Inside The Hunt For Osama

The exercise was code-named Poised Response. Attorney General Janet Reno had invited 200 policemen from the Washington metropolitan area to the FBI's headquarters last Oct. 14 to plan how they'd react to a terrorist attack in the nation's capital. They settled in that Wednesday morning to consider four scenarios: a car-bomb attack, a chemical-weapons strike on a Washington Redskins football game, the planting of an explosive device in a federal building and an assassination attempt on Madeleine Albright, the Secretary of State. But the war game--intended to help the agencies practice working together--quickly melted down into interagency squabbling and finger pointing.

Reno left the session feeling uneasy--understandably so, say Administration officials. Poised Response was anything but poised. And while the cops involved were never told which terrorist might carry out such an audacious attack, Reno and other top Administration aides had one man in mind: Osama bin Laden, whose Afghan camp had been blasted by U.S. cruise missiles two months earlier. His operatives might be coming to town soon. Intelligence sources tell TIME they have evidence that bin Laden may be planning his boldest move yet--a strike on Washington or possibly New York City in an eye-for-an-eye retaliation. "We've hit his headquarters, now he hits ours," says a State Department aide.

The hand-wringing and brainstorming are part of what Albright calls "the war of the future"--a battle in which the foot soldiers are elusive terrorists and the agents are in pursuit. The enemy in this case is a 41-year-old Goldfinger with a bank account of $100 million to $300 million, a far-flung network of cohorts and a fiery hatred for the U.S., which he badly wants out of Saudi Arabia, his homeland. The bloodiest round of this new war came on Aug. 7 when bin Laden's agents allegedly bombed U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, killing 224 people, 12 of them Americans.

Those simultaneous attacks were the most devastating terror assault the U.S. has suffered overseas since the bombing of the Marine barracks in Beirut in 1983. Though Washington retaliated 13 days later, with cruise-missile strikes at Osama's base in Afghanistan, U.S. officials are still licking their wounds. The bin Laden attacks came despite a four-year secret campaign by the U.S. government to contain and control his activities--a frustrating war of attrition in which Washington has both won and lost battles. American agents have tracked, arrested and interrogated members of Osama's terror cells in dozens of countries. Now two government inquiries--one by the CIA's inspector general, the other by a State Department Accountability Review Board--have begun to raise a troubling question: Could the East Africa attacks have been prevented?