The Exile

by Adrian Levy

  In a sixth-floor office at Langley that was manned around the clock, these targeters experimented with algorithms that could supposedly sift through billions of digital files, searching for keywords and coded phrases. Thousands of phone numbers, names, and addresses were generated and forwarded to the teams working under Grenier or Dave in the hope that something might lead to Osama, Abu Zubaydah, or identify the elusive Mokhtar. The information was overwhelming. Grenier’s team was brimming with new staff, generalists now outnumbering specialists. Operating successfully in Pakistan required an understanding of how the country worked. The agency was struggling to feel its way into a campaign that required local knowledge it did not have.

  To make everyone feel like they had some kind of control of the situation, a template for raids was worked out with the ISI’s chief of internal security, General Etesham Zameer, a jovial, balding officer whose father had been a famed Urdu poet. Addresses distributed from the Clubhouse were parceled up and dispatched to provincial ISI chiefs for action. For legal reasons, the Pakistani police had to lead the raids; but the identity of who or what might be picked up was withheld from them. In most cases, one of Grenier’s officers and an FBI representative, often legal attaché Jennifer Keenan, waited across the street or in a parked car until the fuss had died down. Any Pakistanis found inside were dealt with by the domestic authorities, while the foreigners belonged to the Americans, who would also gather up mobile phones, laptops, hard drives, USB drives, passports, and notebooks. Original documents went back via Keenan to FBI headquarters, with copies given to the CIA. “Night after night, data streams from hard drives deemed of priority value would be shot skywards from our roof to satellites overhead,” recalled Grenier, who later described it as one of the largest intelligence operations in the world.54

  Grenier worried that most of those being arrested as a result of these raids were only low-level facilitators at best. Months had passed since 9/11 and not one senior Al Qaeda leader had been run to ground in Pakistan—while eavesdropped communications suggested that hundreds were sheltering there. He was under huge pressure.

  Only when the ISI began tapping one particular mobile phone number in late January did something more interesting turn up. The number had come from the cell phone of an Al Qaeda fighter detained at Tora Bora. He claimed it was for one of Al Qaeda’s most trusted couriers, a man he knew as Abu Ahmad al-Kuwaiti. Listening in, the CIA heard a man talking in Kuwaiti Arabic. When he was connected to a non-Arabic speaker, he switched to fluent Pashto or less confident Urdu. Although he was always careful to speak in code, occasionally he made a passing reference to “the Teacher” or to “Abu Abdullah,” two known cyphers for Osama bin Laden.

  The more they listened, the more certain Grenier’s team was that the caller was closely connected to Osama bin Laden. Sometimes he spoke to a young Arab who spoke too much and giggled—and was using a Pakistani mobile phone in Karachi.

  The abduction of Pearl, which remained a mystery and had seen the CIA trip over Al Qaeda’s sanctuary network, had opened up a view of Al Qaeda that no one had seen before.55 And it centered on Karachi.

  January 29, 2002, Washington, D.C.

  In his first State of the Union address since 9/11, and with nothing much yet to report of the war against Al Qaeda, President George W. Bush zeroed in on nation states that supported terrorism, many of which, he said, were also seeking weapons of mass destruction. North Korea was “a regime arming with missiles and weapons of mass destruction, while starving its citizens.” Iraq “continues to flaunt its hostility toward America and to support terror.”

  Then the president turned on Iran, which, he said, “aggressively pursues these weapons and exports terror, while an unelected few repress the Iranian people’s hope for freedom.” Bush concluded: “States like these and their terrorist allies constitute an Axis of Evil, arming to threaten the peace of the world.”

  In Kabul, veteran diplomat Ryan Crocker, who had been sent there to reopen the U.S. embassy, was dumbstruck.56 All the delicate diplomacy of recent times—the meetings in Geneva, the intelligence and maps locating Taliban and Al Qaeda positions, the haggling at the Bonn conference that had elevated Hamid Karzai into power in Afghanistan—had been swept away by three ill-judged words: “Axis of Evil.”

  Tehran was currently negotiating the transfer of Afghan warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar from his Iranian home into Afghan custody “and ultimately to American control.” According to Crocker’s CIA acquaintances, Hekmatyar was one of the few people in the world who probably knew where Osama bin Laden was hiding. Why ruin all this delicate maneuvering for the sake of a highly politicized speech?

  Crocker could see how this was going to play out. The Iranian leadership was going to conclude that “in spite of their bountiful cooperation with the American war effort, the United States remained implacably hostile.”57

  Bush’s Axis of Evil was a “stupid, gratuitous phrase” that “didn’t advance anything that the U.S. was trying to do in the region” and that “effectively [sabotaged] cooperation with Iran,” said Crocker, who was at that stage unaware of the Al Qaeda factor—which the CIA had got wind of and which had in part contributed to the president’s decision to include Iran in his naming and shaming.

  “For most Americans, it probably sounded like a throwaway line, and for some it may have sounded like the sort of ‘tough’ rhetoric that they think ‘strong’ presidents use,” he recalled. “But instead of conveying strength, it reflected the clumsy incompetence that would define the administration in the years to come.”58

  February 2002, Tehran

  In his office at the old U.S. embassy on Taleqani Street, General Qassem Suleimani was furious. He had the Hekmatyar folder delivered to his office and issued new instructions. The warlord should be secretly transported back to Afghanistan and into the arms of his vast Hezb-i-Islami network, from where he should be encouraged and helped to wreak maximum damage along the Pakistan border in retaliation for Bush’s stance.

  When the Mauritanian, who was also in Tehran, read the news about President Bush’s speech, he was worried but also sensed an opportunity. In alienating Iran, Al Qaeda might become, he thought, a principal beneficiary. Clearly, the Reformists had failed in their attempts to charm Washington, leaving General Suleimani ascendant. Mahfouz would milk this safe haven for all it was worth, and with some careful planning Osama’s caravan could separate itself from the erratic Mokhtar, whose recent actions had placed it in harm’s way, and travel to Iran freely.

  Without thinking through the longer-term consequences of placing Al Qaeda’s future in the hands of an Iranian Shia archstrategist, Mahfouz took out his secret phone and made a call. Within a week, he was inundated with requests from Arab families, which “required the hiring of a great number of houses, huge daily and monthly expenses, plane tickets, and other expenses.”59 So sure was he that this was the right thing to do that he sent for his own family to come, too.

  A Mercedes met them at the Taftan crossing; the younger children were presented with toys that they stared at blankly, as they no longer remembered how to play. When the family reached Tehran, they were taken to a spacious apartment with food in the fridge, a shower and a bath, soft mattresses, even a TV.

  The following day the debriefings began with Quds Force agents asking the Mauritanian direct questions about Al Qaeda, its history, and its future. They were curious about the whereabouts of Osama bin Laden and Mullah Omar. He said he had no idea about Osama’s movements. “I told them that some data could be released since it doesn’t harm anybody but there is some information I will never disclose.”

  As the interrogation evolved, the Mauritanian was struck by a significant detail. The men who came to see him said they were certain that Al Qaeda was not responsible for 9/11. “They believed the USA had carried out the September Eleventh attacks, and that an Israeli American pilot and American missiles had brought down the Twin Towers,” he recalled, amazed that such a proudly intellig
ent race could be so stupid. What he did not appreciate was that the Iranians might simply be spinning him a line.60

  February 21, 2002, Karachi

  The gruesome, juddering video had been auctioned off to Pakistani reporters for a few hundred dollars.61 Its title was self-explanatory: “The Slaughter of the Spy-Journalist, the Jew Daniel Pearl.”

  Raids to find Pearl’s kidnappers began again across Karachi. Doors were kicked down, the police oblivious to how close they were to Osama bin Laden—who fled back to Afghanistan.

  The pressure of mass arrests and house-to-house searches did get to Omar Sheikh, who gave himself up—but not to the authorities. He contacted his maternal uncle Ijaz Shah, a brigadier in the ISI, who kept him hidden in the Punjab for a week, coaching him on what to say, before handing him over to the ISI proper—which allowed U.S. investigators to see him.

  When the FBI asked Omar Sheikh why Pearl had been killed, his answers were vague. Someone high up in the Al Qaeda hierarchy had ordered it. Sheikh didn’t know the identity of that person, only that the leadership had taken over his abductee.

  His group was never a group, he said. Nothing it did was planned. Sheikh’s collaborators, when they were arrested and questioned, had nothing to lose. Pearl’s killer? It was Mokhtar, they all said. What the ISI and CIA did not know was that they were closer to Osama bin Laden than they realized. He had stayed at the safe houses recently raided in Karachi. On one occasion they had missed him by a whisper. But now there was no trace of him.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  “Poor ones, this is not how revenge is, or will be.”

  —ABU ZUBAYDAH, WRITING IN HIS DIARY, FEBRUARY 2002

  February 2002, Lahore, Pakistan

  Abu Zubaydah was comfortably embedded in the Punjab, helping to prepare an alternative bolt-hole with Lashkar-e-Taiba’s assistance, should the Iran plan fail.

  For Abu Zubaydah, who was unaware of Osama’s recent visits to Karachi or the specifics of Al Qaeda’s future operational plans, Pakistan was a logical place to regroup. Given that it was permanently chaotic and home to an estimated six hundred thousand mujahid veterans of conflicts in Afghanistan and Kashmir, plus one hundred thousand active younger members of jihad groups and one million or more enrolled in radical seminaries, he did not have to search too hard to find people willing to assist him.

  However, after a decade in the country, Zubaydah, like Mullah Omar, had learned to be wary of his Pakistani hosts. Lashkar-e-Taiba had been guarding him since early February in an operation personally supervised by its founder and emir, Hafiz Saeed, who knew Osama and counted one former ISI director general among his closest friends.1 Zubaydah appreciated Saeed’s help but suspected that if the ISI leadership knew his business, then wily President Musharraf probably did too. So he took precautions: moving every few weeks, changing his guards, and keeping communications to the bare minimum.

  In early March, Zubaydah arrived at an empty house on the outskirts of Faisalabad, a former British cantonment city three hours west of Lahore. A decade earlier, his older brother Mahir had studied medicine here and had described it as a backwater.2 Tucked out of the way down Canal Road and surrounded by paddy fields, Zubaydah felt safe.

  Nominally in charge of a war chest of $100,000 to prepare the ground for the possible arrival of Saif al-Adel and Al Qaeda’s military committee that had just outflanked U.S. and British forces in Afghanistan’s Shahikot Valley, and eager to move forward with “special programs,” Zubaydah was instructed to sit tight.

  Mulling over the brutal scenes he had witnessed in Kandahar, he imagined these future plans in his diary, writing nightly before he went to bed: “a general war, non-stop and without mercy,” one that would attack “all sectors of life.” Every kind of target and method was on the table, from remote-controlled exploding mobile phones to using fissile material in dirty bombs. “If nuclear is available, no problem, in fact, it would be a lot better,” Zubaydah proclaimed.

  What he did not know was that Saif’s deputies were already pursuing the fissile option from the safety of the Tribal Areas.3 In their sights was America and “those who stood with America (Pakistan is first, Britain is second).” Other countries, too, would get their share “at the right time,” wrote Zubaydah.

  As he sat waiting for updates and those guarding him strung up sheets over doors and outside spaces to stop neighbors from looking in, Zubaydah contemplated the creeping threat of capture. “News keeps coming … the shadow of Ibn al-Sheikh is still around me, may God release him from captivity,” he wrote of his friend, the Khaldan commander, who had been seized in Parachinar and sold to the CIA.4 “God only knows how sad it made me that they caught him, imprisoned him, and whoever is with him. May God enable us to release them from captivity and avenge them.”

  Sometimes good news outweighed the bad: Zubaydah recorded how on March 20 a suicide bomber had brazenly walked into Islamabad’s diplomatic zone, blowing himself up inside a church, killing an American diplomat’s wife and daughter.

  “Some expected that this is the beginning of Al-Qa’ida’s revenge in Pakistan,” Zubaydah wrote, thinking of the women and children U.S. fighter jets had blown up on the bridge at Panjwai. “Poor ones, this is not how revenge is, or will be.”

  February 2002, CIA Station, U.S. Embassy, Islamabad, Pakistan

  “Deuce” Martinez, an analyst with a passion for tessellating statistics, was not typical “war on terror” fodder. A staunch Catholic who did not speak Urdu or Arabic, Martinez had never been to Pakistan and had no idea about its geography when Jose Rodriguez, the chief of staff at the Counterterrorism Center (CTC), sent him there in January 2002.

  Martinez had never been a clandestine operative. Cold drops, legends, and burner phones were alien to him. But Rodriguez, who had spent much of his career to date running the CIA’s Latin America division, had watched Martinez, who was then posted to the Crime and Narcotics Center, transform the agency’s record of interdicting Latin American cartels.

  His specialty was numbers, addresses, grid references, and waypoints—any kind of obscure, mistakenly generated, unseen, discarded data, gathered any which way, from which he could emulsify a target.5

  Now using the same techniques to track Al Qaeda, Martinez focused on one particular cell phone number. Dozens of fighters seized as they crossed over from Tora Bora had it written down on scraps of paper. So many Al Qaeda recruits spoke of the man who owned it and of his legendary logistics hub in Peshawar that he appeared to be a senior member of Al Qaeda’s leadership. Shortly before 9/11, his name had appeared in the President’s Daily Brief warning of Osama bin Laden’s imminent plans to attack the United States.6 The phone belonged to Abu Zubaydah, and he kept it in his briefcase alongside his contacts book and his diary.

  As far as the CIA was concerned, Zubaydah was a “High Value Target,” “bin Laden’s lieutenant,” and Number Three in Al Qaeda. The CIA believed that he was one of the planners of 9/11 and that catching him would strike an existential blow to the terror network.

  Martinez wrote Zubaydah’s number on a large piece of paper pinned to the wall of his new office in Islamabad, next to old ID photographs obtained from Saudi intelligence. But the pictures—which showed the suspect wearing glasses, a mustache, and a neatly clipped beard—posed their own set of problems.

  Zubaydah’s younger brother, Hesham Abu Zubaydah, had been recently tracked down to Portland, Oregon, where he had lived since 1998, emigrating from Saudi Arabia to pursue the American dream. Arrested by the FBI after 9/11, he insisted that the photographs were of someone else. “The person just didn’t look anything like the brother I grew up with,” he recalled.

  Referring to his older brother as “Hani,” his old pet name from childhood which means “sweet” in Arabic, Hesham told the FBI that he remembered him as a “fun, good guy” who had worn blue jeans, putting him on a collision course with their religious and overbearing father. As a teenager growing up in Riyadh, Hani had smoked, chased “cute” gir
ls, watched romantic movies, and listened to Arab and Western love songs, his favorite singer being Chris de Burgh. But after he went to Pakistan in 1990 he had become estranged from the family.

  Hesham told the FBI that he had not seen his brother for a decade, although they had talked on the phone a year before 9/11 when he had been in financial trouble and Hani had helped him out. As far as his brother being the 9/11 mastermind, Hesham doubted it. “I told the FBI, ‘The guy you’re talking about, I don’t know that guy.’ ”7

  Putting Hesham’s denials to one side, and unable to glean any information from other family members who still lived in Saudi Arabia, Martinez concentrated on the phone number, adding lines radiating outward that represented data provided by the National Security Agency on calls made and received, cell towers picked up, and signals relayed. Laid over the top were e-mails received and sent that referenced Zubaydah or his associates. It made, according to those who watched it grow, “a pretty diagram.”8

  By early March, Martinez developed “clear indications” that Zubaydah or someone close to him was in Lahore or Faisalabad.

  Robert Grenier, who had watched Martinez’s quiet, methodical approach with initial skepticism, began to get excited. Zubaydah’s “underground railroad” had been the CIA station chief’s personal obsession for two and a half years.9 By Grenier’s estimation, Zubaydah knew more about the network than anyone else. Getting to him would open up many possibilities.

  Putting Karachi on the back burner, the CTC system went into overdrive, generating even more addresses across the Punjab. Grenier sent operatives down to Faisalabad and Lahore, where, working with the ISI, they captured mobile phone signals close-up using a phone intercept machine they called the “magic box.” But whoever was using the “Zubaydah” phone was on their guard and countersurveillance-aware. They turned it on only to make brief calls or collect messages, which made it difficult to pin the phone down to a specific address.