What the Dog Saw [104]
To read the Shelby report, or the seamless narrative from Nosair to bin Laden in The Cell, is to be convinced that if the CIA and the FBI had simply been able to connect the dots, what happened on September 11 should not have been a surprise at all. Is this a fair criticism or is it just a case of creeping determinism?
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On August 7, 1998, two Al Qaeda terrorists detonated a cargo truck filled with explosives outside the US embassy in Nairobi, killing 213 people and injuring more than four thousand. Miller, Stone, and Mitchell see the Kenyan embassy bombing as a textbook example of intelligence failure. The CIA, they tell us, had identified an Al Qaeda cell in Kenya well before the attack, and its members were under surveillance. They had an eight-page letter, written by an Al Qaeda operative, speaking of the imminent arrival of “engineers” — the code word for bomb makers — in Nairobi. The US ambassador to Kenya, Prudence Bushnell, had begged Washington for more security. A prominent Kenyan lawyer and legislator says that the Kenyan intelligence service warned US intelligence about the plot several months before August 7, and in November of 1997 a man named Mustafa Mahmoud Said Ahmed, who worked for one of Osama bin Laden’s companies, walked into the US embassy in Nairobi and told American intelligence of a plot to blow up the building. What did our officials do? They forced the leader of the Kenyan cell — a US citizen — to return home, and then abruptly halted their surveillance of the group. They ignored the eight-page letter. They allegedly showed the Kenyan intelligence service’s warning to the Mossad, which dismissed it, and after questioning Ahmed, they decided that he wasn’t credible. After the bombing, The Cell tells us, a senior State Department official phoned Bushnell and asked, “How could this have happened?”
“For the first time since the blast,” Miller, Stone, and Mitchell write, “Bushnell’s horror turned to anger. There was too much history. ‘I wrote you a letter,’ she said.”
This is all very damning, but doesn’t it fall into the creeping-determinism trap? It is not at all clear that it passes the creeping-determinism test. It’s an edited version of the past. What we don’t hear about is all the other people whom American intelligence had under surveillance, how many other warnings they received, and how many other tips came in that seemed promising at the time but led nowhere. The central challenge of intelligence gathering has always been the problem of “noise”: the fact that useless information is vastly more plentiful than useful information. Shelby’s report mentions that the FBI’s counterterrorism division has sixty-eight thousand outstanding and unassigned leads dating back to 1995. And, of those, probably no more than a few hundred are useful. Analysts, in short, must be selective, and the decisions made in Kenya, by that standard, do not seem unreasonable. Surveillance on the cell was shut down, but, then, its leader had left the country. Bushnell warned Washington — but, as The Cell admits, there were bomb warnings in Africa all the time. Officials at the Mossad thought the Kenyan intelligence was dubious, and the Mossad ought to know. Ahmed may have worked for bin Laden but he failed a polygraph test, and it was also learned that he had previously given similar — groundless — warnings to other embassies in Africa. When a man comes into your office, fails a lie-detector test, and is