by Steve Coll
27. Panetta, Worthy Fights, p. 307.
28. Panetta-Pasha quotations are from the recollection of a senior U.S. official familiar with the conversation. Pakistani officials confirmed the gist of the sequence and content of the discussions.
29. Interview with Conroy and Pakistani police investigators involved.
30. Interview with Irshad.
31. Interviews with several American and Pakistani officials familiar with the final courtroom resolution.
Chapter Twenty-nine: Dragon’s Breath
1. Maliks, Khasadars present: From witness statements filed in Pakistani court documents seeking redress for the attack. Ledger quotations: From a document maintained by the Federally Administered Tribal Areas secretariat, released by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism (B.I.J.)
2. Author’s interview with Jalal and other residents of North Waziristan between 2010 and 2012, when the rate of drone strikes peaked. For a fuller account of their experiences, see Coll, “The Unblinking Stare,” The New Yorker, November 24, 2014.
3. The New York Times, March 17, 2011.
4. All quotations, author’s interviews with officials involved. Mazzetti, The Way of the Knife, provides a closely similar narrative of these debates.
5. “Drone Wars Pakistan.”
6. This summary of Kayani’s thinking is drawn from interviews with senior Pakistani military officers as well as American officials who worked with him.
7. All quotations, interviews with officials involved.
8. Suspension of strikes, debate in April: Interviews with senior Obama administration officials involved.
9. Author’s interviews, Coll, “The Unblinking Stare.”
10. Bajwa, Inside Waziristan, pp. 115–16.
11. Analysis from B.I.J. data, see Coll, “The Unblinking Stare.”
12. Interviews with American officials familiar with the video feeds and the exchanges with Kayani and Pasha.
13. All quotations from American officials involved in the discussions, recounting the gist of what Karzai and Wood said repeatedly in these private meetings.
14. Interviews with senior military officers involved.
15. All quotations from interviews with participants and contemporary records.
16. Ibid.
17. All details from interviews with participants at State, the White House, the Pentagon, and other agencies involved, as well as from contemporary records.
18. All quotations from interviews with participants and contemporary records.
19. Interviews with Pakistani and American officials familiar with the conversation.
20. “Shouting match”: The New York Times, May 14, 2011. Pasha reportedly said this while appearing before Pakistan’s parliament in camera after the raid on Abbottabad. “There was simply too much risk . . .”: Panetta, Worthy Fights, pp. 308–9.
21. All quotations from interviews with participants, other officials briefed about the conversation, and contemporary records.
22. Ibid.
Chapter Thirty: Martyrs Day
1. The ceremony can be found on YouTube, www.youtube.com/watch?v=SG150-dsuc8. Or search “Youm-e-Shuhada 2011.” The quotations are from The News, May 1, 2011, with slight adjustments of the Pakistani paper’s translations from Urdu to English.
2. This account is from interviews with senior Pakistani military officers and civilian officials familiar with the chronology, as well as interviews with Pakistani journalists who spoke with Pasha and Kayani during May about the raid.
3. This summary of the twenty-minute call between Kayani and Mullen and Kayani’s perspective is drawn primarily from interviews with senior Pakistani and American military officers. The quotations are drawn from the recollections of officers on both sides. “Our people need to understand . . . U.S. operation” is from Bergen, Manhunt, p. 237, whose reporting is in accord with the author’s independent interviews in Washington and Pakistan.
4. The best available evidence about Bin Laden’s exile in Pakistan after 2001 comes from three documentary sources. The first is the 336-page Abbottabad Commission Report, a Pakistani inquiry carried out by a four-member panel during 2011 and 2012 and submitted to the government in early 2013. After Pakistan classified the document, Al Jazeera released it: www.aljazeera.com/news/asia/2013/07/20137813412615531.html.
Among hundreds of others, the panel interviewed seven Bin Laden family members or survivors in Ibrahim and Abrar Ahmed’s families who described the chronicle of Bin Laden’s movements. The second document is a 2012 Pakistani police report obtained by Dawn and The New York Times that appears to draw more heavily on Amal’s testimony than the commission does. Both of the Pakistani reports filter the testimony of witnesses into omnibus findings, so it is hard to know what is left out, but the testimony of the wives appears straightforward. Finally, there are the letters seized from Bin Laden’s Abbottabad home and published in several tranches by West Point’s Combatting Terrorism Center and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, such as at www.dni.gov/index.php/resources/bin-laden-bookshelf?start=1. In citing details and quotations in this section, I will use “Abbottabad Commission,” “2012 Pakistani Police Report,” as summarized in the Times on March 29, 2012, and “ODNI letters.” “People that he knows”: Bin Laden to al-Rahman, October 21, 2010, Combatting Terrorism Center translation.
5. ODNI letters, https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/2084410/letter-to-shaykh-abu-abdallah-dtd-17-july-2010.txt.
6. “Coach” and Amal’s recollection, 2012 Pakistani Police Report. Maryam’s version, “beautiful area,” and “river behind it”: Abbottabad Commission.
7. 9,000 rupees per month: Abbottabad Commission. One hundred fifty dollars per month: Associated Press, April 1, 2012.
8. Bergen, Manhunt, p. 124, cites C.I.A. officials making an initial estimate of the low hundred thousand dollars in construction costs. Other estimates ran as high as $1 million or more.
9. This summary of Kayani’s argument is drawn from interviews with senior Pakistani military and intelligence officers and civilian officials.
10. Abbottabad Commission.
11. See, for example, ODNI letters, December 3, 2010 (27/12/1431).
12. Surveillance: Ibid. Peshawar, “The syringe size . . .”: ODNI letters, January 2017 release, “Letter to sons Uthman and Muhammad.”
13. “The most important security issues . . .”: Bin Laden to al-Rahman, April 26, 2011, Combatting Terrorism Center translation. Cowboy hat: Abbottabad Commission.
14. 30,000 euros: Bin Laden letter to al-Rahman, September 26, 2010, ODNI translation. “Americans will . . . Peshawar”: Al-Rahman to Bin Laden, July 17, 2010, ODNI translation.
15. All quotations, Bin Laden to Al-Rahman, April 26, 2010, Combatting Terrorism Center translation.
16. This account of the shootings is drawn mainly from the memoir of a Navy SEAL on the mission, Mark Bissonnette, who wrote under the pseudonym Mark Owen. Owen, No Easy Day.
17. N.S.C. meeting: Author’s contemporary interviews in Washington with participants as well as contemporary records.
18. Ibid., quotations from contemporaneous interviews. Obama concluded: Interview with Ben Rhodes.
19. The New York Times, May 14, 2011.
20. All quotations, ibid., and from The Washington Post, May 14, 2011. The account is also informed by an interview with a senior Pakistani military officer.
21. “If they don’t trust us . . . deal with it”: BBC Monitoring, GEO “Aapas Ki Baat,” June 10, 2011. Mortgaged house, “We are helpless. . . . ”: The New York Times, June 16, 2011.
22. Contemporaneous interviews with American officials involved in the N.S.C. discussions.
23. Ibid. The quotation is from an interview with an official who read the letter and who summarized its contents.
24. All quotations from contem
poraneous notes.
25. Morell, Pasha, and Kayani: Interview with officials familiar with the discussions. Pasha and Haqqani: Interview with Husain Haqqani.
Chapter Thirty-one: Fight and Talk
1. Interviews with six U.S. officials familiar with the negotiations, and contemporary records.
2. The author obtained a copy of the “Message.” Its existence was first reported in news accounts in early 2012 and it was referred to in Hillary Clinton’s memoir of her State Department years, Hard Choices, p. 154.
3. Grossman and Muqrin: Interviews with participants and contemporary records. “Sometime in 2012 . . .”: Interview with Munter.
4. Interviews with six American and three Pakistani officials familiar with the meeting.
5. Interviews with participants.
6. Interviews with eight U.S. officials, civilian and military, who worked with Petraeus during this period. “You wouldn’t believe . . .” from one of those interviews.
7. The author attended the dinner.
8. Interview with Munter. Diorama and Bin Laden’s rifle: From interviews with participants and contemporary records.
9. Interviews with ten officers and analysts involved in writing the 2011 N.I.E. who provided assessments for the key judgments. Most of those interviews took place while the estimate was being finished.
10. Ibid.
11. 5,400: From a detailed I.S.A.F. briefing about reintegration at a Royal United Services Institute conference in London in 2012, which the author attended.
12. Author’s interviews with multiple participants.
13. Interviews with several officials familiar with the negotiations and contemporary records.
14. Warned about six weeks before: From interviews with both American and Pakistani military officers involved.
15. See “New York on Security Alert amid Warning of 9/11 Terror Threat,” The Guardian, September 9, 2011, for a flavor of the impact of the threat reporting at the time. The truth was typical of the ambiguous murk from which such threat reporting often arose, according to two U.S. officials familiar with the matter. President Karzai had earlier asked Zaeef to help obtain the release of an Afghan diplomat kidnapped by Al Qaeda. Zaeef had been reluctant; he feared he would be accused of having operational contacts with terrorists. At Karzai’s insistence, Zaeef did eventually make inquiries of radical Afghan intermediaries. Later, I.S.I. arrested a man involved in that episode and, while under Pakistani interrogation that was probably not gentle, the detainee fingered Zaeef. Either that, or I.S.I. officers invented the threat story in order to discredit Zaeef, because of his role as a collaborator with Tayeb Agha.
16. Author’s interviews with five senior U.S. military officers, in the United States and Pakistan.
17. Ibid. Four of the interviews were contemporaneous with the events described. According to a former Afghan intelligence official with access to N.D.S., the Americans obtained around this time a cell phone video documenting a meeting between Sirajuddin Haqqani and a Pakistani general at which the Pakistanis handed over an arms cache.
18. The quotations are from an interview with a Pakistani participant in the discussions.
19. Interview with the Pakistani participant.
20. David Sanger, Confront and Conceal: Obama’s Secret Wars and Surprising Use of American Power, New York: Crown, 2012, p. 8.
21. “We ought to hang”: Interview with a participant in the meeting. Mullen testimony: The New York Times, September 22, 2011.
22. All quotations from interviews with participants and contemporary records.
23. All quotations in this passage are from contemporaneous interviews with Pakistani officials summarizing the discussions.
24. All quotations from interviews with participants and contemporary records.
25. Ibid.
26. Ibid.
27. Ibid.
28. Ibid.
Chapter Thirty-two: The Afghan Hand
1. All e-mail reproduced in this chapter is from Holly Loftis. “Celtic build”: Interview with Holly Loftis.
2. Schoolhouse curriculum: Interview with a military officer who participated in the program.
3. “Because it can be twisted”: From Call Me Ehsaan, a short New York Times video documentary by Micah Garen, who filmed Loftis in 2010, when he served on a Provincial Reconstruction Team in Zabul Province. The curriculum: Interview with a former Hurlburt officer, ibid.
4. Loftis bio and all quotations: Interview with Holly Loftis.
5. Ibid.
6. Bordin bio: Interview with Bordin. See also: “Lethal Incompetence: Studies in Political and Military Decision-Making,” a 2006 bound issue of a “slightly edited” version of Bordin’s 1992 doctoral dissertation, by Nonstop Internet Printing.
7. Bordin, “Lethal Incompetence.” “I wasn’t hard enough”: Interview with Bordin.
8. “A Crisis of Trust and Cultural Incompatibility,” declassified Bordin study of May 12, 2011, pp. 13, 55–58. For the full study: http://nsarchive.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB370/docs/Document%2011.pdf. On patrol in 2004, origins of study: Interview with Bordin.
9. That the study was approved after the November 29 killings: “A Crisis of Trust,” p. 6.
10. “Smiley Face”: Ibid., p. 7.
11. All quotations, ibid., pp. 12–28.
12. Ibid., p. 5.
13. Interviews with I.S.A.F. military officers involved in the episode.
14. Ibid. Interviews with participants surfaced disagreement about the circumstances of the Bordin paper’s publication. In correspondence, Bordin wrote, “Originally, the intelligence officer of the brigade I was working for had classified it as UNCLASSIFIED. It was the policy of that brigade to have their intelligence officer classify all such products. . . . My discordant research findings challenged the veracity of GEN Petraeus’ sworn testimony to the U.S. Congress earlier that year. . . . Unfortunately, between the time I had initially reported my findings and recommendations and the time they were finally implemented, over 80 coalition personnel had been murdered.” On the other hand, a military officer in the Petraeus command said, “I did my duty. I pursued every aspect of green on blue and it was provided [to Petraeus]. . . . It was very broad and very deep. . . . None of this was swept under the rug.”
15. Hennessey, The Junior Officers’ Reading Club, pp. 16–17.
16. “A Crisis of Trust,” p. 5.
17. Marc Sageman, “The Insider Threat in Afghanistan in 2012,” unclassified version, p. 9. Sageman conducted an extensive investigation of fratricidal murders in Afghanistan during 2012 for I.S.A.F.’s J-2, or intelligence directorate, in the aftermath of Bordin’s work. See chapter 33. Sageman found the Marine urination video was a “major contributing factor” to the murders of the French soldiers in Kapisa. Sageman interviewed the killer in Kabul’s Pul-e Charki prison.
18. Interview with Allen.
19. www.documentcloud.org/documents/413327-inside-the-wire-reference-guide.html.
20. “Executive Summary of Findings and Recommendations, Army Regulation (AR) 15-6 Investigation (Allegations That US Service Members Improperly Disposed of Islamic Religious Materials),” March 24, 2012.
21. Ibid.
22. Ibid.
23. All quotations, interview with Lanthier.
24. Interview with Tim Conrad Sr.
25. Interview with a U.S. official who reviewed the video.
26. Allen and Karimi quotations: “General Allen Visits Base Attacked After Koran Burning Protests,” www.youtube.com/watch?v=blUTkmysMX0.
27. Interview with Peggy Marchanti.
28. “I’m checking the Taliban Web site”: Interview with Green. Office description, profile of Saboor, description of murders and aftermath: From extensive Agent Investigation Reports, including extensive interviews with witnesses, carried out by the Criminal Investi
gative Division in Kabul, in author’s files. Colonel Green retired after the murders. He might have been at the ministry when the attack took place but happened to be away. The killings affected him deeply, he said in a recent interview. He experiences “regrets, nightmares.” He was so furious at the Afghan police after the murders that he “wanted to kill them.” Even four years later, “I’m very angry and irretrievably biased against the Afghans,” he said. He added, “I don’t go a day without thinking about this.”
29. Interview with Allen.
30. Associated Press, February 28, 2012.
31. Air Force Special Operations Command, www.afsoc.af.mil/News/ArticleDisplay/tabid/136/Article/162715/afghanistan-lost-its-best-friend-loftis-remembered.aspx.
Chapter Thirty-three: Homicide Division
1. C.I.A. analysis summary is from contemporaneous interviews with Obama administration officials familiar with the agency’s products on Afghanistan that spring.
2. Author’s interview with the N.A.T.O. diplomat.
3. The Long War Journal has maintained a database of open source reports of insider killings in Afghanistan, www.longwarjournal.org/archives/2012/08/green-on-blue_attack.php.
4. All quotations from the author’s contemporaneous interviews at I.S.A.F. headquarters in Kabul, 2012.
5. Interviews with Sageman.
6. Ibid.
7. Interviews with officials familiar with the work.
8. Ibid., and author’s contemporaneous interviews with military officers at I.S.A.F. headquarters, 2012.
9. Ibid.
10. Ibid. Then–Brigadier General Paul Nakasone (later promoted to lieutenant general) said that if Sageman worked solely as a contractor, he would not have been able to access the data he sought from the JCATs, but that he considered it unlikely that no sharing took place. “I know we shared the data with everyone throughout the theater that had a part in this ongoing investigation. . . . This was the most important issue taking place.”
11. Ibid. “The Insider Threat in Afghanistan in 2012,” unclassified version.
12. Sageman recalled the checkpoint case as the one that first led him to doubt the role of personal affront in murder cases. It was one of several cases where video and photographic evidence from “helmet cams” clarified with hard evidence what had and had not precipitated insider shootings.
