SEAL Target Geronimo: The Inside Story of the Mission to Kill Osama Bin Laden (19 page)

In Osama’s absence, a subordinate launched an ill-conceived attack on the nearby Russian base. It would have stirred a hornet’s nest. Osama returned to the Lion’s Den just as the attack was nearing fruition—he called it back and chastised the instigators.

The attack was canceled, but there was grumbling in the camp—his men wanted action and Osama was not secure enough as a military leader to tell them that the time was not yet right to bring on a general engagement.

The complaining got worse, with Zawahiri’s henchmen agitating for another move against the nearby Russians. Osama was goaded into action. On April 17, 1987, Osama put himself in the point element of one hundred fighters chosen to hit an Afghan Army outpost near the city of Khost. One can imagine Zawahiri waiting for the result.

The operation was the worst-kept secret of the Soviet-Afghan war. Zawahiri made certain that news of the attack was spread all over Peshawar. Bored Jihadis took it upon themselves to take buses up to the base camp at Jaji and insert themselves into the attacking column. One intrepid American-born Jihadi, Abu Rida, drove his own car from the city and found the gathering column by asking a mule driver where to find Osama bin Laden.

The staging area was a chaos of shouting troops, braying mules, crackling radios. Orders and counterorders were shouted down the valley. First, the cars carrying ammunition were delayed and the attacking troops were without rifle bullets. Rocket launchers and mortars had to be manhandled into positions to cover the attack—something that could have been done days in advance. No provision had been made for food or water, and some men wandered back to base camp for something to eat. The electrical devices and wires necessary to fire the artillery rockets got left back at base. A rider was sent galloping and hallowing back up the mountain to retrieve them.

Osama’s collegial leadership style did not seem to empower officers to give orders. There was a lot of standing around. By twos and threes, some fighters went back to their bunkers and went to sleep. No one seemed to have thought to stop them.

All of this was in broad daylight and in plain sight of the objective.

The Afghan army soldiers manning Osama’s target also slipped away, leaving one man behind with an obsolete Gorjunov machine gun. He was either very brave, or just wanted to see what would happen next. He stayed at his gun, held his fire, and waited.

Somewhere in the massing body of troops, Osama was sick—a thing that happened regularly before contact with the enemy. He did his best to buck up in front of his men, but his languid demeanor and sulky expression did not engender confidence.

Osama allowed one of his lieutenants to give a preattack oration. The pep talk was cut short when the sole remaining Afghan defender decided to open fire. He’d had a long time to aim.

A stream of tracers ripped into the milling throng, splattering one of the attackers cold dead, and seriously wounding two others. Belt after belt of 7.62 mm bullets spanged over the rocks, tearing long sparks in the gathering dusk. Mules heehawed and threw off their loads, horses bolted, and troops without orders flattened or scattered. No one called for covering fire, or ordered any maneuvers. Somewhere, Osama took cover behind a rock and froze. Fighters ran away, and their officers scuttled after them.

The single defender kept firing until the barrel of his weapon glowed red and then white hot. One man kept a hundred leaderless Jihadis pinned down until darkness fell. When he ran out of ammunition, the Afghani soldier sauntered back to rejoin his unit, already a mile back from the point of attack.

It was over. Disgusted, Osama’s men returned to the Lion’s Den. Some gathered their remaining equipment and left, never to return. It was a flat-out fiasco, and amazingly only one man paid for it with his life. Osama’s reputation as a military commander was at rock bottom.

The Afghan fighters who witnessed the debacle spread the word—one soldier had defeated the Arabs. Word got back to the Pakistani army, who began closing down Osama’s guesthouses in Peshawar.

It seemed that Osama bin Laden’s Excellent Adventure was over.

He returned to Peshawar where, quite predictably, Ayman Zawahiri advised him that it was necessary to show more resolve. What was necessary for morale was for Osama to lead another attack. This one would be better planned, and Osama would be assisted by one of Zawahiri’s trusted Egyptian commanders, Abu Ubaydah.

In May, Osama accompanied a nine-man reconnaissance against a Russian rifle squad. That he would again risk his life in direct combat says something either about Osama’s personal valor, or the hold that Zawahiri had over him.

It is unthinkable that anyone who cared about the emir’s safety would willingly put him in direct contact with a technologically superior enemy.

The nine men wobbled forward, made contact and exchanged fire. The Russians withdrew in an orderly fashion. For the Soviets, it was a routine firefight. Zawahiri’s pal Abu Ubaydah persuaded Osama that it had been a resounding success.

It was a success—if the intent was to show the Russians where to find the base.

The Soviets organized a battalion-sized block-and-sweep operation against the Lion’s Den. They assembled dozens of trucks and armored vehicles and closed in. Osama was in a well-covered and camouflaged position. The camp had been greatly improved over the past months, and hundred-foot-long tunnels had been bored into solid rock. The place could have withstood anything short of a nuclear attack, and the Russians were coming at them with a lackadaisical, slow-moving operation in the full light of day.

It would be a turkey shoot. Or so Bin Laden thought.

Abdullah Azzam, eager to get back into Osama’s good graces, later would spin a mythical version of the “battle,” claiming that the Russians attacked with more than ten thousand troops against a mere seventy determined Jihadis.

Osama dramatically yelled “Allah’u Akbar” and the three mortars at his command opened fire. They were aimed with enough precision to stop the Russians’ commanding officer and temporarily halt the attack.

The Russians dialed in their mortars. Osama, expecting the attack, ordered his troops underground, and accompanied a personal protection unit to a bunker on a nearby hill. He watched as a rippling barrage sent geysers of dirt up from the Lion’s Den. Osama’s men were safely underground, and he was on a different peak. He thought, as did his bodyguards, that he was safe from harm.

They had been spotted and the Russians shifted fire onto their position. He took cover and waited out the barrage. By nightfall the Russians lost interest. Osama and his men scuttled back to the deep tranquility of the bunkers in the Lion’s Den.

Day and night the Soviets rained 120 mm mortars on the camp. Napalm strikes set the tall pines ablaze. The ground was churned up and craters pockmarked the mountainside. Though no one was killed or even wounded, some of Osama’s more high-strung fighters began to show symptoms of shell shock. One ran out into the barrage waving a Koran over his head as the shells screamed in around him. He lived through the experience and would tell the tale frequently.

Osama had never in his life been under a sustained artillery barrage. His cover was solid—rock solid—but he feared that the Soviets might be maneuvering under the covering fire and take the camp by main force. Consulting his own safety, Osama ordered the Lion’s Den abandoned.

During a lull a van pulled up to take Osama and his men to the rear. As he drove away he rather dramatically ordered the rearguard to put the camp to the torch. A small detachment tossed the mortar tubes and base plates off a cliff and lobbed hand grenades into the mess hall.

When the evacuees reached the headquarters of Abdul Sayyaf, the regional Jihadi commander, he was furious. The cover at the Lion’s Den was truly bombproof—Sayaff was incensed that so strong and impregnable a position had been cowardly abandoned.

Osama and his men had been under a spectacular barrage but their cover had been solid. However loud it had been, it had killed or wounded no one. Sayaff immediately ordered Osama to reoccupy the position.

To make sure it happened, he sent a reliable platoon of Afghanis to chaperone the Arabs back to their position.

Bin Laden waited until the next morning to travel back to the Lion’s Den, arriving after the position was deemed safe. He showed up with a small bodyguard unit in the middle of the morning. It was Eid ul-Fitr, the feast day that marks the end of Ramadan. It would be a dismal celebration.

Following Osama’s orders the retreating fighters had spoiled the remaining supplies to prevent them from falling into the hands of the Russians. Now his men scrounged through the wreckage for something, anything, to eat. They found nothing but some lemons.

Upon returning to the camp, Osama seems to have undergone some sort of collapse. He gave no orders, and allowed Zawahiri’s military adviser Abu Ubaydah to again dispatch him to the forward edge of the battle area.

He probably had no idea people other than the Russians might want to see him dead. He and his small group made their way to the left flank of the camp. It was daylight, and Osama had incautiously advanced with his party toward a densely wooded hilltop. There he spread them out into a ragged skirmish line.

Osama had blundered to within a hundred yards of a Russian scout team. For some unknown reason Osama climbed a tree—something that, despite what one sees in John Wayne movies—is almost instantly fatal in combat. He was immediately taken under fire and a rocket-propelled grenade was fired at him. It exploded in a fireball of bark and pine needles, shaking the tree so badly that Osama nearly fell to his death.

Osama’s recollection of this contact with the enemy is bizarre but has about it the ring of truth. Lawrence Wright quotes him thus:

“It [the rocket] passed by me and exploded nearby, but I was not effected by it at all—in fact, by the grace of Allah, the exalted, it was as though I had nearly been covered by a handful of mud from the ground. I descended calmly and informed the brothers that the enemy was on the central axis and not on the left wing.”

Osama made it away from the tree as a mortar strike tore apart the hillside. He somehow found cover, likely in a predug firing position. The trees and vegetation around him were sufficiently dense and he was able to hide from the Russians as they determinedly advanced, sweeping the hill with automatic weapons fire and trying to flush out Osama and his men.

Back at the Lion’s Den, Abu Ubaydah showed his mettle. He led a counterattack that managed to flank the Russians and drive them back down the hillside. At one point during the engagement, Osama claims that he took a nap.

The story of Osama’s battlefield slumber was told by Azzam and others of proof of his steadfast resolve and manly courage. It is more likely that he lost consciousness due to the effects of Addison’s disease. Upon his death, a DNA sample would reveal that Osama suffered from this failure of the adrenal gland; it is a life-threatening condition that can cause sudden unconsciousness, especially under conditions of stress.

As the firefight sputtered on, Osama came to and had the calm presence of mind to remain hidden as the counterattack drove the Russians back. Abu Ubaydah and others would claim that thirty Russian Spetsnaz troopers were killed in the action.

Whatever the number, Osama was presented by his men with a snappy AKSU carbine they had collected from the battlefield. Called a
suchka
by the Russians, the AKSU was a signature weapon of the Spetsnaz and is much prized for its compact firepower. Until the end of his life, Osama would keep this weapon by his side, and pose with it whenever the opportunity arose.

After five humiliating forays into combat, Osama had a real battlefield victory to his credit. The win persuaded the Pakistanis to allow the Services Bureau to continue operations. The daylong firefight was polished in the retelling into an almost mythical triumph of good over evil.

His followers, already religious men, began to attribute their survival to the intervention of angels. Osama had nearly lost his base, his reputation, and his life. His insubordinate and unskilled mob of Arab fighters had redeemed themselves—they were no longer hapless, “military guests” but had acquired a reputation for improvisation and almost reckless courage under fire.

Osama had been vindicated as well. With this one victory he reestablished his reputation as a Jihadi, an Islamic warrior and the emir of the Afghan Arabs.

Osama bin Laden had become a legend.

THE EMIR

OSAMA RECOUPED FROM BATTLE
in the company of his four wives and a growing brood of children—now numbering more than ten. A man who was willing to kill boys and girls on three continents was loving and gentle to his own children. In August 1988, in Peshawar, Abdullah Azzam chaired a meeting called to discuss the future of Jihad. Also in attendance were several of Zawahiri’s henchmen, including Abu Ubaydah. Bin Laden sat at the head of the table—he was the real power in the room.

Relations between Osama and Azzam were still cordial, but cooling rapidly. Osama wanted to form a three-hundred-man force selected from non-Afghan volunteers. He proposed to develop this new unit around a command element of battle-tested leaders, and the most promising recruits now graduating from training.

Though he had asked the conference to vote on his proposal, Osama had already created Al Qaeda on May 17—designating a group of approximately a dozen men to form a training cadre and nucleus around which he could grow the new organization. The purpose of the conference was to get the project out into the open.

This was the first time most of the assembled Jihadis had heard the words “
Al Qaeda
.” Abdul Azzam had long suspected that Bin Laden was going to keep a “force in being” after the conclusion of the Afghan war; now he had it spelled out for him.

The founding documents of Al Qaeda divided the “military work” to be undertaken in two parts: operations of “limited” and “open” duration. “Limited duration” meant continuing Arab participation in the Afghanistan resistance. These operations would be terminated when the Russians pulled out. Ominously, military work of “open duration” implied that at the conclusion of hostilities with the Soviets, this new organization would wage Jihad against targets
outside
Afghanistan.