tained Empta, a key ingredient in the production of the nerve gas.
Bobby May, watching much of this on CNN from his room in the Khartoum Hilton, felt sure that the President and his national-security adviser had somehow got it terribly wrong. He and Brookins had toured the Al Shifa plant a few days before it was bombed, and walked around, with no evident restrictions on their movement, as the plant's employees packaged and bottled medicines. May, of course, was no expert on chemical weapons, and he certainly could not prove a negative--that the facility had not produced them. Nevertheless, he was astonished as he watched the coverage of the national-security adviser's press conference. "I'm lying in bed and watching the White House talking about this place being a heavily guarded chemical factory," May told me recently. "I couldn't believe my ears. Until then, I had a lot of faith in our intelligence services, I couldn't figure it out.
"I spent a total of two months in Khartoum," on different trips, May went on. "One of the places where the Sudanese like to take you is the pharmaceutical plant. It was a showplace for them." Schoolchildren routinely toured the facility, he added.
Bishop Brookins, who has been the spiritual leader of the A.M.E. Church since the mid-seventies, had returned to Nashville the day before the bombing. Although Brookins, like May, had no technical expertise in chemical-warfare manufacturing processes, he felt that he had seen enough to be convinced, after learning of the bombing, that "somebody had made a mistake." Several weeks later, he and May separately got in touch with the White House in an effort to tell the President of their concerns about the bombing. May even brought it up with a Clinton official while attending a fund-raiser at the White House. No one in the Administration seemed to care.
ALMOST every aspect of the Administration's planning for the Tomahawk raids has been challenged, in more than a hundred interviews conducted over the past six weeks with past and present officials in the Defense Department, the Justice Department, the State Department, and the C.I.A. The men and women who make American foreign policy believe Osama bin Laden to be an extreme threat to American well-being. No one disputes that Sudan has systematically violated human rights, and permitted bin Laden and other terrorists to operate with impunity inside its borders, at least until 1996, when he and some hundred of his followers were expelled at the request of the United States and Saudi Arabia. Many certainly would have applauded his death if he had been slain, as was hoped. Nevertheless, there is a great degree of disquiet and dissatisfaction over the raids--and widespread concern over the President's possible motives for ordering them. There is also widespread belief that senior officials of the White House misrepresented and overdramatized evidence suggesting that the Tomahawk raids had prevented further terrorist attacks.
No American official would be quoted by name about the extent of disarray inside the government. But the lack of trust shown toward the Clinton White House by the military and intelligence communities goes well beyond the usual bureaucratic backbiting over a failed military action, and is far more corrosive. The Tomahawk missions are seen as very expensive failures; the nearly eighty missiles deployed, which cost roughly seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars apiece, did not kill bin Laden and his associates in Afghanistan, and the target in Sudan may not have been what the C.I.A. said it was. Those failures were a by-product of the secrecy that marked all of the White House's planning for the Tomahawk raids--a secrecy that prevented decisionmakers from knowing everything they needed to know.
Most significantly, the four men who know more about the use of force than anyone in the White House--the three generals and one admiral on the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who run the nation's armed forces--were not briefed about the use of Tomahawk missiles until the day before the raids. The only member of the Joint Chiefs to participate fully in the planning was the chairman, General Shelton, who was instructed not to brief the other chiefs or to involve senior officers of the Defense Intelligence Agency.
Another official kept out of the planning was Louis J. Freeh,
the F.B.I. director, although his agency had played an active
role in investigating the bombings in Kenya and Tanzania. No
office inside the F.B.I. was asked to review the intelligence,
assembled primarily by the C.I.A., which concluded that the Al
Shifa plant was involved in the manu-
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