This was an election year. But in case Americans were not interested in politics, they could watch the Summer Olympics, read about the Whitewater investigations into President Clinton’s prior investments, or watch the start of the riveting O. J. Simpson murder trial on television. There was plenty to keep them busy.
In Washington Richard Clarke put policies, resources, and people in place to confront the growing menace of terrorism. Clinton had signed a “finding” declaring Osama bin Laden a danger to national security, so the paperwork was in order, and he officially sanctioned FBI-CIA cooperation. Coordinating the effort was Clarke’s staff and the super-secret Counterterrorism Security Group (CSG).
In Khartoum, bin Laden was thinking about moving. Someone had tried once again to kill him. The Saudi government had frozen his assets. The Sudanese government had fleeced him by paying their bills for the construction projects he financed with properties like a tannery factory rather than in cash. Further, President Omar el-Bashir’s mood was shifting. What with a never-ending civil war, two irritated and militarized neighbors, Egypt and Ethiopia, and the economic bite of UN economic sanctions, bin Laden’s appeal had waned. As moderates pushed radicals aside in his government, el-Bashir was showing signs he wanted to get back into Washington’s good graces—or at least get out of the doghouse—especially after we closed the U.S. embassy in Khartoum. That was done over the objections of Ambassador Timothy Carney, but with the insistence of the CIA. The asset who reported that embassy personnel were in jeopardy was later proved a liar, but at the time it was imprudent to take chances, especially as an alleged threat was also made against Tony Lake, Clinton’s national security advisor. Finally Sudan’s foreign minister resorted to sending Tony Lake a message when they were both attending the same conference in Algiers: “I am not trying to kill you,” it read. Lake responded, “I am not trying to kill you either.”1
As the embassy pulled out of Khartoum, Carney made clear to Sudan’s government that if it wanted to impress Washington, it had to close down the likes of Hamas, Hezbollah, and al-Qaeda in Sudan and deport Ayman al-Zawahiri and Osama bin Laden. Speaking for the government, the defense minister said fine. Sudan was also ready to arrest bin Laden and hand him over. (They had provided the French with a similar service when they rendered Carlos the Jackal a few years earlier.)2
If the U.S. government had an opportunity, the NSC had an attitude. Christian evangelicals, influential congressional staffers, nongovernmental organizations, and members of the Congressional Black Caucus had maintained pressure for a strong anti-Khartoum policy for years. The reports about threats to Americans only hardened positions. Richard Clarke and Susan Rice, his NSC Africa director colleague, would not be persuaded to interact with the Sudan government.
“There were lots of reasons to be unhappy with Sudan,” Ambassador David Shinn, director of East African Affairs at State, later told the 9/11 Commission. “I did not dispute that the Sudan was subject to severe criticism on many counts. But I saw no point in turning Sudan into an obsession that was not going to achieve any positive results.3 Dick Clarke denied that an offer from Sudan had even been made. He wrote, “The only slivers of truth in this fable are that (a) the Sudanese government was denying its support for terrorism in the wake of the UN sanctions, and (b) the CSG had initiated informal inquiries with several nations about incarcerating bin Laden or putting him on trial. There were no takers.”4
According to other reports, the Clinton administration struggled to find a way to accept Sudan’s offer of rendition, either to the United States, Egypt, or Saudi Arabia, but ultimately they gave up. The Saudis did not want bin Laden fomenting trouble, and so they resorted to paying him—and other Islamist extremists—large sums of money to stay quiet as they decided the delicate royal succession of the day. Egypt did not want him either. The United States was out: the FBI, according to Tony Lake’s successor, Sandy Berger, did not believe the United States had enough evidence to indict bin Laden at that time and therefore opposed bringing him to the United States. Michael Scheuer, head of the CIA’s special bin Laden unit, later explained, “The thinking was that he was in Afghanistan, and he was dangerous, but because he was there, we had a better chance to kill him. But at the end of the day, we settled for the worst possibility—he was there and we didn’t do anything.”5
In May Ali Mohamed helped to move bin Laden, his wives and children, and chosen operatives to Taliban-controlled Afghanistan. Discussions about catching bin Laden in Sudan were now moot. On to other options. The FBI’s Squad I-49 began the legal case against bin Laden under the direction of Assistant U.S. District Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald. A member of his team was seconded to work with the CIA’s Alec Station, headed by Michael Scheuer, to collect intelligence. Others at Alec Station were to coordinate with Agent John O’Neill at the FBI’s New York Office. Clearly I-49 had found a way around “the wall” that prohibited intelligence gatherers from sharing with prosecuting attorneys.6
The CIA and NSA began intercepting communications in Nairobi to better understand what Wadih el-Hage and others were doing. They listened to bin Laden in Afghanistan and Ali Mohamed in California.7 Better than any intercept, however, was an informant. In June Jamal al-Fadl, whom the FBI would call “Junior,” walked into a U.S. embassy in East Africa and said he wanted protection from al-Qaeda. He had stolen money from bin Laden’s coffers and feared the repercussions. During subsequent months of debriefings, Junior described al-Qaeda’s background, structure, mission, objectives, and financial infrastructure. He explained al-Qaeda’s networks and its collaborations with other terrorist groups, including those at the al-Kifah Refugee Center. He gave details about al-Qaeda activities against U.S. soldiers in Somalia and more recent activities in Bosnia. He divulged plans to attack inside the United States or overseas U.S. embassies. He described his own involvement in bin Laden’s efforts to acquire weapons of mass destruction.8 In mid-June an attack in Khobar, Saudi Arabia, gave his interrogators even more questions to ask. A truck bomb had exploded next to one of the Khobar Towers, buildings that housed U.S. Air Force personnel. Nineteen U.S. servicemen were killed, and 498 of many nationalities were wounded. Al-Qaeda was the chief suspect.
While the combined efforts of the FBI and CIA made perfect sense on paper, leading players in these communities proved incapable of overcoming personal animosity and agency prejudices. As al-Qaeda planned war, American protagonists fussed and feuded. FBI agent O’Neill could not abide the CIA’s Michael Scheuer, the head of Alec Station, and they refused to cooperate with one another. Scheuer could not stand Dick Clarke either: “Mr. Clarke was an interferer of the first level, in terms of talking about things that he knew nothing about and killing them. . . . Mr. Clarke was an empire builder. He built the community, and it was his little toy. He was always playing the FBI off against us or us against the NSA.” For his part Dick Clarke said this about Scheuer: “Throwing tantrums and everything doesn’t help. . . . Fine that you came to the same conclusion that we all came to, fine that you’re all worked up about it, and you’re having difficulty getting your agency, the rest of your agency, to fall in line, but not fine that you’re so dysfunctional within your agency that you’re making it harder to get something done.”9 Nor did Clarke like FBI director Louis Freeh. This is what he had to say about Freeh’s race to Saudi Arabia after the highly publicized Khobar Towers bombing:
Freeh should have been spending his time fixing the mess that the FBI had become, an organization of fifty-six princedoms (the fifty-six very independent field offices) without any modern information technology to support them. He might have spent some time hunting for terrorists in the United States, where al-Qaeda and its affiliates had put down roots, where many terrorist organizations were illegally raising money. Instead, he reportedly chose to be chief investigator in high-profile cases like Khobar, the Atlanta Olympics bombing, and the possible Chinese espionage at our nuclear labs. His back channels to the Republicans in the Congress and to supporters in the media made it impossible for the President to dismiss him without running the risk of making him a martyr of the Republican Right and his firing a cause célèbre.10
Meanwhile, the NSA would not share the information from their taps of bin Laden’s phone with the I-49 squad. Nor would it share with the CIA. When it finally did release documents to I-49 after it threatened to build its antennas in Afghanistan, this proved a onetime deal.11
Bin Laden was now settled in the Hindu Kush Mountains under the protection of the Taliban, another set of Islamist jihadists nurtured by Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. With the theatrical backdrop of his Tora Bora cave, he gave press interviews and issued fatwas, religious edicts: kill American troops to get them out of the Arabian Peninsula. This was the consensus of Islamist terrorist groups from Egypt, Algeria, Iran, the Palestinian Liberation Organization, Lebanon, Great Britain, the Balkans, the Persian Gulf, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Sudan. They had overcome rivalries and animus to confer together and agree “to use force to confront all foreign forces stationed in Islamic land.”12 Bin Laden appeared only too happy to deliver the message.
In July, during the Summer Olympics in Atlanta, a bomb exploded at the Centennial Olympic Park, killing one person. Barely a month later, TWA Flight 800 exploded into a ball of fiery debris over the Atlantic just off New York City. All 240 people aboard were killed. Witnesses swore they had seen evidence of a missile attack from the ground. Washington’s attention turned. The perpetrator of the Atlanta bombing turned out to be an American, Eric Rudolph. The cause of the plane crash turned out to be mechanical. It took time and attention away from al-Qaeda to reach those conclusions.
As this was going on, I was spending the summer becoming an ambassador, “extraordinary and plenipotentiary.” I filled out lots of forms concerning our assets; how much money our relatives, dead or alive, had contributed to a political party; whether Richard had ever been arrested; and whether I had ever done anything that, if it became public, would embarrass President Clinton. Once the Senate confirmed me as ambassador designate, I raced around town learning all I could about the interests of the seventeen agencies represented in the embassy. The Defense Department admired the Kenyan military and saw its geostrategic advantages. Commerce saw possibilities marred by corruption. Other agencies predicted that nothing good could happen in the areas of democracy, human rights, poverty reduction, health, or environment as long as Daniel arap Moi remained president. In brief, Kenya at the time was too corrupt for business and development interests, too autocratic for political hopes, and too far away for all but a smattering of American tourists and well-meaning missionaries to care about. That said, Kenya was also a regional economic power, an island of relative peace, a positive player in regional affairs, and an important hub for international organizations and regional transportation.
Colleagues in Diplomatic Security told me Nairobi was a major threat post for crime and a lesser threat for terrorism. I already knew about some of its nefarious residents, including Somali warlords who came to be hosted by the international community to talk peace in five-star hotels. The CIA advised me that a terrorist financier by the name of Osama bin Laden had offices in Nairobi and that they were disrupting his operations. This sounded fine with me.
I took the oath to protect and defend the Constitution in front of a large group of family and friends in the elegant Benjamin Franklin Room of the State Department. Richard held the Bible, and George Moose swore me in. I focused my remarks on Foreign Service families and communities. Mom and Dad were in the audience standing proud.
We left in August. The CIA had been talking to Junior for two months. CIA director George Tenet later wrote: “By 1996 we knew that bin Laden was more than a financier. An al-Qaeda defector [Jamal al-Fadl] told us that [bin Laden] was the head of a worldwide terrorist organization with a board of directors that would include the likes of Ayman al-Zawahiri and he wanted to strike the United States on our soil.”13 They knew that Wadih el-Hage was involved in at least two murders in the United States and that the charities he was running in Nairobi were fronts for terrorist operations. The CIA was tapping his phones. They recognized bin Laden as a danger to national security, with links to the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, dead American soldiers in Somalia, and the conspiracy to blow up landmarks in New York City. They knew that Ali Mohamed, unindicted coconspirator in the Landmarks conspiracy case, had business in Kenya and visited el-Hage. As Junior continued to talk, they learned much more. All of that information was withheld from me as I was handed the responsibility for the safety of all American citizens in Kenya.
Bill Clinton inaugurated his second term in freezing temperatures and talked about domestic reforms and the economy. The Republican Congress focused on a campaign finance scandal and reelected Newt Gingrich as Speaker of the House. Tony Lake’s replacement as national security advisor, Sandy Berger, and the new secretary of state, Madeleine Albright, focused on those aspects of foreign policy that interested them. The press focused on the divorce of Prince Charles and Lady Diana and later on her death. Mad cow disease and El Niño shared the headlines.
The FBI focused on investigating the Oklahoma City bombing, the Khobar Towers bombing, the bombing at the 1996 Summer Olympics, and the explosion of TWA Flight 800. The I-49 Squad, NSA, and Alec Station focused on getting results from wiretaps on the likes of Wadih el Hage, Ali Mohamed, and bin Laden. The Alec Station team, composed mostly of women, also focused on being heard within the CIA. The more the team learned about bin Laden’s network and efforts to buy weapons of mass destruction, the more it sounded the alarm, only to be rebuffed at senior levels. According to later reports, the CIA’s top brass “started to view Scheuer as an hysteric, spinning doomsday scenarios.” Some started referring to him and the bin Laden unit as “the Manson family,” in reference to mass murderer Charles Manson and his female followers.14
There were other problems. Bin Laden’s conversations were in Arabic, and translators were few. The raw data the NSA picked up would not be shared, provoking the CIA into building its own controlled ground station so they could directly intercept calls between bin Laden in Afghanistan and his operations center in Yemen. That gave them only one side of the conversation, however, so Michael Scheuer went to the NSA to analyze their half. Nothing doing.15
What bin Laden was doing in the meantime was putting into motion a plan to blow up the U.S. embassy in Nairobi; the embassy in Dar es Salaam made the list later. He called Wadih el-Hage to Afghanistan in February 1997. According to later trial transcripts, “Wadih el-Hage brought back with him a new policy, a policy to militarize . . . the cell that in 16 or 18 months thereafter would carry out the bombings in East Africa.”16 Soon after that, el-Hage’s deputy, Haroun Fazul, left Nairobi to be trained in Somalia.17
The leadership of the Africa Bureau changed as George Moose left and Susan Rice came over from the NSC. She was pursuing a policy of cultivating so-called Renaissance men among English-speaking African presidents. President Moi was not among them. That meant the embassy was unimpeded by Washington interest, and we could interpret the policy of “peace, democracy, prosperity” ourselves. In addition to U.S. interests in Kenya, our mission ran assistance programs to southern Somalia, and we housed the tiny American staff of the U.S. embassy to Sudan. We had a large community and a reputation for poor morale.
I settled into my role as chief of mission, and Richard threw himself into his role as Top Spouse, immediately volunteering his accounting skills to the Employees Association, which ran the commissary and video club. I worked on establishing a constructive relationship with President Moi and had a breakthrough when I respectfully refused to be bullied. We were in his severe gray office at State House discussing Kenya’s political culture—and how much I did not understand, according to him—when he said accusingly, “I have never once heard you say anything nice about my political party.”
“You have never once heard me say anything nice about any political party,” I retorted.
“You are right,” he admitted.
With that remark we turned a corner, and after a while he actually began to listen to me. Over time we disagreed aplenty. But I found President Moi a man of his word and helpful in many areas of mutual interest––unless it had to do with how he was running his country.
Security concerns permeated both policy and community discussions. Tranquil by comparison to some of its neighbors, Kenya nonetheless faced significant challenges: ethnic tensions, extreme poverty exacerbated by the floods and drought from El Niño, and a political class with a reputation for stealing. Nairobi’s crime threat was “high.” The embassy community struggled to find safe places for teenagers to hang out together, while our security team strained to maintain the balance between advising, dictating, and terrifying people, newcomers in particular. We implemented weekly checks of the handheld radios Americans received for security communications and gave every family the choice of its own call sign. The consular team reenergized the warden system, our communications link to American citizens, most of them missionaries. I held town meetings at my residence and opened the tennis court and pool to the American employee community.
The embassy was located at one of the city’s busiest corners, across from the railroad station, a major bus stop, and a small college. As political demonstrations increased with the advent of political campaigns, I could stand at my window overlooking Moi Avenue and watch young people run by like gazelles, the police at their heels pursuing like predators. Behind them, the media, like the tourists, chased the game to snap the photos. Now and then, tear gas would seep into the first-floor Consular Section waiting room, and we counted the gas masks. Frequently we issued embassy radio-net announcements advising family members of alternate routes should they be coming for a medical appointment or grocery shopping. Once a colleague stopped the brutal beating of a protestor on the other side of our fence. We were in the thick of it, and I let my Washington colleagues know it.
George Tenet became CIA director after a year as “acting” and began on a high note. A month earlier he had told an assembled and elated staff, “No terrorist should sleep soundly as long as this agency exists.”18 The rendition program was working: the gunman who had shot and killed CIA employees in 1993 was kidnapped into U.S. custody and was now on American soil. Why not “render” bin Laden? Dick Clarke later reported:
By 1996 and 1997 the CSG was developing plans to snatch bin Laden from Afghanistan. One plan called for an Afghan snatch team to drive a bound-and-gagged bin Laden to a dirt strip on which a CIA-owned aircraft would briefly land and then head back out of Afghanistan. . . . The flaw that developed in the snatch was our inability to know when it would occur. . . . A variation on the plan was developed. The Afghan snatch team would not just wait for bin Laden to drive by, they would go pick him up at his “farm” at the same time that the CIA aircraft was flying into the country.19
Unfortunately, the farm was a fortress, and the CSG decided against the attempt. Tenet assured the 9/11 Commission years later that more than seventy renditions had been organized before 2001, but none got to bin Laden.20
Sudan’s president, Omar al-Bashir, kept up efforts to persuade the U.S. government to cooperate. To pass his message along, he found a multimillionaire Pakistani American businessman personally acquainted with President Clinton and National Security Advisor Sandy Berger. Al-Bashir also wrote to Lee Hamilton (D-IN), the ranking Democrat on the House Foreign Affairs Committee: “We extend an offer to the FBI’s Counterterrorism units and any other official delegations which your government may deem appropriate, to come to the Sudan and work with [us] in order to assess the data in our possession and help us counter the forces your government, and ours, seek to contain.” Like the other offers, the letter was sent to the NSC and received no reply.21
On the more constructive side, months of interagency discussion about reopening the U.S. embassy in Khartoum finally came to a consensus. Yes, do it. The decision was endorsed by Secretary of State Albright and sent to the NSC for approval. The NSC advisor for Africa, Susan Rice—soon to be assistant secretary for African affairs at State—and Dick Clarke would have none of it, however, and asked Sandy Berger to overrule this decision. Albright withdrew her consent, and State announced that it was scrapping its own initiative.22 American intelligence agents waited until 2001 to see the files Sudan kept on bin Laden.
On August 21 members of Alec Station and I-49 Squad arrived in Nairobi to raid Wadih el-Hage’s house with help from Kenyan police. Like other joint ventures, it involved a kerfuffle. Michael Scheuer later reported:
For most of a year the bin Laden unit prepared for an operation in a foreign city that was set to come to fruition in late-summer 1997. The unit’s lead U.S.-based officer on this operation was an extraordinarily able analyst from [the FBI]; she knew the issue cold. Days before the operation occurred the [FBI] ordered her back to its headquarters. She protested, but was told that she would not be promoted if she balked at returning. I protested to my superiors and to the three most senior officers of the [FBI] who were then in charge of terrorism. All refused to intervene. The operation was much less well exploited because of the loss of this officer.23
I knew a joint CIA-FBI team was coming to talk with Wadih el-Hage, with Kenyan police in the lead. I knew he was a person of interest to the intelligence community because of his relationship with the terrorist financier, Osama bin Laden. I did not have the right to know the purpose, the substance, or anything else relating to the raid on his house lest “sources and methods” be revealed.
When the Kenyan-American group arrived at el-Hage’s house, only his American wife was there to let them in. El-Hage was on his way back from another planning meeting with bin Laden in Afghanistan, and el-Hage’s deputy, Haroun Fazul, was on the coast visiting with another confederate, a man named Mohammed Odeh who ran a fishing business. The Americans left with el-Hage’s computer, diaries, disks, and address book and went to the airport to meet el-Hage himself with the same message they had given his wife: return to the United States.24 When he did just that, I was told, the al-Qaeda office was no more. That was not the case.
When el-Hage took the Americans’ advice to return to the United States, the FBI was waiting for him. He was taken into custody when he got off the plane in New York City and offered a deal if he would switch sides. He declined and ended up in front of a secret grand jury questioned by Assistant U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald. El-Hage chose to lie repeatedly and was allowed to go on his way to Arlington, Texas.25
That left I-49 and Alec Station with el-Hage’s computer and the contents of his address book, which included Ali Mohamed’s phone number. On the computer the FBI found a document indicating that he had been sent to Nairobi to prepare activists for a new policy.26 Even more interesting was what el-Hage’s deputy, Fazul, had written clearly in a state of panic.
Fazul had read an article in a British newspaper that bin Laden’s chief financial officer had turned himself in to the Saudi Arabian authorities and was telling all. Further, Fazul had discovered that el-Hage’s phone was tapped.
We can now state that the security position in the cell is at 100 percent danger. In this report, I will try to explain the reasons that make us feel that danger. I will also try to offer my recommendation to honored and wise high command which I know understands everything and we hope is seeking the best. . . . There is an American-Kenyan-Egyptian intelligence activity in Nairobi aiming to identify the names and residences of the members who are associated with the Shaykh [bin Laden] since America knows well that the youth who lived in Somalia were members of the Shaykh’s cell and the ones who killed the Americans in Somalia. They know that since Kenya was the main gateway for those members, there must be a center in Kenya.27
Fazul then described security measures he had taken and with whom, listing al-Qaeda cohorts in Qatar, Germany, and Sudan. He wrote that he and an associate collected el-Hage’s files and put them in another location. The partisans from Mombasa called, he continued, and he told them never to call el-Hage’s home number again, “as I am one hundred percent sure that the telephone is tapped.” As to activities at hand, Fazul asked, “Are we ready for that big clandestine battle? . . . We, the East Africa cell members, do not want to know about the operation plans since we are just implementers.” He did, however, ask that they be informed in a timely way to “prepare ourselves . . . or so that we may go underground for a while.” Fazul ended the letter suggesting that future communications with the Nairobi cell be conducted by internet or fax.28
In front of the secret grand jury, Patrick Fitzgerald asked el-Hage about the files Fazul mentioned in the security letter. El-Hage gave detailed instructions and a map. When FBI investigators looked for them after the bombings in 1998, they found the boxes exactly where el-Hage had said they would be. “The hardest thing to understand in retrospect is why U.S. law enforcement did nothing to disrupt the activities of the Nairobi cell,” wrote John Miller later. “When el-Hage left Kenya, Haroun Fazul simply stepped into the vacant leadership slot and seamlessly resumed preparations for the embassy bombings. A garden-variety robbery crew would show at least as much resilience. Did the CIA and the FBI still not yet understand that an al-Qaeda soldier was eminently replaceable?”29
A few weeks after questioning el-Hage in New York City, Patrick Fitzgerald and I-49 Squad agents flew to Sacramento to have a conversation with Ali Mohamed. Over dinner Mohamed frankly admitted that he had been in Somalia in 1993 during the battle of Mogadishu and that he had trained bin Laden’s bodyguards in 1994. Bin Laden’s people, he said, were responsible for killing the U.S. soldiers. They did not need a fatwa, or religious edict, to make war on the United States, since it was obvious that America was the enemy.30
An agent present remembered, “He said that he was in touch with hundreds of people he could call on in a moment’s notice that could be, quote, ‘operational,’ and wage jihad against the United States. Very brazenly, he said, ‘I can get out anytime and you’ll never find me. I’ve got a whole network. You’ll never find me.’”
“This is the most dangerous man I have ever met. We cannot let this man out on the street,” Patrick Fitzgerald was quoted as saying. But he did exactly that. Fitzgerald put a wiretap on Ali’s computer and his phone, and that was that. An agent told author Peter Lance, “The Sacramento [FBI] office did a wonderful job in getting into his apartment, wiring it up, and exploiting his computer. So we were able to down a lot of stuff.” After quoting the agent, Peter Lance wondered, “That stunning revelation, published here for the first time in print, raises an even bigger question: If Fitzgerald and the agents in his bin Laden squad had access to Mohamed’s phone and hard disk, why didn’t they come to understand his role as a key player in the embassy bombing plot?”31 Instead, Ali Mohamed was free to fly to Pakistan a few weeks later to meet Ayman al-Zawahiri, who by now had become bin Laden’s partner.
The threat from al-Haramain, the Islamist “charity” near the Somali border, came after the raid on el-Hage’s house. I had no context in which to place the threat, and Washington provided none. It was only as President Moi was making good on his promise to disband the organization that I heard the FBI-CIA wanted to return to interview the men. I agreed with my colleague in Nairobi that we would not press the Kenyan officials if this proved difficult, which it did. We needed their support and willingness to go the extra mile for us. After the bombing, I read that these interviews could have been important. If so, someone should have made that point with me at the time.
In December I was in Washington listening to a colleague lecture me to “stop nagging” about security when a man named Mustafa Mahmoud Said Ahmed walked into our embassy in Nairobi with information that he knew of a group planning to detonate a bomb-laden truck inside our underground parking garage. It would involve several vehicles and stun grenades. The CIA in Washington said he had made up the story. It then issued two reports,32 neither of which I saw, and sent word to me that he was a “fabricator.” On Christmas Eve, amid holiday festivities, I dispatched yet another cable to Washington noting increased crime and political violence, the al-Haramain threat, the walk-in warning of a bombing, and a personal threat against me from the Holy Spirit Movement in Uganda, predecessor to the Lord’s Resistance Army. Let my colleagues in Washington be irritated. The threats were real.