Fall and Rise: The Story of 9/11

WHILE GOVERNMENT AND intelligence officials tried to get a handle on bin Laden before and after his February 1998 fatwa, average Americans remained largely ignorant of him and his followers. For one thing, there was bin Laden’s country of residence. Among journalists, Afghanistan had long been shorthand for any subject too far away for many Americans to care about.

When bin Laden’s name did appear in the American media, journalists focused mainly on his wealth. Usually he’d be described something like this: “[A] multimillionaire Saudi dissident whom the State Department has labeled ‘one of the most significant financial sponsors of Islamic extremist activities in the world today.’” Rarely did news accounts suggest that he might pose a direct threat to the United States as a terrorist leader, although a 1997 article in the New York Times tiptoed in that direction, noting that “recent reports” indicated that bin Laden had paid for a house in Pakistan that sheltered the mastermind of a 1993 World Trade Center truck bombing that killed six people and injured more than a thousand. But in general, at the time of the fatwa it would have been easy for a well-read American to claim little knowledge and less concern about bin Laden. Before he issued his declaration of war, his name had appeared in a grand total of fifteen articles in the New York Times, sometimes only in passing. Most other American news organizations mentioned him less, if at all.

Even bin Laden’s February 1998 fatwa against Americans passed unnoticed by most U.S. news organizations. The first clear reference in the Times came nearly six months later, as an offhand line in a story about a search for suspects in the bombings of the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania: “Earlier this year, Mr. bin Laden and a group of extremist Muslim clerics called on their followers to kill Americans.” The story quickly moved on, mentioning only that bin Laden was the prime suspect in the 1996 bombing of Khobar Towers, an apartment complex in Saudi Arabia, that killed nineteen American airmen. However, a New York Times article in 1999 about the embassy bombings reversed course, sharply downplaying the apparent threat he posed. The story read, in part:

In their war against Mr. bin Laden, American officials portray him as the world’s most dangerous terrorist. But reporters for The New York Times and the PBS program “Frontline,” working in cooperation, have found him to be less a commander of terrorists than an inspiration for them. Enemies and supporters, from members of the Saudi opposition to present and former American intelligence officials, say he may not be as globally powerful as some American officials have asserted.

Yet in the years before 9/11, a few journalists offered darker perspectives about bin Laden’s potential ability to violently carry out his fatwa. The Washington Post reporter Walter Pincus wrote a pointed story two days after bin Laden’s 1998 declaration of war that cited a CIA memo that said U.S. intelligence officials took the threat seriously. Another prescient outlier was ABC’s John Miller, who interviewed bin Laden in May 1998 at a training camp in Afghanistan. In the interview, bin Laden repeated his fatwa and said he would not distinguish between civilian and military targets. Writing about it later, Miller ruefully acknowledged that his interview barely registered with the public: “[W]e had our little story, and a few weeks later, in a few minutes of footage, Osama bin Laden would say ‘hi’ to America. Not many people would pay attention. Just another Arab terrorist.”

One scholar who took serious note of the fatwa was Bernard Lewis, an eminent if controversial intellectual who studied relations between Islam and the West and coined the phrase “clash of civilizations.” Writing in 1998 in Foreign Affairs magazine, Lewis concluded:

To most Americans, the declaration [by bin Laden] is a travesty, a gross distortion of the nature and purpose of the American presence in Arabia. They should also know that for many—perhaps most—Muslims, the declaration is an equally grotesque travesty of the nature of Islam and even of its doctrine of jihad… . At no point do the basic texts of Islam enjoin terrorism and murder. At no point do they even consider the random slaughter of uninvolved bystanders. Nevertheless, some Muslims are ready to approve, and a few of them to apply, the declaration’s extreme interpretation of their religion. Terrorism requires only a few.

Lewis’s warning went largely unheeded.

In the summer of 2001, not everyone in the United States felt confident in the state of the nation, but many relished, or took for granted, the privileges of life in the last superpower at the dawn of the twenty-first century. They had enjoyed the longest uninterrupted economic boom in the nation’s history, and the spread of American culture, political ideas, and business interests to the world’s farthest reaches seemed destined to continue indefinitely. Almost none lost sleep over threats emanating from a cave in Afghanistan. A Gallup poll taken on September 10, 2001, found that fewer than 1 percent of Americans considered terrorism to be the nation’s No. 1 concern.

But they didn’t know that a countdown had already begun. Nineteen bin Laden devotees, radicalized young Arab men living in the United States, awoke on September 11, 2001, determined to fulfill the fatwa. In twenty-four hours, the poll results would change, along with everything else.

CHAPTER 1

“QUIET’S A GOOD THING”

September 10, 2001

CAPTAIN JOHN OGONOWSKI

American Airlines Flight 11

“Dad, I need help with my math!”

John Ogonowski’s eldest daughter, Laura, called out to her father the second he stepped inside his family’s farmhouse in rural Dracut, Massachusetts.

“Laura!” yelled her mother, Margaret “Peg” Ogonowski, in response. “Let him walk in the door!”

Fifty years old, six feet tall and country-boy handsome, John gazed at his wife and sixteen-year-old daughter. His smile etched deep crinkles in the ruddy skin around his blue eyes. Dinner hour was near, and Peg suspected that John felt equal parts tired and happy to be home. As darkness fell on September 10, 2001, he’d just driven from Boston’s Logan International Airport after piloting an American Airlines flight from Los Angeles. A day earlier, he’d flown west on American Flight 11, a daily nonstop from Boston to Los Angeles.

After twenty-three years as a commercial pilot, John’s normal routine upon returning home was to go directly to the master bedroom and strip out of his navy-blue captain’s uniform with the silver stripes on the sleeves. He’d pull on grease-stained jeans and a work shirt, then head to the enormous barn on the family’s 130-acre farm, located thirty miles north of Boston, near the New Hampshire border. Quiet by nature, content working with his calloused hands, John inhaled the perfume of fresh hay bales and unwound by tackling one of the endless jobs that came with being a farmer who also flew jets.

But on this day, to Peg’s surprise, John broke his routine. Changing clothes and doing chores would wait. Still in uniform, he sat at the kitchen counter with Laura and her geometry problems. “Let’s remember,” he often told his girls, “math is fun.” They’d roll their eyes, but they liked to hear him say it.

Homework finished, the family enjoyed a dinner of chicken cutlets, capped by John’s favorite dessert, ice cream. Also at dinner that night were Peg’s parents, visiting from New York; his father’s brother Al, who lived nearby; and their younger daughters Caroline, fourteen, and Mary, eleven.

At one point, Peg noticed something missing from John’s uniform shirt. “Did you go to work without your epaulets?” she asked. “I had to stop for gas,” John said. He’d removed the shoulder decorations so he wouldn’t look showy, like one of those pilots who seemed to expect the world to salute them.

John’s modesty and quiet confidence had attracted Peg nineteen years earlier, when she was a junior flight attendant for American. John had joined the airline as a flight engineer after serving in the Air Force during the Vietnam War, when he flew C-141 transport planes back and forth across the Pacific. Some of his return flights bore flag-draped coffins. In his early years at American, John was a rare bird: an unmarried pilot, easy on the eyes, respectful to all. On a flight out of Phoenix, a savvy senior flight attendant urged Peg to speak with him. When they landed in Boston he got her number.

They were married in less than a year. By the end of the decade John had been promoted to captain, Peg had risen in seniority, and they had three daughters. All that, plus their White Gate Farm, growing hay and picking fruit from three hundred blueberry bushes and an orchard of a hundred fifty peach trees John planted himself. Every spring, they put in pumpkins and corn to sell at John’s parents’ farm a couple of miles down the road, where he’d learned to drive a tractor at the age of eight. Peg often joked that the classic John Deere in their barn was her pilot husband’s other jet.

John and Peg continued to work for American Airlines throughout their marriage, with John flying a dozen days a month and Peg working about the same. They alternated flight schedules so one or the other could be with the girls. When that failed, their families pitched in. John had spent a chunk of his career flying international routes, but the overnight flights wore him down, and he’d recently been recertified on the Boeing 767, the wide-bodied pride of American’s domestic fleet. Lately he’d been flying regularly on the Boston–Los Angeles route, often on Flight 11, which Peg had flown hundreds of times as well.

John was scheduled to fly again the next morning, another six-hour trip to California, but he decided he didn’t want to leave home so soon after returning from the West Coast. Also, federal agriculture officials and a team from Tufts University were coming to the farm in the morning to discuss a program John felt passionate about. He and Peg had set aside a dozen acres to allow Cambodian immigrant farmers to grow bok choy, water spinach, pigweed, and other traditional Asian vegetables, to sell at markets and to feed their families. John plowed for the immigrants and rarely collected the two-hundred-dollar monthly rent. He built greenhouses for early spring planting, provided water from the farm’s pond, and taught the new Americans about New England’s unforgiving soil, crop-killing pests, and short planting season. Soon the Ogonowskis’ White Gate Farm was designated the first “mentor farm” for immigrants. When a reporter stopped by, John heaped credit on the Cambodians: “These guys are putting more care and attention into their one acre than most Yankee farmers put into their entire hundred acres.”

After dinner, John went to the desktop computer in the TV room. He logged in to the American Airlines scheduling system, hoping that another pilot wanted to pick up an extra trip. A match would turn John’s onscreen schedule green, allowing him to stay on the farm on September 11. He tried several times, with the same result each time.

“I’m just getting red lights,” he told Peg.

The farm tour would go on without him, while once again John would serve as captain of American Airlines Flight 11, nonstop from Boston to Los Angeles.

PETER, SUE KIM, AND CHRISTINE HANSON

United Airlines Flight 175

In 1989, a vibrant young woman slalomed through a house party, weaving through the crowd to avoid a determined young man with red dreadlocks, freckles, and a closet stuffed with tie-dyed T-shirts. Peter Hanson was cute, but Sue Kim wasn’t interested in a latter-day hippie desperate to convince her that the music of the Grateful Dead was comparable to the work of Mozart.

This sort of thing happened often to Sue, a first-generation Korean American. It made sense that a curious, intense man like Peter would meet her at a party and be smitten by her intelligence and effervescence. Sue’s easy laugh made people imagine that she’d lived a charmed life. But she hadn’t.

When Sue was two, her overworked parents sent her from their Los Angeles home to live with her grandmother in Korea. She returned to the United States four years later and learned that she had two younger brothers, who hadn’t been sent away from their parents. Her mother died when Sue was fifteen, and she helped to raise her brothers. Later her father committed suicide after being diagnosed with cancer. Beneath her placid surface, Sue craved the bonds of a secure family.

After the house party, Peter engineered ways to see Sue again while he pursued a master’s degree in business administration. When Peter thought that he’d gained romantic traction, he cut off his dreadlocks, stuffed them in a bag, and gave them to his mother, Eunice. She understood: Peter wanted to show Sue he’d be good marriage material. It marked a sharp turn toward responsibility for the free-spirited twenty-three-year-old. His parents worried that perhaps he wasn’t quite ready for marriage, but he couldn’t wait.

“If I don’t nab her now, she won’t be there,” Peter told his mother. Eunice accompanied him on a shopping trip for an engagement ring. Sue said yes, accepting not only Peter but also his devotion to the Grateful Dead. Their wedding bands were antiques, handed down from the parents of Peter’s father, Lee.

Peter earned an MBA from Boston University and became vice president of sales for a Massachusetts computer software company. He stayed close with his parents, with whom he’d traveled the world as a boy and occasionally enjoyed his favorite band’s contact-high concerts. Even as he accepted adult responsibilities, Peter remained a prankster. One day while answering phones at the local Conservation Commission office where she worked, Eunice heard a stern male voice demanding permission to build a structure next to a pond on his property. Eunice calmly explained the review process and the permits needed, but the caller raged about his rights as a landowner. As the rant wore on, Eunice realized it was Peter.

Meanwhile, Sue developed into an impressive academic scientist. She’d worked her way through a biology degree at the University of California, Berkeley, then moved to Boston for a master’s degree in medical sciences. With Peter’s encouragement, Sue pursued a PhD in immunology, working with specially bred mice to explore the role of certain molecules in asthma and AIDS. Sue was scheduled to defend her dissertation that fall, but approval was a foregone conclusion. Her doctoral adviser envisioned Sue joining the faculty at Boston University.

Peter and Sue juggled their professional lives with taking care of their daughter, Christine, who was born in February 1999. She looked like Sue in miniature, a hug magnet with Peter’s love of music. Christine’s middle name was Lee, for her paternal grandfather. Quietly, Sue stocked up on pregnancy tests, hoping to give Christine a little brother and Peter’s parents a grandson.

Lee and Eunice visited often from their Connecticut home. When Eunice arrived one day with a broken foot, Christine yelled, “I help you, Namma! Wait here!” She ran upstairs and returned with a colorful Band-Aid she applied to Eunice’s cast. Lee found joy in watching Christine work with Peter in the yard. The little girl promised the young trees that she and her daddy would help them grow big and strong. When they said grace before meals, Christine insisted on a song from a television show about Barney the purple dinosaur: “I love you, you love me, we’re a happy family. With a great big hug, and a kiss from me to you, won’t you say you love me too?” If her grandparents missed a word, Christine made them start over.

Early in September, Peter needed to fly to California on business, so they decided to turn the trip into a family vacation and a visit with Sue’s grandmother and brothers. The weekend before the September 11 flight, Christine told Eunice of her excitement about the upcoming trip, which included plans for an outing to Disneyland. During one phone call, Christine reported to her grandmother that she was going to California to see Mickey Mouse and Pluto. Then Christine expressed an even stronger desire: “I want to go to your house, Namma!”

On the night of September 10, Christine slept in her new big-girl bed with her favorite stuffed animal, Peter Rabbit holding a carrot. Before she left home the next morning, she’d tuck Peter under the covers, to keep him safe until she returned.

BARBARA OLSON

American Airlines Flight 77

Under the hot lights of the C-SPAN television show Washington Journal, host Peter Slen flipped open a copy of Washingtonian magazine for September 2001. The camera zoomed in to a headline, THE 100 MOST POWERFUL WOMEN IN WASHINGTON. Then it swung across the set to find conservative firebrand Barbara Olson, her telegenic smile dialed to full blast, her gleaming blond hair draped down the back of her red blazer. Slen asked Barbara: “Why are you listed as an influential political insider?”

Barbara knew perfectly well, but she answered modestly: “I don’t know. That’s where they put me.” She changed the subject to a recent lunch where the magazine’s honorees discussed who might be the first female president. Overwhelmingly, the capital’s most powerful women named Hillary Clinton. Virtually alone in dissent was Barbara, who had just completed her second book lacerating the U.S. senator from New York and former First Lady.

“What does it mean to have influence in this town?” Slen asked. “How do you get it? Is it power, is it position, is it money, is it marriage?”

The question carried a sexist dagger, missed by audience members who didn’t know that Barbara’s husband was among the most powerful lawyers in the country: U.S. Solicitor General Ted Olson, the top legal strategist for the White House. President George W. Bush had given him the job after Olson had argued successfully before the U.S. Supreme Court to end the recount of votes in Florida from the 2000 election, a decision that led to Bush becoming president.

Barbara ignored the jab, replying with a laugh that long work paved the road to influence. She’d grown used to questions about whether a glamorous woman who drove a Jaguar and had a weakness for stiletto heels deserved her place at the center of the political world. But at forty-five, having earned a partnership in a prominent law firm, Barbara drew confidence from the knowledge that before marrying Ted, she’d been a professional ballet dancer, worked her way through law school, and prosecuted drug cases in the U.S. attorney’s office in Washington. She’d also served as chief investigative counsel for the U.S. House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.

During her five-year marriage to Ted, his third and her second, Barbara had seen her stock rise further as half of a Washington power couple. They hosted enormous parties for the conservative intelligentsia at their home in Virginia. They shared a love for Shakespeare, poetry, the opera, modern art, and their Australian sheepdogs: Reagan, for the president, and Maggie, for British prime minister Margaret Thatcher.

When the C-SPAN show took calls from viewers, Barbara’s partisan nature was on full display. After lavish praise from one caller who loved her bestselling book about Hillary Clinton, Hell to Pay, another caller laced into Barbara for criticizing the Clintons. Weeks earlier, Barbara had apologized in the Washington Post for describing the former president’s late mother as a “barfly who gets used by men.”

The caller scolded her: “Miss Olson, you have to learn how to be more human. You’re a very evil person… . You’re not going to survive too long. You got too much hate and the devil in you.”

Barbara smiled through the attack, though not as widely as before. Her blue eyes dimmed momentarily as she blinked away the criticism and the ominous prediction. “Well, we do have a First Amendment,” Olson replied. “Everybody has a right to their own opinion. I don’t have hate in me.”

After the show ended, Barbara rushed on with her life. She needed to pack for a flight to Los Angeles, for her next performance as a face of conservatism: she was booked to appear on Politically Incorrect with Bill Maher. Her flight was set for Monday, September 10.

Barbara decided the schedule didn’t work for her. Though it would require a dash from the airport to Maher’s studio, she decided to push back her flight until the next day. Ted Olson would turn sixty-one years old on Tuesday, September 11. Before flying to California, Barbara wanted to wake up beside him, to wish him a happy birthday.

CEECEE LYLES

United Airlines Flight 93

As midnight approached on Monday, September 10, CeeCee Lyles lay on a futon bed in a tiny apartment she shared with four other United Airlines flight attendants near Newark International Airport in New Jersey. She clutched a teddy bear she’d named Lorne and talked on her cellphone to the bear’s namesake, her husband, Lorne Lyles, back home in Florida.

At thirty-three, five foot seven, CeeCee had flashing brown eyes and a love of fine clothes that complemented her athletic figure. Years earlier, Lorne noticed her when each of them was taking a son to baseball practice. He nearly fell out of his car when she walked past. “Man! She is beautiful,” he thought.

CeeCee had traveled a winding road to happiness with Lorne, and the cellphone was a lifeline when her work took her away from him. They’d talk for hours, often five or six times a day, sometimes as many as ten to fifteen. The comfort of the other’s voice mattered as much as the subjects: their sons, two each from previous relationships; her work in airports and airplanes; his, as a police officer on the overnight shift in Fort Myers, Florida. Beyond work and kids, they’d talk about bills and chores and missing each other. As Lorne would say, they’d talk and talk, about “everything and nothing.”

CeeCee had become a United flight attendant less than a year earlier, at Lorne’s urging, after he recognized the emotional toll of her previous jobs, as a corrections officer in Miami and then as a police detective on the streets of Fort Pierce, Florida. When they began dating, Lorne was a police dispatcher in Fort Pierce, so to some extent they’d fallen in love over the airwaves, enchanted by the sound of each other’s voice.

During her six years on the police force, CeeCee had put her good looks to use when she went undercover to portray a prostitute, but she got more satisfaction from helping women and children victimized by crime and drugs. She’d often stop by the Bible Way Soul Saving Station, where her uncle was the pastor, and she became a role model at a Christian women’s shelter founded by two of her aunts. Her kindness had limits, though, replaced by toughness when dealing with criminals. CeeCee excelled in an Advanced Officer Survival course that included hand-to-hand fighting and takedown moves. Before marrying Lorne in May 2000, CeeCee picked up extra shifts and worked second and third jobs to support her sons, Jerome and Jevon, around whom her life revolved. She kept them focused on school, taught them to play baseball, and expected them to fight for loose balls on the basketball court.

Becoming a flight attendant allowed CeeCee to fulfill her dreams of traveling, meeting new people, and trading hardened criminals for the occasional drunken businessman. As a perk of the job, she and her family took sightseeing trips on days off and filled available seats on flights to Indianapolis, where Lorne’s two sons, Justin and Jordan, lived with their mother. They’d done just that the previous weekend, then returned home so CeeCee’s sons could be in school on Monday.