west.”

President Bush wasn’t in Washington, but Vice President Dick Cheney was in his White House office. Secret Service agents rushed in, lifted Cheney from his chair, and hustled him to a tunnel leading to an underground bunker beneath the White House called the Presidential Emergency Operations Center. The agents also told White House staffers to run from the building.

Simultaneously, Reagan airport officials sought urgent help identifying the mystery jet. They called the closest plane in the sky: a military cargo plane that had just taken off from Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland, fifteen miles from the District of Columbia. The FAA’s newly issued ban on takeoffs didn’t apply to military planes, and the cargo plane’s pilots hadn’t heard about it, anyway.

AS THE FAA tried to identify the plane approaching the White House, little more than ten minutes had passed since Major Kevin Nasypany speculated about using a Sidewinder missile “in the face” to stop terrorists from creating another large-scale disaster.

The F-16s from Langley were airborne by 9:30 a.m. with orders from NEADS to fly to Washington. But no one briefed them about exactly why they were scrambled. The pilots defaulted to an old Cold War plan and flew out to sea, to a training area known as Whiskey 386. The lead pilot, who’d heard about a plane hitting the World Trade Center but knew nothing about hijackings, thought he and his two wingmen were supposed to defend the capital against Russian planes or cruise missiles.

As the Langley F-16s took flight, headed the wrong way, a member of Nasypany’s team pressed the issue of how they’d respond if they encountered a hijacked passenger jet being readied for use as a weapon.

“Have you asked … the question what you’re gonna do if we actually find this guy?” wondered Major James Anderson. “Are we gonna shoot him down if they got passengers on board? Have they talked about that?”

At that moment, the man on whom shootdown authority rested stood before two hundred students, a handful of teachers, and a clutch of reporters in an elementary school in Sarasota, Florida.

PRESIDENT BUSH BEGAN his September 11 at 6 a.m. with a four-mile run at a golf course with his Secret Service protectors. Afterwards he showered, dressed, and sat for a routine, fifteen-minute intelligence briefing from CIA official Mike Morell in the president’s suite at Sarasota’s swanky Colony Beach Resort. Many of the president’s summer 2001 briefings had included mentions of a heightened terrorism risk.

One of those briefings, received by the president on August 6, marked the first time that Bush had been told of a possible plan by al-Qaeda to attack inside the United States. Titled “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in US,” the memo read in part: “Clandestine, foreign government, and media reports indicate bin Laden since 1997 has wanted to conduct terrorist attacks in the US. Bin Laden implied in US television interviews in 1997 and 1998 that his followers would follow the example of World Trade Center bomber Ramzi Yousef and ‘bring the fighting to America.’”

But there wasn’t a word about terrorism in Bush’s security briefing on the morning of September 11. Much of it focused instead on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

By 8:40 a.m., Bush’s motorcade had left the resort for the nine-mile drive to the Emma E. Booker Elementary School. The president intended to use the school as a backdrop to promote his “No Child Left Behind” education policy with a press-friendly event: a reading lesson with a diverse class of second graders.

On his way into the school, Bush shook hands with teachers and students. Meanwhile, senior White House adviser Karl Rove answered a call from his assistant: a plane had hit the World Trade Center. Rove passed the information to the president but said he didn’t have details and didn’t know what type of plane. Three decades earlier, during the Vietnam era, Bush had served as a fighter pilot in the Texas National Guard. He’d later say that his first thought was pilot error involving a light airplane. Bush also would say he wondered, “How could the guy have gotten so off course [as] to hit the towers?”

Bush ducked away from the receiving line into a classroom. At 8:55 a.m., less than ten minutes after the first crash, he spoke on a secure phone line with National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice. A half hour had passed since the FAA first learned about the hijacking of Flight 11, but no one had immediately informed the White House, the nation’s national security agencies, or the Secret Service. Rice didn’t know much more than Bush’s other aides.

Bush told the school’s principal the situation, then walked to teacher Kay Daniels’s classroom. “Good to meet you all!” he said as he entered. “It’s really exciting for me to be here.” Bush smiled, clapped, and followed along as Daniels led her sixteen students through rapid-fire phonics exercises.

At about 9:05 a.m., two minutes after United Flight 175 struck the South Tower, White House chief of staff Andy Card hesitated a moment at the door to the classroom. He collected his thoughts, then walked to Bush’s side. Reporters watching from the back of the classroom perked up, knowing that no one would interrupt the president’s event unless something major happened. Card bent at the waist and whispered in Bush’s ear:

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