‘We got them,’ they radioed Berntsen, who punched the air in delight. ‘One word kept pounding in my head,’ he said. ‘Revenge! Let’s do this right and finish them off in the mountains.’
The agents mounted their laser marking devices on tripods and began lighting up targets. To be double sure one of them punched coordinates into a device which looks like a gigantic Palm Pilot. For the next fifty-six hours they directed strike after strike by B-1 and B-2 bombers and F-14 Tomcats on to the al-Qaeda encampment. The battle of Tora Bora had begun.
Following the bombardment, bin Laden and his men fled further into the mountains. A twelve-man Special Forces team was sent in – as well as some crack SAS operatives – to pin the al-Qaeda fighters against the mountains, using Afghan forces to trap them in a ‘kill-box’ between three promontories.
Three rival commanders who between them controlled most of Jalalabad were hired – Hazrat Ali, Haji Zahir and Haji Zaman – and a day rate agreed of $100–150 per soldier.
‘I raised an army with a couple of million dollars,’ says Berntsen.
He sent in an urgent request to US Army Central Command in Tampa, Florida, for a battalion of 600 US Army rangers to be dropped behind al-Qaeda positions to block their escape to Pakistan.
Berntsen was certain bin Laden was there because a second CIA team he sent in had a stroke of luck. One of the dead bodies they found was clutching a cheap Japanese walkie-talkie. Through it they could hear bin Laden exhorting his troops to keep fighting.
‘We were listening to bin Laden praying, talking and giving instructions for a couple of days,’ said Berntsen. ‘I had the CIA’s number one native Arabist who’d been listening to bin Laden’s voice for five years down here listening. Anyone who says he wasn’t there is a damn fool.’
Over and over he kept urging high command: ‘We need rangers now! The opportunity to get bin Laden and his men is slipping away!’
But the answer came back no, it should be left to the Afghans. ‘The generals were afraid of casualties!’ says Berntsen, still incredulous.
Only on the eleventh day of the sixteen-day battle did Delta Force soldiers arrive and the military take control from the CIA. Yet they numbered just forty – and to Berntsen’s amused disgust had to pay bribes to their Afghan allies to be allowed through. Despite the lack of troops, he estimates that between the bombing and the Afghans they killed about 70 per cent of bin Laden’s force.
A couple of times he thought they had got bin Laden. Through the walkie-talkie they knew the al-Qaeda fighters were running short of food and water so they let them be resupplied by some local Afghans. ‘We delivered food and water to them so we could get a GPS on bin Laden’s position then we dropped a 15,000-pound bomb the size of a car and killed a whole lot.’
But on 15 December they heard him on the radio again. The following day the al-Qaeda leader is believed to have split his men into two and left with his group of 200 Saudis and Yemenis over the mountains to Parachinar.
That same day Berntsen also left Afghanistan, full of frustration. Back with his wife and two children for Christmas, he was horrified to switch on his television on Boxing Day and see the bearded face of his tormentor. Bin Laden had released a video to show the world he was still alive. ‘I just kept thinking we could have had him.’
‘It came out later that the President had been briefed and had turned down my request for soldiers,’ he said. ‘I found that heartbreaking.’
The evening after my own trip to Tora Bora, I went to see one of the commanders the Americans had contracted, to hear his version of events.
Haji Abdul Zahir is the closest Afghanistan has to mujahideen aristocracy. His uncle was the great commander Abdul Haq, who was killed by the Taliban when he tried to raise a movement against them in November 2001. His father Haji Qadir was Vice President of Afghanistan and assassinated in Kabul in 2002.
The vehicle he sends to pick me up is equipped both with Sat Nav – useless in Jalalabad but Afghans love gadgets – and men with guns. The house we drive into is a vision in warlord chic. A golden chandelier dominates the marble entrance hall and a sweeping staircase leads up to a balcony with a billiards table. The walls are covered with blown-up photographs of himself and his late father and uncle. Haji Zahir himself is lounging on cushions on a raised platform.
A servant brings glasses of fresh pomegranate juice and small bowls of almonds and Zahir’s personal camera crew appears to record the interview. But the warlord’s words are drowned out by what I first think is screaming.
‘I keep hundreds of birds,’ he explains. ‘I love birds.’ I presume he means fighting birds, a tradition in a country where most hobbies involve fighting, but he looks pained at the suggestion. ‘Not fighting birds,’ he says. ‘I like songbirds. They’re very sweet.’
The servant is dispatched to take out the birds and he begins to tell the story of Tora Bora, using floor cushions to illustrate the topography.
‘From the beginning the mission was not strong enough and the plan was weak,’ he says. ‘If you have enemies on this pillow and you don’t surround it then they will run away. The planes were flying and bombing but the ways were open so of course they ran away.’
Like Berntsen, he has no doubt that bin Laden was there. ‘I myself caught twenty-one al-Qaeda prisoners, some from Yemen, Kuwait, Saudi and Chechnya. One was a boy called Abu Bakr who told me that ten days earlier bin Laden had come to his checkpoint and sat with them for twenty minutes and drunk tea.’
The plan had been to attack al-Qaeda from the Wazir Valley to trap them as the Special Forces wanted. The evening the attack was due, one of the commanders, Haji Zaman, said al-Qaeda had sent a radio message asking to be given till 8 a.m. the following morning and they would surrender. ‘I didn’t agree,’ said Zahir. ‘I said if they want to surrender why not today? They’re the enemy – why are we giving them twelve to fourteen hours to run away?’
But Zaman called off his troops which were supposed to block off the routes to Pakistan. The Americans were outraged. ‘Just for the record,’ said General Richard Myers, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, ‘our military mission remains to destroy the al-Qaeda and the Taliban networks. So our operation from the air and the ground will continue until our mission is accomplished.’
The bombing continued through the night. Sure enough, the next day, the surrendering al-Qaeda troops had vanished. Zahir claims Haji Zaman had been paid off; Zaman says they left because the Americans broke the ceasefire.
Far from Berntsen’s estimate of killing 70 per cent, Zahir thinks the majority escaped. ‘Supposedly there were 600 to 800 people,’ he said. ‘I captured twenty-one. Ali and Zaman got nine. Dead bodies were not easy to count but around 150. That means at least 400 got away. For all that money spent and energy and bombing, only thirty were caught.’
To this day he remains mystified by the Americans. ‘It would have been easy to get bin Laden there,’ he says. ‘I don’t know why there was no plan to block the passes. And why weren’t there more Americans? Believe me there were more journalists than soldiers.’
Mike Scheuer, who headed the CIA’s Osama bin Laden Unit from 1996 to 1999, then was its special adviser from 2001 to November 2004, probably knows more about bin Laden than any other westerner alive. He was on the receiving end in Washington of many of the cables from Tora Bora. ‘It’s like many things in your life,’ he says. ‘If you don’t do something when you have the chance, sometimes that chance doesn’t come back.’
According to Scheuer, by the time of Tora Bora the US had already squandered ten different opportunities to get their man (eight with cruise missiles and two using CIA assets) back in 1998 and 1999.
President Clinton had signed a secret presidential directive in 1998 authorising the CIA to kill bin Laden after al-Qaeda bombed the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, killing more than 200 people. But when it came to it, says Scheuer, the President did not have the necessary resolve. ‘Clinton was worr
ied about European opinion. He didn’t want to shoot and miss and have to explain a lot of innocent deaths.
‘Yet the very same day we turned down one opportunity to kill bin Laden, our planes were dropping thousands of bombs on the Serbs from 20,000 feet.’
On one occasion in 1999, they had live video pictures of bin Laden from a Predator spy plane. ‘But the drone wasn’t armed at that time because the fools in Washington were arguing over which agency should fund the $2 million installation of the Hellfire missile.
‘It’s a very upsetting business. I got into a slanging match with Clinton on TV because he claimed that he never turned down the opportunity to kill bin Laden. That’s a very clear lie and we’re all paying the price.
‘Similarly at Tora Bora, our generals didn’t want to lose a lot of our soldiers going after him. They had seen what had happened to the Russians, who lost 15,000 men in Afghanistan. So it was easier to subcontract to Afghans. I warned them they would be a day late and a dollar short.’
We now know from American journalist Bob Woodward’s book Plan of Attack that there was another reason for Washington’s reluctance to commit troops on the ground. As early as 21 November 2001, when the Taliban had yet to be driven out of southern Afghanistan and bin Laden’s men were amassing at Tora Bora, Bush took Rumsfeld aside after a National Security Meeting and asked, ‘What kind of a war plan do you have for Iraq?’
According to Woodward’s account, when General Tommy Franks got the top-secret message asking for a new Iraq war plan within a week, he was incredulous. ‘They were in the midst of one war in Afghanistan, and now they wanted detailed planning for another? “Goddamn,” Franks said, “what the fuck are they talking about?”’
On paper it shouldn’t be so difficult to find bin Laden. The FBI Most Wanted poster describes him as between six foot four and six foot six tall, about 160 pounds, olive-complexioned, left-handed and walks with a cane. Few in the world would not recognise his bony bearded face and gaunt frame.
He is also said to be ill, though both his former doctor in Lahore, Dr Amer Aziz, and Mike Scheuer dispute the persistent rumour that he has kidney disease and needs dialysis. ‘I came to the conclusion that that was disinformation,’ says Scheuer. ‘You would have laughed if you’d seen how, whenever a video came out, the agency would get it and have US government doctors and specialists pore over it. No one ever found any evidence. If you have serious kidney disease, you have a certain pallor and a way you move that betrays it and bin Laden never showed any sign. We spent more time studying that than listening to what bin Laden said.’
There have been many rumours of his death. Some had him among the 73,000 victims of the Pakistan earthquake in 2005. A paper in southern France claimed to have seen a French intelligence report that bin Laden had died on 23 August 2006 of typhoid fever in Pakistan.
But still the tapes keep coming. There have been no videos now since 2004 but plenty of audio tapes – three in the last year alone.
So why with electronic surveillance so sophisticated that unmanned Predator drones can provide live video pictures from 26,000 feet, and satellites can spot a goat on a hillside, has he managed to slip so easily off the radar?
‘We have become blinded by our own electronic cleverness,’ complained a Special Forces colonel involved in the hunt.
‘We don’t know what to do when there are no telephone lines to tap or fibre-optic cables to tap into,’ adds Scheuer.
All the intelligence officers I have spoken to over the last five years, US, Pakistani, Afghan and British, as well as Special Forces involved in the search, agree – the problem is lack of what the Americans call ‘humint’ – human intelligence.
Says Berntsen, ‘You need human resources to penetrate these groups and there’s not enough of that going on, nowhere near enough.’
He blames cuts in the CIA staff, particularly during the Clinton years. ‘When you get rid of large numbers of people you reduce your humint capacity. You can’t just suddenly hire top-level people. To build a capable operations officer is a seven-year process. Hiring, training, language, two tours in field, that’s just to get them to journeyman level.’
It is well known that when 9/11 happened the CIA did not have a single agent inside Afghanistan. But just as shocking is the lack of relevant language skills. Berntsen says of the 33,000-strong FBI, ‘Only six are proficient in Arabic. That’s five years after 9/11.’
The White House belatedly seems to have come to the same conclusion. During the swearing in of his new intelligence chief Mike McConnell in February, President Bush instructed him to develop more recruits with the language skills and background to infiltrate al-Qaeda.
One source the US did have close to both bin Laden and Mullah Omar who agreed to cooperate is now languishing in jail in Manhattan. The story of the arrest of Haji Bashar Noorzai is a salutary tale of interagency rivalry.
Perhaps the kingpin among Afghanistan’s drug lords, Noorzai was arrested by the Americans in Kandahar after the fall of the Taliban but subsequently released for reasons that are unclear. But as the main financier of Mullah Omar and well connected to bin Laden, he was clearly a key figure. In 2004 he was tracked down to Dubai and approached to be a source given protection in the US rather than re-arrested. After a long period of negotiations he agreed.
In April 2005 he was taken to the Embassy Suites Hotel in Lower Manhattan and grilled by US agents. But after about ten days, when he tried to leave, one of the agents from the Drug Enforcement Administration placed a shocked Noorzai under arrest for conspiring to smuggle narcotics to the US. DEA officials trumpeted his ‘capture’ on that evening’s news. The bin Laden hunters who had helped win him over to be a source were outraged. ‘He should have been utilised as a source to get to Mullah Omar and/or bin Laden. I would rather have a reliable source than a squad of marines any day. No satellite will locate bin Laden, it will be a slip of the tongue or somebody in need of dollars who will give up his location.’
So where do the hunters think that bin Laden is hiding? Israeli intelligence has put him in Iran or among the Weiga people of northern Afghanistan, bordering China and Tajikistan. But the main search has focused on two areas – the wooded mountain valleys of Kunar/Nuristan in north-eastern Afghanistan and the wild tribal areas bordering Pakistan and Afghanistan, particularly North Waziristan. Pakistan’s President General Musharraf insists the al-Qaeda leader is in Afghanistan, probably Kunar. Afghan President Hamid Karzai insists he is in Pakistan, probably in a city such as Lahore or Karachi.
‘I think now he lives in an area where the topography is extremely difficult and where he is a long-term guest of those like Pashtuns who would defend him with their lives,’ says Scheuer. ‘That could be either the upper part of the tribal areas or in Kunar.’
The only reporter to interview bin Laden after 9/11 was Hamid Mir, a Pakistani journalist who has interviewed him three times and wears a black Casio watch that was a present from the al-Qaeda leader. He claims to have met one of bin Laden’s commanders, Abu Daud, in the eastern Afghan city of Ghazni last September. ‘I asked why isn’t he coming on al Jazeera any more; there’s been no video message from him for the last two years. He replied, “We don’t want to provide the Americans fresh pictures because they can find him on their Predator planes.”’
Like Scheuer, Mir believes that the invasion of Iraq in March 2003 distracted those who had been searching for bin Laden. At a key time, Taskforce 121, the shadowy group of Delta Force and Navy Seals, found themselves shipped off to Baghdad to hunt down Saddam and sons.
‘In 2002, bin Laden was facing lots of problems,’ says Mir. ‘His people were scattered, short of money, and running between the mountains of Pakistan, Khost and Waziristan.’ He believes they finally found refuge in the Pech valley in Kunar. ‘It was here in the last week of March 2003 that bin Laden held his first meeting of all his commanders since 9/11, taking advantage of the distraction of Iraq. He was very happy. He said the bad patch is over
and we’ll have a new breeding ground in Iraq. He assigned Saif-ul Adel to go to Iran and meet Abu Zarqawi then establish training camps. Within a few months camps had been set up in Khost, North Waziristan and Iran.’
US officials have also focused attention on Kunar. The remote mountainous area is one of the few forested parts of Afghanistan, with plenty of trails across the border into Pakistan. It is also a long-time stronghold of the anti-coalition warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar where much of the population adheres to bin Laden’s brand of Wahhabism. A video given to al Jazeera in September 2003 showed bin Laden and his deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri scrambling down slopes similar to those found in Kunar and Nuristan. There were persistent reports too of Arabs coming down the mountains to buy supplies in the bordering Pakistani province of Chitral.
US Special Forces established a series of small bases in the region and in 2005 launched Operation Red Wing to sweep the area of militants. But on 28 June a four-man team of Navy Seals was ambushed and trapped on a 10,000-foot mountain ridge above the Pech valley. Only one survived. When they called in for help, one of the two Chinooks was shot down, killing all sixteen Special Forces soldiers aboard, the biggest blow against US forces in Afghanistan since 2001.
Convinced that the attack must have been to defend a senior al-Qaeda figure, the Americans responded with an intense campaign in late 2005 followed by an assault last spring called Operation Mountain Lion. But the militants are believed to have just fled deeper into the mountains.
It seemed a good place to continue my own search.
It is a long journey to Naray, America’s most remote camp in Afghanistan, five hours by helicopter along the Kunar River, through narrow gorges. The Chinooks fly in pairs with a Black Hawk attack helicopter alongside and their gunners scour the rocky hillsides for enemies. It was not reassuring to see that the Chinook’s cargo included boxes marked ‘Human Blood for Naray’.
We are put down inside a small encampment enclosed by razor wire and sandbags and surrounded by jagged 15,000-foot mountains. To the east is Pakistan and ahead, up amid the snowy peaks, is Nuristan, the land of light, a region so remote that many of its valleys have never seen a westerner.
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