O'Neill's troubles had come to a climax on August 17, 2001 when a 33-year-old French citizen of Moroccan descent named Zacarias Moussaoui had been taken into custody after an alert instructor at the Pan Am Flying Academy in Eagan, Minnesota called the bureau's Minneapolis office to report that a newly enrolled Middle Eastern student was logging expensive simulator time learning how to turn and bank heavy aircraft. But the supposed candidate for an Airline Transport Rating had no interest in learning how to land or take-off. When Moussaoui was picked up in Boston, the feds found several passports and Boeing flight manuals in his possession.

The bust was flagged in France. A secure fax sent on Aug. 30, 2001 and addressed to FBI headquarters agent Mike Maltbie from a bureau agent in Paris relayed word from French intelligence that Moussaoui was “very dangerous”. After being indoctrinated into radical Islamic fundamentalism at London's Finnsbury Park mosque, Moussaoui had become “completely devoted” to the strict Wahhabism espoused by the Taliban and Osama bin Laden. The French had also learned that Moroccan had traveled to Afghanistan, where he most likely received training in terrorism.

Now in U.S. custody, the French national became “extremely agitated” after being asked about his recent travels to Pakistan. He became even angrier when agents suggested that he did not have an adequate explanation for the large sums of money in his possession.

FBI field agents in Minneapolis had assessed Moussaoui as an “Islamic fundamentalist preparing for some future act in furtherance of radical fundamentalist goals” involving an aircraft.

Even with multiple warnings reaching the FBI headquarters of an impending al-Qaeda attack using hijacked airliners, the agent who arrested Zacarias Moussaoui spent nearly four weeks attempting to warn his superiors of the obvious threat posed by a known Islamic militant learning to fly a commercial airliner.

Like O'Neill before him, in what the Associated Press described as “a running battle” with Agent Maltbie and Maltbie's boss, David Frasca, chief of the Radical Fundamentalist Unit at FBI headquarters-Field Agent Samitt could not persuade FBI headquarters to take his fears seriously.

Samitt's request to seek a warrant to search Moussaoui's computer and belongings was turned down by superiors who claimed that current federal law prohibited the bureau from sharing information in criminal probes with intelligence investigators.

Agent Coleen Rowley disputes this explanation. On the contrary, this chief lawyer in the Minneapolis field office will later charge that information provided by the French Government on Moussaoui's “activities connected with Osama bin Laden” was more than enough to obtain a warrant to rummage through the files in his laptop two weeks before September 11.

Disregarding the explicit French cable tying Moussaoui to al-Qaeda, Maltbie and Frasca told Samitt that he had not established a link between the suspicious flight student and terrorists.

On August 18, the persistent field agent fired another memo at FBI headquarters accusing Moussaoui of plotting international terrorism and air piracy over the United States. These serious allegations were also ignored.

But a joint FBI-CIA anti-terrorist panel reviewing their records showed that the mysterious Moussaoui had also received training from a flight school in Norman, Oklahoma. The flight school had been cooperating with the FBI since 1998, when one of its former students had been linked to bombings of two American embassies in East Africa. Both attacks were attributed to al-Qaeda.

In April 2001, FBI field agents acting under John O'Neill's orders had again questioned officials of the Airman Flight School officials after learning that Moussaoui was trying to get a pilot's license there. Signing his emails, “Zuluman Tango Tango,” the Moroccan had taken 57 fruitless hours of flying lessons between February and May 2001.

“He's just not getting it,” Moussaoui's instructors told the FBI agents.

THE PHOENIX MEMO
Less than three months later, in July 2001 one of O'Neill's agents had once again warned his superiors about suspicious Arab men receiving flight training-this time at the Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Prescott, Arizona.

Submitted by counter-terrorism Agent Kenneth Williams, the “Phoenix Memo” alerted FBI executives in Washington that eight followers of Osama bin Laden were training in Arizona. Senior FBI officials declined to follow up on the information until after September 11, when all eight students were cleared. William's earlier request for a computer check of all U.S. flight schools for known al-Qaeda operatives was also rejected.

But his five-page memo, which updated about a dozen counterterrorism cases that Williams was working, was approved by Williams's supervisor in Phoenix for transmission to the Radical Fundamentalist Unit within the bureau's counterterrorism division. Though swamped with domestic and international intelligence reports indicating a possible terrorist attack, the FBI counterterrorism division categorized the Phoenix memo as “routine” rather than “urgent”.

These latest warnings were not the first indication that terrorists linked to Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda had a strong interest in aviation. In 1991, United States intelligence agencies had warned that bin Laden's assassins could hijack a jet and fly it into the Pentagon and other government buildings.

In 1994, a group of Algerian hijackers had seized an Air France flight before taking off for Paris. Intending to either crash the airliner into the Eiffel Tower, or blow it up over Paris, their plot was aborted when French commandoes stormed the plane.

In a 1996 confession, a Pakistani terrorist named Abdul Hakim Murad told investigators that he planned to use the training he received at flight schools in the United States to fly a plane into the CIA's headquarters in Langley, Virginia.

In a case widely known throughout the FBI, Murad had been captured in the Philippines the year before, and subsequently convicted in New York after confessing to conspiring to simultaneously blow up a dozen American jumbo jets over the Pacific Ocean. Murad had received flight training in New York, North Carolina, California and Texas.

By August 2001 O'Neill was trying to convince his superiors to act on another urgent memo forwarded by field agent Robert Wright. This veteran member of O'Neill's crack FBI counter-terrorism team was “desperately trying to figure out what Moussaoui was up to.”

After learning from Moussaoui's intercepted emails that the al-Qaeda operative wanted to learn to fly a 747 from London's Heathrow airport to New York's JFK-without knowing how to land once he arrived there-O'Neill's agents held frantic brainstorming sessions trying to guess his intended targets.

The anti-terror team was “in a frenzy, absolutely convinced he was planning to do something with a plane,” a senior official later told the Washington Post. Wright's memo to his superiors warned of “one possibility”-Moussaoui might be planning to “fly something into the World Trade Center.”

When the frustrated anti-terror agents finally took their concerns directly to the Attorney General, instead of giving them permission to shake down Moussaoui, John Ashcroft ordered their investigation stopped.


IMPACT
08:46:
America's chickenhawks are coming home to roost. Seismic needles across New York State jump as American Airlines Flight 11 flies out of a flawless September sky into the north side of the World Trade Center's North Tower. Radar-tracked at 470 miles-per-hour, the big jet is still carrying almost 10,000 gallons of jet fuel when it impacts between the 93rd and 98th floors.

Tower One shakes like a tuning fork. As a blizzard of office paper spreads gaily over Manhattan, the walls and ceiling of Sleigh's office collapse. By the time the 63-year-old American Bureau of Shipping manager crawls from under his bookshelves, the sagging concrete ceiling above him has become the floor of a tomb containing more than 1,300 corpses. Almost no one survives on the floors above him. But on Sleigh's floor and below, nearly everyone lives.

At the moment of impact, both Trade Towers are at slightly less than half occupancy, with between 5,000 and 7,000 people in each tower. To accommodate later financial market openings in distant time zones, many money traders have not yet shown up for work. Other offices are closed due to the Asian recession. And the popular observation deck does not open to crowds of tourists until 9:30.