The Looming Tower (57 page)

Before leaving for Spain, O’Neill had met with Larry Silverstein, the president of Silverstein Properties, which had just taken over the management of the World Trade Center. Silverstein offered him a position as chief of security. It would pay more than twice his government salary. But O’Neill could not commit. He told Barry Mawn that he didn’t want to resign from the FBI with his reputation still in question. He promised Silverstein an answer when he returned from Spain; he also had still not turned down Dick Clarke.

He and Val and her son, Jay, spent several days in Marbella, playing golf and reading. Mark Rossini, who often served as a liaison between the FBI and the Spanish police, had come along to translate. On July
8,
O’Neill lit a cigar on the verandah of the villa where they were staying and told Rossini, “I’m K.M.A.”

It was the twentieth anniversary of the day he became an FBI agent. That is the time when an FBI agent can retire with his full pension and finally tell the bureau, “Kiss my ass.”

O’Neill was smiling, Rossini observed, but his eyes were sad. He was on the verge of making his choice. Rossini could see that O’Neill was saying good-bye to the man he had been, and to the man he might have been. There were dreams that would never be realized. For one, he would never catch Osama bin Laden.

All the time that O’Neill was in Spain, Mohammed Atta and Ramzi bin al-Shibh were also in the country, in a little coastal resort called Salou, reviewing the final details of the 9/11 strike.

I
N THE SAME WAY
that his dress and manners paid tribute to the FBI’s traditional opponent, the mobster, O’Neill also displayed an affinity for the terrorist mind. His hero was the Irish nationalist Michael Collins, the martyred leader of Sinn Fein and the inventor of modern guerrilla warfare, who (like O’Neill) had been betrayed by his own people. Although O’Neill worked against the Irish Republican Army as an FBI agent, supervising several highly successful operations, he sympathized with its aspirations. He obviously saw something of himself in Michael Collins. But for the last decade he had found himself matched in a mortal contest against the most daring terrorist in history, whose goals appalled him but whose commitment and relentlessness were unequaled.

After the
Cole
investigation and the inquiry about the briefcase, O’Neill grasped that his reputation was so undermined that the NSC job was now out of the question. The usual course of a retired FBI executive is to become a security consultant in a high-paying corporate job, so that in the final years of his career he can finally cash in. O’Neill had applied for several positions of that sort, but the one that he settled on when he returned from Spain was the World Trade Center post. Some of his friends, including Mark Rossini, congratulated him, saying, “At least now you’ll be safe. They already tried to bomb it.” And O’Neill replied, “They’ll try again. They’ll never stop trying to get those two buildings.” Once again, he was instinctively placing himself in the bull’s-eye. And perhaps in this decision there was a certain acceptance of his fate.

One can imagine that John O’Neill’s life exemplified, in the minds of Islamic radicals as well as believers of many faiths, the depravity that was characteristic of his country and his age. It was a time in America when, spiritually speaking, people were pushed to extremes. The comfortable morality of the center had decayed, along with the mainstream denominations, which were withering into irrelevance; meanwhile, rapidly growing fundamentalist churches were transforming the political landscape. The sexual decadence of the Clinton presidency was replaced by the dogmatism of the religious right. O’Neill, too, was pulled between turpitude and extreme piousness. He was an adulterer, a philanderer, a liar, an egotist, and a materialist. He loved celebrity and brand names, and he lived well beyond his means. These qualities were exactly the stereotypes that bin Laden used to paint his portrait of America. But now O’Neill was reaching for a spiritual handhold.

He had moved away from the Catholic Church when he met Valerie. She was the daughter of a fundamentalist preacher in Chicago. O’Neill loved the fire-and-brimstone services, but at the same time he was leading a national FBI probe of the violence of anti-abortion protesters. Both he and Val became aware of the power and danger of fundamentalist beliefs. These were people who went to churches very similar to the ones they did, who were drawn to ecstatic experiences that more traditional faiths could not provide. The difference was that the protesters were willing to kill others in the name of God. When O’Neill and Val moved to New York, they attended the stately Marble Collegiate Church on Fifth Avenue, which had been the pulpit of Norman Vincent Peale and his upbeat philosophy of “positive thinking.” It was a safe harbor, but O’Neill was too unsettled for such sedate religion.

After the incident in the FBI parking garage, O’Neill began reading the Bible every day. In Yemen, he kept a Bible on his bedside table, along with a recent biography of Michael Collins. He returned to Catholicism in the spring of
2001,
attending Mass every morning. He told Val that a priest was counseling him about getting a divorce. That August his wife, Christine, signed a property agreement, which gave her custody of the children and the house in Linwood, New Jersey. But his impending freedom seemed only to add to the spiritual burden he was carrying.

O’Neill bought a book titled
Brush Up on Your Bible!
As a preacher’s daughter, Val knew the Bible far better than O’Neill did, no matter how hard he studied. They got into heated discussions about salvation. He believed that a soul was saved through good works; Val thought it was only through belief in Jesus Christ. She always had the sickening feeling that he was doomed.

Soon after he returned from Spain, O’Neill happened upon a children’s book titled
The Soul Bird.
Val was in the bathroom getting ready for work when O’Neill came in to read it to her. She was only half paying attention. The story is about a bird that perches on one foot inside our soul.

This is the soul bird.

It feels everything we feel.

O’Neill, the tough guy, with his service automatic strapped on his ankle, read that the soul bird runs around in pain when someone hurts us, then swells with joy when we are embraced. Then he came to the part about the drawers:

Do you want to know what the soul bird is made of?

Well, it’s really quite simple: it’s made of drawers.

These drawers can’t be opened just like that—because each is locked with its own special key!

Valerie was taken aback as O’Neill began to weep. But he continued to read about the drawers—one for happiness, one for sadness, one for jealousy, one for contentment—until suddenly he was sobbing so hard that he couldn’t finish. He was completely broken.

Immediately after that episode, he buried himself in prayer. He had a couple of prayer guides, and he marked his favorites with ribbons or Post-it notes. He was particularly drawn to the Psalms, including number
142:

On the way where I shall walk

they have hidden a snare to entrap me.

Look on my right and see:

there is not one who takes my part.

I have no means of escape,

not one cares for my soul.

I cry to you, O Lord.

I have said: “You are my refuge,

all I have left in the land of the living.”

Listen then to my cry

for I am in the depths of distress.

In the back of one of his red-leather breviaries, he clipped a schedule of Catholic prayer times, and on July 30 he began to obsessively check them off. It is now a rare practice for ordinary Catholics to pray four or five times a day, as Muslims do, but the ancient practice is still available to members of the clergy and extremely fervent believers. Perhaps in his worship O’Neill drew parallels between the early church and certain aspects of modern Islamism, since the church calendar is full of martyrs and stern ideologues who would be seen as religious extremists today. He began this regimen on the feast day of Peter Chrysologus, the bishop of Ravenna, who banned dancing and persecuted the heretics. The next day, July
31,
celebrates Saint Ignatius of Loyola, the indomitable Spanish soldier who founded the Jesuit order. The vision these saints had of a society governed by God is far more like that of Sayyid Qutb than that of most modern Christians.

In his schedule, O’Neill checked off every prayer until Sunday, August
19,
the day the article about the briefcase incident finally appeared in the
Times.
Then the marks abruptly stopped.

“T
HE DUTIES OF THIS RELIGION
are magnificent and difficult,” bin Laden said in a videotaped speech that was later discovered on the computer of a member of the Hamburg cell. “Some of them are abominable.”

Bin Laden spoke about the Prophet, who warned the Arabs that they would become weak because of their love of life and their fear of fighting. “This sense of loss, this misery that has befallen us: all these are proof that we have abandoned God and his jihad,” bin Laden said. “God has imposed inferiority on you and will not remove it from you until you return to your religion.”

Recalling the Prophet’s injunction on his deathbed that Islam should be the only religion in Arabia, bin Laden asked, “What answer do we have for God on the day of reckoning?…The
ummah
in this time have become lost and have gone astray. Now, ten years have passed since the Americans entered the land of the two holy places…. It becomes clear to us that shying away from the fight, combined with the love of earthly existence that fills the hearts of many of us, is the source of this misery, this humiliation, and this contempt.”

These words reached into the hearts of nineteen young men, many of whom had skills, talent, and education, and were living comfortably in the West; and yet they still resonated with the sense of shame that bin Laden sang to them.

What do we want? What do we want?

Don’t we want to please God?

Don’t we want Paradise?

He urged them to become martyrs, to give up their promising lives for the greater glory that awaited them. “Look, we have found ourselves in the mouth of the lion for over twenty years now,” he said, “thanks to the mercy and favor of God: the Russian Scud missiles hunted us for over ten years, and the American Cruise missiles have hunted us for another ten years. The believer knows that the hour of death can be neither hastened nor postponed.” Then he quoted a passage from the fourth sura of the Quran, which he repeated three times in the speech—an obvious signal to the hijackers who were on their way:

Wherever you are, death will find you,

even in the looming tower.

O’N
EILL WAS A FLAWED AND POLARIZING FIGURE,
but there was no one else in the bureau who was as strong and as concerned, no one else who might have taken the morsels of evidence that the CIA was withholding and marshaled a nationwide dragnet that would have stopped 9/11. The bureau was a timid bureaucracy that abhorred powerful individuals. It was known for its brutal treatment of employees who were ambitious or who fought conventional wisdom. O’Neill was right about the threat of al-Qaeda when few cared to believe it. Perhaps, in the end, his capacity for making enemies sabotaged his career, but those enemies also helped al-Qaeda by destroying the man who might have made a difference. Already the New York office was losing focus, and without O’Neill, terrible mistakes were made.

While O’Neill was in Spain, an FBI agent in Phoenix, Kenneth Williams, sent an alarming electronic communication to headquarters, to Alec Station, and to several agents in New York. “The purpose of this communication is to advise the bureau and New York of the possibility of a coordinated effort by Osama bin Laden to send students to the United States to attend civil aviation universities and colleges,” the note said. Williams went on to advise headquarters of the need to make a record of all the flight schools in the country, interview the operators, and compile a list of all Arab students who had sought visas for flight training.

Jack Cloonan was one of the New York agents to read the memo, which was printed out and distributed. He wadded it into a ball and threw it against a wall. “Who’s going to conduct the thirty thousand interviews?” he asked the supervisor in Phoenix. “When the fuck do we have time for this?” But he did run a check on the several Arab names that the agent in Phoenix had listed. Nothing came up. The CIA, which has an office in Phoenix, also looked at the names and made no connections. As it turns out, a student the Phoenix agent had mentioned had been friendly with Hani Hanjour, one of the presumed pilots of 9/
11,
but there was little chance that an investigation such as the one the agent was suggesting would have led to the plot. At least, not by itself.

Then, in mid-August, a flight school in Minnesota contacted the local FBI field office to express concern about a student, Zacarias Moussaoui. He had asked suspicious questions about the flight patterns around New York City and whether the doors of a cockpit could be opened during flight. The local bureau quickly determined that Moussaoui was an Islamic radical who had been to Pakistan and probably to Afghanistan. The agents believed he might be a potential suicide hijacker. Because he was a French citizen who had overstayed his visa, the INS placed him under arrest. The FBI agents investigating the case sought permission from headquarters to examine Moussaoui’s laptop, which was denied because the agents couldn’t show a probable cause for their search. When the Minneapolis supervisor pressed the matter with headquarters, he was told he was trying to get people “spun up.” The supervisor defiantly responded that he was “trying to keep someone from taking a plane and crashing into the World Trade Center”—a weird premonition that suggests how such thoughts were surging through the unconscious of those who were reading the threat reports.