Author: William Arkin

6 October 1981

Posted on by William Arkin
Sadat assassination

 

Egyptian president Anwar Sadat is assassinated while viewing a military parade celebrating the eighth anniversary of the 1973 Yom Kippur war, when Egypt crossed the Suez Canal into the Sinai Peninsula.

As the two-hour parade is culminating with a flyover, a truck stops in front of the reviewing stand. Five soldiers shoot into the crowd of dignitaries and throw grenades, killing Sadat. The soldiers are often associated with the Muslim Brotherhood, an Islamic group that is a legitimate political force in Egypt. In reality, they are followers of what would become Egyptian Islamic Jihad and Gama’a al-Islamiya (the Islamic Group), the modern-day feeders of al Qaeda.

Some 300 Islamic radicals are arrested after the Sadat assassination, including Ayman al-Zawahiri, an English-speaking doctor, who would go on to become Osama bin Laden’s second and successor.

5 October 2000

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Candidates Dick Cheney and Joseph Lieberman discuss Iraq during a vice presidential debate.

There isn’t really much debate. Both the former secretary of defense and the Connecticut senator support more aggressive action to achieve regime change in Iraq—and both are generally critical of Clinton administration policy.

Cheney defends his record in stopping the 1991 Gulf War short of overthrowing the Iraqi leader and marching on Baghdad by saying that Saddam’s military was “decimated” and that Iraq was “back in the box” after being ejected from Kuwait.

Cheney blames the Clinton administration for allowing sanctions to fray. If it were discovered that Iraq is rebuilding weapons of mass destruction, Cheney says the U.S. might have to consider military action. On a question regarding “taking out” Saddam Hussein, Cheney says: “We might have no other choice.”

But for all of the later criticism of the Bush administration’s supposed conspiracy to depose Saddam and go to war in Iraq, the debate proved a hawk-fest, Lieberman just as hostile towards any kind of normalization of relations, almost competing with Cheney as to who would guarantee military action.

4 October 2000

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Vice President Al Gore and Gov. George W. Bush engage in their first presidential debate, a 90-minute match at the Clark Athletic Center of the University of Massachusetts.

George Bush, considered a lightweight, probably won by not losing, many would later write. But Vice President Gore, while more knowledgeable about the issues, came off as smug and condescending. The New York Times would later write that this seminal debate lost Vice President Gore the presidency, with a rich oral history of those involved speaking in 2016 of the lessons to be learned before the first Clinton-Trump debate.

“We felt the first debate would be his moment—that people would see two candidates on stage, but only one president,” said Tad Devine, Gore senior advisor. But as the debate got underway, Gore showed his contempt and impatience for Bush. “Gore was … sighing and reacting to Bush, and there were lots of reaction shots. It was somewhat inexplicable —as if the things that Gore had been told not to do became his to-do list,” said Robert Shrum, one of Gore’s senior advisors. “I didn’t think Gore’s sighs were a really big deal until I got to the spin room,” Shrum said. The Gore campaign soon found out that many thought Gore had blown it.

3 October 1993

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Black Hawk Down

 

In two days of fighting in urban Mogadishu, Somalia, 18 U.S. Army special operations personnel (Rangers and Delta Force operators) die and over 70 are wounded in a failed raid to capture warlord Mohammed Farrah Aidid. Some 500 Somalis also die in two days of fighting, and three Black Hawk helicopters are lost.

Many would later say that the Pentagon, under Secretary of Defense Les Aspin, was responsible for the incident, denying earlier military requests for additional equipment and then failing to provide backup as the disaster unfolded. Though the Clinton administration inherited the failed Somalia “peacekeeping” operation from the George H.W. Bush administration, Aspin would later admit that he made a mistake in not providing more support for U.S. forces there, and he offered his resignation in December as a result of his decision-making here, after less than a year as secretary.

It was only much later that al Qaeda’s involvement in Somalia was understood. It is now generally agreed that al Qaeda operatives “trained” Somali militia (though what substantive aid they provided is unclear). Osama bin Laden later takes credit for the American deaths and though that is an exaggeration, there is no question that the subsequent U.S. withdrawal influenced al Qaeda views of American weakness.

Mark Bowden’s account of the raid, Black Hawk Down, was a bestselling book and 2001 movie

2 October 1999

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The CIA readies an operation to capture or kill Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan, secretly training and equipping approximately 60 military commandos supplied by the Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) establishment.

The covert action, approved by President Clinton, includes a quid pro quo, that Pakistan would train and prepare the commandos and conduct the operation, in return for the lifting of economic sanctions imposed with Pakistan’s nuclear testing.

The plan is briefed and supposedly ready to go, but it is then aborted because on October 12, Pakistan Army General Pervez Musharraf takes control of the country in a military coup. Most would later say that no ISI-sponsored operation would have been successful given that the organization was filled with Taliban and al Qaeda sympathizers.

1 October 1997

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FBI director Louis Freeh warns that Russian organized crime networks are growing and that they pose a menace to U.S. national security. He says that Russian syndicates are forging ties with the Italian mafia and Colombian drug cartels. Though Freeh would become personally involved in terrorism investigations after the 1996 Khobar Towers attack, 1998 African embassy, and October 2000 USS Cole attacks, his personal focus remains organized crime, and—under Bush administration Attorney General John Ashcroft before 9/11—on pornography.

Freeh would leave office on June 25, 2001 seven years into his ten-year term. The FBI then had an acting director until September 4, when Robert Mueller was confirmed as the sixth director, just a week before 9/11.

30 September 2000

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Predator RQ-1 drone

 

The Taliban issue a press statement saying that an unknown aircraft was seen over Kandahar. CIA-operated Predator drones had started flights over Afghanistan on September 7, flying from an airfield in Uzbekistan.

The satellite-equipped, bulbous-nosed RQ-1 Predator (an enhanced version of the CIA’s Gnat-750) was a newer innovation that allowed the drone to fly beyond the line of sight of ground stations controlling the drones. A year after the satellite-version was introduced, the drone made its first combat debut in hostile airspace, flying near-daily reconnaissance missions over former Yugoslavia (Serbia and Kosovo), then flying from an airfield in Albania.

In December 1998, the CIA first proposed a covert action to use an armed Predator to assassinate Osama bin Laden. Director George Tenet thought the program too risky to be approved on his authority alone and he brought it before the NSC for discussion. The Council gave a go-ahead for development of the capability, but the White House decided to retain control over authorizations for any lethal strikes. Predator development continued to move forward. Flights over Afghanistan are only occasional in September 2000 as the testing program to fire a Hellfire missile from the drone moves forward under Air Force aegis in Nevada. Despite the conclusion that the Predator spotted bin Laden in its first flights (see September 28), the 12-flight covert action is terminated before the end of the year. Predators would not return to the skies of Afghanistan until after 9/11.

29 September 2000

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Osama bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri, and Rifa'i Ahmed Taha

 

Osama bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri, and Rifa’i Ahmed Taha appear on Al Jazeera with the son of Omar Abdel Rahman, the Egyptian “the blind Sheikh,” calling for his release from American prison. The Blind Sheikh’s 1995 trial involved a group of New York-based terrorists in the so-called “Landmarks” case (or the “Days of Terror”), plans to blow up the Holland and Lincoln Tunnels and other New York landmarks. The Egyptian was found guilty and sentenced to life in prison under the rarely used Sedition Act of 1918.

The Al Jazeera video, aired numerous times starting on September 21, is believed to have been filmed sometime in the spring of 2000. It includes a direct warning by Zawahiri. “Enough of words,” he says, “it is time to take action against the iniquitous and faithless force which has spread troops through Egypt, Yemen and Saudi Arabia.”

By 2000, the al Qaeda leader and the two leaders of Egyptian Islamic Jihad (EIJ)—Zawahiri and Taha—are practically joined as one, and the leadership of al Qaeda is dominated by Egyptians. But bin Laden’s influence should not be underestimated. By all accounts, he was successful in getting Zawahiri and the EIJ to focus away from attacks on the Cairo regime and more on international (that is, American) targets. Two weeks after Al Jazeera airs this video, the Navy destroyer USS Cole is attacked in Yemen.

Zawahiri would go on to lead the last remnants of al Qaeda with the killing of bin Laden in 2011. Taha was reported killed in a US drone strike in Syria in 2016.

28 September 2000

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Tarnak Farm

 

A mythical pre-9/11 event gains traction, after the first two missions of an unarmed Predator reconnaissance drone are flown over Afghanistan on September 7 and 8. In review of the videos of the flights, the CIA comes to believe that Predator drones captured images of Osama bin Laden, “a tall man dressed in white robes,” during the overflights.

The 9/11 commission says that the conclusion was made after-the-fact. The drone imaged Tarnak Farms in Kandahar, a former Soviet agricultural collective taken over by al Qaeda. “A group of 10 people gathered around him [the tall man] were apparently paying their respects for a minute or two,” the report says.

CIA director George Tenet sends the video to the White House. White House terrorism specialist Richard Clarke wrote to national security advisor Sandy Berger that there was a “very high probability” bin Laden had been located. President Clinton is then shown the video. It is a mythical event, and not provable one way or another; bin Laden is never to be sighted again in Afghanistan, not before or after 9/11. The lore associated with locating bin Laden fed acceleration of an armed version of the Predator drone and a year of covert action to come up with various schemes to capture or assassinate him while at his Tarnak Farms residence east of the city.

27 September 1996

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At Hurghada, a Red Sea resort in Egypt, two German tourists and two Egyptian nationals are killed as part of Ayman al-Zawahiri’s campaign against tourism.

On September 30, 1992, almost four years earlier, the Egyptian Islamic Group warned tourists not to enter Qena province, the location of some of Egypt’s most famous Pharaonic temples. The following day, terrorists opened fire on a Nile boat carrying over 100 German tourists, injuring three of the Egyptian crew. Between October 1, 1992 and the Hurghada attack, there were 18 additional attacks on tourism, most claimed by Zawahiri’s Egyptian Islamic Jihad (EIJ).

Egyptian police cracked down on the Islamists and increased security around tourist sites. By the end of 1997, after a brutal terrorist attack in Luxor that killed 62 tourists, the campaign of terrorism directed at tourist sites ended. Zawahiri and the EIJ had by then begun to harmonize their attacks with al Qaeda’s global (and American) focus.

Terrorism directed at tourists was also nonexistent for seven years—until 2004, when Egyptian Red Sea villages where Israeli tourists dominated were attacked, killing 34 persons, mostly Israeli visitors. There has been a steady campaign of tourist attacks in Egypt since.