The Americans became sure their quarry was there. A Lebanese-born former Marine with the CIA group, who had fluent Arabic and knew bin Laden’s voice from tapes and intercepts, made a discovery on the morning of December 5. In the wreckage of a bombed encampment, he found a working radio clutched in the hand of a dead fighter. It was tuned to the al Qaeda frequency and soon, amidst the to-and-fro between harried men calling for water and supplies, he heard the familiar voice urging his followers to fight on.
On the 7th, a source who had been in among the enemy reported having encountered an “extremely tall” Arab—bin Laden was between six foot four and six foot six—near some large cave entrances. Berntsen called for the dropping of a BLU-82, the largest nonnuclear bomb in the U.S. arsenal, an eight-ton weapon the size of a Volkswagen Beetle. Used earlier to break Taliban lines on the plains, its primary target now was to be a single man in the mountains.
In the early morning of the 9th, CIA and Delta Force operatives watched through binoculars as an MC-130 airplane delivered the BLU-82. B-52s followed minutes later, dropping bombs guided by GPS. A desperate fighter was soon heard on a radio intercept saying, “Cave too hot. Can’t reach others.” There were calls for the “truck to move wounded.” Another fighter, captured later, would speak of a “hideous” explosion that had vaporized men even deep inside the caves.
Decimated but not yet finally broken, the defenders held out a few days longer. Intercepts picked up an al Qaeda commander giving movement orders, ordering up land mines, exhorting his men to “victory or death.” There was talk of “Father” moving to a different tunnel. Then, on the afternoon of December 13, Delta Force’s Major Fury and his men listened to a voice they were sure was that of bin Laden. “His Arabic prose sounded beautiful, soothing, and peaceful,” Fury recalled. “I paraphrase him … ‘Our prayers have not been answered. Times are dire.… Things might have been different.… I’m sorry for getting you into this battle. If you can no longer resist, you may surrender with my blessing.’ ”
According to the ex-Marine expert at recognizing the Saudi’s voice, bin Laden then gathered his men around him in prayer. There was the sound of mules, used for transport in the high mountains, and people moving around. Then silence.
BY THE TIME the bombing and the shooting stopped, Tora Bora was devastated, a wasteland of shattered rocks and broken trees. The detritus of war: spent ammunition, bloody bandages, torn fragments of documents in Arabic script—and not a trace of Osama bin Laden.
Had he died in the onslaught from the air? Or, in Fury’s words, had a bomb “punched his ticket to Paradise”? Troops flown in months later by helicopter found the cave entrances impenetrably blocked by tons of rubble. Exhumations at a fighters’ graveyard turned up nothing that was identifiable with bin Laden.
Long since convinced that their quarry escaped, those who risked their lives to kill him cast bitter blame on those from whom they had taken their orders. The Delta Force operatives, Fury said, had not been allowed to engage in “real war fighting.” Had they been, he thought, things could have turned out differently. Being held back had been like “working in an invisible cage.”
The CIA’s Gary Berntsen had in vain requested a force of eight hundred U.S. troops—to block the “back door,” the mountain escape route to Pakistan. “We need Rangers [Special Operations combat troops] now!” he had begged with increasing urgency. “The opportunity to get bin Laden and his men is slipping away!” He had been rebuffed every time.
Why were the troops refused, and who was responsible for the refusal? Military decisions were transmitted by the generals, directly to Berntsen by the officer commanding Joint Special Operations Command, Major General Dell Dailey, who in turn answered to General Tommy Franks, commander-in-chief at U.S. Central Command, the man running the Afghanistan operation.
“We have not said,” Franks remarked at a press briefing just before the fighting at Tora Bora, “that Osama bin Laden is a target of this effort.” It was a strange comment, even taking into account security considerations, given what Fury and Berntsen have said of the explicit orders they had been given. In a 2004 memoir, Franks skirted any discussion of the decision not to use U.S. troops to trap bin Laden. As recently as 2009, the general said he had doubted whether bin Laden was even at Tora Bora. Notwithstanding the certainty expressed by the CIA and Delta Force commanders on the spot, he claimed the intelligence had been “conflicting.”
Delta Force’s Major Fury placed responsibility elsewhere. “The generals,” he said, “were not operating alone. Civilian political figures were also at the control panel.… I was not in those air-conditioned rooms with leather chairs when they came up with some of the strangest decisions I have ever encountered.… At times, we were micro-managed by higher-ups unknown, even to the point of being ordered to send the exact grid coordinates of our teams back to various folks in Washington.”
The two civilian higher-ups involved with Franks in the decision making were Defense Secretary Rumsfeld and the man ultimately responsible as commander-in-chief, President Bush. Bush, who six days after 9/11 had indicated that he wanted bin Laden “dead or alive.”
The President “never took his eye off the ball when it came to bin Laden,” according to General Franks. Through October and into November, Bush had appeared still keen to “get” bin Laden. In late November, at a CIA briefing, he was told Tora Bora had become the focus, that Afghan forces were inadequate to do the job, that U.S. troops were required. “We’re going to lose our prey if we’re not careful,” the CIA briefer warned. The President seemed surprised. In Afghanistan in early December, shortly before the massive BLU-82 bomb was unleashed on Tora Bora, those heading the fight in the field were told that POTUS had been personally “asking for details.”
According to CIA sources, Bush would reportedly remain “obsessed” with the hunt for bin Laden even months after Tora Bora. In public, though, far from talking of getting him dead or alive, he seemed to downgrade his importance. “Terror’s bigger than one person,” the President said in March 2002. “He’s a person who has been marginalized.… I don’t know where he is. Nor, you know, I just don’t spend that much time on him really, to be honest with you.… I truly am not that concerned about him.”
THE RECORD, PERHAPS, explains the sea change in the priority given to the hunt for Osama bin Laden. On November 21, a couple of weeks before the final battles in the mountains and bin Laden’s disappearance, the President had taken Rumsfeld aside for a conversation that he insisted must remain secret. He wanted a war plan for Iraq, and insisted that General Franks get working on it immediately.
Franks, already up to his eyes dealing with the conflict in Afghanistan, could barely believe what he was hearing. “Goddamn!” he exclaimed to a fellow general. “What the fuck are they talking about?” From then on, not least in early December, when there were repeated appeals for U.S. troops to block bin Laden’s escape route, the general was constantly plagued with requests for plans as to how to attack Iraq. At a crucial stage of the Tora Bora episode, Bush’s primary focus had begun to shift—and a shift in the commander-in-chief’s focus meant distracting the attention of his overworked general from developments in Afghanistan.
FOR A LONG TIME, for almost three years, Osama bin Laden remained neither dead nor a prisoner—the options the President of the United States had initially contemplated—but an elusive, at times illusory, ghost.
A story in the Pakistan Observer, published on December 25, quoted a Taliban official as saying the fugitive had died “a natural and quiet death” of “serious complications in the lungs.” He had supposedly been buried with military honors, according to his faith, in an unmarked grave. The story was clearly inaccurate—and perhaps a diversionary tactic, given that he in fact survived. A story that bin Laden made his escape after suffering a wound to the shoulder seems entirely possible.
Reports that became available in 2011, meanwhile, offer two versions of his escape. One holds that he headed
north, to a remote part of Afghanistan, and remained there for months. The other suggests that, just as the CIA’s man at Tora Bora had feared he would, he escaped over the snow-covered passes to Pakistan with the assistance of a Pakistani militant commander.
While the force guarding the border was commanded by a Pakistan army general, most of the troops involved were drawn from tribes in the region who answered to tribal chiefs, most of whom bin Laden had cultivated and who to one degree or another approved his cause.
Good evidence that he had survived came gradually: a handwritten letter, scanned and posted on islamonline.net in August 2002; weeks later, another letter; an audiotape, followed by two others in 2003—one of them, triumphal in tone, describing how “the forces of faith” had beaten back “the evil forces of materialism” at Tora Bora; in October 2003 a videotape urging on the fighters resisting the American occupation of Iraq, encouraging the people of Palestine to continue their struggle; in 2004 three further audiotapes and—on October 29, days before the U.S. presidential election—a videotape addressed to the American people.
Bin Laden wished to tell Americans, he said, how “to avoid another Manhattan.” September 11 had been a response to the United States’ “great injustices”—especially in Iraq and Israel. He invoked God’s blessing on “the nineteen” [there had been nineteen hijackers on 9/11], and openly admitted his personal involvement. “We agreed with the general commander Mohamed Atta, may God bless his soul, to carry out all operations within twenty minutes, before Bush and his administration could be aware of them.”
Until he saw that videotape, the former Delta Force commander at Tora Bora had not been sure what to think. Some had believed the previous bin Laden tapes authentic. Some had suspected they were fakes. Fury had preferred to think them fakes, until he saw the fall 2004 appearance.
“I knew immediately that the tape was the real thing. His posture, the voice, his thin body, and the aged beard that seemed frosted of snow were unmistakeable. Unfortunately, the man was still alive.”
Not long before, far off in Afghanistan, a local militiaman named Faqir Shah had accompanied reporter Tim McGirk back to Tora Bora. “This was where Osama lived,” Shah said as they walked the shattered battlefield. “We fought al Qaeda here for two weeks in the snow.… See that hole? An American soldier tossed a piece of concrete in there from the World Trade Center, because he thought al Qaeda was all finished.…
“I didn’t think so.”
PART IV
PLOTTERS
SEVENTEEN
TWO DECADES EARLIER, WHEN THE TWIN TOWERS OF THE WORLD Trade Center had been a relatively new phenomenon—years before the earliest official concern that they would make a prime target for terrorists—an improbably tall young Saudi, still in his early twenties, had flown into the United States with his pregnant wife and two infant children. His visit, in 1979, passed without notice, for he was neither famous nor infamous.
Osama bin Laden’s activity in America appeared entirely peaceful. The fact that he came at all was not firmly established until 2009, when his wife Najwa—nine babies later and separated from her husband by force of circumstance—published a memoir. She recalled having thought that Americans in general were “gentle and nice … easy to deal with.… My husband and I did not hate America, yet we did not love it.”
An incident on the final day of their stay, as the family sat in an airport departure lounge, showed Najwa how little some Americans knew of other cultures. “I saw an American man gawking at me … jaw dropped open in surprise, curious eyes growing as large as bugs popping from his skull.… I knew without asking that his unwelcome attention had been snagged by my black Saudi costume … face veil, head scarf, and abaya.… That man gave us a good laugh.”
Bin Laden had been busy during the trip, but Najwa was the good Arab wife. “Since my husband’s business was not my business, I did not ask questions.” She asked no questions when bin Laden took off for Los Angeles for a week to talk with unknown men. Nor did she press for details when he said he was meeting—elsewhere—with “a man by the name of Abdullah Azzam.”
By mentioning Azzam, bin Laden had provided a first pointer to the direction his life was going to take. Azzam lectured and led prayers in the mosque at King Abdul Aziz University in the Saudi city of Jeddah, where bin Laden was a third-year student of economics and management. Often described as a “cleric” or “scholar,” Azzam was more than that. A Palestinian, whose village had been overrun by the Israelis in the Six Day War, he was on his way to becoming the “Emir of Jihad.”
“Jihad” is a religious duty for Muslims. It can be interpreted in several ways—its basic sense is “struggle,” or “striving”—but what Azzam meant by it was very clear. He preached the need for jihad to liberate Muslim lands from foreign occupation. “Humanity,” he was to say, “is being ruled by Jews and Christians. The Americans, the British, and others. And behind them, the fingers of world Jewry.”
In the late 1970s Azzam, an imposing figure and a fine speaker, was raging especially about Egyptian president Anwar al-Sadat’s peacemaking visit to Israeli-occupied Jerusalem, a visit that millions in the Middle East saw not as statesmanship but betrayal.
With Azzam at Abdul Aziz University was Mohammed Qutb, brother of a writer and thinker who in death, following his execution in Egypt, became the guiding light of Islamic extremism. Sayid Qutb had been the leading voice of the Muslim Brotherhood, deplored the corruption of secular regimes in the Middle East, and advocated using violence to remove them. He excoriated Western society as he had seen it in the United States and poured verbal vitriol on the Jews and Zionism. Osama bin Laden read Sayid Qutb, and attended his brother’s lectures.
Azzam and Qutb were free to spread their message at will in the Saudi Arabia of the 1970s, and what they said about Israel accorded perfectly with Saudi doctrine. For all his anti-Zionist speechifying, moreover, the United States welcomed Azzam. From 1979, the year the young bin Laden met with him in the States, he was perceived as an ally in a common cause, the struggle to expel Soviet forces from Afghanistan. For both Saudi intelligence—the GID—and the CIA, Azzam was useful, a man to manipulate.
An irony, then, that—after 9/11—Azzam’s name would be joined to that of Osama bin Laden. The dedication to a so-called Encyclopedia of Jihad, a sort of how-to manual for terrorists in eleven volumes, would read: “To our much loved brother Abu Abdullah Osama bin Laden, who shared in the jihad of Sheikh Abdullah Azzam … Who has committed himself every day to jihad.”
Azzam, bin Laden himself would say, was “a man worth a nation.” For he, with bin Laden and a few comrades, was to found a movement that would shake the Western world and change history: al Qaeda.
In 1979, when the preacher from Palestine and the Saudi economics student got together in Indiana, the seeds were being sown. For the student, then and for the rest of his life, the driving force was always religion.
“GOD ALMIGHTY was gracious enough for me to be born to Muslim parents in the Arabian Peninsula in al-Malazz neighborhood, in al-Riyadh, in 1377 hegira …”
Bin Laden, perorating—he was always long-winded—on his early life and parentage. The year of his birth, 1377 hegira, is the Muslim calendar’s rendering of the year most of the world refers to as 1957. The actual birthday appears to have been February 15.
Nineteen fifty-seven was the year that President Dwight Eisenhower took office for a second term, and that a rebel named Fidel Castro—previously rumored to have been killed—surfaced to fight on against the Cuban government. The nations of Western Europe began forming a unified economic bloc. The Soviet Union launched the Sputnik satellite into orbit and began catching up with U.S. missile technology.
The Saudi newborn’s full name was Osama bin Mohammed bin Awad bin Aboud bin Laden al-Qatani—“bin” meaning “son of.” He would one day tell his own children that “al-Qatani,” which denotes those who trace their ancestry to Yemen, was their true family name. “Osama” means ?
??Lion,” apt for a man who came to see himself as a warrior.
“I was named,” bin Laden himself said, “after one of the venerable Companions of the Prophet, Osama bin-Zeid … He was someone whom the Prophet, God’s peace and blessings be upon him, has loved and has loved his father before him.” That Osama was an Islamic hero, a commander said to have defeated a Roman army.
“My father was born in Hadramaut,” bin Laden said in 1999. “He went to work in Hejaz at an early age, more than seventy years ago. Then God blessed him and bestowed on him an honor that no other contractor has known. He built the holy Mecca mosque where the holy Ka’bah is located and at the same time, because of God’s blessings to him, he built the Holy Mosque in Medina.… [Then] the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem.… It is not a secret that he was one of the founders of the infrastructure of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.”
The father, Mohamed bin Laden, had been a legend in his time. The Hadramaut was a sparsely populated region of what is now Yemen, which borders on Saudi Arabia, and the young Mohamed made his way the thousand miles to Jeddah penniless and hungry. He started out portering for pilgrims, moved on to lowly work in the construction trade, worked incessantly, thrived as a manager, and eventually—though almost illiterate, he had a phenomenal memory for facts and figures—rose to become a fabulously wealthy construction magnate.
The key to the rise of bin Laden Sr. was the patronage of the all-powerful Saudi elite, the rulers of a land that emerged from obscurity to gilded affluence in the space of a few decades. He hit his prime just as American money for Saudi oil began to bring the royal princes unparalleled riches. From the reign of King Abdul Aziz in the 1930s to that of King Faisal in the 1960s, he built palaces, roads across the desert, reservoirs, power stations. He catered to every royal whim, from providing the ramp that delivered the wheelchair-bound Abdul Aziz to his throne room to—a measure of his wealth—bailing out Faisal when the royal coffers ran dry for a while.