The New Spymasters

by Stephen Grey

  Today this Afridi had a new guise, as a secret agent for the CIA. When the door opened a crack, he announced that he was on a door-to-door vaccination mission and wanted to vaccinate any children in the household against hepatitis B. He in fact intended to get a sample of their blood, because the CIA hoped it was blood that would produce a DNA match with the most wanted man on the planet.

  The door was closed and Afridi was turned away empty-handed. But although his mission was a failure that day, by knocking on the door he had played his part in the dramatic finale of a decade of war. The CIA had never managed to get the secret agent it dreamed of, the ‘man on the rock’ next to bin Laden. Indeed, the al-Qaeda leader was no longer sitting on a rock. But instead the CIA had found a secret agent to bang on his metal front door.

  This was the climax to the hunt that had begun after the fall of the Twin Towers. The shock, hurt and humiliation of the attacks of 11 September 2001 demanded a big and clever enemy. Consciously or unconsciously, all those who talked about security – whether journalist, politician or spymaster – had enlarged the persona of the bogeyman, Osama bin Laden, a name that had been known to only a few in the world just days before the attacks.

  The military and the spies were given the task of hunting him. The public needed a storyline that could be strung out into a worthwhile quest. If he had died too early – for example, when they cornered him in the mountains of Tora Bora, Afghanistan, in December 2001 – the thirst for revenge might not have been quenched. When I asked a young American soldier in 2004 why he was in Iraq, he said, ‘We’ve come to get bin Laden.’ The thought of a manhunt helped that small-town boy understand why he was in the war.

  But the public also needed him to be caught in the end. Few expected it to take quite so long. Hundreds of people were rounded up and shipped to Cuba, to Egypt and even to Syria. The style of interrogation ranged from the FBI’s cold but professional questions to the use of harsh techniques like waterboarding in a secret Polish CIA jail or electric shocks delivered by the Mukhabarat in Egypt (used, for example, on the bin Laden lieutenant Ibn al-Sheikh al-Libi). The methods used were so controversial that, more than a decade after his capture in 2003, Khalid Sheikh Mohamed, the alleged principal ringleader of 9/11, has still not been put on trial. It would be too revealing, too embarrassing. And meanwhile, bin Laden was still out there, his gloomy face staring from the ranks of the Most Wanted gallery. As time went on, the hunt for him was putting all the new ways of gathering intelligence on trial.

  Then, on the evening of 1 May 2011, a Sunday, President Obama announced that US forces had killed Osama bin Laden. Helicopters with Navy Seals on board had stolen over the border in the night from Afghanistan to Pakistan. They had killed him, thrown his body into a bag and dumped it into the Arabian Sea, after an appropriate prayer.

  So how had they got him? Admiral William McRaven, chief of JSOC and commander of the operation, called the manhunt the best intelligence coup in a century. ‘I think when the history is finally written [of] how the CIA determined that bin Laden was there, it will be one of the great intelligence operations in the history of intelligence organizations.’3 Was it the result of a tip-off by a spy? Did they find him by bugging phone calls and deploying all the modern instruments of surveillance? Was it by putting together a puzzle of existing pieces? The answers were neither clear-cut nor convincing. But the aftermath of the assassination and the official accounts of it that were released did throw an extraordinary light on to what had become of spying.

  * * *

  Before Obama made the announcement, there had been Twitter messages that already guessed at the news. But, as he told his officials, ‘No, no, there’s no news until I say so. People can leak all they want. But it’s not news until I say something.’4 This had always been, after all, a war of narratives, a clash of storytellers. That was true until the end.

  Within a couple of years, at least three best-selling books about bin Laden’s killing were written. A blockbuster Hollywood film, Zero Dark Thirty, has been made on the subject, as well as numerous documentaries. Obama had to fight a presidential campaign in 2012: his advisers made sure the journalists were fed a good story that maintained his reputation and placated most of those involved.

  Billions of dollars of taxpayers’ money had been spent on hunting bin Laden. It was convenient to use his end to justify the cost. The explanation that served the purpose was to say that finding him was no flash of brilliance but rather teamwork: all made possible by that time and money. As the Dodo said in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, ‘Everybody has won, and all must have prizes.’

  While the real story remained hidden, killing bin Laden became a victory for anything you chose it to be: for torture, for spycraft, for computer geekery, for soldiering, or for a woman’s intuition.

  Some said it involved a multi-billion-dollar computer system that sorted complex information and highlighted hidden connections. Plaudits were due to software made by a CIA-funded company called Palantir, which had produced the latest-generation application of the ‘total information awareness’ thinking, by which computers were programmed (thanks to multi-billion-dollar grants from the taxpayer) to grab and process huge amounts of ‘unstructured data’ (all kinds of information from multiple sources) and ‘connect the dots’ to find connections and meaning. In the case of Palantir, there was also a large dose of human intervention in their product – and exaggeration about its value. In his narrative of the raid, Mark Bowden wrote, ‘Palantir developed a product that actually deserves the popular designation Killer App.’5

  Much attention was paid to ‘Jen’, the key counterterrorism analyst (now called a ‘targeter’) among a team of mostly women. She was found weeping with relief at a military base in Afghanistan after the Seals returned there with bin Laden’s body, it was reported.6 Her character was re-created to star in the Zero Dark Thirty movie.

  Getting bin Laden had definitely been an intelligence coup. But how much sophistication was involved? So much had been tried – including, arguably, the invasion of two countries, Iraq and Afghanistan. It looked in the end rather like what computer hackers call a ‘brute force attack’ – trying every combination on a locked safe until one of them succeeds. While with hindsight the detective work did look good, none of what has emerged about it was especially novel. The methods used look quite traditional.

  Here is the story in a nutshell. After the attacks of 11 September, President George W. Bush told the CIA to catch bin Laden dead or alive, preferably dead. The message was passed on by Cofer Black, head of the CIA’s counterterrorism centre, to the agency team that duly went where bin Laden was, Afghanistan:

  I don’t want bin Laden and his thugs captured, I want them dead … They must be killed. I want to see photos of their heads on pikes. I want bin Laden’s head shipped back in a box filled with dry ice. I want to be able to show bin Laden’s head to the president. I promised him I would do that.7

  The US duly toppled the Taliban who ruled that country. But, at the Battle of Tora Bora in December 2001, bin Laden slipped away.

  After declaring a so-called War on Terror and rounding up an alliance of nations in support, the US military discovered it was not equipped to fight such a war – al-Qaeda did not have a standing army – so it engaged in largely symptomatic relief. Public anger translated into hunger for war was more than satiated by invading Afghanistan and Iraq, with subsequent attempts at ‘nation-building’ (putting back together the shattered pieces) and then quelling revolts. At the same time specialized military units, such as the guards and interrogators at Guantanamo Bay, could support (and also compete with) the CIA’s hunt for the real enemy: those who had actually attacked the US.

  After asking a great many people in a variety of ways the simple question, ‘Where is bin Laden?’ interrogators drew a blank. So the CIA fell back to the typical approach of any professional tracking a missing person, which was to watch out for sightings and to monitor the movement and communic
ations of his inner circle, both his family and aides, including staying on the lookout for messengers. As long as he lived, bin Laden was likely to continue to assert his authority by releasing periodic media statements, typically on video or audio tape, as well as talking to his subordinates. That meant there had to be couriers.

  How to identify members of his inner circle? The obvious place to look was in the records of all those ‘debriefed’ in the various prison camps. The CIA (and other agencies) had for a long time kept a list of known associates of bin Laden. When new interviews took place, analysts would ask interrogators to press for more details on these targets. So far so obvious.

  According to briefings given by the CIA and the White House about the manhunt – quoted in books by the journalists Peter Bergen and Mark Bowden and confirmed by a report of the Senate Intelligence Committee8 – the CIA was finally led to bin Laden by following the trail of a courier named Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti. This had not been a shift of approach. ‘Couriers were tangential to all of the other information we were following, we had been focusing on the courier network for a long time, it was not new,’ said Marty Martin, a former head of the bin Laden unit.9 Bergen reported that a female CIA analyst had penned a memo in 2005 called ‘Inroads’, which came up with four ‘pillars’ of what should constitute the hunt for bin Laden in the absence of any concrete leads. These were: his courier network, his family members, his communications with other senior leaders and his outreach to the media.10

  The CIA heard of al-Kuwaiti both from captured materials and from the testimony of captured prisoners, under questioning from foreign governments and the CIA. The prisoners included Khalid Sheikh Mohamed (captured in March 2003, who downplayed any involvement by al-Kuwaiti) and Hassan Ghul (an al-Qaeda courier who was arrested in 2004 and transferred to a CIA black site in Eastern Europe). According to Bergen, Ghul ‘told interrogators that the Kuwaiti was bin Laden’s courier and frequently travelled with [him]’.11 These interrogations were the subject of a rather stupid and delusional public argument in the US after bin Laden’s killing about whether the name of that courier had emerged from torture.

  Those who, like Bowden, have consistently noted since 9/11, as a matter of dispassionate fact, that torture could be effective appeared to be at some pains to point out that torture had been part of getting hold of the courier’s name. Bowden wrote, ‘The Obama administration has claimed that torture played no role in tracking down bin Laden, but here, in the first two important steps down the trail, that claim crumbles.’ He cited the documented torture used against two prisoners.12

  But John McCain, the Republican senator who stood against Obama for president, insisted that, based on a detailed briefing from the CIA:

  The first mention of the name Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti, as well as a description of him as an important member of al-Qaida, came from a detainee held in another country. The United States did not conduct this detainee’s interrogation, nor did we render him to that country for the purpose of interrogation. We did not learn Abu Ahmed’s real name or alias as a result of waterboarding or any ‘enhanced interrogation technique’ used on a detainee in U.S. custody.13

  McCain’s conclusion was endorsed by the detailed Senate report on the CIA interrogation programme published in December 2014. It found most of the clues that identified al-Kuwaiti came from prisoners in foreign custody or prisoners who had yet to receive ‘enhanced’ CIA treatment,14 as in the case of Ghul, who was arrested by Kurdish authorities. As the report stated: ‘Seven of the 13 detainees that the CIA listed as having been subjected to the CIA’s enhanced interrogation techniques provided information on Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti prior to being subjected to the CIA’s enhanced interrogation techniques.’ But the whole debate was really meaningless. Whether in foreign or CIA custody almost all prisoners had been mistreated.

  There was no control sample of untortured high-value prisoners. More importantly – as the official versions make clear – no al-Qaeda prisoner in the CIA’s hands gave up al-Kuwaiti’s actual identity. As McCain had correctly stated, ‘None of the three detainees who were waterboarded provided Abu Ahmed’s real name, his whereabouts, or an accurate description of his role in al-Qaida.’15 The name they did discuss was just a start. Calling someone Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti translates literally as ‘Ahmed’s dad from Kuwait’. It was about as useful as saying that bin Laden knew a John in New York. It was a long way short of a traceable identity.

  The difficult and brilliant part came next, with the discovery of Abu Ahmed’s real name and phone number. At the time of writing, how that was accomplished is still a secret. The Senate report indicates, however, that the breakthrough may have occurred by rereading a five-year-old CIA report. A later memo dated 23 November 2007 and headed ‘Probable Identification of Suspected Bin Laden Facilitator Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti’, described how ‘review of 2002 debriefings of a [foreign government] detainee who claimed to have travelled in 2000 from Kuwait to Afghanistan’ with an ‘Ahmed al-Kuwaiti’ provided the breakthrough leading to the likely identification of Habib al-Rahman as Abu Ahmed.16 The foreign government then helped to identify that he operated from the greater Peshawar area. A CIA summary said the name provided by the prisoner turned out to be the name of al-Kuwaiti’s dead brother, but it was enough for the CIA to ‘map out Abu Ahmed’s entire family, including the true name of Abu Ahmed himself’.17

  Having got the courier’s real name, the agency also got his mobile phone number. With the help of the National Security Agency, they could start tracking him. Contrary to popular myth, the NSA cannot listen to or track everything on the globe simultaneously. First they need something to attract their attention, what police call a ‘lead’. But once they have a starting point, with their network of ground stations and access to a constellation of signals intelligence satellites, they do have an incredible capacity to listen into and above all follow specific mobile phones. This was everyday intelligence business. It needed no flash of brilliance or special instructions to put the known numbers of one of bin Laden’s inner circle on to a list of what the NSA called ‘selectors’, the priority watch list of phones to track.

  At first, according to Bowden, Abu Ahmed’s phone could not be traced. ‘But in June of 2010, the United States was able to pinpoint the phone’s location when it was in use, or even perhaps when not in use. This meant they could find the Kuwaiti, and watch him.’18 Now it got interesting.

  The phone had appeared in Pakistan, already the presumed location for bin Laden’s hideout. Advanced technology helped here. Satellites, stealthy drones and surveillance planes could all have been used to spot Abu Ahmed’s car. Agents were deployed to watch roads. His car was found to be a white Suzuki Jimny with a distinctive spare wheel cover on the back. It was tracked from Peshawar to a house surrounded by high walls in the city of Abbottabad, close to a Pakistan Army military base.

  The hunt became conventional again. When any police force finds the lair of a villain, the choice is to raid it or watch it. The CIA still had no evidence that bin Laden lived here. More surveillance technology was deployed. The CIA sent operatives to establish a safe house in a nearby villa in order to watch the compound and its inhabitants. But owing to the compound’s high walls, it was only surveillance from the sky (satellite or drone) that revealed the presence of the man of the household – a man who paced around and cast a tall shadow, soon to be nicknamed ‘the pacer’.

  The CIA now began to believe they had cornered their man. Analysts observed that he walked like the man their predecessors had seen in early 1999 through Predator cameras pacing around a desert compound in Afghanistan. He had later been positively identified as bin Laden, but, at the time, when the identity was still uncertain, President Clinton had refused to strike because of the real risk of killing innocent people.19 His new identification in Pakistan was still a hunch. Every analyst knew that all the evidence might seem to stack up perfectly but could still be wrong. Deciding to launch the attack into Pakistan was a heck of a ca
ll for President Obama to make.

  It was at this point that Shakil Afridi came into the frame. Afridis have a reputation for being independent and rarely open to being recruited, but Dr Afridi had a series of problems that made him susceptible. While working in the tribal areas, he had been accused of medical malpractice. He was kidnapped by a local strongman and had to pay a ransom to be released. Later he visited the US, where he may have come under scrutiny from US intelligence. Research by GQ magazine concluded that Afridi attended a training session by a British charity that was organizing vaccinations in Pakistan. One of the charity’s directors introduced him to the CIA in Peshawar, it claimed. The charity denied this.

  Human intelligence had already played some role in following the courier thus far. A Pakistani ‘asset’ had been the one who spotted his car in Peshawar and helped to follow him home to Abbottabad. Agents were involved in observing the compound and discovering that the courier and his family lied to other family and friends when telling them where they lived.20 But the deployment of Afridi was the most significant use of human intelligence that emerged from the sanitized account of the bin Laden operation. It was probably far from the whole story, but insiders insist that there was never an agent or well-placed ally who gathered anything so precise about bin Laden that they could have pointed to a map and said, ‘Osama bin Laden lives there!’

  When asked to explain how bin Laden was caught, analysts involved speak of putting together a jigsaw puzzle of thousands of pieces. Cindy Storer, a former CIA analyst, was quoted as saying, ‘Pieces fall from the sky and add to the pile the analyst already has … There is no picture [to follow], no edge pieces. And not all of the pieces fit in the puzzle’. Nada Bakos, a former CIA targeting officer, wrote, ‘I can’t stress enough that it is a team effort. It’s much more complicated than one hero catching the bad guys. It is multi-faceted and not focused on one individual and no one in the CIA has a crystal ball.’21