Manhunt: The Ten-Year Search for Bin Laden--From 9/11 to Abbottabad (5 page)

“How soon will we know for sure?” Bush asked.

Morell reviewed how long it took for the United States to determine the culprits in several previous terrorist attacks. “
We knew it was al-Qaeda within two days of the bombings of the U.S. embassies in Africa in 1998, but it took months in the case of the Cole bombing. Bottom line, sir, we may know very soon or it may take some time,” Morell concluded.

In fact, it would be only a matter of hours. When Bush landed
in Nebraska at around 3:30 p.m., he spoke for the first time to CIA director George Tenet. Tenet told him that the attacks “
looked, smelled, and tasted like bin Laden,” particularly because the names of two known al-Qaeda associates, Nawaf al-Hamzi and Khalid al-Mihdhar, had been found on the passenger manifests of one of the crashed planes. For the past several months,
as many as sixty CIA employees had known that Hamzi and Mihdhar were living in the United States, but they had inexplicably failed to inform the FBI.

Over the next few days, Bush and his war cabinet set in motion a plan to overthrow the Taliban in Afghanistan—unconventional in that it
relied on only some four hundred U.S. Green Berets, Special Operations forces, and CIA personnel on the ground, combined with massive American firepower from the air. And
on September 17, Bush signed a highly classified authorization to hunt down and, if necessary, kill the leaders of al-Qaeda, allowing the CIA great leeway as to how to get the job done. One of the top lawyers at the Agency, John Rizzo, who had joined the CIA at the height of the Cold War and who helped draft the authorization, says, “
I had never in my experience been part of or ever seen a presidential authorization as far-reaching and as aggressive in scope. It was simply extraordinary.” The same day that Bush signed this “finding,” he spoke with reporters at the Pentagon, saying, “
I want justice. And there’s an old poster out West, I recall, that said, ‘Wanted, Dead or Alive.’ ”

O
N SEPTEMBER
12, at his office in Islamabad, Jamal Ismail, Abu Dhabi Television’s correspondent in Pakistan,
received a messenger from bin Laden, who told him, “Jamal, I came last night in a hurry from Afghanistan.” The messenger read a statement from bin Laden that, while it did not claim responsibility for the attacks,
endorsed them heartily: “We believe what happened in Washington and elsewhere against the Americans was punishment from Almighty Allah, and they were good people who did this. We agree with them.” Ismail quickly read this message out on Abu Dhabi TV.

Ismail, a savvy Palestinian journalist long based in Pakistan, had known bin Laden on and off over the course of a
decade and a half, having worked as a reporter in the mid-1980s for
Jihad
magazine, an organ funded by bin Laden that publicized the exploits of the Arabs then fighting the Soviets. Ismail had recently resumed his relationship with bin Laden when he interviewed him at length for a documentary profile that aired on Al Jazeera in 1999. Ismail thought that the message from bin Laden about the 9/11 attacks meant that bin Laden likely knew far more than he was publicly saying about the hijackers. “Osama never praised anyone who is non-Muslim. From this I determined he knows something, and he’s confident of their identity.
They have links,” Ismail said.

The Bush administration quickly demanded that the Taliban hand over bin Laden, something that Clinton administration officials had also repeatedly
requested, to no avail, in the years following al-Qaeda’s attacks on the U.S. embassies in Africa in 1998. Abu Walid al-Misri, an Egyptian living in Kandahar who was close to both al-Qaeda and the Taliban, remembers Mullah Omar pronouncing, “
I will not hand over a Muslim to an infidel.”

Mullah Omar explained to Taliban insiders, “
Islam says that when a Muslim asks for shelter, give the shelter and never hand him over to the enemy. And our Afghan tradition says that, even if your enemy asks for shelter, forgive him and give him shelter. Osama has helped the jihad in Afghanistan, he was with us in bad days and I am not going to give him to anyone.”

Rahimullah Yusufzai, one of Pakistan’s leading journalists, interviewed Mullah Omar many times in person and on the phone.
Both before and after 9/11, the Taliban leader was adamant on the issue of handing bin Laden over to the Americans,
telling Yusufzai, “I don’t want to go down in history as someone who betrayed his guest. I am willing to give my life, my regime. Since we have given bin Laden refuge I cannot throw him out now.”

Mullah Omar put great store in the power of dreams to guide him.
Omar asked Yusufzai, “Have you been to the White House? My brother had a dream that there was a White House in flames. I don’t know how to interpret this.” Omar was also convinced that Washington’s threats of serious consequences if bin Laden weren’t handed over were mostly bluster. Mullah Abdul Salam Zaeef, the Taliban’s ambassador to Pakistan, says
Mullah Omar naïvely believed that the United States would not launch a military operation in Afghanistan: “In Mullah Omar’s mind there was a less than ten percent chance that America would resort to anything beyond threats.” Zaeef disagreed and told Omar “that America would definitely attack Afghanistan.”

Mullah Omar’s delusional fanaticism was entirely predictable. When he came to power, he anointed himself the “Commander of the Faithful,” a rarely invoked religious title from the seventh century, suggesting that he was the leader not only of the Taliban but
of Muslims everywhere. To cement his status as a world-historic Muslim leader, in 1996 Mullah Omar had wrapped himself literally and metaphorically in the “Cloak of the Prophet,” a religious relic purportedly worn by the Prophet Mohammed that had been kept in Kandahar for centuries and had almost never been displayed in public. Taking the garment out of storage, Omar ascended the roof of a building and draped the cloak on himself before a crowd of
hundreds of cheering Taliban.

The Taliban leader was barely educated and determinedly provincial; in the five years that he controlled Afghanistan, he rarely
visited Kabul, his own capital, considering it to be a Sodom and Gomorrah. Other than the Taliban’s Radio Sharia, there was no Afghan press to speak of, and so Mullah Omar’s understanding of the outside world was nonexistent, a stance he cultivated by assiduously avoiding meeting with non-Muslims. On a rare occasion when he met with a group of Chinese diplomats, they presented him with a small figurine of an animal as a gift. The Taliban leader reacted as if they had handed him “
a piece of red-hot coal,” so strong was his ultrafundamentalist aversion to images of living beings. In short, Mullah Omar was a dim-witted fanatic with significant delusions of grandeur who believed he was on a mission from Allah. The history of negotiations with such men is not encouraging.

The curtain raiser for how Mullah Omar was going to handle the bin Laden matter was how he had dealt with the issue of the great Buddhas at Bamiyan several months earlier. Looming over the snowcapped central Afghan valley of Bamiyan for more than fifteen hundred years, the
two giant Buddhas were carved out of sandstone cliffs, the larger one towering 180 feet above the valley, as high as a fifteen-story building, while the smaller Buddha stood around twelve stories tall. The Buddhas were Afghanistan’s most famous tourist attraction. They had survived the Mongolian hordes of Genghis Khan and every wave of invaders since. In May 2001, influenced by al-Qaeda’s opposition to any portrayals of the human form, the Taliban announced that they
planned to destroy the Buddhas using explosives.

Many countries around the world, including a number of Muslim states, pleaded with the Taliban not to engage in this epic act of cultural vandalism. Their pleas seemed to make Mullah Omar all the more determined to blow up the statues. He
told a visiting delegation of Pakistani officials that over the centuries rainfall had formed large holes near the base of the statues, which was God’s
way of saying, “This is the place you should plant the dynamite to destroy the idols.”

Bin Laden himself flew up to Bamiyan from Kandahar in a helicopter to spend half a day
helping to wreck the statues. He and an acolyte banged their shoes on the heads of the Buddhas—a great show of disrespect in the Arab world. While bin Laden was in Bamiyan, the Taliban were in the middle of their lengthy effort to destroy the statues, launching a missile at one of the Buddhas, because explosives had not fully destroyed it. Bin Laden then wrote a letter to Mullah Omar congratulating him on the Buddhas’ destruction, adding, “I pray to God, after having granted you success in destroying the dead, deaf, and mute false Gods [the Bamiyan Buddhas] that He will grant you success in destroying the living false gods [such as] the United Nations.”

A week after 9/11, Mullah Omar convened hundreds of Afghan clerics in Kabul to have them weigh in about what to do with bin Laden. Mullah Omar did not attend the convocation himself, but in a message to the assembly, he said that if the United States had evidence of bin Laden’s guilt in the 9/11 attacks, it should be handed over to the Taliban and his fate would then be decided by a group of Afghan religious scholars. At the end of the two-day convention, the assembled clerics
called on bin Laden to leave Afghanistan voluntarily so war could be avoided. Bin Laden, of course, didn’t accede to this request.

As the convocation of clerics wound down in Kabul, U.S. officials were getting their first break in the hunt for bin Laden, two thousand miles to the southwest of Afghanistan in the Yemeni capital of Sana’a. On September 17, FBI Special Agent Ali Soufan and Robert McFadden, an investigator from the Naval Criminal Investigative Service, began interrogating Abu Jandal, who had served as bin Laden’s chief bodyguard for years. Abu Jandal, whose real name
is Nasser Ahmed Naser al-Bahri, had been jailed in a Yemeni prison since 2000. The two American investigators, who both spoke Arabic and had significant experience investigating al-Qaeda, used the standard, noncoercive “
informed interrogator” approach, in which they pretended to know far more than they did.

The FBI 302s, the official summaries of these interrogations, reveal that Abu Jandal divulged a great deal of information—intelligence that was especially valuable to investigators because it largely concerned the time after 1996 when bin Laden and his followers had moved to Afghanistan, a period of al-Qaeda’s history that was then poorly understood. Soufan recalls that the bodyguard “named
dozens and dozens of people” in the organization. Abu Jandal explained al-Qaeda’s bureaucratic structure, the names and duties of its leaders, the qualifications necessary for membership in the group, the regime in its training camps, the location of its guesthouses in Kabul, and its method of encoded radio communications. He
picked out eight of the 9/11 hijackers from photos and he named a dozen members of bin Laden’s security detail and revealed that they were armed with SAM-7 missiles, Russian PK machine guns, and rocket-propelled grenades. He explained that al-Qaeda’s leader usually traveled in a group of about a dozen bodyguards in a motorcade of three Toyota Hilux pickup trucks, each containing a maximum of five armed guards. And he provided a richly detailed seven-page account of the various machine guns, mortars, mines, sniper rifles, surface-to-air missiles, and radar facilities possessed by al-Qaeda and the Taliban.

Crucially, Abu Jandal told his interrogators that highly effective U.S. Stinger anti-aircraft missiles that had fallen into the hands of al-Qaeda and the Taliban—a legacy of the Afghan war against the Soviets—were chronically short of batteries, vital intelligence
for U.S. military planners as they planned for the invasion of Afghanistan.

O
VER THE NEXT SEVERAL WEEKS
, as the Bush administration planned its response to the 9/11 attacks, the CIA secretly worked to widen existing fissures between the Taliban and al-Qaeda. The Agency was well aware that several Taliban leaders had long been fed up with bin Laden’s antics on the world stage. Robert Grenier, the CIA station chief in Pakistan, had intelligence that the number two in the Taliban, Mullah Akhtar Mohammad Osmani, was in particular not a fan of bin Laden’s. “We knew
how deeply resented the Arabs were. The Afghans were quite conscious, being great manipulators themselves, about the extent to which bin Laden, through selected use of donations, was trying to manipulate them to build up his own loyal following within the Taliban,” says Grenier.

In late September, Grenier traveled to the Pakistani province of Balochistan, a sparsely populated desert region the size of Germany, for a clandestine meeting with Mullah Osmani. Mullah Omar himself had sanctioned the meeting between his number two and the CIA officer. For the meeting at the five-star Serena hotel in Quetta, the Baloch capital, Mullah Osmani came with a posse of armed guards festooned with bandoliers. Grenier is not one of the stereotypical CIA operations officers, who tend to be larger-than-life backslappers; he is understated, impeccably dressed, and thoughtful. But his offer to Mullah Osmani was a bold one. Grenier told the Taliban leader, “
The Americans are coming. You need to do something to dodge this bullet.”

Mullah Osmani, surprisingly, said, “I agree. We have to do something. What’s your idea?”

Grenier offered Mullah Osmani a deal—U.S. forces would covertly snatch bin Laden while the Taliban looked the other way—assuring him, “It doesn’t get any more simple. You just give us what we need to do it. Step aside; the man disappears. You could claim complete ignorance.”

Mullah Osmani took careful notes, saying, “I will go back and I will discuss this with Mullah Omar.”

Grenier met with Mullah Osmani again in Quetta on October 2 and presented him with an even more radical proposal: the CIA would assist with a coup against Mullah Omar, with the quid pro quo that bin Laden be handed over after the removal of the Taliban leader. Grenier suggested that Mullah Osmani seize Mullah Omar, cut off his ability to communicate, take control of the radio stations, and read out an announcement along the lines of “We are taking necessary action to save the Taliban movement because the Arabs have failed to meet their obligations as good guests and have perpetrated violence. The Arabs are no longer welcome and should immediately depart the country.”