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MONDAY OCTOBER 08 2001
BY IAN COBAIN
HIS face stares out from the front page of almost every newspaper in the world, yet he is nowhere to be found.
As spy satellites, intelligence agents and, no doubt, US and British special forces, continue their hunt for Osama bin Laden, details are emerging of the extraordinary measures that he is taking to avoid being killed or captured.
The terrorist mastermind is employing at least four doppelgängers, according to Afghan opposition figures. Ahmed Wali Massoud, the chargé d’affaires at the Afghan Embassy in London, which is controlled by the anti-Taleban Northern Alliance, says: “According to our latest information he is in Jalalabad, but we know that he has several doubles who move around in convoys.”
Each double is supposed to to bear an astonishing resemblance to bin Laden, with his gaunt, 6ft 4in frame and greying beard and, like him, walk with a cane.
Another precaution said to be taken by his bodyguards is the use of an ultra-sound scan, designed to examine pregnant women, to search visitors for swallowed homing devices. Hamid Mir, a Pakistani journalist who interviewed bin Laden in 1997, was blindfolded and driven to a mountain camp. He says that an armed guard smeared gel on his stomach before running the scanner over him.
Until August 1998, when the US launched more than 70 cruise missiles to try to kill bin Laden and avenge bomb attacks on its embassies in Kenya and Tanzania 12 days earlier, the terrorist leader was thought to have been living in a fortified cave outside Jalalabad. It supposedly had computers, faxes and satellite phones, an armoury stocked with AK47 assault rifles, mortars and other weapons, and a library filled with classic Islamic writings.
More than 30 people were killed in the missile attack, some said to have been innocent villagers. The camp suffered some damage, but its infrastructure remained intact. It later emerged that it was nowhere near as well-equipped as had been claimed.
After the attack, bin Laden built an underground command and control centre in the Pamir Mountains that is easier to protect, according to US intelligence sources. The attacks are also understood to have brought to an end the National Security Agency’s ability to eavesdrop at will on many of bin Laden’s telephone conversations.
According to evidence this year at the New York trial of four men accused of the embassy bombings, the agency had listened in as bin Laden talked on a laptop satellite telephone.“He’s an inspirational leader, not a micro-manager,” James Bamford, author of two books about the agency, said. “So he didn’t call up each day and ask, ‘So, how are your grades at the ABC flight school’?” Since the missile attacks, however, bin Laden is believed to have been using couriers who carry coded instructions and guidance to Pakistan to use telephones there. Aides send e-mails that use sophisticated encryption software.
Bin Laden is said to have 20 bodyguards, all Arabs or Afghans. Lightly armed, they stay close as he flits from one camp or safe house to another, always at night, in a convoy of black Toyota Land-Cruisers with tinted windows.
The commander of his bodyguards has been identified by US intelligence sources as Tawfiq bin Atash, a Yemeni-born veteran of the Afghan war against the Soviet Union.
Bin Atash is said to have co-ordinated the attempt to sink the destroyer USS Cole in Aden last year. Not all of bin Laden’s bodyguards are efficient: Fahad al-Quso, assigned by bin Laden to videotape the attack on the USS Cole failed to do so. He had overslept.
Brother deplores 'hijacking' of name
Washington: A brother of Osama bin Laden yesterday used the first interview given by a family member since September 11 to condemn the attacks and complain: “Our name is being hijacked,” (Martin Fletcher writes).
Abdullah Mohammed Binladin, 35, said: “It is a big family. There is a black sheep in every big family.” Mr Binladin studies law at Harvard University and is one of the only members of the family still in America. Two dozen nephews, nieces and cousins were flown home to Saudi Arabia on a private aircraft with the FBI’s assistance soon after America’s airports began reopening on September 14.
In The Boston Globe, he recalled that he was buying a café latte in a Boston Starbucks when a waitress said something about an aircraft crashing into the World Trade Centre. He rushed home to see the second aircraft hit, and realised his life was about to change for ever.
BY IAN COBAIN
HIS face stares out from the front page of almost every newspaper in the world, yet he is nowhere to be found.
As spy satellites, intelligence agents and, no doubt, US and British special forces, continue their hunt for Osama bin Laden, details are emerging of the extraordinary measures that he is taking to avoid being killed or captured.
The terrorist mastermind is employing at least four doppelgängers, according to Afghan opposition figures. Ahmed Wali Massoud, the chargé d’affaires at the Afghan Embassy in London, which is controlled by the anti-Taleban Northern Alliance, says: “According to our latest information he is in Jalalabad, but we know that he has several doubles who move around in convoys.”
Each double is supposed to to bear an astonishing resemblance to bin Laden, with his gaunt, 6ft 4in frame and greying beard and, like him, walk with a cane.
Another precaution said to be taken by his bodyguards is the use of an ultra-sound scan, designed to examine pregnant women, to search visitors for swallowed homing devices. Hamid Mir, a Pakistani journalist who interviewed bin Laden in 1997, was blindfolded and driven to a mountain camp. He says that an armed guard smeared gel on his stomach before running the scanner over him.
Until August 1998, when the US launched more than 70 cruise missiles to try to kill bin Laden and avenge bomb attacks on its embassies in Kenya and Tanzania 12 days earlier, the terrorist leader was thought to have been living in a fortified cave outside Jalalabad. It supposedly had computers, faxes and satellite phones, an armoury stocked with AK47 assault rifles, mortars and other weapons, and a library filled with classic Islamic writings.
More than 30 people were killed in the missile attack, some said to have been innocent villagers. The camp suffered some damage, but its infrastructure remained intact. It later emerged that it was nowhere near as well-equipped as had been claimed.
After the attack, bin Laden built an underground command and control centre in the Pamir Mountains that is easier to protect, according to US intelligence sources. The attacks are also understood to have brought to an end the National Security Agency’s ability to eavesdrop at will on many of bin Laden’s telephone conversations.
According to evidence this year at the New York trial of four men accused of the embassy bombings, the agency had listened in as bin Laden talked on a laptop satellite telephone.“He’s an inspirational leader, not a micro-manager,” James Bamford, author of two books about the agency, said. “So he didn’t call up each day and ask, ‘So, how are your grades at the ABC flight school’?” Since the missile attacks, however, bin Laden is believed to have been using couriers who carry coded instructions and guidance to Pakistan to use telephones there. Aides send e-mails that use sophisticated encryption software.
Bin Laden is said to have 20 bodyguards, all Arabs or Afghans. Lightly armed, they stay close as he flits from one camp or safe house to another, always at night, in a convoy of black Toyota Land-Cruisers with tinted windows.
The commander of his bodyguards has been identified by US intelligence sources as Tawfiq bin Atash, a Yemeni-born veteran of the Afghan war against the Soviet Union.
Bin Atash is said to have co-ordinated the attempt to sink the destroyer USS Cole in Aden last year. Not all of bin Laden’s bodyguards are efficient: Fahad al-Quso, assigned by bin Laden to videotape the attack on the USS Cole failed to do so. He had overslept.
Brother deplores 'hijacking' of name
Washington: A brother of Osama bin Laden yesterday used the first interview given by a family member since September 11 to condemn the attacks and complain: “Our name is being hijacked,” (Martin Fletcher writes).
Abdullah Mohammed Binladin, 35, said: “It is a big family. There is a black sheep in every big family.” Mr Binladin studies law at Harvard University and is one of the only members of the family still in America. Two dozen nephews, nieces and cousins were flown home to Saudi Arabia on a private aircraft with the FBI’s assistance soon after America’s airports began reopening on September 14.
In The Boston Globe, he recalled that he was buying a café latte in a Boston Starbucks when a waitress said something about an aircraft crashing into the World Trade Centre. He rushed home to see the second aircraft hit, and realised his life was about to change for ever.
