CIA official tried to blow whistle on 'American Hiroshima' plot in '96

The man who headed the Central Intelligence Agency's Osama bin Laden desk said he recognized al-Qaida's single-minded efforts to secure nuclear weapons for use against the U.S. nearly a decade ago, but multiple efforts to have the terror leader captured before Sept. 11, 2001, went unheeded.

"We had found that he and al-Qaida were involved in an extraordinarily sophisticated and professional effort to acquire weapons of mass destruction," Michael Scheuer told CBS News. "In this case, nuclear material, so by the end of 1996, it was clear that this was an organization unlike any other one we had ever seen."

Scheuer was one of the CIA's foremost authorities on bin Laden. He was the senior intelligence analyst who created and then advised a secret CIA unit for tracking and eliminating bin Laden beginning in 1996.

Scheuer said his bosses at the CIA were skeptical of the information about bin Laden's nuclear ambitions and ability.
In a letter to the House and Senate Intelligence Committees earlier this year, Scheuer says his agents provided U.S. government officials with about 10 opportunities to capture bin Laden. All of them were rejected.

One of the last proposals, which he described to the 9-11 Commission in a closed-door session, involved a cruise missile attack against a remote hunting camp in the Afghan desert, where bin Laden was believed to be socializing with members of the royal family from the United Arab Emirates.
By 1999, Scheuer was in trouble at the CIA because of his persistence about getting bin Laden.

He blames Sept. 11 on poor leadership from people like former CIA Director George Tenet, his chief deputy, Jim Pavitt, and former White House counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke.