-Caveat Lector-
US News & World Report-8/16/99
It was a direct hit, but was it the right target?
Questions linger about a U.S. missile strike
BY KEVIN WHITELAW AND WARREN P. STROBEL
On August 20 last year, 13 American cruise missiles slammed into
a dusty pharmaceutical plant in Sudan. The strike, the White
House said, was in retaliation for the bombings of the U.S.
embassies in Kenya and Tanzania two weeks earlier. But many of
the U.S. intelligence analysts who keep tabs on African affairs
were kept out of the loop, and they were skeptical that the
plant, known as El Shifa, was a chemical weapons facility
connected to the alleged terrorist Osama bin Laden. That was the
charge leveled by top U.S. officials at the time. Responding to
government critics of the strike, the CIA invited several
analysts to a presentation by the agency's scientific experts.
They explained how U.S. intelligence had obtained a soil sample
containing EMPTA, which is used to make VX nerve gas. The meeting
turned into a disaster. "It didn't convince anyone," says an
official who was present. "The iron curtain came down after
that."
It's still down today. The administration's evidence against El
Shifa remains secret�even to most American officials. What is
known isn't encouraging. In the strike's immediate aftermath, an
informal review conducted by the State Department's Bureau of
Intelligence and Research failed to turn up a single piece of
evidence linking El Shifa to chemical weapons or bin Laden. The
bureau was discouraged from even reporting its findings. Says one
U.S. intelligence official, "To this day, I don't know" why they
chose El Shifa.
Assassination plot. Unlike the mistaken bombing of the Chinese
Embassy in Belgrade in May, the El Shifa bombing stems from more
than an intelligence failure. A staunch anti-Sudan policy left
some senior State Department and National Security Council aides
inclined to believe the worst about the Islamic government in
Khartoum, government officials say. There's plenty of bad news,
to be sure. Sudan has been accused of repeated human-rights
violations in its long-running civil war. It has been blamed for
sparking a deadly famine by cutting off aid flights. It allegedly
harbors terrorists.
But what about El Shifa? Some current and former U.S. officials
say Washington developed a harder line against Sudan in 1995,
after intelligence agencies passed along reports of a possible
assas-sination plot against then National Security Adviser
Anthony Lake. The alleged culprits were Sudanese-based
terrorists. The threat was never substantiated, but around the
same time, the U.S. Embassy in Khartoum was closed, virtually
cutting off the flow of firsthand information from Sudan. From
then on, some officials say, the anti-Sudan line in Washington
got harder. U.S. policy makers dismissed many of Sudan's
overtures about peace negotiations outright. And when Sudan
finally signed the chemical weapons treaty in May, the United
States ignored it. Joe Sala, a former Africa expert at the State
Department, says this philosophy is simple: "It's Sudan, and we
don't like them."
The decision to bomb El Shifa was made by fewer than a dozen top
U.S. officials. This meant that experts on both Sudan and
chemical weapons were not consulted about the government's
evidence. Over the past year, White House officials, including
National Security Adviser Sandy Berger, have backed away from
their charge that El Shifa was actually producing chemicals for
weapons as opposed to being a storage or transshipment point. But
Clinton advisers insist they have seen no new evidence to
undercut their conclusion that the plant was linked to bin Laden
and the Iraqi chemical weapons program. Another factor, says one
official, "tipped the scales": It could be struck with little
risk of civilian casualties.
Still, virtually everything the administration said publicly
about El Shifa in the days after the attack has turned out to be
wrong. At the time of the attack, the United States did not know
who owned the plant. No evidence has surfaced to support claims
that the plant was heavily secured. And government spokesmen
misspoke when they said El Shifa did not produce legitimate
pharmaceutical products, apparently unaware the plant had a
United Nations license to ship drugs to Iraq.
The key evidence touted by U.S. officials was a soil sample taken
by a CIA operative from the grounds of El Shifa that supposedly
tested positive for EMPTA. But tests by outside labs of samples
taken after the bombing have found no trace of EMPTA or any of
its components. And the House intelligence committee was told
that the CIA's original soil sample was so small it was used up
in the initial testing.
U.S. officials have been unable to publicly back up their
assertions that El Shifa's owner, Saleh Idris, a Saudi Arabian
businessman, is linked to bin Laden. After the strike, the
Treasury Department promptly froze $24 million of his assets,
alleging links to terrorists. Idris denied the charges and sued
the government. An intermediary spoke with White House counsel
Charles Ruff, who apparently helped release the assets in May
after obtaining an intelligence briefing.
Garnering sympathy. An investigation by the security firm Kroll
Associates, paid for by Idris, turned up no evidence of any links
between Idris and bin Laden except very tenuous connections
through distant third parties. Idris told U.S. News that he plans
to file a second lawsuit "very soon" seeking compensation for his
$30 million factory. "Everyone on the globe knows this was a
mistake," he says.
In the end, Sudan has benefited from the U.S. strike, gaining
sympathy from many other governments. But the Sudanese government
remains its own worst enemy. Khartoum banned aid flights to two
war-torn regions again last month, putting 150,000 people at risk
of starvation. And a U.N. team was sent to Sudan last week to
investigate the government's alleged use of chemical weapons
against the rebels.
In Washington, House and Senate intelligence committees are
continuing to investigate the decisions leading to the attack.
The strike represents "a real lowering of the threshold for
military action against countries with whom we have a
disagreement," says one congressional aide with access to
intelligence reports. But if anything, Congress is even more
anti-Sudan than the administration. Both houses have
overwhelmingly condemned Sudan within the past two months and
called for U.S. support to the rebels. For now, any comprehensive
scrutiny of the missile strike remains unlikely.
With Brian Duffy
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Shalom, A Salaam Aleikum, and to all, A Good Day.
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