How bin Laden gave US the slip
The real nerve centre is an unprepossessing plywood hangar containing a top-secret computer system codenamed Harmony, into which every piece of intelligence gathered about al-Qaeda is entered and cross-checked, however small or apparently insignificant.
Yet for all its impressive capability, the system has been hampered by its diet of misinformation from Afghan commanders, who have discovered that they can earn thousands of dollars from feeding "tips" to American special forces.
And over the past year, Osama bin Laden and most of his lieutenants have proved themselves more than a match for the world's most sophisticated technology and powerful army.
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The new evidence came to light amid thousands of documents seized by Mossad, the Israeli intelligence service, during raids in March on the offices of the Islamic militant organisation Hamas and Yasser Arafat's compound in Ramallah.
The documents were taken to a military hangar one hour north of Tel Aviv where analysts have been sifting through them, hoping to prove a link between the Palestinian leader and terrorists. Instead, they found papers suggesting that "the Sheikh" as bin Laden is known, was alive and living in Yemen.
The intelligence is being taken so seriously by the Americans that they have moved most of their Predator Drones to Djibouti to spy over Yemen as well as some special forces, though the operational lead is being taken by British special forces which have long experience in the region.
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Bin Laden is now believed to be in the Hadhra Maug region of south-eastern Yemen, an unruly area where the tribesmen are fiercely loyal to bin Laden and hostile to the west.
Some members were involved in the bombing of the USS Cole in Yemen in October 2000. To seal this loyalty, many of the al-Qaeda who have fled there have taken local wives, as they did in Afghanistan.
So how might thousands of experts, along with the 8,000 American soldiers and special forces who have been trying to track bin Laden's movements, have got it so wrong?
Partly, it was the reliance on information from untrustworthy sources. "They have been paying the very commanders who were helping al-Qaeda escape," claims Asim Nasser-Zia, a leading Afghan from the Jalalabad region.
The Americans admit they were used by commanders to settle feuds by claiming their enemies were sheltering al-Qaeda.
At the same time, their inability to operate in Pakistan allowed as many as 8,000 fighters to escape across the border.
Al-Qaeda has moved its headquarters to Pakistan, operatives melting away in the teeming cities of Karachi, Lahore, Quetta and Peshawar where there is much local sympathy for their cause.
The situation was complicated by elections last month in which an alliance of religious parties, led by those behind the Taliban, won a record 50 seats in parliament, making them a crucial partner in any coalition as well as giving them control of the governments in the border provinces of North West Frontier and Baluchistan.
Above all, bin Laden's band of Arabs, Chechens and North African have proved a far more fearsome enemy than anticipated.
"The Americans tell us they can see even a small goat move from their spyplanes," said a senior Afghan general, "but al-Qaeda has shown whatever technology the Americans use they can adapt."
There have been some successes. The training camps have all been destroyed. Al-Qaeda's chief military planner, Mohammed Atef, was killed.
Abu Zubaydan, the operations chief, was taken into custody in Faisalabad in March, and last month Ramzi Binalshibh, a Yemeni who was one of the key planners of the September 11 attacks, was captured in Karachi.
Yet they have not managed to catch Mullah Omar, the one-eyed Taliban leader, Haji Jamshed, said to be the chief fundraiser, or Khalid Mohammed, a Palestinian who played a key role in planning the World Trade Center attack.
In some ways, the dispersed al-Qaeda has become much more of a threat now that it has operatives in more than 60 countries.
"It's as though we stepped on a puffball sending spores out to other parts of the world," said a British intelligence official.
"We're operating in two parallel universes where political pressure is on us to get results, whereas al-Qaeda is marching to a different drummer," he added.
"They see the whole business of bringing America to its knees as taking a very long time and are prepared to wait."
telegraph.co.uk |
