THE DRUG CONNECTION

Long before he became Public Enemy No. 1, Osama bin Laden was waging
a different kind of war on Americans and their Western allies.

Since the mid-1990s, while the spotlight shone on cocaine cartels in
Latin America, bin Laden fortified a drug-trafficking network that
provided major revenues for Afghanistan's Taliban regime - and
financed his al Qaeda network of terrorism.

The renegade Saudi's commerce in narcotics helped make Afghanistan
the world's leading exporter of heroin, some 2,200 pounds of which
reached the United States last year, according to the State
Department.

Worth at least 260 million in street value, some of the proceeds from
the American heroin sales found their way back to bin Laden, who
stands accused by President Bush of orchestrating the Sept. 11
suicide hijack attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

"What better way to poison the Western world than through drugs,"
said Donnie Marshall, who headed the U.S. Drug Enforcement
Administration from July 1999 through June of this year. "It's
another weapon in their arsenal."

Yoseff Bodansky, author of a 1999 biography of bin Laden and director
of the congressional Task Force on Terrorism and Unconventional
Warfare, said the terrorist kingpin takes a 15 percent cut of the
drug trade money in exchange for protecting smugglers and laundering
their profits. "The Afghans are selling 7 to 8 billion dollars of
drugs in the West a year," Bodansky said. "Bin Laden oversees the
export of drugs from Afghanistan. His people are involved in growing
the crops, processing and shipping. When Americans buy drugs, they
fund the jihad (holy war)." Rachel Ehrenfeld, who tracks
international money laundering and drug trafficking as director of
the Center for the Study of Corruption in New York, said bin Laden
recycles the drug proceeds through businesses in Europe and the Far
East.

"The drug trade is a triple-pronged weapon for bin Laden and the
Taliban," she said. "It finances their activities. It undermines the
enemy. And it proves that the enemy is corrupt, which they then use
in their own recruiting propaganda."

Heroin is produced in labs through a chemical process from opium gum,
a thick sap scraped from the scored flower bulbs of poppy plants
Afghanistan's Taliban rulers announced a ban on poppy plant
cultivation 14 months ago. Before the Sept. 11 attacks, they
complained that the ban had not succeeded in easing economic
sanctions the United Nations imposed on Afghanistan in 1998 for
harboring terrorists and drug traffickers.

"We have done what needed to be done, putting our people and our
farmers through immense difficulties," Abdol Hamid Akhondzadeh,
director of the Taliban's High Commission on Drug Control, said in
May. "We expected to be rewarded for our actions, but instead were
punished with additional sanctions."

But a five-person panel of United Nations experts concluded that 10
months after the ban, stored opium was being sold to buy arms,
"finance the training of terrorists and support the operation of
terrorists in neighboring countries and beyond."

The U.N. panel also noted that Afghanistan was still importing large
quantities of acetic anhydride, the main chemical used in heroin
production.

Many Western experts suspect the Taliban of stockpiling opium gum and
heroin, which unlike cocaine have long shelf lives and can be stored
for years if securely packaged.

"They have reduced poppy cultivation over the last year or two, but I
think that was largely a sham," said Marshall, the former DEA chief.
"There is a lot of evidence that they have stockpiled opium gum and
that limiting cultivation is not going to have any impact because
they have been preparing for several years to do that."