Manhunt
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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.
OVER 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.”
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 wou
ld 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.”
ON OCTOBER 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.
HAMID MIR, 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 outsi
der 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.”
AS 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.