WASHINGTON -- The call came to FBI headquarters from the State Department at 4: 30 on the morning of Aug. 7, describing two major explosions at U.S. embassies in East Africa with a large loss of life. Director Louis J. Freeh's response was crisp.
"Whatever you need, get it. Get it over there fast," he told his assistant director, Tom Pickard. Freeh's order set in motion the largest overseas investigation ever conducted by the FBI, sending 471 employees to Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, to document the carnage, interview witnesses and collect physical evidence.
That was more than two months ago. Since then:
The FBI, with cooperation from 13 other countries, has sketched the outlines of a radical Islamic terrorist network active in 20 countries that sought to wage war against the United States with everything from home-assembled explosives to weapons of mass destruction. The network, which employed front companies and fake identities, had ties to Iran and Sudan, terrorist groups in Egypt and the killers of 18 U.S. troops in Somalia in 1993, FBI officials say.
Four men, all believed to have links to Saudi exile Osama bin Laden, have been indicted by a federal grand jury in the bombings. Three of them are being held in New York and a reward has been offered for the fourth.
Indications have emerged that bin Laden's men tried to obtain chemical weapons and the fuel used in atomic bombs.
Authorities have begun to penetrate the upper ranks of bin Laden's terror network with the arrest and indictment of a former secretary to bin Laden, Wadih el Hage, who this month was charged with conspiracy. They are also seeking the extradition of two other men described as key figures in the organization, one in London and another in Germany.
More than 1,000 witnesses have been interviewed in Kenya, Tanzania and elsewhere. Investigators have collected 7 tons of evidence, from cotton swabs to metal, rubble and dirt, and stored it all in vaults on two floors of FBI headquarters.
But despite these signs of progress, it may take years before the FBI is in a position to bring to justice the man believed from the start to be responsible for the bombings: bin Laden, the multimillionaire Saudi Arabian who lives in exile in Afghanistan.
"We have not connected bin Laden from a law-enforcement viewpoint to the bombings," a senior official said last week. Although the Saudi's name already figures prominently in court papers, "to take that and say he directed, he controlled, he financed -- we're nowhere near that."
The bombs killed 213 people in Nairobi, including 12 Americans, and 11 in Dar es Salaam. An additional 5,000 were injured.
Investigators are looking into bin Laden's network -- known as al Qaeda, or "the base." Al Qaeda is less a hierarchical organization than "a loose-knit affiliation of individuals," the official said.
"It's a new challenge for us, as far as trying to develop the links and understand the organization," he added. "It's not an organization that we're used to seeing."
The difficulty of the challenge is evident. Even as authorities were briskly pursuing suspects in Africa, Britain and Germany, U.S. officials say they uncovered a plot last month to attack the U.S. Embassy in Uganda, a neighbor of Kenya. Twenty suspects were arrested, some of them believed to have ties to bin Laden.
"Terrorist organizations are the most resilient organizational bodies in the world," says Bruce Hoffman, Washington director for the RAND Corp., a think tank that conducts major studies for the Pentagon. "They are generally small, with not a huge chain of command, and innovative, because their survival depends on staying one step ahead of the authorities."
Yet a roundup of people with suspected links to the network, in Europe and Africa, has drawn complaints of guilt by association and abuse of human rights.
The political heat has been strong enough in Kenya for its government to willingly allow the two suspects captured there, Jordanian Mohamed Sadiq Odeh and Mohamed Rashed Daoud al-Owhali, who held a Yemeni passport, to be tried in the United States. Tanzania, however, wants to try the Dar es Salaam suspects itself.
What's more, the Clinton administration can't shake skepticism about the president's decision to launch retaliatory raids against a bin Laden camp in Afghanistan and a suspected chemical weapons plant in Khartoum.
The controversy over whether the United States bombed
legitimate targets highlights a key dilemma for officials in fighting terrorism, which the administration calls one of the biggest threats facing the United States.
Lengthy investigations allow terrorists to escape punishment for years, giving them time to plan and execute other crimes. Yet striking at them quickly opens officials to charges of shooting first and asking questions later.
"I do not believe that in a situation like the bombing on Dar and Nairobi that law enforcement can act by itself," said Samuel R. Berger, the president's national security adviser.
"We're dealing here with an international network of stateless terrorism," he said. "This is even more difficult in some ways than terrorism sponsored by Libya or terrorism sponsored by another state sponsor, where you have an address, where you have clearly things of value to that entity that you can strike back at."
Court papers say al Qaeda grew out of an earlier group, Mektab al Khidemat, or "Services Office," which supported Afghan rebels in their struggle to oust Soviet troops from Afghanistan in the 1980s.
Bin Laden, who had spent millions of dollars of his family's construction fortune aiding the Afghans, founded al Qaeda to redirect the rebels' fighting experience against Western governments, including the United States and Israel, and overthrow certain governments in Muslim countries, according to FBI complaint that cites a confidential source.
The roots of the group's hatred of the West are murky, given their original collaboration with the United States in fighting the Soviet Union.
They fear that the U.S. military is bent on an occupation of Islamic countries. They oppose the continued American military presence in Saudi Arabia and other countries of the Persian Gulf. They resented the 1992-1993 U.S. intervention in Somalia, which began as a purely humanitarian mission but grew into a military campaign against a leading warlord.
The group, which was based in Sudan in the early 1990s, feared that the United States would use Somalia as a staging ground to attack Sudan.
Although its members are mostly Sunni Muslims, al Qaeda is willing to collaborate with the Shiite regime in Iran and Tehran-linked organizations.
Two suspects were arrested shortly after the bombings. Odeh, a past trainer of Islamic fighters, is accused of helping to plan the attack. A few days before the bombing, according to an indictment, he made preparations to go to Afghanistan "to meet with Osama bin Laden."
Al-Owhali, trained in kidnapping, explosives and hijacking, has confessed to FBI agents that he rode in the bomb vehicle and threw a grenade at an embassy guard.
The closely timed bombings required months of planning, authorities say. In fact, court papers suggest the plot may date from 1996, when al-Owhali, having received training at terrorist camps in Afghanistan, went to bin Laden and asked him for "a mission."
Conspirators may have scouted 20 sites before choosing the downtown embassy compound in Nairobi and the suburban complex in Dar es Salaam, according to the senior law enforcement official.
"First, you've got to do the site selection," he said. "Then you've got to select the personnel to carry it out. You have to have the people who are going to provide the infrastructure and the RTC communications. How are you going to house them? How are you going to feed them? How are you going to get the bomb-delivery vehicle? Who is going to be your bomb expert?"
The alleged "bomb expert" is Haroun Fazil, who rented a villa outside Nairobi three months before the attacks and is accused of using it to build the explosive. Originally from Comoros, an island-nation off the eastern coast of Africa, he fled after the bombings, and the United States has posted a $2 million reward for his capture.
Three other men who have not been directly linked to the bombings may provide a closer tie to bin Laden's operation:
Mamdouh Mahmud Salim, being held in Germany, served al Qaeda as a lecturer on what activities were acceptable under Islam, as a financier and in darker pursuits. In late 1993, according to his indictment, Salim endorsed a plan to procure enriched uranium.
Hage, the former private secretary to bin Laden in Sudan who later lived and worked with Fazil in Kenya, is suspected of trying to obtain chemical weapons, according to court papers.
Khalid al-Fawwaz, whom the United States is seeking to extradite from England, is charged with murder conspiracy. British authorities, who have not publicly identified him, say he is the leader of bin Laden's organization in Britain.
In what appears to be an effort to delve deeper into bin Laden's network, police in Britain, Uganda and Kenya have raided or curtailed the activities of a number of Muslim organizations that are at least outwardly devoted to charity and prayer, raising angry protests.
"We hope the FBI will be more circumspect in these arrests," says Adotei Akwei, advocacy director for Africa at Amnesty USA, the human-rights group. "The FBI has, probably unconsciously, provided a wonderful opportunity for these governments to curtail dissent within their societies."
Meanwhile, the controversy over the U.S. bombing of the pharmaceutical plant in Khartoum continues. Charles Josselin, a top French official dealing with the developing world, says the attack had the unintended effect of making Sudan a victim in the eyes of other countries.
The debate was further fueled by an angry denial by Saleh Idris, owner of the el-Shifa plant, of charges by U.S. intelligence officials that he is believed to have some links to an Egyptian terrorist group.
The Clinton administration has resisted any independent examination of its reasons for the missile attack on the plant.
Pub Date: 10/18/98