OFFICIAL: BIN LADEN PLANNED DRUG WAR

The terror network headed by Osama bin Laden tried to develop a
high-strength form of heroin that it planned to export to the United States
and Western Europe, according to intelligence reports.

Both an informant and a foreign law enforcement agency alerted U.S.
officials about two years ago that the bin Laden network was seeking to
recruit chemists to work on the effort, said a federal official.

That official said that the goal of the project, which never succeeded, was
to create a high-potency heroin that would produce greater addiction and
havoc than drugs already available in Western cities. The plan was
supposedly developed in retaliation for the August 1998 missile attack by
the United States on terrorist training camps in Afghanistan, the official
said.

Asa Hutchinson, the administrator of the federal Drug Enforcement
Administration, confirmed that the agency had received what he described as
"limited information" about the reported effort by bin Laden's network.

The disclosures come at a time when U.S. officials, gearing up for possible
military action in Afghanistan, are seeking to portray both that country's
Taliban rulers and bin Laden as critical cogs in the world drug trade. And
while there is little dispute that the Taliban derived millions of dollars
in recent years from opium production, the intelligence reports, if
accurate, would provide a rare link between bin Laden's organization and drugs.

U.S. officials have been hard pressed to make that connection.

At a hearing in Washington on Wednesday before the House Subcommittee on
Criminal Justice, Drug Policy and Human Resources, both Hutchinson and
William Bach, a narcotics expert with the State Department, testified that
narcotics provided important revenue for the Taliban government.

But both men said in their prepared remarks that federal officials did not
have direct evidence of bin Laden's involvement.

Asked why he had not released the intelligence reports regarding bin Laden
at the hearing, Hutchinson said it was because the information was classified.

At the hearing, both Hutchinson and Bach said that it was their belief that
the close ties between the Taliban and bin Laden's terrorist network made
some interaction in the area of illegal drugs inevitable.

Faced with international pressure, the Taliban government announced last
year that it was banning the production of opium poppies. But most drug
experts believe that large supplies of raw opium or heroin are stockpiled
around Afghanistan and that some of those supplies are slipping across the
country's porous border.