The Looming Tower (34 page)

Bin Laden just gave him the same old smile that Khashoggi had always seen. He didn’t seem to realize what he had done or become in the eyes of his compatriots.

Exasperated, Khashoggi told bin Laden that he was going to leave the next day. If Osama wanted to do the interview, he should call him at the Hilton.

Bin Laden never called.

11

The Prince of Darkness

O
N A
S
UNDAY MORNING
in February
1995,
Richard A. Clarke, the national coordinator for counterterrorism in the White House, went to his office to review intelligence cables that had come in over the weekend. One of the reports noted that Ramzi Yousef, the suspected mastermind behind the World Trade Center bombing two years earlier, had been spotted in Islamabad. Clarke immediately called FBI headquarters, although in his experience there was rarely anyone there on Sundays. A man whose voice was unfamiliar to him answered the phone. “O’Neill,” he growled.

“Who are you?” Clarke asked.

“I’m John O’Neill,” the man replied. “Who the fuck are you?”

O’Neill had just been appointed chief of the FBI’s counterterrorism section. He had been transferred from the bureau’s Chicago office. After driving all night, he had gone directly to headquarters that Sunday morning without dropping off his bags. Alone in the massive J. Edgar Hoover Building, except for security guards, O’Neill was not even supposed to start work until the following Tuesday. Clarke informed him that Ramzi Yousef, the FBI’s most wanted terrorist, had tripped a wire nine thousand miles away. It was now O’Neill’s responsibility to put together a team that would bring the suspect back to New York, where he had been indicted for the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and a conspiracy to bomb American airliners.

O’Neill walked down the empty hallway and opened the Strategic Information and Operations Center (SIOC). The windowless room is set up for secure videoconferences with the White House, the State Department, and other branches of the FBI. It is the nerve center of the bureau, opened only during emergencies. O’Neill began making calls. He wouldn’t leave FBI headquarters for the next three days.

A “rendition”—as the bureau terms the legal kidnapping of suspects in foreign lands—is a complex and time-consuming procedure, usually planned months in advance. O’Neill would need an airplane to fly the suspect home. Because of the $2 million reward on Yousef’s head, there had been a flood of false reports concerning his whereabouts, so one of O’Neill’s first concerns was to make sure he actually had his man. He would have to have a fingerprint expert, whose job would be to determine that the suspect was, in fact, Ramzi Yousef. He needed a medical doctor to attend Yousef in case he was injured or had some unknown condition that required treatment. He would have to push the State Department to get permission from the Pakistani government to perform the snatch immediately. Under ordinary circumstances, the host country would be asked to detain the suspect until extradition paperwork had been signed and the FBI could place the man in custody. There was no time for that. Yousef was planning to board a bus for Peshawar in a few hours. Unless he was quickly apprehended, he would soon be over the Khyber Pass and into Afghanistan, out of reach.

Gradually the room filled with agents in casual weekend clothes or churchgoing finery. A contingent from the New York office flew in; they would be the ones to make the actual arrest if Yousef was captured, since he had been indicted in their district.

For many of the agents in the room, O’Neill was an unfamiliar face, and no doubt it was odd to be suddenly taking orders from a man they had never before met. But most had heard of him. In a culture that favors discreet anonymity, O’Neill cut a memorable figure. Darkly handsome, with slicked-back hair, winking black eyes, and a big round jaw, O’Neill talked tough in a New Jersey accent that many loved to imitate. He had entered the bureau in the J. Edgar Hoover era, and throughout his career he had something of the old-time G-man about him. He wore a thick pinky ring and carried a
9-
mm automatic strapped to his ankle. He favored Chivas Regal and water with a twist, along with a fine cigar. His manner was bluff and profane, but his nails were buffed and he was always immaculately, even fussily, dressed: black double-breasted suits, semitransparent black socks, and shiny loafers as supple as ballet slippers—“a nightclub wardrobe,” as one of his colleagues labeled it.

He had wanted to work for the bureau since boyhood, when he watched Efrem Zimbalist, Jr., star as the buttoned-down Inspector Lewis Erskine in the TV series
The F.B.I.
He got a job as a fingerprint clerk with the bureau as soon as he graduated from high school in Atlantic City, New Jersey, and he put himself through American University and a master’s program in forensics at George Washington University by serving as a tour guide at FBI headquarters. In 1976 he became a full-time agent in the bureau’s office in Baltimore, and in 1991 he was named assistant special agent in charge of the Chicago office. Nicknames—Satan, the Prince of Darkness—followed him around from his days in Chicago, which spoke about his remorseless intensity, his sleeplessness, and the fear that he often inspired in those who worked with him. Time meant little to him; he kept the shades down in his office and seemed to live in eternal night.

In SIOC, O’Neill walked around with a phone at each ear, coordinating the rendition team on one line and arranging for an Air Force transport on the other. Because Pakistan would not permit an American military aircraft to land on its soil, O’Neill ordered the Air Force to paint its jet in civilian colors—immediately! He also demanded that, if Yousef was captured, the flight home would be refueled in midair, fearing that Yousef might claim asylum if the aircraft had to land in another country. O’Neill was operating well outside his authority, but he was reckless and domineering by nature. (The Pentagon later sent him a bill for $12 million for the midair refueling and the paint job. The bill went unpaid.)

As the news spread of Yousef’s sighting, Attorney General Janet Reno and the director of the FBI, Louis Freeh, came into SIOC. Many critical operations had been conducted in this room, but none so urgent and complex. The policy of renditions had only recently been instituted through an executive order that extended the reach of the FBI outside the borders of the United States, turning it into an international police agency; in practice, however, the bureau was still learning—not only how to operate in foreign environments but also how to beat a path through the U.S. government agencies abroad, each of which needed to be bullied or appeased. Such diplomacy normally required lengthy negotiations. But there was no time for talk. If Yousef escaped, few doubted that he would attempt to carry out his scheme of blowing up American airliners or even crashing a plane into CIA headquarters, as he had once planned.

O’Neill got the rendition team in the air, but he still needed to put a snatch team in place. There was only one FBI agent in Pakistan who could be pressed into service. O’Neill located several agents from the Drug Enforcement Administration and the State Department Bureau of Diplomatic Security who were also in the country. They enlisted a couple of Pakistani soldiers and rushed to the motel to grab Yousef before he got on the bus.

At 9:30 a.m. Pakistani time on February
7,
the agents entered the Su-Casa Guest House in Islamabad and knocked on the door of room 16. A sleepy Yousef was immediately thrown to the floor and handcuffed. Moments later, the news reached the jubilant agents at FBI headquarters.

During the three days he was in SIOC, John O’Neill turned forty-three years old. He finally took his luggage to his new apartment. It was Tuesday, his first official day on the job.

I
N
W
ASHINGTON,
O’Neill became part of a close-knit group of terrorism experts that formed around Dick Clarke. In the web of federal agencies concerned with terrorism, Clarke was the spider. Everything that touched the web eventually came to his attention. He was the first coordinator for counterterrorism on the National Security Council, a position he crafted for himself through the powerful force of his personality. The members of this inner circle, which was known as the Counterterrorism Security Group (CSG), were drawn mainly from the CIA, the National Security Council, and the upper tiers of the Defense Department, the Justice Department, and the State Department. They met every week in the White House Situation Room.

The FBI had always been a problematic member of the CSG. Its representatives tended to be close-mouthed and unhelpful, treating all intelligence as potential evidence that couldn’t be compromised, whether there was an actual criminal case or not. O’Neill was different. He cultivated his counterparts in other agencies rather than pulling down the bureaucratic shutters. In Clarke’s experience, most federal law-enforcement officers were dull and slow. By the time they had risen to the upper ranks of management, they were already at their maximum pay rank and were marking time toward their retirement. Against this drab background, O’Neill leaped out—charismatic, improvisatory, outspoken, and intriguingly complicated.

Clarke and O’Neill were both relentless infighters, and they made enemies easily. But each recognized in the other qualities he could use. Clarke had always groomed key allies who protected him against changes in administration and armed him with inside information. After more than two decades in government—beginning as a management intern at the Pentagon in 1973—he had protégés scattered all over Capitol Hill. He was brilliant but solitary, living alone in a blue clapboard house in Arlington, Virginia, with azaleas surrounding the front porch and an American flag flying from the second story. He spoke in emphatic, declarative sentences that brooked no argument. Ambitious and impatient, he had little time for life outside of his office on the third floor of the Old Executive Office Building, overlooking the West Wing of the White House. It was rare that someone interested him as a rival. He could push competitive bureaucrats aside for sport, since he played the game better than all but a few.

Although Clarke was shrewd and formidable, he was also socially awkward, tending to look past people when he spoke to them. He had the pallor of a redhead—now gone gray—and the tight, inappropriate smile of the super realist. He spotted O’Neill as someone who shared his obsession about the threat posed by terrorism at a time when few in Washington considered it real. They had in common the resentment of the unprivileged outsider who had escaped the narrow expectations of his upbringing. O’Neill still had a strong whiff of the Jersey streets about him, which Clarke, the son of a nurse and a factory worker, valued. And, like Clarke, O’Neill saw through the political burlesque.

The two men worked to establish clear lines of responsibility among the intelligence agencies, which had a long history of savage bureaucratic warfare. In 1995 their efforts resulted in a presidential directive giving the FBI the lead authority in both investigating and preventing acts of terrorism wherever in the world Americans or American interests were threatened. After the bombing in Oklahoma City in April of that year, O’Neill formed a separate section for domestic terrorism, while he concentrated on redesigning and expanding the foreign branch. He organized a swap of deputies between his office and the CIA’s Counterterrorist Center despite resistance from both organizations.

To younger agents who gave him what he demanded, which was absolute loyalty, he became a kind of consigliere. In the fiefdoms of the bureau, O’Neill was a powerful sponsor. He would often put his arms around his employees and tell them he loved them, and he showed it by going to extraordinary lengths to help when any of his people faced health problems or financial difficulties. On the other hand, he could be brutal, not only with subordinates but also with his superiors, when they failed to meet his expectations. Many who began by hating him became his most devoted followers, “Sons of John,” as they still call themselves in the bureau. Others held their tongues and stood out of the way. Those who tried to keep pace with him would find themselves wondering what else they were willing to sacrifice—their marriages, their families, their private lives, everything except the bureau. These were sacrifices O’Neill had made long before.

O’N
EILL’S TENURE IN THE FBI
coincided with the internationalization of crime and law enforcement. Since 1984 the FBI had exercised the authority to investigate crimes against Americans abroad, but that mandate had been handicapped by a lack of connection with foreign police agencies. O’Neill made a habit of entertaining every foreign cop or intelligence agent who entered his orbit. He called it his “night job.” In Clarke’s opinion, O’Neill was like an Irish ward boss, who governed through interlocking friendships, debts, and obligations. He was constantly on the phone, doing favors and massaging contacts, creating a personal network that would facilitate the bureau’s international responsibilities. Within a few years, O’Neill was perhaps the most widely known policeman in the world. He would also become the man most identified with the pursuit of Osama bin Laden.

Few people in American law enforcement or intelligence, including O’Neill, had any experience with Islam or much understanding of the grievances that had already given rise to the attack on the World Trade Center and other plots against the United States. Indeed, in a country as diverse as America, the leadership of the FBI was stunningly narrow in its range. It was run by Irish and Italian Catholic men. The backgrounds of many agents in the bureau, particularly in the upper ranks, were monotonously repetitive, very much like O’Neill’s—Jersey boys, or Philly, or Boston. They called each other by boyish nicknames—Tommy, Danny, Mickey—that they had picked up when they were altar boys or playing hockey for Holy Cross. They were intensely patriotic and were trained from childhood not to question the hierarchy.