September 11 Attacks

Plotting and Paying

The attacks took years to plan and between $400,000 and $500,000 to execute, all provided by al Qaeda. The plot originated with Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, a jihadist born in Kuwait who had had a hand in earlier terrorist activity in the Philippines and who had helped financially with the bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993. That attack, carried out by Mohammed's nephew, Ramzi Yousef, killed 6 people and injured more than 1,000. It had also convinced Mohammed that bombs could be problematic and that a new form of attack should be employed for maximum devastation. He also claims that he and Yousef had begun entertaining the idea of using airliners as weapons when they were plotting attacks in the Philippines.

In 1996, during a meeting in Tora Bora, Afghanistan, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed brought his idea of using hijacked airliners as missiles to destroy American targets to bin Laden. According to Mohammed, the 1998 bombings of the U.S. embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam provided a turning point in the plotting of 9/11, because they removed any doubt that bin Laden was serious about attacking the United States. Mohammed was given the green light for the 9/11 operation in late 1998 or early 1999. After bin Laden approved the operation, he, Mohammed, and the alleged al Qaeda military chief Muhammad Atef came up with a list of targets—bin Laden wanted to hit the White House and the Pentagon, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed wanted to strike the World Trade Center, and all three men wanted to hit the Capitol building.

The hijackers, 15 of whom were citizens of Saudi Arabia (as was 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.

Three of the hijackers—Mohamed Atta, Marwan al Shehhi, and Ziad Jarrah—came to Afghanistan via Hamburg, Germany, where as students they had formed a radical Islamist cell dedicated to violent jihad against the United States. They left Germany for Afghanistan in late 1999 and, following instructions given by a contact in Germany, met Atef and bin Laden and were quickly brought into the operation, with Atta designated as an operational leader. The 9/11 plot was once believed to have originated with the Hamburg cell, but it is now believed that Atta, Shehhi, and Jarrah were not involved in the initial planning and were only brought in after meeting Atef and bin Laden, who believed that, on top of the men's anti-American fervor, their fluency in English and familiarity with life in the West made them very attractive candidates for the operation.

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