The Looming Tower (58 page)

Moussaoui was probably intended to be part of a second wave of al-Qaeda attacks that would follow 9/
11,
most likely on the West Coast. If the agents in Minneapolis had been allowed to thoroughly investigate Moussaoui, they would have made the connection to Ramzi bin al-Shibh, who was sending him money. Moussaoui carried a letter of employment from Infocus Tech, which was signed by Yazid Sufaat. That name meant nothing to the FBI, since the CIA kept secret the information about the meeting in Kuala Lumpur, which took place in Sufaat’s condo. The bureau failed to put together the warning from its own office in Minneapolis with that of Kenneth Williams in Phoenix. Typically, it withheld the information from Dick Clarke and the White House, so no one had a complete picture.

O
N
A
UGUST
22, O’Neill wrote an e-mail to Lou Gunn, who had lost his son on the
Cole.
“Today is my last day,” O’Neill informed him. “In my thirty-one years of government service, my proudest moment was when I was selected to lead the investigation of the attack on the USS
Cole.
I have put my all into the investigation and truly believe that significant progress has been made. Unknown to you and the families is that I have cried with your loss…. I will keep you and all the familiesin my prayers and will continue to track the investigation as a civilian. God bless you, your loved ones, the families and God bless America.”

O’Neill was packing boxes in his office when Ali Soufan came in to say good-bye. Soufan was headed back to Yemen later that day; in fact, O’Neill’s last act as an FBI agent would be to sign the paperwork that would send his team back into the country. The two men walked across the street to Joe’s Diner. O’Neill ordered a ham and cheese sandwich.

“You don’t want to change your infidel ways?” Soufan kidded him, indicating the ham. “You’re gonna go to hell.” But O’Neill was not in a joking mood. He urged Soufan to come visit him in the Trade Center when he returned. “I’m going to be just down the road,” he said. It was strange to have O’Neill pleading to be remembered.

Then Soufan confided that he was getting married. He was worried about how O’Neill would react. In the past, whenever they talked about women, O’Neill would make a wisecrack or somehow indicate how uncomfortable he was about the subject. “You know why it costs so much to get a divorce?” O’Neill once asked him. “Because it’s worth it.”

This time, O’Neill thought about it and remarked, “She has put up with you all this time. She must be a good woman.”

The next day, O’Neill started work at the World Trade Center.

T
HE DAY AFTER
O’N
EILL RETIRED
from the bureau, Maggie Gillespie, the FBI analyst at Alec Station who was reviewing coverage of the Malaysia meeting, notified INS, the State Department, Customs, and the FBI, asking them to put Khaled al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi on their watch lists. She had noticed that both men had arrived in Los Angeles in January
2000,
about the same time as Ahmed Ressam had planned to blow up the L.A. airport. Since then, Mihdhar had left the country and returned. Gillespie passed the information to her colleague, Dina Corsi, an intelligence analyst at FBI headquarters.

Alarmed by the information, Corsi sent an e-mail to the supervisor of the I
-49
squad titled “IT: al-Qaeda.” “IT” means “international terrorism.” The message urgently ordered the squad to investigate whether Khaled al-Mihdhar was still in the United States. There was little explanation about who he might be, except that his association with al-Qaeda and his possible involvement with the bombers of the
Cole
made him “a risk to the national security.” The squad’s orders were to “locate al-Mihdhar and determine his contact and reasons for being in the United States.” But no criminal agents could be involved in the search, Corsi said. As it turned out, there was only one intelligence agent on the squad, and he was brand new.

Jack Cloonan was the temporary supervisor. He requested that criminal agents should carry out the investigation. Because of the existing bin Laden indictment, they would have far more freedom and resources to search for any al-Qaeda–related individuals. Corsi e-mailed the squad, “If al-Mihdhar is located, the interview must be conducted by an intel agent. A criminal agent CANNOT be present at the interview…. If at such time information is developed indicating the existence of a substantial federal crime, that information will be passed over the wall according to the proper procedures and turned over for follow-up investigation.”

Corsi’s original e-mail was accidentally copied to a criminal agent on the squad, however: Steve Bongardt, an aggressive investigator who had been Top Gun as a Navy fighter pilot. For more than a year he had been protesting the obstacles that were increasingly being put in the way of criminal investigators by the growing wall. “Show me where this is written that we can’t have the intelligence,” he demanded on a number of occasions from headquarters, but of course that was impossible, since the wall was largely a matter of interpretation. Since the June 11 meeting, Bongardt had been pressing Corsi to supply the information about the men in the photos, including Khaled al-Mihdhar. After Corsi’s e-mail wound up on his computer, Bongardt called her. “Dina, you got to be kidding me!” he said. “Mihdhar is in the country?”

“Steve, you’ve got to delete that,” she told him, referring to the e-mail. She said he had no right to the information. “We’ll have a conference call about it tomorrow.”

The next day Corsi called over the secure phone. A CIA supervisor at Alec Station was also on the line. They told Bongardt he would have to “stand down” in the effort to find Mihdhar. They explained how the wall prevented them from sharing any further information. Bongardt repeated his complaints that the wall was a bureaucratic fiction, and that it was preventing the agents from doing their work. “If this guy is in the country, it’s not because he’s going to fucking Disneyland!” he said. But he was told once again, not only by Corsi but also by her supervisor at the bureau, to stand down.

The next day Bongardt sent Corsi an angry e-mail, “Whatever has happened to this—someday somebody will die—and wall or not—the public will not understand why we are not more effective and throwing every resource we had at certain ‘problems.’”

Rookie intelligence agent Rob Fuller got the assignment to track down Mihdhar, as well as Hazmi, whose name was linked to Mihdhar’s on the watch list. Mihdhar had written on his landing card a month before that he would be staying at the “New York Marriott.” The lone agent set out to find the two al-Qaeda operatives in the nine different Marriotts in the city. They were long gone.

O
N
A
UGUST
30, eight days after O’Neill retired, Prince Turki relinquished his post as head of Saudi intelligence. It was the first time in decades that a senior prince had been pushed aside, reputedly because of Crown Prince Abdullah’s impatience with Turki’s failure to get bin Laden.

Turki says that he was not fired. “I left because I was tired,” he said. “I thought new blood might be needed.” He compared himself to “an over-ripened fruit. You know how it starts to smell bad, the skin peels and it deteriorates. So I asked to be relieved.”

T
HE MOMENT
O’N
EILL LEFT THE FBI,
his spirits lifted. People remarked that he seemed light on his feet for the first time in months, perhaps years. He talked about getting a new Mercedes to replace his aging Buick. He told Anna DiBattista that they could now afford to get married. On Saturday night, September
8,
he attended a wedding at the Plaza Hotel with Valerie James, and they danced nearly every number. “I feel like a huge burden has been lifted from me,” he told his former boss, Lewis Schiliro, who was at the wedding. To another friend within Val’s hearing, he said, “I’m gonna get her a ring.”

The next day, September
9,
Ahmed Shah Massoud agreed to see two Arab television journalists who had been waiting in his camp for nine days for an interview. Massoud was without doubt the greatest of the Afghan commanders, having endured twenty-five years of warfare against the the Soviets, Afghan communists, rival mujahideen, and now the combined forces of the Taliban and al-Qaeda. Massoud’s capacity for survival was a powerful feature of his legend. He was the best hope Afghanistan had of a moderate Islamist alternative to the Taliban.

Zawahiri’s forged letter had gotten the two phony journalists into Massoud’s office. The cameraman’s battery pack was filled with explosives. The bomb tore the assassins apart, killed a translator, and drove two pieces of metal into Massoud’s heart.

When Ali Soufan heard the news in Yemen, he told another agent, “Bin Laden is appeasing the Taliban. Now the big one is coming.”

That day bin Laden and Zawahiri attended a wake for the father of the Taliban’s former interior minister. Two Saudi members of al-Qaeda approached the deputy interior minister, Mullah Mohammed Khaksar, to tell him that Massoud was dead. The Northern Alliance had claimed that Massoud was only wounded. “No, believe me, he is gone,” the Saudis informed the minister. They boasted that bin Laden had given the order to kill Massoud. Now the Northern Alliance was leaderless, the last obstacle to the Taliban’s total control of the country removed by this significant favor.

On Monday, September
10,
O’Neill called Robert Tucker, a friend and security-company executive, and arranged to get together that evening to talk about security issues at the World Trade Center. Tucker met O’Neill in the lobby of the north tower, and the two men rode the elevator up to O’Neill’s new office on the thirty-fourth floor. O’Neill was proud of his domain: seven buildings on sixteen acres of land with nine million square feet of office space. They went up to Windows on the World for a drink, and then drove in a downpour to Elaine’s to have dinner with their friend Jerry Hauer. O’Neill ate steak and pasta. Elaine Kaufman, the renowned doyenne of the establishment, remembered that O’Neill nursed a glass of iced coffee with dessert. “He wasn’t an alcoholic like a lot of them,” she said. Around midnight, the three men dropped in on the China Club, a nightspot in midtown. O’Neill told his friends that something big was going to happen. “We’re overdue,” he said again.

Valerie James had been out entertaining clients that evening. It was Fashion Week, and as the sales director for a major designer, she was harried. O’Neill had called her at the office earlier and promised to be home no later than ten thirty. She finally went to bed an hour later. She woke up at one thirty and he still wasn’t home. Annoyed, she sat down at the computer and began playing a game. John came home around four and sat down next to her. “You play a mean game of solitaire, babe,” he said. But Valerie felt spurned and they went to bed without speaking. The next morning she was still frosty. O’Neill came into the bathroom and put his arms around her. He said, “Please forgive me.” She was touched and said, “I do forgive you.” He offered to drive her to work and dropped her off at
8:13
in the flower district, where she had an appointment. Then he headed to the Trade Center.

B
IN
L
ADEN AND
Z
AWAHIRI
and a small group of the inner corps of al-Qaeda fled into the mountains above Khost, near the Lion’s Den, where bin Laden’s Afghan adventure had begun. He told his men that something great was going to happen, and soon Muslims from around the world would join them in Afghanistan to defeat the superpower. The men carried a satellite dish and a television set.

Before 9/
11,
bin Laden and his followers had been beset by vivid dreams. Normally, after the dawn prayers, if a member of al-Qaeda had a dream during the night, he would recount it, and bin Laden would divine its meaning. People who knew nothing of the plot reported dreams of a plane hitting a tall building. “We were playing a soccer match. Our team against the Americans,” one man told bin Laden. “But the strange thing is, I was wondering why Osama made our entire team up of pilots. Was this a soccer match or an airplane?” The al-Qaeda spokesman, Suleiman Abu Ghaith, dreamed he was watching television with bin Laden, which showed an Egyptian family at the dinner table and the eldest son dancing an Egyptian folk dance. A legend scrolled across the bottom of the screen: “To avenge the children of al-Aqsa [the mosque in Jerusalem], Osama bin Laden carries out attacks against the Americans.” When he described this to bin Laden in front of fifty other men, bin Laden simply said, “Okay, I will tell you later.” But then he abruptly banned all talk of dreams, especially those that envisioned airplanes flying into buildings, for fear that they would give the plan away. He personally dreamed of America in ashes, believing it was a prophecy.

Steve Bongardt was at his cubicle in the I-49 squad reading intelligence on his computer. There was a report that the al-Qaeda camps in Tora Bora were being revitalized. “That can’t be good,” he thought. Barry Mawn was in his office when he heard an earsplitting roar. He looked out his window too late to see the plane passing, nearly at eye level, but he heard the explosion. He thought a jet hurtling down the Hudson River had broken the sound barrier. An instant later his secretary screamed, and Mawn ran to look out her window at the burning hole in the ninety-second floor of the north tower of the Trade Center, blocks away. Mawn immediately gathered his employees. He told the SWAT and evidence recovery teams that they needed to go assist the New York police and fire departments. As an afterthought, he also dispatched the terrorism task force.

John P. O’Neill, Jr., a computer expert for MBNA in Delaware, was on his way to New York to install some equipment in his father’s new office. From the window of the train, O’Neill’s son saw smoke coming from the Trade Center. He called his father on his cell phone. O’Neill told him he was okay. He said he was headed outside to assess the damage.