The Story

by Judith Miller

  Despite financial aid and weapons from Iran and Russia, he said, his alliance was losing ground to the Taliban. They had often tried to kill him, he told me. (On the eve of 9/11, they would succeed.) The soldiers Massoud had fought earlier that day—the so-called Fifty-fifth Brigade—had been assembled by Bin Laden himself, and included some seven hundred Arabs and other militant Muslims. His forces had captured some brigade members whom he called seasoned fighters. I asked to interview them, but he refused. His security had not yet interrogated them. But he agreed to let me interview some of the 120 foreign Muslim fighters whom he was holding among his 1,200 Taliban prisoners. These young foreign fighters—Pakistanis, Yemenis, Britons, and Chinese Uighurs, among others—were in a remote prison that was accessible only by helicopter.

  An eternity later, as the helicopter rounded a set of craggy cliffs, with the prison and our landing spot in sight, its rotor sputtered. The chopper tipped sideways as we began to plunge. One of Massoud’s aides pulled a Koran out of his flak jacket; another rapidly fingered his worry beads. A few seconds later, the chopper righted itself but came down hard about a half mile from our intended landing spot. Even the pilot, who must have been accustomed to such emergencies, looked relieved.

  Over the next two days, I came face-to-face with several of the young men Bin Laden had inspired. Muhammad Khaled Mihraban, a Pakistani from Lahore, was only twenty-six, but he claimed to have killed at least one hundred people. He had an “Islamic ideal” to fulfill, he told me. Afghanistan under the Taliban was the pure land he had been seeking. If ordered to so do, he would travel to New York to kill women and children for Islam. He would not hesitate.

  I heard similar words from other prisoners. Obeida Rahman, twenty-one, a Yemeni from Sana, one of ten children, had been sent to Afghanistan by teachers at his madrassa, the religious school. They had paid for living and training expenses in Afghanistan and, against his family’s wishes, encouraged him to fight. Abdul Jalil, twenty-one, from Kashgar in Xinjiang Province, China, said that despite his capture, he yearned to create an Islamic state “all over the world, God willing.” When released, he would return to China to expand the jihad.

  The young men being held here were a sample of what the CIA estimated were between fifty thousand and seventy-seven thousand militants from fifty-five countries who had been trained in recent years at a network of camps that the Taliban hosted. Arab officials had estimated that as many as five thousand recruits had passed through camps that were operated by Bin Laden. Two terrorism experts I trusted—Mike Sheehan, the former US Army Ranger who had worked for President Clinton as the coordinator of the State Department’s counterterrorism office, and Richard Clarke—said that participants in nearly every plot against the United States and its allies in the past decade had learned the arts of war and explosives in such camps. Bin Laden used the most closely guarded of them for advanced training on suicide bombs and mass attacks. The 1998 US Embassy bombings in Africa had been rehearsed on a model built to scale at a Bin Laden–run camp. Another, Abu Khabab, was being used to experiment on chemicals, poisons, and toxins.

  * * *

  I was planning to fly to Faizabad in the northeastern tip of Afghanistan, where three of the world’s most forbidding mountain ranges converge. There I would wait in a guest house for a private relief group’s weekly supply flight to Dushanbe in a more reliable, fixed-wing Cessna. The chopper that was to fly me to Faizabad was the most dilapidated yet. Its cracked windshield was covered in masking tape. Its fuel tank was leaking; the rusty cabin smelled like a gas station. A pipe carrying fuel to the rotor was wrapped in burlap. The pilot, who was smoking under the helicopter when I arrived, seemed disoriented. It was insane for me to board. But I had no choice. This junkyard dog of a chopper was my only way out of Afghanistan.

  Mine was a telling panic. I had surely come closer to being killed in my reporting career. But I had obviously changed since those near misses. I was no longer the daring young foreign correspondent who had ventured into Khartoum’s Kobar prison yard in 1985 amid several hundred impassioned Muslim believers to cover the hanging of an intellectual “heretic.” By the end of 2000, I had a lot to live for: Jason, good friends, and the life I loved in New York.

  Given my growing aversion to senseless risk, it was doubly ironic that four months later I would be pleading with Steve Engelberg to let me return to Afghanistan—this time as a guest of the Taliban.

  * * *

  Laili Helms was a soccer mom and mother of two who lived in New Jersey. An Afghan-American who had married the nephew of former CIA director Richard Helms, she was the Taliban’s improbable unofficial spokesman in America.9

  I was fascinated by Laili. A granddaughter of two former Afghan ministers in the late monarchy, she never seemed to tire of putting the best possible face on a regime whose human rights abuses were exasperating Washington. It was also clear to me that she loved Afghanistan and thought that the Taliban were the country’s best hope of reestablishing security after a brutal civil war that had ruined what the Soviets hadn’t destroyed.

  In November 2000 she helped me interview the Taliban foreign minister, Wakil Ahmad Mutawakil, who had adamantly denied that his regime was hosting terrorist training camps. (Intelligence sources had already shown me satellite shots of such facilities.) He had also denounced American pressure to expel Bin Laden as “insulting and useless.” Bin Laden had helped expel the Soviets. He was their guest. Finally, while some non-Afghan “volunteers” from the 1980s war against the Soviets remained in Afghanistan because they were not permitted to return to their countries, they were not being “trained” in “jihadi” training camps. There was none in Afghanistan, he insisted. Nothing was “hidden” in Afghanistan. I should come see for myself.

  How could we refuse such an offer? I begged Steve. Thanks to my interviews with the opposition’s Taliban prisoners in northern Afghanistan and information that I had from Western intelligence officials, we knew the names and locations of at least a dozen Bin Laden camps. The trip would provide the natural conclusion of our series on Al Qaeda and militant Islamic terrorism, I said. After a year of research, travel, and nonstop interviews, most of the articles for our series on the growing militant Islamist threat were almost finished, and a portrait of Al Qaeda and Bin Laden’s terror network had emerged. All we needed was on-the-ground information about his camps. This was our best shot at getting it, I argued.

  “Forget it,” Steve Engelberg said when I first proposed the trip. “Dead reporters can’t write stories.”

  Gradually I wore him down with daily justifications for the trip. The Afghan code of hospitality, which even the Taliban shared, would protect me, I argued. If the Taliban refused to expel their “guest” Bin Laden, they were unlikely to kill or jail a reporter whom they had also invited to Kabul and were honor bound to protect. Besides, I had persuaded Laili to accompany me as translator and guide. Would the Taliban murder or imprison their best American advocate? Reluctantly, Steve agreed.

  Clarke, Washington’s counterterrorism chief, was less encouraging. Was I mad? he asked. Unlike Bin Laden, I wasn’t paying the Taliban an estimated $40 million for its “hospitality”—money that had bought off local warlords and secured weapons. Dick was especially concerned about my determination to visit Abu Khabab camp. “Don’t even think about going there,” he warned me.

  I didn’t share Clarke’s advice with Steve. In mid-December 2000 Laili and I left for Afghanistan. True to his word, Mutawakil welcomed us at his ministry with tea and sweets. After he discussed the interviews he had arranged, he asked us what we would like to see. I handed him a list of the Bin Laden camps I wanted to visit. The list contained a dozen names, locations, and ostensible specialties. The minister’s face darkened. He twisted the end of his turban. There were no Arab Afghans at these locations, he said firmly. Yes, there were camps in some of the places on my list, but they were Taliban facilities for Afghans only. Of course I would be welcome to visit them.

>   The next day, armed with my list and a global positioning monitor to determine precise location, Laili and I set out in a Foreign Ministry car with a guide from the Interior Ministry, which conducted surveillance.

  Our first stop was the Qargagh Division camp near the former tourist town of Paghman, twenty minutes north of Kabul. At the entrance, the guards told us that no one could enter without written authorization from the Defense Ministry. The Interior Ministry’s permit was useless, they said, much to our Interior Ministry guide’s embarrassment. The guards said there were no Arabs in the camp, but when we stopped for tea in Paghman, villagers told us there were lots of Arabs in Qargagh, as well as Turks, Africans, Tajiks, and, of course, “Punjabis”—the local term for Pakistanis. The foreigners had been there a long time, they said. Our Taliban guide insisted that they were mistaken.

  Having failed to enter Qargagh, we tried later that day to visit a compound that had been closed a few months earlier through Pakistani pressure but was recently reactivated: Rishkoor, twenty minutes south of Kabul. There, too, guards denied us entry. The camp commandant had gone to Kabul to pray. No one could enter without his permission. We would wait for his return, I replied. That might take several days, they told me. Once again, villagers and relief workers near the camp told us that whenever the Taliban feared that the United States might be planning to target the camp, many of the Arab and other non-Afghan residents who lived there had moved to Kabul or other towns temporarily.

  So it went, day after day, with Mutawakil promising to eliminate obstacles. Afghan officials later told Laili and me that he and the Taliban defense minister had argued over whether we should be admitted and that Mutawakil had even tried to persuade Mullah Omar, the Taliban’s de facto ruler, to expel Bin Laden. As we waited in the Taliban guest house, Mullah Omar decided that only a UN commission would be granted entry to military installations because of the ongoing civil war. Humiliated and overruled, Minister Mutawakil became inaccessible.

  On our fourth day in Jalalabad, a Foreign Ministry official appeared suddenly and promised to escort us to the Darunta complex, housing Abu Khabab. He had full authorization to do so, he said. Laili brightened. Mutawakil had prevailed after all, she said. The official asserted that Abu Khabab was not a military camp at all but an “agricultural and technical training area” where chemicals and other fertilizer ingredients were stored. Yet shortly before we were scheduled to leave, the embarrassed diplomat reappeared: the trip was off, he apologized. The provincial governor had disapproved our visit. He hoped that we had enjoyed our stay in Afghanistan, he added, politely inviting us to leave the country later that day. He would escort us to the border.

  As our car headed for Pakistan, I saw a sign indicating the turnoff to Darunta. “Turn here,” I instructed the driver, as Laili gasped, and the young diplomat protested. “I’m not leaving Afghanistan without seeing the Darunta dam,” I told them. Based on a map I had gotten from Western intelligence officials, I knew that a few miles farther down the road was a bridge that led directly to the Abu Khabab camp. We had made it, I thought.

  Soon after we made the turn, several heavily armed, bearded men suddenly appeared out of nowhere and surrounded our car. Laili blanched. So did the Taliban diplomat. One of the guards was carrying a rocket-propelled grenade; the other approached the driver’s side of the car, pointing his Kalashnikov straight at us through the half-open window. Neither of them spoke, but their motion for us to turn the car around was unmistakable.

  I didn’t know who these men were, but judging from their appearance and dress, they weren’t Afghans. Our status as “guests” of the Taliban riding in a Foreign Ministry car meant nothing to them as they barred our way.

  I looked hard at the guard pointing his rifle at me. He returned the stare. I had seen those sinister eyes before: at Islamist militant rallies in the Sudan; in the jihadis in cages being tried after having killed Egypt’s Anwar Sadat; at the prison in northern Afghanistan earlier that year. This man, whoever he was, meant business. I told our driver to turn the car around.

  — CHAPTER 12 —

  ASHES AND ANTHRAX: THE SHADOW OF 9/11

  Was it preventable—that terrible day?

  The bipartisan 9/11 Commission, whose staff was headed by Philip Zelikow, the historian and policy analyst who had worked for President Bush, thought so. Based on interviews with 1,200 people in ten countries and a review of 2.5 million pages of documents containing national security secrets, the commission’s devastating indictment blamed almost every branch of government, as well as the press, for appalling failures.

  Published nearly three years after the catastrophic attack, the report made heartbreaking reading.1 The CIA had lost track of two of the hijackers in Bangkok, Thailand, and failed to prevent them from entering the country. Although the agency had done more than any other to prevent the attacks, it had downplayed huge failures, such as its lack of sufficient intelligence and paramilitary ability to strike Al Qaeda at its base in Afghanistan. It had not produced a National Intelligence Estimate on terrorism since 1997, despite the growing number and lethality of attacks. Paul Pillar, the intelligence officer responsible for the Middle East and drafting national intelligence estimates on the region, had published a book arguing that terrorism had to be managed, not “won” and that Washington’s “preoccupation” with capturing Osama bin Laden was a “misallocation of attention and resources.”2 Director George Tenet had declared “war” on Al Qaeda in 1998 after the US Embassy bombings in East Africa, almost no one in government had mobilized, including his agency.

  In 1996 the CIA had established a special unit in a nondescript building in a Virginia suburb to monitor Bin Laden.3 But even some of their colleagues regarded the unit as “alarmists.” Resources for counterterrorism were not increased significantly. The CIA, responsible for monitoring enemies overseas, and the FBI, charged with tracking them down internally, resented each other. Rules and perverse traditions also prevented them from sharing information. The Federal Aviation Administration had not received names on the terrorist watch list. The State Department had ignored Saudi financing of militant Islamist groups.

  The crucial weakness, though, was a lack of “imagination.” America’s leaders had failed to grasp “the gravity of the threat,” the report said, echoing the Long Commission’s bottom line in its report on the US Marine compound bombing in 1983. “The terrorist danger from Bin Laden and Al Qaeda,” the 9/11 Commission report concluded, “was not a major topic for policy debate among the public, the media, or in the Congress.”

  The Times’s three-part series, published eight months before 9/11, was called “Holy Warriors.” The project I helped launch, report, and write had warned explicitly of Bin Laden’s militant terrorist network in Afghanistan. It described in detail the web of extremist Muslims that Al Qaeda was mobilizing to wage jihad against America and the West. It reported that Afghanistan had become “an essential base of operations, a reservoir of potential suicide bombers and a battle front where crucial ties were forged and plots being crafted.” It disclosed that Al Qaeda trainers were believed to be experimenting with chemicals—and perhaps biological agents, poisons, and toxins—at a complex of camps at a place called Darunta. It warned of plans for a major attack against America, though not precisely where or when it would come, or what form it would take. The series was among the most ambitious, expensive national security investigations the Times had ever published.

  It had almost no impact.

  * * *

  The days after the 2001 attack were a blur. Dozens of Times reporters had raced to the site. I lived less than a mile away and had just gone around the corner to vote in the city’s mayoral primary when the first plane struck the North Tower. I could see the flames and the smoking towers clearly. I tried to call John O’Neill, a trusted source and former FBI counterterrorism head who had become chief of security at the Towers, but could not reach him.

  When I got to the office, Howell Raines and Ger
ald Boyd were mobilizing the Times army. Having led the paper for less than a week, they would send out three hundred reporters and fifty-four photographers that day to produce a comprehensive report on the attacks.4 In the ensuing weeks and months, they followed up with a daily section of stunning quality. I had never been so proud to be a foot soldier in that Times army.

  I spent much of that first day frantically trying to reach sources in Washington. Since this was surely an Al Qaeda attack, I would be more useful working my sources by phone from Forty-third Street than reporting from the site. I sent an email to Roger Cohen, the acting foreign editor. “Whoever is claiming credit,” I wrote, “I think we need to focus on Bin Laden’s networks.”

  I reached almost no one. Dick Clarke, his counterterrorism team at the White House, and experts at the Pentagon had been evacuated. Cell phones didn’t work.

  Our apartment downtown was a constant reminder of the tragedy. I had begged Jason to move in with friends uptown. The air where we lived—twenty blocks from the smoldering debris—was foul. Jason refused to leave, so I gave him a biomask from the stash I had used to tour Voz Island and warned him not to leave the apartment without wearing it. I did not believe, as officials assured us, that the air was safe.

  I soon learned that John O’Neill had died in the attack he had warned us about for so long. John had seen it all: the bureau’s successful apprehension of Ramzi Yousef in Pakistan to stand trial in New York for the 1993 World Trade Center bombing; the 1998 embassy bombings in Africa; Bin Laden’s 1998 fatwa declaring war on America; the attack on the US Navy destroyer Cole in Yemen in 2000. How I would miss his knowledge and instincts, his “bullshit” barometer on all things Al Qaeda.5