Manhunt: The Ten-Year Search for Bin Laden--From 9/11 to Abbottabad (10 page)

The al-Qaeda operatives captured in Pakistan’s cities in the first years after 9/11 included Abu Zubaydah, who provided logistical support for al-Qaeda; Walid bin Attash, who played a role in the attack on the USS
Cole
in Yemen; Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani, one of the conspirators in the 1998 bombings of the U.S. embassies in Africa;
and Abu Faraj al-Libi, al-Qaeda’s number three, who was nabbed by police officers disguised in burqas. All told, Pakistan
handed over 369 suspected militants to the United States in the five years after the attacks on New York and Washington, for which the Pakistani government earned bounties of millions of dollars.

The remaining leaders of al-Qaeda faced an existential decision: remain in Pakistan’s cities, where they could easily stay in touch with their colleagues in the country and with other militants around the world, or retreat to the safe haven of Pakistan’s tribal areas, where communicating with the outside world was quite difficult, but the reach of the CIA and the Pakistani intelligence services was minimal to nonexistent.

Al-Qaeda’s leaders now chose survival over effective communications.

I
N THE SPRING OF
2003, as the Iraq War was getting under way, a group of British citizens traveled to Pakistan determined to train with al-Qaeda, intending to fight U.S. and other NATO forces in Afghanistan.
Omar Khyam, the cricket-mad son of Pakistani immigrants, was the ringleader. At an al-Qaeda camp on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, the men learned how to build fertilizer-based bombs. During their training, Abdul Hadi al-Iraqi, one of bin Laden’s top lieutenants, sent word to the group that because al-Qaeda already “
had enough people … if they really wanted to do something they could go back [to the United Kingdom] and do something there.” Toward the end of Khyam’s stay in Pakistan, an al-Qaeda operative met him and instructed him to carry out “multiple bombings” either “simultaneously” or “one after the other on the same day” in the United Kingdom.

In the fall, Khyam and most of his group returned to the United Kingdom, where they purchased thirteen hundred pounds, more than half a ton, of the fertilizer ammonium nitrate—almost the quantity used to demolish the Federal Building in Oklahoma City
in 1995—and hid it in a West London storage locker. The fertilizer plotters considered blowing up a variety of possible targets, including a shopping center, trains, synagogues, and “slags” (loose women) dancing at the well-known London nightclub the Ministry of Sound. In February 2004, Khyam contacted an al-Qaeda operative in Pakistan to check the precise bomb-making instructions he had learned in the camps the previous year. By then a suspicious employee at the storage facility had tipped off police, and British authorities had swapped out the fertilizer for a similar
inert material. Khyam was arrested on March 30, 2004, as he was
enjoying his honeymoon at a Holiday Inn in Sussex.

Khyam was the first example of a worrisome nexus that developed in the years after 9/11 between British militants and al-Qaeda’s leaders based in Pakistan’s tribal regions. Al-Qaeda had greater success with the next group of British plotters it trained in bomb making in Pakistan. They were four men, all British citizens, three of them of Pakistani descent. Mohamed Khan, the ringleader, linked up with al-Qaeda when he took time off from his teaching job for a
three-month visit to Pakistan in November 2004. While the soft-spoken British schoolteacher was there, al-Qaeda leader Abdul Hadi al-Iraqi
tasked him with launching an attack in the United Kingdom. On July 7, 2005, the four men detonated bombs on the London Underground and on a bus, killing fifty-two commuters and themselves. It was the deadliest terrorist attack in British history.

Two months after the London bombings, a videotape of Khan appeared on Al Jazeera, branded with the Arabic logo of al-Qaeda’s Pakistan-based media arm, As Sahab (“the Clouds”). On the tape, Khan described Osama bin Laden and his deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, as “
today’s heroes,” and
Zawahiri himself then made an appearance, explaining that the London bombings were revenge for Britain’s participation in the war in Iraq, and came as a result of
its ignoring bin Laden’s earlier offer of a “truce.” Zawahiri asked, “Didn’t the lion of Islam the Mujahid, the sheikh Osama bin Laden, offer you a truce?… Look what your arrogance has produced.”

The London attacks underlined the fact that in Pakistan’s tribal areas, al-Qaeda had begun remaking the kind of base it had once enjoyed in Afghanistan under the Taliban, albeit on a much smaller scale. From this new base, al-Qaeda began training Westerners, in particular second-generation British Pakistanis, for attacks in the West. While the London bombings were not remotely on the scale of the 9/11 attacks, they showed the kind of planning, and the ability to hit targets far from its home base, seen in pre-9/11 al-Qaeda attacks, such as the one mounted on the USS
Cole
in Yemen in 2000.

Morale among al-Qaeda militants must also have been buoyed by the CIA’s failed drone strike targeting Zawahiri. On January 13, 2006, six months after the London attacks, believing it had Zawahiri in its sights, the CIA launched a drone strike aimed at a group of men sitting down to dinner in the village of Damadola, near the Afghanistan-Pakistan border.
The strike killed only local villagers, and two weeks later Zawahiri released a videotape celebrating the fact that he was alive and making
disparaging comments about President Bush.

In the summer of 2006 al-Qaeda directed an effort to blow up several passenger jets flying to the United States and Canada from the United Kingdom, recruiting half a dozen British citizens for the job. The ringleader of the plot, twenty-five-year-old Londoner Ahmed Abdullah Ali, made a “martyrdom” video in which he said, “
Sheikh Osama warned you many times to leave our lands or you will be destroyed. Now the time has come for you to be destroyed.” Luckily, the plot was discovered by British police, and the conspirators were arrested. Michael Chertoff, the cabinet official in charge of the recently created U.S. Department of Homeland Security, said
that if the “planes plot” had succeeded, it “
would have rivaled 9/11 in terms of the number of deaths and impact on the international economy.”

The regrouping of al-Qaeda in Pakistan’s tribal areas was the cause of increasing alarm at the CIA and in the Bush administration. This alarm was compounded by the public release of an increased number of tapes featuring bin Laden, beginning in early 2006. Through them, “the Sheikh” was asserting greater strategic control over jihadist militants around the world. In 2007 he
called for attacks on the Pakistani state; Pakistan had
more than fifty suicide attacks that year. And when the
Saudi government surveyed about seven hundred extremists in its custody—men who had been arrested in the half decade after 9/11—participants cited al-Qaeda’s leader as their most important role model.

As al-Qaeda resurged, the CIA was no longer capturing al-Qaeda operatives in Pakistani cities and was also having little success in picking off al-Qaeda’s leaders with drone strikes in Pakistan’s tribal areas. In 2005 the CIA had given President Bush a
secret PowerPoint briefing on the hunt for bin Laden. Bush was surprised by the small number of CIA case officers posted to the Afghanistan-Pakistan region. “
Is that all there are?” he asked. In June 2005, CIA director Porter Goss said publicly that he had an “
excellent idea” where bin Laden was. In fact, no one at the Agency had a clue where he was, though most assumed that he was in the Pakistani tribal region. Art Keller was one of a handful of CIA officers posted in early 2006 in the seven Pakistani tribal areas where al-Qaeda was concentrated. “
A great deal of the resources has gone to Iraq. I don’t think it’s appreciated that the CIA is not really a very large organization in terms of field personnel,” Keller said.

The intense focus on Iraq at the CIA had begun in the summer
of 2002, when Robert Grenier, the station chief in Islamabad who had tried to negotiate the handover of bin Laden by the Taliban, was summoned back to Washington to begin work at a newly created job at the Agency, that of “Iraq mission manager.” Grenier says the resources devoted to Iraq were a “
big surge,” draining away from Pakistan and Afghanistan the best Agency counterterrorism specialists, case officers, and targeting personnel. For years Iraq also consumed the bulk of President Bush and his national security team’s focus and effort. Australian counterinsurgency guru David Kilcullen—who served in Iraq as General David Petraeus’s advisor and then worked at the State Department advising Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice—says that, until mid-2007, “
they were just all Iraq, all the time.”

Keller says that the few CIA officers like him who were working in the tribal areas were constrained by the fact that they lived on a Pakistani military base and had little freedom of movement. “
I couldn’t go out myself—blond-haired, blue-eyed me. I could do it in Austria, but not in Pakistan.” As a result of the mostly indifferent intelligence gathered on the ground in Pakistan’s tribal areas during 2006 and 2007, there were a total of six CIA drone strikes there, none of which killed anyone significant in al-Qaeda. CIA director Michael Hayden complained to the White House, “
We are zero for ’07,” and asked for permission to conduct a more aggressive drone program.

Steve Kappes, the deputy director of the CIA, and Michael Leiter, the head of the National Counterterrorism Center, formed a task force in the summer of 2008 that brought together a
small, “compartmented,” or highly secret, group of key intelligence officials and experts from outside the intelligence community to think of innovative ways to find “Number One” and “Number Two.” The
plan involved greatly increasing the number of drones flying over the tribal areas, putting more CIA case officers on the ground there, and ramping up cross-border raids by Special Operations Forces.

Bush ordered the CIA to expand its attacks with Predator and Reaper drones, and the U.S. government
stopped seeking Pakistani officials’ “concurrence” or alerting them when strikes were imminent. As a result, the time taken to identify and shoot at a target dropped
from many hours to forty-five minutes. The Predator and Reaper drones were controlled by the CIA and flown out of bases in Afghanistan and Pakistan, but were operated by “pilots” stationed at Creech Air Force Base in Nevada. After a day’s work shooting at targets on the other side of the world, the pilots went home to their families. More than two dozen feet in length, the drones lingered over the tribal areas looking for targets and were equipped to drop
Hellfire missiles or JDAM (joint direct attack munition) bombs.

In the Pakistani tribal region of South Waziristan on July 28, 2008, a U.S. drone
killed Abu Khabab al-Masri, who ran al-Qaeda’s crude chemical weapons program, along with two other militants. The assassination of Abu Khabab marked the beginning of a vastly ramped-up program to take out al-Qaeda’s leaders using drones in the waning months of the Bush administration, likely a legacy-building effort to dismantle the entire al-Qaeda leadership. Between July 2008 and the time he left office, President Bush authorized thirty Predator and Reaper strikes on Pakistani territory, compared with the six strikes the CIA launched during the first half of the year,
a fivefold increase.

Other leading figures in al-Qaeda
killed in the drone strikes in the final six months of Bush’s second term included Abu Haris, al-Qaeda’s chief in Pakistan; Khalid Habib, Abu Zubair al-Masri, Abu Wafa al-Saudi, and Abdullah Azzam al-Saudi, all senior members of the group; Abu Jihad al-Masri, al-Qaeda’s propaganda chief; and
Usama al-Kini and Sheikh Ahmed Salim Swedan, who had played key roles in planning the 1998 bombings of the two American embassies in Africa. In half a year the drone attacks had killed half of the leadership of al-Qaeda in the tribal areas and had made the “number three” job in al-Qaeda one of the most dangerous in the world. But none of these drone strikes targeted bin Laden, who had simply vanished. “
The whole time along, President Bush would ideally have loved to have been able to have gotten bin Laden,” says Ari Fleischer, Bush’s press secretary.

At the same time that he gave the green light to the accelerated drone attacks, Bush also authorized Special Operations Forces to carry out
ground assaults in the tribal regions without the advance permission of the Pakistani government. On September 3, 2008, a team of Navy SEALs based in Afghanistan crossed the Pakistani border into South Waziristan to
attack a compound housing militants in the village of Angoor Adda. Twenty of the occupants were killed, but many of them turned out to be women and children. The Pakistani press picked up on the attack, which then sparked vehement objections from Pakistani officials, who protested that it violated their national sovereignty. Pakistan’s chief of army staff, General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, bluntly said that Pakistan’s “
territorial integrity … will be defended at all costs,” suggesting that any future insertion of American soldiers into Pakistan would be met by force. The cross-border missions by Special Operations ceased, but the drone attacks increased in intensity.

C
IA HEADQUARTERS
in Langley, Virginia, is a grouping of modern buildings with the air of an upscale office park sprawling over acres of quiet woodland, twenty minutes’ drive from downtown Washington, D.C. Casual visits are not encouraged. To reach the main building, you negotiate first the visitors’ center—where machines constantly sniff the air for chemical and biological toxins and guards bristling with automatic weapons direct traffic—then walk for fifteen minutes down a narrow road screened off from the surrounding woods by high fencing topped with barbed wire, then pass the CIA’s own dedicated water tower and electrical plant. At the end of the road is a seven-story modernist glass-and-concrete building, the main headquarters, erected in the 1950s, its lobby paved with slabs of white marble. Emblazoned in the marble floor is the great seal of the Central Intelligence Agency, and
engraved on a wall are words from the Gospel According to John: “And ye shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free.”