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

Some in al-Qaeda continued to push the idea that 9/11 and its
aftermath had been a great success for the movement. In an internal “after-action” report about the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, an anonymous al-Qaeda writer applauded the strategic wisdom of the attacks: “
Targeting America was a very smart choice strategically because the conflict with America’s followers in the Islamic world showed that these followers cannot stay on top of their tyrant regimes without America’s support. So why keep fighting the body when you can kill the head.” The after-action report also celebrated the media attention that the 9/11 attacks had generated: “
The giant American media machine was defeated in a judo-like strike from Sheikh bin Laden. CNN cameras and other media dinosaurs took part in framing the attacks and spreading the fear, without costing al-Qaeda a dime.”

Similarly, Saif al-Adel, one of the group’s military commanders, explained in an interview published four years after the fall of the Taliban that the attacks on New York and Washington were part of a diabolically clever plan to get the United States to overreact and attack Afghanistan: “
Our ultimate objective of these painful strikes against the head of the serpent was to prompt it to come out of its hole.… Such strikes will force the person to carry out random acts and provoke him to make serious and sometimes fatal mistakes.… The first reaction was the invasion of Afghanistan.”

This was a post facto rationalization of al-Qaeda’s strategic failure. The whole point of the 9/11 attacks had been to get the United States
out
of the Muslim world, not to provoke it into invading and occupying Afghanistan and overthrowing al-Qaeda’s closest ideological ally, the Taliban. September 11, in fact, resembled Pearl Harbor. Just as the Japanese scored a tremendous tactical victory on December 7, 1941, they also set in motion a chain of events that led to the eventual collapse of Imperial Japan. So, too, the 9/11 attacks
set in motion a chain of events that would lead to the destruction of much of al-Qaeda and, eventually, the death of its leader.

I
T WAS CODE-NAMED
GREYSTONE
, and was arguably the most expansive covert action program in the history of the CIA. Authorized by President Bush in the wake of 9/11, the program encompassed the aggressive pursuit of al-Qaeda suspects around the globe,
dozens of whom were snatched from wherever they were living and then “rendered” in CIA-leased planes to countries such as Egypt and Syria, where they were tortured by the local security services. The program introduced the use of what the CIA called “enhanced interrogation techniques,” including waterboarding, and led to the establishment of a secret CIA prison system in eastern Europe for “high-value” prisoners. Top CIA lawyer John Rizzo says, “
The consensus of the experts, the counterterrorism analysts, and our psychologists, was that for any interrogation program of high value, senior al-Qaeda officials—and we’re talking here about the worst of the worst, the most psychopathic but knowledgeable of the entire al-Qaeda system—that for any interrogation to have any effect, it was essential that these people be held in absolute isolation, with access to the fewest number of people.” The presidential authorization also allowed the CIA to kill the leaders of al-Qaeda and allied groups using drones.

The urgency of finding bin Laden was underlined
when the CIA discovered that he had met with retired Pakistani nuclear scientists during the summer of 2001 to discuss the possibility of al-Qaeda developing a nuclear device. General Richard Myers, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, says that
six weeks after 9/11, Bush told a meeting of his National Security Council that bin Laden “may have a nuclear
device” big enough to destroy half of Washington. In fact, al-Qaeda had nothing of the sort, but in the panicked aftermath of 9/11, such a threat could not be easily discounted.

Famously, President Bush kept a list in a
drawer of his desk of the most-wanted al-Qaeda leaders. The list was
in the form of a pyramid, with bin Laden at the top. As al-Qaeda leaders were captured or killed, Bush would cross them off the list. For about a year after the fall of the Taliban regime, Bush believed that the leader of al-Qaeda might already be dead. After all, throughout much of 2002 nothing was heard from bin Laden that established “proof of life.” “The president thought maybe we got him already. He’s dead, and we don’t know it. [Killed at] Tora Bora or somewhere else,” recalls Bush’s press secretary, Ari Fleischer.

The uncertainty about bin Laden’s status would begin to change at 10:00 p.m. on November 12, 2002, when Ahmad Zaidan, the Al Jazeera bureau chief in Pakistan, received a
call on his cell phone from a strange number. A man with a Pakistani accent said in English, “I have something interesting and a scoop for you. Meet me at Melody Market, behind the Islamabad hotel.” Zaidan drove through a heavy rainstorm and parked his car at the market, usually crowded with hawkers and shoppers, but now deserted because of the bad weather and late hour. As soon as he got out of the car, a man with his face wrapped in a scarf approached him and handed him an audiotape, saying, “This is from Osama bin Laden.”

Zaidan demanded “Hold on,” but bin Laden’s messenger vanished as quickly as he had materialized. Zaidan shoved the audiocassette in the tape player of his car and recognized immediately that it was bin Laden’s voice, and that what al-Qaeda’s leader was saying on the tape was definitive proof that he had survived the Tora Bora battle. It was quite a scoop for Al Jazeera.

Back at his office, Zaidan started feeding the bin Laden audiotape to Al Jazeera’s headquarters in Qatar. The news soon flashed around the world: “Bin Laden Alive.”
On the tape bin Laden celebrated a string of recent terrorist attacks perpetrated by his followers: the bombing of a synagogue in Tunisia, the attack on a French oil tanker off the coast of Yemen, and the suicide bombings at two nightclubs on the Indonesian island of Bali that killed two hundred mostly young Western tourists. This was a comprehensive “proof of life,” and any faint hopes that bin Laden might have succumbed to the wounds he sustained at Tora Bora had been dashed. The night the tape surfaced, National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice called President Bush in his residential quarters at the White House to tell him the bad news that bin Laden was alive and well.

Bin Laden was alive, but where was he? The consensus in the U.S. government for the first few years after 9/11 was that he was hiding in or around Pakistan’s tribal areas, where al-Qaeda had started to rebuild itself after the Battle of Tora Bora. Some intelligence officials also thought he might be living in the far north of Pakistan, in the sparsely populated mountains of Chitral. This analysis was based in part on trees native to the region that could be seen in a 2003 video of bin Laden, and on the
length of time it seemed to take for audiotapes from bin Laden to make their way to outlets such as Al Jazeera. When bin Laden commented on important news events, it usually took about three weeks for the tapes to make their way to the public. But even that pattern was sometimes upended. After al-Qaeda’s Saudi wing attacked the U.S. consulate in Jeddah in early December 2004, killing five employees, bin Laden released an audiotape crowing over this victory that was made public in just over a week. Maybe he wasn’t in remote Chitral after all?

——

A
FTER THE FALL OF THE TALIBAN
, many of the leaders of al-Qaeda did not, in fact, go to ground in Pakistan’s tribal areas. Some slipped into Iran, but most preferred to hide in the anonymity of Karachi, one of the largest cities in the world. One of bin Laden’s oldest sons, Saad bin Laden, who had recently taken on something of a leadership role in al-Qaeda, spent the first six months of 2002
living in Karachi. He helped one of his aunts and several of his father’s children move from Pakistan to Iran, where they subsequently lived under house arrest for years. Saad joined them in Iran along with a number of other prominent leaders of al-Qaeda, such as Saif al-Adel, a former Egyptian Special Forces officer who had fought against the Soviets in Afghanistan. From Iran,
Adel authorized al-Qaeda’s branch in Saudi Arabia to begin a series of terrorist attacks in the Saudi kingdom that began in Riyadh in May 2003, a campaign that killed scores.

From one of their safe houses in Karachi, two of the key planners of 9/11, KSM and Ramzi bin al-Shibh, gave an extensive interview to an Al Jazeera reporter in the spring of 2002 that
laid out in detail how they had planned the attacks on New York and Washington. Several months later, on the first anniversary of 9/11, bin al-Shibh was arrested in Karachi along with other members of al-Qaeda. Recovered in their safe house were
twenty packages of passports and documents belonging to bin Laden’s wives and children, underlining the key role that Karachi played for bin Laden’s family and inner circle after the fall of the Taliban.

Karachi, the business capital of Pakistan, was also where al-Qaeda did its banking. While bin Laden was strapped for cash in Tora Bora during the winter of 2001, in Karachi the following year, KSM was
routinely handling hundreds of thousands of dollars. KSM gave $130,000, for instance, to the Southeast Asian terrorist group
Jemaah Islamiya, after its successful terrorist attacks in Bali in October 2002.

In Karachi,
KSM planned a second wave of attacks on the West, dreaming up a plan to crash planes into Heathrow airport and scheming about how to use remote-controlled explosive devices hidden inside Sega game cartridges, which al-Qaeda was then developing. He also hoped to relaunch al-Qaeda’s fledgling anthrax research program, discussing the possibility with Yazid Sufaat, a Malaysian who had studied biochemistry at California Polytechnic State University and had previously tried, unsuccessfully, to develop “weaponized” anthrax for al-Qaeda. Sufaat confided to KSM that he had gotten himself vaccinated against anthrax so that he wouldn’t be affected by his research for al-Qaeda, but the program never got off the ground.

KSM’s plotting came to an abrupt end when he was captured in Rawalpindi on March 1, 2003, in a 3:00 a.m. raid in the city that is home to the headquarters of Pakistan’s army. He was caught with the help of an informant who slipped into the bathroom of a house where the terrorist was staying, then text-messaged his American controllers, “
I am with KSM.” Later that night al-Qaeda’s “chief of external operations” was arrested.

T
HE ARREST OF KSM
brought the CIA a trove of intelligence. Not only was he carrying three letters from bin Laden, one of them
addressed to family members in Iran, but the CIA also gained hold of his computer. On the
20-gigabyte hard drive, in a document titled “Merchant’s Schedule,” intelligence officers found a list of the names of 129 al-Qaeda operatives and an accounting of their monthly allowances. Spreadsheets on the computer listed families
who had received financial assistance from the terrorist group; there was also a list of wounded and killed “martyrs” and
passport photos of operatives.

None of this, however, led the CIA any closer to bin Laden.

In October 2003, bin Laden
called for attacks against Western countries whose troops were fighting in Iraq; subsequently, terrorists bombed a
British consulate in Turkey and commuters
on their way to work in Madrid. And on the eve of the 2004 U.S. presidential election, bin Laden suddenly appeared in a videotape mocking Bush for reading the story about the pet goat at the elementary school in Florida while the 9/11 attacks were in progress. On that tape, bin Laden also responded to Bush’s frequent claim that al-Qaeda was attacking the United States because of its freedoms rather than its foreign policy, saying sardonically, “Contrary to Bush’s claims that we hate freedom.
If that were true, then let him explain to us why we do not attack Sweden?” In December 2004, bin Laden
called for attacks on Saudi oil facilities, and a
rash of attacks on energy companies and refineries followed.

Despite the taunting videotapes, a number of key al-Qaeda operatives were run to ground between 2002 and 2005. All of them were captured in Pakistan’s packed cities. Members of al-Qaeda faced a dilemma: if they stopped using their phones or the Internet, it made them much harder to find, but it also made it more difficult to plan terrorist attacks and communicate with colleagues. In the end,
few al-Qaeda operatives threw away their cell phones or stopped using the Internet. The CIA used
newly emerging geolocation technologies to home in on those phones and the locations of the IP addresses used by those operatives. KSM was tracked down in part through his use of
Swiss cell phone SIM cards, which were popular among al-Qaeda operatives because they carried prepaid minutes and could be purchased without the buyer providing a name.

The CIA also used relatively new software to map potential connections between suspected terrorists and suspect cell phone numbers, such as the program called Analyst’s Notebook. A
Silicon Valley outfit named Palantir became a favorite of U.S. intelligence agencies, doing hundreds of millions of dollars of business every year because of its ability to collate information from multiple databases and put together as complete a picture as possible of a suspect. And a whole new category of job was created at the CIA: that of the “
targeter,” someone who helped the terrorist hunters by assembling any scrap of information from a suspect’s “
digital exhaust,” that is, from cell phones, ATM transactions, and any other available information. Additional resources devoted to attacking al-Qaeda quickly flowed to the CIA. Within the first year after 9/11, the Counterterrorist Center at the Agency
mushroomed from 340 to 1,500 operatives and analysts.

Relations between the CIA and Pakistan’s military intelligence service, ISI, were reasonably good during the first years after 9/11. After all, al-Qaeda was a common enemy that was also targeting Pakistan’s president, General Pervez Musharraf, the subject of
two serious assassination attempts by the terrorist group in December 2003. General Asad Munir, who was in charge of ISI’s operations in the North-West Frontier Province in the first years after 9/11, recalls of the CIA, “
We had so much trust with all their people. There was nothing hidden.” Munir says that on dozens of operations in 2002 he worked closely with the CIA, which had few officers on the ground and needed the manpower ISI could provide.