The Looming Tower - Lawrence Wright [167]
On holidays, he went home to New Jersey to visit his parents and to see his wife and children. Although he had been separated from Christine for many years, he never got a divorce. He explained to his friends who knew about his family that it was a “Catholic thing.” He continued to support them, and he spoke to his children frequently on the phone. But Atlantic City was part of his life that he shared with very few. Because the women in his life sensed that they could never trust him, they couldn’t give him the unqualified love and devotion that he sought. He remained isolated by his compulsive deceptions.
Inevitably, the complexity took a toll. He left his Palm Pilot in Yankee Stadium; it was filled with police contacts from all over the world. Fortunately, the Yankees security force found it. Then he left his cell phone in a cab. In the summer of 1999, he and Valerie were driving to the Jersey shore when his Buick broke down near the Meadowlands. His bureau car happened to be parked nearby at a secret off-site location, so O’Neill switched cars, although the bureau bans the use of an official vehicle for personal reasons. Still, O’Neill’s infraction might have been overlooked had he not let Valerie enter the building to use the toilet. She had no idea what the place was. When the FBI learned about the violation, apparently from a spiteful agent who had been caught using the site as an auto-repair shop, O’Neill was reprimanded and docked fifteen days’ pay.
That was a penalty O’Neill could scarcely afford. He had always been a showy host, grabbing every tab, even going so far as to tear another agent’s money in half when he offered to split the bill. These gestures mounted up. An agent who did his taxes noted O’Neill’s credit-card debt and observed, “Gee, John, you’d be a candidate for recruitment.” O’Neill was also paying the mortgage on his wife’s house and dipping into his retirement funds and borrowing money from wealthy friends, who held promissory notes that he had to disclose. Anyone with that much liability would normally come under scrutiny as a security risk.
He was insecure, deceptive, and potentially compromised. He was also driven, resourceful, and brilliant. For better or worse, this was the man America now depended on to stop Osama bin Laden.
IRAQ WAS AN UNLIKELY ALLY in al-Qaeda’s war on the West, but there had been a series of contacts between Iraq and al-Qaeda since the end of the first Gulf War. Saddam Hussein sought allies to salvage his shattered regime, and the radical Islamists at least shared his longing for revenge. In 1992 Hasan al-Turabi arranged a meeting between the Iraqi intelligence service and al-Qaeda with the goal of creating a “common strategy” for deposing pro-Western Arab governments. The Iraqi delegation met with bin Laden and flattered him, claiming that he was the prophesied Mahdi, the savior of Islam. They wanted him to stop backing anti-Saddam insurgents. Bin Laden agreed, but in return he asked for weapons and training camps inside Iraq. That same year, Zawahiri traveled to Baghdad, where he met the Iraqi dictator in person. But there is no evidence that Iraq ever supplied al-Qaeda with weapons or camps, and soon bin Laden resumed his support of Iraqi dissidents.
Talks continued intermittently, however. When bin Laden issued his fatwa against America in 1998, Iraqi intelligence officials flew to Afghanistan to discuss with Zawahiri the possibility of relocating al-Qaeda to Iraq. Bin Laden’s relations with the Taliban were strained at the time, and several senior members of al-Qaeda were in favor of seeking a new haven. Bin Laden opposed this notion, since he didn’t want to be indebted to the Iraqi tyrant.
In September 1999, Zawahiri went to Baghdad again with a false passport to attend the Ninth Islamic People’s Congress, an international consortium of clerics and activists under the sponsorship of the Iraqi government. Coincidentally, a Jordanian jihadi named Abu Musab al-Zarqawi arrived in Baghdad at about the same time. Zarqawi