The Man He Was Before —

And 25 years after 9/11. . .. A Conversation with Michael Tuohey

I have been asking Michael Tuohey the same question for fifteen years: are you the man you were before 9/11?

In 2011, at the ten-year mark, Tuohey told me, “I want to be the man I was before 9/11 — the man open to wonder and spontaneity.” He was the US Airways ticket agent in Portland, Maine, who checked in two of the hijackers. I put his words in the headline of a feature I wrote that year because they were so honest, and because neither of us knew whether he would ever get there.

Last week, at the Falmouth Memorial Library in Maine, not far from the Portland airport, I hosted a conversation/interview with him ahead of the 25th anniversary of the attacks. Partway through, I asked him the question again in front of the audience.

This time, he answered with a firm “Yes.”

It took a quarter of a century, several psychologists, a device that sent a small electric current through his earlobes, and his 83-year-old mother driving up from Boston. But the man who checked Mohamed Atta and Abdulaziz al-Omari in at the Portland Jetport on the morning of September 11, 2001, is, at last, himself again.

BEFORE 9/11

I should say how I met him because it bears on everything that follows.

For years I have commuted between Washington, DC and Portland, and Mike was the man at the US Airways counter. Anyone who flew that route knew him. He was gracious, funny, and helpful, none of which the job mandated, and he treated a line of irritable travelers as though they were guests arriving at his home. I always sought him out.

That matters more than the words may imply. When Mike says he wants to be the man he was before 9/11, I am one of the few people writing about him who can tell you what that man was like, because I stood in front of him. He was a redhead then, quick and jovial, the kind of person who made an airport feel less like an airport. “Open to wonder and spontaneity” is his own phrase for it, and it was accurate.

We have grown closer over the years, as people do when one keeps asking the other hard questions and receives honest answers. He came to lunch at my lakeside house in western Maine on the tenth anniversary. We usually find each other on September 11 now. Last year, over mussels at a restaurant near his home in Scarborough, he asked what I thought would happen on the 25th.

THE MORNING OF SEPTEMBER 11

As usual, he was at the Portland Jetport at 4:30 a.m., getting the computers up and running. It was the week after Labor Day, following a summer he still describes as “horrific.” On some mornings, forty or fifty people were waiting.

That morning there were eight.

Six or seven flights before 7:30, a couple of agents coming in behind him, the lines moving easily. It was the first slow morning in months. He was walking across the floor to step outside for a cigarette when he saw two men in jackets and ties who looked a little lost.

They were booked on the 6 a.m. flight; It was 5:43 a.m.

He brought them over to the counter. Two bags checked. Two one-way, $2,400 first-class tickets, Portland to Boston, connecting to American Flight 11 to Los Angeles.

Something else registered, though he could not have said why it mattered. They had paper tickets. By 2001 paper was slowly disappearing, and to an agent with three decades behind a counter a paper ticket carried a great deal of information. “A paper ticket is like a scanner,” Mike says. It told him when and where the ticket was purchased and the method of payment. He read it the way he had read thousands of them.

He asked what he has always called “the stupid questions,” the ones required at the time. Had anyone unknown asked them to carry anything? Had their bags been out of their sight? Both men shook their heads, no.

He asked for identification. The elder man slid his across the counter and never once looked at him straight on. The younger one, whom Mike took for about 28, held his license up next to his own face and smiled.

“One had a palpable contempt in his eyes,” he has told me many times over the past two decades, “and the other, a goofy smile.”

And then the thing that has haunted him ever since.

“I thought, ‘If these guys don’t look like Arab terrorists, who does?’” He paused there, the way he always does. “I mentally slapped myself, thinking, ‘I have to be politically correct.’”

He had a reason. “Profiling a passenger could cost the airline tens of thousands of dollars in fines” and cost him his job. He talked himself out of the reaction, calling it a bad morning. At five o’clock, everybody has bad mornings.

“I got a visceral reaction, a gut reaction,” he said, “but I didn’t know where to go with that.”

There was not much he could have done in any case, and this is the part that rarely makes the coverage. After the bombing of the USS Cole, security was raised to level three. By September 2001, it had been lowered to level two. “So I couldn’t set them up for extra security as you could do with young Arab males prior to that time.” Thinking quickly, Mike put extra green tags on their checked bags. Under the CAPS computer-assisted passenger prescreening system then in effect, the tags meant the bags should not be loaded before the passengers boarded.

“Then they gave me trouble,” Mike recalls. The dispute was about the one rule he had never been willing to bend. The industry had recently moved to “one-step check-in”: an agent in Portland would issue boarding passes for both legs so the passenger would not have to stop at a counter in Boston. Mike believed it removed a checkpoint and was unsafe. He called himself “a dinosaur in the business.” When the connecting boarding pass came out of the machine, he held it back.

The elder man kept repeating: “They told us one-step check-in.”

Mike told him that since he was flying first class, the attendant at the Ambassador’s Club in Boston would take care of him there. The man repeated his demand.

“You’re going to miss your flight,” Mike told him. “He said something in Arabic to the younger man, and the two of them turned and headed for the gate.”

Twenty-five years later, telling this to a room of strangers, Mike finished the story the way I had never heard him finish it before.

“Unfortunately, they didn’t (miss their flight)! ”

THAT DAY

Word spread through the airport before anyone understood what it meant. A colleague asked whether he had heard what was happening in New York. He assumed a small plane, some terrible accident. Another agent said something about two men out of Boston on Flight 11, and Mike said, “No. No. Those guys are dead.”

Then the second plane hit the World Trade Center. When he learned the first one had been American Flight 11, he knew.

“Oh my God,” he said to himself. “I was right. They were terrorists.”

Mike called the FBI. “We put them on in the morning,” he said. He told agents there was a camera over his position at the counter, not knowing it was inoperative. After changing clothes, the two men were captured by another airport camera as they walked to the gate. Agents came to his house the next morning with photographs. Mike asked them to keep his name out of the press, and for a while they did. When the 9/11 Commission report was finally released his name was the first albeit spelled incorrectly.

He described the feeling to me four years afterward and has never revised it: “the feeling in your stomach when someone you love deeply leaves you.”

Somewhere in all of that he called his mother in Boston, crying, the way he says an all-American boy does. She asked what was wrong. He told her. She said she would be right there.

Two and a half hours later his 83-year-old mother was standing at his door, and she stayed until his wife could get home.

“The greatest psychological counseling you could ever get,” he said, “is when your mother puts her arms around you and says, ‘It’s okay. It’s not your fault.’”

THE AFTERMATH

His wife, Maureen Gallagher, then a US Airways flight attendant, was based in Pittsburgh. He had seen her off that same morning on a flight from Portland. She remembers the clear weather more than anything. Looking out the window, “I was mesmerized the whole flight.” She landed early in Pittsburgh, walked the terminal, noticed agents huddled and talking, and went down to the crew room where the television was on.

“My brain does not comprehend that level of horror,” she said. “You’re watching, but it’s not clicking.”

Then Pittsburgh International announced a full evacuation. Passengers, crew, ramp staff — everyone. She returned the next day to volunteer and found the airport empty. She was grounded for several days before making it back to Portland.

“The hardest part,” she said, “was knowing what Mike was going through and not being able to fly home to be with him.”

I was at an appointment in downtown Washington when the plane hit the Pentagon. When office buildings were evacuated, I walked several miles home in a dense, frightened crowd exchanging guesses about what was happening. Later that day, a television producer in Philadelphia sent a car for me to report from Ground Zero. My eyes burned from the smoke and NY streets looked like a ghost town. Afterward I went back to my hotel and slept.

It was frightening, and as a reporter it was nothing beside what Mike carried. I include it only to say that I know what that week felt like from the outside, and that the outside is where nearly all of us were standing.

WHAT TRAUMA TOOK

What broke Mike was not the ticket counter. He was home watching the coverage. The reporters could not name a sound they kept hearing. It turned out to be people who had jumped, landing on the roof of the building below.

Mike grew up Irish-Italian Catholic in the projects in Roxbury, Massachusetts — 48 families in one building — in a world where every parent watched every child. He calls himself “lapsed” now, “a square guy, feet on the ground, no belief in ghosts or haunted houses.” But “I couldn’t get past the theology.”

“Suicide is a mortal sin. You can’t be buried in sacred ground,” he said. “I kept thinking about a faithful Catholic on that roof, fire coming, certain to die either way, having to wrestle with his own soul in the last minutes of his life.” He asked, “How does somebody rectify that?”

He has never been able to answer it.

For years he blamed himself not only for the two men he checked in, but for a woman he never met. Ana Zanni was the American Airlines agent in Boston who checked Atta onto Flight 11. She later took her own life. Mike’s reasoning, when he first told me in 2005, was this:

“Zanni never would have come in contact with them had I done my job and issued both boarding passes in one step.”

Sit with that for a moment. The one act of genuine instinct he had that morning — the refusal, the stubbornness, the checkpoint he would not give up — is the thing he spent years unable to forgive himself for. His conscience found him guilty of the only moment his judgment was sound.

It took him a long time to let that go.

Mike lost years to the fear and the guilt. He was afraid to leave the house and made excuses not to. “I would dress and then not go out, and wondered: are the windows closed? Is the dishwasher off? An hour of checking. I’d look up routes online to places I had driven to for 30 years.”

“I saw Mohamed Atta’s face in a passing car, staring at me from the passenger seat. It happened again at the mailbox.”

“I would pull into my driveway, shut off the engine, and come to 45 minutes later without any idea where the time had gone. It was like being in a time lapse,” he said. “I was in the worst place I had ever been. My rational mind was telling me one thing, but my subconscious was telling me something else.”

He stood in the shower once until a 65-gallon tank of hot water ran cold. “I thought it was five minutes.”

He retired in 2004 after 37 years, and he did not want to leave. He was passionate about the job. The airline offered him a choice that was no choice at all: a pay cut to stay in Portland, or a move to another city. I was at his retirement party at his home in Scarborough that summer; it was bittersweet in a way I did not fully understand at the time.

THE WAY BACK

He went to psychologist after psychologist. The first three listened and were sympathetic, and each told him it was more than they could handle. All of them wanted to medicate him. “I didn’t want to be ‘Prozac Mike.”

The one who finally helped gave him the word for it. He was dissociating — disconnecting from his surroundings and snapping back with no sense of how much time had passed. Knowing there was a name for it mattered to him.

He resisted the other diagnosis, PTSD, for a long time. “Soldiers at war get PTSD,” he told the room. “I just had a bad dream.”

He also had to embarrass US Air into paying for the treatment.

Along with talk therapy, the psychologist used electrotherapy stimulation, placing electrodes on Mike’s earlobes. “I felt a small pulsed electric current,” he said. The low-level current was intended to raise serotonin and dopamine while lowering cortisol.

“I would sit back, close my eyes, and go through reruns of the morning of September 11 while the psychologist controlled the current. It was as if I saw the whole thing in slow motion, almost like a high-definition video camera. I was very emotional and crying.”

“Then the therapist asked me to think of something pleasant, something that made me smile. That’s when I felt change,” Mike recalls. “I felt like putty. It took me from the worst place I’ve ever been to a more comfortable place.”

Half a dozen hourly sessions later, he began to feel more relaxed, more alert.

“I was over-analyzing myself,” he said. “Now I can just be.”

25 YEARS LATER

Near the end of our conversation, he passed around yellowed newspapers from September 12, 2001, their front-page headlines printed in type reserved for the end of the world.

His point was about the roughly one-third of Americans who were born after September 11, 2001, or were too young to remember it. He worries they cannot feel its enormity. For them, he said, it has flattened into a unit in a school curriculum and a line at a TSA checkpoint.

Over dinner last year he asked a version of the same question: “Will people remember 25 years later?” Then he answered it himself: “Only the ones who lived it.” He hopes he is wrong. He wants younger Americans to understand that it was real, and that it changed this country permanently.

I looked around the room while he said it. Ninety minutes, a good crowd, attentive and full of questions, and as far as I could tell every one of them was old enough to remember exactly where they had been that day. The people who came out to remember were the people who already do. He is not wrong to be uneasy about that.

Someone in the room asked him about the box cutters. He does not believe anyone can know. “Everyone who was on those planes died, and what was in their hands died with them.” He offered a guess, something more ordinary — a metal credit card, cut down, which he says takes a wicked edge. He is not certain and does not pretend to be. He has simply had 25 years to think about what could have gotten through a checkpoint.

He calls himself “unfashionable” about airport security. When everyone turned on the screeners after 9/11 — the grandmothers, the grandfathers, the kids working checkpoints — he defended them, and he still does. “There had been 12 years without a hijacking anywhere. They must have been doing something right.” He is not convinced that hiring and uniforming tens of thousands of people since was the answer.

He goes further than that now, and he did not soften it for the room. “Post-9/11 America is becoming a police state,” he said.

What he minds is how people treat the person on the other side of the counter. He spent 37 years watching Americans get ruder, and he doesn’t think it stopped after 9/11. Ask him what has changed since, and he does not say security. He says “manners,” and he says “trust.”

When he talks about political correctness — and he does, at length, and he always has — I tried to say something to him this September that I had not said before. That the phrase has been so thoroughly captured by politics that it now obscures what he means. He’s talking about the distance between the rules you are handed and what your gut tells you, and about who pays when the two disagree.

He agreed. Then he said what he has been saying for twenty years: he never liked it, and it grates on him.

What he wants people to take from all of it is simpler than any of the arguments. “Don’t trust blindly. Stay aware of your surroundings. It can happen again, and it will not necessarily look like it looked before. They can be from the US or anywhere.”

THE TELLING

Mike has told this story many times now. Oprah. CNN. Jim Bohannon. School projects, strangers on the street, a painting in the mail from an eleven-year-old girl. He said something this September that I want to emphasize, because it runs against what most people assume about trauma and publicity: the telling has helped. He called it a “catharsis.” Every pass through it has taken a little more of the weight off.

I should be honest about the other part of that. I have been recording his account for more than twenty years, and some small details have shifted: the number of psychologists, whether Atta stared at him or would not look at him at all, the reason he left the airline, which he could describe fully only this year. A story told hundreds of times over a quarter century is not the same object as a story told once. Anyone who says otherwise has not spent much time with witnesses.

That is not a mark against him. It is what a memory does when a man must keep picking it up. The core has not shifted in 25 years: the two men, the tickets, the gut, the slap, the boarding pass he would not hand over. What has changed is the man carrying it.

THE ANSWER

Mike is eighty now. His eyesight is failing. He and Maureen have been married 28 years; she flew for US Airways and then, after the merger, for American, and retired a couple years ago. There is a vegetable garden in Scarborough that he is proud of, and there has never been a day he has not thought about that morning. “It’s in my blood,” he told me. “It’s like sky. It’s always there.”

So I asked him, in front of the audience, whether he had gotten back to being the man he was before.

“Yeah,” he said.

He talked for a while after that, the way he does, circling it. “I think I slowly came back,” he said. “I didn’t want to be a whiney guy. I don’t have many years left.” All he ever wanted, he said, was to mind his own business and let other people mind theirs.

And then, from my notes, the sentence I think is the core.

“I just wanted to be myself again, the Mike I used to be. I couldn’t be like this anymore.”

There was one more line, and it went by so quickly I nearly lost it. He said it almost as a joke, as an aside, waving at his own bad eyes.

“Today, I don’t see people in my driveway.”

That is what recovery sounds like, 25 years later. Not a declaration. A man mentioning, in passing, that the face is gone from the end of his road.

Also published on Substack.com