Original subtitles

- Car bombs exploded outside the U.S. embassies

in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam.

- 224 people died, including 12 Americans.

- It was an attack against a U.S. embassy.

It's the purview of the FBI to go over there.

It was decided that we will be going.

- We knew we were walking into something

that I don't think any of us had ever seen before.

- The worst international terrorist incident

on African soil.

- Every piece of glass on that building was blown in.

- People were just moving blocks,

trying to locate people in this pile of rubble.

- One of the witnesses saying that there was probably

one guy, may have gotten away.

- We don't know his first name,

we don't know his last name.

- Maybe he could be a former mujahideen.

- This one lead comes in.

He said, I've got an individual here

who sort of stands out.

But it's in an area that even the police are like,

"Ohh, we don't really go in there."

Is this somebody trying to lure us in and kill us?

[sirens wailing]

- In the FBI, we make a lot of headlines.

♪

Drug busts, mob stings,

terrorist takedowns.

- Get down! [shouting]

- We understand why people want to tell stories about us.

- Mark it. - Freeze!

- FBI. - FBI!

- Action!

- But they don't know the half of it.

What really goes down?

We save that for each other,

when we're talking agent-to-agent.

This is "FBI True."

[tense music]

- Hey, it's her!

- Oh, my God, it's so good to see you guys.

Come on. Let's go in.

- Kristy Kottis is a 24-year veteran of the FBI.

She worked gangs, crimes against children,

as well as human and drug trafficking.

Kottis was the supervisor

of the FBI's threat response squad,

overseeing the Bureau's response to terrorism threats

in New York City.

- So here we have these two embassies bombed.

And this is like-- this is U.S. property.

This is like a piece of Kansas or Massachusetts,

just overseas.

[sirens wailing]

- Car bombs exploded outside the U.S. embassies

in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam.

- The gravitas-- death, U.S. citizens,

citizens of the country,

the Foreign Service Nationals that work there.

Nothing like this has ever happened before.

- The worst international terrorist incident

on African soil.

- Where were you guys when you first heard

about the bombings?

- I remember it very clearly.

I was actually on the BQE heading to the Battery Tunnel,

when I heard it on the news.

- Over the course of his 28 years with the FBI,

John Anticev was involved with major investigations

around the world.

As a member of New York's Joint Terrorism Task Force,

Anticev helped thwart attacks

on the Holland Tunnel and the United Nations.

- It said there was a bombing in two embassies in Africa.

And you know, being on the JTTF in New York,

I said, I don't think I'm going to be sleeping

at home tonight, because the reports were coming in that--

that it was pretty bad.

- 224 people died, including 12 Americans.

- It was an attack against the U.S. embassy.

It's the purview of the FBI to go over there.

It was decided that we will be going.

- I was working Irish terrorism.

My supervisor, he said, you can't go.

You've got too much on your plate.

I said, "No. This is why I'm in New York, and I want to be

included like everybody else."

He said, "All right, you're going to go.

Don't eff this up."

- Abigail Perkins was a lawyer

before she joined the FBI in 1995.

She put her legal training to use in a broad range

of Bureau investigations into terrorist acts,

from the African embassy bombings

to the attacks on 9/11.

- I had no idea what had happened

until I walked into the command post.

I see these guys, and all the activity.

My supervisor at the time is Pat D'Amuro,

the ASAC of the JTTF.

And he says, "Nairobi or Dar es Salaam,

which one do you want to go to?"

And I went, "I'll go to Nairobi."

And he said, "Wow, that was fast.

Why are you picking Nairobi?"

I said, "I don't know where Dar es Salaam is."

[laughter]

- Stephen Gaudin joined the FBI in 1991.

He participated in investigations

in the Middle East and Africa,

and was directly involved with the hunt

and capture of several al-Qaeda operatives.

- And I said, "But before I go, why am I going?"

They said, "But listen, we know you're new to New York.

"We know you're new to terrorism.

"You're one of the only guys on the JTTF

"who's actually on the SWAT team as well,

"so you're going to have a different role than what

these guys are going to do."

- What is your role?

- Don't let anything happen to Pat,

and don't let anything happen to the team.

So I knew it was going to be more

on the overwatch or physical security role,

as opposed to an investigative role, which--

I felt more comfortable on that side, at least initially.

♪

We're going 7,000 miles away from home,

split into two teams, a Nairobi team

and a Dar especially Salaam team.

The gravity of it was really hitting, because we knew there

were American citizens killed.

We knew hundreds of other people

killed or seriously injured.

We knew there were still people trapped in the buildings.

We knew we were walking into something

that I don't think any of us had ever seen before.

- In those first few hours,

we're not getting any real intelligence.

What we're seeing is what we've seen on the news.

- Bomb blasted out the back end of the embassy, I believe.

I haven't got any numbers or names of anybody who--

any injuries or casualties, but there were plenty of.

- And you know, we can't wait till

we get all the proper intel and figure out

exactly what happened.

That would just be wasting too much time.

Figuring out who's going to go--how?

We don't have an FBI plane

that's going to take us to Nairobi.

You have to reach out to the U.S. Air Force

and get them on board.

- Once we got on the plane,

I actually started to feel more comfortable because

it was a military plane.

It was a C-5, and I was a paratrooper in the Army.

So when I got on that, I almost felt at home.

- And it was a 16-hour flight to get there.

We refueled in the air.

I slept the entire time. People were amazed.

I said, that's one of the things I do well.

- About 36 hours between the explosion

and by the time we hit the ground.

- As happy as I was to be on the ground,

that's when I think I started to get to the, uh-oh,

we ain't in Kansas no more.

That's when the realization of,

how much over our heads are we going to be

when we get taken to wherever this is?

What's it going to look like?

The reality of it started to really sink in for me.

- There's a picture of us standing there

looking at this with just this, like, oh, my gosh.

[tense music]

♪

- It was total devastation.

Even though the embassy was still standing,

the force of the explosion ripped

through all the windows, from front to the back.

Nothing was usable in the embassy.

It was completely destroyed on the inside.

There was the huge office building to the left.

Huge, about 45 stories high.

Every piece of glass on that building was blown in.

And then there was a big pile down the middle

between those two structures,

was what looked to me like the remnants of a building

that had collapsed.

And that was the girls' secretarial college.

They were in the building when it went flat and pancaked.

[indistinct chatter]

- There were people still trying to make rescue.

[sirens wailing]

♪

People were just moving blocks with their hands,

trying to locate people in this pile of rubble.

- As much as I remember the sights and the sounds,

it's the smell I remember more than anything else,

because everything smelled burnt and dead.

♪

We're taking that in.

OK, if we had a response, someone obviously

should go into the embassy to get briefed,

to figure out what's going on.

There's no embassy. There's nobody.

And this investigative team is standing

in front of this collapsedness, this--this nothingness.

And 90% of us are like, "Oh, my God, this is real."

- So when you guys land in Kenya,

is there a team that's sent directly

down to Dar es Salaam?

When do you go there? - There is a team.

- Right. - Washington field office

was in charge of the entire investigation,

because they were the extraterritorial office

responsible for that sort of investigation.

We sort of supplemented them.

So a contingent of them went down to Dar es Salaam,

and then we had sprinkled in some New York agents.

And then we had a comparable group in Kenya.

- A little work set-up force is made for us

at the cafeteria of the Canadian consulate,

which is on the same street.

And that's where we're basically--

our little command post is set up.

- The rest of the investigators,

we started working out of the Kenyan police station.

- So they broke us up into teams,

one FBI, or two FBI agents

with one or two Kenyan police officers.

And then those leads started coming in,

and we had to turn over all those rocks.

And then eventually, a more substantive lead

actually started to come in.

- John, you're the team leader.

What's the next step? Where do we go?

- We have to figure out, first of all, what happened?

♪

What was the exact time that it happened?

How did they breach the gate?

We wanted to interview as many witnesses as we could,

to try to figure out how many vehicles were involved.

What kind of vehicle had the explosives in it?

Was there more than one vehicle,

was there a getaway vehicle?

By interviewing as many witnesses as we could,

we started to piece together

what occurred in those final seconds before the bombing.

We knew that one vehicle tried to breach the front gate.

Somebody shot a gun in the air.

Another individual lit off a flashbang

or small explosive device.

We had other witnesses saying that there was probably

one guy who threw the flashbang,

who was out of the vehicle, may have gotten away.

- There were tons of calls coming in,

people with all kinds of agendas providing information.

This one lead comes in.

It's an individual that calls from the Ramadan Hotel.

And he said, "I've got an individual here

who sort of stands out, and he's staying at my hotel."

This area was called Eastleigh,

and it was where Somalis typically hung out.

So if you weren't Somali, you know,

you sort of stood out in this area.

So he said, "He is not Somali, he's Arab.

"He doesn't have any money.

"He doesn't have any travel documents.

"He's got brand new clothing but no luggage.

"He's making phone calls at this payphone to try to get

some money and documentation."

He said, "There's something strange about this guy

that doesn't add up, there's something to this."

But it's in an area that even the police are like,

"Ohh, we don't really go in there."

It's a really dangerous place.

This is, like, day two or three on the ground.

Is this somebody trying to lure us in and kill us?

[tense music]

- That's when Pat D'Amuro says,

"Put your SWAT stuff away.

I need you to do FBI work right now."

And I was like, "Are you sure?"

He's like, "This is your new role.

"Take this lead, work with the Kenyans, go find this guy.

I think this one could be significant."

- We got to figure out who this guy is and go get him.

- And I'm reading the lead, and as good as the information was

that there was something suspicious about this person,

he just didn't fit in was the key thing

that I was focusing on.

So I'm like, OK, we've got to find a guy who doesn't fit in.

But there's no description of him, like how tall he is

or whatever, how fat--nothing.

We don't know his first name,

and we don't know his last name.

You want me to go to Somalitown and find Fnu Lnu?

Oh, this should be easy.

Go find someone who we have no idea who he is.

♪

They go inside the hotel, and they're gone a while.

All of a sudden, someone walks up

to the car with his back to it like this,

and I can't see his face.

And he's just leaning at the window.

He's like, "Listen

"The guy that you're looking for,

"he's not in this hotel anymore.

"He's now moved up to a hotel around the corner up there,

called the Iftin Lodge."

He walks into the crowd, and I never see him again.

The police come out some minutes later.

We get up to the Iftin Lodge, and they come back

with this-- this fella here.

We notice about him very quickly is he had

stitches along the front of his forehead.

Both his hands are very heavily bandaged,

and he's got what definitely appeared to be

brand new clothes on.

He doesn't belong here.

He has this little slip of paper here,

and it's an intake form.

And it shows that he was treated

on the 7th of August, 1998, the day of the bombing,

at the MP Shah Hospital.

The MP Shah Hospital was the hospital closest

to the embassy, and that's where most of the victims

were being sent.

On that hospital card, it has his name of

Khalid Saleh Salim Bin Rashid

is written on there, so we're just calling him Khalid now.

And you don't have to be Sherlock Holmes

to realize this guy was near the embassy, injured,

and was taken to the local hospital.

Minimum, he's a witness.

It doesn't make him a terrorist.

It doesn't make him a bad guy, even.

It just--there's more to this story,

and we've got to get him out of this area and back there.

So we put him in the truck,

immediately start driving

as fast as we can back to Nairobi.

It's a good hour drive, bumpy road, all of that.

The radio isn't working. I couldn't radio ahead

to let anybody know we were coming.

By the time we come back, I'm like,

"Everybody's going to be so pumped!"

And we get back, it's a ghost town.

Pat D'Amuro, the assistant special agent in charge,

he's the head of the JTTF in New York.

Finally find Pat D'Amuro. I'm like, "Pat, what happened?

"We got Fnu Lnu! He's like, "Oh, listen.

"Never mind that right now.

"In the couple hours you were gone,

"this case has taken a big turn.

"There was a guy captured in another country

"who's already made some admissions of involvement

in what happened here."

That's the big lead.

- The Pakistanis had captured somebody in, uh--

was it Karachi, I believe.

He had a bad passport, and he left on the day

before the bombing.

And they were holding him with the bad passport,

and then somebody said, "Wait a minute,

"this guy just came from Nairobi on the day before.

"He's got bad documents.

And the guy's name was Mohammed Saddiq Odeh.

- Pat was like, "That guy's being flown back to Nairobi.

That's the interview."

- Everybody can't work the guy coming in

from Pakistan, you know. - Right.

- So he has to stick with it, and he did.

- Like John said, we couldn't just drop him.

We didn't just, like, OK, let this guy go,

it doesn't matter.

Let's find out more about him.

Who are you? What are you doing here?

There were a couple of things that

didn't really make perfect sense,

and one of them was his clothes.

Then we're like, "Well, what did you do with your clothes?"

He said, "What clothes?"

And I'm like, "Well, you know, these are

new clothes you have on."

He's like, "No, these are the clothes I wore."

He doesn't have a drop of blood on him.

He doesn't have any dust on him.

He doesn't have any holes in his shirt.

No. If you got blown up at that bombing,

your appearance should look a little different.

We took all kinds of photos of him.

When we take off his shirt, his back is where

all the main part of his wounds occurred.

And when I tell you-- he looked like

the top of an American football, his back.

That's how big and clumpy the stitches were.

So again, the logical thing was, he--

wherever he was, he had gotten hit

with something in the back and blown this way,

falls on his hand, falls on his head.

And that's why-- I'm theorizing here,

but that's what it looked like to me.

Well, two things happened.

The interpreter, she kept on saying,

"Steve, I don't think you understand.

"This guy speaks such a high level

"of Fusha Arabic, which would be equivalent to, like,

"Shakespeare in English.

"This guy's got a master's degree, I'm telling you.

"There's something fishy about this guy.

This guy is not a street kid. This kid's well-educated."

Something wasn't making sense.

He tells this very likable, believable story, actually,

of how he ends up where he is.

And he basically says, "Listen, I'm from Sanaa, Yemen.

"And one day about a year ago, I'm in the mosque, praying,

"and I meet this guy from Kenya named Haroon.

"And Haroon and I strike up a friendship,

"and I show him in our culture.

"And when he leaves from his vacation to Sanaa, Yemen,

"he said, 'Let's someday--

"you come to Kenya, and I will return the hospitality.'

"I come to visit him, and he's supposed

"to pick me up at the airport.

"But he doesn't show up for some reason.

"So now I don't know what to do after I clear

"immigration and get my luggage, and I go out

"and I find the taxi driver.

"Luckily, I found a taxi driver who said,

"'Ah, you don't speak the local language,

"'but you do speak Arabic.

"'I'm going to take you to Eastleigh

because the Somalis there all speak good enough Arabic.'"

He was very calm.

Like, he was unflustered.

He's just like, why are you bothering poor me?

But we can't just go on his narrative.

We've got to somehow corroborate

or disprove what he said.

So a bunch of agents, we spend the night

in the Nairobi Airport to try to find his arrival card.

So when I see this card, I'm like, holy crap.

He lied to us.

Because you don't get to the taxi stand,

you don't even get to your luggage,

until you fill out this card.

And it's filled out, "I will be staying

at the Ramadan Hotel in Eastleigh."

So I can't wait to get in and confront him with that.

The next morning, we go in and I put

the immigration card down. I'm like, "Haha!

What do you think of that, smart guy?"

And he was like, "What?"

I'm like, "You knew you were going to the Ramadan Hotel.

"There's no cab driver that picked this hotel."

He's like, "I don't know how to write English."

And I'm like, "Oh, crap."

And what I had noticed, by the way he was answering

the question and this whole logical story that he had--

to me it smacked of, this guy has had

some sort of counter-interrogation training.

Sort of SERE school that he had been through.

- What's SERE school? - Survival, escape,

resistance, and evasion.

It's basically a military training course

that they put--if you get caught as a POW,

we're going to teach you how to survive.

You have to tell a logical story,

and eventually they're going to figure it out.

They're going to know you're lying.

But the longer you take for that lie to be uncovered,

the better it is for your buddies.

And I'm like, "Let's just talk about you for a second."

I said, "You don't have to talk. Let me talk."

And I said, "Look, I've been here three or four days.

"Look how dirty I am.

Look how clean you are."

And he falls right for it.

He goes, "Well, that's because everybody knows

Arab men are very clean and Americans are very dirty."

But I said, "Look at your belt.

"There's no stretch marks on it.

That's a new belt."

And he starts fiddling with the belt.

I say, "Take off that belt!"

And when he takes off the belt--it was a brand new belt.

And I said, "Listen, I don't know what kind

"of money you use in Yemen,

"but I know here they use Kenyan shillings,

so that price tag better say Yemeni whatever you use."

And of course, he takes off the belt,

and it's in Kenyan shillings.

So we know he bought the belt here,

so now we've really caught him in a lie.

And I find John. I said, John,

"I need you to come in just for five minutes.

"Just sit down, tell me your impression.

What do you think of this guy?"

- I said, "Let me-- let me check it out."

So you have to understand my background a little bit.

I started to develop a pretty good intelligence base

on who, what, when, where, and how

folks went to Afghanistan to fight.

And we developed sources who told us more about the psyche

of folks going to fight in Afghanistan,

and how--and how important it was to them.

So I'm looking at him, you know.

I'm looking at his age. This is 1998.

Uh, I'm saying to myself, well, you know,

maybe he could be a former mujahideen.

A lot of the terrorist acts being committed

at that time frame were done by people

who had previous experience in the mujahideen.

- The mujahideen, who have been glorified

as freedom fighters in the West,

even though some are openly hostile to the United States.

- So the most famous personality

within the mujahideen is a guy named Abdullah Azzam.

He was the guy who rallied the whole Muslim world

to go leave their places and go fight with the mujahideen

against the Russians.

- [speaking Arabic]

- So I asked him, I said, "Let me ask you a question."

I said, "Do a guy named Abdullah Azzam?"

He couldn't help himself, you know?

And he says, "Oh, he is a wonderful man.

He's in charge of all the mujahideen."

It's a good clue, you know?

And then I remember, you know, saying to myself,

really quick--it all came in a second--

he's the surviving suicide bomber.

He's supposed to be dead, and he has no exit strategy.

And as soon as he got out of the hospital,

he had to call somebody, and I knew that would be

an important number.

I put a pencil in his hand,

kind of slapped the desk a little bit.

I said, "Write down the first number you called

when you got back to the hotel."

And he writes it.

- [chuckles] - We have officers

assigned to the phone company.

We basically go to them, and we present the case.

If the case is compelling, they'll give you

the phone records.

We want to know, in the last month,

this Yemen phone number--

we'll just call it the 578 number--this 578 number,

tell us everybody from Kenya that called this 578 number

in Yemen in the last 30 days.

And there's only two places in the whole country of Kenya

that called the 578 number in Yemen,

one, a phone that's near the hotel where we arrested him.

And all those calls were made after the bombing happens.

All right, well, that's logical.

That's where he was. He's making those phone calls.

Well, where else called?

There's this other place that called, this other number,

and it's a series of 10 or 12 phone calls in the days

preceding the bombing.

And I'm looking at it and I'm like, holy cow.

The last phone call made from this location

to the 578 number is half an hour before the bomb goes off.

And I'm like, holy crap.

We got to find that house.

- Osama bin Laden, you're going to hear a lot

of talk about him. - The embassy bombings

was al-Qaeda's first major attack against the West.

- Terrorism is one of the greatest dangers

we face in this new global era.

- The bomb techs were like, this place

is loaded with TNT powder.

This is where the bomb was made.

- We had about 14 photographs in there of people

we thought were involved.

- This isn't a needle in a haystack,

this is a needle in a pile of needles.

And I said, "Oh, this guy is from Tanzania."

And I can then see the photo.

I'm like, holy cow.

- I said, "We will not stop until we get

each and every one of you."

- I want to know why all these people had to die.

Why did these people have to die?

[dramatic music]

♪