It is al-Qaeda’s first strike at America. Hundreds are killed by suicide bombs at two US embassies in Africa.
“The scale of the bombing was enormous. It is the beginning of a new era of terrorism. You can’t really overstate the impact. This was the declaration of war on the United States.”
For the CIA, there’s only one man who can hunt down the killers: the legendary operative John Bennett.
“He is entrepreneurial, aggressive. He is exactly the sort of person in a war zone that you would want in charge.”
The terrorists are operating from a country that’s a no-go zone for the US.
“It was very dangerous. The Somali clans will turn you over for a few dollars.”
The top-secret mission: infiltrate the most dangerous country in the world, deliver Operation Celestial Balance, and work with SEAL Team Six to ensure that justice is done.
It’s a bustling August morning in Nairobi, the capital of the East African state of Kenya. If it’s famous for anything, it’s for its world-class safari parks and pristine beaches. It’s a part of Africa that doesn’t often make the news headlines.
Just after 10:30 a.m., a truck drives up to the US embassy, and instead of slowing at the barrier, it accelerates.
“The scale of the bombing was enormous. It was not only the explosive capacity which destroyed the embassy and nearby buildings, but the shock wave shattered glass for many, many blocks around. Most of the Kenyans who were injured badly were hit by flying glass.”
The final death toll is 12 Americans and 200 Kenyans, with over 4,000 injured. Almost simultaneously, another suicide bomb explodes outside the US embassy in Dar es Salaam, the capital of the neighboring country of Tanzania.
“Nothing has ever happened like this before to Americans in the region. It’s an incomprehensible act that stuns the world.”
“Our teams are on the ground in Africa. They are tending to the wounded, they are providing security, they are searching and finding evidence. We will do whatever we can to bring the murderers to justice.”
To a handful of experts inside America’s intelligence and security agencies, it’s immediately obvious that the sophistication of an operation like this can’t have come from locals working alone. The suspicion is that a Saudi prince few have heard of, called Osama bin Laden, is behind the attacks. Earlier in the year, he declared a holy war on the US, and now it’s clear he wants the world to know that America has an implacable enemy that will strike without warning.
“The 1998 embassy bombings were a turning point. Until then, al-Qaeda had been a shadowy, behind-the-scenes presence. It wasn’t really known to the public, wasn’t widely known outside intelligence circles.”
“You can’t really overstate the impact, and this was the declaration of war on the United States.”
The only explanation for the location of the attacks is the ease with which they can be carried out. Poor security, corruption, and easy targets like Western mass tourism make the country irresistible to a burgeoning terror organization.
“The embassy bombing revealed the fact that the East Africa al-Qaeda cell found Kenya to be actually quite a permissive environment to work in. They had both aggrieved Muslim coastal populations that they could find some support from. They had opportunities thanks to Kenya’s corrupt political system and police to operate with near impunity, and they had thousands of soft targets.”
Almost immediately, the US hits back at known al-Qaeda targets.
“Today, I ordered our armed forces to strike at terrorist-related facilities in Afghanistan and Sudan.”
But they failed to achieve their objectives. The strikes on a base in Sudan destroy a harmless pharmaceutical factory. 75 missiles hit four al-Qaeda training camps in Afghanistan in an attempt to kill Osama bin Laden, but he’s not in any of them. As well as tracking down Osama bin Laden, the CIA wants the local cell responsible for the planning and the execution of the attacks. Within hours of the bombing, Kenyan police have an amazing stroke of luck: they arrest a man who turns out to be one of the suicide bombers who panicked and fled at the last minute. On his cell phone are numbers that confirm his links to al-Qaeda. But he gives an even more valuable piece of information: the name of his al-Qaeda handler in Nairobi. That name is Harun Fazul.
The CIA Nairobi station immediately get to work. They check NSA wiretaps of Osama bin Laden’s calls to Nairobi and see regular connections to the offices of an aid charity and conversations with an employee there called Fazul. When investigators raid the charity’s offices, they discover fake passports that show that Harun Fazul is an alias used by someone called Fazul Abdullah Mohammed. It turns out he’s a hardened terrorist with over a decade’s experience.
“Fazul had a very long and winding background. He had moved to several different places, you know, in and out of Africa, even going as far as going to Pakistan. He was the personal secretary to Osama bin Laden and then moved with bin Laden back to Sudan. Fazul really became one of the guys that was a foreign operations director, took on this role of doing the big external foreign attacks for al-Qaeda and specifically the Horn of Africa. He would make trips into Kenya, and so, leading up to the embassy bombings, he would go there, you know, set up logistics, look at financing and money.”
Investigators also discover that Fazul is assisted by a young protégé called Salai Al-Naban. Further interrogations reveal that the two terrorists fled Kenya on the eve of the bombing. CIA analysts conclude they must have gone to one particular country. Kenya’s violent, lawless, and chaotic neighbor, Somalia, is the perfect safe haven for terrorists on the run. For years, it’s been a no-go area for Americans thanks to the notorious Battle of Mogadishu five years earlier.
“The shooting down of a Blackhawk helicopter and the drawn-out rescue attempt that followed led to massive American casualties. It later became known as Blackhawk Down. 18 US Army Rangers were killed. Hundreds of Somali died in that. The US pulled out, and Somalia was left to its own devices for a number of years.”
The CIA now realizes that going after Fazul and Naban means chasing them down to the one place where no commander wants to send his men. Somalia is a dead zone where the US has no base, no friends, and no contacts. The assets that the US intelligence community had in Somalia were practically non-existent. When the US troops pulled out of Mogadishu in 1993, the CIA station went with them. That was the last CIA presence in the country. The CIA is virtually in the dark and will need to build an intelligence-gathering operation from the ground up.
“Very difficult to go in there and really get any sort of intelligence going. There’s not a lot of signals intelligence, so you really have to rely on human intelligence.”
And then the CIA makes another disturbing discovery: because Kenya’s Muslims distrust the US-backed Christian government, al-Qaeda sympathizers straddle the border of Kenya and Somalia. It’s a situation which suits the terrorists perfectly.
“The internal dynamics of Kenya really play…”
Although the psychological offensive is beginning to work, the rebel army is down to a last desperate handful of troops, only 6 miles into the country itself, and Arbenz is still in power. The CIA is about to make an incredible gamble to bluff its way from defeat to stunning victory.
“Right at this critical stage, Phillips introduced what he called his most important big lie. The ‘important big lie’ is the final stage of the fake radio broadcasts, presenting an entirely made-up version of the invasion.”
So, in some ways, there were two invasions. There was the real invasion that showed a poultry invasion force, its numbers reduced by half, and then there was the map created by Radio Liberacion. It suggested the force was having unimpeded progress. The CIA radio broadcasts tell of one victory after another—an invasion which, in reality, doesn’t exist at all.
“Rebel forces were moving. They were moving towards the capital. The invasion was successful. The uprising was coming. It was one tale after another of the inevitable victory of the rebel forces.”
The biggest lie of all is when the radio reports that thousands and thousands of fictitious soldiers are closing in on Guatemala City itself. And the lie was that two military columns were advancing on the capital, ready to take it over. The “big lie” gamble now pays off. Thousands fled the city, car traffic stopped, the city itself was slowly becoming paralyzed. People ran to the outskirts of the city; they were fleeing to safety. The critical moment of the “big lie” is when the senior officers turn against the Guatemalan president.
“The big payoff for ‘black science’ comes when several army colonels make clear to Arbenz that they’re not going to stand with him. They basically tell him, ‘You and your communist friends have got us in trouble with the Americans, and now you’ve got to step down.'”
One by one, the officers around Arbenz distance themselves from the isolated president.
“So you’re a colonel in the Guatemalan army, you’re hearing news of military action, and you’re starting to ask yourself, ‘Where am I going to be? Where am I going to stand when the dust settles?'”
Politically isolated, the pressure on Arbenz surges to dizzying heights. Not only does he fear defeat at the hands of his bitter enemy, Armas, but also the terrifying prospect that America is behind him.
“It’s not the issue of us fighting, uh, Castillo Armas and his guys; it’s that the United States is threatening to invade, and we’d have to fight them.”
He was sitting in his presidential office, bewildered and unsure what to do. He had collapsed internally; the CIA had brilliantly undermined him, and that was really the end of his reign. With the officers turning against him, on June the 27th, Arbenz resigns.
“Couldn’t… he just couldn’t handle it. The psychological pressures were too enormous.”
10 days later, Castillo Armas is sworn in as Guatemala’s new president. The exiled colonel, who just over a week earlier was a relatively unknown figure, is now the most powerful man in the country. In Washington, Operation PB Success goes down as a huge victory. By all accounts, this is an operation that should not have succeeded; this was made possible by gutsy determination and in some ways crazy abandon.
“Operation PB Success was a brilliant deception, one of the great artistic achievements of illusion that the CIA ever produced. Operation PB Success proved that psychological warfare could be used as a deadly and effective weapon. It fooled an entire country and ultimately brought down a president.”
Within the CIA, PB Success becomes the model for future regime change across the world.
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“If the government was willing to give us permission to send in a team of Special Forces operators, it would have been easy to eliminate his bodyguard and capture him.”
But there’s one big obstacle to a ground attack. The president of Yemen, Abdullah Saleh, has ruled out US forces putting boots on the ground.
“The only option left to us was an air strike. Now, uh, President Saleh didn’t want American fighter bombers flying over Yemeni airspace, which left basically an unmanned drone as the only option left to us.”
Until now, an armed drone has only been used once to take out a terrorist. The decision now is to assassinate Al-Harithi with a new technology, something that has never been done before in the Arab world.
“There had been an executive order which allowed the use of drones to kill terrorists effectively, and the implication was al-Qaeda terrorists, and that had happened relatively recently.”
With Al-Harithi pinpointed and a presidential order in place authorizing his killing, the decision to use a drone armed with a missile is given the green light, and the CIA’s well-rehearsed plan is put into action.
“As soon as the order came in, a classified message went to the commander. Two Predator drones, both armed with Hellfire missiles, were sorted from the base, took off, flew into Yemeni airspace, and just sat there and waited for NSA to tell the controllers where their target was located.”
“The drone can fly up to 9, 10,000 ft in the air and just sit there, flying lazy circles in the air waiting for your target to appear. They can stay in the air up to 25 hours at a time.”
The CIA’s drone operators now track the vehicle containing Al-Harithi. They’re assisted by Yemen Special Forces observing and following from a distance. With the Predator drone directly above the target, the operator releases a Hellfire missile.
“The time had come to show that the US would not allow al-Qaeda to crop up on different fronts, that if you’re going to attack the United States, there are going to be consequences of that. And I think, I think actually the attack on Abu Ali was probably a conglomeration of all of those things.”
In November 2002, the strike on Abu Ali al-Harithi is the first time, at least the first recorded time that we have of the US using a drone outside of a declared battlefield.
“It was a very big, it is a very big moment, not only for the US war against al-Qaeda, because killing Abu Al-Hadi sort of, you know, cut off the head of al-Qaeda in Yemen, but also for US technology.”
With Al-Harithi out of action, al-Qaeda in Yemen is left fragmented and weak.
“It was a country that had had violent Islamism, including al-Qaeda, since at least the early ’90s. Goes all the way up to 2002, and then with the death of Abu Ali, it suddenly stops. It’s one of the very few cases in which a drone strike did exactly what it’s meant to, which is decapitate an organization.”
“If you take out the top of an organization, you leave the rest of it without an authority to control it, to tell it what to do, but it just kind of crumbles in on itself and fades. In this case, it did work very well.”
The CIA strike on Al-Harithi is a textbook operation. It goes down in history as one of the most successful drone operations of its kind. For the next three years, top-secret signals technology, combined with advanced intelligence gathering across the Arab world, leads to operations that seize Abdul Rahim al-Nashiri and 13 others. All are jailed. Al-Qaeda is put out of business, and Yemen is closed down as Osama bin Laden’s next place of refuge.
