The Looming Tower - Lawrence Wright [138]
“Send ten green papers, okay?” Hage said in one exchange.
“Ten red papers?” she asked.
“Green.”
“You mean money,” she concluded.
“Thank you very much,” he responded sarcastically.
Coleman took an interest in Hage, who seemed, despite his clumsy tradecraft, to be an attentive father and a caring husband. Whenever he was away, he would call his children and caution his wife about letting them watch too much television. He was ostensibly running a charity called Help Africa People, while making a living as a gem dealer.
The CIA thought Hage might be recruited as an agent. As Coleman studied the transcripts, he decided Hage was unlikely to turn, but he agreed to go to Kenya, thinking that at least he might find some evidence to substantiate the existence of this organization, al-Qaeda, that Fadl had described.
In August 1997, Coleman and two CIA officers appeared at Hage’s home in Nairobi with a search warrant and a nervous Kenyan police officer carrying an AK-47. The house sat behind a high cinder-block wall covered with broken glass, guarded by a scrawny German shepherd on a rope. Hage’s American wife, April Brightsky Ray, and her six children were there, along with April’s mother, Marion Brown. Both women, Islamic converts, were wearing hijabs.
It was odd to see them in person after having studied them from such a distance. Coleman put the women in the same category as mob wives, knowledgeable in some general way that unlawful actions were going on, but not legally complicit. April was a heavy woman with a pleasant, round face. She said her husband was out of the country on business (actually, he was in Afghanistan talking to bin Laden), but he would be back that evening. Coleman showed her his warrant to search for what he said were stolen documents.
The place was filthy and swarming with flies. One of the children had a high fever. While the agency people talked to April in another room, Marion Brown closely watched Coleman going through their drawers and closets.
“Would you like some coffee?” Brown asked.
Coleman took a look at the kitchen and declined.
“That’s good, because I might be trying to poison you,” she said.
There were papers and notebooks stacked everywhere, gas receipts that were eight years old, and business cards for bankers, lawyers, travel agents, and exterminators. On the top shelf of the bedroom closet, Coleman found an Apple PowerBook computer.
Later that day Wadih el-Hage returned. Aslender, bearded man with a withered right arm, Hage had been born in Lebanon but had gained American citizenship through his wife. He was a convert to Islam from Catholicism, and he had his own ideas about recruitment: He arrived at the meeting with the agents carrying religious tracts and spent the evening trying to get Coleman and the CIA officers to accept Islam.
That night in Nairobi, however, one of the CIA men was able to retrieve several deleted documents on the PowerBook’s hard drive that substantiated many of the allegations that Jamal al-Fadl had made about the existence of al-Qaeda and its terrorist goals. The criminal case against bin Laden remained unfocused, however.
Coleman and the agency men went through the documents, piecing together Hage’s travels. He had bought some guns for bin Laden in Eastern Europe and seemed to be making frequent trips to Tanzania. Al-Qaeda was up to something, but it was unclear what that was. In any case, it was certainly a low-end operation, and the exposure of the safe house in Nairobi had no doubt put an end to it.
15
Bread and Water
MULLAH OMAR SENT a delegation to Tora Bora to greet bin Laden and learn more about him. Bin Laden’s declaration of war and the subsequent international media storm had shocked and divided the Taliban. Some of them pointed out that they had not invited