Word: celling
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...operation would produce clues that led to another. For example, a CIA analyst perusing a slip of paper scooped up in one raid realized that scribbled on it was part of a phone number for a bin Laden cell in another country. That cell became the next target and yielded another round of evidence...
...August 1997 the CIA had identified a bin Laden cell operating in Nairobi. The agency believed it was headed by Wadih el Hage, a Lebanese who held American citizenship and who, according to court documents, once served as bin Laden's personal secretary. Washington sent a secret request to Kenyan authorities in Nairobi: roust Wadih el Hage. For several weeks Kenyan police, sometimes accompanied by visiting FBI agents, began paying visits to el Hage's Nairobi home, searching its rooms, confiscating computer disks and darkly warning him that he'd face more hassling if he remained in the country...
...raids never uncovered a list of operatives in the cell but did rattle many of the members. One typed on el Hage's computer a "security report" to a senior bin Laden aide complaining that "the cell is at 100% danger" because of hostile intelligence agencies. FBI agents believe the report's author was Abdullah Mohammed Fazul, whom the CIA at the time had identified only as a distant associate of el Hage's. He was later accused of being a key planner of the embassy bombings the next year. El Hage moved with his family to Texas, where...
State Department officials now question whether the CIA missed clues to a future attack in those papers. Intelligence officials insist that none of the evidence taken revealed a bombing plot. Bin Laden definitely had a cell in Nairobi, the CIA reported to the embassy at the time, but the agency had no idea what he planned to do with it. Bin Laden had made plenty of public threats against the U.S., but the CIA believed he would be most likely to carry them out in Persian Gulf countries, where there was a U.S. military presence he hated, not in East...
...next nine months, East Africa went off the intelligence radar screen. No more CIA reports of terror threats were delivered to the Nairobi embassy. In hindsight, it was probably a tip-off that something bad might happen. Terror cells go quiet before they attack. The CIA thought it had busted up the bin Laden cell, but during the silent period, "the B-team came in," says a U.S. intelligence official. Mohamed Rashed Daoud al-'Owhali and Mohamed Sadeek Odeh, trained in explosives at a bin Laden camp, eventually joined Fazul in Nairobi to organize the strike...