by Steve Coll
Naseem Rana, the director of Pakistani intelligence, had repeatedly told CIA station chief Gary Schroen that if he could locate Kasi, Pakistani police would help arrest him. Now Schroen and Jessie met with ISI officers and laid out their specific plan. They asked the Pakistanis to fly teams of CIA officers and FBI agents on a military plane to Multan, the largest Pakistani city near Dera Ghazi Khan. ISI would then provide ground transportation to the Shalimar and secure the perimeter while the FBI went in. Then they would all fly back to Islamabad where ISI would allow Kasi to be flown immediately to the United States. Rana agreed to the plan in its entirety.
The CIA’s Karachi base chief and the tribal leader flew into Multan for the big day. Just before dawn on June 15, 1997, Kasi’s betrayer knocked on the hotel room door and shouted that it was time to get up for dawn prayers. FBI agents stood at his shoulder. Schroen and two CIA colleagues waited outside, holding a secure satellite radio linked to Langley headquarters. FBI Special Agent Brad Garrett kicked through the door, straddled Kasi on the floor, pressed the suspect’s left thumb onto an ink pad, studied the result with a magnifying glass, and declared exultantly, “It’s a match!” They raced to the Multan airport in six sport utility vehicles, with gunmen from Pakistani intelligence hanging from the windows. On the tarmac next to a CIA helicopter an agency officer connected Schroen’s secure radio to Langley where Tenet and other senior officials had gathered to monitor the operation. “This is Red Light Zulu,” Schroen announced, declaring his call sign. “The package was successfully picked up and is safely bundled and being loaded onto an aircraft for movement to Islamabad. All personnel on the team are safe. This was a totally successful mission.”2
A case that ranked first at CIA headquarters had finally been closed. George Tenet summoned five hundred employees to the Langley auditorium and arranged a closed-circuit television broadcast throughout headquarters. He played a recording of Schroen’s “Red Light Zulu” message for the entire CIA staff. “No terrorist should sleep soundly as long as this agency exists,” Tenet announced triumphantly. He urged his colleagues to give one another high-fives and hugs, and to “have a cocktail before noon.”3
In the heady weeks that followed a question arose inside the CIA’s Counterterrorist Center about what would now become of their elaborately equipped and financed TRODPINT tracking team assets. It seemed a shame to just cut them loose. A few flimsy U.S. government partitions away from the Kasi tracking team stood the small cluster of analysts and operators who made up the bin Laden issue unit. (After a relatively brief life in a Virginia office park, the station had been reincorporated into the headquarters of the Counterterrorist Center.) By the summer of 1997 the unit was reporting regularly to policy makers in classified channels about threats issued by bin Laden against American targets, especially American military forces stationed in Saudi Arabia. The CIA continued to describe bin Laden as an active, dangerous financier of Islamist extremism in Egypt, Sudan, Algeria, and Kashmir.
Yet the CIA had few ways to keep track of bin Laden on its own. Now the tribal team beckoned. The paid, well-organized Afghan agents could monitor or harass bin Laden up close, under direct CIA control.
Paul Pillar, the Princeton-educated analyst who had helped shape the CIA’s thinking about the terrorist threat in the Middle East during the early 1990s, was now the center’s deputy director. His superior, the Counterterrorist Center’s director in the summer of 1997, Jeff O’Connell, was a veteran from the Directorate of Operations who had experience in Yemen, knew Egypt well, and had long studied the threat of Islamist extremism then rising in the Arab world.4 He approved a plan that summer to transfer the Afghan agent team from the Kasi cell to the bin Laden unit, which had been developing draft plans to attack bin Laden’s facilities and financial assets since 1996.
The agents’ new CIA controllers modified the Kasi capture plan so it could be used to seize bin Laden and bring him to justice. At the CIA’s Islamabad station this initiative arrived that summer of 1997 in the form of cables from Langley authorizing meetings with the tribal team leadership to explain that if they wanted to remain on the agency payroll, they now had to go after bin Laden. The Afghan TRODPINT team agreed.
As a target for capture, bin Laden was an easier mark than Kasi. At least they knew for certain where bin Laden lived some of the time: in the compounds provided by Mullah Omar in and around Kandahar. As Unocal’s executives and liaisons had discovered early in 1997, bin Laden moved freely through the Taliban capital. His bodyguard and some of his wives and children lived openly near the Kandahar airport.
Working with the Afghan agents, the CIA began to use satellites and other technology to map in detail Osama bin Laden’s Kandahar world. An anchor of the planning remained the southern Afghan desert airstrip confirmed by the American special operations team. The plan’s premise was that the tribal team would take bin Laden into custody near Kandahar, hold him under their own authority, and then summon the Americans.
By the time the Americans took physical custody of bin Laden, they would have arranged for their captive’s legal disposition. The plan presumed that a federal grand jury would deliver an indictment against bin Laden or that Egypt or Saudi Arabia would agree to accept him for trial. The Islamabad station was a little confused about these uncertain and seemingly provisional legal arrangements. As their plans progressed, station chief Gary Schroen kept asking the Counterterrorist Center at Langley, “Do we have an indictment?” The answers were cryptic: Bin Laden was “indictable,” the Islamabad station was assured. In Washington, Clinton’s aides approved the concept of the capture plan by the spring of 1998.5
A federal grand jury in New York had opened a secret investigation of bin Laden’s terrorist financing activity months before. The grand jury investigation was moving toward criminal charges, but none had yet been delivered.6 Under American law no one outside the Justice Department was supposed to know about the grand jury’s work or whether it was likely to produce criminal charges. Unofficially, however, the status of the investigation began to leak to people involved with the CIA’s planning.
Even if an indictment did not come through, Egypt was a serious possibility. The CIA worked closely during 1997 with Egyptian intelligence and security services in a large-scale, multinational campaign to break the back of its violent Islamist movement. CIA officers seized a number of Egyptian fugitives in foreign countries such as Azerbaijan and Albania and secretly shipped them to Cairo for trial.7 It seemed conceivable that if the CIA captured bin Laden, the Egyptians might be willing this time to accept him for trial even though they had turned down that idea when bin Laden was leaving Sudan. Then, too, it was possible that the American government, working harder than it had in 1996, might persuade Saudi Arabia to take bin Laden for trial if the Afghan agent team had him in physical custody.
The tribal team developed a detailed plan for the CIA in which it would hold bin Laden in a cave in southern Afghanistan for thirty days before the Americans flew in clandestinely to take him away. The tribal team located a cave where they could hide out comfortably. They assured the CIA that they had acquired and stored at the cave enough food and water to keep bin Laden healthy during his stay. The main purpose of the cave detention was to allow some time to pass after bin Laden’s initial capture so that al Qaeda’s agitated lieutenants would be less alert when the Americans moved in to bundle bin Laden off. Also, the thirty-day detention would allow time to arrange for legal authorities. Under the plan, as soon as the Afghan agents had bin Laden on his way to the provisioned cave, the team would notify the Islamabad station, which in turn would signal Langley and Washington that they needed an indictment or a nod from an Arab government in a hurry. Once this indictment or rendition was arranged, an American special operations team would fly to the prearranged rural Kandahar airstrip, and the tribal team would hand over their Saudi captive.
Under American law and policy, this kidnapping plan looked acceptable because there was no Afghan governme
nt or law to offend. Freelance Afghans would be detaining bin Laden for an indefinite time on Afghan territory that was effectively ungoverned. CIA authority to transfer suspects offshore from one place to another—as in the case of rendition to Egypt or Saudi Arabia—was carefully documented in a succession of classified White House executive orders and national security memoranda, all of them briefed repeatedly to Congress. These included a Presidential Decision Directive, signed by President Clinton in 1995, which explicitly instructed the CIA to undertake covert “rendition” programs if they would enhance American national security. As for the scenario where CIA officers might fly in to receive bin Laden for an American trial, they would then be operating under the authority of Executive Order 12333, signed by President Ronald Reagan in 1981 and renewed by successive presidents. This order stated that while the CIA may not participate directly in law enforcement, the agency and its employees could “provide specialized equipment, technical knowledge or assistance, or expert personnel for use by any department or agency” and could “render any other assistance and cooperation to law enforcement authorities not precluded by applicable law.” A thick archive of Justice Department memoranda and court cases upheld the right of American agents to abduct fugitives overseas and return them to U.S. courts in most instances.8
The CIA plan to capture bin Laden also had to accommodate another layer of American law governing covert action: the presidential ban on assassination by the CIA or its agents, a ban initiated by President Gerald R. Ford in 1976 and renewed by Reagan in the same Executive Order 12333. To comply with this part of the law, when they met with their agents to develop their plan, the CIA officers had to make clear that the effort to capture bin Laden could not turn into an assassination hit. The Afghans had to try to take bin Laden alive. CIA officers were assigned to sit down with the team leaders to make it as clear as possible. “I want to reinforce this with you,” station chief Gary Schroen told the Afghans, as he later described the meeting in cables to Langley and Washington. “You are to capture him alive.”9
Bin Laden always traveled with armed bodyguards who were certain to defend him fiercely. These Arab jihadists guarded the entrances to his several residences and packed into bin Laden’s Land Cruiser with assault rifles and rocket-propelled grenade launchers. Everyone involved in the CIA planning understood that a firefight was likely if the Afghan agents attempted a kidnapping. But as long as the agents made a reasonable effort to capture bin Laden alive—as long as they used their weapons in the course of a legitimate attempt to take bin Laden into custody—this would not pose a legal problem. The Islamabad case officers tried to ram this point home in their meetings with the tribal team, but they could never be sure how their pleadings actually registered, unconditioned as the Afghans were by any culture of nitpicking lawyers. As a backup, Langley and the Islamabad station created a careful paper trail to document their meetings and instructions.
Both at the CIA and the White House, almost everyone involved in the closely held planning knew what was likely: The tribal agents would say that they were going to try to take bin Laden captive, but in fact they would launch what CIA officers referred to as “the Afghan ambush,” in which you “open up with everything you have, shoot everybody that’s out there, and then let God sort’em out,” as Gary Schroen put it. Schroen figured that the agents would return to them and say, “We killed the big guy. I’m sorry.” That would be all right as far as nearly everyone at the CIA and the White House was concerned—if the instructions had been clear and sincere, the paper trail was in place, and nothing too awful went wrong during the operation. As soon as the Afghans began to move on such an operation, they were supposed to communicate with the Islamabad station and describe their circumstances, but they were granted autonomy to initiate a strike.
The team reported one unsuccessful ambush during 1997, on a road near Kandahar, against what the agents described as bin Laden’s convoy. The ambush site had been favored by the agents during the anti-Soviet war. In this case, however, they failed to properly seal off bin Laden’s convoy by forming an L-shape at the ambush site. In an L-shaped ambush, attackers rake a convoy first from the side and then seal the vehicles off from the front. The Afghan agents lined up only along the side of the road and opened fire. By the agents’ account, several Arabs traveling with bin Laden were killed, but bin Laden himself managed to escape by driving through the crossfire. The CIA had no way to confirm this account. Its officers concluded that bin Laden had probably been in the reported convoy and that he had probably been shot at, but it was impossible to know for certain. White House officials who reviewed the reports were skeptical. They wondered if the Afghan agents, like the spy protagonist of Graham Greene’s Our Man in Havana, were making up stories of derring-do for the home office in order to hold on to their retainers.
By early 1998 the CIA had studied the compound where bin Laden frequently stayed outside of Kandahar. The Saudi made only limited efforts to disguise his visits. He talked openly on a satellite telephone that the Americans could tap. The question arose: Could the tribal agents be equipped to raid Osama bin Laden’s house and take him from his bed?
AS THE CIA PLOTTED, bin Laden expanded his ambitions. He had settled comfortably into Afghanistan. His increasingly intimate relationship with the Taliban leadership in Kandahar, girded by bin Laden’s lavish construction projects and generous donations, was plain for anyone in the Pashtun capital to see. He also moved freely through the Taliban-controlled eastern Afghan territory around Khost where his legend as an anti-Soviet jihadist had been born almost a dozen years before. His sponsorship of training camps for Pakistani and other volunteer fighters bound for Kashmir and Chechnya provided a way for bin Laden to organize his own private international fighting force outside of Taliban control—a force far more potent than the loose collection of hardened bodyguards he had retained in Sudan. His continued openness to print and television media, and his ability to fund technology-laden promotional offices in London and elsewhere, ensured that his voice remained prominent in worldwide radical Islamist politics.
Nearing middle age, bin Laden clearly saw himself as a man of destiny, an exiled sheikh battling in the name of Islam to liberate occupied lands from Jerusalem to Central Asia. His emotion about American military occupation of his native Saudi Arabia was undimmed. He raged publicly at everything about American policy in the Middle East: its support of Israel, its alliance with the Saudi royal family, and its killing of Iraqi soldiers and civilians during the Gulf War. Increasingly bin Laden’s political vision and the secret operations he funded had global reach.
On February 23, 1998, bin Laden unveiled a coalition that reflected his spreading ambition and rising international charisma. He announced a new enterprise: the International Islamic Front for Jihad Against Jews and Crusaders. Bin Laden had worked for hours on the front’s manifesto. Its contents were dictated over his satellite telephone to editors at a prominent London-based Arabic-language newspaper.10 An angry litany of anti-American threats and grievances, the manifesto was signed by militant leaders from Egypt, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Kashmir. Its publication represented bin Laden’s first explicit attempt to lead an international coalition of Islamic radicals in violent attacks against the United States.
At the center of bin Laden’s reasoning lay the cause of his own personal humiliation in late 1990. Then he had sought to persuade the Saudi royal family to let him lead a jihad against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, to expel Iraqi forces from Kuwait. Instead the royal family had invited the American military to wage the war and had banished bin Laden from the kingdom for protesting. Since the Gulf War in 1991, bin Laden now declared, the United States “has been occupying the most sacred lands of Islam: the Arabian Peninsula. It has been stealing its resources, dictating to its leaders, humiliating its people, and frightening its neighbors. It is using its rule in the Peninsula as a weapon to fight the neighboring peoples of Islam.” The Americans had declared war “on Allah, His Pro
phet, and Muslims.” In reply, the signatories of the manifesto “hereby give all Muslims the following judgment: The judgment to kill and fight Americans and their allies, whether civilians or military, is an obligation for every Muslim who is able to do so in any country.”11
Among the signatures at the bottom of the declaration was that of Ayman al-Zawahiri, the Egyptian physician and Islamist who had first encountered bin Laden in 1987 at a charity hospital for anti-Soviet mujahedin in Peshawar. They had remained in contact over the ensuing decade as each became forcibly exiled from his native country. In Sudan, bin Laden provided support for al-Zawahiri’s faction of the Egyptian Islamist movement, an exceptionally violent splinter group known as the Egyptian Islamic Jihad. At a personal level, bin Laden and al-Zawahiri had much in common, compared to the teenage drifters from Tunis or Algiers or Karachi who made up the infantry troops of the international jihadist movement. They both had university educations. They both came from privileged, modern families. Al-Zawahiri was the son of a university professor and the great nephew of a Grand Imam of Al-Azhar University in Cairo, Islam’s theological citadel. His brother was a dermatologist and his cousins were chemists, pharmacists, judges, and politicians. But like bin Laden in Saudi Arabia, al-Zawahiri had grown up near the Egyptian elite but never had belonged to it. Like bin Laden he had embraced Islam as a teenager while many others in his family lived secular, multinational lives. Al-Zawahiri struck his relatives as shy and insular, and they interpreted his religiosity as a kind of escape, an insistent choice of tradition as a refuge from the confusions of modernity. This was also the way some of bin Laden’s relatives saw Osama.12
