88 Days to Kandahar: A CIA Diary

by Grenier, Robert L.

  As we finished shaking hands at the Islamabad Marriott Hotel, Arnaud got to the point. He would be meeting with a well-known and politically prominent Pakistani tribal figure. This man claimed to have precise information about bin Laden’s whereabouts. Due to political sensitivities, he would meet in Pakistan only with de Borchgrave, and no other American. As had been agreed in Washington, Arnaud reported, I was to arrange for the Pakistani’s immediate, discreet air transport to an aircraft carrier in the Arabian Sea, from which he would then be conveyed to Washington. He would reveal his information in George Tenet’s office, and to Tenet alone.

  I was dumbstruck. McLaughlin had somehow neglected to mention any of this. I had considerable respect for de Borchgrave, but there was no way I was going to suggest a scheme like this—even if the Pakistani gentleman in question could back up his assertion, whatever it was, with compelling evidence, which I was reasonably certain he could not. A glance at my face told Arnaud that I was entirely in the dark. He was miffed.

  “Well, I don’t think McLaughlin was just trying to humor me.” I was reasonably certain that in fact he was. Perhaps McLaughlin had been a shade too polite.

  “Look,” I said, “if this gentleman has reliable information on the whereabouts of bin Laden, it will surely be very perishable, and something on which action will need to be taken immediately. We won’t have time to bring him halfway around the world to meet with George Tenet in order to hear it. If he is really motivated by the desire to help us find bin Laden, and will only speak with you, surely he should tell you immediately what he knows. The fact that he insists only on revealing his information to Tenet suggests to me that he has some other agenda.”

  It was still Ramadan, the month when devout Muslims fast during daylight hours. Over iftar, the post-sunset breaking of the fast, de Borchgrave found that his contact’s previously firm convictions on the whereabouts of bin Laden softened with scrutiny. Within a couple of days, Arnaud’s plans had changed. Now he would journey out to the Tribal Areas with one of his contact’s kinsmen to meet with other members of the tribe, and see where the path led from there. He wanted to get as close to Tora Bora as possible from the Pakistani side. Unable to dissuade him, I offered him the use of a sat phone. I had some trepidation as he set off; he was not a young man.

  A little over twenty-four hours later, I returned to the office from a late-afternoon meeting at ISI Headquarters to find a red light blinking on my “black” or unclassified phone: a voicemail message. Arnaud had been turned back at the Chapri Post on the road to Parachinar, in the Pakistani Tribal Areas. Darkness had fallen, and he and his companion had nowhere to stay. Perhaps they would have to sleep in the car. As the message ended, his voice trailed away: “It’s getting cold. . . .”

  “Swell,” I thought. “A high-profile Washington journalist is going to freeze to death in Pakistan, and it’s going to be on my watch.” I phoned General Jafar to seek his help. Jafar, unfortunately, was quite familiar with Arnaud’s recent work.

  “He criticizes us at every opportunity,” he grumbled. Ah, I pointed out, but that’s what would make this a great opportunity. If the Pak Army garrison at Thall would take him in, they could brief him on all that was being done to stiffen the borders. If a skeptic like de Borchgrave could be shown all that had been done in recent days to guard against incursions by bin Laden’s Arabs, Jafar could turn this into a PR coup. The general was still less than enthusiastic as he rang off, but within a few hours, de Borchgrave was being fed and housed at Thall.

  A bit later on, Jafar called again. “It’s all set,” he said. General Ali Jan Aurakzai, the bluff, imposing Pashtun commander of XI Corps in Peshawar, would stop in Thall by helicopter the following morning to pick up Mr. de Borchgrave before beginning an airborne inspection tour of the army’s newly established border positions in Upper Kurram. This was turning out better than I could have hoped.

  There’s a saying in the military that in any operation, there’s always someone who doesn’t get the word. In this case, unfortunately, it was the young lieutenant who had been placed in charge of de Borchgrave. Rather than putting Arnaud on General Aurakzai’s helo in the morning, he instead escorted him to the gate and sent him on his way. Perhaps he thought the journalist would be chastened and head back to Islamabad. If so, he was wrong: with help from his friend, Arnaud disguised himself in local dress, reentered the tribal agency, and traveled for a full day on local jitneys and shuttle buses all over Kurram.

  The following Sunday I was surprised to glance up at the television, only to see Arnaud on the screen, sitting with a group of his colleagues on one of the Sunday morning news talk shows. I turned up the volume in time to hear him describe his post-Thall journey around the Tribal Areas near Tora Bora. Despite his transparent disguise, he said, he had been able to travel all around the area unmolested, and hadn’t seen so much as a police officer. As far as he could detect, the Pakistan-Afghan border was a sieve, he frowned; precautions to intercept bin Laden and other al-Qa’ida escapees from Afghanistan were nonexistent.

  I shook my head. “I hope Jafar doesn’t hear about this,” I thought. At least no one could say I hadn’t tried.

  It was not until over a month later, in late January 2002, that I learned what had happened when the al-Qaida cadres fled south from Tora Bora. Jafar and I traveled again for discussions with army and Frontier Corps commanders in North Waziristan and Kurram. This time, our concern was the threat of infiltration from the west rather than the north. But I was still curious about what had happened at Tora Bora. Unsurprisingly, each Kurram unit commander with whom we spoke claimed credit for the majority of the captures of the previous December. Not only were their stories contradictory, but none struck me as credible. It was not until the night of January 28, at a dinner hosted for me by the political agent in Parachinar, that I began to piece the story together. After Jafar had retired early with an oncoming case of the flu, I sat with the political agent and a number of local notables, including the bearded, fundamentalist ISI sector commander, all of whom seemed to regard me at the outset with a good deal of suspicion. It took a while to jolly them up, but soon we were all talking and laughing, and they began to lay out the recent events in considerable detail.

  Although a significant number of bin Laden’s followers had fallen into Pakistan Army hands, as reported to me by General Kayani on December 17, it was later, on the night of the 18th, that the majority emerged from the peaks above. In the darkness, most managed to avoid the army outposts on the high slopes, and arrived undetected near the base of the mountains. It was there, in small groups, that they encountered the lashgars, the local temporary tribal militias set up under agreement with the governor of the North-West Frontier. Exhausted, dehydrated, half-frozen, and lacking any food, they were persuaded by the maliks to give themselves up and to turn over their weapons, in the apparent hope that once their immediate needs had been met, they might be turned loose. The maliks instead turned them over to the army, as promised.

  One group of about forty militants, fed, watered, and loaded onto an army bus for the trip south, revived sufficiently to attempt to seize control of the vehicle. In the fracas, the driver ran off the road and the bus overturned in a ditch. A number of the militants were badly injured, but the majority made off with weapons stolen from their guards. Once informed of the escape, the Kurram Militia organized local tribesmen into yet another lashgar and followed after them in hot pursuit. The militants were eventually located and surrounded at the village of Arawali in Lower Kurram, just south of Sadda, a town long known as a hotbed of sedition and religious extremism. It’s not clear how many weapons the militants commanded at that point, but they managed to keep up a firefight for the better part of a day before the survivors among them were recaptured. I told the group that on the trip north I had seen a large field just below Sadda dotted with what appeared to be fresh graves, decorated with a large number of prayer flags.

  “Yes, yes!” several shouted. As
soon as the battle was over, the townsfolk had come out to bury the dead, and the women had decorated their graves with prayer flags to honor them as shouhada: martyrs. “Now you see what we’re up against,” the political agent noted, with a wry smile.

  In the years since, of course, I have seen the reports that bin Laden himself was with the fighters at Tora Bora, and somehow escaped from the area. It was a confused and chaotic period, with decent intelligence very hard to come by. As we consider the reliability of the fragmentary reports of bin Laden’s presence at Tora Bora, it’s worth remembering some of the other wild stories given credence at the time—tales of vast, multistory al-Qa’ida cave complexes, complete with a hotel and massive storage areas, connected with elevators, no less—all of which turned out to be fantasy.

  Perhaps the most compelling evidence of bin Laden’s presence at Tora Bora came from CIA and SF personnel at the scene, who were directing airstrikes and marshaling the efforts of local Afghan militias against the militants. On two occasions, reportedly, bin Laden’s voice was heard over the radio, alternately exhorting his men and apologizing to them for having led them into their hopeless predicament. I have no reason to disbelieve these reports; but even if we take them at face value, it is still not clear whether bin Laden would have been co-located with the militants under bombardment, or just close by. There have been a small number of reports attributed to militants present at Tora Bora, supposedly confirming bin Laden’s presence. None strikes me as definitive. Taken together, the available evidence leads me to believe that bin Laden most likely was present at the battle of Tora Bora, but that he was not reliant upon the fighters trapped there for his security. He had independent arrangements for his own departure.

  Some claim that bin Laden’s escape, if such it was, was proof of his cowardice. I do not agree. I do believe, however, that Osama bin Laden was sufficiently convinced of his own importance to believe that his survival was vital to the future of his movement, certainly more than that of any of his men, whom he could not save in any case. I think he realized that he had a greater chance of survival if he were traveling with a very small group, rather than with a more easily detectable band of fighters. My suspicion—and it is only that—is that if he fled Tora Bora, he would have moved farther east through the mountains, crossing the Pakistani frontier into the Tirah Valley, in the Khyber Agency, just east of Kurram. Tirah Valley in those days was the ultimate “no-go” area, a place where the inhabitants were so fiercely jealous of their autonomy as to forbid any roads to be built, lest they serve as a conduit for government influence. There was certainly no means of intercepting bin Laden there. Once safely in Pakistan, given even a modicum of support, he could have gone virtually anywhere undetected.

  It is still a point of contention whether a vigorous U.S. troop deployment at Tora Bora might have resulted in bin Laden’s capture. Gary Berntsen, the CIA leader on the scene, has long made this claim, stating that if his requests for a modest number of troops had been granted, bin Laden would surely have been killed or captured. I am skeptical. It seems to me that any one of the many deep ravines on the north side of the Safed Koh could easily have swallowed up a whole battalion of troops; the modest numbers requested by Berntsen, and which otherwise might have been available, would have been inadequate to the task.

  One tactic that might have succeeded in interdicting a greater number of those fleeing Tora Bora would have been to airlift U.S. Rangers up into the high passes on the crest of the Safed Koh. Success in capturing al-Qa’ida members fleeing through those passes would still not have been assured by any means, but an armed U.S. presence in those natural channels might have made a difference.

  I was not present at any of the meetings where troop requests were discussed and, reportedly, rejected. Having had considerable contact with the military, though, my strong suspicion is that Berntsen’s requests were rebuffed because they ran contrary to the prevailing doctrine that had been agreed for the conduct of the war. This was to be an Afghan campaign, with the United States merely acting in support. For U.S. troops suddenly to have been in the lead at Tora Bora would have been a sharp departure from established practice. It may well be that in this case, too slavish and literal-minded an adherence to an otherwise sensible doctrine had serious negative consequences. That’s often the problem with doctrine.

  Still, I strongly suspect that even effective American action to block the southerly passes into the Kurram Agency would not have resulted in bin Laden’s capture, if indeed my theory about his escape into the Tirah Valley is correct. We will simply never know: the one man who could tell us is now dead.

  Part Four

  * * *

  PAKISTAN, AL-QA’IDA, AND THE WIDER WAR

  Chapter 36

  * * *

  THE CZAR

  YOU HAD TO GIVE the brigadier his due, though whether he was courageous or merely stubborn, it was hard to tell. The villa we were touring seemed perfect for our purposes. Located on a quiet, leafy, residential street in Islamabad, it was shielded from view by high walls and tall, dense shrubbery. Inside the stout metal gate there was room in the tiled courtyard for several automobiles, so visitors would not have to park in the street and be exposed to the curiosity of neighbors. On the upper floor was a large kitchen and dining area, as well as a comfortable parlor for casual meetings, with several bedrooms for officers resting from watch duty. Below, on the ground floor, there were spaces for work areas, copy machines, faxes, and the like, as well as a formal briefing room and several small rooms for interviewing detainees.

  General Jafar was insisting that the villa be ready within ten days, and the brigadier charged with supporting him was holding just as firm: This would not be possible, he said. But the glowering general was adamant. He walked through each element of the project. Why couldn’t this be done right away, or that? What would be necessary to get a particular project done immediately? More money, more people, what? Dubbed the counterterrorism “Czar” by General Mahmud in September, during that sunny Sunday meeting with me and Wendy Chamberlin, Jafar was in no mood for delay.

  Ten days later, our joint intelligence center was up and running. Quickly dubbed the “Clubhouse” by the Pakistanis, it was staffed by them twenty-four hours a day, and became the venue for daily meetings with my officers. The division of labor quickly became clear: CIA’s global intelligence system would develop and provide leads to al-Qa’ida-connected people and locations, and the ISI would conduct investigations on the ground to confirm whether the leads were valid, taking action jointly with us when they were. Infamous al-Qa’ida facilitators whom we had been tracking for years suddenly went to ground, or fled. Safe locations used for sheltering al-Qa’ida trainees transiting to or from Afghanistan were shut down. Every week or so, General Jafar and I would take our places in the front row of the Clubhouse briefing room, flanked by our respective officers, while Brigadier Adnan reviewed the latest statistics and summarized ongoing operations.

  “To date,” he would say for example, “we have received one hundred thirty-six inquiries from CIA. One hundred twenty-three have been processed and assigned for investigation. Eighty-one have been resolved. Forty-two are pending resolution.” And on it would go, day by day, week by week. We would never reveal the sources of our information, of course, whether it came from human “assets,” or technical intercepts of global communications, or from some allied service on the other side of the planet; but all this information would flow into Islamabad Station, where it was processed, analyzed, and pieced together into coherent investigative leads by targeting officers “forward-deployed” from CTC, and then funneled through the Clubhouse for follow-up by the ISI.

  Our system of cooperation rested on a tacit suspension of the usual rules between representatives of sovereign governments. Under normal circumstances, the first reaction one would expect from the Pakistanis would be to inquire just how it was that we knew so much about what was happening in their country. But the exigencies of the s
ituation did not permit this: the Pakistanis had professed that they would work with us to root out al-Qa’ida, and would not do anything that might call their commitment into question. To them, all that mattered was whether the information we provided was accurate. Our Pakistani friends would not ask where the information came from, and we would not tell. This was bound to lead to recriminations eventually, but that would come later; now was not the time.

  A regular participant in the daily séances was Jenny Keenan, the FBI special agent assigned as the assistant legal attaché, or ALAT, in Islamabad. Diminutive and fit, with cropped brown hair, piercing blue eyes, and a streetwise manner, Jenny was initially a source of startled wonder to our Pakistani colleagues, who didn’t know quite what to make of an assertive young woman poking brazenly into their operations. Her knowledge and energy quickly won them over.

  Her boss, Chris Reimann, the FBI legal attaché, had been assigned to Islamabad at the same time as I, and had already become a great friend. Large and jovial, he was the sort of person one couldn’t help but like, and he quickly cut a wide social swath among both Pakistanis and foreigners in the capital city. Chris just wanted to see the right things get done. If he came across a lead of little potential use to himself, or one his tiny office didn’t have the resources to deal with, he would turn it over to me. His ecumenism was often not appreciated by FBI Headquarters, and he sometimes paid a price for it: we would have to conspire together to keep unhelpful information on his activities from making its way to the J. Edgar Hoover Building in Washington.

  Chris understood that he and I had different roles: mine was gathering intelligence, and his was seeing bad guys, specifically those indicted in the United States, put in jail. We put aside the rivalries that too frequently mar relations between the FBI and CIA. In the years before 9/11, it was nearly unimaginable, at least to me and my CIA colleagues, that the information we were gathering on al-Qa’ida would ever see the inside of a U.S. courtroom. Our job was to track al-Qa’ida and to try to disrupt them so that they couldn’t repeat the success they had enjoyed against the U.S. embassies in Nairobi and Dar es-Salaam in 1998. Our information generally did not meet a legal standard. But as much as Chris was helping me to succeed, I wanted him to succeed, and so I was more than willing to see to it that whatever information we acquired would also be put to use to build legal cases against the militants we were pursuing.