Manhunt: The Ten-Year Search for Bin Laden--From 9/11 to Abbottabad (17 page)

Then, in June 2010, the Kuwaiti and his brother both made changes in the way they communicated on cell phones that suddenly opened up the possibility of the “geolocation” of their phones. Knowing this, the Agency painstakingly reviewed reams of “captured” phone conversations of the Kuwaiti’s family and circle of associates. Around this time the CIA conducted a joint operation with Pakistan’s military intelligence service on phone numbers associated with an al-Qaeda “facilitation network.” The Pakistanis did not know that some of these numbers were linked to Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti, but they could tell that one of the suspects in the network was speaking in a mix of both Arabic and Pashto, the language of northwest Pakistan, which was unusual. This suspect’s phones were also switched off most of the time and were turned back on only in
and around the city of Peshawar in northern Pakistan, not far from the Afghan border.

Finally, in the summer, the Kuwaiti received a call from an old friend in the Persian Gulf, a man being monitored by U.S. intelligence.

“We’ve missed you. Where have you been?” asked the friend.

“I’m back with the people I was with before,” the Kuwaiti responded elliptically.

There was a tense pause in the conversation as the friend mulled this over. “May God facilitate,” the caller finally said, likely realizing that
the Kuwaiti was back in bin Laden’s inner circle.

CIA officials took this call as confirmation that the Kuwaiti was still likely working with al-Qaeda, something they had not been entirely sure about. The National Security Agency was listening to this exchange and, through geolocation technologies, was able to zero in on the Kuwaiti’s cell phone in northwestern Pakistan. But to find out where the Kuwaiti lived by monitoring his cell phone would go only so far. The courier practiced rigorous operational security and was always careful to insert the battery in his phone and to turn it on only when he was
at least an hour’s drive away from the Abbottabad compound where he and bin Laden were living. And Pakistan was a country of 180 million people.

In August 2010 a Pakistani “asset” working for the CIA tracked the Kuwaiti to Peshawar, where bin Laden had founded al-Qaeda more than two decades earlier. In the years that bin Laden had been residing in the Abbottabad compound, the Kuwaiti regularly passed through Peshawar, the gateway to the Pakistani tribal regions where al-Qaeda had regrouped after 9/11. Once the CIA asset had identified the Kuwaiti’s distinctive white Suzuki Jeep with a spare tire on its back in Peshawar, he was
able to follow him as he drove home to Abbottabad, more than two hours’ drive to the east. The large compound
where the Kuwaiti finally alighted immediately drew interest at the Agency because it didn’t have
phone or Internet service, suggesting that its owners wanted to stay off the grid.

No one at the Agency believed that the courier would actually be
living
with bin Laden. CIA officials thought that they would track the courier to his home and then there would be another round of surveillance to see if he would then lead them to bin Laden’s hiding place. But there was something about the Abbottabad compound that piqued their interest. One official remembers her reaction when she first saw the compound: “Holy Toledo! Who in al-Qaeda would the group spend this kind of money on?” Officials calculated that the compound and the land it stood on were worth several hundred thousand dollars—about the cost of the 9/11 operation.

In late August 2010 the top officials in the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center briefed Panetta about the new bin Laden lead, telling him, “We’ve been tracking suspected couriers, people who’ve got historic ties to bin Laden, and we tracked them back to a place that looks like a fortress.” This got Panetta’s attention. “A fortress?
Tell me about that fortress,” he said. The CIA officials described a compound ringed with twelve-foot-high walls, and one section having eighteen-foot-high walls, and a top-floor balcony on one of the buildings shielded by seven-foot-high walls. They told Panetta the residents of the compound burned their own trash.

“This is very strange,” Panetta said. “It’s very mysterious. It requires deeper investigation. I want every possible operational avenue explored to get inside that compound.”

P
ANETTA BRIEFED PRESIDENT OBAMA
and his key national security advisors about this development in the Oval Office, saying, “We
have the courier’s name and we have his location in a place called Abbottabad and maybe, just maybe, bin Laden might be there as well.” Panetta showed the group satellite imagery of the compound and compared the area where the compound sat to Leesburg, Virginia—a pleasant historic town thirty miles northwest of Washington. Obama recalls that Panetta “was cautious in saying that they could say definitively this was where bin Laden was. My feeling at the time was:
interested, but cautious.”

Tony Blinken, a low-key lawyer who had worked for Bill Clinton on his National Security Council staff and was now Vice President Joe Biden’s top national security advisor, recalls both real interest and some skepticism among the officials listening to Panetta. “This wouldn’t have been brought to the president if it wasn’t serious,” Blinken says, “but there had obviously been instances in the past when we really thought we were hot on the trail, and then for one reason or another we weren’t. And so I think it was a real interest, but also we didn’t want to make too much of it.”

Over the next several months, Panetta became increasingly annoyed—some CIA officials even say “pissed”—about what he believed was a lack of creativity among the bin Laden hunters. “I want to know what’s going on inside that compound,” Panetta demanded. “I don’t want to just surveil it from the outside. I want to get inside there, I want to get clarity on what is happening there.” Leaders of the Counterterrorism Center were instructed to show Panetta any of the ideas for observing the compound they came up with—even those they discarded. He urged them to consider every form of espionage, including getting into sewage lines and implanting devices, putting a telescope in the mountains two kilometers away, even putting a camera on a tree inside the compound walls. The Counterterrorism Center officials came back to him, dismissing one approach
after another as too risky or not workable. A few weeks after Panetta suggested putting a camera on a tree inside the compound, the Kuwaiti chopped down the tree in question.

Finally, in the late fall, Jeremy Bash, Panetta’s chief of staff, gathered together the bin Laden hunters at the Agency and said, “Give the director twenty-five operational activities that you could use to get into the compound, or to learn what is happening there, and
don’t be afraid of making some of them kind of creative.” The bin Laden hunters came back with a chart with thirty-eight ideas. Some were outlandish. One idea was to throw in foul-smelling stink bombs to flush out the occupants of the compound. Another was to play on the presumed religious fanaticism of the compound’s inhabitants and broadcast from loudspeakers outside the compound what purported to be the “Voice of Allah,” saying, “
You are commanded to come out into the street!”

Other more plausible ideas included coming up with some technology that would enable the Agency to spy on the occupants using the small satellite dish connected to the compound’s sole television, or from a nearby CIA safe house, where agents would pick up the sounds and energy emissions that would result if bin Laden decided to record a new videotape.

After Panetta was confident that the team had exhausted every possible approach, they narrowed it down to three or four avenues. One creative, if ethically questionable, tactic was to recruit Shakil Afridi, a Pakistani doctor from the tribal regions, to mount a
bogus vaccination program in and around bin Laden’s neighborhood. The idea was to get access to the compound, take samples of the residents’ blood, and then match those with known samples of bin Laden family DNA that were in the Agency’s possession. In March, Dr. Afridi traveled to Abbottabad, telling locals that he had funds to start a free hepatitis B vaccination drive. So as not to arouse suspicion,
Afridi recruited nurses and health workers to administer the vaccinations starting in a poor neighborhood on the outskirts of the city rather than in the more affluent Bilal Town. But Afridi’s team was never able to get DNA samples from the bin Laden children.

The analytical case that the Kuwaiti was the key to finding the al-Qaeda leader was first made in a memo by CIA officials in August 2010 titled “
Closing In on Usama bin Ladin’s Courier.” A month later, an even more detailed assessment of all the intelligence on the Kuwaiti was bundled into a document titled “
Anatomy of a Lead.” It was well understood by the authors of these memos that anything they wrote that focused on bin Laden’s location was going to get a great deal of attention, including from the president. A counterterrorism official explains: “
We had a group who weren’t afraid to say right out front that we believe this leads to bin Laden, putting themselves on the line.”

Almost everyone who was then working on the bin Laden hunt had also worked on the hunt for Ayman al-Zawahiri. And they were keenly aware that seven CIA officers and contractors had died at the forward operating base in Khost, Afghanistan, chasing what at the time seemed to be the most promising lead the Agency had on Zawahiri since 9/11 but turned out to be an al-Qaeda sting operation. Those who died at Khost had been
friends and colleagues of the analysts who were now positing that they had the best lead on bin Laden in a decade.

What everyone involved in the bin Laden hunt wanted to avoid at all costs was another weapons of mass destruction (WMD) debacle. The faulty assumption that Saddam Hussein was reconstituting his WMD program, which had been the key justification for the Iraq War, rested in part on a number of dodgy intelligence sources. One of them was an Iraqi defector with the telling alias of “Curveball,” who claimed that Saddam possessed mobile bioweapons labs. This
became a central exhibit in the Bush administration’s assertions that Saddam had a biological weapons program. What wasn’t well understood by senior Bush officials and in much of the U.S. intelligence community was the fact that Curveball was an
alcoholic and a congenital liar.

The damage done by the fabrications of sources such as Curveball was compounded by the fact that where there were “dissents” about aspects of Iraq’s supposed WMD program from any of the sixteen U.S. intelligence agencies, they were generally buried in lengthy reports. Aluminum tubes shipped to Iraq in 2001 were believed by the CIA to be parts for centrifuges in Iraq’s uranium-enrichment program, but experts at the Department of Energy were rightly
skeptical of this claim, a view that didn’t get any real hearing among policymakers.

The intelligence community was determined to learn from these costly mistakes. This time there would be no repeat of CIA director George Tenet’s famous “slam dunk” assertion to President Bush that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction. The director of terrorism analysis at the CIA, a
careful analyst who for four years had been the official who six days every week delivered to President Bush his highly classified President’s Daily Brief, was determined to thoroughly kick the tires of the analytical case on the Kuwaiti. The small cadre of analysts at the CIA who were aware of the intelligence on the Kuwaiti subjected it to a formal process of structured analytical techniques, drilling down on key questions: What’s the body of evidence that the Kuwaiti is bin Laden’s courier? Who else could the Kuwaiti be if he wasn’t the courier for al-Qaeda’s leader? Was the
Kuwaiti even still working for al-Qaeda?

During October 2010, officials came up with several alternative explanations for the intelligence they had been able to gather on the Kuwaiti: that he had stolen money from al-Qaeda and was
now keeping a low profile; that he was working for someone else in al-Qaeda; that he was the courier for some criminal unrelated to al-Qaeda; or that bin Laden’s family, but not bin Laden himself, was living in the mysterious compound. They concluded that they could not rule out any of these alternative hypotheses. A counterterrorism official recalls, “
We put an enormous amount of work in exploring all of these hypotheses so the president and his advisors could make an informed judgment about what they planned to do next.” Cognizant of the lessons of the WMD fiasco, officials actively encouraged dissent among the analysts leading the hunt for bin Laden. One official says, “
We kept explaining to our group: ‘If you see something that doesn’t make sense you need to raise your hand now.’ ”

During the fall, counterterrorism officials continued to watch the Abbottabad compound and track the Kuwaiti’s movements around northwestern Pakistan. They now had “
high confidence” that the Kuwaiti was still a member of al-Qaeda, but they didn’t have any such level of confidence that bin Laden was living in the compound. The Agency listened in to the Kuwaiti’s phone conversations and spied on him as he traveled around Pakistan. CIA officials found it telling that when the Kuwaiti and his family visited other family members in Pakistan, they lied about where they were living, saying they lived in Peshawar. They also lied to neighbors about who they were, what they were doing, and where they were going. They also didn’t let anybody into the compound, the construction of which seemed to be designed to thwart good surveillance from any angle.

As they observed the comings and goings at the compound, one U.S. official says, “We began to believe bin Laden’s family was there. Was bin Laden nearby, given his devotion to them?” A few analysts, such as John, the deputy chief of the Afghanistan-Pakistan section in the Counterterrorism Center, thought that the likelihood of bin Laden being at the compound was as high as 90 percent, but
whatever an analyst thought the odds might be, the case that bin Laden was there was always entirely circumstantial.

There continued to be features of the compound that caused some head scratching at CIA headquarters. The first “anomaly” was that the compound was less than a mile from the Pakistani military academy. The second was that it was far from small and obscure, rising fortress-like above many of the neighboring buildings. Third, there were many children living there, a number of whom were old enough to blab about a mysterious “uncle” who never left the compound. And the wives and children of the courier and his brother would regularly take trips to visit family members elsewhere in Pakistan. One of those children, seven-year-old Muhammad, even attended a
religious school outside Abbottabad. CIA officials were familiar with the idea of “hiding in plain sight,” but the Abbottabad compound seemed to take that concept to a new level.