Ghost Wars

by Steve Coll

  Meanwhile, if Massoud’s men found themselves “in a position to kill Osama bin Laden, we wouldn’t have waited for approval from the United States,” Abdullah recalled. “We were not doing this just for the U.S. interests. We were doing it for our own interests.”38

  In the end Massoud’s men did not object to the discussions about legal limitations as much as they did to what they saw as the selfish, single-minded focus of American policy. “What was irritating was that in this whole tragedy, in this whole chaotic situation, at times that a nation was suffering,” recalled one of Massoud’s intelligence aides who worked closely with the CIA during this period, “they were talking about this very small piece of it: bin Laden. And if you were on our side, it would have been difficult for you to accept that this was the problem. For us it was an element of the problem but not the problem.”39

  The CIA team pledged to push Massoud’s arguments in Washington, but they sensed their own isolation in the American bureaucracy. They understood State’s objections. They knew that backing Massoud’s grinding war against the Taliban carried many risks and costs, not least the certainty of more Afghan civilian deaths. They had to make the case—unpopular and to many American officials still unproven—that the Taliban and al Qaeda posed such a grave risk to the United States that it required an extraordinary change.

  26

  “That Unit Disappeared”

  THE JAWBREAKER TEAM choppered out to Dushanbe, leaving Afghanistan clandestinely across the Tajikistan border. Within a few weeks, several hundred miles to the south, four young middle-class Arab men who had sworn themselves to secrecy and jihad entered Afghanistan from Pakistan. The Taliban facilitated their travel and accommodation, first in Quetta and then in Kandahar.1

  Mohammed Atta, thirty-one, was a wiry, severe, taciturn Egyptian of medium height, the only son of a frustrated Cairo lawyer who had pushed his children hard. He had just earned a degree in urban planning from the Technical University of Hamburg-Harburg, completing a 152-page thesis on development planning and historic preservation in ancient Aleppo, Syria. Ziad Jarrah was the only son of a Lebanese family that drove Mercedes cars, owned a Beirut apartment, and kept a vacation home in the country. He had emigrated to Germany to attend the University of Applied Sciences in Hamburg, where he studied aircraft construction. He initially caroused and smoked hashish, fell tumultuously in and out with his Turkish girlfriend, and then grew intensely religious and withdrawn. His girlfriend challenged his Islamic beliefs; at times he hit her in frustration. Marwan al-Shehhi had been raised amid the prosperity of the United Arab Emirates in the years of the OPEC oil boom. He served as a sergeant in the U.A.E. army. His parents, too, could afford a German university education for him. Of the four conspirators, only Ramzi Binalshibh, then twenty-five, could not rely on family money. Small, wiry, talkative, and charismatic, he excelled in school and won a scholarship to college in Bonn, but his widowed mother struggled at home in rural Yemen. The Binalshibhs came from Amad, a town in the mountains of Hadramaut province—the province from which, six decades earlier, Mohammed bin Laden struck out for Saudi Arabia to make his name and fortune.2

  The arrival of the four in Afghanistan suggested the complexity of al Qaeda just as American intelligence began to grasp more firmly its shape and membership. In their classified reports and assessments, analysts in the CIA’s Counterterrorist Center described al Qaeda by 1999 as an extraordinarily diverse and dispersed enemy. The mid-1990s courtroom trials in the World Trade Center bombing and related cases, and evidence from the Africa bombing investigations, had revealed the organization as a paradox: tightly supervised at the top but very loosely spread at the bottom. By 1999 it had become common at the CIA to describe al Qaeda as a constellation or a series of concentric circles. Around the core bin Laden leadership group in Afghanistan—the main target of the CIA’s covert snatch operations—lay protective rings of militant regional allies. These included the Taliban, elements of Pakistani intelligence, Uzbek and Chechen exiles, extremist anti-Shia groups in Pakistan, and Kashmiri radicals. Beyond these lay softer circles of financial, recruiting, and political support: international charities, proselytizing groups, and radical Islamic mosques, education centers and political parties from Indonesia to Yemen, from Saudi Arabia to the Gaza strip, from Europe to the United States.3

  Al Qaeda operated as an organization in more than sixty countries, the CIA’s Counterterrorist Center calculated by late 1999. Its formal, sworn, hardcore membership might number in the hundreds.4 Thousands more joined allied militias such as the Taliban or the Chechen rebel groups or Abu Sayyaf in the Philippines or the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan. These volunteers could be recruited for covert terrorist missions elsewhere if they seemed qualified. New jihadists turned up each week at al Qaeda–linked mosques and recruitment centers worldwide. They were inspired by fire-breathing local imams, satellite television news, or Internet sites devoted to jihadist violence in Palestine, Chechnya, and Afghanistan. Many of the Arab volunteers from countries such as Algeria or Yemen were poor, eager, and undereducated; they had more daring than ability and could barely afford the airfare to Pakistan. Yet some were middle class and college-educated. A few—like the four men who arrived secretly in Kandahar in the autumn of 1999: Atta, Jarrah, al-Shehhi, and Binalshibh—carried passports and visas that facilitated travel to Europe and the United States. These relatively elite volunteers moved like self-propelled shooting stars through al Qaeda’s global constellation. Their reasons to join were as diverse as their transnational biographies. In many ways they retraced the trails of radicalization followed in the early 1990s by Ramzi Yousef and Mir Amal Kasi. They were mainly intelligent, well-educated men from ambitious, prosperous families. They migrated to Europe, studied demanding technical subjects, and attempted—unsuccessfully—to establish themselves as modern professionals far from the family embrace and conservative Islamic culture they had known in their youths. As they joined a violent movement led by the alienated, itinerant son of a Saudi construction magnate and a disputatious, ostracized Egyptian doctor, they pledged their loyalty to men strikingly like themselves.

  The Hamburg cell, as it came to be known, coalesced at a shabby mosque in the urban heart of Germany’s gray, industrial, northern port city. A coffee shop and a gymnasium for bodybuilders squeezed the Al Quds Mosque where Arab men in exile gathered for prayers, sermons, and conspiracy. Prostitutes, heroin dealers, and underemployed immigrants shared the streets. A 330-pound Syrian car mechanic who was a veteran of Afghanistan’s wars championed bin Laden’s message at the mosque. Mohammed Haydar Zammar was one of perhaps hundreds of such self-appointed soapbox preachers for al Qaeda scattered in city mosques and Islamic centers around the world. Zammar was well known to CIA and FBI counterterrorist officers based in Germany. The CIA repeatedly produced reports on Zammar and asked German police to challenge him. But German laws enacted after the Holocaust elaborately protected religious freedom, and German police did not see al Qaeda as a grave threat. The young men who came to pray with Zammar gradually embraced his ideas and his politics; Zammar, in turn, saw their potential as operatives.5

  Even in the dim cement block dormitories and rental apartments of polytechnic Hamburg, the Al Quds crew saw themselves as members of a global Islamist underground. They used cell phones, the Internet, and prepaid calling cards to communicate with other mosques, guest houses in Afghanistan, and dissident preachers in Saudi Arabia, including Safar al-Hawali and Saman al-Auda, the original “Awakening Sheikhs” whose vitriolic attacks on the Saudi royal family in 1991 had stimulated bin Laden’s revolutionary ambitions.6

  Atta was among the oldest in the Hamburg group. Born in the Egyptian countryside, he had moved at a young age with his parents and two sisters to a small apartment in a crowded, decaying neighborhood of colonial-era Cairo. They could afford seaside vacations, but they did not live extravagantly. His striving, austere father created “a house of study—no playing, no entertainment, just study,” a fa
mily friend recalled. His father saw Atta, with some derision, as “a very sensitive man; he is soft and was extremely attached to his mother,” as he put it years later. Atta sat affectionately on his mother’s lap well into his twenties. His father used to chide his mother “that she is raising him as a girl, and that I have three girls, but she never stopped pampering him,” as he recalled it. Atta’s older sisters thrived under their father’s pressure; one became a botanist, the other a doctor. Atta shut out all distraction to follow them into higher studies, to meet his father’s expectations or his own. If a belly dancer came on the family television, he shaded his eyes and walked out of the room. Worried that his son would languish forever in Egypt, wallowing in his mother’s pampering, Atta’s father “almost tricked him,” as he later put it, into continuing his education in Germany. Once there, his son grew steadily more angry and withdrawn. He worked four years as a draftsman, never questioning his assignments or offering ideas. His supervisor later said that Atta “embodied the idea of drawing. ‘I am the drawer. I draw.’ ” His roommates found him intolerant, sullen, sloppy, and inconsiderate.While traveling in the Arab world Atta could be relaxed, even playful, but the Europeans who knew him in Germany found him alienated and closed. Increasingly he seemed to use Islam and its precepts—prayer, segregation from women, a calendar of ritual—as a shield between himself and Hamburg.7

  By late 1999, Atta and others in the Al Quds group had committed themselves to martyrdom through jihad. Ramzi Binalshibh, who shared roots with bin Laden and seemed to know his people, helped make their contacts in Afghanistan. Binalshibh ranted at a wedding that October about the “danger” Jews posed to the Islamic world. Handwritten notes made by Ziad Jarrah just before the quartet’s autumn trip to Kandahar describe their gathering zeal: “The morning will come. The victors will come. We swear to beat you.” A week later he wrote: “I came to you with men who love the death just as you love life… . Oh, the smell of paradise is rising.”8

  Bin Laden and his senior planners had already seized on the idea of using airplanes to attack the United States when Jarrah, Atta, al-Shehhi, and Binalshibh turned up in Kandahar that autumn, according to admissions under interrogation later made by Binalshibh and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the plot’s mastermind. A fugitive from an American indictment because of his earlier work with his nephew Ramzi Yousef, Mohammed found sanctuary in Afghanistan in mid-1996, just as bin Laden arrived from Sudan. He had known bin Laden during the 1980s anti-Soviet jihad and used that connection to win a meeting. Mohammed pitched bin Laden and his Egyptian military chief, Mohammed Atef, on several plans to attack American targets. One of his ideas, he told interrogators later, was an ambitious plot to hijack ten passenger jets with trained pilots and fly them kamikaze-style into the White House or the Capitol, the Pentagon, the headquarters of the CIA and the FBI, the two towers of the World Trade Center, the tallest buildings in California and Washington state, and perhaps a nuclear power plant. Mohammed said he proposed to hijack and pilot the tenth plane himself. Rather than crash it into a target, he planned to kill all the male adult passengers, land the plane at a U.S. airport, issue statements denouncing U.S. policies in the Middle East, and then release the surviving women and children.9

  By Mohammed’s account, bin Laden and his aide listened to his ideas but declined to commit their support. Bin Laden had barely settled in Afghanistan. The country was in turmoil, his finances were under pressure, and he lacked a stable headquarters. Only after the Africa embassy bombings in 1998 did Mohammed realize that bin Laden might be ready to renew their ambitious talks—and he was right. They met again in Kandahar in early 1999 and bin Laden declared that Mohammed’s suicide hijacking plan now had al Qaeda’s backing. Bin Laden wanted to scale back the attack to make it more manageable. He also said he preferred the White House to the Capitol as a target and that he favored hitting the Pentagon. Mohammed pushed for the World Trade Center. His nephew had bombed the towers six years before but had failed to bring them down, and now languished in an American high-security prison; Mohammed sought to finish the job.

  Bin Laden provided two potential Saudi suicide pilots who were veterans of jihadist fighting in Bosnia, as well as two Yemeni volunteers who ultimately were unable to obtain visas to the United States. Mohammed taught several of them how to live and travel in the United States, drawing on his own experiences as a college student there. He showed them how to use the Internet, book plane flights, read telephone directories, and communicate with headquarters. They practiced with flight simulators on personal computers and began to puzzle out how to hijack multiple flights that would be in the air at the same time. As this training proceeded the four volunteers from Hamburg arrived in Kandahar, traveling separately. They pledged formal allegiance to bin Laden. Binalshibh, Atta, and Jarrah met with military chief Atef, who instructed them to go back to Germany and start training as pilots. After Atta was selected as the mission’s leader he met with bin Laden personally to discuss targets. The Hamburg group already knew how to operate comfortably in Western society, but before returning to Europe some of them spent time with Mohammed in Karachi, studying airline schedules and discussing life in the United States.10

  The four returned to Hamburg late that winter. Jarrah announced to his girlfriend that after years of drift he had at last discovered his life’s ambition: He wanted to fly passenger jets. Atta used his Hotmail account to email American pilot schools. “We are a small group (2–3) of young men from different arab [sic] countries,” he wrote. “Now we are living in Germany since a while for study purposes. We would like to start training for the career of airline professional pilots. In this field we haven’t yet any knowledge, but we are ready to undergo an intensive training program.”11

  PERVEZ MUSHARRAF’S DAUGHTER married a documentary filmmaker. His son worked in Boston as a financial analyst. His father was a successful civil servant of secular mind. His mother did not hide behind a veil. She was a lively, talkative woman who orchestrated her family like the conductor of a chamber symphony. Doctors, diplomats, businessmen, and modernizers filled her family albums. Musharraf himself was typically called a liberal, which in Pakistan’s political vernacular meant he did not blanch at whiskey, danced when the mood was upon him, and believed Pakistan should be a normal country—Islamic in some respects but also capitalistic and to some extent democratic. Yet Pervez Musharraf, chief of Pakistan’s army staff, also believed firmly in the necessity of the Taliban in Afghanistan, for all of their medieval and illiberal practices. He believed, too, in the strategic value of their allied jihadists, especially those fighting in Kashmir.12

  This was the aspect of the Pakistani officer corps that sometimes eluded American analysts, in the opinion of some Pakistani civilian liberals. Every Pakistani general, liberal or religious, believed in the jihadists by 1999, not from personal Islamic conviction, in most cases, but because the jihadists had proved themselves over many years as the one force able to frighten, flummox, and bog down the Hindu-dominated Indian army. About a dozen Indian divisions had been tied up in Kashmir during the late 1990s to suppress a few thousand well-trained, paradise-seeking Islamist guerrillas. What more could Pakistan ask? The jihadist guerrillas were a more practical day-to-day strategic defense against Indian hegemony than even a nuclear bomb. To the west, in Afghanistan, the Taliban provided geopolitical “strategic depth” against India and protection from rebellion by Pakistan’s own restive Pashtun population. For Musharraf, as for many other liberal Pakistani generals, jihad was not a calling, it was a professional imperative. It was something he did at the office. At quitting time he packed up his briefcase, straightened the braid on his uniform, and went home to his normal life.

  To the extent it was personal or emotional for him, it was about India. He was a small, compact man with round cheeks, a boyish face, a neat mustache, and graying hair parted in the middle. He exuded a certain puffed-up vanity, but he could also be disarmingly casual and relaxed in private. Born in New Delhi
in 1943, the son of an imperial bureaucrat, he and his family migrated to Pakistan unscathed amid the bloodshed of partition. He attended elite Christian boys’ schools in Karachi and Lahore, then won a place at Pakistan’s leading military academy. As a young officer he fought artillery duels in the second of his country’s three wars with India. In the catastrophic war of 1971, when Pakistan lost almost half its territory as Bangladesh won independence, Musharraf served as a gung-ho major in the elite commandos. When he heard of the final humiliating ceasefire with India, a friend remembered, “he took off his commando jacket and threw it on the floor… . He thought it a defeat. We all did.” Like hundreds of his colleagues, Musharraf’s commitment to revenge hardened. On sabbatical at a British military college in 1990, now a brigadier general, he argued in his thesis that Pakistan only wanted “down to earth, respectable survival” while India arrogantly sought “dominant power status” in South Asia. As army chief in 1999, it was his role, Musharraf believed, to craft and execute his country’s survival strategy even if that meant defending the Taliban or tolerating bin Laden as the Saudi trained and inspired self-sacrificing fighters in Kashmir.13

  That spring, in secret meetings with his senior commanders at Rawalpindi, Musharraf went further. Perhaps it was his commando background. Perhaps it was the success his army had recently enjoyed in Afghanistan when it inserted clandestine officers and volunteers to fight secretly with the Taliban against Ahmed Shah Massoud. Perhaps it was the unremitting popular pressure in Pakistan to score a breakthrough against Indian troops in Kashmir. In any case, as the U.S. embassy in Islamabad later pieced it together, Musharraf pulled off his shelf a years-old army plan for a secret strike against a fifteen-thousand-foot strategic height in Kashmir known as Kargil. The idea was to send Pakistani army officers and soldiers in civilian disguise to the area, seize it, and hold it against Indian counterattack. Then Pakistan would possess an impregnable firing position above a strategic road in Indian-held Kashmir, cutting off a section of the disputed territory called Ladakh. With one stiletto thrust, Musharraf calculated, his army could sever a piece of Kashmir from Indian control.14