The Hunt for bin Laden Read Free

then the U.S. ambassador to Pakistan, whose account is supported by several other U.S. officials familiar with the CIA’s Afghan agent roster.

 
    CIA Surveillance Intensifies
    Back at Langley, the bin Laden unit, using classified channels, regularly transmitted reports to policymakers about threats bin Laden issued against American targets via faxed leaflets, television interviews and underground pamphlets. The CIA’s analysts described bin Laden at the time as an active, dangerous financier of Islamic extremism, but they considered him more a money source than a terrorist operator.
    To senior career officers in the CIA’s Counterterrorist Center, the TRODPINT tribal team now beckoned as a way to watch bin Laden in Afghanistan. The paid Afghan agents could monitor or harass the Saudi up close under CIA control — and perhaps capture him for trial if the White House approved such an operation. Operators and analysts in the bin Laden unit argued passionately for more active measures against him. Jeff O’Connell, then-director of the Counterterrorist Center, and his deputy, Paul Pillar, agreed in the summer of 1997 to hand them control of the TRODPINT agent team, complete with its weapons and spy gear.
    As bin Laden’s bloodcurdling televised threats against Americans increased in number and menace during 1997, the CIA — with the approval of the Clinton White House — turned from just watching bin Laden toward making plans to capture him.
    Working with lawyers at Langley in late 1997 and early 1998, the TRODPINT agents’ CIA controllers modified the original Kasi capture plan, with its secret airstrip for extraction flights, so it could be used to seize bin Laden and prosecute him, or kill him if he violently resisted arrest.
    A long and frustrating hunt for bin Laden had formally begun.
    During the three years before the Sept. 11 attacks, the hunt would eventually involve several dozen local paid CIA agents in Afghanistan and Pakistan, a secret commando team drawn from Uzbek special forces, another drawn from retired Pakistani special forces, and a deepening intelligence alliance with the legendary Tajik guerrilla leader from Afghanistan’s north, Ahmed Shah Massoud, a man with a long and mutually frustrating history with the CIA. But despite these varied efforts, bin Laden continually eluded their grasp.
    Years later, those involved in the secret campaign against bin Laden still disagree about why it failed — and who is to blame.
    On the front lines in Pakistan and Central Asia, working-level CIA officers felt they had a rare, urgent sense of the menace bin Laden posed before Sept. 11. Yet a number of controversial proposals to attack bin Laden were turned down by superiors at Langley or the White House, who feared that the plans were poorly developed, wouldn’t work or would embroil the United States in Afghanistan’s then-obscure civil war. At other times, plans to track or attack bin Laden were delayed or watered down after stalemated debates inside Clinton’s national security team.
    At Langley, CIA officers sometimes saw the Clinton Cabinet as overly cautious, obsessed with legalities, and unwilling to take political risks in Afghanistan by arming bin Laden’s Afghan enemies and directly confronting the radical Taliban Islamic militia. But at the Clinton White House, senior policymakers and counterterrorism analysts sometimes saw the CIA’s efforts in Afghanistan as timid, naive, self-protecting and ineffective.
    Some of the agency’s efforts involved collecting intelligence about bin Laden’s whereabouts; others grew into covert actions designed to capture or kill leaders of his al- Qaeda network. Both tracks were carried out in deep secrecy mainly by career clandestine service officers in the CIA’s Counterterrorist Center and the Near East Division of the agency’s Directorate of Operations.

 
    A Plan to Grab Bin Laden
    As the TRODPINT team began its work on bin Laden early in 1998, a federal