Word: ladened
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...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...
Meanwhile, the CIA station conducted another covert operation in Kenya. It was prompted by a tipster who walked into the Nairobi embassy in September 1997 and claimed that seven Arabs who worked for a local Islamic charity had connections with a bin Laden terror group. The agency confirmed that there were indirect ties, so Kenyan authorities deported the men to their home countries, and CIA officers began sifting through all the documents left behind...
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...
...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...
...battling bin Laden on additional fronts. In the spring of 1998, a small CIA-FBI team collected intelligence on him by parking itself at what agents call the "zero line," Pakistan's border with Afghanistan. Back at Langley, CIA and Army special-operations officers drafted contingency plans for commandos to fight their way into Afghanistan for a snatch. CIA director George Tenet nixed the operation, fearing too many U.S. casualties. But in June the agency scored a win. CIA officers working with Albanian police grabbed four members of a bin Laden-affiliated group, the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, who planned...