Eyewitness to Terror: Nairobi's Day of Infamy

On August 7, 1998, a terrorist's bomb turned a U.S. embassy into an inferno. It could happen again.
By Lucien Vandenbroucke

What was it like?" That's a question that survivors of the Aug. 7, 1998, bombing of Embassy Nairobi have faced time and again. The events themselves are easy enough to describe: The terrorists, driving a small truck packed with 2,000 pounds of explosives, drove coolly that morning to their target, located on one of the busiest intersections in downtown Nairobi. They sought to enter the small parking lot abutting the front of chancery, but were turned away by one of the embassy's Kenyan guards. His orders were strict, and he was thorough: No trucks were allowed in the front parking lot. Try as they might, the occupants of the vehicle could not talk their way in. Frustrated, they drove away.

By standing his ground, that Kenyan guard unwittingly usurped the role of the Fates. Had he let the vehicle through, the terrorists would have detonated their deadly cargo in front of the embassy, where most of the occupants -- including the entire country team, which was gathered in the ambassador's office -- would probably have perished. Through his determination, the guard saved most of us in the front of the building, while unknowingly sentencing many of our colleagues in the rear to die.

The truck, having been turned away from the front entrance, inched its way through the congested streets to the back parking lot, only a few meters from the rear chancery wall. The driver pulled up to the barrier controlling access to the embassy's small underground parking lot, hoping to make his way deep into the bowels of the building. If he had gotten in, the bomb would have caused the five-story structure to collapse like a house of cards. His fallback plan was stymied, however, as surely as the original plan. The Kenyan guard manning the entry to the garage refused to let the unauthorized vehicle in. The passenger of the truck jumped out, argued with the guard, and lobbed a grenade into the compound.

The detonation punctuated the din of the street like a thunderclap. A few seconds later, we heard a deafening roar, as if a thousand thunderstorms had struck at once. The driver, seeing his plans unravel in front of his eyes, had chosen to wait no longer. With a flick of a switch, he had blown himself up with his deadly payload. The entire rear of the chancery was torn apart, as if a giant, monstrous hand had clawed off the façade, while an adjacent eight-story building, housing a secretarial college and other offices, collapsed on its occupants. Forty-six employees, both American and Kenyan, died in the chancery, and another 173 Kenyans -- with no other connection to the embassy except that they happened to be working or passing nearby -- died outside the building. Another 50 employees were injured, as were over 4,000 Kenyans in the buildings and streets around the chancery. The Nairobi bombing was one of the bloodiest terrorist attacks in history. In the embassy alone, almost 50 percent of the occupants were dead or wounded. A Small Piece of Hell

The rough outline of what happened is easy to relate, but how can one render the texture of the events? All those who lived through the bombing own their own piece of the hell that called on us that day -- a compound of the specific sights, sounds, and smells each of us had seared into our memories, and of the emotions they stirred. I can only attempt to capture the visions and the feelings that still ebb and flow in my mind and soul.

What was it like? The weekly country team meeting -- the meeting of the mission's senior staff -- was convened in the ambassador's office, and I was chairing it as the ambassador's acting deputy. (The ambassador was meeting the minister of transport in a building behind the chancery.) As fate had it, ours was one of the most protected rooms when the bomb went off. On the opposite side of the building from the explosion, it was sheltered from the blast by the communications room -- a cavernous structure built like a bank vault, whose thick concrete walls gave us protection. Even so, many of us were knocked to the ground. As we picked ourselves up, none of us understood the amplitude of the disaster that awaited a few feet away. We tried to call the Marine standing watch at "Post One," the main entrance of the chancery, but the line was dead.

As we made it to the fifth-floor lobby to take the stairs to the ground floor, a secretary was sprawled, face down, at the intersection of two hallways on one end of the building. Several of us rushed forward. Unconscious, she was moaning softly. Afraid to move her ourselves lest she had suffered damage to her spine, we decided to get the embassy doctor or nurse to help. Kneeling at her side, I peered down the corridor that led to the rear of the building. Only then did I begin to comprehend the scale of the disaster. My gaze, instead of meeting the door that led to the suite of offices that belonged to the Regional Affairs Office, encountered gray sky. That whole rear section of the fifth floor had been blown away.

The trip down the rubble-strewn and dust-filled stairwell lasted an eternity. In the shambles of what was once the downstairs lobby our worst fears were confirmed. Scores of survivors, many bloody and dazed, streamed out of the building. The whole front of the chancery was ravaged, every window shattered. We set up an impromptu command post in front of the building. Chief security officer Paul Peterson, administrative counselor Steven Nolan, security engineer Lee Reed and I, unscathed, divvied up the tasks -- organizing rescue parties to comb the shattered building, mobilizing our colleagues from the warehouse to bring badly needed materiel, getting the wounded to hospitals and keeping track of where they were being sent, contacting our colleagues from the Agency for International Development, located in a separate part of town. Our doctor and nurses set up a makeshift triage center at the door of the embassy. Shocked, bloodied colleagues and passers-by were everywhere.

The Worst Fear

With the first rescue operations set in place, I walked to the rear of the building where the bomb had gone off to assess the damage there. It was a scene Dante might have conjured for his Inferno. The whole back side of the chancery was rubble. In the back parking lot the wrecks of several vehicles were ablaze. Charred corpses, black and shriveled, their hands outstretched in what looked like a last, futile supplication to ward off their demise, were strewn about.

Hundreds of survivors were struggling out of the towering Cooperative Bank building behind the chancery. All that was left of a smaller building that flanked it was a heap of concrete slabs. One man staggered by silently, the left side of his face ripped away, strips of flesh hanging from his bones. One smoldering car looked familiar. I drew closer, and recognized, stalled in the alley leading to the parking lot, what looked like my own Jeep Cherokee. My wife had planned to come to the embassy at 10:30 that morning to take care of some administrative matters before joining me for an early lunch. The bomb went off at 10:37. The shipping section she intended to visit was rubble. My mind raced, while my stomach felt as if caught in a giant vise. I recalled the embassy had vehicles almost identical to my own -- the same make, and the same color. I looked for the telltale signs of our own vehicle, but the license plate was seared beyond recognition. I searched for the distinctive alloy hubcaps of our car, but the force of the explosion had torn the wheels off.

Addressing a silent, desperate plea to God that somehow my wife had escaped, I made it back to the front of the building. There was no one left in the parking lot or the shipping section to help. On the other side of the building, the living at least outnumbered the dead.

On my way back, I saw Ambassador Prudence Bushnell, accompanied by two Foreign Service colleagues, coming out of the Cooperative Bank, where they had been meeting the Kenyan minister. All three were bleeding profusely from multiple gashes. We spoke briefly, and the ambassador found a car. She took her wounded colleagues to a doctor, then went to the USAID building to set up a crisis center to manage the disaster.

Meanwhile a crowd of perhaps 10,000 had quickly formed in front of the embassy. Most, shocked, were just gazing; many others wanted to help, while scores of looters started to swarm into the building through its gaping holes. With the surviving embassy Marines -- one was dead, another wounded -- and a few Army servicemen who were on temporary duty at the embassy, we set up a security perimeter around the building. We needed to control access to the site, if only to let our rescue teams do their job. Part of the crowd, however, suddenly surged forward. They had spotted a surviving embassy guard who had made it from the back of the building to the front, and was trapped behind the security fence that fronted the building. His clothes in shreds, his face and body a welter of bloody gashes, he gripped the bars of the fence gate, wailing pathetically. A Surging Crowd Threatens

The surging crowd threatened to sweep our cordon away; had that happened, we would have been engulfed in a sea of humanity, and any attempt at an organized rescue would have been futile. A couple of us stepped toward the lead group of angry young men, urging them to let us continue our job. Others meanwhile scrambled to find the key to the gate. Feigning calm, we argued with the front line of the crowd. Glancing over my shoulder, I understood why our words carried such weight and the mob stopped: a Marine and a soldier stood three feet behind us, their faces a mask of grim determination, their weapons leveled. We found the key and rescued the guard. Meanwhile, our rescue teams kept hauling shattered bodies, some alive, others lifeless, out of the chancery, using broken doors as makeshift stretchers.

As the minutes and hours passed by, they became a blur. The orders and instructions I gave, the actions I took, the scenes I witnessed slowly faded into a shapeless gray mass, like the choking dust cloud that hung over the bomb site, uniting the living and the dead in its powdery shroud. I recall absenting myself again for a moment from the command post -- determined to stand our ground, we had dubbed it "Post One" -- and heading back to the burned-out Jeep. In a flash, I recognized it was a right-hand drive vehicle, while ours was a left-hand drive. My hopes soared. Minutes later, my wife's voice came across the embassy radio net, trying to reach me. I began to feel alive again. Little did I know that destiny had again struck in its unfathomable way. The spouse of one of my friends and colleagues had dropped by our house unexpectedly that morning, and my wife had been delayed. Both were still at my home when the bomb went off. My wife's life was saved, while our friend lost her son and husband in the blast.

Still another picture of the bombing burns in my memory. Two days after the bombing, I went with a friend to Nairobi's central morgue searching for the body of one of our colleagues, which was still missing. He was not there (he was later identified in another facility), but what I saw constitutes one of my most powerful memories of the bombing. Over 30 bodies lay on tables and the floor. While some were horribly mutilated, others were not. They were all humble people, wearing modest clothes -- hapless victims in the wrong place at the wrong time. On face after face was etched the same look of terror and shock. From beyond death, they seemed to inquire: Why?

"What was it like?" That was my August 7. It is just one person's account, which cannot do justice to the myriad of experiences and contributions of my colleagues. A Lingering Hollowness

How does it appear to me today? Muted pain lingers on. I will forever feel a hollowness when I remember the friends and colleagues lost. My mind still cannot accept the extra-ordinary and needless suffering that occurred that evil day. I am convinced that a jubilant Satan danced down the streets of Nairobi that evening. And I still sometimes wake up at night, fighting the grip of the same dream, in which I search through endless blasted corridors for the body of my wife.

You carry on, absorbed by the kaleidoscope of daily life, but part of you cannot forget. The memories force themselves upon you when they choose. Ultimately, I can only imagine what my fellow survivors, Kenyan and American, feel. But if these are my emotions, when my wife and I survived without a scar, what can it be for those who were wounded in their flesh, or whose loved ones were forever suddenly torn from them, leaving their lives forever altered? The wrenching outpourings of sorrow we witnessed in Nairobi, when family members convened to mark the first anniversary of the bombing, made clear that they suffered beyond my capability to describe.

The anguish of the survivors comes through in other ways as well. I saw it etched every day, for almost a year after the bombing, in the face of my boss Ambassador Prudence Bushnell. Although she had done everything in her power to make Nairobi as safe as possible, she bore with quiet dignity an infinite sorrow that this disaster had happened to those for whom she cared so. The pain comes through in the disabled shuffle of George Okindo, the guard whom we rescued that morning in front of the chancery, and who is again at work with us at the interim Nairobi chancery -- this time as a receptionist, as he can stand only with difficulty. Moments of Bravery

It would be untrue, however, to claim that my memory of August 7, 1998, is entirely a shade of black. Tinged with the sorrow is pride, as I recall the extraordinary spirit our mission members, Kenyans and Americans alike, few of whom had any preparation for such a disaster, displayed in the face of danger and death. The examples are almost innumerable. Who can forget the teams of volunteers who went repeatedly back into the blasted building, by then a death trap, filled with blinding and, we feared, poisonous smoke, littered with live wires, with gaping holes where elevator shafts once were? Ignoring the danger the wrecked chancery might collapse, they worked tirelessly to retrieve the wounded and the dead. Our electrical contractor Juzer Moosajee -- not even a permanent employee -- picked his way to the basement to turn off our generators, which threatened to ignite the tons of fuel stored at the back of the building. Finding the rooms half flooded, he did not hesitate to wade to the generators to switch them off, disregarding the threat of electrocution.

Nothing reminds me more of so many ordinary people performing the extraordinary that day than the image of one young Marine, decked in his flak jacket and cradling his weapon, every inch of him the resolute warrior as he guarded the perimeter. As our security officer Paul Petterson walked up to him, the fierce guardian asked in a soft, quavering voice, "Sir, have you ever experienced anything like this?" The survivors were shocked, but they were undaunted. The fact remains, however, that the memory of August 7 remains chiefly sorrow, despite the tinge of pride. It was a human tragedy, of real people suffering cruelly. In doing my best to convey something of the texture of that day, I strive to keep alive the memory: Friends, colleagues, innocent people in often unspeakable anguish. That day cannot become another dry footnote, devoid of flesh and blood, in the pages of history. The memory of all that occurred cannot fade, lest we invite the tragedy to repeat itself.

Indeed, the basic question we must address is the one the innocent victims at the morgue seemed to whisper: Why? Why did this happen?

It happened because evil men, full of spite for our country and for what it stands, did not hesitate to kill scores and injure thousands to vent their rage. Unfortunately, international terrorism is unlikely to go away, fed as it is by bent minds who seek foreign scapegoats for the ills, perceived or real, of their own societies, and who know no scruples in their attempts to strike back. The Next Nairobi?
This leads us, inescapably, to another conclusion. The tragedy occurred in part because we allowed it to happen. After the bombings of the U.S. embassy and barracks in Beirut in 1983, a commission headed by Adm. Bobby Inman came up with a comprehensive list of steps to forestall more terrorist strategies. At first, Congress and the executive branch supported programs to protect our embassies and overseas posts. But as the memory of the Beirut bombings faded and no new major successful terrorist attacks occurred, we slowly let our guard down.

Thus, 15 years after the Beirut bombings, Embassy Nairobi was still located on a curb of two of the city's major thoroughfares, a sitting duck for a car or truck bomb. It took any new employee less then a minute to realize the chancery was vulnerable. But there was no money to build a new chancery. Moreover, we deemed the threat of terrorism less in Nairobi and East Africa than in other, more turbulent parts of the world. We did not foresee that Middle East terrorists, crazed but hardly foolish, had concluded that as U.S. embassies were increasingly well protected in their own region, they would go after the more vulnerable ones, such as our embassies in East Africa.

In a sense, it was nobody's fault and everybody's fault. Our system performed the way it so commonly does. It devoted the lion's share of attention and resources to the most visible, pressing issues of the day, neglecting what seem to be less urgent problems.

And it is this that causes me deep concern. While the terrorists will not give up their murderous quests, they may take years before launching more large-scale strikes like those in Nairobi and Dar Es Salaam. Will we be better able this time to do what is needed to make our diplomats secure overseas, if the threat once again seems over time to recede? I would like to be sanguine, but I am not sure that is warranted. If we lower our guard again, the question is not if -- but only when -- we will experience another Nairobi.

Lucien Vandenbroucke is political counselor at Embassy Nairobi, and was acting DCM at the time of the 1998 bombing. He served previously in Hong Kong, Mauritania and Sudan. He begins a tour this summer as DCM in Algiers.