By JAMES RISEN
The covert effort, which has not been previously disclosed, was based on an attempt to work with Ahmed Shah Massoud, who was then the military leader of the largest anti- Taliban group in the northern mountains of Afghanistan, and to have his forces go after Mr. bin Laden. Mr. Massoud was himself fatally wounded only two days before the attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center, and the C.I.A. believes that he was assassinated by members of Mr. bin Laden's organization. The C.I.A.'s clandestine efforts to deal with Mr. Massoud were among the most sensitive and highly classified elements of a broader long-term campaign, continuing unsuccessfully through the end of the Clinton administration and into the Bush administration, to destroy Mr. bin Laden's terrorist network. The American campaign against Mr. bin Laden intensified after the August 1998 bombings of two United States Embassies in East Africa, which transformed the Saudi-born exile into America's most wanted terrorist. Today, the hunt for Osama bin Laden and his lieutenants in Al Qaeda, the terrorist network he leads from his sanctuary in Afghanistan, has escalated to wartime levels. The Bush administration is considering a full range of overt and covert military and intelligence proposals that Washington policy makers would have considered too risky or unworkable before the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. But according to current and former intelligence officials and other policy makers, the United States has been trying to kill bin Laden and destroy Al Qaeda for years, as the terrorist organization has become more ruthless and ambitious in its efforts to attack American interests around the world. Clinton administration lawyers determined that the United States could legitimately seek to kill Mr. bin Laden and his lieutenants despite the presidential ban on assassinations, according to current and former American officials. The lawyers concluded that efforts to hunt and kill Mr. bin Laden were defensible either as acts of war or as national self defense, legitimate under both American and international law. As a result, President Clinton did not waive the executive order banning assassinations. There have been an array of unsuccessful attempts to target Mr. bin Laden and disrupt or destroy Al Qaeda, American officials say. The Clinton administration even considered mounting a secret effort to steal millions of dollars from the bin Laden terrorist network by siphoning it out of the international financial system, but discarded the scheme because of objections from the United States Treasury about the implications for world finance. The United States launched cruise missiles against a meeting Mr. bin Laden was believed to be attending, encouraged Mr. Massoud and other Afghan leaders to try to capture him, and received a secret report from one Afghan group last year about its failed attempt to assassinate Mr. bin Laden. The United States also led an international effort to shut down Afghanistan's airline, which American intelligence officials believed was being used by Al Qaeda to ship money and personnel around the world, while also pressuring other nations to arrest and disrupt Al Qaeda cells. "This was a top priority for us over the past several years, and not a day went by when we didn't press as hard as we could," said Samuel R. Berger, national security adviser in the Clinton administration. "But this is a tough, tough problem. I think we were pushing it as hard as we could. And I think the Bush administration is handling it in a smart way." But until the devastating attacks on New York and Washington, the American-led efforts to hunt Mr. bin Laden lacked the sense of urgency that prevails today. American intelligence and law enforcement officials grew complacent about the threat of a domestic attack by Al Qaeda, failed by their own admission to share information adequately or coordinate their efforts, and were caught by surprise on Sept. 11. Washington did not build a strong international coalition to focus on defeating Al Qaeda, which was seen by other nations largely as an American problem. Banks in Europe and the Middle East repeatedly balked at American pressure to cut off Al Qaeda financing, while wealthy individuals in Persian Gulf states — sometimes in the guise of donating to Islamic charities — continued to provide financial support to Al Qaeda. At the same time, Al Qaeda was rapidly evolving into a larger and more complex terrorist threat, making it difficult for the United States to keep up with its scope and abilities. Mr. bin Laden's great achievement within the terrorist world has been to forge alliances with other Islamic extremist groups under the umbrella of Al Qaeda, providing them financing, training and a sanctuary in Afghanistan, while encouraging coordinated action. The United States had only a hazy understanding of Mr. bin Laden's growing significance before 1996, when an Al Qaeda insider, Jamal Ahmed Al-Fadl, defected to the United States and began to describe the extent of Mr. bin Laden's plans and objectives. Based largely on Mr. al- Fadl's information, a federal grand jury indicted Mr. bin Laden on terrorist conspiracy charges in June 1998, just two months before the twin bombings of the American Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. The embassy bombings forced Washington to recognize that Mr. bin Laden had become a major national security threat. Sometime after the bombings, the C.I.A. began its efforts to work with Mr. Massoud against Mr. bin Laden, American officials said. The officials declined to provide many details of the effort. But officials say that C.I.A. officers secretly traveled to Mr. Massoud's mountain stronghold in northern Afghanistan and opened talks in an effort to fashion an anti-bin Laden alliance. Current and former officials said that Mr. Massoud was promised large sums of money if he and his rebel fighters could find a way to get to Mr. bin Laden. Short of capturing the terrorist leader, Mr. Massoud was asked by the C.I.A. to provide intelligence from inside Afghanistan about Mr. bin Laden and his organization, officials said. It remains unclear even today whether Mr. Massoud — more interested in toppling the Taliban — ever made a serious effort to go after Mr. bin Laden. He would have faced enormous obstacles in doing so, considering that Mr. bin Laden was based in territory controlled by the Taliban and its military forces. The effort to work with Mr. Massoud followed the most direct and open American effort to kill Mr. bin Laden. It came on Aug. 20, 1998, two weeks after the embassy attacks in East Africa. President Clinton ordered cruise missile strikes on a complex near Khost, Afghanistan, where the C.I.A. had learned that Mr. bin Laden was scheduled to be meeting with 200 to 300 other members of Al Qaeda. The sea-launched cruise missiles slammed into the camp only about an hour or so after Mr. bin Laden left the conference, American officials believe. According to former senior Clinton administration officials, some 20 to 30 Al Qaeda members were killed, temporarily disrupting the organization. But the attack failed in its unstated but clear objective, which was to kill Mr. bin Laden. One consequence was that Mr. bin Laden drastically improved his own security measures. Realizing that the United States had collected solid intelligence about his physical movements, he cut back on his use of electronic communications. American officials say he now tends to talk to subordinates only in person, and they then pass on his messages to others in the organization. "He has become more sophisticated by becoming less sophisticated," said one former senior American official. In addition, he moves frequently, traveling between Kandahar, the Taliban stronghold in southern Afghanistan, and the rugged Afghan countryside farther north, American officials say. "He became much more secure in his communications, and the only way to track him was to have people on the ground," said one former senior American official. The Clinton administration has been criticized for not following up on its first missile attack with an all- out effort to get Mr. bin Laden. But former officials said that they lacked the "actionable intelligence," or precise information about Mr. bin Laden's whereabouts, to launch another attack. "The main focus was location, location, location," said one former administration official. "We had intensive intelligence gathering efforts to track him." In addition, the logistics of launching an attack by special forces in one of the most remote regions of the world also presented formidable obstacles. "We had a number of contingency plans, but logistically it was a nightmare," said a former senior Clinton administration official. Still, another Afghan group, not connected with Mr. Massoud, did report to the C.I.A. last year that it had attempted to assassinate Mr. bin Laden, American officials said. The group, which the officials declined to identify, reported that it had attempted to kill Mr. bin Laden by assaulting a convoy in which he was thought to be traveling. They reported that it turned out that Mr. bin Laden was not in the convoy. The reported assassination attempt was not approved or planned with C.I.A. assistance, American officials said. But the officials did say that the group had carried out the attack knowing that Washington had a great interest in either capturing Mr. bin Laden or having him killed. Washington has also attempted to target Mr. bin Laden's finances. One idea briefly considered by the Clinton administration called for a clandestine effort to drain money out of bank accounts that could be tied to Al Qaeda. But former Clinton administration officials said that Treasury Department officials opposed the idea, fearing that it might damage the integrity of the financial system. "Treasury was not enamored of the idea," noted one former Clinton administration official. Another former administration official said that the idea was flawed because stealing money from a bank account would in most instances leave the bank liable to make up the loss to the individual, thus hurting the bank rather than depriving Al Qaeda of money. But the United States did mount an international effort to curb Mr. bin Laden's access to the financial system. In 1998, President Clinton invoked emergency economic powers against Mr. bin Laden and Al Qaeda, giving the United States the power to freeze assets of any individuals or institutions working with or assisting the terrorist group. In 1999, the Taliban was added to the list, and American officials were surprised to find that the Taliban had actually left large sums of money in banks in the United States, mostly in older Afghan government accounts. Eventually, American and international pressure led to United Nations sanctions, and effectively shut down international flights by Ariana Airlines, the Afghan government's air carrier, which American intelligence had concluded was being used by Al Qaeda as its conduit to the Persian Gulf and the rest of the world. In 1999, officials from the White House and the Treasury Department traveled to the Persian Gulf to try to pressure governments to shut down Al Qaeda's banking relationships. But they achieved only mixed results. "Where we didn't have success was when other countries delayed or denied that there was a problem," said one former official. "Sometimes it was because of a lack of political will, sometimes because those countries didn't have the legal or regulatory frameworks they needed to really know what was going on in their financial institutions." Former Clinton administration officials say they sympathize with their successors in the Bush administration who now confront Mr. bin Laden, and defend their own efforts as the best possible in a world that lacked the current sense of urgency about Al Qaeda. "It was something that we focused on on a daily basis, and pursued with vigor, and I think we accomplished quite a lot," said former Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright. "I think we took it as far as was possible to go at the time, and I think what we did has provided the basis for things the Bush administration is trying to do now." |
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ASHINGTON,
Sept. 29 — The Central Intelligence Agency secretly began to
send teams of American officers to northern Afghanistan about
three years ago in an attempt to persuade the leader of the anti-
Taliban Afghan opposition to capture and perhaps kill Osama bin
Laden, according to American intelligence officials.