Manhunt: The Ten-Year Search for Bin Laden--From 9/11 to Abbottabad (13 page)

Mudd, an English literature major in college with the lean physique of an avid runner, had been the number two at the CIA’s Counterterrorist Center between 2003 and 2005. He recalls that
bin Laden and Zawahiri were not central to the conversations he was then having: “
If you sat around the table, both in the Center but also in the conversations we had with Director Tenet, you wouldn’t have heard bin Laden or Zawahiri’s name very often. You would have heard about operational guys. And there was a strategic reason for that. People in al-Qaeda didn’t talk about plots and bin Laden. They talked about KSM or they talked about Abu Faraj al-Libi.” Mudd and his team were trying to stop the next attack on the States, and to do that they focused particularly on whoever was “al-Qaeda’s number three” at the time, because he was the person who was trying to put together the next attack on the homeland, not bin Laden, who was believed to be more the big-picture guy.

In 2005 an analyst named Rebecca (a pseudonym), who had worked on the bin Laden case for years, wrote an important paper titled “Inroads” that would help guide the hunt in the years to come. Given the absence of any real leads on bin Laden, how could you plausibly find him? she asked. Rebecca then came up with
four “pillars” upon which the search had to be built. The first pillar was locating al-Qaeda’s leader through his courier network. The second was locating him through his family members, either those who might be with him or anyone in his family who might try to get in touch with him. The third was communications that he might have with what the Agency termed AQSL (Al-Qaeda Senior Leadership). The final pillar was tracking bin Laden’s occasional outreach to the media. These four pillars became the “grid” through which CIA analysts would from now on sift all the intelligence that had been gathered on al-Qaeda that might be relevant to the hunt for bin Laden, and also helped to inform the collection of new intelligence.

The most obvious way to find bin Laden was via the delivery of his statements to the media, which often first went to Al Jazeera. The
problem with this approach, according to a senior U.S. intelligence
official, was that al-Qaeda “didn’t use Zawahiri’s kid” to deliver these tapes, but rather used a series of “cutouts,” that is, several couriers in a chain, each aware only of the courier he received the tape from and the one he delivered it to. And some tapes to Al Jazeera were simply mailed to the station’s headquarters in Qatar’s capital, Doha.

Over the years, counterterrorism officials developed a better understanding of how bin Laden might be living, reaching some “
solid conclusions” by 2006 about his domestic arrangements. By then they had rejected the popular notion that he was living in a cave. They also concluded that he was not moving much, or even at all, and that he wasn’t meeting anyone face-to-face in the years after 9/11, because none of the al-Qaeda detainees in custody seemed to have met bin Laden, nor did they describe others as having met him—though, crucially, some of the detainees did describe receiving communications from their leader through couriers. So when there were periodic Elvis sightings of bin Laden—say, that he had given a speech to hundreds of cheering supporters along the Afghan-Pakistani border—those sightings became
increasingly easy for the CIA to dismiss.

Officials also concluded that bin Laden “
was not making any new friends” while on the run, and that anyone protecting him was likely to have been in his inner circle since well before 9/11. Many of his most loyal bodyguards—a group of thirty guards known to their American interrogators as “the dirty thirty”—had been captured in Pakistan immediately after the Battle of Tora Bora, so bin Laden’s trusted circle had gotten smaller from that point on. Analysts also concluded that while he was on the lam, bin Laden wouldn’t have many guards, to ensure he didn’t have “
too big a footprint.”

To develop a fuller picture of the man and his habits, CIA analysts mined books about al-Qaeda’s leader, such as the 2006 history
The Osama bin Laden I Know: An Oral History
, by this author; the authoritative 2008 biography of his family,
The Bin Ladens
, by Steve Coll; and the 2009 memoir
Growing Up bin Laden
, by his first wife, Najwa, and her son Omar. The analysts noticed how devoted the terrorist leader was to his wives and children and concluded that they
might well be living with him, in which case he would likely be settled in a sizable compound suitable for the separate living quarters for each of his wives and her children that mimicked his domestic arrangements in Sudan and Afghanistan.

Over time, counterterrorism officials came to think it less and less plausible that bin Laden was hiding out in the tribal regions of Pakistan, where the CIA had stationed more case officers from the summer of 2006 forward. They had in turn recruited a considerable number of local agents. Those agents
never developed any intelligence that indicated that bin Laden was living in the tribal areas.

In
Growing Up bin Laden
, Omar bin Laden recounts that after al-Qaeda bombed U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998, his father traveled to Kabul to hide from American retaliation, and he notes that bin Laden had
safe houses in all the major cities in Afghanistan. This helped to confirm the evolving view at the CIA that bin Laden was likely hiding in a city. Then, too, there was the fact that between 2002 and 2005, all the key al-Qaeda leaders and associates who were captured had been found in Pakistani cities.

By 2009 those tracking bin Laden had become even more certain that he was living in some kind of urban setting. On a flight from Islamabad to Washington in May 2010, the CIA station chief in Pakistan was chatting with a group of Obama’s national security officials. One of them asked, “Where’s Osama bin Laden? Everybody thinks he’s hiding out in Karachi in the middle of the slum somewhere.” The station chief replied, “No, he’s
probably in the outskirts of Islamabad in one of those suburbs. Less than sixty miles
outside.” This was an inspired hunch, as it would be another three months before the CIA tracked bin Laden’s courier to Abbottabad, thirty-five miles north of Islamabad.

There was, of course, always a faint hope at the CIA that they might just catch a lucky break. “
We always hoped for a person who said, ‘I walked past the same compound every day for seven years and today a door was open and I spotted Osama bin Laden,’ ” recalls one counterterrorism official. That lucky break never came. Also the CIA was never able to place a spy in al-Qaeda who could tell them where bin Laden was. At the top level of the terrorist group, information was
highly compartmented, and the leaders practiced good operational security, so placing a spy in the leadership ranks was just not feasible. Robert Dannenberg, a CIA veteran of the Cold War who ran counterterrorism operations at the Agency after 9/11, explains that the religious fanaticism of members of al-Qaeda made them hard to recruit as spies: “
It was much easier to convince a Soviet that your way of life was better. You could take them to Kmart in the United States, or to Wal-Mart, because they were driven by many of the same things that we’re driven by: success and taking care of our families. When you’re dealing with a man who has religious or extremist views, it’s completely different.”

Instead, it was the painstaking and cumulative assemblage of information from multiple detainee interviews, from thousands of al-Qaeda documents recovered on the battlefield or following an arrest, and the scouring of open-source reporting about bin Laden that helped build a picture of who his associates were and the circumstances in which he might be living, and with whom.

In the end the Agency returned to the four “pillars” of the hunt: bin Laden’s courier network, his family, his communications with other leaders in his organization, and his media statements. Three of the pillars yielded nothing. His family wasn’t communicating
with him; what communications he had with other leaders were extraordinarily “compartmented,” making it impossible to follow them back to bin Laden; and his media statements over time didn’t yield any useful clues. That left the CIA with his courier network.

Intelligence analysts
created a composite of the ideal courier: he would have to be able to travel in Pakistan without sticking out, he would have to speak Arabic to communicate effectively with al-Qaeda’s Arab leadership, and he would have to have been trusted by bin Laden before the 9/11 attacks. Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti, the man known as “the Kuwaiti,” certainly ticked all those boxes: his family was originally from northern Pakistan, he had grown up in Kuwait, and the Agency believed he had joined al-Qaeda around 1999. But although the Kuwaiti was seen as a player in al-Qaeda, a counterterrorism official who spent years tracking bin Laden recalls that, for a long time, “there was
never a sense: ‘This was the guy.’ ”

T
HE LONG ROAD TO BIN LADEN’S COURIER
began with Mohammed al-Qahtani, the man al-Qaeda was grooming to be the twentieth hijacker in the months before the 9/11 attacks. Qahtani was a poorly educated drifter from Kharj, a rural backwater in the deeply conservative heartland of Saudi Arabia, whose schooling consisted largely of Koranic studies, so even as an adult he
believed that the sun revolved around the Earth. In the late 1990s, Qahtani
dropped out of agricultural college and moved to the United Arab Emirates, where he held down a series of menial jobs for a couple of years. Returning home, he drove an ambulance for a while and later took a job as a laborer at a power company.

In 2000 the twenty-five-year-old Saudi underwent an intense religious awakening, which gave him a new purpose in life. He quit his dead-end job at the power company to travel to Afghanistan for the more glamorous life of
fighting alongside the Taliban against their Northern Alliance enemies—the last force standing between the Taliban and their total victory in Afghanistan.

In Afghanistan in early 2001,
Qahtani trained on the usual panoply of weapons at an al-Qaeda camp and soon met bin Laden, who was by then deep into the planning of the attacks on Washington and New York. Bin Laden told the young Saudi that if he wanted to be of service to Islam he should consult with Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM), the operational commander of the coming attacks on America. In late June 2001, Qahtani met again with bin Laden and told him he was “
ready for a mission in the United States.” KSM then instructed Qahtani to return to Saudi Arabia to get a new, “clean” passport without any telltale entry stamps for Afghanistan and Pakistan, and also to obtain a visa for the United States, which, as a Saudi citizen, Qahtani could do without the kind of difficulties the citizens of other, poorer Arab countries, such as Yemen, routinely encountered. KSM gave Qahtani about $5,000, and Qahtani flew to Saudi Arabia, where he picked up his new passport and visa for the States and from there traveled on to Orlando, Florida, arriving on August 4, 2001.

Mohammed Atta, the lead 9/11 hijacker, was waiting for him in the parking lot at Orlando airport. Atta planned to induct Qahtani into the 9/11 plot as one of the “muscle” hijackers who would help restrain the passengers and crews. But a sharp U.S. immigration official was suspicious of the fact that Qahtani spoke no English and was traveling on a one-way ticket. Through an interpreter, the immigration official asked Qahtani for details about his stay in the United States, at which point the al-Qaeda recruit became increasingly evasive and angry. After he was told that he was being denied entry to the States, Qahtani threatened, “
I’ll be back.”

Qahtani returned to Afghanistan and, after 9/11, was caught up in al-Qaeda’s hasty retreat to Tora Bora during the late fall of 2001. Shortly after bin Laden disappeared from Tora Bora, Qahtani and a group of the al-Qaeda leader’s bodyguards retreated over the border
to Pakistan, where they were
arrested on December 15 and handed over to American custody.

Qahtani was sent to Guantánamo, where at first he told his captors that he had gone to Afghanistan because of his
love of falconry, a not-uncommon al-Qaeda cover story. But by July 2002, investigators had matched Qahtani’s fingerprints to those of the angry young Saudi man who had been deported from Orlando a year earlier. This prompted a much more intensive interrogation regime for Qahtani, who had become increasingly uncooperative, at one point
head-butting one of his interrogators.

Between November 23, 2002, and January 11, 2003, Qahtani was interrogated for forty-eight days, more or less continuously, rousted from bed at 4:00 a.m. for interrogation sessions that went on until midnight. If he dozed off, he was doused with water or given a sharp blast of some especially annoying music by Christina Aguilera. He was forced to perform dog tricks, often exposed to low temperatures, made to stand in the nude, and whenever he seemed to be flagging, he was
given drugs and enemas so that the interrogations could continue.

This abusive treatment caused marked changes in Qahtani’s behavior. An
FBI official later noted that he began “evidencing behavior consistent with extreme psychological trauma (talking to non-existent people, reporting hearing voices, crouching in a cell covered with a sheet for hours on end).” And Qahtani’s treatment amounted to torture, according to Susan Crawford, a former federal judge who was appointed to oversee the Guantánamo military commissions by the Bush administration. Crawford determined that the cumulative effects on Qahtani of sustained isolation, sleep deprivation, nudity, and prolonged exposure to cold met the
legal definition of torture. As a result, Crawford ruled that Qahtani could never be prosecuted for anything.

From the secret summaries of Qahtani’s Guantánamo interrogations made public by WikiLeaks, it appears that it was only
after the weeks of abuse that he told interrogators that KSM had introduced him to a man known as Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti, who had instructed him how best to communicate covertly with al-Qaeda members once he was in the States. In July 2001 the Kuwaiti had taken him to an Internet café in the buzzing Pakistani city of Karachi and given him some tuition in secret communications, likely instructing him in the “dead drop” method of secure e-mail communication that was then prevalent in al-Qaeda, in which two of the group’s members would open a commonly shared password-protected e-mail account and write drafts of e-mails to each other that they never actually sent over the Internet, but that they both could still access in draft form.