SEAL Target Geronimo: The Inside Story of the Mission to Kill Osama Bin Laden (25 page)

In 2006, during a firefight in Ramadi, Iraq, Navy SEAL Michael A. Monsoor threw himself on a hand grenade that had been lobbed into his position, giving his life to save two other SEALs who had taken cover with him. Three years after Monsoor gave his life to save the lives of others, Major General Cleveland and the Obama administration carried out a determined prosecution of his teammates for “abusing a prisoner.”

For his valor, Petty Officer Michael Mansoor was posthumously awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor, becoming the second Navy SEAL to receive his nation’s highest decoration since 9/11. The medal was handed to his mother and father in a White House ceremony.

No wonder SEALs have an aversion to politicians.

As Scott Kerr gathered together the leaders of Red Squadron to plan the mission, he had good reason to move forward carefully. Because the bad thing about politicians is that some of them wear uniforms.

THE MAN WITHOUT A COUNTRY

HOW DID THE U.S. FIND OSAMA BIN LADEN?
After ten years of flawless tradecraft, Al Qaeda’s internal communication system was laid open to American intelligence. CIA interrogators at Guantánamo identified Abu Ahmed al Kuwaiti as the major courier used by Ayman Zawahiri and Osama bin Laden. It is certain that Zawahiri read about this U.S. deduction in books published about Al Qaeda. He knew that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was in custody at Guantánamo and Zawahiri knew also that he had talked. CIA interrogators had pried from Khalid the name of the courier that he and Osama depended upon for communication. Despite knowing that this operative was blown, Zawahiri used Abu Ahmed al Kuwaiti to make repeated trips to Bin Laden’s compound. Based on this accumulation of information, one can draw the conclusion that it was Ayman Zawahiri who led the United States to Osama bin Laden’s hiding place, in Abbottabad, Pakistan, accomplishing this through a complex and persistent series of lapses in security. Some of these slips were subtle, and some of them were so obvious that they were laughable.

After splitting off from Osama bin Laden’s bodyguard as they left Tora Bora, Ayman Zawahiri headed west, moving in darkness to flank the oncoming Americans. The Northern Alliance troops closing in on Tora Bora were more interested in looting Al Qaeda’s abandoned tunnels than with capturing the dazed and bloody fighters that Osama had left behind.

Zawahiri made it to Gardez, Afghanistan, where his daughters had been killed by a drone strike. He paid his respects, then managed to link up with Taliban units and go into hiding.

Zawahiri is an intelligent, even cunning man. He knew better than to use electronic means of communication to try to get in touch with Bin Laden. He kept a low profile, and he kept moving. A Predator killed Abu Atef, Zawahiri’s protégé and operations chief of Al Qaeda. Everywhere Zawahiri traveled destruction followed. The net was closing around him.

Documents recovered at Bin Laden’s compound include a series of letters written by Zawahiri about this time to Osama, trying to bridge an obvious cooling of affection. In the letters, Zawahiri asked for money and sought to explain why his group had separated at Tora Bora. These letters did not state where Zawahiri was hiding, and it is not known when they finally managed to reach Bin Laden. It’s likely that runners brought these handwritten letters to Osama in Parachinar, in the tribal territories of Pakistan sometime in early 2002.

After the debacle at Tora Bora, Zawahiri needed to do something to prove that Al Qaeda was still in business, even though its two emirs were in hiding. U.S. drone strikes and special operations took out dozens of Al Qaeda leaders, including Osama’s brother-in-law, Al Qaeda’s chief financial officer, and several senior operational planners.

During this period Zawahiri moved frequently. He had good reason to be wary. The United States had posted a $25 million reward for Zawahiri’s capture. Though much is made of Pashtun hospitality, Ayman Zawahiri did not trust his life to the quaint cultural obligations of a tribal people. He soon fled into Pakistan, and through connections with the political party Jamaat-e-Islami, he, too, came under the protection of the Pakistani intelligence service, the ISI.

When 9/11 succeeded, Zawahiri was eclipsed in the ranks of Al Qaeda’s leadership by Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the man who plotted the first World Trade Center bombings and the use of airliners as a weapon of war. After the U.S. invaded Iraq and Afghanistan, Zawahiri’s jealousy grew as Khalid Sheikh Mohammed carried out Bin Laden’s orders for a continued series of worldwide attacks.

Zawahiri and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed knew and disliked each other immensely. Zawahiri considered Khalid to be a Muslim in name only. The pious doctor prayed five times a day and cultivated a callus on his forehead from rubbing himself on his prayer rug. Khalid, on the other hand, liked to live large. The mastermind of the 9/11 attacks was a first-class flier who enjoyed spending time in Manila’s seedy nightclubs, liked to drink whiskey, and had lately developed the habit of visiting Karachi’s new Kentucky Fried Chicken outlets and wolfing down drumsticks by the bucketful.

For his part, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed considered Zawahiri to be a duplicitous, armchair Jihadi who rarely put himself in danger, but was always there to wheedle money out of Osama. Clearly, Jihad was not big enough for the two of them.

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was captured after a midlevel Al Qaeda terrorist walked into the American embassy in Islamabad, Pakistan. The CIA does not have a very good record with walk-in spies. During the Cold War, many a Soviet defector found himself tossed out on his ear after trying to offer his services to the United States. More than a few were arrested outside American embassies and summarily executed. In order to be taken seriously, a volunteer intelligence source has to provide actionable intelligence—something that is either so important or so obviously actionable that he is taken seriously.

After going through the usual hoops at the embassy, this Al Qaeda walk-in was fobbed off with a cell phone and told to call if he ever had anything really important to offer. Two nights later, he called back from the bathroom of a Karachi restaurant and told the CIA, “I’m having dinner with Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.”

At 2:00 a.m. on March 2, 2003, CIA officers watched as Pakistani police commandos burst into a house in a comfortable Karachi suburb. They kicked down the door to a back bedroom to find the prime mover of 9/11 asleep on his face in a guest bedroom. The terrorist who’d attacked the World Trade Center and beheaded American journalist Daniel Pearl offered no resistance. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed declined an instant trip to paradise and surrendered in his pajamas.

It may never be known who sent the walk-in into the American embassy in Islamabad. But it is obvious who benefited from the capture of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. With Khalid out of the picture, Zawahiri regained his position as Al Qaeda’s number two. By September 2003, Zawahiri was back at Bin Laden’s side in a video released by Al Shebab, the press arm of the newly merged al Jihad and Al Qaeda.

With Khalid out of the way, Zawahiri was able to reassert his ideological control over Osama bin Laden. When news came from Iraq that Al Qaeda had come into custody of some of Saddam’s chemical weapons, Zawahiri was overjoyed. He persuaded Osama to order the chemical attack at al Baya in 2003, and tried again to use almost a dozen chemical weapons against Amman, Jordan, in 2004. Both attacks fizzled.

Zawahiri promised Osama big things with these chemical weapons, but without the operational expertise of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Zawahiri found it difficult to get an attack through to fruition. His goal was to attack the United States. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed had attended college in North Carolina. He had Western habits and vices and could travel easily around the world. Zawahiri could not. He wore a turban and Pashtoon trousers and had a prayer callus between his eyes and looked very much like what he was, a fanatic sociopath. He was the second-most hunted man in the world, and although he now possessed several shells containing nerve gas, he did not have the organization or the operational ability to deliver these weapons into the belly of the Great Satan. Bin Laden and Zawahiri now had the motive and the means, but they lacked a mechanism of attack. They had to figure a way to get their weapons across the borders of either Britain or the United States. For that they needed Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s expertise—but he had disappeared into America’s secret gulag. Zawahiri, of all people, should have expected that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed would be tortured, and that he would talk. The clock was ticking on Al Qaeda.

However much the pious Zawahiri hated Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, he lacked both his charisma and his ability to command the loyalty of men. Almost all who met Zawahiri came away with the same impression—he was a deeply troubled and unbalanced man, ruthless to his subordinates and obsequious to his patron, Osama. After Khalid’s arrest, Zawahiri saw that Abu Faraj al-Libbi, the man assigned to coordinate his safe houses, was made Al Qaeda’s head of operations. It was al-Libbi who passed the orders to Musab al-Zarqawi to use his chemical weapons to attack coalition forces in Iraq and begin planning for a larger attack on Amman, Jordan.

As these attacks were being carried out, Osama moved from Waziristan to a newly constructed one-acre compound a short walk from the front gate of Pakistan’s Kakul Military Academy. Situated on a triangular lot, the main house was a two-story rectangle surrounded by cement and cinderblock walls that ranged between ten and twenty feet high. The windows facing the street on the north side of the main building were bricked in. It was the biggest house for several miles, and everybody did their best to ignore it and its strangely reticent occupants.

The main house was not air-conditioned but it did have central heating. The home was decorated according to Osama’s austere tastes. The furniture was cheap, and the beds were covered by thin foam mattresses. The property had walled areas for gardens and animals. A garage was built into the eastern wall, with a trellis that allowed visitors to walk from the carport to the main house without being viewed from either the street or the sky. A long, high-walled driveway bisected the triangle and led in a narrow sort of lane or alley to a guesthouse and five smaller structures that included a place for conferences and a media studio.

The compound seems to have been added to in an ad hoc fashion. There were bedrooms that were adjoined by kitchens and bathrooms, allowing occupants to live separately. Interior hallways and stairwells were transected by locking metal grate work, like garden gates. There were doorways that led to brick walls and hallways that went nowhere. It was an odd, top-heavy-looking house.

If Osama’s tastes in interior design were simple, his family arrangements were exceedingly complex. While in Afghanistan, Osama had paid a bridal dowry of five thousand U.S. dollars to a Yemeni family. In Kandahar in 2000, then forty-four-year-old Osama married fifteen-year-old Amal Ahmed al-Sadah. To make her his wife, and still comply with Islamic law, Osama divorced his first wife, Najwa Ghanem. Najwa, the girl he married in high school, was also his first cousin. Osama’s family was displeased. His mother was especially unhappy with Osama’s new child bride. Osama paid no attention. All his life he had done what he pleased and gotten what he wanted. Amal Ahmed al-Sadah became the favorite of his four wives, and soon bore him a daughter.

Osama sent his wives and children out of Afghanistan in the wake of the American invasion, and now that he had moved into his expansive new home, he sent word by couriers for his family to rejoin him. Faraj al-Libbi arranged air transportation for Amal Ahmed al-Sadah and his nine-year-old daughter, Safiryrah, to travel from Yemen to Abbottabad.

Wives number two and three, Khairah and Siham Sabar, were summoned from Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, where they had waited for Bin Laden to establish his new home. It may be asked why the Central Intelligence Agency, scanning the world for a trace of the elusive Osama, did not show an interest in the travel patterns of his family members. As a strict Muslim family man, Osama would not allow any of his wives to travel unaccompanied. It was not only Osama’s several wives and children who jetted between Yemen, Saudi Arabia, and Osama’s hideouts; they were accompanied by Al Qaeda security personnel. It was surely a conspicuous and interesting sight as the burqa-clad wives of the world’s most-wanted terrorist flitted through airline terminals and past customs inspectors with children and luggage in tow. Even if they carried false passports (which they did not) the CIA might have been on the lookout. It is another incredible mystery that Leon Panetta’s CIA failed to detect, or apparently even suspect, that Osama would want for company while on the run.

In Abbottabad, Osama’s family lived on the top two floors of the main house with Amal and rotated Khairah and Siham out of his bedroom as suited his mood. Joining Osama’s domestic suite were two Pakistani brothers, Arshad and Tariq Khan, who lived with their families in the guesthouses.

The brothers did odd jobs around the compound, made purchases of bulk supplies at local stores, and brought in batteries and digital tapes for the video cameras. The food served in the Bin Laden household was basic: olive oil, dates, dried meats, eggs, and fresh-baked naan from a nearby bakery. Occasionally one of the compound’s chickens would make the ultimate sacrifice and be tossed into a pot with rice and raisins.

Osama insisted that his children be homeschooled, and a classroom was set up with a whiteboard and markers on the first floor. There were textbooks in Arabic, and between frequent lessons with their mothers, the kids raised rabbits and played behind the compound’s twenty-foot, barbed-wire-topped walls. They were children of the fortress. They rarely left the compound and were not allowed to visit their neighbors. Osama’s young sons and daughters lived in a four-walled piece of limbo, cut off from school, playgrounds, or other children—they were as isolated and alone as their father.