The Exile

by Adrian Levy

  Even before she was formally allowed to give evidence, the case against her appeared inconsistent and troubling.2

  An FBI firearms expert testified that it was unlikely the U.S. Army–issue M4 assault rifle that she had allegedly picked up off the floor at Ghazni police station had been fired at the scene. The nine government witnesses who took the stand (including the army warrant officer whose weapon allegedly had been discharged by Aafia) offered incomplete and conflicting accounts of what had happened. No trace of her fingerprints was found on the rifle.

  When Siddiqui testified, she admitted that she had tried to escape but denied taking the rifle or firing any shots. “Your president wants to make peace, but you guys are not acting on it,” she said bitterly.

  Turning to her own experiences, specifically the spectral five years, she maintained she had been “tortured in secret prisons” before her arrest by a “group of people pretending to be Americans, doing bad things in America’s name.”3 She alleged that her children had been tortured too and that she had been framed for plotting acts of mass terrorism—when in reality she was so squeamish that she “couldn’t kill a rat myself.”

  It took the jury three days to reach a guilty verdict in February 2010. One of her former attorneys described her as “the ultimate victim of the American dark side.”4

  March 2010, Saudi Embassy, Pasdaran Avenue, Tehran, Iran

  Iman bin Laden had spent almost one hundred days inside the embassy, staying in a diplomatic apartment lent to her by the ambassador, where she watched TV reports about Aafia’s case with mounting fear.

  Although Iman had never met Aafia, they knew people in common from the Al Qaeda world, including Khalid Shaikh Mohammad, and she was mesmerized and appalled by what had happened. Still unsure if she would even be allowed to leave Iran, Iman worried what kind of reception awaited her in the outside world. Would she too be shot and end up on trial in New York?5

  A few weeks after Aafia was found guilty, Iman learned from the state-run Press TV channel that she had clearance to leave Iran. This was how Tehran broke the news. No calls or explanations; just a TV anchor delivering the news, deadpan.

  Iman nervously waited for the next bulletin. It carried an update: she could go where she pleased, so long as it was not Saudi Arabia. The daughter of the world’s most wanted man would have to find another country to take her.6 Feeling panicked, Iman waited nervously for the Saudi diplomats to guide her.

  Najwa flew to Tehran a few days later, Omar staying behind for fear he would be abducted. Aafia Siddiqui’s trial in New York had been a wakeup call to everyone in the family that almost nine years after 9/11 the United States was still vengeful. Greeted at the airport by intelligence agents who silently confiscated her passport and cell phone, Najwa was terrified as she was escorted to the five-star Parsian Esteghlal Hotel, a huge complex near the Tehran International Exhibition Center.7 Was this to be her prison, she wondered?

  “Wait,” they told her.

  Eventually, someone knocked on the door. Opening it nervously, half expecting to be arrested, she saw a tall teenager she barely recognized, accompanied by a Saudi diplomat and an Iranian escort. The last time she and Iman had seen each other had been in Kandahar just before 9/11 when, as an inconsolable mother, she had been forced to say good-bye to her distraught then eleven-year-old daughter as a punishment for her desertion. Before they could catch up on nine lost years, Iman was taken back to the embassy. She would only be produced when the family had secured citizenship for her, Najwa was informed. While Zaina bin Laden worked the phones in Damascus, speaking to the Saudi foreign minister, Saud al-Faisal, and Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad, neither of whom was willing to help, Najwa gazed out at the lights of Tehran from her hotel room and thought about the rest of her family still stuck inside a compound somewhere else in the city. She was desperate to see her oldest daughter, Fatima, and her baby. Saad, Mohammed, Othman, and Hamzah had eleven children among them, most of whom she had never met. She was desperate to comfort Saad’s widow, Wafa, and even wanted to catch up with her sister-wife Khairiah. Even though there was no love lost between them, together they had endured so much.8

  She worked herself up to call the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, demanding visits. When she got no reply, she called Zaina, who rang them every day. She found numbers for the ministries of interior and justice, ringing them, too. But even a determined mother and her feisty British daughter-in-law made barely a mark on the ice face of the Iranian establishment. “No visits,” they were told.

  Inside the Tourist Complex, the Mauritanian was as usual thinking about himself, wondering if Iman still had the thumb drive he had given her. He had penned a foreword to Sulaiman Abu Ghaith’s book and as the first critique of Sheikh Osama by a former member of the inner circle he hoped it would cause controversy. Nine years had passed since 9/11, and he badly wanted to make an impact on what came next: “Al-Qaeda 2.0.”9

  March 18, 2010, Damascus, Syria

  Iman was floored by her first glimpse of the Syrian capital when she flew in with her mother: women in Western clothes, with uncovered heads and faces, walking by bars selling alcohol and nightclubs catering to every sexual predilection. Her older brother Omar, who wore a leather biker jacket and his hair in cornrows, smoked cigars, and ate American burgers, terrified her. For Iman, whose life had always been minutely controlled, Zaina was the most extraordinary person she had ever met. She found her chutzpah, disregard for authority, and love of the outlandish mesmerizing and shocking.

  While Zaina and Omar appealed for a royal decree to restore Iman’s Saudi citizenship, she was reunited with her younger sisters Rukaiya, twelve, and Nour, ten, who like their mother wore Western clothes and wore their hair long and styled. They took her to the beach, ate pizza, and painted her nails.

  Irritated by Riyadh’s sluggish response to her request, Zaina called up influential Arab newspapers and broke the family’s code of silence, revealing that more than a dozen bin Laden siblings, nephews, and nieces, as well as Osama’s eldest wife, Khairiah, were in secret jails in Tehran. To build a case for them all to be allowed to go temporarily to Doha, where Zaina and Omar still lived, they revealed details of his former life, saying that he had almost died on more than one occasion during the years that he lived with his father in Sudan and Afghanistan.10 None of this made Omar a terrorist, he maintained, in a wide-ranging interview, conducted with Zaina at his elbow, prompting him when he faltered and interrupting when he said something compromising. Like those still trapped in Iran, Omar was an unfortunate bystander with a “danger dad” who risked his family’s lives by dragging them into his wars.

  Then, in the middle of these delicate negotiations, a letter purportedly from Omar’s half brother Khalid was uploaded to a pro–Al Qaeda website. Addressed to Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei, it claimed family members in Iran had been “beaten and silenced” after being tricked into entering the country. “We communicated with the Tehran government many times,” Khalid wrote. “We asked scholars and dignitaries to mediate their release promising they won’t return to Iran. But to no avail.”11

  Cursing Khalid’s bad timing, Najwa won herself a small victory: a call to the Tourist Complex. She spoke to her sons and to Saad’s widow, Wafa, who begged her to find out if her husband was really dead. Zaina took up Wafa’s pleas, writing to the Asharq Al-Awsat newspaper, saying, “We have no idea where he is, or if what the media says is true about him being killed.” The intelligence agencies had “got it wrong when they said that Hamzah and Saad were or are connected to Al Qaeda,” since the two had been imprisoned in Iran. “None of the siblings liked war or violence; all they ever wanted was a normal life with a normal family.”12

  March 2010, Bilal Town, Abbottabad, Pakistan

  Osama bin Laden opened the file to find a letter from his dead son Saad.13 It had been dictated to a ghostwriter and saved on a thumb drive before Saad died in the drone strike. It detailed some of what he and other family members
, as well as the Al Qaeda shura, had endured in Iranian custody.

  Osama instructed Atiyah to issue a rebuke to the Iranians. In it he focused on the death of Saad’s baby and Mohammed al-Islambouli’s wife and the beatings endured by Sulaiman Abu Ghaith, the Mauritanian, and others. “As you may know Iran is very concerned about its reputation in the Islamic world,” Osama informed Atiyah, keen to turn the screw.14

  Unaware of the behind-the-scenes efforts to free his family being made from Syria by Zaina, Omar, and Najwa, Osama reached out to his estranged oldest brother, Bakr bin Laden, who lived in Jeddah, where, maintaining a close personal relationship with the Saudi royal family, he was one of the richest men in the kingdom. Bakr had disowned Osama after the 1998 embassy attacks, but now the errant younger brother exhorted his elder sibling that it was his duty to help to secure the release of “the grandsons and granddaughters of our father” from the Iranians, who in his opinion were a pack of wolves. “If you do this, you will be doing good for your father,” Osama continued, using a condescending tone he deployed when sending Al Qaeda recruits on suicide missions. “Allah have mercy on his soul, and you will be doing good for your kin.”

  But even now, when he truly needed assistance, Osama could not resist having a dig at old enemies, sniping about the kingdom of Saudi Arabia’s reluctance to stand up to the Americans waging war in Iraq. “Your sitting back from supporting the mujahideen in Iraq is a great sin,” he berated Bakr, “and your delay in suppressing the rebellion of the rejectionists [Shias] until their danger overcomes everyone is a shameful issue.”15

  Bakr did not reply.

  In Latakia, Damascus, Tehran, Riyadh, and Doha, negotiations to free the bin Ladens crawled on. On March 30, 2010, the Iranian diplomat kidnapped in Peshawar was released after being held by Al Qaeda for more than a year. Tehran had made a significant concession: a promise to free Khairiah, Othman, Mohammed, and Hamzah bin Laden, plus all their families.16

  Thrilled at the news, even though no dates or exit routes had been provided, Osama sent instructions via Atiyah. His family should head for Syria or the Gulf states. He issued specific instructions for Hamzah to be dispatched to Qatar, where he was to study “religious sciences” and take up Al Qaeda duties. Hamzah was “one of the mujahideen and he bears their thoughts and worries.”17

  To distract from the embarrassment it felt at having capitulated to Al Qaeda, the Iranian intelligence ministry started an unnecessary row with Pakistan, accusing it of having failed to help secure the diplomat’s release. Iran’s first vice president boasted that the Tehran-led operation “shows the all-out might of the Islamic Republic of Iran and its all-around dominance in the realm of intelligence.”18

  However, behind the scenes, Iran had agreed to lubricate the Al Qaeda deal by supplying unspecified “anti-drone technology,” some of which had already been sent ahead of the diplomat’s release as a gesture of goodwill.

  When the U.S. intelligence community picked up on the Iranian shipment, CIA analysts went back over recent drone flight plans. Several aerial assets had inexplicably vanished or crashed, including one that had fallen near Hamzoni village in North Waziristan on January 24. At the time, the CIA had struck back, targeting an antiaircraft position at Dande-Darpa Khel in North Waziristan, killing one of the sons of the famous Afghan warlord Jalaluddin Haqqani—a figure who the CIA had once courted and who was still closely aligned to the ISI.19 A later intercept suggested that the Haqqanis received a replacement consignment from Iran days after the diplomat was freed.20

  May 21, 2010, 10:30 P.M., Deegan, North Waziristan, Pakistan

  The Iranian gift of anti-drone assistance did not help Sheikh Saaed al-Masri, the real Number Three of Al Qaeda. He had been on the road working with Azzam the American on a celebratory video about a suicide attack on Bagram air base in which one U.S. contractor had been killed and nine soldiers injured. The journey from the shoot-and-edit had been long, and after several exhausting days on the road he had arrived at a house overlooking the Tochi River, where he enjoyed a warm meal and a heartfelt reunion with his wife, children, and grandchildren.21

  Sheikh Saeed, whose program was normally well choreographed, should have departed the hujra (guest room) at dusk. The house, located five miles west of Miram Shah, was in the middle of a well-known kill zone and was owned by vocal supporters of Al Qaeda. Several brothers who had previously stayed there had been subsequently targeted by U.S. Predator drones.22 The machays (wasps) circled ominously and Atiyah, who presumed the compound was on a U.S. strike list, had instructed everyone that it should never be used as a refuge.

  But shortly before ten P.M., Sheikh Saeed fell asleep. When his son came to wake him, eager to move on, their hosts protested.23 “He is tired, let him rest.”

  Less than an hour later, missiles pounded the compound, in the ninety-fourth strike of the year. When villagers came to inspect the ruins, they pulled from the rubble the bodies of Sheikh Saeed, his Egyptian wife, three daughters, and young granddaughter, Hafsah. Another daughter was critically injured.24

  In the United States, where CIA director Leon Panetta described President Obama’s escalating drone campaign in Pakistan’s Tribal Areas as “the only game in town,” there was little sympathy for the civilian toll. Financier Sheikh Saeed had been on the radar ever since 9/11.25 Recently, he had described the Camp Chapman attack that killed seven CIA operatives as an “epic” operation and he had feted bomber Humam al-Balawi as “a hero.”26

  Sheikh Saeed’s surviving family members were taken in by Atiyah, who delivered a letter from Osama mourning the loss of one of his oldest and most loyal aides. “My deepest condolences for myself and for all of you for the death of your noble father,” he wrote. After nearly three decades on the battlefield, the great Sheikh Saeed, the “prince of financial princes,” had died a hero. “He was persistent in his resistance upon the highest mountains of Waziristan,” Osama said, not missing a beat to remind them also of their duty to honor his death by keeping on the path of jihad. Al Qaeda would inflict “a severe curse … upon the infidels.”27

  But finding a replacement for Sheikh Saeed would be a tricky task.

  July 2010, Bilal Town, Abbottabad

  After Dr. al-Zawahiri, Sheikh Saeed had been Osama’s most important deputy.28 In the weeks leading up to his death, they had corresponded about several clandestine missions, including a plot to assassinate President Obama in Pakistan or Afghanistan.29 Now he was gone, Osama sent a weighty forty-nine-page manifesto and to-do list to Atiyah, appointing him as Number Three.30

  Osama expected to be heartily thanked. However, this position was fast becoming one of the most unpopular jobs in the organization and Atiyah was alarmed when he received the news, knowing that he had no choice but to accept.

  Atiyah’s new duties would be wide-ranging, Osama’s essay explained, from corralling Al Qaeda franchises abroad to promoting the Sheikh’s primary message. His first priority was to tackle the wayward Islamic State of Iraq, which had recently lost both its leaders, Abu Umar al-Baghdadi and Abu Ayyub al-Masri, who had been killed in a U.S. operation near Tikrit on April 18.31

  Atiyah’s brief was to take advantage of the consequent disarray as the outfit coalesced around a newly declared but as yet unproven figurehead, a religious scholar who called himself Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. Like his predecessor, virtually nothing was known about Abu Bakr in jihadist circles, and although Islamic State of Iraq had recently pledged allegiance to Al Qaeda, no effort had been made to bring Osama into the discussion concerning his appointment.

  The affronted Al Qaeda leader intended to spell out this egregious mistake in a polite but firm letter that stressed the “importance of unity and collectiveness” as well as stating overtly who was in charge. But before writing to Abu Bakr, he needed to know who he was dealing with and so he asked Atiyah to dig around.32 For a man constantly on the run from American drones, staying in compounds with little electricity and no Internet access, this was a tall order.
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  Summer 2010, Mosul, Iraq

  Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, who officially became leader of Islamic State of Iraq in May 2010, had been born Ibrahim Awwad Ibrahim al-Badri into a farming family in Samarra in 1971. Shortsighted and compulsively religious, as a child he had been nicknamed “the Believer.” Rather than completing his military service, he had enrolled in endless college courses, editing a medieval book on Koranic recitation for his master’s thesis. For several years, he lived a quiet life in a room attached to a mosque in Tobchi, on the outskirts of Baghdad.33

  In June 2004, as war invaded his clerical world, Ibrahim had disappeared, with one of his professors noting that “he has not attended class.” Arrested at a friend’s house, Ibrahim ended up in Camp Bucca, a mega U.S. internment facility in southern Iraq filled with Islamists, Ba’athist mercenaries, and innocent men recently transferred from the notorious Abu Ghraib. Bucca was known as “the Academy,” and its American commander would later admit that it was “a pressure cooker for extremism.”34 A U.S. military report found that the prison’s unofficial sharia courts, not U.S guards, enforced discipline.35 During his time there, Ibrahim built a reputation for resolving disputes, and he enjoyed the attention and respect of a judge.