The Exile

by Adrian Levy

  “Go.”

  Two Hellfire missiles streaked down, the bright blossom of the explosion seen by Osama, who was blocked in by traffic, bumper to bumper. As clouds of dust and dirt rained down on the car’s windshield, a Yemeni security guard leaped out and, waving his AK-47 around, cleared some space, while Osama’s driver booted the vehicle into reverse and took off.

  When the smoke cleared, and the picture over the compound regained focus, figures could be seen running in all directions. The shrieks and cries on the radios down below were vacuumed up by U.S. eavesdroppers, who reported that Mullah Omar’s son was dead, as well as an uncle, several bodyguards, and “a prized cow.”

  But Omar was no longer there.

  The drone found him again in a Toyota Land Cruiser that was hurtling west toward the Arghandab Mountains. The U.S. military called in F18 Hornets but by the time they had locked on, the Taliban emir was deep inside a cave complex. He sheltered there for an hour while his men commandeered a new vehicle, and in a pause between woof and bark of heavy strikes all around, he headed out again, telling the driver to make for his home district of Sangesar.

  President Bush went on live television to announce that war in Afghanistan had begun. “In this conflict,” he told the American people, “there is no neutral ground … there can be no peace in a world of terror.” He predicted that the Islamic emirate would fall within five days.

  Hundreds of miles to the northwest, seven covert CIA operatives were already on the ground with orders from Cofer Black, the head of the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center, which in the days after 9/11 had geared up to take the lead on the hunt for Al Qaeda. Armed with tracking equipment, and carrying cardboard boxes filled with $3 million in used notes, they had blunt instructions from Black: “I want bin Laden’s head shipped back in a box filled with dry ice. I want to be able to show bin Laden’s head to the President.”41

  Night One: October 7, 2001

  Tomahawk missiles struck targets all over Afghanistan, with long-range bombers flying more than seven thousand miles from Whiteman Air Force Base in Missouri.

  Robert Grenier in Islamabad had drawn up the basic war plan two weeks earlier, at CIA chief George Tenet’s request. The intelligence components were beefed up with detailed maps gifted by the Iranians and data derived from the French security services that had warned that Pakistani specialist units, commanded by the ISI, were assisting Taliban out in the field.42 Striking Mullah Omar’s bases with overwhelming force was of huge psychological importance, Grenier said. The more pain America could inflict quickly, the more likely it was that the Al Qaeda leader would be cut loose.

  8:25 P.M.: Reuters reported three large flashes in the sky twenty-five miles north of Kabul.

  Three minutes later, several loud explosions were heard in the city.

  In northern Afghanistan, CNN reported “bright flashes of light, one after another.”

  8:45 P.M.: Eyewitnesses in Kabul reported at least four large explosions, and a black plume of smoke rising.

  Ten minutes later, bombs hit Kandahar, close to the House of the Pomegranates. The Mauritanian, who was at work, scrabbled around in the dark to find his sandals. Running home through deserted streets, wondering if he was in the crosshairs of an unseen drone, he rapped on his door, flying into the room. Corralling his family, he listened with them in the dark to the whump of American ordnance pounding the Taliban’s communications towers, cutting off Radio Shariat.

  Bombs fell on Tarnak Qila, destroying the Abu Obaida camp where the 9/11 team had trained.

  Far to the north, in the Star Wars camp, Osama’s son Ladin lay on his back, watching wide-eyed as antiaircraft rounds arced through a bruised sky. His aunties Khairiah and Seham had retreated into the bomb shelter, where they listened to the chilling whine of something circling above them. At seven thousand feet, bloated gray Spectre gunships flew like a pod of whales, hunting for targets. In a corner of the shelter, Amal sat on her own, breastfeeding her baby.

  In a darkened house in Kabul to where Osama had bolted, he was euphoric and supervising an edit. It had taken three “spectaculars,” as he described Al Qaeda’s attacks, but he had finally drawn the Americans into war. “I want to tell the United States and its people, I swear by God that he who has praised the sky, the United States will not have peace,” he said in one clip, sending the completed video off with a courier, who would try to dodge the bombs and reach the Al Jazeera office.

  Dr. Ayman al-Zawahiri called the man back. He wanted to add his own sound bite: “A new Islamic epic is under way.”

  A couple of days later, Osama commissioned another video, calling back into service his accidental spokesman, Sulaiman Abu Ghaith. Wearing a pure white turban and with a Kalashnikov peeping over his left shoulder, a man who had never fired a gun told viewers: “I send this message to America’s foreign minister who was sarcastic about what we said, that there are thousands of Muslim youths who are willing to die. Powell and others in the American government know that if Al Qaeda promises to do something, they will do it by the will of Allah.”

  Behind the bluster, Abu Ghaith was frantic. He had picked up news that Fatima, his wife, had just given birth to their first son in a Kuwaiti hospital.

  “This is the last time,” he beseeched the Sheikh. He needed to go home.

  “Yes,” said the Sheikh. “Go whenever you like.”43

  Outside, ordnance thundered.

  October 14, 2001, Kandahar

  As he cautiously pushed open the front door, dawn percolated into the Mauritanian’s home, and he headed out for the Taliban media center. Inside, he found volunteers frantically clearing up papers and files. He had made a decision: to publish his own version of the war and seek permission from Mullah Omar to buy a television. He called his first bulletin Nevir, or “Mobilization.” As he contemplated the destruction raining down on Afghanistan, he wondered, bitterly, what Osama was feeling.

  The rest of the Al Qaeda leadership was emerging from the rubble. Abu Hafs the Commander, crippled by back pain, had arrived in the city overnight, deputed to assume control of Kandahar’s defenses.

  The Mauritanian could see he was overwhelmed. What would happen to the Arab families who had followed the Al Qaeda caravan here from Sudan, Pakistan, and the Gulf? Osama had promised to protect them but he was nowhere to be seen.

  He spotted some other figures he knew. Media chief Abu Walid al-Masri was on his way to Kandahar’s Al Jazeera office. “The number of dead is huge,” he told his friend. “Bodies are on the streets, a number of mosques are destroyed.” Asked if he had seen Osama, he replied: “I can’t sit face to face with him. I am so angry. These idiots have brought about the destruction of the Islamic State.”44

  Only Mokhtar, who flitted about, seemed energized by the chaos.

  Giving him a wide berth, the Mauritanian instead sought out Abu Zubaydah, the master of human traffic. Given how many men, women, and children needed to be evacuated, the logistics chief, with his wealth of Pakistani connections, was the most useful man in town right now.

  At the bus station, women in burqas wrangled screaming children and gargantuan bags. Everyone had heard how Mullah Omar’s family had been whisked out of the city after the strike on his compound. The local branch of the Al Wafa Foundation stepped in. An Islamic welfare nongovernmental organization (NGO), it supplied Al Qaeda families with medicines and treated wounded fighters. Now it began ferrying families to the villages surrounding Kandahar.

  Kandahar’s resolve was broken on the night of October 17, when the House of the Pomegranates and the offices of the Taliban’s Committee for the Propagation of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice both took direct hits, as did several markets, mosques, and hospitals. The Mauritanian and his family narrowly survived a missile strike. He looked out and saw bodies strewn about. He swore to bury them at Kandahar’s martyrs’ cemetery. Looking up, he watched a U.S. warplane draw a huge white cross in the sky with its contrails. “The Americans are sending a message.
Everyone will die unless we give up the Sheikh,” he muttered to his wife.45

  October 20, 2001, Ghazni, Afghanistan

  Nursing his snub-nosed Kalashnikov in one hand and a thimble of tea in the other, Osama was busy planning the next stage of battle from the safety of an Al Qaeda guesthouse one hundred miles south of Kabul in Ghazni.46 Telling everyone that he would lure and then defeat the Americans on the White Mountains just as he had defeated the Soviets at Jaji, he deliberately communicated the same to brothers digging new trenches up in the heights of Tora Bora, knowing the United States would be listening in too.

  While he waited for the refortification works to be completed, he recorded another video: one for his private archive and not to be shared. As the camera rolled, he grew irritated by the framing. “Mokhtar!” he shouted out, and the camera jerked to the right. The 9/11 mastermind had also left bloodied Kandahar to fend for itself.

  Osama performed a freewheeling monologue, with none of his usual caution. This was a video diary. “We calculated in advance the number of casualties from the enemy, and who would be killed, based on the position of the tower,” he said, as his companions, Khaled al-Harbi and Sulaiman Abu Ghaith, giggled.47 “We calculated that we would hit at least three or four floors at once,” he swaggered, while Mokhtar filmed. “I was the most optimistic of them all.”

  Within days, the war reached Ghazni and the tape was discovered by U.S. Special Forces operatives. British prime minister Tony Blair, who had already committed British aerial support to the U.S. offensive in Afghanistan and would soon send in ground troops too, referred to it in a speech before the House of Commons. “The intelligence material now leaves no doubt whatever of the guilt of bin Laden and his associates,” he said.

  Everyone who appeared in the video was now damned.

  October 23, 2001, Star Wars Camp, Jalalabad, Afghanistan

  The camp had filled up with Al Qaeda fighters, everyone readying to move up to Tora Bora. Seventy people had died in Jalalabad on October 10 when a bomb fell on the Sultanpur mosque. Another 120 were blown to pieces when the U.S. bomber returned to drop a second payload on those massing to rescue the casualties. It was time to retreat to the hills.

  Children’s toys and boxes of pasta fought for space with land mines, grenades, and a cache of biological weapons, which included three hundred vials of sarin gas hidden in an outhouse. Ladin, lying on his back, spotted the planes circling just in time, and everyone retreated to the shelter. In nearby Daruntah training camp at least one hundred people were killed.

  At dawn on October 24, Khairiah, Seham, and Amal bin Laden emerged, picking their way between unexploded cluster bomblets as news arrived from their husband, the first they had heard in weeks. The courier was Mokhtar, but instead of passing on news, he came with an order: Sheikh Osama wanted his nine-year-old son at his side.

  “He’s too young for the battlefield,” Khairiah protested.

  A tug-of-war began, with Mokhtar wrestling the boy into his custody.

  Days later, Ladin was filmed inspecting a downed U.S. helicopter and wielding a handgun. Beside him was older brother Mohammed, aged sixteen, shouldering a rocket launcher, while Hamzah, thirteen, who did not need encouragement, kneeled amid the wreckage reciting a poem praising Mullah Omar as a “symbol of manhood and pride.”

  Al Qaeda bodyguards were filmed lecturing the boys in broken English that American soldiers were only strong in Hollywood movies. “Their heroes are only mythical—like Rambo,” one said. If they came to Afghanistan, they would “end up in pieces like this,” he added, pointing to mangled helicopter parts.

  Another brandished an automatic rifle inscribed in Arabic, “Death to Bush,” while someone off-camera shouted: “Hey, Mokhtar, come see this.”

  The footage would end up on Al Jazeera and in Syria, where Ladin’s mother, Najwa, watched, horrified at the depths to which her husband had sunk. She called Osama’s mother, Allia, in Jeddah. She sympathized. Ladin was being indoctrinated into a world of hatred and violence just like his older siblings had been, said Allia. They had to do something.

  A brutal scene came into Najwa’s head. She recalled the time when Abdul Rahman, her mentally disturbed son, had been caught trying to strangle their pet cats, and how Othman had mercilessly beaten the boy until he had been pulled off. Just a little longer and Othman would have killed him. It wasn’t bad genes but her husband’s inhumanity—if that was what you called his pathological lack of interest in society. It had rubbed off on all of their children, Najwa believed.

  She had to rescue Ladin before it was too late. She longed to wipe the cruel smirk from his face. She had no idea how to do it or how long it might take, but she was determined that one day she would rescue her children. The question she dared not ask herself was what state would they be in by the time she got them back?48

  In a cave above Khost, Osama was treating Pakistani journalist Hamid Mir to an exclusive interview. He was tense, snapping that they didn’t have long. Mir was surprised at his demeanor. He looked gaunt. Using Dr. Ayman al-Zawahiri as a translator, Osama delivered a stark message. “The U.S. loves life. We love death,” he said.49

  November 10, 2001, New York City

  General Musharraf put on his best suit and promised the United Nations General Assembly that Pakistan was against terror. He took along his new ISI chief, General Ehsan ul-Haq. Formerly the commander of the Peshawar Corps, ul-Haq had spent the first night of the Afghan war staring up at the contrails from the roof of his villa beside Peshawar golf course. With his hooded eyes and aquiline nose, the general was a smooth glider who slipped by silently and gave nothing away. But he thanked God in a quiet way that he was not in Kandahar or Kabul.50

  On the night of his appointment, October 7, Musharraf had called him at home.

  “General Ahmed’s gone.”

  It took him a second or two to realize that Musharraf was announcing another coup: the ISI chief Mahmud Ahmed had been sacked.

  “And,” Musharraf continued, “I want you to replace him.”

  General ul-Haq feigned surprise, but he had been expecting the call. Rumors about Ahmed’s tenure had been roaring around the Pakistan Army’s General Headquarters (GHQ) in Rawalpindi for a week after Indian newspapers had published false reports that the spy chief was linked to a $100,000 transfer that had been made into a bank account connected to the lead 9/11 hijacker, Mohamed Atta.51

  Ul-Haq knew how this game worked. He had played it many times himself. How likely was it that a spy like Ahmed, with a career in counterintelligence and countersurveillance, would have made a mistake so basic? Instead, GHQ had deliberately spun the allegation in the knowledge that it was made up and leaked it to a stooge in India who had then broken the story.

  Pakistan and its intelligence service were at a critical juncture, Musharraf noted, and ul-Haq did not disagree. “The U.S. will try to size you up,” Musharraf advised, “and I want you to make sure they conclude that a moderate has come.”

  It was as if General ul-Haq could actually hear the dollar bills whirring through his chief’s mind.

  Musharraf’s first substantial meeting with President Bush took place in a private suite in the Waldorf Astoria. Before 9/11, Bush had not even been able to name the Pakistani leader.52 Now, the dapper, English-speaking general impressed him, and Musharraf was gleeful when he learned that Pakistan would be offered $1 billion in an assortment of aid for supporting America. As they clinked glasses before an open fire, Bush summed up: “Pakistan is a strong ally and President Musharraf is a strong leader.”53

  Musharraf savored the moment and his foresight.

  General ul-Haq spent his first evening in Washington with CIA director George Tenet, Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage, and a small retinue of “denominational” analysts and briefers, by which he meant partisan people half his age with one third of his experience who delivered binary lectures on “the links between Al Qaeda, Pakistan, and the Taliban.”

  Having l
istened politely, General ul-Haq, a career soldier, interjected with a dose of reality. Pakistan’s influence over the Taliban was limited, he said, and “the Taliban and Al Qaeda are not one and the same.”

  He felt Armitage sizing him up and went for disarming honesty. “Until 9/11, Al Qaeda wasn’t a challenge for us,” he explained.54 There was no point concealing that Pakistan had other priorities. “Yes, they’d transited through Pakistan, with everyone coming and going. But they’d not raised a specific threat—to us.”

  Armitage looked unimpressed, so ul-Haq turned to Tenet, who, he knew, had been charged with restoring confidence in the CIA—just as Musharraf expected ul-Haq to do with the ISI.

  “You know,” he said, “the [ISI] has lost more in combat than all the stars you have on the wall at Langley. You have to believe us when we say something is not doable.”

  Tenet nodded.

  The following day, ul-Haq was back at CIA headquarters, watching old drone footage of Osama walking across the parade ground at Tarnak Qila.

  “Let’s take him out,” a cocky analyst quipped. “There’s nowhere for him to hide.”

  Ul-Haq doubted that anyone had been listening to him.

  November 11, 2001, Jalalabad

  Bombs were falling all over the city when Osama unexpectedly arrived with his sons. Seham and Khairiah were ecstatic, murmuring prayers and thanks to the Prophet. But this was not a lingering reunion. Osama urged them to pack immediately. The Northern Alliance was advancing and so everyone was heading for his olive farm in Melawa Valley, the gateway to Tora Bora.

  The next day, Osama sent messages to Mokhtar and Abu Zubaydah, who were both in Kandahar. Militants and jihad-minded religious scholars would need to help conceal his family if Al Qaeda was forced to withdraw into Pakistan.55