Anthony Summers - The Eleventh Day

That said, the new unit did remarkable work. Working from a base away from CIA headquarters, near a shopping complex, they became passionately committed to the pursuit of bin Laden. They worked inordinate hours, rarely taking a day off, for a zealot of a boss who as often as not turned up for work at four in the morning. This was Michael Scheuer, whose idea the unit had been in the first place.

Reflecting the CIA’s concept of bin Laden as a mere financier, the bureaucracy initially gave the project the acronym CTC-TFL—for Counterterrorism Center–Terrorist Financial Links. Scheuer saw the mission as far broader, more operational, and its function gradually shifted from data gathering to locating bin Laden and planning his capture. He changed the unit’s moniker to “Alec Station,” after one of his children.

Working around the clock, the unit began to get a clearer sense of what confronted them. Bin Laden’s August 1996 “Declaration of Jihad” brought Scheuer up short. “My God,” he thought as he perused the transcript, “it sounds like Thomas Jefferson. There was no ranting in it.… [It] read like our Declaration of Independence—it had that tone. It was a frighteningly reasoned document. These were substantive, tangible issues.”

Scheuer concluded there and then that bin Laden was a “truly dangerous, dangerous man,” and began saying so as often and as loudly as he could. Though for many months to come there were no new terror attacks, bin Laden’s megaphone utterances, in interviews with journalists and in a second formal declaration in February 1998, could not have been clearer.

In the second declaration, presented as a religious ruling and co-signed by Zawahiri and others, he enumerated Muslim grievances and declared the killing of Americans—“civilians and military”—a duty for all Muslims. Time after time, with increasing clarity, he emphasized that civilians were vulnerable. “They chose this government and voted for it despite their knowledge of its crimes in Palestine, Lebanon and Iraq and in other places.” And: “If they are killing our civilians, occupying our lands … and they don’t spare any one of us, why spare any one of them?”

IN THE WAKE of Clinton’s landmark 1996 Presidential Decision, the heads of relevant U.S. agencies—the Counterterrorism Security Group—had been mulling a possible “snatch” operation to capture bin Laden and bring him to the United States. With satellite surveillance as well as human intelligence, the CIA was to some extent able to track his movements.

Some valuable information came from eavesdropping on the Compact-M satellite phone he had purchased in 1996—number 00-873-682505331. Bin Laden was no longer at Tora Bora, but spending most nights with his family at a training camp near Kandahar.

The CIA developed a plan. A team of Afghans working with the Agency would grab bin Laden while he was sleeping, roll him up in a rug, spirit him to a desert airstrip, and bundle him on board a CIA plane. He would be flown to New York aboard a civilian version of a C-130 airplane within which would be a container, inside which would be a dentist’s chair designed for a very tall man.

The chair would be equipped with padded restraints designed to avoid chafing the captive’s skin. In the event bin Laden had to be gagged, the tape used would have just the right amount of adhesive to avoid excessive irritation to his face and beard. There would be a doctor on the plane, with sophisticated medical equipment.

The Agency’s plan was discussed, modified, and remodified. There were rehearsals. Intelligence agency attorneys conferred solemnly about the provisions for bin Laden’s safety after capture. Then, in May 1998, the operation was scrapped.

CIA director Tenet has said he was responsible for the cancellation. The White House’s Richard Clarke has said he thought it “half-assed,” that he seconded the decision. In an internal memo, supposedly written at Tenet’s direction, Alec Station’s Scheuer wrote that the Clinton cabinet had been worried about potential fallout were bin Laden or others to die during the operation.

Scheuer thought the plan had been “perfect,” that it should have gone ahead. According to him, it long remained difficult to persuade either the White House, or his superiors at the CIA, or the Defense Department, of the gravity of the bin Laden threat. “They could not believe that this tall Saudi with a beard, squatting around a campfire, could be a threat to the United States of America.”

For any who could not see the danger, any last illusion was removed just after 3:30 A.M. Washington time on August 7, 1998. At that moment, a two-thousand-pound truck bomb exploded behind the American embassy in the Kenyan capital of Nairobi. Two hundred ninety-one people were killed, forty-four of them embassy employees. The embassy’s city center location compounded the carnage, and some four thousand were injured. The five-story building was damaged beyond repair, an adjacent secretarial school totally destroyed.

Four minutes later at the U.S. embassy in Dar es Salaam, the capital of neighboring Tanzania, a terrorist detonated another truck bomb. Eleven were killed and eighty-five injured—lower casualties than in Nairobi because the building was on the city’s outskirts. The explosion left part of the U.S. embassy roofless and damaged the missions of two other countries.

In terms of overall casualty figures, this had been the worst-ever terrorist attack on Americans. Clues as to who was responsible came fast, and pointed straight to the bin Laden organization. Instead of being blown to pieces, one of two suicide bombers in the Nairobi attack had jumped out and run at the last moment. He had suffered only minor injuries, and was captured within days. It emerged that the bomber was a Saudi, had trained at one of the camps in Afghanistan, and had met with bin Laden several times. He had believed all along that his mission was for bin Laden.

The Saudi gave investigators the number of a telephone outside Kenya that his controllers had told him he could call, and he had called it both the night before and an hour before the bombing. Using his satellite phone, bin Laden had also called the number before and after the attack. The number—967-1-200578—was a crucial lead, one that will become pivotal as this story unfolds.

Of the five men eventually tried and convicted in the United States for the bombings, the reported statement of another man, Saudi-born but of Palestinian origin, said it all. “I did it all for the cause of Islam,” Mohamed Odeh told interrogators. Osama bin Laden “is my leader, and I obey his orders.”

In Afghanistan on the morning of the bombings, bin Laden had been listening intently to the radio. When the news came through, his son Omar thought his father more “excited and happy” than he had ever seen him. “His euphoria spread quickly to his commanders and throughout the ranks, with everyone laughing and congratulating each other.”

A Canadian teenager whose family had joined the jihadis, Abdurahman Khadr, witnessed the jubilation. “The leader of the guesthouse went outside and brought juice for like everybody. Jugs and jugs of juice. He was just giving it out. ‘Celebrate, everybody!’ And people were even making jokes that we should do this more often. You know, we’d get free juice.”

Asked by reporters about the bombings, bin Laden vacillated between obfuscation and claiming credit. “Only God knows the truth,” he would say, while praising the bombers as “real men … Our job is to instigate and by the grace of God we did that.” Nairobi had been picked, he said, because “the greatest CIA center in East Africa is located at this embassy.” American “plots” against countries in the region, he said, had been hatched there.