The Exile

by Adrian Levy

  Joining the Kurdish interrogation team as an unofficial observer was Nada Bakos, the young CIA analyst who had been tracking Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’s movements across the Iran-Iraq border since late 2001, and who had watched Colin Powell’s speech to the United Nations in February 2003 with horror. She was looking for evidence about Zarqawi and his Iraq-based cells.

  A CIA technician easily cracked the encryption on Ghul’s disks and USB drive, handing Bakos and the Kurdish investigators a gold rush of invaluable data, including a rambling seventeen-page missive from Zarqawi to Osama suggesting a formal joining of forces between his group, Tawhid al-Jihad, and Al Qaeda. “We stand ready as an army for you to work under your guidance and yield to your command,” Zarqawi wrote.

  The Bush administration, which needed to bolster its weak case that Al Qaeda’s Iraq operation was a state-sponsored confabulation, announced Ghul’s capture the same day. “We made further progress in making America more secure,” President Bush said, “when a fellow named Hassan Ghul was captured in Iraq. Hassan Ghul was reporting directly to Khalid Shaikh Mohammad, who was the mastermind of the September Eleventh attacks. He was a killer.”

  A sleight of hand had seamlessly moved the Arab nationalist Ba’athist regime of Saddam Hussein a little closer to being the trigger for 9/11, justifying an unpopular war that had been under way for nearly a year and had already cost hundreds of American lives.

  In Kalar, Nada Bakos disregarded the White House politicking and watched, fascinated, as Ghul happily discussed his Al Qaeda–linked activities. “He was in a safe house,” she said. “He wasn’t locked up in a cell. He wasn’t handcuffed to anything. He was having a free-flowing chitchat.”22

  Ghul described how he worked as a messenger between Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, Osama bin Laden, and Dr. Ayman al-Zawahiri. He gave interrogators four e-mail addresses through which he communicated with Zarqawi and described the code they used when they spoke on the phone—in Zarqawi’s case his Swiss satellite phone (supplied by the Quds Force) and two Iranian numbers registered in Isfahan.23

  He confirmed that Al Qaeda Central had been “ground down” by the joint CIA and ISI efforts in Pakistan and had regrouped in Shakai Valley, South Waziristan, where they had constructed a new Tarnak Qila–style camp under the protection of the Pashtun mujahid Nek Muhammad Wazir and run by Abdul Hadi al-Iraqi. Ghul estimated that approximately sixty Arabs, 150 to 200 Turks and/or Uzbeks, and a “significant population” of Balochis were there.

  Ghul provided important new information about Abdul Hadi. After helping Zarqawi establish relations with Ansar ul-Islam in the Khurmal hills of Kurdistan, Abdul Hadi had headed back east to the Iran-Pakistan border, where he facilitated the movement of Al Qaeda brothers wishing to join Zarqawi’s forces.24 Others he guided down to Shakai, with a plan to launch martyrdom brigades to attack U.S. forces in Afghanistan. According to Ghul, Shakai was a “mini Islamic society.”25 The camp consisted of married quarters, a bachelors’ house, a madrassa, and training facilities. Ghul also “identified and decoded phone numbers and e-mail addresses contained in a notebook he was carrying, some of which were associated with Shakai-based operatives.”

  Probed about Osama’s whereabouts, Ghul gave a clear description of how and with whom the Al Qaeda leader lived. He was not in Pakistan’s tribal belt or Afghanistan but “living in the Peshawar area … in a house with a family.”

  Nothing seemed too sensitive for the talkative Ghul. It was “well known that the Sheikh was always with Abu Ahmad al-Kuwaiti, his closest assistant,” a man who “handled all of Osama’s needs” including his security apparatus, which was “minimal.” Since fleeing Tora Bora, he had only ever maintained “a small security unit of one or two persons.”

  This made the couriers responsible for security, finance, welfare, and communications. In his collapsing universe, they were Osama’s lifeline. As well as caring for him, Abu Ahmad transported and collected messages, received money, and sent donations, connecting Osama to his new operational chief in Pakistan, who was, according to Ghul, a Libyan brother called Abu Faraj al-Libi.

  If the CIA could find these men, they would lead to Osama.

  Ghul hoped he had said enough to get himself off the hook since he was deeply concerned about the vanishings of Khalid Shaikh Mohammad, Ramzi bin al-Shibh, his brother-in-law Abdul Rabbani, Khalid’s nephew Ammar al-Balochi, and al-Balochi’s wife, Aafia Siddiqui.

  The last case was particularly worrisome. If they could make a Western-educated scientist and mother of three disappear, along with her three children, there was clearly no limit to the depths to which America was willing to sink.

  February 2004, Rawalpindi

  Rather than follow up on Hassan Ghul’s vital information about Osama, the CIA’s Islamabad station contacted the ISI with a pressing request: Pakistan should “undertake to verify” the presence of “a large number of Arabs” in Shakai “as soon as possible.”

  However, Pakistan was busy focusing on the investigation into Musharraf’s assassination attempts, and it quickly became clear to the CIA that extra pressure needed to be applied.

  A long-running operation elsewhere provided just the ammunition Western governments were looking for. The British foreign intelligence service MI6 sought out ISI chief General Ehsan ul-Haq to deliver the first warning. It had, he was told, amassed an enormous dossier showing that Pakistan’s preeminent nuclear scientist, who was cherished at home as “the father of the bomb,” was selling proscribed doomsday technology around the world. Dr. Abdul Qadeer Khan, a Pakistani metallurgist who had steered Pakistan’s nuclear program to test blasts in 1998, countering India’s status as South Asia’s sole nuclear power, had approached Iraq, Iran, Libya, North Korea, and a host of other rogue nations.26

  Even worse for General ul-Haq and his president, according to the MI6 dossier, Khan was working not alone but as the brand ambassador for the Pakistani intelligence service and armed forces, which had sought to benefit financially and politically from the illicit deals.

  Musharraf called a crisis meeting. There was only one path to take: isolate Khan and project him as a traitor.

  On February 4, a chastened Dr. Khan appeared on TV to announce that he alone was to blame, which was not true. “There was never ever any kind of authorization for these activities by the government,” he said. “I take full responsibility for my actions and seek your pardon.”27 Dr. Khan later claimed that Musharraf had promised that if he took the flak now he would personally oversee his rehabilitation once the dust had settled, an accusation that Musharraf denied.28

  Seizing the moment, the CIA returned to the issue of Al Qaeda forces hiding in Shakai, urging the ISI to confirm the Arabs’ presence in Shakai.

  On February 12, George Tenet arrived in Islamabad with a twenty-four-member CIA delegation. The large size of the U.S. team was deliberate. They wanted to use the “shock and awe” of intelligence—photos, intercepts, and charts—to compel Musharraf and ISI chief ul-Haq to act.29

  However, when Tenet asked the Pakistani military to launch a ground assault on Shakai, Musharraf refused, recalling how ten soldiers had died when, in June 2002, Pakistani troops had attempted to mop up Al Qaeda fighters in South Waziristan at a barren cleft called Kazha Punga.

  To head off Tenet, Musharraf claimed he had already sent a delegation to Shakai with an ultimatum for the hardheaded Pashtun mujahid Nek Muhammad Wazir: if they were found to be giving refuge to Al Qaeda, his people’s homes and livelihoods would be leveled, like the Israelis did in Gaza.

  Tenet dismissed the idea and instead suggested that Pakistan should allow U.S. drones to fly over the Tribal Areas. This was a far simpler way to track down and kill militants hiding in the hills and gullies, he argued. Musharraf was stumped.

  He knew that after the incident with Dr. Khan, Pakistan was at a fork in the road, a pariah state whose proximity to terror was all that had saved it from being defanged. He began to lobby general headquarters to support the U.S. plan. Drone
technology could whittle away a common enemy, deniably, and without hurting the army, he said.

  General ul-Haq vehemently disagreed. It was Pakistan’s proximity to Al Qaeda that ensured it would always survive, he said. America and Europe could not afford to cast them out. And drones would compromise Pakistan’s sovereignty and curtail their espionage capabilities.30 The United States would inevitably eavesdrop and see ISI deployments in sensitive areas, further compromising Islamabad’s position.

  Sensing resistance, Tenet’s delegation turned the screw and accused Pakistan’s intelligence services of playing a double game by aiding Al Qaeda and the Taliban instead of hunting them down. They also revealed that they had learned the twin assassination attempts on Musharraf had involved the active participation of elements within the armed forces that were demonstrably allied to Al Qaeda.

  Hamstrung, General ul-Haq lunged for a pressure point. Washington was spinning a new Al Qaeda narrative to distract attention away from its unjustifiable war in Iraq. Just days before coming to Pakistan, George Tenet had been forced to admit that there had been no imminent threat from weapons of mass destruction before the 2003 invasion and that the CIA had become transfixed by “fabricated” intelligence on WMDs supplied by an “unreliable” Iraqi defector.31 In ul-Haq’s eyes, and to many voters back home in the United States, the war was “tantamount to a policy catastrophe.”

  Before their next meeting with the Americans, ul-Haq sought out Musharraf. “If the CIA wants to accuse the ISI of misbehaving,” he said, “you must tell President Bush that his people need to give names. Incidents. Evidence. They are insulting us. I’m a serving lieutenant general and I have some military pride. If they don’t trust us, they are going to have to prove that we are disloyal.”32

  Three weeks later Musharraf committed six thousand ground forces to flush foreign fighters out of South Waziristan. He would rather go along with the charade than enrage his friend President Bush. “Success,” his spokesmen announced when thirteen suspected Al Qaeda operatives were killed after the army attacked a bus attempting to flee the area. Human rights lawyers quickly identified the dead as civilians and also revealed the real level of military casualties: sixty-four soldiers dead, fifty-eight injured, and fourteen taken hostage. Trained to fight on the plains of the Punjab, Musharraf’s men were being hammered in the mountains.

  In Islamabad, opposition to Musharraf’s decision to crack down on homegrown jihad outfits was also growing. Clerics at the radical Lal Masjid (Red Mosque) put a voice to a rising tide of criticism, characterizing Musharraf as America’s lapdog, a man who had turned his army against Muslims. “People of South Waziristan,” one cleric exhorted in a fatwa issued against the army, “seize the bodies of dead Pakistani soldiers and do not hand them over.”33 The faujis (soldiers)—who had epitomized national pride—were traitors.

  In Washington, President Bush seemed oblivious to Pakistan’s growing instability. He was busy electioneering and announced that Task Force 121—a special operations force that had played a critical role in the capture of Saddam Hussein—was now being reassigned to Afghanistan to reinvigorate the hunt for the Al Qaeda leader. It would press from one side while Musharraf’s forces would push from the other, catching Osama between an American “hammer” and a Pakistani “anvil.”

  February 2004, Bilal Town, Abbottabad, Pakistan

  Abu Faraj had watched the For Sale signs go up over a large tract of agricultural land at the inexpensive end of Bilal Town, a couple of miles northeast of the city center. To make some easy cash for the military elite, the Abbottabad Cantonment Board had decided to sell it off in small parcels and he passed by on his way to Nawan Shehr. In late 2003 he contacted Ibrahim and Abrar, the Kuwaiti brothers who protected Osama, suggesting they take a look. Osama knew and liked the town. Maybe it could provide a semi-permanent refuge for him and his family.

  Abrar arrived in the city with $50,000 in cash and a forged national identity card, provided by Khalid Shaikh Mohammad and that described him as Mohammed Arshad, son of Naqab Khan from Charsadda.34

  He made a bid for three adjacent plots in the middle of a soggy field. Only a dirt track connected it to the nearest paved road. Having bought the land, in January 2004 he started negotiations with farmers who owned adjoining pieces. One of them recalled that he was a “modest, humble type of man,” sturdily built, and spoke with a Waziri accent.35 The only noticeable thing about him was an unusual tuft of hair under his lower lip. Abrar said he was investing on behalf of an uncle, who needed to relocate from the Tribal Areas because of a blood feud.

  When Abrar had purchased nine connecting plots covering 38,000 square feet, he employed Mohammed Younis from Modern Associates, a local architectural firm, to draw up plans according to precise specifications: a large two-story villa with a staircase at the rear; four bedrooms, three bathrooms, and a kitchen on the first floor; and four bedrooms and four bathrooms on the second floor, with a narrow balcony out front.36

  The Abbottabad Cantonment Board approved the plans without verifying the owner, although this was a legal requirement. Afterward, Abrar hired a local builder, who was told to spend “whatever it costs.”37 When the builder queried an instruction to extend the perimeter wall to a height well above the approved plans, Abrar warned him to ask no further questions or he would be fired. Over the months he worked on the site, the builder sometimes heard his employer talking on the phone about the “master.” Once he listened to him discussing how the “guest” would arrive soon.

  Anyone who asked when the owner was moving in received the same answer: “Only God knows.”38

  April 24, 2004, Shakai Valley, South Waziristan

  President Musharraf had at last come up with a solution to the increasing external pressure on him to fight the domestic jihad and pacify the internal forces that constantly warned that such a move would tear down the entire republic. He proposed a truce.39 If Nek Muhammad Wazir and the foreign fighters living around him in Shakai pledged not to attack Pakistani troops, the military offensive would be called off.

  Nek insisted that Musharraf’s envoy go to Shakai to personally sign the agreement. Musharraf sent up as his sacrificial lamb the Peshawar Corps commander, enabling Nek to brag: “I did not go to them; they came to my place.”40 In Wana, the main town in South Waziristan, the corps commander was photographed draping a garland of tinsel and plastic flowers around the twenty-nine-year-old warlord’s neck. “That should make it clear who surrendered to whom,” Nek quipped to his followers, before the Pakistani officer addressed a crowd of tribal leaders (and a smattering of Al Qaeda brothers), telling them America had been foolish to make war against Afghanistan. Pakistan, by brokering this peace deal, was protecting South Waziristan from an American invasion, he said.

  When it was his turn to speak, Nek was pugnacious. Al Qaeda had never been in Shakai, he claimed. “Had there been a single Al Qaeda fighter here, the government would have caught one by now.”

  With the ceremony over, Nek took a second wife in celebration and almost immediately began harrying Pakistani forces once more. Some habits died hard.

  Musharraf took in the reports somberly. He grudgingly ordered his men back into Shakai on June 10. The clearance operation was swift, bloody, and, Musharraf argued, successful. Once a “partner,” the army was now victor. “We eliminated a major propaganda base and stronghold of the terrorists, including a facility for manufacturing IEDs [improvised explosive device],” Musharraf crowed. The haul from a large underground cellar at one of the targeted compounds included “two truckloads of TV sets, computers, laptops, disks, tape recorders, and tapes.” But no Nek and no Al Qaeda fighters.

  In a classified cable, the CIA’s Islamabad station chief described the Shakai raid as a “fiasco,” with the Al Qaeda base having apparently received advanced warning of the operation from S-Wing. This news reached Washington just as counterterrorism officials were forced to rethink their response to the “war on terror.” A damning report by the C
IA Inspector General suggested that Enhanced Interrogation Techniques tested on Abu Zubaydah and then used on others, including Khalid Shaikh Mohammad, violated the United Nations Convention Against Torture. Unofficial black sites staffed by contractors and where dozens of “High Value Detainees” currently languished were “unauthorized, improvised, inhumane and undocumented.” As a result, detainees all over the world were being shuffled around.

  Abu Zubaydah—who in September 2003 had been transported to an undeclared black site code-named Strawberry Fields, located out of sight of the main internment camp at Guantánamo Bay—was now at another secret CIA site in Rabat, Morocco, being fed sachets of tomato ketchup and fixating on the eyebolts in the ceiling that looked “ready for anything that might happen.”41 Khalid Shaikh Mohammad was being questioned at a detention site in Bucharest, Romania.

  New methods of remote interdiction were needed and drones began to constitute a major part of the CIA’s offensive. Asked for permission for the United States to commence with drone operations in Waziristan, General ul-Haq remained opposed. But pragmatist Musharraf signed off on the deal with the proviso that Pakistani intelligence officials could approve each strike in advance, and that the United States would never acknowledge its hand in any operation.

  Would this charade hold up to scrutiny? the CIA’s Islamabad station asked, incredulous. It seemed a paper-thin ruse.

  No problem, replied Musharraf. “In Pakistan, things fall out of the sky all the time.”42

  Nek Muhammad Wazir, who was enjoying his moment in the limelight and giving regular interviews by satellite phone, was sitting in the yard of his compound in Kari Kot village on June 17 when his eye was drawn to the sky. “Why is that bird following me?” he asked the Al Qaeda brothers surrounding him, before going back to telling the BBC Pashto service that foreigners living in Waziristan were “not terrorists” but “mujahideen who took part in the Afghan jihad.” Asked about his ultimate goal, Nek spelled it out: “We want to eradicate the U.S.-installed puppet governments in Pakistan and Afghanistan.”