This undated photo shows Osama bin Laden flanked at a table by two associates at an undisclosed place in Afghanistan. (AFP)

By Vernon Loeb and
Michael Grunwald
Washington Post Staff Writers
Friday, August 21, 1998; Page A19

President Clinton and senior administration officials cited "compelling evidence" to justify cruise missile attacks on the operations of terrorist financier Osama bin Laden yesterday but provided no new information to substantiate their assertion that the exiled Saudi millionaire masterminded the recent bomb attacks on two U.S. embassies in Africa.

A senior intelligence official said he has rarely seen so much high quality evidence from "a variety of reliable intelligence sources" come together "so uniformly and persuasively" pointing to bin Laden's group. But citing highly classified intelligence, he and other top Clinton aides essentially asked Americans to take them at their word, refusing to divulge what information they had, where it came from or how it was obtained.

Bin Laden has long been high on the U.S. government's list of leading terrorists, having been described in the State Department's 1997 report on "Patterns of Global Terrorism" as "one of the most significant sponsors of Sunni Islamic terrorist groups." But before the Aug. 7 embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania, he remained a shadowy figure largely unknown outside the world of policy analysts, security consultants, intelligence officials and journalists who make a living tracking terrorist threats.

All that changed in dramatic fashion yesterday.

Clinton instantly put bin Laden in the pantheon of global menaces occupied by the likes of Iraq President Saddam Hussein, calling the Saudi in an Oval Office address to the nation "perhaps the preeminent organizer and financier of international terrorism in the world today."

While U.S. officials previously cited circumstantial evidence linking bin Laden to a series of attacks on U.S. troops, Clinton went much further. He tied bin Laden to other bloody attacks in which his direct involvement has never been publicly established: plans to assassinate Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak and the pope, a plot to blow U.S. airliners out of the sky, attacks on German tourists in Egypt and the bombing of the Egyptian embassy in Pakistan.

"A few months ago and again this week," Clinton said, "bin Laden publicly vowed to wage a terrorist war against America, saying -- and I quote -- 'We do not differentiate between those dressed in military uniforms and civilians. They're all targets.' "

Federal law enforcement sources said they were a bit surprised by the attacks, because they are nowhere near bringing criminal charges against bin Laden, or anyone else allegedly involved in the embassy bombings. They noted, however, that the quality of information acceptable for deciding on a military strike is not necessarily as high as the rules of evidence for a legal case, especially when the target has declared his intentions to harm American citizens.

"Legally, you can't expect to get results overnight; it just doesn't work that way," one law enforcement official said. "With the military, well, that's a different story."

Indeed, defense and intelligence officials said they remain highly confident that they have the goods to prove bin Laden's followers were behind the embassy bombings in Africa, which killed 12 Americans and almost 300 Kenyans and Tanzanians.

"After following many terrorist events, rarely have we come to some conclusions as fast as we did; rarely has the quality of what we collected been as high as it has been," the senior intelligence official said. "Based on the information, as a result, we have high confidence that these bombings were planned, financed and carried out by the organization that bin Laden leads."

The CIA, the National Security Agency and the National Reconnaissance Organization are known to maintain a multibillion-dollar array of satellites and worldwide electronic eavesdropping facilities capable of photographing virtually any spot on Earth several times a day and intercepting nearly any form of electronic communication.

U.S. intelligence and law enforcement officials have also been interrogating a suspect in the bombing since Sunday, identified as Mohammed Saddiq Odeh, who was arrested in Pakistan on Aug. 7, the day of the bombings in Kenya and Tanzania, coming off a flight from Nairobi. Pakistani officials said he subsequently admitted to being part of a plot controlled by bin Laden.

Clinton and defense officials said the decision to send ship-launched cruise missiles at six sites near the Afghan town of Khost, including what they described as four training camps, was influenced by intelligence that a meeting of terrorist leaders was supposed to take place at one of the camps yesterday. Intelligence gathering has also indicated that as many as 600 individuals have been present in the camps at any one time, although it was not known how many were present yesterday, Gen. Hugh Shelton, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said at a Pentagon briefing.

"This is the largest Sunni terrorist training facility in the world," the senior intelligence official said. "Essentially, these are like [a] terrorist university for a wealth of worldwide terrorist organizations."

Other intelligence factors influencing the timing of yesterday's simultaneous raids on the camps and the chemical plant in Khartoum, officials said, included "ongoing evidence" that bin Laden's groups were planning further terrorist attacks against Americans. This information, however, was not spelled out.

U.S. intelligence also has evidence, the intelligence official said, that bin Laden "has worked with Sudan to test poisonous gases and to finance simpler manufacturing and dispensing of gas, methods which would be less time-consuming and expensive than prior Sudanese efforts."

But the officials stressed that the attacks were targeted at bin Laden's infrastructure, not bin Laden himself. White House spokesman Michael McCurry said U.S. officials "have no idea of bin Laden's whereabouts and whether he was in this camp at this time."

Defense and intelligence officials described bin Laden's camps in considerable detail, obviously referring to satellite photography that revealed firing ranges, grounds used for testing explosives and an array of heavy weapons, including armored personnel carriers and tanks.

The officials said some of the camps date to the 1980s, when the Soviet Union was involved in Afghanistan fighting Afghan rebel forces, including bin Laden, who helped recruit, finance and lead thousands of Arab volunteers from all over the Middle East. That would mean U.S. intelligence has years of satellite reconnaissance of this area of Afghanistan, located about 94 miles south of Kabul.

"But even in the last couple of months, we've seen continued building and even expansion of these facilities, indicating not a decline in activity; in fact increases in activity, like building and construction activity," one defense official said.

John Pike, an intelligence expert at the Federation of American Scientists, said advanced KH-11 satellites take extremely high resolution images that easily identify buildings and vehicles. "This is real time, in the sense that the images are back at Fort Belvoir within a few seconds of when they're taken, but they're images, not movies."

Pike said KH-11 satellites have infrared capability, enabling them to produce images at night. He said so-called Vega satellites produce images using radar and thus can collect images at night and in spite of cloud cover.

"They have been building profiles of these camps for years," Pike said. "They would have certainly discovered the camps within a few months after they were set up and they have certainly been getting to know them. There are guys at NSA and [other intelligence agencies] who deal with terrorist camps in the Sudan and Afghanistan; that's their job."

Pike and Jeffrey T. Richelson, a senior fellow at the National Security Archive and a leading expert on U.S. intelligence, also said that the NSA is capable of intercepting radio, satellite telephone, even walkie-talkie communications emanating from all of bin Laden's camps.

Richelson said it is conceivable that the NSA has stored communications from those camps in its vast data banks for years. In searching electronic information, he said, "they have word recognition capability. If you're [listening] for a particular word or phrase like, 'Let's blow up the U.S. embassy,' you can sort that out from 'Let's go to dinner.' "

"In terms of the intercepts, anything that goes through the air that's not high frequency can be intercepted by satellites," Richelson said. And everything else, he added, can be intercepted by NSA listening posts on the ground.

The chemical plant targeted in yesterday's attacks, the senior defense officials said, was part of Sudan's military industrial complex, to which bin Laden is known to make financial contributions. The plant, they said, is known to manufacture a precursor chemical used in the production of deadly VX nerve gas.

"We know that bin Laden has been seeking to acquire chemical weapons for use in terrorist acts," the senior intelligence official said. "We know that bin Laden has had an intimate relationship with the Sudanese government, which is a state sponsor of terrorism."

Another senior administration official added that the facility "has been involved in the production of chemical weapons, he has had a connection with it for some time, dating back to when he went there [from 1991 to 1996]. It is part of his infrastructure."

But a senior Sudanese official said the Shifa pharmaceutical plant is owned by a prominent businessman named Salah Idriss, who is said to have purchased it from its previous Sudanese owner a few months ago. Idriss reportedly is a business partner of Mohammed bin Mahfouz, the governor of the Saudi Central Bank.

One U.S. source, who knows Idriss well, said Idriss has been using his Saudi backing to buy factories and businesses in Sudan in anticipation of a political change there. The source said he thinks it is unlikely that he would be a partner with bin Laden.

The Sudanese official said that bin Laden was supposed to have liquidated all his holdings in Sudan when he left the country, but it cannot be excluded that he has some clandestine interest in the pharmaceutical plant. "I do not exclude the possibility that he owns part of it."

Added one U.S. official familiar with his government's counterterrorism policy: "Innocent until proven guilty is an incredibly high standard for someone who has declared war on the United States. This is a bad guy. He's been a bad guy for a long time. This strike is long overdue."

Staff writer Thomas B. Lippman contributed to this report.