Atta's Odyssey

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From mid-1997 to October 1998, Atta seems to have disappeared from Hamburg entirely. He told his thesis adviser that he was gone for family reasons, but it's clear that he underwent profound changes during this time. He returned to school with the bushy beard favored by fundamentalists. He was more serious. Hauth, who left the university at the end of 1995 and lost contact with Atta, told the London Observer his friend could laugh at jokes about Arab dictators. But Chrilla Wendt, who knew Atta after he returned, said she couldn't remember him smiling.

Atta had grown more sullen about his life prospects. His old friend Khalifa ran into him on a Cairo street one day in 1999. He found Atta depressed about not having a career or a family back home. Atta said he had made few German friends. "I think he felt that he had just been studying all those years," Khalifa recalls. "When I said goodbye, I was sad."

German authorities now believe that sometime that year, Atta began touching base with a wide range of people connected to terrorism. They point to his association with a Syrian businessman, Mamoun Darkazanli, who had power of attorney for a German bank account in the name of a man thought to be Osama bin Laden's finance chief. Darkazanli denied any ties to terrorists last week.

Whatever Atta was doing behind the scenes, he was publicly spreading the word of the Koran. Early in 1999, university officials gave him permission to found an Islamic student group. (Investigators believe he eventually met hijackers Marwan Al-Shehhi and Ziad Samir Jarrah in the group.) The 40 or so members gathered to pray every day. The moderate boy from the outskirts of Cairo had grown devout, and he was surrounding himself with like-minded compatriots.

At the end of 1999, Atta, Al-Shehhi and Jarrah reported their passports stolen, possibly to clear any record of travel to Afghanistan. Within weeks, Atta and Al-Shehhi flew to the U.S. for a visit. Even at this early date, Atta may have been planning an air attack. Sometime in spring 2000, Atta--now a clean-shaven cartoon version of an American in Tommy Hilfiger and heavy cologne--walked into a U.S. Department of Agriculture office in Homestead, Fla., and inquired about loans for buying crop dusters. The office doesn't offer such loans, and it turned him away.

Atta returned briefly to Europe, but on June 3, 2000, he arrived in Newark, N.J., from Prague with a six-month tourist visa. Within a month, Atta and Al-Shehhi signed up for flight training at Huffman Aviation International in Venice, Fla. When the two men moved into a little pink house in nearby Nokomis, they brought sweets to their rental agent. Their Venice landlady, Dru Voss, says that while Al-Shehhi was a likable guy, Atta was an icicle who never looked her in the eye.

Atta and Al-Shehhi were eager students. Together they paid Huffman some $40,000 for about four months of training. Huffman owner Rudi Dekkers took an immediate dislike to Atta, the smaller man. Dekkers recalls that Atta once told him he had lived in Germany. Dekkers then launched into German, but Atta just turned away. Neither Atta nor Al-Shehhi socialized with the other 15 to 20 students.

Atta's tourist visa expired on Dec. 3, 2000, but no one seemed to notice (one of several lapses in immigration procedures that aided the hijackers). On Dec. 21, Atta and Al-Shehhi got their pilot licenses. About a week later, they trained for three hours each on the Boeing 727 simulator at Simcenter Inc. at Opa-Locka Airport, outside Miami. By that time, the two men, who called themselves cousins, had each logged about 300 hours of flying time. They were still beginners, but they knew enough to maneuver an airborne plane.

Around this time Atta and other hijackers purchased global-positioning devices known as GPS-3s from Tropic-Aero, an aviation-supply shop in Fort Lauderdale, Fla. These $475 devices, about the size of Game Boys, are used by pilots to navigate. Says Jerry Carbone, Tropic-Aero's president: "It's so simple to use, you and your wife would be able to find your way in a 767 once it's up. It's sad if [the hijackers] were able to use something anyone can get at K Mart."

In January of this year, Atta hopped a flight from Miami to Madrid. It's unclear why he went, and when he returned to Miami International Airport on Jan. 10, he was allowed back in the country despite his expired visa. He didn't bother to list his flight or carrier, yet sailed through immigration. The next month, Atta and Al-Shehhi rented a single-engine Piper Warrior from a Gwinnett County, Ga., flight school. Like many other pilots, they were honing their skills. Atta inquired again about crop dusters--this time in Belle Glade, Fla. He and some men with him wanted to know how much fuel and chemicals the yellow 502 Air Tractors could carry and whether special skills were needed to pilot them.