Steve Kappes, the deputy director of the CIA, and Michael Leiter, the head of the National Counterterrorism Center, formed a task force in the summer of 2008 that brought together a small, “compartmented,” or highly secret, group of key intelligence officials and experts from outside the intelligence community to think of innovative ways to find “Number One” and “Number Two.” The plan involved greatly increasing the number of drones flying over the tribal areas, putting more CIA case officers on the ground there, and ramping up cross-border raids by Special Operations Forces.
Bush ordered the CIA to expand its attacks with Predator and Reaper drones, and the U.S. government stopped seeking Pakistani officials’ “concurrence” or alerting them when strikes were imminent. As a result, the time taken to identify and shoot at a target dropped from many hours to forty-five minutes. The Predator and Reaper drones were controlled by the CIA and flown out of bases in Afghanistan and Pakistan, but were operated by “pilots” stationed at Creech Air Force Base in Nevada. After a day’s work shooting at targets on the other side of the world, the pilots went home to their families. More than two dozen feet in length, the drones lingered over the tribal areas looking for targets and were equipped to drop Hellfire missiles or JDAM (joint direct attack munition) bombs.
In the Pakistani tribal region of South Waziristan on July 28, 2008, a U.S. drone killed Abu Khabab al-Masri, who ran al-Qaeda’s crude chemical weapons program, along with two other militants. The assassination of Abu Khabab marked the beginning of a vastly ramped-up program to take out al-Qaeda’s leaders using drones in the waning months of the Bush administration, likely a legacy-building effort to dismantle the entire al-Qaeda leadership. Between July 2008 and the time he left office, President Bush authorized thirty Predator and Reaper strikes on Pakistani territory, compared with the six strikes the CIA launched during the first half of the year, a fivefold increase.
Other leading figures in al-Qaeda killed in the drone strikes in the final six months of Bush’s second term included Abu Haris, al-Qaeda’s chief in Pakistan; Khalid Habib, Abu Zubair al-Masri, Abu Wafa al-Saudi, and Abdullah Azzam al-Saudi, all senior members of the group; Abu Jihad al-Masri, al-Qaeda’s propaganda chief; and Usama al-Kini and Sheikh Ahmed Salim Swedan, who had played key roles in planning the 1998 bombings of the two American embassies in Africa. In half a year the drone attacks had killed half of the leadership of al-Qaeda in the tribal areas and had made the “number three” job in al-Qaeda one of the most dangerous in the world. But none of these drone strikes targeted bin Laden, who had simply vanished. “The whole time along, President Bush would ideally have loved to have been able to have gotten bin Laden,” says Ari Fleischer, Bush’s press secretary.
At the same time that he gave the green light to the accelerated drone attacks, Bush also authorized Special Operations Forces to carry out ground assaults in the tribal regions without the advance permission of the Pakistani government. On September 3, 2008, a team of Navy SEALs based in Afghanistan crossed the Pakistani border into South Waziristan to attack a compound housing militants in the village of Angoor Adda. Twenty of the occupants were killed, but many of them turned out to be women and children. The Pakistani press picked up on the attack, which then sparked vehement objections from Pakistani officials, who protested that it violated their national sovereignty. Pakistan’s chief of army staff, General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, bluntly said that Pakistan’s “territorial integrity … will be defended at all costs,” suggesting that any future insertion of American soldiers into Pakistan would be met by force. The cross-border missions by Special Operations ceased, but the drone attacks increased in intensity.
5 A WORKING THEORY OF THE CASE
CIA HEADQUARTERS in Langley, Virginia, is a grouping of modern buildings with the air of an upscale office park sprawling over acres of quiet woodland, twenty minutes’ drive from downtown Washington, D.C. Casual visits are not encouraged. To reach the main building, you negotiate first the visitors’ center—where machines constantly sniff the air for chemical and biological toxins and guards bristling with automatic weapons direct traffic—then walk for fifteen minutes down a narrow road screened off from the surrounding woods by high fencing topped with barbed wire, then pass the CIA’s own dedicated water tower and electrical plant. At the end of the road is a seven-story modernist glass-and-concrete building, the main headquarters, erected in the 1950s, its lobby paved with slabs of white marble. Emblazoned in the marble floor is the great seal of the Central Intelligence Agency, and engraved on a wall are words from the Gospel According to John: “And ye shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free.”
On one wall of the lobby are dozens of gold stars that represent CIA officers killed on the job since the Agency was founded in 1947. Beneath the gold stars, the names of the fallen are inscribed in black ink in a glass-encased book. In some cases there is only a star and no name in the book, as the officer remains, even in death, undercover. In the decade after 9/11, the names of two dozen CIA officers and contractors who died in the line of duty were added to the honor roll, a reminder that the Agency is much more than just another office complex in the Virginia suburbs.
On the ground floor of the main building is the Counterterrorism Center, which long oversaw the hunt for bin Laden. During the several years after he disappeared at the Battle of Tora Bora, the hunt for bin Laden sputtered, encountering dry hole after dry hole. Any news that came into the Counterterrorism Center about al-Qaeda’s leader was only in the form of “Elvis sightings,” recall the officials who were tracking him. But all the Elvis sightings still had to be run down, says the founder of the bin Laden unit, Michael Scheuer, “because after 9/11 the senior officers in the Agency and everywhere in the intelligence community were covering their asses. If you got a report that Osama was in Brazil, sunning himself in Rio, you had to at least respond to the cable. And so we were chasing enormous numbers of sightings. And because everybody was afraid something else was coming, we were tracking things down that a normal adult would have never done.”
In April 2002, Barbara Sude, a senior Agency analyst who had done her doctorate at Princeton in medieval Arabic thought and had been working full-time on al-Qaeda for years, joined a task force of analysts from various intelligence agencies who would meet regularly over the course of several weeks to brainstorm ideas about how to track down bin Laden. Sude had near-iconic status among the tight-knit group of veteran al-Qaeda analysts in the intelligence community, as she had been the principal author of the highly classified President’s Daily Brief delivered to President Bush on August 6, 2001, entitled “Bin Ladin Determined to Strike in the U.S.,” which made the case in some detail that al-Qaeda was planning an attack on the homeland. It would be another two years before the 9/11 Commission made that document public and many more years until Sude was first identified as its author. Sude had the reputation of being an “analyst’s analyst,” with a dispassionate interest in the facts, and of having a near-photographic memory of the many hundreds of reports produced by the intelligence community on al-Qaeda.
Sude remembers that, by early 2002, it was obvious to her and her colleagues that bin Laden’s trail had gone cold, so the best hope to find him was to try to map out the relationships of those who knew him best: What were his family connections? What were his links to the Afghan mujahideen groups that had fought the Soviets? Whom else did he trust? The analysts created a baseline assessment of bin Laden’s family and associates and a time line of all his activities. They circulated photos of what bin Laden might look like if he shaved off his beard and wore a Western-style pinstriped suit. “He was so weird looking,” Sude remembers. They also discussed the reward for bin Laden, which at the time stood at $25 million. Some analysts felt that many in Afghanistan couldn’t conceive of that kind of money in a country that was one of the poorest on the planet. Might it make sense actually to lower the reward? The reward remained where it was.
The analysts also produced papers ex
amining whether it would be better to kill bin Laden or to capture him. Bin Laden would likely become a martyr in death, which could well provoke retaliatory attacks, but he would, after all, be dead. A captured bin Laden would try to turn his trial into a soapbox for his poisonous views. There was also the possibility that bin Laden’s followers would try to kidnap Americans around the world as bargaining chips for springing their leader from captivity. And what if he died of some disease while in an American prison? Or was somehow killed by a fellow prisoner? Robert Dannenberg, the head of CIA counterterrorism operations, says that capturing bin Laden was never really on the table because of those concerns: “We wanted to make sure that we didn’t find ourselves in a situation where we were obliged to capture, not kill bin Laden.… We would much rather give him the five-hundred-pound bomb on his complex and pick up his DNA someplace than put him on trial.”
From the founding of the bin Laden unit in December 1995—the first time that the CIA had established a “station” targeting a specific individual—female analysts such as Barbara Sude played a key role in the hunt for al-Qaeda. The founder of the unit, Michael Scheuer, explains, “They seem to have an exceptional knack for detail, for seeing patterns and understanding relationships, and they also, quite frankly, spend a great deal less time telling war stories, chatting, and going outside for cigarettes than the boys. If I could have put up a sign saying, ‘No boys need apply,’ I would’ve done it.”
Jennifer Matthews, one of Scheuer’s top deputies, focused on the all-important Afghanistan-Pakistan border region. Her work was critical to the spring 2002 arrest of Abu Zubaydah, a key al-Qaeda logistician, who provided the first information that it was KSM who had masterminded the 9/11 attacks. This came as a complete surprise to the CIA, where KSM had been largely seen as a peripheral figure in al-Qaeda. Matthews knew Islamic history cold, and how al-Qaeda believed it fit into that history, which made her a formidable interrogator of al-Qaeda detainees, some of whom found the fact that she was a well-informed female particularly disconcerting. After 9/11, in addition to her busy job at the CIA, she was also raising three young children.
Frederica (a pseudonym) was another smart, tough CIA officer who was indefatigable in chasing after al-Qaeda. Scheuer says of her, “If she bites your ankle, if she gets her teeth into your foot, you’re done like dinner. You may as well give up. It may take two years, but she’s going to get you.”
And there was Gina Bennett, who in August 1993, while working at the Bureau of Intelligence and Research, inside the State Department, had authored a paper that was the first strategic warning about a man named “Usama Bin Ladin.” When bin Laden was expelled to Afghanistan in May 1996 from the Sudanese capital of Khartoum, Bennett also wrote a prescient analysis, warning, “His prolonged stay in Afghanistan—where hundreds of ‘Arab Mujahidin’ receive terrorist training and key extremist leaders often congregate—could prove more dangerous to US interests in the long run than his three-year liaison with Khartoum.”
In the years after the attacks on New York and Washington, Bennett helped draft the key National Intelligence Estimates on the state of al-Qaeda while at the same time balancing the demands of her five children. She reported to David Low, who recalls how quick she was to absorb complicated information: “I could walk into her office at noon and say, ‘I need fifteen pages on X,’ and it’s there three hours later. She is really fast.”
The prominent role that women played in the hunt for bin Laden was reflective of the largest cultural shift at the CIA in the past two decades. Veteran CIA operative Glenn Carle recalls, “When I started, there were to my knowledge four senior operation officers who were females, and they had to be the toughest SOBs in the universe to survive. And the rest of the women were treated as sexual toys.” When Scheuer set up the bin Laden unit, Carle remembers the reaction among his fellow operations officers: “What’s his staff? It’s all female. It was just widely discussed at the time that it’s a bunch of chicks. So, the perspective was frankly condescending and dismissive. And Scheuer [and his staff] essentially were saying, ‘You guys need to listen to us; this is really serious. This is a big deal, and people are going to die.’ And of course they were right.”
Scheuer’s team had mounted aggressive efforts in the years before 9/11 to take out bin Laden, but they were often beset by a certain amount of confusion. Senior national security officials under President Bill Clinton believed that he had authorized bin Laden’s assassination, while the Agency officers implementing the program believed it was a capture bin Laden program in which he might only be killed inadvertently. When the Afghan militia leader Ahmad Shah Massoud was told in 1999—at the same time that he was waging a battle to the death with the Taliban—that the CIA was hoping to partner with him in capturing but not killing bin Laden, he responded, “You guys are crazy. You haven’t changed a bit.”
CIA operatives in Afghanistan had bin Laden in their sights a number of times before 9/11. The exact number is in dispute. Clinton’s counterterrorism coordinator Richard Clarke says three times, while Scheuer says there were as many as ten opportunities. But there is little disagreement that the best chance to capture or kill bin Laden came in early February 1999 when he was spotted by CIA assets on the ground in Afghanistan as part of a hunting party outside of Kandahar. The group was hunting desert bustards with falcons in a remote area, so there was little risk of causing civilian casualties during a strike—a consideration that had hampered previous operations to target bin Laden.
On February 9, 1999, satellite imagery confirmed the existence of the hunting camp. Clinton’s national security staff started planning to launch cruise missiles at the camp from submarines standing by in the Arabian Sea, or tasking the CIA’s Afghan allies to snatch al-Qaeda’s leader. This became a much more complicated call when the imagery also revealed the presence of officials of the United Arab Emirates at the camp. A strike at the camp might end up missing bin Laden and instead kill a group of bustard-hunting Emirati princes, who also happened to be allies of the United States. By February 11, the military was ready to launch a strike, but the operation was called off by both Clarke and CIA director George Tenet because of the concerns about the Emiratis. A day later new intelligence indicated the al-Qaeda leader was no longer in the camp.
Bin Laden was also a hard target. His obsession with security had begun in earnest in 1994 when he was living in Sudan, where he was the target of a serious assassination attempt, in which gunmen raked his Khartoum residence with machine-gun fire. After that attack, bin Laden took much greater care of his security, changing locations often and without warning, always surrounded by his cadre of ultra-loyal bodyguards. To kill bin Laden with cruise missiles in the years before 9/11 was additionally complicated because intelligence about bin Laden’s location had to be predictive. Once a decision to launch a strike had been made in Washington, it took time for the cruise missiles to spin up in their submarine tubes in the Arabian Sea and then fly the several hours to their targets in Afghanistan, so officials had to know not only where bin Laden was when they made the decision but where he would be twelve hours later. That kind of perfect intelligence was, of course, rarely if ever available in the years before the 9/11 attacks.
In 1997, when I was a producer for CNN, I was one of a team of three that met with bin Laden in eastern Afghanistan to tape his first television interview. We witnessed the Herculean efforts that al-Qaeda members made to protect their leader. My colleagues and I were taken to bin Laden’s hideout as night fell; we were made to change vehicles while blindfolded; and we had to pass through three successive groups of guards armed with submachine guns and rocket-propelled grenades. We were thoroughly searched and the guards then ran some kind of electronic scanner over us to see if we were concealing weapons or tracking devices. (In fact, the scanner wasn’t working, but bin Laden’s advisors thought it was important to fool the CNN team—something they later had a good laugh about.)
DESPITE THE ABSENCE of any good
leads in the years after the attacks on New York and Washington, the bin Laden hunters at the CIA continued to think that finding him was a “solvable puzzle” because they had gradually built up a “working theory of the case”: what kind of circumstances he might be living in, who might be protecting him, and generally where he might be. Some of this was done through a process of elimination. Early on, analysts concluded that it was quite unlikely that bin Laden had left his old stomping grounds in Afghanistan and Pakistan for a country such as Yemen, the bin Laden family’s country of origin. Bin Laden was so recognizable that the trip would have been too dangerous, and his most dependable support networks were in South Asia.
Over the years, the CIA also began eliminating some of bin Laden’s old buddies from the Afghan war against the Soviets as his possible protectors. The Haqqanis were a Taliban militia who controlled a chunk of eastern Afghanistan and North Waziristan, in the tribal regions of Pakistan. Bin Laden had known the patriarch of the family, Jalaluddin Haqqani, since the mid-1980s. But counterterrorism officials began to think it was less and less likely that bin Laden was living in the vicinity of the Haqqanis’ base in Waziristan. Communications from bin Laden seemed to be going to al-Qaeda members living in Waziristan, but not emanating from there. Similarly, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, a leader of another militant Afghan group that straddled both sides of the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, had been an al-Qaeda ally since the late 1980s. But he had changed sides so often during the series of wars that wracked Afghanistan over the past decades that counterterrorism officials tracking bin Laden assessed Hekmatyar as “untrustworthy” and not someone whom the cagey bin Laden would want to stake his life on.
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