The Looming Tower (40 page)

When O’Neill arrived, however, most of the I-49 squad had been diverted to work on the crash of TWA Flight
800,
which occurred off the coast of Long Island in July 1996. Dozens of witnesses reported having seen an ascending flare that culminated in a midair explosion. It appeared to have been one of the worst acts of terror in American history, and the bureau mobilized all its impressive resources to solve the crime as quickly as possible. The Khobar Towers bombing and TWA 800 investigations were absorbing all the bureau’s available manpower without any resolution in sight.

At the outset, investigators believed that the plane had been bombed or shot down in retaliation by followers of Sheikh Omar Abdul Rahman, who was on trial in New York at the time. But after three months they came to the conclusion that the aircraft had suffered a freakish mechanical failure. The case had become largely a public-relations problem: In the face of vivid eyewitness testimony, the bureau simply didn’t know how to explain its conclusions to a skeptical public. Demoralized agents continued to comb through the wreckage of the plane, which was being put back together piece by piece in a hangar on Long Island.

O’Neill needed his squad back. Together with the Defense Department, O’Neill determined the height of TWA 800 and its distance from shore at the time of the explosion. He demonstrated that it was out of range of a Stinger missile—the most likely explanation at the time of the apparent vapor trail that witnesses noted. O’Neill proposed that the flare could have been caused by the ignition of leaking fuel from the aircraft, and he persuaded the CIA to do a video simulation of this scenario, which proved to be strikingly similar to the witnesses’ accounts. Now he could get to work on bin Laden.

A
LEC
S
TATION WAS NAMED
after the adopted Korean son of O’Neill’s temperamental CIA counterpart, Michael Scheuer. For the first time, the bureau and the agency were working in tandem on a single project, an unprecedented but awkward partnership. As far as Scheuer was concerned, the FBI simply wanted to place a spy inside Alec Station in order to steal as much information as possible. Yet Scheuer grudgingly came to respect Dan Coleman, the first bureau man to be posted inside his domain. Coleman was overweight and disheveled, with a brushy moustache and hair that refused to stay combed. He was as cantankerous as a porcupine (his FBI colleagues called him “Grumpy Santa” behind his back), but he had none of the macho FBI swagger that Scheuer so despised. It would have been easy to dismiss Coleman as another nebbishy bureaucrat, except for his intelligence and decency, the very qualities Scheuer most admired. But there was a fundamental institutional conflict that friendship could not bridge: Coleman’s mission, as an FBI agent, was to gather evidence with the eventual goal of convicting bin Laden of a crime. Scheuer, the CIA officer, had determined early on that the best strategy for dealing with bin Laden was simply to kill him.

Although Coleman dutifully reported to his superiors at the FBI, the only person genuinely interested in what he was learning was O’Neill, whom he first met at one of Dick Clarke’s briefings in the White House. O’Neill was fascinated by the Saudi dissident at a time when it was rare to meet anyone, even in the bureau, who knew who Osama bin Laden was. Then, a couple of months before O’Neill arrived in New York, Coleman had interrogated Jamal al-Fadl, the al-Qaeda defector, who revealed the existence of the terror organization and its global ambitions. In the several weeks he had spent with Fadl in a safe house in Germany, learning about the structure of the group and the personalities of its leaders, Coleman had come to the conclusion that America faced a profound new threat; and yet, his reports met with little response outside a small circle of prosecutors and a few people in the agency and the bureau who took an interest—mainly Scheuer and O’Neill.

They were the two men most responsible for putting a stop to bin Laden and al-Qaeda, and yet they disliked each other intensely—an emotion that reflected the ingrained antagonism of the organizations they represented. From the start, the response of American intelligence to the challenge presented by al-Qaeda was hampered by the dismal personal relationships and institutional warfare that these men exemplified. Coleman was caught between these two bullheaded, tempestuous, talented individuals, who constantly battled each other over a subject—bin Laden—that neither of their organizations really cared about.

In his cubicle in Alec Station, Dan Coleman continued to pursue leads that had been turned up from the Fadl interviews. He examined telephone transcripts from the wiretapped phones that were tied to bin Laden’s businesses in Khartoum. One frequently called number belonged to bin Laden’s former secretary, Wadih el-Hage, in Nairobi, Kenya. Most of Hage’s conversations had been translated from Arabic, but others were in English, especially when he was talking to his American wife. He often made awkward attempts at speaking in code, which his wife obstinately refused to understand.

“Send ten green papers, okay?” Hage said in one exchange.

“Ten red papers?” she asked.

“Green.”

“You mean money,” she concluded.

“Thank you very much,” he responded sarcastically.

Coleman took an interest in Hage, who seemed, despite his clumsy tradecraft, to be an attentive father and a caring husband. Whenever he was away, he would call his children and caution his wife about letting them watch too much television. He was ostensibly running a charity called Help Africa People, while making a living as a gem dealer.

The CIA thought Hage might be recruited as an agent. As Coleman studied the transcripts, he decided Hage was unlikely to turn, but he agreed to go to Kenya, thinking that at least he might find some evidence to substantiate the existence of this organization, al-Qaeda, that Fadl had described.

In August 1997, Coleman and two CIA officers appeared at Hage’s home in Nairobi with a search warrant and a nervous Kenyan police officer carrying an AK-47. The house sat behind a high cinder-block wall covered with broken glass, guarded by a scrawny German shepherd on a rope. Hage’s American wife, April Brightsky Ray, and her six children were there, along with April’s mother, Marion Brown. Both women, Islamic converts, were wearing hijabs.

It was odd to see them in person after having studied them from such a distance. Coleman put the women in the same category as mob wives, knowledgeable in some general way that unlawful actions were going on, but not legally complicit. April was a heavy woman with a pleasant, round face. She said her husband was out of the country on business (actually, he was in Afghanistan talking to bin Laden), but he would be back that evening. Coleman showed her his warrant to search for what he said were stolen documents.

The place was filthy and swarming with flies. One of the children had a high fever. While the agency people talked to April in another room, Marion Brown closely watched Coleman going through their drawers and closets.

“Would you like some coffee?” Brown asked.

Coleman took a look at the kitchen and declined.

“That’s good, because I might be trying to poison you,” she said.

There were papers and notebooks stacked everywhere, gas receipts that were eight years old, and business cards for bankers, lawyers, travel agents, and exterminators. On the top shelf of the bedroom closet, Coleman found an Apple PowerBook computer.

Later that day Wadih el-Hage returned. Aslender, bearded man with a withered right arm, Hage had been born in Lebanon but had gained American citizenship through his wife. He was a convert to Islam from Catholicism, and he had his own ideas about recruitment: He arrived at the meeting with the agents carrying religious tracts and spent the evening trying to get Coleman and the CIA officers to accept Islam.

That night in Nairobi, however, one of the CIA men was able to retrieve several deleted documents on the PowerBook’s hard drive that substantiated many of the allegations that Jamal al-Fadl had made about the existence of al-Qaeda and its terrorist goals. The criminal case against bin Laden remained unfocused, however.

Coleman and the agency men went through the documents, piecing together Hage’s travels. He had bought some guns for bin Laden in Eastern Europe and seemed to be making frequent trips to Tanzania. Al-Qaeda was up to something, but it was unclear what that was. In any case, it was certainly a low-end operation, and the exposure of the safe house in Nairobi had no doubt put an end to it.

15

Bread and Water

M
ULLAH
O
MAR SENT
a delegation to Tora Bora to greet bin Laden and learn more about him. Bin Laden’s declaration of war and the subsequent international media storm had shocked and divided the Taliban. Some of them pointed out that they had not invited bin Laden to Afghanistan in the first place and were not obliged to protect a man who was endangering their relations with other countries. The Taliban had no quarrel at the time with the United States, which was nominally encouraging their stabilizing influence on the country. Moreover, bin Laden’s attacks on the Saudi royal family were a direct violation of a pledge Mullah Omar had made to Prince Turki to keep his guest under control.

On the other hand, the Taliban were hopeful that bin Laden could help rebuild Afghanistan’s ravaged infrastructure and provide jobs to revivify the dead economy. They flattered him, saying that they considered themselves like the supporters of the Prophet when he took refuge in Medina. They emphasized that so long as he refrained from attacking their sponsor, Saudi Arabia, or speaking to the press, he would be welcome to remain under their protection. In return, bin Laden endorsed their rule unconditionally, although he immediately broke their trust.

In March
1997,
a television crew for CNN was driven into the frigid mountains above Jalalabad to a blanket-lined mud hut to meet with Osama bin Laden. Since arriving in Afghanistan, the exiled Saudi had already spoken with reporters from the London-based newspapers the
Independent
and
Al-Quds al-Arabi,
but this was the first television interview he had ever granted. Peter Bergen, the producer, observed that bin Laden seemed to be ill. He walked into the room using a cane and coughed softly throughout the interview.

It is possible that, until now, bin Laden had not killed an American or anyone else except on the field of battle. The actions in Aden, Somalia, Riyadh, and Dhahran may have been inspired by his words, but it has never been demonstrated that he commanded the terrorists who carried them out. Although Ramzi Yousef had trained in an al-Qaeda camp, bin Laden was not connected to the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. Bin Laden told the London-based Palestinian editor Abdel Bari Atwan that al-Qaeda was responsible for the ambush of American forces in Mogadishu in
1993,
the National Guard Training Center bombing in Riyadh in
1995,
and the Khobar Towers bombing in
1996,
but there is no evidence to substantiate these claims. He was certainly surrounded by men, like Zawahiri, who had plenty of blood on their hands, and he supported their actions in Egypt. He was, as the CIA characterized him at the time, a terrorist financier, albeit a financier without much money. Declaring war on America, however, proved to be a dazzling advertisement for himself and his cause—and irresistible for a man whose fortunes had been so badly trampled upon. Of course, his Taliban hosts forbade such publicity, but once bin Laden had gotten hold of the world’s attention, he would allow nothing to pull it out of his grasp.

Peter Arnett, the CNN reporter, began by asking bin Laden to state his criticism of the Saudi royal family. Bin Laden said that they were subservient to the United States, “and this, based on the ruling of Sharia, casts the regime outside the religious community.” In other words, he was declaring
takfir
against the royal family, saying that they were no longer to be considered Muslims and therefore could be killed.

Arnett then asked, what kind of society he would create if the Islamic movement were to take over Saudi Arabia. Bin Laden’s exact response was this: “We are confident, with the permission of God, praise and glory be to Him, that Muslims will be victorious in the Arabian Peninsula and that God’s religion, praise and glory be to Him, will prevail in this peninsula. It is a great pride and a big hope that the revelation unto Mohammed, peace be upon him, will be resorted to for ruling. When we used to follow Mohammed’s revelation, peace be upon him, we were in great happiness and in great dignity, to God belongs the credit and praise.”

What is notable about this response, filled as usual with ritualistic locutions, is the complete absence of any real political plan, beyond imposing Sharia, which of course was already in effect in Saudi Arabia. The happiness and dignity that bin Laden invoked lay on the other side of history from the concepts of nationhood and the state. The radical Islamist movement has never had a clear idea of governing, or even much interest in it, as the Taliban would conclusively demonstrate. Purification was the goal; and whenever purity is paramount, terror is close at hand.

Bin Laden cited American support for Israel as the first cause of his declaration of war, followed by the presence of American troops in Arabia. He added that American civilians must also leave the Islamic holy land because he could not guarantee their safety.

In the most revealing exchange, Arnett asked whether, if the United States complied with bin Laden’s demands to leave Arabia, he would call off his jihad. “The reaction came as a result of the aggressive U.S. policy toward the entire Muslim world, not just the Arabian Peninsula,” bin Laden said. Therefore, the United States has to withdraw from any kind of intervention against Muslims “in the whole world.” Bin Laden was already speaking as the representative of the Islamic nation, a caliph-in-waiting. “The U.S. today has set a double standard, calling whoever goes against its injustice a terrorist,” he complained. “It wants to occupy our countries, steal our resources, impose on us agents to rule us…and wants us to agree to all these. If we refuse to do so, it will say, ‘You are terrorists.’”