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COPYRIGHT 2002 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
About six years ago, Zacarias Moussaoui, who is now facing trial on capital charges as the alleged twentieth man in the September 11th aircraft hijackings, travelled to Chechnya with a childhood friend to join separatists in their fight against Russian control. At the time, young men from throughout the Muslim world were arriving in the region, which was regarded, after the Russian defeat in Afghanistan, as the site of a new jihad. Moussaoui was a Frenchman of Moroccan descent, and his friend was also from an immigrant family. Evidently, Moussaoui did not impress his superiors in the operation. When the Chechens decided that the foreign volunteers were more trouble than they were worth, Moussaoui was told to leave. (His friend was invited to stay, and was later killed, reportedly while filming combat scenes for an Islamic Web site.) "They sent Moussaoui packing," one of the lawyers appointed to represent him told me. "Who wants him around? He brought nothing to the table. He's trouble."
In February, 2001, Moussaoui showed up at the Airman Flight School, in Norman, Oklahoma. He was now thirty-two, and had continued to travel in pursuit of fundamentalist causes. He had been in Afghanistan (where he is alleged to have spent time in an Al Qaeda training camp), in Pakistan, and in Malaysia, while maintaining a base of sorts at a radical mosque in North London. When he arrived in America, two weeks after returning to London from a trip to Pakistan, he told customs he had thirty-five thousand dollars in cash. His sudden interest in flying had led him to pay five thousand dollars, in advance, for a series of lessons that should have allowed him to earn a pilot's license. Over the next three months, Moussaoui took fifty-seven hours of flight instruction, far more than the twenty hours most students need before flying solo. But he left the school in late May without a license.
Moussaoui's foreign travels and his ties to Islamic fundamentalists had brought him to the attention of the French intelligence services. After Moussaoui was arrested here on immigration charges in mid-August of 2001, the French gave the F.B.I. a dossier on him, which, according to an official who reviewed it, documented some of his contacts but provided no specific evidence against him. Nevertheless, the French report came to be viewed as an important missed warning. Americans wondered if the F.B.I. and other government agencies, with the "twentieth hijacker" in custody, had bungled the chance to put the pieces together and possibly stop the attacks.
The assumption of government bungling was predicated on the assumption that Moussaoui was indeed the twentieth hijacker. (There were five hijackers on each of the three planes that hit their targets, but only four on the flight that went down in Pennsylvania.) Moussaoui has said in federal court that he was a member of Al Qaeda, but he has denied any involvement in the hijackings. Many present and former F.B.I. and C.I.A. officials have told me that they believe he was "a wanna-be," as one put it, and far too volatile and unstable to handle a long-term undercover terrorist operation. Nevertheless, they said, Moussaoui may have crucial knowledge about Al Qaeda. "He knew how the system worked and knew how to get in contact," a former C.I.A. official said. The real bungling, this official and others believe, has been the handling of Moussaoui since September 11th and the framing of the indictment against him; for one thing, no federal prosecutor has discussed a plea bargain with him since the indictment, late last year. The case against Moussaoui, like the war on terrorism, is far more complex than the government has revealed.
After his failure at the flight school in Oklahoma, Moussaoui decided to try again, this time in Minnesota. He arrived at the Pan Am International Flight Academy, in Eagan, near St. Paul, on August 11th. According to Clancy Prevost, his instructor, he seemed to be just another wealthy foreigner with a passion for flying--"friendly and amiable." Prevost, a former Navy and Northwest Airlines pilot, said, "I had a terrible time, because he had no knowledge. He knew nothing. He had no spatial skills. But he was a customer, and you wanted to give him his money's worth, and so it boiled down to me just telling him stories. We had lunch and shot the breeze. There was nothing to indicate that this guy was anything other than a genial businessman who liked to hang out with pilots and could tell the girls that he flew a 747."
Moussaoui is known as the man who told his instructor that he wanted to learn only how to fly a plane in the air, not how to take off or land. According to Prevost, however, "He never said that. He did say, 'I want to take off from London Heathrow Airport and land at J.F.K., in New York.' But he wasn't skilled enough to do it, even in a simulator."
There was one disquieting note. After a few days of lessons, Prevost told Moussaoui that his goal as a flight instructor was to put the student in a position to take over a transoceanic...
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