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A DUEL TO THE DEATH(Daily Mail Via Thomson Dialog NewsEdge) ON FEBRUARY 26, 1993, a rented Ford van entered the basement garage of the World Trade Center in New York. The dark, slender young man at the wheel parked, lit four long fuses and fled. The colossal explosion that ensued made the ground shudder a mile away. Six people were killed and 1,042 injured. The Twin Towers shook and swayed but on that occasion they did not fall. The young man was Ramzi Yousef, the son of a Palestinian mother and a Pakistani father who had grown up in Kuwait and studied electrical engineering in Wales. He was the first Islamist terrorist to attack the American homeland. He was also a harbinger of the horrors that were forming in the fevered mind of a wealthy 35-year-old Saudi, then exiled in Sudan, called Osama Bin Laden. The bomber was the product of one of the training camps financed by Bin Laden in Afghanistan and run by his shadowy terrorist organisation, dedicated to worldwide jihad against the enemies of Islam. It was called Al Qaeda - the base. Even after the attack, few American security experts were inclined to see Islamist terror as a global threat. One who did, however, was a tough Irish-American called John O'Neill, who in February 1995 was appointed the FBI's counter-terrorism chief. The deadly duel that ensued between O'Neill and Bin Laden is the central theme of a brilliant new book by American journalist Lawrence Wright, tracing the origins of 9/11. Its title is The Looming Tower, from lines in the Koran quoted by Bin Laden on the eve of the atrocity: 'Wherever you are, death will find you, even in the looming tower.' On the Sunday morning before he was due to start work in his new counter-terrorism role, O'Neill, who had just turned 43, dropped in to the FBI's J. Edgar Hoover Building in Washington to inspect his new headquarters. As he stood in the empty office, a telephone rang. 'Who are you?' asked the caller. 'I'm John O'Neill. Who the f*** are you?' It was Richard A. Clarke, the national co- ordinator for counter-terrorism at the White House. He said Ramzi Yousef had been spotted in Islamabad in Pakistan and ordered O'Neill to put together a team to snatch the bomber and bring him back to the U.S. It was an awesome task. In just hours, an Air Force jet had to be painted in civilian colours so it would be allowed to land in Pakistan. Arrangements had to be made to refuel it in mid-air on the return journey, for fear Yousef might claim asylum if the plane had to land en route - and O'Neill wasn't even due to start work until the following Tuesday. Gradually that Sunday, the room filled with agents in weekend clothes and churchgoing finery. For many, O'Neill was an unfamiliar face, though most had heard of him. He was darkly handsome, with slicked-back hair, black eyes and a round jaw. Every inch the FBI man, he wore black doublebreasted suits, drank Chivas Regal whisky and carried a 9mm automatic strapped to his ankle. Colleagues called him the Prince of Darkness because of his remorseless intensity, his sleeplessness and his habit of keeping the blinds down in his office day and night. At 9.30am Pakistani time on that Tuesday morning, Yousef was seized at the Su-Casa guesthouse in Islamabad and began his long journey back to the U.S. where he was eventually jailed for life. It was O'Neill's first official day on the job and already he had struck a telling blow against what he saw as the gravest menace facing America and the West. O'Neill's realisation, shared by few, was that the radical Islamists had a wider dramatic vision than previous terror movements, and that it included the large-scale murder of civilians. He became convinced that the man behind this worldwide network was Bin Laden, the reclusive Saudi dissident then based in the Sudan, with a dream to destroy America and the West. O'Neill, a Roman Catholic philanderer who managed to juggle a wife and three concurrent mistresses, was separated from Bin Laden, the ultra-pious Muslim with four wives and 17 children, by many layers of culture and belief. But they were well-matched opponents: ambitious, imaginative, relentless and each eager to eliminate the other and all he represented. John O'Neill came from a working- class New Jersey background. His parents were both cab drivers and he had begun working at the FBI as a fingerprint clerk. By contrast, Osama Bin Laden's father Mohammed had become rich through being the Saudi royal family's favourite building contractor, a patriarchal figure who notched up 54 children by 22 wives. Osama, 'the Lion', was born in Riyadh in 1958. His mother Alia, Mohammed's fourth wife, was just 16. Soon after, Mohammed gave Alia away to be the wife of one of his senior executives, as was his custom. The boy went with her. He was 17 when he married his first wife, a 14-year- old cousin. While still at school, he joined a secret society of religious zealots called the Muslim Brothers, whose purpose was to establish an Islamic state, no matter where. But Bin Laden hardly appeared to be the man to bring about such a revolution. Academically undistinguished at university in Jeddah, where he read economics, he was no man of action either. After the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in 1979, he held back from going to help the Mujahideen resistance fighters. When he eventually went in 1984, he proved an inept fighter who often fell ill before battle. But he gained status as a generous financier for the young Arab volunteers who flocked to join the Afghans' fight. These so- called Arab Afghans proved largely ineffectual during the war. Their obsession with martyrdom puzzled other Muslims, but to Bin Laden these youths were a potential army of the righteous. When the 31-year-old returned to Jeddah in 1989, it was as a military and religious hero with a divine mission, millions of dollars of family money in the bank and a legion of international volunteers at his beck and call. Unsurprisingly, King Fahd and the Saudi royal family, with their yachts and private jets, their boozing and carousing, above all their fear of a fundamentalist revolution, found this alarming. In 1992, angered by the dismissive attitude of the Saudis, Bin Laden and his family moved to Khartoum in Sudan, a haven of terrorism. It was at his house, where Islamist radicals gathered to sprawl on carpets and drink mango juice, that a new vision of Al Qaeda was born. It was to be a global organisation to subvert the West and kill its civilians. The Clinton administration still perceived Bin Laden as a wealthy nuisance, not a mortal threat, but there was a consensus that he needed to be pushed out of his sanctuary in Sudan. He and his retinue fled to Afghanistan in 1996 and set up a new HQ among the caves of Tora Bora. On the other side of the world, John O'Neill - now a year into his job - was longing to come to closer grips with his adversary. A couple of months earlier, an FBI officer called Dan Coleman had interrogated the first Al Qaeda defector, a senior Bin Laden lieutenant, Jamal al-Fadl, who revealed the extent of the terror organisation and its global ambitions. Coleman concluded that America faced a profound new threat; yet his reports met with little response, with the notable exceptions of O'Neill and his counterpart at the CIA, Michael Scheuer. They were the two men most responsible for putting a stop to Bin Laden and Al Qaeda, yet they disliked each other intensely. From the start, the response of American intelligence to the challenge presented by Al Qaeda was hampered by the dismal personal relationships and institutional warfare these men exemplified. In 1998, for example, CIA operatives in Azerbaijan examined a laptop computer which contained Al Qaeda organisational charts - 'the Rosetta Stone of Al Qaeda' as Dan Coleman called it - but the CIA refused to turn the information over to the FBI. O'Neill was so angry that he sent an agent to Azerbaijan to demand the actual computer from the government. When that failed, he persuaded Clinton to appeal personally to the Azerbaijani president. Eventually, the FBI got the computer, but the ill-will between the bureau and the agency continued, damaging both in their attempts to round up the Al Qaeda network, which was about to unleash its first world-shaking atrocity. On August 7, 1998, two gigantic suicide bombs were set off. The first exploded outside the American embassy in Nairobi, killing 213 people, including 12 Americans, and injuring 4,500, mostly Kenyans. Nine minutes later, a lorry blew up at the U.S. embassy in the Tanzanian capital, Dar es Salaam. Eleven people died and 85 were wounded, all of them Africans. Muslims all over the world greeted the bombings with horror. The attacks seemed pointless, a showy act of mass murder with no conceivable effect on American policy except to provoke a massive response. But that, as it turned out, was exactly the point. Bin Laden wanted to lure the U.S. into Afghanistan, which already had a history as the graveyard of empires. One of the Nairobi bombers survived the blast. An FBI agent tracked him to a shanty town outside the city and eventually the man confessed. What he said was chilling. 'We have a plan to attack the U.S. but we are not ready yet,' he told the agent. 'We need to hit you outside the country in a couple of places so you won't see what is going on inside. The big attack is coming. There's nothing you can do to stop it.' Washington's reaction was anything but helpful. A cruise missile attack on a supposed chemical weapons factory in Khartoum destroyed a pharmaceuticals plant, while 66 cruise missiles aimed at eliminating Bin Laden in Afghanistan missed him completely, more than half of them landing in Pakistan. The main legacy of this was that it established Bin Laden as a symbolic figure of resistance. When Bin Laden's exhilarated voice came crackling across a radio transmission - 'By the grace of God, I am alive!' - the forces of anti-Americanism had found their champion. John O'Neill was particularly concerned that, as the millennium approached, Al Qaeda would seize the moment to dramatise its war. He was certain that Islamic terrorists had established a beachhead in America. Not so the director of the FBI, who repeatedly stressed in White House meetings that Al Qaeda posed no domestic threat. But O'Neill was convinced there was a pace and momentum to the Al Qaeda attacks, and he told friends: 'We're due.' It says a lot for his burning sense of mission that he remained so focused, for there was much to distract him - not just difficulties with the CIA and an inattentive White House but also his own amazingly demanding private life. Few people in the bureau knew he had a wife and two children in New Jersey but even fewer knew he had a mistress in Chicago, Valerie James, a fashion sales director. She saw O'Neill at a bar and bought him a drink because 'he had the most compelling eyes'. O'Neill sent Valerie flowers every Friday, the weekly anniversary of the day they met. When a female agent pulled her aside at a bureau Christmas party and told her about O'Neill's family in New Jersey, she said: 'That's not possible. We're getting married. He asked my father for my hand.' While he was courting Valerie, O'Neill also had a girlfriend in Washington, Mary Lynn Stevens, who worked at the Pentagon Federal Credit Union and with whom he had requested an ' exclusive' relationship. When Mary Lynn learnt about O'Neill's wife, he explained that he was still talking to the lawyers; he hadn't wanted to endanger his relationship with Mary Lynn by revealing a marriage that, he claimed, was over except for the last legal details. He had said much the same to Valerie James. Soon after he got to Washington, he met another woman, Anna DiBattista, a stylish blonde who was working in the defence industry. She knew he was married from the beginning, but O'Neill never let her know about his other women. Often he spent part of the night with Mary Lynn and the rest of it with Anna. 'I don't think he ever stayed later than 5am or 6am,' said Mary Lynn. 'I never made him breakfast.' In the meantime, he kept his relationship with Valerie in Chicago alive. All three women were under the impression he intended to marry them. In an odd way, his domestic drama paralleled that of his quarry, Bin Laden. Perhaps if O'Neill had lived in a culture that sanctioned multiple marriages, he too would have had a harem. Somehow, amid all this sexual turmoil, O'Neill kept his mind on what he, almost alone, believed to be the most urgent task facing American intelligence: countering the devastating plot he was sure was being hatched by Al Qaeda. His instincts were right. In the spring of 1999, Bin Laden gave the go-ahead for the spectacular plan to attack targets in America with hijacked planes. In November, four Muslim students from Hamburg-arrived at an Al Qaeda training-camp in Afghanistan. One of them was Mohammed Atta, who would become the suicide pilot of American Airlines Flight 11. With their intelligence and grasp of English, they were quickly chosen to join the team of other would-be martyrs being assembled. On January 15, 2000, two of these young men flew into Los Angeles airport to enroll in flying school. The arrival of at least one of them was known to the CIA, yet the agency kept this vital information to itself, to the bitter fury of O'Neill's team at the FBI. Bin Laden now contrived a further distraction. In the port of Aden on October 12, 2000, at 11.15am a fibreglass fishing boat approached the $1bn guided missile destroyer the USS Cole. Two men brought the tiny skiff to a halt amidships, smiled at the sailors on deck, stood to attention - and detonated a huge suicide bomb. The shockwave wrecked cars onshore. Two miles away, people thought there was an earthquake. Seventeen crewmen were killed; 39 wounded. The destroyer was left gaping open like a gutted animal. O'Neill headed the FBI investigation in Aden. He quickly established the link between the bombing of the Cole and Al Qaeda. He was on Bin Laden's scent. But the new Bush administration still played down the terrorist threat, even though by the spring of 2001 nearly all the 19 hijackers of 9/11 were in the U.S.. That summer, Jordanian intelligence overheard the name of the rumoured operation and passed it to Washington: The Big Wedding. In the culture of the suicide bombers, a martyr's death marks his wedding day, when he greets the maidens of paradise. Despite such omens, the American security establishment was in a state of confusion, riven by interagency jealousies. At a meeting in June, exactly three months before 9/11, CIA agents taunted the FBI with photographs of known suspects, but would not tell the bureau people who they were. The meeting broke up with everyone shouting at each other. For, John O'Neill, Bin Laden's keenest pursuer, this was the last straw. He had also been offered a far more lucrative job as head of security at the World Trade Center in New York. During a holiday in Spain, he made his decision to retire from the bureau, after 20 years of service. Sadly, he realised this meant he would never catch his archenemy, Bin Laden. But it would also put an end to the ceaseless infighting and frustration that had dogged his hunt for the mastermind of Al Qaeda. In August, O'Neill took up his new post at the WTC. But within days of his leaving his old job, there was another disastrous stand- off between the FBI and the CIA which further illustrated the fatal animosity between the organisations. The bureau learnt that an al Qaeda suspect called Mihdhar, a rich young Saudi, might be in the country. Still unknown to the FBI, his was one of the photographs they had been shown by the CIA at the June 11 meeting which had broken up in a shouting match. Now the bureau wanted to put one of its most aggressive investigators, a former Navy 'Top Gun' pilot called Steve Bongardt, onto finding this man. But yet again the wall between the intelligence and criminal agencies proved impermeable. Bongardt was ordered to stand down. The FBI man was furious. 'If this guy is in the country,' he said, 'it's not because he'd going to f****** Disneyland!' He followed this with an email deploring the intelligence community's refusal to make common cause: 'Whatever has happened to this, someday somebody will die and the public will not understand why we are not more effective and throwing every resource we had at certain "problems".' On the evening of September 10, 2001, John O'Neill took a colleague up to the famous Windows on the World bar in the World Trade Center to discuss the security of his new empire. Later, he told friends over after- dinner drinks that something big was going to happen. 'We're overdue,' he said again. At 8.45 the next morning, Mohammed Atta piloted his hijacked plane into the north tower of the WTC. O'Neill, already at his desk, came down to ground level to assess the situation. He talked to two of his mistresses, Valerie James and Anna DiBattista, on the phone, assuring them he was OK. Then he went back in. Ten days later, rescuers digging in the rubble near the corner of Liberty and Greenwich Streets found the corpse of a man in a blue suit. It was John O'Neill. His personal war against Islamist terrorism had begun with the capture of the perpetrator of the first onslaught against the World Trade Center. With ghastly symmetry, it ended under the debris of the second. O'Neill was a flawed and polarising figure. But there was no one else in the FBI who was as strong and as concerned, no one else who might have taken the morsels of evidence that the CIA was withholding and marshalled a nationwide dragnet that could have stopped 9/11. O'Neill was right about Al Qaeda when few cared to believe it. Perhaps, 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 - who might even have outwitted the murderous visionary exulting in the caves of Tora Bora. ADAPTED from The Looming Tower: Al Qaeda's Road to 9/11 by Lawrence Wright (Penguin GBP20). Copyright 2006 Daily Mail. Source: Financial Times Information Limited - Europe Intelligence Wire. |