It Was a Direct Hit, But Was It the Right Target?
Questions linger about a U.S. missile strike
On August 20 last year, 13 American cruise missiles slammed into a dusty pharmaceutical plant in Sudan. The strike, the White House said, was in retaliation for the bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania two weeks earlier. But many of the U.S. intelligence analysts who keep tabs on African affairs were kept out of the loop, and they were skeptical that the plant, known as El Shifa, was a chemical weapons facility connected to the alleged terrorist Osama bin Laden. That was the charge leveled by top U.S. officials at the time. Responding to government critics of the strike, the CIA invited several analysts to a presentation by the agency's scientific experts. They explained how U.S. intelligence had obtained a soil sample containing EMPTA, which is used to make VX nerve gas. The meeting turned into a disaster. "It didn't convince anyone," says an official who was present. "The iron curtain came down after that."
It's still down today. The administration's evidence against El Shifa remains secret-even to most American officials. What is known isn't encouraging. In the strike's immediate aftermath, an informal review conducted by the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research failed to turn up a single piece of evidence linking El Shifa to chemical weapons or bin Laden. The bureau was discouraged from even reporting its findings. Says one U.S. intelligence official, "To this day, I don't know" why they chose El Shifa.
Assassination plot. Unlike the mistaken bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade in May, the El Shifa bombing stems from more than an intelligence failure. A staunch anti-Sudan policy left some senior State Department and National Security Council aides inclined to believe the worst about the Islamic government in Khartoum, government officials say. There's plenty of bad news, to be sure. Sudan has been accused of repeated human-rights violations in its long-running civil war. It has been blamed for sparking a deadly famine by cutting off aid flights. It allegedly harbors terrorists.
But what about El Shifa? Some current and former U.S. officials say Washington developed a harder line against Sudan in 1995, after intelligence agencies passed along reports of a possible assassination plot against then National Security Adviser Anthony Lake. The alleged culprits were Sudanese-based terrorists. The threat was never substantiated, but around the same time, the U.S. Embassy in Khartoum was closed, virtually cutting off the flow of firsthand information from Sudan. From then on, some officials say, the anti-Sudan line in Washington got harder. U.S. policy makers dismissed many of Sudan's overtures about peace negotiations outright. And when Sudan finally signed the chemical weapons treaty in May, the United States ignored it. Joe Sala, a former Africa expert at the State Department, says this philosophy is simple: "It's Sudan, and we don't like them."
The decision to bomb El Shifa was made by fewer than a dozen top U.S. officials. This meant that experts on both Sudan and chemical weapons were not consulted about the government's evidence. Over the past year, White House officials, including National Security Adviser Sandy Berger, have backed away from their charge that El Shifa was actually producing chemicals for weapons as opposed to being a storage or transshipment point. But Clinton advisers insist they have seen no new evidence to undercut their conclusion that the plant was linked to bin Laden and the Iraqi chemical weapons program. Another factor, says one official, "tipped the scales": It could be struck with little risk of civilian casualties.
Still, virtually everything the administration said publicly about El Shifa in the days after the attack has turned out to be wrong. At the time of the attack, the United States did not know who owned the plant. No evidence has surfaced to support claims that the plant was heavily secured. And government spokesmen misspoke when they said El Shifa did not produce legitimate pharmaceutical products, apparently unaware the plant had a United Nations license to ship drugs to Iraq.
The key evidence touted by U.S. officials was a soil sample taken by a CIA operative from the grounds of El Shifa that supposedly tested positive for EMPTA. But tests by outside labs of samples taken after the bombing have found no trace of EMPTA or any of its components. And the House intelligence committee was told that the CIA's original soil sample was so small it was used up in the initial testing.
U.S. officials have been unable to publicly back up their assertions that El Shifa's owner, Saleh Idris, a Saudi Arabian businessman, is linked to bin Laden. After the strike, the Treasury Department promptly froze $24 million of his assets, alleging links to terrorists. Idris denied the charges and sued the government. An intermediary spoke with White House counsel Charles Ruff, who apparently helped release the assets in May after obtaining an intelligence briefing.
Garnering sympathy. An investigation by the security firm Kroll Associates, paid for by Idris, turned up no evidence of any links between Idris and bin Laden except very tenuous connections through distant third parties. Idris told U.S. News that he plans to file a second lawsuit "very soon" seeking compensation for his $30 million factory. "Everyone on the globe knows this was a mistake," he says.
In the end, Sudan has benefited from the U.S. strike, gaining sympathy from many other governments. But the Sudanese government remains its own worst enemy. Khartoum banned aid flights to two war-torn regions again last month, putting 150,000 people at risk of starvation. And a U.N. team was sent to Sudan last week to investigate the government's alleged use of chemical weapons against the rebels.
In Washington, House and Senate intelligence committees are continuing to investigate the decisions leading to the attack. The strike represents "a real lowering of the threshold for military action against countries with whom we have a disagreement," says one congressional aide with access to intelligence reports. But if anything, Congress is even more anti-Sudan than the administration. Both houses have overwhelmingly condemned Sudan within the past two months and called for U.S. support to the rebels. For now, any comprehensive scrutiny of the missile strike remains unlikely.
With Brian Duffy
This story appears in the August 16, 1999 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.