U.S. And Russia Team Up To Hunt Down Bin Laden

By Elaine Shannon and Massimo Calabresi/Washington

The FBI, CIA and Russia's Federal Security Service (FSB), formerly the KGB, have joined forces to try to corral terrorist OSAMA BIN LADEN. FSB Chief NIKOLAI PATRUSHEV has offered to mine his agency's sources inside Afghanistan for information. "The Russians have unmatched capabilities there as far as human intelligence goes," says a terrorism specialist. U.S. officials hope to use the pooled data to track and extradite bin Laden lieutenants who venture abroad. But the fledgling U.S.-Russian partnership is fragile, since cold war suspicions die hard. Washington balks at Moscow's efforts to blame bin Laden for the Chechnya uprising. And, says a U.S. official, the Russians fear "we are exploiting the bin Laden bogeyman" to gain a foothold in nations on Afghanistan's northern border. Despite that, Russians are investigating reports out of Aden that before the U.S.S. Cole was bombed, its attackers possessed containers with Cyrillic lettering. Some investigators theorize that the containers held Soviet-made military high explosives from stockpiles abandoned by South Yemen's deposed Marxist regime or Soviet occupation forces in Afghanistan. --By Elaine Shannon and Massimo Calabresi/Washington