19
SOCIAL EVENTS WERE RARE in the al-Qaeda community, but bin Laden was in the mood to celebrate. He arranged a marriage between his seventeen-year-old son, Mohammed, and Abu Hafs’s fourteen-year-old daughter, Khadija. She was a quiet, unlettered girl, and the women wondered what she and Mohammed would have to say to each other. They could just imagine the surprises that awaited her on her wedding night, since sexual matters were rarely discussed, especially with children.
For the occasion bin Laden had taken over a large hall—a former movie theater on the outskirts of Kandahar that had been gutted by the Taliban—to accommodate the five hundred men in attendance. (The women were in a separate facility with the young bride.) He began the festivities by reading a long poem, apologizing that it was not his own work, but that of his speechwriter. “I am not, as most of our brothers know, a warrior of the word,” he said modestly. The poem included a tribute to the bombing of the Cole:
A destroyer, even the brave might fear,
She inspires horror in the harbor and the open sea,
She goes into the waves flanked by arrogance, haughtiness, and fake might,
To her doom she progresses slowly, clothed in a huge illusion,
Awaiting her is a dinghy, bobbing in the waves.
Two television cameras recorded the event, but bin Laden wasn’t satisfied with the result—knowing that the poem would be featured on the Arabic satellite channels and an al-Qaeda recruitment video—so he had the cameras set up again the following morning to record his recitation a second time. He even stationed a few supporters in front of him to cry out praise, as if there were hundreds still in the hall, instead of a handful of reporters and cameramen. His image management extended to asking one of the reporters, who had taken a digital snapshot, to take another picture because his neck was “too full.” He had dyed his beard to cover the streaks of gray, but he couldn’t disguise the dark circles under his eyes that testified to the anxiety and sleeplessness that had become his steady companions.
Twelve-year-old Hamza, the only child of bin Laden’s favorite wife, also read a poem at the wedding. He had long black eyelashes and his father’s thin face, and he wore a white turban and a camouflage vest. “What crime have we committed to be forced to leave our country?” he asked solemnly, with impressive composure. “We will fight the kafr forever!”
“Allahu akhbar!” the men roared in response. Then they began to sing:
Our men are in revolt, our men are in revolt.
We will not regain our homeland
Nor will our shame be erased except through
Blood and fire.
On and on it goes.
On and on it goes.
Following afternoon prayer, the meal was served—meat, rice, and tomato juice. It was a rare extravagance for bin Laden. Some of the diners thought the food rather primitive, however, and his stepfather noticed something larval squirming inside his water glass.
“Eat! Eat!” the guests cried, as they peeled oranges for the young groom. “He has a long night ahead!” The men remarked how much the son’s shy smile resembled his father’s. They danced and sang more songs and lifted the boy up and cheered. Then they put him in a car and sent him to the family compound for his first night of married life.
A FEW MONTHS after the inauguration of George W. Bush, Dick Clarke met with Condoleezza Rice, the national security advisor for the incoming Bush administration, and asked to be reassigned. From the moment the new team had taken over, it was clear that terrorism had a lower priority. When Clarke first briefed her, in January, about the threat that bin Laden and his organization posed to the United States, Rice had given him the impression that she had never heard of al-Qaeda. She subsequently downgraded his position, that of the national coordinator for counterterrorism, so that he would now be reporting to deputies, not to principals. Clarke pressed his strategy of aiding Ahmed Shah Massoud and the Northern Alliance in their struggle against the Taliban and al-Qaeda, but Rice demurred, saying that the administration needed a broader strategy that would include other Pashtun opponents of the Taliban. But the planning for that dragged on for months, without much force. “Maybe you need someone less obsessive,” Clarke now suggested, his irony lost on Rice and her deputy, Stephen Hadley. They were surprised and asked him to stay on until October. During that time, they told him, he should find “someone similar” to replace him.
“There’s only one guy that fits that bill,” said Clarke.
O’Neill viewed Clarke’s job as a perfect fit for him. The offer came at a time when he was despairing about the government’s tangled response to terrorism and distressed about his future. He had always harbored two aspirations—to become deputy director of the bureau in Washington or to take over the New York office. Freeh was retiring in June, so there would be some vacancies at the top; but the investigation into the briefcase incident would likely block any promotion in the bureau. As the nation’s new terrorism czar, however, he would be personally vindicated, and he must have relished the prospect of having both the FBI and the CIA answer to him.
On the other hand, he was financially pressed, and he would still be at the same pay grade in the White House as in the bureau. The Justice Department inquiry had been a ruinous blow. In addition to his other debts, he now owed his attorney eighty thousand dollars, more than he took home in a year.
Throughout the summer, Clarke courted O’Neill, who agonized but refused to commit. He discussed the offer with a number of friends but became alarmed when he thought that FBI headquarters might hear of it. He called Clarke in a fit of anxiety and said that people in the CIA knew he was being considered. “You have to tell them it’s not true,” he pleaded. He was certain that if the agency knew, the bureau was sure to find out. Clarke dutifully called one of his friends in the CIA and said that, by the way, he was looking for names for his replacement since O’Neill had turned him down—even though O’Neill still wanted to be a candidate for that position. O’Neill also talked about the offer to Mawn, saying that he didn’t want him to hear it through the grapevine, but he pointedly told Mawn he wasn’t at all interested in the job.
Money would have been a barrier, but O’Neill—by now a veteran bureaucratic infighter—also understood the ruthlessness with which some powerful people in Washington would greet the news of his new position. Clarke’s offer was tempting, but it was also dangerous.
FOR YEARS, Zawahiri had been battling elements inside al-Jihad who opposed his relationship with bin Laden. He spewed disdain on the Jihad members who found fault with him from comfortable perches in Europe. He called them “the hot-blooded revolutionary strugglers who have now become as cold as ice after they experienced the life of civilization and luxury.” Increasingly, many of his former allies, exhausted and demoralized by years of setbacks, had become advocates of the initiative by Islamist leaders imprisoned in Egypt, who had declared a unilateral cease-fire. Others no longer wanted to endure the primitive living conditions in Afghanistan. Yet, even as the organization was disintegrating, Zawahiri rejected any thought of negotiating with the Egyptian regime or with the West.
In an angry moment he actually resigned as the emir of al-Jihad, but without him the organization was totally adrift. Several months later, his successor relinquished the post, and Zawahiri was back in charge. According to testimony given at the trial of the Albanian cell members, however, there were only forty members left outside Egypt, and within the country the movement had been eradicated. Al-Jihad was dying, and with it the dream that had animated Zawahiri’s imagination since he was a teenager. Egypt was lost to him.
The end came in June 2001, when al-Qaeda absorbed al-Jihad, creating an entity formally called Qaeda al-Jihad. The name reflected the fact that the Egyptians still made up the inner circle; the nine-member leadership council included only three non-Egyptians. But it was bin Laden’s organization, not Zawahiri’s.
Naturally, the domination by the Egyptians was a subject of contention, especially among the Saudi members of al-Qaeda. Bin Laden tried to mollify the malcontents by explaining that he could always count on the Egyptians because they were unable to go home without being arrested; like him, they were men without a country.
Bin Laden turned to Zawahiri and the Egyptians with a particular task. He wanted them to kill Ahmed Shah Massoud. The Northern Alliance commander represented the only credible force keeping the Taliban from completely consolidating their hold on Afghanistan. Slender and dashing, Massoud was a brilliant tactician, and he was willing to match the Taliban in ruthlessness. Now that the Taliban had allied itself with al-Qaeda, Dick Clarke and others saw Massoud as the last chance for an Afghan solution to the bin Laden problem.
Massoud was an eager partner. He was himself a dedicated Islamist whose wife wore a burka and whose troops had committed more than one massacre. Like his competitors, he probably supported his militia on the opium trade. But he spoke a rudimentary French, which he learned in high school in Kabul, and he was well known for his love of Persian poetry, which made him seem like a civilized alternative to the Taliban. In February, Taliban goons had gone through the Kabul museum with sledgehammers, pulverizing the artistic heritage of the country; then in March, they used tanks and anti-aircraft weapons in Bamiyan Province to destroy two colossal images of the Buddha that had loomed above the ancient Silk Road for fifteen hundred years. To the degree that the Taliban were sinking in the world’s estimation, Massoud was rising.
In a reflection of his increased international stature, Massoud addressed the European Parliament in Strasbourg, France, in April 2001. He spoke about the danger that al-Qaeda posed to the world. He also told American officials that his own intelligence had learned of al-Qaeda’s intention to perform a terrorist act against the United States that would be vastly greater than the bombings of the American embassies in East Africa.
In July, Zawahiri composed a letter in poorly written French purporting to be from the Islamic Observation Centre in London. He requested permission for two journalists to interview Massoud. That letter was followed up by a personal recommendation from Abdul Rasul Sayyaf. Permission was granted.
Massoud was not alone in his warnings to America. In addition to the gleeful chatter that the NSA was picking up about a major attack (“spectacular,” “another Hiroshima”) that was in the works, intelligence agencies from Arab countries, with better human sources, issued dire advisories. Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak warned the United States that terrorists were planning to attack President Bush in Rome, “using an airplane stuffed with explosives,” while he was on his way to the G-8 summit in Genoa that July. The Italian authorities put up anti-aircraft emplacements to prevent the attack. The Taliban foreign minister, Wakil Ahmed Muttawakil, confided to the American consul general in Peshawar and the United Nations in Kabul that al-Qaeda was planning a devastating strike on the United States. He feared that American retaliation would destroy his country. Around the same time, Jordanian intelligence overheard the name of the rumored operation, which it passed along to Washington: The Big Wedding. In the culture of suicide bombers, the day of a martyr’s death is his wedding day, when he greets the maidens of Paradise.
BIN LADEN DECIDED to take another bride himself, a fifteen-year-old Yemeni girl named Amal al-Sada. One of bin Laden’s bodyguards traveled to the mountain town of Ibb to pay a bride price of five thousand dollars. According to Abu Jandal, the wedding was a splendid celebration. “Songs and merriment were mixed with the firing of shots into the air.”
Although the marriage seems to have been a political arrangement between bin Laden and an important Yemeni tribe, meant to boost al-Qaeda recruitment in Yemen, bin Laden’s other wives were upset, and even his mother chastised him. Two of bin Laden’s sons, Mohammed and Othman, angrily confronted Abu Jandal. “Why do you bring our father a girl of our age?” they demanded. Abu Jandal complained that he had not even known that the money he took to Yemen was to purchase a bride. He had thought it was for a martyrdom operation.
Najwa, bin Laden’s first wife, left at about this time. After eleven children and twenty-seven years of marriage, she decided to return to Syria, taking her daughters and her retarded son, Abdul Rahman, with her. The man she had married was not a mujahid or an international terrorist; he was a rich Saudi teenager. The life she might have expected as bin Laden’s wife was one of wealth, travel, society; an easy existence made more comfortable with the usual retinue of servants, a beach house, a yacht, perhaps an apartment in Paris. This was the minimum. Instead, she had lived a life on the run, deprived, often in squalor. She had sacrificed so much, but now she was free.
ON MAY 29, 2001, in a federal courtroom in Manhattan, a jury convicted four men in the bombings of the American embassies in East Africa. It was the capstone of a perfect record of twenty-five terrorist convictions accomplished by the prosecutors of the Southern District of New York, which was headed by Mary Jo White, with her assistants Kenneth Karas and Patrick Fitzgerald. The struggle against Islamic terrorists had begun in 1993 with the first World Trade Center bombing. Eight years later, these convictions were practically the only victories that America could point to, and they were based upon the laborious investigations of the New York bureau of the FBI, particularly the I-49 squad.
O’Neill sat in on the closing arguments and after the verdict he drew Steve Gaudin aside. Gaudin was the agent who had broken Mohammed al-‘Owhali, who had gotten his wish to be tried in America. O’Neill put his arm around Gaudin and told him he had a gift for him. “I’m sending you to a language school in Vermont. You’re gonna learn Arabic.”
Gaudin reeled at the thought.
“You know this fight ain’t over,” O’Neill continued. “What did al-‘Owhali tell you? He said, ‘We have to hit you outside so they won’t see us coming on the inside.’”
O’Neill understood that the crime model was just one way to deal with terrorism, and that it had limits, especially when the adversary was a sophisticated foreign network composed of skilled and motivated ideologues who were willing to die. But when Dick Clarke had said to him during the millennium arrests, “We’re going to kill bin Laden,” O’Neill didn’t want to hear about it. Although al-Qaeda posed a far greater challenge to law enforcement than the Mafia, or any criminal enterprise, had, the alternatives—military strikes, CIA assassination attempts—had accomplished nothing except to aggrandize bin Laden in the eyes of his admirers. The twenty-five convictions, on the other hand, were genuine and legitimate achievements that demonstrated the credibility and integrity of the American system of justice. But the jealous rivalry among government agencies, and the lack of urgency at FBI headquarters, hobbled the I-49 squad in New York, who had been rendered blind to the danger that, as it turned out, was already in the country.
As the embassy bombings trial was ending, nearly all of the nineteen 9/11 hijackers had settled in the United States. About this time, Tom Wilshire, who was the CIA’s intelligence representative to the FBI’s international terrorism section at FBI headquarters, was studying the relationship between Khaled al-Mihdhar and Khallad, the one-legged mastermind of the Cole bombing. The CIA had thought, because of the similarity of names, that they might be the same person, but thanks to Ali Soufan’s investigations, the agency now knew that Khallad was part of bin Laden’s security team. “OK. This is important,” Wilshire noted in an e-mail to his supervisors at the CIA Counterterrorist Center. “This is a major-league killer, who orchestrated the Cole Attack and possibly the Africa bombings.” Wilshire already knew that Nawaf al-Hazmi was in the United States and that Hazmi and Mihdhar had traveled with Khallad. He also discovered that Mihdhar had a U.S. visa. “Something bad was definitely up,” Wilshire decided. He asked permission to disclose this vital information to the FBI. The agency never responded to his request.
However, later that same day, July 13, a CIA supervisor requested that an FBI analyst assigned to the CTC, Margarette Gillespie, review the material about the Malaysia meeting “in her free time.” She didn’t get around to it until the end of July. The CIA supervisor did not reveal the fact that some of the participants in the meeting might be in the United States. In fact he conveyed none of the urgency reflected in Wilshire’s note. “It didn’t mean anything to me,” he would later say, even though he was privy to the reports that al-Qaeda was planning a “Hiroshima” inside America.
But the CIA supervisor did want to know what the FBI knew. He gave Maggie Gillespie three surveillance photos from the Malaysia meeting to show to several I-49 agents. The pictures showed Mihdhar and Hazmi and a man who resembled Quso. The CIA supervisor did not tell Maggie Gillespie why the pictures had been taken. Gillespie researched the Intelink database about the Malaysia meeting, but the agency had not posted any reports about Mihdhar’s visa or Hazmi’s arrival in the country. There was NSA coverage of the events leading up to the Malaysia meeting, but Intelink advised her that such information was not to be shared with criminal investigators.
The CIA supervisor, along with Gillespie and another FBI analyst from headquarters, Dina Corsi, went to New York on June 11 to talk with the agents on the Cole investigation—except for Soufan, who was out of the country. The meeting started in midmorning with the New York FBI agents thoroughly briefing the others on the progress of their investigation. That went on for three or four hours. Finally, about two in the afternoon, the CIA supervisor asked Gillespie to display the photographs to her colleagues. There were three high-quality surveillance photos. One, shot from a low angle, showed Mihdhar and Hazmi standing beside a tree. The supervisor wanted to know if the agents recognized anyone, and if Quso was in any of the pictures.
The FBI agents on the I-49 squad asked who was in the pictures, and when and where they were taken. “And were there any other photographs?” one of the agents demanded. The CIA supervisor refused to say. He promised that “in the days and weeks to come” he would try to get permission to pass that information along, but he couldn’t be more forthcoming at present. The meeting became heated; people began yelling at each other. The FBI agents knew that clues to the crimes they were trying to solve were being dangled in front of their eyes, but they couldn’t squeeze any further information from the CIA supervisor or the FBI analysts—except for one detail: The supervisor finally dropped the name Khaled al-Mihdhar.
Steven Bongardt, a former Navy pilot and Annapolis graduate who was on the I-49 squad, asked the supervisor to provide a date of birth or a passport number to go with Mihdhar’s name. A name by itself was not sufficient to put a stop on his entry into the United States. Bongardt had just returned from Pakistan with a list of thirty names of suspected al-Qaeda associates and their dates of birth, which he had given to the State Department as a precaution to make sure they didn’t get into the country. That was standard procedure, the very first thing most investigators would do. But the CIA supervisor declined to provide the additional information.
One can imagine a different meeting, in which the CIA supervisor was authorized to disclose the vital details of Mihdhar’s travel to the United States, his connection to the telephone in Yemen that was a virtual al-Qaeda switchboard, his association with Hazmi, who was also in America, their affiliation with al-Qaeda and with Khallad. The pictures that were laid out on the table in the New York office contained within them not only the answers to the planning of the Cole attack but also the stark fact that al-Qaeda was inside the United States and planning to strike.
There was a fourth photo of the Malaysia meeting, however, that the CIA supervisor did not produce. That was a picture of Khallad. The Cole investigators certainly knew who he was. They had an active file on him and had already talked to a grand jury, preparing to indict him. That fourth photo would have prompted O’Neill to go to Mary Margaret Graham, who headed the New York office of the CIA, which was located in the World Trade Center, and demand that the agency turn over all information relating to Khallad and his associates. By withholding the picture of Khallad standing beside the future hijackers, however, the CIA blocked the bureau’s investigation into the Cole attack and allowed the 9/11 plot to proceed.
At the time, Mihdhar had returned to Yemen and then gone to Saudi Arabia, where presumably he had been herding the remaining hijackers into the United States. Two days after the frustrating meeting between the CIA supervisor and the I-49 squad, Mihdhar received a new American visa from the consulate in Jeddah. Since the CIA had not given his name to the State Department to post on its watch list, Mihdhar disembarked in New York on the Fourth of July.
THE JUNE 11 MEETING was the culmination of a bizarre trend in the U.S. government to hide information from the people who most needed it. There had always been certain legal barriers to the sharing of information. By law—Rule 6E of the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure—information arising from grand jury testimony is secret. The bureau took that as a nearly absolute bar to revealing any investigative material at all. Every morning on Dick Clarke’s classified computer there were at least a hundred reports, from the CIA, the NSA, and other intelligence branches, but the FBI never disseminated such information. Rule 6E also meant that agents could not talk about criminal cases with colleagues who were working intelligence—even if they were in the same squad.
But until the second Clinton administration, information derived from intelligence operations, especially if it might involve a crime, was freely given to criminal investigators. In fact, it was essential. Agents in the 26 Federal Plaza building would often go upstairs to a highly secure room where they could read NSA transcripts and get briefings by a CIA representative posted there. Such cooperation helped convict Sheikh Omar Abdul Rahman, for instance; the wiretaps that had been placed in his apartment during an intelligence-gathering operation proved that he authorized terrorist bombings in New York. But there was always the concern that intelligence operations would be compromised by the disclosure of sensitive information during a trial.
The Justice Department promulgated a new policy in 1995 designed to regulate the exchange of information between agents and criminal prosecutors, but not among the agents themselves. FBI headquarters misinterpreted the policy, turning it into a straitjacket for its own investigators. They were sternly warned that sharing intelligence information with criminal investigators could mean the end of an agent’s career. A secret court in Washington, created by the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, became the arbiter of what information could be shared—“thrown over the Wall,” in the parlance of the court. Bureaucratic confusion and inertia allowed the policy to gradually choke off the flow of essential information to the I-49 counterterrorism squad.
The CIA eagerly institutionalized the barrier that separated it from the bureau. The formula used by the CIA supervisor in the June 11 meeting to justify not telling the agents the identities of the men in the photographs was that it would compromise “sensitive sources and methods.” The source of their intelligence about the Malaysia meeting was the telephone in Yemen belonging to the al-Qaeda loyalist, Ahmed al-Hada, that was so central in mapping al-Qaeda’s network. The Hada phone was an al-Qaeda clearinghouse and an intelligence bonanza. Ironically, it was the FBI’s investigation in the embassy bombings case—headed by the New York office—that had uncovered the Hada phone in the first place. Any information that had to do with the Hada household was crucial. The CIA knew that one of the men in the photographs of the Malaysia meeting—Khaled al-Mihdhar—was Hada’s son-in-law, but the agency also kept this vital detail from the bureau.
The NSA, not wanting to bother with applying to the FISA court for permission to distribute essential intelligence, simply restricted its distribution. For example, in San Diego, Mihdhar made eight calls to the Hada phone to talk to his wife, who had just given birth, which the NSA did not distribute at all. There was a link chart on the wall of the “bullpen”—the warren of cubicles housing the I-49 squad—showing the connections between Ahmed al-Hada’s phone and other phones around the world. It provided a map of al-Qaeda’s international reach. Had the line been drawn from the Hada household in Yemen to Hazmi and Mihdhar’s San Diego apartment, al-Qaeda’s presence in America would have been glaringly obvious.
The I-49 squad responded to the constraints in several aggressive and creative ways. When the NSA began to withhold intercepts of bin Laden’s satellite phone from the bureau and from prosecutors in the Southern District, the squad came up with a plan to build two antennae, one in the remote Pacific islands of Palau and another in Diego Garcia, in the Indian Ocean, that would capture the signal from the satellite. The NSA fought this scheme but finally coughed up 114 transcripts to prevent the antennae from being built. It kept a tight hold on other intercepts, however. The squad also constructed an ingenious satellite telephone booth in Kandahar for international calls, hoping to provide a convenient facility for jihadis wanting to call home. The agents could not only listen in on the calls, they received video of callers through a camera hidden in the booth. In Madagascar, I-49 agents built an antenna aimed at intercepting the phone calls of Khaled Sheikh Mohammed. Millions of dollars and thousands of hours of labor were consumed in replicating information that the U.S. government already had but refused to share.
The agents on the I-49 were so used to being denied access to intelligence that they bought a CD of a Pink Floyd song, “Another Brick in the Wall.” Whenever they received the same formulation about “sensitive sources and methods,” they would hold up the phone to the CD player and push Play.
ON THE FIFTH OF JULY 2001, Dick Clarke assembled representatives of various domestic agencies—the Federal Aviation Administration, the Immigration and Naturalization Service, the Coast Guard, the FBI, and the Secret Service among them—to issue a warning. “Something really spectacular is going to happen here, and it’s going to happen soon,” he told them.
The same day, John O’Neill and Valerie James arrived in Spain, where he had been invited to address the Spanish Police Foundation. O’Neill decided to take a few days of vacation to decide what to do with his life. Although the Justice Department had dropped its inquiry into the briefcase incident, the bureau was conducting an internal investigation of its own, which kept the pressure on. Meantime, he had learned that the New York Times was preparing a story about the affair. The reporters not only knew about the classified material in the briefcase, they also had information about the previous incident with Val at the safe house parking garage and about O’Neill’s personal debt. This information had been leaked to them by someone in the bureau or the Justice Department, along with highly sensitive details about the budget that O’Neill had been preparing. The very material that had caused the Justice Department and the bureau to investigate O’Neill had been freely given to reporters in order to further sabotage his career. The leak seemed to be timed to destroy his chances of being confirmed for Clarke’s job in the NSC, which by now was an open secret.
Before leaving for Spain, O’Neill had met with Larry Silverstein, the president of Silverstein Properties, which had just taken over the management of the World Trade Center. Silverstein offered him a position as chief of security. It would pay more than twice his government salary. But O’Neill could not commit. He told Barry Mawn that he didn’t want to resign from the FBI with his reputation still in question. He promised Silverstein an answer when he returned from Spain; he also had still not turned down Dick Clarke.
He and Val and her son, Jay, spent several days in Marbella, playing golf and reading. Mark Rossini, who often served as a liaison between the FBI and the Spanish police, had come along to translate. On July 8, O’Neill lit a cigar on the verandah of the villa where they were staying and told Rossini, “I’m K.M.A.”
It was the twentieth anniversary of the day he became an FBI agent. That is the time when an FBI agent can retire with his full pension and finally tell the bureau, “Kiss my ass.”
O’Neill was smiling, Rossini observed, but his eyes were sad. He was on the verge of making his choice. Rossini could see that O’Neill was saying good-bye to the man he had been, and to the man he might have been. There were dreams that would never be realized. For one, he would never catch Osama bin Laden.
All the time that O’Neill was in Spain, Mohammed Atta and Ramzi bin al-Shibh were also in the country, in a little coastal resort called Salou, reviewing the final details of the 9/11 strike.
IN THE SAME WAY that his dress and manners paid tribute to the FBI’s traditional opponent, the mobster, O’Neill also displayed an affinity for the terrorist mind. His hero was the Irish nationalist Michael Collins, the martyred leader of Sinn Fein and the inventor of modern guerrilla warfare, who (like O’Neill) had been betrayed by his own people. Although O’Neill worked against the Irish Republican Army as an FBI agent, supervising several highly successful operations, he sympathized with its aspirations. He obviously saw something of himself in Michael Collins. But for the last decade he had found himself matched in a mortal contest against the most daring terrorist in history, whose goals appalled him but whose commitment and relentlessness were unequaled.
After the Cole investigation and the inquiry about the briefcase, O’Neill grasped that his reputation was so undermined that the NSC job was now out of the question. The usual course of a retired FBI executive is to become a security consultant in a high-paying corporate job, so that in the final years of his career he can finally cash in. O’Neill had applied for several positions of that sort, but the one that he settled on when he returned from Spain was the World Trade Center post. Some of his friends, including Mark Rossini, congratulated him, saying, “At least now you’ll be safe. They already tried to bomb it.” And O’Neill replied, “They’ll try again. They’ll never stop trying to get those two buildings.” Once again, he was instinctively placing himself in the bull’s-eye. And perhaps in this decision there was a certain acceptance of his fate.
One can imagine that John O’Neill’s life exemplified, in the minds of Islamic radicals as well as believers of many faiths, the depravity that was characteristic of his country and his age. It was a time in America when, spiritually speaking, people were pushed to extremes. The comfortable morality of the center had decayed, along with the mainstream denominations, which were withering into irrelevance; meanwhile, rapidly growing fundamentalist churches were transforming the political landscape. The sexual decadence of the Clinton presidency was replaced by the dogmatism of the religious right. O’Neill, too, was pulled between turpitude and extreme piousness. He was an adulterer, a philanderer, a liar, an egotist, and a materialist. He loved celebrity and brand names, and he lived well beyond his means. These qualities were exactly the stereotypes that bin Laden used to paint his portrait of America. But now O’Neill was reaching for a spiritual handhold.
He had moved away from the Catholic Church when he met Valerie. She was the daughter of a fundamentalist preacher in Chicago. O’Neill loved the fire-and-brimstone services, but at the same time he was leading a national FBI probe of the violence of anti-abortion protesters. Both he and Val became aware of the power and danger of fundamentalist beliefs. These were people who went to churches very similar to the ones they did, who were drawn to ecstatic experiences that more traditional faiths could not provide. The difference was that the protesters were willing to kill others in the name of God. When O’Neill and Val moved to New York, they attended the stately Marble Collegiate Church on Fifth Avenue, which had been the pulpit of Norman Vincent Peale and his upbeat philosophy of “positive thinking.” It was a safe harbor, but O’Neill was too unsettled for such sedate religion.
After the incident in the FBI parking garage, O’Neill began reading the Bible every day. In Yemen, he kept a Bible on his bedside table, along with a recent biography of Michael Collins. He returned to Catholicism in the spring of 2001, attending Mass every morning. He told Val that a priest was counseling him about getting a divorce. That August his wife, Christine, signed a property agreement, which gave her custody of the children and the house in Linwood, New Jersey. But his impending freedom seemed only to add to the spiritual burden he was carrying.
O’Neill bought a book titled Brush Up on Your Bible! As a preacher’s daughter, Val knew the Bible far better than O’Neill did, no matter how hard he studied. They got into heated discussions about salvation. He believed that a soul was saved through good works; Val thought it was only through belief in Jesus Christ. She always had the sickening feeling that he was doomed.
Soon after he returned from Spain, O’Neill happened upon a children’s book titled The Soul Bird. Val was in the bathroom getting ready for work when O’Neill came in to read it to her. She was only half paying attention. The story is about a bird that perches on one foot inside our soul.
This is the soul bird.
It feels everything we feel.
O’Neill, the tough guy, with his service automatic strapped on his ankle, read that the soul bird runs around in pain when someone hurts us, then swells with joy when we are embraced. Then he came to the part about the drawers:
Do you want to know what the soul bird is made of?
Well, it’s really quite simple: it’s made of drawers.
These drawers can’t be opened just like that—because each is locked with its own special key!
Valerie was taken aback as O’Neill began to weep. But he continued to read about the drawers—one for happiness, one for sadness, one for jealousy, one for contentment—until suddenly he was sobbing so hard that he couldn’t finish. He was completely broken.
Immediately after that episode, he buried himself in prayer. He had a couple of prayer guides, and he marked his favorites with ribbons or Post-it notes. He was particularly drawn to the Psalms, including number 142:
On the way where I shall walk
they have hidden a snare to entrap me.
Look on my right and see:
there is not one who takes my part.
I have no means of escape,
not one cares for my soul.
I cry to you, O Lord.
I have said: “You are my refuge,
all I have left in the land of the living.”
Listen then to my cry
for I am in the depths of distress.
In the back of one of his red-leather breviaries, he clipped a schedule of Catholic prayer times, and on July 30 he began to obsessively check them off. It is now a rare practice for ordinary Catholics to pray four or five times a day, as Muslims do, but the ancient practice is still available to members of the clergy and extremely fervent believers. Perhaps in his worship O’Neill drew parallels between the early church and certain aspects of modern Islamism, since the church calendar is full of martyrs and stern ideologues who would be seen as religious extremists today. He began this regimen on the feast day of Peter Chrysologus, the bishop of Ravenna, who banned dancing and persecuted the heretics. The next day, July 31, celebrates Saint Ignatius of Loyola, the indomitable Spanish soldier who founded the Jesuit order. The vision these saints had of a society governed by God is far more like that of Sayyid Qutb than that of most modern Christians.
In his schedule, O’Neill checked off every prayer until Sunday, August 19, the day the article about the briefcase incident finally appeared in the Times. Then the marks abruptly stopped.
“THE DUTIES OF THIS RELIGION are magnificent and difficult,” bin Laden said in a videotaped speech that was later discovered on the computer of a member of the Hamburg cell. “Some of them are abominable.”
Bin Laden spoke about the Prophet, who warned the Arabs that they would become weak because of their love of life and their fear of fighting. “This sense of loss, this misery that has befallen us: all these are proof that we have abandoned God and his jihad,” bin Laden said. “God has imposed inferiority on you and will not remove it from you until you return to your religion.”
Recalling the Prophet’s injunction on his deathbed that Islam should be the only religion in Arabia, bin Laden asked, “What answer do we have for God on the day of reckoning?…The ummah in this time have become lost and have gone astray. Now, ten years have passed since the Americans entered the land of the two holy places…. It becomes clear to us that shying away from the fight, combined with the love of earthly existence that fills the hearts of many of us, is the source of this misery, this humiliation, and this contempt.”
These words reached into the hearts of nineteen young men, many of whom had skills, talent, and education, and were living comfortably in the West; and yet they still resonated with the sense of shame that bin Laden sang to them.
What do we want? What do we want?
Don’t we want to please God?
Don’t we want Paradise?
He urged them to become martyrs, to give up their promising lives for the greater glory that awaited them. “Look, we have found ourselves in the mouth of the lion for over twenty years now,” he said, “thanks to the mercy and favor of God: the Russian Scud missiles hunted us for over ten years, and the American Cruise missiles have hunted us for another ten years. The believer knows that the hour of death can be neither hastened nor postponed.” Then he quoted a passage from the fourth sura of the Quran, which he repeated three times in the speech—an obvious signal to the hijackers who were on their way:
Wherever you are, death will find you,
even in the looming tower.
O’NEILL WAS A FLAWED AND POLARIZING FIGURE, but there was no one else in the bureau who was as strong and as concerned, no one else who might have taken the morsels of evidence that the CIA was withholding and marshaled a nationwide dragnet that would have stopped 9/11. The bureau was a timid bureaucracy that abhorred powerful individuals. It was known for its brutal treatment of employees who were ambitious or who fought conventional wisdom. O’Neill was right about the threat of al-Qaeda when few cared to believe it. Perhaps, in the end, his capacity for making enemies sabotaged his career, but those enemies also helped al-Qaeda by destroying the man who might have made a difference. Already the New York office was losing focus, and without O’Neill, terrible mistakes were made.
While O’Neill was in Spain, an FBI agent in Phoenix, Kenneth Williams, sent an alarming electronic communication to headquarters, to Alec Station, and to several agents in New York. “The purpose of this communication is to advise the bureau and New York of the possibility of a coordinated effort by Osama bin Laden to send students to the United States to attend civil aviation universities and colleges,” the note said. Williams went on to advise headquarters of the need to make a record of all the flight schools in the country, interview the operators, and compile a list of all Arab students who had sought visas for flight training.
Jack Cloonan was one of the New York agents to read the memo, which was printed out and distributed. He wadded it into a ball and threw it against a wall. “Who’s going to conduct the thirty thousand interviews?” he asked the supervisor in Phoenix. “When the fuck do we have time for this?” But he did run a check on the several Arab names that the agent in Phoenix had listed. Nothing came up. The CIA, which has an office in Phoenix, also looked at the names and made no connections. As it turns out, a student the Phoenix agent had mentioned had been friendly with Hani Hanjour, one of the presumed pilots of 9/11, but there was little chance that an investigation such as the one the agent was suggesting would have led to the plot. At least, not by itself.
Then, in mid-August, a flight school in Minnesota contacted the local FBI field office to express concern about a student, Zacarias Moussaoui. He had asked suspicious questions about the flight patterns around New York City and whether the doors of a cockpit could be opened during flight. The local bureau quickly determined that Moussaoui was an Islamic radical who had been to Pakistan and probably to Afghanistan. The agents believed he might be a potential suicide hijacker. Because he was a French citizen who had overstayed his visa, the INS placed him under arrest. The FBI agents investigating the case sought permission from headquarters to examine Moussaoui’s laptop, which was denied because the agents couldn’t show a probable cause for their search. When the Minneapolis supervisor pressed the matter with headquarters, he was told he was trying to get people “spun up.” The supervisor defiantly responded that he was “trying to keep someone from taking a plane and crashing into the World Trade Center”—a weird premonition that suggests how such thoughts were surging through the unconscious of those who were reading the threat reports.
Moussaoui was probably intended to be part of a second wave of al-Qaeda attacks that would follow 9/11, most likely on the West Coast. If the agents in Minneapolis had been allowed to thoroughly investigate Moussaoui, they would have made the connection to Ramzi bin al-Shibh, who was sending him money. Moussaoui carried a letter of employment from Infocus Tech, which was signed by Yazid Sufaat. That name meant nothing to the FBI, since the CIA kept secret the information about the meeting in Kuala Lumpur, which took place in Sufaat’s condo. The bureau failed to put together the warning from its own office in Minneapolis with that of Kenneth Williams in Phoenix. Typically, it withheld the information from Dick Clarke and the White House, so no one had a complete picture.
ON AUGUST 22, O’Neill wrote an e-mail to Lou Gunn, who had lost his son on the Cole. “Today is my last day,” O’Neill informed him. “In my thirty-one years of government service, my proudest moment was when I was selected to lead the investigation of the attack on the USS Cole. I have put my all into the investigation and truly believe that significant progress has been made. Unknown to you and the families is that I have cried with your loss…. I will keep you and all the familiesin my prayers and will continue to track the investigation as a civilian. God bless you, your loved ones, the families and God bless America.”
O’Neill was packing boxes in his office when Ali Soufan came in to say good-bye. Soufan was headed back to Yemen later that day; in fact, O’Neill’s last act as an FBI agent would be to sign the paperwork that would send his team back into the country. The two men walked across the street to Joe’s Diner. O’Neill ordered a ham and cheese sandwich.
“You don’t want to change your infidel ways?” Soufan kidded him, indicating the ham. “You’re gonna go to hell.” But O’Neill was not in a joking mood. He urged Soufan to come visit him in the Trade Center when he returned. “I’m going to be just down the road,” he said. It was strange to have O’Neill pleading to be remembered.
Then Soufan confided that he was getting married. He was worried about how O’Neill would react. In the past, whenever they talked about women, O’Neill would make a wisecrack or somehow indicate how uncomfortable he was about the subject. “You know why it costs so much to get a divorce?” O’Neill once asked him. “Because it’s worth it.”
This time, O’Neill thought about it and remarked, “She has put up with you all this time. She must be a good woman.”
The next day, O’Neill started work at the World Trade Center.
THE DAY AFTER O’NEILL RETIRED from the bureau, Maggie Gillespie, the FBI analyst at Alec Station who was reviewing coverage of the Malaysia meeting, notified INS, the State Department, Customs, and the FBI, asking them to put Khaled al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi on their watch lists. She had noticed that both men had arrived in Los Angeles in January 2000, about the same time as Ahmed Ressam had planned to blow up the L.A. airport. Since then, Mihdhar had left the country and returned. Gillespie passed the information to her colleague, Dina Corsi, an intelligence analyst at FBI headquarters.
Alarmed by the information, Corsi sent an e-mail to the supervisor of the I-49 squad titled “IT: al-Qaeda.” “IT” means “international terrorism.” The message urgently ordered the squad to investigate whether Khaled al-Mihdhar was still in the United States. There was little explanation about who he might be, except that his association with al-Qaeda and his possible involvement with the bombers of the Cole made him “a risk to the national security.” The squad’s orders were to “locate al-Mihdhar and determine his contact and reasons for being in the United States.” But no criminal agents could be involved in the search, Corsi said. As it turned out, there was only one intelligence agent on the squad, and he was brand new.
Jack Cloonan was the temporary supervisor. He requested that criminal agents should carry out the investigation. Because of the existing bin Laden indictment, they would have far more freedom and resources to search for any al-Qaeda–related individuals. Corsi e-mailed the squad, “If al-Mihdhar is located, the interview must be conducted by an intel agent. A criminal agent CANNOT be present at the interview…. If at such time information is developed indicating the existence of a substantial federal crime, that information will be passed over the wall according to the proper procedures and turned over for follow-up investigation.”
Corsi’s original e-mail was accidentally copied to a criminal agent on the squad, however: Steve Bongardt, an aggressive investigator who had been Top Gun as a Navy fighter pilot. For more than a year he had been protesting the obstacles that were increasingly being put in the way of criminal investigators by the growing wall. “Show me where this is written that we can’t have the intelligence,” he demanded on a number of occasions from headquarters, but of course that was impossible, since the wall was largely a matter of interpretation. Since the June 11 meeting, Bongardt had been pressing Corsi to supply the information about the men in the photos, including Khaled al-Mihdhar. After Corsi’s e-mail wound up on his computer, Bongardt called her. “Dina, you got to be kidding me!” he said. “Mihdhar is in the country?”
“Steve, you’ve got to delete that,” she told him, referring to the e-mail. She said he had no right to the information. “We’ll have a conference call about it tomorrow.”
The next day Corsi called over the secure phone. A CIA supervisor at Alec Station was also on the line. They told Bongardt he would have to “stand down” in the effort to find Mihdhar. They explained how the wall prevented them from sharing any further information. Bongardt repeated his complaints that the wall was a bureaucratic fiction, and that it was preventing the agents from doing their work. “If this guy is in the country, it’s not because he’s going to fucking Disneyland!” he said. But he was told once again, not only by Corsi but also by her supervisor at the bureau, to stand down.
The next day Bongardt sent Corsi an angry e-mail, “Whatever has happened to this—someday somebody will die—and wall or not—the public will not understand why we are not more effective and throwing every resource we had at certain ‘problems.’”
Rookie intelligence agent Rob Fuller got the assignment to track down Mihdhar, as well as Hazmi, whose name was linked to Mihdhar’s on the watch list. Mihdhar had written on his landing card a month before that he would be staying at the “New York Marriott.” The lone agent set out to find the two al-Qaeda operatives in the nine different Marriotts in the city. They were long gone.
ON AUGUST 30, eight days after O’Neill retired, Prince Turki relinquished his post as head of Saudi intelligence. It was the first time in decades that a senior prince had been pushed aside, reputedly because of Crown Prince Abdullah’s impatience with Turki’s failure to get bin Laden.
Turki says that he was not fired. “I left because I was tired,” he said. “I thought new blood might be needed.” He compared himself to “an over-ripened fruit. You know how it starts to smell bad, the skin peels and it deteriorates. So I asked to be relieved.”
THE MOMENT O’NEILL LEFT THE FBI, his spirits lifted. People remarked that he seemed light on his feet for the first time in months, perhaps years. He talked about getting a new Mercedes to replace his aging Buick. He told Anna DiBattista that they could now afford to get married. On Saturday night, September 8, he attended a wedding at the Plaza Hotel with Valerie James, and they danced nearly every number. “I feel like a huge burden has been lifted from me,” he told his former boss, Lewis Schiliro, who was at the wedding. To another friend within Val’s hearing, he said, “I’m gonna get her a ring.”
The next day, September 9, Ahmed Shah Massoud agreed to see two Arab television journalists who had been waiting in his camp for nine days for an interview. Massoud was without doubt the greatest of the Afghan commanders, having endured twenty-five years of warfare against the the Soviets, Afghan communists, rival mujahideen, and now the combined forces of the Taliban and al-Qaeda. Massoud’s capacity for survival was a powerful feature of his legend. He was the best hope Afghanistan had of a moderate Islamist alternative to the Taliban.
Zawahiri’s forged letter had gotten the two phony journalists into Massoud’s office. The cameraman’s battery pack was filled with explosives. The bomb tore the assassins apart, killed a translator, and drove two pieces of metal into Massoud’s heart.
When Ali Soufan heard the news in Yemen, he told another agent, “Bin Laden is appeasing the Taliban. Now the big one is coming.”
That day bin Laden and Zawahiri attended a wake for the father of the Taliban’s former interior minister. Two Saudi members of al-Qaeda approached the deputy interior minister, Mullah Mohammed Khaksar, to tell him that Massoud was dead. The Northern Alliance had claimed that Massoud was only wounded. “No, believe me, he is gone,” the Saudis informed the minister. They boasted that bin Laden had given the order to kill Massoud. Now the Northern Alliance was leaderless, the last obstacle to the Taliban’s total control of the country removed by this significant favor.
On Monday, September 10, O’Neill called Robert Tucker, a friend and security-company executive, and arranged to get together that evening to talk about security issues at the World Trade Center. Tucker met O’Neill in the lobby of the north tower, and the two men rode the elevator up to O’Neill’s new office on the thirty-fourth floor. O’Neill was proud of his domain: seven buildings on sixteen acres of land with nine million square feet of office space. They went up to Windows on the World for a drink, and then drove in a downpour to Elaine’s to have dinner with their friend Jerry Hauer. O’Neill ate steak and pasta. Elaine Kaufman, the renowned doyenne of the establishment, remembered that O’Neill nursed a glass of iced coffee with dessert. “He wasn’t an alcoholic like a lot of them,” she said. Around midnight, the three men dropped in on the China Club, a nightspot in midtown. O’Neill told his friends that something big was going to happen. “We’re overdue,” he said again.
Valerie James had been out entertaining clients that evening. It was Fashion Week, and as the sales director for a major designer, she was harried. O’Neill had called her at the office earlier and promised to be home no later than ten thirty. She finally went to bed an hour later. She woke up at one thirty and he still wasn’t home. Annoyed, she sat down at the computer and began playing a game. John came home around four and sat down next to her. “You play a mean game of solitaire, babe,” he said. But Valerie felt spurned and they went to bed without speaking. The next morning she was still frosty. O’Neill came into the bathroom and put his arms around her. He said, “Please forgive me.” She was touched and said, “I do forgive you.” He offered to drive her to work and dropped her off at 8:13 in the flower district, where she had an appointment. Then he headed to the Trade Center.
BIN LADEN AND ZAWAHIRI and a small group of the inner corps of al-Qaeda fled into the mountains above Khost, near the Lion’s Den, where bin Laden’s Afghan adventure had begun. He told his men that something great was going to happen, and soon Muslims from around the world would join them in Afghanistan to defeat the superpower. The men carried a satellite dish and a television set.
Before 9/11, bin Laden and his followers had been beset by vivid dreams. Normally, after the dawn prayers, if a member of al-Qaeda had a dream during the night, he would recount it, and bin Laden would divine its meaning. People who knew nothing of the plot reported dreams of a plane hitting a tall building. “We were playing a soccer match. Our team against the Americans,” one man told bin Laden. “But the strange thing is, I was wondering why Osama made our entire team up of pilots. Was this a soccer match or an airplane?” The al-Qaeda spokesman, Suleiman Abu Ghaith, dreamed he was watching television with bin Laden, which showed an Egyptian family at the dinner table and the eldest son dancing an Egyptian folk dance. A legend scrolled across the bottom of the screen: “To avenge the children of al-Aqsa [the mosque in Jerusalem], Osama bin Laden carries out attacks against the Americans.” When he described this to bin Laden in front of fifty other men, bin Laden simply said, “Okay, I will tell you later.” But then he abruptly banned all talk of dreams, especially those that envisioned airplanes flying into buildings, for fear that they would give the plan away. He personally dreamed of America in ashes, believing it was a prophecy.
Steve Bongardt was at his cubicle in the I-49 squad reading intelligence on his computer. There was a report that the al-Qaeda camps in Tora Bora were being revitalized. “That can’t be good,” he thought. Barry Mawn was in his office when he heard an earsplitting roar. He looked out his window too late to see the plane passing, nearly at eye level, but he heard the explosion. He thought a jet hurtling down the Hudson River had broken the sound barrier. An instant later his secretary screamed, and Mawn ran to look out her window at the burning hole in the ninety-second floor of the north tower of the Trade Center, blocks away. Mawn immediately gathered his employees. He told the SWAT and evidence recovery teams that they needed to go assist the New York police and fire departments. As an afterthought, he also dispatched the terrorism task force.
John P. O’Neill, Jr., a computer expert for MBNA in Delaware, was on his way to New York to install some equipment in his father’s new office. From the window of the train, O’Neill’s son saw smoke coming from the Trade Center. He called his father on his cell phone. O’Neill told him he was okay. He said he was headed outside to assess the damage.
The plane, carrying about nine thousand gallons of jet fuel, had crashed fifty-eight floors above O’Neill’s office. He made it to the concourse level. People weren’t panicked, they were confused. Was there a bomb? an earthquake? Nothing made sense. Water poured out of the ceiling, puddling on the marble floor. The two-story cathedral windows were shattered, and a disconcerting breeze stirred the lobby. By now, the first jumpers had broken through the windows of the north tower above the burning jet fuel. Their flailing bodies landed like grenades. The plaza outside was set up for a noon concert, and pieces of bodies were draped over the chairs. Dozens of shoes were scattered across the tiles. There was a day-care center in the building, and O’Neill helped usher the children outside to safety.
In Afghanistan, members of al-Qaeda were having difficulty getting a signal from the satellite. One of the men cupped the dish in his hands, aiming it toward the sky, but he found only static. Finally, someone tuned a radio to the BBC Arabic service. A newscaster was finishing a report when he said there was breaking news: A plane had struck the World Trade Center in New York! The members of al-Qaeda, thinking that was the only action, cried in joy and prostrated themselves. But bin Laden said, “Wait, wait.”
Ali Soufan and a handful of other agents were in the American Embassy in Yemen. Barbara Bodine had been rotated out of the country and the new ambassador had not yet arrived. Soufan was talking to his fiancée on the phone when she told him that the Trade Center had been attacked. He asked permission of the deputy chief of mission to enter the ambassador’s office to turn on the TV. Just as he did, the second plane hit.
Valerie James was arranging flowers in her office when “the phones started ringing off the hook.” It was a little after nine in the morning. Her children were calling her in a panic. Finally, O’Neill called. “Honey, I want you to know I’m okay. My God, Val, it’s terrible. There are body parts everywhere. Are you crying?” She was. He asked if she knew what had hit the building. She told him that her son had guessed it was a 747. Then he said, “Val, I think my employers are dead. I can’t lose this job.”
“They’re going to need you more than ever,” she told him.
In Afghanistan, bin Laden also wept and prayed. The accomplishment of striking the two towers was an overwhelming signal of God’s favor, but there was more to come. Before his incredulous companions, bin Laden held up three fingers.
At 9:25, Anna DiBattista, who was driving to Philadelphia on business, received a call from O’Neill. The connection was good and then it decayed. O’Neill said he was safe and outside. “Are you sure you’re out of the building?” she asked. O’Neill replied that he loved her. She absolutely knew he was going back in.
The cloudless sky filled with coiling black smoke and a blizzard of paper—memos, photographs, stock transactions, insurance policies—which fluttered for miles on a gentle southeasterly breeze, across the East River into Brooklyn. Debris spewed onto the streets of lower Manhattan, which were already covered with bodies. Some of them had been exploded out of the building when the planes hit. A man walked out of the towers carrying someone else’s leg. Jumpers landed on several firemen, killing them instantly.
The air pulsed with sirens as firehouses and police stations all over the city emptied, sending the rescuers, many of them to their deaths. Steve Bongardt was running toward the towers, against a stream of people racing in the opposite direction. He heard the boom of the second collision. “There’s a second plane!” somebody cried. Bongardt wondered what kind of aircraft it was, perhaps a private jet that had gotten off course. Then, three blocks away from the towers, he saw one of the massive engines that had blown all the way through the tower. It had landed on a woman, who was still alive and squirming underneath. Bongardt understood then that this was the work of bin Laden.
O’Neill went back into the north tower, where the fire department had set up a command post. The lobby stank of jet fuel, which was draining into the elevator shafts, creating an explosive well. Heavily laden firemen made their way up the stairs. They were used to disaster, but their eyes were filled with awe and uncertainty. Meanwhile, a slow-moving stream of people descended the escalators from the mezzanine, like a dream. They were wet and caked in slime. Some of them had come from the upper floors and were naked and badly burned. Police directed them to the underground tunnels to avoid the jumpers. A rumor raced through the room that a third plane was headed toward them. Suddenly one of the elevators, which had been paralyzed after the strike, popped open, disgorging a dozen dazed people who had been trapped since the first plane hit and had no idea what had happened.
Wesley Wong, an FBI communications expert, leaped into the lobby through one of the busted-out windows, narrowly escaping the plummeting body of a middle-aged man in blue pants and a white shirt. Wong and O’Neill had known each other for more than twenty years. Even in this confusion, O’Neill looked calm and dapper, wearing his usual dark suit with a white pocket handkerchief, only a smudge of ash on his back indicating that the bottom had fallen out of his world. O’Neill asked Wong if there was any information he could divulge, acknowledging the fact that he was now an outsider and not privy to such details. “Is it true the Pentagon has been hit?” he asked. “Gee, John, I don’t know,” said Wong. “Let me try to find out.” But then O’Neill had trouble with the reception on his cell phone and started walking away. He said, “I’ll catch up with you later.” Wong last saw O’Neill walking toward the tunnel leading to the south tower.
At 9:38 a.m., the third plane had crashed into the headquarters of American military power and the symbol of its might. When news came of the Pentagon strike, bin Laden held up four fingers to his wonder-struck followers, but the final strike, on the U.S. Capitol, would fail.
Ali Soufan called O’Neill from Yemen, but could not get a connection.
Steve Gaudin, just back from language school in Vermont, picked up a piece of an airplane on the corner of Church and Vesey Streets and helplessly thought, “I just didn’t ask enough questions.” A few feet away, Barry Mawn was walking west on Vesey Street, toward the police emergency command center. He saw a woman’s foot in the street with a pink sock and a white tennis shoe. Suddenly, the ground trembled. He looked up to see the south tower collapsing on top of itself, gathering momentum and force as it threw off a great gray cloud of pulverized concrete that spilled over the surrounding office towers in a massive cascade. It sounded like an express train roaring through the station, chased by a huge wind. Mawn, plagued by a herniated disk, hobbled after two firemen who ran through the shattered windows of 7 World Trade. There were six or seven men pressed together in the lobby, sheltering behind a single column. One of the firemen cried out that they should hold on to each other and not let go. Just then, the debris blew in like a bomb. If they hadn’t been behind a column they would have been shredded. The room blacked out and the men choked on the acrid dust. Outside, everything was on fire.
Half a block away, Debbie Doran and Abby Perkins, who were on the I-49 squad, were in the basement of a building on the corner of Church and Vesey. They remembered Rosie, the woman rescue workers had failed to save in the rubble of the Nairobi bombing in 1998. She had died of dehydration. Now they expected to be buried under a building themselves, and they began filling trash cans with water.
Dan Coleman was in his bureau car next to St. Paul’s Chapel, waiting for another member of the I-49 squad, when he saw a tornado coming up Broadway. It was incomprehensible. His partner ran past him, headed north. “Get in the car!” Coleman called out. Four policemen also jumped in; one of them was having a heart attack. Then the blackness of the cloud engulfed them. “Turn on the air conditioning!” one of the cops gasped. Coleman turned it on, and the car filled with smoke. He quickly switched it off.
Everybody was yelling at him to get out of there, but he couldn’t see anything. He backed up and almost rolled into a subway entrance. Then an ambulance appeared and the cops got out. Coleman abandoned the car and went to find the rest of his squad.
He walked inside the cloud against the stream of fleeing people who were like ash-covered ghouls, as if they had been exhumed. He also was as white as a snowman, and the dust was beginning to harden, turning his hair into a helmet. The dust was a compound of concrete, asbestos, lead, fiberglass, paper, cotton, jet fuel, and the pulverized organic remains of 2,749 people who died in the towers.
Valerie heard screams in the rental office next door. She ran to see the large-screen TV. As soon as she saw the south tower collapsing, she slumped into a chair and declared, “Oh my God, John is dead.”