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Bin Laden How Close Have We Come?
RIGHT AFTER 9/11, IT WAS Gary Berntsen's job to get Osama bin Laden.Picture a real-life Jack Bauer. Strong. Focused. Committed. A guy who probably knows how to kill you with his car keys. More than 23 years as an officer in the clandestine service of the CIA. In his new book, "Jawbreaker," he says he stopped dozens of bombings and assassinations. He'd learned about al Qaeda when investigating the East African embassy bombings in 1998. In 2000, he was sent to Afghanistan to try to capture a key bin Laden lieutenant and to find out what their plans were. He awoke the morning of Sept. 11 in South America, where he was a station chief, and soon was called home to meet with Cofer Black, the legendary head of the Counter-Terrorism Center. Black sent him to Afghanistan to head the hunt for bin Laden, saying, "if you are not killing the enemy in 48 hours, I will pull you out." Berntsen explained that we first tried to get the Taliban to turn bin Laden over. When they didn't, we knew we had to destroy them first. After the fall of Kabul, our best shot at bin Laden came in mid-November at Tora Bora, "the very mountainous, steep, cold, isolated place along the Afghan-Pak border." Amazingly, there were only a few hundred special ops spread out across an entire country, led by Berntsen, who was lugging a Rubbermaid container with $11 million in cash to make deals in the most hostile part of the world. "To win the major cities, 110 CIA officers and 350 special forces worked alongside 12,000 Northern Alliance to defeat between 50 and 60,000 members of the Taliban and 5 to 7,000 members of al Qaeda. So, we were heavily outnumbered." Berntsen told me that Cent-Com wanted to avoid a larger commitment because of the lesson of the Soviet quagmire. At Tora Bora, Berntsen had an eight-man team, four CIA, four military from Delta Force. "These eight men went down into Nangarhar Province, which is several million people in complete chaos, company-size elements of Chechens and Uzbeks and Al Qaeda and Taliban moving around. I was sweating bullets when I send them down there because Special Forces didn't go down with them... "They linked up with a friendly warlord who we made contact with. And then, with that warlord, they drove down to Tora Bora to get to the foot of the mountains." Four of them found bin Laden, and our best opportunity since 9/11 to kill him. "They were able to visually spot his camp at Milawa... And from that... mountaintop, they are able to call in air strikes for 56 hours. There were hundreds of them there... We are able to hear bin Laden. After we took a radio off of a dead fighter, we could hear him. We were very close." That's when Berntsen called for a Blue 82, a 15,000-pound bomb, the largest explosive in our inventory shy of a nuclear weapon. It has to be dropped off the back of a C-130 because it's too heavy to be suspended from an aircraft. Berntsen's team was on the ground for 11 days of shelling, with the CIA running the show. Then Delta Force took over for the last five days. He says that, at Tora Bora, his request for Army Rangers was denied. "We we wrote a message back to Washington, it goes back to CIA headquarters, that said, 'We need 600 to 800 Rangers. We need a battalion. We need to employ them in the following way: We need to put them between where bin Laden is at this moment and the border of Pakistan. We don't want him to escape.' " But on Dec. 15 or 16, he did escape, Berntsen says, into Pakistan. About this account, Gen. Tommy Franks has said: "Within 72 hours of the time we were receiving reporting on where Osama bin Laden was in Tora Bora, I received similar reporting every place from Baluchistan to a lake up to the northwest of Kandahar. "The fact... is that, at the end of the day, it would be the Afghans who would make the choice, who would make the decision about where they go in their country. And so we don't know. I don't know whether Osama bin Laden was in Tora Bora at that time." Responds Berntsen: "Well, he disputes the fact that bin Laden was there. No one is disputing the fact that I wrote the message... And one day it will be declassified. And the sooner they declassify it, the better." Posted by: tipper 2006-03-09 |
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