The Looming Tower - Lawrence Wright [178]
As Bayoumi later told investigators, he drove up from San Diego on February 1, 2000, to handle some visa matters at the Saudi consulate. From there he went directly to lunch at a halal restaurant nearby and overheard Gulf Arabic being spoken. He talked briefly with Mihdhar and Hazmi, who complained that they were having a hard time in Los Angeles, so he invited them to San Diego. Three days later they showed up. He let them stay in his apartment, then found them another place across the street and lent them money for the first two months’ rent. He held a party to introduce them to other members of the Muslim community.
If Bayoumi was sent to oversee the two men, who sent him? Perhaps he was their al-Qaeda contact. They certainly needed a caretaker. The fact that Bayoumi went directly from the Saudi consulate to the restaurant, however, suggests to some investigators that the two future hijackers were already under surveillance by Saudi government officials, who were aware of their membership in al-Qaeda. The CIA is the only government agency that knew who Hazmi and Mihdhar were and that they were in America. The CIA had tracked Mihdhar and Hazmi from Kuala Lumpur to Bangkok to Los Angeles. Perhaps the agency decided that Saudi intelligence would have a better chance of recruiting these men than the Americans. That would leave no CIA fingerprints on the operation as well.
This is the view of some very bitter FBI investigators, who wonder why they were never informed of the existence of al-Qaeda operatives inside America. Mihdhar and Hazmi arrived nineteen months before 9/11. The FBI had all the authority it needed to investigate these men and learn what they were up to, but because the CIA failed to divulge the presence of two active members of al-Qaeda, the hijackers were free to develop their plot until it was too late to stop them.
THE HEAD OF THE NEW YORK BUREAU, Louis Schiliro, retired soon after the turn of the millennium, and O’Neill badly wanted his job. Because of the size and importance of the New York office, he would be an assistant director of the FBI, a position he held temporarily while the bureau considered two candidates for the post—O’Neill and Barry Mawn, the head of the Boston office. Mawn had more experience and O’Neill had more enemies. Moreover, O’Neill’s record, which had been unblemished, was now clouded by the incident of letting Valerie James use the bathroom in the offsite facility. Thomas Pickard, the deputy director of the bureau, reputedly told O’Neill that his career was going nowhere. The job went to Mawn.
Mawn was still feeling bruised by the campaign O’Neill had waged against him when the two men happened to meet at a seminar at the FBI academy in Quantico, just after the decision was announced. Mawn answered a knock at his door and found O’Neill holding two beers. “I understand you’re an Irishman,” O’Neill explained.
Wary about the prospect of working together, Mawn told O’Neill that he was going to need people in the office who were loyal to him. “I’m not sure I can depend on you,” he stated flatly, offering to find O’Neill another job, possibly in the New Jersey bureau.
O’Neill pleaded to stay in New York for “family reasons.” He said that if Mawn would keep him on, “I’ll be more loyal to you than your closest friend.”
“You’ll still have to prove yourself to me,” Mawn warned.
O’Neill agreed. “The only thing I ask in return is that you be supportive of me,” he said.
Mawn made the bargain, but he soon learned that supporting O’Neill would be a full-time job.
THERE IS AN ANECDOTE that counterterrorism officials often tell about the rendition of Ramzi Yousef. After being captured in Pakistan, he was flown into Stewart Airport in Newburgh, New York, and then transferred to an FBI helicopter for the trip to the Metropolitan Correctional Center next to Federal Plaza in Lower Manhattan. “Two huge guys carried him off the plane, shackled and blindfolded,” remembered Schiliro. “After