The Looming Tower (35 page)

The bureau’s culture had grown up in the decades when the FBI was fighting the Mafia, an organization created by people from very similar origins. The bureau knew its enemy then, but it was deeply uninformed about this new threat. The radical Islamists came from places few agents had ever been to, or even heard of. They spoke a language that only a handful in the bureau understood. Even pronouncing the names of suspects or informants was a challenge. It was hard to believe in those days that people who were so far away and so exotic posed a real threat. There was a sense in the bureau that because they were not like us, they were not a very appealing enemy.

What distinguished O’Neill early in his new posting was his recognition of the fact that the nature of terrorism had changed; it had gone global and turned murderous. In the recent past, terror in America had been largely a domestic product, produced by underground associations such as the Ku Klux Klan, the Black Panthers, or the Jewish Defense League. The bureau had faced foreign elements before on American soil, notably the Fuerzas Armadas de Liberación Nacional (FALN), a Puerto Rican independence group that carried out approximately 150 terrorist acts in the United States during the seventies and early eighties. But deaths from those attacks were accidental, or at least beside the point. O’Neill’s realization, shared by few, was that the radical Islamists had a wider dramatic vision that included murder on a large scale. He was one of the first to recognize the scope of their enterprise and their active presence inside the United States. It was O’Neill who saw that the man behind this worldwide network was a reclusive Saudi dissident in the Sudan with a dream to destroy America and the West. Early in O’Neill’s career as the bureau’s counterterrorism chief, his interest in bin Laden became such an obsession that his colleagues began to question his judgment.

O’Neill was separated from bin Laden by many layers of culture and belief, but he devoted himself to trying to understand this new enemy in the darkened mirror of human nature. They were quite different men, but O’Neill and bin Laden were well-matched opponents: ambitious, imaginative, relentless, and each eager to destroy the other and all he represented.

O
N THE OTHER SIDE OF THAT MIRROR,
bin Laden looked at America as something other than an ordinary country or even a superpower. He saw it as the vanguard of a global crusade on the part of Christians and Jews to crush the Islamic resurgence. Although he may not have read Samuel P. Huntington’s 1993 treatise on the “clash of civilizations,” he seized the idea and would refer to it later in interviews, saying it was his duty to promote such a clash. History moved in long, slow waves, he believed, and this contest had been going on continuously since the founding of Islam. “This battle is not between al-Qaeda and the U.S.,” bin Laden would later explain. “This is a battle of Muslims against the global Crusaders.” It was a theological war, in other words, and the redemption of humanity was at stake.

In August 1995 bin Laden made a decisive break with his homeland. In what he labeled a “frank manifesto,” bin Laden attacked King Fahd directly in one of his faxed commentaries. This was ostensibly a response to the reshuffling of the Saudi cabinet the week before, which, like most political events in the Kingdom, was designed to give the appearance of reform without any real change. In a lengthy preamble, bin Laden made a legalistic case, based upon the Quran and the commentaries of Islamic scholars, that the king himself was an infidel. The takfiri influence is clear, although some of his argument was obscure and wild-eyed. For instance, bin Laden cited article 9 of the charter of the Gulf Cooperation Council, which was set up to resolve trade conflicts between Arab countries in the Persian Gulf. Article 9 states that the council will follow the rules of its constitution, international law and norms, and the principles of Islamic law. “What mockery of Allah’s religion!” bin Laden exclaimed. “You have put the Islamic law only at the end.”

But many of the points bin Laden made in his diatribe were already deeply believed by large numbers of Saudis and echoed the pleas that Islamic reformers had made in a far more polite petition, one that resulted in the imprisonment of several leading clerics. “The main reason for writing this letter to you is not your oppression of people and their rights,” bin Laden began. “It’s not your insult to the dignity of our nation, your desecration of its sanctuaries, and your embezzlement of its wealth and riches.” Bin Laden gestured to the economic crisis that had followed the Gulf War, to the “insane inflation,” the overcrowding in the classroom, and the spread of unemployment. “How can you ask people to save power when everyone can see your enchanting palaces lit up night and day?” he demanded. “Do we not have the right to ask you, O King, where has all the money gone? Never mind answering—one knows how many bribes and commissions ended in your pocket.”

He then turned to the galling presence of American troops in the Kingdom. “It is unconscionable to let the country become an American colony with American soldiers—their filthy feet roaming every-where—for no reason other than protecting your throne and protecting oil sources for their own use,” he wrote. “These filthy, infidel Crusaders must not be allowed to remain in the Holy Land.”

The king’s tolerance of man-made laws and the presence of infidel troops proved to bin Laden that the king was an apostate and must be toppled. “You have brought to our people the two worst calamities, blasphemy and poverty,” he wrote. “Our best advice to you now is to submit your resignation.”

One can imagine the shock that such a letter must have visited on the Saudi people, much less the king. In a society where no one could speak freely, the thunder of bin Laden’s language jolted and titillated his mute countrymen. But he did not call for revolution. Although he accused several leading princes of corruption and incompetence, he was not asking for the overthrow of the royal family. Except for the king’s abdication, he didn’t propose any solutions to the problems he cited. He pointedly made no reference at all to Crown Prince Abdullah, next in line to the throne. Despite the incendiary tone of the document, it was essentially modest in its ambition. Bin Laden showed himself to be a loyal reformer with little to offer in the way of useful political ideas. His insurrectionary zeal was directed toward the United States, not toward his homeland.

Many Saudis shared his hostility to the continuing American presence in the Kingdom, especially after Dick Cheney’s well-known pledge that they would leave. Ostensibly, the troops remained in order to enforce the UN-mandated no-fly zone over Iraq. By
1992,
however, and certainly by
1993,
there were enough new basing agreements in the region that the Americans could have withdrawn without jeopardizing their mission. But the Saudi bases were convenient and well appointed, and there didn’t seem to be a sufficiently pressing need to leave.

T
HE WEEK FOLLOWING
bin Laden’s insulting letter to the king, Prince Naif announced the execution of Abdullah al-Hudhaif. Hudhaif, an Arab Afghan, was not under a death sentence; he had been given twenty years for spraying acid in the face of a security officer who was reputed to have been a torturer. The Saudis were now being advised by the former Egyptian minister of the interior, who had led a brutal crackdown on dissidents in his own country. There was a wide-spread feeling in the Kingdom that the stakes had been raised, and that this summary execution was a message to bin Laden and his followers. Hudhaif’s Arab Afghan comrades, for their part, were calling for revenge against the regime.

In downtown Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, on Telateen Street, across from the Steak House restaurant, there was a communications center for the Saudi National Guard. The mission of the guard was to protect the royal family and enforce stability. Because those goals were also important to the United States, there was an agreement between the two countries that the U.S. Army, along with the Vinnell Corporation, an American defense contractor, would train the guard in the monitoring and surveillance of Saudi citizens.

Shortly before noon on November
13, 1995,
Colonel Albert M. Bleakley, an engineer who had lived for three years in the Kingdom, walked out of the center to his truck, parked on the street outside. Suddenly a hot blast blew him backward several feet. When he was able to stand, he could see a line of cars burning, including the demolished remnants of his Chevrolet Yukon. “Why would my car blow up?” he wondered. “There are no bombs here.”

The assassins had parked a van containing a hundred pounds of Semtex explosive outside the three-story building, which was now shattered and burning. Bleakley staggered into the ruin. He was bleeding from the neck and his ears were ringing from the deafening blast. Three dead men lay in the snack bar, crushed by a concrete wall. Four others were killed and sixty people injured. Five of the dead were Americans.

The Saudi government reacted by rounding up Arab Afghans and torturing confessions out of four men. Three of the four suspects had fought in Afghanistan, and one had also fought in Bosnia. The purported leader of the group, Muslih al-Shamrani, had trained at al-Qaeda’s Farouk camp in Afghanistan. The men read their nearly identical confessions on Saudi television, admitting that they had been influenced by reading bin Laden’s speeches and those of other prominent dissidents. Then they were taken to a public square and beheaded.

Although bin Laden never publicly admitted authorizing the attack or training the men who carried it out, he called them “heroes” and suggested they were responding to his fatwa urging jihad against the American occupiers. “They have pulled down the disgrace and submissiveness off the forehead of their nation,” he said. He noted the fact that the number of U.S. troops in the Kingdom was reduced as a consequence—another proof of the truth of his analysis of American weakness.

The summary executions foreclosed the opportunity of learning exactly what connections there were between al-Qaeda and the perpetrators Bin Laden himself privately confided to the editor of
Al-Quds al-Arabi
that he had activated a sleeper cell of Afghan veterans when the Saudi government failed to respond to his protest of American troops on Arabian soil. John O’Neill suspected that the executed men had nothing to do with the crime. He had sent several agents to try to question the suspects, but they had been executed before the Americans got the chance to talk to them. Whatever al-Qaeda’s actual connection to the attack, Prince Turki would later describe the National Guard bombing as bin Laden’s “first terrorist blow.”

12

The Boy Spies

H
OSNI
M
UBARAK, THE EGYPTIAN PRESIDENT,
is a squat, neckless man with a heavy lower lip that juts forward when he talks, fleshy cheeks, and thickly lidded eyes, like a clay rendering that has not been fully formed. He was sixty-seven years old in
1995,
but his wavy hair was dyed a brilliant black, and the billboards bearing his visage in Cairo showed a man twenty years younger—changelessness being the most obvious feature of his rule. He had stood beside Anwar al-Sadat on the reviewing platform when the assassins struck, and upon assuming the presidency he declared a state of emergency that was still in effect fourteen years later. His early efforts at liberalizing the political process were answered by the victories of the Muslim Brothers and then by the terror campaign of the radical Islamists in the nineties. Mubarak showed himself to be as pitiless as the insurgents, but the violence had not yet reached its climax.

In April, Egyptian intelligence learned that Zawahiri had chaired a meeting of al-Jihad in Khartoum that included leading members of the rival Islamic Group—a troublesome development. The reports said that the two organizations were working together to restart terror activities in Egypt, and that they were being aided by the Sudanese government, which was supplying them with arms and false papers. But as yet there was no word on how they would strike, or where.

Hasan al-Turabi’s grand Islamist revolution had been stymied, unable to spread beyond Sudan. Egypt was of course the ultimate target, but Mubarak had the country in an iron grip. If he were eliminated, Zawahiri and the plotters reasoned, that would create a power vacuum, and in the upcoming parliamentary elections alternative Islamist movements could take charge.

Mubarak was flying to Addis Ababa on June 26 for a meeting of the Organization of African Unity. The Egyptian radicals had been anticipating this event for more than a year, placing members of the cell charged with carrying out the killing in the Ethiopian capital. Some of them married local women and ostensibly became a part of the community.

Working with assassins from the Islamic Group, Sudanese intelligence smuggled weapons into their embassy in Ethiopia. The leader of the plot was Mustafa Hamza, a senior Egyptian member of al-Qaeda and commander of the military branch of the Islamic Group. At a farm north of Khartoum, Zawahiri gave a motivational talk to the nine terrorists who were going to carry out the plot, and then he went on to Ethiopia to inspect the killing ground.

The plan was to station two cars along the airport road, the only route into the capital. When Mubarak’s limousine approached the first car, the assassins would strike with automatic weapons and rocket-propelled grenades. If Mubarak escaped the first trap, another car would be waiting down the road.

Mubarak’s plane arrived an hour early, but delays in getting his entourage and bodyguards together gave the assassins time to get into place. The limousine appeared, the shooters opened fire, but the grenade launcher malfunctioned. Two of Mubarak’s Ethiopian bodyguards were killed in the exchange, and five of the assailants. Mubarak probably saved his own life when he ordered his driver to return to the airport, thus avoiding the second ambush.

Three of the assassins were captured, and one fled back to Sudan.