TWELVE

While America Slept

The African bombings did what no other terrorist attack and no intelligence finding had done until then. They made Al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden the most urgent national security matters of the federal government’s agenda. Two weeks after they took place, on Thursday, August 20, 1998, President Bill Clinton went to a high school auditorium on Martha’s Vineyard, where he was on vacation with his family. Only three days before, on the previous Monday, Clinton had gone on national television to admit what he had long denied, namely that he had had an intimate relationship with the suddenly world-famous White House intern Monica Lewinski. Indeed, the Clinton administration was in such deep political trouble as a result of the scandal—and the largely negative reaction across the country to his Monday admission—that some reporters called to the Martha’s Vineyard auditorium expected Clinton to announce his resignation. Instead, he told the country that he had ordered a strike against the terrorists.

Two targets, a terrorist camp in Afghanistan and a chemical weapons factory in Sudan, had been hit by about seventy-five Tomahawk cruise missiles fired from ships in the Persian Gulf and the Red Sea.

In the days that followed, administration spokesmen argued that the raids had served to forestall planned future terrorist atrocities. Defense Secretary William Cohen said that the American retaliation would “reduce the ability of these terrorist organizations to train and equip their misguided followers or to acquire weapons of mass destruction for their use in campaigns of terror.” Later Cohen explained that the cruise missiles had destroyed targets at the Zhawar Kili al-Badre Camp near Khost in Afghanistan where a high-level meeting of terrorists had been planned for that day. Bin Laden’s whereabouts at that point, whether he was alive or dead, were unknown, but Cohen declared, “The attacks have significantly disrupted the capability to use these camps as terrorist training facilities.”

Soon it became clear that the American retaliation did not achieve its major goal, the liquidation of bin Laden himself, who, it seems, had left the target area a few hours before the cruise missiles struck. The American raids did signal a new stage in the fight against bin Laden, and that fight continued to be waged for the remainder of the Clinton years in office. Still, within a few days of the assault, questions started to be raised, especially about the destruction of the Shifa Pharmaceuticals Industries Company, which was in an industrial suburb of Khartoum. The administration claimed that the plant was actually a disguised chemical weapons factory. Administration officials said that soil samples taken outside the plant had showed the presence of a substance known as Empta, whose only function was to make the nerve gas VX. The plant, moreover, was heavily guarded, the administration said, and it showed a suspicious lack of ordinary commercial activities.

“I’m not sure that anyone visibly can identify what chemicals might be in and around the vicinity,” Sandy Berger said in a television interview, responding to requests for proof that the plant was what the administration said it was. “There is no question in our mind that that facility, that factory, was used to produce a chemical that is used in the manufacture of VX nerve gas and has no other commercial distribution as far as we understand.” Berger added, “We have physical evidence of that fact, and very, very little doubt of it.”

But a British engineer, Thomas Carnaffin, who worked as a technical manager during the plant’s construction between 1992 and 1996, emerged to tell reporters that there was nothing secret or heavily guarded about the plant at all, and that he never saw any evidence of the production of an ingredient needed for nerve gas. The group that monitors compliance with the treaty banning chemical weapons announced that Empta did have legitimate commercial purposes in the manufacture of fungicides and antibiotics. The owner of the Shifa factory gave interviews in which he emphatically denied that the plant was used for anything other than pharmaceuticals, and there was never persuasive evidence to contradict his assertion. At the same time, members of the administration retreated from claims they made earlier that Osama bin Laden had what Cohen called “a financial interest in contributing to this particular facility.” It turned out that no direct financial relationship between bin Laden and the plant could be established. At the same time, the administration, now clearly embarrassed by its inclusion of Sudan in its retaliatory strikes, refused to release the intelligence on which it based its conclusions about Empta; the refusal led to a widespread suspicion that a terrible mistake had been made that it was unwilling to admit.

As for the attack on Afghanistan, it is difficult to see that it played much of a role in forestalling future terrorist attacks by bin Laden or members of his group. It is true that several assaults planned for 2000 and 2001 were discovered and prevented—including a plot to set off a bomb at Los Angeles International Airport and another plot to attack the American embassy in Paris—but this success was thanks to good intelligence, good police work, and some very good luck. Indeed, there is a painful irony about the Clinton administration’s multifaceted effort to arrest or liquidate bin Laden. Remember that by 1998, Mohammed Atta, Mahmud al-Shehhi, and Ziad Jarrah were all installed in Hamburg, Germany, and that a fourth figure, Ramzi bin al-Shihb, was striving mightily to get a visa to go to the United States. Starting in 1998, the quest by Clinton and, later, Bush to hunt down bin Laden and destroy Al Qaeda, which failed, coincided with the planning and execution of the September 11 terror assault, which succeeded.

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It is not that nobody was warning that a devastating attack could occur. In a moment that has become famous in the history of American law enforcement, at a 1997 conference held in Chicago attended by agents of both the FBI and the CIA, John O’Neill, the head of counterterrorism in the New York office of the FBI, predicted almost exactly what happened four years later. A lot of militant terrorist groups were operating on American soil, O’Neill said, especially Islamic fundamentalist groups, some of whose members had passed through the forge of the Afghan jihad and who were now ready to deploy their skills in and against the United States. They had the “support infrastructure” they needed, O’Neill said, and they could strike, “if they chose to.”

O’Neill was speaking of what law enforcement officials and reporters were calling blowback, the idea that the United States had supplied arms, money, and training during the anti-Soviet struggle to groups that were now becoming American enemies. Two reasons explain why O’Neill’s statement in 1997 is famous. First, it was among the most direct of numerous warnings that a devastating terror attack on American soil was likely, and second, O’Neill himself, a well-known figure in New York, a habitué of Elaine’s, a bar and restaurant popular among writers, journalists, and figures in the arts, and a friend of network television correspondents and newspaper reporters, was killed in the World Trade Center when he went into one of the towers to help get people out.

O’Neill, who was probably the bureau’s single most informed student of bin Laden and Al Qaeda, knew what he was talking about, though he was not alone in making his prediction. Rick Rescorla, as we have seen, worried out loud and in public about the likelihood of a devastating attack, and over the course of the 1990s, there were various commissions and studies that made recommendations about steps needed to tighten airport security or do a better job of following up on immigrants who came into the country on student visas but then never went to any language institute, college, or university.

On September 11, Richard C. Clarke, who had been the White House counterterrorism chief in the Clinton years, remembered the warnings made over the years about terrorists striking on American soil. Clarke was another of the officials warning about the terrorist danger. He was commonly reported to be frustrated at the administration’s failure to make terrorism a top priority, or even to follow up on the security recommendations that were made, especially in the aftermath of the World Trade Center attack of 1993. When he heard on the morning of September 11 that American Airlines flight 77 had struck the Pentagon, he reached a quick conclusion: “This is Al Qaeda,” he said.

“Everybody in the business knew,” James Kallstrom, a former head of the FBI’s New York office, said, referring to law enforcement and intelligence agents who kept track of terrorism. “Everybody knew it was going to happen. Not exactly where or when, but nobody was surprised.”

And yet, though everybody knew, the responses of the American government, both under President Clinton and in the early months of the Bush administration, were confused, uncertain, and sporadic, despite the warnings, issued not only by American intelligence agencies but by the terrorists themselves. After all, hadn’t bin Laden said himself that it was the duty of Muslims to kill Americans wherever they could find them? When the Clinton administration, retaliating for the African embassy bombings in 1998, attacked Al Qaeda camps in Afghanistan with cruise missiles, Ayman Zawahiri called a Pakistani journalist and said: “The war has started. Americans should wait for the answer.”

The Clinton administration did take bin Laden seriously. It made several covert efforts to assassinate him, or to find Afghan proxies to do that job, but these initiatives took place against a background of political hesitation, uncertainties about the reliability of intelligence, and paralyzing debates about the proper response to make.

When Bill Clinton took office in January 1993, terrorism was a back-burner issue, a problem to be dealt with among others but not the problem producing the keenest sense of urgency. At the top of the Clinton administration national-security agenda in 1993 were other matters—gays in the military, instability in post-Soviet Russia, peace between Israel and the Arabs, and guarding against rogue states, like Iraq and North Korea. The 1993 attack on the World Trade Center, which took place a month after the Clinton administration took office, was a clear lesson in the new dangers confronting the country, but it was dealt with mostly as a matter of police detection and criminal prosecution, not as a terrorist war against the United States. Suspects were rounded up, put on trial, and convicted, while those who had escaped the dragnet were pursued internationally. But Clinton never visited the site of the attacks; there was no public effort to find the higher-ups who had ordered and financed the bombing; there were no orders to law enforcement agencies to do a better job of sharing information, no big efforts to hire more Arabic-speaking intelligence agents, no warnings to other countries that supporting terrorism was the same as perpetrating it, no calls to the public to be more vigilant; no overall strategy for protecting the United States against the new kind of threat that was signaled by the 1993 bombing.

“It wasn’t the kind of thing where you walked into a staff meeting and people asked, ‘What are we doing today in the war against terrorism?’” said George Stephanopoulos, the president’s adviser for policy and strategy in his first term.

One of the reasons, Stephanopoulos said, is that the 1993 bombing was in its way unsuccessful; it was a shock, but the total death toll of six was relatively small and did not create an intense atmosphere of public concern. And, in the absence of an apocalyptic event like September 11, it was difficult for the government to gear up a response commensurate with the warnings of John O’Neill or the threats of bin Laden. The men arrested in the crime seemed like small-time criminals, not global menaces, and since nobody higher up was ever publicly named—in part because, while Iraq was suspected, there was no hard proof that any government had been involved—there was no sense of some large, outside force that posed a grave danger for the future.

Even later, when bin Laden publicly emerged, there was always something so overblown, so bombastic about his rhetoric that skepticism about his real capabilities seemed natural. He could do damage, but even after the African embassy bombings in 1998, how many people believed he could mount an attack on American territory that would claim thousands of lives? Not very many.

Intelligence on bin Laden and terrorism was collected, but much of it went unshared among agencies, and it was never incorporated into a comprehensive program of anti-terror defense. Diplomatic pressures were brought to bear—on Sudan in particular—to expel bin Laden or to restrict his activities, but the administration did not move firmly to arrest him and bring him to trial, fearing that there wasn’t enough clear, courtroom-ready evidence to convict him. The African embassy bombings put bin Laden and Al Qaeda among the administration’s national security priorities, and the Clinton administration made several highly secret and still-classified attempts to destroy bin Laden and his network. Still, they were sporadic and unsuccessful, and without a commitment to the sort of major, concerted, long-range military enterprise that the Pentagon was saying would be necessary to ensure success.

“From August 1998, bin Laden was Enemy No. 1,” said Sandy Berger, Clinton’s second-term national security adviser. Still, the impression remains that the effort to nail bin Laden—which the president undertook at the height of the Monica Lewinski–impeachment scandal—was made on the cheap, as it were, without a major expenditure of resources and without any risks to American lives.

As Clarke put the problem: “Democracies don’t prepare well for things that have never happened before,” and, until September 11, it hadn’t happened.

Moreover, before September 11 there were political risks to undertaking a full fight against terrorism and no political pressure to do so, not from within Clinton’s party and not from Republicans. The antiterrorism fight wasn’t an issue in the presidential campaigns of either 1996 or 2000. The question “What would you do to protect the country against terrorism?” was never asked in any of the presidential debates. The words “bin Laden” and “Al Qaeda” were never uttered during the course of either campaign and the general public was unfamiliar with them. In 2000, candidate George W. Bush accused the Clinton administration of letting the military deteriorate, but he was speaking of conventional forces facing conventional threats and not of the special forces used against terrorists. There were few, if any, calls in newspaper editorials for a genuine war against terrorism. It would seem that, except for law enforcement or counterterrorism professionals like O’Neill and Clarke—and the warnings by private students of Islamic terrorism like Steven Emerson—there were very few Americans who really believed that bin Laden would be able to carry out his threats. According to Leon E. Panetta, chief of staff in the last part of Clinton’s first term, the president’s senior aides saw terrorism as only one of several pressing problems.

“Clinton was aware of the threat and sometimes he would mention it,” he said. But the “big issues” of the first term were “Russia, Eastern bloc, Middle East peace, human rights, rogue nations, and then terrorism.”

And yet, this history is littered with what seem clear in retrospect to be missed opportunities, missed signals, and close calls. The 1990s present a history in which the United States government became ever more aware of bin Laden, Al Qaeda, and the emergence of a new type of warfare, but, before the cataclysmic event of September 11, it did not develop a means to act decisively and effectively. The war on terrorism in this sense is a kind of unhappy thriller in which the good guys, the American government, the FBI, and other agencies, were often close on the trail of dangerous and ruthless foes, but they never were able to catch up with them.

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The first major indication of bin Laden’s importance came after the World Trade Center bombing of 1993. As we have seen, there has never been any clear evidence that bin Laden was directly involved in that operation. But as part of the investigation that followed the Trade Center blast, the FBI and New York City police examined a cache of materials that had been in their possession for two and a half years, and only then did they became aware of the shape the new terrorist threat was taking. The materials had actually been seized in 1990 from el-Sayyid Nosair, the radical Egyptian, after he assassinated Rabbi Meier Kahane, the founder of the Jewish Defense League. At the time, they didn’t seem to have any forensic value, so they were put aside. Now they were astonished to discover a kind of blueprint for Muslim terrorism against the United States, and it had been in their possession all along.

The cache, for example, contained a note written by Nosair himself in which he called for striking at the “enemies of God by means of destroying and blowing up the towers that constitute the pillars of their civilization such as the tourist attractions they are so proud of and the high buildings they are so proud of.” The FBI also discovered that the Al Kifah Center was linked to radical Muslims in Peshawar, and the link went beyond recruitment for jihad in Afghanistan. There were tape recordings of conversations between the Brooklyn group and Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman, who was in Peshawar at the time, in which Abdel Rahman encouraged Nosair’s ambitions. In other words, already three years before the Trade Center bombing, Abdel Rahman and Nosair were contemplating the sort of attack that then took place in 1993—a strike at one of those tall buildings Americans are so proud of.

At the time, bin Laden was known to American intelligence as a figure in the Peshawar-based jihad movement, and, according to FBI officials active in the investigation, the FBI was aware of him too. But the first person to provide a full portrait of him and his position in the international terrorist movement was a mysterious double agent named Ali A. Mohammed who, in the early to mid-1980s, was both an officer in the Egyptian army and a secret member of Islamic Jihad, which, three years earlier, had assassinated Egyptian president Anwar Sadat. In 1984, Mohammed approached the CIA volunteering to be a spy, and he was put on the payroll. The CIA was trying to collect information on Lebanese groups, especially Hezbollah, that were holding Americans hostage in Beirut, and they hoped that Mohammed could help them. But then the CIA learned that when Mohammed did make contact with a Hezbollah cell in Germany, he revealed that he was working for the CIA, which fired him. Moreover, suspecting that Mohammed was a terrorist himself who had tried to become a double agent, the CIA warned the State Department, which put him on a “watch list” of people not to be allowed into the United States.

Nonetheless, Mohammed applied for a visa at the American embassy in Cairo, and received one. He joined the army, becoming a supply sergeant at the army’s Special Warfare School at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, the place where the anti-terrorist Delta Force is trained. He was even used as a kind of character actor in a Special Forces training video, where his role was intended to convey an idea of how Islamic radicals felt about the world.

In 1989, Mohammed was one of the men observed by the FBI giving training to Nosair, Salameh, and Abuhalima at that firing range on Long Island. It seems that while he was a U.S. Army sergeant, he spent weekends helping members of the Al Kifah Center, staying with Nosair while he was in New York. In other words, on the one hand he was connected with the anti-terrorist Delta Force at Fort Bragg; on the other he was helping to train people who were planning a spectacular act of terror against the United States. In November 1989, he was honorably discharged from the army. He also became a citizen that year and, by 1991, began traveling regularly to Pakistan and Afghanistan, where he became a military trainer at an Al Qaeda camp. That year he helped bin Laden make his move from Afghanistan to Sudan, in part by helping to obtain the false documents needed by some of the Al Qaeda team to transit through third countries under assumed identities. Once bin Laden was installed in Sudan, Mohammed trained his personal bodyguards and coordinated with Sudanese intelligence agents who were responsible for bin Laden’s security when he ventured outside his compound.

In short, Mohammed knew the members of the Islamic terror network in New York and was also close to Osama bin Laden. This was the case in 1991, two years before the 1993 World Trade Center explosion. In fact, Mohammed was never implicated in that, and, despite his links to the Al-Kifah Center, there is no evidence that he knew about it. But soon after it occurred, in 1994, he was stopped crossing the border into the United States from Canada in the company of a man who was carrying false documents. Questioned by the FBI, Mohammed told them of his ties to bin Laden. And soon after that, he was leading a remarkable double life. He was an informer for the FBI, whose agents he met in Santa Clara, California, where he was living, telling them about bin Laden’s operation in the Sudan. At the same time he continued serving bin Laden in the Sudan. He was the man bin Laden had sent to Nairobi in 1993 to case out potential terrorist targets.

“I took pictures, drew diagrams, and wrote a report,” he recounted of that trip, speaking in a later court appearance in New York. He gathered information on the American, French, and Israeli embassies and then returned to Khartoum, where he was debriefed by bin Laden himself. “Bin Laden looked at the picture of the American embassy and pointed to where a truck could go as a suicide bomber,” Mohammed testified.

By about 1996, bin Laden was considered enough of a threat for the CIA to create a virtual station, code-named Alex, to track his movements and activities around the world. The State Department issued a white paper that it circulated to Middle Eastern governments describing bin Laden as a financier of terrorist movements worldwide. For the first time, bin Laden was said to have been behind the Somali attackers of American troops in Mogadishu in 1993. The State Department also pressed Sudan to expel him, but when Sudan hinted that it was willing to turn him over to American authorities, a Justice Department review of that possibility in the spring of 1996 concluded that there wasn’t enough evidence on the Somali attack to convict him in an American court. When Sudan did expel him that year, forcing him to go back to Afghanistan, Berger, the national security adviser, declared, “He lost his base and his momentum.”

In fact, bin Laden wasn’t losing either a base or momentum. While he was in the Sudan, he was at least under the control of a government that was responsive to American pressure; in Afghanistan he wasn’t. Indeed, in Afghanistan he was far freer to recruit new members, to set up training camps, and to mount ever more costly attacks. Moreover, the United States was well aware of the expansion of his network. In 1997, the former Al Qaeda operative Jamal Ahmed al-Fadl emerged to tell American investigators that bin Laden’s aim was no longer just overthrowing Saudi Arabia and other “infidel” Middle Eastern governments, but taking jihad to the United States itself.

Al-Fadl, who introduced himself to a consular official while on a visa line at an American embassy in Africa, also told the FBI that the bin Laden group “might try to make bomb against some embassy.” He recounted the story of bin Laden’s move to Sudan, of his wish to bring harm to American forces in Somalia, and the growth of his empire, which used legitimate business as a way of raising money for jihad. It seems that al-Fadl also prompted American intelligence to begin watching the Al Qaeda cell in Nairobi, and this in turn led to one of the most extraordinary facts of the war on terrorism: it is that for more than a year before the African embassy bombings, American intelligence was not only aware of the Nairobi cell, but it was also monitoring some of its communications. The bombings, in other words, took place under the very noses of American intelligence agents.

The surveillance included National Security Agency taps on telephone lines used by Al Qaeda members in Kenya that enabled the agency to overhear members of the Nairobi group talking by cell phone to bin Laden in Afghanistan. It was around this time that John O’Neill made his now famous prediction about terror attacks on the United States. O’Neill’s warnings coincided almost exactly with those of al-Fadl. In addition, the CIA investigated three other warnings—coming either from Arab informants or from the intelligence services of other countries—that an embassy in Africa was going to be targeted for a terrorist attack.

It was also in 1997 that FBI agents searched the Nairobi home of Wadi el-Hage, a naturalized American citizen from Lebanon who worked for bin Laden. El-Hage’s name had surfaced earlier. He knew Mahmud Abuhalima, one of the 1993 World Trade Center bombers, and other members of Al Kifah in Brooklyn. Indeed, at one point, though he lived in Houston, Texas, he was named as the person who would take over leadership of Al-Kifah after its founder, Mustafa Shalabi, had gone to Pakistan. But Shalabi, as we have seen, was assassinated and El-Hage never did come to New York.

El-Hage did go to Nairobi, however, where he was a close associate of Osama bin Laden. He claimed in a court proceeding in 2001 that he only handled legitimate business for bin Laden and didn’t know of the activities of Al Qaeda, but the jury didn’t believe him. One reason for not believing him was that the FBI found a letter in his office computer written by a certain Fazul Abdullah Mohammed. This is the real name of the person that the Nairobi bomber ‘Owhali knew as Harun, in whose house he stayed in Nairobi when he arrived there from Afghanistan a few days before the bombing and who seemed to ‘Owhali to be in charge. A text of Harun’s letter, which was obtained by the television documentary program Frontline, is written to an unidentified person called Brother Sharif. It is the letter that we have already seen making reference to the role played by Al Qaeda in the 1993 attack against American servicemen in Somalia. It also warns members of the cell that American intelligence has learned of the Al-Qaeda presence in Nairobi.

“My recommendation to my brothers in East Africa was to not be complacent regarding security matters,” Harun’s letter said, “and that they should know that now they have become America’s primary target and that they should know that there is an American-Kenyan-Egyptian intelligence activity in [Na]irobi aiming to identify the names and residences of the members who are associated with the Shaykh since America knows well that the youth who lived in Somalia and were members of the Shaykh’s cell are the ones who killed the Americans in Somalia.”1

Harun was good at taking his own advice, since under his direction, a bomb was built, installed in a truck, kept at a house in Nairobi that he rented, and used to blow away the façade of the American embassy even though American intelligence was monitoring telephone calls and faxes to and from the Al Qaeda cell in Nairobi right up to August 7, 1998, the date of the bombing.

How could it have happened that American intelligence was able to have penetrated the Al Qaeda cell in Nairobi but failed to prevent the embassy bombings? The historian Roberta Wohlstetter, writing about intelligence during World War II, might provide an explanation for this conundrum. Wohlstetter uses the term “static” to describe the confusion, inconsistencies, and sheer volume of intelligence, which makes it very difficult to pick out ahead of time the few items that seem in retrospect to be crucial. American intelligence received thousands of warnings of terrorist attacks. Which ones to pay attention to and which ones are “static” is extremely difficult to decide.

Moreover, in the case of the African embassy bombings, the very effort to get intelligence may have undermined the value of the intelligence itself. We know, for example, that the FBI interviewed el-Hage several times in Nairobi. That would have signaled to el-Hage that the American authorities had at least some strong suspicions about the Al Qaeda network in Africa. Not long after that, Harun’s letter, which warns that American intelligence is hot on Al Qaeda’s trail, turned up in el-Hage’s computer. It seems reasonable to surmise, in other words, that after being interrogated, el-Hage informed Harun of the FBI’s interest in him, and that is what led to Harun’s warning. From that point on, it seems that Harun took extraordinary measures to keep information about the bomb plot from leaking. The death of 224 people in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam is proof of how well he succeeded.

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After the embassy bombings of August, Clinton himself signed three Memoranda of Notification that authorized the American government to capture or to kill bin Laden and his senior associates. The CIA stepped up its efforts to locate bin Laden, and warships were stationed in the Indian Ocean and the Persian Gulf to fire missiles if his whereabouts could be precisely determined. In September 2000, an unarmed “Predator” spy plane, secretly based in Uzbekistan, was flown over Afghanistan, showing what officials believed to be real-time information on bin Laden’s movements. But the Predators were unarmed and several hours were needed between the time bin Laden could be definitively located and missiles from American ships could strike him. Moreover, each time a strike was approved against bin Laden, George Tenet, the director of Central Intelligence, called the president to say that the information was not reliable enough to be used in an attack, and, after the immediate retaliation for the embassy bombings in August, no further attack on bin Laden was launched—until after September 11.2

Indeed, before September 11, no administration—and this includes the Bush administration in its first nine months—was willing to undertake major military and diplomatic moves that would have been necessary to destroy Al Qaeda. And in the absence of a very clear threat, conventional wisdom was that such moves would be so costly in lives and money that the public wouldn’t support them. Some inside the administration favored stronger diplomatic efforts, like putting pressure on Pakistan to end its support for both the Taliban and bin Laden. But senior officials determined that the risk to the American relationship with Pakistan was too great, and a good relationship with Pakistan was deemed important to forestall a nuclear exchange with India. The result is that a traditionally friendly country and a critical one, Pakistan, continued, through its military and intelligence agencies, to give support to the very figure that the national security adviser, Berger, declared to be Public Enemy Number One.

Meanwhile, the White House asked the Joint Chiefs of Staff to develop plans for a commando raid to kill or capture bin Laden, but the military determined that for a commando raid to be successful, bin Laden’s whereabouts would have to be determined twelve to twenty-four hours in advance, a near impossibility.

The chairman of the Joint Chiefs, General Henry H. Shelton, rejected the possibility of striking at bin Laden with just a small commando team and said that only a full-scale invasion of Afghanistan involving many thousands of American troops would do the job. Proposals were made that the Taliban’s only remaining enemy in the field in Afghanistan, the Northern Alliance, be helped with money and materials. But this option too was rejected on the grounds that it would involve the United States too deeply in Afghan politics and, in any case, would be opposed by the Taliban’s main backer, Pakistan.

Throughout the Clinton adminstration’s time in office, a group of officials pressed for strong action. Some wanted to finance and arm the Northern Alliance despite expected Pakistani objections. After the Cole attack in October 2000, Richard C. Clarke, the White House counterterrorism director, pushed for bombing bin Laden’s largest training camps again, but the Clinton administration had been politically wounded the first time it had struck those camps, and it was unwilling to try again. Clinton, politically weakened by the White House sex scandal, had also been deeply embarrassed by the public reaction to the 1998 bombing of the Sudanese pharmaceuticals plant.

When the George W. Bush administration came to power in January 2001, it inherited the Clinton problem: A private group controlled by bin Laden had succeeded in attacking two American embassies in Aden Harbor and the USS Cole, but it had no clear and effective way of responding. The Bush administration did draft a plan for dealing with terrorism. It chose the Northern Alliance option, and its centerpiece was a $200 million CIA program to arm the Taliban’s enemies, but the plan did not include putting American troops on the ground or supporting the Northern Alliance with advisers or air power. The Bush administration, moreover, did not treat the problem with urgency. In August, Bush was briefed by the CIA and told that bin Laden himself might have a plan to hijack American airliners, but no connection was made between that general warning and any specific plot. Meanwhile, the draft plan was approved by Bush’s advisers on September 4 and it was to be presented to the president on the tenth, but Bush was traveling that day and it was never given to him. The next day was September 11, and the entire world, and the American attitude toward bin Laden, changed forever.

This history seems to show that over more than twenty years of terrorist assaults on the United States, no administration had ever found a strong, effective response. One could say that the history began in 1979 when Iranian militants, clearly supported by the revolutionary Iranian government, seized fifty-three hostages from the American embassy and held them for more than a year. Except for a commando raid that turned out to be a disaster for the United States and a propaganda triumph for Iran, there was no retaliation. During the 1980s, terrorists blew up a marine barracks in Lebanon, killing 225; they bombed the American embassies in both West Beirut and East Beirut, and seized several hostages, most of whom were held for several years. Again, the United States found no way to exact a price.

In 1994, Iraq’s Saddam Hussein attempted to assassinate former president Bush during a visit to Kuwait. The response of the Clinton administration was to attack the Iraqi intelligence agency with cruise missiles, at night when the building was empty. During the 1990s, Saddam expelled United Nations arms inspectors investigating Iraq’s nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons plants, and the United States took no action to ensure that the inspections would continue, and, eventually, they were abandoned. In 1993, eighteen American servicemen were killed and dragged through the streets of Mogadishu, and the American response was to withdraw its forces. In 1995, twenty-three American servicemen were killed in two attacks on an American training center and a barracks in Saudi Arabia. Though the attacks were traced to Iran-backed groups, no retaliation was attempted. Then came the African embassy bombings in 1998 and the Cole bombing of 2000—total Americans dead: twenty-nine.

It’s no wonder that Osama bin Laden probably assumed that the United States was too soft, too worried about casualties, too lacking in political conviction to respond to terrorist attacks.