The Looming Tower (59 page)

The plane, carrying about nine thousand gallons of jet fuel, had crashed fifty-eight floors above O’Neill’s office. He made it to the concourse level. People weren’t panicked, they were confused. Was there a bomb? an earthquake? Nothing made sense. Water poured out of the ceiling, puddling on the marble floor. The two-story cathedral windows were shattered, and a disconcerting breeze stirred the lobby. By now, the first jumpers had broken through the windows of the north tower above the burning jet fuel. Their flailing bodies landed like grenades. The plaza outside was set up for a noon concert, and pieces of bodies were draped over the chairs. Dozens of shoes were scattered across the tiles. There was a day-care center in the building, and O’Neill helped usher the children outside to safety.

In Afghanistan, members of al-Qaeda were having difficulty getting a signal from the satellite. One of the men cupped the dish in his hands, aiming it toward the sky, but he found only static. Finally, someone tuned a radio to the BBC Arabic service. A newscaster was finishing a report when he said there was breaking news: A plane had struck the World Trade Center in New York! The members of al-Qaeda, thinking that was the only action, cried in joy and prostrated themselves. But bin Laden said, “Wait, wait.”

Ali Soufan and a handful of other agents were in the American Embassy in Yemen. Barbara Bodine had been rotated out of the country and the new ambassador had not yet arrived. Soufan was talking to his fiancée on the phone when she told him that the Trade Center had been attacked. He asked permission of the deputy chief of mission to enter the ambassador’s office to turn on the TV. Just as he did, the second plane hit.

Valerie James was arranging flowers in her office when “the phones started ringing off the hook.” It was a little after nine in the morning. Her children were calling her in a panic. Finally, O’Neill called. “Honey, I want you to know I’m okay. My God, Val, it’s terrible. There are body parts everywhere. Are you crying?” She was. He asked if she knew what had hit the building. She told him that her son had guessed it was a 747. Then he said, “Val, I think my employers are dead. I can’t lose this job.”

“They’re going to need you more than ever,” she told him.

In Afghanistan, bin Laden also wept and prayed. The accomplishment of striking the two towers was an overwhelming signal of God’s favor, but there was more to come. Before his incredulous companions, bin Laden held up three fingers.

At
9:25,
Anna DiBattista, who was driving to Philadelphia on business, received a call from O’Neill. The connection was good and then it decayed. O’Neill said he was safe and outside. “Are you sure you’re out of the building?” she asked. O’Neill replied that he loved her. She absolutely knew he was going back in.

The cloudless sky filled with coiling black smoke and a blizzard of paper—memos, photographs, stock transactions, insurance policies—which fluttered for miles on a gentle southeasterly breeze, across the East River into Brooklyn. Debris spewed onto the streets of lower Manhattan, which were already covered with bodies. Some of them had been exploded out of the building when the planes hit. A man walked out of the towers carrying someone else’s leg. Jumpers landed on several firemen, killing them instantly.

The air pulsed with sirens as firehouses and police stations all over the city emptied, sending the rescuers, many of them to their deaths. Steve Bongardt was running toward the towers, against a stream of people racing in the opposite direction. He heard the boom of the second collision. “There’s a second plane!” somebody cried. Bongardt wondered what kind of aircraft it was, perhaps a private jet that had gotten off course. Then, three blocks away from the towers, he saw one of the massive engines that had blown all the way through the tower. It had landed on a woman, who was still alive and squirming underneath. Bongardt understood then that this was the work of bin Laden.

O’Neill went back into the north tower, where the fire department had set up a command post. The lobby stank of jet fuel, which was draining into the elevator shafts, creating an explosive well. Heavily laden firemen made their way up the stairs. They were used to disaster, but their eyes were filled with awe and uncertainty. Meanwhile, a slow-moving stream of people descended the escalators from the mezzanine, like a dream. They were wet and caked in slime. Some of them had come from the upper floors and were naked and badly burned. Police directed them to the underground tunnels to avoid the jumpers. A rumor raced through the room that a third plane was headed toward them. Suddenly one of the elevators, which had been paralyzed after the strike, popped open, disgorging a dozen dazed people who had been trapped since the first plane hit and had no idea what had happened.

Wesley Wong, an FBI communications expert, leaped into the lobby through one of the busted-out windows, narrowly escaping the plummeting body of a middle-aged man in blue pants and a white shirt. Wong and O’Neill had known each other for more than twenty years. Even in this confusion, O’Neill looked calm and dapper, wearing his usual dark suit with a white pocket handkerchief, only a smudge of ash on his back indicating that the bottom had fallen out of his world. O’Neill asked Wong if there was any information he could divulge, acknowledging the fact that he was now an outsider and not privy to such details. “Is it true the Pentagon has been hit?” he asked. “Gee, John, I don’t know,” said Wong. “Let me try to find out.” But then O’Neill had trouble with the reception on his cell phone and started walking away. He said, “I’ll catch up with you later.” Wong last saw O’Neill walking toward the tunnel leading to the south tower.

At 9:38 a.m., the third plane had crashed into the headquarters of American military power and the symbol of its might. When news came of the Pentagon strike, bin Laden held up four fingers to his wonder-struck followers, but the final strike, on the U.S. Capitol, would fail.

Ali Soufan called O’Neill from Yemen, but could not get a connection.

Steve Gaudin, just back from language school in Vermont, picked up a piece of an airplane on the corner of Church and Vesey Streets and helplessly thought, “I just didn’t ask enough questions.” A few feet away, Barry Mawn was walking west on Vesey Street, toward the police emergency command center. He saw a woman’s foot in the street with a pink sock and a white tennis shoe. Suddenly, the ground trembled. He looked up to see the south tower collapsing on top of itself, gathering momentum and force as it threw off a great gray cloud of pulverized concrete that spilled over the surrounding office towers in a massive cascade. It sounded like an express train roaring through the station, chased by a huge wind. Mawn, plagued by a herniated disk, hobbled after two firemen who ran through the shattered windows of 7 World Trade. There were six or seven men pressed together in the lobby, sheltering behind a single column. One of the firemen cried out that they should hold on to each other and not let go. Just then, the debris blew in like a bomb. If they hadn’t been behind a column they would have been shredded. The room blacked out and the men choked on the acrid dust. Outside, everything was on fire.

Half a block away, Debbie Doran and Abby Perkins, who were on the I-49 squad, were in the basement of a building on the corner of Church and Vesey. They remembered Rosie, the woman rescue workers had failed to save in the rubble of the Nairobi bombing in 1998. She had died of dehydration. Now they expected to be buried under a building themselves, and they began filling trash cans with water.

Dan Coleman was in his bureau car next to St. Paul’s Chapel, waiting for another member of the I-49 squad, when he saw a tornado coming up Broadway. It was incomprehensible. His partner ran past him, headed north. “Get in the car!” Coleman called out. Four policemen also jumped in; one of them was having a heart attack. Then the blackness of the cloud engulfed them. “Turn on the air conditioning!” one of the cops gasped. Coleman turned it on, and the car filled with smoke. He quickly switched it off.

Everybody was yelling at him to get out of there, but he couldn’t see anything. He backed up and almost rolled into a subway entrance. Then an ambulance appeared and the cops got out. Coleman abandoned the car and went to find the rest of his squad.

He walked inside the cloud against the stream of fleeing people who were like ash-covered ghouls, as if they had been exhumed. He also was as white as a snowman, and the dust was beginning to harden, turning his hair into a helmet. The dust was a compound of concrete, asbestos, lead, fiberglass, paper, cotton, jet fuel, and the pulverized organic remains of
2,749
people who died in the towers.

Valerie heard screams in the rental office next door. She ran to see the large-screen TV. As soon as she saw the south tower collapsing, she slumped into a chair and declared, “Oh my God, John is dead.”

20

Revelations

T
HE
FBI
ORDERED
A
LI
S
OUFAN
and the rest of the team in Yemen to evacuate immediately. The morning after 9/
11,
the CIA’s chief of station in Aden did them the favor of driving them to the airport in Sanaa. He was sitting in the lounge with them when he got a call on his cell phone. He told Soufan, “They want to talk to you.”

One of the FBI communications specialists unpacked the satellite phone and set up the dish so Soufan could make the call. When he spoke to Dina Corsi at headquarters, she told him to stay in Yemen. He was upset. He wanted to get back to New York to investigate the attack on America—
right now!
“This is about that—what happened yesterday,” she told him. “Quso is our only lead.”

She wouldn’t tell him any more. Soufan got his luggage off the plane, but he was puzzled. What did Quso, the sleeping cameraman in the
Cole
bombing, have to do with 9/11? Another investigator, Robert McFadden, and a couple of SWAT guys stayed with him for security.

The order from headquarters was to identify the hijackers “by any means necessary,” a directive Soufan had never seen before. When they returned to the embassy, a fax came over a secure line with photos of the suspects. Then the CIA chief drew Soufan aside and handed him a manila envelope. Inside were three surveillance photos and a complete report about the Malaysia meeting—the very material Soufan had been asking for, which the CIA had denied him until now. The wall had come down. When Soufan realized that the agency and some people in the bureau had known for more than a year and a half that two of the hijackers were in the country, he ran into the bathroom and retched.

One of the photos showed a man who looked like Quso. Soufan went to General Ghalib Qamish, director of the Political Security Office, and demanded to see the prisoner Quso again. “What does this have to do with the
Cole?
” Qamish wanted to know.

“I’m not talking about the
Cole,
” said Soufan. “Brother John is missing.” He started to say something else, but he choked up. General Qamish’s eyes also filled with tears. There was a long silence filled with the immense vacancy of O’Neill’s passing.

General Qamish said that the prisoner was in Aden and there was only one last flight that evening into the capital. He picked up the phone to his subordinates and began shouting into it, “I want Quso flown in here tonight!” The Americans could almost hear the heels clicking on the other end. Then the general called the airport and demanded to be patched through to the pilot. “You will not take off until my prisoner is aboard,” he ordered.

At midnight, Quso sat in the PSO office. He was in a petulant frame of mind. “Just because something happens in New York or Washington, you don’t need to talk to me,” he said. Soufan showed him three surveillance photos, which included the hijackers Mihdhar and Hazmi, but Quso denied that he was in any of the pictures.

The next day the CIA finally gave Soufan the fourth photo of the Malaysia meeting, which it had buried until now. Quso grudgingly identified the figure in the picture as Khallad, although Soufan already knew who he was. He was the mastermind of the
Cole.
The photo was the first link between al-Qaeda and 9/11.

Soufan interrogated Quso for three nights, then wrote reports and did research all day. On the fourth night, Soufan collapsed from exhaustion and was taken to the hospital. The next morning, however, he was back in the PSO office. Quso identified Marwan al-Shehhi, the pilot of United Airlines Flight
175,
which crashed into the second tower. He had met Shehhi in a Kandahar guesthouse. He remembered that Shehhi had been ill during Ramadan, and that the emir of the guesthouse had taken care of him. The emir’s name was Abu Jandal. As it happened, Abu Jandal was also in Yemeni custody.

He was a large man for a Yemeni, powerful, with a dark full beard, although he had softened up after months in jail. Soufan immediately recognized him as bin Laden’s bodyguard.

Abu Jandal scowled at the Americans. “What are these infidels doing here?” he demanded. He took one of the plastic chairs and turned it around, sitting with his arms crossed and his back to the interrogators.

After some coaxing, Soufan got Abu Jandal to face him, but he still refused to look him in the eye. Abu Jandal did want to talk, however; he delivered a lengthy rant against America in rapid-fire Hijazi dialect. He also complained about the fact that he had never been charged. “Why am I in jail?” he kept demanding.

“Why is he in jail?” the Americans asked their Yemeni counterparts during a break.

“Suspicion.”

“Suspicion of what?”

“You know,
suspicion,
” the Yemeni officer responded.

Soufan realized that the prisoner was well trained in counterinterrogation techniques, since he easily agreed to things that Soufan already knew—that he had fought in Bosnia, Somalia, and Afghanistan, for instance—and denied everything else. The responses were designed to make the interrogators question their assumptions. Abu Jandal portrayed himself as a good Muslim who had flirted with jihad but had become disillusioned. He didn’t think of himself as a killer but as a revolutionary who was trying to rid the world of evil, which he believed mainly came from the United States of America, a country he knew practically nothing about.