Nairobi — January 7, 2007 came and went without much ado in Nairobi. It was a Sunday and many Kenyans were adjusting to ordinary life after the Christmas and New Year festivities.

That evening, President Kibaki and his family returned from their traditional Christmas holiday in Mombasa.

Five days earlier, the President had held a closed-door meeting at State House, Mombasa, with the then Somalia President Abdullahi Yusuf Ahmed on the situation in the neighbouring country.

The President had earlier in the morning chaired a national security meeting to grapple with the aggravated situation in Somalia.

The battle between the Islamic Courts Union and Ethiopian military was dragging towards Kenya's border. Details from those meetings are scant but the agenda of Islamist fighters fleeing from the Ethiopian military is in no doubt. The government had sealed the border to prevent the fleeing fighters from entering Kenya and security forces were on high alert.

A press release by the Presidential Press Service after the two high-level meetings said little apart from that the Somali situation had been discussed.

Resurgence

"During the meeting, the two leaders discussed the resurgence of fighting that is threatening to derail the peace process in Somalia," the PPS dispatch issued on the evening on February 2, 2007 said.

But, within five days, the American military conducted an air strike in southern Somalia which, by some accounts, spilt into Kenya in their hunt for the masterminds of the August 7, 1998 attacks on their embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam. More than 250 people died in the 1998 attacks, for which al-Qaeda claimed responsibility. The US believes some of the operatives retreated into Somalia.

The US also holds the al-Qaeda cell in Somalia responsible for attacks on an Israeli aircraft and Israeli-owned hotel in Kenya in 2002, in which 15 people died.

The air strike did not elicit a response from Nairobi in line with the non-military position that Kenya has taken on the Somalia situation.

Little is known about whether the meetings hosted by President Kibaki five days before the strike had discussed the military action directed from Washington or whether Kenyan security chiefs sanctioned the raids. But President Yusuf, who later resigned from office on December 29, 2008, said; "The US has a right to bombard terrorist suspects who attacked its embassies in Kenya and Tanzania."

In Kenya, there has been official silence about the raid but a recently published book on the spy activities of British intelligence operatives has linked Kenyan authorities to the raid.

In his book Secret Wars, author Gordon Thomas says the air strike was conducted on the "Indian ocean island of Lamu." The book says US intelligence believed they killed four British nationals in the raid.

Other jihadists

The four had been born and raised in Leeds, and had told their families they had travelled to visit their families in Islamabad. Instead, they flew to Mogadishu to join other "jihadists" from France, Spain, Italy and Germany.

According to the Secret Wars account, the recruit fighters arrived in Mogadishu and travelled southwards to Lamu just days before the strike. After the bombing, they were buried along with the other dead while the survivors fled back to Mogadishu.

When British intelligence was informed by their American counterparts about the four UK passport holders, they dispatched intelligence operatives from the MI5 agency to Lamu on a fact-finding mission.

It might have been easier to fly to Nairobi or Mombasa but they flew to Turkey and on to an American navy ship in the Arabian sea. From the ship, American military helicopters flew them to the scene.

"For three dangerous days, guarded by a combined force of SAS and Delta Force commandos, the officers had helped to dig up bodies buried in shallow graves," writes author Thomas. "On the fourth day, they unearthed the four Britons. Each still carried his passport."

Secret Wars, written to mark 100 years of British intelligence, is hazy in its reference to Lamu, which is in Kenya just south of Somalia, and the attacks which Mr Thomas writes were targeting "jihadists" in Somalia.

MI5 source

Contacted by the Sunday Nation, Thomas said: "The information came from an MI5 source. It is supported by US Navy sources. While Lamu is indeed in Kenya territorial waters, the intelligence services operated as stated in terms of the four terrorists dug up."

The diggers carried back to London DNA samples. The next hurdle, writes Thomas, was how to establish beyond doubt that the dead men were Britons.

MI5 agents back in London visited the families of the dead men -- using passport information to trace their addresses -- and used a cover story.

"An officer posing as a local health employee checking on contamination of the local water supply due to broken pipes after unseasonable flooding, had called on each address and taken swabs (DNA samples from family members)."

These were taken to lab where a scientist confirmed that each of the samples taken from the shallow graves in Lamu bore a perfect match to families back in the UK.

The interest in hunting Islamists down to Lamu had not always been on the table for British intelligence experts. Though they had a passing interest in Osama bin Laden as he converted impressionable young Muslims into fighters, the magnitude his faith-fuelled war against military giants would only come home on the morning of August 7, 1998 when al-Qaeda militants struck in Nairobi and Tanzania. Nairobi has been traditionally a key intelligence station for the British since colonial days.

Cambridge professor Christopher Andrew who has authored the book Defend the Realm, the official history of the first 100 years of MI5 chronicles how the agents spied on Kenya and how founding president Jomo Kenyatta later asked for their help to spy on his political rivals.The intelligence gathered from Kenya and transmitted to London was in the fight against the Russia-led communist policies.

Along with America's CIA and Israel's Mossad, they - up to 1989 when communism collapsed - worked ceaselessly to ensure that as many nations as possible supported capitalism and democracy as defined by the West.

Not until the August 7 morning in 1998 were the MI5 awakened to the realities of the global threat of extremist Muslims.

Well acquainted

"In the aftermath of the al Qaida attacks in August 1998, the Security Service recognised for the first time that the main international terrorist threat no longer came from the State sponsors with which it had become well acquainted over the past two decades but from the growth of transnational Islamist terrorism with which it had far less experience," writes Prof Andrew from his access of MI5 archives.

At the time of the Nairobi and Dar bombings, little did the British know they would disrupt a number of plans targeted either at UK or US interests around the world or that they would have to deal with an attack on their soil in July of 2005.

Over time, details have emerged that the Nairobi bombing had been predicted by Kenya's intelligence. Mr Thomas writes that in the horrific aftermath of the bombing, the National Security Intelligence Service agents were more interested in answering why the bombers had struck a nation that had no quarrel with al-Qaeda and why so many Kenyans had died. In London and Washington, the question was where to find Osama bin Laden, dead or alive.

The then American ambassador to Nairobi, Prudence Bushnell, according to later revelations, had constantly requested for additional security for the embassy on the corner of Moi and Haile Selassie avenues. The CIA had identified an al-Qaeda cell in Kenya, and its members were under surveillance.

Al-Qaeda operative

They had an eight-page letter, written by an al-Qaeda operative, speaking of the imminent arrival of "engineers" -- the code word for bomb makers -- in Nairobi. Ms Bushnell had asked Washington for more security, according to an article published in the New Yorker magazine.

In their book, The Cell, authors John Miller Michael Stone and Chris Mitchell give details of what transpired between ambassador Bushnell and her State Department counterparts.

"After the bombing, a senior State Department official phoned Bushnell and asked, 'How could this have happened?' For the first time since the blast Bushnell's horror turned to anger. There was too much history. 'I wrote you a letter,' she said."