Hunting Osama

By Johanna McGeary

Every morning military brass in a nondescript office called the intelligence fusion cell at General Tommy Franks' U.S. Central Command headquarters in Tampa, Fla., look up at wall charts for any changes on the lists. These are what the war in Afghanistan is all about: the scorecard of America's most wanted, the bad guys responsible for the global terror jihad, the men whom the Bush Administration has vowed to bring to justice--dead or alive. One list runs down roughly 40 senior Taliban leaders, coded by color as someone defects or is killed or negotiates to surrender. The other names the 20 or so top al-Qaeda terrorists Washington wants, starting with Osama bin Laden. Most of the names accompany color photographs of varying quality. When good news comes in, a fresh version is printed with a bold INJ or KIA (injured or killed) printed across the picture. "If there's nothing there," says a Pentagon official, "it means he's a work in progress."

The rosters have been culled from CIA and Defense intelligence briefs, battlefield reports, local newspapers, spies, rumors. Every day the intelligence bloodhounds search for fresh clues on where these leaders might be and vacuum up electronic and human after-battle reports to see if they can cross another name off. But so far, the scorecard is all too blank. Pentagon list keepers say only three of the 20 men on the al-Qaeda list are thought to be dead; perhaps 12 of those on the Taliban list have been killed or wounded or have defected. On Saturday came word that the Taliban governor of Kandahar and a dozen of his commanders could be marked KIA, after a U.S. bomb took them out in a village outside the city.

Revving up the manhunt should get a bit easier. Opposition forces closed in on the Taliban's last stronghold at Kandahar last week. U.S. Marines were deployed on Afghan soil to seal off avenues of retreat. The fall of Kandahar--whether by surrender or defeat--will peel away the terrorists' last major base of support. But it still won't be enough to put an X through all the names on Tommy Franks' lists.

The biggest name stricken so far is Mohammed Atef, the al-Qaeda military-operations chief suspected of planning the Sept. 11 attacks, who was killed in a mid-November air strike. Two other high-ranking al-Qaeda lieutenants, Egyptians Fahmi Nasr (a.k.a. Mohammed Salah) and Tariq Anwar, senior leaders of Egyptian Islamic Jihad, have also been marked KIA. The top commander of an al-Qaeda ally, the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, has reportedly been eliminated as well. But in some ways, Pentagon officials are even more eager to interrogate those taken alive. Defense Department officers have heard that Taliban intelligence chief Qari Ahmadullah is either in Northern Alliance custody or negotiating to surrender to rebel forces in Kandahar. Taliban sources claim he has gone home to Ghazni. He would be a potential gold mine if captured.

When Kabul fell, the Northern Alliance nabbed Ahmed Abdel Rahman, 28, the son of Omar Abdel Rahman, now jailed for life in a U.S. prison for plotting to blow up New York landmarks in 1993. Young Ahmed and his brother Mohammed, 29, still on the run, were sent to Afghanistan in 1988 as teen recruits in the Islamic holy war. Some U.S. officials think Ahmed could spill a trove of useful information, since he spent years at bin Laden's side. But so far, Ahmed has refused to cooperate with his captors, and U.S. officials say they have not yet had access to question him.

It's not easy to sort out the most wanted from the thousands of POWs in Northern Alliance hands. Interrogating prisoners can be deadly dangerous; it was in just such circumstances that CIA agent Johnny Micheal Spann died two Sundays ago. "They are people who don't walk up and volunteer their names and identification numbers with a sample of DNA," noted Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. "They blend into the other prisoners. It's a messy business."

American operatives have been able to listen in on--and suggest questions to--Northern Alliance interrogators. They are scavenging for any tidbit that could help locate the most wanted. While Washington is content to leave most prisoners in the hands of Afghan custodians, Rumsfeld made it plain that that did not apply to the men on Franks' lists. If those men are found, U.S. forces will take them into custody. But first someone has to catch the prey. The Pentagon is leery of crossing "the Mogadishu line," named for the deadly fiasco in 1993 in which 18 soldiers died trying to apprehend a Somali warlord. So the generals have not sent any Marines into Kandahar to knock on doors. The plan, rather, is to squeeze the holdout Taliban leaders inside a ring of air strikes and advancing opposition forces until they are killed, surrender or flee into the arms of their Afghan enemies.

Mullah Mohammed Omar is calling on his fighters "to achieve martyrdom" defending Kandahar to the last drop of blood. But bin Laden is evidently more interested in laying low and living to fight another day. (Notice we have not heard a word from him since his Taliban guardians started losing control of Afghanistan three weeks ago.) His range of motion has been seriously whittled away. Some warn that he may have already fled the country, though the Pentagon believes he has gone to ground in the most formidable hideout he can find.

That could easily be someplace like the famously impregnable eastern Afghanistan cave complex called Tora Bora, built by mujahedin during the 1980s war against the Soviet Union. Russian troops tried three times to take it and failed. The caves are cut into the jagged, 13,000-ft. peaks of the Spin Ghar range 35 miles south of Jalalabad. They make an ideal retreat: a vast honeycomb of tunnels 8 ft. wide, carved 1,150 ft. deep into the mountain. The warren of entrances, tiny slits in the rock, lead into ventilated chambers heated and lighted by generators. Best of all, the bunker is virtually invisible from the sky and untouchable from the ground; the nearest road ends in a village that is a three-hour walk away in the valley below. Saif Rakhman, secretary to one of Jalalabad's new militia commanders, fought the Soviets at Tora Bora. He couldn't stop from laughing when a reporter asked to visit there. "If you want to sacrifice yourself," he said.

No one really knows if bin Laden is inside. On Saturday the Northern Alliance claimed to know he was hiding somewhere near Kandahar. And former Taliban director of information Mohammed Naeem Safai agrees. "Osama bin Laden and Mullah Omar are still in Kandahar," he told Time from a refugee camp in Pakistan where he is hiding. "They do not want to leave. They have no option but to die." But 1,000 to 2,000 al-Qaeda fighters probably are in Tora Bora, and they are in U.S. gunsights. According to intelligence officials in the neighborhood, "the Arabs" rented houses in the area and paid local villagers to truck in food and water, until they recently disappeared into the caves. Which is why U.S. special-ops men were in Jalalabad last week trying to enlist tribal warriors to attack the underground hideout. One of three new regional Pashtun commanders, Haji Zaman, just returned from years of exile, said he "met face-to-face with U.S. officials in the past few days" but groused that they had not provided enough weapons or warm clothes to prepare his fighters for a campaign. Fellow commander Hazrat Ali announced he "had decided to eliminate the Arabs at Tora Bora" but set no timetable. True to tribal code, local elders were sent off to Tora Bora to try negotiating a surrender first.

In Washington talk of U.S. commandos probing dark Afghan caverns has quieted. Even with nearly 1,500 Marines dug in at Forward Operating Base Rhino, to the southwest of Kandahar, the Pentagon has no current plans to use them in a manhunt. The U.S. prefers to blast away from the sky. "Our specialized approach is to put 500-lb. bombs in the entrance," says Marine General Peter Pace, Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. But on Friday night air strikes hit villages instead. Local villagers reported 40 to 200 civilians perished in the bombardment of Kama Ado and two other villages near Tora Bora. At a hospital in Jalalabad, Said Hassan sat tending his brother's son, 10, the only survivor in his family. "The whole village collapsed with people buried inside," he said. On Saturday the Pentagon denied hitting the villages but said it was reviewing the strikes.

If the bombs don't bury the wanted men, then money might--in the shape of the $25 million bounty on bin Laden's head. And if bombs and cash don't work? Then there will be only one alternative left: U.S. forces really will have to go house to house and cave to cave, looking for the most-wanted terrorist leaders. Last Friday Rumsfeld said the war had entered "a dangerous phase" and that American forces may actually be in more danger now. He sounded like he meant it.

--Reported by Matthew Forney/Jalalabad, Tim McGirk/Chaman and Mark Thompson/Washington

With reporting by Matthew Forney/Jalalabad, Tim McGirk/Chaman and Mark Thompson/Washington