Fall and Rise: The Story of 9/11

by Mitchell Zuckoff

the FAA bore responsibility as the government agency with a duty to protect airline passengers from piracy and sabotage. Despite that mission, the FAA had significant gaps in domestic intelligence and multiple blind spots. Some of this was attributable to a lack of communication, and perhaps a lack of respect, from federal intelligence-gathering agencies. On September 11, 2001, the FAA’s “no-fly list” included a grand total of twelve names.25 By contrast, the State Department’s so-called TIPOFF terrorist watchlist included sixty thousand names. Yet the FAA’s head of civil aviation security didn’t even know that the State Department list existed.26 Two names on that State Department list were Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Mihdhar, both on board Flight 77. That wasn’t the only example of other federal agencies’ not sharing information about potential threats with the FAA.