The Looming Tower - Lawrence Wright [174]
Bin Laden rejected this last conceit, but in the spring of 1999 bin Laden summoned Mohammed back to Kandahar and gave him the go-ahead to put his plan into operation.
A few months later bin Laden, Khaled Sheikh Mohammed, and Abu Hafs gathered in Kandahar to pick potential targets. The three men were the only ones involved. Their goal was not only to inflict symbolic damage. Bin Laden imagined that America—as a political entity—could actually be destroyed. “America is a great power possessed of tremendous military might and a wide-ranging economy,” he later conceded, “but all this is built upon an unstable foundation which can be targeted, with special attention to its obvious weak spots. If it is hit in one hundredth of those spots, God willing, it will stumble, wither away and relinquish world leadership.” Inevitably, he believed, the confederation of states that made up America would dissolve.
It was natural, then, that bin Laden wanted to strike the White House and the U.S. Capitol. He also put the Pentagon on his list. If he succeeded in destroying the American seat of government and the headquarters of its military, the actual dismemberment of the country would not seem such a fantasy. Khaled Sheikh Mohammed nominated the World Trade Center, which his nephew Ramzi Yousef had failed to bring down in the bombing six years earlier. The Sears Tower in Chicago and the Library Tower (now called the U.S. Bank Tower) in Los Angeles were also discussed. Bin Laden decided that the attack on the American cities on the West Coast could wait.
There was little money to work with but plenty of willing martyrs. When the plan merely envisioned blowing up the planes in midair, there was no need for trained pilots, but as the concept evolved and took on the brilliance of its eventual design, it became clear that the planes operation would require a disciplined group with skills that might take years to develop.
Bin Laden assigned four of his most reliable men to be a part of the operation. Yet none of the four men could fly; nor could they speak English, which was required for a pilot’s license. They had no experience living in the West. Mohammed tried to tutor them. He taught them English phrases and collected brochures for flight schools in the United States. They played flight simulator computer games and watched Hollywood movies featuring hijackings, but the gap between the abilities of the men involved and the grandeur of the mission must have been deflating.
Nawaf al-Hazmi was one of those men. He had come to Afghanistan in 1993 when he was seventeen years old. He was strongly built, with a quick and handsome smile. His father was a wealthy grocer in Mecca. His boyhood friend Khaled al-Mihdhar was also from a prominent Meccan family. Following bin Laden’s example, these two rich Saudi boys had fought together in Bosnia and then with the Taliban against the Northern Alliance—the loose group of mujahideen and former Afghan government supporters who were led by Ahmed Shah Massoud. Although he held Saudi citizenship, Mihdhar was originally from Yemen. He married Hoda al-Hada, the sister of one of his Yemeni comrades in arms, and fathered two daughters by her. In fact, it was her family’s phone that the FBI had turned up in the embassy bombings investigation and that would prove so important in understanding the scope of al-Qaeda. The movements of these two men, Hazmi and Mihdhar, offered the most realistic hope for American intelligence to uncover the 9/11 conspiracy.
Because they were Saudi citizens, both Hazmi and Mihdhar easily obtained U.S. visas. They didn’t even have to apply in person. For the other