The Exile

by Adrian Levy

  When Saif was finished, he drove back to the sandbagged position with a heavy heart, only for the radio to screech out a message. “The dogs machine gunned us and killed the women,” a male voice shrieked over the unmistakable whine of helicopter rotors.

  “Where are you?” Saif asked.

  “On the Panjwai Road,” the man said, explaining that he had led survivors out of the Al Wafa compound, as Saif had instructed, trailed by a U.S. helicopter.

  “I am on my way to you,” Saif said, calling the men around him to get back into the taxi.

  As they drove out of the city, he radioed ahead to the safe house in Panjwai. Had anyone made it through? “No one has come,” he was told. The village was also under attack. Several families had fled in four Toyota Corolla station wagons back toward the city, as the Northern Alliance was almost upon them.

  Saif reached the bridge over the Arghandab River, three miles east of Panjwai, within the hour. The first thing he saw was the abandoned Corollas. They had met vehicles exiting the city and the drivers had got out to discuss where else they could go. As Saif got nearer, he spotted a bloody trail of human remains, mostly women and children. Some had died hiding behind rocks. One vehicle had toppled into a canyon. Under the collapsed bridge was an unidentifiable mound of bodies: a missile had struck women and children who had sheltered there.

  Without caring who might be listening in, Saif called Abu Zubaydah and the Mauritanian to help him bury the victims: “Please come. Now.”

  The Mauritanian was stunned by what he saw. “It was a massacre,” he told his wife.74 The thought of Arab terror had driven him to warn Osama there could be no justification in Islam for 9/11. Now all he could see were the Arab victims of American terror and he felt a terrible fury. “We need the world to hear the truth.”

  On the journey back from the Panjwai Bridge slaughter, the Mauritanian decided to end his self-imposed silence and seek out any journalists left in Kandahar. His wife insisted on cleaning him up first. “Your turban is covered in blood.” She used the last teapot of water in the house to damp it down and wring it out as he fretted over how to dry it. They had an iron but no power to heat it. “Hurry, I can’t miss them,” he urged.

  Prowling the streets, he caught hold of an Al Jazeera correspondent and let rip as soon as the camera began to roll.

  “You have to broadcast these horrible pictures … of the children killed in their mothers’ arms; you broadcast pictures of the ruined mosques and the charred Korans inside them; you broadcast pictures of the villages destroyed along with all their residents. These are the results of the American indiscriminate bombing so far.”75

  But Al Qaeda was far from finished, he raged, and “the ranks are still united.” The U.S. bombs had done nothing but harden Al Qaeda’s resolve. “I cannot conceal the fact that we here in Afghanistan … could not contain our joy when we saw America taste, for one day, what the Islamic people have been swallowing every day—for decades,” he fumed. The 9/11 attacks “shoved America’s nose into the earth and struck it with lightning.”

  When the Al Jazeera reporter informed him that his name was on a list of the twenty-two most wanted in connection with those attacks, the Mauritanian smiled. To be classified as America’s enemy was “a medal of honor.” As images of the incinerated and strafed bodies came back to him, careless, angry words tumbled out: “One of the acts of grace of this generation is to kill Americans; to incite to the killing; to fight jihad—full force.” He stared darkly into the camera: “I and my brothers in the Al-Qaeda organization … swore an oath to carry out the mission. We obey Allah and one of the most binding commandments for our generation is jihad. And fighting Americans … We are lying in wait for them, Allah willing …”76

  He was only the second Al Qaeda leader to give a public interview since 9/11, and his words reverberated around the world.

  November 25, 2001, Tora Bora

  Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and his fighters reached Osama high up in the White Mountains, exhausted from the climb and carrying the extra baggage of distressing news. The bin Laden family convoy had been ambushed at the border. Like so many other Arabs, their driver had been hog-tied with electrical wire and turned over to the Americans for a $5,000 bounty, while their chaperone, Osama’s autistic son Saad, and his brother-in-law, the Saudi husband of Osama’s daughter Fatima, were “missing, presumed dead.”

  Horrified, Osama sent a courier back down to Kandahar as he set Zarqawi and his men to work fortifying bunkers. The Jordanian hardman was still far from full strength. Now, he lay on his side in a cot inside the lip of a cave, directing his deputies, Iyad al-Toubasi and Khalid al-Aruri, and corralling the fighters, who took up position high in the cliff faces, hefted sandbags, shored up cave walls, and stockpiled munitions and weapons for the coming showdown.

  In Kandahar, everyone had pitched in to find Osama’s three wives, ten children, three daughters-in-law, and three grandchildren, whose whereabouts following the ambush were unknown. But chaos was overwhelming the alleys and lanes, heightened by the CIA’s hacking of Radio Shariat’s frequencies so that the airways were filled with Pashtun-speaking turncoats exhorting Afghan citizens to give up Arabs in exchange for thousand-dollar rewards.

  Inside one of the last Al Qaeda safe houses, 9/11 architect Mokhtar, planner Abu Zubaydah, military commander Saif al-Adel, and the Mauritanian cleric made a decision to try and send all remaining Arab families to Pakistan.

  However, the disheartening news about Sheikh Osama’s family complicated everything. Which route was safest? They, too, would have no choice but to rely on tribal smugglers who plied arms and drugs across the border—criminals and thugs whom nobody trusted and who were as likely to betray their charges as assist them.

  Saif asked Mokhtar to commandeer taxis, motorbikes, minivans, vegetable trucks, pickups, and even some vintage VW campers left over from Afghanistan’s distant days on the hashish trail. Abu Zubaydah began doing what he did best: organizing reception committees on the other side of the border.

  Those who made it across would be guided by Lashkar-e-Taiba, the ISI-backed Army of the Pure, deep inside Pakistan. This group and many others like it represented one of Pakistan’s most enduring contradictions—a state-sponsored Islamist terror network that shared a public platform with senior generals and intelligence chiefs who made vociferous denials of any connections between them.

  Lashkar-e-Taiba had come into being in 1990, when out-of-work mujahideen fighters who had previously fought on behalf of the CIA and ISI in Afghanistan were redirected to lead Pakistan’s unofficial military efforts to separate Kashmir from India. Over the years, proxy armies such as Lashkar-e-Taiba had been trained, armed, and financially supported by the ISI, which managed these sensitive relations through S-Wing, its semiautonomous department. It was filled with agents who were inseparable from their clients in outlook and appearance, some of whom claimed to be retired from government service, all of them difficult to keep accountable (enabling plausible deniability on the part of the ISI director general).

  In contrast, Lashkar-e-Taiba openly fund-raised and paraded, maintaining a huge training complex and headquarters—at Muridke outside the cosmopolitan city of Lahore—that was run with great discipline and at some cost. The group was led by Hafiz Saeed, an overbearing red-bearded mullah who underlined his outfit’s proximity to Pakistan’s military elite by giving fiery speeches alongside his close friend General Hamid Gul, the former director general of the ISI.

  The ISI’s patronage ensured Lashkar-e-Taiba’s tendrils were spread all over the Islamic Republic of Pakistan, its training camps pockmarking the Tribal Areas on the Pakistan side of the Sulaiman mountain range. And Lashkar-e-Taiba was not alone. Among the myriad other groups funded and coached by ISI agents was Jaish-e-Mohammed, the Army of Mohammed, which was based in the Pakistan-administered portion of Kashmir and now offered to help too.

  Jaish-e-Mohammed had risen to notoriety after kidnapping Western backpackers in India
in 1994 and 1995 (one of whom it beheaded). It mainly concentrated its resources on fighting Indian troops in the Indian sector of divided Kashmir, but it also struck at targets all over the subcontinent, brutally targeting Muslims from other sects inside Pakistan, including Shias and Ahmadis. Its founder, cleric Masood Azhar, a fat Punjabi with a reedy voice from Bahawalpur, had pledged assistance to Osama in December 1999 after being released from an Indian jail in exchange for passengers on a hijacked Indian Airlines jet that had been forced down at Kandahar airport, within sight of Tarnak Qila.

  Both Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Mohammed had networks of safe houses and agents across Pakistan’s seven tribal agencies. In these autonomous areas established by the British during the nineteenth century, the laws of Pakistan did not apply. They were perfect places for Al Qaeda fighters to go to ground.

  As Abu Zubaydah worked the phones, convoys of vehicles rumbled out of Kandahar like ragged bunting, heading two hours north to a village where the smugglers were waiting. Three weeks earlier, they had been charging $250 per person, but now they asked four times as much.

  At the village, the Mauritanian helped his wife and children into the back of a truck that would eventually head back down Highway 4 to Spin Boldak and the border crossing at Chaman.77 Osama’s family had vanished, Saif’s was trapped in occupied Kabul, and Dr. al-Zawahiri, who had lost touch with his wife, Azza, was telling everyone that they had made it over to Pakistan—when he only hoped that this was true.

  Returning alone to Kandahar, with images of his frightened children’s faces etched on his mind, the Mauritanian suspected he might never see them again. For four agonizing days he heard nothing more. He took shelter alongside Saif al-Adel at Kandahar airport, enduring an aerial bombardment so furious that it felt as if the earth was broken.

  A courier finally found them, between strikes. He was shaken and carried terrible news. Tribal gangs had switched sides, blocked the Spin Boldak road, and kidnapped several Arab families. Their identities were not yet known. The Mauritanian hoped his wife had followed his suggestion. Cross at the official border point using your fake Sudanese passports. If that fails, cut on foot through the mountains toward Balochistan.78

  But even if they had survived the border kidnappers, how would they cope in the heights that were now bursting with snow?

  November 29, 2001, Jalalabad

  Muscle-heavy U.S. Navy SEALs crowded around a TV set in the Spin Ghar Hotel to hear U.S. vice president Dick Cheney tell an interviewer that he believed the Al Qaeda leader was trapped in Tora Bora. “He’s got a large number of fighters with him probably, a fairly secure personal security force that he has some degree of confidence in, and he’ll have to try to leave, that is, he may depart for other territory, but that’s not quite as easy as it would have been a few months ago.” A hoo-rah went up.

  In recent days, as it became obvious to everyone in the Bush White House that Tora Bora was to be the scene of the final showdown, Jalalabad had filled up with reporters, CIA operatives, hulking Army Rangers, and Delta Force operatives, their commanders bedding in and seeking alliances with Afghan warlords still loyal to the Taliban’s main enemy, the Northern Alliance. When the time came to attack, the plan was for the Afghans to lead the way so as to have as few American boots on the ground as possible.

  On a map, it was little more than a mile from the foothills of the White Mountains to the first tier of Al Qaeda caves, but the snow was thick, the slopes were steep, and, for even the fittest Afghan fighters, it was an icy three-hour climb. Despite these disadvantages, Bush and his military commander, General Tommy Franks, were confident that spending $70 million on ground support backed up by U.S. airpower would win them one of the biggest “bargains in history.”

  From his vantage point in Islamabad, the CIA station chief Robert Grenier hoped they were right, but all of his years in a greasy business that—like rally driving—saw traction come and go told him not to bank on it.

  Overheads, radio intercepts, and interrogations all pointed to a significant number of jihadis dug in on ragged peaks that topped fifteen thousand feet and ran along an east-west axis, defining a portion of the Durand Line that the British had demarcated in 1893.

  Grenier knew this area incorporated some of the most inhospitable terrain in the world, especially around Tora Bora where Osama, presumably, had superior knowledge. The CIA maps showed that over the years the area had been modified by tunnel rats who had hacked into the quartz and feldspar. Some caverns were supposedly 350 feet deep and fitted with ventilation exhausts, secret exits, and booby-trapped entrances—and even a hydroelectric power plant.79

  Locked inside the CIA station, Grenier studied large-scale American flight charts that had been drawn up at the height of the Cold War. He had given some to ISI analytic chief General Javed Alam Khan in the days when they had been living in each other’s laps, as the ISI’s own maps predated the 1947 partition of India and Pakistan. Without consistent satellite time, other than what was secretly lent them by the Chinese, the ISI, the Pakistan Army, and the Frontier Corps, a paramilitary force staffed by tribal recruits, were reliant on Pashtun guides and Colonial-era gazetteers to hunt and kill along the border. “The blind leading the blind.”

  Studying the maps now, Grenier could see something disturbing. As U.S. forces converged on Jalalabad, if Osama’s fighters were pressed they were likely to spill across the snow line and vanish into Pakistan’s Tribal Areas.

  He knew that this deeply conservative region was not governed by Islamabad but through tribal customs that demanded residents lend protection to any guests irrespective of the situation. Here an entire army could arrive and vanish under the silk handkerchief called Pashtunwali, an ancient system of laws and ethical codes that bound villagers together.

  They had to act. He called on General Khan.

  Officially, homegrown paramilitary units raised from Pashtun villages maintained security in the tribal belt, Khan explained. They were led on and off by regular officers from the army and the Frontier Corps. They were well disciplined and could be counted on to stand and fight, unless “a fortuitous war with India” forced the command to reassign all of the armed forces, he joked.80

  But when Grenier asked to see the snow line for himself, Khan balked. Taking a senior CIA officer on Pakistan’s sensitive western frontier was unthinkable.

  Or was it? After Grenier reminded the counterterrorism tsar of Musharraf’s pledge to assist America unconditionally, Khan sought permissions from his superiors. “Okay. Let’s make an inspection,” he finally said, wondering how much the top brass would extract from the United States in return.81

  November 29, 2001, Parachinar, Pakistan

  A small stone garrison established by the British on a flat, tree-lined expanse at the northwestern end of the Kurram Valley was fading into shadow when they entered at sunset, the glowering jagged peaks of the White Mountains turning bloodred. The Pakistani commanding officer ushered them into a mess replete with dusty memorabilia and gilt-rimmed honors boards, where he gave them a huge dinner before leaving them to play a frame of billiards in a dark, wood-paneled games room that took the station chief “back to a time of Kipling.”

  The following morning a briefing reminded Grenier of how the United States might still lose. He could now see that only the thinnest of uniformed lines stretched the length of the White Mountains, given that this sector was patrolled by the Kurram Militia, an anemic unit of the Frontier Corps.

  From Peiwar Kotal—a mountain pass at the western end, where Major General Sir Frederick Roberts’s rampant forces had struck in 1878, seizing a gateway to Kabul during the Second Afghan War—to Tirah Valley in Khyber Agency to the east, underpaid, poorly armed levies were holding the line. It was impossible to seal off the area, let alone patrol it.

  Grenier asked Khan what was needed to bolster security. The general, who had previously joked he was like Rasputin, made a bid: air and ground mobility for one Pakistani brigade of several thousa
nd soldiers kitted out with night-vision equipment and secure communications. “That might work,” he said.

  Grenier nodded.

  As always when it came to dealing with the Pakistanis, hard cash won the day.

  December 3, 2001, Tora Bora

  Caves meant many things to Osama. Key among them, aside from thick, bomb-resistant walls and their cool shade in scorching summer, was their symbolic value. The Prophet had first encountered the Angel Gabriel in a cave in Mecca, and Osama once astonished the Mauritanian by telling him that his—Osama’s—presence in Tora Bora gave credence to the oft-repeated story that he was the Mahdi (Islam’s messiah). “A cave is the last pure place on this earth,” Osama had said to the Mauritanian, somewhere to retreat from society.

  When he and his sons had lived at Tora Bora in 1996, he had taken them on exhausting treks to the Pakistan border, telling them to memorize every rock, natural stream, and fork in the path, drilling into them the notion that one day their lives might depend upon it.

  Now, as mujahideen scrambled up the slopes and into grave-like trenches, Osama took out his Yaesu VHF radio set, reminding anyone listening of the great victory at Jaji. “The trench is your gateway to heaven,” he declared, ordering fighters to observe the Ramadan fast even in the heat of battle. At his side were sons Othman and Mohammed; his deputy Dr. al-Zawahiri; and his accidental spokesman, Sulaiman Abu Ghaith, who had still not managed to break away. Zarqawi’s men were bedded in all around the peaks. Tough it out, the Jordanian ordered. The Americans were too weak and feckless to ever reach the summit.

  Prowling the snow line, the gathered Al Qaeda forces were led by Afghan strongman Dr. Amin al-Haq, who was the former Taliban commander of Jalalabad, and Ibn Sheikh al-Libi, a Libyan commander who had been with Osama from the start, opening Khaldan, one of the first mujahideen training camps set up with CIA cash during the 1980s and running it in the early 1990s with the assistance of Abu Zubaydah.82 In contrast to Zarqawi, whose bravado was obvious, both al-Haq and Ibn Sheikh were deeply worried about the setup. Despite the envelopes stuffed with U.S. dollars, a hasty feast hosted for tribal leaders in Jalalabad shortly before Kabul had fallen, and Kalashnikovs handed out to local tribal militias, Al Qaeda was still incapable of fighting a long campaign. Supply lines could be cut easily and they would never survive a siege, they warned Osama. But he did not listen.