The Looming Tower - Lawrence Wright [115]
Bin Laden just gave him the same old smile that Khashoggi had always seen. He didn’t seem to realize what he had done or become in the eyes of his compatriots.
Exasperated, Khashoggi told bin Laden that he was going to leave the next day. If Osama wanted to do the interview, he should call him at the Hilton.
Bin Laden never called.
11
The Prince of Darkness
ON A SUNDAY MORNING in February 1995, Richard A. Clarke, the national coordinator for counterterrorism in the White House, went to his office to review intelligence cables that had come in over the weekend. One of the reports noted that Ramzi Yousef, the suspected mastermind behind the World Trade Center bombing two years earlier, had been spotted in Islamabad. Clarke immediately called FBI headquarters, although in his experience there was rarely anyone there on Sundays. A man whose voice was unfamiliar to him answered the phone. “O’Neill,” he growled.
“Who are you?” Clarke asked.
“I’m John O’Neill,” the man replied. “Who the fuck are you?”
O’Neill had just been appointed chief of the FBI’s counterterrorism section. He had been transferred from the bureau’s Chicago office. After driving all night, he had gone directly to headquarters that Sunday morning without dropping off his bags. Alone in the massive J. Edgar Hoover Building, except for security guards, O’Neill was not even supposed to start work until the following Tuesday. Clarke informed him that Ramzi Yousef, the FBI’s most wanted terrorist, had tripped a wire nine thousand miles away. It was now O’Neill’s responsibility to put together a team that would bring the suspect back to New York, where he had been indicted for the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and a conspiracy to bomb American airliners.
O’Neill walked down the empty hallway and opened the Strategic Information and Operations Center (SIOC). The windowless room is set up for secure videoconferences with the White House, the State Department, and other branches of the FBI. It is the nerve center of the bureau, opened only during emergencies. O’Neill began making calls. He wouldn’t leave FBI headquarters for the next three days.
A “rendition”—as the bureau terms the legal kidnapping of suspects in foreign lands—is a complex and time-consuming procedure, usually planned months in advance. O’Neill would need an airplane to fly the suspect home. Because of the $2 million reward on Yousef’s head, there had been a flood of false reports concerning his whereabouts, so one of O’Neill’s first concerns was to make sure he actually had his man. He would have to have a fingerprint expert, whose job would be to determine that the suspect was, in fact, Ramzi Yousef. He needed a medical doctor to attend Yousef in case he was injured or had some unknown condition that required treatment. He would have to push the State Department to get permission from the Pakistani government to perform the snatch immediately. Under ordinary circumstances, the host country would be asked to detain the suspect until extradition paperwork had been signed and the FBI could place the man in custody. There was no time for that. Yousef was planning to board a bus for Peshawar in a few hours. Unless he was quickly apprehended, he would soon be over the Khyber Pass and into Afghanistan, out of reach.
Gradually the room filled with agents in casual weekend clothes or churchgoing finery. A contingent from the New York office flew in; they would be the ones to make the actual arrest if Yousef was captured, since he had been indicted in their district.
For many of the agents in the room, O’Neill was an unfamiliar face, and no doubt it was odd to be suddenly taking orders from a man they had never before met. But most had heard of him. In a culture that favors discreet anonymity, O’Neill cut a memorable figure. Darkly handsome, with slicked-back hair, winking black eyes, and a big round jaw, O’Neill talked tough in a New Jersey accent that many loved to imitate. He had entered the bureau in the J.