Manhunt: The Ten-Year Search for Bin Laden--From 9/11 to Abbottabad (18 page)

Robert Cardillo, a veteran intelligence official who briefed President Obama three times a week about national security developments around the world, thought that if bin Laden was indeed living in the compound, it was “nuts” that he hadn’t moved in six years. And if bin Laden was living there, how could the Pakistanis not know? After all, he reasoned, this wasn’t in some remote, lawless tribal region, but in a well-policed city. Other facets of the case didn’t sit well with Cardillo either; there were about twenty adults and children living at the compound, which seemed a big security risk for bin Laden to take. And while the courier and his brother practiced rigorous operational security with their cell phones, there were other cell-phone users at the compound who weren’t taking any such precautions. Cardillo had so many nitpicky questions about the intelligence picture surrounding the compound that at one point Michael Vickers, the civilian overseer of Special Operations, said,
“You know you’re being Debbie Downer around here.” Cardillo parried, “Mike, that’s my job. Thank you.”

In the early fall the CIA set up a safe house in Abbottabad for agents who would survey the compound and built up a “
pattern of life” analysis of the people living at the compound. According to a retired senior CIA operations officer who worked in Pakistan after 9/11, Agency officials setting up this type of safe house typically looked for a residence that would attract no attention; everything would have to appear to be perfectly normal. This meant there should be no detectable changes made to the profile of the house and its constituent buildings, meaning no proliferation of antennas, no lights on late at night, and no conspicuous new construction. The routine at the safe house would have to be “
non-alerting: no sudden uptick in visitors and no comings and goings at odd hours. Also, the cover story for the residents—who they were, where they came from, what their business was in Abbottabad—would have to be rock-solid. Nothing weird. Nothing unusual. Boring is always best. And, always best to provide answers to questions up front rather than hope that the neighbors will reach the conclusion you want. In a place like Pakistan one easy way to do that is simply to make sure that your own household staff is fed the right cover story. All maids, cooks, and drivers talk in environments like that. It’s like a small-town environment. Whatever your maid knows, or thinks she knows, about who you are, where you came from, and what you are up to will be known to every domestic in the neighborhood within days of your arrival.”

The CIA agents monitoring the compound initially observed only the two families of the courier and his brother living there. But after further careful monitoring, they determined that there was a third family living at the compound. Members of this third family never
seemed to leave the compound, but a careful observation of their movements and the number of men’s, women’s, and children’s garments hung up to dry on clotheslines indicated that this other family consisted of three women, a young man, and at least nine children, all living in the main building. Were these
bin Laden’s wives, children, and grandchildren? Certainly the composition of this family was consistent with what was known about bin Laden’s immediate family.

D
ESPITE HAVING SPIES
on the ground in Abbottabad and NSA satellites orbiting in space above the compound, the Agency was never able to get an image of bin Laden. It did observe that some individual took a walk every day in the vegetable garden of the compound, but someone had cleverly installed a tarpaulin above the area where that person would walk, so spy satellites never got a good look at him. Analysts called the mysterious person “
the pacer.” The pacer never left the compound, and his daily excursions seemed like those of someone in a jail yard who couldn’t leave but was trying to get some exercise. He walked very rapidly in tight circles, then went back inside. Knowing that bin Laden was quite tall, Panetta instructed his team to check the pacer’s height by comparing it to that of the nearest wall. By measuring the pacer’s shadow, intelligence officials determined that the mystery man could measure anywhere from five foot five to six foot eight. This didn’t provide much of a clue.

The CIA went to Congress and successfully lobbied for tens of millions of dollars to be reallocated in the Agency budget to support this ramped-up intelligence effort. Still, officials had what they termed “
collection gaps”: they couldn’t see inside the compound, and they couldn’t monitor it around the clock. But counterterrorism officials were wary of becoming more aggressive in their collection
efforts, because this might end up “spooking the targets.” They were concerned that someone as canny as bin Laden, if he really was the pacer, would have some kind of escape plan in place. They also thought it likely that he would have taken the precaution of putting a local police officer on his payroll—someone who would tip him off if there was any sign of an operation to take down the compound.

In November, Panetta, together with the CIA bin Laden hunters, went to Obama and said, “We think there is a strong possibility that bin Laden is in the Abbottabad compound.” The analysts believed this with varying degrees of certainty, with most estimating the probability at 80 percent. The lead analyst, John, was still at about 90 percent, while Michael Morell, the deputy director of the CIA, was at 60 percent.

“Why do people have different probabilities?” Obama asked Panetta, who pitched the question to Morell.

“Intelligence is not an exact science,” Morell explained. “Even if we had a source inside the compound saying bin Laden was there, I’d only be at 80 percent because sources are of varying reliability. Those analysts who are at 80 to 90 percent have been tracking al-Qaeda in recent years and have had great success stopping plots and undermining the organization. They are confident. The folks at the lower end of the range are those who lived through intelligence failures, particularly the Iraq WMD issue.” At one point Morell told the president that when it came to the sheer volume of data points, “the circumstantial case of Iraq having WMD was actually stronger than the circumstantial case that bin Laden is living in the Abbottabad compound.”

Morell’s own confidence that bin Laden was at the compound remained steady, at 60 percent, because there was never any direct confirmation that bin Laden was there. On the other hand, there was no good alternative explanation for everything that happened
at the compound and the fact that the residents were clearly hiding
something
. Throughout the first weeks of 2011 the circumstantial case that bin Laden was living in the Abbottabad compound remained in a sort of stasis. “We got a lot of information over time that didn’t disprove bin Laden was there and didn’t corroborate it either,” says a counterterrorism official. CIA officers from outside the Counterterrorism Center were brought in to see whether the bin Laden analysts might be missing something. They didn’t see anything obvious. A CIA analyst who hunted bin Laden says, “
We had pulled on a gazillion threads in the last decade, sometimes a ‘sighting’ of bin Laden, or some other piece of intelligence, and every time the threads were pulled they quickly unraveled. With this Abbottabad thread, every time you pulled on it, it didn’t unravel.”

J
OHN BRENNAN
, the longtime CIA officer who was now Obama’s top counterterrorism advisor, met regularly with the analysts working the bin Laden case, many of whom he had known and admired for years. Brennan pushed them to come up with intelligence that disproved the notion that bin Laden was living in the Abbottabad compound, saying, “I’m tired of hearing why everything you see confirms your case. What we need to look for are the things that tell us what’s
not
right about our theory. So what’s not right about your inferences?”

The analysts came back to the White House one day and started their intelligence update, saying, “Looks like there’s a dog on the compound.” Denis McDonough, Obama’s deputy national security advisor, remembers thinking, “
Oh, that’s a bummer. You know, no self-respecting Muslim’s gonna have a dog.”
Brennan, who had spent much of his career focused on the Middle East and spoke Arabic, pointed out that bin Laden, in fact, did have dogs when he was
living in Sudan in the mid-1990s. (Indeed, when al-Qaeda’s leader was living in the Sudanese capital of Khartoum, he had taken an interest in
training police dogs.)

As February turned into March, CIA director Leon Panetta asked a veteran counterterrorism official—who had lived through many years of bin Laden leads not panning out—what percentage she now placed on bin Laden being in the compound. “
Seventy percent,” she said.

The percentages suggested a kind of precision that didn’t exist in reality. Bin Laden was either living in the compound or he wasn’t. Even after months of observation, no one really knew for sure.

B
IN LADEN’S LIFE IN THE COMPOUND
was not, of course, taken up only by attending to his wives and children, saying his daily prayers, indulging in his hobbies of reading anti-American and anti-Zionist literature, and watching old videos of himself. It was also consumed with the serious business of trying to run al-Qaeda, a difficult task for someone in hiding whose key lieutenants were also on the run.

It was only through Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti that bin Laden was able to maintain a semblance of control over his organization. The Kuwaiti and his brother Abrar,
both in their early thirties, were bin Laden’s sole guards and his only connection to the outside world. At the local general store, they bought
rice, lentils, and other groceries. Using their local aliases, Arshad Khan and Tariq Khan, the two brothers would escort the bin Laden children to a local doctor for treatment of the usual
stomach upsets, colds, and coughs. The Khans came and went in the neighborhood without fanfare, driving their white
Suzuki Jeep and red van as they went about their errands. The two brothers occasionally attended daily prayers at a
local mosque but made no small talk. To the inquisitive, they said
they worked in the transportation business. This didn’t satisfy the curiosity of some locals, who thought they might be drug dealers and complained that even with such a big house
they didn’t help the poor.

The brothers were in fact longtime al-Qaeda made men whose
father had immigrated five decades earlier to Kuwait from a small Pashtun village in the north of Pakistan, some three hours’ drive from Abbottabad. This background made the two brothers indispensable to bin Laden because
they could easily blend into the Pashto-speaking areas of northern and western Pakistan, where the leaders of al-Qaeda were now hiding, and they also spoke Arabic and so could communicate easily with the Arab leaders of al-Qaeda. The brothers had sworn
bayat
to bin Laden, a religiously binding oath of allegiance to the man they venerated as the emir (prince) of jihad. They would do bin Laden’s bidding without question.

Crucially, the Kuwaiti transported letters and computer thumb drives containing instructions from bin Laden to other al-Qaeda leaders. The Kuwaiti practiced careful operational security when he transported these items to Peshawar for later distribution to the nearby tribal regions on the border with Afghanistan, where many of al-Qaeda’s leaders were based. Conscious of American and Pakistani abilities to monitor cell phones, the Kuwaiti would turn on his cell only around the
small town of Hasan Abdal, an hour’s drive southwest of Abbottabad.

Through the messages transported by the faithful Kuwaiti, bin Laden stayed in touch with the organization he had founded and did his best to manage al-Qaeda’s far-flung regional affiliates in countries such as Iraq, Somalia, and Yemen. He also continued to
plot carnage on a grand scale—weighty matters that he never discussed with his wives.

Bin Laden’s principal conduit to his organization was Atiyah Abdul Rahman, a Libyan militant of about forty. Viewed by officials in the West as no more than a mid-tier terrorist, Rahman was actually bin Laden’s chief of staff. Privately, bin Laden fretted that Rahman could be
heavy-handed and undiplomatic in his dealings with others, but despite those concerns, bin Laden was in frequent contact with the Libyan, far more so than with his more well-known top deputy, the dour Egyptian surgeon Ayman al-Zawahiri. In the years after 9/11, Western counterterrorism officials believed that Zawahiri was the hands-on manager of al-Qaeda, but in reality it was still bin Laden who was
deep in the weeds of personnel decisions and plotting for the group.

Through Rahman, bin Laden
issued instructions to his regional affiliates: the North African terrorist organization al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, the Somali militant group Al-Shabaab, al-Qaeda in Iraq, and al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. In the years after 9/11,
Rahman also traveled to Iran to act as a bridge between bin Laden and some longtime leaders of al-Qaeda such as Saif al-Adel, who was living there under a form of house arrest, as were a number of bin Laden’s children.

Iraq was a particular concern for bin Laden, who initially had been ecstatic about the opportunities that the 2003 American invasion presented to establish an al-Qaeda affiliate in the Arab heartland. By the time he had moved into the Abbottabad compound two years later, however, he had grown increasingly worried about the brutal tactics of al-Qaeda in Iraq, which included blowing up key Shia mosques and killing fellow Sunnis who didn’t follow the group’s dictates to the letter.
Bin Laden reminded the leaders of his Iraqi affiliate about the mistakes that Islamist militants had made in Algeria in the 1990s, when they launched a civil war so brutal that they eliminated any vestige of popular support they had once enjoyed.

In November 2005, as bin Laden was settling into his new life at the Abbottabad compound,
Rahman wrote a seven-page letter to the leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq, the astonishingly cruel Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who had made a habit of personally beheading his hostages and videotaping the results for global distribution on the Internet. Rahman’s letter, which clearly reflected the views of bin Laden, was a polite but blistering critique of Zarqawi, who had recently directed suicide bombings at American hotels in Amman, Jordan, that had killed sixty people, almost all of them Jordanian civilians attending a wedding. The bombings had severely tarnished al-Qaeda’s image in the Arab world and came on top of Zarqawi’s indiscriminate slaughter of any Muslim who didn’t precisely share his views. Like a dissatisfied boss delivering a performance review, Rahman told Zarqawi that he should henceforth follow instructions from bin Laden and cease counterproductive operations such as the hotel bombings in Jordan.