Ghost Wars (56 page)

The document did not specifically request bin Laden’s expulsion from Sudan, but that idea surfaced in the discussions with Erwa and others. Bin Laden seemed to pick up on the talks. For the first time he granted an interview to an American journalist at his compound in Khartoum. “People are supposed to be innocent until proved guilty,” bin Laden pleaded. “Well, not the Afghan fighters. They are the ‘terrorists of the world.’ But pushing them against the wall will do nothing except increase the terrorism.”
20

Years later the question of whether Sudan formally offered to turn bin Laden over to the United States became a subject of dispute. Sudan’s government has said it did make such an offer. American officials say it did not. “We told the Americans we would be willing to hand him over if they had a legal case,” according to a Sudanese official. “We said, ‘If you have a legal case, you can take him.’ ” But several of the most senior American officials involved said they had never received such a message. Investigators with the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks later concluded there was no “reliable evidence” to support Sudanese claims of such an offer.
21

At the White House, counterterrorism aides held a hypothetical discussion about whether the United States had a legal basis to take bin Laden into custody. Would the Justice Department indict him? Was there evidence to support a trial? At the meeting, a Justice representative said there was no way to hold bin Laden in the United States because there was no indictment, according to Sandy Berger, then deputy national security adviser. Berger, for his part, knew of no intelligence at the time showing that bin Laden had committed any crime against Americans.
22

That was all the insight the White House and the CIA could obtain from Justice. Privately, federal prosecutors were considering a grand jury investigation of bin Laden’s support for terrorism, a probe that could eventually produce an indictment. American law prohibited Justice prosecutors or the FBI agents who worked with them from telling anyone else in government about this investigation, however. They kept their evidence strictly secret.
23

Saudi Arabia seemed the most logical place to send bin Laden if it was possible to detain him. Bin Laden had been expelled from the kingdom for antigovernment agitation. There was also a chance that another Arab country, under assault from violent Islamists who took money from bin Laden, might be willing to accept him for trial. Through CIA channels the United States separately asked Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Jordan whether they would accept bin Laden into custody. Nothing came of it. Overall the White House strategy about bin Laden at the time was “to keep him moving,” Lake remembered. American officials told Sudan that Saudi Arabia would not accept bin Laden for trial. The Saudis did not explain themselves, but it seemed clear to Clinton’s national security team that the royal family feared that if they executed or imprisoned bin Laden, they would provoke a backlash against the government. The Saudis “were afraid it was too much of a hot potato, and I understand where they were,” Clinton recalled. “We couldn’t indict him then because he hadn’t killed anybody in America. He hadn’t done anything to us.” As for Egypt and Jordan, if Saudi intelligence and the Saudi royal family were unwilling to accept the political risks of incarcerating bin Laden, why should they?
24

Nonetheless, Sudan’s government opened discussions with Saudi Arabia about expelling bin Laden back to the kingdom, according to senior officials on both sides. Around the time of General Erwa’s secret visit to Washington, the president of Sudan, Omar al-Bashir, traveled to Saudi Arabia for the annual
hajj
pilgrimage to the holy sites at Mecca. He met there with Saudi Arabia’s de facto ruler, Crown Prince Abdullah. Accounts of this meeting differ. According to Saudi intelligence chief Prince Turki al-Faisal, Abdullah told Bashir that Saudi Arabia would be “happy” to take bin Laden into custody. But he quoted Bashir as insisting that bin Laden “must not face prosecution” in Saudi Arabia. “Nobody is above the law in the kingdom,” Abdullah replied, according to Turki. By his account Saudi Arabia refused to accept bin Laden only because of the conditional terms proposed by Sudan.
25

A Sudanese official recalled the discussion differently. By his account Abdullah and Prince Turki both announced that Saudi Arabia was not interested in accepting bin Laden for trial. Bashir did ask Abdullah during the Mecca meeting to pardon bin Laden for his provocative political writings. But Sudan never insisted on a Saudi promise to forgo prosecution, according to this account. Bashir recalled that in multiple conversations with Saudi officials about bin Laden, the Saudis “never mentioned that they accused Osama bin Laden of anything. The only thing they asked us was to just send him away.” The Saudi attitude at Mecca, according to the Sudanese official, was “He is no more a Saudi citizen. We don’t care where he goes, but if he stays [in Sudan], he may be a nuisance in our relations.”
26
The Saudis did make clear that bin Laden’s “presence in Sudan was considered an obstacle to the development of relations,” said the Sudan cabinet minister Sharaf al-Din Banaqa, who was involved in the talks.
27

It is difficult to know which account to credit. Either way, the long personal ties between bin Laden and Saudi intelligence may also have been a factor in the Saudi decision. Ahmed Badeeb, Prince Turki’s chief of staff, recalled being torn over bin Laden’s fate when the possibility of his expulsion from Sudan first arose. One of bin Laden’s brothers told Badeeb, “Osama is no longer the Osama that you knew.” This pained Badeeb: “I loved Osama and considered him a good citizen of Saudi Arabia.”
28

For their part White House counterterrorism officials regarded Sudan’s offer to turn bin Laden over to Saudi Arabia as disingenuous. Sudan knew Saudi Arabia was unlikely to accept bin Laden for trial, the White House officials believed. They interpreted Sudan’s offer as a safe way to curry favor in Washington since Khartoum knew it would never be called upon to act.
29

By all accounts, Saudi Arabia had a serious chance early in 1996 to explore taking bin Laden into custody. Crown Prince Abdullah declined to press. The Saudi royal family regarded bin Laden as an irritation, but it would not confront him.

Sudan did not act promptly on the list of demands presented in March by the CIA. President Bashir concluded that he could never win back Washington’s confidence—or American investment dollars—as long as bin Laden maintained his headquarters in Khartoum. Through an intermediary, Bashir told bin Laden to move out. Bin Laden replied, according to a Sudanese official involved in the exchange, “If you think it will be good for you, I will leave. But let me tell you one thing: If I stay or if I go, the Americans will not leave you alone.”
30
Osama bin Laden now had every reason to believe that the United States was his primary persecutor. His political theology identified many enemies, but it was America that forced him into flight.

Whether bin Laden explored alternatives to exile in Afghanistan is not known. Mohammed al-Massari, a prominent Saudi dissident, recalled that he had often warned bin Laden that “Sudan is not a good place to stay. One day they will sell you to the Saudis.” He urged bin Laden to find an alternative base. At some stage that spring bin Laden did contact Afghans in Jalalabad whom he had known during the anti-Soviet jihad. “They said, ‘You are most welcome,’ ” according to a Sudanese official. “He was like a holy man to them.” Sudan’s government leased an Ariana Afghan jet and arranged to aid bin Laden’s departure. It required two flights back and forth to move bin Laden, his three wives, his children, his furniture, and his followers to Jalalabad, according to the Sudanese official.
31

According to Prince Turki and his chief of staff, Ahmed Badeeb, bin Laden arranged with the small Persian Gulf state of Qatar to land for refueling. Qatar, a tiny country on Saudi Arabia’s flank that was perennially at odds with its larger neighbor, was in the midst of a succession crisis in its royal family. Radical Islamists held office in its ministry for religious affairs. Bin Laden chose Qatar because it “had good relations with both Sudan and Yemen,” according to Badeeb, and because it was “safer than any other country” between Sudan and Afghanistan. American investigators later reported that according to Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, bin Laden refueled not in Qatar, but in nearby United Arab Emirates. In any event, his tank replenished, bin Laden lifted off a few hours later for Afghanistan.
32

Sudan’s government informed Carney and the White House of bin Laden’s departure only after he was gone. The CIA station in Islamabad did not monitor bin Laden’s arrival at Jalalabad’s airport because it had no active sources in the area.
33

The Americans were the “main enemy” of Muslims worldwide, an angry bin Laden told a British journalist who visited him in an eastern Afghan mountain camp weeks after his arrival in Jalalabad. Saudi Arabian authorities were only “secondary enemies,” he declared. As bin Laden saw it, the world had now reached “the beginning of war between Muslims and the United States.”
34

THE UNCHALLENGED FLIGHT from Sudan was an inauspicious beginning of the CIA’s experimental bin Laden station and the White House’s beefed-up counterterrorism office. In those first months of 1996 it got worse.

Ever since Ramzi Yousef’s arrest early in 1995 and the discovery of evidence about his plot to blow up American planes over the Pacific Ocean, the CIA and the FBI had been on the lookout for Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. After Yousef’s arrest investigators discovered a $660 financial wire transfer sent by Mohammed from Qatar to New York to aid the World Trade Center bombers. When the CIA received the wire record and looked into it, officers determined that Mohammed was Yousef’s uncle and had married a sister of Yousef’s wife. Working from clues discovered among Yousef’s possessions, investigators traced his movements. The CIA received evidence that Mohammed was hiding in Qatar. The agency eventually tracked him to Qatar’s water department where he was employed as a mechanical engineer. The White House asked the CIA if it could quickly arrest Mohammed and fly him to the United States. The CIA reported that it did not have the officers or agents in Qatar to carry out such an operation. The Qatari minister of religious endowments, Sheikh Abdullah bin Khalid al-Tahni, was known to harbor Islamists loyal to bin Laden. If they asked the Qatar government for help in seizing bin Laden, it was likely that Mohammed would be alerted. The White House then turned to the Pentagon to plan a Special Forces raid to take Mohammed. The Pentagon came back with a large-scale plan that involved flying aircraft first into Bahrain and then launched a smaller attack force via helicopters for Qatar.Deputy National Security Adviser Sandy Berger chaired a White House meeting to consider this option. One problem with the Pentagon plan was that Bahrain and Qatar had been feuding recently over disputed islands in the Persian Gulf.What if Qatar interpreted the helicopters as an attack force arriving from Bahrain? While seeking to arrest a single terrorist clandestinely, the United States might inadvertently start a war. The Justice Department cited legal problems with the Pentagon plan. The White House noted that it was negotiating an important air force basing agreement with Qatar. In the end the plan was discarded. Investigators awaited a sealed indictment against Mohammed. It was handed down in January 1996. The FBI moved to arrest him through regular diplomatic channels. Qatar’s government waffled; Mohammed escaped. “I have received disturbing information suggesting that Mohammed has again escaped the surveillance of your Security Services and that he appears to be aware of FBI interest in him,” an angry Louis Freeh, the FBI director, wrote to Qatar’s foreign minister. Nor did the CIA have a clear understanding of Mohammed’s growing affinity for bin Laden’s global war: The CIA’s Counterterrorist Center did not assign his case to its new bin Laden unit, but chased him separately as a freelance extremist.
35

It was the start of a pattern that would persist for several years as the Clinton administration’s secret war against bin Laden and his Islamist network deepened. They had few reliable allies in the Middle East and Central Asia. The CIA’s paramilitary forces were small and sometimes less than nimble. The Pentagon’s planners thought in terms of large attack operations. Tactical intelligence about the enemy was patchy, fleeting.

If their campaign against bin Laden was to be waged this way, they would have to learn to thread a very small needle.

AT THE TIME OF bin Laden’s arrival, Jalalabad was controlled, if not governed, by a regional
shura
of eastern Pashtun tribal leaders and former anti-Soviet guerrilla commanders. Many of them were involved in lucrative smuggling and trade rackets across the Pakistan border. They had resisted overtures to join the Taliban but had also kept their distance from Hekmatyar and Massoud. Their most prominent leader was Haji Qadir, sometimes referred to as the mayor of Jalalabad. Their most prominent patron from the anti-Soviet era was Younis Khalis, now an octogenarian who took teenage wives. Khalis and other Jalalabad
shura
leaders maintained contacts with Pakistani intelligence.
36

Bin Laden certainly knew some of the Jalalabad group from the 1980s and early 1990s, and he had kept in touch during his years in Sudan. He may also have remained in touch with ISI. It is notable that bin Laden did not fly into Afghan territory controlled by the Taliban. Some American analysts later reported that bin Laden had sent money to the Taliban even prior to his return to Afghanistan.
37
Yet bin Laden apparently did not have a comfortable enough relationship with the Taliban’s isolated, severe,mysterious leadership group to place himself and his family under their control.