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CIA closes special bin Laden search unit

The CIA has closed down a secret unit that for a decade had the mission of hunting Osama bin Laden and his top lieutenants, US intelligence officials said on Monday.

The terrorist tracking unit, known inside the spy agency as "Alec Station," was disbanded late last year and its analysts reassigned to other offices within the CIA's Counterterrorist Center, the officials said.

The decision is a milestone of sorts for the agency, which created the unit before Bin Laden became a household name and bolstered its ranks after the Sept. 11 attacks, when US President George W. Bush pledged to bring Bin Laden to justice "dead or alive."

The realignment reflects a view that al-Qaeda is no longer as hierarchical as it once was, intelligence officials said, as well as growing concern about al-Qaeda-inspired groups that have begun carrying out attacks independent of Bin Laden and his top deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri.

CIA officials said that tracking Bin Laden and his deputies remains a high priority, and that the decision to disband the unit is not a sign that the effort has slackened. Instead, the officials said, the realignment reflects a belief that the agency can better deal with high-level threats by focusing on regional trends rather than on specific organizations or individuals.

"The efforts to find Osama bin Laden are as strong as ever," said Jennifer Dyck, a CIA spokeswoman. "This is an agile agency, and the decision was made to ensure greater reach and focus" for counterterrorism efforts.

Michael Scheuer, a former senior CIA official who was the first head of the Bin Laden unit, said he believed the move reflected a view within the agency that Bin Laden was no longer the threat he once was. Scheuer said he believed that view was mistaken.

"This will clearly denigrate our operations against al-Qaeda," Scheuer said. "These days at the agency, Bin Laden and al-Qaeda appear to be treated merely as first among equals."

In his book Ghost Wars, which chronicles the CIA's efforts to hunt Bin Laden in the years before the Sept. 11 attacks, the author and journalist Steve Coll wrote, "The Bin Laden unit's analysts were so intense about their work that they made some of their CIA colleagues uncomfortable."

Officials said Alec Station was disbanded late last year.
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