I felt I was making some progress and was relieved that the task of gathering information wasn’t insurmountable. In fact, it seemed pretty straightforward. But I also worried that I was being given a bad lead. Ten minutes after al Hajj left, I went to the bookstore, which stood around the corner from the mosque.
The bookstore was one big room with wooden floors and wooden bookshelves. Books for women and children were kept in a small area in back, separated from the main room by a curtain. There were books in Arabic, German, and English. Two men greeted me. I introduced myself to the younger one, who looked to be in his early thirties, and told him I was a freelance journalist trying to figure out what had happened. It helped that, like him, I spoke a Moroccan dialect of Arabic.
“No journalists have come to us here,” he said. “I’m wondering why you came.”
I asked if he knew Atta and the others.
“They came in sometimes. They were normal people.”
“Why did they do this?”
“They became political. Ask the Americans why they have killed people in Iraq and Palestine.”
The man told me that he was from Casablanca and that he hadn’t been religious before. “My brother was a bartender,” he said, as if to drive home his secular credentials. At some point, while he was on vacation with his German wife, he had a strong feeling that his life wasn’t proceeding as it should. Both he and his brother became religious, and they invested all their money in the bookstore. Over time, they and other young men their age became Atta’s acolytes, praying and studying together and moving in the same circles.
On the day I visited, a bunch of students were sitting in the bookstore talking politics and criticizing Israel. They told me they weren’t speaking against the American people, because “we know the people are good,” but against America’s involvement in the Middle East.
“If Israel’s the country you have a problem with, why are you attacking the United States?” I asked.
“The Americans are supporting the Israelis,” one of the men said.
It seemed that they blamed the United States reflexively for everything that was wrong in the world. And one word kept coming up: jihad.
“What exactly do you mean by jihad?” I finally asked.
“You have the right to defend yourself,” a Moroccan student told me.
“Who attacked you personally?” I asked. “What are you talking about?”
“They attacked us.”
“Morocco was not attacked.”
“We don’t think as Moroccans,” he said. “We think as Muslims.”
I began to understand that I was entering a world from which my parents had always tried to protect me. As a journalist, it was my job to report what was going on in these men’s minds and to explain it to others. This was just the beginning.
Another man, an Egyptian, seemed suspicious of my questions. “Why do you want to know these things?” he asked. “Who really wants to know the truth? Didn’t people see the truth all these years, and they did nothing? These men took a decision, based on the truth.”
I knew after talking with these men that I wanted to know the truth and that I hadn’t found it yet. Days passed, and I continued to explore and talk to people. The Steindamm neighborhood was only the first of many surprises. I’ll never forget my first interview with the father of Mounir el-Motassadeq, an alleged September 11 collaborator, in Hamburg that fall. I wore a suit, thinking I would look professional. But when I met the man who’d set up the interview, he eyed me dismissively.
“Don’t you have something to wear on top?” he asked. “You can see everything from the back. Where’s your head scarf?”
I went to a Pakistani shop and bought a very long shirt and some scarves.
At another mosque where Atta and his comrades had prayed, I heard about the wars in Bosnia and the Arabian Gulf from an entirely new perspective. I had thought the United States was protecting Muslims in those wars. But for the first time, I was talking to people who hated America, and they saw Western intervention differently. They believed that the United States and its European allies were only interested in economic gain and were forcing their “system” and “way of life” upon others. Some mentioned what the United States had done in South America, specifically that “they killed Che Guevara and others because they didn’t like U.S. imperialism.” These men also accused America of supporting a “genocide against the Palestinians” for decades. To them, the United States was “the big Satan.”
I also began hearing a narrative about the meaning and spirit of Islam that was very different from what I’d grown up with. Like my parents, I believed that religion should be separated from politics. Suddenly I found myself among people whose religion and political views were hopelessly intertwined. At first, the Hamburg connection to the September 11 attacks had baffled me. But the more time I spent there, the more certain I grew that Mohamed Atta and the others had been radicalized and recruited in Germany.
People on Steindamm described Atta as an austere man, strict in his thinking and quick to point out religious lapses in others. He chastised Muslims for their love of music and for smoking cigarettes. He and his cell were not sleeper agents. Atta was known in the city, as were some of his friends. But he’d operated out of sight of German authorities in this parallel world. I found it extraordinary that no one in the security or intelligence services had noticed such extremism.
Despite my na?veté, I did have some advantages, even then. The al-Quds mosque in Hamburg, where Atta and his circle had prayed often, was run by Moroccans. They had long beards, unlike anyone in my family, but the fact that I spoke Moroccan Arabic helped a lot—and not just with the Moroccans.
That fall in Hamburg, I was out for a walk when I happened to meet the head of Der Spiegel’s investigative unit, who had spoken at my journalism school the previous year. He asked who I was working for.
“Nobody now,” I said.
“But you speak Arabic,” he responded.
Der Spiegel was Germany’s most famous weekly magazine, with a reputation for integrity and courage. It was one of the media outlets I most respected. In 1962, its editors had been accused of treason for printing a story that criticized the country’s military readiness. The magazine’s founder had been imprisoned along with several top editors and reporters. It ultimately emerged that the defense minister had lied about his role in the affair, and he was forced to resign.
The magazine had a staff of top-notch reporters but needed someone with access to the Arab communities in Germany. The editor passed my name along, and I became a stringer for the magazine—contributing stories but not yet on staff. It was a huge break, the kind of lucky happenstance that can make a young reporter’s career.