The Looming Tower - Lawrence Wright [150]
“You are like the Middle East version of Teddy Roosevelt,” Miller concluded.
During the interview, many of bin Laden’s followers crowded into the hut. Two Saudis, Mohammed al-‘Owhali and “Jihad Ali” Azzam, were preparing for al-Qaeda’s first big operation the following month. After Miller’s crew finished the taping, bin Laden’s technical experts erased the Saudis’ faces from the videotape before giving it to the Americans.
DURING THE INTERVIEW, Miller asked about Wali Khan Amin Shah, who had been arrested in Manila. “American authorities believe he was working for you, funded by you, setting up training camps there and part of this plan was…the assassination or the attempted assassination of President Clinton during his trip to Manila,” said Miller. Wali Khan was “a close friend,” bin Laden mildly replied. “As to what you said about him working for me, I have nothing to say. We are all together in this.”
The fact that Khan was in American custody was supposed to be a closely held secret, but someone had leaked that information to Miller. Some people in the FBI and the U.S. Attorney’s Office were enraged when Khan’s name was mentioned directly to bin Laden on television. They knew that John O’Neill was a friend of Christopher Isham, an investigative producer for ABC News; they often drank together at Elaine’s. Patrick Fitzgerald, the assistant prosecutor in New York’s Southern District, was so angry that he threatened to indict O’Neill. Both Isham and Miller denied that O’Neill was their source and volunteered to take lie-detector tests to prove it. Fitzgerald backed off, but the allegation that O’Neill talked carelessly to reporters lingered as a slur on his reputation. It didn’t help that some journalists’ investigations of bin Laden were more creative than those of the American intelligence community.
THE FACT WAS THAT THE CIA had no one inside al-Qaeda or the Taliban security that surrounded bin Laden. The agency did have some contacts with a few Afghan tribesmen—leftover assets from the jihad against the Soviets. At Alec Station, Mike Scheuer came up with a plan to use them to kidnap bin Laden. The Afghans were supposed to enter through a drainage ditch that ran under the back fence of Tarnak Farms. Another group of Afghans would sneak through the front gate, using silenced pistols to kill whoever got in the way. When they found bin Laden, they would stash him in a cave thirty miles away. If they were caught, there would be no American fingerprints on the abduction; if they were not, then the Afghans would turn bin Laden over to the Americans a month or so later, after the search parties had given up.
The CIA had outfitted what appeared to be a commercial shipping container that would fit in the cargo hull of a civilian version of a C-130 aircraft. Inside the container was a dentist’s chair with restraints modeled for a very tall man (the CIA was under the impression that bin Laden was six feet five inches tall); there would be a doctor inside the box as well, and he would have a wide array of medical equipment available to him, including a dialysis machine in case bin Laden actually did have kidney problems. The agency had even built a landing strip on a private ranch near El Paso, Texas, in order to practice landing at night with no lights, the pilots using night-vision goggles.
It was Scheuer’s plan to drop bin Laden in Egypt, where he could be rudely questioned and then quietly disposed of. John O’Neill furiously objected to this idea. He was a lawman, not a killer. He wanted