CIA Shifts Its Strategy
As the hunt flagged, analysts in the CIA’s HV Unit — dedicated to hunting for high-value targets (bin Laden was known in the agency as “HVT-1”) — began to envision the search in a new way.
“The story of hunting bin Laden is a story of increased sophistication in thinking,” said an intelligence official. Maybe bin Laden was in the mountains; maybe not. But that was the wrong question.
Even al-Qaeda’s top guns didn’t know where bin Laden was, yet they still managed to get instructions from him. So the most important question wasn’t “Where is bin Laden?” but rather “How does he communicate?”
From interrogations of captured terrorists, analysts determined that bin Laden got his orders out only once a month, by courier, and that led them to decide that, as the intelligence official said, “you have to know the network, the couriers and how that leads to the location.”
At the White House, under pressure from mounting public skepticism about the hunt, Bush moved on a different track. He ordered up Operation Cannonball, directing the CIA to “flood the zone,” beefing up the number of officers on the hunt in Pakistan and Afghanistan. The CIA sharply increased the number of intelligence officers and assets devoted to the pursuit of bin Laden. The intelligence officers teamed with the military’s secretive Joint Special Operations Command and with more resources from the NSA and other intelligence agencies.
The problem was that no one was certain where the “zone” was.
“Here you’ve got a guy who’s gone off the net and is hiding in some of the most formidable terrain in one of the most remote parts of the world surrounded by people he trusts implicitly,” T. McCreary, spokesman for the National Counterterrorism Center, said at the time. “And he stays off the net and is probably not mobile. That’s an extremely difficult problem.”
Intelligence officials still believed that bin Laden was hiding in the northern reaches of the autonomous tribal region along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. That calculation was based largely on a lack of activity elsewhere and on other intelligence, including a videotape, obtained by the CIA, that analysts believed showed bin Laden walking on a trail toward Pakistan at the end of the battle of Tora Bora.
But uncertainty about bin Laden’s location was just one of many problems his hunters faced: the CIA’s inability to access people close to al-Qaeda’s inner circle; Pakistan’s unwillingness to pursue him; the reemergence of the Taliban and al-Qaeda in Afghanistan; the strength of the Iraqi insurgency, which was depleting U.S. military and intelligence resources; and the U.S. government’s own disorganization.
And the underlying reality was that finding one person in hiding is difficult under any circumstances. Eric Rudolph, the confessed Olympic Park and abortion clinic bomber evaded authorities for five years, only to be captured miles from where he was last seen in North Carolina.
It had been so long since there had been anything like a genuinely hot lead that some operatives had given bin Laden a nickname: “Elvis,” for all the wishful-thinking sightings that have substituted for anything real.
But all involved, not to mention the American public, kept hoping. Berntsen, the former CIA officer who led the Tora Bora hunt for bin Laden, said, “This could all end tomorrow.” One unsolicited walk-in. One tribesman seeking to collect the $25 million reward. One courier who would rather his kids grow up in the United States. One dealmaker “and this could all change.”
The break, when it eventually came, would be less dramatic, but in a way more impressive than that.
Missile Raids Miss Zawahiri
Analysts at the HV Unit were learning more about how al-Qaeda worked, and that led them to think about networks in which information doesn’t get passed up through a hierarchy but rather is shared across all ranks.
The network idea was catching on in the military as well. In 2006, Army Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal launched raids against al-Qaeda leaders in Iraq as well as in Yemen and Afghanistan, said a former White House official. To make those raids happen, McChrystal needed information to move in new ways, and he adopted a networked structure modeled on what he called al-Qaeda’s “alarming” ability to grow quickly and shore up weak spots.
“To defeat a networked enemy,” McChrystal wrote in Foreign Policy, “we had to become a network ourselves.”
That meant instantly sharing intelligence with people throughout the battlefield rather than sending it up the chain of command. Video from drones was now delivered not just to analysts who controlled the unmanned flying cameras but also to combat teams on the ground. The result was a dramatic increase in the number of raids and their success rate.
But there were drawbacks. In January 2006, the CIA ordered a missile strike against a house in the village of Damadola, about 120 miles northwest of Islamabad, where Pakistani and American officials thought Zawahiri to be hiding based on information from interrogations.
The missile killed 13 civilians and several suspected terrorists. But Zawahiri was not among them. The strike “could have changed the destiny of the war on terror. Zawahiri was 100 percent sure to visit Damadola . . . but he disappeared at the last moment,” one Pakistani intelligence official said at the time.
Tens of thousands of Pakistanis staged an angry anti-American demonstration near Damadola, shouting, “Death to America!”
“Once again, we have lost track of Ayman al-Zawahiri,” the Pakistani intelligence official said. “He keeps popping on television screens. It’s miserable, but we don’t know where he or his boss are hiding.”
Within days, a videotape emerged of Zawahiri. He called Bush the “butcher of Washington” and “a curse” on the United States in a speech that was broadcast in excerpts on the satellite television channel al-Jazeera. Zawahiri called U.S. policy in Iraq a failure and warned of more bloodshed.
In his speech, Zawahiri referred directly to comments made by bin Laden in an audiotape broadcast on al-Jazeera on Jan. 19, as well as to the attempt on his own life in a Pakistani border village Jan. 13.
“Bush, do you know where I am?” asked a taunting Zawahiri, dressed entirely in white and speaking in front of a pitch-black background. “I am among the Muslim masses.”
Analysts noted the professional production quality of the tape. “This was not done in some cave,” one senior administration official said.
The survival of al-Qaeda’s top leadership by no means meant the organization was unscathed. An al-Qaeda operative described by U.S. intelligence sources as the third-ranking figure in the terrorist organization was captured in Pakistan’s North-West Frontier Province. Officials said he had plotted two assassination attempts against Pakistan’s president.
Abu Faraj al-Libi, a Libyan, was seized with three other men after a shootout in the town of Mardan, about 40 miles northeast of the city of Peshawar, a major strike against the group’s latest generation of leaders. Although al-Libi had been unknown at the time of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the officials said, he took a principal role in al-Qaeda operations in Pakistan after the March 2003 arrest of his mentor, Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the architect of the Sept. 11 attacks.
“If he’s a big fish, it’s because it’s a much smaller pond,” Bruce Hoffman, a terrorism expert at the Rand Corp., a nonprofit research organization, said at the time. “He has advanced through the ranks because of attrition in al-Qaeda. It shows how this movement has a knack for replacing serious operatives — a deep bench.”
A deep bench on a team that still had its captain. The CIA continued its efforts to get inside the thinking that had kept bin Laden safe for so long. They scoured sources from academic tomes to interrogation transcripts. Even popular books such as “Growing Up Bin Laden,” by the terrorist’s wife Najwa and son Omar, were mined for insights. In the book, Omar said his father kept safe houses in Kabul because he believed the Americans would never bomb a big city for fear of killing innocent civilians. That got analysts thinking about urban hideouts.
But the slow, painstaking work of analyzing data met with impatience at the White House, where “a little fatigue had set in,” said a former Bush White House official. “We weren’t about to find him anytime soon. Publicly, we maintained a sense of urgency: ‘We’re looking as hard as we can.’ But the energy had gone out of the hunt. It had settled to no more than a second-tier issue. After all, those were the worst days of Iraq.”
The troubled war in Iraq, mounting concern about Iran’s nuclear program, and the increasingly unstable situation in North Korea stole attention from the bin Laden hunt, said White House and CIA officials.
The search for bin Laden, once the clarion cry of a nation bent on striking back, morphed into a topic Bush and his top staffers sought to avoid.
Tracking a Courier
Through the next few years, leaders of the hunt hoped that the drones surveying the tribal areas would generate new leads, “but it was just a hope,” said Juan Zarate, Bush’s deputy national security adviser for counterterrorism in the middle years of the search. “It was a very dark period.”
In the Bush White House, the lack of credible leads led to public statements designed to play down the individual and focus attention on the broader threat.
The idea was “not to overly aggrandize the man even as we tried to find him,” Zarate said. Outside the HV Unit, the landscape looked grim: “I can’t remember any single piece of intelligence that got us especially excited,” Zarate said.
Even as the hunt became a political liability, the road to bin Laden’s house in Abbottabad was being built, not “brick by brick,” said former CIA director Michael V. Hayden, but “pebble by pebble.”
In retrospect, momentum against al-Qaeda began to build because of two key factors: a major escalation in the campaign of attacks by armed Predator and Reaper drones, and an expanding network of informants that the CIA had managed to assemble from stations inside Afghanistan along the Pakistan border.
Indeed, officials said the two components became mutually reinforcing. Drone strikes not only killed militants associated with al-Qaeda but also sent ripples of anxiety through the network and forced operatives to take substantial risks as they searched for cover.
At the same time, the toll of the drone strikes eroded morale among militant networks, contributing to the agency’s effort to assemble a network of informants independent of Pakistan’s intelligence services. As the network grew, it fed new intelligence into an elaborate operation used to identify new drone targets.
But in the end, success in the hunt for bin Laden hinged almost entirely on identifying a single man: a courier operating out of Pakistan who had been trusted by bin Laden for years during which he had remained in control of al-Qaeda’s central command, even as his whereabouts were carefully concealed. Through messages carried by courier, bin Laden weighed in on major management decisions, although less frequently than he had before 2001 for fear of giving away his position. By design, he remained inaccessible for long periods.
But the Americans knew only the courier’s assumed name. Using information from detainees in U.S. custody, analysts and operatives spent years trying to learn the courier’s identity, concluding that he was a former protege of Mohammed, the Sept. 11 mastermind who was still detained at Guantanamo Bay.
The courier “had our constant attention,” according to an official involved in the hunt. Detainees “identified this man as one of the few al-Qaeda couriers trusted by bin Laden, indicated he might be living with or protecting bin Laden,” the official said.
Turning vague references to a courier into a verified name took upwards of four years, but that opened the door to discovering how the courier operated and the locations he frequented. Two years ago, U.S. officials narrowed down the region in Pakistan where the courier was working and then managed to intercept a phone call, one that seemed at first nothing more than an innocuous, catch-up phone conversation. Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti, the pseudonym for bin Laden’s courrier, was talking to an old friend.
Where have you been, inquired the friend. We’ve missed you. What’s going on in your life? And what are you doing now?
Kuwaiti’s response was vague but heavy with portent: “I’m back with the people I was with before.”
There was a pause, as if the friend knew that Kuwaiti’s words meant he had returned to bin Laden’s inner circle and was perhaps at the side of the al-Qaeda leader himself.
The friend replied, “May God facilitate.”
Using the cellphone number and a vast number of human and technical sources, by August of 2010 U.S. officials had tracked Kuwaiti to a very unusual compound in a very unexpected location: the Pakistani military garrison city of Abbottabad.
Bin Laden’s New Hideout
Abbottabad was far from being the almost lawless frontier where bin Laden was long thought to be hiding. It was a fairly cosmopolitan city, just two hours north of Islamabad by car. Home to the Pakistan Military Academy and two regimental compounds, with suburbs occupied by military families, the city was, by Pakistani standards, relatively welcoming to outsiders, including Pakistanis on vacation, military families being transferred to bases there and even U.S. soldiers who have at times been sent to Abbottabad to train Pakistani troops. It was not the sort of place where Islamic extremists tended to go.
The compound itself was even more surprising. It was a homely place with thick 12- to 18-foot security walls, multiple interior walls dividing the property and massive privacy walls blocking even a third-story balcony. Despite being valued at $1 million, the property had no Internet or phone service.
“When we saw the compound . . . we were shocked by what we saw,” an intelligence official told reporters, describing it as “an extraordinarily unique compound” built perhaps in 2005. “Everything we saw . . . was perfectly consistent with what our experts expected bin Laden’s hideout to look like.”
The main three-story building was impenetrable to eavesdropping technology deployed by the NSA.
Realizing the potential significance of the find, the CIA took advantage of the relatively open atmosphere in Abbottabad to send a small team of case officers into the city undetected to set up a safe house and recruit informants.
The spy team conducted extensive surveillance on the compound over a period of months, relying on their informants and other sources to help assemble a “pattern of life” portrait of the occupants of the compound.They worked with extraordinary caution because of the fear that the man in the compound and those sheltering him might vanish if spooked.
The work involved virtually every category of collection in the U.S. arsenal, ranging from satellite imagery to eavesdropping efforts aimed at recording voices inside the compound. The effort was so extensive and costly that the CIA went to Congress in December to secure authority to reallocate tens of millions of dollars within assorted agency budgets to fund it, U.S. officials said.
Those watching the compound were stunned to realize that whenever Kuwaiti or others left it to make a call, they drove about 90 minutes away before even placing a battery in a cellphone. Turning on the phone made it susceptible to the kind of electronic surveillance residents of the compound clearly wished to avoid.
As intelligence officials scrutinized images of the compound, they saw that a man emerged most days to stroll the grounds of the courtyard for an hour or two. The man walked back and forth, day after day, and soon analysts began calling him “the pacer.” The imagery never provided a clear view of his face.
Intelligence officials were reluctant to bring in other means of technical or human surveillance that might offer a positive identification but would risk detection by those in the compound. The pacer never left the compound. His routine suggested he was not just a shut-in but almost a prisoner.
Was the pacer bin Laden? A decoy? A hoax? A setup?
Bin Laden was at least 6-foot-4, and the pacer seemed to have the gait of a tall man. The White House asked the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, which provides and analyzes satellite imagery, to determine the pacer’s height, but the best it could do was place the man’s height somewhere between 5-foot-8 and 6-foot-8, according to one official.
The problem was a lack of information about the size of the building’s windows or the thickness of the compound’s walls, which could have served as reference points. No U.S. spy agency was ever able to capture a photograph of bin Laden at the compound before the raid or a recording of the voice of the mysterious male figure whose family occupied the structure’s top two floors.