U.S. ID's Bin Laden's Voice Near Tora Bora

Dec. 15, 2001 -- U.S. forces believe they heard Osama bin Laden's voice giving orders over a radio to his troops holed up in the mountains of eastern Afghanistan, a U.S. official told ABCNEWS.

The suspected bin Laden orders, overheard this past week, were not recorded, which might have allowed them to be scientifically compared with known recordings of bin Laden's voice, another U.S. official said. However, the Arabic-speaking special forces who intercepted the transmission are familiar with bin Laden's voice from video and audio tapes, and are reasonably certain it was the alleged terrorist mastermind.

The information may indicate bin Laden is near fighting in the area of his Tora Bora cave hideouts, where reports say U.S. bombing has grown more spread out as some of bin Laden's al Qaeda fighters seem to flee or consider surrendering.

Reports Suggest Scattering Al Qaeda

The Associated Press reported that al Qaeda fighters, believed to number 300 to 1,000 total, could be heard debating whether to surrender over two-way radios. And top opposition commanders fighting al Qaeda spoke of direct surrender overtures.

"They are in collapse," Haji Zahir, an Afghan commander, told ABCNEWS. "They better surrender or they'll have a big problem."

However, alleged surrender deals in recent weeks have turned out to be false, so the opposition commanders say they are wary.

At the same time, there were several reports that some al Qaeda fighters were fleeing the caves. In fact, Pakistan has arrested 31 Arab militants believed to have escaped from fighting in Afghanistan. The men, said to be from Yemen, had crossed the border into Pakistan from the Tora Bora region.

America's Afghan allies already have captured about 50 al Qaeda fighters during punishing combat, and the U.S. plans to interrogate the prisoners, U.S. Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said today during a tour of former Soviet republics.

"There is no question but that [al Qaeda] forces are being significantly damaged in the conflict," Rumsfeld said. "They are fighting, and the fighting in some instances is fierce."

From the vantage point of ABCNEWS' Dan Harris, behind the opposition front lines, U.S. bombing from B-52s and fighter jets today was more dispersed, more sporadic and not as intense as during the previous two days. Smoke from explosions still could be seen rising from various ridges and peaks in the White Mountains near cave complexes.

On Friday, the military dropped 180 bombs, concentrated in the Tora Bora region, down from Thursday's 230 bombs, according to Pentagon figures.

Hunt for Bin Laden

Gen. Tommy Franks, the U.S. commander of the war, told reporters Friday that opposition forces had closed on a "contained" area where intelligence sources believe bin Laden — the al Qaeda leader believed to be behind the Sept. 11 attacks — is hiding in Afghanistan.

On Friday, one day after the Pentagon released a videotape in which bin Laden is seen talking about his foreknowledge of the Sept. 11 attacks, President Bush vowed to get the Saudi dissident.

"I don't care, dead or alive — either way, it doesn't matter to me," Bush said. "I don't know whether we're going to get him tomorrow or a month from now or a year from now. I don't really know. But we're going to get him."

In an interview with ABCNEWS' Sam Donaldson, Secretary of State Colin Powell said: "We want him brought to justice. If justice happens to be a 500-pound bomb that lands on him because he wouldn't surrender, well then, justice has been served."

Hints and Hopes

Eastern Alliance defense chief Hazrat Ali told ABCNEWS his fighters have captured a cave in the Tora Bora mountains where bin Laden was recently hiding, though there was no way to confirm the report, with heavy fighting and U.S. airstrikes continuing in the area.

Ali said his forces were searching the caves where they found evidence of bin Laden, hoping to find the alleged terrorist in one of them.

In a change of policy, U.S. special forces are taking part in the dangerous work of clearing the caves and tunnels, Rumsfeld said, adding that evidence found there has helped authorities make several arrests in other countries. Until this weekend, U.S. special forces had been described as merely helping to find targets for air strikes.

Franks said Friday he believed some al Qaeda leaders have already been killed by the heavy U.S. bombardment, but he could not tell who. Whether bin Laden was among them, as some intelligence reports have suggested, was unclear.

"At this point, we simply don't know where he is," Franks said, adding that it was possible bin Laden has slipped into another country.

If bin Laden was among those killed, verifying his death could be troublesome because he has been known to travel with a number of look-alikes. But ABCNEWS has learned that the U.S. government has obtained DNA samples from his family to identify his remains if they are found.

Move to Airport

As U.S. forces continue to target al Qaeda leaders in eastern Afghanistan, things have calmed down somewhat in southern Afghanistan outside the city of Kandahar, the last major Taliban stronghold to fall to U.S. and opposition forces following U.S. attacks on the conservative Muslim regime that harbored bin Laden. No more are the so-called "hunter-killer" teams roaming the Afghan desert in search of al Qaeda and Taliban holdouts.

Instead, the focus of operations has shifted to the north to Kandahar Airport. U.S. Marines are establishing a base there and preparing to move the majority, if not all, of the material from their present base, known as Camp Rhino, 65 miles south of Kandahar, to the airport.

They say that they are building a detention center at the airport that will house up to 300 expected prisoners from the conflict in Tora Bora.

About three thousand feet of the runway is operational, enough to land large cargo planes. Marines are sweeping other parts of the runway for unexploded bombs and rockets, and setting them off.

"We have about 29 rockets and we're going to explosively detonate them to make the area safe," an unidentified marine told The Associated Press.

Up to now, officials have been worried about security concerns, but as the weather improves they hope to begin a regular round of cargo flights, easing their efforts to leave Cam Rhino behind. They say they should be out of Camp Rhino in a matter of weeks.

New Al Qaeda Prisoners

In other developments:

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said 50 new al Qaeda prisoners were taken Friday. Rumsfeld spoke during the start of a trip to Central Asia to discuss the war on terrorism with leaders in the region. He is expected to visit Azerbaijan, Armenia and Georgia before traveling to Brussels.

U.S. intelligence officials tell ABCNEWS they have identified the mysterious sheikh that appears with Osama bin Laden in a much awaited videotape broadcast by the Pentagon on Thursday. Officials said the man is Sheikh Ali bin Said al Ghamdi, a Saudi from the area south of the port city of Jeddah, where 9 of the 19 hijackers came from.

John Walker, the American Taliban fighter who surrendered to U.S. forces in Afghanistan, has been moved from Camp Rhino in Afghanistan to the U.S.S. Peleliu in the Arabian Sea. Walker is being treated "the same way we would treat an enemy prisoner," Franks said, meaning he is held according to the Geneva convention.

ABCNEWS' Bob Woodruff in Kabul, Afghanistan, Dan Harris near the Tora Bora complex in eastern Afghanistan, and Martha Raddatz, John McWethy and Barbara Starr in Washington contributed to this report.