How Bin Laden Gave US the Slip
The Telegraph (UK)
Sunday, 17 November, 2002
An audio tape released last week confirmed that Osama bin Laden was still alive and perhaps preparing his next attack. Christina Lamb, in Kabul, reveals the route that the world's most wanted man took to evade capture
On the dusty Shamali plain one hour north of Kabul, amid ruins of mud-baked villages that suffered the worst atrocities of the Taliban years, American soldiers with M4 rifles, machine pistols and night-vision goggles guard a razor-wired compound.
The operations headquarters of the world's biggest manhunt, Bagram airbase feels like a film set, with the dark shadows of Chinooks and Apache helicopters ferrying American and coalition troops in and out.
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.
Last week's comment by General Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, that the search had "lost momentum" seemed to reflect the mood in the hangar.
Most agents privately believed that far from lying dead in a cave in Tora Bora, bin Laden had slipped through the net. On Tuesday night, a piece of intelligence came in from operatives in Pakistan that confirmed their worst suspicions.
At a meeting at 10pm in Islamabad, a tape cassette had been passed to Ahmad Muaffaq Zaidan, an al-Jazeera journalist, by a man with his face shrouded in a scarf and speaking heavily accented English.
Zaidan listened to the tape on his car stereo, recognising it as the voice of bin Laden. whom he had interviewed twice, then played it down his home telephone to his editor in Qatar where it was quickly broadcast on the satellite network.
"It is time we get even," menaced the soft, breathy voice. "You will be killed just as you kill," naming first Britain, then France, Italy, Canada, Germany and Australia.
In Washington, where it was early afternoon, some of the world's leading language specialists were summoned. Working through the night, they compared voice inflections and use of words on the four-minute message with the library of voiceprints from previous bin Laden tapes.
Within a day they were confirming that the voice was indeed that of the man behind the trail of death and destruction from New York to Bali.
The breathless tone suggested chronic illness, perhaps the kidney disease he apparently suffers, but the reference to recent events such as the Moscow theatre siege meant this was not a rehashed old tape. Osama bin Laden was alive.
The authentication sent panic through the corridors of Washington and London, not to mention Paris and Rome.
A similar warning had been issued by bin Laden a week before September 11, and this week's tape has been endlessly scrutinised to see if it contains a coded message for followers to activate a new attack.
The first tape of bin Laden since a video was released in April showing him and his deputy, Dr Ayman al-Zawahiri, which was dismissed by the US Defense Department as a pastiche of earlier clips, its timing was significant.
A meeting between sworn enemies of the West - al-Qaeda, Taliban ministers, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar (a fundamentalist mujaheddin leader), and members of Pakistan's military intelligence (ISI) - was being held in the Pakistani town of Quetta and the taped message was seen as rallying the troops.
The meeting took place in the knowledge of Western intelligence services, yet they could do nothing about it. 'There's one word for why we didn't catch Osama and that's Pakistan," complained one frustrated intelligence officer.
"Put it this way, the Pakistanis are selling nuclear technology to the north Koreans after September 11 yet we're calling them our best buddies. . ."
Most CIA agents are convinced that their inability to seal off Afghanistan's long border with Pakistan because their supposed ally would not allow them to deploy troops on its soil until April, allowed bin Laden to cross over twice and ultimately escape.
They also believe that ISI helped about 3,000 al-Qaeda members escape after the fall of the Taliban's stronghold of Kandahar last December.
Around the same time that the Americans began bombing the mountain cave network of Tora Bora further east, in the belief that bin Laden was there, another 2,000 slipped across the border into the tribal areas, aided by Afghan commanders who were supposedly helping the US.
"At every occasion we came too late and left a window open," said one operative, shaking his head.
The release of last week's tape came as no surprise to those on the ground. Not only was bin Laden not killed in Tora Bora, but perhaps was never there at all.
Haji Zaman, the Afghan commander who provided the initial information of bin Laden's presence in the region, is now regarded as highly suspect and lives in exile in Peshawar.
A much-vaunted radio interception from Tora Bora on December 10 of bin Laden exhorting his troops to fight was never authenticated.
Agents now believe it may have been his son Saad or a recording. "We made a very Western assumption that bin Laden would lead from the front," said one agent.
Instead, new intelligence has emerged suggesting that the al-Qaeda leader left Afghanistan in November and retreated to his family's ancestral homeland of Yemen to lick his wounds.
His deputy, al-Zawahiri, the Egyptian doctor who once treated him for high blood pressure, was left running operations.
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.
The killing a fortnigh ago in Yemen of one of bin Laden's lieutenants by a missile fired from an unmanned US Predator drone and the capture of one of his wives suggest that they are closing in.
The long journey which bin Laden is now believed to have taken matches information given to The Telegraph in February by Maulana Abdullah Sahadi, deputy Defence Minister of the Taliban.
He insisted that he had met bin Laden at the Mowafaq hotel in Herat in October, the week after the American bombing began, and believed he had then left for south-eastern Iran to prepare his escape route.
From Iran he travelled east through the deserts of south-western Afghanistan near to his base in Jalalabad where he addressed a meeting of his followers.
He then retraced his steps west using drug-smuggling routes and switched from jeep to camel to move down through the Baluchistan desert, a vast unpopulated area of Pakistan largely off-limits to foreigners.
At the same time, convoys of land cruisers were travelling around Jalalabad region as decoys.
At Gwador, a seaport with a large amount of Arab and North African dhow traffic, he is understood to have crossed the Arabian Sea to Oman and on to the Yemeni port of Al Muhalla.
"We were very bad on boats, particularly early on," admitted an American involved in the search. "The dhows were impossible to monitor."
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."
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