The Looming Tower - Lawrence Wright [195]
The I-49 squad responded to the constraints in several aggressive and creative ways. When the NSA began to withhold intercepts of bin Laden’s satellite phone from the bureau and from prosecutors in the Southern District, the squad came up with a plan to build two antennae, one in the remote Pacific islands of Palau and another in Diego Garcia, in the Indian Ocean, that would capture the signal from the satellite. The NSA fought this scheme but finally coughed up 114 transcripts to prevent the antennae from being built. It kept a tight hold on other intercepts, however. The squad also constructed an ingenious satellite telephone booth in Kandahar for international calls, hoping to provide a convenient facility for jihadis wanting to call home. The agents could not only listen in on the calls, they received video of callers through a camera hidden in the booth. In Madagascar, I-49 agents built an antenna aimed at intercepting the phone calls of Khaled Sheikh Mohammed. Millions of dollars and thousands of hours of labor were consumed in replicating information that the U.S. government already had but refused to share.
The agents on the I-49 were so used to being denied access to intelligence that they bought a CD of a Pink Floyd song, “Another Brick in the Wall.” Whenever they received the same formulation about “sensitive sources and methods,” they would hold up the phone to the CD player and push Play.
ON THE FIFTH OF JULY 2001, Dick Clarke assembled representatives of various domestic agencies—the Federal Aviation Administration, the Immigration and Naturalization Service, the Coast Guard, the FBI, and the Secret Service among them—to issue a warning. “Something really spectacular is going to happen here, and it’s going to happen soon,” he told them.
The same day, John O’Neill and Valerie James arrived in Spain, where he had been invited to address the Spanish Police Foundation. O’Neill decided to take a few days of vacation to decide what to do with his life. Although the Justice Department had dropped its inquiry into the briefcase incident, the bureau was conducting an internal investigation of its own, which kept the pressure on. Meantime, he had learned that the New York Times was preparing a story about the affair. The reporters not only knew about the classified material in the briefcase, they also had information about the previous incident with Val at the safe house parking garage and about O’Neill’s personal debt. This information had been leaked to them by someone in the bureau or the Justice Department, along with highly sensitive details about the budget that O’Neill had been preparing. The very material that had caused the Justice Department and the bureau to investigate O’Neill had been freely given to reporters in order to further sabotage his career. The leak seemed to be timed to destroy his chances of being confirmed for Clarke’s job in the NSC, which by now was an open secret.
Before leaving for Spain, O’Neill had met with Larry Silverstein, the president of Silverstein Properties, which had just taken over the management of the World Trade Center. Silverstein offered him a position as chief of security. It would pay more than twice his government salary. But O’Neill could not commit. He told Barry Mawn that he didn’t want to resign from the FBI with his reputation still in question. He promised Silverstein an answer when he returned from Spain; he also had still not turned down Dick Clarke.
He and Val and her son, Jay, spent several days in Marbella, playing golf and reading.