Manhunt Read online

  ALSO BY PETER L. BERGEN

  THE LONGEST WAR

  THE OSAMA BIN LADEN I KNOW

  HOLY WAR, INC.

  Copyright © 2012 by Peter L. Bergen

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Crown Publishers,

  an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group,

  a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  www.crownpublishing.com

  CROWN and the Crown colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Bergen, Peter L., 1962–

  Manhunt : the ten-year search for Bin Laden from 9/11 to Abbottabad / Peter L. Bergen. — 1st ed.

  1. Bin Laden, Osama, 1957–2011. 2. Qaida (Organization) 3. Terrorists—Saudi Arabia. 4. Fugitives from justice—United States. 5. Terrorism—United States—Prevention. 6. Special operations (Military science)—United States. 7. War on Terrorism, 2001–2009. I. Title.

  HV6430.B55B473 2012

  363.325’16092—dc23

  2012004258

  eISBN: 978-0-307-95558-6

  Maps by Gene Thorp

  Jacket design by Ben Wiseman

  Jacket art by Universal History Archive/Getty Images

  Author photograph: CNN/Brent Stirton

  v3.1

  For Pierre Timothy Bergen,

  born November 17, 2011

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  MAPS

  Epigraph

  A NOTE ABOUT THIS BOOK

  Prologue: A Comfortable Retirement

  1 9/11 and After

  2 Tora Bora

  3 Al-Qaeda in the Wilderness

  4 The Resurgence of Al-Qaeda

  5 A Working Theory of the Case

  6 Closing In on the Courier

  7 Obama at War

  8 Anatomy of a Lead

  9 The Last Years of Osama bin Laden

  Photo Insert 1

  10 The Secret Warriors

  11 Courses of Action

  12 The Decision

  13 Don’t Turn On the Light

  14 Aftermath

  Photo Insert 2

  Epilogue: The Twilight of Al-Qaeda

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  NOTES

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  About the Author

  We sleep soundly in our beds because rough men stand ready in the night to visit violence on those who would do us harm.

  —WINSTON CHURCHILL

  It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming, but who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself for a worthy cause; who, at the best, knows, in the end, the triumph of high achievement, and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who knew neither victory nor defeat.

  —THEODORE ROOSEVELT

  A NOTE ABOUT THIS BOOK

  I FIRST MET Osama bin Laden in the middle of the night in a mud hut in the mountains of eastern Afghanistan in March 1997. I was there to produce his first television interview for CNN. In person bin Laden was not the table-thumping revolutionary I had expected, presenting himself as a low-key cleric. But while his manner was mild, his words were full of a raw hatred of the United States. Bin Laden surprised us by declaring war on the United States on camera; it was the first time he had done so before a Western audience. That warning, of course, was not sufficiently heeded, and four years later came the 9/11 attacks.

  In a sense, I have been preparing to write this book ever since. While the exact timing of bin Laden’s capture or death could not be predicted, it was all but inevitable that he would eventually be tracked down. The book you are about to read is the full story of how that happened.

  After bin Laden was killed, I traveled to Pakistan three times, on my last visit making an extensive tour of the Abbottabad compound in which he lived his final years. I was the first outside observer to be granted entry by the Pakistani military, which controlled all access, and two weeks after my visit, in late February 2012, the complex was demolished.

  The visit to the compound helped me form a much better understanding of the way al-Qaeda’s leader and his family and followers lived there for years undetected, and of the U.S. Navy SEAL raid that killed bin Laden. I stood in the room where bin Laden lived for almost six years of his life and where he finally died. I also spoke to a variety of Pakistani security and military officials who investigated the SEAL raid and who were privy to the debriefings of his wives and children who were living on the compound.

  On the U.S. side, I spoke to almost every senior official at the White House, Defense Department, CIA, State Department, National Counterterrorism Center, and Office of the Director of National Intelligence who was responsible for building and assessing the intelligence on bin Laden, weighing the possible courses of action in response to the suspected bin Laden compound, and overseeing the execution of the raid. Many of these officials are quoted by name in the book, but several could not be quoted directly due to the sensitivity of aspects of the mission. In the cases where a CIA official’s name has not been made public I have used a pseudonym. (No one, including myself, has interviewed the U.S. Navy SEALs who were on the mission.) The SEALs recovered some six thousand documents at the bin Laden compound in Abbottabad. At the White House, I was allowed to review a number of those just-declassified, unpublished documents in mid-March 2012.

  The anti-secrecy website WikiLeaks proved another very useful source of information. By consulting leaked, classified documents about Guantánamo, I was better able to map out bin Laden’s movements after the 9/11 attacks and to reconstruct how CIA officials were able to zero in on the courier who led them to the al-Qaeda leader’s front door. Just because a U.S. government document is secret does not, of course, guarantee that it is accurate, and so I did my best to cross-reference those documents with a variety of other accounts and sources.

  This reporting was supplemented by additional interviews with former CIA officials and U.S. military officers involved in the hunt for bin Laden in the decade after 9/11, and multiple trips to Afghanistan to retrace bin Laden’s footsteps at the Battle of Tora Bora, where he managed to evade the grasp of the United States during the winter of 2001.

  When I met bin Laden back in 1997, it was outside the Afghan city of Jalalabad and close to the mountains of Tora Bora—the region from which, four years later, just months after 9/11, he would stage one of history’s great disappearing acts and become the subject of the most intensive and expensive manhunt of all time. It was perhaps fitting that, a decade later, on the moonless night of May 1, 2011, bin Laden’s final reckoning would begin with helicopters launched from Jalalabad Airfield. As they ascended, the Navy SEALs on board could see through the pixilated green glow of their night-vision goggles the mountains of Tora Bora only thirty miles to the south, rising fourteen thousand feet to the sky: the last place that a small group of American Special Operations Forces had bin Laden in their sights. This time, they vowed, bin Laden would not escape America’s grasp.

  PROLOGUE A COMFORTABLE RETIREMENT

  IT WAS A PERFECT HIDING PLACE.

  Squint a little and the neat houses that climb up the green hills and compact mountains that surround Abbottabad are reminiscent of Switzerland, or maybe Bavaria. This Pakistani city of s
ome five hundred thousand souls sits at four thousand feet in the foothills of the Himalayas, which march in ranks toward the border with China. The town was founded in 1853 by James Abbott, an English officer who was a bit player in the Great Game that pitted the British and Russians against each other as they struggled for mastery in Central Asia. Somewhat unusually for an administrator of the Raj, Major Abbott was beloved by the inhabitants of Abbottabad. Abbott even penned an awkward but heartfelt poem to the town when he departed for England:

  I remember the day when I first came here.

  And smelt the sweet Abbottabad air …

  I bid you farewell with a heavy heart

  Never from my mind will your memories thwart.

  Vestiges of Abbottabad’s colonial past can be seen in the Anglican church of St. Luke’s, which looks like it was airlifted in from Sussex, and the occasional sets of low-slung nineteenth-century buildings lining the main roads that once housed the administrators of the Empire.

  Abbottabad is known today as the “City of Schools” and is home to a number of excellent prep schools and Pakistan’s leading military academy. U.S. Special Forces soldiers were posted there in 2008 to help with the training of recruits.

  Enticed by its relatively cool summers and negligible crime rate, a mix of retired army officers and civil servants, as well as some who have made good working in the Persian Gulf, have been drawn to live in Abbottabad. The vacation high season begins in June, when families from the hot plains of Pakistan travel there to cool off and to revel in its soft mountain breezes. The golfers among them can play on one of the country’s finest courses. The overall vibe is a little more country club than the rest of Pakistan’s heaving, teeming, smog-filled cities.

  Despite Abbottabad’s relative obscurity, foreigners are not unknown here. Western adventurers drawn by the Karakoram Highway, which wends its way through the city before heading north toward China, three hundred miles away, occasionally stop off to stock up on camping supplies or linger at an ice-cream shop. And wealthy Afghan refugees fleeing the instability in their country have built large walled compounds to hide their womenfolk.

  It was to the placid environs of Abbottabad half a decade after his great victory on 9/11 that Osama bin Laden decided to retire. It was one of the last places in Pakistan that anyone would have suspected he might be living—far enough from the tribal regions of Pakistan, where pretty much every observer believed he was based, so that he would be hard to find, yet not so far away that he couldn’t communicate relatively easily by courier with his key lieutenants, many of whom lived in those regions. It was also close to Pakistan-held Kashmir and the Kashmiri militant groups to which bin Laden had long allied himself, a support network that might come in handy.

  By the spring of 2011 the terrorist mastermind was in his sixth year of hiding out in the Bilal Town neighborhood of Abbottabad. It isn’t the city’s glitziest address, but with its porticoed white villas interspersed with small shops selling fruits and vegetables, it is certainly a reasonably pleasant place to live.

  Seven years earlier, the man whom bin Laden had entrusted with his life, someone known within al-Qaeda by the alias Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti—“the Kuwaiti who is the father of Ahmed”—had begun assembling some small parcels of agricultural land on the fringes of Bilal Town. The Kuwaiti purchased the land over the course of four transactions in 2004 and 2005, paying about $50,000 and buying most of the plots from a local doctor, Qazi Mahfooz Ul Haq. Haq recalls the Kuwaiti as a “very simple, modest, humble type of man” who spoke the local language, Pashto, dressed in traditional Pashtun clothing, and said that he was buying the land for an uncle.

  The Kuwaiti hired an architect at Modern Associates, a family-run firm in Abbottabad, to design a residential compound suitable for a family of a dozen or more. The specs for the building were not unusual for these parts: two stories with four bedrooms on each floor, each with its own private bathroom. “One of my students could have done the design,” recalls Junaid Younis, the owner of Modern Associates. The architecture firm submitted the drawings of the house to the local planning board, and permission for its construction was duly granted.

  Sometime in 2005, bin Laden’s compound began rising from what were once open fields. Locals estimate that the sprawling one-acre complex cost in the low hundreds of thousands of dollars to build. During its construction, a third floor was added to the building. No planning permission was sought for this addition, a common enough dodge in a part of the world where paying property taxes is regarded as a sucker’s game. But there was a more compelling reason to keep this alteration as secret as possible: the unauthorized floor was for the exclusive use of Osama bin Laden and his newest and youngest wife, a spirited Yemeni named Amal.

  The third floor, where bin Laden would live with Amal, was a little different from the others. Unlike the floors below it, it had windows on only one of its four sides, and they were opaque. Four of the five windows were just small slits well above eye level. A tiny terrace leading off the floor was shielded from prying eyes by a seven-foot-high wall designed to conceal even someone as tall as the six-foot-four bin Laden.

  Habitually dressed in light-colored flowing robes, a dark vest, and a prayer cap, bin Laden rarely left the second and third floors of the house during the more than five years he lived there. When he did, it was only to take a walk in the compound’s kitchen garden. A makeshift tarpaulin over a section of the garden was designed to keep even those walks a secret from the all-seeing American satellites that traversed the skies overheard.

  It must have been quite confining for an outdoorsman like bin Laden, who routinely boasted of his ability to ride a horse for forty miles without a break, and who regularly took his sons on arduous hikes through the Afghan mountains that could last for more than twelve hours. Bin Laden was also an avid soccer player, and quite adept at volleyball. Before the fall of the Taliban, one of his great satisfactions had been to take his various wives and children out for expeditions into the vast deserts of southern Afghanistan to practice shooting and toughen them up for the life on the run that he firmly believed would one day be their collective lot.

  Now bin Laden was living in Abbottabad in a prison of his own making. But there were some compensations. For one thing, he was a long way from the American drone strikes that were steadily picking off many of his longtime aides, the cream of al-Qaeda, in Pakistan’s tribal regions some two hundred miles to the west. And he certainly wasn’t cowering in a dank cave, as many of the “infidels” imagined. Nor was he suffering from debilitating kidney disease, as was often reported in the West. In fact, he was in fine fettle, graying and slowing down only a little as he approached the middle of his fifth decade. Most important for a committed family man, he was surrounded by three of his wives and a dozen of his children and grandchildren.

  Bin Laden’s first wife, his tall, beautiful Syrian cousin Najwa, was not among them. They had married in 1974, when he was seventeen and she was fifteen, and she had faithfully stuck with him as he embarked on a life of jihad that took him to Pakistan and Afghanistan during the 1980s, and later Sudan and Afghanistan again in the late 1990s. But after living for five years in grim Taliban-controlled Afghanistan, Najwa had had enough. During the summer of 2001, she started insisting that she wanted to go home and see her family in Syria. She had, after all, given bin Laden eleven children and almost three decades of her life, a good portion of which she had spent with him in exile, and so he eventually agreed to her request. But he allowed her to take only three of their as-yet-unmarried children with her to Syria, insisting that their eleven-year-old daughter, Iman, and seven-year old son, Ladin, stay with him.

  Bin Laden was the absolute monarch of his household, and there was nothing Najwa could do to protest this decision. As she was leaving Afghanistan, bin Laden told her—sensing perhaps that this would be the last time he would see her—“I will never divorce you, Najwa. Even if you hear I have divorced you, it is not true.” Najwa left Af
ghanistan on September 9, 2001, the same day that bin Laden’s assassins murdered Ahmad Shah Massoud, the leader of the few Afghan forces then still fighting the Taliban, and only forty-eight hours before al-Qaeda’s attacks on Washington and New York. Perhaps bin Laden knew that the gentle Najwa, who had married him long before he had devoted his life to the rigors of holy war, wouldn’t be able to handle the aftermath of the attacks on America.

  Still, a decade after 9/11—even with his first wife long gone—bin Laden had the satisfaction of having his three other wives living with him in his Abbottabad hideaway. They ranged in age from the twenty-nine-year-old Amal to the sixty-two-year-old Khairiah, who had recently and happily reappeared in bin Laden’s life quite unexpectedly after an absence of nine years.

  Bin Laden had married Khairiah in 1985, when he was twenty-eight and she was thirty-five, an inordinately late age in Saudi Arabia for a woman to get married. Bin Laden’s motivation to marry Khairiah was in part religious. He believed that marrying a “spinster” was something that Allah would regard favorably because, should they have children, it would increase the number of Muslims in the world. Before her marriage, Khairiah had had something of an independent career as a teacher of deaf-mute children. She also held a PhD and hailed from a wealthy, distinguished family that claims descent from the Prophet Mohammed. Khairiah had taken the position of bin Laden’s second wife only because she wanted to be married to a man she believed to be a true holy warrior, whose exploits fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan were becoming well known in Saudi Arabia in the mid-1980s. Four years after she married bin Laden they had a boy, Hamza, and from then on, Khairiah was known as Um Hamza, “the mother of Hamza.”

  As the Taliban regime was imploding during the fall of 2001, Khairiah fled Afghanistan for neighboring Iran, together with her beloved Hamza and several of bin Laden’s children from his other wives. For years they all lived under some form of house arrest in the Iranian capital of Tehran. Their conditions were not uncomfortable, with time for shopping trips, PlayStation video games, and visits to swimming pools, but they were still in a cage, albeit a gilded one. The Iranian regime likely saw bin Laden’s family members as useful bargaining chips in the event of some kind of peace deal with the United States.