The Exile

by Adrian Levy

  More Praise for The Exile

  “Where did Osama bin Laden, his family, and Al Qaeda disappear to for a decade after 9/11 and Tora Bora? In The Exile, Cathy Scott-Clark and Adrian Levy reveal a staggering amount of fresh information as to how Osama bin Laden survived and give us a picture of the ‘missing years.’ This is a remarkable book that readers will not be able to put down.”

  —Ahmed Rashid, author of Taliban, Descent into Chaos, and Pakistan on the Brink

  “The West spends far too little time trying to understand those who attacked on 9/11, and if we do not understand them, we will never combat their ideology. The Exile fills the gap in a very thorough and readable way.”

  —Clive Stafford Smith, director of Reprieve and legal representative of more than one hundred Guantánamo detainees

  “The Exile combines a reporter’s meticulous research with the skill of a thriller writer. This is a must-read for those interested in understanding the dynamics of global jihad.”

  —Husain Haqqani, former Pakistan ambassador to the United States and author of Magnificent Delusions: Pakistan, the United States, and an Epic History of Misunderstanding

  “A fascinating, dynamic, and detailed account—based on considerable research—of how the ideas and people of Al Qaeda survived and revived after 9/11. Informative and highly readable.”

  —Richard Barrett, former head of counterterrorism for MI5 and MI6

  The Exile

  For GG

  BY THE SAME AUTHORS

  The Stone of Heaven: Unearthing the Secret History of Imperial Green Jade

  Nuclear Deception: The Dangerous Relationship between the United States and Pakistan

  The Meadow: Kashmir 1995—Where the Terror Began

  The Amber Room: The Fate of the World’s Greatest Lost Treasure

  The Siege: 68 Hours inside the Taj Hotel

  Contents

  Map

  Preface

  One.        “Shit. I think we bit off more than we could chew.”

  Two.        “Terrorism is a duty and assassination is a Sunnah.”

  Three.      “These Arabs … they have killed Afghans. They have trained their guns on Afghan lives … We want them out.”

  Four.        “Poor ones, this is not how revenge is, or will be.”

  Five.        “The banging was so strong that I felt at some point that my skull was in pieces.”

  Six.          “If you bid us plunge into the ocean, we would follow you.”

  Seven.      “The reprisals of the mujahideen shall come like lightning bolts.”

  Eight.       “We will get you, CIA team, inshallah, we will bring you down.”

  Nine.       “I’m back with the people I was with before.”

  Ten.         “We go to a house, we fuck with some people, and we leave. This is just a longer flight.”

  Eleven.    “What really happened doesn’t matter if there is an official story behind it that 99.999% of the world would believe.”

  Twelve.    “It is going to be worse when my father dies. The world is going to be very, very nasty … it will be a disaster.”

  Thirteen.  “It will be just the end of the beginning rather than the beginning of the end.”

  Acknowledgments

  Brief Biographies of Major Characters

  Bibliography

  Notes

  Index

  Note on the Authors

  Preface

  Eighteen years into an epoch of Islamist terror that began with horrific attacks on U.S. embassies in East Africa in 1998, few books have told the story of Al Qaeda from the inside.

  Part of this is due to difficulty. Getting into any volatile, paranoiac outfit, one that executes outsiders as spies or lures reporters to meetings that become kidnappings—is hair-raising. Instead, we have had gripping tales of those in the West and the Gulf states who have hunted Al Qaeda. The prism through which we see this bloody era has become a police procedural—pathological killers triangulated by deep-in-the-weeds analysts using sources procured by intelligence officers out in the field, parrying with American special agents for interrogation rights.

  However, there is another reason why apart from the great volumes that chart the road to 9/11 there has been no history of these times told by the other side, and that is an extraordinary act of control by Western governments. To find an equivalent, one would have to go all the way back to the 1980s and the actions of the British government in its dealings with the Irish Republican Army, when jury trials were suspended, Catholics were interned, and the voice of Sinn Féin leader Gerry Adams was banned on TV and replaced with that of an actor (while secretly Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s emissary negotiated with the IRA).

  After 9/11, the Bush administration incarcerated, en masse, as many as 779 suspected enemy combatants in Guantánamo military prison in Cuba. Even now that the number has been whittled down to 41 at the time of press, the prison still costs half a billion dollars a year to run. Only five men accused of being directly involved in the planning or execution of 9/11 have been put on trial, and their hearings drag on at a snail’s pace.

  In August 2016, Abu Zubaydah, who the Bush administration claimed was Number Three in Al Qaeda but who the Obama administration concluded had never been a formal member of the outfit, appeared before a Guantánamo review board, the first time he had been seen publicly in almost fifteen years. He had been rendered to Thailand in 2002; waterboarded eighty-three times; confined in a coffin-shaped box and a smaller one resembling a dog kennel; kept awake for days, frozen, naked, shackled, and beaten; and spirited away to several more CIA black sites before landing in Guantánamo in 2006. Even now, observers of the review board hearing were not allowed to listen to his voice. Instead, a Pentagon-appointed “personal representative”—Gitmo-speak for a uniformed U.S. soldier—read out his words.

  Of the other prisoners who remain in Cuba, we have heard little or nothing. Meanwhile, on the outside, Al Qaeda leaders are mostly dead, in hiding, or compelled to be silent by the Arab, Asian, and African governments that took them in.

  What we do have, courtesy of the U.S. government, is a cherry-picked history. In 2012, a sample of Al Qaeda’s letters and communiqués was released to academics from the Combating Terrorism Center at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. They were previewed in a powerful Washington Post opinion piece by David Ignatius, “Osama bin Laden, a Lion in Winter,” and suggested that fractious Al Qaeda was as finished as its newly dead emir. Also put into the public domain were well-chosen images showing Osama, graying and diminished, watching his TV set or fudging his words in outtakes from videoed speeches. Unnamed Defense officials claimed that he had become delusional and impotent, and that his organization was defunct. To further undercut Al Qaeda’s well-crafted image of a pious Sheikh who saw himself as a ghazi, or holy warrior, rumors were started about his alleged pornography collection.

  The same year, the Obama administration backed Zero Dark Thirty—an overt wedding of the White House to Hollywood, where the CIA, Pentagon, and West Wing facilitated a thrilling cinematic account of the sleuthing that led to the raid on Abbottabad. The impact of the photographs, documents, and this film was to suggest that a president, Obama, canvassing for his second term in the White House, had beaten an old enemy, Al Qaeda, that was so pathological that U.S. interrogators had been required to deploy pitiless means to crack it. The killing of Osama bin Laden was a major factor in Obama’s reelection.

  But Zero Dark Thirty, nominated for five Academy Awards, was materially wrong in many ways, perhaps none more important than its claim that torture uneart
hed vital knowledge leading to Osama’s capture. In truth, the real trail had been pieced together through dogged detective work, good luck, and well-crafted interrogations conducted well before the beatings and mock executions.

  While falsehoods were advanced, behind the scenes the Pentagon and White House aggressively pursued those who broke real stories. In August 2016, as Abu Zubaydah rose in silence from his cell in Guantánamo, former U.S. Navy SEAL Matthew Bissonnette, who wrote a no-holds-barred account of the real Abbottabad raid called No Easy Day, was compelled by a Federal Court to pay back $6.8 million in royalties and speaking fees. He was also made to apologize for failing to clear his disclosures with the Pentagon, even as the Senate Intelligence Committee lashed out at Zero Dark Thirty for being “grossly inaccurate and misleading.”

  There were three more selective releases of documents by the Defense Department, in 2015, 2016, and 2017, as well as a list of books that Osama was reading. The declassified paperwork represented about 1 percent of the million-plus-document trove recovered from Abbottabad, but its appearance came as another large cache of enemy documents, including records of Saddam Hussein’s high command in Iraq and Al Qaeda material from Afghanistan, vanished. The Conflict Records Research Center at the National Defense University in Washington, D.C.—that was, according to the New York Times, a resource like no other to “provide insights about inner workings of United States foes”—was being shuttered. The Pentagon, whose budget request for 2016 was $600 billion, could not afford the $1 million needed to keep it open.

  All of which made it more essential than ever to get behind the history that was being told. We need more detail and not less. We require more nuance and understanding if we are to ever tamp down a bloody conflict that threatens the globe. And it is from this place—a desire for a contemporary, complex, untidy, knotted, verbal history, where no one is regular or consistent, and where allies are murderously betraying their friends, in which good men make poor choices, and switch sides, and wives become double agents—that this book begins.

  The idea began to coalesce after a last-minute meeting on a dark Islamabad night in February 2012 with Zakariya al-Sadeh, a Yemeni student, pro-democracy campaigner, and brother of Amal bin Laden, Osama’s youngest wife. At the time Zakariya was trying to free his sister from the legal limbo that Pakistan’s intelligence service, the ISI, had slung her into, having captured her at Abbottabad after U.S. SEAL Team Six flew off with her dead husband’s body and his letters.

  At that meeting, everyone was nervous. Zakariya was frightened of worsening his sister’s predicament by being caught with Western journalists, and we were worried about being glimpsed with him, as we were in the middle of complex negotiations with the Pakistan Army on another delicate project. The memory of the Abbottabad raid was still raw and remained incredibly sensitive in-country. But that tense discussion with Zakariya led to nervy conversations with many others that resulted eventually (after trust being won) in meetings with Osama’s family, friends, mentors, companions, factotums, security chiefs, and religious and media advisers.

  We traveled to wherever a meeting could be brokered—from Mauritania to Yemen, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, the Emirates, Kuwait, the United States, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and back home to London. Gradually, something unique came into focus—a story told about Al Qaeda by Al Qaeda men and women with nothing more to lose but lots to prove. They, too, had letters, e-mails, text messages and chat transcripts, videos and photo albums that corroborated their claims.

  Al Qaeda shura (leadership council) members revealed the schism that opened up when 9/11 was first plotted, describing how they rejected the plan while Osama and Khalid Shaikh Mohammad (who was not in Al Qaeda) pressed on in secret. They described how they had all been astonished on the day the Twin Towers fell, excited at Al Qaeda having achieved something so staggeringly shocking, as well as being a little panicked by the knowledge that they had no choice but to back the operation.

  These fighters, religious thinkers, friends, and family members recalled how as war came to Afghanistan, they rumbled along the desert plains of Jalalabad with Osama’s terrified family, and watched tracer fire light up the night sky from a redoubt they called the Star Wars camp. As the United States struck back, they feared capture and were daunted by the way in which they had been condemned to a life on the run, their lives subordinated into a mission most of them had never chosen. But there was no way back.

  Some sources took us along the rat runs to the Afghanistan-Pakistan border as Osama’s family, friends, and advisers fled and Kandahar and Kabul fell, eviscerating the Taliban dream of an Islamic homeland. Talking to homecoming British forces stationed in Helmand Province, we heard firsthand the impact of a close-quarter campaign: veterans shattered and broken, mentally and physically. The same happened with Al Qaeda’s force, bombed into the dust while those who did escape told how and why they were guided and nourished by Pakistan-based jihad fronts. Gradually they coalesced again in new locations—Pakistan and Iran—and began plotting new attacks.

  Daniel Pearl’s killing and the Bali bombings of 2002, the Riyadh compound bombings of 2003, the Madrid train bombings of 2004, the London public transport attacks of July 2005, and the Amman hotel bombing in 2005, the list goes on—exploding tankers, suicide bombers in mosques, nightclubs, and universities in Pakistan, Syria, Turkey, and Iraq, schools strafed with automatic fire—individual acts of cruelty have become all-too familiar. But here they were described from the other side, the plotter and bomber who fueled a war that could not be stopped, as well as the victims—men and women who also saw the aerial war from the ground up, the sound of drones swarming like wasps.

  They detailed the secret cease-fire deals fielded by the masters of espionage in Pakistan, spies who shielded Al Qaeda leaders as they became greedy for U.S. reward money. And all the while, Osama’s closest family was battered by the ebb and flow of war. Here came news of one son’s death, Saad bin Laden, a boy groomed by Osama and killed accidentally. Then the revelation of a parallel world in distant Iran known as the Tourist Complex, where many bin Laden family members, much of Al Qaeda’s original military leadership and most of its shura had become caught up in a nerve-jangling real-life game of Risk. But in Washington, where politics required wars to be endless, the Bush administration stepped away from making a deal that might have lanced the boil.

  One of Osama’s long-lost wives would materialize, even as those keeping watch in Abbottabad succumbed to chronic depression and battled cancer. The bin Laden family could not stop growing, and eventually eroded the generosity of its guardians, who slapped the world’s most wanted man with an eviction notice. Requiring a new hideout, fearing betrayal by his most beloved spouse—who might be a double agent or a dupe, with her dental fillings swapped out for Iranian tracking devices—and only weeks away from SEAL Team Six storming Abbottabad, Osama cut what he regarded as a great deal. He renegotiated an agreement to stay put in Abbottabad, rather than having to seek a new bolt-hole elsewhere.

  Outside, the Black Hawks were coming and another of Osama’s sons, Hamzah, the real heir apparent to Al Qaeda, arrived, only to be shooed away by his fearful father. Inside, Osama fired off letters and paced, directing family and friends, frantically plotting, exhorting his outfit to work until it burst, like the chief mechanic in the engine room of the Titanic.

  The Exile dives deep inside this world, recounting for the first time the stories of Al Qaeda’s leaders, gunmen, planners, and their spiritual guides, fighters made outlaws by their brutal acts. Through them, we meet their wives and children, who as a result of their affiliations and blood—marriages and births—also became fugitives.

  The piecing together of their stories begins high in the peaks above Khost, inside a cave where Osama bin Laden, swaddled in blankets, sits impatiently, confronted by the galling news that his mobile satellite TV set is malfunctioning, while thousands of miles away the long-awaited Planes Operation is about to commence.

  CHAPTER
ONE

  “Shit. I think we bit off more than we could chew.”

  —MOKHTAR TO HIS DEPUTIES ON SEPTEMBER 11, 20011

  September 11, 2001, noon, Khost, Afghanistan

  Settling down into a nest of shawls and bolsters, fortified by sweetened tea, Osama bin Laden was anxious and excited, watching as a scrawny Yemeni bodyguard, who also covered duties in Al Qaeda’s media office, ranged around the mouth of the cave balancing a large satellite dish, humming to himself.

  “It is very important we are able to watch the news today,” Osama insisted, directing the guard this way and that.2

  Installed up in the Sulaiman mountain range, high above the city of Khost, and accompanied by his teenage sons Othman and Mohammed, Osama had driven across the plains from Kandahar in his improvised media truck, loaded down with a satellite dish, a receiver, a small television set, laptops, and an old generator.3 In the last few minutes, a message had come through on the radio that Mohamed Atta, the lead hijacker, had passed security and was boarding his flight, American Airlines 11.4 Osama now intended to observe the “Planes Operation” unfolding from a position of complete safety.

  But wherever the bodyguard moved the dish, finding new ledges and handholds in the rock face, the mountains got in the way of the signal. Osama clicked his tongue in annoyance. Was it the heavy cloud cover? Or was his man just incompetent? It might have been the cabling, which he could see was poorly spliced. Whatever it was, there was no picture and it became obvious to everyone that they were going to have to listen to the radio, while the rest of the world watched.

  Osama’s military chief, Abu Hafs the Commander, had given a hint of the plan to a trusted Al Jazeera journalist in Kandahar a few months earlier during the wedding of his daughter, Khadija, to Osama’s son Mohammed.5 “The United States is going to be forced to invade Afghanistan soon,” the reporter was warned as the Commander chewed on a knuckle of roasted goat. “And we are preparing for that. We want them to come.”