first spectacular terrorist attack.
For years, dating back to his time in Sudan, Bin Laden had been nurturing a plan to bomb American embassies in East Africa. On August 7, 1998, after a last round of phone conversations with Afghan headquarters, two of Al Qaeda’s clandestine African cells struck. Suicide truck bombers tried to ram themselves into American embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. They detonated near the buildings; they killed more than 225 people and wounded several thousand more.
Osama had used his satellite phone to cross the Indian Ocean and strike American targets by remote control. It was an innovation in global terrorism derived from his instincts and experiences as a Bin Laden: as his half-brothers invested in satellite telephony in Washington, Osama used the same technology to attack Washington’s embassies abroad. It was not the last time that he would use technologies of global mobility familiar to his family as a means of brilliant tactical innovation.
That August, in the name of a previously unknown front organization, Bin Laden sent a claim of responsibility by fax, through the North London fax shop, The Grapevine: “The days to come are sufficient for the U.S., God willing, to see a black fate like the one that befell the Soviet Union,” he wrote. “Blows will come down on the U.S. one after another from everywhere and new Islamic groups will emerge one after another…”26
PRESIDENT BILL CLINTON fired cruise missiles at Osama several weeks after the Africa attack. The evidence from Osama’s monitored satellite phone, combined with admissions by detained Al Qaeda operatives, left no doubt about Bin Laden’s responsibility for the bombings. The intelligence used to target him proved faulty, however, and the missiles failed to find him. Osama realized that his satellite phone might be employed to track him as a target; he turned it off and never used it again.
The retaliatory missile attack instantly elevated Osama’s global profile. He was now certified as worthy of the military attention of the most powerful political leader on the planet. That August, televised press conferences in Washington held by Clinton administration officials and generals responsible for the missile strike introduced Bin Laden’s name to mass audiences who had never heard of him. Muslims rallied in Pakistan to praise Osama’s leadership; his bearded face appeared on posters and T-shirts.
In the midst of Osama’s global brand launch, Iridium was itself just weeks away from inaugurating its phone service. “It suddenly occurred to all of us that we had one of these people on our board,” General Counsel Tuttle recalled, referring to the Bin Ladens. Iridium executives hurriedly tried to research the Bin Laden family. They inquired about Osama with Hassan in a “dignified and tactful way.” He assured them that Osama had been cut off. Iridium’s executives decided to issue no formal statement; they did not want to call attention to themselves at such a crucial moment, with $5 billion in investments at stake. When reporters called, a spokeswoman said only that Osama had been cut off from his family and its businesses.27
Iridium’s executives soon had other problems to worry about. When the company’s phones went on sale, it became clear that Iridium was destined not to change the world, but to be recorded as one of the most spectacular bankruptcies in recent business history.
The company had misjudged the price question. It had also been so slow to bring its service to market— more than a decade had passed between conception and launch—that cellular telephone service and the World Wide Web began to overtake its initial vision. Iridium persuaded only about fifty-five thousand people and businesses to purchase handsets and subscribe to its service, about one-tenth of the number required. Motorola ultimately wrote off losses totaling more than $2.5 billion.28 Iridium filed for bankruptcy in 1999. Its gateway investors, the Bin Ladens among them, lost all of their money.
The company’s satellites were soon in danger of falling from the sky and burning up in the Earth’s atmosphere. To prevent this, the Pentagon signed a contract to pay $3 million a month for Iridium phone service, to help keep the system operating. A Pentagon spokesman explained that a global phone network offered some unique military advantages. “Iridium provides service to some areas of the world that are very underserved,” the spokesman said. For the American armed forces, the network’s reach and security “has some operational implications,” he added.29
They were learning, but not fast enough. Osama Bin Laden had now announced himself as a formal enemy of the United States. The American government knew remarkably little about him or his family, however, and some of the information it possessed—and circulated at the highest levels—was wrong. Investigating the Bin Ladens, however, was proving to be a daunting and complicated task, even for the CIA.
34. LAWYERS, GUNS, AND MONEY
DANIEL COLEMAN, an agent at the Federal Bureau of Investigation, arrived on assignment to the CIA’s Bin Laden unit in March 1996. The CIA and the FBI sought to foster cooperation; because of his prior experience with intelligence investigations, Coleman was a natural emissary. He was a bulky, plain- speaking man who had lived for most of his life in New York or New Jersey. The Bin Laden unit was then housed in a suburban office building in Northern Virginia. As Coleman settled in, he immersed himself by reading what is referred to at the CIA as a “201 file,” a kind of case history. The Bin Laden 201 ran to thirty-six volumes, although some of it included duplications and repetitions. Remarkably, Coleman noted, there was not a single written record of Osama Bin Laden’s involvement in the anti-Soviet Afghan war of the 1980s, a conflict in which the CIA had played such a prominent role.1
CIA officers had collected intelligence about Osama from the agency’s station in Khartoum; their files, mainly accumulated between 1993 and 1995, contained detailed information about Bin Laden’s bank accounts in Sudan and Dubai, his Sudanese businesses, farms, and equipment inventories. Beginning in the summer of 1996, two informants who had worked for Bin Laden, and who volunteered to help the United States, added considerably to this portrait. One of the defectors, Jamal Al-Fadl, described the existence and history of Al Qaeda—it was the first time anyone in the U.S. government had heard the name.
The amounts of money the CIA had discovered in Osama’s bank accounts were not very large, but at least they knew where some of his funds were located. The presumption was that he had hidden larger sums in other accounts, possibly in Europe, which had not yet been identified. The CIA’s analysts took for granted that Osama Bin Laden was independently very wealthy, as a result of his inheritance. And yet, until 1996, nobody in the United States government had attempted to investigate in depth basic questions about Osama’s supposed riches: How much cash had he actually received from his father? How much income had he received from the Bin Laden businesses? Had the family truly cut him off? If he was still receiving aid from Saudi Arabia, where was it coming from? How much cash savings had he retained?2
Anthony Lake, national security advisor to President Clinton during the first term of Clinton’s presidency, had pushed for the creation of a special Bin Laden tracking unit at the CIA; Lake was concerned about the threat of transnational terrorist financing. The unit was initially referred to as CTC-TFL, which stood for Counterterrorist Center–Terrorist-Financial Links.3 Its chief when Daniel Coleman arrived was Michael Scheuer, a blunt and aggressive CIA intelligence analyst who had followed the covert Afghan war during the 1980s.
Scheuer was skeptical about the value of investigating terrorist finance, compared to other lines of investigation or covert action; he gradually concluded that following money trails would not reveal very much about Osama’s intentions and plans for violent attacks. Nonetheless, toward the second half of 1996, Scheuer and Coleman decided to investigate how many Bin Laden family members were in the United States, what they were doing, and how they viewed Osama. Through formal interviews, they figured, they might learn something useful about Osama’s resources and motivations. The CIA was prohibited by law from collecting intelligence inside the United States in many circumstances; that mission fell primarily to the FBI, and so Coleman took on the task of rounding up Bin Laden interviews.4
Coleman and another agent in the FBI’s Washington field office went to visit with Philip Griffin, the former State Department diplomat who now ran the Bin Laden office in suburban Maryland. Coleman felt the session was not particularly fruitful: “We just got a lecture about how saintly the Bin Laden family was,” he recalled. Coleman returned to Rockville a second time and asked Griffin if it would be possible to arrange a meeting with Bakr Bin Laden, since he was the head of the family and would know the most about Osama’s history and finances. Griffin said that Bakr traveled to the United States rarely, if at all, and he suggested that the FBI would do better to focus
