Hunting Osama

U.S. forces' top goal remains getting al-Qaeda leaders. Smoking them out is not proving easy

By Johanna Mcgeary Monday, Dec. 10, 2001

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    When Kabul fell, the Northern Alliance nabbed Ahmed Abdel Rahman, 28, the son of Omar Abdel Rahman, now jailed for life in a U.S. prison for plotting to blow up New York landmarks in 1993. Young Ahmed and his brother Mohammed, 29, still on the run, were sent to Afghanistan in 1988 as teen recruits in the Islamic holy war. Some U.S. officials think Ahmed could spill a trove of useful information, since he spent years at bin Laden's side. But so far, Ahmed has refused to cooperate with his captors, and U.S. officials say they have not yet had access to question him.

    It's not easy to sort out the most wanted from the thousands of POWs in Northern Alliance hands. Interrogating prisoners can be deadly dangerous; it was in just such circumstances that CIA agent Johnny Micheal Spann died two Sundays ago. "They are people who don't walk up and volunteer their names and identification numbers with a sample of DNA," noted Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. "They blend into the other prisoners. It's a messy business."

    American operatives have been able to listen in on--and suggest questions to--Northern Alliance interrogators. They are scavenging for any tidbit that could help locate the most wanted. While Washington is content to leave most prisoners in the hands of Afghan custodians, Rumsfeld made it plain that that did not apply to the men on Franks' lists. If those men are found, U.S. forces will take them into custody. But first someone has to catch the prey. The Pentagon is leery of crossing "the Mogadishu line," named for the deadly fiasco in 1993 in which 18 soldiers died trying to apprehend a Somali warlord. So the generals have not sent any Marines into Kandahar to knock on doors. The plan, rather, is to squeeze the holdout Taliban leaders inside a ring of air strikes and advancing opposition forces until they are killed, surrender or flee into the arms of their Afghan enemies.

    Mullah Mohammed Omar is calling on his fighters "to achieve martyrdom" defending Kandahar to the last drop of blood. But bin Laden is evidently more interested in laying low and living to fight another day. (Notice we have not heard a word from him since his Taliban guardians started losing control of Afghanistan three weeks ago.) His range of motion has been seriously whittled away. Some warn that he may have already fled the country, though the Pentagon believes he has gone to ground in the most formidable hideout he can find.

    That could easily be someplace like the famously impregnable eastern Afghanistan cave complex called Tora Bora, built by mujahedin during the 1980s war against the Soviet Union. Russian troops tried three times to take it and failed. The caves are cut into the jagged, 13,000-ft. peaks of the Spin Ghar range 35 miles south of Jalalabad. They make an ideal retreat: a vast honeycomb of tunnels 8 ft. wide, carved 1,150 ft. deep into the mountain. The warren of entrances, tiny slits in the rock, lead into ventilated chambers heated and lighted by generators. Best of all, the bunker is virtually invisible from the sky and untouchable from the ground; the nearest road ends in a village that is a three-hour walk away in the valley below. Saif Rakhman, secretary to one of Jalalabad's new militia commanders, fought the Soviets at Tora Bora. He couldn't stop from laughing when a reporter asked to visit there. "If you want to sacrifice yourself," he said.

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