20

Revelations

THE FBI ORDERED ALI SOUFAN and the rest of the team in Yemen to evacuate immediately. The morning after 9/11, the CIA’s chief of station in Aden did them the favor of driving them to the airport in Sanaa. He was sitting in the lounge with them when he got a call on his cell phone. He told Soufan, “They want to talk to you.”

One of the FBI communications specialists unpacked the satellite phone and set up the dish so Soufan could make the call. When he spoke to Dina Corsi at headquarters, she told him to stay in Yemen. He was upset. He wanted to get back to New York to investigate the attack on America—right now! “This is about that—what happened yesterday,” she told him. “Quso is our only lead.”

She wouldn’t tell him any more. Soufan got his luggage off the plane, but he was puzzled. What did Quso, the sleeping cameraman in the Cole bombing, have to do with 9/11? Another investigator, Robert McFadden, and a couple of SWAT guys stayed with him for security.

The order from headquarters was to identify the hijackers “by any means necessary,” a directive Soufan had never seen before. When they returned to the embassy, a fax came over a secure line with photos of the suspects. Then the CIA chief drew Soufan aside and handed him a manila envelope. Inside were three surveillance photos and a complete report about the Malaysia meeting—the very material Soufan had been asking for, which the CIA had denied him until now. The wall had come down. When Soufan realized that the agency and some people in the bureau had known for more than a year and a half that two of the hijackers were in the country, he ran into the bathroom and retched.

One of the photos showed a man who looked like Quso. Soufan went to General Ghalib Qamish, director of the Political Security Office, and demanded to see the prisoner Quso again. “What does this have to do with the Cole?” Qamish wanted to know.

“I’m not talking about the Cole,” said Soufan. “Brother John is missing.” He started to say something else, but he choked up. General Qamish’s eyes also filled with tears. There was a long silence filled with the immense vacancy of O’Neill’s passing.

General Qamish said that the prisoner was in Aden and there was only one last flight that evening into the capital. He picked up the phone to his subordinates and began shouting into it, “I want Quso flown in here tonight!” The Americans could almost hear the heels clicking on the other end. Then the general called the airport and demanded to be patched through to the pilot. “You will not take off until my prisoner is aboard,” he ordered.

At midnight, Quso sat in the PSO office. He was in a petulant frame of mind. “Just because something happens in New York or Washington, you don’t need to talk to me,” he said. Soufan showed him three surveillance photos, which included the hijackers Mihdhar and Hazmi, but Quso denied that he was in any of the pictures.

The next day the CIA finally gave Soufan the fourth photo of the Malaysia meeting, which it had buried until now. Quso grudgingly identified the figure in the picture as Khallad, although Soufan already knew who he was. He was the mastermind of the Cole. The photo was the first link between al-Qaeda and 9/11.

Soufan interrogated Quso for three nights, then wrote reports and did research all day. On the fourth night, Soufan collapsed from exhaustion and was taken to the hospital. The next morning, however, he was back in the PSO office. Quso identified Marwan al-Shehhi, the pilot of United Airlines Flight 175, which crashed into the second tower. He had met Shehhi in a Kandahar guesthouse. He remembered that Shehhi had been ill during Ramadan, and that the emir of the guesthouse had taken care of him. The emir’s name was Abu Jandal. As it happened, Abu Jandal was also in Yemeni custody.

He was a large man for a Yemeni, powerful, with a dark full beard, although he had softened up after months in jail. Soufan immediately recognized him as bin Laden’s bodyguard.

Abu Jandal scowled at the Americans. “What are these infidels doing here?” he demanded. He took one of the plastic chairs and turned it around, sitting with his arms crossed and his back to the interrogators.

After some coaxing, Soufan got Abu Jandal to face him, but he still refused to look him in the eye. Abu Jandal did want to talk, however; he delivered a lengthy rant against America in rapid-fire Hijazi dialect. He also complained about the fact that he had never been charged. “Why am I in jail?” he kept demanding.

“Why is he in jail?” the Americans asked their Yemeni counterparts during a break.

“Suspicion.”

“Suspicion of what?”

“You know, suspicion,” the Yemeni officer responded.

Soufan realized that the prisoner was well trained in counterinterrogation techniques, since he easily agreed to things that Soufan already knew—that he had fought in Bosnia, Somalia, and Afghanistan, for instance—and denied everything else. The responses were designed to make the interrogators question their assumptions. Abu Jandal portrayed himself as a good Muslim who had flirted with jihad but had become disillusioned. He didn’t think of himself as a killer but as a revolutionary who was trying to rid the world of evil, which he believed mainly came from the United States of America, a country he knew practically nothing about.

As the nights passed, Abu Jandal warmed to the sport of the interrogation. He was in his early thirties, older than most jihadis. He had grown up in Jeddah, bin Laden’s hometown, and he was well read in religion. He enjoyed drinking tea and lecturing the Americans on the radical Islamist view of history; his sociability was his weak spot. Soufan flattered him and engaged him in theological debate. Within Abu Jandal’s diatribes, Soufan picked up several useful details—that he had grown tired of fighting, that he was troubled by the fact that bin Laden had sworn bayat to Mullah Omar, that he worried about his two children, one of whom had a bone disease. Soufan also noted that Abu Jandal declined the pastries that came with the coffee, admitting he was a diabetic. These were small revelations that Soufan could use in getting him to identify the hijackers.

The next night, the Americans brought some sugarless wafers, a courtesy that Abu Jandal acknowledged. Soufan also brought him a history of America in Arabic.

Abu Jandal was confounded by Soufan and what he represented: a Muslim who could argue religion with him, who was in the FBI, who loved America. He quickly consumed the history that Soufan gave him and was shocked to learn of the American Revolution and the passionate struggle against tyranny that was woven into the American heritage. His worldview depended on the assumption that the United States was the wellspring of evil in the world.

Soufan, meanwhile, was trying to determine the boundaries of Abu Jandal’s moral landscape. He asked about the proper way to wage jihad. Abu Jandal eagerly talked about how a warrior should treat his adversary in battle. The Quran and hadith are full of instructions concerning the honorable conduct of warfare.

Where does it sanction suicide bombing? Soufan wanted to know.

Abu Jandal said the enemy had an advantage in weapons, but the suicide bombers evened the score. “These are our missiles,” he said.

What about women and children? Soufan asked. Aren’t they supposed to be protected? He pointed to the bombings of the American embassies in East Africa. He recalled a woman on a bus in front of the Nairobi embassy, who was found clutching her baby, trying to protect him from the flames. Both had been incinerated. What sin had the mother committed? What about the soul of her child?

“God will give them their rewards in the Hereafter,” said Abu Jandal. Besides, he added, “can you imagine how many joined bin Laden after the embassy bombings? Hundreds came and asked to be martyrs.”

But many of the East African victims, perhaps most of them, were Muslims, said Soufan. The discussion was growing heated. Several times Abu Jandal resorted to quoting certain clerical authorities or suras from the Quran, but he found that Soufan was more than a match for him on theological matters. Now Abu Jandal asserted that, because the embassy bombings were on a Friday, when the victims should have been in the mosque, they were not real Muslims. It was the usual takfir view, but at least Soufan knew where the moral lines were drawn.

On the fifth night, Soufan slammed a news magazine on the table between them. There were photographs of the airplanes crashing into the towers and the Pentagon, graphic shots of people trapped in the towers and jumpers falling a hundred stories. “Bin Laden did this,” Soufan told him.

Abu Jandal had heard about the attacks, but he didn’t know many details. He studied the pictures in amazement. He said it looked like a “Hollywood production,” but the scale of the atrocity visibly shook him. At that time the casualties were thought to be in the tens of thousands.

Besides Soufan and Abu Jandal, the small interrogation room held McFadden and two Yemeni investigators. Everyone sensed that Soufan was closing in. American and allied troops were preparing to go to war in Afghanistan, but they were waiting for information about the structure of al-Qaeda, the locations of hideouts, and the plans for escape, all of which American intelligence officials hoped Soufan and the other investigators could supply.

Coincidentally, there was a local Yemeni paper sitting on a shelf under the coffee table. Soufan showed it to Abu Jandal. The headline read, “Two Hundred Yemeni Souls Perish in New York Attack.”

Abu Jandal read the headline and drew a breath. “God help us,” he muttered.

Soufan asked what kind of Muslim would do such a thing. Abu Jandal insisted that the Israelis must have committed the attacks on New York and Washington, not bin Laden. “The Sheikh is not that crazy,” he said.

Soufan took out a book of mug shots containing photos of known al-Qaeda members and various pictures of the hijackers. He asked Abu Jandal to identify them. The Yemeni flipped through them quickly and closed the book.

Soufan opened the book again and told him to take his time. “Some of them I have in custody,” he said, hoping that Abu Jandal wouldn’t realize that the hijackers were all dead.

Abu Jandal paused a fraction of a second on the picture of Marwan al-Shehhi before he started to turn the page. “You’re not done with this one,” Soufan observed. “Ramadan, 1999. He’s sick. You’re his emir and you take care of him.”

Abu Jandal looked at Soufan in surprise.

“When I ask you a question, I already know the answer,” said Soufan. “If you’re smart, you’ll tell me the truth.”

Abu Jandal conceded that he knew Shehhi and gave his Qaeda name, Abdullah al-Sharqi. He did the same with Mohammed Atta, Khaled al-Mihdhar, and four others. But he still insisted that bin Laden would never commit such an action. It was the Israelis, he maintained.

“I know for sure that the people who did this were Qaeda guys,” said Soufan. He took seven photos out of the book and laid them on the table.

“How do you know?” asked Abu Jandal. “Who told you?”

“You did,” said Soufan. “These are the hijackers. You just identified them.”

Abu Jandal blanched. He covered his face with his hands. “Give me a moment,” he pleaded.

Soufan walked out of the room. When he came back he asked Abu Jandal what he thought now.

“I think the Sheikh went crazy,” he said. And then he told Soufan everything he knew.

MARK ROSSINI had been told that John O’Neill was safe, and so he had spent much of that day and the next calling O’Neill’s friends around the world, reassuring them that O’Neill was fine. Now he had to call them again, one by one. He was so angry with O’Neill. “Fucking bastard. Why didn’t he run away?” For weeks, when he went home, Rossini would sit in his car and weep before he went into his house. Some of the agents had breakdowns. Some, like Dan Coleman, suffered permanent damage to their lungs because of the dust they inhaled that day.

The Trade Center burned for a hundred days. All during that time, the acrid stench penetrated the office of the FBI, a sickening reminder of their failure to stop the attack and their own narrow escape from death. One active agent, Leonard Hatton, a bomb technician, did not survive. He had worked the embassy bombings and the Cole with O’Neill, and he died trying to rescue victims in the towers. In the hectic, endless months following 9/11, the members of the I-49 squad were sorting through their shock, their grief, and their shame. Better than anyone in the country, they had known the danger America faced. And yet the I-49 squad had been largely alone in its efforts. Since the embassy bombings they had labored tirelessly, spending months and even years out of the country, many of them losing marriages or significant relationships because of the toll the investigations had taken. They were exhausted even before 9/11. Now their trauma was compounded by the stigma that was assigned to them because they had not prevented the tragedy they had known was coming.

O’Neill’s face was one of thousands on the handmade posters plastering the walls of the Port Authority and Grand Central Terminal and telephone poles all over Manhattan. Against all odds, Valerie’s brother, John McKillop, a paramedic in Chicago, vowed to find O’Neill. He and twenty-five of his colleagues drove to New York, with a police escort all the way. They were one of many spontaneous caravans of emergency services that poured into the city from all over the country. It was strange to see military forces on the streets of an American city, with gun emplacements protecting the bridges and significant buildings. Airports were shut down everywhere in America, but military jets scurried about like angry hornets.

When McKillop got to Ground Zero, he was staggered by the immense burning mountain of debris. Rescue workers were digging night and day hoping to find survivors, but the sight sucked the hope out of McKillop. “All I could think of was, What am I going to tell my sister?”

Many of the bodies of the people who died in the Trade Center were never found, but on September 21 rescuers digging in the rubble near the corner of Liberty and Greenwich streets found the corpse of a man in a blue suit. His wallet was in his breast pocket. It was John.

In so many respects, the Trade Center dead formed a kind of universal parliament, representing sixty-two countries and nearly every ethnic group and religion in the world. There was an ex-hippie stockbroker, the gay Catholic chaplain of the New York City Fire Department, a Japanese hockey player, an Ecuadoran sous chef, a Barbie Doll collector, a vegetarian calligrapher, a Palestinian accountant…. The manifold ways in which they attached to life testified to the Quranic injunction that the taking of a single life destroys a universe. Al-Qaeda had aimed its attacks at America, but it struck all of humanity.

As bits and pieces of the dead were extracted from the site, they were cataloged and identified, often using DNA that emergency workers had secured from family members who supplied strands of hair from a victim’s brush, for instance. Each part of each body was given the same treatment, with one exception: When anyone of the more than four hundred deceased members of the uniformed services was discovered, there was a special protocol, which was accorded O’Neill. An American flag was draped over his body, and the New York City policemen and firemen who were digging through the rubble stood at attention as his body was carried to the ambulance.

When he was growing up in Atlantic City, John O’Neill had been an altar boy at St. Nicholas of Tolentine Church. On September 28, a thousand mourners gathered at St. Nicholas to say farewell. Many of them were agents and policemen and members of foreign intelligence services who had followed O’Neill into the war against terrorism long before it had become a rallying cry. In the nervous days after the attacks, the streets around the church were barricaded and an army helicopter prowled overhead.

Dick Clarke had not shed a tear since 9/11, but when the bagpipes played and the casket passed by, he suddenly broke down. He remembered the last conversation he had with O’Neill, when he had turned down the job. “Look on the bright side,” O’Neill had told him. “Whenever you come to New York, you can come up to Windows on the World.” Then he had said, “Wherever we wind up, we’ll always be brothers.”

O’Neill’s funeral was the catastrophe of coincidence that he had always been dreading. His wife and two children, and Valerie James and her two children, and Anna DiBattista encountered each other for the first time. All his secrets were revealed at once. But redemption was also present. O’Neill’s greatest regrets had to do with his failings as a father. In May he had been given another chance: He was presented with his first grandchild. Ironically, O’Neill, who had been so nurturing to Valerie’s grandchild, had trouble accepting his own status as grandfather, which always rings a mortal bell. It took him two months to get around to going to see the child. But afterward, the man who never kept family pictures in his office placed a photo of his grandson on his trophy wall. “You have been born in the greatest country in the world,” O’Neill wrote to his grandson, in a letter that his brokenhearted son read at the funeral service. “It is well to learn the ethnic backgrounds of your parents, to love and cherish the ancient folklore. But never, never forget, you are an American first. And millions of Americans before you have fought for your freedom. The Nation holds all the terms of our endearment. Support, defend and honor those whose duty it is to keep it safe.”

WHILE THEY WAITED for the mujahideen to rise up across Muslim lands and rush to Afghanistan, bin Laden and Zawahiri gloated over the success of the operation. “There is America, hit by God in one of its softest spots,” bin Laden boasted in a prerecorded videotape on al-Jazeera on October 7,the day after American and British bombers launched their first attacks on Taliban positions. “Its greatest buildings were destroyed, thank God for that. There is America, full of fear from its north to its south, from its west to its east. Thank God for that.” Then he issued his call. “These events have divided the whole world into two sides—the side of believers and the side of infidels. May God keep you away from them. Every Muslim has to rush to make his religion victorious. The winds of faith have come.”

One evening bin Laden and Zawahiri sat in a guesthouse in Kandahar. They were hosted by a paralyzed Saudi cleric named Khaled bin Ouda bin Mohammed al-Harby. “We planned and made calculations,” bin Laden recounted. “We sat and estimated the casualties of the enemy. We figured the passengers in the planes, those will die. As regards the towers, we assumed they would include the people in the three or four floors the planes would crash into. That was all we estimated. I was the most optimistic. Due to the nature of my profession and work [i.e., construction], I figured that the fuel in the plane would raise the temperature in the steel to the point that it becomes red and almost loses its properties. So if the plane hits the building here”—he gestured with his hands—“the portion of the building above will collapse. That was the most we could hope for.”

Many of the families of al-Qaeda had evacuated right after the attacks. Maha Elsamneh, the wife of Zawahiri’s friend Ahmed Khadr, packed some clothes and food and took her children to an orphanage in Lowgar, fifty kilometers south of Kabul. They hid there for a couple of months. There was a well and indoor bathrooms. In mid-November, two nights after the fall of Kabul, Zawahiri’s family appeared at the door. They looked awful. The children were barefoot and one of the daughters was not properly covered. Zawahiri’s wife, Azza, was seriously ill. She explained that they had fled first to Khost, but then had returned to Kabul to pick up some supplies. That’s when the American bombardment began.

In her feverish condition, Azza said that she had never realized who her husband actually was. “I never knew he was an emir,” she said. “I can’t believe it.” It seemed strange to Maha, because everyone else knew.

Azza was carrying her youngest, Aisha, the Down syndrome child, who was still in diapers although she was four years old. Azza worried that if she died no one else could take care of Aisha. The girl was wide-eyed and so small and needful.

By now it had gotten bitterly cold, although the war was still in the cities, the men of al-Qaeda were making their stand in Tora Bora, and their families decided to head to Pakistan. A large convoy formed and they made a slow drive through the mountains. Azza and her children stopped in Gardez at the guesthouse of Jalaladin Haqqanni, a Taliban government official, but Maha’s family went on to Khost. That night there were two thundering explosions, so great that some of the children vomited and others had diarrhea. In the morning, one of Maha’s sons went to check on the Zawahiris. He found that the house they were in had been struck. The cement roof had collapsed, pinning Azza underneath. The rescuers had found little Aisha injured but still alive, and they set her outside on a bed while they tried to save Azza. She was still alive, but she refused to be excavated because of her fear that men would see her face. Eventually, her cries stopped. When the rescuers finally returned to take care of the child, they discovered that she had frozen to death.

IN THE CAVES OF TORA BORA, bin Laden and Zawahiri visited the remaining al-Qaeda fighters and urged them to hold their positions and wait for the Americans. Instead, the al-Qaeda warriors found themselves fighting Afghans in the first two weeks of December, while the Americans flew overhead in B-52s, so far out of reach, dropping Daisy Cutter bombs on their caverns. “We were about three hundred mujahideen,” bin Laden recounted. “We dug one hundred trenches that were spread in an area that does not exceed one square mile, one trench for every three brothers, so as to avoid the huge human losses resulting from the bombardment.” Despite his preparations, on December 3, after American bombers struck a cave complex, Afghan ground troops uncovered more than a hundred bodies; they were able to identify eighteen of them as top al-Qaeda lieutenants.

Bin Laden felt betrayed by the Muslims who had failed to join him. Even the Taliban slipped away. “Only a few remained steadfast,” he complained. “The rest surrendered or fled before they encountered the enemy.” He wrote this on December 17. The brief battle of Tora Bora was over—a crushing loss for al-Qaeda, but also for the United States and its allies, who failed to nab their quarry. Bin Laden and the remaining al-Qaeda fighters had escaped into Pakistan, getting away with their lives but losing Afghanistan. Bin Laden chose this time to write what he described as his final bequest.

In his will, bin Laden tried to salvage his legacy. “I consider all Muslims in this immensely miserable time as my relatives,” he wrote. He pointed to the bombings of the embassies in East Africa, the destruction of the World Trade Center, and the attack on the Pentagon: They were great victories. “Despite the setbacks that God has inflicted upon us, these painful blows will mark the beginning of the wiping out of America and the infidel West after the passing of tens of years, God willing.”

Then he addressed his own family. “My wives, may God bestow His blessings on you,” he wrote. “You knew from the very first day that the road is surrounded with thorns and mines. You have given up the pleasures of life, your families, and chosen the hardship of living by my side.” He adjured them not to think of marrying again. “My sons, forgive me because I have given you very little of my time ever since I have chosen the path of jihad…. I have chosen a perilous course, filled with all sorts of tribulations that ruffle one’s life…. If it were not for treason I would have triumphed.” He then advised them not to join al-Qaeda. “In that I follow the example of Omar bin al-Khatab, the commandant of the faithful, who directed his son Abdullah not to proceed to the caliphate after his death. He said, ‘If it is good we have had enough of it; if not, then Omar’s suffering was enough.’”

IN MARCH 2002 AL-QAEDA REGROUPED in the mountains near Khost, close to the Lion’s Den. Predator drones were circling the skies and American and Afghan troops, along with soldiers from Canada, Australia, Denmark, France, Germany, and Norway, were sweeping through the mountains in an operation called Anaconda. The fighting had narrowed down to the Shah-e-Kot valley on the ragged eastern edge of Afghanistan. Regional warlords had been bought off, the borders supposedly sealed, and the al-Qaeda fighters were under constant bombardment. And yet a band of horsemen rode unhindered to Pakistan.

They came to the village of a local militia leader named Gula Jan, whose long beard and black turban might have signaled that he was a Taliban sympathizer. “I saw a heavy, older man, an Arab, who wore dark glasses and had a white turban,” Jan said four days later. “He was dressed like an Afghan, but he had a beautiful coat, and he was with two other Arabs who had masks on.” The man in the beautiful coat dismounted and began talking in a polite and humorous manner. He asked Jan and an Afghan companion about the location of American and Northern Alliance troops. “We are afraid we will encounter them,” he said. “Show us the right way.”

While the men were talking, Jan slipped off to examine a flyer that had been dropped into the area by American airplanes. It showed a photograph of a man in a white turban and glasses. His face was broad and meaty, with a strong, prominent nose and full lips. His untrimmed beard was gray at the temples and ran in milky streaks below his chin. On his high forehead, framed by the swaths of his turban, was a darkened callus formed by many hours of prayerful prostration. His eyes reflected the sort of decisiveness one might expect in a medical man, but they also showed a measure of serenity that seemed oddly out of place in a Wanted poster. The flyer noted that Zawahiri had a price of $25 million on his head.

Jan returned to the conversation. The man he now believed to be Zawahiri said to him, “May God bless you and keep you from the enemies of Islam. Try not to tell them where we came from and where we are going.”

There was a telephone number on the Wanted poster, but Gula Jan did not have a phone. Zawahiri and the masked Arabs disappeared into the mountains.