Peter L. Bergen - Manhunt: The Ten-Year Search for Bin Laden--from 9/11 to Abbottabad

ALSO BY PETER L. BERGEN

THE LONGEST WAR

THE OSAMA BIN LADEN I KNOW

HOLY WAR, INC .

Copyright 2012 by Peter L. Bergen

All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Crown Publishers,
an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group,
a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
www.crownpublishing.com

CROWN and the Crown colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Bergen, Peter L., 1962
Manhunt : the ten-year search for Bin Laden from 9/11 to Abbottabad / Peter L. Bergen. 1st ed.
1. Bin Laden, Osama, 19572011. 2. Qaida (Organization) 3. TerroristsSaudi Arabia. 4. Fugitives from justiceUnited States. 5. TerrorismUnited StatesPrevention. 6. Special operations (Military science)United States. 7. War on Terrorism, 20012009. I. Title.

HV6430.B55B473 2012
363.32516092dc23

2012004258

eISBN: 978-0-307-95558-6

Maps by Gene Thorp
Jacket design by Ben Wiseman
Jacket art by Universal History Archive/Getty Images
Author photograph: CNN/Brent Stirton

v3.1

For Pierre Timothy Bergen,
born November 17, 2011

We sleep soundly in our beds because rough men stand ready in the night to visit violence on those who would do us harm.

WINSTON CHURCHILL

It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming, but who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself for a worthy cause; who, at the best, knows, in the end, the triumph of high achievement, and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who knew neither victory nor defeat.

THEODORE ROOSEVELT

I FIRST MET Osama bin Laden in the middle of the night in a mud hut in the mountains of eastern Afghanistan in March 1997. I was there to produce his first television interview for CNN. In person bin Laden was not the table-thumping revolutionary I had expected, presenting himself as a low-key cleric. But while his manner was mild, his words were full of a raw hatred of the United States. Bin Laden surprised us by declaring war on the United States on camera; it was the first time he had done so before a Western audience. That warning, of course, was not sufficiently heeded, and four years later came the 9/11 attacks.

In a sense, I have been preparing to write this book ever since. While the exact timing of bin Ladens capture or death could not be predicted, it was all but inevitable that he would eventually be tracked down. The book you are about to read is the full story of how that happened.

After bin Laden was killed, I traveled to Pakistan three times, on my last visit making an extensive tour of the Abbottabad compound in which he lived his final years. I was the first outside observer to be granted entry by the Pakistani military, which controlled all access, and two weeks after my visit, in late February 2012, the complex was demolished.

The visit to the compound helped me form a much better understanding of the way al-Qaedas leader and his family and followers lived there for years undetected, and of the U.S. Navy SEAL raid that killed bin Laden. I stood in the room where bin Laden lived for almost six years of his life and where he finally died. I also spoke to a variety of Pakistani security and military officials who investigated the SEAL raid and who were privy to the debriefings of his wives and children who were living on the compound.

On the U.S. side, I spoke to almost every senior official at the White House, Defense Department, CIA, State Department, National Counterterrorism Center, and Office of the Director of National Intelligence who was responsible for building and assessing the intelligence on bin Laden, weighing the possible courses of action in response to the suspected bin Laden compound, and overseeing the execution of the raid. Many of these officials are quoted by name in the book, but several could not be quoted directly due to the sensitivity of aspects of the mission. In the cases where a CIA officials name has not been made public I have used a pseudonym. (No one, including myself, has interviewed the U.S. Navy SEALs who were on the mission.) The SEALs recovered some six thousand documents at the bin Laden compound in Abbottabad. At the White House, I was allowed to review a number of those just-declassified, unpublished documents in mid-March 2012.

The anti-secrecy website WikiLeaks proved another very useful source of information. By consulting leaked, classified documents about Guantnamo, I was better able to map out bin Ladens movements after the 9/11 attacks and to reconstruct how CIA officials were able to zero in on the courier who led them to the al-Qaeda leaders front door. Just because a U.S. government document is secret does not, of course, guarantee that it is accurate, and so I did my best to cross-reference those documents with a variety of other accounts and sources.

This reporting was supplemented by additional interviews with former CIA officials and U.S. military officers involved in the hunt for bin Laden in the decade after 9/11, and multiple trips to Afghanistan to retrace bin Ladens footsteps at the Battle of Tora Bora, where he managed to evade the grasp of the United States during the winter of 2001.

When I met bin Laden back in 1997, it was outside the Afghan city of Jalalabad and close to the mountains of Tora Borathe region from which, four years later, just months after 9/11, he would stage one of historys great disappearing acts and become the subject of the most intensive and expensive manhunt of all time. It was perhaps fitting that, a decade later, on the moonless night of May 1, 2011, bin Ladens final reckoning would begin with helicopters launched from Jalalabad Airfield. As they ascended, the Navy SEALs on board could see through the pixilated green glow of their night-vision goggles the mountains of Tora Bora only thirty miles to the south, rising fourteen thousand feet to the sky: the last place that a small group of American Special Operations Forces had bin Laden in their sights. This time, they vowed, bin Laden would not escape Americas grasp.

I T WAS A PERFECT HIDING PLACE .

Squint a little and the neat houses that climb up the green hills and compact mountains that surround Abbottabad are reminiscent of Switzerland, or maybe Bavaria. This Pakistani city of some five hundred thousand souls sits at four thousand feet in the foothills of the Himalayas, which march in ranks toward the border with China. The town was founded in 1853 by James Abbott, an English officer who was a bit player in the Great Game that pitted the British and Russians against each other as they struggled for mastery in Central Asia. Somewhat unusually for an administrator of the Raj, Major Abbott was beloved by the inhabitants of Abbottabad. Abbott even penned an awkward but heartfelt poem to the town when he departed for England: