My Wisconsin AP_Reading chum — Tom Robertson — sent along a link to playing cards for the 55 warhawks in the United States: Karl Rove all the way down to Bill O'Reilly. (Most of these guys never served in combat, let alone the armed forces.) Go to Warhawks. In the meantime, where the hell is Osama bin Laden?
[x New Yorker]
July 30, 2003
THE SEARCH FOR OSAMA
by JANE MAYER
Did the government let bin Laden’s trail go cold?
One day this past March, in Langley, Virginia, there was jubilation on a little-known thoroughfare called Bin Laden Lane. Analysts at the C.I.A.’s Counter-Terrorism Center, a dingy warren of gray metal desks marked by a custom-made street sign, were thrilled to learn that, seven thousand miles away, in Rawalpindi, Pakistan, colleagues from the agency had helped local authorities storm a private villa and capture Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the man believed to be the third most important figure in the Al Qaeda terrorist organization.
At last, the stalled hunt for Al Qaeda fugitives had gained momentum. The authorities in Pakistan had obtained Mohammed’s laptop computer and satellite phone; this breakthrough, they hoped, would help them track down the organization’s leader, Osama bin Laden. Analysts in Washington speculated that news of Mohammed’s capture might even prompt bin Laden into fleeing his current hideout. According to an F.B.I. official, in the weeks before his arrest Mohammed had been moving from one place to another in Baluchistan, a lawless province that borders Afghanistan and Iran. Bin Laden, it was thought, was probably in the same area.
Days later, American intelligence satellites traced a telephone call made to Baluchistan by Saad bin Laden, one of Osama’s sons, who was thought to be hiding in Iran. Intelligence officials knew that bin Laden no longer dared to answer the phone, but they believed the call might have been placed to one of his aides.
An unmanned spy plane dispatched to the region spotted a suspicious convoy moving at night. It consisted of about a hundred people on horseback and on foot, and was advancing along an ancient smugglers’ route, in a rocky desert area. Bin Laden, the officials hoped, might be travelling with this group.
A team made up of C.I.A. paramilitary operatives, Delta Force soldiers, and Pakistani officials descended upon the convoy. Meanwhile, in Washington, the C.I.A. had orders to launch a Hellfire missile from an unmanned Predator intelligence aircraft if the presence of bin Laden could be confirmed. After the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, President Bush signed a top-secret Memorandum of Notification, calling for bin Laden to be either captured or killed on sight.
“The C.I.A. was very confident—they thought they had him there in Baluchistan, across from the Iranian border,” Vincent Cannistraro, a former chief of operations for the C.I.A.’s Counter-Terrorism Center, said. “They had a fixed location on him. They mounted a moderate-sized operation.” The convoy was intercepted, Cannistraro said. Each traveller was examined. “Lo and behold, bin Laden wasn’t there,” he said. The convoy was merely a group of refugees.
Instead of firing a Hellfire missile, American aircraft dropped flyers that featured an image of bin Laden’s face behind bars. The flyers also publicized a twenty-five-million-dollar reward that would be given to anyone who could hand bin Laden over to the authorities.
Iranian officials issued a statement denying that bin Laden’s son was in their country. (Iran has maintained this position, despite numerous reports to the contrary.) American officials declined to acknowledge the incident at all.
Soon after this episode, I visited the office of Cofer Black, a veteran of the C.I.A. whom President Bush appointed last year to be the State Department’s coördinator for counter-terrorism. If Black was disappointed about the failure to find bin Laden, he did not betray it. He leaned forward across the coffee table separating us and said emphatically, “The guy’s a goner. The only question is whether he’ll be arrested in cuffs or taken dead. He deserves to die.”
If bin Laden was killed, Black continued, the world would demand proof. “You’d need some DNA,” he said. “There’s a good way to do it. Take a machete, and whack off his head, and you’ll get a bucketful of DNA, so you can see it and test it. It beats lugging the whole body back!”
Tough talk and aggressive military action have been hallmarks of the Bush Administration’s war on terrorism. In the wake of the attacks on New York and Washington, President Bush made it clear that he was targeting bin Laden; in one speech, he declared that the terrorist was “wanted, dead or alive.” In another speech, Bush said, “If he thinks he can hide and run from the United States and our allies, he will be sorely mistaken.” However, as months went by without a successful capture—“point” targets, as individuals are called by military tacticians, are notoriously elusive—Bush rarely mentioned bin Laden’s name in public. The Administration’s attention shifted to building support for the war in Iraq, and Saddam Hussein seemed to replace bin Laden in the role of the world’s most notorious “evildoer.” Indeed, Bush’s reticence on the subject of bin Laden grew so conspicuous that critics, such as the Democratic Presidential candidate Bob Graham, began referring to the terrorist as “Osama bin Forgotten.”
In June, at a joint press conference at Camp David with President Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan, the President was forced to address the bin Laden question. A reporter asked where bin Laden might be, and Bush’s response was muted and cautious. “If Osama bin Laden is alive . . . slowly but surely we’re dismantling the networks, and we’ll continue on the hunt,” he said. He added that locating bin Laden “could take years.”
Al Qaeda is clearly good at finding hiding places. The Times recently reported that, after a shoot-out in the mountains of Afghanistan in January, American soldiers were amazed to find a kitchen big enough to feed forty people, complete with a cow, several donkeys, and a larder, hidden behind a false wall in a cave. Searching bin Laden’s cave network in Tora Bora, in the White Mountains, analysts have found artillery, tank parts, and computers.
The working theory of the C.I.A., and also of foreign intelligence services, is that bin Laden is most likely hiding somewhere along the fifteen-hundred-mile border between Afghanistan and Pakistan. “If he is protected by a big group, I think bin Laden is on the Afghan side of the border,” Musharraf told Le Monde in July. “If his group has less than ten people, he could be on the Pakistan side.” Some people familiar with the region claim that bin Laden’s whereabouts can be narrowed even further. Mansoor Ijaz is an American financier with family members in Pakistan who are connected with intelligence circles there. A New York-based investment company he owns, Crescent Investment Management, has ties to the international intelligence community through James Woolsey, a former director of the C.I.A., who serves on the company’s board. Ijaz recently returned from a trip to Pakistan. In an interview, he contended that bin Laden was “very much alive, and hiding in the tribal areas”—that is, in the borderlands dominated by ethnic Pashtuns. Ijaz said that, during his trip, he spoke with top intelligence figures in the region. “Bin Laden is travelling around within about a hundred-and-fifty-mile diameter,” he said. “He’s essentially being babysat by tribal leaders who have an arm’s-length relationship with the Pakistani government. The tribal leaders have said he can’t move except at night, and he can’t communicate by phone, radio, or walkie-talkie. He knows it is too dangerous. They have constructed a perfect spider’s web of communication.” Ijaz said he had been told that bin Laden communicated via “handwritten notes” transmitted by “a human chain-link fence,” because word of mouth had proved unreliable. “Some of his messages were not being correctly communicated,” he said.
Ijaz said he’d been told that bin Laden was surrounded by concentric circles of security: an outer ring of loyal villagers, a second ring of tribal leaders, and an inner ring of personal aides and bodyguards. “Since he’s surrounded by devout followers, there’s virtually no chance of the U.S. being able to pinpoint him,” he said.
Rahimullah Yusufzai, a journalist in Peshawar who is known for his interviews with bin Laden, and who has maintained access to Al Qaeda sympathizers, also told me that bin Laden was likely hiding in western Pakistan. He said that bin Laden’s bodyguards, who are assumed to include as many as five of his sons, have vowed to “martyr” their father rather than allow him to be taken alive.
Although bin Laden is believed to have had hundreds of soldiers with him when he escaped to the tribal areas after the American bombardment of Afghanistan, most experts think that he is now nearly alone. He is said, however, to keep in touch with his inner circle. This spring, the Washington Post reported that bin Laden had been spotted in the tribal areas with his closest co-conspirator, Ayman Zawahiri. (Rumors that Zawahiri has been captured by authorities in Iran have been discounted by U.S. officials.) Dominic Simpson, the head of the Middle East division of Kroll, a New York-based security firm, told me that a reliable source had shared details about a recent meeting inside Pakistan which was attended by Mullah Mohammed Omar, the fugitive leader of the Taliban. Simpson said that during the meeting Omar confided, “Yes, I am with Osama. We’re travelling together in Pakistan.”
Such shreds of information, of course, are no more than informed conjecture. Bin Laden has not been seen publicly since December 26, 2001, when he appeared in a videotape that was released to celebrate the three-month anniversary of what he called “the blessed attack.” Instead of seeming joyous, the forty-six-year-old terrorist looked sickly and aged. After a month passed by without another videotape, some experts began thinking that bin Laden was dead. Then came a stream of audio recordings, faxes, Internet postings, and other communications, all asserting, or implying, that bin Laden was alive.
Last spring, bin Laden reportedly sent a handwritten letter to his mother that said, “I am in good health and in a very, very safe place. They will not get me unless Allah wills it.” Another letter apparently from bin Laden, written in longhand approximately six months ago, was found on the body of a suspected Al Qaeda operative who was killed by Saudi police in May. According to Al Watan, an Arabic daily, the letter offered season’s greetings on the occasion of Eid al-Fitr, a major Muslim holiday, and noted the “achievements of the Al Qaeda cells.” (A bloodstain obliterated the name of the letter’s recipient.)
“He’s sending tapes and messages to his followers all the time, with instructions that could not have come from anyone else,” Yossef Bodansky, the director of the Congressional Task Force on Terrorism and Unconventional Warfare, told me recently. “They’re things like condolences to families of Islamic luminaries who have died,” he said. “People from the Philippines to Indonesia to South America ask bin Laden questions, and they get answers from him.” Bodansky was struck by the meditative tone of the letters. “They are written with a tremendous amount of peace of mind. There are no mistakes. He is not a guy on the run.”
Terrorism experts have pored over several audiotaped messages purporting to have come from bin Laden since September 11th. Analysis of voice patterns and syntax suggests that these messages are authentic. Specialists have tried to explain why bin Laden stopped videotaping himself. “He seemed possibly injured on his left side in the last videotape,” Matthew Levitt, a former F.B.I. anti-terrorism specialist, told me. Others have noted that, although bin Laden is left-handed, in his last video he perched his Kalashnikov rifle next to his right side. He also failed to gesticulate as much as he usually did when he spoke. In the past, when bin Laden was ill he avoided being photographed, evidently careful never to project a weakened image.
Even if bin Laden is impaired, to many experts, he still appears to be playing a direct role in coördinating Al Qaeda’s campaign of terrorism. In February, three months before the wave of bombings in Morocco, Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan, a tape was released on which a voice thought to be bin Laden’s ordered “martyrdom operations” on all three targets. Similarly, last October bin Laden released a tape calling on infidels to convert or face dire consequences. Two senior Al Qaeda operatives captured by authorities, Abu Zubaydah and Ramzi bin al-Shibh, warned American interrogators that the wording was definitely bin Laden’s, and that his last-minute call for conversion was an attempt to fashion himself in the image of Muhammad. The prisoners interpreted these signs as an attempt to rationalize an imminent act of violence. Within days, more than two hundred people had been murdered in Kuwait and Bali.
Indeed, the most difficult problem for American officials who are trying to find bin Laden may be determining who his helpers are and how they fit into Pakistan’s power structure. “The reason bin Laden is so hard to get is that people are helping him,” Cofer Black told me. The search has been stymied not so much by tactical or logistical hurdles as by political ones. The tribal regions of Pakistan are impoverished and increasingly fundamentalist, and there is ambivalence within Musharraf’s government about how vigorously to press in the fight against Muslim jihadis. Although Musharraf has been an outspoken ally of the United States, the aggressive pursuit of bin Laden poses political risks for him, since it is sure to incite his regime’s fundamentalist opponents. Some skeptics argue that the capture of bin Laden may not be in Musharraf’s interest for other reasons as well. As long as bin Laden and other top figures in Al Qaeda are believed to be on the lam in Pakistan, they say, Musharraf can be assured of receiving favorable treatment from the United States in exchange for his coöperation. Since September 11th, Pakistan has been rescued from the verge of bankruptcy. The United States lifted economic sanctions that were imposed in 1998, after Pakistan began testing nuclear weapons, and it restored foreign aid, last month promising a five-year package of three billion dollars in return for Pakistan’s continued help in the fight against terrorism. “Essentially, Musharraf was very lucky this happened in his neighborhood,” Yusufzai told me.
The official position of the Bush Administration is that Musharraf’s government is working as hard as it can to rout out terrorists in Pakistan. “The Pakistani government under Musharraf is a strong and key player in the global war on terrorism, and their contribution has been second to none,” Cofer Black told me. More than twenty-five Pakistani security officers have been killed helping the United States capture an estimated four hundred and eighty Al Qaeda members and sympathizers. (Globally, a third of the Al Qaeda leadership is thought to have been captured or killed.) “When there have been arrests of terrorists to be made, the Pakistanis have been the first ones through the door,” Milton Bearden, a former C.I.A. field officer, said.
Nevertheless, the United States and Pakistan have never completely agreed on which militant Muslim groups qualify as terrorist organizations. In particular, rounding up members of the Taliban has been a sticking point for Pakistan’s intelligence service, the Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate, or I.S.I. According to Jessica Stern, a lecturer in public policy at Harvard’s Kennedy School, the I.S.I. is like “an unreconstructed K.G.B.” The Taliban was virtually created by the I.S.I., which wanted to insure that a friendly government took over in Afghanistan after the Soviet war. “If you think about how Pakistan views Afghanistan, then it’s no surprise that it supported the Taliban,” Roger Cressey, a former director for Trans-National Threats on the National Security Council, told me. “The Taliban provided strategic depth to Pakistan in the Indo-Pakistan political game. Without Pakistani support, the Taliban would have been a bunch of frustrated students of the Koran sitting in coffeehouses.”
Officially, the Musharraf government severed ties with the Taliban two years ago, after the Bush Administration made clear that any country harboring terrorists would be viewed as a legitimate target. But the question of conflicting loyalties persists. After September 11th, the United States pressured Pakistan to dismiss the head of the I.S.I., Lieutenant General Mahmood Ahmed, who was seen as being too close to the Taliban. (He was fired, but has since resurfaced in Pakistan as the head of a subsidiary of a prominent business consortium, a position that required government backing.) According to terrorism experts, lower-level I.S.I. officials remain sympathetic to the Taliban, particularly in the predominantly Pashtun tribal regions where many of the Taliban and Al Qaeda fighters are thought to have fled.
Fundamentalists have been gaining power throughout western Pakistan in recent years. Last October, voters in the North-West Frontier Province, a Pashtun region, chose to be governed by a coalition of six fundamentalist religious parties known as the Muttahida Majlis-i-Amal, or M.M.A., which constitutes the main political opposition to Musharraf. Last month, the province adopted the orthodox code of Islamic law, Sharia, banning everything from coeducation and television to the wearing of white socks and noisy shoes by women. (These sartorial options were deemed too titillating.) In the province, a top Pakistani diplomat admitted to me, “The Taliban are local heroes.”
An American official who attended recent private meetings between American policymakers and leaders of the I.S.I. told me that the Pakistani officials tried to draw clear distinctions between the Taliban and Al Qaeda. But the two groups are historically intertwined. Between 1996 and 2001, bin Laden personally subsidized the Taliban, as he is now suspected of subsidizing Pakistan’s tribal chiefs. The Taliban’s leader, Mullah Omar, is married to one of bin Laden’s daughters.
“If you’re harboring one lot, it’s hard to go after the others,” Ahmed Rashid, the author of a best-selling book on the Taliban and a prominent Pakistani journalist, told me. “There’s lots of sympathy for the Taliban even among the military forces and intelligence agencies.” Rashid said he doubted that there was similar sympathy for Al Qaeda, but he added, “People tend to forget that Al Qaeda has been working in Pakistan for the last two decades, most emphatically since 1996. There was an enormous network here of supporters and safe houses before 9/11.”
Shaheen Sehbai is a Pakistani journalist who, until last year, edited the News, the largest English-language newspaper in Pakistan. I asked him about efforts by I.S.I. officials to find bin Laden. “I question how hard they’re trying,” he said. “I think they’re not looking very hard, because he’ll always remain a bargaining chip.” Sehbai attended college in Peshawar, the capital of the North-West Frontier Province. He speaks Pashto, the local dialect, and said, “I know that area like the back of my hand.” He rejects the prevailing argument in Islamabad that the Musharraf government cannot do more because the region is beyond the reach of its laws. “Every tribal chief is in the pocket of the government in Pakistan,” he said. “The tribal areas are divided into agencies, and each has an administrator, who is part of the Pakistani civil service.” Tribal leaders rarely defy these federal administrators, he said. He has seen suspected murderers and high-profile kidnappers flee into the tribal areas, only to be turned over by the chiefs to local authorities within days. “There would be more resistance in bin Laden’s case, because of ideological sympathy,” Sehbai acknowledged. “But if the government seriously wanted him they’d know where he is, and under whose protection. In the past, the Army has laid siege to villages and burned them to the ground. I’ve heard of no such operations with bin Laden.”
In America, too, the vigor of Pakistan’s efforts has come into doubt. “Bin Laden is their Get Out of Jail Free card,” Yossef Bodansky said. “Every time we complain about the heroin production, they say, ‘Look, we’re helping you with bin Laden,’ and we backpedal. When we complain about Pakistan sponsoring terrorism in Kashmir, they invoke bin Laden, and we backpedal. ‘We’re on your side,’ they say. But I think there’s strong evidence that Pakistan is shielding him.” Bodansky also charged that the Pakistanis have produced major Al Qaeda members only when it served their own political purposes.
Asad Hayauddin, a spokesman at the Pakistani Embassy in Washington, dismissed Bodansky’s views. “There are always going to be doubting Thomases,” he said. “The F.B.I. has been after the Mafia for eighty years—does that mean they’re on the take?” Of the difficulties involved in finding bin Laden, Hayauddin said, “It’s not a question of will—it’s a question of terrain.”
Unsurprisingly, no one is more cynical about the Pakistanis than the Indians. Their intelligence service has devoted considerable energy to discovering links between Al Qaeda and Pakistani extremist groups that oppose India’s presence in Kashmir. (Bin Laden has championed the cause of Kashmiri independence.) Many of the Pakistani groups, the Indians say, have received covert support from the country’s military and intelligence apparatus. An Indian intelligence official emphasized that Abu Zubaydah, a Saudi-born Palestinian who had assumed one of the highest posts in Al Qaeda’s chain of command, was found in the northeast city of Faisalabad, in a villa owned by a Pakistani jihadi organization called Lashkar-e-Taiba. In addition, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, whose family is from Baluchistan, was found in March living with a member of the Jamaat-e-Islami Party—part of the militant coalition that Musharraf lost ground to in the last election. The safe house was in Rawalpindi, a well-heeled town outside Islamabad that is home to much of Pakistan’s military. Indeed, the villa is a quick walk from Musharraf’s own house, and its back yard faces a military training ground.
Pakistan has barred the United States from playing more than a token military role in the country. Robert Oakley, a former Ambassador to Pakistan, told me that the Pakistanis have countenanced a few American military advisers, and accepted intelligence help from the F.B.I. and the C.I.A. Pakistan also allows the United States to conduct overflights and provide logistical help. Small teams of special-ops forces have occasionally offered assistance. But Oakley said that Pakistan has resisted offers to send troops. After September 11th, he told me, “the U.S. military said, ‘Maybe we can help?’ But Pakistan said, ‘No, you’ll get us all killed!’”
Asad Hayauddin confirmed that a United States military presence in the tribal areas “would be very unwelcome. There is great resistance to the idea of foreign occupation of any sort.” He added, “You have to deal with this area politically, not militarily. That’s why the U.S. is having such problems. They don’t have an anthropological approach to world problems. If you take an armored personnel carrier, or a helicopter gunship, you kill innocent people. Then you’ve lost that village for a hundred years. These places run on revenge.”
The Pakistani government has tried to advance this argument in Washington, encouraging a less confrontational strategy in the tribal regions. In December, 2001, according to several knowledgeable sources, Musharraf met with Wendy Chamberlin, then the American Ambassador to Pakistan, and asked for American support in helping him extend his control over the tribal areas. He argued that, unless the borders were cauterized there, the flow of fighters from Afghanistan would be impossible to stop. Musharraf told Chamberlin that the local Pashtun people could be bought off with basic government services that their tribal leaders had never provided—such as schools, clinics, roads, and water. Large cash awards could be offered to locals who helped track down fugitive Arabs.
“How much do you need?” Chamberlin asked. Musharraf’s answer was forty million dollars.
Chamberlin told Musharraf that she would back his plan. But when her funding request reached Congress, it was derailed. Charlie Flickner, the powerful Republican clerk of the foreign-operations subcommittee of the House Appropriations Committee, felt that the expenditure was a waste of money. He had travelled to western Pakistan, and concluded that the tribal areas were essentially sinkholes. On his recommendation, Chamberlin’s proposal was rejected. Instead, the committee agreed to give fourteen million dollars to the tribal areas, in the form of law-enforcement assistance to the local constabularies.
“It’s not something you throw money at,” Flickner told me. “It’s the typical thing that the bureaucrats in Islamabad think of. I don’t think everything in the world is susceptible to American money.” Members of the Democratic minority on the committee refused to respond to questions on the record. One Democrat, however, told me, “We blew it. There was a window of opportunity, but we lost it by not funding them adequately.” Soon after Chamberlin’s proposal was dismissed, the North-West Frontier Province fell into the hands of Musharraf’s Islamist opponents; in the tribal areas, fundamentalists further expanded their influence.
Musharraf, during his visit to America last month, stressed that, for the first time since the nation’s founding, in 1947, Pakistan has begun deploying thousands of soldiers in the tribal areas. The United States recently donated five Huey-2 helicopters and three fixed-wing Cessna surveillance aircraft to help the Pakistani government monitor the province—officially, to further efforts to control poppy production there. Ahmed Rashid isn’t impressed. He has been to the border region in recent weeks, and was struck by the weakness of the Pakistani military effort. “The troops are just sitting there at the border—they’re not doing sweeps,” he said, adding that the security situation in the borderlands was getting worse. “The Taliban’s really reasserted itself. Hundreds of Taliban fighters have been crossing the borders and attacking American troops. Al Qaeda commanders are helping the Taliban in the background, supplying funds and logistical support. Al Qaeda’s also providing reward money for captured or killed American soldiers.” The sums offered, he said, ranged up to a hundred thousand dollars. “All the Americans are complaining about the lack of support from the Pakistani military,” Rashid said. “The soldiers on the ground think the Pakistanis are allowing the Taliban to operate.”
To the frustration of many of the people involved in the fight against Al Qaeda, the Bush Administration is said to have been distracted by competing priorities—most notably, the war in Iraq. Rohan Gunaratna, a Sri Lankan terrorism expert who has analyzed thousands of Al Qaeda documents recovered by various governments, said, “I feel that if they had not gone to Iraq they would have found Osama by now. The best people were moved away from this operation. The best minds were moved to Iraq. It’s a great shame. It’s the biggest military failure in the war on terrorism so far. The Americans need more resources, and more high-level people exclusively assigned to this task.”
Supporters of the Iraq war suggest that this view overlooks longer-term benefits that have yet to be fully appreciated. Ambassador Oakley, for example, said, “I think the war in Iraq has made governments much more cautious about allowing terrorists into their countries—Iran and Syria, for instance—because they can see the consequences to themselves from the U.S.”
Many intelligence insiders, however, shared Gunaratna’s concerns. Cannistraro, the former C.I.A. official, said that the effort to find bin Laden had “lost at least half of its original strength.” He added, “Arabic speakers are in short supply. You still have some intelligence-collection assets in Afghanistan, but mostly it’s just small teams looking for signals. That’s because of Iraq.”
Rand Beers, who until March handled terrorism issues for the National Security Council, told me he had become so concerned about the impact that the war in Iraq was having on the war on terrorism that he quit his job—at the height of the American invasion. Beers, who served on the N.S.C. under Ronald Reagan and both Presidents Bush, is now an adviser for the Presidential campaign of the Democratic Senator John Kerry. He told me, “I have worried for some time that it became politically inconvenient” for the Bush Administration to “complete operations sufficiently in Afghanistan.”
Last February, he said, on the eve of the bombing of Baghdad, the Bush Administration peremptorily drafted an announcement declaring that in Afghanistan the military was moving to “stability operations,” a euphemism for military deescalation. “They wanted to make it sound as if there were just a few more stitches needed in the quilt,” he said. At the time, in fact, Beers believed that the security situation in Afghanistan was so unstable that Al Qaeda might reconstitute itself there. For instance, a recent U.N. report found that the average number of attacks per month on coalition forces rose from around nine last year to more than thirty since the beginning of 2003.
The Administration, Beers said, ignored such concerns. “They didn’t want to call attention to the fact that Osama was still at large and living along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border, because they wanted it to look like the only front was Iraq,” he said. “Otherwise, the question becomes: If Afghanistan is that bad, why start another war?”
Richard Clarke, the country’s first counter-terrorism czar, told me in an interview at his home in Arlington, Virginia, that he wasn’t particularly surprised that the Bush Administration’s efforts to find bin Laden had been stymied by political problems. He had seen such efforts fail before. Clarke, who retired from public service in February and is now a private consultant on security matters, has served every President since Ronald Reagan. He has won a reputation as a tireless advocate for action against Al Qaeda. Clarke emphasized that the C.I.A. director, George Tenet, President Bush, and, before him, President Clinton were all deeply committed to stopping bin Laden; nonetheless, Clarke said, their best efforts had been doomed by bureaucratic clashes, caution, and incessant problems with Pakistan.
In the course of several hours, Clarke revealed details of previous intelligence failures that had allowed bin Laden to escape, many of which the Bush Administration continues to classify as top secret. These details were withheld from the Congressional Report on September 11th; according to an official familiar with the report, they were censored from the section “Covert Action and Military Operations Against Bin Laden.”
Clarke told me that in the mid-nineties “the C.I.A. was authorized to mount operations to go into Afghanistan and apprehend bin Laden.” President Clinton, Clarke said, “was really gung-ho” about the scenario. “He had no hesitations,” he said. “But the C.I.A. had hesitations. They didn’t want their own people killed. And they didn’t want their shortcomings exposed. They really didn’t have the paramilitary capability to do it; they could not stage a snatch operation.” Instead of trying to mount the operation themselves, Clarke said, “the C.I.A. basically paid a bunch of local Afghans, who went in and did nothing.”
In 1998, Al Qaeda struck the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, killing more than two hundred people. In retaliation, Clinton signed a secret Presidential finding authorizing the C.I.A. to kill bin Laden. It was the first directive of this kind that Clarke had seen during his thirty years in government. Soon afterward, he told me, C.I.A. officials went to the White House and said they had “specific, predictive, actionable” intelligence that bin Laden would soon be attending a particular meeting, in a particular place. “It was a rare occurrence,” Clarke said. Clinton authorized a lethal attack. The target date, however—August 20, 1998—nearly coincided with Clinton’s deposition about his affair with Monica Lewinsky. Clarke said that he and other top national-security officials at the White House went to see Clinton to warn him that he would likely be accused of “wagging the dog” in order to distract the public from his political embarrassment. Clinton was enraged. “Don’t you fucking tell me about my political problems, or my personal problems,” Clinton said, according to Clarke. “You tell me about national security. Is it the right thing to do?” Clarke thought it was. “Then fucking do it,” Clinton told him.
The attacks, which cost seventy-nine million dollars and involved some sixty satellite-guided Tomahawk cruise missiles, obliterated two targets—a terrorist training camp outside Khost, in Afghanistan, and a pharmaceutical plant thought to be manufacturing chemical weapons in Khartoum, Sudan—and were notorious failures. “The best post-facto intelligence we had was that bin Laden had left the training camp within an hour of the attack,” Clarke said. What went wrong? “I have reason to believe that a retired head of the I.S.I. was able to pass information along to Al Qaeda that an attack was coming,” he said.
Clarke also blames the military for enabling the Pakistanis to compromise the mission. “The Pentagon did what we asked them not to,” he said. “We asked them not to use surface ships. We asked them to use subs, so they wouldn’t signal the attack. But not only did they use surface ships—they brought additional ones in, because every captain wants to be able to say he fired the cruise missile.”
Asad Hayauddin denies that anyone in Pakistan even had enough knowledge to compromise the mission: “The U.S. didn’t tell us about it until forty-five minutes before the missiles hit.”
After the 1998 fiasco, Clinton secretly approved additional Presidential findings, authorizing the killing not just of bin Laden but also of several of his top lieutenants, and permitting any private planes or helicopters carrying them to be shot down. These directives led to nothing. “The C.I.A. was unable to carry out the mission,” Clarke said. “They hired local Afghans to do it for them again.” The agency also tried to train and equip a Pakistani commando force and some Uzbeks, too. “The point is, they were risk-averse,” he said. Tenet was “eager to kill bin Laden,” Clarke said. “He understood the threat. But the capability of the C.I.A.’s Directorate of Operations was far less than advertised. The Directorate of Operations would like people to think it’s a great James Bond operation, but for years it essentially assigned officers undercover as diplomats to attend cocktail parties. They collected information. But they were not a commando unit that could go into Afghanistan and kill bin Laden.”
“That’s bullshit,” a senior intelligence official said. “Risk-taking depends on political will allowing you to take the risk. It wasn’t until after September 11th that people wanted the gloves to come off.”
But Clarke said that in October, 2000, when the U.S.S. Cole was bombed, off the coast of Yemen, Clinton demanded better military options. The Department of Defense prepared a plan for a United States military operation so big that it was dismissed as politically untenable; meanwhile, General Hugh Shelton, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, concluded that, without better intelligence, a smaller-scale attack would be too risky. (Indeed, according to the Congressional Report on September 11th, Shelton said, “You can develop military operations until hell freezes over, but they are worthless without intelligence.”) The Navy tried stationing two submarines in the Indian Ocean, in the hope of being able to shoot missiles at bin Laden, but the time lag between the sighting of the target and the arrival of the missiles made it virtually impossible to pinpoint him accurately.
The first promise of an intelligence breakthrough came in the fall of 2000, when Clarke, and a few allies in the C.I.A. and the military, recognized the potential of the Predator, a nine-hundred-and-fifty-pound unmanned propeller plane being tested by General Johnny Jumper, the Air Force’s head of air combat at the time. It could supply live video surveillance—day or night, and through cloud cover. Clarke said that the plane, which was tested in Afghanistan, supplied “spectacular” pictures of suspected Al Qaeda terrorists, including one of a tall, white-robed man who closely resembled bin Laden and was surrounded by security guards as he crossed a city street to a mosque. At the C.I.A.’s Global Response Center, analysts who were used to receiving fuzzy satellite photographs and thirdhand reports were now able to watch as live video feeds captured the daily routines inside Al Qaeda training camps. They watched as men did physical exercises, fired their weapons, and practiced hand-to-hand combat. Two or three times that fall, intelligence analysts thought they might have spotted bin Laden himself. The man in question was unusually tall, like bin Laden, and drove the same model of truck that bin Laden preferred, the Toyota Land Cruiser. (The images weren’t clear enough, however, to allow analysts to discern facial features.) The C.I.A. rushed the surveillance tapes over to the White House, where the President, like everyone else, was stunned by their clarity. Later that fall, however, fierce winds in the Hindu Kush caused the Predator to crash. The accident led to recriminations inside the C.I.A. and the Air Force and quarrels about which part of the bureaucracy should pay for the damage.
By early 2001, Clarke and a handful of counter-terrorism specialists at the C.I.A. had learned of an Air Force plan to arm the Predator. The original plan called for three years of tests. Clarke and the others pushed so hard that the plane was ready in three months. In tests, the craft worked surprisingly well. In the summer of 2001, an armed Predator destroyed a model of bin Laden’s house which had been built in the Nevada desert. But Clarke said, “Every time we were ready to use it, the C.I.A. would change its mind. The real motivation within the C.I.A., I think, is that some senior people below Tenet were saying, ‘It’s fine to kill bin Laden, but we want to do it in a way that leaves no fingerprints. Otherwise, C.I.A. agents all over the world will be subject to assassination themselves.’ They also worried that something would go wrong—they’d blow up a convent and get blamed.”
On September 4, 2001, all sides agree, the issue reached a head, at a meeting of the Principal’s Committee of Bush’s national-security advisers, a Cabinet-level group that includes the Secretary of State, the Secretary of Defense, the director of the C.I.A., the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Attorney General, and the national-security adviser. Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz also attended that day. As Clarke, who was there, recalled, “Tenet said he opposed using the armed Predator, because it wasn’t the C.I.A.’s job to fly airplanes that shot missiles. The Air Force said it wasn’t their job to fly planes to collect intelligence. No one around the table seemed to have a can-do attitude. Everyone seemed to have an excuse.”
“There was a discussion,” the senior intelligence official confirmed. “The C.I.A. said, ‘Who’s got more experience flying aircraft that shoot missiles?’ But the Air Force liked planes with pilots.”
In looking back at the deadlock, Roger Cressey, Clarke’s deputy for counter-terrorism at the N.S.C., told me, “It sounds terrible, but we used to say to each other that some people didn’t get it—it was going to take body bags.”
A week later, in the worst terrorist attacks in history, which were carried out at bin Laden’s direction, nearly three thousand Americans were killed. In November, Clarke said, the United States finally deployed the armed Predator to help destroy what video surveillance showed to be a high-level Al Qaeda meeting outside Kabul. In many respects, the trial run was a brilliant success. The strike killed Al Qaeda’s military chief, Mohammad Atef, who left behind valuable documents. But evidently bin Laden was spared. A few weeks later, his voice was reportedly detected by agents on a satellite telephone near the Tora Bora cave complex. American B-52 bombers pounded the area. Afterward, Secretary of State Colin Powell declared, “We’ve destroyed Al Qaeda in Afghanistan.” But, once again, bin Laden evidently escaped.
One problem, Clarke suggested, was that the United States had waited too long before starting to bomb, and again had relied too heavily on “Afghans it had rented.” In any event, Tora Bora was the last place that bin Laden was definitively detected alive by the United States. The best estimates are that he either walked, rode a donkey, or took a bus across the border into Pakistan, sometime in the third week of December, 2001.
It has been nearly two years since the attacks on New York and Washington, and there is now a growing debate in academic circles about how crucial a target bin Laden remains—given that, if he is indeed still alive, he has been driven almost completely underground. According to Jessica Stern, of Harvard, Al Qaeda is “still the most significant threat to U.S. national security today.” But she told me that, because the organization has been decentralized by the relentless hunt for its leaders, capturing bin Laden “almost doesn’t matter.”
Gilles Kepel, a well-known French scholar of Islam, suggested that, without media exposure, bin Laden was “fading.” He added, “Terrorism requires the media, but he’s become invisible. It becomes less and less important to kill him, except as a trophy.”
Those involved in the day-to-day battle against terrorism, however, are not convinced that bin Laden has become insignificant. They note that an alleged Al Qaeda spokesman warned recently of plans for another attack the size of September 11th. The triple bombings in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, on May 12th, which killed thirty-four and wounded more than two hundred, have now been traced to Al Qaeda, and intelligence agencies in Europe and Africa, as well as in the United States, have detected increased recruitment by Al Qaeda in response to the war in Iraq. A recent U.N. report asserted that Al Qaeda and the Taliban have regrouped in Afghanistan and the tribal areas of Pakistan, and are showing “new boldness” in their attacks on international aid workers and coalition troops.
“Anyone who says that, at this point, getting bin Laden doesn’t matter is, purposefully or not, providing a completely self-serving judgment,” Rand Beers said. “It’s not true. There would be a huge favorable political fallout to finding him. It would reverberate all over the Islamic world. Maybe someday it will matter less, but right now it’s a continuing, nagging question, and a huge political embarrassment.”
© The New Yorker, 2003
