Washington Post
October 8, 2001
Pg. 16
Former Recruits Provide Best Knowledge Of Camps
Intelligence on Targeted Bin Laden Training Sites Sketchy
By Walter Pincus and Vernon Loeb, Washington Post Staff Writers
Among the targets of yesterday's military strikes into Afghanistan were fortified training camps operated by accused terrorist Osama bin Laden and his al Qaeda network, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said.
U.S. and British air and naval forces had "targeted command facilities for those forces that we know support terrorist elements in Afghanistan, and critical terrorist sites," Rumsfeld said at the Pentagon. He gave no details.
Although many of those mountain redoubts were built with CIA funds in the late 1980s when the agency helped mujaheddin fighters drive the Soviet Union out of Afghanistan, they have functioned over the past decade as important indoctrination centers and training facilities for thousands of bin Laden recruits.
The U.S. government has spent years compiling information on the camps through satellite imagery, signals intelligence and some human reports, but information about what takes place inside them remains sketchy.
The number of facilities listed as being associated with bin Laden has been as large as 55. The British government gave a much lower estimate last Thursday in a document outlining bin Laden's connections to the Sept. 11 attacks on New York and Washington.
"We know from intelligence that there are currently at least a dozen camps across Afghanistan of which at least four are used for training terrorists," the document said.
Much of the U.S. government's recent intelligence about the camps came to light this year in court testimony from Ahmed Ressam, the man convicted of plotting to blow up Los Angeles International Airport during millennial celebrations in January 2000, and L'Houssaine Kherchtou, a former al Qaeda member who became a government informant.
Appearing as a government witness against one of his confederates in the millennial plot, Ressam said that he went to a camp called Darunta, located west of Jalalabad in eastern Afghanistan, and received training in rocket launching, urban warfare, assassination and sabotage. The latter class focused on how "to blow up the infrastructure of a country," he said.
Kherchtou, testifying against four men convicted in May for involvement in the August 1998 bombing of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, described how al Qaeda operatives were taught to prepare a terrorist attack using separate groups for surveillance, targeting, bomb construction and the attack itself. Both witnesses said al Qaeda recruits received training in semiautomatic rifles, explosives and surveillance techniques.
The British report issued last week said that two al Qaeda members who participated in the bombing of the USS Cole in Yemen in October 2000 also were trained in bin Laden camps.
The firsthand accounts of Ressam and Kherchtou added a level of detail the CIA and other U.S. intelligence agencies had never achieved. But even their testimony falls far short of a long-sought objective -- gathering intelligence and forensic evidence directly at the camp sites -- that may soon become possible if U.S. Special Forces launch raids aimed at killing or capturing bin Laden and his top lieutenants.
As bombing began yesterday, it was unclear which -- if any -- of the camps were occupied. But if U.S. forces reach them during any military action, U.S. officials said last week, they will be searched first for booby traps and then treated like crime scenes. U.S. operatives will scour them for bomb components, signs of experimentation with chemical or biological weapons and documents listing al Qaeda trainees scattered around the world, officials said, as part of an evidence-collection operation.
"We will be looking for ways to identify people who have been there," an intelligence official said.
"They must have a database," added Robert Blitzer, former head of FBI domestic counterterrorism, "where they store information about their 'warriors.' " Any group that communicates globally by e-mail and sends particular people with particular skills to particular countries, he said, must maintain "a terrorist personnel section."
Should U.S. forces attack the camps, they could encounter stiff resistance. Commercial satellite imagery taken in December 1999 of the Darunta camp, where Ressam trained, shows tunnel entrances, infantry trenches, observation posts and a possible helicopter landing zone.
Rumsfeld hesitated when asked whether U.S. ground forces were operating inside Afghanistan. He said there were not "a significant number of forces on the ground."
Patrick G. Eddington, a former CIA imagery analyst, said many of the camp fortifications bear the mark of having been built by the Soviets in the 1980s after their invasion of Afghanistan. "It tells you what structures are there," Eddington said. "But I would have expected to see more wear in certain areas around there -- more evidence, essentially, that it had been in use, and in use recently."
One more problem, Eddington said, is whether satellite images can help U.S. forces locate bin Laden, who is known to move from site to site around Afghanistan, often under protection of the Taliban militia that controls most of the country. Eddington said satellite imagery is of limited use when trying to locate someone hiding in a rugged, mountainous terrain as vast as Texas.
During the Persian Gulf War 10 years ago, Eddington said, U.S. spy satellites could easily differentiate the Iraqi Republican Guard from regular troops because only the Republican Guard had T-72 tanks. Al Qaeda is a far different target.
"You don't have that kind of fairly distinct signature here," he said.
John Pike, a military and intelligence analyst who runs www.GlobalSecurity.org, said the government's satellite photographs of the camps could still be of enormous value, particularly because every shot is "geo-located." That means any tunnel or building can be identified by its exact coordinates for attack by precision-guided munitions.
Terrorism experts inside and outside government continue to debate the effectiveness of cruise missiles fired by the Clinton administration at a series of camps called Zhawar Kili Al-Badr near the city of Khost south of Jalalabad in retaliation for the 1998 embassy bombings in East Africa. But satellite images released by the Pentagon afterward showed that virtually every major building at Zhawar Kili Al-Badr was destroyed. U.S. officials say the camp has been rebuilt enough to be returned to a lengthy list of targets.
Although Rumsfeld said yesterday that the Taliban does not maintain "high value" targets inside Afghanistan, military planners nonetheless had a multitude of choice in focusing on the Taliban's air defense network, aircraft and terrorist camps.
The Russians have given the U.N. Security Council a list of 55 facilities used by bin Laden and al Qaeda. Pike's Web site, using open-source information on camps in Afghanistan, has published its own list of 44 sites.
But some of the best information about bin Laden's camps came in a federal courthouse in Lower Manhattan from Kherchtou, the former al Qaeda member, who described four al Qaeda camps in the Khost area.
Each has had a special function in the al Qaeda training scheme, according to Kherchtou, a Moroccan who attended the camps as a recruit in 1991 and returned as a trainer in 1994.
Kherchtou described a camp called al Farouq, near Khost, as the facility where Muslim recruits spent two months training. The training included the firing of semiautomatic military rifles -- the Russian AK-47, the U.S. M-16 and the Israeli Uzi -- and the use of explosives such as plastic C3 and C4, and dynamite, Kherchtou said.
Recruits also learned how to build electronic and chemically explosive detonators during a 15-day course, Kherchtou said.
At another camp where Kherchtou taught, Abi Bakr Sadeek, recruits attended three-week courses in light weapons, grenades and small pistols. Another camp in the area, Khalid Ibn Walid, was reserved for special groups, such as Algerian recruits of al Qaeda, Kherchtou said.
Still another camp, Jihad Wal, was used not only for another special 15-day explosives course but also as headquarters for the other training camps, Kherchtou said.
Beyond military training, Kherchtou said, each camp had a mosque where recruits were regularly exposed to Islamic fundamentalist teachings, mixed with the language of the Jihad, bin Laden's holy war with the United States and others.
At the camps, recruits were screened, and a skilled few would be offered membership in al Qaeda. Training groups at al Farouq varied in number "but never exceeded 100," Kherchtou testified.
Out of any given class, he said, 10 to 12 were selected to become al Qaeda members. Those star recruits, Kherchtou testified, were told they were joining a group "to fight for Islam, and to do the good things for Islam and Muslims all over the world."
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