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Washington: The CIA has disbanded a unit set up in the 1990s to oversee the spy agency's hunt for Osama Bin Laden. The Bin Laden unit, codenamed Alec Station was established in 1996, following Bin Laden's initial calls for global jihad, and employed about 24 people. The operation was stepped up a gear after the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington. A US intelligence official said on Tuesday that the ending of the Bin Laden unit was a "reallocation of resources" within the CIA's Counterterrorism Center, but stressed the spy agency still has staff devoted full time to the analysis of intelligence related to Bin Laden and other senior al Qaeda leaders. After 9/11, Al Qaeda shifted leadership away from top operatives towards regional networks of militants and the dedicated Bin Laden unit became less valuable as a separate operation.
"Al Qaeda is no longer the hierarchical organization that it was before 9-11. Three-quarters of its senior leaders have been killed or captured," the US intelligence official said. "The Bin Laden effort has been absorbed into a larger effort," he said. "It's now one part of an effort that looks at all of these Jihadist organizations." John Negroponte, the US director of national intelligence, told the Senate in February that Al Qaeda was a "battered" organization but that it remained the top concern for the intelligence community.
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