Unknown to U.S. intelligence, Ziad Jarrah (the hijacker pilot of United Airlines flight 93 that crashed in Shanksville, Pennsylvania) returns to the United States from a trip to Germany just two weeks after the bombing of the USS Cole in Yemen. It was the first of five foreign trips he would take during his time in the United States.
It was the first or last time that Jarrah would depart from the United States to see his common law wife, Aysel Senguen. As the most westernized of the hijackers, and also married, Jarrah was relatively invisible to immigration and customs officials. The 9/11 Commission later reported that Jarrah “made hundreds of phone calls to her and communicated frequently by email” during his stay in the United States (911 Commission, p. 224) but because they were in German–and were mostly love letters and other communications dealing with the day-to-day lives of the two–U.S. intelligence never paid attention.
Jarrah flew from Atlanta, Georgia to Frankfurt, Germany on Delta Flight 20 on October 7, just five days before the Cole was attacked. Mohammed Atta (the plot’s emir in the U.S.) worried that given the terrorist attack, he might not be able to return, with intelligence vigilance and police measures being tightened. Jarrah and Aysel went to Paris for a late honeymoon while al Qaeda pondered whether it lost one of its valuable pilots.
Finally, on the 29th, Jarrah arrived back in the United States, flying from Dusseldorf, Germany (Condor Flight 7178) to Frankfurt and on to Tampa, Florida (Lufthansa Flight 223). On a tourist visa, he received a six-month length of stay in the United States. Immigration and customs asked nothing.