Osama bin Laden is seen in this video footage recorded "very recently" at an undisclosed location in Afghanistan aired by the Qatar-based satelite TV station al-Jazeera October 7, 2001.
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Some of the future hijackers developed a connection with Portland, Maine, that investigators are still puzzling over. Getting to and from that city has become easier in the past few years as the big airlines have laid on small-jet routes to link it to Boston and other Northeastern hubs. The Portland airport still has just one security checkpoint, which has a surveillance camera pointed at it. On Tuesday, shortly before 6 a.m., the camera captured an image of Mohamed Atta and Abdulaziz Alomari clearing security in the quiet airport for a US Airways flight to Boston. "In the photo, Atta has a ticket in his hand and a small shoulder bag," says Michael Chitwood, who runs Portland's 155-man police department. Both men were dressed in Western garb.
They evidently arrived in Boston the previous Sunday, drove back to Portland and then flew again to Boston. But this would have increased their exposure to airline security, which they had to clear once in Portland and again in Boston, since US Airways and American Airlines operate from opposite ends of the terminal. Yet, says Chitwood, "if these guys carried out this attack the way they did, they had a reason to be up here, but who the hell knows what it is?"
The movements, however, suggest a group of hijackers quite familiar with airport and immigration security, men who had figured out how to move in and around the U.S. without attracting notice. This is especially remarkable since several of them, sources tell TIME, were already on FBI watch lists. Toward the end of 1999, the CIA received sketchy information connecting two of the dead hijackers--Khalid Al-Midhar and Nawaq Alhamzi--to bin Laden's organization. Officials tell TIME the CIA information was considered too vague to pass along, but by this summer those suspicions had firmed up. There was no indication of the plot they had in mind, but there were strong hints of links to bin Laden associates, including a connection to a suspect in the bombing of the U.S.S. Cole, enough to raise a flag in the CIA database. A U.S. official deep in the investigation says it has now been determined from Immigration and Naturalization Service records that Al-Midhar and Alhamzi visited the U.S. briefly in 2000. They returned in July 2001, giving "Marriott in New York City" as their destination. On Aug. 23, the CIA passed their names to the FBI and the INS for inclusion on the U.S. watch list, and FBI agents searched the country for the two. But they had left addresses that turned out to be useless, and the FBI never found them until they crashed into the Pentagon. Only afterward did the FBI turn up the address for Al-Midhar in the Claremont area of San Diego.
The suicide squads seem to have regularly used their own names, or at least consistent noms de guerre, when they enrolled in flight school, rented apartments, bought cars. Police have impounded cars they used and searched apartments up and down the American East Coast and in Germany, hauling off bags of potential evidence. In Florida, the FBI picked up a discarded tote bag at the Panther Motel, where Al-Shehhi stayed during the past two weeks. Its contents: maps, flight manuals and martial-arts books.