Manhunt: The Ten-Year Search for Bin Laden--From 9/11 to Abbottabad
Read Manhunt: The Ten-Year Search for Bin Laden--From 9/11 to Abbottabad Online
Authors: Peter L. Bergen
Tags: #Intelligence & Espionage, #Political Freedom & Security, #21st Century, #United States, #Political Science, #Terrorism, #History
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, 1957–2011. 2. Qaida (Organization) 3. Terrorists—Saudi Arabia. 4. Fugitives from justice—United States. 5. Terrorism—United States—Prevention. 6. Special operations (Military science)—United States. 7. War on Terrorism, 2001–2009. I. Title.
HV6430.B55B473 2012
363.325’16092—dc23
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
A NOTE ABOUT THIS BOOK
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 Laden’s 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-Qaeda’s 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 official’s 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 Guantánamo, I was better able to map out bin Laden’s 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 leader’s 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 Laden’s 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 Bora—the region from which, four years later, just months after 9/11, he would stage one of history’s 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 Laden’s 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 America’s grasp.