While Jarrah mailed his package, Atta prepared to leave his room at the Boston hotel. Some items in his Travelpro luggage made sense for a devout Muslim who’d received a commercial pilot’s license nine months earlier: alongside a Koran and a prayer schedule, he packed videotaped lessons on how to fly two types of Boeing jets; a device for determining the effect of a plane’s weight on its range; an electronic flight computer; a procedure manual for flight simulators; and flight planning sheets. Anyone who knew what he had planned would also have noted that he packed a folding knife and a canister of “First Defense” pepper spray. Finally, tucked into the black suitcase was a four-page letter, handwritten in Arabic, that charted Atta’s physical and spiritual intentions.
Divided into three sections, the letter provided detailed instructions and exhortations on the subjects of martyrdom and mass murder. It covered demeanor and grooming, battle tactics, and the promise of eternal life in the company of “nymphs.” After formal invocations, “In the name of Allah, the most merciful, the most compassionate,” the first section addressed Atta’s situation at that very moment. Titled “The Last Night,” it began:
1 Embrace the will to die and renew allegiance. -Shave the extra body hair and wear cologne. -Pray.
2 Familiarize yourself with the plan well from every aspect, and anticipate the reaction and resistance from the enemy.
3 Read the Al-Tawbah [Repentance], the Anfal chapters [in the Quran], and reflect on their meaning and what Allah has prepared for the believers and the martyrs in Paradise.
Near the end of the first section, it offered this direction:
1 13. Examine your weapon before departure, and it was said before the departure, “Each of you must sharpen his blade and go out and wound his sacrifice.”
Among the nineteen men with plans to wreak havoc in the next twenty-four hours, at least two others, one in New Jersey and the other outside Washington, had copies of the same letter.
Atta left the Milner Hotel and drove a rented blue Nissan Altima to a cheap hotel in the Boston suburb of Newton. There he picked up the man believed to have written, or at least copied, the instruction letter: Abdulaziz al-Omari, the same young Saudi who days earlier had ordered prostitutes like delivery pizza.
Atta and Omari headed toward Interstate 95 for a two-hour drive to Portland, Maine, a trip that could best be described as the first arc of a circular route. They held tickets for a commuter flight that would bring them back to Boston. The flight was scheduled to leave Portland at six o’clock the following morning, September 11.
American Airlines Flight 11
September 11, 2001
AMERICAN AIRLINES PILOT JOHN OGONOWSKI ROUSED HIMSELF BEFORE dawn on September 11, 2001, moving quietly in the dark to avoid waking his wife, Peg, or their three daughters. He slipped on his uniform and kissed Peg goodbye as she slept.
As the sun began its rise on that perfect late-summer morning, John stepped out the back door. Coffee would wait until he reached Boston’s Logan International Airport, forty-five minutes away. He climbed into his dirt-caked green Chevy pickup, with hay on the floor and a bumper sticker that read THERE’S NO FARMING WITHOUT FARMERS.
John drove a meandering route as he left the land he loved. He could see the plots he’d set aside for the Cambodian immigrants, plus five acres of ripening pumpkins and ten acres of fodder corn whose stalks would be sold as decorations for Halloween and Thanksgiving. John steered down the long dirt driveway, through the white wooden gate that gave the farm its name. He passed the home of his uncle Al and tooted his horn in a ritual family greeting. It was nearly six o’clock.
Under sparkling blue skies, John drove southeast toward the airport, ready to take his seat in the cockpit and his place in a vast national air transport system that flew some 1.8 million passengers daily, aboard more than twenty-five thousand flights, to and from more than 563 U.S. airports.
He expected to be home before the weekend, for a family picnic.
AS JOHN OGONOWSKI neared the airport, Michael Woodward left his sleeping boyfriend at his apartment in Boston’s fashionable Back Bay neighborhood and caught an early train for the twenty-minute ride to Logan. More than six feet tall and 200-plus pounds, Michael had a gentle face and a razor wit. Thirty years old, bright and ambitious, he’d risen from ticket agent to flight service manager for American Airlines, a job in which he ensured that planes were properly catered, serviced, and equipped with a full complement of flight attendants.
A salty breeze from Boston Harbor greeted Michael when he exited the train at the airport station, but that was the last he expected to see of the outdoors until the end of a long day. At 6:45 a.m., dressed in a gray suit and a burgundy tie, Michael walked to his office in the bowels of the airport’s Terminal B, one level below the passenger gates. He wore a serious expression that revealed his discomfort.
Michael remained friends with many of the more than two hundred flight attendants he supervised, and now he had to scold one to get to work on time, keep her uniform blouse properly buttoned, and generally clean up her act or risk being fired. He called her into his office, took a deep breath, and delivered the reprimand. She accepted the criticism and Michael relaxed, confident that he had completed the worst part of his September 11 workday.
Outside Michael’s office, flight attendants milled around a no-frills lounge where airline employees grabbed coffee and signed in by computer before flights. Michael brightened when he saw Betty Ong, a fourteen-year veteran of American Airlines whose friends called her Bee, sitting at a desk in the lounge, enjoying a few minutes of quiet before work.
Tall and willowy, forty-five years old, with shoulder-length black hair, Betty had grown up the youngest of four children in San Francisco’s Chinatown, where her parents ran a deli. Betty loved Chinese opera, carousel horses, Nat King Cole music, and collecting Beanie Babies; she also excelled at sports. Betty walked with a lively hop in her step and had a high-pitched laugh that brought joy to her friends. She ended calls: “I love you lots!” After countless flights together, she’d grown friendly with pilot John Ogonowski and his flight attendant wife, Peg, who often drove Betty home from Logan Airport to her townhouse in suburban Andover, Massachusetts, not far from the Ogonowskis’ farm. Single after a breakup, between flights Betty acted like a big sister to children who lived in her neighborhood and took elderly friends to doctors’ appointments. Betty had returned to Boston the previous day on a flight from San Jose, California. Now she was back at work, piling up extra trips before a Hawaiian vacation later in the week with her older sister, Cathie.
Michael scanned the room and saw Kathleen “Kathy” Nicosia, a green-eyed, no-nonsense senior flight attendant whom he’d taken to dinner recently in San Francisco. Kathy had spent thirty-two of her fifty-four years working the skies, and she’d developed a healthy skepticism about managers, a skepticism that somehow didn’t include Michael. He walked over and she gave him a hug. A whiff of her perfume lingered after Kathy and Betty headed upstairs to the passenger gates.
AROUND 7:15 A.M., on the tarmac outside the terminal at Gate 32, Logan Airport ground crew member Shawn Trotman raised his fuel nozzle and inserted it into an adapter underneath a wing of a wide-bodied Boeing 767. The silver plane had rolled into place a little more than an hour earlier, after an overnight flight from San Francisco. It stretched 180 feet long, with red, white, and blue stripes from nose to tail. The word “American” spanned the top of the first-class windows. Bold red and blue A’s, separated by a stylized blue eagle, adorned