By JAMES WALSH

"What Clinton is saying is there are two superpowers again: the U.S. and Osama bin Laden."

The day began with no hint of the horror in store. It was Aug. 7, a Friday morning, and staffs at two U.S. embassies in East Africa were looking forward to the weekend. People came and went as usual, but then the routine was punctuated by gruesome double booms. Car bombs parked near the American compounds in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam, the capitals of Kenya and Tanzania, exploded with immense power, killing 224 people and wounding 4,500. For days afterward, investigators from three countries mounted an intense hunt for clues about the culprits behind such a shocking attack. Before a week was out, the face of one man appeared in newspapers around the world: Osama bin Laden.

He looked as if he might have been Hollywood Central Casting's idea of an Arab terrorist, with brooding visage and upper lip seemingly twitched in a sneer. False as such stereotypes are, however, this image represented an adversary all too real for U.S. intelligence agents, who tagged bin Laden as the likely mastermind of the bombings. Termed by Washington "the pre-eminent organizer and financier of international terrorism," the millionaire son of a Saudi Arabian construction magnate abruptly leaped off the pages of counterterrorism files to become a household name. His reputation reached Fu Manchu-like dimensions when the White House ordered cruise missile strikes against his sanctuary in Afghanistan along with a Sudanese factory suspected of chemical weapons work and links with bin Laden. But his Tomahawked encampment reportedly suffered only minor damage, and a frustrated U.S. Justice Department posted a $5 million reward for his capture.

The notoriety is deserved, according to sleuths who have tracked his movements. With a fortune estimated at $300 million, the 41-year-old Saudi exile sits atop a loose network of perhaps 3,000 to 5,000 allies or associates around the world. Bin Laden's hand has been suspected in killings of 18 American peacekeeping troops in Somalia, the 1993 World Trade Center bombing in Manhattan and plots to assassinate Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, Pope John Paul II and U.S. President Bill Clinton. In all events, this leader of jihad on many fronts has emerged as the most formidable Middle Eastern holy warrior. With the depth of his pockets, the geographical span of his reach and the broad appeal of a man who cares more for his faith than his money, bin Laden is a kind of Abu Nidal cubed: a terrorist who makes the Palestinian skyjackings of the 1970s seem almost quaint in retrospect.

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