In late March 2011, out of Hong Kong, came a story suggesting that the CIA had “launched a series of secret operations in the high mountains of the Hindu Kush … consistent reports have established that Osama bin Laden has been on the move through the region in recent weeks.”
It is a fair guess that much if not all of this was disinformation, planted to suggest to the quarry that U.S. intelligence had lost the scent, had no strong lead as to where precisely bin Laden might be, and had no plan for an imminent strike against him.
At 10:24 P.M. on the night of Sunday, May 1, 2011—an improbably late hour—this bulletin came over the wires:
Breaking News Alert: White House says Obama to make late-night statement on an undisclosed topic.
Soon after, there was this from The Washington Post:
Osama bin Laden has been killed in a CIA operation in Pakistan, President Obama will announce from the White House, according to multiple sources.
At 11:35 P.M., the President appeared on television screens across the globe to say:
Tonight I can report to the American people and to the world that the United States has conducted an operation that killed Osama bin Laden, the leader of al Qaeda and a terrorist who’s responsible for the murder of thousands of innocent men, women and children.…
The images of 9/11 are seared into our national memory.… And yet we know that the worst images are those that were unseen to the world. The empty seat at the dinner table. Children who were forced to grow up without their mother or their father. Parents who would never know the feeling of their child’s embrace. Nearly three thousand citizens taken from us.…
Osama bin Laden avoided capture and escaped across the border into Pakistan.… Shortly after taking office I directed Leon Panetta, the director of the CIA, to make the killing or capture of bin Laden the top priority of the war against al Qaeda.… Then, last August, after years of painstaking work by our intelligence community, I was briefed on a possible lead to bin Laden.… I met repeatedly with my security team as we developed more information about the possibility that we had located bin Laden hiding within a compound deep inside of Pakistan. And finally, last week, I determined that we had enough intelligence to take action.…
Today, at my direction, the United States launched a targeted operation.… A small team of Americans carried out the operation with extraordinary courage.… No Americans were harmed.… After a firefight, they killed Osama bin Laden and took custody of his body.
It was a total surprise—and a momentous victory. Jubilant Americans thronged in front of the White House, in Times Square, and at Ground Zero. For many days, there was wall-to-wall coverage in newspapers, television, and radio. The Internet has hummed with information, misinformation, and rumor ever since.
A long article published in The New Yorker in August 2011 was seen as the first informed independent account of the operation that killed bin Laden. It told how two years of painstaking intelligence work led to the tentative belief that bin Laden was alive, holed up in a compound in the Pakistani town of Abbottabad, 120 miles from the Afghan border. U.S. Navy SEAL commandos began training on a replica of the compound in the eastern United States. The concept was that they would fly to Abbottabad by helicopter and attack under cover of darkness. President Obama gave the go-ahead.
So it was that, on the moonless night of May 1, twenty-three commandos aboard two U.S. helicopters—with others as backup—crossed from Afghanistan into Pakistan and headed for the target. The operation began badly when one of the helicopters crash-landed on the perimeter wall of the compound. Uninjured, though, the commandos emerged from the aircraft, blasted their way through metal barriers, shot dead three men and a woman they encountered, and reached a staircase leading to an upper floor. Each of the men was reportedly armed, and one—a son of bin Laden—is said to have opened fire before being killed.
The raiders’ first view of their quarry, according to the New Yorker account, was of a “tall, rangy man with a fist-length beard peeking out from behind a bedroom door.” As the Americans entered the bedroom, their way was blocked by two of bin Laden’s wives, who “placed themselves in front of him.” One of the women was shot in the leg and both were pushed aside. A commando then killed bin Laden with two shots, one to the chest, one to the head.
In the White House, some seven thousand miles away, Obama and his senior advisers were monitoring night-vision images—transmitted by an unmanned drone flying over the compound—and radio traffic. According to U.S. sources, they listened now as the commando who had shot bin Laden reported: “For God and country—Geronimo, Geronimo, Geronimo … E.K.I.A.” “Geronimo” was the night’s code word for “bin Laden.” “E.K.I.A.” meant “Enemy killed in action.”
Operation completed, the American raiders departed the way they had come, by helicopter, taking bin Laden’s corpse with them. It was photographed—samples of DNA had been taken at the scene—then flown to a U.S. aircraft carrier and buried at sea.
There are a few variants to this account of the killing of the world’s most wanted man. A retired Pakistani army brigadier, Shaukat Qadir, who examined the compound and interviewed relevant officers, concluded that—contrary to U.S. claims—none of the men killed at the scene had been armed. He suspected that some of those harboring bin Laden may have betrayed him—and been shot not in combat but to ensure their silence. As this edition went to press, Pakistan’s official commission of inquiry had yet to issue its findings.
Pakistan was severely compromised by the fact that bin Laden had been hiding—by all accounts for years, and comfortably housed—in not just any Pakistani city but Abbottabad. The town is not only home to many serving and retired military officers, but within shouting distance of the nation’s most prestigious military academy—the equivalent of America’s West Point. The ISI also had a presence there.
Officials in Washington did not mince their words when these facts became public. The Pakistanis, CIA director Panetta said, had been either “involved or incompetent.” The President’s counterterrorism advisor, John Brennan, thought it “inconceivable” that bin Laden had not had a “support system” in Abbottabad. On CBS’s 60 Minutes, Obama himself speculated “whether there might have been some people inside of government, people outside of government, [supporting bin Laden] … that’s something we have to investigate, and more importantly the Pakistani government has to investigate.”
Bin Laden, Pakistan’s President Zardari said helplessly, “was not anywhere we had anticipated he would be.” The ISI, long the principal object of U.S. suspicion, denied that it had shielded the terrorist or had known where he was. Former ISI chief Hamid Gul, the veteran supporter of jihad, declared it “a bit amazing” that bin Laden could have been living in Abbottabad incognito.
According to U.S. sources, bin Laden had been tracked to Abbottabad thanks to satellite surveillance of one of the men who was killed with him. This was Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti, said to have chosen his leader’s last refuge and to have hand-carried his messages to associates. Behind that assertion, however, may lie a more complex truth.
As early as 2005, five years before the United States caught up with bin Laden, Pakistani investigators had captured and transferred to U.S. custody another very senior bin Laden aide, Abu Faraj al-Libi. In the course of pursuing him, as Pakistan’s former president Musharraf revealed publicly soon afterward, the investigators learned that he had used no fewer than three safe houses—in Abbottabad. Far from being a place where one would not expect a top terrorist to be hiding, the town had a known track record for being exactly that.
Retired Pakistani brigadier Shaukat Qadir, moreover, has claimed that in 2010—almost a year before bin Laden was killed—Pakistan’s ISI intelligence agency had become suspicious of Ahmed al-Kuwaiti and “made a request to the CIA for satellite surveillance”—of the very building in which he and (as it was to turn out) bin Laden were living. Did Pakistan deserve at least some of the credit for pinpointing bin Laden’s h
ideout?
According to Leon Panetta, who was CIA director at the time, U.S. authorities gave the Pakistanis no advance notice of the strike that killed bin Laden—although the operation involved a highly sensitive incursion, an overflight of Pakistan’s airspace, and action on the ground deep inside Pakistani territory. “It was decided,” Panetta told Time magazine, “that any effort to work with the Pakistanis could jeopardize the mission. They might alert the targets.”
Both U.S. and Pakistani officials, however, initially suggested that Pakistan may have been informed—“a few minutes” in advance. Some sources in the Pakistani capital claimed even then that they had been cooperating with the United States, and had been keeping the building in Abbottabad under surveillance.
There is yet another wrinkle, one that may conceivably one day illuminate the truth about the attitude of those in authority in Pakistan—whatever knowledge some Pakistani element may have had of bin Laden’s presence in the town. Ten days after the strike against bin Laden, it was reported that a decade ago—after 9/11—President Bush struck a deal with then–Pakistan president Musharraf. Under the deal, should bin Laden be located inside Pakistan’s borders, the United States would be permitted unilaterally to conduct a raid.
“There was an agreement,” a former senior U.S. official was quoted as saying, “that if we knew where Osama was, we were going to come and get him. The Pakistanis would put up a hue and cry, but they wouldn’t stop us.” Musharraf has denied that the reported deal was made. A Pakistani official, however, reportedly offered corroboration for the story. “As far as our American friends are concerned,” he said, “they have just implemented the agreement.”
Pakistan did, sure enough, protest the violation of its sovereignty after bin Laden was killed. Should anything similar occur in the future, Prime Minister Yousaf Gilani said sternly, his country would be within its rights “to retaliate with full force.” That, though, according to the U.S. source of the story, was merely the “public face” of the arrangement. Gilani himself had reportedly long since said of similar possible American action: “I don’t care if they do it, so long as they get the right people. We’ll protest in the National Assembly and then ignore it.”
How much of what has been alleged by sources in both countries, Pakistan and the United States alike, is spin? Credible accounts of the hunt for Osama bin Laden and of his bloody end are emerging, but an unvarnished telling—shorn of any nation’s propaganda—remains elusive.
AFTERWORD
IN THE ALMOST ELEVEN YEARS SINCE 9/11, WORLD-SHAKING EVENTS have grown out of the catastrophe—and resolution of very little.
“We are sure of our victory against the Americans and Jews, as promised by the Prophet,” bin Laden had said three years before 9/11. In 2009, in a letter to the military judges at Guantánamo, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed said the attack had been “the noblest victory known to history over the forces of oppression and tyranny.”
Victory? Amid all his flowery verbiage, the essential elements of what bin Laden demanded are clear. He called for: the “complete liberation of Palestine”; an end to the American “Crusaders’ occupation of Saudi Arabia”; an end to the U.S. “theft” of Arab oil at “paltry prices”; and the removal of [Arab] governments that “have surrendered to the Jews.”
A great upheaval is under way across the Middle East. Dictatorships have been toppled, others rocked to one degree or another by rebellion or protest. It seems improbable, though, that the outcome of the convulsion will be the sort of Middle East bin Laden would have wanted. “Rage against geriatric autocrats is only one part of it,” the experienced observer Robin Wright has written. “Most of the region is also actively rebelling against radical ideologies. Muslim societies are now moving beyond jihadism.”
Oil, which bin Laden had variously said should retail at $144 a barrel and “$100 a barrel at least,” at one point since 2001 peaked at $146. In spring 2012, it stood at $103.
As for the presence of U.S. forces in Saudi Arabia, all were gone by fall 2003. Only conditional upon a subsequent pullout, reportedly, had Crown Prince Abdullah permitted the use of Saudi bases for the invasion of Iraq. The Palestine issue, though—a constant in bin Laden’s rhetoric from the start and so far as one can tell the primary motivation for KSM and the principal operatives involved in the 9/11 attacks—festers on.
How much the activity of bin Laden and al Qaeda had to do with what has changed is another matter. Though rumors swirl, there is no good evidence that Islamist extremism is playing an important role in the latest turmoil across the region. The price of oil vacillates not so much according to doctrine as according to the law of supply and demand. On the other hand, the threat of more terrorist attacks—in both America and Saudi Arabia—was surely a factor in the decision to remove the U.S. military from Saudi territory.
The decade has seen some American pressure applied to Israel over its persistent occupation of Palestinian territory and its overall treatment of the Palestinians. It has been ineffectual pressure, though, and the United States’ commitment to Israel seems undiminished. Few people, it seems, are even aware that the Palestine issue was a primary motivation for the perpetrators of 9/11.
The true effect of the 2001 onslaught is less what it achieved than what it triggered. Bin Laden and some of those closest to him had fervently hoped to goad the United States into retaliating. “We wanted the United States to attack,” his military chief Mohammed Atef said after an earlier attack. “… They are going to invade Afghanistan … and then we will start holy war against the Americans, exactly like the Soviets.” The notion was that the United States could be bled into defeat, literally and financially, as the Soviets had been in Afghanistan, and bin Laden shared it.
Then there was Iraq. “I am rejoicing,” he said in 2003, “that America has become embroiled in the quagmires of the Tigris and Euphrates. Bush thought that Iraq and its oil would be easy prey, and now here he is, stuck in dire straits.”
More than a decade after 9/11, with bin Laden dead and gone, we cannot know the end of the story. The invasion of Afghanistan that some al Qaeda leaders had desired brought disruption and death to both the organization and the country that hosted it. The United States and its allies did become bogged down in Afghanistan and Iraq but—as of early 2012—not as fatally as bin Laden had hoped.
When U.S. troops pulled out of Iraq in late 2011, however, they left behind them a country that was still dangerously volatile. An American force 90,000 strong, along with some 31,000 troops from allied countries, remained in Afghanistan as of the spring of 2012. With withdrawals either under way or scheduled, however, it was evident that the Taliban and their allies remained not only undefeated but resurgent.
Human casualties aside, the dollar cost of the “war on terrorism”—Afghanistan, Iraq, and other post-9/11 operations—was estimated in 2010 to have been $1.5 trillion. That, a Congressional Research Service report indicated, made the cost of the conflict second only to that of World War II—with adjustments for inflation. A 2011 report from Brown University’s Institute for International Studies put the cost as high as $2.3 to $2.7 trillion.
With the killing of bin Laden, some believe al Qaeda is defeated, a spent force. Even before he was killed, a Pew Research survey had indicated that its support had faded in the Muslim countries studied. The handful of terrorist attacks aimed at U.S. targets since 9/11 have not succeeded. Anwar Aulaqi, the preacher with dual American-Yemeni citizenship who acted as “spiritual adviser” to two key 9/11 terrorists and then resurfaced as an al Qaeda leader in Yemen, was killed by a U.S. drone strike in fall 2011. Over the months, other terrorists and terrorist suspects have reportedly met the same fate.
In early May 2012, after long years of indecision as to how and even whether they could be put on trial, five alleged key planners and accomplices in the 9/11 conspiracy were arraigned before a military court at Guantánamo. The five, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Ramzi Binalshibh, Walid bin Attash, Ammar al-Baluc
hi, and Mustafa al-Hawsawi, face a possible death sentence if convicted.
Ayman al-Zawahiri, bin Laden’s longtime deputy—who may have been al Qaeda’s effective leader since soon after 9/11—remained at large as this edition went to press. On formally taking over in 2011, he had promised a “jihadist renaissance” and a new “black Tuesday,” an attack on the United States along the lines of 9/11. He said that bin Laden, who had “terrified America in life,” would “continue to terrify it after death.”
IN THE United States in 2011, there was crass posturing and prolonged squabbling, with predictably tragic results.
In Florida, after months of threatening to do so—and after many appeals that he desist, including one by President Obama—the pastor of a fringe church he called the Dove World Outreach Center burned a copy of the Qur’an. He had earlier held a mockery of a “trial” at which the Muslims’ holy book was found guilty of “crimes against humanity.” A “jury” convened by the pastor, Terry Jones, had chosen burning over three other ways of destroying the sacred text: shredding, drowning, or firing squad.
In Afghanistan, when news of the burning of the Qur’an spread, thousands of protesters took to the streets. Seven United Nations employees were killed, two of them by beheading, when a mob overran one of the organization’s compounds. Violence over three days resulted in further deaths and dozens of injuries. Back in Florida, Jones said that he did not feel responsible, and that the time had come “to hold Islam accountable.”
The Eleventh Day: The Full Story of 9/11 and Osama bin Laden Page 48