The Baltimore Sun October 9, 2001, Tuesday
WAR ON TERRORISM; MILITARY RESPONSE
U.S. knows hiding places;
America helped design, build tunnels used by bin Laden; Russia captured one in '80s;
By Scott Shane
As the United States deploys satellites, high-tech aircraft and commandos to hunt for Osama bin Laden in the mountains of Afghanistan, American officials should know a great deal about some of his likely hiding places.
That's because the United States conceived and paid for them, according to Yossef Bodansky, a terrorism consultant and biographer of the Saudi-born terrorist leader who is believed to be behind the devastation of Sept. 11 in New York and Washington.
"We know about six possible locations, complexes of caves and tunnels, because we helped design and build them back in the '80s," Bodansky said yesterday. "They were built to withstand everything short of a nuclear blast. A lot of thought and a large amount of money went into making them virtually impregnable." Bodansky said Americans might not have been present when the steel-reinforced complexes were built for CIA-financed Muslim guerrillas then battling Soviet troops. U.S. officials preferred to work through Pakistani military intelligence so as to be able to deny publicly that they were fighting a proxy war against the Soviet Union.
But he said American engineering advice and money went into the construction of the complexes, situated to make approach by ground troops difficult and guarded by stone barriers to prevent "smart" guided missiles from penetrating the entrances. Only one was ever captured by Soviet forces -- in 1987, "at a huge cost in blood" -- and the remaining underground bases have probably been reinforced since then, Bodansky said.
Bodansky's account of the U.S. role in financing the bunkers was confirmed by another expert on Afghanistan, Thomas E. Gouttierre, who now runs the Center for Afghanistan Studies at the University of Nebraska in Omaha.
President Bush and other top officials have stated repeatedly that their campaign against terrorism is a long-term effort not targeted at one individual. But they have simultaneously emphasized the evidence linking bin Laden and his organization, al-Qaida, to the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Most nongovernment experts believe that the U.S. anti-terror campaign will have to capture or kill bin Laden to remain credible.
"The goal is not to get just him -- it's to tear up the network worldwide," said Michael S. Swetnam, president of the Potomac Institute for Policy Studies and co-author of a book on bin Laden published this year. "But you have to get him, because he's become such a symbol of terrorism."
Bin Laden is protected by a guard of several hundred fighters, about 30 of whom have been with him since the 1980s and have taken a vow to kill him rather than allow enemy troops to take him alive, Bodansky said.
In recent years, bin Laden is believed to have moved frequently between the tunnel complexes, various training camps and possibly safe houses in villages or in the city of Kandahar, the headquarters of the Taliban militia that rule Afghanistan and a target of the air strikes that began Sunday. The reinforced tunnels -- some natural caves, some dug in the 1980s -- are mostly located in eastern Afghanistan in a crescent around Jalalabad, in forbidding mountainous terrain rising from about 8,000 to 15,000 feet. Some may also be near Kandahar in the south.
On its Web site, the CIA posted a statement Friday declaring that the CIA had "never employed, paid, or maintained any relationship whatsoever" with bin Laden. Outside experts said that was technically correct, though the agency covertly spent more than $3 billion supporting the anti-Soviet mujahedeen alongside whom bin Laden fought.
The 17th of 52 children born to a Saudi construction magnate, bin Laden, 44, is believed to have three wives and about 15 children. The lifestyle of the man who grew up in splendor and inherited a fortune of at least tens of millions of dollars is now spartan, his only luxury a library of Islamic books.
"I don't think he's seen much running water since the mid-'90s," when he left Sudan for Afghanistan, Bodansky said.
Bin Laden is said to like riding horses, Swetnam said, and holds a degree in engineering and business management. But Bodansky said most of bin Laden's time is probably spent conferring with al-Qaida aides or "studying and writing," laying out the theological justification for his jihad, or holy war, against America. Despite their malign purpose, Bodansky said, "his writings are beautiful -- rich, logical and well-researched."
Like Bodansky, Gouttierre, who lived and worked for the United Nations in Afghanistan in the 1990s, said he has never met bin Laden. But Gouttierre did see the terrorist's convoy pass by the noisy, crowded bazaar in Kandahar one day in 1999.
Gouttierre said the convoy consisted of a half-dozen sport-utility vehicles with blackened windows and armed guards riding on top and on the sides.
"When he drove by, it was like Ringling Brothers and Barnum and Bailey passing by," Gouttierre said. "All of a sudden there was a hush. People said, 'Osama. Osama.' There was a kind of awe. He was considered a bigger-than-life figure, whether people liked him or not."
Since 1998, when U.S. forces fired cruise missiles at a terrorist training camp where he was believed to be attending a meeting, bin Laden has become far more careful about security. He is said to have recruited one or more men who resemble him physically to sow confusion about his whereabouts, according to Bodansky, who has taught at the Johns Hopkins University and directs a congressional task force on terrorism.
Pentagon officials are remaining mum about their knowledge of bin Laden's whereabouts. But the hunt for bin Laden certainly intensified Sept. 11, with consultations with Pakistani intelligence and the opposition Northern Alliance, as well as the deployment over Afghanistan of U.S. spy satellites capable of photographing objects as small as 6 inches across.
"People are about at the limit of their resolution," said John Pike, an intelligence expert at GlobalSecurity.org. But because the satellites pass every few hours over target areas, "you can tell the difference between rocks that don't move and people that do."
From the satellites, the aerial hunt probably has been or will soon be passed to surveillance aircraft wielding high-resolution cameras and electronics capable of intercepting radio signals.
A key tool is likely to be the Predator unmanned aerial vehicle, which flies at up to 27,000 feet and sends back video of its target, Pike said. Aircraft might also drop motion detectors that will send a signal when people pass along a path or occupy a camp, he said.
Pike said that when U.S. commanders believe they have sufficient clues to bin Laden's location, they might drop in special forces to capture and interrogate people with knowledge of the terrorist leader.
Gouttierre said bin Laden's notoriety could work against him. "He can't move without being noticed. It may take a month or two, it may take until spring, but I think we can find him," he said.
But all agreed that getting bin Laden will be a difficult and possibly bloody task. "All of our technical means cannot see through the roof of a car, let alone through a mountain," Bodansky said. "This is going to be a long, hard war. We could have a lot of casualties. But we have to win it. We don't have a choice."
Copyright 2001 The Baltimore Sun Company
