by Tim Weiner
The members of the FBI’s new Radical Fundamentalist Unit knew nothing about Ali Mohamed and al-Qaeda at the time. They usually had no idea what investigations their colleagues were pursuing. Nor did their supervisors really know what was going on in the field. The FBI had individual experts but no institutional knowledge. The FBI’s fifty-six field offices worked in isolation. Agents rarely talked to analysts. The terrorism task forces across the country rarely talked to headquarters. And the director still was not talking to the White House.
“KILL THE AMERICANS”
In early September 1997, two weeks after he left Nairobi, Dan Coleman confronted Ali Mohamed over a meal at a Sacramento restaurant. The Egyptian was working as a security guard for a California military contractor. While the two men talked, FBI agents searched Mohamed’s home and mirror-imaged his computer.
Their conversation was one-sided. Coleman’s interview notes record a barrage of taunts: “MOHAMED stated … that he loved bin Laden and believed in him. MOHAMED admitted that he had trained people in ‘war zones’ and added that war zones can be anywhere. MOHAMED indicated that he knew lots of people and was well trusted and could put people together with people that they need.”
A stronger warning came on February 23, 1998. Bin Laden and his new ally, Ayman al-Zawahiri, the leader of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad group, sent a proclamation from Afghanistan. The two men had joined forces, creating the first global terrorist group, and their words were published across the world.
“We issue the following fatwa to all Muslims,” they said. “To kill the Americans and their allies—civilians and military—is an individual duty for every Muslim who can do it in any country in which it is possible to do it.”
Using the fruits of Dan Coleman’s investigation in Nairobi, the federal prosecutor in charge of the New York grand jury, Patrick Fitzgerald, was preparing an indictment against bin Laden. Attorney General Janet Reno authorized the monitoring of al-Qaeda’s cell phones and satellite phones inside and outside the United States. But as the surveillance started picking up signs and signals of a gathering attack, the investigation began to sputter and stall.
The FBI kept hunting for al-Qaeda in Africa. The CIA was preparing to capture or kill bin Laden in Afghanistan. They had between them evidence of his next attack in hand: the el-Hage files and the wiretaps on four telephones in Nairobi revealed the identities of at least four men in an al-Qaeda bomb plot. But America’s leading counterterrorists were too busy making war on one another to perfect their plans.
The chief of the FBI’s national security division, John O’Neill, refused to share the el-Hage files with the Agency. After the CIA seized al-Qaeda records in a raid in Azerbaijan, the head of the CIA’s Bin Laden Unit, Michael Scheuer, refused to share them with the FBI. The two men built walls mortared by mutual hatred. When O’Neill died in the second World Trade Center attack, Scheuer said his death was “the only good thing” that happened that day. “O’Neill poisoned relations between the FBI and the CIA,” Scheuer said. “He withheld information from the FBI’s partners in the intelligence community; he misled the congressional intelligence committees; and he disrupted anti-al-Qaeda operations overseas.”
“STEELED TOWARD WAITING FOR THE FALL”
The United States ambassador to Kenya, Prudence Bushnell, remembered everything that happened when the bomb exploded in Nairobi on August 7, 1998.
“I thought to myself that the building was going to collapse, that I was going to tumble down all those stories, and that I was going to die, and every cell in my body was just steeled toward waiting for the fall,” she said.
She was covered with blood, but whether it was her own or the blood of others, she could not tell. “I saw the charred remains of what was once a human being,” she recalled. “I saw the back of the building completely ripped off, and utter destruction, and I knew that no one was going to take care of me.”
Two men in a pickup truck loaded with a ton of explosives had driven to the entrance of the embassy’s underground parking lot, just as bin Laden had instructed Ali Mohamed four years before. The explosion shattered the embassy from its façade to its back wall, and brought down a commercial office building next door. Twelve Americans and 212 Kenyans died. Nearly five thousand people were injured, many blinded and mutilated by flying glass.
The ambassador knew there was an al-Qaeda cell in Nairobi, and she strongly suspected bin Laden wanted to attack her embassy. “I had been told in Washington that we wanted to disrupt his activities, which seemed pretty sensible,” she said. Then an Egyptian had walked into the embassy and informed a CIA officer that the building would be bombed. “I was assured that the guy had done the same thing a number of times to other embassies in Africa,” the ambassador said. “He was considered a flake.” He was not. He was one of the bombers that struck the U.S. Embassy in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, a few minutes after the Nairobi attack, killing eleven people and wounding eighty-five.
The first wave of FBI agents—more than 250 of them—started arriving in Nairobi overnight. The Bureau eventually deployed close to 900 people on the East Africa embassy bombings, the biggest overseas investigation in its history.
Ambassador Bushnell did not want them to appear as an occupying army. She had “tough negotiations about whether they would come with guns,” and she convinced the special agent in charge of the arriving force, Sheila W. Horan, one of the first women ever to hold power at the FBI, to make the agents wear street clothes, carry their weapons discreetly, and work with the Kenyan police. “It was the Kenyans who were knocking on doors, but nobody was particularly fooled,” the ambassador said. “The last thing I needed was to deal with lies about how people were being treated by the police and FBI.”
The first man to confess was Mohamed Odeh, a Palestinian born in Saudi Arabia, raised in Jordan, and educated in the Philippines. He had been arrested by the immigration police in the international airport in Karachi, Pakistan, carrying a crudely forged passport and bearing chemical traces of explosives on his body. It took a week before he was returned to Kenya and interviewed by the FBI. By then, the police had searched his residence in Nairobi, where they found sketches of the area surrounding the American embassy, along with budget ledgers for weapons and training.
Odeh sat down with the FBI’s John Anticev—the same agent who had handled the undercover investigation of the first World Trade Center bombing—at police headquarters in Nairobi on August 15. The suspect told the story of his life. He had pledged loyalty to bin Laden and al-Qaeda five years before, in Peshawar, Pakistan. He had been working on the Nairobi bomb plot for months.
“He stated that the reason he was talking to us now was because the people that he was with were pushing him and pushing him and pushing him and they’re all gone and he’s left here facing big problems,” Anticev recounted. Odeh thought the bombing was “a blunder. He didn’t like the fact that so many civilians and Kenyans were killed. He said that the bombing of Khobar Towers was a hundred times better and that the individual who drove the truck with the explosives should have got it into the building or died trying.”
It soon became clear that Odeh was denouncing his confederate—the second man to confess.
Mohamed al-Owhali had been riding shotgun in the truck that destroyed the embassy. He had panicked at the last moment. When a Kenyan security guard refused to raise the wooden bar at the entrance to the parking garage, al-Owhali jumped from the truck, tossed a stun grenade, and fled on foot. Badly wounded by the explosion, he had stopped at his hotel and then checked himself into a hospital. The hotel clerk alerted the Kenyan police, who found him at the hospital, searched him, pulled a detailed copy of the plans for the bombing from his pants pocket, and arrested him.
“He wanted to tell his entire story from the beginning to the end,” said the FBI’s Steve Gaudin, who began to take the suspect’s confession in a crowded Nairobi police station over the course of the next week. Gaudin had been on vacation at the New Jer
sey shore when called to duty in Nairobi. He had never worked an international terrorism case. He would work on nothing else for the next five years.
Al-Owhali was a wealthy twenty-one-year-old Saudi, born in Liverpool, England, educated not only in the Koran and the sharia religious laws, but in history and political science. He had left his family to join the jihad in Afghanistan two years before. “He had met with Mr. bin Laden several times and had expressed to him interest in missions that he would like to do,” the FBI agent said. “Mr. bin Laden told him: ‘Take your time. Your mission will come in time.’ ”
The interrogation went deep into the plans and the goals of al-Qaeda. “Al-Owhali explained to me that Osama bin Laden is at the very top of al-Qaeda but that he has several senior military leaders directly under him, and that bin Laden provides the political objectives to these military leaders,” Gaudin said. “These people would then provide the instructions down to the lower chains of command.” That summer, al-Owhali had learned that his mission was to serve as a suicide bomber.
“There were several reasons why the embassy in Nairobi was picked,” al-Owhali told Gaudin. “First, there was a large American presence at the U.S. Embassy in Nairobi; the ambassador of the U.S. Embassy was a female, and if the bomb resulted in her being killed, it would further the publicity for the bombing. There were also a number of Christian missionaries at the embassy. And lastly … it was an easy target.”
Al-Owhali completed his confession by revealing bin Laden’s grandest ambitions: “There are targets in the U.S. that we could hit, but things aren’t ready yet, we don’t have everything prepared to do that yet,” he told Gaudin. “We have to have many attacks outside the United States and this will weaken the U.S. and make way for our ability to strike within the United States.”
The FBI relayed the confessions from Nairobi to Washington. For the first time, the United States had ironclad evidence that it was under attack by al-Qaeda.
On August 20, 1998, President Clinton retaliated with a barrage of cruise missiles. The targets were training camps outside Khost, Afghanistan, and a pharmaceutical factory outside Khartoum, Sudan. The CIA thought bin Laden was at the training camp; the intelligence was already stale. The Agency also had reported that the pharmaceutical plant was a chemical-weapons factory; the evidence proved unusually frail. The counterattack was perceived around the world as a fiasco, compounded by the president’s public confession that the FBI had caught him lying about his sex life. His humiliation was all but complete, his impeachment all but assured.
Louis Freeh arrived in Nairobi a few hours before the cruise missiles started spinning in their launching tubes. “He and I were to meet the following morning,” Ambassador Bushnell remembered. “That night, however, I received an urgent telephone call advising me the Director was coming over to see me immediately.” She got out of bed and threw on some clothes. “When Freeh arrived he was beside himself,” the ambassador said. “He had just learned that the U.S. was going to launch missile attacks and no one had given him prior warning. He wanted to know what I knew—which was less than he, at that point—and what my plan was.”
Freeh evidently feared that the missile attacks would spark an Islamic uprising in Kenya, where fewer than one in ten people were Muslims. He told the ambassador: “I assume that you’re going to evacuate. I’m removing all FBI personnel. I have five seats left on the plane coming in that I’ll give to you. You can decide whom you want to send out.” Then he dashed off.
Bushnell was astonished. She called her security officers to her home. “We looked at one another with both shock and bemusement,” she recounted. “Given the anger Kenyans were feeling toward al Qaeda, and the small number of Muslims in Nairobi, about the worst we would experience was the ire of people coming back from Friday prayers at a mosque some distance away. We decided to close the embassy at noon, advise people to stay home, and see what happened,” she said. “Nothing. Meanwhile, the FBI with all of their long guns, short guns and soft suits had high-tailed it.”
Freeh did not bring all his agents out of Africa. On August 27 and 28, a week after the cruise missile attacks, the FBI’s John Anticev and Steve Gaudin separately brought Odeh and al-Owhali to New York, under the formal procedures of criminal rendition. Without a suggestion of coercion or the hint of a threat, the FBI had obtained their full confessions along with crucial information about the global reach of al-Qaeda. Among other things, al-Owhali had provided a telephone number in Yemen that served as an international switchboard for bin Laden.
On November 4, 1998, an indictment unsealed in the United States Court House in the Southern District of New York charged bin Laden and twenty other members of al-Qaeda with carrying out the embassy bombings. Ten of the defendants wound up serving life sentences. El-Hage, Odeh, and al-Owhali were convicted on the evidence delivered by the FBI.
Federal prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald had tried to strengthen the indictments by compelling the duplicitous Ali Mohamed, the leading al-Qaeda operative in America, to talk. As Mohamed later confessed: “After the bombing in 1998, I made plans to go to Egypt and later to Afghanistan to meet bin Laden. Before I could leave, I was subpoenaed to testify before the grand jury in the Southern District of New York. I testified, told some lies.” He denied, under oath, that he had trained bin Laden and his men in the techniques of terrorism, intelligence, and counterintelligence.
Fitzgerald and the FBI agents who worked with him in New York all knew that Ali Mohamed was working for al-Qaeda. They decided to arrest him then and there. Two years later, he pleaded guilty in open court to serving as bin Laden’s first deep-penetration agent in America and a key conspirator in the embassy bombings. Then the United States made him vanish; no record of his imprisonment exists. He was an embarrassment to the FBI.
“ARREST THE EMPEROR”
After all the trials in U.S. v. Bin Laden, eleven of the attackers were still at large—including the lead defendant.
Eleanor Hill, an experienced federal prosecutor serving as staff director for two congressional intelligence committees, asked an FBI agent in New York about the strategy against al-Qaeda. “It’s like telling the FBI after Pearl Harbor, ‘Go to Tokyo and arrest the emperor,’ ” he said. “The Southern District doesn’t have any cruise missiles.”
Fitzgerald did not want missiles. He wanted a bulldozer to tear down “the Wall.”
The Justice Department had erected the Wall to comply with the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) of 1978. For sixty years before that law, the FBI had wiretapped on orders from the attorney general, or at J. Edgar Hoover’s say-so. For the twenty years since, federal judges who met in secret—the FISA court—oversaw the FBI’s surveillance of suspected spies and terrorists. They legalized the warrantless bugs and taps Hoover once had used at will.
The FBI had been left to decide when to share intelligence with federal prosecutors. But it had mishandled that power more than once. In 1995, new guidelines ordered agents to get advance approval from the Justice Department. The rules were badly written and widely misread. The FBI’s leaders compounded and reinforced their misinterpretation. In the field, and at headquarters, FBI agents working intelligence cases thought they could not talk to outsiders—including other agents working criminal cases.
“Here were the ground rules,” Fitzgerald said. “We could talk to the FBI agents working the criminal case; we could talk to the New York City Police Department; we could talk to other Federal agencies in the Government, including the intelligence community; we could talk to citizens, foreign police, and foreign intelligence, including spies. We did that. We went overseas to talk to people. We could even talk to Al Qaeda.… But we had a group of people we were not allowed to talk to. And those were the FBI agents across the street in Manhattan working the parallel intelligence investigation. We could not talk to them.”
The Wall was a maze of misunderstandings, created in large measure by the breakdown in communications at Freeh’s FBI. Agent
s perceived walls where none existed. Their misconceptions had disastrous consequences for the struggle against suspected terrorists.
Louis Freeh reported to Congress that he had reorganized the FBI at the start of 1999. Counterterrorism and counterintelligence were the new top priorities. But his testimony was little more than empty words and wishful thinking.
“Did we have a war plan?” the FBI counterterrorism chief, Dale Watson, asked rhetorically. “Absolutely, we did not.” He tried to push the Bureau forward. It was like leaning on the great monolith of the Hoover Building and trying to move it off its foundations. He called it “the hardest thing we ever tried to do.”
Watson thought the Bureau’s work in Nairobi had been a breakthrough. The intelligence the agents had gathered had opened up two hundred leads against al-Qaeda. He wanted to focus the FBI on the mission.
On December 4, 1998, the headline on the President’s Daily Brief, the most secret intelligence document in the government of the United States, read: “Bin Ladin Preparing to Hijack US Aircraft and Other Attacks.” It was a secondhand report picked up by the CIA from the Egyptian intelligence service, but no one ever had seen anything like it. “Bin Ladin might implement plans to hijack US aircraft before the beginning of Ramadan on 20 December,” the warning read. “Two members of the operational team had evaded security checks during a recent trial run at an unidentified New York airport.” The imputed motive was freeing the imprisoned bombers of the World Trade Center and the American embassies in Africa.
Clinton’s terrorism czar, Richard Clarke, saw Watson as his best ally at the FBI. In his role as chief of the National Security Council’s counterterrorism group, he told Watson to alert the New York City police and the Federal Aviation Administration about the threat report. New York’s airports went to maximum security.
