I sat in the bathtub, bandaged hands aloft, as Top Spouse washed strangers’ blood from my hair. I was on automatic, one step at a time. The control room was in good hands, and I could have a normal breakfast before I climbed into the burgundy Cadillac with orange-red plates so Duncan could take us to ground zero. I needed to see it for myself. As he drove us down the winding roads that took us to our now eerily quiet corner of the city’s center, he said solemnly, “God has a plan for us, Ambassador. We are still alive.” Duncan was by nature a quiet, serious man who excelled in finding me among herds of diplomats after official events in time to get in front of the traffic jams that official processions created. He had not talked about God before, but then his colleagues had not been blown up before. Had he been with them, he would have been blown to smithereens as well.
A group calling itself the Islamic Army for the Liberation of Holy Places had barely waited for the documents and papers exploding from the U.S. embassy to hit the ground before taking responsibility for the attacks. We would soon learn its other name: al-Qaeda. Duncan maneuvered the Cadillac into the cordoned area near the blast site. Our marines were still standing guard with assistance from the British military trainers. “Perimeter secured, Mr. President,” I thought. There was no telling when the plane carrying reinforcements would arrive.
Duncan parked next to the surprisingly clean sidewalk in front of a singed, wounded version of the brown concrete lunchbox of a building that had housed more than a dozen U.S. government agencies. USAID colleagues had sent as many supplies as they could muster, and our chief security engineer was putting them to good use inside the tent he was using as an office. Nearby, the Cooperative Bank Building, which I had twice believed would hold my remains, loomed ominously over the huge piles of rubble and dead cars. Its windows, like all others in a five-block area, had been blown out. Next door, a team from the Israeli Defense Forces climbed around chunks of concrete with sniffer dogs to locate the thirty to forty people estimated to be buried alive under the Ufundi House. My security engineer colleague handed me a hard hat. On the front of it, he had put the gold consular seal of the United States with the typed title “Ambassador” pasted underneath. We walked up the few steps from the sidewalk into the remains of extraordinary violence. The offices closest to the explosion bulged with rubble—concrete, file cabinets, desks, computers, calendars, furniture, papers, bits of clothes, dangling wires, pieces of ceiling, large shards of glass, and huge piles of stuff. The smell of death was everywhere.
The bomb had swept through the building and returned in the opposite direction, my colleague explained, turning broken glass into missiles and leaving a crater ten feet wide in the rear parking lot. He spoke softly as he gave me the guided tour of death through our motor pool, personnel, shipping, budget, political and commercial offices, and down a corridor to the embassy’s cashier.
“The folks waiting in line to cash checks died here. . . . Over there, you can see where someone was flung against the wall. . . . Be careful where you step. . . . No, we don’t know the extent of structural damage, but it looks pretty bad.” The briefing gave me a good sense of what had happened inside. Lurid media photos and live television coverage had only captured the damage outside.
I finished the tour and took from the car a large bouquet of roses sent in sympathy by Sally Kosgei, the permanent secretary of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and my closest connection in the Kenyan government. I put them on the front steps to mark the grave that had been our workplace. I had complained about those steps and the proximity of our building to the street in God knows how many cables. Now they led to remains of the dead. I was sickened and angry.
The control room at the USAID building was buzzing and organized. It was Saturday, but everyone had shown up. People were used to taking charge, thank heaven, because we had some good managers among our senior ranks, especially at AID. Some people still looked in shock; others came on crutches and in bandages. Volunteers were forming groups to pay calls on the families of the known dead. Where was Julian? We still had no word. Another group was creating funeral committees to prepare for the immediate burials, customary under Muslim and other Kenyan traditions. The bomb response teams continued the gruesome search for the missing among overflowing morgues. Our human resources staff dashed off travel orders for people who were to be evacuated, as our security people handled the demands of hundreds of FBI agents soon to arrive to begin the investigation. Drivers from USAID and what remained of our motor pool staff were already ferrying visitors from the airport to hotels. Communications and IT teams had begun cobbling equipment together; local and international phone service was still intermittent. The budget and fiscal offices dealt with the necessary authorization requests for the money we would be hemorrhaging. The minutia was incredible, and the loss we felt from the deaths of colleagues weighed heavily. By now we had counted their numbers, and every one of the forty-five employees who had died left a hole in our community. Had leadership not emerged from the survivors, we would have closed down. Instead, we bustled grimly. Leadership, I noticed, still had nothing to do with position and everything to do with character and personal skills.
Multiple demands flew my way. Kenyan president Daniel arap Moi had convened all ambassadors to State House, while a military medical evacuation plane was on its way to pick up our most seriously wounded. We were not sure everyone would make it, and I had one chance to say good-bye. Which would it be? State House or the hospital? A thought entered my brain, the advice a former boss and mentor had given me when he sent congratulations for my appointment as ambassador. “Take care of your people, and the rest will take care of itself.” I went to the Nairobi hospital and delegated State House to someone else.
The pace there was busy and controlled, but I could see that the people were starting to wear out. So were their medical supplies. I hoped that the U.S. military medical personnel and provisions would arrive soon. Determined to retain composure, I moved from bed to bed of embassy staff encased in bandages. Who was I to fall apart? I had my health, limbs, and family almost intact. The least I could do was to measure up to the dignity of my wounded colleagues. We said our good-byes, hoping everyone would survive. They did.
I visited the Kenyan minister of commerce next. He had been sitting right next to me twenty-four hours earlier. Now he greeted me heartily from a hospital bed with forty stitches in his head.
By the time I returned to the control room, I had learned the obvious: the international media was in town demanding attention. The State Department’s public affairs people must clear interviews with the U.S. press—local media does not matter—and they had given the go-ahead. The journalists appeared as interested in my stitched lip as anything that came out of my mouth, and I was too busy to care about either.
By midafternoon, I was more than busy; I was mad.
“Can you hear the anger in my voice?” I asked a former colleague from Nairobi now on the department’s Crisis Task Force in Washington. I had long ago adapted to the narrow parameters of acceptable behavior imposed on angry women by male-dominated organizations. I had learned to channel negative energy into a tone of focused calm. I used the F-word seldom and with intention. Whether he recognized the tone without the intense eye contact I cultivated, I am not sure, but he said the right thing. Yes. He could hear the anger.
Yet another flight was screwed up. The medical evacuation plane, already late in arriving, had landed without a backup crew or any supplies. The reason? We had not specified they would be needed, so it was our fault, said our military colleagues on the Washington end. The injured and our medical team, which had been working nonstop for twenty-four hours to keep them alive, now would have to wait on the required fifteen-hour crew rest. With little hope for a waiver, I nonetheless climbed the chain of command at the Defense Department, listening to an assortment of reasons why it was not their fault that the crew had arrived unprepared. Thankfully, no one died.
I also used the same calm, don’t-mess-with-me voice with the FBI a while later. They wanted to keep our dead American colleagues in Nairobi for another two weeks in order to perform autopsies there. That meant their families would return stateside without them. No way was I asking shattered families to leave loved ones behind. I was ready to take on FBI director Louis Freeh if I had to. I did not. The bodies would be released.
Secretary Albright called to advise me of her intention to pay an official condolence visit. Really? The rescuers still had not arrived, and the greatest number of casualties had come from the very sections needed to staff high-level visits like this one. I told her that we could not handle it, and she seemed to understand. Her entourage did not and made no pretense of hiding their displeasure with me when they arrived a week or so later.
The most difficult part of the day came with the calls on family members of deceased and missing colleagues. One of our newly arrived colleagues was leaving immediately with his two daughters. His Foreign Service officer spouse had not felt well Friday morning, but, like so many of us who worry about first impressions, she came to work anyway. Now she was dead.
We still had not found Julian Bartley, although many were looking. He was a member of Nairobi’s Rotary Club, a golfer, and a chronic networker. One of his best friends was a three-star general in the Kenyan military who vowed to find him. Sue Bartley remained quiet, calm, and dignified though it all. She was a twenty-seven-year veteran spouse, having served in the Dominican Republic, Colombia, Spain, Israel, and Korea before coming to Kenya. Like my mother, she had raised children, Edith and Jay, in multiple cultures as her husband rose to senior levels. Their son, Jay, had graduated from the International School of Kenya (ISK) and stayed with his parents to attend the United States International University in Nairobi. He also had volunteered as ISK’s basketball coach. When the high school lost one of its most beloved teachers to a deadly carjacking a few months earlier, Jay was one of the people whom traumatized students sought for counsel. In that way, he was like his father. Sue already knew Jay was gone. She garnered hope for Julian’s well-being with a ferocity that broke my heart.
Duncan drove me home, again in silence. Usually we would listen to a tape of music I provided; not that day. I made it through the arched front door into the tiled entry hall, closed the door quickly, and sobbed.
Just as we were beginning to think we had established a semblance of order, chaos erupted. Our most seriously wounded colleagues had finally been evacuated, forty hours after the bombing, and we were making headway in accounting for our dead and missing. Then on Sunday, August 9, the rescuers arrived, hordes, all within a few hours. Suddenly we were dealing with a Marine Corps support team, a State Department foreign emergency support team (FEST), the Fairfax County Urban Search and Rescue Squad, a USAID team from the Office of Disaster Assistance, an Air Force planeload of support personnel, and hundreds of FBI agents. None of them appeared to have arrived with logistics or administrative support personnel, and each of them had a different set of expectations and needs.
As confusion grew, one of my senior teammates offered to resign after his efforts to control the newcomers failed; another offered to blow his top. That was it. I stomped into the control room and asked someone to call attention. Top Spouse happened to be present, and in his best military voice—the one he saved for special occasions—he bellowed, “Ten-shun!” The room fell quiet, and I took over with the imperious command the situation warranted. “Take a good look at me,” I announced. “I am the chief of mission here. Nothing, I mean nothing, happens at this post unless I say so. And if I’m not here, this is my deputy, and nothing happens unless he says so. Is that perfectly clear to everyone?”
I told folks to get organized into working teams, and when ready, they could see Linda to set up meetings with me. In the meantime, the Nairobi teams would carry on. I left them to it. I also insisted that the following weekend, everyone on the Nairobi side stand down to allow our colleagues to do what they came to do—help.
Julian’s body was found in one of the city’s overcrowded morgues. That made twelve dead American colleagues who would leave in coffins on a mortuary flight the next day. Their families would immediately follow on commercial airlines. It was unacceptable to me that we might say our good-byes without the Foreign Service rituals that accompany arrivals and departures.
I decided on a memorial at our residence. Unfortunately, everyone was so busy, and not even Top Spouse was available. I decided I would start the prep work myself. It was Sunday, and our household staff had weekends off, which left Duncan and me. What had I been thinking?
“Duncan, find the coffee maker, and I will find the tablecloths,” I instructed as we rushed into the empty house.
“Where, Ambassador?” he queried.
How did I know? I never made the coffee. Top Spouse had long ago assumed full responsibility for managing the household and official functions.
“Never mind,” I answered. “You find a tablecloth, and I will look for the coffee maker.”
“Where, Ambassador?”
Was this really beyond our capabilities? A voice came from the front door. “Can I help?”
Community to the rescue! Linda must have alerted them—she knew where my strengths lay. Soon others joined us, and in remarkably short order, chairs were set up theater-style on the large veranda overlooking the back garden. Tubs of fresh roses materialized; cookies and coffee turned up on the dining room table, and my lovely neighbor found a pianist and created floral arrangements. News of the late afternoon service spread, and soon an overflow crowd arrived.
In the living room off the veranda, the lead person from Washington briefed family members about the ceremony at Andrews Air Force Base at which President Clinton would preside as the coffins of their loved ones arrived. One of our widowers would not have enough time to collect his son at college and get to Washington in time. He asked if the ceremony could be postponed a day.
“No. Sorry,” was the knee-jerk answer. It made me bristle.
I pushed back. “Why can’t arrangements be made to postpone the ceremony for a day? I’m sure the president won’t mind, and anyway, it’s worth asking.” The arrival ceremony was subsequently postponed.
A few minutes later I stood in front of my community to say something about the Americans we had lost, seven women and five men from six U.S. government agencies. Jessie Aliganga. Julian Bartley. Jay Bartley. Jean Dalizu. Molly Hardy. Ken Hobson. Prabhi Kavaler. Arlene Kirk. Louise Martin. Michelle O’Connor. Sherry Olds. “Tom” Shah.
Others followed, remembering our friends and what they meant to us. Some family members spoke, while others listened in heartbreaking silence. Duncan, who was our only Kenyan colleague present, began with this: “I was born a Kenyan, but today I feel I am an American.” At the other end of the veranda, the pianist played quietly. We ended in silent prayer. Someone played “Taps.” We handed out remembrance roses, and we said good-bye as best we could.
The next morning I stood next to the foreign minister on the tarmac of Jomo Kenyatta International Airport watching flag-draped coffins being lifted into a military aircraft. I wondered as each went by to whom I was saying good-bye and silently sang good ole American Fourth of July songs to keep control.
“You’re a grand old flag, you’re a high-flying flag and forever in peace . . .” Could that be Julian going by? Which coffin is holding his son, Jay?
“I’m a Yankee Doodle dandy, a Yankee Doodle do or die . . .” Is that Molly Hardy? “A real live nephew of my Uncle Sam . . .” Is that Prabhi? Arlene? “Born on the Fourth of July . . .” And so it went.
We planned our memorial for the thirty-four Kenyan colleagues we lost, the nine women and twenty-five men from three agencies. Chrispin Bonyo. Lawrence Gitau. Hindu Idi. Tony Irungu. Geoffrey Kalio. Joel Kamau. Lucy Karigi. Francis Kibe. Joe Kiongo. Teresa Warimu Kiongo. Dominic Kithuva. Peter Macharia. Francis Maina. Cecilia Mamboleo. Lydia Mayaka. Catherine Mukeithi. Moses Namayi. Francis Ndungu. Kimeu Nganga. Francis Njunge. Vincent Nyoike. Francis Ochilo. Maurice Okach. Edwin Omori. Lucy Onono. Evans Onsongo. Eric Onyango. Caroline Opati. Josiah Owuor, Rachel Pussy. Farhat Sheikh. Phaedra Vrontamitis. Adams Wamai. Frederick Yafes.
Stoic faces and haunted eyes identified the many family members of the dead. They were so quiet in their grief. As we greeted each other in the residence garden, many offered hugs and whispered words of encouragement. “God is great,” they told me, one after another. Kenyans were teaching me the power of faith.
There were individual funerals. American and Kenyans went in mixed pairs to represent the embassy, often going great distances. It took a toll on an already exhausted and traumatized community, and it was the right thing to do. Two hundred and one funerals took place, but as a nation, Kenya mourned the death of Rose Wanjiku most publicly. She had survived under the Ufundi House rubble for more than four days. She became a national symbol of hope, “the Kenyan Rose.” When she died, hope turned to anger. Besides the dead, 400 people were severely disabled, and 164 more had acute bone and muscle injuries. Thirty-eight others were blinded and fifteen totally deafened; seventy-five more suffered from severely impaired vision; and forty-nine were living with hearing disabilities.1 Hundreds of businesses were damaged or destroyed, many of them mom-and-pop enterprises with little or no insurance. All of this happened because Americans had become targets of foreign terrorists. What community would not be furious?
The anger was directed at us. On August 7 our marines had performed as trained with courageous competence. That was what I saw. What Kenyans saw were white men pointing guns at Kenyans coming to help at a moment of crisis. The spirit of harambee—mutual support—appeared violated at the time it was needed most. Kenyans could not see the devastation behind the still-sturdy walls of the building. We were accused of hostility, indifference, and racism.
The travel advisory that the U.S. State Department issued, citing the chaos of the bombing and scaring off tourists, made the local headlines, while pundits and politicians lambasted us. I decided to appear on television. The intention was to show that we shared their hurt and anger and to explain why we had acted as we had. The devastation, flooding, and live wires inside the building were blocked from public view but nonetheless made it a death trap. Everyone in the building was escorted out for their own safety and for security, including looters. The word “looter” provoked fury among the political class—all but the Moi government, which remained silent. How dare the U.S. ambassador accuse Kenyans of looting! Never mind that the press had already printed the news. That was different! I spent the next few months confronting the consequences of my words.
We learned that a man named al-Owhali had been arrested in Nairobi and another man had been taken into custody in Karachi, Pakistan. I was too busy to think much about it.
Two days after the television fiasco, I faced a CNN reporter on camera who opened with, “Ambassador, is it true that you sent a letter to Secretary Albright complaining about the security of the embassy before the bombing?”
How in the world would she know that? Never mind. I instinctively obfuscated and moved on. I knew better than to lie. Later that night, which is when colleagues in Washington started their day, the secretary’s counselor and the deputy spokesperson told me there had been a leak concerning my letter to the secretary, and they wanted to know my thoughts about what to say.
“CNN already asked me about that on camera this morning,” I replied, clearly giving an answer they did not want to hear.
“What? Who approved your appearance on CNN? Why did you say anything?” They sounded very put out. “We’ll have to figure out what to do now and call you back.”
Was their problem my doing? They sure acted as though it were. I hung up and paced the bedroom, feeling despair and loneliness. I was trying so hard to do things right, to lead as best I could under terrible circumstances, and now I was being taken to task, in that ever-so-subtle way that can drive you crazy, for a leak that had occurred in Washington. Over the previous few days I had wept for others’ pain. This time it was all about me.
One of them called back to say things were settled and I had done nothing wrong. The words were welcome, but I recognized that no one had my back in Washington.
In Washington, career people rather than political appointees were chosen to respond to the press. Pat Kennedy, one of the key recipients of my cables as assistant secretary for administration and acting assistant secretary for security, commented, “Bushnell expressed her concerns over the vulnerability of the embassy, requested a security assessment team, and stated her desire to have a new building. In January of 1998, the [State] Department expressed its agreement and shared its understanding for the ambassador’s concern and stated that the requested assessment team would be sent in the near future. . . . Unfortunately, we simply lack the money to respond immediately to all the needs of embassy construction. Just like, I guess, a family with limited resources, we need to have a priority ranking of how to spend our money.”2
The Foreign Service of the United States of America is just like a family with limited resources? Then whose job is it to secure them? Later Tom Pickering, undersecretary for political affairs and number three in the department’s hierarchy, noted, “Even had we had the money to operate on Ambassador Bushnell’s recommendations—and, I tell you, we sympathized, understood, and supported those recommendations—we would still be in the early phase of construction right now.”3
In other words, I had voiced concerns a couple of times beginning in late 1997. Those were met with sympathy, but, too bad, there was no money for a new building—and even if there had been, we would still have been in the old one at the time of the bombing. Nicely done; narrow truths. I was learning a lot about managing the message.
That night, President and Mrs. Clinton, along with members of the cabinet and grieving families, received the coffins from Nairobi.