88 Days to Kandahar: A CIA Diary (47 page)

Our targeting system went into overdrive, and we began generating multiple sites for General Imran and his operators—many more than we would be able to handle at one time, even if only a portion of the suspected targets proved viable. Until then, we had done a maximum of two or three raids on a given night, but since we couldn’t pin Abu Zubayda to any particular one of the targeted locations, we determined that we would have to hit every identified site simultaneously, in hopes that Zubayda might be in one of them. Manpower would of course be no problem for the Pakistanis, but we would not have nearly enough Americans—CIA or FBI—to go around; both had to be present at each
target location. We deployed a number of our officers to Faisalabad, with a senior visiting ethnic-Arab CIA case officer in charge—a first-rate fellow dubbed “Detroit” by the FBI—to work with the Pakistanis under Dave’s supervision and set the raid plan. I went to work getting us more resources.

The one source of readily deployable people, not otherwise productively occupied, that I knew of was the Incident Response Team (IRT) in CTC. This unit had a long and undistinguished pedigree. It had been created with much fanfare back in the 1980s, given a dedicated aircraft, highly skilled operational and technical officers, and the most sophisticated gadgetry available at the time. The idea was that any time there was a terrorist incident anywhere in the world, such as a plane hijacking or hostage taking, the IRT would be sent in to provide advice, guidance, and technical assistance to the host government. It was a wonderful idea, with a small wrinkle: No country would have it. Any time there is a terrorist incident, the government of the concerned country wants to demonstrate that it is competent to deal with it. Inviting foreigners to handle a high-profile situation is a political impossibility, and bringing in such a team surreptitiously, directly under the glare of world media, would be unfeasible. Add to that the fact that many governments will want to have the flexibility to deal with such incidents in their own way—perhaps to include paying ransom or striking some other deal the United States is likely to disapprove of—and you begin to understand why the Incident Response Team may not have been such a good idea after all. As the years of inaction mounted, the team became something of a refuge for misfits and problem children.

I got a bad feeling when I held a video conference with the unit’s chief. I made clear that I was only looking for people who could passively observe detentions and make copies of any materials seized: all the muscle would be provided by the Pakistanis. The IRT, bristling with guns and pent-up testosterone, was looking for validation and a larger role. They would prove problematic, but I’d gotten the bodies I needed.

On the afternoon of March 28, 2002, Dave laid out the plan for the visiting senators. After ground investigations led by the ISI, we had
winnowed the number of targets in Faisalabad to fourteen. We had identified another three related locations well outside town. All would be hit simultaneously. I rated the chances of capturing Abu Zubayda at fifty-fifty. We had also identified another “safe” location quite some distance from Faisalabad to which we thought Abu Zubayda might flee if we missed him in the first wave. We would allow for reasonable travel time, and then hit that one, too.

The raids were to be launched late that night. Two hours beforehand, I got a call from “Detroit.” The ISI had detected a “squirter”: one of the militants had left a target villa under surveillance, and boarded a train south. Surely we should not have him arrested right away, Detroit advised. He might alert others with a cell phone. Should we just let him go?

“No,” I said. “For all we know, it might be Abu Zubayda.” We had not told the ISI about our main target. “Have the Pakistanis break off surveillance so as to avoid alerting him. They can relay a full description ahead and have him picked up at a scheduled stop after the start of the raids.” I lost all track of this fellow in the subsequent excitement; I have no idea if he was ever picked up.

At most locations, the raids went smoothly. Dozens of foreign militants were captured. The teams at at least two locations claimed initially to have captured Zubayda, based on identification from outdated photographs, but just as quickly concluded they were in error. There was firing at one location not far from the safehouse in Faisalabad where our officers were staged. A militant had attempted to escape across the roof of the villa in which he was trapped, but was shot several times in the thigh and lower abdomen by a member of the Punjab Rangers, a paramilitary force pressed into service by the ISI. Badly wounded and bleeding profusely, the man was dumped onto the rear bed of a police pickup truck. Dave Falco, a visiting FBI special agent, took a look at him. The man in the truck appeared quite different from the one in the photograph. He was considerably heavier, and had no facial hair. “It’s him,” Dave said.

Chris Reimann, the legal attaché, rushed to the scene. He shook his head. “I don’t think so,” he said, but Falco was adamant. They took a
picture at the scene, which was sent by sat link to CIA Headquarters. Within a few minutes, after some technical analysis, CTC returned its assessment: an over 85 percent likelihood that this was, in fact, Abu Zubayda. That was encouraging, but in the meantime the wounded captive was bleeding to death. He had to be gotten to a hospital. A Pakistani police driver leapt behind the wheel of the truck. It wouldn’t start. A mixed group of Pakistanis and Americans pushed to jump-start it; finally, the engine caught with a lurch, and the truck raced off, with several other vehicles following.

Detroit reached me in my office. I directed that there was to be an American with Abu Zubayda every minute, 24/7, until we could get him out of the country. I didn’t relish the thought of trying to explain how we had let him escape if he went missing. Detroit set up a round-the-clock watch at the hospital. All the IRT members, notably, declined to participate. The raids over, they were eager to return to a safer locale. Soon, Detroit was back on the phone. He was with Zubayda.

“There’s firing outside the hospital,” he said. He hadn’t seen anything penetrate the building, but feared they might be under attack. Dave, my deputy, immediately phoned Imran. The general called back ten minutes later, laughing.

“It’s just celebratory firing,” he said. “There’s a wedding in the neighborhood.”

I arrived home at three in the morning. Four hours later, I was driving myself in an armored SUV to a breakfast appointment in town.

As is now well known, Abu Zubayda survived his wounds. After a day and a half in that hospital in Faisalabad, he was sufficiently stable to be moved by helicopter to a hospital in Lahore. A day later, he was loaded aboard a CIA plane and taken to a third country where he was treated, and then interrogated. He was the first senior member of al-Qa’ida to be captured. It was his apprehension which triggered—one might say forced—CIA back into the business of interrogation, after a hiatus of many years.

There remains much confusion about what Abu Zubayda represented. Some say that we erred in considering him a senior leader. I don’t think they understand the way we perceived him. After tracking
the man for two and a half years, I did not believe he was a senior
leader
; he was merely a
senior,
and a very important one. The distinction is significant. If al-Qa’ida were an army, Abu Zubayda would certainly not be a commander, or even an executive officer. He was more like a sergeant major. He wasn’t hatching plots and giving orders: he was the guy who got things done. I did not expect that he would know the time or place of the next attack; in fact, I would have been surprised if he did know such things. I had little doubt, however, that he would know the names, the aliases, the phone numbers, the points of contact that would enable us to find and capture the operatives who would be involved in those future attacks.

That was what we, the entire U.S. government, and indeed the American people most feared in those days: the next attack. CIA was supposed to make sure it didn’t happen. Given the importance of what we were sure was in Abu Zubayda’s head, extracting it was not a responsibility we could delegate to someone else. We would have to do it ourselves, and quickly. This was the thinking and the unbearable pressure which led us, starting with Abu Zubayda and continuing with the even more important captures made subsequently, down the road that led to CIA “black sites” and coercive interrogation techniques. I couldn’t know it in 2002, but it would someday fall to me to deal with that legacy.

EARLY APRIL 2002

T
HE MOST SURPRISING THING
about the man was the softness of his voice. The timbre was deep, but the volume was barely above a whisper. Sitting a few feet away, I had to lean forward to hear him—to the point where I thought this must be a ploy to gain advantage. It was hard to argue with someone when you were devoting all your energies simply to hearing what he had to say.

The post of Director-General for Military Operations, or DGMO, in the Pakistan Army is only a two-star slot, its occupant nominally on a par with all the divisional commanders in the Pakistani armed forces, of which there are many. The leaders of Pakistan’s Army, the three-star Corps commanders, are far more prominent than the DGMO, their support carefully cultivated by the four-star chief of Army Staff. But in this case, rank is deceiving, even in the ultra-rank-conscious Pakistan Army. In fact, the DGMO has enormous power, essentially controlling the day-to-day operations of Pakistan’s military, and exercising great influence, even if from behind the scenes. That was why I was sitting across a desk from this slight, chain-smoking army officer inside a brick bungalow flanking the central courtyard at the General Headquarters of the Pakistan Army. Major General Ashfaq Pervaiz Kayani, I would soon learn, was the ultimate behind-the-scenes operator. What he clearly lacked in command presence he more than made up for in intelligence, clarity of thought, and deftness of maneuver. To me, he was the Sage. The truth was that I was caught, once again, in the fog of mutual incomprehension
between Washington and Islamabad. I was looking for an ally, and badly needed his help.

Ironically, in view of CTC’s distrust of the Pakistanis, the first reports I was aware of concerning al-Qa’ida fighters in the area of Afghanistan’s Shahi Kot Valley came to us from Brigadier Suhail Majid, the ISI Afghanistan expert. According to his sources, as of late January 2002, Arabs were regularly descending from the mountains near Zormat, in Afghanistan’s eastern Paktia Province, to buy food from villagers in the valleys below. They appeared well equipped, and had money to spend. These reports were followed by others from American sources, and soon it was clear that there were at least several hundred foreign fighters in and around Shahi Kot. One had to wonder how many had escaped Kandahar, from under our noses.

By early February 2002, CIA and the U.S. military command in Afghanistan were collaborating on a strategy to attack them. The plan, as I understood it, appeared intended as a refinement of the one that had largely come to grief in Tora Bora. Again, an Afghan militia organized by CIA, guided and supplemented by U.S. Special Forces, was intended to be the main fighting force. It would sweep into the Shahi Kot Valley from the west. But this time, the expected escape routes at the northern and southern ends of the valley, and through the mountains to the east, would be blocked by a combination of U.S. conventional and Special Operations forces. That was the plan.

In subsequent weeks, as Afghan forces were being trained and U.S. units moved into place, I received a pair of cables from CTC, describing the evolving battle arrangements for “Operation Anaconda.” Both expressed the peculiar view that the key to our success—and the chief weakness in the plan—would be the Pakistanis’ ability to seal their border and interdict foreign fighters fleeing the Shahi Kot battle zone. Given my past history with CTC, it was hard not to be paranoid about this. It seemed to me an obvious and gratuitous effort to shift the blame for possible failure onto the Pakistanis and, by extension, onto me.

I shot back immediately to both cables. The Pakistani border, I pointed out, was a minimum of 50 kilometers distant from the area where we hoped to hem in the al-Qa’ida fighters. The further out one
projected from the battle zone, the wider the area in which “squirters” could disperse, and the greater the consequent difficulty in intercepting them. There should be no illusions about the Pakistanis’ ability to control infiltration across their border, I said.

In January, when General Jafar and I had made our second foray into the Tribal Areas, Colonel Wajahat Chaudry, the Tochi Scouts’ commander, had taken us to their elevated observation post at Ghulam Khan, northwest of Miram Shah. From there, we had an unobstructed view over many miles of the Afghanistan-Pakistan frontier opposite Khost, Zormat, and the Shahi Kot Valley. The low, brown, treeless hills to our west offered little impediment to would-be infiltrators. Though Colonel Wajahat provided a spiritedly optimistic appraisal of his ability to control the area, it was obvious that with the few resources at his disposal, the border was essentially wide open, particularly at night. Lacking any sort of electronic sensors or other means of technical observation, the colonel’s system of static checkposts and infrequent foot patrols could be easily circumvented.

I shared CTC’s reluctance to provide an advance indication to the Pakistanis concerning the timing or location of our intended attacks on al-Qa’ida. We had no assurances that the information would be protected as we would wish, and the risk of a leak to the enemy would be intolerable. But even my modest proposal to wait until after the battle was well under way, and then merely to make suggestions to the Pak military as to which sections of the border we would wish them to reinforce, was met with cold silence. Under the circumstances, I said, if we intended that the foreign fighters in and around Shahi Kot should be entrapped, we had better make sure we were in a position to do it ourselves.