Targets Shared Insidious Links, U.S. Intelligence Officials Say

One target was a dusty training camp like something out of the movie “Patriot Games,” littered with tanks and howitzers and peopled by a polyglot assemblage of 600 terrorists-in-training. The other was a pharmaceutical company with no apparent commercial product, no customers and a perimeter fence manned by Sudanese soldiers.

In the days leading up to Thursday’s raids, U.S. intelligence officials drew what they called exceptionally compelling connections between the two facilities--one as the supplier of a key ingredient in deadly nerve gas, the other as the place where purveyors of violence learned how best to use such frightening weapons.

And on Thursday, the facilities--one in the Afghan desert, the other on the outskirts of Sudan’s capital, Khartoum--were linked by violence and history.

U.S. intelligence officials said Thursday that the case against the two facilities--and their links to Saudi militant Osama bin Laden--is airtight and was rapidly assembled.

“Rarely do numerous sources converge so uniformly and persuasively as they have in this instance,” said a senior U.S. intelligence official. “Rarely have we come to some conclusions as fast as we did; rarely has the quality of what we have collected been as high as it has been.”

President Clinton, addressing the nation Thursday, took pains to demonstrate that intelligence findings strongly undergirded the choice of targets--as well as the timing of the attacks.

“There is convincing information from our intelligence community that the Bin Laden terrorist network was responsible for these bombings,” Clinton said in his televised speech. “Based on this information, we have high confidence that these bombings were planned, financed and carried out by the organization Bin Laden leads.”

The intelligence tumbled in from many quarters: international financial sleuths; suspects and informants questioned in Pakistan, Tanzania and throughout the Arab world; and a high-tech network of spy satellites and listening devices crisscrossing the globe. Virtually all pointed to Bin Laden, who is believed to control a fortune of as much as $250 million, as the chief architect of the Aug. 7 terrorist bombings in Tanzania and Kenya that killed more than 260 people and wounded more than 5,000.

Once the United States had fingered Bin Laden, intelligence and military officials suggested that they had a wealth of targets available to them. The Saudi, whom intelligence officials called “a transnational actor in and of himself,” is thought to either contribute to or preside over a sprawling global network of enterprises used to carry out terrorist strikes.

“This is not someone who needs a state sponsor,” one intelligence official said Thursday. “He has networks on every continent almost. He has an infrastructure that’s very, very replete with capability, money, people.”

U.S. officials suggest that they had little trouble picking as a target the Zawa Kili al Badr training camp, a complex of storage bunkers, rifle ranges, barracks and bombed-out vehicles that lies about 90 miles southeast of Kabul, the Afghan capital. The complex, which intelligence officials said has been in business for more than a decade, is a way station for insurgents, mercenaries and terrorists hailing from such far-flung battle zones as the Kashmir region claimed by India and Pakistan and the African nation of Somalia. In boom times and in bust--and recent years have been boom times, with a surge in construction--the camp has been generously bankrolled by Bin Laden, U.S. officials said.

While much of this intelligence was already well in hand before the terrorist bombings in East Africa, the probe that followed those attacks brought a new development to light--one which appeared to force the hands of U.S. officials. Bin Laden’s subordinates--the executors of worldwide terrorism, according to National Security Advisor Samuel R. “Sandy” Berger--were scheduled to huddle at the Afghan training complex Thursday. The fate of the Zawa Kili al Badr complex was sealed.

More challenging, however, was the choice of the Shifa Pharmaceutical Facility in Sudan. Ringed by a fence and armed guards in an industrial complex in north Khartoum, the Shifa complex’s link to Bin Laden is more tenuous. Intelligence officials said they knew with “high confidence” that the Shifa facility produced a unique chemical that, when mixed with another compound, could create the deadly nerve agent VX. They also knew that Shifa is a key node in the Sudan government’s military-industrial complex, to which Bin Laden has made financial contributions in recent years.

To complete the link, U.S. intelligence officials made several observations and a key inference. Bin Laden lived in Sudan from 1991 until 1996, when he was deported under pressure from the U.S. and Saudi Arabia. He has close ties with the Sudanese government, which the United States has characterized as a state sponsor of terrorism. And Bin Laden has been shopping in recent years for chemical weapons to use in terror attacks, according to U.S. officials. With factories like Shifa, Sudan appears to have both the means and the will to satisfy Bin Laden’s needs, officials said.

For U.S. military planners faced with orders to blunt Bin Laden’s ability to foment terrorism, these two targets are hardly the heart of the operation. That, they suggest, is the Saudi’s “very intricate financial infrastructure,” a vast and shadowy network of bank accounts and front companies that makes possible his support for terrorism.

But unlike the two facilities that were struck Thursday, that’s a target that cannot be reached with cruise missiles.

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Hitting Back

In some of the terrorist incidents where American interests were the target, the United States has been able to point to the responsible government and mount a military retaliation.

(1) April 14 1986: U.S. warplanes strike targets in Libya in retaliation for an April 5 terrorist bombing in West Berlin in which an American serviceman killed.

(2) October 19, 1987: U.S. Warships shell two Iranian oil platforms in reprisal for an Iranian attack a week earlier on a U.S.-flagged Kuwaiti tanker. Eighteen people are injured in the attack.

(3) April 18, 1988: U.S. warships attack two strategic Iranian oil platforms four days after a Persian Gulf mine explosion that damages a Navy frigate and injures 10 American seamen.

(4) June 27, 1993: U.S. warships pound Iraqi intelligence building in Baghdad with cruise missiles after FBI and CIA investigators determine that Iraq’s spy agency attempted to assassinate President George Bush during a visit to Kuwait City in April 1993.

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ECONOMIC SANCTIONS

(5) Two Libyan agents were found to be responsible for the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, in December 1988, but they remain protected by the Libyan government. The U.S. imposed severe economic sanctions against the country that remain in place.

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UNSOLVED

(6) Murders of U.S. businessmen and diplomatic personnel in Karachi, Pakistan, on Nov. 12, 1997.

(7) Bombing of U.S. military facility in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, on June 25, 1996. The perpetrators are to believed to be still at large, although the Saudi government claimed that they were tried and executed.

Source: Staff and wire reports

compiled by JANET LUNDBLAD and VICKY McCARGAR / Los Angeles Times