International fugitives eventually get caught

WASHINGTON -- Carlos the Jackal was tracked across four continents for two decades before agents caught him in Africa, put him in a sack and hauled him to France to face justice.

Now the man who has inherited Carlos' mantle as the world's most wanted terrorist is on the run. If Osama bin Laden eludes pursuers for the rest of his natural life, he will have defied daunting odds.

"One of the nice things about fugitive-hunting is that you can make a thousand mistakes; the fugitive only has to make one," Howard Safir, former New York police commissioner and assistant director of the U.S. Marshals Service, said Tuesday.

That's not to say bin Laden will be found soon.

Whether it's a matter of grabbing Martin Luther King Jr.'s killer at a British airport or pursuing Libyans suspected in the Pan Am bombing, chasing international fugitives brings special challenges, veterans of the hunt say. But bin Laden is obviously a special case.

"A lot of times law enforcement agencies just sort of forget about somebody," said Larry Barcella, a Washington attorney and former international fugitive-hunter. "Clearly that's not an issue here."

No other outlaw is as well known. None is as intensely sought.

Yet not everything is stacked against him.

Certain advantages

"What's working to his advantage is, he operates in a very closed society in which you need a very special kind of operative to penetrate it," said Safir, Barcella's one-time partner in far-ranging manhunts.

"Now he's in a hunker-down mode where he's only going to deal with people he has very close and long associations with."

Bin Laden has many more supporters willing to shelter him than the usual outlaw enjoys. But he also has a $25 million bounty on his head, armed forces pursuing him and even Islamic leaders who would like to be rid of him.

In the past, corners have been cut to get the most wanted international fugitives, and even nations without friendly relations have engaged in backchannel cooperation to track them down.

The flamboyant Carlos, real name Ilich Ramirez Sanchez, killed 83 people by his own account and was wanted for bombings, assassinations and kidnappings dating to the early 1970s when French secret agents found him in Sudan in 1994 and lured him to a "special villa."

Odd partners

They did so with the help of odd partners: the CIA, Syrians and Sudan's fundamentalist Islamic regime. Spirited to France, he introduced himself to the court as a "professional revolutionary" and bragged, "The world is my domain."

He is serving life in prison and recently praised the Sept. 11 attacks.

It took only days to corner Manuel Noriega after the 1989 U.S. invasion of Panama; he is in a U.S. prison convicted of drug trafficking, money laundering and racketeering.

In June 1968, a police search that was then called the most extensive in history closed in on James Earl Ray, captured at London's Heathrow Airport while preparing to board a plane for Belgium, less than two months after the slaying of King, the civil rights leader. Ray was soon returned to the United States and convicted.

And Ramzi Yousef, mastermind of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, was sent to the United States without extradition formalities when he was found in Pakistan less than a year after the attack. A $2 million reward was paid to an informant.

Often, the problem with manhunts abroad is not finding out where the fugitives are, but getting to them. In the way are legal and diplomatic entanglements, few likely to inhibit the United States this time.

It took a dragged-out diplomatic effort to persuade Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi to hand over two Libyan suspects in the December 1988 Pan Am bombing, which he did in 1999. One was acquitted; the other is appealing his life sentence.

Other manhunts have tripped over geopolitics, essentially written off because of the complications of international law or a calculation that stretching the rules is not worth the consequences.

As a result, a variety of fugitives have been living peacefully abroad.

In 1982, Barcella, then a U.S. attorney, and Safir, a marshal, teamed up to get Frank Terpil and renegade CIA operative Edwin P. Wilson, both wanted for running arms to Libya.

Their elaborate trap lured Wilson out of hiding in Libya, where he had been living luxuriously as an adviser to Gadhafi. He landed in New York and discovered his "vacationing" seatmates were U.S. marshals. He's serving 52 years.

Barcella and Safir were not so lucky when they staked out Terpil's apartment in bombed-out Beirut in 1983, intending to grab him and bring him to America.

Terpil had already fled, and went on to make his life in Cuba.

Today, Barcella takes a bit of comfort in the thought that Terpil's life in the struggling communist state is surely "not all scotch and roses."