The Exile

by Adrian Levy

  Marrying into the right tribe would provide a ready-made constituency to absorb the move and provide protection. But since Osama could not travel, he needed an emissary to find the right girl. In early 2000, he dispatched a Yemeni cleric working in the Kabul office, a holy man who started looking in his own hometown, the historic Yemeni city of Ibb. His instructions were to say that he acted for a wealthy Saudi businessman, whose family originated from Hadraumat, in eastern Yemen, where Osama’s father had been born.52

  In a land of few opportunities, many families were initially hooked by this tale. However, as they interrogated the intermediary and he refused to divulge Osama’s identity, several backed off. Dejected, he called Kandahar, which came up with a new suggestion. A brother at Tarnak Qila had married the daughter of an unemployed Yemeni civil servant who supposedly had many more daughters still unwed.53 The family was by no means ideal, the cleric was told. The girls were estranged from their father and living with their mother and uncle in Ibb. They were poor, staying in a home with no television, and were likely to agree if a decent dowry was put on the table.

  When he visited, the cleric decided to get the identity of the groom out in the open. No one balked, and he was shown a photo of the teenager: Amal. “The choice is yours,” said her uncle, who said later that he was not aware Osama “was wanted by the Americans” for the 1998 bombings of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.54 The bad news was that the girl was only seventeen, had dropped out of school, and sported a mop of short, unveiled black hair that made her look like an ingénue and not a minor wife. But Osama was in a hurry.

  Coming from such reduced circumstances, the uncle told the cleric, it would be an honor for her to marry Osama. When Amal, who apparently knew more about Osama than her uncle did, told her mother that she “wanted to go down in history” by marrying such an important figure in the world of jihad, her photograph was dispatched to Kandahar.

  While they waited for Osama’s reply, some of Amal’s better-read siblings tried to talk her out of it. Her younger brother Zakariya, a student activist, said she was “crazy.” Osama had been married at least five times already, including to one woman whose name had been erased from the bin Laden family history and who had lasted only three days. What would it be like joining such a harem as wife number four, a position that was akin to being the family servant?

  Amal spent several days deliberating with her older sister Farah, who was married to an Al Qaeda commander. “This is destiny from God,” she said, playing the odds but needing something to believe in. Osama’s offer was better than any other she was likely to receive, and his high-risk lifestyle meant that the marriage was likely to be a short one. “I accept,” she decided. Now, all there was left to do was to fix a dowry.

  June 2000, Kandahar

  Osama called in his Yemeni security chief, Nasser al-Bahri, a pockmarked opportunist from Sana’a. His kunya, Abu Jandal, meant “Father of Death” and amused the Sheikh to no end. Since the time of the 1998 embassy attacks, Abu Jandal had proudly carried around two bullets. “With one,” he pledged to Osama, “I will kill you if we are captured.” There was no need to ask about the second. The Father of Death could be seen around the camp polishing the rounds daily, like a chauffeur cleaning his ride.

  That summer he braced himself, half expecting to be sent on a suicide mission as Osama opened a cashbox and counted out $5,000. It amazed Abu Jandal that so few notes could create mayhem somewhere in the world. Where was he being sent? And would he have time to say his good-byes?

  Ignoring his questions, Osama instructed his bodyguard to travel to Sana’a with his wife, Tayez, and check into the Al Jazeera Hotel.55

  A few mornings later, Abu Jandal was sitting in the lobby waiting nervously for his connect. When the man arrived and took Abu Jandal for juice in a crowded café, asking, “Have you brought the dowry?” the visitor’s face fell.

  Was this really the mission he had been entrusted with? Domestic tomfoolery. He shook his head in amazement. He was not going to die today.

  For the next week, he paid the bills as Amal’s family enthusiastically shopped for bridal gowns and gold wedding jewelry. Even her father turned up to claim a share of the sudden windfall. After a modest engagement party at the Al Jazeera, Abu Jandal arranged for the bride to be flown to Karachi on a three-month Pakistani visa that stated she was traveling for medical treatment.56 She would be chaperoned by her sister Farah and by Abu Jandal’s wife, Tayez.

  Was the teenager apprehensive, Tayez wondered? If it had been her, knowing what lay in wait in Osama’s compound, she would have been terrified.57

  During the last parched sixty-mile push through the Kandahar desert, Amal, now covered with the requisite black abaya (robe) and niqab (face veil), reached out for Farah as the cab swayed. At her first sight of Tarnak Qila, tears pricked her eyes. For a girl accustomed to the cooled stone cloisters of ancient Ibb, the fort seemed to be little more than a ruin.

  She was shown into a drab hut with bolsters and bedrolls lining the walls. A group of Arab women joined her and they silently ate plates of rice and cold mutton. Afterward, she was left alone to wash and wait.

  She heard men muttering and then gunfire, and she realized that she was now married. After dark, a tall, lean figure entered, dressed in a white robe. He was far more handsome than she had imagined.

  The next morning, when she woke, he was gone, but staring down at her from the window were two glowering female faces.

  Khairiah and Seham could not believe what Osama had done: insulting them by marrying a girl who was younger than many of his children. Bringing a teenage bride into the fold broke with the pattern of austerity and moderation, they argued. Khairiah said Osama was suffering from a midlife crisis. A man who had once railed against the sleaziness of President Bill Clinton’s indiscretions with Monica Lewinsky, and who described polygamy as like “riding a bicycle, fast but a little unstable,” was having sex with a child.58

  After the wedding, Amal’s sister Farah returned to Yemen and Osama left the compound for a round of meetings in Kandahar and Kabul. The wives turned their backs on the new bride.59 It hit Najwa hardest, but she was too exhausted to complain. The previous year she had given birth to her eleventh child, a girl called Nour, and she was still weak, her body unable to recover after so many births.

  Amal, who had no children to fill her time, felt the snub keenly. She longed for her siblings and the political ramblings of her lazy, khat-chewing uncle. Her stomach, filled with gritty rice, ached for grilled fish, salad, and honeycomb bread. She missed the aromatic smell of the southern mountains, and her friends. In the quiet hours before dawn prayer, she traced with her finger lines of the Koran given by her mother.60

  Abu Jandal’s wife, Tayez, was subjected to the wrath of the harem. But unlike Amal, who had no way out of Kandahar, Tayez decided not to take it. She was accused by Khairiah and Seham of having failed to warn them about Osama’s intention to marry a teenager; they harangued Tayez until she told her husband she was leaving.

  Astounded, he ran to the Sheikh, who, embarrassed by the cattiness of his family, gave his security chief permission to relocate to Sana’a, dressing it up as a “mission.” Abu Jandal was to shore up support among Yemeni tribal leaders, sheikhs, and imams in preparation for Al Qaeda’s relocation there. There could be no scandal and so the Father of Death was to take his entire family—including his brother-in-law, who worked for Osama as a mechanic and driver.61

  Unaccustomed to a sensitive political task, Abu Jandal took to it like he did to war. Over the following months, he dragged his brother-in-law across Yemen, armed with videos of their Sheikh, holding public meetings to describe Al Qaeda’s training camps, while Tayez quietly set up home in Sana’a. Eventually, Yemeni intelligence came for Abu Jandal, arresting him at his home on suspicion that he had helped facilitate the USS Cole attack.62 His brother-in-law, who was on hajj (pilgrimage to Mecca) with his wife at the time, received a tip-off and hotfooted it b
ack to Afghanistan.

  August 2001, Kandahar

  Just a few weeks before 9/11, Osama celebrated the birth of his first child with Amal, a daughter called Safiyah.

  When Amal’s unemployed father learned the news through his ex-wife, he sensed an opportunity to cash in and flew to Pakistan. “I want to make sure Amal is happy in her new life,” he told relatives, who, knowing him better, wondered how much he intended to ask for.63

  After waiting in Islamabad for twenty days, he crossed the border and was driven for seven hours until he reached a large tent guarded by the mujahideen. Inside was an opening to an underground passage, which led to a clearing and another vehicle that drove him to a cave where Osama greeted him with a twenty-one-gun salute. Over plates of meat cooked on preheated stones in the Yemeni style, Osama bragged about how many attempts Arab and U.S. intelligence had made on his life since becoming a jihadist. “I was injured … and a lot of people were killed,” he said. “But I was spared from death because God wished it.”

  Amal’s father, a canny operator, nodded appreciatively, but what he saw was a disillusioned man, deserted by many of his advisers.64 When Osama began to talk of “a big event that will occur in the world,” and described a “future strike” that would herald chaos, Amal’s father found himself worrying. What would happen to his daughter and granddaughter? Making his excuses, he found Amal. Come home, he pleaded. Osama was unhinged. “I will be your father once again.”

  Amal shook her head. “It’s true that my life is now moving between caves in Afghanistan, but I’m comfortable with Osama,” she told him. Her husband was a “noble man” who treated her well.

  Another member of the family party overheard Osama talking to Amal later that night. He had picked up the panic in his wife’s family. She had a choice: “Stay with me or flee to Yemen, I will not keep you.”

  Amal stared up at him. “I want to be martyred with you, and I won’t leave as long as you’re alive,” she said.

  Her father departed the same evening, worried that he had consigned his daughter and granddaughter to a squalid life or even an early death. But more riling, all he had to show for the trip were bags of Saudi dates and olives from Osama’s farms near Tora Bora. He discarded them en route to the Pakistan border.

  September 14, 2001, Star Wars Camp, Jalalabad, Afghanistan

  A cold, clear night crept over them, and Khairiah and Seham huddled together under a blanket, with a Kalashnikov and a stash of grenades.

  Amal remained on her own with her baby daughter, Safiyah, staring up at stars.

  Without any adult male relatives to protect them, only Al Qaeda guards who could not enter the same room as them, they had been instructed to blow themselves up if the situation became critical. Death was preferable to Americans, said Khairiah. As always, Seham went along with her.

  Amal shuddered. She had no intention of dying.

  September 14, 2001, Washington, D.C.

  General Mahmud Ahmed shifted nervously in his seat as he willed the plane to take off. After three long days trapped in Washington and New York, the ISI director was at last on his way home to Pakistan: the sole passenger on a CIA-requisitioned flight. His ordeal had begun on the morning of September 12 when he had gone to offer condolences to U.S. deputy secretary of state Richard Armitage, only to be greeted by a furious fifteen-minute fusillade. “You are either with us or against us,” Armitage had hectored. War in Afghanistan was coming and if Pakistan did not offer “unqualified support,” it would “be bombed back to the Stone Age.”65

  In Karachi, Pervez Musharraf was pulled out of a meeting to take a call from Secretary of State Colin Powell. “You are either with us or against us,” Powell said, aping Armitage’s words although using a more conciliatory tone. Over the next forty-eight hours, as 5,600 people were listed as dead or missing on the East Coast, the details of what America wanted were reinforced by Wendy Chamberlin, the U.S. ambassador to Pakistan.

  The demands made Musharraf’s head spin. Selective Pakistani border posts and even some frontier bases had to be opened up to U.S. forces. Islamabad had to cut diplomatic ties with the Taliban. There could be no “no-go” areas.

  These are just words, Musharraf reasoned, and language is ambiguous.66 There were ways through every bottleneck. American units and intelligence operatives could be allowed to embed at key locations. The United States would deny it and so would he. Musharraf could agree to clamp down on anti-U.S. demonstrations, knowing that this promise would be impossible to enforce, since raising a mob was a national pastime. He would allow the United States greater landing rights and overflights. That was something he could get away with as hardly anyone would see.

  What Musharraf did need was to find out what the Taliban knew and what they might say when confronted by the United States.

  Spy chief General Mahmud Ahmed landed on the afternoon of September 15 and was ordered to debrief Mullah Omar at once. But, as he headed for the Aabpara ISI headquarters, he received some alarming reports. American Predator drones were already in the skies over the Pakistan–Afghan border and Kandahar. Hiding anything now would require more skill and the use of deniable, remote proxies, he thought.

  Since 1979, Pakistan had devolved sensitive domestic operations and those that targeted India to ISI-trained but independent jihad outfits, such as Lashkar-e-Taiba (the Army of the Pure), that recruited in dusty towns across the Punjab underpinned by poverty and hereditary malice. Another was Jaish-e-Mohammed, run by a plump Punjabi cleric named Masood Azhar, whose fighters were sporadically called on to unleash well-appointed violence in complex operations in Indian Kashmir.

  There were so many splinter groups and there was so much politicking among them that General Ahmed found it hard to keep tabs on them all, and he usually left it to the retired ISI generals who controlled the ISI’s S-Wing to discreetly maintain the network on his behalf.67

  Foremost among these generals was Hamid Gul, a notorious attack dog who had headed the ISI during the Afghan jihad and encouraged a description of himself as Father of the Taliban. Gul’s secret work, Ahmed noted, had to continue.

  The second message the spy chief received was more worrying: Robert Grenier was already conducting talks with the Taliban. The CIA station chief had beaten the ISI to a meeting.

  The general made some calls. As soon as Grenier left, his men would find out what had been said. He then rang Musharraf. “I’ve been thinking about it, sir. Let the U.S. do its own dirty work. Its enemies are our friends,” he said, advising his chief to concede nothing, as America was weaker now than it had been at any point since Pearl Harbor.

  Musharraf was incensed by his spymaster’s shortsightedness. “The Taliban is not worth committing suicide over,” he snapped, disconnecting the call, hoping that this one was not being listened to.68

  On the morning of September 16, General Ahmed reluctantly received the CIA station chief at Aabpara. According to protocol, they should have met one-on-one in his first-floor office, but Grenier was taken to a conference room where a phalanx of Pakistani spooks awaited him.

  Ahmed said he had analyzed the available evidence: there wasn’t enough to pin 9/11 on Al Qaeda.

  Grenier frowned.

  Ahmed called forward the director general for analysis, General Javed Alam Khan, presenting him as his newly appointed “counterterrorism tsar.” Grenier’s old sparring partner leaned over and whispered: “More like a Rasputin.”69 He would have full authority to do whatever was required to demonstrate Pakistan’s solidarity with the United States, Ahmed said with a forced smile.

  The Taliban, he continued, would require sensitive handling. “After all, they are the legitimate government over there.” But it was a mistake to think that Pakistan could control them, he continued. Everyone knew the story about a recent cross-border football match for which the Pakistani team had turned up in Kandahar wearing shorts. The Taliban had blackened the players’ faces with charcoal, shaved their heads, and lashed them to donkey
s, facing the men backward and parading them through the streets like charred mummers. “Afghanistan is a place where you had to barter every step of the way.”

  Grenier’s turn came. He stood and gave “an arm-waving, blow-by-blow account” of his meeting with the Taliban, who, he felt, were reasonably confident they would be able to persuade Mullah Omar to find a solution to “the Osama bin Laden problem.”

  General Ahmed claimed to be “amazed.” The station chief had made “a huge breakthrough,” he said. He shook his head in admiration. “These are exploitable concessions,” he concluded, announcing that he was due to meet Mullah Omar personally, knowing that even Grenier could not get an audience with a man who declined to share a room with non-Muslims.

  As soon as he left the meeting, Ahmed accelerated his schedule. The next day he set off for Kandahar, where he was welcomed at Mullah Omar’s office by Mahfouz Ibn El Waleed, Osama’s former spiritual guide who was now a senior Taliban adviser. The Mauritanian took notes as the ISI chief dispensed advice. According to Mahfouz, spy chief Ahmed told Mullah Omar he should “never hand over Sheikh Osama,” and to protect him “at any cost.”70

  Mullah Omar said nothing.

  “Even if the Sheikh is handed over,” continued Ahmed, according to Mahfouz, “the Americans will still invade, just as the British did more than a hundred years before.”

  Mullah Omar spoke his response so quietly that everyone else in the room found themselves staring at his lips trying to unlock the words. The Islamic emirate was dealing with things in a transparent way, he whispered. He had entrusted “the case of Sheikh Osama” to a team of scholars who would arbitrate. But in fact, the matter had already been decided—thanks to a preemptive strike by Osama.