In June, U.S. intelligence officers were "fairly certain" they could snare him. Today Somali warlord Mohamed Aidid is still at large, his ragtag militia confounding the world's most sophisticated intelligence and military.
The mystery of Aidid's ability to elude arrest, and his devastating success at maiming and killing U.N. peacekeepers, are critical matters in the wake of this week's casualties.Why can't Aidid be captured?
"The intelligence has always been very weak," said Rep. Dan Glickman, D-Kan., chairman of the House Intelligence Committee.
Glickman blamed the problem partially on the difficulties of pooling information with the U.N. command in Somalia and with 32 other nations operating there under its umbrella.
Other intelligence experts also blamed the anarchy in Somalia, the difficulty of penetrating its society and the problems of collecting information about urban guerrillas.
The sophisticated electronic monitoring, eavesdropping and spy satellites that were so successful in helping the United States rout Saddam Hussein from Kuwait have proven useless against Aidid.
"Our edge is technology," said Rep. Jack Reed, D-R.I., a former Army Ranger who is a member of the intelligence committee. "That's no good to us in an urban environment."
For example, a spy satellite cannot spot Aidid running through an alley in the crowded market of Mogadishu - labyrinthian terrain he knows intimately and where the population is entirely loyal to him.
In addition, the United States is reluctant to share its hard-won intelligence out of concern for compromising its sources, and it carefully edits what information it does pass on to the U.N. command, an official said.
"The culture of the U.N. abhors the concept of intelligence," said Reed, who visited Somalia twice this year and wrote a report on the intelligence problems there.
The United Nations, which drew strong criticism for its views of intelligence on Iraq after the gulf war, has established a centralized facility for the clearing of such information in Somalia. But the United States is reluctant to feed sensitive details into that pot.
Several other countries that also have intelligence collection operations - such as Italy, for example, which developed good sources when it ruled the region earlier this century - are reluctant to pass on sensitive information, he said.
The 4,700 U.S. troops in Somalia constitute less than 20 percent of the overall U.N. force there, but they are the best trained and have the best intelligence - making the Americans the natural leaders in the search for Aidid.
When the United Nations first issued its arrest warrant for the warlord on June 23, after his militia ambushed and killed 26 Pakistani peacekeepers, the United States assured the United Nations that it would get him.
"They were fairly certain they could nab him, although no one thought it would be easy," said one congressional staffer insisting on anonymity.
After several abortive efforts, the Pentagon last month sent in elite Army Rangers whose task was to capture Aidid. At that time, retired U.S. Adm. Jonathan Howe, who serves as the special U.N. envoy to Somalia, told the administration he was confident the Rangers would capture Aidid.
But such operations are only as good as the information they are based on - a fact that was brought home last month when the Rangers executed a precision raid on a suspected Aidid hideout only to find out it was the office of a U.N. agency.
Aidid, who received some military training from the Soviets in the 1970s when Somalia was allied with Moscow, has proven wily. Some of his techniques are simple: regularly switching the frequencies he uses to communicate by radio with his forces and broadcasting only in short bursts to avoid detection by the state-of-the-art equipment of U.S. signals intelligence, Reed said.
The United States is also hampered by poor human intelligence, which is an important source of information for urban warfare. The Americans are unable to blend in with the local population and freely recruit reliable sources.
Also, said Reed, some of the Somalis recruited as informers have turned out to be unreliable - with some, like those hired as interpreters or drivers - actively working against the United States and United Nations by reporting to Aidid.