A month after US officials expressed confidence that they had cornered Osama bin Laden in the mountains of Tora Bora, they now acknowledge they have lost track of the terrorist leader and are increasingly frustrated over the virtual absence of intelligence about his whereabouts.
The officials say they have had no firm fix on bin Laden since early December, when intelligence agents believed they overheard him directing troops over a short-wave radio in the Tora Bora area of southeastern Afghanistan.
"He has gone silent," one official said.
That silence has fueled debate among analysts over whether bin Laden has switched to a more secure form of communications, gone into hiding or died.
So far, the consensus of US intelligence officials is that bin Laden remains alive, hiding in either southeastern Afghanistan or just across the border in the Pakistani province of Baluchistan.
Other al-Qaeda operatives may have slipped into Iran, with its compliance, US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and others in the administration said.
The assessment of bin Laden's whereabouts is based primarily on an absence of evidence, officials said. It is assumed that if bin Laden were dead, the remnants of his al-Qaeda network would be overheard discussing his demise in phone calls or radio transmissions.
"It would be hard for some of these guys to resist talking about it," one US official said.
Another reason he is believed to be alive, officials said, is that Afghans have not produced any convincing evidence that he is dead, despite a US$25 million reward for such information.
One official described the effort to find bin Laden as a mix of guesswork and analysis.
* US officials have conceded they have no recent evidence as to whether Osama bin Laden is dead or alive.
* US National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice said that one point of concern for the US is that Iran has not sufficiently fortified its border and that bin Laden might have slipped across.
* Some analysts say that the heavy bombing of the Tora Bora area in December may have prompted bin Laden and his top deputies to split up in order to survive.
* US officials also acknowledge that they had also lost track of Mullah Mohammed Omar, the former Taliban leader.
"We have some fixes on where he was at certain times in the past," the official said, "and we have some estimates of how fast he was moving from one fix to another and so we kind of navigate where we should look next."
For months, intelligence officers have scoured Afghanistan, peering at thousands of hours of videotape and satellite photos and listening to countless intercepted phone calls and radio transmissions. While the exhaustive hunt has not yielded bin Laden, officials disclosed that they have turned up some sensitive information: Intelligence reports that some members of al-Qaeda are being allowed into Iran from western Afghanistan.
On Sunday, Rumsfeld accused Iran of turning a blind eye to al-Qaeda members seeking refuge there.
"The Iranians have not done what the Pakistan government has done: put troops along the border and prevent terrorists from escaping out of Afghanistan into their country," he said on ABC's This Week.
Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser, said, "This is one of the things that we are concerned about with the Iranians, that there may be some porousness on that border."
Speaking on Fox News Sunday, she also said of bin Laden, "We have no recent evidence that he's alive or dead."
With bin Laden elusive, US President George W. Bush has recast his stated aims of the war.
On Sept. 17, Bush declared that the capture or death of bin Laden was a prime objective.
"I want justice," Bush said. "There's an old poster out West I recall, that said `Wanted Dead or Alive.'"
But in a recent televised interview the president said: "Osama bin Laden is not my focus. My focus is terror at large."
And in his State of the Union speech he did not even mention bin Laden by name, simply delivering a general warning to terrorists that "you will not escape the justice of this nation."
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