ations commander said his view of actionable intelligence was that if you "give
me the action, I will give you the intelligence."
that U.S. operations might fail disastrously.We have found no evidence that such
a long-term political-military approach for using Special Operations Forces in
the region was proposed to or analyzed by the Small Group, even though such
capability had been honed for at least a decade within the Defense Depart-
ment.
he said to us,"They were very, very, very reluctant."
rienced professional judgment. That was how Secretary of Defense Cohen
viewed it. He said to us:"I would have to place my judgment call in terms of,
do I believe that the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, former commander of Spe-
cial Forces command, is in a better position to make a judgment on the feasi-
bility of this than, perhaps, Mr. Clarke?"
or CIA, there was a still larger option that could have been considered--invad-
ing Afghanistan itself. Every official we questioned about the possibility of an
invasion of Afghanistan said that it was almost unthinkable, absent a provoca-
tion such as 9/11, because of poor prospects for cooperation from Pakistan and
other nations and because they believed the public would not support it. Cruise
missiles were and would remain the only military option on the table.
Early in 1999, the CIA received reporting that Bin Ladin was spending much
of his time at one of several camps in the Afghan desert south of Kandahar.At
the beginning of February, Bin Ladin was reportedly located in the vicinity of
the Sheikh Ali camp, a desert hunting camp being used by visitors from a Gulf
state. Public sources have stated that these visitors were from the United Arab
Emirates.
Ladin's smaller, adjacent camp.
February 8, the military began to ready itself for a possible strike.
the larger camp and showed the nearby presence of an official aircraft of the
United Arab Emirates. But the location of Bin Ladin's quarters could not be
pinned down so precisely.