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...have been a case of hitting the target but missing the opportunity. Reports last week said Saad bin Laden, Osama bin Laden's fourth son and a midranking al-Qaeda operative, was killed by a recent CIA Predator strike. But six years ago, the U.S. had an opportunity to get him alive - and lost it when the Bush Administration decided to pull away from cooperation with Iran. (Read "Obama's Unlikely Ally: Iran Signs On to Afghan Plan...
...jihadist enterprise; his older brother Mohammed is still at large, believed to be in Pakistan. (Osama has at least nine other sons and six daughters.) Saad had only recently returned to the Afghan-Pakistani border after nearly six years under house arrest in Iran. He was one of several al-Qaeda commanders, including military chief Saif al-Adel, captured by Iranian authorities in the spring and summer of 2003 as they tried to sneak across the border from Afghanistan. (See pictures of Osama bin Laden...
...time, the Bush Administration and the Iranian regime were secretly cooperating in the fight against al-Qaeda and the Taliban. In February of that year, Iranian officials had given their U.S. counterparts photocopies of the passports of more than 200 Arabs - including Saad bin Laden - who had been turned away at the Afghan border. The Iranians worried that many of them would enter the country illegally through the porous border. Hillary Mann Leverett, then an official with the National Security Council and one of a handful of Americans involved in negotiations with Tehran, says the Iranians were concerned that...
What the Iranians wanted was a multilateral mechanism, initiated by the U.S., to get the Arab intruders off their hands. Such a mechanism would have given U.S. interrogators access to the al-Qaeda operatives (whom the Iranians would presumably have detained if they once again tried to cross the border). But, says Leverett, the Bush Administration insisted that the Iranians deport the Arabs without any preconditions. By May, negotiations between the two countries broke down, and the chance was lost. Shortly thereafter, Saad bin Laden succeeded in crossing the border. Details of what happened next are murky, but he didn...
...Bush Administration would have none of it. "The Americans just couldn't bring themselves to trust the Iranians, even though they had been pretty straight in their dealings over al-Qaeda and the Taliban," says the official. Instead, the U.S. decided to protect the MEK, even over the objections of Iraq's elected government. (Read "Bin Laden's Son Loses Political-Asylum Bid in Spain...