Inside The Hunt For Osama

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The targeting of Osama's network began in earnest almost two years after the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, which killed six people and injured more than 1,000. On a chilly, clear February night in 1995, a helicopter soared over the Hudson River to the FBI's office at New York City's Federal Plaza. Sitting blindfolded in the chopper next to the bureau's Lewis Schiliro was Ramzi Yousef, the mastermind of the Trade Center attack, who had just been nabbed in Pakistan. During the transatlantic leg of the flight back to the U.S., Yousef had bragged that his original plan had been to plant enough explosives in one of the 110-story twin buildings to topple it, killing maybe 250,000 people in the tower and on the ground. But his shoestring operation couldn't afford enough dynamite, and settled for a much smaller blast.

As the chopper neared the Trade Center, agents removed Yousef's blindfold. "See?" said one. "It's still standing." Yousef squinted at the high-rise. "Next time, if I have more money," he finally said, "I'll knock it down."

Schiliro, who's now running the FBI's investigation of the Africa bombings, remembers feeling a chill run through his body. His fellow agents had already discovered that the terrorist now had the cash to back up his threat. Yousef apparently had a benefactor, a wealthy Saudi expatriate named Osama bin Laden, who in the 1980s had bankrolled mujahedin guerrillas fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan and who had fled his Saudi homeland after he had been charged with inciting fundamentalist opposition to the country's royal family.

Until then, the FBI and the CIA considered bin Laden, son of a Saudi construction magnate, to be a "Gucci terrorist" with a fat wallet and a big mouth. His followers were a loosely bound group of former Afghan freedom fighters called al Qaeda, meaning (military) base. But bin Laden was moving into the big leagues. Al Qaeda operatives or sympathizers are accused of attacking American soldiers in Somalia, Yemen and Saudi Arabia. They had plans to kidnap U.S. military personnel in the Persian Gulf, and they might have U.S.-made Stinger missiles left over from the Afghan war. Worse, intelligence officials discovered that by 1993 bin Laden had begun hunting for nuclear weapons. First on his shopping list was a Russian nuclear warhead he hoped to buy on the black market. He abandoned that effort when no warhead could be found. Instead, his agents began scouring former Soviet republics for enriched uranium and weapons components that could be used to set off the fuel.

Fortunately, "Osama's buyers weren't physicists, and the people selling to him were trying to rip him off," says an Energy Department official. The enriched uranium they were offered turned out to be low-grade reactor fuel unusable for a weapon. Another con man tried to sell them radioactive garbage, claiming it was "red mercury," a supposedly lethal Russian bomb the CIA says never existed. Frustrated, bin Laden instead settled on chemical weapons, which are easier to manufacture. Although U.S. intelligence officials have been unable to pinpoint hidden caches, they suspect that during a five-year stay in Sudan before moving to Afghanistan in 1996, bin Laden tested, with the help of Sudanese officials, nerve agents that would be dispensed from bombs or artillery shells.