The Foreseeable Past

MOST OF THE Monday-morning quarterbacking done in the wake of the 9/11 Commission has been unfair. One federal agency, however, really could have taken steps to stymie the attacks--the FAA. By simply changing its guidelines on how to handle hijackings, the Federal Aviation Administration could conceivably have prevented September 11.

Known as the Common Strategy, the FAA's hijacking protocol instructed pilots and crews never to resist, confront, or negotiate with hijackers. Instead, they were to peacefully accede to a hijacker's demands, even if this meant turning over control of the aircraft.

This policy was developed starting in the 1960s in response to a rash of air piracy, and at the time it made sense. Through the early 1970s, most domestic hijackings were carried out by fugitives and criminals seeking to flee America. The destination was often Cuba (which had no extradition for hijackers until 1973), and the FAA's primary concern was loss of life on the aircraft. Not unreasonably, the agency, essentially, advised: Everyone sit still and enjoy the ride. The Common Strategy remained in place, largely unaltered, until September 11.

In the aftermath of 9/11, various U.S. officials have insisted they had no way of foreseeing the use of a hijacked airplane as a weapon. Former FBI director Louis Freeh told the 9/11 Commission he "never was aware of a plan that contemplated commercial airliners being used as weapons after a hijacking. I don't think that was integrated into any plan." President Bush said much the same during his April 13 press conference: "Nobody in our government at least--and I don't think in the prior government--could envision flying airplanes into buildings, on such a massive scale."

Besides which, as one FAA official who left the agency shortly before 9/11 told me, "Up to 9/11 the Common Strategy was borne out by 40-some years of history. . . . The accepted theory was: Agree to almost anything and just get the airplane down on the ground. Once the airplane is on the ground, then we have a lot of other resources to put on it."

Not everyone sees it that way. Former FAA security chief Billy Vincent says, "The argument that we had no idea that the hijackers could use the airplanes as bombs is pure bull--." Vincent Cannistraro, a former head of the CIA's counterterrorism operations, says that by the mid-1990s, there was sufficient evidence of terrorists "thinking of flying planes into buildings" that the Common Strategy clearly needed revision. Even before that, there had been cases of people planning to use commercial aircraft as weapons. Troubled Passage, the fifth volume of the FAA's self-published history, describes two such hijackings. In November 1972, three fugitives hijacked a Southern Airlines DC-9 and threatened to crash it into a nuclear facility. The authorities became so concerned that they shot out the plane's tires during a refueling stop.

Then in February 1974, one Samuel J. Byck stormed a Baltimore airport, killed a security guard, and boarded a plane sitting at the gate. He ordered the plane to take off, and when there was a slight delay, Byck shot the pilot and copilot. Wounded by the police, he committed suicide before the plane got off the ground. Afterwards, it was discovered that Byck had left behind a tape detailing "Operation Pandora's Box," his plan to crash the plane into the White House.

Fast forward to convicted terrorist Ramzi Yousef. The New York Times reports that "in interviews with FBI agents in the mid-'90s [Yousef] seemed obsessed with the notion of hijacking airliners and attacking vulnerable targets." When Yousef's terror cell in the Philippines was broken up in 1995, one of his followers, Abdul Hakim Murad, told Philippine police that he and Yousef had discussed hijacking a commercial jet and flying it into CIA headquarters at Langley. The report, which was passed on to U.S. authorities, sketched the idea this way: "He will board any American commercial aircraft pretending to be an ordinary passenger. Then he will hijack said aircraft, control its cockpit, and dive it at the CIA headquarters. There will be no bomb or any explosive that he will use in its execution. It is simply a suicidal mission that he is very much willing to execute."

Even aside from these events, members of the intelligence community had considered the scenario. Last week, NORAD revealed that it ran a simulation between 1991 and 2001 in which the central concern was a hijacked airliner being crashed into a high-profile building in the United States.