The Looming Tower (52 page)

Mawn was still feeling bruised by the campaign O’Neill had waged against him when the two men happened to meet at a seminar at the FBI academy in Quantico, just after the decision was announced. Mawn answered a knock at his door and found O’Neill holding two beers. “I understand you’re an Irishman,” O’Neill explained.

Wary about the prospect of working together, Mawn told O’Neill that he was going to need people in the office who were loyal to him. “I’m not sure I can depend on you,” he stated flatly, offering to find O’Neill another job, possibly in the New Jersey bureau.

O’Neill pleaded to stay in New York for “family reasons.” He said that if Mawn would keep him on, “I’ll be more loyal to you than your closest friend.”

“You’ll still have to prove yourself to me,” Mawn warned.

O’Neill agreed. “The only thing I ask in return is that you be supportive of me,” he said.

Mawn made the bargain, but he soon learned that supporting O’Neill would be a full-time job.

T
HERE IS AN ANECDOTE
that counterterrorism officials often tell about the rendition of Ramzi Yousef. After being captured in Pakistan, he was flown into Stewart Airport in Newburgh, New York, and then transferred to an FBI helicopter for the trip to the Metropolitan Correctional Center next to Federal Plaza in Lower Manhattan. “Two huge guys carried him off the plane, shackled and blindfolded,” remembered Schiliro. “After we got airborne and were flying down the Hudson River, one of the SWAT guys asks me, ‘Can we take off his blindfold?’ It took Yousef a minute to focus his eyes. Ironically, the helicopter was alongside the World Trade Center. The SWAT guy gives him a nudge and says, ‘You see, it’s still standing.’ And Yousef says, ‘It wouldn’t be if we had had more money.’”

Because it was still standing, however, the Trade Center had become a symbol of the success of New York’s Joint Terrorism Task Force, a coalition of the FBI, the CIA, the New York City Police Department, the Port Authority, and various other regional and federal agencies. In September 2000 the JTTF chose to celebrate its twentieth anniversary there, in the famous Windows on the World banquet room. Some of the representatives looked a little out of place in black tie, but this was a night to congratulate themselves. Mayor Rudy Giuliani, a former U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, was present, as was Mary Jo White, his successor in that job. She praised the task force for “your close-to-perfect record of successful investigations and convictions,” which included Yousef and six other World Trade Center bombers, as well as Sheikh Omar Abdul Rahman and nine of his followers who had planned to assassinate public officials and blow up New York City landmarks. The people in the room had seen the world of terrorism move from the relatively innocent days of Croatian nationalists and anti-Castro Cubans, who had been more interested in publicity than terror, to the sobering new world of deliberate mass murder.

It was a misty night, and the clouds obscured the view from the 106th floor of the tower. O’Neill seemed at ease as he wandered through the room, although some might have wondered why Mary Jo White had omitted his name from the list of FBI officials she chose to acknowledge. Mark Rossini, the new I-49 representative at Alec Station, was there; he had just gotten engaged, and he introduced his fiancée to his boss, a man he idolized. Rossini was one of the Sons of John. He studied everything about O’Neill, including his taste in cigars and restaurants; he even dressed like O’Neill. But Rossini had no idea that his mentor’s career had been thrown further into turmoil because of a troubling incident that had occurred two months earlier.

O’Neill had attended a mandated pre-retirement conference in Orlando that July. He had no intention of retiring and was impatient that he had been forced to attend, but since he was in Florida, he asked Valerie James to join him so they could spend the weekend in Miami.

During the conference O’Neill got a page, and he left the room to return the call. When he returned a few minutes later, the other agents had broken for lunch. His briefcase was missing. O’Neill first called the local police, then Mawn. He admitted that the briefcase contained some classified e-mails and one highly sensitive document, the Annual Field Office Report, which contained an itemized breakdown of every national security operation in New York. Both the director of the FBI and the attorney general would have to be notified.

“It’s hideous,” O’Neill told Valerie when he came back to the room. He was ashen.

Police found the briefcase a couple of hours later in another hotel. A Montblanc pen had been stolen, along with a silver cigar cutter and an expensive lighter. The papers were intact, and fingerprint analysis soon established that they had not been touched, but it was another careless mistake at a pregnable moment in his career.

Even though O’Neill immediately reported the theft and none of the information had been compromised, the Justice Department ordered a criminal inquiry. Mawn thought that was absurd. He would have recommended an oral reprimand or, at worst, a letter of censure. People took work home all the time, he observed; they just never had it stolen. He felt guilty because he had been pushing O’Neill to get the AFOR completed, and O’Neill was just doing what he’d asked.

Despite their competition for the top job in New York, Mawn had become O’Neill’s staunchest defender. Mawn appreciated that excellence was the enemy of any bureaucracy and that a forceful personality was essential to fight off the interagency rivalries and departmental jealousies that sap the will of the best people. They were the ones who needed to be protected and encouraged; only then, behind a powerful and visionary leader, could a heartless bureaucracy like the FBI achieve anything remarkable. O’Neill was such a leader. He had made the New York office the most effective branch in the bureau, but it had come at great cost, as Mawn slowly realized. The enemies that O’Neill had accumulated in his polarizing bureaucratic struggle were eager to destroy him, and now he had given them an opening.

A
L
-Q
AEDA HAD DEVELOPED
a management philosophy that it called “centralization of decision and decentralization of execution.” Bin Laden decided on the targets, selected the leaders, and provided at least some of the funding. After that, the planning of the operation and the method of attack were left to the men who would have the responsibility of carrying it out.

That approach had worked well in the embassy bombings, but the operations scheduled for the millennium had gone awry. One had been a comical fiasco: the attempted bombing of USS
The Sullivans
at the end of Ramadan, when the fiberglass skiff that was supposed to attack the destroyer had foundered so ignominiously in Aden’s harbor.

Originally, the intention had been to attack an oil tanker off the coast of Yemen. Bin Laden, characteristically, urged the planners to be more ambitious. He wanted them to sink an American warship. When that failed, bin Laden demanded that the two suicide bombers be replaced. The local supervisor of that operation, Abdul Rahim al-Nashiri, stoutly disagreed with bin Laden. He argued that one of the bombers had been injured in the cruise missile attack on the al-Qaeda training camps, and it would be unjust to take away the opportunity to strike an American ship that might well have been a participant in that attack. Moreover, the team had trained together for a year and a half, and Nashiri had built a sophisticated new bomb, one with shaped charges that would concentrate the force of the explosion in one direction. Everything was ready for the next U.S. Navy warship to call at the Yemeni port.

Bin Laden relented and let his supervisor retain control of the operation. He also released a video in which he threatened America with another assault. As in the interview with ABC before the embassy bombings, he included a teasing clue: This time he wore a distinctive, curved Yemeni dagger in his belt. Next to him, Zawahiri declared, “Enough of words. It is time to take action.”

A
DEN PERCHES ON THE SLOPE
of a former volcano, the collapsed cone of which forms one of the finest deepwater ports in the world. The name derives from the belief that this is the site of the Garden of Eden. It is also said to be the spot where Noah launched his ark, and where Cain and Abel are buried. Steeped in legend and antiquity, the city had known prosperity during the British era, which ended in
1967,
when the country split apart and the People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen began its rocky experiment with secular socialism. The lines of fracture were still evident in
1994,
after the war had ended and the country was reunited. Decades of violence and instability had left Aden much reduced from the cosmopolitan port it once had been.

Docked at a fueling buoy was the USS
Cole,
a billion-dollar guided-missile destroyer. Using advanced stealth technology, the sleek warship was designed to be less visible to radar, but it was starkly evident in the Aden harbor: more than five hundred feet long, displacing
8,300
tons, with its swirling antenna scanning the skies for any foreseeable threat. The
Cole
was one of the U.S. Navy’s most “survivable” ships, with seventy tons of armor shielding its vital spaces; passive protection for chemical, biological, or nuclear attack; and a hull capable of withstanding an explosion of fifty-one thousand pounds per square inch. In addition to Tomahawk cruise missiles, which it had launched in Operation Infinite Reach, the
Cole
carried anti-ship and anti-aircraft missiles, a five-inch cannon, and the Phalanx Close-In Weapons System, which fires fifty 20-mm shells per second. The ship’s network of computers and radars, called AEGIS, was capable of simultaneously tracking hundreds of incoming missiles or aircraft more than two hundred miles away. The
Cole
was superbly designed to fight the Soviet navy.

On October
12, 2000,
at
11:15
a.m., as the
Cole
was preparing to get under way, a fiberglass fishing boat approached its massive prey. Some of the sailors were standing watch, but many were below decks or waiting in the chow line. Two men brought the tiny skiff to a halt amidships, smiled and waved, then stood at attention. The symbolism and the asymmetry of this moment were exactly what bin Laden had dreamed of. “The destroyer represented the capital of the West,” he said, “and the small boat represented Mohammed.”

The shock wave of the enormous explosion in the harbor knocked over cars onshore. Two miles away, people thought there was an earthquake. In a taxi in the city, the concussion shook Fahd al-Quso, a member of the al-Qaeda support team who was running late; he was supposed to have videotaped the attack, but he slept through the page on his phone that would have notified him to set up the camera.

A fireball rose from the waterline and swallowed a sailor who had leaned over the rail to see what the men in the little boat were up to. The blast opened a hole forty feet by forty feet in the port side of the ship, tearing apart sailors who were waiting for lunch. Seventeen of them perished, and thirty-nine were wounded. Several of the sailors swam through the blast hole to escape the flames. The great modern man-of-war was gaping open like a gutted animal.

W
ITHIN HOURS OF THE ATTACK
on the
Cole,
Barry Mawn called headquarters and demanded that the New York office gain control of the investigation. “It’s al-Qaeda,” he told Tom Pickard. He wanted O’Neill to be the on-scene commander.

As he had during the embassy bombings investigation, Pickard declined, saying there was no proof that al-Qaeda was involved. He intended to send the Washington Field Office instead. Mawn went over his head, appealing the decision to Louis Freeh, who immediately agreed that it was New York’s case. But the question of sending O’Neill was controversial.

“John’s my guy,” Mawn insisted. There was no one else with O’Neill’s experience and commitment. He was told, “If it falls on bad times, it’s your ass.”

“I can live with that,” said Mawn.

O’Neill was overjoyed. It would be his best chance to break up the criminal enterprise of al-Qaeda and perhaps his last opportunity to redeem his career. “This is it for me,” he told a friend in Washington.

O’Neill had learned many lessons since his first day on the job in Washington five years before, when he coordinated the Ramzi Yousef rendition. One of those lessons was to stockpile supplies on skids at Andrews Air Force Base so that a rapid-response team would be ready to go at any moment. In little more than twenty-four hours after the explosion, O’Neill and about sixty FBI agents and support staff were in the air.

They had to stop first in Germany to await clearance from the Yemen authorities, who were still claiming that the explosion had been an accident. Coincidentally, many of the injured sailors were also in Germany, having been flown to the Landstuhl Regional Medical Center, the largest American hospital outside the United States. O’Neill took his investigators directly to the ward where the sailors were being treated. While the bomb technicians swept the victims’ hair and clothing for residue, O’Neill went through the room with a naval investigator, talking to the wounded sailors. They were young men and women, most of them not yet out of their teens, some of them missing limbs, some horribly burned. Three of the sailors were too badly wounded to be interviewed. One of them, petty officer Kathy Lopez, was completely swathed in bandages, but she insistently motioned that she wanted to say something. A nurse put her ear to the sailor’s lips to hear the whispered words. She said, “Get them.”