Travelers too hurried or too tired to pay attention routinely walked by the hundreds of foreign-born workers who handled security, cleaned the departure lounges and hallways, and staffed the shops and restaurants at Dulles. Voyagers passing through had no reason to observe that Dulles was like a small city. It had its share of homeless actually living in the nooks and crannies of the vast terminal; it also hosted criminals and those with something to hide, and workingmen and -women just trying to earn a living. As at most other large American institutions and businesses, foreign workers, legal and illegal, held jobs at Dulles that few citizens wanted. As September 10, 2001, wound down, one of those workers was Eric Safraz Gill. A slender man of medium height, impeccably dressed in an Argenbright Security blue blazer and a conservative tie, Gill was a legal immigrant from Pakistan working the evening shift as a checkpoint supervisor.
Al Qaeda’s plan to take the jihad to the crusaders’ homeland should not have been a surprise to American authorities. There had been years of warnings of an Al Qaeda jetliner conspiracy. The CIA and National Security Agency (NSA), which routinely monitor all sorts of electronic communications, had been detecting Al Qaeda “chatter” through much of the spring and summer of 2001. And yet communication between the FBI and CIA about what the chatter meant was almost nonexistent. In addition, since 1995 the CIA had had access to a handful of Al Qaeda members in custody who had spoken of potential attacks using airplanes. In the early 1990s Osama bin Laden had a plan — Project Bojinka — to crash multiple airliners in the Pacific Rim on a single day. No one at the CIA or Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) made the leap from Project Bojinka to the idea of using airliners as missiles. The bomb builder arrested by Philippine authorities in Project Bojinka confessed in detail about the use of airliners in terrorist attacks, saying that another plan was to crash a plane into CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia. The executive branch of the US government took no action to warn the FAA or the airlines that terrorists had such plans.
Ever since 1976 the CIA had been betting everything on the decision to rely on the GID — the Saudi intelligence service — for intelligence on the region, which eventually included keeping track of Al Qaeda’s plotting. It was a curious decision, since much of the Saudi royal family had been funding Islamic extremism over the years through a network of Islamic charities around the world. In fact, one of Saudi Arabia’s leading funders of Islamic causes was spending the night of September 10 just a few miles from Dulles International. Eric Gill did not know when he took his dinner break that evening that what he had feared so much as a young man would engulf him in ways he could never have imagined.
Gill has an eye for detail. He remembers times, faces, even the weather. On September 10, 2001, he was stationed at the departure level of the swooping twelve-hundred-foot-long concrete-and-glass main terminal at Dulles, which looks as if it is floating over the lush green countryside of northern Virginia. At dusk, the xenon lighting gives the exterior of Eero Saarinen’s masterwork a sense of energy even as the interior starts to quiet with the evening slowing of takeoffs and landings.
Twilight gave way to darkness as Gill returned from his dinner break at a little past 8 pm. Gill had just returned to his post at the West Checkpoint on the main level. Right next to the checkpoint, with its magnetometers and X-ray machines, was a plain door with an electronic lock that could be opened with an all-access airport identification card. The door allowed police and other airport employees to get into the secure areas quickly without having to wade through the passenger lines. There was such a door next to the checkpoint at both the west and east ends of the terminal.
On September 10, Gill was standing near the side door watching the passenger lines and observing and supervising the entire screening process. Because of the door’s close proximity to the West Checkpoint, security for it came under Argenbright’s jurisdiction. This doorway was so important because going through it meant you’d cleared the last serious hurdle to boarding any aircraft or getting to any secure area at Dulles. Once through the doorway, you could exit into the postscreening area with cleared passengers; you could then make your way to a mobile lounge that took passengers out to the planes parked at a series of midfield terminals, or you could walk downstairs where some commuter aircraft had gates adjacent to the main terminal. The difference in entering through the employees’ door was that you also had the choice of going down the stairs to secure employee-only areas. At Dulles this side door was not normally used by ramp workers, mechanics, or cleaning crews. It was mostly for police and security people. Ramp workers normally cleared security downstairs behind the airport’s baggage area.
The stairwell from the side door led to Door 8 on the lower level. Hundreds of airport workers accessed their workplaces in the secure areas of Dulles through Door 8. Behind that door, an Argenbright Security guard was the last line of defense to make certain that no one without proper identification got through. Like the upstairs checkpoints, Door 8 was also under constant video surveillance. However, bags and parcels carried by employees going through this door were never opened or searched.
| Security footage of the 9/11 hijackers being screened. |
Upstairs, on the evening of September 10, Eric Gill kept an eye on the employee door to prevent “badge piggybacking” — a lax practice in which a single worker would swipe his ID card through the electronic lock and then allow several colleagues to come in without swiping their own cards. Part of Gill’s job was to make sure that only one certified employee got through the door at a time.
At 8:15 pm Gill noticed a group of five men approaching the checkpoint in a strange manner. They looked like airport employees — three of the men wore the striped shirts and blue pants of United Airlines ramp workers, and they had the appropriate green A all-access pass that would enable them to open the side door. However, instead of coming straight toward the side door as most airport workers would, the men came in at an angle next to one of the X-ray belts. There they simply stopped and looked for a few moments, as if they were examining security procedures at the checkpoint.
“Normally,” says Gill, “people who had legitimate business would just keep walking because they knew where they were going and what they were doing . . . Because they hesitated, I became suspicious.”
One of the group, an Arab-looking man in his late twenties, swiped his electronic pass and held the door open for the others. At this point Gill walked over and asked them if he could be of help. That is when he noticed that two of the five, though neatly dressed, were not in uniform and had no airport identification.
Gill politely told them that they were not entitled to enter the secure area unless they had their own IDs with them. He then asked who they were and what business they had that required using this entrance. When he did not get an answer, Gill told the two who did not have identification that they had to turn around and go back. “I said, ‘You have to go back again’ . . . They said they had IDs and were all going inside.”
At this point Gill’s colleague Nicholas DeSilva came on the scene and witnessed the rest of the encounter. Meanwhile, seeing the men close up, Gill realized that the United uniforms worn by three of them “were very dirty.” Gill had never seen United management tolerate such dirty or ragged-looking employees. Furthermore, after fifteen years at Dulles, “This was the first time I had seen these faces, and they were trying to escort these two guys without ID through there, and that worried me,” Gill recalls.
Gill refused to let the men in uniform escort the others through. “After I refused the escort, they got angry with me and they started to become rude,” he recalls. “They said, ‘We have IDs, we can go through here, and we can take them in.’ And I said to them, ‘Well, you have an ID, I can take only those who have IDs with them through the side door. All others who have no IDs will have to go back out and through the main security checkpoint.’” At that point the one who had swiped his ID to let the others through “came close to me and he started abusing me.” Gill recognized the man’s accent as Middle Eastern.
When Gill and DeSilva continued to block their way, the others joined in the abuse. “They told me to fuck off,” says Gill. “One said, ‘We are important people you don’t know and we should be allowed to go through here.’ He said, ‘You make your own rules.’”
The incident was unpleasant but not that surprising. Over the years Gill had been abused by a number of passengers and employees impatient with security procedures. “It was part of the job,” Gill explains. What did surprise him was what the men did next. Instead of the two without identification proceeding through the screening checkpoint, all five retreated. Gill watched intently as they walked straight ahead toward the escalators that led downstairs to the baggage levels. Because no FAA security warnings had been issued to the airlines and then to Argenbright, there was no reason for Gill or his colleagues to take any further action that night. Had the men been more physically threatening, he might have reported the incident to the airport authorities. But rudeness and trying to piggyback on a friend’s ID was not unusual enough to warrant a report.
At 10 pm, Eastern Daylight Time, Eric Gill finished his shift at the West Checkpoint and headed home to his apartment. After 10 pm the electronic door on the upper level was no longer covered by anyone. However, there was always an Argenbright guard on duty at Door 8 downstairs, where the West Checkpoint door led. Anyone coming through the upstairs door or through the lower-level employee entrance would be recorded on videotape. In addition, each key card used on the upstairs door was electronically logged.
On the night of September 10 Khalid Mahmoud was on duty at Door 8. On a normal night he would observe baggage handlers, maintenance people, and cleaning crews coming through his checkpoint. By 10 pm crews would be cleaning and preparing Dulles-based planes for flights the next day. Once a crew finished prepping a plane, it was officially sealed until accessed by the caterers and flight crew before takeoff. However, as Ed Nelson, Gill’s Argenbright supervisor, explains, “If someone wanted access to an aircraft, say to plant weapons, it would have been easy for the group Eric saw to come back after he got off duty and simply use the ID cards they had to activate the electronic lock and slip through.”
As Eric Gill drove home, a curious set of events played out a few miles away at the Marriott Residence Inn in Herndon, Virginia. Several guests with strikingly similar interests had checked into the same hotel. The first guest to register was one of the most powerful Saudi funders of Islamic causes, Saleh Ibn Abdul Rahman al-Hussayen. Al-Hussayen had been on an extended trip to Canada and the United States on behalf of the Saudi royal family, visiting various Islamic charities he assisted in funding. US government investigators were already aware that al-Hussayen was a financial backer of a
Later that night three men who fit the description of the men who tried to piggyback through Eric Gill’s checkpoint came to the Marriott Residence Inn. They were part of the Al Qaeda team that would return to the airport for the early-morning American Airlines Flight 77 to Los Angeles. The Al Qaeda team had spent several days in Laurel, Maryland, a suburb of Washington, before relocating to the Marriott.
