TEARS OF ALLAH

Another Weapon In Osama Bin Laden's War Against The West

Osama bin Laden's search for new ways to strike at the West may have gone
beyond planes and bombs. Officials believe that shortly after the Saudi
exile's operatives bombed two U.S. embassies in August 1998, he began
searching for another weapon in his war against the West -- a super-charged
drug that bin Laden hoped would worsen addiction and possibly even kill the
infidels. He called it the "Tears of Allah."

These officials told U.S. News that bin Laden's plan to let loose a plague
of potent heroin on the United States and its friends was detailed in
intelligence reports from U.S. allies.

Tears of Allah was described as a liquid drug, requiring 50 kilograms of
opium to produce one liter of heroin. Officials say the reports describe
how bin Laden and his al Qaeda network of terrorists recruited chemists in
South Asia in an unsuccessful attempt to create the powerful new
concoction. "It was a chemical dud,'' explains one official. "He wanted a
deadly form of the drug and he wanted to get it to the U.S. He wanted to kill."

Officials disclosed the plan to underscore the breadth of bin Laden's
efforts to maim and murder his enemies. Bin Laden is now the most hunted
man in the world, said by the U.S. and its allies to be the brains behind
the deadly Sept. 11 bombings of the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

His ties to the illicit drug trade have been difficult to pin down. But
American authorities are now convinced of the accuracy of foreign
intelligence reports detailing his involvement. "He sees it as a way to
poison the West,'' says one U.S. official. Experts say bin Laden has
profited from the drug trade by taking payment for providing armed fighters
to protect opium and heroin shipments moving from Afghanistan to the West,
primarily Europe. They also say that the intelligence reports link bin
Laden's people to the labs in Afghanistan where heroin is produced.

Officials maintain that bin Laden does not need the drug trade to finance
his terrorism, but instead became involved as a good will gesture designed
to cement his relationship with the militant Islamic Taliban government.
The Taliban--which controls most of the impoverished nation--has provided
bin Laden with a safe haven for more than five years.

Opium is one of Afghanistan's few cash crops, and there is no doubt that
the Taliban government profits from the illicit trade. Western officials
say the opium and heroin trade provides a ready source of badly needed cash
for the Taliban. A United Nations report issued earlier this year put it
this way: "Funds raised from the production and trading of opium and heroin
are used by the Taliban to buy arms and other war materiel, and to finance
the training of terrorists and support the operations of these extremists
in neighboring countries and abroad.'' U.S. officials estimate that the
Taliban makes at least $50 million a year by taxing and selling opium and
by providing protection for smugglers.

Afghanistan became the world's largest producer of raw opium in the 1990s,
supplying more than 70 percent of global demand. According to U.S
officials, the country produced more than 3,600 metric tons last year. Last
July, U.S. officials say, the Taliban sought to polish its image by
declaring a ban on the cultivation of opium poppy. Opium production did
drop substantially, but U.S. officials contend the move was part of larger
scheme to reduce supply and drive up the wholesale price. The Taliban
stockpiled much of the 2000 crop, and the wholesale price did indeed rise
tenfold to $301 from $30 a kilogram, according to the United Nations.

American officials now say it is essential for the United States and its
coalition to destroy the poppy fields and choke off this valuable revenue
stream if the war against terrorism is to succeed. Anticipating a possible
strike, U.S. officials say, law-enforcement agencies both here and overseas
have provided the Defense Department with the locations of some of the
stockpiled opium and heroin. The trouble now is that since Sept. 11, the
Taliban has been moving the stockpiles, the officials say. In an interview,
Asa Hutchinson, the new administrator of the U.S. Drug Enforcement
Administration, declined to say whether he thought the United States would
go after the stockpiles. "The focus is obviously to get after the
terrorists,'' he says. "But, whenever you see the terrorist training camps
and the poppy fields and the opium labs in the same geographic area, there
is a correlation that is impossible to avoid."

"Heroin is to Afghanistan what oil is to Saddam Hussein,'' says another
American official. "It is the juice.'' He says that by destroying the
fields, the West would be killing off a critical source of cash to the
Taliban and hurting bin Laden as well. The United States needs to "starve
the terrorists' treasuries of money,'' adds Rep. Henry Hyde, an Illinois
Republican, who wants DEA agents to begin training border police in the region.

Efforts to track down or kill bin Laden have failed. After his network
bombed the U.S. embassies in Tanzania and Kenya in August 1998, then
President Clinton ordered missile strikes on training camps used by bin
Laden's forces in Afghanistan. Bin Laden avoided the attack. Soon after
that, he began trying to develop the new potent form of heroin known as the
Tears of Allah, according to an American official who has reviewed foreign
intelligence reports. "He wasn't just thinking ABC,'' the official says,
referring to atomic, biological, and chemical warfare. "He was thinking
ABCD'' to include drug warfare.