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ON JUNE 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’NEILL 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.
When O’Neill arrived, however, most of the I-49 squad had been diverted to work on the crash of TWA Flight 800, which occurred off the coast of Long Island in July 1996. Dozens of witnesses reported having seen an ascending flare that culminated in a midair explosion. It appeared to have been one of the worst acts of terror in American history, and the bureau mobilized all its impressive resources to solve the crime as quickly as possible. The Khobar Towers bombing and TWA 800 investigations were absorbing all the bureau’s available manpower without any resolution in sight.
At the outset, investigators believed that the plane had been bombed or shot down in retaliation by followers of Sheikh Omar Abdul Rahman, who was on trial in New York at the time. But after three months they came to the conclusion that the aircraft had suffered a freakish mechanical failure. The case had become largely a public-relations problem: In the face of vivid eyewitness testimony, the bureau simply didn’t know how to explain its conclusions to a skeptical public. Demoralized agents continued to comb through the wreckage of the plane, which was being put back together piece by piece in a hangar on Long Island.
O’Neill needed his squad back. Together with the Defense Department, O’Neill determined the height of TWA 800 and its distance from shore at the time of the explosion. He demonstrated that it was out of range of a Stinger missile—the most likely explanation at the time of the apparent vapor trail that witnesses noted. O’Neill proposed that the flare could have been caused by the ignition of leaking fuel from the aircraft, and he persuaded the CIA to do a video simulation of this scenario, which proved to be strikingly similar to the witnesses’ accounts. Now he could get to work on bin Laden.
ALEC STATION WAS NAMED after the adopted Korean son of O’Neill’s temperamental CIA counterpart, Michael Scheuer. For the first time, the bureau and the agency were working in tandem on a single project, an unprecedented but awkward partnership. As far as Scheuer was concerned, the FBI simply wanted to place a spy inside Alec Station in order to steal as much information as possible. Yet Scheuer grudgingly came to respect Dan Coleman, the first bureau man to be posted inside his domain. Coleman was overweight and disheveled, with a brushy moustache and hair that refused to stay combed. He was as cantankerous as a porcupine (his FBI colleagues called him “Grumpy Santa” behind his back), but he had none of the macho FBI swagger that Scheuer so despised. It would have been easy to dismiss Coleman as another nebbishy bureaucrat, except for his intelligence and decency, the very qualities Scheuer most admired. But there was a fundamental institutional conflict that friendship could not bridge: Coleman’s mission, as an FBI agent, was to gather evidence with the eventual goal of convicting bin Laden of a crime. Scheuer, the CIA officer, had determined early on that the best strategy for dealing with bin Laden was simply to kill him.
Although Coleman dutifully reported to his superiors at the FBI, the only person genuinely interested in what he was learning was O’Neill, whom he first met at one of Dick Clarke’s briefings in the White House. O’Neill was fascinated by the Saudi dissident at a time when it was rare to meet anyone, even in the bureau, who knew who Osama bin Laden was. Then, a couple of months before O’Neill arrived in New York, Coleman had interrogated Jamal al-Fadl, the al-Qaeda defector, who revealed the existence of the terror organization and its global ambitions. In the several weeks he had spent with Fadl in a safe house in Germany, learning about the structure of the group and the personalities of its leaders, Coleman had come to the conclusion that America faced a profound new threat; and yet, his reports met with little response outside a small circle of prosecutors and a few people in the agency and the bureau who took an interest—mainly Scheuer and O’Neill.
They were the two men most responsible for putting a stop to bin Laden and al-Qaeda, and yet they disliked each other intensely—an emotion that reflected the ingrained antagonism of the organizations they represented. From the start, the response of American intelligence to the challenge presented by al-Qaeda was hampered by the dismal personal relationships and institutional warfare that these men exemplified. Coleman was caught between these two bullheaded, tempestuous, talented individuals, who constantly battled each other over a subject—bin Laden—that neither of their organizations really cared about.
In his cubicle in Alec Station, Dan Coleman continued to pursue leads that had been turned up from the Fadl interviews. He examined telephone transcripts from the wiretapped phones that were tied to bin Laden’s businesses in Khartoum. One frequently called number belonged to bin Laden’s former secretary, Wadih el-Hage, in Nairobi, Kenya. Most of Hage’s conversations had been translated from Arabic, but others were in English, especially when he was talking to his American wife. He often made awkward attempts at speaking in code, which his wife obstinately refused to understand.
“Send ten green papers, okay?” Hage said in one exchange.
“Ten red papers?” she asked.
“Green.”
“You mean money,” she concluded.
“Thank you very much,” he responded sarcastically.
Coleman took an interest in Hage, who seemed, despite his clumsy tradecraft, to be an attentive father and a caring husband. Whenever he was away, he would call his children and caution his wife about letting them watch too much television. He was ostensibly running a charity called Help Africa People, while making a living as a gem dealer.
The CIA thought Hage might be recruited as an agent. As Coleman studied the transcripts, he decided Hage was unlikely to turn, but he agreed to go to Kenya, thinking that at least he might find some evidence to substantiate the existence of this organization, al-Qaeda, that Fadl had described.
In August 1997, Coleman and two CIA officers appeared at Hage’s home in Nairobi with a search warrant and a nervous Kenyan police officer carrying an AK-47. The house sat behind a high cinder-block wall covered with broken glass, guarded by a scrawny German shepherd on a rope. Hage’s American wife, April Brightsky Ray, and her six children were there, along with April’s mother, Marion Brown. Both women, Islamic converts, were wearing hijabs.
It was odd to see them in person after having studied them from such a distance. Coleman put the women in the same category as mob wives, knowledgeable in some general way that unlawful actions were going on, but not legally complicit. April was a heavy woman with a pleasant, round face. She said her husband was out of the country on business (actually, he was in Afghanistan talking to bin Laden), but he would be back that evening. Coleman showed her his warrant to search for what he said were stolen documents.
The place was filthy and swarming with flies. One of the children had a high fever. While the agency people talked to April in another room, Marion Brown closely watched Coleman going through their drawers and closets.
“Would you like some coffee?” Brown asked.
Coleman took a look at the kitchen and declined.
“That’s good, because I might be trying to poison you,” she said.
There were papers and notebooks stacked everywhere, gas receipts that were eight years old, and business cards for bankers, lawyers, travel agents, and exterminators. On the top shelf of the bedroom closet, Coleman found an Apple PowerBook computer.
Later that day Wadih el-Hage returned. Aslender, bearded man with a withered right arm, Hage had been born in Lebanon but had gained American citizenship through his wife. He was a convert to Islam from Catholicism, and he had his own ideas about recruitment: He arrived at the meeting with the agents carrying religious tracts and spent the evening trying to get Coleman and the CIA officers to accept Islam.
That night in Nairobi, however, one of the CIA men was able to retrieve several deleted documents on the PowerBook’s hard drive that substantiated many of the allegations that Jamal al-Fadl had made about the existence of al-Qaeda and its terrorist goals. The criminal case against bin Laden remained unfocused, however.
Coleman and the agency men went through the documents, piecing together Hage’s travels. He had bought some guns for bin Laden in Eastern Europe and seemed to be making frequent trips to Tanzania. Al-Qaeda was up to something, but it was unclear what that was. In any case, it was certainly a low-end operation, and the exposure of the safe house in Nairobi had no doubt put an end to it.