Word: attacked
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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State Department officials now question whether the CIA missed clues to a future attack in those papers. Intelligence officials insist that none of the evidence taken revealed a bombing plot. Bin Laden definitely had a cell in Nairobi, the CIA reported to the embassy at the time, but the agency had no idea what he planned to do with it. Bin Laden had made plenty of public threats against the U.S., but the CIA believed he would be most likely to carry them out in Persian Gulf countries, where there was a U.S. military presence he hated, not in East...
...months later, in November 1997, another informant walked into the Nairobi embassy. He was Mustafa Mahmoud Said Ahmed, an Egyptian, who warned that unnamed terrorists planned to car bomb the compound. Ahmed had details about the planned attack--details that would end up being eerily similar to what happened in the bombing nine months later. (He is under arrest in Dar es Salaam, accused in the Tanzania embassy blast...
...next nine months, East Africa went off the intelligence radar screen. No more CIA reports of terror threats were delivered to the Nairobi embassy. In hindsight, it was probably a tip-off that something bad might happen. Terror cells go quiet before they attack. The CIA thought it had busted up the bin Laden cell, but during the silent period, "the B-team came in," says a U.S. intelligence official. Mohamed Rashed Daoud al-'Owhali and Mohamed Sadeek Odeh, trained in explosives at a bin Laden camp, eventually joined Fazul in Nairobi to organize the strike...
...still looking at targets to hit, and the CIA continues covert operations to trip up bin Laden operatives. His aides have recently been arrested in Britain and Germany. Three months ago, intelligence sources tell TIME, the CIA broke up a bin Laden ring that had been planning an attack on the U.S. embassy in Baku, Azerbaijan. Egyptian terrorists identified in the plot were deported to Cairo...
Washington remains sure that bin Laden will strike back. And when he draws blood again, all the past covert operations will be deemed failures because they did not prevent the latest attack. In the calculus of terrorism, the last side to show its fangs becomes the victor for the moment. "The game is tilted in Osama's favor until he's gone," admits a White House aide. "That's the problem we face." If so, this may be a war--for now--without...