York, needed paint, the oversized yard needed care, and a half-finished bathroom needed remodeling. Plus, someone needed to close their aboveground pool for the season, a chore that Nasypany loudly proclaimed to be a royal pain in the ass.
To top it off, he had to protect the lives of roughly one hundred million Americans.
Nasypany was a major in the Air National Guard, working as a mission control commander at the Northeast Air Defense Sector, or NEADS (pronounced knee-ads). NEADS was part of the North American Aerospace Defense Command, or NORAD, the military organization with the daunting task of safeguarding the skies over the United States and Canada.
Protection work suited Nasypany, who’d been a leading defenseman on his college hockey team. At NEADS, he and his team stood sentry against long-range enemy bombers and intercontinental ballistic missiles sneaking past U.S. air borders, along with a catalog of other airborne dangers such as hijackings. Nasypany had joined NEADS seven years earlier, after an active duty Air Force career during which he earned the radio call sign “Nasty” and spent months aloft in a radar plane over Iraq, Kuwait, and Saudi Arabia during the First Gulf War.
On workdays, Nasypany drove his Nissan Stanza twenty-five miles to NEADS headquarters, a squat aluminum bunker that resembled a UFO from a 1950s sci-fi movie. It was the last operating facility in a military ghost town, on the property of the decommissioned Griffiss Air Force Base in Rome, New York. The obscure location was fitting: in the grand scheme of U.S. military priorities, defending domestic skies had become something of a backwater, staffed largely by part-time pilots and officers in the Air National Guard.
Working eight-hour shifts around the clock, three hundred sixty-five days a year, Nasypany and several hundred military officers, surveillance technicians, communications specialists, and weapons controllers huddled in the green glow of outdated radar and computer screens. Bulky tape recorders preserved their spoken words as they kept a lookout for potential national security threats over Washington, D.C., and twenty-seven states in the Northeast, Mid-Atlantic, and Midwest.
One of the many challenges for Nasypany was to keep his crews sharp amid the daily tedium of a peacetime vigil. Entire shifts would pass with no hint of trouble, which was good for the country but potentially numbing to NEADS crews. Then, perhaps a dozen times a month, an “unknown” would appear on a radar scope, and everyone needed to react smartly and immediately, knowing that a mistake or a delay of even a few minutes theoretically could mean the obliteration of an American city.
In most of those cases, the NEADS crew would quickly identify the mystery radar dots. But three or four times a month, when initial efforts failed, NEADS staffers would carry out the most exciting part of their job: ordering the launch of supersonic military fighter jets to determine who or what had entered American airspace.
Nationally, NORAD and its divisions could immediately call upon fourteen fighter jets, two each at seven bases around the country. Those fighters remained perpetually “on alert,” armed and fueled, pilots ready. The military had many more fighter jets spread among U.S. bases, but time would be needed to round up pilots and load fuel and weapons, and time would be an unaffordable luxury if America came under attack.
During the decade since the fall of the Soviet Union, America’s leaders had behaved as though the airborne threat had nearly disappeared. At fourteen, the number of on-alert fighters nationwide marked a sharp drop since the height of the Cold War, when twenty-two military sites, with scores of fighter jets, were always ready to defend against a ballistic missile attack or any other threat to North America. In fact, by the summer of 2001, the number of on-alert fighter jet sites throughout the United States had been ordered to be cut from fourteen to only four, to save money, though that order had yet to be carried out.
NEADS directly controlled four of the on-alert fighter jets: two F-15s at Otis Air National Guard Base in Buzzards Bay, Massachusetts, on Cape Cod, and two F-16s at Langley Air Force Base in Hampton, Virginia.
When the fighters launched, time and again the unknown aircraft or mystery radar dot would turn out to be benign: a fish-spotting plane from Canada with faulty electronics, or a passenger jet from Europe whose pilots failed to use proper codes on their cockpit transponder, a device that sends ground radar a wealth of identifying information plus speed and altitude. In NEADS parlance, the end result would be a “friendly” plane that didn’t “squawk,” or properly identify itself by transponder, as a result of human or mechanical error. When the potential threat passed, the NEADS sentinels resumed their watch.
To stay ready for surprise inspections and, above all, a genuine threat by an unknown with nefarious intent, Nasypany and other NEADS officers regularly put their crews through elaborate exercises. They had one planned for September 11, with the impressive name Vigilant Guardian. The drill focused on a simulated attack by Russian bombers, with elaborate secondary scenarios including a mock hijacking by militants determined to force a passenger jet to land on a Caribbean island. Nasypany and some colleagues wanted the exercise to include a plot by terrorists to fly a cargo plane into the United Nations building in New York City, but a military intelligence officer had nixed that idea as too far-fetched to be useful.
Nasypany spent his September 10 shift preparing for the next day’s exercise, but he also had to carry out a more mundane family responsibility. NEADS allowed tours by civilians, so Boy Scout troops, local politicians, and civic groups regularly clomped around the Operations Room, looking at the radar scopes after classified systems were switched off. In this case, his wife’s sister Becky was visiting the Nasypanys from Kansas, and she’d always been curious about Kevin’s work. He got approval for Becky to witness what she had long imagined to be the exciting world of national security surveillance in action.
As Nasypany toured NEADS with his wife and sister-in-law, disappointment spread across Becky’s face. The nerve center of U.S. air defense didn’t seem much different from the office of the air conditioning manufacturer where she worked.
“It looks like you guys don’t do much,” Becky said. “It’s really quiet in here.”
Nasypany couldn’t help but smile. A good shift for NEADS, and for the nation, was eight hours of hushed monotony. “Quiet’s a good thing around here,” Nasypany told her. “When it starts getting loud, and people start raising their voices, that’s a bad thing.”
MOHAMED ATTA
American Airlines Flight 11
ZIAD JARRAH
United Airlines Flight 93
Inside a third-floor room in a middling Boston hotel, an unremarkable man prepared to move on. He pulled on a polo shirt, black on one shoulder and white on the other, and packed a flimsy vinyl Travelpro suitcase that resembled the rolling luggage preferred by airline pilots.
If not for the glare of his dark eyes, Mohamed Atta would have been easy to overlook: thirty-three years old, slim, five feet seven, clean-shaven, with brushy black hair, a drooping left eyelid, and a hard-set mouth over a meaty chin. After one night in room 308 of the Milner Hotel, Atta gathered his belongings before a final move that represented the last steps of a years-long journey that he believed would elevate him from angry obscurity into eternal salvation.
The youngest of three children of a gruff, ambitious lawyer father and a doting stay-at-home mother, Atta spent his early childhood in a rural Egyptian community. Atta’s father, also named Mohamed, complained that Atta’s mother pampered their timid son, making him “soft” by raising him like a girl alongside his two older sisters. Devout but secular Muslims—as opposed to Islamists, who wanted religion to dominate Egypt’s political, legal, and social spheres—the family moved to Cairo when Atta was ten. While his peers played or
