JOHN BRENNAN, the longtime CIA officer who was now Obama’s top counterterrorism advisor, met regularly with the analysts working the bin Laden case, many of whom he had known and admired for years. Brennan pushed them to come up with intelligence that disproved the notion that bin Laden was living in the Abbottabad compound, saying, “I’m tired of hearing why everything you see confirms your case. What we need to look for are the things that tell us what’s not right about our theory. So what’s not right about your inferences?”
The analysts came back to the White House one day and started their intelligence update, saying, “Looks like there’s a dog on the compound.” Denis McDonough, Obama’s deputy national security advisor, remembers thinking, “Oh, that’s a bummer. You know, no self-respecting Muslim’s gonna have a dog.” Brennan, who had spent much of his career focused on the Middle East and spoke Arabic, pointed out that bin Laden, in fact, did have dogs when he was living in Sudan in the mid-1990s. (Indeed, when al-Qaeda’s leader was living in the Sudanese capital of Khartoum, he had taken an interest in training police dogs.)
As February turned into March, CIA director Leon Panetta asked a veteran counterterrorism official—who had lived through many years of bin Laden leads not panning out—what percentage she now placed on bin Laden being in the compound. “Seventy percent,” she said.
The percentages suggested a kind of precision that didn’t exist in reality. Bin Laden was either living in the compound or he wasn’t. Even after months of observation, no one really knew for sure.
9 THE LAST YEARS OF OSAMA BIN LADEN
BIN LADEN’S LIFE IN THE COMPOUND was not, of course, taken up only by attending to his wives and children, saying his daily prayers, indulging in his hobbies of reading anti-American and anti-Zionist literature, and watching old videos of himself. It was also consumed with the serious business of trying to run al-Qaeda, a difficult task for someone in hiding whose key lieutenants were also on the run.
It was only through Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti that bin Laden was able to maintain a semblance of control over his organization. The Kuwaiti and his brother Abrar, both in their early thirties, were bin Laden’s sole guards and his only connection to the outside world. At the local general store, they bought rice, lentils, and other groceries. Using their local aliases, Arshad Khan and Tariq Khan, the two brothers would escort the bin Laden children to a local doctor for treatment of the usual stomach upsets, colds, and coughs. The Khans came and went in the neighborhood without fanfare, driving their white Suzuki Jeep and red van as they went about their errands. The two brothers occasionally attended daily prayers at a local mosque but made no small talk. To the inquisitive, they said they worked in the transportation business. This didn’t satisfy the curiosity of some locals, who thought they might be drug dealers and complained that even with such a big house they didn’t help the poor.
The brothers were in fact longtime al-Qaeda made men whose father had immigrated five decades earlier to Kuwait from a small Pashtun village in the north of Pakistan, some three hours’ drive from Abbottabad. This background made the two brothers indispensable to bin Laden because they could easily blend into the Pashto-speaking areas of northern and western Pakistan, where the leaders of al-Qaeda were now hiding, and they also spoke Arabic and so could communicate easily with the Arab leaders of al-Qaeda. The brothers had sworn bayat to bin Laden, a religiously binding oath of allegiance to the man they venerated as the emir (prince) of jihad. They would do bin Laden’s bidding without question.
Crucially, the Kuwaiti transported letters and computer thumb drives containing instructions from bin Laden to other al-Qaeda leaders. The Kuwaiti practiced careful operational security when he transported these items to Peshawar for later distribution to the nearby tribal regions on the border with Afghanistan, where many of al-Qaeda’s leaders were based. Conscious of American and Pakistani abilities to monitor cell phones, the Kuwaiti would turn on his cell only around the small town of Hasan Abdal, an hour’s drive southwest of Abbottabad.
Through the messages transported by the faithful Kuwaiti, bin Laden stayed in touch with the organization he had founded and did his best to manage al-Qaeda’s far-flung regional affiliates in countries such as Iraq, Somalia, and Yemen. He also continued to plot carnage on a grand scale—weighty matters that he never discussed with his wives.
Bin Laden’s principal conduit to his organization was Atiyah Abdul Rahman, a Libyan militant of about forty. Viewed by officials in the West as no more than a mid-tier terrorist, Rahman was actually bin Laden’s chief of staff. Privately, bin Laden fretted that Rahman could be heavy-handed and undiplomatic in his dealings with others, but despite those concerns, bin Laden was in frequent contact with the Libyan, far more so than with his more well-known top deputy, the dour Egyptian surgeon Ayman al-Zawahiri. In the years after 9/11, Western counterterrorism officials believed that Zawahiri was the hands-on manager of al-Qaeda, but in reality it was still bin Laden who was deep in the weeds of personnel decisions and plotting for the group.
Through Rahman, bin Laden issued instructions to his regional affiliates: the North African terrorist organization al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, the Somali militant group Al-Shabaab, al-Qaeda in Iraq, and al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. In the years after 9/11, Rahman also traveled to Iran to act as a bridge between bin Laden and some longtime leaders of al-Qaeda such as Saif al-Adel, who was living there under a form of house arrest, as were a number of bin Laden’s children.
Iraq was a particular concern for bin Laden, who initially had been ecstatic about the opportunities that the 2003 American invasion presented to establish an al-Qaeda affiliate in the Arab heartland. By the time he had moved into the Abbottabad compound two years later, however, he had grown increasingly worried about the brutal tactics of al-Qaeda in Iraq, which included blowing up key Shia mosques and killing fellow Sunnis who didn’t follow the group’s dictates to the letter. Bin Laden reminded the leaders of his Iraqi affiliate about the mistakes that Islamist militants had made in Algeria in the 1990s, when they launched a civil war so brutal that they eliminated any vestige of popular support they had once enjoyed.
In November 2005, as bin Laden was settling into his new life at the Abbottabad compound, Rahman wrote a seven-page letter to the leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq, the astonishingly cruel Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who had made a habit of personally beheading his hostages and videotaping the results for global distribution on the Internet. Rahman’s letter, which clearly reflected the views of bin Laden, was a polite but blistering critique of Zarqawi, who had recently directed suicide bombings at American hotels in Amman, Jordan, that had killed sixty people, almost all of them Jordanian civilians attending a wedding. The bombings had severely tarnished al-Qaeda’s image in the Arab world and came on top of Zarqawi’s indiscriminate slaughter of any Muslim who didn’t precisely share his views. Like a dissatisfied boss delivering a performance review, Rahman told Zarqawi that he should henceforth follow instructions from bin Laden and cease counterproductive operations such as the hotel bombings in Jordan.
When Zarqawi was killed in an American air strike six months later, bin Laden’s subsequent public statements of admiration for him were only because Zarqawi had taken the fight to the Americans in Iraq in a manner that bin Laden himself could only dream of. Privately, bin Laden was worried that Zarqawi had grievously harmed the al-Qaeda brand, and in October 2007, al-Qaeda’s leader even issued an unprecedented public apology for the behavior of his followers in Iraq, scolding them for “fanaticism.”
As bin Laden’s stay in Abbottabad lengthened into years, his central focus always remained attacking the United States. By early 2011 he was keenly aware that almost a decade had passed since a successful attack on America. As the tenth anniversary of his great victory against the Americans approached, bin Laden wrote messages to al-Qaeda’s franchises in Algeria, Iraq, and Yemen reminding them that America was still their main enemy, and admonishing them not to be distracted by
local fights. He schemed about assassinating President Obama and General David Petraeus, who had inflicted such heavy losses on al-Qaeda’s affiliate in Iraq, although he observed that killing Vice President Joe Biden would likely be a waste of time because he was not a sufficiently important target. To his team, bin Laden emphasized the continued importance of targeting major American cities such as Chicago, Washington, New York, and Los Angeles. Rahman frequently had to remind bin Laden that al-Qaeda simply didn’t have the resources to carry out his ambitious plans. Some of bin Laden’s other lieutenants pointed out to him that it would be much more realistic to focus on fighting American soldiers in Afghanistan rather than trying to attack the United States itself, advice bin Laden simply ignored.
Writing in his journal, bin Laden, a meticulous note taker, tallied up how many thousands of dead Americans it would take for the United States to withdraw finally from the Arab world. He mused about attacking trains by putting trees or cement blocks on railroad tracks in the United States, and he suggested that al-Qaeda enlist non-Muslim American citizens opposed to their own government, citing disaffected African Americans and Latinos as potential recruits. Al-Qaeda enjoyed only modest success with this tactic, recruiting Bryant Neal Vinas, an unemployed Hispanic American from Long Island, who participated in an attack on a U.S. base in Afghanistan in 2008 before he was arrested by the Pakistanis and handed over to American custody.
Bin Laden exhorted his followers to plan an attack on the United States to coincide with the tenth anniversary of 9/11 or with holidays such as Christmas, and he advocated attacks on oil tankers as part of a wider strategy to bleed the United States economically. He ordered Rahman also to focus on recruiting jihadists for attacks in Europe. Al-Qaeda’s last successful European attacks had been the four suicide bombings on London’s transportation system on July 7, 2005, which killed fifty-two commuters. Rahman was in touch with a group of Moroccan militants living in Düsseldorf, and in the fall of 2010, al-Qaeda’s leaders were impatient to pull off an attack with multiple gunmen somewhere in Germany, though this plan fizzled out.
In one of his more blue-sky moments, bin Laden considered changing the name of al-Qaeda, which he believed had developed something of a branding problem. He worried that the full name of the group, al-Qaeda al-Jihad, which means “The Base for Holy War,” was being lost in the West, where the group was known, of course, simply as al-Qaeda. Bin Laden believed that lopping off the word jihad had allowed the West to “claim deceptively that they are not at war with Islam.” Bin Laden mulled over some decidedly un-catchy alternative names: the Monotheism and Jihad Group and the Restoration of the Caliphate Group.
Bin Laden paid a great deal of attention to his relatively new but quite promising Yemen-based affiliate, al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. It was this affiliate that had managed to smuggle a bomb onto an American passenger jet in the underwear of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the Nigerian recruit who tried, unsuccessfully, to detonate the device as the plane flew over Detroit on Christmas Day 2009. Bin Laden gave tactical advice to the group, which published Inspire, an English-language webzine aimed at recruiting militants in the West. In one issue of Inspire a writer proposed that jihadists turn a tractor into a weapon by outfitting it with giant blades and then driving it into a crowd. Bin Laden tut-tutted that such indiscriminate slaughter did not reflect al-Qaeda’s “values.” And bin Laden made important personnel decisions for the group. When the leader of al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula suggested appointing the American-born cleric Anwar al-Awlaki to head the organization, because his name recognition in the West would help with fund-raising, bin Laden nixed the idea, saying that he didn’t know Awlaki and was quite comfortable with the leadership already in place. Bin Laden also offered strategic advice to his Yemeni followers, warning that there wasn’t yet enough “steel” in al-Qaeda’s support in the region to try to impose a Taliban-style regime there.
His key lieutenants wrote to bin Laden about the problems they were facing; chief among them was the campaign of American drone strikes in Pakistan’s tribal regions. The U.S. drone campaign had begun there in 2004, under President Bush, but, as we have seen, President Obama had massively expanded the program. Under Bush, there had been one strike every forty days; under Obama, the tempo increased to one every four days. The strikes had made the position of al-Qaeda’s “number three” one of the world’s most perilous. In May 2010, down a dirt road from Miran Shah, the main town in the tribal region of North Waziristan, a missile from a drone killed Mustafa Abu al-Yazid, along with his wife and several of their children. Yazid was a founding member of al-Qaeda who served as the group’s number three and oversaw the group’s plots, recruitment, fund-raising, and internal security. In the past two years, bin Laden had also lost to drone strikes his chemical weapons expert, his chief of operations in Pakistan, his propaganda chief, and half a dozen other key lieutenants.
Rahman wrote to bin Laden that al-Qaeda was getting hammered by the drones, and asked whether there were alternative locations where the organization might rebase itself. Bin Laden instead approved the formation of a counterintelligence unit to root out the spies in the tribal areas who were providing pinpoint-accurate information to the Americans about the locations of his lieutenants. In 2010, however, he received a complaint that the counterintelligence shop could barely function on its small budget of a few thousand dollars. A particular worry for both bin Laden and Rahman was the fact that cash flow at al-Qaeda headquarters had by then slowed to a trickle. They corresponded about ways to refill the group’s depleted coffers, focusing in particular on kidnapping diplomats in Pakistan.
Conscious of the pressures that al-Qaeda was now under—its dire financial situation, its decimated leadership bench, and its longtime inability to carry out any attack in the West—bin Laden started casting about for ways to reinvigorate his group. In the spring of 2011 he contemplated a new effort to negotiate a grand alliance of the various militant groups fighting in Afghanistan and Pakistan. In exchanges with his aides, he also considered brokering some sort of deal with the Pakistani government: al-Qaeda would halt its attacks in Pakistan and would in turn receive official Pakistani protection. There’s no evidence that this deal ever happened, and it was, in any event, quite a naïve idea. No Pakistani government would make a peace deal with al-Qaeda; bin Laden and his top deputies had for many years publicly and repeatedly called for attacks on Pakistani officials and, as noted ealier, had on two occasions in 2003 tried to assassinate Pakistan’s president, General Pervez Musharraf.
To the world, of course, bin Laden tried to present a very different image from that of the aging leader of a troubled terrorist group that he had become. Bin Laden once told the Taliban leader Mullah Omar that up to 90 percent of his battle was fought in the media. Indeed, he took his media campaign seriously, and in the videotapes he shot in a makeshift studio in the Abbottabad compound he dyed his whitening beard jet black and dressed in his finest beige robes trimmed with gold thread. In these videos, he sometimes sat behind a desk and no longer had the gun that had invariably been beside him, a prominent feature of many of his earlier videotaped appearances.
In 2007, bin Laden released a half-hour videotape that received considerable attention in the West because it was the first time he had appeared on video in three years. On the tape, he spoke directly to the American people from behind a desk in a jihadist parody of a presidential address from the Oval Office. He made no explicit threat of violence but instead urged Americans to convert to Islam and, in a meandering indictment of the United States, invoked the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki; the extermination of Native Americans; the baleful influence of U.S. corporations; and America’s poor record on climate change, as demonstrated by its failure to sign the Kyoto agreement on global warming. These seemed more the musings of an elderly reader of The Nation than the leader of global jihad.
Bin Laden also recorded an average of five audiotapes a year from his Abbottabad lair, which w
ere passed by courier to As Sahab, al-Qaeda’s propaganda arm. As Sahab would dress up the audio files with photos of bin Laden, graphics, and sometimes subtitled translations and then upload the results to jihadist websites or deliver them to Al Jazeera. On the audiotapes, bin Laden, ever the news junkie, would comment on events both large and small in the Muslim world. In March 2008 he denounced the publication five years earlier of cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed by a Danish newspaper as a “catastrophe.” Three months later, an al-Qaeda suicide attacker bombed the Danish embassy in Islamabad, killing six. After a nine-month silence, bin Laden released an audiotape in March 2009 condemning the recent Israeli invasion of Gaza. In late 2010 he weighed in on France’s decision to ban Muslim women from wearing the all-enveloping burqa in public, and threatened revenge. Around the same time, he released a tape lambasting the Pakistani government’s slow response to the massive flooding that had displaced twenty million Pakistanis during the summer of 2010.
Bin Laden’s eloquence on every issue of interest to the Muslim world made his public silence about the events of the Arab Spring of 2011 all the more puzzling. After all, here was what he had long dreamed of: the overthrow of the tyrannical regimes of the Middle East. His silence on the issue is likely explained by the fact that his foot soldiers and his ideas were notably absent in the revolutions that roiled the Middle East. No protestors held aloft pictures of bin Laden or spouted his virulent anti-American rhetoric, and few were demanding Taliban-style theocracies, bin Laden’s preferred political end state. The protests also undercut two of bin Laden’s key claims: that only violence could bring change to the Middle East, and that only by attacking America could the Arab regimes be overthrown. The protestors in Tunisia and Egypt who overthrew their dictators were largely peaceful and were not inspired by al-Qaeda’s attacks on the West; rather, they were ordinary Tunisians and Egyptians fed up with the incompetence and cruelty of their rulers.
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