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WTC BOMBING: Tracing Money Trail Is Hard As Operatives Pay With Cash
"Attempts to throttle Mr. bin Laden's finances by scouring bank records and monitoring international transfers may miss their target. Mr. bin Laden's al Qaeda group, which U.S. authorities believe was responsible for last week's attacks, has in the past often moved money by hiding $100 bills in suitcases or shuffling funds through an informal and almost entirely unregulated system of remittances, not by issuing transfer orders to big banks. He and other Islamic militants have been doing this since the 1980s, when, with arms provided in part by the U.S., they fought to drive Soviet troops from Afghanistan.

Mr. bin Laden's group hasn't entirely skirted conventional channels. He or his close associates have had accounts in London, Vienna, Dubai, Malaysia, Hong Kong, the Sudanese capital of Khartoum and several other locations, according to a former financial aide. Nor does the basic infrastructure of his organization -- training camps stocked with weapons -- come cheap.

Before moving in 1996 to Afghanistan, where he is believed to be now, Mr. bin Laden ran his operation from Sudan and splashed out $430,000 to buy chunks of land, the first of many investments there, according to testimony in the African bombings trial in New York federal court. He sent the money to a bank in Khartoum. He spent a further $230,000 to buy a used American C-130 cargo carrier. (It later crashed into a sand dune.)"