In an appearance on CNN’s Late Edition with Wolf Blitzer on August 30, 1998, then-Ambassador to the UN Bill Richardson discussed the August 20 missile attack on a pharmaceutical plant in Sudan that was linked to Iraq and bin Laden. “He called the targeting ‘one of the finest hours of our intelligence people.’ Richardson said, ‘We know for a fact [there was] physical evidence, soil samples of VX [nerve gas] precursor–[a] chemical precursor–at the site.’ He cited ‘direct evidence of ties between Osama bin Laden’ and Sudan’s Military Industrial Corporation. ‘You combine that with Sudan support for terrorism, their connections with Iraq on VX, and you combine that, also, with the chemical precursor issue, and Sudan’s leadership support for Osama bin Laden, and you’ve got a pretty clear-cut case.’ For journalists and many at the CIA, however, the case was hardly clear-cut. For one thing, U.S. intelligence had collected the soil sample from outside the plant’s front gate, not within the grounds, despite the fact that an internal CIA memo issued a month before the attacks had recommended gathering additional soil samples from the site before reaching conclusions. ‘It caused a lot of heartburn at the agency,’ recalls a former top intelligence official.”
– Stephen F. Hayes, The Connection, Pages 109-110