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HOW BIN LADEN BECAME TERRORIST #1
MID-EAST REALITIES � - MER - www.MiddleEast.Org - Washington - 10/03:
A decade ago Osama bin Laden first took up his own crusade against the USA after
the Americans set up permanent bases in Saudi Arabia, rather than leaving "the
Kingdom" at the end of the Gulf War as the Saudis had initially been assured. Half a
decade ago it was also the Americans who were instrumental in forcing bin Laden out of
Sudan and letting him go to Afghanistan, a place he knew well because of his role in
the Afghan/U.S.war against the Soviet empire. And a few years ago it was the
Americans that lit the long fuse that was to explode on 11 September when they trained
and hired hit teams to kill bin Laden after failing to do so with a volley of some 66
cruise missiles. On matters of this kind the investigative capabilities of The
Washington Post are considerable, nearly always after some issue has captured the
American agenda. Important investigative reporting and insights from today's
Washington Post:
U.S. Was Foiled Multiple Times in Efforts To Capture Bin Laden or Have Him Killed
CIA Trained Pakistanis to Nab Terrorist but Military Coup Put an End to 1999 Plot
By Bob Woodward and Thomas E. Ricks
Washington Post Staff Writers
[The Washington Post - Wednesday, 3 October 3 2001; Page 1]: In 1999, the CIA
secretly trained and equipped approximately 60 commandos from the Pakistani
intelligence agency to enter Afghanistan for the purpose of capturing or killing Osama
bin Laden, according to people familiar with the operation.
The operation was arranged by then-Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif and his chief
of intelligence with the Clinton administration, which in turn promised to lift
sanctions on Pakistan and provide an economic aid package. The plan was aborted later
that year when Sharif was ousted in a military coup.
The plan was set in motion less than 12 months after U.S. cruise missile strikes
against bin Laden's training camps in Afghanistan that Clinton administration
officials believe narrowly missed hitting the exiled Saudi militant. The clandestine
operation was part of a more robust effort by the United States to get bin Laden than
has been previously reported, including consideration of broader military action, such
as massive bombing raids and Special Forces assaults.
It is a record of missed opportunities that has provided President Bush and his
administration with some valuable lessons as well as a framework for action as they
draw up plans for their own war against bin Laden and his al Qaeda network in the
aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks on New York and Washington. The Pakistani commando
team was up and running and ready to strike by October 1999, a former official said.
"It was an enterprise," the official said. "It was proceeding." Still stung by their
failure to get bin Laden the previous year, Clinton officials were delighted at the
operation, which they believed provided a real opportunity to eliminate bin Laden. "It
was like Christmas," a source said.
The operation was aborted on Oct. 12, 1999, however, when Sharif was overthrown in a
military coup led by Gen. Pervez Musharraf, who refused to continue the operation
despite substantial efforts by the Clinton administration to revive it.
Musharraf, now Pakistan's president, has emerged as a key ally in the Bush
administration's efforts to track down bin Laden and destroy his terrorist network.
The record of the CIA's aborted relationship with Pakistan two years ago illustrates
the value -- and the pitfalls -- of such an alliance in targeting bin Laden.
Pakistan and its intelligence service have valuable information about what is
occurring inside Afghanistan, a country that remains closed to most of the world. But
a former U.S. official said joint operations with the Pakistani service are always
dicey, because the Taliban militia that rules most of Afghanistan has penetrated
Pakistani intelligence.
"You never know who you're dealing with," the former senior official said. "You're
always dealing with shadows."
'We Were at War'
In addition to the Pakistan operation, President Bill Clinton the year before had
approved additional covert action for the CIA to work with groups inside Afghanistan
and with other foreign intelligence services to capture or kill bin Laden.
The most dramatic attempt to kill bin Laden occurred in August 1998, when Clinton
ordered a Tomahawk cruise missile attack on bin Laden's suspected training camps in
Afghanistan in response to the bombings of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.
At the time, the Pentagon informed the president that far more ambitious and riskier
military actions could be undertaken, according to officials involved in the decision.
The options included a clandestine helicopter-borne night assault with small U.S.
special operations units; a massive bombing raid on the southeastern Afghan city of
Kandahar, the spiritual home of the Taliban and a place frequently visited by bin
Laden and his followers; and a larger air- and sea-launched missile and bombing raid
on the bin Laden camps in eastern Afghanistan.
Clinton approved the cruise missile attack recommended by his advisers, and on Aug.
20, 1998, 66 cruise missiles rained down on the training camps. An additional 13
missiles were fired at a pharmaceutical plant in Sudan that the Clinton administration
believed was a chemical weapons factory associated with bin Laden.
Clinton's decision to attack with unmanned Tomahawk cruise missiles meant that no
American lives were put in jeopardy. The decision was supported by his top national
security team, which included Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright, Secretary of
Defense William S. Cohen and national security adviser Samuel R. "Sandy" Berger,
officials said.
In the aftermath of last month's attacks on the United States, which the Bush
administration has tied to bin Laden, Clinton officials said their decision not to
take stronger and riskier action has taken on added relevance. "I wish we'd recognized
it then," that the United States was at war with bin Laden, said a senior Defense
official, "and started the campaign then that we've started now. That's my main
regret. In hindsight, we were at war."
Outside experts are even more pointed. "I think that raid really helped elevate bin
Laden's reputation in a big way, building him up in the Muslim world," said Harlan
Ullman, a defense analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a
Washington think tank. "My sense is that because the attack was so limited and
incompetent, we turned this guy into a folk hero."
Senior officials involved in the decision to limit the attack to unmanned cruise
missiles cite four concerns that in many ways are similar to those the Bush
administration is confronting now.
One was worry that the intelligence on bin Laden's whereabouts was sketchy. Reports at
the time said he was supposed to be at a gathering of terrorists, perhaps 100 or more,
but it was not clear how reliable that information was. "There was little doubt there
was going to be a conference," a source said. "It was not certain that bin Laden would
be there, but it was thought to be the case." The source added, "It was all driven by
intelligence. . . . The intelligence turned out to be off."
A second concern was about killing innocent people, especially in Kandahar, a city
already devastated by the Soviet Union's 1979 invasion of Afghanistan. Large loss of
civilian life, the thinking went, could have cost the United States the moral high
ground in its efforts against terrorism, especially in the Muslim world.
The risks of conducting a long-range helicopter assault, which would require aerial
refueling at night, were another factor. The helicopters might have had to fly 900
miles, an official said. Administration officials especially wanted to avoid a repeat
of the disastrous 1980 Desert One operation to rescue American hostages in Iran.
During that operation, ordered by President Jimmy Carter, a refueling aircraft
collided with a helicopter in the Iranian desert, killing eight soldiers.
A final element was the lack of permission for bombers to cross the airspace of an
adjoining nation, such as Pakistan, or for helicopters to land at a staging ground on
foreign soil. Since Sept. 11, Pakistan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan have offered the
United States use of bases and airspace for any new strike against bin Laden.
Bin Laden, 44, a member of an extended wealthy Saudi family, was expelled from Saudi
Arabia in 1991 and stripped of his citizenship three years later. In early 1996, the
CIA set up a special bin Laden unit, largely because of evidence linking him to the
1993 bombing of the World Trade Center. At the time, he was living in Sudan, but he
was expelled from that country in May 1996 after the CIA failed to persuade the Saudis
to accept a Sudanese offer to turn him over.
After his subsequent move to Afghanistan, bin Laden became a major focus of U.S.
military and intelligence efforts in February 1998, when he issued a fatwa, or
religious order, calling for the killing of Americans. "That really got us spun up,"
recalled retired Marine Gen. Anthony C. Zinni, who was then the chief of the Central
Command, which oversees U.S. military operations in the Middle East and Central Asia.
When two truck bombs killed more than 200 people at the U.S. embassies in Kenya and
Tanzania in August of that year, and the U.S. government developed evidence that bin
Laden was behind both attacks, the question was not whether the United States should
counterattack, but how and when. And when depended on information about his
whereabouts. Two weeks later, intelligence arrived in Washington indicating that bin
Laden would be attending a meeting in eastern Afghanistan. Much turned on the quality
of the intelligence provided by CIA Director George J. Tenet, recalled a senior
official who had firsthand knowledge of the administration's debate on how to respond.
"Some days George was good," the official said, "but some days he was not so good. One
day he would be categorical and say this is the best we will get . . . and then two
days later or a week later, he would say he was not so sure."
'It Was a Sustained Effort'
The quality of the intelligence behooved restraint in planning the raid. Hitting bin
Laden with a cruise missile "was a long shot, very iffy," recalled Zinni, the former
Central Command chief. "The intelligence wasn't that solid."
At the same time, new information surfaced suggesting that bin Laden might be planning
another major attack. Top Clinton officials felt it was essential to act. At best,
they calculated, bin Laden would be killed. And at a minimum, he might be knocked off
balance and forced to devote more of his energy to hiding from U.S. forces.
"He felt he was safe in Afghanistan, in the mountains, inside landlocked airspace,"
Zinni said. "So at least we could send the message that we could reach him."
In all, 66 cruise missiles were launched from Navy ships in the Arabian Sea off the
coast of Pakistan into the camps in Afghanistan. Pakistan had not been warned in
advance, but Air Force Gen. Joseph Ralston, then the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs
of Staff, met with Pakistani officials at the precise time of the launch to tell them
of the operation. He also assured them that Pakistan was not under surprise attack
from India, a potential misapprehension that could have led to war.
At least one missile lost power and crashed in Pakistan, but the rest flew into
Afghanistan and slammed into suspected terrorist training camps outside Khost, a small
town near the Afghan-Pakistani border. Most of the cruise missiles were carrying loads
of anti-personnel cluster bomblets, with the intention of killing as many people as
possible. Reports from the scene were inconclusive. Most said that the raid killed
about 30 people, but not bin Laden.
Intelligence that reached top Clinton administration officials after the raid said
that bin Laden had left the camp two or three hours before the missiles struck. Other
reports said he might have left as many as 10 or 12 hours before they landed.
Sources in the U.S. military said the launch time was adjusted some to coordinate it
with the Sudan attack and to launch after sundown to minimize detection of the
missiles. This had the effect of delaying the launch time by several hours. An earlier
launch might have caught bin Laden, two sources said.
Cohen came to suspect that bin Laden escaped because he was tipped off that the strike
was coming. Four days before the operation, the State Department issued a public
warning about a "very serious threat" and ordered hundreds of nonessential U.S.
personnel and dependents out of Pakistan. Some U.S. officials believe word could have
been passed to bin Laden by the Taliban on a tip from Pakistani intelligence services.
Several other former officials disputed the notion of a security breach, saying bin
Laden had plenty of notice that the United States intended to retaliate.
There also is dispute about the follow-up to the 1998 raid, specifically about whether
the Clinton administration, having tried and failed to kill bin Laden, stopped paying
attention.
There were attempts. Special Forces troops and helicopter gunships were kept on alert
in the region, ready to launch a raid if solid intelligence pinpointed bin Laden's
whereabouts. Also, twice in 1999, information arrived indicating that bin Laden might
possibly be in a certain village in Afghanistan at a certain time, officials recalled.
There was discussion of destroying the village, but the intelligence was not deemed
credible enough to warrant the potential slaughter of civilians.
In addition, the CIA that year launched its clandestine operation with Pakistani
intelligence to train Pakistani commandos for operations against bin Laden.
"It was a sustained effort," Cohen said recently. "There was not a week that went by
when the issue wasn't seriously addressed by the national security team."
Berger said, "Al Qaeda and bin Laden were the number one security threat to America
after 1998. It was the highest priority, and a range of appropriate actions were
taken."
But never again did definitive information arrive that might have permitted another
attempt to get bin Laden, officials said.
"I can't tell you how many times we got a call saying, 'We have information, and we
have to hold a secret meeting about whether to launch a military action,' " said
Walter Slocombe, the former undersecretary of defense for policy. "Maybe we were too
cautious. I don't think so."
Sudan's Offer to Arrest Militant Fell Through After Saudis Said No
By Barton Gellman
[The Washington Post - Wednesday, 3 October 3, 2001 - Page 1]: The government of
Sudan, employing a back channel direct from its president to the Central Intelligence
Agency, offered in the early spring of 1996 to arrest Osama bin Laden and place him in
Saudi custody, according to officials and former officials in all three countries.
The Clinton administration struggled to find a way to accept the offer in secret
contacts that stretched from a meeting at a Rosslyn hotel on March 3, 1996, to a fax
that closed the door on the effort 10 weeks later. Unable to persuade the Saudis to
accept bin Laden, and lacking a case to indict him in U.S. courts at the time, the
Clinton administration finally gave up on the capture.
Sudan expelled bin Laden on May 18, 1996, to Afghanistan. From there, he is thought to
have planned and financed the twin embassy bombings of 1998, the near-destruction of
the USS Cole a year ago and last month's devastation in New York and Washington.
Bin Laden's good fortune in slipping through U.S. fingers torments some former
officials with the thought that the subsequent attacks might have been averted.
Though far from the central figure he is now, bin Laden had a high and rising place on
the U.S. counterterrorism agenda. Internal State Department talking points at the time
described him as "one of the most significant financial sponsors of Islamic extremist
activities in the world today" and blamed him for planning a failed attempt to blow up
the hotel used by U.S. troops in Yemen in 1992.
"Had we been able to roll up bin Laden then, it would have made a significant
difference," said a U.S. government official with responsibilities, then and now, in
counterterrorism. "We probably never would have seen a September 11th. We would still
have had networks of Sunni Islamic extremists of the sort we're dealing with here, and
there would still have been terrorist attacks fomented by those folks. But there would
not have been as many resources devoted to their activities, and there would not have
been a single voice that so effectively articulated grievances and won support for
violence."
Clinton administration officials maintain emphatically that they had no such option in
1996. In the legal, political and intelligence environment of the time, they said,
there was no choice but to allow bin Laden to depart Sudan unmolested.
"The FBI did not believe we had enough evidence to indict bin Laden at that time, and
therefore opposed bringing him to the United States," said Samuel R. "Sandy" Berger,
who was deputy national security adviser then.
Three Clinton officials said they hoped -- one described it as "a fantasy" -- that
Saudi King Fahd would accept bin Laden and order his swift beheading, as he had done
for four conspirators after a June 1995 bombing in Riyadh. But Berger and Steven
Simon, then director for counterterrorism on the National Security Council (NSC)
staff, said the White House considered it valuable in itself to force bin Laden out of
Sudan, thus tearing him away from his extensive network of businesses, investments and
training camps.
"I really cared about one thing, and that was getting him out of Sudan," Simon said.
"One can understand why the Saudis didn't want him -- he was a hot potato -- and,
frankly, I would have been shocked at the time if the Saudis took him. My calculation
was, 'It's going to take him a while to reconstitute, and that screws him up and buys
time.' "
Conflicting Agendas
Conflicting policy agendas on three separate fronts contributed to the missed
opportunity to capture bin Laden, according to a dozen participants. The Clinton
administration was riven by differences on whether to engage Sudan's government or
isolate it, which influenced judgments about the sincerity of the offer. In the
Saudi-American relationship, policymakers diverged on how much priority to give to
counterterrorism over other interests such as support for the ailing
Israeli-Palestinian talks. And there were the beginnings of a debate, intensified
lately, on whether the United States wanted to indict and try bin Laden or to treat
him as a combatant in an underground war.
In 1999, Sudanese President Omar Hassan Bashir referred elliptically to his
government's early willingness to send bin Laden to Saudi Arabia. But the role of the
U.S. government and the secret channel from Khartoum to Washington had not been
disclosed before.
The Sudanese offer had its roots in a dinner at the Khartoum home of Sudanese Foreign
Minister Ali Othman Taha. It was Feb. 6, 1996 -- Ambassador Timothy M. Carney's last
night in the country before evacuating the embassy on orders from Washington.
Paul Quaglia, then the CIA station chief in Khartoum, had led a campaign to pull out
all Americans after he and his staff came under aggressive surveillance and twice had
to fend off attacks, one with a knife and one with claw hammers. Now Carney was
instructed, despite his objections, to withdraw all remaining Americans from the
country.
Carney and David Shinn, then chief of the State Department's East Africa desk,
considered the security threat "bogus," as Shinn described it. Washington's dominant
decision-makers on Sudan had lost interest in engagement, preparing plans to isolate
and undermine the regime. The two career diplomats thought that was a mistake, and
that Washington was squandering opportunities to enlist Sudan's cooperation against
radical Islamic groups.
One factor in Washington's hostility was an intelligence tip that Sudan aimed to
assassinate national security adviser Anthony Lake, the most visible administration
critic of Khartoum. The Secret Service took it seriously enough to remove Lake from
his home, shuffling him among safe houses and conveying him around Washington in a
heavily armored car. Most U.S. analysts came to believe later that it had been a false
alarm.
Taha, distressed at the deteriorating relations, invited Carney and Shinn to dine with
him that Tuesday night. He asked what his country could do to dissuade Washington from
the view, expressed not long before by then-United Nations Ambassador Madeleine K.
Albright, that Sudan was responsible for "continued sponsorship of international
terror."
Carney and Shinn had a long list. Bin Laden, as they both recalled, was near the top.
So, too, were three members of Egypt's Gamaat i-Islami, Arabic for Islamic Group, who
had fled to Sudan after trying to kill Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak. Sudan also
played host to operatives and training facilities for the Palestinian Islamic
Resistance Movement, or Hamas, and Lebanon's Hezbollah.
"It was the first substantive chat with the U.S. government on the subject of
terrorism," Carney recalled.
Taha mostly listened. He raised no objection to the request for bin Laden's expulsion,
though he did not agree to it that night. His only rejoinders came on Hamas and
Hezbollah, which his government, like much of the Arab world, regarded as conducting
legitimate resistance to Israeli occupation.
Sudanese President Bashir, struggling for dominance over the fiery cleric Hassan
Turabi, had already made overtures to the West. Not long before, he had delivered the
accused terrorist known as "Carlos the Jackal" to France. Less than a month after
Taha's dinner, he sent a trusted aide to Washington.
Maj. Gen. Elfatih Erwa, then minister of state for defense, arrived unannounced at the
Hyatt Arlington on March 3, 1996. Using standard tradecraft, he checked into one room
and then walked to another, across Wilson Boulevard from the Rosslyn Metro.
Carney and Shinn were waiting for him, but the meeting was run by covert operatives
from the CIA's Africa division. The Washington Post does not identify active members
of the clandestine service. Frank Knott, who was Africa division chief in the
directorate of operations at the time, declined to be interviewed.
In a document dated March 8, 1996, the Americans spelled out their demands. Titled
"Measures Sudan Can Take to Improve Relations with the United States," the two-page
memorandum asked for six things. Second on the list -- just after an angry enumeration
of attacks on the CIA station in Khartoum -- was Osama bin Laden.
"Provide us with names, dates of arrival, departure and destination and passport data
on mujahedin [holy warriors] that Usama Bin Laden has brought into Sudan," the
document demanded. The CIA emissaries told Erwa that they knew of about 200 such bin
Laden loyalists in Sudan.
During the next several weeks, Erwa raised the stakes. The Sudanese security services,
he said, would happily keep close watch on bin Laden for the United States. But if
that would not suffice, the government was prepared to place him in custody and hand
him over, though to whom was ambiguous. In one formulation, Erwa said Sudan would
consider any legitimate proffer of criminal charges against the accused terrorist.
Saudi Arabia, he said, was the most logical destination.
Susan Rice, then senior director for Africa on the NSC, remembers being intrigued with
but deeply skeptical of the Sudanese offer. And unlike Berger and Simon, she argued
that mere expulsion from Sudan was not enough.
"We wanted them to hand him over to a responsible external authority," she said. "We
didn't want them to just let him disappear into the ether."
Lake and Secretary of State Warren Christopher were briefed, colleagues said, on
efforts launched to persuade the Saudi government to take bin Laden.
The Saudi idea had some logic, since bin Laden had issued a fatwa, or religious edict,
denouncing the ruling House of Saud as corrupt. Riyadh had expelled bin Laden in 1991
and stripped him of his citizenship in 1994, but it wanted no part in jailing or
executing him.
Saudis Feared a Backlash
Clinton administration officials recalled that the Saudis feared a backlash from the
fundamentalist opponents of the regime. Though regarded as a black sheep, bin Laden
was nonetheless an heir to one of Saudi Arabia's most influential families. One
diplomat familiar with the talks said there was another reason: The Riyadh government
was offended that the Sudanese would go to the Americans with the offer.
Some U.S. diplomats said the White House did not press the Saudis very hard. There
were many conflicting priorities in the Middle East, notably an intensive effort to
save the interim government of Prime Minister Shimon Peres in Israel, which was
reeling under its worst spate of Hamas suicide bombings. U.S. military forces also
relied heavily on Saudi forward basing to enforce the southern "no fly zone" in Iraq.
Resigned to bin Laden's departure from Sudan, some officials raised the possibility of
shooting down his chartered aircraft, but the idea was never seriously pursued because
bin Laden had not been linked to a dead American, and it was inconceivable that
Clinton would sign the "lethal finding" necessary under the circumstances.
"In the end they said, 'Just ask him to leave the country. Just don't let him go to
Somalia,' " Erwa, the Sudanese general, said in an interview. "We said he will go to
Afghanistan, and they said, 'Let him.' "
On May 15, 1996, Foreign Minister Taha sent a fax to Carney in Nairobi, giving up on
the transfer of custody. His government had asked bin Laden to vacate the country,
Taha wrote, and he would be free to go.
Carney faxed back a question: Would bin Laden retain control of the millions of
dollars in assets he had built up in Sudan?
Taha gave no reply before bin Laden chartered a plane three days later for his trip to
Afghanistan. Subsequent analysis by U.S. intelligence suggests that bin Laden managed
to draw down and redirect the Sudanese assets from his new redoubt in Afghanistan.
>From the Sudanese point of view, the failed effort to take custody of bin Laden
>resulted primarily from the Clinton administration's divisions on how to relate to
>the Khartoum government -- divisions that remain today as President Bush considers
>what to do with nations with a history of support for terrorist groups.
Washington, Erwa said, never could decide whether to strike out at Khartoum or demand
its help. "I think," he said, "they wanted to do both."
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