The Near Misses

Prince Turki al Faisal knew Osama bin Laden was bad. For the last 10 of Turki's 24 years as Saudi Arabia's intelligence chief, neutralizing bin Laden was one of his primary responsibilities. But the Saudi radical kept slipping through his fingers. Then came Sept. 11 and the awful realization that bin Laden was far worse than he had imagined. "Who would expect it?" Turki asks. "I think we should have been more aware. When you look back on it, you say, 'My God, they have been telling us they are going to do something like that.' And we didn't believe them."

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Sept. 11 will haunt Turki and others in the spy trade for years to come. Having left his post, Turki, 56, is at least free to talk about his torments. In a three-hour interview with TIME last week, he described two failed attempts by the Saudis to have bin Laden handed over to them, and he discussed the inability of intelligence services to "take out" the fugitive once it became clear how dangerous he was.

As a key organizer of the joint Saudi-American-Pakistani support for Afghan rebels fighting the Soviet Union in the 1980s, Turki met bin Laden, a prominent volunteer in that war, five times and remembers him from those days as enthusiastic but gentle and shy. The Saudis first began to be worried about bin Laden in 1990, after he returned home from Afghanistan still hungry for more jihad. Soon after, according to Turki, bin Laden began taking veterans of the Afghan war to North Yemen to fight the Marxist regime in the Republic of South Yemen. "North Yemen is an arms market. You can buy a weapon anywhere. He had to be stopped," says Turki. "The kingdom said, 'You have done your best to help the mujahedin in Afghanistan. Leave it at that.' He was not pleased."

Bin Laden grew angrier later that year when the government invited U.S. troops to the kingdom to defend against the menace of Iraq's Saddam Hussein. When bin Laden grew confrontational, the Saudis withdrew his passport. Nevertheless, he made his way to Sudan, where he began to organize for global Islamic revolution.

Though the Sudanese at first welcomed bin Laden, eventually they decided he had to go, according to Turki. In 1996, Turki says, a Sudanese envoy arrived with a message: "We want to get him out. Will you take him?" The deal fell through, according to Turki, because the Saudis refused to accept the condition that bin Laden would not be prosecuted for his activities. Bin Laden wound up instead back in Afghanistan.

There he began issuing diatribes against the Saudi government and called for jihad against the U.S. That, says Turki, prompted the Saudis and Americans to start systematically sharing intelligence on him. By then, Turki notes, assassinating bin Laden was not an option. The Saudis did not have the "assets"--the undercover agents--to do it. "If we had the assets, maybe we would have made a proposal--to infiltrate people in to take him out. I don't think [the CIA] had the assets [either]."

In June 1998, King Fahd dispatched Turki to Kandahar to meet with Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar. His instructions were to "ask him to hand over bin Laden." Turki argued that bin Laden was endangering Afghanistan's greater interests. Mullah Omar "agreed in principle," Turki says.

But when the two met again, after the U.S. had struck Afghanistan with cruise missiles in retaliation for the bombing of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania--which were attributed to bin Laden--they had a tense, half-hour exchange. "He reverses himself completely," Turki recalls. "He starts spouting bin Laden propaganda against the kingdom. He was very, very hysterical, high-pitched, screaming, gesticulating. I just stood up and said, 'I'm not going to hear any more of this.' I told him, 'What you are doing is going to bring harm to Afghanistan.'" Just as Turki never grasped the full dangers attached to bin Laden, Mullah Omar seems to have made the same mistake.