After 12:40 p.m. September 11, 2001: Investigators Ask Managers at Dulles Airport to Identify the Screeners Who Let the Hijackers onto Flight 77

Federal agents ask managers Steve Wragg and Ed Cox to help identify the screeners who worked at the checkpoint at Washington’s Dulles International Airport that the alleged hijackers of Flight 77 passed through this morning, and suggest these screeners could be guilty of collusion with the hijackers. [Trento and Trento, 2006, pp. 129] Flight 77 took off from Dulles Airport at 8:20 a.m. (see (8:20 a.m.) September 11, 2001) and crashed into the Pentagon at 9:37 a.m. (see 9:37 a.m. September 11, 2001). [9/11 Commission, 7/24/2004, pp. 8, 10] Wragg works as the district manager in charge of the airport for Argenbright Security, which handles the passenger security checkpoints, baggage, and other services there for American Airlines and United Airlines. [Atlanta Business Chronicle, 10/12/2001; Trento and Trento, 2006, pp. 125] Cox is the airport security coordinator at Dulles Airport. [9/11 Commission, 10/16/2003 ] Wragg was away from work when the crashes at the World Trade Center took place but promptly headed to Dulles Airport when he learned of them (see After 11:00 a.m. September 11, 2001). [Trento and Trento, 2006, pp. 128] Cox, meanwhile, was at work in the airport operations office when they occurred. [9/11 Commission, 10/16/2003 ]
Agents Say They Are ‘Looking for Collusion’ – At some point this afternoon, CIA and FBI agents who have come to the airport to look into the hijacking of Flight 77 ask the two men to help identify the screeners who were working at a security checkpoint at the airport when the hijackers passed through it. The agents apparently believe that some of the screeners may be complicit in this morning’s attacks. “We want you to identify the screeners and quite frankly we’re looking for collusion here,” they say. They show Wragg and Cox video on which the alleged hijackers can be seen passing through the checkpoint (see 7:18 a.m. September 11, 2001, 7:35 a.m. September 11, 2001, and 7:36 a.m. September 11, 2001). (It is unclear whether Wragg and Cox are shown footage of all the hijackers going through the checkpoint or just some of them.)
Agents Seem Desperate to Find Incriminating Evidence – Wragg gets the impression that the federal agents are desperate to find something incriminating on the video. As one of the hijackers is shown walking through a metal detector, an agent asks, “Is he looking at your agent there?” Presumably referring to hijacker Nawaf Alhazmi, an FBI agent asks: “Can you zoom in on that guy’s back pocket? Zoom in. Is that a box cutter? Zoom in on that.” Wragg just laughs at this, which strikes him as “absolutely just a stupid comment.” “You could not identify what it was” in the pocket and the screener “had done everything perfectly,” he will remark. A screener is shown randomly selecting Alhazmi to have his carry-on luggage traced with the explosive detection system. “It was perfect procedure,” Wragg will opine. The fact that the hijacker was chosen for this procedure at random “just shows that we were doing everything we were supposed to,” he will add.
Agents Copy All the Files with Details of the Screeners – The federal agents want details of all the screeners who were working at Dulles Airport this morning and so they go to Argenbright Security’s office at the airport and copy all of the files with information about them. “Anything we had on them was copied, and we copied and copied and copied,” Wragg will recall. He will add that the agents “came back on more than one occasion and asked for the same copies they had already taken earlier.” However, Wragg notices nothing incriminating in the evidence he reviews with the federal agents. He sees no evidence “that any of the hijackers had gone through security at Dulles with any weapon, legal or illegal,” according to investigative journalists Joseph Trento and Susan Trento. [9/11 Commission, 8/26/2004, pp. 27; Trento and Trento, 2006, pp. 129-130]