The Eleventh Day Read online

  Copyright © 2011 by Anthony Summers and Robbyn Swan

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Ballantine Books, an imprint of The Random

  House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  BALLANTINE and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint

  previously published material:

  David Corn: Excerpt from “When 9/11 Conspiracy Theories Go Bad.”

  Reprinted by permission of the author.

  Forbes: Excerpt from “There Is No Time, There Will Be Time”

  by Peggy Noonan (Forbes, November 30, 1998).

  Reprinted by permission of Forbes Media LLC © 2011.

  HarperCollins Publishers: Excerpt from At the Center of the Storm

  by George Tenet, copyright © 2007 by George Tenet; excerpts from

  Perfect Soldiers by Terry McDermott, copyright © 2005 by Terry McDermott.

  Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers.

  Riverhead Books, an imprint of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.:

  Excerpt from The Ground Truth: The Untold Story of America Under Attack on 9/11 by

  John Farmer, copyright © 2009 by John Farmer.

  Reprinted by permission of Riverhead Books,

  an imprint of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  St. Martin’s Press and Liza Dawson Associates: Excerpts from Growing Up bin Laden

  by Najwa bin Laden, Omar bin Laden, and Jean Sasson, copyright © 2009

  by The Sasson Corporation. Rights outside of North America are controlled

  by Liza Dawson Associates. Reprinted by permission of

  St. Martin’s Press and Liza Dawson Associates.

  eISBN: 978-0-345-53125-4

  www.ballantinebooks.com

  Jacket design: Misa Erder

  Jacket photograph: Benjamin Thompson/Flickr/Getty Images

  v3.1

  “I don’t believe for a minute that we got everything right.

  We wrote a first draft of history.”

  —LEE HAMILTON,

  vice chairman, 9/11 Commission

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Epigraph

  AUTHORS’ NOTE

  PREFACE

  PART I ATTACK

  PART II DISTRUST AND DECEIT

  PART III AMERICA RESPONDS

  PART IV PLOTTERS

  PART V PERPETRATORS

  PART VI TWENTY-FOUR HOURS

  PART VII UNANSWERED QUESTIONS

  AFTERWORD

  DEDICATION

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  PHOTO INSERT

  NOTES AND SOURCES

  SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Other Books by This Author

  About the Authors

  AUTHORS’ NOTE

  OVER THE YEARS, THE EVENT TO WHICH THE WORLD GAVE THE BRIEF name “9/11” has burgeoned into a universe of facts and factoids. Our approach to the writing of this book was to build a chronology, which eventually ran to well over a thousand pages, to gather information from a multitude of sources, including published material in both paper and electronic form, and to conduct interviews of our own. We read as deeply as possible the many thousands of pages of staff reports, original memoranda, and other 9/11 Commission records that began to be released as of 2009.

  Additional information on numerous points can be found in the Notes and Sources section at the back of the book. These are linked to the text by page number.

  For ease of reading, we have adopted a single standard for Arabic names that are rendered differently in different texts. The name “bin Laden,” for example, can be found elsewhere as “bin Ladin” or even “ben Ladin,” and the organization associated with him as “al-Qaeda,” or “al Qida”—and more. We have stuck to “bin Laden” and “al Qaeda.”

  The full rendering of many Arab persons’ names is lengthy, and we have in many cases shortened them. After a full first mention, for example, “Khalid al Mihdhar” becomes just “Mihdhar.” We render “Ramzi bin al-Shibh,” as have many other texts, simply as “Binalshibh.” Though perhaps not strictly correct, or satisfactory to the purist, this makes for smoother reading.

  Our aim has been to make readable sense out of a kaleidoscopic story, to offer rational explanation where there has been confusion or unnecessary controversy, and to serve history as well as possible.

  A.S. R.S.

  May 2011

  PREFACE

  TEN YEARS ON, MEMORY AND LOSS. WHERE TWO WONDERS OF THE modern world once soared high over the city, two great cascades feed reflecting pools of shimmering water. The abyss into which it flows is now a hallowed place of remembrance. Pilgrims about to descend to the underworld, the underworld of what once was the World Trade Center, will pass a ribbon of names etched into parapets of bronze.

  They identify those killed in New York City on September 11, 2001: the 206 passengers and crew aboard the three planes that were used as missiles that day; the forty who died when a fourth airliner fell from the sky in Pennsylvania; the 2,605 office workers and visitors and would-be rescuers known to have died in and around the Trade Center; and the 125 men and women who died at the Pentagon in Washington. Included, too, are the names of the six people killed eight years earlier, in 1993, in the first attempt to bring down the towers with a truck bomb.

  The memorial names 2,982 men, women, and children as of the spring of 2011. The true tally of 9/11 fatalities, however, is incomplete. Some of those who labored in the rubble of the fallen towers have died since, agonizingly slowly, from respiratory disease contracted in the fire and poisoned dust of the place they called Ground Zero. Some nineteen thousand others are reported to be sick and receiving treatment. By one prediction, disease will eventually cripple and kill as many again—more perhaps—as died on the day of the attacks.

  We do not know, shall never know, how many have died in the far-off wars that followed the onslaught launched that September day. Fighting men aside, the vast majority of the dead have been civilians: unknown thousands—conservatively, many tens of thousands—of men, women, and children killed in Afghanistan and in Iraq.

  Of the three thousand who died on 9/11 itself, fewer than half have graves. Some bodies were consumed by fire, others reduced to minute fragments of mortality, morsels of burned bone, decaying flesh, a single tooth with a silver filling. To this day, forensic pathologists are confronted by a monstrous human jigsaw, one they know they will never complete.

  Consider five of the names that are etched, lettered in bronze, above the curtain of water at the 9/11 memorial.

  Jimmy Riches, a New York firefighter, died in the lobby of the North Tower. His father, James, himself a Fire Department battalion chief, recovered his son’s mangled body months later.

  Donald McIntyre, a Port Authority police officer, also died at the Trade Center. His handcuffs, recovered at the scene, were given by his widow to a colleague assigned to hunt down terrorists in Afghanistan.

  No identifiable remains were ever found for Eddie Dillard, an American Airlines passenger who died at the Pentagon. His widow, by odd happenstance, had been American’s base manager in Washington, D.C., when his plane took off that day.

  Ronald Breitweiser, a money manager, died in the South Tower of the Trade Center. Only his arms and hands were recovered, identified by fingerprints—and by his wedding ring, which his widow now wears.

  Only part of a leg and one foot were found—six years later—to account for Karen Martin, chief flight attendant on the plane that plunged into the North Tower. Attendant Martin was probably the first person harmed by the hijackers
on 9/11.

  • • •

  SOMETHING ELSE WAS LOST that day, something precious that touches on the stories of all the thousands who have died. The Greek tragic dramatist Aeschylus, twenty-five centuries earlier, understood well what it was. “In war,” he wrote, “the first casualty is truth.”

  James Riches worked in the rubble for months, motivated in part by the hope of recovering his own son’s dead body. He labored, like thousands of others, buoyed by the assurance of the Environmental Protection Agency, that the air in Lower Manhattan was safe to breathe. Today, no longer a fire chief, Riches Sr.’s health is irreparably damaged, his lung capacity reduced by 30 percent.

  Like so many others, meanwhile, Riches wants vengeance against those who killed his son. The Saudi exile Osama bin Laden, said to have ordered the 9/11 attacks, became—in the West—a constant demon, a symbol of the dark forces of terror. President George W. Bush at first promised to get him “dead or alive,” only to backtrack months later and say, “I don’t know where bin Laden is … and really don’t care. It’s not that important.”

  In 2009, at the White House, Riches and others met Bush’s successor, Barack Obama. “I pulled out Jimmy’s bracelet and funeral mass card and gave them to him,” the former fire chief said later. “I told him that I’m frustrated that I haven’t seen justice for my son Jimmy.… Please capture Osama bin Laden.” Obama promised “swift and certain justice.”

  Police officer McIntyre’s handcuffs, engraved “Mac,” were later snapped on to the wrists of a fugitive named Abu Zubaydah—a native of Saudi Arabia like bin Laden. Imprisoned ever since, Zubaydah remains today the subject of serious controversy. For U.S. interrogators treated him with extreme brutality, using duress that has been defined by the International Committee of the Red Cross, and many others, as torture.

  Eddie Dillard’s widow, Rosemary, for all her grief, was one of a number of bereaved family members incensed by the ill treatment of prisoners and by plans to try them before military tribunals. “The secret and unconstitutional nature of these proceedings,” they said, “deprives us of the right to know the full truth about what happened on 9/11.”

  Ronald Breitweiser’s widow, Kristen, for her part, has been one of the most articulate of those whose lives were devastated. She testified to a joint House-Senate inquiry and fought for a further, full, independent investigation. When that aspiration was realized—in the shape of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States—Breitweiser excoriated its failings. She believes that much is still hidden, and wants convincing explanations. The CIA, she points out, identified two of the hijackers as terrorists more than eighteen months before 9/11, learned they had visas to enter the United States, yet kept the information from U.S. law enforcement. Why?

  Though the final chapter of the congressional report into 9/11 is said to discuss Saudi financial links to the hijackers, all but one page of the chapter was kept secret on the orders of President Bush. Why? At a 2009 meeting with bereaved families, Breitweiser says, President Obama said he was willing to declassify the suppressed material. As of this writing, two years later, the chapter remains classified. Why?

  Though less than complete, and though it left some questions open, the Final Report of the National Commission—known as the 9/11 Commission Report—was overwhelmingly well received by an uncritical media. It went to the top of The New York Times best-seller list, and was nominated for a National Book Award. The CIA obstructed the Commission’s work, as its chairmen—former New Jersey governor Thomas Kean and former congressman Lee Hamilton—later acknowledged. Senator Bob Kerrey, who served on the Commission, shared their concerns. Alleging a Bush White House cover-up, Senator Max Cleland had resigned from the Commission early on. It was, he said, a “national scandal.” The final Report was in fact not final, Hamilton said, merely “a first draft of history.”

  A 2006 New York Times/CBS poll found that only 16 percent of those responding thought Bush administration members had told the truth about 9/11. Fifty-three percent of responders thought they were “mostly telling the truth but hiding something.” Twenty-eight percent thought Bush’s people were “mostly lying.” A year later, a Scripps Howard poll found that 32 percent thought it “very likely” that the government had chosen to ignore specific warnings of the 9/11 attacks. A further 30 percent thought that “somewhat likely.” A Zogby poll found that 51 percent of Americans wanted a congressional investigation of President Bush’s and Vice President Dick Cheney’s performance in the context of the attacks.

  In 2008, a poll conducted by the Program on International Policy Attitudes—at the University of Maryland—asked questions of sixteen thousand people in seventeen countries. Only 46 percent of those responding thought al Qaeda had been responsible for the attacks. Fifteen percent thought the U.S. government was itself responsible for the attacks, as a ploy to justify an invasion of Iraq. A large number of Americans, meanwhile, have thought Iraq was behind the attacks—a notion encouraged by the Bush administration but unsupported by the evidence. As late as 2010, though, an Angus Reid poll indicated that one in four Americans still thought 9/11 was “a fabrication designed to facilitate the campaign against terrorism.” This all reflects an epidemic of doubt and disbelief. It has been spread in part, to be sure, by conspiracy theorists—the “9/11 truth” movement, as it has become known—preaching to the gullible through the phenomenal influence and reach of the Internet. Less well known is the prevalence of doubt in people one would expect less likely to challenge official orthodoxy.

  Those who have expressed grave doubt or called for a new investigation have included five past or present U.S. senators, four members of the U.S. House of Representatives, a former governor, three state deputy or assistant attorneys general, members of state legislatures, numerous public officials and civil servants, diplomats, engineers, and twenty-six former Army, Navy, or Air Force officers. In 2010, two gubernatorial candidates in Texas, a Republican and a Democrat, both said they had questions as to whether the U.S. government had been involved in the 9/11 attacks.

  Former CIA officers, FBI agents, and intelligence officials from other agencies have also spoken out. Twenty-five of them expressed their views in a letter to the Congress. Louis Freeh, who was FBI director until the summer of 2001, raised specific issues on television and in a 2005 Wall Street Journal article.

  Three sometime presidential contenders have expressed concerns. Former Vice President Walter Mondale said he favored a new investigation. “We’ve never completed the investigation of 9/11,” said General Wesley Clark, former Supreme Allied Commander Europe, “and whether the administration actually misused the intelligence information it had.” Former U.S. senator Bob Graham, who had been cochair of Congress’s Joint Inquiry into 9/11, pointed the finger at Saudi Arabia. The investigation, he said, found grounds for “suspicion that the Saudi government and various representatives of Saudi interests supported some of the hijackers and might have supported all of them.” President Bush, he said, “engaged in a cover-up.”

  TEN YEARS ON, there is a lingering sense that the nation and the world have been let down, deprived of the right to know—deceived, even—on a matter of greater universal concern than any event in living memory. It need not have been that way.

  The release in the past two years of some 300,000 pages of 9/11 Commission documents, a plethora of other material, and new interviews make it possible to lay some of the perceived mysteries to rest.

  With access to the new information, we strive in this book to blow away unnecessary controversy, to make up for omissions in the record, and to throw light into the shadows of deception. In a time of anxiety, to tell the story as honestly as it can be told.

  PART I

  ATTACK

  ONE

  DID THE STORY BEGIN TWENTY YEARS AGO DURING THE GULF WAR, when a great American army was installed in Saudi Arabia, a land sacred to Muslims? Did it begin in 1948, when the United States recognized the declaration
of a Jewish state to be known as Israel? Or on the day in 1938 when Americans discovered in Saudi Arabia one of the largest reserves of oil on the planet? From then on, certainly, the West began an addictive dance with danger, one that it dances to this day.

  This is a story, moreover, rooted in a world and a culture that few Westerners really know or can begin to understand, yet played out in the heart of the United States. Mystery and terror, a frightening mix. Yet there is a simple point of entry, a routine event on an ordinary American morning.

  IN THE DAWN of September 11, 2001, in Massachusetts, ninety-two people were getting up, breakfasting, heading for Boston’s Logan Airport. They were the passengers and crew of American Airlines Flight 11, one of some forty thousand planes scheduled to crisscross the country that day.

  To glance at some of the names on the passenger manifest, to learn a little about them, is to glimpse the melting pot nature of the country. Philip Rosenzweig, an executive for Sun Microsystems; Thelma Cuccinello, a grandmother on her way to see a sister in California; Peter Gay, a vice president for Raytheon Electronic Systems, traveling with two colleagues; Laura Lee Morabito, U.S. sales manager for the Australian airline Qantas; photographer Berinthia Berenson, widow of the actor Anthony Perkins; David Angell, executive producer of the television series Frasier, accompanied by his wife, Lynn; Jeffrey Mladenik, an ordained minister and acting CEO of a trade publishing company; Lisa Gordenstein, an executive with a discount clothing company; Michael Theodoridis, on his way to a wedding with his wife, Rahma, who was six months pregnant; Walid Iskandar, a business strategy consultant for a British company, setting off to visit his parents; Alexander Filipov, a retired electrical engineer; Daniel Lewin, chief technology officer for Akamai Technologies in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Also on their way to the flight were five young men from the Middle East, an Egyptian and four Saudis.

  The pilot who was to fly these people to California, John Ogonowski, flew twelve days a month and worked the rest of the time on his 150-acre farm. At fifty, he was a veteran of twenty-three years with American, married to a flight attendant. He had hoped to attend a farming event on the 11th, but the schedule proved unchangeable. At 5:00 that morning Ogonowski awoke, kissed his wife, peeked in at their three sleeping teenage daughters, and climbed into his pickup to drive to the airport. His copilot that day would be Tom McGuinness, a former Navy fighter pilot.