by Adrian Levy
According to the Inspector General’s report: “Jessen saw a value in the hard takedown in order to make Rahman uncomfortable and experience a lack of control. Jessen recognized, however, that the technique was not approved and recommended to [redacted] that he obtain written approval for employing the technique.”
Jessen left Cobalt after preparing an interrogation plan for Rahman that stated: “It will be important to manage the [proposed interrogation] deprivations so as to allow [Rahman] adequate rest and nourishment so he remains coherent and capable of providing accurate information.”58
Noting that Dr. Jessen and Dr. Mitchell had left the site some days before Rahman died and that ten student interrogators still in training had taken over, the CIA Inspector General reported that Rahman had been found dead, naked and lying on his side, with his hands and feet shackled together and chained to a grate on the wall. His hips, shoulders, and wrists were all marked by abrasions.59
December 4, 2002, Detention Site Green, Thailand
Two weeks after Gul Rahman’s death, the CIA decided to “render” Abu Zubaydah to a new location after the Washington Post picked up rumors that he was in Thailand.60
On December 4, Zubaydah, who had by now lost his left eye, was dressed in an orange jumpsuit, with opaque goggles tightened around his face, a hood pulled down over his head, and his legs shackled and wrists cuffed.61 He was shoved into the back of a vehicle, where two guards forced him down in the footwell by placing their feet on his head.
Before he boarded the Gulfstream jet, the guards told him it would be a long journey. “They … took out my genital organ and held it and although I felt I was going to explode from controlling my urination it took me some time to start urinating and in fact it was like it was exploding from pressure. The pain was so strong I couldn’t help but screaming or moaning until I was done. They then undid my slacks and sat me down on the bucket; at this point I said: ‘no, there is no need’, although I really needed to do it, but!!! The wait was long after which they took us to the car and then the plane.”
Inside the plane, they conducted an anal cavity search. Then they tried to put him in a diaper, which he refused. “They chained us to the floor. And I started counting the hours that go very slowly when you want them to go fast and you find yourself begging the hours to go by fast. The plane stopped for a long period of time and then took off and I was destroyed and felt that was the end.”
Zubaydah’s journey concluded at the end of a snowy landing strip at Szymany in northern Poland. The plane in which he arrived was screened off from the airport control tower before he and another prisoner were led out and bundled onto Polish military vehicles. From Szymany, the prisoners were taken to the village of Stare Kiejkuty, an SS outpost during World War Two and now a Polish intelligence training base.62 It had been co-opted as the CIA’s new Detention Site Blue. “I was carried up to a location where they sat me down on a seat,” Zubaydah later recalled, “chained me for some time and then they removed the hood, the blindfolds and the earplugs. I found myself in a new place that I will call Prison 2.”
Zubaydah was placed in a cage, and he asked for a pad of paper so he could continue writing his diary. “When I asked them in the outset if there was a problem writing down what was happening to me, their response was: ‘no, none of the things we did to you was considered illegal.’ I was surprised to hear that, for I have a different understanding.”63
Addressing his alter ego, Hani, Zubaydah wrote in the third person: “Since they tortured him, he began having nightmares. Of people messing w/ his sisters or his small brothers & he is wanting to help, but cannot. He wakes up in a start. Not afraid, as a child, but very, very angry. Sometimes thinking about his situation is distressing enough to trigger a seizure.”
One night in March 2003, Zubaydah wrote, he was kept awake by the sound of a power drill and someone screaming.64 After nine months in secret CIA detention, all that was left of Abu Zubaydah was “Hani.”
After Zubaydah’s rendition to Poland and the investigation into the death of Gul Rahman, Dr. Bruce Jessen and Dr. James Mitchell formed a company, Mitchell Jessen and Associates, whose principal officers included former CIA and Defense Department officials. It was awarded a sole-source multimillion-dollar contract to manage the CIA’s global Enhanced Interrogation Program.
Dr. Mitchell and Dr. Jessen continued to be employed by the CIA long after the torture program and use of black sites was exposed in 2006 and President Bush ordered the secret prison system to be closed down.65
By the time that newly elected president Barack Obama terminated Jessen and Mitchell’s contract in 2009, their Spokane-based company had reportedly been paid $71 million.66 Mitchell later claimed that most of the cash was earmarked for “overhead, operating expenses, and salaries for employees” and that he had been paid by the hour and only when he worked.67
November 12, 2002, Islamabad
Al Jazeera’s Pakistan bureau chief Ahmad Zaidan had been enjoying a rare evening off. It was a state holiday, he was tired, and when his cell phone began buzzing at ten P.M. he did not answer it. But the caller was persistent, and Zaidan was an inveterate story-getter. When it rang for the third time he pressed accept. “Salaam Alaikum.”
“I have a scoop for you,” an unidentified man said in English. The language was not the caller’s birth tongue, but he was a proficient speaker, suggesting someone who had lived among English-speaking people. “Come to Melody Market, behind the Islamabad Hotel.”68
Zaidan glanced outside. Cold rain fell in squalls. Throwing on a jacket, he ran to his car. Melody Market, crammed with cafés and outdoor restaurants, was desolate. As he pulled up, a man with his face obscured behind a woolen shawl knocked on the car window and slid a plastic bag through the gap. Ripping it open, Zaidan found an audiocassette. He listened to it on his car’s player on the way back home.
First there was a mournful nasheed (chant) and then a distinctive voice rang out eulogizing Khalid Shaikh Mohammad’s suicide attack on the Djerba synagogue. It then praised a second, more recent attack: the slaughter of more than two hundred tourists on the Indonesian island of Bali on October 12.69 A suicide bomber had detonated his backpack inside an Irish bar in the resort town of Kuta, and when the crowd of young clubbers and staff had stampeded, a bomb in a Mitsubishi van parked outside had scythed through them and through drinkers at a second, open-air club in a sadistic attack on the softest of targets. Was Al Qaeda really claiming these acts of hypercruelty?
Zaidan closed his eyes and listened to that unmistakable Saudi diction used only by the elite of the kingdom. It was not Al Qaeda claiming the incidents; it was Al Qaeda’s missing emir. In Osama bin Laden’s last video after Tora Bora he had looked gaunt and injured. “We say that the end of the United States is imminent,” he had declared. That was the last the world had heard of him, and recent ISI-fueled speculation had suggested that he was gravely ill or possibly dead. But here he was on tape making pronouncements about events that had occurred in the past four weeks.
Racing back to his office, he pinged the sound file to his news editor in Doha as he prepared his exclusive: OSAMA BIN LADEN ALIVE.
December 2002, Malir Town, Karachi, Pakistan
Khalid Shaikh Mohammad was busier than ever. There was no news about his two young sons, Yusuf and Abed, who had been picked up in the ISI raids that had snagged the Burmese brothers and spirited out of Pakistan by the CIA. But his wife was pregnant again and his plots abroad, carried out in Al Qaeda’s name, were coming to fruition, some spectacularly. Recently, he had arranged for a prize of $130,000 to be sent to Hambali, the jihadi mastermind of the Bali bombing, who had once been his partner in Southeast Asia.
Then he received his own reward.
Courier Hassan Ghul, who was still at-large despite the arrest of his brother-in-law Abdul Rabbani, arrived with a message from Osama. He had decided to appoint Khalid as chief of external operations for Al Qaeda, putting him on a par with Saif al-Adel,
whose sternly worded warning that Khalid and Osama were out of control had done nothing to dampen either man’s ardor for terror. The appointment came with one proviso: Osama wanted to confer the title face-to-face.
The Sheikh also wanted to see Khalid to discuss new operations, especially those advancing in Britain and Spain. Despite the heightened security, the capture of Abu Zubaydah, the arrest of Khalid’s sidekick Ramzi bin al-Shibh, the operation that had wrapped up the Burmese brothers and seen Khalid’s two young sons taken, the interrogation of Riyadh the Facilitator, and the ongoing waves of unknowable chaos in Iran, Al Qaeda’s emir could not bear to stay under wraps for long.
December 2002, Kutkey, Martung Tehsil, Shangla, Pakistan
Osama bin Laden was seriously ill. Despite having obtained medication from a specialist and possibly having had an operation, his kidneys continued to plague him, resulting in long periods of extreme tiredness and occasional blackouts.70 The few people who saw him could not fail to notice it, along with the fact that he appeared frustrated and more ill-tempered than before. Gone were the caves of war, the attentive circle of admirers, and the heart-stopping radio broadsides. He was now living as his wives did—in a kind of purdah. A man who craved attention spent most of his time alone.
The cat-and-mouse games with the media had dried up, as had the ego-stroking audiences with visiting mullahs and mujahideen—and the covert trips to Karachi. No one could be trusted when a $25 million bounty had been placed on his head.
Instead, Osama shared a house with two nursing mothers and their squalling tots. His aide Ibrahim Saeed Ahmad, aka Abu Ahmad al-Kuwaiti, was his only sparring partner, and according to Amal, he was also feeling the stress.
Most of those with words—the clerics, lawyers, and military strategists who continued to run Al Qaeda—were gathered in Iran. The rest were hundreds of miles away in Shakai, regrouping under the protection of the egotistical young mujahid Nek Muhammad Wazir, whose handsome profile and notoriety caused jealous Osama to feel threatened. Dr. Ayman al-Zawahiri and others in Al Qaeda Central had taken a unilateral decision to buff Osama as the outfit’s totem, an untouchable but mesmerizing figurehead who would draw in funds and recruits but would be kept away from the action.
Too sick to live in the Tribal Areas, a place where brothers were often required to shift locations at short notice and had infrequent access to medical facilities, Osama had had no choice but to go along with these decisions. But nothing could stop him from writing. Daily, he sat at his laptop in his bedroom overlooking the terraced Shangla hills, typing up letters for Ibrahim to dispatch down the courier chain, often signing them with his favorite moniker, Azmaray (the Lion).71
Nightly, he pestered Ibrahim to bring replies, demanding to know when he was next going down to Peshawar or Mardan, where he met the couriers coming up from Waziristan. When Osama felt well enough, he attempted to get Ibrahim to walk with him through the mountains, and on one occasion he asked to be taken to a local mosque, as he wanted to make a donation.
Ibrahim tried to stand firm. Osama’s face adorned posters in Mingora’s markets, he said. His name was sprayed on rock faces and Al Qaeda was written about daily in newspapers sold in shops across Swat and Shangla. To distract his companion, he arranged for a satellite dish to be delivered, at great expense, beaming Al Jazeera into the home. The news reported that Al Qaeda facilitators were being picked up all over Pakistan, and some were giving up compromising information about how they worked and communicated. This was not the right time to make a public appearance, Ibrahim constantly reminded Osama. With Abu Zubaydah apprehended and being interrogated by the CIA in an unknown location, a crucial phone book and diaries had also been captured, which meant that the CIA was folding things up.
But the recalcitrant Al Qaeda leader would not listen. Eventually, Ibrahim became so worn down that he took Osama and Amal on a day trip to a nearby bazaar in a curtained van, silently cursing as they drove. Wanting to get it over with, he drove fast and ran into one of the rarest things in the area: a police speed trap. The constable who pulled him over asked to see his documents. Terrified, Ibrahim produced a roll of rupees, while Osama shrank beneath a shawl in the back. They crawled home that night so ashen that Maryam asked if she should call a doctor.72
In a house where everyone was lying to each other, it was difficult to mask the tension. When she was not attending to baby Safiyah or her husband, Amal did her best to maintain her friendship with Maryam, without being able to explain where she spent her nights.
Maryam wondered constantly about the tall, thin, beardless man who lived like a ghost upstairs and who was always deferentially referred to as “the Sheikh.” One day, when she asked Ibrahim directly, he exploded like a pinwheel and beat her.
Nursing her bruises, Maryam pleaded with him to allow her to visit Alpuri, where her sister lived. Ibrahim locked her in her room. He charged around the house, shouting at everyone, and took away her cell phone. Great danger would befall all of them if she gossiped. Stop asking me questions, or making demands, and focus on your housework, he hissed.
Ibrahim was falling apart, Maryam thought.
What he could not tell her was that unbreakable family ties bound him to a man he called “the mujahid of the Islamic World”—otherwise he would have already run away. This job was killing him.73
Ibrahim’s father, Ahmad Saeed, had studied at the same Pakistani madrassa as Taliban leader Mullah Omar, after which he had migrated with his family to Kuwait to work as a honey trader. The business brought him into contact with Khalid Shaikh Mohammad’s father, who, aside from his religious duties, imported honey from Pakistan’s Tribal Areas.
Soon, Ahmad Saeed and his sons were frequenting the mosque in Al Ahmadi, on the southernmost edge of Kuwait City, where Khalid’s father was imam. The fathers and their sons became close, and when Khalid’s father extolled the Afghan jihad, Ahmad Saeed had felt compelled to send several of his boys back home to join.74
In early 2002, when Khalid first asked Ibrahim to become Osama’s companion in exile, he had felt honored as he was taught how to communicate safely with the outfit’s couriers and was shown basic countersurveillance craft. He should use a different alias with each contact, as they would with him. “Make sure neither side knows any other name, be it your true name or another alias,” Khalid had said. He had stuck with Abu Ahmad al-Kuwaiti, a name he had chosen when he first volunteered for Al Qaeda.
But no one had talked about how to manage stress or claustrophobia, and after nearly a year with Osama in Shangla the situation was made even harder by the nine thousand rupees a month (then about $150) Ibrahim was paid, which was barely enough to cover the food, fuel, and electricity for a household of eight, let alone run the courier network. When they ran short, Ibrahim was forced into the humiliation of asking for credit from shopkeepers, while Osama remained oblivious to their daily struggle.
The threat was grinding and continuous. Any journey Ibrahim made was perilous. Every time he left the valley with the Sheikh’s messages or met a courier bringing notes from Waziristan or cash from Khalid in Karachi, he had to pass through a phalanx of army and ISI checkpoints: outside the Pakistan Army cantonment at Dargai, on the way in to Peshawar, and every other place he visited. He varied his route. He took the back roads. He changed vehicles when he could. He bought different clothes, cut his hair, and shaved or grew a beard. He sought new rendezvous points: a pomegranate juice stall in Charsadda, the covered mall in Hayatabad, Peshawar.
But these things—the pressure of a clandestine life—began to build, until one afternoon he announced that he was leaving. He packed a small bag and headed for his ancestral village of Suleman Talaab, on the outskirts of Kohat, a city southwest of Kutkey. His parents remained in Kuwait, but several brothers had migrated back to Pakistan to marry and, according to Maryam’s later account, upon arriving in the village, Ibrahim partly confided in them.
Ibrahim had a special guest, he explained, a famous mujahid, stayi
ng at his wife’s home in Kutkey, and he was this man’s guardian. It was an irksome task and he needed support. Sometimes, when he had to go to the bazaar or take the women and children to the doctor, he had to leave this guest alone, contrary to his instructions. Then there was his wife, Maryam. She was becoming nosy and in a fit of rage he had lashed out at her, making things even worse.
The family had to shoulder this responsibility, he said. He needed help. After a long discussion, Abrar Saeed, Ibrahim’s unmarried older brother, was volunteered. A weather-beaten, puffy-cheeked man with greasy hair, a tuft of hair on his chin, and a drooping mustache that gave him the look of an unlucky matador, Abrar was the black sheep of the family.
Ibrahim asked Khalid for approval. The instructions that came back were that Abrar would have to marry so that there was a credible reason for him to move into the house. But getting Abrar hitched was a challenge. He had a storied past and it was well known by residents in the district. Addicted to heroin in his teens, Abrar had had a history of intoxication and warring with his neighbors before he had fled to fight jihad, as if he were some kind of foreign legionnaire.
The only wife they could find for Abrar was fourteen-year-old Bushra, the daughter of a desperately poor relative. With the wedding agreed, Ibrahim asked Khalid for extra funding only to be told that the winding up of Al Qaeda networks combined with the on-off Iranian crisis had choked the outfit’s cash flow.
Maryam took Bushra in without questions. They would find a way to feed everyone. Maryam asked Amal to help prepare for the marriage in the same way that Khalid’s Balochi wife had coached them. On the day of the celebration, a few families from across the valley were press-ganged into sharing a meal, while Osama stayed upstairs. Afterward, the house was split into four: one area for Abrar and Bushra, a second for Maryam and Ibrahim, a third for Amal and her daughter Safiyah, and the fourth for the mysterious Sheikh.