The Looming Tower (56 page)

O’Neill sat in on the closing arguments and after the verdict he drew Steve Gaudin aside. Gaudin was the agent who had broken Mohammed al-‘Owhali, who had gotten his wish to be tried in America. O’Neill put his arm around Gaudin and told him he had a gift for him. “I’m sending you to a language school in Vermont. You’re gonna learn Arabic.”

Gaudin reeled at the thought.

“You know this fight ain’t over,” O’Neill continued. “What did al-‘Owhali tell you? He said, ‘We have to hit you outside so they won’t see us coming on the inside.’”

O’Neill understood that the crime model was just one way to deal with terrorism, and that it had limits, especially when the adversary was a sophisticated foreign network composed of skilled and motivated ideologues who were willing to die. But when Dick Clarke had said to him during the millennium arrests, “We’re going to kill bin Laden,” O’Neill didn’t want to hear about it. Although al-Qaeda posed a far greater challenge to law enforcement than the Mafia, or any criminal enterprise, had, the alternatives—military strikes, CIA assassination attempts—had accomplished nothing except to aggrandize bin Laden in the eyes of his admirers. The twenty-five convictions, on the other hand, were genuine and legitimate achievements that demonstrated the credibility and integrity of the American system of justice. But the jealous rivalry among government agencies, and the lack of urgency at FBI headquarters, hobbled the I-49 squad in New York, who had been rendered blind to the danger that, as it turned out, was already in the country.

As the embassy bombings trial was ending, nearly all of the nineteen 9/11 hijackers had settled in the United States. About this time, Tom Wilshire, who was the CIA’s intelligence representative to the FBI’s international terrorism section at FBI headquarters, was studying the relationship between Khaled al-Mihdhar and Khallad, the one-legged mastermind of the
Cole
bombing. The CIA had thought, because of the similarity of names, that they might be the same person, but thanks to Ali Soufan’s investigations, the agency now knew that Khallad was part of bin Laden’s security team. “OK. This is important,” Wilshire noted in an e-mail to his supervisors at the CIA Counterterrorist Center. “This is a major-league killer, who orchestrated the
Cole
Attack and possibly the Africa bombings.” Wilshire already knew that Nawaf al-Hazmi was in the United States and that Hazmi and Mihdhar had traveled with Khallad. He also discovered that Mihdhar had a U.S. visa. “Something bad was definitely up,” Wilshire decided. He asked permission to disclose this vital information to the FBI. The agency never responded to his request.

However, later that same day, July 13, a CIA supervisor requested that an FBI analyst assigned to the CTC, Margarette Gillespie, review the material about the Malaysia meeting “in her free time.” She didn’t get around to it until the end of July. The CIA supervisor did not reveal the fact that some of the participants in the meeting might be in the United States. In fact he conveyed none of the urgency reflected in Wilshire’s note. “It didn’t mean anything to me,” he would later say, even though he was privy to the reports that al-Qaeda was planning a “Hiroshima” inside America.

But the CIA supervisor did want to know what the FBI knew. He gave Maggie Gillespie three surveillance photos from the Malaysia meeting to show to several I-49 agents. The pictures showed Mihdhar and Hazmi and a man who resembled Quso. The CIA supervisor did not tell Maggie Gillespie why the pictures had been taken. Gillespie researched the Intelink database about the Malaysia meeting, but the agency had not posted any reports about Mihdhar’s visa or Hazmi’s arrival in the country. There was NSA coverage of the events leading up to the Malaysia meeting, but Intelink advised her that such information was not to be shared with criminal investigators.

The CIA supervisor, along with Gillespie and another FBI analyst from headquarters, Dina Corsi, went to New York on June 11 to talk with the agents on the
Cole
investigation—except for Soufan, who was out of the country. The meeting started in midmorning with the New York FBI agents thoroughly briefing the others on the progress of their investigation. That went on for three or four hours. Finally, about two in the afternoon, the CIA supervisor asked Gillespie to display the photographs to her colleagues. There were three high-quality surveillance photos. One, shot from a low angle, showed Mihdhar and Hazmi standing beside a tree. The supervisor wanted to know if the agents recognized anyone, and if Quso was in any of the pictures.

The FBI agents on the I-49 squad asked who was in the pictures, and when and where they were taken. “And were there any other photographs?” one of the agents demanded. The CIA supervisor refused to say. He promised that “in the days and weeks to come” he would try to get permission to pass that information along, but he couldn’t be more forthcoming at present. The meeting became heated; people began yelling at each other. The FBI agents knew that clues to the crimes they were trying to solve were being dangled in front of their eyes, but they couldn’t squeeze any further information from the CIA supervisor or the FBI analysts—except for one detail: The supervisor finally dropped the name Khaled al-Mihdhar.

Steven Bongardt, a former Navy pilot and Annapolis graduate who was on the I-49 squad, asked the supervisor to provide a date of birth or a passport number to go with Mihdhar’s name. A name by itself was not sufficient to put a stop on his entry into the United States. Bongardt had just returned from Pakistan with a list of thirty names of suspected al-Qaeda associates and their dates of birth, which he had given to the State Department as a precaution to make sure they didn’t get into the country. That was standard procedure, the very first thing most investigators would do. But the CIA supervisor declined to provide the additional information.

One can imagine a different meeting, in which the CIA supervisor was authorized to disclose the vital details of Mihdhar’s travel to the United States, his connection to the telephone in Yemen that was a virtual al-Qaeda switchboard, his association with Hazmi, who was also in America, their affiliation with al-Qaeda and with Khallad. The pictures that were laid out on the table in the New York office contained within them not only the answers to the planning of the
Cole
attack but also the stark fact that al-Qaeda was inside the United States and planning to strike.

There was a fourth photo of the Malaysia meeting, however, that the CIA supervisor did not produce. That was a picture of Khallad. The
Cole
investigators certainly knew who he was. They had an active file on him and had already talked to a grand jury, preparing to indict him. That fourth photo would have prompted O’Neill to go to Mary Margaret Graham, who headed the New York office of the CIA, which was located in the World Trade Center, and demand that the agency turn over all information relating to Khallad and his associates. By withholding the picture of Khallad standing beside the future hijackers, however, the CIA blocked the bureau’s investigation into the
Cole
attack and allowed the 9/11 plot to proceed.

At the time, Mihdhar had returned to Yemen and then gone to Saudi Arabia, where presumably he had been herding the remaining hijackers into the United States. Two days after the frustrating meeting between the CIA supervisor and the I-49 squad, Mihdhar received a new American visa from the consulate in Jeddah. Since the CIA had not given his name to the State Department to post on its watch list, Mihdhar disembarked in New York on the Fourth of July.

T
HE
J
UNE
11
MEETING
was the culmination of a bizarre trend in the U.S. government to hide information from the people who most needed it. There had always been certain legal barriers to the sharing of information. By law—Rule 6E of the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure—information arising from grand jury testimony is secret. The bureau took that as a nearly absolute bar to revealing any investigative material at all. Every morning on Dick Clarke’s classified computer there were at least a hundred reports, from the CIA, the NSA, and other intelligence branches, but the FBI never disseminated such information. Rule 6E also meant that agents could not talk about criminal cases with colleagues who were working intelligence—even if they were in the same squad.

But until the second Clinton administration, information derived from intelligence operations, especially if it might involve a crime, was freely given to criminal investigators. In fact, it was essential. Agents in the 26 Federal Plaza building would often go upstairs to a highly secure room where they could read NSA transcripts and get briefings by a CIA representative posted there. Such cooperation helped convict Sheikh Omar Abdul Rahman, for instance; the wiretaps that had been placed in his apartment during an intelligence-gathering operation proved that he authorized terrorist bombings in New York. But there was always the concern that intelligence operations would be compromised by the disclosure of sensitive information during a trial.

The Justice Department promulgated a new policy in 1995 designed to regulate the exchange of information between agents and criminal prosecutors, but not among the agents themselves. FBI headquarters misinterpreted the policy, turning it into a straitjacket for its own investigators. They were sternly warned that sharing intelligence information with criminal investigators could mean the end of an agent’s career. A secret court in Washington, created by the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, became the arbiter of what information could be shared—“thrown over the Wall,” in the parlance of the court. Bureaucratic confusion and inertia allowed the policy to gradually choke off the flow of essential information to the I
-49
counterterrorism squad.

The CIA eagerly institutionalized the barrier that separated it from the bureau. The formula used by the CIA supervisor in the June 11 meeting to justify not telling the agents the identities of the men in the photographs was that it would compromise “sensitive sources and methods.” The source of their intelligence about the Malaysia meeting was the telephone in Yemen belonging to the al-Qaeda loyalist, Ahmed al-Hada, that was so central in mapping al-Qaeda’s network. The Hada phone was an al-Qaeda clearinghouse and an intelligence bonanza. Ironically, it was the FBI’s investigation in the embassy bombings case—headed by the New York office—that had uncovered the Hada phone in the first place. Any information that had to do with the Hada household was crucial. The CIA knew that one of the men in the photographs of the Malaysia meeting—Khaled al-Mihdhar—was Hada’s son-in-law, but the agency also kept this vital detail from the bureau.

The NSA, not wanting to bother with applying to the FISA court for permission to distribute essential intelligence, simply restricted its distribution. For example, in San Diego, Mihdhar made eight calls to the Hada phone to talk to his wife, who had just given birth, which the NSA did not distribute at all. There was a link chart on the wall of the “bullpen”—the warren of cubicles housing the I
-49
squad—showing the connections between Ahmed al-Hada’s phone and other phones around the world. It provided a map of al-Qaeda’s international reach. Had the line been drawn from the Hada household in Yemen to Hazmi and Mihdhar’s San Diego apartment, al-Qaeda’s presence in America would have been glaringly obvious.

The I-49 squad responded to the constraints in several aggressive and creative ways. When the NSA began to withhold intercepts of bin Laden’s satellite phone from the bureau and from prosecutors in the Southern District, the squad came up with a plan to build two antennae, one in the remote Pacific islands of Palau and another in Diego Garcia, in the Indian Ocean, that would capture the signal from the satellite. The NSA fought this scheme but finally coughed up 114 transcripts to prevent the antennae from being built. It kept a tight hold on other intercepts, however. The squad also constructed an ingenious satellite telephone booth in Kandahar for international calls, hoping to provide a convenient facility for jihadis wanting to call home. The agents could not only listen in on the calls, they received video of callers through a camera hidden in the booth. In Madagascar, I
-49
agents built an antenna aimed at intercepting the phone calls of Khaled Sheikh Mohammed. Millions of dollars and thousands of hours of labor were consumed in replicating information that the U.S. government already had but refused to share.

The agents on the I-49 were so used to being denied access to intelligence that they bought a CD of a Pink Floyd song, “Another Brick in the Wall.” Whenever they received the same formulation about “sensitive sources and methods,” they would hold up the phone to the CD player and push Play.

O
N THE FIFTH OF
J
ULY
2001, Dick Clarke assembled representatives of various domestic agencies—the Federal Aviation Administration, the Immigration and Naturalization Service, the Coast Guard, the FBI, and the Secret Service among them—to issue a warning. “Something really spectacular is going to happen here, and it’s going to happen soon,” he told them.

The same day, John O’Neill and Valerie James arrived in Spain, where he had been invited to address the Spanish Police Foundation. O’Neill decided to take a few days of vacation to decide what to do with his life. Although the Justice Department had dropped its inquiry into the briefcase incident, the bureau was conducting an internal investigation of its own, which kept the pressure on. Meantime, he had learned that the
New York Times
was preparing a story about the affair. The reporters not only knew about the classified material in the briefcase, they also had information about the previous incident with Val at the safe house parking garage and about O’Neill’s personal debt. This information had been leaked to them by someone in the bureau or the Justice Department, along with highly sensitive details about the budget that O’Neill had been preparing. The very material that had caused the Justice Department and the bureau to investigate O’Neill had been freely given to reporters in order to further sabotage his career. The leak seemed to be timed to destroy his chances of being confirmed for Clarke’s job in the NSC, which by now was an open secret.