The Looming Tower - Lawrence Wright [192]
ON MAY 29, 2001, in a federal courtroom in Manhattan, a jury convicted four men in the bombings of the American embassies in East Africa. It was the capstone of a perfect record of twenty-five terrorist convictions accomplished by the prosecutors of the Southern District of New York, which was headed by Mary Jo White, with her assistants Kenneth Karas and Patrick Fitzgerald. The struggle against Islamic terrorists had begun in 1993 with the first World Trade Center bombing. Eight years later, these convictions were practically the only victories that America could point to, and they were based upon the laborious investigations of the New York bureau of the FBI, particularly the I-49 squad.
O’Neill sat in on the closing arguments and after the verdict he drew Steve Gaudin aside. Gaudin was the agent who had broken Mohammed al-‘Owhali, who had gotten his wish to be tried in America. O’Neill put his arm around Gaudin and told him he had a gift for him. “I’m sending you to a language school in Vermont. You’re gonna learn Arabic.”
Gaudin reeled at the thought.
“You know this fight ain’t over,” O’Neill continued. “What did al-‘Owhali tell you? He said, ‘We have to hit you outside so they won’t see us coming on the inside.’”
O’Neill understood that the crime model was just one way to deal with terrorism, and that it had limits, especially when the adversary was a sophisticated foreign network composed of skilled and motivated ideologues who were willing to die. But when Dick Clarke had said to him during the millennium arrests, “We’re going to kill bin Laden,” O’Neill didn’t want to hear about it. Although al-Qaeda posed a far greater challenge to law enforcement than the Mafia, or any criminal enterprise, had, the alternatives—military strikes, CIA assassination attempts—had accomplished nothing except to aggrandize bin Laden in the eyes of his admirers. The twenty-five convictions, on the other hand, were genuine and legitimate achievements that demonstrated the credibility and integrity of the American system of justice. But the jealous rivalry among government agencies, and the lack of urgency at FBI headquarters, hobbled the I-49 squad in New York, who had been rendered blind to the danger that, as it turned out, was already in the country.
As the embassy bombings trial was ending, nearly all of the nineteen 9/11 hijackers had settled in the United States. About this time, Tom Wilshire, who was the CIA’s intelligence representative to the FBI’s international terrorism section at FBI headquarters, was studying the relationship between Khaled al-Mihdhar and Khallad, the one-legged mastermind of the Cole bombing. The CIA had thought, because of the similarity of names, that they might be the same person, but thanks to Ali Soufan’s investigations, the agency now knew that Khallad was part of bin Laden’s security team. “OK. This is important,” Wilshire noted in an e-mail to his supervisors at the CIA Counterterrorist Center. “This is a major-league killer, who orchestrated the Cole Attack and possibly the Africa bombings.” Wilshire already knew that Nawaf al-Hazmi was in the United States and that Hazmi and Mihdhar had traveled with Khallad. He also discovered that Mihdhar had a U.S. visa. “Something bad was definitely up,” Wilshire decided. He asked permission to disclose this vital information to the FBI. The agency never responded to his request.
However, later that same day, July 13, a CIA supervisor requested that an FBI analyst assigned to the CTC, Margarette Gillespie, review the material about the Malaysia meeting “in her free time.” She didn’t get around to it until the end of July. The CIA supervisor did not reveal the fact that some of the participants in the meeting might be