The Exile

by Adrian Levy

  The companions Ibrahim and Abrar had been in on it, too, Qadir claimed. “They wanted bin Laden gone, and they wanted a share of the $25 million [the reward offered by the United States for his capture].”108 On the night of the raid, the brothers had not reached for their weapons as they knew the Americans were coming, Qadir claimed he was told by official ISI sources.

  A glimpse of another narrative was beginning to emerge from the Abbottabad saga, one that put the CIA firmly in the frame as collaborating with Iran. Only one person could confirm the story: Khairiah bin Laden. But she, Qadir revealed, was once again refusing to cooperate. “She is so aggressive, she borders on being intimidating,” a “medium high level officer” in the ISI’s counterterrorism wing had told him. “Short of torturing her, we cannot get her to admit to anything.”109

  By the time Abbottabad Commission member Ashraf Qazi was allowed to see the wives in September 2011, they had been in ISI custody for five months. “They were desperate to be released and to return to their families,” he reported.110

  Qazi was not allowed to stay long, recording only glimpses of what life had been like inside Osama’s compound; and he never got to ask the most important questions, like what had happened to Hamzah bin Laden or what was in the “significant dossier” the Iranian authorities held on the family and that was referred to in other ISI records.111 Vital questions about Iran’s role in the trapping of Osama remained unanswered, such as how much information Iran had shared with the United States about its transfer of several bin Laden family members to Pakistan in the autumn of 2010.112

  Qazi argued with the ISI about the relevance of Maryam’s seemingly important statement that “visitors” had turned up in Abbottabad just days before the raid—a reference to the brief visit made by Hamzah.

  The ISI interrogators had simply dismissed this claim as “the nonsense of a woman” and not worthy of further investigation. Qazi disagreed. Maryam’s viewpoint from out in the annex was crucial. When he pushed for access to Maryam, he saw her briefly but she was not allowed to speak freely. Huge gaps in her narrative and that of Osama’s wives remained unanswered. “The ISI did not ask many more obvious questions like how [the family] moved around, how Khalid, Hamzah and Saad moved around, how Saad was killed,” he complained. Where was Saad bin Laden buried, he asked? No response.

  The ISI apparently had Osama’s diaries but they, too, were withheld from the commission as were the twenty stacked boxes of files that SEAL Matthew Bissonnette had spotted on the second-floor landing but had not had time to take. These were now in the hands of the ISI and presumably contained a large collection of hugely valuable letters and documents from Osama bin Laden. But they would never be published, or seen again outside Aabpara.

  Qazi concluded: “There are questions that the Commission did not put to the wives of OBL and that the intelligence agency had the time and expertise to do so if they had wished.”113 As far as he could see, the ISI’s main focus over the five months since Osama’s death had been to silence all potentially dangerous witnesses and close down all incriminating lines of inquiry, any one of which might have exposed links between the ISI, Osama bin Laden, and the Al Qaeda and Taliban shuras.

  November 2011, Islamabad

  Amal bin Laden’s younger brother Zakariya al-Sadeh flew into Islamabad after being informed by the Yemeni embassy that his sister was about to be released. He claimed that until he saw reports about the Abbottabad raid on TV he had lost touch with her and thought her dead.114

  Zakariya, a twenty-four-year-old student at Sana’a University, who could not speak English or Urdu and had spent all his money on the plane ticket, was at a loss as to what to do. A Yemeni engineering student who doubled as an IT consultant at the Yemeni embassy took him in.115

  Zakariya and his new friend, Abdul Rahman, were unsuited for dealing with Pakistani bureaucracy or the ISI.116 It took them several weeks to negotiate a first visit with Amal—a thirty-minute session that took place in a three-bedroom apartment with no windows. Zakariya was horrified at how damaged his nephews and nieces appeared. “I brought them toys, but they did not know how to play,” he recalled. “They had not seen the sun. They were just being kept alive.”

  He was also shocked at the changes in his sister. Gone was the perky teenager who had neglected her studies and forgotten her hijab. Here was a prematurely aged and physically weak woman who seemed so overwhelmed by the present situation and the needs of her children that she sought solace in her Koran.117

  He demanded that the Yemeni ambassador lobby for better treatment for his sister’s leg injury, more suitable accommodation, psychiatrists, and a date for their release. But since the family had not been formally arrested and still floated around in an ISI netherworld, they had no legal status.

  Zakariya sought out lawyers willing to work pro bono and spoke to anyone he thought might help. Eventually, he found moral backing in the form of Omar bin Laden, who, having dealt with the Iranians in 2009, now assumed the role of family spokesman, as ever prompted by his fearless British wife, Zaina.

  Omar had watched the news about the raid that killed his father from his home in Doha, with Zaina by his side. Although he never spoke to his father again after leaving Kandahar in 2001, he had told Zaina when they met in 2006 that he knew his father was still alive. By 2010, Omar also knew his father was in Pakistan. Although he had spoken publicly against his father, he labeled the American operation as a “criminal mission” that had “obliterated an entire defenseless family” and said that he and his siblings were “not convinced on the available evidence in the absence of a dead body, photographs, and video evidence that our natural father is dead.”118

  But his father’s death had far wider ramifications than simply one family’s grief, said Omar, warning that without the unifying figure of Osama, even more bloodthirsty Islamists would replace him and run amok. As far as Omar was concerned, killing his father had been a terrible mistake: “Without the head, the arms and legs will run wherever.”119

  Now he requested that family members stuck in Pakistan be given temporary travel documents so they could go to Saudi Arabia.120 Bakr bin Laden, Osama’s elder brother and the powerful head of the family clan, had offered to take some of them in temporarily, so long as they signed agreements never to speak about their experiences. Now that his troublesome brother was finally dead, Bakr wanted the connection between Al Qaeda and the bin Laden family name permanently severed.

  Pakistan’s president, prime minister, and army chief all refused Ashraf Qazi’s requests to appear before the Abbottabad Commission. The only willing attendee was the ISI’s General Pasha, who turned up for three sittings and gave a smooth performance. First, he attempted to flatter Qazi by describing the commission’s deliberations as “of critical importance” to the ISI’s functioning as “the first line of national defense.” Then he repeated what he had said to acting CIA director Mike Morell: that during the early years after 9/11, the ISI had established an Osama bin Laden cell to follow its own leads; but that the CIA had shared “disjointed and out of context information,” sending his operatives chasing false leads in Sargodha, Lahore, Sialkot, and Gilgit.121

  When U.S. interest waned as a result of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the ISI came to believe Osama had probably died, confided Pasha. This fitted with preexisting reports that his health was declining, Pasha added, repeating the old Hamid Gul excuse. Osama’s name never again came up in CIA–ISI discussions, he said. There had been no indications of his presence or existence in Pakistan. Yet the ISI had steadfastly continued the hunt for him even though America and Pakistan’s other security agencies had not.

  Digging the knife in, he accused Pakistan’s Federal Investigation Agency, Special Branch, Military Intelligence, and Intelligence Bureau of all failing in their duties to locate Osama. The regular police, which had “tentacles down” to the local level should have picked up chatter about Osama’s presence in Abbottabad, he said, but instead they worked i
n “pathetic conditions.” He reserved the harshest criticism for the Special Branch, which was responsible for conducting sweeps around the area of the Pakistan Military Academy ahead of VIP visits. They—not the ISI—should have located Osama in Bilal Town.

  Asked why he thought the United States had gone it alone with the Abbottabad raid and not informed the ISI in advance, Pasha came up with an inventive response. President Barack Obama had not wanted the ISI to claim the glory of finding Osama and win the laurels, he said with a broad smile, before making way for a lieutenant general, who came to inform the commission about the army’s own internal review of the raid.

  The lieutenant general concluded that he had found no evidence that any religious group or faction within the armed forces had “provided any kind of protection or support to OBL during his stay in Pakistan.” The army was “disciplined and organized” and functioned “in accordance with laid down procedures,” he commented. A system of checks and monitoring was in place at all tiers of its command structure. It was “possible” that some retired officers could have been involved in a support network. But given that the army had suffered considerably at the hands of Al Qaeda and militants, he believed this to be “unlikely, if not unthinkable.”

  The ISI had done a tremendous job in “thwarting the enemy and keeping it at bay.”

  No one mentioned the directorate’s links to Lashkar-e-Taiba, Hafiz Saeed, Ilyas Kashmiri, Masood Azhar’s Jaish-e-Mohammed, the Haqqani network, or Fazlur Rehman Khalil, the founder of Harkat-ul-Mujahideen. No one talked about the role of former ISI director general Hamid Gul or any of the other outfits he and S-Wing had romanced and nurtured as coins in an Islamist war chest to which Osama also had access.

  Diplomat Ashraf Qazi was stunned by the performances of General Pasha and his supporters, and he poured his contempt into the commission’s draft conclusions. The ISI had “completely failed to track down OBL,” leading foreign and domestic critics to reasonably conclude that its operatives were too close to assets in the field who would “never tolerate a betrayal of OBL.” As a result, the Pakistan file “was closed on him.” The ISI had “neither briefed the government leadership on the status of its information on OBL, nor was it asked to do so.” Even after Hillary Clinton had made her sensational accusation in 2010 that Osama was receiving official protection in Pakistan, the ISI had still not “stepped up its efforts to satisfy itself that there was no basis for such accusations.”

  The “pretense” that the ISI leadership was in command of its field operatives “was exposed by the fact that they dared not offend their most zealous operatives.” The handling of the Raymond Davis case was a “national disgrace in which the ISI played an inglorious role.” Pasha had lost control of “both violent jihadi militant extremists on the one hand” and “CIA special operatives and dirty tricks killers on the other.” Even after the Abbottabad raid, the ISI had failed to investigate anything about Osama’s network of support beyond “two dead Pakistani security guards cum couriers.”122 Who, for example, was Mohammed Aslam, the brother’s crucial Peshawar-based deputy who had put up Khairiah and Hamzah and his family? No answer.

  It was a damning indictment of Pasha’s tenure.

  Qazi’s conclusions were not that different from those of General Javed Alam Khan, the ISI’s former director of analysis who had once assisted the CIA’s Robert Grenier on the Al Qaeda file. Forcibly co-opted into the ISI prior to 9/11, the former intelligence chief had been appalled by what he had seen in the days after Tora Bora. A secret General Khan kept from no one these days was his abiding belief that the ISI, despite the conspiracies and mythmaking, was a bantam fighter punching above its weight. Khan cynically thanked ambitious journalists, who, in their desire to woo news desks, fluffed up grandiose stories about the ISI’s legendary spying abilities like feather beds, because, frankly, without this free media, replete with suppositions, Grand Guignol, and make-believe, he was absolutely certain that no one outside Pakistan would ever talk about the ISI at all.123

  Ashraf Qazi saved his most scathing comments for last. Although the commission had found no smoking gun of ISI complicity in hiding Osama, it concluded that “connivance, collaboration and cooperation at some levels” must have existed “on a plausible deniability basis outside government structures.” From start to finish the whole Abbottabad episode was “nothing less than a collective and sustained dereliction of duty by the political, military and intelligence leadership of the country.”

  Having questioned three hundred witnesses and reviewed three thousand official documents, the Abbottabad Commission wrote a final report that would be classified “top secret” and submitted to the prime minister of Pakistan. Anticipating an adverse reaction from the military leadership, Qazi noted in his closing comments “apprehensions that the Commission’s report would be ignored, or even suppressed,” and he urged the government to release it. However, no details were made public despite numerous requests.

  Qazi’s damning findings only saw the light of day when a copy of the report was leaked to Al Jazeera.124 Within minutes of publishing it, Al Jazeera’s website was blocked in Pakistan, and page 197 of the report, which contained part of General Pasha’s testimony, was missing. It was thought to contain a list of seven demands made by the United States to President Pervez Musharraf in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks.

  No serving ISI officer would ever be held to account for Abbottabad; and, after he gave evidence to the commission, General Pasha never spoke publicly about the Osama bin Laden affair again.

  But influential figures outside Pakistan continued to pile on the pressure. When militants from the Haqqani network attacked the U.S. embassy in Kabul later, Admiral Mike Mullen, who had once regarded Pakistan’s army chief General Kayani as a friend, told a Senate panel that the Haqqani network was a “veritable arm” of the ISI, which had played a direct role in the attack.

  It was the most serious charge that the United States had leveled against Pakistan in a grinding decade of mealymouthed cooperation and horse trading between the two countries. Mullen, who was about to retire, went on to accuse the Pakistan Army and ISI of “choosing to use violent extremism as an instrument of policy.” The army and ISI had “eroded their internal security and their position in the region.”125 To reinforce the message, General Pasha was summoned back to Washington and warned that if the ISI did not rein back its Haqqani thugs, American troops were prepared to cross the Afghan border and attack them.

  June 2011, Washington, D.C.

  After the Abbottabad raid, John Brennan, the president’s counterterrorism adviser, had assured reporters that everything that could be told would be told, as “we want to make sure that not only the American people but the world understand exactly what happened.” And by June 2011, the White House, CIA, and Pentagon were working closely with filmmakers on a big-budget Hollywood retelling of the raid, provisionally entitled Killing bin Laden.

  Oscar-winning director Kathryn Bigelow and scriptwriter Mark Boal, who had made The Hurt Locker, a tense blockbuster about a U.S. military bomb disposal unit in Iraq, had been deep into a screenplay on America’s Tora Bora operation when Abbottabad happened. Existing contacts at the CIA and Defense Department suggested that instead of making a film about how the U.S. military had lost Osama in 2001, they should regear to show how the military had finished him off in 2011.

  “I know we don’t pick favorites,” wrote CIA spokesperson Marie Harf in an internal e-mail backing the new project, “but it makes sense to get behind a winning horse.”

  Scheduled to open in October 2012, Bigelow’s film would be a timely boost for Barack Obama during the forthcoming presidential elections. “Mark and Kathryn’s movie is going to be the first and the biggest,” said Harf as she recommended they be given exclusive access.126

  Bigelow and Boal attended private briefings at Langley, meetings arranged despite the previous warnings given to the SEALs about the need to maintain secrecy. During one forty-minute sess
ion with Boal, Mike Morell, who was still the CIA’s acting director, gushed about how much he had loved The Hurt Locker, a film widely praised for its neutral stance on the war in Iraq and that had won six Oscars in 2010. The CIA, now under investigation by the Senate Intelligence Committee for its use of illegal torture techniques during the war on terror, and the Obama administration, suffering in approval ratings, could both do with a little stardust.127

  Boal spoke to Leon Panetta, who was now secretary of defense and declared himself “very interested in supporting” the film. Plans were made for Bigelow to have dinner with Panetta once a forthcoming trip to Afghanistan was out of the way. Boal also met John Brennan, who promised to make sure that the team’s White House material was “in good shape.”128

  To thrash out more details, the Hollywood team sat down with Michael Vickers, who was now the undersecretary of defense for intelligence, on July 15, 2011. Vickers began by apologizing that Admiral McRaven, the brains behind Abbottabad, and his boss, Admiral Eric Olson, the commander of U.S. Special Operations Command, could not be directly involved in the film. “They’re just concerned that as commanders of the force and they’re telling [SEALs] all the time—don’t you dare talk to anyone—that it’s just a bad example if it gets out,” said Vickers. Instead, Bigelow and her team would be given access to Jay, the SEAL Team Six commander who had lectured his men on keeping a low profile. He could “give you everything you would want or would get from Admiral Olson or Admiral McRaven,” Vickers said.129

  The only restriction was that Jay would have to remain an anonymous consultant. “This gives him one step removed,” Vickers continued, “and he knows what he can and can’t say … It ought to meet your needs and give you lots of color.”130

  Over the following weeks, Boal interviewed five CIA and military operatives involved in the raid, including the Pashto translator. Everyone signed release forms allowing their material to be used, and Boal was invited to a private ceremony feting SEALs from the raid.131