Following The Money

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But despite this early progress, terrorism experts warn, it will be difficult to follow the flow of bin Laden's money and harder still to turn off the spigot. His money is believed to be scattered among as many as 55 countries. It appears to move surreptitiously, often through backdoor channels. And much of it is cloaked in the respectability of legitimate-looking businesses and charities. Al-Qaeda appears to move much of its money through bin Laden's extensive portfolio of agriculture, construction and investment businesses. Investigators call it "reverse money laundering," because the funds start out clean and end up being used for criminal schemes.

Bin Laden may even have his own legitimate bank that he uses to bankroll terror. At a Senate Banking Committee hearing last week, Senator Carl Levin, a Michigan Democrat, presented evidence that bin Laden used a Sudanese bank called al Shamal Islamic Bank, of which he may be the largest shareholder, to distribute funds used in the 1998 terrorist bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. (The Sudanese bank denies it has any connection with bin Laden.)

Once bin Laden has money in a bank he controls, it is not hard for him to pass it through mainstream U.S. financial institutions. "By the time money gets here, it could be anyone's," says Alan Cohen, a former federal prosecutor who specialized in financial fraud. And the money can be used for anything. In testimony on the embassy bombings, a bin Laden associate said he received a $250,000 wire transfer from the Shamal bank to his bank in Texas and used the money to buy an airplane for bin Laden.

Even if the U.S. receives broad cooperation in its efforts to freeze assets, bin Laden may find nations that lack the will or the wherewithal to find his assets and freeze them. If Atta received critical wire transfers from Egypt and if bin Laden has banking interests in Sudan, the U.S. will need those nations to be active parts of its campaign.

Even in cooperative countries, bin Laden can use national borders to stay one step ahead of investigators. "It only takes five minutes to deposit 1 million French francs in a Dutch account and another five minutes to transfer that to an account in Britain," warned a French parliamentary report on terrorist funding. But "for the judge investigating the origins and movement of that money, it will take six months to get a court warrant authorizing inspection of the account in the Netherlands, a year to get one in Britain, six months more for clearance in Switzerland--all to discover that the suspicious funds have been withdrawn and the account closed."

Bin Laden boasted last week that his assets are hidden away in "three alternate financial systems which are separate and independent." The money that funds his network is so well guarded by sophisticated managers, he told a pro-Taliban newspaper in Afghanistan, that "if the whole world, including the U.S., tries to remove them, they won't succeed."

The Bush Administration promises it will expand its list of targets to include businesses that investigators believe are operating as terrorist fronts or being used by terrorist groups. That will be a necessary step, but history has demonstrated that showing a terrorist connection in these cases can be exceedingly difficult.