Cracking The Terror Code

Suicide squads are as old as the medieval Assassins and as modern as the Japanese kamikaze pilots of World War II. What makes Al Qaeda killers seem especially menacing is their apparent normalcy and independence. Most of the Black Tuesday hijackers were not like the Palestinian suicide bombers, poor losers brainwashed and bribed to strap on a bomb and take a one-way bus ride to Allah. The half-dozen leaders were educated and middle class. As pilots, several never did get the hang of takeoffs and landings, but their navigation skills were perfect. They depended more on the anonymity of American life than on their social skills. Still, an examination of the plotters' path, as it has emerged over the past month, reveals a mix of professionalism and fanaticism that will make the next attack hard to stop.

The top plotters met last August in an odd location: Las Vegas. They stayed in cheap hotels on a dreary stretch of the Strip frequented by dope dealers and $10 street hookers. Perhaps they wished to be fortified for their mission by visiting a shrine to American decadence. Or maybe they just wanted a city that was easy to reach by air from their various cells in Florida, New Jersey and San Diego. In the past, Al Qaeda has sent a top lieutenant to trigger an attack and then slip away. FBI agents are searching records for any Middle Eastern-looking man who visited Vegas in August. The bureau is sure that six of the hijackers were present: the four presumed pilots and two others, Nawaf Alhazmi, 25, and Khalid Almihdhar, 26. These last two appear to have been an advance guard, arriving in San Diego in the fall of 1999.

The duo was remarkable for being unremarkable. They bought a car, worked at odd jobs, obtained credit cards and insurance. "They were nice," recalled their landlord, Abdussattar Shaikh, though he did observe that his tenants "went out to make their phone calls." The two men visited strip clubs (Dancers and Cheetah's). Alhazmi apparently advertised, unsuccessfully, for a Mexican bride. Shaikh remembers that Alhazmi was "very caring" and even confiding: "He told me once that his father had tried to kill him when he was a child. He never told me why, but he had a long knife scar on his forearm." Almihdhar seems to have been a bit dimmer and more standoffish. According to a flight instructor, Rick Garza, Almihdhar drew the airplane wings backward in class. Garza, who described the two as "Dumb and Dumber," said that Almihdhar and Alhazmi were impatient students: "They wanted to bypass primary training and go right to flying Boeings."

The two terrorists may have been poor pilots, but they were well connected: in January 2000 they were videotaped by Malaysian secret police in Kuala Lumpur, meeting with a Qaeda operative who later emerged as a key suspect in the bombing of the USS Cole. And to make up for their deficient flying skills, Al Qaeda was able to provide reinforcements. In San Diego the two were joined by Hani Hanjour, the man who, investigators believe, eventually steered American Flight 77 into the Pentagon. The shy, devout son of a well-to-do Saudi, Hanjour appears to have been the one true "sleeper," living in the United States on and off for a decade and starting flight school in the mid-'90s. He, too, was a poor flight student, but he may have had a helping hand from his Qaeda bosses. It appears that, in June, an Algerian pilot, Lotfi Raissi, came to the United States to help train Hanjour on a jet simulator. (Raissi, now being held in England, denies that he was in on the plot.)

No plotter moved around the world with more ease or frequency than Mohamed Atta. In the months before the hijacking, he traveled to Zurich (where he bought a couple of Swiss knives in the duty-free shop), Madrid and Prague. In Spain last July he seems to have touched base with a ring of Algerian terrorists. His meetings in Prague are more intriguing. NEWSWEEK has learned that Atta met not once but twice with Iraqi intelligence operatives, in June 2000 and again last April. The second meeting was with Farouk Hijazi, Iraq's ambassador to Turkey, who was called back to Baghdad before Sept. 11. One intelligence source called the two meetings interesting but still far from proof of Iraqi involvement in the plot.

While polite when necessary, Atta had a seething temper and an almost pathological aversion to women. "I don't want any women to go to my grave at all during the funeral or any occasion thereafter," Atta wrote in a 1996 will. "I don't want a pregnant woman or a person who is not clean to come and say goodbye to me," Atta wrote, adding, "the person who will wash my body near the genitals must wear gloves on his hand so he won't touch my genitals."