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THE NEW YORKER

FIION THE ARCHIVE
«rr OF NATONAL many
The Real bin Laden
by Mary Anne Weaver
Issue of 2000-01-24
Posted 2001-09-13

In the wake of the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon,
intelligence experts focussed on the possible role of Osama bin Laden, the Saudi
multimillionaire who has been held responsible for a number of terrorist actions,
including the bombing of the American embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam.
This piece, from last year, profiles bin Laden.

In August of 1998, the mysterious Saudi multimillionaire Osama bin Laden was
declared Washington's most-wanted fugitive. The previous February, he had called
on his followers to kill Americans around the world, and now he was being accused
of the bombings of two United States Embassies, in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam. Not
long after the embassy attacks, American cruise missiles struck targets in
Afghanistan believed to be bin Laden training camps, killing a number of people
but not bin Laden, who was then forty-three years old. Today, a year and a half
later, after one of the costliest and most complicated international criminal
investigations in United States history, the government seems divided on how to
deal with him. Every strategy has backfired, from covert operations, to what is now
euphemistically called "bringing bin Laden to justice," to our missile attacks, whose
clear but unstated objective was to kill bin Laden and his key aides. Some American
officials I spoke to conceded that they could only hope reports that bin Laden is
seriously ill—reports he has denied—prove to be true.
Perhaps as bedevilling as anything else has been bin Laden's silence in the past
eleven months. Last February, he "disappeared" somewhere in the mountains of
Afghanistan. Then, during the summer, the C.I.A. issued a series of intelligence
reports warning that bin Laden appeared to be about to strike again. These findings,
based on telephone intercepts, were greeted skeptically by some within the United
States intelligence community. Other American intelligence warnings came and
went, and there were scores of arrests around the world—most recently last month,
when an Iraqi, an Algerian, and eleven Jordanians were arrested in Amman after
entering Jordan from Afghanistan. All the men had trained with explosives at one of
bin Laden's military camps and, according to Jordanian officials, were in the early
stages of planning a series of terrorist attacks against Biblical and tourist sites.

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