The Looming Tower (44 page)

The CIA had outfitted what appeared to be a commercial shipping container that would fit in the cargo hull of a civilian version of a C-130 aircraft. Inside the container was a dentist’s chair with restraints modeled for a very tall man (the CIA was under the impression that bin Laden was six feet five inches tall); there would be a doctor inside the box as well, and he would have a wide array of medical equipment available to him, including a dialysis machine in case bin Laden actually did have kidney problems. The agency had even built a landing strip on a private ranch near El Paso, Texas, in order to practice landing at night with no lights, the pilots using night-vision goggles.

It was Scheuer’s plan to drop bin Laden in Egypt, where he could be rudely questioned and then quietly disposed of. John O’Neill furiously objected to this idea. He was a lawman, not a killer. He wanted bin Laden arrested and tried in America. He made his case to Janet Reno, the U.S. attorney general, who agreed to let the bureau take possession of bin Laden should he actually be captured. Soon Dan Coleman found himself in El Paso, rehearsing his role as the arresting officer. The plane would land, the cargo door would open, and then the container with the manacled terrorist inside would be loaded into the bay. Coleman would enter the container and find Osama bin Laden strapped to the dentist’s chair. Then he would read him his rights.

But for that, he needed an indictment. A federal grand jury in New York was listening to evidence even as the training was under way. One of the documents Coleman found on Wadih el-Hage’s computer in Nairobi made a tentative link between al-Qaeda and the killing of American servicemen in Somalia, and that became the basis of the criminal indictment that was eventually returned against bin Laden in New York in June 1998. Those specific charges against him were later dropped, however, and no testimony in subsequent terrorist trials ever proved that al-Qaeda or bin Laden had been responsible for the murder of Americans—or anyone else—before August of that year. Had he been captured at that time, it’s unlikely that bin Laden would have been convicted.

The dispute between the FBI’s O’Neill and the CIA’s Scheuer, along with the reluctance of the National Security Council to endorse what might be an embarrassing and bloody fiasco, paralyzed the plan. In desperation, George Tenet, the director of Central Intelligence, flew to the Kingdom twice in May 1998 to beg for the help of the Saudis. According to Scheuer, Crown Prince Abdullah made it clear that if the Saudis succeeded in getting bin Laden from the Taliban, American intelligence “would never breathe a word.”

The Saudis had their own concerns about bin Laden. Prince Turki had learned that he had attempted to smuggle weapons to his followers inside the Kingdom in order to attack police stations. The Saudis repeatedly complained to the Taliban about bin Laden’s meddling with Saudi internal affairs, to no effect. Finally, in June
1998,
the king summoned Turki and told him, “Finish this.”

Turki flew into the Kandahar airport, directly over the fortress-like Tarnak Farms. Until then, Turki had never met Mullah Omar. The prince was taken to a decrepit guesthouse, the former home of a wealthy merchant, a remnant of what had once been a graceful city. Mullah Omar limped forward to greet him. The one-eyed leader appeared thin and pale, with a long beard, and some kind of infirmity in one of his hands, which he clutched to his chest. War wounds and other afflictions were surpassingly common in Afghanistan; most of the Taliban cabinet members and governors were amputees or severely handicapped in multiple ways, and it was rare for any male assemblage to have a full complement of arms, legs, or eyes. Turki shook hands and sat opposite him on the floor of the salon. Behind Omar were French doors that looked out onto a semicircular terrace, and beyond that, to a dusty, barren yard.

Even during such an important ceremonial occasion as this, there was a casually disconcerting atmosphere of chaos. The room was full of people, young and old, entering at their leisure. Turki was grateful at least for the single air conditioner, which moderated the stifling heat of the Afghan summer.

Turki had brought with him Sheikh Abdullah Turki, a renowned Islamic scholar and the former minister for religious endowments, which was a lucrative source of contributions to the Taliban. In addition to serving as a reminder of Saudi support, Sheikh Abdullah’s authoritative presence would instantly resolve any religious or legal questions that might be posed about bin Laden’s status. Reminding Omar of his pledge to keep bin Laden from launching attacks of any kind against the Kingdom, Turki then asked Mullah Omar to hand over bin Laden, who had inconveniently left town for the duration of Turki’s visit.

Mullah Omar professed to be totally surprised. “I can’t just give him to you to put on the plane,” Omar complained. “After all, we provided him shelter.”

Prince Turki was stupefied by this turnabout. Mullah Omar then lectured him on the Pashtu tribal code, which he said was quite strict about betraying guests.

Sheikh Abdullah Turki offered the opinion that if a guest breaks his word, as bin Laden had done repeatedly by granting press interviews, that action absolves the host who is protecting him. The Taliban leader was unconvinced.

Thinking that Omar needed a face-saving compromise, Prince Turki suggested that the two of them set up a committee that would explore ways to formally hand over bin Laden. Then Prince Turki and his party got up to leave. As he did so, Turki asked specifically, “Are you agreed in principle that you will give us bin Laden?”

Mullah Omar said he was.

After the meeting, Saudi Arabia reportedly sent four hundred four-wheel-drive pickup trucks and other financial aid to the Taliban as a down payment for bin Laden. Six weeks later, the money and the trucks allowed the Taliban to retake Mazar-e-Sharif, a bastion of a Persian-speaking, Shiite minority, the Hazaras. Among the Taliban fighters were several hundred Arabs sent by bin Laden. Well-placed bribes left a force of only
1,500
Hazara soldiers guarding the city, and they were quickly killed. Once inside the defenseless city, the Taliban continued raping and killing for two days, indiscriminately shooting anything that moved, then slitting throats and shooting dead men in the testicles. The bodies of the dead were left to wild dogs for six days before survivors were allowed to bury them. Those citizens who fled the city on foot were bombed by the Taliban air force. Hundreds of others were loaded into shipping containers and baked alive in the desert sun. The UN estimated the total number of victims in the slaughter to be between five and six thousand people. They included ten Iranian diplomats and a journalist, whom the Taliban rounded up and shot in the basement of the Iranian consulate. Four hundred women were taken to be concubines.

But the massacre of Mazar was immediately overshadowed by other tragedies far away.

A
FTER THE FORMATION OF THE ISLAMIC FRONT,
American intelligence agencies took a greater interest in Zawahiri and his organization, al-Jihad, which was still separate from al-Qaeda but closely allied. In July 1998 CIA operatives kidnapped Ahmed Salama Mabruk and another member of Jihad outside a restaurant in Baku, Azerbaijan. Mabruk was Zawahiri’s closest political confidant. The agents cloned his laptop computer, which contained al-Qaeda organizational charts and a roster of Jihad members in Europe—“the Rosetta Stone of al-Qaeda”—as Dan Coleman called it, but the CIA refused to turn it over to the FBI.

It was a typical, pointless bureaucratic standoff of the sort that had handicapped counterrorism efforts at both organizations from the start, made worse by the personal vindictiveness that several senior agency people, including Scheuer, felt toward O’Neill. Overvaluing information for its own sake, the agency was a black hole, emitting nothing that was not blasted out of it by a force greater than gravity—and it recognized that O’Neill was such a force. He would
use
the information—for an indictment, a public trial—and it would no longer be secret, no longer be intelligence; it would be evidence, it would be news, and it would become useless as far as the agency was concerned. The agency treated the exposure of any bit of intelligence as a defeat, and it was in its nature to clutch the Mabruk computer as if it were the crown jewels. Such high-quality information was difficult to come by and, when acquired, even more difficult to act upon. Because of decades of cutbacks on human intelligence assets, there were only two thousand real operatives—spies—in the agency to cover the entire world.

O’Neill was so angry that he sent an agent to Azerbaijan to demand the actual computer from the president of the country. When that failed, he persuaded Clinton to appeal personally to the Azerbaijani president. Eventually the FBI got the computer, but the ill will between the bureau and the agency continued unabated, damaging both in their attempts to round up the al-Qaeda network.

The CIA moved against another al-Jihad cell in Tirana, Albania, which had been created by Mohammed al-Zawahiri in the early nineties. Albanian agents, under CIA supervision, kidnapped five members of the cell, blindfolded them, interrogated them for several days, and then sent the Egyptian members to Cairo. There they were tortured and put on trial with more than a hundred other suspected terrorists. Their ordeal produced twenty thousand pages of confessions. Both Zawahiri brothers were given death sentences in absentia.

On August
6,
a month after the breakup of the Albanian cell, Zawahiri sent the following declaration to the London newspaper
Al Hayat:
“We are interested in briefly telling the Americans that their message has been received and that the response, which we hope they will read carefully, is being prepared, because, with God’s help, we will write it in the language that they understand.”

D
ESPITE THE BLUSTER,
the media, the lurid calls for jihad, al-Qaeda had really done nothing so far. There were grand plans, and there were claims of past successes that al-Qaeda had little or no part of. Although al-Qaeda had already existed for ten years, it was still an obscure and unimportant organization; it didn’t compare to Hamas or Hezbollah, for instance. Thousands of young men had trained in al-Qaeda camps and returned to their home countries to create havoc; because of their training, they would be called, by intelligence agencies, “al-Qaeda linked.” Unless they had pledged their loyalty to bin Laden, however, they were not formally a part of the organization. There were fewer actual al-Qaeda members in Kandahar than there had been in Khartoum because bin Laden could no longer support them. The fireworks displays he put on for reporters were accomplished with rented mujahideen. Like blowfish, al-Qaeda and bin Laden made themselves appear larger than they actually were. But a new al-Qaeda was about to make its debut.

It was August
7, 1998,
the same day the slaughter commenced in Mazar-e-Sharif and the anniversary of the arrival of American troops in Saudi Arabia eight years before.

In Kenya, an Egyptian bomb-maker called “Saleh”—one of Zawahiri’s men—oversaw the construction of two huge explosive devices. The first, made of two thousand pounds of TNT, aluminum nitrate, and aluminum powder, was stuffed in boxes that were wired to batteries then loaded into a brown Toyota cargo truck. The two Saudis who sat in on the ABC interview, Mohammed al-‘Owhali and Jihad Ali, drove the truck through downtown Nairobi toward the American Embassy. At the same time, in Tanzania, Saleh’s second bomb was on its way to the American Embassy in Dar es Salaam. This bomb was similar in construction except that Saleh had added a number of oxygen tanks or gas canisters to provide additional fragmentation. The delivery vehicle was a gasoline truck driven by Ahmed Abdullah, an Egyptian whose nickname was Ahmed the German because of his fair hair. The bombings were scheduled for ten thirty on a Friday morning, a time when observant Muslims were supposed to be in the mosque.

Al-Qaeda’s first documented terrorist strike bore the hallmarks of its future actions. The novelty of multiple, simultaneous suicide bombings was a new and risky strategy, given the increased likelihood of failure or detection. If they succeeded, al-Qaeda would make an unrivaled claim on the world’s attention. The bombings would be worthy of bin Laden’s grandiose and seemingly lunatic declaration of war on the United States, and the suicide of the bombers would provide a scanty moral cover for operations intended to murder as many people as possible. In this, al-Qaeda was also unusual. Death on a grand scale was a goal in itself. There was no attempt to spare innocent lives, since the concept of innocence was subtracted from al-Qaeda’s calculations. Although the Quran specifically forbids killing women and children, one of the reasons the embassy in Kenya was targeted was that the death of the female American ambassador, Prudence Bushnell, would garner more publicity.

Each part of the operation betrayed al-Qaeda’s inexperience. As Jihad Ali drove into the rear parking lot of the embassy, ‘Owhali jumped out and charged toward the guard station. He was supposed to force the unarmed guard to raise the drop bar, but the guard refused. ‘Owhali had left his pistol in his jacket in the truck. He did carry out a portion of his mission, which was to throw a stun grenade into the courtyard. The noise drew the interest of people inside the buildings. One of the lessons Zawahiri had learned from his bombing of the Egyptian Embassy in Islamabad three years before was that an initial explosion brought people rushing to the windows, and many were decapitated by flying glass when the real bomb went off.