The Last Great Place
TAKE A BOW, CAPT. AMERICA
By MICHAEL CAPUZZO

The twentieth hijacker’s assignment to attack the Great Satan (United States) was simple, really: Hijack a jumbo jet and steer it like some fuel-loaded bomb, with hundreds of people aboard, into the White House. Kill the President, cut off the head, incapacitate the body.

The twentieth hijacker’s assignment was shockingly simple, we know now, because nineteen other Al-Qaeda operatives succeeded in their attack on September 11, 2001. Like his fellow operatives, the twentieth hijacker, Zacarias Moussaoui, successfully entered the country clandestinely, posed as an ordinary businessman, signed up for jumbo-jet flight lessons, fooled his neighbors and countless police and other officials.

Then something happened on the way to the terrorists’ worst plans on that day that will live in infamy. Moussaoui’s luck ran out. Six-foot-five Captain Clarence Prevost, Northwest Airline jumbo jet pilot retired, Wellsboro native forever, stood in his way.

What trick of heart makes a hero? What turn of mind creates a real Sherlock Holmes?  Clancy Prevost performed both tricks in the summer of 2001, when he worked in Minneapolis as a jumbo-jet flight instructor using a Boeing 747 simulator. Moussaoui aroused his suspicions immediately.  “I knew there was something wrong because he read all the manuals, and he never talked about (women),” Clancy quipped.  “Real pilots never read the manuals, and all they talk about is (women).” (Real pilots also use colorful words other than “women,” but you get the picture.).

The affable Muslim businessman had only minimal training in small-beginner-type aircraft. He didn’t want to learn to land the wide-body plane, only to fly it at cruising altitude. These were red flags, but Clancy, one of the most open-minded and tolerant men I know, thought Moussaoui was a “nice guy.”  He took him to lunch to see what he was about, and was startled when a casual discussion about religion made the student sullen and defensive. On his own initiative, Clancy further investigated and discovered that Moussaoui had taken the unusual step of paying for his training in cash, using $100 bills.

The captain became alarmed. He was concerned he was training a future hijacker, and immediately brought his concerns to his employees’ attention.  As always happens to heroes, nobody listened to him.  But he kept agitating to learn the truth, and finally the FBI, alerted to talk to Moussaoui, arrested the Muslim “businessman” on August 16, 2001. Less than a month later, the other 19 hijackers succeeded in their mission, killing 3,000 Americans and destroying the World Trade Center, and crashing a jumbo jet – how hard could the White House have been? – right into the heart of the Pentagon.

Five years later, Clancy then provided crucial testimony against Moussaoui in the 2006 trail that led to the terrorist’s conviction and life imprisonment – the only man caught and convicted in the infamous “911” attacks.

Clancy hasn’t gotten enough credit.  Partly, it’s his own fault – a shy man, he turned down interviews with CBS Evening News’s Katie Couric, and almost everyone else. (He gave an exclusive interview to Mountain Home for our March 2006 cover story, one of our proudest moments. Yes, the magazine celebrates its second anniversary with this issue, and if you want to congratulate, or berate us, please do write).  I sent the Mountain Home story to friends at The Washington Post, hoping during the trial Clancy would get wider credit. Nada. Reader’s Digest wanted me to write about what was in the terrorist’s mind and heart – not the American hero’s.  So it goes.

So they missed the story, and the answer to the question: What makes a hero/Sherlock Holmes?  Here’s a clue: Clancy, a great high school athlete who could have been a leading man in the movies, flops around in bright blue or red Chuck Taylor 1950s-style sneakers. He writes poetry. He never stops laughing and wise-cracking. He laughs at the difficulty of flying – “flying is easy, life is hard.”  He’s an atheist, and yet one of the most spiritual men I know. In other words, like Chuck Taylors, Clancy Prevost is an original. What has this to do with detection? Richard Walter, the renowned forensic psychologist in Montrose, Pennsyvania, known, to Scotland Yard, as “the living Sherlock Holmes,” says great detectives can think out of the box because, to simplify it terribly, they use their heart as well as their mind, and “can make connections across the matrix..” Rules and procedure aren’t the answer to them; just the starting point for a thousand questions. That’s how Clancy did it, I think, but I can’t it explain it any further. Some things are best left mysteries.

Clancy is starting to get credit due. Recently, I’m happy to say, The Air Line Pilots Association (ALPA), the largest airline pilot union in the world with 60,000 members, announced it was awarding Captain Prevost a prestigious Presidential Citation for Outstanding Work in Aviation Security. 

More credit is coming in the history books. Captain Clancy Prevost in August 2001 earned himself a remarkable place in the first two-plus centuries of American life. No, it’s nothing like June 1940, when Winston Churchill, with only Great Britain still unconquered, only Churchill standing in Hitler’s way, went before the House of Commons and said, “If we can stand up to him, all Europe may be free and the life of the world may move forward into broad, sunlit uplands. But if we fail, then the whole world, including the United States, including all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age… Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves that, if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, “This was their finest hour.”

No, it’s nothing like that really. Not our finest hour by any stretch. But in the thousands of moments that fly home to days and years, one of our finest moments. A moment that never will be forgotten.

Way to go, Clanc.