The Exile

by Adrian Levy

Othman could not say. But he asked Omar to make discreet approaches to the Saudi authorities to see if they would be allowed to return home. Frightened and reluctant to reopen old wounds, Omar said he would consult his wife. She handled all the tricky stuff. She was his guide and counsel. A British woman twice his age, she had met Omar in 2006 through her work as a psychoanalyst based in Egypt at a time when he was broken and dejected after six years living back in the real world.

  After returning to Saudi Arabia from Afghanistan in late 2001 and assuming he would slide easily into a playboy life of private jets and luxurious homes as part of the larger bin Laden clan, Omar instead had found himself rejected by his family and put to work as a real estate agent—earning commission. Seven different Saudi women, including cousins, turned down his proposals of marriage. In 2006, he had left again, heading for Egypt and seeking a fresh start. While horse trekking around the pyramids, twenty-five-year-old Omar had bonded with British-born Zaina, aged fifty-one. She could see he was an absolute mess. But something about Omar intrigued her and she took him under her wing. When he revealed his true identity, and told stories of his upbringing, instead of being rapt, she was appalled. Osama had been a terrible father, she commented. Omar reacted furiously. “He is a prince,” he responded defensively. It was the start of a combative relationship.123

  Within months they had married and settled at her expat villa in Cairo. But after neighbors contacted British newspapers and revealed the identity of her new husband, his outlaw status cost her a residency visa and they spent the next couple of years bouncing around Europe, looking for asylum.

  Deported, followed, questioned, and confined inside various immigration holding facilities, Omar, like his father before him, searched for asylum, with Zaina leading the way. In frustration, Zaina rang the United Nations and asked to be put through to the “refugee section.” A well-educated fighter, she wrote to George W. Bush, Tony Blair, and Amnesty International. But in the end, only New Zealand and Qatar had responded, Omar now told his younger brother.124 The previous year they had moved to Doha, where they were sharing a government compound filled with exiles—families ostracized by revolutions, insurgencies, and wars, or the wives and children of those who had started them. It was a fantasy housing geopolitical cul-de-sac and their current neighbors included several members of Saddam Hussein’s family (including his imposing widow Sajida), Yasser Arafat’s daughter, and Yusuf al-Qaradawi, a controversial Egyptian cleric who had been barred from entering the United States and several European countries after being described by some in the West as the “sheikh of death.”

  Maybe the liberally minded Qatar was the answer. “Maybe they will welcome the rest of the bin Ladens,” Omar told Othman.

  His head swirling with Omar’s story and convinced that Zaina was a British spy, Othman hung up, and the party returned to Tehran to reflect on what they had learned.125 Days later, they were still debating when a photograph flicked up on Al Jazeera that all of them instantly recognized. It was a snap of Saad, taken in Iran.

  What followed was a story of a drone strike in Waziristan. Wafa, who was also watching in the women’s section of the apartment, froze. One of the victims had been identified as Saad. He was not missing after all, rambling through the badlands, an infuriating houseguest, but dead.

  That night, Othman, Mohammed, Ladin, and Hamzah gathered in the majlis. None of them had expected Saad to get far, but when they had heard nothing after his midnight flight from Yazd they had convinced each other that he had succeeded in being reunited with their father.

  However unlikely, he had become a reason to hope. Now with that thread severed, a furious row blew up. All of them were desperate to go. Pakistan was clearly out of the question. But someone—one of them—had to try another escape.126

  They eyed one another but no one volunteered.

  The women whispered that Saad’s death was on Iran’s hands and that its intelligence agencies had surely followed him and tipped off the CIA as they had done so many times before. “No one else should try to leave,” they said.

  By the time they heard that a Pakistani working at the Iranian consulate in Peshawar had been shot dead on November 12, 2009, in retribution for Saad’s killing, the family was deeply divided.

  November 20, 2009, Tehran

  The Mauritanian was deep into his Koran when he heard a gentle knocking at the door late at night. He opened it a sliver, to see a covered girl standing in the shadows. It was Iman, Osama’s eighteen-year-old daughter, asking to see his daughter Khadija, her best friend. When they were alone, Iman took off a gold ring and handed it to Khadija. “This was a gift from my father,” Iman said. “Why are you giving away something so precious?” a puzzled Khadija asked. Her friend hugged her. Something was about to happen that would “hit the compound like an earthquake,” Iman said. Khadija suddenly knew what that was. Iman was preparing to escape. Khadija fetched her father. The Mauritanian knew not to intervene but instead gave Iman a thumb drive containing a copy of Sulaiman Abu Ghaith’s anti–bin Laden treatise, Twenty Guidelines on the Path to Jihad.

  “If you get out, please ensure to get this published,” he said.127

  The following morning, the Al Qaeda women gathered in the yard for a special Eid shopping trip—their first outing in more than six months. Iman was chatty as ever, and she and Khadija sat together on the bus that took them to Shahrvand, a Western-style supermarket on Argentine Square. It was thronged with diplomats who worked in nearby embassies.

  While Khairiah and the other mothers filled their trolleys, with a dozen excited young children trailing behind demanding sweets, Iman pulled Khadija into the toy section.

  Weren’t they too old for this, Khadija asked?

  When Iman was sure no one was looking, she grabbed a life-size baby doll from the shelf and took out some sunglasses and clothes she had snatched elsewhere in the store. Khadija watched, stunned and amused, as her friend transformed herself by slipping out of her black chador and niqab, putting on an Iranian chemise and a pair of jeans and wrapping a colorful headscarf around her hair in the Iranian style. She then swaddled the doll in a blanket, as if it were a baby.

  She gave her friend an embrace and set off for the main entrance, showing her face to the world for the first time since she was a three-year-old child in Kandahar. What are you doing? hissed Khadija.

  What does it look like? Iman called back with a grin, before she disappeared into the crowd.

  Casting around, increasingly panicked, the escorts realized a few minutes later that Iman had gone. Shouting to one another, they shut the shop and corralled the remaining women and children back onto the bus, wondering who among them had collaborated in the escape. Within minutes, Iranian soldiers swarmed into Argentine Square to lock it down. But Iman had been too quick for them and had asked the first woman she saw with a phone if she could borrow it.

  She rang her oldest brother, Abdullah, a respectable family man in Jeddah who had rejected his father’s lifestyle back in 1995. Unable to believe he was talking to someone he thought was long dead, he told Iman to make her way to the Saudi embassy. He would call ahead to let them know she was coming—and to warn them to check she was not an imposter.

  Back in the Tourist Complex everyone was grilled but nobody talked. When the questioners had gone, Mohammed, Othman, and Hamzah argued among themselves. Over the years, they had all discussed trying to reach the Saudi embassy and plead for assistance. They had looked up its location on local maps. But after Saad’s death, their enthusiasm had waned. Now their baby sister had shown them up as cowards.

  For three days there was no news. Then, while the Mauritanian and his family were watching a local cable channel, they spotted something odd on a ticker tape running at the bottom of the screen. Normally it carried service updates or advertisements for a local kebab restaurant, and for a small fee customers could display a message about a birthday or marriage. Tonight it read: “Iman is fine. She has come.”128

 
Everyone sat up. Was this their Iman? Who had posted the message? Had they imagined it? Then it came again. “Iman is fine. She has come.”

  Saudi Embassy, Pasdaran Avenue, Tehran

  Dumbfounded Saudi diplomats listened to Iman’s story and checked it out as best they could before allowing her to call her mother in Syria. She appeared to be telling the truth. In Latakia, Najwa, who had believed her children to be dead or in hiding with Osama, was overjoyed and immediately called her mother-in-law Allia in Jeddah and Omar in Qatar.129

  Omar flew to join his mother in Syria. Within days, the family received a call from an Iranian woman claiming to work for the foreign ministry in Tehran. They should come to collect Iman, she said.

  The instructions made Omar fearful. He often said that when he was put under stress, he got “a mess” in his head.”130 Najwa had gained some confidence in the years since leaving Kandahar, but she was also not accustomed to dealing with the authorities or doing anything for herself.

  Everyone in the family relied on Omar’s worldly and savvy wife, Zaina, who when she argued with Najwa was jokingly denounced as “the British spy.”

  Najwa could not get over her extraordinary daughter-in-law, who was five years her senior. Brought up in the United Kingdom, she claimed to have a Kuwaiti Arab father and a Jewish mother. Her original name was Jane Felix Browne.

  Eschewing the hijab and abaya, she mostly dressed in drainpipe trousers, crepe-soled shoes, and tailored jackets that she designed herself. Her hair was dyed jet-black, sometimes shaved on one side, and she had striking blue eyes. She rode a motorbike, swore like a Marine, and had reportedly been married five times already (once to a Hells Angel). Zaina was ready to take on the world. She talked with a broad Cheshire accent, had multiple tattoos, had a flesh tunnel in one ear, and treated the sensitive and underconfident Omar like the child he really was, helping him daily to overcome his autistic tendencies.

  In the three years since their marriage, Omar had come to rely on Zaina for practically everything, and she acted as his dresser and interpreter. Their relationship had endured a blizzard of negative publicity led by the British tabloids, which accused her of marrying a bin Laden just for the notoriety or even in a misfired bid to get rich.

  Among the more outlandish claims were that wild Zaina had once dated the British soccer superstar George Best, that Omar wanted to leave her and marry Drew Barrymore, and that in a bid to save her marriage she had hired a surrogate mother to carry her and Omar’s babies. Sylvester Stallone, who briefly met the couple when they stayed at the same hotel in Rome, fueled the flames by spinning a story that Omar was “the son of Hitler” who had an “old grandmother wife.” He was disgusted to stand in the same room as them, he said.131 But Zaina, who had always been her own woman, liked to shock; she was naturally drawn to outsiders and underdogs, and she loved Omar deeply. She was, also, the only person allowed to call him “babe.”

  Now, with Zaina’s help, Najwa and Omar applied for Iranian visas. But when they tried to call the Saudi embassy in Tehran to confirm they were coming, they could not get through. Zaina told them not to worry. Admitting that Osama bin Laden’s family was in Iran was a huge embarrassment for President Ahmadinejad, who, she argued, was probably doing everything he could to keep the story under wraps. To date, the state media had issued only one vague statement, saying that a member of Osama bin Laden’s family had been in Tehran but had already left the country, smuggled in a truck.

  After the Asharq Al-Awsat newspaper discovered more of the truth and asked if the relative was Osama’s daughter, Iranian foreign minister Manouchehr Mottaki was forced to issue a clarification. Yes, the family member was actually still in Iran, but “we are not able to confirm her identity,” he said.

  While Najwa and Omar waited for updates, Zaina piled on the pressure, meeting with Saudi and Syrian officials, who promised to help but did little. She also lobbied the Iranian foreign ministry to release Iman’s younger brother Ladin, who was now aged seventeen. Both had been minors when they entered the country, they had committed no crime, and they should be released together, she argued.

  Surprisingly, and after lengthy discussions, Ladin was brought out of the Tourist Complex. He was not taken to join his sister at the embassy but driven straight to the airport and put on a commercial flight to Damascus, arriving alone in the early hours of Christmas Day. That afternoon, he turned up at Najwa’s home in Latakia trailing a small carry-on case. When Zaina opened the door, she thought he was an Arabic-speaking salesman. Only when Ladin, who didn’t speak English, uttered her name did she invite him inside.132

  Najwa smothered her child in kisses, while Omar called the press, reading a statement written by Zaina.

  “My youngest brother, [Ladin,] arrived from Tehran,” he told Asharq Al-Awsat. “The family is overjoyed, and my mother wiped away many tears … However, this joy will not be complete until the safe return of the rest of my siblings, God willing, from the Iranian capital.”

  The parallel world was being revealed as Najwa caught up on all she had missed: Hamzah’s marriage, the death of Saad’s second son, Fatima’s second marriage to Abu Ghaith and her new baby, and the death of her niece Khadija, not to mention the plight of those others still trapped in the Tourist Complex.

  Assisted by Zaina, she once more tried to dislodge Iman.

  Playing for time, the Iranians demanded legal proof of the teenager’s identity.

  Saudi Arabia had revoked Iman’s citizenship. Officially the girl had nowhere to go.

  December 30, 2009, U.S. Forward Operating Base Chapman, Khost, Afghanistan

  The CIA agents and American security contractors stood waiting nervously with the GID’s Captain Ali bin Zeid as a red Subaru station wagon drove across the desert toward the base.

  After several false starts, Humam al-Balawi, their Al Qaeda double agent, who had leveraged his way into treating Dr. al-Zawahiri and counseling Atiyah, was on his way to meet them. But everyone was on tenterhooks as he was twenty-four hours late.133

  Wrapped in a thick woolen blanket and wearing a pakul, his face obscured by a thick black beard, Balawi was sitting in the rear seat of the Subaru, behind an Afghan driver who worked at the American base and had met him at the Pakistan border.134

  Bin Zeid and his CIA partner were worried even before they saw Balawi get out of the car. They had flown to Afghanistan in early December for a quick visit to give him more training and had ended up staying for more than three weeks. Senior CIA officials in Khost and Langley had taken over the operation, and, greedy to capture Dr. al-Zawahiri, they had not listened to the junior officers’ mounting reservations.

  Things were moving too fast, the captain feared. The operation had been taken out of his hands; it involved too many people and they had allowed Balawi to dictate the pace and determine locations.

  So keen were his handlers to make him feel at home that no one even searched him as he drove through the outer security checkpoints at Camp Chapman. Now sixteen people waited to greet him in the glare of the winter sun.

  As a U.S. contractor, who had served as a Navy SEAL, opened the passenger door of the Subaru, Balawi slid away from him across the seat, stepping out of the far door.

  Balawi was late because Hakimullah Mehsud, the new emir of the Pakistan Taliban, had insisted on one last video to record his sweetest triumph. The two men had sat side by side, surrounded by weapons and sticks of explosives. Balawi was a man “who wants to go on a martyrdom mission” that would be remembered for “a hundred years,” declared Hakimullah.135 When he spoke, Balawi cited the imprisonment of Aafia Siddiqui as one of his motivations.

  Balawi was weighed down by more than thirty pounds of explosives and shrapnel worn in a suicide vest that had been stitched by Al Qaeda’s tailor in the North Waziristan town of Datta Khel. He had paid for that vest, and for this moment, with money given him nine months earlier by bin Zeid.

  In the past few days, Balawi had recorded a dozen martyrdom statem
ents as Al Qaeda’s revenge attack on the U.S. security establishment came together. “We will get you, CIA team, inshallah, we will bring you down,” he said in one clip, filmed as he got into the Taliban car taking him to the border. “This is my goal: to kill you, and to kill your Jordanian partner.”

  Raising his left hand and addressing the camera in English, Balawi revealed a wristwatch beneath his sleeve. “Look, this is for you: It’s not a watch, it’s a detonator.”136 Although there was fear in his eyes and he flubbed some of his lines, he pressed on. It was a blessing from Allah, he said, to have “my limbs, my bones and my teeth turned into shrapnel.” He would go to paradise, while those he killed would go to hell.137

  “Do you not fear to be cowardly at the last moment … unable to press the button?” Balawi’s online avatar Abu Dujana had once asked supporters. “I have often wished to know what is going on in the head of a martyr before a martyrdom operation.”138 Now he knew.

  Captain bin Zeid stepped forward as a percussive cloud swept over all of them, shaking their chests and squeezing their hearts, before a fireball tore through Camp Chapman.

  Ali bin Zeid, his CIA partner, and three security contractors were killed outright, while shrapnel, bone, and teeth fragments hit eleven others, just as Balawi had imagined. By the end of the day, seven CIA officers were dead—the worst loss for the agency in twenty-five years—two of them women who had played vital roles in the search for Osama bin Laden.

  At a somber meeting of stunned seniors in Langley the following Monday, all Leon Panetta could do was pledge revenge. The CIA would fight back, he said, as one family.

  CHAPTER NINE

  “I’m back with the people I was with before.”

  —ABU AHMAD AL-KUWAITI1

  January 2010, New York City

  Aafia Siddiqui, the Pakistani neuroscientist and alleged Al Qaeda agent, had been in U.S. detention for eighteen months when her trial began in New York in January 2010. Unofficially, she had been detained far longer. She took to the stand with most of her face hidden behind a cream scarf and delivered a series of outbursts as government lawyers laid out their case against her: that she had grabbed a gun and deliberately tried to kill the U.S. military personnel who had gone to arrest her in Afghanistan in July 2008, the incident in which only she had suffered gunshot wounds. The judge expelled Aafia from the courtroom for “disrespecting proceedings” as government lawyers did their best to steer clear of the five missing years in her story—from her disappearance in 2003 to her arrest in 2008—a period during which she claimed she had been held in secret U.S. detention facilities and tortured, while being coerced to act as an agent for the CIA and ISI.