Fall and Rise: The Story of 9/11

by Mitchell Zuckoff

By contrast, other countries48 had both Mihdhar and Hazmi on watchlists. Once the two men reached the United States, the CIA withheld from the FBI crucial information about them and their movements. Compounded by what a later investigation would call “individual and systemic failings”49 by the FBI, the result was a series of missed opportunities.

their flight training stalled after they told an instructor they wanted to learn how to fly a plane but showed no interest in takeoffs or landings.50

All told, the entire plan cost less than half a million dollars.

Flight 11 had a capacity of 15854 passengers, but as the crew prepared for takeoff, only 81 seats were filled: 9 passengers in first class, 19 in business class, and 53 in coach.

Transponders were required for all planes that fly above 10,000 feet, and it would be hard to imagine any reason a pilot of Flight 11 would purposely turn it off.

Without a working transponder, controllers could still see Flight 11 as a dot on their primary radar scopes, but they could only guess at its speed. They also had no idea of its altitude, and it would be easy to “lose” the plane amid the constant ebb and flow of air

tra...

The idea that hijackers might incapacitate or eliminate the pilots and fly a Boeing 767 themselves didn’t register in the minds of Boston Center controllers. To them, the old rules still applied. Zalewski

kept trying to hail the plane.

None of the five men or their luggage was chosen by the computerized system or by airport workers for additional security screenings.34

If the message had been understood immediately, the plural use of “planes” conceivably might have prompted Zalewski and other air traffic controllers to warn other pilots to enforce heightened cockpit security. Those pilots, in turn, might have told flight attendants to be on guard for trouble. But that’s a best-case scenario. It’s also possible that the comment would have been overlooked or dismissed as an empty boast or downplayed as a misstatement by a hijacker with limited English skills.

Even if the plane slowed somewhat, it could fly from Albany to Manhattan in as little as twenty minutes.

At 8:29 a.m.,18 a half hour after takeoff, American Flight 11 turned south-southeast, putting it more directly on a route to Manhattan. The 767 climbed to 30,400 feet. Two minutes after adjusting course, it descended to 29,000 feet. One second before 8:34 a.m., air traffic

controllers at Boston Center heard a third disturbing transmission from the cockpit, a lie apparently intended for the passengers and crew but never heard by them: “Nobody move, please. We are going back to the airport. Don’t try to make any stupid moves.”

Normally, if the system had worked as designed, top officials at the FAA in Washington would contact the Pentagon’s National Military Command Center, which in turn would call the North American Aerospace Defense Command, or NORAD, the military organization responsible for protecting the skies over the United States and Canada. NORAD, in turn, would ask approval from the Secretary of Defense to use military jets to intervene in the hijacking of a commercial passenger jet. None of that was necessarily a smooth or rapid process.

In fact, the cockpit doors were relatively flimsy and weren’t strong enough46 to prevent forced entry. Another possibility was that the hijackers stabbed the first-class flight attendants to induce the pilots to open the cockpit door. Or maybe it was even simpler: In September 2001, one key47 opened the cockpit doors of all Boeing planes. Maybe the hijackers brought a key on board with them.

If

Ogonowski and McGuinness were in their seats, low and strapped in, they would have been at a distinct disadvantage against knife-wielding attackers coming at them from behind with the element of surprise.

Flight controllers, airline officials, government and military experts, and everyone else would need to accept a new script for hijackings, one that featured a multipronged murder-suicide plot designed to maximize

Just as with their collaborators, it only meant that their checked bags were held off the plane until after they boarded.

a man who U.S. intelligence officials had known for several years was a member of al-Qaeda, yet who traveled under his real name.

seize. It could be two, ten, or more. But from the terrorists’ perspective, the first hour of their attack went like clockwork: so far, they’d hijacked three planes, two of which had struck their targets in New York and the third was under their control, coursing toward Washington, D.C. Those results were the fruits of a poisoned tree. After months of research and reconnaissance led by Mohamed Atta, the hijackers had guessed correctly about how their victims in the air and their enemies on the ground would and wouldn’t react to a hostile airborne takeover. During the first three hijackings, fifteen terrorists had used planning, training, subterfuge, and deadly violence to exploit preconceived notions and gaping weaknesses6 they’d identified in U.S. airline security, all in service to Osama bin Laden’s 1998 declaration of war against the United States and its people. The

hijackers on American Flight 11, United Flight 175, and American Flight 77 had boarded without incident, despite their apparent possession of short-bladed knives, not to mention previous travels and associations that should have been flaming red flags. They’d swiftly gained access to cockpits and replaced pilots with men who’d trained to fly jets expressly for the purpose of becoming martyrs. “Muscle” hijackers spread fear by attacking several crew members and passengers. They herded the rest to each plane’s rear section to keep them out of the way. Claims about bombs, whether true or (more likely) false, confused and frightened passengers and crew members into obedience, perhaps with the exception of former Israeli commando Danny Lewin on Flight 11, whose throat was apparently slashed by the hijacker who sat behind him.

Departure times typically specified when a plane was supposed to leave the gate,7 before taxiing and takeoff.

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,

Mihdhar, both on board Flight 77. That wasn’t the only example of other federal agencies’ not sharing information abo...

Earlier in the summer, an FBI agent in Phoenix named Kenneth Williams had written a memo27 to his superiors in Washington expressing concern about Middle Eastern men with ties to extremists receiving flight training in the United States. Williams’s memo presciently warned about the “possibility of a coordinated effort by [O]sama bin Laden” to send would-be terrorists to U.S. flight schools to become pilots to serve al-Qaeda. Among other recommendations, he urged the ...

The FBI neither acted on the memo nor shared ...

The content of many of the calls from Flight 93 reflected the fact that the hijackings were no longer nearly simultaneous. The forty-two-minute delay before takeoff, plus the forty-six minutes of flight prior to the hijacking, meant that word of the earlier attacks and the terrorists’ suicidal tactics had spread widely on the ground. Almost

That knowledge became a powerful motivator. It transformed them from victimized hostages into resistance fighters.

JoAnne told Lyz: “Make him . . . make him brave.” She repeated the phrase, almost like a benediction: “Make him brave.”

Thirty-eight of those planes landed in the tiny community of Gander, Newfoundland, where they deposited nearly seven thousand passengers and crew members from more than a hundred countries, plus seventeen dogs and cats.56 An outpouring of kindness, hospitality, and generosity from the people of Gander became a bright spot on a dark day.

The toll from inside the four hijacked planes stood at 246 men, women, and children, killed by nineteen suicide terrorists. Attention had shifted from the sky to the ground, where the terrible toll had yet to be tallied, and where smoke and ash still obscured extraordinary stories of heroism and sacrifice, survival and loss.

Previously, super-tall buildings relied on internal “bones” of heavy steel, upon which hung the structural equivalent of muscle and skin made of stone. In this case, though, the towers’ engineers designed each one essentially like a box within a box. The external walls, the outer boxes, were made entirely from thin bands of structural steel.

The external columns gave the towers a look reminiscent of pinstripe power suits, but it was more than a stylistic choice. Fewer interior steel columns meant more rentable space on each acre-sized office floor. Some internal columns were still necessary, so the engineers clustered them in the inner boxes, known as the central core, among the elevators, stairwells, and utility shafts. The result was an extraordinary thirty thousand square feet9 of rentable, customizable space on nearly every office floor, uninterrupted by columns or walls, with incredible views to boot. Also, the narrow windows between the closely spaced exterior columns tended to reduce dizzying vertigo among people afraid of heights,

Yet those and other advances came with an unwanted, largely overlooked price: they collectively made the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center more susceptible to fire, especially when compared with older buildings whose exteriors were clad in fire-resistant masonry, whose floors were divided into compartments like the hull of a ship, and whose skeletons contained thicker and more abundant steel.

Exacerbating the potential fire risk was a quirk of timing in revisions to the New York City Building Code. As a public agency, the Port Authority wasn’t required to comply11 with the code, but its top officials promised to meet or exceed the city’s standards at the trade center. During initial planning, that meant applying strict rules adopted in 1938. But in the mid-1960s, as the towers took shape, a revised, less stringent code moved toward enactment.

The old code would have mandated six emergency exit stairwells in each tower. The Port Authority interpreted the new rules as requiring only three stairwells per tower. However, even under the new code, each tower should have included at least a fourth stairwell,12 to accommodate visitors to public spaces on the highest floors. Also, fire safety experts generally urge that stairwells in tall buildings be spaced as far apart as possible. But in each of the Twin Towers, the three stairwells were bunched relatively close to one another in the central core. That left them collectively more vulnerable to fire or other damage affecting the core and made them harder to reach for tenants and visitors working in desirable offices near the windows.

In addition, the old construction code required tall buildings to have a “fire tower,” one stairwell encased in masonry,

with an entranceway that trapped and vented smoke away from the stairs. The new rules didn’t require fire towers, so the World Trade Center didn’t have them. Instead, each tower’s three central stairwells were encased in lightweight...

Also worrisome were the techniques used to stop or at least slow a fire from weakening the spindly steel frames that supported the towers’ floors. Because the floor system was so original, neither the new nor the old New York City codes included regulations t...

Special tests could have determined those answers, but no one conducted them. In the end, Port Authority officials essentially guessed14 at what type of fire-resistant material to use and how much to apply to prevent the steel floor supports from buckling in a blaze. Initially, they insisted that the fireproofing was adequate, and that each

floor was built to be airtight. If a fire did break out, they said, it would be locally contained and cause limited damage. Later, however, they installed a sprinkler system, too.

Below the plaza was an underground shopping mall called the Concourse that connected the buildings in the complex. Deeper still were parking levels and a train station that served New Jersey commuters and provided connections to New York City subway lines. Surrounding the six underground stories were walls of concrete three feet thick and eighty feet deep, affectionately called “the bathtub.” The nickname was a misnomer: the walls didn’t contain water, they held back the Hudson River.

After the towers withstood the 1993 bombing, Port Authority officials boasted about their durability, even as the agency upgraded and replaced fireproofing,16 added an air pressure system to limit smoke rising through the core, installed backup power for emergency lights, and improved stairwell lighting.

As it entered the building, what remained of Flight 11 sliced through thirty-five exterior steel columns and heavily damaged two more. It severed six core columns and damaged three others. It shattered at least 166 windows. It broke the concrete floor slabs of the 95th and 96th floors eighty feet deep into the building. It launched a fusillade of flying debris that knocked or scraped fire-retarding insulation from forty-three core columns. It stripped the insulation from sixty thousand square feet of steel floor supports over several floors. It severed pipes that fed water into the fire sprinkler system. It stopped elevators in motion and cut off elevator service to at least

the sixty upper stories. It sent glass and metal and office contents and body parts raining down a thousand feet to the plaza and the streets below.

It altered the path of American and world history. All that damage took...

A wheel from the left wing landing gear crashed through the North Tower’s central core, embedded itself in an exterior column on the far side, ripped the steel beam from the building, and flew with that piece another seven hundred feet to the south, landing on Cedar Street. Another wheel also passed entirely thr...