Manhunt

by Peter L. Bergen

  No one at the Agency believed that the courier would actually be living with bin Laden. CIA officials thought that they would track the courier to his home and then there would be another round of surveillance to see if he would then lead them to bin Laden’s hiding place. But there was something about the Abbottabad compound that piqued their interest. One official remembers her reaction when she first saw the compound: “Holy Toledo! Who in al-Qaeda would the group spend this kind of money on?” Officials calculated that the compound and the land it stood on were worth several hundred thousand dollars—about the cost of the 9/11 operation.

  In late August 2010 the top officials in the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center briefed Panetta about the new bin Laden lead, telling him, “We’ve been tracking suspected couriers, people who’ve got historic ties to bin Laden, and we tracked them back to a place that looks like a fortress.” This got Panetta’s attention. “A fortress? Tell me about that fortress,” he said. The CIA officials described a compound ringed with twelve-foot-high walls, and one section having eighteen-foot-high walls, and a top-floor balcony on one of the buildings shielded by seven-foot-high walls. They told Panetta the residents of the compound burned their own trash.

  “This is very strange,” Panetta said. “It’s very mysterious. It requires deeper investigation. I want every possible operational avenue explored to get inside that compound.”

  PANETTA BRIEFED PRESIDENT OBAMA and his key national security advisors about this development in the Oval Office, saying, “We have the courier’s name and we have his location in a place called Abbottabad and maybe, just maybe, bin Laden might be there as well.” Panetta showed the group satellite imagery of the compound and compared the area where the compound sat to Leesburg, Virginia—a pleasant historic town thirty miles northwest of Washington. Obama recalls that Panetta “was cautious in saying that they could say definitively this was where bin Laden was. My feeling at the time was: interested, but cautious.”

  Tony Blinken, a low-key lawyer who had worked for Bill Clinton on his National Security Council staff and was now Vice President Joe Biden’s top national security advisor, recalls both real interest and some skepticism among the officials listening to Panetta. “This wouldn’t have been brought to the president if it wasn’t serious,” Blinken says, “but there had obviously been instances in the past when we really thought we were hot on the trail, and then for one reason or another we weren’t. And so I think it was a real interest, but also we didn’t want to make too much of it.”

  Over the next several months, Panetta became increasingly annoyed—some CIA officials even say “pissed”—about what he believed was a lack of creativity among the bin Laden hunters. “I want to know what’s going on inside that compound,” Panetta demanded. “I don’t want to just surveil it from the outside. I want to get inside there, I want to get clarity on what is happening there.” Leaders of the Counterterrorism Center were instructed to show Panetta any of the ideas for observing the compound they came up with—even those they discarded. He urged them to consider every form of espionage, including getting into sewage lines and implanting devices, putting a telescope in the mountains two kilometers away, even putting a camera on a tree inside the compound walls. The Counterterrorism Center officials came back to him, dismissing one approach after another as too risky or not workable. A few weeks after Panetta suggested putting a camera on a tree inside the compound, the Kuwaiti chopped down the tree in question.

  Finally, in the late fall, Jeremy Bash, Panetta’s chief of staff, gathered together the bin Laden hunters at the Agency and said, “Give the director twenty-five operational activities that you could use to get into the compound, or to learn what is happening there, and don’t be afraid of making some of them kind of creative.” The bin Laden hunters came back with a chart with thirty-eight ideas. Some were outlandish. One idea was to throw in foul-smelling stink bombs to flush out the occupants of the compound. Another was to play on the presumed religious fanaticism of the compound’s inhabitants and broadcast from loudspeakers outside the compound what purported to be the “Voice of Allah,” saying, “You are commanded to come out into the street!”

  Other more plausible ideas included coming up with some technology that would enable the Agency to spy on the occupants using the small satellite dish connected to the compound’s sole television, or from a nearby CIA safe house, where agents would pick up the sounds and energy emissions that would result if bin Laden decided to record a new videotape.

  After Panetta was confident that the team had exhausted every possible approach, they narrowed it down to three or four avenues. One creative, if ethically questionable, tactic was to recruit Shakil Afridi, a Pakistani doctor from the tribal regions, to mount a bogus vaccination program in and around bin Laden’s neighborhood. The idea was to get access to the compound, take samples of the residents’ blood, and then match those with known samples of bin Laden family DNA that were in the Agency’s possession. In March, Dr. Afridi traveled to Abbottabad, telling locals that he had funds to start a free hepatitis B vaccination drive. So as not to arouse suspicion, Afridi recruited nurses and health workers to administer the vaccinations starting in a poor neighborhood on the outskirts of the city rather than in the more affluent Bilal Town. But Afridi’s team was never able to get DNA samples from the bin Laden children.

  The analytical case that the Kuwaiti was the key to finding the al-Qaeda leader was first made in a memo by CIA officials in August 2010 titled “Closing In on Usama bin Ladin’s Courier.” A month later, an even more detailed assessment of all the intelligence on the Kuwaiti was bundled into a document titled “Anatomy of a Lead.” It was well understood by the authors of these memos that anything they wrote that focused on bin Laden’s location was going to get a great deal of attention, including from the president. A counterterrorism official explains: “We had a group who weren’t afraid to say right out front that we believe this leads to bin Laden, putting themselves on the line.”

  Almost everyone who was then working on the bin Laden hunt had also worked on the hunt for Ayman al-Zawahiri. And they were keenly aware that seven CIA officers and contractors had died at the forward operating base in Khost, Afghanistan, chasing what at the time seemed to be the most promising lead the Agency had on Zawahiri since 9/11 but turned out to be an al-Qaeda sting operation. Those who died at Khost had been friends and colleagues of the analysts who were now positing that they had the best lead on bin Laden in a decade.

  What everyone involved in the bin Laden hunt wanted to avoid at all costs was another weapons of mass destruction (WMD) debacle. The faulty assumption that Saddam Hussein was reconstituting his WMD program, which had been the key justification for the Iraq War, rested in part on a number of dodgy intelligence sources. One of them was an Iraqi defector with the telling alias of “Curveball,” who claimed that Saddam possessed mobile bioweapons labs. This became a central exhibit in the Bush administration’s assertions that Saddam had a biological weapons program. What wasn’t well understood by senior Bush officials and in much of the U.S. intelligence community was the fact that Curveball was an alcoholic and a congenital liar.

  The damage done by the fabrications of sources such as Curveball was compounded by the fact that where there were “dissents” about aspects of Iraq’s supposed WMD program from any of the sixteen U.S. intelligence agencies, they were generally buried in lengthy reports. Aluminum tubes shipped to Iraq in 2001 were believed by the CIA to be parts for centrifuges in Iraq’s uranium-enrichment program, but experts at the Department of Energy were rightly skeptical of this claim, a view that didn’t get any real hearing among policymakers.

  The intelligence community was determined to learn from these costly mistakes. This time there would be no repeat of CIA director George Tenet’s famous “slam dunk” assertion to President Bush that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction. The director of terrorism analysis at the CIA, a careful analyst who for four years had been the offic
ial who six days every week delivered to President Bush his highly classified President’s Daily Brief, was determined to thoroughly kick the tires of the analytical case on the Kuwaiti. The small cadre of analysts at the CIA who were aware of the intelligence on the Kuwaiti subjected it to a formal process of structured analytical techniques, drilling down on key questions: What’s the body of evidence that the Kuwaiti is bin Laden’s courier? Who else could the Kuwaiti be if he wasn’t the courier for al-Qaeda’s leader? Was the Kuwaiti even still working for al-Qaeda?

  During October 2010, officials came up with several alternative explanations for the intelligence they had been able to gather on the Kuwaiti: that he had stolen money from al-Qaeda and was now keeping a low profile; that he was working for someone else in al-Qaeda; that he was the courier for some criminal unrelated to al-Qaeda; or that bin Laden’s family, but not bin Laden himself, was living in the mysterious compound. They concluded that they could not rule out any of these alternative hypotheses. A counterterrorism official recalls, “We put an enormous amount of work in exploring all of these hypotheses so the president and his advisors could make an informed judgment about what they planned to do next.” Cognizant of the lessons of the WMD fiasco, officials actively encouraged dissent among the analysts leading the hunt for bin Laden. One official says, “We kept explaining to our group: ‘If you see something that doesn’t make sense you need to raise your hand now.’ ”

  During the fall, counterterrorism officials continued to watch the Abbottabad compound and track the Kuwaiti’s movements around northwestern Pakistan. They now had “high confidence” that the Kuwaiti was still a member of al-Qaeda, but they didn’t have any such level of confidence that bin Laden was living in the compound. The Agency listened in to the Kuwaiti’s phone conversations and spied on him as he traveled around Pakistan. CIA officials found it telling that when the Kuwaiti and his family visited other family members in Pakistan, they lied about where they were living, saying they lived in Peshawar. They also lied to neighbors about who they were, what they were doing, and where they were going. They also didn’t let anybody into the compound, the construction of which seemed to be designed to thwart good surveillance from any angle.

  As they observed the comings and goings at the compound, one U.S. official says, “We began to believe bin Laden’s family was there. Was bin Laden nearby, given his devotion to them?” A few analysts, such as John, the deputy chief of the Afghanistan-Pakistan section in the Counterterrorism Center, thought that the likelihood of bin Laden being at the compound was as high as 90 percent, but whatever an analyst thought the odds might be, the case that bin Laden was there was always entirely circumstantial.

  There continued to be features of the compound that caused some head scratching at CIA headquarters. The first “anomaly” was that the compound was less than a mile from the Pakistani military academy. The second was that it was far from small and obscure, rising fortress-like above many of the neighboring buildings. Third, there were many children living there, a number of whom were old enough to blab about a mysterious “uncle” who never left the compound. And the wives and children of the courier and his brother would regularly take trips to visit family members elsewhere in Pakistan. One of those children, seven-year-old Muhammad, even attended a religious school outside Abbottabad. CIA officials were familiar with the idea of “hiding in plain sight,” but the Abbottabad compound seemed to take that concept to a new level.

  Robert Cardillo, a veteran intelligence official who briefed President Obama three times a week about national security developments around the world, thought that if bin Laden was indeed living in the compound, it was “nuts” that he hadn’t moved in six years. And if bin Laden was living there, how could the Pakistanis not know? After all, he reasoned, this wasn’t in some remote, lawless tribal region, but in a well-policed city. Other facets of the case didn’t sit well with Cardillo either; there were about twenty adults and children living at the compound, which seemed a big security risk for bin Laden to take. And while the courier and his brother practiced rigorous operational security with their cell phones, there were other cell-phone users at the compound who weren’t taking any such precautions. Cardillo had so many nitpicky questions about the intelligence picture surrounding the compound that at one point Michael Vickers, the civilian overseer of Special Operations, said, “You know you’re being Debbie Downer around here.” Cardillo parried, “Mike, that’s my job. Thank you.”

  In the early fall the CIA set up a safe house in Abbottabad for agents who would survey the compound and built up a “pattern of life” analysis of the people living at the compound. According to a retired senior CIA operations officer who worked in Pakistan after 9/11, Agency officials setting up this type of safe house typically looked for a residence that would attract no attention; everything would have to appear to be perfectly normal. This meant there should be no detectable changes made to the profile of the house and its constituent buildings, meaning no proliferation of antennas, no lights on late at night, and no conspicuous new construction. The routine at the safe house would have to be “non-alerting: no sudden uptick in visitors and no comings and goings at odd hours. Also, the cover story for the residents—who they were, where they came from, what their business was in Abbottabad—would have to be rock-solid. Nothing weird. Nothing unusual. Boring is always best. And, always best to provide answers to questions up front rather than hope that the neighbors will reach the conclusion you want. In a place like Pakistan one easy way to do that is simply to make sure that your own household staff is fed the right cover story. All maids, cooks, and drivers talk in environments like that. It’s like a small-town environment. Whatever your maid knows, or thinks she knows, about who you are, where you came from, and what you are up to will be known to every domestic in the neighborhood within days of your arrival.”

  The CIA agents monitoring the compound initially observed only the two families of the courier and his brother living there. But after further careful monitoring, they determined that there was a third family living at the compound. Members of this third family never seemed to leave the compound, but a careful observation of their movements and the number of men’s, women’s, and children’s garments hung up to dry on clotheslines indicated that this other family consisted of three women, a young man, and at least nine children, all living in the main building. Were these bin Laden’s wives, children, and grandchildren? Certainly the composition of this family was consistent with what was known about bin Laden’s immediate family.

  DESPITE HAVING SPIES on the ground in Abbottabad and NSA satellites orbiting in space above the compound, the Agency was never able to get an image of bin Laden. It did observe that some individual took a walk every day in the vegetable garden of the compound, but someone had cleverly installed a tarpaulin above the area where that person would walk, so spy satellites never got a good look at him. Analysts called the mysterious person “the pacer.” The pacer never left the compound, and his daily excursions seemed like those of someone in a jail yard who couldn’t leave but was trying to get some exercise. He walked very rapidly in tight circles, then went back inside. Knowing that bin Laden was quite tall, Panetta instructed his team to check the pacer’s height by comparing it to that of the nearest wall. By measuring the pacer’s shadow, intelligence officials determined that the mystery man could measure anywhere from five foot five to six foot eight. This didn’t provide much of a clue.

  The CIA went to Congress and successfully lobbied for tens of millions of dollars to be reallocated in the Agency budget to support this ramped-up intelligence effort. Still, officials had what they termed “collection gaps”: they couldn’t see inside the compound, and they couldn’t monitor it around the clock. But counterterrorism officials were wary of becoming more aggressive in their collection efforts, because this might end up “spooking the targets.” They were concerned that someone as canny as bin Laden, if he really was the pacer, would have some kind of
escape plan in place. They also thought it likely that he would have taken the precaution of putting a local police officer on his payroll—someone who would tip him off if there was any sign of an operation to take down the compound.

  In November, Panetta, together with the CIA bin Laden hunters, went to Obama and said, “We think there is a strong possibility that bin Laden is in the Abbottabad compound.” The analysts believed this with varying degrees of certainty, with most estimating the probability at 80 percent. The lead analyst, John, was still at about 90 percent, while Michael Morell, the deputy director of the CIA, was at 60 percent.

  “Why do people have different probabilities?” Obama asked Panetta, who pitched the question to Morell.

  “Intelligence is not an exact science,” Morell explained. “Even if we had a source inside the compound saying bin Laden was there, I’d only be at 80 percent because sources are of varying reliability. Those analysts who are at 80 to 90 percent have been tracking al-Qaeda in recent years and have had great success stopping plots and undermining the organization. They are confident. The folks at the lower end of the range are those who lived through intelligence failures, particularly the Iraq WMD issue.” At one point Morell told the president that when it came to the sheer volume of data points, “the circumstantial case of Iraq having WMD was actually stronger than the circumstantial case that bin Laden is living in the Abbottabad compound.”

  Morell’s own confidence that bin Laden was at the compound remained steady, at 60 percent, because there was never any direct confirmation that bin Laden was there. On the other hand, there was no good alternative explanation for everything that happened at the compound and the fact that the residents were clearly hiding something. Throughout the first weeks of 2011 the circumstantial case that bin Laden was living in the Abbottabad compound remained in a sort of stasis. “We got a lot of information over time that didn’t disprove bin Laden was there and didn’t corroborate it either,” says a counterterrorism official. CIA officers from outside the Counterterrorism Center were brought in to see whether the bin Laden analysts might be missing something. They didn’t see anything obvious. A CIA analyst who hunted bin Laden says, “We had pulled on a gazillion threads in the last decade, sometimes a ‘sighting’ of bin Laden, or some other piece of intelligence, and every time the threads were pulled they quickly unraveled. With this Abbottabad thread, every time you pulled on it, it didn’t unravel.”