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Laden's trail is lost, but US officials suspect he is alive
( 2002-02-04 14:29 ) (7 )

In this image made from video broadcast by the Qatar-based television station Al-Jazeera on Wednesday, Dec. 26, Osama Bin Laden speaks from an undisclosed location at an undisclosed time. His statements indicated he was speaking in the first half of December. Writing at top right reads "Exclusive to Al-Jazeera." [AP]

A month after United States officials expressed confidence that they had cornered Osama bin Laden in the mountains of Tora Bora, they now acknowledge that they have lost track of the terrorist leader and are increasingly frustrated over the virtual absence of intelligence on his whereabouts.

The officials say they have had no firm fix on Mr. bin Laden since early December, when intelligence agents believe that 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 Mr. bin Laden has switched to a more secure form of communications, gone into hiding or died.

So far, the consensus of American intelligence officials is that Mr. bin Laden remains alive, hiding in either southeastern Afghanistan or just across the border in the Pakistani province of Baluchistan.

Other operatives of Al Qaeda may have slipped into Iran, possibly with its compliance, US Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and others in the administration say.

The assessment of Mr. bin Laden's whereabouts is based primarily on an absence of evidence, officials said. It is assumed that if Mr. bin Laden were dead, the remnants of his network, Al Qaeda, 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," said one American official.

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 Mr. 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."

The national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, appearing on "Fox News Sunday," said that the administration had "no recent evidence that he's alive or dead."

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 Mr. bin Laden, officials disclosed that they have turned up some sensitive information: intelligence reports that some members of Al Qaeda, possibly including top officials of the terrorist group, are being allowed into Iran from western Afghanistan.

Mr. Rumsfeld on Sunday accused Iran of turning a blind eye to Al Qaeda members finding 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 the ABC program "This Week."

Ms. Rice said, "This is one of the things that we are concerned about with the Iranians, that there may be some porousness on that border."

The administration officials did not specifically charge that the reformist government of Mohammad Khatami has sanctioned such border crossings. Some officials said approval may have come from local leaders in the border regions or conservatives in the intelligence and security apparatus.

With Mr. bin Laden remaining elusive, President Bush has recast his war aims. On Sept. 17, he declared that the capture or death of Mr. bin Laden was a prime objective. "I want justice," he 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 Mr. 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 that it is too late for the Bush administration to alter the focus of the war, and play down the importance of finding Mr. bin Laden.

They noted that the United States has frequently stumbled whenever one person has been made the object of American foreign policy. President 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 American official. "But it is too late for that now."

Some American intelligence analysts say that the heavy bombing of the Tora Bora area in December may have prompted Mr. bin Laden and his top deputies to split up in order to survive. American officials have long believed that Mr. bin Laden has been traveling with one of his top deputies, Ayman al-Zawahiri, as he retreated from the advancing American and anti-Taliban forces.

Now, some officials say it is possible that Mr. Zawahiri and another top lieutenant of Al Qaeda, Abu Zubaydah, have dispersed and are hiding somewhere in Afghanistan or the Pakistani border region.

American officials also acknowledged that they had lost track of Mullah Muhammad Omar, the former Taliban leader who is believed to be somewhere in central Afghanistan.

As American troops and Afghan forces have moved in to search the cave complexes around Tora Bora, the United States has not found any physical evidence that might reveal exactly where in the cave complex Mr. bin Laden had been hiding, American officials said.

One official said the government had considered getting DNA samples from members of Mr. bin Laden's family to aid in identification if the United States finds a body it suspects is his. But those steps have not yet been taken.

In November, the C.I.A. concluded that Muhammad Atef, Al Qaeda's chief of military operations, had been killed in an American 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 United States has such men among the prisoners it is holding in Guantanamo Bay in Cuba, it is not saying.