Part 4
Years of detective work led to al-Qaida target
His tour over, John Bennett was preparing to fly home. The CIA’s station chief in Nairobi, Kenya, Bennett had been running the United States’ secret war in East Africa, negotiating with Somali warlords while hunting al-Qaida members across the region. On his watch, the United States and its proxies had managed to capture or kill at least 10 or so al-Qaida militants.
However, the most wanted al-Qaida figure in East Africa, who went by a variety of aliases but whom U.S. officials called Harun Fazul, was still on the loose. A native of the Comoros Islands wanted in connection with al-Qaida’s 1998 attacks on the U.S. embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam as well as the November 2002 attacks on Israeli targets in Kenya, Fazul had proved “a very savvy” enemy, according to an intelligence source with long experience in the Horn of Africa.