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Al Qaeda finds a sanctuary in Iran--NBC News

NBC News has learned that in the chaotic last days before Kabul, Afghanistan, fell to U.S. troops in November 2001, bin Laden and his lieutenants made a strategic decision. Al-Qaida’s then military commander, Mohammed Atef, has just been blown up in a U.S. air attack in the city, one in which a CIA Predator had pinpointed the very house he was staying in. It was time to move out.

Al-Qaida’s leadership had been divided into consultative and management councils, both of which reported to bin Laden.

The consultative council, the “al shura,” was viewed as the more critical to the terror network's continued operations. Its members, including bin Laden and his No. 2, Ayman al-Zawahiri, would flee east to cities in Pakistan. There, over the next few years, many key players would be picked up and bundled off to interrogation centers with great regularity. Abu Zubaydah, al-Qaida’s recruitment and training leader — known as the “dean of students” — was arrested in Faisalabad. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, its operations commander, was grabbed in Rawalpindi; two of his deputies, Ramzi bin al-Shibh and Abu Faraj al Libbi, were taken in Karachi and Multan, and other lesser figures were regularly rousted by Pakistani forces.

The management council went west, to northern Iran, where the United States had little sway and the Iranians had little interest in pushing for their arrests. The group included al-Adel and abu Ghaith; Shaik Said, al-Qaida's chief financial officer; Abu Hafs, al-Qaida’s personnel director; the two top aides to Zawahiri; and a mysterious Yemeni, Abu Dahak, who served as al-Qaida’s ambassador to the rebels in Chechnya. On a personal level, two of bin Laden’s teenage sons, Sa’ad and Hamza, also were taken to Iran.

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The Iranians admit privately they have the al-Qaida officials and say they are “investigating” their activities. That does not impress Townsend.

“But the Iranians are not telling us who they have," she said. "They may be telling you and there may be things in their newspapers, but they're not telling us, and they were not talking about what, if anything, what progress, if any, has been made in terms of their investigation.”