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T H E L O O M I N G T O W E R "What a riveting tale Lawrence Wright fashions in this marvelous book. The Looming Tower is not just a detailed, heart-stopping account of the events leading up to 9/11, written with style and verve. [It's] a thoughtful examination of the world that produced the men who brought us 9/11, and of their progeny who bedevil us today . . . Wright has unearthed an astonishing amount of detail about Osama bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri. . . and all the rest of them. They come alive . . . The portrait of John O'Neill, the driven, demon-ridden F.B.I, agent who worked so frantically to stop Osama bin Laden, only to perish in the attack on the World Trade Center, is worth the price of the book alone. The Looming-Tower is, a thriller. And it's a tragedy, too."

—Dexter Filkins, Cover, The New York Times Book Review

"A towering achievement. One of the best and more important books of recent years. Lawrence Wright has dug deep into and written well a story every American should know. A masterful combination of reporting and writing." —Dan Rather

"A searing view of the tragic events of September 11, 2001. a view that is at once wrenchingly intimate and boldly sweeping in its historical perspective . . . A narrative history that possesses all the immediacy and emotional power of a novel, an account that indelibly illustrates how the political and the personal, the pub- lic and the private were often inextricably intertwined."

—Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

"Lawrence Wright's integrity and diligence as a reporter shine through every page of this riveting narrative." —Robert A. Caro

CURRENT A F F A I R S / ISBN 0 - 3 7 5 - 4 K 8 6 - X HISTORY

5 2 7 9 5

780375"4K862

U.S.A. $ 2 7 . 9 5

CANADA $ 3 6 . 9 5

A SWEEPING NARRATIVE HISTORY of the events leading to 9/11, a groundbreaking look at the peo- ple and ideas, the terrorist plans and the Western intelligence failures that culminated in the assault on America. Lawrence Wright's remarkable book is based on five years of research and hundreds of interviews that he conducted in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Sudan, England, France, Germany, Spain, and the United States.

The Looming Tower achieves an unprecedented level of intimacy and insight by telling the story through the interweaving lives of four men: the two leaders of al-Qaeda, Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri; the FBI's counterterrorism chief, John O'Neill; and the former head of Saudi intelligence, Prince Turki al-Faisal.

As these lives unfold, we see revealed: the cross- currents of modern Islam that helped to radicalize Zawahiri and bin Laden . . . the birth of al-Qaeda and its unsteady development into an organiza- tion capable of the American embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania and the attack on the USS Cole . . . O'Neill's heroic efforts to track al-Qaeda before 9/11, and his tragic death in the World Trade towers . . . Prince Turki's transformation from bin Laden's ally to his enemy . . . the failures of the FBI, CIA, and NSA to share intelligence that might have prevented the 9/11 attacks.

The Looming Tower broadens and deepens our knowledge of these signal events by taking us behind the scenes. Here is Sayyid Qutb, founder of the modern Islamist movement, lonely and despair- ing as he meets Western culture up close in 1940s America; the privileged childhoods of bin Laden and Zawahiri; family life in the al-Qaeda com- pounds of Sudan and Afghanistan; O'Neill's high- wire act in balancing his all-consuming career with his equally entangling personal life—he was living with three women, each of them unaware of the others' existence—and the nitty-gritty of turf bat- tles among U.S. intelligence agencies.

Brilliantly conceived and written, The Looming Tower draws all elements of the story into a gal-

vanizing narrative that adds immeasurably to our understanding of how we arrived at Septem- ber i i , 2001. The richness of its new information, and the depth of its perceptions, can help us deal more wisely and effectively with the continuing ter- rorist threat.

LAWRENCE WRIGHT graduated from Tulane Uni- versity and spent two years teaching at the American University in Cairo, Egypt. He is a staff writer for The New Yorker and a fellow at the Center on Law and Security at New York University School of Law. The author of five works of nonfiction— City Children, Country Summer; In the New World; Saints and Sinners; Remembering Satan; and Twins— he has also written a novel, God's Favorite, and was cowriter of the movie The Siege. He and his wife are longtime residents of Austin, Texas.

Lawrence Wright's Remembering Satan and Saints and Sinners are available in Vintage paperback.

With 16 pages of photographs and 1 map in text

jacket photograph: Osama bin Laden and His Sixteen al-Qaeda Members, © Reuters/Corbis

Jacket design by Chip Kidd

> ~ < Alfred A. Knopf, Publisher, New York

www.aaknopf.com 8/2006

http://www.aaknopf.com
THE LOOMING

TOWER

A L S O BY L A W R E N C E W R I G H T

God's Favorite

Twins

Remembering Satan

Saints and Sinners

In the New World

City Children, Country Summer

THE LOOMING

TOWER Al-Qaeda and the

Road to 9/11

Lawrence Wright

Alfred A. Knopf ^ ^ New York 2006

THIS IS A B O R Z O I B O O K

P U B L I S H E D BY A L F R E D A. K N O P F

Copyright © 2006 by Lawrence Wright

All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in

Canada by Random House of Canada, Limited, Toronto.

www.aaknopf.com

Grateful acknowledgment is made to Constable & Robinson Ltd. and Michal Snunit for permission to reprint an excerpt from

The Soul Bird by Michal Snunit. Reprinted by permission.

Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Wright, Lawrence, [date]

The looming tower : Al-Qaeda and the road to 9/11 / by Lawrence Wright.

p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 0-375-41486-x

1. September 11 Terrorist Attacks, 2001. 2. Qaida (Organization) 3. Terrorism—Government policy—United States.

4. Intelligence service—United States. I. Title.

HV6432.7.W75 2005 973.931—dc22 2006041032

Manufactured in the United States of America Published August 8, 2006

Reprinted Three Times Fifth Printing, August 2006

http://www.aaknopf.com
This is for my family,

Roberta, Caroline, Gordon & Karen

CONTENTS

Prologue

i. The Martyr

2. The Sporting Club

3. The Founder

4. Change

5. The Miracles

6. The Base

7. Return of the Hero

8. Paradise

9. The Silicon Valley

10. Paradise Lost

11. The Prince of Darkness

12. The Boy Spies

13. Hijira

14. Going Operational

15. Bread and Water

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60

84

99

121

145

163

176

187

202

213

224

237

245

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18.

19.

20.

"Now It Begins"

The New Millennium

Boom

The Big Wedding

Revelations

Principal Characters

Notes

Bibliography

Author Interviews

Acknowledgments and Notes on Sources

Index

262

287

301

333

362

375

385

429

439

447

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Sayyid Qutb, the educator and writer whose book Milestones ignited the radical Islamist move- ment, is shown here displaying one of his books (probably Social Justice in Islam) to the president of Col- orado State College of Education, Dr. William Ross.

Greeley, Colorado, from the air in the 1940s. "The small city of Greeley, in which I am staying, is so beautiful that one may easily imagine that he is in paradise," Qutb wrote. But he also saw the darker side of America.

Qutb on trial, circa 1965. He was hanged in 1966. "Thank God," he said when his death sentence was pronounced. "I performed jihad for fifteen years until I earned this martyrdom."

/*£££%.

Zawahiri as a schoolboy, right, and as a medical student at Cairo University, below

Ayman al-Zawahiri grew up in Maadi, a middle-class suburb of Cairo. A solitary child, his class- mates regarded him as a genius. He is shown in his childhood in a Cairo park.

Opposite bottom: Ayman al-Zawahiri was defendant number 113 of the 302 who were charged with aiding or planning the October 1981 assassina- tion of Anwar al-Sadat. He became spokesperson for the defendants because of his superior English. He is shown here delivering his lecture to the world press in December 1982. Many blame the torture of prisoners in the Egyptian prisons for the savagery of the Islamist movement. "They kicked us, they beat us, they whipped us with electric cables! They shocked us with electricity! And they used the wild dogs!"

The defendants on trial

Left: Sheikh Omar Abdul Rahman, "the blind sheikh," was one of the defendants. He was the emir of the Islamic Group at the time.

Left: Mohammed bin Laden came to Saudi Arabia in 1931 as a penniless Yemeni laborer and rose to become the king's favorite contractor and the man who built much of the infrastructure of the modern Kingdom. He gestures here to Prince Talal bin Abdul Aziz during a tour of the renovation of the Grand Mosque in Mecca, circa 1950.

Right: Mohammed bin Laden and King Faisal. During the construction of the road to Taif, King Faisal would often come to examine the progress and ask about cost overruns. When the road was completed, the Kingdom was finally united and Mohammed bin Laden became a national hero.

*+

Left: The renovation of the Grand Mosque took twenty years. During the hajj it can accommodate a million worshippers at once.

Jamal Khalifa, bin Laden's college friend and later his brother-in-law, moved into bin Laden's house with his first wife. Their friendship broke apart over the issue of creating an all-Arab legion in Afghanistan, which was the predecessor of al-Qaeda.

Osama moved to this house in Jeddah with his mother after Mohammed bin Laden divorced her.

Osama bin Laden's second house in Jeddah, a four-unit apartment build- ing, which he acquired after he became a polygamist

Opposite, bottom: Juhayman al-Oteibi, the leader of the attack on the mosque in 1979, a turning point in the history of Saudi Arabia. The demands of the insurgents foreshadowed bin Laden's agenda. When Oteibi begged for forgiveness after his capture, Prince Turki, head of Saudi intelligence, told him, "Ask forgiveness of God!"

Abdullah Azzam, who issued a fatwa in 1984 that called upon Muslims everywhere to "join the cara- van" of the Afghan jihad. He and bin Laden set up the Services Bureau in Peshawar to facilitate the movement of Arabs into the war.

Bin Laden in a cave in Jalalabad in 1988, at about the time that he began al-Qaeda

Below: Azzam in the Panjshir Valley in 1988, where he traveled to meet with Ahmed Shah Massoud, the greatest of the Afghan commanders in the war against the Soviet invasion. Massoud sits next to Azzam with his arm around Azzam's son Ibrahim. Shortly after this visit Azzam and two of his sons, including Ibrahim, were assassi- nated in a bombing that has never been solved.

General Hamid Gui, who ran the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence during the Afghan jihad. The United States and Saudi Arabia tunneled hundreds of millions of dollars through the ISI, which was largely responsible for creating the Taliban when the Soviets withdrew from Afghanistan.

Right: Prince Turki al-Faisal, head of Saudi intelligence, held the file on Afghanistan and worked with bin Laden. Later he negotiated with Mullah Mohammed Omar, the Taliban leader, but came away empty- handed.

Prince Turki after the Soviet occupation, negotiating among the warring mujahideen. He is on the far left, next to Burhanuddin Rabbani, the head of Ahmed Shah Massoud's political party. Pakistani prime minister Nawaz Sherif sits on the right.

The World Trade Center as seen from New Jersey/where the followers of Sheikh Omar Abdul Rahman plotted to bring it down

Ramzi Yousef was the mastermind of the first World Trade Center bombing. It was his dark imagination that gave shape to al-Qaeda's ambitious agenda.

Hasan al-Turabi, the loquacious and provocative ideologue who organized the Islamist coup in Sudan and courted bin Laden to invest in the country. "Bin Laden hated Turabi," a friend confided. "He thought he was a Machiavelli." Bin Laden came to Sudan a wealthy man; he left with little more than his wardrobe.

While bin Laden was in Sudan, the king of Saudi Arabia revoked bin Laden's citizenship and sent an emissary to collect his passport. Bin Laden threw it at the man. "Take it, if having it dictates anything on my behalf!"

In the mornings, bin Laden walked to the mosque, followed by acolytes, and would linger to study with holy men, often breakfasting with them before going to his office.

Osama bin Laden returned to Afghanistan in 1996. He habitually carried the Kalikov AK-74 that had been awarded to him in the jihad against the Soviets.

Opposite, top: Zawahiri and bin Laden holding a press conference in Afghanistan in May 1998. In Afghanistan, the destinies of bin Laden and Zawahiri became irrevocably intertwined, and eventually their terrorist organi- zations, al-Qaeda and al-Jihad, merged into one.

Taliban fighters headed to the front to fight against the Northern Alliance in 2001. The Taliban arose out of the chaos of mujahideen rule in 1994 and swiftly moved to consolidate their control of Afghanistan. At first, bin Laden and his followers had no idea who they were— there were rumors that they were communists.

The Dar-ul-Aman Palace, Kabul. The palace was caught between the lines during the civil war that followed the Soviet withdrawal. After twenty-five years of continuous warfare, much of Afghanistan was left in ruins.

Above: The ruins of the American Embassy in Nairobi, Kenya, which was bombed on August 7,1998— al-Qaeda's first documented ter- rorist strike. The attack killed 213 people and injured thousands. More than 150 people were blinded by flying glass.

Right: The American Embassy in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, was bombed nine minutes later, killing 11 and wounding 85.

Left: The Clinton administration responded by destroying several al-Qaeda training camps in Afghanistan and the al-Shifa pharmaceutical plant in Khartoum, pictured here. A night watchman was killed in the plant, which later proved to have nothing to do with producing chemical or biological weapons.

The USS Cole after a suicide attack by two al-Qaeda operatives in a fishing skiff in October 2000. The attack nearly sank one of the most invulnerable ships in the U.S. Navy. Seventeen sailors died. "The destroyer represented the capital of the West," said bin Laden, "and the small boat represented Mohammed."

Michael Scheuer, who created Alec Station, the CIA's virtual Osama bin Laden station. He and the FBI's John O'Neill were bitter rivals.

Richard Clarke, the counterterrorism czar in the White House, proposed that O'Neill succeed him in his job—an offer that may have led to his downfall.

Valerie James saw John O'Neill in a bar in Chicago in 1991 and bought him a drink because "he had the most compelling eyes." O'Neill was married at the time, a fact he failed to reveal to the many women he courted.

While he was dating Valerie in Chicago, O'Neill asked for an "exclusive relationship" with Mary Lynn Stevens in Washington, D.C.

In Washington, O'Neill also became involved with Anna DiBattista. "That guy is never going to marry you," her priest warned her.

John O'Neill said good-bye to Daniel Coleman and his FBI teammates at a farewell coffee on the occasion of his retirement from the bureau on August 22, 2001. The next day he started work at the World Trade Center.

Above: After gaining the names of the hijackers from al-Qaeda suspects in Yemen, Ali Soufan (left, with Special Agent George Crouch) traveled to Afghani- stan. Here he stands in the ruins of what was bin Laden's hideout in Kabul.

O'Neill's funeral was the catastrophe of coincidence that he had always dreaded. Here his mother, Dorothy, and his wife, Christine, leave St. Nicholas of Tolentine Church in Atlantic City. They were among a thousand mourners.

The ruins of the World Trade Center burned for a hundred days. John O'Neill's body was found ten days after the 9/11 attack.

THE LOOMING

TOWER

Prologue

ON SAINT PATRICK'S DAY, Daniel Coleman, an agent in the New York office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation handling foreign intelligence cases, drove down to Tysons Corner, Virginia, to report for a new posting. The sidewalks were still buried under gray banks of snow from the blizzard of 1996 a few weeks before. Coleman entered an undistinguished government office tower called the Gloucester Building and got off the elevator at the fifth floor. This was Alec Station.

Other stations of the Central Intelligence Agency are located in the various countries that they cover; Alec was the first "virtual" station, situated only a few miles from the headquarters building in Langley. On an organizational chart it was labeled "Terrorist Financial Links/7 a subsection of the CIA's Counterterrorist Center, but in practice it was devoted to tracking the activities of a single man, Osama bin Laden, whose name had arisen as the master financier of terror. Coleman first heard of him in 1993, when a foreign source spoke about a "Saudi prince" who was supporting a cell of radical Islamists who were plot- ting to blow up New York landmarks, including the United Nations, the Lincoln and Holland tunnels, and even 26 Federal Plaza, the build- ing where Coleman worked. Now, three years later, the bureau had finally found time to send him to look over the intelligence the agency had compiled to see if there was any reason to pursue an investigation.

Alec Station already had thirty-five volumes of material on bin Laden, consisting mostly of transcripts of telephone conversations that had been sucked up by the electronic ears of the National Security Agency. Coleman found the material repetitive and inconclusive. Still, he opened an intelligence case on bin Laden, largely as a placeholder in case the "Islamist financier" turned out to be something more than that.

3

T H E L O O M I N G T O W E R

Like many agents, Dan Coleman had been trained to fight the Cold War. He joined the FBI as a hie clerk in 1973. Scholarly and inquisitive, Coleman was naturally drawn to counterintelligence. In the 1980s, he concentrated on recruiting communist spies in the populous diplo- matic community surrounding the United Nations; an East German attaché was a particular treasure. In 1990, however, when the Cold War had just ended, he found himself on a squad devoted to Middle East- ern terrorism. There was little in his background that prepared him for this new turn—but that was true of the bureau as a whole, which regarded terrorism as a nuisance, not a real threat. It was difficult to believe, in those cloudless days after the fall of the Berlin Wall, that America had any real enemies still standing.

Then, in August 1996, bin Laden declared war on America from a cave in Afghanistan. The stated cause was the continued presence of U.S. forces in Saudi Arabia five years after the first Gulf War. "Terroriz- ing you, while you are carrying arms in our land, is a legitimate right and a moral obligation,,, he stated. He presumed to speak on behalf of all Muslims, and even directed some of his lengthy fatwa to U.S. Secre- tary of Defense William Perry personally. "I say to you, William, that: These youths love death as you love life.... These youths will not ask you for explanations. They will sing out that there is nothing between us that needs to be explained, there is only killing and neck-smiting."

Other than Coleman, few in America—even in the bureau—knew or cared about the Saudi dissident. The thirty-five volumes in Alec Sta- tion painted a picture of a messianic billionaire from a sprawling, influential family that was closely connected to the rulers of the King- dom of Saudi Arabia. He had made a name for himself in the jihad in Afghanistan against the Soviet occupation. Coleman had read enough history to understand the references in bin Laden's war cry to the Cru- sades and the early struggles of Islam. Indeed, one of the striking fea- tures of the document was that time seemed to have stopped a thousand years ago. There was now and there was then, but there was nothing in between. It was as if the Crusades were still going on in bin Laden's universe. The intensity of the anger was also difficult for Cole- man to grasp. What did we do to him? he wondered.

Coleman showed the text of bin Laden's fatwa to prosecutors from the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York. It was droll, it was weird, but was it a crime? The lawyers puzzled over the language and found a rarely invoked seditious conspiracy statute

4

Prologue

from the Civil War era that forbids instigating violence and attempting to overthrow the U.S. government. It seemed a stretch to think that it might be applied to a stateless Saudi in a cave in Tora Bora, but on the basis of such meager precedent, Coleman opened a criminal hie on the figure who would become the most wanted man in the FBI's history. He was still working entirely alone.

A few months later, in November 1996, Coleman traveled to an American military base in Germany with two U.S. attorneys, Ken- neth Karas and Patrick Fitzgerald. There in a safe house was a jittery Sudanese informer named Jamal al-Fadl, who claimed to have worked for bin Laden in Khartoum. Coleman carried a briefing book with pho- tographs of bin Laden's known associates, and Fadl quickly identified most of them. He was selling a story, but he clearly knew the players. The problem was that he kept lying to the investigators, embroider- ing his tale, depicting himself as a hero who only wanted to do the right thing.

"So why did you leave?" the prosecutors wanted to know. Fadl said that he loved America. He had lived in Brooklyn and he

spoke English. Then he said he had run away so he could write a best- selling book. He was keyed up and had a hard time sitting still. Obvi- ously, he had a lot more to tell. It took several long days to get him to stop confabulating and admit that he had run off with more than $100,000 of bin Laden's money When he did that, he sobbed and sobbed. It was the turning point in the interrogation. Fadl agreed to be a government witness should a trial ever occur, but that seemed unlikely, given the modest charges that the government lawyers were considering.

Then, on his own initiative, Fadl began talking about an organiza- tion called al-Qaeda. It was the first time any of the men in the room had ever heard the term. He described training camps and sleeper cells. He talked about bin Laden's interest in acquiring nuclear and chemical weapons. He said that al-Qaeda had been responsible for a 1992 bombing in Yemen and for training the insurgents who shot down the American helicopters in Somalia that same year. He gave names and drew organizational charts. The investigators were stunned by his story. For two weeks, six or seven hours a day, they went over the details again and again, testing his responses to see if he was consistent. He never varied.

When Coleman got back to the bureau, no one seemed particularly

5

T H E L O O M I N G T O W E R

interested. Fadl's testimony was chilling, they agreed, but how could they corroborate the testimony of a thief and a liar? Besides, there were other more pressing investigations.

For a year and a half, Dan Coleman continued his solitary investi- gation of bin Laden. Because he was posted to Alec Station, the bureau more or less forgot about him. Using wiretaps on bin Laden's busi- nesses, Coleman was able to draw a map of the al-Qaeda network, which extended throughout the Middle East, Africa, Europe, and Cen- tral Asia. He was alarmed to realize that many of al-Qaeda's associates had ties to the United States. He concluded this was a worldwide ter- ror organization dedicated to destroying America, but Coleman couldn't even get his superiors to return his phone calls on the matter.

Coleman was left to himself to puzzle out the questions that would later occur to everyone. Where had this movement come from? Why had it chosen to attack America? And what could we do to stop it? He was like a laboratory technician looking at a slide of some previously unseen virus. Under the microscope, al-Qaeda's lethal qualities began to reveal themselves. The group was small—only ninety-three mem- bers at the time—but it was part of a larger radical movement that was sweeping through Islam, particularly in the Arab world. The possibili- ties for contagion were great. The men who made up this group were well trained and battle hardened. They apparently had ample re- sources. Moreover, they were fanatically committed to their cause and convinced that they would be victorious. They were brought together by a philosophy that was so compelling that they would willingly— eagerly—sacrifice their lives for it. In the process they wanted to kill as many people as possible.

The most frightening aspect of this new threat, however, was the fact that almost no one took it seriously. It was too bizarre, too primi- tive and exotic. Up against the confidence that Americans placed in modernity and technology and their own ideals to protect them from the savage pageant of history, the defiant gestures of bin Laden and his followers seemed absurd and even pathetic. And yet al-Qaeda was not a mere artifact of seventh-century Arabia. It had learned to use mod- ern tools and modern ideas, which wasn't surprising, since the story of al-Qaeda had really begun in America, not so long ago.

6

1 The Martyr

IN A FIRST-CLASS STATEROOM on a cruise ship bound for New York from Alexandria, Egypt, a frail, middle-aged writer and educator named Sayyid Qutb experienced a crisis of faith. "Should I go to Amer- ica as any normal student on a scholarship, who only eats and sleeps, or should I be special?" he wondered. "Should I hold on to my Islamic beliefs, facing the many sinful temptations, or should I indulge those temptations all around me?" It was November 1948. The new world loomed over the horizon, victorious, rich, and free. Behind him was Egypt, in rags and tears. The traveler had never been out of his native country. Nor had he willingly left now.

The stern bachelor was slight and dark, with a high, sloping fore- head and a paintbrush moustache somewhat narrower than the width of his nose. His eyes betrayed an imperious and easily slighted nature. He always evoked an air of formality, favoring dark three-piece suits despite the searing Egyptian sun. For a man who held his dignity so close, the prospect of returning to the classroom at the age of forty-two may have seemed demeaning. And yet, as a child from a mud-walled village in Upper Egypt, he had already surpassed the modest goal he had set for himself of becoming a respectable member of the civil ser- vice. His literary and social criticism had made him one of his coun- try's most popular writers. It had also earned the fury of King Farouk, Egypt's dissolute monarch, who had signed an order for his arrest. Powerful and sympathetic friends hastily arranged his departure.