Attack carefully coordinated over the course of 18 months

WASHINGTON - The 19 hijackers who carried out the worst act ofterrorism ever to occur on U.S. soil worked with little outside helpas a single, integrated group composed of identifiable leaders andshadowy foot soldiers who prepared for their final day in a tightchoreography over 18 months.

An examination of public records and dozens of interviewsshatters the image of the conspiracy that coalesced immediatelyfollowing the Sept. 11 attacks.

Based on early, flawed information from federal investigators,initial accounts depicted an operation that was carried out by fourcompartmentalized cells of terrorists. And because investigationsand neighbors were confused by similar or falsified Arabic names,reports emerged that the cells included as many as 10 pilots, whowith wives and children had blended seamlessly into suburbanAmerica.

In fact, it now seems clear that only a single hijacker aboardeach of the four commandeered aircraft knew how to fly a plane. Justtwo of the other hijackers - both linked to terrorist Osama binLaden - had briefly taken flight lessons.

These six men apparently formed the conspiracy's leadership.Records and interviews show that this core group, often separated bythousands of miles, remained in the United States the longest andleft behind the most visible tracks that, in retrospect, can be seenas highly synchronized preparations.

Some of the leaders were educated, worldly and so intimatelyconnected that three of the four suspected pilots had roomedtogether in Germany, where they attended the Technical University ofHamburg. Sophisticated as they were, the leaders were clumsy enoughin their English and their manners that they repeatedly provokednotice and annoyance while they were in the United States, if notoutright suspicion.

Helping these leaders was a cadre of 13 Saudi Arabian men, mostof them younger and less educated, many from their country's poorestregions. These young Saudis left faint appearances in U.S. publicrecords and seem for the most part to have arrived only in recentmonths.

Leader or follower, none of the hijackers brought wives orchildren with them. And contrary to early reports, none of thepilots had worked for Saudi Arabian Airlines.

For the leaders and followers alike, a maze of connections -including overlapping addresses - exists among hijackers who endedup on different flights.

The synchronization of their preparations is evident in the mostbasic ingredients of their plot. Seven of the hijackers obtainedFlorida driver's licenses within a 15-day span in early summer.Thirteen purchased airline tickets for their final flights withinfive days in late August. And over the course of the summer, a dozen- who ultimately ended up spread among the four flights - movedthrough South Florida apartments.

The plot revolved around mundane, perfectly legal details ofeveryday life: tourist visas, driver's licenses, apartment leases,Internet connections, airline tickets, mailboxes and rental cars.The records left by the hijackers as they carried out these ordinaryacts reveal the footprints of the conspiracy. They detail who didwhat and with whom, and they reveal that the hijackers were dividedinto two distinct classes.

"There are two groups on each plane: You've got the brains, whoare the pilots and the leaders, and then you have the muscle comingin later on," said a senior government official. "They were the oneswho held the passengers at bay."

This newer portrait of the conspiracy may yet evolve. The FBIinvestigation into the plot is preliminary, and the conspiracy'sprecise nature probably will not be understood for years. Only afraction of what has been learned about the conspirators by federalinvestigators is publicly known. Telephone records and airlinemanifests, for example, would be disclosed only in secret before agrand jury or in a courtroom.

But from the information that is available at the moment, certainpatterns already can be gleaned that render a fuller picture of theconspirators.

In particular, an analysis of the hijackers' visible trails givesgreater clarity to the role of Mohamed Atta, the 33-year-oldEgyptian lawyer's son already identified by a government official asthe "axel" of the plot. He traveled the most, listed the mostaddresses, took the most practice flights and had the greatestinteraction with other conspirators. Atta and two of the othersuspected pilots - Marwan Al-Shehhi and Ziad Samir Jarrah - belongedto a radical Islamic student group in Hamburg that investigatorsbelieve may have been a birthplace of the plot.

More broadly, both the leaders and the followers can be seen tohave often deployed in pairs. They came together for crucial tasks,such as to get new government identification cards that would easetheir passage onto the planes.

The hijackers' behavior reveals certain incongruities. They wereIslamic fundamentalists who nevertheless indulged in Westernculture, from fast food to hard liquor. One spent $4,500 on a singleairline ticket, yet they haggled over bar tabs, car rental fees, andapartment security deposits just days before they would die.

The most basic incongruity, though, is this: The preparations ofthe 19 hijackers were imperfect. Some were kicked out of pilotschools. Some had to pay cash for their plane tickets after theircredit cards were rejected. Two were late for the Boston flight thatwould be the first to slam into the World Trade Center.

But inexact as it was, their plot succeeded in claiming more than6,000 lives.

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In November 1999, two Saudi Arabian men moved into a ground floorapartment at the Parkwood Apartments, a townhouse complex in SanDiego near a busy commercial strip. Khalid Almihdhar and NawafAlhazmi struck their neighbors as odd. They had no furniture butoften carried briefcases and seemed to be on their cell phones alot.

Two months later, investigators believe, Almihdhar and Alhazmitraveled to Malaysia, where they met with bin Laden operatives whowere later linked to the bombing of the destroyer USS Cole.

By May 2000, they arrived at Sorbi's Flying Club, a small school20 miles north of San Diego that trains about four dozen pilots ayear, and announced that they wanted to learn to fly Boeingairliners.

Almihdhar and Alhazmi were part of the advance guard.

Their flight lessons began within weeks of the day two of theother leaders, Atta and Al-Shehhi, a 23-year-old native of theUnited Arab Emirates, enrolled in a six-month course at HuffmanAviation, a flying school in Venice, Fla.

A continent apart, the four men displayed uncanny parallels.According to former neighbors, landlords and flight instructors, theCalifornia team and the Florida team almost always left theirapartments as a pair. Few people recall ever seeing any of themalone.

Within each pair, one man assumed a more genial, communicativerole, while the other was quieter, brooding. In California, Alhazmiis remembered as more outgoing. In Florida, waitresses and othersconsistently recall Al-Shehhi as friendlier than Atta - a dour,arrogant man whose English seemed atrocious at times, but suddenlycould be smooth when he needed a car or hotel room.

These four men traveled often: Al-Shehhi to Morocco andAmsterdam, Atta twice to Spain.

Neither team took pains to be furtive. While Atta occasionallyused aliases, all four men gave their real names when theyregistered for flight lessons or bought airline tickets - aviolation of a "terrorist's manual" written for bin Laden's network.

Almihdhar and Alhazmi, in particular, were readily visible withinthe local Muslim community. They mingled at the Islamic Center ofSan Diego. It was at the center that they bought the blue Corollathey would ultimately drive across the country and park at DullesInternational Airport on Sept. 11.

Even as they sought to blend into the United States well enoughto complete their necessary tasks, the pairs of men were imperfectchameleons. At times, they were overeager. They were hindered byfaulty English. They were, on occasion, aggressive, even boorish.

Rick Garza, Sorbi's chief flight instructor at the time, satAlmihdhar and Alhazmi down after a half-dozen ground lessons and twoflights. "This is not going to work out," he told them.

Their English was terrible, but Garza was more disturbed by acertain overzealousness. Even though "they had no idea what theywere doing," the instructor said, they insisted on learning to flymulti-engine planes, at one point offering him extra money if hewould teach them.

In Florida, Atta strived to adapt to U.S. styles, shedding theflowing beard and tunic he had favored in Germany for a clean-cutlook. But both he and and Al-Shehhi, while more successful than theSan Diego pair at acquiring pilots' skills and licenses, could besimilarly off-putting. At Huffman, Atta appropriated the seatcushion of a fellow student while he flew in the school's PiperCherokee Warrior.

Infuriated, the student, Anne Greaves, tried to wrest the cushionfrom Atta's grasp. "Marwan lunged, putting his arm quickly betweenAtta and myself, to protect him in a way," Greaves said. "I rememberthinking, "What on Earth could they be frightened of?' "

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If the behavior of the first four was conspicuously unpleasant,they nevertheless were clearly more adept than the young Saudi menwho came in a second wave.

One of these men, who moved early last summer into a shabbyapartment building in Paterson, N.J., once had to ask a neighbor howto screw in a light bulb.

Among the first to arrive were Hamza Alghamdi, 20, and MohandAlshehri, 23, who in January rented a post office box in DelrayBeach, Fla.

Most of the second group of conspirators were from poor families.A few had enough education to give them skills that would provehandy. Alshehri, who graduated from a religious high school anddropped out of Imam Muhammed bin Saud University, was facile enoughwith computers that he could use the Internet at a Delray Beachpublic library.

But these younger men seemed to settle under the wings of aleader for such basic needs as finding a place to live. Last winter,Hani Hanjour, another pilot, did the talking when he rented thePaterson apartment with Salem Alhazmi, 21, even though Hanjour's ownEnglish was poor. In June, Al-Shehhi, by then a licensed pilot whohad been in Florida for at least a year, helped Hamza Alghamdi shopfor an apartment, according to the real estate agent who worked withthem.

Unlike the first wave, who focused on the mentally rigorous workof pilot training, the second wave of young men put time intostrengthening their bodies. In Florida and Maryland, they paid cashto train with weights in gyms.

In ways that were curiously out of sync with Islamic orthodoxy,these young men seemed to revel in their brief taste of Americanlife. They wore shorts and T-shirts. Last month, Majed Moqed, 22,another hijacker on American Airlines Flight 77 that hit thePentagon, stopped into a Beltsville, Md., store that rents adultvideos. After scanning the titles, he did not rent any, but hereturned at least once.

Some of the hijackers who passed through New Jersey during thesummer developed the habit of buying doughnuts by the boxful andmeals from a Chinese carryout. Others frequently stopped by a localbar at night for Salem or Parliament cigarettes, Heineken orBudweiser beer.

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New Jersey served as one hub for the conspirators in the days andnights of summer. South Florida served as the other. Soon, the earlypairs gave way to larger, interlocking groups.

The apartment that Al-Shehhi had helped Hamza Alghamdi to findalso became the home of Saeed Alghamdi and Ahmed Ibrahim A. AlHaznawi.

On Aug. 2, at least five - and possible seven - of the hijackerswent to a Department of Motor Vehicles office in Arlington, Va.,where they allegedly met a local man who fraudulently helped themobtain identification cards they could flash at airport counters.

The men who got the IDs that day later would later fan out tothree of the four hijacked planes, illustrating the conspiracy'sinterwoven nature. The scheme is striking for a second reason: Itshows the amount of calculation behind the plot. The men who got theVirginia cards included those who would board the flight at nearbyDulles. The only others who took part in the scam were the twohijackers on other planes who had not obtained a driver's license inFlorida since last spring.

Such close coordination, visible all along, is particularlyevident as the conspirators purchased their tickets and moved intotheir final positions before the attacks. The last weeks of Augustand first days of September appear in retrospect as a blur ofmotion, as hijackers left apartments, returned rental cars andrealigned to join the men with whom they would board their planes.

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As more of the conspiracy becomes understood, government sourcesnow say that the investigation so far suggests the 19 had "no majorhelp" in the United States. Sources say that the conspirators werefunded with $500,000 from overseas and that the terrorist missionwas planned and launched several years ago in Germany, with crucialsupport in Britain, the United Arab Emirates and Afghanistan.

Of the more than 480 people detained during the last few weeks, ahandful have drawn particular attention.

Zacarias Moussaoui was detained Aug. 17 after he caused a sceneat a flight simulator in Minnesota, where he worried his instructorsby baldly saying he wanted to learn how to fly jets but not to landthem.

Two Indian men who had gotten off an airplane on Sept. 11 werearrested on a train in Fort Worth the next day. Accounts differ onwhat led to the arrests, but the men were discovered with $5,000 incash, hair dye and box-cutter knives similar to ones used by thehijackers to take control of the planes.

Of all the mysteries that linger, a central one surrounds the manbelieved to be the fourth hijacker pilot: Hanjour. Unlike the otherthree suspected pilots - Atta, Al-Shehhi and Ziad, who trained inEurope - there is no evidence that Hanjour was radicalized inIslamic circles within Germany. Unlike the other pair of leaders -Almihdhar and Nawaf Alhazmi, who have been linked to bin Laden'snetwork and settled together in San Diego - Hanjour did not train tofly with a partner.

Of all the 19, Hanjour's roots in the United States seem deepest.The first trace of him in this country dates to 1990, when heappeared at the University of Arizona in Tucson for an eight-weekEnglish course. Exactly a decade later, he received a student visaby applying for another English course, this time in Oakland, Calif.He entered the country but never showed up in class.

In his long acquaintance with America, Hanjour is the onlyhijacker who fits the profile of what investigators call a"sleeper," a terrorist who lives inconspicuously in a country foryears before committing his violent act.

It is clear that Hanjour knew the San Diego leadership team. Theywere in the city together and, by some accounts, were roommates fora time. By last spring, he was on the East Coast, helping theyounger group in New Jersey. What is less evident is his exact rolein the conspiracy. Was he dispatched early to prepare the path? Washe taken into the plot as a pilot after the pair in San Diego provedso inept?

Certainly, Hanjour's own piloting skills were shaky. He tooklessons at a Scottsdale, Ariz., flight school four years ago, buteventually was asked to leave by instructors who said his skillswere poor and his manner difficult. Just a month ago, instructors atFreeway Airport in Bowie flew with him and deemed him unfit to renta plane by himself.

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