The Exile

by Adrian Levy

  “Amal described Khairiah as ‘the real killer of bin Laden,’ ” the newspaper duly reported. “Khairiah accused Amal of sticking to Osama like a prostitute who wanted sex 24 hours a day.” Amal had to be “pulled apart from … Khairiah after the pair began brawling.”38 Both inside and outside the safe house things were coming to a head.

  On the evening of March 2, two weeks before Pasha’s formal retirement date, a Pakistani lawyer employed by Amal’s brother Zakariya was informed that the wives’ cases would now be heard—the following day.39 After ten months of drifting in unofficial custody, the family’s case was suddenly “urgent.” A First Information Report (FIR) had been hastily prepared and it accused the women of technical charges including “illegal entry into Pakistan without any valid travel documents” as well as misrepresenting themselves to doctors when they gave birth.40

  Zakariya was amazed, as for the past three months he had been prevented from having any contact with his sister or her children.41 When the Islamabad district courts opened at eight the next morning, Zakariya and his lawyer arrived to find Rehman Malik, Pakistan’s interior minister, addressing reporters. Zakariya challenged him, as his sister’s repatriation order required Malik’s signature.42

  Malik shook Zakariya’s hand and smiled for the cameras. General Pasha, who had only just informed Malik that his ministry was now in charge of Osama’s family, had caught him out and he was doing what he did best, talking himself out of trouble.

  Knowing that the women and children could not be slung in a regular jail, which would be bad publicity, Malik had called up an old acquaintance, Yaqoob Tabani, one of the richest men in Pakistan. Malik knew Tabani owned several luxurious villas in Islamabad, some of which were empty. “I have some foreign friends coming to the city,” said Malik casually. “Can you look after them for a few days?”

  Tabani agreed. “They turned up with the police that evening, I couldn’t believe it,” he recalled.43 That night he learned from the news that Malik’s supposed friends were actually the wives and children of Osama bin Laden.

  He had already handed over the keys to a house located behind his own villa on Atatürk Avenue in the exclusive G-6 neighborhood, and now he watched as a huge crowd descended on the pavement outside his gates, scanned by the ISI.

  The next day he was horrified to learn that his home had been redesignated as a judicial lockup. “Rehman Malik apologized and told me it would be over in a few days. But the women brought furniture, dozens of religious books, and put grilles up on all the windows.”

  Over the following weeks, judges, lawyers, security officials, and embassy personnel converged on Tabani’s villa, all of them put in their place by the grim-faced International Islamic University professor, Dr. Zaitoon Begum, who had befriended Khairiah during the Abbottabad Commission hearings. “A curtain was strung up in the living room and the case against the women was held right there, the women behind it,” said Tabani, who watched discreetly from his adjoining property.44

  While several references had been made in the FIR to “others who made arrangements for securing and facilitating their illegal entry into Pakistan and subsequently harbored them at different places,” the temporary court made no attempt to identify these “others.”

  At the end of the case, the widows and Osama’s adult daughters Sumaiya and Miriam were each handed a forty-five-day detention notice and a fine of 10,000 Pakistani rupees ($100).45 They would serve their short sentences in situ as the villa was now reclassified as a sub-jail.

  Barring travel documents that would have to be provided by the Saudi and Yemeni embassies, it was all settled.46 Distracting attention away from questions about ISI collusion, Pasha’s deputies released a video purporting to be of the women, but starring actors dressed up in abayas and niqabs praying and corralling children who looked nothing like Osama’s youngest offspring and were all the wrong ages.47 The ISI also released “transcripts” of Amal’s interrogation. “Osama loved me the most,” she allegedly told her questioners. “We used to talk about romance … apart from Al Qaeda things.” In the last days, “he was ready to face death.” Echoing the private fears of shura members still in Tehran, the ISI insinuated that it was the Iranians who had found Osama, not the CIA.

  Asked about the ongoing search for Dr. Ayman al-Zawahiri, General Pasha lobbed one final grenade: “ISI is working hard to locate him,” he said, but the “US is continuing to withhold vital information from the ISI and could be planning another assault somewhere in Pakistan.”

  Finally, Pasha’s successor was announced.48 For the next three years, the job of guarding Pakistan’s tower of secrets would fall to Zahir ul-Islam, a general who had been responsible for the country’s internal security during the Abbottabad period.

  April 27, 2012, Islamabad

  Almost a year after his killing, Osama’s family was deported from Pakistan. As an excited crowd of journalists gathered outside Tabani’s villa in G-6, Osama’s youngest sons, Hussein and Ibrahim, looked out through curtained windows.

  Making efforts to maintain the women’s modesty, police and guards strung plastic sheets and blankets across the driveway, and through this impromptu structure that resembled a soccer tunnel, the family trooped onto a curtained bus. Once everyone was on board, it charged off down the Islamabad Highway and deposited the family at the airport, where they boarded a private jet bound for Jeddah.

  Waiting at the other end were Omar and his mother, Najwa. Zaina had sensibly decided to stay away. Osama bin Laden’s older brother Bakr offered the returning wives three houses in the vast bin Laden family compound on the outskirts of Jeddah.49 After they settled in, he paid for the whole family to go on umrah (pilgrimage) to Mecca, but when they returned, Najwa decided to leave. The day after the Abbottabad raid her mother had died of shock at home in Latakia, and Najwa could not help but associate the bin Ladens with that loss. Having spent time in Mecca with Khairiah, she was also convinced that the “old sourpuss,” as she called her elder sister-wife, had cost Osama his life, although she did not understand the intricacies of what had happened. Doha—with its palm-fringed Corniche, smart malls, fancy Western restaurants, and relative-free living—represented a fresh start.

  She moved permanently into Omar and Zaina’s West Bay Lagoon compound, leaving behind her daughter, Iman, who had recently married a bin Laden cousin.

  All that remained of the bin Ladens’ time in Pakistan were the religious books, towels, broken teacups, and pieces of discarded furniture that littered Tabani’s house.50 Jewelry held by the ISI was not returned to the wives as promised but sold to a gold dealer in Rawalpindi. The land where the Abbottabad compound had stood reverted to the Cantonment Board—meaning it went back to the military.

  But it wasn’t all over for everyone.

  A few weeks after Osama’s family departed, Dr. Shakil Afridi, the doctor who had unwittingly helped the CIA, appealed his thirty-three-year sentence. When Fox News managed to smuggle a phone into his cell, he said he had been kept in an ISI lockup for more than a year and was being tortured.

  ISI sources told reporters that Afridi was a hard-drinking womanizer of bad repute who in the past had faced accusations of sexual assault, harassment, and stealing.51 They said his main obsession was making easy money. Later, in May 2015, Afridi’s lawyer was shot dead in Peshawar.52

  Having cleared his desk, General Pasha walked out of Aabpara in March 2012, securing a lucrative contract to advise the Dubai government on “intelligence matters.”53 Despite the Abbottabad fiasco and the findings of the Abbottabad Commission, that year he was named as among the top one hundred “most powerful and influential people” in the world by Time and Forbes, ahead of President Barack Obama and CIA director David Petraeus.

  April 2012, Nouakchott, Mauritania

  From the sports complex in Tehran, the Mauritanian had reached his embassy, where he ran inside and demanded asylum. “My mother tongue was a little shrunk but they brought me a boubou [traditional robe],�
�� he recalled. He felt like a character from the Old Testament: “People who lived alone many years in a cave. It was the same for me.”

  Mauritanian diplomats got him out of Iran on April 4, 2012, flying him on a commercial carrier that made stops in the Middle East and North Africa. Every time he stepped off the plane, he broke into a sweat, expecting to be seized by the CIA. At Nouakchott’s tin-roofed international airport, he was welcomed like a homecoming hero and then escorted away by security officials, although no one pretended he was going to jail for long.

  “My judgment was based on a mutual understanding between me and the Mauritanian authorities,” he recalled. What followed was a lengthy interview with the prosecutor and his deputy. “I answered most questions and refused to answer some others.” He trotted out a few old Al Qaeda snippets like his story of opposing 9/11 and resigning, but nothing more.

  To maintain the appearance of judicial process he was held for a few weeks in a secret prison in the capital, where he was locked up with Abdullah al-Senusi, Muammar Gaddafi’s brother-in-law and until recently Libya’s notorious spy chief. He had fled after Gaddafi had been captured and bloodily executed in October 2011, arriving in Nouakchott disguised as a Tuareg chieftain.54

  The prisoners circled one another for a few hours but soon began debating Al Qaeda, Osama bin Laden, the Arab Spring, and the future of the global jihad.

  In May 2012, the authorities announced the Mauritanian’s release if he agreed to one condition: meeting a delegation from the U.S. embassy. “It will be a short session,” assured a security official. “You are free to say what you want. How about it?”55 He was shocked. “I came back on the understanding that the only body authorized to consider my case is the Mauritanian judiciary,” he replied haughtily.

  When the officials made clear that without this meeting he was going nowhere, he consented. But as a matter of pride, he requested the Americans arrive first.

  They met on May 26 at a government office. As he shook hands with five U.S. officials, one of them, an FBI officer of Lebanese descent, stepped forward and told him in Arabic that he was the luckiest man alive. “If you knew how many plots there have been to kill you, you would be amazed,” he said.56

  The first question was the kind of thing Osama would have asked: general, sweeping, and thorny. “How can we end the war in Afghanistan?”

  He slipped back into his old speechifying. “When you invade great countries like Iraq and kill thousands of innocent people, what consequences do you expect? Billions of violent people will emerge from all over the world to fight you.”

  It felt good to be lecturing again; but the Americans looked bored. They switched to Iran, asking why Al Qaeda had been allowed to stay there for so long.

  “We were their ‘trump card,’ ” he boasted, “ready to wave around and play whenever they needed.” Their presence had bought protection for Iran against Al Qaeda attacks and increased Iran’s influence in the region. He said nothing about Zarqawi or the funding pipeline. He made no mention of the secret deals with Iran or his personal relationship with General Qassem Suleimani.

  When the Americans asked about Saif al-Adel, Sulaiman Abu Ghaith, and other shura members still in Iran, he grew irritated. “I don’t have contact with them now,” he snapped. “They are only allowed to write e-mails to close friends and family. They are censored.”

  The U.S. delegation became restless. “You’re covering up for killers and criminals,” an official snapped. Another accused him of deceiving his own government, alleging that his real intention was to assist Al Qaeda in Mali. The Mauritanian shook his head. “I’ve retired,” he said. “I left Al Qaeda because of my religious convictions.”

  His inquisitors made him an offer. If he cooperated in a detailed, honest way, his name would be taken off the sanctions list. The Mauritanian shrugged. “It’s not something I need,” he said, dismissing the repercussions of being on that list, something he had never really thought about.

  One session extended to four, much to his mounting annoyance, and finally a man he presumed to be in the CIA asked him about Hamzah bin Laden. “How important is Hamzah, and where is he right now?”

  “I’ve not seen him since 2010,” the Mauritanian replied truthfully. “Ask Sheikh Osama’s family about him.”

  One of the Americans produced documents from Abbottabad, including a letter Hamzah had written to his father in 2010 in which he mentioned the Mauritanian. He took a look but handed it back. “I can’t comment on its authenticity.”

  They showed him Osama’s will, which detailed his intention to pay the Mauritanian for his efforts to launder the $29 million left in Sudan in 1996.57 They read out a line: “I need you to take 1% from the total and give it to Shaykh Abu Hafs al-Mauritani,” Osama had written, using the Mauritanian’s old Al Qaeda kunya. “By the way, he has already received 20,000–30,000 dollars from it. I promised him that I would reward him.” He shrugged.

  As the meeting broke up, the CIA officials delivered a warning: “If you wander far from Nouakchott, we cannot guarantee your safety.” He nodded. Freed on July 7, he was reunited with his family.58

  When he felt it was safe, he recovered his Al Qaeda files from the orange USB stick in his shoe, bought a new laptop, and downloaded encryption software to cloak his presence on the dark web, as Al Qaeda began its resurrection.

  With tentacles stretching from Nouakchott to Timbuktu, across Algiers to Tunis, and into Niamey and Bamako, Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb and its regional affiliates, Nigeria’s Boko Haram, Somalia’s Al Shabaab, and Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula in Yemen, flexed their muscles. Far from being shattered by Osama’s death, they were galvanizing and growing: attacking beach resorts, the Westgate shopping center, the Amenas gas facility, killing hundreds of innocent people in suicide-bomb blasts, often citing America’s mistreatment of Pakistani neuroscientist Aafia Siddiqui or those at Guantánamo as their inspiration, taking dozens of hostages, including Westerners and Christian schoolgirls.

  In Nouakchott, the Mauritanian became a star of Friday prayers.

  December 2012, Tourist Complex, Tehran

  Sulaiman Abu Ghaith also wanted to leave. He was allowed to speak to his brother in Kuwait, who promised to arrange a new passport for him and even a possible reunion with his first wife. His third wife, Fatima bin Laden, who was seven months pregnant, wanted to get away too, from Iran and from Abu Ghaith, who was driving her mad.59

  The Iranians agreed. Their only proviso was that they should leave as a couple and travel overland via Turkey. Desperate to go, they accepted. In early January 2013, they bade farewell to the remaining shura members before they were escorted northwest toward the Turkish border, which was deep in snow.

  At the border town of Urmia, they were introduced to people smugglers. As the drifts deepened, Abu Ghaith worried that he had no telephone numbers for the guides who were supposed to meet them on the other side. He urged Fatima to call Abdullah bin Laden, her oldest brother, who promised to fly from Jeddah to meet them in Ankara.60

  Soon the way became impassable as the temperature dropped. Fatima could not go on. They stayed in a hotel for four restless days waiting for the conditions to improve.

  On January 13 there was a letup. They were given fake Iranian passports and told to huddle among fifty Iranian migrants who were being taken to a remote crossing by truck.

  From the border gate, they had to struggle on foot through the snow to the Turkish side, where a car was waiting. The driver introduced himself as Naji. He was slim, middle-aged, and clean-shaven, and he chatted easily throughout the twenty-hour drive west to Ankara.

  At the Saudi embassy, Fatima was reunited with her brother, who she had not seen for eighteen years.

  While she and Abdullah went inside to sort out her passport, Abu Ghaith excitedly checked into a five-star hotel and ordered room service. Fatima called to say she had got her passport and they were set. That just left the driver to deal with. Abu Ghaith went out and told
Naji he was no longer needed, before dressing for dinner. Fatima and Abdullah had invited him for a farewell meal. But on his way out of the hotel, the preacher was seized by Turkish intelligence officials after Naji, who was an informer, tipped off the police.

  Abu Ghaith remained under house arrest in his hotel room for the next month. Pressured by the United States to hand him over, prickly Turkish officials decided to deport him back to Kuwait. The Americans were furious, but by the time his flight stopped over in Amman on February 28 they had persuaded Jordan’s General Intelligence Directorate to arrest him on behalf of the FBI.

  By ten P.M. that evening he was aboard an FBI Gulfstream bound for New York. The interrogation began immediately. No mention was made in the official FBI transcript as to whether he was restrained, but he was allowed to “rest, pray, use the bathroom, stretch his legs,” and he was regularly checked by an FBI medic.61

  Speaking mainly in English, Abu Ghaith seemed relieved that it was finally all over. “I will not hold back,” he said. “I will be honest with you. You will hear things of Al Qaeda that you never imagined.” All he could think about was his first wife and the seven children in Kuwait, whom he was sure the American justice system would allow him to see. He was willing to give up everything and everyone to meet them again.

  He began by explaining how the Iranians had arrested him with Saif, Abu al-Khayr, and Abu Mohammed in April 2003. He revealed how Saif and Abu Mohammed had openly admitted to him that they had been behind the 1998 embassy attacks. He spoke of the Mauritanian, who he still loved as a brother even though he had lured him to Afghanistan in the first place. He described how Osama had compelled him to make videos in the days after 9/11, and how hard life had been inside the Quds Force compound. He was an accidental spokesman who had never wanted to be part of Al Qaeda, he insisted.