The Looming Tower (55 page)

A destroyer, even the brave might fear,

She inspires horror in the harbor and the open sea,

She goes into the waves flanked by arrogance, haughtiness, and fake might,

To her doom she progresses slowly, clothed in a huge illusion,

Awaiting her is a dinghy, bobbing in the waves.

Two television cameras recorded the event, but bin Laden wasn’t satisfied with the result—knowing that the poem would be featured on the Arabic satellite channels and an al-Qaeda recruitment video—so he had the cameras set up again the following morning to record his recitation a second time. He even stationed a few supporters in front of him to cry out praise, as if there were hundreds still in the hall, instead of a handful of reporters and cameramen. His image management extended to asking one of the reporters, who had taken a digital snapshot, to take another picture because his neck was “too full.” He had dyed his beard to cover the streaks of gray, but he couldn’t disguise the dark circles under his eyes that testified to the anxiety and sleeplessness that had become his steady companions.

Twelve-year-old Hamza, the only child of bin Laden’s favorite wife, also read a poem at the wedding. He had long black eyelashes and his father’s thin face, and he wore a white turban and a camouflage vest. “What crime have we committed to be forced to leave our country?” he asked solemnly, with impressive composure. “We will fight the
kafr
forever!”

“Allahu akhbar!” the men roared in response. Then they began to sing:

Our men are in revolt, our men are in revolt.

We will not regain our homeland

Nor will our shame be erased except through

Blood and fire.

On and on it goes.

On and on it goes.

Following afternoon prayer, the meal was served—meat, rice, and tomato juice. It was a rare extravagance for bin Laden. Some of the diners thought the food rather primitive, however, and his stepfather noticed something larval squirming inside his water glass.

“Eat! Eat!” the guests cried, as they peeled oranges for the young groom. “He has a long night ahead!” The men remarked how much the son’s shy smile resembled his father’s. They danced and sang more songs and lifted the boy up and cheered. Then they put him in a car and sent him to the family compound for his first night of married life.

A
FEW MONTHS
after the inauguration of George W. Bush, Dick Clarke met with Condoleezza Rice, the national security advisor for the incoming Bush administration, and asked to be reassigned. From the moment the new team had taken over, it was clear that terrorism had a lower priority. When Clarke first briefed her, in January, about the threat that bin Laden and his organization posed to the United States, Rice had given him the impression that she had never heard of al-Qaeda. She subsequently downgraded his position, that of the national coordinator for counterterrorism, so that he would now be reporting to deputies, not to principals. Clarke pressed his strategy of aiding Ahmed Shah Massoud and the Northern Alliance in their struggle against the Taliban and al-Qaeda, but Rice demurred, saying that the administration needed a broader strategy that would include other Pashtun opponents of the Taliban. But the planning for that dragged on for months, without much force. “Maybe you need someone less obsessive,” Clarke now suggested, his irony lost on Rice and her deputy, Stephen Hadley. They were surprised and asked him to stay on until October. During that time, they told him, he should find “someone similar” to replace him.

“There’s only one guy that fits that bill,” said Clarke.

O’Neill viewed Clarke’s job as a perfect fit for him. The offer came at a time when he was despairing about the government’s tangled response to terrorism and distressed about his future. He had always harbored two aspirations—to become deputy director of the bureau in Washington or to take over the New York office. Freeh was retiring in June, so there would be some vacancies at the top; but the investigation into the briefcase incident would likely block any promotion in the bureau. As the nation’s new terrorism czar, however, he would be personally vindicated, and he must have relished the prospect of having both the FBI and the CIA answer to him.

On the other hand, he was financially pressed, and he would still be at the same pay grade in the White House as in the bureau. The Justice Department inquiry had been a ruinous blow. In addition to his other debts, he now owed his attorney eighty thousand dollars, more than he took home in a year.

Throughout the summer, Clarke courted O’Neill, who agonized but refused to commit. He discussed the offer with a number of friends but became alarmed when he thought that FBI headquarters might hear of it. He called Clarke in a fit of anxiety and said that people in the CIA knew he was being considered. “You have to tell them it’s not true,” he pleaded. He was certain that if the agency knew, the bureau was sure to find out. Clarke dutifully called one of his friends in the CIA and said that, by the way, he was looking for names for his replacement since O’Neill had turned him down—even though O’Neill still wanted to be a candidate for that position. O’Neill also talked about the offer to Mawn, saying that he didn’t want him to hear it through the grapevine, but he pointedly told Mawn he wasn’t at all interested in the job.

Money would have been a barrier, but O’Neill—by now a veteran bureaucratic infighter—also understood the ruthlessness with which some powerful people in Washington would greet the news of his new position. Clarke’s offer was tempting, but it was also dangerous.

F
OR YEARS,
Zawahiri had been battling elements inside al-Jihad who opposed his relationship with bin Laden. He spewed disdain on the Jihad members who found fault with him from comfortable perches in Europe. He called them “the hot-blooded revolutionary strugglers who have now become as cold as ice after they experienced the life of civilization and luxury.” Increasingly, many of his former allies, exhausted and demoralized by years of setbacks, had become advocates of the initiative by Islamist leaders imprisoned in Egypt, who had declared a unilateral cease-fire. Others no longer wanted to endure the primitive living conditions in Afghanistan. Yet, even as the organization was disintegrating, Zawahiri rejected any thought of negotiating with the Egyptian regime or with the West.

In an angry moment he actually resigned as the emir of al-Jihad, but without him the organization was totally adrift. Several months later, his successor relinquished the post, and Zawahiri was back in charge. According to testimony given at the trial of the Albanian cell members, however, there were only forty members left outside Egypt, and within the country the movement had been eradicated. Al-Jihad was dying, and with it the dream that had animated Zawahiri’s imagination since he was a teenager. Egypt was lost to him.

The end came in June
2001,
when al-Qaeda absorbed al-Jihad, creating an entity formally called Qaeda al-Jihad. The name reflected the fact that the Egyptians still made up the inner circle; the nine-member leadership council included only three non-Egyptians. But it was bin Laden’s organization, not Zawahiri’s.

Naturally, the domination by the Egyptians was a subject of contention, especially among the Saudi members of al-Qaeda. Bin Laden tried to mollify the malcontents by explaining that he could always count on the Egyptians because they were unable to go home without being arrested; like him, they were men without a country.

Bin Laden turned to Zawahiri and the Egyptians with a particular task. He wanted them to kill Ahmed Shah Massoud. The Northern Alliance commander represented the only credible force keeping the Taliban from completely consolidating their hold on Afghanistan. Slender and dashing, Massoud was a brilliant tactician, and he was willing to match the Taliban in ruthlessness. Now that the Taliban had allied itself with al-Qaeda, Dick Clarke and others saw Massoud as the last chance for an Afghan solution to the bin Laden problem.

Massoud was an eager partner. He was himself a dedicated Islamist whose wife wore a burka and whose troops had committed more than one massacre. Like his competitors, he probably supported his militia on the opium trade. But he spoke a rudimentary French, which he learned in high school in Kabul, and he was well known for his love of Persian poetry, which made him seem like a civilized alternative to the Taliban. In February, Taliban goons had gone through the Kabul museum with sledgehammers, pulverizing the artistic heritage of the country; then in March, they used tanks and anti-aircraft weapons in Bamiyan Province to destroy two colossal images of the Buddha that had loomed above the ancient Silk Road for fifteen hundred years. To the degree that the Taliban were sinking in the world’s estimation, Massoud was rising.

In a reflection of his increased international stature, Massoud addressed the European Parliament in Strasbourg, France, in April 2001. He spoke about the danger that al-Qaeda posed to the world. He also told American officials that his own intelligence had learned of al-Qaeda’s intention to perform a terrorist act against the United States that would be vastly greater than the bombings of the American embassies in East Africa.

In July, Zawahiri composed a letter in poorly written French purporting to be from the Islamic Observation Centre in London. He requested permission for two journalists to interview Massoud. That letter was followed up by a personal recommendation from Abdul Rasul Sayyaf. Permission was granted.

Massoud was not alone in his warnings to America. In addition to the gleeful chatter that the NSA was picking up about a major attack (“spectacular,” “another Hiroshima”) that was in the works, intelligence agencies from Arab countries, with better human sources, issued dire advisories. Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak warned the United States that terrorists were planning to attack President Bush in Rome, “using an airplane stuffed with explosives,” while he was on his way to the G-8 summit in Genoa that July. The Italian authorities put up anti-aircraft emplacements to prevent the attack. The Taliban foreign minister, Wakil Ahmed Muttawakil, confided to the American consul general in Peshawar and the United Nations in Kabul that al-Qaeda was planning a devastating strike on the United States. He feared that American retaliation would destroy his country. Around the same time, Jordanian intelligence overheard the name of the rumored operation, which it passed along to Washington: The Big Wedding. In the culture of suicide bombers, the day of a martyr’s death is his wedding day, when he greets the maidens of Paradise.

B
IN
L
ADEN DECIDED
to take another bride himself, a fifteen-year-old Yemeni girl named Amal al-Sada. One of bin Laden’s bodyguards traveled to the mountain town of Ibb to pay a bride price of five thousand dollars. According to Abu Jandal, the wedding was a splendid celebration. “Songs and merriment were mixed with the firing of shots into the air.”

Although the marriage seems to have been a political arrangement between bin Laden and an important Yemeni tribe, meant to boost al-Qaeda recruitment in Yemen, bin Laden’s other wives were upset, and even his mother chastised him. Two of bin Laden’s sons, Mohammed and Othman, angrily confronted Abu Jandal. “Why do you bring our father a girl of our age?” they demanded. Abu Jandal complained that he had not even known that the money he took to Yemen was to purchase a bride. He had thought it was for a martyrdom operation.

Najwa, bin Laden’s first wife, left at about this time. After eleven children and twenty-seven years of marriage, she decided to return to Syria, taking her daughters and her retarded son, Abdul Rahman, with her. The man she had married was not a mujahid or an international terrorist; he was a rich Saudi teenager. The life she might have expected as bin Laden’s wife was one of wealth, travel, society; an easy existence made more comfortable with the usual retinue of servants, a beach house, a yacht, perhaps an apartment in Paris. This was the minimum. Instead, she had lived a life on the run, deprived, often in squalor. She had sacrificed so much, but now she was free.

O
N
M
AY
29, 2001, in a federal courtroom in Manhattan, a jury convicted four men in the bombings of the American embassies in East Africa. It was the capstone of a perfect record of twenty-five terrorist convictions accomplished by the prosecutors of the Southern District of New York, which was headed by Mary Jo White, with her assistants Kenneth Karas and Patrick Fitzgerald. The struggle against Islamic terrorists had begun in 1993 with the first World Trade Center bombing. Eight years later, these convictions were practically the only victories that America could point to, and they were based upon the laborious investigations of the New York bureau of the FBI, particularly the I-49 squad.