The Looming Tower (39 page)

“Y
OU ARE NOT UNAWARE OF THE INJUSTICE,
repression, and aggression that have befallen Muslims through the alliance of Jews, Christians, and their agents, so much so that Muslims’ blood has become the cheapest blood and their money and wealth are plundered by the enemies,” bin Laden said, on August
23, 1996,
in his “Declaration of War Against the Americans Occupying the Land of the Two Holy Places.” The latest indignity—“one of the worst catastrophes to befall the Muslims since the death of the Prophet”—was the presence of American and coalition troops in Saudi Arabia. The purpose of his treatise was “to talk, work, and discuss ways of rectifying what has befallen the Islamic world in general and The Land of the Two Holy Mosques in particular.”

“Everyone is complaining about everything,” bin Laden observed, adopting the voice of the Islamic man on the street. “People have been greatly preoccupied with matters of their livelihood. Talk of economic decline, high prices, massive debts, and overcrowded prisons is widespread.” As for Saudi Arabia, “everyone agrees that the country is moving toward a deep abyss.” Those brave few Saudis who confronted the regime demanding change were disregarded; meanwhile, the war debt had caused the state to impose taxes. “People are wondering: Is ours really the largest oil exporting country? They feel that God is tormenting them because they kept quiet about the regime’s injustice.”

He then taunted the American secretary of defense, William Perry, by name. “O William, tomorrow you will know which young man is confronting your misguided brethren…. Terrorizing you, while you carry weapons in our land, is a legitimate and moral obligation.”

He was so far from being able to carry out such threats that one might conclude that the author of this document was utterly mad. Indeed, the man in the cave had entered a separate reality, one that was deeply connected to the mythic chords of Muslim identity and in fact gestured to anyone whose culture was threatened by modernity and impurity and the loss of tradition. By declaring war on the United States from a cave in Afghanistan, bin Laden assumed the role of an uncorrupted, indomitable primitive standing against the awesome power of the secular, scientific, technological Goliath; he was fighting modernity itself.

It did not matter that bin Laden, the construction magnate, had built the cave using heavy machinery and that he had proceeded to outfit it with computers and advanced communications devices. The stance of the primitive was appealingly potent, especially to people who had been let down by modernity; however, the mind that understood such symbolism, and how it could be manipulated, was sophisticated and modern in the extreme.

S
OON AFTER BIN
L
ADEN
set up his camp in Tora Bora, he agreed to meet a visitor named Khaled Sheikh Mohammed. He had known Mohammed slightly during the anti-Soviet jihad, when Mohammed worked as a secretary for bin Laden’s old sponsor, Sayyaf, and also for Abdullah Azzam. Far more significantly, Khaled Sheikh Mohammed was also the uncle of Ramzi Yousef, who had bombed the World Trade Center in 1993. Now Yousef was under arrest and his uncle was on the run.

Except for their hatred of America, Khaled Sheikh Mohammed and Osama bin Laden had almost nothing in common. Mohammed was short and squat; pious but poorly trained in religion; an actor and a cutup; a drinker and a womanizer. Whereas bin Laden was provincial and hated travel, especially in the West, Mohammed was a globe-trotter fluent in several languages, including English, which he perfected while studying mechanical engineering at North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University, a mostly black school in Greensboro.

In Tora Bora, Mohammed briefed bin Laden about his life since the anti-Soviet jihad. Inspired by Ramzi Yousef’s attack on the World Trade Center, Mohammed joined his nephew for a month in the Philippines in 1994. They came up with an extraordinary plan to bomb twelve American jumbo jets over the Pacific. They called it Operation “Bojinka”—a nonsense word that Mohammed had picked up when fighting in Afghanistan. Ramzi Yousef, the master bomb-maker, had perfected a small nitroglycerine device that was undetectable by airport security. He tested it out on a flight from Manila to Tokyo. Yousef got off the flight in Cebu, a city on one of the central islands of the Philippine archipelago. The passenger who took his seat was Haruki Ikegami, a twenty-four-year-old Japanese engineer. Two hours later, the bomb under Ikegami’s seat detonated, tearing him apart and nearly bringing the aircraft down. The assault that Yousef and Mohammed were planning would bring international air travel to a complete standstill.

Although bin Laden claims he did not know Yousef personally, he had sent a messenger to Manila to ask Yousef to do him the favor of assassinating President Bill Clinton when he came to Manila in November 1994. Yousef and the others mapped out the president’s route and sent to bin Laden diagrams and sketches of possible points of attack; finally, however, Yousef decided that the security was too tight. The men thought instead to kill Pope John Paul II when he came to the city the following month—even going so far as to get priests’ cassocks—but that plan, too, came to nothing. The Manila police caught on to them after chemicals in their apartment caught fire, and Yousef fled, leaving behind his computer with all their plans encrypted on the hard drive.

The plans were still in Khaled Sheikh Mohammed’s mind, however. He came to bin Laden with a portfolio of schemes for future attacks against America, including one that would require training pilots to crash airplanes into buildings. Bin Laden was noncommittal, although he did formally ask Mohammed to join al-Qaeda and move his family to Afghanistan. Mohammed politely declined. But the seed of September 11 had been planted.

14

Going Operational

O
N
J
UNE
25, 1996, John O’Neill arranged a private retreat for FBI and CIA agents at the bureau’s training center in Quantico, Virginia. There were hamburgers and hot dogs, and O’Neill even let the CIA officers on the firing range, since they rarely had the opportunity to shoot. It was a lovely day. O’Neill went out to play a round of golf on the Quantico course. Suddenly everyone’s beepers went off.

There had been a catastrophic explosion in Saudi Arabia, at the Khobar Towers military-housing complex in Dhahran. The building served as the barracks for the 4404th Airlift Wing, which was enforcing the no-fly zone in Iraq. Nineteen American soldiers had died and nearly four hundred other people were injured. O’Neill assembled a team of more than a hundred agents, support personnel, and members of various police agencies. The next day they were on an Air Force transport plane to Saudi Arabia. A few weeks later, O’Neill himself joined them, along with the director of the FBI, Louis Freeh.

A slender and sober man, Freeh was temperamentally O’Neill’s opposite in many ways. The director prided himself on being a family man, usually leaving the office at six in order to be home with his wife and children. Unlike O’Neill, who was fascinated by gadgetry and always had the latest electronic organizer or mobile phone in his pocket, Freeh was bored by technology. One of his first actions on taking office in 1993 was to jettison the computer on his desk. The bureau was technologically crippled even before Freeh arrived, but by the time he left not even church groups would accept the vintage FBI computers as donations. Like most of his male agents, Freeh inclined toward cheap suits and scuffed shoes, posing quite a contrast to O’Neill, his subordinate, in his Burberry pinstripes and his Bruno Magli loafers.

It was evening when the two men, along with a small executive team, arrived in Dhahran. The disaster site was a vast crater, eighty-five feet wide and thirty-five feet deep, illuminated by lights on high stanchions; nearby lay charred automobiles and upended Humvees. Looming above the debris were the ruins of the housing complex. The bomb was larger by far than the car bomb that had destroyed the Saudi National Guard training center the year before and even more powerful than the explosives that had killed 168 people in Oklahoma City in 1995. O’Neill walked through the rubble, embracing exhausted agents who were sifting sand for evidence and painstakingly bagging personal effects. Body parts still lay in the sand, indicated by circles of red paint. Under a tarp nearby, investigators were gradually reconstructing fragments of the truck that had carried the bomb.

The agents on the ground were demoralized by the obstacles that Saudi investigators put in their path. They were not allowed to interview witnesses or question suspects. They couldn’t even leave the bomb site. In the opinion of the agents, the Saudis were obstructing the investigation because they didn’t want to expose the existence of internal opposition in the Kingdom. The impression, quickly formed by agents with little experience in the Middle East, was that the Saudi royal family was hanging on to power by their fingernails.

Freeh was initially optimistic that the Saudis would cooperate, but O’Neill became more and more frustrated as the late-night meetings drifted on a sea of pleasantries. As they were flying home after one of their several trips to the Kingdom together, Freeh was upbeat. “Wasn’t that a great trip? I think they’re really going to help us.”

O’Neill replied, “You’ve got to be kidding. They didn’t give us anything. They were just shining sunshine up your ass.”

For the remainder of the flight, Freeh refused to speak to him. But, recognizing O’Neill’s passion and talents, he sent him back to Saudi Arabia to continue lobbying for cooperation. O’Neill met with Prince Naif and other officials. They listened grudgingly to his pleas. Intelligence agencies across the world are jealous and insular organizations, not inclined to share information, which O’Neill appreciated. He was used to cadging what he could through charm and persistence, but the Saudis were seemingly immune to his wooing. They were far more close-mouthed than any other police organization he had ever worked with. The Americans were infuriated to learn that a few months earlier Saudi authorities had intercepted a car from Lebanon that was stuffed with explosives and headed for Khobar. It was Naif who decided not to inform his U.S. counterparts.

In addition to their ingrained cultural reticence, the Saudis had legal reasons to be cautious in dealing with the Americans. Because the Kingdom is governed by Sharia law, clerical judges have complete discretion to throw out any evidence they don’t care to hear, such as material provided by foreign agencies. The Saudis were worried that the involvement of the FBI would taint the case. O’Neill worked out an agreement that allowed the FBI agents to interview suspects through mirrored glass, which gave the bureau access while preserving the appearance of separation that the Saudis insisted upon.

As the evidence began to point to Iranian-backed terrorists as being the most likely perpetrators of the bombing, however, the Saudis became reluctant to pursue the investigation. They worried what the Americans would do if Iran were implicated, which soon became the case. The Saudi’s own investigation pointed to a branch of Hezbollah inside the Kingdom. Economic and diplomatic sanctions against Iran appeared unlikely, because the Europeans wouldn’t go along. “Maybe you have no options,” one of the Saudis told O’Neill. “If it is a military response, what are you going to bomb? Are you going to nuke them? Flatten their military facilities? Destroy their oil refineries? And to achieve what? We are next door to them. You are six thousand miles away.”

In the new era of a globalized FBI, O’Neill learned, it was one thing to solve the case, another to gain justice.

O’N
EILL LONGED TO GET OUT OF WASHINGTON
and “go operational.” He wanted to supervise cases again. In January 1997 he became special agent in charge of the National Security Division in New York, the bureau’s largest and most prestigious field office. When he arrived, he dumped four boxes of Rolodex cards on the desk of his new secretary, Lorraine di Taranto. Then he handed her a list of everyone he wanted to meet—the mayor, the police commissioner, the deputy police commissioners, the heads of the federal agencies, and religious and ethnic leaders in all five boroughs. Within six months, he had checked off all the people on his list.

By then it seemed as if he had lived in New York his entire life. The city was a great stage upon which O’Neill claimed a title role. He stood with John Cardinal O’Connor, the archbishop of New York, on the steps of St. Patrick’s Cathedral during the Saint Patrick’s Day parade. He prayed with imams in Brooklyn. Sports figures and movie stars, such as Robert De Niro, consulted him and called him their friend. “John, you’ve got this town wired,” one of his buddies said after a late night when it seemed that everyone had bowed in O’Neill’s direction. O’Neill replied, “What’s the point of being sheriff if you can’t act like one?”

O’Neill was now in charge of counterterrorism and counterintelligence in a city that was full of émigrés, spies, and shady diplomats. The particular squad responsible for the Middle East was called, in the noncommittal bureaucratic vernacular, I-49. Its personnel spent the bulk of their time covering the Sudanese, Egyptians, and Israelis, all of whom were actively recruiting in New York.

Most members of the squad were native New Yorkers who had stayed close to home. They included Louis Napoli, an NYPD detective, who had been assigned to I-49 through the Joint Terrorism Task Force. Napoli still lived in the same house in Brooklyn that he had grown up in. The Anticev brothers, John and Mike, also from Brooklyn, were the children of Croatian immigrants. Richard Karniewicz was a Brooklyn son of Polish immigrants who played polkas on his accordion. Jack Cloonan grew up in Waltham, Massachusetts, and it was not only his accent that set him apart: He was an English and Latin major who joined the bureau in 1972 on the day its director, J. Edgar Hoover, died. Carl Summerlin was a black New York State trooper and former tennis champion. Kevin Cruise was a West Point graduate and former captain in the Eighty-second Airborne. Mary Deborah Doran was the daughter of an FBI agent; she had worked for the Council on Foreign Relations before going to Northern Ireland for graduate work in Irish history. Their supervisor was Tom Lang, a blunt, profane, and quick-tempered Irishman from Queens who had known O’Neill from the days when they both served as tour guides at headquarters. Some members of the squad, like Lang and the Anticev brothers, had been working on terrorism for years. Others, like Debbie Doran, were new to the squad; she had joined the bureau in 1996 and was assigned to New York the month before O’Neill took over. This squad would soon grow much larger, but the nucleus was these seven agents, one state trooper, and a city police detective. The other member of the squad was Dan Coleman, who was assigned to Alec Station and who had been laboring alone on the bin Laden case.