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If you were Usama bin Laden today where would you be and what would you be doing? With the mightest power the world has ever known on your case, assisted by most of its allies--except New Zealand--where would you hide out?
Where would you go to avoid the satellites that, so its operators claim, can pick up a car number plate from hundreds of miles up in the sky, the eavesdropping capacity of the National Security Agency with its computers measured in acres rather than numbers, the pilotless surveillance planes, the helicopters and the the Rambo-style special forces of America, Britain and Germany?
Assessed in these terms, the odds against bin Laden appear to be stacked heavily against him. But consider this. No one knows what he currently looks like. The photographs and film of him are months--in some cases years--old. He is swarthy, sports a long unkempt beard and wears baggy clothes and a turban. But that description fits millions of other men in Afghanistan.
The Americans know which places he has frequented in the past and which bunkers he has used for hide-outs. They know because they themselves built them during the war between Afghanistan and the Soviet Union when bin Laden was the CIA's favourite freedom fighter. But since bin Laden knows that they know, the CIA bunkers are the last place to look for him.
They know he must communicate with his lieutenants but he has not used his cell phone since February so he must have found a secure method that the experts cannot intercept. His followers use email with an across-the-counter encryption package that they change frequently. Or pay-as-you-go mobiles that they use for one conversation and then throw away. Or they pop into an internet cafe, create a new Hotmail address, send an email and are gone again in five minutes. When bin Laden wants to make an announcement someone carries a despatch by bicycle or on foot across the border into Pakistan and then pays a street urchin to deliver it to a sympathetic newspaper.
The unpalatable truth is that nobody in the American alliance knows where he is, and nobody has known for a long time. Former President Bill Clinton admitted as much last this week when he revealed a fact he had been saving for his book--"I authorised the arrest and, if necessary, the killing of Usama bin Laden... But we didn't have the necessary intelligence to do it in the way we would have had to do it." In short, they couldn't find him.
President Bush has announced that one way of pinning down bin Laden might be the through the Department of Justice's tactic popular in criminal cases: "follow the money" by putting pressure on the international banking community to trace donations flowing to him from his supporters or being moved around by him. But this has never been very successful or popular because it interferes with legitimate business practice.
It never stopped funds from reaching the IRA, for example, and it has not appreciably harmed drug barons or money launderers. British banks reported to the regulatory authorities some 16,000 suspicious banking transactions in 2000. Less than a quarter were investigated and there has not been a successful prosecution in years, which is why London is the money-laundering capital of the world.
This is why the Americans have resorted in desperation to the tactics of the Wild West in order to get their man. They have put a price on his head. "Usuma bin Laden, public enemy No.1. Wanted dead or alive. $25 million dollar reward. Information to the CIA or the FBI." The aim is not to encourage bounty hunters to try their luck in the mountains of Afghanistan but to try to tempt someone in bin Laden's organisation to "grass" or "rat" on him. They want to inspire treachery.
Bin Laden is, by many accounts, a very intelligent man and has considered the fact that one of his followers might be tempted by the devil's money. The people closest to him are family, the others relatives, clan members or absolutely devout followers. As he moves around, the composition of his band changes frequently. Those who have just left him spread stories about where he has been, what he has been doing and where he is going. They are all false and intended to mislead and cause confusion.
The parallels with Keyser Soze in the cult movie "The Usual Suspects" are striking. Keyser Soze is a semi-mythical criminal mastermind with tentacles all over the world. He is nowhere and everywhere. No one has ever seen him and no one is one hundred per cent sure that he actually exists.
In the Western alliance all those experts with the specialist knowledge to assess the chances of finding "Keyser bin Laden" do not want to be quoted because of the risk of being labelled defeatist before the operation to locate him has even begun.
But Brigadier General Reinhard Gunzel, head of the German Special Services which are expected to join the hunt for bin Laden, said earlier this week said he considered the task to be "just about impossible". And he added that this view was shared by special forces in the United States, Britain, France and--very significantly--Israel.
But the operation will go ahead because all the governments concerned believe that to do nothing is "essentially to capitulate to terrorism." Of course, the special forces might get lucky and bump into bin Laden disguised as a waiter and working in an Afghani teahouse high in a mountain pass. But the chances are slim. Some say it need not have been like this. They argue that the American intelligence community could well have had the ability to foresee the attacks on the Trade Centre and the Pentagon and to pinpoint bin Laden's whereabouts had it not been for a series of short-sighted budget cuts in vital intelligence areas.
Their case goes like this. When communism collapsed and the Cold War ended, taxpayers in the West began to demand a peace dividend. The American intelligence community responded by shuffling its budget--$30 billion last year--to make it look good. Money was spent on high-profile projects like "force protection": the modifying of American embassies to protect them from terrorist attack to such an extent that today most resemble fortresses rather than diplomatic outposts.
The CIA cut staff and contracted out their work to outside firms who immediately employed the very CIA staff who had just been made redundant. They all looked for high-tech solutions because they are easier to justify than sitting around, analysing information and thinking about what it could mean.
And because the military complained in the Gulf War and then in Kosovo that it was hampered by lack of intelligence, the CIA and NSA switched their efforts to the high-tech gathering of information to support military operations. The concentration was on spying on "rogue" states, seen as the main threat. Counter-terrorism was left largely to the think tanks--the Kennedy School's Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard University has produced no less than fourteen papers on terrorism in the past ten years.
Intelligence officers who believed that "asymetric warfare", a fancy name for terrorism, posed a real threat to the United States and that "humit", intelligence gathered and analysed by humans, was the only real defence against it, were side-lined or ignored. As Jack Blum, former special counsel to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee complains, "The 'people budget', the money for analysts who do the intelligence grunt work, was being cut to protect the money for the big weapons systems.
"Where in all the electronic junk that our technology picked up was the gem that would have prevented the New York bombing? Finding the needle, understanding what it means and fitting it into other pieces of the puzzle is a people-intensive exercise. And all too often the messages we most need are in dialects of difficult foreign languages. Imagine trying to make sense of an intercepted telephone conversation between two Afghan war veterans. Yet the U.S. government cut drastically all its programmes for foreign language training, especially 'exotic' foreign languages."
As for inserting a penetration officer or agent into bin Laden's organisation, this too, has been a non-starter. The CIA runs only "official cover" operatives in the Middle East--CIA officers who work out of American embassies under the cover of a diplomatic posting or as American businessmen abroad.
But former CIA case officer Reuel Gerecht says, "As of late 1999, no programme to insert non-official-cover operatives [local, dialect-speaking spies working for money] into Islamic fundamentalist organisations had been implemented." He quoted one CIA officer as saying, "We're still a group of fake businessmen who live in big houses overseas. We don't go to mosques and pray."
The results of these failures are already only too painfully apparent. The world now awaits the next stage. Given all the difficulties it would be be tempting for the American alliance to announce that they had located bin Laden and destroyed him and his group with a well-aimed missile, leaving no remains to identify. As one of Keyser Soze's henchmen says at the end of the movie, blowing an imaginary feather from the palm of his hand: "Phhhht. And he was gone." Or was he?
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