The Exile

by Adrian Levy

  But all this had happened under the Bush administration, and Obama was sick of paying for his predecessor’s mistakes. He wanted to draw a line under the era of renditions, torture, and black sites. It was time for a cleaner story, a simpler hit. And the president knew full well that killing or capturing Osama would silence his critics.

  The principal investigator, who was the deputy chief of the CTC’s Afghanistan-Pakistan desk, an intelligence official known only as John, compiled a detailed assessment of everything the CIA had on al-Kuwaiti. The document, entitled “Anatomy of a Lead,” was put on a “close hold,” which meant only a rarefied circle had access to it—and none of them was from Pakistan.

  As the weeks progressed, more clues emerged as the NSA and CIA did what Osama had long feared they would: fixed on phone calls made by Maryam and Bushra. When they spoke to relatives, they lied about where they lived. For several years, the two women had pretended to their families that they were in Kuwait. They went to great lengths to shore up the lie, even taking gifts of expensive foreign clothes and cloth whenever they went home to Shangla or Kohat.

  Maryam had recently told her mother that she had “returned to Pakistan.” However, she said she was living in Peshawar.94

  Neither of them even mentioned Abbottabad. But where they said they were was not where the phone calls were ever made from.

  September 2010, Bilal Town, Abbottabad

  The compound was steeped in fear and paranoia but not because anyone had any inkling of America’s plans. The funk set in after Osama received a shocking letter from Daood’s new wife Sarah in Mir Ali.

  “Please forgive my poor sentences,” she began. On September 19, Daood had left home after dawn prayers and driven along the dangerous road between Datta Khel and Miram Shah to meet Atiyah’s representative, who had money to pay for Khairiah bin Laden’s ongoing stay at his home.

  It was a notorious route along which hundreds of Al Qaeda brothers had been killed, including Sheikh Saeed al-Masri. But the minor roads were so backbreaking and so much longer that many fighters took the risk.

  On his return journey he had stopped at Deegan, the halfway point, when a drone targeted his vehicle, killing Daood and his driver outright. “He was killed before breaking the fast, right before sunset prayer, on his way [back] to us. The loss is bigger than can be expressed in just a few lines,” a distraught Sarah wrote.95

  Osama panicked. Whether the strike had been opportunistic or had deliberately targeted his former son-in-law, Daood’s death made his home unsafe for any bin Laden family member. It also brought any observers one step closer to Osama. Security had to be tightened up and Khairiah had to move.

  Osama held a series of urgent meetings with Ibrahim and Abrar, asking them to speed up Khairiah’s arrival, while they pointed out she had not yet had the requisite checks to make sure she was not bugged. Meanwhile, Seham, Miriam, and Sumaiya agonized over how to break the news to Daood’s children.

  Sarah sent another update. Going through her husband’s possessions she had found many items that belonged to the family in Abbottabad, including two boxes of Khadija’s gold jewelry and gifts for Aisha and Seham.96

  There was a computer, a pistol, and notebooks containing Daood’s will, as well as his ring, which now belonged by rights to his eldest son, Abdallah, along with an iPod.

  She had also found Khadija’s old diary, inside which all the family birthdays had been marked. There was also a handwritten poem from Seham commemorating Khadija’s wedding to Daood in 2000.

  The most tragic relic was Saad bin Laden’s suitcase and possessions from Iran. There were clothes, notebooks, and photographs of his children. On Saad’s cell phone they had found the two video files that comprised his will and a letter to his father.97

  Sarah wanted to send all these possessions on with Khairiah.

  Tempering all the bad, there was one piece of good news. Sarah was seven months pregnant with her second child. If it was a girl, she intended to name it Khadija, after Osama’s dead daughter. Her first child had been named after Saad.

  Seham wrote back immediately. “Misfortune has enveloped us,” she began, saying that the children were standing around her, crying and blowing kisses. Trying to be positive, she wrote that their “mother,” Miriam, had had a dream in which she saw God calling to Daood to rise up with the martyrs. When she told the children that Sarah was pregnant, they had “divided into two teams,” guessing whether she would have a boy or a girl. Miriam had scolded them not to be silly but to “pray to God for her to be safe, whether a girl or boy.”98

  Whatever happened, Sarah had to stay in touch. “Saad and the newborn are brothers to Abdallah and his sisters, as there is no difference between them all,” Seham wrote. Family was family. The children were planning to write their own letters when things settled down.

  November 2010, White House, Washington, D.C.

  Panetta, John, and the bin Laden team went back to the president. There was a “strong possibility” that the Al Qaeda leader was in the compound, they reported. When he asked each of them to quantify their degree of certainty, John said 90 percent. His team went for 80 percent, while Michael Morell, the deputy director of the CIA, was at 60 percent.

  The president remained skeptical, thinking of the many previous leads over the years that had turned out to be “Elvis sightings.” Among the most embarrassing was a photograph of Osama bin Laden sitting in an open-top jeep in Chitral that Dick Cheney had gleefully presented to Musharraf in 2007. The president of Pakistan had come back a few days later beaming with the news that the man in the picture was a well-known smuggler from Khost who liked to dress up as his hero.99

  To avoid a repeat, presidential advisers began an “interrogation of data,” testing the CIA theory.100 Among the possibilities they conjured was that the Abbottabad compound did house a senior Al Qaeda figure, but not Osama. Perhaps it was another Gulf sheikh on the run, or members of Osama’s family—but not the man himself.

  To take a closer look, the CIA needed an observation post and someone fireproof in the field. It reached out to a retired Pakistan Army officer, Lieutenant Colonel Saeed Iqbal. A former commanding officer of the 408th Military Intelligence Battalion, he had once held a prestigious position reporting directly to the chief of army staff and had been responsible for his personal security.101

  He also had a checkered record—which made him gettable. The officer had been accused by a government inquiry of torturing a man to death, allegations that had summarily ended his military career in 1993.102 Afterward, he had sought to maintain important military, establishment, and intelligence connections, with one of his sons working as a private secretary to Pakistan’s former president Pervez Musharraf.

  The family bought an elegant home in the upmarket Defense Housing Authority, where his neighbors were all senior officers.

  In 1994, Iqbal had started a private security business, staffed by ex-ISI officers, and according to some of those who worked for him, he had almost immediately turned a profit by winning prestigious security contracts with embassies in Islamabad. His relations with the West deepened when in 1997 he was introduced to the CIA station in Islamabad.103

  Within a decade that relationship had blossomed. Iqbal regularly supplied “contractors” to work with the CIA in-country: drivers, muscle, street surveillance and pickpockets, logistics, and armorers.104

  In the fall of 2010, he set off for Abbottabad, where he approached Dr. Amir Aziz, a young major in the Army Medical Corps. Aziz was not related in any way to Osama bin Laden’s doctor from Lahore, although they shared the same name. Iqbal’s interest was that Dr. Aziz’s elaborate house with fake Doric columns sat fewer than eighty yards away from the mysterious Abbottabad compound and had a clear view of it.

  Iqbal expressed interest in land Aziz was selling, saying he wanted to build a retirement home for himself and his wife. He returned several times, according to Aziz, always driving an expensive bulletproof “silenced” car that
Aziz described as creeping up on people.

  Aziz recalled that Iqbal was keen to look around, climbing up onto the flat roof of the building to “take pictures of Aziz’s pets”—with the mysterious compound in the background.105 Eventually, he moved on, finding other homes in the neighborhood.

  President Obama was informed that the CIA had “eyes on” the house. As well as Iqbal’s photographs, a team of locally recruited informants had been installed in one nearby building, from where they watched through curtained windows. They photographed everything that could be seen, copied down the license plates of cars that came and went, and used infrared cameras to capture any movement at night. They planned to insert listening devices into a row of young poplar trees that grew close to the outside wall—until a gardener cut them all down, in a move that spooked the observation post.

  Iqbal took a backseat, renting an office in his company’s name at Jadoon Plaza in downtown Abbottabad. A mile away from the compound, the “camp office,” as he called it, became a forward operating station from where his men could come and go for debriefings without fear of being spotted.106

  His operation began to accumulate useful data, sufficient for the CIA to put together a “pattern of life” study that reported that about a dozen women and children lived in the compound, the group consisting of at least two families, with between six to eight children among them. They would buy sweets and soft drinks for the children at Rasheed’s corner store, about a one-minute walk from the house, while the adults got their bulkier supplies from Sajid General Store down the road. Occasionally they bought naan bread from a shop with a tandoor oven that was nearby, but most baking was done at home.107

  The close observation post homed in on yet more strange elements in the house’s setup. Four separate electricity meters had been wired up, along with four gas meters, all listed in just one name—Sahib Khan, son of Noor Hussain—who was not the registered owner of the property.108

  There were other oddities, small but pronounced. Only one of the children, a boy aged about seven, went to school, at a madrassa outside the city. The rest spent their days inside, only occasionally emerging to play cricket in the street. Local children reported they were “unfriendly.”

  But still there was nothing that the CIA or its assets could offer to firm up the presence of Osama.

  Analysts came up with increasingly imaginative proposals. The CIA could dig a tunnel underneath, or hack into the large satellite dish that sat on the roof of a small sunroom in the yard. Perhaps a high-powered telescope placed on a nearby mountain could pick up activity at the house.

  None of these proposals was practical, leaving agents to return to the compound and inveigle themselves into the families who lived around it.

  The closest described their secretive neighbors as “polite people who did not make small talk.” The only residents they had ever met were two brothers—Arshad and Tariq Khan—who had built the house in 2005 for an elderly relative fleeing from a “blood feud” in their native Waziristan, which explained the high walls.109

  Others gossiped that the Khan brothers were shifting heroin. How else could two men with no obvious source of wealth afford such a lavish home? One complained that the Khans were miserly as they rarely gave charity to the poor of the area, as was customary.

  The best eyewitness was Shamraiz Khan, a laborer who lived in a low-slung mud-brick home directly opposite the compound’s main gate. He had only ever noticed one visitor, he said, someone who came to the compound in the summer of 2010 in a white Toyota Corolla.110 Shamraiz had also been inside the compound: the Khan brothers paid him a few hundred rupees to plow the soil in the field next to the house. But he never went into the residential courtyard where Osama lived or saw anyone from the main house.

  The only sight of the compound’s female residents came when they occasionally emerged, fully covered, and were driven out in the white jeep or the compound’s other vehicle, a red Suzuki van. Sometimes they went to the hospital. Other times they went to Shangla or Kohat, where they stayed for several days.

  A young man also lived at the compound and, according to Shamraiz, had bought a cow from him and was attempting to grow vegetables.

  Eventually, after scrutinizing the pieces of laundry that went up on a washing line in the yard, the CIA concluded that a third family was living on the top floor that never went out at all. It consisted of at least three adult women, two men, and ten children—figures that were roughly consistent with what was known about Osama’s family.

  All attention was now focused on identifying one figure. He emerged most days from the back door of the main house to stroll around the courtyard for an hour or two, walking back and forth in tight circles like a prisoner in an exercise yard. Sometimes a woman and child accompanied him.

  By magnifying satellite images of the figure and measuring the length of his shadow, officials determined he was tall, roughly Osama’s height.111 However, since he always stayed under an awning and wore a wide-brimmed hat, no one had seen his face.

  September 26, 2010, Bilal Town, Abbottabad

  Inside the compound, Osama waited anxiously for Khairiah, filling his time by reading a biography of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi that Atiyah had found on a jihadist website.

  It was attributed to Saif al-Adel in Tehran and was ultimately a damning critique. It detailed secret Al Qaeda smuggling points into Iran, and how the Quds Force had assisted in Zarqawi’s passage to Iraq and continued to allow the through-flow of financing.

  Osama was furious that such sensitive material about their crucial Iran network had been published, and he could not believe that Saif would have been so indiscreet. Atiyah was instructed to mount a damage-limitation exercise. Saif was not the author, everyone should be told. “Remind them he is in jail.”112

  October 21, 2010, Bilal Town, Abbottabad

  More than two months had passed since Khairiah bin Laden’s arrival in Pakistan and there was still no clearance for her travel to Abbottabad. Daood’s death continued to hang over the house, with the children bursting into tears while Osama ignored them and spent most of his time writing letters or in front of the television news. The United States, he argued, was flailing: a record number of American soldiers had been killed in Afghanistan and a financial crisis of their own making threatened to impact Pentagon budgets. “Anyone who looks at the enemies in NATO, especially America, will know that they are in big trouble,” he wrote to Atiyah.113 The “local enemies” were also in crisis, he said, referring to Pakistan’s worsening security situation and recent floods that had affected more than twenty million people.

  Through the “generosity of God, the situation is moving in the direction of the mujahideen,” he wrote. Be patient and strong, and God would reward them, Osama told Atiyah, who still remained in office unable to leave, having narrowly survived a drone strike earlier in the month—something the CIA crowed about in the media, mistakenly believing that he was dead.114

  Family members, still in Waziristan, should “move only when the clouds are heavy,” and not use the Datta Khel–Miram Shah road, instructed Osama.115

  Unsure about the Ibrahim situation, Atiyah informed Osama that he had been working up a contingency plan to find temporary accommodation for Hamzah in Balochistan. A son of the dead Al Qaeda financial chief Sheikh Saeed al-Masri and another brother had gone there to secure a suitable location.

  Osama wrote back that the emissaries should be wary of certain Balochi brothers who had once been loyal to Khalid Shaikh Mohammad but were now known to “work for Pakistani intelligence.”116 Hamzah should “not leave the house” until Atiyah was ready to send him to Peshawar with a “trusted Pakistani brother.” What about the “new companion”? Had any person been hired? Osama asked.

  Frustrated, he turned on Atiyah, accusing him of throttling his public voice as his latest video had still not been aired. “It seems there is a misunderstanding regarding the issue of jihadi media,” he said, sarcastically. “It is a main pie
ce of the war and I did not mean that it should be abandoned.” Atiyah needed to “do better,” he needled, ignoring the fact that his Number Three wanted to quit.

  The tenth anniversary of 9/11 was coming and “attention should be paid to start preparing for [it] now,” Osama railed. Al Qaeda needed to “benefit from this event” and present “our just cause to the world, especially to the European people.” Atiyah should reach out to the right people. He suggested Ahmad Zaidan at Al Jazeera, Robert Fisk of the Independent, and the prominent Arab newspaper editor Abdel Bari Atwan, based in London.

  Osama had an idea. “Ask Brother Azzam about which U.S. channel you should send the tape to.” On the USB stick were yet more audio recordings, to be broadcast “before the American congressional election.”

  One thing that had made Osama contented was a letter from Mullah Omar—the first direct correspondence since 9/11. “I have received your kind letter,” Osama replied. “I was so happy reading it. We are your soldiers and we are with you heart and soul in supporting the religion of God Almighty.”117

  November 24, 2010, Bilal Town, Abbottabad

  Ibrahim was far sicker than he realized. According to family members, the doctor’s diagnosis was cancer. As a result, the thirty-two-year-old was incapable of making scheduled courier exchanges, so it took almost a month for letters from Waziristan to reach Abbottabad. When Atiyah’s reply to Osama’s entreaties finally arrived, it contained bad news.

  The two emissaries he had sent to Balochistan to find a safe house for Osama’s family had been picked off in a drone strike. They included Sheikh Saeed’s last remaining adult son.

  Atiyah confirmed that Hamzah, his family, and Khairiah were now staying with him in North Waziristan, although he was careful not to identify their precise location.118 Khairiah still intended to go to Abbottabad, he continued. They were just waiting for a “cloudy day” and a “green light” from the Sheikh. The fear that she was somehow a dupe of the Iranians, or even the CIA, was being taken so seriously that Atiyah worried “they are even overdoing it.” Someone had ordered a female recruit to examine Khairiah’s teeth, as Osama had become paranoid that a chip could have been inserted into a filling by the Quds Force during one of her frequent dental appointments at the Tourist Complex. “I doubt—with God’s help—that there would be anything [hidden in her teeth],” Atiyah added. “Nevertheless I preferred to mention this to you just so you know.”