EIGHT

“In Time of War There Is No Death”

It was 10:30 on the hot morning of August 7, 1998, when Mohammed Rashed Daoud al-‘Owhali and a man known only as Azzam were riding down Haile Selassie Avenue, a main commercial thoroughfare in Nairobi, Kenya. The men wove through the heavy morning traffic in a light brown truck listening to inspirational poetic chants in Arabic on the radio. This was to help them maintain their courage, not to lose faith, as they faced what both believed would be the last minutes of their lives.

Their freight, carried on the truck bed behind them, consisted of four hundred pounds of mixed aluminum nitrate, aluminum powder, and TNT packed into wooden crates and wired through a battery to a detonator button in the cab. Their target was the American embassy, and they were carrying out the worst terrorist assault up to that point sponsored by Osama bin Laden and his Al Qaeda organization. Indeed, the terrorist assault of that day, against two American embassies in Africa simultaneously, marked the final transformation of bin Laden’s organization from a locally based faction in the anti-Soviet struggle in Afghanistan into a global terrorist network with global ambitions. It sees bin Laden himself making a strange round-trip from Afghanistan to the Sudan and back to Afghanistan, and that round-trip parallels another story, the transformation of Afghanistan itself from an arena of Cold War conflict against the Soviet Union into a base of operations for the world’s largest terrorist network as it embarked on a war against the United States.

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In 1989, with the Soviets beginning to escape from their lethal quagmire in Afghanistan, bin Laden returned for a time to his native Saudi Arabia. The next year, on August 2, 1990, Saddam Hussein, the dictator of Iraq, occupied the neighboring oil-rich country of Kuwait. In response, bin Laden had a plan. He sent a message to the Saudi leadership proposing that they allow him to raise an army of thirty thousand Afghan-war veterans, and, using them, to drive Iraq away. The request was denied. Instead, in a decision that was to infuriate bin Laden and to make him a sworn enemy of the Saudi government forever after, the United States was invited to send an expeditionary force to Saudi Arabia from which it would launch its land invasion of Iraq in 1991. As a consequence of that, the United States established permanent military bases in Saudi Arabia—what bin Laden called “the land of the two holy places,” Mecca and Medina. Bin Laden, far from seeing himself elevated to the status of protector of Islam, was thrust aside by the Saudi monarchy, which chose instead to rely for its defense on an infidel power. From that point on, like the Ayatollah Khomeini in Iran, incensed over an American military presence in Iran, bin Laden became a determined foe of the United States, and of any Arab government that remained linked to it.

Still, it was not a good time for bin Laden. With the war against the Soviet Union winding down in Afghanistan, there was little for him to do there. Or, as Jamal Ahmed al-Fadl, a longtime Al Qaeda member, put it in later court testimony, “In Afghanistan, we don’t have too much work because the Russians, they left.” Still, disappointed in his native country, bin Laden returned to Peshawar for a time in 1990 and 1991, and he seems to have been there when a golden opportunity presented itself.1

Toward the end of 1990 or early in 1991, Hassan Turabi, the spiritual leader of the Islamic Salvation Front, which had taken power in Sudan after a military coup in 1989, invited bin Laden to move to his own country, and to bring Al Qaeda and its training operations there. Al-Fadl was present at the deliberations that ensued at bin Laden’s Peshawar headquarters. Who was this Turabi and could he be trusted? Some Al Qaeda leaders were concerned over reports that Turabi had studied at the Sorbonne in Paris—reports that were true—and might therefore not be a true Muslim, but bin Laden sent a delegation of his lieutenants to Sudan itself to investigate Turabi’s invitation, and, when they came back, he decided to accept it.2

And so, in a complicated logistical operation, bin Laden moved himself and the entire top Al Qaeda leadership to Sudan. Al-Fadl himself was dispatched with money to rent (and eventually buy) farms and houses—the farms to serve both as businesses and training camps, the houses to accommodate the Al Qaeda members who made the move to the new location. Bin Laden paid $250,000 for one farm north of Khartoum, Sudan’s capital, the money given to al-Fadl, who made the purchase in his own name, by Ayman Zawahiri. Then he paid $180,000 for a salt farm on the Red Sea, about 800 miles from Khartoum, where, he said, military training took place. In fact, at one point, neighbors complained to the police of the noise of explosions at the farm, leading the police to arrest several Al Qaeda members. But Al Qaeda quickly contacted the Sudanese intelligence service, which arranged for the men to be released.

Over the next five years, to the casual observer, bin Laden would have appeared to be a legitimate businessman, doing in the Sudan what the main family business had long done in Saudi Arabia. He created a company called Wadi al-Aqiq, which ran a diverse portfolio of enterprises. There was a trading company called Laden International, a construction company called Hijra Construction, an international currency trading outfit called Taba Investment. Al-Themar al-Mubaraka grew and marketed sesame seeds, peanuts, and white corn on a farm near Damazine. There was a fruit and vegetable company, a trucking business, a tannery, and a $50 million investment in a new Islamic Bank in Khartoum. At first the company rented an eight- or nine-room office on McNimr Street in Khartoum with secretaries, a reception room, and an office for bin Laden, the first room on the left. It then moved to larger quarters in Riyadh City, a subdivision of Khartoum.

In the town of Soba, near the Blue Nile, bin Laden bought four farms, one of them with an airport hangar–like building where he could store supplies. He bought a three-story guest house in Khartoum, with a room for himself on the second floor and where he held lectures and discussions every Thursday about jihad and what bin Laden called “our agenda.” He had a letter signed by Omar Hassan Ahmad al-Bashir, the Sudanese president, giving him the right to import goods from abroad without customs inspections or customs duties. He delegated a liaison man to work for Sudanese intelligence to provide information on Islamic groups that, like Al Qaeda, wanted to set up shop in Sudan.

Military training for the thousands of jihad soldiers who now came to Sudan was conducted at bin Laden’s farms. Bin Laden himself began issuing fatwas calling on Muslims to fight the American presence in the Gulf region. Meanwhile, Egyptian veterans of the Afghan jihad who had returned to their homeland engaged in a spree of assassinations there. This led Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak to ask Saudi Arabia to take action against bin Laden, and it did, stripping him of his citizenship and making it impossible for him ever to return to his homeland.

In 1995, prosecutors in the Southern District of Manhattan, who handled all of the early cases of terrorism, including the World Trade Center attack of 1993 and Omar Abdel Rahman’s plan to blow up other New York City landmarks, indicted bin Laden for what they claimed was his role in the attacks on American servicemen in Somalia in 1993. Somalia, on the horn of Africa, was a country ruled by a collection of rival warlords who were obstructing efforts by relief agencies to deliver food to a starving population, and the American troops, dispatched in the waning days of the first Bush administration, were intended at first to assure that the supplies would get through. This part of the mission succeeded, saving uncountable lives. But then, the Clinton administration, which had taken office in the meantime, was reluctant to leave Somalia in the hands of the same warlords who had caused the problem in the first place, and it ordered American forces to move against the most notorious of those figures, Mohammed Farah Aidid. It was then, October 3, 1993, that an American Black Hawk helicopter was shot down and eighteen servicemen were killed, their bodies dragged through the streets of Mogadishu by a furious mob.

Was bin Laden ultimately behind the Black Hawk attack? American prosecutors believe that he was, and so do some of the former Al Qaeda operatives who have given information to American investigators. According to al-Fadl, for example, bin Laden repeatedly expressed concerns that the American move into Somalia was a geo-strategic move, not a humanitarian act, that threatened to have a kind of domino effect elsewhere in Africa. From Somalia, bin Laden told his followers, the United States could expand its influence to South Sudan, where Christians were in a state of rebellion against the Muslim government of the north, and the end result would be ever greater American influence in the Islamic world.

“He say about American army now they came to the Horn of Africa, and we have to stop the head of the snake,” al-Fadl later testified during a trial in New York in 2001. “He said that the snake is America, and we have to stop them. We have to cut the head and stop them, what they doing now in Horn of Africa.”3

American press reports have cited intelligence sources to the effect that bin Laden trained the Somalian groups that attacked American troops in Mogadishu. This remains unproved, but there are two findings, aside from the statements by bin Laden overheard by al-Fadl, that indicate a role in Somalia for Al Qaeda. Al-Fadl himself testified that bin Laden sent several of his people to Somalia, including Mohammed Atef, an Egyptian who was later to emerge as Al Qaeda’s military chief. Upon returning to Sudan, Atef reported at a meeting at the Khartoum guest house attended by al-Fadl that “everything happening in Somalia, it’s our responsibility.” Al-Fadl reported that Atef had difficulty getting out of Somalia after the anti-American attack, but that he was spirited back to Sudan by members of the Afar tribe, who gave him a spot on a small plane they used for transporting khat, the intoxicating plant that is in widespread use in Somalia.4

Several years later, in 1997, American investigators discovered a letter, written by an Al Qaeda operative in Nairobi warning the bin Laden organization in Kenya that American intelligence was closing in on them. In the letter, the writer, believed to be one Harun Fazul, who will play a key role later on in the story of Islamic terrorism, refers specifically to the “members” of the Al Qaeda cell in Nairobi, who were “the ones who killed the Americans in Somalia.”5

But whether bin Laden had a hand in the Somalia disaster or not, there is no mistake that he was expanding elsewhere in Africa. In 1991 or 1992, al-Fadl was dispatched to Nairobi where he handed over an envelope full of money to two operatives who picked him up at the airport. American prosecutors in later terrorism cases have maintained that bin Laden’s creation of a cell in Nairobi was aimed at giving him a gateway to the Horn of Africa, specifically Somalia. But his plans went beyond Somalia. By 1993, bin Laden already had in mind targets against American interests in other African countries as well. That year he sent an agent to Nairobi to take pictures of the American embassy there, pictures that bin Laden personally scrutinized looking for a way to inflict as much harm as possible.

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But bin Laden’s plans for a major attack in Africa were postponed when he himself, once again, had to change his address. During his time in Sudan, bin Laden, as we have seen, was particularly affronted by two events in the early 1990s: the stationing of American troops in Saudi Arabia and the dispatch of American marines to Somalia. It was then that bin Laden began talking to followers like al-Fadl in the Khartoum guest house of the need to cut off the head of the American snake. And it was then too that bin Laden began to take on greater importance in the American view of things. American officials came to the belief that he played a role in the disastrous attack on American troops in Somalia. Then, in 1995, there were two bomb attacks on Americans in Saudi Arabia—one at a military training center in Riyadh, another at a barracks for American troops in Dhahran, killing a total of twenty-four American servicemen. Bin Laden was suspected of responsibility in those attacks, though nothing has ever been proved against him in those incidents, and the most common belief now is that they were carried out independently of him, very likely by Iranian-backed Saudis. Still, alerted to the increased danger of terrorism, the Americans were putting intense pressure on Sudan to expel bin Laden. Sudan capitulated; having invited bin Laden to move his operations to Sudan five years earlier, it now invited him to leave, and it took possession of its share of his Sudanese assets when he did so.6

It was then that bin Laden returned to an Afghanistan much changed since the days of jihad against the Soviet Union. According to one account, Turabi, the Sudanese religious leader, contacted the Sudanese ambassador to Afghanistan, who persuaded several commanders in the Jalalabad region to give protection to bin Laden. Bin Laden flew to Jalalabad in May 1996 on a special plane with three of his wives, a number of his children, and about one hundred Arab fighters. But the commanders whom he expected to see had been defeated by the rising Taliban army, and bin Laden quickly made contact with the Taliban instead, meeting with the mayor of Kabul, Mohammed Rabbani, and promising him his support.7

The Taliban had grown out of a local movement in the southwestern Afghan city of Kandahar where it was led by a reclusive religious teacher known as Mullah Omar. From modest beginnings as a kind of law-and-order religious party, the Taliban, helped by Pakistan, which provided money, arms, and training, began to extend its sway over the rest of the country. The Pakistani involvement seems to have been motivated by a combination of religious and political goals. Pakistan wanted a compliant Afghanistan on its northern frontier, which it could use, in part, as a base area for its support of guerrilla forces in Kashmir, control over which is fiercely disputed between it and India. In addition, some figures within Pakistani intelligence, Inter Services Intelligence, or ISI, were sympathetic to the fundamentalist brand of Islam represented by Mullah Omar. The Islamic schools that sprang up along the Pakistani side of the border, each of them led by its own bearded sheik, became, in essence, boot camps that provided recruits for Taliban military units. Students would study jihad in the classroom and then they could cross the border into Afghanistan and fight in a real jihad as allies of the Taliban.

Afghanistan itself had fragmented. Mutually suspicious military factions, each under its own warlord, often divided along ethnic lines, occupied chunks of territory. Technically, the president of Afghanistan—or, at least, the Afghanistan that held a seat in the United Nations and had the diplomatic recognition of a majority of countries—was Burhanuddin Rabbani, who was supported by the most famous of the former anti-Soviet commanders, Ahmed Shah Massoud. But both Rabbani and Massoud were Tajik, an ethnic minority from the north whose members speak a dialect of Persian, and they were not recognized by many of the southern commanders, most of whom were Pashtuns, who speak the same language as their cousins across the border in the Northwest Territories of Pakistan.

As the Taliban extended its control from Kandahar, defeating some warlords militarily, buying others off with money supplied by Pakistan, a natural alliance sprang up with bin Laden. “He had money in his pocket,” Mohammed Khaksar, a senior Taliban official, said later, after the United States had helped an anti-Taliban alliance take power late in 2001. “Any time he wanted, he would just pull it out and give it to them.” Bin Laden, Khaksar said, gave fancy cars and other valuables to Taliban leaders. He supplied pickup trucks for military operations.8

The money cemented a relationship between bin Laden and the mysterious Mullah Omar that seems based not just on money but on common aspirations as well, a common vision. In the early years, Mullah Omar seems to have had no interest in anything outside of Afghanistan itself, but under bin Laden’s tutelage, he too began to think about a global mission. The two men would talk by the light of kerosene lamps late into the night about restoring the greatness of Islam. Sometime in late 2000 or early 2001, bin Laden swore a “bayat,” an oath, to Omar in which he swore his fealty to the Afghan leader, and, in videotapes and conversations, he began referring to him as the commander of the faithful, or the caliph, terms that have powerful connotations in Islam. Bin Laden was recognizing Omar as a figure of world historical significance. Those titles recognized him as the future leader of a renascent Islam, the bearer of the title of Saladin who conquered the Crusaders, the man who would realize the great dream of Wahhab and other Muslim revivalists for a unified Islamic state governed in accordance with sharia, Islamic law.

Meanwhile, bin Laden was given free reign to recruit abroad, to bring Islamic fighters to camps throughout Taliban-controlled Afghanistan, and to build a kind of state within a state, to become one of the country’s most powerful warlords in his own right. Bin Laden organized a network of about a dozen different training camps, bringing together several different groups, in addition to Al Qaeda. These included the Pakistani group Harkat ul-Mujahadeen and the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, which aimed to create a vast Muslim state out of several former Soviet republics and the west Chinese region of Xinjiang. Recruits came from about twenty different countries, including Pakistan, Kyrgyzstan, Syria, Egypt, Morocco, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Libya, Somalia, China, and the Philippines, as well as Canada, the United States, Britain, and Russia. In the wake of the American-led war in Afghanistan after September 11, New York Times reporters uncovered large caches of documents in Al Qaeda safe houses and training camps—letters, notebooks, diaries, instruction manuals, magazines, inspirational audio- and videotapes, personnel records, and even American military training manuals—that give a detailed picture of life within the Al Qaeda state-within-a-state.

Most of the recruits received basic infantry training, whose purpose seems not to have been international terrorism but the ongoing trench war in Afghanistan between the Taliban and its main rival, the Northern Alliance led by Massoud. The documents in this sense confirm that bin Laden became indispensable to the Taliban because he provided them with a substantial core of religiously committed and well-trained troops. The average recruit was a young, unmarried man who had studied, or perhaps memorized, the Koran, and, in many cases, belonged to a fundamentalist group in his native country. Whether the young man had received permission to join the jihad from his parents was carefully noted in personnel records. Each mujahid, or holy warrior, was given a code name so that even his fellow recruits generally did not know his real name. Each was supposed to be equipped with a uniform, boots, a belt, a hat, a handkerchief, a flashlight, batteries, soap, a pencil, some jackets, gloves, and medicines. Every day began with a rigorous program of calisthenics—sit-ups, push-ups, crawling, and running—followed by training in the Kalashnikov assault rifle, rocket-propelled grenades, mortars, map reading, and what military experts found to be sophisticated coordinated infantry tactics in which infantrymen advance just behind covering fire provided by units on their flanks. The training, not surprisingly, was accompanied by steady infusions of Islamic fervor, in the form of Koran study, movies, lectures, and pamphlets. There was great stress on the glory of giving one’s life for Allah, and the two greatest prohibitions, the most mortal spiritual sins, were what was called “love of the world” and “hatred of death.” A key slogan was “In time of war there is no death.” A document found in an Al Qaeda house established these as the organization’s chief goals and objectives:

1. Establishing the rule of God on earth.

2. Attaining martyrdom in the cause of God.

3. Purification of the ranks of Islam from the elements of depravity.

It was a smaller, more elite group that got additional, specialized training in the techniques of terrorism. Presumably this was the pool of young men willing to die from which the Al Qaeda terror task forces were drawn. After completing the basic infantry training of the ordinary recruits, they got lessons in surveillance, assassinations, hijackings, and bomb-making. They learned about secure communications, manufacturing and handling nitroglycerine and the plastique explosives C-3 and C-4, the uses of electronic components like diodes, resistors, and switches, and how to convert a radio-controlled toy boat into a remote detonator. The elite groups also seem to have had the honor of an audience with “Abu Abdullah,” bin Laden himself. Some of them made martyrdom videotapes, reading texts prepared for them and claiming to be members of an organization whose name was provided for them. The system was a kind of theological Leninism. It consisted of a disciplined party organization broken up into small cells that reported to higher ups and whose members were expected to be obedient literally unto death, to do whatever their commanding officers demanded of them. At the same time they received heavy doses of ideological indoctrination in the form of radical Islamic principles. “God Almighty has ordered us to terrorize his enemies,” began one manual found in Afghanistan. The standard oath that every recruit was required to sign pledged him to “slaughter infidels my entire life.” One text was a paperback by bin Laden himself entitled, “Announcement of Jihad Against the Americans Occupying the Land of the Holy Places,” on the cover of which was a map of Saudi Arabia surrounded by American, French, and British flags.

As for Afghanistan itself, it is hard to be sure whether bin Laden was a guest of Mullah Omar or whether Mullah Omar became the titular leader in an Afghanistan where bin Laden increasingly controlled the most powerful military force.

A strange episode in this regard has to do with an effort in 1998 by Prince Turki bin Faisal, who was Saudi Arabia’s intelligence chief at the time, to persuade Omar to drop his support of bin Laden and to extradite him to Saudi Arabia on charges of attempting to overthrow the monarchy. Saudi Arabia was one of only two countries that officially recognized the Taliban—Pakistan was the other—and Saudi money heavily subsidized Taliban rule. One would think, given that, that the Taliban would be amenable to Saudi persuasion. And, indeed, according to bin Faisal, when he visited Omar in June 1998, Omar promised to turn bin Laden over to the Saudis sometime later. But when bin Faisal returned to see Omar a second time in September, a month after the bombing of the American embassies in Africa, Omar had reversed his decision.

“Mullah Omar started using harsh language against the kingdom,” bin Faisal said. “He used the same words that bin Laden uses, about the presence of infidel troops despoiling the land of the two holy mosques and people have a right to declare a jihad to liberate the holy land from these infidel operators.”

According to American intelligence officials, Pakistani intelligence also helped to consolidate bin Laden’s position inside Afghanistan. The ISI, they said, trained some of the covert operatives it sent to fight Indian control of Kashmir in Al Qaeda camps. Thus, not only did Pakistan have a special relationship with the Taliban, it maintained a degree of cooperation with bin Laden at a time when bin Laden was seen in the United States as a terrorist menace. When President Bill Clinton was contemplating a trip to Pakistan in 2000, the Secret Service adamantly opposed it, on the grounds that the ISI was so penetrated by extremist groups that secret details of the president’s whereabouts and itinerary might be leaked to assassins. When Clinton insisted on going to Pakistan, Air Force One was flown empty into the country as a decoy, while the president traveled on an unmarked plane.

Accounts that filtered out of Afghanistan after the American-sponsored overthrow of the Taliban indicate that bin Laden’s Al Qaeda became a kind of Praetorian Guard for the Taliban, its shock troops, its version of the SS, helping as the Taliban went about establishing a harsh Islamic dictatorship, enforced by the Ministry for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice. The Taliban banned women from the streets, from schools, and from jobs. Shopkeepers were jailed for doing business during Friday prayers. Music, dancing, pool and billiards, chess, television, VCRs, nail polish, satellite dishes, firecrackers, sewing catalogues, photographs, and statues—all were made illegal by the Taliban, which banned keeping pigeons and flying kites as well, both favorite Afghan pastimes. The once heavily agricultural Shamali Plain north of Kabul, an area previously occupied by non-Pashtun groups, was ethnically cleansed, its villages and orchards burned. Thousands of Hazaris, Shiite Muslims who had lived for centuries in Bamiyan, northwest of Kabul, were killed and buried in mass graves.

In the wake of the Taliban’s fall late in 2001, Afghans in Kabul told reporters that the Arab and Pakistani soldiers who arrived in Afghanistan by the thousands, many of them part of bin Laden’s network, imposed a kind of foreign occupation on the country. The Arabs especially were even fiercer in their practice of Islam than the Taliban itself and they roamed the streets of the cities enforcing their own moral and religious code on the population. They got the best houses in the cities, thanks to Taliban generosity. They were given local girls as brides. According to some Afghans, it was the foreign troops that persuaded the Taliban to destroy the ancient Buddhist statues in the Hazara territory of Bamiyan, which were blown up in March 2001, and to prosecute eight European and American aid workers for proselytizing Christianity.

Afghanistan, in short, wasn’t exactly an occupied country, but it was colonized by a group of extremists that needed a safe and supportive territory from which to base its operations, and in Mullah Omar, bin Laden had found the perfect, willing, and very likely dependent partner. There was a kind of escalation in bin Laden’s rhetoric and activity as the months in Afghanistan went by, traced by Frontline, the television documentary series. In 1995, when still in Sudan, bin Laden said in an interview with a French journalist, “I did not fight against the communist threat while forgetting the peril from the West.” A few months later, in an “Open Letter to King Fahd,” the Saudi ruler, he called for a guerrilla war to drive American troops out of Saudi Arabia. “The Saudis now know their real enemy is America,” he said in July 1996.

After being expelled from the Sudan, bin Laden turned to an unmistakable declaration of war against the United States. “Muslims burn with anger at America,” he said on August 23, 1996. A year later, in an interview with CNN, he said: “We declared jihad against the U.S. government because the U.S. government is unjust, criminal, and tyrannical. It has committed acts that are extremely unjust, hideous, and criminal whether directly or through its support of the Israeli occupation.” Then came his most extreme utterance. He announced not only that the American government and military would be the targets of his wrath, but so would any Americans wherever they could be struck. The occasion for this declaration was the formation of a united front between Al Qaeda and Ayman Zawahiri’s group, Egyptian Jihad. Or, as bin Laden called the new organization, “The International Islamic Front for Jihad Against the Jews and Crusaders.” It is worth quoting this declaration at some length:

We—with God’s help—call on every Muslim who believes in God and wishes to be rewarded to comply with God’s order to kill the Americans and plunder their money wherever and whenever they find it. We also call on Muslim ulema [the traditional Muslim religious conclave], leaders, youths, and soldiers to launch the raid on Satan’s U.S. troops and the devil’s supporters allying with them, and to displace those who are behind them so that they may learn a lesson.

The ruling to kill the Americans and their allies—civilians and military—is an individual duty for every Muslim who can do it in any country in which it is possible to do it, in order to liberate the Al Aqsa Mosque [in Jerusalem] and the Holy Mosque [in Mecca] from their grip, and in order for their armies to move out of all the lands of Islam, defeated and unable to threaten any Muslim.9

This declaration was called a fatwa by bin Laden, a religious order. A few years earlier, the Ayatollah Khomeini in Iran had issued a fatwa calling it a religious obligation to kill the writer Salman Rushdie. Now bin Laden was saying, in essence, that there was a similar religious obligation to kill Americans anyplace they could be found. It was a kind of theological blank check, an open invitation issued by the acknowledged leader of the armed Muslim International. The bombing of the embassies in Africa was bin Laden’s way of announcing to the world that the program announced in this fatwa was operational.

Nobody better illustrates the way bin Laden’s ambitions were realized than that young man, Mohammed ‘Owhali, who on August 7, 1998, was sitting in the passenger seat of that bomb-laden truck driving toward the American embassy in Nairobi.10 ‘Owhali is the perfect embodiment of Al Qaeda’s methods of recruitment and training and its selection of members of a small elite force for special martyrdom operations. He was born in 1977 (in Liverpool, England, where his father was a student in a master’s degree program at a British university) and given a strict religious upbringing back home in Saudi Arabia. He read magazines like Al Jihad, which was being published by Abdullah Azzam in Peshawar, and Al Mujahedeen, or “Holy Warriors,” and he read books like Love and Hour of the Martyrs that glorified the sacrifices made by the soldiers of Allah. He remembered listening to one videotape in particular, recorded by a man named Abdul Rachman al-Howari, that made mention of something called the Kissinger Promise, which he described as the American secretary of state’s plan to occupy the Arabian Peninsula.

Eventually, like other young Saudis, like Osama bin Laden some years before him, ‘Owhali found his way to Afghanistan where he received military training and theological indoctrination in an Al Qaeda camp called Khalden. He got the standard training in light weaponry, demolition, and artillery, and the standard religious training as well—especially in the fat-was calling on Muslims to kill rulers who did not rule in accordance with Islamic law.

At a certain point, to reward his skills and enthusiasm, ‘Owhali was chosen to be part of a group to have an audience with bin Laden himself, often referred to as “the emir.” Bin Laden impressed upon his listeners the importance of fighting against the Americans and casting them out of Saudi Arabia. He also encouraged them to get further training, and ‘Owhali did, going to a succession of camps in Afghanistan and studying an advanced terrorist curriculum. He learned how to gather intelligence and how to prevent intelligence from being divulged, how to conduct hijackings of buses and planes and how to carry out kidnappings.

‘Owhali met others in Al Qaeda. Azzam, another Saudi whom he met at the Khalden Camp, became a kind of mentor, assuring him that they would do great and important things. He met a man he knew by the name of Khalid who was of higher rank than Azzam. He saw action, fighting in the Kabul region alongside the Taliban, and his bravery earned him certain privileges, most important the privilege of carrying his rifle anywhere he went in camp including in the presence of bin Laden himself. One day his friend Azzam asked him if he wanted to undertake something more important than fighting with the Taliban. When ‘Owhali answered that he did, he became part of the mission to blow up the American embassy in Nairobi.

For this, he received the advanced training that was given to only a small elite group in Al Qaeda. He learned about the operation and management of cells, the small groups of operatives that Al Qaeda was establishing outside of Afghanistan. He learned that the person who is the intelligence chief of a cell is also the cell’s overall commander. He studied surveillance techniques along with still- and video-camera photography. His training complete, he was told to shave his beard, so as not to look like an Islamic militant. Furnished with an Iraqi passport in the name of Abdul Ali Latif, he was sent over the border to Peshawar and from there on a commercial flight to Yemen where he got a Yemeni passport in still another name—Khaled Salim Saleh bin Rashid. He returned for three months to Pakistan where, under orders from Azzam and Khalid, he made a martyrdom video, identifying himself in front of a camera as a member of the Third Martyrs Barracks First Squad of the El Bara Bin Malik Division of the Army of Liberating the Islamic Holy Lands.11 Then, using his Yemeni passport, he went from Peshawar to Nairobi passing through Karachi, Muscat, and Abu Dhabi, arriving early in the morning of August 2.

In Nairobi, he was reunited with his friends Azzam and Khalid, and he began to rehearse the glorious mission that would be his life’s work. He lived at the house of a man called Harun and took instruction from another man named Saleh, who was described to him as the leader of the Nairobi Al-Qaeda cell. It was Saleh who showed ‘Owhali the brown truck, parked at Harun’s house, with the bomb already assembled and installed in back. Saleh also gave ‘Owhali his instructions: first, that he would ride in the passenger seat in the truck, which would be driven by Azzam, to the embassy. When they arrived, he was to jump out and force the guard to open the gate by threatening him with a pistol; second, he was to throw some stun grenades, which he would wear on his belt, to get people to scatter from the area; and, three, if the electrical detonator failed to work, he was to throw a stun grenade into the back of the truck and cause the bomb to explode manually.

Saleh also explained the choice of the American embassy in Nairobi, and this tells volumes about Al Qaeda’s vision of the world. First, he said, there was a large American presence in Nairobi; second, the American ambassador there was a woman and therefore if the bomb resulted in her being killed, it would further the publicity aroused by the attack; third, that some of the embassy personnel in Nairobi were responsible for work in Sudan, from which bin Laden had been expelled; four, that there were a number of Christian missionaries at the embassy; and, fifth, it was an easy target.

On the day of the bombing, at about 9:20, ‘Owhali made a last telephone call, to a friend in Yemen. A few minutes later, at 9:45, he and Azzam got into the truck and left Harun’s house. ‘Owhali was wearing black shoes, blue jeans, a white short-sleeved shirt, and a blue cotton jacket inside of which was his pistol. He attached four stun grenades to his belt. Harun led the way in a white pickup truck, turning away at a roundabout before reaching the target. In a fateful move, an illustration of a kind of terrorists’ Murphy’s Law, Azzam told ‘Owhali that the jacket he was wearing might make it difficult for him to reach the stun grenades on his belt, so ‘Owhali took the jacket off.

At the embassy, Azzam drove the truck into an alley between the embassy itself and the seven-story Ufundi Cooperative House, which housed a secretarial school, in full session at that hour, and some commercial offices. The alley led to the parking garage behind the embassy, barred by a drop gate controlled by a Kenyan security guard. When the Kenyan refused the two suicide bombers permission to entry, ‘Owhali, according to plan, jumped out to threaten the guard with his pistol and force him to open the gate. But as he did so, he realized that his pistol was in the pocket of the jacket he had left in the truck. Without any means of threatening the guard, he tossed a stun grenade instead. People began to run, including the guard and ‘Owhali himself, who suddenly had second thoughts about suicide. Or, as he put this to an FBI agent who interrogated him in Nairobi, he realized that his mission was complete, that there was nothing further for him to do. To die while carrying out the mission would be a martyrdom, he felt, but to die uselessly after the mission is complete would be suicide, and suicide is not acceptable in Islam. And so he ran and as he did so Azzam gamely carried on. He detonated the bomb, and suddenly a peaceful morning in Nairobi became a scene of carnage, foreshadowing what was to come on a similarly bright morning in New York and Washington, D.C., four years later.

Outside on Haile Selassie Avenue more than 1,600 people were immediately wounded, almost all of them Kenyans. The dismembered bodies of 15 people were later found on the street outside the embassy. The Ufundi Cooperative House collapsed in on itself, killing dozens of people inside and leaving people on the outside crawling over the mountain of cement and steel and clawing at the debris to free people trapped inside and calling for help. In all 250 people were killed, including twelve Americans inside the embassy. Ambassador Bushnell, who was meeting with a Kenyan minister in a building adjacent to the embassy—and who had written letters pleading with the State Department to build a safer, more terrorist-proof embassy—was cut by falling glass. In the Solar Building, across the street from the embassy, Beatrice Ngeru, a twenty-three-year-old secretary, happened to be standing next to a window. She heard what sounded to her like a gunshot, and she looked across the street. In the next instant, the window exploded, raking her arms, face, and chest with glass. In the hours that followed, rescue workers managed to pull four survivors out of the rubble, but hopes that more would be found were dimming.

They didn’t know it in Nairobi at the time, but minutes before the Nairobi blast, the bomb placed in a truck and pulled up near the front entrance of the American embassy in Dar es Salaam exploded as planned, killing seven people, none of them American.

Back in Nairobi, ‘Owhali himself was knocked over by the blast, suffering some injuries, but he was able to make it on his own steam to the clinic. There, he threw his last remaining stun grenade into a trash can and deposited the keys to the truck, and three bullets to the pistol, on a ledge in the men’s room. He had no money and, since he was supposed to die, no plan to get away from Nairobi. He took a taxi back to the Ramada Hotel, where he told the reception clerk that he had been injured in the embassy blast and lost his money. He persuaded the clerk to loan him the money to pay for his taxi and to give him a room, promising to pay for everything after he had contacted some friends who would send him money.

Some time later, he did get some money, sent to him by the very friend in Yemen he had called before setting off for the embassy. But when he went to a hospital to receive treatment for the cuts he had received in the bomb blast, he came under suspicion when he was unable to produce any identity papers. He was arrested by the Kenyan police on August 12 and interrogated by both Kenyan and American law enforcement personnel. In January 2001, he pleaded innocent to charges of carrying out the bombing of the Nairobi embassy. He was found guilty and sentenced to life in prison.