So where is the world's most wanted man?

So where is the world's most wanted man?

The Age
August 9, 2005

Every tool in the spying game has been used - and a $25 million bounty placed on his head - but still no one can find Osama bin Laden. Declan Walsh in Pakistan joins the most intense man-hunt ever mounted.

A fury of dust billowed from the military helicopter as it prepared to leave Shikai, a hamlet of fortress-like farmhouses near the Afghan border. Faridullah Khan, a Wazir tribal leader, walked me to the landing pad. Eyes veiled by sunglasses and mouth obscured by a bushy moustache, Khan had an impenetrable air. But one thing was clear, he said: only one year earlier, the settlement was a major global operations hub for Osama bin Laden.


Osama bin Laden.
Photo: AP

Several hundred Uzbek, Chechen and Arab militants lurked inside the towering compounds ?- training recruits, plotting attacks in Pakistan and the West, and operating a sophisticated propaganda factory complete with video-editing suites and CD burners. Some locals harboured the foreigners; others made a small fortune charging extortionate rates for everything from bread to beds; most were simply frightened.

"Al-Qaeda was all over the valley," Khan said as we neared the whumping helicopter blades, pointing to a line of craggy hills. "But this year they are gone, the army flushed them out. Al-Qaeda is on the run. Peace has been restored."

Twenty-four hours later, Khan was dead. The killers waited at a diversion off the main road. When his jeep passed ?- on the way from a meeting with the South Waziristan army commander ?- they sprayed it with bullets. But Khan did not die immediately, according to one witness. So to finish the job they incinerated the vehicle with a rocket-propelled grenade.

The murder might have been part of a simple blood feud. During an extensive tour of Waziristan weeks later, I met army commanders who speculated that Khan was killed because of a grudge. In the tribal areas every man carries a gun, they said, and the gun is the law.

But Wazir leaders ?- and several Western diplomats ?- embrace a more sinister theory: that Khan, a key figure in last year's army offensive against al-Qaeda, was taken out by supporters of bin Laden.

"There is an atmosphere of fear in the tribal areas. Al-Qaeda is killing so many informers," said human rights activist Afrasiab Khattak in Peshawar. "Khan was seen as having links with Western circles. That was probably fatal."

About 1400 days ago, George Bush vowed, as the twin towers smouldered, to find bin Laden "dead or alive". The search for OBL, as he is known in spy parlance, has become the largest man-hunt ever. Across the globe intelligence agents have shut down bank accounts, palmed money to back-street snitches, rifled houses.

Paramilitary CIA teams kidnapped bin Laden supporters in Sweden, Italy, Macedonia and Canada, then spirited them off to allied regimes in the Middle East, where several were tortured. Another 18,000 troops were deployed in Afghanistan. Their job is principally to quell the Taliban and rebuild the nation. But the greatest desire of many GIs is printed on the T-shirts at Kandahar air force base: "Wanted: Bin Laden".

"This is the greatest concentration of government resources outside a conventional war we have ever done," said one US official. And still, nothing. For all its money and muscle, all the US has to show are a mountain of rumours, two taunting video appearances by bin Laden (one delivered days before last year's presidential election) and an untouched $US25 million ($A32.5 million) bounty. Investigators are unsure whether the London Tube suicide bombers were under the direct command of a bin Laden lieutenant or were merely inspired by his corrosive ideology of hate.

Either way, the attack was yet another grisly testament to what one diplomat calls the "brand-image power" of the greatest jihadi of all, the one whose intoxicating rhetoric moves men from Lahore to Leeds but who the US, for all its might, cannot lay a glove on.

Now desperation is setting in. This year, US-sponsored "wanted" ads started appearing on Pakistani television. "Who can stop these terrorists? Only you!" implored a voice as images of bin Laden and 13 henchmen flashed across the screen. Embarrassed counter-terrorism specialists felt the ads were just a gimmick. "I'd prefer not to comment," said one US official. After all, hardly anyone has a television in Waziristan.

Across the border in Afghanistan, soldiers turned to a new weapon: matchboxes. I have watched as US troops roared into a village in Uruzgan, a volatile and mountainous province, to hand out matchboxes with covers showing a ponderous bin Laden juxtaposed against a pile of toppling gold coins. A text in Pashto detailed the $25 million reward and a website address.

But the idea of betrayal is deeply offensive to Pashtunwali, the age-old Pashtun code of honour. So even if any of the tribesmen had any information to divulge, the only sentence on the matchboxes they heeded was the one written in English: "Be Safe: Keep Cover Closed".

Yet recently tantalising hints have suggested that the Saudi's ironclad cover has cracked. They first surfaced last May in Mardan, a frontier town that is best known for its soldiers and sweets.

As two men on a motorbike roared through a graveyard of white tombs and tinsel decorations, a group wearing blue burqas ?- the head-to-toe veil worn by women ?- stepped on to the road. Flicking back the burqas, they revealed themselves as armed Pakistani commandos. The pillion passenger, a bearded man with splotches on his face, panicked and fled through a field, into a warren of streets, up a ladder and across a roof. He was finally cornered in the guest quarters of a businessman's house. The commandos flushed him out with tear gas; he emerged weeping and clutching his mobile phone.

"The funny thing is, he was not very upset," said Bakht Munir, a 30-year-old mechanic who said he directed the commandos to their quarry. "He looked almost relaxed."

The man was Abu Faraj al-Libbi, al-Qaeda's third most senior operative after bin Laden and the Egyptian Ayman al-Zawahiri, according to American and Pakistani officials.

President Bush hailed the scalp as a "critical victory". Speculation grew that he could lead to his boss. The former CIA station chief in Islamabad, Gary Schroen, predicted on television that bin Laden would be collared "within the next three to four months".

But the greatest excitement was sparked by a Time magazine interview with CIA director Porter Goss on June 20. "I have an excellent idea where he is," he said.

Goss refused to elaborate further, but all eyes turned in one direction: Pakistan. Since 2001 nearly every major al-Qaeda arrest has taken place there, including that of Khalid Sheikh Muhammed, the brains behind the 9/11 attacks. Pakistani security forces have detained or killed more than 1000 foreign militants and local allies. In terms of "high-value target" No.1, attention has persistently focused on the lawless 2400-kilometre border with Afghanistan. Until now, the question was on which side. Now America says it knows.

Before leaving for a new job in Iraq in June, the showy US ambassador to Kabul, Zalmay Khalilzad, pointedly declared that bin Laden was "not in Afghanistan". In the Time interview, Goss spoke of "sanctuaries in sovereign states". But strangely, those most likely to find bin Laden seem least optimistic about their chances.

Pakistan's military leader, General Pervez Musharraf, is increasingly irritated at suggestions that the bearded fugitive has a toehold in his country. Pakistani security forces have "broken the vertical and horizontal command and communication links of al-Qaeda, which means that they have ceased to exist as a homogeneous, wellcontrolled, centralised force," he boasted to foreign reporters recently.

Yet still the OBL question haunts him like Banquo's ghost. "There are a lot of people who say that Osama bin Laden is here in Pakistan," he said before leaving for Saudi Arabia in June. "Please come and show us where."

To get a sense of the scale of the challenge, I took a journey into Waziristan. Ruled by draconian colonial-era laws, inhabited by trigger-happy tribesmen and effectively fenced off from the rest of the country, Waziristan is in every sense on the outer edge of Pakistan and was, until very recently, where the smart money was in the hunt for OBL.

Divided into two tribal agencies, north and south ?- a total of seven nestle along the Afghan border ?- Waziristan has a rich history of tribes and trouble. During the 1980s, it became a vast muster station for Muslims across the world wishing to fight the godless Soviets across the border in Afghanistan.

Then, in 2001, as 1000-kilogram American "bunker buster" bombs devastated the Tora Bora cave complex in southern Afghanistan, hundreds of al-Qaeda militants ?- Arabs, Chechens and especially Uzbeks ?- streamed into Pakistan. Many found solace and shelter in Waziristan. During my recent bone-jarring, four-day road trip across the lawless territory, it was easy to see why.

Every house is a castle, a vast compound ringed by a towering mud wall, medieval battlements and fronted by a giant, thick door. The desert villages squat on desiccated plains, the mountain ones cling to dizzying, detritus-strewn slopes. Men with sun-beaten faces and fierce henna beards hunker by the tarless roads, fingering their prayer beads and cradling AK-47s. Some cast defiant glares as we pass.

By the middle of last year, Waziristan had become home to the world's largest al- Qaeda base. At least 15 camps were dotted around the southern area under the protection of the Wazir tribe, mostly around Wana and Shikai. The militants plotted against targets at home and abroad. Al-Libbi orchestrated two assassination attempts against Musharraf from Wana. Muhammad Naeem Noor Khan, a Pakistani computer whiz from Karachi who was later arrested with blueprints of plans to attack New Jersey and London, was also a visitor.

For all that is so far known about the July 7 bombings in London it is possible ?- but not yet probable ?- that the plan germinated inside one of these citadel-like houses. For at least a year Pakistan denied there was a problem in South Waziristan.

Then, in early 2004, under strong American pressure, it acted ?- first deploying 70,000 army and paramilitary troops and then launching a pulverising operation that quickly turned to all-out war. By mid- 2004, the army had won, but at considerable cost. More than 300 militants were dead, about half of them foreigners, but so were 250 Pakistani soldiers.

But the much-vaunted victory was not a fatal blow to al-Qaeda in Pakistan or, indeed, Waziristan. And it did not light up a trail to bin Laden. The dead Central Asian fighters were at the bottom of the al-Qaeda ladder, simple foot soldiers. Meanwhile, the big fish ?- Qari Tahir Yuldashev, a radical mullah and bin Laden ally from Uzbekistan's Fergana Valley, Arabs such as al-Libbi, maybe even bin Laden himself ?- escaped. Clues and rumours in the world's greatest game of hide-and-seek are as fleeting and intangible as the swirling mountain winds. Speculative reports from the past year place bin Laden everywhere from Kashmir to the Khyber Pass.

Some say he is hiding in the Shomal mountains of North Waziristan; more recently, others have looked further along the Afghan border to Baijaur, a previously unremarkable tribal agency close to the village where al-Libbi was captured.

According to one recent report, villagers in Baijaur saw a jeep full of Arabs stock up on supplies, then disappear up a mountain slope towards Afghanistan. A persistent theory, championed by the former CIA station chief Gary Schroen, is that Pakistan hasn't found bin Laden because it doesn't want to. Ali Dayan Hassan of Human Rights Watch agrees that the "rugged terrain" excuse for not finding him is "rubbish" because the army has extensive intelligence tentacles in the tribal areas. Schroen maintains that a diehard fundamentalist strain still holds sway within the Pakistani army.

But one US diplomat says he is "extremely dubious" of such suggestions. Schroen might be working on outdated assumptions, he says. "I don't believe Musharraf or anyone senior in government is deliberately failing. Are there guys at lower levels who don't want to do it? Maybe. But it's impossible to say."

For now, experts can offer only guesses about bin Laden's life, mostly picked up from militants who fled at Tora Bora. If they are to be believed, we know just this: that he is surrounded by concentric layers of security; that he communicates only by courier and never by phone; that he travels on horseback or under a burqa to skirt US satellite surveillance.

Abu Faraj al-Libbi has been transferred to Guantanamo Bay after weeks of Pakistani interrogation. Officials say they discovered nothing to lead to bin Laden. Maybe they are right, and the focus on Pakistan is wrong. Perhaps he is hiding in an entirely different country ?- Afghanistan or the wild borderlands of China or Iran are often mentioned ?- chortling quietly at the magnificent confusion of his disappearing act.

But the one sure thing is that if bin Laden were captured in Pakistan, it would be a major political trauma for Musharraf. Because of the Iraq war, bin Laden has acquired a poke-them-in-the-eye, Robin Hood legitimacy across the Islamic world, even among moderate Muslims. One recent opinion poll, for example, found that he had 63 per cent support in Pakistan, compared to just 9 per cent for George Bush. Musharraf knows this, but insists he will not shirk from the task. Still, that broad well of support might be a key hurdle in the faltering man-hunt.

On a scorching afternoon, Mukthiar Gul, a 32-year-old unemployed man, is swigging water outside the house where al-Libbi was caught. If he had known who al-Libbi was, he would have happily helped him escape, he says. "He was doing a service for Islam ?- jihad," he explains, his friends nodding in agreement. And if it were bin Laden, would he do the same? Gul smiles. "Of course, yes."

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