Manhunt: The Ten-Year Search for Bin Laden--From 9/11 to Abbottabad (2 page)

I
T WAS A PERFECT HIDING PLACE
.

Squint a little and the neat houses that climb up the green hills and compact mountains that surround Abbottabad are reminiscent of Switzerland, or maybe Bavaria. This Pakistani city of some five hundred thousand souls sits at four thousand feet in the foothills of the Himalayas, which march in ranks toward the border with China. The town was founded in 1853 by James Abbott, an English officer who was a bit player in the Great Game that pitted the British and Russians against each other as they struggled for mastery in Central Asia. Somewhat unusually for an administrator of the Raj,
Major Abbott was beloved by the inhabitants of Abbottabad. Abbott even penned an awkward but heartfelt poem to the town when he departed for England:

Vestiges of Abbottabad’s colonial past can be seen in the Anglican church of St. Luke’s, which looks like it was airlifted in from Sussex, and the occasional sets of low-slung nineteenth-century buildings lining the main roads that once housed the administrators of the Empire.

Abbottabad is known today as the “
City of Schools” and is home to a number of excellent prep schools and Pakistan’s leading military academy.
U.S. Special Forces soldiers were posted there in 2008 to help with the training of recruits.

Enticed by its relatively cool summers and negligible crime rate, a mix of retired army officers and civil servants, as well as some who have made good working in the Persian Gulf, have been drawn to live in Abbottabad.
The vacation high season begins in June, when families from the hot plains of Pakistan travel there to cool off and to revel in its soft mountain breezes. The golfers among them can play on one of the country’s finest courses. The overall vibe is a little more country club than the rest of Pakistan’s heaving, teeming, smog-filled cities.

Despite Abbottabad’s relative obscurity, foreigners are not unknown here.
Western adventurers drawn by the Karakoram Highway, which wends its way through the city before heading north toward China, three hundred miles away, occasionally stop off to stock up on camping supplies or linger at an ice-cream shop. And
wealthy Afghan refugees fleeing the instability in their country have built large walled compounds to hide their womenfolk.

It was to the placid environs of Abbottabad half a decade after his great victory on 9/11 that Osama bin Laden decided to retire. It was one of the last places in Pakistan that anyone would have suspected he might be living—far enough from the tribal regions of Pakistan, where pretty much every observer believed he was based, so that he would be hard to find, yet not so far away that he couldn’t communicate
relatively easily by courier with his key lieutenants, many of whom lived in those regions. It was also close to Pakistan-held Kashmir and the Kashmiri militant groups to which bin Laden had long allied himself, a support network that might come in handy.

By the spring of 2011 the terrorist mastermind was in his sixth year of hiding out in the Bilal Town neighborhood of Abbottabad. It isn’t the city’s glitziest address, but with its porticoed white villas interspersed with small shops selling fruits and vegetables, it is certainly a reasonably pleasant place to live.

Seven years earlier, the man whom bin Laden had entrusted with his life, someone known within al-Qaeda by the alias Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti—“the Kuwaiti who is the father of Ahmed”—had begun assembling some small parcels of agricultural land on the fringes of Bilal Town.
The Kuwaiti purchased the land over the course of four transactions in 2004 and 2005, paying about $50,000 and buying most of the plots from a local doctor, Qazi Mahfooz Ul Haq. Haq recalls the Kuwaiti as a “
very simple, modest, humble type of man” who spoke the local language, Pashto, dressed in traditional Pashtun clothing, and said that he was buying the land for an uncle.

The Kuwaiti hired an architect at Modern Associates, a family-run firm in Abbottabad, to design a residential compound suitable for a family of a dozen or more. The specs for the building were not unusual for these parts: two stories with four bedrooms on each floor, each with its own private bathroom. “
One of my students could have done the design,” recalls Junaid Younis, the owner of Modern Associates. The architecture firm submitted the drawings of the house to the local planning board, and permission for its construction was duly granted.

Sometime in 2005, bin Laden’s compound began rising from what were once open fields.
Locals estimate that the sprawling one-acre complex cost in the low hundreds of thousands of dollars to
build. During its construction, a third floor was added to the building.
No planning permission was sought for this addition, a common enough dodge in a part of the world where paying property taxes is regarded as a sucker’s game. But there was a more compelling reason to keep this alteration as secret as possible: the unauthorized floor was for the
exclusive use of Osama bin Laden and his newest and youngest wife, a spirited Yemeni named Amal.

The third floor, where bin Laden would live with Amal, was a little different from the others. Unlike the floors below it, it had windows on only one of its four sides, and they were opaque. Four of the five windows were just small slits well above eye level. A tiny terrace leading off the floor was shielded from prying eyes by a seven-foot-high wall designed to conceal even someone as tall as the six-foot-four bin Laden.

Habitually dressed in light-colored flowing robes, a dark vest, and a prayer cap, bin Laden
rarely left the second and third floors of the house during the more than five years he lived there. When he did, it was
only to take a walk in the compound’s kitchen garden.
A makeshift tarpaulin over a section of the garden was designed to keep even those walks a secret from the all-seeing American satellites that traversed the skies overheard.

It must have been quite confining for an outdoorsman like bin Laden, who routinely boasted of his ability to ride a horse for forty miles without a break, and who regularly took his sons on arduous hikes through the Afghan mountains that could
last for more than twelve hours. Bin Laden was also an avid soccer player, and
quite adept at volleyball. Before the fall of the Taliban, one of his great satisfactions had been to take his various wives and children out for expeditions into the vast deserts of southern Afghanistan to practice shooting and toughen them up for the life on the run that he firmly believed would one day be their collective lot.

Now bin Laden was living in Abbottabad in a prison of his own making. But there were some compensations. For one thing, he was a long way from the American drone strikes that were steadily picking off many of his longtime aides, the cream of al-Qaeda, in Pakistan’s tribal regions some two hundred miles to the west. And he certainly wasn’t cowering in a dank cave, as many of the “infidels” imagined.
Nor was he suffering from debilitating kidney disease, as was often reported in the West. In fact, he was in fine fettle, graying and slowing down only a little as he approached the middle of his fifth decade. Most important for a committed family man, he was surrounded by three of his wives and a dozen of his children and grandchildren.

Bin Laden’s first wife, his tall, beautiful Syrian cousin Najwa, was not among them. They had married in 1974, when he was seventeen and she was fifteen, and she had faithfully stuck with him as he embarked on a life of jihad that took him to Pakistan and Afghanistan during the 1980s, and later Sudan and Afghanistan again in the late 1990s. But after living for five years in grim Taliban-controlled Afghanistan, Najwa had had enough. During the summer of 2001, she started insisting that she wanted to go home and see her family in Syria. She had, after all, given bin Laden eleven children and almost three decades of her life, a good portion of which she had spent with him in exile, and so he
eventually agreed to her request. But he
allowed her to take only three of their as-yet-unmarried children with her to Syria, insisting that their eleven-year-old daughter, Iman, and seven-year old son, Ladin, stay with him.

Bin Laden was the absolute monarch of his household, and there was nothing Najwa could do to protest this decision. As she was leaving Afghanistan, bin Laden told her—sensing perhaps that this would be the last time he would see her—“
I will never divorce you,
Najwa. Even if you hear I have divorced you, it is not true.” Najwa
left Afghanistan on September 9, 2001, the same day that bin Laden’s assassins murdered Ahmad Shah Massoud, the leader of the few Afghan forces then still fighting the Taliban, and only forty-eight hours before al-Qaeda’s attacks on Washington and New York. Perhaps bin Laden knew that the gentle Najwa, who had married him long before he had devoted his life to the rigors of holy war, wouldn’t be able to handle the aftermath of the attacks on America.

Still, a decade after 9/11—even with his first wife long gone—bin Laden had the satisfaction of having his three other wives living with him in his Abbottabad hideaway. They ranged in age from the twenty-nine-year-old Amal to the sixty-two-year-old Khairiah, who had recently and happily reappeared in bin Laden’s life quite unexpectedly after an absence of nine years.

Bin Laden had married Khairiah in 1985, when he was twenty-eight and she was thirty-five, an inordinately late age in Saudi Arabia for a woman to get married. Bin Laden’s
motivation to marry Khairiah was in part religious. He believed that marrying a “spinster” was something that Allah would regard favorably because, should they have children, it would increase the number of Muslims in the world. Before her marriage, Khairiah had had something of an independent career as a teacher of deaf-mute children. She also held a PhD and hailed from a wealthy, distinguished family that claims descent from the Prophet Mohammed. Khairiah had taken the position of bin Laden’s second wife only because she wanted to be married to
a man she believed to be a true holy warrior, whose exploits fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan were becoming well known in Saudi Arabia in the mid-1980s. Four years after she married bin Laden
they had a boy, Hamza, and from then on, Khairiah was known as Um Hamza, “the mother of Hamza.”

As the Taliban regime was imploding during the fall of 2001,
Khairiah fled Afghanistan for neighboring Iran, together with her
beloved Hamza and several of bin Laden’s children from his other wives. For years they all lived under some form of house arrest in the Iranian capital of Tehran. Their conditions were
not uncomfortable, with time for shopping trips, PlayStation video games, and visits to swimming pools, but they were still in a cage, albeit a gilded one. The Iranian regime likely saw bin Laden’s family members as useful bargaining chips in the event of some kind of peace deal with the United States.

However, by the time al-Qaeda
militants abducted Heshmatollah Attarzadeh-Niyaki, an Iranian diplomat, in late 2008 near his home in the western Pakistani city of Peshawar, the Iranian regime had long given up on making any accommodation with the United States. After holding the diplomat for more than a year, the militants quietly released him back to Iran in the spring of 2010.
This was part of a deal that finally allowed bin Laden’s family to end their years of house arrest in Iran.

Sometime during the blazing summer of 2010, Khairiah, now in her early sixties, managed to travel from western Iran to North Waziristan, a flinty, remote tribal region of Pakistan that lies more than fifteen hundred miles to the east of Tehran; the journey took her across tough mountain ranges and through some of the harshest deserts on Earth. She then traveled on to Abbottabad to reunite with her husband after almost a decade.
Her one disappointment was that her only child, Hamza, who had traveled with her from Iran, remained in the remote Pakistani tribal regions that were then home to many of al-Qaeda’s leaders.

The next wife in seniority in the bin Laden compound was Siham bin Abdullah bin Husayn, an exact contemporary of the fifty-four-year-old al-Qaeda leader, who, like his oldest wife, Khairiah, hailed from a distinguished Saudi family that claimed descent from the Prophet. For bin Laden, who tried—at least in his own mind—to
model his life on that of the Prophet, this direct connection to the founder of Islam through his wives no doubt had special meaning. Living in the Abbottabad compound with his mother and father was
Siham’s first son, Khalid, age twenty-three.

Siham had been a student at King Abdulaziz University in the holy city of Medina, pursuing a degree in religious studies, when bin Laden first proposed marriage to her in the mid-1980s. She insisted on completing her education as a condition of accepting his proposal, a request that bin Laden acceded to only reluctantly.
Siham’s parents opposed the match because bin Laden already had other wives, but she went ahead with the marriage anyway because she had a steadfast belief in bin Laden’s burgeoning jihad project, fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan. By the time they were married, bin Laden was well on his way to becoming an authentic jihadist war hero; Siham found this intriguing. When bin Laden gave her the gold jewelry that is traditional for the wedding dowry, Siham
donated it all to the Afghan jihad.

Siham went on to obtain her MA while studying in Medina, and later her PhD in Koranic grammar while she was living with bin Laden in Sudan in the mid-1990s. A poet and an intellectual, she would
often edit bin Laden’s writings. As a result of her husband’s only grudging acceptance of her pursuit of a graduate education, she dedicated her PhD dissertation not to him, but to her children. Her brother says that she was “
chained” to bin Laden only because of her intense love for them.