The Looming Tower - Lawrence Wright [152]
Prince Turki was stupefied by this turnabout. Mullah Omar then lectured him on the Pashtu tribal code, which he said was quite strict about betraying guests.
Sheikh Abdullah Turki offered the opinion that if a guest breaks his word, as bin Laden had done repeatedly by granting press interviews, that action absolves the host who is protecting him. The Taliban leader was unconvinced.
Thinking that Omar needed a face-saving compromise, Prince Turki suggested that the two of them set up a committee that would explore ways to formally hand over bin Laden. Then Prince Turki and his party got up to leave. As he did so, Turki asked specifically, “Are you agreed in principle that you will give us bin Laden?”
Mullah Omar said he was.
After the meeting, Saudi Arabia reportedly sent four hundred four-wheel-drive pickup trucks and other financial aid to the Taliban as a down payment for bin Laden. Six weeks later, the money and the trucks allowed the Taliban to retake Mazar-e-Sharif, a bastion of a Persian-speaking, Shiite minority, the Hazaras. Among the Taliban fighters were several hundred Arabs sent by bin Laden. Well-placed bribes left a force of only 1,500 Hazara soldiers guarding the city, and they were quickly killed. Once inside the defenseless city, the Taliban continued raping and killing for two days, indiscriminately shooting anything that moved, then slitting throats and shooting dead men in the testicles. The bodies of the dead were left to wild dogs for six days before survivors were allowed to bury them. Those citizens who fled the city on foot were bombed by the Taliban air force. Hundreds of others were loaded into shipping containers and baked alive in the desert sun. The UN estimated the total number of victims in the slaughter to be between five and six thousand people. They included ten Iranian diplomats and a journalist, whom the Taliban rounded up and shot in the basement of the Iranian consulate. Four hundred women were taken to be concubines.
But the massacre of Mazar was immediately overshadowed by other tragedies far away.
AFTER THE FORMATION OF THE ISLAMIC FRONT, American intelligence agencies took a greater interest in Zawahiri and his organization, al-Jihad, which was still separate from al-Qaeda but closely allied. In July 1998 CIA operatives kidnapped Ahmed Salama Mabruk and another member of Jihad outside a restaurant in Baku, Azerbaijan. Mabruk was Zawahiri’s closest political confidant. The agents cloned his laptop computer, which contained al-Qaeda organizational charts and a roster of Jihad members in Europe—“the Rosetta Stone of al-Qaeda”—as Dan Coleman called it, but the CIA refused to turn it over to the FBI.
It was a typical, pointless bureaucratic standoff of the sort that had handicapped counterrorism efforts at both organizations from the start, made worse by the personal vindictiveness that several senior agency people, including Scheuer, felt toward O’Neill. Overvaluing information for its own sake, the agency was a black hole, emitting nothing that was not blasted out of it by a force greater than gravity—and it recognized that O’Neill was such a force. He would use the information—for an indictment, a public trial—and it would no longer be secret, no longer be intelligence; it would be evidence, it would be news, and it would become useless as far as the agency was concerned. The agency treated the exposure of any bit of intelligence as a defeat, and it was in its nature to clutch the Mabruk computer as if it were the crown jewels. Such high-quality information was difficult to come by and, when acquired, even more difficult to act upon. Because of decades of cutbacks on human intelligence assets, there were only two thousand real operatives—spies—in the agency to cover the entire world.
O’Neill was so angry that he sent an agent to Azerbaijan to demand the actual computer from the president of the country. When that failed, he persuaded Clinton to appeal personally to the Azerbaijani president.