COLUMN ONE : The Case of the Missing Warlord : ‘Wanted’ Somali clan leader Mohammed Farah Aidid has eluded a U.N. dragnet entering its third month. Some say the search is turning him into a legend. Others insist his capture is crucial to peace.

Dawn breaks here to helicopter thunder, the jarring wake-up call of low-flying U.S. Black Hawk spotters scouring the lethal and broken streets. Below is a war-tattered tapestry now besieged by bandits, thugs and the militia of a man on the run.

The choppers buzz rickety markets of looted timber and tin. They zip at the treetops over merchants armed with knives and guns who open at daybreak to hawk soap, scrap, stolen food and other staples to 2 million Somalis exhausted from years of fear.

Their belt-fed M-60 machine guns armed and at the ready for potential targets, the Black Hawks occasionally hover over a blown-out compound, a shell-pocked villa or a straw hut. This just might be the one--the house this capital’s most wanted man has chosen to sleep in for the night.

This is the morning ritual here of the aerial patrolmen the United Nations calls its “eyes in the sky.” Their work is just part of the United Nations’ unprecedented--and increasingly controversial--effort to combine intelligence reports, tips and blind luck to find and arrest a fugitive in a lawless, urban jungle too dangerous to tread on foot.

The quarry: Mohammed Farah Aidid, 57, a clan leader, veteran guerrilla fighter and former Somali army general turned warlord and renegade.

The chief of the U.N. mission here blames Aidid for tormenting and occasionally stymieing one of the most ambitious, expensive modern international efforts to reconstruct and re-create a nation.

For the chief hunter, Ret. U.S. Adm. Jonathan Howe, Aidid is a “vicious individual” who on June 5 declared war on the United Nations in what has become “a well-orchestrated terrorist campaign” that has claimed the lives of two dozen Pakistani peacekeepers and four U.S. Army military police. Aidid’s campaign, the admiral asserts, also is responsible for scores more U.N. battle injuries and almost nightly mortar and machine-gun guerrilla attacks on U.N. bases throughout southern Mogadishu.

Howe--who as Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali’s special representative commands the United Nations’ $1.5-billion mission to pacify and rebuild Somalia--has offered a $25,000 reward for Aidid’s capture. Howe has saturated the city with “wanted” posters and has presided over what he calls a sophisticated, systematic strategy to employ political and military operations to neutralize, isolate and corner a man once viewed by many Somalis as a national hero.

There’s just one problem: This week, Howe’s hunt has entered its third month, and Aidid, still, has managed to elude some of the world’s most sophisticated military hardware and--in Mogadishu alone--more than 13,000 U.N. troops with tanks, armored personnel carriers and a fleet of reconnaissance and attack helicopters.

Aidid reportedly is moving from house to house in Mogadishu and continuing to orchestrate increasingly bloody guerrilla combat, costing the United Nations millions of dollars. The thus-far unsuccessful pursuit of him, many Somalis say, adds daily to the warlord’s emerging status as a folk legend. Meantime, criticism is mounting in Somalia and in the capitals of some of the 28 nations participating in the peacekeeping operation that Howe’s hunt for Aidid is fast becoming a personal obsession.

There are growing signs that some military commanders of the U.N. force here want to make his capture a lower priority, worrying that there may be more fatalities among peacekeeping troops or Somali civilians and concerned about the prospect of an escalation of street battles after a potential commando raid on an Aidid safehouse.

Their fears were fed by a series of U.S.-led air strikes on select Aidid compounds and arsenals during the two-month hunt; the military actions escalated the conflict with Somalis, left dozens dead and Aidid apparently no closer to capture.

Privately, officials within the multinational coalition confirm that many in the U.N. military command would prefer to see successful political efforts to persuade elders of Aidid’s clan to isolate and neutralize him and his sub-clan.

Aidid, however, has proven difficult to ignore. Just how he and his small force--no more than 200 militiamen with small arms and mortars--have evaded a modern, multinational army is a tale that would be almost comic were it not for its grave implications for the future of U.N. efforts to save Somalia.

Even Howe has taken a light tack in describing the hunt for Aidid. When he publicly ordered Aidid’s arrest on July 17, the admiral said he figured there would be as many sightings of the warlord as there have been of Elvis Presley.

“Yes, we were calling it, ‘The Hunt for Elvis,’ for a while, and we’re still calling it” that, Howe said.

But he shifted to a more serious tone to answer critics and to explain why Aidid has been able to hold the United Nations at bay for so many weeks. “We know, with Aidid, it’s taking too long, and I wish it weren’t,” said Howe, at 57 one of the youngest and most highly decorated senior officers in U.S. naval history.

“I wish we could all walk around more freely in this city, but I am still confident we will prevail in this situation,” added the former deputy national security adviser to former President George Bush, who experienced hare-and-hound hunts on foreign soil while working on the two-year mission to bring Panamanian strongman Manuel A. Noriega to justice.

The Panama effort culminated in an American invasion and a 10-day chase of Noriega, who, after being bombarded with blaring rock ‘n’ roll surrendered from his refuge in the Vatican Embassy in Panama City.

Conceding that he had hoped the hunt for Aidid would be shorter and cause less fear and violence in Mogadishu’s streets, Howe insisted in an interview that he took pains not to set a deadline for the effort to capture the warlord.

“I was very cautious because I’ve been through some of this stuff in the past,” he said. “You remember Noriega. I know how hard it is. I was not expecting instant success. . . . I refused to put a timetable on it because I knew how hard it was.

“I hoped that it would be very quick,” he added. “But I honestly didn’t know.”

Howe refused to discuss the strategy he has brought to bear in the hunt, stressing, “I don’t want to tip my hand. . . . I certainly want to keep him (Aidid) guessing.”

Apparently referring to U.N. negotiations with factions within Aidid’s Habr Gedir clan, Howe added: “I just want to say we have a whole range of options. We consider each situation thoughtfully. We have a broader strategy that is unfolding.”

Already, Howe insisted, the U.N. forces have “come close--very, very close” to snagging Aidid. “We’ve had some very close opportunities to do so. It would have been wonderful if it had happened. But it didn’t. Now, I’m not saying we’re at a point where it is Mission Impossible. I don’t think it is. I think the guy will be turned in, turned up or we will do the job.”

Howe clearly eliminated the most obvious option, about which Mogadishu has been buzzing: Does the United Nations have a contingency plan to kill Aidid?

“No,” Howe said flatly. “We’re not trying to kill him. . . . It is clearly not ‘Dead or alive.’ And that’s what makes it much more difficult. Much more. Because we’re trying to arrest him, we’re not trying to kill him.”

Further complicating the hunt, Howe conceded, is the fact that Aidid--widely credited with marshaling the oft-brilliant military rebellion that united many clans to overthrow former Somali dictator Mohamed Siad Barre before the clans began warring among themselves and destroyed all semblance of order in early 1991--is a veteran guerrilla commander. He previously has managed to live underground and escape capture for years.

As one veteran U.N. humanitarian aid worker put it: “Aidid is a master tactician. And certainly he was a hero when he drove out Siad Barre. He lost a lot of that during the civil war, but it is true that he is getting some of it back now. In fact, history has shown that the only way you can unite Somalis is by giving them a common enemy. And that’s why they (U.N. military commanders) are so concerned about turning him into a martyr.”

As the weeks have passed without Aidid’s capture, Somalis at every level--particularly among the clans that dislike and fear Aidid--also have expressed concern that the warlord’s reputation is growing.

“They are making him into a hero, and Aidid is just biding his time, while every day more people support him,” said Ahmed Hussein Fidow, a former Somali Airlines pilot who worked for the United Nations for several months. “It’s not that they like Aidid. Things have just gone out of control in the city, and it looks more and more like (the United Nations) is just another clan, and getting Aidid is a personal vendetta.”

In reply, Howe said, “I’ve heard that allegation a lot.”

But he said that, since he issued the arrest order two months ago, “I have said we are not going to focus our mission on arresting this guy. We will do it in due course. We will try to ensure that he does not frustrate us in doing our mission.”

Howe said that aid and development work is accelerating in the Somali countryside, unaffected by the guerrilla campaign, which is mostly confined to one large section of the capital. Howe likened the impasse with Aidid to “one long speed bump” that is slowing the U.N. mission’s progress.

But, in interviews with dozens of Somalis and Western experts hired by the United Nations to reconstruct the country, it was clear that the continuing street violence spawned in part by Aidid’s response to the hunt is taking a huge financial toll and slowing the rebuilding of Somalia.

Random attacks on U.N. vehicles have forced all employees and even most peacekeepers into their compounds and off the roads. U.N. employees commute the few miles from home to the U.N. headquarters at the former U.S. Embassy compound in contracted shuttle helicopters, a service that is as time-consuming as it is costly.

And, fueled largely by Howe’s vow that Aidid will be given a fair trial with due process, most in Mogadishu wonder just what the United Nations will do with Aidid if and when he is captured.

“If we were to catch Aidid today, what are we going to do with him? Try him? Make a big circus out of it?” asked Eddie Johns, the American harbor master in Mogadishu.

Johns spent months directing the reconstruction of the city’s strategic seaport as a U.S. Army reservist activated earlier this year. He quit the military and returned to Mogadishu on June 1 under civilian contract with the United Nations to build the harbor into a major, profitable commercial port for the Somalis to inherit--a challenge, he said, made all the more difficult by the continuing impasse over Aidid.

For Johns, an end to the siege of the city and the beginning of an earnest, coordinated reconstruction of the country is critical.

“The only way that it’s going to work, I feel--and please, this is a personal opinion--is for the Somalis to give him to us. The Somali businessmen must decide: ‘We’ve had enough of this. Take this idiot. We’re going to work.’ That’s how it’ll work. And I think we’re moving in that direction. The Somali businessmen are tired of it. Aidid is a strong man, but he’s an old man. So really, just how long can this go on?”

A Somali War of Wills

The United Nations mission to rescue Somalia seems to have focused on a controversial effort by the world body to capture and bring to justice warlord Mohammed Farah Aidid. The U.N. blames him for a series of bloody, escalating exchanges that have disrupted efforts to rebuild the famine-torn nation. The struggle, in brief, shapes up this way:

The Hunter: James Howe . . . retired admiral, U.S. Navy . . . one of the youngest and most highly decorated senior officers in American naval history . . . former deputy national security adviser to President George Bush . . . helped capture Panamanian strongman Manuel A. Noriega . . . now heads U.N. Somalia mission.

The Quarry: Mohammed Farah Aidid . . . former Somali general . . . veteran guerrilla fighter who previously has lived for years underground . . . a leader in the Habr Gedir clan . . . credited with marshaling rebellion that united clans and ousted Somali dictator Siad Barre . . . became a key warlord when clan strife broke out wildly in 1991.

Recent Provocations: On June 5, 24 Pakistani peacekeepers and dozens of Somalis killed in worst recent outbreak of fighting; Aidid later blamed . . . on June 12, U.N. forces lunch series of hard strikes at Aidid and his headquarters; raids later prove to be controversial as reports grow of deaths and injuries of Somalis . . . on Aug. 8, four U.S. soldiers killed in ambush.

U.N. Force in Somalia

Pakistan: 4,718 soldiers (21%)

U.S.: 3,881 soldiers (17%)

Italy: 2,442 soldiers (11%)

Germany: 1,700 soldiers (8%)

Others: 9,813 soldiers (44%)