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From Washington Post online, the first of two articles by staff writer Steve Coll, whose just-published book "Ghost Wars" details the CIA's efforts to capture or kill Osama Bin Laden during the 1990's and through Sept. 10, 2001.
There is no poltical angle here. I'm posting this because lot of curiosity and frustration have been expressed about why Bin Laden wasn't stopped from carrying out his well publicized threats.
BTW, the author will be answering questions online tonight at 10 pm east coast U.S. time. For the link, go to http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A59775-2004Feb21.html. Access to Washington Post online is free but requires registering your name and e-mail address.
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A Secret Hunt Unravels in Afghanistan
Back at Langley, the bin Laden unit, using classified channels, regularly transmitted reports to policymakers about threats issued by bin Laden against American targets -- via faxed leaflets, television interviews and underground pamphlets. The CIA's analysts described bin Laden at this time as an active, dangerous financier of Islamic extremism, but they saw him as 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 approval from Clinton's 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 Massoud, the northern Afghan guerrilla leader. 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 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 cabinet.
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, naïve, 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 bin Laden's 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.
Audacious Plans Take Root
As the TRODPINT team began its work on bin Laden early in 1998, a federal 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.
Osama bin Laden in a 1998 news conference in Afghanistan. (Reuters File Photo)
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 in the cave to keep bin Laden healthy while he was there.
By imprisoning bin Laden in the cave, the agents hoped to ease his extraction. If enough time passed after bin Laden's initial capture, al Qaeda's agitated lieutenants would be less alert when the Americans flew in to bundle bin Laden off. Also, the detention would allow time to persuade either a U.S. attorney or a foreign government to hand down criminal charges.
If CIA offiers 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, as he later described the meeting in cables to Langley and Washington. "You are to capture him alive."
Physical and Political Risks
As they refined their kidnapping plans in the spring of 1998, the bin Laden unit at the CIA's 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 in this period and lived fairly openly, protected by bodyguards. The question arose: Could the CIA's tribal agents be equipped to raid bin Laden's house 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 lay 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 all of their vehicles. They would drive to a secondary rallying point a few miles from Tarnak.
The main raiding party would walk across the desert at about 2 a.m. They had scouted a path that avoided minefields and had deep gullies to mask their approach. They would breach the outer wall by crawling through a drainage ditch on the airport side.
A second group planned to roll quietly toward the front gate in two vehicles. They would carry silenced pistols to take out two guards at the entrance. Meanwhile the other attackers would have burst into the several small huts where bin Laden's wives slept. When they found the tall, bearded Saudi, they would cuff him, drag him toward the gate, and load him into a Land Cruiser. Other vehicles back at the rally point would approach in sequence and they would all drive together to the provisioned cave about 30 miles away.
Satellite photography and reports from the ground indicated that there were dozens of women and children living at Tarnak. Langley asked for detailed explanations from members of the tribal team about how they planned to minimize harm to bystanders during their assault.
The CIA officers involved thought their agents were serious, semiprofessional fighters who were trying to cooperate as best they could. Yet "if you understood the Afghan mind-set and the context," recalled an officer involved, it was clear that in any raid the Afghans would probably fire indiscriminately at some point.
In Washington, Richard Clarke, the White House counterterrorism coordinator, drove out to Langley late in the spring of 1998 to meet with his CIA counterpart, O'Connell, who briefed him on the details of the Tarnak attack plan and how much it would cost. O'Connell also outlined the political risks, including the potential problem of civilian casualties.
Members of the White House counterterrorism team reacted skeptically. Their sense was that the TRODPINT agents were old anti-Soviet mujaheddin who had long since passed their peak fighting years and were probably milking the CIA for money while minimizing the risks they took on the ground. If they did go through with a Tarnak raid, some White House officials feared, women and children would die and bin Laden would probably escape. Such a massacre would undermine U.S. interests in the Muslim world and elsewhere.
The CIA's top leaders reviewed the proposed raid in June 1998. The discussion revealed similar doubts among senior officers in the Directorate of Operations. In the end, as CIA Director George J. Tenet described it to colleagues years later, the CIA's relevant chain of command -- Jack Downing, then chief of the Directorate of Operations, his deputy James Pavitt, O'Connell and Pillar -- all recommended against going forward with the Tarnak raid.
By then there was no enthusiasm for the plan in the Clinton White House, either. "Am I missing something? Aren't these people going to be mowed down on their way to the wall?" Clarke asked his White House and CIA colleagues sarcastically, one official recalled.
Tenet never formally presented the raid plan for Clinton's approval, according to several officials involved.
The decision was cabled to Islamabad. The tribal team's plans should be set aside, perhaps to be revived later. Meanwhile, the agents were encouraged to continue to look for opportunities to catch bin Laden away from Tarnak, where, among other things, an ambush attempt would carry relatively little risk of civilian deaths.
Some of the working-level CIA officers involved in the planning reacted bitterly to the decision. They believed the kidnapping plan could succeed.
Less than two months later, on Aug. 7, 1998, two teams of al Qaeda suicide bombers launched synchronized attacks against two U.S. embassies in Africa. In Nairobi, Kenya, 213 people died and 4,000 were injured. In Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, the toll was 11 dead and 85 wounded. Within months, the New York federal grand jury previously investigating bin Laden delivered an indictment of the Saudi for directing the strikes, among other alleged crimes.
At Langley's Counterterrorist Center, some CIA analysts and officers were devastated and angry as they watched the televised images of death and rescue in Africa. One of the bin Laden unit's analysts confronted Tenet. "You are responsible for those deaths," she said, "because you didn't act on the information we had, when we could have gotten him" through the Tarnak raid, one official involved recalled her saying. The woman was "crying and sobbing, and it was a very rough scene," the official said.
Tenet stood there and took it. He was a boisterous, emotional man, and he did not shrink from honest confrontation, some of his CIA colleagues felt. After the Africa attacks, Tenet redoubled his pressure on the bin Laden unit's covert campaign to find their target.
{My italics - This makes me grateful that when I have a bad career year, people don't die. They just buy fewer homes in golf course communities. SR}
By then, however, bin Laden had dramatically increased his security. He discarded his traceable satellite phone and moved much more stealthily around Afghanistan.
For those who had worked on the Tarnak raid plan, the questions lingered. Why had the CIA's leaders turned the idea down?
Down in the trenches of a bureaucracy enveloped in secrecy, the resentments festered, amplified by rumors, office grievances and the intensity of the daily grind.
On Aug. 20, acting on intelligence reports of a scheduled meeting of bin Laden and other al Qaeda leaders, Clinton ordered 75 cruise missiles launched from a submarine in the Arabian Sea against a network of jihadist training camps in eastern Afghanistan. The attack killed at least 21 Pakistani volunteers but missed bin Laden.
'Weekend Warriors'
By mid-1999, the sense both at the White House and in Tenet's seventh-floor suite at CIA headquarters in Langley was that the Counterterrorist Center had grown too dependent on the TRODPINT tribal agents. One of Tenet's aides referred to them derisively as "weekend warriors," middle-aged and now prosperous Afghan fighters with a few Kalashnikovs in their closets.
At the White House, among the few national security officials who knew of the agents' existence, the attitude evolved from "hopeful skepticism to outright mockery," as one official recalled it.
At one point the agents moved north to Kabul's outskirts and rented a farm as a base. They moved in and out of the Afghan capital to scout homes where bin Laden occasionally stayed. They developed a new set of plans in which they would strike a Kabul house where bin Laden slept, snatch the Saudi from his bed and retreat from the city in light trucks. The CIA supplied explosives to the agents because their plan called for them to blow up small bridges as they made their escape.
The agents never acted. Their rented farm was a working vineyard. William B. Milam, then U.S. ambassador to Pakistan, who was briefed on the operation, asked his CIA colleagues sarcastically, "So what are they waiting for -- the wine to ferment?"
To shake up the hunt, Tenet appointed a fast-track executive assistant from the seventh floor, known to his colleagues as Rich, to take charge of the bin Laden unit. Tenet also named Cofer Black, a longtime case officer in Africa who had tracked bin Laden in Sudan, as the Counterterrorist Center's new director. The bin Laden unit and its chief reported directly to Black; during the next two years they would work closely together.
When Black took over, the bin Laden unit had about 25 professionals. Most of them were women, and two-thirds had backgrounds as analysts. They called themselves "the Manson Family," after the crazed convicted murderer Charles Manson, because they had acquired a reputation within the CIA for wild alarmism about the rising al Qaeda threat.
Their reports described over and over bin Laden's specific, open threats to inflict mass casualties against Americans. They could not understand why no one else seemed to take the threat as seriously as they did. They pleaded with colleagues that bin Laden was not like the old leftist, theatrical terrorists of the 1970s and 1980s who wanted, in terrorism expert Brian Jenkins's famous maxim, "a lot of people watching but not a lot of people dead." Bin Laden wanted many American civilians to die, they warned. They could be dismissive of colleagues who did not share their sense of urgency.
The rest of the CIA and the intelligence community looked on our efforts as eccentric and at times fanatic," recalled a former chief of the bin Laden unit. "It was a cult," agreed a U.S. official who dealt with them. "Jonestown," said another person involved, asked to sum up the unit's atmosphere. "I outlawed Kool-Aid."
Working with the Islamabad station, the bin Laden unit pushed for the recruitment of agents who could operate or travel in Afghanistan.
Some of those were informal sources, helping the CIA because of their political opposition to the Taliban. Others were recruited onto the CIA's payroll. Case officers working the Afghan borderlands began to recruit a few Taliban military leaders, including a brigade-level commander in eastern Afghanistan. One young case officer operating from Islamabad recruited six or seven Taliban commanders operating in the eastern region. Yet none of the recruited agents was close to bin Laden. The CIA could not recruit a single agent inside the core al Qaeda terrorist leadership.
Black knew that the CIA was in trouble "without penetrations" of bin Laden's organization, as a classified Counterterrorist Center briefing to Clinton's national security aides put it late in 1999. "While we need to disrupt [terrorist] operations . . . we need also to recruit sources," even though "recruiting terrorist sources is difficult."
The CIA had the best agent coverage around Kandahar. Even so, its classified tracking reports from multiple sources always seemed a day or two behind bin Laden's movements. The lack of a source in al Qaeda's inner circle made forecasting the Saudi's hour-to-hour itinerary impossible. Moreover, Kandahar was the Taliban's military stronghold. The Taliban had provided safe haven to bin Laden in Afghanistan in exchange for money and al Qaeda's troops. Even if the CIA pinpointed bin Laden downtown, there was no easy way to organize a capture operation; the attacking force would face strong opposition from Taliban units.
In the summer of 1999, a truck bomb detonated outside the Kandahar house of Taliban leader Mohammad Omar. Afterward, bin Laden used his wealth to build new compounds for the Taliban leader. In Omar's home province of Uruzgan, bin Laden built a new training complex for foreign al Qaeda volunteers.
The CIA ordered satellite imagery and agent reports to document this camp. Officers hoped bin Laden might wander in for an inspection. At one point a team of four or five Afghan agents from the original TRODPINT group approached the camp at night. Al Qaeda guards opened fire and wounded one of them, they reported.
Kabul was a relatively easy place to spy. The Afghan capital was a sprawling and ethnically diverse city, a place of strangers and travelers. At one point the CIA believed bin Laden had two wives in Kabul. He would visit their houses periodically. The Islamabad station recruited an Afghan who worked as a security guard at one of the Kabul houses bin Laden used. But the agent was so far down the al Qaeda information chain that he never knew when bin Laden was going to turn up. He was summoned to duty just as the Saudi's vehicles rolled in.
Traveling 'the Circuit'
Bin Laden's travels within Afghanistan followed a somewhat predictable path. He would often ride west on the Ring Road from Kandahar, then loop north and east through Ghowr province. The CIA mapped guesthouses in obscure Ghowr, one of Afghanistan's most isolated and impoverished regions. From there the Saudi usually moved east to Kabul and then sometimes on to Jalalabad before turning south again toward Kandahar.
Americans who studied this track called it "the circuit." At the White House, counterterrorism coordinator Richard Clarke tried to develop logarithmic formulas that attempted to predict where bin Laden was likely to move next when he was at any given point.
The CIA's bin Laden unit sought to trap bin Laden out of "KKJ," an insider's abbreviation for the densely populated cities of Kabul, Kandahar and Jalalabad. They hoped to catch him in lightly populated rural areas. Yet they struggled to find a convincing plan.
They knew that on the ground in Afghanistan by the summer of 1999, there was only one experienced, proven guerrilla leader waging war and collecting intelligence day in and day out against the Taliban, bin Laden and their radical Islamic allies. This was the legendary Tajik guerrilla leader Ahmed Shah Massoud, a man with a long and mutually frustrating history with the CIA.
From 1997 onward, Massoud's Northern Alliance militia forces waged a brutal, existential war against the Taliban north of Kabul, often battling directly against bin Laden's Arab, Chechen and Pakistani volunteers. They knew bin Laden not only as a preacher, financier and terrorist planner, but sometimes as a military field commander who wandered near their battle lines.
There were serious doubts inside Clinton's cabinet about the history of drug trafficking and human rights violations among Massoud's Northern Alliance forces. But at the CIA, in the Counterterrorist Center, analysts and officers in the bin Laden unit knew one thing for certain: Massoud was the enemy of their enemy.
A deeper, more active, more lethal alliance with Massoud, these CIA officers argued, offered by far the best chance to capture or kill bin Laden before he struck again.
Staff writer Griff Witte contributed to this report.
NEXT: The CIA and Massoud.
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This report was adapted from Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001, The Penguin Press (New York: 2004), by Washington Post managing editor Steve Coll, who will be online Monday at 10 a.m. ET to answer questions about the book.
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A related story by the book's author in today's W. Post:
Legal Disputes Over Hunt Paralyzed Clinton's Aides
By Steve Coll
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, February 22, 2004; Page A17
Between 1998 and 2000, the CIA and President Bill Clinton's national security team were caught up in paralyzing policy disputes as they secretly debated the legal permissions for covert operations against Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan.
The debates left both White House counterterrorism analysts and CIA career operators frustrated and at times confused about what kinds of operations could be carried out, according to interviews with more than a dozen officials and lawyers who were directly involved.
There was little question that under U.S. law it was permissible to kill bin Laden and his top aides, at least after the evidence showed they were responsible for the attacks on U.S. embassies in Africa in 1998. The ban on assassinations -- contained in a 1981 executive order by President Ronald Reagan -- did not apply to military targets, the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel had previously ruled in classified opinions. Bin Laden's Tarnak Farm and other terrorist camps in Afghanistan were legitimate military targets under this definition, White House lawyers agreed.
Also, the assassination ban did not apply to attacks carried out in preemptive self-defense -- when it seemed likely that the target was planning to strike the United States. White House and Justice Department lawyers debated whether bin Laden qualified under this standard as well, and most of the time agreed that he did.
Clinton had demonstrated his willingness to kill bin Laden, without any pretense of seeking his arrest, when he ordered the cruise missile strikes on an eastern Afghan camp in August 1998, after the CIA obtained intelligence that bin Laden might be there for a meeting of al Qaeda leaders.
Yet the secret legal authorizations Clinton signed after this failed missile strike required the CIA to make a good faith effort to capture bin Laden for trial, not kill him outright.
Beginning in the summer of 1998, Clinton signed a series of top secret memos authorizing the CIA or its agents to use lethal force, if necessary, in an attempt to capture bin Laden and several top lieutenants and return them to the United States to face trial.
From Director George J. Tenet on down, the CIA's senior managers wanted the White House lawyers to be crystal clear about what was permissible in the field. They were conditioned by history -- the CIA assassination scandals of the 1970s, the Iran-contra affair of the 1980s -- to be cautious about legal permissions emanating from the White House. Earlier in his career, Tenet had served as staff director of the Senate Intelligence Committee and director of intelligence issues at the White House, roles steeped in the Washington culture of oversight and careful legality.
Tenet and his senior CIA colleagues demanded that the White House lay out rules of engagement for capturing bin Laden in writing, and that they be signed by Clinton. Then, with such detailed authorizations in hand, every one of the CIA officers who handed a gun or a map to an Afghan agent could be assured that he or she was operating legally.
This was the role of the Memorandum of Notification, as it was called. It was typically seven or eight pages long, written in the form of a presidential decision memo. It began with a statement about how bin Laden and his aides had attacked the United States. The memo made clear the president was aware of the risks he was assuming as he sent the CIA into action.
Some of the most sensitive language concerned the specific authorization to use deadly force. Clinton's national security aides said they wanted to encourage the CIA to carry out an effective operation against bin Laden, not to burden the agency with constraints or doubts. Yet Clinton's aides did not want authorizations that could be interpreted by Afghan agents as an unrestricted license to kill. For one thing, the Justice Department signaled that it would oppose such language if it was proposed for Clinton's signature.
The compromise wording, in a succession of bin Laden-focused memos, always expressed some ambiguity about how and when deadly force could be used in an operation designed to take bin Laden into custody. Typical language, recalled one official involved, instructed the CIA to "apprehend with lethal force as authorized."
At the CIA, officers and supervisors agonized over these abstract phrases. They worried that if an operation in Afghanistan went badly, they would be accused of having acted outside the memo's scope. Over time, recriminations grew between the CIA and the White House.
It was common in Clinton's cabinet and among his National Security Council aides to see the CIA as too cautious, paralyzed by fears of legal and political risks. At Langley, this criticism rankled. The CIA's senior managers believed officials at the White House wanted to have it both ways: They liked to blame the agency for its supposed lack of aggression, yet they sent over classified legal memos full of wiggle words.
Clinton's covert policy against bin Laden pursued two goals at the same time. He ordered submarines equipped with cruise missiles to patrol secretly in waters off Pakistan in the hope that CIA spotters would one day identify bin Laden's location confidently enough to warrant a deadly missile strike.
But Clinton also authorized the CIA to carry out operations that legally required the agency's officers to plan in almost every instance to capture bin Laden alive and bring him to the United States to face trial.
This meant the CIA officers had to arrange in advance for detention facilities, extraction flights and other contingencies -- even if they expected that bin Laden would probably die in the arrest attempt. These requirements made operational planning much more cumbersome, the CIA officers contended.
In fashioning this sensitive policy in the midst of an impeachment crisis that lasted into early 1999, Clinton's national security adviser, Samuel R. "Sandy" Berger, struggled to forge a consensus within the White House national security team. Among other things, he had to keep on board a skeptical Attorney General Janet Reno and her Justice Department colleagues, who were deeply invested in law enforcement approaches to terrorism, according to senior officials involved.
As the months passed, Clinton signed new memos in which the language, while still ambiguous, made the use of lethal force by the CIA's Afghan agents more likely, according to officials involved. At first the CIA was permitted to use lethal force only in the course of a legitimate attempt to make an arrest. Later the memos allowed for a pure lethal attack if an arrest was not possible. Still, the CIA was required to plan all its agent missions with an arrest in mind.
Some CIA managers chafed at the White House instructions. The CIA received "no written word nor verbal order to conduct a lethal action" against bin Laden before Sept. 11, one official involved recalled. "The objective was to render this guy to law enforcement." In these operations, the CIA had to recruit agents "to grab [bin Laden] and bring him to a secure place where we can turn him over to the FBI. . . . If they had said 'lethal action' it would have been a whole different kettle of fish, and much easier."
Berger later recalled his frustration about this hidden debate. Referring to the military option in the two-track policy, he said at a 2002 congressional hearing: "It was no question, the cruise missiles were not trying to capture him. They were not law enforcement techniques."
The overriding trouble was, whether they arrested bin Laden or killed him, they first had to find him.
© 2004 The Washington Post Company
There is no poltical angle here. I'm posting this because lot of curiosity and frustration have been expressed about why Bin Laden wasn't stopped from carrying out his well publicized threats.
BTW, the author will be answering questions online tonight at 10 pm east coast U.S. time. For the link, go to http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A59775-2004Feb21.html. Access to Washington Post online is free but requires registering your name and e-mail address.
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A Secret Hunt Unravels in Afghanistan
Back at Langley, the bin Laden unit, using classified channels, regularly transmitted reports to policymakers about threats issued by bin Laden against American targets -- via faxed leaflets, television interviews and underground pamphlets. The CIA's analysts described bin Laden at this time as an active, dangerous financier of Islamic extremism, but they saw him as 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 approval from Clinton's 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 Massoud, the northern Afghan guerrilla leader. 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 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 cabinet.
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, naïve, 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 bin Laden's 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.
Audacious Plans Take Root
As the TRODPINT team began its work on bin Laden early in 1998, a federal 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.
Osama bin Laden in a 1998 news conference in Afghanistan. (Reuters File Photo)
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 in the cave to keep bin Laden healthy while he was there.
By imprisoning bin Laden in the cave, the agents hoped to ease his extraction. If enough time passed after bin Laden's initial capture, al Qaeda's agitated lieutenants would be less alert when the Americans flew in to bundle bin Laden off. Also, the detention would allow time to persuade either a U.S. attorney or a foreign government to hand down criminal charges.
If CIA offiers 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, as he later described the meeting in cables to Langley and Washington. "You are to capture him alive."
Physical and Political Risks
As they refined their kidnapping plans in the spring of 1998, the bin Laden unit at the CIA's 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 in this period and lived fairly openly, protected by bodyguards. The question arose: Could the CIA's tribal agents be equipped to raid bin Laden's house 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 lay 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 all of their vehicles. They would drive to a secondary rallying point a few miles from Tarnak.
The main raiding party would walk across the desert at about 2 a.m. They had scouted a path that avoided minefields and had deep gullies to mask their approach. They would breach the outer wall by crawling through a drainage ditch on the airport side.
A second group planned to roll quietly toward the front gate in two vehicles. They would carry silenced pistols to take out two guards at the entrance. Meanwhile the other attackers would have burst into the several small huts where bin Laden's wives slept. When they found the tall, bearded Saudi, they would cuff him, drag him toward the gate, and load him into a Land Cruiser. Other vehicles back at the rally point would approach in sequence and they would all drive together to the provisioned cave about 30 miles away.
Satellite photography and reports from the ground indicated that there were dozens of women and children living at Tarnak. Langley asked for detailed explanations from members of the tribal team about how they planned to minimize harm to bystanders during their assault.
The CIA officers involved thought their agents were serious, semiprofessional fighters who were trying to cooperate as best they could. Yet "if you understood the Afghan mind-set and the context," recalled an officer involved, it was clear that in any raid the Afghans would probably fire indiscriminately at some point.
In Washington, Richard Clarke, the White House counterterrorism coordinator, drove out to Langley late in the spring of 1998 to meet with his CIA counterpart, O'Connell, who briefed him on the details of the Tarnak attack plan and how much it would cost. O'Connell also outlined the political risks, including the potential problem of civilian casualties.
Members of the White House counterterrorism team reacted skeptically. Their sense was that the TRODPINT agents were old anti-Soviet mujaheddin who had long since passed their peak fighting years and were probably milking the CIA for money while minimizing the risks they took on the ground. If they did go through with a Tarnak raid, some White House officials feared, women and children would die and bin Laden would probably escape. Such a massacre would undermine U.S. interests in the Muslim world and elsewhere.
The CIA's top leaders reviewed the proposed raid in June 1998. The discussion revealed similar doubts among senior officers in the Directorate of Operations. In the end, as CIA Director George J. Tenet described it to colleagues years later, the CIA's relevant chain of command -- Jack Downing, then chief of the Directorate of Operations, his deputy James Pavitt, O'Connell and Pillar -- all recommended against going forward with the Tarnak raid.
By then there was no enthusiasm for the plan in the Clinton White House, either. "Am I missing something? Aren't these people going to be mowed down on their way to the wall?" Clarke asked his White House and CIA colleagues sarcastically, one official recalled.
Tenet never formally presented the raid plan for Clinton's approval, according to several officials involved.
The decision was cabled to Islamabad. The tribal team's plans should be set aside, perhaps to be revived later. Meanwhile, the agents were encouraged to continue to look for opportunities to catch bin Laden away from Tarnak, where, among other things, an ambush attempt would carry relatively little risk of civilian deaths.
Some of the working-level CIA officers involved in the planning reacted bitterly to the decision. They believed the kidnapping plan could succeed.
Less than two months later, on Aug. 7, 1998, two teams of al Qaeda suicide bombers launched synchronized attacks against two U.S. embassies in Africa. In Nairobi, Kenya, 213 people died and 4,000 were injured. In Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, the toll was 11 dead and 85 wounded. Within months, the New York federal grand jury previously investigating bin Laden delivered an indictment of the Saudi for directing the strikes, among other alleged crimes.
At Langley's Counterterrorist Center, some CIA analysts and officers were devastated and angry as they watched the televised images of death and rescue in Africa. One of the bin Laden unit's analysts confronted Tenet. "You are responsible for those deaths," she said, "because you didn't act on the information we had, when we could have gotten him" through the Tarnak raid, one official involved recalled her saying. The woman was "crying and sobbing, and it was a very rough scene," the official said.
Tenet stood there and took it. He was a boisterous, emotional man, and he did not shrink from honest confrontation, some of his CIA colleagues felt. After the Africa attacks, Tenet redoubled his pressure on the bin Laden unit's covert campaign to find their target.
{My italics - This makes me grateful that when I have a bad career year, people don't die. They just buy fewer homes in golf course communities. SR}
By then, however, bin Laden had dramatically increased his security. He discarded his traceable satellite phone and moved much more stealthily around Afghanistan.
For those who had worked on the Tarnak raid plan, the questions lingered. Why had the CIA's leaders turned the idea down?
Down in the trenches of a bureaucracy enveloped in secrecy, the resentments festered, amplified by rumors, office grievances and the intensity of the daily grind.
On Aug. 20, acting on intelligence reports of a scheduled meeting of bin Laden and other al Qaeda leaders, Clinton ordered 75 cruise missiles launched from a submarine in the Arabian Sea against a network of jihadist training camps in eastern Afghanistan. The attack killed at least 21 Pakistani volunteers but missed bin Laden.
'Weekend Warriors'
By mid-1999, the sense both at the White House and in Tenet's seventh-floor suite at CIA headquarters in Langley was that the Counterterrorist Center had grown too dependent on the TRODPINT tribal agents. One of Tenet's aides referred to them derisively as "weekend warriors," middle-aged and now prosperous Afghan fighters with a few Kalashnikovs in their closets.
At the White House, among the few national security officials who knew of the agents' existence, the attitude evolved from "hopeful skepticism to outright mockery," as one official recalled it.
At one point the agents moved north to Kabul's outskirts and rented a farm as a base. They moved in and out of the Afghan capital to scout homes where bin Laden occasionally stayed. They developed a new set of plans in which they would strike a Kabul house where bin Laden slept, snatch the Saudi from his bed and retreat from the city in light trucks. The CIA supplied explosives to the agents because their plan called for them to blow up small bridges as they made their escape.
The agents never acted. Their rented farm was a working vineyard. William B. Milam, then U.S. ambassador to Pakistan, who was briefed on the operation, asked his CIA colleagues sarcastically, "So what are they waiting for -- the wine to ferment?"
To shake up the hunt, Tenet appointed a fast-track executive assistant from the seventh floor, known to his colleagues as Rich, to take charge of the bin Laden unit. Tenet also named Cofer Black, a longtime case officer in Africa who had tracked bin Laden in Sudan, as the Counterterrorist Center's new director. The bin Laden unit and its chief reported directly to Black; during the next two years they would work closely together.
When Black took over, the bin Laden unit had about 25 professionals. Most of them were women, and two-thirds had backgrounds as analysts. They called themselves "the Manson Family," after the crazed convicted murderer Charles Manson, because they had acquired a reputation within the CIA for wild alarmism about the rising al Qaeda threat.
Their reports described over and over bin Laden's specific, open threats to inflict mass casualties against Americans. They could not understand why no one else seemed to take the threat as seriously as they did. They pleaded with colleagues that bin Laden was not like the old leftist, theatrical terrorists of the 1970s and 1980s who wanted, in terrorism expert Brian Jenkins's famous maxim, "a lot of people watching but not a lot of people dead." Bin Laden wanted many American civilians to die, they warned. They could be dismissive of colleagues who did not share their sense of urgency.
The rest of the CIA and the intelligence community looked on our efforts as eccentric and at times fanatic," recalled a former chief of the bin Laden unit. "It was a cult," agreed a U.S. official who dealt with them. "Jonestown," said another person involved, asked to sum up the unit's atmosphere. "I outlawed Kool-Aid."
Working with the Islamabad station, the bin Laden unit pushed for the recruitment of agents who could operate or travel in Afghanistan.
Some of those were informal sources, helping the CIA because of their political opposition to the Taliban. Others were recruited onto the CIA's payroll. Case officers working the Afghan borderlands began to recruit a few Taliban military leaders, including a brigade-level commander in eastern Afghanistan. One young case officer operating from Islamabad recruited six or seven Taliban commanders operating in the eastern region. Yet none of the recruited agents was close to bin Laden. The CIA could not recruit a single agent inside the core al Qaeda terrorist leadership.
Black knew that the CIA was in trouble "without penetrations" of bin Laden's organization, as a classified Counterterrorist Center briefing to Clinton's national security aides put it late in 1999. "While we need to disrupt [terrorist] operations . . . we need also to recruit sources," even though "recruiting terrorist sources is difficult."
The CIA had the best agent coverage around Kandahar. Even so, its classified tracking reports from multiple sources always seemed a day or two behind bin Laden's movements. The lack of a source in al Qaeda's inner circle made forecasting the Saudi's hour-to-hour itinerary impossible. Moreover, Kandahar was the Taliban's military stronghold. The Taliban had provided safe haven to bin Laden in Afghanistan in exchange for money and al Qaeda's troops. Even if the CIA pinpointed bin Laden downtown, there was no easy way to organize a capture operation; the attacking force would face strong opposition from Taliban units.
In the summer of 1999, a truck bomb detonated outside the Kandahar house of Taliban leader Mohammad Omar. Afterward, bin Laden used his wealth to build new compounds for the Taliban leader. In Omar's home province of Uruzgan, bin Laden built a new training complex for foreign al Qaeda volunteers.
The CIA ordered satellite imagery and agent reports to document this camp. Officers hoped bin Laden might wander in for an inspection. At one point a team of four or five Afghan agents from the original TRODPINT group approached the camp at night. Al Qaeda guards opened fire and wounded one of them, they reported.
Kabul was a relatively easy place to spy. The Afghan capital was a sprawling and ethnically diverse city, a place of strangers and travelers. At one point the CIA believed bin Laden had two wives in Kabul. He would visit their houses periodically. The Islamabad station recruited an Afghan who worked as a security guard at one of the Kabul houses bin Laden used. But the agent was so far down the al Qaeda information chain that he never knew when bin Laden was going to turn up. He was summoned to duty just as the Saudi's vehicles rolled in.
Traveling 'the Circuit'
Bin Laden's travels within Afghanistan followed a somewhat predictable path. He would often ride west on the Ring Road from Kandahar, then loop north and east through Ghowr province. The CIA mapped guesthouses in obscure Ghowr, one of Afghanistan's most isolated and impoverished regions. From there the Saudi usually moved east to Kabul and then sometimes on to Jalalabad before turning south again toward Kandahar.
Americans who studied this track called it "the circuit." At the White House, counterterrorism coordinator Richard Clarke tried to develop logarithmic formulas that attempted to predict where bin Laden was likely to move next when he was at any given point.
The CIA's bin Laden unit sought to trap bin Laden out of "KKJ," an insider's abbreviation for the densely populated cities of Kabul, Kandahar and Jalalabad. They hoped to catch him in lightly populated rural areas. Yet they struggled to find a convincing plan.
They knew that on the ground in Afghanistan by the summer of 1999, there was only one experienced, proven guerrilla leader waging war and collecting intelligence day in and day out against the Taliban, bin Laden and their radical Islamic allies. This was the legendary Tajik guerrilla leader Ahmed Shah Massoud, a man with a long and mutually frustrating history with the CIA.
From 1997 onward, Massoud's Northern Alliance militia forces waged a brutal, existential war against the Taliban north of Kabul, often battling directly against bin Laden's Arab, Chechen and Pakistani volunteers. They knew bin Laden not only as a preacher, financier and terrorist planner, but sometimes as a military field commander who wandered near their battle lines.
There were serious doubts inside Clinton's cabinet about the history of drug trafficking and human rights violations among Massoud's Northern Alliance forces. But at the CIA, in the Counterterrorist Center, analysts and officers in the bin Laden unit knew one thing for certain: Massoud was the enemy of their enemy.
A deeper, more active, more lethal alliance with Massoud, these CIA officers argued, offered by far the best chance to capture or kill bin Laden before he struck again.
Staff writer Griff Witte contributed to this report.
NEXT: The CIA and Massoud.
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This report was adapted from Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001, The Penguin Press (New York: 2004), by Washington Post managing editor Steve Coll, who will be online Monday at 10 a.m. ET to answer questions about the book.
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A related story by the book's author in today's W. Post:
Legal Disputes Over Hunt Paralyzed Clinton's Aides
By Steve Coll
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, February 22, 2004; Page A17
Between 1998 and 2000, the CIA and President Bill Clinton's national security team were caught up in paralyzing policy disputes as they secretly debated the legal permissions for covert operations against Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan.
The debates left both White House counterterrorism analysts and CIA career operators frustrated and at times confused about what kinds of operations could be carried out, according to interviews with more than a dozen officials and lawyers who were directly involved.
There was little question that under U.S. law it was permissible to kill bin Laden and his top aides, at least after the evidence showed they were responsible for the attacks on U.S. embassies in Africa in 1998. The ban on assassinations -- contained in a 1981 executive order by President Ronald Reagan -- did not apply to military targets, the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel had previously ruled in classified opinions. Bin Laden's Tarnak Farm and other terrorist camps in Afghanistan were legitimate military targets under this definition, White House lawyers agreed.
Also, the assassination ban did not apply to attacks carried out in preemptive self-defense -- when it seemed likely that the target was planning to strike the United States. White House and Justice Department lawyers debated whether bin Laden qualified under this standard as well, and most of the time agreed that he did.
Clinton had demonstrated his willingness to kill bin Laden, without any pretense of seeking his arrest, when he ordered the cruise missile strikes on an eastern Afghan camp in August 1998, after the CIA obtained intelligence that bin Laden might be there for a meeting of al Qaeda leaders.
Yet the secret legal authorizations Clinton signed after this failed missile strike required the CIA to make a good faith effort to capture bin Laden for trial, not kill him outright.
Beginning in the summer of 1998, Clinton signed a series of top secret memos authorizing the CIA or its agents to use lethal force, if necessary, in an attempt to capture bin Laden and several top lieutenants and return them to the United States to face trial.
From Director George J. Tenet on down, the CIA's senior managers wanted the White House lawyers to be crystal clear about what was permissible in the field. They were conditioned by history -- the CIA assassination scandals of the 1970s, the Iran-contra affair of the 1980s -- to be cautious about legal permissions emanating from the White House. Earlier in his career, Tenet had served as staff director of the Senate Intelligence Committee and director of intelligence issues at the White House, roles steeped in the Washington culture of oversight and careful legality.
Tenet and his senior CIA colleagues demanded that the White House lay out rules of engagement for capturing bin Laden in writing, and that they be signed by Clinton. Then, with such detailed authorizations in hand, every one of the CIA officers who handed a gun or a map to an Afghan agent could be assured that he or she was operating legally.
This was the role of the Memorandum of Notification, as it was called. It was typically seven or eight pages long, written in the form of a presidential decision memo. It began with a statement about how bin Laden and his aides had attacked the United States. The memo made clear the president was aware of the risks he was assuming as he sent the CIA into action.
Some of the most sensitive language concerned the specific authorization to use deadly force. Clinton's national security aides said they wanted to encourage the CIA to carry out an effective operation against bin Laden, not to burden the agency with constraints or doubts. Yet Clinton's aides did not want authorizations that could be interpreted by Afghan agents as an unrestricted license to kill. For one thing, the Justice Department signaled that it would oppose such language if it was proposed for Clinton's signature.
The compromise wording, in a succession of bin Laden-focused memos, always expressed some ambiguity about how and when deadly force could be used in an operation designed to take bin Laden into custody. Typical language, recalled one official involved, instructed the CIA to "apprehend with lethal force as authorized."
At the CIA, officers and supervisors agonized over these abstract phrases. They worried that if an operation in Afghanistan went badly, they would be accused of having acted outside the memo's scope. Over time, recriminations grew between the CIA and the White House.
It was common in Clinton's cabinet and among his National Security Council aides to see the CIA as too cautious, paralyzed by fears of legal and political risks. At Langley, this criticism rankled. The CIA's senior managers believed officials at the White House wanted to have it both ways: They liked to blame the agency for its supposed lack of aggression, yet they sent over classified legal memos full of wiggle words.
Clinton's covert policy against bin Laden pursued two goals at the same time. He ordered submarines equipped with cruise missiles to patrol secretly in waters off Pakistan in the hope that CIA spotters would one day identify bin Laden's location confidently enough to warrant a deadly missile strike.
But Clinton also authorized the CIA to carry out operations that legally required the agency's officers to plan in almost every instance to capture bin Laden alive and bring him to the United States to face trial.
This meant the CIA officers had to arrange in advance for detention facilities, extraction flights and other contingencies -- even if they expected that bin Laden would probably die in the arrest attempt. These requirements made operational planning much more cumbersome, the CIA officers contended.
In fashioning this sensitive policy in the midst of an impeachment crisis that lasted into early 1999, Clinton's national security adviser, Samuel R. "Sandy" Berger, struggled to forge a consensus within the White House national security team. Among other things, he had to keep on board a skeptical Attorney General Janet Reno and her Justice Department colleagues, who were deeply invested in law enforcement approaches to terrorism, according to senior officials involved.
As the months passed, Clinton signed new memos in which the language, while still ambiguous, made the use of lethal force by the CIA's Afghan agents more likely, according to officials involved. At first the CIA was permitted to use lethal force only in the course of a legitimate attempt to make an arrest. Later the memos allowed for a pure lethal attack if an arrest was not possible. Still, the CIA was required to plan all its agent missions with an arrest in mind.
Some CIA managers chafed at the White House instructions. The CIA received "no written word nor verbal order to conduct a lethal action" against bin Laden before Sept. 11, one official involved recalled. "The objective was to render this guy to law enforcement." In these operations, the CIA had to recruit agents "to grab [bin Laden] and bring him to a secure place where we can turn him over to the FBI. . . . If they had said 'lethal action' it would have been a whole different kettle of fish, and much easier."
Berger later recalled his frustration about this hidden debate. Referring to the military option in the two-track policy, he said at a 2002 congressional hearing: "It was no question, the cruise missiles were not trying to capture him. They were not law enforcement techniques."
The overriding trouble was, whether they arrested bin Laden or killed him, they first had to find him.
© 2004 The Washington Post Company
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