The Looming Tower - Lawrence Wright [189]
A destroyer, even the brave might fear,
She inspires horror in the harbor and the open sea,
She goes into the waves flanked by arrogance, haughtiness, and fake might,
To her doom she progresses slowly, clothed in a huge illusion,
Awaiting her is a dinghy, bobbing in the waves.
Two television cameras recorded the event, but bin Laden wasn’t satisfied with the result—knowing that the poem would be featured on the Arabic satellite channels and an al-Qaeda recruitment video—so he had the cameras set up again the following morning to record his recitation a second time. He even stationed a few supporters in front of him to cry out praise, as if there were hundreds still in the hall, instead of a handful of reporters and cameramen. His image management extended to asking one of the reporters, who had taken a digital snapshot, to take another picture because his neck was “too full.” He had dyed his beard to cover the streaks of gray, but he couldn’t disguise the dark circles under his eyes that testified to the anxiety and sleeplessness that had become his steady companions.
Twelve-year-old Hamza, the only child of bin Laden’s favorite wife, also read a poem at the wedding. He had long black eyelashes and his father’s thin face, and he wore a white turban and a camouflage vest. “What crime have we committed to be forced to leave our country?” he asked solemnly, with impressive composure. “We will fight the kafr forever!”
“Allahu akhbar!” the men roared in response. Then they began to sing:
Our men are in revolt, our men are in revolt.
We will not regain our homeland
Nor will our shame be erased except through
Blood and fire.
On and on it goes.
On and on it goes.
Following afternoon prayer, the meal was served—meat, rice, and tomato juice. It was a rare extravagance for bin Laden. Some of the diners thought the food rather primitive, however, and his stepfather noticed something larval squirming inside his water glass.
“Eat! Eat!” the guests cried, as they peeled oranges for the young groom. “He has a long night ahead!” The men remarked how much the son’s shy smile resembled his father’s. They danced and sang more songs and lifted the boy up and cheered. Then they put him in a car and sent him to the family compound for his first night of married life.
A FEW MONTHS after the inauguration of George W. Bush, Dick Clarke met with Condoleezza Rice, the national security advisor for the incoming Bush administration, and asked to be reassigned. From the moment the new team had taken over, it was clear that terrorism had a lower priority. When Clarke first briefed her, in January, about the threat that bin Laden and his organization posed to the United States, Rice had given him the impression that she had never heard of al-Qaeda. She subsequently downgraded his position, that of the national coordinator for counterterrorism, so that he would now be reporting to deputies, not to principals. Clarke pressed his strategy of aiding Ahmed Shah Massoud and the Northern Alliance in their struggle against the Taliban and al-Qaeda, but Rice demurred, saying that the administration needed a broader strategy that would include other Pashtun opponents of the Taliban. But the planning for that dragged on for months, without much force. “Maybe you need someone less obsessive,” Clarke now suggested, his irony lost on Rice and her deputy, Stephen Hadley. They were surprised and asked him to stay on until October. During that time, they told him, he should find “someone similar” to replace him.
“There’s only one guy that fits that bill,” said Clarke.
O’Neill viewed Clarke’s job as a perfect fit for him. The offer came at a time when he was despairing about the government’s tangled response to terrorism and distressed about his future. He had always harbored two aspirations—to become deputy director of the bureau in Washington