Word: turky
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...Prince Turki al Faisal knew Osama bin Laden was bad. For the last 10 of Turki's 24 years as Saudi Arabia's intelligence chief, neutralizing bin Laden was one of his primary responsibilities. But the Saudi radical kept slipping through his fingers. Then came Sept. 11 and the awful realization that bin Laden was far worse than he had imagined. "Who would expect it?" Turki asks. "I think we should have been more aware. When you look back on it, you say, 'My God, they have been telling us they are going to do something like that...
Sept. 11 will haunt Turki and others in the spy trade for years to come. Having left his post, Turki, 56, is at least free to talk about his torments. In a three-hour interview with TIME last week, he described two failed attempts by the Saudis to have bin Laden handed over to them, and he discussed the inability of intelligence services to "take out" the fugitive once it became clear how dangerous...
...Turki, who retired from his post earlier this year, feels the Bush administration made a mistake in not channeling the war on terrorism through the United Nations. The bombing of Afghanistan, he tells TIME, is "really affecting people's consciences" and "creating opposition to the U.S. position." In concrete terms, Turki says, "if someone like (assassinated rebel leader) Abdul Haq comes and says, 'Join us in supporting the U.S. against Al Qaeda,' it won't make sense... for an Afghan who sees his neighbor's house being destroyed by an American bomb." Turki says that a U.N. effort to support...
...Turki says putting U.S. commandos on the ground is one possible way of getting bin Laden, but that method certainly won't be easy. "The guy knows the country better than you or I, and he has people who know it better than him," Turki says. "I'm sure throughout the last couple of years he has been planning hiding places for himself, and figuring out routes to get there, and setting up decoys and diversions so that airplanes can't find him, and so satellites don't trace his movements. He is that kind of person...
...Laden, Turki cautions, has fooled the experts before. Turki says that he was surprised by the U.S. "intelligence failure" of not having had "more forewarning, more interdiction, less freedom of action, for the terrorists" who carried out the September 11 attacks. But he admits that it was a failure for Saudi and other intelligence services, too. "All we were hearing about before I left my job was that Al-Qaeda was going to do something. But where, when, by whom - that information was not available...