by Adrian Levy
Supporters in the Arabian Peninsula also wrote: “How true is it that Shaykh Ayman [al-Zawahiri] is the most influential man in the organization and that Abu Abdullah [bin Laden] is like a puppet on his hand?” Had Osama ceded all authority to Dr. al-Zawahiri? The writer worried Al Qaeda was now “tinged” with the ideology of Egyptian Islamic Jihad “to the detriment of the whole movement.”5
Osama dispatched polite replies stating that he was well and remained the captain of the ship, but privately he had become fixated on his inability to rein in Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, whose theater of death continued unabated.
One particular act got Osama riled: the fallout from Zarqawi’s November 2005 hotel bombings in Amman, as video and eyewitness accounts emerged from the Radisson SAS Hotel, where husband and wife suicide bombers, Ali and Sajida al-Rishawi, had invaded a wedding in the Philadelphia Ballroom.6 Sajida, the sister of one of Zarqawi’s closest aides, was unable to make her belt work. Ali screamed at her to run, while he leaped onto a table and flicked his switch, bringing down the ceiling and a wall of plate-glass windows, killing thirty-eight Jordanian partygoers, including the fathers of the bride and groom.7
Failed bomber Sajida was made to confess her crimes on TV. The attack triggered immediate and ferocious condemnation from mujahideen, clerics, and influential Saudi sheikhs. It also spurred President Bush to deploy a secret military unit, Task Force 145, to run Zarqawi to ground any way it could.8
Emboldened by his cheerleaders, Zarqawi released a provocative video in which he strutted about dressed in black fatigues with ammunition pouches strapped to his chest, while swearing allegiance to Osama and surrounded by heavily armed companions who obscured their faces. He made a surprise announcement. He intended to declare an Islamic state or caliphate in Iraq within three months. Whoever remained would have to submit to living under the ancient hudud punishments of execution, beheading, stoning, and amputation.9 Those who rejected him would be hunted down and killed.
However, Zarqawi was running out of time. Nine days before the video was released, Task Force 145 killed five of his men, captured another five, and almost grabbed Zarqawi himself. The previous February, they had come so close that they had glimpsed his face through a car windshield, but rules of engagement in a densely inhabited neighborhood had prevented them from firing. After the video emerged, on May 13 and 14, Task Force 145 killed one of Zarqawi’s lieutenants and fifteen others. Two days later another two were dead.
In Damadola, a new arrival came with a tale so exhilarating that it temporarily pricked the bubble of paranoia and fear triggered by the drones. He was a young Libyan theologian, Abu Yahya al-Libi, who had once been the Mauritanian’s student in Nouakchott and when last heard of had been embedded at the battle of Kandahar airport.
Abu Yahya revealed that not only had he survived, but U.S. forces had captured him and taken him to Bagram air base, where he had undergone months of torture. Recently, he and three others had slipped their shackles, discarded their orange jumpsuits, and sprinted away. A manhunt had been launched, with thermal-imaging cameras slung beneath a U.S. military helicopter that sought a heat signature in a frozen landscape, but Afghan families had taken them in.
“They gave us a hero’s welcome,” Abu Yahya told a rapt audience. “As soon as we showed up at a compound, they would ask, ‘You’re the four who escaped from Bagram?’ Despite their fear and poverty, they—by Allah—helped us with everything they possibly could.” Some offered their shirts. Old women insisted on shaking and kissing their hands “out of love and support for the mujahideen.”
Dr. al-Zawahiri realized that Abu Yahya’s was a great story of survival and that the power of this firsthand testimony of American torture—and bettering it—could draw attention away from Zarqawi’s excesses. An account was uploaded into As Sahab by Azzam that concluded with a rousing quote from Abu Yahya that aped U.S. Marine–speak: everyone should fight “for the captive brothers who we left behind.”
Abu Yahya’s broadcast contained detailed descriptions from his time in custody, revealing that he had been tortured in a place dubbed the Salt Pit, an experience he described as “being put in the grave while you’re still alive.” He had made friends there with Dr. Ghairat Baheer, son-in-law of Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, whom everyone also presumed was dead. He had also met Ibn Sheikh al-Libi, the camp commander seized at Tora Bora, but this giant had been reduced to “skin and bones.”
Life in the Salt Pit had been bleak, and when Abu Yahya overheard a rumor that the Americans were holding in permanent isolation and raping a female prisoner, he had staged a hunger strike. She was, Abu Yahya discovered, a forty-year-old American-sounding Pakistani who had “lost her mind,” someone the other inmates called the “gray lady of Bagram.” Some concluded she was Aafia Siddiqui, the Pakistani neuroscientist who had been abducted in Karachi in 2003. It was impossible to confirm whether this or the rape claims were true, but nevertheless the “gray lady” conjured by Abu Yahya would become a potent symbol.10
June 7, 2006, 6:12 P.M., Hibhib Village, Baqubah, Iraq
Task Force 145 was following a compelling nugget of actionable intelligence. Zarqawi’s most frequent visitor was his spiritual adviser, Sheikh Abd al-Rahman, who made an elaborate series of vehicle switches but always ended up in a small blue car when he was visiting the Tawhid al-Jihad leader. A small blue car. It seemed too obvious. But they watched out for it anyhow. Even the most security-minded had mental blocks.
Watching drone feeds throughout May, they spotted al-Rahman twice but then lost him. Task Force 145 found him a third time in a small blue car on June 7 and trailed him to an isolated compound in a palm grove five miles from Baqubah—a war-scarred city north of Baghdad that had witnessed heavy insurgent activity.
After the Jordanian General Intelligence Directorate (GID)—which had been monitoring Zarqawi since 1990, longer than anyone else, and particularly wanted him dead after the Amman bombings—provided map coordinates confirming that this was a location known to be connected to Zarqawi’s third wife, an Iraqi woman with whom he had several small children, a five-hundred-pound guided bomb was called in and it smashed into the compound, throwing up star-shaped plumes, the first overwhelming strike quickly followed by a second.11
When the Americans arrived and pulled Zarqawi from the rubble, he was still alive, although close to death. He tried to get up but fell back, lost consciousness, and died in the vehicle he was hauled into.
“Today is a great day in Iraq,” said a spokesman for the Multi-National Force in Iraq.12 “Today, Iraq takes a giant step forward.” Uncompromising images were shared of the dead Zarqawi’s swollen and bloodied face. No pictures were released of his Iraqi wife or children, who also died in the blast alongside preacher Sheikh Abd al-Rahman.
With Zarqawi out of the way, Al Qaeda Central jumped in to reassert control of jihad forces in Iraq after storyteller Abu Yahya recorded a glowing elegy that gave away none of the relief some must have felt that the uncontrollable Jordanian was gone. At al-Zawahiri’s insistence, Abu Yahya had written to Zarqawi during the second half of 2005, repeatedly asking him to stop committing atrocities. But now he talked of him as one of “the lions of Islam,” describing him as “an igniter of wars” and “the man who split the Romans’ heads.”13 Soon, Zarqawi’s successors would “[cleave] the darkness of the enemy like meteors.” Abu Yahya rounded off with a Koranic flourish: “Let the worshippers of the cross, dynasties of treason, suckers of depravity and agents of the Jews … know that their swaggering won’t be for long and that the reprisals of the mujahideen shall come like lightning bolts.”
Charged with leading these reprisals was Zarqawi’s old friend, the veteran Kurdish commander Abdul Hadi al-Iraqi, from the Shakai camp. Osama and al-Zawahiri had chosen him as the new commander of Al Qaeda in Iraq. Already known to the CIA and FBI, Abdul Hadi would have to take extreme care on the long journey from Waziristan to northern Iraq, and knowing he would probably be gone for a long time, he took alon
g his wife and four young children. They would travel via Quetta, across Iran, and into Turkey using fake Iranian passports provided by the Quds Force.14 From there, he planned to drop down across the border into Mosul. His appointment as leader of Al Qaeda in Iraq would be announced once he sent confirmation of his arrival.
While they waited for updates from Abdul Hadi, Al Qaeda Central refocused on Afghanistan, where Dr. al-Zawahiri had launched a new offensive against NATO forces. On June 6, an IED in Nangarhar Province had killed two U.S. soldiers. On June 15, a bus bomb killed ten workers at an American base, and on July 1, two British troops died when their compound was attacked with RPGs. Dozens more attacks were in the pipeline.
Summer 2006, Islamabad, Pakistan
Since 9/11, Pakistan had received almost $10 billion in U.S. government aid, most of it paid directly to the military. However, President Musharraf was at his lowest ebb.15 Constantly pressured by the United States to do more to rein in the Taliban and Al Qaeda, he had committed seventy thousand soldiers to the Tribal Areas, where they were virtually under siege and unable to leave their bases for fear of attacks.
In March, the Taliban had taken over the telephone exchange and government buildings in Miram Shah and established in plain sight a recruitment office in Wana. By late July, barbers were being shot in Tank, wedding music was outlawed in Dera Ismail Khan, and even peaceable Swat, where Osama had once sheltered, was roiling, with clerics burning television sets. The military death toll was rising daily, with eight hundred troops lost so far.
Musharraf was struck by a fear that Pakistan was heading toward all-out civil war. Wondering if the Islamic Republic would disintegrate like Iraq had, he suspected that what was needed was a big policy idea that would eclipse troop deaths and the drone program while satisfying the demands of an American paymaster—and securing his own future office. The attacks came from all sides. Islamists portrayed him as an American puppet, Western-leaning secular Pakistanis characterized him as a tool of the jihad, and democrats criticized him for suspending the country’s constitution.
He called Lieutenant General Ali Jan Aurakzai, the uncompromising former head of Western Command who had been in charge of Pakistan’s force at Tora Bora.
Aurakzai, who was now the governor of North-West Frontier Province, had good connections inside the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), which translated in Washington simply as being a “Taliban sympathizer.” Asked by Musharraf to come up with a “holistic approach” to solving the current crisis, he was clear. “There can be no military solution,” he told the president, thinking of a vast area governed by ancient feudal rules, where the people were literally disenfranchised, having no voting rights, meaning they had no investment in the greater vision of Pakistan. “There has to be a political solution,” the retired general stressed. “It’s time for dialogue.”16
In an elaborately staged spectacle, the ISI prompted influential warlord Sirajuddin Haqqani to issue a decree on June 26, 2006, that it was not Taliban policy to fight the Pakistan Army, while Aurakzai began drawing up a formal agreement. The government pledged to put an end to airstrikes and ground operations. It also committed, woollily, to resolve the issue of foreign militants hiding in FATA, “while respecting local traditions and customs.”
Musharraf wondered, privately, at this. These customs required the tribes of FATA to respect the code of hospitality, meaning that evicting a guest was tantamount to bringing dishonor on an entire community. Aurakzai tweaked the wording so that foreign fighters who had married into local families would be allowed to remain if they agreed to “live peacefully, respecting the law of the land and the agreement.” That included high-value targets like Dr. Ayman al-Zawahiri. But hopefully no one outside Pakistan would spot this.
Crucially, the army pledged to withdraw from all FATA checkpoints and retreat to its bases in the main towns like Mir Ali, Razmak, and Miram Shah. For their part, the elders and tribal commanders agreed to cease their support for foreign militants and halt cross-border operations.
Robert Grenier, who had been sacked from the CIA in January for opposing the secret detention system and the use of interrogation practices he likened to torture, read about the accord while at home in Virginia. “It’s a rout,” he said to himself, referring to the Pakistan Army. “Now we know where they stand.”17
Running so hard on ideology, the Bush administration, which had invaded Afghanistan, deposed Saddam in Iraq, and cold-shouldered Tehran, was not going to stand by and allow this to happen, Grenier thought.
September 5, 2006, Government Degree College, Miram Shah, North Waziristan
A grand jirga of more than five hundred tribesmen gathered on the football pitch under a brightly colored shamiana (wedding tent).18 Commanders, elders, and military officials exchanged bear hugs as chapli kebabs were dished out. Officeholders in the Taliban and Al Qaeda stayed away. Journalists were barred, too, although Syed Saleem Shahzad, bureau chief for Asia Times Online, who made it a policy to disregard the army’s rules, had sneaked in, noticing how someone had slung Al Qaeda’s black standard over the stadium’s scoreboard.
“Fire and blood were in the air,” he wrote in an article headlined THE KNIFE AT PAKISTAN’S THROAT. Unlike the Pakistani journalists who were happy to remain in Islamabad and Rawalpindi and print whatever they were told by the establishment, Shahzad was unafraid to meet Taliban representatives and publish reports that took in the views of Pakistan’s jihad networks.
However, on this day Shahzad was worried, and he concluded that “momentous events loom over the Pakistani Tribal Areas of North and South Waziristan where the Taliban are in complete control.”
General Aurakzai welcomed the peace agreement as “unprecedented in tribal history” and commissioned a celebratory painting of himself handing a ceremonial pen to tribal elders, although he did not attend the official ceremony. “They were armed to the teeth,” he said, recalling their private meeting. “I showed them the pen and I said this fellow is stronger than the Kalashnikov you carry.”19
Only a few signatures remained outstanding, including those of the extremist preachers Faqir Mohammad and Liaqat Ali, who had escaped the drone strike at Damadola back in January 2006 and were to be pardoned as part of the new deal.
General Aurakzai’s representatives negotiated to meet with them separately on their home turf in Chinagai village, where the walls of Ali’s seminary were adorned with the slogan “Come unto Jihad.”20
Once agreement had been reached, Aurakzai and Musharraf planned to fly to Washington and seek President George W. Bush’s approval of their peace plan.
September 6, 2006, White House, Washington, D.C.
Making friends with Al Qaeda and the Taliban was the last thing on Bush’s mind. Since the previous November, when the Washington Post revealed that the CIA was holding Al Qaeda prisoners in secret jails around the world, his administration had been under huge pressure to explain the clandestine detention and interrogation program. While senior White House staff scrambled to find suitable responses, the CIA sought to place its so-called ghost detainees elsewhere.
The most dangerous and those who could not be released for fear of what they would say about their treatment would be transferred to Guantánamo Bay. Others were sent back to their home countries against their will, including the former Al Qaeda commander and friend of Abu Zubaydah, Ibn Sheikh al-Libi, who was deported to Libya, where he would later die of wounds sustained in his prison cell.21
Incriminating evidence was destroyed on the orders of Jose Rodriguez, who in November 2004 had been promoted to deputy director of operations at the CIA. In November 2005, he was directly involved in the decision to destroy video recordings of Abu Zubaydah’s torture that had been stored in a safe at the U.S. embassy in Bangkok.22 Officially, Rodriguez claimed he had made the decision to protect agents in the field from terrorist reprisals. But, according to one unnamed official in a declassified e-mail, there was also deep concern about a public backlash. T
he official claimed that Rodriguez had said, “Heat from destroying is nothing compared to what it would be if the tapes ever got into [the] public domain.” The e-mail continued: “He said that out of context, they would make us look terrible: it would be ‘devastating’ to us.”23
On one of the destroyed tapes, an interrogator verbally threatened Abu Zubaydah: “If one child dies in America, and I find out you knew something about it, I will personally cut your mother’s throat.” In a subsequent investigation by the Department of Justice, the Inspector General found that there was also a twenty-one-hour gap in the taped record, which included two of Zubaydah’s waterboarding sessions.24 The tapes had been removed from the catalog of videotapes much earlier.25
On September 6, after a series of hastily arranged late night CIA charter flights into Cuba, the president was ready to front his new plan. Surrounded by the families of 9/11 victims, he announced that over the past forty-eight hours, fourteen captives whose names had become synonymous with the “war on terror” had been transferred into Defense Department custody in Guantánamo, where “military commissions” would try them.
They included Al Qaeda courier Abu Faraj al-Libi, Abu Zubaydah, 9/11 mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohammad, and Mustafa Ahmad al-Hawsawi, who was suffering from “chronic hemorrhoids, an anal fissure, and symptomatic rectal prolapse” as a result of the anal-rehydration program.26 Also there was Khalid’s sidekick Ramzi bin al-Shibh; his nephew Ammar al-Balochi and his Karachi-based assistant, Walid bin Attash (Silver); and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, who had been waterboarded and subjected to mock executions by CIA interrogators, one of whom had cocked an unloaded pistol against his head and revved up a power drill as if preparing to drill into him.27
After several minutes of applause, Bush defended the CIA program as “one of the most vital tools in our war against the terrorists,” one that was “invaluable to America and to our allies.”28 To show how well it had worked, he revealed details about Abu Zubaydah’s capture and subsequent treatment. “Zubaydah was severely wounded during the firefight that brought him into custody,” he explained gravely to the families. “And he survived only because of the medical care arranged by the CIA.” After he recovered, Zubaydah had been defiant and evasive, Bush continued. “He declared his hatred of America. During questioning, he at first disclosed what he thought was nominal information—and then stopped all cooperation.”