The Black Banners_ 9_11 and the War Against Al-Qaeda - Ali H. Soufan [17]
John had a few favorite restaurants, and his choice was determined by what kind of food he was in the mood for and what time of night it was. For steak, he loved Cité, on West Fifty-first Street. If it was very late, we would head to 1st, on First Avenue. (He would tell me that it was “the place where all the good chefs in the city go after-hours.”) If he was looking for a more social evening, he’d choose Elaine’s.
A place John especially liked taking officials from other countries was Bruno’s, owned, “ironically,” as John liked to say, by an Albanian. “The best Italian food in the city, and the guy’s Albanian.” There was a table on the second floor that the manager would reserve for John if he knew he was coming. An exceptional Israeli piano player usually played Frank Sinatra songs, but when John had guests he would take requests from our group.
During the investigation into the 1998 East African embassy bombings, we were entertaining Tanzanian officials, and John asked the piano player for “an African song.” Without pause the pianist started playing the 1920s Solomon Linda tune “Mbube” (“The Lion Sleeps Tonight”), more or less as rendered in the Disney film The Lion King, with its chorus of “In the jungle, the mighty jungle.” When we took Saudi officials there and John requested a Middle Eastern song, the piano player opened with “Desert Rose.”
John always tried to make foreign officials feel at home, so if there was a good restaurant in New York that served food from their countries, we went. In 1999, we were working with Saad al-Khair and his fellow Jordanian intelligence officers on the Millennium Operation, the investigation that thwarted a terrorist plot to attack American and Israeli targets in Jordan on and around January 1, 2000. We took the Jordanians to a place called Cedars of Lebanon. The restaurant’s live band often played traditional Arabic songs, which our visitors loved.
John understood the importance of personal relationships. Foreign law enforcement and intelligence officers could make life either difficult or easy for us, depending upon how cooperative they were. John endeared himself to them. When a British official’s wife had cancer, John spent time researching the best hospitals in New York and helped the couple plan their trip. In turn, officials treated him and his team well when we traveled to England.
Most of our counterparts came to adore John. A phone call from him achieved much more than official cables. I saw this firsthand when I was in England taking part in Operation Challenge, the investigation that disrupted al-Qaeda and EIJ activity there. The relationship was one of honesty and friendship, not diplomatic niceties. One evening when our colleagues from Scotland Yard were visiting, John raised his glass during dinner and told them, “Unless you get your side to help more, the queen’s going to end up living in Northern Ireland.” No offense was taken—they knew John spoke from the heart, out of genuine concern for us all—and we got the help we wanted.
The bureaucracy didn’t always understand the importance of John’s dinners and entertaining and sometimes refused to give funding approval. In those cases John would just put the dinner on his own credit card. I learned to do the same, telling others, as John had told me, “We’re not in the bureau to save money, we’re here to save lives.”
As the bureau began investigating bin Laden and al-Qaeda, agents began uncovering an American contingent with ties to the group. It wasn’t only bin Laden who saw Azzam as his mentor; several Americans fell under Azzam’s spell when he toured the United States in the 1980s to raise funds for the mujahideen and recruit believers to go to Afghanistan. Among the Americans lured were Wadih el-Hage, Essam al-Ridi, and Ihab Ali.
El-Hage was born in Lebanon to a Christian family but raised in Kuwait, where his father worked. There he began hanging out