[0] The Day That Changed America.

September 11 dawned bright and clear, but was soon darkened by terror. The story of a survivor, a killer and the vice president whose lives collided in hours of horror and heroism

Except for the place where they died, Bill Feehan and Mohamed Atta would seem to have had absolutely nothing in common. Feehan rescued people; Atta killed them. As a lifelong firefighter who rose to become first deputy commissioner of the New York City Fire Department, Feehan was directly or indirectly responsible for saving thousands of lives. As a suicidal terrorist who flew American Airlines Flight 11 into the North Tower of the World Trade Center, Atta murdered thousands, including Bill Feehan, who was helping a woman at the base of the North Tower when the building collapsed on him. Any suggestion of moral equivalence between the two men is repugnant. And yet, it must be said, both believed in the rightness of their causes with absolute certainty. It might be more comforting to think that Atta was stark raving mad, but true madmen, who are usually dysfunctional, don't work with Atta's calm purpose. No one wants to think that even a seminormal human being--indeed, nearly a score of them--could do what the terrorists did on September 11. In a world of moral relativism, we prefer psychological explanations; no one wishes to stare directly into the face of evil. Virginia DiChiara did have a premonition that something wicked was on the way. DiChiara, whose office was on the 101st floor of the North Tower, had worried that the terrorists might come back to finish off the World Trade Center. She had been a block away, working at Bankers Trust at 130 Liberty Street, when terrorists bombed the WTC in 1993. But in 2000, when she got a big job as director of audit for Cantor Fitzgerald, a bond-trading firm at the top of the North Tower, she tried to put her fears out of her mind. Her corner office looked out on the Statue of Liberty far below, at the brilliant sunsets and, in the distance, to the Jersey shore, where she liked to go boating in the summer. Once a carefree sun worshiper, DiChiara will never soak up the rays in the same way again; on September 11 she sustained third-degree burns on much of her body. She had gone to hell and then, slowly, painfully, come back. Denial is an ordinary and understandable response to calculated mass murder. Americans, like most people, don't want to see what they don't wish to know. Warning about "grand terrorism"--terror with weapons of mass destruction--and calling for "homeland defense" has been an academic subspecialty for years. Foundation and government reports warned that it was only a matter of time before the terrorists struck America in a way that could claim thousands of lives. Yet at the White House, homeland defense was not the first job Vice President Dick Cheney got when the new administration took office last January. Cheney spent several months running a task force to solve an energy crisis that, it turns out, was probably exaggerated. His staff was just formally turning to the subject of homeland defense on September 11, when the terrorists hit. To be sure, few could have guessed at the brazenness and resourcefulness of Atta or Al Qaeda, the terrorist network that backed him and the 18 other suicide attackers. The September 11 plots had been methodically thought out and meticulously planned over at least two years. And yet a reconstruction of Atta's movements in the months leading up to the attacks shows that the terror ringleader, for all his careful planning, made numerous small blunders. His trip-ups could have been tipoffs--if only Americans had been watching. The fog of war, a term now much in vogue, was thick around the first battle in the new terror war. As FDNY First Deputy Commissioner Bill Feehan mustered his troops to combat the blazes at the Twin Towers, there appears, in perfect hindsight, to have been an almost willful blindness toward the risk that the towers might collapse. Likewise, in the Presidential Emergency Operations Center (PEOC), the bunker buried far below the White House where Vice President Cheney commanded the initial U.S. response, misinformation overwhelmed the facts. At one point, NEWSWEEK has learned, Cheney gave an order to shoot down a hijacked civilian airliner that didn't exist--a phantom created by panic and garbled communications. That is not to say that Feehan and Cheney were anything but cool and steady in crisis. Indeed, they showed true sangfroid at some very frightening moments. We celebrate many such tales of courage on September 11--perhaps the most moving of which is the passenger revolt on the hijacked United Flight 93 that may have saved the U.S. Capitol or the White House from destruction (NEWSWEEK, Dec. 3). And there continue to be quieter, more private acts of defiance and human resolve, like the bravery shown by DiChiara, the burn victim from September 11 whose everyday life has been transformed but whose fierce love of life is undimmed. This is the story of September 11, the day that changed America, told through four characters whose lives collided in those once unthinkable hours: Mohamed Atta, Bill Feehan, Virginia DiChiara and Dick Cheney. It is a story of good and evil, despair and shock, determination and courage. It begins with the strange obsession of a young Egyptian engineer more than a decade ago. I. A Killer's Resentments Mohamed Atta's otherwise austere apartment in Hamburg, Germany, had a curious decoration. On his wall hung a poster of the black-and-white photograph taken by Lewis Hine in 1930 of construction workers perched on a beam of the Empire State Building high above New York. The city far below looks dwarfed and inconsequential. According to his teachers and former classmates, Atta believed that high-rise buildings had desecrated his homeland. In the ancient cities of the Middle East, the time-honored mode of construction was to build one- and two-story houses with private courtyards. The construction of towering, impersonal and usually ugly apartment blocks in the 1960s and '70s, Atta believed, had ruined the old neighborhoods, robbing their inhabitants of privacy and dignity. It may have been particularly galling to Atta that his own family had moved into an 11th-floor apartment in just such a hulking monstrosity in 1990, as he was graduating with an engineering degree from Cairo University. To Atta, the boxy building was a shabby symbol of Egypt's haphazard attempts to modernize and its shameless embrace of the West. Atta burned with desire to restore the old glories of Islam--though peaceably, at least at first. It was after the assassination of Anwar Sadat in 1981 that Atta, then 13, started a daily regimen of prayer. While in engineering school, Atta came under the influence of the Muslim Brotherhood, a movement aimed at creating an Islamic state and curbing Western influence. The Muslim Brotherhood officially condemns violence, though militants often emerge from its ranks. In Egypt in the late '80s, engineering schools, full of disillusioned students, were prime recruiting grounds for the Muslim Brotherhood; in the country's stagnant state-run economy, young engineering grads could look forward to low-paying, dead-end jobs in a bloated bureaucracy. Atta's parents were more ambitious for their children. His overbearing father, the elder Mohamed Al-Amir Atta, who grandly but preposterously described himself to NEWSWEEK as "one of the most important lawyers in Cairo," wanted his only son to study abroad. Only by learning German--"the language of engineers"--could young Atta catch up to his accomplished sisters, both of whom had doctorates. His son should go to Germany, the father decided. At first, Atta resisted; he did not want to be separated from his mother. Even in his 20s, the short, slight Atta would sometimes sit in his mother's lap. "I used to tell her that she was raising him as a girl," the father scoffed, "but she never stopped pampering him." There was another problem, more than a little ironic in retrospect: Atta hated flying. "My daughter, who is a doctor, used to get him medicine for every journey, to combat the cramps and the vomiting he feels every time he gets on a plane," said the father. Atta was precise in his work. Laboring part time as a draftsman for Plankontor, an urban-planning firm in Hamburg, while he studied for his master's, he was obsessive about his drawings--extremely detailed, color-coded diagrams in fine ink. He rarely showed his feelings, but on a trip back to Cairo he revealed his disgust with the Egyptian government to a colleague, Ralph Bodenstein. The government was interested only in promoting tourism and attracting rich Westerners, Atta complained. Meanwhile, they were tearing down houses and forcing mass relocations. Atta had hoped to use his education to help set Egypt on a new path, but he often complained that his only option was working for a government he despised. "He had ideals. He wanted to improve urban life," says Bodenstein. Atta scorned the United States for its support of Israel and its callousness and "hypocrisy" toward the Muslim world. Although Atta seethed, he did not rant. "He did not raise his voice when he talked about politics," says Bodenstein, but he was "very clear. He would have an insisting tone in his voice." He was, in other words, like a lot of college-age Egyptians of his time. Atta's progression from disgruntled student to Islamic militant to terrorist appears to have been gradual and subtle. No single event explains how a mama's boy became a mass murderer. Atta did show some psychological tics, including an almost pathological disdain for women. In writing his will in 1996, he barred females from his funeral and grave site. But he does not appear to have been so much mad as profoundly angry. Somehow, his bitterness hardened into fanaticism and then to something like pure evil. It seems clear that his resentments were sharpened by the casual racism he encountered in Germany, where the large immigrant Muslim population is widely treated as a lower caste. He found refuge in the mosques of Hamburg, where radical mullahs enjoyed more free-speech rights than they ever would in Egypt--and sometimes acted as recruiting agents for the terrorist underground. Atta's search for Islamic purity deepened on a pilgrimage to Mecca in 1995; possibly, he fell in with Al Qaeda operatives who fished for possible terrorists among the true believers. The most obvious turning point came in 1997, when Atta traveled to Afghanistan and enrolled in one of Osama bin Laden's training camps. There, in a cultlike atmosphere designed to break waverers and forge implacable hatreds, Atta was taught dark arts like bomb building and chemical weaponry. Egyptians were given special treatment in these camps. While not physically robust, Atta appears to have been picked out for a leadership role. His hard stare alone was enough to compel obedience. When he returned to Hamburg in 1998 it was to set up a terror cell: two of his roommates, Marwan Al-Shehhi and Ziad Samir Jarrah, would join him as suicide hijackers. The three men all came from solid middle-class families who were multilingual, computer literate and highly educated. Atta did not abandon his purely intellectual pursuits. While he plotted to bring down the World Trade Center, he diligently continued his urban-planning studies at Hamburg Technical University. His thesis was on the restoration of Aleppo, an ancient Syrian city, to its pure Islamic past--devoid of skyscrapers. It was awarded a B-plus. Atta was intelligent and certainly determined. But his drawn-out preparation to become a suicide-squad wing commander was dotted with red flags. It is painful, in hindsight, to realize that if the authorities had spotted any of them, the September 11 attacks might have been headed off. At the outset, beginning in 1998, Atta's Hamburg apartment at Marienstrasse 54 was under surveillance by German federal investigators who knew that its occupants were in touch with a suspected bin Laden operative, Mamoun Darkazanli (Darkazanli says he is innocent of any wrongdoing). But the surveillance of the apartment was dropped; the investigation stalled. When Atta, along with other Qaeda men, entered the United States to train for their mission at Florida flight schools, the hijackers were often clumsy and boorish. They were saved only by the willingness of both officials and ordinary people to look the other way. Atta antagonized his instructors, his landlords and just about everyone he came in contact with by staring coldly and behaving arrogantly. His efforts to be polite (he brought his landlady cookies) could not conceal his contempt for women. One day Atta was flying with a fellow student, a woman named Anne Greaves. As they sat in the cockpit of a plane, Atta reached in and grabbed her seat cushion. Surprised, Greaves tried to wrestle it from his grasp, but Al-Shehhi lunged forward, putting his arm between them. "To protect him in a way," Greaves recalls. "I remember thinking, 'What on earth could they be frightened of?' " Rudy Dekkers, the owner of Huffman Aviation in Venice, Fla., was on the verge of kicking out Atta and Al-Shehhi in September 2000 when the two men abruptly switched to Jones Aviation Service in Sarasota. They quickly made themselves unwelcome with careless flying and rudeness, and returned to Huffman, where they finally won their instrument-grade pilot's licenses that December. In one extraordinary incident, they rented a plane that stalled on the runway at Miami International Airport. Atta and Al-Shehhi simply got out and walked away, abandoning the plane on the runway of the nation's ninth busiest airport at the height of the Christmas season. (The FAA later reviewed the plane's maintenance records, but no action was taken.) Atta's behavior was suspicious as well as obnoxious. In the spring of 2001 he flew to Tennessee to a small airport in the Appalachian mountains and began asking pointed questions of one of the airport regulars, Dan Whitener. "Tell me about this chemical factory we flew over," Atta said, pointing to a plant that once manufactured sulfur dioxide and sulfuric acid. Then he asked about a local water reservoir and whether it connected with a river flowing by two nearby nuclear power plants. When he had gone, Whitener turned to his friend John Rutkowsky and described the strange interaction. "Danny, sounds like terrorists," Rutkowsky joked. Atta had two brushes with the authorities. His tourist visa had expired when he came back from a trip to Spain in January 2001, but he convinced Customs officials that he was waiting for a student visa.…