The Looming Tower (54 page)

There were so many perceived threats that the agents often slept in their clothes and with their weapons at their sides. The investigators learned from a mechanic that a truck similar to one purchased by the bombers had been brought to his shop to have metal plates installed in a way that might be used to direct the force of an explosion. Certainly the most tempting target for such a bomb would be the hotel where the agents were staying.

Bodine thought these fears were overblown. The agents were suspicious of everyone, she observed, including the hotel staff. She assured O’Neill that the gunfire he frequently heard outside the hotel was probably not directed at the investigators but was simply the noise of wedding celebrations. Then one night, when O’Neill was running a meeting, shots were fired just outside the hotel. The hostage rescue team took positions. Once again, Soufan ventured out to talk to the Yemeni troops stationed in the street.

“Hey, Ali!” O’Neill said. “Be careful!” He had raced down the steps of the hotel to make sure Soufan was wearing his flak jacket. Frustration, stress, and danger, along with the enforced intimacy of their situation, had brought the two men closer. O’Neill had begun to describe Soufan as his “secret weapon.” To the Yemenis, he simply called him “my son.”

Snipers covered him as Soufan strolled outside. The Yemeni officer stationed there assured him that everything was “okay.”

“If everything is okay, why are there no cars on the street?” Soufan asked.

The officer said there must be a wedding nearby. Soufan looked around and saw that the hotel was surrounded with men in traditional dress, some in jeeps, all carrying guns. They were civilians, not soldiers. Soufan was reminded of the tribal uprising in Somalia, which ended with dead American soldiers being dragged through the streets of Mogadishu. That could happen right here, right now, he thought.

O’Neill ordered the U.S. Marines to deploy two armored vehicles to block the street in front of the hotel. The night passed without further incident, but the next day O’Neill relocated his team to the USS
Duluth
, stationed in the Bay of Aden. He had to get permission from the Yemeni government to fly back to shore. The helicopter pilot had to take evasive maneuvers after the craft was painted by an SA-7 missle. O’Neill sent most of the investigators home. He and Soufan and four other agents moved back to the hotel, now practically empty because of bomb threats.

Relations between Bodine and O’Neill deteriorated to the point that Barry Mawn flew to Yemen to assess the situation. “It became clear that she simply hated his guts,” Mawn observed, but what Bodine told him was that O’Neill couldn’t get along with the Yemenis. For the next ten days Mawn spoke to members of the FBI team and American military officers. Every night, when the Yemen authorities did business, he would go with O’Neill and watch him interact with his counterparts. The meetings invariably went late, with O’Neill cajoling, pressuring, charming, entreating, doing whatever he could do to inch the process along. One such night O’Neill complained to General Ghalib Qamish of the PSO that he needed photographs of the suspects that the Yemenis had arrested. The discussion dragged on deep into the early-morning hours, with General Qamish politely explaining that the FBI was not needed on this case at all and O’Neill patiently describing the urgency of the situation. Mawn could barely keep his head up. But the following night the general announced, “I have your photos for you.”

O’Neill thanked him, then went on to beg for the right to interview the suspects face-to-face, rather than feeding questions to the Yemeni interrogators. It was an endless and tortuous negotiation, but in Mawn’s view it was carried out with respect and even affection on both sides. General Qamish referred to O’Neill as “Brother John.” When Mawn returned, he reported to the director that O’Neill was doing a masterful job, adding that Bodine was his “only detractor.” He said as much to Bodine on his way out of the country. He was not recalling O’Neill, he told her. Of course, Mawn was responsible for sending O’Neill in the first place. He may not have wanted to see Bodine’s point of view. In any case, ambassadors have the final say over which Americans are allowed to remain in a foreign country, and O’Neill was not one of them.

T
HE
Y
EMENIS ARRESTED
F
AHD AL
-Q
USO,
the al-Qaeda cameraman who had overslept his assignment to videotape the bombing, at the end of October. Quso admitted that he and one of the suicide bombers had delivered five thousand dollars to “Khallad”—the one-legged mastermind of the
Cole
attack—in Bangkok. He said the money was to buy Khallad a new prosthesis. The transcript of the conversation was passed along to the FBI a month later.

Soufan remembered the name Khallad from a source he had recruited in Afghanistan. The source had described a fighter with a metal leg who was the emir of a guesthouse in Kandahar—bin Laden’s “errand boy,” he had called him. Soufan and O’Neill faxed the mug shots to the Afghan source, who made a positive identification of Khallad. That was the first real link between the
Cole
bombing and al-Qaeda.

Soufan wondered why money was leaving Yemen when a major operation was about to take place. Could there be another operation under way that he didn’t know about? Soufan queried the CIA, asking for information about Khallad and whether there might have been an al-Qaeda meeting in the region. The agency did not respond to his clearly stated request. The fact that the CIA withheld information about the mastermind of the
Cole
bombing and the meeting in Malaysia, when directly asked by the FBI, amounted to obstruction of justice in the death of seventeen American sailors. Much more tragic consequences were on the horizon.

A
MONTH AFTER THE
C
OLE
INVESTIGATION BEGAN,
assistant FBI director Dale Watson told the
Washington Post,
“Sustained cooperation” with the Yemenis “has enabled the FBI to further reduce its in-country presence…. The FBI will soon be able to bring home the FBI’s senior on-scene commander, John O’Neill.” It appeared to be a very public surrender to Bodine’s complaints. The same day, the Yemeni prime minister told the
Post
that no link had been discovered between the
Cole
bombers and al-Qaeda.

O’Neill came home just before Thanksgiving. Valerie James was shocked when she saw him: He had lost twenty-five pounds. He said that he felt he was fighting the counterterrorism battle alone, without any support from his own government, and he worried that the investigation would grind to a halt without him. Indeed, according to Barry Mawn, Yemeni cooperation slowed significantly when O’Neill left the country. Concerned about the continuing threats against the remaining FBI investigators, O’Neill tried to return in January
2001,
but Bodine denied his application. Meanwhile, the American investigators, feeling increasingly vulnerable, retreated behind the walls of the American Embassy in Sanaa.

Soufan finally was allowed to interview Fahd al-Quso, the sleeping cameraman, who was small and arrogant, with a wispy beard that he kept tugging on. Before the interview began, a colonel in the PSO entered the room and kissed Quso on both cheeks—a signal to everyone that Quso was protected. And indeed, whenever it seemed obvious that Quso was on the verge of making an important disclosure, the Yemeni colonel would insist that the session stop for meals or prayers.

Over a period of days, however, Soufan was able to get Quso to admit that he met with Khallad and one of the
Cole
bombers in Bangkok, where they stayed at the Washington Hotel. Quso confessed that his mission was to hand over thirty-six thousand dollars in al-Qaeda funds, not the five thousand he had mentioned before, nor was the money for Khallad’s new leg. It now seems evident that the money was used to purchase first-class air tickets for the 9/11 hijackers Mihdhar and Hazmi and support them when they arrived in Los Angeles a few days later, which would have been obvious if the CIA had told the bureau about the two al-Qaeda operatives.

The FBI agents went through phone records to verify Quso’s story. They found calls between the Washington Hotel in Bangkok and Quso’s house in Yemen. They also noticed that there were calls to both places from a pay phone in Malaysia. It happened to be directly outside the condo where the meeting had taken place. Quso had told Soufan that he was originally supposed to have met Khallad in Kuala Lumpur or Singapore—he couldn’t seem to get the two cities straight. Once again, Soufan sent an official teletype to the agency. He sent along a passport picture of Khallad. Do these telephone numbers make any sense? Is there any connection to Malaysia? Any tie to Khallad? Again, the agency had nothing to say.

If the CIA had responded to Soufan by supplying him with the intelligence he requested, the FBI would have learned of the Malaysia meeting and of the connection to Mihdhar and Hazmi. The bureau would have learned—as the agency already knew—that the al-Qaeda operatives were in America and had been for more than a year. Because there was a preexisting indictment for bin Laden in New York, and Mihdhar and Hazmi were his associates, the bureau already had the authority to follow the suspects, wiretap their apartment, intercept their communications, clone their computer, investigate their contacts—all the essential steps that might have prevented 9/11.

In June 2001, Yemeni authorities arrested eight men who they said were part of a plot to blow up the American Embassy in Yemen, where Soufan and the remainder of the FBI investigators had taken refuge. New threats against the FBI followed, and Freeh, acting on O’Neill’s recommendation, withdrew the team entirely.

T
HE STRIKE ON THE
C
OLE
had been a great victory for bin Laden. Al-Qaeda camps in Afghanistan filled with new recruits, and contributors from the Gulf states arrived carrying Samsonite suitcases filled with petrodollars, as in the glory days of the Afghan jihad. At last there was money to spread around. The Taliban leadership, which was still divided about bin Laden’s presence in the country, became more compliant when cash appeared, despite the threat of sanctions and reprisals. Bin Laden separated his senior leaders—Abu Hafs to another location in Kandahar, and Zawahiri to Kabul—so that the anticipated American response would not kill the al-Qaeda leadership all at once.

But there was no American response. The country was in the middle of a presidential election, and Clinton was trying to burnish his legacy by securing a peace agreement between Israel and Palestine. The
Cole
bombing had occurred just as the talks were falling apart. Clinton maintains that, despite the awkward political timing, his administration came close to launching another missile attack against bin Laden that October, but at the last minute the CIA recommended calling it off because his presence at the site was not completely certain.

Bin Laden was angry and disappointed. He hoped to lure America into the same trap the Soviets had fallen into: Afghanistan. His strategy was to continually attack until the U.S. forces invaded; then the mujahideen would swarm upon them and bleed them until the entire American empire fell from its wounds. It had happened to Great Britain and to the Soviet Union. He was certain it would happen to America. The declaration of war, the strike on the American embassies, and now the bombing of the
Cole
had been inadequate, however, to provoke a massive retaliation. He would have to create an irresistible outrage.

One can ask, at this point, whether 9/11 or some similar tragedy might have happened without bin Laden to steer it. The answer is certainly not. Indeed, the tectonic plates of history were, shifting, promoting a period of conflict between the West and the Arab Muslim world; however, the charisma and vision of a few individuals shaped the nature of this contest. The international Salafist uprising might have occurred without the writings of Sayyid Qutb or Abdullah Azzam’s call to jihad, but al-Qaeda would not have existed. Al-Qaeda depended on a unique conjunction of personalities, in particular the Egyptians—Zawahiri, Abu Ubaydah, Saif al-Adl, and Abu Hafs—each of whom manifested the thoughts of Qutb, their intellectual father. But without bin Laden, the Egyptians were only al-Jihad. Their goals were parochial. At a time when there were many Islamist movements, all of them concentrated on nationalist goals, it was bin Laden’s vision to create an international jihad corps. It was his leadership that held together an organization that had been bankrupted and thrown into exile. It was bin Laden’s tenacity that made him deaf to the moral quarrels that attended the murder of so many and indifferent to the repeated failures that would have destroyed most men’s dreams. All of these were qualities that one can ascribe to a cult leader or a madman. But there was also artistry involved, not only to achieve the spectacular effect but also to enlist the imagination of the men whose lives bin Laden required.

19

The Big Wedding

S
OCIAL EVENTS WERE RARE
in the al-Qaeda community, but bin Laden was in the mood to celebrate. He arranged a marriage between his seventeen-year-old son, Mohammed, and Abu Hafs’s fourteen-year-old daughter, Khadija. She was a quiet, unlettered girl, and the women wondered what she and Mohammed would have to say to each other. They could just imagine the surprises that awaited her on her wedding night, since sexual matters were rarely discussed, especially with children.

For the occasion bin Laden had taken over a large hall—a former movie theater on the outskirts of Kandahar that had been gutted by the Taliban—to accommodate the five hundred men in attendance. (The women were in a separate facility with the young bride.) He began the festivities by reading a long poem, apologizing that it was not his own work, but that of his speechwriter. “I am not, as most of our brothers know, a warrior of the word,” he said modestly. The poem included a tribute to the bombing of the
Cole: