Blow the House Down (29 page)

CHAPTER 51

T
HE WAITING ROOM FOR THE
C
HINATOWN EXPRESS
(or Dragon Coach or Today Bus—it goes by many names) sits in the basement of a modest two-story townhouse, two doors down from the 6th and I Streets Synagogue and across the street from the redbrick Fujian Residents' Association and the barely standing Teddy's House of Comedy Restaurant and Tavern. This is Washington at its most eclectic.

A television was playing low by the door: some grainy black-and-white movie that looked as if it ought to be starring Ray Milland. One of those church-social-size coffee urns steamed and sputtered on a Formica-topped table. The half dozen chairs were taken up by a motley collection of students, wizened Chinese-American ancients, and a pair of hard-looking women. I thought I recognized one of them from Rhode Island Avenue. Maybe the smoke had driven her to high ground.

The rest of us stood against the walls, trying not to think about what we were doing waiting for a bus at three-fifteen in the morning. The price was right, though: twenty dollars one way to Manhattan, thirty dollars round-trip. If the traffic cooperated, the trip took only an hour longer than by rail. It was the safest way I could get up to see O'Neill to get a copy of the documents without leaving a trace. Unlike the shuttle or the Metroliner, there was no chance I'd have to show an ID. And the buses ran all night long.

I was surprised when I stepped out on the street to see more people waiting: what looked like a rock band complete with drum set, a pair of mothers each with sprawls of children, two guys who might have been pimps for the two women inside. Our Chinatown-to-Chinatown express was going to be standing room only if we picked up many more passengers in Baltimore and Philadelphia.

Just at the edge of the crowd, leaning against the side of the stoop of the building next door, was a dark pile of some sort—clothing or people. I walked over and bent down for a look. An old woman was leaning against the steps, asleep, her face half covered by a worn black shawl. The rest of her seemed to disappear into its folds. In the woman's lap, cradled in her arms, also wrapped in black, was a little girl: four, five, six years old; I've never been able to tell.

I'd seen this tableau a thousand times, from Khartoum to Kabul—grandmother and granddaughter, destiny's orphans—and my response was always the same. I looked for bulges, barrels under the shawl, wires, anything out of the usual, anything to suggest that what I was seeing was what I was supposed to see, not what really was. That's how you stay alive in my world. Then the rock band shifted its drum set so that the streetlight fell on my human pile, and I felt as if I were seeing some kind of tableau of my own life.

I had no way of knowing. She could have been Afghan or Iranian. There were too many ruts in her face to say anything for sure, but in that instant when the street lamp first hit her, I was willing to bet the grandmother I was staring at was Baluch. She had the nose, the eyes, the forehead of my friend's mother who had taken me in when my own mother set across the desert for a life without me. She might even have been my stepmother if I hadn't known for certain that she had been dead twenty years, but yes, I did make that leap, just for a second, beyond time, beyond this overwhelming doubt, beyond the suspicion beaten into me by every experience I could think of, to some innocent land where miracles do happen.

Then the grandmother shifted slightly in her sleep and the little girl opened her eyes with that stunned amazement kids have when they're pulled from dreams, and I truly was floored. It was Rikki, a look I loved from that brief moment when she had been that age and Marissa and I really were a family. Christ, I wanted to see Rikki so badly, the one true thing I knew anymore. Maybe next week. Or the week after.

I was thinking that maybe I had found that miracle land after all; thinking that I would sit with these two on the way to New York, that we could talk, swap life stories; that for once I might really tell the truth, the whole truth, nothing but the truth, and that maybe the old woman would tell me a truth in return—tell me how we had all come to live in a world as fucked up as this one, tell me how I had fallen into a life that piled betrayal on betrayal on betrayal—when I heard a rumbling and a rush of air behind me and turned around to find the bus, door open, ready for us to board. The Chinatown express was a luxury liner.

“Grandma,” I said in Baluch, hand on her shoulder, shaking her gently. “It's here. Time to get on board. I'll help you.”

“No,” she answered, unsurprised to find someone speaking her tongue in Washington, D.C. “No. We're waiting.”

The little girl's eyes were open wide now, too. Waiting for what?

CHAPTER 52

I
F ANYTHING CAN GO WRONG,
it will. Murphy's Law. It's the first thing they teach you at the Farm, maybe the one eternal truth down there. Fifteen miles south of Wilmington, Delaware, a fuel tanker a few hundred yards in front of us swerved to avoid a pair of deer that must have been standing stock-still in its lane, jackknifed, caught a van broadside traveling two lanes over, and exploded into flames. We got a front-row seat to the aftermath from behind a barricade of Delaware state-police cars.

The two deer on the right seemed to have been dismembered. On the far left, someone—man or woman, it was impossible to tell—had somehow survived. He or she or God knows what was collapsed in the arms of an EMT. In between were the twisted hulk of the van and the still-burning fuel tanker.

I sat there thinking of the fragility of it all—of the tanker driver, of whoever might be ashes in the embers of the van, of the one thing I knew I couldn't stand to lose myself: my daughter, Rikki. Maybe it had taken me this whole winding route to understand that. Now I did.

By the time a Medivac helicopter had lifted off with the sole survivor and tow trucks had cleared the highway, our four-hour trip had turned into a five-hour one. At 8:15 when I was supposed to be meeting O'Neill, we were still working our way crosstown from the Holland Tunnel. When the doors finally opened at 88 East Broadway, it was 8:32. I took off running. O'Neill said he'd light the fire at 9
A
.
M
. I knew he meant it.

I was in full stride thirteen minutes later, dead in the center of Foley Square, when a shadow descended like some Biblical judgment, followed by the roar of engines.

What in the name of hell, I remember thinking, is an American Airlines passenger jet doing a few hundred feet over Lower Manhattan? I heard the explosion and looked up. The first thing I noticed were the flames shooting out of the North Tower: a bright ocher.
That's not the color of burning jet fuel.
And that's when I knew: I was too late.

I turned and raced north for blocks looking for a taxi. Traffic was at a standstill. I stopped at a phone booth. The line was busy. I moved to the next one. Broken. Another block north some woman was just hanging up a pay phone as I ran by. I grabbed it, punched in a call-card number, and dialed England. I was waiting for a rock anthem to finish so I could leave a message when the second plane hit.

“Rikki!” I shouted into the receiver. “Rikki! I promise. I'll be there. I'll be there.”

AUTHOR'S NOTE

In August 1996, in Jalalabad, Afghanistan, Osama bin Laden came to his door to greet a man with a close-cropped beard and dressed in a starched white shirt with a straight collar and a lightweight synthetic suit. Bin Laden led the man into his sparse living room, where they sat on either end of a couch. The two were alone. What they had to say they wanted to remain between them, but bin Laden was delighted by the visit.

Recently expelled by the Sudanese, who had seized all his property, Osama bin Laden had arrived in Jalalabad basically broke. Rumors about his having a huge inheritance and trafficking in narcotics and “blood diamonds” were simply not true. He had been reduced to living off the Taliban's meager hospitality, but bin Laden had another problem: The Sudanese also had betrayed most of his networks to Western intelligence. By August 1996, bin Laden needed all the friends he could get. Now, an unlikely one had come to his door.

The visitor's Arabic wasn't fluent, but it was good enough for bin Laden to understand the proposition the man had crossed Afghanistan in the midst of a civil war to deliver: Al-Qaeda and Iran, he said, should conduct joint terrorist attacks against the United States.

A month earlier, bin Laden had sent a feeler to Tehran, suggesting Iran turn its attention from fighting the Taliban and destabilizing Central Asia to attacking the United States. Still, the idea of a cooperative effort must have startled him. Bin Laden was a Wahhabi Muslim, a sect despised by all Shia, but especially by the Iranians.

Rather than respond right away, bin Laden changed the subject. Afghanistan, he told his visitor, was pitting Shia Muslims against Sunni Muslims, and Israel and the United States were using the divide to destroy Islam.

The hour was late by now, and the visitor said he would have to go. As they rose, bin Laden put his hand on the man's shoulder and told him he would accept Iran's offer but only on the condition that their cooperation remain a secret, kept even from his own Qaeda inner circle. The visitor shook bin Laden's hand to close the deal, telling him they would be in touch.

When news of the meeting hit the CIA, alarm bells went off, at least with the Iran watchers. Bin Laden's visitor was an Iranian intelligence operative with American blood on his hands. Less than two months before, he'd been involved in the truck bombing of the Khobar Towers barracks in Saudi Arabia, which killed nineteen U.S. servicemen. Surely, this new partnership promised a new, even more lethal strike against the United States. The only questions were where and when. Those were answered on August 5, 1998, when truck bombs took down our embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam in Tanzania, killing more than 250 people.

After the embassy attacks, the Justice Department indicted senior Qaeda members on charges of conspiring with Iran to commit terrorism against the United States. But there was one thing hauntingly odd about the indictments. While bin Laden and other members of Al-Qaeda were named, including some known only by alias, no Iranian was. Not even the one bin Laden had made his original bargain with in Jalalabad. The same thing would occur three years later when indictments came down for the Khobar attack. Iran was named, but no Iranian.

By then, I admit, I was beyond dismay. When I served in Lebanon in the eighties, there seemed to be, in effect, a blanket immunity for Iran. We knew which Iranians bombed our embassy and the Marine barracks. We knew the names of Iranians kidnapping Americans. And it wasn't as if the Iranians were trying very hard to cover their tracks. The first American hostage kidnapped by the Pasdaran was moved out of Lebanon and held in Evin prison in Tehran. When Bill Buckley was held in Balabakk at the Sheikh Abdallah barracks, he and the other hostages could see their Pasdaran guards from their cells. We knew the names of the local Pasdaran commanders. But they were never named, let alone indicted.

I remember thinking that the odd relationship had reached some kind of crescendo when the Reagan administration clandestinely sent missiles to Iran—through Israel no less—that ended up in the hands of the Pasdaran, the same crew killing and kidnapping Americans in Lebanon. But things got even stranger when Oliver North, Reagan's point man on the Iran-contra arms-for-hostages deal, gave a Pasdaran officer a tour of the White House late one night and later met in Europe with another Pasdaran officer who had been involved in Buckley's kidnapping. This was truly crazy, insane. Then along came the meeting in Jalalabad, and Khobar Towers, and the embassy bombings, and 9/11, and the bizarre grew commonplace.

The blue-ribbon commission that investigated 9/11 did finger Iran, at least to a degree. Iranian intelligence assisted some of the hijackers transiting Iran to Afghanistan, making sure their passports were not stamped. Khalid Sheikh Muhammad, the mastermind behind the slaughter, had a cozy relationship with Iran, too. KSM, as he's known in intelligence circles, stashed his family there back when he was wanted by the United States for trying to assassinate President Clinton and blow up twelve U.S. airliners over the Pacific. When three of the future hijackers flew from Beirut to Iran in 2000, a particularly nasty Hizballah operative with close ties to Iran was on the same plane.

All that's in the 9/11 report, as is the fact that KSM apparently wasn't a member of Al-Qaeda. In the commission's word: “KSM states he refused to swear a formal oath of allegiance to bin Laden, thereby retaining a last vestige of his cherished autonomy.” Did he then have an “allegiance” to Iran? The commission doesn't offer an opinion, only recommending that Iran's role in 9/11 be studied further. It should. But what's striking in the 9/11 commission's report is the same thing that was striking in the indictments for the embassy bombings and Khobar Towers: No Iranian—or even the Hizballah operative traveling on the plane with the 9/11 hijackers—is named.

Stack up the intelligence we had against Saddam Hussein next to what we had on Iran, especially if we go all the way back to the Tehran embassy takeover in 1979, and it's obvious that the United States went to war against the wrong country in March 2003. Why? I don't pretend to know for sure, but maybe the answer has something to do with a grand balance-of-power scheme: Depose Saddam and give Iraq to the Shia, sow conflict between the Shia and Sunni across the Middle East, and drive a fatal wedge between the Indo-European Persians and the Semite Arabs. Divide and conquer—an ancient strategy.

Amid the blind stumblings of the Iraq war, the evidence for a master plan is thin, but there is some. In 1996, a group of neocons who would go on to become architects of the Iraq invasion wrote a paper entitled “A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm.” It's mostly drivel, but in one telling part the paper calls for bringing down Saddam and containing Syria, all of which has come to pass. Once again, though, there was no plan for Iran. It's as if the neocons like the country just the way it is.

Or maybe the far left has it right: The White House warmongerers are all about power and money, especially oil money. After all, Exxon's revenues soared to over $100 billion a quarter in 2005, and even Dick Cheney's Halliburton climbed out of the red in the wake of the Iraq war.

Whatever the actual truth, the absence of convincing evidence leaves the field open to a fictional one. That's what I try to get at in
Blow the House Down
. Like any fictional truth, this one stands, I hope, on a firm foundation of reality. Aside from the above indictment of Iran, here are the facts I've drawn from:

The FBI forced John O'Neill into retirement by giving his personnel file to the
New York Times
. O'Neill died on September 11. He was last seen running towards the South Tower, where his office was on the thirty-fourth floor.

Freddie Woodruff's murder remains open on FBI books. The Bureau is unsure whether he was murdered or died from a stray round.

Two Saudi officials—one suspected of being a Saudi intelligence agent—were in contact with two of the hijackers in California almost two years before 9/11.

John Millis was assigned to Peshawar in the late eighties, at the same time bin Laden was living there. On June 2, 2000, Millis was suspended as House intelligence committee staff director. He committed suicide the same day.

One of Beirut AP correspondent Terry Anderson's captors spoke with a French accent and claimed to have attended the American University of Beirut.

Another American abducted in Lebanon, Father Lawrence Martin Jenco, told investigators after his release that one of his captors had blue eyes and red hair.

In October 2000, the Kuwaitis detained two of the 9/11 hijackers transiting from Iran. The record of their interrogation has never been made public.

The character of Prince Al Sabah is based on a real Gulf prince who tried to warn the United States that KSM planned to use commercial airliners in suicide operations inside the United States.

The Securities and Exchange Commission and the FBI found no evidence that anyone benefited financially from 9/11, but experts acknowledge that the use of encrypted trades, fiduciary agents, and multiple accounts makes it nearly impossible to determine whether anyone has benefited from foreknowledge of a disaster like 9/11.

By January 2000, the CIA knew two bin Laden terrorists and future hijackers had entered the United States and taken up residence in California. The CIA failed to tell the FBI until August 2001. The 9/11 Commission concluded that had the FBI arrested the two on material witness warrants—both men were involved in the attack on the U.S.S.
Cole
—9/11 might never have happened.