‘I Want Bin Laden’s Head’
Langley’s choice to head up the bin Laden hunt in Afghanistan was an operative named Gary Berntsen. Berntsen was known at CIA headquarters as an aggressive field operative, the type inclined to act first and ask permission later. But he possessed the right combination of brawn and brains for tough missions. When summoned to the front office in the Counterterrorist Center in October 2001, Berntsen recalls, his boss’s orders were simple: “Gary, I want you killing the enemy immediately.”
It might have been more specific and more colorful than that. In a memoir published by Schroen, who preceded Berntsen into the battle, he recounted the instructions he received from Black, director of the CIA Counterterrorist Center: “I want bin Laden’s head shipped back in a box filled with dry ice. I want to be able to show bin Laden’s head to the president.”
In any case, Berntsen got the message. He left for Afghanistan the next day, determined to eliminate one man in particular.
Berntsen worked out of a Kabul guesthouse, fueling the hunt with several million dollars in cash that he kept stowed in a Rubbermaid tub. From that makeshift bank, he distributed payoffs in the thousands of dollars to informants in tribal villages where bin Laden sightings had been reported.
“I must have gotten eight reports at the time, saying he’s in this village here or that village there,” said Berntsen, who had investigated al-Qaeda’s 1998 bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. “He was stopping and giving speeches.”
In early October, Yunus Khalis, an elderly Afghan warrior who controlled a swath of territory in the country’s east, including the regional capital of Jalalabad and the nearby cave complex at Tora Bora, sent a message to bin Laden offering him sanctuary .
Bin Laden had friends and followers all along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. Even before al-Qaeda’s founding in 1988, bin Laden had spent years in the area, developing relationships with tribal and religious leaders, having worked with side by side with many of them in the Afghan mujaheddin’s 1980s battles against the Soviet Union.
Khalis and bin Laden had known each other since those days, when Khalis, one of the most prominent leaders of the anti-Soviet resistance, had received tens of millions of dollars in guns and money from the CIA. He later introduced bin Laden to Mohammad Omar, the Taliban leader. After the United States began to bomb Afghanistan, Khalis, then 82, called for jihad against the Americans.
Taking advantage of Khalis’s hospitality, bin Laden arrived in Jalalabad in November and immediately began to spread cash among local tribes, either directly or through trusted intermediaries.
When the bombing around Jalalabad intensified, bin Laden fled into the fortified caves of Tora Bora, about 35 miles south of the regional capital. Bin Laden knew the territory: As a young man, he had driven bulldozers there as Afghan resistance fighters excavated miles of tunnels.
In late November, probably within days after bin Laden had arrived in the area, Berntsen’s team tracked him to a mountainous redoubt called Milawa, just below the peaks of Tora Bora.
Berntsen says he knew exactly where the 1,000-man jihadist force had fallen back. An Arabic-speaking JAWBREAKER team member reported hearing bin Laden speaking on a radio taken from a dead al-Qaeda fighter.
The airstrikes called in by Berntsen’s men were fierce: a barrage from B-52s, F-15s and plenty more that lasted nearly 60 hours.
“Our guys were exhausted. They had been hammering Osama for days,” Berntsen said. “Finally, bin Laden fled deeper into the mountains.”
Berntsen, who was back in Kabul, summoned several members of his team to tell him what they would need to take down bin Laden now that they thought they knew where he was. The response: “We need 800 Army Rangers between bin Laden and the border.”
By Berntsen’s estimate, there were just 40 Special Operations soldiers and a dozen other Special Forces on hand to head off bin Laden’s potential flight “across hundreds of miles of caves and mountain passes.”
In his own memoir, Berntsen recalls shouting at an Army general in Kabul who had made it clear that ground troops would not be coming, for “fear of alienating our Afghan allies.”
“Screw that!” Berntsen says he retorted.
In Berntsen’s view, the Afghan militia was “unreliable” and “cobbled together at the last minute” — certainly not the army to trust with nabbing the man who had ordered the 9/11 attacks. “I’d made it clear in my reports that our Afghan allies were hardly anxious to get at al-Qaeda in Tora Bora,” he writes. But his superiors at Langley told him it wasn’t the CIA’s call to make.
Berntsen begged, but his pleas went unanswered, according to a Senate Foreign Relations Committee report on Tora Bora. Without more manpower, Berntsen couldn’t risk a ground assault.
Still, the Americans tried to stay close to bin Laden. Berntsen’s deputy, a CIA paramilitary officer, recruited an Afghan to trek into the mountains and offer bin Laden and his followers food and water, then report back on the terrorist’s location.
“The guy saw bin Laden and his son,” Berntsen said. “When you’re desperate, you’re desperate. And when you don’t have food and water, you’ll take it.”
As the United States carpet-bombed the cave complex, bin Laden and al-Zawahiri urged their fighters to carry on against the Americans. In the bitter cold of the caves, bin Laden sipped mint tea. He heard pleas from his fighters for medicine and, with ever-greater urgency, escape routes.
A videotape later obtained by the CIA shows bin Laden during that time , teaching followers how to dig holes where they could spend the night without being seen by U.S. spy planes. As bin Laden speaks, a U.S. bomb explodes in the background. Bin Laden casually notes, “We were there last night.”
The terrorist leader exhorts his followers to keep fighting and at one point apologizes “for getting them trapped . . . and pounded by American airstrikes.”
Despite the success of the air campaign, U.S. officials remained reluctant to send in ground troops to flush out bin Laden. They told officers on the ground in Afghanistan that Pakistani troops would help them, cutting off bin Laden if he tried to cross into their country.
But in early December, over lunch at his palace in Islamabad, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, Pakistan’s president, made it clear to U.S. officials that he didn’t want to commit troops unless the Americans would help transport them to the border by air. According to Wendy Chamberlin, who was U.S. ambassador to Pakistan, Musharraf told her and Army Gen. Tommy R. Franks, commander of U.S. Central Command: “I’d put the troops in trucks, but that’ll take weeks. Could you give me air support?”
According to Chamberlin, Franks was noncommittal. Only later did she learn that the general was already “planning for Iraq,” she said. “Even if he could have helped out, he was already starting to have to reshuffle.” Without the air support, the Pakistanis would agree to send only a small force, too small to secure the border.
Back at Tora Bora, a team from Delta Force — the military’s secretive, elite Special Operations unit — planned to sneak up on bin Laden from behind, crossing into the terrorist’s suspected lair from Pakistan through an undefended back door. That would have required using supplemental oxygen to scale a 14,000-foot peak, but according to the leader of the Delta Force team, who later wrote a book under the pseudonym Dalton Fury, the plan had a better chance of succeeding than any frontal assault that relied on help from Afghan fighters.
Fury, the assault troop commander who retired from the Army as a major, said in an e-mail interview that even the reduced number of Pakistani forces who were supposed to seal the border “never made it there.” He said his superiors told him to skip the border-side assault and instead “align our mission with the Afghan mujaheddin to put an Afghan face on killing” bin Laden.
Fury didn’t trust the Afghans any more than Berntsen. “The mujaheddin were not very skilled or motivated fighters,” he said. But following orders, the Delta Force team stayed on the Afghan side of the border.
Tora Bora and the Big Bomb
On Dec. 10, Fury’s team got another tip from a source who claimed to know bin Laden’s general location in the Tora Bora area. Thirty members of the team launched a hasty assault, but when some of his men were abandoned by their Afghan allies behind enemy lines, the team halted its advance and spent two hours rescuing their mates. Fury aborted the mission.
Finally, after weeks of searching the caves and mountains of Tora Bora for signs of bin Laden, Berntsen believed that his men had a good peg on the terrorist. Berntsen called in the big bomb — the BLU-82, a 15,000-pound device the size of a car.
The bomb was pushed out of the back of a C-130 transport plane. It struck with such force that it vaporized men deep inside caves. The devastation spread across an area as big as five football fields, killing numerous al-Qaeda fighters — including, Berntsen believed, bin Laden.
It was three months after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and Berntsen thought, “I’ve got him now.”
Six days later, two of Berntsen’s men were listening to a radio they had picked up from a dead al-Qaeda fighter. They heard bin Laden addressing his troops in Arabic.
It was only later, during the questioning of a prisoner seized at Tora Bora, that intelligence officials discovered what went wrong. The prisoner, Abdallah Tabarak, a Moroccan who had been one of bin Laden’s longtime bodyguards, told his interrogators that as the bombs fell, he took possession of the al-Qaeda leader’s satellite phone on the assumption that U.S. intelligence agencies were monitoring it to get a fix on their position.
Tabarak moved away from bin Laden and his entourage as they fled; he continued to use the phone in an effort to divert the Americans and allow bin Laden to escape. Tabarak was captured at Tora Bora in possession of the phone, officials said.
“He agreed to be captured or die,” a Moroccan official said of Tabarak. “That’s the level of his fanaticism for bin Laden. It wasn’t a lot of time, but it was enough. “
After Tora Bora, the Americans would never again feel certain that they knew where bin Laden was. The trail had gone cold, but Berntsen’s team stayed on the hunt.
Tora Bora taught both sides important lessons. The Americans learned, as a top intelligence official said, “that it was a bad idea to ‘outsource’ something as important as capturing or killing bin Laden.” Mutual mistrust kept the Pakistani military and Afghan fighters from embracing the Americans’ search for bin Laden.
After Tora Bora, the Americans knew that “when the time came to move, we would do it ourselves,” said the official, who was involved in the search for years.
A Man on the Run
Bin Laden, who took the U.S. bombing seriously enough to have written his will in mid-December of 2001, learned that he had lost his safe haven and was now a fugitive. “Hiding and isolation from operatives and recruits transformed him from a hands-on leader into an almost mythical figure within al-Qaeda,” the intelligence official said. That new mystique lent additional import to each video or audio transmission that bin Laden managed to smuggle out, but it also dampened al-Qaeda’s fundraising and recruiting capacity.
The popular version of bin Laden’s escape from Tora Bora – the version American intelligence analysts initially believed — was dramatic enough. Somehow, a hunted man made it over the mountains, south to the tribal areas of Pakistan.
But U.S. interrogators later learned from Guantanamo detainees that bin Laden had actually taken a more daring route: to the north toward Jalalabad, right past the approaching U.S. and British special forces and their Afghan allies. After resting there, he proceeded on horseback for several days into Konar province, in Afghanistan’s far northeast.
“It’s still unclear who bribed who and who talked to who,” a U.S. intelligence official said, but “bin Laden got out. Knowing the land, knowing the people who could direct you, he was able to get out to Konar” into valleys “that no one has subdued ... places the Soviets never pacified.”
Bin Laden and al-Zawahiri next moved on to an “unknown location,” according to military documents. Some detainees reported that the two had stayed in Konar for up to 10 months. Even bin Laden’s closest followers didn’t know where he had gone, according to U.S. analysts who mined the interrogations of al-Qaeda operatives.
“It became clear that he was not meeting with them face to face,” said an intelligence official. “People we would capture had not seen him.”
U.S. forces believed that at Tora Bora they had come within perhaps 2,000 yards of bin Laden. Yet he managed to slip away, vanishing so completely that several years went by without a single tip, surveillance photo or monitored transmission of any value. On the ground, American operatives continued to try to pry intelligence from “locals willing to talk for some pocket change,” Fury said. “The CIA did a lot of this fishing. Mind-numbing. A million dead ends.”
A few months after Tora Bora, as part of the preparation for war in Iraq, the Bush administration pulled out many of the Special Operations and CIA forces that had been searching for bin Laden in Afghanistan, according to several U.S. officials who served at the time. Even the drones U.S. forces depended on to track movements of suspicious characters in the Afghan mountain passes were redeployed to be available for the Iraq war, Army Lt. Gen. John Vines told The Washington Post in 2006. Once, when Vines’s troops believed they were within half an hour of catching up to bin Laden, the general asked for drones to cover three possible escape routes. But only one drone was available — others had been moved to Iraq. The target got away.
Back home, frustration over the long search led to a debate between critics of the Bush administration’s global war on terrorism, who argued that the cause of security would be better served by focusing on targeted strikes against bin Laden and al-Qaeda, and defenders of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, who said the best way to contain terrorism was to take the fight to where the enemy lived.
But even as the invasion of Iraq loomed, the Americans — very quietly and clandestinely — pursued the chase. Since early 2002, a small number of personnel from the NSA and the CIA had been stationed where analysts believed bin Laden may have been hiding, embedded with counterterrorism units of the Pakistan army’s elite Special Services Group.
The NSA and other specialists collected imagery and electronic intercepts that their CIA counterparts then shared with the Pakistani units in the tribal areas.
But even with sophisticated technology, the local geography presented formidable obstacles. In a land of dead-end valleys, high peaks and winding ridge lines, it was easy to hide within the miles of caves and deep ravines or to live unnoticed in mud-walled compounds barely distinguishable from the surrounding terrain.
The Afghan-Pakistan border is about 1,500 miles. Pakistan’s army had never even entered the area until October 2001, more than a half century after Pakistan’s founding.
A Muslim country where many considered bin Laden a hero, Pakistan grew increasingly reluctant to help the U.S. search. The army lost its best source of intelligence in 2004, after it began raids inside the tribal areas. Scouts with blood ties to the tribes ceased sharing information for fear of retaliation.
They had good reason. At least 23 senior anti-Taliban tribesmen were assassinated in South and North Waziristan in 2005 and 2006. “Al-Qaeda footprints were found everywhere,” Pakistan’s Interior Minister Aftab Khan Sherpao said. “They kidnapped and chopped off heads of at least seven of these pro-government tribesmen.”
Pakistan all but stopped looking for bin Laden. “The dirty little secret is they have nothing, no operations, without the Paks,” one former counterterrorism officer said.