US ignored leads on embassy bombing in city, new book reveals

Rescuers search through rubble forvictims near the US Embassy afterthe bombing on August 7, 1998. [PHOTO: FILE/STANDARD]

The US Embassy bombing in Nairobi on August 7, 1998, could have been prevented had US intelligence analysed and interrogated a treasure trove of documents and a computer recovered from an apartment where an Al-Qaeda cell operator was arrested almost a year to the attack, a newly published book reveals.

It also discloses that the documents and computer recovered from the Nairobi terrorism operative arrested in August 1997 were put in a box and shipped off to Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) headquarters in Langley, Virginia, where, astonishingly, they lay in a room unopened until the attack a year later.

What's more, the book titled Tyranny of Consensus by Janne E. Nolan discusses the frustrations the then US Ambassador to Kenya, Prudence Bushnell, encountered from Washington mandarins in her attempts to have the embassy relocated from the central business district.

It also discloses the story of an Egyptian Al-Qaeda informant who walked into the US embassy in Nairobi in November 1997 and revealed, in stunning detail, how the bombing would be executed. He was promptly dismissed as a "fraud", the book says.

Nolan's book analyses the limitations of American policy-makers to comprehend major developments around the world. It specifically examines three cases — the Islamic Revolution in Iran, the proxy war with the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, and the 1998 embassy bombings in East Africa.

The book's chapter on East Africa bombings is based on interviews with the former US Ambassador to Kenya, 9/11 Commission reports that investigated the New York attacks, an Accountancy Review Board (ARB) report that investigated the East Africa attacks and recently declassified CIA documents that reveal the US intelligence was warned about the impending attacks but failed to act.

The book discloses, in detail, a frosty conversation between Ambassador Bushnell and US President Bill Clinton moments after the attack after she had just left the rubble of the bombed out embassy building in Nairobi.

In late November 1997, Mustafa Mahmoud Said Ahmed walked calmly into the US Embassy on the corner of Moi and Haile Selassie avenues with some startling information. The Egyptian national received an audience with US intelligence officials.

According to the book, he told US intelligence officials that there was a plot to blow up the Nairobi embassy.

"He described a plan to drive a truck full of explosives through the embassy's back gates (not far from a major public thoroughfare) with a plan to enter the garage underneath the embassy before detonating it," the book unveils.

But what happened next confounded even pessimistic intelligence experts. Instead of verifying the accuracy and veracity of the information, the US intelligence officials decided to run the tip-off through Israeli intelligence. The goal was to ascertain whether the informant was credible. The Israelis came back with the verdict that the walk-in informant was a "fraud" and after three months of interacting with Ahmed, the US intelligence cut him loose and made no further contact with him, the book reveals.

But even worse, the information was not shared with Kenyan intelligence.

What the US did not understand at that time was that the seeds of 9/11 were being planted slowly and quietly in Nairobi, a station considered "medium risk" despite its ambassador shouting from the rooftop for anyone who would care to listen that the embassy was a sitting duck.

Yet everything that the Egyptian national had foretold came to pass on August 7, 1998, with deadly consequences.

Later, the book says, Ahmed suddenly showed up in Dar es Salaam a week after the twin bombings in East Africa. This time, he offered to sell to the US intelligence or any another country information about the attacks. Again, the book reveals, he was rebuffed despite the accuracy of his prior information.

Other sources revealed that Ahmed was arrested by Tanzanian authorities and then released after two years. An Australian newspaper claimed he was instrumental in financing Mohammed Atta, the 9/11 attack leader to execute the attacks but this information has never been corroborated.

The book claims that the 1998 attack was not a surprise and the presence of an Al-Qaeda cell operating in Kenya prior to 1998 was well known within the intelligence community. The author quotes declassified intelligence assessments that indicate that Al-Qaeda sought to establish an operational terrorism base in Kenya as early as 1991.

Osama bin Laden had begun his first phase to promote his agenda in the Horn of Africa. American presence in Somalia in 1992 pushed the need for the terror cell presence a notch higher.

The Nairobi casing team is believed to have developed a laboratory for developing their photographs from the safety of an apartment. US intelligence believed the team's technical surveillance and communications equipment, including state-of-the-art video cameras, were from China but had been purchased from dealers in Germany.

By early 1994, it is believed Bin Laden received the team's casing report and it was agreed that the Nairobi embassy was an easy target because a car bomb could be parked close by. US intelligence believe Al-Qaeda put a team of operatives to execute the attack and even sent them for training to Hezbollah camps in Lebanon.

Nairobi was slowly being woven into a deadly tapestry for terror activities, the new frontier for Bin Laden's wider agenda.

But the local terror cell went through an upheaval from 1994 to 1997, which delayed the planned attacks.