As the 25th anniversary of the September 11, 2001 attacks approaches, we should remember that the events of that day were far from unforeseeable.
Standing on the 55th floor of One World Trade Center in downtown Manhattan, Assistant Secretary of Transportation Benjamin O. Davis, Jr. gazed upon an audience of government and private-sector security professionals. His subject: the US government’s approach to the relatively recent phenomenon of terrorist hijacking. As the architect of the federal sky marshal program, Davis offered no easy assurances about the escalating threat. Fighting terror, he admitted, presented no quick solutions. Rather, it demanded constant vigilance, because, as Davis noted, “a great deal can be done before a tragedy demands the action that should have previously been taken.” Addressing the solemn room in the North Tower, Davis gave voice to the single greatest fear haunting the aviation industry: an airborne mass-casualty event.
Eight months after he concluded 33 years of distinguished military service, Lt. Gen. Davis—West Point graduate, legendary commander of the Tuskegee airmen, the first African American general in the US Air Force, and the son of the first Black general in American history—now found himself spearheading the anti-hijacking efforts of the federal government. When President Richard Nixon tapped Davis to confront the new and growing threat, the nation was summoning an old pilot for one last journey.
Largely forgotten today, the US government’s decades-long quest to contain and prevent hijackings unfolded in a series of warnings, shifting security postures, evolving threats, and missed opportunities. The attacks of September 11, 2001, which marked the dawn of the new millennium and appeared to many like a wholly new phenomenon, were, in fact, the culmination of decades of changing terrorist tactics, systemic aviation vulnerabilities, and institutional failures to recognize and address known threats.
The Age of Terrorist Skyjackings
Domestic air travel in the 1960s was quite different from what we know today. Passengers would arrive at the airport with a ticket in hand, traverse all the way to the departure gate escorted by family or friends, and often walk right onto the tarmac and up a staircase to board the airplane—while facing virtually no screening, identity check, or other security protocols. A considerable number of individuals in the United States took advantage of this situation to hijack airplanes as a means of transport to Cuba or for financial extortion. Because screening procedures were minimal and cockpit access was too often relatively open, these “skyjackings,” as they came to be known, were difficult to prevent. At the same time, a more organized and politically motivated terrorist threat to aviation was forming overseas.
By the time President Nixon took office in January 1969, the United States and its allies confronted a new type of threat to civil aviation. Founded in 1967 to liberate Palestine through armed struggle, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) quickly recognized the inherent vulnerabilities of commercial air travel. Between 1968 and 1969, the group ushered in the era of modern aviation terrorism through a series of attacks against El Al and TWA aircraft across Europe, including tarmac shootouts in Athens and Zurich and mid-air hijackings out of Rome. The threat of hijackings and hostage-taking evolved to mass-casualty sabotage in February 1970, when a bomb linked to Palestinian militants detonated in the rear cargo compartment of Swissair Flight 330, causing the aircraft to crash and killing all 47 people aboard.
On September 6, 1970, the PFLP launched an operation using two-person teams to hijack four commercial airliners departing for New York City simultaneously. The hijacking of the El Al flight was thwarted mid-air when armed sky marshals shot and killed the male hijacker and subdued his female accomplice. Two other operatives rejected by El Al for that same flight purchased tickets and hijacked Pan Am Flight 93 instead, evacuating the occupants and destroying the plane after landing in Cairo. The hijackers of separate TWA and Swissair flights successfully diverted the aircraft to Dawson’s Field, an abandoned British airbase in the Jordanian desert, where the passengers and crew became hostages.
The crisis then unexpectedly expanded three days later when the PFLP hijacked a fifth aircraft, bringing it to the desert airstrip to extort the release of the surviving El Al hijacker. As the standoff ensued over the next several days, the PFLP demanded the release of numerous terrorists held in several countries in exchange for releasing the hostages. President Nixon recognized the hijackings not merely as security failures but as an attack on the US economy and national security—and determined that the federal government must take the lead.
On September 11, after days of strategizing, Nixon unveiled a sweeping anti-hijacking plan. The measures placed armed federal personnel aboard US commercial flights, expanded airport screening, and accelerated efforts to detect weapons and explosives. They strengthened the collection and sharing of relevant intelligence with airlines and law enforcement personnel.
The commander-in-chief needed a strong, courageous leader to implement this ambitious aviation security program, bound to alter the air traveler’s experience. For this, he turned to Lt. Gen. Davis, who started work on September 21 as director of Civil Aviation Security at the Department of Transportation.
President Nixon meets with Secretary of Transportation John A. Volpe and Lt. Gen. Benjamin O. Davis, Jr., on September 21, 1970, in the Oval Office. (Richard M. Nixon Presidential Library)
Davis immediately began studying other countries’ approaches. His first major initiative was to scale up a sky marshal program to more than 1,700 armed officers protecting commercial aviation in flight. Next, he targeted the airlines’ lax screening and inconsistent implementation of the new federal security procedures. At an international meeting on transportation and security on January 11, 1971, he noted that four recent hijackings could easily have been prevented if the airlines had simply adhered to the new protocols.
In March, Davis went further, urging airline crews to resist hijackers when appropriate rather than simply complying with their demands. This public stance aligned with internal communications between Davis and Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) Administrator John Shaffer regarding the need to provide special training to air crews to react with force if faced with a suicidal hijacker.
Little remembered today, Davis—“the hijacking guy,” as Nixon and his aides called the general on the White House tapes—became something of a celebrity as he waged parallel campaigns, in private and in public, to raise awareness of the perils of modern air travel. Tall and slender with a trimmed pencil mustache, Davis favored Japanese watches. He appeared as a guest on The Mike Douglas Show alongside Dionne Warwick and Leslie Uggams, obligingly demonstrated new magnetometer devices for newsmen, and drew “roars of laughter” when he related that “One airline told us they handle luggage so roughly that no explosive could survive the loading process.”
Following his initial successes, Davis was sworn in as Assistant Secretary of Transportation for Safety and Consumer Affairs on August 3, 1971. In this role, he spent the next several years working with the FAA, airlines, and airports nationwide to establish a comprehensive Civil Aviation Security System.
Terrorist attacks were becoming increasingly brazen and violent, culminating in the televised massacre of 11 Israeli athletes and coaches at the Munich Olympics in September 1972 by the Palestinian terrorist group Black September. The danger to civil aviation, however, was not limited to organized international terrorism. On November 10, 1972, three men armed with handguns and grenades hijacked Southern Airways Flight 49 shortly after it departed from Birmingham, Alabama, and demanded $10 million. During the ensuing negotiations, the hijackers threatened to crash the aircraft into a nuclear reactor at Oak Ridge National Laboratory as they circled the facility from above; the 30-hour ordeal ended when the aircraft landed in Havana, and Cuban authorities arrested the hijackers.
The Oak Ridge episode provided the immediate catalyst for a security measure Davis had long urged. On December 5, the Department of Transportation announced that, beginning January 5, 1973, all passengers and their carry-on baggage would be screened before they boarded flights operated by US carriers. The nationwide requirement represented a great leap forward in aviation security and effectively ended the “transport to Cuba” incidents, leading to a major drawdown of the sky marshal program. Hijackings of US commercial flights sharply declined, but the underlying threat to civil aviation did not.
The Rise of Suicide Pilots
The possibility that terrorists might deliberately crash an aircraft into a populated target had already entered discussions at the highest levels of government. In January 1973, investigative journalist Jack Anderson reported that US officials had warned Israel of intelligence suggesting that the Black September Organization (the covert arm of the PLO) might attempt to hijack an aircraft and crash it into Tel Aviv.
On February 21, Israeli fighter aircraft shot down a non-responsive Libyan passenger plane that had strayed into Israeli-controlled airspace over the Sinai Peninsula, killing 108 of the 113 people aboard. When Prime Minister Golda Meir met with Nixon in the Oval Office on March 1, she explained that Israel had recently received warning that Black September was planning to crash a plane into an Israeli city. Recalling a prior terror attack targeting an airport, she told Nixon that Israel had regarded the unidentified aircraft as a serious threat.
The July 23 President’s Daily Brief (PDB) included intelligence reporting that Israel and Saudi Arabia were both claiming they had information that the hijackers of Japan Airlines Flight 404 were planning to crash the plane in a kamikaze-style raid following takeoff in Dubai. While the Japanese Red Army and Palestinian militant hijackers ended up blowing up the aircraft after its final landing in Benghazi, a potential suicide hijacking scenario had now once again reached the president.
Then, on February 22, 1974, a deranged individual named Samuel Byck attempted to commandeer a passenger plane at Baltimore/Washington International Airport to crash it into the White House. The attempt ended while the aircraft was still on the ground, after police wounded Byck and then took his own life. In a recording sent to Anderson, the investigative journalist, Byck described his plan, dubbed “Operation Pandora’s Box,” to force the pilots to fly towards the White House, kill them, and steer the aircraft into the White House himself. The incident clearly registered with Benjamin Davis.
Against this backdrop, the general joined several other terrorism experts from the FBI, the Department of State, and the private sector on the 55th floor of One World Trade Center for a Conference on Terrorism and Executive Safety, organized by the World Trade Institute on September 11, 1974. In his speech, entitled a “US Approach to Terrorism-Hijacking,” Davis issued this blunt warning to his audience of security professionals:
“Security cannot be left to the judgment of individuals. It must be obligatory at all times, the same as the requirement that an airplane be properly fueled and otherwise airworthy. No one questions the necessity for an effective and dependable navigation and communications system on an aircraft or for a thoroughly qualified flight crew. Security screening is just as important to the safety of the airliner. Since the hijacking virus sprang up in the late 1960s, we have been especially fearful of one specter—a mass air tragedy.”
Davis closed with another warning: that the issue wasn’t going away. “There is an old adage: ‘All that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing.’ We inhabit a shrinking world, interrelated through technology and necessity. It is intricate, a world where cultures and causes often clash…”
As Davis wrapped up his efforts as assistant secretary, he left one final warning for those who would succeed him: “Conventional warfare aside, modern society suffers its cruelest blows from the international terrorist movement. And there is no course for us to take but resistance. Realizing that aircraft and air terminals have perhaps the greatest potential for disaster, the United States must be especially strong in defending those areas.” He then concluded: “And if the job seems too big and too demanding, I can only suggest that we would do well to think of the consequences and alternatives.”
During Davis’ retirement party held at the Fort McNair Officers’ Club on September 11, 1975, Secretary of Transportation William T. Coleman, Jr., the first African American to hold that position, presented his fellow pioneer with the department’s highest award, hailing Davis’ contribution to aviation security:
“I know of no single individual who has made a more effective and valiant contribution to the safety of the traveler. When this decade began, domestic airlines faced the constant threat of hijacking and air piracy. Under the dedicated leadership of General Davis, and against staggering odds, the Federal Civil Aviation System has curbed criminal activity against airlines and facilities.”
In fact, the rate of successful hijackings in the United States had dropped from 33 in 1969 to zero in 1973. Between the time of the imposition of the full Civil Aviation Security Program in early 1973 and Davis’ retirement, not a single commercial airliner from the US domestic fleet was hijacked or destroyed by bomb sabotage.
Although Davis left his retirement party satisfied with what the department had accomplished to date, he knew the threat remained. The aviation security system he had worked so hard to establish continued to evolve over the next several years, with hostage-style hijackings of international flights remaining the prevailing threat. On September 11, 1981, Federal Aviation Regulations Part 108 went into effect, officially mandating that US carriers implement formal, FAA-approved security programs to standardize passenger screening and prevent air piracy.
Alongside these physical security measures, the FAA-approved Common Strategy emerged, which generally instructed flight crews to avoid confrontation, accommodate hijacker demands, and prioritize landing the aircraft safely. This approach reflected a belief that cooperation would successfully bring most hijackings to a bloodless resolution. Yet, this very perceived strength in dealing with a known threat would be ineffective against hijackers whose objective was not political bargaining, but a mass-casualty suicide attack.
That suicidal intent, however, was already appearing in intelligence channels during this exact same window. In August 1979, the Israeli Defense Minister Ezer Weizman announced at a cabinet meeting that Palestinian terrorists were being trained as pilots in Libya for suicide missions to crash planes full of explosives into Israeli cities and that Israel was preparing countermeasures. A year later, US intelligence translated similar regional news reports of the head of the PFLP-General Command claiming the ability to launch kamikaze planes against population centers in Israel.
This rhetoric quickly escalated into state-sponsored threats. A May 1984 Terrorism Review produced by the CIA’s Directorate of Intelligence noted that the speaker of the Iranian Assembly had suggested deploying aircraft on suicide missions against US warships near the Strait of Hormuz. An exhibit entered into the Congressional Record on February 7, 1985 detailed allegations from Iranian defector Houshang Mortezai, who reportedly alerted Western intelligence that he and other pilots were undergoing exactly this type of training for kamikaze-style operations, explicitly including civilian targets.
Similar reports of Syria’s kamikaze pilots had reached the Director of Central Intelligence (DCI) by early June. The June 5, 1985 issue of Early Warning, routed directly to the DCI, quoted Syrian President Hafez al-Assad’s speech at the ninth congress of the National Federation of Syrian Students, allegedly relaying that during his early military career he had discussed with his colleagues the necessity of pilot suicide squads, then continuing:
“Still, we must differentiate between the ordinary mission and the commando [fida’i] mission, which requires the pilot to pounce on the enemy target and strike enemy ships, airports, and other targets by turning himself, his planes, and his bombs into one fireball. Such attacks can inflict heavy losses on the enemy. They guarantee results, in terms of scoring a direct hit, spreading terror among enemy ranks, raising people’s morale, and enhancing citizens’ awareness of the importance of martyrdom.”
The director of the Congressional Task Force on Terrorism and Unconventional Warfare, Yossef Bodansky, later outlined in Target America & The West: Terrorism Today how a former trainee at an Iranian installation in Vakilabad conveyed that one terrorist training exercise involved a Palestinian Islamic Jihad team hijacking an aircraft and utilizing their flight training to crash the plane with passengers aboard into a designated target.
These intelligence warnings about suicide operations emerged in the midst of a wave of increasingly brutal hostage hijackings by Shia fundamentalist groups, including Palestinian Islamic Jihad and Hezbollah, which culminated in the June 1985 seizure of TWA Flight 847 and the murder of a US Navy diver. In response, President Ronald Reagan directed the expansion of the air marshal program on select international flights, which was codified and increased the force to 400 marshals.
Just months later, seven terrorists affiliated with the Abu Nidal Organization attacked the Vienna and Rome airports on December 27, 1985, killing 19 people and wounding about 140 others. A December 30 classified cable from the US Embassy in Rome to the State Department, received in the White House Situation Room, reported that the lone surviving terrorist in Rome told Italian investigators the attackers were suicide commandos who planned to seize an El Al aircraft and blow it up over Tel Aviv. The next day newspapers in Italy and the United States reported that he had described a plan to hijack planes in Vienna and Rome and crash them simultaneously into Tel Aviv.
In early January, the Austrian Interior Ministry announced that its investigation, including interrogations of the two surviving Vienna attackers, had uncovered a similarly described plan to hijack an El Al aircraft, fly it to Tel Aviv, and bring it down over the city in a suicide attack.
In April 1986, the British government caused quite a stir when it expelled 21 Libyan students, including 23-year-old pilot Adel Massoud, who was enrolled at the Oxford Air Training School. This action came after Tripoli Radio broadcast a phone call in which Massoud declared that he and his Libyan classmates in Britain were ready to serve as “suicide squads against America and its arrogance.”
These tensions had arisen following the US bombing of Libya in response to the bombing by Libyan agents of a West Berlin nightclub that killed two American soldiers and a Turkish woman and injured over 200 others. UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher announced in the House of Commons that additional action would be forthcoming regarding over 300 Libyan nationals undergoing training in the UK as pilots or mechanics. White House and State Department spokesmen in Washington welcomed the news.
On December 21, 1988, a different form of aviation terrorism struck when Pan Am Flight 103 exploded over Lockerbie, Scotland, killing all 259 people aboard and 11 victims on the ground. In response, President George HW Bush created a Commission on Aviation Security and Terrorism to comprehensively study and appraise practices and policy options to prevent future terrorist acts against aviation.
The commission’s May 1990 final report determined that existing aviation security systems were seriously flawed, advocated for increased federal leadership, and urged reforms in intelligence coordination, international cooperation, and explosives-detection technology. After Lockerbie, US aviation security policy increasingly focused on changes needed to secure air travel against sabotage, particularly explosives concealed in checked baggage. This focus would shape legislation and institutional reforms throughout the next decade.
In a paper on The Terrorist Threat to Commercial Aviation published by The RAND Corporation in March 1989, Brian Michael Jenkins highlighted “The nightmare of governments is that suicidal terrorists will hijack a commercial airliner and, by killing or replacing its crew, crash into a city or some vital facility.” Shortly thereafter, the ubiquitous Jack Anderson and his colleague Dale Van Atta resurfaced Mortezai’s account of Iranian suicide pilots, also citing intelligence sources to report that terrorist leaders had gathered in Beirut the previous winter and there designated the United States as the prime target.
The columnists warned that terrorists could crash an aircraft into the White House. Contacted by Anderson, President Bush commented: “You’re talking with a man who is old enough to remember the kamikaze pilots of World War II, indeed, whose ship was attacked by such pilots. So I remember it personally and vividly, and I know what damage someone intent on sacrificing one’s own life can do driving a plane.”
World events then took an unexpected turn when Iraqi strongman Saddam Hussein launched a surprise invasion of neighboring Kuwait on August 2, 1990. That September 11, President Bush addressed a Joint Session of Congress, framing the war to come in terms of two major objectives: liberating the United States’ oil-producing ally and making the region, and thereby the world at large, “freer from the threat of terror.” Yet, the deployment of US forces to Saudi Arabia was already deepening Osama bin Laden’s hostility toward the American enterprise. Over ensuing years, these grievances would lead the Al Qaeda founder to identify the United States as the terrorist organization’s principal enemy.
During the same period, the long-retired General Davis continued to warn publicly about terrorist plots against US embassies and domestic targets, and to propose possible safeguards. “The Department of Transportation established this security shield because of the spiraling domestic crime rate and the international terrorist movement,” he reflected in his autobiography published in early 1991. “Terrorism and its perpetrators, after all, are only a jet ride away from this country, if not in our very midst…We are still vulnerable today to the machinations of terrorists, saboteurs, and deranged persons.” General Davis visited the White House on April 23, 1991, and presented a copy to President Bush.
General Davis presents President George HW Bush with a copy of his autobiography at the White House on April 23, 1991. (George HW Bush Presidential Library and Museum)
The 9/11 Threat Takes Shape
By the early 1990s, the warnings and attacks were intensifying. Ramzi Yousef and Ahmad Ajaj arrived at John F. Kennedy International Airport in Queens on September 1, 1992, with fraudulent documentation after receiving explosives training at a terrorist camp in Afghanistan. Ajaj was arrested by immigration authorities at the airport when officers located materials related to bomb-making and Islamic extremism.
Still, Yousef, claiming to be a refugee from Iraq, was admitted into the United States without a valid visa pending asylum proceedings. On February 26, 1993, Yousef and an accomplice drove a rental truck containing explosives into the parking garage beneath the North Tower of the World Trade Center. The explosion killed six people and injured more than 1,000 others but fell short of accomplishing its goal of bringing the Twin Towers down. Yousef escaped to Pakistan and continued planning terrorist attacks, this time targeting commercial aviation.
The concept of a commercial airliner being used as a weapon of mass destruction entered mainstream popular fiction in August 1994 when novelist Tom Clancy released his bestseller Debt of Honor that ends with a pilot deliberately crashing a Boeing 747 into the US Capitol building during a joint session of Congress. On September 11, less than a month after Debt of Honor hit the shelves, a despondent Frank Eugene Corder stole a Cessna 150 and, in the early hours of the next morning, crashed it onto the White House grounds. While no fatalities resulted, the event showed these vulnerabilities weren’t limited to fiction. The incident prompted a review of White House security protocols but produced no major changes in aviation security.
Three months later, the possibility of terrorists turning a commercial airliner into an instrument of mass-casualty attack emerged in a far more concrete form. On December 24, 1994, four members of the Algerian Armed Islamic Group seized Air France Flight 8969 in Algiers, murdered three passengers, and directed the pilot to fly to Paris. Nearly 14 hours after the plane landed in Marseille to refuel, French commandos stormed the aircraft, killed the four hijackers, and rescued the passengers and crew. French authorities determined that they likely intended to destroy the plane over Paris, possibly by crashing it into the Eiffel Tower. This event further demonstrated that a hijacked airplane could serve not merely as a means of leverage in hostage negotiations, but as the instrument of lethal attack itself.
Investigators in the Philippines soon uncovered an aviation plot of still greater scale and sophistication. Led by Ramzi Yousef, the Bojinka plot sought to detonate 11 commercial aircraft traveling over the Pacific Ocean to the American homeland. An accomplice, Abdul Hakim Murad, was arrested in Manila in January 1995. The recipient of extensive pilot training in the States, Murad had also discussed with Yousef the idea of a suicide plane attack on CIA headquarters.
Philippine authorities turned Murad over to the FBI and shared the information they uncovered. Following Yousef’s subsequent arrest in Pakistan and extradition to the United States, his uncle, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM), carried the mission forward, specifically by conceiving of a plan that combined aspects of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and the Bojinka plot. KSM pitched the plan to bin Laden sometime around 1996.
For security officials, it was a time of heightened alarm. On July 17, 1996, TWA Flight 800 exploded off the coast of Long Island. Investigators would eventually determine that an explosion of fuel vapors in the aircraft’s center wing tank caused the crash, but in its immediate aftermath, terrorism was widely feared. Eight days later, President Bill Clinton announced the creation of the White House Commission on Aviation Safety and Security, chaired by Vice President Al Gore. The president directed the commission to produce an action plan focused on advanced explosives detection technology.
On September 11, 1996, just two days after the Gore Commission issued its initial recommendations, Keith O. Fultz of the General Accounting Office (GAO) testified before Congress that “protecting civil aviation from a terrorist attack is an urgent national issue.” Warning of vulnerabilities throughout the system, GAO reinforced the commission’s calls for additional security protocols, including improved explosives detection and passenger-bag matching.
When the vice president issued the commission’s final report on February 12, 1997, it opened with a single word: “Change.” The report recognized that terrorism was evolving and called for a layered security system incorporating enhanced intelligence coordination, vulnerability assessments, employee background checks, access controls, passenger profiling, and defenses against emerging threats such as surface-to-air missiles. The report’s most concrete aviation security initiatives concentrated on preventing explosives from being brought aboard commercial aircraft. As those reforms were being developed and implemented, Al Qaeda’s planners were preparing an operation built around a very different central premise: seizing passenger aircraft and turning them into weapons.
Al Qaeda demonstrated its growing ambition and capacity for the coordination of mass-casualty attacks with deadly bombings carried out at US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in August 1998. Later that year, General Davis, who had continued to warn about terrorist attacks on US embassies and at home throughout his retirement, made one final trek to the White House. On December 9, 1998, President Clinton advanced him to four-star general in honor of his lifetime of service to the United States of America, with Secretary Coleman, his proud boss during his final year at the Department of Transportation, and 20 of his fellow Tuskegee airmen, in attendance.
By early 1999, bin Laden had green-lighted Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s planes-as-weapons proposal. Similar scenarios began appearing, to little notice, in US government exercises, analytical studies, and threat-reporting. A 1999 Library of Congress study, prepared for the National Intelligence Council, suggested that suicide bombers affiliated with Al Qaeda’s Martyrdom Battalion could seek to crash aircraft into the Pentagon, CIA headquarters, or the White House: an elaboration on Ramzi Yousef’s idea of targeting Langley.
That same year, Northeast Air Defense Sector (NEADS) exercises included hijack scenarios that involved suicide attacks on the White House and the Statue of Liberty. The FAA judged this type of attack unlikely, however, reckoning bombing as the primary threat to commercial aviation. Meanwhile, internal FAA audits and other official reviews had repeatedly exposed weaknesses in checkpoint screening, with even obvious test items going undiscovered. At the same time, small knives remained permitted under prevailing aviation security rules.
The arrest of Ahmed Ressam at the US-Canada border in December 1999 disrupted an Al Qaeda plot to bomb Los Angeles International Airport during upcoming Y2K celebrations. Less than a month later, several Al Qaeda operatives met in Kuala Lumpur, including Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi, both of whom would later participate in the September 11 hijackings. At the CIA’s request, Malaysian authorities photographed the gathering, and US officials subsequently obtained information about the participants’ movements.
The intelligence community did not effectively track and share information about their movements after they left Kuala Lumpur for Bangkok, and critical data, including Mihdhar’s valid US visa and Hazmi’s January 2000 flight to Los Angeles, was not formally disseminated outside the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center in time for effective action. Over the coming year, the 19 Al Qaeda operatives, all of whom had completed training with Al Qaeda in Afghanistan, continued to filter into the country and move into position to serve their designated operational roles as either pilots or “muscle” hijackers to subdue the passengers and crew.
A suicide attack on the USS Cole, docked for refueling in the Yemeni port of Aden on October 11, 2000, killed 17 US sailors and injured 39 others, further validating Al Qaeda’s asymmetric tactics. Encouraged by their success at Aden, KSM’s plane operation had now evolved from a proposal developed overseas into a mission whose final preparations were occurring largely within the United States.
By mid-2001, Kenneth Williams, an FBI agent in Phoenix, had become alarmed by “the inordinate number of individuals of investigative interest” for Islamic extremism who were attending flight schools in Arizona. On July 10, Williams sent a memo to FBI headquarters, warning of the “possibility of a coordinated effort by Usama bin Laden” to send individuals to civil aviation schools in the United States. The memo recommended compiling a list of such schools, establishing liaisons with them, circulating the theory across the intelligence community, and obtaining visa information on the suspected students.
Although Williams stressed the belief that this was more than a coincidence, no further action was taken. By this point, four of the hijackers, including their ringleader Mohamed Atta, had already completed training at flight schools across the nation. Only too late would it be learned that one of the individuals named in the Phoenix memo was a close associate and flight training partner of Hani Hanjour—who would only months later fly Flight 77 into the Pentagon.
Another general warning came in an August 6, 2001 PDB entry that carried the now-infamous headline “Bin Ladin Determined To Strike in US,” including FBI information noting “patterns of suspicious activity” consistent with preparations for hijackings as well as surveillance of federal buildings in New York.
Ten days later, FBI agents in Minnesota arrested Zacharias Moussaoui on immigration charges. The Bureau had begun investigating Moussaoui, a French citizen trained by Al Qaeda in Afghanistan, following his suspicious behavior at flight training sessions in Eagan, Minnesota. Unaware of the similar concerns raised in Phoenix, the agents in Minnesota were unable to gain approval to search Moussaoui’s laptop and notebook; as a result, his connections to other terrorists remained unknown to the FBI during this initial, and critical, period of investigation.
On August 24—long after both had entered the United States—Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi were finally added to the State Department’s TIPOFF watchlist. As TIPOFF was not integrated into the domestic security infrastructure, both men were able to purchase airline tickets for American Airlines Flight 77 on September 11.
The Federal Air Marshal Program had dwindled to 33 officers assigned primarily to international flights, reflecting a security posture that did not anticipate a threat taking shape within the United States at that moment.
Zero Hour
On September 11, 2001, exactly 31 years after President Nixon announced his comprehensive anti-hijacking measures, 19 Al Qaeda operatives cleared airport security and hijacked four commercial aircraft departing from Boston’s Logan International Airport, Washington Dulles International Airport, and Newark International Airport. The computerized prescreening system known as CAPPS selected several of the hijackers for additional scrutiny. Under the rules then in place, however, that selection typically affected only checked baggage and did not trigger enhanced passenger screening. All 19 passed through the standard checkpoints, some carrying knives or box cutters, to board their flights.
At 8:46 am, American Airlines Flight 11 struck the North Tower of the World Trade Center.
United Airlines Flight 175 struck the South Tower at 9:03 am.
American Airlines Flight 77 hit the Pentagon at 9:37 am.
And at 10:03 am, United Airlines Flight 93 crashed near Shanksville, Pennsylvania, after passengers and crew members fought their way into the cockpit and thwarted the hijackers from steering the aircraft back to Washington, DC.
Nearly 3,000 people were killed, and the world was forever changed. That evening, President George W. Bush addressed the nation:
“Today, our fellow citizens, our way of life, our very freedom came under attack in a series of deliberate and deadly terrorist attacks. The victims were in airplanes, or in their offices; secretaries, businessmen and women, military and federal workers; moms and dads, friends and neighbors. Thousands of lives were suddenly ended by evil, despicable acts of terror. The pictures of airplanes flying into buildings, fires burning, huge structures collapsing, have filled us with disbelief, terrible sadness, and a quiet, unyielding anger. These acts of mass murder were intended to frighten our nation into chaos and retreat. But they have failed; our country is strong…”
In the aftermath of 9/11, the United States carried out the most sweeping redesign of aviation security since the Nixon-Davis reforms of the early 1970s. The result was a federally directed, multi-layered aviation security system on a scale without precedent. The Aviation and Transportation Security Act of November 2001 created the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), established a federal screening workforce, strengthened intelligence coordination and information sharing, mandated hardened cockpit doors, and authorized a significant increase in federal air marshals. The Homeland Security Act of 2002 then moved TSA into the newly created Department of Homeland Security, further integrating aviation security into the broader national security framework.
In this sense, these reforms represented the tragic fulfillment of the warning General Davis had issued 27 years earlier when he cautioned at the World Trade Center on September 11, 1974, that “a great deal can be done before a tragedy demands the action that should have previously been taken.”
In their execution and the nature of the threat they posed to America, the 9/11 attacks appeared sudden, new—but they did not arise overnight or without warning. They happened following decades of evolving terrorist tactics and persistent aviation vulnerabilities, revealing the risk that security systems designed to protect against known tactics can become increasingly vulnerable as threats evolve. Twenty-five years after the fall of the Twin Towers and the rise of the black smoke over the Pentagon, we must ensure that vigilance is an ongoing discipline—one that requires us to both remember the last attack and to recognize when the next threat may be taking a different form.
About the Author: Chris Naylor
Chris Naylor is a researcher and writer focused on US national security history. He holds degrees in history, German, and public policy from the University of Maryland. Chris is currently the Executive for Research Services at the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) and previously served as an analyst at the Department of Homeland Security. The views expressed here are his own and do not necessarily reflect those of NARA or the US government.
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