Reviewed by Dr. Robert D. Gay, Jr. for the American Intelligence Journal, Volume 38, Number 1, 2021.

From the beginning, one can tell that this book is going to deliver a “no-holds barred” firsthand account of the Al-Qaeda (AQ) August 1998 bombing of the U.S. Embassy in Nairobi, Kenya, that killed more than 220 people (mostly Kenyans, but also twelve U.S. citizens) and injured another 4,000. This is initially seen when the author, the former U.S. Ambassador to Kenya, responds to urgent phone calls on the day of the terrorist attack from both then-State Department Assistant Secretary for African Affairs Susan Rice and Secretary Madeleine Albright. In the subsequent phone calls, both were surprised to learn that the Embassy was so close to a main throughfare in the city, to which the author responds to the former, “I wrote you and the f—ing secretary of state all about it.” Naturally, Ambassador Bushnell was more respectable in her response to Secretary Albright: “Madame Secretary, I wrote you a letter.” Unfortunately, the response was “I never got it.” Later, the same day, President Bill Clinton called to advise the Ambassador to “secure the perimeter” not only of the Embassy but also the building next door (Ufundi House).1 The author mentions being“dumbstruck” by the instruction, even when it was repeated after informing the President, “We’re still bringing out bodies.” After future reflection, she remarks that she should have responded by saying, “The bloody perimeter was already secured by a few good U.S. Marines with help from a British military training team,” especially when the initial casualty list already showed the loss of two of the six-member Marine detachment.

As the story progresses, it is learned that two months before the attack the State Department had granted a waiver for the requirement to have at least a 100-foot offset from a public street, and it assessed only a “medium threat” of a terrorist attack on the Embassy and its personnel, though an AQ assassination plot on the Ambassador had been thwarted by Kenyan security authorities. Instead, Bushnell’s two-year battle prior to the attack of repeatedly drawing attention to the security vulnerabilities of the Embassy’s location provoked complaints of “nagging” and being “obsessed” from State Department executive management, which was noted in one of her annual performance appraisals with the notation of tending to “overload the bureaucratic circuits.” Likewise, in early 1998, then-Commander of U.S. Central Command, General (USMC) Anthony Zinni, offered to send a vulnerability assessment team as a coordinated State-Defense effort, since there was no available funding in the State Department budget for it. Instead, this initiative was rebuffed by State, which advised Zinni that he should mind his own business and informed Ambassador Bushnell that embassy security was State’s responsibility.

It is against this backdrop that her memoir, exemplified by the book’s jacket showing the Ambassador at the site of the bombing with a makeshift memorial behind her, attempts to cope with the shock, as well as the shortcomings of the U.S. government, before and after the attack. Furthermore, it is an examination of intelligence failures in combating Osama bin Laden and AQ, divided into three sections: (1) What Happened? (2) How Did It Happen? and (3) So What? to address the terrorism, betrayal, and resilience of the title. In addition, interspersed among the sections is a biography of Bushnell’s life and career within the State Department’s Foreign Service, particularly given her father was a member of the same, which means her experience in foreign cultures and locales were extensive before her joining the service. In the end, Ambassador Bushnell makes the call for a holistic shift within the government from a supervisory approach to dynamic leadership, defined as the tension between “doing things right” and “doing the right thing,” and how diplomacy and effective executive direction is the country’s most compelling offense and defense for the future. [Editor’s Note: Kenya was not Bushnell’s only ambassadorial post. I met her about two years after the bombing in Nairobi when she was Ambassador to Guatemala and my National Defense University/Perry Center for Hemispheric Defense Studies team was conducting a national security strategy planning seminar in Guatemala City. After leaving her chief of mission post there, for a while Ambassador Bushnell served as a dean at the Foreign Service Institute.]

To address the first component of the title, Terrorism, Ambassador Bushnell begins by describing firsthand the 1998 U.S. Embassy bombing in Nairobi where she was posted at the time, as well as providing information learned about the simultaneous attack on the Embassy in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, before focusing on Islamic terrorism attacks in general. In the “What Happened?” section, she conveys the human and physical devastation of the AQ terrorist attack, along with the shock and lingering effects on the survivors. One compelling failure at the time was the lack of preparedness to respond to such an event. For instance, in addition to the State Department rescue team not being able to arrive as planned due to aircraft mechanical problems, the same was true for the Fairfax County, VA, rescue squad and its sniffer dogs. Moreover, when a U.S. military medical evacuation plane arrived in country, not only did it arrive late, but there was no backup crew. This meant that the injured and the medical team had to wait another 15 hours (mandatory crew rest time) before being evacuated. Moreover, the plane arrived without any medical supplies or other needed essentials because they had not been specified or requested. Once more, this is reflective of the author’s viewpoint of the tension in U.S. government decision-making between “doing things right” and “doing the right thing.”

In the following section, “How Did It Happen?” the Ambassador provides a chronological progression toward the bombings by year, months, and days before the attack, highlighting the political and cultural events occurring in the United States at the time. From such episodes as the O.J. Simpson trial and the Bill Clinton- Monica Lewinsky scandal, she underscores how many serious or cliched events consumed Americans’ attention during this period—that is, until the suicide bombing attacks of the USS Cole (2000) in Yemen’s Aden harbor

and the 9/11 World Trade Center (WTC) (2001) shifted

much needed attention to Osama bin Laden and AQ.

For the second element of the title, Betrayal, not only

does the author express feeling responsible for the dead

and wounded from the attack on the U.S. Embassy in

Nairobi but believes that attack and others could have

been prevented. As mentioned earlier, in both “What