Jihad Joe_ Americans Who Go to War in the Name of Islam - J. M. Berger [64]
In May 1998 bin Laden granted an interview to John Miller of ABC News:
We say to the Americans as people and to American mothers, if they cherish their lives and if they cherish their sons, they must elect an American patriotic government that caters to their interests not the interests of the Jews. If the present injustice continues with the wave of national consciousness, it will inevitably move the battle to American soil, just as Ramzi Yousef and others have done.42
It would be the final warning. On August 7, 1998, the embassy bombings plot—so long in the making—finally came to fruition. Within four minutes of each other, two al Qaeda teams bombed the U.S. embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, and in Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania. More than two hundred people were killed in Nairobi—the operation Ali Mohamed had planned—and eleven died in Dar Es Salaam. The bomb in Kenya was a suicide bomber, and the bomb in Tanzania was meant to be—but the driver panicked and fled before it went off.43
Bin Laden’s declaration of war had become a reality.
Not long after the blast, Ali Mohamed’s phone rang. He told the FBI agents on the line that he had heard something years ago about a planned attack on the embassy in Nairobi, but that he had discouraged the plotters from carrying it out. He knew who the bombers were, but he had no intention of naming names.44
The FBI also showed up on Wadih El Hage’s doorstep. He too lied, telling them he had quit working for bin Laden back in 1994 and hadn’t seen him since. El Hage said he wasn’t aware of anyone working for bin Laden in Kenya or Tanzania. At any rate, bin Laden couldn’t be behind the attacks because he was a “humanitarian,” besides which he would have done the bombing at a time of day to minimize harm to innocent bystanders.45
Despite such humanitarian leanings, El Hage was able to explain to the FBI why bin Laden hated America so much. According to FBI agent Robert Miranda,
He said that any true believing Muslim, it was the duty of any true believing Muslim to drive out the US from the Saudi Peninsula because the Koran had reserved the Saudi peninsula only for Muslims. He also said that the US government unfairly supported Israel, and by that he described his statement by saying that the US was quick to come to the aid of Israel if something happened to it but that if Israel did something illegal that the US was slow to act.
And then he also said that Israel was expanding to take control of the entire Middle East. And finally in response to that questioning, he said that many people wanted to make the world live according to the Koran, but that they don’t have the resources, but Bin Laden has the resources to make the world live according to the Koran.46
A few days later, FBI agents searched the California home of Ali Mohamed. They discovered a shocking collection of documents that showed just how sophisticated al Qaeda was: manuals describing surveillance techniques and tactics used by government intelligence agencies, instructions for creating improvised explosives, codebooks, coded letters, al Qaeda intelligence reports (including one written by Wadih El Hage), and reports on the activities of U.S. law enforcement.47
Mohamed was dragged before a grand jury investigating the embassy bombings, and he lied again. This time, he could feel the walls closing in, although the prosecutors had not yet decided whether he was connected to the bombings. FBI agents accompanied him under guard back to his hotel. Mohamed excused himself to go to the bathroom and, with the door closed, began ripping pages out of his personal address book and flushing them down the toilet. When he came out of the room, he was arrested. Later Mohamed admitted that if he hadn’t been arrested, he would have been on the next flight to Afghanistan.48
Days later El Hage was arrested. Khalid Abu El Dahab, Mohamed’s California crony, was captured