Manhunt: The Ten-Year Search for Bin Laden--From 9/11 to Abbottabad (12 page)

Bin Laden’s trackers minutely examined the audio- and videotapes bin Laden occasionally released, for clues to his health, state of mind, and possible location. On October 29, 2004, bin Laden appeared in his first videotaped address in three years. On the tape, he looked like he had recovered completely from his near-death experience at the Battle of Tora Bora, delivering his “
Message to the American People” while dressed in beige and gold robes. He even appeared to be reading from some kind of teleprompter. Addressing himself to American voters five days before they went to the polls in the close race between President Bush and Democratic challenger John Kerry, bin Laden said that it didn’t matter whom Americans voted for—that they had to change U.S. foreign policy in the Muslim world if they wanted to avoid further attacks by al-Qaeda.

This elder-statesman-of-jihad pose was quite aggravating for President Bush and his national security team, recalls Bush’s top counterterrorism advisor, Fran Townsend, a feisty former federal prosecutor from New York whose bold designer clothes and Christian Louboutin shoes stood out in the sea of gray flannel at the White House. Townsend remembers, “
I can still see the picture of bin Laden on the screen looking for all the world like a statesman.
He was standing at a podium. It was maddening to see him present himself as though he was some head of state and legitimate representative of an ideology.”

Frustratingly, such tapes never gave away much of anything about bin Laden’s location. On the more than thirty tapes that bin Laden released after 9/11, no one was ever heard whispering in the background something helpful like “Sure is hot here in Waziristan.” Speaking of the bin Laden trackers, Scheuer recalls, “
When there were videos, the highest priority was the background. They didn’t give a shit about what he was talking about. If he was walking around, they would get geologists in and see if those rocks were particular to one place in Afghanistan.” When a bird could be heard chirping on one tape, a German ornithologist was called in to analyze the chirps.
If plants were visible, they, too, were analyzed to see if they were unique to a particular place. None of this forensic work on the tapes ever yielded a useful lead.

At the Pentagon, officials were similarly frustrated. On the second anniversary of 9/11, al-Qaeda released a statement celebrating the attacks, along with footage of a gaunt bin Laden walking with the help of a wooden staff through a steep mountainous region. Analysts thought that the area looked similar to the province of Kunar in the northeast of Afghanistan, but analysis of the vegetation visible on the tape was inconclusive.

As at the CIA, Pentagon
intelligence officials also had to chase down every bin Laden lead no matter how implausible. One recalls, “Every time a news report said he’s in Thailand, or he’s in this location, we literally had to set up a little special project we called ‘Where’s Waldo?’ and we did a comprehensive study around the globe of all of the funky, insane mentions of where we saw a tall Arab-looking guy with a beard.”

The statements on the various tapes made by bin Laden while he
was on the run did yield some clues about his possible living conditions. In 2004 he referred to a sequence in
Fahrenheit 9/11
, a film by the American documentarian Michael Moore, and three years later he
recommended the works of Noam Chomsky, the leftist author. The fact that bin Laden was watching DVDs and reading books tended to rule out the notion that he was stuck in a remote cave. Also, in his appearances on videotape his clothes were well pressed and the productions were well lit. Sude, who was often tasked to write analyses of these tapes, remembers the debates they would spark at the Agency: “
We didn’t necessarily think anybody would be in a cave. But we went back and forth: ‘Did they have a curtain up? Are they covering up a cave wall?’ ”

Officials turned to the study of a number of successful manhunts to see if there were any lessons to be learned. They examined how the Israelis had managed after many years to track down Adolf Eichmann, who had helped send millions of Jews to their deaths in the concentration camps during World War II. After the war, Eichmann escaped Germany for Argentina, where he lived with his family in some comfort in Buenos Aires, under an alias, for a decade and a half. It was Eichmann’s son who gave the game away when he
bragged to his girlfriend’s father about his father’s Nazi past. The girlfriend’s father, who was half-Jewish, contacted a judge in Germany who had prosecuted former Nazis. Mossad, the Israeli intelligence service, somehow got wind of this and sent operatives to Buenos Aires, where they kidnapped Eichmann and bundled him onto a flight for Israel, where he would stand trial. The lesson for the manhunters at the CIA was that family members could provide inadvertent and important clues to the location of a target.

Another manhunt the CIA examined was
the operation to find Pablo Escobar, the brutal Colombian drug lord who dominated the lucrative cocaine trade in the United States during the 1980s,
murdering and kidnapping many of Colombia’s top politicians and journalists. Unlike bin Laden, Escobar was known to live in one particular place: his hometown of Medellin, in whose sprawling slums the tubby drug lord with penchants for having sex with teenage girls and torturing his enemies to death was something of a folk hero. Yet even though elite Colombian police units working with CIA officials and American Special Operations Forces knew that Escobar was hiding somewhere in Medellin, it still took two years to track him down, and that was with plenty of help from Escobar’s rivals, the Cali cartel. Escobar moved around town in nondescript taxis, and when he talked to his associates on a radio-phone, he constantly changed frequencies, which made his location hard to pinpoint.

What finally gave him away was his love for his son. Escobar was careful to speak only briefly on his phone, knowing the prowess of the Americans in signals intelligence, but one day he spoke for several minutes to his sixteen-year-old son, Juan Pablo, and that was long enough for direction-finding technology provided by the CIA to Colombian police units to zero in on the street where he was. The police swarmed Escobar’s hiding place and shot him dead.

The two lessons of the Escobar takedown were that love of family can get you caught and that you should never talk on the phone. But as General Mike Hayden, the head of the CIA during much of George W. Bush’s second term, observed, “
You can throw all your phones away, but you pay a price in speed, you pay a price in agility. So, we find, they don’t throw their phones away. They try to be careful, but they don’t throw them away.” The problem was that bin Laden hadn’t talked on a phone since even before 9/11. According to his London-based
Saudi media advisor, Khaled al-Fawwaz, bin Laden started avoiding any electronic communications as early as 1997, understanding that they could be intercepted. Also, al-Qaeda’s leaders had closely followed the April 1996 assassination
of
Dzhokhar Dudayev, the Chechen prime minister, who was killed by a Russian missile that homed in on the signal emitted by his cell phone. At the time, Chechnya was a major focus of al-Qaeda’s efforts to foment global jihad.

Closer to home, counterterrorism officials looked at the case of Eric Rudolph, who had bombed a park in downtown Atlanta thick with tourists in town for the 1996 Olympics. The nail bomb killed a woman, and Rudolph later went on to firebomb abortion clinics and gay nightclubs. He was soon the subject of one of the most intensive manhunts in FBI history, but for years he gave his pursuers the slip, hiding in the backwoods and mountains of North Carolina, near where he had grown up. Five years passed, and Rudolph’s trail went very cold. The fugitive began taking more chances, descending from his hiding places in the Appalachians to score fast food at outlets such as Taco Bell. One day a
rookie cop saw a vagrant Dumpster-diving behind a Piggly Wiggly grocery store and arrested him. A fellow deputy thought the suspect looked like Rudolph, so they ran the suspect’s prints and realized they had their man. The lesson here was that as fugitives get comfortable over time, some start taking more risks, and then pursuers might just catch a lucky break. But relying on a lucky break wasn’t much of a strategy in bin Laden’s case.

The manhunt whose features most resembled the hunt for “UBL,” as bin Laden was universally known in the U.S. government, was the one that struck closest to home for the CIA. It began with the murder of two Agency employees driving into the main entrance of the CIA’s Virginia headquarters on the morning of January 25, 1993. Mir Aimal Kansi, a Pakistani from a prominent family in Quetta, a city near the Afghan border, calmly shot Lansing Bennett, sixty-six, and Frank Darling, twenty-eight, with an AK-47 as he strolled through rush-hour traffic that was backed up waiting to
get into the CIA main gate. No one gave chase, and the next day the shooter was
on a flight back home to Pakistan.

It took more than four years to find Kansi, who, after the CIA murders, was lionized in the border regions of Afghanistan and Pakistan, where he hid out before being captured. The man who tracked him was FBI special agent Brad Garrett, a former marine who
habitually dressed from head to toe entirely in black, accessorized with black shades. The soft-spoken agent, a workaholic who typically got home to his crash pad in Washington at 11:00 p.m. and was back in the gym by 6:00 a.m., had a long string of fugitive scalps under his belt and a PhD in criminology. He was exactly the sort of person you wouldn’t want on your tail.

Garrett spent four years
chasing the elusive Kansi around the Afghan-Pakistani border region before Kansi made a serious mistake, which was to leave the relative safety of Taliban-controlled Afghanistan and travel to central Pakistan. From a country where there was no American presence to speak of at the time, he entered one where Garrett had developed a good network of sources over the years, many of them informants for the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, which was active in Pakistan because of the large role the country played in the heroin trade. Eventually Garrett found some tribal sources who were meeting with Kansi. Motivated at least in part by the sizable reward ($2 million) for anyone willing to give up Kansi, the sources supplied Garrett with a glass Kansi had drunk from, and FBI technicians were able to lift a fingerprint from the glass and got a match with Kansi’s prints. Bingo! Garrett finally tracked Kansi down to the city of Dera Ghazi Khan, in central Pakistan, where he was staying in a two-dollar-a-night hotel, and arrested him there in the middle of a sweltering night in mid-June 1997.

For two years after 9/11 no one bothered to talk to Garrett about his role in the Kansi takedown. Finally, in 2003, he got a call from the CIA asking him to come out to Langley to brief officials on the Kansi hunt. Garrett’s central advice was blunt:
You can’t trust the Pakistanis. “Every time we had a conversation with the Pakistanis the information just immediately leaked,” he told them. “I remember we had a conversation with them one day and the next day in the
Dawn
newspaper it talked about the agents that had talked to this particular guy and what flight they were going to fly to Lahore the next day to go interview somebody else.” Garrett said it was fine to work with the Pakistanis if they simply provided the muscle for the arrest, but otherwise going after al-Qaeda’s leaders had to be a unilateral American operation. And he emphasized that the
sizable cash reward had really helped in the Kansi case.

The bottom line for those tracking bin Laden, after they had “scrubbed” all the intelligence they had on him and had examined the lessons of other manhunts: there wasn’t much to go on. Working with Pakistani officials on a bin Laden takedown could blow the whole operation, so that eliminated a large potential source of help. There was
no signals intelligence, or SIGINT, from bin Laden’s phones, so that eliminated the vast resources of America’s technical spying capabilities. And there was no human intelligence, or HU-MINT, from sources in and around al-Qaeda. Finally, there had been large cash rewards advertised for information leading to bin Laden for years before 9/11, but there had never been any takers, because members of al-Qaeda believed bin Laden to be the savior of true Islam and wouldn’t rat him out for a cash reward, no matter how large.

By 2005 there was a dawning realization at the CIA that there would be no one magic piece of intelligence that took them straight to bin Laden. Nor would there be a “
magic detainee”—one
al-Qaeda prisoner who would supply the decisive lead. Meanwhile, al-Qaeda was operating with impunity in Pakistan’s tribal regions and was training significant numbers of Westerners for mass casualty attacks in the West. It was also developing “nodes” in Iraq, Yemen, Somalia, North Africa, and Lebanon that were capable of acting autonomously. And the Agency concluded that although it could capture or kill any number of “
midlevel managers” in al-Qaeda, the linchpins of the operation remained bin Laden and, to some degree, his deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri.

With bin Laden having vanished and al-Qaeda resurgent, morale at the CIA’s Counterterrorist Center was poor. Also, a new congressionally mandated National Counterterrorism Center was being “stood up” to provide strategic analysis of the threat from terrorism, and it was draining away many talented analysts from the CIA. In 2005 the dedicated bin Laden unit at the CIA was closed, and its analysts and operatives were reassigned. This did not mean that the CIA had suddenly decided that bin Laden was no longer important, but it did mean that a single focus on one man wasn’t reflecting how al-Qaeda had changed since the bin Laden unit was founded in December 1995. Philip Mudd, then a senior CIA counterterrorism official, recalls, “
It was a reflection of what was happening in the war, which was a globalization of ‘al-Qaedaism.’ I do remember the sense that we were facing not just bin Laden and core al-Qaeda, but we were facing a bigger global jihad problem.” Around this time
Mudd authored an influential memo outlining how al-Qaeda the centralized organization was morphing into al-Qaeda the movement, which was spreading into countries such as Iraq and penetrating North Africa.