Averting 9/11: How close we came

In the spring of 1998, a unit dedicated to Osama bin Laden at the CIA's counterterrorism center hatched a plan to snatch the Al Qaeda leader, who by then had declared war on the US.

The group of 17 women and 7 men who referred to themselves as "the Manson family," according to an official familiar with the plan, meticulously surveyed - through intelligence from Afghan tribal leaders and satellite photography - the Tarnak Farm, a mud-walled complex in an isolated stretch of desert near the airport in Kandahar, Afghanistan.

The plan called for a midnight raid of the compound through a drainage tunnel. An attack party of 30 fighters would emerge from the desert floor, scour the buildings for the terrorist leader who was believed to be sleeping with one of his four wives, and then spirit him away in a convoy of motorcycles.

The plan, however well conceptualized, was never approved. The reason: the likelihood that innocent bystanders would be killed. It was one of at least four opportunities the CIA identified in the late 1990s to either capture or kill the most infamous terrorist in the world.

The decision not to act in any of these cases highlights a central question emerging from the pointed and emotional 9/11 hearings on Capitol Hill this week: whether the context before 9/11 justified the lack of more forceful action against Al Qaeda.

In its preliminary report, the independent commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks has suggested evidence existed in advance that some sort of terror strike in the US was imminent. But officials in both the Clinton and Bush administrations say not enough was known to justify a full-scale invasion of Afghanistan or a military incursion against Al Qaeda. They suggest such a move would have alienated much of the world or killed too many innocents.

Two days of extraordinary testimony from top officials in successive administrations have exposed other problems in America's war on terror as well: the difficulty of handing off intelligence from one White House to the next, especially when they're from different parties, and the limitations of using traditional diplomatic and military levers to deal with an amorphous threat like terrorism.

"It was a different kind of threat, and the tools are different," says Jim Walsh, an international expert at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. "When you're competing against other states, like the Soviet Union, and have alliances, you can turn to your allies to help you. But with bin Laden and Al Qaeda, it was hard to politically persuade the Pakistanis, Saudis, and Afghans to give up their friends."

To be sure, all this information is being off-loaded in a highly charged political season, in which both presidential candidates are seeking to capitalize on their national security records. But what's emerged from the hearings is the near unanimity of two administrations on the limitations and difficulties of coping with a new threat - and the frequent frustrations of commission members about why it wasn't done better.

Former and current secretaries of State and Defense, as well as the director of central intelligence, and the former Clinton and Bush administration counterterrorism adviser testified about how the range of options was explored and exploited - from diplomatic to economic, covert, and military operations.

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