Manhunt: The Ten-Year Search for Bin Laden--From 9/11 to Abbottabad (14 page)

The admission from Qahtani that the Kuwaiti had given him training in operational security seems to have been the first time that U.S. officials realized that the Kuwaiti was a player in al-Qaeda and a confidant of KSM’s. It’s not clear whether Qahtani gave that information up because he had been coercively interrogated or because interrogators had told him that KSM, who had been captured in Pakistan on March 1, 2003, was in American custody and Qahtani thought it was therefore permissible to divulge information relating to KSM’s trusted circle. Either way, Qahtani identified the Kuwaiti only after he was subjected to a considerable amount of abuse at the hands of his captors.

American interrogators now knew that the Kuwaiti had helped train potential hijackers for the 9/11 mission, but as yet there was no sense that he might be bin Laden’s key courier. And Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti was just one of many hundreds of names and aliases of al-Qaeda members and associates that interrogators were learning in 2002 and 2003 from detainees housed at Guantánamo, from
captives in CIA secret prisons in eastern Europe, and from documents recovered in Afghanistan after the fall of the Taliban.

When KSM was first arrested, there was a sense at the CIA that his capture might soon lead to bin Laden himself. Michael Scheuer, who had led the dedicated bin Laden unit at the CIA when it was founded in December 1995, was less sanguine than most. He knew that bin Laden had a far better sense of security than KSM and some of the other al-Qaeda leaders who had been captured in the years immediately after 9/11. “
Those guys were swashbucklers, they were the first generation, they didn’t think there was a bullet made for them,” says Scheuer. In fact, the letters and photos found on KSM did not provide any real leads to bin Laden’s whereabouts.

Initially KSM was held by the Pakistanis, and he
gave them some useful information that the CIA appears to have overlooked, or perhaps wasn’t briefed about. A day after he was captured, he told his interrogators that bin Laden might be in Kunar province in Afghanistan. He also told them that the last letter he had received from bin Laden came through a courier, and that his leader had been helped out of Tora Bora by Ahmed al-Kuwaiti and a man named Amin ul-Haq. This was all accurate information. It’s not clear how the information was extracted from KSM, but Pakistani interrogators are known to use harsh methods on occasion.

KSM was then transferred to U.S. custody. Despite being
waterboarded 183 times and at one point kept up for seven and a half days straight while
diapered and shackled at a CIA secret prison in northern Poland, KSM did not confess to the Kuwaiti’s key role in al-Qaeda, instead telling his interrogators in late 2003 only that the Kuwaiti was now “
retired.” But hopes ran so high that KSM might provide the Rosetta Stone to al-Qaeda that
senior CIA analyst Frederica traveled from the Agency’s headquarters in Virginia to Poland to watch KSM being waterboarded.

KSM’s assertion that the Kuwaiti was retired was curious, as not too many members of al-Qaeda were known to have retired. Indeed, information that KSM had given his U.S. interrogators a few months earlier led to the arrest in Thailand of a man known as Hambali, who was a leader of al-Qaeda’s virulent Southeast Asian affiliate, Jemaah Islamiya.
When CIA officials interrogated Hambali, he said that when he fled Afghanistan after the fall of the Taliban he
stayed in an al-Qaeda safe house in Karachi, which was managed by … the Kuwaiti.

And shortly after KSM told his interrogators that the Kuwaiti was retired, an al-Qaeda courier by the name of Hassan Ghul told CIA interrogators a quite different story. Ghul, a Pakistani, was arrested in mid-January 2004 in northern Iraq carrying a
letter addressed to bin Laden from al-Qaeda’s leader in Iraq urging that he be allowed to embark on a full-scale war against Iraq’s Shia population. Ghul obviously had access to al-Qaeda’s inner circle in Pakistan and so was taken to a secret CIA prison in eastern Europe, where he was subjected to a variety of coercive interrogation techniques, including being slapped, slammed against a wall, forced to maintain stress positions, and deprived of sleep. Ghul’s interrogators also requested permission to use nudity, water dousing, and dietary manipulation, but it’s
not clear if these techniques were actually employed on Ghul. At some point, Ghul told interrogators that the Kuwaiti was bin Laden’s courier and frequently
traveled with al-Qaeda’s leader. He also said that
the Kuwaiti was trusted by KSM and by Abu Faraj al-Libi, KSM’s successor as
the operational commander of al-Qaeda.

Libi had masterminded
two serious but ultimately unsuccessful attempts to assassinate Pakistani president Pervez Musharraf in December 2003, and so he became the subject of intense interest from Pakistani security services. Libi was quite recognizable because of a skin disease that disfigured his face with blotchy white patches
where he
lacked melanin. As a result, Libi held the number-three spot in al-Qaeda for only a couple of years before he was
arrested in Pakistan on May 2, 2005, in the city of Mardan, one hundred miles from Abbottabad, where bin Laden himself would soon arrive to live for the next six years.

A month after his arrest, Libi was
handed over to the CIA. Coercive interrogation techniques (though not waterboarding) were used on him, and he told his American interrogators that after KSM was captured he, Libi, had received notice from bin Laden through a courier that
he had been promoted to KSM’s spot as the number three in al-Qaeda. At the time of his promotion, Libi was living in Abbottabad, an early indicator that the city was something of a base for al-Qaeda. It would be another seven years before the CIA would focus on Abbottabad as a likely hiding place for al-Qaeda’s leader.
Libi also told his interrogators that the Kuwaiti wasn’t an important player in al-Qaeda and that it was in fact “Maulawi Abd al-Khaliq Jan” who was the courier who had informed him of his promotion by bin Laden. Counterterrorism officials later concluded that Maulawi Abd al-Khaliq Jan was a
made-up name.

Did coercive interrogations lead to bin Laden? Such techniques were used on Qahtani, the twentieth hijacker, and on Ghul, the Pakistani al-Qaeda courier who was captured in Iraq. Both of them subsequently gave interrogators information that led the CIA to focus on the Kuwaiti as a possible avenue to finding bin Laden, which to defenders of these interrogation techniques would seem to prove that they are effective. Critics of the techniques, however, can point out that harsh methods were also used by the CIA to get KSM and Libi to talk, and both those men gave their interrogators disinformation about the Kuwaiti. Since we can’t run history backward, we will never know what conventional interrogation techniques alone might have elicited from these four prisoners. And as we shall see, there
were other steps along the way to finding bin Laden that had little to do with the information derived from al-Qaeda detainees.

Robert Richer, a veteran covert operations officer who ran the CIA’s Near East Division after 9/11, says that, despite the frequent claims of Bush administration officials, information from detainees was not particularly helpful in averting possible terrorist attacks: “
If you were to ask me what operations were actually defeated based on the information provided by the detainees, I’d be hard-pressed to give you an operation. I’d say we got some names; we could track some people.” Where the detainee interrogations were useful, Richer said, was to fill in what he compares to the largely blank
Scrabble board that was the structure of al-Qaeda known to the CIA in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. In combination with other information the CIA derived from documents and phone intercepts, detainee interrogations “could put that last thing in that got us a triple score.”

Robert Dannenberg, who ran CIA counterterrorism operations from 2003 to 2004, agrees with this assessment: “
Those guys gave a wealth of invaluable information about al-Qaeda. I wouldn’t say so much about specific plots—you know, Abu is going to take a bomb and go blow up a train station in New York, no—but who the players are and what their relationships are, what their modus operandi is.… It gave us a cartography of al-Qaeda that would have taken us years to assemble had we not had this program in place. And it was an ongoing value. We would run pictures past these guys all the time and they said, ‘This is so-and-so and this is so-and-so.’ ”

Neither KSM nor Libi ever produced any information that could
help in the hunt for bin Laden. Counterterrorism officials gradually realized that for the senior al-Qaeda members they had in their custody, any items of knowledge they possessed that might lead to bin
Laden were the “crown jewels” that would be protected by the detainees at all costs.

Because both KSM and Libi had downplayed the Kuwaiti’s importance to al-Qaeda, he began to be a subject
of real interest at the CIA. But the Kuwaiti was not going to be easy to find, not least because he went by a blizzard of aliases, including “Mohamed Khan” (a name in Pakistan roughly equivalent to John Smith in America), “Arshad Khan,” and “Sheik Abu Ahmed,” while
his real name, Ibrahim Saeed Ahmed, was known to almost no one but his immediate family.

Adding to the confusion, the Kuwaiti came from a
large family of brothers, at least one of whom had died in Afghanistan after 9/11. In 2006, interrogators were told by a Mauritanian detainee who had joined al-Qaeda in the first year or so of its existence that
the Kuwaiti had died in the arms of another al-Qaeda recruit during the Battle of Tora Bora. This suggested to the CIA that the Kuwaiti might well be a member of al-Qaeda. But was he now dead?

As the years passed after 9/11, President Bush abandoned his early “dead or alive” rhetoric about finding bin Laden and rarely mentioned him in public. If he did, it was to say, as he did in March 2002, that bin Laden had been “
marginalized.” After all, there was no need to add to the al-Qaeda leader’s already-mythic profile by reminding the world that he continued to elude America’s grasp.

In private, though, Bush never let the subject go. Michael Hayden, the CIA director during much of Bush’s second term, recalls, “
As I would walk into the Oval Office about 8 o’clock on a Thursday morning, the President would kind of look up from the desk and say, ‘Well, Mike, how’re we doing?’ And there was no doubt in anyone’s mind that was in the Oval, what he was talking about. He was talking about the pursuit of Osama bin Laden.” One of the officials
leading the hunt for bin Laden recalls drily, “
The president’s questions were passed down to us.”

Hayden has the affability and twinkle of a favorite uncle, but his easy charm masks the steely edge of someone who grew up in a working-class family in Pittsburgh and rose to become a four-star air force general. Before he headed the CIA, Hayden spent years presiding over the ultra-secretive National Security Agency (NSA), which sucks up terabytes of data from phone calls and e-mails around the world. The NSA during Hayden’s tenure also controversially, without first obtaining a
warrant from a judge, listened in on phone conversations taking place in the United States by those who were suspected to have ties to al-Qaeda.

Hayden recalls that sometime in 2007 counterterrorism officials at the CIA began to brief him on a new approach:
pursuing bin Laden through his courier network. “Now, keep in mind, if you’re doing this, you’re not chasing bin Laden,” Hayden says. “This is at best a bank shot. You’re putting your energy into identifying and deconstructing the courier network in the belief that it would lead you to bin Laden.” Hayden in turn briefed Bush, explaining that the CIA had yet to find bin Laden’s key courier but had zeroed in on the Kuwaiti as a possible candidate. “There was still
no bated-breath moment about Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti,” recalls one of the officials hunting bin Laden, but the fact that no al-Qaeda detainee had seen the Kuwaiti for a while made him intriguing.

The group at the CIA whose day-to-day task was to find bin Laden was never larger than two dozen men and women; all of them could fit comfortably into a medium-size conference room. Members of the group would come and go over the decade of the hunt, but many stayed on the bin Laden “account” during the long, lean years when there were no promising leads of any kind. John (a pseudonym), an
analyst with the tall, lanky physique of the avid basketball player he had been in both high school and college, was highly regarded by senior officials at the Agency. John joined the Counterterrorism Center in 2003 and stayed there—even though he could have taken promotions to go elsewhere—because he was
fixated on finding bin Laden. He had pushed for more drone strikes in the tribal regions of Pakistan in 2007, when he noticed that more Westerners were showing up there for terrorist training. Chuck (a pseudonym) was a careful analyst who had been on the al-Qaeda account since the terrorist group had bombed the two U.S. embassies in Africa in 1998, killing more than two hundred. As the years went by during the hunt for bin Laden,
Chuck’s hair had gradually turned gray.

Hanging over the veteran members of the team was the knowledge that some of their number could have done more to avert the 9/11 attacks. Certainly the general perception among the public was that there had been some kind of intelligence failure at the CIA. In fact, the intelligence community had
done a thorough job of warning the Bush administration of the likelihood of some sort of large-scale anti-American attack during the spring and summer of 2001, as demonstrated by the titles and dates of reports the Agency generated for policymakers: “Bin Ladin Planning Multiple Operations,” April 20; “Bin Ladin Public Profile May Presage Attack,” May 3; “Bin Ladin Network’s Plans Advancing,” May 26; “Bin Ladin Attacks May Be Imminent,” June 23; “Bin Ladin Threats Are Real,” June 30; “Planning for Bin Ladin Attacks Continues, Despite Delays,” July 2; “Bin Ladin Plans Delayed but Not Abandoned,” July 13; and “Threat of Impending al-Qaeda Attack to Continue Indefinitely,” on August 3. Of course, the CIA did not predict the time and place of al-Qaeda’s looming attack, but that kind of precise warning information happens more often in movies than in real life.
If there was a fault, it was the failure among key national security officials in the Bush administration to take the CIA’s warnings seriously enough.