Now what? What does “retirement” mean to an overachieving woman of a certain age? Where are the role models? I did nothing for three months and almost went crazy. Then I opened a one-woman shop and began giving talks about leadership, crisis management, the Rwanda genocide, the Kenya bombing, and strategies women can apply to be heard in patriarchal environments. I briefly tried consulting with senior executives at other federal agencies and found them uninterested in practicing leadership. It is so much more fun to make policy as individual contributors. A group of political appointees and career executives in one case agreed with my findings that they were terrific individual achievers and lousy team players. I invited a discussion of next steps, and they hosted a farewell lunch for me.
By word of mouth, my speaking and training gigs increased in enough numbers to fund garden projects, home improvements, and eventually overseas trips. Gerry, my father, died at ninety, and Dufie decided she did not want to live without him, leaving us a year later. Richard and I settled into an inner Northern Virginia suburb with an alphabet soup of ethnicities and matching restaurants. Our two Kenyan cats adjusted, and I found life as an American woman, Ambassador (Ret.), to be okay.
I had to deal with the symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder before life became better than okay. I had learned to stuff it all into a drawer that stayed shut—unless it popped open. When it did, I found emotional rubble still fresh from the bombing.
Anger was paramount, revived when I learned I was barred from consideration for a job in the State Department during Secretary Hillary Clinton’s tenure because “Pru had health issues.” Now that was closure. I was “obsessed” before the bombing when I would not stop sounding out about vulnerabilities of our chancery; I was “headed over the edge” when I demanded attention after al-Qaeda blew up our work community and thousands of Kenyan neighbors; and now, years later, I had “health issues.”
Another bomb survivor had recommended EMDR—eye movement desensitization and reprocessing—which uses rhythmic eye movements or applied sensations to dampen the power of emotionally charged memories of past traumatic events. Who knows how it works, but it did for me. Not perfectly, but I was looking for relief, not perfection. I took up knitting and earned praise for being “prolific and persevering.” Years later, I am still pursuing “talented” and “creative.” Eventually I decided to research and write about the August 7 bombing.
Countless authors had penned material about September 11, 2001, with reports, books, articles, self-congratulating memoirs, and the 9/11 Commission Report. I wanted to understand the people, the decisions, and the policies related to August 7, 1998. What had prevented the United States from protecting vulnerable diplomatic facilities in East Africa from a terrorist group hiding out in Afghanistan?
When Osama bin Laden attacked us, he was stateless and significantly short of resources. The Saudi government had revoked his citizenship and frozen his assets two years earlier, and the government of Sudan, which had hosted him for years, had asked him to leave in 1996. Bin Laden went to Afghanistan to live under the protection of the Taliban-Islamist warriors trained in Pakistan, who now controlled several regions with ruthless repression and misogyny. He was under the surveillance of the CIA, the FBI, the NSA, and the National Security Council. How did he manage to blow up two American embassies in distant countries given that level of scrutiny? What had kept the U.S. government from listening to the security concerns of its ambassador in Kenya?
It was fascinating and unpleasant to spend a series of winters sequestered with the faces of scowling jihadists and smug American political figures staring at me from book jackets. I knitted copiously, and I wrote copiously. Who needs another book about al-Qaeda? Who wants to hear about betrayal or read about policies gone awry? And why in the world did I want to spend time in the museum of past hurts? Richard said I needed to write the story, and family and friends agreed. I persevered with my knitting, and I persevered with the writing, meanwhile producing lots of sweaters and promoting leadership among federal executives.
Eventually, like my sweater projects, the story of the August 7 bombing in Nairobi came together. Ironically, it begins the same year I decided to join the Foreign Service.
The fall of the shah of Iran was a strategic surprise. President Jimmy Carter had been in office two years when our ally was chased from his country in a revolution that replaced him with a radical theocracy. The event inspired attention throughout the Muslim world and astonishment in Washington DC. It was not supposed to happen. The shah was our guy, and the militant Ayatollah Khomeini was barely known to us. Under the ayatollah’s watch, sixty-six U.S. government representatives were taken hostage at our embassy in Tehran by Shia Muslim students. A few weeks later, fifty American representatives in our embassy in Islamabad, Pakistan, were almost burned to death in an assault carried out by Sunni Islamists. These things were not supposed to happen, either. At year’s end, the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan. This is where the story of August 7, 1998, begins.
Once upon a time we thought the shah of Iran would never fall. We nurtured policies to support him because he was vital to our Middle East interests—oil, Israel, and the Communist threat—and we had no Plan B should something happen. We had initiated a coup d’état in 1953 to put the shah at the head of a geostrategically important government and then spent decades providing billions of dollars of economic and military assistance in return for platforms for the CIA to keep tabs on Russia, for cheap oil, and for a moderate stance toward Israel. The deal worked for years. The shah implemented draconian policies to force a secular culture on a conservative Shia Muslim community, invested in guns not butter, enabled government corruption, and kept everyone under control with a violent and ruthless intelligence service. As we spied on the USSR, we played deaf, dumb, and blind to realities in Iran.
I knew at the tender age of eighteen that the shah was feared and despised. In Iran’s countryside it was equally clear that people did not embrace the westernized dress and customs of elites in Tehran. I felt a tension in this Muslim country I had not found in Pakistan, and I was hardly an embassy political reporting officer. The tensions mounted over the years, but Washington policy makers would hear or see none of it. The willful ignorance of facts that belie policy—a tendency of administrations across party lines—would contribute to our fate years later.
After a particularly bloody protest on “Black Friday” in 1979, when the shah’s forces gunned down hundreds of demonstrators, the U.S. embassy issued a public statement: “The monarchy is a deeply important institution in Iran, and the Shah is, in our view, the individual most suited to lead the Iranian people to a more democratic system.”1 Meanwhile, the Washington intelligence community was concluding in its National Intelligence Estimate, “Iran after the Shah,” that “the government of Iran has the ability to use as much force as it needs to control violence, and the chances that the recently widespread urban violence will grow out of control is [sic] relatively small.”2
Not everyone at the embassy agreed with that conclusion. Ann Swift, chief of the political section, had this to say:
The people who had been stationed at the embassy through the earlier period thought things were getting better. To somebody like me coming in August, this was the craziest, most lawless situation I’d ever been in. There were mounting demonstrations against the embassy. I mean, you had demonstrations all the time, huge demonstrations. This place was crazy and extremely, extremely dangerous. And for the older officers to minimize what was going on was insane and that’s what they were doing. And they were doing it on orders from Washington. I was told I was stupid, I knew nothing of what I was talking about, I knew nothing about Iran. I had no experience in Iran and shut up small child, and forget it. I still get angry. This was two weeks before we were taken.3
Ann Swift spent 444 days in captivity.
When the Khomeini government refused to release the majority of the Americans taken hostage by student demonstrators, Washington policy makers were outraged and powerless. Rescue efforts failed, and President Carter lost his bid for a second term as president.
Like U.S. presidents before and since, Carter came into office with a domestic agenda—innovative approaches to health care, urban problems, welfare, and energy dependence. In foreign affairs he was fighting a cold war, and he selected a cold warrior, Zbigniew Brzezinski, as his national security advisor. Carter claimed that only an outsider could fix Washington, and he had four short years to make good on his promises.
He tackled his agendas at breakneck speed. The administration created the Department of Energy and the Department of Education, established a national energy policy, took measures to improve the environment, and began the process responsible for deregulating the airline, trucking, rail, communications, and finance industries. In foreign affairs Carter and Brzezinski introduced human rights into policy considerations, negotiated the Camp David Accords between Israel and Egypt, returned the Panama Canal to Panama, and initiated another round of Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT II) with the Soviets.
Then came the fall of the shah and the new Islamic Republic of Iran. That was not the only theocracy to emerge in 1979. In Sudan the military president invited an Islamist scholar, Hassan al-Turabi, to help his government create a pure Islamic state. In Pakistan Gen. Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq, having hanged his civilian predecessor, announced that he would bring a “genuine Islamic order” to his country. As a group of radical Muslim zealots attacked the U.S. embassy in Islamabad, he waited five hours to make good on his international obligation to safeguard foreign diplomats. By the time his security forces arrived, two people lay dead from the initial assault and others suffered injuries and trauma. That night President Carter publicly thanked Zia for saving Americans. Little over a month later, the U.S. government embarked on a strategic partnership with Pakistan.
On Christmas Eve 1979, the Russians invaded Pakistan’s neighbor, Afghanistan, to prop up their allies in the Communist government against persistent insurgents. When Brzezinski learned about it, he had what he called “an excellent idea.”4 Step up covert assistance to Afghan rebels, the warlords who were rebranding themselves mujahedin, or “holy warriors,” to fight the infidel Russians. Use Zia’s intelligence service, ISI, to disseminate U.S. assistance and give Pakistan permission to develop nuclear capability. “[We] must both reassure Pakistan and encourage it to help the rebels. This will require a review of our policy toward Pakistan, more guarantees to it, more arms aid, and alas, a decision that our security problem toward Pakistan cannot be dictated by our nonproliferation policy.”5 It did not matter that the professionals in the field left to fry in a burning embassy considered Zia untrustworthy. Washington and Brzezinski knew better.
Years later Brzezinski was still congratulating himself: “That secret operation was an excellent idea. It had the effect of drawing the Russians into the Afghan trap, and you want me to regret it? The day that the Soviets officially crossed the border, I wrote to President Carter. We now have the opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam War. Indeed, for almost ten years, Moscow had to carry on a war unsupportable by the government, a conflict that brought about the demoralization and finally the breakup of the Soviet empire.”6 Over the next decade, billions of American dollars went to the Pakistani ISI, matched dollar for dollar by Saudi Arabia. The Pakistani intelligence service members, in turn, funneled the funds to militias of choice that practiced a radical brand of fundamentalist Islam.
The call for “jihad,” a holy struggle against the Soviets, echoed throughout the Muslim world. Firebrands like world-renowned Abdullah Azzam and other scholars inspired thousands of men to heed the call. They poured into the border town of Peshawar, Pakistan, to sign up. Among them was a wealthy Saudi construction engineer by the name of Osama bin Laden, an Egyptian physician, Dr. Ayman al-Zawahiri, and an Egyptian cleric, Sheikh Omar Abdel-Rahman. Their recruits would blow up the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.
I began the process to join the Foreign Service in 1979 with no inkling of the path that was unfolding. It never occurred to me that I might face the violence of a genocide or a terrorist attack any more than it occurred to me to aim for the rank of ambassador. I had known the culture and the pecking order of the department from childhood. Management people maintained the platform, services, and cocoon within which U.S. government agencies operated. Consular people adjudicated visas and provided services to Americans. Political and economic policy people ran the place. I was going into management.
Ronald Reagan won the U.S. presidency on a campaign of “Morning in America.” Iran released the hostages after Jimmy Carter left office. Reagan announced that America’s biggest problem was its huge government. He deregulated industries, closed out social programs, and ran up the national debt. He did not change course in international affairs, however. The Cold War against the Soviet Union, aka “Evil Empire,” continued. The Reagan administration adopted the policy of its predecessor to support Afghan warlords and the mujahedin they led. Pakistan’s ISI continued to serve as the funnel for money and weapons; the CIA continued to serve as the lead agency.
The Central Intelligence Agency had been around since the end of World War II, born of the same legislation as the National Security Council. Harry Truman had negotiated the act to bring together the three branches of the military, now under civilian leadership, with the State Department in order to defeat the worldwide threat of communism. Each of the military services came to the table with its own intelligence units. State had but a small, respected division of analysts; it was at a disadvantage from the first. The CIA was created to coordinate intelligence from outside U.S. borders, while the FBI clung jealously to its jurisdiction within the borders. It did not take long for presidents and their national security advisors to recognize and use CIA’s operational capabilities. Unlike other departments accountable to Congress and the American people as well as to the president, the CIA and the NSC had only the president as a client. NSC members needed no Senate confirmation, remained unimpeded by regulation, and, thanks to the CIA, had the means to conduct secret operations anywhere outside of U.S. borders. Its senior advisors could serve as policy counselors, coordinators, micromanagers, or operators. Reagan ran through six national security advisors in eight years and ended up confronting the scandal called Iran-Contra. He did not, however, change his CIA director. William Casey spent six activist years in office and embraced the concept of bringing down the Russians through a proxy war.
According to Coll, “At the CIA station in Islamabad, the new era arrived in the form of visiting delegations from Washington: Pentagon officials carrying satellite maps; special forces commandos offering a course in advanced explosives; and suitcase-carrying congressional visitors who wanted Disney-quality tours of mujahedin camps and plenty of time to buy hand-woven carpets.”7 The men receiving this military largesse adhered to a fundamentalist strain of Islam, to which Washington policy makers showed ignorance and indifference. They did not appear to understand Islam as a religion, either. As a religious historian explained,
In Islam, Muslims have looked for God in history. Their sacred scripture, the Quran, gave them a historical mission. Their chief duty was to create a just community in which all members, even the most weak and vulnerable, were treated with absolute respect. . . . The political well-being of the Muslim community was a matter of supreme importance. Like any religious ideal, it was almost impossibly difficult to implement in the flawed and tragic conditions of history, but after each failure Muslims had to get up and begin again.8
Islam integrated religion into the community’s daily life, and like all religions, it bred moderates and extremists. The latter rallied around fundamentalist political thinking that produced Wahhabism in Saudi Arabia, the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, and the Ayatollah Khomeini in Iran. Their interpretation of the Koran was severe. Their resentment of western ways of thinking and governing dated back to the Crusaders. It was fueled by modern history: political borders redrawn at the whim of colonial powers at the end of World War I; the recognition of the state of Israel in 1948 and humiliating losses of wars and territory to Israel during the 1960s; and westernized social norms. Ignoring their worldview, the United States used these groups during the Cold War as foils against nationalist leaders like President Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt and Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh of Iran when they defied American interests.9 Now Director Casey and his case officers were pushing billions of dollars in kind and in weapons to them through ISI. They brought rabid Islamists to the United States to recruit holy warriors, and they even obtained a legal exemption from reporting on officers, agents, or assets involved in drug smuggling.10
Like most Americans, I was oblivious to our proxy war activities. In the “administrative cone,” as my career track was called, I ran my operations in Dakar and Bombay largely detached from the policy issues that my “substantive” colleagues enjoyed. While the people in political and economic “cones” held most of the top jobs, they had little experience or interest in management. “Training is for dogs,” growled a political officer to me when I returned to Washington as director of the Executive Development Division of the Foreign Service Institute, the department’s “schoolhouse.” Training political and economic reporting officers in management “can’t be done,” said some of my colleagues, never mind that Congress has mandated that it would be done. Most of them never had to manage until they reached senior positions, and then they delegated. For purely pragmatic reasons we changed the focus to leadership, and I started looking at my work world through a new prism.
We interviewed respected senior career colleagues as we designed the seminar. While they told us that teamwork was important, what we actually saw senior people do was negotiate with other Washington peers about decisions, policy pronouncements, and legislative coups in dawn-through-dusk meetings together. That, in turn, generated more meetings and lots of paperwork for their staffs. Ironically, the department’s influence within the Washington national security community had already diminished, along with its resources.11 The cost of getting one’s boss into the right meeting with the right talking points did not yield the benefits of long-term funding or respect from the interagency.
I was taken aback by the disdain for strategic thinking, long-term goals, and short-term measurements. Diplomacy cannot be measured, officials would sniff; it is too dependent on external factors. As to resources, that was the job of the budget people, just like taking care of people was an administrative task.
I had a mandate to confront that attitude, great bosses who gave us resources and attention, and an innovative team. Together we created and delivered state-of-the-art leadership training. It was a tremendous success. “I can’t believe you are an admin officer,” said an economic colleague who was complimenting me on the outcome. “I’d hire you any day!” By the time I had helped to deliver almost a dozen offerings of the Foreign Affairs Leadership Seminar, I had concluded that State was a second-rate organization filled with first-rate people, and I wrote about it in an article I entitled “Leadership at State: The Neglected Dimension.” Richard and I returned to Senegal five years after we had left. This time I was deputy chief of mission for Ambassador George Moose. I would have the chance to practice what we had been preaching and see if it worked in reality.
Osama bin Laden trained, recruited, and waged war with radical Egyptian friends like Dr. Ayman al-Zawahiri and the blind scholar, Omar Abdel-Rahman. The three shared a vision of a pure Islamic state, starting with a victorious holy war in Afghanistan. Their policy was to kill Russian infidels, and their leadership expertise in business, recruitment, training, and battle plans would make it happen. From a wealthy construction family with close ties to the Saudi royal entourage, bin Laden built roads, set up training camps, and even experienced a battle. Tall, quiet-spoken, and polite, he was popular for living a humble life and giving away a lot of money. Al-Zawahiri, a bespectacled man of ordinary features who cultivated a mark in the middle of his forehead to show how fervently he prayed, was a surgeon from an Egyptian family of doctors and scholars. An active member in the Muslim Brotherhood opposition movement, al-Zawahiri was imprisoned and tortured by the Egyptian government after President Anwar Sadat was assassinated. After his release, he headed the militant Islamic Jihad Movement. Abdel-Rahman was a renowned cleric who ran his own radical group opposed to Egypt’s secular government, al-Gama’a al-Islamiyya.
Each of the three men brought singular contributions to their effort to kill infidels. Bin Laden had business skills and a significant bank account. He created a worldwide infrastructure and financed recruiting centers that Abdel-Rahman and al-Zawahiri used as cells and bully pulpits to organize radical Muslim men who also wanted jihad. Washington policy enthusiasts likened them to the international brigade of volunteers who flocked to Spain to fight Franco in the 1930s. The CIA chief then in Islamabad commented that Osama bin Laden “actually did a few good things. He put a lot of money in a lot of right places in Afghanistan.”12 Abdel-Rahman contributed a huge following and preaching skills—he was sent to Brooklyn, New York, where he became known as the Blind Sheikh at the al-Farooq Mosque. Al-Zawahiri brought the experience of militant activities, torture in Egyptian prisons, and enthusiasm for violent action. By the time the Soviets departed Afghanistan in 1989, bin Laden and his associates had established recruiting offices in thirty cities in the United States and more around the world, trained thousands of fervent radicals, and defeated a superpower.
Bin Laden proudly boasted: “The Soviet Union entered Afghanistan in the last week of 1979 and, with Allah’s help, their flag was folded a few years later and thrown on the rubbish heap, and there was nothing left to call the Soviet Union. That victory cleared from Muslim minds the myth of the superpowers.”13 He was now ready to form a base for more holy war.
The purpose of al-Qaeda was “to establish the truth, get rid of evil, and establish an Islamic nation.” Recruits were required to have references, good manners, and a willingness to obey instructions. In return for a loyalty pledge to bin Laden, they would receive a salary commensurate with polygamous family needs, health benefits, yearly vacations, and an annual round-trip ticket home, as well as a buy-out option.14 Bin Laden put himself at the top of the organization, established a clear chain of command heavily influenced by Egyptians, and looked for another jihad. Ayman al-Zawahiri and Sheikh Abdel-Rahman became affiliates, sharing al-Qaeda’s mission and passion for jihad while remaining heads of their own groups. The three represented the policy makers. To make war, they needed implementers. Al-Zawahiri provided the one who played a prominent role in blowing us up in 1998. His name was Ali Mohamed.
Mohamed was mustered out as a major from the Egyptian army after members of his unit assassinated Anwar Sadat. In 1985 in Hamburg, Germany, the CIA hired him as an informant and then fired him for disclosing his role to one of his targets. Nonetheless, he received a “special” visa to the United States, and on his flight to California, he sat next to an American woman whom he married a few weeks later. He was buff, well-educated, and multilingual. The couple settled in Santa Clara, California, where Mohamed promptly established a clandestine cell for al-Zawahiri that would serve as a regional communications hub for al-Qaeda. Ali Mohamed also became a U.S. citizen.
He enlisted in the U.S. Army as a private in 1986, and the army assigned him to a two-year stint at the JFK Special Warfare Center in Fort Bragg, North Carolina. He was promoted to supply sergeant, but he was not just any supply sergeant. He lectured about Islam to Special Forces audiences headed for the Middle East, with little effort to hide his fundamentalist Islamist views.15
On weekends Ali Mohamed left base to train al-Qaeda recruits headed for Afghanistan (even after the war had ended) as they came through one of the branch offices funded by bin Laden, the al-Kifah Refugee Center in Brooklyn. In 1988 Mohamed told his military superiors of his plans to take annual leave to kill some Russians in Afghanistan. Yes, Mohamed told his ranking officer, he knew it was against regulations, but he was going anyway. He met up with al-Zawahiri and bin Laden, trained new jihadists calling themselves “Arab-Afghans,” and may even have enjoyed a battle. He returned to the U.S. Army with ne’er a negative consequence and got an honorable discharge in 1989. That was the year that his mentor, al-Zawahiri, traveled to the United States on a stolen passport raising money for more holy wars. Abdel-Rahman would come a year later to settle into the al-Kifah Refugee Center in Brooklyn, never mind that he was on a “terrorist watch list.”16 In 1989 bin Laden created al-Qaeda, and the last of the Soviet troops departed Afghanistan, a country still at war with itself. It was the year the Berlin Wall crumbled, and it was the year the Cold War ended. It was the year in which a new war machine started.