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ON A SUNDAY 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.
IN WASHINGTON, 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’NEILL’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.
The bureau’s culture had grown up in the decades when the FBI was fighting the Mafia, an organization created by people from very similar origins. The bureau knew its enemy then, but it was deeply uninformed about this new threat. The radical Islamists came from places few agents had ever been to, or even heard of. They spoke a language that only a handful in the bureau understood. Even pronouncing the names of suspects or informants was a challenge. It was hard to believe in those days that people who were so far away and so exotic posed a real threat. There was a sense in the bureau that because they were not like us, they were not a very appealing enemy.
What distinguished O’Neill early in his new posting was his recognition of the fact that the nature of terrorism had changed; it had gone global and turned murderous. In the recent past, terror in America had been largely a domestic product, produced by underground associations such as the Ku Klux Klan, the Black Panthers, or the Jewish Defense League. The bureau had faced foreign elements before on American soil, notably the Fuerzas Armadas de Liberación Nacional (FALN), a Puerto Rican independence group that carried out approximately 150 terrorist acts in the United States during the seventies and early eighties. But deaths from those attacks were accidental, or at least beside the point. O’Neill’s realization, shared by few, was that the radical Islamists had a wider dramatic vision that included murder on a large scale. He was one of the first to recognize the scope of their enterprise and their active presence inside the United States. It was O’Neill who saw that the man behind this worldwide network was a reclusive Saudi dissident in the Sudan with a dream to destroy America and the West. Early in O’Neill’s career as the bureau’s counterterrorism chief, his interest in bin Laden became such an obsession that his colleagues began to question his judgment.
O’Neill was separated from bin Laden by many layers of culture and belief, but he devoted himself to trying to understand this new enemy in the darkened mirror of human nature. They were quite different men, but O’Neill and bin Laden were well-matched opponents: ambitious, imaginative, relentless, and each eager to destroy the other and all he represented.
ON THE OTHER SIDE OF THAT MIRROR, bin Laden looked at America as something other than an ordinary country or even a superpower. He saw it as the vanguard of a global crusade on the part of Christians and Jews to crush the Islamic resurgence. Although he may not have read Samuel P. Huntington’s 1993 treatise on the “clash of civilizations,” he seized the idea and would refer to it later in interviews, saying it was his duty to promote such a clash. History moved in long, slow waves, he believed, and this contest had been going on continuously since the founding of Islam. “This battle is not between al-Qaeda and the U.S.,” bin Laden would later explain. “This is a battle of Muslims against the global Crusaders.” It was a theological war, in other words, and the redemption of humanity was at stake.
In August 1995 bin Laden made a decisive break with his homeland. In what he labeled a “frank manifesto,” bin Laden attacked King Fahd directly in one of his faxed commentaries. This was ostensibly a response to the reshuffling of the Saudi cabinet the week before, which, like most political events in the Kingdom, was designed to give the appearance of reform without any real change. In a lengthy preamble, bin Laden made a legalistic case, based upon the Quran and the commentaries of Islamic scholars, that the king himself was an infidel. The takfiri influence is clear, although some of his argument was obscure and wild-eyed. For instance, bin Laden cited article 9 of the charter of the Gulf Cooperation Council, which was set up to resolve trade conflicts between Arab countries in the Persian Gulf. Article 9 states that the council will follow the rules of its constitution, international law and norms, and the principles of Islamic law. “What mockery of Allah’s religion!” bin Laden exclaimed. “You have put the Islamic law only at the end.”
But many of the points bin Laden made in his diatribe were already deeply believed by large numbers of Saudis and echoed the pleas that Islamic reformers had made in a far more polite petition, one that resulted in the imprisonment of several leading clerics. “The main reason for writing this letter to you is not your oppression of people and their rights,” bin Laden began. “It’s not your insult to the dignity of our nation, your desecration of its sanctuaries, and your embezzlement of its wealth and riches.” Bin Laden gestured to the economic crisis that had followed the Gulf War, to the “insane inflation,” the overcrowding in the classroom, and the spread of unemployment. “How can you ask people to save power when everyone can see your enchanting palaces lit up night and day?” he demanded. “Do we not have the right to ask you, O King, where has all the money gone? Never mind answering—one knows how many bribes and commissions ended in your pocket.”
He then turned to the galling presence of American troops in the Kingdom. “It is unconscionable to let the country become an American colony with American soldiers—their filthy feet roaming every-where—for no reason other than protecting your throne and protecting oil sources for their own use,” he wrote. “These filthy, infidel Crusaders must not be allowed to remain in the Holy Land.”
The king’s tolerance of man-made laws and the presence of infidel troops proved to bin Laden that the king was an apostate and must be toppled. “You have brought to our people the two worst calamities, blasphemy and poverty,” he wrote. “Our best advice to you now is to submit your resignation.”
One can imagine the shock that such a letter must have visited on the Saudi people, much less the king. In a society where no one could speak freely, the thunder of bin Laden’s language jolted and titillated his mute countrymen. But he did not call for revolution. Although he accused several leading princes of corruption and incompetence, he was not asking for the overthrow of the royal family. Except for the king’s abdication, he didn’t propose any solutions to the problems he cited. He pointedly made no reference at all to Crown Prince Abdullah, next in line to the throne. Despite the incendiary tone of the document, it was essentially modest in its ambition. Bin Laden showed himself to be a loyal reformer with little to offer in the way of useful political ideas. His insurrectionary zeal was directed toward the United States, not toward his homeland.
Many Saudis shared his hostility to the continuing American presence in the Kingdom, especially after Dick Cheney’s well-known pledge that they would leave. Ostensibly, the troops remained in order to enforce the UN-mandated no-fly zone over Iraq. By 1992, however, and certainly by 1993,there were enough new basing agreements in the region that the Americans could have withdrawn without jeopardizing their mission. But the Saudi bases were convenient and well appointed, and there didn’t seem to be a sufficiently pressing need to leave.
THE WEEK FOLLOWING bin Laden’s insulting letter to the king, Prince Naif announced the execution of Abdullah al-Hudhaif. Hudhaif, an Arab Afghan, was not under a death sentence; he had been given twenty years for spraying acid in the face of a security officer who was reputed to have been a torturer. The Saudis were now being advised by the former Egyptian minister of the interior, who had led a brutal crackdown on dissidents in his own country. There was a wide-spread feeling in the Kingdom that the stakes had been raised, and that this summary execution was a message to bin Laden and his followers. Hudhaif’s Arab Afghan comrades, for their part, were calling for revenge against the regime.
In downtown Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, on Telateen Street, across from the Steak House restaurant, there was a communications center for the Saudi National Guard. The mission of the guard was to protect the royal family and enforce stability. Because those goals were also important to the United States, there was an agreement between the two countries that the U.S. Army, along with the Vinnell Corporation, an American defense contractor, would train the guard in the monitoring and surveillance of Saudi citizens.
Shortly before noon on November 13, 1995, Colonel Albert M. Bleakley, an engineer who had lived for three years in the Kingdom, walked out of the center to his truck, parked on the street outside. Suddenly a hot blast blew him backward several feet. When he was able to stand, he could see a line of cars burning, including the demolished remnants of his Chevrolet Yukon. “Why would my car blow up?” he wondered. “There are no bombs here.”
The assassins had parked a van containing a hundred pounds of Semtex explosive outside the three-story building, which was now shattered and burning. Bleakley staggered into the ruin. He was bleeding from the neck and his ears were ringing from the deafening blast. Three dead men lay in the snack bar, crushed by a concrete wall. Four others were killed and sixty people injured. Five of the dead were Americans.
The Saudi government reacted by rounding up Arab Afghans and torturing confessions out of four men. Three of the four suspects had fought in Afghanistan, and one had also fought in Bosnia. The purported leader of the group, Muslih al-Shamrani, had trained at al-Qaeda’s Farouk camp in Afghanistan. The men read their nearly identical confessions on Saudi television, admitting that they had been influenced by reading bin Laden’s speeches and those of other prominent dissidents. Then they were taken to a public square and beheaded.
Although bin Laden never publicly admitted authorizing the attack or training the men who carried it out, he called them “heroes” and suggested they were responding to his fatwa urging jihad against the American occupiers. “They have pulled down the disgrace and submissiveness off the forehead of their nation,” he said. He noted the fact that the number of U.S. troops in the Kingdom was reduced as a consequence—another proof of the truth of his analysis of American weakness.
The summary executions foreclosed the opportunity of learning exactly what connections there were between al-Qaeda and the perpetrators Bin Laden himself privately confided to the editor of Al-Quds al-Arabi that he had activated a sleeper cell of Afghan veterans when the Saudi government failed to respond to his protest of American troops on Arabian soil. John O’Neill suspected that the executed men had nothing to do with the crime. He had sent several agents to try to question the suspects, but they had been executed before the Americans got the chance to talk to them. Whatever al-Qaeda’s actual connection to the attack, Prince Turki would later describe the National Guard bombing as bin Laden’s “first terrorist blow.”