All language subtitles for FBI.True.S03E02.720p.WEB.h264-EDITH_track3_[eng]

[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]

♪ ♪