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By Root 706 0

They came up with an extraordinary plan to bomb twelve American jumbo jets over the Pacific. They called it Operation “Bojinka”—a nonsense word that Mohammed had picked up when fighting in Afghanistan. Ramzi Yousef, the master bomb-maker, had perfected a small nitroglycerine device that was undetectable by airport security. He tested it out on a flight from Manila to Tokyo. Yousef got off the flight in Cebu, a city on one of the central islands of the Philippine archipelago. The passenger who took his seat was Haruki Ikegami, a twenty-four-year-old Japanese engineer. Two hours later, the bomb under Ikegami’s seat detonated, tearing him apart and nearly bringing the aircraft down. The assault that Yousef and Mohammed were planning would bring international air travel to a complete standstill.

Although bin Laden claims he did not know Yousef personally, he had sent a messenger to Manila to ask Yousef to do him the favor of assassinating President Bill Clinton when he came to Manila in November 1994. Yousef and the others mapped out the president’s route and sent to bin Laden diagrams and sketches of possible points of attack; finally, however, Yousef decided that the security was too tight. The men thought instead to kill Pope John Paul II when he came to the city the following month—even going so far as to get priests’ cassocks—but that plan, too, came to nothing. The Manila police caught on to them after chemicals in their apartment caught fire, and Yousef fled, leaving behind his computer with all their plans encrypted on the hard drive.

The plans were still in Khaled Sheikh Mohammed’s mind, however. He came to bin Laden with a portfolio of schemes for future attacks against America, including one that would require training pilots to crash airplanes into buildings. Bin Laden was noncommittal, although he did formally ask Mohammed to join al-Qaeda and move his family to Afghanistan. Mohammed politely declined. But the seed of September 11 had been planted.

14

Going Operational

ON JUNE 25, 1996, John O’Neill arranged a private retreat for FBI and CIA agents at the bureau’s training center in Quantico, Virginia. There were hamburgers and hot dogs, and O’Neill even let the CIA officers on the firing range, since they rarely had the opportunity to shoot. It was a lovely day. O’Neill went out to play a round of golf on the Quantico course. Suddenly everyone’s beepers went off.

There had been a catastrophic explosion in Saudi Arabia, at the Khobar Towers military-housing complex in Dhahran. The building served as the barracks for the 4404th Airlift Wing, which was enforcing the no-fly zone in Iraq. Nineteen American soldiers had died and nearly four hundred other people were injured. O’Neill assembled a team of more than a hundred agents, support personnel, and members of various police agencies. The next day they were on an Air Force transport plane to Saudi Arabia. A few weeks later, O’Neill himself joined them, along with the director of the FBI, Louis Freeh.

A slender and sober man, Freeh was temperamentally O’Neill’s opposite in many ways. The director prided himself on being a family man, usually leaving the office at six in order to be home with his wife and children. Unlike O’Neill, who was fascinated by gadgetry and always had the latest electronic organizer or mobile phone in his pocket, Freeh was bored by technology. One of his first actions on taking office in 1993 was to jettison the computer on his desk. The bureau was technologically crippled even before Freeh arrived, but by the time he left not even church groups would accept the vintage FBI computers as donations. Like most of his male agents, Freeh inclined toward cheap suits and scuffed shoes, posing quite a contrast to O’Neill, his subordinate, in his Burberry pinstripes and his Bruno Magli loafers.

It was evening when the two men, along with a small executive team, arrived in Dhahran. The disaster site was a vast crater, eighty-five feet wide and thirty-five feet deep, illuminated by lights on high stanchions; nearby lay charred automobiles