The Exile

by Adrian Levy

  Conveniently, the tunnel was also a well-known intelligence dead-spot. The southern half of the tunnel came under the jurisdiction of ISI Kohat, while the northern half was the responsibility of ISI Peshawar. The spy agency maintained checkpoints at either end but rarely bothered to go inside.

  January 2008, Block 300, Quds Force Training Facility, Tehran, Iran

  Sulaiman Abu Ghaith was at a breaking point. More than six years had passed since he had last seen his family. He had sent them off to Kuwait just before 9/11, only to be roused by a midnight door-knock in Kabul and frogmarched to a cave above Khost, where he had been compelled to voice Osama’s 9/11 vision—which had then enveloped him like a noxious cloud. From Afghanistan, via a cellar somewhere in Tehran, he had ended up in the hands of the Quds Force, as far away from his family as a man could be. When he learned on the TV news that the Kuwaitis had canceled his passport, another door slammed shut. What he thought of most often was how he had never met his son, born as the Twin Towers fell.

  A stateless prisoner in a nameless jail, Abu Ghaith felt as if his heart would burst every time Block 300 celebrated the arrival of a new baby—Othman bin Laden’s second wife Sofia being the latest to give birth.5 At night, he retreated to his room, which was bereft of ornamentation, with no children’s drawings to brighten up the rough concrete walls.

  Before his capture in Shiraz in April 2003, Abu Ghaith had snatched two brief phone conversations with his wife, Fatima, explaining that he had fled Afghanistan for another country. But since then there had been no contact, and an unhappy second marriage to the daughter of one of the Egyptian brothers had not eased his pain. “No lawyers, no charges, no rights,” he would chant under his breath whenever an Iranian administrator crossed his path in the yard. That his children’s last sight of him had been the videotaped threats he had made to bring down more mayhem on the West tore at his heart. Every waking moment, he regretted those recordings.6 He hoped that his first wife had explained that it was not their real father speaking but someone compelled to serve a man drunk on fervor.

  He resented having been press-ganged into supporting “the project of one individual using the blood of others to act out what seem[ed] correct to him.”7 He hated those around him who were reunited with their families and bragged about their roles in a war he had not fought in.8

  Over the past five years, he had begged to be allowed to make a phone call, post a letter, or send an e-mail. He tried to distract himself through study, spending most days with the Mauritanian, the only man in the compound he still trusted.

  After the Eid decorations were put away at the end of 2007, Abu Ghaith decided to take things up a notch and refused to eat or get out of bed. The women cooked up bowls of mutton-bone broth but he would not touch them. In two weeks, he lost many pounds, but an Iranian doctor concluded that he needed to diet and ruled out any intervention.

  After twenty-one days, the Mauritanian sought out a senior official—Abu Ghaith was weakening. Worried by the repercussions of a death in the compound, a Quds Force agent brought in a voice recorder and asked him to compile a message for his family. They would do their best to deliver it via the Iranian embassy in Kuwait City.

  After several weeks, a small envelope arrived. Abu Ghaith played the audiocassette inside, and when he heard his brother’s voice, he felt joyful. There were updates about brothers and cousins, and personal greetings from aunties and uncles. But nothing from his wife and children. Abu Ghaith replayed the cassette. Omission, he told himself, was an admission.

  He wandered around mournfully, asking for a second opinion. Was his wife sick? Maybe she had died. For three weeks he pestered the compound directors for a phone call.9 Finally, they relented.

  Since Abu Ghaith had a $5 million bounty on his head and Iranian intelligence could not afford for anyone to eavesdrop, they drove him ten hours east to Mashhad and then for two more hours to get him over the Afghan border, a deserted place close to where Osama’s family had crossed in March 2002. He was given a Thuraya satellite phone and instructions to say nothing about his location or his fellow prisoners.

  Standing in sand-blasted western Afghanistan, Abu Ghaith called home with trepidation. There was no answer. He tried all the numbers he could remember, eventually getting his brother. Where was his wife? His brother fell silent.

  There was no good way to break it: she had waited for four years, but in line with the Islamic principle of idah (the waiting period), she had then submitted a case to a magistrate who had granted her a divorce.10 Divorce? He could not believe what he was hearing.

  There was more. His wife had married one of his closest friends, with whom she now had a child. Their other children had been sent to live with in-laws.

  “The news was like a lightning strike,” recalled the Mauritanian, who consoled Abu Ghaith when he got back.11

  January 22, 2008, Islamabad, Pakistan

  In a quiet cul-de-sac in the Pakistani capital, another long-dead relative reappeared. Aafia Siddiqui’s elderly uncle, Shams ul-Hassan Faruqi, a spritely government geologist with a huge white beard, was drinking tea with guests when his doorbell rang.12 A white car had pulled up at the gate and the driver beckoned him over. A burqa-clad woman in the back leaned forward and rolled down the window. “Uncle, I’m Aafia,” she whispered.

  He stepped back, barely able to believe it. This woman who refused to show her face was his missing niece, a woman who had since become an Islamic cause célèbre as Prisoner 650 or “the gray lady of Bagram”—one of America’s famous “ghost prisoners.”

  Aafia had been on her way to visit him when she vanished in March 2003, nabbed by the ISI, with the CIA looking on, as a result of Khalid Shaikh Mohammad’s tip-off. Since then nothing more had been heard of her, although Pakistan’s extremist outfits claimed her as their own, citing her case as an example of the worst excesses of the U.S. administration and plastering her photograph on their posters and banners.

  “Where have you been all this time?” asked Faruqi.

  The woman, still veiled, shook her head. “Three people are watching me,” she whispered. “Get in the car.”

  They drove to Captain Cook’s, a fish-and-chips restaurant in nearby Jinnah Supermarket, a middle-class shopping bazaar. Aafia, still whispering, told him a story that in another country would have seemed extraordinary. “I was kept in cells, people wore gloves and masks when they gave me food,” she muttered. Maybe it was Bagram, or an ISI facility in Pakistan, she did not know. Some of the guards were Americans, the others Pakistanis. “They kept shifting me.”

  Her jailers’ goal had only recently become clear. Certain that she was broken and without hope, they had ordered her to infiltrate Al Qaeda. Willing to say anything to get out, Aafia had agreed, and she had been set free that morning and put on a bus heading for the Tribal Areas. Taking a risk, she had jumped off the bus at a rest stop and hailed a taxi.13

  Aafia had rare potential as the perfect double agent. She had the right pedigree: related to Khalid Shaikh Mohammad through marriage and demonstrably connected to several Al Qaeda plots before and after 9/11. Like Hassan Ghul, she also had family in Pakistan, which meant the ISI could turn the screw. Agents had warned that she would never see her children again if she failed to go along with the plan, she told her uncle; and as of now, she had no idea where they were.14

  As she became more agitated, Faruqi found himself backing away.

  “I have money,” she rasped. “Help me get to Afghanistan.”

  Why was she was in such a hurry? Faruqi thought. What was it she needed? “Where will you go?” he asked.

  A pause. “Ta-li-ban.”

  Faruqi recalled: “She was desperate to reach the Taliban, who she believed were essentially moral and would not stand by while her children were held hostage. ISI, Taliban, holding cells—all of this felt so alien and wrong to me.”15

  He thought back to the last time he had seen his niece. It had been in November 2001, when she had also turned
up unexpectedly, begging for assistance. Back then, she had asked him to help her buy a house in Gilgit, a remote and picturesque area of Pakistan. The attacks in New York were on her mind and she wanted to disappear, she said. At the time, Faruqi had wondered whether she was paranoid or perhaps complicit in something he did not understand.

  Now, unable to decide what to do, Faruqi called Aafia’s mother in Karachi. “Come quickly, your daughter is here,” he said.16

  His sister did not seem at all pleased, and when she arrived that night she launched herself at Aafia, telling her she was a troublemaker.17 The family had already suffered, with the ISI holding them under house arrest for months after she vanished. Aafia was on her own, her mother said.

  Faruqi could not stand his sister’s coldness. “She is my blood. She trusted me at a time of calamity. I cannot throw her out.”

  Aafia sat in a corner, silently observing the row.

  They eventually went to bed, with Aafia sleeping on a prayer mat in the lounge. When they woke the next morning, she was gone.

  January 2008, Bilal Town, Abbottabad, Pakistan

  Seham bin Laden had turned the second-floor bedroom she had set aside for her daughter Khadija into a shrine. At least she now had three of the grandchildren with her. They had been brought out of Waziristan in December, much to their father Daood’s relief. However, his relocation to Abbottabad had been canceled after one of the senior Al Qaeda brothers with him said he was too fair-skinnd and Arab-looking to get away with traveling as a local. He wrote to Osama, apologizing for being “incapable of assisting you” and saying for the first and last time he “wished I was an Afghani or a Pakistani.”18 Osama was disappointed, but his daughter Miriam was secretly delighted she would not now have to marry him.

  Seham described the boys as “little heroes” and the girl as a “sweet rose” and “little chick.”19 Abdallah, born before 9/11, was the only one to have met his grandfather before, and he regarded him silently, this great mujahid leader who sat on the floor under a blanket and shooed the children away.

  To cheer things up, the women stitched matching pink dresses for the girls and braided their hair with pink ribbons, while the boys took over the hallway, flying paper airplanes and floating paper boats in a plastic basin.20 Having grown up in the relative freedom of a Pashtun village, they had no concept of a confined life and filled the house with noise, infuriating Ibrahim and Abrar.21

  Seham wrote to Daood, who had returned to his Al Qaeda duties in Waziristan: “Do not worry about the children, they are in our hearts and eyes, they will be surrounded by kindness, affection and care.”22 But “we cannot compare your affliction to mine,” she wrote dejectedly, mentioning that she had not seen her “precious and beloved” daughter Khadija for five years before her death.

  Seham wanted Daood to “send the name of the region where our precious was buried, and the address of the graveyard.” He should go to visit on Eid al-Adha and take the family’s prayers. One day, she intended to visit, too.

  Then she came to a bone of contention. A decision had been made to leave her daughter’s baby behind with the wet nurse in Mir Ali. Seham wanted the girl to be sent to Abbottabad directly, along with Khadija’s last remaining possessions. “Send me whatever my daughter was wearing, even her wristwatch, where I can smell her.” He could keep the gold and any other valuables. They did not matter.

  Daood wrote back.23 “My dear Abdallah, Aisha, and Osama [Daood’s younger son had been named after his grandfather] kiss the forehead of your grandfather, grandmother, and your [new] mother [Miriam].” They should listen, study, and not forget to do physical exercise. They should always kneel when saying their prayers. He would never forget them, he said, updating them with disturbing news from their old life that evidently was a fast-changing scenario. “The rabbits we used to have in the house gave birth, but the cat ate the little ones and after that, the infidels entered the place.” Addressing them as his “little fighters,” he signed off: “My dears, please pray for victory for the mujahideen.”

  Spring 2008, Rawalpindi, Pakistan

  Pervez Musharraf was falling into a political abyss, but, as a canny survivor, he still believed he could pull himself out by his fingernails.

  After cycles of increasingly brutal violence by Islamist groups, including those manipulated by the ISI, dovetailed with growing protests by the middle classes, who were infuriated by the president’s sidelining of democracy, he had announced that he would stand for the presidency again when his first term finished in October 2007. To alleviate the increasing pressure, he had conceded to a general election that was slated for February 2008. But given that his popularity was at an all-time low, he doubted that even a massive vote-rigging exercise would save his political party in the polls. It would take something more.

  Desperate for allies, the outgoing president had held secret talks with erstwhile enemies, including his nemesis Benazir Bhutto. Their relationship was rancorous. Former prime minister Bhutto had been exiled from Pakistan for eight years, charged along with her husband with having stolen millions from the state purse and secreting it in Swiss bank accounts and property in England. In Pakistan, it was customary for an incoming leader to ambush the outgoing one in a legal minefield, sown with corruption and theft charges; and these surrounded Bhutto and her husband, Asif Ali Zardari, by the dozen, courtesy of Musharraf and of Nawaz Sharif, the prime minister who had succeeded her—and who also faced similar charges thanks to Bhutto and Musharraf.

  The president resented Bhutto’s gender, her dynastic power, and her liberal inclinations—which stuck in his throat. She had experienced his wiles and games directly when she had been prime minister in 1993 and he, as her director general of military operations, had unsuccessfully lobbied her to order the Pakistan Army to invade Indian-administered Kashmir, claiming she would be able to “wear its crown like a queen.”

  More recently, Musharraf had offered Bhutto a quid pro quo. If she backed his bid for another term as president, he would ease her legal problems, enabling her to return to Pakistan and run in the February 2008 elections as the head of her Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP).

  They had discussed a deal in Dubai in the summer of 2007, after which her team and his had surreptitiously got together in Duke Street, in London’s Mayfair, and in Dupont Circle, in Washington, D.C.24 But, having been warned by her advisers that dealing with a dictator would tarnish her last remaining democratic credentials, Bhutto had pulled back, instead seeking broader support from the U.S. and British governments. She had returned to Pakistan in October 2007, daring Musharraf to jail her, ignoring the warnings from the CIA and British MI6 that he might stand by while elements within the ISI and Islamist groups, stoked by Al Qaeda, placed her in their sights.25 Within hours of arrival, her homecoming cavalcade was blown up as it wound its way through the streets of Karachi, resulting in more than 150 deaths.

  Bhutto agonized over the maimed and murdered.26 “I have to press on, for them,” she concluded, failing to appreciate how much Pakistan had changed.27 The drone campaign, the raid on the Red Mosque in Islamabad, and the burgeoning presence of Al Qaeda and the Taliban that had merged with tribal levies had transformed politics. The mood of the whole country was far darker than when she had last lived in Pakistan.

  Bhutto’s return augmented the simmering unrest about Musharraf’s long rule, with the country’s lawyers taking a stance against him, deepening his problems. The Supreme Court of Pakistan was persuaded to investigate the constitutionality of his twin roles as army chief and president. On November 2, 2007, with only days before his term ran out, and with judges threatening his future, he declared a state of emergency, fired the chief justice, and sent troops clattering into the Supreme Court. Taking to TV, he warned that the country was facing an existential crisis and that uncertainty over its leadership would only make matters worse. What was needed, he said, was a firm hand, someone who could face down the forces that Al Qaeda had unleashed.28 “The extremists are
trying to take the authority and power of the government into their own hands,” he said. He was the only man strong enough to resist them.

  However, Musharraf’s support had evaporated, with many believing the extremists were being enabled by those in power—who themselves were lawless. Demonstrators massed in cities across the country as a patchy media blackout was implemented. Leading human rights activists were jailed, international correspondents were deported, and Bhutto was placed under house arrest, twice, as lawyers began to march in protest.

  Musharraf temporarily stepped down as army chief in order to be elected president for the second time in November, backed by a tame parliament facing reelection itself in February.

  Up in the Tribal Areas, more than thirteen armed tribal groups came together to form the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), a leathery coalition of Islamists, warlords, robber barons, and cutthroats that would become better known as the Pakistan Taliban and sought Islamabad’s submission through suicide bombs, IEDs, kidnappings, and beheadings. Baitullah Mehsud led it, as a successor to hardheaded highwayman Nek Muhammad Wazir, who had been killed by a drone strike in 2004. And he had Bhutto in his sights.

  The TTP’s charter had been shaped and honed by Al Qaeda, which regarded it as an affiliate. Both Osama’s general manager, Atiyah Abd al-Rahman, and Abu Yahya al-Libi, who now served as a religious adviser to Al Qaeda Central, had sent detailed suggestions on how the new movement should be run, pointing out flaws in its governing documents and making requests for more information so that new wording could be added.29 The TTP should “trust the rule of the Amir of the Believers Mullah Muhammad Omar Mujahid, and consider him as their emir.”30