WASHINGTON - The Central Intelligence Agency, returning to some of its cloak-and-dagger ways to penetrate hostile territory, has handed out tens of millions of dollars in unmarked bills in recent months to foreign intelligence contacts in the hunt for Osama bin Laden and other top Al Qaeda leaders, according to US officials and former CIA members.
Just as the CIA spent several hundred million dollars in $100 bills on hand-picked warlords to help motivate and arm ground forces in the war in Afghanistan, agents have been given stacks of US currency to spend in Yemen, Pakistan, Indonesia, Malaysia, and the Philippines, among other countries.
Some intelligence specialists applaud the return to the aggressive development of local spies - called assets by intelligence officials - as a long-overdue revitalization of a global operation that had become complacent and risk-averse. But the practice also is creating great tension with some host governments, which contend the practice could undermine their own efforts as well as cause dissension in their intelligence ranks.
CIA agents are covertly giving the cash to members of foreign intelligence services either to pay for information or to be passed on in recruiting other sources, according to the US officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity.
''They have received tremendous cooperation from the intel services in those countries,'' said a former CIA member, speaking on condition of anonymity. ''The incident in Yemen is a direct result from the cooperation of the Yemeni intelligence service.''
On Nov. 5, a CIA drone aircraft fired a Hellfire missile and destroyed a vehicle carrying six suspected Al Qaeda members. The car contained Qaed Salim Sinan al-Harethi, one of the two top Al Qaeda leaders in Yemen. That operation also used electronic intercepts collected by the National Security Agency, which took sophisticated surveillance equipment into Yemen with the government's quiet blessing.
The CIA agents are carrying the currency in denominations of $20, $50, and $100 bills, confirmed two intelligence officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity. The bills are neither crisp nor in sequence so the money can't be traced to the US government, much less CIA headquarters, and jeopardize the safety of local CIA contacts, officials say.
Distributing the money is only one of the tactics being used by US intelligence and the military, which have come under increasing pressure - especially in the last 10 days, since the latest purported message from bin Laden. The Al Qaeda leader warned over a scratchy audiotape that the United States and its allies would be attacked again.
The disclosure that the United States had Abd al-Rahim Al-Nashiri, a top Al Qaeda commander, in custody was seen as evidence by some analysts that the intelligence community was tightening the circle around the terror network's top operators, including bin Laden. Nashiri, described as the head of Al Qaeda's Arabian Peninsula operations, allegedly played a role in the bombing of the USS Cole two years ago and in the Oct. 6 attack on a French supertanker off the coast of Yemen.
Nashiri's arrest not only removes an important Al Qaeda plotter, but it also could pay dividends through interrogation. US officials say the arrests of Ramzi Binalshibh and Abu Zubaydah in Pakistan have been extremely helpful even if Zubaydah's information is dated.
Those three suspects are some of the few senior leaders to be captured in the US-led war on terrorism. Muhammad Atef, a top Al Qaeda operative, was killed in Afghanistan in November 2001 by a missile fired from a CIA drone.
Despite those successes, several senior Al Qaeda-linked leaders remain unaccounted for - about 80 percent of the leadership. In addition to bin Laden, those still free include Ayman al-Zawahr, bin Laden's top aide; Khalid Shaikh Mohammed; and Mullah Mohammed Omar, the former head of the Taliban. Intelligence officials say they believe the freer flow of cash to informers and agents may help capture these elusive leaders.
But as intelligence officers go after the top leaders, the CIA is facing strains in its relationships with some foreign governments, US intelligence officials acknowledge. A Pakistani official told the Globe that the large disbursement of cash ''is a recipe for disaster. They are trying to run their own parallel intelligence organization.''
''The CIA and FBI are saying they want to have their own assets,'' said the Pakistani official, speaking on condition of anonymity. ''Ten thousand dollars goes a long way, but it's a very temporary way. The general impression is that Americans use people like condoms and then walk away.
''Everyone knows that once Osama bin Laden is captured, the Americans are going to bug out of there. That's why Pakistani intelligence is being very careful with them,'' the official said.
But intelligence specialists counter that Pakistan has not done enough in rooting out dissidents in its intelligence ranks. Many people contend that Pakistan intelligence may be hiding bin Laden and his close advisers somewhere in the nation's vast lawless regions along the Afghan border.
''Someone's protecting'' bin Laden, said Robert Baer, a former CIA agent and author of ''See No Evil,'' a scathing account of US missteps in running covert actions in the 1980s and 1990s in the Middle East and elsewhere. ''This guy has more support that we can ever imagine. You don't just hide out guys like bin Laden and have them disappear. ''
Some contend that just before the Tora Bora battle in early December last year, bin Laden sneaked out through the Baluchistan region and crossed the Arabian Sea to his ancestral home in Yemen. The US military and CIA say they are beginning to improve their network of sources in that region. The US military, in particular, has set its aim on deepening its relationship with Djibouti on the tip of the Horn of Africa. Many of the unmanned US Predator drones are now based in Djibouti to spy over Yemen.
Surveillance is another key tool. The most obvious targets are the frequently chosen messengers of Al Qaeda: reporters working for the Al-Jazeera TV network. One US official said a reporter of particular interest to US intelligence officers is Ahmad Muaffaq Zaidan, the bureau chief in Islamabad, Pakistan, who has received several of bin Laden's communiqués, including an audio recording on Nov. 12 in Islamabad in which bin Laden applauds the recent terrorist attacks in Bali and Yemen.
The release of the audiotape should spark an intensified effort to catch bin Laden, said Michael E. O'Hanlon, a military analyst at the Brookings Institution, a centrist Washington think tank. ''The best way to make the argument is to look around the world at top terrorist leaders and what happens to the organizations under them once the leaders are caught. You see a remarkable drop-off with their capture.''
In recent weeks, US intelligence has reported a substantial increase in phone calls and messages made by those linked to Al Qaeda. Jay C. Farrar, a military analyst with the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a centrist Washington think tank, said the US intelligence community should be responding to that increase in activity in equal measure.
''The reality is you've got to step back and take a look at all the possibilities,'' Farrar said. ''It is like a police investigation of a murder. You eliminate things that don't bear fruit, you keep working on those that give you an opening.
''The feeling is that inevitably someone is going to make a mistake, and the more you stay on it, the more you concentrate, the better able you'll be to see that first stumble.''
Offering multimillion-dollar public rewards for bin Laden hasn't worked. Now, the CIA hopes, furtive payments of a few hundred dollars to the right local agents will.
John Donnelly can be reached at donnelly@globe.com
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