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THE MEN WHO CAME TO TRAIN in Afghanistan in the 1990s were not impoverished social failures. As a group, they mirrored the “model young Egyptians” who formed the terrorist groups that Saad Eddin Ibrahim had studied in the early eighties. Most of the prospective al-Qaeda recruits were from the middle or upper class, nearly all of them from intact families. They were largely college-educated, with a strong bias toward the natural sciences and engineering. Few of them were products of religious schools; indeed, many had trained in Europe or the United States and spoke as many as five or six languages. They did not show signs of mental disorders. Many were not even very religious when they joined the jihad.
Their histories were more complicated and diverse than those of their predecessors who fought the Soviets. The previous generation had included many middle-class professionals—doctors, teachers, accountants, imams—who had traveled to Afghanistan with their families. The new jihadis were more likely to be young, single men, but there were also criminals among them whose skills in forgery, credit card fraud, and drug trafficking would prove to be useful. The former group had been predominantly from Saudi Arabia and Egypt; many of the new recruits spilled out of Europe and Algeria. There were practically none from Sudan, India, Turkey, Bangladesh, or even Afghanistan or Pakistan. In the jihad against the Soviets, some Shia Muslims had participated; there had even been a Shia camp in bin Laden’s outpost of Maasada. This new group of jihadis was entirely Sunni. Their immediate goal was to prepare themselves for combat in Bosnia or Chechnya and then to return to their own homelands and establish Islamist governments. Between ten and twenty thousand trainees passed through the Afghan camps from 1996 until they were destroyed in 2001.
The recruits were interviewed about their background and special skills. The information gathered was useful in determining what kinds of assignments they would be given; for instance, Hani Hanjour, a young Saudi, noted that he had studied flying in the United States. He would become a part of the 9/11 plot.
In addition to the strenuous physical training the new recruits endured, they were also indoctrinated with the al-Qaeda worldview. The class notes of some of the trainees spelled out the utopian goals of the organization:
1. Establishing the rule of God on Earth.
2. Attaining martyrdom in the cause of God.
3. Purification of the ranks of Islam from the elements of depravity.
These three precisely stated goals would frame al-Qaeda’s appeal and its limitations. They beckoned to idealists who did not stop to ask what God’s rule would look like in the hands of men whose only political aim was to purify the religion. Death, the personal goal, was still the main attraction for many of the recruits.
They studied past operations, both the successful ones, such as the embassy bombings, and the unsuccessful, like the attempt on Mubarak’s life. Their text was a 180-page manual, Military Studies in the Jihad Against the Tyrants, which included chapters on counterfeiting, weapons training, security, and espionage. “The confrontation that we are calling for with the apostate regimes does not know Socratic debates…Platonic ideals…nor Aristotelian diplomacy,” the manual begins. “But it does know the dialogue of bullets, the ideals of assassination, bombing and destruction, and the diplomacy of the cannon and machine gun.”
There were three main stages in the training. The raw recruits spent a period of fifteen days in boot camp, where they were pushed to total exhaustion, with only a couple of hours of sleep some nights. During the second phase, lasting forty-five days, the recruits received basic military training in map reading, trenching, celestial navigation, and the use of an extraordinary variety of weapons, including light machine guns, Claymore mines, mortars, shoulder-fired rockets, and anti-aircraft missiles. The targets were always Americans, either U.S. soldiers or vehicles, but there were other “enemies of Islam,” according to the handwritten notes of a student in an al-Qaeda ideology class:
1. Heretics (the Mubaraks of the world)
2. Shiites
3. America
4. Israel
The diversity of enemies would always plague al-Qaeda, especially as new actors with different priorities came upon the stage.
Graduates of the second phase could choose to attend the guerrilla warfare school, which also lasted forty-five days. There were specialty camps in hijacking and espionage, and a ten-day course in assassination. One al-Qaeda trainee recorded in his diary that he had learned “shooting the personality and his guard from a motorcycle” on one day and “shooting at two targets in a car from above, front and back” on the next. Another camp specialized in making bombs, and still another, called the Kamikaze Camp, was reserved for suicide bombers, who wore special white or gray clothes and lived alone, speaking to no one.
There was a well-supplied library of military books, including Revolt, the autobiography of the Israeli terrorist and eventual prime minister Menachem Begin. Another book, on the establishment of the U.S. Marines Rapid Deployment Force, included a scenario in which a tanker carrying liquefied natural gas would be blown up in the Straits of Hormuz at the mouth of the Persian Gulf, leading to a massive rise in the price of oil. The trainees were captivated by this notion and spent considerable time planning how to pull off such a maneuver. At night they would often watch Hollywood thrillers, looking for tips. The movies of Arnold Schwarzenegger were particular favorites.
Zawahiri was particularly keen on the use of biological and chemical warfare. He noted that “the destructive power of these weapons is no less than nuclear weapons.” He established a program, code-named Zabadi—“curdled milk”—to explore the use of unconventional techniques for mass murder, and he pored over medical journals to research various poisons. “Despite their extreme danger, we only became aware of them when the enemy drew our attention to them by repeatedly expressing concern that they can be produced simply,” he wrote. One of his men, named Abu Khabab, set up a laboratory near Jalalabad, where he experimented on dogs with homemade nerve gas and videotaped their agonizing deaths. It often took them more than five hours to die. Abu Khabab explained to his trainees that humans were much more susceptible, not having as powerful antibodies as the dogs. Zawahiri set up another laboratory near Kandahar, where a Malaysian businessman, Yazid Sufaat, spent months attempting to cultivate biological weapons, particularly anthrax. Sufaat had a degree in chemistry and laboratory science from California State University in Sacramento.
Bin Laden was cool at first to the use of biological or chemical weapons, but he found himself at odds with Abu Hafs, who led the hawks in the al-Qaeda debate about the ethics and consequences of using such indiscriminate agents. Would they be used in Muslim lands? Would civilians be targeted? The doves argued that the use of any weapon of mass destruction would turn the sympathy of the world against the Muslim cause and provoke a massive American response against Afghanistan. Bin Laden clearly preferred nuclear bombs over the alternatives, but that posed additional moral considerations. The hawks pointed out that the Americans had already used the nuclear bomb twice, in Japan, and they were currently using bombs in Iraq that contained depleted uranium. If the United States decided to use nuclear weapons again, who would protect the Muslims? The UN? The Arab rulers? It was up to al-Qaeda to create a weapon that would inoculate the Muslim world against Western imperialism.
WHAT THE RECRUITS tended to have in common—besides their urbanity, their cosmopolitan backgrounds, their education, their facility with languages, and their computer skills—was displacement. Most who joined the jihad did so in a country other than the one in which they were reared. They were Algerians living in expatriate enclaves in France, Moroccans in Spain, or Yemenis in Saudi Arabia. Despite their accomplishments, they had little standing in the host societies where they lived. Like Sayyid Qutb, they defined themselves as radical Muslims while living in the West. The Pakistani in London found that he was neither authentically British nor authentically Pakistani; and this feeling of marginality was just as true for Lebanese in Kuwait as it was for Egyptians in Brooklyn. Alone, alienated, and often far from his family, the exile turned to the mosque, where he found companionship and the consolation of religion. Islam provided the element of commonality. It was more than a faith—it was an identity.
The imams naturally responded to the alienation and anger that prompted these men to find a spiritual home. A disproportionate number of new mosques in immigrant communities had been financed by Saudi Arabia and staffed by Wahhabi fundamentalists, many of whom were preaching the glories of jihad. Spurred by the rhetoric and by the legend of the victory against the Soviets, young men made the decision, usually in small groups, to go to Afghanistan.
Such was the case of four young men in Hamburg.
The most prosperous city in Germany, with more millionaires per capita than any other metropolitan area in Europe, Hamburg was, in 1999, a bourgeois, libertarian stronghold. The city liked to think of itself as more British than German—aloof but polite, patrician but multicultural. It had become a popular destination for foreign students and political refugees, with about 200,000 Muslims among them. Mohammed Atta arrived in the fall of 1992 and enrolled as a graduate student of urban planning at the Technical University of Hamburg-Harburg. Foreign students in Germany could stay as long as they wanted, paid no tuition, and could travel anywhere in the European Union.
The scars of history were easy to detect, not only in the reconstructed portion of the Old City, but also in the laws of the country and the character of the German people. The new Germany had carefully enshrined tolerance in its constitution, including the most openhanded political asylum policy in the world. Acknowledged terrorist groups were allowed to operate legally, raising money and recruits—but only if they were foreign terrorists, not domestic. It was not even against the law to plan a terrorist operation so long as the attack took place outside the country. Naturally, many extremists took advantage of this safe harbor.
In addition to the constitutional barriers that stood in the way of investigating the radical groups, there were internal cautions as well. The country had suffered in the past from xenophobia, racism, and an excess of police power; any action that summoned up such ghosts was taboo. The federal police preferred to concentrate their efforts on native right-wing elements, paying little attention to the foreign groups. Germany feared itself, not others. The unspoken compact that the Germans made with the radical foreign elements inside their country was that if Germans themselves were not attacked, they would be left alone. In recoiling from its own extremist past, Germany inadvertently became the host of a new totalitarian movement.
The radical Islamists had little in common with the Nazi enterprise. Although they would often be accused of being a fascistic cult, the resentment that burned inside the al-Quds mosque, where Atta and his friends gathered, had not been honed into a keen political agenda. But like the Nazis, who were born in the shame of defeat, the radical Islamists shared a fanatical determination to get on top of history after being underfoot for so many generations.
Although Atta had only vaguely socialist ideas of government, he and his circle filled up the disavowed political space that the Nazis left behind. One of Atta’s friends, Munir al-Motassadeq, referred to Hitler as “a good man.” Atta himself often said that the Jews controlled the media, banks, newspapers, and politics from their world headquarters in New York City; moreover, he was convinced that the Jews had planned the wars in Bosnia, Kosovo, and Chechnya as a way of holding back Islam. He believed that Monica Lewinsky was a Jewish agent sent to undermine Clinton, who had become too sympathetic to the Palestinian cause.
The extreme rigidity of character that everyone detected in Atta was a Nazi trait, and no doubt it was reinforced in him by the need to resist the lure of this generous city. The young urban planner must have admired the cleanliness and efficiency of Hamburg, which was so much the opposite of the Cairo where he had grown up. But the odious qualities that Sayyid Qutb had detected in America—its materialism, its licentiousness, its spiritual falsity—were also spectacularly on display in Hamburg, with its clanging casinos, prostitutes in shop windows, and magnificent, empty cathedrals.
During World War II, Hamburg was a great shipbuilding center; the Bismarck had been built here, as well as the German U-boat fleet. Naturally it became a prime target of Allied bombing. In July 1943, Operation Gomorrah—the destruction of Hamburg—was the heaviest aerial bombardment in history until that time. But the attack went far beyond the destruction of the factories and the port. The firestorm created by the day and night attacks killed forty-five thousand people in a deliberate campaign to terrorize the population. Most of the workers in the shipyards occupied row houses in Harburg, across the Elbe River, and the Allied bombing was particularly heavy there. Atta lived in an apartment at 54 Marienstrasse, a reconstructed building on a street that had been almost entirely destroyed by the terror bombings.
Atta was a perfectionist; in his work he was a skilled but not creative draftsman. Physically, there was a feminine quality to his bearing: He was “elegant” and “delicate,” so that his sexual orientation—however unexpressed—was difficult to read. His black eyes were alert and intelligent but betrayed little emotion. “I had a difficult time seeing the difference between his iris and his pupil, which in itself gave him the appearance of being very, very scary,” one of his female colleagues recalled. “He had an unusual habit of, when he’d ask a question, and then he was listening to your response, he pressed his lips together.”
On April 11, 1996, when Atta was twenty-seven years old, he signed a standardized will he got from the al-Quds mosque. It was the day Israel attacked Lebanon in Operation Grapes of Wrath. According to one of his friends, Atta was enraged, and by filling out his last testament during the attack he was offering his life in response.
Although the sentiments in the will represent the tenets of his community of faith, Atta constantly demonstrated an aversion to women, who in his mind were like Jews in their powerfulness and corruption. The will states: “No pregnant woman or disbelievers should walk in my funeral or ever visit my grave. No woman should ask forgiveness of me. Those who will wash my body should wear gloves so that they do not touch my genitals.” The anger that this statement directs at women and its horror of sexual contact invites the thought that Atta’s turn to terror had as much to do with his own conflicted sexuality as it did with the clash of civilizations.
MOHAMMED ATTA, Ramzi bin al-Shibh, Marwan al-Shehhi, and Ziad Jarrah, the four friends from Hamburg, arrived in the Khaldan camp in November 1999 for a preliminary training course. They came at a propitious moment.
In the three years since Khaled Sheikh Mohammed had proposed his “planes operation” to bin Laden in a cave in Tora Bora, al-Qaeda had been researching a plan to strike the American homeland. Mohammed envisioned two waves of hijacked planes, five from the East Coast and five from Asia. Nine of the planes would crash into selected targets, such as the CIA, the FBI, and nuclear plants. Khaled Sheikh Mohammed himself would pilot the last plane. He would kill all the men aboard, then make a proclamation condemning American policy in the Middle East; finally, he would land the plane and set the women and children free.
Bin Laden rejected this last conceit, but in the spring of 1999 bin Laden summoned Mohammed back to Kandahar and gave him the go-ahead to put his plan into operation.
A few months later bin Laden, Khaled Sheikh Mohammed, and Abu Hafs gathered in Kandahar to pick potential targets. The three men were the only ones involved. Their goal was not only to inflict symbolic damage. Bin Laden imagined that America—as a political entity—could actually be destroyed. “America is a great power possessed of tremendous military might and a wide-ranging economy,” he later conceded, “but all this is built upon an unstable foundation which can be targeted, with special attention to its obvious weak spots. If it is hit in one hundredth of those spots, God willing, it will stumble, wither away and relinquish world leadership.” Inevitably, he believed, the confederation of states that made up America would dissolve.
It was natural, then, that bin Laden wanted to strike the White House and the U.S. Capitol. He also put the Pentagon on his list. If he succeeded in destroying the American seat of government and the headquarters of its military, the actual dismemberment of the country would not seem such a fantasy. Khaled Sheikh Mohammed nominated the World Trade Center, which his nephew Ramzi Yousef had failed to bring down in the bombing six years earlier. The Sears Tower in Chicago and the Library Tower (now called the U.S. Bank Tower) in Los Angeles were also discussed. Bin Laden decided that the attack on the American cities on the West Coast could wait.
There was little money to work with but plenty of willing martyrs. When the plan merely envisioned blowing up the planes in midair, there was no need for trained pilots, but as the concept evolved and took on the brilliance of its eventual design, it became clear that the planes operation would require a disciplined group with skills that might take years to develop.
Bin Laden assigned four of his most reliable men to be a part of the operation. Yet none of the four men could fly; nor could they speak English, which was required for a pilot’s license. They had no experience living in the West. Mohammed tried to tutor them. He taught them English phrases and collected brochures for flight schools in the United States. They played flight simulator computer games and watched Hollywood movies featuring hijackings, but the gap between the abilities of the men involved and the grandeur of the mission must have been deflating.
Nawaf al-Hazmi was one of those men. He had come to Afghanistan in 1993 when he was seventeen years old. He was strongly built, with a quick and handsome smile. His father was a wealthy grocer in Mecca. His boyhood friend Khaled al-Mihdhar was also from a prominent Meccan family. Following bin Laden’s example, these two rich Saudi boys had fought together in Bosnia and then with the Taliban against the Northern Alliance—the loose group of mujahideen and former Afghan government supporters who were led by Ahmed Shah Massoud. Although he held Saudi citizenship, Mihdhar was originally from Yemen. He married Hoda al-Hada, the sister of one of his Yemeni comrades in arms, and fathered two daughters by her. In fact, it was her family’s phone that the FBI had turned up in the embassy bombings investigation and that would prove so important in understanding the scope of al-Qaeda. The movements of these two men, Hazmi and Mihdhar, offered the most realistic hope for American intelligence to uncover the 9/11 conspiracy.
Because they were Saudi citizens, both Hazmi and Mihdhar easily obtained U.S. visas. They didn’t even have to apply in person. For the other two prospective hijackers, both Yemenis, the situation was different. Immigration authorities believed that Yemenis were far more likely to disappear into the illegal underground once they arrived in the United States, so they were routinely turned down when they sought visas. Stymied by the inability to get all of his men into America, bin Laden sent them instead to Southeast Asia, to study the possibility of carrying out Khaled Sheikh Mohammed’s scheme of simply blowing up American airliners in midair. At that point, the grand plan of attacking the American homeland seemed to have been shelved.
That is the moment when Mohammed Atta and his friends first showed up in Afghanistan. Their arrivals were staggered over a two-week period at the end of November, when the leaves were dropping and Ramadan was about to begin. Abu Hafs spotted them immediately: educated, technical men, with English skills ranging from rudimentary to fluent. They did not need to be told how to live in the West. Visas would be no problem. All they needed was to learn how to fly and to be willing to die.
By the time bin al-Shibh arrived, Atta, Jarrah, and Shehhi told him that they had been picked for a secret, undisclosed mission. The four of them were invited to a Ramadan feast with bin Laden himself. They discussed the Taliban, and bin Laden asked about the conditions of Muslims living in Europe. Then he informed them that they would be martyrs.
Their instructions were to return to Germany and apply to flight schools in the United States.
THERE WERE NOW two separate teams on the rapidly changing planes operation, each of which would lead to a major attack. The Hamburg cell reported their passports lost or stolen in order to cover up their trip to Afghanistan. Meantime, the four men who had originally been selected for the planes operation went to Kuala Lumpur. Besides Khaled al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi, there were the two Yemenis: Abu Bara and Tewfiq bin Attash, who adopted the name Khallad.
Khallad was another elusive but highly significant figure in al-Qaeda. He wore a metal prosthesis in place of the right leg he had lost while fighting against Ahmed Shah Massoud’s Northern Alliance. Although he was born in Yemen, he was raised in Saudi Arabia, and he had known bin Laden since he was a child. He had been part of the embassy bombing and the failed attempt to blow up USS The Sullivans in the Aden harbor, and he would be the mastermind behind the bombing of the USS Cole ten months later.
At the end of 1999, Khallad telephoned Midhar and summoned him to a meeting in Kuala Lumpur. It was the only time that members of the two teams would be together. The NSA picked up a conversation from the phone of Mihdhar’s father-in-law, Ahmad al-Hada, in Yemen—the one that al-Qaeda used as a message board—in which the forthcoming meeting in Malaysia was mentioned, along with the full name of Khaled al-Mihdhar and the first names of two other participants: Nawaf and Salem. The NSA had information from the same phone that Nawaf’s last name was Hazmi, although the agency did not check its own database. “Something nefarious might be afoot,” the NSA reported, but it did not pursue the matter further.
The CIA already had the names of Mihdhar and Hazmi, however. Saeed Badeeb, Prince Turki’s chief analyst in Saudi intelligence, had previously alerted his American colleagues that they were members of al-Qaeda in one of the monthly meetings in Riyadh. Armed with this knowledge, the CIA broke into Mihdhar’s hotel room in Dubai, where he had stopped on his way to Malaysia. The American agents photographed his passport, then faxed it to Alex Station. Inside the passport was the critical information that Mihdhar had a multi-entry American visa, due to expire in April. Alec Station notified various intelligence agencies around the world saying “We need to continue the effort to identify these travelers and their activities…to determine if there is any true threat posed.” The same cable said that the FBI had been alerted to the Malaysia meeting and that the bureau had been given copies of Mihdhar’s travel documents. That turned out not to be true.
The CIA asked Malaysian authorities to provide surveillance of the meeting in Kuala Lumpur, which took place on January 5 at a secluded condominium in a resort overlooking a golf course designed by Jack Nicklaus. The condo was owned by Yazid Sufaat, the Malaysian businessman who had worked with Zawahiri to cultivate anthrax spores. The meeting was not wiretapped, so the opportunity to discover the plots that culminated in the bombing of the USS Cole and the 9/11 attack was lost. Without Mike Scheuer’s sleepless vigilance, Alec Station had lost its edge. He was still sitting in the library, waiting to be used.
There was a cable that same day from Riyadh Station to Alec Station concerning Mihdhar’s American visa. One of the FBI agents assigned to Alec, Doug Miller, read the cable and drafted a memo requesting permission to advise the FBI of the Malaysia meeting and the likelihood that one or more of the terrorists would be traveling soon to the United States. Such permission was required before transmitting intelligence from one organization to another. Miller was told, “This is not a matter for the FBI.” Miller followed up a week later by querying Tom Wilshire, a CIA deputy chief who was assigned to FBI headquarters; Wilshire’s job was ostensibly to facilitate the passage of information from the agency to the bureau. Miller sent him the memo he had drafted and asked, “Is this a no go or should I remake it in some way?” Wilshire never responded. After that, Miller forgot about the matter.
Special Branch, the Malaysian secret service, photographed about a dozen al-Qaeda associates entering the condo and visiting Internet cafés. On January 8, Special Branch notified the CIA station chief in Thailand that three of the men from the meeting—Mihdhar, Hazmi, and Khallad—were flying to Bangkok. There, as it happened, Khallad would meet with the bombers of the USS Cole. But the CIA failed to alert anyone that the men should be followed. Nor did the agency notify the State Department to put Mihdhar’s name on a terror watch list so that he would be stopped or placed under surveillance if he entered the United States.
Three months later, the CIA learned that Hazmi had flown to Los Angeles on January 15, 2000. Had it checked the flight manifest, it would have noticed that Mihdhar was traveling with him. The agency neglected to inform either the FBI or the State Department that at least one known al-Qaeda operative was in the country.
Why would the CIA—knowing that Mihdhar and Hazmi were al-Qaeda operatives, that they had visas to the United States, and that at least one of them had actually arrived on American soil—withhold this information from other government agencies? As always, the CIA feared that prosecutions resulting from specific intelligence might compromise its relationship with foreign services, but there were safeguards to protect confidential information, and the FBI worked routinely with the agency on similar operations. The CIA’s experience with John O’Neill, however, was that he would demand complete control of any case that touched on an FBI investigation, as this one certainly did. There were many in the agency—not just the sidelined Scheuer—who hated O’Neill and feared that the FBI was too blundering and indiscriminate to be trusted with sensitive intelligence. And so the CIA may have decided to hide the information in order to keep O’Neill off the case. Several of O’Neill’s subordinates strongly believe in this theory.
There may have been other reasons the CIA protected information that it was obliged to give to the bureau. Some other members of the I-49 squad would later come to believe that the agency was shielding Mihdhar and Hazmi because it hoped to recruit them. The CIA was desperate for a source inside al-Qaeda; it had completely failed to penetrate the inner circle or even to place a willing partner in the training camps, which were largely open to anyone who showed up. Mihdhar and Hazmi must have seemed like attractive opportunities; however, once they entered the United States they were the province of the FBI. The CIA has no legal authority to operate inside the country, although in fact, the bureau often caught the agency running backdoor operations in the United States. This was especially true in New York City, where there are so many foreign delegations. On many occasions, O’Neill complained to the CIA’s chief of station in New York about shenanigans that the I-49 squad had discovered. It is also possible, as some FBI investigators suspect, the CIA was running a joint venture with Saudi intelligence in order to get around that restriction. Of course, it is also illegal for foreign intelligence services to operate in the United States, but they do so routinely.
These are only theories about the CIA’s failures to communicate vital information to the bureau, which can perhaps be better explained by the fact that the agency was drowning in a flood of threats and warnings. Alec Station had begun with twelve employees in 1996, a number that had grown to about twenty-five when the Malaysia meeting occurred. There were another thirty or so analysts in the Counterterrorist Center who worked on all forms of terrorism worldwide, but al-Qaeda was not their primary responsibility. The analysts at Alec Station were a junior group, with about three years of experience on average. Most of them were women, which counted against them in the very masculine culture that surrounded the Near East Division of the agency. These young women analysts were the ones primarily charged with preventing a terrorist attack on the United States, a burden that weighed so heavily on them that they came to be seen in the agency as fanatics—“the Manson Family” some called them, after Charles Manson, the convicted psycho-killer. But they were sounding an alarm that the older generation of civil servants did not care to hear.
The atmosphere inside Alec Station was poisoned as a result of the attitude of the CIA analysts who held O’Neill responsible for the firing of Mike Scheuer, the driven leader of Alec from its inception. Only a few months before, the senior FBI agent assigned to Alec had demanded the authority to release CIA information to the bureau, and the quarrel over this matter had gone all the way to Freeh and Tenet, the respective heads of the two institutions. Scheuer was forced to step down, but the FBI agent who did gain that authority developed cancer and had to resign only a few days before the Malaysia meeting. None of the three FBI agents remaining in Alec had the seniority to release information, and consequently they had to rely on the agency to give them permission for any transfer of classified cable traffic. This was true until July 2000, when a more senior agent, Charles E. Frahm, was assigned to Alec. He never saw a single memo or cable or heard any discussion about withholding information from the FBI. When he later learned about the Malaysia meeting, he concluded that the fact that it hadn’t been transmitted to the bureau was a mistake, accounted for by the abundance of threats that had occurred during the millennium period.
Many critical events occurred in the interim.
When Mihdhar and Hazmi arrived in Los Angeles, on January 15, 2000, they were supposed to enroll in flight school. They must have been overwhelmed by their assignment. Even finding a place to live would have presented a formidable challenge, since neither of them spoke English. Soon after their arrival, however, they became acquainted with Omar Bayoumi, a forty-two-year-old student who rarely attended classes and was supported by a stipend from a Saudi government contractor. He had drawn the attention of the local FBI office in 1998 because of the suspicions of the manager of the apartment complex where he lived. One of the bureau’s sources in San Diego asserted that Bayoumi was an agent for the Saudi government, but that meant little to the FBI investigators, since Saudi Arabia was seen as a loyal ally. In any case, the agents were called off the investigation by their supervisor, who worried that the Bayoumi inquiry would intrude on a major counterterrorism operation then under way.
As Bayoumi later told investigators, he drove up from San Diego on February 1, 2000, to handle some visa matters at the Saudi consulate. From there he went directly to lunch at a halal restaurant nearby and overheard Gulf Arabic being spoken. He talked briefly with Mihdhar and Hazmi, who complained that they were having a hard time in Los Angeles, so he invited them to San Diego. Three days later they showed up. He let them stay in his apartment, then found them another place across the street and lent them money for the first two months’ rent. He held a party to introduce them to other members of the Muslim community.
If Bayoumi was sent to oversee the two men, who sent him? Perhaps he was their al-Qaeda contact. They certainly needed a caretaker. The fact that Bayoumi went directly from the Saudi consulate to the restaurant, however, suggests to some investigators that the two future hijackers were already under surveillance by Saudi government officials, who were aware of their membership in al-Qaeda. The CIA is the only government agency that knew who Hazmi and Mihdhar were and that they were in America. The CIA had tracked Mihdhar and Hazmi from Kuala Lumpur to Bangkok to Los Angeles. Perhaps the agency decided that Saudi intelligence would have a better chance of recruiting these men than the Americans. That would leave no CIA fingerprints on the operation as well.
This is the view of some very bitter FBI investigators, who wonder why they were never informed of the existence of al-Qaeda operatives inside America. Mihdhar and Hazmi arrived nineteen months before 9/11. The FBI had all the authority it needed to investigate these men and learn what they were up to, but because the CIA failed to divulge the presence of two active members of al-Qaeda, the hijackers were free to develop their plot until it was too late to stop them.
THE HEAD OF THE NEW YORK BUREAU, Louis Schiliro, retired soon after the turn of the millennium, and O’Neill badly wanted his job. Because of the size and importance of the New York office, he would be an assistant director of the FBI, a position he held temporarily while the bureau considered two candidates for the post—O’Neill and Barry Mawn, the head of the Boston office. Mawn had more experience and O’Neill had more enemies. Moreover, O’Neill’s record, which had been unblemished, was now clouded by the incident of letting Valerie James use the bathroom in the offsite facility. Thomas Pickard, the deputy director of the bureau, reputedly told O’Neill that his career was going nowhere. The job went to Mawn.
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.
THERE 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.
AL-QAEDA 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.”
ADEN 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.
WITHIN 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.”
AS SOON AS ALI SOUFAN, the young Arabic-speaking agent recently assigned to the I-49 squad, got on the plane to Yemen, O’Neill told him that he was the case agent for the USS Cole—the biggest assignment of his career.
Soufan is a highly caffeinated talker, his voice carrying a hint of Lebanon, the country where he was born. He knew what it was like to live in lawlessness and chaos, to see cities destroyed. His family fled to America during the civil war, and he loved America because it allowed him to dream. In return, America embraced him. His experience was completely opposite to that of the alienated Muslims in the West who had turned to Islamism as a way of finding an identity. He never personally experienced prejudice because he was an Arab or a Muslim; on the contrary, he was elected president of his student body and presented with many academic awards. After gaining his master’s degree in international relations at Villanova University, he planned to get his Ph.D. at Cambridge. But he had developed a fascination with the American Constitution, and like many naturalized citizens, he had a feeling of indebtedness for the new life he had been given. As he stood poised on the brink of an academic career, he decided—“as a joke”—to send his résumé to the FBI. He thought the chances that a Muslim American scholar of Arab extraction would be hired by the bureau were laughably remote, but he was drawn by the mystique, and obviously something inside him cried out to be saved from the classroom. As he was packing to go to England, the response came: report to the FBI Academy in two weeks.
O’Neill had drafted him on the squad because of his language ability, but he soon came to value Soufan’s initiative, imagination, and courage. When the plane landed in Aden, the agents looked out upon a detachment of the Yemen Special Forces, wearing yellow uniforms with old Russian helmets, each soldier pointing an AK-47 at the plane. The jittery hostage rescue team, who had been sent along to protect the investigators, immediately responded by breaking out their M4s and their handguns. Soufan realized they were all going to die in a bloodbath on the tarmac if he didn’t do something quickly.
He opened the plane’s door. One man among the yellow uniforms was holding a walkie-talkie. Soufan walked directly toward him, carrying a bottle of water, while the guns followed him. It was about 110 degrees outside; behind their weapons, the Yemeni soldiers were wilting.
“You look thirsty,” Soufan said in Arabic to the officer with the walkie-talkie. He handed him the bottle of water.
“Is it American water?” the officer asked.
Soufan assured him that it was; moreover, he told the man, he had American water for all the others as well. They treated it as such a precious commodity that some would not drink it.
With this simple act of friendship, the soldiers lowered their weapons and Soufan gained control of the airport.
O’Neill was a little puzzled to find the soldiers saluting as he disembarked. “I told them you were a general,” Soufan confided.
One of the first things O’Neill noticed was a sign for “Bin Ladin Group International,” a subsidiary of the Saudi Binladen Group, which had a contract to rebuild the airport after it was damaged in the 1994 civil war. It was a small reminder that he was playing on his opponent’s court.
O’Neill had already spent some time studying the country. He was reading a book by Tim Mackintosh-Smith titled Yemen: The Unknown Arabia. He learned that Sanaa, the capital, claimed to be the world’s first city and that the Hadramout, bin Laden’s homeland, meant “death has come.” He underlined these facts with his Montblanc ballpoint in a firm straight hand, as he always did when he was reading. He was determined not to be defeated by the exoticism.
His real adversary, however, turned out to be his own ambassador, Barbara Bodine. She had personally negotiated the agreements between the United States and Yemen two years before, which allowed American warships to refuel in Aden’s harbor. That now seemed a calamitous miscalculation. They met at six o’clock on the morning after O’Neill arrived. In his New Jersey accent, he remarked that he was looking forward to working with her in “Yay-man.”
“Ye-men,” she coldly corrected him.
From O’Neill’s perspective, Yemen was filled with jihadis, and it was still quaking from the civil war. “Yemen is a country of 18 million citizens and 50 million machine guns,” he later reported. Gunfire was a frequent distraction. The temperature often exceeded 120 degrees, and scorpions were as common as houseflies. Moreover, Yemen was full of spies who were well equipped with listening devices. One of the largest cells of Zawahiri’s al-Jihad operated here, and there were many veterans who had fought with bin Laden in Afghanistan. When the rest of O’Neill’s team arrived, he warned them, “This may be the most hostile environment the FBI has ever operated in.”
Bodine, however, saw Yemen as a promising American ally in an unsettled but strategically crucial part of the world. The country was an infant democracy, far more tolerant than its neighbors; it even allowed women to vote. Unlike O’Neill, the ambassador had plenty of experience working in dangerous places. During the Iraqi invasion and occupation of Kuwait, she had served as deputy chief of mission and stayed through the 137-day siege of the American Embassy by Iraqi troops until all the Americans were evacuated. Moreover, Barbara Bodine was as forceful and blunt as John O’Neill.
Bodine thought she had an understanding with O’Neill that he would bring in a team of no more than fifty. She was furious when many more investigators and support staff arrived. In her mind, it was the same as if a military plane with “three hundred heavily armed people” arrived to take over Des Moines. (O’Neill’s account, confirmed by other agents and news reports, said that there were only 150 personnel in his group, not 300.) She pleaded with O’Neill to consider the delicate diplomatic environment he was entering. O’Neill responded that he was here to investigate a crime, not to conduct diplomacy. That was the kind of answer Bodine had come to expect in her dealings with the FBI. “There was the FBI way, and that was it,” she had concluded. “O’Neill wasn’t unique. He was simply extreme.”
Her goal was to preserve the delicate relations between the United States and Yemen, which she had worked hard to improve. Although one can understand that the State Department and the FBI might have two different agendas, in this case Bodine had been given clear directives by the secretary of state to ensure the safety of American investigators and to assist them in their investigation. Those were to be her top priorities, not protecting the relationship with the Yemen government; instead, she continually worked to lower the bureau’s “footprint” by reducing the number of agents and stripping them of their heavy weapons, which she said was for their own safety. Meanwhile, on local television each night, the Yemeni parliament featured speakers who were openly calling for jihad against America.
Bodine ordered that the entire FBI team be moved to the Aden Hotel, which was crammed with other U.S. military and government employees. O’Neill’s investigators were billeted three and four to a room. “Forty-five FBI personnel slept on mats on the hotel’s ballroom floor,” O’Neill reported. He set up a command center on the eighth floor of the hotel; fifty Marines guarded the sandbagged hallway. Outside, the hotel was ringed with machine-gun nests manned by Yemeni troops. It wasn’t entirely clear what their purpose was, other than to make sure the Americans were confined to the hotel. “We were prisoners,” one of the agents recalled.
Early on the morning after his arrival, O’Neill boarded a launch to the Cole, which was listing in the harbor a thousand yards offshore. The recovery of the dead was still under way, and bodies lined the deck, draped with American flags. Down below there were clumps of flesh mashed into the tangled mass of wire and metal of a ship that had once seemed so invulnerable. Through the blast hole, O’Neill could see divers searching for bodies and, in the background, the rocky city embracing the port like an ancient theater.
The sailor in charge of refueling the ship told investigators that it normally took about six hours for the ship to take on the 240,000 gallons of fuel it required. They were just forty-five minutes into the process when the bomb exploded. He’d thought the gas line had blown, and he immediately shut off the connection. Then a cloud of black liquid suddenly covered the ship. It was not oily. It was the residue of the bomb.
O’Neill spent much of his time coaxing the Yemeni authorities in the Political Security Organization—the equivalent of the FBI—to cooperate with the investigation. He was conscious of the need to build cases that would survive American standards of justice, so his agents would have to be present during interrogations by local authorities to assure U.S. courts that none of the suspects had been tortured. He also sought to gather eyewitness testimony from residents who had seen the explosion. Both the PSO and Bodine resisted these requests. “You want a bunch of six-foot-two Irish-Americans to go door-to-door?” Bodine asked O’Neill. “And, excuse me, but how many of your guys speak Arabic?”
Actually, there were only half a dozen Arabic speakers in the FBI contingent, and language was a constant source of misunderstanding. O’Neill kept Ali Soufan at his side most of the time. Once, when he was talking to an obstructionist colonel in Yemen intelligence, O’Neill exclaimed in frustration, “Christ, this is like pulling teeth!” When the colonel’s personal translator repeated the remark in Arabic, the officer stood up, visibly angry. “What’d I say?” O’Neill asked Soufan. Soufan told him that the translator had told the colonel, “If you don’t answer my questions, I’m going to pull out your teeth!”
The Yemeni authorities understandably felt encroached upon and unfairly treated. In exchange for the evidence O’Neill was demanding, they wanted access to any information the FBI gathered outside the country, which for legal reasons O’Neill could not provide. The Yemenis finally produced a videotape taken by a harborside security camera, but it appeared to have been edited to delete the crucial moment of the explosion. When O’Neill expressed his frustration to Washington, President Clinton sent a note to President Ali Abdullah Saleh. It had little effect. The FBI was convinced that the bombers had been tipped off about the arrival of the Cole, and they wanted to expand the investigation to include a member of the president’s own family and a colonel in the PSO. There was scant interest on the part of the Yemen authorities in pursuing such leads.
O’Neill had spent his entire career romancing police from other countries. He had found that “coppers”—as he called them—formed a universal fraternity. And yet some of his requests for evidence mystified the local detectives, who were not acquainted with the advanced forensic techniques the bureau is famous for. Elementary procedures, such as fingerprinting, were rarely employed. They couldn’t understand, for instance, why O’Neill was requesting a hat worn by one of the conspirators, which he wanted to examine for DNA evidence. Even the harbor sludge, which contained residue from the bomb and bits of the fiberglass fishing boat, was off-limits until the bureau paid the Yemeni government $1 million to dredge it. The debris was loaded onto barges and shipped to Dubai for examination.
Yemen was an intensely status-conscious society, and because Soufan had promoted O’Neill to “general,” one of his counterparts was General Hamoud Naji, head of Presidential Security. General Naji finally agreed to take them to the site where the bombers had launched their boat. The police had discovered a twelve-year-old boy named Ahmed who had been fishing on the pier when the bombers unloaded their skiff. One of the men had paid him a hundred Yemeni riyals—about sixty cents—to watch his Nissan truck and boat trailer, but he never returned. The police had arrested Ahmed to make sure he didn’t disappear, and then locked up his father as well to take care of him. “If this is how they treat their cooperating witnesses,” O’Neill observed, “imagine how they treat the more difficult ones.”
O’Neill also viewed the safe house where the bombers had been living. It was clean and neat. In the master bedroom was a prayer rug oriented to the north, toward Mecca. The bathroom sink was full of body hair that the bombers had shaved before going to their deaths. The investigators were solemn, imagining the scene of the ritual ablutions and the final prayers.
But cooperation was still very slow in coming. “This investigation has hit a rock,” General Naji admitted. “We Arabs are very stubborn.”
Ali Soufan teased him, saying, “You’re dealing with another Arab, and I’m also stubborn.”
When Soufan translated this exchange, O’Neill contended that the Arabs were not the equal of the Irish in that department. He told a story about the O’Neill clan in Ireland, who he said had the reputation of being the strongest men in their country. Every year there was a boat race to a giant stone in the middle of a lake, and the O’Neills always won. But one year, another clan was rowing faster and pulling ahead, and it appeared that they would touch the stone first. “But then my great-grandfather took his sword,” said O’Neill, “and he cut off his hand and threw it at the rock. You got anything that can match that?”
Soufan and the general looked at each other. “We’re stubborn,” said Soufan, “but we’re not crazy.”
ONE OF THE PROBLEMS investigators faced was that the Cole was in real danger of sinking. Naval engineers were urgently trying to prevent this indignity. Finally an immense Norwegian semi-submersible salvage ship, with a middle deck designed to dip underwater and scoop up oil platforms, arrived to pick up the wounded warship and take it on its long journey home. The public-address system of the Cole broadcast “The Star-Spangled Banner” as it piggybacked out of the harbor, followed defiantly by Kid Rock’s “American Bad Ass.”
There were so many perceived threats that the agents often slept in their clothes and with their weapons at their sides. The investigators learned from a mechanic that a truck similar to one purchased by the bombers had been brought to his shop to have metal plates installed in a way that might be used to direct the force of an explosion. Certainly the most tempting target for such a bomb would be the hotel where the agents were staying.
Bodine thought these fears were overblown. The agents were suspicious of everyone, she observed, including the hotel staff. She assured O’Neill that the gunfire he frequently heard outside the hotel was probably not directed at the investigators but was simply the noise of wedding celebrations. Then one night, when O’Neill was running a meeting, shots were fired just outside the hotel. The hostage rescue team took positions. Once again, Soufan ventured out to talk to the Yemeni troops stationed in the street.
“Hey, Ali!” O’Neill said. “Be careful!” He had raced down the steps of the hotel to make sure Soufan was wearing his flak jacket. Frustration, stress, and danger, along with the enforced intimacy of their situation, had brought the two men closer. O’Neill had begun to describe Soufan as his “secret weapon.” To the Yemenis, he simply called him “my son.”
Snipers covered him as Soufan strolled outside. The Yemeni officer stationed there assured him that everything was “okay.”
“If everything is okay, why are there no cars on the street?” Soufan asked.
The officer said there must be a wedding nearby. Soufan looked around and saw that the hotel was surrounded with men in traditional dress, some in jeeps, all carrying guns. They were civilians, not soldiers. Soufan was reminded of the tribal uprising in Somalia, which ended with dead American soldiers being dragged through the streets of Mogadishu. That could happen right here, right now, he thought.
O’Neill ordered the U.S. Marines to deploy two armored vehicles to block the street in front of the hotel. The night passed without further incident, but the next day O’Neill relocated his team to the USS Duluth, stationed in the Bay of Aden. He had to get permission from the Yemeni government to fly back to shore. The helicopter pilot had to take evasive maneuvers after the craft was painted by an SA-7 missle. O’Neill sent most of the investigators home. He and Soufan and four other agents moved back to the hotel, now practically empty because of bomb threats.
Relations between Bodine and O’Neill deteriorated to the point that Barry Mawn flew to Yemen to assess the situation. “It became clear that she simply hated his guts,” Mawn observed, but what Bodine told him was that O’Neill couldn’t get along with the Yemenis. For the next ten days Mawn spoke to members of the FBI team and American military officers. Every night, when the Yemen authorities did business, he would go with O’Neill and watch him interact with his counterparts. The meetings invariably went late, with O’Neill cajoling, pressuring, charming, entreating, doing whatever he could do to inch the process along. One such night O’Neill complained to General Ghalib Qamish of the PSO that he needed photographs of the suspects that the Yemenis had arrested. The discussion dragged on deep into the early-morning hours, with General Qamish politely explaining that the FBI was not needed on this case at all and O’Neill patiently describing the urgency of the situation. Mawn could barely keep his head up. But the following night the general announced, “I have your photos for you.”
O’Neill thanked him, then went on to beg for the right to interview the suspects face-to-face, rather than feeding questions to the Yemeni interrogators. It was an endless and tortuous negotiation, but in Mawn’s view it was carried out with respect and even affection on both sides. General Qamish referred to O’Neill as “Brother John.” When Mawn returned, he reported to the director that O’Neill was doing a masterful job, adding that Bodine was his “only detractor.” He said as much to Bodine on his way out of the country. He was not recalling O’Neill, he told her. Of course, Mawn was responsible for sending O’Neill in the first place. He may not have wanted to see Bodine’s point of view. In any case, ambassadors have the final say over which Americans are allowed to remain in a foreign country, and O’Neill was not one of them.
THE YEMENIS ARRESTED FAHD AL-QUSO, the al-Qaeda cameraman who had overslept his assignment to videotape the bombing, at the end of October. Quso admitted that he and one of the suicide bombers had delivered five thousand dollars to “Khallad”—the one-legged mastermind of the Coleattack—in Bangkok. He said the money was to buy Khallad a new prosthesis. The transcript of the conversation was passed along to the FBI a month later.
Soufan remembered the name Khallad from a source he had recruited in Afghanistan. The source had described a fighter with a metal leg who was the emir of a guesthouse in Kandahar—bin Laden’s “errand boy,” he had called him. Soufan and O’Neill faxed the mug shots to the Afghan source, who made a positive identification of Khallad. That was the first real link between the Cole bombing and al-Qaeda.
Soufan wondered why money was leaving Yemen when a major operation was about to take place. Could there be another operation under way that he didn’t know about? Soufan queried the CIA, asking for information about Khallad and whether there might have been an al-Qaeda meeting in the region. The agency did not respond to his clearly stated request. The fact that the CIA withheld information about the mastermind of the Cole bombing and the meeting in Malaysia, when directly asked by the FBI, amounted to obstruction of justice in the death of seventeen American sailors. Much more tragic consequences were on the horizon.
A MONTH AFTER THE COLE INVESTIGATION BEGAN, assistant FBI director Dale Watson told the Washington Post, “Sustained cooperation” with the Yemenis “has enabled the FBI to further reduce its in-country presence…. The FBI will soon be able to bring home the FBI’s senior on-scene commander, John O’Neill.” It appeared to be a very public surrender to Bodine’s complaints. The same day, the Yemeni prime minister told the Post that no link had been discovered between the Cole bombers and al-Qaeda.
O’Neill came home just before Thanksgiving. Valerie James was shocked when she saw him: He had lost twenty-five pounds. He said that he felt he was fighting the counterterrorism battle alone, without any support from his own government, and he worried that the investigation would grind to a halt without him. Indeed, according to Barry Mawn, Yemeni cooperation slowed significantly when O’Neill left the country. Concerned about the continuing threats against the remaining FBI investigators, O’Neill tried to return in January 2001, but Bodine denied his application. Meanwhile, the American investigators, feeling increasingly vulnerable, retreated behind the walls of the American Embassy in Sanaa.
Soufan finally was allowed to interview Fahd al-Quso, the sleeping cameraman, who was small and arrogant, with a wispy beard that he kept tugging on. Before the interview began, a colonel in the PSO entered the room and kissed Quso on both cheeks—a signal to everyone that Quso was protected. And indeed, whenever it seemed obvious that Quso was on the verge of making an important disclosure, the Yemeni colonel would insist that the session stop for meals or prayers.
Over a period of days, however, Soufan was able to get Quso to admit that he met with Khallad and one of the Cole bombers in Bangkok, where they stayed at the Washington Hotel. Quso confessed that his mission was to hand over thirty-six thousand dollars in al-Qaeda funds, not the five thousand he had mentioned before, nor was the money for Khallad’s new leg. It now seems evident that the money was used to purchase first-class air tickets for the 9/11 hijackers Mihdhar and Hazmi and support them when they arrived in Los Angeles a few days later, which would have been obvious if the CIA had told the bureau about the two al-Qaeda operatives.
The FBI agents went through phone records to verify Quso’s story. They found calls between the Washington Hotel in Bangkok and Quso’s house in Yemen. They also noticed that there were calls to both places from a pay phone in Malaysia. It happened to be directly outside the condo where the meeting had taken place. Quso had told Soufan that he was originally supposed to have met Khallad in Kuala Lumpur or Singapore—he couldn’t seem to get the two cities straight. Once again, Soufan sent an official teletype to the agency. He sent along a passport picture of Khallad. Do these telephone numbers make any sense? Is there any connection to Malaysia? Any tie to Khallad? Again, the agency had nothing to say.
If the CIA had responded to Soufan by supplying him with the intelligence he requested, the FBI would have learned of the Malaysia meeting and of the connection to Mihdhar and Hazmi. The bureau would have learned—as the agency already knew—that the al-Qaeda operatives were in America and had been for more than a year. Because there was a preexisting indictment for bin Laden in New York, and Mihdhar and Hazmi were his associates, the bureau already had the authority to follow the suspects, wiretap their apartment, intercept their communications, clone their computer, investigate their contacts—all the essential steps that might have prevented 9/11.
In June 2001, Yemeni authorities arrested eight men who they said were part of a plot to blow up the American Embassy in Yemen, where Soufan and the remainder of the FBI investigators had taken refuge. New threats against the FBI followed, and Freeh, acting on O’Neill’s recommendation, withdrew the team entirely.
THE STRIKE ON THE COLE had been a great victory for bin Laden. Al-Qaeda camps in Afghanistan filled with new recruits, and contributors from the Gulf states arrived carrying Samsonite suitcases filled with petrodollars, as in the glory days of the Afghan jihad. At last there was money to spread around. The Taliban leadership, which was still divided about bin Laden’s presence in the country, became more compliant when cash appeared, despite the threat of sanctions and reprisals. Bin Laden separated his senior leaders—Abu Hafs to another location in Kandahar, and Zawahiri to Kabul—so that the anticipated American response would not kill the al-Qaeda leadership all at once.
But there was no American response. The country was in the middle of a presidential election, and Clinton was trying to burnish his legacy by securing a peace agreement between Israel and Palestine. The Cole bombing had occurred just as the talks were falling apart. Clinton maintains that, despite the awkward political timing, his administration came close to launching another missile attack against bin Laden that October, but at the last minute the CIA recommended calling it off because his presence at the site was not completely certain.
Bin Laden was angry and disappointed. He hoped to lure America into the same trap the Soviets had fallen into: Afghanistan. His strategy was to continually attack until the U.S. forces invaded; then the mujahideen would swarm upon them and bleed them until the entire American empire fell from its wounds. It had happened to Great Britain and to the Soviet Union. He was certain it would happen to America. The declaration of war, the strike on the American embassies, and now the bombing of the Cole had been inadequate, however, to provoke a massive retaliation. He would have to create an irresistible outrage.
One can ask, at this point, whether 9/11 or some similar tragedy might have happened without bin Laden to steer it. The answer is certainly not. Indeed, the tectonic plates of history were, shifting, promoting a period of conflict between the West and the Arab Muslim world; however, the charisma and vision of a few individuals shaped the nature of this contest. The international Salafist uprising might have occurred without the writings of Sayyid Qutb or Abdullah Azzam’s call to jihad, but al-Qaeda would not have existed. Al-Qaeda depended on a unique conjunction of personalities, in particular the Egyptians—Zawahiri, Abu Ubaydah, Saif al-Adl, and Abu Hafs—each of whom manifested the thoughts of Qutb, their intellectual father. But without bin Laden, the Egyptians were only al-Jihad. Their goals were parochial. At a time when there were many Islamist movements, all of them concentrated on nationalist goals, it was bin Laden’s vision to create an international jihad corps. It was his leadership that held together an organization that had been bankrupted and thrown into exile. It was bin Laden’s tenacity that made him deaf to the moral quarrels that attended the murder of so many and indifferent to the repeated failures that would have destroyed most men’s dreams. All of these were qualities that one can ascribe to a cult leader or a madman. But there was also artistry involved, not only to achieve the spectacular effect but also to enlist the imagination of the men whose lives bin Laden required.