THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY-
Where has he
been? How did we ever let him get away? Our correspondent— one of the few
Western
journalists ever to have met Osama bin Laden—traces the al-Qaeda leader's
footsteps in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and describes the sometimes hapless
American pursuit
by peter bergen
W hen you fly over the icy peaks of the
Hindu Kush, which march in serried ranks toward the Himalayas, dividing
Central Asia from the Indian subcontinent, yon get a sense of the scale of the
problem: Osama bin Laden may be hiding somewhere out there. Wherever he is,
bin Laden continues to give substantial ideological direction to jihadist
movements around the globe—and so American forces are scouring the Hindu Kush
to find him.
The conventional
wisdom now, of course, is that tracking bin Laden down won't make much of a
difference to the-larger war on terrorism anyway. At a March 2002 press
conference President Bush referred to bin Laden as "a person who's now
been marginalized," Although it is certainly the case that the global jihadist
movement will carry on whatever bin Laden's fate, it would be dangerously
wrong to assume that it doesn't really matter whether he is apprehended.
Finding bin
Laden remains of utmost importance for three reasons. First, there is the
matter of justice for the 3,000 people who died in the 9/11 attacks, and for
the hundreds of other victims of al-Qaeda attacks around the world. Second,
every day that bin Laden remains at liberty is a propaganda victory for al-Qaeda.
Third, although bin Laden and his deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri don't exert
day-to-day control over al-Qaeda, according to Roger Cressey, a former senior
U.S. counter terrorism official, they do continue to supply "broad
strategic guidance" for the group's actions, and for those of its
affiliates. Statements from bin Laden and, to some degree, al-Zawahiri have
always been the most reliable guide to the future actions of jihadist movements
around the world—and this has remained the case even while both men have been
on the run. Shortly after bin Laden called for assaults against Western
economic interests in October of 2002, an Indonesian disco was bombed, killing
200 Western tourists, and a suicide attack launched at a French oil tanker
steaming off the coast of Yemen. In December of 2003, after al-Zawahiri
condemned Pakistan's President Pervez Musharraf for supporting the campaign
against al-Qaeda, Musharraf narrowly survived two assassination attempts.
Around the same time, bin Laden called for attacks against members of the
coalition in Iraq; subsequently terrorists bombed a British consulate and a
bank in Turkey, and commuters on their way to work in Madrid. According to U.S.
intelligence officials, a plot to carry out a large-scale terror attack against
the United States in the near future, possibly tied to the presidential
election in November, is being directed personally by bin Laden and
al-Zawahiri.
In the past year I traveled twice to
Afghanistan and Pakistan to find out how the hunt for bin Laden was
progressing. While in Kabul I stayed at a comfortable guesthouse owned by a
British combat cameraman—a spacious villa chat is reportedly the former
residence of one of Osama bin Laden’s four wives. After the fall of the Taliban
the villa was converted to its present use. For a hundred dollars and change
it's now possible to have the ambiguous pleasure of sleeping in what may once
have been the marriage chamber of the world’s most wanted man; for me it was an
appropriate place to begin an investigation into what became of bin Laden after
9/11. My investigation included more than two dozen interviews with American,
Afghan, and Pakistani officials, and discussions with several people who have
met with bin Laden over the years.
Only three
people outside al-Qaeda and the Taliban are known to have spent any time with
bin Laden after 9/11. Two are journalists and the third is a doctor. One of the
journalists, Taysir Alouni, of al-Jazeera television, interviewed bin Laden in
late October of 2001. (Alouni was later indicted in Spain for allegedly
providing money to al-Qaeda.) During the al-Jazeera interview bin Laden for the
first time linked himself publicly to the 9/11 attacks, after Alouni asked him,
"America claims that it has proof that you are behind what happened in New
York and Washington. What's your answer?" Bin Laden said, "If
inciting people to do that is terrorism, and if killing those who are killing
our sons is terrorism, then let history be witness that we are
terrorists." At one point he said, "We practice the good
terrorism."
Hamid Mir, a
Pakistani who has spent several years writing a biography of bin Laden, was the
other journalist. Two months after 9/11 Mir was taken to meet bin Laden
somewhere in Afghanistan, "I was blindfolded," he told me, "and
they gave me some pills, and I was unconscious after that. When I woke up, it
was the morning of the eighth of November. I have some impression that the
place where he gave the interview was not far away from Kabul. They took me
into a mud house, and I was surrounded by armed Arabs, 'Welcome! Welcome!' they
said as I entered."
Eventually Mir
was taken to see bin Laden, who was eating a hearty meal of meat and olives,
and was in a jocular frame of mind. What bin Laden had to say during the interview,
however, was anything but a laughing matter. When Mir asked him how he could
justify the killing of so many civilians, bin Laden replied, "America and
its allies are massacring us in Palestine, Chechnya. Kashmir, and Iraq. The
Muslims have the right to attack America in reprisal... The September eleven
attacks were not targeted at women and children. The real targets were
America's icons of military and economic power." In the interview bin
Laden openly discussed his willingness to use nuclear weapons.
At about the
same time, in the first week of November 2001, Amer Aziz, a prominent Pakistani
surgeon, was summoned to Kabul to treat Muhammad Atef, who was then the
military commander of al-Qaeda. During his visit Aziz, a Taliban sympathizer
who had treated bin Laden in 1999 for a back injury, also met with bin Laden.
The meeting is significant because there have been widespread but erroneous
reports that bin Laden suffers from some form of deadly kidney disease. Aziz
later told the Associated Press, "When 1 saw him last, he was in excellent
health. He was walking. He was healthy. I didn't see any evidence of kidney
disease. I didn't see any evidence of dialysis."
Khalid Khawaja,
formerly an official in Pakistan's military-intelligence agency, Inter-Services
Intelligence, has known bin Laden since 1987, when the two fought side by side
against the Soviets in Afghanistan. I met with Khawaja, a heavily bearded man
of fifty-three who speaks flawless English, at the offices of an Islamabad law
firm, in a conference room lined with legal treatises. 1 asked him when he had
last seen bin Laden, but he ducked the question. When I asked about the state
of bin Laden's health, however, he said that he had received reliable reports
since 9/11 that bin Laden was "riding horses"—a further indication
that he isn't suffering from a serious illness.
According to
several U.S. officials who track al-Qaeda, bin Laden’s medical condition is not
life threatening. One told me he believes that bin Laden may be afflicted with Marfan
syndrome, a disease that attacks the connective tissues and is commonly found
in very thin tall people. (Abraham Lincoln probably suffered from the
syndrome.) Bin Laden does have a variety of ailments, including low blood
pressure, diabetes, and a foot wound that he sustained while fighting in
Afghanistan in the late 1980s; but although all these conditions are
debilitating, none is likely to cause bin Laden's death anytime soon. Moreover,
al-Zawahiri, who is likely to be with bin Laden most of the time, is a skilled
doctor. A senior Afghan official told me that bin Laden and al-Zawahiri travel
together "like a couple."
On November 13,
2001, Kabul fell to the Northern Alliance, and bin Laden decamped to Jalalabad,
in eastern Afghanistan. He knew the city well, having first settled there in
May of 1996, after being expelled from his previous base, in Sudan. During the
late 1990s bin Laden maintained a compound in Hadda, a suburb of Jalalabad,
that consisted of dozens of rooms spread out over more than an acre. The
compound sustained several direct hits during the Afghan war and is now a
shell.
For some
perspective on Jalalabad, I spoke with Dr. Muhammad Asif Qazizada, the deputy
governor of Nangarhar, the
province that contains Jalalabad. In his office, in a splendid blue-domed
nineteenth-century building thai was once the winter palace of Afghanistan's
kings, Qazizada explained why Jalalabad and the nearby mountainous redoubt of
Tora Bora were the perfect places for bin Laden to stage one of history's great
disappearing acts. In his early twenties Qazizada worked as a medic in Tora
Bora when it was an important base for the Afghan resistance to the Soviets. At
the time, he recalled, Tora Bora was a warren of caves and fortifications
defended by machine guns and anti-aircraft batteries. Because it offered easy
access by foot to Parachinar, a region of Pakistan that juts like a parrot's
beak into Afghanistan, it was also an ideal place from which to mount
hit-and-run operations against the Soviets, Indeed, bin Laden fought his first
battle against the Soviets, in T987, at Jaji, an Afghan village that abuts
Parachinar.
During the
1980s, Qazizada said, Tora Bora was the object of several Soviet offensives,
one of them involving thousands of soldiers, dozens of helicopter gun ships,
and several MiG fighter jets; so solid were the fortifications that the Soviet
offensives were held off by a Force of no more than 130 Afghans. For this
reason, Qazizada believes, bin Laden chose the region as his hideout and escape
route in November of 2001. When the two-week battle of Tora Bora took place
shortly afterward, in December, it was fought largely by the forces of local Afghan commanders, supported
by small numbers of U.S. Special Forces, who called in intense air strikes
against al-Qaeda's positions. But Tora Bora's mountainous topography worked to
bin Laden's advantage. "It was difficult for the Americans to
attack," Qazizada says, "and there was a way to flee."
From Jalalabad,
Tora Bora is a two-hour drive up a narrow, potholed country road. Protected by
a squad of ten Afghan government soldiers, 1 was led there by Muhammad Zahir,
a thirty-year-old Afghan commander. As we drove into the foothills, we saw
beneath us terraced fields of the deepest green, rising toward towering
mountains that are flecked with snow even in summer. On one of Tora Bora's many
rocky outcrops we visited four al-Qaeda graves—marked by flying pennants of
pink, green, blue, and orange. "The villagers made the shrine," Zahir
explained. "They are al-Qaeda sympathizers. They think al-Qaeda are holy
warriors, fighting against the infidels."
During lunch
Zahir, who fought on the front lines throughout the 2001 battle of Tora Bora,
explained how the conflict had unfolded. Al-Qaeda's bases had dotted the
surrounding mountains, which were covered with snow during the battle. Zahir
said that he had seen Arab, Pakistani, and Chechen members of al-Qaeda
fighting with rockets, tanks, machine guns, and artillery—a formidable force
that could be taken on only with the help of B-52 bombing raids on al-Qaeda's
positions.
A turning point
came on December 12, when Haji Zaman, one of the Afghan commanders leading the
attack against al-Qaeda, opened negotiations with members of the group for a
surrender agreement. "They talked on the radio with Haji Zaman,"
Zahir told me, "saying they were ready to surrender at two P.M. Commander
Zaman told the other commanders and the Americans about this. Then al-Qaeda
said, 'We need to have a meeting with our guys. Will you wait until eight A.M.
tomorrow?' So we agreed to this. Those al-Qaeda who were not ready to be killed
escaped that night. At eight A.M. the following day no one surrendered, so we
started attacking again. Those people who chose to stay were serious fighters."
When I returned
to Jalalabad. I spoke with Commander Muhammad Musa, who said he had led 600
Afghan soldiers on the Tora Bora front lines; with grudging admiration he
recalled the tenacity with which some of al-Qaeda's fighters resisted to the
end. "They fought very hard with us. When we captured them, they committed
suicide with grenades. 1 saw three of them do that myself. The very hardest
fighters were the Chechens." Musa praised the U.S. Air Force but was
dismissive of American forces on the ground. "The\ were not involved in
the fighting," he said. "There were six American soldiers with us,
U.S. Special Forces. They coordinated the air strikes. My personal view is if
they had blocked the way out to Pakistan, al-Qaeda would not have had a way to
escape. The Americans were my guests here, but they didn't know about
fighting."
And therein lies
the crux of the problem. With only a small number of American "boots on
the ground." the U.S. military chose to rely on the services of local
Afghan proxies of uncertain loyalty and competence—a blunder that allowed many
members of al-Qaeda, including Osama bin Laden himself, to slip away. The
blunder meant that, as a senior U.S. military official told me, "we don't
know for sure when bin Laden disappeared."
I got help with
this question from Lutfullah Mashal, a senior official in Afghanistan's
Ministry of the Interior. Mashal told me, based on information he gleaned from
radio intercepts, that "the Sheikh," as bin Laden is called by his
supporters, departed Tora Bora in the firsi week of the American bombing
campaign in that region, at the beginning of December 2001. According to
Mashal, this information has been confirmed by Abu Jaffar, a Saudi financier
who traveled to Afghanistan shortly before 9/11 with $3 million in charitable donations for al-Qaeda. Abu
Jaffar, a fat middle-aged man with an amputated leg who described himself as an
old friend of bin Laden's, told Mashal that once bin Laden had reached
Jalalabad, he arranged for safe passage out of Afghanistan with the help of
local tribal leaders.
Mashal told me
that there were three routes out of Tora Bora. The young and the energetic took
the difficult, snow-covered passes south toward Parachinar. Others took the
road to the southeastern Afghan city of Gardez. Older fighters headed east into
Pakistan. According to Mashal, bin Laden took the Parachinar route, aided by
members of the Pashtun Ghilzai tribe, who were paid handsomely in money and
rifles for their efforts. And so was lost the last, best chance to capture
al-Qaeda's leader, at a time when he was confined to an area of several dozen
square miles. Bin Laden may now be somewhere in Pakistan's North West Frontier
Province—and if so, the area involved is approximately 40,000 square miles, a
largely mountainous tract the size of Virginia.
Despite the
importance of finding al-Qaeda's leaders, by early 2002 the United States was
already shifting its attention and resources away from Afghanistan. (That shift
began early: according to Bob Woodward, in late November of 2001 President Bush
had asked the Pentagon to revamp its Iraq war plan, an 800-page document known
as Op Plan 1003.) For more than a year and a half the search for bin Laden was
given relatively low priority. On February 24, 2002, General Richard Myers,
the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said, "I wouldn't call [getting
bin Laden] a prime mission." Intelligence and military assets that might
have been directed at bin Laden were directed largely at Iraq. Only after the
capture of Saddam Hussein, in December of 2003, were those resources redirected
to the search for al-Qaeda's leaders. And according to CNN, not until this past
spring were U.S. satellites ordered to survey the Afghan-Pakistani border
region twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.
Although bin
Laden was able to give U.S. forces the slip at Tora Bora, he did not make it
through the battle without some personal cost. The Palestinian journalist Abdel
Bari Atwan, who spent two days interviewing bin Laden in 1996 and has proved a
consistently reliable source of information about al-Qaeda, told me that bin
Laden was wounded in the shoulder during the Tora Bora battle. In late December
of 2001 bin Laden released his last videotaped statement, which seems to
confirm the existence of this injury. On the videotape bin Laden appears
haggard, his beard streaked with white and the left side of his upper body
immobilized, which is unusual; he tends to gesture with both hands when he is
speaking. As if to underline his weakened physical state, bin Laden says on the
videotape, "I am a poor slave of God. If I live or die the war will
continue."
Since the
appearance of that videotape, bin Laden group's spokesman, and al-Zawahiri have
released a dozen or so audiotapes -- about one every three months since 9/11.
Paul Eedle, an Arabic-speaking British journalist who closely monitors
discussions on al-Qaeda Web sites, says the audiotapes are "enormously
important," in that "they provide sustenance to discussions of
al-Qaeda's planning." In a recent bin Laden tape, which surfaced in April,
he vowed revenge for the assassination of Hamas's founder Sheikh Ahmed Yassin,
who had been killed by Israeli security forces three weeks earlier.
Why is it so
hard to find Osama bin Laden? First, there is his obsession with security,
which began in earnest not after 9/11 but a decade ago. In 1994, while bin
Laden was living in Sudan, he was the target of a serious assassination
attempt, possibly mounted by the Saudis, when a group of gunmen raked his
Khartoum residence with machine-gun fire. After that attack bin Laden took
much greater care of his security—an effort that was coordinated by Ali
Mohamed, an Egyptian-American U.S. Army sergeant who during the late 1980s had
worked as an instructor at U.S. Special Forces headquarters, at Fort Bragg, in
North Carolina.
In 1997, when I
was a producer for CNN, I met with bin Laden in eastern Afghanistan to film his
first-ever television interview, and thus witnessed the extraordinary lengths
to which members of al-Qaeda went to protect their leader. My colleagues and I
were taken to bin Laden's hideout in the middle of the night; we were made to
change vehicles while blindfolded; we were aggressively searched and electronically
swept for tracking devices; and we had to pass through three successive groups
of guards armed with submachine guns and rocket-propelled grenades.
As has often
been observed, the leadership of al-Qaeda is highly secretive, running the
organization in a compartmentalized manner, which makes it hard to penetrate—
and also ensures that any operative who may be captured will know only a
portion of the group's secrets. An illustration of this is the limited number
of al-Qaeda leaders who knew of the 9/11 plot. In a videotape discovered by
U.S. forces in Afghanistan after the fall of the Taliban, bin Laden is seen
gesturing at Sulaiman Abu Ghaith, then the group's spokesman, and observing
that not even Abu Ghaith was clued in on 9/11. And it's worth recalling that
bin Laden and al-Zawahiri have spent their entire adult lives in organizations
that prize discipline and secrecy. Al-Zawahiri joined a jihadist cell in
Egypt when he was only fifteen; bin Laden became involved in clandestine
efforts against the Soviets in Afghanistan when he was in his early twenties.
The situation
is further complicated if bin Laden and al-Zawahiri are indeed hiding out in
the tribal areas of Pakistan on the Afghan border—"the most concentrated
al-Qaeda area on the planet," one American intelligence official told me.
The Pakistan-Afghan border stretches 1,500 miles—roughly the distance from
Washington, D.C., to Denver. It is lightly guarded and even undefined in some
places; clandestine travel in the region is therefore relatively easy. The two
Pakistani provinces that abut Afghanistan are Baluchistan, a vast,
inhospitable expanse of broiling deserts, and the North West Frontier Province,
a flinty, mountainous region punctuated by the fortresses of tribal chiefs.
Pash-tun tribes, who constitute one of the largest tribal groups in the world,
are a major presence in both provinces. They subscribe to Pashtunwali, the law
of the Pashtuns, which places an enormous premium on hospitality and on the giving
of refuge to anybody who seeks it—an obvious boon to fugitive members of al-Qaeda.
But there's a
problem with hiding somewhere along the Afghanistan-Pakistan frontier,
according to Rahimul-lah Yusufzai, a prominent Pashtun journalist.
"Everybody knows everybody there," he told me. "If someone comes
there who is from a different tribe, they stick out. It's difficult for Arabs
to hide in tribal areas." If bin Laden and al-Zawahiri are indeed in
Baluchistan or the North West Frontier, therefore, they may be hiding outside
the remote tribal belt, in a city such as Peshawar or Quetta, or in a town such
as Kohat or Dera Ismail Khan.
A further
possibility, which to date has received scant attention, is that bin Laden is
somewhere in the mountains of Pakistani Kashmir—an area that is off limits to
outsiders and home to numerous Kashmiri militant groups, some of which are
deeply intertwined with al-Qaeda. Harakat ul-Mujahideen (HUM), for instance,
shared training camps in Afghanistan with al-Qaeda in the late 1990s. An
offshoot of HUM, Jaish-e-Muham-mad, orchestrated the kidnapping-murder of the
American journalist Daniel Pearl in 2002, an operation run in conjunction with
al-Qaeda. U.S. officials believe that Jaish-e-Muhammad received funding from
bin Laden. The multiple relationships between those groups and al-Qaeda—what
one U.S. official in the region described to me as "overlapping networks
of nasty people"—make the groups obvious potential allies in the effort to
hide bin Laden and al-Zawahiri. According to Pakistani terrorism analysts,
several of the most militant Pakistani groups have recently gathered under an
umbrella organization called Brigade 313, named for the number of men who stood
with the Prophet Muhammad at the key battle of Badr, in the seventh century.
Also, the Kashmiri militant groups are genuinely popular in Pakistan. Until
January of 2002, when it was officially banned, Lashkar-e-Taiba maintained
2,200 offices around the country and attracted hundreds of thousands of
followers to its annual gatherings. Technically Lashkar no longer exists, but
it continues to operate, under a different name and with a lower profile, and
its leader, Hafiz Saeed, continues to address rallies in Pakistan.
Further
complicating the picture, the Pakistani government has long had a close
relationship with the Kashmiri groups because they share the goal of expelling
Indian forces from the Kashmir region. Bin Laden understands that Kashmir is
Pakistan's "blind spot," a senior U.S. military-intelligence official
told me. Musharraf's government has cracked down on Kashmiri militants since
9/11, but the intensity of the crackdown has ebbed and flowed. For instance,
Maulana Masood Azhar, the leader of the Jaish terror group, is not under house
arrest and, according to a U.S. official, has "good relations with
[Pakistan's] spooks." An official in Afghanistan's Foreign Ministry
concurs: "The leadership and brains of al-Qaeda are not in the tribal
areas of Pakistan. The question is, Who is in Kashmir?"
To the extent
that al-Qaeda has set up a new base of operations, it is neither in Afghanistan
nor along the Afghan-Pakistani border but in the anonymity of Pakistan's
teeming cities. As Lieutenant General Assad Durrani, the former head of
Pakistan's ISI, explained to me, "Cities offer the best refuge. In the
countryside information gets leaked out more easily." Since 9/11 none of
the key captured al-Qaeda operatives have been found in Pakistan's tribal
areas; instead they have been run to ground in the cities of Karachi, Peshawar,
Quetta, Faisalabad, Gujrat, and Rawalpindi. Those arrested include Ramzi bin
al-Shibh, who was critical to the planning of 9/11; Abu Zubaydah, who recruited
for al-Qaeda; Walid bin Attash, who played an important role in the attack on
the U.S.S. Cole in Yemen; Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani, who is one of the
conspirators in the 1998 bombing of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania;
Mustafa Ahmed al-Hawsawi, who bankrolled the 9/11 hijackers; and, most
important, Khalid Sheikh Muhammad, the military commander of al-Qaeda, who had
overall responsibility for planning the 9/11 attacks. Khalid Sheikh Muhammad
was arrested in Rawalpindi, which happens to be home to the headquarters of
Pakistan's army. One Western diplomat in the region asked me, "What the
fuck was this guy doing just down the road from GHQ [Army headquarters]?"
In particular
Karachi, a barely governable megacity of 14 million people, has emerged as a
locus ofjifiadist violence perpetrated by a toxic alliance of the
Kashmiri militant groups, Sunni sectarian fanatics who have launched a war on
Pakistan's minority Shia, and al-Qaeda itself. Since 9/11 Karachi has
experienced the bombing of a Sheraton hotel, which killed eleven French defense
contractors; two separate attacks on the U.S. consulate, one of which killed a
dozen Pakistanis; multiple bombings of Shell gas stations; and the murder of
Daniel Pearl. In May alone militants killed sixty-three people in the city.
Al-Qaeda's
active presence in Pakistan raises an important question: How reliable is the
Pakistani government in the effort to hunt down the terrorist group? U.S.
sources say that certain elements in the ISI may retain some
ideologicalsympathy for the Taliban. However, the consistent record of
high-profile al-Qaeda arrests in Pakistan indicates that the Pakistanis are
doing a reasonably diligent job. According to Major General Shaukat Sultan
Khan, the spokesman for the ISI, Pakistan has arrested 500 "foreign
fighters" since 9/11. Moreover, after the assassination attempts against
him Musharraf is personally determined to destroy al-Qaeda. Nevertheless, lower-level
members of the military were involved in the planning of those assassination
attempts: up to four members of the army and six members of the air force,
according to Khan.
The capture of
Khalid Sheikh Muhammad, in March of 2003, was the most important al-Qaeda
arrest since 9/11. However, according to Syed Mohsin Naqvi, a Pakistani
journalist who interviewed Muhammad while he was on the run in August of 2002,
Muhammad claimed that others were ready to replace him in the event he was
arrested. "We already have so many backups," he said, "that the
Americans can't imagine."
Muhammad's
arrest may have brought investigators tantalizingly close to bin Laden himself.
According to American sources, when Muhammad was arrested he may have been
tortured, a not uncommon technique of Pakistani law enforcement. That may
explain why he quickly volunteered that he had met with bin Laden in December
of 2002. Although Muhammad would not reveal where the meeting took place, it
was probably in Pakistan. After Muhammad's capture there was a brief flurry of
anticipation that bin Laden himself would soon be arrested, but now, according
to one U.S. official, bin Laden's "personal signature trail is cold."
A few months
after the apprehension of Muhammad, I talked with Gofer Black, the former head
of the CIA's Counterterrorist Center, who has something of a personal interest
in tracking down bin Laden. In his spacious office at the State Department,
where he is now serving as ambassador for counterterrorism, Black told me that
while he was the CIA station chief in Sudan, during the mid-1990s, al-Qaeda
tried to assassinate him. He handled the episode with admirable sangfroid,
deciding to consider the attempt an exercise to "see how they [al-Qaeda]
were conducting themselves." After 9/11, Black famously told President
Bush that his operatives would bring Bush bin Laden's head "in a box." (A member of Black's staff
told me that when his words came out in the press, Black said with a deadpan
look, "Well, we will need some DNA.")
Black began our
conversation by observing that the war on terrorism is far larger than the hunt
for bin Laden. "You can't stop crime just by catching Al Capone," he
said, going on to stress that he was not personally obsessed with getting bin Laden:
"This is no Ahab and Moby Dick kind of deal." Bin Laden "is on
the run, he is very defensive, spending a lot of time worrying about
security," Black continued. "How effective can you be?" To avoid
being captured bin Laden has to adopt a "hermit on the hilltop" approach,
Black said, which destroys his ability to run an effective terrorist
organization. On the other hand, if he remains "in business," he
opens himself to the possibility that his communications will be detected. I
suggested that bin Laden seems to be caught between a rock and a hard place,
and Black leaned toward me, smiling broadly, and said, "You got it."
This past
January, Lieutenant Colonel Brian Hilferty, the senior spokesman for U.S.
forces in Afghanistan, announced, "We're sure we're going to catch Osama
bin Laden and [the former Taliban leader] Mullah Omar this year." His
prediction came at about the same time that the U.S. and Pakistani governments
announced a plan to conduct more-intensive operations to find bin Laden. The
joint "hammer-and-anvil" strategy involved Pakistan's moving 70,000
soldiers into the tribal regions to flush out al-Qaeda forces, which would
then, at least theoretically, flee across the border into the arms of U.S.
forces waiting for them on the Afghan side. But the plan was trumpeted at every
turn—and as a result, any al-Qaeda member with an ounce of common sense very
probably left the tribal areas earlier this year. "Al-Qaeda are not so
foolish that they would be sitting waiting there for a year for the Pakistan
army," Syed Mohsin Naqvi told me.
In late July, I
met with Lieutenant General David Barno, the commander of U.S. forces in
Afghanistan, at a Pakistani air-force base near Islamabad, after Barno had
completed one of his regular meetings with his Pakistani counterparts to
coordinate efforts along the Afghan-Pakistani border. Of bin Laden and
al-Zawahiri, Barno said, "Their location remains a mystery." But he
added, "More resources are on that today." He then described an
important problem confronting the United States in Afghanistan—the $2.3 billion
heroin trade. Barno said that drug money accounts for more than 40 percent of
the Afghan economy—a figure that could rise above 50 percent next year. The
possibility that Afghanistan could emerge as a Colombia-style narcostate,
dominated by competing warlords and drug cartels, is what Afghanistan's Foreign
Minister, Abdullah Abdullah, described to me as "the biggest danger and
threat to stability."
Iran is another
area of concern. Since early last year a number of important al-Qaeda
operatives have shown up in Iran, a country that, according to one U.S.
intelligence official, some in al-Qaeda envisaged as "an administrative
hub" for the group. U.S. officials told me that Saif al-Adel, the No. 3
man in al-Qaeda's hierarchy; Sulaiman Abu Ghaith, the group's spokesman;
Muhammad al-Masri, an important al-Qaeda trainer; and Abu al-Khayr, one of
al-Zawahiri's deputies, have all been apprehended by the Iranian authorities.
What the Iranians plan to do with their prisoners is something of a mystery.
"We wish we could predict how this is going to turn out," one U.S.
official says.
Given that
al-Qaeda is highly secretive, compartmentalized, and security conscious, what
strategies might work to flush out bin Laden? Will the $50 million bounty on
his head work? In the past cash rewards have been useful in bringing terrorists
to justice. Mir Aimal Kansi, a Pakistani who killed two CIA employees outside
the Agency's headquarters in Virginia in 1993, was apprehended in part because
of the $2 million reward offered. A $25 million reward played a role in the
apprehension of Khalid Sheikh Muhammad. However, these men did not inspire the
spiritual awe that Osama bin Laden does. That bin Laden's inner circle would
turn him over for money is unthinkable. Bin Laden has had a
multi-million-dollar bounty on his head since as far back as 1999, but there
have been no takers.
In Washington I
met one of the FBI's most effective investigators, Special Agent Brad Garrett,
who ran Mir Aimal Kansi to ground in Pakistan in 1997. I asked Garrett, a
former Marine who habitually dresses entirely in black, what methods had worked
to find Kansi, and how they might be applicable in the hunt for bin Laden.
"The key is developing sources," Garrett said. "You have to sort
out what is BS from what is the truth, and develop multiple sources to see what
is real. You hope to get an associate to give up real-time information about
the fugitive. The intelligence is very perishable, so another factor is one's
ability to react to it in a timely fashion."
Garrett
encountered many dry holes in his four-year hunt for Kansi, finally tracking
him down in the dusty backwater of Dera Ghazi Khan, in central Pakistan, which
"felt like it was out of The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly? Garrett
explained that although Kansi was helped by a loose network of people who
"respected" him for his attack outside CIA headquarters, he did not
have an organization he could rely on, as bin Laden does. In short, Kansi was
more vulnerable to detection than the terrorist mastermind, because he was
essentially a lone wolf.
It's possible,
but not likely, that signal intelligence, known as "sigint," could be
bin Laden's undoing. Sigint was critical in the case of the Colombian drug
kingpin Pablo Escobar, the subject of a huge manhunt by the Colombian police in
his native city of Medellin in 1993.
The operation
used CIA eavesdropping and direction-finding technology. When Escobar made a
cell-phone call to his son thai lasted lunger than a few minutes. Colombian
forces swarmed his neighborhood and shot him dead. But bin Laden is savvier
than Escobar; a U.S. official told me that he "has quit any kind of device
that can be listened to." That includes satellite phones, cell phones, and
handheld radios. When communication is absolutely necessary, he relies on
couriers.
Information
obtained from al-Qaeda detainees hat-proved important in the hunt for the
group's leaders, as have the cell-phone numbers, documents, and computers
recovered when al-Qaeda members are captured. U.S. intelligence services have
apparently failed, however, to insert agents in al-Qaeda's inner circle—the
only sure-fire way lo gel real-time intelligence about bin Laden's whereabouts.
Colonel Patrick I.a rig, a Uncut Arabic-speaker who ran Middle Eastern
"humint" (human intelligence) for the Defense Intelligence Agency in
the early 1990s, told me that the lack of humint remains a problem.
"Everybody talks about effective humint," he said, "but nothing
is happening. The people who do this kind of work are gifted eccentrics, who
the bureaucrats don't like, or they are the criminal types, who the lawyers
don't like. If only we were the ruthless bastards everyone thinks we are."
According to the Pakistani terrorism analyst Amir Mir. however, the past year
or so has produced one promising Imniiut development: FBI officials have
created what is known as the Spider Group—an elite team of retired Pakistani
army and intelligence officers who are gathering information about the Taliban
and al-Qaeda.
No matter how
many resources are directed at the hunt for bin Laden, it is complicated by
what one could call "the problem of finding one person." Criminals
often stay on the FBI's Ten Most Wanted list for years. Eric Rudolph, the
alleged bomber of Atlanta's Centennial Park during the 19% Olympics, eluded the
police during the most intense manhunt in FBI history and was caught only last
year, in the small town of Murphy, North Carolina, when an alert rookie cop
spotted him and took him in for questioning.
The problem of
finding one person becomes more pronounced once the hunt is extended overseas,
of course. For almost a decade the United States and its NATO allies have
searched the former Yugoslavia for Radovan Kanidzicand Ratko Mladic, both alleged
to have played a key role in the genocide of Bosnian Muslims during the early
1990s. "The last time we got a sniff of Karadzic," a U.S. military
official told me, "was in 1997." During Operation Restore Hope, a
1993 humanitarian mission to feed starving; Somalis, the United States had some
20,000 soldiers stationed in Mogadishu, the Somali capital, hunting for
Muhammad Atdeed, a warlord who was fomenting factional strife in Somalia.
Aideed was never captured.
Of course, the
capture of Saddam Hussein is an example of a successful U.S. operation against a
high-value target. However, the search for Saddam played out against a d if
lei-cut backdrop: the United States has some 140,000 soldiers in Iraq; it has
only 20,000 in Afghanistan, a much larger country. And in Pakistan, where bin Laden
is most probably hiding, the United States has only a smattering of CIA ;md FBI
officials hunting for members of al-Qaeda, and must rely oil the Pakistani army
for search operations. Moreover, once Saddam's reign of fc-ar col lapsed, there
were relatively few Saddam loyalists; in contrast, "love" is not too
strong a word for the feelings of ihos-e who surround bin Laden. The former
senior U.S. counter terrorism official Roger Cressey told me that an al-Qaeda
operative betraying bin Laden would be like "a Catholic giving up the
Pope."
If cash rewards,
electronic intercepts, and moles within al-Qaeda are unlikely to yield leads in
the search for bin Laden, then what might work, other than dumb luck? An
obvious vulnerability is the audiotapes that bin Laden and al-Zawahiri
periodically release to media outlets; theoretically, the custody chain of
these tapes could be traced back to al-Qaeda's leaders. Another possible
vulnerability is bin Laden's family. He is the only son of his Syrian mot her,
to whom he is extremely close and who visited Afghanistan in early 2001 to
attend the wedding of one of her grandsons. She apparently splits her time
between Saudi Arabia and the resort town of Latakia, Syria, and is presumably
of considerable interest to investigative agencies.
Bin Laden also
has a family of four wives and some twenty children, who cannot all have simply
vanished into thin air. Although some of his children are living openly in
Saudi Arabia, others are quite possibly somewhere in Afghanistan, probably
under (he protection of key Taliban commanders close to bin Laden. The person
protecting bin Laden's family may be Jalaluddin Haqqani, a Ibrmidable Taliban
commander who continues to attack American forces in eastern Afghanistan.
Haqqani may be a key to finding bin Laden.
One of the most
effective Afghan commanders against the Soviets, Haqqani was close to the Arab
militants who were drawn to the Afghan jihad. He is married to an Arab,
speaks fluent Arabic, and received substantial funding from sources in the Gulf
during the early 1980s, which he used to set up an impressive base in the Khost
area of eastern Afghanistan. After 9/11 Haqqani was tapped to become the
Taliban's military commander. Lntf'ullali Mashal. of the Afghan Interior
Ministry, told me that it was Haqqani who saved bin Laden after the fall of the
Taliban, affording him refuge in Khost not long after the terrorist leader had slipped
out of Tora Bora. According to Mashal, Haqqani is now based in Pakistan, in the
wild tribal area of Waziristan, traveling back and forth more or less at will.
According to Afghan and American officials, he remains an important point of
contact for al-Qaeda's leaders.
Another veteran
commander of the Afghan war against the Soviets who is close to bin Laden and therefore
merits further investigation is Younis Khalis. When bin Laden settled in
Jalalabad, in May of 1996, he was welcomed not by the Taliban, who as yet did
not control Jalalabad, but by Khalis. Khalis has repeatedly declared a jihad
against U.S. forces in Afghanistan, most recently this past summer.
Locating bin Laden's
old friend Mullah Omar might of course also yield clues to the al-Qaeda
leader's whereabouts—but according to Rahimullah Yusufzai, the prominent
Paslitun journalist, who has interviewed Mullah Omar on several occasions since
the mid-1990s, the number of people who would know where Omar can be found is tiny,
and is confined to the Taliban's tup leadership. "Eight or nine people would
know," he told me.
Robert Raer, a
former CTA operative based in the Middle East, argues thai only a proactive
approach to finding bin Laden will work. "It's never easy to find a single
person," he told me, "but if you are operating on the ground, you go
for the assassination and yon find a group of people who will do this and
benefit." The problem is, who would be foolhardy enough to take on the
risky job of assassinating al-Qaoda"s leaders?
Bounty limners
might. While I was staying in Kabul this summer, the bizarre tale of Jonathan
"Jack" Idema, a former Green Beret, came to light- According to
Afghan officials, Idema, who has a rich history of fraud, misrepresentation,
and litigiousness in (he United States, set up a private prison in the capital
in an effort to run his own investigation into al-Qaeda. He developed u
reputation in Kabul as a Special Forces-wannabe who drove around in an SUV,
weapon at the ready, and a blowhard who hung out at the Mustafa Hotel, a seedy
joint where like-minded war junkies came to swap tall tales over endless beers.
Idema and two
American sidekicks. Brent Bennett and a cameraman named Edward Caraballo,
rented a house near the Intercontinental Hotel. They told neighbors that they
were running a company. Universal Exports, that dealt in Afghan rugs. After
receiving multiple complaints of unexplained disappearances of Kabul
residents, the Afghan authorities raided the house, where they found eight prisoners,
some hanging by their feet from the ceiling. Idema had made his
"arrests" based largely on people's appearance, particularly
targeting men with long beards—hardly an uncommon trait in Kabul. According to
Afghan officials. Idema and his colleagues interrogated and beat some of their
prisoners to get them to confess they were members of al-Qaeda. Idema has said
in his defense that he was acting with the knowledge of the Pentagon and of
Afghan officials-claims that have been firmly denied by both parties.
Osama bin Laden
may eventually be apprehended, or he may eventually be killed. A U.S.
intelligence official told me that little thought has been given in
Washington to what happens next. Which outcome is more desirable? What are the
implications of either of those outcomes? If bin Laden is captured alive, for
instance, where should he be put on trial? A case could be made that he be
tried by an international tribunal, similar to those set up for crimes against
humanity in the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda. And a useful precedent exists for
handling a captured bin Laden: the pictures beamed around the world after
Saddam Hussein's capture, of Saddam submitting to a doctor's probings, did more
than anything else to puncture the Iraqi dictator's mystique. Similar pictures
would do much to deflate bin Laden's mythic persona.
Of course, on
several occasions bin Laden has said that he's prepared to die in his holy
war—a statement that should be taken at face value, Khalid Khawaja, the former
Pakistani military-intelligence official who has known bin Laden for almost two
decades, told me, "He will never be captured. He's not Saddam Hussein.
He's Osama. Osama loves death." In the short term bin Laden's death would
probably trigger violent anti-American attacks around the globe. In the medium
term it would be a serious blow to al-Qaeda, which depends to a critical degree
on the charisma of its leader. But in the long term bin Laden's "martyrdom"
would most likely give an enormous boost to the power of his ideas. Sayyid
Qutb, generally regarded as the Lenin of the jihadist movement, was a
relatively obscure writer before the Egyptian government executed him, in 1966.
After his death his writings, which called for offensive holy wars against the
enemies of Islam, beramt.' enormously influential. The same thing would happen
after bin Laden's death, but to an infinitely greater degree.