The Looming Tower - Lawrence Wright [0]
Title Page
Dedication
Map
Prologue
1. The Martyr
2. The Sporting Club
3. The Founder
4. Change
5. The Miracles
6. The Base
7. Return of the Hero
8. Paradise
9. The Silicon Valley
10. Paradise Lost
11. The Prince of Darkness
12. The Boy Spies
13. Hijira
14. Going Operational
15. Bread and Water
16. “Now It Begins”
17. The New Millennium
18. Boom
19. The Big Wedding
20. Revelations
Principal Characters
Notes
Author Interviews
Photographic Credits
Bibliography
Acknowledgments and Notes on Sources
Copyright Page
Also by Lawrence Wright
This is for my family,
Roberta, Caroline, Gordon & Karen
Prologue
ON SAINT PATRICK’S DAY, Daniel Coleman, an agent in the New York office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation handling foreign intelligence cases, drove down to Tysons Corner, Virginia, to report for a new posting. The sidewalks were still buried under gray banks of snow from the blizzard of 1996 a few weeks before. Coleman entered an undistinguished government office tower called the Gloucester Building and got off the elevator at the fifth floor. This was Alec Station.
Other stations of the Central Intelligence Agency are located in the various countries that they cover; Alec was the first “virtual” station, situated only a few miles from the headquarters building in Langley. On an organizational chart it was labeled “Terrorist Financial Links,” a subsection of the CIA’s Counterterrorist Center, but in practice it was devoted to tracking the activities of a single man, Osama bin Laden, whose name had arisen as the master financier of terror. Coleman first heard of him in 1993, when a foreign source spoke about a “Saudi prince” who was supporting a cell of radical Islamists who were plotting to blow up New York landmarks, including the United Nations, the Lincoln and Holland tunnels, and even 26 Federal Plaza, the building where Coleman worked. Now, three years later, the bureau had finally found time to send him to look over the intelligence the agency had compiled to see if there was any reason to pursue an investigation.
Alec Station already had thirty-five volumes of material on bin Laden, consisting mostly of transcripts of telephone conversations that had been sucked up by the electronic ears of the National Security Agency. Coleman found the material repetitive and inconclusive. Still, he opened an intelligence case on bin Laden, largely as a placeholder in case the “Islamist financier” turned out to be something more than that. Like many agents, Dan Coleman had been trained to fight the Cold War. He joined the FBI as a file clerk in 1973. Scholarly and inquisitive, Coleman was naturally drawn to counterintelligence. In the 1980s, he concentrated on recruiting communist spies in the populous diplomatic community surrounding the United Nations; an East German attaché was a particular treasure. In 1990, however, when the Cold War had just ended, he found himself on a squad devoted to Middle Eastern terrorism. There was little in his background that prepared him for this new turn—but that was true of the bureau as a whole, which regarded terrorism as a nuisance, not a real threat. It was difficult to believe, in those cloudless days after the fall of the Berlin Wall, that America had any real enemies still standing.
Then, in August 1996, bin Laden declared war on America from a cave in Afghanistan. The stated cause was the continued presence of U.S. forces in Saudi Arabia five years after the first Gulf War. “Terrorizing you, while you are carrying arms in our land, is a legitimate right and a moral obligation,” he stated. He presumed to speak on behalf of all Muslims, and even directed some of his lengthy fatwa to U.S. Secretary of Defense William Perry personally. “I say to you, William, that: These youths love death as you love life…. These youths will not ask you for explanations. They will sing out that there is nothing between us that needs to be explained, there is only killing and neck-smiting.”
Other than Coleman, few in America—even in the bureau—knew or