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“Praise be to Allah, we seek his help and ask for his pardon,” the declaration began, then launched into a catalogue of the iniquities imposed on Muslims by “the Zionist-Crusaders alliance.” The greatest of the aggressions, bin Laden wrote, was the presence of the “American invaders” in Saudi Arabia, followed by U.S. exploitation of Arab oil and the “annexing” of Arab land by Israel.

“After Faith,” he went on, “there is no more important duty than pushing the American enemy out of the holy land.” Addressing U.S. Defense Secretary William Perry in person, he warned that his recruits to the cause made formidable enemies. “These youths love death as you love life. They inherit dignity, pride, courage, generosity, truthfulness and sacrifice. They are most effective and steadfast in war.… They have no intent but to enter Paradise by killing you.”

Around the time he issued this proclamation of punishment to come, bin Laden sat down to confer with Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.

WHETHER THE TWO men had seen each other in the recent past remains unclear. According to KSM, he had hoped to meet with bin Laden in Sudan, but settled for seeing his military aide Atef instead. One intelligence lead suggests that he and bin Laden had traveled somewhere together—perhaps on one of the trips they both made to Bosnia. It seems certain, though, that they got together at Tora Bora in mid-1996.

At the meeting, which Atef also attended, KSM came up with a raft of ideas for terrorist attacks, most of them involving airliners. Atef, too, had recently been discussing the idea of attacking aircraft. Terrorist attacks on planes had usually followed a pattern—hijack a plane, have it land in a compliant nation-state, then make demands (often for the release of captured comrades). By the mid-1990s, however, bin Laden operatives had little prospect of finding a “friendly” place to land. For the men meeting at Tora Bora, the focus was simply on destroying planes.

Atef apparently favored finding ways to blow up airliners in mid-air, as in the 1988 downing of Pan Am 103 over Scotland. He and bin Laden listened, however, as KSM proposed a very different concept—using hijacked planes as weapons.

There are two versions of what he suggested. According to KSM himself, the notion he proposed was ambitious in the extreme. Ten planes would be hijacked, on the same day, to be crashed into target buildings on both coasts of the United States. He himself, as commander, would force a landing at an airport, kill all male passengers, then deliver a speech assailing American support for Israel and “repressive” regimes around the world. This, as the 9/11 Commission put it, would have been “theater, a spectacle of destruction with KSM as the self-cast star—the super-terrorist.”

According to another detainee, KSM’s proposal was more modest, a suggestion that the World Trade Center should be targeted again—this time not with a bomb but by small planes packed with explosives. This, the detainee said, prompted bin Laden to suggest a grander vision. “Why do you use an ax,” he supposedly mused, “when you can use a bulldozer?”

KSM thought it was important to target civilian landmarks. Were only military or government buildings hit, he surmised, ordinary Americans “would not focus on the atrocities that America is committing by supporting Israel against the Palestinian people.” The purpose of a further strike on the World Trade Center was to “wake people up.”

KSM’s proposal may have been premature. He got the impression that bin Laden’s priority concern remained the situation in Saudi Arabia. He told KSM he was “not convinced” of the practicality of the planes operation. For now, the discussion went no further.

Nevertheless, a further strike on the World Trade Center apparently remained on the drawing board. Months after the meeting at Tora Bora, a bin Laden operative in Europe traveled to America and shot videotape of various prominent buildings—including the Twin Towers. The footage, seized after 9/11, included shot after shot of