Terry McDermott

A Perfect Soldier
Mohamed Atta, whose hard gaze has stared from a billion television screens and newspaper pages, has become, for many, the face of evil incarnate.

By TERRY McDERMOTT
Times Staff Writer
January 27, 2002

WILHELMSBURG, Germany -- After Mohamed el Amir Atta disappeared from the Technical University of Hamburg-Harburg in 1997, he turned up here on an island in the middle of the Elbe River, at a red-brick prewar housing project on a broad, bleak street that faces a ribbon-wire fence and the Hamburg harbor, gray and forbidding, beyond.

Wilhelmsburg is industrial, worn-out, so psychologically remote that it is sometimes called the Forgotten Island. It's here but hidden. If you wanted to vanish, to drop off the face of the world and yet keep the world close at hand, this would be a place to come to.

The six-story buildings of the Wilhelmsburg projects contain hundreds of two- and three-room apartments and nobody knows how many people. The buildings are filled mainly with Turks, by far the largest minority group in Germany.

Atta rented a third-floor, three-room walk-up for $250 a month. The apartment, neighbors say, was home to a large group of Arab men who were seldom seen and, until the events of Sept. 11, not much remembered. Like the island itself, they were here but hidden, shielded by their otherness.

The men talked long into the night most nights and disappeared all day most days, said Helga Link, a neighbor. Link lived directly beneath Atta's apartment and could hear every footstep on the wooden floors. She never heard a radio or television or music. Just the footsteps and voices of men talking.

Atta's stay in Wilhelmsburg marked a turning point in his life. He had until then followed an utterly conventional middle-class path, a striving, upward arc from boyhood through prestigious university and into graduate school. When he left, he turned in directions that people who knew him still can't fathom.

In the days after Sept. 11, a narrative of the attacks emerged with remarkable speed. These were hard, dedicated men, we learned, religious zealots executing a devious plan to strike at the core of America. Central to the narrative was Atta. In numerous accounts, he was referred to as the mastermind. Osama bin Laden was said to be the evil leader who inspired and funded the plot; Atta was the brilliant acolyte who led a small, suicidal army in its execution.

Not much has altered this narrative since. Bin Laden remains the sinister presence behind the plot, taunting from a shrinking but thus far unbridgeable distance. The hijackers remain mute, unknowable ciphers. Atta, whose hard gaze has fumed from a billion television screens and newspaper pages, has become, for many, the face of evil incarnate.

He has become famous. A woman in Finland claims that he was her virtual lover. A Hamburg shopkeeper claims that she regularly sold Atta large quantities of mid-priced perfume, for what purpose no one pretends to know. A genial car repairman says Atta worked as an intermediary for Arab car-buyers. They liked Mercedes-Benzes, the repairman says.

Atta is said to have lived a double life; to have met with an Iraqi spy in the Czech Republic; to have traveled throughout Europe conferring with who knows what members of terrorist cells; to have so excelled in his terrorist training that he was chosen to form his own cell in Hamburg.

Some of these stories might be true, but as details of Atta's life are examined and new ones uncovered, a less mysterious, more mundane man emerges. It is a man drawn on a smaller, less epic scale.

The people who knew Atta best during the past decade--housemates, roommates, co-workers and classmates--say he was taciturn, introspective and zealously religious.

"I'm more fundamental than the fundamentalists," he told his first Hamburg roommate.

He was an exceptionally resolute, disciplined, stoic man. He was--particularly for a university graduate student--enormously respectful of authority. He did what he was told. Joerg Lewin, who hired Atta as a draftsman at an urban planning firm, said Atta did his job with extraordinary single-mindedness. Although already a trained architect and a prospective city planner, Atta--in four years at the company--never offered opinions of the plans he was asked to illustrate. He was assigned to make maps; he made maps.

"I think he embodied the idea of drawing," Lewin said. " 'I am the drawer. I draw.' "

It's hard to imagine that such a man could acquire the verve and daring to lead an enterprise as audacious as the September attacks. Maybe we have misconceived the nature of the attacks and built the requisite figure to orchestrate them. Maybe a brilliant general is not what was needed. Maybe the plan wasn't so much difficult as it was detailed, and what it really required was somebody with will and steadfastness to see it through.

That is the Mohamed Atta described by the people who knew him: a meticulous, dutiful believer, a man who could sublimate himself, a man who could embody a plan, who could make it his, a man who could be, as he became, a perfect soldier.



Kafr el Sheik: A STRICT, AUSTERE FATHER

The Nile River delta is Egypt's breadbasket. The markets are full of bananas, oranges, corn, guavas, figs, wheat, rice and lentils.

The last village is never out of sight before you come to the next. Men and animals work fields that are jigsawed across the land, small and irregularly shaped. Women wear veils or head scarves; many men wear long cotton tunics.

Alleys are clogged with cotton bales and rice straw. Ducks and chickens pick their way through scraps in tiny street-side pens. The roads are full of pickup trucks, the rare tractor and donkey carts; uniformed schoolchildren are everywhere. Nokia cell phone advertisements stand in front of ditches filled with trash, still water and women bathing and washing dishes.

Atta was born here in 1968 in the delta province of Kafr el Sheik. His father, Mohamed el Amir Awad el Sayed Atta, came from a tiny provincial village, and his mother, Bouthayna Mohamed Mustapha Sheraqi, from the outskirts of the provincial capital, also called Kafr el Sheik.

As is still customary in rural Egypt, his parents met and married by arrangement of their families. Mohamed el Amir (neither he nor his son used the name Atta anywhere except on official documents) was already a lawyer. Bouthayna was just 14, but as the daughter of a wealthy farming and trading family, she came from several rungs up the social ladder.

Mohamed was their last child. Two daughters, Azza and Mona, preceded him. The father was regarded by his in-laws as austere, strict and private.

Nearly all of Egypt's 65 million people are squeezed by the surrounding deserts into the narrow band of fertile land along the Nile. The geography forces Egyptian life to be crowded, communal and shared. To resist takes real effort. Atta's father was willing to expend it.

"The father is alone. There are no brothers, one sister maybe. We never met her," said Hamida Fateh, Atta's aunt on his mother's side. "Here, the families are all very close. But even here, the father was separate."

Fateh's family owns land, an auto parts store and a large commercial building. But the family lives on a cobbled, dirty street in a cramped apartment with whitewashed walls, cheap rugs, stuffed furniture and a television.

The balcony door is open to let the heat escape. The lace curtains barely stir. The idea of living behind closed doors here seems almost as peculiar to Fateh as the idea that the boy who used to sit here on her sofa flew an airliner into a skyscraper.

A cousin, Essam Omar Rashad, nodded toward the television and said that he and Mohamed, as teenagers, would watch it together. Mohamed, he said, left the room whenever belly dancing programs--staples of Egyptian broadcasting--came on.

Outside, the call to afternoon prayer echoes down the block. You are never out of earshot of the prayer call here. Fateh wears a head scarf, but more out of habit, she said, than belief; neither her family nor Atta's was particularly religious. Fateh studied agricultural engineering at university. We are educated, secular people, she said, people from the country but not country people.

Fateh said Atta's father was always ambitious and focused. His law practice thrived here, but he was not satisfied. "He moved to Cairo," Fateh said. "He wanted to be famous."



Cairo: 'A HOUSE OF STUDY'

It's early morning on Eldmalsha Street and nothing moves, or will for a while. Cairo, the capital, is a slow city in the morning. It's common to find shops not yet open at 11 or noon. Breakfast is a rumor, and some restaurants start lunch service at 4 p.m.

Residents see this as proof of their sophistication, a measure of distance from the villages their ancestors left not decades but millenniums ago.

Mohamed Atta spent his adolescence here in Abdin, a cramped quarter near the old financial and government centers. Much of the wealth of the city has migrated to newer districts, west across the Nile and south and east to new suburbs. Old core neighborhoods like Abdin have been left to crumble.

Most of the five- and six-story stone apartment buildings are holdovers from British colonial rule, which didn't end until independence in 1952. Lobbies are paved with marble and limestone, remnants of a grander past. Few buildings have elevators, and stairwells are dark.

Atta was 9 or 10 years old when the family arrived here. His father rented a double flat, an entire floor. All three children got their own rooms. The old apartment, like most interiors in Cairo, is dim and still, windows covered against the sun.

Later, Atta's father bought a vacation home on the Mediterranean coast, but the family lived frugally in town. Atta's mother, Bouthayna, did her own cooking and cleaning. The father drove a used Opel, then a small Fiat sedan.

When Fateh and her family came to visit Abdin, they found the father had instilled his ambition in the children.

"It was a house of study. No playing, no entertainment. Just study," Fateh said.

The children weren't allowed to play outside the apartment. One neighbor said the walk to school had been timed, and if the children took longer than the allotted few minutes to get home, they would be asked why.

"His friends would sit on the corner there, chewing pistachios, spitting out the shells. Not Mohamed. There was no hanging around, no friends, very strict rules," said Mohamed Gamel Khamees, a neighbor who runs an auto repair shop on the ground floor of the Attas' old building.

"They came from a village, and they had their own traditions. They brought them along," Khamees said. "They lived a closed family life. They were very polite but had little contact with any others."

Neighbors laughed at Bouthayna when she pulled a little handcart behind her to the market. They thought that she was putting on airs. It didn't matter. The family went its own way.

The senior Atta, a huskier version of his son, is unapologetic about his lack of sociability. He's a blustering, forceful man who delivers speeches more often than answers. "We are people who keep to ourselves," he said. "We don't mix a lot with people, and we are all successful."

Young Mohamed's room looked out the back of the building, over rooftops and into a tangle of wires and adjacent windows. Neighbors said Mohamed used his window for clandestine conversations with neighbor boys. That was playtime.

Abdin is one of the densest districts in one of the most densely populated cities on Earth. The street is a place for entertaining, for sport, for business.

When visitors come, chairs and a tiny foot-high table are plopped down in the street. Tea is served.

A donkey cart loaded with dates rolls by. A sweet potato salesman pushes his wagon past. In between the tea being poured and the sugar offered, a man rolls a whetstone by. The cries of the knife man, the date man and the sweet potato seller bounce down the stone alleys.

It is hard to remain closed off here, even harder than in the delta. Asked if Atta's family ever made exceptions--if, for example, it shared evening breakfast with neighbors during the holy month of Ramadan, which in Cairo is a period of daytime fasting but late-night socializing and celebration--Khamees said no, the father was a tough man, not given to making exceptions.

The family, Khamees said, was "like a set of rings interlocked with one another. They didn't visit and weren't visited." He paused for a moment and waved a hand at the insects circling the sugar bowl. He looked up at the apartment.

"Not even the flies entered there," he said. "Not even the flies."



University: LOST IN A SEA OF STUDENTS

All three children were superior students. Atta followed his two sisters to Cairo University, one of the most prestigious colleges in the country. Admission is granted solely on the basis of national tests.

The university is mammoth, with 155,000 students and more than 7,000 teachers. It sprawls across both banks of the Nile, including an island in between. The campus is so large, some students drive cars from class to class.

Degree programs are typically five years. The first year is a preparatory year, used to direct students into major areas of study. If you want to study medicine, for example, but your first-year grades are insufficient, you might find yourself--without consultation or consent--enrolled in the Department of Ornamental Horticulture.

Students are grouped by their names.

"I found him standing there, staring up at the name sheets to see where he was assigned," said Mohamed Mokhtar el Rafei. "I introduced myself. 'I'm Mohamed,' I said. So was he. We looked at the class sheets. We had three full classes of Mohameds. Oh wow.

"We used our fathers' names to refer to one another. I was Rafei. He was always Amir."

The two became friends. Both excelled in the first year, 1985, and were chosen for engineering, one of the most venerable and prestigious departments. Within engineering, the highest-scoring students were assigned to the architecture program. The two Mohameds, whether they wanted to, would be architects.

The engineering department had nearly 1,000 teachers. The size meant tremendous competition and--except for the very best students--little attention from professors.

For the first time in his life, Atta did not stand out. Architecture, more than most creative disciplines, is a blend of the utterly pragmatic--what do you coat glass with to keep heat out and let light in?--and the artistic--what should a house say? Atta shone at analytical subjects, but the curriculum was skewed toward design.

"He was a very clever person in mathematics, physical structures, less good in design and the more artistic aspects," Rafei said. "He had been one of the top-ranked students in high school, and he had a very high rank in his preparatory year. In our time, though, design was emphasized, and maybe you could say he couldn't adjust himself to what was needed. In the third year, when we studied soils, street plans and steel, something more concrete, he excelled. . . . You would recognize him more as an engineer than an architect."

Another classmate recalled that Atta became upset when things didn't go his way.

"He was a child," she said. "So like a child that one time something happened, where he didn't get the grade he wanted, and he pouted. Somebody said to him, 'You're acting like a child.' Then he got very, very angry. Proving the point, he really was like a child. Spoiled."

But mainly, Atta is remembered as utterly ordinary. "Mohamed was there, sharing all our fun times. He liked it. He would tell jokes, laugh. He was one of us," said Waleed Khairy, another classmate.

Atta's father often drove him to and from school. This was not unusual. In fact, unless they move to another city, many young adults remain in their parents' homes until they marry. Many 30-year-olds eat dinner at home every night.



Politics: A GROWING RELIGIOSITY

Cairo is a plotter's paradise. There is a shortage of jobs and a surplus of cafes filled with men, idling away days over sweet Turkish coffee, water pipes, Marlboro Lights and filtered Cleopatras, filling the narrow, cluttered streets with talk and soft, smoky haze. Not all the talk is idle chatter.

Egypt's history for the last half a century is one of sporadic violence and constant tension between the government and Islamic activists.

President Hosni Mubarak came to power in 1981 when his predecessor, Anwar Sadat, was assassinated by Islamic militants. Mubarak himself has been the object of three dozen assassination plots. One of the results is a repressive political system, democratic in name only. More than half the officially recognized political parties have at one time or another been barred from political activity.

The involvement of religious groups in politics is forbidden. Members of the strongest, most broadly active Islamic group--the Muslim Brotherhood--are routinely jailed for violating this prohibition. The lack of any avenue for legal dissent criminalizes political opposition and almost ensures that it will become extreme.

During Atta's college years, the Muslim Brotherhood conducted major recruiting campaigns. It called for a return to basic Islamic principles and warned against the corrupting forces of modernization and Egypt's tilt toward the United States. Its campus activism coincided with a period of increasing religiosity in Egypt generally.

Atta was neither politically active nor particularly religious, friends said. His father said he warned his children away from political involvement. Far from advocating a resistance to the West, Atta's father insisted that his son, in addition to his regular classwork, study English and later German.

He said he wanted his son to match his daughters' successes. Both had excelled at the university: Azza became a botany professor, Mona a cardiologist. Atta earned respectable grades, but they were not good enough for acceptance to Cairo University's graduate school. His father gave him a 1974 Fiat 128 coupe as a graduation present but insisted that he continue his studies.

"My son is a very sensitive man; he is soft and was extremely attached to his mother. I almost tricked him to go to Germany to continue his education. Otherwise, he never wanted to leave Egypt," Atta's father said. "He didn't want to go. By pure coincidence, a friend of mine had visitors from Germany, two high school teachers in Hamburg. I invited them to dinner, and Mohamed was the king of the evening because he spoke German fluently . . . and three weeks later, Mohamed went to Germany."



Hamburg: 'I AM GROWN UP NOW'

When Mohamed Atta, 24 years old and on his own for the first time, arrived in Hamburg in the summer of 1992, one of the first things he asked for was the location of the nearest mosque.

Atta's family was moderately religious but not publicly so. His father, for example, said he reads the Koran every day, but none of the family's old neighbors remembered ever seeing the Attas at the neighborhood mosque. Once in Germany, Atta went every day.

Atta lived, rent-free, with the two teachers he had met in Cairo. The couple had been organizing exchange programs between Germany and Egypt for several years. They had an extra room in their small cottage and were happy to help. Atta arrived with a single suitcase. But in other respects, he carried more baggage than almost anyone his hosts had ever met.

In addition to praying at the mosque and observing a strict Islamic diet--no pork, no alcohol--Atta refrained from the pleasures young students often sought. He seldom socialized, never went to clubs or sporting events. Hamburg is a notably unrepressed city. Sex businesses--theaters, prostitution, publishing--thrive. For someone who would leave the room when belly dancers came on television, Hamburg can come on strong.

Atta's hosts had traveled often to Egypt; they welcomed cultural differences. The woman initially liked Atta's seriousness. He was eisern, she said--iron.

They discussed religion. She knew the Old Testament well and tried to make the point that the roots of Islam and Christianity were similar. Mohamed would listen, then reply, yes, but what is written in the Koran is the truth, the only truth. They would argue, the woman said, until she left the room disgusted by his closed-mindedness.

Atta went to Germany on a tourist visa. He would need a student visa to attend graduate school but apparently hadn't understood that he could get it only in Cairo.

The teachers, on a trip to Cairo to make arrangements for other students, put through his visa application. When they returned and told him, he was quite angry.

"I am grown up now; I can take care of that myself," he told them.

"He said that a lot," one of his hosts said. " 'I am abroad now; I am grown up. Now I can decide on my own.' "

It seemed silly to resist their help, "but that's the way he was," she said.

Atta made few friends. He could be amiable and polite but never warm. The landlady felt that there was "always a wall between him and the family."

She said that eventually she didn't feel comfortable in her own home. He would glare at her if she walked through the living room in a sleeveless top. He complained when her adult, unmarried daughter came to visit and brought along her young daughter. It was strange, she said. He played with the little girl and obviously enjoyed it. "He was free. The only time I remember him to be free," she said. But then he railed against the licentiousness that produced the child.

In the spring of 1993, by mutual agreement, Atta moved out of the little cottage.

When he had arrived in Hamburg, he intended to enroll for the fall term in the graduate architecture program at the University of Applied Sciences. He was denied admission. The university said the program was full; Atta's father said this was simple prejudice. Atta sued, the university relented, and he was quickly admitted. Then, just weeks into his first term, he abruptly quit and enrolled in an urban planning program at a different school, the Technical University of Hamburg-Harburg.

He told his hosts he realized belatedly that the architecture program would be repetitive of his undergraduate work in Cairo.

Technical University is not in Hamburg proper but south of the Elbe River, in the old industrial suburb of Harburg. The Elbe forms what planners here call a cultural border. People who live north of it seldom cross over. Technical University was built south of that border 20 years ago as an economic development measure for a declining Rust Belt town. When Atta enrolled, it had only 5,000 students.

The planning program, from which he hoped to receive the German equivalent of a master's degree, was a good fit for Atta, in line with his analytical ability and meticulousness. It opened up a field of study that would combine those skills with his newly evident interest in Islam: the preservation of old Islamic cities.

The department was housed in a former police barracks that was left standing as the new university was built around it. Fortuitously for Atta, the department's chairman, Dittmar Machule, was a Mideast specialist. Machule said he sensed in Atta someone who shared his passion for the old cities of the region. He described Atta as "tender, sensitive . . . he had deep, dark eyes. His eyes would speak. You could see the intelligence, the knowledge, the alertness."

Hans Harms, another professor, said Atta was "almost shy in the beginning but engaged. I could see that he was listening, that what I said as a teacher would influence him." He was beeindruckt und beeindruckbar, impressed and impressible, Harms said. Harms and Martin Ebert, a student who took several classes with Atta, recalled that Atta seldom jumped into discussions. He would sit and listen, often not saying a word, then come back a week later with something to offer on the subject.

Ebert said Atta wasn't much different outside class. He was careful about what he said, weighing it, never one to get excited. "I don't think it was possible to have a fight with him," Ebert said.

Harmut Kaiser, another classmate, said it was hard to draw Atta into a political discussion in class. "He wasn't a guy who acted like he wanted to change the world--unlike a lot of other students in the group," Kaiser said.

When students complained about a teacher's idiosyncrasies, Atta would join in the critique only if he thought a professor hadn't prepared properly or didn't know the subject. For those teachers who did, Ebert said, Atta showed a respect bordering on awe.



Roommates: POTATOES AND MISS PIGGY

Atta showed somewhat less respect for his roommates. The difficulties he experienced when he lived in the small cottage with the host family repeated themselves in Harburg, where he moved into a university-subsidized apartment building called Centrumshaus. Each apartment had two bedrooms, a shared bath and a kitchen. Atta lived there from 1993 to 1998. He shared the flat successively with two men.

In the end, Atta so aggravated both that neither could bear to be in his company. He seldom washed the dishes, they said, even if he had borrowed theirs to eat from. He almost never cleaned the bathroom. If asked, he would do it once, then not again for months. He left food uncovered in the refrigerator for weeks, affecting the taste of everything else.

The roommates grew to dislike Atta himself even more than the things he did. The two roommates are very dissimilar. The first is high-strung, anxious, the son of recent immigrants. The other is laid-back and was chosen by the house manager in the hope that he could get along with Atta. Both objected to the same personality trait in Atta: his complete, almost aggressive insularity.

Just 5-foot-7 and wiry, Atta nonetheless had a heavy, foreboding presence. He was slightly awkward, stiff and self-contained. The now famous face, with its angled planes and low, dark brow, was more hangdog than menacing but seldom welcoming.

The men's shared kitchen was compact, functional, with a maple table that overlooked the street. It was a bright, sociable space, a place to sit for coffee or tea in the morning. Atta was often so inwardly focused he would walk in and out of the room without acknowledging anyone else in it.

The first roommate tried early on to loosen Atta up. He took Atta to a showing of Disney's animated film "The Jungle Book." Atta became so upset at the crowd's unruliness before the film began that he seethed in his seat, muttering over and over in disgust, "Chaos, chaos."

He didn't speak a word during or after the film, and when they arrived back at the apartment, he stomped into his bedroom and slammed the door behind him. Another time, Atta asked the roommate if he had any light reading material. The roommate gave Atta a book of absurdist, Monty Python-esque short stories. Atta took it, then returned it the next morning without a word of thanks or comment.

Atta spent very little money on food and very little time eating. When he did eat, he complained about the necessity of doing so.

"He was reluctant to any pleasure," the roommate said. "We never shared food. We shared dishes. Mostly, he messed them up and I cleaned them."

Atta sometimes prepared a meal by boiling potatoes whole, scraping the skins away, then smashing them into a mound. He would eat his little potato mountain, without reheating it, for a week or more, sticking his fork into it and shoving the whole assembly back into the refrigerator when he finished a meal.

Each bedroom was furnished with a bed, a desk and shelves. The only thing Atta added was a slide-projector table that he used as a bookstand. He kept a Koran on it. Atta prayed five times a day, fasted on holidays and went to the mosque whenever he could. When he couldn't make it to a mosque, he prayed in his room, at work, even in the corner of classrooms.

Sometimes Atta had a beard. Other times he shaved. He almost always wore the same clothes: cotton slacks and sweaters. He never wore shoes in the apartment, changing to a pair of blue flip-flops as soon as he came home.

The second roommate said that by the end of three years, he and Atta were barely speaking. Atta was so intense that the roommate, out with friends one time, joked that he hoped Atta wasn't back at the apartment blowing himself up.

"In the end, I counted the days until Mohamed would leave the flat for good," he said. Students were allotted up to four years at Centrumshaus but could extend that to five if they were near graduation. Atta received the extension, much to the roommate's dismay.

The roommate's girlfriend, a frequent visitor, was even more put off by Atta. He answered questions from her in curt, clipped tones and would never look her in the eye, she said.

"It was a good day when Mohamed wasn't home," she said.

The woman was so offended by Atta's behavior toward women that she conspired to get even with him. She persuaded her boyfriend to hang a poster of a Degas nude in the bathroom above the toilet. The bathroom was small; a person couldn't open its door and avoid seeing the nude. Atta initially didn't respond to the provocation. Finally, three months later, he asked that it be removed.

Then the girlfriend hung a poster in the kitchen, this one of the Muppet character Miss Piggy, dressed voluptuously in a negligee. Atta never said a word.



Aleppo: IN MOSQUE, A TRANSFORMATION

Dittmar Machule, the Technical University professor, had taken a special interest in Atta. Machule is a committed Orientalist who sees his role at the university as both teacher and promoter of intercultural communication. When Atta early on chose the subject that would become the topic of his degree thesis--preservation of ancient cities in the Middle East--Machule was pleased.

"The other Muslim students, when they come to our world, they had problems with another cultural context," Machule said. "Either they try to get more and more a part of the Western culture, or they try to take something of that and this. . . . With Mohamed, I was somewhat impressed, I must say, with someone who didn't change, who tried to be as he was before, to try to learn, but to be who he was.

"I thought if this young man went back to his mother country, he could be able to work with the fundamentalist person, he could work with strong religious people because they believe in him."

For years, Machule had supervised a project in northern Syria, excavating the ruins of an ancient city near Aleppo. In 1994, he invited Atta to visit the site and consider Aleppo as the place to do fieldwork for his dissertation. Atta was already planning a summer excursion with other students to Istanbul, Turkey.

"I told him, 'Mohamed, try to come over to Syria; it's a direct bus line to Aleppo.' He arrived in August, early morning, after three days on a bus. He came with his little suitcase, and I felt so sorry for him."

Atta spent time at the excavation site and then went on to Aleppo. In towns like this throughout the developing world, the collision of old and new isn't merely theoretical. You can follow old roads, twisting along lines of elevation and drainage, through old neighborhoods, dense and jumbled just as they must have been a thousand years before, then suddenly come upon something new--a concrete apartment building that looks like it arrived from Mars or Moscow, or a three-story mini-mall fresh off the boat from Sherman Oaks.

Atta focused on a neighborhood called Almadiyeh Square. It, too, had suffered modern improvements. In the 1970s, the government dug broad new roads, improving access to and through the old town. Crews cut part of a road right through Almadiyeh, tearing down what they needed to, and put up a small building to sell souvenirs to the tourists the road was intended to carry.

"That was the only thing I ever saw him get emotional about. He was very angry at the destruction of our old heritage," said Razan Abdel-Wahab, a Syrian engineer who still works at the Aleppo redevelopment project.

When Atta returned to Hamburg, he told Machule that he would make Aleppo the focus of his thesis. He and another student, Volker Hauth, made a second research trip to Syria at the end of the year.

Atta was enlivened by the work, Hauth said.

On a side trip to Damascus, Syria's capital, Hauth went to a mosque with Atta. Hauth was a devout Protestant and the two of them talked about religion often, but Hauth had never seen Atta in religious circumstances. At the mosque, he was surprised to see Atta leading prayers.

Hauth said Atta was self-assured, self-confident and diplomatic. It was a revelation for Hauth, who knew the dour, introverted Atta from Hamburg. Here, he was a different person--looser, more talkative, animated, at times almost playful. It was as if he had been released, like "a fish in water." He even made tentative advances to a woman he met in Aleppo. She teased him in return, calling him an Egyptian pharaoh.

Atta seemed to have everything going his way. He had gone to an alien culture, had found work that engaged and challenged him, and had gained a measure of acceptance and encouragement he never found at Cairo University.

As an undergraduate in Cairo, Atta had never talked about his career, his dreams. Now he spoke of having found a future, about eventually going back to Egypt--"as an Arab to Arabia," as he described it to a German colleague, to help build neighborhoods where people could live better lives.



Cairo Again: IDEALISM RUNS INTO REALITY

Much of the political map of Africa has been drawn by foreign hands. Egypt is the great exception. More than 50 centuries old, it was home to grand civilizations when, as Gernot Rotter, a prominent Islamic scholar in Germany, puts it, "middle and northern Europeans were still sitting in trees."

This is cause for both an abiding pride and an abiding sense of loss. Both the glory and its passing are nowhere more evident than in an old section of Cairo known as the Islamic City, a rich concentration of ancient monuments, modern marketplaces and medieval architecture.

In the summer of 1995, Atta and Hauth won a grant from a German think tank to go to Cairo to study and analyze redevelopment plans the Egyptian government had devised for the Islamic City. They were joined on the trip by a third student, Ralph Bodenstein.

What the three young architects found appalled them. The government planned to "restore" the area by removing many of the people who lived there, evicting the onion and garlic sellers, repairing the old buildings and bringing in troupes of actors to play the real people they would displace.

Bodenstein described what happened: "We had a very critical discussion with the municipality. They didn't understand our concerns. They wanted to do their work, dress people in costumes. They thought it was a good idea and couldn't imagine why we would object."

It was Atta's first professional contact with the Egyptian bureaucracy and it distressed him, Bodenstein said.

"Mohamed was very, very critical of the planning administration, the nepotism. He had begun to make inquiries about getting a job after school, and he had difficulty finding anything. He did not belong to the network, where jobs were handed down from one generation to the next, to political allies. Mohamed was very idealistic, humanistic; he had social ideals to fulfill."

Atta's complaints about the difficulty of finding a decent job were not unique. Egypt's ambitious, virtually free system of higher education pumps out many more graduates than the economy can handle. The more education you have, the less likely you are to find a job. According to one 1998 study, those with graduate degrees are 32 times more likely to be unemployed than illiterate people are.

Bodenstein said Atta's critique of the government grew more expansive as the study project went on. He said the government's redevelopment plans would turn the old city into an Islamic Disneyland. Such Western influences, he said, were the result of the government's eagerness to be allied with the United States.

The study project lasted five weeks. Hauth and Bodenstein returned to Hamburg. Atta stayed on in Cairo and spent time with his family, which had moved from Abdin west across the river to Giza. Atta went back to the old neighborhood to visit and have Khamees check out his car. While they talked, the afternoon call to prayer sounded. Atta excused himself to answer it. It was the first time Khamees had ever seen anyone in Atta's family go to mosque.

Religion had become a chief focus of Atta's life. With his father's blessing, and financial assistance, he joined that year's pilgrimage to Mecca, in Saudi Arabia, an important, often powerful experience in a Muslim's life. Every believer who is able is supposed to make the trip at least once. Saudi Arabia restricts the number of pilgrimage visas, so they are highly prized. To make the pilgrimage at such a young age--Atta was 27--was a privilege.

When Atta returned to Hamburg, Hauth thought he was, if possible, more quiet, more inward-looking and more fervent. John Sadiq, a classmate who worked with Atta at a part-time job, saw the same change. Atta told Hauth that he eventually wanted to return to Egypt to work as a planner but despaired of the political situation. "He lived in fear of being criminalized for his religious beliefs," Hauth said.



Al Quds: AT LAST, SOME FRIENDS

Atta never had many German acquaintances, and none who regarded themselves as close. One reason was Atta's introversion. Another was his narrow range of interests. He simply wasn't much fun to talk to unless you wanted to talk about Islam, Cairo or city planning, not subjects known to foster German friendship.

During his first four years in Hamburg, Atta worked as a draftsman at a Hamburg urban planning firm, Plankontor. He was an excellent employee, said Joerg Lewin, one of the firm's partners. But not once did Atta socialize with other employees. He stayed at his drawing table and worked, or knelt beside it and prayed. Although the firm invited him on annual holiday trips, he never went.

He owned almost no books, didn't like food, didn't listen to music other than religious chants and, as far as anyone knows, the only movie he ever saw was the one his first Hamburg roommate dragged him to.

When Atta had enrolled at Technical University, there were about 100 "foreign" students in the entire school. More than half of those weren't really foreigners but ethnic Turks whose families were longtime residents of Germany. There were only about 40 "real" foreigners and just a handful of Arabs among them.

Atta wouldn't find many cultural soul mates in Harburg. Where he found them, instead, was in a seedy neighborhood east of the rail station in downtown Hamburg, at Al Quds mosque. The biggest, oldest mosques in Hamburg are Persian. Most others, including those Atta attended in his early years in Hamburg, are small, neighborhood Turkish congregations. Al Quds is mainly Arab.

Al Quds is on Steindamm Street, squeezed between a body-building parlor and a Turkish coffee shop. The street is best known for sex shops and drug dealing; you can be propositioned within sight of the mosque at any hour of the day or night.

Al Quds is of medium size; it holds at most 150 people. The walls are white, with Koranic verses painted on them. The carpets are gray, and the place has a utilitarian feel to it. It is regarded by German intelligence agencies as the most radical mosque in Hamburg; in Cairo there might be 1,000 just like it.

It is the sort of place that was enveloped in cheers when news of the Sept. 11 attacks broke. On the day the Taliban was forced to flee Kabul, Afghanistan's capital, the men at Al Quds screamed and shouted in anger. Many there, including the imam, Abu Maziad, blame the United States for most that is wrong in the world and blame Israel and Jews for much else.

Abu Maziad said Atta began coming to Al Quds in the mid-1990s. He came often, both for prayers and to talk with friends. Atta's new Arab friends--men of all ages--called on him frequently at Centrumshaus, his roommates said. He sometimes invited groups of them to dinner. He made soup.

Not long after he returned from Mecca, Atta asked two of the men from the mosque to witness a will he had written.

The will, dated March 6, 1996, subsequently turned up in a suitcase that was left behind when Atta boarded an American Airlines flight out of Boston 5½ years later. It's an odd document, a mixture of standard Islamic text and stern orders on preparations for his burial and who would be allowed to attend it. In it, Atta dedicates his life and death to Allah and forbids women to visit his grave. It's difficult to discern the meaning of the will, but if nothing else it provides an indication of a young man's growing obsessions and frustrations.



Marienstrasse: THE HOUSE OF THE FOLLOWERS

Atta continued to live at the university apartment and worked at Plankontor until the firm laid him off when business declined in 1996. Atta hated to lose the job, he told Lewin, but left gracefully. He sent back money that he thought the firm had overpaid him on his final paycheck.

Atta finished his course work the next spring. All he had left was to write his thesis. Instead, he seemed to vanish. He had almost no contact with the university for a year beginning with the fall of 1997.

He taught a series of seminars put on by the think tank that had sponsored his research trip to Cairo. The seminars, in 1997 and '98, were for students undertaking similar projects. Atta wasn't markedly different as a teacher than he was as a student. He was well-prepared, thorough, unexciting and serious, said one man who attended two of the four-day meetings. The man, an Egyptian, said that he was initially excited to meet another Egyptian so far from home but that Atta, while not hostile, showed little interest in personal conversation.

The seminars included evening social events. Atta attended none of them.

The Egyptian student said Atta always seemed preoccupied. There was "a wall" between him and the students, he said.

Atta took another part-time job, in a warehouse packing computers for shipment. Unlike the work at Plankontor, this job had no connection to his city planning career. It did have other connections, however. At least two of his co-workers are alleged to have been involved in the planning or execution of the Sept. 11 attacks.

U.S. investigators think that at some point during this period, Atta went to Afghanistan for training at a camp run by Al Qaeda, Bin Laden's terrorist network, but the seminar schedule didn't permit lengthy absences. His longest absence appears to have been a couple of months at the beginning of 1998. He told his roommate at Centrumshaus that he was going on another pilgrimage. He didn't say where.

By autumn 1998, Atta finally exhausted his eligibility for subsidized student housing. He told his house manager, Manfred Schroeder, that he would take an apartment with friends. Schroeder was probably the only one sorry to see him leave.

Schroeder is an older man. He has an air of authority. Not all the students appreciate it. Atta, though, habitually treated older men with deference. He sometimes invited Schroeder into his apartment for tea and chocolate candy, Atta's sole indulgence.

But he had been at Centrumshaus five years. He had to move.

He packed his bag and was gone to the Forgotten Island, Wilhelmsburg. Neighbors said the large group of Arab men stayed at the housing project there a few months, then disappeared as quickly as they had arrived, leaving only 11 mattresses behind.

By November, Atta was back in Harburg. He and two other men, Ramzi Binalshibh and Said Bahaji, rented a freshly remodeled apartment on Marienstrasse near the university. The apartment had three bedrooms, new paint and heating and a great many visitors. The tenants paid for installation of high-speed computer lines.

This was, investigators say, the formation of a new Al Qaeda terrorist cell and a central planning point for what would turn out to be the Sept. 11 attacks.

Binalshibh, a Yemeni national, had no apparent means of support and little interest in school. He attended Hamburg's University of Applied Sciences for a few months, didn't do well and quit. Bahaji, a German of Moroccan descent, studied computer engineering at Technical University. He and Atta petitioned the school for space to establish a Muslim meeting and prayer room.

U.S. investigators say Binalshibh intended to join the hijack teams in the United States. Bahaji is thought to have provided key technical and logistical support to the teams. Both men left Germany shortly before the attacks, surfacing briefly in Pakistan before disappearing again.

In 1998, Bahaji came under the scrutiny of German police because of his association with a middle-aged Syrian businessman, Mamoun Darkazanli, whom he had met at the Al Quds mosque. Darkazanli had an odd, still-vague association with a man who had once been a financial officer for Bin Laden.

Nothing came of the police surveillance because, an investigator said later, "we only knew them as radical Muslims. That's not a crime. They might have had contact with followers of Osama bin Laden. This is also not a crime."

Atta, Binalshibh and Bahaji were good tenants, said Thorsten Albrecht, their landlord. They paid their rent, often noting on the check that it was from the Dar el Anser, the House of the Followers.

Albrecht thought that they looked and acted like philosophy students. They seemed almost dreamy, preoccupied. They dressed in clothes that had been out of style for a while. He remembers one of them wearing beige bell-bottom jeans. They also sometimes wore traditional Muslim tunics. Neighbors said the flat became a gathering spot. As in Wilhelmsburg, large numbers of Arab men visited routinely. Among them were two other alleged Sept. 11 hijackers--Marwan Al-Shehhi and Ziad Samir Jarrah.

Atta requested a meeting with Dittmar Machule to renew work on his thesis. Machule said he asked him: "Where have you been, Mohamed? . . . There is trouble? Problems in the family?"

"Yes, in the family, at home," Atta told him. "Please understand, I don't want to talk about this."

And that was that. Atta began vigorous work on his Aleppo thesis. He resumed regular meetings with Machule to discuss it and in June 1999, he turned in a 152-page manuscript. Machule opened it to find an Arabic inscription and dedication to Allah on the first page.

The rest of the work held few surprises. It was a solid, thorough examination of Aleppo's history, current redevelopment and a proposal to better integrate the city's past with its future. Machule judged it to be of high quality intellectually but uneven in its writing. He asked another professor, Chrilla Wendt, to work with Atta to polish the thesis before it was formally submitted.

They worked together at regular meetings, side by side at a desk, for six weeks. Wendt knew of Atta's discomfort around women but said the work went smoothly until, suddenly, Atta told her that he could no longer stand to be in such close proximity. By then, the rewriting was nearly done and in August, Atta formally submitted the thesis. He defended it before the review committee later in the month and received high marks and congratulations.

The thesis is a routine piece of urban analysis. The most interesting thing about it is why Atta chose to finish it at all. It seems clear in retrospect that Atta was already well down the road to Sept. 11. He, Al-Shehhi and Jarrah would soon, within weeks of one another, report their passports stolen, presumably to obtain new, clean documents without the sort of travel record that might stop them from getting U.S. visas.

Maybe the thesis was something Atta set his mind to and did solely because he wanted to; he was a resolute man. Maybe Machule is right: He thinks that Atta didn't yet know his fate.

Machule remembers Atta coming by his office one final time. Machule was busy with another student and Atta, being Atta, didn't barge in. He didn't even knock. He just stood at the open door, hoping to catch Machule's eye. Machule gestured to him to wait. Atta stood there for 10 minutes. Then he walked away, and Machule never saw him again.

At the end of 1999, Atta went home to Cairo, degree in hand. His father greeted him as a conquering hero.

"I told him we should look for a wife for him," Atta's father said. He always had things arranged. This time, he had a potential bride lined up: "We went to visit a family, and Mohamed met the daughter and they liked each other. The woman's parents also liked Mohamed, but their only condition was that their daughter not leave Cairo. So Mohamed got engaged to her and then went back to finish his PhD."

There would be, of course, no marriage, no doctorate.

By this time, Atta's parents were estranged. There had been a dispute over arrangements for their older daughter's marriage, according to Atta's aunt, Hamida Fateh. Atta's father didn't approve of the groom, who had been selected by Bouthayna's brothers, Fateh said.

Bouthayna's health had declined. Atta's visit was a time of great joy for her, Fateh said. Bouthayna took Atta to Kafr el Sheik to show him off to her relatives.

"It made her very, very happy," Fateh said.

The aunt said Atta told his mother that he didn't want to leave, didn't want to continue his studies. He wanted to stay in Cairo and take care of her. He asked if he could.

"His mother insisted he return to his studies," the aunt said.

You need to get a doctorate, she told him. Go to America.



America: AN IRRECONCILABLE MEMORY

Most of the north tower of the World Trade Center was air. All big buildings are, but the trade center was especially so. The center's chief engineer used to enjoy showing a chart of all the lightest tall buildings in the world. His were clustered near the top of the chart. He achieved this extraordinary lightness mainly by clever design that reduced the amount of steel in the buildings, creating more space.

Because they were so light, the main structural concern was wind. The trade center was designed to withstand gusts of hurricane force. But the wind isn't pointed, and even hurricanes don't attack at the speed of a Boeing 767. Eerily, another of the buildings' engineers had once bragged that they were designed to withstand the impact of an airliner; people laughed when they heard that anyone would ever consider such a thing.

After the unlikely weapon with the unlikely pilot rammed it, 24,000 gallons of kerosene ignited inside the north tower with the force of 7 million sticks of dynamite, eventually buckling columns and collapsing floors, one on top of another, until the entire building collapsed on itself, along with the south tower, turning a million tons of glass, stone, steel, Crane's 24-bond embossed letterhead stationery, janitors' mops, Italian wool suits, silk ties, Herman Miller chairs and nearly 3,000 people into a seven-story-high stack of rubble.

In November, on a blustery cold day in northern Germany, a young woman in Hamburg, the former girlfriend and now wife of one of Atta's old roommates, talked about an image she couldn't get out of her head. She said when the bombs started falling in Afghanistan, she would sit in front of her television, staring in disbelief, unable to comprehend that the bombs were in a very real sense put in motion by her husband's old roommate.

Watching the explosions, she would try to match them, the war, everything that has gone on in the world since Sept. 11, to her memory of the slight young man padding around his student apartment in his shower shoes. It didn't fit. She would ask herself: All of this because of Mohamed? It's impossible, she said. Not little Mohamed in his blue flip-flops.

There is much about Atta we can't now know. But when a person moves through the world, he leaves a path that can be traced, however faint parts of it may be. Down in the Atta traces, the image that lingers is of a man who was far too small to accomplish the huge thing he did. This was a man too timid even to knock on a professor's open office door. There is something deeply unsatisfying about this. We want our monsters to be monstrous. We expect them to be somehow equal to their crimes. More than anything, we want them to be extraordinary, to allow us to think the horrible thing itself is unlikely to be repeated.

When we go looking for people capable of inflicting such great destruction, the last thing we expect to find is little Mohamed in his blue flip-flops.

_ _ _




The Plot
How terrorists hatched a simple plan to use planes as bombs.

By TERRY McDERMOTT
Times Staff Writer

September 1, 2002


A decade ago, a cadre of freelance terrorists planned an improbable day of horror in which they would blow up a dozen U.S. airliners, killing, if the men were lucky and good, several thousand people. This plan was foiled and most of the men caught, but one key figure escaped, and the idea went with him. He was something of a ghost, eluding investigators for years, just beyond vision and reach, forever a step ahead. He fled to Afghanistan, where he became a key Al Qaeda agent.

He brought with him the idea of using airplanes as weapons. The leaders of Al Qaeda liked the idea and made it their own.

A small group of men spread across the globe was assigned the task, and last September they killed more than 3,000 people in New York and Pennsylvania and at the Pentagon. In the first weeks following the attacks, authorities loudly and frequently blamed Osama bin Laden and his organization, Al Qaeda. Since then, however, authorities have been reluctant to say much of anything about the details, in large part because they do not know them.

Enough is known, however, to describe how the plan to fly airplanes into buildings came into being, how it was elaborated upon and how it succeeded.

The story begins in Manila, Christmastime, 1994.

For most of a month, the men with the chemical burns and the misshapen fingers carted boxes and bottles through the terrazzo lobby of the Josefa, up six flights and down the hall to the shut door of Apartment 603, a furnished studio with kitchenette, dark parquet floors, off-white walls and a shuttered window overlooking President Quirino Avenue.

It was the window that worried the cops.

In normal years, Christmas in Manila is a prolonged celebration. That December, though, arrived in a meaner season. A typhoon had barreled through mid-month, ripping out trees and power lines and, for the authorities, sharpening the edge on an already anxious time.

Pope John Paul II had announced a five-day January visit. There were substantial fears within the country's intelligence community that increasingly violent Islamic activists would try to kill him.

The national police had just completed a 182-page catalog of terrorist activity throughout the island nation. It had been a horrible year: More than 50 incidents and 101 deaths, with Roman Catholic priests among the frequent targets. The terrorists were based on the southern island of Mindanao, but bombs had already exploded in Manila on Metro trains, at a Wendy's hamburger stand and a local movie theater. Another had blown a hole in an airliner.

The pope was a complication the cops didn't need. They increased surveillance and put local officials on high alert. That's where the window on the sixth floor of the Josefa came in. The apartment is but a quarter-mile from the Vatican ambassador's residence, where the pope would stay. The window looks directly down onto a busy street that the papal entourage would use.

The story has been told for years that on the night of Jan. 6, a week before the pope's arrival, the men in 603 accidentally started a fire in the kitchenette, and fled as it set off alarms. Firefighters and police rushed to the scene. They discovered the fire had subsided without assistance and prepared to call it a night until one suspicious police officer insisted on taking a look in the room. Inside, she found the place littered with beakers, funnels, cotton batting, cans of gasoline and a pair of king-size Welch's grape juice bottles filled with what turned out to be liquid nitroglycerin.

The truth about that night and the fire, officials say now, is a bit more complicated.

Manila is a sprawling mess of a metropolis, divided into districts called baranguays. Local politics operate like a turn-of-the-century American patronage machine: Each baranguay has a chief who delivers neighborhood complaints up the line and municipal favors down it. They keep their eyes open.

The Josefa is in the Malate baranguay. Apolinario Medenilla was the machine's man in Malate. He came around to have a look.

The Josefa is a drab, water-stained stucco, half-hotel, half-apartment house, with groaning air conditioners and a transient clientele. It rents rooms by the day, week or month. Next to it is a ragtag slum of tin-can squatter shacks, dusty pawnshops and two-stool cafes. Manila Bay is half a mile west, and cargo ship crewing agencies have offices in the slum, making it a place of constant movement.

The men in 603 had rented the room for a month and were so secretive they wouldn't let the maid in to change the sheets. It wasn't that they seemed averse to women, as some Muslim visitors were. They paid considerable attention to the city's salacious nightlife, coming and going at all hours, not always unaccompanied. And then there was the puzzle of all those boxes carted through the lobby. Manila is a tropical city, a steam room. Labor is cheap and people don't exert themselves if it can be avoided. Hauling heavy cartons is not typical tourist behavior. Medenilla passed the information on to police, who shared his suspicions.

Government officials now say police, worried about the pope's imminent arrival, started the fire that set off the alarm at the Josefa. When it sounded, the occupants ran out, the cops walked in and looked around. They then left and hunted down a search warrant. Even at that, according to police records, they had to ask 11 judges before they found one who would sign it.

Whatever the method of discovery, the police hit an intelligence gold mine.

The evidence filled three police vans. There were priests' robes and collars, Bibles, crucifixes and maps of the pope's prospective travels; chemistry textbooks and chemicals--acids and nitrates by the gallon, one finished pipe bomb and another waiting to be packed; there were a dozen passports and as many Casio watches, apparently to be used as timers; soldering irons, switches and loops of electrical wire.

The men in 603 were professional terrorists. They had stocked a bomb factory and left behind evidence they intended to use it.

One of them, a Pakistani named Ramzi Yousef, was among the most wanted men on Earth--the key suspect in the 1993 truck bombing of the World Trade Center in New York. They had come to Manila with enough new plans to make New York seem like a warm-up act. The plans were left behind on a Toshiba laptop. They included a plot to assassinate the pope and another audacious scheme to board a dozen American jumbo jets, place homemade bombs aboard them and blow them up over the Pacific. Yet another plan on the computer called for the terrorists to dive-bomb an airplane into CIA headquarters.

Through a combination of luck and international cooperation, the two men in 603 and an accomplice were captured within a year. Interrogations revealed there were still more plans and more men, men who have yet to be found. An investigator described the cell as part of "a strong network, continuously hatching plots." One of the unfound men, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, was a particular mystery. Nobody was quite certain who he was. Even his name was suspect. There are now more than a dozen aliases attributed to him.

It turned out he had been living in Manila for most of a year. He told people he was a Saudi businessman. He stayed in a fancy apartment in a nicer part of town, across the street from the country's future president. He drove his own car. He took diving lessons. He patronized go-go bars and karaoke clubs and held meetings at plush hotels. He tipped well. He was flashy--once renting a helicopter just to impress a girlfriend by hovering over her office, calling on his cell phone and telling her to wave.

Still, police had little idea what his connection to the bombers might be.

Then came Sept. 11 and one of the most intensive police and intelligence investigations in history. In the course of it, apparitions of Mohammed kept emerging from the mists of information. By this summer, American investigators had concluded Mohammed was a principal planner of the September attacks. The idea to kill thousands of Americans last fall by turning airliners into bombs might well have been his.

Filipino investigators came to a similar conclusion. The idea to kill thousands of Americans by blowing up airplanes in 1995 was probably Mohammed's as well, and Sept. 11 its fulfillment.

Much had happened between the two plots. What the investigator had said about the Manila cell could easily be applied to all of Osama bin Laden's Al Qaeda in the intervening years: Foremost, it was a network continuously hatching plots.

Whatever Al Qaeda's circumstances, successes or lack thereof, one thing that never changed was that the plots just kept coming: ships in Yemen, embassies in Africa, an airport in Los Angeles, a cathedral in France, a subway in Singapore. As the plots multiplied, Khalid Mohammed kept reappearing.

Over the years, many of the plots seemed ill-conceived ideas pursued by ill-equipped or unprepared men. Ramzi Yousef, convicted of the first attack on the World Trade Center and the plot to blow up airliners, complained to investigators that if he'd had enough money, he'd have toppled the trade center towers back in 1993.

It took time, but by the autumn of 2001, money was no longer a problem. Khalid Mohammed and his cohorts eliminated that and every other obstacle. Rather than rely on casual collections of hapless men patching together whatever foolhardy scheme they lit upon, they drew new men from three continents into their plot--diverse men, including an architect, an aerospace engineer, a patent medicine salesman, a computer programmer, sons of the Saudi middle class and an itinerant Yemeni who lived for two years in a cramped government barracks so uninviting authorities called it a container.

The organization was patient. While the men from around the globe were assembled and prepared, it went on doing what it otherwise did--churning out ideas for new and imaginative ways to kill.

By the time they were done, the old idea, the one with the airplanes, turned out to be the best--or worst--of them all.



Fighters Without a War



Al Qaeda was born in the course of a 10-year resistance to the Soviet Union's 1979 invasion of Afghanistan. The war against the Soviets became a worldwide rallying cry of radical Islam and, more, a forum for action. Tens of thousands of young men from throughout Islam answered the call to arms. The war's end presented a predicament: What would these so-called Afghan Arabs do now?

Fundamentalist Islam is viewed as a threat in much of the Muslim world. Many moujahedeen came home to inhospitable regimes. One of them later described the group as lost, without purpose "except to carry out the jihad."

One such man and his wife arrived at a compound of migrant quarters in tiny Kampung Sungai Manggis, south of Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, in early April 1991. He was short, stout, bearded and wearing a skullcap; she, even shorter, and completely covered in dark dress and full veil. The couple were strangers to Mior Mohamad Yuhana, the man who owned the migrant shacks, but they came recommended by a local man, and Mior thought they looked kindly.

The visitor said his name was Hambali, he was Indonesian and was moving to Malaysia so that he might practice Islam more freely. Mior told him he didn't care about that. Stay out of trouble, pay the rent and we'll be fine, he said. He led them to a tiny wooden shack, about the size of a one-car garage, with weathered siding, bare concrete floors and a single lightbulb inside.

Hambali grew up in the volcanic highlands of west Java and attended an Islamic boarding school and university. He answered the call to jihad and spent three years fighting in Afghanistan.

Hambali and his wife arrived in Sungai Manggis with the clothes they wore and a single bag each.

"They cooked and ate, slept on the floor," Mior said.

Sungai Manggis is just minutes from the western Malaysian coast, and from there an hour by boat across the Strait of Malacca to Indonesia. It is a well-traveled path for poor Indonesians, who come for work. But Sungai Manggis is not a place to get rich.

The area is blanketed with overgrown rubber plantations, abandoned when the fickle world market moved on. The landscape is green and tangled, the earth a deep orange clay that clings as dust in the morning and mud after the heavy midday rains. The hills are empty as yet of the Western-style subdivisions of the capital, but the bulldozers are coming. The area is being pulled into the sprawling compass of Kuala Lumpur.

Roadside stands are piled high with mangoes, pineapple, durian and--an indication of the oncoming march of the suburbs--sacks of used golf balls.

Hambali did odd jobs and soon began showing up outside the gold-domed mosque on the southern edge of the nearby market town of Banting, selling kebabs out of a tri-shaw cart. His wife, joined by her mother, was seldom seen beyond the rented shack.

Hambali switched from kebabs to patent medicines and began traveling, on business, he said, disappearing for weeks at a time. At home, he received what became a steady stream of visitors, Mior said. They spoke English and Arabic and sometimes carried Duty Free shopping bags. The men were "in their late 20s or early 30s. They looked tough. I remembered thinking at that time they would make good footballers," Mior said.

Hambali prospered. Soon, he was driving a red Proton hatchback and juggling calls on a pair of cell phones. Many of those calls, investigators later determined, were made to a man who had recently arrived in Manila, Osama bin Laden's brother-in-law.

Joining the Jihad

When the Soviets left Afghanistan, the country descended into gruesome civil war. With shifting alliances of tribes, warlords and religious sects, a network of camps, schools and supply routes that Bin Laden had helped establish along the Pakistani border was busier than ever.

Ramzi Yousef was one of the mujahedeen who returned to the region. Yousef was born and raised in Kuwait, where his parents were among thousands of Pakistanis drawn to the oil-rich kingdom. Yousef had first come to the camps on a break from college in Wales in 1988. He returned in 1991, after receiving an associate degree in electrical engineering. He later told investigators he spent six months training in the camps. He was so adept at bomb-making that he was known to trainees as "the chemist."

After his training, Yousef began recruiting the motley crew with which he would attack the United States.

Yousef later told investigators his principal goal was the liberation of Palestine, a political rather than religious motive. A boyhood friend, Abdul Hakim Murad, said that what Yousef really wanted to do was kill a lot of Jews. He didn't care how or where.

Yousef arrived in New York in the fall of 1992 wearing a three-colored silk suit and carrying an Iraqi passport with no entry visa. He claimed to be seeking political asylum. He was given two options--arrest or deportation. He chose arrest and was then immediately released on his own recognizance because, an INS agent later testified, "There was a lack of detention space."

Yousef moved into a Jersey City, N.J., apartment and started scouting targets. He spent time driving around Brooklyn because he had been told Jews lived there. Murad, according to transcripts of police interrogations, had earlier suggested to Yousef that many Jews worked at the World Trade Center and that maybe he should consider the site as a target.

Five months later, a bomb Yousef built for $3,000 blew up in the basement of the trade center's north tower, killing six, injuring about 1,000 and causing $300 million in damage. It was less than Yousef intended. He wanted the bomb to topple the north tower onto the south and release a cyanide cloud into the complex's ventilation system.

Collaborators were arrested and Yousef's role discovered. An international manhunt followed, with a reward of $2 million for his capture. Yousef disappeared for a time into the lawless western Pakistani province of Baluchistan, where he had relatives. He soon reemerged as a man about town in Peshawar and Karachi, a kind of folk hero much sought after among people who wanted to blow things up.

His boyhood friend Murad was living in Karachi. He had recently returned from the U.S., where he had earned a commercial pilot's license. Yousef came to see him. He talked, Murad said, about the need for good Muslims to give their lives, if needed, to the struggle. They talked about potential targets: Benazir Bhutto, then the prime minister of Pakistan; nuclear power stations; a government official in Iran; the U.S. Consulate there in Karachi and a variety of other U.S. government buildings. There was a plan to assassinate President Clinton.

"If you ask anybody," Murad said later, "even if you ask children, they will tell you that the U.S. is supporting Israel and Israel is killing our Muslim brothers in Palestine."

Murad proposed packing an airplane full of explosives and dive-bombing into the Pentagon or CIA headquarters. Yousef said it was worth considering.

He took Murad to meet a man interested in such things. He said his name was Abdul Magid. He was a Saudi import-export businessman, he said.

His real name, police later determined, was Khalid Shaikh Mohammed. He wasn't Saudi, but like Yousef a Baluchi, born and raised by expatriates in Kuwait. He is thought to be Yousef's uncle.

Foreign workers flooded the Gulf states in the 1970s and '80s. The oil economy couldn't have functioned without them, but they were not encouraged to think of it as home. In Kuwait, they are referred to as bidoon, translated as "without," as in without citizenship.

Like Yousef, Mohammed had gone abroad to study engineering. He enrolled at a two-year college in North Carolina in 1984. After college, he came home to Pakistan and joined what appears to have been the family business--jihad. A Kuwaiti newspaper has reported that he went to work as secretary to an Afghan warlord. It is likely his older brother Zayed arranged the job.

Zayed was a Pakistani representative of Mercy International, a Saudi-funded relief organization. The Kuwaiti government this summer said Zayed was a full-fledged member of Al Qaeda.

Murad said his first meeting with Magid/Mohammed was at Mohammed's Karachi apartment. He said Mohammed was very interested in learning everything he could about pilot training: how long it took, how expensive it was and who could qualify for it.

Yousef took Murad to see Mohammed a second time. Again, Murad said, Mohammed talked almost exclusively about flying.

By now, Yousef had persuaded Murad to join the cause. The two of them moved to an open-air compound where Yousef taught Murad to build bombs. Making chocolate, Yousef called it. In one practice session, a detonator exploded in Yousef's face. Yousef lost partial sight in one eye, Murad said.

As Yousef recuperated, Mohammed showed up out of nowhere, Murad said, to pay the bills.

Eluding Capture

Khalid Mohammed, Yousef and a third plotter, Wali Shah Khan, arrived in the Philippines in early 1994. Khan had stopped en route in Kuala Lumpur, where he and Hambali, the Indonesia patent medicine salesman, incorporated an export company called Konsojaya. Its real purpose, police say now, was to serve as a financial conduit for the plotters.

In Manila, the trio acted like anything but Islamic terrorists. All had local girlfriends. They hung out at karaoke bars and strip clubs.

Yousef and Mohammed, just weeks before they intended to blow up the pope, went on holiday to a coastal resort, where they took scuba-diving lessons.

Yousef's friend Murad joined them just before Christmas. The plans for the airplane plot--which they code-named Bojinka, Serbo-Croatian for explosion--called for men to board flights in Asia that had intermediate stops before heading across the Pacific. They would plant Yousef's bombs on the planes, disembark at the intermediate stop and do the same thing on another flight. The bombs' timers would be set so that all the bombs would go off more or less simultaneously.

Yousef did a trial run Dec. 9, planting a small version of his bomb on a Philippine Airlines flight to Tokyo. It exploded, killing one man. It would have caused the plane to crash if not for what were described as heroic efforts by the pilot.

That was the end of it, though. Police intelligence and fears for the pope's safety led to the fire alarm and discovery of the bomb factory.

Murad was caught that night when Yousef sent him back to the apartment to get Yousef's Toshiba laptop. Yousef walked off into the night. He made his way via Thailand to Pakistan. He was betrayed there by a man he tried to recruit and captured in a raid by U.S. agents and Pakistani security forces at a small hotel in Islamabad.

When Khan was arrested seven months later, just one of the known Manila plotters remained at large--Khalid Shaikh Mohammed.

Authorities think now he stayed for some days, perhaps weeks, in Manila, then made his way to Doha, Qatar, where he apparently enjoyed the patronage of a high-ranking member of the government.

One of Mohammed's brothers had attended university in Doha in the 1980s and became a much respected teacher. He reformed a network of social clubs that had previously been disreputable and made them a key feature in Doha's social and religious life. Many people there still speak fondly of the brother, and this apparently helped Mohammed settle quickly into Qatar society.

Mohammed was a kind of happy networker, said Khaled Mahmoud, an acquaintance.

"He knew your name the second time you met him and remembered things about you from previous conversations," Mahmoud said.

Mahmoud recalls running into Mohammed at the mosque. They chatted for perhaps 30 minutes, during which they were repeatedly interrupted by people coming up to say hello to the short, slightly plump, slightly balding young Mohammed.

Mohammed is said to have been funny and charming, an image that fits with the evidence of him as Manila raconteur. His very public lifestyle caught up with him in 1996. U.S. investigators identified him as their Manila suspect, and FBI Director Louis J. Freeh sent a letter to the Qatar government asking for permission to send a team after Mohammed. The government agreed and the team moved in, according to Robert Baer, a retired CIA officer. Baer said his account of the attempted capture was given to him later by the head of Qatar's national police, who told him he was ordered by a member of the Qatar ruling family to provide Mohammed and four other men with blank passports. The police chief said the other men included top Bin Laden aides Ayman Zawahiri and Mohammed Atif.

By the time the FBI team arrived, Mohammed and the others were gone.

American officials decline to speak about the escape, except to say that cooperation between Qatar and the U.S. is excellent now.

U.S. officials think Mohammed moved to Afghanistan, where he went to work for Al Qaeda.

In discussions of terrorism at the time, Bin Laden's name was mentioned in passing, if at all. That was about to change.

In late 1995, a National Guard post in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, had been bombed, and five Americans were killed.

The U.S. had begun to suspect that Bin Laden was training and dispatching terrorists from his base in Sudan. When they pressured the Sudanese to expel him, there were not many places he could go. Of these, Afghanistan was the most likely.

In May 1996, Bin Laden and an entourage of 150 men, women and children arrived by C-130 transport plane in Kandahar.

In June, a fuel truck exploded at a U.S. Marine barracks in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, killing 19.

Bin Laden did not claim responsibility for the attacks, but he conspicuously praised them.

In August, Bin Laden issued from his new home in the Afghan mountains a declaration of war against the United States.

Taliban leaders welcomed Bin Laden. He repaid the favor by furnishing them fighters and money. The moujahedeen training camps were rejuvenated by Bin Laden's presence.

In 1998, Bin Laden issued a second declaration of war against the U.S. and announced a merger of his Al Qaeda with organizations from Pakistan, Egypt and across Africa. The merger brought experienced fighters and strategists under Bin Laden's banner.

The new organization declared: "To kill Americans and their allies, both civil and military, is an individual duty of every Muslim who is able, in any country where this is possible."

It was a call for a new generation of jihadists.

A Place of Comfort and Hate

On a typically gray, damp day in Hamburg, when steel-hard winds blow down from the Baltic and the city grows dark and the evening cool turns cold, the thing that is noticed first when men come out of the weather into Al Quds mosque is the warmth they bring with them. A hand is clasped; bearded cheeks brush one against another; shoulders are squeezed; smiles, soft words and quiet laughter are shared.

Al Quds occupies a warren of sparsely decorated rooms upstairs from a downscale gym. It sits in a poorer quarter of Germany's richest city, on a hard, seamy street just east of Hauptbahnhof, the city's main rail station. The location, amid but removed from the drug dealers and hookers on Steindamm Street below, is perfect: Rent is cheap and the train station makes Al Quds accessible from all points on the Hamburg map.

The men come to evening prayer from across the city and from across the Arab world. Hamburg has a sizable Muslim population, about 5% of its almost 2 million people, and mosques are spread throughout the city to serve them. The overwhelming majority are Turks, but Al Quds is not a Turkish mosque.

There is within Islam, as they say, only one God and God is great, but any religion that requires its faithful to pray five times a day can expect them to exercise some discretion in determining where and with whom those prayers are said. Mosques, like churches in Christendom, segregate themselves by ethnicity, economics and scriptural interpretation. The version presented at Al Quds is Arab, dispossessed and harsh, which fit exactly the world view of certain Muslims in the 1990s.

"The Jews and Crusaders must have their throats slit," is the way one Al Quds preacher put it. This was for most of the decade not an unusual formulation.

A match had been struck in Afghanistan, and Islam was aflame. Al Quds was distinctive in Hamburg but no different from thousands of other mosques around the world--from San Diego to Jakarta to London--where a new radical Islam was nursed to a fire, and the fire fed.

There are two smaller, mostly Arab mosques very near Al Quds, and members of what later came to be called the Hamburg terrorist cell sometimes worshiped at those as well. But investigators think it was within Al Quds' plain rooms that a group of like-minded young men found one another and, for many of them, a calling.

The group was small--investigators think fewer than 20 people. It produced three of the Sept. 11 pilots--Mohamed Atta, Marwan Al-Shehhi and Ziad Samir Jarrah. Two other men apparently wanted to join them--Ramzi bin al-Shibh and Zakariya Essabar, both of whom were denied U.S. visas. When the pilots left for the United States, Bin al-Shibh became the key contact--and a conduit for money--back in Germany. Essabar, Bin al-Shibh and a roommate of Atta, Said Bahaji, all fled Germany before the attacks and remain fugitives.

The men of the Hamburg cell came from different backgrounds and countries but in ways were strikingly similar. Many were physically slight, men the size of boys; most were from the fringes of whatever society they came from and whatever schools they attended. All but one enrolled in college and many did not fit well into German life. Several had never before expressed much interest in religion or politics.

The men came to Germany at different times and to different cities over five years, beginning in the summer of 1992 when Atta, then 24, arrived from Egypt. He eventually enrolled at the Technical University of Hamburg-Harburg, studying urban planning.

Atta lived as a strict Muslim from the time of his arrival in Hamburg. He fasted during Ramadan and observed dietary prohibitions carefully. He prayed five times a day. He visited mosques when his schedule permitted; otherwise, he prayed wherever he was--at home, school or work.

During his first years in Hamburg, Atta gave no sign of being anything other than an exceptionally disciplined student. He went to class, did his work and prayed. A roommate took him to a movie once. Atta hated it and they never went again. He made few friends. He generally ate alone and, his roommates said, not with any joy.

"I remember," a roommate said, "sitting down at the table and Mohamed sighing, 'This is boring. Eating is boring.' He said it wasn't just that he wanted different food, it was just the act of eating."

He was an oddly self-contained man, the roommate said, "reluctant to any pleasure."

It is not certain when Atta started going to Al Quds, but a friend recalls meeting him there soon after the mosque opened in 1993. He went to mosque daily and sometimes returned to his room in the evening with Arab friends.

Foreign undergraduates must demonstrate German language competence before being admitted to university. When the other members of the cell began to arrive in Germany in 1994, they all enrolled in language programs, most of them in smaller cities around Germany.

When Said Bahaji came to Hamburg at the beginning of 1995, it was a homecoming of sorts. His Moroccan father and German mother met and married in Germany, and Bahaji was born there in 1975. The family moved to Morocco when he was 9. He came back for college.

He enrolled in the electrical engineering program at the technical university in 1996. He lived at a student home and spent weekends with his aunt Barbara Arens, a graphic designer with whom Bahaji shared an affinity for computers. He called her his "high-tech aunt." He had been secular, she said, until introduced to radical Islam by fellow students. Arens eventually kicked him out of the house.

Ramzi bin al-Shibh came to Germany not as a student, but, using the name Ramzi Omar, by claiming to be a political refugee from Sudan.

No one knows exactly when he arrived in the country. He made an asylum claim in 1995, which was denied; he appealed and was assigned to what the Germans call a container camp north of Hamburg. The camp in the little town of Kummerfeld is a single building about the size and shape of a ship container. The container is divided into three sleeping rooms, one bathroom and one kitchen. It's cramped, drafty and unpleasant. Container residents were paid a modest monthly stipend. They were encouraged but not required to find work. Typically for Germany's modern bureaucracy, as long as they showed up for weekly roll calls, they were free to come and go as they pleased.

Bin al-Shibh's asylum appeal was eventually denied. The judge in the case said he doubted Bin al-Shibh was even Sudanese, much less fleeing persecution. The judge was right. Bin al-Shibh was born in Yemen, in the mountain valley region of Hadramaut, the ancestral home of Osama bin Laden.

The dismissal of the claim had little effect. Bin al-Shibh had already returned to Yemen, then, using his real name, he received a German visa and reentered the country legally.

Marwan al-Shehhi came from a small town north of Dubai in the United Arab Emirates. His father was a Muslim cleric, and the son has been described as an especially devout Muslim. He enrolled in a language institute in Bonn in February 1996. He boarded with a local family. He took language classes for more than two years before he demonstrated sufficient competence to enroll in university.

He didn't move permanently to Hamburg until 1999.

This seems to some investigators quite late for someone who would play such a key role in the plot. Al-Shehhi had spent several months in 1998 in Hamburg, trying to pass his language exams. Presumably, had he passed in Hamburg in 1998, he would have stayed. He didn't, however, and had to move back to Bonn.

Just after Al-Shehhi left, a Pakistani student named Atif bin Mansour arrived in Hamburg. Early the next year, Mansour, whose name has never been released by German authorities, was Atta's co-applicant for a room for a new Islamic study group at the technical university. Mansour was a pilot on leave from the Pakistani Air Force. This in itself is intriguing--a Pakistani pilot? Investigators acknowledge they haven't figured out Mansour's role in the plot, if any. The German Federal Bureau of Criminal Investigations said he remains "a very interesting figure."

Mansour's brother, also in the Pakistani armed forces, was killed in battle that spring of 1999. Mansour rushed home to be with his family and never came back. Not long after, Al-Shehhi returned to Hamburg. It is as if they replaced one another.

Ziad Samir Jarrah came from a well-known and secular family in Lebanon. He moved to Greifswald, in the former East Germany, in the spring of 1996 to begin college. Almost immediately, Jarrah met a medical student, a woman named Aysel Senguen, and within the year they were living together and plotting their escape from Greifswald.

Jarrah moved to Hamburg in 1997, enrolling in the aeronautical engineering department at the University of Applied Sciences. The summer after he started classes, he worked in the paint shop of the Volkswagen factory in Wolfsburg. He was there at the same time, apparently on the same shift, as a young Moroccan student, Zakariya Essabar, who, that fall, also moved to Hamburg and enrolled at Applied Sciences.

The Big Man

Bernhard Falk, vice president of the German investigative agency, said the recruiting of men to join the jihad seldom occurred in the open. It was "in the backrooms, in closed circles. Only there, they preach hate and anti-Western sermons, and say what they really think. And there, the radicals try to convince certain people to go to Afghanistan."

There were notable exceptions to this. One man everyone within Al Quds knew was a big, beefy, bearded middle-aged fellow named Mohammed Haydar Zammar. He was an auto mechanic who had been unemployed for years. He, his wife and six children survived on welfare payments.

Zammar's bluster matched his size. In almost any discussion, his was the loudest voice and most radical view. He was well-known in many of the city's mosques as an advocate of jihad; though he spoke of serious things, he was not always regarded seriously.

The president of the neighboring Muhadjirin mosque said Zammar was "like a little boy" who talked too much.

Even Zammar's brother said, "His tongue was his problem."

Zammar was familiar to authorities too, because of his boisterousness and because he was apparently an acquaintance of a man arrested as a suspected Al Qaeda agent in 1998, charged with complicity in the bombing of two U.S. embassies in Africa.

In part because of Zammar's outspokenness, authorities tend to discount his role in the Sept. 11 plot. They concluded no one would entrust information to a braggart like him. It is clear, though, that Zammar knew the men in the Hamburg cell, in particular Said Bahaji. In part because of the acquaintance, German police in 1998 performed what they describe as limited surveillance on Bahaji.

Bahaji at the time was living with Atta and Bin al-Shibh. Nothing came of the surveillance and it was discontinued.

In Germany in the 1990s, the threat of terrorism of any sort seemed distant. The last real threats had come from the political left, in the Red Army Faction, successor to the 1970s Baader-Meinhof gang. But that threat ended years before. The class struggle was history.

The only thing young Germans, Generation Golf, as they were called, shared with the Maoists was an affinity for black turtlenecks. Rather than rejecting the status quo, they wanted what their parents had and worried they might not be able to get it. Germany might have been the safest place in Europe to establish an Al Qaeda cell.

One measure of the seriousness with which Germany viewed the threat of terrorism from within its fast-growing Muslim population is the distribution of counter-terrorism resources. In Hamburg, authorities had one man assigned part-time to monitor radical Islam. That's half a man to watch 80,000 people.

Law enforcement authorities say they viewed men such as Zammar as individuals, not connected to any formal networks.

"We only knew them as radical Muslims. This is not a crime," one investigator said. "They might have had contact with followers of Osama bin Laden. This is also not a crime."

There were, however, fundamentalist recruiting networks. In some instances, these networks overlapped with--and took advantage of--a missionary sect of Muslims called the Tabligh.

The Tabligh proselytizes throughout the world. It professes to be peaceful, but intelligence services throughout the Mideast say the group was hijacked by organizations, such as Al Qaeda, to recruit moujahedeen.

Zammar was a Tabligh, according to his brother. He had traveled to Pakistan at the group's invitation some years ago and joined, he said.

Since Zammar no longer worked, religion became almost a full-time job. To recruit people for jihad was not unusual, or illegal. For more than a decade, thousands of men throughout Western Europe went to Afghanistan, Bosnia or Chechnya to fight or, more usually, as a sort of baptism to the broad goals of radical Islam. It became, within that world, an almost hip thing to do.

That was part of the ingenuity of the Sept. 11 plot. Much of it could be put into place without crimes being committed. Those would come later.

The Soft Man

German law enforcement officials think the recruitment of the Hamburg cell probably didn't take place until 1998. The officials claim, without describing it, to have one solid piece of evidence from that period that indicates Atta played an unspecified lead role.

These officials describe the most likely recruitment process as being less formal than has generally been reported. They think there might have been several steps in the process: first, a soft, mainly religious recruitment, drawing the men into a deeper commitment to their religion; second, an urging or outright invitation to go to Afghanistan to see what it was like; third, at the camps, a harder recruitment for those, perhaps few, deemed worthy of joining Al Qaeda; and finally, a selection process for specific missions.

They think Zammar would have contributed to the second stage, acting as a sort of travel agent for people who wanted to go to Afghanistan.

A principal candidate for the first-stage recruiter is a Hamburg postal worker named Mohammed bin Nasser Belfas.

He was born in Indonesia and spent part of his childhood in Yemen. He went to university in Cairo. Belfas came to Germany on a six-month tourist visa in 1972. He stayed 13 years before he was discovered and jailed. When he was released, the Germans tried to deport him. But there was no place to deport him to. He was stateless. The Germans relented and allowed him to stay. He was granted citizenship in 2000.

Belfas works the night shift at a suburban postal facility. He is almost constantly in the company of young men. He is quite well-known among Muslims. Friends say he is a lay missionary who has made it his task--one called it a mission--to unite the various ethnicities and sects of Muslims in Germany. He speaks German, Arabic, Indonesian and English.

He travels the country, paying particular attention to college towns, where he will speak to any group no matter how small. He is, in every sense, a recruiter, whether he knows it or not.

For several years, Belfas has conducted regular study meetings at his apartment. Mohamed Atta and Marwan Al-Shehhi were regular members of the study group. Atta, one attendee said, acted almost as Belfas' deputy.

Once, said Volker Harum Bruhn, a member of the group, they watched a CNN newscast on suicide bombers in Israel. Part of the program told the story of a bomber who set off his charge prematurely, injuring only himself. He was rushed to an Israeli hospital unconscious. He awoke on the operating table, looked up and said: "Is this heaven?"

The doctor asked whether the bomber thought there were Jews in heaven.

The bomber replied, "No."

"Then," the doctor said, "I guess you're not in heaven."

This cracked everybody up, Bruhn said, even Atta, who didn't laugh much.

Joined Together

Atta left Hamburg over the winter holiday, as he usually did, in 1997. This time, he didn't return for three months. He told his roommate he had been on a pilgrimage to Mecca. He had been to Mecca 18 months earlier and it would be unlikely for a student--even one so devout--to go twice so quickly or stay so long.

It was the biggest gap in his schedule since he had come to Hamburg and the first opportunity he would have had to go to camps in Afghanistan.

After he returned in the spring of 1998, almost everything the core members of the group did, they did with others in the group. That spring, Bin al-Shibh left the container camp and lived for a time with Belfas. That summer, Atta, Bin al-Shibh, Al-Shehhi and Belfas worked in a computer warehouse together, packing boxes. Authorities say they don't know quite what to make of this. The man who owns the company said he hired students when he had extra work. It is normal summer work for students, but Belfas? Even the man who owned the company thought it odd that a middle-aged night postal worker would spend his days in a computer warehouse.

Atta left the student house at the end of summer. He and a group of men--nobody knows how many--moved for a couple months into a project flat on a cold stretch of road on an island in the Elbe River. They had no furniture, only mattresses. Neighbors said they were out of the house all day and they talked long into most nights.

In the winter, Atta, Bin al-Shibh and Bahaji moved into a neat, newly refurbished three-bedroom apartment at Marienstrasse 54, near the university.

Some investigators theorize the men in the Hamburg cell might have been recruited by Al Qaeda scouts in the smaller German towns where many lived, then sent to Hamburg. As possible evidence of this, they cite the fact that several of the cities where the hijackers lived--even small towns such as Greifswald and Muenster--had well-known radical preachers.

The biggest argument against the "sending theory" is that it assumes there was some sort of control center in Hamburg, operating for many years, and authorities have no evidence of this. German officials, in fact, think the planning and control for Sept. 11 occurred almost entirely in Afghanistan.

The simplest explanation of the movement of the members of the Hamburg cell is that it was completely natural. Most Arab students--not just those who become terrorists--leave the smaller college towns after they pass language tests and most of them head for Berlin, Hamburg or Frankfurt. These are the largest cities in Germany and the cities with the largest Islamic populations.

However they arrived, by the end of 1998, all of the men in the Hamburg cell except Al-Shehhi were in Hamburg and ready.

Mohammed's Plan

Given his taste for the high life and pretty girls, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed can't have enjoyed Afghanistan much under the puritanical Taliban. He seems to have gotten away often.

European intelligence experts say in 1996 and '97 he spent time in the Czech Republic capital of Prague, a key crossroads then for questionable men and dirty money.

American intelligence officials say he was in Germany in 1999. The Americans speculate that Mohammed was there to meet with the Hamburg cell.

He is thought to have made repeated visits to Southeast Asia--Malaysia and the Philippines. Once, in 1999, Philippine intelligence officials say, the FBI tipped them Mohammed was back to visit an old girlfriend. He vanished before agents arrived to arrest him.

American officials have told Italian authorities they suspect Mohammed was in Rome for as long as three weeks in 2000. Others say he played a central role that year in organizing the bombing of the U.S. destroyer Cole in Yemen.

Finally, this summer--even after Sept. 11--a report circulated in Manila that Mohammed was back in town to see a girlfriend yet again. Police found only a rumor and no man to back it up.

It is uncertain when Mohammed first proposed the Sept. 11 airliner attacks on the United States, but captured Al Qaeda officers have told interrogators it was in fact Mohammed's idea, according to a U.S. intelligence official. American officials think Mohammed brought the airliner idea to the Al Qaeda hierarchy, which approved it and gave Mohammed and perhaps another Bin Laden lieutenant, Abu Zubeida, who ran the training camps, responsibility to manage it.

Mohammed wouldn't need bombs this time. The airplanes would become the bombs. What he would need instead were pilots. Zubeida's camps would be a good place to find them.

This operation was different from previous Al Qaeda plots: It was of a grander scale, more ambitious and expensive. It seems to have been more closely controlled. The men seem to have been more carefully chosen, more cosmopolitan and technically proficient.

German investigators think the men were already committed to Al Qaeda by the time of Mohammed's 1999 visit to Germany, although Atta for one seemed to retain doubts.

Throughout 1999, Atta regularly attended Belfas' Islamic study group. After one of these meetings, Atta asked to see Volker Harum Bruhn privately. At that meeting, Bruhn said Atta warned him strongly to stay away from Islamic extremists, to follow the Koran strictly but to live a careful life.

Later in the year, after Atta finally received his master's degree in October, he went home to Cairo one last time. While there, according to his aunt, he asked his mother, who was ill, whether he could remain in Egypt permanently, to begin a career and care for her.

She insisted he continue his education, to go on to a doctoral program in the United States. He did, of course, go to the United States, but the next step in his education was in Afghanistan.

Officials with the German federal police say they have uncovered airline data that indicate Atta, Al-Shehhi and Jarrah--three Sept. 11 pilots--and Bin al-Shibh, who applied for flight school but was never able to get a U.S. visa, all flew to Pakistan in November. They went from there to an Al Qaeda training camp near Kandahar.

Al-Shehhi, who was paid a $2,000-per-month stipend from the United Arab Emirates Army the entire time he was in Germany, withdrew $6,000 from his bank account to pay for the tickets. They flew separately, with at least some of them using aliases through Istanbul to Karachi. The timing of the meeting suggests this could have been when they committed to the mission and were told it would involve learning to fly airplanes.

Building a Terror Business

Khalid Shaikh Mohammed wasn't the only one who got away after the failed Manila bomb plot. Hambali, the Indonesian businessman, didn't just elude capture; he eluded detection. Authorities didn't even know he was involved.

He remained in his little hut along Manggis River Village Road and, security officials now say, began constructing a regional network. Two other Indonesian fundamentalists lived in the village for much of the same time Hambali did. Together, the three embarked on a long, patient recruiting process. The other men preached frequently at mosques. Hambali spoke only to small groups in private.

One follower later told police what was most impressive about Hambali was "his quiet and humble manners." He made a regular circuit of small prayer groups; he raised money and insisted that jihad was the answer. Malaysian police say they have since arrested several men whom Hambali sent to Afghanistan for training; several bombing plots have been attributed to his network.

At the time, no one paid any attention.

One of Hambali's disciples was Yazid Sufaat, a former Malaysian army captain and Cal State Sacramento graduate. Sufaat and his wife, also a Sacramento alumnus, had prospered after their return to Kuala Lumpur. She owned a computer services firm; he did drug testing for the government.

They lived with their young children in a small row house in a middle-class Kuala Lumpur suburb. It is not lavish; the house has the decaying look of many things in the tropics, where time, heat and humidity conquer all. But the couple were able to buy a weekend getaway at a new condominium complex in the hills out of town. The development advertises "city living, country style." With its Jack Nicklaus-designed golf course, sports clubs, foot reflexology and postpartum slimming classes, the development could be in Orange County.

One notable difference was that Sufaat frequently lent the condo to Afghan war veterans who came to town to get artificial limbs. It probably didn't seem all that unusual then, in early January 2000, when a small group of Arabs, one missing a leg, showed up at the condominium.

The one-legged man was Tawfiq bin Atash, for many years a personal aide to Osama bin Laden. With him were two men who would become Sept. 11 hijackers: Khalid Almihdhar and Nawaf Alhazmi. At least two other men attended, one of whom has been identified, tentatively, as Ramzi bin al-Shibh from Hamburg.

The men were followed at the request of the CIA. The Americans had intercepted a telephone call to Yemen in which Almihdhar detailed arrangements for the trip. The Americans didn't know Almihdhar, but they knew the number he called was used as a dispatch center for Al Qaeda. Bin Laden had called it dozens of times over a period of years in the late 1990s, according to court records.

The CIA asked the Malaysians to monitor the Kuala Lumpur meeting. The Malaysians photographed the men going in and out of the condo.

It was not until much later that CIA analysts figured out who the men in the photos were. Atash was determined to have been one of the coordinators of the October 2000 attack in Yemen on the destroyer Cole. Yemeni authorities say Almihdhar also helped prepare the attack.

Bin al-Shibh has not been positively identified from the photographs. German police, however, say they have credit card receipts that indicate Bin al-Shibh was in Malaysia at the same time.

Sufaat, who has been arrested, told Malaysian officials he allowed the condo to be used at Hambali's request and had no idea who the men were. He said he does not know whether Hambali attended the meeting but said Hambali has his own key to the condo.

Investigators do not know who else the men might have met while in Kuala Lumpur. They do know that Malaysia was a frequent haunt of one of Hambali's old business partners, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed. It would have made sense for him to be there, but no one knows whether he was.

The meeting occurred in early January 2000, just after a series of planned Al Qaeda millennium attacks failed. Intelligence officials believe the men met to discuss new attacks: the Cole and, given the timing, Sept. 11.

On Jan. 8, the men left Kuala Lumpur.

On Jan. 15, Almihdhar and Alhazmi arrived in Los Angeles.

On Jan. 18, in the United Arab Emirates, Marwan Al-Shehhi, using a brand-new passport, became the first of the Hamburg cell to apply for and receive a U.S. visa.

In March, Mohamed Atta began e-mailing 31 flight schools in the United States.

In May, Atta, also using a new passport, received his U.S. visa.

By the end of June, Al-Shehhi, Atta and Jarrah were all in the United States, looking for flight schools.

R&R in San Diego

It's not clear when Omar Al-Bayoumi arrived in San Diego, who he was, whom he worked for, why he came or why he left. What is clear is that he had more to do with two men who later ended up aboard American Airlines Flight 77 on Sept. 11 than anyone else in town.

Al-Bayoumi appears to have arrived in San Diego in 1995. He lived with his wife and four children at a suburban apartment complex. He told people he was a student of international business, but it seemed unlikely because he was already 40 years old and he never went to school. He didn't work, either. He explained that by telling some people he received a monthly stipend from his former employer, an aviation company in his native Saudi Arabia, and telling others he had a Saudi government scholarship.

Al-Bayoumi almost always carried a video camera and taped everything. He spent a lot of time at the Islamic Center of San Diego, which is the hub of the city's multiethnic Muslim population. He paid particular attention to newcomers and could be counted on to help them find housing and get settled.

In late 1999, he brought to town two young Saudi students and asked people to help them settle in. They hardly spoke English and would need help getting Social Security cards, driver's licenses and bank accounts.

The two men Al-Bayoumi brought to San Diego were Almihdhar and Alhazmi.

Alhazmi later told a friend he and Almihdhar met Al-Bayoumi at a Los Angeles restaurant, when Al-Bayoumi overheard them speaking Arabic and introduced himself. Al-Bayoumi learned they were new to the area and offered to drive them to San Diego and help them get settled.

They took him up on the offer, Alhazmi said. Al-Bayoumi brought them to the Parkwood Apartments, got them a room and even paid the rent for the first couple of months.

He threw them a welcome party. Al-Bayoumi told people they were in San Diego to learn English, although, like him, no one can remember either of them ever going to a single class. Alhazmi spent a lot of time at the San Diego State library, surfing the Web.

Alhazmi signed a six-month lease. And despite the fact that Al-Bayoumi paid the first two months' rent, they complained that they couldn't afford the place. They moved out, taking a room in the house of a retired professor. In the spring, Alhazmi told a friend he was having $5,000 wired to him from Saudi Arabia, but he had no account. He asked whether the money could be sent to the friend's account. The friend agreed, but when the money arrived it was from the United Arab Emirates, not Saudi Arabia, and the sender was identified only as Ali.

The money was intended for flight lessons, which both Alhazmi and Almihdhar said they wanted to take. Another friend took them to Montgomery Field, north of San Diego, and arranged for them to start lessons. They took one and quit.

"The first day they came in here, they said they want to fly Boeings," recalled Fereidoun "Fred" Sorbi, the instructor. "We said you have to start slower. You can't just jump right into Boeings."

Acquaintances said the pair seemed to regard their time in California almost as R&R. Alhazmi had season passes to Sea World and the San Diego Zoo. They bought a Toyota sedan and liked to make the run up to Las Vegas. In town, they hung out at Cheetah's, a nude bar near the Islamic Center.

The center itself is hardly a haven for radical Islam. It is multiethnic and promotes assimilation. All the signs in the building are in English. In 2000, a group of men showed up and passed out literature praising Bin Laden. Center officials confiscated the leaflets and told the men to leave and not come back.

Almihdhar left San Diego in June 2000. Alhazmi stayed until December. He took a job for a few weeks, washing cars at a Texaco station. The station was owned by two Palestinians and was a hangout for Arab men, who sat outside at a picnic table, talking and drinking coffee. Alhazmi hung out with them even when he wasn't working. He talked often, friends said, about Muslims being treated unfairly around the world.

He did not tell his San Diego friends that he had left Saudi Arabia three years earlier to go to Chechnya to fight, which is what his family says now.

In December, another young Saudi arrived. Alhazmi introduced him as Hani. The man was apparently Hani Hanjour, a Saudi who had spent most of three years in Arizona in the late 1990s, training at various flight schools. He was by every account a horrible flight student, but eventually in 1999 managed to obtain a commercial license, after which he returned to Saudi Arabia. Now back in the U.S., he and Alhazmi went off to fly airplanes in Arizona.

On the Move

The core of men involved in the Sept. 11 attacks did an enormous amount of traveling. Much of 2000 and 2001 is a blur of movement. They put thousands of miles on rental cars. They spent thousands of dollars on plane tickets.

Atta and Al-Shehhi each made at least two separate transatlantic trips. Ziad Samir Jarrah arrived in the U.S. for flight training in late June 2000. In the next 13 months, he left the country five times.

On Oct. 20, 2000, one of the odder trips occurred. Mohammed Belfas, Atta's Hamburg mentor, accompanied Agus Budiman, a young architecture student he had known for years, from Germany to the United States.

Belfas later said he simply wanted to see the United States. He and Budiman flew to Washington, D.C. Budiman--like Belfas, an Indonesian--had been coming to the United States for years. He had family in the Washington suburbs, and even had a Virginia driver's license, and now wanted to move permanently to the U.S.

While here, Belfas occasionally accompanied Budiman to his job as a driver for Take-Out Taxi restaurant delivery service.

Belfas offered to help drive the delivery car if Budiman would help him get a U.S. driver's license. Budiman told Belfas he didn't need an American license. Belfas insisted, saying he wanted the license as a souvenir.

On Nov. 4, Belfas and Budiman made the first of two trips to the Department of Motor Vehicles office in downtown Arlington, Va. On the first trip, Belfas received a Virginia identification card after he and Budiman swore that Belfas lived in Arlington. When they went back two days later, they got his driver's license, using the ID card as proof of residence.

That's all there was to it. Belfas had his souvenir, if that's what it was. Within the week, he returned to Germany.

In the summer of 2001, as they too neared the ends of their stay in the U.S., seven of the 19 hijackers visited the same office to get IDs or driver's licenses in exactly the same way. They didn't need Budiman. They paid other men to sign on their behalf.

They used the IDs to make purchasing airline tickets and boarding planes simpler.

The Saudis

Of all the hijackers, Khalid Almihdhar is the one who seems to have the broadest contacts with Al Qaeda. He appears to be the son-in-law of a well-known Yemeni Al Qaeda figure and is believed to have had a role in the Cole bombing.

Almihdhar left the U.S. in the summer of 2000 and did not return until July 4, 2001, by which time 12 other young Saudi men and one from the United Arab Emirates had arrived at various locations on the East Coast.

Less is known about these late-arriving men, in part because Saudi Arabia has barred most reporters from the country. For months after the attacks, the Saudi government denied even that the men were Saudi citizens.

Most of the men were from the southwestern provinces of Saudi Arabia. Most were from relatively well-off but not wealthy families. Two-thirds of them told their families they were leaving to join the jihad. Several mentioned wanting to fight in Chechnya. Several left with friends or relatives.

It is not known who recruited them for the Sept. 11 plot, but those who went for training in the Afghan camps could easily have been recruited there. Almihdhar's absence from the U.S. for the entire time during which they were presumably recruited suggests he might have played some role in recruiting them.

In one sense, it isn't surprising that so many Saudis would be among the attackers: It is easier for Saudis to get American visas.

From the beginning, too, Saudis were the largest national group among the Afghan Arabs. Bin Laden obviously is Saudi and so were many of the financial backers of the moujahedeen and, later, the Taliban.

The relief groups and charities that have been among the most prominent supporters of the Taliban and have been implicated in various Al Qaeda plots are either based in Saudi Arabia or derive much of their support from there.

Khalid Shaikh Mohammed's brother ran one such agency.

A Meeting on the Coast

Two months before he made history, Atta made one last overseas trip. On July 8, he flew from Miami to Madrid. The next day, Atta rented a silver Hyundai and set off for Tarragona, an eight-hour drive. It was his second trip to Spain that year. This time, he spent 11 days. For most of that time, Atta's former roommate Ramzi bin al-Shibh was also in Spain, in the same region.

Bin al-Shibh checked into the Hotel Monica in Cambrils. Atta stayed in a hotel in Tarragona 15 minutes away.

The next day, Bin al-Shibh checked out without breakfast and disappeared for five days. Atta too largely dropped off the screen. Most investigators suspect the two came not to meet just one another, but also with someone else--an operational commander such as Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, or a courier relaying instructions. Perhaps, some suspect, this was when the final details of the plot were set--the date of the attack, maybe, or who would go on which airplanes. A meeting could have taken place in a safe house provided by a local network.

This theory is consistent with the length of time they stayed and with their disappearance for the bulk of it. But in Spain, as elsewhere, despite months of investigation, the plotters left more unknowns than answers.

Another theory is the meeting concerned finding a replacement pilot for Bin al-Shibh, who despite four applications was unable to get a U.S. visa. The replacement, according to this theory, was Zacarias Moussaoui, a muscular, angry French Moroccan veteran of the Afghan camps and Chechnya.

Moussaoui is the only man charged by the United States with involvement in the Sept. 11 plot. The logic of the U.S. indictment of Moussaoui is that because Bin al-Shibh could not get into the United States, the hijackers were one man short of the four teams of five designated to commandeer the planes; Bin al-Shibh brought in Moussaoui as a late replacement, prosecutors allege.

On July 10, the day after Atta and Bin al-Shibh arrived in Spain, Moussaoui paid the Pan Am International Flight Academy in Minnesota for a flight simulator course, according to the indictment. He was still in Norman, Okla., where he had washed out of a course earlier in the year. He made another payment to the Minnesota school July 11.

Bin al-Shibh returned to Hamburg on July 20. On July 29 and Aug. 2, Moussaoui made several calls to a number in Dusseldorf, Germany. Bin al-Shibh received wire payments totaling $15,000 from the suspected 9/11 paymaster in United Arab Emirates on July 30 and 31 in Hamburg, then wired $14,000 to Moussaoui on Aug. 1 and Aug. 3.

A week later, Moussaoui left Oklahoma for Minnesota, where he paid approximately $6,300 in cash to the Pan Am International Flight Academy on Aug. 10 and started his course. He quickly attracted suspicion, resulting in his arrest on Aug. 17. Some investigators suspect his arrest set the attacks in motion, perhaps prematurely.

Final Flights

Not long after Atta returned to the United States from Spain, he made a quick trip to Las Vegas, his second of the summer. He stayed, as usual, in a cheap motel off the Strip. At least two other hijackers were in town at the same time--Alhazmi and Hanjour.

Like much else about the plot, no one knows whether they met, or if they did, why. Alhazmi and Hanjour by that point were living in New Jersey. Atta had bought his Madrid air ticket the previous month near the same New Jersey town where Hanjour and Alhazmi were living. They could easily have met in New Jersey. Las Vegas wasn't convenient. So why go there a month before the attacks?

It could well be they were in Las Vegas to meet someone else, just as in Spain. Las Vegas certainly seems like Khalid Shaikh Mohammed's kind of town.

The next month, in effect, the last month, has been well-documented. The Saudis were integrated with the Hamburg cell. They moved in varying combinations up and down the East Coast. They worked out at gyms and reserved and purchased air tickets.

In Europe, the remaining members of the Hamburg cell were making preparations as well. Three months before Sept. 11, Said Bahaji told his employers at the computer company he would be quitting his job in the fall. He had accepted an internship in Pakistan, he told them, and would be moving. His employers say he was an exceptional worker. They were sorry to see him go.

He told his family the same thing. His aunt Barbara Arens heard about the internship, and she says now that she didn't believe a word of it. She says she even went to the police before Sept. 11 to try to get them to do something. Like what, they asked.

Bahaji left Hamburg on Sept. 4, flew to Karachi via Istanbul and disappeared. German agents later determined two other passengers on the same flight stayed in the same room with Bahaji at the Embassy Hotel in Karachi. They were traveling with false identification papers. Zakariya Essabar disappeared from Hamburg at the same time. Investigators think he might have been one of the men with Bahaji. They don't know who the third man might have been.

Ramzi bin al-Shibh returned to Spain on Sept. 5, flying from Dusseldorf. He stayed at a private home in the Madrid area, investigators say. He did not use his return ticket to Germany and is presumed to have made his way to Afghanistan.

All the while, it was later determined, FBI agents were trying unsuccessfully to get a look at Zacarias Moussaoui's computer. Other agents were searching for Alhazmi and Almihdhar after having been belatedly notified by the CIA that the two men were known to have associated with terrorist suspects.

There was in the intelligence community a general air of concern, verging on panic, that something very bad was about to happen. The signs were there. The intelligence machine produced enormous amounts of information and people were beginning to make sense of it. Electronic intercepts, telephone chatter, warnings from foreign services, internal memos--everything pointed in one direction. There was something out there.

In retrospect, the information makes the Sept. 11 attacks seem inevitable. Unfortunately, retrospective analysis is useful in understanding the past, not changing it, or even guaranteeing the future will be different. For now, one thing has not changed whatsoever:

U.S. agents have been chasing the specter of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed since 1994. They've come close to catching him at least twice, but every time he managed to slip away, to stay a step ahead of his pursuers.

This spring, with the Afghan war fought and resolutely won, with many key Al Qaeda operatives dead or captured, with the organization flushed from its hide-outs, on the run and in some disarray, a truck bomb exploded outside a synagogue in Tunisia, killing 19 people. Al Qaeda?

Before the attack, one of the bombers called a cell phone belonging, it is thought, to Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, who some believe has assumed a more central role in the organization and who, whatever his role, remains, still, a step ahead.



























The Plots and Designs of Al Qaeda's Engineer
Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the man believed to be behind 9/11, hides in plain sight -- and narrowly escapes capture in Pakistan.
By Terry McDermott, Josh Meyer and Patrick J. McDonnell

Times Staff Writers

December 22, 2002

KARACHI, Pakistan -- Senior Pakistani and American intelligence officials say the operational commander of Al Qaeda, the man believed to have planned the Sept. 11 attacks on the United States, narrowly avoided capture during a raid in which authorities took his two young sons into custody.

It was one of at least half a dozen missed opportunities over eight years to seize Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, who is described by intelligence analysts on three continents as the man most responsible for Al Qaeda's continuing terrorist attacks.

Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence agency has had Mohammed's two sons, ages 7 and 9, in custody since September. One senior American investigator said authorities believe that they might have come "within moments" of capturing Mohammed in the raid at a Karachi apartment.

In family photos seized at the apartment, Mohammed is pictured playing with the boys.

Pakistani intelligence officials said that in recent months they have seen persistent evidence that Mohammed -- even on the run -- has been aggressively directing Al Qaeda terrorist cells.

"Despite being so much in danger, he has not gone into hibernation," one senior Pakistani official said. "He is trying to protect what they have. He would like to consolidate first and then rebuild on the same edifice. And he is doing that. He remains active."

Mohammed has been linked to attacks against the United States as far back as 1993, but his importance in the Al Qaeda structure became clear only after Sept. 11 last year, U.S. officials say. Now, some officials say, stopping Mohammed is as important as capturing Osama bin Laden is, perhaps even more so.

Mohammed, believed to be 37, has traveled the world as one of the chief managers of the Al Qaeda network, using Egyptian, Qatari, Saudi, British and Kuwaiti identities. He is said to speak Arabic with a Kuwaiti accent and to be fluent in Urdu, the principal language of Pakistan, and English, acquired in part as he studied for his mechanical engineering degree at a university in North Carolina.

Although born in Kuwait, he is a Pakistani national whose family is from Baluchistan, an area that straddles Pakistan's borders with Iran and Afghanistan. He has used more than three dozen aliases, including one -- Mukhtar al Baluchi -- that honors this tribal heritage.

Mohammed has been operating out of Karachi on and off for a decade. He communicates with Al Qaeda cells around the world by courier, e-mail, coded telephone conversations and shortwave radio; German intelligence agents say that when he has been forced to retreat to rural hide-outs he sends his messages by donkey.

Even during the U.S. bombing campaign against Al Qaeda in Afghanistan late last year, Mohammed continued to plan, staff and direct new terrorist attacks, according to intelligence documents made available to The Times. The documents detail Mohammed's orchestration of a bombing campaign in Southeast Asia.

Mohammed the Pakistani, as the Asian bombers knew him, housed a young Canadian recruit for weeks in his Karachi apartment, personally instructing him on communication protocols -- e-mail passwords, telephone codes. He then sent him off to coordinate and finance the bomb squads. With just a few days' notice, Mohammed was able to deliver $50,000 to the recruit to pay for bomb-making materials. The money was delivered in packs of $100 bills at a shopping mall in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, according to the intelligence documents.

That plot was foiled, but Mohammed's intimate involvement in it underscores his leadership in building regional terrorist networks. One network linked to Al Qaeda is allegedly behind the October bombing in Bali, Indonesia, in which nearly 200 people died.

It is the same role that American investigators believe he played not just in Asia but also around the world: If Bin Laden has been the architect of Al Qaeda, Mohammed has been its engineer. Al Qaeda members in custody have told their interrogators that Mohammed had operational cells in place in the United States after the Sept. 11 attacks and that he was the principal proponent within Al Qaeda of developing radioactive "dirty bombs," according to European intelligence officers.

The FBI acknowledges that it underestimated Mohammed's significance for years, a senior agency official said. "He was under everybody's radar. We don't know how he did it. We wish we knew.... He's the guy nobody ever heard of. The others had egos. He didn't."

Mohammed's persistence has earned the grudging admiration of some investigators, who marvel at his uncanny ability to stay one step ahead of unprecedented dragnets. In Pakistan, where the FBI believes Mohammed is still hiding, those attempts have involved a small army of agents from the military, police and multiple countries and intelligence agencies.

"The way he is managing their affairs, the way he is controlling things, he is not an ordinary man," said one top Pakistani intelligence official. "He is very sharp and brave -- an unusual combination."

Sometimes Mohammed's escapes have been abetted by the caution of his pursuers. In one instance, in 1996, U.S. intelligence had determined that Mohammed was in Doha, Qatar. Some American officials wanted to organize what they call a "snatch and grab," essentially a commando raid, to seize him.

"Good intel had placed him in Qatar. This was, 'Oh my God! This bastard is in Doha -- let's get him," said one person involved in the investigation.

This plan was defeated when high-level managers complained during a White House meeting that it was too risky and might result in American deaths, according to two people involved in the decision. They said this failure to act decisively characterized the U.S. government's lack of a serious approach to terrorism before the Sept. 11 attacks.

"Look at what has happened in the last six years -- you would have to assume that he played a role in everything from that point on. We absolutely believe that," said Neil Herman, a former top FBI counter-terrorism officer. "He is right there. He is a common denominator. If he had been caught in 1996, who knows what could have been prevented."

Pakistani and American officials say catching Mohammed now could turn the tide in the war on terrorism. The senior Pakistani intelligence official said: "If you catch Khalid Shaikh at this point, you will break the backbone of the entire network."

Almost every Al Qaeda suspect whom the Pakistanis have arrested since last year has had some connection to Mohammed, authorities say. Many of those arrested have no links to one another, but they all know Mohammed.

Even those investigators who have been most involved in the hunt for Mohammed say they know very little about him. In the small, closed world of international counter-terrorism, he has become a mythic figure -- a ghost in the machine -- whose vague presence lurks behind innumerable plots but never comes completely into view.



Kuwait: Oil Town

Khalid Shaikh Mohammed was born in 1965, according to records, and reared in Fahaheel, a busy oil settlement south of Kuwait City, on the road to Saudi Arabia. The town was historically part of a sleepy agricultural zone on the edge of an oasis, a traditional site of palm and vegetable cultivation. Older Kuwaitis recall driving the route from Kuwait City through miles of desert, with the occasional vehicle, camel and Bedouin tent as the only landmarks.

That changed with the explosive growth of the petroleum business. By the late 1950s, Fahaheel boomed with a jaunty, cosmopolitan rhythm all its own. Palestinians, Lebanese, Syrians, Egyptians, Jordanians -- even the British and Americans -- were drawn here by the oil. Almost none of them were able to become Kuwaiti citizens, no matter how long they stayed, creating an enduring anxiety among many of the overseas workers. Even now, a majority of Kuwait's 2 million people are noncitizens.

Mohammed attended high school at a three-story, 1960s-style brick all-boys school that housed as many as 1,200 students. Fahaheel teachers and alumni said they recall him as a studious youth who concentrated on science. School was, and is, a serious thing in Kuwait: Schoolboys wear white shirts and gray slacks and the headmaster walks around with a bamboo cane, to be used on obstreperous students.

Mohammed's oldest brother, Zahed Shaikh, attended Kuwait University in the 1980s and was a leader of the Muslim Brotherhood -- a militant pan-Arab organization that functioned as an underground opposition throughout the region. A man who knew the family said a group called the Islamic Assn. of Palestinian Students was also formed on campus then; one of its leaders went on to become head of the political bureau of the militant Islamic group Hamas. This was the initial politicization of Mohammed, the friend said.

Much of the Middle East, following the devastating Arab loss to Israel in the 1967 war and the death of Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser -- failed champion of the drive for a secular and united Arab world -- embarked on a gradual but inexorable turn toward religion, leading up to the Islamic Revolution in Iran. Analysts say it seemed that the secular path had been exposed as lacking, and religion was an alternative source of identity and regional esteem.

"It was like a huge vacuum, and nobody was able to fill this vacuum better than the rising Islamists," said Shafeeq Ghabra, a political scientist in Kuwait.

The Kuwaiti government acknowledges that Mohammed was born in Kuwait, but that is about as far as the authorities will go in admitting any relationship with him.

"Just because he lived in Kuwait, or may have been more here, doesn't mean that this man is a Kuwaiti," Foreign Ministry Undersecretary Khalid al Jarallah said recently. "He is definitely not a Kuwaiti."

The Pakistani government also seeks to disown Mohammed, even though his first known passport was issued by Pakistan.

"Why do the Kuwaitis want to shift the blame to us?" said Muhammad Khalid, head of chancery at the Pakistani Embassy in Kuwait City.

Although much remains murky about Mohammed's background, it seems clear that his parents came from Baluchistan, which encompasses great swaths of southwestern Pakistan, southern Iran and Afghanistan. As avid coastal traders, the Baluchis have an extended history throughout the Gulf. Generations ago, area sheiks brought in fearsome Baluchi tribesmen to serve as palace guards.

Mohammed's parents had religious callings, according to local press reports. His father, Shaikh Mohammed Ali Doustin Baluchi, who died decades ago, according to Mohammed's acquaintances, has been described as a former imam, or preacher, at a mosque in the sprawling Ahmadi municipality. Mohammed's mother, Halema, was said to have worked cleaning women's bodies for burial. This is considered a prestigious job in Islam, however ill-paid.

Mohammed is one of at least five siblings -- four boys and a girl. The brothers' names -- Khalid (meaning man of eternal life); Zahed (pious); Abed (worshiper) and Aref (knowledgeable) -- reflect the family's religious orientation.

What little is known about the sister includes one compelling piece of information: She is thought to be the mother of Abdul Karim Basit, better known as Ramzi Ahmed Yousef, the man convicted of masterminding the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center in New York.



Chowan College: Abbie Dahbies

Mohammed's first extended encounter with the West occurred at Chowan College, a tiny Baptist school nestled among the cotton farms, tobacco patches and thick forests of eastern North Carolina, just south of the Virginia line.

The school was founded in 1848 as a refuge of learning for proper Southern women. Later, it became a two-year junior college, a place where young adults could gain an academic foothold. Its entry standards were liberal, but its values were bedrock and its leafy setting in isolated Murfreesboro, with no bars and a single pizza shop, pretty much ensured that everyone remained on the straight and narrow. Generations of small-town ministers, teachers and other community mainstays passed through Chowan's colonnaded facade.

After World War II, the school's missionary alumni began referring students from overseas. Dominating the international contingent by the 1980s were Middle Eastern men.

Chowan did not require the standardized English proficiency exam then widely mandated for international students, a fact that spread through the global academic network. Foreign enrollees often spent a semester or two at Chowan, improved their English and then transferred to four-year universities.

Mohammed applied to Chowan as a Pakistani citizen shortly after graduating from Fahaheel Secondary in 1983, according to college records. He told school administrators that he had heard of the college from a friend in Kuwait. His bill -- $2,245 for the spring semester -- was paid in full the day of matriculation, Jan. 10, 1984. He told fellow students that his father was dead and that his brothers picked up the tab.

"He took his studies seriously and was a very good Muslim," said Badawi Hindieh, a Palestinian from Fahaheel who attended Chowan at the same time.

Acquaintances knew him as Khalid Shaikh, a name that stuck in people's minds. Mohammed, acquaintances said, was culturally integrated into Arab and Kuwaiti society and could have passed as a Kuwaiti Arab.

"Khalid Shaikh spoke very good Arabic, like a Kuwaiti, but introduced himself as a Pakistani," Hindieh said. "We knew he was Baluchi."

Later in life, as Mohammed used multiple identities and moved from the Gulf to Afghanistan, the West and beyond, this ability to immerse in varying cultures would serve him well.

By 1984, about 50 of the 650 or so male students at Chowan were Middle Easterners, including a sizable contingent from Fahaheel and elsewhere in Kuwait. The local boys had a name for them: "Abbie Dahbies."

The Arab students were frequent recipients of anti-Iranian epithets in the years after the 1979 takeover of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran. The foreigners were sometimes viewed as cliquish.

"They seemed to be praying all the time," recalled John Franklin Timberlake, a 1984 Chowan graduate, now a police officer in Murfreesboro. "Just chanting, like. We never understood a word of it. Sometimes we'd come home late on a weekend night, maybe after we'd had a few beers, and they'd still be praying."

At Chowan, Mohammed embarked on a pre-engineering curriculum -- popular among the foreigners.

"He was a good student -- a bit better than a B-type student," Garth D. Faile, chairman of the science department, said in an interview this fall.

Mohammed, like every student, was required to attend a once-a-week chapel service based on Christian doctrine.

One large bloc of Middle Easterners lived in Parker Hall, a brick tower overlooking the campus' Lake Vann, a restful crescent of water frequented by migrating birds and couples holding hands.

Groups of Arab students would gather in a fifth-floor dorm room and follow a kind of ritual: boil a chicken, share it with rice among all present, pray and commence intense discussions, before praying anew.

In the Middle Eastern tradition, they would leave their shoes in the corridor. Some U.S. students could not resist the temptation: The footwear sometimes ended up in the lake. Another prank involved filling 55-gallon garbage containers with water and propping the vessels against the doors of the "Abbie Dahbies," knocking and running away. When the door opened, water flooded the room.

The hijinks did not appear to discourage the visitors, many of whom remained in the States and completed their degrees. Years later, one alumnus interviewed at his office in Kuwait City recalled his time at Chowan with great affection, remembering in particular the becalmed lake -- an extravagance for Arabs reared in parched latitudes.

"In a place like Chowan, some students became more insular -- speaking only to Arab students, while others tried to mix with the Americans," he recalled. "I tried to mix, but others did it differently."

Mohammed completed his semester at Chowan and moved on.



Greensboro: The Mullahs

In summer 1984, Mohammed enrolled as an engineering major at North Carolina Agricultural & Technical State University in Greensboro, a historically black college on the Piedmont plain in the central part of the state.

On Feb. 1, 1960, students at A&T -- whose most famous graduate is Jesse Jackson -- staged the first lunch-counter sit-in at a downtown Greensboro Woolworth's, a galvanizing action that spread throughout the South.

College abroad was a rite of passage for legions of Middle Eastern students -- overwhelmingly men. Typically, this was their initial long-term exposure to Western life. Some left appalled at what they witnessed. Others ate it up.

"We were all excited about going to the States," said Khalil A. Abdullah, a 1987 A&T graduate. "In high school we had seen all the movies, heard the music. We wondered so much about it."

In Greensboro, Mohammed was part of the large Middle Eastern bloc in the university's expansive engineering department -- a natural major for Kuwaitis and others from oil-producing nations. By all accounts, there were three distinct student groups at the school: African Americans (by far the largest group), white Americans and Middle Easterners.

"It wasn't like there was tension or anything, but that's just the way it was," said Winfred S. Kenner, who studied mechanical engineering at the sprawling, tree-lined campus east of downtown.

The Middle Easterners tended to live off campus in anonymous complexes like the Yorktown and the Colonial, seldom ate in the cafeteria and skipped organized events. While "Aggies" trundled off in merry droves to Saturday football games, the foreign students arranged soccer matches in the park. They socialized mainly with one another.

"It was the college life: We used to get together three, four times a week, watch the games, chat, drink, you know," said Sami Zitawi, a Kuwaiti native who recalled large get-togethers of Arabs on Friday, the Muslim holy day. "We used to go to the farmers, buy a lamb or a goat. Butcher it with a knife.... Every Friday night someone would have a big dinner: 15, 20, 25 students."

Political discussions inevitably occurred. The year before Mohammed's arrival, students in Greensboro marched in protest of the 1982 massacres of Palestinians at refugee camps in Lebanon -- though the Arab visitors learned to mute their criticisms.

The Middle Eastern students were far from a monolith. Differences in politics, culture and, especially, in the practice of Islam tore at regional solidarity.

"Basically, what you saw was a micro-society of our home," explained Mahmood Zubaid, a Kuwaiti architectural engineer. "Everybody fit in where they felt most comfortable."

A social barrier separated the elite scholarship boys like Zubaid and students like Mohammed, the Baluchi, and the Palestinians, reliant on their families or smaller grants for tuition and living expenses. But religion was the real dividing line.

Wherever large concentrations of Middle Eastern students gathered on Western campuses, graduates say, groups of religious conservatives sprung up. These self-appointed moral overseers endeavored to ensure adherence to Koranic values and avoidance of wine, women, drugs and other vices. They grew beards as religious statements and prayed five times a day, typically in makeshift mosques in apartments or university-provided centers. And they actively recruited fellow students.

"We called them the mullahs," recalled Waleed M. Qimlass, a 1980s A&T graduate who now directs environmental affairs for Kuwait City. "Basically, the students at Greensboro were divided into the mullahs and the non-mullahs."

At A&T, several Arab graduates say, Mohammed was among the mullahs. Even back at Chowan, one student recalled, Mohammed had reproached him for eating pork.

There was plenty at A&T for Mohammed and other true believers to be distressed about. Some Arab students drank, flirted and frequented clubs -- indulging in hedonistic pursuits absent back home. A few motored about the expansive campus in Porsches and Mercedeses.

The party crowd attempted to keep their indiscretions private, fearing that word might get back to their families. But the mullahs took notice and exercised pressure both intense and subtle.

Islamists at Greensboro and other U.S. universities made a point of seeking out newly arrived Arab students at airports. Qimlass recalled how three "guys with beards" intercepted him and a friend as the two Kuwaitis waited for their luggage at the airport in Tulsa, Okla., where Qimlass studied before transferring to A&T. The trio immediately ushered the two arriving Kuwaiti students to a kind of rooming house that doubled as a mosque, reproaching a fatigued Qimlass when he lighted up a cigarette.

If they missed new arrivals at the airport, the bearded ones would seek them out on campus. Their advances were sometimes rejected but often welcomed among vulnerable newcomers who were homesick and out of place.

"Your first day in Greensboro, you didn't know anybody, maybe your English is not so good, and they met you at the airport and helped you get started," Zubaid said.

One former Kuwaiti student wasn't so thrilled: He would place a bottle of Johnnie Walker on his table whenever the mullahs came by, like a cross proffered to Dracula.

The disproportionate influence of religious students overseas has long troubled Arab capitals. The region's mostly autocratic rulers aren't keen to subsidize the training of would-be ayatollahs who would return and espouse revolt. Nor did the prospect of religious indoctrination abroad thrill secular parents seeking to broaden their children's horizons.

"Pre-Sept. 11, I knew many mothers here who worried about their children going to America and coming back very radical in their thinking as Islamists," said Ghabra, the political scientist at Kuwait University.

The Kuwaiti government would disperse U.S.-based scholarship students if fears emerged that any kind of religious-political cabal was gaining traction, according to several former students. The precise reason remains unexplained but, in the late 1980s, the steady stream of Kuwaitis attending North Carolina Agricultural & Technical State University dwindled. Few Arab students attend the school today.

In the aftermath of Sept. 11, the religious recruitment inevitably takes on a sinister slant. Yet former A&T students stress that the Muslim evangelizing there was largely spiritual and cultural, common enough throughout the Islamic world, where communal prayer is encouraged.

Students who recall Mohammed invariably describe a studious and private devotee of the library and Allah, but friendly enough in a casual way and capable of a laugh.

"All anyone knows about him is that he was in the mosque all the time," said Faisal Munifi, who studied mechanical engineering at the same time.

"He very much kept to himself," said Zitawi, now a gas station owner in the Greensboro area. "We'd see each other at the Burger King for coffee or lunch. That was our hangout.... He was always polite. He wasn't a funny guy, but when he's talking to you, you feel like he's smiling. He wasn't rude or anything."

Nor did Mohammed spout anti-Western or anti-American rhetoric. "Something must have happened later that caused that feeling," said Hindieh, who knew Mohammed at both Chowan and Greensboro. "I never remember him saying anything like that."

There is an unmistakable similarity between descriptions of Mohammed and the later accounts of the men, like Mohamed Atta, he sent to attack the United States: all Western-educated scions of middle-class Arab families; dedicated young men from discerning backgrounds who came to embrace a volatile creed of religion, politics and resentment.

By the end of 1986, after just 2 1/2 years, Mohammed had completed his work. He graduated Dec. 18, one of 28 mechanical engineering graduates, almost a third of them Middle Easterners. As at Chowan, there is no photo of him in the yearbook.

None of almost a dozen faculty members in the department from that era recalled Mohammed. For most of his classmates and teachers, the future terrorist mastermind with a $25-million price on his head did not cast a long shadow, if any at all.



Peshawar: The Call

Jihad, Abdullah Azzam wrote, is the way of everlasting glory, and the only way to get there is behind the barrel of a gun. "Jihad and the rifle alone: no negotiations, no conferences and no dialogues," he said.

Azzam, more than any man, created the modern notion of a Muslim's duty to wage war against all comers in order to reestablish the reign of Islam on Earth. It is a duty, he said, that commands all Muslims to its banner.

Azzam was born in the West Bank in 1941, land later occupied by Israel. He answered his first call to battle with the Palestinian resistance there, which he criticized because it was, he said, mere politics insufficiently rooted in Islam.

He departed for Cairo and an academic career, then left that when the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in 1979. He was among the first of the Afghan Arabs to arrive in Peshawar, Pakistan, in an upland basin ringed by hills that rise into mountains north and west en route to the Khyber Pass and Afghanistan.

Peshawar, capital of Pakistan's unruly Northwest Frontier Province, has for centuries been an international crossroads for traders, warriors and rough statesmen. In the 1980s, Azzam made it the capital of the Afghan resistance and the destination for tens of thousands of Muslims who joined the holy war.

Saudi Arabia's national airline offered special jihad fares. Arab governments sent emissaries and opened offices for dozens of state-sponsored charities to assist the fighters.

For a decade, parts of Peshawar were transformed into a sort of Little Mecca.

"It was a bustling Arab town -- Arab restaurants, bazaars, bakeries. During the jihad there were Arab newspapers and magazines published here. There were men in kaffiyeh, women fully covered in black," said Rahimullah Yusufzai, a Pakistani journalist who became a leading chronicler of the Afghan wars.

It was, said Gen. Hamid Gul, who formerly headed Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence, "the first international brigade of the modern time."

Among those who answered Azzam's call was a former student, Osama bin Laden. Azzam's intellectual fervor and Bin Laden's bank book combined in an organization that eventually became Al Qaeda.

The Saudi government sent dozens of missionaries and millions of dollars. The United States funneled arms and more millions through Peshawar.

Gun violence had been a way of life and death in the region long before the Soviet war. As one Pushtun saying puts it: A man's jewelry is his gun. But there had never been anything on this scale before.

Pakistani intelligence, the ISI, was installed as executor of American and Saudi interests. The service created a new logistics operation just to distribute the flood of armaments. Convoys of 10-ton trucks filled with rifles, machine guns, grenade launchers and antiaircraft missiles were sent out daily on the cross-country trip from the docks in Karachi to Peshawar and the Afghan interior beyond.

"The original jihadis started in old Peshawar with very little money, in the pre-Saudi, pre-CIA days," Yusufzai said. "Later, they all rented places in University Town, the most expensive neighborhood in Peshawar."

The Arab neighborhoods in University Town were, oddly, the most westernized in the city. Old Peshawar is a crooked tangle of alleys and bazaars rich with the smells, smoke and people of Central Asia. A thick haze of exhaust, dust and brick kiln smoke lies over it.

University Town is clean and rectangular, laid out on a grid filled with walled compounds of big three-story stucco houses that would be at home in Orange County. The new villas were filled by the Arabs and an even larger militia of camp followers. Armies used to be trailed by merchants of flesh and other entertainments; modern armies, even ragtag agglomerations like the moujahedeen, are as likely to be followed by a social worker as a streetwalker. The Afghan wars, because of the international nature of their combatants and finances, were the apotheosis of this.

The biggest industry in Peshawar in the '80s and '90s, after the arms trade, was good works. More than 150 charities, development and refugee care organizations opened offices.

There was plenty to do. Afghanistan at the time of the Russian invasion had a population of 15 million. Over a decade, that would shrink by almost half. Many fled through the mountain passes to Pakistan.

One of the largest aid agencies was a Kuwaiti charity called Lajnat al Dawa al Islamia, the Committee for Islamic Appeal. The charity at one point had more than 1,000 employees in Pakistan and was spending $4 million a year in the region. Its regional manager was Zahed Shaikh -- Khalid Shaikh Mohammed's older brother.

As head of one of the largest charities in town, Zahed became a figure of importance. He knew local diplomats, the Afghan warlords; when Pakistani politicians came to town, he shared the dais with them.

After college in North Carolina, Khalid, according to Kuwaiti authorities, never returned home. Instead, he joined his big brother in Peshawar. Another brother, Abed, a schoolteacher, left his job in the Gulf emirate of Qatar and came east too. A man who knew all three said Zahed, the eldest, was the coolest head of the trio; Abed was more militant and Khalid tended to follow him.

At the center of the Afghan resistance movement in Peshawar was Pushtun warlord Abdul Rasul Sayyaf, who had been a junior lecturer at Kabul University and was known as the Professor. He had been schooled in Cairo and spoke fluent Arabic. He became the favored recipient of money from the Saudi and American governments.

The money funded his army, a political party, a newspaper, a huge refugee camp and a college called the University of Dawa al Jihad, which means Convert and Struggle.

The university became known as a place you could learn darker trades than mathematics -- bomb-making, for example. A student once described it to U.S. journalist Mary Anne Weaver as an Islamic Sandhurst, likening it to the famous British military academy. For a time, the college also had as many as 1,000 students studying engineering, medical technology and literature.

The abandoned school sits behind high mud walls amid the sprawling Jalozai refugee camp, which today has more than 200,000 residents and is less an encampment than a city. Pakistanis marvel at the ingenuity of the Afghans, who have built a thriving local economy that includes the manufacture of pottery, textile and latticed wooden roofs that are exported back to Afghanistan where timber to make such things is scarce. There's even a carwash.

By 1989, Mohammed had gone to work at Sayyaf's university, a friend said. He taught there and worked weekends at the refugee camp. The three Baluchi brothers became part of the small, semi-permanent Arab community that included Azzam, Islamic Jihad founder Ayman Zawahiri and Bin Laden, who came and went with his wives and children in his own airplane. Most of the Arabs in town worshiped at a small mosque on a dead-end alley called Arbat Road, across the street from Zahed's office.

It was a different world then, said one man who was part of the scene. Everyone had the same goal: to oust the Soviets. Everyone knew one another, prayed and socialized together, and even went to the jihad training camps together.

Victory over the Soviets, who withdrew in 1989, should have been the crowning achievement of the jihad. But the various Afghan factions, deprived of a common enemy, began fighting one another. American support disappeared with the end of the Soviet campaign. Many felt that the U.S. actively opposed the establishment of an Islamic government in Kabul after the Soviet withdrawal. This was, to some, the cruelest cut of all.

Azzam, the heart of the Arab jihadi resistance, and two young sons were murdered by a bomb on the street outside the mosque in 1989. That same spring, Khalid's brother, Abed, also was killed by a bomb.

The political and religious climate changed in Peshawar, and resentment of the American abandonment festered. Bin Laden replaced Azzam as head of the Arab moujahedeen and began preaching hatred against the U.S.

Then came the 1990 Iraqi invasion of Kuwait and the American-led counterattack, which deepened divisions in the Arab world. Bin Laden, for one, was furious that the Saudi royal family allowed the U.S. to base its soldiers in the kingdom, violating what he felt was a Koranic dictate to keep infidels out of the holy land.

Most of the moujahedeen who had gathered in Pakistan went home, warriors without a war. Those who stayed changed perceptibly. Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and his circle changed with the times, one friend said.

"In 1991-92, their whereabouts, their meetings, their thoughts, it became more secret," he said. "The hatred for Americans -- it was among every Arab who came to Afghanistan."



Karachi: The Next War

Peshawar in the jihad years was said to have more spies, secret agents and freelance schemers per capita than any city in the world. Conversations dripped intrigue and purpose. Among the plotters was Khalid Shaikh Mohammed's nephew, Ramzi Yousef.

Like Khalid, Yousef had left Fahaheel and Kuwait for college -- in his case, to study electrical engineering in Wales. He first visited Peshawar on a summer break in 1988 and then returned in 1991. He would become the first of the next-generation jihadis to carry the fight beyond Afghanistan.

It has never been clear who, if anyone, recruited Yousef, but at some point over the next year he began to make plans to attack. He asked a boyhood friend who was studying at flight schools in the U.S. to suggest potential targets. The friend suggested the World Trade Center, and by the fall of 1992 Yousef was in New York, assembling a team to bomb the twin towers.

American investigators say that Mohammed in late 1992 wired several hundred dollars to Yousef, so he knew at least where Yousef was; investigators believe that he also knew what Yousef was doing.

Mohammed moved his base of operations to Karachi, the metropolis of Pakistan's southern seaboard, with direct flights throughout the Gulf, to Europe, to Southeast Asia, to Africa and the Americas. It is Pakistan's most cosmopolitan city, if also its most violent.

In 1995 alone, there were 1,742 slayings, most of them the result of sectarian political rivalries that made parts of the city the exclusive property of one political party or another. These districts are called "no-go areas"; even police have abandoned any pretext of controlling what goes on within them.

Mohammed lived off and on in Karachi, using the city as a base from which to travel the globe. He began using the first of dozens of aliases, often posing as a Gulf businessman. At various times he told people that he was a holy-water salesman, an electronics importer and a Saudi oil sheik.

When Yousef returned to Pakistan in 1993 after the first World Trade Center bombing, he and Mohammed began assembling a team to broaden the battleground. By 1994, both men were spending months at a time in the Philippines and Malaysia, meeting like-minded men.

The events they planned were, in what would become a Mohammed signature, perversely spectacular: They would assassinate the pope, perhaps the American president, and in a stunning finale would blow up a dozen American airliners over the Pacific.

The plans were thwarted when bomb-making chemicals were ignited in a Manila apartment, leading to the discovery of their plots and the eventual arrest of fellow plotters. Yousef fled, just as he had after the first World Trade Center bombing, back to Pakistan. Mohammed had been careful; none of the other plotters even knew his name. It would be months before authorities figured out who he was and many years and thousands of deaths before they realized his significance.



Qatar: Slipping Away

Yousef wasn't so careful. Some of the other plotters had known him for years; one told police that Yousef was the same man who had planned the Trade Center bombing. A worldwide manhunt ensued and within months Yousef's whereabouts were betrayed. American and Pakistani agents stormed a hotel room in Islamabad, the Pakistani capital, in February 1995 and hauled Yousef away, kicking and screaming. At least that's what another guest told a reporter.

"It was like a hurricane, a big panic," the guest said. "He was shouting: 'Why are you taking me? I am innocent! Show me papers if you are going to arrest me! Who are you?' No one listened to him. They took him without his shoes. His eyes were blindfolded, his head was covered, his arms and legs were tied."

The man giving this account identified himself as a Karachi businessman. He was registered under the name Khalid Shaikh. It was, American authorities eventually came to believe, Mohammed, hiding in plain sight.

Mohammed's caution -- he used three aliases on the Manila plot alone -- had paid off. He was still an unknown. That was about to end.

Yousef never gave up any valuable information. But investigators had recovered his laptop computer in Manila and a treasure trove of leads. The computer files included a letter seeking money for the plots. It was addressed to a potential donor, one who the letter-writer apparently felt was shirking his duty.

"Fear Allah, Mr. Siddiqui, there is a day of judgment," the letter said.

It was signed Khalid Shaikh.

"We knew there was another person involved ... but he was very mysterious and we didn't know who he was," said Herman, who led the FBI investigation of the Manila plot. "He basically eluded us."

The evidence they did have led investigators back to Peshawar and the circle of friends and acquaintances there. Zahed Shaikh -- Mohammed's brother -- was scrutinized, and although there was never a formal accusation lodged against him, he disappeared from Peshawar.

Investigators say Mohammed spent the next year building and maintaining a fund-raising network in the Persian Gulf.

"Throughout the region, there was this classic sort of money collector -- the guy who was hanging out at the mosque, checking out the scene, basically casing the mark, who would invariably be some old guy with lots of money. A religious guy, probably. The collector would come up alongside him, make his pitch very persistently and the mark would write him a check," said one American official, who worked in the Gulf throughout the 1990s.

"Khalid Shaikh Mohammed was a collector, a guy who would collect the money from the street collectors.... A guy in the Philippines would call a guy in Dubai who would call Khalid Shaikh Mohammed. It would be a chain of telephone calls, and Khalid would send the money."

American understanding of Islamic terrorism then was still inchoate. Even Bin Laden was seen as just another guy with bad ideas and a lot of money. Al Qaeda was barely on the screen. Potential state-sponsored terrorism was deemed more dangerous, so more attention was given to Iran, which had become the chief international proponent of Islamist goals.

Mohammed lived openly in the Gulf. "He wasn't even using an alias," said one official. American agents tracked him to Italy, Egypt, Singapore, Jordan, Thailand, the Philippines and Qatar. In Qatar, American officials say, he stayed as the guest of a member of the country's ruling family, Abdullah ibn Khalid al Thani, who was then the country's minister of religious affairs.

"Abdullah ibn Khalid had a farm outside" Doha, said one American official. "A lot of these guys had what were basically gentlemen's truck farms. It was a hobby. Grow cabbages, raise ducks. So he has this farm and he always had a lot of people around, the house was always overstaffed, a lot of unemployed Afghan Arabs.... There were always these guys hanging around and maybe a couple of Kalashnikovs in the corner."

American intelligence figured out that one of the guys on the farm was Mohammed. About the same time, a grand jury in New York indicted Mohammed for the Manila airliner plot and a debate occurred on what, exactly, to do about it.

FBI Director Louis J. Freeh met with Qatari officials seeking permission to arrest him. One FBI official said months passed without approval, even though Qatar acknowledged that Mohammed, whom agents had begun referring to as KSM, was there. At one point, according to documents obtained by The Times, Qatar told the U.S. that it feared Mohammed was constructing an explosive device. They also said he possessed more than 20 different passports; still, they delayed granting the U.S. permission to arrest him.

Some officials strongly felt that the U.S. should act as quickly and with as much force as necessary to capture Mohammed. Others were more wary. A meeting was called in Washington in early 1996. Caution prevailed.

"That D.C. meeting ... struck me as one of the great lessons in politics," said one person who attended the meeting. "Here was this opportunity to get this bad guy, and we didn't do it. The Qatar government had no interest in screwing up its fragile relationship with us. If we had gone in and nabbed this guy, or just cut his head off, the Qatari government would not have complained a bit.

"Everyone around the table for their own reasons refused to go after someone who fundamentally threatened American interests.... The FBI can't go anywhere overseas without the CIA providing the intel, the [Department of Defense] providing the logistics and military muscle in the event we have to shoot our way in. And none of that happened."

Another person at the meeting said the real obstacle was the Pentagon, which feared another "Black Hawk Down" debacle similar to the one in Somalia in 1993 and insisted that a raid would require hundreds, if not thousands, of troops.

In the end, rather than sending a kidnapping squad, Freeh sent a letter to Qatar's government. By the time permission was granted and American agents went to Doha, Mohammed was gone.

"We reached out to every one of our friends out there to try and get him," recalls one senior Justice Department official. "But he just kind of slipped off the screen."



Afghanistan: Regrouping

Being on the run did not mean that Mohammed was out of commission.

He left Qatar about the same time Bin Laden was making common cause with the newly emergent Taliban in Afghanistan, who in exchange for his assistance gave him a secure base from which to operate.

A pair of attacks in Saudi Arabia marked the beginning of a new jihad, Bin Laden told British journalist Robert Fisk in 1996. He began expanding the reach of Al Qaeda across the world. Investigators now suspect that Mohammed was the key man in that effort.

While Bin Laden and the men previously identified as his main deputies -- Zawahiri, Mohammed Atef and Abu Zubeida -- spent the bulk of their time in Afghanistan and Pakistan consolidating and rebuilding their training camps, Mohammed traveled the globe, searching out allies and recruits, and assembling what now seems like an omnipresent worldwide network.

"He was building a terrorism business. He was one of the key lieutenants in the entire Al Qaeda structure," said the FBI's Herman.

Investigators suspect that Mohammed developed direct personal relationships with several of the men who became Al Qaeda's top regional operatives.

His trail wound through Europe, Africa, the Gulf, Southeast Asia and even South America, according to investigators in Malaysia where Mohammed, traveling under an Egyptian passport, obtained a Brazilian visa.

At times, said one senior U.S. counter-terrorism official, Mohammed would travel to other countries to personally establish terrorist cells and provide them with plans for attack, money, manpower and logistical support. Other times, he would operate at a higher level, overseeing senior Al Qaeda commanders who led the attacks.

The official said Mohammed is believed to have been actively involved in the bombing of two U.S. embassies in Africa that killed 224 people in 1998, the bombing of the Cole in the Yemeni port of Aden in 2000, which killed 17 sailors and nearly sank the $1-billion U.S. warship, and many other attacks.

"There is a clear operational link between him and the execution of most, if not all, of the Al Qaeda plots over the past five years," the official said.

American investigators acknowledge that this evaluation of Mohammed as a central figure in Al Qaeda is largely retrospective. It wasn't until after Sept. 11 that his larger role became apparent.

"He popped up post 9/11 and then, looking back, we saw that he was the Zelig of Al Qaeda, involved in a lot of other things," one investigator said.



Sept. 11

One of the hallmarks of Al Qaeda is its breadth, the dispersion of its resources. So, for example, parts of the network could be preparing to attack American warships in Yemen, others to bomb civilian targets in Europe and Asia, even as the larger organization was already planning Sept. 11.

In an interview with Al Jazeera television, recorded in May this year, Mohammed described himself as the head of Al Qaeda's military committee. He said that "about 2 1/2years prior to the holy raids on Washington and New York, the military committee held a meeting during which we decided to start planning for a martyrdom operation inside America."

That would date the inception of the plot to early 1999. Later that same year, the men who would execute it were chosen, he said. German intelligence agencies believe that Mohammed first came into contact with these men when they visited Al Qaeda camps in Afghanistan.

Several of the men were students in Hamburg, Germany, part of a small group of devout Muslims who were growing increasingly restive over the plight of the Islamic world.

They were largely middle class, some well educated, not dispossessed in any apparent way. One was an urban planner and architect, one an aeronautical engineering student and one a prospective marine engineering student. Mohammed, a mechanical engineering graduate, chose other engineers for Al Qaeda's riskiest undertaking. They were, like him, devout but at home in the West, adept at languages and technically inclined.

The rest of the hijacking crews were made up of two veteran Al Qaeda operatives, a replacement pilot and a group of young Gulf Arab volunteers, chosen from what Mohammed described as "a big excess of brothers who were filled with desire for martyrdom," whose job was mainly to effect the physical takeover of the airliners.

As Sept. 11 approached, intelligence agents in the West were nearly beside themselves with anxiety. They knew something was going to happen, but they couldn't figure out what. Mohammed was already moving on. He spent the weeks before Sept. 11 instructing a new Canadian recruit on communications protocols. He was sending the recruit to Southeast Asia to coordinate a bombing campaign in the Philippines and Singapore. The only acknowledgment that something big was afoot was his suggestion that the recruit should probably leave Pakistan before Sept. 11.

It is that sort of unrelenting focus that makes Mohammed such a feared figure among those who pursue him. He simply does not stop.

In the months after Sept. 11, investigators think that Mohammed was moving back and forth between Pakistan and Afghanistan. One Afghan general, Ziaudeen Deldar, said intelligence reports indicate that "Khalid the Baluchi" was among hundreds of Al Qaeda fighters who escaped on foot to Pakistan from a camp near Shahi Kot in southeastern Afghanistan last spring when American forces launched Operation Anaconda -- an attempt, they said, to finish off Al Qaeda.

Instead, the Americans faced considerably more resistance than anticipated and backed off. The grasp of the anaconda relaxed and the prey, including Mohammed, slipped away. Weeks later, Al Qaeda operatives blew up a truck outside a synagogue in Tunisia, killing 19 people. In the days leading up to the attack, investigators say, one of the bombers was in frequent telephone contact with a man in Karachi -- Mohammed.

Mohammed was accompanied at the Al Jazeera interview by Ramzi Binalshibh, another Hamburg man who had wanted to become one of the suicide pilots but who tried and failed four times to obtain a U.S. visa. Binalshibh instead became Mohammed's field coordinator for the plot.

It's noteworthy that in the interview, Mohammed let Binalshibh do most of the talking. Even in granting an interview, the purpose of which ostensibly was to reveal, he exposed almost nothing.



Karachi: Behind Walls

Karachi is a reasonably modern, at times almost ordinary, place. Kids on bikes pass by on their way to school. Boys and girls giggle in one another's presence and listen to music that offends their parents' ears. Young hipsters scout the latest boutiques and restaurants with cool, enigmatic one-word names. Okra is one of the latest.

The city is by many measures a mess. It hasn't had a comprehensive development plan since the 1920s, the air is foul, but cars are smaller and traffic manageable. Important people ride Toyota Corollas to work, some with chauffeurs and bodyguards.

It has some of the vanity and swagger of cities accustomed to dominating their surroundings. It is in love with the myth of itself as a place of danger and deception.

So maybe it is not surprising how many people here can tell you where Khalid Shaikh Mohammed is, would be or has recently been. For a ghost, he has made many appearances. You can, in a couple of weeks, collect half a dozen addresses and a great many more stories.

The stories start in the Defense Housing Society, a large, newer group of neighborhoods between the old city center and the sea. It was at a Defense apartment building that a big shootout occurred in September. Defense -- it's named for its developer, army officers -- contains many of the finer districts in the city. Benazir Bhutto, the former prime minister, lives in one of them, a leafy area of big homes and older-model Mercedeses.

The shootout was just beyond the better neighborhoods, in a commercial-industrial tract full of five- and six-story buildings, most with low-rent light industrial tenants: textile plants, zipper and button factories and small machine shops. The streets are paved, but the buildings are separated by bare dirt and are shuttered in the front with metal roll-up doors. The night before, when police arrived, the streets were empty and dark.

Nothing happened that night. The police or, rather, the authorities -- there were more intelligence agents and army special forces than there were cops -- waited. This is the sort of thing that spawns rumors. Why did they wait? The simplest explanation, the one authorities give, is of course not trusted, but it is the one that makes sense. They waited because they didn't know what else to do. They didn't know what or who to expect and waited to see.

People would like to believe the opposite: that authorities knew everything and waited because that would confuse things afterward; that they waited to give the people they had come to get time to escape; that they waited because this is Karachi and nobody knows why they waited.

This is what happens in a place where everything has been secret for so long. And it is one of the reasons Karachi is such a great place to hide: Who couldn't hide in a place where everything is hidden?

Khalid Shaikh Mohammed first came here to live and do business a decade ago, assembling money and people for plots that would occur everywhere in the world but here. An early co-conspirator said he first met Mohammed in an Arab neighborhood full of money changers and bucket shops. A man who was captured in another plot had a phone number for Mohammed that was traced to the other end of town, a middle-class preserve of single-family homes of clean modern lines behind pale stucco walls.

The walls, actually, are the one thing many of the neighborhoods have in common. Karachi is a city of walls.

Another address is in the neighborhood where Ramzi Yousef's in-laws lived, a cramped, dense place where the food stalls are full of root vegetables and the women wear the richly embroidered dresses favored by Baluchis. At least 10% of Karachi's 12 million people are from Baluchistan, the next province to the northwest, and there is a constant traffic to and from the rural precincts, and from there to Iran and Afghanistan. It's where Mohammed's people came from.

A man claimed that he met Mohammed and his family across the marsh flats in the mud huts of another neighborhood this past spring. Mohammed was posing as a spiritual advisor, a holy man on the run from Arab agents who didn't like his brand of Islam. The story seemed preposterous, but police acknowledge that they received a tip from another source and searched the same neighborhood extensively.

The part about there being a family turned out to have some basis. The police and the agents and the army all gathered for the big shootout in Defense because of the family. Earlier that day, acting on a tip, the police raided an apartment a couple of miles away. Pakistini authorities say they had information, based on utility records, that a senior Al Qaeda leader might be there. Instead, they found three children, two women and a man.

One of the women was a caretaker, and one child was hers. The other woman was a "foster mother" of sorts to the other two children, and the man her companion. The two boys, ages 7 and 9, were named Omar and Abdullah. Pakistani and American officials believe that their father is Khalid Shaikh Mohammed.

American authorities say the house contained photographs of Mohammed with the children; there was also evidence of another woman, thought to be Mohammed's wife. It seemed a happy, playful group, a senior FBI investigator said. Some thought that they might have missed Mohammed by mere minutes, so when the people they captured told them about a group of Arabs living at another address in Defense, the authorities called up reserves and hurried across town.

"Our officers moved immediately," said a senior Pakistani official. "No, we didn't know that he was there. But from the interviews and surveillance we knew there was something big going on. The number of people there, the weapons, the intelligence we gathered. "

After morning prayers, they found the caretaker, who told them that the entire top floor was filled with Arabs. They'd been there for two months, he said, and overpaid on the rent. The authorities went in, and all hell broke loose. They were fired on immediately, the Pakistani official said. "Then it was a free-for-all. We fired at the windowpanes, put in tear gas and stormed them."

Hundreds of rounds and two dead men later, the authorities secured the building. They searched room by room and in a storage space under a stairwell found the would-be Sept. 11 pilot Ramzi Binalshibh.

Afterward, and still, Karachi was thick with rumor. Mohammed was dead, was captured, was there and got away, was there and was allowed to get away.

The police are about the only ones who claim not to know how near they were to catching him that morning. They think that they were close, but they don't really know. They are, as they've been for a decade, still looking and they're not quite sure who it is they're trying to find.

They're hesitant to talk about it much, but intelligence officers acknowledge that they have interrogated Khalid Shaikh Mohammed's two young sons. Not surprisingly, the boys haven't had much to say. Not even his children know much about the man who engineered Sept. 11.








Prelude to 9/11: A Hijacker's Love, Lies
Aysel Senguen saw her fiancé fall into radical Islam. She knew something was wrong but had no idea what lay ahead.

By Dirk Laabs and Terry McDermott

Special to The Times

January 27 2003

HAMBURG, Germany -- The letter from the dead man did not surface for months after it was sent, after, presumably, Aysel Senguen had enough time to fully absorb the grim deeds and suicide death of her fiancé, Ziad Jarrah.

Ziad sent the letter and a package of personal belongings to Aysel from the United States on Sept. 10, 2001, a day before he and three comrades hijacked United Airlines Flight 93, set it on a heading for Washington, D.C., and, finally, rather than allow a passenger revolt to rescue the airplane, purposely pitched it nose first from 40,000 feet into a pasture in Stony Creek Township, Pa.

By the time the letter was revealed in November 2001, Aysel knew others thought the evidence overwhelming that Ziad had been at the controls of that airliner, that he was a critical component in the deadliest terrorist attack in history. She nonetheless believed, she told investigators, that he was alive; that he would one day come back; that he would, as he had before, show up at her door with gifts and a sheepish grin, telling her not to worry, that there had been problems but now everything was fine and they would have the life they had planned.

There was something about Ziad Jarrah that made a lot of people hope, if not actually conclude, that Aysel was right and the investigators wrong — that some horrible mistake had been made and he wasn't a mass murderer.

Then came the letter, which postal officials said was misaddressed and lost in the mail for weeks.

"I did not escape from you but I did what I was supposed to do and you should be very proud of me," Ziad wrote. "Remember always who you are and what you are. Head up. The victors never have their heads down!"

He was gone, he said. "Everyone has his time."

Ziad apologized for feeding Aysel's dreams of a wedding and children and a normal life. He called her, as he frequently did in his letters, "chabibi" — darling.

"I am what you wished for," he said.

For many who held out hope, the letter erased it. Not Aysel. She ignored the dark passages and chose to believe the part where he promised to "always be your man," the part where he said, "I love you from all my heart. You should not have any doubts about that. I love you and I will always love you, until eternity," the part where he promised that one day they would live in a place "where there are no problems, and no sorrow, in castles of gold and silver."

Of course, Aysel didn't believe the evidence. She believed what lovers always believe: She believed in Ziad.

Aysel Senguen was for five years — almost from the day they met in Germany in the spring of 1996 — in love with Ziad Jarrah. For much of that time, they fought, as lovers will, about their differences, about what she described as his secrets.

Aysel watched as Ziad turned toward a harsh interpretation of Islam and joined a group of like-minded young men in steadfast commitment to wage holy war. She knew that something had gone horribly wrong. And she was hardly alone.

Evidence now being used to prosecute a member of the Hamburg group that produced three of the Sept. 11 suicide pilots makes clear that the views of Jarrah and the group were well known to relatives, friends, casual acquaintances and, notably, to police and intelligence officials.

The evidence, much of it not previously disclosed, includes interviews with close associates of the hijackers, wiretaps, extensive correspondence between Aysel and Ziad, correspondence among other hijackers and between them and friends, financial records and eyewitness accounts from informants in Germany and at Al Qaeda training camps in Afghanistan. The accounts and quotations in this report, unless otherwise attributed, are derived from that evidence.

The evidence presents a new view of the Hamburg cell. So public were the beliefs of the hijackers and their associates that the often stated notion that they were a cell of secret "sleeper agents" of the Al Qaeda terrorist network seems almost opposite the truth.

The group was far larger than previously described, including at least several dozen men. Almost everyone who had significant contact with them knew that the men professed a personal commitment to holy war and spent years trying to determine how best to wage it. Casual acquaintances were sometimes frightened by the group's beliefs. A member of the congregation at the Al Quds mosque in Hamburg brought his father to a worship service, and the older man was so unnerved by what was a routine day at the mosque that he warned his son never to return. Others fled town to avoid the group.

Members of the group hectored acquaintances to join the cause, at one point physically beating one man because they declared him insufficiently devout. They pressured other men to grow beards, to dress in a prescribed manner and to make their wives convert to Islam.

Intelligence officials from the United States and Germany were well aware of the radical nature of the group. A CIA agent was so agitated about the group's activities that German authorities at one point told him that they would throw him out of the country if he continued to make a nuisance of himself by demanding the Germans do something.

Members of the group and others they were in frequent contact with were under regular surveillance. Some of them, including the man suspected of bringing the group into contact with Al Qaeda, had been watched since at least 1998.

Jarrah, for example, was in regular contact with at least five people who were being watched by intelligence organizations. Jarrah himself was interrogated in January 2000 in the United Arab Emirates because he had copied a page from the Koran into his passport.

Many people suspected that something was seriously wrong. They saw much — and did nothing. No one saw more than Aysel.

Greifswald

Ziad Jarrah was the middle child and only son in a prosperous, industrious family in Beirut. His parents drove fashionable Mercedes automobiles, owned a condominium in Beirut and a vacation home in Lebanon's countryside. The family was secular Muslim, and Ziad attended private Christian schools — a mark of affluence, not religious inclination.

He had a tough time in school, at one point apparently flunking out of high school. He was, according to some published reports, more interested in girls than studies. He eventually earned a high school diploma and was given the choice of attending university abroad in two places the Jarrahs had relatives — Toronto, or Greifswald, Germany, a tiny northeastern backwater on the Baltic coast.

Going to Canada would have required Ziad to marry a cousin as part of the deal. He chose Germany. He and another cousin, Salim, arrived in Greifswald in the spring of 1996, not long after a vivacious young woman named Aysel Senguen enrolled there in the college of dental medicine.

They met within a month of Ziad's arrival, on the day he moved into his student quarters at the University of Greifswald. Aysel lived just down the hall. She was the daughter of conservative, working-class Turkish immigrants to southern Germany and had been in Greifswald for a semester.

She already had a boyfriend, but Ziad must have seemed an answer to many dreams: a big-city boy with an easy smile, like her a moderate Muslim who enjoyed a good time. She wondered about potential problems, confiding to her sister that Arab men could be domineering, but she took the leap.

She dumped the boyfriend. She and Ziad became a couple. They cooked meals together; she helped him learn German. Bleary-eyed photographs from the time — including one of Ziad lighting a water pipe — indicate that they did their share of partying.

Not everybody joined in. One man Ziad later grew close to, Abdulrachman Makhadi, one of Aysel's fellow dentistry students, must have frowned on their behavior. Makhadi, a Yemeni, was known around campus as the self-appointed enforcer of Muslim doctrine; he governed — harshly, some say — from a small concrete-block mosque that locals referred to as "the Box." Inside it, Makhadi preached a strict interpretation of Islam and collected money for the Palestinian militant group Hamas.

Ziad went home for the winter holiday after his first semester and upon his return seemed changed from the happy-go-lucky playboy. His cousin, Salim, noticed that he began reading radical Islamist publications.

A friend of Aysel's told investigators that in early 1997, Ziad talked about being "dissatisfied with his life up till now." The friend said Ziad wanted to make a mark in life and "didn't want to leave Earth in a natural way."

There is no indication of what lay behind the change. Salim Jarrah said once that his cousin was like a tree without roots; Greifswald was not a place for an Arab to grow them. The city is a dim, almost medieval place that seems decades behind the rest of Germany. Fashions in clothing, even today, seem stuck in 1987, and the city has for years had a large population of neo-Nazi skinheads. It is not exactly a welcoming place for foreigners.

Makhadi, who disclaims anything but the slightest acquaintance with Ziad Jarrah, seems the likeliest candidate to have influenced him. Investigators about that time had begun monitoring Makhadi, whom they classified as "an endangerer" of other Muslims, but they say they have no real idea what, if anything, happened.

Ziad's new piety caused problems with Aysel almost immediately. He criticized her choice of friends, the way she dressed and what she drank.

Aysel and Ziad were in many ways dissimilar. He was quiet and withdrawn. She talked all the time about everything to whomever would listen. "That's my way. That's how I am. I tackle problems through conversations," she said later.

Throughout the relationship, according to their correspondence, she railed at Ziad for not telling her more, for not sharing more of himself. Ziad responded that he told her what he felt she needed to know.

At some level, she must have understood what Ziad was going through. She had earlier experienced an identity crisis of her own. She told investigators that after high school her parents had sent her to Turkey, apparently an attempt to ground her in her heritage. It backfired. She attempted suicide. "I was in a cultural conflict," she said.

"When he asked me to change, I sometimes said, 'OK, you are right,' but I didn't do anything. I know that kind of culture — that's not so different with Turks."

One thing they agreed on 100% was getting out of Greifswald. Ziad had upon his arrival enrolled, as foreign students are required to do, in preparatory German classes. He was due to complete those within the year, and in the spring of 1997 he began to apply for regular university admission. He wanted to study dental medicine like Aysel and he applied at medical schools around the country.

Later, out of the blue, she said, he also applied to the biochemistry program at Greifswald, probably as a fallback position, and to study aeronautical engineering in Hamburg. She told investigators that he went to Hamburg because it was the only place he was accepted.

Maybe this is what Ziad told her, but according to records, it was untrue. He was accepted into a medical school in western Germany, the science program in Greifswald and at Hamburg, which is the one he chose.

Hamburg

Ziad moved to Hamburg and enrolled at the University of Applied Sciences, which was then home to a group of young, tough Moroccan students who were regarded as the hardest of the hard-core Islamists at the city's radical Al Quds mosque. Ziad quickly befriended the group.

The Moroccans, many of whom worked together at an outdoor supply shop, always sat in the same place at Al Quds, in a corner on the right side. They monitored relationships of their friends. One man told investigators that he was called repeatedly by one of the Moroccans, Zakariya Essabar, who just months before had been the best man at his wedding.

Essabar asks: When will your German wife convert to Islam?

Never, the man says.

Essabar calls to ask the same question again and again. Then, after a period of months without contact, they talk.

Essabar asks: What about your wife? Did she convert?

No, the man says. Where can I reach you?

Essabar replies: You can't reach me anymore.

In the beginning, Ziad returned to Greifswald every other weekend. He sometimes rode the train with Makhadi, who had an internship in Hamburg. They had earlier made other trips from Greifswald, including at least one to the western town of Aachen, which for more than a decade had been a center of radical Islam in Europe. Ziad befriended the second in command at the Muenster Islamic Center, which was run by a man who had fled Egypt under suspicion of a political murder.

Ziad also met a Yemeni named Ramzi Binalshibh, a regular at Al Quds, and through him a group of multinational Arab men just then beginning to figure out how they could contribute to the jihad. This group was based across town at the Technical University of Hamburg-Harburg. A series of apartments shared by the Harburg men became a kind of floating headquarters for young jihadis.

The Harburg group was connected to others of similar intent throughout Europe and the Middle East. They had access to criminal enterprises that could and did furnish false identification for some group members.

The man chiefly responsible for making connections among this mosaic of activists, militants and sympathizers was Binalshibh, now suspected of being a field coordinator of the Sept. 11 plot. Binalshibh traveled constantly, meeting fellow believers from the Netherlands, Kosovo, Afghanistan and the Persian Gulf.

At trial and in other interrogations, witnesses repeatedly described Binalshibh — not Mohamed Atta — as the group's most respected and charismatic figure.

Atta has typically been described as the leader of the group. Part of the reason authorities first thought that Atta was the leader stems from early confusion about Atta's name. He rarely used his full name, which includes seven distinct components of which Atta is the last. He never used Atta except on official documents. He was known by almost everyone as Mohamed el-Amir, or simply El-Amir, which means "leader" in Arabic. Investigators apparently mistook these references as an indication of respect.

Some members of the group barely knew Atta; all knew Binalshibh, who worked nearly full time on his religious-political activities. He had lived in Germany since at least 1995 and never held a regular job or attended school more than a couple of days at a time. He seldom had a fixed address. All he needed, a friend said, was a mattress and a corner in which to put it.

Binalshibh and Atta regularly lectured and recruited at several mosques in Hamburg, although not always with great success. Atta, in particular, had such a stern vision of Islam that he drove people away. One young recruit described attending Atta's study group for two years. Over time, it included dozens of members, but by the time Atta left town for good in 2000, the recruit said, the group had dwindled to the point that Atta "was sitting there almost alone."

Binalshibh was dreamily romantic about jihad. "It is the highest thing to do, to die for the jihad," he told friends. "The moujahedeen die peacefully. They die with a smile on their lips, their dead bodies are soft, while the bodies of the killed infidels are stiff."

A spirit of easy brotherhood prevailed within the Harburg group. However extreme its aims, it was a kindred community. The men shared apartments, bank accounts and cars. The group members strictly observed the tenets of their religion: They prayed five times a day, maintained strict Islamic diets and even debated the proper length of their beards. They talked endlessly about the damage done by Jews, including their assumption that Israel had conspired with Monica Lewinsky to bring down President Clinton. For entertainment, they watched battlefield videos and sang songs about martyrdom.

Aysel's Dilemma

Ziad's family members in Lebanon grew concerned about him. They sent emissaries to talk to him, threatened to cut off his monthly stipend, and, according to investigators, his father once feigned a heart attack in hopes that Ziad would come home. It didn't work. He grew more and more involved with his new friends.

He saw Aysel less. She visited Hamburg a few times but felt unwelcome; on at least one occasion, Ziad abandoned her in his room to spend time with his friends, whom she never met. She was angry, but Ziad said that where he went, women were not allowed.

Aysel later told investigators that she first heard Ziad talk about jihad just after he moved to Hamburg in late 1997.

"I didn't know what it means," she said. "I asked Arab friends about the meaning. Somebody explained to me that the word 'jihad' in the softer form means to write books, tell people about Islam. But Ziad's own jihad was more aggressive, the fighting kind, giving oneself up for the religion."

The couple broke up and reconciled over and over. Aysel became pregnant.

She aborted the pregnancy, she told investigators, because of the uncertainty of their relationship. She later apologized to Ziad by mail:

"I had to think about our baby today," she wrote. "I am sorry about everything I did to you."

Around that time, Aysel told a friend: "I don't want to be left behind with the children, because my husband moved into a fanatic war." Aysel at one point contemplated moving back with her parents in Stuttgart. She transferred instead to Bochum, in coal country near Düesseldorf. Theoretically, it was more convenient to Hamburg, but Ziad's visits remained irregular. Aysel would be beside herself with loneliness and her inability to track him down. Once, in desperation, Aysel wrote him:

"Again you haven't been reachable. I left a message for you to call me back. Since you haven't done so, I assume you haven't been home at all. I couldn't sleep last night and I thought for a long, long time. What is love for you? ... I want to tell you what love is for me: To take the other as he is, to share everything with him you have (mentally and physically, materially, in all areas of life), to do something for the other you wouldn't do for yourself, to be there for the other (especially in bad times).

"I will fight for you. I am willing to live with you in Lebanon even if you say you wouldn't live in Turkey, because it isn't your home, and I don't accept the point of view 'the wife has to live where the man wants her to, because he is responsible,' because this is written nowhere in the Koran, that this has to be that way, and I don't believe that God made this religion for men. I think in the Koran everything is taken care of for marriage and it's not in the hand of the man. Islam offers equal rights for men and women, maybe it grants even more rights to the women than you know."

Once, she said later, she told Ziad, "I do not cover myself for you; if I choose to do so myself it's for God or for my faith."

When Ziad was out of touch, Aysel would try to track him down, calling all the numbers she had for friends in Hamburg. When that produced nothing, she combed through old telephone bills for calls Ziad made from her flat when he visited. She called every number she didn't know, demanding that someone tell her where he was.

It was a fruitless battle. For the first two years in Hamburg, Ziad maintained nominal commitment to Aysel and studied in school. Gradually, Ziad drifted further away from her and deeper into his own war.

He told her that he was ashamed of her. Aysel's roommates say the criticism sometimes grew violent. Once, she told them, he hit her; another time, she said, he threatened her with much worse: "Today I am sitting here with you and tomorrow I will kill you."

Talks Heating Up

As time went on, discussions in the Harburg group intensified although, witnesses said later, they were unfocused. One week the members were intent on fighting in Kosovo, the next in Chechnya. They wanted to fight; they didn't know which war.

In 1998, Binalshibh, Atta and a newcomer, Marwan Al-Shehhi, became the first of the group to take concrete action toward joining the jihad. They quietly left Hamburg, apparently for the Afghan training camps. When they returned, they were more fervent than ever and encouraged others to follow their example.

The pace had quickened in the broader jihad community too. That spring, Osama bin Laden had issued his call for direct action against the United States. In the summer, two American embassies in East Africa were attacked with truck bombs. It was as if a battle horn had sounded. The war was on.

Everything seemed to take on a new urgency. The group members moved in and out of flats. They began physical fitness training. One of them, Said Bahaji, joined the German army, then left after completing his basic combat training. He could have avoided service altogether, but he apparently wanted the training.

Atta, for one, had executed a last will years earlier. Others downloaded templates for jihad wills from the Internet and followed suit. One man instructed his survivors to pay all his debts to Muslims but withhold all money from Christians and Jews.

Their living arrangements became increasingly fluid. One insider later told investigators that the group members always looked as if they were ready to leave at a moment's notice.

They tidied up personal affairs, assigning power of attorney and control of bank accounts to friends. They rushed to finish school courses or gave up all pretense of trying. Three members of the group married in a period of six months.

They included Ziad Jarrah, who married Aysel in a spring 1999 ceremony at a mosque in Hamburg. It must have been a desultory affair, done to appease Ziad's friends. It was never registered with the state, and Aysel said later that she never considered it a real wedding. Aysel did, however, insist on a contract before the wedding that specified she could continue her studies. Ziad later sought to renege on this and asked her to quit, but she appealed to the imam who performed their wedding ceremony and he upheld her position.

In any event, they broke up again within weeks of the wedding, and then, as usual, made up.

In May, after they reunited, Ziad wrote this e-mail: "It's me again. How is my darling? All I can say for me is I miss you very very much. Meow. I want to cuddle. I love you."

By summer, they were apart again.

"I thought it is forever, and he probably, too, but we got back together on the telephone after two weeks," she said.

Back in Bochum that fall, a friend called Aysel, warning that Ziad was up to something, that he might be headed for Afghanistan. The friend said Ziad's family in Beirut was frantic. Where was Ziad?

Aysel visited him in Hamburg. Ziad had been talking lately about Chechnya, she said. He seemed weighed down; she suspected he was about to make a decision. He quit going to classes. He told her that he was going home to Lebanon for a while, clear his head and figure out what to do with his life. He was even more withdrawn than usual. "That scared me," she said.

Notes in Ziad's handwriting, dated just before Aysel's visit and later discovered by investigators, gave an indication of what was on his mind: One entry read: "The morning will come. The victors will come, will come. We swear to beat you. The earth will shake underneath your feet." And a week later: "I came to you with men who love the death just as you love life.... The moujahedeen give their money for the weapons, food and journeys to win and to die for Allah's cause but the unhappy ones will be killed. Oh, the smell of paradise is rising."

When Ziad took Aysel to catch the train back to Bochum, she was filled with dread.

Aysel knew that wherever he was going, it probably wasn't Lebanon, the destination he had given her. She repeatedly called Hamburg trying to find out where he was. This must have set off alarms in the network.

Mounir Motassadeq, a Moroccan now on trial in Hamburg for allegedly providing logistical support for the Sept. 11 plotters, testified that he was contacted by Binalshibh, who asked him to call Aysel and calm her down. Motassadeq did as he was asked. A couple of weeks later, a letter for Aysel arrived with a Yemeni postmark and a stranger's handwriting on the envelope. Inside was a letter from Ziad.

The letter, she said later, advised her that he was well. It said that "I shouldn't worry and that he wants to have a child. The special thing about the word 'child' was that he wrote it in several different languages. He also wrote that he missed me."

"I was incredibly happy with that letter because now I knew he was alive. I told his parents at once. I had received a sign of life."

A week later, Ziad called.

"He told me he would be home soon. But I can't recall the exact content of the conversation because I was so excited," she said.

Then one day in February 2000, there he was, Aysel said, standing at her door: Cleanshaven, neatly dressed — the Ziad she knew from the first weeks in Greifswald, the man she fell in love in. He has jewelry, honey, shoes, a skirt for her.

"And of course I asked the question, 'Where have you been?' And I did not ask it once. I asked it a lot of times. The only answer I got was, 'Don't ask me.' Later he would say, 'Don't ask me, it's better for you.' That sort of irritated me, so I asked, 'Why was it better for me?' I would not receive an answer.

"At some point, I just told myself, 'It's OK,' and I was content with the situation. Basically I was happy that he was here and that his Sturm und Drang — that's how I interpreted this time — was over."

That night, as Ziad slept in her bed, Aysel lifted the blankets and carefully examined his body, looking for bruises or scars. There were none. He looked fit, athletic. He's OK, Aysel thought. He's back, and everything is going to be like it was in the beginning.

Flight Plans

For a while, it was. Ziad seemed more relaxed about his religion, more moderate. He spoke a little of Pakistan, but mainly about the landscape and how differently and simply people lived. He never said a word about being in Afghanistan or what he'd done there. He told Aysel that he had decided what to do with his life: He wanted to become a pilot.

Immediately, Aysel began making plans, imagining their life: Another year in Germany for training, then children, some time in Turkey. If Ziad wanted to leave Germany, he could work for the Turkish airlines and she could work as a dentist. Then they could move on to Beirut if he wanted.

The two of them together, plotting and dreaming just as they had in Greifswald, only now instead of universities they were looking for flight schools. They contacted those schools near Bochum. But Ziad took off on his own some days. He went to Hamburg, Berlin. He visited a cousin he hadn't seen in years who worked as an engineer at a nuclear power plant. And one day, while he was gone, Aysel came home to find a message on the answering machine, indicating that Ziad had contacted a flight school in Florida.

Aysel was furious. This was more like the old Ziad than she had bargained for — lying, hiding information. When he came home, he had an explanation, as usual: It's the best training and, more to the point, the fastest. He can earn his license faster in the U.S. than anywhere else. Besides, he said, I have to get away from my old friends. This is the only way to do it.

Aysel put her doubts aside. She acquiesced. Not long after, she e-mailed a friend: "I know he did some bull .... I know more than he thinks I know."

What Aysel didn't know was that some of Ziad's old friends would be in the U.S. with him, or that he had told a cousin he thought it would be great to be a Muslim martyr and a plot had been set in motion to achieve that end.

Jarrah, Atta and Al-Shehhi arrived in Florida in the summer of 2000. Binalshibh and Essabar tried to join them but repeatedly failed to obtain visas. Binalshibh became the key contact between the pilots — the hit teams, as they called them — and the plot's principal planner, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, and the rest of the Al Qaeda hierarchy.

During the next year, Aysel and Ziad replayed their relationship. Aysel was inquisitive. Ziad was evasive. She couldn't find him. They fought. They made up. He came to visit. He left. In total, he returned to Germany six times while he was in the U.S. She visited him once in Florida. He flew her down to the Keys and showed her how he trained in a Boeing simulator.

He told her not to tell friends where he was. She agreed, but when asked, she said, "of course I never stick to that. If somebody called and asked his whereabouts, I give them an answer. I told him too, and he is very angry."

They talked or e-mailed almost every day.

Aysel wrote Ziad in late October:

"Please, I ask you please call me. Just give me a short call so I know that you're all right. I'm angry that you don't think about me and that I wait for a message here and have to think about you all the time. Can you think about me once and try to pretend to be me. You're taking so many risks and I know a lot even though you don't tell it. It's no surprise that I'm afraid for you, right?

"I love you.

"Your Aysel."

Ziad responded:

"I arrived well. I'm sorry I haven't sent you a message for a long time. I did get your letter and I found it super sweet. And full of understanding and compassion. It's not about trust. I love you, Aysel, and don't worry."

Ziad's father had a heart bypass operation a month later, in February 2001. Ziad went home to Beirut for a month to be with him. He stopped in Bochum on his way back to the U.S.

He seemed to recommit himself, Aysel said later.

"He was really moved, and said, he, Ziad, wants [us] to have children soon, so his father could see them before he dies."

Later, after Ziad returned to the U.S. and still couldn't set a date for when his training would end, Aysel grew angry again because she didn't see "any progress." Ziad, as always, had an excuse. Aysel, as always, accepted it. In part, their relationship was constructed on her capacity to believe Ziad's lies, even those that seemed preposterous.

Once, Ziad showed her a picture of him on one of his trips in a commercial airliner. She asked why he was sitting in business class. The flight attendant made me, he said, because I am Lebanese, and they wanted me where they could keep an eye on me.

This seems close to what Aysel had wanted too — Ziad in a place where she could keep an eye on him. But even when he was within sight — in the same room or the same bed — Aysel saw only so far. Ziad made it hard to look too deeply, but Aysel seemed to blind herself too.

She saw Ziad descend almost every step of the way into the Sept. 11 plot. Even today she can recount the steps, but, she says, she still doesn't know quite where he was going.

The Destination

Ziad's quick training course in the U.S. stretched out beyond a year. Every time he came home, Aysel thought it was for good. She booked his flights home and unless told otherwise booked one-way fares. Then he'd show up carrying only hand luggage, and she would know that he wasn't staying this time, either.

Finally, on Sept. 10, 2001, Ziad packed up his things, wrote Aysel the final letter declaring his pride and devotion and dreams of castles in the sky and put them all in the mail.

The next morning, very early his time, he called her. She had complained often that even when he did call, the conversations were brief, sometimes cut off when his prepaid calling cards ran out of time. This conversation was abrupt even by those standards.

Three times, quickly, he told her he loved her. Then Ziad told Aysel goodbye.








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