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.
"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."
Although government rhetoric has shifted, many officials say they believe it is too late for the Bush administration to alter the aims of the war, and play down the importance of finding bin Laden.
They noted that the US has frequently stumbled whenever one person has been made the object of US foreign policy.
Bush's father, for example, ran into difficulty in Panama in 1989, when the Panamanian strongman Manuel Noriega briefly slipped through America's grasp.
"I think everyone knew from the beginning how hard it was going to be to get one person, and we knew we shouldn't put so much emphasis on Osama bin Laden," said one US official. "But it's too late for that now."
Some US intelligence 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 have long believed that bin Laden has been traveling with one of his top deputies, Ayman al-Zawahiri, as he retreated from the advancing US and anti-Taliban forces.
Now, some officials say it is possible that Zawahiri and another top al-Qaeda lieutenant, Abu Zubaydah, have dispersed and are hiding somewhere in Afghanistan or the Pakistani border region.
US officials also acknowledged that they had also lost track of Mullah Mohammed Omar, the former Taliban leader who is believed to be somewhere in central Afghanistan. "I've seen even less intelligence about Mullah Omar than about Osama lately," noted one official.
As US troops and Afghan forces have moved in to search the cave complexes around Tora Bora that were heavily bombed in December, the US has not found any physical evidence that might reveal exactly where in the cave complex bin Laden had been hiding, US officials said.
One official said the government had considered getting DNA samples from members of bin Laden's family to aid in identification if the US finds a body it suspects is his. But those steps have not yet been taken.
Intelligence officers are monitoring both telephone and radio transmissions for indications of bin Laden's whereabouts or his death.
In November, the CIA concluded that Mohammed Atef, al-Qaeda's chief of military operations, had been killed in a US bombing raid after it intercepted communications among al-Qaeda officials discussing his death.
So far, however, no other senior leaders of al-Qaeda have been reported killed, and if the US has such men among the prisoners it is holding in Guantanamo Bay in Cuba, it is not saying.
US intelligence officials say they believe that some officials of al-Qaeda are apparently escaping from Afghanistan through Iran, where the US has no way of getting at them.
Bush administration officials do not believe that senior Iranian government officials associated with the reformist Khatami government have sanctioned the movement of al-Qaeda members into Iran.
They may not even be aware of it, some officials said. Approval for the border crossings appears to have come either from local government leaders in the border region, who are being paid off, or possibly from conservatives in the intelligence and security apparatus.
Iran's Shiite Muslim rulers have long officially opposed the Sunni Muslim hard-liners in the Taliban, but many conservatives are even more vehemently opposed to the US.
"There are probably al-Qaeda and Taliban people who have gotten out that way," said one US intelligence official. "Iran has always been a route for al-Qaeda people to get out of Afghanistan. How much has been officially sanctioned is unclear."
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