[NYTr] Into Thin Air: Osama's Still Out There. The Ongoing Hunt for bin Laden

[All the News That Doesn't Fit]

Newsweek - Sep 3, 2007 issue
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/20430170/site/newsweek/

Into Thin Air: Osama's still out there. 
The ongoing hunt for bin Laden.

By Evan Thomas
Newsweek

Sept. 3, 2007 issue - The Americans were getting close. It was early in
the winter of 2004-05, and Osama bin Laden and his entourage were holed
up in a mountain hideaway along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border.
Suddenly, a sentry, posted several kilometers away, spotted a patrol of
U.S. soldiers who seemed to be heading straight for bin Laden's
redoubt. The sentry radioed an alert, and word quickly passed among the
Qaeda leader's 40-odd bodyguards to prepare to remove "the Sheik," as
bin Laden is known to his followers, to a fallback position. As Sheik
Said, a senior Egyptian Qaeda operative, later told the story, the
anxiety level was so high that the bodyguards were close to using the
code word to kill bin Laden and commit suicide. According to Said, bin
Laden had decreed that he would never be captured. "If there's a 99
percent risk of the Sheik's being captured, he told his men that they
should all die and martyr him as well," Said told Omar Farooqi, a
Taliban liaison officer to Al Qaeda who spoke to a NEWSWEEK reporter in
Afghanistan.

The secret word was never given. As the Qaeda sentry watched the U.S.
troops, the patrol started moving in a different direction. Bin Laden's
men later concluded that the soldiers had nearly stumbled on their
hideout by accident. (One former U.S. intelligence officer told
NEWSWEEK that he was aware of official reporting on this incident.)

And so it has gone for six years. American intelligence officials
interviewed by NEWSWEEK ruefully agree that the hunt to find bin Laden
has been more a game of chance than good or "actionable" intelligence.
Since bin Laden slipped away from Tora Bora in December 2001, U.S.
intelligence has never had better than a 50-50 certainty about his
whereabouts. "There hasn't been a serious lead on Osama bin Laden since
early 2002," says Bruce Riedel, who recently retired as a South Asia
expert at the CIA. "What we're doing now is shooting in the dark in
outer space. The chances of hitting anything are zero."

How can that be? With all its spy satellites and aerial drones, killer
commandos and millions in reward money, why can't the world's greatest
superpower find a middle-aged, possibly ill, religious fanatic with a
medieval mind-set? The short answer, sometimes overlooked, is that
good, real-time intelligence about the enemy is hard to come by in any
war, and manhunts are almost always difficult, especially if the
fugitive can vanish into a remote region with a sympathetic population.
(Think how long—five years—it took the FBI to track down Eric Rudolph,
the Atlanta Olympic bomber, in the wilds of North Carolina.) That said,
the U.S. government has made the job harder than necessary. The Iraq
War drained resources from the hunt, and some old bureaucratic
bugaboos—turf battles and fear of risk—undermined the effort. The
United States can't just barge into Pakistan without upsetting, and
possible dooming, President Pervez Musharraf, who seems to lurch
between trying to appease his enemies and riling them with heavy-handed
repression.

The story of the search for the men known to American spies and
soldiers as high-value targets one and two (HVT 1 and HVT 2)—Osama bin
Laden and his possibly more dangerous No. 2, Ayman al-Zawahiri—is a
frustrating, at times agonizing, tale of missed opportunities,
damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don't choices, and outright blunders.
It has been related to NEWSWEEK by dozens of American, Pakistani and
Afghan military and intelligence officials, as well as a few Qaeda
sympathizers like Omar Farooqi. Capturing bin Laden "continues to be a
huge priority," says Frances Fragos Townsend, President George W.
Bush's chief counterterror adviser. It may be true, as Townsend points
out, that Qaeda leaders do not have anything like the safe haven they
enjoyed in Afghanistan before 9/11. But it is also true that Al Qaeda
has been reconstituting itself in the mountains of Pakistan and
Afghanistan, and that the terrorist organization is determined to stage
more 9/11s, and maybe soon. "We have very strong indicators that Al
Qaeda is planning to attack the West and is likely to attack, and we
are pretty sure about that," says retired Vice Adm. John Redd, chief of
the National Counterterrorism Center, which coordinates all U.S.
intelligence in the so-called Global War on Terror (GWOT). Hank
Crumpton, who ran the CIA's early hunt for bin Laden in 2001-02 as
deputy chief of the agency's counterterrorism center and recently
retired as the State Department's coordinator of counterterrorism,
says, "It's bad; it's going to come."

Before 9/11, the hunt for bin Laden was marked by a certain
tentativeness, an official reluctance to suck America into the dirty
business of political assassination or to get U.S. troops killed.
Within days after 9/11, President Bush was vowing to capture bin Laden
"dead or alive," and Cofer Black, the CIA's counterterror chief at the
time, was ordering his troops to bring back bin Laden's head "in a
box." (In fact, CIA operatives in Afghanistan requested a box and dry
ice, just in case.) With old-fashioned derring-do, CIA case officers,
carrying millions of dollars, choppered into Afghanistan to work with
tribesmen to drive out Al Qaeda and its Taliban hosts. The CIA's
alacrity caused some heartburn at the Pentagon. According to Bob
Woodward's "Bush at War," Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld steamed
impatiently while the military seemed to dither, stymied by weather and
fussing with complex backup and rescue arrangements before the brass
would commit any troops.

Rumsfeld's foot-stamping was rewarded. By mid-October, CIA case
officers and Army, Navy, and Air Force Special Operations units were
working together in unusual harmony, using high-tech air support and,
at one point, mounting what Rumsfeld gleefully called "the first
cavalry charge of the 21st century" to kill, capture or chase away
thousands of jihadists. The Taliban fled for the hills. Bin Laden, it
seemed, would be cornered. Indeed, on Dec. 15, CIA operatives listening
on a captured jihadist radio could hear bin Laden himself say "Forgive
me" to his followers, pinned down in their mountain caves near Tora
Bora.

As it happened, however, the hunt for bin Laden was unraveling on the
very same day. As recalled by Gary Berntsen, the CIA officer in charge
of the covert team working with the Northern Alliance, code-named
Jawbreaker, the military refused his pleas for 800 Army Rangers to cut
off bin Laden's escape. Maj. Gen. Dell Dailey, the Special Ops
commander sent out by Central Command, told Berntsen he was doing an
"excellent job," but that putting in ground troops might offend
America's Afghan allies. "I don't give a damn about offending our
allies!" Berntsen yelled, according to his 2005 book, "Jawbreaker." "I
only care about eliminating Al Qaeda and delivering bin Laden's head in
a box!" (Dailey, now the State Department's counterterror chief, told
NEWSWEEK that he did not want to discuss the incident, except to say
that Berntsen's story is "unsubstantiated.")

Berntsen went to Crumpton, his boss at the CIA, who described to
NEWSWEEK his frantic efforts to appeal to higher authority. Crumpton
called CENTCOM's commander, Gen. Tommy Franks. It would take "weeks" to
mobilize a force, Franks responded, and the harsh, snowy terrain was
too difficult and the odds of getting bin Laden not worth the risk.
Frustrated, Crumpton went to the White House and rolled out maps of the
Pakistani-Afghan border on a small conference table. President Bush
wanted to know if the Pakistanis could sweep up Al Qaeda on the other
side. "No, sir," Crumpton responded. (Vice President Dick Cheney did
not say a word, Crumpton recalled.) The meeting was inconclusive.
Franks, who declined to comment, has written in his memoirs that he
decided, along with Rumsfeld, that to send troops into the mountains
would risk repeating the mistake of the Soviets, who were trapped and
routed by jihadist guerrilla fighters in the 1980s (helped out, it
should be recalled, with Stinger missiles provided by the CIA).

To catch bin Laden, the CIA was left to lean on local tribesmen, a
slender reed. NEWSWEEK recently interviewed two of the three tribal
chiefs involved in the operation, Hajji Zahir and Hajji Zaman. They
claimed that the CIA overly relied on the third chieftain, Hazrat
Ali—and that Ali was paid off (to the tune of $6 million) by Al Qaeda
to let bin Laden slip away. Ali could not be reached for comment. But
Crumpton, who admits that he has no hard evidence, told NEWSWEEK he is
"confident" that a payoff allowed Al Qaeda to escape. Unsure which side
would win, some tribesmen apparently hedged by taking money from both
sides.

Bin Laden was not so much seeking refuge as coming home when he
disappeared into the jagged peaks along the frontier of northwest
Pakistan. He had always liked hunting and horseback riding in the
mountains, and had even built himself a crude swimming pool with a
spectacular view near Tora Bora. Though a wealthy Saudi, bin Laden had
long since learned to live close to the ground, abjuring his followers
to learn to survive without modern comforts like plumbing or air
conditioning.

Local Pashtun tribesmen were not about to turn bin Laden in for a
reward, even a $25 million one. The strictly observed custom of
defending guests, part of an ancient honor code called Pashtunwali,
insulated Al Qaeda. The Pakistan central government could do little to
crack this social system. The wilds of the Federally Administered
Tribal Area (FATA) have been virtually ungovernable for centuries. The
British Raj failed, and the Pakistan government never tried very hard,
leaving administration up to federally appointed tribal agents and law
enforcement in the hands of a local constabulary of dubious loyalty. In
the 1980s, during the insurrection against Soviet rule in Afghanistan,
the tribal agencies were a kind of staging area for jihadists like bin
Laden. Saudi money built hundreds of madrassas—fundamentalist schools
that radicalized local youth—and Pakistani intelligence (the ISI)
formed alliances with the jihadists to subvert the Soviet-backed Afghan
regime.

The American effort to chase bin Laden into this forbidding realm was
hobbled and clumsy from the start. While the terrain required deep
local knowledge and small units, career officers in the U.S. military
have long been wary of the Special Operations Forces best suited to the
task. In the view of the regular military, such "snake eaters" have
tended to be troublesome, resistant to spit-and-polish discipline and
rulebooks. Rather than send the snake eaters to poke around mountain
caves and mud-walled compounds, the U.S. military wanted to fight on a
grander stage, where it could show off its mobility and firepower. To
the civilian bosses at the Pentagon and the eager-to-please top brass,
Iraq was a much better target. By invading Iraq, the United States
would give the Islamists—and the wider world—an unforgettable lesson in
American power. Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich was on Rumsfeld's
Defense Policy Board and, at the time, a close confidant of the SecDef.
In November 2001, Gingrich told a NEWSWEEK reporter, "There's a feeling
we've got to do something that counts—and bombing caves is not
something that counts."

When Franks refused to send Army Rangers into the mountains at Tora
Bora, he was already in the early stages of planning for the next war.
By early 2002, new Predators—aerial drones that might have helped the
search for bin Laden—were instead being diverted off the assembly line
for possible use in Iraq. The military's most elite commando unit,
Delta Force, was transferred from Afghanistan to prep for the invasion
of Iraq. The Fifth Special Forces Group, including the best Arabic
speakers, was sent home to retool for Iraq, replaced by the Seventh
Special Forces Group—Spanish speakers with mostly Latin American
experience. The most knowledgeable CIA case officers, the ones with
tribal contacts, were rotated out. Replacing a fluent Arabic speaker
and intellectual, the new CIA station chief in Kabul was a stickler for
starting meetings on time (his own watch was always seven minutes fast)
but allowed that he had read only one book on Afghanistan. One slightly
bitter spook, speaking anonymously to NEWSWEEK to protect his identity,
likened the station chief to Captain Queeg in "The Caine Mutiny." (CIA
spokesman Paul Gimigliano insists "station chiefs go through a
rigorous, multistep selection process, designed to get leaders with the
right skills in the right places.")

The frustrations of the snake eaters are well illustrated by the
recollections of Adam Rice, the operations sergeant of a Special Forces
A-Team working out of a safe house near Kandahar in 2002. With his
close-cropped orange hair and beard, wearing a yellow Hawaiian shirt
around the safe house, Rice was not the sort to shine at inspections at
boot camp. But he had lived in Kabul as a child (his father had been a
USAID worker) and he had been a Special Forces operator for more than
two decades. In July 2002, a CIA case officer told Rice that a figure
believed to be Mullah Omar, the one-eyed chief of the Taliban, had been
tracked by aerial drone to a location in the Shahikot Valley, a short
flight to the north. The Taliban chief and his entourage would be
vulnerable to a helicopter assault, but the Americans had to move
quickly.

Rice was not optimistic about getting timely permission. Whenever he
and his men moved within five kilometers of the safe house, he says,
they had to file a request form known as a 5-W, spelling out the who,
what, when, where and why of the mission. Permission from headquarters
took hours, and if shooting might be involved, it was often denied. To
go beyond five kilometers required a CONOP (for "concept of
operations") that was much more elaborate and required approval from
two layers in the field, and finally the Joint Special Operations Task
Force at Baghram air base near Kabul. To get into a fire fight, the
permission of a three-star general was necessary. "That process could
take days," Rice recalled to NEWSWEEK. He often typed forms while
sitting on a 55-gallon drum his men had cut in half to make a toilet
seat. "We'd be typing in 130-degree heat while we're crapping away with
bacillary dysentery and sometimes the brass at Kandahar or Baghram
would kick back and tell you the spelling was incorrect, that you
weren't using the tab to delimit the form correctly."

But Rice made his request anyway. Days passed with no word. The window
closed; the target—whether Mullah Omar or not—moved on. Rice blames
risk aversion in career officers, whose promotions require spotless
("zero defect") records—no mistakes, no bad luck, no "flaps." The
cautious mind-set changed for a time after 9/11, but quickly settled
back in. High-tech communication serves to clog, rather than speed the
process. With worldwide satellite communications, high-level commanders
back at the base or in Washington can second-guess even minor decisions.

In Pakistan, President Musharraf was wary of his American allies in the
War on Terror. In 2002, he told a high-ranking British official: "My
great concern is that one day the United States is going to desert me.
They always desert their friends." According to this official, who
declined to be identified sharing a confidence, Musharraf cited the
U.S. pullouts from Vietnam in the 1970s, Lebanon in the 1980s and
Somalia in the 1990s. Still, he quickly gave the Americans considerable
leeway to operate inside Pakistan. He did not demand prior approval of
Predator attacks, and he allowed "hot pursuit" for American forces five
kilometers or more inside the border. (With a grim laugh, one U.S.
officer interviewed by NEWSWEEK recalled watching on Predator video as
insurgents fled across the border and stopped on what they thought was
safe terrain—until a U.S. Special Ops helo reared up and blasted them.)
Musharraf told the Americans he understood that they would do what they
had to do to attack high-value targets, although he indicated the
Pakistanis might have to issue pro forma denunciations. His one
request, said a U.S. official who dealt directly with the Pakistani
leader, was that bin Laden not be captured alive and be brought to
trial in Pakistan.

The cooperation has resulted in some high-profile successes. Working
with the Pakistani police, the CIA and FBI helped to capture
"KSM"—Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Al Qaeda's operations chief and
mastermind of the 9/11 attacks—at a house in Quetta, a city near the
Afghan border, on March 1, 2003. Mohammed Naeem Noor Khan, a Qaeda
communications expert, was picked up in Karachi in 2004 (and released,
to the immense frustration of American officials, last week by the
Pakistan government without ever having been formally charged with a
crime). KSM's successor as chief of operations, Abu Faraj al-Libbi, was
seized in May 2005. Qaeda officials who came down out of the mountains
to make contact with jihadists risked exposure, especially if they were
at all careless about using cell phones that could be tracked.

But the mountains themselves have remained virtually impenetrable.
After Al Qaeda twice tried to assassinate Musharraf in 2003, the
Pakistani leader decided he had no choice but to go after the jihadists
in their lair. Generals blustered about trapping bin Laden between a
"hammer" (American forces operating out of Afghanistan) and an
"anvil" (the Pakistani military). Pakistani tanks and helicopter
gunships began to rumble and roar into the northwestern territories.
But despite periodic claims of success, the fighting on the ground went
badly. The Pakistani forces had been trained to fight on the plains of
Punjab against the Indian Army. They were not well suited for guerrilla
war and sustained heavy casualties. More broadly, questions remain
about the loyalties of the Frontier Constabulary, the militia
responsible for security in the tribal areas. A Western military
officer with experience on both sides of the Pakistan-Afghanistan
border says that FC troops often fail to warn U.S. units of militants
crossing over into Afghanistan; in May 2006 one FC soldier even shot
and killed an American officer in Pakistan. Musharraf can rightly claim
to have purged the ISI of agents with lingering Taliban and Qaeda
sympathies, but the Western officer claims that several of those former
agents are now unofficially aiding their former charges.

The Iraq War, meanwhile, has proved to be a black hole for the
Americans, devouring men and matériel and absorbing the attention of
the brass in Washington. In 2005, the CIA gave President Bush a secret
slide show on the hunt for bin Laden. The president was taken aback by
the small number of CIA case officers posted to Afghanistan and
Pakistan. "Is that all there are?" the president asked, according to a
former intelligence official, who declined to be identified discussing
White House meetings. The CIA had already embarked on a "surge" of
sorts, and doubled the number of officers in the field. But many were
inexperienced and raw recruits, and they produced little improvement in
"actionable" intelligence.

CIA officials at Langley were anxiously watching their flank. At the
Pentagon, Rumsfeld, vexed by the CIA's inability to provide actionable
intel, had been pushing to get Special Forces into clandestine
operations and gathering of human intelligence (HUMINT). Under an
"execute order" approved by President Bush in July 2005, the Pentagon
identified 350 Qaeda targets globally, including senior leaders,
recruiters, financiers and couriers, according to a high-ranking
Defense official who, like others quoted anonymously in this story, did
not wish to be identified revealing such matters. The CIA naturally
resisted this invasion of its turf. Congressmen and ambassadors
grumbled that they were being kept in the dark about the military's
black ops.

The Defense official claims that "the Horn of Africa has been a
fruitful place" for missions. But when it came to going after the top
Qaeda leadership along the Pakistan border, the military was still
dogged by poor intelligence and risk aversion. These two chronic
failings combined to undo what may have been America's best shot at
killing or capturing some top Qaeda leaders since the escape at Tora
Bora.

In late 2005, the CIA and the Pentagon's Joint Special Operations
Command came up with intelligence that gave them "80 percent
confidence" that either Zawahiri, bin Laden's longtime sidekick, or
another of bin Laden's highest-ranking lieutenants would be attending a
meeting in a small compound just inside Pakistan along its northern
border with Afghanistan. "This was the best intelligence picture we had
ever seen" about a so-called HVT, said a former intelligence official
who was involved in the operation. The spooks and Special Operations
Forces planned an airborne commando raid that could have been produced
by Jerry Bruckheimer. Some 30 U.S. Navy SEALs were to be flown by C-130
transport planes, under cover of darkness, to a spot high above the
Afghan side of the Pakistan border, about 30 to 40 miles away from the
target. The SEALs would jump from the plane and use parasails—motorized
hang gliders—to fly through the night sky, across the mountains, to a
secret staging point close to the compound. They would attack the
target and capture Zawahiri or whatever other HVTs were on the
premises, killing them only if necessary. The SEALs would then spirit
their captives away to another staging point, where two CH-53
helicopters awaited to airlift them back to Afghanistan.

The plan was enthusiastically endorsed by the then CIA Director Porter
Goss and JSOC Commander Stanley McChrystal, who was a major at the
time. But when the Pentagon's civilian leadership, including Rumsfeld
and his principal intelligence adviser, Under Secretary Steve Cambone,
pored over the plan, they began raising questions. Was the intelligence
good enough to justify the risk to U.S. troops and the possible
blowback on Musharraf if the mission went bad? "Can't you get the
confidence up to 100 percent?" Pentagon officials asked their CIA
counterparts, eliciting frustrated eye-rolling in return, according to
the former intelligence officer interviewed by NEWSWEEK. According to a
former Defense official close to Rumsfeld, a familiar Pentagon planning
maxim had already kicked in: the more uncertain the intelligence, the
more precautions the military wants to take. The top brass was asking,
were two helicopters really sufficient to extract the SEALs? What if
one was shot down or had mechanical problems? Images of the failed 1980
Iranian hostage-rescue mission came to mind. Or Rangers fighting their
way through Mogadishu to rescue trapped commandos in the 1993 fiasco
known as Blackhawk Down. In order to bolster the rescue part of the
plan, JSOC proposed sending in teams of Army Rangers to add security.
As discussions continued, the size of the Ranger team grew to 150,
about five times the size of the initial commando force.

To Rumsfeld, the operations began to seem more and more like an
invasion of Pakistan. Musharraf would have to be consulted, or at least
informed. But did that mean his unreliable intelligence service, the
ISI, would leak the plan to Al Qaeda? The official close to Rumsfeld
says that the SecDef became increasingly wary as he weighed potential
risk against reward.

But time was of the essence. The C-130s were circling over the border,
the SEALs were ready to jump, while Rumsfeld was still deliberating
with the top brass. CIA Director Goss went to the Pentagon to implore
him to go ahead. At the last minute Rumsfeld called off the raid.
"Believe me, if this had been easy and there were certainty, we'd have
done this," says the former Rumsfeld adviser. "There just wasn't
certainty."

Certainty is painfully hard to achieve in this hunt, despite America's
enormous technological edge. American spy satellites, designed for the
cold war against the Soviets, don't have antennas sensitive enough to
pick up cell-phone or handheld radio transmissions. So Special Ops
teams—known as Task Force Orange—have slipped into the tribal areas to
plant listening devices on various peaks. The listening posts have been
useful, in several cases pinpointing the locations of Qaeda operatives.
But the jihadists have adapted, and use codes to disguise the kind of
actionable information the hunters need.

The common saying among intelligence and Special Ops officers is that
all the thugs have been killed by now—but the smart guys have survived,
and become smarter. Predators have scored some hits, including killing
Abu Hamza Rabia, another Qaeda operations chief (al-Libbi's successor),
in 2005. (To cloak American involvement, the Pakistani government
cooked up the story that Rabia had blown himself up experimenting with
explosives.) But the jihadists have learned to avoid the drones: it's
easier to hear a Predator, which sounds like a loud model airplane, in
the Pakistani hill country than in an Iraqi city. And when the
Americans shoot and miss, the consequences can be grave. In January
2006, a Predator fired a Hellfire missile at a house in Damadola,
Pakistan, where Zawahiri was supposed to be meeting. Once again, the
intel was unreliable: Zawahiri was not there, but more than a dozen
civilians were killed, and the survivors were enraged.

By 2006, Musharraf was weary. American focus on Afghanistan was fading;
the war in the territories was costly in terms of lives and public
sentiment; the jihadists were starting to spill into the cities. The
president of Pakistan decided to cut his losses, and in September 2006,
his local governor signed a peace deal with tribal militants.

Al Qaeda did not hesitate to assert itself. Jihadists paraded brazenly
in Waziristan, dragging "criminals" through the streets. American
satellite photos soon showed single files of foreign jihadists, their
feet sometimes wrapped in plastic bags against the snow, crossing the
Pakistani border into Afghanistan. An Algerian man known as "the
Bombmaker," a seasoned veteran of Iraq, set up shop to teach jihadists
how to build IEDs. Local militants ruled through assassination and
intimidation. The experienced Western military official interviewed by
NEWSWEEK described how militants killed a petty merchant and his entire
family simply for selling watermelons to the local constabulary.
"Imagine what they'd do to the guy who sells out Osama," said the
officer.

In late 2006 and early 2007, anxious top American policymakers,
including Vice President Cheney and Defense Secretary Robert Gates,
traveled to Pakistan to persuade Musharraf to renew his military
operations along the frontier. "There is no question the peace
agreement failed Pakistan and it failed us," said Townsend, the White
House counterterror chief. The Pakistani president was in a difficult
position, risking his unpopular and shaky regime if he cracked down on
the jihadists and risking it if he didn't. Once more, Sisyphus began to
roll the stone up the hill: Musharraf ordered 20,000 soldiers to march
into the territories, to reinforce the 80,000 who were already there.
But "I don't think the Pakistani military is going to move
wholeheartedly against Al Qaeda," a knowledgeable Pakistani military
source told NEWSWEEK. "I don't think their hearts are in it." The tough
talk by American politicians calling for unilateral action is not
helping matters, says retired Pakistani Army Lt. Gen. Talat Masood, a
well-regarded moderate. "It's very humiliating for civilians and the
military alike," he says. (Mahmud Ali Durrani, Pakistan's ambassador to
Washington, insisted that Pakistan is doing more than the United States
to attack Al Qaeda. "The threat to us is far greater," he said.)

U.S. Special Operations Forces have had considerable practice by now
chasing jihadists in Iraq and Afghanistan. The JSOC headquarters at
Baghram is so full of high-tech listening and tracking equipment that
it resembles "something out of 'Star Wars'," says a Pentagon official
who has seen the place. In recent months, says John Arquilla, a Special
Ops expert at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, Calif., the
U.S. military has achieved a 100-to-1 kill ratio (100 dead guerrillas
to every American). But by calling in airstrikes, the Americans also
kill a lot of civilians, which breeds more jihadists. And according to
Thomas Johnson, also at the Naval Postgraduate School, the military's
continued fixation on body counts and kill ratios is irrelevant and
even counterproductive. "When you kill a person it's a multiplication
factor. It demands that all the male relatives join the fight."

The Americans will not find top Qaeda leaders unless they can win the
trust of local tribesmen who may know their whereabouts. Johnson, an
Afghan expert, spent last February at Forward Operating Base Salerno
near the Pakistan border, briefing commanders on the tribal custom of
Pashtunwali. He says only about 5 percent of American troops in
Afghanistan ever leave their bases—a statistic, he believes, that
explains better than any other why Americans are struggling in the
battle for intelligence. He says most soldiers in Afghanistan don't
know simple phrases like "stop," "go," or "put your hands up."
Americans continually make cultural blunders, like using canine units
to search people's homes (dogs are considered unclean in Muslim
culture). Meanwhile the Taliban works at winning the trust and
confidence of villagers—or intimidating them. "They go into villages
and say, 'The Americans have the watches but we have the time. We might
not come back in a week or a year, but you bet your britches we'll
eventually come back'," says Johnson.

The American military, understandably, puts a high priority on "force
protection," but as a practical matter that means staying behind armor
and barricades. Rice, the A-Team sergeant stuck in his safe house near
Kandahar, recalls that his team's frustration peaked when a memo came
down from the brass at Baghram, ordering men not to initiate fire
fights and even not to use words like "death" and "destruction" in
their CONOPS. Among Rice's men, it became known as the "limp dick
memo." (The Defense Department declined to comment specifically on
Rice's memories.)

The American military is forever caught in a dilemma. During the early
days of the cold war, the old boys who ran the CIA began to reason that
when it came to fighting against an underhanded foe in a battle for
global survival, the rules of fair play they had learned as schoolboys
no longer applied. If the communists fight dirty, we must, too, they
rationalized—or freedom would perish. This ends-justifying-the-means
rationale led to foolish and ultimately unsuccessful assassination
plots and other dirty tricks that disgraced and demoralized the CIA
when the agency's so-called Crown Jewels were revealed during
Watergate. After 9/11, Bush administration officials, particularly Vice
President Cheney, vowed to take the gloves off against Al Qaeda. But in
the aftermath of allegations of torture in secret prisons, there has
been a strong push back, particularly among administration lawyers
disturbed by the abuse of constitutional rights. According to
knowledgeable sources, Rumsfeld's deputy for intelligence, Steve
Cambone, engaged in an angry debate with the Pentagon's top lawyer,
William Haynes, over the activities of U.S. Special Forces—who in the
minds of some government lawyers and lawmakers have been given too
much, not too little, license to roam.

The frustrations at the top are understandable. There is a certain
desperate quality to the hunt for bin Laden. Some experts think he's
constantly on the move; others believe he must be holed up somewhere,
never using electronics, impossible to detect. After the close call in
2004, says Omar Farooqi, "the Sheik" shrank his security staff and
employed only faithful Arabs. A Western military official who has
worked both sides of the Afghan-Pakistani border told NEWSWEEK that bin
Laden may have deployed small groups of bodyguards spread along the
frontier with the same "signature": small security detail, secretive,
saying little to local villagers, always moving on. That's a perfect
disinformation campaign, says the official. The nearby locals start
whispering that bin Laden must be nearby. "Word gets around that it
must have been him," he says. "We react. It throws us off the trail and
makes us waste assets following bad leads. And it's a cheap and easy
way to do."

No wonder the intelligence community is reaching out to anyone who can
glean even a hint of bin Laden's whereabouts. As early as November
2001, John Shroder, a geographer at the University of Nebraska, found
himself addressing an audience of intelligence officials, analyzing the
rock formations behind bin Laden in a video released that October.
About all he could do was tell the spooks that bin Laden seemed to be
in the western part of Afghanistan's Spin Ghar Mountains. "We were
grasping at straws," says Michael Scheuer, who was special adviser to
the head of the CIA's bin Laden unit at the time. "We called in
geologists. We had the Germans bring in ornithologists because they
thought they heard a bird chirping on a video and wanted to see if it
was particular to certain regions of South Asia." The agency enlisted
doctors to look for signs of kidney disease, which bin Laden was
rumored to be suffering from at the time. A Dec. 27, 2001, video,
nicknamed by analysts "the Gaunt Tape," shows a haggard-looking bin
Laden, who seems to be unable to move his left arm. "But the doctors
couldn't pinpoint any problems with his health," says Scheuer.

CIA analysts began calling bin Laden "Elvis" because he was here,
there, but really nowhere. Some wonder if he's dead. He has not issued
a video since the end of 2004, and he has not been heard on an
audiotape for more than a year. It is possible he is incapacitated by
disease—the rumors of kidney problems persist. There have been reports
that bin Laden has sought medication to be used in the terminal stages
of kidney disease. But "I don't have any reason to think he's dead,"
says Townsend, who sees all the intelligence coming to the office of
the president. "It's inconceivable to me to think that he would expire
and we wouldn't have some information, intelligence, that something had
happened to him."

If he is alive, there is no doubt he means to kill as many Americans as
possible. "The Sheik's desire is to strike another blow at the palaces
of the West," says Sheik Said, the senior Egyptian Qaeda leader. In
2003, Scheuer points out, bin Laden even managed to gain religious
sanction from a radical Saudi cleric to kill "no more than 10 million
Americans" with a nuclear or biological weapon.

America remains his obsession. NEWSWEEK interviewed Nasser al Bahri,
who served as bin Laden's personal bodyguard for six years. Now under
very loose house arrest in Yemen, the former bodyguard still reveres
"the Sheik." According to al Bahri, bin Laden used to amuse himself by
chanting this bit of doggerel, part of a longer poem by a jihadist
poet: I am the enemy of America Till this life is over and doomsday
comes. It's the root and trunk of destruction, It's the evil on the
branches of trees.

"The only thing that seems to rile him up is mention of America," says
al Bahri. "I think from the very beginning of his childhood he hated
America. I don't know why. He won't even drink a Pepsi."

Bin Laden's No. 2, Zawahiri, is just as baleful toward the United
States. According to various accounts, it was Zawahiri, a well-educated
Egyptian doctor, who before 9/11 persuaded bin Laden to turn his
terrorist ambitions from the "near enemy" (the corrupt regimes of Saudi
Arabia, Jordan and Egypt) to the "far enemy" (the United States).
Zawahiri may represent more of a threat to the West than bin Laden. By
taking himself off the grid, bin Laden may no longer be in operational
control; capturing him might be more symbolic than significant. But
meanwhile Zawahiri has become more visible. "In the past two years he
has put out more than 30 messages," says Rita Katz, director and
founder of the SITE Institute, which monitors jihadist Web sites. She
notes that within hours of the storming of the Red Mosque by Pakistani
forces, Zawahiri's response was uploaded on the Internet. "I believe
he's in or near an urban area where he is able to get news and respond
to issues quickly," says Katz. "In 2005, you'd still see videos with
cheap fabric backdrops that rippled in the wind. Today, they seem to be
using better equipment, complete with artificial backgrounds added
postproduction." "Al Qaeda may have seventh-century ideas, but they
have 21st-century acumen for communications," says Georgetown
University terrorism expert Bruce Hoffman. "Al Qaeda has become a world
brand and their videos are the juice that fueled that recognition."

The overarching question is whether Al Qaeda has the ability to strike
the United States with another "spectacular" along the lines of 9/11,
or possibly something worse. When the Qaeda leadership was driven into
the hills in 2001, and many of their top operators were killed or
captured, the jihadist movement was sustained by local wannabes. They
set off bombs and blew up subways and discos from Indonesia to Britain.
But they were not very high-tech, and some were klutzes, like the two
mokes who last June failed to set off a pair of car bombs in London and
then tried, unsuccessfully, to become suicide bombers at the Glasgow
airport. (One eventually did die of his burns, but no civilians were
injured when their car caught fire but failed to explode.)

When the United States struck Afghanistan in 2001, "there were probably
3,000 core Al Qaeda operatives," says Arquilla of the Naval
Postgraduate School. "We killed or captured about 1,000; about 1,000
more ended up in distant parts of the world. And about 1,000 ended up
in Waziristan. But the great terror university in Afghanistan is gone;
they've relied on the Web since. They haven't had the hands-on
instruction and the bonding of the camps. That's resulted in low-skill
levels. Their tradecraft is really much poorer."

The danger now, says Arquilla, is that the longer the Iraq War goes on,
the more skilled the new generations of jihadists will become. "They're
getting re-educated," he says. "The first generation of Al Qaeda came
through the [Afghan] camps. The second generation are those who've
logged on [to Islamist Web sites]. The next generation will be those
who have come through the crucible of Iraq. Eventually, their level of
skill is going to be greater than the skill of the original generation."

It is disturbing to recall that when U.S. forces overran Qaeda training
grounds, they found scientific documents discussing nuclear, chemical
and biological weapons. (Zawahiri is reported to have a particular
interest in chem-bio.) A true weapon of mass destruction is very hard
to come by, and it may be a while before the jihadists can make, steal
or buy a nuclear weapon or a germ bomb capable of killing more than a
few people. But dirty bombs are less difficult to craft from
conventional explosives and radioactive material, the kind that can be
found in the waste bins of hospitals. Crumpton recalls that Zawahiri
canceled a planned attack to set off a cyanide bomb in the New York
City subways in 2003. "We don't know why," says Crumpton, or what
became of the team Al Qaeda recruited to stage the attack but
apparently never dispatched to the United States. "You think: Why did
he call it off? Where are they?"

Intelligence officials in Europe and America have spent a jittery
summer seeing signs that Al Qaeda is gearing up to hit the West in some
significant way. In his interview with NEWSWEEK, Admiral Redd of the
National Counterterrorism Center was guarded about details. But it was
clear from his comments that the terror watchers are seeing signs and
hearing chatter that have put them on alert. For an attack on Europe?
America? "They would like to come west, and they would like to come as
far west as they can," is how Redd puts it. The intelligence community
lacks specific information about the movements of terrorists, he said.
"What we do have, though, is a couple of threads which indicate, you
know, some very tactical stuff, and that's what—you know, that's what
you're seeing bits and pieces of, and I really can't go much more into
it."

Meanwhile, the hunt for bin Laden goes on. Recently, it has gone all
the way back to the beginning—to the Tora Bora region. This summer,
about 500 jihadists—Taliban and Al Qaeda, increasingly
indistinguishable—infiltrated the area. After three American Special
Forces soldiers were killed by a roadside bomb in early August, the
Americans launched a sweep of bin Laden's old hideout, backed by aerial
strikes. Last week a NEWSWEEK reporter, led by a guide, hiked up into
the mountains to visit the battlefield.

On the way up, they passed small convoys of American Humvees and Afghan
National Army Ford Ranger pickups. Along the trail, past a few dozen
unmarked Arab graves from the 2001 bombing, they saw bits of shrapnel,
corroded bullets and scraps of military detritus, some of it quite old.
Leaflets blew around. They warned the locals that American troops would
hunt down people who sheltered terrorists. On the leaflets were garish
pictures of evil-looking masked men with glaring white eyes; one had
the word OSAMA in a red circle with a diagonal slash through it.

The NEWSWEEK reporter and his guide walked past a series of burned-out
Soviet tanks, scrawled with triumphalist Arab graffiti, leftovers from
the struggle against the Russian occupation of Afghanistan. Eventually,
they came to bin Laden's old cave complex, just above a gorge known as
the Malawa Valley. On a wide ledge was Osama's old swimming pool, dry
now, but with its still spectacular view. There had been rumors of
sightings of the Sheik and his entourage. But they were just rumors.

[This story was reported by Ron Moreau and Sami Yousafzai on the
Afghanistan-Pakistan border; Zahid Hussain in Islamabad; Rod Nordland
in Tora Bora; Mark Hosenball, Michael Hirsh, Michael Isikoff, John
Barry, Dan Ephron and Eve Conant in Washington; Christopher Dickey in
Paris, and Roya Wolverson in New York. It was written by Evan Thomas.]

© 2007 MSNBC.com