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AFP Osama bin Laden, in Afghanistan [an error occurred while processing this directive]
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It was different this time. In other bombings of U.S. installations abroad, particularly the Khobar Towers military barracks in Saudi Arabia, the trail of the culprits has been unclear, leading in various directions. This time the U.S. had a suspect right from the start: Osama bin Laden, the multimillionaire Saudi businessman turned Islamist revolutionary, a self-declared scourge of America. When the evidence against him piled up, quickly and conclusively in the eyes of the Administration, Clinton decided to attack. He had the villain, the targets and an opportunity he could hardly ignore. A military blow against bin Laden's camps in Afghanistan could be retaliation, deterrent and disruption all at once. Knowing it was more likely to be a beginning than an end, he gave the order to go ahead with Operation Infinite Reach on Aug. 14. The Central Intelligence Agency has been watching bin Laden for years, and the two bombings in Africa on Aug. 7 looked like his sort of operation. Only last May he had promoted a fatwa, a religious instruction, calling for attacks on Americans, both military personnel and civilians. By the weekend after the embassy blasts, the CIA's 24-hour-a-day counterterrorism center at Langley, Virginia, was putting the case together from informants, radio and telephone intercepts, defectors from groups associated with bin Laden, spy satellites, bankers and businessmen. What U.S. National Security Adviser Sandy Berger calls "substantial amounts of credible information from many sources and many methods" were pointing to bin Laden. So were friendly intelligence services in Israel, Jordan, Pakistan, Egypt, Malaysia and several African countries, a U.S. intelligence official told TIME. This information did not necessarily mean the U.S. could take bin Laden to trial and convict him. The kind of evidence needed to accuse specific individuals of crimes is being collected by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, which says the process will probably take months. The CIA effort was aimed at making a firm judgment on "who had overall responsibility for the operation, who funded it, not who actually wired the bomb." Could this stand up in a court of law? "Probably not," says a senior U.S. official. "But when you put together the conversations intercepted, the overhead surveillance and the human intelligence, the intelligence community was able to paint a picture that concluded bin Laden was responsible." The picture depicted the East Africa bombings as the work of a combination of terror groups, including the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, supported by bin Laden. There was more to come. "Credible evidence" indicated other U.S. embassies were to be hit--possibly those in Albania, Eritrea, Malaysia, Uganda or Yemen. The State Department temporarily closed more than half a dozen vulnerable embassies to review security measures. "We anticipated there could be future truck bombs," said Defense Secretary William Cohen.
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