``We've hit his headquarters, now he hits ours,'' the magazine quotes a State Department aide as saying. US Attorney General Janet Reno organised an exercise at FBI headquarters in Washington on October 14 to plan for a possible terror attack by bin Laden, the weekly said.

The 200 Washington policemen at the exercise, code-named `Poised Response,' discussed four scenarios including an assassination attempt on Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, a car bombing, a chemicals weapon strike on a Washington Redskins football game and an explosive device in a federal building.

The magazine's report, to be published in its December 21 issue and available on the newsstands on Monday, also reported that a bin Laden ring that had been planning an attack on the US embassy in Baku, Azerbaijan, wasbroken up three months ago.

But US agencies are questioning whether they could have prevented the August 7 twin bombings of US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania that bin Laden is believed to have orchestrated.

Some 224 people, including 12 Americans died in the atrocities. The United States responded by attacking suspected terrorist camps run by bin Laden in Afghanistan.

By August 1997, the CIA had evidence that bin Laden had agents operating in Nairobi, Kenya, but it believed that bin Laden would strike in a Persian Gulf country, where the US had a presence, not East Africa.

Two separate inquiries by the Central Intelligence Agency's inspector general and by a State Department Accountability Review Board have questioned whether clues were missed.

Time also chronicles a four-year campaign to contain and control bin Laden's activities, including attempts to bring him to justice in the United States.

In 1996, the CIA was planning to snatch bin Laden from a foreign country and bring him to trialin the United States, but he avoided travelling to those countries.

The investigation also revealed that intelligence officials discovered in 1993 that bin Laden was shopping for nuclear weapons. But bin Laden agents scouring former Soviet republics for enriched uranium and weapons components were offered unusable low-grade reactor fuel or radioactive garbage.