16
AL-QAEDA’S FORTUNES began to improve after the coalition’s fatwa to kill Americans wherever they might be found. Until then, bin Laden’s name and his cause had been obscure outside of Saudi Arabia and Sudan, but news of the fatwa excited a new generation of fighters. Some came from the madrassas in Pakistan, others from the streets of Cairo or Tangier. The call was heard also in Muslim enclaves in the West. In March 1998, only a month after the fatwa, Ahmed Ressam came from Montreal. A petty thief of Algerian origin who would later be arrested for trying to blow up the Los Angeles International Airport, Ressam was one of about thirty Algerians in the Khaldan camp, the entry point for al-Qaeda trainees in Afghanistan. That same month, Zacarias Moussaoui, a French citizen of Moroccan descent who was living in London, arrived; he would later plead guilty to planning to attack the United States. Young men from Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Sweden, Turkey, and Chechnya came to Khaldan, and each nationality had its own emir. They created cells that they could then transplant to their own or adopted countries. Some went to fight in Kashmir and Chechnya. Many fought for the Taliban.
Publicity was the currency bin Laden was spending, replacing his wealth with fame, and it repaid him with recruits and donations. Despite his pledge to Mullah Omar to remain silent, bin Laden followed up the fatwa with a series of press conferences and interviews, first with a group of fourteen Pakistani journalists, who were driven around in circles for two days before landing in an al-Qaeda camp only miles from where they had started. They stood around idly waiting for bin Laden to make his appearance. Suddenly there was a barrage of gunfire and rocket grenades to herald bin Laden’s arrival in a convoy of four pickup trucks, accompanied by bodyguards with their faces covered. A dog ran amok, looking for cover, and skidded behind a tree.
The event struck the Pakistani reporters as staged and cartoonish. They weren’t interested in bin Laden’s declaration of war against America, which seemed like an absurd publicity stunt. India had just tested a nuclear device, and they wanted bin Laden to declare jihad against India instead. Frustrated, bin Laden tried to steer the reporters back to his agenda. “Let’s talk about real problems,” he pleaded.
“Terrorism can be commendable and it can be reprehensible,” bin Laden philosophized in response to a planted question from one of his followers. “Terrifying an innocent person and terrorizing him is objectionable and unjust, also unjustly terrorizing people is not right. Whereas, terrorizing oppressors and criminals and thieves and robbers is necessary for the safety of people and for the protection of their property…. The terrorism we practice is of the commendable kind.”
After the formal interview, Rahimullah Yusufzai, the reporter for the News in Islamabad, drew bin Laden aside and asked if he would talk a bit about his life. For instance, how many wives and children did he have?
“I’ve lost count,” bin Laden said, laughing.
“Maybe at least you know about your wives,” Yusufzai suggested.
“I think I have three wives, but I have lost count of my children,” bin Laden said.
Yusufzai then asked bin Laden how much money he had. Bin Laden put his hand on his heart and smiled. “I am rich here,” he said. He continued to evade personal questions.
As soon as Yusufzai got back to Peshawar, he received a call from a furious Mullah Omar. “Bin Laden holds a press conference announcing jihad and he doesn’t even tell me?” he exclaimed. “There can only be one ruler in Afghanistan, either me or bin Laden.”
THESE INTERVIEWS always took a toll on bin Laden’s voice, although he drank copious amounts of tea and water. The next day he wouldn’t speak at all, communicating by gesture, because his vocal cords were so inflamed. His bodyguard contended that this was the lingering effect of a Soviet chemical weapon, but some of the reporters concluded that he must be suffering from kidney disease—the origin of a persistent and unsubstantiated legend.
Two days after speaking to the Pakistani press, bin Laden received reporter John Miller and an ABC news crew. Beforehand, the irrepressible American correspondent had sat on the floor of a hut with Zawahiri and explained the needs of his crew. “Doc, we need shots of bin Laden going around the camps, interacting with the men, watching them train or whatever, so we’ll have some footage over which we can narrate his story,” Miller said. Zawahiri nodded knowingly. “You need some ‘B’ roll,” he said, using the technical term for such coverage. He chuckled and continued, “Mr. Miller, you have to understand that this is not like your Sam Donaldson walking with the president in the Rose Garden. Mr. bin Laden is a very important man.”
It occurred to Miller at the time that Zawahiri might be the real power behind al-Qaeda, but then bin Laden himself arrived, with the same staged, awe-inspiring fusillade as before. Over the chirping of crickets outside the mud hut, Miller asked bin Laden if his fatwa was directed at all Americans or just the military. “Through history, America has not been known to differentiate between the military and the civilians, or between men and women or adults and children,” bin Laden quietly responded. He cast shy, doe-eyed glances at the American, as if he worried about giving offense. “We anticipate a black future for America. Instead of remaining united states, it shall end up separated states”—just like the old Soviet Union. Bin Laden wore a white turban and a green military jacket. Looming behind his head was a large map of Africa, an unremarked clue.
“You are like the Middle East version of Teddy Roosevelt,” Miller concluded.
During the interview, many of bin Laden’s followers crowded into the hut. Two Saudis, Mohammed al-‘Owhali and “Jihad Ali” Azzam, were preparing for al-Qaeda’s first big operation the following month. After Miller’s crew finished the taping, bin Laden’s technical experts erased the Saudis’ faces from the videotape before giving it to the Americans.
DURING THE INTERVIEW, Miller asked about Wali Khan Amin Shah, who had been arrested in Manila. “American authorities believe he was working for you, funded by you, setting up training camps there and part of this plan was…the assassination or the attempted assassination of President Clinton during his trip to Manila,” said Miller. Wali Khan was “a close friend,” bin Laden mildly replied. “As to what you said about him working for me, I have nothing to say. We are all together in this.”
The fact that Khan was in American custody was supposed to be a closely held secret, but someone had leaked that information to Miller. Some people in the FBI and the U.S. Attorney’s Office were enraged when Khan’s name was mentioned directly to bin Laden on television. They knew that John O’Neill was a friend of Christopher Isham, an investigative producer for ABC News; they often drank together at Elaine’s. Patrick Fitzgerald, the assistant prosecutor in New York’s Southern District, was so angry that he threatened to indict O’Neill. Both Isham and Miller denied that O’Neill was their source and volunteered to take lie-detector tests to prove it. Fitzgerald backed off, but the allegation that O’Neill talked carelessly to reporters lingered as a slur on his reputation. It didn’t help that some journalists’ investigations of bin Laden were more creative than those of the American intelligence community.
THE FACT WAS THAT THE CIA had no one inside al-Qaeda or the Taliban security that surrounded bin Laden. The agency did have some contacts with a few Afghan tribesmen—leftover assets from the jihad against the Soviets. At Alec Station, Mike Scheuer came up with a plan to use them to kidnap bin Laden. The Afghans were supposed to enter through a drainage ditch that ran under the back fence of Tarnak Farms. Another group of Afghans would sneak through the front gate, using silenced pistols to kill whoever got in the way. When they found bin Laden, they would stash him in a cave thirty miles away. If they were caught, there would be no American fingerprints on the abduction; if they were not, then the Afghans would turn bin Laden over to the Americans a month or so later, after the search parties had given up.
The CIA had outfitted what appeared to be a commercial shipping container that would fit in the cargo hull of a civilian version of a C-130 aircraft. Inside the container was a dentist’s chair with restraints modeled for a very tall man (the CIA was under the impression that bin Laden was six feet five inches tall); there would be a doctor inside the box as well, and he would have a wide array of medical equipment available to him, including a dialysis machine in case bin Laden actually did have kidney problems. The agency had even built a landing strip on a private ranch near El Paso, Texas, in order to practice landing at night with no lights, the pilots using night-vision goggles.
It was Scheuer’s plan to drop bin Laden in Egypt, where he could be rudely questioned and then quietly disposed of. John O’Neill furiously objected to this idea. He was a lawman, not a killer. He wanted bin Laden arrested and tried in America. He made his case to Janet Reno, the U.S. attorney general, who agreed to let the bureau take possession of bin Laden should he actually be captured. Soon Dan Coleman found himself in El Paso, rehearsing his role as the arresting officer. The plane would land, the cargo door would open, and then the container with the manacled terrorist inside would be loaded into the bay. Coleman would enter the container and find Osama bin Laden strapped to the dentist’s chair. Then he would read him his rights.
But for that, he needed an indictment. A federal grand jury in New York was listening to evidence even as the training was under way. One of the documents Coleman found on Wadih el-Hage’s computer in Nairobi made a tentative link between al-Qaeda and the killing of American servicemen in Somalia, and that became the basis of the criminal indictment that was eventually returned against bin Laden in New York in June 1998. Those specific charges against him were later dropped, however, and no testimony in subsequent terrorist trials ever proved that al-Qaeda or bin Laden had been responsible for the murder of Americans—or anyone else—before August of that year. Had he been captured at that time, it’s unlikely that bin Laden would have been convicted.
The dispute between the FBI’s O’Neill and the CIA’s Scheuer, along with the reluctance of the National Security Council to endorse what might be an embarrassing and bloody fiasco, paralyzed the plan. In desperation, George Tenet, the director of Central Intelligence, flew to the Kingdom twice in May 1998 to beg for the help of the Saudis. According to Scheuer, Crown Prince Abdullah made it clear that if the Saudis succeeded in getting bin Laden from the Taliban, American intelligence “would never breathe a word.”
The Saudis had their own concerns about bin Laden. Prince Turki had learned that he had attempted to smuggle weapons to his followers inside the Kingdom in order to attack police stations. The Saudis repeatedly complained to the Taliban about bin Laden’s meddling with Saudi internal affairs, to no effect. Finally, in June 1998, the king summoned Turki and told him, “Finish this.”
Turki flew into the Kandahar airport, directly over the fortress-like Tarnak Farms. Until then, Turki had never met Mullah Omar. The prince was taken to a decrepit guesthouse, the former home of a wealthy merchant, a remnant of what had once been a graceful city. Mullah Omar limped forward to greet him. The one-eyed leader appeared thin and pale, with a long beard, and some kind of infirmity in one of his hands, which he clutched to his chest. War wounds and other afflictions were surpassingly common in Afghanistan; most of the Taliban cabinet members and governors were amputees or severely handicapped in multiple ways, and it was rare for any male assemblage to have a full complement of arms, legs, or eyes. Turki shook hands and sat opposite him on the floor of the salon. Behind Omar were French doors that looked out onto a semicircular terrace, and beyond that, to a dusty, barren yard.
Even during such an important ceremonial occasion as this, there was a casually disconcerting atmosphere of chaos. The room was full of people, young and old, entering at their leisure. Turki was grateful at least for the single air conditioner, which moderated the stifling heat of the Afghan summer.
Turki had brought with him Sheikh Abdullah Turki, a renowned Islamic scholar and the former minister for religious endowments, which was a lucrative source of contributions to the Taliban. In addition to serving as a reminder of Saudi support, Sheikh Abdullah’s authoritative presence would instantly resolve any religious or legal questions that might be posed about bin Laden’s status. Reminding Omar of his pledge to keep bin Laden from launching attacks of any kind against the Kingdom, Turki then asked Mullah Omar to hand over bin Laden, who had inconveniently left town for the duration of Turki’s visit.
Mullah Omar professed to be totally surprised. “I can’t just give him to you to put on the plane,” Omar complained. “After all, we provided him shelter.”
Prince Turki was stupefied by this turnabout. Mullah Omar then lectured him on the Pashtu tribal code, which he said was quite strict about betraying guests.
Sheikh Abdullah Turki offered the opinion that if a guest breaks his word, as bin Laden had done repeatedly by granting press interviews, that action absolves the host who is protecting him. The Taliban leader was unconvinced.
Thinking that Omar needed a face-saving compromise, Prince Turki suggested that the two of them set up a committee that would explore ways to formally hand over bin Laden. Then Prince Turki and his party got up to leave. As he did so, Turki asked specifically, “Are you agreed in principle that you will give us bin Laden?”
Mullah Omar said he was.
After the meeting, Saudi Arabia reportedly sent four hundred four-wheel-drive pickup trucks and other financial aid to the Taliban as a down payment for bin Laden. Six weeks later, the money and the trucks allowed the Taliban to retake Mazar-e-Sharif, a bastion of a Persian-speaking, Shiite minority, the Hazaras. Among the Taliban fighters were several hundred Arabs sent by bin Laden. Well-placed bribes left a force of only 1,500 Hazara soldiers guarding the city, and they were quickly killed. Once inside the defenseless city, the Taliban continued raping and killing for two days, indiscriminately shooting anything that moved, then slitting throats and shooting dead men in the testicles. The bodies of the dead were left to wild dogs for six days before survivors were allowed to bury them. Those citizens who fled the city on foot were bombed by the Taliban air force. Hundreds of others were loaded into shipping containers and baked alive in the desert sun. The UN estimated the total number of victims in the slaughter to be between five and six thousand people. They included ten Iranian diplomats and a journalist, whom the Taliban rounded up and shot in the basement of the Iranian consulate. Four hundred women were taken to be concubines.
But the massacre of Mazar was immediately overshadowed by other tragedies far away.
AFTER THE FORMATION OF THE ISLAMIC FRONT, American intelligence agencies took a greater interest in Zawahiri and his organization, al-Jihad, which was still separate from al-Qaeda but closely allied. In July 1998 CIA operatives kidnapped Ahmed Salama Mabruk and another member of Jihad outside a restaurant in Baku, Azerbaijan. Mabruk was Zawahiri’s closest political confidant. The agents cloned his laptop computer, which contained al-Qaeda organizational charts and a roster of Jihad members in Europe—“the Rosetta Stone of al-Qaeda”—as Dan Coleman called it, but the CIA refused to turn it over to the FBI.
It was a typical, pointless bureaucratic standoff of the sort that had handicapped counterrorism efforts at both organizations from the start, made worse by the personal vindictiveness that several senior agency people, including Scheuer, felt toward O’Neill. Overvaluing information for its own sake, the agency was a black hole, emitting nothing that was not blasted out of it by a force greater than gravity—and it recognized that O’Neill was such a force. He would use the information—for an indictment, a public trial—and it would no longer be secret, no longer be intelligence; it would be evidence, it would be news, and it would become useless as far as the agency was concerned. The agency treated the exposure of any bit of intelligence as a defeat, and it was in its nature to clutch the Mabruk computer as if it were the crown jewels. Such high-quality information was difficult to come by and, when acquired, even more difficult to act upon. Because of decades of cutbacks on human intelligence assets, there were only two thousand real operatives—spies—in the agency to cover the entire world.
O’Neill was so angry that he sent an agent to Azerbaijan to demand the actual computer from the president of the country. When that failed, he persuaded Clinton to appeal personally to the Azerbaijani president. Eventually the FBI got the computer, but the ill will between the bureau and the agency continued unabated, damaging both in their attempts to round up the al-Qaeda network.
The CIA moved against another al-Jihad cell in Tirana, Albania, which had been created by Mohammed al-Zawahiri in the early nineties. Albanian agents, under CIA supervision, kidnapped five members of the cell, blindfolded them, interrogated them for several days, and then sent the Egyptian members to Cairo. There they were tortured and put on trial with more than a hundred other suspected terrorists. Their ordeal produced twenty thousand pages of confessions. Both Zawahiri brothers were given death sentences in absentia.
On August 6, a month after the breakup of the Albanian cell, Zawahiri sent the following declaration to the London newspaper Al Hayat: “We are interested in briefly telling the Americans that their message has been received and that the response, which we hope they will read carefully, is being prepared, because, with God’s help, we will write it in the language that they understand.”
DESPITE THE BLUSTER, the media, the lurid calls for jihad, al-Qaeda had really done nothing so far. There were grand plans, and there were claims of past successes that al-Qaeda had little or no part of. Although al-Qaeda had already existed for ten years, it was still an obscure and unimportant organization; it didn’t compare to Hamas or Hezbollah, for instance. Thousands of young men had trained in al-Qaeda camps and returned to their home countries to create havoc; because of their training, they would be called, by intelligence agencies, “al-Qaeda linked.” Unless they had pledged their loyalty to bin Laden, however, they were not formally a part of the organization. There were fewer actual al-Qaeda members in Kandahar than there had been in Khartoum because bin Laden could no longer support them. The fireworks displays he put on for reporters were accomplished with rented mujahideen. Like blowfish, al-Qaeda and bin Laden made themselves appear larger than they actually were. But a new al-Qaeda was about to make its debut.
It was August 7, 1998, the same day the slaughter commenced in Mazar-e-Sharif and the anniversary of the arrival of American troops in Saudi Arabia eight years before.
In Kenya, an Egyptian bomb-maker called “Saleh”—one of Zawahiri’s men—oversaw the construction of two huge explosive devices. The first, made of two thousand pounds of TNT, aluminum nitrate, and aluminum powder, was stuffed in boxes that were wired to batteries then loaded into a brown Toyota cargo truck. The two Saudis who sat in on the ABC interview, Mohammed al-‘Owhali and Jihad Ali, drove the truck through downtown Nairobi toward the American Embassy. At the same time, in Tanzania, Saleh’s second bomb was on its way to the American Embassy in Dar es Salaam. This bomb was similar in construction except that Saleh had added a number of oxygen tanks or gas canisters to provide additional fragmentation. The delivery vehicle was a gasoline truck driven by Ahmed Abdullah, an Egyptian whose nickname was Ahmed the German because of his fair hair. The bombings were scheduled for ten thirty on a Friday morning, a time when observant Muslims were supposed to be in the mosque.
Al-Qaeda’s first documented terrorist strike bore the hallmarks of its future actions. The novelty of multiple, simultaneous suicide bombings was a new and risky strategy, given the increased likelihood of failure or detection. If they succeeded, al-Qaeda would make an unrivaled claim on the world’s attention. The bombings would be worthy of bin Laden’s grandiose and seemingly lunatic declaration of war on the United States, and the suicide of the bombers would provide a scanty moral cover for operations intended to murder as many people as possible. In this, al-Qaeda was also unusual. Death on a grand scale was a goal in itself. There was no attempt to spare innocent lives, since the concept of innocence was subtracted from al-Qaeda’s calculations. Although the Quran specifically forbids killing women and children, one of the reasons the embassy in Kenya was targeted was that the death of the female American ambassador, Prudence Bushnell, would garner more publicity.
Each part of the operation betrayed al-Qaeda’s inexperience. As Jihad Ali drove into the rear parking lot of the embassy, ‘Owhali jumped out and charged toward the guard station. He was supposed to force the unarmed guard to raise the drop bar, but the guard refused. ‘Owhali had left his pistol in his jacket in the truck. He did carry out a portion of his mission, which was to throw a stun grenade into the courtyard. The noise drew the interest of people inside the buildings. One of the lessons Zawahiri had learned from his bombing of the Egyptian Embassy in Islamabad three years before was that an initial explosion brought people rushing to the windows, and many were decapitated by flying glass when the real bomb went off.
‘Owhali abruptly faced a moral choice that he believed would determine his eternal fate—at least, that was what he later told an FBI agent. He had expected to be a martyr; his death in the operation would assure him his immediate place in Paradise. But he realized that his mission of setting off the stun grenade had already been accomplished. If he were to go forward to his own certain death, that would be suicide, he explained, not martyrdom. Damnation would be his fate, not salvation. Such is the narrow bridge between heaven and hell. To save his soul, ‘Owhali turned and ran, failing in his main task of raising the drop bar so that the truck could get closer to the building.
‘Owhali didn’t get far. The blast knocked him to the sidewalk, shredding his clothes and pounding shrapnel into his back. When he managed to stand, in the weird silence after the blast, he could see the results of his handiwork.
The face of the embassy had sheared off in great concrete slabs. Dead people still sat at their desks. The tar-covered street was on fire and a crowded bus was in flames. Next door, the Ufundi Building, containing a Kenyan secretarial college, had completely collapsed. Many were pinned under the rubble, and soon their cries arose in a chorus of fear and pain that would go on for days, until they were rescued or silenced by death. The toll was 213 dead, including 12 Americans; 4,500 were injured, more than 150 of them blinded by the flying glass. The ruins burned for days.
Nine minutes later, Ahmed the German drove his truck into the parking lot of the American Embassy in Dar es Salaam and pushed the detonator wired into the dashboard. Fortuitously, between him and the embassy there was a water tanker truck. It was blown three stories high and came to rest against the chancery of the embassy, but it prevented the bomber from getting close enough to bring the building down. The toll was 11 dead and 85 wounded, all of them Africans.
Beyond the obvious goal of calling attention to the existence of al-Qaeda, the point of the bombings was vague and confusing. The Nairobi operation was named after the Holy Kaaba in Mecca; the Dar es Salaam bombing was called Operation al-Aqsa, after the mosque in Jerusalem; neither had an obvious connection to the American embassies in Africa. Bin Laden put forward several explanations for the attack. He initially said that the sites had been targeted because of the “invasion” of Somalia; then he described an American plan to partition Sudan, which he said was hatched in the embassy in Nairobi. He also told his followers that the genocide in Rwanda had been planned inside the two American embassies.
Muslims all over the world greeted the bombings with horror and dismay. The deaths of so many people, most of them Africans, many of them Muslims, created a furor. Bin Laden said that the bombings gave the Americans a taste of the atrocities that Muslims had experienced. But to most of the world and even to some members of al-Qaeda, the attacks seemed pointless, a showy act of mass murder with no conceivable effect on American policy except to provoke a massive response.
But that, as it turned out, was exactly the point. Bin Laden wanted to lure the United States into Afghanistan, which was already being called the graveyard of empires. The usual object of terror is to draw one’s opponent into repressive blunders, and bin Laden caught America at a vulnerable and unfortunate moment in its history.
“NOW IT BEGINS,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Pat Fitzgerald told Coleman when the news of the bombings came. It was 3:30 in the morning in New York when he called. Coleman got out of bed and drove immediately to Washington. Two days later his wife met him at a Dairy Queen on I-95 to drop off his medicine and a change of clothes. She knew he would be at SIOC for a long time.
FBI headquarters assigned the embassy bombings case to the Washington field office, which normally handles overseas investigations. O’Neill passionately wanted control. New York had a sealed indictment of bin Laden, which gave that office the right to claim the case if he indeed was behind it; but bin Laden was still obscure, even in the upper reaches of the FBI, and the term “al-Qaeda” was almost unknown. Several possible perpetrators were under discussion, Hezbollah and Hamas among them. O’Neill had to prove to his own bureau that bin Laden was the prime mover.
He snatched a young Lebanese American agent named Ali Soufan from another squad. Soufan was the only FBI agent in New York who actually spoke Arabic, and one of eight in the entire country. On his own, he had studied bin Laden’s fatwas and interviews, so when a claim of responsibility was sent to several press organizations the same day of the bombing from a group no one had ever heard of before, Soufan immediately recognized bin Laden as the author. The language was exactly the same as in his previous declarations. Thanks to Soufan, O’Neill was able to send a teletype to headquarters the very day of the bombing outlining the damning similarities between bin Laden’s past statements and the demands expressed in the pseudonymous claim.
Thomas Pickard, then head of the criminal division at headquarters, was temporarily in charge of the bureau while Director Freeh was on vacation. He spurned O’Neill’s request to give the New York office control of the investigation. Pickard wanted to keep the probe under the supervision of the Washington office, which he formerly headed. O’Neill frantically enlisted every powerful contact he could, including Attorney General Reno and his friend Dick Clarke. Eventually, the bureau bowed to the strong-arm pressure that this subordinate was able to apply, but as punishment O’Neill was not allowed to go to Kenya personally to oversee the investigation. The bruises left by this internecine conflict would never heal.
Only eight hours after the bombings, dozens of FBI investigators were on their way to Kenya. Eventually, almost five hundred would be working the two cases in Africa, the largest deployment in the history of the bureau. On the way into Nairobi, the airport bus carrying the agents stopped for a Masai tribesman herding his cattle across the road. The agents stared at the congested streets, crammed with bicycles and donkey carts, dizzying scenes that were at once beautiful, exotic, and full of shocking poverty. Many of the agents were unfamiliar with the world beyond America; indeed, some had not even been given passports until the day of their departure, and here they were, nine thousand miles away. They knew little about the laws and customs of the countries they were working in. They were anxious and watchful, knowing that they were now likely targets of al-Qaeda as well.
Stephen Gaudin, a stocky redhead from the North End of Boston, took out his short-stock machine gun and placed it on his lap. Until recently, his FBI career had been spent in a two-person office in upstate New York above a Dunkin’ Donuts. He had never heard of al-Qaeda. He had been brought along to provide protection, but he was staggered by the immense number of people surrounding the embassy. They dwarfed any crowd he had ever seen. Nothing looked familiar to him. How could he protect the other agents when he had no idea what was going on?
The bus dropped them off in front of the smoldering ruins of the embassy. The scale of devastation was overwhelming. The building was gutted from one end to the other; next door, the Kenyan secretarial school was completely flattened. Rescuers were digging into the rubble with their bare hands, trying to reach the wounded. Steve Gaudin gaped at the ruins and wondered, “What the hell are we going to do?” The FBI had never solved an overseas bombing.
One of the people buried under the secretarial school was named Roselyn Wanjiku Mwangi—Rosie, as everyone called her. The rescuers could hear her talking to another victim whose leg was crushed, trying to keep his spirits up. For two days Rosie’s encouraging voice inspired the rescuers, who worked relentlessly. Finally they reached the man with the crushed leg and carefully worked him free of the debris. They promised Rosie they would have her loose in less than two hours, but when they finally did reach her, it was too late. Her death was a heartbreaking blow to the exhausted workers.
The bombings were an audacious assault on America’s place in the world. The level of coordination and technical sophistication required to carry out nearly simultaneous explosions was surprising, but more troubling was the willingness of al-Qaeda to escalate the level of violence. The FBI eventually discovered that five American embassies had been targeted—luck and better intelligence had saved the other three. The investigators were stunned to learn that nearly a year earlier an Egyptian member of al-Qaeda had walked into the U.S. Embassy in Nairobi and told the CIA about the bombing plot. The agency had dismissed this intelligence as unreliable. This was not an isolated incident. All through the spring there had been a drumroll of threats and fatwas from bin Laden, but few had taken them seriously. Now the consequence of that neglect was starkly evident.
THREE DAYS AFTER THE BOMBING, Steve Gaudin’s chief, Pat D’Amuro, told him to check out a lead. “There’s a guy in a hotel outside of Nairobi,” said D’Amuro. “He doesn’t fit in.”
“That’s it?” Gaudin asked. “He doesn’t ‘fit in’? What does that mean?”
“If you don’t like it, I got a hundred other leads,” said D’Amuro.
Gaudin and a couple of other agents drove to a shantytown largely inhabited by Somali refugees. Their truck inched along through a staring crowd and stopped in front of a decrepit hotel. “Whatever you do, don’t get out of the truck,” their Kenyan colleague warned. “They hate Americans here.”
While the agents nervously waited for the Kenyan cop to return, a man in the crowd leaned against the truck with his back to the window. “I told you not to come here,” he said under his breath. “You’re going to get killed.”
Gaudin guessed the man was the tipster. “Can you help us?” he asked.
“He’s not here,” the man hissed. “He’s in another hotel.”
At the next hotel, the agents found a man who didn’t fit in: a slender young Arab with several jagged stitches on his forehead and bandages on his hands that were leaking blood. He identified himself as Khaled Saleem bin Rasheed from Yemen. He said he was in the country researching business opportunities—he was a nut merchant—and that he had stopped at a bank near the embassy when the “accident” happened. The only items in his pocket were eight brand-new hundred-dollar bills.
“How did you wind up at this hotel?” the interrogator asked.
Bin Rasheed said that when he got out of the hospital, a cab driver took him there, knowing that he didn’t speak Swahili. It was a place where Arabs sometimes stayed.
“Where are the rest of your things—your clothes, your identification documents?”
“Everything was lost in the explosion,” bin Rasheed explained. “These are the clothes I was wearing that day.”
As Gaudin listened to the young Arab responding to the American interrogators, he thought the story was plausible. It wasn’t Gaudin’s place to ask questions; more experienced agents handled that. Still, Gaudin noticed that bin Rasheed’s clothes were a lot neater than his own. Although Gaudin had been in the country only a couple of days, he was rumpled and coated in dust; and yet bin Rasheed, who claimed to have lost everything in a catastrophic bombing, looked comparatively spiffy. But why would he lie about his clothes?
Gaudin couldn’t sleep that night, he was so troubled by an improbable thought that played in his mind. The next morning when the investigation resumed, Gaudin asked the lead interrogator if he could ask a couple of questions. “I spent six years in the army,” he told bin Rasheed. He said that he had gone through specialized training in counterinterrogation techniques at the John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center. It had been a brutal experience. Soldiers learned what to expect if they were ever taken prisoner. They were beaten and intimidated; they were also coached on how to tell a convincing cover story. “I think you got the same training,” Gaudin asserted. “Now, if you remember your instruction, when you lie you must tell a single logical story. But you made a mistake. You said one thing that was illogical.”
Instead of laughing in disbelief, bin Rasheed pulled his chair closer. “Where was I illogical?” he asked.
“Here’s where your story falls apart,” said Gaudin, who was staring pointedly at bin Rasheed’s shoes, which were scuffed and filthy like Gaudin’s own. “You got cuts on both hands, but there’s not a drop of blood on your green denim pants. In fact, you’re perfectly clean.”
“Arab men are much cleaner than American men,” bin Rasheed responded.
“I’ll give you that,” said Gaudin, still staring at his shoes. “And maybe you’ve got a magic soap that gets the blood out of your clothes.”
“Yes.”
“You’ve got a gash on your back as well. I suppose there was some way a piece of glass fell from a building and went down your shirt without tearing it.”
“Anything is possible,” said bin Rasheed.
“I’ll give you that, too. Then you wash your bloody shirt with your magic soap and it looks like new. But there are two things you don’t wash.”
Bin Rasheed followed Gaudin’s stare. “Of course, I don’t wash my shoes!”
“No,” said Gaudin, leaning forward and putting his hand on bin Rasheed’s knee. “But I said there were two things you don’t wash, and here’s where you forgot your training.” Gaudin stood up and put his hands on his belt, which was worn and faded. “You don’t wash a belt! Look at yours. It’s pristine! Stand up and take it off!”
Bin Rasheed stood up like a soldier obeying an order. As soon as he undid his belt, everyone in the room noticed the price tag.
Although bin Rasheed quickly recovered his poise, the interrogation now moved to a different level. Gaudin brought in John Anticev, one of the original members of the I-49 squad. Anticev has a calm manner, but his blue eyes are as vivid as searchlights. He began by politely asking if bin Rasheed had had a chance to pray. This led to a discussion of Sayyid Qutb, Abdullah Azzam, and the blind sheikh. Bin Rasheed relaxed. He seemed to relish the opportunity to lecture a Westerner about the importance of these men. They chatted until late in the evening.
“There’s one other person we haven’t talked about,” Anticev observed. “Osama bin Laden.”
Bin Rasheed’s eyes narrowed and he stopped talking. A small smile appeared on his face.
Anticev, who had been listening like a captivated student, suddenly thrust a pen and paper into bin Rasheed’s hand. “Write down the first telephone number you called after the bombing!”
Once again, bin Rasheed obeyed the order. He wrote “967-1-200578,” a number in Yemen. It belonged to a jihadi named Ahmed al-Hada. Bin Rasheed had called the number both before and after the bombing—as had Osama bin Laden, investigators quickly learned. This Yemeni telephone number would prove to be one of the most important pieces of information the FBI would ever discover, allowing investigators to map the links of the al-Qaeda network all across the globe.
After giving up the number, bin Rasheed stopped cooperating. Gaudin and other agents decided to leave him alone, hoping he would think he wasn’t so important to them. Meanwhile, they began to check out his story. They went to the hospital to see if they could find the doctor who treated his wounds, but there were nearly five thousand injured the day of the bombing, and few of the staff remembered any faces in the sea of blood and pain. Then a janitor asked the agents if they had come because of the bullets and the keys he had found. The items had been stashed on a window sill above a toilet stall. The key fit the model of truck used in the bombing.
At the airport, the agents discovered bin Rasheed’s landing card, which gave as his address in Nairobi the hotel where he had been discovered—so he was lying about the cab driver taking him there after the bombing. Phone records led them to a large villa where a call had been placed to the Hada phone in Yemen half an hour before the bombing. When the evidence team arrived, their swabs lit up with explosive residue. It was here the bomb had been made.
“You want to blame this on me?” bin Rasheed shouted when Gaudin confronted him with the evidence. “It’s your fault, your country’s fault for supporting Israel!” He was sputtering with fury. Flecks of foam were flying from his mouth. It was a startling turnaround from the controlled demeanor the investigators had witnessed for the past few days. “My tribe is going to kill you and your entire family!” he promised.
Gaudin was also angry. The death toll had been rising all through the week as badly injured people succumbed to their awful wounds. “Why did these people have to die?” he asked. “They had nothing to do with the United States and Israel and Palestine!”
Bin Rasheed didn’t answer directly; instead, he said something surprising: “I want a promise that I’ll be tried in America. Because America is my enemy, not Kenya. You get me that promise, and I’ll tell you everything.”
Gaudin brought Patrick Fitzgerald, the prosecutor from the Southern District of New York, into the room. Fitzgerald drew up a contract pledging that the investigators would do everything in their power to get the suspect extradited to the United States.
“My name is not Khaled Saleem bin Rasheed,” the suspect now said. “I am Mohammed al-‘Owhali, and I’m from Saudi Arabia.”
He said he was twenty-one years old, well educated, from a prominent merchant family. He had become very religious as a teenager, listening to sermons on audiocassettes and reading books and magazines that glorified martyrdom. A tape by Sheikh Safar al-Hawali that talked about “Kissinger’s Promise”—a purported plan of former American secretary of state Henry Kissinger’s to occupy the Arabian Peninsula—particularly affected him. Inflamed by this spurious information, ‘Owhali made his way to Afghanistan to join the jihad.
He took basic training at the Khaldan camp, learning how to use automatic weapons and explosives. ‘Owhali performed so well that he was granted an audience with bin Laden, who counseled him to get more instruction. ‘Owhali went on to learn techniques for kidnapping, hijacking planes and buses, seizing buildings, and gathering intelligence. Bin Laden kept an eye on him, reassuring him that he would eventually get a mission.
While ‘Owhali was fighting with the Taliban, Jihad Ali came to him and said that they had finally been approved for a martyrdom operation, but it was to be in Kenya. ‘Owhali was crestfallen. “I want to attack inside the U.S.,” he pleaded. His handlers told him that the embassy strikes were important because they would keep America distracted while the real attack was being prepared.
“We have a plan to attack the U.S., but we’re not ready yet,” the suspect told Gaudin and the other investigators. “We need to hit you outside the country in a couple of places so you won’t see what is going on inside. The big attack is coming. There’s nothing you can do to stop it.”
WORKING FOR O’NEILL sometimes felt like being in the Mafia. The other agents observed that O’Neill’s dress and manners, not to mention his Atlantic City background, gave him a mobbed-up air. The founding director of the FBI, J. Edgar Hoover, was sufficiently concerned about the young agent when he first entered the bureau that he drew O’Neill aside to ask about his “connections.” The only link was that O’Neill, like the Mafia, was a product of a culture that thrived on personal loyalty. Nor was he above issuing threats to ruin the careers of agents who crossed him.
After the embassy bombings, O’Neill scheduled meetings at four o’clock each afternoon, and typically he arrived as much as an hour late. His chronic tardiness aroused a lot of angry chatter among the married agents, who had children to attend. O’Neill would finally enter the conference room, then go around the table and shake the hands of each team member—another time-consuming ritual.
On one of these occasions, Jack Cloonan, a member of the I-49 squad, kissed the massive FBI ring on O’Neill’s finger. “Thank you, Godfather,” he said.
“Fuck you,” O’Neill snapped.
Dan Coleman was explaining a piece of intelligence in one of the meetings when O’Neill broke in. “You don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said to the man who, more than anyone in America, with the exception of Mike Scheuer, had studied bin Laden and his organization.
“Fine,” said Coleman.
“I’m just kidding.”
“You know what? I’m just Joe Shit the Ragman,” Coleman said heatedly. “You’re the SAC. I can’t defend myself in a position like this.”
The next day O’Neill came by Coleman’s desk and apologized. “I shouldn’t have done that,” he said.
Coleman accepted the apology, although he afforded himself the opportunity to lecture O’Neill on the responsibility of being a boss. O’Neill listened, then observed, “You look like you comb your hair with a hand grenade.”
“Maybe I should use some of that oil you dump on your hair,” said Coleman.
O’Neill laughed and walked away.
After that, Coleman slyly began to study O’Neill. The key, Coleman decided, was that “he had come from nowhere.” O’Neill’s mother still drove a cab in Atlantic City during the day, and his father operated the same cab at night. O’Neill’s uncle, a piano player, helped support them when the casino economy died. O’Neill had left home as soon as he could. On his first job, when he was a tour guide at FBI headquarters, he would carry a briefcase to work—as if he needed one—and he immediately attempted to exert control over the other guides. They resentfully called him “Stinky” because he was always in a sweat.
Coleman had a sense of the empty space between the public O’Neill and the private one. The flashy suits, the gleaming fingernails, concealed a man of humble background and modest means. It was a front O’Neill could scarcely afford on a government salary. Belligerent and belittling at times, O’Neill was also anxious and insecure, frequently seeking reassurance and dragging a long tail of debt. Few knew how precarious his career was, how fragmented his private life, how unsettled his spirit. Once, when an agent got so angry at O’Neill in a meeting that he began screaming, O’Neill stalked out of the room and calmed himself down by making calls on his cell phone. “You can’t do that,” Coleman told the agent. “Tell him you’re sorry—you didn’t mean to disrespect him.” O’Neill was as emotionally dependent on respect as any gangster.
But he was also capable of extravagant and almost alarming gestures of caring, quietly raising money for victims of the bombings he investigated and personally making sure his employees got the best doctors in the city when they fell ill. One of O’Neill’s friends in Washington had bypass surgery during a blizzard. Traffic in the city was shut down, but he awakened to see O’Neill at his bedside. He had tramped through eighteen inches of snow. Every morning he insisted on bringing coffee and a pastry to his secretary from a kiosk on the street, and he always remembered birthdays. These gestures, large and small, spoke to his own longing to be noticed and attended.
TEN DAYS AFTER THE EMBASSY BOMBINGS Jack Cloonan got a call from one of his intelligence contacts in Sudan telling him that two men involved in the case were in Khartoum. They had rented an apartment overlooking the American Embassy there. Cloonan gave the information to O’Neill, who called Dick Clarke at the National Security Council the following day. “I want to work with the Sudanese,” he told Clarke. O’Neill was well aware that the country was on the State Department’s terror list, but at least they were making an overture.
“John, there’s something I can’t tell you,” Clarke said on the phone. He suggested that O’Neill come to Washington to talk to the attorney general. She informed him that it was out of the question for him to work for the Sudanese: in a few hours the United States was going to bomb that country in retaliation for the attacks on the embassies in East Africa. The missiles were already spinning in their tubes, preparatory to launch, in American warships stationed in the Red Sea.
O’Neill landed in Washington the same day that Monica Lewinsky, a former White House intern, testified before a Washington grand jury that she had provided oral sexual favors for the president of the United States. Her story would be a deciding factor in the articles of impeachment that followed. In the minds of Islamists and, indeed, many Arabs, the relationship between the president and his intern perfectly symbolized Jewish influence in America, and any military response to the bombings was likely to be seen as an excuse to punish Muslims and divert attention from the scandal. “No war for Monica!” was a sign seen in many Arab streets. But Clinton’s crippled presidency offered him few options.
The CIA suspected that bin Laden was developing chemical weapons in Sudan. The information had come from Jamal al-Fadl, bin Laden’s former assistant who was now a U.S. government witness. But Fadl had left Sudan two years before, about the same time that bin Laden had been expelled from the country. Unconvinced by the sincerity of the Sudanese government’s repeated overtures to the United States to get itself removed from the State Department blacklist, the agency hired a spy from an Arab country to secure a soil sample from an area close to al-Shifa, a pharmaceutical plant suspected of being a secret chemical-weapons facility and thought to be owned in part by bin Laden. The sample, taken in June 1998, purportedly showed traces of EMPTA, a chemical that was essential in making the extremely potent nerve gas VX; indeed, it had few other uses. On August 20, on the basis of this information, President Clinton authorized the firing of thirteen Tomahawk cruise missiles into Khartoum as the first part of the American retaliation for the embassy bombings. The plant was completely destroyed.
It developed that the plant actually made only pharmaceuticals and veterinary medicines, not chemical weapons. No other traces of EMPTA were ever found in or around the site. The chemical might have been a product of the breakdown of a commercially available pesticide widely used in Africa, which it closely resembles. Moreover, bin Laden had nothing to do with the plant. The result of this hasty strike was that the impoverished country of Sudan lost one of its most important manufacturers, which employed three hundred people and produced more than half of the country’s medicines, and a night watchman was killed.
Sudan let the two accomplices to the East Africa bombings escape, and they’ve never been seen again. O’Neill and his team lost an invaluable opportunity to capture al-Qaeda insiders.
AT THE SAME TIME that the warheads were exploding in northern Khartoum, sixty-six U.S. cruise missiles were in flight toward two camps around Khost, Afghanistan, near the Pakistan border.
Zawahiri happened to be talking on bin Laden’s satellite phone at the time to Rahimullah Yusufzai, a distinguished reporter for BBC and the Pakistani paper the News. Zawahiri told him, “Mr. bin Laden has a message. He says, ‘I have not bombed the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. I have declared jihad, but I was not involved.’”
The best way American intelligence had of detecting bin Laden’s and Zawahiri’s movements at the time was by tracking their satellite phone. If surveillance aircraft had been positioned in the region, Zawahiri’s call to the reporter would have given agents his exact location. But the strike was delivered so quickly that there was little time to prepare. Still, American intelligence knew in general where bin Laden and Zawahiri were hiding, so the fact that surveillance aircraft were not available prior to the strike is inexplicable. Had they pinpointed Zawahiri prior to launch there is little question that he would have been killed in the strike. On the other hand, it takes several hours to prepare a missile for firing, and the flight time from the warships in the Arabian Sea across Pakistan to eastern Afghanistan was more than two hours. By the time Zawahiri picked up the phone the missiles were probably already on their way and it was already too late.
Although the National Security Agency was able to monitor calls on the satellite phone, it refused to share the raw data with the FBI or the CIA or Dick Clarke in the White House. When the CIA learned from one of its own employees, who was posted at the NSA, that al-Qaeda’s phones were being monitored, it demanded the transcripts. The NSA refused to hand them over; instead, it offered narrative summaries that were often out of date. The CIA then turned to its own director of science and technology to construct a device that would monitor the transmissions of satellite phones from that portion of Afghanistan. They were able to receive only one side of the conversation, but based on one of the partial intercepts the CIA determined that bin Laden and others were going to be in Khost.
The information was timely and relevant. Bin Laden had made the decision to go to Khost only the night before. But as he and his companions were driving through Vardak province, they happened to pause at a crossroads.
“Where do you think, my friends, we should go?” bin Laden asked. “Khost or Kabul?”
His bodyguard and others voted for Kabul, where they could visit friends.
“Then, with God’s help, let us go to Kabul,” bin Laden decreed—a decision that may have saved his life.
AT THE AGE OF FIFTEEN, Abdul Rahman Khadr was the youngest trainee in the Farouk camp near Khost. There were between 70 and 120 men training there, he estimated, and about an equal number in the Jihad Wal camp nearby. After the evening prayer, he was walking back from the washroom, carrying a bucket, when bright lights punctured the sky just above him. He threw the bucket aside, but before it hit the ground the missiles began to explode.
The first twenty explosions were at Jihad Wal. Abdul Rahman dove for cover as the next wave followed, detonating all around him. He glanced up to see the air pulsing with explosive waves. When the rain of rocks and pebbles subsided, he walked around the smoking ruins to see what was left.
The administration building was destroyed. Abdul Rahman concluded that the trainers must be dead. But then he heard shouting, and he walked over to Jihad Wal, where he discovered that the trainers had gathered for a meeting. Amazingly, they were all alive. None of al-Qaeda’s leaders were harmed.
There were five injured men, whom Abdul Rahman loaded into a four-by-four. Despite his youth, he was the only one who could drive, so he rushed them to the hospital in Khost. He stopped along the way to give water to one of the badly injured, and the man died in his arms.
Abdul Rahman returned to the camp to help bury the dead. One body was so mutilated it was impossible to identify. “Can you at least find his feet?” Abdul Rahman asked. Someone discovered one of them, and by the birthmark on a toe Abdul Rahman was able to identify his friend, a Canadian citizen of Egyptian background like himself. There were four other dead men, whom they buried as surveillance aircraft flew overhead recording the damage.
IN THE BIG-CHESTED PARLANCE of U.S. military planners, the failed strikes were dubbed Operation Infinite Reach. Designed to be a surgical and proportional response to the terrorist acts—two bombings, two decisive replies—the missile attacks exposed the inadequacy of American intelligence and the futility of military power, which rained down nearly three-quarters of a billion dollars’ worth of armament on two of the poorest countries in the world.
According to General Hamid Gul, the former head of the ISI, more than half of the missiles fell in Pakistani territory, killing two Pakistani citizens. Although Abdul Rahman Khadr buried only five men in the al-Qaeda camp, not counting the one who died in his arms, there were many false claims. Sandy Berger, Clinton’s national security advisor, said that “twenty or thirty al-Qaeda operatives were killed.” The Taliban later complained that twenty-two Afghans had also been killed and more than fifty gravely wounded. Bin Laden’s bodyguard observed the damage, however, and agreed with Abdul Rahman’s assessment. “Each house was hit by a missile but they did not destroy the camp completely,” he reported. “They hit the kitchen of the camp, the mosque, and some bathrooms. Six men were killed: a Saudi, an Egyptian, an Uzbek, and three Yemenis.”
The attacks did have other profound consequences, however. Several of the Tomahawk missiles failed to detonate. According to Russian intelligence sources, bin Laden sold the unexploded missiles to China for more than $10 million. Pakistan may have used some of the ones found on its territory to design its own version of a cruise missile.
The main legacy of Operation Infinite Reach, however, was that it established bin Laden as a symbolic figure of resistance, not just in the Muslim world but wherever America, with the clamor of its narcissistic culture and the majestic presence of its military forces, had made itself unwelcome. When bin Laden’s exhilarated voice came crackling across a radio transmission—“By the grace of God, I am alive!”—the forces of anti-Americanism had found their champion. Those Muslims who had objected to the slaughter of innocents in the embassies in East Africa were cowed by the popular support for this man whose defiance of America now seemed blessed by divine favor. Even in Kenya and Tanzania, the two countries that had suffered the most from al-Qaeda’s attacks, children would be spotted wearing bin Laden T-shirts.
The day after the strikes, Zawahiri called Yusufzai again. “We survived the attack,” Zawahiri informed him. “Tell the Americans that we aren’t afraid of bombardment, threats, and acts of aggression. We suffered and survived the Soviet bombings for ten years in Afghanistan, and we are ready for more sacrifices. The war has only just begun; the Americans should now await the answer.”