So it was for Jim Owens, a historian from Falls Church, Va., who at around 10:30 in the morning last Friday was sitting in the office of the acting United States consul in the American Embassy in the Tanzanian capital of Dar es Salaam. Owens was talking about a 100-day trek he had just made through central Africa, following the route once taken by the body of 19th-century missionary and explorer David Livingstone on its nine-month journey home to England. Suddenly the embassy official flew across the desk and landed on top of Owens. “It felt like the impact came before I heard the sound of the explosion,” Owens told NEWSWEEK. “All the glass in the office just disappeared; and then all hell broke loose.”
A bomb had exploded just outside. According to Tanzanian officials, it had been attached to the underside of a tanker truck that was entering the compound. The guardpost was destroyed; despite being shielded by thick concrete-and-iron walls (the building had belonged to Israel, and had decent security), four floors of one side of the embassy were blown off. Owens and the diplomat struggled to free a woman pinned under a filing cabinet and moved toward the stairwell. They could not know it, but at almost exactly the same time, 400 miles to the north, a pickup truck turned in to a parking lane off Haile Selassie Avenue in the Kenyan capital of Nairobi. The truck passed guards from the Cooperative Bank of Kenya, which occupies a 21-story building, turned left toward the underground parking garage of the American Embassy, one building from the bank, and stopped in front of a small guardpost at the top of the ramp to the garage. According to a Kenyan Army officer supervising cleanup operations the day after the bombing, the guard didn’t like the look of the driver, and called for the assistance of a U.S. Marine.
The American ambassador to Kenya, Prudence Bushnell, was on the top floor of the Cooperative Bank building, discussing a scheduled visit by the American secretary of Commerce, William Daley, with Joseph Kamotho, Kenya’s Trade minister. There was an explosion, and the building shook. Bushnell asked Kamotho if there was construction going on in the area; Kamotho thought the noise might have come from the nearby railroad station. Then a blast hit the building, Kamotho thinks from a second explosion. “I just saw blood,” said Kamotho. “We were all cut up, running for our lives.” Kamotho walked down 21 flights to the street (Bushnell later could not recall how she got out of the building), where something like a modern form of hell awaited him.
The windows in the Cooperative Bank tower had been blown away, and the bomb had hit the back of the embassy with such force that the blast ripped off bombproof doors and blew out windows at the front of the building. (At a briefing soon after the bombs, U.S. Under Secretary of State Thomas Pickering conceded that neither embassy would meet the building and security standards imposed by Congress in 1986, and that was especially true in Nairobi.) But neither the bank nor the embassy had taken the full blast; that was reserved for the building that stood in between them, the seven-story Ufundi Cooperative House, which held offices and a secretarial school. The entire building crumbled, killing dozens instantly and trapping many more in the wreckage. Abraham Muthogo Kamau, a 28-year-old corporate analyst, was in his office on the ground floor of Ufundi House. Like Kamotho, Kamau heard an initial blast, got up from his desk and went to investigate. The next thing he knew, he was outside the building on the street, having been thrown. A passerby loaded him into a car and rushed him to the hospital, where, the next day, he explained why he was there: “God loves me,” said Kamau.
Others were not so lucky. By Saturday night the death toll had risen to 148, nine in Dar es Salaam and 189 in Nairobi, where more than 4,300 were said to have been injured. Of those 11 were American, all killed in Nairobi. The first to be identified was Sgt. Kenneth R. Hobson II, 27, who had served in the Persian Gulf and spent the last year in Kenya. He came from Lamar, Mo., where his mother, Bonnie, and father, Kenneth R. Hobson Sr., await their son’s body. He was, says Mrs. Hobson, “a very loving person, full of life, who made friends wherever he went.”
In the Nairobi morgue, where Kenyans looked for their loved ones, bodies were piled six high. Many were hard to identify–two of them little more than bundles of charred flesh and bone–and all were decomposing fast. Chief pathologist Alex Olumbe said the 22 members of his staff were overwhelmed. In Dar es Salaam, too, many of the bodies were charred beyond recognition, and some, as yet uncounted, may have been pulverized in the blast; U.S. Charge d’Affaires John Lange told Tanzanian Prime Minister Frederick Sumaye that there may be some dead “we never know about–bypassers and pedestrians in the area.” In Washington, Bill Clinton condemned “these acts of terrorist violence. . .they are inhuman.”
Even as he spoke, the relief effort had begun. Within nine hours of the blast, C-141s from Germany and Andrews Air Force Base near Washington were airborne. They were loaded with medical supplies, dozens of FBI agents and forensic explosives experts. Firefighters from Fairfax County, Va., specialists in rescuing survivors, were on their way, too, accompanied by the same sniffer dogs that had been sent to Oklahoma City. Altogether, some 150,000 pounds of equipment and medical supplies were dispatched immediately–and that was just the U.S. contribution.
On the ground and around the world, the question was asked: what hatred is it that drives people to strike at America with such venom that they can shrug at the death and injury of thousands of Africans, and possibly welcome their own? (Almost certainly, some of the bombers died in the blasts.) The search for a solution to these crimes will start in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam, where clues may be hard to find. The first FBI investigators on the scene in Kenya shook their heads in amazement at the “contamination” of the crime site; the parking lot where the bomb went off had been bulldozed, with debris hauled away. U.S. officials had to stop the Kenyans from cutting down charred, leafless trees; fragments from the truck and even trace elements from the bomb are likely to be embedded in the wood.
In the end, motive may turn out to be as important a pointer as physical evidence, but one day after the bombs, the only organization to have claimed responsibility in public was a group that had not been heard from before. The Islamic Army for the Liberation of the Holy Places said it had planted the bombs in protest of the “occupation of Islamic sites in the Arabian peninsula,” and called for the release from prison of Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman, currently serving time in the United States for plotting bombings in New York. Speculation, as it always does, ran rife and came cheap; but (ask any Arab who lived in the Midwest after the Oklahoma City bomb) speculation after incidents of terror has a habit of being wrong. Still, the common assumption was that the bombers would be found somewhere in that netherworld of almost stateless men who have fought in the muddled battles of the post-cold-war world. Soon enough, this puzzle will take sleuths to places a long way from East Africa or Washington–to Afghanistan or Albania, Bosnia or Burundi.
Africa itself is not a stable place; Rwandan or Burundian Hutu exiles, keen to strike a blow at the American patrons of their Tutsi enemies, could have had a motive to bomb the embassies. In Washington, though, an African source of the terror was discounted (with the notable exception of Sudan). “On a scale of 1 to 10, that’s a 1,” says a CIA official. Car bombs themselves are not sophisticated, but the fact that two attacks were made almost simultaneously speaks to an impressive degree of organization. “These were not amateurs,” says the CIA official.
So: who are the professionals? Though it’s too early to come to even tentative conclusions, security and intelligence sources around the world suspect that the bombers will be found in one of the many Islamic groups who have shown themselves prepared and able to wage war on the United States. The possible list of those with a motive, a track record or both is dauntingly long. The CIA, for example, has been running covert actions in southern Sudan aimed at the Islamic Sudanese government; in late 1997 Secretary of State Madeleine Albright unveiled tough new sanctions against Sudan because of its sponsorship of international terror and its abysmal human-rights record. Followers of at least four radical Islamic groups are known to operate out of Sudan. So bad had relations between the two countries become that a couple of years ago the United States moved its American personnel, including its local CIA station, out of Khartoum–to Nairobi. But there is no prior record of official Sudanese involvement in anything like last week’s horror.
Again, some anti-American factions in Iran, perturbed by a possible improvement of relations between Washington and the government of President Mohamed Khatami, might have had a motive for the bombing. In the use of cars and trucks packed with explosives, last week’s events called to mind 1988’s attacks on American targets like the Marine barracks and embassy in Lebanon. Those atrocities were carried out by Hizbullah, or the Party of God, which is backed by Iran; but in the 1990s Hizbullah has left American interests alone, allegedly focusing its efforts outside Lebanon on Israeli and Jewish targets.
Perhaps for that reason, in the immediate aftermath of the bombs, security sources looked elsewhere–to a terrorist group, and a man, who appear to be linked. The man is Osama bin Laden, a rich Saudi financier born in 1957, who, with other Islamists, fought against the Soviet forces occupying Afghanistan in the 1980s. Bin Laden’s Saudi passport was seized in 1994, after which he allegedly established a terrorist training camp in Sudan; his base is now thought to be in Afghanistan, where he was interviewed by ABC News earlier this year. Bin Laden has long been suspected by American sources of involvement in terrorist attacks on American targets, including a car bomb in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, in 1995 that killed five Americans, and the bombing of the Khobar housing complex near Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, in 1996, in which 19 U.S. service personnel died. American authorities have never been able to pin anything on him: “If he arrived in New York today, could the FBI arrest him? No,” says a retired CIA officer. But he certainly spews hate for Americans; in the ABC interview, bin Laden said: “We believe that the biggest thieves in the world and the biggest terrorists in the world are the Americans. The only way for us to defend these assaults is to use similar means.” This year alone bin Laden has issued a handful of fatwas, or religious instructions, urging attacks against U.S. interests not just in Muslim areas but also, for the first time, anywhere in the world. Bin Laden’s network is said to include many cells in Africa, including Kenya, where CIA personnel have had people associated with him under surveillance.
The group under suspicion in the bombings is Islamic Jihad (in the tangled web of terrorism, sometimes called “Egyptian” Islamic Jihad), responsible for the assassination of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat in 1981. In recent years, the organization has been credited with the December 1995 bombing of the Egyptian Embassy in Islamabad, Pakistan, and a 1997 attack on a tourist market in Cairo. Islamic Jihad’s leader, Ayman el-Zawahri, is known to be a close associate of bin Laden’s, who, according to U.S. sources, allegedly funds the Egyptian group. In February this year, bin Laden convened a meeting at which a number of Islamist groups, including Islamic Jihad, formed an umbrella organization–The World Islamic Front for Crusade Against Jews and Crusaders.
Western officials have been watching el-Zawahri carefully since early July, when he faxed a statement to a Kuwaiti newspaper. In the fax, el-Zawahri said, “The Islamic movement is now in agreement on the need for a jihad [against America and Israel].” The context of the message is intriguing. In three separate operations in June and July, a total of four members of Islamic Jihad were picked up in Tirana, the capital of Albania, allegedly on tips from American intelligence. All four of them were later flown to Cairo, where at least two of them were wanted on terrorist charges. Last Wednesday, two days before the bombing, Islamic Jihad released a statement to the London-based newspaper Al-Hayat, blaming the arrests of those and three more of their colleagues on Israel and the United States and vowing vengeance. The communique concluded: “We are interested in briefly telling the Americans that their message has been received and that the response, which we hope they will read carefully, is being prepared, because we, with God’s help, write it in a language that they understand.”
Were the bombs in Africa that response? An Islamic Jihad spokesman denies that the group had anything to do with the terror attacks. “Islamic Jihad did not do the bombings,” asserts this source, who, referring to the message from the Islamic Army for the Liberation of the Holy Places, says, “The context of the message says it’s Osama bin Laden.” But since American intelligence sources believe that Islamic Jihad and bin Laden are joined at the hip, it’s not clear what this proves.
With a fragment of explosive here, an intercepted cell-phone call there; with a lot of shoe leather and even more luck, the search for those responsible for the horror in Africa will continue. Computer records of international banking transactions and airline tickets will be sifted slowly. And in homes across America–but in many, many more of them in Africa–families will be wondering why their son, daughter, husband, wife or friend was blown, crushed or cut to death for a cause in which they had no interest, by a force they could not know. TARGETING AMERICANS ABROAD
Last week’s near-simultaneous African bombings were the latest in a series of attacks on U.S. embassies and bases overseas.
1965 Saigon: A Viet Cong terrorist explodes a car bomb outside the U.S. Embassy, killing 20, including two Americans. This was the first deadly attack on a U.S. embassy.
1979 Tehran: Islamic students storm the U.S. Embassy and hold 52 Americans hostage for 444 days. They demand the return of ousted Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, who is in New York for medical treatment.
1983 Beirut: A massive car bomb demolishes much of the U.S. Embassy, kills 17 Americans and forces the embassy to move to the suburbs.
1983 Beirut: A suicide bomber driving a yellow Mercedes truck packed with explosives destroys a U.S. Marine temporary barracks, killing 241 American servicemen and injuring more than 80.
1983 Kuwait City: Six people are killed and dozens more are wounded after Islamic fundamentalists set off bombs outside the U.S. and French embassies.
1984 Beirut: A van drives past barricades protecting the U.S. Embassy annex and explodes, killing two Americans and injuring the ambassador.
1995 Riyadh: A car-bomb attack on a temporary U.S. training facility kills five Americans.
1996 Dhahran: A truck bomb explodes outside a U.S. Air Force housing complex, killing 19 and injuring 500.
