The Eleventh Day_ The History and Legacy of 9_11 - Anthony Summers [136]
Berger and Clarke spent the morning of Christmas Day at FBI headquarters and the afternoon at the CIA. Nothing happened. Come the night of the Millennium, thousands of law enforcement agents and military personnel were on duty. FBI director Louis Freeh and Attorney General Reno kept vigil in their offices—Reno would sleep the night on a couch at the Justice Department. In New York’s Times Square, local FBI counterterrorism chief John O’Neill waited for the famous ball to fall at midnight.
The ball fell, and no catastrophe came. “I think we dodged the bullet,” Berger said when he rang Clarke after midnight. Clarke said he would wait three more hours, until New Year’s came in Los Angeles. At 3:00 A.M., when all was still well, he went up to the roof of the White House and “popped open a bottle.”
The FBI told Berger after the Millennium, he was to recall, that al Qaeda did not after all have active cells in the U.S. “They said there might be sleepers, but they had that covered. They were saying this was not a big domestic threat.”
NO ONE THAT New Year’s spoke publicly about a specific danger, that an attack in the United States might come in the shape of airplane hijackings. Many months earlier, however, bin Laden had spoken of just that. “All Islamic military,” he had boasted, “have been mobilized to strike a significant U.S. or Israeli strategic target, to bring down their aircraft and hijack them.”
In 1998, indeed, the White House had quietly held an exercise involving a scenario in which terrorists flew an explosives-laden jet into a building in Washington. In December that year, the CIA had told Bill Clinton of intelligence suggesting that “bin Laden and his allies are preparing for attack in the U.S., including an aircraft hijacking.”
During 1999, Britain’s foreign intelligence service warned its American counterparts that bin Laden was planning attacks in which airliners could be used in “unconventional ways.” Two U.S. bodies, moreover, produced prophetic warnings.
“America,” the congressionally mandated Commission on National Security forecast in its initial report, “will become increasingly vulnerable to hostile attack on our homeland.… Americans will likely die on American soil, possibly in large numbers.” The same month, a report by the Library of Congress’s Federal Research Division, which had wide circulation within the government, said al Qaeda could be expected to retaliate for the cruise missile attack on bin Laden’s camps.
“Suicide bombers belonging to al Qaeda’s Martyrdom Battalion,” the report went on to say, “could crash-land an aircraft packed with high explosives (C-4 and Semtex) into the Pentagon, the headquarters of the Central Intelligence Agency, or the White House.”
IN NOVEMBER 1999, just months after bin Laden had decided on the 9/11 operation, two young Saudi students had boarded as Coach Class passengers on an America West Flight 90 from Phoenix, Arizona, to Washington, D.C. During the flight, one of them—in the words of a flight attendant—“walked into the First Class section and continued walking towards the cockpit door. He tried to open the door. He was very subtle in his actions.” A passenger in First Class also saw the Arab man “try to get into the cockpit.”
The cockpit door was locked, and the man claimed he had mistaken it for the lavatory. The behavior of the passenger and his traveling companion had made the flight attendants uneasy, though, and they alerted the captain. At a routine stopover in Ohio, the plane had taxied to a remote parking place and the two men had been taken away in handcuffs. After four hours of interrogation and a search of