Osama bin Laden is the most wanted terrorist in the world - the shadowey Saudi-born millionaire who has declared a holy war against the West. But its secret services are divided on how to capture him.
This morning, 5:30 a.m. by the expensive Rolex watch on his wrist, the moment he calls "the first dawn for the faithful", Osama bin Laden will awaken to prepare for another day of outwitting the combined intelligence forces of the world.
Between them they have bestowed on him more labels than any other terrorist has received: "the grandmaster of terrorism (CIA); "The world's public enemy Number One" (FBI); "a most dangerous fanatic" (Egyptian Intelligence Agency); "Wanted at all costs" (Mossad); "Arrest on sight" (BND).
The security services of no fewer than 25 nations have him top of their Top Ten Most Wanted lists.
To his followers he is a folk hero: the multi-millionaire who feeds the poor, encourages their children to dance before him, knows the verses of the Koran better than any Islamic preacher. To them all he is a living prophet come to cleanse the world of what he calls "Western decadence".
To achieve this he has orchestrated a campaign of violence that, since 1996, has claimed hundred of lives and injured thousand more innocent people.
After last year's bombing of the United States Embassy in Nairobi, President Clinton ordered that bin Laden must be hunted down. In a series of phone calls to Western leaders he asked they should mobilise their intelligence services to join the hunt.
For the past six months satellites and the most sophisticated ground-tracking equipment has been used to locate Osama bin Laden.
Yet on this Sunday morning he remains secure from capture because of serious disagreement among his hunters on how he should be tackled.
Physically he is an easy man to spot from an orbiting American satellite. With his high cheekbones, narrow face and gold-fringed robe he is the classic mountain warrior of Mujadehin.
A distinct long pepper-and-salt beard and sharp, penetrating eyes, adds to his recognition factor. His smile is only for his followers, who see him as a hell-storming advocate, living a personal life of such frugality that even they find hard to match. He is also a man steeped in personal violence, having driven a captured tank against Russian soldiers in the Afghan war.
Ironically in those days he was armed by the CIA, who gave him an arsenal of Stingers. When he had helped drive out the Soviet occupiers he turned against the Americans and their "hamburger and Coca-Cola values". Today he takes pride in being its most sought-after enemy.
Everywhere he goes, so do his bodyguards: some fifty heavily bearded taciturn figures. Every man is hand-picked. Each is ready to die for him.
His voice is equally well known - thanks to his intermittent appearances on America's TV networks. On those occasions he speaks gently, persuasively, about the need for "purity", his "disgust and revulsion" at President Clinton, "a president who has no heart".
Though he refuses to discuss his private life - his four wives remain at home in Jeddah in Islamic purdah - Western intelligence services have built-up a portrait of bin Laden that in theory should enable them to capture him.
They know that when he awakens he first brushes his teeth in the Arab fashion with a stick of miswak wood. Then he will pray for the strength to destroy his enemies. Like a cancer they consume him, burrowing into his mind, even capable at times of making him week. Then, real tears will fall down his cheek, the crying of an unforgiving fanatic who hates with a passion that is awesome.
For the rest of today, as with any other, bin Laden will plot how to strike against those enemies.
Though they far out-number him, he continues to outwit their vast electronic and human resources - because the forces arraigned against him cannot agree on a strategy that will capture Osama bin Laden.
In Tel Aviv, a senior analyst, close to Mossad's director-general Efraim Halevy, told me that "part of the problem is the old one of the Americans thinking they know best. They think putting up more satellites and pouring in electronic surveillance equipment is the answer. We have told them that the best solution is human intelligence."
Rafi Eitan, who masterminded Mossad's capture of Adolf Eichman, identified the problem of capturing bin Laden.
"There is a need for patience. Satellites can only tell you what is happening now - not what could be happening in the future. That can only come from having men on the ground. The greatest successes Mossad have had is through 'humint' - human intelligence".
For the past year Mossad has been infiltrating Afghan-born Jews into Kabul to try and penetrate the Taliban regime.
The spies are equipped with suicide pills to be swallowed if they are captured. They are at the cutting edge of intelligence gathering - their task equated as being as dangerous as the Mossad agents who operate deep within Saddam Hussein's regime.
The Taliban regime is one of the most extreme in the Islamic Fundamentalist world. Its leader Mullah Mohaddad Omar calls bin Laden his "honored guest".
Last week - as a spate of reports emanated from Afghanistan that bin Laden has disappeared from the country - placing him variously in Parkistan, Iran and even Iraq - the Mossad agents were able to inform Halevy that bin Laden remained in his mountain fastness in the south of the country.
Last year the Americans attacked the complex with Cruise missiles. Little damage was done to the interlocking caves.
But the ever-cautious bin Laden - who believes that "the American Satan can strike twice in the same place" - has set up a new base ten miles away.
Long realising that the United States has the capability to electronically eavesdrop on his discussions, bin Laden writes his orders in a neat hand - then distributes them to trusted aides. They travel to neighbouring countries and transmit them from there to bin Laden's global network of some 2,500 terrorists. Some of these are based in Germany and Britain.
Those orders can be turned into reality from the DM500 million estimated personal fortune of bin Laden.
So great a bogeyman has he become that this week in Washington there was speculation as to whether bin Laden would follow Nature - and have his men trigger avalanches.
More certain is his own chilling words issued last December:
"We don't consider it a crime if we try to obtain nuclear, chemical or biological weapons. Our holy land is occupied by Israeli and American forces. We have the right to defend ourselves and liberate our holy land".
To implement that self-styled "right", Osama bin Laden continues to survive because there is no agreement on a common policy to capture him among intelligence services.
Mossad sources I have spoken to say that bombing his bases or tracking him by satellites is not the answer.
Its strategists have proposed an international snatch team could positioned either in Israel or the Gulf to Israel - ready to fly into an area where bin Laden is known to be.
The team would use the much-vaunted HALO method of parachuting - High Altitude, Low Opening.
The team could be made up from the Special Forces of Israel, the United States, Germany and Great Britain.
Developed by the United States, this technique allows a man to jump from an aircraft at 35,000 feet and only to open his parachute at 1,000 feet.
Both Israeli and American Special Forces have perfected a technique which allows for virtually total surprise.
A Pentagon office, who asked not to be named, told me: "We would be on to bin Laden before he and his men even knew we were overhead".
Part of a HALO-based operation would include a US Galaxy aircraft dropping canisters filled with equipment. The 1,000 pound canisters would home in homing devices planted by Mossad agents.
"The capabilitry is all there", an Israeli senior intelligence officer told me. "The team would strike at night, when bin Laden is on the move betwewen his bases. Once we have him, our helicopters could drop in and fly him and the team out to Pakistan. From there he could be flown to the United States".
Almost certain any such plan would falter at the first hurdle: who would lead the team?
"Even if we agreed with the idea, we would expect to run it our way", a CIA source told me.
Similar disagreement bedevilled the Gulf War. French and German intelligence sources have told me that part of the problem would be language difficulties.
"When the adrenalin is flowing, we like to give and take orders in our own language", a French contact said.
Nevertheless, there remains a well-entrenched belief in Tel Aviv and Washington that both Germany and France, while paying lip-service to a need to capture bin Laden, in reality are reluctant to become involved in doing so.
To do so could enrage the sizeable Moslem population in both countries. Given the riots that followed the capture of the Kurdish leader, Abdullah Ocalan, there has to be certain sympathy for such an attitude.
That policy can change if bin Laden carries out his public threat to attack "British and American installations" in both those countries.
Meantime the United States have turned to another tactic - offering a DM4 million reward for information leading to bin Laden's capture.
Meir Amit, a former director-general of Mossad, told me last year that such a tactic often does not work.
"Betrayal for money is a hard thing to induce in someone committed to a terrorist leader. Part of the reason is fear of someone discovering the treachery. Part of the reason is that the leader has picked his men with care. A prime example are those around bin Laden. No promise of a bounty will make them turn him in".
Equally, David Kimche, a former senior Mossad analyist, believes that "everyone has an Achilles heel".
Last week in Tel Aviv a currently serving intelligence officer told me that weakness could be bin Laden's strong family ties to his four wives and seven children.
"We know where they live and their movements. If a wife and some of his children were kidnapped it would certainly focus bin Laden's mind. At minimum they could be held as hostages against him carrying out any further outrage. If they did, then he should expect 'an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth' policy to exist".
Such ruthlessness will no doubt be seen as further proof that Mossad still runs a no-hold barred way of dealing with terrorism.
To which men like its present chief, Efraim Halevy would reply: "This may be a dirty business - but so is terrorism".
Late last week the State Department in Washington told me that in the past six months US intelligence services had "thwarted no fewer than six attempts by bin Laden to attack our overseas embassies and air bases".
The spokesman sounded triumphant. But it may be short lived.
A hint of further problems came this week with the admission by Britain's Atomic Energy Authority that its ships carrying reprocessed nuclear fuel between Sellafield Reprocessing Plant in Cumbria and Japan are to be guarded by a special unit equipped with "heavy naval weapons" to protect the vessels against hi-jacking by terrorists.
The ships - each carrying enough reprocesssed fuel to make fifty plutonium bombs - will travel in convoy and be in constant contact with the International Maritime Bureau's Piracy Reporting Center in the U.S.
The first shipment is expected to leave Britain in early summer.
Already Washington has urged the ships should not sail through the Suez Canal but around the Cape.
South African intelligence sources have told me that bin Laden has a growing network of supporters in the country.
President Mandela's government has indicated it will insist on the ships remaining at least 200 miles off the South African coast as they head into the Indian Ocean.
For intelligence agencies the plutonium-laden carriers create another potential problem - and possibly an enticing target for Osama bin Laden.
This Sunday morning, his prayers over, his frugal breakfast eaten, he will continue to plot.
The only certainty is that the further he is from his last atrocity, the closer he is to the next one.
This material is Copyright Gordon Thomas © 2000 Gordon Thomas
For publishing rights, contact the author at gordon@gordonthomas.ie |
