The students took turns getting a good feel for their flights to hell, swapping captain and co-pilot seats and banking the big jet into turns.
When Mohamed Atta and Marwan al-Shehhi stepped from a Boeing 727 simulator in Miami last December, flight training for the suicide pilots was essentially complete.
They'd guided a machine that operated and even moved almost exactly like their weapons, a pair of Boeing 767s. They'd familiarized themselves with the complex cockpit, the thrust and stabilizer levers, the flap trims, the dozens of switches and glowing gauges, even practiced needless skills like landing.
It was a brief test-run, six hours, never leaving the ground. It wasn't enough to fly. It was more than enough to crash.
From that day, the plot to attack America escalated, centered in South Florida. Much of it took shape in steps out of a terror textbook: train, infiltrate, strike.
Within five months, as many as 14 conspirators began bouncing around hotels, apartments and rental homes from Hollywood to Daytona Beach, sometimes mobilizing for apparent practice runs on targeted planes. By late August, they sealed the date, booking tickets on four flights. On Sept. 11, a flawless morning over the Northeast, they slaughtered some 6,600 innocent people with the clockwork timing of airline departure schedules.
It will take months, even years, to draw a full portrait of a monster with tentacles in at least seven states and dozens of countries. For investigators, running a perplexing maze of sketchy records, multiple aliases and possibly bogus names, it's like chasing ghosts. The FBI is scrambling to fill holes in its timeline, but after 10 days, key details and dates have emerged of a broad, intricate plot.
One thing stands out clearly: An attack spanning 74 minutes took years of planning.
``One of the keys to understanding this is the length of time these hijackers spent here,'' a U.S. investigator said. ``These weren't people coming over the border just to attack quickly. . . They cultivated friends, and blended into American society to further their ability to strike.''
Florida was a natural.
Numerous aviation schools cater to thousands of foreign-born students. People of different colors and tongues commonly mingle in shops and restaurants. Tourists and transients come and go with the weather. Melting into such a polyglot place has long proven easy.
``We have an international reputation as a good place to get lost,'' said Chris Mancini, a former assistant U.S. attorney now in private practice who guides tours of the region's storied criminal geography. ``This is where people come to disappear.''
By May 2000, records suggest at least two of the 19 hijackers had already done just that, renting modest apartments in Delray Beach and Daytona Beach. Others would soon follow, including the men investigators consider probable ringleaders, Mohammed Atta, thin and tight-lipped, and Marwan al-Shehhi, pudgy and congenial by comparison.
May 29, 2000: Al-Shehhi arrived at Newark Airport in New Jersey, his entry document a tourist visa issued Jan. 18 in Dubai, the United Arab Emirates.
June 3, 2000: Atta arrived in Newark from Prague on a tourist visa issued May 18 in Berlin, his stated destination the Lexington Hotel in New York City where records indicate he never showed up.
July 2000: Both men surface in sleepy Venice, a small Southwest Florida town home to Midwestern snowbirds and Huffman Aviation, a flight school. They made no friends and revealed little about themselves, except that they were cousins from Germany who wanted to be commercial pilots.
Investigators believe as many as four others also earned their suicide wings at schools here, possibly starting as early as 1993. They've also traced names of at least three others to flight schools in Maryland, Arizona and California.
But with a jumble of Arabic names and spellings, constantly shifting addresses and growing concerns of pilfered identities, the probe has only made some of the shadowy figures murkier. The Saudi Arabian embassy is claiming proof that at least two and possibly more of the hijackers used stolen names. Agents are struggling to reconcile names on the manifest with actual suspects.
Dec. 29-30, 2000: After five months of training, Atta and al-Shehhi were qualified to fly small multi-engine planes but they needed one more critical lesson. The carnage they envisioned required a jet.
The found the next best thing at Simcenter Inc. in Opa-locka, a virtual replica of a Boeing 727 flight deck. It was a vintage late 1960s to early '70s machine, but still a sophisticated full-motion simulator. It pitched and dipped, responding to the yoke and controls. The cockpit array closely matched newer jets.
They told owner Henry George they needed the experience for job interviews. Sitting behind the two men, George ran them through two introductory sessions. He did it like he always does, mimicking a real flight: checklist, taxiing, takeoff, turns, touchdown. There was no personal chitchat.
``We didn't do anything in that simulator that would not be normal in the airplane,'' George said.
Normal was enough. Hitting the world's tallest skyscrapers required only rudimentary skill. Flight training for the suicide pilots, aside from a few apparent brush-up sessions in small planes, was over.
Jan. 4, 2001: Atta left the United States, flying out of Miami to Madrid.
Jan. 11, 2001: Al-Shehhi quickly followed, adding a side trip to New York City first.
THE SQUAD ASSEMBLES
January-March, 2001: Almost immediately, the stage for something bigger was being set by the others already in South Florida.
Within days, Hamza Alghamdi and Mohand Alsheri paid $200 to rent a mailbox at a Delray Beach shopping center, the first of a number of mail drops, bogus or temporary addresses the hijackers would use to secure driver licenses and book tickets.
Atta and al-Shehhi would crisscross the Atlantic on separate flights, each at least twice and perhaps more, with the last flights by Atta in July. Destinations: Hamburg, Germany, where both were students at a technical university, and Madrid.
If the Sunshine State's suburbs served as a training ground and base of operations, investigators suspect Hamburg served as a logistics or inspirational center, the place where unnamed masterminds set things into murderous motion.
German police believe at least four hijackers were members of an Islamic extremist cell: Atta, al-Shehhi, former roommate Sahid Bahaji and Ziad Jarrahi, who attended a nearby school.
March 11: Atta and al-Shehhi vacated their spartan Hamburg flat, leaving it clean, empty and freshly painted.
They rarely stopped moving after that, sharing a shifting array of Florida addresses but carefully avoiding traveling together.
Atta's movements were especially confounding. Immigration and Naturalization Service documents, matched against an FBI alert given to German police, show two men named Mohamed Atta arrived in Miami on Jan. 10, each offering different destination addresses to INS agents, one in Nokomis, near Venice, the other at a Coral Springs condo. He was admitted, despite having overstayed his previous visa by a month.
The double entry could be a paperwork error, confusion over a visa extension. It could be Atta arrived in Miami, flew to another country like the Bahamas and returned the same day. Or it could be that two men somehow cleared immigration with the same name using the same passport number.
Sometime in the summer, Atta also was reportedly spotted meeting with a high-ranking Iraqi intelligence officer somewhere in Europe. The CIA would not confirm that but a U.S. official said, ``I wouldn't steer you away from the thrust of this proposition.''
May-July: Slowly, steadily, the small force gathered, many scattering across South Florida, a handful of others in Maryland and elsewhere.
Where they came from and when remains uncertain. Some, records indicate, were what counterterrorism experts call ``sleepers'' or ``submarines,'' agents placed for long periods to await orders. Others, investigators believe, arrived in the last few months.
The men settled in several spots: A cheap rooming house in downtown Hollywood, a condo in Coral Springs mainly populated by French-Canadian snowbirds, a series of modest tourist hotels or apartments in Deerfield Beach, Delray Beach and Vero Beach. They kept multiple addresses or changed them often, some by the month, and further twisted the trail with mail-drop rentals in Hollywood, Delray Beach and other places.
Public and financial records, sparse before, suddenly multiplied. Al-Shehhi got his driver's license April 12, Atta and Jarrahi on May 2, another man going by the name Waleed M. al-Shehri on May 4. Three more would obtain official ID cards or licenses by July 10. Bank accounts were opened. Leases were signed.
They proved adept infiltrators, behaving in ways that defied FBI profiles of radical Arab suicide terrorists. They held no obvious jobs and weren't friendly, but they were, in general, older, smarter, technically savvy and schooled in psychological warfare. They looked, dressed and acted much like normal neighbors, assuring them the faceless obscurity they needed. They visited ATMs dressed in dweebish plaid button-downs, shopped at wholesale warehouses, regularly used free computers at public libraries.
They even joined gyms. But while others were pumping to stay fit, they were toughening up to butcher passengers in a suicide mission. At US-1 Fitness in Dania Beach, suspect Ziad Jarrahi honed street-fighting techniques. All the men paid by the month.
In a new and chilling twist, USA Today reported Friday that the men, likely aided or advised by accomplices, also scouted the exact flights they would later target, even taking practice trips to refine the assaults.
It was characteristic terrorist teaching, outlined in a terrorist manual prosecutors introduced last June in the trial of a man convicted of involvement in the U.S. Embassy bombing in Tanzania. The primer that Osama bin Laden's organization gave to would-be terrorists included rules for an undercover member: Don't reveal your true name. Don't have a typically Islamic appearance. Carry falsified personal documents.
``When they look at it now, it appears they left trails all over the map, but this is something that was in the works for a long time. Without some informant tip-off, it would have been hard to put all of it together,'' said an Israeli official who had been briefed on the network. ``They were meticulous and very patient.''
READY TO STRIKE
Aug. 24-29: The attack is set -- time, date and specific flights, four jets departing from Newark, Boston and suburban Washington, D.C.
In a five-day span, at least 14 of the 19 suspects booked their flights. Some used frequent flier accounts they'd just opened. Six provided the same Broward phone number, a Verizon cellular that now answers calls with the message, ``The customer you have reached is temporarily not accepting calls.'' Three others used the same Delray Beach address.
Some paid cash, some used credit cards. At least 10 employed the faceless convenience of the Internet. Federal agents are examining computers at public libraries and Kinko's stores in Broward and Palm Beach counties, where the men are believed to have clicked away and possibly communicated by code in email.
The flights were cunningly selected for maximum impact and minimum resistance. They were all transcontinental, each sloshing with more than 20,000 gallons of jet fuel. They left at an early hour on one of the lightest of travel days, a Tuesday, departing within 43 minutes of each other.
Aug. 27: The squad begins moving into final position. Ziad Jarrahi spent three nights in a hotel in a suburb outside Washington, followed on Sept. 1 by Nawaq Alhamzi. Both would later board separate flights targeting Washington.
Sept. 4: Security cameras, checked after the attacks, captured a white Mitsubishi sedan casing a parking lot at Logan International Airport in Boston several times over the next few days. After the attacks, a motorist reported a confrontation with five Middle Eastern men in the car. Records traced the Alamo rental to Atta. Inside, police found a ramp pass, allowing access to restricted airport areas.
Sept. 5: Two other hijackers purchased one-way tickets to Newark from Mile High Travel in Fort Lauderdale.
Sept. 7: Only in the final days, as the suicide squad made its way north, did cracks show in their wall of obscurity.
It happened at Shuckums, a raw bar on Hollywood's Harrison Street. Al-Shehhi and Atta knocked back drinks -- forbidden by the Islamic teachings they so zealously embraced. The men bickered with a bartender over a $48 tab.
Sept. 9: Al-Shehhi and two others check out of the Panther Hotel in Deerfield Beach, leaving behind in a Dumpster a flying school tote bag. Inside were a box cutter, aviation maps, martial arts books, notebook and protractor.
Sept. 10: Two suspects check in at the Park Inn in Chestnut Hill, Mass., two others at the Days Hotel in Brighton. Atta and another man wind up in Room 432 at the Comfort Inn in South Portland, Maine.
Sept. 11, 5:53 a.m: With the sun rising on a gorgeous morning, Atta and another hijacker board a US Airways flight at the Portland Jetport. Still images from a video camera show the two men passing through the security area just moments before the flight was scheduled to leave for Boston.
Atta made his connection but his bag did not. Inside, investigators found a Saudi passport, a video on flying Boeing jets, airline uniforms and a suicide note, reportedly dated 1996. In it, Atta said he intended to kill himself and go to heaven as a martyr.
In the end, they left a curiously obvious trail -- from martial arts manuals, maps, a Koran, Internet and credit card fingerprints. Maybe they were sloppy, maybe they didn't care, maybe it was a gesture of contempt of a culture they considered weak and corrupt. Scrawled on a curb near Atta's last known address in Coral Springs: ``Mohamed 11.'' Police believe it was there before the attack.
7:59 a.m.: American Airlines Flight 11, the first of four hijacked jets, left Boston, followed by United Airlines Flight 175 from Boston, American Airlines Flight 77 from Dulles International Airport near Washington, and United Airlines Flight 93 from Newark International Airport.
8:48 a.m.: Flight 11 struck the World Trade Center's north tower.
10:02 a.m.: Flight 93, on a beeline for Washington, plunged into a Pennsylvania field. Its passengers, the first to be informed of the attacks by loved ones on cellphones, apparently wrested control of the plane from their knife-wielding captors.
Herald staff writers William Yardley, Erika Bolsted, Alfonso Chardy, Manny Garcia, Jennifer Babson and Charles Savage and researchers Elisabeth Donovan and Gay Nemeti this report, which was supplemented by Herald wire services.
