The Eleventh Day
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24 “patience”: DOD press conference, 1/9/02, www.defenselink.mil;
25 Black briefed: Tenet, 177;
26 Shelton: DeYoung, 351–;
27 “When we’re through”: Ron Suskind, The Price of Loyalty, NY: Simon & Schuster, 2004, 185;
28 “comfort food”/“Amazing Grace”/O’Neill: ibid., 189–;
29 CIA proposing/Memorandum: New Yorker, 8/17/07, 8/4/03, NYT, 9/10/06, 12/15/02, Joseph Margulies, Guantánamo and the Abuse of Presidential Power, NY: Simon & Schuster, 2006, 189, CR, 333, “Who Authorized the Torture of Abu Zubaydah,” www.huffingtonpost.com, 4/28/09;
30 “war on terrorism”: NY Daily News, 9/17/01, BBC News, 9/16/01;
31 “war on terror”: Bush address, CNN, 9/20/01.
32 joint session: The joint session was on September 30. On the 14th, the Congress had passed a resolution authorizing the use of “all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he [the President] determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided” the 9/11 attacks “or harbored such organizations or persons.” The resolution passed in the Senate by 98 votes to 0, in the House by 420 votes to 1 (Richard Grimmett, “Authorization for Use of Military Force in Response to the 9/11 Attacks,” Congressional Research Service);
33 “I want”: CNN, 9/17/01, int. Dan Bartlett by Scott Pelley, 8/12/02, “Press Interviews of Staff,” B1, T3, CF;
34 “platter”: Meet the Press, www.cbsnews.com, 9/16/01;
35 “Gentlemen”: Gary C. Schroen, First In, NY: Ballantine, 2005, 40;
36 “The mission”: Ron Suskind, The One Percent Doctrine, NY: Simon & Schuster, 2006, 21.
37 British commandos: The British contingent was from the Special Boat Service, or SBS, similar to the better known SAS—Special Air Service—but drawn largely from the ranks of the Royal Marines. Though specializing in amphibious operations, the unit also operates overland. British and American special units have long collaborated. As for the overall number of operatives initially sent into Afghanistan, the authors have used the figure given by the commander of the Delta Force unit on the ground. Perhaps referring to a total at a somewhat later stage of the operation, Bob Woodward referred in his book Bush at War to a larger figure: “about 110 CIA officers and 316 Special Forces personnel” (SBS: “The Special Boat Service,” www.hmforces.co.uk, “British Special Forces Member Killed in Afghanistan,” Guardian [U.K.], 7/2/10, Alastair Finlan, “The [Arrested] Development of UK Special Forces and the Global War on Terror,” Review of International Studies, Vol. 35, 2009; overall number: Dalton Fury, Kill bin Laden, NY: St. Martin’s, 2008, xix, Woodward, Bush at War, 314).
38 “This is why”: Schroen, 33;
39 “Tell them”: Gary Berntsen & Ralph Pezzullo, Jawbreaker, NY: Three Rivers, 2005, 289.
40 Dalton Fury: “Dalton Fury” is the pen name the major used as author of a 2008 book on the operation against bin Laden. While protecting his identity, the media have accepted his authenticity (Fury, 200; major media: e.g., 60 Minutes, CBS, 10/5/08);
41 “A cloudy”: Fury, xx;
42 $100 bills/“Money”: Schroen, 29,38, 88, 93–;
43 duffel bags: Fury, 105;
44 defeat: Tommy Franks with Malcolm McConnell, American Soldier, NY: Regan, 2004, 322;
45 “God has”: ed. Lawrence, 104;
46 “great, long-term”: Bergen, OBL I Know, 316;
47 “safe and sound”: ibid., 322;
48 poor intelligence: Berntsen & Pezzullo, 156, 108;
49 Atef: Hamid Mir, “How Osama Has Survived,” www.rediff.com, 9/11/07, bin Ladens & Sasson, 271;
50 OBL Jalalabad: Christian Science Monitor, 3/4/02, Berntsen & Pezzullo, 239, Sunday Times (London), 1/15/09, John Miller & Michael Stone with Chris Mitchell, The Cell, NY: Hyperion, 2002, 319, Corbin, 262–;
51 “Black Widow”: Newsweek, 12/10/01, BBC News, 9/27/08;
52 Towr Ghar: Fury, 107, “The Caves & Graves of Tora Bora,” www.legionmagazine.com, 9/1/03;
53 “purpose-built”: The Independent (U.K.), 11/27/01 & see “The Lair of Bin Laden,” www.edwardjepstein.com;
54 no electricity/water: bin Ladens & Sasson, 185–;
55 schoolhouse: Berntsen & Pezzullo, 253, Fury, 108;
56 Afghan generals: e.g., Berntsen & Pezzullo, 272, 275, 280–, Fury, 114–, 124, 129–, 257;
57 negotiating: Berntsen & Pezzullo, 289–, NYT, 9/11/05, Fury, 216–, 234, 244;
58 OBL largesse/sons: Fury, 209, 108;
59 “flawed”: Fury, 99, Berntsen & Pezzullo, 213–;
60 reluctance: Berntsen & Pezzullo, 277–, 290, 295, 305–, 309, 314, “In the Footsteps of Bin Laden,” CNN, 8/23/06;
61 airpower: e.g., Berntsen & Pezzullo, 270, 274–, Fury, 170–, 192;
62 Marine: Berntsen & Pezzullo, 34–, 283–;
63 “tall”: ibid., 291;
64 6′4″: “Most Wanted Terrorists,” www.fbi.gov;
65 BLU-82: description at www.globalsecurity.org, Berntsen & Pezzullo, 291, Fury, 127;
66 Used on plains: Berntsen & Pezzullo, 137–;
67 delivered: ibid., 295–, Fury, 149–;
68 BLU-82: described at www.fas.org, Michael O’Hanlon, “A Flawed Masterpiece,” Foreign Affairs, 3/02;
69 “too hot”/“hideous”: “Tora Bora Revisited: How We Failed to Get Bin Laden and Why It Matters Today,” Report, U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 2009, 7;
70 movement orders: Fury, 230.
71 “victory or death”/“Father”: According to Delta Force leader Fury, bin Laden was overheard saying in desperation, “arm your women and children against the infidel!” His lead bodyguard Abu Jandal has recalled that “all bin Laden’s wives knew how to handle weapons. They had taken a military course while al Qaeda was in the Sudan.” It seems unlikely, though, that the terrorist leader would have expected young children to take part in the battle (Fury, 233, Nasser al-Bahri [Abu Jandal] with Georges Malbrunot, Dans l’Ombre de Ben Laden, Neuilly-sur-Seine, France: Michel Lafon, 2010, 199).
72 Dec. 13/listened to a voice: The CIA’s Gary Berntsen dated this last intercept as having occurred not on December 13 but the 15th. Fury suggested that bin Laden was overheard once more, a day or so later. What he said, Fury wrote, came over as “more of a sermon than issuing orders” (Fury, 233–, 236–, Berntsen & Pezzullo, 307).
73 devastation: Fury, 270, 272, Berntsen & Pezzullo, 296;
74 not a trace/“punched”/rubble/Exhumations: Fury, 286, 282, Newsweek, 10/31/08;
75 “real war”: Fury, 293;
76 “We need”: Berntsen & Pezzullo, 290;
77 Dailey: Berntsen & Pezzullo, e.g., 307, 276;
78 “We have not said”: DOD press conference, 11/8/01, www.defense.gov, & see Franks with McConnell, 388;
79 skirted discussion: ibid.
80 As recently as 2009: In testimony to the Senate Armed Services Committee, and on the PBS program Frontline, Franks suggested that the drive to “get into Tora Bora” came from the Afghan commanders. A decision was made, he said, to support the Afghan operation and to “work with the Pakistanis along the Pakistani border.” He declared himself “satisfied with the decision process.” CIA’s Gary Berntsen has responded by writing that Franks was “either badly misinformed or blinded by the fog of war.” Berntsen had made it clear in his reports, he said, that the Afghans were less than keen to attack Tora Bora. General Franks, meanwhile, has also said he had concerns as to the amount of time it would have taken to get U.S. troops into the mountains. He has pointed out, too, most recently in 2009, that relying principally on Afghan ground forces in the field had worked in overthrowing the Taliban (“get into”/“work with”: int. Tommy Franks for Frontline, www.pbs.org; “satisfied”: Testimony of Tommy Franks, U.S. Senate Armed Services Committee, 7/31/02, www.access.gpo.gov; Berntsen: Berntsen & Pezzullo, 290–; concerns: New Republic, 12/22/09).
81 “conflicting”: New Republic,
12/22/09 & see NYT, 10/19/04, MFR 04021460, 4/9/04. General Michael DeLong, who had been Franks’s deputy at CentCom, wrote in his September 2004 memoir that bin Laden “was definitely there when we hit the caves.” Then, after Franks had expressed doubt in an October 19 article, he abruptly reversed himself. “Most people fail to realize,” DeLong wrote in a November 1 article in The Wall Street Journal, “that it is quite possible that bin Laden was never in Tora Bora to begin with.” There was a report the same month—citing what Taliban sources had purportedly said at the time—that bin Laden had been “nowhere near Tora Bora” but had sent a decoy there to deceive U.S. intelligence. If the Taliban did make such a claim, there is no good reason to credit it. If bin Laden was indeed at Tora Bora, the claim was as likely disinformation designed to take pressure off. (For what it is worth, bin Laden himself in a 2003 audiotape spoke of the Tora Bora battle as though he was present.) The intelligence cited by Berntsen and Fury as to bin Laden having been at Tora Bora, on the other hand—information from human sources coupled with voice recognition of intercepted radio conversations—remains persuasive (“was definitely”: U.S. Senate, Tora Bora Revisited, 8; “Most people”: WSJ, 11/1/04 & see MFR 04021460 4/9/04, CF; “nowhere near”: CounterPunch, 11/1/04—citing Kabir Mohabbat; bin Laden: ed. Lawrence, 18–).
82 “The generals”: Fury, xxiii–.
83 “never took”: NYT, 10/19/04. During his 2004 campaign against Bush for the presidency, Senator John Kerry claimed the President “took his eye off the ball, off of Osama bin Laden” (second Bush-Kerry debate, 4/10/08, cbsnews.com);
84 “get” bin Laden: Woodward, Bush at War, 254, 224, 311, The Times (London), 10/14/01;
85 “going to lose”: Suskind, One Percent, 58–;
86 “asking”: Fury, 148;
87 “obsessed”: Suskind, One Percent, 96, Woodward, Bush at War, 338;
88 “Terror’s bigger”: Bush press conference, http://archives.cnn.com, 3/13/02.
89 taken Rumsfeld: Woodward, Plan of Attack, 1–;
90 “Goddamn!”: ibid., 8 & see Franks, 315;
91 general pestered: Woodward, Plan of Attack, 31, 36–, 42– & see Michael Gordon & Bernard Trainor, Cobra II, NY: Pantheon, 2006, 25–.
92 “a natural”: al-Wafd (Egypt), 12/26/01, citing Pakistan Observer, www.opednews.com, Fox News, 12/26/01;
93 escape/wound: Newsweek, 10/31/08, Fury, 286, New Republic, 10/22/07, NYT, 9/23/02, Bergen, OBL I Know, 334–, U.S. Senate, Tora Bora Revisited, 2;
94 2011 reports/tribes: Guardian (U.K.), 4/26/11, Michael Scheuer, Osama bin Laden, NY: Oxford University Press, 2011, 131.
95 Good evidence/02/03/04: Not included here as an indication of bin Laden’s survival is a videotaped statement shown by Al Jazeera on December 26, 2001. Though that transmission postdated the Tora Bora battle, all one knows for sure—because of a reference in the statement to the bombing “some days ago” of a mosque at Khost—is that it was recorded shortly after November 16. Thus not necessarily after the Tora Bora conflict ended—on December 17 (ed. Lawrence, 151–, U.S. Senate, Tora Bora Revisited, 14).
96 “We agreed”: Though not all the hijacked flights took off on time on 9/11, they had been scheduled to take off within the same twenty-five-minute period. The authors have in these paragraphs cited letters and tapes attributed to bin Laden, edited by Professor Bruce Lawrence, humanities professor of religion at Duke University, translated by James Howarth, and published in book form.
“Although the question of authenticity inevitably arises whenever a message is released in bin Laden’s name,” Howarth wrote, the statements in the book had all “been accepted as genuine by a majority of the experts and officials who have examined them.” Lawrence and others have cast doubt on the authenticity of other taped statements attributed to bin Laden, allowing for the possibility of forgery for propaganda purposes.
It is not a ridiculous notion, for the CIA is on record as having fabricated film footage. In the late 1950s it arranged for the making of a film purportedly showing President Sukarno of Indonesia in bed with a woman in the Soviet Union. As late as 2003, before the invasion of Iraq, there was discussion about making a video showing Saddam Hussein having sex with a teenage boy. According to a Washington Post report, the CIA actually did make a video “purporting to show Osama bin Laden and his cronies sitting around a campfire swigging bottles of liquor and savoring their conquests with boys.”
Doubts have been expressed about a videotape released in December 2001, supposedly following its seizure by U.S. troops in Afghanistan. It purports to show bin Laden in conversation the previous month with a visiting sheikh, openly acknowledging his foreknowledge of the 9/11 attack. While there may be other good reasons to doubt the tape’s authenticity, the authors suggest that a couple of points made in support of the forgery theory have no validity.
Skeptics noted that the bin Laden figure wears a ring in the video—supposedly out of character for him, perhaps even contrary to religious law. As noted in another chapter, his wife Najwa had given him a ring as a token of her affection just before leaving Afghanistan on the eve of 9/11. He is, moreover, shown wearing a ring in another video accepted as authentic. Bin Laden’s son Omar, meanwhile, has scotched the argument that a shot of his father writing with his right hand is a giveaway—as the real Osama was supposedly left-handed. “My father,” Omar wrote in 2009, “is right-handed.”
That is not to say that the “confession” videotape is necessarily authentic. Professor Lawrence did not use the transcript of it in his published collection on bin Laden, and has reportedly expressed the view that the tape is indeed a fake. No quotations from it have been used in this book (scheduled: CR, 10; ed. Lawrence, 158–244 & see BBC News, 4/15/04, “The Osama bin Laden Tapes,” Special Report, undated, www.guardian.co.uk; Sukarno: Interim Report, “Alleged Assassination Plots Involving Foreign Leaders,” U.S. Senate Select Committee to Study Govt. Ops with Respect to Intelligence Activities, 94th Cong., 1st Sess., Washington, D.C.: U.S. Govt. Printing Office, 11/20/55, 74n4, Anthony Summers, Goddess, NY: Macmillan, 1985, 182; Hussein sex/“purporting”: WP, 5/25/10; video 12/01: transcript by Defense Dept. cited www.defenselink.mil, NYT, 12/14/01; not ring: e.g., Griffin, The New Pearl Harbor Revisited, 209, “Farce: Control of the Village Through Terror,” 2/6/07, www.opednews.com; had ring: bin Ladens & Sasson, 282 & see “Confession Video,” www.911myths.com; left-handed: David Ray Griffin, Osama bin Laden, Gloucestershire, U.K.: Arris, 2009, 30, Bergen, OBL I Know, 335; “right-handed”: bin Ladens & Sasson, 159–; reportedly expressed: Griffin, OBL, 36).
97 “I knew”: Fury, 286;
98 “This was where”: National Geographic, 12/04.
Part IV: PLOTTERS
CHAPTER 17
1 phenomenon: Staff Statement 13, CO, Lawrence Wright, The Looming Tower, NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006, 176–, CR, 278;
2 target: James F. Pastor, Security Law & Methods, NY: Butterworth-Heinemann, 2006, 522, 539, Barrett & Collins, 107.
3 OBL visit to U.S.: bin Ladens & Sasson, 25–, 302, & see (1981 visit) New Yorker, 12/14/08. Though the best, firsthand source, Najwa is not the first to refer to an early bin Laden visit to America. Kahled Batarfi, a boyhood friend, has spoken of the episode, offering details that to some extent conform with Najwa’s account. Bin Laden’s sometime supervisor at the family construction firm, Walid al-Khatib, said bin Laden made “trips” to America. Allowing for confusion over the date, Khatib’s and Najwa’s recollections may be corroborated by the account of wealthy Saudi businessman Yassin Kadi. Kadi said he met bin Laden in Chicago in 1981, when the future terrorist leader was recruiting engineers for the family business. Khaled Bahaziq, a boyhood friend of bin Laden who knew Azzam, has recalled that Azzam was “lecturing in America in the 1970s.” He certainly visited repeatedly in the 1980s (Batarfi: Bergen, OBL I Know, 22, Coll, Bin Ladens 209–; Khatib: Coll, Bin Ladens, 209–, but see New Yorker, 6/30/09, citing Khatib as referring to visiting “once”; Kadi: NYT, 12/13/08, Bahaziq:
Robert Lacey, Inside the Kingdom, London: Hutchinson, 2009, 114–).
4 lectured/led prayers: Andrew McGregor, “Jihad and the Rifle Alone,” Journal of Conflict Studies (Univ. of New Brunswick), Fall 2003, Gilles Kepel, Jihad, Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 2002, 314, Abdel Bari Atwan, The Secret History of Al Qaeda, Berkeley: Univ. of Calif. Press, 2006, 42, Wright, 95;
5 third-year: bin Ladens & Sasson, 25;
6 “cleric”: Gerald Posner, Secrets of the Kingdom, NY: Random House, 2005, 36, Bergen, OBL I Know, 92;
7 “scholar”: e.g., Bergen, OBL I Know, int. Jamal Ismael, courtesy Paladin InVision, 2006, “Jihad and the Rifle”;
8 village overrun: bin Ladens & Sasson, 29, Bamford, Pretext, 98;
9 “Emir”: e.g., Anouar Boukhars, “At the Crossroads, Saudi Arabia’s Dilemma,” Journal of Conflict Studies (Univ. of New Brunswick), Summer 2006;
10 jihad: John Esposito, Islam, NY: Oxford Univ. Press, 1998, 20–;
11 liberate: Atwan, 73–;
12 imposing/speaker: Wright, 95;
13 Sadat: Gerald Posner, Why America Slept, NY: Ballantine, 2003, 30;
14 Mohammed/Sayid Qutb: “Jihad & the Rifle”; Jason Burke, Al Qaeda, London: Penguin, 2004, 47, Kepel, 314, ed. Lawrence, xii, Ian Hamel, L’Énigme Oussama Ben Laden, Paris: Payot, 2009, 64;
15 Qutb re Jews: Sayyid Qutb, In the Shade of the Qu’ran, Falls Church, VA: WAMY International, 1995, WP, 8/10/10;
16 read Qutb: Bergen, OBL I Know, 19;
17 OBL at lectures: Hamel, 64, Wright, 79–;
18 Azzam travel: Lacey, Inside the Kingdom, 115, Rohan Gunaratna, Inside Al Qaeda, NY: Columbia Univ. Press, 2002, 101, Terry McDermott, Perfect Soldiers, NY: HarperCollins, 2005, 96–;
19 Azzam useful: corr. Barnett Rubin, 2010, 9/10. New Yorker, 3/27/95; McDermott, 96–, eds. Der Spiegel, 169, Samuel Katz, Relentless Pursuit, NY: Forge, 2002, 38–. Pulitzer Prize–winning author Steve Coll wrote in 2004 that Prince Turki al-Faisal and the GID “became important supporters” of Azzam. In a letter to Coll the following year, however, Turki would claim that “Azzam was never supported by me or the GID.” Support for the mujahideen, Turki wrote, was “measured by the ISI [Pakistani intelligence] and then evaluated by both the CIA and G.I.D.” (“became”: Coll, Ghost Wars, 156; “Azzam was”: Coll, Bin Ladens, 295, 612n21).