• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

A Canadian teenager whose family had joined the jihadis, Abdurahman Khadr, witnessed the jubilation. “The leader of the guesthouse went outside and brought juice for like everybody. Jugs and jugs of juice. He was just giving it out. ‘Celebrate, everybody!’ And people were even making jokes that we should do this more often. You know, we’d get free juice.”

Asked by reporters about the bombings, bin Laden vacillated between obfuscation and claiming credit. “Only God knows the truth,” he would say, while praising the bombers as “real men … Our job is to instigate and by the grace of God we did that.” Nairobi had been picked, he said, because “the greatest CIA center in East Africa is located at this embassy.” American “plots” against countries in the region, he said, had been hatched there.

There appeared to be an opportunity for the United States to retaliate—or, with the niceties of international law in mind—“to respond.” Bin Laden, the CIA learned, was shortly to attend a gathering of several hundred men at one of the training camps. On the day of his visit, it was decided, U.S. vessels—mostly submarines—would fire salvos of Tomahawk cruise missiles at six sites in Afghanistan. The camps aside, missiles would also strike a bin Laden–financed pharmaceutical factory in Sudan. The CIA believed it was producing the ingredients for nerve gas.

On the appointed day, August 20, the go-ahead was given. Security was exceptionally tight, with one significant exception. Because the missiles were to overfly Pakistan, it was deemed necessary to inform the Pakistani military. To avoid provoking an international incident, though, the Pakistan army was to be told—not consulted—and at the very last minute. The vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Joseph Ralston, broke the news to a top Pakistani commander over dinner when the missiles were already on their way.

In Washington, Clinton went on television to tell the nation of the action he had taken. “Our target was terror,” he said. “Our mission was clear: to strike at the network of radical groups affiliated with and funded by Osama bin Laden.”

That was a circumlocution, to avoid mentioning publicly the fact that Clinton had signed memoranda designed to get around the long-standing legal ban on planned assassinations. After Kenya, however, the President was “intently focused,” as he later wrote, “on capturing or killing [bin Laden] and with destroying al Qaeda.”

In that, the U.S. attack failed miserably. The targets were hit and destroyed, and some people were killed at the camp where bin Laden was supposed to be. The man himself, however, remained very much alive. The factory in Sudan was destroyed, but there never was any proof that it had been more than a legitimate plant producing medicines. The CIA’s intelligence had been shaky at best.

The strikes had been expensive in more ways than one. At $750,000 each, just the cost of the sixty-five Tomahawks fired amounted to about $49 million. The embassy bombings in Africa, to which the missiles had responded, are said to have cost around $10,000. Worse by far, the missile strikes and the failure to get bin Laden proved to be a propaganda victory for the intended target. Across the Muslim world, people began sporting Osama bin Laden T-shirts. Bin Laden’s life had been spared, his followers were convinced, thanks to the direct intervention of Allah.

The truth was more mundane, as his son Omar revealed in 2009. Shortly before the strikes, he recalled, his father had received “a highly secret communication.” “He had been forewarned,” former U.S. Defense Secretary William Cohen was to tell 9/11 Commission staff, that “the intelligence [service] in Pakistan had a line in to him.” The tight U.S. security had not been tight enough, a failing that one day in the distant future would be remedied—fatally for the target.

If the name Osama bin Laden had been slow to penetrate the American consciousness, it had now become