Revealed: How US intelligence slept on the job

By 1994, the US intelligence had identified a naturalised US citizen named Wadih El-Hage as the Nairobi terror cell "On-site" manager. El-Hage, described as an accountant, had worked for one of Osama Bin Laden's companies in Sudan and had relocated to Nairobi where he had been tasked with building the lattices of a terror network.

El-Hage, according to the new book titled "Tyranny of Consensus" that provides new information on the 1998 US Embassy bombings in East Africa, had set up a charitable organisation named Al-Haramain, which was believed to be a cover for funneling money from Bin Laden to Islamists groups.

His local phone number 8200067 was tapped between July 1996 to August 1997 and it opened a treasure trove of telephone numbers and contacts of other top Al Qaeda operatives in the region. The wire taps in particular brought to the fore the name Harun Fazul, a Comoro Island native and founding member of Al Qaeda and a close associate of Bin Laden.

It later emerged that Fazul had moved in with El-Hage and worked for him as a "secretary". Fazul was exposed later as the mastermind of the 1998 Nairobi bombing. He rented the truck that was used to transport the bomb and was later implicated as the person behind the 2002 Kikambala bombings. (Fazul was killed in 2011 when he drove into a military check point in Mogadishu).

The planned 1998 attacks suffered a major setback when one of Al Qaeda's operatives was reported to have turned himself over to Saudi Government and became an informant. As the story of the defection was broken by the Daily Telegraph, El-Hage was still in Afghanistan having been summoned to receive further instructions from Bin Laden via his satellite phone.

The trace on El-Hage phone revealed an Imarsat (satellite) phone number 682505331 which intelligence believes was being used by Bin Laden.

The Nairobi cell panicked when they found out that El-Hage phone had been tapped. They went into a frenzy of damage control which included going to his house and removing potentially incriminating documents.

But they made one fatal mistake which would later haunt them. According to the book, they failed to purge information on the computer which El-Hage had left in his house.

The Kenya and US intelligence moved quickly and raided his house and carted away documents and his computer. El-Hage arrived back in Nairobi from Afghanistan clueless to what had happened. But he found a welcoming reception at JKIA on August 21, 1997, composed of FBI and Kenya police. He was informed that he was under investigation and it "was in his interest that he co-operates and returns to the US".

According to the book, El-Hage flatly refused. He wound up his affairs in Kenya and left with his family back to the US on September 23.

Al Qaeda believed that his exposure and tapped phone had turned him into a liability for the organisation. He was essentially damaged goods and was effectively expelled from Al Qaeda.

Dejected and broke, El-Hage arrived in Arlington, Texas and struggled to start a new life with a wife and more than five children working at a car repair shop. The US made attempts to extract information and turn him into an informant but he flatly refused. Eventually he faced a grand jury for his support for terrorism in September 1998 and was convicted in 2001. He is currently serving life in prison.

The book reveals that El-Hage's computer and documents recovered from his house in Nairobi were put in boxes and shipped to CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia.

The book reveals: "A CIA official claimed that because of a shortage of Arab linguists at the agency who could review the documents, they remained unopened boxes and were not translated until well after the bombings."

But even worse, the book discloses that even if all the material was not translated, some of the material was made available to certain analysts and were read and reviewed. "At least one CIA analyst integrated information taken from El-Hage with other intelligence that had been collected over the preceding year making it possible to produce a comprehensive report of the organisation structure, operational objectives and records of attacks of Al Qaeda up to mid-1998."

Produced months before the attack, the book says this insightful and remarkably useful report remained in draft form and was not widely distributed.

If the contents in the box recovered from El-Hage's house had been analysed and shared, they would conceivably have exposed Al Qaeda's evil plans and stemmed the bombings on August 7, 1998. What's more, the US and Kenya intelligence were made to believe that the threat had been removed with the deportation of El-Hage.

Former US Ambassador Bushnell told The Standard in a phone interview from her Falls Church, Virginia home that once the Al Qaeda cell was exposed, US intelligence made the mistake of believing that the threat had been ostracised.

Very little effort was made to monitor further Al Qaeda activities which meant the plot for August 7 kept going. Even worse, there was a belief in Washington that "terrorism did not occur in East Africa" and was confined to the Middle East.

But ostensibly the soporific US intelligence failed to connect the biggest dot. That August 7 attack was really the preamble to a much bigger event that was yet to come, 9/11.