Ideologies remind us that cruelty’s most potent precursor is a conned conscience.
Such was the self-deceit deluding two al Qaeda terrorists 25 years ago this week as they drove their explosive-packed truck down Nairobi, Kenya ’s Haile Selassie Avenue, toward the U.S. Embassy. Five hundred miles away, a second al Qaeda vehicle was simultaneously breaching the American Embassy’s perimeter in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania .
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While tending to their morning routines, 224 Muslims and Christians, educators and epidemiologists, and mothers and mothers-to-be had their lives violently cut short by two massive explosions. The devastating blasts grievously injured over 4,500 innocent people, permanently maiming hundreds.
Reflecting on his group’s murderous depravity, al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden assessed that not enough blood had been spilled. As mutual allies mourned around the world, inside their shared sorrow gestated a global network of Islamic extremists, inspired by the carnage, while planning their next mass-casualty bombings.
If the 1998 East Africa embassy attacks proved an early skirmish in the global war on terrorism, then al Qaeda’s opening campaign of hammering a wedge between dedicated allies backfired.
In reply to the bombings’ barbarity, the United States responded with valor and determination. Within hours, rolling waves of emergency medical care and disaster relief were deployed to the shaken African capitals.
Members of Fairfax County Fire and Rescue toiled shoulder to shoulder with Kenyan counterparts, heroically recovering buried victims from the smoldering rubble. The most critically injured were medevaced to military surgical wards across Europe. The partnership’s gritty perseverance personified Kenya’s national motto, Harambee ("all pull together").
No international collaboration was more deeply intertwined than the pursuit of justice. For its part, the FBI dispatched 1,000 agents and support personnel to East Africa to lead this imperative.
Having previously served as a military attache in Nairobi, I found that participation in the FBI deployment held extra meaning for me. The case would become my singular vocation over the next three years.
Beginning light on facts and heavy on speculation, the bureau’s relentless investigative prowess methodically reversed this informational imbalance.
Discovering a safe house in Tanzania, searchers noticed a discarded toothbrush at the bottom of a sewage tank. With mitochondrial DNA extracted from its bristles, agents approached the family of an emerging suspect. Would his mother and siblings be willing to contribute sample DNA for use as comparative evidence, undoubtedly sealing the fate of their loved one?
During two decades of service, I had many occasions to meet family members of young men seduced by radical fundamentalism’s low-resolution depiction of life’s complexities. The experience was often heartbreaking yet affirming. For those spiritually devoted, whose faith provided deep meaning and dignity, the shame of a child’s unmoored drift into the obscenity of violence was shattering, yet the impetus for their cooperation.
Through community assistance, such as the DNA volunteered by this family, fugitives were arrested in Pakistan, Germany, and England. Others were killed in violent confrontations in Somalia and Afghanistan. Today, seven al Qaeda co-conspirators, convicted for their roles in the embassy bombings, are serving life sentences in federal prison.
For better or worse, the last 25 years have shaped both change and stasis. While the bombing survivors continue to inspire, time fails to heal the awful pain of those who lost loved ones.
The FBI’s once-revered reputation has suffered from some unpardonable leadership missteps. Restoration of that legacy will be an uphill trek borne on the shoulders of its front-line investigators.
But the most distressing change since 1998 has been a peculiar inversion. Americans then rejected and derided the illiberal societal strictures in which ideological terrorism spawned. Obsession with gender and the aggressive enforcement of cultural pieties were deemed ideas to be avoided.
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Yet today, contagions of censorship, social ostracism, and ideological indoctrination run rampant through America, deranging its sensemaking institutions and threatening our values-based order. Like theocratic zealots, fiction-fueled citizens now quash discourse, defenestrate dissenters, and destroy statues.
As the people of a noble nation, having lost countrymen to violent extremism, we must ask: If this fever doesn’t break, what follows next?
William Corbett is a former U.S. Marine Corps officer who served 22 years in the FBI. He is a contributor to the upcoming 44 Blue Productions docuseries Terminate Wolfpack, the true story of the FBI’s role in the capture and trial of Saddam Hussein.
