We learned how serious it was on the seventh of August, when our embassies in Kenya and Tanzania were hit by suicide truck bombs. Twelve Americans (including three members of our CENTCOM Security Assistance team) and 234 locals were killed in the attacks, and over 5,000 were wounded. The attacks were conducted by Osama bin Laden’s Al Qaeda terrorist group.
We immediately sent a Fleet Antiterrorist Support Team (FAST), from the Marines, Navy engineer units, and medical units to meet the emergency needs; and I dispatched a team to Nairobi from our headquarters to function as a Joint Task Force Command Element to determine what else was needed. All of this became “Operation Resolute Response.”
The attack did not come as a total surprise. We had already learned from President Moi several months earlier that Muslim extremists were operating in his country and in neighboring Somalia, and that terrorist activities were becoming a grave threat to East, Central, and West Africa.
In February, acting on a request from our ambassador in Kenya, Prudence Bushnell, I had sent a message to the Secretary of State warning of the vulnerability of the Nairobi embassy to car bomb attacks (it was located on one of Nairobi’s busiest thoroughfares) and offering to help with a security assessment and recommendations. The State Department reply essentially told me that my help was not needed — the same message the ambassador had got when she’d tried to catch Washington’s attention before coming to me.
When a reporter somehow dug up the basic contents of the message, there was a small crisis in Washington; but, to my amazement, the State Department just blew it off, and the issue died.
This was just as well. We had a much larger question to answer: What to do about Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda? In those days, we knew that they were a growing threat, but we did not know how dangerous they would become. Yet on the evidence of Nairobi and Dar es Salaam, “dangerous” might be too mild a word. Clearly, we had to counterattack. But that was not going to be easy. Al Qaeda has never been a “place” that we could easily target; it’s a network, a web. And Osama has always been elusive. We did know that Al Qaeda had facilities in Afghanistan; and our intelligence agencies knew Osama was then located somewhere near these facilities; but there was no way we could locate his day-to-day position.
By mid-August, additional intelligence suggested that bin Laden might be visiting one of his terrorist training camps in Afghanistan. I was ordered to prepare Tomahawk missile strikes on the camp and on a target in Khartoum, Sudan. (According to our intelligence, this was a pharmaceutical plant that produced a precursor used to develop toxic chemical agents for terrorist organizations.) The strikes were scheduled for August 20.
The Sudan target was new to me; I had not yet seen them mentioned in our intel assessments, but the evidence of its terrorist use seemed highly reliable.
The training camps were rough-and-ready facilities that did not offer high-value targets in terms of infrastructure, and the odds of getting bin Laden were not good, but in my mind it was worth the shot. If he was there, and we hit him, great. If he wasn’t, then at least he’d know we could reach him. I knew it was a long shot and that if he wasn’t there we would be criticized, but I felt we had to take the shot.
The day we fired the missiles, I cleared my desk of everything but a card of thanks from the parents of Sergeant Sherry Olds, a remarkable NCO who had been killed in the Nairobi attack, for a letter I’d sent them and for our honor guard at her funeral.
This strike was called “Operation Infinite Reach.”
It did not actually do much damage, and we did receive a lot of press and political criticism for it, but in my mind it was worth doing. Intelligence came down with several other targets after these strikes, but, again, they never had the specificity or reliability that I felt warranted launching missile strikes or special operations missions. The risks to our forces or the assured collateral damage were not justified by the sketchy intel we saw in the strikes executed.
On a visit to Nairobi on the twenty-ninth of August, I promised Ambassador Bushnell that our FAST security forces would not leave until a new embassy was established — work that could not be completed for several months. I was therefore shocked a short time later when the Pentagon started pressuring me to withdraw the Marines before a new, more secure location for the embassy had been acquired.
According to the Pentagon, keeping the Marines there was too expensive, and security at the embassy was a State Department problem anyhow. “We did our part. Now it’s their business.”
“We can’t pull out,” I told them. “There is no way, shape, or form we can leave Americans exposed and in jeopardy out there.”
“Well, that’s the State Department’s problem,” the Pentagon kept saying. “They should be taking care of their people. Not us.”
I wasn’t going to let interagency bickering get in the way of protecting Americans. So I got tough. “Bullshit,” I said. “I’m not going to leave Americans in danger. Those Marines are going to stay out there until they get a suitable place to move the American embassy. I’m going to protect the Americans where they live and work. They’re still vulnerable.”
I got a lot of mumbling and grumbling from the Pentagon, but no one was going to challenge me on this.
By early September, the crisis between Ethiopia and Eritrea had grown even more alarming. It looked like war was soon coming to the Horn of Africa. In an effort to ease tensions and find a peaceful solution to the crisis, the President had designated former National Security Adviser Tony Lake to be a special envoy; and I was tasked to work with him. This effort became known as “the Tony-Tony Strategy.”
I traveled to Ethiopia and Eritrea during the first week of September. In meetings over several days with Prime Minister Meles and General Tsadkan of Ethiopia and President Isaias and General Shebat of Eritrea, I tried to convince everyone that a war over Badime — a desolate and barren patch of ground on the common border — was senseless and would lead to a needless bloodbath. Everyone listened politely, but neither side was willing to compromise. It was clear they were already committed to military action. I returned to the States extremely discouraged, convinced a bloody war was approaching.
Still, I had to keep trying to prevent it.
Later in September, when I made my first visit to the Central Asian states, I found all these societies in a state of post-Soviet shock. After seventy years of communism, Kazakhs, Uzbeks, Kirghiz, Tajiks, Turkomans, and the other ethnic groups in what had once been the southern parts of the USSR had significant economic, security, political, and social problems. Now that the communist weight had been lifted from their backs, they were trying to figure out their true identity and search for the best way forward. Naturally, each looked at our new U.S. involvement as a chance to gain the support they needed to make necessary changes. And, naturally, the U.S. was once again unwilling to invest in this new region of engagement.
But the U.S. wasn’t the only barrier to progress. Each state had its own set of problems and view of the way ahead; and there was little interest in the collective, regional approach that we preferred. Thus it was clear to me that we had to begin with bilateral arrangements.
For starters, their militaries had a dire need to reform the old Soviet system, while their security concerns about the threats (extremism, drugs, and crime, primarily coming out of Afghanistan) were real. Once again, we’d be creating an engagement program with few resources, but I was determined to work with what we had. These were frontline states, extremely vulnerable to the growing forces of extremism and chaos in South Asia. It was becoming ever clearer that these threats were not just directed at them; they were also directed at us. We
I had begun to hear the same warning from all the leaders in the region — from President Moi of Kenya to President Karamov of Uzbekistan. They were all alarmed over the spreading menace of religious extremism and terrorist activities.
Nineteen ninety-eight marked a major transition in the institutional nature of terrorism. Before 1998, terrorist bands tended to be small, disparate, and haphazardly managed… or else run by charismatic leaders. They were more likely to be gangs with gripes than organizations with plans, programs, and strategies.
Al Qaeda[80] changed all that.
The genius of Al Qaeda was to pull the disparate terrorist groups together, create a network to link them all, and provide the resources, training, command and control, and global reach to make this threat international. Al Qaeda had created what was in effect a virtual state whose base was its global network. Each part of the network
