The Looming Tower (48 page)

Bin Laden still sat with the men in his same casual manner, and it was easy for anyone to approach him. On one occasion, a Sudanese named Abu al-Sha‘tha came into the circle and spoke rudely to bin Laden in front of the other leaders. One of the men, Abu Jandal, recognized the man as a takfiri and offered to sit between him and bin Laden. “There is no need,” bin Laden assured him, but he put his hand on his pistol while he talked.

When the Sudanese takfiri made a sudden movement, Abu Jandal pounced on him and pulled his hands behind his back, sitting on the man until he could no longer move. Bin Laden laughed and said, “Abu Jandal, let the man be!”

But bin Laden and his Egyptian security men had been impressed by the alertness and strength of this loyal follower. Bin Laden gave Abu Jandal a pistol and made him his personal bodyguard. There were only two bullets in the gun, meant to kill bin Laden in the face of capture. Abu Jandal took care to polish the bullets every night, telling himself, “These are Sheikh Osama’s bullets. I pray to God not to let me use them.”

After the humiliation of Prince Turki by Mullah Omar, both the Taliban and bin Laden’s security force were on edge about an expected Saudi response. The Taliban caught a young Uzbek in Khost who was acting strangely. His name was Siddiq Ahmed, and he had grown up in the Kingdom as an expatriate. He admitted that Prince Salman, the governor of Riyadh, had hired him to kill bin Laden (Prince Salman denies this). In return, the assassin would receive two million Saudi riyals and Saudi citizenship. “Did you expect that you would be able to kill Sheikh Osama bin Laden and escape from fourteen highly trained guards armed with automatic weapons?” Abu Jandal demanded. The boy was only eighteen, but he looked like a child. “I made a mistake,” he cried. He was dazed and pathetic. Finally, bin Laden said, “Release him.”

I
N EARLY
F
EBRUARY
1999, bin Laden floated into Mike Scheuer’s sights once again. The CIA received intelligence that bin Laden was camping with a group of royal falconers from the United Arab Emirates in the desert south of Kandahar. The tip came from the bodyguard of one of the princes. They were hunting the houbara bustard, an endangered bird legendary for its speed and cunning, as well as its potency as an aphrodisiac. The princes arrived in a C
-130,
carrying generators, refrigerated trucks, elaborate air-conditioned tents, towering masts for their communications equipment and televisions, and nearly fifty four-by-four pickups, which they would leave behind for their Taliban hosts as gratuities. Scheuer could see the encampment vividly on reconnaissance photos. He could even make out the falcons roosting on their poles. But he could not find bin Laden’s smaller camp, which he knew must be nearby.

Whenever bin Laden set foot in the royal camp, the Emirati bodyguard would report to his American handler in Pakistan, and the information would be on Scheuer’s desk within the hour. Afghan spies placed in a wide circle around the camp confirmed the Saudi’s comings and goings.

Scheuer is tall and rumpled, with glasses and a bristling brown beard. One can imagine his portrait on the wall of a nineteenth-century Prussian estate. He is a driven and demanding person, who sleeps only a few hours a night. Coleman used to notice the employee sign-in sheets with “
2:30
a.m.” or some such hour marked by Scheuer’s name. He would usually linger till eight at night. A pious Catholic of the type Coleman knew well, Scheuer had a cold detachment about the job he needed to do. Only a couple of months before, Scheuer had gotten intelligence that bin Laden would be spending the night in the governor’s residence in Kandahar. When Scheuer proposed an immediate cruise missile strike, the military objected, saying that as many as three hundred people might die and a nearby mosque would likely be damaged. Such considerations enraged Scheuer.

Convinced that the sighting in the bustard camp was the best chance he would ever get to assassinate bin Laden, Scheuer accompanied CIA director George Tenet to meet with Dick Clarke in the White House. Once again, the Pentagon was readying cruise missiles—America’s chosen means of assassination—for a strike the following morning. Coincidentally, Clarke had recently returned from the Emirates, where he had helped negotiate the sale of American-built fighter aircraft worth $8 billion. He had personal ties to the UAE royal family. No doubt the image of dead princes scattered in the sand played in his mind, along with the failures of Operation Infinite Reach. Moreover, the CIA could not guarantee that bin Laden was actually in the camp.

Clarke rejected the mission. Tenet also voted against it. Scheuer felt betrayed. The considerations that turned the men against the project seemed petty and mercenary compared to the opportunity to kill bin Laden. “I’m not a big consequences guy,” Scheuer admitted, and to prove it he sent out a series of wounded, recriminating e-mails. Talk in the hallways of the agency suggested that he had suffered a breakdown, that his obsession with bin Laden had gotten the best of him. In the meantime, he blew up at a senior FBI manager in Alec Station, which elicited an angry phone call from Director Freeh to Tenet. In May, Scheuer was dismissed as the head of Alec. “You’re burned out,” his boss told him.

He was expected to retire and accept the intelligence medal that had been struck for him. “Stick it in your ass,” said Scheuer. He reported at his usual dizzying time on Monday morning and occupied a desk in the library. He remained there month after month, with no duties, waiting for the agency to come to him when it was ready to kill, not to dither over a few dead princes.

O’N
EILL’S OFFICE
was in the northeast corner of the twenty-fifth floor of New York’s 26 Federal Plaza, overlooking the Chrysler and Empire State buildings through one window and the Brooklyn Bridge through the other. He made sure that there was no other FBI office like it. He cleaned out the prison-made government-issue furniture and brought in a lavender couch. On his flame mahogany coffee table was a book about tulips—
The Flower That Drives Men Wild
—and he filled the room with plants and seasonal cut flowers. He kept two computers, one the antiquated and handicapped version supplied by the bureau and the other his own high-speed PC. In the background CNN ran constantly on a small television. Instead of the usual family pictures that adorn office walls and desktops, O’Neill had prints of French Impressionists.

Few people in the bureau knew that he had a wife and two children (John Junior and Carol) in New Jersey, who did not join him when he moved to Chicago in 1991. Shortly after he arrived in that city, he met Valerie James, a fashion sales director who was divorced and had two children of her own. She was tall and beautiful, with a level gaze and a sultry voice. She saw O’Neill at a bar and bought him a drink because “he had the most compelling eyes.” They stayed up talking till five in the morning.

O’Neill sent Valerie flowers every Friday, the weekly anniversary of the day they met. He was a terrific dancer and allowed that he had been on
American Bandstand
when he was a teenager. Whenever Valerie had to travel on business, she would find a bottle of wine waiting for her in her hotel room. “Are you sure you’re not married?” Valerie asked.

Just before O’Neill moved to Washington, a female agent pulled Valerie aside at the bureau Christmas party and told her about O’Neill’s family in New Jersey. “That’s not possible,” said Valerie. “We’re getting married. He asked my father for my hand.”

While he was courting Valerie, O’Neill had a girlfriend in Washington, Mary Lynn Stevens, who worked at the Pentagon Federal Credit Union. He had asked her for an “exclusive” relationship two years before, when she visited him in Chicago on New Year’s Eve. Mary Lynn found out about Valerie when she happened to hear a message on O’Neill’s answering machine. She confronted him, and he dropped to his knees begging forgiveness, promising he would never see Valerie again. But when Mary Lynn got back to Washington, her hairdresser, who happened to be from Atlantic City, filled her in about O’Neill’s wife. O’Neill explained that he was still talking to the lawyers; he hadn’t wanted to endanger his relationship with Mary Lynn by revealing a marriage that was over except for the last legal details. He had said much the same to Valerie James.

Soon after he got to Washington, he met another woman, Anna DiBattista, a stylish blonde who was working in the defense industry. She knew he was married from the beginning—a coworker informed her—but O’Neill never let her know about his other women. Anna’s priest warned her, “That guy is never going to marry you. He’s never going to get an annulment.” And yet one day O’Neill told her he had gotten the annulment after all, which was a lie. “I know how much that means to you,” he told her. Often he spent part of the night with Mary Lynn and the rest of it with Anna. “I don’t think he ever stayed later than five or six a.m.,” said Mary Lynn. “I never made him breakfast.” In the meantime, he kept his relationship with Valerie in Chicago alive. All three women were under the impression that he intended to marry them. He was also obsessed with a beautiful, high-powered woman in the Justice Department who was married, a fact that caused him endless despair.

In an odd way, his protean domestic drama paralleled that of his quarry, Osama bin Laden. Perhaps, if O’Neill had lived in a culture that sanctioned multiple marriages, he would have created such a harem. But he was furtive by nature, thriving on dangerous secrets and innovative lies. His job, of course, gave him the perfect cover, since he could always disappear for days on some “classified” mission.

There was a side of him that sought the solace of a committed relationship, which he seemed closest to achieving with Valerie James. When O’Neill moved to New York, Val joined him. They got an apartment in Stuyvesant Town. He was so fond of her two grown children that friends mistook them for his, and when her first grandchild came along, and needed babysitting, O’Neill stayed home with the baby so Val could go to work. They settled into a routine. On Tuesday mornings, they left their clothes at the Laundromat and went for a run. Every Saturday morning, O’Neill would treat himself to a haircut and a hot shave. On Sundays, he and Val experimented with churches and sometimes explored the city on bicycles. Often when he came in late at night, smashed after entertaining cops from Venezuela or Uzbekistan, he would crawl into bed with a glass of milk and a plate of chocolate-chip cookies. He loved handing out candy on Halloween.

But there was a restlessness in him that seemed frightened of simple arrangements. When Anna DiBattista got a job offer in New York in 1999 that threatened to complicate his life beyond reason, O’Neill actually pleaded for her to come. “We can get married!” he said. But when she arrived, he told her she couldn’t move in with him right away. He said there were “linguists” staying in his apartment.

With each woman, he lived a different life. He managed to keep his social circles separate, so one group of friends knew him with Val, another with Anna, another with Mary Lynn. He took them to different restaurants and even to different countries on vacation. “Jazz was his thing,” said Val. With Anna, he listened to Andrea Bocelli. “Our song was ‘Time to Say Goodbye,’” she recalled. Mary Lynn introduced him to grand opera. “He flew all the way from California when I invited him to
Mephisto.
” His politics were also flexible, tending to conform to the views of his companion at the time, a moderate Democrat with one, a moderate Republican with another.

On holidays, he went home to New Jersey to visit his parents and to see his wife and children. Although he had been separated from Christine for many years, he never got a divorce. He explained to his friends who knew about his family that it was a “Catholic thing.” He continued to support them, and he spoke to his children frequently on the phone. But Atlantic City was part of his life that he shared with very few. Because the women in his life sensed that they could never trust him, they couldn’t give him the unqualified love and devotion that he sought. He remained isolated by his compulsive deceptions.

Inevitably, the complexity took a toll. He left his Palm Pilot in Yankee Stadium; it was filled with police contacts from all over the world. Fortunately, the Yankees security force found it. Then he left his cell phone in a cab. In the summer of
1999,
he and Valerie were driving to the Jersey shore when his Buick broke down near the Meadowlands. His bureau car happened to be parked nearby at a secret off-site location, so O’Neill switched cars, although the bureau bans the use of an official vehicle for personal reasons. Still, O’Neill’s infraction might have been overlooked had he not let Valerie enter the building to use the toilet. She had no idea what the place was. When the FBI learned about the violation, apparently from a spiteful agent who had been caught using the site as an auto-repair shop, O’Neill was reprimanded and docked fifteen days’ pay.

That was a penalty O’Neill could scarcely afford. He had always been a showy host, grabbing every tab, even going so far as to tear another agent’s money in half when he offered to split the bill. These gestures mounted up. An agent who did his taxes noted O’Neill’s credit-card debt and observed, “Gee, John, you’d be a candidate for recruitment.” O’Neill was also paying the mortgage on his wife’s house and dipping into his retirement funds and borrowing money from wealthy friends, who held promissory notes that he had to disclose. Anyone with that much liability would normally come under scrutiny as a security risk.

He was insecure, deceptive, and potentially compromised. He was also driven, resourceful, and brilliant. For better or worse, this was the man America now depended on to stop Osama bin Laden.

I
RAQ WAS AN UNLIKELY ALLY
in al-Qaeda’s war on the West, but there had been a series of contacts between Iraq and al-Qaeda since the end of the first Gulf War. Saddam Hussein sought allies to salvage his shattered regime, and the radical Islamists at least shared his longing for revenge. In 1992 Hasan al-Turabi arranged a meeting between the Iraqi intelligence service and al-Qaeda with the goal of creating a “common strategy” for deposing pro-Western Arab governments. The Iraqi delegation met with bin Laden and flattered him, claiming that he was the prophesied Mahdi, the savior of Islam. They wanted him to stop backing anti-Saddam insurgents. Bin Laden agreed, but in return he asked for weapons and training camps inside Iraq. That same year, Zawahiri traveled to Baghdad, where he met the Iraqi dictator in person. But there is no evidence that Iraq ever supplied al-Qaeda with weapons or camps, and soon bin Laden resumed his support of Iraqi dissidents.