childhood in a rural Egyptian community. Atta’s father, also named Mohamed, complained that Atta’s mother pampered their timid son, making him “soft” by raising him like a girl alongside his two older sisters. Devout but secular Muslims—as opposed to Islamists, who wanted religion to dominate Egypt’s political, legal, and social spheres—the family moved to Cairo when Atta was ten. While his peers played or watched television, Atta studied and obeyed his elders, a dutiful son determined to satisfy his disciplinarian father and follow the path of his intelligent sisters, on their way to careers as a doctor and a professor.
Atta graduated in 1990 from Cairo University with a degree in architectural engineering and joined a trade group linked to the Muslim Brotherhood, a political group that advocated Islamic rule and demonized the West. But his career hopes were hamstrung because he didn’t earn high enough grades to win a place in the university’s prestigious graduate school. At his father’s urging, Atta studied English and German, and a connection through a family friend steered him toward graduate studies in Germany.
In 1992, at twenty-four, Atta enrolled at the Technical University of Hamburg-Harburg to pursue the German equivalent of a master’s degree in urban planning. Some men in their early twenties from a traditional society might have viewed a cosmopolitan new home as an opportunity to expand their horizons, to explore their interests, or to rebel against a controlling father. Atta took another route, burrowing into his religion and trading his docile ways for fundamentalist fervor aimed at the West.
He shunned the pulsing social and cultural life of Hamburg, a wealthy city where the sex trade prospered alongside a thriving commercial district. He grew a beard and became a fixture in the city’s most radical mosque, called al-Quds, the Arabic name for the city of Jerusalem. Most of the seventy-five thousand Muslims in Hamburg were Turks with moderate beliefs, but al-Quds catered to the small minority of Arabs drawn to extreme interpretations of Islam. The mosque’s location placed the spiritual literally above the worldly: the rooms of the mosque sat atop a body building parlor in a seedy part of the city. Preachers tried to outdo one another in expressions of hatred toward the United States and Israel. Congregants could buy recordings of sermons by popular imams, including one who risked arrest under German antihate laws by declaring that “Christians and Jews should have their throats slit.”
By 1998, nearly finished with his studies, Atta had surrounded himself with like-minded men who came to Germany for higher education but retreated into a radically distorted understanding of their religion.
One close confidant with whom he could engage in endless anti-American rants about the oppression of Muslims was named Marwan al-Shehhi, a native of the United Arab Emirates with an encyclopedic knowledge of Islamic scriptures. Ten years younger than Atta, Shehhi struggled in school but flourished as a fundamentalist.
Another member of Atta’s inner circle was Ziad Jarrah, the only son of a prosperous family from Lebanon. Jarrah seemed an unlikely Islamic firebrand: he attended private Christian schools as a boy and later became a sociable, beer-drinking regular at Beirut discos. Jarrah found a girlfriend after he arrived in Germany, but later fell harder for the ferocious ideas he heard at al-Quds.
Along with at least one other member of their circle, the trio of Atta, Shehhi, and Jarrah decided to put their beliefs into action by waging violent jihad among Muslim separatists fighting Russians in Chechnya. While still in Germany, they connected with a recruiter for Osama bin Laden’s terror group, al-Qaeda, who urged them to go first to Afghanistan, where they could receive training at jihadist camps. They reached Afghanistan in late 1999, where they pledged bayat, or allegiance, to bin Laden. The three well-educated men quickly drew attention from al-Qaeda’s top leaders, including bin Laden himself. He’d been searching for men exactly like Mohamed Atta, Marwan al-Shehhi, and Ziad Jarrah.
In the months before the Hamburg group’s arrival in Afghanistan, bin Laden had embraced the idea of a simultaneous suicide hijacking plot against the United States, and he needed certain recruits to serve as its key participants: men who possessed English language skills, knowledge of life in the West, and the ability to obtain travel visas to the United States. Known to al-Qaeda as the Planes Operation, the plot was reportedly the brainchild of a longtime terrorist named Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who’d met bin Laden in the 1980s. Mohammed admired the murderous ambitions of his nephew Ramzi Yousef, who carried out the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. After Yousef’s 1995 arrest in Pakistan, as the terrorist was flown by helicopter over Manhattan, a senior FBI agent lifted Yousef’s blindfold and pointed out the World Trade Center’s Twin Towers, aglow in the dark. The agent taunted his prisoner: “Look down there. They’re still standing.” Yousef replied: “They wouldn’t be if I had enough money and explosives.”
Al-Qaeda’s Planes Operation sought to pick up where Yousef left off and to go much further. The plot had several iterations during its years of planning, but as envisioned by Khalid Sheikh Mohammed at least as far back as 1996, jihadists would hijack ten planes and use them to attack targets on the East and West Coasts of the United States. Bin Laden eventually rejected the idea as too complex and unwieldy. He wanted a combination of high impact and high likelihood of success. In a scaled-down version, approved by bin Laden in mid-1999, the plot intended to fulfill the threat of his 1998 fatwa against the United States and its people, and to inspire others to similar action, by striking key symbols of American political, military, and financial might.
Soon after meeting Atta, bin Laden personally chose him as the mission’s tactical commander and provided him with a preliminary list of approved targets. Bin Laden sent the group back to Hamburg with instructions about what to do next. To avoid attracting attention and to appear less radical, Atta shaved his beard, wore Western clothing, and avoided extremist mosques. Next, in March 2000, he emailed thirty-one flight schools in the United States to ask about the costs of training and living accommodations, all of which would secretly be covered by wire transfers from al-Qaeda. Before they applied for visas to the United States, Atta, Shehhi, and Jarrah each claimed that he had lost his passport; their replacements eliminated evidence of potentially suspicious trips to Pakistan and Afghanistan. By late May 2000, all three men had new passports and tourist visas. By late summer they were studying in Florida to be pilots, with Atta and Shehhi at one flight school and Jarrah at another.
Meanwhile, both before and after the Hamburg group began flight school, sixteen other men who’d also pledged their lives to bin Laden and al-Qaeda entered the United States to play roles chosen for them in the Planes Operation. One, a twenty-nine-year-old Saudi named Hani Hanjour, had studied in the United States on and off for nearly a decade and had obtained a commercial pilot certificate in April 1999. While in Arizona, Hanjour fell in with a group of extremists, and by 2000 he was an al-Qaeda recruit in Afghanistan, where his flying and language skills, plus his firsthand knowledge of the United States, made him an ideal candidate in bin Laden’s eyes to join the Planes Operation as a fourth pilot.
Thirteen of the others were between twenty and twenty-eight years old, all from Saudi Arabia except for one, who hailed from the United Arab Emirates. A few had spent time in college, but most lacked higher education, jobs, or prospects. All but one were unmarried. Like the Hamburg group, they’d joined al-Qaeda originally intending to fight in Chechnya. Bin Laden handpicked them for the plot and asked them to swear loyalty for a suicide operation. Although they weren’t especially imposing, most no taller than five foot seven, he wanted them to serve as “muscle” for the men who were training to be pilots. Most returned home to Saudi Arabia to obtain U.S. visas, then returned to Afghanistan for training in close-quarters combat and knife killing skills. They began to arrive in the United States in April 2001, keeping to themselves and generally avoiding trouble.
The other two “muscle” group members originally were supposed to participate in Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s ten-plane plot. Experienced jihadists who’d fought together in Bosnia, Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Mihdhar arrived in California on six-month tourist visas in January 2000, even before the Hamburg group began pilot training. The U.S. intelligence community identified
