The Quiet Student

0:08The Record Before any of this, there is a young man with a measuring tape.

0:13Classmate Okay. Hold the end against the doorway. No, the stone one, the old one. Good. What does it say? Four point two. Four point two meters.

0:26Classmate You know, when I tell people at home I spend my spring measuring alleys, they think I'm on holiday. And the man who sells the tea thinks we're from the city government. He thinks we're going to knock his house down. We're not, of course. We're going to write a very long paper and nobody's going to read it.

0:45Classmate You could laugh, you know. It's allowed. No? Okay. Next door. Hold the end.

0:53The Record The student holding the other end of the tape is an Egyptian, in his twenties, studying urban planning in Germany. He is quiet. He is careful. He is, by the account of nearly everyone who knew him then, very good at his work. His subject is this neighborhood: an old quarter of Aleppo, in Syria, whose lanes were being cut open by new roads and new concrete towers. His teachers in Hamburg would remember that he cared about the old city, about keeping it whole.

1:27The Record His name is Mohamed Atta. Six years after this spring, he will lead the men who carried out the attacks of September eleventh, two thousand one.

1:37The Record This episode is about how that happened, as far as the record can show it. It's not a defense of him, and it won't make him a mystery, or a hero, or a victim. The record is detailed, and in places it is plain. In other places it runs out. Where it runs out, we will say so.

2:00The Record From Will Sigmon Media. This is The Long Fuse. Episode one. The Quiet Student.

2:07The Record A word on how this works. Everything you'll hear is drawn from the public record: the 9/11 Commission Report, government investigations, court judgments in Germany, and the reporting of journalists who spent years on this. A few short scenes are reconstructed. Their settings are real, the people in them are composites, and the words are ours. The show notes list the source for every claim. Where the record is uncertain, we'll tell you.

2:35The Record He was born on September the first, nineteen sixty-eight, in Kafr el-Sheikh, a provincial town in the farmland of the Nile Delta, north of Cairo. His family was middle class. His father was a lawyer.

2:50The Record He was the youngest of three children, and the only son. His two older sisters would go on to careers in medicine and university teaching. When he was about ten, the family moved to Cairo, to an apartment in the crowded middle of the capital.

3:06The Record People who knew the household describe a strict father who set the rules and kept his children close. They say the children were expected to study, not to play in the street. The boy was small, polite and serious, and some who knew the family called him sheltered. His father would later say he raised him to be disciplined.

3:28The Record Cairo in the nineteen-eighties was a city of more than ten million people, swelling fast, and its old neighborhoods were being torn down and rebuilt in concrete. A boy who liked to draw could look out of the window and see a city being remade. Years later, that would be the subject of his life's only real piece of scholarship. How much a childhood like that explains is not something the record can settle. Many children grow up in strict, ambitious, loving homes in Cairo, and in every other city, and nothing like this follows. We note it and move on.

4:07The Record He did what was expected. He went to Cairo University and studied architecture, in the engineering faculty. He graduated in nineteen ninety with a degree in architectural engineering.

4:20The Record For a couple of years he worked as an urban planner in Cairo. Then, in the fall of nineteen ninety-one, he asked a favor of a German couple he had met in the city: could they help him continue his education in Germany? They suggested Hamburg. They invited him to stay with them there, at least at first.

4:42The Record Egypt at the end of the nineteen-eighties was a country in a long, quiet struggle over religion and power. President Anwar Sadat had been assassinated in nineteen eighty-one by Islamist militants. The movement those men came from was harshly suppressed, and it would still be in the news when Atta left. There is no evidence that the young architecture graduate belonged to any of it. When he left for Germany, the Commission would later write, he appeared religious, but not fanatically so.

5:40The Record He came to Germany for the first time in July nineteen ninety-two, after a German language course. He stayed briefly in Stuttgart. That fall he moved to Hamburg and into his host family's home.

5:49The Record Hamburg is a port city, rich and rainy and Protestant, on the river Elbe. In nineteen ninety-two it was also a city absorbing the aftershock of German reunification, and thousands of foreign students.

5:57The Record He enrolled at the University of Hamburg, then promptly transferred to the Technical University of Hamburg-Harburg, across the river, into the course in city engineering and urban planning. He would stay registered there for seven years.

6:05The Record The living arrangement with the host family did not last. By the accounts gathered later, he found their household too free: the mixed company, the ordinary habits of a liberal German home. He moved into student housing.

6:14The Record He got a part-time job as a draftsman at a Hamburg urban-planning firm, and he was good at it. He was also, by the recollection of people there, hard to know. He kept to himself. He did not eat with colleagues, or drink with them. He prayed at work, in a room they let him use.

6:33The Record At the university, the picture is the same. The Commission's summary of how he came across in those years is almost gentle: very intelligent, reasonably pleasant, and fluent in German. He went home to Cairo on visits. He travelled for his studies. And in his thesis subject he found something he seems to have cared about: a historic Arab city, and his objection to what modern planners and investors were doing to it.

7:02The Record Nothing in the first years in Hamburg points to what came later. That's part of what makes the record uncomfortable to read. Hindsight wants a sign, and for a long time there isn't one.

7:16Colleague We're going to the place on the corner. Just one. Come for an hour. No? You always say no. One day I'm going to stop asking.

7:28Colleague The drawing is always due tomorrow, hm? All right. Turn the lights off when you go.

7:34The Record Colleagues from those years remember him as exacting and competent. They also remember him as someone they never really got to know.

7:46The Record The Commission Report is careful about the change in him. When he arrived in Germany, it says, he appeared religious, but not fanatically so. This would change.

7:58The Record It changed slowly, and then it didn't. In the mid-nineteen-nineties, by the accounts of people who knew him, he made the pilgrimage to Mecca, and he grew a beard.

8:11The Record Hamburg in those years had dozens of mosques, most of them small, most of them quiet, serving Turkish, Arab, Afghan and African families. Almost all of that community had nothing to do with what follows, and it's important to say so. The men in this story found one another in a very small corner of it.

8:29The Record Atta began to organize: as early as nineteen ninety-five, by one later account, he tried to set up a Muslim student association at the university.

8:37The Record In nineteen ninety-five he also met a Yemeni man at a mosque in Hamburg: Ramzi Binalshibh. Binalshibh had come to Germany that year and claimed asylum under a false name. He was sociable where Atta was austere. The two became close friends.

8:55The Record In April nineteen ninety-six, at twenty-seven, Atta signed a will. Two acquaintances from the Hamburg mosque community witnessed it. It's a short document, mostly instructions about his own funeral and burial, and about who should and shouldn't attend. Some of it is harsh, especially about women. We won't read it. What matters is the date. Nothing in the record ties him to al Qaeda in nineteen ninety-six. But at twenty-seven, a graduate student in urban planning was writing down how he wanted to be buried.

9:30The Record On a visit home to Egypt a couple of years later, he met an old college friend. The friend told investigators that Atta had changed a great deal. He had grown a beard, and he had, in the friend's words, obviously adopted fundamentalism.

9:48The Record A pause here, and a jump back in time, because the ideas he was absorbing had a history, and part of it runs through America.

9:57The Record In nineteen forty-nine, a middle-aged Egyptian education official named Sayyid Qutb spent part of a year at a small teachers college in Greeley, Colorado. He went to a church dance. He watched the lawns being watered. He went home appalled by what he took to be American emptiness, and he became, over the next seventeen years, the most influential writer of a militant Islamist movement.

10:24The Record Egypt executed him in nineteen sixty-six. The 9/11 Commission names him as a writer bin Laden relied on heavily. His books were everywhere in the circles Atta moved in by the late nineties.

10:37The Record We have no record that Atta read him, or which books Atta read at all. The line isn't a direct one. It runs through a movement, not through a man. We'll come back to Greeley later in this series. For now it's enough to know that the fuse was lit long before Hamburg.

10:58The Record In nineteen ninety-eight, Atta and Binalshibh began sharing an apartment in the Harburg district of Hamburg with a young student from the United Arab Emirates, Marwan al-Shehhi. Shehhi was twenty. He was in Germany on a military scholarship, and he was struggling in his classes. By the end of that year the men were living at fifty-four Marienstrasse, a plain building on a plain street.

11:23The Record A fourth man completed the core. Ziad Jarrah was Lebanese, from a well-off family, educated at Christian schools. When he arrived in Germany in nineteen ninety-six he was known for knowing the best discos in Beirut. He had a girlfriend. In Hamburg he began to attend the al-Quds mosque on Steindamm, near the main railway station, and he became friendly with Binalshibh there.

11:48The Record The al-Quds mosque was a small prayer hall above a shop. Among its worshippers was a loud, well-known veteran of the Afghan war, Mohammed Haydar Zammar, who pressed young men to fight, and who later claimed he had influenced this group. German and American intelligence knew who he was.

12:08The Record Atta had once joined a working group at that mosque meant to bridge Muslims and Christians. The Commission's judgment is dry: he proved a poor bridge.

12:18The Record What the neighbors and acquaintances later described was a closed circle: meetings at the apartment three or four times a week, conversations in Arabic so that others couldn't follow, and talk that was hostile to America and to Jews. One member later described the group as something like a sect, whose members dealt only with each other. Atta, the Commission says, was intolerant of dissent. When someone near the group declined to commit himself, Atta dismissed him as too weak.

12:48The Record On the rent checks for the apartment, Atta wrote a name for it, in Arabic. It meant, roughly, house of the followers.

12:57The Record Of the four, Jarrah is the one who seems least likely, and the Commission says so. He drank beer at student parties in Greifswald, the small university town where he first studied. He spent most of his time at his girlfriend's apartment. Then, after a trip home to Lebanon at the end of nineteen ninety-six, witnesses saw him change. He started living more strictly. In the fall of nineteen ninety-seven he switched his course of study, abruptly, from dentistry to aircraft engineering. The Commission says his motive remains unclear. In Hamburg he grew a full beard. He began criticizing his girlfriend for not being religious enough and for how she dressed. He wouldn't introduce her to his friends there. They quarreled, broke up, and got back together, again and again.

13:48The Record It's worth hearing that pattern once, because it's the pattern for all of them. None of them arrived in Germany as a militant. Each of them narrowed. Old friends fell away, and new ones closed around them. Ordinary life started to look like a betrayal. By late nineteen ninety-nine, the Commission writes, they were ready to abandon their student lives.

14:14Secretary Your thesis? Two bound copies, yes? Good. It's a heavy one. Aleppo. My sister went to Syria once. She said it's beautiful. Well.

14:27Secretary Congratulations. It took you long enough, hm? Good luck with whatever comes next.

14:34The Record He finished. After seven years he completed his degree in urban planning, with a thesis on the old quarter of Aleppo. The Commission notes that he applied himself fairly seriously to his studies, at least compared to his friends, and that he received his degree shortly before the next trip.

14:53The Record By the published accounts of people who have read it, the thesis is an ordinary piece of academic work. It surveys the lanes, the courtyard houses and the markets of one old quarter, and argues that the old city should be repaired rather than bulldozed for roads and high-rises. Parts of it are careful and even tender about buildings. Its argument is a planner's argument, and nothing in it is a manifesto. He was thirty-one. He had a degree, and a profession, and a subject he knew better than almost anyone in Hamburg. Within weeks, he was on his way to Afghanistan.

15:35The Record In nineteen ninety-nine, by Binalshibh's later account, the four friends decided to go and fight in Chechnya, against the Russians.

15:44The Record It helps to know what was waiting for them. By nineteen ninety-nine, al Qaeda was an organization based in Afghanistan, under the protection of the Taliban. On August seventh, nineteen ninety-eight, it had bombed the American embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, within minutes of each other. Two hundred and twenty-four people were killed; twelve of them were Americans. The United States had answered with cruise missiles. bin Laden had survived.

16:13The Record And in Afghanistan, a plan was already moving. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, a Kuwaiti-raised veteran of the anti-Soviet war whose nephew had bombed the World Trade Center in nineteen ninety-three, had brought bin Laden an idea for an attack using airplanes. Sometime in late nineteen ninety-eight or early nineteen ninety-nine, bin Laden gave it the green light. That spring he summoned K-S-M to Kandahar to tell him al Qaeda would support it. The first men chosen for it were veterans of the camps. They were fighters, but they spoke little English, and they had never lived in the West. The plan needed pilots.

16:53The Record The Hamburg men knew none of this, as far as the record shows. And in fact, they never got to Chechnya. A chance conversation on a train in Germany put two of them in touch with a man in Duisburg, whom the Commission alleged was a significant al Qaeda operative. He was never charged with any crime. He told them that the road to Chechnya was blocked, and that they should go to Afghanistan instead and train there first. He told them how to get there: Pakistani visas, a flight to Karachi, then the city of Quetta, near the border.

17:21The Record In the last week of November nineteen ninety-nine, Atta and Jarrah left Hamburg for Karachi. Shehhi left around the same time. Binalshibh followed about two weeks later. Friends in Hamburg paid their bills and handled their mail, so that no one would notice they were gone.

17:49The Record They were taken to Kandahar. There, all four pledged loyalty to Usama bin Laden.

18:17The Record What happened next is known mainly from what Binalshibh told his interrogators, and from what the Commission could corroborate. bin Laden's military chief, Mohammed Atef, told them they were about to undertake a highly secret mission. They were to go back to Germany and enroll in flight training. And bin Laden chose Atta to lead them.

18:45The Record The Commission remarks on how fast this happened. The Hamburg men had not yet even met Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the plot's chief planner, known as K-S-M. They had skipped the usual testing in the camps. But they had what the first recruits for the operation lacked: they were educated, spoke English and moved easily in the West. bin Laden and Atef, the Commission concludes, judged that Atta was best suited to be the operation's commander on the ground.

18:47The Record On the way home, early in two thousand, Atta and Binalshibh stopped in Karachi. There they met K-S-M, who instructed them on security and on living in the United States.

18:59The Record The record doesn't give us his reasons in his own words, and this program would not repeat them if it did. What it gives us is a sequence. A strict, gifted, isolated young man was drawn, over years, into a closed circle that fed his worst convictions. A movement had been waiting for exactly that kind of recruit.

19:23The Record He came back to Hamburg in late February two thousand, and he came back looking different.

19:38Clerk Number forty-one? Yes. Sit. What can I do for you? Passport. Lost. Stolen, or lost? Lost. Mm. Everybody loses them.

19:43Clerk Your consulate issues the new one, not us, but you'll need this report from us. Sign here. And here.

19:56The Record He had shaved the beard. He wore Western clothes. He stayed away from the extremist mosques and from men like Zammar, who drew the attention of the police. Atta, Shehhi and Jarrah each got a new passport, each claiming the old one had been lost. The Commission's explanation is simple: the old passports carried Pakistani visas, and those visas could lead an investigator to Afghanistan.

20:23The Record In March two thousand, Atta sent emails to thirty-one flight schools in the United States. He wrote on behalf, he said, of a small group of men from Arab countries studying in Germany, with no prior training, who wanted to learn to fly in America. He asked about cost, financing, and where they could stay.

20:44The Record He got an American visa on May eighteenth. Binalshibh could not. His applications were rejected, again and again, on the ordinary suspicion that a young Yemeni might stay in America to work. The Commission is plain about the irony. Security, before September eleventh, played little part in whether a visa was granted, unless the applicant was already on a watchlist. None of these four men was.

21:19The Record So Binalshibh stayed in Hamburg. He would never reach America. He became the relay instead: the man in the middle, passing messages and money between the pilots in the United States and the leadership in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

21:26The Record On June the second, Atta took a bus from Germany to Prague. The next day he flew from Prague to Newark, New Jersey.

21:37Desk clerk Afternoon! You boys here about the accelerated program? Figured. All right. It's the private license first, then instrument, then commercial, if you keep at it. Most folks take a year. The accelerated ones do it quicker, if they fly every day.

22:18Desk clerk You got a place to stay? No? Plenty of rentals around here this time of year. Nobody wants to be here in July but us. Okay, I'll need a copy of your passports, and we take the deposit up front. Welcome to Venice.

22:25The Record Venice, Florida is a quiet Gulf Coast town, full of retirees, about an hour south of Tampa. Shehhi had arrived in America a few days before Atta. Together they looked at a flight school in Norman, Oklahoma, and decided against it. In July, Atta started lessons at Huffman Aviation in Venice, and then both men enrolled in its Accelerated Pilot Program. Jarrah was already training at another school in Venice.

22:36The Record By the end of July they had flown solo. By mid-August they had passed the private pilot test. Money came in by wire from the United Arab Emirates, from a relative of K-S-M, who used aliases: a hundred and fourteen thousand five hundred dollars between the end of June and mid-September. No one had to show identification to send it.

22:59The Record When the two men tried another school up the road, in Sarasota, the instructor there later described them as aggressive and rude. He said they sometimes fought him for the controls. They failed an instrument exam, told him they were in a hurry because jobs were waiting at home, and went back to Venice.

23:20The Record In November two thousand, Atta and Shehhi earned their instrument ratings from the Federal Aviation Administration. In mid-December they passed their commercial pilot tests and received their licenses.

23:32The Record Then they began training to fly large jets, on a flight simulator. The Commission notes it plainly: by the end of two thousand, less than six months after they had arrived, the pilots were simulating flights on large jets.

23:48The Record Nobody at any of these schools reported anything to the authorities. There was, as far as the record shows, nothing obvious to report. Foreign students paying to learn to fly were ordinary in Florida. Flight schools were businesses, and these customers paid.

24:04The Record Over the holidays, Jarrah flew home to Beirut, and then back to Florida with his girlfriend, who stayed ten days and even went with him to a training session. The Commission notes that the other operatives had broken off regular contact with their families.

24:21The Record In early January two thousand one, Atta flew to Germany and met Binalshibh in Berlin. He told him the three Hamburg pilots had finished their flight training and were awaiting orders, and that a fourth pilot had joined the operation. Binalshibh was to carry that message to the leadership in Afghanistan.

24:42The Record Atta flew back to Florida. His visa situation was irregular. He had applied to change from tourist to student status, and at the airport he had to persuade the immigration inspectors to let him back in so he could continue training. He was admitted.

25:23The Record That spring, the record shows him moving. He was in Georgia, where he rented a small plane with an instructor, and in Virginia Beach, where he and Shehhi opened a mailbox and then closed it. On April eleventh, he and Shehhi leased an apartment in Coral Springs, Florida. The Commission found no explanation for some of these trips.

25:25The Record And from late April onward, other men began to arrive in the United States, in pairs and small groups, on ordinary visas. They were young, mostly Saudi, and trained in the camps. Those who landed in Florida were met and helped by Atta and Shehhi. When Binalshibh proposed a meeting in Malaysia that summer, Atta said he couldn't come. He was too busy helping the new arrivals settle in.

25:55The Record In the first week of July two thousand one, Atta picked up plane tickets for Spain from a travel agency in Paterson, New Jersey. On July eighth he landed in Madrid. He stayed the night in a hotel and made three phone calls from his room.

26:07The Record The next day he rented a car and drove east, across the country, to the airport at Reus, near Barcelona, and picked up Binalshibh. They drove to Cambrils, a resort town on the Mediterranean, at the height of the tourist season.

26:25The Record What was said there, we know only from Binalshibh, after his capture. He says he told Atta that bin Laden wanted the attack carried out as soon as possible, and was worried about how many operatives were now in the United States. He says Atta answered that he couldn't set a date yet. He needed five or six more weeks.

26:47The Record He says they talked about security, about the other men, and about Ziad Jarrah, who was chafing under Atta's authority, visiting his family and his girlfriend, and whom the planners in Pakistan now worried might pull out.

27:03The Record We won't go through the rest of the conversation. It's in chapter seven of the Commission Report for anyone who needs it. It is operational, and it serves no one to perform it here.

27:16The Record Binalshibh flew back to Hamburg on July sixteenth, on a ticket Atta had bought for him that day. Atta stayed on the coast for three more days. On July nineteenth he returned the car in Madrid and flew back to Fort Lauderdale.

27:34The Record Back in America, the summer went on. On July twenty-fifth, Jarrah flew to Germany on a one-way ticket, to see his girlfriend and his family. That was a first; on his four earlier trips he had always bought a round trip. According to the Commission, Atta appears to have driven him to the airport. In Germany, Binalshibh met Jarrah and, in an emotional conversation, urged him to see the plan through.

28:02The Record On August fifth, Jarrah came back. Whatever doubt he had, he did not act on it. The record shows no one among these men who went to the police, or warned a friend, or simply walked away. By early August, Atta had been back in the United States for a little under three weeks.

28:31The Record That same summer, in Washington, the warnings were piling up. For months the intelligence reports to the President had been getting sharper. That story belongs to the next episode, and to the people who were trying to hear it.

28:40The Record In August two thousand one, the President was spending the month at his ranch in Crawford, Texas. On Monday, August sixth, his Daily Brief, a short, highly classified document from the intelligence community, carried an item that the Commission later printed in full.

28:57The Record Most of the brief each day is about the world: wars, elections, weapons, markets. That morning's book held an analytic piece that the Commission says was prepared because the President had asked a question. Did any of the threats, he had asked his briefers, point to the United States? The analysts assembled what they had. It was the first item in the President's brief that year devoted to the possibility of an attack in the United States.

29:24The Record The item's title is: "Bin Ladin Determined To Strike in US."

29:29The Record "Clandestine, foreign government, and media reports indicate Bin Ladin since 1997 has wanted to conduct terrorist attacks in the US." "Nevertheless, FBI information since that time indicates patterns of suspicious activity in this country consistent with preparations for hijackings or other types of attacks, including recent surveillance of federal buildings in New York."

29:52The Record He had been back in America for eighteen days.

29:56The Record Next time, on The Long Fuse: the same summer, from the other side of the page.