text:
!! History Commons Alert, Exciting News
This is a scalable context timeline. It contains events related to the event February 22-25, 2001: 9/11 Hijacker Atta Spends Weekend in Key West on a 'Continuous Party,' then Bails Girlfriend out of Jail?. You can narrow or broaden the context of this timeline by adjusting the zoom level. The lower the scale, the more relevant the items on average will be, while the higher the scale, the less relevant the items, on average, will be.
Future 9/11 hijacker Mohamed Atta tries, unsuccessfully, to sell artifacts from Afghanistan. At some time this year, Atta contacts an unidentified archaeologist at the University of Göttingen in Germany and offers to sell him Afghan artifacts. He says he needs to sell them to raise money for flying lessons in the United States. But the archaeologist declines his offer. The archeologist will later tell the German secret service about the incident. [Blouin Artinfo, 1/28/2010; Art Newspaper, 2/2010; National Geographic, 6/13/2014] Atta will spend time in Afghanistan in late 1999 and early 2000 (see Late November-Early December 1999 and January 18, 2000). [New York Times, 9/10/2002; 9/11 Commission, 7/24/2004, pp. 166-167] He will begin taking flying lessons in Florida in July 2000 (see July 6-December 19, 2000). [US Congress, 3/19/2002; St. Petersburg Times, 7/25/2004]
Entity Tags: Mohamed Atta
Timeline Tags: Complete 911 Timeline, 9/11 Timeline
Mohamed Atta, along with others of the alleged 9/11 hijackers, is believed by some to have resided in Punta Gorda, Florida before July 2000 (see Before July 2000), prior to his attending flight school in Venice, about 30 miles north of there (see July 6-December 19, 2000). He is also witnessed in Punta Gorda around July-August 2001 (see Mid-July-Mid-August 2001), well after the time he leaves Venice. Additionally, Atta and some other hijackers are reportedly witnessed at the Charlotte County Airport in Punta Gorda. Cathy Mohr, the owner of a cafe there, later says, "The picture [of Atta] in the paper looked really familiar and people from the airport said, 'Hey you know they were here.'" [NBC 2 (Fort Myers), 4/24/2002] After seeing photos of them after 9/11, Frank Cvelbar, whose Aero Precision flight school is based at the airport, believes he has seen four of the alleged hijackers "very occasionally" visiting the airport, shopping in his school's pilot supplies shop, or hanging around the airport's lobby. Cvelbar will say he is "very sure" about having seen Atta, and "pretty sure" about seeing Marwan Alshehhi, Saeed Alghamdi, and Ahmed Alnami. [Charlotte Sun, 10/3/2001] A salesperson at Eastern Avionics, a vendor at the airport, later recalls Marwan Alshehhi having bought a pilot's headset from them. After the sale, he starts receiving e-mails, apparently sent by Mohamed Atta (see Before September 11, 2001). After 9/11, the Punta Gorda Police Department will confirm handing over half a dozen pieces of information to the FBI. [Charlotte Sun, 10/2/2001; NBC 2 (Fort Myers), 4/24/2002] Yet according to official accounts, Atta and Alshehhi were only in this area when attending flight school in Venice. [US Congress, 9/26/2002; 9/11 Commission, 7/24/2004, pp. 223-253] When asked to corroborate or refute reports of the hijackers having been in Charlotte County, FBI spokeswoman Sara Oates will only respond, "The FBI has information but the FBI cannot disclose the information because the investigation is pending." [Charlotte Sun, 10/3/2001]
Entity Tags: Mohamed Atta, Saeed Alghamdi, Ahmed Alnami, Marwan Alshehhi
Ziad Jarrah (left) at his flight school in the second half of 2000. [Source: National Geographic]Some 9/11 hijackers open bank accounts in Florida around the time they start flight training there (see July 6-December 19, 2000). Ziad Jarrah opens an account at the First Florida National Bank with a $2,000 deposit and, nine days later, hijacker pilots Mohamed Atta and Marwan Alshehhi open a joint account at SunTrust Bank in Venice, Florida. [9/11 Commission, 8/21/2004, pp. 139 ; US District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, Alexandria Division, 7/31/2006 ; US District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia; Alexandria Division, 7/31/2006 ] It is unclear whether more accounts are opened at this time, although the New York Times will also say that an account is opened with the Century Bank and that money is paid into this account from abroad (see (July-August 2000)). [New York Times, 11/4/2001] It will initially be claimed that the hijackers provide fake and randomly made up social security numbers. [New York Times, 7/10/2002] However, the 9/11 Commission will say that they did not present or give false numbers, but that in some cases bank employees completed the social security number field with a hijacker's date of birth or visa control number. [9/11 Commission, 8/21/2004, pp. 140 ] Reports of the number of accounts the hijackers open in the US vary over time (see Late-September 2001-August 2004), although the hijackers are known to have had several other bank accounts (see February 4, 2000, Early September 2000, May 1-July 18, 2001 and June 27-August 23, 2001).
Entity Tags: Marwan Alshehhi, Ziad Jarrah, Mohamed Atta, SunTrust Bank
Huffman Aviation logo. [Source: Huffman Aviation]9/11 hijackers Marwan Alshehhi and Mohamed Atta attend Huffman Aviation, a flight school in Venice, Florida and enroll in its Accelerated Pilot Program, aiming to get commercial pilot licenses. According to the school's owner Rudi Dekkers, Atta already has a private pilot's license—though where and how he gained this is unstated—and wants to obtain a commercial license. Alshehhi wants to obtain both licenses. They begin their training in a Cessna 172 with instructor Thierry Leklou. According to the 9/11 Commission, by the end of July both are already taking solo flights. However, in August Leklou complains to Chief Flight Instructor Daniel Pursell that the two are failing to follow instructions and have bad attitudes. Pursell considers expelling them, but, according to Dekkers, after a warning they improve their behavior and continue without further problems. [US Congress, 3/19/2002; 9/11 Commission, 7/24/2004, pp. 224, 227; St. Petersburg Times, 7/25/2004] Yet Pursell later testifies that the school's instructors breathed "a collective sigh of relief" when the two left Huffman. [Associated Press, 3/23/2006] Furthermore, reportedly, "Atta and al-Shehhi would rent a plane from Huffman and be gone for days at a time, Pursell said. They could fly to 20 airports across the state and never be noticed." [St. Petersburg Times, 7/25/2004] Mark Mikarts, another of the school's instructors, says Atta has "big problems with authority," and doesn't take instructions well. [Wall Street Journal, 9/17/2001; 9/11 Commission, 8/21/2004, pp. 17 ] Susan Hall, Huffman's office manager, refers to Atta as "the little terrorist" while he is at the school, because, she later says, "I just didn't like the aura he gave off." [Reuters, 3/22/2006] In the middle of their training, in late September, Atta and Alshehhi enroll at another flight school, in nearby Sarasota. However, they are soon asked to leave it, and return to Huffman in October (see Late September-Early October 2000). While Atta and Alshehhi attend Huffman Aviation, another of the alleged hijackers, Ziad Jarrah, is taking lessons at a flight school just down the road from them (see (June 28-December 2000)). Yet no reports describe the three ever meeting up while they are all in Venice. According to official accounts, Atta and Alshehhi complete their schooling at Huffman on December 19, 2000, when they take their commercial pilot license tests. Rudi Dekkers says that after returning to the school to settle their bills, they leave and are never seen there again. [US Congress, 3/19/2002; 9/11 Commission, 8/21/2004, pp. 17 ] Yet Daniel Pursell will later allege that early in 2001 the two are still connected with Huffman, being reported to the school for practicing nighttime landings in one of its planes at another Florida airport (see Between January and February 2001).
Entity Tags: Huffman Aviation, Daniel Pursell, Susan Hall, Mohamed Atta, Thierry Leklou, Marwan Alshehhi
Lizsa Lehman [Source: Sarasota Herald-Tribune]While attending flight school in Venice, Florida (see July 6-December 19, 2000), Mohamed Atta and Marwan Alshehhi regularly visit a couple of local bars. Most nights, after flying classes, they drink beer at the Outlook. They are observed there as being well dressed and well spoken. Atta comes across as cold and unfriendly, and is disapproving of the presence of women servers behind the bar. Bartender Lizsa Lehman will later say that, after the 9/11 attacks, "I remember thinking that [Atta] was capable of everything they had said was done." In contrast, Alshehhi is "friendly and jovial and… always eager to interact with bartenders and patrons." Lehman later says, "I, to this day, have trouble seeing [Alshehhi] doing it [i.e., participating in 9/11]." [Sarasota Herald-Tribune, 9/10/2006; Sarasota Herald-Tribune, 9/10/2006] Atta and several friends are also regulars at the 44th Aero Squadron bar. The group drinks Bud Light, talks quietly, and stays sober. The bar's owner, Ken Schortzmann, says Atta has "a fanny pack with a big roll of cash in it," and comments, "I never had any problems with them.… They… didn't drink heavily or flirt with the waitresses, like some of the other flight students." While he regularly goes to these bars during this period, Atta never visits any of the three mosques in Southwest Florida, and avoids contact with local Muslims. [Newsweek, 9/24/2001; Sarasota Herald-Tribune, 9/28/2001] Interestingly, other witnesses later describe Atta as possibly doing drugs as well. The owner of a unit of apartments where Atta reportedly lived with some other Middle Eastern men in late 2000 (see (Mid-July 2000 - Early January 2001)) says these men smoked a strange tobacco, which smelled like marijuana. [Charlotte Sun, 9/14/2001] Atta may also be a heavy smoker, as he is reported to spend his time "chain smoking," when later living in Coral Springs. [Sunday Times (London), 2/3/2002]
Entity Tags: Mohamed Atta, Marwan Alshehhi
In order to enter a professional flight training program, 9/11 hijackers Mohamed Atta and Marwan Alshehhi are required to apply for student visas. They are currently in the US on tourist visas, attending Huffman Aviation flight school in Venice, Florida (see July 6-December 19, 2000). On August 29, 2000, according to the school's owner Rudi Dekkers, Huffman's student coordinator Nicole Antini sends I-20M forms demonstrating Atta and Alshehhi's enrollment at the school to the Immigration and Naturalization Service. She also sends copies of their passports. Their forms state, "The student is expected to report to the school not later than Sept. 1, 2000, and complete studies not later than Sept. 1, 2001." [Charlotte Sun, 3/13/2002; US Congress, 3/19/2002] However, the 9/11 Commission claims that the forms are filled out later, on September 15. [9/11 Commission, 7/24/2004, pp. 224; 9/11 Commission, 8/21/2004, pp. 13 ] Interestingly, considering these contradictory dates, Antini later tells the FBI that on "one occasion, Atta was very upset with the date of his visa and wanted it changed," though he did not say what upset him about the date or why he wanted it changed. [9/11 Commission, 8/21/2004, pp. 38 ] Huffman only receives notification that the INS has approved the visa applications 18 months later, well after 9/11 (see March 11, 2002). Atta and Alshehhi will be cleared to stay in the US until October 1, 2001. [Charlotte Sun, 3/13/2002]
Entity Tags: Marwan Alshehhi, Mohamed Atta, Nicole Antini
Writing in 2004, veteran British intelligence officer Colonel John Hughes-Wilson will note that, at the same time as hijacker pilots Mohamed Atta and Marwan Alshehhi are learning to fly at Huffmann Aviation in Venice, Florida (see July 6-December 19, 2000), "A CIA front company called Air Caribe was also operating out of the very same hangar at Venice airport." He will go on to comment that "this highly curious coincidence must inevitably raise some suspicions of just how much the CIA really did know before 9/11. Was the CIA trying to infiltrate and 'double' the US-based al-Qaeda cell, in the hope of using it against Osama bin Laden's organization in the future?" [Hughes-Wilson, 2004, pp. 391] The Air Caribe story is originally broken by investigative reporter Daniel Hopsicker, who will publish a book about Atta's time in Florida in 2004 (see March 2004).
Entity Tags: Mohamed Atta, Central Intelligence Agency, John Hughes-Wilson, Air Caribe, Marwan Alshehhi, Daniel Hopsicker
Jones Aviation [Source: Jones Aviation] (click image to enlarge)Having attended Huffman Aviation flight school in Venice, Florida since early July, 9/11 hijackers Mohamed Atta and Marwan Alshehhi move to Jones Aviation in Sarasota, about 20 miles north of Venice, to continue their training. However, their instructor finds them rude and aggressive, and claims they sometimes fight with him to take over the controls of the training plane. The instructor later says that when he talks to Atta, "he could not look you in the eye. His attention span was very short.… [T]hey didn't live up to our standards." Atta and Alshehhi each complete about 20 hours of flying time in single-engine planes, but early in October fail their Stage I exam for instruments rating. Gary Jones, the vice president of the school, later states, "We told them we wouldn't teach them anymore. We told them, one, they couldn't speak English and, two, they had bad attitudes. They wouldn't listen to what the instructors had to instruct." The two then return to Huffman Aviation to continue their training. [Chicago Tribune, 9/16/2001; Washington Post, 9/19/2001; 9/11 Commission, 7/24/2004, pp. 224]
Entity Tags: Marwan Alshehhi, Mohamed Atta, Jones Aviation
Anne Greaves. [Source: History Channel]While they attend Huffman Aviation flying school in Venice, Florida, future 9/11 hijackers Mohamed Atta and Marwan Alshehhi use the same training airplane as Anne Greaves, a 56-year-old Briton. Greaves will later say she sees Atta and Alshehhi on an almost daily basis over roughly six weeks. Mohamed Atta Seen as Saudi Prince - Greaves will say that she finds it odd to find two Arabs in the quiet, retirement town of Venice, so she asks her flight instructor about them one day, and is told Atta is Saudi royalty and Alshehhi is his bodyguard. She will recall: "I remember thinking at the time I found this very strange because normally royalty learn at military establishments for security reasons alone. And also royalty I remember remarking usually had manners and I felt these these two certainly didn't have any manners." Asked if others at Huffman Aviation also thought Atta was some kind of prince, Greaves will comment, "It was my impression that was generally believed because it was my instructor who told me this at the time so I had the impression that that was generally believed, yes." Whereas Alshehhi dresses casually, Greaves sees Atta "always very formally dressed… always neatly pressed trousers of a wool type. A shirt and a waistcoat to match the trousers." This is in spite of the "extremely hot" weather. [Associated Press, 9/24/2001; Australian Broadcasting Corporation, 10/18/2001] Yet Rudi Dekkers, the school's owner, will later claim the two only said they were cousins from Germany. [USA Today, 9/13/2001] (Atta and Alshehhi are in fact unrelated.) [9/11 Commission, 7/24/2004, pp. 160-162] Atta Given Preference - Greaves will recall, "I was really a little bit jealous in that they were always given preference with one of the Warriors which was a much newer, much neater aircraft." She will also comment that for Atta "to have progressed as rapidly as he seemed to have done at Huffman he must have had flying skills before he came to Huffman Aviation." (This fits with claims made by Rudi Dekkers, that Atta already had a private pilot's license when he first arrived at the school (see July 6-December 19, 2000).) Alshehhi Never Practices Flying - However, though the pair always flies together, she says: "I never saw Alshehhi take the controls of the aircraft. It was always Mohamed Atta." [Associated Press, 9/24/2001; Australian Broadcasting Corporation, 10/18/2001; US Congress, 3/19/2002] Excited about the Cole Bombing? - The only time Greaves sees Atta and Alshehhi show any enthusiasm is around the "middle end of October" or "possibly early in November," when they have been busy on the Internet in the school's computer room. She sees them "hugging each other with joy and almost dancing in the room." Several reports will later speculate that this celebrating is in response to the al-Qaeda bombing of the USS Cole in Yemen (see October 12, 2000), though Greaves will be unsure. [Australian Broadcasting Corporation, 10/18/2001; BBC, 12/12/2001; PBS, 1/17/2002] Greaves Suspects They Are Drug Smugglers - Greaves will later say: "I couldn't help but be suspicious as to why [Atta] was there [at Huffman]. There was no love of flying in him." She says Atta never shows any emotion and appears hypnotized. Although she never considers terrorism, she thinks there is "an ulterior motive, maybe drug smuggling." After the 9/11 attacks, due to her suspicion of the pair, Greaves will contact the FBI with her concerns before the names of the suspected hijackers are made public. [BBC, 9/24/2001; Associated Press, 9/24/2001; Daily Telegraph, 9/25/2001; BBC, 12/12/2001; Guardian, 7/5/2002]
Entity Tags: Huffman Aviation, Mohamed Atta, Anne Greaves, Marwan Alshehhi
Future 9/11 hijacker Marwan Alshehhi goes missing, and his family, German police, and United Arab Emirates (UAE) officials look for him until he finally calls and says he is okay. Alshehhi Goes Missing - Alshehhi is a citizen from the UAE. In the spring of 2000, Alshehhi spent time with his family in the UAE before returning to Germany. He called his mother periodically after that (his father had already died), but the calls grew less frequent. In April 2000, Alshehhi was removed from the UAE army for the crime of desertion (see April 1, 2000). During the Islamic holy month of Ramadan in December 2000, Alshehhi does not call his mother at all. His mother grows alarmed and calls the UAE embassy in Germany. UAE officials contact the Technical University in Harburg, near Hamburg, where Alshehhi is supposed to be studying, and find out that he has not been there for a year and he has been removed from the school's registration rolls. Local German police open a missing person investigation, but are unable to find him. On December 23, 2000, the UAE army stops paying for Alshehhi's studies (see Spring 1996-December 23, 2000). Alshehhi's Half-Brother Leads a Search - Finally, Alshehhi's mother sends his half-brother Mohamed Yousef Mohamed Alqusaidi to Germany to look for him. A UAE embassy official spends several days traveling with Alqusaidi in Bonn and Hamburg looking for Alshehhi, but without success. A UAE official will later say: "We knew he was not going to school and the Germans never had this. We were trying to get him back. We were trying to track him." In Harburg, they talk to Mounir El Motassadeq, who says that Alshehhi has gone to Chechnya or Afghanistan. Alqusaidi returns to the UAE. Alshehhi Calls and Lies about What He's Doing - Later in the month, Alshehhi calls his family and says that stories about him being out of Germany are wrong. He says that he has been going through a rough time but things are improving, and he is now studying elsewhere in Hamburg. It is unclear if his family believes him or not. But his half-brother Alqusaidi had been periodically sending him money, and sent him money for the last time around November 2000 (see July 1999-November 2000). [McDermott, 2005, pp. 214-215] In fact, Alshehhi has been learning to fly in Florida with Mohamed Atta (see July 6-December 19, 2000).
Entity Tags: Mounir El Motassadeq, Marwan Alshehhi, Mohamed Yousef Mohamed Alqusaidi
Clearwater Airpark. [Source: Douglas R. Clifford / St. Petersburg Times]9/11 hijackers Mohamed Atta and Marwan Alshehhi reportedly spend at least 30 minutes practicing landing a single-engine plane at Clearwater Airpark, Florida, after it has closed for the night. This is according to Daniel Pursell, the chief instructor at Huffman Aviation, the Venice flight school attended by the two during the latter half of 2000 (see July 6-December 19, 2000). What they are doing at Clearwater is unknown. Their activities draw the attention of a police aide acting as a night watchman, who leaves a voice message at Huffman complaining about the incident. The plane is subsequently identified as having been rented by Atta and Alshehhi. Pursell, along with fellow instructor Thierry Leklou, reprimands them when they return to Venice the following morning. According to the St. Petersburg Times, the two leave Huffman shortly afterwards. This incident first surfaces publicly in 2006, when Pursell testifies at the trial of Zacarias Moussaoui. However, others will dispute his allegations. Local police say no incident reports were filed describing the event, and neither the FAA nor city have any record of unauthorized landings during this period. According to Bill Morris, Clearwater's marine and aviation director, a police aide would have called for backup and recorded the plane's details in a log, rather than calling Huffman. He says even if the aide had wanted to contact the plane's owner, it would have been impossible to ascertain who this was at night, as allegedly occurred, because the FAA's offices would have been closed. [CNN, 3/23/2006; St. Petersburg Times, 3/30/2006; Clearwater Citizen, 4/6/2006] Furthermore, Atta and Alshehhi supposedly finished training at Huffman Aviation in December 2000, and the school's owner Rudi Dekkers will claim Huffman last heard from them around the end of that month. [US Congress, 3/19/2002; 9/11 Commission, 8/21/2004, pp. 17 ] However, a similar incident to this is known to have occurred previously, where Atta and Alshehhi abandoned one of Huffman's planes at Miami International Airport (see December 26, 2000). [CNN, 3/23/2006] And according to the 9/11 Commission, after passing their instrument rating airplane tests on November 6, 2000, the pair was "able to sign out planes. They did so on a number of occasions, often returning at 2:00 and 3:00 A.M. after logging four or five hours of flying time." [9/11 Commission, 8/21/2004, pp. 15 ] The St. Petersburg Times reports that Atta and Alshehhi "would rent a plane from Huffman and be gone for days at a time, Pursell said. They could fly to 20 airports across the state and never be noticed." [St. Petersburg Times, 3/30/2006]
Entity Tags: Daniel Pursell, Mohamed Atta, Marwan Alshehhi, Clearwater Airpark, Thierry Leklou
Amanda Keller. [Source: Unknown]A man, possibly Mohamed Atta, stays for a time at the apartment of a 21-year-old blonde-haired pizza restaurant manager named Amanda Keller. Keller lives in the Sandpiper Apartments in Venice, Florida, the same complex in which Atta reportedly shared a (presumably) separate apartment with Marwan Alshehhi and four others months earlier (see (Mid-July 2000 - Early January 2001)). Stephanie Frederickson, a resident at the Sandpiper Apartments, later remembers Keller and Atta. She claims Keller moved in next door to her. She goes on to say, "Then one day in the middle of March she brought home Atta." Her recollection of Atta mirrors that of others. She will call him "a really nasty guy," and say that he "had no patience, and seemed mad at the world." Charles Grapentine, the manager of the Sandpiper Apartments, later recalls seeing Atta at the complex for about three weeks in April, and confirms that he was living with Keller. Keller's mother, Susan Payne, also meets Atta and later says, "I didn't like him; he just seemed strange." As well as his stay at the Sandpiper Apartments, the man, possibly Atta, briefly rents a home in North Port. Its owners, Tony and Vonnie LaConca, know him only as "Mohamed." They will be questioned in the days after 9/11 by the Florida Department of Law Enforcement (FDLE), and describe him as 25 years old, "very polite," "very handsome," and with "beautiful, unblemished skin." From talking with "Mohamed" and Keller, the couple learns he is training for a commercial pilot's license at Huffman Aviation, the Venice flight school attended by Atta in 2000 (see July 6-December 19, 2000). The Sarasota Herald-Tribune will claim that Keller's companion is not Mohamed Atta, but another man of Middle Eastern descent who also took flying lessons in Venice. But authorities will refuse to reveal the full name of this "unidentified fifth man," and investigators are reportedly unable to find him. [Charlotte Sun, 9/14/2001; Sarasota Herald-Tribune, 9/23/2001; Hopsicker, 2004, pp. 57, 60-65 and 76] According to official accounts, plus the testimony of Huffman Aviation's owner Rudi Dekkers, Atta left the Venice flight school around the end of 2000, months before "Mohamed" stays in the apartment of Keller. [US Congress, 3/19/2002; US Congress, 9/26/2002; 9/11 Commission, 8/21/2004, pp. 17 ] Investigative reporter Daniel Hopsicker later locates and interviews Amanda Keller, and she claims that the Middle Eastern man who was briefly her boyfriend was indeed Mohamed Atta (see March 2004). However, in 2006 she will retract this claim and say she lied to Hopsicker. She will say, "It was my bad for lying. I really didn't think about it until after I did it." [Sarasota Herald-Tribune, 9/10/2006] Keller, Charles Grapentine, and Stephanie Frederickson will all later allege that the FBI intimidated them after 9/11, and told them to keep quiet about what they knew (see (September 12, 2001-2002)).
Entity Tags: Stephanie Frederickson, Tony LaConca, Vonnie LaConca, Susan Payne, Daniel Hopsicker, Mohamed Atta, Amanda Keller, Charles Grapentine
Some reports later suggest that around this time 9/11 hijacker Mohamed Atta has an American girlfriend called Amanda Keller (see (February-April 2001)). According to Tony and Vonnie LaConca, a couple that meet Keller and her boyfriend (who they know only as "Mohamed"), the pair and another woman go on a short trip to Key West, Florida. Tony LaConca later recalls, "They were gone for three days. They didn't sleep—it was a continuous party." The three indulge in drugs and alcohol, all paid for by "Mohamed," even though he does not have a job. After returning from the trip, on February 25 "Mohamed" has to bail Keller out of South County Jail, after police take her in because of an outstanding warrant over a "worthless check charge." [Charlotte Sun, 9/14/2001; Charlotte Sun, 9/11/2003] The Sarasota Herald-Tribune claims that Keller's companion is not Mohamed Atta, but another man of Middle Eastern descent named Mohammed. [Sarasota Herald-Tribune, 9/23/2001] In 2002, Keller will say that her boyfriend was indeed Mohamed Atta, but in 2006 she retracts this claim. [Sarasota Herald-Tribune, 9/10/2006] Interestingly, other witnesses later describe Atta as frequently drinking alcohol, smoking, and possibly doing drugs (see (Mid-July - December 2000)).
After entering the US, Zacarias Moussaoui engages in activities that appear to mirror those of the 9/11 hijackers. Both Moussaoui and the hijackers do the following: Take flight training (see February 23-June 2001 and July 6-December 19, 2000); Physically import large amounts of cash (see October 2000-February 2001 and January 15, 2000-August 2001); Purchase knives with short blades that can be carried onto airliners (see August 16, 2001 and July 8-August 30, 2001); Take fitness training (see August 16, 2001 and May 6-September 6, 2001); Obtain several identification documents (see April 12-September 7, 2001 and August 1-2, 2001); and Purchase flight deck videos from the same shop (see November 5, 2000-June 20, 2001). In addition, Moussaoui is supported by some of the same al-Qaeda operatives as the 9/11 hijackers: Ramzi bin al-Shibh (see July 29, 2001-August 3, 2001 and June 13-September 25, 2000) and Yazid Sufaat (see September-October 2000 and January 5-8, 2000). At Moussaoui's trial, the prosecution will cite these parallel activities in its argument that Moussaoui was connected to 9/11, rather than some follow-up plot. There is also one reported meeting between Moussaoui and two of the lead hijackers before 9/11 (see August 1, 2001), but this will not be mentioned at the trial (see March 6-May 4, 2006). [US District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, Alexandria Division, 3/9/2006]
Entity Tags: Zacarias Moussaoui
According to an associate of the 9/11 hijackers, Ramzi bin al-Shibh, and flight school owner Rudi Dekkers, the hijackers have more training on large jets than the FBI will disclose. The FBI will say that the four hijacker pilots never fly real large jets before 9/11 and have a total of approximately 17 sessions on large aircraft simulators, mostly on older models: Both Mohamed Atta and Marwan Alshehhi each take two sessions lasting 90 minutes on a Boeing 727 simulator and one session on a simulator for a Boeing 767, the type of aircraft they fly on 9/11 (see December 29-31, 2000); Ziad Jarrah, who flies a Boeing 757 on 9/11, has five sessions on 727s and 737s (see December 15, 2000-January 8, 2001); Hani Hanjour, who flies a Boeing 757 on 9/11, practices for a total of 21 hours on a Boeing 737-200 simulator (see February 8-March 12, 2001). When he learns what the FBI believes is the extent of the hijackers' training, bin al-Shibh will complain in a fax sent to a reporter after 9/11: "How do aviation experts evaluate the skill with which the aircraft were flown, especially the Pentagon attack—accurate and professional as it was? Is it credible that the executers had never before flown a Boeing? Is it credible they only had some lessons on small twin-engine aircrafts and some lessons on simulators?" Referring to the period in early 2001 after the pilots spend a few hours practicing on simulators, bin al-Shibh will say, "What they needed was more flying hours, more training on simulators of large commercial planes such as Boeing 747s and Boeing 767s, as well as studying security precautions in all airports." However, apparently bin al-Shibh does not mention exactly when or where such additional training took place, if in fact it did. [Fouda and Fielding, 2003, pp. 24-6, 38, 134] Interviewed two days after 9/11, Dekkers, at whose flight school Mohamed Atta and Marwan Alshehhi initially trained (see July 6-December 19, 2000), will comment, "After the training they had here they went to another flight school in Pompano Beach and they had jet training there, simulator or big planes, but there is where they conducted the training to do what they had to do." Dekkers will say that he has heard this "from several directions." However, the Pompano Beach school is not named. [Dekkers, 9/13/2001]
Entity Tags: Ziad Jarrah, Rudi Dekkers, Mohamed Atta, Marwan Alshehhi, Ramzi bin al-Shibh, Hani Hanjour
Jean Waldorf, the owner of the Shipping Post, a mail service business in Punta Gorda, Florida, will later report seeing Mohamed Atta and an unidentified associate visiting her store some four to six times. According to Waldorf, Atta purchases US postal money orders in denominations of $100 to $200, paying for them with cash, but she does not know how they are spent. Waldorf says that the money orders, which can only be cashed in the US, are "not traceable." The owner of a local childcare center, Anna Brookbank, later says she recognizes Atta, having seen him shopping at a Punta Gorda supermarket during this period. [CNN, 10/1/2001; Associated Press, 10/2/2001; Charlotte Sun, 10/2/2001; Charlotte Sun, 10/3/2001] Punta Gorda is about 30 miles south of Venice, where Atta, along with Marwan Alshehhi, previously attended flight school in 2000 (see July 6-December 19, 2000). According to official accounts, the only time Atta was in this area was during his time at the flight school. [US Congress, 9/26/2002; 9/11 Commission, 7/24/2004, pp. 223-253]
All the 9/11 hijackers book their flights for September 11, 2001, using their apparent real names. The total cost of the tickets is in excess of $30,000: August 25: Khalid Almihdhar, who was watchlisted two days previously (see August 23, 2001), and Majed Moqed book tickets for American Airlines flight 77 using the AA.com website. They are collected from the American Airlines ticket counter at Baltimore Washington International Airport on September 5. The tickets were not mailed, because the shipping address did not match the credit card address. [US District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, Alexandria Division, 7/31/2006, pp. 72, 74 ] August 26: Wail Alshehri buys a ticket for American Airlines flight 11 over the phone with his debit card. His brother Waleed buys a ticket for the same flight at the AA.com website using his debit card. [US District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, Alexandria Division, 7/31/2006 ; US District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, Alexandria Division, 7/31/2006, pp. 72 ] August 27: Nawaf Alhazmi, who was watchlisted four days before (see August 23, 2001), buys tickets for himself and his brother Salem for American Airlines flight 77 through Travelocity from a Kinkos computer in Laurel, Maryland, using his debit card (see August 25-27, 2001). [US District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, Alexandria Division, 7/31/2006 ; US District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, Alexandria Division, 7/31/2006, pp. 72 ] August 27: Saeed Alghamdi uses his debit card to purchase tickets for United Airlines flight 93 for himself and Ahmed Alnami from the UA.com website. The tickets are not paid for until September 5, 2001, due to a problem with the debit card. [US District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, Alexandria Division, 7/31/2006, pp. 72 ] August 27: Fayez Ahmed Banihammad uses his visa card to purchase tickets for himself and Mohamed Alshehri for United Airlines flight 175 over the telephone. [US District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, Alexandria Division, 7/31/2006, pp. 72-73 ; US District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, Alexandria Division, 7/31/2006 ] August 28: Mohamed Atta uses his debit card to buy tickets for American Airlines flight 11 for himself and Abdulaziz Alomari from the AA.com website. [US District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, Alexandria Division, 7/31/2006 ] August 28: Waleed Alshehri purchases a ticket for Satam Al Suqami for American Airlines flight 11 in person from the company's counter at Fort Lauderdale Airport. [US District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, Alexandria Division, 7/31/2006, pp. 73 ] August 28: Marwan Alshehhi purchases a ticket for United Airlines flight 175 from the company's counter at Miami International Airport. [US District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, Alexandria Division, 7/31/2006 ; US District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, Alexandria Division, 7/31/2006, pp. 73 ] August 29: Hamza Alghamdi books tickets for himself and Ahmed Alghamdi for United Airlines flight 175 from the UA.com website. [US District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, Alexandria Division, 7/31/2006 ] August 29: Ahmed Alhaznawi creates a new e-mail account and Travelocity.com account and uses them to book a ticket for himself on United Airlines flight 93. [US District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, Alexandria Division, 7/31/2006 ; US District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, Alexandria Division, 7/31/2006, pp. 74 ] August 30: Ziad Jarrah purchases a ticket for himself for United Airlines flight 93 from the UA website. [US District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, Alexandria Division, 7/31/2006 ] August 31: Hani Hanjour purchases a ticket for American Airlines flight 77 from ATS Advanced Travel Services in Totowa, New Jersey, paying in cash. [US District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, Alexandria Division, 7/31/2006 ] At least five tickets are one way only. [Los Angeles Times, 9/18/2001] There are numerous connections between the hijackers booked on the four flights by this point: Hijackers on different 9/11 flights arrived in the US on the same plane. For example, Salem Alhazmi (Flight 77) arrived with Abdulaziz Alomari (Flight 11), and Fayez Ahmed Banihammad (Flight 175) arrived with Saeed Alghamdi (Flight 93) (see April 23-June 29, 2001); Two of the pilots, Mohamed Atta and Marwan Alshehhi, train and live together, and have a joint bank account (see (Mid-July 2000 - Early January 2001), July 6-December 19, 2000, and June 28-July 7, 2000); Hijackers from different planes open bank accounts together (see May 1-July 18, 2001 and June 27-August 23, 2001); and The hijackers obtain identity documents together (see April 12-September 7, 2001 and August 1-2, 2001). Six hijackers also provide the same phone number and three use the same address. [Miami Herald, 9/22/2001]
Entity Tags: Ahmed Alnami, Fayez Ahmed Banihammad, Hamza Alghamdi, Khalid Almihdhar, Ahmed Alhaznawi, Hani Hanjour, Marwan Alshehhi, Majed Moqed, Ahmed Alghamdi, Wail Alshehri, Mohamed Atta, Ziad Jarrah, Waleed Alshehri, Abdulaziz Alomari, Satam Al Suqami, Nawaf Alhazmi, Salem Alhazmi, Mohand Alshehri, Saeed Alghamdi
A number of witnesses who claim they saw Mohamed Atta living in Venice, Florida in early 2001 later allege that, in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, they are intimidated by the FBI and told to keep quiet about what they knew. Amanda Keller, who claims to have lived with Atta during early 2001 (see (February-April 2001)), later says that, even after she moved away from Venice, FBI agents called her every other day for several months after the attacks. She tells investigative reporter Daniel Hopsicker about "intimidation by the FBI" that she suffered, adding, "They told me not to talk to anybody, to keep my mouth shut." Stephanie Frederickson, who remembers Keller and Atta living next door to her in the Sandpiper Apartments in Venice, later recalls, "At first, right after the attack, [the FBI] told me I must have been mistaken in my identification. Or they would insinuate that I was lying. Finally they stopped trying to get me to change my story, and just stopped by once a week to make sure I hadn't been talking to anyone. Who was I going to tell? Most everyone around here already knew." Charles Grapentine, the manager of the Sandpiper Apartments, also confirms Atta having lived with Keller. He says that, after 9/11, the FBI "called me a liar, and told me to keep my mouth shut." [Hopsicker, 2004, pp. 62-63, 65 and 88-89] According to the FBI's account of events, Atta had left Venice by late December 2000 or early January 2001. Its account makes no mention of him returning there later. [US Congress, 9/26/2002] A former manager at Huffman Aviation, the Venice flight school attended by Atta in late 2000 (see July 6-December 19, 2000), also later alleges that the FBI intimidated him and told him to keep quiet. He says the FBI was "outside my house four hours after the attack." He claims his phones were bugged after 9/11, and adds, "I thought these guys [Atta and his associates] were double agents. Why is that so incriminating?" [Hopsicker, 2004, pp. 149-150]
Entity Tags: Daniel Hopsicker, Charles Grapentine, Mohamed Atta, Federal Bureau of Investigation, Stephanie Frederickson, Amanda Keller
The man in the picture on the left is supposed to be bin Laden in October 2001. The picture on the right is undisputendly bin Laden in December [Source: Reuters]Following the release of a home video in which Osama bin Laden apparently confesses to involvement in 9/11 (see Mid-November 2001), some commentators question its authenticity, as a number of strange facts about the video soon emerge. For example, all previous videos had been made with the consent of bin Laden, and usually released to the Arabic television channel Al Jazeera. This video was supposedly recorded without his knowledge, found in a house in Afghanistan, and then passed to the CIA by an unknown person or group. Experts point out that it would be possible to fake such a video. So many people doubt the video's authenticity that President Bush soon makes a statement, saying it was "preposterous for anybody to think this tape was doctored. Those who contend it's a farce or a fake are hoping for the best about an evil man." [Guardian, 12/15/2001] Some commentators will suggest that the person thought to be bin Laden is not actually the al-Qaeda leader. For example, arabist Kevin Barrett will say that the person in the video is "at least 40 or 50 pounds heavier, and his facial features [are] obviously different." [Capital Times (Madison), 2/14/2006] The man said to be bin Laden also makes some questionable statements in the video: "I was thinking that the fire from the gas in the plane would melt the iron structure of the building…" [US Department of Defense, 12/13/2001 ] The jet fuel spilled from the planes burned up about 10 minutes after impact (see 8:57 a.m. September 11, 2001), the towers' structure did not melt (see September 12, 2001-February 2002), and the towers were not made of iron, but steel. [National Institute of Standards and Technology, 9/2005, pp. 6] Bin Laden had studied civil engineering at university and had experience as a construction contractor. [Burke, 2004, pp. 47; Laden, 2005, pp. xii-xiii] It is unclear why he would think the towers were made of iron. "We did not reveal the operation to [the brothers who conducted the operation] until they are there and just before they boarded the planes." [US Department of Defense, 12/13/2001 ] All the hijackers purchased tickets for the 9/11 flights about two weeks in advance (see August 25-September 5, 2001). The six plot leaders had flight training (see July 6-December 19, 2000, (June 28-December 2000), January-February 2001, and May 5 and 10, 2000), and some of the other 13 are thought to have assisted with target surveillance and casing flights (see May 24-August 14, 2001, August 1, 2001, June 2001 and August 2001). "Those who were trained to fly didn't know the others. One group of people did not know the other group." [US Department of Defense, 12/13/2001 ] The opposite is true: the pilots intermingled with the muscle and the teams for the various planes mixed (see April 23-June 29, 2001, April 12-September 7, 2001, and June 27-August 23, 2001). There are reports that bin Laden had from four to ten look-alike doubles at the time. [Agence France-Presse, 10/7/2001; London Times, 11/19/2001]
Entity Tags: Bush administration (43), Kevin Barrett, Central Intelligence Agency, George W. Bush, Osama bin Laden
Daniel Hopsicker. [Source: Daniel Hopsicker]A book examining the life of Mohamed Atta while he lived in Florida in 2000 is published. Welcome to Terrorland: Mohamed Atta and the 9-11 Cover-Up in Florida, is by Daniel Hopsicker, an author, documentary maker, and former business news producer. Hopsicker spent two years in Venice, Florida, where several of the 9/11 hijackers went to flight school, and spoke to hundreds of people who knew them. His account portrays Atta as a drinking, drug-taking, party animal, strongly contradicting the conventional view of Atta having been a devout Muslim. He interviewed Amanda Keller, a former stripper who claims to have briefly been Atta's girlfriend in Florida. Keller describes trawls through local bars with Atta, and how he once cut up her pet kittens in a fit of anger. The book also alleges that the CIA organized an influx of Arab students into Florida flight schools in the period prior to 9/11, and that a major drug smuggling operation was centered around the Venice airfield while Atta was there. [Deutsche Welle (Bonn), 4/30/2004; Sarasota Herald-Tribune, 7/11/2005] It also implicates retired businessman Wally Hilliard, the owner of Huffman Aviation, as the owner of a Lear jet that in July 2000 was seized by federal agents after they found 43 pounds of heroin onboard. [Long Island Press, 2/26/2004; Green Bay Press-Gazette, 3/22/2004] The book is a top ten bestseller in Germany. [Hopsicker, 2004; Deutsche Welle (Bonn), 4/30/2004]
Entity Tags: Wally Hilliard, Mohamed Atta, Central Intelligence Agency, Amanda Keller, Daniel Hopsicker
Wolfgang Bohringer. [Source: TVNZ]A German citizen suspected by the FBI of having had links with alleged 9/11 ringleader Mohamed Atta arrives in the remote South Pacific archipelago of Kiribati, one of the world's smallest nations. Wolfgang Bohringer wants to set up a tourist resort and flight school on the isolated outpost of Fanning Island, which is only 13 square miles in size, has no phones or a functioning airstrip, and is home to just 600 people. Its only advantage is that it is among the closest of the islands to Hawaii, which is 1,200 miles to the north. Bohringer meets Kiribati President Anote Tong to discuss his proposal. Bill Paupe, who runs an aviation business in Honolulu and is Kiribati's consul in the US, comments that the flight school plan makes no sense: "It would be very expensive. You would have to [transport] all the people there… and all your instructors and your staff would have to be housed and fed and everything." However, he adds, "A rationale for setting up a private training school in such a remote location would be to get beyond the reach of regulatory agencies." The FBI will later brief President Tong on its suspicions of Bohringer and warn him that small countries like Kiribati could be vulnerable to terrorists. In November 2006, when the whole incident comes to light, the FBI will confirm that Bohringer is considered a "person of interest," and had close ties with a US flight school attended by Mohamed Atta. (This is presumably Huffman Aviation in Venice, Florida (see July 6-December 19, 2000).) But by this time, Bohringer will have fled Kiribati, with his whereabouts unknown. [Associated Press, 11/15/2006; Australian Associated Press, 11/15/2006; Australian Broadcasting Corporation, 11/15/2006; Daily Telegraph, 11/16/2006]
Entity Tags: Wolfgang Bohringer, Mohamed Atta, Anote Tong
Receive weekly email updates summarizing what contributors have added to the History Commons database
Developing and maintaining this site is very labor intensive. If you find it useful, please give us a hand and donate what you can.Donate Now
If you would like to help us with this effort, please contact us. We need help with programming (Java, JDO, mysql, and xml), design, networking, and publicity. If you want to contribute information to this site, click the register link at the top of the page, and start contributing.Contact Us
Except where otherwise noted,
the textual content of each timeline is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike


text:
BOSTON — When the members of the Harvard Business School class of 2013 gathered in May to celebrate the end of their studies, there was little visible evidence of the experiment they had undergone for the last two years. As they stood amid the brick buildings named after businessmen from Morgan to Bloomberg, black-and-crimson caps and gowns united the 905 graduates into one genderless mass.
But during that week's festivities, the Class Day speaker, a standout female student, alluded to "the frustrations of a group of people who feel ignored." Others grumbled that another speechmaker, a former chief executive of a company in steep decline, was invited only because she was a woman. At a reception, a male student in tennis whites blurted out, as his friends laughed, that much of what had occurred at the school had "been a painful experience."
He and his classmates had been unwitting guinea pigs in what would have once sounded like a far-fetched feminist fantasy: What if Harvard Business School gave itself a gender makeover, changing its curriculum, rules and social rituals to foster female success?
The country's premier business training ground was trying to solve a seemingly intractable problem. Year after year, women who had arrived with the same test scores and grades as men fell behind. Attracting and retaining female professors was a losing battle; from 2006 to 2007, a third of the female junior faculty left.
Some students, like Sheryl Sandberg, class of '95, the Facebook executive and author of "Lean In," sailed through. Yet many Wall Street-hardened women confided that Harvard was worse than any trading floor, with first-year students divided into sections that took all their classes together and often developed the overheated dynamics of reality shows. Some male students, many with finance backgrounds, commandeered classroom discussions and hazed female students and younger faculty members, and openly ruminated on whom they would "kill, sleep with or marry" (in cruder terms). Alcohol-soaked social events could be worse.
"You weren't supposed to talk about it in open company," said Kathleen L. McGinn, a professor who supervised a student study that revealed the grade gap. "It was a dirty secret that wasn't discussed."
But in 2010, Drew Gilpin Faust, Harvard's first female president, appointed a new dean who pledged to do far more than his predecessors to remake gender relations at the business school. He and his team tried to change how students spoke, studied and socialized. The administrators installed stenographers in the classroom to guard against biased grading, provided private coaching — for some, after every class — for untenured female professors, and even departed from the hallowed case-study method.
The dean's ambitions extended far beyond campus, to what Dr. Faust called in an interview an "obligation to articulate values." The school saw itself as the standard-bearer for American business. Turning around its record on women, the new administrators assured themselves, could have an untold impact at other business schools, at companies populated by Harvard alumni and in the Fortune 500, where only 21 chief executives are women. The institution would become a laboratory for studying how women speak in group settings, the links between romantic relationships and professional status, and the use of everyday measurement tools to reduce bias.
"We have to lead the way, and then lead the world in doing it," said Frances Frei, her words suggesting the school's sense of mission but also its self-regard. Ms. Frei, a popular professor turned administrator who had become a target of student ire, was known for the word "unapologetic," as in: we are unapologetic about the changes we are making.
By graduation, the school had become a markedly better place for female students, according to interviews with more than 70 professors, administrators and students, who cited more women participating in class, record numbers of women winning academic awards and a much-improved environment, down to the male students drifting through the cafeteria wearing T-shirts celebrating the 50th anniversary of the admission of women. Women at the school finally felt like, " 'Hey, people like me are an equal part of this institution,' " said Rosabeth Moss Kanter, a longtime professor.
And yet even the deans pointed out that the experiment had brought unintended consequences and brand new issues. The grade gap had vaporized so fast that no one could quite say how it had happened. The interventions had prompted some students to revolt, wearing "Unapologetic" T-shirts to lacerate Ms. Frei for what they called intrusive social engineering. Twenty-seven-year-olds felt like they were "back in kindergarten or first grade," said Sri Batchu, one of the graduating men.
Students were demanding more women on the faculty, a request the deans were struggling to fulfill. And they did not know what to do about developments like female students dressing as Playboy bunnies for parties and taking up the same sexual rating games as men. "At each turn, questions come up that we've never thought about before," Nitin Nohria, the new dean, said in an interview.
The administrators had no sense of whether their lessons would last once their charges left campus. As faculty members pointed out, the more exquisitely gender-sensitive the school environment became, the less resemblance it bore to the real business world. "Are we trying to change the world 900 students at a time, or are we preparing students for the world in which they are about to go?" a female professor asked.
The Beginning
Nearly two years earlier, in the fall of 2011, Neda Navab sat in a class participation workshop, incredulous. The daughter of Iranian immigrants, Ms. Navab had been the president of her class at Columbia, advised chief executives as a McKinsey & Company consultant and trained women as entrepreneurs in Rwanda. Yet now that she had arrived at the business school at age 25, she was being taught how to raise her hand.
A second-year student, a former member of the military, stood in the front of the classroom issuing commands: Reach up assertively! No apologetic little half-waves! Ms. Navab exchanged amused glances with new friends. She had no idea that she was witnessing an assault on the school's most urgent gender-related challenge.
Women at Harvard did fine on tests. But they lagged badly in class participation, a highly subjective measure that made up 50 percent of each final mark. Every year the same hierarchy emerged early on: investment bank and hedge fund veterans, often men, sliced through equations while others — including many women — sat frozen or spoke tentatively. The deans did not want to publicly dwell on the problem: that might make the women more self-conscious. But they lectured about respect and civility, expanded efforts like the hand-raising coaching and added stenographers in every class so professors would no longer rely on possibly biased memories of who had said what.
They rounded out the case-study method, in which professors cold-called students about a business's predicament, with a new course called Field, which grouped students into problem-solving teams. (Gender was not the sole rationale for the course, but the deans thought the format would help.) New grading software tools let professors instantly check their calling and marking patterns by gender. One professor, Mikolaj Piskorski, summarized Mr. Nohria's message later: "We're going to solve it at the school level, but each of you is responsible to identify what you are doing that gets you to this point."
Mr. Nohria, Ms. Frei and others involved in the project saw themselves as outsiders who had succeeded at the school and wanted to help others do the same. Ms. Frei, the chairwoman of the first-year curriculum, was the most vocal, with her mop of silver-brown hair and the drive of the college basketball player she had once been. "Someone says 'no' to me, and I just hear 'not yet,' " she said.
After years of observation, administrators and professors agreed that one particular factor was torpedoing female class participation grades: women, especially single women, often felt they had to choose between academic and social success.
One night that fall, Ms. Navab, who had laughed off the hand-raising seminar, sat at an Ethiopian restaurant wondering if she had made a bad choice. Her marketing midterm exam was the next day, but she had been invited on a very business-school kind of date: a new online dating service that paired small groups of singles for drinks was testing its product. Did Ms. Navab want to come? "If I were in college, I would have said let's do this after the midterm," she said later.
But she wanted to meet someone soon, maybe at Harvard, which she and other students feared could be their "last chance among cream-of-the-crop-type people," as she put it. Like other students, she had quickly discerned that her classmates tended to look at their social lives in market terms, implicitly ranking one another. And like others, she slipped into economic jargon to describe their status.
The men at the top of the heap worked in finance, drove luxury cars and advertised lavish weekend getaways on Instagram, many students observed in interviews. Some belonged to the so-called Section X, an on-again-off-again secret society of ultrawealthy, mostly male, mostly international students known for decadent parties and travel.
Women were more likely to be sized up on how they looked, Ms. Navab and others found. Many of them dressed as if Marc Jacobs were staging a photo shoot in a Technology and Operations Management class. Judging from comments from male friends about other women ("She's kind of hot, but she's so assertive"), Ms. Navab feared that seeming too ambitious could hurt what she half-jokingly called her "social cap," referring to capitalization.
"I had no idea who, as a single woman, I was meant to be on campus," she said later. Were her priorities "purely professional, were they academic, were they to start dating someone?"
As she scooped bread at the product-trial-slash-date at the Ethiopian restaurant, she realized that she had not caught the names of the men at the table. The group drank more and more. The next day she took the test hung over, her performance a "disaster," she joked.
The deans did not know how to stop women from bartering away their academic promise in the dating marketplace, but they wanted to nudge the school in a more studious, less alcohol-drenched direction. "We cannot have it both ways," said Youngme Moon, the dean of the M.B.A. program. "We cannot be a place that claims to be about leadership and then say we don't care what goes on outside the classroom."
But Harvard Business students were unusually powerful, the school's products and also its customers, paying more than $50,000 in tuition per year. They were professionals, not undergraduates. One member of the class had played professional football; others had served in Afghanistan or had last names like Blankfein (Alexander, son of Lloyd, chief executive of Goldman Sachs). They had little knowledge of the institutional history; the deans talked less about the depressing record on women than vague concepts like "culture" and "community" and "inclusion."
As the semester went on, many students felt increasingly baffled about the deans' seeming desire to be involved in their lives. They resented the additional work of the Field courses, which many saw as superfluous or even a scheme to keep them too busy for partying. Students used to form their own study groups, but now the deans did it for them.
As Halloween approached, some students planned to wear costumes to class, but at the last minute Ms. Frei, who wanted to set a serious tone and head off the potential for sexy pirate costumes, sent a note out prohibiting it, provoking more eye rolls. "How much responsibility does H.B.S. have?" Laura Merritt, a co-president of the class, asked later. "Do we have school uniforms? Where do you stop?"
A few days before the end of the fall semester, Amanda Upton, an investment banking veteran, stood before most of her classmates, lecturing and quizzing them about finance. Every term just before finals, the Women's Student Association organized a review session for each subject, led by a student who blitzed classmates through reams of material in an hour. Some of the first-years had not had a single female professor. Now Ms. Upton delivered a bravura performance, clearing up confusion about discounted cash flow and how to price bonds, tossing out Christmas candy as rewards.
Like many other women, Kate Lewis, the school newspaper editor, believed in the deans' efforts. But she thought Ms. Upton's turn did more to fortify the image of women than anything administrators had done. "It's the most powerful message: this girl knows it better than all of you," she said.
Breaking the Ice
One day in April 2012, the entire first-year class, including Brooke Boyarsky, a Texan known for cracking up her classmates with a mock PowerPoint presentation, reported to classrooms for a mandatory discussion about sexual harassment. As students soon learned, one woman had confided to faculty members that a male student she would not identify had groped her in an off-campus bar months before. Rather than dismissing the episode, the deans decided to exploit it: this was their chance to discuss the drinking scene and its consequences. "They could not have gone any more front-page than this," Ms. Boyarsky said later.
Everyone in Ms. Boyarsky's classes knew she was incisive and funny, but within the campus social taxonomy, she was overlooked — she was overweight and almost never drank much, stayed out late or dated. After a few minutes of listening to the stumbling conversation about sexual harassment, she raised her hand to make a different point, about the way the school's social life revolved around appearance and money.
"Someone made the decision for me that I'm not pretty or wealthy enough to be in Section X," she told her classmates, her voice breaking.
The room jumped to life. The students said they felt overwhelmed by the wealth that coursed through the school, the way it seemed to shape every aspect of social life — who joined activities that cost hundreds of dollars, who was invited to the parties hosted by the student living in a penthouse apartment at the Mandarin Oriental hotel in Boston. Some students would never have to seek work at all — they were at Harvard to learn to invest their families' fortunes — and others were borrowing thousands of dollars a year just to keep up socially.
The discussion broke the ice, just not on the topic the deans had intended. "Until then, no one else had publicly said 'Section X,' " Mr. Batchu said. Maybe it was because class was easier to talk about than gender, or maybe it was because class was the bigger divide — at the school and in the country.
That was only one out of 10 sessions. At most of the others, the men contributed little. Some of them, and even a few women, had grown to openly resent the deans' emphasis on gender, using phrases like "ad nauseam" and "shoved down our throats," protesting that this was not what they had paid to learn.
Patrick Erker was not among the naysayers — he considered himself a feminist and a fan of the deans. As an undergraduate at Duke, he had managed the women's basketball team, wiping their sweat from the floor and picking up their dirty jerseys.
But as he silently listened to the discussion, he decided the setup was all wrong: a discussion of a sex-related episode they knew little about, with "89 other people judging every word," led by professors who would be grading them later that semester.
"I'd like to be candid, but I paid half a million dollars to come here," another man said in an interview, counting his lost wages. "I could blow up my network with one wrong comment." The men were not insensitive, they said; they just considered the discussion a poor investment of their carefully hoarded social capital. Mr. Erker used the same words as many other students had to describe the mandatory meetings: "forced" and "patronizing."
That week, Andrew Levine, the director of the annual spoof show, was notified by administrators that he was on academic and social probation because other students had consumed alcohol in the auditorium after a performance. (His crime: dining with visiting family instead of staying as he had promised in a contract.) He was barred from social events and put on academic probation as well.
That was just what students needed to believe their worst suspicions about the administration. Ms. Frei had not made the decision about Mr. Levine and worked to cancel his academic probation, he said later, but students called her a hypocrite, a leadership expert who led badly. Hundreds of students soon wore T-shirts that said "Free Andy" or "Unapologetic."
"Daddy, why are the students hating on you?" Mr. Nohria's teenage daughters asked him, he told students later.
A few days before commencement, Nathan Bihlmaier, a second-year student, disappeared while celebrating with classmates in Portland, Me. He had last been seen so inebriated that a bartender had asked him to leave a pub. When the authorities told students that Mr. Bihlmaier's body had been dredged from the harbor, apparently after a fall, Mr. Nohria and Ms. Moon were standing beside them.
The first year of their experiment was ending with a catastrophe that brought home how little sway they really had over students' actions. Mr. Bihlmaier had not even been the drinking type. In the spirit of feminist celebration, Ms. Sandberg gave a graduation address at the deans' invitation, but during the festivities all eyes were on Mr. Bihlmaier's widow, visibly pregnant with their first child.
Amid all the turmoil, though, the deans saw cause for hope. The cruel classroom jokes, along with other forms of intimidation, were far rarer. Students were telling them about vigorous private conversations that had flowed from the halting public ones. Women's grades were rising — and despite the open resentment toward the deans, overall student satisfaction ratings were higher than they had been for years.
A Lopsided Situation
Even on the coldest nights of early 2013, Ms. Frei walked home from campus, clutching her iPhone and listening to a set of recordings made earlier in the day. Once her two small sons were in bed, she settled at her dining table, wearing pajamas and nursing a glass of wine, and fired up the digital files on her laptop. "Really? Again?" her wife, Anne Morriss, would ask.
Ms. Frei been promoted to dean of faculty recruiting, and she was on a quest to bolster the number of female professors, who made up a fifth of the tenured faculty. Female teachers, especially untenured ones, had faced various troubles over the years: uncertainty over maternity leave, a lack of opportunities to write papers with senior professors, and students who destroyed their confidence by pelting them with math questions they could not answer on the spot or commenting on what they wore.
"As a female faculty member, you are in an incredibly hostile teaching environment, and they do nothing to protect you," said one woman who left without tenure. A current teacher said she was so afraid of a "wardrobe malfunction" that she wore only custom suits in class, her tops invisibly secured to her skin with double-sided tape.
Now Ms. Frei, the guardian of the female junior faculty, was watching virtually every minute of every class some of them taught, delivering tips on how to do better in the next class. She barred other professors from giving them advice, lest they get confused. But even some of Ms. Frei's allies were dubious.
At the end of every semester, students gave professors teaching scores from a low of 1 to a high of 7, and some of the female junior faculty scores looked beyond redemption. More of the male professors arrived at Harvard after long careers, regaling students with real-life experiences. Because the pool of businesswomen was smaller, female professors were more likely to be academics, and students saw female stars as exceptions.
"The female profs I had were clearly weaker than the male ones," said Halle Tecco, a 2011 graduate. "They weren't able to really run the classroom the way the male ones could."
Take the popular second-year courses team-taught by Richard S. Ruback, a top finance professor, and Royce G. Yudkoff, a co-founder of a private equity firm that managed billions of dollars. The men taught students, among other lessons, how to start a "search fund," a pool of money to finance them while they found and acquired a company. In recent years, search funds had become one of the hottest, riskiest and most potentially lucrative pursuits for graduates of top business schools — shortcuts to becoming owners and chief executives.
The two professors were blunt and funny, pushing a student one moment, ribbing another one the next. They embodied the financial promise of a Harvard business degree: if the professors liked you, students knew, they might advise and even back you.
As Ms. Frei reviewed her tapes at night, making notes as she went along, she looked for ways to instill that confidence. The women, who plainly wanted to be liked, sometimes failed to assert their authority — say, by not calling out a student who arrived late. But when they were challenged, they turned too tough, responding defensively ("Where did you get that?").
Ms. Frei urged them to project warmth and high expectations at the same time, to avoid trying to bolster their credibility with soliloquies about their own research. "I think the class might be a little too much about you, and not enough about the students," she would tell them the next day.
By the end of the semester, the teaching scores of the women had improved so much that she thought they were a mistake. One professor had shot to a 6 from a 4. Yet all the attention, along with other efforts to support female faculty, made no immediate impact on the numbers of female teachers. So few women were coming to teach at the school that evening out the numbers seemed almost impossible.
As their final semester drew to a close, the students were preoccupied with the looming question of their own employment. Like graduates before them, the class of 2013 would to some degree part by gender after graduation, with more men going into higher-paying areas like finance and more women going into lower-paying ones like marketing.
Ms. Navab, who had started dating one of the men — with an M.D. and an M.B.A. — from the Ethiopian dinner, had felt freer to focus on her career once she was paired off. She was happy with her job at a California start-up, but she pointed out that she and some other women never heard about many of the most lucrative jobs because the men traded contacts and tips among themselves.
This was the lopsided situation that women in business school were facing: in intellectual prestige, they were pulling even with or outpacing male peers, but they were not "touching the money," as Nori Gerardo Lietz, a real estate private equity investor and faculty member, put it. A few alumnae had founded promising start-ups like Rent the Runway, an evening wear rental service, but when it came to reaping big financial rewards, most women were barely in the game.
At an extracurricular presentation the year before, a female student asked William Boyce, a co-founder of Highland Capital Partners, a venture capital firm, for advice for women who wanted to go into his field. "Don't," he laughed, according to several students present. Male partners did not want them there, he continued, and he was doing them a favor by warning them.
Some women protested or walked out, but others said they believed he was telling the truth. (In interviews, Mr. Boyce denied saying women should not go into venture capital, but an administrator said student complaints prompted the school to contact the firm, which he had left decades before.)
The deans had not focused on career choice, earning power or staying in the work force; they felt they first needed to address campus issues. Besides, the earning gap posed a dilemma: they were hoping fewer students would default to finance as a career. "Have the courage to make the choices early in your life that are determined by your passions," Mr. Nohria told students.
Plenty of women had taken Mr. Ruback and Mr. Yudkoff's classes on acquiring and running businesses, including Ms. Upton, who had delivered the crackerjack finance presentation. She counted 30 to 40 classmates planning search funds, all men except for a no-nonsense engineer named Jennifer Braus. The professors eventually decided to finance and advise Ms. Braus, hoping other Harvard women would follow."Nothing succeeds like success," Mr. Ruback said.
Ms. Upton decided to take a far lower-risk job managing a wealthy family's investments in Pittsburgh, where her fiancé lived. "You can either be a frontier charger or have an easier, happier life," she said.
Looking Ahead
Of all the ceremonies and receptions during graduation week, the most venerated was the George F. Baker Scholar Luncheon, for the top 5 percent of the class, held in a sunny dining room crowded with parents who looked alternately thrilled and intimidated by what their offspring had achieved.
In recent years, the glory of the luncheon had been dimmed by discomfort at the low number of female honorees. But this year, almost 40 percent of the Baker scholars were women. It was a remarkable rise that no one could precisely explain. Had the professors rid themselves of unconscious biases? Were the women performing better because of the improved environment? Or was the faculty easing up in grading women because they knew the desired outcome?
"To my head, all three happened," Professor Piskorski said. But Mr. Nohria said he had no cause to think the professors had used the new software, and the subjective participation scores, to avoid gender gaps. "Sunshine is the best disinfectant," he said, a phrase that he said had guided him throughout his project.
One of the Baker scholars was Ms. Boyarsky, the classroom truth-teller. Two hours after the luncheon, she stepped up to a lectern to address thousands of graduates, faculty members and parents. Of the two dozen or so men and only 2 women who had tried out before a student committee, she had beaten them all, with a witty, self-deprecating speech unlike any in the school's memory.
"I entered H.B.S. as a truly 'untraditional applicant': morbidly obese," she said.
The theme of her speech was finding the courage to make necessary but painful changes. "Courage is a brand new H.B.S. professor, younger than some of her students, teaching her very first class on her very first day," she said. "Courage is one woman" — the one who reported the groping episode — "who wakes the entire school up to the fact that gender relations still have a long way to go at H.B.S."
And, Ms. Boyarsky continued, she had lost more than 100 pounds during her final year at Harvard. "Courage was then me battling the urge to be defensive — something I believe I had been for a long time about this particular issue — and taking a hard, honest look within myself to figure out what had prevented change," she said.
Even before she finished, her phone was buzzing with e-mails and texts from classmates. She was the girl everyone wished they had gotten to know better, the graduation-week equivalent of the person whose obituary made you wish you had followed her work. She had closed the two-year experiment by making the best possible case for it. "This is the student they chose to show off to the world," Ms. Moon said. For the next academic year, she was arranging for second-year students to lead many of the trickiest conversations, realizing students were the most potent advocates.
The administrators and the class of 2013 were parting ways, their experiment continuing. The deans vowed to carry on but could not say how aggressively: whether they were willing to revise the tenure process to attract more female contenders, or allow only firms that hired and promoted female candidates to recruit on campus. "We made progress on the first-level things, but what it's permitting us to do is see, holy cow, how deep-seated the rest of this is," Ms. Frei said.
The students were fanning out to their new jobs, full of suspense about their fates. Because of the unique nature of what they had experienced, they knew, every class alumni magazine update and reunion would be a referendum on how high the women could climb and what values the graduates instilled — the true verdict on the experiment in which they had taken part.
As Ms. Boyarsky glanced around her new job as a consultant at McKinsey in Dallas, she often noticed that she was outnumbered by men, but she spoke up anyway. She was dating more than she had at school, she added with shy enthusiasm.
"I am super excited to go to my 30th reunion," she said.

subset: commoncrawl