The Exile

by Adrian Levy

  Less than two weeks later he dispatched a colossal truck bomb to blow up the UN headquarters in Baghdad, which flattened a poorly guarded building and much of the neighborhood, killing twenty-two people, including the head of the UN mission in Iraq, Sergio Vieira de Mello.

  Ten days later he sent another car bomber to attack the Imam Ali Mosque in Najaf, the third holiest site in Shia Islam. It killed the senior Shia cleric Mohammed Bakr al-Hakim and more than eighty worshippers. Al-Hakim had been the spiritual leader of the Supreme Council of the Islamic Revolution in Iraq and his death struck terror in the country’s large Shia population.

  In committing his first major offensive against Shias, Zarqawi had made sure to give it a personal touch. The suicide bomber, a Jordanian called Yassin Jarrad, was his own father-in-law, the rabidly jihadist father of his beautiful Palestinian wife.130

  Soft targets. Sectarian objectives. Family connections. Blood and more blood. Children, women: no one would be spared. Zarqawi knew his actions would be criticized as “hasty and rash.” But he had warned Saif that real Muslims had to be brought to their senses. There were many people and parties competing for attention. To get it, Zarqawi had to conceive of actions that would be “revolting.” And much “blood has to be spilled.”131

  CHAPTER SIX

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

  —INTERCEPTED LETTER FROM ABU MUSAB AL-ZARQAWI TO OSAMA BIN LADEN, OCTOBER 20041

  June 2003, Suleman Talaab Village, Kohat, Pakistan

  Maryam, Bushra, and Amal bin Laden had been living in limbo on the outskirts of Kohat for more than two months. Occasionally, they were allowed out to the bazaar accompanied by a male householder, but otherwise they were stuck inside with their children. No explanations as to their long-term future had been given and the young women were too scared to ask.

  Their departure from isolated Kutkey had been sudden and unsettling. Two days after Ibrahim, Abrar, and Osama had fled from the house, Ibrahim had returned alone, rapping on the door after dark. Thinking that the ISI had come for them, the women froze. Is it our time? Amal whispered. Bushra, who was heavily pregnant, started crying.2

  When Maryam recognized Ibrahim through the shadows, she unlocked the door. “Where have you been?”

  Pack, Ibrahim hissed, ignoring her question.

  The women were bundled into a vehicle with all they could carry and by midnight they were in Peshawar. Ibrahim pulled into a silent courtyard in the Ganj district of the old city. Before them was an annex of the Ganj madrassa, a feeder school for the jihad and a way station for Al Qaeda.3

  “Get out,” Amal was told.

  She stepped down with her two young daughters and, looking over her shoulder, saw that Maryam and Bushra remained in the van.

  She was shown into an empty office, from where she heard the minibus depart.

  Maryam and Bushra were driven on to Suleman Talaab, Ibrahim’s ancestral village. “You go here,” Ibrahim barked, letting his wife out at his sister’s place, while Bushra was dropped at her father’s.4

  In the Ganj madrassa annex, Amal and her two young daughters were hustled into an upstairs room, where a Moroccan woman greeted her.5

  “A taxi is coming,” she explained. “We are going to Kohat. It is for your safety.”

  July 2003, Peshawar, Pakistan

  With hooded eyes that looked as if they were rimmed with kohl, and disfiguring blotches caused by severe vitiligo, the Libyan mujahid was the most unlikely choice for a covert operative working in a shadow organization that was being tracked by the intelligence services of the world. However, despite his unforgettable face, he remained invisible.

  Abu Faraj al-Libi enjoyed some kind of social camouflage that made him vanish, a skill he deployed when taking over Khalid Shaikh Mohammad’s network in the spring of 2003. Abu Faraj had other skills, although he could not drive and so had to be ferried around the North-West Frontier Province on the back of a distinctive red motorbike. He spoke Arabic, Pashto, and passable Urdu.6 He also had a well-honed sense of self-preservation, and sensing the growing ISI and CIA joint operation in Peshawar, with Asad Munir’s sniffer-dogs going door-to-door in the Faquirabad and Gulbahar neighborhoods—where Al Qaeda and Taliban supporters dispersed themselves among the refugees and travelers—he sought out a new permanent base for himself and his Moroccan wife, Miriam, who had just accompanied Amal bin Laden to Suleman Talaab.

  Abu Faraj was drawn to a sleepy bolt-hole where security, relaxation, and retirement were uppermost on people’s minds: a hill station in Hazara region, at the eastern corner of the North-West Frontier Province that was popular with tourists, home to three of the army’s most well-respected training schools, including the prestigious Pakistan Military Academy, and was named after Major James Abbott, the British Raj officer who founded the town in 1853. Osama bin Laden had rented a house here during the Peshawar days for his wife and children.7

  These days, smart young Pakistani officers trained in Abbottabad with the military elite who, in their spare time, played golf. Given that the city is just under ninety miles by car from the capital, Islamabad’s middle classes descended during the holidays, and they sent their children to its upmarket schools. The air was clean and the wide avenues were lined with flowerbeds, statues, and military memorials. All around, the rugged Sarban hills were thick with pine trees and crisscrossed with walking tracks.

  Like any other city in Pakistan, Abbottabad had its share of conservative religious scholars and a sprinkling of Islamist seminaries. It even had a small militant presence in the form of a single unit of Sipah-e-Sahaba, a sectarian outfit formed with the blessing of the deep state to harry and murder religious minorities. Officially, President Musharraf had banned it and several other homegrown militant groups after the United States demanded that Pakistan do something to contain the domestic forces of terror it manipulated. All it and the other banned groups had done was reemerge under new names.

  What Abbottabad did not have was the ISI. The spy directorate considered the city to be “too far inland,” ISI-speak for far away from the Islamist whirlpool. The nearest ISI field detachment was located at Mardan, a three-hour drive west.8

  Abu Faraj found a house in historic Nawan Shehr, close to Ban Wali Masjid, the oldest mosque in the area. He also rented two apartments in the busy city center, intending to use them as Al Qaeda guesthouses.

  September 2003, Shakai Valley, South Waziristan, Pakistan

  Abu Faraj was summoned to the first of several jirgas at Shakai. The base was led by an ethnic Kurd called Abdul Hadi al-Iraqi, who had once served as a major in Saddam Hussein’s army before defecting to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan. A close associate of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, Abdul Hadi had fought with Al Qaeda forces at Tora Bora in December 2001 before traveling with Zarqawi’s group to Iran.9

  Under Abdul Hadi’s leadership, Shakai had been transformed into Al Qaeda Central’s new nerve center, a place for training recruits, planning operations, and manufacturing suicide vests, remote-controlled devices, and car bombs. He had local assistance in the form of Ilyas Kashmiri, a striking Pakistani mujahid famed for his mirrored aviator sunglasses (that hid a missing eye), luxuriant hennaed beard, and long, tangled relationship with Pakistan’s security services.

  A veteran of the Pakistan Army’s elite Special Services Group (President Musharraf’s old unit in which Kashmiri occasionally denied he had fought) who had honed his skills during the Afghan jihad (a campaign he often bragged about), Kashmiri had been funded, armed, and trained by the ISI, losing a finger as well as an eye to the Afghan slaughter of the 1980s. During the 1990s, he had been sent over the border to battle Indian forces in Kashmir in operations directly sponsored by Pakistan’s spy directorate.

  Musharraf’s recent crackdown on homegrown militancy had infuriated and disappointed veterans like Kashmiri, who had formed his own jihad unit with funding from S-Wing, the Islamist section of the ISI that ran fundamentalist factions on beh
alf of the deep state. Called the 313 Brigade, Kashmiri’s new outfit was staffed by former ISI agents and mujahideen who, along with him, were allied to Al Qaeda.10

  Kashmiri joined the jirga alongside Al Qaeda financier Sheikh Saeed as the agenda was read out: “Al Qaeda’s new priorities.” Plans to attack the “far enemy,” including Britain and the United States, were in development over the border in Iran, but what about the near enemy? asked Dr. Ayman al-Zawahiri, referring to the regimes it opposed in the Middle East.11

  Abu Faraj suggested sinking more resources into Al Qaeda’s presence in Iraq.

  Abu Musab al-Zarqawi already had that region well covered, said Abdul Hadi.

  Kashmiri put forward another idea. Al Qaeda Central should attack Pakistan, as its American-loving president was currently doing more damage to the cause of global jihad than anyone else.12

  December 14, 2003, Rawalpindi, Pakistan

  General Pervez Musharraf was driving home from the airport with his military secretary, Major General Nadeem Taj. The officer, who had survived a few near misses with Musharraf, had been in on the plotting to overthrow the civilian government in 1999 and had been rewarded with marriage to the sister of Musharraf’s wife.13

  They were discussing a disturbing photo in the newspapers. U.S. forces, in an operation code-named Red Dawn, had just run Saddam Hussein to ground, pulling him out of a “spider hole” in ad-Dawr, close to Tikrit. The photo released to the newswires showed a broken dictator, with a wild gray beard and mussed-up hair. It was a world away from the striking portrait of Saddam in a three-piece wool suit and homburg, discharging his Ruger rifle like a Mafia don. Musharraf told his military secretary that he was struck by the transformation. What came to mind was how this picture resembled those released of Khalid Shaikh Mohammad after he had been captured in Rawalpindi. They reflected the CIA’s modus operandi. Americans diminished the dictators they fell out with while continuing to feather the beds of those they needed, like the princes in Bahrain, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia.14

  “Even us,” Musharraf joked. “Pakistan will always be needed so long as Osama bin Laden remains at large.”

  A screech. And: boom.

  Musharraf’s stomach flipped and his eardrums popped. He felt the air sucked from the vehicle as he was slammed into the footwell.

  “Nadeem!”

  The major general groaned from the other footwell. “Alive, sir,” he said.

  A huge explosion had sent the three-ton armor-plated Mercedes hurtling into the air. As the car, still intact, crashed back down onto the road, bursting all four tires, Musharraf screamed for the driver to hit the accelerator.

  Looking back, the president saw a pall of smoke, dust, and debris. They did not pull over, even though the vehicle was riding on its rims, sending up showers of sparks. Arriving at Army House, shaken and enraged, Musharraf charged into his private quarters, showered, changed his clothes, and called for his X Corps commander, General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, a laconic, chain-smoking and golf-obsessed career officer he regarded as a dependable pair of hands.

  “Get the bastard,” Musharraf thundered at Kayani. “Imagine trying to take out a head of state!” He could not get over the attack. It was the military’s job to deploy terror, not be a target of it.15

  “I want the ISI to lead this investigation,” Musharraf insisted. “The police must be kept out of it.” As Kayani got to work, Nadeem Taj was promoted to Director-General of Military Intelligence. Musharraf needed his friends around him.

  That night, the president and his wife attended a wedding at the Serena, Islamabad’s top five-star hotel, where he regaled guests with his near-death experience and blamed Osama bin Laden.

  In Rawalpindi, General Kayani, the son of a noncommissioned officer and a “soldier’s soldier,” threw everything at the inquiry, knowing that one of the top jobs in the armed forces, the director general’s seat at the ISI, was coming up for reappointment in October. If he could substantiate Musharraf’s surmise—that this had been an Al Qaeda operation—the post would almost certainly be offered to him.16

  Intelligence flowed in quickly, but not of the right kind. The jihadi chatter led to a member of Jaish-e-Mohammed, the ISI-sponsored outfit behind the Indian parliament attack, bringing everything uncomfortably close. All clues pointed to the failed assassination as being in response to Musharraf’s recent attempts to declaw Jaish and other homegrown Islamist groups.

  Kayani’s problems deepened when, under interrogation, one mujahid swore that those behind the assassination attempt included religious officers serving in the Pakistan Air Force. The plotters had procured inside knowledge on the route taken by the president’s column from sources inside general headquarters in Rawalpindi. The more Kayani dug, the more it looked like a conspiracy, with members of the armed forces siding with the jihad movement over the president and general, demonstrating that infiltration was an unconscionable reality in Pakistan.

  But fissures in the ranks was not something Kayani could sell to his president.

  He directed his officers to refocus on Al Qaeda. The forensic evidence was laid out. Examining the trigger, the chemical composition of the explosives, and the fragmentation ballast packed around them, officers advised that the bomb was similar to those the ISI taught mujahideen to build and rig in Indian Kashmir, which pointed to this being the handiwork of Ilyas Kashmiri—given his deep links to the ISI and the Kashmir jihad.

  December 25, 2003, Rawalpindi

  Two weeks later, President Musharraf was traveling along the same stretch of road, on his way home from a meeting in Islamabad, when a minivan slipped out of a petrol station just a few hundred yards ahead. A vigilant police patrol stepped on the gas and placed itself between the convoy and the van as a blinding fireball engulfed the road.

  Another minivan entered the curtain of fumes and drove straight at the now almost stationary presidential convoy, detonating only feet away. “The second bomb was jarring,” Musharraf recalled. “Smoke and flames blinded us, but I told the driver to keep on going, and Allah saved us.”

  When the president’s Mercedes lurched into the drive at Army House “plastered with human flesh,” his wife, Sebha, screamed. Back at the scene, General Kayani’s men counted seventeen bodies, with fifty bystanders seriously injured. Picking through the charred remains, they recovered the face of one of the bombers, which had been peeled off its skull by the force of the blast. Kayani radioed the details to Musharraf, who ordered that a plastic surgeon reconstruct the head.17 The president appeared on national television and blamed “terrorists and extremists” for the attack.18

  However, the forensics team combing the scene again found evidence straight out of the military playbook.19 The drivers had rammed the convoy just beyond the same bridge where the first bomb had been rigged. Whoever designed the first attack was also likely to have been involved in the second and had detailed inside knowledge of how to override jammers that were deployed to block remote detonations.

  Kayani ordered his men to intensify their search. Later that day, at three thirty P.M. during raids on a housing complex, the ISI recovered a SIM card. One number on it registered in the ISI database. It belonged to an Al Qaeda courier called Salahuddin. Kayani’s men quickly tracked Salahuddin to a Rawalpindi district close to the bridge, and he broke down in an hour, confessing that he was in contact with Abdul Hadi al-Iraqi, the leader of Al Qaeda’s Shakai camp, via “a panda-faced Libyan” Al Qaeda operative called Abu Faraj al-Libi.

  Salahuddin had met Abu Faraj twice but explained that the Musharraf plots had been designed and implemented by Ilyas Kashmiri and his new outfit, which combined ISI agents and mujahideen.

  Al Qaeda flow charts from the Peshawar station suggested Abu Faraj was a middle-ranking operative who worked as a go-between. The ISI station in Peshawar obtained an old photograph of Abu Faraj in his Libyan days, dressed in a suit, and some recent intelligence bulletins that pointed to his possible location: Hassan Abdal, a historic town twenty
-eight miles west of Rawalpindi, located at the junction between the Grand Trunk Road and the N5 highway leading north to Abbottabad. Kayani could work on this material and bury the parts of the confession that impacted on the military.

  After he briefed his president, Musharraf called CIA director George Tenet. He had identified the man who was trying to kill him: “Abu Faraj al-Libi, he is the third biggest fish in Al Qaeda’s pond.” Sensing an opportunity, the Pakistani president assured the CIA director that the hunt was already on for Abu Faraj.20 There was no mention of Ilyas Kashmiri or his new outfit that combined ISI agents and the mujahideen.

  January 23, 2004, Kalar, Kurdish Iraq

  On a map the route looked forbidding, but Hassan Ghul, Khalid Shaikh Mohammad’s overweight courier who wore a shirt with open collar and carried a satchel containing a notebook, three bundles of currency, three cell phones, two computer disks, and a USB drive, knew what to expect.21 He had made this 1,500-mile journey many times before, traveling with messages from Al Qaeda Central in Waziristan, skirting beneath Afghanistan, crossing the width of Iran, and into the cauldron of Kurdish Iraq, where he would link up with one of Zarqawi’s operatives.

  This time, however, after Ghul had exited Iran at Khosravi and entered Kalar, a city just twenty miles inside the Iraqi border, chatting on his phones, the CIA and the NSA were watching. Ghul should have been more careful. His Karachi apartment had been one of the addresses searched during the September 2002 raids that had caught the Rabbani brothers and Ramzi bin al-Shibh. Now, the Kurdish security services let him do his business in Kalar and then picked him up. If the investigators had got it right, Ghul would hopefully be carrying correspondence for Osama.

  Expecting Ghul to put up a strong resistance, his jailers found instead that he was pliant and polite. One Kurdish agent recalled how he walked the prisoner into a local military garrison and watched as he neatly laid out his possessions on a table. “He didn’t want to get hurt. He was a deal maker, a talker,” the agent said.