• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

Had you seen it with your own eyes you would have been very pleased,

Your heart would have been filled with joy.

In a recruitment video that circulated the following year, bin Laden spelled out his grand theory. “With small means and great faith, we can defeat the mightiest military power of modern times. America is much weaker than it seems.”

SIX DAYS AFTER the bombing of the Cole, President Clinton spoke at a memorial service for the dead. “To those who attacked them we say, you will not find a safe harbor. We will find you. And justice will prevail.”

“Let’s hope we can gather enough intelligence to figure out who did the act,” said George W. Bush, then in the last weeks of his campaign for the presidency. “There must be a consequence.”

A cabinet-level White House meeting after the attack, however, had decided to take no immediate action, to wait for clear evidence as to who was responsible. Michael Sheehan, the State Department representative on the Counterterrorism Security Group, seethed with rage as he talked with Richard Clarke afterward. “What’s it gonna take, Dick?” he exploded. “Who the shit do they think attacked the Cole, fuckin’ Martians? … Does al Qaeda have to attack the Pentagon to get their attention?”

No one doubted bin Laden and his people were behind the bombing. In the final days of the administration, however, and with fresh memories of the failed missile attack following the embassy bombings in Africa, there was going to be no action without clear evidence.

In public and in private, the President had been hot on the issue all year long. Terrorism, Clinton had said in his State of the Union address, would be a “major security threat” far into the future. In February, when sent a memo updating him on efforts to locate bin Laden, he responded with a scrawled note in the margin—“not satisfactory … could surely do better.”

The Air Force had done better. By September, Clarke and others had sat in amazement as an Air Force drone—an unmanned craft named Predator—beamed back pictures taken from the air over Afghanistan. Not merely pictures but, on two occasions, pictures of a tall man in a white robe—surrounded by what appeared to be bodyguards—at one of bin Laden’s camps. The Afghan winter was coming, however, and photography would soon become impossible. Besides, the Predator could not be used to hit bin Laden. It was as yet unarmed.

In late fall, American negotiators were in secret negotiations with the Taliban that reportedly included talk of the possible handover of bin Laden. In December, a U.N. Security Council resolution called for the Saudi’s extradition. To no avail.

On December 18, CIA director Tenet warned Clinton that there was increased risk of a new bin Laden attack. The best information indicated it would occur abroad, he said, but the United States itself was also vulnerable. Intelligence had been coming in of terrorist plans similar to what was actually being planned.

A Pakistani recently arrived in the States had told the FBI of having been recruited in England, flown to Pakistan, and given training on how to hijack passenger planes. His instructions, he said, had been to join five or six other men—they included trainee hijacking pilots—already in America. On arrival in New York, however, he had gotten cold feet and turned himself in. Though the man passed FBI lie detector tests, no action was taken. He was simply returned to London.

In Italy in August, a bug planted by Italian police had picked up a chilling conversation between a Yemeni just arrived at Bologna airport and a known terrorist operative. Asked how his trip had been, the Yemeni replied that he had been “studying airplanes.” He spoke of a “surprise strike that will come from the other country … one of those strikes that will never be forgotten” engineered by “a madman but a genius … in the future listen to the news and remember these words. We can fight any power using airplanes.”

Such intelligence was routinely shared with other Western intelligence agencies, according to a senior Italian counterterrorism officer