As the United States deploys satellites, high-tech aircraft and commandos to hunt for Osama bin Laden in the mountains of Afghanistan, American officials should know a great deal about some of his likely hiding places.
That's because the United States conceived and paid for them, according to Yossef Bodansky, a terrorism consultant and biographer of the Saudi-born terrorist leader who is believed to be behind the devastation of Sept. 11 in New York and Washington.
"We know about six possible locations, complexes of caves and tunnels, because we helped design and build them back in the '80s," Bodansky said yesterday. "They were built to withstand everything short of a nuclear blast. A lot of thought and a large amount of money went into making them virtually impregnable."
Bodansky said Americans might not have been present when the steel-reinforced complexes were built for CIA-financed Muslim guerrillas then battling Soviet troops. U.S. officials preferred to work through Pakistani military intelligence so as to be able to deny publicly that they were fighting a proxy war against the Soviet Union.
But he said American engineering advice and money went into the construction of the complexes, situated to make approach by ground troops difficult and guarded by stone barriers to prevent "smart" guided missiles from penetrating the entrances. Only one was ever captured by Soviet forces -- in 1987, "at a huge cost in blood" -- and the remaining underground bases have probably been reinforced since then, Bodansky said.
Bodansky's account of the U.S. role in financing the bunkers was confirmed by another expert on Afghanistan, Thomas E. Gouttierre, who now runs the Center for Afghanistan Studies at the University of Nebraska in Omaha.
President Bush and other top officials have stated repeatedly that their campaign against terrorism is a long-term effort not targeted at one individual. But they have simultaneously emphasized the evidence linking bin Laden and his organization, al-Qaida, to the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Most nongovernment experts believe that the U.S. anti-terror campaign will have to capture or kill bin Laden to remain credible.
"The goal is not to get just him -- it's to tear up the network worldwide," said Michael S. Swetnam, president of the Potomac Institute for Policy Studies and co-author of a book on bin Laden published this year. "But you have to get him, because he's become such a symbol of terrorism."
