The Wrong Enemy

by Carlotta Gall

  This revelation explained a lot. For example, there were things that did not make sense about bin Laden’s hideout. He had no escape route or priest’s hole to hide in, in case of a search party or raid. He was slow to react to the explosions in the house. He never reached for his guns or at least never fired them. From the accounts of the women in the compound, he knew from the instant it started that it was an American raid and, if anything, seemed resigned to the fact. In his correspondence, he had warned colleagues of betrayal by Pakistan. He relied on Pakistan to hide him but knew it could not last forever.

  CIA officials thought of the same thing. As they watched his compound, they realized there was no back door, no tunnel. They concluded bin Laden was relying on being forewarned to evade capture. It was one of the reasons they decided not to bring the ISI in on their planning for the raid.4 I realized U.S. officials had come to the conclusion that someone in the ISI had been protecting bin Laden too. “It is likely that ‘someone’ in ISI knew of UBL’s residence in Abbottabad,” General Helmly wrote to me in an email two years after the raid. (He used the military’s standard acronym for bin Laden.) “It was most likely,” he continued, that the army and intelligence chiefs “did not wish to know of this.”

  A string of prominent Pakistani officials have been linked to the possible installation of bin Laden in Abbottabad in 2005. Again, there is no hard evidence against them. Retired General Ziauddin Butt, who served as director general of the ISI in the government of Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif from 1998 to 1999, insists that someone in power had to have known when bin Laden was ensconced behind those high walls. He said he thought General Musharraf and Ejaz Shah had arranged for bin Laden to move into the safe house. “Since it was the Musharraf era and he was very well informed, he would have known,” Butt told me. Shah was very close to Musharraf and “did everything” for him, Butt added. His theory is that they hid bin Laden in order to keep the war on terror on the boil and U.S. financial assistance flowing, while continuing to cooperate by capturing and handing over lesser al Qaeda figures. Butt was certainly qualified to know how such things were done in Pakistani intelligence circles, but he did not provide any proof for his claims, and he clearly had an axe to grind since he was removed from his post when Musharraf seized power in 1999 and jailed for two years. When Ejaz Shah threatened to sue him, he retracted his claims.

  Ejaz Shah insists that everyone in Pakistan was genuinely appalled by the events of 9/11, and that no official would have hidden bin Laden. Yet even Ejaz Shah, who headed the Intelligence Bureau, Pakistan’s equivalent of the FBI, from 2004 to 2008, agrees that someone had to have known. “Nobody can believe he was there without people knowing,” he told me. “In a Pakistani village, they notice even a stray dog.”

  Another senior official who would have known of bin Laden’s presence in Abbottabad was Lieutenant General Nadeem Taj, a former military secretary to Musharraf and relative of Musharraf’s wife. Taj served as head of both Military Intelligence and the ISI during the years bin Laden moved to Haripur and then to Abbottabad. Taj also served as commandant of the Kakul Military Academy for a year in 2006, and so had lived and worked within a mile of bin Laden’s house just when he was moving in. The chief of army staff, General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, who served as ISI chief from 2004 to 2007 before succeeding General Musharraf in the top military post, also would have known. As did his successor at the ISI, Lieutenant General Ahmad Shuja Pasha, and his successor, Lieutenant General Zaheer ul-Islam, who served as the ISI’s number two under Pasha, in charge of internal security.

  I received another bombshell. A Pakistani official told me soon after the raid on bin Laden’s house that the United States had direct evidence that the ISI chief, Pasha, had known of bin Laden’s presence in the house in Abbottabad. The information came from a senior U.S. official, and I guessed that the Americans had intercepted a phone call of Pasha’s or one about him in the days after the raid. “He knew of Osama’s whereabouts, yes,” the Pakistani official told me. The official was surprised, and said that the Americans were even more surprised. General Pasha had been an energetic opponent of the Pakistani Taliban, leading operations in Swat, and had proved an open and cooperative counterpart at the ISI. “Pasha was always their blue-eyed boy,” the official said. But in the weeks and months after the raid, Pasha, and the ISI press office, strenuously denied that they had had any prior knowledge of bin Laden’s presence in Abbottabad.5 Yet Pasha’s demeanor had been revealing. For the first time ever, the ISI chief was called on to testify before parliament. “Pasha’s attitude was a mixture of threat, a mixture of bluster, and a mixture of intimidation, and then a lot of hyper-nationalistic talk about sovereignty,” the Pakistani official recounted. It was because he had been caught red-handed. There was no proof that his boss, the Army Chief Kayani, knew anything, however. Kayani, the quiet general, was far more careful. Yet American officials suspected he also knew. The relationship between the two went back so far in the military that they considered there was nothing Pasha would do of which Kayani would not be aware.

  Colleagues at the New York Times ran this information past U.S. officials in Washington, but suddenly everyone clammed up. It was as if a decision had been made to contain the damage to the relationship between the two governments. “There’s no smoking gun,” officials of the Obama administration began to say.6

  The haul of handwritten notes, letters, computer files, and other information collected from bin Laden’s house during the raid revealed regular correspondence between bin Laden and a string of militant leaders, Pakistanis and Arabs, who must have known that bin Laden was living in Pakistan. American investigators going through the load found correspondence with Hafiz Saeed, the founder of Lashkar-e-Taiba, the pro-Kashmiri group that has also been active in Afghanistan. Bin Laden had likewise maintained correspondence with Mullah Omar. Saeed and Omar are two of the ISI’s most important and loyal militant leaders. Both have been protected by the agency. Both cooperate closely with it, restraining their followers to coordinate with Pakistan’s greater strategic plans and never attacking the Pakistani state. Any correspondence the two men had with bin Laden must surely have been known to their ISI handlers.

  There were other connections to Pakistani militants. The courier al-Kuwaiti’s cell phone, which was recovered in the raid, contained contacts to the militant group Harkat-ul-Mujahideen, which had been the closest Pakistani group to bin Laden in the 1990s and also a longtime asset of Pakistani intelligence. In tracing the calls made by the Harkat contacts, American analysts found that the militants were also in touch with, and had even met with, ISI handlers.7 The ISI has often explained that it needs to maintain contacts with Afghan Taliban and members of banned Pakistani militant groups as part of its basic intelligence gathering.

  Western officials have grown weary of this excuse. The high level of those involved on both sides of these meetings means the interactions are far more serious than a general debriefing, one Western diplomat in Islamabad told me. Other correspondence revealed that bin Laden and his aides were discussing the idea of a deal with Pakistan in which al Qaeda would refrain from attacking Pakistan in return for protection inside the country. Some of the correspondence dated from the last year of his life.8 The correspondence does not prove that bin Laden was in touch with the Pakistani officials about any deal, but Pakistani journalists and some former security officials say it matches their understanding of bin Laden’s relationship with the ISI. They believe bin Laden was supportive of Pakistan, whereas his deputy, Zawahiri, was not.

  Bin Laden did not only rely on correspondence. There were occasional comings and goings from the Abbottabad compound, and he did travel to meet his aides and fellow militants. “Osama was moving around,” one Pakistani security official told me, adding he heard so from jihadi sources. Bin Laden would travel “for inspiration,” he said. “You cannot run a movement without contact with people.” He traveled in plain sight, relying on contacts seeing him through any checkp
oints. In the same way that police gave a wide berth to militants’ safe houses, so too did they let VIP convoys pass through highway checkpoints, no questions asked. In 2003, bin Laden traveled with a small group of men and women from Peshawar to the Swat Valley where he stayed for six to eight months. Bin Laden had shaved off his beard, and was with his youngest wife, Amal, and their small daughter. The courier Ibrahim and his wife, Maryam, accompanied them. A driver and a man in a police uniform escorted the group.9

  In 2009, bin Laden was reported by Pakistani intelligence to have visited Kohat, in Pakistan’s tribal areas, to meet with the Pakistani militant leader Qari Saifullah Akhtar. Akhtar was the commander accused of trying to kill Benazir Bhutto on her return in 2007. Often called the “father of jihad,” Akhtar is considered one of the ISI’s most valuable guerrilla assets. A Pashtun born in Waziristan, he was a graduate of the Binori madrassa in Karachi, infamous for its extremist, sectarian teaching. He founded one of the first Pakistani militant groups, Harkat-ul-Jihad-ul-Islami, or HUJI. After years in Afghanistan, he was close both to Mullah Omar and bin Laden. He is the person credited with driving Mullah Omar out of Afghanistan on the back of a motorbike in 2001, and moving bin Laden out of harm’s way just minutes before U.S. missile strikes on his camp in 1998.10 After 2001, he was detained several times in Pakistan. Yet he was never prosecuted and was quietly released each time by the ISI.

  At his meeting with bin Laden in August 2009, Akhtar reportedly requested al Qaeda’s help in mounting an attack on the Pakistani General Army Headquarters in Rawalpindi. Intelligence officials learned about the meeting later that year, from interrogations of men involved in the attack who were detained afterward. The information on the bin Laden meeting was compiled in a report seen by all the civilian and military intelligence agencies, security officials at the interior ministry, and U.S. counterterrorism officials. The report was leaked to the Pakistani newspaper The Daily Times in May 2010. It is the only recorded episode showing that bin Laden’s presence inside Pakistan was known to Pakistani intelligence agencies.11

  At the meeting, bin Laden rejected Akhtar’s request for help on the headquarters attack and urged him and other militant groups not to fight Pakistan but to serve the greater cause—the jihad against America. Bin Laden warned against fighting inside Pakistan since it would destroy their home base: “If you make a hole in the ship, the whole ship will go down.” He told Akhtar that he did not want to allow U.S. forces an easy exit from Afghanistan. He wanted Akhtar and the Pakistani Taliban to accelerate the recruitment and training of fighters, so they could trap U.S. forces in Afghanistan with a well-organized guerrilla war. Bin Laden said Pakistan, Afghanistan, Somalia, and the Indian Ocean would be al Qaeda’s main battlefields in the coming years, and he needed more fighters recruited from those areas. He even offered navy training for militants, saying that soon the United States would exit Afghanistan and then the next war would be waged on the seas.

  Akhtar, in his mid-fifties by 2013, remains at large in Pakistan. He is still active in jihadi circles and running madrassas. Pakistani intelligence has also established that he has been in contact with Zawahiri and Mullah Omar since 2010. He is an example of a militant commander whom the ISI has struggled to control, yet who is too valuable for them ever to lock up or eliminate. They keep trying to bend and use him, instead.

  The ties between Pakistani militants and al Qaeda were undeniable, but even as the Musharraf government arrested al Qaeda figures, it always sought to cover up the extent of the links with Pakistani groups. The top al Qaeda figures caught in Pakistan after 9/11 were found in homes of Pakistani Islamist supporters, far from the border with Afghanistan. Abu Zubaydah was caught in the house of a worker of Lashkar-e-Taiba in the Punjabi town of Faisalabad. Lashkar-e-Taiba was a favorite group of the ISI and continued operating throughout the decade after 9/11 despite evidence that it was behind the worst terrorist actions in the region. The mastermind of 9/11, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, was taken into U.S. custody from a house in Rawalpindi, the home of Pakistan’s army, that belonged to a member of the religious party Jamaat-e-Islami and whose relatives were serving military officers. Two of the suicide bombers responsible for the hits on the London transport system on 7/7 in 2005 had met with a leading figure of Jaish-e-Mohammad in the Pakistani city of Faisalabad during a trip there two months before the attacks. Rashid Rauf, the chief suspect in an al Qaeda plot ordered by Zawahiri to blow up planes over the Atlantic Ocean, was a member of Jaish-e-Mohammad and related by marriage to its leader. Pakistani authorities arrested Rauf in 2006 but never handed him over to British police despite repeated requests, probably because he knew too much of the depths of the links. The list goes on. Even after the Red Mosque siege in 2007, Musharraf and Kayani still thought they could control the militants and turn them to good use. Government policy was to control and use them while cracking down on the wayward ones, and above all hiding the depth of the connections. Bin Laden was an intrinsic part of that plan.

  There were also occasional visitors to Abbottabad who should have caused security officials to do a more careful search of the environs. Abu Faraj al-Libi, an important operational commander, often described as the third in command of al Qaeda, had been behind the two assassination attempts on General Musharraf in 2003. He lodged in Abbottabad occasionally before his capture in 2005. One of his associates had rented no less than three houses in Abbottabad for al-Libi’s use, according to Musharraf, who recounts the details in his book, In the Line of Fire.12 As police closed in on one house, al-Libi, who was staying in another, managed to escape. That alone should have made Pakistani law enforcement scrutinize real estate records in towns like Abbottabad more methodically.

  One visitor to Abbottabad who clearly did reach bin Laden was his third wife, Khairiah, a woman of over sixty who had spent most of the decade in Iran separated from bin Laden. She had been with a group of bin Laden’s family members that had traveled to Iran after 9/11 and been detained under house arrest by the Iranian authorities. Iran was anti-America but had no love for bin Laden. Some of the group were released in exchange for the Iranian diplomat Heshmatollah Attarzadeh, who was kidnapped in Pakistan in 2008 and held hostage in the tribal areas for sixteen months, according to Pakistani intelligence officials. Angry at the deal, Pakistani officials briefed one of my Pakistani journalist colleagues about it at the time. The story was impossible to verify then, but some of bin Laden’s children were allowed to leave Iran. Khairiah traveled to Pakistan to rejoin her husband along the smuggling routes that militant groups have long used to evade border controls. According to Pakistan’s official Commission of Inquiry into the event, she arrived in Abbottabad in early 2011.

  The Abbottabad raid caused shock waves that reverberated through all layers of Pakistani society: Shock that bin Laden was hiding in such a small, bucolic town, when Pakistanis had been told for years by their leaders that he was either in a cave in Afghanistan or dead. Shock that the U.S. commandos slipped under Pakistan’s radar, raided a house, and escaped unhindered, even stopping to refuel inside Pakistan. There was little anger, however, at the fact that bin Laden had been killed. Public reaction was limited to a few small demonstrations by religious parties, with none of the violence that raged on the streets after the deaths of Benazir Bhutto in 2007 or the Baluch tribal leader Nawab Akbar Bugti, shot by the Pakistani army in 2006. Revenge attacks from militant groups would come later, but the general public did not rise up. Bin Laden was not popular within Pakistan. What did rise was criticism against the military and the intelligence services for their evident failures. Shock turned to resentment within the military, especially when CIA chief Leon Panetta said that the United States had decided not to work with Pakistan in hunting for bin Laden because of fears that leaks might alert the target.

  The media, especially prominent television talk-show hosts, exploded with outrage and astonishment at the ineffectiveness of the military, and suspicion that it had been playing a double game and hiding bin
Laden all along. Jokes began circulating by text message and social media among the English-speaking elite. The favorite one was a poke at the failure of Pakistan’s air defenses to detect the U.S. helicopter raid: “Pakistan radar system for sale: $99.99. Buy one, get one free (can’t detect U.S helicopters but can receive Star Plus),” a reference to an Indian satellite channel. Others tweaked the army’s pride in its service: “Public Service Message from the Army: ‘Stay Alert. Don’t rely on us. Don’t honk. Cantonment area.’” And, “Brave, honest and dedicated ‘bloody’ civilians for protection of our delicate armed forces.” More angry comments circulated about the generals’ appropriating much of the country’s wealth with investments in vast real estate developments, shopping centers, farms, factories, and banks, instead of guarding Pakistan’s borders.

  The military was dumbfounded and made no immediate public comment. The first government statement came from the office of President Asif Ali Zardari, the widower of Benazir Bhutto who had succeeded Musharraf as president after her death. He welcomed the death of bin Laden. For General Kayani, however, it was the bad dream as described years earlier to General Helmly. Kayani had an internal crisis on his hands as feelings of humiliation within the army swelled into a backlash against the United States. He was quick to distance himself from the relationship with the United States and asked that the U.S. administration not announce that Pakistan had cooperated in the raid. He announced he was withdrawing military cooperation with the American troops serving in Pakistan’s training facilities, and he warned that another such affront to Pakistan’s sovereignty would force Pakistan to review its overall cooperation with the United States.