The passport of 9/11 hijacker Satam Al Suqami is reportedly found a few blocks from the World Trade Center. [ABC News, 9/12/2001; Associated Press, 9/16/2001; ABC News, 9/16/2001] Barry Mawn, the director of the FBI’s New York office, will say that police and the FBI found it during a “grid search” of the area. [CNN, 9/18/2001] However, according to the 9/11 Commission, the passport is actually discovered by a male passer-by who is about 30 years old and wearing a business suit. The man gives it to New York City Police Department Detective Yuk H. Chin shortly before 9:59 a.m., when the South Tower of the WTC collapses. The man leaves before he is identified. Chin, according to the 9/11 Commission, will give the passport to the FBI later in the day. [9/11 Commission, 1/26/2004; 9/11 Commission, 8/21/2004, pp. 40 
] An FBI timeline concerned with the 9/11 hijackers will state that the passport is found by a civilian “on the street near [the] World Trade Center,” and is “soaked in jet fuel.” [Federal Bureau of Investigation, 10/2001, pp. 291 ] According to FBI agent Dan Coleman, Al Suqami’s passport is handed to a New York City detective who is “down there, trying to talk to people as they were coming out of the buildings.” By the time the detective looks up again after receiving the passport, the man who handed it to him has run off, “which doesn’t make sense,” Coleman will say. The passport is then given to a detective on the Joint Terrorism Task Force. Coleman will say that by this evening, “we realized… that this was the passport of one of the people that headquarters had identified as one of the 19 probable hijackers.” [France 5, 3/14/2010] Investigative journalist Nick Davies will later write that he talked to “senior British sources who said they believed that the discovery of a terrorist’s passport in the rubble of the Twin Towers in September 2001 had been ‘a throwdown,’ i.e. it was placed there by somebody official.” [Davies, 2009, pp. 248] The Guardian will comment, “The idea that Mohamed Atta’s passport had escaped from that inferno unsinged [tests] the credulity of the staunchest supporter of the FBI’s crackdown on terrorism.” (Note that, as in this Guardian account, the passport will frequently be mistakenly referred to as belonging to Atta, not Al Suqami.) [Guardian, 3/19/2002]
9:30 a.m. September 11, 2001: Boston Airport Director Receives Passenger Manifests for Flights 11 and 175; Singles Out Arab Names
A director at Boston’s Logan Airport receives the passenger manifests for Flight 11 and Flight 175, and reportedly is able to quickly single out the names of the five hijackers on each of these flights. Ed Freni, the director of aviation operations at Logan, had phoned his contacts at American and United Airlines who are based at the airport roughly around 9:00-9:15. He had requested the manifests for the two hijacked planes that took off from there (see (9:00 a.m.-9:15 a.m.) September 11, 2001). Several pages with names listed in long columns now roll out of the fax machine in the Massachusetts Port Authority (Massport) aviation office at Logan, where Freni recently arrived. Freni looks over the manifest for Flight 11. Aware that Arab men attacked the World Trade Center in 1993, he searches for any Arabic names. According to author Tom Murphy, he circles the names of the five men later accused of being the plane’s hijackers: “In 2A and 2B, he circled two, both W. Alshehri. In 8D, M. Atta, and 8G, A. Alomari. In 10B, he circled S. Al Suqami.” None of the names of the other individuals on the plane appear suspicious to him. Freni then looks over the manifest for Flight 175. Again, according to Murphy, he singles out the names of the men later accused of being the plane’s hijackers: “He circled F. Alquadibanihammad [presumably Fayez Ahmed Banihammad], A. Alghamdi, H. Alghamdi, M. Alshehri, and M. Alshehhi.” Freni asks John Duval, Logan’s deputy director of operations who is with him in the aviation office, “FBI here yet?” Duval replies, “They’re on the way over from downtown.” Freni says, “Tell ‘em we got their guys.” [Murphy, 2006, pp. 34-36] However, at 10:59 a.m., the FBI’s Chicago command post will receive a copy of the manifest for Flight 175, and, according to an FBI document, this will have six Muslim names on it—one more than Freni reportedly singles out. [Federal Bureau of Investigation, 9/12/2001 ] Presumably the sixth Muslim name is that of Touri Bolourchi, a nurse originally from Iran. [New York Times, 6/30/2002] There were also at least another two passengers on Flight 11 with names that might appear to be Arabic, yet that Freni apparently does not single out: Waleed Iskandar was a Lebanese management consultant. [Palo Alto Weekly, 12/12/2001; Associated Press, 9/11/2002] And Rahma Salie was an IT consultant of Sri Lankan descent. [Independent, 10/11/2001; New York Times, 7/14/2002]
Shortly After 9:37 a.m.: FISA Judge Grants Five Warrantless Surveillance Requests Minutes after Pentagon Attack
Royce Lamberth, head of the FISA court which grants warrants for intelligence cases, grants five warrantless surveillance requests minutes after the Pentagon attack. Lamberth will later report being stuck in a carpool lane near the Pentagon when it is hit. With his car enveloped in smoke, he calls US marshals to help him get to his office. Lamberth will later say that by the time officers reached him, “I had approved five FISA coverages [warrants] on my cellphone.” [Associated Press, 6/24/2007] Presumably this represents the start of a flurry of surveillance activity in response to the 9/11 attacks, but it is not known who was to be monitored or how their names were learned and acted on so quickly.
9:42 a.m. September 11, 2001: FBI Arrives at the Pentagon; Assumes Responsibility for Investigation
Within five minutes of the Pentagon being hit, the first group from the FBI’s National Capital Response Squad arrives there. Due to this being a terrorist attack, the Pentagon and its grounds are immediately declared a federal crime scene. Under the terms of a 1995 presidential directive, this makes them the exclusive responsibility of the FBI. The FBI immediately begins collecting evidence and is also responsible for recovering bodies. Its agents are able to confiscate security videos from a nearby gas station within minutes of the crash (see (After 9:37 a.m.) September 11, 2001). More than 700 FBI agents, assisted by hundreds of individuals from other organizations, will participate in the recovery operation. [US President, 6/21/1995; Washington Times, 9/12/2001; US Department of Health and Human Services, 7/2002, pp. A-7, A-23, C-1, C-54 ]
After 10:00 a.m. September 11, 2001: Arizona FBI Agents Visit a Local Flight School and Learn that a Suspected Hijacker Was a Student There
George Piro and Ken Williams, two agents at the FBI field office in Phoenix, Arizona, visit a flight school in Phoenix to see if any suspicious students have attended it recently and the manager immediately informs them about Hani Hanjour, one of the alleged hijackers of Flight 77. As they watched the terrorist attacks unfolding on television, Piro and Williams decided they wanted to start responding to the crisis on their own initiative, rather than sitting around and waiting for an order. They know Phoenix has the second-highest concentration of flight schools in the nation. Piro therefore looked in the Yellow Pages and found three programs that offer commercial pilot licenses. With this information in hand, the two agents set out to visit some flight schools. The first one they go to is the Sawyer School of Aviation at Sky Harbor Airport in Phoenix. They ask the manager there if any suspicious students have attended recently. Almost without hesitation, she gives them the file of one such student: Hanjour. [Graff, 2011, pp. 325; Washingtonian, 5/5/2011] Hanjour received training at the flight school earlier this year and, previously, in 1998 (see 1998 and Summer 2001). [Washington Post, 10/15/2001; Associated Press, 12/29/2001; 9/11 Commission, 7/24/2004, pp. 529] He allegedly flew Flight 77 into the Pentagon (see 9:37 a.m. September 11, 2001). [Fox News, 1/7/2016] Just after they are given the file, Piro receives a call on his cell phone from an agent from the FBI’s Boston office. The agent, who is currently at Logan International Airport in Boston, says he has a name from the passenger manifest for Flight 77 that the Phoenix agents should look into: Hani Hanjour. To the agent’s surprise, Piro replies, “I’m holding his file in my hands right now.” Piro and Williams then head back to their office to report their progress. At the office, Piro tells their squad leader, “I’ve identified one of the hijackers.” Incredulous at this news, the squad leader replies, “Get out of here—I don’t have time for jokes today.” [Graff, 2011, pp. 325-326; Washingtonian, 5/5/2011]
After 10:06 a.m. September 11, 2001: Al-Qaeda Agents Heard Saying ‘We’ve Hit the Targets’
According to Newsweek, “shortly after the suicide attacks,” US intelligence picks up communications among bin Laden associates relaying the message: “we’ve hit the targets.” [Newsweek, 9/13/2001]
After 10:28 a.m. September 11, 2001: FBI Establishes a Temporary Field Office in Manhattan
FBI agents in New York quickly set up a temporary field office in an FBI parking garage, where they will be based for the next few weeks, after the attacks on the World Trade Center rendered their original office unusable. The New York office is the FBI’s largest field office, comprising some 1,100 special agents. It is located at 26 Federal Plaza, just a few blocks away from the WTC site. However, the collapses of the Twin Towers (see 9:59 a.m. September 11, 2001 and 10:28 a.m. September 11, 2001) disabled its telephone service, thereby rendering it useless. Officials are also concerned that 26 Federal Plaza might be the target of another terrorist attack.
New Facility Is Set Up in 24 Hours – Therefore, “Almost immediately” after the Twin Towers came down, according to the New York Times, the FBI starts relocating to a garage in Manhattan. The block-long, multilevel garage at 26th Street and the West Side Highway is usually used by the FBI to store and repair its fleet of vehicles. But within 24 hours of the attacks on the WTC, a temporary field office is up and running there. The facility is equipped with about 100 laptop computers. Three hundred phone lines are installed, with phones hooked up to a satellite truck positioned outside the garage.
Investigation Is Coordinated from the Temporary Facility – Officials from over two dozen federal, state, and local agencies are then based at the makeshift facility. Barry Mawn, director of the FBI’s New York office, and key federal prosecutors, including Mary Jo White, US Attorney for the Southern District of New York, coordinate the work of almost 2,000 investigators from there. The garage will serve as the command center for the first four weeks of the FBI’s investigation of the terrorist attacks. [New York Times, 9/24/2001; Washington Post, 10/20/2001; Kessler, 2002, pp. 5, 424; Journal of Public Inquiry, 3/2002 ] It will be “New York’s nerve center for information about the attacks,” according to the Associated Press. [Associated Press, 9/27/2001] Agents will move back to their original field office at 26 Federal Plaza early in October. [Washington Post, 10/20/2001]
After 10:30 a.m. September 11, 2001: Gate Agent Has Singled Out Boarding Passes of Suspicious Flight 93 Passengers
A United Airlines manager finds that a gate agent has already singled out boarding passes belonging to four suspicious passengers who were on Flight 93. Terri Rizzuto is the United Airlines station manager at Newark Airport, from where Flight 93 departed. Some time after hearing that this plane has crashed, she speaks on the phone with the FBI, which is requesting the plane’s manifest and its Passenger Name Record (PNR). After arranging permission to release these, she goes to Gate 17, from where she knows Flight 93 departed, wanting to talk to her staff there. When she arrives, a supervisor hands her four boarding passes. The supervisor tells her they are “The men, who did this maybe,” and points her toward one of the gate agents who had boarded the passengers onto the flight. When Rizzuto asks the gate agent, “How do you know?” he replies: “They were too well-dressed. Too well-dressed for that early in the morning. And their muscles rippled below their suits.… [A]nd their eyes.” [Murphy, 2006, pp. 71-73] However, this report of men with rippling muscles contradicts the 9/11 Commission’s description of the so-called “muscle” hijackers (i.e. the non-pilot hijackers) on the four targeted planes: They “were not physically imposing,” with the majority of them being “slender in build.” [9/11 Commission, 6/16/2004]
10:45 a.m. September 11, 2001: Coroner Surprised by Lack of Human Remains at Flight 93 Crash Site
Wallace Miller, the coroner of Somerset County, who is one of the first people to arrive at the Flight 93 crash scene, is surprised by the absence of human remains at the site. He will later say: “If you didn’t know, you would have thought no one was on the plane. You would have thought they dropped them off somewhere.” [Longman, 2002, pp. 217] The only recognizable body part Miller sees is a piece of spinal cord with five vertebrae attached. He will tell Australian newspaper The Age: “I’ve seen a lot of highway fatalities where there’s fragmentation. The interesting thing about this particular case is that I haven’t, to this day, 11 months later, seen any single drop of blood. Not a drop.” [Age (Melbourne), 9/9/2002] Dave Fox, a former firefighter, also arrives early at the crash scene, but sees just three chunks of human tissue. He will comment, “You knew there were people there, but you couldn’t see them.” [Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, 9/11/2002] Yet, in the following weeks, hundreds of searchers will find about 1,500 scorched human tissue samples, weighing less than 600 pounds—approximately eight percent of the total body mass on Flight 93. Months after 9/11, more remains will be found in a secluded cabin, several hundred yards from the crash site. [Washington Post, 5/12/2002]
After 11:00 a.m. September 11, 2001: Investigators Refuse to Let a Manager at Dulles Airport Get Involved with Interviews of His Personnel
Investigators at Washington’s Dulles International Airport sternly refuse to let Steve Wragg, a manager, get involved with interviews of his employees, even just to help as a translator for workers with limited English-speaking skills. [Trento and Trento, 2006, pp. 128-129] 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] Having just returned from a trip to Boston, he was away from work when the crashes at the World Trade Center took place. [Brighton Argus, 9/26/2001] But after learning of the attacks, he headed to Dulles Airport to check on Ed Nelson, a security manager who works for him, and the airport’s screeners. He arrived at around 11:00 a.m. and found the place in chaos, filled with people dressed in suits who were wearing earpieces and carrying guns. He found Nelson and the two men headed to the airport’s security checkpoints where they saw personnel standing around, being interviewed by men in suits with clipboards.
Manager Is Told that the Investigation Is None of His Business – Wragg now heads to his office, where screeners are being questioned by investigators, and sees people who belong to numerous agencies, including the FBI, the CIA, airport police, the Department of Transportation, and the Immigration and Naturalization Service. However, he is unable to find anyone who can tell him who is in charge, what is going on, or who he is meant to talk to. Instead, an agent orders him to get out. “Anybody I spoke to said, ‘We need you to stay out of this, we’re taking over, this is none of your business right now,’” he will later recall.
Manager’s Offer of Help with Translation Is Rejected – Wragg calls Argenbright Security’s headquarters, and is told to “secure the records” and “make sure no one touches anything.” He explains to his bosses what the situation is like at the airport and asks what they want him to do. He is instructed to try and get involved if investigators are speaking to Argenbright employees. He then attempts to do this but the investigators refuse to let him participate. “You’re not going to be a part of this,” they tell him. Wragg thinks the investigators will need him to help translate, since many of his company’s employees are immigrants with limited English-speaking skills. Some of them are saying yes to investigators when they don’t know the answer to a question, just to pacify their interrogators, and some of the investigators are getting frustrated at the situation. Wragg wants to assist. “I’m not here for any other reason but to help,” he tells the investigators, but they still order him to “get out.” [Trento and Trento, 2006, pp. 128-129]
