September 11 Attacks

Plotting and Paying

The attacks appear to have taken years to plan and hundreds of thousands of dollars to execute. Members of a Hamburg, Germany, Al Qaeda cell, are thought to have originally conceived the idea of using airplanes as terrorist weapons; they presented Al Qaeda's senior leadership with the idea and were granted funding and support.

The hijackers, 15 of whom were citizens of Saudi Arabia (as is bin Laden), and other conspirators were apparently brought together by their embrace of radical Islam and their hatred of the United States. Most of the hijackers, perhaps all, spent time in Al Qaeda training camps in Afghanistan, and some may have met there.

The attacks were apparently planned in Hamburg sometime in 1998. Members of the Hamburg cell included three men who would pilot hijacked planes on September 11—Mohamed Atta, Marwan al-Shehhi, and Zia al-Jarrah—as well as Ramzi Binalshibh.

In late 1999, Atta, al-Shehhi, and al-Jarrah all reported their travel documents missing to the German police and were issued new ones; they then applied for travel visas to the United States. Investigators believe that reporting the documents stolen was a ploy to get “clean” travel documents, ones without visa stamps indicating that the men had traveled to Afghanistan.

By mid-2000, Atta, al-Shehhi, and al-Jarrah had all received the appropriate visas and had moved to the United States. Binalshibh, however, encountered difficulties. From May to October 2000, he applied four times for a visa to enter the United States; his request was denied each time. In December 2000, Binalshibh traveled to London, apparently to meet with Zacarias Moussaoui, a French-born ethnic Moroccan living in London who had reportedly trained at an Al Qaeda camp in Afghanistan in 1998. Moussaoui was able to obtain the proper visas and entered the United States in February 2001.

Atta, al-Shehhi, and al-Jarrah began meeting with Hani Hanjour, Nawaf al-Hazmi, and Khalid al-Midhar, all of whom lived in California. Al-Midhar had been photographed speaking to a suspect in the October 2000 bombing of the American naval destroyer Cole in Yemen. In August 2001, al-Midhar and Nawaf al-Hamzi were placed on an FBI terrorist-alert list as associates of bin Laden in Yemen. Nevertheless, the two were able to leave and reenter the United States at will before being placed on the list, and they were able to buy plane tickets in late August 2001 without triggering any security alerts.

Funding

Beginning in the summer of 2000, Atta and al-Shehhi began to receive large sums of money, wired to them from Binalshibh or from a source in the United Arab Emirates. During this time, the six men lived in different parts of the United States and moved frequently. They attended flight schools in various states, purchased instruction videos on how to fly large aircraft, and made several trips out of the United States, apparently to contact Al Qaeda cells abroad. Atta also made inquiries into starting crop-dusting companies in Florida; later, Moussaoui would do the same in Oklahoma.

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