DC Bureau

Civilian and military personnel inspect the damage to the Pentagon on September 12, 2001. Photo by the US Government

When word of the World Trade Center attacks reached the airport, panic spread throughout the complex. The FAA ordered Dulles locked down; no one could enter or leave. FBI agents and Immigration and Naturalization agents were swarming. “I am standing by the glass doors we have just shut near the East Checkpoint,” Ed Nelson recalls. “This FAA guy runs by me and says there are several more planes in the air ready to do mass destruction. He yelled, ‘We just got word that one was on its way from Dulles en route to the White House.’ Within a minute later the Pentagon is hit. There are seven more planes in the air to go to different destinations. Minutes later Pennsylvania is hit . . .”

Nelson, who is genetically wired to talk to everyone in his path, “knew something wasn’t adding up” at Dulles on the afternoon of 9/11. For Nelson nothing the FBI and INS agents were asking his people made sense. “They were not asking about the hijackers — they were focusing in on what my screeners might have done wrong. It was as if they were working off a script,” he says.

According to FBI agents assigned to Dulles that day, who agreed to speak only if their names and office assignments were not published, that is precisely what they were given by supervisors at several Washington-area FBI offices. “The orders came from headquarters through the local Washington-area FBI field offices and the Joint Task Force on Terrorism. The teams of agents were told to ‘get the screeners to admit they had violated FAA recommended procedures,’” one of the FBI supervisors says.

Nelson remembers first seeing the FBI agents within an hour or two of the attacks. The security tape at the main terminal’s West Checkpoint was the first target for the bureau. “They pulled the tape right away . . . they brought it to me to look at it. They went right to the first hijacker on the tape and identified him. They knew who the hijackers were out of hundreds of people going through the checkpoints. They would go ‘roll and stop it’ and showed me each of the hijackers . . . It boggles my mind that they had already had the hijackers identified . . . Both metal detectors were open at that time and lots of traffic was moving through. So picking people out is hard . . . I wanted to know how they had that kind of information. So fast. It didn’t make sense to me.”

Nelson’s instincts were valid. The CIA had finally given the FBI information it had been deliberately withholding for more than a year — including information about two of the Flight 77 hijackers. These two men were the same ones, Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi, who had attended the Al Qaeda meeting in Kuala Lumpur twenty-one months earlier. The CIA and the FBI were supposed to be working together on a task force called STATION ALEC to track down the bin Laden network. Jack Cloonan, one of the FBI’s top agents on the task force, says: “As each month went by in 2000, the bureau was being deprived from seeing more and more intelligence.” What the CIA did not know is that when al-Mihdhar and al-Hazmi moved to San Diego in the summer of 2001, their benefactors included an FBI informant and a Saudi intelligence officer, and they were getting funding from bank accounts tied to then Saudi ambassador Prince Bandar’s wife. The prince is a close friend of the Bush family.

But apart from identifying the hijackers on the checkpoint tape, the agents were focusing not on them but on Argenbright’s security procedures. Ed Nelson says: “One agent looking at the tape with me said, ‘It really didn’t look like he hand-wanded him down to the ankle. Did he really check that bag good enough with the hand wand?’ I told them about technology and about how there are steel bars in the floor if you get too close. At that time we could not take shoes off of people. All we could do was feel the shoe. If it has a steel tip you can’t feel anything.”

As Nelson was trying to manage through the crisis, he was noticing that employees were missing. He soon realized they were being questioned by the INS. “I would get a phone call from the INS office in the airport requesting that we send this person down and then another person down, and . . . they were not coming back . . . Hours and hours would go by. Nobody would call. I would finally get a call saying, ‘Don’t expect this guy to come back, don’t expect this one to come back — he’s gone, she’s gone.’ They were just taking my employees from the airport down to DC and locking them up. But,” Nelson adds, “I never got a phone call saying this person was deported back to his country.”

Eric Gill got the news of the hijackings on his car radio as he and his wife were arriving at Wal-Mart for their second jobs. “When I called the airport,” he recalls, “there was no answer. I was trying to find out if I should come to my job in the afternoon.”

Gill and his wife, Roseline Safraz, who then ran a CTX machine that checks luggage for explosives, drove from Wal-Mart that afternoon to the locked-down terminal. Gill could not believe what he was seeing. The lower level of the terminal near the baggage-claim area was teeming with INS agents rounding up his colleagues and taking them away. FBI teams, along with Department of Transportation investigators, were questioning Argenbright workers not about what they had witnessed but about what they had done.

Eric Gill’s sense of foreboding began to build as he, like Ed Nelson earlier in the day, got the impression that the agents were following a script that had nothing to do with finding out how the hijackers had proceeded.

“When I came to Dulles I thought that these guys who tried to get through the night before could be involved,” Gill recalls. He immediately went to his supervisor, Chandresh Patel, and told him that his colleague Nicholas DeSilva was also present at the checkpoint when the incident took place. Patel called the FBI and arranged for Gill and DeSilva to be interviewed immediately. Gill and DeSilva were separated during their interviews downstairs in the Customs area. Gill’s interview team, a male and a female FBI agent, interrogated him for about two hours. It was clear to the agents that Gill had seen something important, but inexplicably they never showed him the videotape of the hijackers going through the checkpoint that morning to see if any of the five men he had encountered the previous night were in fact the same people. The FBI had no hesitation about showing the video to other Argenbright employees that afternoon, but they never showed it to Gill. DeSilva has a poor memory for faces but he did confirm that the incident took place.

Two days later the FBI team brought some pictures to Gill’s home. “Unfortunately,” says Gill, “they were just photocopies of poor quality and hard to see. They said they were in a hurry to find out what actually happened.” Even though the quality of the images was poor, Gill recognized one of the Dulles hijackers and a short, dark-skinned man who was later identified as one of the Logan hijackers.

“The picture was bad . . . but I told them he looked like he could be the one who had been dressed in a ramp uniform with the ID card on the night of the tenth,” Gill says. Had the agents brought Gill better-quality photographs or showed him the Dulles video, they might have learned a great deal more from him. Instead, after that second interview the FBI lost interest in what Eric Gill had to say.

Gill later learned that the man who could have corroborated part of his story, Khalid Mahmoud, had been inexplicably thrown out of the country. Mahmoud, who was still on Door 8 at Dulles after Eric Gill left work on the night of the tenth, was among the scores of Dulles workers swept up by the Immigration and Naturalization Service. Neither Ed Nelson nor Eric Gill ever saw or heard from Mahmoud again. Nelson says he was told by the FBI that Mahmoud simply would not be coming back to work. The FBI confiscated the 9/10 and 9/11 videotapes of the checkpoints and security doors. It also confiscated the logs of the electronic lock, which would reveal whose ID was used for the piggybacking attempt that led to the confrontation with Gill. Ed Nelson was unable to get access to the logs, and the FBI has not released the information they contained.

The rousting of foreign employees at Dulles scared both Eric and Roseline Gill. Two weeks after the hijackings, Eric was at Wal-Mart reading the National Enquirer during his break. “I was . . . reading the story on 9/11,” Gill says. “They had color pictures of the hijackers with the story. I was with my wife on my break and I said, ‘I recognized two of them.’ She said, ‘Are you sure?’ I told her, ‘I am pretty sure.’ The good thing I have is face memory. Even if I don’t remember the name, at least I always remember faces.” Roseline Gill thought her husband should speak up, and he was prepared to tell the FBI when they next interviewed him. But to his surprise, they never came back.

Fearful that speaking out would endanger his family, Gill remained silent. He did not even bring the matter up with Ed Nelson or Steve Wragg, who ran Argenbright’s station at Dulles. Instead, along with thousands of others working at Dulles, he quietly went through new fingerprinting and received a new identification card.

Watch our interview with Gill in Unsafe at any Altitude.

Gill had more than a passing familiarity with extreme Islam. He was a religious refugee lucky to have left the Middle East with his life. The son of a well-educated Pakistani family, Gill got on the wrong side of the Islamic fundamentalists when he converted to Christianity and became a priest in the Anglican Church of Pakistan. By 1986 he had attracted enough fundamentalist enemies at home to be reassigned to Dubai, where he became part of an underground network financed by the Methodist Church of England to save the lives of Muslims who converted to Christianity and were being targeted by Islamist extremists.

It was when Gill participated in the rescue of a young Pakistani woman named Ramah that he personally became a serious target for the fundamentalists. When Ramah’s Muslim elders demanded that she return to her home village for punishment, Gill and his fellow Christians understood what that meant: Ramah would face death for her conversion and her defiance of her family. Gill and his colleagues weighed their options, concluding that Ramah’s devotion to Christ was real, and she deserved protection. “This was not like the Taliban in Afghanistan but the even more extreme Sipa-e-Sahaba,” Gill recalls.  They’re a very fundamentalist Muslim group who are against Christians and especially against those who became Christians. They were giving a lot of problems to the church there . . . We wanted to support her because she was so much devoted to her faith and remained Christian. So we took her out of sight and took her to Dubai.” Gill’s underground network was eventually able to get her a Canadian visa, but it took quite awhile.

By this time it was clear to his church elders that Gill himself was in the sights of Sipa-e-Sahaba and could not live safely anywhere in the Middle East. The United Methodist Church agreed to sponsor Gill into the United States, where he successfully sought asylum because of religious persecution.

Gill understood when he entered the United States that his personal history and culture would be of little interest in his new country. “For me it was a source of strength to draw on,” he says, as he was put through the economic and emotional hazing that happens to most new immigrants. He knew his education and experience in Pakistan didn’t matter. He would have to start again. “If I did well, then it would be the new life that would define me in my new country.”

Failure was unacceptable for Eric Gill. He was a classic modern immigrant, well educated and willing to work as many jobs as it took to get a share of the American dream. His religious calling as a pastor was behind him. In early 1989, six months after arriving in the United States, Gill received papers from the Immigration and Naturalization Service that allowed him to work legally in his newly adopted country.

For Gill and others in his situation, the challenge was to find employers willing to hire foreigners brand new to the country for jobs that did not involve harsh manual labor. Argenbright Security supplied passenger-screening and other security services to airlines. Gill learned that the starting jobs at Argenbright paid little more than minimum wage, but that working conditions were usually good and the work was reliable. Gill took a job as a checkpoint screener, and after a few days of training he was put to work at Dulles. He had joined the massive workforce that guards the civil aviation structure throughout the country. Gill’s intelligence and work ethic impressed his bosses. He was promoted to a supervisory position just three months after he was first hired. By September 10, 2001, Eric Gill was a veteran Argenbright supervisor and, in the eyes of his fellow immigrants at Dulles, an example to be emulated.

Frank Argenbright, the founder of the company, had come from a more modest background than had Eric Gill. Argenbright had built a billion-dollar company by marshaling thousands like Gill into a low-wage but highly motivated workforce that could provide low-cost security for the airlines. His formula was so successful that in just over twenty years his company became the largest aviation security firm in the United States, with 40 percent of the market. There were high turnover rates as employees moved on to better jobs, but Argenbright took particular pride in the fact that his screeners had never been responsible for a serious security incident by allowing weapons through. Argenbright’s methods were so successful in the United States that he was invited to revamp screening in Europe after the Pan Am 103 bombing over Lockerbie, Scotland. By 1999 he helmed the largest aviation security company in the world.

In December 2000 a British-based outfit called Securicor bought Argenbright Security. For Eric Gill, the main difference was that the new owners were less personal in the way they treated employees. All the little extras that had made Argenbright Security different from the other screening companies were being cut. Whenever Frank Argenbright came through an airport his company served, employees like Gill would a get a personal hello, and they would get a personal note on a holiday card each year. For Gill, it was a matter of respect. The fresh carnation that Argenbright insisted every employee wear each day was no longer handed out under Securicor. Gill was also sorry to learn that Securicor would not be continuing the annual awards dinners honoring Argenbright’s best. Gill had won his share of these “110 Percent” awards. After fifteen years with Argenbright, Gill was one of the most experienced security officers at Dulles.

Every day Gill reminded himself that had he returned to Pakistan instead of coming to the United States, he would probably be dead. Many of his fellow Christians had been slaughtered in his native country, which was now a center for anti-Western Islamist activities.

Ed Nelson says, “I never received a phone call from anyone beyond watching the tapes with the FBI that first day, and I ran the security checkpoints . . . I never heard from the 9/11 Commission.” Every single employee who worked at Dulles checkpoints saw the tape of the Al Qaeda team in the immediate aftermath of the hijackings, Nelson adds, except for Eric Gill and Nicholas DeSilva.

Long after the FBI lost interest in Eric Gill, he was finally shown accurate pictures of the hijackers by Steve Wragg. On the FBI Web site www.fbi.gov/pressrel/penttbom/penttbomb.htm, Wragg had found pictures of each of the terrorists categorized under the specific flight hijacked. Wragg, long experienced in airline security, sat next to Gill and watched as he went through the pictures. Under American Airlines Flight 77 — the one that crashed into the Pentagon — Gill recognized Nawaf al-Hazmi as one of the men he saw the evening of September 10.

Then, clicking on United Flight 175 from Boston to Los Angeles, Eric pointed to Marwan al-Shehhi. Wragg says, “He did this before the pictures of the remaining three hijackers appeared on the screen.” Gill told Wragg, “I do remember these two faces especially because . . . al-Hazmi abused me . . . that’s why I can always remember him. Yeah, both of them were in the group of five people and these two were wearing IDs and uniforms also . . . I remember al-Shehhi, he was the first one who came in and showed me his ID.”

A source in the FBI, who asked not to be named, says that one reason Gill was not taken seriously was that the bureau had trouble understanding why and how one of the United 175 hijackers would have been at Dulles the night before his early-morning flight from Boston. Complicating the FBI’s problem was the fact that there were no cameras at the checkpoints at Logan. If Gill was correct about what he saw, then that raises questions about the entire post-9/11 investigation.

Both Nelson and Gill are convinced that the three men Gill did not recognize were not investigated by the FBI or any other government agency in the wake of the hijackings. Gill believes they may have been “Al Qaeda collaborators and no effort was made to catch them.” Nelson is more direct: “There were just way too many loopholes at Dulles then.” Gill was never shown the ID pictures of airport employees who might have been the ones he confronted on the tenth.

Almost eighteen months later Gill finally heard from the government again. The staff of the 9/11 Commission interviewed him, but only over the phone. He tried again to explain the significance of what he had seen. “I did explain to the agents that we had a camera on the West Checkpoint when they came through. They could have compared the pictures with the guys who came through the checkpoint the next day but again they didn’t do it.”

A high-level source at American Airlines says their security people were aware of the Eric Gill incident: “I believe the reason the FBI did not pay attention to Gill was because first he was from Pakistan, and second because his information was not consistent to the theory they had developed of what happened.”

Why a Boston hijacker might have been at Dulles could have something to do with Saleh al-Hussayen, the Saudi benefactor of Islamic charities who coincidentally was staying at the same Marriott Residence Inn where the Dulles hijackers spent their last night. According to testimony from an FBI agent in a 2004 terrorism financing trial of al-Hussayen’s nephew, Saleh al-Hussayen had a long history of arranging for financing of charities the US government suspected of having terrorist connections. Al-Hussayen arrived in the United States on August 20, 2001, and, according to the FBI, actually was taken on a tour of the World Trade Center. He visited Manhattan, Canada, Detroit, and Ann Arbor, Michigan, and returned to northern Virginia on September 6.

One of the FBI agents who worked on al-Hussayen for the Joint Task Force on Terrorism speculated that the Saudi, who later was put in charge of the most holy of all Islamic shrines in Mecca, “may have had some connection to the attacks and is likely to have met with those funding the hijackers if not the hijackers themselves” while on the trip. The agent pointed to the fact that al-Hussayen and his wife initially checked into another hotel in Herndon on September 6, but then moved to the Marriott Residence Inn.

The FBI finally got around to interviewing al-Hussayen on September 17 at the Marriott Residence Inn. During the interview the agents began to ask him whom he had met with while staying at the hotel. According to sworn testimony by an FBI agent in the nephew’s trial, “The uncle exhibited signs of physical distress and actually fainted to the ground during the course of the interview. He was subsequently brought to a local hospital and examined by a physician there . . . The agent conducting the interview spoke directly with the attending physician, who told the agent he could find nothing wrong with the patient and in the opinion of the agent, she felt the attack was feigned.”

The next day the FBI agent returned to the Marriott Residence Inn to try again to interview al-Hussayen about the events of 9/11. The agent found him unhelpful. After she left, al-Hussayen contacted the Saudi embassy, which in turn contacted the FBI. Former Saudi ambassador Prince Bandar, a personal friend of al-Hussayen, was already deeply involved in evacuating bin Laden family members and others from the United States after the attacks.

The next day another FBI agent, who was much less aggressive, was dispatched for yet another interview. That agent reported back that he could uncover no additional information. The first FBI agent on the case was adamant that al-Hussayen should not be permitted to leave the country until questions about 9/11 were resolved. Because of pressure from Prince Bandar on the Bush administration, however, the agent’s supervisors overruled her, and on September 19 al-Hussayen was allowed to fly to Saudi Arabia. He had never answered the FBI’s 9/11 questions.

Rear Admiral Cathal Flynn has the look of a warrior. Born in Ireland, six and half feet tall, a former navy SEAL, Flynn had the job of protecting civil aviation for most of the Clinton years. Before becoming associate administrator for security at the FAA, he had been the top navy counterintelligence official and played a major role in the infamous Jonathan Pollard spy case.

In the hours after the Al Qaeda attack Flynn received many calls from journalists. None was as memorable as that from Seymour “Sy” Hersh, the legendary investigative reporter. Hersh, not known for being either low-key or subtle, was particularly direct with Flynn, who had been a source for him on the Pollard case. With a certainty uniquely his own, Hersh told the admiral, “The guns were put onto the plane by the ramp workers.”

Flynn had not learned of Eric Gill’s encounter the evening before the hijackings, and neither had Hersh. Flynn, in his deep baritone voice, told Hersh that as far as he knew there were no pistols used in any of the hijackings. Hersh countered, “Those ramp workers aren’t even checked.” Flynn knew Hersh was right about ramp-worker security. He told Hersh, “Sy, why would they go through the process of ramp workers doing this rather than just take these things onto the plane by themselves?” According to Flynn, Hersh was adamant: “There were pistols and they were put onto the plane by the ramp workers.” Flynn, who is not easily intimidated by anyone, especially reporters, asked Hersh, “Who told you that?” Hersh replied, “The FBI.”

Flynn was not surprised. He sensed that the FBI had gone into defense mode even as the wreckage was still smoking and was trying to deflect blame for the disaster. Flynn knew a lot about how government employees reacted when they were put on the defensive. But he understood that what Sy Hersh was saying went to the heart of the vulnerability of commercial airline security. Six hundred thousand employees had access to the back of America’s airports. There was a deep, underlying fear among security people who understood how starkly the elaborate, sometimes arbitrary security required of passengers contrasted with the haphazard system for airline and airport employees and contractors.

Sy Hersh remembers the conversation with the admiral. “But my source was not the FBI,” he says, “it was the INS.” It is not unusual for reporters to disguise sources when asked by other officials where they got their information. After all, if you tell the wrong person, it could be an easy matter for him or her to track down and silence your original source.

Khalid Mahmoud, who was guarding the downstairs door of the West Checkpoint at Dulles the night Eric Gill turned those five men away, “was interviewed by the INS in the hours after the hijacking and then immediately deported,” according to an agent who worked for the INS at the time. While an FBI team was interviewing Gill and Nicholas DeSilva, the INS was already interviewing Khalid Mahmoud. “That is how the INS knew about the incident,” the INS source says. An FBI source who asked not to be identified says, “That is probably how the information got to Hersh.”

The sources who most threatened the Justice Department’s story that the screeners were responsible for 9/11 were Eric Gill and Khalid Mahmoud. If Al Qaeda had access to the aircraft at Dulles — or at any of the other airports — ahead of time and could have placed weapons on board, that meant that anything the screeners did or didn’t do was irrelevant.

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