Inside The Hunt For Osama

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For the 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.

The CIA was battling bin Laden on additional fronts. In the spring of 1998, a small CIA-FBI team collected intelligence on him by parking itself at what agents call the "zero line," Pakistan's border with Afghanistan. Back at Langley, CIA and Army special-operations officers drafted contingency plans for commandos to fight their way into Afghanistan for a snatch. CIA director George Tenet nixed the operation, fearing too many U.S. casualties. But in June the agency scored a win. CIA officers working with Albanian police grabbed four members of a bin Laden-affiliated group, the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, who planned to bomb the U.S. embassy in Tirana.

It was before sunrise in Langley on Aug. 7 when the bombs went off in Africa. Within hours of the blast, the CIA's counter-terrorism officers began crowding into their "fusion center," a small room used to monitor terror crises overseas that is crammed with computers and large screens displaying satellite photos. The carpet still had burn marks from the time an excited Tenet dropped his cigar upon learning that CIA officers had apprehended Mir Amal Kasi, who had murdered two agency employees outside Langley. Tension was high as early casualty figures flowed in from Africa. Almost immediately, the CIA officers had a good idea who triggered the explosions at Nairobi and Dar es Salaam. The bin Laden cell. The covert operation the year before apparently had not cleaned out that nest of terrorists.

The conclusion hardened within days. The FBI took Odeh and al-'Owhali into custody in Nairobi, and they began spilling secrets. The security protecting bin Laden's network was porous, and other informants began talking, revealing that bin Laden planned assaults on other U.S. embassies in Africa, Asia and the Middle East.

Though the U.S. soon flexed its military muscle with the cruise-missile strike against bin Laden, and his network has been quiet for four months, Washington still sees him as a major threat. The White House has ordered stepped-up efforts to disrupt the terror network, but with mixed results. Treasury Department officials have made no headway dismantling bin Laden's financial empire. Most of his investments are in European or African companies that are unaffected by U.S. economic sanctions and don't deal in dollars, which Treasury could track. The State Department, likewise, has not convinced Afghanistan's ruling Taliban to evict bin Laden so the FBI can get its hands on him.

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