by Adrian Levy
The marriage had taken place at Tarnak Qila, an ancient fort in the desert southwest of Kandahar airport that Al Qaeda had made its field headquarters, the outfit’s second most important base after Osama’s cherished Tora Bora cave complex in the far northeast of the country.
The celebrations had been the most lavish of several weddings that Osama had fixed over the past year to ensure that all his children of marriageable age were wed to soldiers, thinkers, and funders before the Planes Operation unfolded. Al Qaeda needed all the support it could get in the months ahead, he supposed, and matchmaking with his children gave the outfit an economic and strategic depth. There was another reason for the rush. For a Gulf Arab, a father facing possible death was compelled to ensure his offspring’s future. If Osama were martyred in the coming war, leaving his children without betrothals, he would forfeit his reward in the afterlife.
By lunchtime, his blood sugar level was dropping. This was supposed to be his greatest moment and yet he was unsettled. There had been weeks of upheavals within Al Qaeda, a grueling falling-out with Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar, which was ongoing, and profound family discord.
Until recently Osama had lived with four wives and more than a dozen children and grandchildren at Tarnak Qila. The family was a font of pride that spoke of his virility, and demonstrated his power. But his fourth son, Omar, and his senior wife, Najwa, had both walked out on him—unexpected acts of desertion that had sent him into a spiral of rage.
Many Al Qaeda brothers had witnessed the screaming rows he had had with Omar, a teenager who Osama had been training as his heir, and who bore a striking resemblance to his father. But Omar had never shared his father’s obsession with war. “I want to leave this place, I must leave this place,” the teen had sobbed, after he learned of the coming Planes Operation. Please could his father stop?
Osama, who could not tolerate being challenged, had shouted back: “Omar, I will fight until my dying day! … I will never stop this jihad!”
Realizing that his father was beyond reach, Omar went to his mother, Najwa, pleading for her to leave with him. “Please leave mother and come back to real life with me.” But timid, downtrodden Najwa, who had never disobeyed her husband, refused and so Omar had slipped away alone.6 “[My father’s] violent path had separated us forever,” he later recalled.7
The remaining bin Laden boys were more robust. Othman, who Omar had regarded as brutish, stepped into the breach, attempting to impress his father with a public pledge: “Jihad is in my mind, heart and blood veins. No fear, nor intimidation can ever take that feeling out of my mind and body.”8
At the end of August 2001, Najwa had had a change of heart, and with Omar’s words playing on her mind, she had asked to leave, an unexpected act of rebellion from a woman who had loyally stuck by her husband’s side for twenty-six years and given him eleven children.
Najwa had never intended to be a jihad bride. Glamorous and beautiful, she was a Ghanem, one of the oldest families in Syria, and she had grown up in the cosmopolitan seaside resort of Latakia, where women wore bikinis. Arriving as Osama’s young wife in Jeddah in 1974 she had reluctantly donned a chador and niqab. She consented when he also insisted that she wear black socks and gloves, but underneath the black folds she still wore lipstick and designer clothes. Nevertheless, over the years, his exacting demands dragged her down. His brothers’ wives recalled her being downcast, drab, and permanently pregnant. “Najwah [sic] seemed almost completely invisible,” recalled Carmen bin Laden, who was once married to Osama’s brother Yeslam.9
Even so, Najwa could never have predicted that she would end up in a shack in Kandahar, wearing an Afghan burqa, cooking on a “one-eyed camping burner” and plugging the bullet holes in her hut with raw wool to keep out snakes, scorpions, and the bitter wind. “I never stopped praying that everything in the world would be peaceful,” she said later, “and that our lives might return to normal.”10
The Planes Operation and her husband’s recent decision to marry yet again, this time to a Yemeni teenager, was what had made up Najwa’s mind to leave. “Osama, can I go to Syria?” she asked in the last week of August 2001. She knew whatever was coming was imminent and felt a duty to save those children not yet pledged to Al Qaeda.
Osama’s face fell. “Are you sure, Najwa?” he asked, incredulous.
“Yes,” she said falteringly. “I need to go.”
They had made their final farewells on the morning of September 9. “I will never divorce you, Najwa,” he told her earnestly. “Even if you hear I have divorced you, know that it cannot be true.”
Najwa slid a ring from her finger and pressed it into his hand.
Osama took it. “But these,” he said, his voice changing register, and pointing to their eleven-year-old daughter Iman and nine-year-old son Ladin, “belong with their father. You can only take the babies.”
Najwa’s eyes filled with tears as Osama pushed the older children away. She knew that under Saudi law she had no rights to keep them and that in Afghanistan there was virtually no law protecting women at all.
She was helped into a pickup with her youngest two daughters—Rukaiya, three, and Nour, one. Her disabled adult son, Abdul Rahman, who could not function without her and so was also leaving, sat up front next to moody Othman, the family bully. He would escort his mother to the Pakistan border and then return to his father’s side.
As they drove away, Najwa turned to see her family enveloped in the dust. “My mother’s heart broke into little pieces watching the silhouettes of my little children fade into the distance,” she said later.11 She did not expect to ever see them again.
Back in the cave above Khost, Osama picked up a VHF walkie-talkie and sent a brief message. Someone had to find his spiritual adviser, a Mauritanian scholar called Mahfouz Ibn El Waleed. He should have been here, supporting Osama and sitting beside him sipping tea. But the Mauritanian had chosen to remain in Kandahar.
He and Osama were no longer talking after he had voted against the Planes Operation, leading a revolt and taking more than half of Al Qaeda’s ruling shura with him. A few weeks back, the Mauritanian had gone further and quit Al Qaeda altogether—a move that Osama had not seen coming and subsequently had tried to hush up as it threatened to split the outfit irreconcilably.
Today, September 11, 2001, and with the countdown to the attacks ticking, Osama knew what he wanted to do. Najwa and Omar might have been beyond his control, but he could still rub the Mauritanian’s nose in the dust.
September 11, 2001, 3 P.M., Kandahar, Afghanistan
Down on the plains, the Mauritanian was working in the Taliban media center, assembling the latest edition of Islamic Emirate magazine, when Osama’s messenger poked his head around the door. The cleric looked up. “Yes?” he asked, frustrated, knowing who the man served.
“The Sheikh says you should listen out for some joyous news,” the messenger said, scuttling away.12
Disturbed and fully understanding what this meant, the Mauritanian packed up his papers, made an excuse to the Taliban brothers, and returned home to dig out his old Sony radio. Had it already started? He could not bear to be with the Talibs when the Planes Operation—which none of them had been consulted about and which he had been unable to stop—was reported around the world.
For ten years the Mauritanian had been at Osama’s side, becoming a pivotal, highly respected figure on Al Qaeda’s shura and chairman of the outfit’s influential sharia (legal) committee. Osama relied on him to construct the religious justification for Al Qaeda operations and anchor them in Koranic values. The Mauritanian would be asked whether a particular broadside could be defended. And if so, how? His was not a crowded field. Even though Al Qaeda was seen in the West through an Islamist prism and was commonly portrayed as a ferocious clerical turbine, the Mauritanian was the sole member of the leadership to have had any genuine religious training. And for that reason he commanded Osama’s utmost respect.
For years, he had succe
ssfully finessed his Sheikh’s wilder plans, acting as his censor, confessor, counselor, voice, and, on more than one occasion, his accountant cum investment consultant. He understood Osama’s weaknesses: vanity, single-mindedness, a fierce anger quick to spark, and a quixotic vision that was virtually impossible to temper with facts.
When he wasn’t at his Sheikh’s side, he was in Kandahar city, acting as liaison to the Taliban’s Mullah Omar or running the House of the Pomegranates, a finishing school where Al Qaeda and Taliban recruits delved deeper into the cultural and religious foundations of jihad.13 Here, war-weary veterans came to relearn Koranic teachings. Everyone was encouraged to write poetry. This was as much about betterment, instilling discipline, and learning as it was about indoctrination.
The Mauritanian had always been culturally minded. He had won prizes for his odes when growing up in the low-rise dustbowl of Nouakchott, the Mauritanian capital.14 Over the years, he had ghost-written most of Osama’s speeches, religious judgments, and press releases, even authoring a lengthy and controversial tirade excoriating King Fahd of Saudi Arabia for allowing U.S. troops into the holy land—a correspondence that had cost Osama his Saudi citizenship.
The Mauritanian’s duties also reached beyond the Sheikh to his sons, helping them memorize the Koran and understand Islamic jurisprudence, acting as their mentor and counselor. His wife and daughters did the same for Osama’s wives and girls.
The Mauritanian could, on occasion, play a strategic hand, as he did after Osama’s first great international broadside—the August 1998 attacks on U.S. embassies in Nairobi and Dar-es-Salaam, which killed 224 and catapulted Al Qaeda into the spotlight. Afterward, he had helped log and direct the money and recruits that poured in, particularly from donors in the Gulf states.
Toward the end of 1998, while investigating the atrocities, the CIA identified the Mauritanian while hunting down Osama’s assets. Suspecting that he had arranged finances for the embassy operations, they tracked him to a hotel in Khartoum, Sudan, but missed him by minutes as he fled out of a kitchen door. Subsequently, he vocally criticized the East Africa attacks for having cost the lives of so many civilians.
When the Mauritanian first picked up rumors about the Planes Operation in 1999, he was infuriated. From what he could discern, many innocent people would be killed, and he sought out the Sheikh to warn him that it was against Islam. Al Qaeda should concentrate its energies on attacking Israel. This operation would also drive a coach and horses through the Taliban’s wishes. Mullah Omar had offered Al Qaeda sanctuary when it had none, asking only that Osama refrain from plotting any attacks against America while on Afghan soil. “Our donkey is in the mud,” the Taliban’s emir had explained, using a Kandahari expression to suggest that his movement was far from full strength. They needed time to achieve legitimacy, to raise funds, recruit, and win international backing.15 Osama had responded disrespectfully, telling Mullah Omar that “jihad against America is an individual duty and it cannot be given up.” If the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan was unable to protect him, then he would leave with the women and children and “go for jihad in God’s name.”
A second Al Qaeda spectacular against the United States in October 2000—a bomb-laden skiff that had rammed into the side of the USS Cole, an American warship refueling in Aden harbor, Yemen, killing seventeen American sailors—had only made the situation worse.
From that moment on, the two leaders had been on a collision course: Osama, who encouraged his men to see him as a modern incarnation of the Prophet, railing against Mullah Omar, the self-styled Commander of the Faithful, who was frequently talked of as the Caliph of All True Islam.
September 11, 2001, 5:30 P.M., Kandahar
All afternoon, the Mauritanian remained stooped over the radio, skipping channels while his wife and children watched him nervously.
After sunset, the first report came in. A plane had hit a skyscraper in New York City. Then another.
Outside, in darkened Kandahar, a crescendoing cry traveled up and down the street, like a New Year’s countdown in Times Square. Then jabbering, laughing, and whooping as people began spilling out of their homes.
September 11, 2001, 6 P.M., Islamabad, Pakistan
Pakistani journalist Hamid Mir was at his office contemplating dinner when an agitated Pashtun visitor arrived at the gate.16 “I am here with a message from the Sheikh,” he whispered over the internal phone.
“Which sheikh?” Mir replied coolly. He knew plenty.
“The Sheikh with the plastic wristwatch,” the man replied.
“What are you talking about?” countered Mir, who was in no mood for riddles. Then, he recalled windswept Tarnak Qila and a meeting with Osama bin Laden. He had complimented that sheikh on his wristwatch that sang out prayer times, half-hoping to receive it as a gift.
Mir told the man to come inside.
“Put on the TV,” the visitor urged as he entered. “Look, look,” he said excitedly, pointing to footage of flames and black smoke pouring from the North Tower of the World Trade Center in New York City.
They both watched as a plane hit the South Tower, a fireball flaring. Stunned TV anchors tried to make sense of what they were witnessing, “Oh my goodness, there’s another one,” said one. “Now it’s obvious. This may not be an accident.”
The visitor put his hand in his pocket and pulled out a watch.
“A present from the Sheikh,” he said, handing it over.17
September 11, 2001, 7 P.M., Rawalpindi, Pakistan
General Javed Alam Khan, a barrel-chested spook in charge of analysis and foreign liaison at Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence directorate (ISI), was at home following reports of a plane crashing into the Pentagon. He rang the Pakistani embassy in Washington, D.C., even though the line was not secure. “What the hell’s going on?” he asked the ISI station chief. “Where’s the DG?”18
The Washington station chief sounded harried. The ISI director general was in the United States on an official visit, which was good or bad news—depending on whose office he was now in. It would fall to General Khan to brief him on how to handle the Americans.
Khan pulled out a Dunhill cigarette and pushed away his dinner. A pit bull with a locking jaw, he smoked more than he ate. His phone rang. “Sir.” The station chief’s tone said it all: “The DG’s attending a breakfast meeting on Capitol Hill discussing terrorism generated in Afghanistan!” Khan choked on a lungful of smoke.
Someone had to exfiltrate the phlegmatic chief before he did a disservice to the republic. General Mahmud Ahmed hated Americans and had a tendency to lash out when cornered.19 “Get him to a phone,” Khan rasped. “And can someone trace my brother-in-law?” He lived in Manhattan and was not answering his cell phone.
Khan crushed his cigarette, lit another, and reflected on how he was in a job he loathed, facing a shit-storm not of his making. He suspected that soon everyone who mattered would focus on trying to prove his agency’s complicity in the unfolding chaos.
A former tank commander, Khan had never sought out this plainclothes desk job, but he had been seconded to the ISI in 1999, and as a patriot, he lived to serve. Most of his family had worn uniforms: a father who served with the British Army in India, one brother in the navy, three in the air force, and five in the army—one of whom had been martyred in the bloodletting of 1971 in which East Pakistan had been torn away and become Bangladesh. The only fillip with this job was the intrigue that went with it and his cordial but combative relationship with his opposite number in the CIA, the forensically minded Islamabad station chief, Robert Grenier.
Short and lean, Grenier had been squeezing Khan for months about the Taliban and Al Qaeda, asking for capillary-level details about religious factions, warlords, and jihad leaders, demonstrating a level of knowledge about Pakistan that he doubted existed about America in the ISI station in D.C.20
Khan called for his staff car. He needed to get ahead of Grenier, and the good news was that his side had languages
and deep, unctuous connections. They sped along the highway linking army-dominated Rawalpindi to its twin city, the Pakistani capital, Islamabad. “Aabpara,” he hissed at the driver, naming the hulking gray spy complex that dominated the G-7/4 district.
As the car pulled up at ISI headquarters, Khan was greeted by a phalanx of senior officials “standing with their mouths open” like Venus flytraps waiting for a feeding.
“Shut those,” he shouted, “and use these.” He raised a dialing finger. Taking a long drag on his cigarette, he stomped inside.21
September 11, 2001, 7 P.M., Diplomatic Zone, Islamabad
Three and a half miles northeast, beyond the civic runway of Constitution Avenue, Robert Grenier was sitting in his fortress within a fortress watching footage of people jumping from the burning World Trade Center towers. At the U.S. embassy, a nest of buildings encircled with razor wire and surveillance cameras, the CIA station occupied its own warren, accessed through doors with coded locks.
Grenier was already focused on one man, the same one he had been tracking for the past two years, flooding bazaars and villages on the Afghan border with matchbooks printed with his picture and advertising a $5 million reward.
Although Grenier did not trust the ISI’s General Khan, he now desperately needed Pakistan’s help as all previous attempts to interdict Osama had been disastrous. One intervention attempted with the CIA’s blessing and that had gone disastrously wrong was to send Saudi Arabia’s intelligence chief to visit Mullah Omar shortly after Osama had issued his first fatwa against the West, announcing that “the killing of Americans and their allies, both civilians and military, is a duty for every Muslim.”
Arriving on a Boeing 747 belonging to the Saudi Arabian royal family, an extraordinary sight in Kandahar, where all international flights had long since stopped, Prince Turki al-Faisal had confronted the Taliban emir, Muslim to Muslim, demanding he hand over Osama and his family. Mullah Omar had reacted badly, sickened to see a prince of an Islamic state doing what he considered to be the bidding of the West.