By Walter Pincus and Vernon Loeb
Washington Post Staff Writers
Tuesday, August 11, 1998; Page A16

CIA operatives foiled two attacks on U.S. embassies last year in advanced stages of planning and disrupted three other incipient plots after infiltrating terrorist cells and by monitoring and intercepting electronic communications, administration and congressional sources said yesterday.

In the wake of twin terrorist bombings of U.S. embassies last week in Kenya and Tanzania, the sources refused to provide details about the locations of the intended targets of the 1997 attacks, or how they were uncovered and undone, for fear of tipping terrorists to U.S. intelligence-gathering capabilities.

But the sources suggested that intelligence successes, both in preventing embassy attacks and aiding in the arrest of more than 40 suspected terrorists since 1993, may have contributed to the decision by whoever was behind Friday's bombings to pick the embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam, both of which were deemed low security risks by the State Department.

The prevention of the two more advanced plans aimed at U.S. embassies was first disclosed to Congress by CIA Director George J. Tenet last year. He gave no further details and did not mention the three other plots unraveled by his agency and cited by officials yesterday.

The two more advanced plots, sources said, did not involve embassies in Africa.

"If you go beyond the target of embassies to American facilities and personnel, it is a very long list of bad things that have been prevented from happening by good intelligence that was properly acted on," said Rep. Porter J. Goss (R-Fla.), chairman of the House Select Committee on Intelligence and a former CIA case officer.

Robert Oakley, former State Department coordinator for counterterrorism, said yesterday that elaborate means are used to infiltrate terrorist groups targeting U.S. facilities. He recalled an episode in the mid-1980s when U.S. intelligence recruited a terrorist who had been assigned to bomb an American embassy in Europe. The putative bomber, Oakley said, was allowed to detonate a bomb inside the embassy compound in such a way that little damage was done, far removed from U.S. personnel, so that his relationship with U.S. intelligence was not exposed, Oakley said.

"They work hard at it," Oakley said of the CIA's embassy security efforts. "But as Tenet has said this year, we rely too much on technical intelligence and we don't have enough human intelligence out there -- and the terrorists are getting sophisticated about evading our technical intelligence."

Since the bombings, State Department officials and members of Congress have called for substantial funding increases to bring most or all U.S. embassies up to security standards recommended in the mid-1980s by a panel on diplomatic security headed by retired Adm. Bobby Ray Inman.

Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. (Del.), ranking Democrat on the Senate Foreign Affairs Committee, yesterday wrote to Albright that "it is imperative that we redouble our efforts to ensure that our employees are adequately protected."

But beyond the so-called Inman standards, which call for 75-foot setbacks from the street and nine-foot walls at all embassy compounds, Goss emphasized the need to realign U.S. intelligence capabilities, once arrayed primarily against the Soviet Union, to combat global terrorism.

He also noted that the Clinton administration had significantly cut back on the number of CIA stations operating in Africa. However, a senior intelligence official noted that both Nairobi and Dar es Salaam were not among the capitals to lose an intelligence presence.

"If you cut back on your coverage of intelligence, are there consequences?" Goss asked. "I would say . . . yes. And I would say that is something that somebody who has the oversight responsibility for intelligence will be looking into."

The bombings in East Africa Friday have triggered one dozen to two dozen new threats telephoned in to U.S. installations, said Patrick Kennedy, assistant secretary of state for management.

Intelligence sources with knowledge of the CIA's work last year circumventing attacks on embassies said every agency success breeds a change in tactics by terrorist groups, which often spend as much time studying the CIA as the agency spends studying them.

The result, the sources said, has been tighter compartmentalization of terrorist operations, where cells responsible for planning an attack don't know who assembles the explosives and those building the bombs don't know who will detonate them.

"You're going up against such rigid compartmentalization," said Charles Englehart, a former CIA station chief in the Middle East now working for Kroll Associates, a large private investigation agency. "One of the things you're doing is, you're always looking for threats against the embassy. You've got the high-profile ambassador moving around. You've got the Peace Corps people running up the road in tribal areas -- you're always looking for a threat."