State Dept. Scrambles For Data
President Clinton was awakened at 5:30 a.m. Friday by his national security adviser Sandy Berger and told of the blasts that rocked American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, CBS News White House Correspondent Bill Plante reports.
"`He's watching it very closely," an administration official said. "Obviously, at this point [the reaction is] shock. We're just trying to get more information."
As happens often with such terrorism, Plante reports, the information that comes into the White House comes primarily from television and the news wires. The U.S. reporting system through the embassies - and even the CIA -is just not quite as instantaneous.
By late morning, Plante said, officials had learned little more from government sources than they knew when the president was awakened.
The staff in the situation room at the White House is trying to gather older intelligence reports, gather whatever new fragments of information they can, and then try to determine what has happened.
Meanwhile, the president, in remarks in the Rose Garden Friday morning, called the bombings "abhorrent and inhuman" and vowed to put the full resources of the U.S. to the task of finmding those responsible.
The White House always has been concerned about the fact that U.S. embassies are prime targets for terrorists. The most serious and tragic of all of the embassy bombings in recent times was the one in Beirut, Lebanon, in the early '80s, in which dozens of people were killed and injured.
This is the kind of thing that puts the whole U.S security apparatus - from the White House on down - on high alert.
The State Department has set up a task force on the bombings, one official said. A second State Department official said it was too early to know who was responsible.
Secretary of State Madeleine Albright was en route to Europe to attend the weekend wedding of her spokesman, James P. Rubin, in Rome. She was notified of the bombings.
The Defense Department official said the threat condition at the two embassy locations was considered low.
Although the president, in his spring trip to Africa, never traveled east of Uganda, White House sources are considering whether that trip may be linked in some to the bombings.
When President Clinton visited Africa, Plante reports, many thought it was the beginning of some sort of U.S. effort to take notice of a part of the world that has traditionally been ignored in the West. There was sign of protest.
In fact, there was the belief that it would mean greater U.S. trade, and Africa sees U.S. trade as the gateway to the future.
Plante reports that suspicion so far has focused on one Saudi expatriate who lives in Afghanistan. There are other possibilities, of course, including that this - and it could be, like other terrorist problems -connected in some way to the Middle East.