In the spring of 1998, Prudence Bushnell, the U.S. ambassador to Kenya, sent an emotional letter to Secretary of State Madeleine Albright begging for the secretary’s personal help.
Bushnell, a career diplomat, had been fighting for months for a more secure embassy in the face of mounting terrorist threats and a warning that she was the target of an assassination plot. The department had repeatedly refused to grant her request, citing a lack of money. But that kind of response, she wrote Albright, was “endangering the lives of embassy personnel.”
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The CIA and the FBI had been amassing increasingly ominous and detailed clues about potential threats in Kenya, officials said. But the State Department bureaucracy still dismissed Bushnell. She was even seen by some at the State Department as a nuisance who was overly obsessed with security, according to one official.
Albright took no action. Three months later, on Aug. 7, the American Embassies in Tanzania and Kenya were simultaneously attacked with car bombs. Twelve American diplomats and more than 200 Africans were killed in Kenya.
The State Department has acknowledged that Bushnell raised questions about security before the bombing, but a close examination of events in the year before the assaults, based on interviews with officials throughout the U.S. government, shows her concerns were more intense, more well-founded, more specific, and more forcefully expressed than has previously been known.
The review shows that:
– The CIA repeatedly told State Department officials in Washington and in the Kenya embassy that there was an active terrorist cell in Kenya connected to Osama bin Laden, the Saudi exile who is accused of masterminding the attack.
– The CIA and FBI investigated at least three terrorist threats in Nairobi in the year before the bombing and took one seriously enough to send a counter-terrorism team from CIA headquarters. The agency ultimately concluded that threat was unfounded, but some officials believe the inquiry was botched, and the agency’s inspector general is investigating how it was handled.
– State Department officials brushed aside Gen. Anthony Zinni, commander of the U.S. Central Command, who had visited Nairobi on his own and warned that the Nairobi embassy was an easy and tempting target for terrorists. Zinni’s offer to send his own specialists to review security in Nairobi was turned down by the State Department.
– The State Department had all but abandoned the commitment it made after the 1983 bombing of the Beirut embassy to improve embassy security. Department officials had long since stopped asking Capitol Hill for the money needed to meet its own standards, and had adopted a strategy of improving the handful of embassies it believed were at greatest risk. Nairobi was not one of them.
Bushnell, in a rare interview about the bombing, said by telephone from Nairobi on Friday: “This is a tragedy in the real sense of the word, and it’s a tragedy that has caused us to think differently. We no longer operate under the assumptions that we did in the past.”
A report made public Friday by a commission appointed by Albright excoriated the State Department for failing to safeguard American missions against terrorist attacks, particularly for the practice of giving vulnerable missions like the one in Nairobi lower priority when experience shows they make likely targets for terrorists.
The report also called on the department to consider closing a number of embassies around the world that are vulnerable to terrorist attack and replacing them with regional “super-embassies.”
But the report, signed by Adm. William Crowe, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, concluded that “intelligence provided no immediate tactical warning of the Aug. 7 attacks.”
Still, classified cable traffic and intelligence reports, which were not included in the public version of Crowe’s report, show that while none of the warnings gathered by American intelligence in the year before the bombings pointed to a particular act of terrorism on a particular day, the United States had growing evidence that the embassy was a target of terrorist plots, and that terrorists hostile to American interests were active in Kenya.
State Department officials insist that they were sympathetic to Bushnell’s concerns. Officials say it is impossible to respond to each terrorist threat it receives.
They also said they were told at the time by the CIA that the threats in Nairobi had either proved unfounded or had been dealt with by Kenyan authorities.
Administration officials said Bushnell began raising concerns about the embassy’s security soon after her arrival in Nairobi in 1996.
She sent two cables to headquarters in December 1997, outlining the dangers and asking for a new embassy. Her request was not seriously considered, officials said, when senior State Department officials met in January 1998 at the State Department to set a budget for embassy construction in the coming year.
This prompted Bushnell to try her end-run with Albright. In memos sent in April and May, she asked Albright to cite Nairobi’s vulnerability to Congress in seeking more funds for security. In addition, Bushnell was lobbying every senior American official and member of Congress who came to Nairobi.
By the mid-1990s, the global investigation touched off by the 1993 World Trade Center bombing had focused on bin Laden and his associates. FBI agents from New York were hard at work building a criminal case against the Saudi exile. At the same time, the CIA was tracking the group’s movements and finances in hopes of preventing attacks.
One trail led to Kenya, where the agency discovered that bin Laden’s operatives were living in the country. Intelligence officials say they briefed Bushnell about the presence of the group in early 1997 but told her there was no evidence of a specific threat against the embassy or American interests in Kenya.
In the summer of 1997, American intelligence officials began to look more closely at what bin Laden was doing in Africa. The CIA identified an intriguing suspect: Wadih el Hage, a Lebanese-born American citizen in Kenya who was believed to have close ties to the leadership of bin Laden’s group.
American officials prodded their Kenyan counterparts to raid el Hage’s home in Nairobi, an overture that was shared with Bushnell and others in the embassy.
Kenyan police, accompanied by the CIA and FBI, searched the house in August 1997. They found his computer, downloaded its files, and read a letter describing the existence of an “East African cell” of bin Laden’s group.
The author of the letter mentioned recent attempts by American intelligence to investigate the group’s Kenyan operations and alluded to its role in attacking American soldiers in Somalia a few years earlier. According to the document, the group had moved a cache of incriminating files from el Hage’s house and hidden them elsewhere.
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Despite an intensive search, no files were found.
The FBI interviewed el Hage, who had moved to the United States, three times, but he professed to know little of bin Laden or his activities in Kenya.
Today, el Hage is in jail in New York, awaiting trial on charges of lying in those interviews and conspiring with bin Laden to kill Americans abroad. He has not been directly linked to the bombings in Kenya, but has been accused of being one of the Saudi exile’s chief lieutenants, responsible for setting up front companies in Kenya and seeking components for chemical weapons. He has pleaded not guilty.
Still, the CIA and FBI believed at the time that they had uncovered a potentially dangerous terrorist group linked to bin Laden.
State Department officials insist that they were not told of this and stress that they were given only a “fragmentary” understanding of the reasons for the raid on el Hage’s house.
Intelligence and law-enforcement officials strongly dispute the State Department’s assertions.
But one intelligence official said the State Department was briefed about the presence of bin Laden’s operatives in Kenya “before, during and after” the August 1997 raid on el Hage’s house.