My life

As we pressed Turabi to expel bin Laden, we asked Saudi Arabia to take him. The Saudis didn’t want him back, but bin Laden finally left Sudan in mid-1996, apparently still on good terms with Turabi. He moved to Afghanistan, where he found a warm welcome from Mullah Omar, leader of the Taliban, a militant Sunni sect that was bent on establishing a radical Muslim theocracy in Afghanistan. In September 1996, the Taliban captured Kabul and started seizing other areas of the country. By the end of the year, the CIA’s bin Laden unit had developed significant information on him and his infrastructure. Almost a year later, Kenyan authorities arrested a man they believed was involved in a terrorist plot against the U.S. Embassy there.

In the week after the bombings, I kept up my regular schedule, traveling to Kentucky, Illinois, and California to promote the Patients’ Bill of Rights and our clean water initiative, and to help Democrats up for election in those states. Beyond the public events, I spent most of my time with our national security team discussing how we were going to respond to the African attacks. On August 13, there was a memorial service at Andrews Air Force Base for ten of the twelve American victims. The people bin Laden believed deserved to die just because they were Americans included a career diplomat I had met twice and his son; a woman who had just spent her vacation caring for her aged parents; an Indian-born foreign service officer who had traveled the world working for her adopted country; an epidemiologist working to save African children from disease and death; a mother of three small children; a proud new grandmother; an accomplished jazz musician with a day job in the foreign service; an embassy administrator who had married a Kenyan; and three sergeants, one each in the army, the air force, and the Marine Corps.

By all accounts, bin Laden was poisoned by the conviction that he was in possession of the absolute truth and therefore free to play God by killing innocent people. Since we had been going after his organization for several years, I had known for some time that he was a formidable adversary. After the African slaughter I became intently focused on capturing or killing him and with destroying al Qaeda. One week after the embassy bombings, and after videotaping an address to the people of Kenya and Tanzania, whose losses were far greater than ours, I met with the national security principals. The CIA and FBI both confirmed that al Qaeda was responsible and reported that some of the perpetrators had already been arrested.

I had also received an intelligence report that al Qaeda had plans to attack yet another embassy, in Tirana, Albania, and that our enemies thought America was vulnerable because we would be distracted by the controversy over my personal behavior. We closed the Albanian embassy, sent in heavily armed marines to guard it, and began working with local authorities to break up the al Qaeda cell there. But we still had other embassies in countries with al Qaeda operations.

The CIA also had intelligence that bin Laden and his top staff were planning a meeting at one of his camps in Afghanistan on August 20 to assess the impact of their attacks and plan their next operations. The meeting would provide an opportunity to retaliate and perhaps wipe out much of the al Qaeda leadership. I asked Sandy Berger to manage the process leading up to a military response. We had to pick targets, move the necessary military assets into place, and figure out how to handle Pakistan. If we launched air strikes, our planes would pass over Pakistan’s airspace. Although we were trying to work with Pakistan to defuse tensions on the Indian subcontinent, and our two nations had been allies during the Cold War, Pakistan supported the Taliban and, by extension, al Qaeda. The Pakistani intelligence service used some of the same camps that bin Laden and al Qaeda did to train the Taliban and insurgents who fought in Kashmir. If Pakistan found out about our planned attacks in advance, it was likely that Pakistani intelligence would warn the Taliban or even al Qaeda. On the other hand, Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott, who was working to minimize the chances of military conflict on the Indian subcontinent, was afraid that if we didn’t tell the Pakistanis, they might assume the flying missiles had been launched at them by India and retaliate, conceivably even with nuclear weapons.