From The Sunday Times March 18, 2007

The invisible man

Five years ago the Americans had the world’s most wanted man in their sights but failed to pull the trigger. Since then the trail has gone stone-cold, despite history’s biggest manhunt and a $25m reward. So where is Osama Bin Laden? And just how hard is the US trying to find him?

Christina Lamb

”You’re a great guy but you ain’t that clean,” says the American, spraying his hands with sanitiser after slipping some dollars into the palm of one of his local informants.

The American is dressed in long baggy shalwar kameez and sports a beard. But he will never be taken for a local, here in the frontier town of Peshawar. We have met before, two years ago in the bar of the Mustafa hotel in Kabul, where such characters hung out amid its marbled walls and mirrored ceilings, pulling out knives and guns to see whose weapon was the largest.

His name is “Dave” and he works in “private security”, and maybe it is and maybe he does. But what he is really is a bounty hunter in search of the $25m payday: Osama Bin Laden.

On one thigh is strapped a Glock pistol and out of his pocket he pulls a packet of Cipro, a powerful antibiotic used by the military, which he swallows between visits to the bathroom. “Occupational hazard,” he grimaces.

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Over time most of his fellow bounty hunters have given up, despite the high prize. But “Dave” has ended up here in Green’s hotel, where last night in bed a cockroach crawled across his face and the windows look out onto the jagged mountains of the Khyber Pass. “This is the place,” he says. “Not Afghan-land.”

His eyes are slightly crazed and I can almost see the $ signs flashing up in front of them as he speaks. He talks conspiratorially of the valleys of Dir and Tirah.

“That’s where the big guy’s holed up,” he says. But he has yet to go there. According to his fixer, those who have tried have been tortured and castrated. Their eyeballs have been plucked from their sockets, their ears hacked off and their tongues ripped from their mouths. Dollars have been stuffed into their pockets and notes pinned to their groins declaring: “This is what happens to agents of the USA.”

The last CIA agent to come close to killing Osama Bin Laden digs his spoon into a cheesecake 7,000 miles away in a Manhattan diner, and smiles coldly. “He killed 3,000 Americans, here in my city, and I wanted him dead,” says Gary Berntsen. “I wasn’t going to ask for permission because I knew I wouldn’t get it.”

A large-framed man with pale blue eyes, he tells me he will be 50 this year, the same age as Bin Laden. The diner is packed with harassed Christmas shoppers squashing into the booths with armfuls of shopping bags. It’s an odd place to ask if he has ever previously killed anyone. It is a world away from the mountains of Tora Bora in eastern Afghanistan, into which Berntsen’s team of four agents and 10 Afghans ventured to try to kill history’s most wanted terrorist.

They failed, as Berntsen has been regularly reminded by Bin Laden’s release of 17 videos and audiotapes. Code-named Operation Jawbreaker, the attempt is about to be given the Hollywood treatment by Oliver Stone. But it has left Berntsen, who has since divorced and retired from the agency, a haunted man. He insists that if President Bush had not refused his request to send troops into Tora Bora to block his escape, then Bin Laden would be dead. “There isn’t a day when I don’t think ‘If only,’” he says.

Astonishingly, that was the last positive sighting of Bin Laden, more than five years ago, despite the most extensive manhunt in history, and the reward. The trail has gone stone-cold. “We don’t even know which zone he is in,” admits one US intelligence officer. Governments have been asked to look for him everywhere from Cancun to Rio, according to the former head of the in Laden unit, while agents have taken to referring to him as Elvis. One of them gave team members copies of Where’s Bin Laden?, a Where’s Wally?-style picture book in which readers try to find the world’s most wanted man everywhere from Paris to a shopping mall in Edmonton, Canada.

Although Bin Laden has released no new video since October 2004, hardly anyone believes he is dead. On the contrary, American counterterrorism officials admit he is very much in control of a resurgent Al-Qaeda. So embarrassing is the failure to find him that George Bush, who once insisted “We want him dead or alive,” now rarely mentions him.

To piece together how it was that the combined efforts of the CIA, FBI, National Security Agency, Special Forces, Navy Seals, Interpol, MI6 and the SAS managed to lose Bin Laden, it makes sense to start where they lost him, in Tora Bora. Just as Bin Laden did in mid-November 2001, when the US bombing of Afghanistan sent the Taliban fleeing from the capital, I drove from Kabul to Jalalabad, in a battered white pick-up between two Afghans.

That evening I went for dinner at the palace of the governor. A warlord turned administrator, Gul Agha Sherzai is a giant bear of a man with a bushy dyed black beard, missing front teeth and an elaborate turban. I found him presiding over a long table of tribesmen chewing and slurping food, which included a bowl of mutton soup Gul Agha told me he’d made himself. He insisted I sat next to him, and began tearing off hunks of fatty meat, which he plonked on my plate in between sucking the flesh off a large bone, then wiping his mouth on the end of his turban. I remembered a British official telling me how Jack Straw lunched with him and was incapacitated for days afterwards.

I asked why he thought the Americans cannot find Osama, and he laughed so much his big shoulders shook. “So many rumours,” he said, puffing on a Marlboro Light. “Poor Americans scurrying here and there, not knowing who to believe! They think that they can solve everything with dollars.” He should know. Gul Agha received millions from the CIA for helping to oust the Taliban and Al-Qaeda.

After dinner, he took me on a tour of the palace he had just renovated. In the audience room was a painting of the man who built it, King Abdur Rahman. “My grandfather,” announced Gul Agha. They may both hail from the Barakzai tribe but I know Gul Agha is the son of a champion dogfighter, not a prince. But this was not the time to quibble over ancestry. We were heading for the basement, where the Russians used to kill people and the walls were stained with blood. Gul Agha has turned it into a disco. The tour ends outside with a final flourish of warlord kitsch – a display of coloured lights round the fountain and swimming pool.

Early the next morning, as promised, Gul Agha sends some guards to accompany me to Tora Bora: a police vehicle and two trucks of men with Kalashnikovs. One of them introduces himself as Commander Lalalai, a famous old mujahid. We speed through the streets, scattering donkey carts and men on bicycles. Eventually we turn onto an unmade road towards the White Mountains. “Tora Bora,” points the driver, Mahmood.

Every so often, Mahmood puts on a terrifying burst of speed, throwing up so much dust that we can see nothing as we hurtle along the narrow track and I grip the side of the door.

“Al-Qaeda, Al-Qaeda!” he exclaims. Occasionally the truck in front screeches to a halt and Commander Lalalai jumps out and starts berating Mahmood for not going fast enough, saying we could be killed by the “bad guys”.

After two hours we stop at a schoolhouse that was used by the CIA as base camp during the battle for Tora Bora, and pick up two more vehicles of guards. Now we have 26 gunmen. The road has turned from dust to stones, making the journey even more bone-shaking. But the scenery is spectacular, swirled-toffee mountains as far as the eye can see, rising to black rock under a deep blue sky. On the other side lie the passes to Parachinar and the Tribal Areas of Pakistan.

Eventually our convoy pulls up under a tree and everyone piles out. “Now we walk 10 minutes,” says Mahmood. This is Afghan time. An hour later we are still climbing the stony track along a dry river bed, breathless from the thinning oxygen. But the guards are happy. They hold hands, pose for photographs and pick me some lavender. Every so often we pass people with donkeys or small children bearing bundles of wood – the slopes all around have been denuded of trees. The women hurriedly pull their shawls over their faces.

Finally we stop and they point across the gorge, shouting “Osama house, Osama house.” First I can see nothing, then I can just make out a few holes and ruins on the terraced slopes. It is not at all what I am expecting. Where is the James Bond-style high-tech cave complex with hydroelectric power plants, elevators, loading bays big enough for tanks and trucks portrayed in newspapers at the time?

First used by mujaheddin fighting the Soviets in the 1980s, Tora Bora is really just a natural stronghold of caves. When Bin Laden took them over, he used dynamite to extend them and built some mud-brick houses. A combination of Afghan scavengers and US and British intelligence have scoured the caves. In one of them an SAS team found plans for Al-Qaeda’s next attack, in Singapore. Berntsen told me US agents even scraped the sides of the cave for DNA in the hope of finding they had killed Bin Laden.

It was clear from the craters that one hell of a battle had gone on. It was from behind a tree along the bluff that Gary Berntsen’s team of four CIA agents crept into a position where they could observe the encampment unseen and use laser guns to mark out bombing targets.

Their instructions were clear. “I don’t want Bin Laden and his thugs captured. I want them dead,” said Cofer Black, head of the Counterterrorist Center of the CIA, handing over a large suitcase containing $5m. “I want Bin Laden’s head shipped back in a box filled with dry ice. I want to be able to show Bin Laden’s head to the president.”

Berntsen set up CIA operations in a Kabul guesthouse after the fall of the Afghan capital in November 2001. As soon as he picked up reports that Bin Laden and as many as 1,000 followers were massed at Tora Bora, he knew he had to act. He went to the US special-forces commander at Bagram and asked for a team to go down there, together with some of his agents. “He said we’re not going – it’s too disorganised, too dangerous, too this, too that. I said, okay, I go by myself.

“I knew if I didn’t do anything, Bin Laden would escape the country with his entire force, so I just improvised. I sent four guys into those mountains alone to look for 1,000 people – it was a very, very large risk. If they’d been found, they would have been tortured and killed and I would probably have been fired.”

His team and their Afghan guides left in late November 2001, scaling the 10,000ft mountains. After two days they spotted Bin Laden’s camp, complete with trucks, command posts and machinegun nests. They estimated that there were between 600 and 700 gunmen.

“We got them,” they radioed Berntsen, who punched the air in delight.

“One word kept pounding in my head,” he said. “Revenge. Let’s finish them off in the mountains.” The agents mounted their laser marking devices on tripods and began lighting up targets for bombers that would come from the Bagram base. One of them punched co-ordinates into a device like a huge Palm Pilot, to be relayed to US Army Central Command (Centcom) in Tampa, Florida. For the next 56 hours they directed strike after strike by B-1 and B-2 bombers and F-14 Tomcats onto the Al-Qaeda encampment. The battle of Tora Bora had begun.

After the bombing, Bin Laden and his men fled further into the mountains. By then, special forces had agreed to send in a 12-man team and some crack SAS operatives to pin the Al-Qaeda fighters against the mountains, using Afghan forces to trap them between three promontories.

Three rival commanders who between them controlled most of Jalalabad – Hazrat Ali, Haji Zahir and Haji Zaman – were hired, and a day rate agreed of $100-150 per soldier. “I raised an army with a couple of million dollars,” says Berntsen.

He sent in an urgent request to Centcom for a battalion of 600 US Army rangers to be dropped behind Al-Qaeda positions to block their escape. Berntsen knew Bin Laden was there because a second CIA team had a stroke of luck. One of the bodies they found was clutching a cheap walkie-talkie. Through it they could hear Bin Laden exhorting his troops to keep fighting.

“We were listening to Bin Laden praying, talking and giving instructions for a couple of days,” said Berntsen. “I had the CIA’s No 1 native Arabist, who’d been listening to Bin Laden’s voice for five years, down here listening.”

Over and over, Berntsen told high command: “We need rangers now! The opportunity to get Bin Laden and his men is slipping away!”

But the answer came back: no, it should be left to the Afghans. “The generals were afraid of casualties!” says Berntsen, still incredulous.

Only on the 11th day of the 16-day battle did Delta Force soldiers arrive and the military take control from the CIA. Yet they numbered just 40 – and to Berntsen’s amused disgust they had to pay bribes to their Afghan allies to be allowed through. Despite the lack of troops, he estimates that between the bombing and the Afghans they killed about 70% of Bin Laden’s force.

A couple of times he thought they had got Bin Laden. Through the walkie-talkie they knew his fighters were running short of food and water, so they let them be resupplied by local Afghans. “We delivered food and water so we could get a GPS on Bin Laden’s position, then we dropped a Blu-82 [a 15,000lb bomb] the size of a car, and killed a whole lot.”

But on December 15 they heard him on the radio again. The following day the Al-Qaeda leader is believed to have split his men into two and gone with his group of 200 Saudis and Yemenis over the mountains to Parachinar.

That same day, Berntsen also left Afghanistan, full of frustration. Back with his wife and two children for Christmas, he was horrified to switch on his television on Boxing Day and see the bearded face of his tormentor. Bin Laden had released a video to show the world he was still alive. “I just kept thinking, we could have had him.

It came out later that the president had been briefed and had turned down my request for soldiers,” he said. “I found that heartbreaking.”

The evening after my own trip to Tora Bora, I visited one of the commanders the Americans had contracted, to hear his version of events. Haji Abdul Zahir is the closest Afghanistan has to mujaheddin aristocracy. His uncle was the great commander Abdul Haq, killed by the Taliban when he tried to raise a movement against them in 2001.

His father, Haji Qadir, was vice-president of Afghanistan and assassinated in Kabul in 2002.

The vehicle he sends to pick me up is equipped with both sat nav (useless in Jalalabad, but Afghans love gadgets) and men with guns. The house we drive to is a vision of warlord chic.

A golden chandelier dominates the marble entrance hall and a sweeping staircase leads up to a balcony with a billiard table. Everywhere there are blown-up photographs of himself and his late father and uncle. Haji Zahir himself is lounging on cushions, which he uses to illustrate the battlefield. “From the start the plan was weak,” he says. “If you have enemies on this pillow and you don’t surround it, then they will run away. Without any plan, the planes were bombing but the ways were open, so of course they ran away.”

Like Berntsen, he has no doubt Bin Laden was there. “I myself caught 21 Al-Qaeda prisoners, some from Yemen, Kuwait, Saudi and Chechnya. One was a boy called Abu Bakr, and I asked him when he had last seen Bin Laden. He said 10 days earlier Bin Laden had come to his checkpoint and sat with them for 20 minutes and drank tea.”

The plan had been to attack from the Wazir Valley to trap Al-Qaeda, as the special forces wanted. The evening the attack was due, Al-Qaeda had radioed asking to be given till 8am the next morning and they would surrender.

“I didn’t agree,” said Zahir. “I said, if they want to surrender, why not today? Why are we giving them 12 to 14 hours to run away?”

The other Afghan commanders agreed to the ceasefire and the Americans were outraged. “Our military mission,” said Gen Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, “remains to destroy the Al-Qaeda and Taliban networks. So our operation from the air and the ground will continue until our mission is accomplished.”

The bombing continued through the night. Sure enough, the next day, the Al-Qaeda troops had vanished. And, far from Berntsen’s estimate of killing 70%, Zahir thinks the majority escaped. “Supposedly there were 600 to 800 people,” he said. “I captured 21. Ali and Zaman got nine. Dead bodies were not easy to count but around 150. That means at least 400 got away. For all that money spent, and bombing, only 30 were caught.” To this day he remains mystified by the Americans. “It would have been easy to get Bin Laden there,” he says. “I don’t know why there was no plan to block the passes. And why weren’t there more Americans? Believe me, there were more journalists than soldiers.”

Mike Scheuer, who headed the CIA’s Osama Bin Laden unit from 1996 to ’99, then was its special adviser from 2001 to November 2004, probably knows more about Bin Laden than any other westerner alive. He was on the receiving end in Washington of many of the cables from Tora Bora. “If you don’t do something when you have the chance, sometimes it doesn’t come back.”

By the time of Tora Bora, Scheuer says, the US had already squandered 10 different opportunities to get their man (eight with cruise missiles, two using CIA assets) back in 1998 and ’99.

Clinton had signed a secret directive in 1998 authorising the CIA to kill Bin Laden after Al-Qaeda bombed the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. But when it came to it, says Scheuer, he didn’t have the resolve. “He was worried about European opinion. He didn’t want to shoot and miss and have to explain a lot of innocent deaths. Yet the very same day we turned down one opportunity to kill Bin Laden, our planes were dropping thousands of bombs on the Serbs.”

On one occasion in 1999, they had live video pictures of Bin Laden from a Predator spy plane. “But the drone wasn’t armed because the fools in Washington were arguing over which agency should fund the $2m installation of the Hellfire missile. It’s a very upsetting business.

“I got into a slanging match with Clinton on TV because he claimed that he never turned down the opportunity to kill Bin Laden. That’s a very clear lie, and we’re all paying the price.

“Similarly, at Tora Bora our generals didn’t want to lose a lot of soldiers going after him. They had seen what had happened to the Russians, who lost 15,000 men in Afghanistan. So it was easier to subcontract to Afghans.”

We now know from the American journalist Bob Woodward’s book Plan of Attack that there was another reason for Washington’s reluctance to commit troops on the ground. As early as November 21, 2001, while the Taliban were still in southern Afghanistan and Bin Laden’s men were massing at Tora Bora, Bush took Rumsfeld aside after a national-security meeting and asked: “What kind of a war plan do you have for Iraq?”

According to Woodward, when Gen Tommy Franks got the top-secret message asking for an Iraq war plan within a week, he was incredulous. “ ‘They were in the midst of one war in Afghanistan, and now they wanted detailed planning for another? Goddamn,’ Franks said, ‘what the f*** are they talking about?’ ”

On paper it shouldn’t be so difficult to find Bin Laden. He is over 6ft 4in tall, about 160lb, olive complexion, left-handed, and walks with a cane. There are few in the world who would not recognise his bony, bearded face and gaunt frame.

He is also said to be ill, though both his former doctor in Lahore, Dr Amer Aziz, and Mike Scheuer dispute the persistent rumour that he has kidney disease and needs dialysis. “I came to the conclusion that was disinformation,” says Scheuer. “You would have laughed if you’d seen how whenever a video came out, the agency would have doctors pore over it. Apparently, if you have serious kidney disease, you have a certain pallor and a way of moving that betrays it, and Bin Laden never showed any sign. We spent more time studying that than listening to what he said.”

There have been many rumours of his death. Some had him among the 73,000 victims of the Pakistan earthquake in 2005. Then, last autumn, a French newspaper claimed that a French intelligence document reported Bin Laden had died on August 23 of typhoid fever in Pakistan.

But still the tapes keep coming. There have been no videos now since 2004 but plenty of audiotapes – three in the last year alone.

So why, with electronic surveillance so sophisticated that unmanned Predator drones can provide live video pictures from 26,000ft, and satellites can spot a goat on a hillside, has he managed to slip so easily off the radar?

“We have become blinded by our own electronic cleverness,” complained a special-forces colonel involved in the hunt. “We don’t know what to do when there are no telephone lines to tap, or fibre-optic cables to tap into,” adds Scheuer.

All the intelligence officers I have spoken to over the past five years, US, Pakistani, Afghan and British, as well as special forces involved in the search, agree: the problem is lack of what the Americans call “humint” – human intelligence. “You need human resources to penetrate these groups, and there’s not enough of that going on, nowhere near enough,” says Berntsen.

He blames cuts in the CIA staff, particularly during the Clinton years. “When you get rid of large numbers of people you reduce your humint capacity. You can’t just suddenly hire top-level people. To build a capable operations officer is a seven-year process.”

It is well known that when 9/11 happened the CIA did not have a single agent inside Afghanistan. But just as shocking is the lack of relevant language skills. Berntsen says of the 30,000-strong FBI: “Only six are proficient in Arabic – five years after 9/11.”

The White House belatedly seems to have come to the same conclusion. During the swearing-in of his new intelligence chief, Mike McConnell, in February, Bush instructed him to develop more recruits with the language skills and background to infiltrate Al-Qaeda.

One source the US did have, who was close to both Bin Laden and the Taliban leader Mullah Omar and agreed to co-operate, is languishing now in jail in Manhattan. The arrest of Haji Bashar Noorzai is a salutary tale of inter-agency rivalry. Perhaps the kingpin of Afghanistan’s drug lords, Noorzai was arrested by the Americans in Kandahar after the fall of the Taliban but later released for reasons that are unclear. As someone well connected to Bin Laden, he was clearly a key figure. In 2004 he was tracked down to Dubai and approached to be a source given protection in the US rather than be re-arrested. After a long period of negotiations he agreed.

In April 2005 he was taken to the Embassy Suites hotel in lower Manhattan and grilled by US agents. After about 10 days he tried to leave, but a Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) agent placed a shocked Noorzai under arrest for conspiring to smuggle narcotics to the US. DEA officials trumpeted his “capture” on the news. But the Bin Laden hunters who had helped win him over to be a source were outraged. “He should have been utilised to get to Mullah Omar and/or Bin Laden,” said one official.

So where do the hunters think Bin Laden is hiding? Israeli intelligence has put him in Iran or among the Weiga people of northern Afghanistan, bordering China and Tajikistan. But the main search has focused on two areas: the wooded mountain valleys of Kunar/Nuristan in northeast Afghanistan, and the wild Tribal Areas bordering Pakistan and Afghanistan, particularly North Waziristan. Pakistan’s President Musharraf insists he is in Afghanistan, probably Kunar. The Afghan president, Hamid Karzai, insists he is in Pakistan, probably in a city like Lahore or Karachi.

“I think now he lives in an area where the topography is extremely difficult and where he is a long-term guest of those like Pashtuns who would defend him with their lives,” says Scheuer. “That could be either the upper part of the Tribal Areas or Kunar.”

The only reporter to interview Bin Laden after 9/11 was Hamid Mir, a Pakistani journalist who has interviewed him three times and wears a black Casio watch that was a present from the Al-Qaeda leader. He claims to have met one of Bin Laden’s commanders, Abu Daud, in the eastern Afghan city of Ghazni last September. “I asked, why isn’t he coming on Al-Jazeera any more? There’s been no video message for the last two years. He replied: ‘We don’t want to provide the Americans with fresh pictures because they can find him on their Predator planes.’”

Like Scheuer, Mir believes that the invasion of Iraq in March 2003 distracted those who had been searching for Bin Laden. At a key time, Task Force 121, the shadowy group of Delta Force and Navy Seals, found themselves shipped off to Baghdad to hunt down Saddam and sons.

“In 2002, Bin Laden was facing lots of problems,” says Mir. “His people were scattered, short of money, and running between Pakistan, Khost and Waziristan.” He believes they finally found refuge in the Pech Valley in Kunar. “It was here that in the last week of March 2003, Bin Laden held his first meeting of all his commanders since 9/11, taking advantage of the distraction of Iraq. He was very happy. He said the bad patch is over and we’ll have a new breeding ground in Iraq. He assigned Saif al-Adel to go to Iran and meet [the insurgency leader] Abu Zarqawi, then establish training camps. Within a few months, camps had been set up in Khost, North Waziristan and Iran.”

US officials have also focused attention on Kunar. This mountainous area is one of the few remaining forested parts of Afghanistan, with plenty of trails into Pakistan. It is also a stronghold of the anti-coalition warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, and much of the population adheres to Bin Laden’s brand of Wahhabism. A video given to Al-Jazeera in September 2003 showed Bin Laden and his deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, scrambling down slopes similar to those found in Kunar and Nuristan. There were persistent reports, too, of Arabs coming down the mountains to buy supplies in the bordering Pakistani province of Chitral.

US special forces established a series of small bases in the region, and in 2005 began an operation called Red Wing to sweep the area of militants. But on June 28 a four-man team of Navy Seals was trapped on a 10,000ft ridge above the Pech Valley. Only one survived. When they called in for help, one of the two Chinooks was shot down, killing all 16 aboard.

Convinced that the attack must have been to defend a senior Al-Qaeda figure, the Americans responded with an intense campaign in late 2005, followed by an assault last spring called Mountain Lion. But the militants are believed to have just fled deeper into the mountains. It seemed a good place to continue my search.

It is a long journey to Naray, America’s remotest camp in Afghanistan, five hours by helicopter along the Kunar river through narrow gorges. The Chinooks fly in pairs, with a Black Hawk attack helicopter alongside, their gunners scouring the rocky hillsides for enemies. It was not reassuring to see that the Chinook’s cargo included boxes marked “Human Blood for Naray”.

We are put down inside a small encampment enclosed by razor wire and sandbags, and surrounded by 15,000ft mountains. To the east is Pakistan and ahead, up amid the snowy peaks, is Nuristan, land of light, a region so remote that many of its valleys have never seen a westerner.

“It’s beautiful until you realise there are dudes up there trying to kill you,” says Capt Todd Polk, the company commander. He points out the US observation posts on top of the mountains.

Until six months ago, only special forces ventured this far north, but now there are neat rows of tents along gravel paths that house the men from 10th Mountain Division, some of the most experienced US forces in Afghanistan. Even so, many of the camp’s activities are top secret – we must not photograph anything.

Every night, howitzer guns pound away at the enemy in the hills, sending shudders through the whole camp. “We interact with the enemy on a regular basis,” says 1st Lt Joe Lang, who heads the Information Operations Cell. “The camp gets rocketed a lot. You’ll probably get rocketed. Who knows if Bin Laden’s directly involved?”

“We all want to get Osama, to make the world a safer place for our children,” says Private Zak Schultz, of Charlie Company. “But I gotta tell you, ma’am, it’s like chasing shadows up there.”

Fighters disappear across mountains into what the American soldiers refer to as “Paksville”. “If we could go just 10 miles the other side we could finish this,” Schultz complained.

The US military is losing patience with attacks from across the border. Last year they carried out several bombing raids inside Pakistani territory, particularly in Bajaur Agency, which borders Kunar. Last January a US drone dropped a bomb on a house in Bajaur where al-Zawahiri, Bin Laden’s deputy, was believed to be hiding, a few miles from Naray. He was not there, possibly tipped off. Then, in October, a madrasah in Bajaur was bombed, killing 82 people allegedly training to be suicide bombers. Gen Dan McNeill, the new US commander, flew to Islamabad before assuming command in February, to confront Gen Musharraf with video surveillance showing fighters openly crossing into Afghanistan in front of Pakistani border guards.

American commanders have now changed strategy in Kunar. “We came here to hunt and destroy the enemy,” said Lt Lang. “But now we realise we’re fighting an insurgency, and the cornerstone of fighting an insurgency is securing the population. We’re no longer breaking people’s doors down – that was a mistake.”

To win local support they have begun an aggressive programme of building roads; these not only make travel much easier for locals but are also harder for the enemy to mine. The commander, Col Michael Howard, has $50,000 a month to use at his discretion on anything from school classrooms to micro-hydro projects.

“This is a very neglected area, so what we can do is show we’ve something to offer – roads, schools, clinics etc – whereas all the enemy is bringing is fighting,” explains Lt Lang.

But the Taliban resurgence and the deterioration of security in Afghanistan have meant that many of those who were looking for Bin Laden are now engaged in trying to prevent the Taliban from retaking southern Afghanistan.

“I think we’re about out of luck,” says Mike Scheuer. “We still have SF and CIA officers chasing Bin Laden, but I understand it’s a pretty cold trail, and as long as we don’t go into Pakistan…”

While the US has 22,000 troops in Afghanistan charged with trying to hunt down Bin Laden, most people involved have long believed him to be over the border in Pakistan, where they cannot officially look. It might seem odd to suggest that America’s ally in the war on terror could be harbouring its deadliest enemy. After all, Pakistani officials are quick to point out, they have 80,000 soldiers on the border and have lost 750, while President Musharraf has narrowly escaped two assassination attempts.

But at the same time, this is where Al-Qaeda was born, and it seems more than coincidence that all six most senior Al-Qaeda people to be arrested since 9/11 were living in Pakistani cities.

“I keep telling our American and British friends, please be patient with us,” says Tariq Aziz, Musharraf’s national-security adviser and closest friend. “You have to remember that Pakistan had 22 years of Islamisation after General Zia took over in 1977. It was state policy to support the Taliban. We can’t turn this round overnight.”

Others put it more bluntly. “No one here is interested in finding Osama,” says Shujaat Hussein, the president of Pakistan’s ruling Muslim League. “Here he is far more popular than President Bush.”

But there is a more sinister possibility. Senior UN officials in Afghanistan believe that Pakistan is playing a double game: that while its military intelligence (ISI) officially co-operates with the hunt for Bin Laden, there is a shadow ISI making sure nobody gets near him. This is, after all, a country where ministers I go to interview turn up the TV, believing their offices are bugged. And its national hero is the nuclear scientist Dr Abdul Qadeer Khan, a man who, until exposed by the West two years ago, was smuggling nuclear-weapons technology to states such as Iran and North Korea. US intelligence is convinced al-Zawahiri was tipped off by ISI the few times they got near.

The theory that Bin Laden is in a Pakistani city is something a growing number of US officials now consider possible. But for the time being the spotlight is on the seven tribal agencies along the 1,500-mile Afghan border, a dirt-poor land where almost everyone is armed and lives on smuggling and kidnapping. When they were part of British India, colonial officers gave up trying to control them. Instead they put in political agents to act as go-betweens. When Pakistan was created in 1947, the Tribal Areas were left semi-autonomous.

In these lands where mountains rise from barren plains like scales from a dragon’s back, tribes live by the Pashtunwali honour code. This demands an eye for an eye, so people live inside forts with walls 3ft thick and watchtowers to protect themselves from those with whom they have feuds. They are highly conservative; women are kept in purdah, and literacy is only about 10%. The code also requires guests to be protected, whatever they may have done. This, then, could be a safe haven for Al-Qaeda fighters, particularly as many are said to have married local women.

The Waziris are reputed to be the fiercest tribe of all, and it was in Waziristan that the British met most resistance. In 1936 a mysterious leader, the Fakir of Ippi, led an armed revolt in North Waziristan. At one point, 40,000 British and Indian troops were searching for him, yet he was never found, and died in his bed in 1960.

“Remember the Fakir of Ippi,” says a friend from the Afridi tribe when I ask why nobody can find Bin Laden.

I would like to go to Ippi, but journalists who have tried have ended up dead or badly beaten. I go to the frontier town of Peshawar, where friends warn me off.

“Where is Osama?” sighs Lt Gen Ali Jan Aurakzai, the blue-eyed governor of the frontier, who is himself from the Tribal Areas and commanded Pakistan’s troops when they went in there for the first time in 2003. “I’m fed up with this question. The Afghans say Bin Laden is in a Pakistan military base. I would say: why would they come to our Tribal Areas infested with troops and intelligence agencies rather than Afghanistan, where the writ of the government barely extends beyond a few cities and foreign troops are only in a few bases and daren’t venture out?”

The embarrassing failure to find Bin Laden has led Washington to downplay his significance and insist that he and his deputy are fatally weakened. “Al-Qaeda is on the run,” declared President Bush just before last year’s election.

The US Army’s highest-ranking officer said in February that there was “not that great a return” in finding Bin Laden. “So we get him – then what?” asked Gen Peter J Schoomaker, the outgoing army chief of staff. “In the long run, we may make him bigger than he is today. He’s hiding and knows we’re looking for him. We know he’s not particularly effective.”

In Washington, officials look pained when I raise the subject. “To be honest, I’m relatively relaxed about the Bin Laden situation,” says Dr David Kilcullen, chief counterterrorism strategist at the State Department. “I think he’s largely irrelevant. Five years ago the guy killed 3,000 people in New York City; now he makes videos.” Kilcullen insists Bin Laden’s control over Al-Qaeda has been damaged. “You guys want to grant him the kind of rock-star status he’s seeking. But he has a lot of problems.”

Others say that Al-Qaeda is training for new attacks. Those involved say the hunt is now “confused and unfocused”. “The president likes to believe Bin Laden is running from rock to rock,” says Scheuer, “but that’s the Hollywood version. He’s probably in a pretty comfortable compound. He’s certainly beaten us at the moment.”

Back in Manhattan, the man who could have got Bin Laden looks at a souvenir postcard I have just bought that still shows the twin towers. “We’ll get him in the end,” Berntsen insists. “One really good officer can make a difference, and one lucky break. I’ve captured people who’ve been on the run for 16 years. They make mistakes. You only have to be right once to be able to pull the trigger and it’s all over.”