Word: bins
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Iran. But the trail went cold at the Afghan border with Pakistan in December 2001, when a voice believed to be his was last overheard in Tora Bora. Senior Bush aides admit privately that the month it took to build up forces for the invasion of Afghanistan gave bin Laden and his senior leaders plenty of time to carry out evacuation plans. The military is a lot less keen to confess that it blew its best opportunity to nab him in the December assault on Tora Bora. Washington committed too few American troops to the hunt, even some U.S. military...
...military and intelligence operatives in Afghanistan ran the hunt out of Bagram air base. Led by an Army commander, teams patrolled the "rat trail," the countless smugglers' paths that loop into the mountainous tribal zones of western Pakistan, where they had picked up a pattern of phone communication between bin Laden and friends. While the teams never got close to him, most intelligence analysts think bin Laden is still holed up in Pakistan's treacherous border zone, out among the clannish tribes who barely recognize national control, or tucked up by sympathizers among the 3 million residents of dusty Peshawar...
...taken over control of the terrorist search-and-destroy mission. While some 1,100 analysts and covert operatives staff the terrorism hunt, operating out of Virginia, the special bin Laden station has 50 officers who focus solely on the terrorist leader. (Bin Laden unit is a cover; the office is actually named after the child of the CIA officer who first organized it, but that name remains secret to protect the child from retaliation.) They even have a "red cell" made up of a dozen analysts who try to think like bin Laden and dream up ways he might attack...
...Spot him with a Predator drone and drop a precision-guided weapon on him. Fast, cheap, simple. It worked in Yemen on Nov. 3, when a drone's missile obliterated a car carrying a former bin Laden bodyguard and five other al-Qaeda operatives. But an air strike inside Pakistan would require more cooperation from President Pervez Musharraf than the U.S. has. Pakistan only reluctantly agreed to allow the U.S. to use its airspace and bases to stage the Afghan invasion; it would balk at Predator drones flying all over the country...
...Persuade someone else to get him. But it's virtually impossible for anyone to infiltrate his tiny, devoted circle. The long mountainous stretch of tribal lands in western Pakistan probably remains the best place for bin Laden to hide. It presents a formidable geographical defense for U.S. hunters to penetrate. The CIA has fewer than 100 paramilitary officers in the region at any time...