The Looming Tower - Lawrence Wright [209]
O’Neill’s funeral was the catastrophe of coincidence that he had always been dreading. His wife and two children, and Valerie James and her two children, and Anna DiBattista encountered each other for the first time. All his secrets were revealed at once. But redemption was also present. O’Neill’s greatest regrets had to do with his failings as a father. In May he had been given another chance: He was presented with his first grandchild. Ironically, O’Neill, who had been so nurturing to Valerie’s grandchild, had trouble accepting his own status as grandfather, which always rings a mortal bell. It took him two months to get around to going to see the child. But afterward, the man who never kept family pictures in his office placed a photo of his grandson on his trophy wall. “You have been born in the greatest country in the world,” O’Neill wrote to his grandson, in a letter that his brokenhearted son read at the funeral service. “It is well to learn the ethnic backgrounds of your parents, to love and cherish the ancient folklore. But never, never forget, you are an American first. And millions of Americans before you have fought for your freedom. The Nation holds all the terms of our endearment. Support, defend and honor those whose duty it is to keep it safe.”
WHILE THEY WAITED for the mujahideen to rise up across Muslim lands and rush to Afghanistan, bin Laden and Zawahiri gloated over the success of the operation. “There is America, hit by God in one of its softest spots,” bin Laden boasted in a prerecorded videotape on al-Jazeera on October 7, the day after American and British bombers launched their first attacks on Taliban positions. “Its greatest buildings were destroyed, thank God for that. There is America, full of fear from its north to its south, from its west to its east. Thank God for that.” Then he issued his call. “These events have divided the whole world into two sides—the side of believers and the side of infidels. May God keep you away from them. Every Muslim has to rush to make his religion victorious. The winds of faith have come.”
One evening bin Laden and Zawahiri sat in a guesthouse in Kandahar. They were hosted by a paralyzed Saudi cleric named Khaled bin Ouda bin Mohammed al-Harby. “We planned and made calculations,” bin Laden recounted. “We sat and estimated the casualties of the enemy. We figured the passengers in the planes, those will die. As regards the towers, we assumed they would include the people in the three or four floors the planes would crash into. That was all we estimated. I was the most optimistic. Due to the nature of my profession and work [i.e., construction], I figured that the fuel in the plane would raise the temperature in the steel to the point that it becomes red and almost loses its properties. So if the plane hits the building here”—he gestured with his hands—“the portion of the building above will collapse. That was the most we could hope for.”
Many of the families of al-Qaeda had evacuated right after the attacks. Maha Elsamneh, the wife of Zawahiri’s friend Ahmed Khadr, packed some clothes and food and took her children to an orphanage in Lowgar, fifty kilometers south of Kabul. They hid there for a couple of months. There was a well and indoor bathrooms. In mid-November, two nights after the fall of Kabul, Zawahiri’s family appeared at the door. They looked awful. The children were barefoot and one of the daughters was not properly covered. Zawahiri’s wife, Azza, was seriously ill. She explained that they had fled first to Khost, but then had returned to Kabul to pick up some supplies. That’s when the American bombardment began.
In her feverish condition, Azza said that she