Losing Bin Laden

How Bill Clinton's Failures Unleashed Global Terror

Richard Miniter

• Publisher: Regnery
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780895260482
• eBook ISBN: 9781621571117
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political History & Theory
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Journalist Rich Miniter uses his unparalleled access to sources and stories throughout the Middle East, Africa, and the United States. He paints a devastating portrait of how close the U.S. military was to killing bin Laden--on multiple occasions--and how, each time, Clinton dropped the ball and allowed bin Laden to grow stronger and more dangerous.

CHAPTER ONE 1992

BIN LADEN STEPS OUT OF THE SHADOWS

ADEN, YEMEN—Osama bin Laden’s first attack on Americans began as the sky darkened over the windy port city of Aden, in an unstable desert republic called Yemen, located on the southwestern tip of the Arabian Peninsula.

This largely unknown attack was the start of a deadly pattern. It was President-elect William Jefferson Clinton’s first face-off with bin Laden. It was December 29, 1992.

Bin Laden’s men looked forward to a night of murder and glory. They had trained and fought together in Afghanistan.¹ They had patiently studied their targets and built their bombs. In less than an hour, they would start a new jihad.

Their targets were two skyscrapers at opposite ends of the harbor, the Goldmore and Aden Hotels. These hotels were islands of Western culture, with alcohol, rock music, and even Christmas lights.² And, as the only international five-star hotels in the city, they were also beacons of luxury that offered swimming pools and a disco, places where casually dressed men and women could flirt, drink, and dance. There was much in these targets that would displease a fundamentalist Muslim.

But, most importantly, these hotels were temporary homes to almost one hundred U.S. Marines.

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For the Marines, it was not supposed to be a combat posting, just a standard supply operation hundreds of miles from battle. The Marine Corps’ Aerial Refueler/Transport Squadron 352, part of the Third Marine Aircraft wing, were there to fly giant KC-130 Hercules transports out of Aden to Somalia. For the other Marine units, Aden was a way station, a comfortable bed in a luxury hotel before shipping out to the dusty, dangerous outskirts of Mogadishu, Somalia.

There was no compelling military reason to station Marines in Yemen, where they handled only one major cargo flight per day—out of the eighteen per day bound for Somalia from other, more active bases. This was political make-work. At the time, Yemen was a terrorist haven that famously abstained from a UN vote condemning Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait. Still, both the U.S. State Department and Yemen were eager to improve relations, provided by stationing a few Marines in Aden.

Yet, it was the symbolic presence of the U.S. Marines on the Arabian Peninsula that enraged Osama bin Laden. Days before Clinton was to be sworn in as president, bin Laden was all but unknown to American intelligence. But they were about to find out.

It was after nine in the evening when a security guard spotted two men³ squatting near a parked car in front of the Aden Hotel.⁴ Were they trying to place something under the car? Car bombs were common enough in Yemen to make the guard suspicious. As the guard walked over to investigate, one of the men ran toward him, toting a suitcase.⁵ The man had a grim look on his face. Before the guard could speak to him, the bomb-rigged suitcase exploded.⁶ The terrorist howled in pain; his right arm had vanished in the blast. His clothes were singed and coated in his own blood. Hot debris from the bomb slammed into both the guard and the bomber’s accomplice, a shaking eighteen-year-old. All three lay wounded and stunned.

Police arrived quickly. The wounded guard gave a hurried report. One team took the guard and the two injured terrorists to a hospital. Another police unit set to work to disarm the bomb placed under a parked car.⁷ The Aden police were experienced with bombs and worked quickly. They were fortunate. The bomb was meant to explode in minutes.

Meanwhile, a timer on a massive TNT charge was ticking to zero in a hall closet on the fourth floor of the Goldmore Hotel.⁸ Investigators still don’t know if bin Laden’s men bribed a hotel desk clerk or brazenly walked past the front desk carrying a mysterious suitcase. But there is little doubt about the bomb they left behind.

At about 9:15 P.M. local time, a janitor was walking down the hall of the Goldmore Hotel.⁹ The timer triggered the blast, spraying a lethal wave of shrapnel. The janitor was killed instantly.

Inside the hotel restaurant, Herbert Denes, a seventy-year-old Austrian man on vacation, was having dinner with his wife. A giant wall of blast-driven glass shards rushed toward him. In seconds, he was bleeding to death. His wife, her face slashed by glass, was critically injured. Five other hotel guests were cut and bleeding.¹⁰ Around them sharp glass glittered on the floor and blood coated the walls.

In the hall and in five rooms beyond, a fire raged. The bloodied victims were temporarily cut off from rescuers.

Back at the Aden Hotel, the bomb planted beneath the car was disarmed and police searched a vehicle that had been driven by the terrorists. Police Major Kassem Mohammed later told reporters that his officers had found twenty-five bombs, two anti-tank mines, and two detonators in the truck.¹¹ Yemen’s state-run television later added to this deadly inventory: two sticks of dynamite, two machine guns, and a pistol. Clearly, a larger attack had been planned.

Yemeni intelligence was quick to connect bin Laden to the Aden bombings. The two terrorists who were wounded in the blast in the Aden hotel parking lot admitted they had trained in camps in Afghanistan funded by bin Laden. Four more men were arrested in the following days; each had a connection to bin Laden. (All four later escaped in a jailbreak. Eight years later, one of the four escapees was detained in a police sweep after the attack by bin Laden’s organization on the USS Cole in Aden harbor in October 2000.) As the investigation widened, still more links to bin Laden appeared. Police searched the apartment of one of the terrorists and found a large amount of cash, “twenty-one explosive devices, TNT, detonators,” and documents written in code.¹² Those documents also connected the attackers to bin Laden.

The hunt for bin Laden was on, at least on the Yemeni side. Within days, Yemen’s Ministry of Interior publicly blamed “hirelings of foreign elements.”¹³ But, in private, they were not so vague about the perpetrator. The Ministry of Interior, which supervises Yemen’s police and intelligence services, contacted Interpol, an international body that coordinates efforts to capture transnational criminals and terrorists. Yemen wanted help tracking down Osama bin Laden.

But no help ever came, over the next few weeks and months, from the Clinton Administration. If Clinton had energetically swung behind Yemen’s efforts to arrest a terrorist who plotted to kill Americans, bin Laden might have been stopped years before September 11, 2001—and thousands of lives would have been saved.

The Aden bombings are believed to have been Osama bin Laden’s first attack on Americans,¹⁴ the beginning in a long series that would culminate in the September 11 attacks on New York and Washington. But it was a misfire.

Unbeknownst to the terrorists, the American soldiers staying at the Goldmore had checked out two days earlier. While there were some one hundred U.S. Marines still at the Aden Hotel, a sharp-eyed security guard had foiled that attack. The terrorists had failed to kill or wound a single American. It was not a miscalculation that bin Laden would make again.

But bin Laden won anyway.

Within hours of the blasts, all American military personnel were immediately evacuated from Aden. By midnight, most Americans had been airlifted out. A spokesman for the U.S. Naval Forces Central Command dryly told the Associated Press that the evacuation was ordered “because of concern about the security situation.” ¹⁵ A quick victory for bin Laden.

Quick victories, the Clinton Administration would soon painfully learn, only emboldened bin Laden. The rapid evacuation allowed bin Laden to turn a misfire into triumph.

Bin Laden’s war on America had begun.

LANGLEY, VIRGINIA—The headquarters of the Central Intelligence Agency are perched on a high ridge west of the Potomac River, obscured by a wall of maples and pines, ringed by a chain-link fence, patrolled by armed guards, and surveyed by a battery of exposed and hidden cameras. Behind its various gates is a sprawling campus of concrete parking garages, grassy terraces, and a pile of nondescript office buildings.

About an hour after the explosion in Yemen, the CIA’s station chief there telephoned the CIA’s Counter-Terrorism Center.¹⁶

The Center was established under President Reagan, on February 1, 1986, to combat a wave of terror attacks backed by Iran and Syria. It was supposed to break down the bureaucratic barriers among CIA operations, which were divided into Near East, Middle East, and Africa stations. Properly run, the CTC—as it was known internally—could help the agency prevent attacks. In the late 1980s, it was an exciting place to be an analyst; by all accounts, it helped the operations division win some important clandestine victories over terrorists.

But by the end of the first Bush Administration, morale was plunging. The CTC was still resented by many operations officers as an invasion of their turf. The number of interesting assignments was shrinking. The Center’s principal enemies, the Abu Nidal Operation and Hezbollah, seemed to be reducing their attacks. Some of the best analysts were retiring or seeking transfers.

Even the CTC’s mission seemed obsolete. Some intelligence analysts believed that terrorism would wither away with the demise of the Soviet Union, which had been a major source of terrorist funding.

With two bomb blasts in faraway Aden, all of that was about to change.

The agents at the CTC got the news just after lunch. The CIA’s station chief in Yemen said that Yemen’s intelligence service suspected a mastermind named Osama bin Laden.

The supervisor paused for a moment. To whom could he assign the case?

The CTC is a large room with a low ceiling, sliced into rows of cubicles.¹⁷ Each row is devoted to studying, tracking, and stopping particular terrorists. Signs point the way to “Abu Nidal Boulevard,” but in December 1992, there was no “Bin Laden Boulevard.”¹⁸ The CIA would not set up a bin Laden “station” until January 1996,¹⁹ after a meeting of National Security Advisor Tony Lake and the National Security Council.²⁰

Bin Laden was not well known to the CIA’s Middle East specialists. “It was only after this bomb in Aden that first word came through of bin Laden’s connections and how he might target America,” said one former senior official at the CIA’s directorate of operations.²¹

At the time, bin Laden was well known to Middle Eastern and East African intelligence services. Saudi Arabia, Yemen, and Egypt had, for different reasons, developed dossiers on bin Laden. If the incoming Clinton Administration had asked its Arab allies for information or even asked the CIA, which was rapidly developing information, it might have learned a good deal about the Arab arch-terrorist. But no one on Clinton’s transition team was curious about their new nemesis. Clinton himself was absorbed with picking political appointees and the details of inauguration parties.

JEDDAH, SAUDI ARABIA—The only son of Mohammed bin Awaz bin Laden, a Saudi construction magnate from Yemen, and his least-favored wife, a Jordanian named Alia, Osama bin Laden grew up mocked and isolated. As his older half-brothers basked in their father’s attention and were rewarded with well-paying jobs in the family construction firm, Osama retreated into books and religion. He soon gravitated to a severe form of Islam, which, in addition to traditional Islam’s strictures against drinking and unveiled women, forbids all music, movies, television, smoking, dancing, and singing. By all accounts, his father approved, but did not share, Osama’s zealous form of Islam.

Osama had only two consistent ways of winning his father’s attention: speaking knowledgeably with his father and older relatives about the Koran after Friday night prayer services and gleefully forgoing all creature comforts during the family’s annual two-week excursion into the Saudi desert. There they would camp in tents, without electricity or running water, in 110-degree heat. In time, these two traits—extreme religiosity and survivalism—would fuse to make the bin Laden we know today.

Radical ideology was the catalyst. While studying at King Abdul Aziz University in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, in the late 1970s, he joined the Muslim Brotherhood, a radical Islamic group founded in Egypt in 1928. The group, which was banned by many Arab governments, is believed to have cells across the Middle East. The Brotherhood specializes in recruiting university students and young professionals, many of whom later move on to even more radical and violent Islamist organizations. The Brotherhood believes that all Arab dictatorships should fall because they are insufficiently “Islamic” and that a return to the seventh-century values of Mohammed will raise the Arab world to global preeminence. These soon became the views of Osama bin Laden.

While still at the university, bin Laden graduated to a more violent brand of Islamism. Sometime in 1978, he met a Palestinian firebrand named Abdullah Azzam. Azzam, a tall, charismatic man with arresting eyes, spoke with conviction and passion. His theme was holy war, jihad. He did not mean a spiritual struggle, as some American jihad apologists say, but violence. Azzam was quite clear that jihad meant war. Ten years later, a videotape of Azzam’s fiery speech on jihad surfaced at an Islamist conference in Oklahoma City. “The jihad, the fighting, is obligatory on you wherever you can perform it. And just as when you are in America you must fast—unless you are ill or on a voyage—so, too, must you wage jihad. The word jihad means fighting only, fighting with the sword.”²²

Such was his power as a speaker that a videotape of a single speech would lead young men to abandon their studies, their families, and their jobs, to train for war. Even Azzam’s enemies came to respect his ability to recruit and inspire thousands of terrorists. Israel’s former ambassador to the United Nations, Dore Gold, recently wrote: “It is difficult to overstate the impact that this Islamic radical [Azzam] had.”²³

Young bin Laden saw Azzam in person in 1978. It changed his life. Without Azzam, bin Laden might have become a Saudi executive with a soft spot for radical ideas. With Azzam, he started on a path to become the most feared and hated terrorist of our time.

Less than a year later, two cataclysmic events at the frontiers of the Muslim world completed bin Laden’s transformation from a radical to a jihadi. In November 1979, Islamic extremists led a coup in Tehran, the capital of Iran. The Iranian revolution showed to bin Laden and his generation of Islamists that their dream of a Koranic theocracy was actually possible. They could change the world. Just as the 1917 Soviet revolution in Russia electrified communists across Europe, the Iranian revolution energized radicals across the Muslim world.

The Iranian revolution taught bin Laden and his comrades-in-arms a second deadly lesson: not to fear the United States. Iranian militants took fifty-two American diplomats hostage in the U.S. embassy in Teheran. America did nothing. As the months ticked by, President Carter seemed increasingly weak and ineffectual. Carter’s feeble response surprised the Islamic radicals. According to their speeches and printed propaganda, militants became convinced that Allah was protecting the fundamentalist revolution in Iran and holding America at bay. They were elated and emboldened. No one could stop them now.

Then, in Dec...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Dedication
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• CHAPTER ONE 1992 - BIN LADEN STEPS OUT OF THE SHADOWS
• CHAPTER TWO 1993 - BIN LADEN AND THE TWIN TOWERS
• CHAPTER THREE 1993 - THE BATTLE OF THE BLACK SEA
• CHAPTER FOUR 1994 - THE SEPTEMBER 11 PRACTICE RUN
• CHAPTER FIVE 1995 - SHOWDOWN IN SUDAN
• CHAPTER SIX 1996 - THE FRIEND OF BILL
• CHAPTER SEVEN 1997 - KILLING THE MESSENGER
• CHAPTER EIGHT 1998 - BIN LADEN DECLARES WAR, AGAIN AND AGAIN
• CHAPTER NINE 1999 - THE MILLENNIUM PLOT
• CHAPTER TEN 2000 - CLINTON’S RUMOR OF WAR
• CHAPTER ELEVEN 2000 - THE ATTACK ON THE USS COLE
• APPENDIX A - THE IRAQ–AL QAEDA CONNECTION
• NOTES
• BIBLIOGRAPHY
• INDEX
• Copyright Page