The Eleventh Day_ The History and Legacy of 9_11 - Anthony Summers [164]
Until then …
The key part of the message is the reference to “high schools” and “universities.” In an earlier discussion of targeting—Atta and Binalshibh had still been discussing the option of striking the White House—they had used “architecture” to refer to the World Trade Center, “arts” to mean the Pentagon, “law” the Capitol, and “politics” to denote the White House.
The true meaning of the message, Binalshibh would explain in the interview he gave before he was captured, was:
Zero hour is going to be in three weeks’ time. There are no changes. All is well. The brothers have been seeing encouraging visions and dreams. The Twin Towers, the Pentagon and Capitol Hill. Everything is going according to plan. This summer is for sure going to be hot. I want to talk to you about some details. Nineteen hijackers and four targets. Regards to Khalid [KSM]/Osama.
Until we speak.
In the early hours of August 29, in Germany, Binalshibh was woken by the telephone. The caller was Atta, his Egyptian-accented voice instantly recognizable.
Atta had a riddle for Binalshibh, a joke as he put it: “ ‘Two sticks, a dash, and a cake with a stick down’ … What is it?” Binalshibh, half asleep, was stumped for a moment. Then—presumably he was expecting such a call—he figured out the answer. The puzzle, he told Atta, was “sweet.”
“Two sticks” signified “11.” The “dash” was a dash. A “cake with a stick down” was a “9.”
11–9—the way most of the world renders the days of the calendar. Or, as Americans render them:
9/11
The date was set.
• • •
BINALSHIBH PASSED on the date to KSM, and the hijackers’ operation entered its final phase. Everything now depended on Atta’s organizing ability and success in maintaining security. An effort to bring the total number of terrorists up to twenty—four five-man teams, one for each target—had recently risked wrecking the entire endeavor.
In early August, at Orlando, Florida, a U.S. immigration inspector had had his doubts about a newly arrived young Saudi. Standing instructions were to take it easy on Saudis—they were a boost to tourism—but this man had no return ticket and had not filled out customs and immigration forms. The inspector sent the man on for a “secondary,” a grilling that was to last two hours.
The would-be “tourist,” twenty-five-year-old Mohamed el-Kahtani, said that, though he would be staying only a few days, he did not know where he would be going next. He first said that someone due to arrive from abroad would be paying for his onward travel, then that another “someone” was waiting for him in Arrivals. Secondary inspector José Meléndez-Pérez noted, too, that the subject was belligerent.
“He started pointing his finger … Whatever he was saying was in a loud voice—like ‘I am in charge—you’re not going to do anything to me. I am from Saudi Arabia.’ People from Saudi think they are untouchable … He had a deep staring look … [like] ‘If I could grip your heart I would eat it’ … This man intimidated me with his look and his behavior.”
The inspector felt in his gut that Kahtani had evil intent—he thought he might be a hit man—and recommended that he be sent back to Saudi Arabia. This was the one occasion, after a series of inefficiencies involving the terrorists, that an alert INS official had really done his job. KSM was to admit under interrogation that the suspect had indeed been sent to the States to join the terrorist team—to “round out the number of hijackers.”
It is rational to think that, but for the inspector’s acumen, there would have been five rather than four hijackers aboard United Flight 93. With Kahtani’s additional muscle—Meléndez-Pérez remembered him as having looked trim, “like a soldier”—they might have been better able to resist the passengers’ attempt to retake the cockpit. Instead of plunging to the ground in Pennsylvania, Flight 93 might have stayed on course and struck its target in Washington.
There