The Looming Tower - Lawrence Wright [121]
The summary executions foreclosed the opportunity of learning exactly what connections there were between al-Qaeda and the perpetrators Bin Laden himself privately confided to the editor of Al-Quds al-Arabi that he had activated a sleeper cell of Afghan veterans when the Saudi government failed to respond to his protest of American troops on Arabian soil. John O’Neill suspected that the executed men had nothing to do with the crime. He had sent several agents to try to question the suspects, but they had been executed before the Americans got the chance to talk to them. Whatever al-Qaeda’s actual connection to the attack, Prince Turki would later describe the National Guard bombing as bin Laden’s “first terrorist blow.”
12
The Boy Spies
HOSNI MUBARAK, THE EGYPTIAN PRESIDENT, is a squat, neckless man with a heavy lower lip that juts forward when he talks, fleshy cheeks, and thickly lidded eyes, like a clay rendering that has not been fully formed. He was sixty-seven years old in 1995, but his wavy hair was dyed a brilliant black, and the billboards bearing his visage in Cairo showed a man twenty years younger—changelessness being the most obvious feature of his rule. He had stood beside Anwar al-Sadat on the reviewing platform when the assassins struck, and upon assuming the presidency he declared a state of emergency that was still in effect fourteen years later. His early efforts at liberalizing the political process were answered by the victories of the Muslim Brothers and then by the terror campaign of the radical Islamists in the nineties. Mubarak showed himself to be as pitiless as the insurgents, but the violence had not yet reached its climax.
In April, Egyptian intelligence learned that Zawahiri had chaired a meeting of al-Jihad in Khartoum that included leading members of the rival Islamic Group—a troublesome development. The reports said that the two organizations were working together to restart terror activities in Egypt, and that they were being aided by the Sudanese government, which was supplying them with arms and false papers. But as yet there was no word on how they would strike, or where.
Hasan al-Turabi’s grand Islamist revolution had been stymied, unable to spread beyond Sudan. Egypt was of course the ultimate target, but Mubarak had the country in an iron grip. If he were eliminated, Zawahiri and the plotters reasoned, that would create a power vacuum, and in the upcoming parliamentary elections alternative Islamist movements could take charge.
Mubarak was flying to Addis Ababa on June 26 for a meeting of the Organization of African Unity. The Egyptian radicals had been anticipating this event for more than a year, placing members of the cell charged with carrying out the killing in the Ethiopian capital. Some of them married local women and ostensibly became a part of the community.
Working with assassins from the Islamic Group, Sudanese intelligence smuggled weapons into their embassy in Ethiopia. The leader of the plot was Mustafa Hamza, a senior Egyptian member of al-Qaeda and commander of the military branch of the Islamic Group. At a farm north of Khartoum, Zawahiri gave a motivational talk to the nine terrorists who were going to carry out the plot, and then he went on to Ethiopia to inspect the killing ground.
The plan was to station two cars along the airport road, the only route into the capital. When Mubarak’s limousine approached the first car, the assassins would strike with automatic weapons and rocket-propelled grenades. If Mubarak escaped the first trap, another car would be waiting down the road.
Mubarak’s plane arrived an hour early, but delays in getting his entourage and bodyguards together gave the assassins time to get into place. The limousine appeared, the