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nistan in the 1980s, and in 1992 he went to Sudan to become one of al Qaeda's
major financial operatives.When Hage returned to the United States to appear
before a grand jury investigating Bin Ladin, the job of cell manager was taken
over by Harun Fazul, a Kenyan citizen who had been in Bin Ladin's advance
team to Sudan back in 1990. Harun faxed a report on the "security situation"
to several sites, warning that "the crew members in East Africa is [sic] in grave
danger" in part because "America knows . . . that the followers of [Bin Ladin]
. . . carried out the operations to hit Americans in Somalia." The report pro-
vided instructions for avoiding further exposure.
87
On February 23, 1998, Bin Ladin issued his public fatwa.The language had
been in negotiation for some time, as part of the merger under way between
Bin Ladin's organization and Zawahiri's Egyptian Islamic Jihad. Less than a
month after the publication of the fatwa, the teams that were to carry out the
embassy attacks were being pulled together in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam.The
timing and content of their instructions indicate that the decision to launch
the attacks had been made by the time the fatwa was issued.
88
The next four months were spent setting up the teams in Nairobi and Dar
es Salaam. Members of the cells rented residences, and purchased bomb-mak-
ing materials and transport vehicles. At least one additional explosives expert
was brought in to assist in putting the weapons together. In Nairobi, a hotel
room was rented to put up some of the operatives. The suicide trucks were
purchased shortly before the attack date.
89
While this was taking place, Bin Ladin continued to push his public mes-
sage. On May 7, the deputy head of al Qaeda's military committee,
Mohammed Atef, faxed to Bin Ladin's London office a new fatwa issued by a
group of sheikhs located in Afghanistan. A week later, it appeared in Al Quds
al Arabi, the same Arabic-language newspaper in London that had first published
Bin Ladin's February fatwa, and it conveyed the same message--the duty of
Muslims to carry out holy war against the enemies of Islam and to expel the
Americans from the Gulf region.Two weeks after that, Bin Ladin gave a video-
taped interview to ABC News with the same slogans, adding that "we do not
differentiate between those dressed in military uniforms and civilians; they are
all targets in this fatwa."
90
By August 1, members of the cells not directly involved in the attacks had
mostly departed from East Africa. The remaining operatives prepared and
assembled the bombs, and acquired the delivery vehicles. On August 4, they
made one last casing run at the embassy in Nairobi. By the evening of August 6,
all but the delivery teams and one or two persons assigned to remove the evi-
dence trail had left East Africa. Back in Afghanistan, Bin Ladin and the al Qaeda
leadership had left Kandahar for the countryside, expecting U.S. retaliation.
Declarations taking credit for the attacks had already been faxed to the joint
al Qaeda­Egyptian Islamic Jihad office in Baku, with instructions to stand by
THE FOUNDATION OF THE NEW TERRORISM
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