terror,” he said. “Our mission was clear: to strike at the network of radical groups affiliated with and funded by Osama bin Laden.”
That was a circumlocution, to avoid mentioning publicly the fact that Clinton had signed memoranda designed to get around the long-standing legal ban on planned assassinations. After Kenya, however, the President was “intently focused,” as he later wrote, “on capturing or killing [bin Laden] and with destroying al Qaeda.”
In that, the U.S. attack failed miserably. The targets were hit and destroyed, and some people were killed at the camp where bin Laden was supposed to be. The man himself, however, remained very much alive. The factory in Sudan was destroyed, but there never was any proof that it had been more than a legitimate plant producing medicines. The CIA’s intelligence had been shaky at best.
The strikes had been expensive in more ways than one. At $750,000 each, just the cost of the sixty-five Tomahawks fired amounted to about $49 million. The embassy bombings in Africa, to which the missiles had responded, are said to have cost around $10,000. Worse by far, the missile strikes and the failure to get bin Laden proved to be a propaganda victory for the intended target. Across the Muslim world, people began sporting Osama bin Laden T-shirts. Bin Laden’s life had been spared, his followers were convinced, thanks to the direct intervention of Allah.
The truth was more mundane, as his son Omar revealed in 2009. Shortly before the strikes, he recalled, his father had received “a highly secret communication.” “He had been forewarned,” former U.S. Defense Secretary William Cohen was to tell 9/11 Commission staff, that “the intelligence [service] in Pakistan had a line in to him.” The tight U.S. security had not been tight enough, a failing that one day in the distant future would be remedied— fatally for the target.
If the name Osama bin Laden had been slow to penetrate the American consciousness, it had now become —as it would remain—a fixture. “In 1996 he was on the radar screen,” said Sandy Berger, who had succeeded Anthony Lake as national security adviser. “In 1998 he was the radar screen.”
Before the embassy bombings, bin Laden had been secretly indicted merely for “conspiracy to attack.” After the bombings, a two-hundred-page public indictment charged him with a litany of alleged crimes. A $5 million reward was offered for information leading to his arrest. The figure would rise to $25 million after 9/11, and was later doubled.
At the CIA after the bombings, combating the bin Laden threat was raised to “Tier 0” priority, one of the very highest levels. “We are at war,” Director Tenet declared in a memo soon after. “I want no resources or people spared in this effort.” President Clinton, for his part, signed a further “lethal force” order designed to ensure it was possible to circumvent the ban on targeted assassination. Nevertheless, and though operations against bin Laden were planned repeatedly during the two years that remained of the Clinton administration, none got the go- ahead.
Since 9/11, there have been bitter recriminations. “Policy makers seemed to want to have things both ways,” Tenet wrote. “They wanted to hit bin Laden but without endangering U.S. troops or putting at significant risk our diplomatic relations.”
In one year alone, former bin Laden unit head Scheuer wrote in 2008, the CIA presented Clinton with “two chances to capture bin Laden and eight chances to kill him using U.S. military air power.” The blame for failing to act on such occasions, according to Scheuer, lay in part with the White House and in part with his own boss. Quoting Clinton aides, he said, “Tenet consistently denigrated the targeting data on bin Laden, causing the President and his team to lose confidence in the hard-won intelligence … it spared him from ever having to explain the awkward fall-out if an attempt to get bin Laden failed.”
Scheuer’s most savage barb, however, was aimed at the President and aides Berger and Clarke. They, Scheuer would have it, “cared little about protecting Americans and were not manly enough to order such an attack, and their moral cowardice resulted in three thousand deaths on 9/11.” The words “moral cowardice,” in the context of Clinton and his people, occur no fewer than six times in Scheuer’s book.
Richard Clarke, for his part, thought the CIA had proved “pathetically unable to accomplish the mission.… I still do not understand why it was impossible for the United States to find a competent group of Afghans, Americans, third-country nationals, or some combination, who could locate bin Laden in Afghanistan and kill him.”
Comments by the former President and Berger on the failure to get bin Laden remain in closed Commission files. As recently as 2006, however, Clinton continued to insist that he “authorized the CIA to get groups together to try to kill him … I
Had the world been able to witness the way bin Laden conducted himself in August 1998, when told of the death and damage the missile attacks had caused, his image would surely not have been enhanced.
“My father,” his son Omar recalled, “was struck by the most violent, uncontrollable rage. His face turned red and his eyes flashed as he began rushing about, repeatedly quoting the same verse from the Qur’an, The God kills the ones who attacked! … May God kill the ones who attacked! How could anyone attack Muslims? How could anyone attack Muslims? Why would anyone attack Muslims!’ ”
For a while after the missile attacks, bin Laden went to ground, rarely slept in the same place two nights running. He stopped using his satellite phone, which up to now had been a boon to those tracking him. Within a day of the U.S. onslaught, though, he had his military aide Atef risk a phone call to Abdel Atwan, editor of the London- based newspaper
Having survived the missile strike, Atef said, bin Laden “wished to send this message to U.S. President Bill Clinton: that he would avenge this attack in a spectacular way and would deal a blow to America that would shake it to its very foundations, a blow it had never experienced before.”
After the attack on the American embassy in Kenya, the bomber who had run for his life at the last moment —and fallen into U.S. hands—had said something both sinister and significant. A senior accomplice, he told his questioners, had confided that al Qaeda also had targets in America. “But things are not ready yet,” the accomplice had added. “We don’t have everything prepared yet.”
NOT READY YET, but the concept was there. In late summer 1998 or soon after, Osama bin Laden summoned Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. Two years after rejecting KSM’s idea of hijacking planes and crashing them into buildings, he now said he thought it “could work.”
KSM, it seems, may have been back in the bin Laden camp for some time. An intelligence report suggests that he may have flown into Kenya, using an alias, before the bombing of the U.S. embassy there. There is a report that, two weeks later, he led a decoy operation designed to conceal bin Laden’s whereabouts when America struck the training camps. It had been the East Africa bombings, KSM would say under interrogation, that persuaded him that bin Laden really was committed to attacking the United States.
The idea of flying hijacked airplanes into U.S. targets, bin Laden said at the renewed discussion, had his people’s “full support.” KSM thought it was probably Mohammed Atef, the military commander, who had led him to change his mind. Asked to run the operation, KSM agreed.
The initial notion was still to seize a number of American airliners and crash them into U.S. targets, so far as possible simultaneously. At a first targeting meeting, bin Laden said his hope was to hit the Pentagon, the White House, and the Capitol in Washington. The World Trade Center, one of KSM’s preferences, was apparently raised later. Bin Laden had several operatives in mind for the hijackings and hoped KSM would come up with others.
Early in 1999, the “military committee” met and agreed once and for all that the project should go ahead. KSM thought it would take about two years to plan and execute. Those in the know began speaking of it as the “planes operation.”
At some point that year, Omar bin Laden was taken aside by Abu Haadi, an aide of his father to whom he was close. Omar, now eighteen, had over a period become disillusioned, and was yearning for a way to get out of Afghanistan. Now Abu Haadi had a warning for him. “I have heard talk,” he said, “that there is something very big in the works. You need to leave.”
The something, he suggested, was “gigantic.”
AT ABOUT THE TIME bin Laden summoned KSM, in the United States
