Praise for Perpetrators

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One of the enduring mysteries of the Sept. 11 terror attacks is why the pilots of three suicide flights all came from Hamburg. That German city on the North Sea, U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft said last week, served as a "central base of operations." What was it about Hamburg that made it more attractive as a base than, say, Frankfurt, London or even Cairo?

Central to that question is whether or not the terrorists were originally sent to Hamburg as agents by Osama bin Laden. Were they "sleepers," for years going about their daily business until they were activated to take part in the hijacking plot? German police believe that scenario is unlikely. "We think the terrorists came to Hamburg to study, didn’t do anything extremist and were eventually recruited by agents of bin Laden," said a police official in Hamburg. In all, three of the hijackers and at least three accomplices who are now fugitives lived in Hamburg, at various times in the same apartment. Mohamed Atta, who is believed to be the ringleader of the group, arrived in Hamburg in 1992. Said Bahaji, an alleged accomplice who fled to Pakistan before the attack, was born in Germany and even served briefly in its military. So it seems unlikely, police say, that they were sent to Hamburg by bin Laden.

But they could have joined a cell there; young Arab students would not stand out in the city of 1.7 million people, 16% of them foreigners. The Technical University of Hamburg-Harburg, where at least three of the plotters studied, has 900 foreign students, 20% of the total.

"The university has an extensive marketing campaign all over the world to attract foreign students," says Jörg Severin, the chancellor. It’s a good deal too: foreign students pay no tuition to study in Germany. Because nearly all of the hijackers and their accomplices were formally enrolled at universities and had legal residence in Germany, they could easily travel around Europe or go home to the Middle East, from where they could visit Afghanistan without arousing suspicion. And college students in Germany frequently take eight or nine years to finish their studies, giving them plenty of time to move around.

Police believe another attraction of Hamburg was the relative absence of activity by Islamic radicals. "In a city like Cologne or Frankfurt, where there is a big Islamic scene, there was a danger the terrorists could come to the attention of state agencies while attending a mosque or Islamic meetings," said a police official. The run-down al-Quds mosque, where the terrorists worshiped, didn’t set off any alarm bells, although Bahaji had come under surveillance briefly in 1998. A Hamburg-based Syrian entrepreneur, Mamoun Darkanzli, who had ties to a bin Laden money man, also attended the mosque without police notice.

"We all together failed," German Interior Minister Otto Schily said in Washington last week of the West’s catastrophic intelligence lapses. "We have to re-examine our security system." A good place to start would be Hamburg.