[iwar] [fc:U.S..Pursued.Secret.Efforts.to.Catch.or.Kill.bin.Laden]

From: Fred Cohen (fc@all.net)
Date: 2001-09-30 15:58:12


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Subject: [iwar] [fc:U.S..Pursued.Secret.Efforts.to.Catch.or.Kill.bin.Laden]
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Sunday September 30 09:04 AM EDT

U.S. Pursued Secret Efforts to Catch or Kill bin Laden

By JAMES RISEN The New York Times

The Central Intelligence Agency began an attempt about three years ago
to persuade the leader of the anti-Taliban Afghan opposition to capture
and perhaps kill Osama bin Laden. 

WASHINGTON, Sept.  29 ‹ The Central Intelligence Agency secretly began
to send teams of American officers to northern Afghanistan about three
years ago in an attempt to persuade the leader of the anti- Taliban
Afghan opposition to capture and perhaps kill Osama bin Laden, according
to American intelligence officials. 

The covert effort, which has not been previously disclosed, was based on
an attempt to work with Ahmed Shah Massoud, who was then the military
leader of the largest anti- Taliban group in the northern mountains of
Afghanistan, and to have his forces go after Mr.  bin Laden.  Mr. 
Massoud was himself fatally wounded only two days before the attacks on
the Pentagon and the World Trade Center, and the C.I.A.  believes that
he was assassinated by members of Mr.  bin Laden's organization. 

The C.I.A.'s clandestine efforts to deal with Mr.  Massoud were among
the most sensitive and highly classified elements of a broader long-term
campaign, continuing unsuccessfully through the end of the Clinton
administration and into the Bush administration, to destroy Mr.  bin
Laden's terrorist network.  The American campaign against Mr.  bin Laden
intensified after the August 1998 bombings of two United States
Embassies in East Africa, which transformed the Saudi-born exile into
America's most wanted terrorist. 

Today, the hunt for Osama bin Laden and his lieutenants in Al Qaeda, the
terrorist network he leads from his sanctuary in Afghanistan, has
escalated to wartime levels.  The Bush administration is considering a
full range of overt and covert military and intelligence proposals that
Washington policy makers would have considered too risky or unworkable
before the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. 

But according to current and former intelligence officials and other
policy makers, the United States has been trying to kill bin Laden and
destroy Al Qaeda for years, as the terrorist organization has become
more ruthless and ambitious in its efforts to attack American interests
around the world. 

Clinton administration lawyers determined that the United States could
legitimately seek to kill Mr.  bin Laden and his lieutenants despite the
presidential ban on assassinations, according to current and former
American officials.  The lawyers concluded that efforts to hunt and kill
Mr.  bin Laden were defensible either as acts of war or as national self
defense, legitimate under both American and international law.  As a
result, President Clinton did not waive the executive order banning
assassinations. 

There have been an array of unsuccessful attempts to target Mr.  bin
Laden and disrupt or destroy Al Qaeda, American officials say.  The
Clinton administration even considered mounting a secret effort to steal
millions of dollars from the bin Laden terrorist network by siphoning it
out of the international financial system, but discarded the scheme
because of objections from the United States Treasury about the
implications for world finance. 

The United States launched cruise missiles against a meeting Mr.  bin
Laden was believed to be attending, encouraged Mr.  Massoud and other
Afghan leaders to try to capture him, and received a secret report from
one Afghan group last year about its failed attempt to assassinate Mr. 
bin Laden. 

The United States also led an international effort to shut down
Afghanistan's airline, which American intelligence officials believed
was being used by Al Qaeda to ship money and personnel around the world,
while also pressuring other nations to arrest and disrupt Al Qaeda
cells. 

"This was a top priority for us over the past several years, and not a
day went by when we didn't press as hard as we could," said Samuel R. 
Berger, national security adviser in the Clinton administration.  "But
this is a tough, tough problem.  I think we were pushing it as hard as
we could.  And I think the Bush administration is handling it in a smart
way."

But until the devastating attacks on New York and Washington, the
American-led efforts to hunt Mr.  bin Laden lacked the sense of urgency
that prevails today.  American intelligence and law enforcement
officials grew complacent about the threat of a domestic attack by Al
Qaeda, failed by their own admission to share information adequately or
coordinate their efforts, and were caught by surprise on Sept.  11. 

Washington did not build a strong international coalition to focus on
defeating Al Qaeda, which was seen by other nations largely as an
American problem.  Banks in Europe and the Middle East repeatedly balked
at American pressure to cut off Al Qaeda financing, while wealthy
individuals in Persian Gulf states ‹ sometimes in the guise of donating
to Islamic charities ‹ continued to provide financial support to Al
Qaeda. 

At the same time, Al Qaeda was rapidly evolving into a larger and more
complex terrorist threat, making it difficult for the United States to
keep up with its scope and abilities.  Mr.  bin Laden's great
achievement within the terrorist world has been to forge alliances with
other Islamic extremist groups under the umbrella of Al Qaeda, providing
them financing, training and a sanctuary in Afghanistan, while
encouraging coordinated action. 

The United States had only a hazy understanding of Mr.  bin Laden's
growing significance before 1996, when an Al Qaeda insider, Jamal Ahmed
Al-Fadl, defected to the United States and began to describe the extent
of Mr.  bin Laden's plans and objectives.  Based largely on Mr.  al-
Fadl's information, a federal grand jury indicted Mr.  bin Laden on
terrorist conspiracy charges in June 1998, just two months before the
twin bombings of the American Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. 

The embassy bombings forced Washington to recognize that Mr.  bin Laden
had become a major national security threat.  Sometime after the
bombings, the C.I.A.  began its efforts to work with Mr.  Massoud
against Mr.  bin Laden, American officials said. 

The officials declined to provide many details of the effort.  But
officials say that C.I.A.  officers secretly traveled to Mr.  Massoud's
mountain stronghold in northern Afghanistan and opened talks in an
effort to fashion an anti-bin Laden alliance. 

Current and former officials said that Mr.  Massoud was promised large
sums of money if he and his rebel fighters could find a way to get to
Mr.  bin Laden.  Short of capturing the terrorist leader, Mr.  Massoud
was asked by the C.I.A.  to provide intelligence from inside Afghanistan
about Mr.  bin Laden and his organization, officials said. 

It remains unclear even today whether Mr.  Massoud ‹ more interested in
toppling the Taliban ‹ ever made a serious effort to go after Mr.  bin
Laden.  He would have faced enormous obstacles in doing so, considering
that Mr.  bin Laden was based in territory controlled by the Taliban and
its military forces. 

The effort to work with Mr.  Massoud followed the most direct and open
American effort to kill Mr.  bin Laden.  It came on Aug.  20, 1998, two
weeks after the embassy attacks in East Africa.  President Clinton
ordered cruise missile strikes on a complex near Khost, Afghanistan,
where the C.I.A.  had learned that Mr.  bin Laden was scheduled to be
meeting with 200 to 300 other members of Al Qaeda. 

The sea-launched cruise missiles slammed into the camp only about an
hour or so after Mr.  bin Laden left the conference, American officials
believe.  According to former senior Clinton administration officials,
some 20 to 30 Al Qaeda members were killed, temporarily disrupting the
organization. 

But the attack failed in its unstated but clear objective, which was to
kill Mr.  bin Laden. 

One consequence was that Mr.  bin Laden drastically improved his own
security measures.  Realizing that the United States had collected solid
intelligence about his physical movements, he cut back on his use of
electronic communications.  American officials say he now tends to talk
to subordinates only in person, and they then pass on his messages to
others in the organization. 

"He has become more sophisticated by becoming less sophisticated," said
one former senior American official. 

In addition, he moves frequently, traveling between Kandahar, the
Taliban stronghold in southern Afghanistan, and the rugged Afghan
countryside farther north, American officials say.  "He became much more
secure in his communications, and the only way to track him was to have
people on the ground," said one former senior American official. 

The Clinton administration has been criticized for not following up on
its first missile attack with an all- out effort to get Mr.  bin Laden. 
But former officials said that they lacked the "actionable
intelligence," or precise information about Mr.  bin Laden's
whereabouts, to launch another attack. 

"The main focus was location, location, location," said one former
administration official.  "We had intensive intelligence gathering
efforts to track him."

In addition, the logistics of launching an attack by special forces in
one of the most remote regions of the world also presented formidable
obstacles.  "We had a number of contingency plans, but logistically it
was a nightmare," said a former senior Clinton administration official. 

Still, another Afghan group, not connected with Mr.  Massoud, did report
to the C.I.A.  last year that it had attempted to assassinate Mr.  bin
Laden, American officials said.  The group, which the officials declined
to identify, reported that it had attempted to kill Mr.  bin Laden by
assaulting a convoy in which he was thought to be traveling.  They
reported that it turned out that Mr.  bin Laden was not in the convoy. 

The reported assassination attempt was not approved or planned with
C.I.A.  assistance, American officials said.  But the officials did say
that the group had carried out the attack knowing that Washington had a
great interest in either capturing Mr.  bin Laden or having him killed. 

Washington has also attempted to target Mr.  bin Laden's finances.  One
idea briefly considered by the Clinton administration called for a
clandestine effort to drain money out of bank accounts that could be
tied to Al Qaeda.  But former Clinton administration officials said that
Treasury Department officials opposed the idea, fearing that it might
damage the integrity of the financial system. 

"Treasury was not enamored of the idea," noted one former Clinton
administration official.  Another former administration official said
that the idea was flawed because stealing money from a bank account
would in most instances leave the bank liable to make up the loss to the
individual, thus hurting the bank rather than depriving Al Qaeda of
money. 

But the United States did mount an international effort to curb Mr.  bin
Laden's access to the financial system.  In 1998, President Clinton
invoked emergency economic powers against Mr.  bin Laden and Al Qaeda,
giving the United States the power to freeze assets of any individuals
or institutions working with or assisting the terrorist group.  In 1999,
the Taliban was added to the list, and American officials were surprised
to find that the Taliban had actually left large sums of money in banks
in the United States, mostly in older Afghan government accounts. 
Eventually, American and international pressure led to United Nations
sanctions, and effectively shut down international flights by Ariana
Airlines, the Afghan government's air carrier, which American
intelligence had concluded was being used by Al Qaeda as its conduit to
the Persian Gulf and the rest of the world. 

In 1999, officials from the White House and the Treasury Department
traveled to the Persian Gulf to try to pressure governments to shut down
Al Qaeda's banking relationships.  But they achieved only mixed results. 

"Where we didn't have success was when other countries delayed or denied
that there was a problem," said one former official.  "Sometimes it was
because of a lack of political will, sometimes because those countries
didn't have the legal or regulatory frameworks they needed to really
know what was going on in their financial institutions."

Former Clinton administration officials say they sympathize with their
successors in the Bush administration who now confront Mr.  bin Laden,
and defend their own efforts as the best possible in a world that lacked
the current sense of urgency about Al Qaeda. 

"It was something that we focused on on a daily basis, and pursued with
vigor, and I think we accomplished quite a lot," said former Secretary
of State Madeleine K.  Albright.  "I think we took it as far as was
possible to go at the time, and I think what we did has provided the
basis for things the Bush administration is trying to do now."

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