by Steve Coll
If I.S.I. did run a compartmented support operation, perhaps in the hope that it would encourage Al Qaeda not to target Pakistan, the service’s incentive would have been to work as indirectly as possible and to urge Bin Laden to lie low. The Americans had publicized a $25 million reward for Bin Laden’s capture. There was so much corruption in the Pakistani police forces and I.S.I. itself that even if the service had been ordered by Musharraf or Kayani to keep Bin Laden safe, there could be no guarantee against some enterprising officer in the know walking into the U.S. embassy or one of the American consulates and arranging to be resettled in Arizona with reward money and a new identity, as had happened with previous informers aiding American fugitive hunts in Pakistan.4
C.I.A. and other Obama administration officials have said they possess no evidence—no intercepts, no unreleased documents from Abbottabad—that Kayani or Pasha or any other I.S.I. officer knew where Bin Laden was hiding. Given the hostility toward Pakistan prevalent in the American national security bureaucracy by 2011, if the United States possessed such hard evidence, it almost certainly would have leaked.
However, the Abbottabad letters do contain references to negotiations between Al Qaeda and Pakistan about a kind of mutual nonaggression pact. Bin Laden wrote to Al Qaeda colleagues about the position they should take in such talks, but the letters provide no proof of who was negotiating on the Pakistani side, if anyone. “Our stance was essentially: We are ready to quit the fight with you, as our battle is primarily with the Americans; however, you entered into it with them,” Atiyah Abd al-Rahman, a Libyan-born Al Qaeda operator who wrote regularly to Bin Laden, reported in July 2010, referring to apparent contacts with the Pakistani state. “If you leave us alone, then we will leave you alone.”5
This passage and others suggest that Al Qaeda was making an appeal for a truce, not that one had been reached. And there are numerous indications in the letters that Bin Laden and his family members had no easy way to travel on Pakistani roads at this time and that they and other Al Qaeda figures regarded such travel as very risky.
The fuzziest period in the available chronology of Bin Laden’s exile after 2001 involves the first months after he escaped from Tora Bora. There is some detainee testimony that he moved north to Kunar Province, inside Afghanistan, and other testimony that he hid inside Pakistan. None of this information appears as credible as the testimony of Amal, Bin Laden’s young Yemeni wife. Her account picks up in mid-2002, when she said she was reunited with Bin Laden in Peshawar. By then Osama had connected with a man known within Al Qaeda as Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti, who was in his midtwenties, and his wife, Maryam, who was then fifteen years old. Al-Kuwaiti’s real name was Ibrahim Saeed Ahmed. He was well suited to take charge of Bin Laden’s personal security inside Pakistan. He was an ethnic Pashtun whose family came from northwestern Pakistan, yet he had grown up in Kuwait. He could therefore communicate with Al Qaeda operators in fluent Arabic while appearing to locals in western Pakistan to be a native.
Late in 2002, Bin Laden, his wife Amal, Ibrahim, and his wife, Maryam, traveled by “coach”—a bus or a minibus—in the company of a man dressed as a police officer. They rode to the Shagla District of Swat, about eighty miles northwest of Islamabad, a mountain resort long influenced by conservative Islamist preachers. The foursome stayed in the region for eight or nine months, in two different houses, according to Amal. Maryam remembered a stay in just one home for six to nine months, a house in “a beautiful area” with a “river behind it.”6 A Pakistani investigative commission later reported that the house belonged to Maryam’s father. Ibrahim’s brother Abrar joined them and got married during this period. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed visited for about two weeks. Bin Laden busied himself recording an audiotape in which he praised mass casualty terrorist attacks in Bali, Moscow, and Jordan and he composed long written statements about the urgency of jihad against Americans and Jews.
Early in March 2003, Pakistani police working with the C.I.A. and the F.B.I. arrested Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in Rawalpindi. Bin Laden and his wife fled Swat three days later. The letters and travel documents seized from K.S.M. provided insights into Bin Laden’s support network in Pakistan but no target address. The documents showed that Bin Laden’s children and wives had access to passports, visas, and trusted escorts, allowing these family members to move through Karachi and eventually to seek refuge in Iran. Yet the fact that close family members such as Bin Laden’s son Saad and two of Osama’s older wives went in 2002 to Iran—a Shiite-majority country hostile to Al Qaeda’s ideology—suggested that Bin Laden did not have cooperation, or at least not extensive cooperation, from the Pakistani state; otherwise, he would have tried to avoid exposing loved ones to Iran. Later letters make clear that he would have preferred to have all of his family in Pakistan. I.S.I.’s role in the arrests of Al Qaeda leaders such as K.S.M. and Musharraf’s willingness to turn detainees over to the Americans would have made clear to Bin Laden that the Pakistani state could not be trusted fully.
The available record contains another gap in Bin Laden’s movements over the summer of 2003 but comes back into focus in August of that year, when Bin Laden and Amal moved into a rented two-story home in Naseem Town, a suburb of Haripur, Pakistan. The area was in Pakistan’s Pashtun-dominated western province of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, formerly the Northwest Frontier Province. Ibrahim and Abrar as well as their wives moved in with the Bin Ladens. Osama, who was now forty-five years old, paid each of the Ahmed brothers about 9,000 Pakistani rupees per month, or just over $100, for their services. The house rent was another $150 a month.7 That year Amal gave birth to a girl, Aaisa, either in a government hospital or in a private clinic. Bin Laden made audiotapes and videotapes throughout this period, including one, released on October 29, 2004, on the eve of the American election, in which he took responsibility for September 11 and threatened more violence against the United States.
During the Haripur sojourn, Ibrahim and Abrar went to work on more sustainable and secure accommodation, in Abbottabad. They acquired land and, no doubt in close consultation with Bin Laden, who came from a family that specialized in construction, designed a multistory compound that could house the emir’s growing family with Amal and perhaps other wives and children if they could be brought into Pakistan. The total cost of the project was estimated at several hundred thousand dollars or more.8 The group moved into the new compound in August 2005. Twelve-foot walls ringed the property; in one place, they rose as high as eighteen feet. Seven-foot walls protected a balcony on the highest floor. The home had no telephone or Internet connections. The occupants burned their own trash. In its design and location, the house stood apart from its neighbors and its walls were unusually high. Yet in a region of drug traffickers, tribal figures living in fear of revenge attacks by rivals, and conservative Pashtun families that sought to keep their wives and daughters in purdah, many people walled off their homes. This layout was only somewhat on the extreme side of the local spectrum of fortress architecture.
The house stood less than a mile from the treed, red-roofed campus of the Pakistan Military Academy, the country’s equivalent of West Point, which lay off PMA Road. That proximity presented damning circumstantial evidence of connivance with Bin Laden by the Pakistani state, but the evidence was not conclusive. Was it conceivable that Bin Laden could live so close to the army’s highest seat of officer education for six years without anyone in uniform or in I.S.I. being aware of his presence? Kayani later insisted that it was the case. The compound was not actually visible from the academy. Pakistanis did not routinely get to know their neighbors in the way that many Americans did, he argued to American visitors. The army rarely conducted perimeter security sweeps of neighborhoods around its bases, except in conflict areas; the army was not under threat in Abbottabad. In October 2009 ten militants disguised in army uniforms penetrated the walls of General Headquarters in Rawalpindi in a raid that killed fifteen people, including a brigadier and a colonel. It turne
d out one of the conspirators had rented a house in Rawalpindi and conducted surveillance undetected for two months. In December another Pakistani Taliban suicide bombing cell struck the Parade Lane mosque near G.H.Q., attended almost exclusively by military officers, and killed about forty people, including a two-star general. Obviously if I.S.I. or military intelligence had the wherewithal to detect the cells lurking around supreme headquarters in Rawalpindi it would have done so. Yes, we are that blind became the thrust of Kayani’s argument about the location of Bin Laden’s hideout in Abbottabad.9
Of course, Kayani and Pasha made the same argument to American visitors about their supposed lack of knowledge of the hideouts of Taliban leaders in Quetta and Karachi—implausibly so. In Bin Laden’s case the Pakistani generals advanced by implication a subtle argument, as the Americans heard it: We lie to you about our access to Taliban leaders, because our relations with the Taliban are a vital national interest of Pakistan, but we are telling you the truth about our lack of access to Bin Laden, because Al Qaeda is our enemy, too.
Bin Laden’s lifestyle in hiding was pinched but warmly familial. He arrived on move-in day at Abbottabad with nine items of clothing.10 He watched satellite television on a tiny black-and-white set—Bin Laden had been a TV news junkie since adolescence. In 2006, Amal gave birth to another daughter, Zainab, and Bin Laden released a handful of audiotapes. In 2007, he released his first video in about three years, to mark the sixth anniversary of September 11. Throughout, he wrote many long, discursive letters to Al Qaeda operatives and international affiliates, letters characteristic of a man with a lot of time on his hands. Some of his writing concerned the proper conduct of revolutionary jihad, such as concentrating on attacking America, avoiding Muslim civilian casualties, and cranking up media campaigns. Sometimes he offered specific instructions about operations or hostage exchanges. He issued what he evidently believed to be binding decisions about Al Qaeda alliances with allies in Iraq, North Africa, and Somalia. He wrote frequently about the welfare of those sons and wives from whom he remained separated.
As the university-educated scion of a modern Arabian business family, Bin Laden had always considered himself an expert on finance, and he distributed detailed if quirky investment advice. In a 2010 letter, he advised that ransom proceeds from the kidnapping of an Afghan should be invested in gold, euros, Kuwaiti dinars, and Chinese renminbi. He was bullish on gold (which usually rose in price whenever the world was engulfed in chaos, which Bin Laden sought to create) and he suggested that his correspondent monitor price fluctuations and buy in at $1,500 an ounce, whenever that was possible.11
He was paranoid about American aerial and electronic surveillance capabilities. He urged Al Qaeda allies in North Africa to grow more trees to hide from Predator drones and spy satellites. He asked supporters trying to smuggle his wife and son from Iran to travel only on cloudy days. He repeatedly urged allies to stay out of Waziristan because of the dangers of aerial surveillance and drone strikes. He reminded a colleague considering a media interview that even a trusted journalist “may be under surveillance that neither we nor they can perceive, either on the ground or via satellite.” Also, “A chip could be planted in a piece of their equipment.” He wrote to two of his sons that Al Qaeda had decided that Waziristan was “well known to the enemy” and that it would be necessary to shift to Peshawar, where C.I.A. drones did not operate. He offered complex instructions about how to slip into Peshawar. He was as paranoid about Iran as he was about the C.I.A. He worried that Iranian doctors might use medical treatment as a pretense to inject his sons with tracking chips. “The syringe size may be normal but the needle is expected to be larger than normal size,” Bin Laden wrote. “The chip size may be as long as a seed of grain but very thin and smooth.”12
In another letter, he noted that “the most important security issues in the cities is controlling children, by not getting out of the house except for extreme necessity like medical care, and teaching them the local language; and that they do not get to the yard of the house without an adult who will control the volume of their voices.” He and the Ahmeds rigged a tarp covering the outdoor space in Bin Laden’s section of the compound, and he sometimes wore a cowboy hat when he walked in short loops outside.13
He did have the ability to call on substantial Al Qaeda funds. He once asked for a draw on his “personal fund” of 30,000 euros, presumably the equivalent of a C.E.O.’s allowance managed by Al Qaeda’s finance committee. Bin Laden asked at one point for an accounting of incoming funds by country of origin, indicating that several Gulf States were sources, although his request did not indicate whether the donors were official or private. Bin Laden apparently contemplated arranging for his son Hamzah to migrate to Qatar, and Atiyah Abd al-Rahman queried as to whether he should approach the Qatari embassy in Pakistan to determine whether this was possible or if the “Americans will definitely take him” once he reached the emirate. Al-Rahman thought, on balance, it was better for Hamzah to remain in Iran. “Perhaps the matter is more difficult than you imagine, in terms of the route and searches between us and Peshawar.”14
On April 26, 2011, Bin Laden wrote what would be his final letter, to al-Rahman. He began by reflecting on the “consecutive revolutions” of the Arab Spring of that year, “a great and glorious event” that would “inevitably change the conditions” for Al Qaeda. The Muslim Brotherhood, then ascending to power in Egypt, was a movement of “half solutions,” so it would be incumbent “upon us, the mujaheddin,” to “plug that gap.” On the Afghan war, he expressed satisfaction that the jihad there was “bleeding down the head of the international apostasy, until it reaches such weakness that the Muslim people have regained some self-confidence and daring.”
He added some advice about security: “It is proved that American technology and modern systems cannot arrest a Mujahid if he does not commit a security error that leads them to him. So adherence to security precautions turns their technological advancement into a loss and a disappointment to them.”15
Bin Laden was about to be discovered even though he had not made a significant security error. Since 2002, the two dozen or so C.I.A. analysts looking for him from the Counterterrorism Center’s ground-floor suites in New Headquarters had been trying to identify couriers who might ferry his messages and supply him with money and other support. Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti’s name surfaced during interrogations of several Al Qaeda detainees after 2002, but it was not clear whether he was still active. Exactly how the C.I.A. discovered Ibrahim Ahmed’s true name, that he was living in Pakistan, and that he might be working with Bin Laden remains unclear. The agency released a version emphasizing help from other intelligence services, cell phone intercepts, and street work by C.I.A. agents in Pakistan who identified Ibrahim’s jeep and followed it to Abbottabad.
Operation Neptune Spear, the carefully rehearsed plan to deliver SEALs to Abbottabad by helicopter, launched on May 1 from Jalalabad. The attackers faced disruption early on when one of the two helicopters carrying the assault team crash-landed at the Abbottabad compound. The pilots of the second helicopter then landed in a different place from where they had intended. This led the SEALs to improvise. One team approached the outer building where Ibrahim and his family lived. They pounded on the door with a sledgehammer. Somebody shot at them from inside. They shot back and killed a man who turned out to be Ibrahim. Inside the main house they also killed Abrar, his wife, and then, as they climbed higher up the stairs, Osama’s son Khalid. On the top floor, they shot Bin Laden in the head and several times in the chest, as he lay writhing on the floor. The SEALs shot and wounded Amal, but she and Maryam, Ibrahim’s widow, survived and were later taken into custody by Pakistani police.16
The killing of Osama Bin Laden had many reverberations. It delivered justice for the victims of September 11. It disrupted the founding branch of Al Qaeda and delivered the organization to a turgid successor, Zawahiri. It achieved a significant goal of Barack O
bama’s surge of troops into Afghanistan, creating political space for Obama to carry out the rapid troop withdrawal from Afghanistan that he increasingly believed was the correct policy. And for anyone who had not yet come to terms with the depths of nuclear-armed Pakistan’s disorder or its stew of international terrorists working or at least living side by side with prestigious institutions of the Pakistani state, the raid provided bracing clarity. Among those shocked into recognition were many disgruntled citizens of Pakistan.
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On Tuesday, May 4, two days after he announced Bin Laden’s killing on national television, President Obama descended to the Situation Room to preside over a Principals Committee meeting called to review American strategy toward Pakistan and Afghanistan now that Bin Laden was eliminated. From Islamabad, Ambassador Munter reported that the atmosphere in Pakistan was one of “cognitive dissonance.” He kept taking calls from the Pakistani government, as well as civilian friends and contacts. They all congratulated the United States. But a backlash against the army and I.S.I. was building in the media, egged on by civilian politicians who sensed an opening to recapture authority from Kayani and Pasha. The public discourse in Pakistan during those first days was similar to that in the United States: Either I.S.I. was complicit in sheltering a mass murderer, or it was incompetent. Yet it seemed clear that much or most of the Pakistani public was more offended by the fact that the SEALs had been able to penetrate the country’s borders undetected than by the possibility that I.S.I. had sheltered Bin Laden. “Someone will have to answer,” Munter said.17