from lucianne link

BRITISH intelligence agents have discovered the position of terror chief Osama bin Laden.

A specialist MI6 squad — some working undercover in Afghanistan — traced the Al-Queda leader to a desolate region close to the town of Jalalabad on the country's north-east border with Pakistan.

PM Tony Blair's official spokesman last night confirmed: "Bin Laden is in Afghanistan. We know he is there, put it that way."

When asked if Bin Laden's exact whereabouts had been identified, he insisted: "We know where he is."

A senior Ministry of Defence source confirmed that intelligence agents have been "actively pursuing" Osama bin Laden in the north of the country. He added: "They have been given good information and are following it up. I understand Britain is leading the search."

The vital new information was passed to Mr Blair by foreign policy adviser Sir David Manning and military adviser General Tony Piggott, as they flew to meet President George W Bush in Washington.

Sir David is chair of the Joint Intelligence Commitee, effectively head of MI5, MI6 and the other secret services. Mr Blair then passed on the information to Mr Bush as they dined in the White House on Thursday night.

The search for Bin Laden has been led by America's CIA using satellite technology.

Elite

But the remote passes of the Hindu Kush mountains, with their caves and underground passages, are almost impenetrable even to cameras in space.

The CIA have NO agents on the ground in Afghanistan. But MI6 HAS maintained a small but specialised team since 1999.

They are nicknamed The ‘Golden Crescent Club' and work for the ‘Global Issues Controllerate'. They are an elite unit of agents who usually investigate major drugs producers in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Turkey.

But immediately after the September 11 atrocity in New York they were contacted and given new orders. They are the closest thing the intelligence services have to James Bond. They are even licensed to kill — but only in self-defence.

Downing Street last night refused to deny that Bin Laden has been located.

But they said he is not yet under constant surveillance.

Armed with the news, Bush and Blair finalised the details of a search and destroy mission to take out Bin Laden and his terrorist organisation.

Meanwhile the US government has put an incredible £18 million reward on the head of Bin Laden and his gang — dead or alive.

Informants are even offered a place in the witness protection programme usually reserved for those who squeal on the Mafia and Cosa Nostra.

By IAN KIRBY, Political Editor

-- Anonymous, September 22, 2001

Answers

Oh DAMN. It's from the News of the World, which is a sleazy British tabloid, unfortunately. I'm not saying the report doesn't have some truth in it, but I'm skeptical about most of it.

-- Anonymous, September 22, 2001

Natl Post

British commandos likely operating in Afghanistan

Chris Wattie and Jan Cienski in Washington National Post, with files from news services

WASHINGTON - Somewhere in the dusty Afghan hills tonight, a small group of commandos will almost certainly be slipping through the darkness, hunting for the hideouts of the terrorists who attacked New York and Washington last week.

"I've got no doubt they're deployed right now," says Alan Bell, a former soldier in the British Army's Special Air Service (SAS). "They're up in some rocks somewhere, keeping their heads down and watching."

The men of the SAS are among the best in the world at their highly specialized tasks, trained to operate for long periods behind enemy lines, to live for months on little nourishment and to wreak enormous havoc on the enemy.

"They'll attack you, disappear and hide, then attack again," says Mr. Bell. "They're very well trained and very difficult to combat.

"If they're smart, they're planning a hard-hitting SAS infiltration: six teams coming in, attacking six different targets at the same time, killing everyone, identifying them, then getting extracted."

An SAS commando can survive for months on little food, eating whatever can be scrounged from the land and waiting until the time is right to strike.

"Then they go in, destroy their targets and get out," says Mr. Bell.

Their rigorous training gives them fitness levels approaching that of Olympic athletes and they are practiced in the arts of surveillance, camouflage and what one analyst described as "highly targeted, very precise use of violence."

But Mr. Bell, who served 12 years in the SAS, including fighting in the 1982 Falklands War, says Afghanistan may be the most challenging mission the unit has ever undertaken.

"I've worked in Afghanistan, I know what it's like," he says. "These mujahedeen are not going to lie down, they are not going to surrender. You can put bullets into them and they will keep coming after you. They are tough, hardened fighters."

The SAS is familiar with the terrain, having made numerous forays into Afghanistan during the 1979-89 Soviet occupation.

They will likely be scouting out Taleban forces, the training camps and strongholds of al Qaeda, the umbrella organization of alleged terrorist mastermind Osama bin Laden, targeting them for air strikes or commando attacks.

Michael Vickers, a former member of the U.S. Special Forces, says commando teams could also be used for "snatch" raids in which the enemy is captured or killed.

"These are high risk and, if you have any mistakes in your intelligence, they are really high risk," says Mr. Vickers, who now works at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessment, a Washington think tank.

They will operate, as they did during the Persian Gulf War, under a screen of strike aircraft and with U.S. Air Force search and rescue units nearby.

If a team snatching bin Laden runs into trouble, Mr. Vickers says they can get backup in a hurry.

"If his followers are with him, then it can become a big fight," he says.

"In that case, you need air support from the attack helicopters and a reaction force nearby."

The U.S. and British commando units are the tip of the military's anti-terrorism spear, flying to their targets in ground-hugging MH-47 helicopters or leaping out of airplanes at high altitude and hurtling through the night air in a 200 kilometres-per-hour free-fall High Altitude Low Opening (HALO) jump.

The U.S. Army's elite Army Special Operations Command at Fort Bragg, N.C., which commands roughly 8,000 Rangers, Green Berets and other special forces, says its troops have been ordered to deploy. No details were given.

Two British Royal Marine commando units are believed to be in the Persian Gulf and the SAS has been reportedly training in Pakistan for some time.

The United States has 35,000 special forces, made up of highly trained units from the U.S. Navy, the U.S. Air Force and the U.S. Army, each with its own skills.

The United States Marine Corps has thousands more men who have been trained in special operations.

"Just about all of the special ops forces we have will go," predicts retired General David Grange, former commander of a U.S. Army Ranger battalion.

Unlike conventional forces, which require supply lines, bases and a long lead time, special forces are self-reliant, agile and able to strike quickly.

There have always been elite units, but the SAS and most of the U.S. units go back only to the Second World War.

Special ops units have been involved in some missions that went awry. An attempt in 1993 to capture Somali warlord Mohammed Aideed in Mogadishu failed, and American and British special ops units were unable to destroy many Scud missile launchers in long-range desert patrols during the 1991 Gulf War in Kuwait and Iraq.

But many successes are kept secret. The U.S. Delta Force is rumoured to have helped the Colombian government hunt down and kill drug lord Pablo Escobar, an operation that bears many similarities to the hunt for bin Laden.

Delta Force and its Navy equivalents, the SEALS, are said to be the most highly skilled U.S. commandos. Using a command structure developed by the SAS, they are formed in squadrons that are subdivided into smaller groups called troops.

Unlike regular soldiers, elite soldiers are often informally dressed, with beards, shaggy hair and a contempt for the rigid command structure of their more conventional colleagues.

They develop skills in myriad areas, from linguistics and communications to hand-to-hand combat, sniping, path-finding and survival, evasion, resistance and escape. More than half of the recruits wash out.

Those who don't are hand-picked, then physically and mentally hardened to master the craft of close-quarter combat using everything from sniper rifles and submachine-guns to knives or bare hands.

However, while the men (no women are allowed in U.S. or British special forces) of these crack units are tough, "these guys are not street thugs," says Brigadier General Colonel Stanley McChrystal, a former commander of a Ranger regiment.

"These are middle-class kids who want to be in something special. They're not just waiting for the next throat to cut. But, yeah, they can fight."

Delta and SEALS train extensively with the SAS, France's GIGN, Germany's KSK and Canada's secretive and highly regarded Joint Task Force 2.

However, the Canadian unit is relatively new and trains in what the special forces community calls "door kicking" -- extracting hostages from seized embassies, hijacked aircraft or other similar perilous situations.

The U.S. can also call on its Army Rangers, 2,000-strong, and the Marines Expeditionary Units, each with 2,200 troops, to seize larger areas that could be used as bases for a larger operation in Afghanistan.

Beyond that, even larger formations can be called upon, such as the 82nd Airborne Division and the 101st Mountain Division, both of which are highly trained and could invade a part of Afghanistan to help destabilize and destroy the Taleban regime while rooting out bin Laden's terrorist network.

Although many observers say a prolonged ground war involving British and American troops is unlikely, one report suggests the U.S. government is pressing for a military campaign to topple the Taleban regime and replace it with an interim United Nations administration.

The Guardian British newspaper reported yesterday that diplomatic cables from the Washington embassy of a key NATO ally reveal the U.S. is bent on evicting the Taleban from power by force.

The U.S. strategy appears to entail supporting the exiled 86-year-old monarch of Afghanistan, King Zahir Shah, to return to power by encouraging the guerrilla army of the Northern Alliance opposition to fall in behind him.

"The king plans to call on all the Afghan tribes to rise up against the Taleban," the newspaper quotes the diplomatic cable as saying.

U.S. special forces are likely in close contact with their Spetznaz colleagues in Russia, who still possess valuable knowledge of Afghanistan from their failed 10-year attempt to conquer the country. "I think we'd be crazy not to get whatever information we could from the Russians," says General Grange.

The U.S. and its allies will apparently repeat tactics Moscow employed during its occupation of Afghanistan in the mid-1980s: killing rebel leaders and destroying supply depots.

In that conflict, Soviet special forces would swoop down in attack helicopters, often before dawn, to wipe out rebels within hours of arriving in villages.

That strategy was so successful that the United States in 1986 began arming mujahedeen with sophisticated Stinger anti-aircraft missiles.

However, Mr. Bell warns that the battle-hardened Afghan fighters are not to be underestimated. "They are incredibly tough fighters," he says. "They're a formidable enemy on the ground."

And special forces depend heavily on intelligence, something that the United States is sorely lacking in Afghanistan.

Without solid information on their targets, troops could end up flying into ambushes or attacking caves long abandoned by bin Laden and his sympathizers, warned retired Colonel Daniel Smith, now an analyst with the Center for Defense Information.

"Launching a special operations unit without some intelligence, you're just asking for trouble in doing that," he says.

The main problem will be finding the Saudi-born bin Laden in the inhospitable mountainous terrain prevalent in Afghanistan.

Major Charles Heyman, editor of Jane's World Armies, says bin Laden is "probably roaming the countryside with about six or seven people in a couple of Toyota pick-up trucks" to avoid drawing attention to himself.

"The Americans have probably lost him. Bin Laden has a great ability to vanish into the hills."

Once on the ground, the Western troops, dressed in battle gear, wearing heavy boots and equipped with the latest high-tech equipment would stand out like sore thumbs in a world of dry mountains, few trees and a hostile and well-armed local population, making it imperative that a raid be smoothly organized with reliable intelligence.

Any failure could mean bodies displayed in the markets of Kabul and a public relations disaster for the United States and its allies.

"If we don't get it right the first time, we blow our chance to build a lasting international coalition," warns Col. Smith.

Mr. Bell shakes his head at the thought of the task facing his former SAS comrades and U.S. special forces.

"I don't envy them," he says. "The guys on the ground have lost the element of surprise ... these bad guys know the cavalry is coming down on them."

"And they don't take prisoners these guys, they'll cut off your body parts, shove them in your mouth and shoot you. There is no Geneva Convention in Afghanistan."

Despite the risks, every special ops soldier in the Western world is likely checking his gear, cleaning his weapons and hoping to get into a fight that will allow him to use his training and courage.

"If you're a special ops guy, you will be going in," says Jack Spencer, a defence analyst at Washington's Heritage Foundation. "If not the Afghanistan mission, then there will be a lot of others."

Mr. Bell predicts that whatever action is taken in Afghanistan, it will be decided by special forces on the ground. "The bad guys are dug into the ground - into these tremendous networks of tunnels and bunkers in the mountains," he says.

"You can't take them out with bombs: you need guys on the ground with bayonets to go in and kill them all."

-- Anonymous, September 23, 2001

OG, I wondered about this report, but thought I would post it anyway. If they did find bin Laden, it shouldn't be in the news and from what little I know about MI6, I don't think someone there would spill the beans.

-- Anonymous, September 23, 2001

He's right here:

-- Anonymous, September 23, 2001

Beckie, yes, glad you posted it because there's bound to be at least some truth to it. As you see, the National Post (a publication I'm not familiar with) says something similar, except their emphasis is on the SAS. Could be these are rumors deliberately planted by the Brits to further put the fear of Allah into the Taliban. COuld also be there is a group of specially-trained folks in there somewhere. I'd bet on the Brits before the Americans because of their connections and knowledge of the area.

-- Anonymous, September 23, 2001