Mohamed Atta

• 1. Introduction

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  Mohamed Atta left behind at least eight variations of his name on documents, and al-Qaeda knew him by yet another, Abd al-Rahman al-Misri. He told some people he was from the United Arab Emirates. During flight training in Florida, he claimed to belong to the Saudi royal family. The man behind those names was an Egyptian trained as an architect, and he worked as a civil engineer. He was 33 years old when he died, the oldest of the 19 hijackers in the September 11 attacks. He was also the ringleader of the plot and the hijacker-pilot of American Airlines Flight 11. This documentary asks how a quiet graduate student from Egypt became the operational leader of such a plan. It asks how a man so many people found strange kept slipping past the people who might have stopped him. It asks why scholars still disagree about what drove him. And it asks which famous stories about him, from a meeting in Prague to a secret military chart, fall apart under examination.

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• 2. A Sheltered Cairo Boyhood

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  Kafr el-Sheikh, a town in the Nile Delta, was where Atta was born on the 1st of September 1968. His father, Mohamed el-Amir Awad el-Sayed Atta, was a lawyer educated in both civil law and sharia. His mother, Buthayna Mohamed Mustafa Shiraqi, came from a wealthy family of farmers and traders and was also educated. They had married in an arranged match when she was 14. Relatives on his father's side were few, and the household kept its distance from his mother's family. In-laws called his father "austere, strict, and private," and neighbors saw a reclusive family.

  Atta was the only son, with two older sisters. One became a medical doctor and the other a professor. When he was ten, the family moved to Abdeen, a neighborhood near the center of Cairo. His father forbade him to befriend the other children on the street. With little else to do, the boy studied at home and did well in school.

  In 1985 Atta enrolled at Cairo University to study engineering. He was among its highest-scoring students, and by his senior year he had won a place in an exclusive architecture program. After graduating in 1990, he joined the Engineers Syndicate. He then spent several months at the Urban Development Center in Cairo, working on building projects and a range of architectural tasks. That same year his family moved into an eleventh-floor apartment in Giza. His marks, however, were not strong enough for the graduate program he wanted, and his father had other plans.

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• 3. Aleppo and the Skyscrapers

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  A dinner conversation in Cairo in 1992 changed the course of Atta's studies. His father insisted that he go abroad, and Atta had been taking German classes at the Goethe-Institut in Cairo. His father overheard a German couple who were visiting the capital. They ran an exchange program, and they invited Atta to continue his studies in Germany and offered him room and board. He arrived two weeks later, in July, and entered the urban planning graduate program at the Hamburg University of Technology.

  Two high school teachers hosted him at first, and the arrangement lasted six months. They found his closed-mindedness and introversion too much to bear. He followed the strictest Islamic diet and sought out the most conservative mosques. He rarely socialized, and he treated the couple's unmarried daughter, who had a young child, with disdain. By early 1993 he had moved into university housing at Centrumshaus, where he stayed until 1998. His two roommates grew annoyed at how seldom he bathed. They described his "complete, almost aggressive insularity," and he often answered a simple greeting with silence.

  Dittmar Machule, the department chair, guided Atta's work. Machule specialized in the Middle East. Atta disliked modern development, especially high-rise construction in Cairo and other ancient cities of the region. He believed the drab apartment blocks of the 1960s and 1970s ruined old neighborhoods and stripped people of privacy and dignity. To him, the block where his parents lived was "a shabby symbol of Egypt's haphazard attempts to modernize and its shameless embrace of the West." His thesis examined the ancient Syrian city of Aleppo and the conflict between Arab and modern civilization. He criticized how skyscrapers and other modernizing projects blocked common streets, altered the skyline and tore at the fabric of communities.

  In August 1994, Machule brought Atta on an archaeological expedition to Aleppo. The invitation covered three days, but Atta stayed several weeks and returned that December. In Syria he met Amal, a young Palestinian woman who worked for a planning bureau in the city. Volker Hauth, who traveled with him, described her as "attractive and self-confident." Atta and Amal seemed drawn to each other. He soon decided that her emancipation did not fit, and the episode was the nearest thing to romance in his life.

  In mid-1995, a grant from the Carl Duisberg Society sent Atta to Cairo for three months with fellow students Volker Hauth and Ralph Bodenstein. The team studied how redevelopment was affecting Islamic Cairo, the old quarter that the government was remodeling for tourism. Money was a constant concern. From 1992 he worked part-time at the urban planning firm Plankontor, which let him go in 1997 after buying a CAD system made his draughtsmanship unnecessary. He also did odd jobs, sometimes for a cleaning company and sometimes buying and selling cars. Going home looked impossible. Cairo offered few jobs, his family lacked the "right connections," and the Egyptian government had imprisoned droves of political activists. Atta did not trust it to spare someone with his beliefs. What he did with his evenings in Hamburg was changing, and a mosque called al-Quds was at the center of it.

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• 4. The Hamburg Cell

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  On the 11th of April 1996, Atta signed his last will and testament at al-Quds Mosque in Hamburg. The document declared his Muslim faith and gave 18 instructions for his burial. That same day Israel attacked Lebanon in Operation Grapes of Wrath. Atta was furious, and signing a will that offered his life was his answer. The instructions mixed Sunni funeral customs with stricter Salafist demands, including a request that mourners not "weep and cry." Mounir el-Motassadeq and a second person signed as witnesses.

  After arriving in Hamburg in 1992, Atta had grown steadily more devout. Friends described an intelligent man in whom religious conviction and political motive carried equal weight. He resented American policy in the Middle East, singling out the Oslo Accords and the Gulf War. He was bitter toward Egypt's elite, whom he believed hoarded power, and toward its government for cracking down on the Muslim Brotherhood. He was also antisemitic, believing that Jews controlled the world's media, finance and politics from New York City. In 1995 he grew a beard, both as a sign of devotion and as a political gesture, and he joined the pilgrimage to Mecca.

  Al-Quds followed a version of Sunni Islam described as "harsh, uncompromisingly fundamentalist, and resoundingly militant." Atta taught classes there and at a Turkish mosque near the Harburg district. He started a prayer group that Ahmed Maklat and Mounir el-Motassadeq joined. He also became friends with Ramzi bin al-Shibh, who sometimes taught as well.

  Then Atta began to vanish. In the summer of 1997, after leaving Plankontor, he disappeared until 1998, with no progress on his thesis. He told Machule by phone that there were family problems, adding, "Please understand, I don't want to talk about this." At the winter break in 1997 he left again for three months and said he had returned to Mecca, only 18 months after his first pilgrimage. The American journalist Terry McDermott doubted this, noting that three months is far longer than the Hajj requires. When Atta returned, he said his passport was lost and applied for a new one, a common way to erase evidence of travel to places such as Afghanistan. In spring 1998 he came back with a thick, long beard, and people who knew him found him more serious and aloof.

  By mid-1998 Atta was no longer eligible for university housing. He moved into an apartment with Said Bahaji and bin al-Shibh, which they supposedly named bayt al-ansar. That year he also packed computers into crates at a warehouse alongside Marwan al-Shehhi, bin al-Shibh and Belfas. The next winter the group settled into an apartment at Marienstrasse 54 in Harburg. There the circle behaved more like a group, meeting three or four times a week to voice anti-American feelings and discuss possible attacks. Many al-Qaeda members stayed there at various times, including Zakariya Essabar and al-Shehhi. Atta had finished his thesis by early 1999, and he formally defended it in August.

  In late 1999, Atta, al-Shehhi, Ziad Jarrah, Bahaji and bin al-Shibh planned to fight the Russians in Chechnya. Khalid al-Masri and Mohamedou Ould Salahi talked them out of it at the last minute, and they went to Afghanistan instead. On the 29th of November 1999, Atta boarded Turkish Airlines flight TK1662 from Hamburg to Istanbul and changed to flight TK1056 for Karachi, Pakistan. The al-Qaeda leader Mohammed Atef selected the men for what was called the planes operation. They were well educated, had lived in Western society, spoke some English, and could probably obtain visas. Even before bin al-Shibh arrived, Atta, al-Shehhi and Jarrah were sent to the House of Ghamdi near Osama bin Laden's home in Kandahar. Bin Laden asked for a pledge of loyalty and a commitment to suicide missions, and all four Hamburg men agreed. Atef gave them an overview, and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in Karachi covered the specifics.

  German investigators later said Atta trained at al-Qaeda camps in Afghanistan. On the 23rd of August 2002, Klaus Ulrich Kersten, then director of the Bundeskriminalamt, Germany's federal anticrime agency, gave the first official confirmation. He placed Atta there from late 1999 until early 2000 and said there was evidence of a meeting with bin Laden. In October 2006, a video surfaced. Its first chapter showed bin Laden at Tarnak Farms on the 8th of January 2000. Its second showed Atta and Jarrah reading their wills together ten days later. The Sunday Times, which obtained it, said the recording had no soundtrack and that lip readers could not decipher it. Atta and Jarrah appeared in high spirits, laughing and smiling, and sources from both al-Qaeda and the United States confirmed the video was authentic.

  Atta left Karachi on the 24th of February 2000 and flew back to Hamburg through Istanbul. Immediately afterward, he, al-Shehhi and Jarrah reported their passports stolen, possibly to discard their Afghan travel visas.

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• 5. Flight Schools in Florida

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  "We would like to start training for the career of airline professional pilots," Atta wrote on the 22nd of March 2000. His e-mail went from Germany to the Academy of Lakeland in Florida and described a small group of young men from different Arab countries. He sent 50-60 similar messages to flight schools across the United States.

  On the 17th of May he applied for a visa, and the United States embassy in Berlin issued a five-year tourist and business visa the next day. He had lived in Germany for about five years and had a strong record as a student, so he was treated favorably and not scrutinized. On the 2nd of June he took a bus from Hamburg to Prague and stayed overnight. Bin al-Shibh later explained that flying out of Prague rather than Hamburg helped operational security. Al-Shehhi left from a different place, traveling via Brussels. Atta flew to Newark International Airport on the 3rd of June, according to official reports.

  A different account puts him in the United States earlier. On the 6th of June 2002, ABC's World News Tonight aired an interview with Johnelle Bryant, a former loan officer at the Department of Agriculture in south Florida. She said that between the third week of April and the third week of May 2000, a man named Atta asked her to finance a crop-duster. He wanted a twin-engine, six-passenger aircraft with the seats removed. He insisted she write his name as ATTA, said he was an engineer from Egypt who had moved to Afghanistan, and said his dream was to attend flight school. He asked about the Pentagon and the White House. He also asked about security at the World Trade Center. He mentioned al-Qaeda, saying it could use memberships from Americans. Of bin Laden, he said, "this man would someday be known as the world's greatest leader." Bryant contacted the authorities after recognizing him in news reports, and law enforcement officials said she passed a lie-detector exam. Her dates fall before his official entry into the country.

  In June, Atta and al-Shehhi stayed in hotels and rented rooms in New York City on short terms. Jarrah arrived on the 27th of June, and the three searched for schools, visiting Airman Flight School in Norman, Oklahoma, on the 3rd of July. Days later they reached Venice, Florida. Atta and al-Shehhi opened accounts at SunTrust Bank and received wire transfers from Ali Abdul Aziz Ali, a nephew of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in the United Arab Emirates. On the 6th of July, Atta, Jarrah and al-Shehhi enrolled at Huffman Aviation in its Accelerated Pilot Program.

  Atta and al-Shehhi first stayed in a spare room with Huffman's bookkeeper and his wife. After a week they were asked to leave for being rude. They moved to a small house in nearby Nokomis and stayed six months. Atta trained almost daily, and by the end of July both men had flown solo. He earned a private pilot certificate in September. The pair then switched to Jones Aviation in Sarasota, where they struggled to follow instructions and were very upset after failing a Stage 1 exam. They asked about multi-engine planes and said they wanted to move quickly because jobs awaited them at home. In mid-October they returned to Huffman. Atta earned his instrument rating in November and a commercial pilot's license from the Federal Aviation Administration in December.

  On the 22nd of December, Atta and al-Shehhi applied to Eagle International for large-jet and simulator training on the McDonnell Douglas DC-9 and Boeing 737-300. Four days later, their rented Piper Cherokee lost engine power and needed a tow on a taxiway at Miami International Airport. On the 29th and the 30th of December they practiced on a Boeing 727 simulator at Opa-locka Airport. On the 31st of December they trained on a Boeing 767 simulator at Pan Am International. In November and December, Atta also ordered cockpit videos by mail from Sporty's Pilot Shop in Batavia, Ohio, covering the Boeing 747-200, 757-200, 767-300ER and the Airbus A320. Phone records show that on the 2nd of January 2001 he called the Moroccan embassy in Washington, just before al-Shehhi flew to that country.

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• 6. Rehearsals and a Summit

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  On the 4th of January 2001, Atta flew to Spain to coordinate with bin al-Shibh, and he returned to the United States on the 10th. He then traveled to Lawrenceville, Georgia. There he and al-Shehhi visited a health club, and Atta flew out of Briscoe Field with a pilot over the Atlanta area.

  On the 11th of April, Atta and al-Shehhi rented an apartment in Coral Springs, Florida, for $840 per month. From there Atta helped the "muscle" hijackers arrive. These men were meant to subdue passengers and crew so the hijacker-pilots could take over. On the 16th of April he received a citation for driving without a valid license, and he picked up his own license in Lauderdale Lakes on the 2nd of May. He owned a red 1989 Pontiac Grand Prix.

  On the 11th of May, Atta visited Logan International Airport in Boston with another man and took many photographs and videos inside. Airport employees grew suspicious and alerted security, but the alarm was ignored. One technical worker complained about Atta and spoke with him, but did not stop him. Late in June he flew from Fort Lauderdale to Boston, then San Francisco, then Las Vegas. On the 28th of June, he landed at McCarran International Airport to meet the three other pilots. The next day he registered at the Econo Lodge on South Las Vegas Boulevard and paid cash for a room at $49.50 a night.

  On the 7th of July 2001, Atta flew Swissair Flight 117 from Miami to Zurich, where a security camera filmed him withdrawing 1700 Swiss francs from an ATM. At the airport shop he bought two Swiss Army knives and some chocolate. He reached Madrid that afternoon at 4:45 and checked into the Hotel Diana Cazadora. The next morning he rented a silver Hyundai Accent, drove toward Tarragona and picked up bin al-Shibh at the airport in Reus. They spent a night at the Hotel Mònica in Cambrils. After that, investigators found no hotel stays, signed receipts or credit card stubs for them. They believe the two men met at a safe house provided by other al-Qaeda operatives. Clues link the stay to Imad Eddin Barakat Yarkas, known as Abu Dahdah, and to Amer el Azizi. The journalist Yosri Fouda believes Bahaji and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed may also have attended.

  The 9/11 Commission reconstructed the meeting from interrogations of bin al-Shibh after his arrest in September 2002. Bin al-Shibh passed along bin Laden's wish that the attacks happen as soon as possible, since bin Laden worried about having so many operatives in the United States. Atta confirmed that all the muscle hijackers had arrived safely and said he needed five to six more weeks. Bin Laden also asked that other operatives not learn the date until the last minute. The two men ruled out striking a nuclear plant. Bin Laden's list named the United States Capitol, the Pentagon and the World Trade Center, which he saw as "symbols of America." Atta said that any hijacker who could not reach his target should crash the plane. They also discussed Atta's difficulties with Jarrah, and bin al-Shibh feared Jarrah might abandon the plan. The Commission speculated that Zacarias Moussaoui was being trained as a possible replacement. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed said Moussaoui was meant for a second wave that never came. Atta flew back on the 19th of July through Atlanta to Fort Lauderdale.

  On the 25th of July, Atta drove Jarrah to Miami International Airport for a flight to Germany. In early August he is believed to have waited at Orlando International Airport for Mohammed al-Qahtani, the suspected "20th hijacker," whom immigration officers held as suspicious. After Qahtani was refused entry, Atta apparently used a payphone to call a number linked to al-Qaeda. He twice flew to Las Vegas on "surveillance" flights, rehearsing how the attacks would unfold. All summer he met monthly with Nawaf al-Hazmi to review the operation's status.

  On the 23rd of August, Atta's driver's license was revoked after he missed traffic court. The same day, the Mossad gave the CIA 19 names of United States residents it suspected of planning an imminent attack. Only four are public, and they include Atta, al-Shehhi, al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Mihdhar. Nobody knows whether the 19 names matched the 19 hijackers.

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• 7. The Last Morning

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  On the 10th of September 2001, Atta collected al-Omari at the Milner Hotel in Boston and drove a rented Nissan Altima to a Comfort Inn in South Portland, Maine. The pair made two ATM withdrawals and stopped at a Wal-Mart. The FBI later said two Middle Eastern men were seen in a Pizza Hut parking lot where Atta is known to have eaten that day.

  At 5:40 the next morning, the two men reached the Portland International Jetport and left their rental car in the lot. At 6:00 they boarded a Colgan Air flight to Logan International Airport in Boston. In Portland, a screening system called CAPPS selected Atta. His checked bags faced extra explosives screening, but he faced no added scrutiny at the passenger checkpoint. The connection in Terminal B had a quirk. The gates for the two flights were not linked inside security, so passengers had to go outdoors and enter another building. Planners had overlooked that Atta would have to pass through screening again. A ticket staffer in Portland felt uneasy at his anger when told of the extra screening. The staffer did not act, worrying about racially profiling him.

  At 6:45 a.m., Atta took a call from Marwan al-Shehhi, apparently to confirm the attacks were ready. He checked in for American Airlines Flight 11, passed through security and boarded, taking business class seat 8D. At 7:59 the plane left Boston for Los Angeles with 81 passengers. Roughly fifteen minutes later, at about 8:14, the hijacking began. The pilots stopped responding to air traffic control and the plane left its route. At 8:21 the transponder went off. Pilots of United Airlines Flight 175 heard a transmission saying, "Everyone, stay in your seats." Investigators concluded it came from the cockpit of Flight 11 and that Atta was probably the speaker. Flight attendant Betty Ong told American Airlines by phone that the cockpit was unresponsive and inaccessible.

  At 8:24:38, air traffic controllers heard a voice believed to be Atta's say: "We have some planes. Just stay quiet and you will be OK. We are returning to the airport." He had apparently meant to speak on the cabin intercom but pressed the wrong switch. That tipped off controllers that the flight had been hijacked. Seconds later he said, "Nobody move, everything will be OK. If you try to make any moves you'll endanger yourself and the airplane. Just stay quiet." About a minute after, he turned the plane south toward New York City. At 8:33:59 came the last transmission from Flight 11: "Nobody move, please. We are going back to the airport. Don't try to make any stupid moves."

  At 8:46:40, Atta flew the plane into the North Tower of the World Trade Center between floors 93 and 99. Everyone aboard died, along with hundreds inside the tower. The impact cut every escape route from floor 92 upward, trapping more than 800 people. Nobody above the 91st floor got out before the tower fell 102 minutes later, at 10:28. More than 1,600 people died in the impact, the fire and the collapse. That makes it the deadliest air crash and the deadliest terrorist attack ever recorded.

  Because the Portland flight had been delayed, Atta's luggage never made it onto Flight 11. Investigators recovered his bags at Logan. They held airline uniforms, flight manuals and a copy of his will. They also held a document titled The Last Night, divided into three sections. The first is a fifteen-point list of instructions for a martyr's last night. The second covers travel to the plane. The third covers the time between boarding and martyrdom.

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• 8. Doubts and Denials

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  Within days of the attacks, the name Mohamed Atta was being confused with another man's. Mahmoud Mahmoud Atta, a native Jordanian 14 years older, had bombed an Israeli bus in the West Bank in 1986, killing one person and badly injuring three. He was deported from Venezuela to the United States, extradited to Israel, convicted and sentenced to life. The Israeli Supreme Court later overturned his extradition and freed him. Other reports claimed Mohamed Atta attended the International Officers School at Maxwell Air Force Base in Alabama. The Washington Post quoted an Air Force official who said birth dates 20 years off suggested "we are probably not talking about the same people."

  A meeting in Prague proved just as slippery. Czech Interior Ministry officials said Atta met an Iraqi intelligence agent, Ahmed Khalil Ibrahim Samir al-Ani, there on the 8th of April 2001. The claim reached the FBI as unevaluated raw intelligence. Intelligence officials have concluded it did not happen. A Pakistani businessman named Mohammed Atta had arrived in Prague from Saudi Arabia on the 31st of May 2000, which may have added to the confusion. The Egyptian Atta reached Prague by bus from Germany on the 2nd of June 2000 and left the next day. Some Czech officials say the source was an Arab informant who came forward only after Atta's photograph appeared in newspapers worldwide.

  In 2005, Army Lieutenant Colonel Anthony Shaffer and Congressman Curt Weldon alleged that Able Danger, a Defense Department data-mining project, had charted Atta as part of a Brooklyn-based al-Qaeda cell in early 2000. Shaffer relied largely on the recollection of Navy Captain Scott Phillpott. Phillpott later recanted, saying he was "convinced that Atta was not on the chart that we had." The Defense Department Inspector General's report said Phillpott may have exaggerated his certainty because he supported using Able Danger's techniques against terrorism. Five other witnesses told journalists that the report distorted or omitted what they had said. Their complaint centered on evidence that the project had tracked Atta years before 9/11.

  Scholars also disagree about his motives. The political psychologist Jerrold Post suggests the hijackers followed al-Qaeda's orders, doing whatever bin Laden said was right for the cause. The political scientist Robert Pape argues that Atta was committed to a political cause and psychologically normal, and "not readily characterized as depressed." Adam Lankford, a criminal justice professor, found evidence that Atta was suicidal. He points to isolation, depression, guilt, shame, hopelessness and rage resembling the struggles of people who commit murder-suicide. On this view, Atta's beliefs shaped the method and the target but were not the root cause.

  His own family rejects the entire story. Atta's father insisted his son was a quiet boy devoted to architecture and uninvolved in politics. He said he had spoken to him by phone on the 12th of September 2001. On the 24th of September 2001 he said, "My son is gone. He is now with God. The Mossad killed him." He blamed the Mossad and the United States government for framing his son. In interviews with Bild am Sonntag in late 2002, he said his son was alive and hiding, and that American Christians were responsible. In 2021, on the 20th anniversary, Atta's 79-year-old mother told the Spanish newspaper El Independiente that her son had no part in the attacks. She said she felt he was in Afghanistan.

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