USA Today October 5, 2001 Friday
The hunt for bin Laden --
Report from Pakistan
By Jack Kelley
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan -- There are hundreds of rugged mountains from which he can launch attacks and thousands of unmapped caves in which he can hide. He moves to a new location most days. Only a few people know where he goes. He's stopped communicating with the outside world in any way that can be traced.
Osama bin Laden and many of his mujahedin, experts in guerrilla warfare, have been to war before. They helped drive the Soviet Army out of Afghanistan. Now, they appear ready to fight, or try to outfox, U.S. and British forces.
Finding him looks to be one of the most difficult manhunts ever attempted.
"The Americans are never going to find or defeat Osama," says Maulana Sami ul-Haq, chancellor of the Dar-ul-Uloom Haqquania madrassa, or religious school. He says he is bin Laden's closest friend in Pakistan. "If he could outwit the Soviets, he can do the same to the Americans. Tell the (U.S.) special forces they are wasting their time."
U.S. and British special operations forces, operating out of Pakistan and the Central Asian nations of Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, have begun a clandestine hunt for bin Laden in Afghanistan, senior U.S. and British officials say.
But their efforts to track him are being seriously hampered by a lack of "real-time" intelligence on his whereabouts. Bin Laden has been concealing his actions and movements, and some intelligence sources inside Afghanistan have "dried up" since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, Pakistani officials say.
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has said the United States has an idea of bin Laden's whereabouts but not the precise location. Two key members of Congress told USA TODAY on Thursday that the intelligence on bin Laden's movements is surprisingly good and that commandos "almost" know where he is.
But, says former State Department counterterrorism ambassador Paul Bremer, "If we're serious about getting him, we need to know where bin Laden is today -- not yesterday, not last week and not 6 months ago. And that's what we don't have. Without this 'real-time' intelligence, we're in deep trouble."
'The harshest of conditions'
If the United States doesn't find bin Laden, it won't be for lack of trying.
U.S. special operations teams are working hard to confirm the locations of airfields, bunkers and routes used by bin Laden and the ruling Taliban militia that has been harboring him, the officials say. Many of the sites are already known to U.S. intelligence, but efforts are being made to track the movements of weapons, trucks and people between the locations.
All the sites, including those that have been abandoned, could be hit during any U.S. military strike on bin Laden for his role in the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon.
Military planners would want to destroy even abandoned sites to prevent them from being used again.
Officially, the Pentagon isn't commenting on its operations or plans. "I can't offer any information on intelligence because of the direct impact on operational security," spokesman Rear Adm. Craig Quigley said Thursday. "Any comment that could have an impact on operational matters is not something I'm going to be providing."
It's well-known that U.S. commandos can work for long stretches in hostile territory. They are "trained to operate for several days in the harshest of conditions," says former Army Green Beret captain Mike Vickers, now director of strategic studies at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, a think tank based in Washington. Much of the time, they're gathering information.
"For all the satellites and surveillance aircraft, nothing beats a human being seeing a target with his own eyes," Vickers says.
Those teams in Afghanistan most likely entered under cover of night and spend their days hidden in locations from which they can observe their surroundings.
To help them identify bin Laden's location, spy satellites, monitored by the National Security Agency in Fort Meade, Md., record any communications involving Taliban or al-Qa'eda officials. Unmanned planes, or drones, sent up by the CIA, take pictures of the landscape and Taliban troop movements, U.S. officials say. The information is analyzed, with the help of the CIA's bin Laden task force in Langley, Va., and relayed to the troops.
If they identify a new strategic target, some commandos can use high-tech "squirt" communications devices to transmit key data to a satellite in just seconds. That means there isn't enough time for adversaries to trace their transmissions.
Once a military strike begins and targets are identified, commandos can, if necessary, help direct fighter jets to their targets on the ground.
But information on bin Laden's whereabouts has been limited and confusing. U.S. and Pakistani officials have at different times thought he might be near the Afghan cities of Kandahar or Jalalabad -- places hundred of miles apart. British reports say he was recently spotted near the Afghan capital of Kabul. He could have dozens of different places to chose from. Russian reports have placed him or his al-Qa'eda supporters at 55 different locations, according to a March 9, 2001, Russian memo to the United Nations Security Council.
Much of the uncertainty about his whereabouts appears to have been caused by bin Laden's efforts to conceal his actions. Bin Laden has long been known to move between locations several times a week and, to prevent information leaks, he has been informing only one or two trusted aides of his destination, his friend Haq says.
He has also been dispatching several "decoy" conveys of four-wheel drive vehicles in various directions when he travels and has been using couriers, instead of satellite phones and faxes, to deliver messages, Pakistani officials believe.
Taliban checkpoints
Taliban officials are also helping out. Last Friday, Taliban soldiers began setting up roadside checkpoints where, assisted by teen-age girls, they've been lifting the required face veils of all women who pass, senior Pakistani officials say. The soldiers are trying to catch Green Berets or CIA operatives who may be disguised as women in a covert attempt to gather intelligence on bin Laden, they add.
"Only we know where Osama is," Mullah Abdul Salam Zaeef, the Taliban's ambassador to Pakistan, said this week. "He is in a safe location where he will not be found, not by (President) George Bush, not the special forces, not by anyone."
To make matters even more difficult, Pakistan's ISI intelligence service, considered by U.S. officials to have the best information on bin Laden in the region, says some of its informants in Afghanistan have stopped talking since the attack. They've been spooked by the Taliban's efforts to find and punish them.
Also, though some of the informants are willing to trade information, they are still anti-Western and angry at Pakistan for agreeing to share its information on bin Laden with the United States.
It's not the first time a lack of information about bin Laden's whereabouts has stymied U.S. efforts to capture him. U.S. special ops teams, based in the Pakistani city of Kakul, have been trying to capture or kill bin Laden since 1998 without success, U.S. and Pakistani officials say.
Their efforts were held back by a lack of intelligence and because the 1999 takeover of the government by current President Pervez Musharraf put a halt to joint U.S-Pakistani efforts, Pakistani intelligence officials say.
Afghan graveyard
The lack of intelligence on bin Laden is just one of many problems the U.S. and British commandos are facing, U.S. military planners say.
Bin Laden is often reported to be surrounded by nearly 400 armed supporters, many of whom arrived with him from Sudan in 1996. There are also up to 40,000 mujahedin, or Islamic guerrillas, in Afghanistan who have vowed to fight alongside bin Laden.
Many of the mujahedin are veterans of the fighting during the 1979-1989 Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. Military analysts say the mujahedin know the country's rugged terrain better than anyone.
"The mujahedin are second to none in a guerrilla war," says London-based defense analyst Paul Beaver. "They defeated the Soviets with only small arms and plenty of motivation."
Afghanistan's rugged terrain also presents problems. Eighty percent of the country, which is roughly the size of Texas, is mountainous. There are also miles of underground caves and bunkers in some of the interior provinces where Pakistani intelligence officials believe bin Laden could be hiding.
The country is booby-trapped with more than 10 million landmines, most left over from the fighting with the Soviets, International Red Cross officials say. Many of the mines are disguised as rocks or hidden inside cigarette packs and even doorknobs.
Finally, there's the country's bitter winter, which runs from November to April. Temperatures can plunge to minus 40 degrees below zero and snowdrifts can reach 10 feet tall.
"Afghanistan is an impregnable fortress," Russian lawmaker Yevgeny Zelenov, who fought with the Soviet Army in Afghanistan, said in a telephone interview. "It is a graveyard for invading armies. I would hope the U.S. special forces wouldn't go in there. Otherwise, they could be among its casualties."
Some U.S. analysts are encouraging the United States to support the Northern Alliance, the anti-Taliban coalition that controls 10% of Afghanistan.
British SAS troops, along with U.S. commandos and CIA operatives, have been equipping and training the rebels to capture more Taliban-controlled territory, U.S. and British officials say. The U.S. has not formally endorsed the rebels' efforts to take control of Afghanistan.
Smoking him out
"If we aid the (Northern Alliance) and they're able to gain more and more territory, eventually the area where bin Laden can hide will get smaller and smaller and we'll smoke him out," terrorism analyst and former Defense Intelligence Agency official Julie Sirrs says.
Otherwise, she says, the United States will have to hope that the Taliban, or someone in bin Laden's entourage, turns him over or tips off U.S. officials to his location.
Don't count on it, former Pakistani intelligence chief Gen. Hamid Gul says. "If you can't even find the terrorists in your own country, what makes you think you can find Osama in Afghanistan?" Gul asked during an interview in Islamabad. "Your soldiers are going to come out of Afghanistan bloodied and empty-handed. It's going to be embarrassing."
Why Osama bin Laden?
According to the British government, these points were established by intelligence sources:
* Bin Laden said shortly before Sept. 11 that he was preparing a major attack on the United States.
* In August and early September, bin Laden's close associates were warned to return to Afghanistan from other parts of the world by Sept. 10.
* Bin Laden mounted a propaganda campaign before Sept. 11. He justified attacks on American and Jewish targets.
* One of bin Laden's "closest and most senior associates" was responsible for detailed planning of the attacks.
GRAPHIC: GRAPHIC, Color, Web Bryant, USA TODAY (ILLUSTRATION); GRAPHIC, B/W, Dave Merrill, USA TODAY, Sources: Jane's; GlobalSecurity.org; AP wire reports (MAP); PHOTO, B/W, Agence France-Presse; Terrorist trio: Osama bin Laden, center, sits with two of his associates, Ayman Al-Zawahiri, left, Egyptian Islamic Jihad founder, and Muhammad Atef, who was indicted in the U.S. embassy bombings in Africa.
Copyright 2001 Gannett Company, Inc.
