The CIA secretly began to send teams of American officers to northern Afghanistan about three years ago in an attempt to convince the leader of the anti-Taliban Afghan opposition to capture and perhaps kill Osama bin Laden, according to American intelligence officials.
The covert effort, which had 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 bin Laden. Massoud was himself killed, CIA officials say, only two days before the terrorist attacks on the US, and the CIA believes he was assassinated by members of bin Laden's organization.
The CIA's efforts to deal with Massoud were among the most sensitive and highly classified elements of a broader long-term campaign, continuing unsuccessfully through the end of the Bill Clinton administration and into the George W. Bush administration, to destroy bin Laden's terrorist network. The US campaign against bin Laden intensified following the August 1998 bombings of two US 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 Sept. 11 attacks.
But according to intelligence officials and other policy makers, the US 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 US interests around the world.
Clinton administration lawyers determined that the US could legitimately seek to kill bin Laden and his lieutenants despite the presidential ban on assassinations, according to those officials. The lawyers concluded that efforts to hunt and kill bin Laden were defensible either as acts of war or as national self defense, legitimate under both American and international law.
There have been an array of unsuccessful attempts to capture or kill 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 US Treasury about the implications for world finance.
The US launched cruise missiles against a meeting bin Laden was believed to be attending, encouraged 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 bin Laden.
The US 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.
Top priority
"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 Sandy 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."
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