To Kill a Wanted Man

The twists and turns of the world’s most expensive manhunt ever

The first time they pulled the trigger on Osama bin Laden was on 20 August 1998, long before they dug into Apache history to codename him Geronimo. That was the day that US President Bill Clinton ordered a military strike on a camp in the rocklands of Zawahar Killi in Afghanistan. Back then, it was the cruise missiles that had a Red Indian name: 75 Tomahawks slammed into the camp, killing dozens of jihadist fighters who had reportedly gathered for a jihad strategy meeting. But, apparently, Osama was not among them.

Clinton’s okay for the missile strike came after US intelligence detected Osama’s signature on the 7 August 1998 attacks on US embassies in Nairobi and Dar-es-Salaam. It wasn’t that Osama wasn’t on the US radar before that. The US actively started collecting intelligence on him from 1993 onwards in Sudan—to which the Sudanese government had welcomed him after his expulsion from Saudi Arabia in 1991. In Khartoum, Osama dabbled in an import and export business in collusion with Sudanese government officials. He was still a businessman then, with big money at his disposal. Two transactions perhaps stand out from this period. Following a Pakistan crackdown on Arab jihadists in 1993, Osama wired money to fly in nearly 500 of them to Khartoum to become part of his guard. He also reportedly wired $210,000 to a contact in the US to purchase a jet to transfer weapons between Pakistan and Sudan.

It was only in January 1996 that America’s Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) opened an office near its Langley headquarters, codenamed Alex Station, to be charged fulltime with the task of tracking Osama. It was the first time in the history of the US that a counter terrorism cell had been formed to focus on just one individual: one of the ‘most significant financial sponsors of Islamic extremist activities in the world’, as the CIA had begun to view him. With a team of a dozen, the station brought together all kinds of technical intelligence, even managing to get intercepts of the man’s satellite phone.

Later that year, the Sudanese regime—under American pressure—issued Osama an ultimatum to leave Sudan, and arranged an Ariana Afghan jet to fly him and his entourage to Jalalabad in Afghanistan (the plane refuelled in Doha). The Taliban, having just taken over the country, welcomed Osama and offered him a sanctuary close to Kandahar airport at Tarnak Farms, an agricultural compound. Writes Steve Coll in Ghost Wars: ‘The United States still had no legal indictment or covert action plan to target Laden. The virtual bin Laden station in Virginia tracked his financial dealings and analyzed his public statements but had yet to direct lethal operations against him.’

Interestingly, as Coll says, the first CIA plan to capture or kill Laden emerged from a CIA plan to arrest Mir Amal Kasi, a Pakistani migrant who had been involved in a shootout at the CIA headquarters in 1993. The Islamabad CIA station had recruited a group of Afghan tribal fighters, who had earlier fought the Soviets, to assist in the hunt for

Kasi. Codenamed FD/TrodPint, they were essentially bounty hunters. The plan that eventually developed was for the Afghan team to capture and hold Osama in Afghanistan for a month before the US flew him to Egypt or Saudi Arabia for trial. Trying him in a US court was also a possibility.

Writes Coll: ‘The CIA plan to capture Laden also had to accommodate another layer of American law governing covert action: the presidential ban on assassination by the CIA or its agents, a ban initiated by President Gerald R Ford in 1976 and renewed by President Ronald Reagan in executive order 12333. To comply with this part of the law, when they met with their agents, the CIA officers had to make clear that the effort to capture bin Laden could not turn into an assassination hit.’

The detailed plan drawn up between the CIA and the TrodPint team envisaged a night raid on the Tarnak Farm complex and a building-to-building search to locate Osama. But the plan never got the go-ahead signal for fear of too much ‘collateral damage’ (Osama and his bodyguards had their families with them), and the general assessment that the Afghan team would only fight the way they knew best—all guns blazing.

What the twin embassy bombings in Africa did was impart America’s hunt for Osama bin Laden a sense of utmost urgency. Briefed by the CIA that he had ‘planned, funded and ordered’ the 7 August 1998 attacks, Clinton issued a secret Memorandum of Notification authorising the CIA to use lethal force to capture bin Laden and others.

The CIA demanded clarity on the legal cover they had, raising such questions as at what point ‘was it permissible to shoot a suspect overseas in the course of an attempted arrest’. Though some higher-ups in the US administration wondered whether the CIA was turning ‘gun shy’, as this narrative goes, the agency only wanted to eliminate any scope for misinterpretation in case things went wrong. Lawyers had to assure the CIA in writing that it was legal to shoot bin Laden as long as it was in self-defence and during the course of an attempted arrest.

Soon enough, the CIA came up with another proposal. This time, it involved Pakistan’s Inter Services Intelligence (ISI) carrying a message to Osama that could be read only by him. The CIA plan was to have the TrodPint team ambush Osama while he was on his way to meet the ISI officer. According to Coll, the plan was rejected by ISI chief General Ziauddin (under the Nawaz Sharif government).

The next move on the Osama front was Nawaz Sharif’s own. In a one-on-one meeting with Clinton in 1998, the Pakistani prime minister offered to have the ISI train a team of former Pakistani special forces (with CIA assistance) to go after bin Laden. All the CIA had to do was pinpoint his location, and Pakistani commandos would swoop down on the Arab. The US accepted the Pakistani proposal, even though it recognised the utter unlikelihood of a Pakistani team actually going after the man.

Soon after this, the CIA received a tip-off that bin Laden was to join or had joined an Emirati Sheikh’s hunting expedition in southern Afghanistan (falcon hunting of the houbara bustard was known to be a passion with Bedouins). The TrodPint team marked the hunting camp with beacons and took its GPS coordinates. As claimed, they even identified the exact tent that Osama was in. But, worried that he may not really be there and a missile strike would end up incinerating a bunch of Emiratis, White House personnel quit the idea.

Alex Station, which had been unable to convince CIA Director George Tenet that bin Laden was there (an extremely high probability of his presence was its assessment), underwent a churn after this episode. Tenet appointed Coffer Black as its new head, the man who had been CIA station chief in Sudan in 1993 and the one who had initiated the intelligence gathering on Osama in Khartoum.

By early 1999, the CIA believed that bin Laden could strike against the US anytime. Later that year, a problem pinned on Alex Station was that it was heavily staffed by analysts from the US Directorate of Intelligence and not spies from the Directorate of Operations. Besides, some complained that 70 per cent of its staffers were women and many case officers stationed in the field didn’t take too kindly to requests from ‘ladies sitting in Langley’.

Meanwhile, to complement TrodPint’s efforts (plus the Pakistani commandos’), Black decided to seek the help of Ahmad Shah Massoud, the charismatic Tajik leader and head of the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan, in going after bin Laden.

In early 2000, the CIA received an intelligence input that bin Laden was at a training camp at Derunta, near Jalalabad. Supplied by the Agency with this information, Masood packed off a team, armed with Soviet Katyusha rockets loaded on muleback, towards the site. Once his men had embarked on their mission, Masood called Langley back with his plan. This sent CIA lawyers into a panic, since the Tajik leader had only been authorised to gather information, not attack Osama—an event that would violate Clinton’s Memorandrum of Notification. Masood, on his part, shrugged and told the CIA that his team had no satellite phones or radio links and could not be called back. At the end, however, it didn’t matter. For, nothing came of it.

The ISI’s commando team was equally pointless. It didn’t survive the army coup of 12 October 1999 that brought General Pervez Musharraf to power. And under changed circumstances, the crack team’s leader Ziauddin presumably didn’t want to be ‘on the wrong side of history’.

Sometime in the spring of 2000, Alex Station’s staffers brainstormed with Clinton’s counter-terrorism chief Richard Clarke, and came up with their now-famous Predator drone experiment. The initial idea was to use unmanned aerial aircraft to keep a round-the-clock eye on the Tarnak Farm, to which Osama was expected to return, and hook up with Arabian Sea submarines armed with missiles to be triggered by a positive sighting.

At a cost of $3 million a drone, the exercise was a strain on the budget, but deemed worthwhile from a precision perspective (remember all the talk about wasting a million dollar missile on striking a camel’s ass?). In an early sortie, a Predator hovering over Tarnak took a picture of a man the CIA was pretty sure was bin Laden. By winter that year, Black was pitching for an armed version of the drone. In case of a positive identification, the Agency didn’t want any delay. An armed drone, as Coll writes, would crunch the ‘sensor to shooter’ time gap from hours to seconds.

Afghanistan was in turmoil by then, and Masood’s stronghold of Taloqan was overrun by the Taliban in 2001 with the help of Pakistani madrassa students and the ISI. Masood himself was soon to be blown up by a couple of Arabs posing as journalists. Hours later, on the other side of the globe, there were 19 Arabs posing as aircraft passengers.

Next came 9/11.

The next best chance to ‘take out’ bin Laden came soon after 9/11, in December 2001, at the Tora Bora cave complex of Afghanistan. Nearly 500 Al-Qaida fighters had been boxed into these crevices and caves by incessant US bombing. Among them were Osama, his son, and possibly Ayman al-Zawahiri, his No 2. The Al-Qaida chief had split his militants into two groups, with Saudis and Yemenis asked to rally to his side even as the rest were ordered to fork off and fend for themselves.

The CIA, meanwhile, had the cave complex under close watch, with a team overseeing the bombing operations. It was on one of those runs that a 6,800 kg Blu-82—the size of a car—was dropped on the complex. Nicknamed Daisy Cutter, it was the most lethal conventional bomb in America’s war-chest.

Writes Gary Bernsten, the CIA officer in charge of operations at Tora Bora, in his book Jawbreaker: ‘It didn’t take a great military strategist to figure out that bin Laden was looking for a way out and would ultimately succeed in escaping. It was a 24 hour climb through the White Mountains from Tora Bora to Pakistan. Yet General Dailey and [the US Central Command] continued to ignore my request for 800 US ground troops.’

A few Al-Qaida soldiers captured in the mountains revealed that Osama had tea with them and urged them to fight on. Over a Yazoo radio that some Afghans had recovered from a dead Al-Qaida fighter, they could hear Osama’s voice loud and clear. Writes Bernsten: ‘As Bilal and Adam Khan listened, bin Laden addressed his men in Arabic. “Forgive me,” he said. He went on to apologize for getting them trapped in the White Mountains and pounded by American airstrikes. Then, he gathered them together in prayer… A number of Al-Qaida detainees later confirmed that bin Laden escaped with his Saudi and Yemeni group of fighters by a more difficult eastern route over difficult snow-covered passes into the Pushtun tribal area of Parachinar, Pakistan. He was guided by members of the Pushtun Ghilzai tribe, who were paid handsomely in money and rifles.’

American forces had failed to plug the mountain passes through which Osama escaped. That’s when the trail went cold, though there was the odd ‘sighting’ reported in the broad region of the Subcontinent’s northwest. For almost a decade, most of what appeared in the media—of his location, of his being dead or alive—was no better than guesswork.

Then came Abbottabad.

In 1671, THE great naval battle of Lepanto in the Gulf of Patias, Greece, resulted in a victory for Western crusaders. All of Christendom celebrated the victory. But in Turkish archives, the officer commanding the Islamic fleet, Kapudan Pasha, writes matter-of-factly: ‘The fleet of the divinely guided Empire encountered the fleet of the wretched infidels, and the will of Allah turned the other way.’ It’s a will on which Al-Qaida can lay no claim either.

The writer is the editor of Cobrapost. This piece relies heavily on Ghost Wars by Steve Coll and Jawbreaker by Gary Bernsten

About The Author

Aniruddha Bahal