The Hunt for bin Laden Read Free Page A

grand jury in New York opened a secret investigation into the Saudi’s terrorist-financing activity. The probe had been prompted by a defector from bin Laden’s inner circle, financial evidence from terrorist attacks in Egypt and elsewhere, and old files from earlier terrorist cases in New York. No one outside the Justice Department was supposed to know about the grand jury’s work, but it began to leak to officials involved with the CIA’s planning.
    CIA officers working from Islamabad, led by station chief Gary Schroen, assumed in early 1998 that if their agents captured bin Laden in southern Afghanistan, a U.S. grand jury would quickly indict him. If not, the CIA or the Clinton White House would ask Egypt or Saudi Arabia to take custody of bin Laden for trial. Schroen kept asking the Counterterrorist Center at Langley, “Do we have an indictment?” The answers, according to several officials involved, were cryptic: Bin Laden was “indictable,” the Islamabad station was told.
    The TRODPINT team developed a detailed plan to hold bin Laden in a cave in southern Afghanistan for 30 days before U.S. Special Forces flew in secretly to take him away. The agents located a cave where they could hide out comfortably. They assured their CIA handlers that they had stored enough food and water there to keep bin Laden healthy.
    By imprisoning bin Laden in the cave, the agents hoped to ease his extraction. If enough time passed after his capture, al-Qaeda’s agitated lieutenants would be less alert when the Americans flew in to bundle him off. Also, the detention would allow time to persuade a U.S. attorney or a foreign government to hand down criminal charges.
    If CIA officers and their paid agents detained bin Laden for an eventual trial in the United States, they would be operating under the authority of Executive Order 12333, which allowed the CIA to aid the pursuit of international fugitives. The measure was signed by President Ronald Reagan in 1981 and renewed by successive presidents. A thick archive of Justice Department memorandums and court opinions upheld the right of American agents to abduct fugitives overseas and return them to U.S. courts in many instances.
    At the same time, Executive Order 12333 banned assassination by the CIA or its agents. CIA officers met with their TRODPINT agents in Pakistan to emphasize that their plan to capture bin Laden and hold him in the Afghan cave could not turn into an assassination. “I want to reinforce this with you,” one officer told the Afghans in a meeting later described in cables to Langley and Washington. “You are to capture him alive.”
    As they refined their kidnapping plans in the spring of 1998, the bin Laden unit at the Counterterrorist Center looked with rising interest at Tarnak Farm. This was a compound of perhaps 100 acres that lay isolated on a stretch of desert about three miles from the Kandahar airport. On some nights, bin Laden slept at Tarnak with one of his wives. He chatted on his satellite phone and lived fairly openly, protected by bodyguards. The question arose: Could the CIA’s tribal agents be equipped to raid bin Laden’s home and take him from his bed?
    Tarnak’s main compound was encircled by a mud-brick wall about 10 feet high. Inside were about 80 modest one-story and two-story structures. Flat plains of sand and sagebrush extended for miles. Kandahar’s crowded bazaars were a half-hour drive away.
    CIA officers based in Islamabad spent long hours with the TRODPINT team’s leaders to devise a plan to attack Tarnak in the middle of the night. The Afghans had scouted and mapped Tarnak up close; the CIA had photographed it from satellites.
    The agents organized an attack party of about 30 fighters. They identified a staging point where they would assemble their vehicles. They would drive to a secondary rallying point a few miles from Tarnak.
    About 2 a.m., the main raiding party would walk across the desert. They had scouted a path that