"We've hit his headquarters, now he hits ours," a State Department official tells Time magazine in this week's issue. "The game is tilted in Osama's favor until he's gone."

The CIA as far back as 1996 was planning to "snatch" Bin Laden and bring him to the U.S. for trial. But the Saudi millionaire foiled the plot by staying away from countries eyed by the CIA, Time reports.

Osama Bin Laden
Bin Laden has been linked to bombings in Somalia in October 1993 that killed 18 U.S. troops and at the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania on Aug. 7 that killed 223 people.

His family — owners of Saudi Arabia's richest construction firm — disowned him and the Saudis stripped him of his citizenship after he turned radical in 1990. Bin Laden fled to the Sudan, then to Afghanistan.

American missiles struck and destroyed two of his Afghan bases Aug. 21 in retaliation for the embassy attacks. He has been in hiding since.

Bin Laden was indicted in New York last month on charges of masterminding the embassy slaughter, prompting a worldwide search and a $5 million reward for his capture.

Time says Attorney General Janet Reno invited 200 Washington metro policemen to FBI headquarters in October to map a simulated response to a terrorist attack. Among the exercises were four scenarios: a car bombing, a chemical-weapons strike at a Redskins football game, an explosive device in a federal building and an assassination attempt on Secretary of State Albright.

But the war games quickly deteriorated into interagency squabbling, disturbing Reno greatly, the magazine said.

Apparently, a Bin Laden terrorist ring planned an attack on the U.S. Embassy in Baku, Azerbaijan, but was successfully broken up three months ago, according to the magazine.

-- Owen Moritz - 12/13/98