Infowar: Laden
Played it First, then America took over-- Part I
By S Raghotham
How Osama Bin Laden used leaks in the Press to throw American
intelligence off the scent.
The bloody war has just started, but information warfare, or Infowar, between Bin Laden and America started a long time before even September 11. If Laden is indeed the culprit behind the Sept 11 attacks, then all one can say is that he played a very simple game of deception, but he started it three years ago - first by starving American intelligence agencies of information on what he was up to, and then, through the media, planting Red Herrings that misled American, Russian and Israeli intelligence. America took charge of the Infowar only after the attacks.
Assuming, in the face of lack of irrefutable evidence, that Laden was responsible for the Sept 11 attacks, tracing how he and the Taliban hoodwinked the great intelligence agencies makes fascinating reading.
Up until late 1998, Bin Laden and his lieutenants used satellite communications and encrypted e-mail. Laden owned a Ethiopia-registered communications company that operated protected channels for him. Even so, American intelligence still could intercept his messages and so, at least, knew he was alive and kicking. But the messages stopped coming in the wires and the air soon after the 1998 US embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania. So, the Americans could not see or hear anything at all.
Laden started using human couriers - men who posed as labourers or as businessmen - and delivered messages and material to his men in foreign lands, including America. And American human intelligence capabilities have been acknowledged as being pathetic, especially due to its long-practiced reluctance towards human spying and espionage. Instead, America had come to believe too much in the efficacy of electronic intelligence.
As luck would have it, May 1998 had already seen America¿s ties with Pakistan sour. That cut off the critical intelligence output from Taliban-insiders, indeed Taliban-makers, the ISI, whose officers are said to have actually stopped trusting the American CIA and gone off to prop up the Taliban on their own. So it happened that after the US embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania in late 1998, America went on to witness its ship USS Cole blown off in Yemen by a group of ¿fishermen¿ last year.
Yet, nobody woke up to the need for getting human intelligence on terrorist activities. In fact, after the USS Cole attack, American intelligence experts had come to believe two things that contributed greatly to the failure of intelligence: one, Bin Laden is the only terrorist America faces danger from; and two, the next terrorist attack on American interests would come in 2002 - because, they thought, they had discerned a pattern in Laden¿s planning and they concluded that the pre-planning period for a Laden operation is in the range of two years or more.
In the end, Laden himself let out some information.
In August 2001, the Taliban planted a story through a Russian news agency that it had appointed Laden as the commander-in-chief of its armed forces. Intelligence experts all over the world saw the report, but no one could make sense of it. In fact, a whole lot of sharing of notes between US, Russia and Israel (under a deal struck in June 2001) did not yield a definite answer to the many questions that the story raised. One of those questions was: why was Bin Laden, who has always maintained low visibility, putting himself in the spotlight, and in the path of danger, now? After all his low profile had earned him respect among his men as being a true Islamic warrior and not a publicity-seeker. After all, it had also helped him save his life from the many attempts on it by CIA covert operations.