The Looming Tower - Lawrence Wright [182]
AS SOON AS ALI SOUFAN, the young Arabic-speaking agent recently assigned to the I-49 squad, got on the plane to Yemen, O’Neill told him that he was the case agent for the USS Cole—the biggest assignment of his career.
Soufan is a highly caffeinated talker, his voice carrying a hint of Lebanon, the country where he was born. He knew what it was like to live in lawlessness and chaos, to see cities destroyed. His family fled to America during the civil war, and he loved America because it allowed him to dream. In return, America embraced him. His experience was completely opposite to that of the alienated Muslims in the West who had turned to Islamism as a way of finding an identity. He never personally experienced prejudice because he was an Arab or a Muslim; on the contrary, he was elected president of his student body and presented with many academic awards. After gaining his master’s degree in international relations at Villanova University, he planned to get his Ph.D. at Cambridge. But he had developed a fascination with the American Constitution, and like many naturalized citizens, he had a feeling of indebtedness for the new life he had been given. As he stood poised on the brink of an academic career, he decided—“as a joke”—to send his résumé to the FBI. He thought the chances that a Muslim American scholar of Arab extraction would be hired by the bureau were laughably remote, but he was drawn by the mystique, and obviously something inside him cried out to be saved from the classroom. As he was packing to go to England, the response came: report to the FBI Academy in two weeks.
O’Neill had drafted him on the squad because of his language ability, but he soon came to value Soufan’s initiative, imagination, and courage. When the plane landed in Aden, the agents looked out upon a detachment of the Yemen Special Forces, wearing yellow uniforms with old Russian helmets, each soldier pointing an AK-47 at the plane. The jittery hostage rescue team, who had been sent along to protect the investigators, immediately responded by breaking out their M4s and their handguns. Soufan realized they were all going to die in a bloodbath on the tarmac if he didn’t do something quickly.
He opened the plane’s door. One man among the yellow uniforms was holding a walkie-talkie. Soufan walked directly toward him, carrying a bottle of water, while the guns followed him. It was about 110 degrees outside; behind their weapons, the Yemeni soldiers were wilting.
“You look thirsty,” Soufan said in Arabic to the officer with the walkie-talkie. He handed him the bottle of water.
“Is it American water?” the officer asked.
Soufan assured him that it was; moreover, he told the man, he had American water for all the others as well. They treated it as such a precious commodity that some would not drink it.
With this simple act of friendship, the soldiers lowered their weapons and Soufan gained control of the airport.
O’Neill was a little puzzled to find the soldiers saluting as he disembarked. “I told them you were a general,” Soufan confided.
One of the first things O’Neill noticed was a sign for “Bin Ladin Group International,” a subsidiary of the Saudi Binladen Group, which had a contract to rebuild the airport after it was damaged in the 1994 civil war. It was a small reminder that he was playing on his opponent’s court.
O’Neill had already spent some time studying the country. He was reading a book by Tim Mackintosh-Smith titled Yemen: The Unknown Arabia. He learned that Sanaa, the capital, claimed to be the world’s first city and that the Hadramout, bin Laden’s homeland, meant “death has come.” He underlined these facts with his Montblanc ballpoint in a firm straight hand, as he always did when he was reading. He was determined not to be defeated by the exoticism.
His real adversary, however, turned out to be his own ambassador, Barbara