Bin Laden pushed his survivalist ideas to absurd lengths, forbidding his family to use refrigerators and air-conditioning even when they lived in the scorching Sudanese capital of Khartoum. And when he moved to Kandahar from Jalalabad sometime in 1997, bin Laden chose to base himself and his men at the Kandahar airport housing complex, a place with no running water or electricity. In the words of his chief bodyguard Abu Jandal, “He wanted his followers to live an austere and modest life in this world.”
Those outside his immediate circle also witnessed the al-Qaeda leader’s determination to live a life of austerity. Abdel Bari Atwan, the Palestinian journalist who interviewed him in Afghanistan in 1996, recalls that dinner for bin Laden and several of his inner circle consisted of salty cheese, a potato, five or six fried eggs, and bread caked with sand. Zaynab Khadr, whose family lived with the al-Qaeda leader in Afghanistan during the late 1990s, remembers that “he didn’t allow [his children] to drink cold water … because he wanted them to be prepared that one day there’s no cold water.” Noman Benotman, the Libyan who once fought alongside al-Qaeda, says that when bin Laden lived in Afghanistan he instructed his followers, “You should learn to sacrifice everything from modern life like electricity, air conditioning, refrigerators, gasoline. If you are living the luxury life, it’s very hard to evacuate and go to the mountains to fight.”
Cofer Black, who ran the CIA’s Counterterrorist Center at the time of the 9/11 attacks and who told President Bush that his operatives would bring him bin Laden’s head “in a box,” explained that bin Laden had a dilemma after the fall of the Taliban: to avoid being captured he had to adopt a “hermit on the hilltop” approach. On the other hand, if he remained “in business,” he opened himself to the possibility that his communications would be detected. Al-Qaeda’s leaders were surely cognizant of this fact, which might explain why bin Laden sometimes sharply reduced the number of tapes he released, going eleven months without releasing one in 2002.
Ahmed Zaidan, Al Jazeera’s bureau chief in Pakistan, an intense Syrian intellectual who speaks English faster than most native speakers, described what it was like to receive one of those audiotapes: “It was November 2002, just after the Bali incident. Somebody called me saying ‘I want you urgently now.’ I met a man with a half-covered face who handed me a cassette. I said to him ‘What is this?’ He said ‘No questions.’” Once the mysterious man had disappeared Zaidan played the cassette and realized that it was bin Laden’s voice on the tape.
On the audiotape, which aired first on Al Jazeera on November 12, 2002, and then was picked up by media outlets around the globe, bin Laden referenced a string of recent terrorist attacks perpetrated by al-Qaeda or one its affiliates, from the bombing of a synagogue in Tunisia on April 11, 2002, which killed twenty, to the attack on a French oil tanker, the Limburg, off the coast of Yemen on October 6, to the October 12 suicide bombings of two nightclubs on the holiday island of Bali in Indonesia, which killed two hundred mostly young Western tourists.
At eight o’clock on the evening that the bin Laden audiotape was released, National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice called President Bush with the unwelcome news that there was a proof of life from al-Qaeda’s leader. The next day Bush walked into his morning staff meeting very intense. The man he had promised to capture Dead or Alive was very much Alive.
Tracing back the chain of custody of audiotapes such as the one received by Al Jazeera’s Ahmed Zaidan would conceivably eventually lead to al-Qaeda’s leaders, but such an investigation was complicated by the fact that the group used cutouts and varied the media outlets that received its messages. In the nine years after 9/11, al-Qaeda’s two top leaders had released more than one hundred audio and videotapes, on average about one tape a month. However, despite the fact that many of these tapes were released first to Al Jazeera, U.S. intelligence services (which were funded to the tune of around $75 billion a year) were seemingly incapable of tracing the chain of custody of the tapes, an abject failure of intelligence-gathering.
The release of a bin Laden videotape just before the 2004 U.S. presidential election was no exception to this pattern. Five days before the election, on October 29, Zaidan again received a mysterious videotape at his Islamabad office. CNN reported that Pentagon officials were not surprised that bin Laden would issue such a statement around the time of the American election, yet there was nothing to indicate that U.S. intelligence agencies were staking out the most obvious recipient of such a tape: Al Jazeera’s bureau in Pakistan.
The new bin Laden videotape played on Al Jazeera and on television networks around the world; on the tape al-Qaeda’s leader responded directly to President Bush’s frequent claim that his group was attacking the United States because of its freedoms rather than its foreign policy. The terrorist leader said sardonically, “Contrary to what Bush says and claims that we hate your freedom. If that were true, then let him explain why did we not attack Sweden?”
The unexpected reappearance of bin Laden did remind Americans that the Bush administration still had not caught the terrorist mastermind, but it also reminded them of the threat from terrorism, an issue on which Bush was seen as stronger than his rival, Senator John Kerry. Kerry later said that the bin Laden tape’s appearance in the final days of the close election race was a critical factor in his loss to Bush. “It froze our polls that night, and over the weekend, we went down one point by Monday,” Kerry recalls, adding, “There was no other issue, other than 48 hours of talk about the War on Terror and Osama bin Laden. It had a profound impact.”
It was clear from the videotapes of bin Laden and Zawahiri that aired in the years after 9/11 that they were not living in caves. On those tapes both men’s clothes were clean and well pressed. Caves generally don’t have laundry facilities. And the videotapes that they released were well-lit and well-shot productions, suggesting access either to electrical outlets or generators to run lights. Zawahiri was often filmed in a library setting and on one of his videotapes from March 2006 there were curtains clearly visible behind him, suggesting that the tape was shot in a house.
And the statements made by al-Qaeda’s leaders while they have been on the run were surprisingly well informed about what was going on around the world. In a 2004 videotape, bin Laden made a reference to the scene in Michael Moore’s film Fahrenheit 9/11 where President Bush continued to read a story about a goat to a kindergarten class after he had been informed that passenger jets had crashed into the World Trade Center. In 2003, bin Laden issued an audiotape that inserted himself into an arcane debate then going on in Saudi clerical circles over the meaning of jihad. Similarly, a year later, Zawahiri issued tapes criticizing France’s push to ban Muslim head scarves in schools. And in a 2007 tape bin Laden favorably mentioned the work of the leftist American author Noam Chomsky.
The content of these tapes implied that while they have been on the lam both of al-Qaeda’s leaders have had access to a variety of Arab and English sources—not the sort of materials readily available in a cave. This also suggested that if bin Laden and Zawahiri were indeed in Pakistan’s tribal areas, then they were either in or near an urbanized area. While the tribal areas along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border are in the main undeveloped, there are some larger towns in the tribal belt that are more urbanized and around which can be found tribal compounds that have access to modern amenities such as electricity. It is inside such compounds that al-Qaeda’s top leaders were likely hiding.
A top U.S. military intelligence official familiar with the hunt for bin Laden said that he might be living in the remote northern Pakistani region of Chitral, on the Afghan border, an analysis that was based in part on trees that are peculiar to that region and can be seen in a 2003 video of bin Laden walking in a mountainous area. In addition, the official said, that analysis was based on the length of time it took for bin Laden’s audiotapes to make their way from this presumed location in the remote mountains on the Afghan-Pakistan border to outlets such as Al Jazeera when he comm
ented on important news events, such as the death of al-Qaeda’s leader in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. It took three weeks, for instance, for bin Laden’s reaction to Zarqawi’s death to appear on the world’s television screens.
Given that al-Qaeda is highly secretive, compartmentalized, and security conscious, what strategies might work to flush out bin Laden? Will the $25 million bounty on his head work? In the past, cash rewards have been useful in bringing terrorists to justice. Mir Aimal Kasi, a Pakistani who killed two CIA employees outside the Agency’s headquarters in Virginia in 1993, was apprehended in part because of the $2 million reward offered. A $25 million reward played a role in the apprehension of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. However, these men did not inspire the spiritual awe that bin Laden does. That bin Laden’s inner circle would turn him over for money is unthinkable. Bin Laden has had a multimillion-dollar bounty on his head since as far back as 1999, but there have been no takers.
FBI Special Agent Brad Garrett is a former Marine, habitually dressed entirely in black, who ran Kasi to ground in Pakistan after a four-year hunt. He explained what methods had worked to find Kasi, and how they might be applicable in the hunt for bin Laden. “The key is developing sources,” Garrett said. “You have to sort out what is BS from what is the truth, and develop multiple sources to see what is real. You hope to get an associate to give up real-time information about the fugitive. The intelligence is very perishable, so another factor is one’s ability to react to it in a timely fashion.”
Garrett encountered many dry holes in his four-year hunt for Kasi, finally tracking him down in the dusty backwater of Dera Ghazi Khan, in central Pakistan, which “felt like it was out of The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly.” Garrett explained that although Kasi was helped by a loose network of people who “respected” him for his attack outside CIA headquarters, he did not have an organization he could rely on, as bin Laden does. In short, Kansi was more vulnerable to detection than the terrorist mastermind, because he was essentially a lone wolf.
Robert Grenier, the CIA station chief in Pakistan during the fall of the Taliban, said that a local-informant-based approach was likely to yield the best results. Those informants would be looking for “anomalies” such as unusual amounts or types of food being provided to a particular location in areas where the al-Qaeda leader is believed to be hiding. Also, bin Laden has certain lifelong habits he is unlikely to break that may provide what CIA analysts call a “signature” of his presence. The first is a passionate attachment to riding thoroughbred horses, which he has done since he was a teenager. Even in his late forties he would boast that he could ride up to seventy kilometers a day. And bin Laden is a family man who over time has accumulated five wives and some twenty kids. While most of his wives have left him, as have many of his children, some of his kids remain in the region and he will no doubt want to take part in family events such as the weddings of his offspring. And bin Laden may even have remarried himself into the families of the local tribes, as some of his own men and Zawahiri have done.
U.S. intelligence services have failed to insert agents in al-Qaeda’s inner circle, the only surefire way to get real-time intelligence about bin Laden’s whereabouts. Colonel Patrick Lang, a fluent Arabic-speaker who ran Middle Eastern “HUMINT” (human intelligence) for the Defense Intelligence Agency in the early 1990s, said that the lack of HUMINT remained a problem after 9/11. “Everybody talks about effective HUMINT,” he said, “but nothing is happening. The people who do this kind of work are gifted eccentrics, who the bureaucrats don’t like, or they are the criminal types, who the lawyers don’t like. If only we were the ruthless bastards everyone thinks we are.”
It’s possible, but not likely, that signals intelligence, known as “SIGINT,” could be bin Laden’s undoing. SIGINT was critical in the case of the Colombian drug kingpin Pablo Escobar, the subject of a massive manhunt by the Colombian police in his native city of Medellin in 1993. The operation used CIA eavesdropping and direction-finding technology. When Escobar made a cell phone call to his son that lasted longer than a few minutes, Colombian forces swarmed his neighborhood and shot him dead. But bin Laden is sav-vier than Escobar; a U.S. official said that he “has quit any kind of device that can be listened to.” That includes satellite phones, cell phones, and handheld radios. When communication is absolutely necessary he relies on couriers, and there had been some success in intercepting these messengers in the past. “We have hit couriers from time to time,” a U.S. military official said.
The same official said, “My sense is that he has been hunkered down in one place for a long time,” making it harder to track him. The official said that Zawahiri, by contrast, is “more operational and is moving more.” That may account for why the United States believed it had sufficiently good intelligence to launch a strike from a pilotless drone aimed at killing Zawahiri on January 13, 2006, in the village of Damadola, on Pakistan’s border with Afghanistan. The strike missed Zawahiri by a couple of hours but resulted in the death of five militants, including one of the al-Qaeda leader’s relatives. But a little over two weeks after the strike, Zawahiri released a videotape thumbing his nose at President Bush and celebrating the fact that he had survived the attack.
In the face of the intense Pakistani opposition to American boots on the ground, the Bush administration chose to rely on drones to target suspected al-Qaeda and Taliban leaders. Bush ordered the CIA to expand its attacks with Predator and Reaper drones during the summer of 2008, and the U.S. government stopped notifying Pakistani officials when strikes were imminent or obtaining their “concurrence” for the attacks. As a result, the time that it took for a target to be identified and engaged dropped from many hours to forty-five minutes.
The Predator and Reaper drones were operated by a squadron of pilots stationed in Nevada and were equipped to drop Hellfire missiles and JDAM bombs, respectively. More than two-dozen feet in length, the drones lingered over the tribal areas looking for targets. Between July 2008 and the time he had left office, President Bush had authorized thirty Predator and Reaper strikes on Pakistani territory, a fivefold increase compared to the six strikes that the CIA had launched during the first half of 2008.
Those drone strikes killed dozens of lower-ranking militants and at least ten mid-and upper-level leaders within al-Qaeda or the Taliban. One of them was Abu Laith al-Libi, who had orchestrated a 2007 suicide attack targeting Vice President Dick Cheney while the latter was visiting Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan. Libi was then described as the number-three man in the al-Qaeda hierarchy, perhaps the most dangerous job in the world, given that the half-dozen or so men who had occupied that position since 9/11 have ended up in prison or dead. Other militants killed in the stepped-up drone strikes included Abu Khabab al-Masri, al-Qaeda’s WMD researcher, and Abu Jihad al-Masri, the group’s propaganda chief. None of these strikes targeted bin Laden, who seemed to have vanished like a wraith.
The pace of drone attacks ramped up further during the waning days of the Bush administration—likely a legacy-building effort to dismantle the entire al-Qaeda top leadership. Cheney seemed to acknowledge this in an interview with CNN eleven days before Obama took office, saying optimistically of efforts to kill bin Laden, “We’ve got a few days left yet.” A week earlier, the Bush administration had received the welcome news that Osama al-Kini and his lieutenant, Sheikh Ahmed Salim Swedan, had been killed by a Hellfire missile launched from a drone over Waziristan. Kini and Swedan had played a central role in planning the 1998 bombings of the two American embassies in East Africa. Bush told CNN’s Larry King with a slight smirk that bin Laden would eventually be found “just like the people who allegedly were involved in the East African bombings. Couple of them were brought to justice recently.”
As the drone program was in full swing, the CIA director, General Michael Hayden, explained in November 2008 that “by making a safe haven feel less safe, we keep al-Qaeda guessing. We make them doubt their allies; question their methods, their plans, even their p
riorities.” Hayden went on to say that the key outcome of the drone attacks was that “we force them to spend more time and resources on self-preservation, and that distracts them, at least partially and at least for a time, from laying the groundwork for the next attack.”
Privately, American officials raved about the drone program. One Bush administration official said that the drones had so crimped the militants’ activities in the FATA that they had begun discussing a move to Yemen or Somalia. The number of “spies” al-Qaeda and the Taliban killed rose dramatically after the summer of 2008, suggesting that the militants were turning on themselves in an effort to root out the sources of the often pinpoint intelligence that had led to what officials described as the deaths of half of the top militant leaders in the FATA by early 2009.
One way of measuring the pain that the drone program had inflicted on al-Qaeda was the number of audio-and videotapes that the terrorist group had released through its propaganda arm, Al Sahab. Al-Qaeda takes its propaganda operations seriously and in 2007 Al Sahab had a banner year, releasing almost one hundred tapes. But the number of releases dropped by half in 2008, indicating that the group’s leaders were more concerned with survival than public relations.
Pakistan was not the only country where al-Qaeda’s top leaders fled following the fall of the Taliban in the winter of 2001. A number of important al-Qaeda operatives fled to Iran, where they were taken into Iranian custody. Saif al-Adel, number three in the al-Qaeda hierarchy; Suleiman Abu Ghaith, the group’s spokesman; and Abu al-Khayr, a deputy of Zawahiri’s, were all apprehended by Iranian authorities a year or so after 9/11. What the Iranians planned to do with their al-Qaeda guests was something of a mystery: “We wish we could predict how this is going to turn out,” said one U.S. intelligence official. They appeared to be bargaining chips that the Iranians could use in the event of some normalization of relations with the United States.
The Longest War Page 45
