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.
2 TORA BORA
DESPITE 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.
In 1987, bin Laden started opening a crude road from Jaji to Jalalabad, which was then occupied by the Soviets; it went directly through the mountains of Tora Bora. It was a challenging task, for which he used bulldozers provided by his family’s construction company. It took more than six months to build the road, which only four-wheel-drive vehicles could navigate.
When bin Laden was exiled from Sudan in 1996, he chose to live in the Tora Bora settlement of Milawa, high up in the mountains, in an Afghan-style mud house encircled by lookout posts. He told visitors to his Tora Bora retreat, “I really feel secure in the mountains. I really enjoy my life when I’m here.” It was in Milawa that bin Laden took his older sons on all-day hiking expeditions, admonishing them, “We never know when war will strike. We must know our way out of the mountains.”
His three wives and more than a dozen children did not share bin Laden’s joy in living the life of medieval peasants in a place where the only light at night was from gas lanterns and the moon, and the only heat—in a place where fierce blizzards were common—was from a wood-burning metal stove. Hunger was a frequent companion to the bin Laden children, who lived on a subsistence diet of eggs, salty cheese, rice, and bread. Even honored guests, such as leading Palestinian journalist Abdel Bari Atwan, were fed a diet of salty cheese, fried eggs, and bread invariably caked with sand.
Almost a decade and a half after the Battle of Jaji, bin Laden would put his intimate knowledge of Tora Bora and its mountain passes to good use. Once it was obvious that the United States was planning a serious attack on Afghanistan, he envisioned Tora Bora as the place where he could reenact his heroic stand against the Soviets. During the 1987 Jaji engagement, which had also taken place during the holy month of Ramadan, bin Laden and some fifty Arab fighters had held off a much larger group of Soviet soldiers, including Soviet Special Forces, in a battle that lasted about a week before bin Laden and his colleagues were forced to retreat. Bin Laden’s stand at the Battle of Jaji received considerable attention in the Arab world, marking his ascension from mere financier of jihad to military commander and becoming a central part of his heroic self-image.
Before traveling to Tora Bora, bin Laden had dispatched Walid bin Attash, one of the planners of the bombing of the USS Cole in Yemen, to prepare for his arrival. Around the beginning of November a number of bin Laden’s bodyguards started stockpiling food and digging trenches and tunnels between some of the small caves that dot the mountains of Tora Bora.
At the same time, the CIA was closely monitoring bin Laden’s whereabouts. The Agency’s top official on the ground at that time was Gary Berntsen, a CIA operations officer who spoke Dari, one of the local languages. Shortly after the fall of Kabul, Berntsen received a stream of intelligence reports indicating that bin Laden and a group of his followers had retreated from Kabul to the Jalalabad area. A few days later Berntsen got “multiple hits” from sources on the ground that bin Laden had moved on to the cave complexes of Tora Bora.
The information that a large contingent of al-Qaeda fighters had moved to Tora Bora was relayed back to the Counterterrorist Center at CIA headquarters in Virginia, where it was fed into an electronic map that overlaid data of the Taliban and al-Qaeda positions and the locations of American Special Forces soldiers and CIA officers on the ground, and of allied Afghan forces. That map was then duplicated at Central Command (CENTCOM), the U.S. military headquarters in Tampa, Florida, which was coordinating the war effort. The CIA now predicted that “bin Laden would make a stand along the northern peaks of the Spin Ghar Mountains” at a place called Tora Bora.
In the last week of November, bin Laden gave a speech to his men holed up at Tora Bora, telling them it would be a “grave mistake and taboo to leave before the fight was over.” Al-Qaeda’s leader again gave a speech along similar lines to his followers in Tora Bora in early December. As his Tora Bora battlefield commander, bin Laden appointed Ibn al-Sheikh al-Libi, a tall, thin Libyan with a regal manner who had fought against the Soviets in Afghanistan and later commanded the Khaldan training camp, where Islamist militants from around the world had trained in the years before 9/11. Bin Laden was convinced that U.S. soldiers would soon land in the Spin Ghar Mountains by helicopter and that his men would inflict heavy losses on them. This never happened. Beyond this vague hope, bin Laden didn’t seem to have much of a battle plan, other than somehow to duplicate the mujahideen’s successes against the Soviets.
Unlike bin Laden’s vision of things, the battle—which took place over an area of some thirty square miles—turned out to be more a series of skirmishes between al-Qaeda’s foot soldiers and the ground forces of three fractious local Afghan warlords on the American payroll, punctuated by intense U.S. bombi
ng.
During this time, snow was falling steadily in the mountains, and the temperature at night often dipped below zero. Ayman Saeed Abdullah Batarfi, an articulate Yemeni orthopedic surgeon in his thirties, was asked by bin Laden to treat the injured. Around December 1, Batarfi told bin Laden he would have to send someone back to Jalalabad to get supplies, since he was out of medicine. As the casualties mounted, Batarfi resorted to doing amputations with knives and scissors. He told bin Laden that if they did not leave Tora Bora soon, “no one would stay alive” under the American bombardment. He noted that bin Laden had made few preparations for the Tora Bora battle and seemed preoccupied mostly with making his own escape from the battlefield.
One obstacle to his escape was that he was strapped for cash, money that would be vital if he and his men were to bribe their way out of Tora Bora and pay for shelter and travel expenses. A Yemeni al-Qaeda member traveled into Tora Bora to deliver $3,000 to the al-Qaeda leader. Bin Laden also borrowed $7,000 from a local cleric.
Back in Washington and at CENTCOM in Tampa, there was growing certainty that bin Laden was now trapped at Tora Bora. Lieutenant General Michael DeLong, the deputy commander of CENTCOM, remembers, “We were hot on Osama bin Laden’s trail. He was definitely there when we hit [the Tora Bora] caves. Every day during the bombing, [Secretary of Defense Donald] Rumsfeld asked me, ‘Did we get him? Did we get him?’ ” On November 20, Vice President Dick Cheney told ABC News that bin Laden “was equipped to go to ground there. He’s got what he believes to be secure facilities, caves underground. It’s an area he’s familiar with. He operated there during the war against the Soviets in the eighties.”
Dalton Fury (a pseudonym), a thirty-seven-year-old major in the elite and secretive Delta Force commandos, led the small Western forces hunting bin Laden at Tora Bora, which comprised about seventy American and British Special Operations soldiers and CIA officers. From the beginning of the operation, Fury had identified the central weakness in the American plan at Tora Bora: there was no one to guard the escape routes into Pakistan. Fury recommended in late November that his own Delta team be dropped into Tora Bora at eight thousand feet or so. Equipped with oxygen, his team would then climb to fourteen thousand feet to reach the tallest peaks in the area—a trek that would take a few days—and from there descend to attack al-Qaeda’s positions from above, the direction from which bin Laden’s followers would least expect them. Somewhere in the chain of command, that request was turned down.
Despite the casualties they were taking and the extreme weather conditions, al-Qaeda fighters were still able to lay down somewhat effective mortar barrages and small-arms fire. Mohammed Zahir, who commanded a group of thirty Afghan militiamen on the front lines throughout the Battle of Tora Bora, skirmished with Arab and Pakistani militants fighting with rockets and machine guns, a formidable force that could be taken on only with the help of the American bombing raids on al-Qaeda’s positions. Muhammad Musa, a commander who led hundreds of Afghan soldiers on the Tora Bora front lines, recalled the fanatical bravery of bin Laden’s fighters: “They fought very hard with us. When we captured them, they committed suicide with grenades. I saw three of them do that myself.” Al-Qaeda fighters were no doubt buoyed by the fact that they were fighting during the holy month of Ramadan, as it was at the Battle of Badr during Ramadan that the Prophet Mohammed had led a small group of Muslims to victory fourteen centuries earlier, against a much larger army of infidels.
On the morning of December 3, heavy American bombing began, and continued around the clock. It was the beginning of a four-day period during which seven hundred thousand pounds of American bombs rained down on Tora Bora. During this period, bin Laden was videotaped by an al-Qaeda member instructing his followers how best to dig trenches in which to shelter. On the tape a bomb explodes in the distance. Bin Laden comments without evident concern in his voice, “We were there last night.”
As the American bombing increased in intensity, bin Laden reminisced fondly with his deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, about the nineteen 9/11 hijackers, talking about each one with emotion. Fearing that he would be killed by the American bombardment and wanting to be sure that he had properly memorialized these heroic “martyrs,” he wrote out nineteen death certificates for the hijackers.
The Afghan warlords on the ground who were working with the Americans were at odds with one another, and every evening during the battle, they and their foot soldiers retreated to their homes as dusk fell to observe the Ramadan breaking of the fast. On the evening of December 3, realizing that the Afghan ground forces were not up to the job of encircling al-Qaeda’s hard core, CIA officer Gary Berntsen sent out a lengthy message to headquarters asking for up to eight hundred elite Army Rangers to assault the complex of caves where bin Laden and his lieutenants were believed to be hiding and to block their escape routes. Berntsen’s boss, Henry A. Crumpton, who was by that time “100 percent” certain that bin Laden was bottled up in the Tora Bora mountains, called the CENTCOM commander General Tommy Franks, who had overall control of the Tora Bora operation, to request the additional soldiers. Franks pushed back, pointing out that the American “small footprint” approach had worked well during the overthrow of the Taliban, and also that it would take weeks to get more U.S. soldiers on the ground. Franks never asked Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld for more troops at Tora Bora, and Rumsfeld didn’t ask Franks if he needed them.
General Franks also believed the United States could rely on the Pakistanis to cut off fleeing members of al-Qaeda. “I think it was a pretty good determination, to provide support to that operation, and to work with the Pakistanis along the Pakistani border to bring it to conclusion,” he said in a 2002 interview. The assumption that the Pakistanis had their side of the border covered was, at best, wishful thinking. Crumpton had repeatedly warned the White House, his own CIA leadership, and CENTCOM that the Pakistanis were not capable of securing their border. President Bush even asked Crumpton directly if the Pakistanis would seal the border, to which he replied, “No, sir.”
Delta ground commander Dalton Fury remembers that, to rectify that problem, in early December his squadron commander suggested dropping GATOR antipersonnel mines from the air into the Tora Bora passes leading to Pakistan, mines that disable themselves after a set period of days. This request also died somewhere farther up the chain of command.
The Delta team set up camp near Tora Bora and tried to press closer toward al-Qaeda’s positions to get “eyes on target.” They directed laser beams on al-Qaeda targets so that accurate air strikes could be called in. By now the latest intelligence placed bin Laden squarely in Tora Bora. On December 9, a U.S. bomber dropped a fifteen-thousand-pound bomb known as a “daisy cutter” on al-Qaeda’s positions. That night, al-Qaeda member Abu Jafar al-Kuwaiti was “awakened to the sound of massive and terrorizing explosions very near to us.” The following day, members of al-Qaeda received the awful news that the trench of “Sheikh Osama” had been destroyed. But bin Laden had survived, having moved his position just before the daisy cutter strike.
The day after the daisy cutter was dropped, the U.S. National Security Agency picked up an intercept from Tora Bora: “Father [bin Laden] is trying to break through the siege line.” At about 4:00 p.m., Afghan soldiers said that they had spotted bin Laden. In Washington, Paul Wolfowitz, the number two official at the Pentagon, told reporters that bin Laden was likely at Tora Bora, saying, “We don’t have any credible evidence of him being in other parts of Afghanistan or outside of Afghanistan.”
By December 11, bin Laden realized that his only hope was escape. He told his men he was leaving them, and just after nightfall he prayed with his most loyal bodyguards. That same day, al-Qaeda leaders suggested a cease-fire to Hajji Zaman, one of the Afghan warlords on the U.S. payroll, saying that they would surrender the following morning. Much to the anger of his American sponsors, Zaman agreed to the cease-fire, and that night some of the militants holed up in Tora Bora, including bin Laden, began t
heir retreat out of their mountain refuge.
American signals operators on the ground at Tora Bora now intercepted radio transmissions from bin Laden addressing his followers. “I am sorry for getting you involved in this battle. If you can no longer resist, you may surrender with my blessing,” he said in one of them. Fury kept a careful log of these intercepted communications, which he typed up at the end of each day and passed on up his chain of command.
A Pentagon official back in Washington, who had been tracking bin Laden intensively since 1997, was monitoring all this in real time. “Everyone in the community who was working on al-Qaeda was absolutely aware of every radio message that was coming in and every sit rep that was coming back from our SOF [Special Operations Forces] guys. There was a lot of attention being paid to it.” The official remembers that he and his colleagues were excited because it seemed to them that now bin Laden would make his final stand. They did not think that bin Laden would try to escape because it would so damage his credibility with al-Qaeda and the wider jihadist movement. “Little did we know that this was his farewell message,” says the official. It was a miscalculation the Pentagon would come to regret.
The man responsible for the deadliest terrorist attack in U.S. history, along with many of his top lieutenants, was making his escape. Why was there no effort to put more American boots on the ground, beyond the total of several dozen Delta operators, Green Berets, U.S. Air Force tactical air controllers, and CIA officers already in Tora Bora? Lieutenant General DeLong says the Pentagon did not want to put many American soldiers on the ground because of a concern that they would be treated like enemies by the locals: “The mountains of Tora Bora are situated deep in territory controlled by tribes hostile to the United States and any outsiders. The reality is if we put our troops in there we would inevitably end up fighting Afghan villagers—creating bad will at a sensitive time.”
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