Saudi Prince: Afghans Could Have Sold Out bin Laden

Prince Turki al Faisal of Saudi Arabia knows Afghanistan well. He helped direct Saudi aid to anti-Soviet fighters in their war against Moscow. And since 1998, as head of the Saudi intelligence service, he's made a number of attempts to negotiate a deal to get Osama bin Laden out of Afghanistan. He failed. Still, Turki believes the current American method of trying to extract bin Laden is ill-advised.

Turki, who retired from his post earlier this year, feels the Bush administration made a mistake in not channeling the war on terrorism through the United Nations. The bombing of Afghanistan, he tells TIME, is "really affecting people's consciences" and "creating opposition to the U.S. position." In concrete terms, Turki says, "if someone like (assassinated rebel leader) Abdul Haq comes and says, 'Join us in supporting the U.S. against Al Qaeda,' it won't make sense... for an Afghan who sees his neighbor's house being destroyed by an American bomb." Turki says that a U.N. effort to support an alternative Afghan government would have rallied Afghans against Bin Laden more effectively, reducing the appearance of a "U.S.-against-Afghanistan" conflict. "I don't think Al-Qaeda could escape from such an effort," he explains. "Afghans are pretty wily people. They know where their interests will lie in the future. (Bin Laden) knows that the possibility of his being sold out is always there."

Turki says putting U.S. commandos on the ground is one possible way of getting bin Laden, but that method certainly won't be easy. "The guy knows the country better than you or I, and he has people who know it better than him," Turki says. "I'm sure throughout the last couple of years he has been planning hiding places for himself, and figuring out routes to get there, and setting up decoys and diversions so that airplanes can't find him, and so satellites don't trace his movements. He is that kind of person."

Bin Laden, Turki cautions, has fooled the experts before. Turki says that he was surprised by the U.S. "intelligence failure" of not having had "more forewarning, more interdiction, less freedom of action, for the terrorists" who carried out the September 11 attacks. But he admits that it was a failure for Saudi and other intelligence services, too. "All we were hearing about before I left my job was that Al-Qaeda was going to do something. But where, when, by whom — that information was not available."