Perfect Soldiers

PERFECT SOLDIERS: The Hijackers—Who They Were, Why They Did It. By Terry McDermott. HarperCollins. 330 pp. $25.95

Books about the September 11 terrorist attacks are almost too numerous to count, but Perfect Soldiers deserves to stand out. Terry McDermott, a Los Angeles Times reporter, may know more than anyone else about the Hamburg-based Islamic extremists who pulled off Al Qaeda’s spectacularly successful attack.

The most familiar face among the 19 hijackers, Mohamed el-Amir Atta, is actually the most unknowable of the top organizers. In dramatic contrast to the mean and sour visage in photos from the final years of his life, pictures from his youth show a joyous teenager. He was raised in a solidly middle-class Cairo family, and “forced by his father to leave home and go to Germany” for graduate school in 1992, at age 24.

At Hamburg’s Al Quds mosque, Atta and three other principal players grew committed to a Muslim jihad: Marwan al-Shehhi, who flew one plane into the World Trade Center (Atta flew the other); Ziad Jarrah, who piloted the plane that crashed in Pennsylvania; and Ramzi bin al-Shibh, who couldn’t get a visa to enter the United States and ended up serving as the plotters’ primary overseas contact. McDermott notes that the public expression of radical ideas was “far more common” in big cities “outside the Islamic world than within it.” Even so, few could match this quartet’s utter preoccupation with the obligations of religious devotion. “It is hard to appreciate how much time these young men spent thinking, talking, arguing, and reading about Islam,” he writes. “It became for some of them nearly the only thing they did.”

McDermott says that the hijackers’ story reflects “the power of belief to remake ordinary men.” In no instance was that power more mystifying than in the case of Ziad Jarrah. The son of a secular, middle-class Beirut family, Jarrah, like Atta, came to Germany to pursue his education. In contrast to the aloof Atta, the partygoing Jarrah married a young Turkish woman who had grown up in Germany, and remained devoted to her until he boarded the United Airlines flight on September 11. Jarrah, whom McDermott calls “an unlikely candidate for Islamic warrior,” rendezvoused with his wife six times during his final 14 months, while he, Atta, and al-Shehhi were attending flight schools in Florida.

Jarrah kept his real plans from his wife, and McDermott observes that “their relationship survived on her capacity to believe Jarrah’s lies, even those that seemed preposterous.” Yet on the morning of September 11, Jarrah wrote her a I did what I was supposed to do. You should be very proud of me,” he wrote. Their separation would be only temporary, he assured her: When “we see each other again . . . we will live a very nice and eternal life, where there are no problems, and no sorrow.” From Jarrah’s certainty of a superior future life sprang the ability to sacrifice his present one.

“Al Qaeda was not a slick, professional outfit that didn’t get caught because it didn’t make mistakes,” McDermott concludes at one point. “It made mistakes all the time. It didn’t get caught because the government with which it was dealing made more of them.” That analysis is certainly correct, but it’s the life stories McDermott recounts, rather than the conclusions he draws from them, that make Perfect Soldiers such a memorable book.

—David J. Garrow