The Looming Tower - Lawrence Wright [201]
Turki says that he was not fired. “I left because I was tired,” he said. “I thought new blood might be needed.” He compared himself to “an over-ripened fruit. You know how it starts to smell bad, the skin peels and it deteriorates. So I asked to be relieved.”
THE MOMENT O’NEILL LEFT THE FBI, his spirits lifted. People remarked that he seemed light on his feet for the first time in months, perhaps years. He talked about getting a new Mercedes to replace his aging Buick. He told Anna DiBattista that they could now afford to get married. On Saturday night, September 8, he attended a wedding at the Plaza Hotel with Valerie James, and they danced nearly every number. “I feel like a huge burden has been lifted from me,” he told his former boss, Lewis Schiliro, who was at the wedding. To another friend within Val’s hearing, he said, “I’m gonna get her a ring.”
The next day, September 9, Ahmed Shah Massoud agreed to see two Arab television journalists who had been waiting in his camp for nine days for an interview. Massoud was without doubt the greatest of the Afghan commanders, having endured twenty-five years of warfare against the the Soviets, Afghan communists, rival mujahideen, and now the combined forces of the Taliban and al-Qaeda. Massoud’s capacity for survival was a powerful feature of his legend. He was the best hope Afghanistan had of a moderate Islamist alternative to the Taliban.
Zawahiri’s forged letter had gotten the two phony journalists into Massoud’s office. The cameraman’s battery pack was filled with explosives. The bomb tore the assassins apart, killed a translator, and drove two pieces of metal into Massoud’s heart.
When Ali Soufan heard the news in Yemen, he told another agent, “Bin Laden is appeasing the Taliban. Now the big one is coming.”
That day bin Laden and Zawahiri attended a wake for the father of the Taliban’s former interior minister. Two Saudi members of al-Qaeda approached the deputy interior minister, Mullah Mohammed Khaksar, to tell him that Massoud was dead. The Northern Alliance had claimed that Massoud was only wounded. “No, believe me, he is gone,” the Saudis informed the minister. They boasted that bin Laden had given the order to kill Massoud. Now the Northern Alliance was leaderless, the last obstacle to the Taliban’s total control of the country removed by this significant favor.
On Monday, September 10, O’Neill called Robert Tucker, a friend and security-company executive, and arranged to get together that evening to talk about security issues at the World Trade Center. Tucker met O’Neill in the lobby of the north tower, and the two men rode the elevator up to O’Neill’s new office on the thirty-fourth floor. O’Neill was proud of his domain: seven buildings on sixteen acres of land with nine million square feet of office space. They went up to Windows on the World for a drink, and then drove in a downpour to Elaine’s to have dinner with their friend Jerry Hauer. O’Neill ate steak and pasta. Elaine Kaufman, the renowned doyenne of the establishment, remembered that O’Neill nursed a glass of iced coffee with dessert. “He wasn’t an alcoholic like a lot of them,” she said. Around midnight, the three men dropped in on the China Club, a nightspot in midtown. O’Neill told his friends that something big was going to happen. “We’re overdue,” he said again.
Valerie James had been out entertaining clients that evening. It was Fashion Week, and as the sales director for a major designer, she was harried. O’Neill had called her at the office earlier and promised to be home no later than ten thirty. She finally went to bed an hour later. She woke up at one thirty and he still wasn’t home. Annoyed, she sat down at the computer and began playing a game. John came home around four and sat down next to her. “You play a mean game of solitaire, babe,