The Exile

by Adrian Levy

  Who was going to be asked to leave, and where they would go, he didn’t say.4

  A couple of days later, Ibrahim delivered a missive to Khairiah telling her that she was, after all, to go to Peshawar, where the wife of Mohammed Aslam was ready to take her to a doctor and a dentist.

  Osama was not sure about the exact date of her journey to Abbottabad, but it would probably be a Thursday afternoon or a Friday, he wrote, days that Pakistani police and soldiers often took off, leaving many security checkpoints unmanned.

  However, not everything he had agreed with the Kuwaiti brothers was set in stone. Osama had already penned two secret messages for Atiyah, one instructing Hamzah to come to Abbottabad along with his family and another asking his sons Mohammed and Othman to travel to Peshawar and meet a contact who would rendezvous with them either in the Lady Reading Hospital or Paradise Square. From there they would be taken to a Peshawar safe house until it was safe to come to Abbottabad.5

  Osama updated Atiyah about tensions inside the compound. “Eight years and months have passed accompanied by Ahmad [Ibrahim] and his brother. They accepted the job a short time before the arrest of Hafith [Khalid Shaikh Mohammad]. The length of companionship and the security pressure have affected [Ibrahim’s] health and his nerves. And his condition [impacts on Abrar], who is now suffering from a dangerous disease that hit him a few weeks back, and his illness is the reason we did not communicate with you.”6

  Osama had a sensitive announcement: a crisis to reveal that could put the kibosh on all other decisions. The candidate who Atiyah had found in Lahore to replace Ibrahim and his brother as companion had got cold feet and dropped out. They would have to start again. “Inform me of the developments in every message,” Osama wrote, his exhaustion and frustration that the move from Abbottabad may be further delayed evident from the text.

  The Sheikh tidied up loose ends, writing directly to Mohammed Aslam to thank him for agreeing to host his family when they arrived in Peshawar. He used this letter as a chance to ask Aslam if he knew anyone in Peshawar suitable for the companion job. “It’s been eight years and a few months in the company of the brothers,” he explained. “But with the length of time they have suffered serious fatigue. Do you have brothers from Pakistan who you know and trust and are fully confident?”7

  If the answer was yes, then Aslam should act fast and brief whoever he proposed as to how the bin Laden caravan was run: “We are in two separated houses, inside and out, and we are making our bread by ourselves, and we buy grain wholesale.” Medical needs were minimal as they kept stocks in-house. At most, the adults went out once a year. His son Khalid was the only one who spoke to neighbors and he “knows Pashtu 70 percent and now would endeavor to speak Urdu.”8

  The upheavals had had one positive consequence. Even though Osama had no idea where they would all live after the 9/11 anniversary, their getting out of Abbottabad would finally free up Khalid, who was keen once more to fix a marriage date for September 2011—if his bride-to-be could be persuaded that the stop-start engagement was really back on.

  In a letter that was probably dispatched on the same thumb drive as Osama’s missives, Seham updated Karima’s mother. “I want to assure you that this is the last and final appointment, no more and no less, God willing,” she assured her. “My son says he will compensate [Karima] for waiting for him.”9

  January 2011, Washington, D.C.

  CIA director Leon Panetta and his deputy Michael Morell were exploring possible courses of action. Some were suggesting “over-kill,” meaning an aerial bombing raid that would obliterate the compound and everyone in it, or a precision drone strike to take out the Pacer as he made his daily circuit. “I’d rather just push the easy button,” said Gina Bennett, an analyst who had become a key figure in the CIA’s hunt for Osama bin Laden over more than a decade.

  After Admiral William McRaven, a former Navy SEAL who now led the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), was brought into the conversation, the focus switched to a ground operation. A bunker-buster strike would make it almost impossible to verify that they had hit the main target, he warned, and collateral damage to women and children in the compound as well as those living in neighboring houses would probably be substantial, causing aftershocks, real and psychological, that the United States might not be able to contain or ride out. Besides, there was no way of knowing whether the surgical strike had hit or missed its target, meaning Osama; and if he survived, he could go to ground, possibly forever. They had to go in person to kill or capture him.10

  McRaven pointed out that during the past decade JSOC had conducted thousands of such raids against compounds much harder to penetrate than Abbottabad. It would not be the first time SEALs had operated inside Pakistani territory, either. At least ten covert forays had been made into Waziristan, without Pakistan’s knowledge, and many more had been planned, including an aborted parasail operation to nab Dr. al-Zawahiri from Damadola in 2006.11

  This swoop, however, was far trickier and the political fallout potentially catastrophic. Abbottabad was more than 150 miles inside Pakistani airspace, which meant a covert mission that involved flying temperamental helicopters—notoriously difficult to cloak—beneath Pakistan’s radar, unless they brought Islamabad into the discussion.

  In Virginia, no one could see that working.

  In Aabpara, the ISI had never felt more alienated from Langley. General Ahmed Shuja Pasha told friends that relations with the CIA had reached their “lowest ebb” as a result of a private lawsuit lodged in New York the previous November that had named him as complicit in the Mumbai attacks of 2008, alongside Hafiz Saeed, emir of Lashkar-e-Taiba.12 Pasha told friends that he suspected the CIA had had a hand in pursuing the case.

  Langley had sent a succession of station chiefs to Islamabad who had spent far less time building up goodwill than had their predecessors. Jaded case officers cycled through the capital, with each one leaving Pakistan more embittered or disengaged than the last.

  Pasha believed that “the main agenda of the CIA is to have the ISI declared as a terrorist organization,” and he had responded to the Mumbai court case by leaking the name of the CIA Islamabad station chief, Jonathan Bank, thereby forcing Bank to pull out.13

  His replacement, Mark Kelton, an acerbic old-school type who was coming straight from Russia, had yet to arrive, although CIA director Panetta had concluded that years of engaging in adversarial espionage in Moscow could be a significant asset in Islamabad.14

  Everyone in the know at Langley was worried by the consequences of a hostile ISI and an unsettled Islamabad CIA station on the building Abbottabad plan.

  For Obama administration veterans like Defense Secretary Robert Gates, history, rather than Pakistan, was also a potent issue. The emerging proposal to dispatch helicopters into hostile territory evoked a vision of the Black Hawk Down episode, referring to the disastrous 1993 mission to Mogadishu in which two U.S. helicopters had been shot down and eighteen soldiers killed.15

  Admiral McRaven’s job was to find workable solutions, and he profiled the unit he intended to use: SEAL Team Six. Its commander had led an audacious mission in 2009 to rescue Richard Phillips, the captain of an American freighter that had been seized by Somali pirates. The operation had been so successful that Tom Hanks was already in talks with major Hollywood studios to star in a cinematic retelling of the story.

  What was needed was detail. McRaven appointed a JSOC official known as Brian, an officer who had previously been an operational commander, to prepare a meticulous raid schematic.

  Brian moved into an unmarked office on the first floor of the CIA’s printing plant at Langley, which he filled with topographical maps and overheads of Osama’s home, which was officially identified as AC1—or Abbottabad Compound 1. Some jocularly referred to the proposed raid as “a trip to Atlantic City.”16

  January 25, 2011, Abbottabad

  Post office clerk Tahir Shehzad’s luck had run out in November when he failed to waive a cu
stomer’s bill at the counter where he worked, a squat building across the road from Abbottabad’s British-era St. Luke’s Church. The customer owed a handful of rupees, not enough to buy a plate of biryani, but Shehzad was a zealot and with his supervisor always breathing down his neck he felt obliged to threaten the customer.

  After an argument, the embarrassed customer—a former army officer—stomped out, waiting outside for Shehzad to finish his shift so he could rough him up. But instead of jumping him, he had instead followed him to a deadbeat corner in an otherwise smart army town, where he saw Shehzad chitchatting with a fair-skinned man who was unmistakably an Arab. The retired officer watched intrigued as the two men dived inside a religious bookshop. Suspicious, he called a police contact to say he had witnessed what looked like “an Arab plot” unfolding.

  The cops, who were under ISI instructions not to touch any cases involving Arabs—just as former ISI chief Hamid Gul had told Osama would happen—gave the tidbit to the ISI station that had opened in town after the 2005 earthquake so as to keep an eye on the jihad outfits disguised as aid groups.

  The spooks had just changed roster, and an energetic new chief took up the tip, ordering his men to tail clerk Shehzad, eventually following him to Lahore International Airport on January 23. They surprised him as he greeted two men off a flight who turned out to be French nationals—one of Pakistani descent and the other a Caucasian convert to Islam.

  Terrified, the jet-lagged men admitted they were on their way to North Waziristan to join Al Qaeda. Clerk Shehzad did not put up much of a struggle either and confessed to being a low-level Al Qaeda foot soldier. He offered to trade his way out of a lifetime off the grid, in an ISI cell, by leading spooks back to his senior contacts in Abbottabad.

  Two days later, he pointed out an apartment where another foreign couple he had also recently met off an international flight was now staying. An ISI raiding party swooped on the property, firing off rounds before going in and bringing down a bloodied prisoner. In pain, the bleeding man—clearly not a Pakistani—confessed, to the amazement of the ISI team, that he was the notorious Indonesian mujahid Umar Patek, on the run for the Bali bombings of 2002.

  Sought by U.S., Indonesian, and Australian intelligence for almost a decade, Patek described how he had fled his hiding place in the Philippines the previous May, stopping off in Saudi Arabia, where an Al Qaeda connect had set him up with a contact in Pakistan.

  ISI Abbottabad was incredulous. They had bumped into a terrific score. The cash reward for Patek, offered by the U.S. Department of Justice, was $1 million.17 The cachet was even greater since the CIA’s new station chief, Mark Kelton, had arrived in-country that very morning.

  General Athar Abbas, head of the combined ISI and army press bureau, the Inter-Services Public Relations (ISPR), was delighted. Accustomed to dealing with endless black news days, Athar sent a congratulatory text message to ISI director General Pasha, suggesting they exploit this rare event and publicize the arrest of Patek. “This is a project Pakistan enabled to happen and we should trumpet it from upon high.”

  However, there was no response from Pasha, and Athar watched, frustrated, as the air was sucked out of the story.18

  January 27, 2011, Lahore, Pakistan

  General Pasha was not being idle. He quietly contacted the ISI’s secretive S-Wing—the section of the spy agency charged with maintaining relations with outlawed extremist groups—and asked for “comments, clarifications and a plan to develop intelligence derived from the raid.” He heard nothing back, and he meant to chase it up, but cascading events rolled over him.

  Just two days later, Raymond Davis, a former U.S. Special Forces soldier and security contractor, shot dead two Pakistani men in front of hundreds of eyewitnesses at a red stop light in Lahore. As a crowd grew, colleagues racing to Davis’s rescue sped down the wrong side of the road and killed a third Pakistani.

  Davis was beaten, arrested, and taken to Kot Lakhpat prison, while in his car the Pakistani authorities found a collection of gear that could be used for espionage. When Davis was charged with double murder and accused of covertly chasing down links between the ISI and the banned terrorist outfit Lashkar-e-Taiba, Mark Kelton issued instructions to the U.S. ambassador, Cameron Munter. “Don’t tell them anything.”19

  As news of Davis’s arrest spread, Lashkar’s Hafiz Saeed and cronies working for former ISI chief Hamid Gul and Fazlur Rehman Khalil organized street protests, demanding that the American be sentenced to death. When Munter’s spokesman stubbornly backed Davis’s claim that he was an “administrative and technical official” at the American consulate in Lahore and had acted in self-defense as he feared he was about to be robbed, the fatal street fight became a major diplomatic incident. The United States required deniability, and Pakistan feared it could no longer furnish it.

  A senior Pakistani official briefed reporters that Davis worked for XE Services, an American private security firm that had until 2009 been named Blackwater and had been linked to the killing of civilians and torturing of detainees in Iraq.20 President Obama hit back, describing Davis as “our diplomat” and citing the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations. On Capitol Hill, angry Republicans proposed slashing Islamabad’s $1.5 billion annual aid budget.

  In an attempt to calm things, Admiral Mike Mullen, the U.S. chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, called up his old friend General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, Pakistan’s army chief. Mullen had had a significant say in Kayani’s appointment as army chief, and the two men shared a close working relationship, with Mullen vising Pakistan twenty-seven times during his tenure.21 They spoke about Davis three times on the phone before Kayani promised to refer the case to his ISI chief General Pasha.

  Pasha was duty bound to intervene in the Davis affair, but he was deeply worried about the implications of doing so. Already furious but unable to do anything about the ever-increasing number of U.S. government contractors arriving on remote airstrips all over Pakistan with visas issued by the Pakistani embassy in Washington, he was amazed that the United States had become so lax that it had entrusted a spying mission in the heart of the Punjab to a Caucasian agent with no languages who tooled around Lahore apparently armed with everything except a cool head and tradecraft.22 Now that one of the “CIA’s secret sniffer dogs” had been caught in the act, Pasha was incredulous that Kayani had asked him to save Davis on America’s behalf. He preferred jailing Davis and launching an investigation into which other Western spies were in Pakistan working against Pakistan. Instead, his boss was bending over backward to pacify a country whose arrogance already “knew no limits.”23

  But Pasha was nothing if not loyal. Having received a direct order, he called Leon Panetta on February 23, suggesting that they try to resolve the matter. Out of all the Americans he had come across, Pasha liked Panetta better than most. He was the only U.S. official he had ever invited to his house, introducing him to his wife and son.24 Now, Panetta proved standoffish. The U.S. State Department was taking the lead on Davis, he said, and the CIA would not intervene.

  Surprised, Pasha posed a direct question. “Was Davis working for CIA?”

  “No, he’s not one of ours,” Panetta replied before hanging up.

  Believing that he was being lied to, Pasha backed off, instructing the ISI station in Lahore to leave Davis’s fate in the hands of the Punjab police and the courts, the former brutal and the latter unpredictable.25 The United States had just lost its only chance to end the dispute safely and quickly, he told friends.

  The ISI continued to milk the case, leaking to local newspapers details of Davis’s presumed mission: “tracing links between the ISI and Lashkar-e-Taiba.” Video footage of Davis’s arrest and interrogation played on national broadcaster PTV, clips that showed Davis reaching beneath his flannel shirt and producing a jumble of identifications.26 “This is an old badge,” the American can be heard saying. “This is Islamabad.” He showed the badge to the man across the desk and then a more recent one proving his
employment in the American consulate in Lahore.

  “You are working at the consulate general in Lahore?” a policeman asked.

  “Yes.”

  “As a …?”

  “I, I just work as a consultant there.”

  The equipment confiscated from his car was also paraded on PTV: an unlicensed pistol, a long-range radio, a GPS device, an infrared flashlight, and a camera with pictures of buildings around Lahore. “He was doing espionage and surveillance activities,” said the Punjab law minister.27

  President Obama’s chief diplomatic troubleshooter, Senator John Kerry, was dispatched to Islamabad to secure Davis’s release but returned empty-handed.

  Before SEAL Team Six set out for Abbottabad, someone had to get Davis back to the United States.

  Early February 2011, Bilal Town, Abbottabad

  Osama sent a flurry of letters to Khairiah when she reached Peshawar. Things were finally on track for her arrival, he said, but he warned that she should not be surprised if Ibrahim or Abrar were unfriendly: “They are exhausted … It is hard for them to do some of the things I ask them to. One of the hardest things is to ask them to bring one of my family members.”28 The fact that three of Osama’s sons and their families were also now in Pakistan made that job even harder.

  Although Osama was desperate to see her, writing, “Please trust me that I am working very hard to live with you,” he still remained fixated on the possibility of a sophisticated Iranian-CIA plot. Why had the Iranians released Khairiah, Hamzah, Mohammed, and Othman at the Pakistan border, rather than allowing them to fly to Syria or Qatar as had been previously discussed? He asked her again, “Did you ask to go to Qatar?” drilling down for details. “Were they afraid if you and Hamzah went to Syria you would not stay there, but instead that you would go to Saudi Arabia and that you would embarrass them through the media?”