CIA Efforts to Get Bin Laden Detailed

The Central Intelligence Agency secretly trained and equipped Pakistani commandos to capture or kill Osama bin Laden in 1999 and, three years earlier, the agency considered an offer from the government of Sudan to arrest the terrorist and place him in Saudi custody, according to officials and people familiar with the operations.

But both efforts failed. They were reported in today’s Washington Post.

Some former Clinton administration officials are tormented that Bin Laden slipped through U.S. fingers, because they believe the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks might have been averted.

The 1999 mission involved the training of 60 commandos from the Pakistani intelligence agency to enter Afghanistan and find Bin Laden. The operation was arranged with the Clinton administration by then-Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif and his chief of intelligence. U.S. officials promised to lift sanctions on Pakistan and provide an economic aid package, but the plan was aborted later that year when a military coup ousted Sharif.

Gen. Pervez Musharraf, who led the coup, refused to continue the mission despite substantial efforts by the Clinton administration to revive it.

Musharraf, now Pakistan’s president, has emerged as a key ally in the Bush administration’s efforts to track down Bin Laden and destroy his terrorist network.

The 1999 operation was approved less than a year after the U.S. launched cruise missile strikes against Bin Laden’s training camps in Afghanistan.

The Clinton administration had considered a number of military options, including Special Forces raids and a massive bombing campaign.

Those missed opportunities have provided the Bush administration with a number of valuable lessons, including a possible blueprint for future action as it prepares its own war against Bin Laden and his Al Qaeda terrorist network.

Pakistan and its intelligence service have valuable information about what is occurring inside Afghanistan, a country that remains closed to most of the world.

A former U.S. official, however, told the Post that joint operations with the Pakistani service are always dicey, because the Taliban militia that rules most of Afghanistan has penetrated Pakistani intelligence.

The other effort that targeted Bin Laden was initiated in 1996 when the government of Sudan, employing a back channel direct from its president to the CIA, offered to arrest the Saudi terrorist.

Clinton administration officials attempted to find a way to accept the offer in secret contacts that stretched from a meeting at an Arlington, Va., hotel on March 3, 1996, to a fax that closed the door on the effort 10 weeks later. Unable to persuade the Saudis to accept Bin Laden, and lacking a case to indict him in U.S. courts at the time, the Clinton administration finally gave up on the capture.

Sudan expelled Bin Laden on May 18, 1996, to Afghanistan. From there, he is thought to have planned and financed the twin embassy bombings of 1998, the near-destruction of the destroyer Cole a year ago and last month’s devastation in New York and at the Pentagon.

Clinton administration officials emphatically maintain that in the legal, political and intelligence environment of the time, there was no choice but to allow Bin Laden to depart Sudan unmolested.

“Had we been able to roll up Bin Laden then, it would have made a significant difference,” said a U.S. government official with responsibilities, then and now, in counter-terrorism. “We probably never would have seen a Sept. 11.

“We would still have had networks of Sunni Islamic extremists of the sort we’re dealing with here, and there would still have been terrorist attacks. . . . But there would not have been as many resources devoted to their activities, and there would not have been a single voice that so effectively articulated grievances and won support for violence.”