Terror In Africa

By Johanna McGeary

When terror strikes, it always tears through the comforting screen of normality. One moment, midmorning shoppers and workers bustle along Nairobi's Haile Selassie Avenue at the downtown corner where a bronze eagle and a fluttering flag mark the five-story U.S. embassy. The next, the earth trembles as a thunderclap unleashes a mighty shock wave. Seconds later, black smoke plumes into the sky as the tarmac ignites, flashing fire to parked cars and passing buses. The blast shatters every window within a quarter-mile radius into lethal slivers, blows the bombproof doors off the embassy, sucks out ceilings and furniture and people, pancakes a seven-story building next door into a mountain of rubble. Thousands of innocent people are injured, and more than a hundred die, including 11 Americans.

Nearly 450 miles away in Tanzania, at almost exactly the same time, a vehicle drives into the sunny grounds of the U.S. embassy in a residential quarter of Dar es Salaam and explodes, wrecking the entrance, blowing off parts of the building's right side and setting cars ablaze. Seven Tanzanians are killed, and 72 hurt.

Two bombs with a single message: don't forget the world's superpower still has enemies, secret, violent and determined. America is ever a target, its embassies and installations abroad inviting symbols of its power. See, say the bombers, despite your enormous wealth and strength, we can still inflict a great hurt.

The mystery, of course, is why. Why there, why now? Who has a reason, however perverse? What do they gain from this carnage? In the earlier era of terrorism, the years of skyjackings and Lebanese horrors, the purpose was usually obvious, a bloody form of bargaining, and the perpetrators trumpeted their responsibility; the message got across only if it was signed. But more recent practitioners, like the men who leveled an American military barracks in Saudi Arabia two years ago or set off a bomb at the Atlanta Olympic Games, rarely call in with their names or seek a discernible result. Theirs may be acts of recruitment to win adherents to some fanatic's cause, or of a secret vengeance. Above all, the anonymous blasts from the blue are terror for terror's sake, intended to sow fear and make Americans tremble.

When National Security Adviser Sandy Berger woke President Bill Clinton at 5:30 a.m. with the news, the Commander in Chief's first concern was for the victims, his second for the perpetrators. A few hours later, the President uttered a grim public warning to the terrorists: "We will use all the means at our disposal to bring those responsible to justice, no matter what or how long it takes." The U.S. has long believed that the only way to curtail terrorism is to exact justice by capturing and convicting individual culprits and retaliating against nations that sponsor them. Declared National Security Council spokesman P.J. Crowley: "We don't forgive, we don't forget."

Yet the U.S. record of success is not very good. Out of 24 major attacks on American targets since Iranian fundamentalists seized the Tehran embassy in 1979, only eight ever ended in arrest and trial, and three of those eight assaults took place in the U.S. Only once, when Libya was blamed for the 1986 bombing of a German discotheque, did the U.S. retaliate militarily. But persistence has paid off: the Palestinian who set a bomb on a Pan Am jet that killed one person in 1982 was finally turned over to American courts in June. The U.S. has also developed extensive and effective preventive measures.

But the large majority of terrorists who carried out operations--those who bombed the U.S. embassy in Beirut, American peacekeepers in Lebanon, U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia, Pan Am 103; those who hijacked TWA 847 and shot up the Rome and Vienna airports--have never been caught or punished. Countries long deemed the fountainheads of terrorism, like Iran, Syria and Sudan, have never felt the sting of U.S. retaliation. Even so, as the Administration dispatched its teams of investigators to Nairobi and Dar es Salaam, Berger vowed that the U.S. would succeed. Said he: "Our strongest weapon is our persistence and our determination."

Washington will need a great deal of both this time. Amid the pandemonium in Nairobi, rescuers may have inadvertently destroyed the vital bits and shreds from which the experts reconstruct the bombs and their delivery vehicles that serve as a kind of fingerprint of the terrorists. The manhunt begins on hands and knees at the decimated sites as investigators search for telltale scraps and pass them along to high-tech analysts in Washington. Intelligence agents are already sweeping through phone intercepts and combing computer databases that list some 200,000 terrorist suspects and more than 3,000 groups.

So far, they have no evidence to implicate any of them, but counterterrorism officials aren't ruling anyone out. The bombers could be Kenyans or Tanzanians with a grudge against the U.S., outside terrorists from around the globe, or a combination of the two. The bombings could be the work of an enemy state, an organized fringe group or fanatic individuals. Mindful that the first blame in the Oklahoma City bombing was pointed at Muslims though the culprit turned out to be a disgruntled American militiaman, officials caution that it is way too early to speculate on the guilty.

But the Administration's investigators are working from certain assumptions. "It doesn't look like the handiwork of a bunch of guys who got together in a garage," says Morris Busby, former director of the State Department's counterterrorism office. Intelligence experts believe the operation had to be "professionally" planned to get two powerful car bombs into both cities and parked near the embassies, and to explode them almost in tandem. They think it would probably have taken "several months" to organize. They suspect the two embassies were chosen because they were "soft": easily accessible buildings in wide-open countries that offered easy entry to people and explosives.

So the initial presumption is that the bombers came from outside Africa, and past experience points first to the Middle East. Eighteen of those 24 previous attacks were believed to have been done by Muslims. But even there, the number of possible suspects is sizable. Iran, Iraq and Libya all have means and motives to hit the U.S. in Africa, but officials say Saddam Hussein or Muammar Gaddafi would have little to gain and much to lose if caught in such a brazen act of aggression. Investigators will also look toward renegade extremists within the Iranian government who seek to disrupt the inching rapprochement between the West and moderate President Mohammed Khatami. Sudan, one of the main havens for terrorists today, could have provided the bombers with training, money, explosives, phony documents, safe passage and refuge, but is not known to have undertaken operations abroad on its own behalf.

Likewise, some of the familiar groups involved in terror, like Lebanon's Hizballah and the Palestinian militants of Hamas, seem less suspect this time, since both now largely restrict their attacks to Israeli targets. But little dissident cells keep proliferating, and for many of them America is a generalized object of their hatred. A previously unknown group calling itself the Liberation Army of the Islamic Shrines phoned the Cairo office of al-Hayat newspaper to claim responsibility after the blast but offered no information to back up its claim. Investigators are also looking at a threat published in the same paper last Thursday by Egypt's Islamic Jihad, a band of Muslims seeking to depose Egypt's secular government. The group vowed revenge against the U.S. for helping Albania arrest and deport three of its members to Egypt in June. A larger, related organization, the Islamic Group, has long sworn to exact vengeance for the conviction and life sentence imposed on its spiritual leader, Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman, for his involvement in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.

Highest on the U.S. list at the moment is Saudi renegade millionaire Osama bin Laden. Over the past year or so, he has issued a number of decrees, calling on all Muslim groups to attack U.S. facilities. Bin Laden is thought to be a major financier of terror groups and is the prime suspect in the 1996 bombing of the Khobar Towers military barracks in Saudi Arabia that killed 19 U.S. servicemen. While his declared goal is the overthrow of the Saudi monarchy, bin Laden's bitterness toward the U.S. is just as strong. "All Muslims," he said last May, "must declare jihad against them." Such general threats do not help U.S. intelligence officials sort through the 30,000 they receive each year to pick out the real warnings. And African embassies, by any measure, seemed to be the least threatened and thus the last in line for congressionally mandated but underfunded security improvements.

It is especially shocking that so many citizens of two U.S.-friendly African nations were murdered in the terrorist attack. Few Kenyans will ever exorcise the hideous images of charred bodies draped from a bus, of mutilated corpses stacked in the bed of a pickup truck, of the dazed walking wounded stained with the bright red of fresh arterial blood. No arrest, trial or conviction will make sense of the losses.

That is precisely the nightmare message the terrorists intended to stamp upon the minds of Americans. However hard you come looking for us, we will always be out there, planning and plotting to hit you again, sometime, someplace.

--Reported by Scott MacLeod/Paris, Clive Mutiso/Nairobi and Douglas Waller/Washington

With reporting by Scott MacLeod/Paris, Clive Mutiso/Nairobi and Douglas Waller/Washington