THE TWENTIETH MAN

About six years ago, Zacarias Moussaoui, who is now facing trial on capital charges as the alleged twentieth man in the September 11th aircraft hijackings, travelled to Chechnya with a childhood friend to join separatists in their fight against Russian control. At the time, young men from throughout the Muslim world were arriving in the region, which was regarded, after the Russian defeat in Afghanistan, as the site of a new jihad. Moussaoui was a Frenchman of Moroccan descent, and his friend was also from an immigrant family. Evidently, Moussaoui did not impress his superiors in the operation. When the Chechens decided that the foreign volunteers were more trouble than they were worth, Moussaoui was told to leave. (His friend was invited to stay, and was later killed, reportedly while filming combat scenes for an Islamic Web site.) "They sent Moussaoui packing," one of the lawyers appointed to represent him told me. "Who wants him around? He brought nothing to the table. He's trouble."

In February, 2001, Moussaoui showed up at the Airman Flight School, in Norman, Oklahoma. He was now thirty-two, and had continued to travel in pursuit of fundamentalist causes. He had been in Afghanistan (where he is alleged to have spent time in an Al Qaeda training camp), in Pakistan, and in Malaysia, while maintaining a base of sorts at a radical mosque in North London. When he arrived in America, two weeks after returning to London from a trip to Pakistan, he told customs he had thirty-five thousand dollars in cash. His sudden interest in flying had led him to pay five thousand dollars, in advance, for a series of lessons that should have allowed him to earn a pilot's license. Over the next three months, Moussaoui took fifty-seven hours of flight instruction, far more than the twenty hours most students need before flying solo. But he left the school in late May without a license.