On Terrorism's Trail
How the FBI unraveled the Africa embassy bombings
At the bomb sites, agents combed the rubble for auto parts--looking especially for the VIN, or vehicle identification number, of the delivery vehicles. In Dar es Salaam, the FBI found the terrorists had welded their bomb to the chassis of a 1987 Nissan Atlas refrigeration truck, which investigators painstakingly reconstructed. Agents tracked the VIN back to Nissan in Japan, and then followed a trail of ownership that ran from a Japanese dealership to the truck's first owner, and then to the exporter who shipped the used vehicle to Tanzania. The path led to a local importer, then to the broker who peddled the truck, and, eventually, to one of the bombers. Still, despite their progress, investigators needed a big break. It came from an unexpected place.
On the day of the bombings, a slight, cleanshaven fellow named Mohammed Sadeek Odeh arrived at the international airport in Karachi, Pakistan. An alert immigration officer noted that Odeh looked nothing like the photo in his Yemeni passport, which showed a bearded, heavy-set man. Odeh had just come from Nairobi and was bound for Afghanistan.
For three days, unknown to Americans, Pakistani security officers interrogated Odeh. He later claimed he was coerced into confessing a key role in the bombings, but Pakistani officials say he boasted of his feat to them. By week's end, a team of CIA and FBI agents were secretly escorting Odeh back to Nairobi.
"We were very hopeful, but guarded," says Horan. "These kinds of things happen and then don't pan out." Indeed, on his return to Kenya, Odeh stonewalled his interrogators. Two days later, confronted with evidence found in his Kenyan home, he broke.
Bomb building. From Odeh's mouth, investigators say, spilled details of the Nairobi bomb plot: how he and others had cased the area before the blast, where they built the bomb, and how he and six others fled Kenya before the attack. He even offered up names: Owhali, the suspect whom the CID picked up that first week, his body covered with cuts; the driver, Azzam, who had likely perished in the attack; Fazul Mohammed, an explosives expert; and others Odeh had only met at the airport. Two of the bomb makers, he said, already had escaped to Afghanistan: Mohammed Saleh, a Sudanese, and Abdullah, a Saudi. Best of all, he named the group responsible, Al Qaeda, and its leader--Osama bin Laden.
Within hours, agents were knocking on doors, raiding sites, and grabbing documents. An FBI-CID team pushed its way into the Hilltop Hotel, a $10-a-night lodge in a seedy Nairobi neighborhood, where Odeh and others planned the attack. Odeh's tips also led them to a steel-gated villa in an exclusive part of town, which had once been rented by Fazul Mohammed; inside, they found explosives residue everywhere.
Under pressure, Owhali also admitted to being one of bin Laden's men. A week before the attack, he had traveled from Pakistan to Kenya, scouted the embassy, and rode in the bomb vehicle, expecting to die in the blast. But Owhali left the truck to throw a grenade at a guard stationed outside, he said, and then fled.
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