To develop a fuller picture of the man and his habits, CIA analysts mined books about al-Qaeda’s leader, such as the 2006 history The Osama bin Laden I Know: An Oral History, by this author; the authoritative 2008 biography of his family, The Bin Ladens, by Steve Coll; and the 2009 memoir Growing Up bin Laden, by his first wife, Najwa, and her son Omar. The analysts noticed how devoted the terrorist leader was to his wives and children and concluded that they might well be living with him, in which case he would likely be settled in a sizable compound suitable for the separate living quarters for each of his wives and her children that mimicked his domestic arrangements in Sudan and Afghanistan.
Over time, counterterrorism officials came to think it less and less plausible that bin Laden was hiding out in the tribal regions of Pakistan, where the CIA had stationed more case officers from the summer of 2006 forward. They had in turn recruited a considerable number of local agents. Those agents never developed any intelligence that indicated that bin Laden was living in the tribal areas.
In Growing Up bin Laden, Omar bin Laden recounts that after al-Qaeda bombed U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998, his father traveled to Kabul to hide from American retaliation, and he notes that bin Laden had safe houses in all the major cities in Afghanistan. This helped to confirm the evolving view at the CIA that bin Laden was likely hiding in a city. Then, too, there was the fact that between 2002 and 2005, all the key al-Qaeda leaders and associates who were captured had been found in Pakistani cities.
By 2009 those tracking bin Laden had become even more certain that he was living in some kind of urban setting. On a flight from Islamabad to Washington in May 2010, the CIA station chief in Pakistan was chatting with a group of Obama’s national security officials. One of them asked, “Where’s Osama bin Laden? Everybody thinks he’s hiding out in Karachi in the middle of the slum somewhere.” The station chief replied, “No, he’s probably in the outskirts of Islamabad in one of those suburbs. Less than sixty miles outside.” This was an inspired hunch, as it would be another three months before the CIA tracked bin Laden’s courier to Abbottabad, thirty-five miles north of Islamabad.
There was, of course, always a faint hope at the CIA that they might just catch a lucky break. “We always hoped for a person who said, ‘I walked past the same compound every day for seven years and today a door was open and I spotted Osama bin Laden,’ ” recalls one counterterrorism official. That lucky break never came. Also the CIA was never able to place a spy in al-Qaeda who could tell them where bin Laden was. At the top level of the terrorist group, information was highly compartmented, and the leaders practiced good operational security, so placing a spy in the leadership ranks was just not feasible. Robert Dannenberg, a CIA veteran of the Cold War who ran counterterrorism operations at the Agency after 9/11, explains that the religious fanaticism of members of al-Qaeda made them hard to recruit as spies: “It was much easier to convince a Soviet that your way of life was better. You could take them to Kmart in the United States, or to Wal-Mart, because they were driven by many of the same things that we’re driven by: success and taking care of our families. When you’re dealing with a man who has religious or extremist views, it’s completely different.”
Instead, it was the painstaking and cumulative assemblage of information from multiple detainee interviews, from thousands of al-Qaeda documents recovered on the battlefield or following an arrest, and the scouring of open-source reporting about bin Laden that helped build a picture of who his associates were and the circumstances in which he might be living, and with whom.
In the end the Agency returned to the four “pillars” of the hunt: bin Laden’s courier network, his family, his communications with other leaders in his organization, and his media statements. Three of the pillars yielded nothing. His family wasn’t communicating with him; what communications he had with other leaders were extraordinarily “compartmented,” making it impossible to follow them back to bin Laden; and his media statements over time didn’t yield any useful clues. That left the CIA with his courier network.
Intelligence analysts created a composite of the ideal courier: he would have to be able to travel in Pakistan without sticking out, he would have to speak Arabic to communicate effectively with al-Qaeda’s Arab leadership, and he would have to have been trusted by bin Laden before the 9/11 attacks. Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti, the man known as “the Kuwaiti,” certainly ticked all those boxes: his family was originally from northern Pakistan, he had grown up in Kuwait, and the Agency believed he had joined al-Qaeda around 1999. But although the Kuwaiti was seen as a player in al-Qaeda, a counterterrorism official who spent years tracking bin Laden recalls that, for a long time, “there was never a sense: ‘This was the guy.’ ”
6 CLOSING IN ON THE COURIER
THE LONG ROAD TO BIN LADEN’S COURIER began with Mohammed al-Qahtani, the man al-Qaeda was grooming to be the twentieth hijacker in the months before the 9/11 attacks. Qahtani was a poorly educated drifter from Kharj, a rural backwater in the deeply conservative heartland of Saudi Arabia, whose schooling consisted largely of Koranic studies, so even as an adult he believed that the sun revolved around the Earth. In the late 1990s, Qahtani dropped out of agricultural college and moved to the United Arab Emirates, where he held down a series of menial jobs for a couple of years. Returning home, he drove an ambulance for a while and later took a job as a laborer at a power company.
In 2000 the twenty-five-year-old Saudi underwent an intense religious awakening, which gave him a new purpose in life. He quit his dead-end job at the power company to travel to Afghanistan for the more glamorous life of fighting alongside the Taliban against their Northern Alliance enemies—the last force standing between the Taliban and their total victory in Afghanistan.
In Afghanistan in early 2001, Qahtani trained on the usual panoply of weapons at an al-Qaeda camp and soon met bin Laden, who was by then deep into the planning of the attacks on Washington and New York. Bin Laden told the young Saudi that if he wanted to be of service to Islam he should consult with Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM), the operational commander of the coming attacks on America. In late June 2001, Qahtani met again with bin Laden and told him he was “ready for a mission in the United States.” KSM then instructed Qahtani to return to Saudi Arabia to get a new, “clean” passport without any telltale entry stamps for Afghanistan and Pakistan, and also to obtain a visa for the United States, which, as a Saudi citizen, Qahtani could do without the kind of difficulties the citizens of other, poorer Arab countries, such as Yemen, routinely encountered. KSM gave Qahtani about $5,000, and Qahtani flew to Saudi Arabia, where he picked up his new passport and visa for the States and from there traveled on to Orlando, Florida, arriving on August 4, 2001.
Mohammed Atta, the lead 9/11 hijacker, was waiting for him in the parking lot at Orlando airport. Atta planned to induct Qahtani into the 9/11 plot as one of the “muscle” hijackers who would help restrain the passengers and crews. But a sharp U.S. immigration official was suspicious of the fact that Qahtani spoke no English and was traveling on a one-way ticket. Through an interpreter, the immigration official asked Qahtani for details about his stay in the United States, at which point the al-Qaeda recruit became increasingly evasive and angry. After he was told that he was being denied entry to the States, Qahtani threatened, “I’ll be back.”
Qahtani returned to Afghanistan and, after 9/11, was caught up in al-Qaeda’s hasty retreat to Tora Bora during the late fall of 2001. Shortly after bin Laden disappeared from Tora Bora, Qahtani and a group of the al-Qaeda leader’s bodyguards retreated over the border to Pakistan, where they were arrested on December 15 and handed over to American custody.
Qahtani was sent to Guantánamo, where at first he told his captors that he had gone to Afghanistan because of his love of falconry, a not-uncommon al-Qaeda cover story. But by July 2002, investigators had matched Qahtani’s fingerprints to those of the angry young Saudi man who had been deported from Orlando a year earlier. This prompted
a much more intensive interrogation regime for Qahtani, who had become increasingly uncooperative, at one point head-butting one of his interrogators.
Between November 23, 2002, and January 11, 2003, Qahtani was interrogated for forty-eight days, more or less continuously, rousted from bed at 4:00 a.m. for interrogation sessions that went on until midnight. If he dozed off, he was doused with water or given a sharp blast of some especially annoying music by Christina Aguilera. He was forced to perform dog tricks, often exposed to low temperatures, made to stand in the nude, and whenever he seemed to be flagging, he was given drugs and enemas so that the interrogations could continue.
This abusive treatment caused marked changes in Qahtani’s behavior. An FBI official later noted that he began “evidencing behavior consistent with extreme psychological trauma (talking to non-existent people, reporting hearing voices, crouching in a cell covered with a sheet for hours on end).” And Qahtani’s treatment amounted to torture, according to Susan Crawford, a former federal judge who was appointed to oversee the Guantánamo military commissions by the Bush administration. Crawford determined that the cumulative effects on Qahtani of sustained isolation, sleep deprivation, nudity, and prolonged exposure to cold met the legal definition of torture. As a result, Crawford ruled that Qahtani could never be prosecuted for anything.
From the secret summaries of Qahtani’s Guantánamo interrogations made public by WikiLeaks, it appears that it was only after the weeks of abuse that he told interrogators that KSM had introduced him to a man known as Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti, who had instructed him how best to communicate covertly with al-Qaeda members once he was in the States. In July 2001 the Kuwaiti had taken him to an Internet café in the buzzing Pakistani city of Karachi and given him some tuition in secret communications, likely instructing him in the “dead drop” method of secure e-mail communication that was then prevalent in al-Qaeda, in which two of the group’s members would open a commonly shared password-protected e-mail account and write drafts of e-mails to each other that they never actually sent over the Internet, but that they both could still access in draft form.
The admission from Qahtani that the Kuwaiti had given him training in operational security seems to have been the first time that U.S. officials realized that the Kuwaiti was a player in al-Qaeda and a confidant of KSM’s. It’s not clear whether Qahtani gave that information up because he had been coercively interrogated or because interrogators had told him that KSM, who had been captured in Pakistan on March 1, 2003, was in American custody and Qahtani thought it was therefore permissible to divulge information relating to KSM’s trusted circle. Either way, Qahtani identified the Kuwaiti only after he was subjected to a considerable amount of abuse at the hands of his captors.
American interrogators now knew that the Kuwaiti had helped train potential hijackers for the 9/11 mission, but as yet there was no sense that he might be bin Laden’s key courier. And Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti was just one of many hundreds of names and aliases of al-Qaeda members and associates that interrogators were learning in 2002 and 2003 from detainees housed at Guantánamo, from captives in CIA secret prisons in eastern Europe, and from documents recovered in Afghanistan after the fall of the Taliban.
When KSM was first arrested, there was a sense at the CIA that his capture might soon lead to bin Laden himself. Michael Scheuer, who had led the dedicated bin Laden unit at the CIA when it was founded in December 1995, was less sanguine than most. He knew that bin Laden had a far better sense of security than KSM and some of the other al-Qaeda leaders who had been captured in the years immediately after 9/11. “Those guys were swashbucklers, they were the first generation, they didn’t think there was a bullet made for them,” says Scheuer. In fact, the letters and photos found on KSM did not provide any real leads to bin Laden’s whereabouts.
Initially KSM was held by the Pakistanis, and he gave them some useful information that the CIA appears to have overlooked, or perhaps wasn’t briefed about. A day after he was captured, he told his interrogators that bin Laden might be in Kunar province in Afghanistan. He also told them that the last letter he had received from bin Laden came through a courier, and that his leader had been helped out of Tora Bora by Ahmed al-Kuwaiti and a man named Amin ul-Haq. This was all accurate information. It’s not clear how the information was extracted from KSM, but Pakistani interrogators are known to use harsh methods on occasion.
KSM was then transferred to U.S. custody. Despite being waterboarded 183 times and at one point kept up for seven and a half days straight while diapered and shackled at a CIA secret prison in northern Poland, KSM did not confess to the Kuwaiti’s key role in al-Qaeda, instead telling his interrogators in late 2003 only that the Kuwaiti was now “retired.” But hopes ran so high that KSM might provide the Rosetta Stone to al-Qaeda that senior CIA analyst Frederica traveled from the Agency’s headquarters in Virginia to Poland to watch KSM being waterboarded.
KSM’s assertion that the Kuwaiti was retired was curious, as not too many members of al-Qaeda were known to have retired. Indeed, information that KSM had given his U.S. interrogators a few months earlier led to the arrest in Thailand of a man known as Hambali, who was a leader of al-Qaeda’s virulent Southeast Asian affiliate, Jemaah Islamiya. When CIA officials interrogated Hambali, he said that when he fled Afghanistan after the fall of the Taliban he stayed in an al-Qaeda safe house in Karachi, which was managed by … the Kuwaiti.
And shortly after KSM told his interrogators that the Kuwaiti was retired, an al-Qaeda courier by the name of Hassan Ghul told CIA interrogators a quite different story. Ghul, a Pakistani, was arrested in mid-January 2004 in northern Iraq carrying a letter addressed to bin Laden from al-Qaeda’s leader in Iraq urging that he be allowed to embark on a full-scale war against Iraq’s Shia population. Ghul obviously had access to al-Qaeda’s inner circle in Pakistan and so was taken to a secret CIA prison in eastern Europe, where he was subjected to a variety of coercive interrogation techniques, including being slapped, slammed against a wall, forced to maintain stress positions, and deprived of sleep. Ghul’s interrogators also requested permission to use nudity, water dousing, and dietary manipulation, but it’s not clear if these techniques were actually employed on Ghul. At some point, Ghul told interrogators that the Kuwaiti was bin Laden’s courier and frequently traveled with al-Qaeda’s leader. He also said that the Kuwaiti was trusted by KSM and by Abu Faraj al-Libi, KSM’s successor as the operational commander of al-Qaeda.
Libi had masterminded two serious but ultimately unsuccessful attempts to assassinate Pakistani president Pervez Musharraf in December 2003, and so he became the subject of intense interest from Pakistani security services. Libi was quite recognizable because of a skin disease that disfigured his face with blotchy white patches where he lacked melanin. As a result, Libi held the number-three spot in al-Qaeda for only a couple of years before he was arrested in Pakistan on May 2, 2005, in the city of Mardan, one hundred miles from Abbottabad, where bin Laden himself would soon arrive to live for the next six years.
A month after his arrest, Libi was handed over to the CIA. Coercive interrogation techniques (though not waterboarding) were used on him, and he told his American interrogators that after KSM was captured he, Libi, had received notice from bin Laden through a courier that he had been promoted to KSM’s spot as the number three in al-Qaeda. At the time of his promotion, Libi was living in Abbottabad, an early indicator that the city was something of a base for al-Qaeda. It would be another seven years before the CIA would focus on Abbottabad as a likely hiding place for al-Qaeda’s leader. Libi also told his interrogators that the Kuwaiti wasn’t an important player in al-Qaeda and that it was in fact “Maulawi Abd al-Khaliq Jan” who was the courier who had informed him of his promotion by bin Laden. Counterterrorism officials later concluded that Maulawi Abd al-Khaliq Jan was a made-up name.
Did coercive interrogations lead to bin Laden? Such techniques were used on Qahtani, the twentieth hijacker, and on Ghul, the Pakistani al
-Qaeda courier who was captured in Iraq. Both of them subsequently gave interrogators information that led the CIA to focus on the Kuwaiti as a possible avenue to finding bin Laden, which to defenders of these interrogation techniques would seem to prove that they are effective. Critics of the techniques, however, can point out that harsh methods were also used by the CIA to get KSM and Libi to talk, and both those men gave their interrogators disinformation about the Kuwaiti. Since we can’t run history backward, we will never know what conventional interrogation techniques alone might have elicited from these four prisoners. And as we shall see, there were other steps along the way to finding bin Laden that had little to do with the information derived from al-Qaeda detainees.
Robert Richer, a veteran covert operations officer who ran the CIA’s Near East Division after 9/11, says that, despite the frequent claims of Bush administration officials, information from detainees was not particularly helpful in averting possible terrorist attacks: “If you were to ask me what operations were actually defeated based on the information provided by the detainees, I’d be hard-pressed to give you an operation. I’d say we got some names; we could track some people.” Where the detainee interrogations were useful, Richer said, was to fill in what he compares to the largely blank Scrabble board that was the structure of al-Qaeda known to the CIA in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. In combination with other information the CIA derived from documents and phone intercepts, detainee interrogations “could put that last thing in that got us a triple score.”
Robert Dannenberg, who ran CIA counterterrorism operations from 2003 to 2004, agrees with this assessment: “Those guys gave a wealth of invaluable information about al-Qaeda. I wouldn’t say so much about specific plots—you know, Abu is going to take a bomb and go blow up a train station in New York, no—but who the players are and what their relationships are, what their modus operandi is.… It gave us a cartography of al-Qaeda that would have taken us years to assemble had we not had this program in place. And it was an ongoing value. We would run pictures past these guys all the time and they said, ‘This is so-and-so and this is so-and-so.’ ”
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