Original subtitles

[siren wails]

- Car bombs exploded outside the U.S. embassies

in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam.

- 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.

- We knew we were walking into something

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

- There were tons of calls coming in,

but this one lead comes in, said I've got an individual

here who sort of stands out.

- He's a surviving suicide bomber.

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

I said, "Write down the first number you called

when you got back to the hotel," and he writes it.

- The last phone call made from this location

is half hour before the bomb goes off.

And I'm like, "Holy crap.

We got to find that house."

- Osama bin Laden, you're gonna 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, "We will not stop

until we get each and every one of you."

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

Why did these people have to die?

[dramatic music]

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

♪ ♪

Drug busts,

mob stings,

terrorist takedowns.

- Get down! Get down!

- 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.

[indistinct radio chatter]

What really goes down,

we save that for each other

when we're talking agent-to-agent.

♪ ♪

This is "FBI True."

[ominous music]

♪ ♪

- We know that a devastating attack had taken place

at our embassies, and the embassies are gone.

- The worst international terrorist incident

on African soil.

- 224 people died, including 12 Americans.

- We have split into two teams, a Nairobi team

and a Dar es Salaam team.

- I remember saying to myself,

"He's a surviving suicide bomber.

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

He had to call somebody.

- There's only two places in the whole country of Kenya

that call the 578 number in Yemen.

- So you're looking at the data information,

and the last number to call the Yemen number

comes from this location... - Comes from this house.

- That you're showing me right now.

- We get there, and it's this big, beautiful--

they called it Embassy Row.

This is where all the diplomats lived,

and it's 43 Rundu Estates.

And you can see this is the gate, big black gate,

you know, iron-wrought gate, and we start talking.

This is basically the caretaker

of the property, the gardener.

So I'm like, "Excuse me. Who lives here?"

"Oh, well, nobody lives here."

Now I'm like, "Crap. We got the wrong house."

He goes, "Well, there were some people who lived here,

a bunch of Arab guys."

"Where are these guys?" "Oh, they left."

Well, "when did they leave?"

"The day of the big attack on the embassy,

they left in two trucks. They never came back."

I'm like, "Okay.

Do you mind if we take a look around?"

So we're able to bring special agent bomb technicians.

They come over. As soon as they opened it up,

the bomb techs were like,

"This place is loaded with TNT powder.

This is where the bomb was made."

♪ ♪

- So Abby, while this is going on, what's your role?

- Now we know this is where they built the bombs.

And so we're going around the neighborhood,

knocking on doors with our Kenyan counterparts

and saying, "Do you know this individual?"

- I basically have a real sit-down with him

the next morning, armed with a tremendous amount

of information.

In our initial discussions with this person,

we're just calling him Khalid

like it is on the paper in the hospital.

So I start to lay out the stuff in front of him.

Okay, we know that you lied to us about your clothes

and the belt, et cetera.

I put all the phone information right in front of him.

And when he saw the picture of the house,

that's when he said-- he's like, "Oh."

He's like, "You guys got me."

I said, "I don't care who got you or don't got you.

"I wanna know why all these people had to die.

Why did these people have to die?"

[dark music]

♪ ♪

And he said, "Oh, you wanna blame that on me?

"That's your fault. That's the American government's fault.

"All your policy, all your views,

that's what made us have to do this."

And that's when I was like, "Oh, boy."

You know, what did we really stumble into here?

And then that's when he said, "Listen.

"I want a promise from you all.

"I'll tell you everything about Osama bin Laden.

I'll tell you everything about al-Qaeda."

"I want to stand trial in America

because America is my enemy, not the Kenyans."

And in my head, I said to myself, "Holy cow.

"I've heard of bin Laden.

But this al guy, this al-Qaeda guy,

we gotta find him too.

I don't know if anybody knows about him.

It proved that I didn't know a lot about terrorism,

but the embassy bombings was

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

It was the vanguard mission.

[tense music]

♪ ♪

He said, "Okay, first thing I have to say, my name isn't

Khalid Salem bin Rashed, and I'm not from Yemen.

"My real name is Mohamed Rashed Daoud al-'Owhali.

I'm a very wealthy man from Saudi Arabia."

- What are you thinking? - It was very surreal.

And he went into incredible detail.

They had been planning this since 1994.

This wasn't something they put together on a napkin

a couple nights before the attack.

"Here's how I got to the camps,"

all the different training he did.

"Then I met with bin Laden,"

and then boom, boom, boom, boom, boom.

And then he's in Nairobi.

What his role was to get the truck as close

to the embassy as possible, how he had guns and grenades,

and help get the truck as close as it could.

But because he's outside of the truck

when the bomb goes off...

[siren wails]

Instead of dying, he ends up in the hospital.

And he has no escape plan.

- So you guys are doing this interview.

Abby's going out there and doing leads.

- That's when we're narrowing down,

this is an al-Qaeda operation, all the al-Qaeda hierarchy.

So I think the people back in New York believe

that this is an attack by bin Laden.

He had already said he was gonna attack America.

- Osama bin Laden--you're gonna hear a lot of talk about him--

he's this Saudi very wealthy millionaire

who's been hiding out in Afghanistan.

- FBI investigators and Kenyan police in Nairobi,

they have in custody one suspect.

He's not considered the mastermind of this bomb,

but they do believe that he is quite a player in this.

He was arrested entering Pakistan.

He told Pakistani officials

that he was an associate of Osama bin Laden.

- There was that individual who the Pakistanis had.

Tell us about him.

- The Pakistanis had captured somebody

who had left Nairobi on the day before the bombing.

And they were holding him with a bad passport,

and then somebody said, "Wait a minute."

The guy's name was Mohamed Saddiq Odeh.

He was questioned

by the Pakistani intelligence services.

And they told me that he had made some admissions

that they were concerned about

and that they were gonna send him back to us, to Nairobi.

And Pat D'Amuro asked me to be the lead interviewer.

- So how does the interview start?

Was it in a room when he was brought in?

- It was at the CID, Nairobi police.

I just go through my normal getting-to-know-you routine,

you know? "Where were you born?

What were your parents' names? Where did you go to school?"

He goes, "Oh, I went to school in Jordan."

And I go, "Well, did you go to university?"

He says, "Yes, I went to the university in Manila."

He goes, "Yeah, and I used to go to the Islamic Center

in Manila." I said, "Oh, yeah,

so who'd you meet there?"

We talked about one guy.

He made me listen to tapes from Abdullah Azzam.

He was the guy who rallied the whole Muslim world

to go fight in jihad, and that goes on.

And he took Bay'ah, you know, Bay'ah,

meaning he swore allegiance to bin Laden.

- Mm-hmm. - He gave us

a tremendous amount of detail about everything.

They had a real bureaucracy in al-Qaeda, you know?

It's not what you think.

He tells me about "When I got to Peshawar,

"to Pakistan, I went to this camp first.

They sent me to a second camp in Afghanistan."

After fighting in Afghanistan...

- [speaking indistinctly]

[high-pitched ringing]

- He gets to Kenya.

He's told to go there by the number three guy

in al-Qaeda at the time.

The only drawback to Odeh

was that everything he talked about was,

"Well, I was in the group.

I was kind of observing from afar."

- It's like the "I was wit him, but I wasn't really wit him."

- Yeah, exactly. [laughter]

And I wanted to show him how... horrible...

[hopeless music]

What it looks like at the end.

This is what happens when high explosives goes off

close to human beings, you know?

And I knew that there was a picture

of a mother that was holding a child,

and they were burned to-- they were charred.

So as I took the picture out and I was starting to bring it,

he saw it, and he just turned his whole chair to the side

and put his head down. I said, "No, no, no, no, no.

You wanted this. This is what you wanted to do."

- That's right. - "Now you're gonna see

the results of your actions," you know?

- Mm-hmm. - And he turned away.

♪ ♪

I went behind him, and I kind of did grab him

by the shoulders and a little bit by the hair

and made him look at it.

Became an issue at trial later, but I didn't care.

But I know he looked at it, and he seemed to break.

I think he did have some regret because he said,

"You know, I think we failed because there were

"so many Kenyan casualties.

I don't even think bin Laden was happy with this."

He said that more than once to me.

- And what does that feel like to hear somebody saying--

- Well, I liked it, number one because it shows that--

it's a quasi-admission of guilt,

and it showed that he had foreknowledge

and that he knew that al-Qaeda had done this.

[dramatic music]

- Good afternoon, terrorism is one of the greatest dangers

we face in this new global era.

We saw its twisted mentality at work last week

in the embassy bombings in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam.

Today, we have struck back.

- The United States has launched

simultaneous air and missile strikes

on what President Clinton described

as terrorist-related facilities in Afghanistan and Sudan.

- The American pledge to retaliate

has been delivered with a vengeance.

For those caught up in the military strikes,

the effects have been devastating.

[somber music]

♪ ♪

- So there's a group of us that sort of peel off

from Nairobi and we head down to Mombasa...

And go to the immigration office.

The great thing about Kenya identification documents

is, they have photograph, they have fingerprints.

So we're gonna have really good photos to take around

and show other people to try to continue to build the case.

So we go down to Mombasa. I go to the immigration office.

It's this dusty, old concrete building

where the notes are handwritten in this huge book.

I find Odeh's name. So it says, "Mohamed Saddiq Odeh,

mother, Miriam," as I recall.

It said his tribe. And so I said, "Great.

Please go pull these documents."

And as I'm looking at the book,

I see below his name another name,

Mustafa Elbishy, same mother, same tribe,

same--you know, same particulars.

And so I said, "Well, I don't know what that is,

"but pull him too.

He must be associated with Odeh."

And so we grabbed his photograph and fingerprints,

and we start using that

to build the picture about who was who.

We ended up identifying basically

the operational support cell network

that supported both Nairobi and Dar es Salaam.

We started building this photo book of these subjects.

We had about 14 photographs in there of people

we thought were involved after we learned

that they were meeting there.

They were talking to each other.

They were buying trucks.

They were buying vehicles.

They were headed north when they needed to head north,

and they were headed south when they needed

to head south. People we thought

were involved in either supporting Osama bin Laden

or were witnesses to what was going on in preparation

for these attacks--once we gathered that information,

Steve had preceded me down to Tanzania.

We had nobody directly indicted

for their involvement in the Dar case.

In Kenya, obviously, great success, right?

We already had two people in custody.

But in this case, Dar was-- at that point, we had nobody.

So when I get down there, I see a bunch of things that--

from the crime scene itself.

And so one of the things that they located

pretty early on was the VIN number of the truck.

The VIN number of the truck gives us the documents

of who had the truck last,

and that starts really sort of revealing

everything from there.

And we recovered a cell number.

And this phone led us to--it was an operational cell phone

that the group shared amongst themselves.

That phone connects this group to the 43 Rundu house in Kenya,

and it connects it to the family

of a gentleman named Khalfan Khamis Mohamed

in Dar es Salaam.

Mike Forsee, who was another case agent on the case,

was able to locate the nephew of Khalfan Khamis Mohamed,

who said, "I'll take you to the location

where my uncle wanted me to pick up these items."

Khalfan Khamis Mohamed had called his nephew,

and he said, "I'm getting ready to leave.

Take these items to the family."

One of the items that he had was a flour grinder.

And so he said, "Get this. Give it to my sister.

"Tell her to clean it really good because

we've used it for unclean things."

Well, the unclean things was they used this flour mill

to grind the TNT into a fine powder

that they used for the bombing in the vehicle.

[dramatic musical sting]

[dark music]

♪ ♪

- Mike calls me. He says, "Hey, Abby,

you want a late birthday present?"

I said, "Yeah, what do you got?"

He said, "I found the bomb factory."

He then brought me there.

We all looked around the location.

It had high walls. It was fully enclosed.

It had a gate where you could pull a truck into.

And sitting on a windowsill was an electric blasting cap.

[tense music]

So we're like, "Bingo. We got it."

[laughs] "We got it."

♪ ♪

So then we're starting to set leads with,

you know, various countries

and say, "Is this person in your country?

Has he traveled to your country?" and what have you.

As the year went on, we got a break.

The Tanzanian police called up and they said

Khalfan Khamis Mohamed,

he had obtained an alias from a school friend,

and he went and traveled by bus over land

and ended up in South Africa.

♪ ♪

- I don't know what his alias is.

And we got to South Africa. The South African folks

we worked with from the Home Affairs office--

and they come in the room and they dump

a whole box of these 3x5 cards.

This isn't a needle in a haystack.

This is a needle in a pile of needles.

And then literally the second card I pick up

is the card I'm gonna show you right now.

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

And I can then see the photo. I'm like, "Holy cow.

That's KKM."

And they drop his immigration file in front of us,

and they said, "He has to come back

"to this location every six weeks

and get a new stamp."

So I'm like, "Well, when was the last time he was here?"

And they look at the stamp-- Tuesday.

- So you're now basically undercover on surveillance,

waiting for this guy to come back,

'cause he could come back before six weeks...

- Right. - Or after six weeks.

- So I'm there working with our South African folks,

Abby, we're all working in concert.

We're all trying to help each other.

And he finally shows up,

and a very quick-witted South African immigration officer

we work with-- his name was Salli--

Salli sees him, and KKM is actually leaving,

because he said, "Oh, that's a big mess.

"I don't know what the hell this big crowd is.

I'll come back another time."

And Salli goes up to him and bumps him

and basically says, "Hey, listen.

For 25 rand, I can get you to the front of the line,"

and he does, and he brings him in the elevator.

♪ ♪

- Where were you? - I'm in the elevator

with Salli.

And I know we gotta go to the top floor

because that's where the office is.

And he starts walking down the hallway,

and South Africans were supposed to grab him.

I'm like, "If he takes six more steps,

he could run that way. He could run that way."

And it was kind of one of these things.

Like, wait. There's nobody else up here.

And I thought he was gonna take off,

so I just run around, tackle him.

I said, "I know your name is Khalfan Khamis Mohamed.

"It isn't whatever's on this piece of paper,

and we know everything about you so don't even try to lie."

And as I said the word "lie," the elevator door opened,

and it's Abby.

[soft music]

- I see Khalfan standing against the wall.

I look at him, and I'm elated.

And Steve and I literally run

and nearly knock each other down.

We were like--just hugged each other.

We couldn't believe that we had actually pulled this off.

- Amazing. - And boom, we're off

to the races.

♪ ♪

- The South Africans did their interview of him.

It was immigration violations in their country

that they could hold him on.

And then we came in afterwards

and conducted our interview.

- Then he doesn't stop talking for,

I don't know how many days.

- And he was sort of bragging about what he had done.

At some point, I asked him a question.

I said, "He's killed innocent people."

In Dar es Salaam, they killed no Americans.

They only killed local people,

and so I said, "Was that a success?

You know, you didn't kill any Americans."

He said, "Yeah." He said, "Because you've spent

all your time looking for me."

And Steve had shared a Swahili saying with me.

It was... [speaking Swahili]

So I said to Khalfan, I said, "Khalfan"...

[speaking Swahili]

"You know what that means, right?"

And he just sort of looked at me.

And I said, "Little by little, we fill the cup."

I said, "We will not stop

until we get each and every one of you."

- These are the people that were indicted in that case

and actually captured-- every one of these people,

whether they were or would be suicide bomber or bomb maker,

you name it, administrative people, part of this cell.

There's only one person who was not captured

or killed yet.

Saif al-Adel is the only one left

out of this original group that we indicted back in 1999.

And you know, presumably, he is now,

you know, the senior man left for al-Qaeda.

[foreboding music]

♪ ♪

- Yeah, well, I can absolutely say, as an FBI agent,

you guys did an amazing job.

- After the whole case was over, my boss grabbed me.

He's like, "I've got good news for you and bad news for you."

He goes, "The good news is, you and your team

"have helped solve the murder of 224 people.

"That's the good news.

"The bad news is, you've only been in the FBI

"for five years, and this is probably gonna be

the biggest case you ever get to work on,"

which at the time was obviously true,

but we never stopped working that case.

I worked the embassy bombing case from the day it happened

until the day I retired.

- Of all the cases that you've worked, Abby,

how does this rank? - I mean,

the success of this case,

it's probably one of my proudest.

- What about you, John? - Yeah, when I look

at the accomplishments done by this team,

I see this picture of us in front of the embassy,

this ragtag team from New York

with no embassy to work out of,

nothing, zero, no supplies.

Then you go to years later when they're all convicted.

It was just an amazing amount of work and professionalism.

- Two commercial jetliners crashed

into the World Trade Center here in New York City

and sent the giant Twin Towers, filled with workers,

crumbling to the ground.

[somber music]

♪ ♪

- One of my biggest disappointments is the number

that we got--what we call now the al-Qaeda switchboard--

about 18 months prior to 9/11,

our services saw that two of the future 9/11 hijackers,

Al-Hazmi and Mihdhar,

were going to come to the United States,

and those services did not notify the FBI.

- And here's the big miss. The hijackers get to the U.S,

and then from California, they also call that number.

♪ ♪

- The FBI was never notified

that these two individuals were here,

and them being on our own turf, we would have--I'm 100% sure

that both of these individuals would have been the subjects

of full-field investigations.

- I agree. - Everything would have been

monitored, everything from their telephone traffic

to their computer traffic to surveillance.

There is no doubt that we would have figured out

that they were part of another cell.

It would be hard to imagine what would have happened

if we had been on top of that.

♪ ♪

[dramatic music]

♪ ♪