WASHINGTON, Jan 15: Al Qaeda leaders no longer feel safe in Afghan-Pakistan border areas, where they face heavy US and Pakistani pressure and their local welcome has worn out, CIA chief Michael Hayden said on Thursday.

Hayden also said he believed Iran was nearing a decision on whether to proceed with development of a nuclear weapon.

He stood by his defence of CIA waterboarding and said that regardless of whether the agency’s harsh interrogations will be judged worth the widespread condemnation, they worked.

“The agency did none of this out of enthusiasm. It did it out of duty, and it did it with the best legal advice,” he said.

Hayden said a disappointment of his 2 1/2-year term was that Al Qaeda leader Osama Bin Laden was still at large. But he said Bin Laden and top lieutenants were no longer secure in the Pakistan mountain hideouts believed to be hiding them.

“The great danger was that — I’m going to use a little euphemism here — the border region between Pakistan and Afghanistan was a safe haven for Al Qaeda,” Hayden said. “It is my belief that the senior leadership of Al Qaeda today believes that it is neither safe, nor a haven. That is a big deal in defending the United States.”

An audio message from Bin Laden this week may have been intended in part simply to show he was still alive, Hayden suggested.

“What we and our Pakistani allies have been able to do have changed the equation there,” he said. US forces in Afghanistan launched about 30 missile strikes in Pakistan in 2008, according to a Reuters tally.

Residents in the border areas have also begun to make Al Qaeda feel unwelcome, Hayden said.—Reuters