Ears to the Ground

By Johanna McGeary

To take out Osama bin Laden with a search-and-destroy mission, you have just a few minutes to find, identify and attack. How do you locate one man--one wary, mobile guerrilla--amid the trackless peaks and chasms of Afghanistan? He's protected by caves and safe houses and ultraloyal bodyguards. He travels with a few aides he has known for life, in vehicles that change daily, perhaps with a decoy double nearby. You've got eyes in the sky scanning every rocky quadrant, and those satellites can see trucks and buildings and moving people--but they can't pick out his face. Technology might get you close, but not close enough: You need another man--someone in his inner circle or in the Taliban, or overheard chattering unwisely--to give him up.

So the U.S. must get its eyes and ears down to ground level. It might start the search in the mud-brick city of Peshawar, Pakistan, hard by the Afghan border at the foot of the Khyber Pass. This is where the terrorists meet, form cells and deploy--and where access to the closed world of the Taliban begins. Bin Laden's foot soldiers regularly slip through the walled enclaves and jostling bazaars to recruit jihadis or send out instructions. Taliban fighters float through to spy and resupply. Every Afghan faction has its representative in some dim house. Intelligence agents linger in the lobby of the Pearl Continental Hotel, where the phones are tapped and drivers let fall scraps of information. Places like this are where the operatives who can pin a real-time target on bin Laden must be recruited or bought or blackmailed. But the terrorists have their agents here too, looking for those who are looking for them.

No Western CIA man is going to penetrate these dark corners. Even if the agency's directorate of operations had an adequate supply of case officers who speak the local dialects--which it doesn't--the Americans typically attach them to embassies and consulates, where their diplomatic cover makes them easy to spot, and the CIA's risk-averse ethos precludes any attempt to go native. Back home, intelligence sources tell TIME, the agency's directorate of intelligence had just one Afghan analyst prior to Sept. 11, and he's been moved to a special center near the State Department to work 18 hours a day.

The American intelligence community's single greatest failing is its lack of good "humint"--human intelligence, the dirty, diligent, shoe-leather penetration of terror networks. The humint void is behind the CIA's failure to pick up advance word of the Sept. 11 attacks, and it makes ferreting out bin Laden especially hard. "We don't have real spies anymore who go out and get dirt under their nails," admits an Administration official. The CIA rolled up most of its regional networks when the Soviets pulled out of Afghanistan in 1989. Its old sources dried up, and the Executive Order that put restrictions on hiring local assets with unsavory backgrounds made the agency reluctant to rent new ones. Now, says Senate Intelligence chairman Bob Graham, "it's a high priority to get a foreign national who will become our spy and have the entree to get close enough to the head of al-Qaeda."

To acquire such "ground truth," the U.S. has to rely on the services of others. "What the CIA does well," says an intelligence official, "is give money to foreigners in exchange for information." So success may depend largely on Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence agency, or ISI, a tough outfit that has racked up a formidable reputation as a state within a state. With more than 40,000 officers and staff whose headquarters are in a drab military compound in Islamabad, the ISI puts tentacles deep into Afghanistan through thousands of Pashtu-speaking Pakistanis and hundreds of free-lance Afghan spies lured with money and sanctuary for their families. As a godfather to the Taliban, which it has financed, supplied, advised and fought alongside, the ISI has intimate contacts with the very heart of the terror network.

That's the problem. Though Pakistan's military ruler, President Pervez Musharraf, offered swift declarations of full intelligence sharing, some U.S. officials tell TIME they aren't sure which side the ISI is really on. The CIA and the Pentagon have long been split on ISI's reliability. Islamabad pleased the CIA by extraditing three key terrorists in recent years. But as TIME reported 18 months ago, a 1999 CIA plot to train 60 Pakistani commandos to snatch bin Laden went nowhere when the ISI dragged its feet. "They didn't do squat," says an American close to the operation, who suspects Pakistan never intended to get bin Laden. Pentagon officials complain that ISI has "led us down blind alleys" before in the hunt for bin Laden.

Many ISI men harbor bitterness too, over the way the U.S. built them up as a useful tool in the Afghan war against the Soviet Union, then turned away when the war ended. A sizable portion of ISI rank and file embraces Islamic fundamentalism, and even if the top brass promise help, spooks on the ground may thwart them by withholding information or spreading disinformation. "The ISI has excellent intelligence about bin Laden," says a former Defense specialist on the region. "I find it doubtful they will give it to us."

Pakistan's public promise to help the U.S. has scared off its Afghan sources. The Taliban pressed Islamabad to call its diplomatic officials home for "safety" reasons, and other Pakistani informants are no longer allowed to move freely around Afghanistan. The Taliban destroyed satellite phones, and the Afghan ambassador in Pakistan moved down to Quetta for more secure contact with Taliban leaders in Kandahar. Taliban police are checking beneath women's body-length veils for disguised spies and keeping an eye on any tribal elder receiving guests or a sudden flow of money.

So the U.S. needs other silent partners for the search--like locals and rebels tied to the Northern Alliance. But exaggeration and contradictions color their tales, and their sources inhabit the north while bin Laden is more likely holed up in the Pashtun territory of the south and east. Saudi Arabia and Yemen, which resisted sharing intelligence when terrorists attacked U.S. targets in their countries, have now dumped their computer files in Washington's hands. President Vladimir Putin has promised to share Russia's file on bin Laden, and Moscow is providing useful stuff on terror camp locations and military installations from the old days.

American military action hangs on finding bin Laden. As Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said last week, "It's not going to be a cruise missile or a bomber that's going to be the determining factor. It's going to be a scrap of information from some person in some country that's going to enable us to pull his network up by its roots." So in the back alleys of Peshawar, agents infiltrate the religious students who answer the Taliban's call. And along the dusty Afghan track to the Chaman frontier post, operatives troll for information from truck drivers and traders and traitors. Fighting terrorism, says Frank Anderson, a former chief of the CIA's Middle East section, "requires a stool pigeon on every corner." The U.S. has put a $5 million price on bin Laden's head. As everyone who's ever spied there believes, there's nothing in Afghanistan that money can't buy.

--Reported by Massimo Calabresi and Douglas Waller/Washington, Tim McGirk/Chaman and Terry McCarthy/Peshawar

With reporting by Massimo Calabresi and Douglas Waller/Washington, Tim McGirk/Chaman and Terry McCarthy/Peshawar