The Looming Tower - Lawrence Wright [158]
At the airport, the agents discovered bin Rasheed’s landing card, which gave as his address in Nairobi the hotel where he had been discovered—so he was lying about the cab driver taking him there after the bombing. Phone records led them to a large villa where a call had been placed to the Hada phone in Yemen half an hour before the bombing. When the evidence team arrived, their swabs lit up with explosive residue. It was here the bomb had been made.
“You want to blame this on me?” bin Rasheed shouted when Gaudin confronted him with the evidence. “It’s your fault, your country’s fault for supporting Israel!” He was sputtering with fury. Flecks of foam were flying from his mouth. It was a startling turnaround from the controlled demeanor the investigators had witnessed for the past few days. “My tribe is going to kill you and your entire family!” he promised.
Gaudin was also angry. The death toll had been rising all through the week as badly injured people succumbed to their awful wounds. “Why did these people have to die?” he asked. “They had nothing to do with the United States and Israel and Palestine!”
Bin Rasheed didn’t answer directly; instead, he said something surprising: “I want a promise that I’ll be tried in America. Because America is my enemy, not Kenya. You get me that promise, and I’ll tell you everything.”
Gaudin brought Patrick Fitzgerald, the prosecutor from the Southern District of New York, into the room. Fitzgerald drew up a contract pledging that the investigators would do everything in their power to get the suspect extradited to the United States.
“My name is not Khaled Saleem bin Rasheed,” the suspect now said. “I am Mohammed al-‘Owhali, and I’m from Saudi Arabia.”
He said he was twenty-one years old, well educated, from a prominent merchant family. He had become very religious as a teenager, listening to sermons on audiocassettes and reading books and magazines that glorified martyrdom. A tape by Sheikh Safar al-Hawali that talked about “Kissinger’s Promise”—a purported plan of former American secretary of state Henry Kissinger’s to occupy the Arabian Peninsula—particularly affected him. Inflamed by this spurious information, ‘Owhali made his way to Afghanistan to join the jihad.
He took basic training at the Khaldan camp, learning how to use automatic weapons and explosives. ‘Owhali performed so well that he was granted an audience with bin Laden, who counseled him to get more instruction. ‘Owhali went on to learn techniques for kidnapping, hijacking planes and buses, seizing buildings, and gathering intelligence. Bin Laden kept an eye on him, reassuring him that he would eventually get a mission.
While ‘Owhali was fighting with the Taliban, Jihad Ali came to him and said that they had finally been approved for a martyrdom operation, but it was to be in Kenya. ‘Owhali was crestfallen. “I want to attack inside the U.S.,” he pleaded. His handlers told him that the embassy strikes were important because they would keep America distracted while the real attack was being prepared.
“We have a plan to attack the U.S., but we’re not ready yet,” the suspect told Gaudin and the other investigators. “We need to hit you outside the country in a couple of places so you won’t see what is going on inside. The big attack is coming. There’s nothing you can do to stop it.”
WORKING FOR O’NEILL sometimes felt like being in the Mafia. The other agents observed that O’Neill’s dress and manners, not to mention his Atlantic City background, gave him a mobbed-up air. The founding director of the