Psy-Ops: free advice for the CIA

(... and worth every penny!)

Admission & disclaimer: this advice was sent via email to the CIA in early 2002, via "contact us" link on CIA website.
Needless to say, CIA has not yet adopted this "brilliant advice".

Observation:
bin Laden publishes at will, on his own schedule.
The typical avenue by which he disseminates his statements is the news outlet, al Jazeera. A tape - either audio or video - mysteriously appears at al Jazeera. They publish it.

Brilliant advice:
The apparently random timing of bin Laden's communications presents an opportunity which we have yet to exploit:

Forge him!

Produce forged tapes of bin Laden - both audio and video.

Surely the CIA has sufficient archived bin Laden material & the technical resources needed to produce a pretty decent forged message! [... not to mention: after al Jazeera publishes the message, the CIA can issue its authentication a few days later!]

I'd advocate a series of messages suggesting that bin Laden is slipping into madness.

For example, if he were to begin hinting that he is Allah's next Prophet - replacing Mohammed - that might drive his religiously-inspired followers away.

Were he - in the role of Allah's Prophet - to propose fundamental changes to Islam, this would also be good. His hatred of the Saudis is well-known. This could be portrayed as morphing into a hatred of the Arabian holy places in Mecca & Medina. He could present himself (in these forgeries) as establishing a new central shrine, perhaps in Pakistan.

The messages ought be timed to correspond both to events in the Islamic calendar, and to significant secular anniversaries based on the lunar calendar.

This tactic assumes that the CIA has the technical resources to accomplish such a feat - and I've little doubt that they do!

Allowing bin Laden to continue to choose the timing of his messages is simply absurd - and we have the ability to thwart him! If nothing else, this tactic may provoke him to issue messages denying that these CIA-generated messages are his.
[This is simply a variant of LBJ's time-tested "make him deny it!" tactic.]

... and this, too, provides us opportunity: surveille al Jazeera offices, the intent being to intercept a genuine message from bin Laden. This is currently impractical because we don't know when bin Laden will choose to speak. But, if we provoke him to respond, we can be prepared to intercept the courier, and perhaps use this as a toe-hold on the way to the summit!

This could turn into a fun game, pitting bin Laden against his CIA surrogate! It might just put him on the defensive (and therefore more likely to blunder!).

Just a free suggestion, worth every penny!