The Finish

by Mark Bowden

  Bin Laden seemed serenely untroubled by the unfolding disaster around him, and in high spirits. Sitting with the two most wanted men in the world, surrounded by other members of their group, Mir began nervously. He asked, “Are you responsible for 9/11?”

  Bin Laden reached over with one long finger and shut off Mir’s tape recorder.

  He asked, “Can you ask this question to George W. Bush: Are you responsible for the killing of many Muslims in Palestine and Iraq?”

  “No, I cannot ask him this question because I’ll not get any chance to interview him,” said Mir.

  “Okay, but if you do get a chance and if you ask this question, will he answer?”

  “No,” said Mir.

  “Then why are you asking this question of me?”

  “Because he is a politician and you are a fighter,” said Mir, thinking fast, and then, falling back on any journalist’s most trusted tactic, he resorted to flattery. “You said that you are a mujahid, so there must be a difference between a politician and a mujahid. Mujahid always speak the truth. You have to answer my question.”

  “Off the record, yes,” said bin Laden. Then he turned the recorder back on. “I cannot answer your question because my answer will create problems for the Taliban.”

  Clearly the Taliban had problems enough. Bombs were exploding outside so close that the journalist was shaken. His fright amused bin Laden.

  “Oh, Mr. Mir, maybe today you will be killed with me at this place,” he said, lightly mocking him. “You are here to interview me and maybe you will not be able to report that interview back to your newspaper. What will happen with you?”

  Bin Laden and the others laughed. They spoke for hours. Mir worked through a list of questions he had prepared. They discussed the various attempts that had been made on bin Laden’s life, and after shutting off Mir’s recorder again the Sheik spoke at length about his disdain for Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein and Libyan strongman Muammar Gaddafi, neither of whom had joined the struggle against the Soviet Union years before. Mir asked him about widespread reports that he suffered a kidney disease and needed dialysis treatments. Again, the Sheik laughed. He promised to address the question in more detail when they had finished the interview. So when Mir finished asking his questions, breakfast was brought in for them—olives, cheese, bread and butter, beef. Bin Laden began eating vigorously.

  “A kidney patient cannot eat a lot,” he told Mir. “You see this is beef? I am eating beef. You see this is cheese? I am eating cheese.”

  Mir looked to al-Zawahiri, who agreed. “Yes, I am a doctor, I can confirm, kidney patients cannot eat a lot.”

  “I can ride my horse seventy kilometers without any stop,” said bin Laden.

  He kept Mir far longer than the reporter had expected, or desired. The Pakistani, having asked his questions, was eager to leave and get out of the city. He knew that bin Laden might well be a target for the Americans. After this exchange about the Sheik’s health, Mir asked, “Can I leave now?”

  “No,” said his host. “You spend some more time with us and have some tea and you can ask some other questions, off the record questions.”

  Bin Laden told Mir that the day after the attacks in America, his youngest wife had given birth to a daughter, whom he named Safiyah.

  “Why Safiyah?” Mir asked.

  Bin Laden explained that Safiyah had been an aunt of the Prophet and an early convert to Islam. She had given up all her possessions to join the faith, and had taken part in battles and slain unbelievers in defense of the faith.

  “Are you now planning to involve the females of your family in your fight against the Americans?” Mir asked, mindful of the Sheik’s strictly traditional views on the role of women. Bin Laden laughed.

  “Maybe Safiyah will follow the footsteps of her father,” he said, and resisted when Mir seemed to be taking the comment too seriously.

  “Just forget, forget,” he said.

  “No, no, it’s very important for me.”

  “Okay, rest assured Safiyah will not become a mujahid, don’t worry,” bin Laden said, and laughed again. And at last he said, “Okay, now you can go back.”

  Despite the relentless American attacks and the imminent defeat of the Taliban, the Sheik was filled with confidence from the impact of 9/11. All was unfolding as he foretold.

  He did not see any of his attacks as wanton terror, as his horrified enemies did. They were retribution. They were not simply just, but divinely inspired. They were his duty.

  “We kill civilian infidels in exchange for those of our children they kill,” he told an interviewer from Al Jazeera five months after the 9/11 attacks, citing an estimate he often used, that a “million children” had died in Iraq owing to UN–imposed sanctions on that country, a number most serious analysts considered absurdly inflated. Asked about the children killed who had been attending a school inside the World Trade Center, he reasoned: “[Retribution] is permissible in law and intellectually. The men that God helped [on September 11] did not intend to kill babies, they intended to destroy the strongest military power in the world, to attack the Pentagon that houses more than 64,000 employees, a military center that houses military intelligence. The twin towers are an economic power and not a children’s school.”

  It is worth noting here, and for most it goes without saying, that Osama bin Laden’s ideas were neither new nor compelling outside his relatively small circle of followers. They belonged to an ugly cul-de-sac of history, an era where witches and heretics were burned in town squares. They were adolescent ideas, in that they remained willfully ignorant of all that had come before. There are many who choose to believe that certain ancient texts are literally the word of one God or the other, but not many who would go so far as to regard as a sacred duty the slaughter of those who disagree with them, or to kill in order to advance their aims. This was a philosophy that would never appeal to more than a few dedicated fanatics. But one of the peculiarities of the modern world is that, because of telecommunications, small groups of like-minded people, even if widely scattered, can form a community of belief. They can feed off of each other, and can come to wield influence far beyond their actual numbers or appeal. Bin Laden’s was the first to use these tools to build his network into a deadly force. The idea of turning fully fueled commercial airliners into guided bombs effectively gave al Qaeda the destructive power of a small air force or small arsenal of missiles. The suicide attackers who pulled it off had been recruited and trained internationally, financed by global money transfers, and steered by telephone and e-mail. The attacks themselves were designed to create a horrible spectacle for the entire world, television providing the audience, complete with replays and analyses for those who came late. It was a backward-looking movement with forward-looking tactics.

  3. Taking Up Arms

  Late Summer 2010

  “Mr. President, Leon and the guys at Langley think they may have come up with something.”

  Tom Donilon brought this up at the end of President Obama’s morning briefing one day in August. Instead of being briefed on sensitive national security issues by a CIA analyst, as President Bush had been, Obama preferred to be briefed by Donilon, his deputy national security adviser. Donilon would continue this practice even after he stepped into the top National Security Council job a few months later. It was that time of year when not much was going on in Washington. Heat and humidity drove everyone from the capital except the most determined tourists and those who had to stay.

  “Something related to bin Laden,” Donilon said. “We don’t know yet what this is, but I think you need to have them in here for a briefing.”

  Donilon had been with Obama ever since the final stages of the 2008 campaign, when he was summoned to reprise a role he had played for President Clinton, coaching the candidate for a series of formal debates with his Republican rival. The Bush years had been a long break from government service for Donilon, who had continued with his work as a lobbyist for Fannie Mae for
several years and had then moved on to become a partner in the D.C. law firm O’Melveny & Myers. But his heart was still in politics and governance, and when he was invited to help prep Obama for his face-off against Republican candidate Senator John McCain he leapt at it. He believed in the importance of presidential debates. They not only gave the public a better sense of the candidates, but they forced those running to examine the weaknesses in their own thinking and policy prescriptions, and to confront them, before an audience of millions. One of the first recommendations he made to Obama, which was adopted, was that he debate McCain on foreign policy issues first, precisely because it was an arena in which the veteran senator and war hero was thought to have a strong advantage. McCain’s storied military service in Vietnam, where he was held prisoner for five years after his A-4E Skyhawk was shot down over Hanoi, and his twenty-six years in Congress, weighed impressively against Obama, who, twenty-five years younger than McCain, had never served in the military and had yet to complete his first Senate term. On paper, McCain had stronger qualifications for the job. But presidents were not hired, they were elected, and even the most distinguished résumé counted for little next to the impression the candidates made on the public. Donilon felt that if Obama could be seen on national television holding his own in a national security debate with McCain, voters could better begin to imagine him as their president. And better for that to happen sooner than later. He believed this is what Obama accomplished.

  His role in prepping the candidate meant confronting him with the cracks in his thinking before he stepped onstage. In that sense, Donilon was one of the only people around Obama whose job it was to kick him, so to speak—to ruffle the candidate’s famous cool. He worked at tripping Obama, poking holes in his reasoning, challenging his facts, pushing him beyond his stump-tested applause lines and polished talking points.

  “All right, that’s what you say on the campaign trail,” he would say, “but if you are pressed on it, what do you really mean?”

  Or, “I’ve heard you say that, but are you willing to live with it as president?”

  Or, sniffing disagreeably at one of the candidate’s typically long-winded responses, “And how do you explain that in ninety seconds?”

  The candidate must have liked this sort of thing, because he had kept his tormentor close ever since. Donilon found him to possess a fine mind and a deep knowledge of American history and the law. It was hard to get the better of him in argument. To engage him fully meant being fully prepared; otherwise you were likely to come away humiliated. A physically expressive man, Obama had a way of shooing away an ill-founded argument with an amused smile or a more subtle expression like a raised eyebrow and dismissive tilt of his head. Donilon worked hard to avoid that look. He was rarely seen outside the corridors of the White House, a rumpled creature of the cramped warren of offices occupied by the National Security Council leadership downstairs. He was rarely interviewed by the press and seemed egoless. Obama drove his inner staff hard, but Donilon, if anything, drove himself harder. He graded his performance every day—high or low. After the election, Obama asked him to chair his State Department transition team, and had then placed him under General James Jones on the NSC staff. Jones, a former Marine Corps commandant, had been recruited in part as a bridge to the U.S. military, with which Obama had virtually no firsthand experience, and he had agreed from the start to stay in the job for only a year or two. From the beginning of the term Donilon was seen as Jones’s likely successor.

  It particularly pleased him to have something new for the president about bin Laden. There had been no scent of the world’s most infamous terrorist for more than seven years, ever since he had slipped away from the mountain outpost of Tora Bora during a botched siege by allied troops. The Bush administration had said for years that he was somewhere in the mountainous regions of northwest Pakistan but, in truth, they had no idea. There had not been a lead or a sighting in years. Obama had taken office determined to resurrect the hunt.

  On May 26, 2009, four months into his presidency, he had ended a routine national security briefing in the Situation Room by pointing to Donilon, Leon Panetta, his newly appointed CIA director, Mike Leiter, director of the National Counter Terrorism Center, and Rahm Emanuel, his chief of staff.

  “You, you, you, and you,” he said. “Come upstairs. I want to talk to you guys about something.”

  The four followed Obama up a short flight of stairs and through the warren of narrow West Wing hallways to the Oval Office. Afternoon sun poured through the windows from the Rose Garden. They didn’t sit down. This was something quick that the president had been thinking about and wanted to impress on them personally. They had been on the job now long enough to have taken hold of America’s vast intelligence apparatus… time enough to have eased fully into their new roles.

  As Donilon would tell me, Obama said: “Here’s the deal. I want this hunt for Osama bin Laden and al-Zawahiri to come to the front of the line. I worry that the trail has gone cold. This has to be our top priority and it needs leadership in the tops of your organizations. You need to ensure that we have expended every effort to take down the top leadership of al Qaeda, especially these two individuals. And I want regular reports on this to me, and I want them starting in thirty days.”

  Donilon followed up and drove the point home with a memo, which the president signed. He sent it to each of those present. It read: “In order to ensure that we have extended every effort—directly provide to me a detailed operational plan for locating and bringing to justice Osama bin Laden.”

  That brief huddle in the Oval Office had not been scheduled, as virtually every minute of the president’s day was, and Obama had not discussed it beforehand with Donilon. The president had plenty of other things to think about. He was beginning to withdraw U.S. troops from Iraq and was reevaluating the future of the ongoing conflict in Afghanistan. He had authorized a covert cyberwar on Iran’s efforts to enrich uranium to weapons grade, and he was trying to assemble a coalition to apply economic pressure on that country to end its pursuit of nuclear weapons. He had vigorously expanded the secret program to target al Qaeda leaders inside Pakistan and other countries with drones, putting unrelenting daily pressure on the organization. He was trying to counter a Chinese military buildup by reorienting the nation’s military forces toward the Pacific Rim. So there was plenty on the agenda every time his national security team sat down with him. But as the president would later tell me, he wasn’t hearing enough about bin Laden to convince him that everything was being done, that every effort was being made. He wanted to make sure the right people knew what a big priority this was for him. And in the months that had followed, in between those monthly reports, he brought the matter up again and again. It was one of several things he raised at nearly every security meeting. He would always ask about cybersecurity efforts and he would always ask about Osama bin Laden.

  Obama’s leadership style was to enumerate clear, consistent priorities, and stay focused on them until they were accomplished. About twice a year he would meet with the national security team for several hours with nothing else on the agenda. He would bring in a legal pad on which he had listed his priorities in handwriting so small and meticulous that from across the room it looked like type.

  “Hey guys, these are the three most important things we’re working on right now,” he’d say. “And this is where I want your efforts.”

  He’d go through his list item by item and they would discuss and critique their performance: where they had made progress and where they had not. Often he would move things up or down on his list or add things, but when he was done everyone had a clear understanding of where they should be spending their time and resources. Always, from the first such session, finding bin Laden had been at the top of that list.

  As far as Obama was concerned, getting him was more than just symbolic. He had long been critical of Bush’s “War on Terror.” The way he saw it, America was not at war with something am
orphous, like a concept or a tactic. It was at war with specific individuals who had attacked the country and continued to threaten it. When he took office in 2009 al Qaeda and its affiliate organizations remained the first clear and present danger, even after two long, bloody wars and the unceasing efforts of America’s intelligence and special ops soldiers.

  Obama had been sternly warned about this by Bruce Riedel, a former CIA analyst and Brookings Institution scholar whom he had called at home just days after the inauguration and asked to conduct a sixty-day review of American policy in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Eight days before he had pulled his intelligence chiefs into the Oval Office, Riedel had briefed him on his findings in a long meeting aboard Air Force One. He had told Obama that, in his estimation, al Qaeda was more dangerous today than it had been on September 11.

  As Bob Woodward would report in his 2010 book, Obama’s Wars, Riedel said, “Some al Qaeda watchers would argue that bin Laden, hiding in Pakistan, is irrelevant. He’s stuck in a cave somewhere, and yes, he puts out these audiotapes once in a while, but he’s more of a symbol than the commander of a global jihad. What I learned is that’s just not true. He communicates with his underlings and is in touch with his foot soldiers. His troops believe they are getting his orders, and we know from good intelligence that they are… These guys are serious. They are clever, and they are relentless. Until we kill them, they’re going to keep trying to kill us.”

  As Obama saw it, there was no way to defeat al Qaeda so long as its founder and spiritual leader remained at large. He was the soul of the organization. The president believed that bin Laden wasn’t just evil, he was charismatically evil.

  “He understood that with technology and modern media, the potential impact of a big event can magnify and leverage the power of even a small group,” the president told me. “In that sense, although the notions of terrorism hadn’t obviously developed or started with him, I think he had an understanding of the West and where our potential vulnerable points were that made him a singular figure, somebody who was uniquely capable of doing great damage to us.”