Manhunt: The Ten-Year Search for Bin Laden--From 9/11 to Abbottabad (6 page)

Mullah Osmani listened to all this and said, “The whole idea is very interesting. I’ll think about it. Let’s set up communication so that we can talk to each other.” He seemed buoyed by the discussion and sat down for a robust lunch with the CIA officer. In the end, though, Mullah Osmani didn’t go through with the coup idea.
Grenier thought perhaps Osmani just could not conceive of himself as the overall leader of the Taliban.

At the same time, bin Laden
shuttled between his headquarters in Kandahar and al-Qaeda’s guesthouses in Kabul. Once it was obvious that the United States was readying an attack on Afghanistan, bin Laden wrote to Mullah Omar on October 3 to alert him to a recent survey showing that seven out of ten Americans were
suffering from psychological problems following the 9/11 attacks. In the
letter, bin Laden asserted that an American attack on Afghanistan would begin the United States’ self-destruction, causing “long-term economic burdens which will force America to resort to the former Soviet Union’s only option: withdrawal from Afghanistan, disintegration, and contraction.”

O
N
O
CTOBER
7, as the U.S. Air Force started bombing Taliban positions, bin Laden was in
Kandahar meeting with Mullah Mansour, a top Taliban official. Bin Laden and his entourage
quickly decamped for Kabul, likely calculating it would be safer there since there were fewer Taliban leadership targets and a larger civilian population. The same day, al-Qaeda’s leader made a
surprise appearance in a videotape that was shown around the world. Dressed in a camouflage jacket with a submachine gun propped at his side, bin Laden, in his first public comments since 9/11, said that the attacks were revenge for the long-standing Western humiliation of the Muslim world.

“There is America, hit by God in one of its softest spots,” bin Laden said. “Its greatest buildings were destroyed, thank God for that. There is America, full of fear from its north to its south, from its west to its east. Thank God for that. What America tastes now is something insignificant compared to what we have tasted for scores of years. Our nation [the Islamic world] has tasted this humiliation and this degradation for more than eighty years.”

Despite his approving remarks, bin Laden’s initial stance was total denial of his role in the attacks. In late September, for example, al-Qaeda’s leader told a Pakistani newspaper, “
As a Muslim, I try my best to avoid telling a lie. I had no knowledge of these attacks.” The truth is, bin Laden was in something of a bind: if he admitted to his role in the attacks, the Taliban defense that there was no
evidence that he was involved would be rendered moot, and Mullah Omar wouldn’t have much choice but to hand him over to the United States. Still, bin Laden’s ego demanded that he take
some
credit for what he believed to be his greatest accomplishment, and once the United States started to bomb Taliban targets in Afghanistan, he began asserting more ownership of the 9/11 attacks.

Tayseer Allouni of Al Jazeera television was one of the only international correspondents the Taliban had permitted to work in Afghanistan in the years before 9/11. Bin Laden sat down with Allouni for a
lengthy interview on October 21. For reasons that Al Jazeera never convincingly elucidated, the network did not air this interview for a year. At one point Al Jazeera explained that the decision not to broadcast the interview was because it wasn’t “
newsworthy,” an explanation that was risible. As this was his only post-9/11 television interview, it would have been news if bin Laden had simply read from the phone book.
It seems likely that the Qatari royal family, which owns Al Jazeera, caved to Bush administration pressure not to air the interview, at a time when Bush officials were also putting pressure on American broadcasters not to air “propaganda” from bin Laden.

In fact, the Al Jazeera interview was both wide-ranging and newsworthy, as became apparent three months later, when CNN obtained and broadcast it without Al Jazeera’s permission. During the interview, bin Laden appeared relaxed, and for the first time publicly, he explicitly linked himself to the 9/11 attacks. Allouni asked him, “America claims that it has proof that you are behind what happened in New York and Washington. What’s your answer?” Bin Laden replied, “If inciting people to do that is terrorism, and if killing those who are killing our sons is terrorism, then let history be our judge that we are terrorists.… We practice the good terrorism.”

Allouni followed up with a key question: “
How about the killing of innocent civilians?” Bin Laden countered: “The men that God helped [on September 11] did not intend to kill babies; they intended to destroy the strongest military power in the world, to attack the Pentagon.… [The World Trade Center is] not a children’s school.” Bin Laden gloated as he recounted to the Al Jazeera correspondent the large
economic consequences of the attacks: Wall Street stocks lost 16 percent of their value, airlines and air freight companies laid off 170,000 employees, and the hotel chain Intercontinental fired 20,000 workers.

In a meeting with a toadying Saudi supporter a few weeks after 9/11 that was filmed by al-Qaeda’s media arm, bin Laden showed that
he well understood the propaganda value of the attacks when he explained that the hijackers “said in deeds, in New York and Washington, speeches that overshadowed all other speeches made everywhere else in the world. The speeches are understood by both Arabs and non-Arabs—even by Chinese.” He added that 9/11 had even resulted in unprecedented conversions to Islam in countries such as Holland.

By now bin Laden was entering the realm of myth. For his supporters he was the noble “Emir of Jihad,” or Prince of Holy War—veneration he did not discourage. Self-consciously mimicking the Prophet Mohammed, who first received the revelations of the Koran in a cave, bin Laden made some of his early videotaped statements from the caves and mountains of Afghanistan. Pro–bin Laden rallies drew tens of thousands in Pakistan, and a beatific image of his face could be found on T-shirts throughout the Muslim world. To his detractors—and there were many, including Muslims—bin Laden was an evil man who had ordered the wanton murder of thousands of civilians in the city many see as the capital of the world. But
whether you admired or loathed him, there was little debate that he had become one of the few individuals in modern times who had unequivocally changed the direction of history.

H
AMID
M
IR
, the editor of the pro-Taliban Urdu newspaper
Ausaf
, was a
natural choice to conduct bin Laden’s only print interview following 9/11. On November 6, Mir was taken from his Islamabad office to meet with bin Laden in Kabul. On the way, he was
blindfolded and bundled up in a carpet in a van, arriving at an al-Qaeda safe house the morning of November 8. Mir, who had previously been skeptical that bin Laden was behind 9/11, started to change his mind when he saw pictures of Mohammed Atta, the lead hijacker, in the house where the interview took place.

Seemingly unaware that the
fall of Kabul was only four days away, bin Laden was in great spirits at their meeting, consuming a hearty breakfast of meat and olives. The Saudi terrorist leader privately admitted everything, reaching over to turn off Mir’s tape recorder and saying, “Yes, I did it. Okay. Now play your tape recorder.”
Mir turned the tape recorder back on, and bin Laden said, “No, I’m not responsible.”
When Mir asked him how he could justify the killing of so many civilians, bin Laden replied, “America and its allies are massacring us in Palestine, Chechnya, Kashmir, and Iraq. The Muslims have the right to attack America in reprisal.”

Mir asked bin Laden to comment on reports that he had tried to acquire nuclear and chemical weapons. Al-Qaeda’s leader replied, “
I wish to declare that if America used chemical or nuclear weapons against us, then we may respond with chemical and nuclear weapons. We have the weapons as a deterrent.” Mir followed up: “Where did you get these weapons from?” Bin Laden responded coyly, “Go to the next question.”

After the interview was finished, Mir had tea with bin Laden’s deputy, Dr. Ayman al-Zawahiri. “It is difficult to believe that you have nuclear weapons,”
Mir told Zawahiri.

“Mister Hamid Mir, it is not difficult,” Zawahiri replied. “If you have thirty million dollars, you can have these kind of nuclear suitcase bombs from the black market of Central Asia [in the former Soviet Union].”

This claim was entirely nonsensical. Al-Qaeda never possessed anything remotely close to a nuclear weapon, and the supposed black market in Soviet “nuclear suitcase bombs” exists in Hollywood, not in reality. So what was the point of the claim? It seems to have been a clumsy attempt at psychological warfare—an attempt to dissuade the Bush administration from its attacks on Afghanistan. Zawahiri, in particular, was well aware that the American national security establishment was anxious about terrorists acquiring weapons of mass destruction. Indeed,
two years earlier, Zawahiri had sanctioned the establishment of al-Qaeda’s amateur and poorly funded chemical and biological weapons program precisely because the United States seemed to be so worried about those weapons.

Around the same time that Mir was interviewing al-Qaeda’s leaders, another outsider was admitted to meet with members of al-Qaeda’s inner circle: Dr. Amer Aziz, a prominent Pakistani surgeon. Dr. Aziz, a Taliban sympathizer who had treated bin Laden in 1999 for a back injury, was
summoned to Kabul in early November 2001 to treat Mohammed Atef, a former Egyptian policeman who served as the military commander of al-Qaeda. While examining Atef, Dr. Aziz again met with bin Laden. For years there had been reports that the al-Qaeda leader suffered from kidney disease, but Dr. Aziz said those reports were false: “
He was in excellent health. He was walking. He was healthy. I didn’t see any evidence of kidney disease. I didn’t see any evidence of dialysis.”

A
S THE AMERICAN BOMBING
campaign intensified and U.S. Special Forces
began arriving in small numbers in northern Afghanistan, bin Laden had to start making serious contingency plans for the possibility that the Taliban and his al-Qaeda foot soldiers would soon be on the run. It was a kind of planning that he had neglected to do when he authorized the 9/11 attacks. In mid-October he met with Jalaluddin Haqqani, arguably the most effective military commander of the Taliban, whom bin Laden had known since the early days of the
jihad against the Soviets. Together they discussed the possibility of waging a long guerrilla war against the infidel Americans, as they had with the Soviets.
Haqqani was sure that the Americans were “creatures of comfort” who would be defeated in the long term. Around the same time, another warlord from the anti-Soviet war, Yunis Khalis,
invited bin Laden to move into his territory surrounding Jalalabad in eastern Afghanistan, the region where bin Laden had long maintained his Tora Bora country retreat.

On the same day as the Mir interview, bin Laden
attended a memorial ceremony for an Uzbek militant leader who had just been killed in a U.S. air strike. The next day, the Uzbek city of Mazar-e-Sharif, the largest city in northern Afghanistan, fell to the Northern Alliance and a small team of U.S. Special Forces. Twenty-four hours later, a bin Laden security advisor, Dr. Amin ul-Haq,
met with tribal elders in the area around Jalalabad and gave them each $10,000 and a horse, in exchange for which the elders agreed to provide refuge to the members of al-Qaeda who soon would be streaming toward Jalalabad, close to the border with Pakistan.

On November 12, Kabul also fell to the Northern Alliance forces. Just ahead of them, bin Laden and his followers hastened from Kabul down the steep, narrow, and
winding road to Jalalabad.

A few days later, Mohammed Atef was killed in a U.S. Predator drone air strike. Atef had been not only al-Qaeda’s military commander
but also bin Laden’s
chief executive officer,
working around the clock to manage al-Qaeda’s personnel and operations. He had been bin Laden’s closest collaborator in al-Qaeda since the group was founded in 1988. A Saudi member of al-Qaeda recalls that Atef’s death “
shocked us deeply, because this was the candidate to succeed bin Laden.”

Fearing for their safety, bin Laden’s son-in-law Muataz
made arrangements for three of bin Laden’s wives and a number of their younger children to leave Kandahar and cross over the border into Pakistan.

Two months after 9/11, bin Laden had lost his longtime military commander, much of his family was fleeing into exile, and the regime that had provided him his sanctuary was on life support. Instead of goading the United States into departing the Arab world, he was now facing a massive and relentless American bombing campaign and a reinvigorated Northern Alliance, allied to small groups of highly effective U.S. Special Forces and CIA officers. It was a disaster the scale of which bin Laden was only beginning to grasp. He had only one plan now, to flee to Tora Bora, a place he had known intimately since the mid-1980s, and mount there some kind of final stand before slipping away to fight another day.

D
ESPITE HIS RETREAT
, bin Laden seemed undaunted. In the small city of Jalalabad, al-Qaeda’s leaders and foot soldiers regrouped, and bin Laden gave rousing
pep talks to his men and to local supporters. Around the beginning of the holy month of Ramadan, on November 17, he and Ayman al-Zawahiri
and a contingent of bodyguards set off on the bumpy three-hour ride over a narrow mud-and-stone track to the mountains of Tora Bora, where they planned to dig in and face the coming American onslaught.

Tora Bora was an ideal base for guerrilla warfare. The Afghan mujahideen had routinely mounted hit-and-run operations against the Soviets from there during the 1980s because it had easy escape routes by foot to Parachinar, a region of Pakistan that juts like a parrot’s beak into Afghanistan. And bin Laden had fought his first major battle against the Soviets in 1987 at Jaji, a valley some twenty miles west of Tora Bora. Although Tora Bora had been the object of
several offensives by the Russians, one of them involving thousands of soldiers, dozens of helicopter gunships, and several MiG fighter jets, so solid are the caves that riddle the Spin Ghar Mountains surrounding
Tora Bora that the Soviet offensives were held off by a force of not much more than a hundred Afghans.