4.4 COVERT ACTION
As part of the response to the embassy bombings, President Clinton signed a
Memorandum of Notification authorizing the CIA to let its tribal assets use
force to capture Bin Ladin and his associates. CIA officers told the tribals
that the plan to capture Bin Ladin, which had been "turned off" three
months earlier, was back on. The memorandum also authorized the CIA to attack
Bin Ladin in other ways. Also, an executive order froze financial holdings that
could be linked to Bin Ladin.101
The counterterrorism staff at CIA thought it was gaining a better
understanding of Bin Ladin and his network. In preparation for briefing the
Senate Select Committee on Intelligence on September 2,Tenet was told that the
intelligence community knew more about Bin Ladin's network "than about any
other top tier terrorist organization."102
The CIA was using this knowledge to disrupt a number of Bin Ladin-associated
cells. Working with Albanian authorities, CIA operatives had raided an al Qaeda
forgery operation and another terrorist cell in Tirana. These operations may
have disrupted a planned attack on the U.S. embassy in Tirana, and did lead to
the rendition of a number of al Qaeda-related terrorist operatives. After the
embassy bombings, there were arrests in Azerbaijan, Italy, and Britain. Several
terrorists were sent to an Arab country. The CIA described working with FBI
operatives to prevent a planned attack on the U.S. embassy in Uganda, and a
number of suspects were arrested. On September 16, Abu Hajer, one of Bin Ladin's
deputies in Sudan and the head of his computer operations and weapons
procurement, was arrested in Germany. He was the most important Bin Ladin
lieutenant captured thus far. Clarke commented to Berger with satisfaction that
August and September had brought the "greatest number of terrorist arrests
in a short period of time that we have ever arranged/facilitated."103
Given the President's August Memorandum of Notification, the CIA had already
been working on new plans for using the Afghan tribals to capture Bin Ladin.
During September and October, the tribals claimed to have tried at least four
times to ambush Bin Ladin. Senior CIA officials doubted whether any of these
ambush attempts had actually occurred. But the tribals did seem to have success
in reporting where Bin Ladin was.104
This information was more useful than it had been in the past; since the
August missile strikes, Bin Ladin had taken to moving his sleeping place
frequently and unpredictably and had added new bodyguards. Worst of all, al
Qaeda's senior leadership had stopped using a particular means of communication
almost immediately after a leak to the Washington Times.105
This made it much more difficult for the National Security Agency to intercept
his conversations. But since the tribals seemed to know where Bin Ladin was or
would be, an alternative to capturing Bin Ladin would be to mark his location
and call in another round of missile strikes.
