Fall and Rise: The Story of 9/11. MItchell Zuckoff

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