The Looming Tower - Lawrence Wright [153]
The CIA moved against another al-Jihad cell in Tirana, Albania, which had been created by Mohammed al-Zawahiri in the early nineties. Albanian agents, under CIA supervision, kidnapped five members of the cell, blindfolded them, interrogated them for several days, and then sent the Egyptian members to Cairo. There they were tortured and put on trial with more than a hundred other suspected terrorists. Their ordeal produced twenty thousand pages of confessions. Both Zawahiri brothers were given death sentences in absentia.
On August 6, a month after the breakup of the Albanian cell, Zawahiri sent the following declaration to the London newspaper Al Hayat: “We are interested in briefly telling the Americans that their message has been received and that the response, which we hope they will read carefully, is being prepared, because, with God’s help, we will write it in the language that they understand.”
DESPITE THE BLUSTER, the media, the lurid calls for jihad, al-Qaeda had really done nothing so far. There were grand plans, and there were claims of past successes that al-Qaeda had little or no part of. Although al-Qaeda had already existed for ten years, it was still an obscure and unimportant organization; it didn’t compare to Hamas or Hezbollah, for instance. Thousands of young men had trained in al-Qaeda camps and returned to their home countries to create havoc; because of their training, they would be called, by intelligence agencies, “al-Qaeda linked.” Unless they had pledged their loyalty to bin Laden, however, they were not formally a part of the organization. There were fewer actual al-Qaeda members in Kandahar than there had been in Khartoum because bin Laden could no longer support them. The fireworks displays he put on for reporters were accomplished with rented mujahideen. Like blowfish, al-Qaeda and bin Laden made themselves appear larger than they actually were. But a new al-Qaeda was about to make its debut.
It was August 7, 1998, the same day the slaughter commenced in Mazar-e-Sharif and the anniversary of the arrival of American troops in Saudi Arabia eight years before.
In Kenya, an Egyptian bomb-maker called “Saleh”—one of Zawahiri’s men—oversaw the construction of two huge explosive devices. The first, made of two thousand pounds of TNT, aluminum nitrate, and aluminum powder, was stuffed in boxes that were wired to batteries then loaded into a brown Toyota cargo truck. The two Saudis who sat in on the ABC interview, Mohammed al-‘Owhali and Jihad Ali, drove the truck through downtown Nairobi toward the American Embassy. At the same time, in Tanzania, Saleh’s second bomb was on its way to the American Embassy in Dar es Salaam. This bomb was similar in construction except that Saleh had added a number of oxygen tanks or gas canisters to provide additional fragmentation. The delivery vehicle was a gasoline truck driven by Ahmed Abdullah, an Egyptian whose nickname was Ahmed the German because of his fair hair. The bombings were scheduled for ten thirty on a Friday morning, a time when observant Muslims were supposed to be in the mosque.
Al-Qaeda’s first documented terrorist strike bore the hallmarks of its future actions. The novelty of multiple, simultaneous suicide bombings was a new and risky strategy, given the increased likelihood of failure or detection. If they succeeded, al-Qaeda would make an unrivaled claim on the world’s attention. The bombings would be worthy of bin Laden’s grandiose and seemingly lunatic declaration of war on the United States, and the suicide of the bombers would provide a scanty moral cover for operations intended to murder as many people as possible. In this, al-Qaeda was also unusual. Death on a grand scale was a goal in itself. There was no attempt to spare innocent lives, since the concept of innocence was subtracted from al-Qaeda’s calculations. Although the Quran specifically forbids killing