SEAL Target Geronimo: The Inside Story of the Mission to Kill Osama Bin Laden (26 page)

Osama became increasingly reclusive and seldom left the main building, unless it was to put on a set of golden-threaded robes and have one of his aides film him as he tried to read pronouncements to be aired on Al Jazeera or released on Al Qaeda’s Web sites. Osama collected designs for truck bombs and attack plans for London, Washington, New York, Paris, and Rome. He received couriers from Zawahiri and al-Libbi, and officers from Pakistan’s ISI who periodically checked on him, but for the most part, his Pakistani hosts let him alone. The news that found its way to the compound, on foot by couriers and through the air on Pakistani TV, was increasingly bleak.

On May 2, 2005 al-Libbi was captured dressed in a pale blue woman’s burqa, riding on a motor scooter. An intercepted cell phone call brought him to the attention of the Pakistani police. Osama may have wondered about his own safety when the Pakistanis turned over a coded notebook that al-Libbi was carrying when he was arrested. American code breakers eventually deciphered the contents, and foiled an Al Qaeda plot to use liquid explosives concealed in airline carry-on baggage to destroy airliners traveling between London and the United States.

That plot was foiled, but the notebook yielded nothing about the whereabouts of Osama bin Laden. The Pakistani ISI knew exactly where he was, but did not inform the United States. They continued to let Osama pace back and forth in his compound. They must have wondered, as did his family, if he were going insane.

The spoiling of yet another plot provoked a spat between Osama and Zawahiri. The unctuous doctor did his best to heal the split. His future, and the future of Jihad, depended on Osama’s cash. Al Qaeda’s operational capabilities were further diminished in June 2006, when Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of Al Qaeda in Iraq, was killed outside Bagdad. Zarqawi had been betrayed by a courier and was “laser tagged” by a pair of SEAL Six snipers on the evening of June 7, 2006.

His loss was a major setback. Al Qaeda’s store of chemical weapons in Iraq had been one of its own closely guarded secrets. Like any clandestine organization, Al Qaeda compartmentalized its operations. To Osama’s dismay, Musab al-Zarqawi had taken the secret of Al Qaeda’s WMD storage caches with him when he died. Although U.S. intelligence analysts sifted through the rubble of Zarqawi’s safe house, the building had been obliterated. The U.S. bombing had taken out a major terror player, but gained little else. All of Zarqawi’s computers and documents had gone up with him.

The United States announced a troop surge in 2007, and kept the pressure on. Al Qaeda’s use of chemical weapons were the reason SEAL missions quadrupled in Iraq, with Teams operating against as many as four or five targets a night, rolling up Al Qaeda terrorists as soon as they could be linked to one another or turned.

Within Al Qaeda, morale was failing. Martyrs who risked their lives in what were supposed to be “glorious” chemical attacks found that their missions did not strike terror into coalition soldiers, and were all but ignored by Western news outlets. Al Qaeda itself was in no hurry to tell the world that its attempts to use Saddam’s legacy of chemical weapons usually fizzled. At great pain, Osama and Zawahiri smuggled nerve and mustard gas into Afghanistan and attempted to use these weapons against coalition forces there. The WikiLeaks documents suggest that Iraqi chemical munitions were recovered from IEDs and cache sites, but Al Qaeda’s attempts to gas American soldiers by battalions and regiments came to nothing. The U.S. rarely confirmed when a chemical weapon was discovered, and the American press assisted them, not out of patriotism, or out of a desire to defeat Al Qaeda in the information space, but because they had told a different story for a decade—there were no Iraqi WMD—thereby ignoring one of the single greatest strategic threats ever faced by the United States.

To the SEAL Teams and America’s counterterrorism community, it was incomprehensible that no one in government or the media discussed this threat, yet every year the entire U.S. government practiced the response to chemical, nuclear, and biological attacks in an exercise called “TOPOFF.” The secret was out in the open—but no one looked, because the press and elected officials said nothing of Al Qaeda’s weapons of mass destruction. America took the threat of Osama’s chemical weapons very seriously. The national counterterrorism plan has a fifty-page annex on improvised nuclear, radiological, chemical, and biological weapons. The chemical weapons are based on designs incorporating purloined chemical munitions—just like the one found at al Baya.

Pacing in his walled garden in Abbottabad, Osama faced a problem: With Musab al-Zarqawi dead, and Al Qaeda in Iraq shattered, he no longer had access to the hundreds, or possibly thousands of Saddam Hussein’s WMD that were scattered in the deserts of Iraq. Al Qaeda had only a limited supply of chemical weapons, mustard and nerve gas shells, that were stored somewhere in Waziristan and Afghanistan. Osama and Zawahiri wanted to use these weapons but faced the almost insurmountable problem of how to put them in a place where they could no longer be ignored by the Western media—by attacking an American city.

The ten-year anniversary of 9/11 was fast approaching.

Months passed. Zawahiri’s plots, proclamations, and plans came to Osama by courier and piled up in hard drives in his office. Without Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s network and with recruitment and training disrupted by American forces in Afghanistan, Osama could find no one willing to destroy themselves by delivering a chemical weapon to the United States. Osama was surrounded by sycophants who were eager, even anxious, to martyr themselves; but in order to attack the U.S. or Europe he needed tech-savvy volunteers, men who could speak foreign languages and live in Western cities undetected. The nineteen terrorists who crashed hijacked planes into Manhattan and Washington represented an increasingly hard-to-find commodity: educated men who still believed the ugly myth of mayhem in this life and peace and pleasure in the world beyond.

Few people were buying what Osama and Zawahiri were selling: You martyr yourself, and we’ll take over when the Western world collapses. From materials removed from the house in Abbottabad, a picture of Osama’s life clearly emerges. As he failed to sell his mythology to others, Osama became increasingly involved in his own. Locked away in the third floor of his home, he spent hours watching himself on television. In the study attached to his home, he took months to produce carefully staged video recordings of himself.

His health was failing; the Addison’s disease that wracked his body made him lethargic. It became increasingly obvious to those around him that he had set out to change the world, but instead was trapped in a prison of his own making.

Since 1996, Osama bin Laden had been kicked out of every country he had attempted to settle in. When he began to make pronouncements against the Saudi royal family, he was forced to leave the country and take refuge in Sudan. The Saudis had revoked his passport. In Sudan, where he had plotted 9/11, Osama spent tens of million of dollars building roads and airports. He accepted payment in title deed to tens of thousands of acres of empty desert. When the Sudanese bowed to world pressure and kicked him out, Osama had no passport and no commercial air carrier would transport him. He had to charter a Russian aircraft and fly across Saudi Arabia to Afghanistan. The only place that would have him was the Islamic “Republic” of Afghanistan, a brutal religious dictatorship ruled by a one-eyed mullah who enforced religious orthodoxy with terror squads of Talibanis who threw acid into the faces of school girls, dynamited Afghanistan’s centuries-old religious monuments, and whipped women on the street for failing to cover their heads.

When 9/11 occurred, the United States came for Osama, and they came through Afghanistan. Bin Laden declined to make a glorious last stand at Tora Bora, opting instead to slink across the border. By 2011, he lived behind locked doors in Pakistan, trusting his security to a pair of twenty-year-old sons, the occasional courier, and a pair of Pakistani brothers who had no place else to live. Osama had made himself a target and it was inevitable that the Americans would eventually figure out where he was and either kill him with a missile or snatch him from his bed like they had done to Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.

Documents taken from Osama’s compound showed that in 2008, Al Qaeda tested out new combinations of truck-bomb and chlorine-gas weapons in a series of bombings in Baghdad. These bombs blew more than two hundred Iraqi civilians to pieces, and choked the wounded to death with chlorine gas. The victims were two hundred Muslims that Ayman Zawahiri had determined were
kafirs
. When these attacks again failed to interest the American media or bring forth an Islamic government in Iraq, relations between Zawahiri and Bin Laden hit bottom.

Zawahiri had also been given protection by the Pakistani intelligence service. Like Osama, he lived under the radar, moving between safe houses in the tribal areas of Baluchistan close to the Iranian border. Zawahiri had also become a TV news junkie. And what he saw on television must have alarmed him greatly.

In Tunisia, a hated military despot was overthrown and replaced, not by religious zealots, but by a transitional regime groping its way toward democracy—the form of government that Zawahiri held as a disgusting artifact of Western civilization.

In Egypt, hundreds of thousands of people filled Tahrir Square demanding that the tyrant Hosni Mubarak relinquish power. He was replaced not by Zawahiri’s co-Jihadists, the Muslim Brotherhood, but, again, by a caretaker government that promised to establish a Western-style, representative democracy.

In Syria and Libya, brave citizens battled armored vehicles with their bare hands, not in the name of Islam, but in the pursuit of freedom of expression, freedom of association, and a chance at representative government. All of these things were anathema to Al Qaeda and the goals of armed Jihad. As the Arab Spring turned to summer the concept of Jihad teetered on the howling brink of irrelevance.

For thirty years, Zawahiri had been willing to use violence to bring about his idea of Islamic government. Now the Muslim faithful were throwing off the chains of dictatorship and calling out not for sharia law but for democracy. Zawahiri had worn himself out trying to get Osama to escalate his attacks against the West. Repeated plans to smuggle chemical weapons into the United States had come to naught, and now Zawahiri had had enough. By late in 2009, he had determined to rest control of Al Qaeda from Bin Laden.

Zawahiri had several advantages over his boss. Besides an innate visciousness, Zawahiri could speak and read English. He was an avid consumer of American news about Al Qaeda.

Moving between his own ISI-provided safe houses, Zawahiri had his messages delivered in Abu Ahmed al Kuwaiti’s fantastically painted four-wheel-drive truck. The vehicle and its frequent destination soon attracted the attention of American intelligence.

During the Afghan war, Zawahiri had continually urged Osama forward into combat. As his personal physician from 1984 to 2003, Zawahiri examined and treated Osama frequently. Zawahiri was a trained physician who studied at one of the finest universities in the Middle East. Yet he failed to diagnose Osama’s obvious symptoms of back pain, low blood pressure, and fainting spells. All of these, and a telltale craving for table salt led to a diagnosis that was obvious, yet Zawahiri never mentioned it to Osama and withheld from him the easy-to-acquire medication that would have held his disease in check.

Zawahiri tried to get the Russians to kill Bin Laden; they did not.

He hoped that Addison’s disease would take him, but it did not.

Now Ayman Zawahiri played his final card—he deliberately used a blown courier to communicate with Osama, and the inevitable happened.

The Americans found him.

NEPTUNE’S SPEAR

ADMIRAL BILL MCRAVEN STEPPED
out of one of the low, Quonset-like tents beside hangar five at Jalalabad airbase in Afghanistan; he was standing forty miles north of the Pakistani frontier. McRaven had been in the close confines of the Joint Operations Center (JOC) for almost twelve hours, and he needed some air. The admiral, like the other members of the expedition, had been awake for most of the last two days, first on a flight from Norfolk, Virginia—a sixteen-hour marathon with two midair refuelings—and then during the hurried preparations to put together the JOC, from which he would monitor the progress of Neptune’s Spear.

As they had done during the
Maersk Alabama
operation, the Twidgets from Det Alpha went to work with a vengeance, unloading pallets of gear from the airplanes, setting up inflatable tents to shelter Web servers and crypto gear, and stringing hundred of yards of cable to connect tons of communications gear and downlinks to plasma-screen monitors and teleconferencing equipment that gave the commander of JSOC the ability to speak with the White House, the Pentagon, and CIA in real time. Det Alpha joked that the admiral could talk to anyone he wanted, except Osama bin Laden—and that was because Osama didn’t own a functioning telephone. If he did, Det Alpha could make it ring on his nightstand and reverse the long-distance charges when he answered. These guys were the SEAL Team Six of cyberspace.

Admiral McRaven moved away from the tents and let his eyes adjust to the gathering dark. Already the mountains above the runways were surrendering to night. Two SEAL Six operators dressed in khaki pants and photographers’ vests kept pace behind McRaven as he walked. They carried cut-barreled laser-sighted M-4s, called “choppers.” Their weapons could fit under a jacket and fired the same deadly 5.56 mm ammo as their larger cousins, the M-4 assault rifle. Jalalabad was considered a combat zone, and the airbase had been attacked five months earlier when Taliban insurgents dressed as Afghan soldiers slipped onto the airfield and opened fire. The admiral was allowed to take his walk, but the SEALs guarding him kept within a dozen paces.