nkdatta8839

http://www.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,3604,1027949,00.html

The Guardian
Saturday August 23, 2003

Inside story of the hunt for Bin Laden

[The al-Qaida leader is said to be hiding in northern Pakistan guarded
by a 120-mile ring of tribesmen whose job it is to warn of the
approach of any troops. Rory McCarthy reports]

Early in March, intelligence agents searching the western deserts of
Pakistan thought they had finally tracked down the world's most wanted
man. A convoy was spotted racing along one of the remote smugglers'
routes which winds down from southern Afghanistan, through the sand
dunes of Pakistani Baluchistan and into Iran. American intelligence
agents had a tip that Osama bin Laden was in the group.

They seemed to have reason to be optimistic. Five days earlier
Pakistani officers had scored the biggest success so far in the hunt
for Bin Laden and his al-Qaida deputies. In a midnight raid they had
arrested a ragged-looking Khalid Sheikh Mohammad, the Pakistani
Kuwaiti who was regarded as the third most senior figure in Bin
Laden's network, a man described by the jubilant authorities in
Islamabad as a "kingpin of al-Qaida."

Mohammad had been pinpointed when he made a satellite telephone call,
which US military electronic eavesdropping tracked to Quetta, the
provincial capital of Baluchistan. A computer and lists of phone
numbers were recovered after his arrest, amounting to what the
Pakistani interior minister, Faisal Saleh Hayat, called an "arsenal"
of information.

That new information encouraged investigators to focus their attention
on the sparsely populated deserts of Baluchistan. Within a few days
they had spotted the convoy.

A major operation was mounted by Pakistani soldiers and US troops.
There were reports of heavy gun battles around the Afghan border town
of Spin Majid, with up to nine of the men in the convoy killed.

Baluchistan's interior minister appeared on television to announce
that two of Bin Laden's sons had been captured. Then one Pakistani
journalist broke the sensational news that Bin Laden himself had been
caught.

Within hours, it became clear that he had not. In fact, several
sources now say the intelligence tip was faulty: Bin Laden was never
even in the convoy.

Those with knowledge of the operation have told the Guardian that two
of the Saudi-born millionaire's sons had been led by Afghan warlords
in the previous days down the same route, a well-trodden drug
smugglers' path, and across into Iran. By the time the operation took
place, there were still convoys of drug smugglers on the trail but the
sons were gone.

"In the end it was just another flop," said Hamid Mir, a Pakistani
journalist who has met Bin Laden three times and studied al-Qaida in
detail.

"The intelligence agencies have totally failed with al-Qaida. They are
such highly motivated people in al-Qaida that it is very difficult to
break into the rank and file of the organisation."

That is one of the reasons why, almost two years after the September
11 attacks, Osama bin Laden has yet to be found.

But a Guardian inquiry has revealed that there are others. Experts who
have been following the attempts of the Pakistanis and the US to find
the al-Qaida leader have suggested that:

· The Pakistani president, General Pervez Musharraf, struck a deal
with the US not to seize Bin Laden after the Afghan war for fear of
inciting trouble in his own country;

· The al-Qaida leader is being protected by a three elaborate security
rings which stretch 120 miles in diameter; and

· The Pakistani special forces looking for him are no closer than they
were a year ago.

For the Americans, the March operation was yet another bitter lesson
in the difficulty of tracking down Bin Laden. With the US election
nearing and mounting concerns about Washington's second great military
project - Iraq - George Bush more than ever needs the incalculable
political boost that Bin Laden's capture would bring.

The Saudi's last known hiding place was in the caves of Tora Bora in
the Spin Ghar mountains of eastern Afghanistan. It was December 2001
and the Taliban regime was collapsing across Afghanistan under the
weight of America's bombing campaign.

Hundreds of al-Qaida fighters were holed up in the caves, where Bin
Laden was heard making a radio address exhorting his men to fight. He
also made a 33-minute video recording. Looking gaunt and tired, he
described the September 11 attacks as "blessed strikes".

"We say that the end of the United States is imminent," he said. It
was the last the world saw of him.

Bin Laden fled the mountains and spent the next six or seven months
trying to re-establish his network, according to Mansoor Ijaz, a
financier who has spent years tracking his movements and operations.
In the small world of international terrorism ****ysts, Mr Ijaz, an
American of Pakistani origin, knows al-Qaida better than most. He has
close contacts in Pakistan's intelligence agencies and has worked,
behind the scenes, as negotiator over Bin Laden in the past. In 1997
he was involved in negotiating attempts by Sudan to provide crucial
information on the Saudi exile and worked on an attempt to have him
extradited from Afghanistan through the United Arab Emirates in 2000.

In the same year he persuaded General Musharraf and his ISI
intelligence agency to accept a rare ceasefire among Kashmiri militant
groups.

Since 1991 he has been chairman of a New York-based hedge fund,
Crescent Investment Management, which focuses on national security
technologies and for which James Woolsey, a former chief of the CIA,
is vice-chairman of the advisory board.

Mr Ijaz argues that the flight from Tora Bora badly disrupted
al-Qaida's access to electronic communications: satellite phones,
radios and email. "Initial communications were stopped and it took
them a while to transplant and regroup," he said in an interview. "It
was in a place where it was impossible for them to get communications
across to anybody."

He suggests Bin Laden is hiding in the "northern tribal areas", part
of the long belt of seven deeply conservative tribal agencies which
stretches down the length of the mountain ranges that mark Pakistan's
1,500-mile border with Afghanistan.

Mr Ijaz, who has recently visited Pakistan, believes Bin Laden is
protected by an elaborate security cordon of three concentric circles,
in which he is guarded first by a ring around 120 miles in diameter of
tribesmen, whose duty is to reportany approach by Pakistani troops or
US special forces.

Inside them is a tighter ring, around 12 miles in diameter, made up of
tribal elders who would warn if the outer ring were breached. At the
centre of the circles is Bin Laden himself, protected by one or two of
his closest relatives and advisers. Bin Laden has agreed with the
elders that he will use no electronic communications and will move
only at night and between specified places within a limited radius.

At first Bin Laden and his deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, a bespectacled
Egyptian doctor who is regarded as the potent intellectual force
behind the al-Qaida net work, passed messages by word of mouth, what
Mr Ijaz calls a "human chain-link fence". But the message system was
inefficient; too many specific details were being missed.

"By the time they got from the first man to the 10th man, the messages
had in fact become so distorted no one knew what they were talking
about," he said.

officers acting on information from US military eavesdroppers arrested
Yassir al-Jazeeri in Karachi.

Al-Jazeeri, a Moroccan, was believed to be one of Bin Laden's closest
bodyguards. In his pocket he carried a handwritten note from Bin
Laden. It was perhaps the closest investigators had come to finding
the trail of the al-Qaida chief.

For their part Pakistani officials say their intelligence on Bin Laden
is still remarkably limited.

Many of the reports they receive of his movements, they insist, are
simply wrong. "We have been getting reports of his presence across the
border inside Afghanistan and along the border area also," Mr Hayat
said in an interview.

"Not all reports have been credible at times. If others were credible
we would certainly have been able to get near to him but certainly
that has not been the position so far." Nevertheless Bin Laden, he
said, remained a "fiercely hunted man."

The terrain of the tribal regions makes it almost impossible to find a
single man intent on hiding, according to Mr Hayat. Local communities
rule themselves, bound by deeply rooted codes of honour and respect
which are enforced with vast armouries of weapons, ranging from
assault rifles to heavy artillery.

Few would dispute Mr Hayat's complaints about the terrain. The tribal
agencies have developed an infamy for their protection of wanted men.
Even today Pakistani officers describe the immense difficulties they
face operating in the tribal lands, an area without police and which
the army never entered before September 11. Several hundred soldiers
are required every time one house is searched. A handful of men are
needed for the search, dozens more to protect them from the
neighbours.

Some argue that the Pakistani authorities saw the difficulties from
the start and, although they publicly stressed their commitment to the
hunt for Bin Laden, in private they had a different strategy.

Mr Ijaz believes an agreement was reached between Gen Musharraf and
the American authorities shortly after Bin Laden's flight from Tora
Bora.

The Pakistanis feared that to capture or kill Bin Laden so soon after
a deeply unpopular war in Afghanistan would incite civil unrest in
Pakistan and would trigger a spate of revenge al-Qaida attacks on
western targets across the world.

"There was a judgment made that it would be more destabilising in the
longer term," he said. "There would still be the ability to get him at
a later date when it was more appropriate."

The Americans, according to Mr Ijaz, accepted the argument, not least
because of the shift in focus to the impending war in Iraq. So the
months that followed were centred on taking down not Bin Laden, but
the "retaliation infrastructure" of al-Qaida.

It meant that Gen Musharraf frequently put out remarkably conflicting
accounts of the status of Bin Laden, while the US administration
barely mentioned his name.

In January last year Gen Musharraf said he believed Bin Laden was
probably dead. A year later he said he was alive and moving either in
Afghanistan or perhaps in the Pakistani tribal areas.

Yet western diplomats say they believe the Pakistani authorities are
committed to the hunt for Bin Laden, although they admit that
frequently the official accounts of the timing and location of
successful arrests do not square with reality.

Since Tora Bora, there has been a series of high-profile arrests. "I
think there is no doubt they are very much against al-Qaida," said
Talat Masood, a retired Pakistani general and security ****yst. "I
think the Americans find their reliance on the Pakistanis now is
increasing."

In March last year police in the Pakistani city of Faisalabad raided a
house on a tip from the CIA eavesdroppers and arrested Abu Zubaydah,
one of Bin Laden's top associates and a man responsible for running
two al-Qaida camps in Afghanistan.

On the anniversary of September 11, a raid in Karachi produced Ramzi
al-Shibh, a Yemeni who was suspected of passing money and information
between the teams of the September 11 hijackers and al-Qaida leaders
in Afghanistan.

He was also an aide to Khalid Sheikh Mohammad, who was eventually
picked up in Rawalpindi this March in the most significant arrest to
date. Dozens of less high-profile men, responsible for providing
shelter to al-Qaida figures or printing off fake passports, have been
arrested.

"We were able to nab some of the very high-profile al-Qaida
activists," Mr Hayat said. "We launched very successful operations all
over inside Pakistan, arresting and neutralising those people who were
involved in facilitating those people, who were the planners, the
architects, the financiers."

For the future, the single greatest task facing the Pakistanis and the
Americans will be to tame the powerful elders who run Pakistan's
tribal areas and who appear to have given Bin Laden sanctuary. The
danger is that the longer he remains uncaught, the bolder and stronger
the surviving al-Qaida elements will feel.

"With so much of the retaliation infrastructure gone or unsustainable,
Bin Laden's martyrdom does not pose nearly the threat it did a year
ago," Mr Ijaz said.

Yet failing to catch the Saudi now could embolden the surviving
al-Qaida forces. It was like "watching a radiation-hardened cancerous
tumour regenerate and proliferate even more dangerously", he said.

"That's why Pakistan must now end the charade and get Bin Laden."