Time flies. Twenty months ago, America was steeling itself for a gory feast at the end of the Millennium as the twin threats of Y2K and a globalist Islamist conspiracy, masterminded by renegade CIA operative Osama bin Ladin, threatened to rip planes from the sky, topple Microsoft and Merrill Lynch and transform the site in Jordan where John the Baptist anointed Jesus from a spiritual landmark into the killing ground of a fresh 'holy war'. The apocalypse, as Tuesday demonstrated, was simply delayed.
Millions of column inches in Western newspapers were devoted to building this bearded holy warrior from Saudi Arabia into a villain fit to qualify as the nemesis of America's post-Cold War empire. The spirits of Professor Moriarty, Carlos the Jackal, the Old Man of the Mountains and the Great Gatsby took turns to haunt Osama's cruel but sensual features. Here was a man whose wealth was variously estimated at between US$150 million and US$7 billion -- all dedicated to killing Americans 'wherever they might be' as he declared in February 1998.
His ability to deliver on that promise was proven spectacularly throughout the 1990s in a series of attacks on US property and persons that were as symbolic as they were imaginative and audacious. But this was no neighbourhood fox, who killed Americans for the sheer pleasure: he sought also to humble and chastise. From a mountain eyrie that he built in Afghanistan during the war of resistance against Soviet occupation, Osama presided by satellite phone over a far-flung network of supporters all committed to evicting the US from its Gulf War bases in oil-rich Saudi Arabia, even if it cost them their lives.
Ailing King Fahd had regularised a US military presence in the kingdom eleven years ago last August 7. This blasphemy was revenged eight years on exactly with the split-second, timed destruction of the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, evidence -- if any were still needed -- of bin Ladin's ability to orchestrate a complex, logistical killing spree. For Osama and his followers, the US presence is tantamount to 'Christian' occupation of the pilgrimage centres of Mecca and Medina, an offence against the Prophet, and it spurs their belief in themselves as latterday Saracens confronting a vastly superior army of heathen Crusaders.
When the embassy bombings in Africa were identified as the fruit of his handiwork, President Bill Clinton called Osama 'as dangerous as any state we face', a comparison that put him up there with such pariah states as Libya, Iraq, Iran, North Korea and Cuba. His personal organisation, Al Qa'ida (The Base), was allegedly responsible for the killing of 18 US troops in Somalia in 1993, a blow so damaging to Clinton's popularity it elevated the body bag into a half-mast abjuration of direct US military involvement on the ground throughout the remainder of his presidency. US pride was further damaged the same year when a handful of bin Ladin followers in Brooklyn and New Jersey exploded a crude bomb at New York's World Trade Centre - the first foreign-backed act of aggression on US soil since Pearl Harbour -- in what now appears to have been a dress rehearsal for Tuesday's spectacular devastation.
Since 1993, his men have killed 19 Americans in Saudi Arabia, 224 civilians in East Africa and 17 sailors on board the USS Cole in Aden harbour. His forces are reported to be fighting in Chechnya, Dagestan, Kashmir, the Philippines, Yemen, Egypt and Afghanistan. He may have financed the rise to power of the Taliban in 1996: their hospitality to him since then, in spite of the diplomatic cost, has known no bounds. He is also reputed to have plotted the assassination of Bill Clinton and President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt and attempted -- without success, so far as is known - to obtain chemical and nuclear weapons from black market suppliers in states of the former Soviet Union.
The evidence suggests that, far from being a diabolically nimble conspiracy of suicidal fanatics, Al Qa'ida has run rings around US intelligence simply because the latter's personnel and field skills are unequal to the task of protecting American lives and property. The families of ten US citizens killed in Nairobi in 1998 had come to the same conclusion, filing compensation claims against the government for failing to take adequate security precautions after receiving warnings of terrorist action months before the explosions.
Neither the FBI, CIA or other agencies in America's generously funded Joint Terrorist Task Force were on the stand during the four-month trial in Fulton Street, Lower Manhattan of four confederates of bin Ladin this spring, but perhaps they should have been. The trial was widely interpreted as evidence of the meticulousness of US efforts to track down and corner bin Ladin in the weeks and months after the embassy bombings. From thousands of pages of evidence assembled by intelligence agents and an original list of 100 witnesses, the prosecution sought to draw back the veil on bin Ladin's network in a legal extravaganza that should have rivaled the OJ Simpson trial.
But the defendants were Arabs in a land that had moved on to new obsessions and concerns under President George W. Bush. At one stage, the New York Times filed news agency reports on the trial, though the courthouse was only a few blocks away. Indeed, there was a sense that this was a fag-end of the Clinton era and the sorry saga that had been Clinton's own trial for lying about Monica Lewinsky that had directly fed the ensuing panic about bin Ladin and his terrorist training camps in Afghanistan and Sudan.
The hunt to connect bin Ladin to the Nairobi calamity galloped parallel -- with scarcely a nose between -- to Special Prosecutor Kenneth Starr's pursuit of testimony to illumine the precise nature of Clinton's relationship with Lewinsky. Dried semen had replaced national security as the chief concern of a naked and exposed presidency. It was against this background that US military and intelligence chiefs met to determine a response to the embassy bombings, amid 'intelligence reports' that there was to be a gathering of leaders of Islamist militant groups at bin Ladin's training camps at Al-Badri, near Khost in Afghanistan.
US intelligence had been aware that the camps now trained bin Ladin's soldiers for at least two years, but had taken no action for fear of estranging Pakistan and because, a generation earlier, the CIA itself had established the facilities to further the jihad against the Soviet Union. But what precisely had the combined CIA and FBI leadership done to pre-empt bin Ladin's two aborted assassination bids against Bill Clinton? What efforts had been made to eliminate the Saudi, or disrupt his hostile network in the wake of the bombing of the World Trade Centre and the 1995 attack on the US' Khobar Towers apartment block in Saudi Arabia?
Very little it seems. The sole attempt to kill or capture bin Ladin, planned some time prior to a peace mission to Kabul by the then US Ambassador to the UN, Bill Richardson, in April 1998, had been aborted due to the expected number of US and Afghan casualties. Was fear of casualties a convincing enough reason for America's Praetorian Guard to allow a committed assassin to remain on the loose, or was it fear of public exposure, or something more unthinkable? Blame-shirking, it seemed had become the guiding principle of the CIA and the presidency equally in the days after the Nairobi bombing.
On August 20, at 6.30AM, as Lewinsky lay dreaming of the detail she would reveal to the Grand Jury later that morning about oral sex and fondling, 70-100 Tomahawk missiles were launched at targets in Khartoum, Sudan and near Khost. The missiles contained 166 bomblets each of 3.3lbs and were designed -- like Lewinsky's confession, perhaps -- to cause maximum damage over a wide area, rather than take out a single pinpointable target. Six of his men perished in the raid, but Osama escaped, though rumours of kidney trouble circulated for some weeks after.
The enemy that US intelligence confronted in Al Qa'ida was neither well-trained nor particularly astute. One day after the Nairobi bombing, the first suspect, Mohammed Sadiq Odeh was arrested in Karachi, having travelled from Kenya with a passport whose photo did not quite match his face. Following the evasion techniques drilled into Al Qa'ida's volunteers in Sudan -- which include dressing in western clothes, wearing cologne and smoking cigarettes -- Odeh had shaved his beard off, making him an easy mark for immigration officials.
Similarly, US interception of email, fax and satellite phone messages between bin Ladin and his overseas associates revealed an astonishingly naïve grasp of spy-craft, the Manhattan prosecutors revealed. In one fax, the Saudi was referred to by his US and Irish pseudonyms -'Mr Sam' and 'Mr O'Sam -- and repeatedly warned to beware of 'an opposition company called the Food and Beverage Industry, based in the US'. Bin Ladin's American coordinator followed this warning with a letter in which he wrote: 'Give my regards to Sam and tell him to take extra precautions because business competition is very fierce.'
Though Washington threatened blue murder from the wings after Khost, on-the-ground relations with his protectors, the Taliban, displayed a remarkable reticence by the Goliath of the post-Cold War world. Yes, a $5 million reward was posted and, yes, the State Department made it abundantly clear that diplomatic recognition of Afghanistan's rulers would depend upon their handing over bin Ladin to stand trial. But there was a marked reluctance to take any more direct action, whether by challenging the Taliban to reveal his whereabouts, or launching a cross-border raid to take him forcibly into custody. Wherever he was hiding, the Afghan whispering gallery guaranteed it would not remain secret for long.
Why did Washington fail to press its undoubted advantages, preferring to genuflect to the unfathomable logic of 'Pashtun hospitality', rather than resort to a snatch operation or an outright assassination attempt? Certainly there was the risk that US agents would be killed, or captured and presented to the world through the whetted lens of the media. But an operation was still feasible with cut-outs, perhaps Arabs affiliated with Israel's Mossad.
For one reason or another, the US' combined intelligence forces had made killing Osama seem as inconceivable as Tuesday's meltdown in Manhattan.
Also by Michael Griffin:
Satellites and stars
Mission to cleanse?
Reaping the whirlwind: The Taliban movement in Afghanistan by Michael Griffin is published by Pluto Press (www.plutobooks.com/).
