After Six Years, A $50 Million Reward and Billions Spent on the Pursuit,
U.S. Officials Admit They Haven't Had A Good Lead Since Early 2002;
Certainty of Bin Laden's Whereabouts Never More Than 50-50
U.S. Unit May Have Stumbled Upon His Hideout In Late 2004, But Passed By
Without Realizing
NEW YORK, Aug. 26 /PRNewswire/ -- In the winter of 2004-05, U.S.
soldiers on patrol in the mountains along the Afghanistan/Pakistan border
came so close to the most wanted man in the world, Osama bin Laden, that
his entourage considered using the code word to kill the Al Qaeda leader
and commit suicide, according to a report in the current issue of Newsweek.
According to Sheikh Said, a senior Egyptian Al Qaeda operative, bin Laden
had decreed that he would never be captured. "If there's a 99 percent risk
of the sheikh [as bin Laden is known to his followers] 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 Newsweek
in Afghanistan.
(Photo: http://www.newscom.com/cgi-bin/prnh/20070826/NYSU003 )
The code word was never given since the U.S. troops moved off in a
different direction. Bin Laden's men later concluded that the soldiers had
nearly stumbled on their hideout by accident. In the September 3 Newsweek
cover, "He's Still Out There. The Hunt for Bin Laden." (on newsstands
Monday, August 27), a team of Newsweek correspondents reconstruct the
six-year operation to track down the Al Qaeda leader -- a tale filled with
missed opportunities, damned-if-you-do decisions, and outright blunders.
"There hasn't been a serious lead on Osama bin Laden since early 2002,"
Bruce Reidel, who recently retired as a South Asia expert at the CIA, tells
Newsweek. Since that time, U.S. intelligence has never been more than 50
percent certain of his whereabouts, say intelligence officials interviewed
by Newsweek. "What we're doing now is shooting in the dark in outer space.
The chances of hitting anything are zero."
Capturing bin Laden "continues to be a huge priority," says Frances
Fragos Townsend, President 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 its also true
that Al Qaeda has been reconstituting itself in the mountains of Pakistan
and Afghanistan, and that they are determined to stage more 9/11s, 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
former Vice Adm. John Redd, the chief of the National Counterterrorism
Center. Says Hank Crumpton, who ran the CIA's early hunt for bin Laden in
2001-02 and recently retired as the State Department's chief of
counterterrorism, "It's bad; it's going to come."
Newsweek reports on a scrapped plan from late 2005 that would have sent
Navy SEALs into Pakistan where Ayman Zawahiri or another of bin Laden's
highest-ranking lieutenants would be attending a meeting. The CIA and the
Pentagon's Joint Special Operations Command came up with intelligence that
gave them "80 percent confidence" that the meeting would be taking place 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 (high-value target), said a former intelligence
official who was involved in the operation.
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, Newsweek
reports. 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 compound
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 then CIA Director Porter Goss
and JSOC Commander Gen. Stanley McChrystal. But when the Pentagon's
civilian leadership, including Donald 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 just as importantly, to the political standing
of Pakistani President Pervez 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 senior intelligence officer interviewed by Newsweek.
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.
Still, 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 came 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."
(Read cover story at http://www.Newsweek.com)
URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/20430170/site/newsweek
SOURCE Newsweek
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