Simultaneous bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania took place on August 7, 1998. “The first blast, in the Kenyan capitol of Nairobi, injured some 4,500 people and killed 213, including 40 embassy employees. Another 11 lives were lost in Tanzania, where the lower casualty numbers owed mostly to luck: August 7 happened to be a national holiday, and the U.S. embassy in Dar es Salaam had been closed. What had become clear with time is that facets of the East Africa plot had been known beforehand to the FBI, the CIA, the State Department, and to the Israeli and Kenyan intelligence services. The embassy attacks thus represented law enforcement’s most egregious failure to date to protect the lives and interests of Americans and American allies against bin Laden’s vicious holy war.”
– John Miller, Michael Stone, and Chris Mitchell, The Cell, Page 194