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By Root 1090 0

victims buried under tons of rubble. Kenya’s emergency services, geared up for a mass catastrophe involving at most sixty people, were overwhelmed. There was no heavy lifting gear, insufficient reserves of blood, and not enough room in the mortuaries. The US offered US$2 billion by way of compensation and reconstruction, although individuals would receive only US$500 for injury and relatives only US$11,000 for a death. The hunt for the perpetrators was relentless, with five hundred FBI agents and hardened CIA counter-terrorism operatives like Gary Berntsen descending on Nairobi in C-130s. Odeh was arrested using a false passport when he flew into Pakistan. At Nairobi airport he was greeted with chilling politeness by Kenyan police: ‘Welcome back to Nairobi, Mr Odeh. We have been waiting for you.’ He was soon going to talk one way or another. Al-Owahli had been injured in the attack and had visited a hospital. This enabled the Kenyan police and FBI agents to trace him to a hotel outside the city. That his clothes, including his belt and shoes, were pristine despite evidence of cuts on his hands and back was enough to arrest him. His cover story broke when the FBI found bullets and the key to the Toyota on a sill in the hospital. When the CIA produced evidence that Al Qaeda was planning a meeting for 20 August to review the success of these attacks, president Clinton took the decision to launch strikes on Afghanistan and Sudan, where two of the Nairobi bombers had recently surfaced.

Because the Pakistanis could not be trusted, and because they might regard incoming missiles as a sneak Indian attack, a US general was despatched to Islamabad for a dinner with a Pakistani colleague, during which the American would explain that the missiles entering Pakistani airspace were not Indian. Right until the last minute, and despite the concurrent pressures of the Monica Lewinsky affair, Clinton agonised over certain targets in Sudan, but not including the Shifa chemical plant that the CIA had linked to bin Laden because of suspicious trace elements in the compound’s soil. Tomahawk Cruise missiles rotated in their tubes on several destroyers in the Arabian Sea as their gyroscopes were orientated. Seventy-five missiles were launched, some circling until the whole flock set off on their contour-hugging two-hour flight into Afghanistan. Each was about twenty feet long, and armed with an assortment of warheads. Some had one-thousand-pound bombs, designed to flatten buildings, if necessary entering via their windows, others were laden with cluster bomblets to kill softer human targets. Each had a payload equal to a Second World War V2 ballistic rocket. During the night these missiles hit six Al Qaeda training camps near Khost, at US$75,000,000 an expensive way of killing a total of six people. Although the National Security Agency (NSA) had been eavesdropping on a satellite phone call made by al-Zawahiri, which might have enabled the US to pinpoint the location of the Al Qaeda leadership, this information was not shared with those who launched Operation Big Reach, which became Big Propaganda Flop. For the Al Qaeda chemical plant in Sudan had been sold on; it was a legitimate business selling repackaged pharmaceuticals locally. Despite this failure, Clinton stationed two nuclear submarines armed with Cruise missiles off the coast of Pakistan, to decrease the response time between actionable intelligence and any attack, while secretly authorising the CIA to use lethal force to deal with bin Laden, thereby breaking with US policy since the Ford era.

These missile attacks led to expressions of anger, easily incited on the streets of Pakistan, while boosting bin Laden’s prestige in the Muslim world as his voice announced on radio, ‘By the grace of God, I am alive.’ Weighing up whether he wanted the US as an enemy, mullah Omar moved closer to bin Laden, who prudently took an oath to Omar as ‘the emir of the faithful’. Omar himself vowed in return: ‘Even if all the countries of the world unite, we would defend Osama with our blood.’66 By this time,