On Terrorism's Trail
How the FBI unraveled the Africa embassy bombings
Special Agent Sheila Horan's flight had just landed in Rota, Spain, for a quick refueling. As Horan strolled into a forward cargo hold to stretch her legs, she saw smoke. "Out!" she yelled to her team of FBI agents and rescue specialists. "Get out of the plane!" No one was hurt, but it took mechanics 12 hours to fix the faulty valve that had routed engine exhaust into the cabin. Horan's government KC-135 arrived in Nairobi, Kenya, at 3 a.m. on August 9, a long 41 hours after the bombings of U.S. embassies there and in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.
It was an inauspicious beginning for what would become the FBI's largest overseas investigation--and for Horan, head of counterterrorism at the FBI's Washington field office and the first woman to run an operation of this size. Within days, 375 FBI agents and crime experts would pour into East Africa. Yet despite planes that broke down, phones that didn't work, and myriad obstacles of distance, culture, and logistics, that investigation is now widely judged a success. Osama bin Laden, an exiled Saudi millionaire, was indicted this month with five of his associates, based largely on the work of the FBI and its partners in Africa. Among the highlights:
The key to cracking the case came, as in many investigations, with a lucky break. A man arrested a thousand miles away with a phony passport identified many of the bombers and tied them to bin Laden, who prosecutors say masterminded the attacks.
The FBI has determined that the bombs used against both embassies were big, crude devices that packed as much as 2,000 pounds of TNT into each charge. Blasting caps and plastic explosives were used as detonators; other parts gave the bombs a Middle Eastern signature.
The trail that provided money for the bombings led through accounts at a Saudi-backed bank in Dar es Salaam and through Islamic charities in Nairobi. But investigators have yet to trace the money back to bin Laden.
Working with only shards of metal and an ID plate, the FBI traced the bomb vehicle in Tanzania back to its manufacturer in Japan, then through at least five owners to one of the bombers.
U.S. News has interviewed Horan and her deputy, Kenneth Piernick, at length. The agents took pains not to comment on the results of what is a continuing investigation; but their interviews, along with those of African police and U.S. justice and intelligence officials, provided fresh glimpses into how the case of the embassy bombings was solved.
In those first August days after the bombings, the FBI flooded East Africa with its best people: From Washington, D.C., came bomb experts and lab technicians. From Pocatello, Idaho, came computer specialists trained in logging and analyzing data. From New York came counterterrorism agents who for two years had followed Osama bin Laden. The bureau also brought to the scene a lesson it had learned in Saudi Arabia. There, investigating the bombing of the Khobar Towers, agents found the Saudis less than cooperative, and the case had ended in frustration. Here, Horan hoped the bureau would fare better with local police.
In Kenya, Peter Mbuvi was the man the FBI needed. As deputy director of Kenya's Criminal Investigative Division, Mbuvi, a man of infectious enthusiasm, knew his country's criminal side intimately. But he knew the FBI only by reputation and worried how the Americans would view his CID. "They expected a developing country, maybe an inferior police force," he said. Mbuvi was determined to prove them wrong. His CID agents paired up with FBI agents, running raids and interrogation sessions together. He even gave the FBI space for its command post: a half-dozen utility tables thrown together in a spartan police conference room.
While FBI-CID teams fanned out across the city, Mbuvi's men had set up a hot line. From it came leads of all sorts: Some callers claimed to know the killers but, agents discovered, actually only wanted a free ticket to America, courtesy of the FBI. Others were more helpful. One tipster suggested police check out a suspicious fellow named Rashed Daoud al Owhali. When the CID found him, his face and hands were covered with cuts, and a large wound ran down his back. He claimed he was an innocent victim of the blast.
In Tanzania, where FBI agents also teamed up well with locals, differences quickly emerged. One Tanzanian commander told his FBI counterpart that American interrogators were simply too polite. "In our country, that is a disadvantage," he explained. "Our people understand force. . . . Now we're going to be a little more direct." But as in Nairobi, the Americans gained a growing respect for their partners. "They continually found evidence we overlooked," says Piernick.
In Dar es Salaam, Piernick found, the evidence even grew on trees. Visiting the bomb site, he was standing in the shade when a breeze jarred something loose from a branch above him. He looked down to find a piece of human flesh the size of a cigar. Up went investigators, who found the nearby trees littered with body parts, car pieces, and other potential evidence--blown there by the force of the bomb. Local cops had puzzled over the FBI's grisly work at collecting human remains; an agent finally showed them a portable X-ray machine the bureau had brought to examine pieces of flesh for bomb fragments. At the Nairobi morgue, victims' bodies were cut apart in the search for bomb components.
Big and crude. Eventually, from the rubble and elsewhere, 3 tons of materials were packed up, sealed, and shipped to the bureau's crime labs back home to be analyzed. Bomb experts, meanwhile, used computer models to reconstruct the blast. Their conclusions: The crude bombs that devastated the U.S. embassies each contained some 2,000 pounds of TNT. Investigators found blasting caps and traces of RDX--a plastic explosive--that were used as detonators. They also found bits of cylindrical tanks that held oxygen and acetylene, commonly used by Mideast terrorists with the mistaken belief they enhance an explosion. Similar blasting caps and explosive residue were later found at the home of Rashid Saleh Hemed, one of the suspects held by Tanzanian authorities.
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.
At the FBI's makeshift command center, the excitement rose. Agents burst into the command center after interrogations, shouting about what leads to follow. "We are getting close to our aim," Mbuvi told Horan. "We are breaking through."
Other agents began to follow the trail of money to the bombers. Funds were traced through bank accounts at the Saudi-backed Greenland Bank in Dar es Salaam and through Islamic service organizations in Nairobi. Kenyan officials shut down five of the groups, and a FBI-CID team hauled away documents from one, Mercy Relief International. But following the funds has not proved easy. "We know where they sent the money," said one agent. "We don't yet know how."
Agents had better luck following the paper trail the bombers left behind. Officials in East Africa were sticklers for bureaucracy, and their records were voluminous. Telephone bills, vehicle registrations, entry-exit records--all proved useful in tracking the terrorists. From the Hilltop Hotel, investigators traced a call from the bombers to the Comoros Islands, an archipelago in the Indian Ocean. Horan's agents worked with local police there to track Mohammed, the explosives expert fingered by Odeh. The agents apparently had just missed him. Two days after the FBI's query, investigators believe he slipped out of the islands to Dubai and disappeared. But at his home, agents found incriminating letters and computer disks tying him to al Qaeda and a U.S. citizen named Wadih el Hage. Ostensibly a tire repairman in Arlington, Texas, officials say, Hage had served as a top bin Laden aide during the early 1990s and was tied to terrorists who had bombed the World Trade Center and killed 18 U.S. soldiers in Somalia.
U.S. intelligence already had linked bin Laden to a half-dozen terrorist incidents, including the bombing of U.S. military trainers in Saudi Arabia and the murder of dozens of tourists in Egypt. Two months before the embassy attacks, a federal grand jury in New York had secretly indicted the Saudi exile for his role in Somalia. Now, with growing evidence from Africa, U.S. officials expanded their assault on bin Laden's organization, sparking arrests in at least six countries. Prosecutors in New York filed criminal complaints against Odeh, Owhali, and Mohammed. Then, two weeks ago, in a sweeping indictment, the Justice Department added their names to those of bin Laden, Hage, and another top aide, charging the entire group with conspiracy to commit murder in the embassy bombings.
Bin Laden remains in Afghanistan, protected by the fundamentalist Taliban militia. But those pursuing the man believe he cannot hide forever. If he is captured and brought to trial, the evidence found in the rubble of East Africa may yet prove his undoing.
This story appears in the November 23, 1998 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.