Article:

OCTOBER 04, 09:58 EDT
Bin Laden Frustrating U.S. Sleuths

By GEORGE GEDDA
Associated Press Writer
Osama bin Laden
AP/File [19K]
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WASHINGTON (AP) — Through luck, guile, timing, accommodating foreign governments — and perhaps a dose of American incompetence — Osama bin Laden survives.

A U.S. attempt in 1996 to have him arrested in Sudan and placed in Saudi Arabian custody failed, as did an American cruise missile attack on his camps in Afghanistan in 1998. A CIA-sponsored plan to have Pakistani commandoes hunt him down a year later also fell short.

The United States has done no better in sniffing out the deadly plots for which bin Laden is believed responsible: the bombings of U.S. embassies in East Africa in 1998, the bombing of the USS Cole in Yemen in 2000 and the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks in New York and Washington, with a death toll of more than 6,000.

Should American intelligence agencies have been more alert?

Secretary of State Colin Powell says there were a lot of signs that ``there was something going on'' prior to Sept. 11 but concrete information was lacking.

The assessment of former CIA official Herbert Meyer is less kind. He sees ``a cascading series of intelligence failures'' that began years earlier when, he says, U.S. officials failed to take the threat of bin Laden seriously enough.

Powell epitomizes a ``we shall overcome'' mood in Washington in the wake of America's deadliest terrorist disaster. Flanked by members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Wednesday, he said, ``We will be patient. We will be persistent. We will prevail.''

Bin Laden appears to disagree.

A propaganda tape shows him saying, ``With small means and great faith, we can defeat the mightiest military power of modern times. America is much weaker than it seems.''

At 6 feet 5, bin Laden would seem to be an imposing target, but he's been a master at evading American sleuths. Even his enemies concede he's on a roll.

—In hopes of neutralizing bin Laden in 1996, the Clinton administration, according to two former government officials, sought to have him transferred from Sudan to police custody in his native Saudi Arabia. The Saudis rejected the plan because they believed his presence would be destabilizing, citing the many Saudis who embrace his extremist views.

—He was expelled from Sudan in May 1996 and settled in Afghanistan. Fortuitously for him, the Taliban militia, a radical Islamic movement, assumed power four months later. Afghanistan has given support and shelter to him and his movement since then, refusing to take him into custody despite evidence of his involvement in mass murder. Bin Laden was indicted for the embassy bombings.

—Bin Laden survived an assault by 66 U.S. cruise missiles on his Afghan camps on Aug. 20, 1998. The attack was aimed at avenging the bombing of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania two weeks earlier.

—In 1999, the Clinton administration tried a new approach, training 60 Pakistani commandoes to hunt down bin Laden. But as the unit was ready to do battle, the democratic government in Pakistan was deposed in a military coup. The new leader, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, called off the operation, and once again bin Laden was spared.

President Clinton said recently, ``I authorized the arrest and if necessary the killing of Osama bin Laden, and we actually made contact with a group in Afghanistan to do it. And they were unsuccessful.

``So we did everything we could and everything I thought was appropriate. We did not have the necessary intelligence to do it in the way we would have had to do it then.''

President Bush has defended U.S. intelligence agencies, declaring last week during a morale-boosting visit to the CIA that the nation has ``the best intelligence we can possibly have.'' He reaffirmed his confidence in Director George Tenet.

But Republican Sen. Richard Shelby of Alabama, vice chairman of the Senate intelligence panel, takes a harder stance, saying the Sept. 11 attacks represented a ``colossal intelligence failure.''

``Basically, we missed the boat,'' he said. ``We did not have any inkling that such an attack with such precision and such destructive force was going to occur on our soil.''

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