The Exile

by Adrian Levy

  The first thing that he noticed, stuck to the bus windshield, was the flier bearing Sheikh Osama’s face. Was it celebratory or a wanted poster? He dared not study it. He decided to take it as a good omen as he headed for the backseat. Soon, Quetta’s grimy streets gave way to a desert that ran beige and lumpy like poor pancake batter. As the dead hours washed over him, so did searing images from Panjwai and the siege of Kandahar airport. He found himself wondering why Osama had brought down so much destruction.

  When they lurched to a halt at the first Pakistani checkpoint, he came to his senses, reaching into his pocket to isolate a small bundle of notes from the roll as a soldier boarded to vet everyone’s papers. Fear prickled down his spine as he pressed the notes into his passport and offered it up. Without hesitation the soldier pocketed the money and moved on to the next passenger.

  The bus set off again, heading into a dark meadow of stars toward where Pakistan had first tested its nuclear bomb in 1998.

  A face came into his thoughts. It was his father back in Nouakchott, probably sitting at home in his hand-stitched Mauritanian boubou (robe). He doubted they would ever see each other again.

  When the bus reached Taftan at dawn, men in uniforms and civilian clothes studied everyone stepping down. The Mauritanian noticed tired Arabs sitting in small huddles in the shadows. Everyone was hoping for a ride across, but many had already been turned away.

  Clutching his suitcase of dollars, the Mauritanian followed the fence toward the edge of town until he spotted a small gate guarded by a private militia. Not having done anything like this before, he walked up to the guard and nervously produced the wad of money. It had worked on the bus.

  The guard looked at him suspiciously. “Wait!” he hissed, pushing the Mauritanian with some force into a small hut. After a half hour, worried that he would be betrayed and sold to a kidnap gang or an intelligence agency, he opened the door and, looking around, hared off in the direction of the border fence, eventually spotting a group of official-looking men waiting on the other side. On seeing him, they waved.

  As he studied the sixty-foot kill zone ahead of him, an area sewn with cameras, razor wire, and mines, the Iranians pointed to a gap in the chain-link fence. He ran for it. Behind him the Pakistani guards screamed for him to stop, warning they would fire. But he kept going, eyes fixed on the gap. Before he knew it, he was across and bundled into the backseat of a car that drove off through Mirjaveh at high speed.

  “Welcome to Iran, Dr. Abdullah,” a young man said, talking over his shoulder. “My name is Ali.”

  Within an hour they were in Zahidan, the capital of Iranian Balochistan, where smiling officers who did not give their names told him they were part of the Ansar ul-Mahdi Corps. The Mauritanian had no idea what this meant, that they were with an elite unit within the Quds Force responsible for counterintelligence and the protection of senior officials.

  He was shown into a house where an elderly Shia cleric sat waiting. “I am to be your translator,” the man said. How different he looked from a Sunni maulvi. The Shia with his neatly trimmed beard and gray robe resembled a bank manager.

  The Ansar ul-Mahdi agents had many queries about the war in Afghanistan. Could Dr. Abdullah explain the mysterious disappearances of Mullah Omar and Osama bin Laden? Did he know where they were? The Mauritanian squirmed. One of the agents chipped in. “Look, don’t worry so much,” he said. “We have much in common, you and us, since we all believe in one God, one Prophet, one book, and pray in the same direction. Am I right?”

  Mahfouz nodded, but it would take more than this empty patter to open him up.

  The Iranian cleric spoke: “We all face the common enemies of the USA and Israel. Is this not the case, doctor?”

  He agreed. He felt like a village fakir thrown into the role of global interlocutor. How much should he say? Mullah Omar’s message, a plea for assistance and sanctuary, was something he could offer up. He started with that, but then he could not stop and so he also explained Al Qaeda’s needs: the hundreds of brothers and their families stuck inside Pakistan. He did not mention Osama’s family caravan. Above everything he had to protect the outfit’s legacy.

  Al Qaeda had the financial means to provide for their fighters, he said, pointing at his suitcase. In return Al Qaeda would guarantee a pass card: immunity for Iran from future actions, he continued, unsure about the power of his words. With Osama missing and presumed dead, Tora Bora occupied by Western forces, and Kabul fallen, would these Iranian agencies still perceive Al Qaeda as a threat capable of striking inside their country? What would be useful right now, he could not help but think, was a new broadside against their common enemies in the West. And he hoped Saif al-Adel was thinking the same—if he was even alive. He needed something: a sign that Al Qaeda was a deadly foe but also a formidable friend.

  Agent Ali rose. He told the Mauritanian to rest, showing him to a clean, simple room.

  “For the first time in several months I slept safely,” he recalled.

  December 22, 2001, Kabul, Afghanistan

  After Hamid Karzai was sworn in as interim president, the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), a NATO-led security mission established during the Bonn conference of December 2001, began to take shape. An intelligence-collation exercise also began the daunting job of piecing together the Tetris puzzle that was Al Qaeda. There were thousands of names and kunyas of unidentified Al Qaeda fighters and functionaries. Albums were filled with CVs, photographs, and letters taken from abandoned safe houses, alongside more than a thousand audiocassettes that had been found in one of Osama’s bolt-holes in Kandahar.16

  The CIA and FBI tried to grapple with the information overload by interrogating captured Al Qaeda fighters. When Osama’s Yemeni driver, Salim Hamdan, was turned over to the CIA with a booklet found inside his car’s glove compartment containing numerical codes used internally to refer to key figures in the movement, agents learned that Osama bin Laden was 4, Dr. Ayman al-Zawahiri was 22, Saif al-Adel was 11, and someone who used the alias Mokhtar was 10.

  Among the early discoveries was a letter written by Mokhtar to a department in Al Qaeda described as “external operations,” in which he asked its emir to send all available operatives to the United States or the United Kingdom.17

  The threat levels across Europe and the United States were raised, while at Kandahar airport, in an outdoor detention pen surrounded by dense coils of razor wire and policed by female U.S. Army guards and barking dogs, a seminaked Salim Hamdan was pressed further to reveal the identity of Mokhtar. Osama’s former mechanic refused to talk; but others were more forthcoming, especially those who felt that they had been betrayed by him at Tora Bora.

  On the night of December 15, the day after Osama disappeared, Ibn Sheikh al-Libi, the former commander of Khaldan camp, had tried to evacuate his remaining men, strapping the most severely injured to mules that lurched down the mountain to Parachinar—the old British fort previously visited by the CIA’s Robert Grenier. But on December 17, Ibn Sheikh and thirty of Osama’s Yemeni and Saudi bodyguards were caught by Pashtun villagers and handed over to Pakistan’s Frontier Corps. Dubbed the Dirty Thirty by U.S. forces, who hooded and cuffed them, they arrived in Kandahar on December 26.

  Dr. Ayman Batarfi, the Al Wafa doctor who had run the first-aid post on the mountaintop and operated without anesthetic, was caught in another group. “Osama didn’t care about anyone but himself,” he complained, explaining how he had tried to escape down the mountain in a large group of fleeing fighters but had been attacked from the air, with more than forty in his party killed. Forced to return to Tora Bora with the injured, the doctor had discovered that Osama, who had insisted everyone remain, had himself disappeared.

  Khalid al-Hubayshi, a young Saudi recruit, complained: “We were ready to lay down our lives for him. What did he care when he sent us over the horizon to die?”18 For those who had known Osama the longest, it was a disturbingly familiar story of personal cowardice.

>   Although his well-aired public history had him pitching up in Afghanistan in 1979 with a Kalashnikov in hand, born to be the leader of men, in reality, there had been many years of indecision before Osama had joined the jihad and during which he had lived off others’ deeds.

  Osama was tied to his mother’s real estate and his father’s inheritance and had found it hard to break away. “The jihad … what is it like?” he would ask visitors to his opulent family home in Jeddah. Among those who came was the son-in-law of Abdullah Azzam, the Palestinian preacher who had lectured at Osama’s university mosque and had first fired his imagination with the punchy slogan “Jihad and the rifle alone.”19

  Fresh off the front lines in Mazar-e-Sharif, where he had been battling the Soviets, Azzam’s son-in-law had arrived exhausted in Jeddah in 1983, hoping to catch up on his sleep. Osama had demanded that the visitor accompany him to a camp pitched in the Saudi desert. “When we got there, Osama revealed that he had made arrangements for us to enact a sort of pretend jihad,” he recalled.20 “He wanted to imagine what it would be like, so he had dreamed up some scenarios. It was play-acting. I grew tired just listening.”

  Osama’s first genuine trip to Afghanistan had not come until 1984, halfway through the war, when he had inadvertently found himself caught up in battle on a mountaintop. He had cowered in a trench while Afghan mujahideen on a lucky streak shot down four Soviet planes. Afterward, he had snapped a picture of a dead Russian pilot, describing the corpse as resembling a “slaughtered sheep,” before returning home with his war story. “I asked forgiveness from God Almighty, feeling that I had sinned because I listened to those who advised me not to go,” he admitted later. “I felt this four-year delay could not be pardoned unless I became a martyr.”21

  That same instinct for self-preservation had saved him at Tora Bora in December 2001.

  But not his fighters. On January 11, 2002, six were transferred from the Kandahar detention pens to Cuba, becoming the first prisoners at a new off-shore U.S. military facility at Guantánamo Bay, a U.S. naval base located on land that had been leased from Cuba since 1903. Ill-judged photographs were distributed of these earliest inmates: cowed men in orange jumpsuits kneeling in the gravel of an open-air pen with their hands and feet shackled, blackout goggles on their eyes, noise-canceling earmuffs, and masks over their mouths and noses.22

  December 2001, Political Security Organization (PSO) Prison Facility, Sana’a, Yemen

  Salim Hamdan’s brother-in-law Abu Jandal, the bull-like security man who in 2000 had escorted Osama’s new bride Amal from Sana’a to Kandahar, was also talking to the FBI.

  Special Agent Ali Soufan, a Lebanese-American who had been tracking Al Qaeda since 1998, had first got to see Jandal on the night of September 17, six days after 9/11. After Soufan had brought some biscuits and they chatted about movies, Jandal opened up.23

  His favorite film was Braveheart, which he had watched with his wife when they had quit Afghanistan as a result of Osama’s bickering wives. “Amal was very young, and the others resented me for bringing her, and in turn they were mean to my wife,” he complained to Soufan. “And so we ended up leaving.”

  Over successive sessions, Jandal was cajoled into areas that were more sensitive, including characterizing the personal habits of military chief Saif al-Adel, Osama’s deputy Dr. al-Zawahiri, and moneyman Sheikh Saeed.

  Soufan already had these men well drawn in his file, but he listened to see if Jandal lied or added rich details.

  The Yemeni explained how whenever the shura met the younger brothers would joke, “God help us,” knowing the older men were plotting a new attack that would inevitably involve a call out for suicide operatives.

  The interviews had stepped up a notch when Soufan asked Jandal about Mokhtar. The prisoner said he had no idea who Mokhtar was, although he knew the name from a key Al Qaeda lieutenant based in Karachi, a one-legged heavy, also from Yemen, who he called Silver.24

  For Soufan the operative called Mokhtar remained the biggest mystery. There were traces of him everywhere, including at the bomb site where Abu Hafs the Commander had been found dead. A letter recovered from the rubble implied that Mokhtar was the 9/11 linchpin. His name had also cropped up in the candid monologue delivered by Osama about the 9/11 operation. Again he was mentioned in the film of Osama’s sons inspecting the wreckage of a downed U.S. helicopter, with someone calling to him off- camera. All of these splinters indicated that Mokhtar was significant and close to Osama. But it did not help bring investigators any nearer to unmasking his real identity.

  December 11, 2001, Tora Bora, Afghanistan

  It would take years to piece together how Osama had slipped away, but the Al Qaeda prisoners in Kandahar’s detention pens had been telling the truth. Heeding Mullah Omar’s advice and suspecting that Musharraf was looking hard at the $25 million bounty placed on his head by Washington, the Al Qaeda leader had abandoned his Yemeni cohort on the summit of the White Mountains during the night of Ibn Sheikh’s cease-fire.

  Accompanied by sons Othman and Mohammed, Dr. al-Zawahiri, and his captive adviser Sulaiman Abu Ghaith, he had scrambled down the mountain, heading for Jalalabad in a procession led by Abu Ahmad al-Kuwaiti, Mokhtar’s deputy in the media office at Tarnak Qila, who was by now a trusted aide. Guarding the column was strongman Dr. Amin al-Haq, the Tora Bora commander. Working in tandem was a prominent Taliban leader, Awal Gul, who several weeks earlier had secured the Star Wars camp for Osama’s wives and children. Now he hid Osama’s party at his house on the outskirts of the city, where, “hiding in plain sight,” Osama sat with his VHF set. Praying with the mujahideen still out on the mountain slopes, exhorting them to fight to the death and encouraging them to embrace martyrdom, his broadcasts gave the impression to everyone listening that he remained up there, too.25

  Three days later, Osama had written his will. It was the twenty-seventh day of Ramadan, the so-called Night of Power—an auspicious moment to die for Muslims who believe that on this day only the gates of heaven are open. The next morning, he switched on the VHF set again and declared: “O youth of the nation. Crave death and life will be given to you.”

  Above the city in the White Mountains, Al Qaeda fighters were consumed by a blitzkrieg: the dead included Abu Ahmad al-Kuwaiti’s older brother Habib. On the plains of Jalalabad, Osama’s messengers contacted Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, a veteran Afghan warlord, looking for protection. Hekmatyar’s murderous fight to control Kabul in the 1990s was often credited with enabling the rise of the Taliban, as Afghanis fell behind the black-robed students who offered protection from the cold-blooded raids carried out by the warlord’s cutthroats. These days, Hekmatyar was exiled in Iran, where General Qassem Suleimani’s Quds Force protected him: an arrangement that at times more resembled house arrest, as each side pondered how best to use the other.

  Steered from Tehran, Hekmatyar’s network in Afghanistan remained active, and it responded to Osama’s cry for help, instructing commander Gul and strongman Dr. Amin al-Haq to deliver the beleaguered Al Qaeda leader to a veteran Afghan mujahid known as Kashmir Khan. He ruled Kunar, a rugged and isolated Afghan province north of Jalalabad. Its difficult terrain, cave networks, and porous border with Pakistan’s North-West Frontier Province, had long been a haven for insurgents, militias, and smugglers. It was, Hekmatyar recalled many years later, “a safe place” for Osama to go to ground.26

  Dr. al-Haq was instructed to take the party north on horseback, following the upper courses of the Kunar River, staying high up in the tree line and sleeping rough in the forest. Meanwhile in Tora Bora, Zarqawi’s party was told to head for Iran, where they would rendezvous with Hekmatyar and shore up new alliances. Abdullah Tabarak, Osama’s chief bodyguard, was sent eastward toward Parachinar, carrying his boss’s satellite phone. He was instructed to switch it on at regular intervals like a homing beacon for U.S. forces to track.

  Tabarak and his group were duly captured as Osama’s unseen party reached Shigal after a grueling e
ighty-mile horse ride bypassing Asadabad, the provincial capital of Kunar. Kashmir Khan had arranged for the Al Qaeda leader and his son Mohammed to stay in a mud-walled fort between two snow-covered summits. Overlooking a river and surrounded by terraced fields, the fort had no neighbors, nor were there roads or passing traffic.

  Dr. Ayman al-Zawahiri had split off and gone south, taking Othman bin Laden, a handful of guards, and Sulaiman Abu Ghaith. They would attempt to cross into Pakistan wherever they could and establish an Al Qaeda base in the Tribal Areas.

  Abu Ahmad al-Kuwaiti, the erstwhile media man, was told to try to get over the border on his own and rendezvous with his mentor Mokhtar in Karachi.

  On December 29, a videotape of Osama was aired on Al Jazeera, showing him dressed in military fatigues and looking physically exhausted. “I am just a poor slave of God,” he declared to the camera, his left side immobile during the recording, suggesting some injury had been sustained. “If I live or die, the war will continue.”

  It was sufficient for his followers to know that he was still alive and committed to global jihad.

  Abu Zubaydah, who was still at Barmal, recorded the news in his diary.27 “Let me dip my pen or quill in my eyes and fill it with tears, not ink, to write you a thing to remember today,” he wrote. “Today no one is left around [Osama bin Laden] except for a few individuals in the mountains, even if millions are around him in the outside …” Of the Sheikh’s exact circumstances, he added: “The group that remains with [the Sheikh] does not exceed six, and they are all well in a very safe location, thank God.”

  January 2002, Karachi, Pakistan

  Mokhtar was busy spinning plates. The dumpy, hirsute Kuwaiti-Pakistani rushed purposefully about the city as if he, not Osama, was the emir, authorizing compensation payments for Al Qaeda widows, rehousing Arab families arriving from Afghanistan, paying off medical bills for injured fighters, as well as distributing stipends to brothers heading out on new projects abroad.