Kill Bin Laden: a Delta Force Commander's account of the hunt for the world's most wanted man (55 page)

And with that, our Battle of Tora Bora officially came to a close.

For several years we would cling to the hope that bin Laden’s foul remains were still inside a darkened and collapsed Tora Bora cave and that the terrorist was forever an inmate in hell. It was not until October 2004 that we learned he had gotten out and was still alive.

We have to give him credit for that escape, but we also must recognize the price he paid. Bin Laden made it out, but he left behind a battered, beaten, and shell-shocked bunch of terrorists. Perhaps he also left behind some pools of his own blood, but most of all, he had to abandon buckets of self-respect.

Only two months after his spectacular and cowardly 9/11 attack on the United States, a handful of American and Brit commandos, a fleet of warplanes and an ill-trained force of Afghan muhj had ripped away his fortress and made him run for his life.

I’m just a poor slave of God. If I live or die, the war will continue.

   
—USAMA BIN LADEN, VIDEO TAPE PLAYED
DECEMBER 27, 2001

A month or so after the Battle of Tora Bora, I had an opportunity to fill in the Delta command group on what happened there. The official briefing was followed with an informal afternoon cup of coffee and a private sit-down with Col. Jim Schwitters, the Delta commander who was known as Flatliner for his unflappable manner.

I had known him for years, and as we spoke, I recalled a day that had given me an unexpected glimpse of both the colonel’s experience, and our own. After a training exercise in an American desert, we were returning to the base when the old asphalt road led us past a little-known but historically important site. Some derelict single-story buildings loomed off to our left, and we pulled over. As the Unit chaplain and I waited at the vehicle, Flatliner walked to an old wooden wall that had been weathered by the fiery desert sun and was anchored by four rusted but sturdy steel support cables. The buildings were discolored and warped from years of exposure.

Flatliner rested his hand on one of the rusty cables and rubbed it with reverence. He spoke to us in his trademark dry manner.

“We probably went over this wall a hundred times,” he said softly. His eyes swept the area as if it were occupied by ghosts. “We had to get
over the wall of the embassy to get to the hostages.” Flatliner added, looking up. “I don’t remember it being this high.”

It finally struck me that this was where Delta conducted its rehearsals for the planned rescue of American hostages in Iran back in 1979 and 1980. During that raid, Operation Eagle Claw, Jim Schwitters had been a young E-5 buck sergeant and was the radio operator for Delta’s founder and first unit commander: Col. Charlie Beckwith.

Besides this site being the rehearsal stage for the eventually aborted rescue mission, it also was where the infant Delta Force underwent its final evaluation by the Department of the Army to validate the long, painful, and costly birthing process.

If anyone knew first-hand how a good operation can go sour, it was Flatliner. He had been there.

The Delta commander listened carefully as I described the conflicted feelings that some of us had about the outcome in Tora Bora, and I believed that I was experiencing the same bitterness felt by the original Deltas after the Eagle Claw disaster. An important job had not been completed, and it was no one’s fault.

Tora Bora was yesterday, and all we could do about it was pick up and go forward to the next assignment. The war on terrorism was really only just getting under way, so there would be more battles in the future. Flatliner left the table after expressing how much he appreciated the boys’ efforts and individual acts of heroism.

There is no doubt that bin Laden was in Tora Bora during the fighting. From alleged sightings to the radio intercepts to news reports from various countries, it was repeatedly confirmed that he was there. The lingering mystery was: What happened then?

In February 2002, an audiotape was released to the al-Jazeera network in which the terrorist leader himself described the fighting at Tora Bora as a “great battle.” Although the tape was released at that time, it was not known when it had been made.

In May 2002, a decision was made to try and resolve the issue by
sending troops back to the now-quiet battlefield and having them do some exploring. The destination was the spot where some of General Ali’s fighters had reported seeing a tall individual, whom they believed to be bin Laden, enter a cave about noon on December 14, the day that his last radio transmission had been intercepted. The muhj reported the lanky figure had been accompanied by approximately fifty companions. The cave they entered had been targeted by a B-52 bomber that dumped dozens of JDAMs on the site and forever rearranged the terrain. Follow-up strikes pounded the area day and night with an extraordinary amount of ordnance.

The investigation team was preceded by several dozen Green Berets and some Navy SEALs under my command, who drove in during the early-morning darkness and mowed down trees and obstacles with explosives to create a landing zone for a couple of CH-47 helicopters. Then a combined group of the 101st Airborne Division, soldiers of the Canadian army, and a twenty-man forensic exploitation team arrived.

The Canadians and 101st paratroopers found the caves completely sealed by tons of rubble that towered several stories high. It was obvious that the few hundred pounds of explosives they had brought along with them were not going to be enough to open that rocky tomb.

The forensic team shifted its focus instead to an eerie place known by the locals as the Al Qaeda Martyr Memorial, where colorful banners fluttered lazily on graveyard sticks, a place that would later give the intel imagery analysts fits during planning for the raid to capture Gul Ahmed. An assortment of Afghan mujahideen watched them work, probably feeling ashamed and insulted as dozens of jihadist graves were exhumed.

None of the DNA recovered from the cemetery proved to be the bin Laden jackpot, and the suspect cave where the terrorist leader was believed possibly to be entombed was impenetrable. The mission was a bust, doing little more than deepen the mystery.

TV personality Geraldo Rivera had spent several days near Tora Bora during the battle and returned to the mountains for a television special
in September 2002. His interview with Gen. Hazret Ali in Jalalabad was broadcast on September 8, and I tuned in.

The general looked sharp in a suit and his familiar muhj hat, no longer just a bewildered muhj commander, but someone of substance and importance in his country. Shortly after the Tora Bora battle, Afghanistan’s new leader, Hamid Karzai, had promoted Hazret Ali to the rank of three-star general, and the sly fellow with only a sixth-grade education had become the most powerful warlord in eastern Afghanistan. I was biting my nails while he was on camera, but he stayed with our agreement and never even hinted that American commandos had been anywhere near the Tora Bora battlefield.

Ali remained consistent and accurate with the known facts: Usama bin Laden was seen by some of his fighters in Tora Bora and was repeatedly heard talking on the radio. Initially, the terrorist had been full of confidence and resolve, encouraging and sending instructions to his al Qaeda forces. But as the battle wore on, that confidence evaporated, and he was heard apologizing to his men and weeping for his failures.

That matched up perfectly with what I knew to be the basic reasons to show bin Laden had been there.

General Ali also used the broadcast to level blame at his archrival, Haji Zaman Ghamshareek, for orchestrating the cease-fire fiasco during the fight, and negotiating with al Qaeda fighters to buy time for bin Laden to escape. He offered no proof of the latter part of his statement.

A few years later, a newspaper in Pakistan reported an Afghan Interior Ministry spokesman who had been present at the battle as saying it was General Ali who was truly at fault, and that bin Laden paid Ali to look the other way as the terrorist fled across the border.

It was just tit-for-tat fingerpointing and got us no closer to finding out how bin Laden obtained safe passage into Pakistan.

While Ali became a three-star, his slippery rival Zaman fled the country and, at the time of this writing, remains on the run.

Several days after that interview, Rivera was back on TV from near the Afghanistan and Pakistan border. Sitting on a large boulder, the
visibly exhausted television guy described having made a three-hour walk through the Tora Bora Mountains, from Afghanistan into Pakistan. He displayed a colorful tourist map on which he had marked a small black X near the border to illustrate his location. His point was that if he could do it in three hours, then bin Laden would have had plenty of time during the cease-fire to abandon the field and cross safely into Pakistan. Just a three-hour hike!

For emphasis, Rivera read off his current latitude and longitude coordinates. I’m not sure exactly where Rivera was, but my mates and I had a good laugh as we watched him weave this bit of show business. What he claimed was a mere three-hour trek was a stretch of his imagination, because he was there in pleasant weather; during the harsh winter campaign, that same route would have required about ten hours, if it could have been done at all. Huge peaks blocked the way, along with impassable valleys where the snow blew horizontally in a hard and wicked wind and temperatures stayed well below freezing. By the way, the only thing shooting at Geraldo during his peaceful tour was his photographer’s camera.

The two events were in no way comparable. Rivera gave us nothing new.