The Hunt for bin Laden (4 page)

The Panjshir Missions

To pursue his plans in a serious way, Massoud needed helicopters, trucks and other vehicles. Some CIA officers working with Massoud wanted to help him by supplying the mobile equipment, cash, training and weapons he would need to expand his war against the Taliban and al-Qaeda. Yet as 2000 passed, the CIA struggled to maintain the basics of its intelligence liaison with Massoud.

It was difficult and risky for the agency’s officers to reach the Panjshir Valley. The only practical route was through Tajikistan. From there, CIA teams usually took one of the few rusting, patched-together Mi-17 transport helicopters the Northern Alliance managed to keep in the air. On one trip, the Taliban scrambled MiG-21 jets in an effort to shoot down Massoud’s helicopter. If successful, the militia would have discovered American corpses in the wreckage.

Even on the best days, the choppers would shake and rattle, and the cabin would fill with the smell of fuel. The overland routes were no better. When a CIA team drove in from Dushanbe, one of its vehicles flipped over and a veteran officer dislocated his shoulder.

These reports accumulated on the desk of Pavitt, the deputy director of operations who had overall responsibility for CIA espionage. Pavitt was a blue-eyed, white-haired former case officer and station chief who had served in Europe during the Cold War. Like Tenet, who had appointed him, he was a spy manager with a feel for politics. Pavitt began to ask why CIA officers were taking such huge physical risks to work with Massoud. Were they getting enough to justify the possibility of death or injury?

Those opposed to the Panjshir missions argued, as one official recalled it, “You’re sending people to their deaths.”

The agency sent out a team of mechanics knowledgeable about Russian helicopters. When Massoud’s men opened up one of the Mi-17s, the mechanics were stunned: An engine originally made for a Hind attack helicopter had been patched into the bay of the Mi-17 transport. It was a flying miracle.

Afterward, Tenet signed off on a compromise: The CIA would secretly buy its own airworthy Mi-17 helicopter, maintain it properly in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, and use CIA pilots to fly clandestine teams into the Panjshir.

But the helicopter issue was a symptom of a larger problem. By the late summer of 2000, the CIA’s liaison with Massoud was fraying on both sides.

Frustrated by daunting geography and unable to win support for Massoud in Cabinet debates, the CIA’s officers felt stifled. For their part, Massoud’s aides had hoped their work with the agency would lead to clearer recognition of Afghanistan’s plight in Washington and perhaps covert military aid. They could see no evidence that this was happening.

Instead they were badgered repeatedly about mounting a “Hollywood operation,” as one of Massoud’s intelligence aides put it, to capture bin Laden alive. The aide likened the mission urged on them by the CIA to a game of chess, in which they would have to capture the king without touching any other piece on the board.

Massoud’s men asked their CIA counterparts, as this intelligence aide recalled it: “Is there any policy in the government of the American states to help Afghanistan if the people of Afghanistan help you get rid of your most-wanted man?”

After the terrorist bombing of the USS Cole in October 2000, in which 17 sailors were killed at Aden, Yemen, the CIA’s Panjshir teams tried to revive their plan to supply Massoud with more extensive and more lethal aid. CIA officers sat down in November at Langley and drew up a specific list of what Massoud needed. In addition to more cash — to bribe commanders and to counteract a Taliban treasury swollen with Arab money — Massoud needed trucks, helicopters, light arms, ammunition, uniforms, food, and maybe some mortars and artillery. He did not need combat aircraft. Tanks were not a priority.

The list of covert supplies proposed for Massoud would cost between $50 million and $150 million, depending on how aggressive the White House wanted to be.

Under the plan, the CIA would establish a permanent base with Massoud in the Panjshir Valley. Rich, the bin Laden unit chief, argued that the agency’s officers had to constantly be down around the campfire with Massoud’s men.

The CIA wanted to overcome the confusion and mutual mistrust that had developed with Massoud over operations designed to capture or kill bin Laden. The plan envisioned that CIA officers would go directly into action alongside the Northern Alliance if they developed strong intelligence about bin Laden’s whereabouts. There would be no more embarrassments like the mission against Derunta.

In the late autumn, Clarke sent a memo outlining the CIA’s proposal to Berger, Clinton’s national security adviser. But they were worse than lame ducks now at the White House. The November presidential election had deadlocked; White House aides were enduring the strangest post-election transition in a century just as the CIA’s paper landed on their desks.

The word went back to the Counterterrorist Center: There would be no new covert-action program for Massoud.

Covert War in Jeopardy

As the Bush administration took office early in 2001, Massoud retained a Washington lobbyist. He wrote a letter to Vice President Cheney urging the new administration to reexamine U.S. policy toward Afghanistan. He told his advisers that he knew he could not defeat the Taliban on the battlefield as long as the ruling militia was funded by bin Laden and reinforced from Pakistan. He sought to build up a new political and military coalition within Afghanistan to squeeze the Taliban and break its grip on ordinary Afghans. For this, sooner or later, he told visitors, he would require the support of the United States.

His CIA liaison had slackened, but his intelligence aides still spoke and exchanged messages frequently with Langley. That spring, they passed word that Massoud had been invited to France to address the European Parliament.

Schroen, the CIA officer from Islamabad, and Rich flew to Paris to meet with Massoud. They wanted to reassure him that even though the pace of their visits had slowed because of the policy gridlock in Washington, the CIA still intended to keep up its regular installment payments of several hundred thousand dollars as part of their intelligence-sharing arrangements. They also wanted to know how Massoud felt about his military position.

Massoud told them that he thought he could defend his lines in the northeast of Afghanistan but that was about all. The United States had to do something, Massoud told the CIA officers quietly, or eventually he was going to crumble.

“If President Bush doesn’t help us,” Massoud told reporters in Strasbourg a few days later, “then these terrorists will damage the United States and Europe very soon — and it will be too late.”

Early in September 2001, Massoud’s intelligence service transmitted a routine classified report to the CIA’s Counterterrorist Center about two Arab television journalists who had crossed Northern Alliance lines from Kabul.

The intelligence-sharing between Massoud and the CIA concentrated mainly on Arabs and foreigners in Afghanistan. In this case, officers in the bin Laden unit at the Counterterrorist Center took note of the movement of the two journalists. It did not seem of exceptional interest.

Members of the Bush’s Cabinet met Sept. 4 at the White House. Before them was a draft copy of a National Security Presidential Directive, a classified memo outlining a new U.S. policy toward al-Qaeda, Afghanistan and Massoud.

It had been many months in the drafting. The Bush administration’s senior national security team had not begun to focus on al-Qaeda until April, about three months after taking office. They did not forge a policy approach until July. Then they took additional weeks to schedule a meeting to ratify their plans.

Among other things, the draft document revived almost in its entirety the CIA plan to aid Massoud that had been forwarded to the lame-duck Clinton White House — and rejected — nine months earlier. The stated goal of the draft was to eliminate bin Laden and his organization. The plan called for the CIA to supply Massoud with a large but undetermined sum for covert action to support his war against the Taliban, as well as trucks, uniforms, ammunition, mortars, helicopters and other equipment. The Bush Cabinet approved this part of the draft document.

Other aspects of the Bush administration’s al-Qaeda policy, such as its approach to the use of armed Predator surveillance drones for the hunt, remained unresolved after the Sept. 4 debate. But concerning Massoud, the CIA was told that it could at least start the paperwork for a new covert policy — the first in a decade that sought to influence the course of the Afghan war.

In the Panjshir Valley, Massoud — unaware of these developments — read Persian poetry in his bungalow in the early hours of Sept. 9. Later that morning, he finally decided to grant an interview to the two Arab journalists from Kabul.

As one of them set up a television camera, the other read aloud a list of questions he intended to ask. About half of them concerned bin Laden.

A bomb secretly packed in the television equipment ripped the cameraman’s body apart. It shattered the room’s windows, seared the walls in flame and tore Massoud’s chest with shrapnel.

Hours later, after Massoud had been evacuated to Tajikistan, his intelligence aide Amrullah Saleh called the CIA’s Counterterrorist Center. He spoke to Rich, the bin Laden unit chief. Saleh was sobbing and heaving between sentences as he explained what had happened.

“Where’s Massoud?” the CIA officer asked.

“He’s in the refrigerator,” said Saleh, searching for the English word for morgue.

Massoud was dead, but members of his inner circle had barely absorbed the news. They were all in shock. They were also trying to strategize in a hurry. They had already put out a false story claiming that Massoud had only been wounded. Meanwhile, Saleh told the Counterterrorist Center, the suddenly leaderless Northern Alliance needed the CIA’s help as it prepared to confront al-Qaeda and the Taliban.

On the morning of Sept. 10, the CIA’s daily classified briefings to Bush, his Cabinet and other policymakers reported on Massoud’s death and analyzed the consequences for the United States’ covert war against al-Qaeda.

Officers in the Counterterrorist Center, still hopeful that they could maintain a foothold in northern Afghanistan to attack bin Laden, called frantically around Washington to find a way to aid the rump Northern Alliance before it was eliminated.

Massoud’s advisers and lobbyists, playing for time, tried to promote speculation that Massoud might still be alive. But as Sept. 10 wore on, privately and phone call by phone call many of the Afghans closest to the commander began to learn that he was gone.

Karzai, who was in Pakistan when his brother reached him, had spoken to Massoud a few days earlier. He was considering a plan to fly into Massoud’s territory, work his way south and open an armed rebellion against the Taliban — with or without U.S. support.

Karzai’s brother said it was confirmed: Ahmed Shah Massoud was dead.

Karzai reacted in a single, brief sentence, as his brother recalled it: “What an unlucky country.”

Al-Qaeda’s Murderous Strike

Within 24 hours, it would be the United States that proved to be an unlucky country.

On the morning of Sept. 11, 19 al-Qaeda operatives, some of whom had been living and working in America for years, hijacked four commercial airliners, flying two of them into the World Trade Center twin towers within minutes of each other. A third plane struck the Pentagon, and on a fourth, passengers who had heard the news of the attacks on New York and Washington sacrificed their lives to foil the terrorists’ plans to hit the Capitol or the White House. They stormed the plane’s cockpit, overpowered the hijackers and drove the plane down nose-first into a Pennsylvania field. In all, nearly 3,000 people died in the attacks, and the world’s sole superpower was shaken to its foundations.

As the planes streaked toward their targets, bin Laden was in his Kandahar stronghold attempting to get a TV signal. According to a former bodyguard, bin Laden had asked his media chief to try to set up a satellite dish, but the mountainous terrain prevented that. On a videotape discovered in Afghanistan after the attacks, bin Laden said he was at dinner when he heard that the towers had collapsed. He toasted the victory, then expressed surprise that the strike had brought the buildings down.

Still basking in the glow of his success, bin Laden declared that he and his followers were engaged in a preordained war that would continue until the climax of Earthly time, a war that was not a means to a political end but rather an expression of God’s will and as such could offer no peace to the enemies of God’s true religion.

Intelligence analysts would later learn, mainly through interrogations of al-Qaeda operatives held at CIA “black sites” overseas and at the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, that after the attacks, bin Laden went on the run in a hectic tour of Afghanistan.

But in the immediate aftermath of Sept. 11, the Americans had no idea that bin Laden and his chief deputy, an Egyptian doctor named Ayman al-Zawahiri, were on the move, traveling by car, meeting frequently with followers and Taliban leaders. According to classified U.S. military documents based on interviews with detainees and obtained by the anti-secrecy group WikiLeaks, bin Laden held court at a secret guesthouse in or near Kabul.

Acting like an exiled head of state, he received terrorist operatives from Afghanistan, Malaysia and elsewhere and met with such leaders as the Taliban’s Jalaluddin Haqqani. He issued instructions for campaigns against Western targets, lectured on Islam and history, and sent out a video boasting about how pleasantly surprised he was that the attacks had claimed so many American lives.

On October 7, less than a month after the Sept. 11 attacks, U.S. bombers began hitting Afghanistan, hoping to bring down the Taliban government for giving al-Qaeda sanctuary. On the ground, the hunt for bin Laden was also underway. A few dozen U.S. paramilitary troops, dressed as Afghans in beards and loose robes and accompanied by hired Afghan fighters, took up the chase. The American presence in the manhunt at first was thin, and expertise was scarce. The CIA team that had been tracking bin Laden from back home at Langley since 1996 scrambled to find officers who knew Afghanistan and could deploy immediately. Only about a dozen agency people were working in the country on Sept. 11, according to a former senior intelligence official who helped set up agency outposts there.

The first job was to identify tribal leaders and meet with them, always bringing gifts. “The message was ,‘We’re your friends,’ ” said the senior intelligence official. “We’re everyone’s friends. But whoever hosts us is in line to get American money.”