The Exile

by Adrian Levy

  He was also concerned about maintaining his own far-fetched cover story—a blood feud, warring brothers from the Tribal Areas. He tried several times to engage the Sheikh, but Osama wasn’t interested. With Fazlur Rehman Khalil’s plan on his mind, Osama was proposing to build another story on the house with an annex in the garden so the couriers and their families could move out of the main house. He wanted Al Qaeda Central in Waziristan to fund it, which meant delivering yet another letter.

  Asoray Village, North Waziristan, Pakistan

  The Kuwaiti brothers were safer than they thought. A CIA report from September 1, 2005, disclosed that couriers “remain largely invisible to us until a detainee reveals them.” Interrogations were going badly and even those who had previously cooperated, like Hassan Ghul, who had confirmed to the CIA Ibrahim’s nom de guerre Abu Ahmad al-Kuwaiti, saying he was Osama’s “closest companion,” were no longer trusted. “We have to consider the possibility that they are creating fictitious characters to distract us or to absolve themselves of direct knowledge about bin Laden,” the report concluded.98

  With no luck on the ground, the United States was reliant on fire from up above. When Hellfire missiles struck a house in the village close to Miram Shah on November 5, eight people were killed instantly, including the three children and the wife of Dr. al-Zawahiri’s new courier, Abu Hamza Rabia, the successor to Abu Faraj. Abu Hamza escaped with a leg wound and went into hiding. A TV reporter who lived next door described the scene: “I grabbed my Kalashnikov because I thought somebody fired a rocket at my house.” Poking his head inside the ruined building, he saw “nothing left but body parts.”99

  On November 30, a drone struck again, this time killing Abu Hamza Rabia and four others. Musharraf welcomed the news by announcing the death of “Al Qaeda’s new Number Three.”

  To conceal the role of the CIA, Musharraf’s spokesman told reporters that Abu Hamza had blown himself up while constructing a bomb. But another gutsy tribal journalist, who went to the compound and photographed pieces of shrapnel that appeared to be from a Hellfire missile, published his story in the Urdu daily Ausaf, causing an outcry.

  “Let’s enjoy the fact that Al Qaeda has lost another key person,” said an irritated Pakistani government official as he tried to dismiss talk of American drones. When the tribal reporter continued to investigate, five gunmen abducted him. Six months later, his corpse was dumped in a marketplace in Miram Shah, his family alerted to it by a man who claimed to be from the intelligence services.100

  Reassessing their position from the relative safety of the Damadola trench complex, Dr. al-Zawahiri’s commanders concluded that the mounting drone strikes were, in part, a response to Zarqawi’s savagery. Al Qaeda was his sponsor and had to be crushed.

  On November 18, Zarqawi had sent bombers into three popular hotels in Amman, killing at least fifty-seven people.101 Al-Zawahiri tried again to rein him in via a letter written by Zarqawi’s friend and collaborator Atiyah Abd al-Rahman. “I am with them,” Atiyah wrote to Zarqawi of the high command, “and they have some comments about some of your circumstances.”102 Explaining that direct communications between Waziristan and Iraq were difficult and that it was easier for Zarqawi to send a courier to Pakistan rather than the other way around, he advised his Jordanian friend that the brothers “wish that they had a way to talk to you and to advise you, and to guide and instruct you; however, they too are occupied with vicious enemies here.”

  Al Qaeda Central was weak, he admitted, “and we ask God that He strengthen them and mend their fractures. They have many of their own problems, but they are people of reason, experience and sound, beneficial knowledge.” Zarqawi should listen to his seniors.

  He had to improve his relationships with other Sunni insurgent groups in Iraq, be more judicious in using the Al Qaeda name, and, perhaps, consider standing down as leader.

  “It is a possibility,” Atiyah suggested politely, “if you find at some point someone who is better and more suitable than you.” He added: “Know that we, like all mujahideen,… have not yet reached a level of stability. We have no alternative but not to squander any element of the foundations of strength or any helper or supporter.” Before the letter was dispatched in December 2005, the state security court in Amman, Jordan, sentenced Zarqawi to his third death sentence in absentia.

  A surprise visitor to Waziristan lifted the gloom: Abdullah Saeed al-Libi, the Al Qaeda prisoner who had sneaked out of Rajai Shahr prison dressed in his wife’s chador. He had spent the best part of a year trying to reach Al Qaeda Central’s new bolt-hole, and he reported that the Al Qaeda army council and its shura, as well as Osama’s missing family members, were alive—and imprisoned in Iran.103

  Atiyah immediately wrote to Abbottabad, where Osama’s house was clad in bamboo scaffolding while his home improvements were carried out. It was the first confirmation Osama had that his family was still alive, and he was delighted. But how to get them back?

  Al Qaeda Central came up with several suggestions, including kidnapping an Iranian VIP. Yusuf al-Balochi, a relative of Khalid Shaikh Mohammad who, because he had both an Iranian and a Pakistani passport, was able to come and go between the two countries freely, could lead the negotiations.

  Osama sounded out his wife Seham. Her sister-wife Khairiah, Khairiah’s son Hamzah, and Najwa’s children Saad, Othman, Mohammed, Fatima, Iman, and Ladin were all being held, along with several spouses and grandchildren. Also imprisoned was Saif al-Adel and the Mauritanian, to name but two on the shura. Perhaps they should first appeal to the supreme leader of Iran, Ayatollah Khamenei, and his radical new president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who had taken up office in August and was ushering in a new age of cooperation with the Quds Force, marking a downturn in the fortunes of the Reformers. Osama asked his son Khalid to draft a suitable letter—yet more correspondence for the nervous Ibrahim to transport to Al Qaeda Central.104

  January 13, 2006, Damadola

  The mud-brick compound had been brim-full since Eid, with elders traveling from miles around to listen to two local firebrand clerics, both renowned for their extreme views and ash-black pakuls.105 One carried an AK-47 with a red wood stock on his shoulder that lent him the air of Osama. They were both on the run, having been charged with being heralds for Al Qaeda; but in a lawless land being an outlaw was something of a tautology. When the Frontier Corps came to Damadola, which was infrequently, it was cap in hand. The Corps always knew where the clerics would be, as they spent their days running a jihad seminary in Chinagai village.

  The gathered elders relaxed, watching their teenage sons slaughtering goats, as younger children raced about in holiday clothes. Despite the festivities, their host, a local jeweler, was unnerved.106 Up above, tiny glinting slivers hovered, and since the previous November, when rockets had pounded Miram Shah, killing the latest Al Qaeda courier, any unidentified flying objects were a cause for concern.

  Unable to sleep that night, the host woke before dawn, put on his beige anorak, and climbed up a hill above the town to find his friends wakeful, too. “There are three of them now,” they said, pointing.

  Arrow-shaped and metallic, they circled on the thermals far up in the sky.

  Moments later, the men were blown off their feet as missiles slammed into the compound below, shaking the hillside.

  When the jeweler came to, his house was gone. “Where are my children?” he croaked, staggering back into the village.

  In Washington, the CIA briefed that Dr. al-Zawahiri had been holding a “terror summit” in the compound. In Rawalpindi, President Musharraf told journalists that “at least two high-profile Al Qaeda targets” had been killed, including Abu Khabab al-Masri, the chemist and bomb maker, who had a $5 million bounty on his head and was credited with manufacturing Richard Reid’s shoe-bomb.107 Pentagon sources suggested that Dr. al-Zawahiri had left “only minutes before the strike” and that a son-in-law had died.

  On the ground, residents laid out on winding sheets the bodi
es of ten villagers and children who had no connections to terror. The people of Damadola came to pay their respects, and the firebrand clerics, who had escaped unscathed, led the funerals.

  When local journalists arrived, they were presented with shrapnel wrapped in tissue like take-home cake at a children’s party.108 Afterward, they were escorted to a nearby clinic to photograph dying children on metal gurneys.

  Back at the crater, the jeweler—who had lost two sons and a daughter—denied he had ever met al-Zawahiri. “I don’t know him,” he hissed. “No foreigner was ever at my home.”109

  To prove he was still alive, Dr. al-Zawahiri issued a mocking audiotape. “Bush, do you know where I am? I am among the Muslim masses!” he taunted. “The whole world has discovered the extent of America’s lies, failures, and savagery.”

  Bomb maker Abu Khabab also contacted a reporter in Peshawar to correct a published obituary.

  In Islamabad, ISI chiefs stirred the pot by suggesting that the FBI had illegally taken some bodies away from the blast scene for DNA testing. In response, a local office of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) was attacked and the border region boiled, while in Karachi and Islamabad tens of thousands of people took to the streets, chanting “Death to America.” Reacting to the darkening public mood, Pakistan’s information minister announced an inquiry, as the government wanted “to assure the people, we will not allow such incidents to reoccur.”

  Despite the heartfelt bluster, the inquiry was never opened.

  May 2006, Block 100, Tehran

  A rock thumped down into the dirt, and the Mauritanian retrieved the piece of paper wrapped around it. It was the third such message he had received in as many days, and it contained more updates from the Egyptian and Libyan brothers incarcerated on the other side of the wall.

  Brother Urwah decided the rock telegraph was too slow. He would try to climb into Block 200 through an air-conditioning duct. The Mauritanian tried to dissuade him. “The ceilings are old and frail,” he warned. Urwah went ahead anyway. Armed with a flashlight and some tools, he set off down the tube. “We kept praying for him,” the Mauritanian said.

  After Urwah’s voice could no longer be heard, they strained for sounds of his feet and fists. Finally, they heard a howling and saw a gust of black soot, as Urwah shot back out of the duct “looking like he had come out of a grave.” He had reached a narrower section of the tube, turned back, and lost his footing.

  Frustrated, the Mauritanian waited until morning and then confronted the Iranian block chief, Mr. Nasseri, telling him that they knew brothers were being held next door. He listed names. Embarrassed, Nasseri allowed some of the brothers and their wives from Block 200 to visit Block 100.

  But the exchange program did nothing to alleviate building tensions that were predominantly fueled by a troubled mujahid from the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, Abu Anas al-Libi. A fluent English speaker, he had been sent to the United Kingdom by Al Qaeda in 1995. The following year, he was granted political asylum, moved to Manchester, and was recruited by the British security services to kill Colonel Muammar Gaddafi. But the plot had failed without Anas even leaving Britain. Afterward, he fled, leaving behind in his apartment a 180-page terrorist manual that would become known as the Manchester Manual, the most important tome on Al Qaeda field craft to be recovered pre-9/11.

  After making it back to Afghanistan, tall and slender Abu Anas had worked as a body double for Osama. He also helped Khalid Shaikh Mohammad manage the Al Qaeda’s IT needs. In late 2001, he was placed on the FBI’s Most Wanted Terrorist list, after being charged with playing a significant role in the 1998 embassy bombings. Now, imprisoned, he was a constant source of friction, and the Mauritanian, who had known him since the Sudan days, was running out of patience.

  When a child broke both legs as a result of a fall in the garden and had to wait for several hours before being taken to hospital, Anas set fire to his room and whipped others into a riot.110

  The Iranians drew weapons and after locking the families up, fired stun grenades and rubber bullets. Abu Anas was carted off to Evin prison, an action that triggered a hunger strike that degenerated into another riot. “The complex was transformed into a war zone,” recalled the Mauritanian.

  The Libyan brothers voted to bring the entire building down, brick by brick, gathering whatever they could from the corridors and setting it on fire, before kicking through walls and smashing glass.111

  An internal phone rang. The Mauritanian grabbed the handset.

  It was block chief Nasseri. “Make peace,” he urged.

  “What’s in it for me?” the Mauritanian shouted.

  A pause. “Okay. There is another camp. We call it Block Three Hundred.”

  The Mauritanian bit his lip.

  The silence drew Nasseri out. “There are people held there …” A pause. “Who are more like you …”

  The Mauritanian was desperate to ask more but sensed he should not.

  “Make peace,” Nasseri begged.

  The Mauritanian walked out into the smoke-logged corridors. “We need to stop,” he shouted. “We need to find another way.” Stunned by seeing a quiet man turning purple with rage, one by one men who respected him downed their burning torches.

  “Ahmadenijad’s appointment means we will never be handed over to the Americans. We are safe here,” the Mauritanian insisted. “We should make the most of this time.”

  The men walked back to their cells and he returned to his family.

  “Pack,” he whispered to his wife. “We are leaving.”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  “The reprisals of the mujahideen shall come like lightning bolts.”

  —ELEGY FOR ZARQAWI, WRITTEN BY ABU YAHYA AL-LIBI, AL QAEDA CLERIC1

  Summer 2006, Damadola, Bajaur Agency, Federally Administered Tribal Areas, Pakistan

  Along the Afghan border, a death-strip of fortifications neared completion, and fighters bedded down in trenches in Razmak, Mir Ali, Miram Shah, and Dande-Darpa Khel as well as Damadola. Villages and towns were sown with preachers who beat a drum for the Taliban and Al Qaeda.

  While Abu Musab al-Zarqawi kept the black flags aloft in Iraq, and Osama (whose anonymous existence was being safeguarded by mujahid outfits cloaked by the intelligence service) did the same from Abbottabad, his life force drawing in funds and recruits from around the world, Dr. al-Zawahiri reshaped Al Qaeda’s ideology and set a course for war against American troops in Afghanistan.

  Money was flowing in once more. After the recent years of fame, Al Qaeda was attracting cash, recruits, and prestige like no other jihad group in history. Hundreds of thousands of U.S. dollars were pledged by supporters in the Gulf states who were inspired by American atrocities in Iraq and drone strikes that killed innocent civilians in Pakistan, and who wanted to see more action from an organization that had inspired the London public transport bombings of July 2005. Its network reached around the globe and through the heart of Iran.

  As Al Qaeda’s chief strategist, Dr. al-Zawahiri briefed a new generation of two hundred operational commanders, men entrusted with driving events out in the field without recourse to the center. Beneath grew a standing army of impoverished peasants, madrassa graduates, unemployed farmhands, orphans and the children of broken families, local ruffians, and Taliban fighters who crossed the border every month to attend training workshops run by visiting Al Qaeda commanders from the front lines of Iraq.2

  Huge swathes of the impoverished Tribal Areas had been sucked into a Taliban–Al Qaeda vortex that transformed the lands-beyond-reach into a vision drawn by Hieronymus Bosch. The most courageous tribal journalists photographed the beheading of spies and the crucifixions of heretics, nailed to telegraph poles in Miram Shah, while in Mir Ali the guilty were flayed, chained alive to pickups, and dragged through the streets until they disintegrated.

  From the center of the maelstrom, Dr. al-Zawahiri issued a new edict. Believing the intelligence that had led the CIA to bomb th
e Damadola compound had come from the eavesdropping of loose-lipped couriers, he fired them, ordering media-savvy Azzam the American to upgrade Al Qaeda’s delivery methods. Instead of sending out traceable men with cumbersome tapes and letters in plastic shopping bags to be dumped at discoverable dead-drops under bushes in Islamabad, announcements and speeches would in the future be uploaded invisibly onto password-protected websites, accessed by a new distribution network called Al-Fajr Media Center. It comprised hundreds of anonymous webmasters scattered around the globe whose job was to decrypt the material, repost it on popular Islamist forums, and encourage like-minded armchair mujahideen to enlist.

  Content was streamlined, too, with Azzam producing broadcast-quality quasi-documentaries on his Sony Vaio, editing together high-definition footage and cell-phone videos, underscored by easy-to-understand Islamic dogma. In his makeshift studio, he had mastered a version of “green screen” that enabled him to transport Dr. al-Zawahiri to a backdrop of his choosing.3

  Osama kept a close eye on their prolific output. He was pleased at the progress the doctor made in representing Al Qaeda, but he disliked his deputy’s hectoring and pedantic tone. He preferred the poetic and ambiguous Arabic phonemes of the old days. Looking forward to a time when he could seize back control of the message, he had expanded his own media center in Abbottabad into two bedrooms, ordering the children whose space he took to squash up.

  Osama’s silence was a cause for worry, especially among shura members trapped in Iran who wondered if he was ill or even dead, as the ISI maintained in its dealings with the CIA. “I want to criticize you the same way a younger brother would criticize his older brother for not letting us know how you are doing,” wrote one of the Mauritanian’s comrades in a letter that was smuggled over the border and reached courier Ibrahim, who took it to Abbottabad. “I hope you know how much you mean to us.”4