The Longest War (14 page)

Aside from its obvious advantage as a place from which to disappear, Tora Bora was a place that bin Laden loved. In the Tora Bora settlement of Milewa, a three-hour drive up a narrow mud-and-stone road from Jalalabad, the al-Qaeda leader maintained his own mini-jihadist kingdom for several years before 9/11. The buildings that made up the settlement were strung across a series of ridges that in winter lay far above the snow line, commanding lovely views of the verdant valleys below. They comprised a series of scattered lookout posts, a bakery, and bin Laden’s two-bedroom house, all constructed of the baked mud and stone typical of Afghan villages. Next to bin Laden’s house was a crude swimming pool and a broad field where al-Qaeda members cultivated their crops.
From bin Laden’s house
all he could see was his own little feudal fiefdom; the nearest village was out of sight, thousands of feet below down a scree-covered slope.

In the winter of 1996 bin Laden took Abdel Bari Atwan, a Palestinian journalist based in London, on a walking tour of frigid Tora Bora. The al-Qaeda leader told Atwan, “
I really feel secure
in the mountains. I really enjoy my life when I’m here. I feel secure in this place.” Bin Laden also well understood how the Tora Bora caves where he sat down with Atwan for an interview and a photographic session would have a certain resonance in the Muslim world, as it was in a cave in the mountains that the Prophet Mohammed had first received the revelations of the Koran.

Bin Laden would also routinely hike from Tora Bora into neighboring Pakistan, according to his son Omar. The treks could take anywhere between seven and fourteen hours. The Saudi exile instructed his sons on these walks, “We never know when war will strike. We must know our way out of the mountains.” Bin Laden told his sons they had to memorize every rock on the escape routes to Pakistan. Omar bin Laden later recalled, “
My brothers and I
all loathed these grueling treks that seemed the most pleasant of outings to our father.”

During the fall of 2001, Tora Bora was not yet a familiar name to many
Americans—but it would be soon enough. What unfolded there remains, many years later, the most consequential single battle of the war on terrorism. Presented with an opportunity to kill or capture al-Qaeda’s top leadership just three months after September 11, the United States was instead outmaneuvered by bin Laden, who slipped into Pakistan, largely disappeared from American radar, and slowly began rebuilding his organization.

Abdallah Tabarak, bin Laden’s
chief bodyguard
, says that
during the month of Ramadan
, which began on November 17, 2001, bin Laden and his top deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, made their way from Jalalabad thirty miles south to the mountains of Tora Bora, hard up on the border with Pakistan.
Around the same time
, Hazarat Ali, a local Afghan commander, told a
New York Times
reporter that the al-Qaeda leader had been recently spotted in Tora Bora.

Bin Laden’s retreat from Kabul to Jalalabad and then on to the easily defended craggy ridges and cave complexes of Tora Bora was being closely monitored by the CIA. The Agency’s top official on the ground was Gary Berntsen.
Berntsen had arrived in Kabul
on November 12, the same day that the Taliban had fled the capital, and within two days was receiving a stream of intelligence reports from the Northern Alliance that the al-Qaeda leader was in Jalalabad, giving pep talks to an ever-growing caravan of fighters.

Berntsen decided to push a four-man CIA team into Jalalabad. To provide them with local guides he made contact with the Afghan commander Hazarat Ali, a longtime opponent of the Taliban, who sent three teenage fighters to escort the American team into Jalalabad, an area that was now crawling with fleeing Taliban and al-Qaeda fighters. Berntsen’s team
arrived uneventfully in Jalalabad
on November 21 and several days later they moved into a schoolhouse in the foothills of Tora Bora, which they used as a base. Berntsen says he was now receiving “multiple hits” from his sources on the ground that bin Laden was in Tora Bora.

Khalid al-Hubayshi, a Saudi bomb-making expert, was in the Tora Bora trenches as the al-Qaeda leader prepared for his showdown with the United States. Bin Laden, Hubayshi says, “was convinced” that U.S. soldiers would land in the mountains by helicopter. “
We spent five weeks
manning our positions in case the Americans landed,” he recalls.

As bin Laden set about preparing for an American landing that never came, Gary Berntsen’s team remained just one step behind him. At the end of November, the team, which had by now grown to eight,
decided to split
into two groups of four
, one of which would head farther into the mountains with ten Afghan fighters as guides. The team’s members included an air force combat controller who specialized in calling in airstrikes, and they took with them a laser capable of “painting” targets with a signal that American bombers could then lock on to. The expedition was delayed when a poorly packed set of grenades carried on a mule blew up, killing two of the Afghan guides. But as dusk was falling the group reached a mountaintop from which it could see several hundred of bin Laden’s men arrayed below. For the following fifty-six hours straight, the team called in airstrikes from all the bombers available in theater.

Berntsen had not asked anyone for permission to begin the battle of Tora Bora. About twenty-four hours after the airstrikes had begun, Berntsen’s boss, Hank Crumpton, the head of Afghan operations at the CIA, called him and asked, “Are you conducting a battle in Tora Bora?” Not quite knowing what his boss’s reaction might be, Berntsen simply said, “Yes.” Crumpton replied, “Congratulations! Good job!”

As the battle began to gear up, the
Times
of London ran
an elaborate graphic
purporting to show what bin Laden’s hideaway in Tora Bora looked like, a report that was then picked up by media outlets around the world. The graphic showed a multifloored lair suitable for a James Bond villain, protected by iron doors, powered by hydroelectricity, built more than a thousand feet deep into the mountain, and replete with bedrooms and offices capable of sheltering up to a thousand al-Qaeda foot soldiers. The reality was more prosaic. The caves that dot the hills of Tora Bora are certainly well insulated from bombing raids, but
even the larger ones
are suitable only for holding several men standing up.

Shortly after 9/11
, Adam Khan, an Afghan-American who had served in the Marines and who spoke Pashtu and Dari, the two main Afghan languages, received a call about deploying to Afghanistan. An American official asked him, “Do you want to read the news or do you want to make the news?” Khan (a pseudonym) arrived at Bagram Air Base north of Kabul at the end of November.
There he was introduced to
a team of half a dozen Delta Force operators and signals intelligence “collectors” led by Dalton Fury (also a pseudonym). Khan would be their eyes and ears on the ground in Jalalabad.

Fury, a thirty-seven-year-old major in the elite Delta Force commandos, would lead
the small American and allied force
at Tora Bora: forty Delta
operators from “black” Special Forces, fourteen Green Berets from the less secretive “white” Special Forces, six CIA operatives, a few Air Force signals operators, and a dozen British commandos from the Special Boat Service. Their mission was to link up with the three Afghan warlords in the Tora Bora area, in particular Hazarat Ali, and provide them tactical advice and intelligence and above all accurately map out the al-Qaeda hideouts in the mountains and then call in American airstrikes. In the end,
1,110 precision-guided
smart bombs were dropped on Tora Bora, many of them guided in by Fury’s team.

Muhammad Musa
, a laconic, massively built commander who led six hundred Afghan soldiers on the Tora Bora front lines, recalled the fanatical bravery with which some of al-Qaeda’s fighters resisted to the end. “They fought very hard with us. When we captured them, they committed suicide with grenades. I saw three of them do that myself.” But Musa said he was not impressed by the American forces on the ground. “They were not involved in the fighting,” he said. “There were six American soldiers with us, U.S. Special Forces. They coordinated the airstrikes. My personal view is if they had blocked the way out to Pakistan, al-Qaeda would not have had a way to escape. The Americans were my guests here, but they didn’t know about fighting.”

In fact, the five dozen or so Americans on the ground at Tora Bora fought well; there were just far too few of them to cordon off a mountainous area of scores of square miles—something that their more numerous Afghan allies failed to do, as did the Pakistani military on the other side of the border.

At the end of November, Hank Crumpton, the veteran CIA officer who was overseeing the Agency’s Afghan operation,
briefed Bush and Cheney
in the White House that bin Laden would likely flee Tora Bora since there were so many potential avenues of escape. Crumpton, a soft-spoken Georgian, recalled from his posting in Australia shortly after 9/11 to run the CIA’s special operations, says, “I briefed the White House and said, ‘You cannot expect the Pakistanis to seal that border.’ That is impossible. You can’t even expect the U.S. to be able to seal a border with Mexico. Borders just don’t function that way. Moreover, we understood the limitations of the Pakistani military, both in terms of their resources and also in terms of their will.” CIA director George
Tenet remembers
President Bush asking Crumpton directly if the Pakistanis would seal the border, to which the CIA veteran replied, “No, sir.”

Meanwhile, the CIA commander on the ground, Gary Berntsen, realized that the Afghan militias the United States was relying on at Tora Bora were
simply not up to the task of taking on al-Qaeda’s hard core there.
By the evening of December 3
, one of his team, a former Delta Force operator who had gone deep into Tora Bora, was back in Kabul to brief Berntsen about the lay of the land there and what would be needed to deliver a knockout blow to bin Laden and his men. The task could be accomplished, he told Berntsen, but it would require hundreds of Rangers, elite soldiers who have gone through the Army’s most rigorous physical training. That same night Bentsen sent out a lengthy message to CIA headquarters asking for a battalion of Rangers—up to eight hundred soldiers—to assault the complex of caves where bin Laden and his lieutenants were believed to be hiding and to block their escape routes. Berntsen’s boss back at CIA headquarters, Crumpton, recalls, “
I remember the message
, I remember talking not only to Gary, every day, but to some of his men who were
at
Tora Bora. Directly. And their request could not have been more direct, more clear, more certain: that we needed U.S. troops there. More men on the ground.”

By early December Crumpton was “one hundred percent” certain that bin Laden was bottled up in the Tora Bora mountains, so he called General Tommy Franks, who had overall control of the Tora Bora operation, to request additional soldiers. Crumpton recalls that Franks pushed back because of two issues: the small American “footprint” approach had already worked so well at overthrowing the Taliban, and the time it would take to get more U.S. soldiers on the ground into Tora Bora. Crumpton countered that taking on the al-Qaeda hard core hiding out in Tora Bora was not the same as defeating the Taliban: “This was different, this was a high mountain stronghold heavily defended. … And I maintained that we could not wait for weeks, even many days, because of my concern that al-Qaeda, bin Laden in particular, would escape to Pakistan.”

General Franks explained by email his reasoning
about why he did not send more U.S. soldiers to take on al-Qaeda’s hard core: “My decision not to add American troops to the Tora Bora region was influenced, as Hank [Crumpton] reports, by several factors: The comparative light footprint of coalition troops in theater, and the fact that these troops were committed to operations ongoing across Afghanistan; the amount of time it would take to deploy additional troops would likely create a ‘tactical pause’ which would run the risk of losing the momentum our forces were enjoying across Afghanistan [and] uncertainty as to whether bin Laden was in fact in Tora Bora. Intelligence suggested that he was, but conflicting intelligence also reported
that he was in Kashmir; at a recreational lake NW of Kandahar [and] at a stronghold on the Iranian border.”

Franks also said
that part of his calculation about not sending more American soldiers was his belief that the United States could rely on the Pakistanis to cut off fleeing members of al-Qaeda. This was wishful thinking. Like Crumpton, the Special Forces ground commander Dalton Fury had identified the central weakness in the plan at Tora Bora: there was no one to guard the back door into Pakistan.
Fury recommended
that his own team be dropped in from the mountainous Pakistani side of Tora Bora, an area where
al-Qaeda would not expect an attack
. For reasons that have never been satisfactorily clarified, that request was turned down somewhere in the Pentagon chain of command. Instead, as Fury later wrote, “
For this most important mission
to date in the global war on terror our nation was relying on a fractious bunch of AK-47-toting lawless bandits and tribal thugs, not bound by any recognized rules of warfare.”

The ground forces at Tora Bora were overwhelmingly provided by
a motley crew
of Afghan commanders: Haji Zaman Gamsharik, an Afghan who had been living in exile in the comfortable environs of Dijon, France, before he returned to Afghanistan as the Taliban fell; Hazarat Ali, a nose-picking, semi-literate from a local tribe who spoke the obscure Pashai language; and Hajji Zahir, the twenty-seven-year-old son of a Jalalabad warlord. This team of rivals assembled some two thousand Afghans, who launched attacks on December 3 into Tora Bora. The Afghan commanders certainly disliked each other more than they did al-Qaeda, and their subcommanders were more than happy to take bribes from Arabs trying to break out of Tora Bora.