by Shuja Nawaz
Musharraf was clear on where things stood in the search for bin Laden.
[T]he search for Osama bin Laden has gone completely cold, with no recent intelligence indicating where he and his top lieutenants are hiding.
More than three years after al Qaeda’s attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon killed almost 3,000 people, Musharraf insisted that Pakistani forces are still aggressively pursuing the world’s most notorious terrorist. But he acknowledged that recent security force operations and interrogations have been able to determine only one fact—that bin Laden is still alive.
‘He is alive, but more than that, where he is, no, it’ll be just a guess and it won’t have much basis,’ Musharraf said in an interview with Washington Post editors and reporters. 32
Later he and others in Pakistan would opine that perhaps bin Laden was dead.
Former FBI Special Agent Brad Garrett who had been involved in tracking and capturing Aimal Kansi, the killer of CIA staff in Langley VA, had a clear notion of how to work with the Pakistanis in this quest. He suggested using Pakistani muscle but maintaining a ‘unilateral American operation’, and putting out a ‘sizable cash reward’. 33
Meanwhile, presidential candidate Barack Obama, a fresh senator from Illinois, delivered a well-crafted speech at the Wilson Center in Washington DC that outlined his position on the search for bin Laden and other terrorists:
If we have actionable intelligence about high-value targets and President Musharraf won’t act, we will . . . I will not hesitate to use military force to take out terrorists who pose a direct threat to America. 34
This was more than campaign rhetoric and was later to inform his decisions once he became president. On 2 June 2009, Obama issued an order to the director of the CIA, Leon Panetta, that included the following sentence:
In order to ensure that we have expended every effort, I direct you to provide me within 30 days a detailed operational plan for locating and bringing to justice bin Laden. 35
Pakistan, a frontline state once more, in an Afghanistan war, became a huge target for the US, and every effort was made to flood agents into the country from then onward. Strengthening that view was the series of attacks or aborted attacks on US targets by persons trained in Pakistan, including an Afghan Najibullah Zazi 36 and Pakistani Faisal Shahzad.
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had her own very clear idea of where Pakistan stood regarding the Al-Qaeda and Taliban leadership.
On a fence-mending visit to Pakistan in 2009, she
. . . strongly suggested . . . that some Pakistani officials bore responsibility for allowing terrorists from Al Qaeda to operate from safe havens along this country’s frontier.
‘I find it hard to believe that nobody in your government knows where they are, and couldn’t get to them if they really wanted to,’ she said to a group of Pakistani journalists. ‘Maybe that’s the case; maybe they’re not gettable. I don’t know.’ 37
This new focus on the search for bin Laden and other terrorist leaders led to the rejuvenation of the JSOC under Gen. Stanley McChrystal. JSOC had grown to 4,000 personnel after 9/11, with its own drones and intelligence operations. McChrystal’s intelligence specialist in the early days was a Col. Michael Flynn, 38 whom he sent to Iraq to learn the ropes of battlefield intelligence operations. Later, McChrystal would take him to Afghanistan. McChrystal created a virtual network of expertise via video conferencing to capture analyses and data speedily across the globe. And he personally sat in on many intercontinental video conferences. 39
When McChrystal moved on to command troops in Afghanistan, he was succeeded by Vice Admiral William McRaven, a veteran of the JSOC wars inside Iraq, where, among other things, he had led Task Force 121 that hunted down and captured Saddam Hussein in 2003. By 2009, McRaven had been shifted from Iraq to Afghanistan by Gen. David Petraeus, then commander in Afghanistan. In the process, he increased Special Operations missions in Afghanistan from 200 a year in 2008 to well over 2,000 a year by 2010. 40
Behind the scenes, a small group of female CIA analysts laid the ground for the tracking of bin Laden. The basis of their work was a paper entitled ‘Inroads’ that listed four pillars for the search: first, locating the courier network that bin Laden used to communicate with his organization; second, contacts with his family members; third, communications with senior Al-Qaeda persons; and fourth, outreach to the media. 41 This grid served as a guide for their persistent work, and all incoming intelligence fell into their framework. Pakistani information became an unwitting element of this search process.
According to an interview given by former DG-ISI Ahmed Shuja Pasha to Pakistani journalist Azaz Syed:
Months before the [Abbottabad] operation, the Americans would routinely request the data of surveillance of different mobile phone numbers from the ISI. Two of these numbers were of the Kuwaiti brothers [the Pakistanis who had lived in Kuwait and who were hiding bin Laden] . . . About 18 people were tasked to tap and monitor the special telephone numbers . . . The ISI routinely shared Americans (sic) the data they requested. Little did the ISI know that the shared data would lead to the most-wanted man of the world. Pasha spoke very little about this topic, saying ‘most of the times (sic) these [phone] numbers were silent’. 42
The Americans were triangulating information from their interrogations of Al-Qaeda leaders, often captured with Pakistani help inside Pakistan, with electronic intercepts by their own array of eavesdropping technologies and systems and the ISI’s local interception of targeted and suspected Al-Qaeda cell phones. The CT cooperation between the Americans and their Pakistani counterparts continued to be a key element in this search, even if the Pakistanis did not benefit from feedback from their American partners.
The US focus began to sharpen on the cut-outs used as couriers between Al-Qaeda leadership. Numerous references to a courier named Al Kuwaiti sparked their interest in the brothers who had once lived in that Gulf kingdom and also worked for bin Laden. ISI intercepts importantly helped prepare that case. The brothers identified by the CIA as Abu Ahmed Al-Kuwaiti and Tariq (real name: Abrar) became the focus of the CIA’s attention as the conduits for bin Laden’s communications with his far-flung network. Abu Ahmed was in fact Arshad, a Pakistani born in a village near Kohat, Pakistan. He had been the contact for Abu Faraj Al Libi also, especially in the period when bin Laden was moving between different hideouts inside Pakistan proper. 43
In fact, bin Laden had moved into a safe house in Shangla in Swat and then into a home in Haripur, not far up the road from Abbottabad, reportedly also near a sensitive Pakistani security site (most likely a nuclear weapons storage location).
Interestingly, Amrullah Saleh, the head of the Afghan security service NDS, is reported to have sent a warning to Pakistan that bin Laden was hiding in that general area, near Mansehra, a short distance from Abbottabad. Pakistan maintained it could not confirm that intelligence. Eventually, a decision was made by Al-Qaeda to have Arshad purchase different tracts of land in the Bilal Town area near Abbottabad and combine them into a single plot. Bin Laden drew a sketch of the outline of the house within a house that would shelter him and his family, as well as the Pakistani brothers who were his keepers and couriers. The site was considered safe since it was far from the battlefront. Also, it turns out the ISI did not have a permanent presence there till after Al Libi was tracked to that town in the Nawan Shehr neighbourhood, not far from Bilal Town. The ISI team later grew in size. In February 2011, a terrorist Umer Patek, alias Jaffer Alawi, a.k.a. Hisyamein Alazein (of Kuwaiti origin), implicated in the Bali bombing, was captured near Abbottabad. But even this did not raise the alarm at ISI headquarters about a more important Al-Qaeda presence in the area.
In addition to the ISI presence, there is also an MI detachment in Abbottabad. After the raid, it emerged that some questions about the origins and background of these brothers had been raised by ISI investigators who were trying to verify their antecedents and contacts in Mardan (where they had a home at one ti
me), Charsadda and Peshawar, but these got lost in the maw of the Pakistani bureaucracy. The ISI was tracking Arshad’s movements though, and established that he travelled once a month to Peshawar and bought medicines. It was during this period of inquiry that the ISI requested satellite surveillance by the CIA of the house on ‘Pathan Street’ in Bilal Town. 44
The Americans had meanwhile zeroed in on the house with the unusual architecture. It had a wall within the outside wall and windows that looked away from habitations in the neighbourhood. Using their extensive network of local agents, they began surveillance of the house, supplemented by aerial surveillance. A separate local operation was launched to use a Pakistani doctor, Shakeel Afridi, and his team to try to get DNA evidence from the inhabitants of the mysterious house on Pathan Gali under the guise of a health campaign that was wrongly attributed later to an anti-polio campaign. It is not clear if he succeeded. The betting began in Washington on who lived there and on the chances that this was bin Laden. McRaven’s team was brought into the picture and saw it as a routine operation, except that it involved penetrating deep into a non-NATO ally’s country and exiting safely after completing the search-and-destroy mission.
This was a serious concern if the Pakistanis were to engage with the US force during or after the raid was over and tried to arrest them. According to a member of the SEAL Team Six, ‘When President Obama was presented with that possibility, he nodded his head and said, “That’s interesting.” Then he looked at the Air Force Chief of Staff and said, “What do you need to rain hell on Pakistan—because my guys aren’t surrendering to anybody.” 45 If true, that was the clearest signal about Obama’s intentions regarding Pakistan when it came to capturing or killing bin Laden. Separately, according to a senior US official, Obama had told his senior colleagues that he would not fight Pakistan over the Taliban. He stuck to that despite being under US military pressure.’ 46
The story of the raid has by now become part of popular lore. Fact and fiction have intermingled. Some by accident. Some by design, to create misinformation and to protect the innocent and the not so innocent. A Hollywood movie that conflated various events unconnected with the raid (including an attack on the movie heroine analyst as she drove from her home on to the street in Pakistan) 47 also served to further obfuscate reality.
In short, the US story was that the raid began in Jalalabad, Afghanistan, using stealth helicopters. An intermediate drop site in Kala Dhaka was used as a staging post for reserve helicopters. A senior Pakistan Air Force officer confirmed that to me. Two helicopters, Dash 1 and Dash 2, were to get to Abbottabad in the middle of the night around midnight. One was supposed to drop some members of SEAL Team Six outside the house to guard the perimeter and the rest on to the roof. The perimeter team included Robert O’Neill, two snipers, a machine gun operator, a dog handler, and Cairo, the Belgian Malinois dog, 48 plus an interpreter. The other chopper was supposed to land in the courtyard and its team was to force its way into the compound. The aim was to kill bin Laden and take his body back to Afghanistan. In the event, one of the stealth helicopters crashed while landing, though without any injuries to the SEAL team members. Team members rappelled into the courtyard of the house from the other.
Despite losing one helicopter in the ingress operation, the SEAL team managed to achieve its objective without any casualties. Bin Laden was shot and killed. His wife was injured and left for dead. Bin Laden was photographed, identified, and a message sent to superiors in Afghanistan and those huddled in a small room at the White House:
Geronimo EKIA!
(Geronimo being the code name for bin Laden’s capture or killing, and EKIA being the initials for Enemy Killed in Action.)
Mission accomplished, the helicopters headed back to Afghanistan, where bin Laden was properly identified and then a decision was made to transport his body to a US aircraft carrier that then buried him at sea.
O’Neill, who claimed to have fired the shots that killed bin Laden, saw the CIA female analyst who had briefed them on bin Laden and took her over with his point man to see bin Laden’s body. ‘As I watched her look him over, I was just thinking, This is historic. Here’s her life’s work. She just found the most wanted man in history. There he is. It’s all her doing. What’s she going to say? Stone-cold, stone-faced, she said, “Uh, I guess I’m out of a fucking job.” And then she walked away.’ 49 That is what happened in real life. In the movie Zero Dark Thirty, the analyst walks away quietly and tears up only when she boards a C-130. Reality was far more dramatic.
The Plot Thickens
As is usual in such cases, involving intelligence agencies and secretive governments, the story of the Abbottabad raid became complicated and messy once the operation was completed. Questions arose regarding possible Pakistani collusion with American forces as well as the timeline of events of that fateful night of the attack. When did Pakistan Army leadership find out about the raid? How did they react? 50
Wider issues arose: How could the American forces penetrate deep into Pakistani territory without being detected? Who was to be held responsible for such dereliction of duty to protect the borders of Pakistan? Given the seemingly perpetual chasm between the civil and military inside Pakistan, could the raid be used to assert civilian supremacy over the military?
The American narrative was that Pakistan was unaware of the raid because the Pakistanis could not be trusted. In Pakistan, the Land of Conspiracies, this was seen as a smokescreen to help protect Pakistani collaboration. Providing fuel for such thinking were articles in the US and UK media indicating that US helicopters had used the Special Services Group training base near Tarbela as the final jumping-off point for the raid on Abbottabad.
‘From Ghazi Air Base in Pakistan, the modified MH-60 helicopters made their way to the garrison suburb of Abbottabad, about 30 miles from the center of Islamabad,’ wrote Marc Ambinder for the Atlantic on 2 May 2011. He halved the distance to Islamabad, unless it was a calculation of the direct map distance as the crow flies. But clearly, he had been privy to some inside information, adding,
In an interview at CIA headquarters two weeks ago, a senior intelligence official said the two proud groups of American secret warriors had been ‘deconflicted and basically integrated’—finally—10 years after 9/11. Indeed, according to accounts given to journalists by five senior administration officials Sunday night, the CIA gathered the intelligence that led to bin Laden’s location. A memo from CIA Director Leon Panetta sent Sunday night provides some hints of how the information was collected and analysed. In it, he thanked the National Security Agency and the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency for their help. NSA figured out, somehow, that there was no telephone or Internet service in the compound. How it did this without Pakistan’s knowledge is a secret. The NGIA makes the military’s maps but also develops their pattern recognition software—no doubt used to help establish, by February of this year, that the CIA could say with ‘high probability that bin Laden and his family were living there’.
Ambinder also recalled in a separate conversation with me 51 that he was suddenly being approached by officials offering to connect him to intelligence analysts who could provide background information on the raid. Hollywood also was being fast-tracked. A movie under way called Tora Bora, by Mark Boal and Kathryn Bigelow, was suddenly shelved in favour of a new film entitled Zero Dark Thirty. The producers were given access to CIA headquarters and also a walking tour of the NCTC so they could get a sense of the surroundings in which US intelligence experts work. They even ended up being invited to the tent on the CIA grounds where Director Panetta lauded the work of his Agency in the raid on Abbottabad, though it was unclear, according to the CIA Inspector General’s (IG) report, who had invited them and whether the event was ‘classified’ or not. 52
In any case, the end result of the movie of the raid was a mish-mash of reality and fiction, patching together different pieces from different sources and time periods. Either wittingly or unwittingly, Holl
ywood ended up creating a new reality of how the raid was conducted and how it eluded Pakistani defences and detection.
I asked Gen. Kayani if he knew that bin Laden was hiding in Abbottabad. His response was direct and crisp: ‘Did we know? Of course we did not know. Even the Americans did not know, when they came. It was a shot in the dark. All phone conversations were captured by the United States. They came to the conclusion that we did not know.’ 53 The Pakistani military did establish afterwards the fact that bin Laden’s family was there, based on DNA testing and the body of bin Laden’s son.
The American story of trailing the bin Laden courier ‘was not disinformation’ according to Kayani. But he stated unequivocally that there was ‘no walk-in’. Admitting this would have indicated a chink in his armour. But how then to explain the defection of Col. Eqbal? He maintained that there had been intelligence-sharing with the Americans. The ISI gave a lead for the courier. The US developed the lead but ‘they kept us in the dark’. Referring to a retired officer as an ‘old timer who lived in Islamabad’, and who reportedly walked into the US embassy, Kayani said this man had never seen Osama bin Laden. It is not clear how that was established. But Islamabad is rife even today with detailed stories about the walk-in episode.
Kayani regretted that the American raid ‘created a bad environment’. He told Admiral Mullen, when the latter called him to inform him of the US action: ‘If you had shared with us, we would have done it as a daylight two-hour operation. You could have monitored it “live”.’ Even if this meant ‘incurring the wrath of Al-Qaeda. You should have trusted me.’ Kayani maintains that the raid ‘ruined the US–Pakistan relationship’. It also ruined his personal relationship with Mullen, who went on the war path against the ISI and Pakistan to denounce the ISI and pronounce the Haqqani Group as a ‘veritable arm of the ISI’. A lesser-known coda to this incident was a private meeting that the two had, at Mullen’s instigation, in Spain, prior to Mullen’s testimony against the ISI on Capitol Hill. Each of them continues to hold the other in high regard.