SEAL Target Geronimo: The Inside Story of the Mission to Kill Osama Bin Laden (21 page)

Back in Saudi Arabia, Osama made a show of rejoining the construction business, commuting between his ranch, his multifamily apartment complex in Jeddah, and a place in Mecca. Osama lived modestly, a stark contrast to the ostentatious lives of dozens of Saudi princes who roared around in Lotus convertibles, partied on the French Riviera, and prayed hungover under the soaring minarets built by Mohammed bin Laden.

To thousands of Muslims, Osama bin Laden was a larger-than-life hero. He combined for them, as Abdul Azzam had earlier, the allure of a warrior with a mystical sort of religious intensity.

He began to see himself as a man in the grip of destiny. His gestures were wan, almost feline, and his voice was so quiet that a listener had to pay close attention to hear what he said. Osama spoke this way deliberately, and began to affect the languid gestures and lingering gaze of a person who was talked to by God. His reedy voice was in contrast with a message that was increasingly apocalyptic.

One night after his return, Osama rose to speak at the end of evening prayers at one of the family’s mosques in Jeddah. His audience was male, some of them had already answered his call and given combat to the Russians in Afghanistan. They had seen that enemy thrown into retreat, and now watched as the Soviet empire slouched toward dissolution.

Osama had convinced himself that his tattered band of Jihadis had been the deciding factor in the Russia’s nine-year war and eventual defeat. He believed, utterly, that it was the military contributions of the Afghan Arabs that had turned the balance and sent the Soviet Union back across the border.

Now he drew a bead on the world’s other superpower. Osama told his assembled audience that it was time for the United States to be brought to account.

“America went to Vietnam thousands of miles away and began bombing them in planes,” Osama told his rapt listeners. “The Americans did not get out of Vietnam until they had suffered great losses. Over 60,000 American soldiers were killed until there were demonstrations by the American people. The Americans won’t stop their support of Jews in Palestine, until we give them a lot of blows. They won’t stop until we do jihad against them.”

In later pronouncements, Osama would maintain that his hatred for the United States began when U.S. forces came ashore in Lebanon in 1982.

“America permitted the Israelis to invade Lebanon and the American 6th Fleet helped them.” That was true enough. American Marines had been landed under the guns of America’s Mediterranean fleet, but they had come to provide security for Yasser Arafat’s withdrawal.

It is one of the ironies of history that Navy SEALs were deployed as countersnipers to prevent the Israeli army from killing Arafat as he boarded a ferry for Larnaca, Cyprus.

But Osama could not know that; it is unlikely that he would have cared, for a second group of Marines and another SEAL platoon were landed in September of the same year, as part of a multinational peacekeeping force. British, Italian, and French troops took up positions in the city of Beirut, to prevent a repeat of the massacres at Sabra and Shatila.

Osama preferred to remember differently: “Blood and severed limbs, women and children sprawled everywhere. Houses destroyed along with their occupants and high-rises demolished over their residents.… The situation was like a crocodile meeting a helpless child, powerless except for his screams.” What Osama was describing was an inaccurate portrayal of Lebanon’s sectarian civil war and the carnage meted out by Menachem Begin’s 1982 Israeli invasion.

For Osama, the massacres at Sabra and Shatila were the start of a genocidal, Western-backed assault against Islam. He not only blamed the Lebanese Christian militiamen who laid waste to the camps, but also the Israeli soldiers who stood by and did nothing as a crazed gang of psychopaths wasted more than two thousand unarmed people.

Though an Israeli investigative commission would find Defense Minister Ariel Sharon “personally responsible” for the massacre, and dismiss him from office, Osama would feel hatred toward Jews and Israel for the rest of his life. Until he drew his last breath, Osama blamed Israel for the massacre and he blamed the United States for arming Israel. It was Osama’s belief that the bloody hand of the United States had been lopped off by the valiant sacrifice of two Lebanese martyrs. When the multinational peacekeeping force was withdrawn from Lebanon, Osama drew the conclusion that two truck bombs had defeated the combined forces of the United States Marine Corps and the French Army.

What he proposed now was for the Muslim world to gather together, under his leadership, and again strike the United States. Osama thought that if enough Muslim martyrs attacked the United States at home and abroad, it would collapse, just as the once mighty Soviet Union was doing now.

No one told him differently, certainly not Ayman Zawahiri, and Abdullah Azzam, the one man who had dared to speak to truth to Osama, was dead.

Saudi Arabia makes no pretense about allowing its citizens the freedom of speech. Its media is tightly controlled, so when Osama bin Laden declared Jihad on the United States, his words took on a semiofficial resonance. He was wealthy, his family called princes their friends, and because he was not disavowed for his speech and because the government did not contradict him, the “truth” of his words cast a long shadow.

In the 1990s, Osama would speak often of how the United States had murdered Muslim men, women, and children. In the days before American troops invaded Iraq and Afghanistan, these pronouncements left Americans baffled. To their recollection, they had never engaged in warfare against the Arab people or the Muslim faith. But this was to overlook that American weapons had killed Arabs, in the tens of thousands. Flown by Israeli pilots, American-made airplanes dropped American-made bombs. Israeli gunners fired American-made artillery pieces that scattered American-made cluster bombs on Arab soldiers and civilians alike.

No one in Saudi Arabia contradicted him, and nobody in the United States could bring themselves to take Osama bin Laden seriously.

That he was anti-Israel was no surprise. King Faisal had called Jews “monkeys.” That Osama thought the U.S. was to blame for Israel’s career of military aggression was a perception that was shared, even among Western leftists. Hugo Chávez, the darling of Latino progressives, has compared Israeli military operations to “genocide.” Asked by the French newspaper
Le Monde
to comment about Israeli retaliation against Hamas militants in the Gaza strip, he said, “What was it if not genocide?… The Israelis were looking for an excuse to exterminate the Palestinians.”

Osama bin Laden agreed. Talking to the men sitting and kneeling in rows on the floor of the mosque before him, he told them it was time to leave
Dar Islam,
the place of Islam, and enter the labyrinth of
Dar Jihad.

It was time to abandon their jobs, their lives, the families that loved them; they should give away all their possessions and enter with him into
Dar Jihad
: the place of war.

Bin Laden was as good as his word.

Taking a page from the Lebanon’s terror group Hezbollah, Osama bin Laden ordered that two martyrs be selected, trained, and sent to Africa. On the morning of August 7, 1998, a rented Mitsubishi Canter truck turned toward the gate of the American embassy in Mombasa, Kenya. Built to Hezbollah specifications, the truck bomb contained more than a ton of gas-enhanced high explosives, stacked and configured to maximize blast effect and concussive shock. Like the bomb that struck the Marine barracks, a firing wire had been installed between the explosive payload and the passenger compartment. It was a “dead man’s switch” that allowed the driver to actuate the bomb without taking his hand from the steering wheel.

It was 10:30 in the morning. Grinding gears, the Canter truck rolled up to the embassy gate. In quick succession, a grenade was thrown, shots were fired, and the bomb was detonated. The explosion melted the concrete façade of the chancellery building, blasting out windows and starting fires. But the real carnage was done to the buildings surrounding the embassy. The multistory Ufundi Building was torn apart by the shock wave and collapsed, killing hundreds of students and teachers at a secretarial college—most of them women in their twenties. A ten-foot chunk of white-hot shrapnel flew down Haile Selassie Street, and tore through a packed commuter bus. It burst into flames, incinerating dozens of passengers in their seats. Throughout the city of Mombasa, windows shattered in high-rises, raining glass down on panicked citizens, maiming and blinding many scores of people.

Nine minutes later, and four hundred miles away, another Al Qaeda truck bomb, configured with both high explosives and cylinders of compressed oxygen, was detonated at the American embassy in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. It tore a five-foot-deep crater into the Bagamoyo Road, and sent a swirling, mushroom-shaped cloud five hundred feet into the sky.

When the smoke wafted away, almost a hundred Tanzanian citizens were struck down, eleven killed instantly and eighty-five more suffering second- and third-degree burns, blast effect, and shrapnel injuries. The bomb in Nairobi had been even more devastating. In the smoke-choked swirling chaos after the explosions, buildings collapsed on either side of the American embassy, trapping hundreds of people. Four thousand Kenyan civilians were injured, and two hundred and twenty-two people had been killed.

Many of the victims in both Nairobi and Dar es Salaam were innocent Muslims.

On October 12, 2000, another pair of Al Qaeda martyrs crashed a speedboat loaded with explosives into an American destroyer, refueling at a pier in the harbor at Aden, in the country of Yemen. A sophisticated charge exploded next to the warship’s hull—blasting a fifteen-foot-wide hole into the ship, killing seventeen sailors and burning and wounding thirty-nine more.

Osama had only begun to pay back the United States for its crimes against Muslims. In February 2001, the Israeli minister of defense who was found personally responsible for the massacres at Sabra and Shatila was elected to the office of prime minister of the nation of Israel. Osama’s anger grew cold and implacable.

In September 2001, nineteen years after the attacks on the Lebanese camps, Osama would order the 9/11 attacks on the United States. This time he would command four near simultaneous attacks, using hijacked airliners to smash into what he considered symbols of American arrogance and greed: the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in New York City and the Pentagon in Washington, D.C.

Three thousand innocent, unarmed American men, women, and children would be consumed in the attacks—almost the same number who perished at Sabra and Shatila.

Osama had brought Jihad to America.

WEAPONS OF MASS DENIAL

MAY 2003: IT COULD BE SEEN PLAINLY
through binoculars: an artillery shell, angled up onto the side of the curb, in a position to maximize blast effect and shrapnel—a fairly typical roadside bomb. For an improvised explosive device, the design was crude, the fuse appeared to be wired to a wristwatch and battery, but it was surely a Humvee killer. The patrol had seen it a hundred yards away, stopped and called in the Explosive Ordnance Disposal guys from battalion. Everyone was now hunkered under cover, and they were impatient; the sun was beating down and they wanted to get going, but the bomb technicians were in no hurry to go forward.

The IED was too obvious. No one had tried to cover it with trash, or bury it by the roadside—it was just sitting in the open, taunting them.

What the bomb techs worried about was a trap. Not even the laziest insurgent left an IED out in the open—it was likely that under the artillery shell there was another explosive, maybe even a five-hundred-pound bomb, laid and waiting. The goal was to lure the patrol forward to the obvious threat, then destroy them with the buried charge, or wait until an EOD tech lumbered out in a hundred-pound bomb suit, and simply kill him with a sniper. That was a guess. The head game was played daily between insurgents and bomb disposal teams. The bomb techs peered through their laser-range finders and stared. Maybe it was, after all, just the work of an amateur.

An unmanned aerial vehicle snarled overhead, a small, light, miniature airplane. It scanned the rooftops around the IED with thermal and high-resolution video, beaming the pictures to a laptop in the lead Humvee. There seemed to be no one waiting in ambush. There were no obvious wires or leads pointing to a hidden firing position. The patrol leader had already waited too long. This was after all Saddam Highway, the main road leading into the Baghdad airport, and it wasn’t a good place to stay.

The technician donned her bomb suit, a hundred pounds of Kevlar and ceramic armor plate, checked the audio and video connection to the laptop, and waddled toward the patiently lethal object at the side of the road. This simple, selfless act of valor was committed a dozen times a day all over Iraq.

The tech quickly identified the improvised explosive, a 155 mm artillery shell, painted with a faded yellow band. The shell was maybe twenty inches long, a steel cylinder truncated into a tapering arch. A digital clock taped to the shell had stopped at 11:30. Without incident, the bomb tech attached a “disrupter,” a countercharge designed to separate the main explosive shell from the smaller, electrically activated blasting cap connected to the clock. The tech returned to cover, radioed “fire in the hole” and set off the disrupter using a remote firing device. There was a small, sharp crack as the disrupter blew off the clock and battery, rendering the roadside bomb safe.

The bomb technician doffed her protective suit and walked forward with her partner to inspect the IED. Per standing orders, they would collect what was left of the shell, watch, and battery. The pieces would be studied and logged, and details of the incident would be added to the growing catalog accumulated by the FBI’s Bomb Data Unit.