NO ONE KNEW at the time how benign a harbinger it was, but the 1,500-pound bomb that shook the towers on February 26, 1993, was rated by the FBI as “the largest by weight and by damage that we’ve seen since the inception of forensic explosive identification” in 1925.1
It arrived in the 2,000-car parking garage beneath the World Trade Center in a yellow van, mistaken for one of the nearly identical Port Authority vans that frequented the world’s largest, seven-building, complex. Inside the 10-foot van’s 295 cubic yards of cargo space were four cardboard boxes of urea nitrate, a murky mix of fertilizer and acid bound together by wastepaper. Each box had its own 20-foot fuse, encased in rubber to slow the burn. Boosting each bomb was a nitroglycerine trigger, manufactured from 60 gallons of sulfuric acid, and a red tank of compressed hydrogen, a blast enhancer that had already become an international signature of Muslim extremists. A 99-cent cigarette lighter launched the new age of American terror a scant 12 minutes before the explosion—just enough time for Ramzi Yousef, Mohammed Salameh, and Eyad Ismoil to escape in a backup rented Corsica.
They had chosen their parking spot carefully, near a concrete wall almost midway between the two 110-story towers. When it went off, the bomb fractured the strong shoulders on which the vast complex sat. It carved a huge, jagged crater in the B-2 parking level, also destroying large swaths of the B-1 level above it. The crater was 150 feet by 130 feet and reached downward to B-5, nearly the bottom of a basement so vast it doubled all the square feet of the city’s precursor giant, the Empire State Building. The smoke from the underground fires, fueled by the gas of at least 30 burning cars, jumped up the chimney-like elevator shafts to the top, overwhelming towers with tens of thousands of choking inhabitants. The force of 150,000 pounds per square inch threw a 3,000-pound steel beam 30 feet in the air like a jumbo javelin, sending it inside a North Tower lunchroom where four workers, one of them seven months pregnant, were instantly crushed.
Two million gallons of water gushed from severed pipes and air-conditioning chillers into the subgrade levels. Fifteen thousand square feet of steel and concrete were obliterated, leaving 2,500 tons of smoldering debris. A 200-foot section of underground ceiling collapsed on a commuter train platform below. Two hundred thousand linear feet of plaster disintegrated. Seven-inch masonry walls ruptured. An 11-inch-thick section of concrete floor, 80 feet long and 50 feet wide, fell two stories, coming to rest on a precarious perch below. A man at a stoplight 300 feet away from the towers saw his rear windshield shatter. A woman buying airline tickets three stories above the blast was blown 30 feet through the air. Six victims died and 1,042 were injured, 15 seriously. A federal prosecutor would later describe it as “the largest patient-producing incident in U.S. history apart from certain battles in the Civil War.” It was also, no doubt, history’s biggest building evacuation, with an estimated 50,000 visitors and tenants rushing toward the exits.
To the mastermind of the attack, however, it was a disappointment. After two months of mixing his deadly paste in Jersey City, a chagrined Yousef, whose dozen aliases make him an unidentifiable mirage to this day, studied his still-standing target at dusk from a waterfront vantage post across the New York Harbor. That night he would be on his way to Pakistan, mortified by the paltry death toll. When he was caught two years later, he boasted that his plan was to topple the North Tower onto the South Tower, sparking a firestorm of colossal death. His self-described goal was to kill 250,000 people. That’s why the van was parked against a wall that separated the garage from a line of nine steel support columns, a quarter of the columns that held up the North Tower. Though the columns were severely shaken, the towers stiffened and stood.
But Yousef came very close to realizing his goal of mass murder on an epic scale. “The Vista Hotel, located directly above the blast area, was almost toppled,” J. Gilmore Childers, a prosecutor who convicted most of the bombers, told a Senate hearing years later. The 829-room, 22-story hotel—located at 3 World Trade Center—teetered as if on stilts. Its basement columns, which had rested every 12 feet on solid concrete slab floors, were left without reinforcement for nearly five gutted stories. Without these floors, these new “long, spindly” columns were “much weaker than the short, stubby ones that they had been at the start of the day,” experts concluded. Even Leslie Robertson, the structural engineer who’d designed the towers and toured them within hours of the blast, said the hotel columns “were subject to collapse at any time.”
The Vista was still trembling as late as 9 P.M., when Police Commissioner Ray Kelly stood on a table in the dining room to talk to the 300 or so top officials and rescuers who’d gathered there for a briefing. The Port Authority’s chief engineer whispered to Kelly’s deputy that he was afraid the floor might collapse, since the crowd was right above damaged columns. But he was reluctant to interrupt Kelly.
“Tell him, tell him,” implored the deputy.
“This is extremely serious. It is in danger of collapse,” the PA official warned the group, and everyone relocated. Steel braces were quickly lowered through holes cut in the ballroom floor and fastened to shaky columns. Eventually, half an acre of cracked concrete floor slab was replaced.
But as Leslie Robertson roamed the cavern beneath the tower, he was even more concerned about the threat to the 10-acre foundation of the complex. Perhaps the WTC’s greatest engineering feat was its buried slurry wall, a 70-foot-tall and three-foot-thick dike that literally held back the Hudson, whose tidal waters rushed up near the base of the complex. If that “bathtub” of reinforced concrete—3,100 feet around—was disturbed by the blast, the river would surge through the commuter and subway tunnels underneath the basement, wreaking havoc. One crucial concrete slab had already slipped three feet, requiring immediate bracing.
A third threat would go unmentioned for more than a year. When Salameh and his codefendants were sentenced in May 1994, U.S. District Court Judge Kevin Duffy declared, “You had sodium cyanide around and I’m sure it was in the bomb. Thank God the sodium cyanide burned instead of vaporizing. If the sodium cyanide had vaporized, it is clear that what would have happened is that cyanide gas would have been sucked into the North Tower and everyone in the North Tower would’ve been killed.”
Senator Jon Kyl, chair of the Subcommittee on Technology, Terrorism and Government Information, put it this way: “Shortly after the bombing, FBI agents discovered in the storage locker of one of Ramzi Yousef’s co-conspirators all the ingredients necessary for making poison gas hydrogen cyanide. This fact is well known. Less well known is that Yousef told FBI personnel who were accompanying him back to the United States after his capture that he had indeed originally hoped to explode a chemical weapon in the World Trade Center; the only thing that apparently stopped him was lack of funds to finance the operation.” All he had to spend, according to prosecutors, was $8,000 to $12,000.
But it wasn’t just a few thousand missing dollars that thwarted Yousef’s deadly plan. He got off to a late start that morning. The plan was to detonate the bomb a couple of hours earlier, when the buildings were fully occupied. But the steel-nerved Yousef overslept. Instead, the 12:18 blast killed only the handful of basement workers who hadn’t gone out for lunch. The FBI declared it a miracle that only six people died, and that was partly due to the fast work of the Fire Department.
The first FDNY units—Engine and Ladder companies 10—arrived in a single minute, merely crossing the street from their firehouse. In the end, 750 firefighters, on and off duty, wound up at the WTC. Eighty-eight firefighters, 35 police officers, and one emergency service worker sustained injuries. One firefighter, Kevin Shea, fell 45 feet into the dark crater, was rescued by another firefighter descending by rope, and survived major surgery. The basement fire was brought under control a mere hour and a half after the explosion. “The decision to attack the basement fires in the initial stages of the incident,” wrote Anthony Fusco, chief of the department, “was the most important decision in that hundreds—maybe thousands—of lives were saved due to the timely extinguishing of the fires.” No one died of smoke inhalation, concluded Fusco, precisely because the fire was rapidly suppressed.
Five hundred people were trapped in elevators, including 72 grade school students and teachers who spent five hours in one smoky car. Since the bomb shut down the Operations Control Center, which was located in the basement, the public address systems became instantly inoperable, leaving tens of thousands to make up their own minds about whether to stay or go. With regular and emergency power out, they fled down black stairwells that, especially right after the blast, were drenched in smoke. It wasn’t until 5 P.M. that the first firefighter made it to the top floor, having worked his way up crammed stairwells barely wide enough to squeeze past the descending crowd.
“You could sense the fear in this city,” Police Commissioner Kelly said.
NEW YORKERS ARE divided to this day about how good or bad a mayor David Dinkins was. What’s inarguable is that he had terrible luck—a recession, a race riot, and a surge in the murder rate beset him almost from his earliest days at City Hall. When the World Trade Center was bombed, Dinkins, true to form, was far away in Japan on an economic development mission. His top deputy, Norman Steisel, rushed from City Hall to the WTC, where he operated out of a police-run mobile Fieldcom unit, taking a backseat to Chief Fusco, whose department was in charge, and Ray Kelly. Steisel woke Dinkins at 3:30 A.M. Japanese time, and the mayor immediately began his long trek back to New York, first by train from a city outside Tokyo and then aboard the earliest plane he could get a seat on. Meanwhile, Steisel, bald, grim, and pudgy, wound up doing national television interviews all day and night, making the kind of visceral connection with a panicked city that only crisis can confer. Used to the obscurity of a behind-the-scenes handler, he was stunned a few days later when he and his wife went to one of the city’s finer restaurants and got a spontaneous standing ovation.
Dinkins, who was up for reelection that fall, had missed a rare opportunity to make an I’m-in-control impression on a temporarily attentive populace. The 65-year-old mayor did not actually get to the bomb site until Saturday afternoon, 24 hours after the blast. Though it was never reported, Rudy Giuliani, who’d narrowly lost to Dinkins in 1989 and was running again, rushed to the site in his campaign car, but was barred by cops from entering. In public, Giuliani never made Dinkins’s awkward absence an issue. But in private, he and his campaign aides derided the mayor, poking fun at the fact that he wore a construction helmet when he toured the site, even though it was long after the danger had subsided. They saw Dinkins’s appearance as “lame” and “ineffectual.”2
The mayor was also tormented by his Mario Cuomo problem. Dinkins was always upstaged by the charismatic governor, the reverse of what would happen in the aftermath of the second WTC attack on 9/11. Shortly before Dinkins got back on Saturday, Steisel hosted a nationally covered morning press conference. Before it, Kelly and FBI chief Jim Fox urged Cuomo, Steisel, and the rest of the officials not to tell reporters that the incident was a bombing. The earliest news reports had suggested it might have been a transformer accident, and Kelly and Fox wanted another day of muddled messages, apparently to decoy the perpetrators. But at the conference Cuomo couldn’t contain himself: “It looks like a bomb. It smells like a bomb. It’s probably a bomb.” Then, as he left the mike and passed Fox, he smiled: “Well, I didn’t say it was a bomb.” With Dinkins just minutes from arriving, Cuomo had delivered the sound bite that would dominate the news cycle. “All of America has been violated by this,” Cuomo added. “What it does to the psyche is frightening. We have lived behind this invisible but impenetrable shield for all these years.”
If the public was eager to believe the impenetrable shield still existed, the swift arrests of the bombers helped the process of denial along. Salameh, who was first, became an instant national joke when, six days after the bombing, he returned for his $400 deposit on the Ford Econoline van he’d rented from a New Jersey franchise. Raids at Brooklyn and Jersey addresses listed for Salameh led to the busts of three co-conspirators and the identification of others, including the already vanished Yousef.
The FBI soon began ridiculing this clumsy crew, with officials calling them “unsophisticated” and Time magazine dismissing them as “rank amateurs.” But the truth, which only emerged over time, was that this powerful if crude bombing was as much an indictment of FBI preparedness as the subsequent arrests were a measure of its investigative prowess. Eight months before the attack, the agency had fired an Egyptian confidential informant so plugged into this deadly circle that he’d warned the FBI about a bombing plot and urged them to tail two of the bombers, possibly even specifying the WTC as a target.
After the bombing, the FBI rushed to put the informant, a 43-year-old former military officer named Emad Salem, back on the payroll. Though he wanted only $500 a week before the attack, the FBI was now promising him $1.5 million to risk his life back inside the cell. “If Emad had stayed with us, yeah, he would have prevented” the bombing, said Lou Napoli, a police detective assigned to the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force in New York. In addition to Salem’s warnings, a Palestinian terrorist group predicted in late January that “a bomb would be planted in a New York City skyscraper” that month, a threat relayed to the police. Pete Caram, the antiterrorism chief at the Port Authority, got a similar warning from the Joint Terrorism Task Force.3 Security was soon beefed up at the WTC, but when no attack occurred, the alert was rescinded. Despite this fumbling, no one criticized the police, the Port Authority, or the FBI—not even mayoral candidate Giuliani, who never so much as mentioned the new terrorism, or cited the bombing as an example of it, throughout the 1993 mayoral race.
Charles Schumer, the Brooklyn congressman who would later become a senator, certainly wasn’t ignoring the security issues raised by the bombing. Calling it “a shot across the bow importuning us to act,” Schumer’s Subcommittee on Crime and Criminal Justice held a Washington hearing that posed a critical question: “Are there reasonable precautions we can take to improve the security of our public buildings?”
The Schumer hearing—like much of the “new era,” postbombing press—highlighted the continuing nature of the terrorist threat in New York, and especially at the World Trade Center. Police Commissioner Ray Kelly testified: “Obviously, we’re concerned about the possibility of the bombing being the first in a series.” David Dinkins—in one of the mayor’s rare public discussions of the subject—told the committee that “our city and our world have drastically changed” and acknowledged that “we in New York and we in America must rethink our national attitude toward terror and security.”
Brian Jenkins, the senior managing director of Kroll Associates, the international security firm retained by the Port Authority after the bombing, observed, “With this bombing, a taboo has been broken. Others may be inspired to follow the example.” Neil Livingstone, director of the Institute on Terrorism, told the committee that the World Trade Center remained “one of the three best known structures in New York City,” along with the United Nations and Statue of Liberty. Calling terrorism “a form of communication” utterly dependent on publicity, he prophetically noted that “by hitting” the towers, “the terrorists were virtually guaranteed that there would be a vast amount of electronic and print coverage.”
A COUPLE OF weeks after Schumer’s autopsy of the attack, State Senator Roy Goodman, who doubled as chair of the Manhattan Republican Party, started three days of hearings on March 22, designed to examine “the security and safety aspects” of the WTC bombing. Goodman’s committee questioned 26 witnesses in a no-holds-barred probe of the city and of the Port Authority, both Democratic bastions. He opened the hearing by branding the bombing a “tragic wake-up call” and a “dire warning of future disasters with far greater loss of life if we fail to prepare” for terrorism “here at home.” He laid bare a shocking series of Port Authority consultant and internal security reports that predicted exactly the kind of garage bomb the terrorists pulled off. He berated one Port Authority executive director after another about why the security recommendations weren’t followed, particularly when it came to the wide-open parking garage. He likened one witness, Edward O’Sullivan, to the seer Nostradamus and told him that he was “thunderstruck at the degree to which your crystal ball was functioning” in 1985, when his 120-page study pinpointed the vulnerabilities exploited by the bombers.
Another persistent in-house advocate for closing or tightly regulating the garage was Pete Caram, the only Port Authority employee with a top security clearance and Joint Terrorism Task Force assignment. Caram sounded an alarm at Goodman’s hearing, saying he feared “further disaster somewhere down the line.” He urged the authority to “harden our target,” meaning the World Trade Center. “I can’t see implementing counter-terrorism programs on a crisis basis only,” he concluded. Caram’s warning was echoed by the FBI’s Fox, who somberly concluded, “We would be well advised to prepare for the worst and hope for best.” Kelly said the city should be at “a heightened state of awareness and readiness for the foreseeable future.”
Goodman quickly introduced a bill in Albany to bring Port Authority buildings, including the World Trade Center, under the jurisdiction of the New York City building code. The bi-state authority had long exploited its exemption from any local code, cherry-picking the standards it would meet, especially at the trade center. Port Authority officials prattled on for years about how they voluntarily met or exceeded city code, but everything from the fireproofing to the stairways to the wide-open floors sidestepped it. The Port Authority’s exemption meant it didn’t have to file permits with the city buildings department, so there was no public record of what part of the code it chose to adhere to and what part it chose to ignore.
The Port Authority was determined to head off Goodman’s bill. Stan Brezenoff, the Port Authority’s executive director, decided that the best way to defend the exemption was to look like he was surrendering to it. He announced on the eve of Goodman’s hearing that he would execute memos of understanding with Dinkins’s buildings and fire departments that committed the authority to code compliance and granted oversight powers to the city. The agreements wouldn’t actually be signed until late 1993, and, while they did strengthen city powers, the authority still held the upper hand.
The Fire Department did get some limited right to review and approve fire safety system projects and to do inspections. But Chief Bill Feehan, the FDNY’s first deputy commissioner, testified that “the problem” with memos of understanding is that all they empower the Fire Department to do is “act as their consultant.” When the Fire Department and the Port Authority disagreed, said the then 34-year veteran of the department, “they are not required to accept our advice.” Feehan submitted a statement from Fire Commissioner Carlos Rivera, a Dinkins appointee, who said it was his “firm belief” that legislation should be passed to ensure that Port Authority buildings comply with codes and giving his department enforcement power at the World Trade Center. Brezenoff said he understood the department’s concern and insisted the memos would change all that.
When that exchange was over, Goodman asked if it was the “overwhelming sentiment” of the fire and buildings departments that the authority should be compelled by law to comply with the city code, and Feehan and Buildings Commissioner Rudolph Rinaldi said yes. A deputy mayor appeared at the hearing and endorsed the senator’s bill, while Norman Steisel promised that city lawyers would draft their own version within 45 days. But nothing happened. When Goodman released a final report that August, contending that his bill would “at least insure that the City is never again so unprepared” for a terrorist event, and defining the WTC as “a singular potential terrorist target,” the two mayoral combatants, Dinkins and Giuliani, were silent.
Giuliani’s silence was the strangest. Goodman was, in many ways, his mentor, intimately involved in the 1993 campaign. Giuliani was a member of the senator’s East Side Republican Club and had announced his candidacy for mayor there in 1989. As the GOP leader for Manhattan, Goodman raised money for Giuliani and supplied foot soldiers. Yet when Dinkins walked away from an action plan he’d once embraced, Goodman couldn’t get his own candidate to take up the cause. Seth Kaye, an ex–Goodman aide who became a key campaign adviser to Giuliani, even brought up the Goodman WTC findings and bill within the campaign staff, according to other policy aides. But it all fell by the wayside. Eight years later, Goodman would say his hearings and report were “ignored,” but he drew a blank on any interactions he might’ve had with Giuliani about it.
At the same time as the well-covered Goodman hearings, Giuliani was quietly participating in his own carefully crafted, private meetings with experts on the issues of municipal governance he knew so little about—from schools to the budget. On March 25, sandwiched in between the two days of Goodman testimony, Giuliani met for the first time with Bill Bratton, the Boston police commissioner who would ultimately replace Kelly. The interview occurred less than a month after the bombing, but the subject never came up. Neither did the subject of terrorism, in any form.4
Bratton had been the Transit Authority police chief in New York before moving on to Boston, pioneering strategies of zero tolerance for fare beaters and graffiti, demonstrating that a crusade against quality-of-life infractions in the subways could also cut the felony crime rate. Giuliani wanted to know if the same strategies would “work on the streets” of the city. Even though crime had declined throughout the last three years of the Dinkins administration, New York was still widely regarded, especially by its citizens, as a city out of control. Giuliani knew his candidacy depended on whether voters could be convinced that he would make them safer—not from Muslim extremists but from muggers and crazed homeless people.
It was hardly surprising that the candidate stressed these issues in his three-hour session with Bratton, or that he wasn’t planning to run on terrorism. What the interview indicated, though, was that the new terrorist threat was nowhere on his public safety radar screen. Giuliani’s campaign staff remained in phone contact with Bratton throughout 1993, peppering him with periodic questions about policing, but they never raised a question about terrorism or the bombing.
And when it came to terrorism, there continued to be a lot to talk about. On June 24, the FBI raided a warehouse in Queens where five Muslims in white overalls, who were linked to the WTC bombing, were busted with plans—and enough fuel and fertilizer—to blow up two Hudson River tunnels, the United Nations, and the tower that housed the FBI. The banner on the Daily News was: TARGET N.Y.: ON THE BRINK OF TERROR. The FBI’s Jim Fox also announced the arrest of three other conspirators, adding that the bombers were caught with five metal drums filled with a “witches brew” of explosives. Kelly noted that “they were looking” to execute their “Day of Terror” plan “in the next week.”
The million-dollar informant Salem had picked the small warehouse on 90th Avenue in the Jamaica section of Queens without telling his co-conspirators that it was wired for sound and video. In the following weeks, the number of conspirators indicted grew to 13, led by the infamous blind sheik, Omar Abdel-Rahman.
Newsweek’s 2,500-word account of the bust was typical of the news coverage: “The possibilities were stupefying—too dreadful to be believed. Some day very soon, perhaps as early as this week, New York would be struck by a series of powerful explosions that would bring the city to its knees. First, bombs would go off in the Holland and Lincoln Tunnels, trapping thousands of commuters deep below the Hudson River in the ultimate claustrophobic horror. Two more explosions would follow: at the United Nations building and the Jacob Javits Federal Building. Swamped by multiple catastrophes, police, fire and ambulance crews would be stretched beyond their limits. New York would panic.” Had the gang not been penetrated by an informant, Newsweek declared, its “plan almost certainly would have worked.” The arrests and the WTC bombing “demonstrated all too well,” the magazine concluded, that “New York and many other ‘soft targets’ across America are now undeniably vulnerable to terrorist attack.”
The drumbeat of local and national coverage—much of it focused on the sheik—made terrorism the hottest story of the day, all of it with implications for the next city administration. But even when it was revealed that Giuliani’s top Orthodox Jewish supporter, Democratic assemblyman Dov Hikind, had been under 24-hour police protection for more than a month because of death threats by the same terrorist cell, the campaign said nothing. Hikind, U.S. Senator Al D’Amato, and City Comptroller Liz Holtzman, embroiled in her own reelection race, publicly demanded the arrest of the sheik for days before Attorney General Janet Reno finally acceded to it. But Giuliani said nothing.
Even when the trial of the first five WTC bombers started in mid-September, capping off what would be the worst year of at-home terrorist attacks in history, Candidate Giuliani saw no need to discuss city preparations for future incidents. Though his law enforcement credentials and Dinkins’s halfhearted response represented a political opportunity, Rudy stayed on message, and his message did not include terrorism.
Richard Bryers, who was Giuliani’s campaign spokesman, acknowledges that they “did absolutely nothing about the bombing” or the warehouse conspiracy, saying they were focused on the murder rate, budget, and racial tensions. “We did three weeks on whether it was appropriate to use the word ‘pogrom’ to describe” the anti-Semitic riot in Crown Heights. “We didn’t make any commercials about the attack; it never came up internally. It was seen as a foreign policy issue. Campaigns tend to focus on the top concern of the moment. Terrorist concerns were not a top concern.” The only reference Giuliani made to the bombing came in a major September 9, 1993, speech about quality-of-life issues, when he used it as an inspirational prop. “What I will do is ask you to work with me to restore our city,” he said, “to reach down and show that same kind of spirit and grit that we showed during the World Trade Center explosion.”
THE DISCONNECT BETWEEN Giuliani and counterterrorism—both as a candidate and ultimately as mayor—was all the more surprising considering his ostensible career connections to it. In a 15-year career as a G-man, Giuliani ran the entire criminal side of the Justice Department in Washington from 1981 to June 1983 and served as U.S. attorney in Manhattan from 1983 until days before he announced his first mayoral campaign in 1989. While terrorism was hardly a high-profile issue in those years, Giuliani has not hesitated, before and since 9/11, to suggest that his federal law enforcement background equipped him in an unusual way to both understand and combat terrorism. In a 1998 television appearance, he said, “I had to deal with terrorism when I was U.S. Attorney, and when I was the third ranking official in the Justice Department, so I have a pretty good sense of it.” And in his post-9/11 book, Leadership, he reiterated how his “career as a prosecutor” had prepared him to put himself “inside the minds” of terrorists.
The highlight of that early resume was his claimed frontline status in the fight against Yasir Arafat and the Palestine Liberation Organization. As early as his 1989 mayoral race, well before any major attack on the city, Giuliani branded Dinkins “soft on terrorism” because Dinkins wouldn’t oppose an Arafat visit to the United Nations. Giuliani declared then that as mayor, he would have Arafat “arrested as an accomplice to terrorism” if he entered the city. He also made much of the fact that he had “personally argued the case to throw the PLO out of this country,” a reference to an instantly dismissed eviction proceeding filed against the PLO’s mission in 1988. In a city where the subject of international relations often shows up in mayoral campaigns, Giuliani’s stance was not regarded as anything other than the politically pragmatic antipathy toward enemies of Israel that is as commonplace in New York as handshakes and cheek kisses. (Although Giuliani never carried out the campaign promise to have Arafat arrested, he did create a diplomatic incident in 1995 when he had Arafat thrown out of a Lincoln Center celebration of the United Nations’ 50th anniversary.)
Giuliani claimed his hatred of Arafat stemmed from the days when “I investigated Arafat for his alleged involvement in the murder of Leon Klinghoffer.” He was referring to the 1985 murder of a New York businessman aboard the Achille Lauro, an Italian ship hijacked off the coast of Egypt by Palestinian extremists. The killing was so savage—the wheelchair-bound, 69-year-old Klinghoffer was shot in the head and dumped in the Mediterranean—that, as Klinghoffer’s daughter would later say, it “put a face” on terrorism in the American mind. Giuliani has repeatedly cited his supposed work on the Klinghoffer case since the ’80s, even including it in his book, Leadership. The lionizing historian Fred Siegel, who was a policy adviser to Giuliani in his mayoral campaign, went so far as to assert in a TV interview “the little known fact” that Giuliani “would have been the one to prosecute” the hijackers “had they been brought back to the U.S.” As mayor, Giuliani cited the Klinghoffer case as the reason for his “special contempt” for Arafat, adding that his probe in the ’80s had uncovered “evidence of maybe 30 or 40 people he had murdered.”
Yet there was never any criminal investigation by Giuliani or the Justice Department that directly implicated Arafat in the Klinghoffer killing. Giuliani’s friend and mentor Arnold Burns, who was associate attorney general in Washington when the Achille Lauro case was reviewed there and who argued a civil case on behalf of the Klinghoffer family before the U.S. Supreme Court after he left government, says Giuliani was never involved with it. Burns, the finance chair of Giuliani’s first campaign for mayor in 1989, added, “I know of nothing Rudy did in any shape or form on the Klinghoffer case.” Jay Fischer, the Klinghoffer family attorney who spearheaded their litigation for 12 years and eventually won a monetary settlement with the PLO, says he “never had any contact” with Giuliani or anyone in his office about the case. “It would boggle the mind if anyone in 1985, 1986, 1987 or thereafter conducted an investigation of this case and didn’t call me,” said Fischer.
Victoria Toensing, the deputy at Justice who did investigate the Palestinian leader who organized the Achille Lauro hijacking, Abu Abbas, says that no one in Giuliani’s office “was involved at all.” Asked if there was any consideration given to indicting Arafat over the Klinghoffer case or other terrorist attacks on Americans, Toensing said, “Sure, people were always talking about indicting Arafat. I explained to those people that they had to show me exactly what law he had broken.” (Abbas represented his own organization on the PLO executive council).
The only involvement Giuliani really had with Arafat was the eviction suit almost three years after the Klinghoffer affair, and he’s hyped his role in that as well. It was Justice officials in Washington who decided to file the suit, spurred by legislation in 1987 that appeared to mandate it. Arnold Burns says he “assigned Rudy to shut down the PLO office in New York.” Together with John Bolton, then head of Justice’s Civil Rights Division, Giuliani brought the case in Manhattan, unrestrained by the U.N.’s 1974 decision to grant the PLO official observer status. The U.N. General Assembly voted 148 to 2 to oppose the Justice action, Secretary of State George Shultz called the eviction “dumb,” the World Court ruled unanimously against it, and even incoming president George H.W. Bush “distanced himself” from it, according to news accounts. But Giuliani still attempted to have the utilities at the PLO’s East Side townhouse turned off, ultimately losing the case and abandoning an appeal he announced he would file.
Beyond the flawed eviction proceeding, the only terrorist case Giuliani ever brought to indictment was announced with great fanfare at a 1986 press conference, and had nothing to do with Arafat. It involved a scheme to sell $2.5 billion in antitank missiles, fighter jets, bombs, and other hardware to Iran. Giuliani called it “mind-boggling” and the biggest arms smuggling case in American history. U.S. Customs Commissioner William Von Rabb called the 10 defendants “brokers of death who operated a terrorist flea market.” The sale was to the Iranian government, but on Giuliani’s motion, a judge ruled that it was the legal equivalent of a terrorist sale, since Iran was then tied to 87 terrorist incidents over the previous three years. The case never became part of the now much-vaunted Giuliani counterterrorist resume because he personally filed papers terminating it in his final month in office in January 1989. While the mysterious death of a key witness hurt the case, it was also crippled by errors in Giuliani’s office, with 46 of the 55 charges stricken by the courts.
When he left the Justice Department to start his political career, he worked as a corporate lawyer—for longer than he had intended, since he lost his first race against David Dinkins in 1989. The law firms he wound up working at did business with multiple institutions that had ties to terrorist activities. The firm he joined in 1989—White & Case—became a campaign issue in part because of its representation of the Saudi-based Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI), a veritable life force for drug cartels, despots like Saddam Hussein, and even the most notorious terrorist of the time, Abu Nidal. This was merely the crassest of the law firm connections that may have also partially explained Giuliani’s reluctance to talk about terrorism in the ’93 campaign. Giuliani personally represented the Milan-based Montedison, which was accused in Italian press reports of providing “chemicals and expertise” to a poison-gas plant in Libya. Already on the U.S. terrorist state list while Giuliani represented Montedison, Libya also began surfacing as the possible sponsor of the bombing of Pan Am 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, an attack that killed 217 Americans.
His second law firm, Anderson, Kill, Olick & Oshinsky, represented 11 companies, mostly European, accused of selling components of chemical weapons or other arms to Saddam Hussein.5 Giuliani represented one himself. He also had an opportunity to object to the rest, since a 1991 memo was circulated within the firm listing the clients of a prospective new partner, and most of them were on it. The firm was debating whether to accept the partner, and the Iraqi connections of some of the companies had been published by the New York Times, provoking American Jewish leaders to meet in protest with the German chancellor about the most egregious examples. Neither Giuliani nor any of his other ex-prosecutor friends at the firm, including Denny Young, said a word. At the time of the bombing in 1993, Giuliani was still running his fledgling mayoral campaign out of a conference room at a firm festering with strange Saddam associations. One of the bombers, Aboud Yasin, fled immediately to his native Iraq, where Hussein welcomed and harbored him, feeding neoconservative suspicions to this day that Hussein had sponsored the attack. As this awkward nexus of career and coincidental connections emerged, Giuliani remained, as he had at White & Case, tone deaf to the rumble.
ONCE GIULIANI WON in November of 1993, the immediate focus of his postelection transition was the selection of a police commissioner. Kelly and Bratton appeared in news accounts to be the prime candidates, but Kelly says now that he wasn’t seriously considered. An ex-marine, Kelly was championed with Giuliani by another ex-marine, Republican Staten Island borough president Guy Molinari, one of Giuliani’s most influential early supporters. “Guy set up a meeting for me with Giuliani,” recalls Kelly. “It was kind of mysterious. It was in a hotel room, super secret, and Giuliani mostly asked me questions about merging the transit police with the NYPD. We also talked about street crime, although not in depth. He did it to keep Guy happy. There was no discussion about terrorism or February 26. Then I met with a committee of Giuliani’s and they never mentioned the bombing or anything about terrorism either.”
The mayor-elect’s public safety transition committee interviewed several other candidates as well. One was Henry DeGeneste, the former Port Authority superintendent of security who had moved on to become head of global security operations for Prudential. Another was Leslie Crocker Snyder, a Manhattan Supreme Court judge with an impressive record in the district attorney’s office. Neither recalls even a single question about terrorism or the bombing. DeGeneste says he’d “written articles and spoken about counter-terrorism,” but that he was only asked about drug trafficking and community policing. Kelly, who helped spearhead both the WTC and the warehouse bombing probes, remembers clearly that “no terrorism-related issues were raised.” Snyder is “quite sure it never came up,” as is Bratton. “These guys had no understanding of the threat of terrorism,” says Bratton, “they were concerned with day-to-day crime and homicide in the streets.”
Bratton was initially interviewed the day after Thanksgiving at the Scarsdale farmhouse of Adam Walinsky, the former chair of the State Commission of Investigation and a member of the transition committee in charge of police, fire, and corrections. On the same day, Walinsky and Howard Wilson, a former federal prosecutor close to Giuliani and chair of the committee, took Bratton to a secret session with Giuliani at Wilson’s law office. Bratton then appeared before the eight-member transition committee and, finally, did an intimate session in December with Rudy and an inner circle of his five closest advisers that ran until 1 A.M. In all of those combined hours, there wasn’t so much as a whisper about the terrorist threat that had so dramatically surfaced only months earlier.
“I don’t believe that any member of the committee or anyone else involved spent five seconds, there wasn’t five seconds of discussion, about terrorism,” Walinsky recalls, adding that Giuliani never mentioned it as a factor in the selection process. “I don’t believe one person in those meetings raised it.” Walinsky and two other members of the committee—Herman Badillo, who ran for comptroller on Giuliani’s ticket, and attorney Gary Cooper—agree that the WTC attack and the June breakup of the bombing plot never figured in the transition’s public safety talks.
It did not even come up when the panel interviewed Tom Sheer, the former head of the FBI’s New York office, who’d helped reorganize it to focus on international espionage. Newsday said the Sheer interview “was a courtesy to FBI director Louis Freeh,” an old friend of Giuliani’s who’d recommended Sheer. While Sheer did not have the urban policing background for the top job, the mayor didn’t consider creating a counterterrorism deputy post for him, similar to the two created by Kelly when he became commissioner again under Mayor Bloomberg. Had Giuliani seen the terrorist events of 1993 as a rationale for such a position, he would have had a high-level conduit at the Police Department, connected to the FBI and federal prosecutors, focused on keeping the issue on City Hall’s agenda.
A month after Bratton’s selection, when Giuliani was sworn in on January 2, 1994, he became New York’s first mayor in 100 years to take office without ever holding any other elective office. He was the stern and resolute embodiment of law enforcement; all he’d ever done was prosecute. His campaign revolved around a single promise: I will make you safe. He was, however, as disengaged from the new terrorist threat as the Harlem clubhouse incumbent he defeated. His city had been shocked and battered, not just by street thugs, but also by a shadowy and sinister new circle of mass murderers. Yet Giuliani came to City Hall as if this latest lethal breed did not exist.
The federal judge Giuliani asked to swear him in was Michael Mukasey, a lifelong friend who’d tried a career-making congressional corruption case with him in the early ’70s when both were young prosecutors. Only a few months before the inauguration, Sheik Rahman, the spiritual founding father of Islamic terrorism in America, and a dozen of his followers, had been arraigned before Mukasey, manacled, and charged with chilling conspiracies, the targets of which ran from the U.N. to the Hudson River tunnels. Mukasey would soon put Rahman and the rest of his Day of Terror gang in prison, some for life. If Giuliani needed a lesson in the gravity of the threat, all he had to do was read his close friend’s statement to Rahman at the sentencing. “You were convicted of directing others to perform acts which, if accomplished, would have resulted in the murder of hundreds if not thousands of people,” Judge Mukasey said in a courtroom that his friend Rudy made sure was heavily guarded. If the terrorists had been successful, he said, the bombings would have caused destruction on a scale “not seen since the Civil War.”
That was the intimate law enforcement network from which Giuliani came. It was Giuliani, as U.S. attorney, who hired and befriended the men who made these cases, from Gil Childers to Rahman’s prosecutor Andrew McCarthy, to Yousef’s prosecutor Dietrich Snell, to the embassy bombing trial attorney Patrick Fitzgerald, to the chief of the counterterrorism unit David Kelley. Yet as mayor in the new age of terror, he never talked to them, never sought a briefing that might have allowed him to benefit, at least in broad strokes, from the unique understanding of this underworld that only a prosecutor who’s tried one of these complex cases has.6
At the 9/11 Commission’s final hearing in 2004, former U.S. senator Bob Kerrey suggested just how valuable such briefings might have been while questioning Fitzgerald, the assistant U.S. attorney who spearheaded the Yousef, Rahman, and embassy bombing investigations. If Fitzgerald “had gone and briefed” President Bush, delivering just “the public information you had at trial,” Kerrey said, Bush would have learned far more than he got from the infamous CIA daily briefing on August 6, 2001. Claiming that he’d now seen all the classified material, Kerrey declared there was “more content” in the court files about “what bin Laden intended to do,” calculating that 70 percent of what the government knew was public by 1997 and 100 percent well before 9/11. Fitzgerald agreed: “I think it’s fair to say that there’s a lot in the open sources that wasn’t reported widely. I’ve always been confused by why people didn’t pay attention to what becomes public.” A memo on bin Laden, for example, was filed at the courthouse as early as 1995.
U.S. Attorney Mary Jo White, who ran Giuliani’s former Southern District office throughout his mayoralty, agrees with Kerrey, contending that “by 1998, all of it was in the public record.” Yet, White added, neither she nor any of the trial assistants were ever asked to brief him or his staff. In the summer of 1994, White recalled, she invited Rudy to address the whole office, and he came, sat at his old desk, and gabbed before delivering a speech and taking questions. He talked about “how to make the city safer” and cited the gang cases the office was doing. “I don’t recall the subject of terrorism coming up,” White said. Her chief assistant, Matt Fishbein, remembered that 10 or 12 people, from White’s and Giuliani’s top staff, talked for a while before the speech and no one mentioned the bombing or terrorism.
White had taken over the Southern District in mid-1993, right before the Day of Terror busts. When this meeting occurred, her office had already prosecuted the first group of 1993 bombers and was trying the warehouse plotters. Yet Giuliani did not attempt to set up a pipeline of information to an office that would become the national headquarters for the war on bin Laden. The only time he ever discussed the 1993 bombing with White was when he called to congratulate her on the first convictions. White remembered two other meetings she had at City Hall with Giuliani, and believed that one involved the mob-infested Fulton Fish Market and that the other focused on city assistance for a youth program her office was sponsoring in Washington Heights.
“We didn’t have any substantial discussions about terrorism until after 9/11,” White said, saying that the sit-downs she did have with him were not “heavy duty” and “did not include” any exchanges about al Qaeda, the attacks, or the threat. White was also sure that no one from her terrorism unit—the only U.S. attorney’s office in America to have one—was ever asked by the police or City Hall to “sit down and focus” on what it knew. White assumed that all Giuliani wanted was periodic intelligence about specific threats or events, not a broader terrorist picture, and she believed he got that from the FBI. “He could have picked up the phone” if he needed a fuller context, said Fishbein. “We were more on top of this than anyone else.” Counterterrorism chief David Kelley said his highest-level interaction was with a deputy police chief, and that he relied on the detectives in the Joint Terrorism Task Force, which he oversaw, as the “conduit available to city government.” He acknowledged that the city never increased the number of Task Force detectives before 9/11,7 and that he didn’t know “how the information went up the ranks” and simply “assumed” Giuliani was briefed, at least about specific threats.
White did not find the lack of substantive exchange surprising, even though her office was pursuing a cabal that menaced the city and Giuliani was charged with protecting it. Childers, McCarthy, and Snell did not regard it as any failing on Rudy’s part that his administration had not tapped into their understanding of the threat, or even that no one from the NYPD had monitored their trials or sought their transcripts. But to anyone outside these two cocoons, the disengagement is mystifying. Certainly, Giuliani gave voters reason to believe they would benefit in unusual ways from the experience he frequently cited, and his fraternal law enforcement relationships were presumed to be part of that advantage.
It’s not like there was nothing the new mayor of New York could do about the rising threat. The postbombing reports by Chief Fusco and other Fire Department brass were a mandate for reforming the city’s response to a catastrophic attack. The Port Authority’s admitted system failures were an invitation for aggressive city oversight and inspection. The litany of ignored warnings was a cry to better connect intelligence and action. Senator Goodman’s bill was a recipe for jurisdictional empowerment. But with most of the bombers in jail and the towers reopened, the casualties and near-casualties of 1993 were already fading from view, especially the view from City Hall.
Just weeks before the first anniversary of the WTC bombing, Giuliani opened his City Hall inaugural with the fierce vow that “the era of fear has had a long enough reign.” Though the Metropolitan Correctional Center, also just a couple hundred yards from where he stood, was already jammed with new jihadists, some on trial as he spoke, he did not include them in his definition of the fearsome. His key staff and new police commissioner were already exchanging memos detailing plans for the fight against fear, but these rigorous to-do lists did not mention terror. A summary of the initiatives discussed at a meeting with Bratton just eight days after the inaugural—prepared for Giuliani special adviser Richard Schwartz—spelled out the NYPD response to nine City Hall proposals without a reference to any counterterror strategy. A half dozen similar initiative memos between City Hall and the Police Department in 1994 document the Giuliani blank slate on emergency terrorist response, without so much as a sentence about the bombing or the continuing threat.8
For only the second time, his speech that inaugural day did mention the bombing. But as he had in September, Giuliani reduced it to a self-help metaphor, converting the evacuation into a tribute to personal responsibility. “Fifty thousand New Yorkers took charge of themselves and each other,” he declared on this chilly day of stiff resolve, anticipating the welfare and other reforms he would soon introduce. “The New York spirit that brought us through the World Trade Center crisis was a demonstration of the courage and ingenuity that we must now apply to restoring public safety, saving our schools, reducing our deficit and improving the quality of our lives.”
In a memorable speech that challenged his city to change in so many other ways, Rudy Giuliani, 49, embarking on the greatest public mission of his life, described the trade center crisis as if it were over—proof, as he put it, that “nothing is beyond our grasp.”