The day began with what airline pilots call “severe clear”: seemingly infinite visibility. Downtown, in the precincts of the World Trade Center, the giddy, indulgent years of stock speculation had long since ended, and in the offices and restaurants, on the trading floors and in the hallways, there was worried talk about a “crisis” in consumer confidence, a “crisis” of rising unemployment, a prolonged period of “getting worse before it gets better.” It was also Primary Day in the city: four Democrats and two Republicans were lining up to win their party nominations and succeed Rudolph Giuliani in City Hall. It was fair to say that none of the candidates had, as yet, struck most New Yorkers as the next Fiorello LaGuardia. But these were hardly worries of a historic scale, not worries of basic security, of existence. This was a late-summer day, a gift to enjoy.
Kirk Kjeldsen, a reporter for the magazine Waters, which covers finance and technology, was on his way to the north tower of the World Trade Center for a conference, hosted by the magazine’s parent company, the Risk Waters Group, when he did something he had never done before: he fell asleep on the subway. “I don’t know what happened,” he said. “I had a cup of coffee, but I was going in and out of sleep. You know how you open your eyes and think, O.K., it’s not my stop?” He finally got to the World Trade Center, and, as he ran out of the subway station toward the north tower, he said, “I remember looking up. It was a marvel to me how tall it was.”
Kjeldsen was covering the conference, which was being held at Windows on the World, on the hundred and sixth floor. He navigated his way through the lobby and the crush of people going to work. He was told that there was an elevator for Windows on the World, an express to the seventy-eighth floor, where he could change and go on to the hundred and sixth. Kjeldsen looked at the clock on his cell phone: it was eight-forty-four. “I was thinking, Oh, shit.” He had scheduled his first interview for eight-forty.
“There was a black gentleman there, a good-looking guy, strong, a linebacker type,” Kjeldsen said. “It was his job to take people up and down. If it had been just me, I would have gone on up, but he held the door for a couple who were going to the same conference. The woman was dressed in a very corporate, clean-cut outfit, and just as she was stepping into the elevator I remember looking down and seeing a rose tattoo on her ankle. It was a little dim through her stockings. Then the plane hit. The whole building rocked. The elevator bounced up and down like a yo-yo on a string. Everyone just stood there, frozen. Nobody screamed, nobody panicked. The elevator door was stuck about three-quarters of the way open. The elevator operator said, ‘What the hell was that?’ I thought a bomb had gone off in the building. It felt like the building got snapped like a towel. I could hear glass breaking.
“It was unbelievable how quickly smoke started filling the atrium once we got there,” Kjeldsen continued. “I started seeing pieces of concrete around me. There would be a piece the size of an alarm clock, then I’d turn around and there would be a piece the size of a desk. My first thought was to get out of there, and I got out on some sort of platform or observation deck. I didn’t know it wasn’t an exit. And it was just covered with dozens of shoes. High heels. Strap-ons. A few penny loafers and business shoes. There were bodies, luggage, torsos. People were jumping. At first, I didn’t know they were people, but I realized they were flailing on the way down. I’ve seen maybe a million movies where people are falling and it’s always, like, choreographed, but this was really ugly. It looked like lemmings, people lining up and dropping, too many people falling. Then something landed right next to me, and I went back inside.
“There were dying people. There was this guy who had no skin left. And he had white powder all over him. He looked like a spectre. And as I was walking quickly past him he took two short breaths—like ‘Hah hah’—and then he stopped and then he froze up like the concrete all around him. I saw people going through a catwalk, and I joined in. I think maybe it was a glass catwalk, and I looked up at the building and the explosion of fire bloomed like a flower.”
When Kjeldsen finally got out of the north tower and onto the street, he called his girlfriend and told her that the top of the World Trade Center had just blown up. As he was talking, he saw a second plane, headed for the other tower. “It was a blur to me. I was looking at it from the ground up, and it looked like a flaming arrow had pierced the building.”
Eventually, the Risk Waters Group posted a message on its Web site saying that sixteen staff members and more than fifty delegates were “unaccounted for.”
In the hours to come, the world would learn the details of a terrorist operation directed at the symbols and centers of American power and modernity: at government in Washington and at finance in New York. Four teams of terrorists, working with extreme coördination and the sick bravado of martyrdom, hijacked four planes flying east to west. Topped with hundreds of gallons of fuel, these planes—two setting out from Logan Airport, in Boston, one from Newark, and one from Dulles, in Washington—had been converted into flying bombs with human freight.
The two towers of the World Trade Center collapsed into flaming steel, rubble, and dust, and vanished from the skyline of southern Manhattan. The Pentagon was severed along its southwest side. Fighter jets patrolled the skies above Central Park, the aircraft carriers U.S.S. John F. Kennedy and U.S.S. George Washington, along with eight other warships, patrolled the Atlantic. New York officials ordered six thousand body bags; then they ordered many thousands more. The United States declared the attacks—by far the most catastrophic in American history—acts of war.
At nine-fifteen, riders on the West Side I.R.T. trains had not yet heard the news, and so there was a collective gasp when an announcer on the subway’s creaky public-address system—audible for once—said, “Due to an emergency at the World Trade Center, there will be no service between Chambers Street and South Ferry.”
On Church Street, passengers came up the subway stairs and into the sunlight only to see plates of glass the size of store windows and strips of metal larger than trucks flying out of buildings and plunging to the ground. As thousands of frightened and tear-stained people fled, some stopped to gather around an enormous cylinder of twisted metal in front of a bagel cart, not far from Murray Street. People were taking pictures of it, and there was a minute or so before they realized that it was the engine of a jet plane.
Policemen kept saying that the situation was dangerous, that nobody should be there, and yet for a short while one had the strange feeling—clichéd, shaming, and inevitable—of watching a movie, an outlandish disaster film in which the grave threat would increase and increase and then all the tension would be released when the action hero shot his way through and clipped the wires and set the world right. But, of course, no one would set anything right: real people were being crushed and incinerated inside the real, and buckling, World Trade towers. In the north tower, some were jumping or diving from the highest floors. Many were clinging to beams and ledges that had bowed like melting plastic when the plane plowed into the building and set off fireballs of more than a thousand degrees Fahrenheit. Every few minutes, another desperate person lost his grip or just let go or jumped. Some dropped, rigid, all the way to earth. A firefighter was killed when he was hit by a man who had fallen from one of the towers.
A writer who lives thirteen blocks north of the Trade Center and watched from his roof sent an E-mail saying, “For the last two years, we’ve been living with the Twin Towers—the ‘Big Tow-ahs,’ as our son Ollie calls them. I often changed Ollie’s diaper by their lights, and they made for beautiful spectacles during night rain when half veiled in clouds. This apocalyptic tragedy started off as a fire-engine festival for Ollie, a fun, exciting morning as seen through the eyes of a boy who is twenty-six months old, but the fire engines and the police cars kept coming and coming and the sirens were unrelenting, and suddenly the traffic stopped issuing from the Holland Tunnel. We didn’t know it was a suicidal plane attack then. It seemed like some terrible explosion had blown open a hole three quarters up the north face of the north tower, and the aluminum cladding had been exploded off the structure of the building. There was a ghastly hole that showed the profile of the aircraft’s wing; orange flames were burning along entire floors above and below; each window looked like the window into a kiln.
“It was astonishing and terrifying to watch the flames spread, but still inconceivable that the buildings would not survive even as charred hulks. From my roof, I could see a man waving a white flag from perhaps the uppermost floor of the north tower, in the bay of windows closest to the river. He kept waving and waving the white flag; the fire kept spreading. Chairs came flying out in splashes of glass, and then—and maybe this is why I’m writing this down—people.
“When I went up to the roof, a bunch of workers and residents from our building said, ‘People are jumping,’ but I didn’t believe them. I looked with my binoculars, and what they were saying were people was clearly debris—sheets of metal, chairs, unidentifiable stuff, and then a . . . oh God, a man in khakis and an open blue suit jacket, feet up in the air, falling down the side of the building facing the river, three, four, five seconds, gone, vanished between a low silver-skinned building and World Trade No. 7 in the foreground. Then more people began to jump out the river side of the tower, and then out the front, where they fell against the backdrop of the windows, almost in sequence, like paratroopers bustling out of an aircraft.”
At around ten, there was a tremendous whoosh, the sound of a rocket launch, but louder still. Suddenly, people in the area started to run: an avalanche of white debris, of powder and concrete, steel and glass, headed for the ground. The smoke and grit made it impossible to see or to breathe, and everyone was coughing, gasping for air. The police kept screaming, “There is air! There is air!’’ and people ran toward them, for oxygen masks. If you looked up, it was clear what had happened: the south tower, a hundred and ten floors, had collapsed—in seconds, a building that it had taken eight years to build was gone.
At the corner of Church and Reade, seven blocks uptown, a clump of spectators who had been watching passively became uneasy as white smoke appeared on the street and billowed toward them. “Go north!” someone shouted. “The smoke is coming this way!”
Two boys looked up: “No more Twin Towers, yo!”
A pair of Haitian men were shouting at each other, but not arguing: “God gave us sense to communicate with each other. Why?”
People who had escaped from the buildings ran past. Some stopped, and remained frozen against a wall. A woman had fallen to the ground and was writhing, shouting. Her sister was trying to help her up.
A guy pulled out his cell phone: “Man, I was there! The tower just collapsed.” He became frustrated. “Turn on your TV!”
A policeman appeared and pointed to the smoke: “If you breathe that in, you are going to die.”
This got the spectators moving, too, but they moved slowly, as if walking out of a ballpark to the parking lot after a defeat.
Then, just before ten-thirty, another collapse: the north tower, on Liberty Street. And again the rocket whoosh, the snowball of murderous debris, the shards of glass and the glittering steel panels speeding down from the sky. Now there was unbridled panic: a stream of people, most of them in business dress, heading north or toward the bridges to Brooklyn.
In Washington, at the F.B.I.’s J. Edgar Hoover Building, on Pennsylvania Avenue, the bureau’s newly appointed director, Robert Mueller, and his senior staff were wrapping up their daily briefing when they were notified that at eight-forty-eight a Boeing 767 with ninety-two passengers aboard—American Flight 11, bound from Boston to Los Angeles—had crashed into One World Trade Center, the north tower. All the assistant directors of the bureau were there, including the counterterrorism chief, Dale Watson. It was still not clear that the crash was a terrorist attack. After the meeting, some of the staff moved into the office of Thomas Pickard, the deputy director, to watch the television coverage. At 9:06 a.m., United Flight 175, a 767, hijacked, again, along a Boston-Los Angeles route, and with sixty-five passengers, slammed into the south tower. Once that second plane hit, “it removed all doubt,” an official who was there said. Yet so intense was the shock that not a single agent spoke for a few moments. The F.B.I., like many other agencies in Washington, had repeatedly reviewed scenarios of grand-scale attacks involving weapons of mass destruction. But this was not in anyone’s plans or imagination.
Dale Watson went to his office down the hall and, following the protocol that had been created for national emergencies, activated the Strategic Information Operations Center for crisis mode. sioc, as it is known, is a forty-thousand-square-foot room on the fifth floor, which opened in 1998 and was dedicated to George Herbert Walker Bush. sioc operates around the clock, with a minimum of eight staffers. It has a high-tech secure communications system and situation maps, and is designed to deal with five crises at once. Watson, his deputies, and various agents started calling representatives from government law-enforcement and national-security agencies to coördinate an immediate investigation. There was a sense of organized pandemonium. “Unfortunately, we’ve learned a lot from these terrible experiences, and we ramped up as smoothly as I’ve ever seen,” one agent said. Meanwhile, nonessential employees were evacuated from the building.
All around Washington, security officials were scrambling to take precautions: heavily armed Secret Service agents manned posts on the roof of the White House, around the grounds, and in Lafayette Park, across the street. When, at 9:45 a.m., American Airlines Flight 77, a 757 from Dulles, bound for Los Angeles with sixty-four people aboard, crashed into the side of the Pentagon, rumors and reports inside the F.B.I. and beyond intensified. It turned out that the hijackers on Flight 77 might have been aiming at the White House.
Now it appeared that yet another plane—United Airlines Flight 93, a 757 from Newark, bound for San Francisco with forty-five aboard—had been hijacked somewhere over Ohio, and was heading back East, toward Washington. “There was a feeling of helplessness,” one of the F.B.I. officials said. “We were all waiting to see what was going to happen. . . . There was a tremendous focus on what planes were in the sky. What was accounted for and what was not.” At 10:37 a.m., Flight 93 crashed in Somerset County, southeast of Pittsburgh. It was reported that some passengers might have struggled with the hijackers, forcing down the plane before it could reach the capital.
Agents were reading through recent intelligence reports to see if they had overlooked any hints of an assault on this scale. Typically, intelligence officials look at communications traffic in the forty-eight hours preceding and following an attack; they look for telephone calls using code words to warn that something is going to happen—sometimes innocuous phrases, such as “There is a wedding tomorrow” or “You should come home.” But no specific warnings or threats immediately stood out; going through all the intercepts in detail could take up to six months, a military official said.
A senior F.B.I. official said that the bureau had quickly been able to identify most of the pilots of the hijacked planes; incredibly, agents discovered that a couple of the hijackers were on federal watch lists but had been able to slip across the borders without being detected or stopped by immigration officials. He said that within the F.B.I. there was already a lot of questioning, “as there always is when something like this happens”—wondering whether some intercept had not been translated properly or quickly enough.
A former top F.B.I. official said that the bureau had been concerned about an attack in New York City ever since this summer, when associates of Osama bin Laden, the notorious Saudi-born terrorist leader, were convicted in federal court in connection with the 1998 bombing of American embassies in Africa. “It was his trial in absentia,” another official said. “We were always worried about something happening in New York.” During the last several years, the government regularly planned for and simulated terrorist attacks, including scenarios that involved multiple-plane hijackings, ship hijacking, and nuclear attacks. But a scenario like the one that wrecked downtown Manhattan and part of the Pentagon had not been conceived of.
Richard Holbrooke, the former American Ambassador to the U.N., said, “There are a lot of people around who have said that the threat of terrorism, of suitcase bombs and the rest, was always much greater than the threat of missiles from rogue states. But there is no one I have met who anticipated what is really, in the darkest terms, a Hollywood scenario. This is a security failure, and whoever did this identified this failure and exploited it four times in a single hour.”
A dozen interviews with past and present top intelligence officers produced the usual bureaucratic recriminations and finger-pointing over which agency was primarily responsible for the failure of American intelligence to alert the nation’s leadership to such a serious threat. But there also was a consensus that there was something special, terrifyingly so, about the professionalism of the attack.
“We couldn’t do this,” a military planner said, speaking of the total secrecy of the terrorist team. A former C.I.A. station chief said, “It was an incredible operation that was pulled off perfectly.” One law-enforcement official who is now immersed in the investigation said, sadly, “I have never seen anything like this—where we were caught so flatfooted.”
Defense experts have, in fact, been warning that, with the end of the Cold War, the United States is most vulnerable not to traditional rival states but to much smaller “non-state actors” that are willing to fight dirty, with the backing of countries like Iraq and Afghanistan. The warnings are usually of a chemical, a biological, a nuclear, or a cyber attack. The attack that did happen was clearly an example of what military strategists call “psyops”; that is, a brand of warfare whose aim is not to disable military targets but to sap the over-all will of a nation and its leaders. In 1999, Joseph C. Cyrulik, a military analyst, published an article in an Army journal entitled “Asymmetric Warfare and the Threat to the American Homeland”:
Leslie Gelb, a former Defense Department official and now the president of the Council on Foreign Relations, said, “For the past decade, there has been report after report on the coming terrorist threat—and very little has been done to implement the findings. . . . A lot of people said these sorts of preparations would be a waste of money, but there was little doubt in the minds of most professionals that the terrorist threat to America was far greater and more imminent than any missile attack to be defended by the President’s proposed missile-defense system.”
In the rubble and on the streets of the financial district, firefighters were a dominant presence, and they were covered in moondust, the pulverized concrete, flakes of burning paper. As hundreds, thousands of people ran down the stairwells of the towers, firemen rushed in. Their bravery—and their losses—quickly became emblematic of New York heroism. It is likely that more than two hundred firemen were killed trying to rescue other New Yorkers; the dead included Chief of Department Peter Ganci, First Deputy Fire Commissioner William Feehan, and a department chaplain, a Franciscan friar named Mychal Judge. Three élite units—Rescues 1, 2, and 4—appeared to be entirely wiped out. “The Fire Department will recover, but I don’t know how,” Fire Commissioner Thomas Von Essen told reporters. As one building after another collapsed, the Office of Emergency Management had to repeatedly seek out new command centers. The firefighters finally ended up working out of a firehouse north of “ground zero” on Houston Street, in Greenwich Village.
The firefighters, police officers, and rescue teams worked in a landscape of ruin. The antenna that had been on the north tower fell like an immense spear when the building collapsed. Now it was jutting out of the ground next to the cemetery at Trinity Church. The headstones were caked in soot, and everywhere, from ground zero to the streets of Brooklyn, was the airborne detritus of commerce: memorandums, reports, urgent messages. Papers floated across the East River all morning long. They carpeted the docks of Brooklyn and drifted down onto the streets of Carroll Gardens. Some of the sheets looked as if they had just fallen off someone’s desk. A Port Authority memo about a feasibility study for a new electrical substation: “This may not end up as being ‘fast-tracked.’ ” From Deloitte & Touche, the accounting firm, a consolidated statement of financial conditions for the bond trader Cantor Fitzgerald. (Cantor Fitzgerald may have lost as many as two-thirds of its Trade Center employees in the blast.) A blank sheet of notepad paper from the desk of a man named John McLane, with the letterhead “Marsh” in royal blue. (Marsh’s offices were on the ninety-third through the hundredth floors of One World Trade Center.)
One exhausted firefighter sat on the ground near the wreckage, his eyes ringed red, and said, “My boss and all my buddies died and I don’t think there is anything else to say.” In one of the buildings, some firefighters had written graffiti tributes to the dead on the dust-furred walls. One of them said, “Remember the Fallen Brothers.”
On television, the experts spoke freely of making war, of unanimity, but there were clearly things they felt they could not say on the air. One frequent guest, a veteran diplomat, said, “People like me who are going on television are maybe filling a necessary role—we’re the voices of authority telling people it will be all right. But the fact is, we don’t know that it will be all right. Remember, it took six months for us to get from Pearl Harbor to Midway. I can’t say this on the air, but what makes me angriest is that, with surprise, tactical skill, luck, and brilliant symbolism, they had a great success.”
In the immediate aftermath of the Oklahoma City bombing, in 1995, there were experts and officials who automatically assumed, in print and on television, that the perpetrators were Islamic fundamentalists. When it turned out that two young Americans had planted the bomb, everyone—talking heads and government officials alike—vowed to practice more restraint. In the initial reports from the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, one could hear that catch, that attempt at evenhandedness and caution. And yet, by early afternoon, Administration officials, congressional leaders, and many others were saying that the bombing had “all the characteristics” of an operation carried out by Islamic radicals—in particular, the terrorist network run, at least in part, by Osama bin Laden.
Yossef Bodansky, the director of the Congressional Task Force on Terrorism and Unconventional Warfare and the author of “Bin Laden: The Man Who Declared War on America,” was not among those who hurried to focus solely on bin Laden. “We don’t have all the evidence yet,” he said. “We have to look at the material as it comes through, and, if the material says it is the little green man on Mars, then it will be the little green man on Mars. I’m not among the choir who says the bearded one did it. He may have done it, but we’ll see.”
Bodansky went on, “Training a would-be martyr is one thing. Usually, as in Turkey or in Israel, a martyr is like a robot. He gets a specific mission: You strap on a bomb, you go stand in a night club, count to three, say ‘Allah is Great,’ and boom. This is something else. These people, four crews, had to have had special preparation, they had to work together, to hold together a situation in which a planeload of people is taken captive and they know they are headed for a bad end. And in three of the four cases the crews succeeded. No one is rushing to take credit for this. The sponsoring states don’t want to be bombed, and they will go to extreme measures to conceal who did it, just as they went to extreme measures to coördinate it.”
Bodansky and others have said that U.S. intelligence has long known that countries such as Iran and independent groups have made plans for “super-terrorism” and have trained people to carry out terrorist acts.
“We’ve known since the mid-eighties, for example, that Iran was training people to fly as kamikazes on commercial planes, as bombs, into civilian targets,” Bodansky said. “The question was whether the political leaders of the sponsoring states would give the order to actually do it. From the moment a country starts risking the wrath of the civilized world to start such a training program, it must be serious about it.” Bodansky explained that Iran’s principal “school” is in Wakilabad, in the northeast part of the country, and is an entity of Iranian intelligence and the Revolutionary Guard. The school, he said, has American-made commercial jets for training its students in techniques of hijacking, sabotage, and flying into civilian targets. While evidence was beginning to accumulate that at least some of the nineteen suspected hijackers were men who had taken flying lessons at schools in Florida, Bodansky indicated that it was still early and the picture incomplete.
“The bottom line is that the attack in New York and Washington was carefully prepared and studied,” Bodansky said. “The people who flew into the World Trade Center were highly trained professionals with experience in flying large commercial jets. Flying large aircraft at low altitudes in an urban sky is not a simple thing.”
A retired C.I.A. officer said, “I’ve never seen an operation go that smoothly.” What particularly alarmed him, and other members of the intelligence community, was the likelihood that the terrorists had been sheltered—and never betrayed—by Muslim communities in the United States.
Even as commentators and political leaders repeatedly warned against stereotyping, there was strong agreement among former intelligence officials that Arab and Muslim communities in the United States could suffer. A former national-security adviser was outspoken. “We can’t do racial profiling?” he asked. “Like hell. Nobody is going to trust anybody looking like an Arab. They’re done.” Another former high security official said, “It’s civil liberties versus getting the bad guys.” A Justice Department official put it more delicately: “You’ve got bunches of Arabs who don’t want to throw bombs. Yet they’re Arabs. It doesn’t mean we’re going to profile Arabs, but we’re going to look at people who come from a certain culture with a certain background.” A military officer said, simply, “The Muslim people will pay a horrible price.”
Throughout the day, some news broadcasts talked about Osama bin Laden as if he were a singular actor, beholden to no one.
“Bin Laden is not an operational guy,” Yossef Bodansky said. “His role is that he is the most sophisticated spokesman for the grievances of the Muslim world. He gives voice not only to anger but to solutions—a relentless terrorist war until the West is banished from the lands of Islam. And in such a war everything is permissible. He also sprinkles holy water on the solutions. Although he is not religiously educated, his language, his citations are all beautiful to his followers. The conservative Muslim leaders who do not believe in terror, who believe in coexistence, do not have an equal spokesman. And, finally, bin Laden is the connection, the linchpin, between the sponsoring states, without whom nothing would happen, and the perpetrators.” Bin Laden’s connections have extended to leaders in states with marked differences, among them Iran, Iraq, Pakistan, Sudan, and Afghanistan.
Tall, gaunt, charismatic, elusive, bin Laden is not merely an impresario of rage and violence; he is also representative of a new kind of indigenous radical élite. Bin Laden was born in Saudi Arabia, to a family that became immensely wealthy, but he did not study abroad, at Sandhurst and Cambridge, and then return with an imported brand of violent Marxism. He is distinctly homegrown, shaped by the events and currents of the Islamic world—its historical resentments, its humiliations, and its victories. The lingering American military presence in Saudi Arabia in the years after the Gulf War is central to bin Laden’s rage and his constant calls for jihad. American culture—its liberties and pluralism, and the way it has reached the rest of the world through international travel and modern communications—is also, for the world bin Laden represents, the enemy.
“Clearly, after Belief, there is no more important duty than pushing the American enemy out of the holy land,” bin Laden wrote in 1996, in “Ladenese Epistle: Declaration of War.” “Due to the imbalance of power between our armed forces and the enemy forces, a suitable means of fighting must be adopted, i.e., using fast-moving light forces that work under complete secrecy. In other words to initiate a guerrilla warfare, where the sons of the nation, and not the military forces, take part in it.”
Since the late nineteen-sixties, radical Islamic theorists have described the tactics of a potential armed jihad against the West—a war of protracted terror—but no one has proved as adept or as ruthless a leader as bin Laden. He made his name first as a financier who helped the Afghan rebels drive the Soviet Union out of Kabul in 1989. Despite the defeat of Iraq in the Gulf War, bin Laden’s experience in Afghanistan gave him the continuing confidence that any superpower, including the United States, could be humbled and driven from Islamic lands. Since leaving Saudi Arabia for good, in 1991, bin Laden, along with Al Qaeda, his terrorist network of ex-mujahideen and other supporters, has been linked to at least a dozen terrorist missions, including the attack on American troops in Somalia, in 1993; the first World Trade Center bombing, in 1993; the attacks on American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, in 1998; and last year’s attack on the U.S.S. Cole, in Aden, Yemen. He is also said to have made repeated attempts to obtain components for nuclear and chemical weapons.
Bin Laden has often been asked if he can rationalize terrorism, and in every case he turns the question around. In 1996, in an issue of the magazine Nida’ul Islam, he said, “As for the accusations of terrorizing the innocent, the children and the women, these are in the category of ‘accusing others with their own affliction in order to fool the masses.’ The evidence overwhelmingly shows America and Israel killing the weaker men, women, and children in the Muslim world and elsewhere.”
Five years ago, bin Laden moved to Afghanistan and began to arrange financial support for the Taliban fundamentalists who seized power later that year. In return, the Taliban has given him shelter. In 1998, he issued an edict calling for attacks on all Americans: “The ruling to kill the Americans and their allies—civilians and military—is an individual duty for every Muslim who can do it in any country in which it is possible to do it, in order to liberate the al-Aqsa Mosque and Mecca from their grip, and in order for their armies to move out of all the lands of Islam, defeated and unable to threaten any Muslim.”
Curiously, Osama bin Laden has not always been in the vanguard of the struggle against Israel. If anything, his multidirectional jihad has been more of a threat to India in Kashmir than it has been to Israel on the West Bank. But bin Laden is an expert in co-opting Muslim preoccupations, and he seems to have co-opted the biggest preoccupation of the moment: the yearlong Palestinian uprising against Israel. This sort of political talent, combined with his striking successes in rhetoric, organization, and terrorism, has made him extraordinarily popular to many in the Muslim world. To his admirers, Osama bin Laden projects hayba, an Arabic word whose meaning could be distilled as “the awe produced by the shadow of God upon the earth.” It is a quality ascribed in Muslim tradition to the caliphs. In the past few years, in Cairo, Amman, Gaza, Peshawar, Kashmir, and Kabul, countless encomiums have been attached to bin Laden’s name. Young men in the Darul Uloom Haqqania madrasah, one of the largest Taliban training schools in Pakistan’s North-West Frontier Province, could name for a visiting reporter no heroes except bin Laden and the Prophet Muhammad himself.
While the attacks in New York and Washington were being carried out, Dennis Ross, the former special envoy to the Middle East, was addressing a seminar in Washington on the future of peace in the region. Ross said later that when he was first told of the attacks he thought that it must be some sort of hypothetical scenario being pitched at him as an academic exercise.
“We’d looked at the possibility in the past of planes being seized and flown into targets,” Ross said. “It was something that certainly the Israelis had considered a possibility. But the possibility that four could happen at once?”
The operation, he went on, was astoundingly sophisticated. “They must have surveyed the airlines, and the particular flights. It looks as if they had even chosen flights they were fairly certain wouldn’t be very full, to insure they wouldn’t be overpowered.” Ross said that he would never forget the expressions he saw on the faces of Washingtonians as he walked back to his office from the morning seminar. “I’ve spent a lot of time in Israel,” he said. “I know that look.” This is a new day, he thought, a transforming event. The danger now, as he sees it, is to fall back into traditional responses to terrorism, which clearly haven’t worked. He said, “We can’t just do the usual thing—bomb a few targets, if it turns out to be Osama bin Laden. If we respond the same old way, nothing will change.”
Ross and others in previous Administrations are already talking about reviewing the ban on United States-sponsored assassinations abroad. However, that already seems moot: there have been attempts at killing Muammar Qaddafi and Saddam Hussein, and in 1998 the United States launched cruise missiles into Afghanistan, hoping to kill bin Laden. He was miles away at the time.
Some analysts feel that the future requires a rapid change in American defense strategy. Military planners, equipped still to wage war against the old Soviet Union, are faced with an infinitely smaller, yet less predictable target. Several sources say that the White House is likely to make a rapid strike, perhaps in Iraq or Afghanistan, if the initial evidence warrants, but that the over-all conflict is likely to be a prolonged one. If, in fact, bin Laden and Afghanistan prove to be at the center of things, Washington may attempt to work closely with Russia. And yet foreign military ventures in Afghanistan have a dismal history: the British in the nineteenth century fared no better than the Soviet Union in the twentieth.
In parts of the Arab universe, the reaction to the terror attacks was startling to American eyes. The headline in the Lebanese daily Assafir, a pro-Syrian paper, was “apocalypse now,” and its main editorial equated the attack on the World Trade Center with the great fire of Rome. Since that great fire, the editorial said, man had not seen such a spectacle. “The fire of Rome foretold the fall of an empire, but no one can yet predict whether the cataclysm in New York will lead to the fall of the American empire, or vanquish the world order that America dictated until 8:45, 11 September. All signs are that the day of reckoning is near.”
Most Arab and Palestinian newspapers were more cautious. On the streets, however, things were quite different. Hundreds openly celebrated in Nablus, on the West Bank, in Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon, and in East Jerusalem. Candy was handed out, shots of victory were fired in the air. Until police intervened and dispersed the crowds, elation ruled.
“There was a feeling that the all-powerful America is vulnerable,” Azmi Bishara, an Arab Israeli member of parliament, said in the verdant courtyard of the America Colony Hotel, in East Jerusalem. Bishara quoted a friend who called him some hours after the passenger jets crashed into the Twin Towers to say, “At last, a new balance of terror has been struck. After a decade in which America could do as it pleased anywhere in the world, from Iraq to Serbia, the poor and disenfranchised are finally rising up against her.” Bishara said he was horrified by the sight of people jumping to their death from the blazing towers, and pointed out that most people expressed horror and sympathy. Yet he also thought that the “bigger picture” should not be ignored. “America must understand that if it turns its back on the world’s poor it will get stabbed in the back,” he said. “The feeling among Arabs since 1967 is that they have been under American attack.”
According to Bishara, America is tearing apart the fabric of Arab society in three ways: with its cultural hegemony, it fosters a huge industry of negative Arab images; with brute force, it battles all those who threaten it; and with all its resources and all its resolve it supports Israel. “If the attack was indeed carried out by fundamentalist Muslims, it was an attack on modernity: a modernity that excludes them—a modernity that opens a McDonald’s in Cairo but does not provide them the means to eat there. Most people in the Arab world feel that they are not partners in the process of globalization but victims.”
In intellectual and political circles especially, there was a growing realization that, if Muslim terrorists were behind the attacks on New York and Washington, the effect on the Palestinian cause might be as grave as that of the Gulf War. Modern Rome was indeed aflame, but woe to those caught in its line of fire when it exacted its revenge. Yasir Arafat was, it appeared, quick to understand this. Hours after the attack, he condemned it and sent his condolences to the American people. The next evening, he made a point of being photographed donating his own blood to wounded Americans—a gesture that was quickly dismissed by many abroad. As his security forces were confiscating videotapes that had recorded the initial jubilation on some streets, Arafat ordered schools to hold special assemblies to memorialize America’s dead.
On the West Bank, one of the leaders of the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas spoke to a reporter by telephone. He is known for handing out candy when members of his group succeed in killing Jews. When he was asked about the celebrations that had broken out in the streets of Nablus, he said, “You don’t understand. Without America, the Jews are nothing. We would have defeated the Jews a long time ago, as the Prophet Muhammad defeated the Jews.” Then he said, “America is the problem that lies behind all other problems.”
A free-floating anti-Americanism is found in some corners of the Muslim world: among the Muslim Brotherhood sympathizers in Cairo; in the leading anti-Israel activist in Jordan, Leith Shbeilat; in the foreign minister of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, Wakil Ahmed Mutawakel; and, indirectly, in the leader of the Taliban himself, the reclusive Mullah Omar, who is the protector of Osama bin Laden. Mullah Omar does not meet with non-Muslims, but he does answer questions submitted to him through his aides, and that is how an interview was conducted with him last year in Kandahar, the spiritual capital of the Taliban. One morning, as donkey carts kicked up dust on Kandahar’s ugly and battered streets, a reporter stood outside Mullah Omar’s compound and relayed questions to an aide, a twenty-four-year-old mullah who had been taught English by an American woman in a Pakistani refugee camp. Why was Mullah Omar harboring Osama bin Laden, who was, it seemed, violating Shari’a, Muslim law, by murdering civilians? “Osama bin Laden is a guest of our country, and in Islam a guest must be protected” was the answer. Did Mullah Omar subscribe to bin Laden’s brand of anti-Americanism? “America is a God-fearing country,” the aide said. “It is not like the Soviet Union, which America helped us to defeat. But America stands behind the enemies of Islam.”
Among many Palestinians recently, there has been a pronounced shift in thinking about the role of America in the Middle East. During the eight-year peace process that ended with the Palestinian revolt last October, traditional Palestinian anti-Americanism had been more or less restrained, but as the conflict erupted Islamic clerics who had previously directed their anger exclusively against Israel began, once again, to blame America for standing behind their enemy. Four years ago, the Mufti of Jerusalem, Sheikh Ekrima Sabri, said in an interview, “The American people are good people. It is the Jews who make them act against us. But we know the Americans are good people.” Yet on August 24th, in his Friday sermon in the al-Aqsa mosque, on the Temple Mount, he said, “Our God, in you we trust. . . . There is no strength but in Allah. . . . God, destroy the occupation and its helpers and agents. Destroy the U.S. and its helpers and its agents. God, destroy Britain and its helpers and its agents. God, prepare those who will unite the Muslims and march in the steps of Saladin. God, we ask you for forgiveness, forgiveness before death, and mercy and forgiveness after death. God, grant victory to Islam and the Muslims.”
Voices of militancy were heard at the recent U.N. conference on racism, in South Africa, where fractious energies had overtaken, or crowded out, the forces of harmony. Earlier this month, the Reverend Jesse Jackson arrived home from the conference, where he had tried to broker a vexed deal with the Palestinians, to see on television the rejoicing in the West Bank. “When I saw that, I knew that it was the wrong thing to do, morally and strategically,” he said. “I knew that, morally, they should not rejoice in the killing of innocent people. And that, strategically, they were putting a noose around their own necks.”
Jackson describes himself as a preacher in the “prophetic tradition,” a type whose specialty is the expression of unwelcome views. As such, he says, he was able to empathize with those Palestinian demonstrators even as he recognized the damage they were doing to their own cause. “I understand that people act out their pain, act out their fears, act out their alienation,” he said. “Alienated people do alienating things, unless somehow the honest broker can counsel them into a more acceptable relationship.”
The “honest broker” to whom Jackson refers is the United States, which has, he believes, under George W. Bush abandoned its authority by removing itself from direct involvement in the Middle East peace process. “You can’t lead from the rear,” he said. “That’s the genius of diplomacy, that you engage in the valleys and shadows of death. You engage in the mess of stuff.”
Senator Hillary Clinton, who inspected the damage in lower Manhattan on Wednesday morning, also spoke in distinctly theological terms. “From the sky as we flew in, looking down on the Trade Center, what I saw were what looked like the gates of Hell,” she said. “Any person of faith knows that evil is omnipresent, and the struggle we face is to overcome the tendency to lash out in violence at each other. My religion starts with the story of one brother murdering another. Human nature is always going to challenge us. But I believe that God has a purpose, and the challenge of being human is to overcome the cheap, easy allure of evil. These attacks were cheap, insignificant displays by cowardly people whose efforts don’t compare to the hard work of ordinary people raising a family, going to work, running businesses, and building a great city.”
President Bush’s day was a strange and chilling odyssey that seemed never to end. There were those who wondered why he did not fly directly back to the capital from Florida after hearing the news, but, as we learned later, the Secret Service believed the terrorists had made the White House, Air Force One, and Camp David potential targets. Throughout the day, Air Force One shuttled Bush from Florida to Barksdale Air Force Base, near Shreveport, Louisiana, and then to Offutt Air Force Base, in Omaha, Nebraska (the site of the strategic command for the American nuclear force), zigzagging through the skies, accompanied by F-15 and F-16 fighter jets. At Barksdale Air Force Base, there were signs on office windows that said “Threatcon Delta,” the military’s highest alert. The Secret Service, which had resisted advisers hoping to bring the President back to the White House immediately, knew the gravity of the threat—not least because it had a field office, with more than two hundred agents, in the World Trade Center.
The President finally arrived at the White House around 7 p.m. He was scheduled to address the nation at eight-thirty from the Oval Office. When the hour arrived, NBC cameras turned to the President apparently a few moments before he was ready. There was no escaping the impression that, as he waited for a cue to start reading his text, he was nervous. His hands were clasped in front of him on the desk, and his lips were pressed tightly together, forming a slightly crooked line. He blinked rapidly under the lights.
“Good evening,” he began. “Today our fellow-citizens, our way of life, our very freedom came under attack in a series of deliberate and deadly terrorist acts. The victims were in airplanes or in their offices: secretaries, businessmen and women, military and federal workers, moms and dads, friends and neighbors.”
In the night hours after the President’s brief address, the event somehow seemed to grow worse. As New Yorkers wandered through the drifts of downtown or watched hour after hour of television, it became clear that by morning, at the latest, one was likely to hear terrible news: the death of a friend, the death of someone from work, the death of someone you saw every day in the elevator, at the grocery store. Hundreds of doctors and nurses and volunteers had mobilized at all the downtown hospitals, including Beekman, St. Vincent’s, Bellevue, and New York University, but, while there were plenty of injuries to treat—burns, concussions, fractures, cuts, bruises from the falling debris—the halls were relatively empty.
Families who could not locate their relatives were told to go to the Farkas Auditorium, at N.Y.U. Medical Center, on East Thirtieth Street. The Red Cross was running the operation there, and volunteers handed out ten-page questionnaires. A social worker and volunteer named Desiree Diaz had the task of addressing the people in the auditorium. Over and over, she gave her speech: “I realize the process is going a little slow, but the auditorium is full, and we want to get to everyone. We’re going to ask for a lot of information, all types of questions. We’re going to want names, addresses, any description you can give us, their location in the building. We would like to know what they were wearing yesterday, if you know, any scarring they had. We would like the name of their doctors and the name of their dentist.” Diaz altered the speech a little each time she gave it, but she was always very clear about asking for the name of the dentist.
At Chelsea Piers, the sports complex along the Hudson River in west Chelsea, medical teams and volunteers from around the tristate area set up a triage facility: every space—the basketball courts, the gymnastics area, even a television studio, where “Spin City” is filmed—was set up for an enormous influx. The ice-skating rink was to be the morgue. Earlier that day, Bill Abramson, a vice-president of Chelsea Piers, said, “We’re just a straight shot up the West Side Highway from the Trade Center. But we haven’t seen many patients, maybe a dozen people altogether. There are just not people coming out of there. They thought they were going to have a lot of injuries and overflow from the hospitals and they could treat them here. We had more volunteers than we needed, lots of doctors just walking in and asking to help. But there was nothing to do.” Similarly, at the trauma center at Bellevue there was a startling absence of activity in the operating rooms, and little illusion as to why. “Those who got out, got out,” one nurse said. “Those who didn’t, they died.”
Katherine Ilachinski is a seventy-year-old architect. As a girl, she survived the German bombing of Belgrade. On Tuesday morning, she was in her office on the ninety-first floor of Two World Trade Center, working on a sketch for changes to an electrical substation at the Hoboken terminal of New Jersey Transit. The first jet hit One World Trade just above the level of her office window.
“There was an explosion, and a fireball went along the side of my building where I was sitting,” she recalled. “It was so hot. It was like being in a boiler. I had to get out of my office. I went into an interior passage, then into the main corridor, to the elevators. You know, I was in the building in 1993, when we were bombed, and that time my instincts were completely different. Then, I closed my office. This time, I just wanted to get out of the building. Some people were taking the stairs. But I thought, I’m too old to walk so far down. Our elevators go to the lobby on seventy-eight. So I took the elevator to seventy-eight.
“The lobby there was mobbed, everybody trying to get in the elevators to the ground. I saw a guy who worked for me, Anthony—Anthony Portillo,” Mrs. Ilachinski said. Her voice trembled. “He’s a cad operator—that’s computer-aided design. I told Anthony, ‘Let’s take the elevator to forty-four.’ It was still too high for me to walk, but the elevators to the ground were so crowded. There was no air. And I know what happens if the elevator gets stuck. You are doomed. But Anthony said, ‘No, Katy.’ He wanted to take the elevator all the way down. I didn’t trust it. So I took the elevator to the forty-fourth floor. That elevator was relatively empty.
“But the scene in the lobby on forty-four was a repetition of seventy-eight. It was just mobbed. People all the way from east to west. Most of them waiting for the elevator to the ground. That was when I decided to try to walk, and something just propelled me to the north stairs. I don’t know by what force I was propelled. But now, two days later, I can look at the pictures and see: that was the side least affected by the second jet.
“In the stairwell, it was quiet. There were announcements on the loudspeakers, saying, ‘It’s safe. The building is safe. Don’t panic.’ I think they even told us we could go back to our offices, but I’m not sure. I was just going down, down, down, like an automaton. After the plane hit our building, and the building started shaking, there were no more announcements.
“Through almost everything, I felt amazingly calm, except for that one moment in the stairwell, when the building started shaking and I thought, I’m a goner. I wished I was back on the ninety-first floor, and I could jump. Because I could jump from the window—reluctantly, but I could do it—because then it is over. But to be trapped under rubble, that is worse. I remember, from the war, from Belgrade, what it is to be trapped under rubble.
“I don’t really know where I was when the plane hit. I had with me some water, but when the stairs started shaking I dropped it. There was smoke, but not too thick. A colleague was with me when we reached the ground, and we came out of the building together.
“We started toward the Manhattan Bridge. I didn’t even turn to look back. I was just walking. We had gone three blocks when the ground shook, and it suddenly got very dark, and everybody started running. I’m not too good at running, so I was just walking briskly. The smoke came from behind us, and everything became covered with a fine white powder. I actually thought it was an atom bomb, because that is what it’s supposed to be like.
“When I heard that the Pentagon was also attacked, I became very worried about my son, because he often goes there for his work. I tried to phone him, but I couldn’t get through. I walked and walked. Finally, at Penn Station, I managed to get through to his home, and my daughter-in-law answered. She gave the phone to my son, and he told me he was packing to go to New York to my funeral. They had been watching TV all morning, and they saw the buildings fall, and they had already buried me. It was a conclusion that I am dead that would be easily understood. But my son told me that a very strange thing happened. He reached up to take my picture from the shelf to take with him to New York, and a book fell from the shelf, and he saw a word on the cover, ‘Miracles.’ And three minutes later I called. I think it’s a miracle. Do you believe in God?”
Mrs. Ilachinski had worked in the World Trade Center since 1980. She still talks about the buildings as if they exist. Only two weeks before the attack, she went on a tour to inspect the provisions in the structural design of the south tower. The design, she said, was far ahead of its time. “The building was designed to move three feet from the center, which was remarkable,” she said. “When we first moved in, some people got seasick. And when there was a lot of wind there was screeching in the inner core. You know, the buildings were designed for a jet hit as well. But that was thirty years ago, and jets are different now. And nobody thought about the fuel.”
At points, without warning, her architect’s curiosity and practicality falter. “Guilt feeling you wouldn’t believe,” she said, with a voice full of pain. “At this time of life. And all those young people went. Strange. Very strange. And I am only asking why. All those poor people. Thousands and thousands.”
When the planes hit the World Trade towers, Dan Feigelson, a genial forty-three-year-old six-footer with a dark, graying beard, was in the first hour of his fourth day in his job as principal of P.S. 6, a grade school on the Upper East Side. By lunchtime, arrangements had been made to release the students—parents waited in the teachers’ lounge while volunteers ferried the children from the classrooms.
“We decided we shouldn’t be the first ones to tell the kids about the tragedy,” Feigelson said. “We wanted to let the parents decide what and how to tell them.” So the principal and the assistant principal stayed in the school, watching as each child was picked up calmly and quickly—until 6 p.m., when the last child, a fourth grader, was finally called for by his aunt, who had to walk north from Twenty-third Street. Feigelson spent the next three hours in his car, getting home to Brooklyn.
The morning after, the schools were closed. Feigelson spent several hours at district headquarters—one of forty principals conferring with a study team of New York University psychologists about how to talk clearly to the kids about the tragedy. “My big worry here is about the six-year-olds who sat in front of the TV watching people jumping out of windows,” he said. “Six-year-olds don’t understand death; they think the dead come back, they want to put food in the coffins.”
The next day, at 8 a.m., dressed in a neat black suit and a blue necktie, Feigelson was in his school office, waiting for his teachers. He made sure there was coffee and bagels in the teachers’ lounge for the staff and teachers, all of whom had been asked to arrive a couple of hours before the children were due. He straightened a framed photograph on the wall, of the Marx Brothers hugging Lou Gehrig in Yankee uniform. He checked a letter he had written that said, “Dear P.S. 6 Parents: We hope that you will help impart to our precious children that they are safe and cared for.”
It was warm in the school. Feigelson removed his jacket. He said he was a little nervous. With his teachers seated in the school auditorium, he thanked them for coming in early and talked about assuring the children that they were safe. When the children were settled—in twenty-six classrooms—Feigelson said he was going to visit them all, starting with the older children.
“First of all, thanks for the way you pitched in,” he said. “You’re the fifth graders. A lot of the little kids look up to you. This is no time to tease them or to say scary things around them. They need you to be supportive of them. As our Mayor says, this is no time for hate.”
At home in his apartment, in Astoria, Queens, Kirk Kjeldsen began thinking that, just at the moment when his country’s serene luck was extinguished, he had been saved. He had been inside the World Trade Center for a conference at Windows on the World, but he had made it out because he’d been running late. He had been in a position to escape, if only by moments. He thought about the books he’d never get to write if he’d died, how he’d never marry, the places he’d never see. “All these things I selfishly thought,” he said. Then he checked his E-mail, and there were messages from his family, his friends, people he had worked with, people he had gone to school with.
“To be honest, I’m on auto pilot most of the time, and I don’t think too highly of myself,” Kjeldsen said. “But when it struck me how many people cared about me, and then I multiply that on the people I should have been with up there at the conference, then the thousands of people who were in the building, and when I start multiplying that in my head and think about how many people it is affecting, then I start crying.”
On Wednesday morning, he called his office, on Lafayette Street, but nobody answered. He didn’t know what to do. There was a hospital at the end of the street where his girlfriend lives, and they went to give blood, but the hospital wasn’t accepting donations. He tried to go to his office, but he couldn’t get below Fourteenth Street, so he went back to Astoria. Watching television was brutal, especially when a report came on about the Windows on the World conference that had been hosted by the Risk Waters Group. “As of now, no one has been accounted for,” the reporter said. But there was Kirk Kjeldsen, alive and watching television. He decided he needed a break, so he went to the gym, but the gym was full of televisions. People on the screen were holding up posters showing photographs of their friends and relatives. Later, Kjeldsen recognized some of the faces in those pictures. When he picked up the pictures from his vacation in Miami, he realized that some of those shots could have been on posters as well.
On Thursday, Kjeldsen managed to reach the London office of the Risk Waters Group by telephone. Many of the people at the conference were not Americans and had no family in the city, so the company was assembling a group to survey the hospitals and morgues, when it was allowed, in order to identify any of the attendees. Kjeldsen tried to meet up with members of the group later that evening, but missed them amid all the confusion.
Finally, on Thursday night, he got to sleep, but a storm came into the city, and he was awakened at three in the morning by thunder that seemed to him like the sound of bombs. ♦
Written by David Remnick, with reporting by the New Yorker staff, including Michael Agger, Peter J. Boyer, Chip Brown, John Cassidy, William Finnegan, Joe Klein, Nicholas Lemann, Françoise Mouly, Nick Paumgarten, Lillian Ross, John Seabrook, Michael Specter, James B. Stewart, James Surowiecki, Judith Thurman, and Jeffrey Toobin in New York; Jeffrey Goldberg, Seymour M. Hersh, Jane Mayer, and Elsa Walsh in Washington; Lawrence Wright in Austin; and Ari Shavit in Jerusalem.
