The Plot Comes Into Focus

By John Cloud

If the military campaign doesn't want the name "Operation Infinite Justice" because of its religious allusion, perhaps the mammoth investigation into the Sept. 11 terror attacks should adopt it, simply for accuracy. The name certainly fits, what with 7,000 FBI employees and countless state and local police officers following some 63,232 leads in the case. FBI Deputy Director Tom Pickard, a key figure in the case against the 1993 World Trade Center bombers, and the bureau's top man in New York, Barry Mawn, are running the investigation from Washington and two secret locations in Manhattan. Detectives and intelligence agents around the world are pitching in. The flow of data is crushing; every day brings new leads--and new dead ends. But answers to some of the most important questions are beginning to emerge.

HOW LIKELY IS ANOTHER ATTACK?

Federal agents have already turned up some worrisome evidence. One discovery that causes shivers: among the belongings of suspected terrorist Zacarias Moussaoui, sources tell TIME, was a manual showing how to operate crop-dusting equipment that could be used to spray lethal biological, chemical or radiological toxins into the air. On Sept. 16 the government temporarily grounded all crop dusters and warned farmers and pilots to put even their most modest planes under guard.

Rumors lit on every tongue last week; the most unsettling focused on Sept. 22. Because Dr. Al-Badr Al-Hazmi, 34, a Saudi national who is being held as a material witness, had made three reservations to fly to San Diego via Denver on that date, people worried that terrorists would hijack another aircraft. (As it turned out, Al-Hazmi's two extra tickets were in the names of his wife and child.) More ornate scenarios had the bad guys finishing off New York City with a suitcase nuke or poisoned water supply. But the day passed, mercifully, without incident.

Still, no one is breathing easy. Top law-enforcement officials believe that associates of the hijackers remain tucked away in American communities. Senator Bob Graham of the Intelligence Committee said last week that Sept. 11 was intended to be the first of several days of horror. No one can say how many other terrorist cells may be sleeping near our homes, but Osama bin Laden, the prime suspect in the attacks, has trained thousands of terrorists. Last week authorities were determined not to let anyone build on the destruction--or escape punishment for it. By week's end, at least 100 people had been arrested in the U.S. in possible connection to the attacks, and 230 more were wanted for questioning.

Bin Laden has cells around the world; the next attack could come overseas--especially with the U.S. so vigilant. According to the German Secret Service, as many as 1,000 of bin Laden's soldiers have infiltrated Europe after completing their training in Afghan camps. Closer to home, the Canadian Security Intelligence Service has identified some 350 individuals who it believes aid terrorist organizations.

It is important to note that there is no hard evidence that a second strike is planned. Says an upper-level investigator: "We don't put a high credibility" in the talk of a biological, chemical or nuclear attack. And at least for now, the U.S. civil defense seems ready for the worst. In the past few days, sources tell TIME, military leaders have scrambled fighter jets at least a dozen times in a jittery--but thorough--effort to prevent another kamikaze attack.

HAVE THEY CAUGHT ANY ACCOMPLICES?

Maybe. Hours after the attacks, authorities picked up Dr. Al-Hazmi. He had been finishing the last year of his medical residency in radiology at the University of Texas Health Science Center in San Antonio but didn't show up for work on Sept. 11 at a military hospital on Lackland Air Force Base. Sources close to the investigation say Al-Hazmi's credit card was used by two of the hijackers to buy their plane tickets, possibly without his knowledge. Additionally, the doctor reportedly bought a plane ticket for Sept. 22 and a return ticket a month later, though the university says he didn't have permission to take a month off.

Perhaps coincidentally, two men with names identical to those of two hijackers had lived or studied at Lackland Air Force Base. Pentagon sources confirmed that a man named Saeed Alghamdi graduated from the Defense Language Institute at Lackland, and that both Saeed and Ahmed Alghamdi appeared on a list for foreign military housing. (Men with the same names as other hijackers turned up at other bases in the south.) Whether the hijackers stole the identities of these men is as yet unknown.

Al-Hazmi, a slight, bespectacled, devout man who lives in a gated community in San Antonio with his wife and two young children, has been flown to New York, where a grand jury has been empaneled. No legal counsel has spoken publicly on his behalf.

The fine comb that law-enforcement officials dragged across America last week picked up as many questions as answers. Nabil Al-Marabh is an example. Arrested Wednesday night outside Chicago, his name is on a U.S. list of "suspects, potential associates of the suspects and potential witnesses"--more than 200 people in all--who may have answers about Sept. 11. Al-Marabh made the list because U.S. officials have been concerned for months about his ties to a man named Raed Hijazi. Hijazi had listed Al-Marabh as his emergency contact at work; both men used to drive for Boston cab companies. Hijazi is now jailed in Jordan for his alleged role in a plot to blow up a hotel filled with Americans and Israelis on New Year's Day 2000. Jordanian officials say that the plot was backed by the bin Laden organization and that Hijazi admits he was trained in bin Laden camps in Afghanistan. U.S. Customs Service agents assisting Jordanian prosecutors found documents showing Al-Marabh wired money to Hijazi in Jordan.

Al-Marabh moved to Detroit after he was arrested in Boston in May 2000 for assault and battery with a knife. (He stabbed his roommate in the knee after an argument.) The Boston police had been trying to arrest him since March for violating probation on the assault charge. Since Sept. 11, 2000, he has held a commercial driver's license that certifies him to transport hazardous materials--more than 10,000 lbs. of explosives, for example. In recent weeks, according to Michigan records, he applied for two duplicate copies of this license; one application was made six days after the attacks.

An FBI source says investigators are trying to "sort out what connection," if any, Al-Marabh has to the plot. And the bureau is not willing to say this Al-Marabh is the man on its watch list. (The bureau is sure, however, that he is the Boston cabdriver who stabbed his roommate.) In interviews with TIME, neighbors and co-workers describe Al-Marabh as a hot-tempered slacker with a fondness for fruity, slushy drinks and a longing for female companionship. "He was always asking if anyone could hook him up with women," says a co-worker calling himself Haidar. As of Saturday Al-Marabh had not been charged with any offense and had not asked for a lawyer, sources told TIME. Investigative sources suggest the slacker pose was just a cunning cover. Still, Al-Marabh didn't try very hard to evade capture last week: minutes before his arrest, he told his boss at 7 Days Liquor in Burbank, Ill., that the authorities wanted him for something that had happened in Boston. "I knew you were coming," he said when FBI agents came to take him away.

By then Al-Marabh had probably already heard about the arrests of three men whom federal agents had found in his former Detroit home when they were looking for him. As with Al-Marabh, it is unclear whether Farouk Ali-Haimoud, 21, Karim Koubriti, 23, and Ahmed Hannan, 33, have any connection to the attacks. Yet two of them--Koubriti and Hannan--had worked for two months for LSG Sky Chefs, a catering company providing airplane meals at Detroit Metropolitan Airport. The agents who arrested the three men uncovered several phony documents including a passport, a Social Security card and U.S. immigration papers. Investigators also found a day planner containing Arabic notes about an American military base in Turkey. Sketched diagrams of an airplane-servicing area and runways of an unidentified airport were also in the planner. Lawyers for the men suggested during a detention hearing Friday that many of the possessions collected as evidence by the FBI do not belong to the three men.

The men's company identification would allow them access only to the kitchen facilities, which are not located at the airport, and they stopped working for Sky Chefs in July. Were other support personnel aiding the hijackers on Sept. 11? Senior federal and airline officials told TIME last week that two knifelike weapons were found on two separate Delta Airlines planes that never took off on Sept. 11; a similar weapon was discovered on another company's aircraft. The officials would not say where the planes were parked and are not certain who may have left the weapons. But they are investigating whether would-be hijackers somehow arranged to have the weapons hidden onboard. A U.S. official told TIME, "These look like inside jobs." On Wednesday the FAA ordered all U.S. airlines to immediately check every single employee against the FBI's watch list.

Canadian authorities are holding Nageeb Abdul Jabar Mohamed Al-Hadi, reportedly a contract employee for Lufthansa who authorities say was trying to fly into Chicago on Sept. 11 with three false Yemeni passports and two Lufthansa uniforms. His flight was grounded in Toronto after the attacks. U.S. investigators are seeking extradition, although they have no information he was connected to the terror plot.

Perhaps the most intriguing fellow to be detained after the attacks is Khalid S.S. Al Draibi. About 12 hours after the planes crashed, a police officer in Manassas Park, Va., pulled Al Draibi over. He was about 10 miles along the highway that leads north from Dulles International Airport, and he was so eager to leave that he was driving with a flat tire and bending his rim. When Al Draibi's white Lincoln Town Car was searched, the cop and an FBI agent found aviation manuals. He was charged with an immigration violation for lying to the agent about his citizenship--Saudi, not American, as he first said.

There is no public evidence tying Al Draibi to the terrorism, but the feds included his name on a notice they sent to U.S. banks last week asking bank officials to report "any relationships or transactions" with a group of 21 people. Nineteen of those names were used by the hijackers. Since coming to the U.S. in 1997, Al Draibi has used at least 10 variations on his name, three Social Security numbers and driver's licenses from five states. He took flight classes in Alabama and Kansas. On Friday Drewry Hutcheson Jr., Al Draibi's court-appointed lawyer, said his client is a man of little means who denies any involvement in the attacks. On Saturday agents expanded their probe to a post office box in Anniston, Ala., after learning that it may have been used by Al Draibi and others with names similar to those on the FBI watch list. Anniston is near an Army ordnance depot where nerve gas and other chemical weapons are stored.

DO WE KNOW THE HIJACKERS' REAL NAMES?

There are disputes about several identities. Flight 11's Mohamed Atta and Satam Al Suqami appear to have used their real names, but there has been confusion over the names of other men on the flight. Two brothers called Wail and Waleed Alshehri have been missing from their home in the southern part of Saudi Arabia for several months, and their families reportedly identified hijacker photographs. Another Waleed Alshehri, son of a Saudi diplomat, is alive in Morocco and working for the Saudi airlines. A man using the name Abdul Alomari, born Dec. 24, 1972, is listed on the passenger manifest of Flight 11. But someone called Abdulaziz Alomari who shares that birth date is alive and well in Riyadh. Last week he told a newspaper that in 1995, when he was studying engineering at the University of Denver, his passport was stolen.

Part of the difficulty in sorting out the identities is that names like Alshehri are as common in Saudi Arabia as Smith is in the U.S. Hence Saudi authorities are pressing U.S. investigators for middle names and dates of birth. Still, using the FBI's list of names, Saudi newspapers have tracked down the families of most of the suspected hijackers. The reporters have found that relatives often haven't seen the men in several months or more. The kingdom's Daily Arab News reported last week that at least five of the hijackers told their families several months ago that they were going on jihad. Four months ago, Hamza Alghamdi, 20, one of the men who torpedoed Flight 175 into 2 World Trade Center, called his parents and asked for their prayers and forgiveness.

WHAT ABOUT THIS "20TH HIJACKER"?

Some investigators wonder whether the four flights were supposed to have five hijackers apiece. (The plane that went down in Pennsylvania had only four.) They speculate that Zacarias Moussaoui might have missed his date with infamy.

Moussaoui was arrested Aug. 17 after an instructor at Pan Am International Flight Academy's facility in Eagan, Minn., became suspicious of his request for use of the flight simulator. Moussaoui reportedly showed keen interest in mid-air navigation--and utter indifference to the landing sequence. His instructor then alerted the FBI, and Moussaoui was arrested on immigration charges. It turned out that he has long been suspected in his native France of involvement in terrorist organizations, and the French had been seeking his extradition before Sept. 11.

According to French press reports of interviews with his mother, Moussaoui led a secular childhood near the southern city of Narbonne. In 1990, however, the arrival of a female cousin--a former student of the Islamic Brotherhood in Rabat--marked the change in his life that would ultimately lead him to his U.S. jail cell. Vexed at the wild ways of her son and unhappy about her niece's fundamentalist opinions, Moussaoui's mother invited the pair to leave--which they did, eventually settling down in Montpellier. There, the young woman began introducing her cousin to acquaintances in the Islamic community. They soon convinced Moussaoui to start a new life as a devout Muslim.

Moussaoui later moved to Britain, where the focus of his life became the radical mosques of London's Baker Street and the fiery discourses of imams who even today are openly urging the destruction of infidel societies like the U.S. In 1995 Moussaoui made his first visit to Afghan training camps run by bin Laden, visits that continued through 1996. And Moussaoui began recruiting other young Muslims to fight for Islam in Chechnya and Kosovo. Moussaoui finally set down in the U.S. in February using an entry visa obtained in Pakistan.

That month he enrolled in Airman Flight School in Norman, Okla. He was a weak student, according to Dale Davis, director of operations. The problem could have been a language barrier. Moussaoui spoke fair English, Davis said, but some of the school's instructors had problems communicating with him. He left the school after a heart-to-heart with Davis about his lack of progress. Investigators have noted that both Atta and Al-Shehhi visited Airman, though they didn't enroll.

HOW DID THE HIJACKERS HIDE THEIR PLANS FOR SO LONG?

The hijackers achieved stealth by design and happenstance. For one thing, they lived quiet lives. They resided in low-rent, out-of-the-way neighborhoods and often wore the bland American uniform: khakis and polos. What was striking about many of them, in retrospect, is that there was nothing striking about them. "It amazes me how ordinary these guys looked, yet they ended up being involved in probably the greatest crime in American history," says Corey Moore, assistant manager of Gold's Gym in Greenbelt, Md., where five of the hijackers worked out.

At least some of the five were probably staying at the nearby Valencia Motel in Laurel, one of the cheapest motels on a rundown stretch of Route 1. Gail North, a former housekeeper at the motel, did notice that the men were exceedingly private and barely nodded when neighbors said hello. But they never did anything suspicious enough for her to speak up. When the manager at a nearby hotel refused a full refund to one hijacker when he checked out early, the man showed no emotion and didn't make a fuss.

In fact, those early reports that Atta and Marwan Al-Shehhi got hammered at a bar and then haggled over the bill in the days before the attack turn out to be the exception, not the rule. (Atta was also given to long-sleeved silk shirts, whereas most of the other hijackers dressed conservatively--or, in the words of a former neighbor, "foreign preppy.") For the most part, they had learned American ways well after being here for so long: one of them, Hani Hanjour, who is believed to have piloted Flight 77 into the Pentagon, lived in the U.S. as long ago as 1990, when he took an English course in Arizona.

Their simple lives contrast sharply with the multimillion-dollar rumors surrounding Osama bin Laden. If they were doing his bidding, they weren't living large on his dime. Donna Cooper, 43, a waitress at the Denny's on South Federal Highway in Delray Beach, remembers Atta coming in several times to have a veggie cheese omelet and coffee. His friend Al-Shehhi had only Minute Maid orange juice. "I've constantly re-searched my brain to see if there was something I missed about them, something that I should have told somebody about," says Cooper. "I know there wasn't, but you can't stopping thinking about it."

In San Diego two of the hijackers lived on a shabby street with houses built between the 1920s and '50s. Nawaq Alhamzi and Khalid Al-Midhar, both of Flight 77, which crashed into the Pentagon, stayed with a retired language teacher, Abdussattar Shaikh. The FBI has questioned Shaikh and searched his house. "There was always a series of cars driving up to the house late at night," says neighbor Dave Eckler, 52, a longtime resident of the area. "Sometimes they were nice cars. Sometimes they had darkened windows. They'd stay about 10 minutes." But the worst Eckler thought was that they were selling fake IDs.

The hijackers followed the same m.o. in Germany, where the terror plot may have been nurtured at two universities in Hamburg, which three of the four terror team leaders attended. On Friday German police issued arrest warrants for two suspects in connection with the attacks. Ramzi Binalshibh, from Yemen, and Said Bahaji, who was born in Germany, are charged with at least 5,000 counts of murder, suggesting a role in the Sept. 11 attacks. The men were both roommates of Atta.

For four months in 1997, Marwan Al-Shehhi lived in a small room while he attended classes at University of Bonn. The room has white wallpaper--hardly the "terrorist's lair" of which the local paper has written. The landlord says he and his wife "were shocked" when they heard from the police that the young man who shared their flat was one of the terrorists (Al- Shehhi was on Flight 175, which destroyed the south tower of the World Trade Center). Adds the landlord with a sigh: "I always prided myself on possessing not a little knowledge of character, but I never noticed anything unusual about him."

HOW WERE THE TERRORISTS FINANCED AND ORGANIZED?

Accounts at Suntrust and Dime Bancorp surely form just the exposed layer of the terrorists' deeply buried finances. They may have employed a system of brokers called hawala, which means "in trust" in Hindi. It's essentially an IOU system based on mutual trust and little record keeping.

Top investigators also believe that at least some of those involved in logistical support for the terrorists didn't know the full scope of the plot or were unwitting facilitators. Among the latter, investigators say, is Egyptian-born travel agent Ahmed Badawi of Orlando, Fla., who may have provided the Florida-based hijackers with airline tickets, flight information and hawala services. He was taken into custody Sept. 15 as a material witness but has been released.

Another facilitator for the hijackers may have been Luis Martinez Flores. Last week Flores' name appeared on the list that the U.S. government sent to banks inquiring about 21 "suspects." Two addresses for Flores on the bank alert match addresses on the driver's licenses for four of the hijackers, although they likely never lived there.

Untangling this mess is mind numbing, and that's the idea. "When you look at the people and networks involved, you quickly realize that the apparent lack of structure and seemingly random intersection of operatives is very much intentional," says French terrorism expert Roland Jacquard. "They don't want police to be able to follow one person to another and follow the trail back up to someone calling the shots. In reality, it's a hell of a lot more amorphous than that."

WHO WAS THE MASTERMIND?

At the top, bin Laden remains the biggest suspect. His organization's operations manual recommends that terrorists adopt the dress and manner of their host country, as most of the 19 hijackers did. And his top lieutenant, Ayman al-Zawahri, is said to have the operational experience to plot something of the scale of Sept. 11. Al-Zawahri leads the Egyptian al-Jihad, the group responsible for the assassination of Anwar Sadat in 1981; a federal court in New York indicted al-Zawahri in the 1998 U.S. embassy bombings.

For day-to-day decisions, however, someone closer to the ground was running the show. "Maybe one or two people--Atta maybe--might have known more, might have had more communication with the other cells," says an investigator. If Atta was in charge, it will mark the first time the FBI has encountered a plot thought to be sponsored by bin Laden in which the leader was killed. Last week several newspapers reported that Atta met with an Iraqi intelligence agent in Prague several months ago. Israeli intelligence tells TIME that it sees no evidence of a bin Laden-Iraq link. Then again, little has been confirmed at this stage, except this: infinite justice could take an eternity.

--Reported by Massimo Calabresi, Sally Donnelly, Elaine Shannon, Viveca Novak and Lissa August/Washington, Amanda Bower/New York, Bruce Crumley/Paris, Hilary Hylton/Austin, Marguerite Michaels and Maggie Sieger/Chicago, Tim Padgett/Miami, Amany Radwan/Cairo, Timothy Roche/Atlanta, Jill Underwood/San Diego and Charles P. Wallace/Berlin

With reporting by Massimo Calabresi, Sally Donnelly, Elaine Shannon, Viveca Novak and Lissa August/Washington, Amanda Bower/New York, Bruce Crumley/Paris, Hilary Hylton/Austin, Marguerite Michaels and Maggie Sieger/Chicago, Tim Padgett/Miami, Amany Radwan/ Cairo, Timothy