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 men seemed to use the same Visa card, on which they rang up substantial charges, and gave the same Mail Boxes Etc. addresses, especially toward the last days of their lives. On attack day, four to seven cross-country tickets were billed to the same card. The same card number showed up on the rental contract for a car the hijackers left at Logan Airport and for a Boston hotel room some slept in. The pile of credit-card receipts, rental-car contracts, hotel bills and airline tickets tracks their movements as they eventually made their way from Florida to three chosen airports. By then, the ones determined to die didn't seem to care whether they left a trail, but investigators say the paperwork also opens useful leads in new directions.
Investigators don't know how much the suicide pilots knew about their confederates before they gathered Tuesday morning at their assigned planes--or if they knew others would undertake similar missions. But preliminary information suggests that the cells followed classic bin Laden practice: over time, cell members built up a small local support network to collect information, rent houses, buy equipment for the "sleeper" operatives while they waited to be activated. As happened with the East Africa embassy bombings, agents think only a few superior handlers--a Commander X or two--sent perhaps by HQ at the penultimate moment, knew how the final pieces were meant to fit together. They're the ones Washington desperately wants to find, because they might provide the definitive link to bin Laden and interdict more terrorist acts.
But there are plenty of clues to retrace the steps of the hijackers in their final days and hours. Boston seems to have served as a forward staging area, a big city where the terrorists could vanish in the large Arab population. Three times last month Atta rented cars from Warrick's Rent-a-Car in Pompano Beach and checked one back in with 2,000 miles on the odometer. He brought the last one back Sept. 9. Parking-lot cameras picked up a white Mitsubishi sedan leased from an Alamo franchise that had gone in and out of Boston's Logan Airport five times between Sept. 5 and Sept. 11.
Someone, maybe Atta, was meticulously casing the airport, checking plane schedules, looking for half-empty flights, testing security measures. He and his accomplices obviously learned a great deal about airline schedules, aircraft capabilities and fuel loads, perhaps even seat configurations. The car was found there again Tuesday night, containing a "ramp pass" to enter restricted areas of Logan Airport. Maybe that someone was reconnoitering with accomplices who worked on the planes, who could plant weapons onboard. Monday night, some of the Boston suicide squads collected at the Park Inn in suburban Chestnut Hill. By Wednesday dozens of police in bulletproof vests descended on Room 432 to collect and remove evidence.