The Looming Tower - Lawrence Wright [100]
9
The Silicon Valley
IN THE EARLY MORNING, when the sun hit the towers of the World Trade Center, the twin shadows stretched across the entire island of Manhattan. The object of the buildings was to be noticed. They were the two tallest towers in the world when they were finished in 1972 and 1973, a record that didn’t last long, since architectural egos are always straining for the sky. Vanity was their most obvious quality; otherwise, the buildings were bland and impractical. Tenants felt isolated; just descending to earth and going out to lunch meant a time-consuming drop through several elevators and a brisk walk across the concourse to what was, finally, the welcome smell and clatter of the city. The “tube” construction that held up these stupendous stilts required columns spaced only twenty-two inches apart, which gave the impression, inside the offices, of being in a cage. But the vistas were glorious: the endless snake of lights on the New Jersey Turnpike; the bustling harbor with the diminutive Statue of Liberty; tankers and cruise ships slicing through the bending horizon of the Atlantic; the gray shores of Long Island; the trees beginning to turn in Connecticut; and recumbent Manhattan stretched out like a queen on her great bed between the rivers. Such momentous constructions are bound to intrude on the subconscious, as they are meant to do—“those awesome symbolic towers that speak of liberty, human rights and humanity”—as bin Laden labeled them.
The most impressive view of the Trade Center was just across the Hudson River in Jersey City; there, in a neighborhood known as Little Egypt, followers of Omar Abdul Rahman, the blind sheikh, conspired to bring the towers down. Abdul Rahman was seeking asylum in the United States, despite being listed as a terrorist on the State Department watch list. As he had done in Egypt, he issued a fatwa in America that permitted his followers to rob banks and kill Jews. He traveled widely in the United States and Canada, arousing thousands of young immigrant Muslims with his sermons, often directed against Americans, who he said are “descendants of apes and pigs who have been feeding from the dining tables of the Zionists, Communists, and colonialists.” He called on Muslims to assail the West, “cut the transportation of their countries, tear it apart, destroy their economy, burn their companies, eliminate their interests, sink their ships, shoot down their planes, kill them on the sea, air, or land.”
And indeed his followers were laboring to bring about this apocalypse. They hoped to paralyze New York by assassinating several political figures and destroying many of its most important landmarks—the George Washington Bridge, the Lincoln and Holland tunnels, Federal Plaza, and the United Nations—in simultaneous bombings. They were reacting to American support for the Egyptian president, Hosni Mubarak, whom they intended to kill when he came to New York. The FBI later learned that Osama bin Laden was financially backing the blind sheikh’s efforts.
Few Americans, even in the intelligence community, had any idea of the network of radical Islamists that had grown up inside the country. The blind sheikh may as well have been speaking in Martian as Arabic, since there were so few Middle East language specialists available to the FBI, much less to the local police. Even if his threats had been heard and understood, the perception of most Americans was dimmed by their general insulation from the world’s problems and clouded by the comfortable feeling that no one who lived in America would turn against it.
Then, on February 26, 1993, a rented Ford Econoline van entered the World Trade Center’s massive basement parking garage.