August 6, 1998: Al-Qaeda Evacuates Afghanistan Training Camps in Anticipation of Immediate US Retaliation after Embassy Bombings

After the African embassy bombings, a bomber named Mohammed Saddiq Odeh confesses his role to the FBI. In doing so, he describes a conversation he had with Abdullah Ahmed Abdullah, one of the leaders of the bomb plot. According to the later court testimony of an FBI agent, Abdullah tells Odeh on August 6, 1998, one day before the bombings: “I just got news from Kandahar, which is an area in Afghanistan, that all the people have been evacuated. And Odeh says, what do you mean? And he says, well, we’re expecting a retaliation by the United States Navy, we’re expecting their warplanes to start hitting us and we’re expecting missile attacks.” [United States of America v. Usama bin Laden, et al., Day 12, 2/28/2001] Presumably, US intelligence would notice such evacuations, as they are closely monitoring al-Qaeda’s training camps in Afghanistan at the time. For instance, Michael Scheuer, head of the CIA’s bin Laden unit at the time, will later say that since the 1980s, “the CIA and the US intelligence community kept a steady, inquisitive, and increasingly knowledgeable eye on these facilities.” [Scheuer, 2008, pp. 32]