Former Maine airline ticket agent recalls encounter with 9/11 terrorists

By Phil Hirschkorn

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    SCARBOROUGH, Maine (WMTW) — Twenty years after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on America, former U.S. Airways ticket agent Mike Tuohey does not blame himself for failing to stop plot ringleader Mohammed Atta.

Tuohey was on duty early that day at the Portland International Jetport when Atta, along with fellow al Qaeda terrorist Abdul Aziz al Omari, arrived less than 30 minutes before Flight 5930 to Boston was scheduled to take off.

“It was a flight at 6 o’clock, a commuter aircraft; it only held 19 people,” Tuohey recalled in an interview at his home on Wednesday, three days before the 20th anniversary of 9/11.

The flight was half full, and Atta and Omari were the last passengers to arrive.

Atta, an Egyptian, and Omari, a Saudi, held $2,400 first class tickets to fly from Portland to Boston to Los Angeles.

“These guys looked like they might have been on business travel,” Tuohey said. “They didn’t do anything to raise any real suspicions. They had probably practiced this countless times at different airports.”

Tuohey asked what — even back then — were standard security questions.

He recalled saying to Atta and Omari: “Has an unknown person asked you to carry an item onboard an aircraft? ‘No.’ They’re supposed to say ‘no.’ And have your bags been out of your sight since you packed them? They have to say ‘no’ to that.” So, Atta said, ‘Nah.’ But he doesn’t look at you. This is what I first noticed. His head is tilted off to the side. He’s got a smirk on his face, and he kind of looked at you sideways and said, ‘No.’

“The other guy is just shaking his head,” Tuohey continued. “I don’t think he understood a word I said.”

When Tuohey asked for identification, Atta and Omari showed their Florida driver’s licenses.

“Now, Atta, still smirking, he throws it up on the desk,” Tuohey said. “I had this thought, exact thought in my mind – ‘If this guy doesn’t look like an Arab terrorist, nobody does.’ Alright, because he just seemed so miserable, and I gave myself a slap, a mental slap, and said, ‘That’s not right, you shouldn’t be doing that.’”

Each terrorist brought one bag to check, but due to their late arrival, their bags were flagged automatically for a positive bag matchup – not to be loaded until after the passengers had boarded, a standard pre-9/11 security measure meant to stop baggage bombs like the one that blew up Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland in 1988.

“The bag check time was 5:43, it said on the bag tag,” Tuohey said. “Don’t put that bag on unless you know these people actually made the flight.”

Tuohey declined to issue the last-minute strangers their Boston boarding passes for American Airlines Flight 11, a 7:45 a.m. departure. Atta was unhappy.

Tuohey said, “He looks at his envelope, and he looks at me and says, ‘They told me one-step check-in.’ I said to myself, ‘Uh, oh, this guy knows I have his boarding cards here, and I’m not giving them to him.’ I hope he doesn’t give me a hard time.”

Tuohey assured them, as first class passengers, they’d be top priority to board in Boston, but Atta pushed back.

“They told me one-step check-in!” Tuohey recalled Atta saying.

“I said, Mr. Atta, if you don’t get upstairs very quickly, you’re going to miss your flight altogether,” Tuohey said.

Unfortunately, they did not miss their connection.

At 8:46 a.m., with Atta in the pilot’s chair, Atta, Omari, and three other muscle hijackers, crashed their Boston-to-LA flight into the north tower of the World Trade Center, the first of the day’s four airliners commandeered into weapons of mass destruction, resulting in the immediate deaths of nearly 3,000 people in New York, at the Pentagon, in northern Virginia, and in a field in Shanksville, Pennsylvania.

Afterward, Tuohey struggled with guilt.

He said, “That was the tortuous question that ran through my mind for years, that I went to counseling for: What did I miss? Why didn’t I see this?”

Tuohey, 75, retired a decade-and-a-half ago after 38 years in the airline industry.

On 9/11, FBI agents questioned him about his encounter with evil, asking him to positively identify Atta and Omari from a photo array, which he did.

But his brush with history remained unknown to the public until the 9/11 Commission report, in 2004, mentioned his name in a footnote about the Jetport connection.

Tuohey said, “Until that report, no one knew who I was.”

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