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Editor's Note: In May 2005, The Rake ran a story by former KSTP-TV reporter Dean Staley about Clancy Prevost, the man whose suspicions about his flight student Zacharias Moussaui led to the apprehension of the "twentieth hijacker" behind the 9/11 attacks. Before our story hit the street in print, but after it was posted on our website, the StarTribune, in an attempt to discredit us and Prevost, (and to take credit themselves for the story of who caught Moussaui) ran a front page story the day before our story hit the streets crediting the tip that led to Moussaui to Tim Nelson and Hugh Sims, colleagues of Prevost at the Pan Am Flight Academy.

As noted in a Strib story today (January 25, 2008), the State and Justice Departments gave a $5 million reward for the Moussaui tip to Clancy Prevost, not to Nelson and Sims. It seems the State and Justice Departments thought The Rake story had it right, and the Strib had it wrong. Our story is below.

—Tom Bartel

He wraps his long fingers around his coffee cup, measures me with steady pale blue eyes, the eyes of an airline pilot. He smiles at the absurdity of his story. We are just a few miles down the road from the Eagan flight school where, one month before the September 11th attacks, he tried to teach Zacarias Moussaoui how to fly a Boeing 747.

His name is Clancy Prevost. He is sixty-eight years old, a retired pilot for Northwest Airlines, a lapsed Catholic, and a recovering alcoholic. He shakes his head as he recalls his story publicly for the first time.

The morning of August 13, 2001, was warm and humid, the Minnesota summer nearing its peak. Clancy Prevost left his room at the Spring Hill Suites, his local lodging when he commutes from the East Coast. He jumped on the hotel shuttle and headed for the nearby offices of the Pan-Am International Flight Academy. He wore a blue polo shirt, khakis, and red Converse sneakers.

At 10:30 that morning, Prevost walked into the air-conditioned lobby of the Northwest Aerospace Training Corporation, Northwest Airlines’ affiliated training facility. Here his employer, Pan Am Flight Academy, leases time on a range of multimillion-dollar simulators, including the 747-400 model, which realistically mimics the flight deck of a Boeing 747. There, thirty days before September 11th, he shook hands with the man the government would later call “the twentieth hijacker.”

”He was pleasant, but I expected him to be better dressed. He just was wearing Dockers and they didn’t fit real well, he was a little overweight, and he had this baseball hat, and growth of beard,” Prevost recalls. There was nothing remarkable about Moussaoui. In fact, Prevost’s first impressions of Moussaoui barely registered at all.

Prevost expects young pilots to arrive with energy, even nervousness, but from Moussaui, he got nothing. “I guess I wanted him to be a little more alive and comin’ at ya. But there wasn’t much comin’ at ya. It was just, ‘Hello.’”

Prevost wrote off Moussaoui’s timidity to first-day jitters. “It’s understandable since it’s all new. It’s daunting even to the experienced pilots that show up, let alone this guy who’s wandering in to supposedly kill everybody.

Moussaoui’s demeanor may have helped him go unnoticed during the five and a half months leading up to his arrest. He arrived in Chicago from London on February 23 and declared at least thirty-five thousand dollars in cash on his customs form. He traveled to Oklahoma City, and later to Minnesota. Along the way, Moussaoui bought knives and flight-training videos and inquired about starting a crop-dusting company. Not once did he draw the attention of authorities. Not even when he walked into the Pan Am flight school, counted out sixty-eight one-hundred dollar bills, and signed up to learn how to fly a 747. His luck ended the day he met his flight instructor, Clancy Prevost.

At first glance, Moussaoui was the kind of client Prevost had seen before: a wealthy civilian with no ties to the airline industry who wanted to learn how to fly a commercial jetliner. One might be surprised to learn how many “vanity clients” come to flight school, men of means with lots of free time, whose ultimate hope is apparently to impress women with a 747-type rating—bragging rights worth thousands of dollars. (Normally, most of Pan Am’s students are working, commercial pilots who are training to upgrade their ratings from smaller passenger jets. Maybe two or three vanity students turn up each year.) But that first day, Moussaoui would prove unlike any other student Prevost had known.

At 10:45, Prevost and Moussaoui took a shuttle van a mile and a half to the Pan-Am classroom building to start ground school. Michael Guess, a twenty-one-year-old support worker, met them at the reception desk. Guess set them up in a room with a projector and a PowerPoint presentation on the systems of the 747-400. (Guess, an aspiring pilot himself, would die a year later copiloting the flight that crashed and killed Senator Paul Wellstone in the woods of Northern Minnesota.)

The room was not much bigger than a large office. Moussaoui sat down. Prevost drew the blinds. Standing, he projected the PowerPoint presentation onto the white wall. Prevost paged his way through the schematics of the 747-400. Using color-coded charts and graphics, he described the hydraulic systems that power the flight control surfaces: the rudder, flaps, and horizontal elevator at the rear of the aircraft.

Moussaoui repeated some of the technical phrases and asked a few questions. Prevost, who flew 747s for Northwest Airlines, smiles and says, “I knew he wasn’t pilot material, because he’d actually read his manuals and he didn’t talk about pussy.” But over the course of the lesson, an odd pattern emerged. Moussaoui used the correct jargon, but his questions often didn’t make sense or were out of context.

Prevost tried to explain to Moussaoui the complex backup systems that in an emergency mean the difference between life and death. “There are two parts each. You have your engine-driven pumps and the backups to the engine-driven pumps, which are the man (manual) pumps. Two of them are electric. Two of them are air-driven. One and four are air-driven. Two and three are electric. The EDPs (engine driven pumps) are the main pumps and floor systems.”

Moussaoui was plainly bewildered. “So you say stuff like that and he’s sitting there like…” Prevost drops his jaw, gives a blank look. “It’s useless. He doesn’t have any knowledge on anything.” Moussaoui’s reaction exposed him as a man profoundly out of his depth trying to learn to fly a 747. Frustrated, looking for a break, Prevost suggested they get lunch. By 11:30, they were back at the NATCO building. 

They sat down to lunch in the cafeteria. Prevost asked Moussaoui what he did for a living. Moussaoui said he worked in the import/export business, that his family was covering for him while he was gone. Though Moussaoui is a French national of Moroccan descent, he never said specifically where he was from. Moussaoui told Prevost he had to get his training done as soon as possible, because there was only so much time his family would cover for him.

Prevost remembers trying to stall, because the training seemed pointless with such an unpromising student. “We’re sitting up there in the cafeteria and I’m thinking, I’m going to stay here for two or three hours because I don’t want to go back to the classroom building and try to teach him something, because you can’t. There’s no awareness of anything.” Moussaoui seemed equally discouraged. He had good reason.

That spring, Moussaoui had taken three months of private lessons at the Airman Flight School in Norman, Oklahoma. In twice the time it would take a new student to earn a novice pilot’s license, Moussaoui failed even to solo in a single-engine Cessna. A worker there told me, “That was his issue. Never did (solo). He just wasn’t good enough.”

In Eagan, hoping to learn to fly an aircraft that carries 524 people, 57,285 gallons of fuel, and, fully loaded, weighs more than four hundred tons, Moussaoui was well out of his depth. Prevost, smiling through lunch with his new student, thought to himself, “This is awful. We’re getting nothing out of this. This is stupid.’”

But in the world of private flight training, there are practicalities to be observed. The client, though wholly unprepared, must be encouraged with no less enthusiasm than the tennis pro lends to the hopelessly uncoordinated student. They both paid their money. In this regard at least, Moussaoui had the perfect instructor.

At six feet, four inches tall, Prevost has the height and gait of a retired basketball player. In fact, he was a reluctant center whose size obliged him to a mediocre career that ended after high school. Instead, Prevost went to law school, dropped out when his first wife got pregnant, and then, feeling trapped by domestic life, joined the Navy. The Navy taught him to fly.

With gray hair cut close on the sides, Prevost has the easy smile of a man who has spent a lifetime sharing jokes, stories, and drinks—though as a recovering alcoholic, he’s given up the last of these. He is a popular instructor known for helping struggling students pass the all-important “check ride,” the pressure-filled practical exam in a simulator that reproduces severe weather, complex system failures, engine malfunctions, and other emergencies.

At 1:00, Prevost and Moussaoui left the cafeteria and took the shuttle back to the classroom building. In the darkened room, Prevost picked up where he’d left off, paging through more schematics of the 747. In a lull in the lecture, Prevost asked Moussaoui what he hoped to accomplish. Moussaoui told Prevost he wanted to take off from London’s Heathrow Airport and land at Kennedy Airport in New York. (In the weeks after September 11th it was erroneously reported that Moussaoui didn’t care about taking off or landing.) Prevost dutifully tried to encourage Moussaoui, saying the trip was just a simulator away. “You’ll be able to do that. The simulator can fly the Atlantic track system. We can fast-forward it and you’ll fly all the way across the Atlantic in about forty-five minutes, and then you can land. You can do this.” Moussaoui seemed unconvinced. Prevost leaned across the table and gave him a pep talk—the one he reserved for vanity clients that weren’t likely ever to sit in the cockpit of an actual commercial jetliner.

He remembers the conversation perfectly: “Listen, Zach,” he said, “this is what’ll happen. You’ll be on a flight and the pilots will get a bad meal. They’ll get food poisoning and they’ll both be incapacitated. Somebody will say, ‘Does anybody know how to fly a 747?’ And you can raise your hand and say, ‘I can.’ And you’ll save everybody!” (This was the scenario in the spoof film Airplane.)

”I would rather take a parachute and jump out the door.” Moussaoui responded.

”You can’t get the doors open. The pressurization is too great.” Prevost told Moussaoui a story well known in pilot training circles about a Middle Eastern flight.

It was a hajj charter flight to Mecca. Shortly after takeoff, somebody with a cooking pot caught the inside of the airplane on fire. The pilot turned the plane around and landed. All they had to do was evacuate, but the engineer failed to depressurize the airplane. They couldn’t get the doors open. Everyone inside burned to death.

The story made Prevost think, his mind making a quick series of associations. He asked Moussaoui, “Hajj? Ramadan… what is that? Are you Muslim?” Here Moussaoui’s emotion betrayed him for the first time.

According to Prevost, Moussaui suddenly got very grave, and in a low, stern growl, said, “I am nothing.”

”He said it just like that. ‘I am nothing.’”

Hoping to establish some kind of rapport with his hopeless student, Prevost tested the waters by offering a little of himself. “I said, ‘Well, you know, I am nothing, either.’” In a manner of speaking, this was certainly true; Prevost is a former Catholic who for the last eleven years has lived his life according to the secular comfort and guidance he finds at his monthly Alcoholics Anonymous meetings.

But just at the moment he’d hoped to connect somehow with Moussaoui, something began to dawn on Prevost. Suddenly, he looked at his student as though for the first time. He had trained pilots for Middle Eastern airlines before, but Moussaoui was different. “That’s when I got the idea: Wait a minute, Middle Eastern businessman? What are we doing here? Muslim? Wait a minute. Do we know what we’re doing?”

Acting on his reservations would prove much harder than Prevost could have guessed at the time.

***

Prevost struggled through more of the Power Point presentation, most of it lost on Moussaoui. By 3:00, Prevost was exhausted. He dismissed Moussaoui for the day. Back at his hotel that afternoon, Prevost picked up the phone and called the Pan Am office. He asked for Alan McHale, the manager of pilot training. McHale was second in charge at Pan Am. He oversaw the program managers—one for each aircraft type; A320, 747, 757, DC-10—and the flight instructors. Prevost talked to Liz Stone, one of the schedulers, who told him McHale was unavailable.

Feeling his anxiety rising, Prevost couldn’t help mentioning his strange student to Stone. “I said, ‘Liz, bring this up to Alan. Do we know really what we’re doing here? This is a guy who we don’t know anything about and we’re teaching him how to get on the flight deck of an airplane. And he’ll know how to operate the switches and we don’t know a thing about him. We should investigate this guy before we allow him to do this training, and make sure he’s OK.’ I said, ‘Bring this up to him, would ya?’” That evening Prevost went to dinner alone. Confident his bosses would have Moussaoui checked out, he thought no more about it.

At 10:00 the next morning, Prevost arrived at the classroom building ahead of Moussaoui and approached Stone. “So I said to Liz, ‘Did you tell Alan about what I said?’ She said, ‘Yeah. He doesn’t seem to be too concerned.’”

”I yelled into the office. I said, ‘Alan, should we be doing this? Do we know what we’re doing? Training somebody we don’t know anything about to get on the flight deck?’ He said he paid the money, we don’t care. I said, ‘You’ll care when there’s a hijacking and they’ll wonder where did he learn to work all those switches? And all the lawsuits start rolling in. Then you’ll care.’ He said, ‘We’re not worried.’ I said, ‘Ohhh-K.’ “ Prevost’s voice goes up here in singsong resignation. Liz Stone says she remembers passing messages between instructors and managers, but this one made no particular impression. When asked about Prevost’s version of the conversation, McHale declined to comment.

But McHale’s boss, John Rosengren, says Alan McHale may have told Prevost to leave it alone. “It could be that [McHale] told [Prevost] that the first day, because that’s what I told Alan the first day. I told him to hold off. Let’s see what other information was out there. This was a customer. He’s entitled to be treated like a customer. I didn’t want to jump to any conclusions until I had more information.”

Rosengren, who was the director of Pan Am’s Minnesota school at the time, admits now that Moussaoui, a man who wasn’t qualified to fly a single-engine Cessna, had no business trying to learn to fly a 747. “I knew we couldn’t teach him to fly. Everybody knew that. So all we were doing was going through the motions of instructing this individual and collecting the money from him.”

In fact, the combination of Moussaoui’s incompetence and certain business realities at Pan Am put Rosengren in a tough spot. Pan Am leased bulk time on Northwest Airlines’ flight simulators at NATCO. Rosengren says, “Obviously, if you’re going to lease the time, we don’t want it to go empty. We were all under pressure to keep that time full as much as possible.”

Just so, Rosengren denies that it was business considerations that kept them from calling the FBI that first day. He says he told McHale not to do anything about Moussaoui, in order to allow themselves more time to work with Moussaoui the next day and find out more, maybe keep an eye on him.

“When we first heard about this, there wasn’t enough information to go on,” says Rosengren, indicating that Prevost’s hunch wasn’t necessarily enough. “That’s when we sent everybody back and I specifically told [McHale] to get some more information to see if there was any reason why we should contact the FBI.”

In retrospect, of course, this may seem dilatory. But at that time, no one had ever intentionally flown an airliner into a skyscraper.

Back at the classroom building that Tuesday morning, Prevost turned up the pressure. During a break in a managers’ meeting, Prevost says he went in and made his case directly to the program managers. Prevost insists at this point that a manager tried to bluff him. Prevost says he was told to call Pan Am’s headquarters in Miami. When Prevost asked for the number, he says the manager told him he would take care of it. Prevost left the room.

Minutes later, waiting for Moussaoui, Prevost saw Pan Am’s comptroller, Jerry Liddell. Prevost asked, “Jerry, what do we know about this guy?” Liddell said Moussaoui paid cash. Prevost asked, “Like how—credit card? Check?” Liddell said, “No. Cash. One-hundred-dollar bills.” Prevost’s reservations about Moussaoui hardened into deep suspicion.

Prevost went back into the meeting room. “Hey you guys, how ‘bout this? This guy paid for his training with one-hundred-dollar bills. You know what, if he went to buy an airplane ticket over at the terminal and comes up with hundred-dollar bills, lookin’ like he’s lookin’, they’d have him in the rubber room. They’d have him in jail, and they’d be questioning him. We should call the FBI!” Another Pan Am worker says the bigger concern at the time was what to do with Moussaoui’s stacks of hundred-dollar bills until somebody could get to the bank.

The meeting resumed behind closed doors. Prevost walked away feeling somewhat reassured. He hoped his message had gotten through, and that management would consider calling the FBI. Prevost wouldn’t get the chance to plead his case again.

Moussaoui arrived just before 11:00 a.m. At noon, after an hour of looking over more of the Power Point presentation, they went to lunch. Back in the NATCO cafeteria, Prevost thought of a way to keep Moussaoui occupied. He invited Moussaoui to sit in on a simulated flight or LOFT (Line Oriented Flight Training) he had scheduled with other students that evening.

The LOFT is the practical portion of flight training. Students take the controls of a full-motion simulator that creates scenarios based on real-world incidents unfolding in real time. A typical LOFT session might include losing an engine on takeoff, encountering severe thunderstorms, an untimely hydraulic failure in flight, and dangerous wind shear upon landing. The LOFT tests a student’s ability to react to unfolding problems in the cockpit, complete with all the real-world distractions of a pitching flight deck, alarms sounding, and the ambient sound of engines whining and wind and rain pounding the aircraft.

To Prevost, the LOFT training seemed a perfect out. There was no real teaching to be done with Moussaoui, and sitting in on the LOFT would keep him occupied. The offer seemed to encourage Moussaoui. That night he would get what he came for—his flight in the simulator.

Prevost passed the rest of the afternoon back at his hotel. The LOFT was scheduled for 6:00 p.m. Students were expected to show up an hour early. Prevost made sure he was in the lobby of the NATCO building at 4:30 waiting for Moussaoui. Prevost was about to do the type of detective work that in a post-September 11th world seems obvious, but that pre-September 11th was extraordinary.

He saw a car pull into the lot. Moussaoui stepped out of the passenger side, and Prevost walked outside to greet him. Prevost noted the car was a Subaru. “I said hello to Moussaoui as he got out, like I was just coming out to see him, but actually I was looking at the car and looking at the license plate.” Prevost tried to memorize the plate, but could remember only the numbers 6-8-6. (The numbers stuck in his mind because they were the same as the phone number prefix at the Spring Hill Suites where Prevost was staying.) “I said, ‘Where are you staying?’ He said, ‘Residence Inn.’ I said ‘Oh, that’s nice.’” (As a former Northwest Airlines pilot, Prevost knew all the hotels near the airport.) Prevost noted that the driver appeared to be Asian. He had black hair, a slight build. As he drove away, Prevost walked Moussaoui inside.

The simulators, which cost between twelve and fourteen million dollars, are housed at NATCO. A quiet, carpeted hallway leads deep inside the massive facility. On one side of the hall are classrooms. On the other side doors opens to giant rooms. In each of these rooms, which have the antiseptic feel of a research facility, a walkway extends toward a simulator that sits fifteen feet off the floor, perched on a network of hydraulic legs and cables. The 747-400 simulator is white, twice the size of a cargo van, with no windows. A short steel gangplank joins the vehicle to the walkway. Once passengers and pilots have crossed, the gangplank is lifted, isolating the simulator in midair. It is free to move in any direction, like a real cockpit at thirty thousand feet.

In action, the computer-controlled hydraulics simulate almost any movement of the 747-400; it can make steep climbs, dives, and rolls from side to side. Using a trick of perception, the simulator tilts up and vibrates forward on takeoff, pressing the occupants back into the seats. On landing, the capsule tilts down and vibrates backward, pulling the shoulder harnesses tight against the chest, the same feeling one has when an aircraft slows to land. To the passengers inside, the effect is astonishingly real, right down to the scream of the engines on takeoff.

Prevost showed me the simulator Moussaoui sat in. His long frame bent over, Prevost sat down and pulled round reading glasses from his shirt pocket. In the confines of the cockpit, he suddenly came to life, like a large bird, scanning the computer screen and typing commands more quickly than I could follow. “Let’s go to L.A.,” he said, maneuvering a cursor over a green screen. On an alphabet pad he typed “K-L-A-X” as our point of departure. “OK, we’re in L.A. Let’s put it on the runway.” He typed in “K-S-F-O” (San Francisco) as our destination. “We’re gonna weigh 630,000 pounds. The CG (center of gravity) is twenty-one (twenty-one percent of the length of the aircraft). Let’s be China Airlines today. Let’s do a ‘venture two’ departure.” Prevost pressed “execute.” He turned off a fluorescent overhead light. The cabin was suddenly illuminated by the image outside the cockpit window. It was dawn on the runway, buildings and runway equipment silhouetted by the first pale hint of morning. Prevost turned on the cockpit lights, and the cabin glowed a dull orange.

It was in this environment that Moussaoui took his first and only simulator flight. The two students that evening sat up front, the pilot and co-pilot. Just behind them, Prevost sat sideways at a computer terminal programming disastrous scenarios for his students to solve.

In the next row back sat Moussaoui, strapped securely into his seat by his shoulder harness. He watched quietly and intensely as Prevost put the students through the paces. Prevost remembers, “I didn’t even know he was there because he was so quiet and unobtrusive.” Since the first day’s reaction to the word “Muslim,” Moussaoui talked conspicuously little about himself. After the LOFT that night, on the short ride back to his room on the hotel shuttle bus, the thought of Moussaoui nagged Prevost. He was still not confident his managers would call the FBI.

Prevost had Wednesday off. Having finished two days of what passed for ground school, his time with Moussaoui was effectively over. That morning he got a call from his office. The FBI wanted to talk with him.

At 1:00 p.m. Prevost met with an FBI agent and an Immigration and Naturalization Service agent in the commons room of his hotel. Prevost had done all the footwork for them.

“Where does Moussaoui stay?” they asked.

“At the Residence Inn.”

“How does he get over to NATCO?”

“He comes in a Subaru with a silver paint job, four-door sedan, and the license plate is green and white and the last three numbers are 686.”

“Who drives him?”

“A guy with black hair. He looks Oriental from the back but he’s dark complected and has black hair.”

The interview lasted less than twenty minutes. Prevost felt enormous relief. “OK, now we’ve told the FBI,” he remembers thinking. “It’s out of my hands. I’ve done as much as I can.”

Prevost’s next day at work was Thursday. He had a four-hour LOFT scheduled overnight from 10 p.m. to 2 a.m. (Pan Am often used the simulators during off hours.) Another instructor, Rich Lamb, was scheduled to give Moussaoui LOFT training at 6 p.m. (Prevost had been charged only with Moussaoui’s ground school course work.)

Prevost left a message for another new student to show up at 5 p.m. On the chance that someone canceled, they could fill the 6 p.m. slot, be done by 10 p.m., and avoid the overnight shift. Prevost and Lamb waited in the lobby for Moussaoui and the other student.

Dana Wilson, one of the schedulers, came up and told Lamb, “Your sim’s canceled.”

Prevost asked, “What happened to Zach?” Two days of intrigue ended with a matter-of-fact statement.

“They led him away,” she said.

***

For the next twenty-eight days, Prevost entertained his AA buddies with the anecdote of the odd Middle Easterner who disappeared into the hands of government agents. It made a good story. Over coffee, someone would prod him to repeat the account, the story that always ended with the same deliberate punch line, “They led him away.”

On the morning of September 11th, Prevost was sitting at home. The phone rang. It was his daughter Annie. In a scene that was being repeated across the country, she said, “Dad, they’re crashing airplanes into the Trade Center.”

Prevost remembers, “I’m thinking, Oh yeah, well, a Cessna got lost in the fog and crashed into the Trade Center. And then I turn on the TV and it’s no Cessna. You see this airplane banking in, and I said, ‘Shit, that’s an Airbus or a five-seven (Boeing 757).’ And bam! I saw the second one.” Prevost was like a man who after years of ignorance finds out his wife has been cheating on him. “Oh. I get it. It explained everything in a split second.”

When Moussaoui was arrested, he had in his possession two knives, binoculars, flight manuals for the 747-400, a flight simulator computer program, fighting gloves, and shin guards. After September 11th, authorities would learn Moussaoui had followed many of the same preparations as the nineteen hijackers.

In 1998, Moussaoui trained at an al-Qaida-affiliated camp in Afghanistan. In the months before his arrest, Moussaoui pursued training at the same Norman, Oklahoma, flight school attended by Mohammed Atta and Marwan al-Shehhi (who piloted planes into the north and south towers of the World Trade Center, respectively). Moussaoui purchased flight deck videos from the Ohio Pilot Store, just as Atta had. Moussaoui received money from Ramzi Bin al-Shibh in Germany. Bin al-Shibh, who was later captured in Pakistan and now is in U.S. custody, also wired money to Atta and al-Shehhi.

The people at the Pan Am flight school were closer to giving Moussaoui deadly skills than they imagined. Even with Moussaoui’s limited background, the instruction he paid for would have given him enough experience to guide an aircraft to a given target. In practice, you only have to turn two dials on the autopilot to maneuver the giant aircraft in flight.

Ziad Jarrah, one of four hijackers aboard United Airlines flight 93 bound for San Francisco, used those very controls to turn the plane around and head east toward Washington, D.C. Of the four hijackers who piloted planes on September 11th, none had flown an airliner before. Time in a simulator had proved sufficient.

Prevost made his observations before the pre-September 11th paradigm collapsed along with the Twin Towers. These were the innocent days before an Arab man inquiring about crop dusting warranted an automatic call to the FBI and before box cutters were considered serious weapons and Arab men were asked to get off planes for no other reason than their race. Moussaoui spent twenty-five weeks in the U.S.; he spent only two days with Prevost. So why did Clancy Prevost see so clearly what no one else seemed able to?

Al Johnson, a program manager at Pan Am and the man who introduced Prevost to Moussaoui, says, “Clancy is just the type of a guy who would be curious about what this guy wants to do with an airplane. He isn’t there just to walk in and start training a guy in the morning because the guy wants to see if he can fly a 747. I’m not sure that anybody else would have been as curious as Clancy, or asked the right questions.”

After September 11th, Alan McHale personally thanked Prevost for his actions.

***

Prevost sits across the table, takes another sip of coffee, eyes fixing me. He dispenses advice, most of it straight from AA meetings. “If you keep on doing what you’re doing, you’ll keep getting what you’re getting,” he tells me. Some of his advice runs deeper.

He looks back at Moussaoui as a walking contradiction: the quiet potential terrorist, the incompetent pilot, the Muslim fundamentalist who took advantage of an open, secular society to prepare himself possibly to attack it.

When Moussaoui met Clancy Prevost, he met his equal and his opposite. Prevost is an atheist with the intellectual energy of a college freshman, the moral clarity of a monk, and the wonder of a man awakened for the first time at the age of fifty-six from a life of drinking.

“Live your life according to principles, not people,” he says, head shaking slightly, eyes wide, grinning at the beauty of the statement. Prevost can smell B.S. a mile away. He smelled it all over Zacarias Moussaoui a month before September 11th. (Moussaoui says he had nothing to do with the attacks.) In late March, the U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear Moussaoui’s appeal, clearing the way in April for federal judge Leonie Brinkema to set a trial date. Today, Moussaoui is the only person who has been charged in the U.S. for the events of September 11th.