The Exile

by Adrian Levy

  Two days before 9/11, the Al Qaeda leader had sent two Tunisians, posing as journalists, to see Ahmad Shah Massoud, the charismatic and popular leader of the Northern Alliance, a rival warlord faction that was supported by the United States and was therefore Mullah Omar’s nemesis. They had detonated a bomb hidden in their camera, killing Massoud in an act that required a quid pro quo. Now, Osama would never be forced out of Afghanistan at any price.

  According to Mahfouz, the Pakistani spymaster nodded and offered some tactical advice. “If the United States does attack, they will rely on aerial bombardment rather than putting soldiers on the ground.” Given his access to high-ranking U.S. officials, and shared intelligence, he would brief Mullah Omar what those likely targets would be. The ISI was entering into an intelligence sharing agreement with the Taliban.

  Eleven days later, Ahmed returned to Kandahar, telling Grenier he was delivering a final ultimatum to Mullah Omar. Instead, according to Mahfouz, he took with him two Pakistani brigadier generals, who would spend several hours talking through simple strategies to commence a “mountain guerrilla war.” Outside in a pickup sat a team of ISI specialists, who were to be left behind to rig Kandahar with booby traps, protect Mullah Omar, and train his praetorian guard.

  Once back in Islamabad, Ahmed assembled his final gift, dispatching so many Pakistani fuel tankers and supply trucks toward the Taliban that they choked the border crossing into Afghanistan at Chaman.71

  September 15, 2001, Geneva, Switzerland

  Post 9/11, old friends had to stand fast, and new deals had to be made.

  As soon as his colleagues cleared out of Foggy Bottom for the weekend, senior State Department official Ryan Crocker caught a taxi to the airport and flew to Geneva, knowing he had a critical twenty-four hours of secret meetings ahead. He would have to be back at his desk by Monday morning, so that his trip went unnoticed.

  Crocker, the son of a U.S. Air Force officer, was fresh from a kinetic posting as ambassador to Syria, one in which his embassy had been stormed by protesters, making him a steady pair of hands in a tight spot. A man who could be firm but also informal, he was “never your typical diplomat,” as President George W. Bush would joke, finishing off the story by saying, “for social engagements Crocker likes to tell guests: ‘no socks required.’ ”72

  The cloak-and-dagger of the Geneva mission was proportional, Crocker thought, not only to insulate it from ideologically senior Bush appointees who would try to stop it, especially Richard Armitage, but also because of the risks being taken by those he was about to meet on the other side of the table.

  Using the United Nations as cover, Crocker was sitting down with a high-level delegation of Iranian diplomats led by Mohammad Javad Zarif, a deputy minister of foreign affairs who was conversant in all things American, as his affluent family had paid for him to be educated there—in San Francisco and Denver. After graduation, he had taken a post in New York as part of Iran’s delegation to the United Nations. Engaging and confident, he spoke English with an American twang, his children had been educated in American schools, and he made it clear to Crocker from the start that he represented the inner sanctum of Iran’s Reformist president, Mohammad Khatami.73

  What was on offer was “extraordinary and extraordinarily sensitive,” Crocker thought. Given Iran’s shared border with Afghanistan, and a history of vicious anti-Shia pogroms and massacres undertaken by Sunni zealots from there, as well as the more recent instability kicked up by Mullah Omar’s regime and its kinship with Osama bin Laden, Tehran’s Reformists wanted to be rid of the Taliban and Al Qaeda altogether. This put Iran in the unusual position of seeing—for the first time in many years—its foreign policy goals coalesce with those of the United States, which had blackballed everything Iranian since the fall of the shah and the storming of the U.S. embassy in 1979.

  Crocker and his Iranian counterpart stayed up through the night talking. They found they had much in common, and the Iranian delegation was keen to crack on. Khatami, who had been voted into office in 1997, saw the 9/11 tragedy as a chance to usher in a new era of détente with Washington, and Zarif offered introductions to Afghan warlords who might assist the United States in purging the Taliban and their Arab guests, enabling the formation of a new pro-Western government in Kabul.

  Several more clandestine meetings were scheduled. As a result of Crocker’s trips and over the course of several weeks, the pace picked up and he soon recognized that while Iran was keen to forge ahead, the United States was the tardy partner, always deferring and playing for time.

  At one weekend session, an Iranian official slammed a sheaf of papers on the table. The Twin Towers had fallen weeks earlier but the United States had still not responded, he railed. “If you guys don’t stop building these fairy-tale governments in the sky, and actually start doing some shooting on the ground, nothing is ever going to happen! When you’re ready to talk about serious fighting, you know where to find me.”74

  All Crocker could do was laugh.

  The next time they met, Zarif handed him a map of Afghanistan with Taliban positions marked on it. “These are the most sensitive spots,” he explained. “You want to strike these first, especially the ones in Kandahar.”75

  Could he write all of this down? Crocker asked.

  “Keep the map,” Zarif replied, turning on his heel.

  October 7, 2001, Kandahar

  The U.S. Army was coming. Everyone knew it. The euphoria that the Taliban had felt at seeing America forced to “drink from the bitterness cup” of 9/11 was fading fast.76

  Inside Mullah Omar’s compound, he and his advisers grew more furious by the day at having been blindsided by the Planes Operation. Since Osama had not even bothered to tell them the date for the attack, they had sent their forces to fight the Northern Alliance days beforehand, leaving Kandahar and its half-million citizens undefended.

  What should the Commander of the Faithful do? he asked the Mauritanian.

  Ready yourself and the city, the cleric advised him.

  The Taliban mobilized its citizens, rousing them door-to-door, ordering them to excavate their own air-raid shelters.

  Using farm tools, they dug large holes in the ground and covered them with tarpaulins. Their wives dubbed them “mass graves.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  “Terrorism is a duty and assassination is a Sunnah.”

  —ABU MUSAB AL-SURI, THE CALL FOR GLOBAL ISLAMIC RESISTANCE1

  May 1996, Tora Bora, White Mountains, Afghanistan

  When Osama moved back to Afghanistan in 1996 he returned to a place whose Pashto name “Tora Bora” meant Black Cave. He had first got to know it at the height of the Afghan jihad.

  Panicked by the Soviet invasion of 1980, the ISI and its paymasters in the CIA and Saudi intelligence had by 1986 turned this South Asian fault line into a major front in the Cold War. That year, the ISI spotted the potential for Tora Bora, an impenetrable honeycombed aerie, to become a staging post from which to arm the Afghan-bound mujahideen; and it employed Osama to build a route up from the Jalalabad side to fifteen thousand feet—using equipment, engineers, and know-how borrowed from his father’s construction empire in Saudi Arabia.2 When the Soviet war ended, Osama had gone home to Saudi Arabia, but after falling out with the royal family, in 1991 he had shifted his family and supporters to Sudan.

  After five arid years in Khartoum, a period in which he had talked of jihad but spent his time building roads and factories, he was thrilled to be back in the jaws of the White Mountains accompanied by his trusted deputy Abu Hafs the Commander, a handful of bodyguards, and his teenage son Omar. Almost immediately, he began to reminisce about the old fighting days, particularly his initiation into real battle in 1987, when he had gone from being a rich facilitator of jihad to a real soldier, establishing a military redoubt he called the Lion’s Den a couple of valleys away from Tora Bora, and within sight of a large Soviet base at Jaji.

  Sleeping in foxholes with a band of seventy ill-traine
d Arab fighters, he had expelled from the camp those who had mocked his ability or questioned the strategy of eyeballing the Russian special forces. “This is jihad!” the inexperienced Osama had insisted. “This is the way we go to heaven.”3

  When the Soviets attacked, it had seemed implausible that the Arabs could win. But at the peak of battle, and with nine of Osama’s men facing down seventy Spetsnaz troops, the Red Army unexpectedly pulled back, handing Osama an unlikely genesis story that helped him launch Al Qaeda the following year. A snub-nosed Kalashnikov recovered from a dead Russian officer became Osama’s totem and he brandished it, saying “men without weapons are incomplete.”4 He was no longer just the rejected seventeenth son of Saudi billionaire Mohammed bin Laden but a warrior fighting a noble cause, a hero of his own making.

  Now in 1996, according to Omar, who was at his side, Osama quickly built himself up into a fury about Saudi Arabia and the West. He spent his evenings ranting on a Dictaphone about the wars he intended to launch.5

  Separated from his family and his closest advisers, who remained in Sudan, vanity hardened into unrelenting solipsism as he began to dream about a new battle for the heart of Islam. Believing that dreams were messages from God, he became transfixed by the idea of inciting war against another superpower: America. He tried to lure Omar into the discussion, but all the boy could think of was how his cousins in Jeddah lived in beautiful houses and drove luxury cars, while his home was a dank cave. “My father did not mind the trying conditions but seemed exhilarated by them as if his previous risky exploits as a warrior in Afghanistan had created a lifelong need for stimulation,” Omar recalled.6

  Omar was shocked when, four months into their stay, his father called for the rest of their family to join them on the mountain, flown over in a chartered plane with hundreds of loyal mujahideen fighters (who had followed him to Africa after finding themselves unable to return to their homes at the end of the Afghan jihad). Najwa, who was pregnant for the tenth time, Khairiah, and Seham arrived with thirteen children among them, to find themselves expected to billet in windowless shepherds’ huts on the edge of a precipice, without running water or electricity.

  As mujahideen veterans converged on Tora Bora, Omar comparing them to “worker bees looking for their king,” Osama ignored his wives’ concerns that the nearest doctor was “a long fall away,” four hours over in Jalalabad.7

  They would have to get used to their new home, he said, a place from which he intended to launch a global revolution. If their mothers fretted, the children loved the freedom of Tora Bora, calling it “bin Laden mountain.” After being cooped up in a parched Khartoum compound for four years, the caves and cliffs were exhilarating.

  Into this febrile atmosphere stepped “the Syrian,” whose real name was Mustafa Setmariam Nasar, a confident, red-haired Islamist from middle-class Aleppo who had first been introduced to Osama in Peshawar in 1988 at the height of the Soviet war. The Syrian, whose kunya was Abu Musab al-Suri, a man who was considered an extremist within the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood, had a black belt in judo and had been a mujahideen trainer during the 1980s, teaching explosives engineering, urban warfare, and “special operations”—leading some recruits to joke that he was the ummah’s Carlos the Jackal.8

  Preparing a memoir, which he hoped would be instructional, the Syrian recounted how he had received training in 1980 at the age of 22 in a camp in Iraq that set the tone for all that he would accomplish.

  “Are you Muslim brotherhood members.” We all said “yes.” Then the trainer said while pointing at his neck “you will all get slaughtered, do you approve of that?” Then we happily and joyfully said, “we approve, sir.” He then turned to the chalkboard and wrote the title of his very first lecture: “Terrorism is a duty and assassination is a Sunnah [an action ordained by the Prophet Mohammed].”9

  After three years in Afghanistan, the Syrian had left for Europe, as Al Qaeda headed for Sudan. For several years he had had no more contact with Al Qaeda but now he returned armed with a master plan for global jihad that he predicted would culminate in the declaration of a caliphate, God’s kingdom on earth, a precursor to the Muslim day of judgment. The thesis was spelled out in a lengthy book that was half-written and that the Syrian wanted Osama to endorse. Much of it was drawn from the writings of Abdullah Azzam.10

  Al Qaeda could be the beacon on the mountain, the Syrian argued. The Taliban’s recent declaration of an Islamic emirate—the precursor to a caliphate—in Afghanistan was a “golden opportunity” to get things started.”11

  After four years of conflict between opposing warlords, the Taliban had seized control of Kabul after ejecting their main rivals, the Northern Alliance—who had retreated to the north. Taliban leader Mullah Omar had given Al Qaeda tacit permission to stay as long as it vowed loyalty and maintained a low profile. Osama had accepted this deal but had no intention of keeping quiet.

  The Sheikh spent the winter of 1996 feverishly debating the Syrian, both men wrapped up in shawls and sheltering inside a cave stacked with ammunition boxes and religious texts, plotting the “downfall of the greatest power, America.” Fight the United States and Al Qaeda would become a fountainhead, the Syrian declared.12 In nearby huts Osama’s wives and children struggled in the sub-zero weather and had barely anything to eat.13

  When Mahfouz, Osama’s Mauritanian spiritual chief, joined the pair in March 1997, he was delighted to see the Syrian—who he greatly admired—but he was unnerved by his ambition to attack the West. A charismatic man of action had captured Osama’s attention and both men were plotting global war, despite Al Qaeda having only a ragtag army of followers and a few thousand dollars to its name.14

  The Mauritanian had stayed behind in Sudan to tidy up the mess the outfit had left there after four years in residence, including a broken-down 747 passenger jet bought by Osama in a moment of messianic madness that was now rusting in the Sudanese desert. He had been charged by Osama with liberating Al Qaeda’s cash, around $29 million, some of it sitting in various banks in Khartoum, the rest sunk into Sudanese businesses that needed to be sold. The task was so vital that Osama had promised to pay the Mauritanian a $300,000 finder’s fee, and the current plotting was predicated on this money arriving.15

  The Mauritanian had to admit that he had failed. The Sheikh’s Sudanese accounts had been frozen on the request of the Saudis and the Americans. His companies there were either bankrupt or had also had their assets seized. Many things had been stolen. Touring the Tora Bora cave complex, the Mauritanian saw the disappointment written on everyone’s faces, from Osama’s hungry family to the Afghani villagers who had been dragooned into expanding the caves and were waiting for payday. Embarrassed, he offered his resignation.

  Osama would not accept it, insisting that the Mauritanian had a vital role to play alongside the Syrian and a second new member of the inner circle, to whom he was now introduced.

  “Mokhtar the Pakistani,” a burly Sufi whose family came from Balochistan but who had grown up in Kuwait, was touting a plan for an ambitious broadside to force the deployment of U.S. troops in Afghanistan. Osama had typed up the outlines on his old laptop powered by a portable generator that was off-limits to his wife and children, who lived by candlelight and cooked on gas burners.

  The Sheikh’s spiritual adviser studied the document. The ramifications of this apocalyptic plan—to set a near-defunct movement against a superpower—struck the Mauritanian as absurd and possibly deranged. Given his failure in Khartoum, Al Qaeda did not have the financial muscle to launch a war or repel one, he warned. The brothers recently arrived from Sudan—many of whom were struggling to adapt from the desert to the mountain cave and were bedridden with malaria and typhoid—did not constitute an army.

  He knew how to handle his Sheikh and reasoned with him.

  But Osama was not listening. “I have missed you,” he said, smiling at the Mauritanian. “Stay, edit and write, help shape our future.”16

  The Mauritanian felt torn. Qu
it now and have no influence over anything, or remain and mold the plan.

  He thought hard. The Syrian was a tactician. Mokhtar was—no one knew what Mokhtar was. But the Mauritanian, with his superior religious knowledge, was the only one in Al Qaeda who might be able to moderate the Sheikh’s thinking. But where to start? According to the Islamic spirit of learning etiquette, if one’s teacher or elder was wrong, there could be no public correction, only praise; even in private, criticism could only ever be implied or inferred—following which it was customary to say, “God knows best; maybe both of us are wrong.” The only sensible suggestion Mahfouz could instantly arrive at was to gently ease his way back into Osama’s affections by helping to rebuild the outfit’s reserves, human and financial. Could they import a machine to counterfeit U.S. dollars? he suggested.

  Osama asked him to look into it.17 For better or worse, the Mauritanian was back, and he would bide his time before trying again to influence Osama.

  Over the next few months as the Taliban consolidated its hold over Afghanistan, the Mauritanian stuck to Osama’s side, the two of them touring Afghanistan in a battered Hilux, collecting funds, meeting veteran Afghan warlords, making new alliances and shoring up old ones. Sharing oranges and swapping seats at toilet breaks, he tried to steer Osama away from the Syrian’s dark imaginings of the day of judgment and calling a caliphate. Mokhtar’s apocalyptic plan, which now had the working name of the “Planes Operation,” was held at arm’s length, too. “We do not need to attack to win,” Mahfouz repeatedly told Osama. “We are already an idea, a powerful one, and to sustain our influence we need to survive—and grow.” These men whose counsel Osama was taking had usurped Al Qaeda’s shura and, adding insult to injury, Mokhtar was not even in Al Qaeda.

  Most disturbing for the Mauritanian was the threat that Osama’s plotting posed for the Taliban’s embryonic Islamic emirate. Although they had yet to meet Mullah Omar, Osama seemed not to care one jot about the Taliban leader’s demands that Al Qaeda remain invisible.