Ears to the Ground

American military action hangs on finding bin Laden. As Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said last week, "It's not going to be a cruise missile or a bomber that's going to be the determining factor. It's going to be a scrap of information from some person in some country that's going to enable us to pull his network up by its roots." So in the back alleys of Peshawar, agents infiltrate the religious students who answer the Taliban's call. And along the dusty Afghan track to the Chaman frontier post, operatives troll for information from truck drivers and traders and traitors. Fighting terrorism, says Frank Anderson, a former chief of the CIA's Middle East section, "requires a stool pigeon on every corner." The U.S. has put a $5 million price on bin Laden's head. As everyone who's ever spied there believes, there's nothing in Afghanistan that money can't buy.

--Reported by Massimo Calabresi and Douglas Waller/Washington, Tim McGirk/Chaman and Terry McCarthy/Peshawar