The Looming Tower - Lawrence Wright [156]
The bus dropped them off in front of the smoldering ruins of the embassy. The scale of devastation was overwhelming. The building was gutted from one end to the other; next door, the Kenyan secretarial school was completely flattened. Rescuers were digging into the rubble with their bare hands, trying to reach the wounded. Steve Gaudin gaped at the ruins and wondered, “What the hell are we going to do?” The FBI had never solved an overseas bombing.
One of the people buried under the secretarial school was named Roselyn Wanjiku Mwangi—Rosie, as everyone called her. The rescuers could hear her talking to another victim whose leg was crushed, trying to keep his spirits up. For two days Rosie’s encouraging voice inspired the rescuers, who worked relentlessly. Finally they reached the man with the crushed leg and carefully worked him free of the debris. They promised Rosie they would have her loose in less than two hours, but when they finally did reach her, it was too late. Her death was a heartbreaking blow to the exhausted workers.
The bombings were an audacious assault on America’s place in the world. The level of coordination and technical sophistication required to carry out nearly simultaneous explosions was surprising, but more troubling was the willingness of al-Qaeda to escalate the level of violence. The FBI eventually discovered that five American embassies had been targeted—luck and better intelligence had saved the other three. The investigators were stunned to learn that nearly a year earlier an Egyptian member of al-Qaeda had walked into the U.S. Embassy in Nairobi and told the CIA about the bombing plot. The agency had dismissed this intelligence as unreliable. This was not an isolated incident. All through the spring there had been a drumroll of threats and fatwas from bin Laden, but few had taken them seriously. Now the consequence of that neglect was starkly evident.
THREE DAYS AFTER THE BOMBING, Steve Gaudin’s chief, Pat D’Amuro, told him to check out a lead. “There’s a guy in a hotel outside of Nairobi,” said D’Amuro. “He doesn’t fit in.”
“That’s it?” Gaudin asked. “He doesn’t ‘fit in’? What does that mean?”
“If you don’t like it, I got a hundred other leads,” said D’Amuro.
Gaudin and a couple of other agents drove to a shantytown largely inhabited by Somali refugees. Their truck inched along through a staring crowd and stopped in front of a decrepit hotel. “Whatever you do, don’t get out of the truck,” their Kenyan colleague warned. “They hate Americans here.”
While the agents nervously waited for the Kenyan cop to return, a man in the crowd leaned against the truck with his back to the window. “I told you not to come here,” he said under his breath. “You’re going to get killed.”
Gaudin guessed the man was the tipster. “Can you help us?” he asked.
“He’s not here,” the man hissed. “He’s in another hotel.”
At the next hotel, the agents found a man who didn’t fit in: a slender young Arab with several jagged stitches on his forehead and bandages on his hands that were leaking blood. He identified himself as Khaled Saleem bin Rasheed from Yemen. He said he was in the country researching business opportunities—he was a nut merchant—and that he had stopped at a bank near the embassy when the “accident” happened. The only items in his pocket were eight brand-new hundred-dollar bills.
“How did you wind up at this hotel?” the interrogator asked.
Bin Rasheed said that when he got out of the hospital, a cab driver took him there, knowing that he didn’t speak Swahili. It was a place where Arabs sometimes stayed.
“Where are the rest of your things—your clothes, your identification documents?”
“Everything was lost in the explosion,” bin Rasheed explained. “These are the clothes I was wearing that day.”
As Gaudin listened to the young Arab responding to the American interrogators, he thought the story was plausible. It wasn’t Gaudin’s place to ask questions; more experienced agents handled that. Still, Gaudin noticed that bin Rasheed’s clothes were a