You all remember Annie Jacobsen, whose article about Northwest flight 327 set the blogosphere abuzz last summer. Don’t miss her latest installment, in which she recounts a visit she got from four federal Homeland Security Department officials. Here’s the most interesting part:

For the record, I explained, I had never heard of the James Woods incident either. [In case you're not aware, the actor James Woods flew on an American Airlines flight from Boston to Los Angeles one month prior to 9/11. Alarmed by the behavior of a group of four Middle Eastern men, Woods summoned the pilot and told him that he was "concerned the men were going to hijack the plane." A report was filed with the FAA on Woods' behalf but, tragically, no one followed up with Woods or the men. A few days after 9/11, several federal agents showed up in Woods' kitchen. Woods can't talk about what was said -- he believes his testimony will be used in the trial of the supposed 20th hijacker, Zacarias Moussaoui-- but, in an interview with Bill O'Reilly, Woods revealed that his flight "was a rehearsal [for 9/11] with four men.”]

Standing in my kitchen, one of the agents said, “What I can tell you is this: Mohammed Atta was one of the passengers on that flight with James Woods.” (Apparently, this information has never been made public.)

Read the whole thing.

Yes, we all recall when James Woods came forward after the 9/11 attacks to recount his suspicions about the dry run on his flight (Jeff Quinton sends this transcript as a reminder). The new news is that a federal agent revealed Atta’s presence on the flight.

Flashback: Here’s what Seymour Hersh wrote in the June 3, 2002, issue of The New Yorker about the James Woods incident:

Several weeks before the attacks, the actor James Woods was in the first-class section of a cross-country flight to Los Angeles. Four of his fellow-passengers were well-dressed men who appeared to be Middle Eastern and were obviously travelling together. “I watch people like a moviemaker,” Woods told me. “As in that scene in ‘Annie Hall’ “-where Woody Allen and Diane Keaton are sitting on a bench in Central Park speculating on the personal lives of passers-by. “I thought these guys were either terrorists or F.B.I. guys,” Woods went on. “The guys were in synch-dressed alike. They didn’t have a drink and were not talking to the stewardess. None of them had a carry-on or a newspaper. Nothing.

“Imagine you’re at a live-music event at a small night club and you’re standing behind the singer. Everybody is clapping, going along, enjoying the show- and there’s four guys paying no attention. What are they doing here?” Woods concluded that the men were “casing” the plane. He said that his concern led him to hang on to his cutlery after lunch. He shared his worries with a flight attendant. “I said, ‘I think this plane is going to be hijacked.’ I told her, ‘I know how serious it is to say this,’ and asked to speak to the captain.” The flight attendant, too, was concerned. The plane’s first officer came over immediately and assured Woods that he and the captain would keep the door to the cockpit locked. The remainder of the trip was bumpy but uneventful, and Woods recalled laughingly telling his agent, who asked about the flight, “Aside from the terrorists and the turbulence, it was fine.”

Woods said that the flight attendant told him that she would file a report about the suspicious passengers. If she did, her report probably ended up in a regional Federal Aviation Authority office in Tulsa, or perhaps Dallas, according to Clark Onstad, the former chief counsel of the F.A.A., and disappeared in the bureaucracy. “If you ever walked into one of these offices, you’d see that they have no secretaries,” Onstad told me. “These guys are buried under a mountain of paper, and the odds of this”-a report about suspicious passengers-”coming up to a higher level are very low.” Even today, eight months after the hijacking, Onstad said, the question “Where would you effectively report something like this so that it would get attention?” has no practical answer.

Throughout the spring and early summer of 2001, intelligence agencies flooded the government with warnings of possible terrorist attacks against American targets, including commercial aircraft, by Al Qaeda and other groups. The warnings were vague but sufficiently alarming to prompt the F.A.A. to issue four information circulars, or I.C.s, to the commercial airline industry between June 22nd and July 31st, warning of possible terrorism. One circular, from late July, noted, according to Condoleezza Rice, that there was “no specific target, no credible info of attack to U.S. civil-aviation interests, but terror groups are known to be planning and training for hijackings, and we ask you therefore to use caution.”

For years, however, the airlines had essentially disregarded the F.A.A.’s information circulars. “I.C.s don’t require special measures,” a former high-level F.A.A. official told me. “To get the airlines to react, you have to send a Security Directive”-a high-priority message that, under F.A.A. regulations, mandates an immediate response. Without a directive, the American airline industry was operating in a business-as-usual manner when Woods noticed the suspicious passengers on his flight.

On the evening of September 11th, Woods telephoned the Los Angeles office of the F.B.I. and told a special agent about the encounter. In an interview on Fox Television in February, Woods described being awakened at six-forty-five the next morning by a telephone call from the agent. “I said, ‘I’ll get ready and I’ll come down to the federal building,’ ” Woods recounted. “He said, ‘That’s O.K. We’re outside your house.’ ” By then, Woods told me, he was no longer certain of the date of his trip. “The first thing I said is ‘I’m not sure which flight it was on.’ ” But he had a vivid memory of the men’s faces. When he was shown photographs, Woods thought he recognized two of the hijackers-Hamza Alghamdi, who flew on United Airlines Flight 175, which struck the south tower of the World Trade Center, and Khalid Almihdhar, who was on American Airlines Flight 77, which struck the Pentagon. One of the men stood out because of his “pointy hair,” Woods told me, and the other looked like one of the characters in the movie version of John le Carre’s “The Little Drummer Girl.”

A senior F.B.I. official told me that the bureau had subsequently investigated Woods’s story but had not been able to find evidence of the hijackers on the flight Woods thought he had taken. “We don’t know for sure,” the official said.

(The New Yorker article was brought to my attention by See Dubya guest-blogging at Patterico.)

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