by Adrian Levy
August 2008, Pakistan-Iran Border
The bus pulled up to the stand in Quetta and Abu Uthman’s man stood watching as the passengers stepped off one by one. When the young Arab man in the white prayer cap failed to appear, he casually asked the driver about him. The driver knew immediately who he meant: a youthful man who had talked so much that he had upset other passengers. He had got off several stops back.
Unaware of the true identity of his missing charge, Abu Uthman’s agent quickly relayed the news to his boss. Somewhere along the N40 highway, a road that everyone knew was watched from above by American drones, the Arab guest had gone AWOL. Abu Uthman sent an urgent message to Abbottabad.
Osama was deeply worried. Almost seven years had passed since he had last seen Saad, and it had been four years since he had heard anything from the family in Iran. Now his son, an adult with a childish demeanor, was wandering around a tribal battleground, almost certainly lost and definitely confused. Knowing his son’s limited faculties would hold him back and worried that his incessant chatter would let slip something about his father’s whereabouts, and wondering if Saad’s reappearance was actually a trap sprung by the Iranians, he dispatched Ibrahim with an urgent message for the brothers in Waziristan. They had to find Saad before he compromised everyone. Above all, he had to be stopped from coming to Abbottabad.
Several hundred miles to the south, on the Balochistan-Waziristan border, Saad had talked his way into a Pashtun family’s compound, telling anyone who would listen who he was and where he had come from, making the householders, who were bound by Pashtunwali to take him in, queasy with fear.
Saad, too, was jittery and, believing his life was in danger, he asked the family’s teenage son—the only one in the family who could read and write Arabic—to compose a couple of letters, something he was unable to do himself.
He wanted to send his last will and testament to his wife back in Yazd and a message to his father. The Iranians could come after him at any moment, he said. There was no time to waste.
August 15: “My dear wife,” Saad began, addressing Wafa through his teenage ghostwriter. “How are you doing?” How were the children? He was praying daily. “I ask God … that he expedites your release and all the prisoners of the mujahideen to the shores of safety.” But as a result of his present predicament, which he did not go into, he was not confident he was going to be able to help them.45
The spelling errors and crossings-out on the pages of the schoolboy’s spiral-bound notebook evoked the state of fear and haste in which the letter was composed. At moments it also became mawkish. Wafa, who he had married when she was sixteen and he was nineteen, was “the apple of my eye, the most precious thing that I have in this world,” said Saad, who also dictated compromising details about what he had done in Iran. “My dear wife, you know I escaped from prison for my sister, you, [Khairiah,] and Hamzah.” But whatever had happened since his departure was going to hold him up. It may take “a long time” to get them out, he wrote, and he was evidently feeling the burden. “I know you are in a psychological crisis,” Saad continued, referring to his unexpected midnight flit. He was sorry for causing additional stress. “Know that you fill my heart with love, beautiful memories.” Every time he thought about her, tears sprang to his eyes, he said. He was praying for the day when God brought them together again and he could “enjoy looking at you and at my children.” Then he would “compensate you for the kindness and love you missed in prison.”
Now that he had entered the land of drones, darker thoughts also preoccupied him. “If meeting in the world is not possible, then I will see you in the thereafter and that will suffice.” In the event of his death, Wafa could return to her family in Sudan if she wished, he said. “But you have to raise my children properly, and watch them and be careful of bad company for them, especially after puberty, especially the girls Asma and Duha.” She should find them husbands who were mujahideen, he said, “that is best,” or otherwise “good people.”
As for his son, he wanted only one thing for him. Without considering the need for secrecy he instructed his teenage ghostwriter to continue: “Send him to the battlefield at his grandfather’s.” Wafa should only trust the boy to Osama and no other, “because his path is clear and true without qualms.” Finally, he gave Wafa permission to remarry in the event of his death, so long as she came back to him in paradise. He felt so imperiled that he had to set her free. “Please forgive me for my shortcomings,” he ended, “pray for me and remind my children to pray for me. So, so long either in this world or in the hereafter.” He signed the letter in his own name.
The next letter. “What a father you are, you are the greatest,” Saad dictated. “I do not forget your kindness in raising us and for deepening the meaning of jihad in our hearts.” If he were to die, he hoped his father would take care of Wafa and the children. Saad also wanted to set the record straight. “My dear father, I counted myself as a mujahid and an immigrant on God’s path.” He was in a fix right now, and he asked his father to “please pray a lot for me, and do continuous charities in my memory, as I will need all the push I can get to reach that everlasting home.”
There were financial accounts that needed to be settled—a dead man’s dealings. He owed money to a friend who had underwritten his marriage in Sudan in 1998.46 “Please pay him back so that I will not be imprisoned in my grave.” Mostly, he wished his father triumph. “I ask [God] to make you victorious over your enemies” and to establish the caliphate “sooner and not later.” Once again he signed it with his own name.
A few days later, after the son who had acted as the scribe for Saad revealed the existence of the letters to his parents, they asked the Arab visitor to leave. Exhausted by his emotional journey, Saad took the boy’s notebook with him. At some stage over the next couple of months he or someone else propped it up on a Sony Vaio laptop and filmed the letters with a cell phone. Enticing glimpses of the videographer’s location could be seen around the edges of the screen—a window ledge, a clear blue early evening sky above a band of vivid green. There was no sign of houses, trees, or people.
July 18, 2008, Ghazni, Afghanistan
Across the border in Afghanistan another missing piece of the 9/11 years had recently come together inside an out-of-the-way police station filled with sweating officers and local reporters.
The focus of everyone’s attention was a delicate woman with her face wrapped up in her black scarf.47 According to the local police chief, who addressed the media pack summoned at short notice, she had been caught the previous day with enough chemicals in her bag to build a powerful explosive device. Beside her sat a thirteen-year-old boy, who she was accused of recruiting as the suicide bomber.48
Later that day, the woman, who the police chief falsely identified as “a Pakistani from Sindh” although he knew that her real identity was Aafia Siddiqui, was resting on a bed behind a curtain at the police station when an Afghan translator and four Americans—two FBI special agents and two soldiers—came to pick her up. Hopeful of winning a reward, the Ghazni police chief had agreed to hand her over. One soldier laid his M4 on the floor not realizing that Siddiqui was resting just behind the curtain. Moments later, according to statements taken later from the Americans, the curtain swung back and Siddiqui stood, pointing the assault rifle in their faces. One witness alleged that she fired twice. Another alleged that she shouted in English, “Get the fuck out of here!” and “Allahu Akhbar!” before being wrestled to the floor, where she was shot twice in the stomach.49
Barely alive, she only survived because a U.S. Army surgeon cut her open from clavicle to belly button. One kidney and several teeth were removed, while her broken nose was reset. While still recovering from her wounds, she was flown on an FBI jet to the United States, where, seventeen days later, she was officially identified as Aafia Siddiqui, “a fugitive Al Qaeda operative.”
While Aafia awaited charges in a Manhattan detention center, the boy arrested with her, who the
Afghan authorities claimed had been groomed to be a human bomb, was named as her missing eldest son, Ahmed. He was taken to Islamabad and put in the temporary care of his great-uncle Faruqi, who tried to be welcoming but could not get the thought out of his head that the boy bore little resemblance to old photos he had of Ahmed from before 9/11. This boy’s habits and demeanor were all Pashtun, not middle-class Karachi, and when he began to probe gently, “Ahmed” made some startling claims.
“He said that his real name was Ali Hasan and he came from a remote hill village beyond Mansehra,” Faruqi recalled.50 “He told me his family had died during the earthquake of 2005.”
Initially picked up by the Pakistani police, the boy said he had spent two years inside children’s jails and had been used several times by the ISI as a dummy witness to mount false cases.
“Eventually, he had ended up in Kabul at a prison run by Americans,” said the uncle. “He was moved every two months and periodically given a new name and a new story to recite.” He was used by U.S. intelligence to penetrate and inform on groups of prisoners: Al Qaeda, Taliban, and those from other jihad fronts. It was not the first time that children had been enveloped in U.S. counterterrorism operations: Khalid Shaikh Mohammad’s two sons had been captured and then threatened with beatings and had had insects placed on them, before vanishing into the U.S. detention program.
Ahmed aka Ali Hasan also claimed he had met Aafia Siddiqui for the first time when he was taken to Ghazni on the morning of the press conference.
Despite concerns that the boy was an imposter, Aafia’s sister and mother, who lived in Karachi, accepted him as one of the family, while they accused the uncle of being senile. After the boy was flown to Karachi to live with them, Aafia’s sister, a strident and outspoken U.S.-trained scientist, claimed that Aafia had been in U.S. detention for the entirety of the past five years, distancing the ISI from the story. Even Aafia’s ex-husband came out of hiding to back this version of the story.
“That was part of the deal when they gave him to us,” Aafia’s sister admitted later, without expanding on who “they” were.51 A child who they would all say was Aafia’s, and the United States to blame: it was a tragically familiar story in Pakistan—a family riven apart under pressure from the spy agencies.
When a frail-looking and faltering Aafia Siddiqui appeared in a New York court charged with seven counts of assault and attempted murder, hundreds of thousands of people in Pakistan who thought they could guess what had really happened to her took to the streets in protest.
After a shocking photograph taken shortly after her tussle with U.S. soldiers in Ghazni was released, Moazzam Begg, a British-Pakistani former Guantánamo Bay detainee, who now ran CAGE, a London-based group campaigning for detainees’ rights, took up her case. Aafia became a poster girl for American excess, even though it was Pakistani forces in the deep state and the world of jihad that had nurtured her.52
September 2008, Islamabad
Pervez Musharraf was in no mood for sympathy for Pakistan’s “daughter,” as Aafia was described in the domestic press. Instead, he watched horrified from his Zamzama bungalow in Karachi as Bhutto’s widower, Asif Ali Zardari, rode a wave of pity to election victory as president.53 Soon afterward, the former president-dictator exiled himself to Edgware Road in Central London, from where he could reconsider his future surrounded by wealthy acolytes and without fear of assassination.
One of his legacies was the aerial drone campaign against Al Qaeda and the Pakistan Taliban that during his last eight months in office had been ratcheted up, something that Zardari would now have to confront along with a long-promised military campaign in Waziristan. As insurance, Zardari had kept on Musharraf’s army chief, General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, who was practically the only man in the new administration with any experience dealing with the Taliban and Al Qaeda. As a graduate of the U.S. Army’s staff college at Fort Leavenworth and infantry school at Fort Benning, Kayani also provided crucial contacts within the Bush administration.
By 2008, the drone war had a new flavor to it. The United States was now conducting operations without Pakistan’s cooperation, and four senior Al Qaeda figures had been killed since the beginning of the year, including Abu Laith al-Libi, who had been commander of Al Qaeda operations in eastern Afghanistan and central to Dr. al-Zawahiri’s fight against NATO.54
An internal Pakistani military assessment on the campaign in the Tribal Areas made for stark reading, with 1,140 insurgents killed or wounded and 197 captured. More than 800 civilians had been killed or seriously injured.55
In the face of the omnipresent drones, Al Qaeda Central shuttered safe houses, closed down communications, and relocated families in a scramble to regroup. Couriers went into hiding. The network went dark, just as Saad bin Laden most needed help.
November 2008, Peshawar, Pakistan
Desperate to locate his son and to elicit news about family members he now knew were still being held against their will in Iran, Osama bin Laden issued orders for the screw to be turned on Tehran.
Heshmatollah Attarzadeh, the commercial attaché at the Iranian consulate in Peshawar, was targeted on his way to work on the morning of November 13.56 Based in Peshawar for three years, he was already jittery, as just the previous day an American aid worker had been shot dead by unknown gunmen on a busy street.57 Now, as his vehicle drove through the upmarket Hayatabad neighborhood, two cars rammed it and gunmen, lying in wait, stepped out and sprayed the vehicle with bullets, killing his police escort. Attarzadeh was bundled into a pickup and driven away, thinking, he would reveal later, he was about to be executed.
By dawn the next morning he was deep in the mountains of South Waziristan, being held inside a stone house by an angry-looking Arab and Pashtun-speaking masked gunmen from Al Qaeda’s new allies in the Pakistan Taliban.58
The questioning of Attarzadeh, who was blindfolded and manacled, centered on Osama bin Laden’s family. Where were they? What had happened to Saad? What about the Al Qaeda shura members? Unless everyone was located and released, he would be beheaded.
When the diplomat explained that he was far too junior to be a party to such high-grade intelligence, his jailers grew sullen. They recorded a video, in which they threatened to kill him if Osama’s family was not freed. Over the course of the next few weeks, they kept him permanently on the move, as the TTP guards tried to outsmart U.S. drones. Eventually, the diplomat found himself in an isolated village near Mir Ali, sharing a room with the Afghan consul general to Peshawar, who had been kidnapped by Al Qaeda the previous September and was by now “half dead.” The two prisoners remained locked up together, whispering to each other in the dark through a thick curtain as Al Qaeda tried to extract some kind of benefit from its captives.59
When Tehran demanded that the Pakistani government open a channel with the kidnappers, the case was referred to the new ISI chief, General Ahmed Shuja Pasha, a diminutive infantryman with a taste for tailored suits. Army chief General Kayani had appointed him in September, anxious to replace Musharraf’s brother-in-law, General Nadeem Taj, and usher in a new era.
Trained at the Pakistan Military Academy in Kakul, Abbottabad, and with the British Army on Salisbury Plain, and having once headed up United Nations peacekeeping troops in Sierra Leone, Pasha was reasonably global, and knowledgeable about the West, as well as being a savvy political strategist.60 Behind the wisecracks and amenability—Pasha liked to say he was the first soldier in Pakistan to own a sleeping bag, something he had bought in England at the end of a military training course in 1979—he was also deeply patriotic. He was a staunch supporter of Pakistan’s strategic depth policy of secretly backing the Taliban and homegrown jihad groups through the ISI’s S-Wing, all of which put him on a direct collision course with Washington.61
Initially, the U.S. government had high hopes for Pasha. For the past two years he had played a key role in Waziristan as director general of military operations and seemed, genuinely, to be seeking engagement with j
ihad fronts that the United States also wanted gone. Kayani had taken him along to six meetings with the U.S. chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Mike Mullen, who was impressed with their talk on tackling the Taliban through counterinsurgency rather than conventional warfare. However, General Michael Hayden, the CIA director, remained skeptical. “PAKMIL was big, artillery heavy, and road-bound and ill-suited to navigating mountain trails or dealing with insurgents,” he recalled.62 The idea that it knew how to fight any kind of war other than a front-on collision with a force it hoped was weaker was naïve.
Hayden, who had taken serious flak for surveillance failures over 9/11, as he had been director of the National Security Agency (NSA) at the time, and who as a result of 9/11 had ushered in controversial new NSA surveillance methods for technological communications, was also doubtful that the ISI could change course. For him, the test would be Pasha’s willingness to tackle S-Wing. Hayden knew enough about the ISI’s internal workings to know that S-Wing’s contractors and field operatives dealt directly with armed Islamist outfits without referral back to headquarters to ensure plausible deniability for the ISI chief.63
The U.S. government hoped that the ISI’s newly revamped facilities might influence future thinking on the matter. The gray hulk of Aabpara had been completely rebuilt thanks to U.S. tax dollars—both aid cash and secretly paid reward money for culling Al Qaeda scalps. That the figure ran into many millions was evidenced in the ambition that lay behind the new building. Standing behind five layers of security, it more resembled a five-star hotel than a ministry, and it towered over squat, peeling old structures that still housed junior officers.64 Inside, everything had been finished off to the highest specifications (especially Pasha’s office).65
In reality, whatever Hayden thought, General Pasha told his closest colleagues that he believed that Pakistan had no choice but to reform.66 The Islamic Republic had been rocked by more than forty suicide-bomb blasts since the beginning of the year, most of them orchestrated by the TTP, whose men got behind security cordons and into sensitive areas, making some official complicity undeniable. Only it was not inexplicable to Pasha, who had read the files on the Musharraf assassination attempts and knew that the Pakistan military itself was heavily infiltrated by allies of Al Qaeda or the Taliban. Unless he got them under control, which would take considerable time and dexterity, the force he had dedicated his life to would buckle.
