Word: huntting
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...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 officers say, while relying on iffy Afghan warlords to do the dirty work and indifferent Pakistani forces to cut off escape routes. Bin Laden vanished so completely that a few Administration officials regularly pronounced him dead...
...troops were trying to find him. In late 2001 combined U.S. 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...
...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...
...feel really old. Friends joke that I’m 23 going on 30, teammates refer to me as the old man and too many of the fairer freshmen are legally out of bounds. I’m concerned that I’m behind on the job hunt and each night another one of “the best days” of my life slips...
...Tools of the Hunt...