WASHINGTON - Recent intelligence reports indicate Osama bin Laden survived the U.S. bombing assault on his hideouts in Afghanistan and may still be somewhere in the lawless, mountainous region that straddles the Afghan-Pakistan border, officials said Sunday.
The reports, which were distributed at top levels of the U.S. government about 10 days ago, are somewhat vague and don't involve solid evidence such as sightings by witnesses or interception of radio transmissions of the voice of the terrorist leader, said one official.
But, this official added, ''There are indications that point to his still being in Afghanistan or in that general region.'' He declined to discuss the nature of that evidence, but it apparently involves in part information gleaned in recent interrogations of al-Qaida members now in captivity.
The new intelligence reports aren't sufficiently detailed to lead to direct military action right now, the official said. He indicated that both sides of the Afghan-Pakistan border are being closely monitored by foot patrols, surveillance aircraft and reconnaissance satellites. The United States blames bin Laden for the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
The new report on bin Laden's possible location isn't ''precise enough to know where to put a big operation,'' the official said. Even so, he said, ''There's a lot of attention being paid to it.''
One effect of the report may be to increase pressure on the U.S. military to consider inserting additional troops into the hills of eastern Afghanistan in order to cordon and search areas.
There already has been some quiet criticism inside the Army's officer corps that Army Gen. Tommy R. Franks, the U.S. commander in the war, and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld should have been more willing to put ground troops into the Tora Bora area in late November to help anti-Taliban Afghan allies track down members of the Taliban leadership and bin Laden's al-Qaida terrorist network.
But in separate television appearances yesterday, Rumsfeld and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Air Force Gen. Richard B. Myers, both appeared to anticipate and reject such pressure to escalate the U.S. military presence in the border region.
''The idea you can seal a border is a notion that is very hard in reality to make come true,'' Myers said on ''Fox News Sunday.'' ''So what we ask, we ask the Pakistan government to provide troops along their side of the border. We have reconnaissance and so forth along the border as well, and through that means, trying to stop the infiltration.''
Rumsfeld, appearing on CBS' ''Face the Nation,'' also argued that capturing bin Laden isn't necessarily a military task. ''We're not organized to do manhunts,'' he said. ''That's a law-enforcement-type thing. So we're trying to figure out different ways of doing it and gathering intelligence and getting a lot of cooperation from other people, other countries. And we'll keep at it until we find him.''
The new indications of bin Laden's whereabouts were first reported by The New York Times. Asked about that report, Sen. Richard C. Shelby, an Alabama Republican, vice chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, said that, ''We've gotten new information that he could be in a certain area, but we've heard this before.''
Appearing on CNN's ''Late Edition with Wolf Blitzer,'' he added, ''I think the bottom line is that he is on the run, and we're in the hunt, big time, and we're going to find him.''
