America Fights Back
Clinton raises the stakes in the war against terrorism
To the world, President Clinton seemed consumed by his well-known personal problems. Yet as he strode pensively on the grounds of a Martha's Vineyard estate with his dog, Buddy, last week, the president pondered other events known only to a handful of his closest advisers. U.S. intelligence agents had already decided that the August 7 bombings of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania were the work of Osama bin Laden, the wealthy scion of a Saudi construction magnate, who had been kicked out of his native country in 1991 for radical leanings. Meanwhile, on seven U.S. warships in the Red Sea and the Arabian Sea, weapons specialists were plotting the flight paths of dozens of cruise missiles targeted at complexes in Sudan and Afghanistan linked to bin Laden. Then, according to Clinton administration officials, came secret intelligence information that bin Laden's forces planned to carry out further acts of terror against Americans, perhaps within days.
The resulting U.S. action--Operation Infinite Reach--amounted to one of the most decisive attacks against suspected terrorists in years. More than 70 Tomahawk cruise missiles shattered buildings at a sprawling base about 90 miles south of Kabul, Afghanistan, that U.S. officials said was used to train terrorists. Some of bin Laden's lieutenants and associates were probably killed, though bin Laden himself evidently survived. An additional six Tomahawks slammed into a suspected chemical weapons plant in Khartoum, Sudan, virtually destroying it. Perhaps more significantly, the strikes signaled a new aggressiveness in dealing with those who wish harm upon America and its citizens. "There are no expendable American targets," Clinton said sternly from the Oval Office, after returning to Washington briefly to meet with his national-security team. "There will be no sanctuary for terrorists."
Despite the show of force that backed that rhetoric, Clinton's strategy of raising the stakes for terrorists is risky. Government leaders were quick to caution that the strikes themselves could prompt further terrorist attacks, either by bin Laden's organization or by others who sympathize with him. It is "very important for the American people to understand . . . that there may in fact be retaliatory actions," said Secretary of State Madeleine Albright. After the strikes, government officials said an unprecedented number of threats poured into U.S. embassies and other outposts. Bin Laden himself pledged further attacks, telling a London newspaper through a spokesman that "the battle has not yet started." Even if imminent attacks are foiled, terrorists can be patient and persistent. The bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 in 1988 is widely believed to have been an act of revenge for the U.S. bombing of Libya in 1986, itself retaliation for a terrorist incident in Berlin a week earlier.
Using million-dollar weapons to take down a bunch of unfortified buildings in the Afghan hill country also puts the prestige of American power on the line. Cloudy skies over Afghanistan obscured initial pictures taken by U.S. reconnaissance satellites, making it difficult to assess the extent of damage there. But a senior defense official said early returns showed that "some buildings sustained meaningful damage. We missed some others." If the damage turns out to be light enough that bin Laden is able to reconstitute his organization quickly, his following among anti-American Muslims in the Middle East could rise.
Sanctions irrelevant. Yet bin Laden's unique circumstances convinced American officials that a vigorous military strike was the best way to combat him. Unlike most other well-known terrorist groups, bin Laden's loose network of adherents is not sponsored by any particular country. Bin Laden appears to finance the group from his personal fortune of $250 million or more. That means that conventional measures such as economic sanctions and world condemnation, which experts credit with being somewhat effective at helping reduce terrorism in recent years, don't apply. Such considerations "have forced us to adopt some very different approaches to the problem," said Defense Secretary William Cohen.
Those differences were evident in how quickly and secretly Clinton's team planned the raids. Clinton first discussed possible military retaliation with his advisers on August 12, just five days after the embassy bombings. Since August 7, when the two blasts occurred, U.S. intelligence agents had been gathering electronic intercepts--mainly satellite telephone calls among bin Laden and his associates--that linked the Saudi dissident to the bombings. By August 14, CIA director George Tenet had decided that the evidence was conclusive. In his televised address last week, President Clinton even fingered bin Laden for events he had only been suspected of previously: ambushes of American, Belgian, and Pakistani peacekeepers in Somalia in 1993; plots to kill the pope and the president of Egypt; a scheme to blow up several American jetliners over the Pacific; and a bus bombing that killed nine German tourists in Egypt in 1997.
In addition to retribution, U.S. officials said the strike was aimed at heading off additional truck bombings that bin Laden's operatives were heard discussing in the intercepts. Though U.S. officials never knew for sure when or where those attacks were to occur, the information led the State Department to evacuate half of the American employees from its four diplomatic posts in Pakistan, which borders Afghanistan and is home to numerous bin Laden supporters. The United States also boosted security at embassies around the world and scaled back operations in places such as Egypt, Albania, Eritrea, Malaysia, Uganda, and Yemen.
Bin Laden's Afghanistan camps and the chemical plant in Sudan--which Sudan's Islamic government said produced only medicines--had been in the Pentagon's inventory of targets for several years. That made it relatively easy for military planners to organize the strikes. One final step was to run computer models of the risk that explosions at the chemical factory would unleash a plume of poison gas across Sudan. After assessing data on the suspected chemicals, climate, and prevailing winds, analysts decided the harmful effects would be minimal.
By August 14--just seven days after the embassy bombings killed 257 people, including 12 Americans, and injured more than 5,000--Defense Secretary William Cohen and Gen. Henry Shelton, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, had briefed Clinton on the military plan. Clinton gave the go-ahead for technical experts on the U.S. ships in the region to begin orchestrating the launches--a laborious process that involves charting by hand the flight paths of every missile to check the computerized plans and make sure that the weapons would not interfere with one another. By noon Washington time on August 20, those missiles were airborne. They hit their targets at roughly the same time--approximately 7:30 p.m. local time in Sudan and 10:00 p.m. in Afghanistan.
Small group. All the while, only select military planners and the top one or two officials from the Defense Department, CIA, State Department, and National Security Council were aware of the imminent attack. The "small group," as it was called, amounted to only about a dozen senior officials. One reason manned jets were not used was that putting pilots on alert and repositioning aircraft could have tipped off news organizations--and bin Laden--that a military operation was afoot. Officials said the secrecy was required to make sure bin Laden did not accelerate plans for terrorist attacks and to catch him as off guard as possible.
National Security Adviser Sandy Berger said that one reason the attack occurred on August 20 was that intelligence sources predicted a sort of terrorist convention at the Afghanistan camp on that day, involving many of bin Laden's far-flung deputies. Reports indicated that several of the Tomahawks targeted at the camps carried cluster munitions, designed to disperse shrapnel-like bomblets over a large area. That suggests a U.S. effort to kill as many of the suspected terrorists as possible. One source familiar with the planning says that if a missile packed with cluster bombs exploded over the middle of a football field, it would kill anybody standing on the field. "Collateral damage was just not an issue" in Afghanistan, says another official. Government lawyers had determined that rules prohibiting assassinations did not apply to the attacks, because they were carried out as acts of self-defense and did not target a specific individual.
The shroud of secrecy persisted well after the attacks, with President Clinton and his advisers much more reluctant than is typical after military action to describe exactly how the strikes occurred, who was involved, and even, officially, what weapons were used. One explanation was that by keeping information from the press, the United States was also keeping bin Laden in the dark. If a follow-up strike were deemed necessary, that would make it harder for him to know what defenses to put in place. Military officials also hoped that confusion would force bin Laden to get information from his associates via faxes and satellite phones--instead of CNN--which would let U.S. spies continue to monitor his activities. "If they have to check around with each other, that's a good kind of intelligence thing for us," says a defense official.
Republicans waver. But a scarcity of information also fueled speculation about a Wag the Dog scenario, based on the movie in which advisers to a president hounded by sexual scandal manufacture a phony war to focus attention elsewhere. Shortly after the attacks, Republican Sen. Dan Coats of Indiana expressed skepticism at the raid's timing, suggesting it was motivated by Clinton's desire for favorable publicity. But after a top-secret briefing on Operation Infinite Reach, he said, "There does appear to be credible evidence to suggest that targeting an Osama bin Laden terrorist training site was necessary." Then he canceled plans to appear on weekend talk shows to criticize the president. Other politicians, of both parties, generally supported the strikes. And defense and intelligence officials also said that evidence of bin Laden's culpability was growing so clear that military action was a logical response.
Still, the swiftness with which the attack went forward was out of character for the Clinton administration. Compared with the deliberations that preceded other military actions under Clinton, "this happened in a millisecond," said a former senior defense official. There was no attempt to consult with allies or build international support, which could backfire if public opinion in the Middle East turns strongly against the United States. And there was evidently no major effort after the embassy bombings to persuade the Taliban, the severe Islamic regime that controls most of Afghanistan and is bin Laden's current host, to turn him over or oust him from the country.
A broad information blackout also deferred some sensitive questions about how the attacks took place. The missiles that struck Afghanistan evidently flew from the Arabian Sea over Pakistani airspace, even though U.S. officials had decided not to ask permission of the Pakistanis (or inform any allies of the attack in advance). Administration officials worried, however, that the Pakistanis might detect the missiles and mistake them for a nuclear attack by archrival India. So a U.S. military officer in Pakistan was dispatched to fill the Pakistanis in just before the missiles might have triggered an alert. A senior defense official says those kinds of arrangements may become more commonplace with the emergence of "transnational" terrorists such as bin Laden.
Mystery chemical. U.S. officials have not explained exactly how the Sudanese chemical factory was linked to an urgent need for self-defense. National Security Adviser Berger said the United States had "physical evidence" that the plant was making chemical weapons components. But he and others declined to identify the chemical, and the connection they made with bin Laden is tenuous. Berger said that bin Laden had helped finance the facility and had expressed a general interest in obtaining chemical weapons. Beyond that, there was no evidence that bin Laden was on the verge of acquiring poison gas from the facility. Yet to placate the Arab world and justify the roughly 10 Sudanese casualties from the bombing, says Amatzia Baram of the U.S. Institute of Peace, the United States must "show evidence this was producing something terrible."
Those points may ultimately amount to quibbles, if the military attack turns out to have been largely successful. But as with the defeat of Iraq's Saddam Hussein in 1991, upholding the military victory may be much more difficult than achieving it. More important than destroying the assets of a bin Laden-style terrorist is sending the message that he will be struck repeatedly if his attacks continue, says retired Gen. J. H. Binford Peay, former chief of the Pentagon's Central Command. "If we only get a 30 percent return [a low bombing success rate], that's OK, provided we hit him every time we have solid evidence he did something." But that may require a willingness to attack when the evidence is more ambiguous than it appears to have been in this case, and when the risks of political fallout or casualties are greater.
The current barrage of threats against Americans also enlarges the burden on intelligence agencies to predict and interdict terrorist plots. Capturing bin Laden and bringing him to trial will remain a key goal. The FBI says that establishing a tight legal case against bin Laden is still months away. But viewing a terrorist attack as an act of war--as U.S. leaders say they do--"makes it easier to retaliate and helps with pre-emption," says a former senior defense official. "Covert action becomes possible. You don't need this big evidence string." If President Clinton were to authorize a commando raid to snatch bin Laden, the strategy would probably be to monitor him closely and try to nab him while he was traveling away from his lair.
To address immediate security concerns, the State Department plans to ask Congress for special funds to improve security at high-risk posts. In the fall, the department will fully assess security needs around the world. Meanwhile, the more urgent challenge is to prevent any pending terrorist actions. That will require not just superior technology for watching and eavesdropping on suspects but a well-placed network of human spies to gather information from inside terrorist organizations--a capability critics say has eroded recently. President Clinton cited a few such successes last week, saying, "We have quietly disrupted terrorist groups and foiled their plots." The ones that go forward, however, speak much more loudly.
Travel warnings Last week, the State Department urged Americans traveling worldwide to "exercise much greater caution than usual." Briefly:
U.S. embassies in Albania, Eritrea, and Pakistan shut down for all but emergency services. All American Embassy operations also ceased in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
The State Department rescinded its earlier recommendation that Americans avoid travel to Kenya and Tanzania. But U.S. Embassy services remain very limited in those countries.
Possible threats against U.S. targets in Egypt, Malaysia, Mongolia, and Yemen have been reported.
For more information, including consular information sheets for every country, as well as travel warnings, call (202) 647-5225, or go to (http://travel.state.gov).
Retaliatory strikes The United States Navy launched cruise missile attacks on suspected terrorist-related facilities in Afghanistan and Sudan on August 20. The sites are believed to be part of the terrorist infra-structure of Osama bin Laden, the exiled Saudi millionaire and prime suspect in bombing attacks on U.S. embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, on August 7.
Tomahawk missile Length: 18 feet, 3 inches Weight: 2,650 pounds Cruise altitude: 50 to 100 feet Speed: 550 miles per hour Cost: $750,000
[Maps are not available.] [Map labels]: Libya; Egypt; Saudi Arabia; Iran; Russia; India; Afghanistan; Pakistan; Sudan; Ethiopia; Congo; Uganda; Kenya; Tanzania; Zambia; Dar es Salaam; Nile River; Khartoum; Kabul; Islamabad; Khost; Nairobi; Guidance system; Warhead; Propulsion: solid-propellant rocket motor
Red Sea. Six missiles fired from two ships directly into Sudanese airspace. Arabian Sea. More than 70 missiles fired from four ships and one submarine, passing over Pakistan en route to targets in Afghanistan.
Target in Sudan Missiles hit the El Shifa Pharmaceutical plant at 7:30 p.m., local time. U.S. officials say the factory produced essential ingredients for VX gas, a deadly chemical weapon. [Map labels]: Sudan; Omdurman; Khartoum North; Khartoum; Nile River; White Nile; Blue Nile; Civil Airport; The factory, guarded by Sudanese troops, was located in an industrial section of the city.
Targets in Afghanistan Zhawar Kili al-Badr terrorist-training facilities hit at 10:00 p.m., local time. Officials believe several hundred activists were present. [Map labels]: Afghanistan; Khost; Tani; Pakistan; Support camp: primary logistics center, including storage for weapons and ammunition; Base camp: main command-and-control center, with housing, storage, training, and administrative facilities; Training camp: four sites used for political indoctrination and training in tactics and use of weaponry.
This story appears in the August 31, 1998 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.