The Looming Tower - Lawrence Wright [199]
Then, in mid-August, a flight school in Minnesota contacted the local FBI field office to express concern about a student, Zacarias Moussaoui. He had asked suspicious questions about the flight patterns around New York City and whether the doors of a cockpit could be opened during flight. The local bureau quickly determined that Moussaoui was an Islamic radical who had been to Pakistan and probably to Afghanistan. The agents believed he might be a potential suicide hijacker. Because he was a French citizen who had overstayed his visa, the INS placed him under arrest. The FBI agents investigating the case sought permission from headquarters to examine Moussaoui’s laptop, which was denied because the agents couldn’t show a probable cause for their search. When the Minneapolis supervisor pressed the matter with headquarters, he was told he was trying to get people “spun up.” The supervisor defiantly responded that he was “trying to keep someone from taking a plane and crashing into the World Trade Center”—a weird premonition that suggests how such thoughts were surging through the unconscious of those who were reading the threat reports.
Moussaoui was probably intended to be part of a second wave of al-Qaeda attacks that would follow 9/11, most likely on the West Coast. If the agents in Minneapolis had been allowed to thoroughly investigate Moussaoui, they would have made the connection to Ramzi bin al-Shibh, who was sending him money. Moussaoui carried a letter of employment from Infocus Tech, which was signed by Yazid Sufaat. That name meant nothing to the FBI, since the CIA kept secret the information about the meeting in Kuala Lumpur, which took place in Sufaat’s condo. The bureau failed to put together the warning from its own office in Minneapolis with that of Kenneth Williams in Phoenix. Typically, it withheld the information from Dick Clarke and the White House, so no one had a complete picture.
ON AUGUST 22, O’Neill wrote an e-mail to Lou Gunn, who had lost his son on the Cole. “Today is my last day,” O’Neill informed him. “In my thirty-one years of government service, my proudest moment was when I was selected to lead the investigation of the attack on the USS Cole. I have put my all into the investigation and truly believe that significant progress has been made. Unknown to you and the families is that I have cried with your loss…. I will keep you and all the familiesin my prayers and will continue to track the investigation as a civilian. God bless you, your loved ones, the families and God bless America.”
O’Neill was packing boxes in his office when Ali Soufan came in to say good-bye. Soufan was headed back to Yemen later that day; in fact, O’Neill’s last act as an FBI agent would be to sign the paperwork that would send his team back into the country. The two men walked across the street to Joe’s Diner. O’Neill ordered a ham and cheese sandwich.
“You don’t want to change your infidel ways?” Soufan kidded him, indicating the ham. “You’re gonna go to hell.” But O’Neill was not in a joking mood. He urged Soufan to come visit him in the Trade Center when he returned. “I’m going to be just down the road,” he said. It was strange to have O’Neill pleading to be remembered.
Then Soufan confided that he was getting married. He was worried about how O’Neill would react. In the past, whenever they talked about women, O’Neill would make a wisecrack or somehow indicate how uncomfortable he was about the subject. “You know why it costs so much to get a divorce?” O’Neill once asked him. “Because it’s worth it.”
This time, O’Neill thought about it and remarked, “She has put up with you all this time. She must be a good woman.”
The next day, O’Neill started work at the World Trade Center.
THE DAY AFTER O’NEILL RETIRED from the bureau, Maggie Gillespie, the FBI analyst at Alec Station who was reviewing coverage of the Malaysia