The Looming Tower (46 page)

“No,” said Gaudin, leaning forward and putting his hand on bin Rasheed’s knee. “But I said there were two things you don’t wash, and here’s where you forgot your training.” Gaudin stood up and put his hands on his belt, which was worn and faded. “You don’t wash a belt! Look at yours. It’s pristine! Stand up and take it off!”

Bin Rasheed stood up like a soldier obeying an order. As soon as he undid his belt, everyone in the room noticed the price tag.

Although bin Rasheed quickly recovered his poise, the interrogation now moved to a different level. Gaudin brought in John Anticev, one of the original members of the I-49 squad. Anticev has a calm manner, but his blue eyes are as vivid as searchlights. He began by politely asking if bin Rasheed had had a chance to pray. This led to a discussion of Sayyid Qutb, Abdullah Azzam, and the blind sheikh. Bin Rasheed relaxed. He seemed to relish the opportunity to lecture a Westerner about the importance of these men. They chatted until late in the evening.

“There’s one other person we haven’t talked about,” Anticev observed. “Osama bin Laden.”

Bin Rasheed’s eyes narrowed and he stopped talking. A small smile appeared on his face.

Anticev, who had been listening like a captivated student, suddenly thrust a pen and paper into bin Rasheed’s hand. “Write down the first telephone number you called after the bombing!”

Once again, bin Rasheed obeyed the order. He wrote “967-1-
200578,
” a number in Yemen. It belonged to a jihadi named Ahmed al-Hada. Bin Rasheed had called the number both before and after the bombing—as had Osama bin Laden, investigators quickly learned. This Yemeni telephone number would prove to be one of the most important pieces of information the FBI would ever discover, allowing investigators to map the links of the al-Qaeda network all across the globe.

After giving up the number, bin Rasheed stopped cooperating. Gaudin and other agents decided to leave him alone, hoping he would think he wasn’t so important to them. Meanwhile, they began to check out his story. They went to the hospital to see if they could find the doctor who treated his wounds, but there were nearly five thousand injured the day of the bombing, and few of the staff remembered any faces in the sea of blood and pain. Then a janitor asked the agents if they had come because of the bullets and the keys he had found. The items had been stashed on a window sill above a toilet stall. The key fit the model of truck used in the bombing.

At the airport, the agents discovered bin Rasheed’s landing card, which gave as his address in Nairobi the hotel where he had been discovered—so he was lying about the cab driver taking him there after the bombing. Phone records led them to a large villa where a call had been placed to the Hada phone in Yemen half an hour before the bombing. When the evidence team arrived, their swabs lit up with explosive residue. It was here the bomb had been made.

“You want to blame this on me?” bin Rasheed shouted when Gaudin confronted him with the evidence. “It’s your fault, your country’s fault for supporting Israel!” He was sputtering with fury. Flecks of foam were flying from his mouth. It was a startling turnaround from the controlled demeanor the investigators had witnessed for the past few days. “My tribe is going to kill you and your entire family!” he promised.

Gaudin was also angry. The death toll had been rising all through the week as badly injured people succumbed to their awful wounds. “Why did these people have to die?” he asked. “They had nothing to do with the United States and Israel and Palestine!”

Bin Rasheed didn’t answer directly; instead, he said something surprising: “I want a promise that I’ll be tried in America. Because America is my enemy, not Kenya. You get me that promise, and I’ll tell you everything.”

Gaudin brought Patrick Fitzgerald, the prosecutor from the Southern District of New York, into the room. Fitzgerald drew up a contract pledging that the investigators would do everything in their power to get the suspect extradited to the United States.

“My name is not Khaled Saleem bin Rasheed,” the suspect now said. “I am Mohammed al-‘Owhali, and I’m from Saudi Arabia.”

He said he was twenty-one years old, well educated, from a prominent merchant family. He had become very religious as a teenager, listening to sermons on audiocassettes and reading books and magazines that glorified martyrdom. A tape by Sheikh Safar al-Hawali that talked about “Kissinger’s Promise”—a purported plan of former American secretary of state Henry Kissinger’s to occupy the Arabian Peninsula—particularly affected him. Inflamed by this spurious information, ‘Owhali made his way to Afghanistan to join the jihad.

He took basic training at the Khaldan camp, learning how to use automatic weapons and explosives. ‘Owhali performed so well that he was granted an audience with bin Laden, who counseled him to get more instruction. ‘Owhali went on to learn techniques for kidnapping, hijacking planes and buses, seizing buildings, and gathering intelligence. Bin Laden kept an eye on him, reassuring him that he would eventually get a mission.

While ‘Owhali was fighting with the Taliban, Jihad Ali came to him and said that they had finally been approved for a martyrdom operation, but it was to be in Kenya. ‘Owhali was crestfallen. “I want to attack
inside
the U.S.,” he pleaded. His handlers told him that the embassy strikes were important because they would keep America distracted while the real attack was being prepared.

“We have a plan to attack the U.S., but we’re not ready yet,” the suspect told Gaudin and the other investigators. “We need to hit you outside the country in a couple of places so you won’t see what is going on inside. The big attack is coming. There’s nothing you can do to stop it.”

W
ORKING FOR
O’N
EILL
sometimes felt like being in the Mafia. The other agents observed that O’Neill’s dress and manners, not to mention his Atlantic City background, gave him a mobbed-up air. The founding director of the FBI, J. Edgar Hoover, was sufficiently concerned about the young agent when he first entered the bureau that he drew O’Neill aside to ask about his “connections.” The only link was that O’Neill, like the Mafia, was a product of a culture that thrived on personal loyalty. Nor was he above issuing threats to ruin the careers of agents who crossed him.

After the embassy bombings, O’Neill scheduled meetings at four o’clock each afternoon, and typically he arrived as much as an hour late. His chronic tardiness aroused a lot of angry chatter among the married agents, who had children to attend. O’Neill would finally enter the conference room, then go around the table and shake the hands of each team member—another time-consuming ritual.

On one of these occasions, Jack Cloonan, a member of the I-49 squad, kissed the massive FBI ring on O’Neill’s finger. “Thank you, Godfather,” he said.

“Fuck you,” O’Neill snapped.

Dan Coleman was explaining a piece of intelligence in one of the meetings when O’Neill broke in. “You don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said to the man who, more than anyone in America, with the exception of Mike Scheuer, had studied bin Laden and his organization.

“Fine,” said Coleman.

“I’m just kidding.”

“You know what? I’m just Joe Shit the Ragman,” Coleman said heatedly. “You’re the SAC. I can’t defend myself in a position like this.”

The next day O’Neill came by Coleman’s desk and apologized. “I shouldn’t have done that,” he said.

Coleman accepted the apology, although he afforded himself the opportunity to lecture O’Neill on the responsibility of being a boss. O’Neill listened, then observed, “You look like you comb your hair with a hand grenade.”

“Maybe I should use some of that oil you dump on your hair,” said Coleman.

O’Neill laughed and walked away.

After that, Coleman slyly began to study O’Neill. The key, Coleman decided, was that “he had come from nowhere.” O’Neill’s mother still drove a cab in Atlantic City during the day, and his father operated the same cab at night. O’Neill’s uncle, a piano player, helped support them when the casino economy died. O’Neill had left home as soon as he could. On his first job, when he was a tour guide at FBI headquarters, he would carry a briefcase to work—as if he needed one—and he immediately attempted to exert control over the other guides. They resentfully called him “Stinky” because he was always in a sweat.

Coleman had a sense of the empty space between the public O’Neill and the private one. The flashy suits, the gleaming fingernails, concealed a man of humble background and modest means. It was a front O’Neill could scarcely afford on a government salary. Belligerent and belittling at times, O’Neill was also anxious and insecure, frequently seeking reassurance and dragging a long tail of debt. Few knew how precarious his career was, how fragmented his private life, how unsettled his spirit. Once, when an agent got so angry at O’Neill in a meeting that he began screaming, O’Neill stalked out of the room and calmed himself down by making calls on his cell phone. “You can’t do that,” Coleman told the agent. “Tell him you’re sorry—you didn’t mean to disrespect him.” O’Neill was as emotionally dependent on respect as any gangster.

But he was also capable of extravagant and almost alarming gestures of caring, quietly raising money for victims of the bombings he investigated and personally making sure his employees got the best doctors in the city when they fell ill. One of O’Neill’s friends in Washington had bypass surgery during a blizzard. Traffic in the city was shut down, but he awakened to see O’Neill at his bedside. He had tramped through eighteen inches of snow. Every morning he insisted on bringing coffee and a pastry to his secretary from a kiosk on the street, and he always remembered birthdays. These gestures, large and small, spoke to his own longing to be noticed and attended.

T
EN DAYS AFTER THE EMBASSY BOMBINGS
Jack Cloonan got a call from one of his intelligence contacts in Sudan telling him that two men involved in the case were in Khartoum. They had rented an apartment overlooking the American Embassy there. Cloonan gave the information to O’Neill, who called Dick Clarke at the National Security Council the following day. “I want to work with the Sudanese,” he told Clarke. O’Neill was well aware that the country was on the State Department’s terror list, but at least they were making an overture.

“John, there’s something I can’t tell you,” Clarke said on the phone. He suggested that O’Neill come to Washington to talk to the attorney general. She informed him that it was out of the question for him to work for the Sudanese: in a few hours the United States was going to bomb that country in retaliation for the attacks on the embassies in East Africa. The missiles were already spinning in their tubes, preparatory to launch, in American warships stationed in the Red Sea.

O’Neill landed in Washington the same day that Monica Lewinsky, a former White House intern, testified before a Washington grand jury that she had provided oral sexual favors for the president of the United States. Her story would be a deciding factor in the articles of impeachment that followed. In the minds of Islamists and, indeed, many Arabs, the relationship between the president and his intern perfectly symbolized Jewish influence in America, and any military response to the bombings was likely to be seen as an excuse to punish Muslims and divert attention from the scandal. “No war for Monica!” was a sign seen in many Arab streets. But Clinton’s crippled presidency offered him few options.

The CIA suspected that bin Laden was developing chemical weapons in Sudan. The information had come from Jamal al-Fadl, bin Laden’s former assistant who was now a U.S. government witness. But Fadl had left Sudan two years before, about the same time that bin Laden had been expelled from the country. Unconvinced by the sincerity of the Sudanese government’s repeated overtures to the United States to get itself removed from the State Department blacklist, the agency hired a spy from an Arab country to secure a soil sample from an area close to al-Shifa, a pharmaceutical plant suspected of being a secret chemical-weapons facility and thought to be owned in part by bin Laden. The sample, taken in June
1998,
purportedly showed traces of EMPTA, a chemical that was essential in making the extremely potent nerve gas VX; indeed, it had few other uses. On August
20,
on the basis of this information, President Clinton authorized the firing of thirteen Tomahawk cruise missiles into Khartoum as the first part of the American retaliation for the embassy bombings. The plant was completely destroyed.

It developed that the plant actually made only pharmaceuticals and veterinary medicines, not chemical weapons. No other traces of EMPTA were ever found in or around the site. The chemical might have been a product of the breakdown of a commercially available pesticide widely used in Africa, which it closely resembles. Moreover, bin Laden had nothing to do with the plant. The result of this hasty strike was that the impoverished country of Sudan lost one of its most important manufacturers, which employed three hundred people and produced more than half of the country’s medicines, and a night watchman was killed.

Sudan let the two accomplices to the East Africa bombings escape, and they’ve never been seen again. O’Neill and his team lost an invaluable opportunity to capture al-Qaeda insiders.