The Finish (17 page)

There still wasn’t that much excitement over Ahmed the Kuwaiti. Again, he was just one of a great number of potential leads, many, many of which looked a lot more promising. Most of the analytical effort focused on finding the new al Qaeda Number Three or other key operational players, which had the added benefit of possibly thwarting ongoing plots. The Kuwaiti was peripheral. Much of what they had heard about him over the years suggested that he had dropped out of the organization altogether. His past associations would have been enough to explain why he kept out of sight. Perhaps it was the renewed pressure generated by President Obama in 2009, or perhaps just a decision by the teams to crank up the courier angle. It might have been that there was no change at all, that the patient collection of information and the growing sophistication of the software used to explore the TIA database finally delivered a key. But in June of 2010, because of either some change in his cell phone or its service package or some improvement in their own capability, the United States was able to pinpoint the phone’s location when it was in use. This meant they could find the Kuwaiti, and watch him.

What they found, and what immediately provoked even more curiosity at Langley, was that Ibrahim and his brother Abrar were extremely careful. They would use their phones only in the car. Ahmed drove a white Suzuki Jimny with a spare tire mounted on the back, which could be watched from above. It turned out that before even turning on his phone he would drive for at least an hour from what turned out to be that very curious compound in Abbottabad. Ibrahim and his brother were using assumed names, Arshad and Tareq Khan. That was interesting, but there could be many explanations for it. Ibrahim’s past associations alone might account for it. It was possible they were involved in some sort of illegal enterprise. Drug smuggling was big business in the Afghan-Pakistan border areas. Or maybe they were still working for al Qaeda.

These insights were sufficient to ramp up interest. If Ahmed the Kuwaiti was still a courier, perhaps he could lead them to where bin Laden was hiding.

The brothers’ recorded phone calls now got close attention. Neither gave away anything in conversation about what they were doing but, significantly, there was that business about telling lies even to close family members about where they were living. And in one of Ibrahim Ahmed’s calls came the brief exchange that appeared to confirm that he was still working with al Qaeda.

“I’m with the same ones as before.”

Now his compound in Abbottabad had the agency’s full attention.

5
“Please Make Sure to Keep the Children and All of the Families Away from the Areas That Are Being Photographed and Bombed”

Fall, 2010

Nine years after his most spectacular success, things were not going as Osama bin Laden had foreseen. He was cut off from his followers, frustrated, and his organization was fraying. The 9/11 attacks had been both his greatest achievement and his undoing. Toppling the World Trade Center towers and crashing a commercial jet into the Pentagon had not, as he supposed, sent the United States into a spiral of fear, retreat, and ruin. It had instead set al Qaeda and himself on the run from a patient, determined, and deadly pursuer. The movement had been fragmented physically and conceptually. It had become less his organization than a franchise, a banner waved by men who did not share his precise, divine insight, and who sullied its name with acts that killed, maimed, and alienated those he sought to defend and convert. The holy cause had gone off the rails. In isolation, he could no longer steer it himself. But the Sheik had not given up. The divinely inspired don’t.

So he wrote letters, windy letters that filled many pages, a steady stream of them that were passed along a chain of couriers to the men he recognized as his deputies. Despite the oppressive reality, his letters offered consistently hopeful assessments of al Qaeda’s opportunities. They contained detailed instructions promoting men to positions made vacant by virtue of an arrest or drone attack, bestowed or withheld his official blessing on start-up organizations in other countries, requested more detailed updates and information, mourned the dead, and critiqued, guided, and motivated his increasingly far-flung troops. He himself had little else to do. He would either tap away on the keyboard with his long, delicate fingers or dictate to one of his wives. He paced.

“In the name of God most merciful,” he began one letter in October, 2010
to “Sheik Mahmoud” Atiyah Abd al-Rahman, one of his most faithful, long-serving soldiers, “may God protect him. I hope that this letter finds you and your family are in good health. I offer my condolences to you for the death of our beloved brothers. May God have mercy on their souls and consider them among the martyrs.”

A Libyan, al-Rahman had sought out the Sheik in Afghanistan more than twenty years earlier, when he was a teenager determined to fight the great Soviet military machine. Even today he had a youthful, permanently unkempt look, with pale skin and a beard so sparse that it grew only in wisps on his jaws before thickening under his chin. Until recently, al-Rahman had been living in relative safety in Iran, serving as bin Laden’s emissary to that country’s mullahs, with whom bin Laden had an uneasy relationship. One of the Sheik’s three wives and some of his twenty-two living children had been in Iran for years, either imprisoned or living under “protective custody.” It was a matter of interpretation. Al-Rahman had helped broker their release, and was now back in the tribal regions of western Pakistan, somewhere in North or South Waziristan, ready to assume an operational role.

As it happened, there was an opening. The Sheik must have been grateful to have al-Rahman back. Drone attacks on al Qaeda forces in Waziristan had so thinned its ranks that the group was finding it hard to retain anyone in the critical Number Three position —operations commander, beneath only the Sheik himself and al-Zawahiri. Anyone pledged to al Qaeda was now a marked man, but this was especially true for its Number Three. The job required suicidal commitment. Unlike the organization’s most infamous leaders, the operations commander had to be in constant touch with the group’s rank and file, plotting actions, moving money, and training recruits, and the more active you were the more likely it was that the American satellites, drones, or raiders would find you. Number Threes did not last long. There had been 9/11 planner Khalid Sheik Mohammed, who was found and arrested in Pakistan in 2003. His successor, Abu Faraj al-Libi, was arrested in 2005, and al-Libi’s successor, Hamza Rabia, was killed later that year by a drone strike. Next up, Sheik Saeed al-Masri, had been killed in May of 2010. The Americans were getting better. The rain of death was accelerating. Al-Rahman, stepping in for the late al-Masri, would die within the year, less than a month before his successor, Abu Hafs al Shahri, would likewise be killed in a Predator strike. And his successor, Abu Yahya al-Libi, would be killed in June 2012.

By now, every letter the Sheik composed from his cramped third-floor office in Abbottabad began with prayers for the martyrs and lists of condolences.

“This is the path of jihad,” he intoned stoically in another letter to Atiyah Abd al-Rahman, his new Number Three. “God said, ‘You will sacrifice your money and yourself for His sake.’ They strike us and we will strike them back.”

The limitations of this movement were more apparent. And while bin Laden politely asked his followers to launch more attacks on the United States, there was no longer any way for al Qaeda to make such ambitious arrangements. The 9/11 attacks had taken years to prepare, and had involved substantial international travel, long months of training, money, and close coordination. When the plan had been set in motion, the group was a peripheral concern for the United States and the Western world. Michael Sheehan, the U.S. ambassador for counterterrorism in the waning years of the Clinton administration, had felt like he was butting his head against a wall trying to get people to take bin Laden and his group seriously in the late 1990s. Michael Scheuer and “the Manson Family” of analysts at ALEC Station were regarded as alarmist, and wore themselves out with frustration.

This was no longer the case. America had spread an invisible web of surveillance that registered seemingly everything that stirred. Death rained continually. It was dangerous for the organization’s leaders to move from one house to another, much less put another international plot in motion. And yet here was the Sheik still dreaming his big dream. His own men, even those who shared his vision, were discovering that their revered leader lived in a fantasy. He was still urging them to “hunch forth and stain the blade of lances red.” Bin Laden had become the crazy officer waving his sword and rallying depleted troops to run headlong into withering fire—before him, mind you, not behind him. He sent them broad strategic analyses and called for specific missions that were wildly unrealistic, even screwy.

“I asked Sheik Sa’id, Allah have mercy on his soul, to task brother Ilyas to prepare two groups—one in Pakistan and the other in the Bagram area of Afghanistan—with the mission of anticipating and spotting the visits of Obama or Petraeus to Afghanistan or Pakistan to target the aircraft of either one of them,” he wrote. “They are not to target visits by U.S. Vice President Biden, Secretary of Defense [Robert] Gates, Joint Chiefs of Staff (Chairman) [Michael] Mullen, or the Special Envoy to Pakistan and Afghanistan [Richard] Holbrooke. The groups will remain on the lookout for Obama or Petraeus. The reason for concentrating on them is that Obama is the head of infidelity and killing him will automatically make Biden take over the presidency for the remainder of the term, as it is the norm over there. Biden is totally unprepared for that post, which will lead the United States into a crisis. As for Petraeus, he is the man of the hour in this last year of the war, and killing him would alter the war’s path. So please ask brother Ilyas to send to me the steps he has taken into that work.”

Bin Laden diagnosed their primary problem not as the deadly American pursuit, which it was primarily, but their own lack of focus. And he had become a scold.

“After the war expanded and the
mujahidin
spread out into many regions, some of the brothers became totally absorbed in fighting our local enemies, and more mistakes have been made due to miscalculations by the brothers planning the operations.”

Too many operations against Americans had inadvertently killed Muslims. He criticized two specific efforts, both by local jihadists affiliated with al Qaeda: the first being the unsuccessful attempt on the life of Afghanistan regional commander General Abdul Rashid Dostum in January 2005. The suicide bomber in that case had blown himself up outside the Ghocha Park mosque in Dostum’s hometown of Sheberghan, where the general and his retinue had been praying during the annual Eid al-Adha festival. About twenty people had been injured. The other was an attempt to kill Pakistani General Muhammad Yusef Khan, in June 2004, again setting off a bomb at a mosque. Both had killed many Muslims, and both, bin Laden wrote, “bear extreme negative impact on the partisans of the jihad
. . .
It is extremely sad for an individual to fall into the same mistake more than once.”

The campaign of terror led by al Qaeda’s franchise in Iraq had killed eight times more Muslims than non-Muslims, according to a 2009 study. Bin Laden saw this kind of information reported on satellite TV. The bloodshed was thought to have caused many Sunni groups opposed to the U.S. invasion to turn on al Qaeda. This had been a clear tactical error, and a moral one. The rule was that one did not kill Muslims unless there was no other way to get at legitimate targets.

“[This] has resulted in the killing of Muslims (we ask God to have mercy on them and forgive them, and compensate their families).”

Bin Laden was now not so sure that the rule allowing even this exception to killing brother Muslims was valid. He wanted such rationales “revisited based on the modern-day context, and clear boundaries established for all the brothers, so that no Muslims fall victim except when it is absolutely essential
. . .
Here is an important issue that we should pay attention to: carrying out several attacks without exercising caution, which impacted the sympathy of the Nation’s crowds toward the
mujahidin
. It would lead us to winning several battles while losing the war at the end. It requires an accurate criterion for the ramifications of any attack prior to carrying it out; also weighing the advantages and disadvantages, to then determine what would be the best attack to carry out.”

Even successes troubled him. During a siege in Khobar, Saudi Arabia, in May 2004, a large group of terrorists took hostages from two oil company installations and killed nineteen foreigners. The attackers were part of the “al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula” branch, based in Yemen. They had asked each of the hostages if they were Muslims, and slit the throats of those who were not. Most of the attackers were killed in a rescue operation, and the incident helped provoke a brutal Saudi crackdown on extremists.

The Sheik now cautioned against mounting attacks like these and others inside Arab countries.

“The regime shall have a huge reaction toward the
mujahidin
; this would lead to defending themselves and avenging the regime,” he wrote. “The brothers and the regime would then engage in a war that we did not begin against it, because the power of the brothers is not ready for it.” The right strategy was to defer conflict with local Arab states, such as Yemen and Iraq and Saudi Arabia, “to avoid wasting our energy with these regimes at this stage [and]
. . .
losing the sympathy of the Muslims toward us
. . .
We are the ones defending the Muslims and fighting their biggest enemy, the Crusader-Zionist alliance.”