The uncertainty about bin Laden’s status would begin to change at 10:00 p.m. on November 12, 2002, when Ahmad Zaidan, the Al Jazeera bureau chief in Pakistan, received a call on his cell phone from a strange number. A man with a Pakistani accent said in English, “I have something interesting and a scoop for you. Meet me at Melody Market, behind the Islamabad hotel.” Zaidan drove through a heavy rainstorm and parked his car at the market, usually crowded with hawkers and shoppers, but now deserted because of the bad weather and late hour. As soon as he got out of the car, a man with his face wrapped in a scarf approached him and handed him an audiotape, saying, “This is from Osama bin Laden.”
Zaidan demanded “Hold on,” but bin Laden’s messenger vanished as quickly as he had materialized. Zaidan shoved the audiocassette in the tape player of his car and recognized immediately that it was bin Laden’s voice, and that what al-Qaeda’s leader was saying on the tape was definitive proof that he had survived the Tora Bora battle. It was quite a scoop for Al Jazeera.
Back at his office, Zaidan started feeding the bin Laden audiotape to Al Jazeera’s headquarters in Qatar. The news soon flashed around the world: “Bin Laden Alive.” On the tape bin Laden celebrated a string of recent terrorist attacks perpetrated by his followers: the bombing of a synagogue in Tunisia, the attack on a French oil tanker off the coast of Yemen, and the suicide bombings at two nightclubs on the Indonesian island of Bali that killed two hundred mostly young Western tourists. This was a comprehensive “proof of life,” and any faint hopes that bin Laden might have succumbed to the wounds he sustained at Tora Bora had been dashed. The night the tape surfaced, National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice called President Bush in his residential quarters at the White House to tell him the bad news that bin Laden was alive and well.
Bin Laden was alive, but where was he? The consensus in the U.S. government for the first few years after 9/11 was that he was hiding in or around Pakistan’s tribal areas, where al-Qaeda had started to rebuild itself after the Battle of Tora Bora. Some intelligence officials also thought he might be living in the far north of Pakistan, in the sparsely populated mountains of Chitral. This analysis was based in part on trees native to the region that could be seen in a 2003 video of bin Laden, and on the length of time it seemed to take for audiotapes from bin Laden to make their way to outlets such as Al Jazeera. When bin Laden commented on important news events, it usually took about three weeks for the tapes to make their way to the public. But even that pattern was sometimes upended. After al-Qaeda’s Saudi wing attacked the U.S. consulate in Jeddah in early December 2004, killing five employees, bin Laden released an audiotape crowing over this victory that was made public in just over a week. Maybe he wasn’t in remote Chitral after all?
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AFTER THE FALL OF THE TALIBAN, many of the leaders of al-Qaeda did not, in fact, go to ground in Pakistan’s tribal areas. Some slipped into Iran, but most preferred to hide in the anonymity of Karachi, one of the largest cities in the world. One of bin Laden’s oldest sons, Saad bin Laden, who had recently taken on something of a leadership role in al-Qaeda, spent the first six months of 2002 living in Karachi. He helped one of his aunts and several of his father’s children move from Pakistan to Iran, where they subsequently lived under house arrest for years. Saad joined them in Iran along with a number of other prominent leaders of al-Qaeda, such as Saif al-Adel, a former Egyptian Special Forces officer who had fought against the Soviets in Afghanistan. From Iran, Adel authorized al-Qaeda’s branch in Saudi Arabia to begin a series of terrorist attacks in the Saudi kingdom that began in Riyadh in May 2003, a campaign that killed scores.
From one of their safe houses in Karachi, two of the key planners of 9/11, KSM and Ramzi bin al-Shibh, gave an extensive interview to an Al Jazeera reporter in the spring of 2002 that laid out in detail how they had planned the attacks on New York and Washington. Several months later, on the first anniversary of 9/11, bin al-Shibh was arrested in Karachi along with other members of al-Qaeda. Recovered in their safe house were twenty packages of passports and documents belonging to bin Laden’s wives and children, underlining the key role that Karachi played for bin Laden’s family and inner circle after the fall of the Taliban.
Karachi, the business capital of Pakistan, was also where al-Qaeda did its banking. While bin Laden was strapped for cash in Tora Bora during the winter of 2001, in Karachi the following year, KSM was routinely handling hundreds of thousands of dollars. KSM gave $130,000, for instance, to the Southeast Asian terrorist group Jemaah Islamiya, after its successful terrorist attacks in Bali in October 2002.
In Karachi, KSM planned a second wave of attacks on the West, dreaming up a plan to crash planes into Heathrow airport and scheming about how to use remote-controlled explosive devices hidden inside Sega game cartridges, which al-Qaeda was then developing. He also hoped to relaunch al-Qaeda’s fledgling anthrax research program, discussing the possibility with Yazid Sufaat, a Malaysian who had studied biochemistry at California Polytechnic State University and had previously tried, unsuccessfully, to develop “weaponized” anthrax for al-Qaeda. Sufaat confided to KSM that he had gotten himself vaccinated against anthrax so that he wouldn’t be affected by his research for al-Qaeda, but the program never got off the ground.
KSM’s plotting came to an abrupt end when he was captured in Rawalpindi on March 1, 2003, in a 3:00 a.m. raid in the city that is home to the headquarters of Pakistan’s army. He was caught with the help of an informant who slipped into the bathroom of a house where the terrorist was staying, then text-messaged his American controllers, “I am with KSM.” Later that night al-Qaeda’s “chief of external operations” was arrested.
THE ARREST OF KSM brought the CIA a trove of intelligence. Not only was he carrying three letters from bin Laden, one of them addressed to family members in Iran, but the CIA also gained hold of his computer. On the 20-gigabyte hard drive, in a document titled “Merchant’s Schedule,” intelligence officers found a list of the names of 129 al-Qaeda operatives and an accounting of their monthly allowances. Spreadsheets on the computer listed families who had received financial assistance from the terrorist group; there was also a list of wounded and killed “martyrs” and passport photos of operatives.
None of this, however, led the CIA any closer to bin Laden.
In October 2003, bin Laden called for attacks against Western countries whose troops were fighting in Iraq; subsequently, terrorists bombed a British consulate in Turkey and commuters on their way to work in Madrid. And on the eve of the 2004 U.S. presidential election, bin Laden suddenly appeared in a videotape mocking Bush for reading the story about the pet goat at the elementary school in Florida while the 9/11 attacks were in progress. On that tape, bin Laden also responded to Bush’s frequent claim that al-Qaeda was attacking the United States because of its freedoms rather than its foreign policy, saying sardonically, “Contrary to Bush’s claims that we hate freedom. If that were true, then let him explain to us why we do not attack Sweden?” In December 2004, bin Laden called for attacks on Saudi oil facilities, and a rash of attacks on energy companies and refineries followed.
Despite the taunting videotapes, a number of key al-Qaeda operatives were run to ground between 2002 and 2005. All of them were captured in Pakistan’s packed cities. Members of al-Qaeda faced a dilemma: if they stopped using their phones or the Internet, it made them much harder to find, but it also made it more difficult to plan terrorist attacks and communicate with colleagues. In the end, few al-Qaeda operatives threw away their cell phones or stopped using the Internet. The CIA used newly emerging geolocation technologies to home in on those phones and the locations of the IP addresses used by those operatives. KSM was tracked down in part through his use of Swiss cell phone SIM cards, which were popular among al-Qaeda operatives because they carried prepaid minutes and could be purchased without the buyer providing a name.
The CIA also used relatively new software to map potential connections between suspected
terrorists and suspect cell phone numbers, such as the program called Analyst’s Notebook. A Silicon Valley outfit named Palantir became a favorite of U.S. intelligence agencies, doing hundreds of millions of dollars of business every year because of its ability to collate information from multiple databases and put together as complete a picture as possible of a suspect. And a whole new category of job was created at the CIA: that of the “targeter,” someone who helped the terrorist hunters by assembling any scrap of information from a suspect’s “digital exhaust,” that is, from cell phones, ATM transactions, and any other available information. Additional resources devoted to attacking al-Qaeda quickly flowed to the CIA. Within the first year after 9/11, the Counterterrorist Center at the Agency mushroomed from 340 to 1,500 operatives and analysts.
Relations between the CIA and Pakistan’s military intelligence service, ISI, were reasonably good during the first years after 9/11. After all, al-Qaeda was a common enemy that was also targeting Pakistan’s president, General Pervez Musharraf, the subject of two serious assassination attempts by the terrorist group in December 2003. General Asad Munir, who was in charge of ISI’s operations in the North-West Frontier Province in the first years after 9/11, recalls of the CIA, “We had so much trust with all their people. There was nothing hidden.” Munir says that on dozens of operations in 2002 he worked closely with the CIA, which had few officers on the ground and needed the manpower ISI could provide.
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.
4 THE RESURGENCE OF AL-QAEDA
IN 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 l
eader 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.
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