Israel Fires Missiles Into Southern Lebanon

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS, August 23, 1999
http://www.nytimes.com/yr/mo/day/news/world/israel-lebanon.html

BEIRUT, Lebanon -- Israeli warplanes attacked suspected guerrilla hideouts in southern Lebanon Sunday, hours after two Israeli soldiers were wounded in an attack in the part of southern Lebanon that Israel occupies as a buffer zone, Lebanese security officials said.

Israeli jets fired two missiles at guerrilla positions in a region that faces Rihan, a village in the Israeli-occupied zone, the officials said. The area is about nine miles north of Israel's border.

Jets returned at night to unleash four more missiles in the area during renewed clashes between Israeli troops and guerrillas along the front line near Rihan, the officials said. There was no word on casualties from the air strike, the second in two days.

The first air raid came hours after an attack by Hezbollah guerrillas wounded two Israeli soldiers in the zone. Hezbollah said it mounted three attacks this morning on an Israeli position, scoring "direct hits."

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Colombia Abuzz With Talk of Intervention

By Serge F. Kovaleski Washington Post Foreign Service Monday, August 23, 1999; Page A13
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WPlate/1999-08/23/060l-082399-idx.html

BOGOTA, ColombiaEmblazoned across a recent cover of the weekly magazine Cambio was the headline "Intervention." Its red, white and blue letters were set against the background of a large photograph showing a U.S. fighter pilot in his cockpit and at the ready.

"Never has there been so much talk about a United States military intervention in Colombia," a note on the cover read. "How close is this possibility?"

From newsrooms in Bogota and other regional capitals to towns and rebel camps in the Colombian jungle, speculation is rife about the possibility of a direct U.S. military role in Colombia's escalating conflict with leftist insurgents. The conjecture has flared up recently despite a series of statements from the Clinton administration and Colombian President Andres Pastrana that the United States plans nothing beyond its long-standing--and growing--anti-narcotics assistance.

"It is totally false, totally crazy, totally in my view irrelevant to the situation," Undersecretary of State Thomas Pickering said during a recent visit to Bogota. "What we are able to do is provide training and equipment so that Colombia is able to confront its own problems."

Nevertheless, recent polls show that a majority of Colombians surveyed would favor involvement of U.S. forces in the 36-year civil war, which has killed at least 35,000 people and displaced several million others from their homes and livelihoods. The feeling is that people are willing to try anything to end the bloodshed. And although such involvement seems out of the question now, Colombians remember U.S. intervention in Panama, Haiti and Grenada, as well as Washington's role in the Nicaraguan and Salvadoran civil wars.

Speculation also has been encouraged during the past month by a burst of reports concerning the U.S. military presence already here.

An American De Havilland RC-7 military reconnaissance plane crashed in southern Colombia on July 23, killing the crew of five Americans and two Colombians, and the United States began training Colombia's first special anti-narcotics battalion.

Then came the back-to-back visits by Pickering, the highest ranking U.S. diplomat to visit Colombia in nearly a decade, and Barry R. McCaffrey, the Clinton administration's drug policy director. Both arrived as the media were reporting that Washington was losing patience with Colombia's faltering peace process.

Colombia, which produces about 80 percent of the word's cocaine, receives $289 million in annual U.S. assistance to fight the drug trade, making it the third-largest recipient of American security aid after Israel and Egypt. The United States has about 240 military personnel in Colombia at any time, none engaged in combat, according to U.S. officials.

"That help is concentrated only on drug trafficking," Pastrana recently said. "As long as I am president of Colombia, there will be no foreign intervention in this country."

Questions among Colombians about a possible intervention have arisen with particular intensity in recent months, because the line has faded between Colombia's thriving narcotics trade and the nation's largest rebel group, the Marxist Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), which earns tens of millions of dollars protecting illicit crops. Faced with what in effect has become a single war, American military authorities fighting cocaine smuggling have started sharing intelligence about the rebels with Colombia's armed forces even if the information is not directly related to narcotics.

"The fundamental question is how do you beat drugs without beating the guerrillas and vice versa," said Sergio Uribe, a political analyst and drug consultant.

In that light, the Clarin newspaper in Argentina and ABC in Spain published stories last month about a supposed plan by the United States to launch a large-scale military campaign against the rebels, with participation of troops and equipment from neighboring Peru and Ecuador. The governments of Peru and Ecuador denied the reports, while McCaffrey and Pickering went out of their way to dispel ideas that an intervention of any sort was planned.

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U.S. Ready to Boost Aid to Troubled Colombia

By Douglas Farah Washington Post Foreign Service Monday, August 23, 1999; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WPlate/1999-08/23/056l-082399-idx.html

The Clinton administration is preparing to greatly step up military and economic aid to Colombia in response to fears that the growing strength of drug-financed Marxist guerrillas there could undercut counternarcotics efforts across the Andean region.

In separate visits to Colombia, senior U.S. officials warned President Andres Pastrana last week that he risks losing U.S. support if he makes further concessions to the insurgents in an effort to restart stalled peace negotiations, according to sources familiar with the talks. But the officials, White House drug policy director Barry R. McCaffrey and Undersecretary of State Thomas Pickering, also told Pastrana the United States will sharply increase aid if he develops a comprehensive plan to strengthen the military, halt the nation's economic free fall and fight drug trafficking.

Part of the economic aid will be $3 billion in International Monetary Fund loans, with some additional direct U.S. military aid. Pickering, briefing reporters here, said he asked Pastrana to present his plan by the middle of September in order to seek supplemental funding from Congress this year.

While specific aid figures will not be discussed until Pastrana presents his plan, senior officials and congressional sources said it would be hundreds of millions of dollars. Colombian defense officials last month requested $500 million in additional military aid over the next two years, a number U.S. officials said is being discussed. U.S. security assistance already stands at $289 million this year, making Colombia the third-largest recipient of such U.S. aid after Israel and Egypt.

"We are working toward a much larger engagement with the United States, involving combating narcotics, strengthening our battlefield capabilities and economic issues," said a senior Colombian Foreign Ministry official. "It is a much broader engagement than just the narcotics issue because all our problems are linked."

President Clinton, for the first time that senior administration officials could recall, was briefed on Colombia by cabinet officials Wednesday. The officials said national security adviser Samuel R. "Sandy" Berger and Pickering, the State Department's third-ranking official, were put in charge of interagency coordination of Colombia policy.

The decision to escalate aid comes a year after the United States resumed helping the army and expanded intelligence sharing, ending a period covering most of this decade during which collaboration was cut off because of the army's human rights record.

Currently the United States is training a 950-man Colombian army counternarcotics battalion, the first such specialized unit in the military, whose primary objective will be to regain control of guerrilla-controlled territory. Pentagon and State Department officials said they recently agreed to try to provide the group with 18 Huey UH-1N helicopters. And, according to the same sources, the United States is planning to fund at least two more such battalions, a move that would boost U.S. aid by tens of millions of dollars.

Pickering said he was "sobered but certainly not panicked" by his trip and stressed that the guerrillas are not on the verge of military victory. But other officials were less optimistic.

"Colombia is a disaster, and I don't see any way around that," said McCaffrey, a retired general who recently proposed spending an additional $1 billion in the Andean drug-producing region, with about half of the money going to Colombia. "We are in a period of intense debate in the administration and on the Hill . . . but we don't have the latitude to let a fellow democracy go under."

McCaffrey, in an interview, said his proposal, including money for alternative development and judicial reform along with military aid, was an attempt to tackle Colombia's multiple problems.

"So far the debate has been at a micro level, about 10 helicopters here or training a battalion there," McCaffrey said. "We are not talking about the right order of magnitude for this problem."

Colombia produces 80 percent of the world's cocaine and about 70 percent of the heroin sent to the United States. Two Marxist guerrilla groups -- the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), with about 15,000 combatants, and the National Liberation Army (ELN), with about 5,000 -- control about 40 percent of the national territory and receive hundreds of millions of dollars a year from protecting drug trafficking routes, airstrips and laboratories. In addition, 7,000 right-wing paramilitary troops, who also derive millions of dollars from cocaine trafficking, control about 15 percent of the national territory.

With the U.S. military gone from Panama, officials say, the FARC is increasing its use of the southern portion of that nation as a safe haven, while expanding its presence in neighboring Ecuador and Venezuela. And Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, a populist leftist who has expressed sympathy for armed revolution, has denied use of Venezuelan airspace to U.S. planes pursuing drug traffickers.

"We have a disaster in our back yard, and it is an incredibly dangerous situation," said Rep. John L. Mica (R-Fla.) in an interview. "It is compounded by the mess in Panama, with Howard Air Force Base being shut down, and Chavez in Venezuela is thumbing his nose at us. The question is, will we move too late to avoid an even bigger disaster?"

But human rights organizations say tilting aid heavily toward the military is dangerous.

"In a world with a lot of bad policy options toward Colombia, the United States is taking the worst one," said Winifred Tate of the Washington Office on Latin America. "By strengthening the military you are strengthening an abusive, corrupt institution that has resisted civil control and human rights reforms. This is not going to achieve U.S. policy objectives."

While policy is being debated, officials in the Pentagon, State Department, White House and Congress said consensus already has emerged on some points.

One is that Pastrana gave away too much to the FARC in an effort to negotiate peace, including allowing the guerrillas to occupy a demilitarized zone the size of Switzerland. The concessions so angered the military that in May Defense Minister Rodrigo Lloreda resigned in protest, sparking an unsuccessful coup plot by senior military officers.

There is also agreement that, while U.S. aid should be focused on fighting drugs, the line between counternarcotics and counterinsurgency has blurred so much that it is almost meaningless because of the FARC's deep involvement in the drug trade.

In the past two years the FARC has taken over the vast jungle regions of Putumayo and Caqueta in southern Colombia, and their presence has brought a huge increase in the amount of coca -- the raw material for cocaine -- under production there. Because of the FARC's strength, the government has been unable to maintain a presence in the region.

That is due, in part, to the weakness of the Colombian military.

"Intelligence assessments have identified numerous deficiencies in training, force structure, leadership, intelligence, mobility and communications which must be corrected if the government of Colombia is to mount credible counter drug operations," McCaffrey wrote in a July 13 letter to Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright. "Unless the government of Colombia succeeds in establishing a security presence in the coca growing regions, Colombian coca cultivation will continue to expand and the guerrilla movement will continue to strengthen."

To counter that, the heart of any immediate increase in military aid will focus on upgrading a sophisticated intelligence and listening post in Tres Esquinas, on the edge of Putumayo province, and Pentagon training of new, special units in the Colombian army, administration officials said.

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World: Americas
Death squads strike terror in Colombia
Death squads attacked villages in the northeast of Colombia

By Jeremy McDermott in Colombia August 23, 1999 BBC
http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/world/americas/newsid_427000/427644.stm

Ultra right-wing death squads in Colombia have killed at least 29 people over the weekend.

The killers from the outlawed paramilitary army, the Self Defence Forces of Colombia, are targeting suspected rebel sympathisers as they continue a campaign against Marxist guerrillas in the Norte de Santander province.

Some 4,000 people have already fled in terror across the border to Venezuela.

No questions asked

The paramilitaries have a simple and effective strategy; they arrive in a town or village, seal it off, then with a list in hand, drag suspected guerrilla sympathisers into the street where they are executed.

The warning to the community is clear - those who support the rebels will be killed, no questions asked.

This latest campaign has already affected Venezuela, and the country's president, Hugo Chavez, has announced he will hold talks with Colombian Marxist guerrillas, with or without the permission of the Colombian government in an attempt to stop the spillover of Colombia's 35-year-old civil war into his country.

Authorities powerless

The border region with Venezuela has traditionally been a rebel stronghold, hence the President Chavez' wish to speak to those who hold the power in the area, and the paramilitary campaign to rid it of guerrillas.

Either way, the Colombian authorities seem powerless to make any difference, as now almost half of the country is under the control of one or other of the illegal armies.

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Kosovo Battle Cost Yugoslavia $64B

By The Associated Press, August 22, 1999
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/i/AP-Kosovo-Cost.html

LONDON (AP) -- The Kosovo conflict will cost Yugoslavia almost $64 billion and make it the poorest country in Europe, according to a report being published Monday.

The Economist Intelligence Unit said NATO's 11-week bombing campaign inflicted enormous damage on Yugoslavia's economy and infrastructure, and will cause the economy to shrink dramatically in the next few years.

Gross domestic product, the total value of goods and services produced by a nation, will drop by 40 percent this year and remain at levels far below those of a decade ago, the report said. Measured by that yardstick, Yugoslavia will sink below nearby Albania and become the poorest country in Europe, it said.

The report said it estimated the economic cost of the war by comparing average GDP rates that would have occurred without a war and the levels now forecast. Estimates of the future growth of the Yugoslav economy are based on the experience of other war-affected countries and other countries in the region, the report said.

The Economist Intelligence Unit is a research division associated with The Economist magazine.

The Kosovo conflict also adversely affected the region's environment. On Sunday, U.N. environmental experts arrived in Yugoslavia for a second fact-finding mission to assess pollution levels and other environmental damage caused by the 78-day NATO bombing.

A total of 10 experts from eight European countries are to focus on damage to Yugoslavia's main waterways, particularly the Danube River, mission spokesman Robert Bisset told The Associated Press.

After their first visit in July, the U.N. team identified environmental ``hotspots'' -- sites where mercury, asbestos and other hazardous substances accidentally leaked from industrial facilities during the bombing.

A full U.N. report on the environmental damage is expected in September.

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U.S. Wasn't Sure Plant Had Nerve Gas Role
Before Sudan Strike, CIA Urged More Tests

By Vernon Loeb Washington Post Staff Writer Saturday, August 21, 1999; Page A01
http://search.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WPlate/1999-08/21/111l-082199-idx.html

One month before the United States bombed the El Shifa pharmaceutical plant in Sudan, CIA analysts said more testing would be needed before they could firmly conclude that the plant was producing a key component of deadly VX nerve gas, as the Clinton administration maintained on the night of the strike.

The bombing, one year ago this week, has led to a lawsuit by the plant's owner, an embarrassing series of retractions by top U.S. officials, and an increasingly pressing question: Just how certain does the government need to be before it uses force against a suspected terrorist group overseas?

The Clinton administration continues to defend the airstrike, which killed a night watchman and destroyed the pharmaceutical factory in Khartoum, Sudan's capital. But senior officials now concede that the plant did, in fact, make some medicines. They also acknowledge that it may not have manufactured chemical weapons -- at least at the time of the bombing.

President Clinton ordered the missile strike in retaliation for Saudi millionaire Osama bin Laden's alleged role as the mastermind in the terrorist bombing of two U.S. embassies on Aug. 7, 1998. The twin truck bombs in Kenya and Tanzania killed more than 200 people, including 12 Americans.

To strike back, U.S. Navy ships fired 13 Tomahawk cruise missiles at El Shifa and 66 missiles at bin Laden's training camps in Afghanistan. The attack was timed to coincide with a meeting of bin Laden's key operatives at one of the camps.

Since the attack, senior administration officials have stood behind what they continue to describe as a "compelling" piece of evidence: a soil sample, secretly obtained near the El Shifa site by a CIA operative, that was found to contain a high concentration of EMPTA, a chemical that does not occur in nature and has no use except in making nerve gas.

"Nothing that we've learned subsequent to the attacks has led anybody to [conclude], if they had to do it over again, that they would make a different decision," one senior administration official said this week.

However, in a three-page analytical paper written late last July, well before the embassy bombings or the retaliatory targeting of El Shifa, CIA analysts raised questions about what conclusions could safely be drawn from the soil sample.

According to officials familiar with the paper, the CIA analysts considered the presence of EMPTA to be a virtually sure-fire indicator that the plant had something to do with chemical weapons. But they could not be sure whether the plant actually manufactured VX or merely served as a warehouse or transshipment point for chemicals used in making nerve gas. Nor could they be sure how recently that activity might have occurred.

The paper, which was reviewed at senior levels in the CIA and disseminated to the National Security Council staff, recommended covert efforts to obtain more soil samples to try to answer those questions.

Intelligence officials also said in interviews this week that even if El Shifa did make nerve gas, they cannot explain why a high concentration of EMPTA would have been present in the soil outside the plant. EMPTA is a viscous substance that is not volatile enough to vaporize, and the plant's drainage system is unlikely to have deposited effluent in surface soil on its periphery.

That uncertainty, the officials said, is another reason why CIA analysts recommended additional soil sampling at the site last July.

Still, the intelligence officials played down the importance of that recommendation and said CIA Director George J. Tenet did not mention any need for further testing when he presented senior policymakers with a "mosaic" of intelligence to support the targeting of El Shifa at a White House briefing on Aug. 17, 1998, three days before the U.S. missile strike.

Tenet's chain of evidence, they said, consisted of:

Financial records enabling CIA analysts to "follow the movement" of millions of dollars from bin Laden to Sudan's state-owned Military Industrial Corp. in the mid-1990s.

"Highly reliable intelligence" indicating that bin Laden had reached an agreement with the Sudanese government, which is on the State Department's list of state sponsors of terrorism, enabling him to produce chemical weapons in Sudan with government assistance under certain conditions.

Frequent visits by officials linked to El Shifa's original owner to Samara Drug Industries in Iraq, a pharmaceutical firm closely linked to the head of Iraq's program for producing VX from EMPTA.

And, finally, the soil sample containing a high concentration of EMPTA gathered near the El Shifa plant by an operative who had been carefully polygraphed and vetted by his CIA handlers.

The officials denied published reports that the operative was an Egyptian or an agent of the Egyptian intelligence agency. They said they still have full confidence both in the "CIA asset" who collected the sample and in the chemical analysis of the sample by an independent laboratory, which they characterized as "95 percent" reliable.

One intelligence official said Tenet's analysis, which came after the embassy bombings, had moved "light-years" beyond the July document recommending further sampling.

"With information that bin Laden had attacked Americans before and planned to do so again, that he was seeking chemical weapons to use in future attacks, that he was cooperating with the government of Sudan in those efforts, and that Sudan's El Shifa plant was linked to both bin Laden and chemical weapons, we had a responsibility to counter this threat," White House press secretary Joe Lockhart said in a statement Thursday.

But even in defending the attack, one administration official said that national security adviser Samuel R. "Sandy" Berger and Defense Secretary William S. Cohen made "inaccurate" statements on the night of the attack when they said they were certain that El Shifa produced EMPTA.

"We never had any evidence of that," the official said. "The correct statement, and it has been corrected, was that EMPTA was present at the plant."

The official also noted a substantial change in the administration's position with regard to the plant's owner, the wealthy Saudi businessman Saleh Idris: The U.S. government no longer claims that he is a terrorist.

Shortly after the missile strike, administration officials conceded that they had not realized Idris owned the plant, which he had acquired six months earlier. Nevertheless, the Treasury Department moved almost immediately to freeze $24 million he had on deposit at the Bank of America. The freeze was lifted in May, after Idris filed suit in federal court and the government did not contest the case.

Idris has said he now intends to file a second suit, seeking $30 million in compensation for the plant. It is unclear whether the government will contest it.

One senior administration official maintained in an interview this week that Idris's case is "irrelevant" to the justification for striking the plant.

"Even if you took his view, that he owned it and he's an innocent guy, as long as we believe, and continue to believe, that this was a resource associated with chemical weapons that was available to bin Laden, Idris's innocence or guilt, and his intentions, really don't have anything to do with it."

Idris's lawyer, Mark J. MacDougall, a partner at Akin, Gump, Strauss, Hauer & Feld, responded that there is no evidence linking El Shifa to the Military Industrial Corp., under Idris or the plant's previous owner.

The administration's explanation for the El Shifa attack "has changed dramatically during the past year," MacDougall said. "Either the evidence supporting the decision to destroy the plant exists, or it doesn't. Until the facts are disclosed, and tested, this is not going to go away."

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FBI's 'Clean' Team Follows 'Dirty' Work of Intelligence
Units Pool Facts on Sensitive Foreign Cases but Work Apart

By Roberto Suro Washington Post Staff Writer Monday, August 16, 1999; Page A13
http://search.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WPlate/1999-08/16/057l-081699-idx.html

In FBI slang they are known as "dirty teams" and "clean teams," or as "dark" and "light" agents, or even more cryptically as "fives" and "sixes." The two groups are deployed together when terrorists strike or when top-secret information has gone astray, and they often spend months, even years, working in tandem. Yet they rarely talk to each other.

As the FBI becomes more and more involved in overseas investigations of terrorist threats, using two distinct teams of agents kept apart by an imaginary wall has become a key to separating criminal cases that can be prosecuted in open court from intelligence secrets that must be protected forever.

On one side of the wall are agents privy to top-secret intelligence gleaned from spy satellites or foreign officials whose loyalties and methods may not be fit for public disclosure. On the other side are agents protected from such information so that when they are challenged in court, they need not fear revealing national security secrets or introducing evidence tainted by human rights abuses committed in a faraway jail.

"We find ourselves more and more frequently in situations that require us to protect intelligence assets even as we develop evidence that can be used in a criminal prosecution," Larry R. Parkinson, general counsel of the FBI, said in an interview.

Whether the target is Osama bin Laden, the terrorist chieftain accused in last August's African embassy bombings, or a campaign fund-raiser suspected of working for the Chinese government, this division of labor--once limited to Cold War espionage cases--is becoming a more common feature of federal law enforcement. Following a presidential directive issued last May, the FBI now works intimately with intelligence agencies and the military in foreign counterterrorism operations.

Under the new strategy, criminal prosecutions, guided behind the scenes by intelligence information, have become a favorite means of combating enemies overseas. Senior administration officials said that FBI agents, prepackaged in clean and dirty teams, are regularly deployed abroad in much the same manner as diplomats or aircraft carriers. Bin Laden, for example, has been the target of both cruise missiles and a criminal indictment.

"Gathering intelligence and investigating a criminal case can be just two different ways of going at a similar task, but they each have their own rules, and information that fits in one may not fit into the other," said Victoria Toensing, a Washington attorney who helped develop techniques for international terrorist cases while serving at the Justice Department during the 1980s.

When a case crosses the boundaries between national security and criminal investigation, the FBI sets up one team--the dirty or dark team--drawn from the National Security Division, known bureaucratically as "division five," to handle the intelligence. Another team--the clean or light team--taken from the FBI's Criminal Division, or "division six," builds the case that will be presented in court.

Between the two teams stands an FBI attorney with specialized training who determines what information can be passed from the national security side to the criminal side, screening and packaging the intelligence so that it protects the source but still points the criminal agents in the right direction.

"When you are working a criminal case, the intelligence side can give you valuable information, but it is information, not evidence," said Robert Blitzer, former chief of the FBI's domestic terrorism unit who is now an executive with Science Applications International Corporation. "No matter how good the intelligence, you then have to get witness statements and physical evidence, following all the steps necessary so it can be entered in a court of law. In effect, you have to prove with evidence what you think you know from intelligence."

While the protection of top-secret sources and methods is the most frequent concern, FBI officials said the same basic structure is used to prevent criminal cases from becoming tainted with information acquired by methods that might shock a U.S. court. When the FBI has to deal with foreign police or intelligence agencies that have questionable records on due process or human rights, a national security team takes in the information and, with an attorney, decides what can be properly passed along to the criminal team.

Domestically, the FBI either gathers its own information or draws on other law enforcement agencies well-versed in U.S. criminal practice. But overseas, "almost everything initially comes to us through intelligence channels, either our own agencies or from a foreign government, and so almost everything has to be screened and then reworked by a criminal team," Parkinson said.

That is exactly what took place in the investigation of bin Laden a year ago, after nearly simultaneous bombings shattered the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.

On Aug. 7, the day of the bombings, suspected terrorist Mohammed Saddiq Odeh was passing through Pakistan when he was arrested by local airport authorities for carrying a false passport. In the course of nearly a week of interrogation by Pakistani investigators, Odeh admitted that he had helped organize the Kenya bombing, gave key details of the plot and fingered several accomplices, sources said. Most important, he confirmed that bin Laden had directed and financed the bombings from his base in Afghanistan.

That information provided the first break in an investigation that ultimately involved the deployment of more than 500 FBI agents overseas, and it led directly to several other arrests and the seizure of significant evidence in several countries, the sources said. But officially, the FBI never learned of Odeh's confession in Pakistan. Not a word of it appears in court records.

While Odeh was being questioned, Pakistani interrogators allegedly refused to let him eat, drink or sleep for days at a time and threatened action against his pregnant wife, according to one of his attorneys. (The Pakistani government denies these allegations.)

The Pakistanis passed Odeh's revelations to a U.S. intelligence agency, which in turn alerted an FBI intelligence team, sources said. This dirty team, which may not have known the precise origins of the intelligence, worked with an FBI attorney to further filter the information before passing it to a clean team. Meanwhile, the Pakistan government, which had never "officially" advised the U.S. government of Odeh's capture and interrogation, quietly deported him to Kenya, sources said.

In Nairobi, Kenyan authorities advised their U.S. counterparts of Odeh's presence. The FBI's clean team then visited Odeh in jail and, after fully informing him of the rights he enjoyed under the U.S. Constitution, began questioning him. During this interrogation, Odeh admitted to much less than he had in Pakistan. But the clean team, armed with the information provided by the dirty team, knew what questions to ask and where to find corroborating evidence, sources said.

Odeh awaits trial in New York. Due to the efforts of the clean and dirty teams, only information gained under procedures acceptable in a U.S. court has made its way into the indictments naming him, bin Laden and 14 others for their alleged roles in the embassy bombings.

That same basic method has been applied repeatedly during operations overseas, including the ongoing investigation of the 1996 bombing of Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia, which housed U.S. military personnel; the successful manhunt for Mir Amal Kansi, charged in the 1993 murder of two CIA employees in McLean; and several still-secret missions that preempted planned terrorist attacks and have not yet led to criminal cases.

Some critics argue that the FBI's use of clean and dirty teams encourages the bureau to cut ethical corners when it deploys agents abroad. The federal courts have essentially established the doctrine that U.S. due process and constitutional guarantees only apply after a suspect comes into U.S. custody and that it does not matter much how they got there.

For example, Ramzi Yousef and two co-defendants charged in 1995 in a plot to blow up American airliners sought to suppress statements made to FBI agents after they had been detained by authorities abroad. Rejecting the motions in 1996, U.S. District Court Judge Kevin Thomas Duffy wrote: "The courts of this nation cannot enforce our constitutional guarantees as against foreign governments acting in their own lands."

Such rulings worry some critics. "The whole terrorism scare has given a certain legitimacy to the idea of linking U.S. law enforcement with foreign governments, and when that happens in places like Turkey or Egypt that do not have great records on due process, you have a recipe for losing respect for the rule of law," said Robert E. Precht, who served as a defense attorney in the World Trade Center trial and now directs the public service program at the University of Michigan law school.

To remedy such concerns and avoid pretrial motions to suppress evidence, the FBI's Parkinson said, "we are trying to develop the kind of working relations with foreign police services that allow us to step into a case as early as possible, so we can take custody of evidence and conduct our own interviews of witnesses and suspects. Our goal is to be building our own criminal case from the very start without having to rely on foreign officials."

So far, though, the FBI's most notable difficulty has not been its involvement with foreign governments but internal friction between intelligence teams and their criminal counterparts. For more than a year--and despite intervention by top officials--turf battles have plagued the recent federal investigation into an alleged Chinese plot to buy political influence in the United States, according to an inquiry by the inspector general of the Department of Justice. The report, released last month, found that FBI intelligence operatives were so concerned about protecting their sources of information, they stymied the criminal inquiry.

The FBI is in the process of reorganizing the National Security Division, with an emphasis on resolving the problems highlighted in the inspector general's report.

With counterterrorism as a top strategic priority for the bureau and with a mushrooming number of cases involving intelligence and criminal matters, Parkinson said: "To a certain extent, we are sorting through this as we go along because we constantly have to deal with situations we never encountered before."

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Tank Training's Enemy Is Red Tape

By STEVEN A. HOLMES, August 22, 1999
http://www.nytimes.com/yr/mo/day/news/national/urban-army-school.html

FORT KNOX, Ky. -- On 26 acres in the middle of this Army post, work crews are putting the finishing touches on a mock town of 22 pastel-colored buildings, painting the walls, paving the roads, stringing electrical wire and landscaping the grounds.

Then will come the armored invasion, when the Army begins to use this state-of-the-art training area to teach tank units how to fight in the dangerously crowded confines of an urban center.

As the training area is envisioned by its creators, computerized technology borrowed from amusement parks will provide the sounds, sights and surprises that tankers and Bradley fighting vehicle crews could expect to find in a hostile city.

Railroad cars will suddenly move across a road crossing, cutting a tank column in two. Electrical wires will dangle overhead, sparks splaying out from severed ends, forcing a tank commander to decide whether he can continue forward and how much of a charge his vehicle can take without electrocuting all inside.

Cars might suddenly explode in front of a tank column on a road; anti-tank batteries could open fire, splashing the hapless vehicles with brightly colored paint-ball rounds.

But although the "town" is supposed to be ready by December, its designers do not know when it will be fully put to use. Though the site's creators are spending roughly $15 million building the training center -- and several elite units, including the Army's Rangers, the Navy's Seals and the 101st Airborne Division, are eager to use it -- the $500,000 needed to put it into operation is a prisoner of tight training budgets and bureaucratic delays.

"I have to have seed money to stand the site up," said F.L. "Andy" Andrews, Fort Knox's range manager and one of the designers of the training facility. "I've got to have an inventory of special effects. I've got to have manpower in place and trained to run this thing."

So far, Andrews does not have a commitment for any of those. Under the Defense Department's intricate financing procedures, no money can be allocated to run the urban training center until the Armor School, here at Fort Knox, determines where the center will fit in its curriculum.

But Col. Richard P. Geier, director of the Armor School, said he could not determine that until the site was up and running, and its use evaluated.

As the financing is caught in the Army's bureaucratic round-robin, the Senate has passed an amendment to the military appropriations bill that provides $1 million for the Fort Knox urban training site. But the money is not in the House-passed spending bill for the Pentagon, meaning the two bills will have to be reconciled in conference.

Officials at Fort Knox say the site will open in October, with low-level training that does not involve the computer-generated special effects. The officials are confident, they added, that Congress will provide the money needed to make the site fully operational by January.

"I'm pretty confident we will get the funds," said Col. J.C. Allard, director of operations at Fort Knox. "I don't think we'll be delayed in any meaningful way, frankly because there's too much interest in this."

Advocates of the new training center say the need has been growing. For years, American forces have tried to avoid urban areas where fighting from house to house or street to street is inherently more difficult for both soldiers and civilians.

Instead, American forces have preferred to fight -- and been trained to fight -- on open plains where the mobility and firepower of M1A2 Abrams tanks, Bradley fighting vehicles, Apache helicopter gunships, mobile howitzers and rocket launchers and low-flying fighter-bombers can be used to full advantage.

But with the increased use of American troops as peacekeepers in cities in places like Bosnia and Kosovo, the Army and Marines have begun setting up centers at places like Fort Benning, Fort Polk and Camp Lejeune to give a realistic simulation of what it is like to fight in a crowded city.

Those centers, however, are designed to train light infantry. No facility currently exists that can provide training for tanks and armored vehicles either by themselves or in conjunction with infantry troops.

The need for such combined use of armor and infantry in cities was demonstrated in 1993 when 18 American soldiers were killed and 75 were wounded during a battle in the streets of Mogadishu in Somalia. The soldiers were pinned down for hours because they had no support from tanks or other armored vehicles.

Even if tanks had been available, American commanders later said, neither American infantrymen nor tank crews knew how to fight alongside each other on city streets because they had never trained together.

"Although a lot of people perceive urban combat as an infantry fight -- and a light infantry fight at that -- that's absolutely not the case," said Russell Glenn, the former chief of staff of the Third Armored Division who is now a military analyst at the Rand Corp. "It is a combined arms fight. The infantryman who does not have the support of mechanized and armored vehicles can be in big trouble. Mogadishu was a good example of that."

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Military's Political Popularity Good for Feds

By Mike Causey, Sunday, August 22, 1999; Page C09
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WPlate/1999-08/22/157l-082299-idx.html

Federal white-collar workers hope to cash in--literally--on the political popularity of the military by the time their January 2000 pay raise kicks in.

The White House has budgeted a 4.4 percent adjustment for civil servants, while Congress is set to give military personnel a 4.8 percent adjustment. Congressional friends of feds have convinced the House and Senate to approve nonbinding resolutions that would give both groups the same--higher--amount next year. That would be good news for feds.

Congressional Republicans tend to look with favor on the military. The Clinton administration is working hard to prove that it isn't anti-military in any way, shape or form.

Whether the proposed pay "parity" between feds and military personnel is temporary or becomes permanent, both groups are heading for the equivalent of a 20 percent-plus pay raise over the next four years.

Under pay projections made by the White House, civilian personnel are due a 4.4 percent raise next year, a 3.4 percent adjustment in 2001 and 3.9 percent each year through 2004.

Under a new pay formula tentatively approved by Congress, military personnel next January would get 4.8 percent, followed by a 3.5 percent raise in 2001, 4.3 percent in 2002, 4 percent in 2003 and 3.9 percent in 2004.

When the Congressional Budget Office crunched the projections--and took into effect the value of compounding--it found the end result is pretty much the same for both groups.

Contractors vs. Feds

Proponents of contracting out say it is cheaper and more efficient for the federal government to pay outside contractors to perform many functions now--or once--handled by federal employees. The Clinton administration has pushed agencies to get rid of employees in so-called overhead jobs, including payroll, personnel and budget.

During downsizing operations--when the government wound up paying 130,000 employees an average of $24,000 to retire--many in-house maintenance and repair functions were farmed out to nonfederal personnel. In many agencies, from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration to the Central Intelligence Agency, contractors outnumber civil servants in some functions.

When the government was shutting down shipyards, critics argued that it was leaving the military without the personnel or ability to handle major work during times of emergency or war. The counterargument was that the private sector can do it better--at lower cost--and doesn't add people to the payroll, or pension roles, for life.

Which is why lots of folks were intrigued by news reports Friday of Operation Octanova. It was a sting operation--which began in 1995--resulting in criminal charges against 21 individuals. It was a joint operation with investigators from the FBI, the Navy, the Defense Department and the Department of Transportation. The contractors have been charged with big-time fraud and presenting the Navy with inflated bills for ship repair work--all in areas where Uncle Sam has gone out of the ship repair business.

The individuals who got $200 million in Navy payments managed to buy themselves--or give to friends--such things as television sets, golf clubs, trips, private school tuition and some individual dinners that cost more than your annual health insurance premiums.

People who worry about the influx of contractors, especially in areas involving national security and defense, feel--or make the argument--that civil servants are easier to control and watch and more likely to have a deeper loyalty to the organization or operation they are serving.

Obviously not all feds are saints, and not all contractors are sinners. But this sting--now public--is one of several that are still in various stages of investigation. And it is hard to recall similar shenanigans involving federal workers.