Despite a $5-million reward for information leading to his capture and high-tech tracking, Osama bin Laden has proved elusive
Rory McCarthy and Ewen MacAskill
The United States has spy satellites over the Indian Ocean capable of providing pictures from Afghanistan so detailed that they can identify cigarette butts. But, for all its technology, the US has for the past five years been unable to find the man at the top of its wanted list, Osama bin Laden.
Even before Tuesday’s attacks, he had been indicted for more than 200 killings. A $5-million reward had been posted by the FBI for information leading to his capture. But he has proved elusive.
The leader of the terrorist movement al-Qaida seldom sleeps in the same place two nights in a row, according to both his supporters and to intelligence sources. In a practice common among men on the run, his guards pick out two or three possible locations for each night, with the final decision left until the last minute.
In recent months he has been identified as being in Jalalabad in eastern Afghanistan, Kandahar in the centre and in the Hindu Kush mountains north of Kandahar. Public appearances are few but he was in Kandahar for a wedding in January.
He has training camps throughout Afghanistan for Arabs wanting either to fight with Afghanistan’s ruling Taliban, the hardline Islamic group, or to prepare for action against the US. Intelligence sources confirm that pictures of these camps are relayed to them on a daily basis, but he mainly avoids the camps, knowing they are too obvious a target.
Even if he was in a camp, the satellites would not pick him up as they cannot film inside buildings, tents and caves.
The limitations of satellites were shown after the attack on US embassies in East Africa when Bill Clinton ordered cruise missiles to be fired against a camp at the town of Kost in 1998. Bin Laden was not there.
The US thought it had him cornered when a call made by Bin Laden was intercepted by one of the Indian Ocean satellites but action was taken too late. Although he has since reverted to use of handwritten messages, he has not stopped using satellite phones: he gave an interview to a journalist in Pakistan by phone this year.
An alternative to the cruise missiles used in 1998 would be a snatch squad landing by helicopter but this runs up against the same problem of locating him. And Bin Laden is heavily guarded, which raises the prospect of heavy US casualties.
Peter Bergen, a Washington-based journalist who met Bin Laden and is writing a book about the Saudi and his terrorist network, said: “The US has no problem with killing Bin Laden but it is incredibly hard to find him. It is a huge country, he could be anywhere.
“They need real-time intelligence but they don’t have spies inside the organisation. They have people who have left the organisation and so their effective knowledge of the organisation ends in 1998. It is old information.
“The reward is no good, because these people are not motivated by money. The only possible route is if the Taliban are sufficiently horrified by what happened to hand him over. But at the moment he has the Taliban on his side.”
International influence on the Taliban is minimal, as demonstrated by its refusal in February to heed pleas not to destroy the Banyan statues. UN sanctions imposed to try to force the Taliban to hand him over hardened attitudes in Kabul.
Bin Laden, who inherited 200-million from his father’s construction business, bankrolls the Taliban’s military operations. At least 5000 Arabs have gone to Afghanistan to fight alongside the Taliban, most in the Bin Laden-funded “055 brigade”. Taliban ministers openly speak of Bin Laden as their hero.