Inside The Hunt For Osama

Monday, Dec. 21, 1998 By DOUGLAS WALLER/WASHINGTON
Article Tools
Print
Reprints
Sphere
RSS

(3 of 6)
By the end of 1995 President Clinton signed a top-secret order, approved by the congressional intelligence committees, that authorized the CIA to begin covert operations to break up bin Laden's terror network. The agency's counterterrorism center--200 operatives housed in a windowless warren of cubicles in the CIA's Langley, Va., headquarters--had set up a special bin Laden task force. Analysts were assigned to read every word the Saudi had spoken or written. Computers with sophisticated "link analysis" programs were busy printing out diagrams of bin Laden's loose-knit network, which included thousands of Muslim fighters with varying degrees of allegiance to him in almost a dozen countries. In early 1996, intelligence sources tell TIME, the CIA also began making plans to "snatch" Osama from a foreign country and bring him to the U.S. for trial. But bin Laden avoided some of the nations where the U.S. was waiting to pounce--including Qatar and Kuwait.

Related Articles

With bin Laden out of reach, the CIA launched a secret program to harass his network. Using its own informants plus the counterterrorism center's computers, which tracks passports worldwide, the CIA would spot bin Laden operatives in foreign countries, then quietly enlist the local security service to arrest or deport them and allow the agency to sift through materials left in their apartments. In many cases, the CIA didn't know "exactly what each person was doing," says an intelligence official, "just that he was doing something with a terror organization, so we should disrupt it."

One operation would produce clues that led to another. For example, a CIA analyst perusing a slip of paper scooped up in one raid realized that scribbled on it was part of a phone number for a bin Laden cell in another country. That cell became the next target and yielded another round of evidence.

The CIA had a similar "disruption operation" under way in Kenya a year before the bombing. The agency's station in Nairobi is one of the busiest in Africa, responsible for keeping watch as well on the war-torn countries of Somalia, Sudan, Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo. In Kenya, CIA and embassy security officers believed the biggest threat to Americans was common crime. But the risk of terror lurked below the surface. Nairobi had become a transit stop for Iranian and Sudanese intelligence agents. Along the country's Indian Ocean coast were Kenyan veterans of the Afghan war that bin Laden agents had been recruiting.

By August 1997 the CIA had identified a bin Laden cell operating in Nairobi. The agency believed it was headed by Wadih el Hage, a Lebanese who held American citizenship and who, according to court documents, once served as bin Laden's personal secretary. Washington sent a secret request to Kenyan authorities in Nairobi: roust Wadih el Hage. For several weeks Kenyan police, sometimes accompanied by visiting FBI agents, began paying visits to el Hage's Nairobi home, searching its rooms, confiscating computer disks and darkly warning him that he'd face more hassling if he remained in the country.