The Hunt for Bin Laden

Table of Contents

- The Hunt for bin Laden

- Introduction

- One Manhunt Creates a Bigger One

- The Beginnings of bin Laden

- A Radical Turning Point

- CIA Surveillance Intensifies

- A Plan to Grab bin Laden

- ‘What Are They Waiting For?’

- Building an Alliance

- Massoud and His Militiamen

- Doubts About Massoud

- The Panjshir Missions

- Covert War in Jeopardy

- Al-Qaeda’s Murderous Strike

- ‘I Want bin Laden’s Head’

- Tora Bora and the Big Bomb

- A Man on the Run

- CIA Shifts Its Strategy

- Missile Raids Miss Zawahiri

- Tracking a Courier

- bin Laden’s New Hideout

- ‘If You See It, Shoot It’

- More from The Washington Post

- Connect with Diversion Books

The Hunt for bin Laden

by The Washington Post

Edited by Tom Shroder

Introduction

The long, secret campaign to track down Osama bin Laden has been called the biggest, costliest manhunt in history. It began in 1997 during the Clinton administration, when bin Laden was known as a jihadi money man, not a terrorist mastermind. As bin Laden issued increasingly explicit threats against the West, and America in particular, field CIA agents became convinced bin Laden posed a clear and present danger to the homeland. Time and again they had bin Laden in their cross-hairs only to have missions cancelled at the last moment by superiors in Langley and the White House.

As four hijacked commercial jets streaked toward their targets in New York and Washington, bin Laden was living comfortably in Afghanistan, trying to get a satellite signal to watch his handiwork on live TV. That evening, he toasted the collapsed towers at a collegial dinner, expressing pleasant surprise that the attack had killed so many. Then he went on the lam, touring strongholds of support in Afghanistan’s outback and making speeches. As the U.S. bombing campaign in Afghanistan began in earnest, bin Laden retreated to a complex of caves and tunnels dug into a mountainous region called Tora Bora. The CIA team hunting him had a solid fix on him there and concentrated huge blockbuster bombs on his location. But he escaped once more, and soon the war in Iraq drained the resources and diverted the spotlight from the hunt, turning the mission to kill or capture bin Laden into a back-burner operation and political liability for the Bush administration.

The hunt continued in the background for years without any solid leads as to where bin Laden had gone. The best guess put him in the almost lawless tribal regions on the border of Pakistan and Afghanistan, but the best guesses were wrong. As the treacherous attacks of 9/11 drifted almost a decade into the past, increasingly punishing drone attacks, interrogations of captured al Qaeda operatives and an ever expanding network of informants finally began to yield a trail, pebble by pebble.

It wasn’t until the Iraq war began to wind down that the search gained its endgame momentum, reclassified as a highest priority again by a new president. The breakthrough came when bin Laden’s shadowy courier was finally identified, and his cell phone intercepted. Wire intercepts and surveillance eventually led the CIA directly to a mysterious million-dollar compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan. After fourteen years, two wars and billions of dollars spent in the effort, a team of Navy Seals finally brought the hunt to a swift and conclusive end.

This is a reconstruction of the hunt culled from reporting by more than two dozen Washington Post correspondents and staffers over more than 15 years.

From stories by: John Ward Anderson, Peter Baker, Karin Brulliard, Steve Coll, Karen DeYoung, Michael Dobbs, Peter Finn, Marc Fisher, Bradley Graham, Anne E. Kornblut, John Lancaster, Richard Leiby, Vernon Loeb, Jerry Markon, Greg Miller, Molly Moore, Dana Priest, Ian Shapira, Ann Scott Tyson, Joby Warrick, Craig Whitlock, Scott Wilson and Bob Woodward.

Contributors: William Branigin, Pamela Constable, Susan B. Glasser, John Lancaster, Allan Lengel, Colum Lynch, Ellen Nakashima, Walter Pincus, John Pomfret, Keith B. Richburg, Thomas E. Ricks, Paul Schwartzman, Robert E. Thomason, Josh White, Griff Witte and Kevin Sullivan; staff researcher Julie Tate; and special correspondents Haq Nawaz Khan and Kamran Khan.

Edited by Tom Shroder

One Manhunt Creates a Bigger One

The seeds of the CIA’s first formal plan to capture or kill Osama bin Laden were contained in another urgent manhunt — for Mir Aimal Kasi, the Pakistani migrant who murdered two CIA employees while spraying rounds from an assault rifle at cars idling before the entrance to the agency’s Langley headquarters in 1993.

For several years after the shooting, Kasi remained a fugitive in the border areas straddling Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iran. From its Langley offices, the CIA’s Counterterrorist Center asked the Islamabad station for help recruiting agents who might be able to track Kasi down. Case officers signed up a group of Afghan tribal fighters who had worked for the CIA during the 1980s guerrilla war against Soviet occupying forces in Afghanistan.

The family-based team of paid agents, given the cryptonym FD/TRODPINT, set up residences around the city of Kandahar. They were rugged, bearded fighters — often in teams of a dozen or so — who rolled around southern Afghanistan in four-wheel-drive vehicles, blending comfortably into the region’s militarized tribal society.

When the TRODPINT team set out to find Kasi, one or two senior family members handled the face-to-face contacts with the CIA. Case officers working from the U.S. Embassy in Islamabad supplied them with cash, assault rifles, land mines, motorcycles, trucks, listening devices and secure communications equipment.

Together they concocted a bold plan to capture Kasi and fly him to the United States for trial. If the Afghan agents found Kasi, they would detain him until U.S. Special Forces secretly flew into Afghanistan to bundle the fugitive away. With the TRODPINT team acting as spotters, the CIA identified a desert landing strip near Kandahar that could be used for a clandestine American extraction flight. The White House approved the plan, and President Bill Clinton secretly dispatched a Special Forces team to southern Afghanistan to confirm the coordinates and suitability of the makeshift airstrip.

In the end, Kasi was found elsewhere. In late May 1997, an ethnic Baluch man walked into the U.S. Consulate in Karachi, Pakistan, and told a clerk that he had information about Kasi. He was taken to a young CIA officer, who was chief of base in the city. The informant handed her an application for a Pakistani driver’s license Kasi had filled out under an alias. It contained a photo and a thumbprint that confirmed Kasi’s identity.

Three weeks later, a team of CIA officers, Pakistani intelligence officers and FBI agents arrested Kasi at a hotel in Pakistan, flew him to the United States and jailed him for trial. (He was convicted of murder in 1997, sentenced to death in 1998 and executed in Virginia on Nov. 14, 2002.)

In the weeks that followed Kasi’s arrest, a new question was raised inside the CIA’s Counterterrorist Center: What would become of their elaborately equipped and financed TRODPINT assets? The agents had filed numerous reports about where Kasi might be, but none had panned out. Ultimately, the team played no direct role in Kasi’s arrest. Despite this questionable record, it seemed a shame to just cut them loose, some Langley officers believed.

At CIA headquarters, the unit set up to track Kasi was located in the Counterterrorist Center. A few partitions away was another small cluster of analysts and operators who made up what the CIA officially called the “bin Laden issue unit.”

The unit had been created early in 1996 to watch a troublesome supporter of radical Islamic jihad named Osama bin Laden, who was then living in Sudan.

The Beginnings of bin Laden

Osama bin Laden’s father, Mohammed bin Laden, emigrated as a youth from the Hadramawt region of Yemen, arriving as a penniless laborer in 1925 in what would become the kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Energetic and engaging, Mohammed bin Laden had a knack for engineering and found his way into the construction business.

By the late 1930s, he had established his own firm and was working on palaces for the royal family. In time, he became a favored contractor for the huge projects the kingdom undertook with its ever-growing oil riches.

He had already taken multiple wives and had more than a dozen children when, in 1956, he married 14-year-old Alia al-Ghanem, who came from a Syrian family of citrus farmers. In 1957, Alia gave birth to a son, Osama, which means “young lion” in Arabic.

He divorced Alia when Osama was a young boy and arranged for her to remarry Mohammed al-Attas, a mid-level administrator in the bin Laden company. Attas and Alia had four other children.

All the available testimony about Osama’s early years from relatives and friends portray him as a quiet, placid child whose favorite hobby was horseback riding. Despite the divorce and his life with a stepfamily, he remained a fully recognized member of the bin Laden clan.

He visited his father’s kin on weekends, joined the bin Laden family on outings and attended school with some of his half-brothers. He mourned with them when, in 1967, Mohammed bin Laden died in a plane crash in Saudi Arabia.

Osama bin Laden, who attended an elite private school in Jiddah — the al-Thager Model School — joined an after-school Islamic study group in eighth or ninth grade. In time, he adopted the beliefs and practices of an insistent piety, praying multiple times a day, letting his beard grow and arguing for a restoration of Islam in Arab politics.

Bin Laden continued this religious study after he entered Jeddah’s King Abdulaziz University in 1976, where he participated in the Muslim Brotherhood, an Islamist organization intent on imposing Koranic law throughout Muslim societies. But he remained quiet and deferential, focused on the search for a pure spiritual life. Only years later did his religiosity harden into a fanatical hatred.

He studied management and economics but never earned a university degree, leaving for a job with the bin Laden family business as a manager in Mecca. By that time, the company, headed by Osama’s older brother Salem, had been handed the enormous task of renovating the holy cities of Mecca and Medina.

At 17, bin Laden married his first wife: Najwa, a 14-year-old first cousin whom he had gotten to know during sojourns to Syria to visit his mother’s family. After university, he took a second and then a third wife, women who were better educated than his first. He would marry at least once more.

A Radical Turning Point

The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in late 1979 profoundly influenced bin Laden’s course. Muslims around the world rallied to the Afghan cause, volunteering to help the mujaheddin resistance against the Soviet army. In the first years of the war, bin Laden served essentially as a philanthropic activist, traveling between the war front and Saudi Arabia with donations for the Afghan rebels.

During this period, he developed ties with a radical Palestinian professor of Islamic studies, Abdullah Azzam, who introduced him to the concept of transnational jihad. In 1984, bin Laden financed Azzam’s establishment in Peshawar, Pakistan, of a Services Office, which acted as a clearinghouse for information about the Afghan war and a vehicle for channeling recruits into Afghanistan.

In 1986, bin Laden moved his family to Peshawar and threw himself more actively into the war. He delivered his first known speech denouncing the United States for its support for Israel. It was in Peshawar, too, that bin Laden met members of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, most notably Ayman al-Zawahiri, a surgeon who had spent time in Cairo prisons on conspiracy charges. Zawahiri would become the senior deputy in bin Laden’s terrorist movement.

Dissatisfied with merely financing the struggle against the Soviets, bin Laden decided to build his own small Arab militia in the mountains along the Afghan-Pakistani border. Near Jaji in eastern Afghanistan, he constructed a camp called the Lion’s Den.

Even more significant for the resistance effort was his construction work. Using equipment supplied by his family’s firm, he helped build roads north toward Tora Bora, a mountainous region in eastern Afghanistan, and a warren of caves to serve as shelters and arms depots.

When Soviet troops attacked bin Laden’s camp in the spring of 1987, he and his band of Arab volunteers battled back, earning him recognition as a fighter and not just a bankroller and proselytizer of jihad.

Even after Moscow announced plans in 1988 to begin withdrawing from Afghanistan, bin Laden hoped to develop a larger Arab force and employ it in a broader jihad.

Giving this new Islamic entity a name, he and associates decided to call it al-Qaeda al-Askariya, or “the Military Base.”

But in late 1989, with ethnic Afghan factions fighting increasingly among themselves, bin Laden moved back to Saudi Arabia. His brother Bakr, who had taken over leadership of the bin Laden family holdings after the death of Salem in a plane accident in Texas the year before, was about to oversee a major corporate reorganization and inheritance distribution. By then, the family business had expanded into an international conglomerate, with projects around the world and interests in industrial and power contracts, oil exploration, mining and telecommunications.

As part of a one-time distribution to Mohammed bin Laden’s heirs, Osama reportedly received about $8 million in cash in 1989. He reinvested the rest of his inheritance in new partnerships set up by Bakr, acquiring shares valued at about $10 million.

Such wealth, while significant, amounted to far less than the huge fortune sometimes attributed to bin Laden. According to journalist Steve Coll in his book “The Bin Ladens,” the stream of regular dividends and salaries that flowed to Osama from the early 1970s to the early 1990s averaged slightly more than $1 million a year.

Although bin Laden no doubt funded some of al-Qaeda’s development from his own pocket, a more significant portion of the financing probably came from the prodigious ability he had demonstrated during the Afghan war to raise funds through a complex web of charities, donors and proselytizing networks.

Bin Laden’s return to Saudi Arabia led to serious strains with government authorities; Saudi officials took issue with his support for Islamist rebels in Yemen. Bin Laden, in turn, grew deeply irritated with King Fahd’s willingness to accept U.S. troops on Saudi soil in the war ousting Iraqi troops from Kuwait.

In the middle of 1991, bin Laden was forced out of Saudi Arabia. He settled in Sudan, whose ruler, Hassan al-Turabi, shared bin Laden’s dream of establishing a purist Islamic state and had courted his investment. Bin Laden proceeded to establish a number of legitimate businesses but also began laying the groundwork for a global terrorist network.

During this period, al-Qaeda turned from being the anti-communist Islamic army that bin Laden conceived into a terrorist organization bent on attacking the United States. As the 9/11 Commission Report later recounted, bin Laden, while in Khartoum, enlisted groups from across the Middle East, Africa and Southeast Asia. He provided equipment and training assistance to terrorists in the Philippines, aided insurrectionists in Kashmir, assisted Islamists in Tajikistan and maintained connections in the Bosnian conflict.

His siblings publicly repudiated him in February 1994 after trying to persuade him to cease his militant activities and return to Saudi Arabia. His shares in the family businesses were sold, and he was cut off from all dividend and loan payments. Saudi Arabia revoked bin Laden’s citizenship.

Under pressure from the Saudis, Americans and others to do something about bin Laden, Sudanese authorities forced him out in May 1996 and seized a number of his personal assets. Moving to the Afghan city of Jalalabad, bin Laden released a long document declaring war against the United States, the first document he published that formally endorsed a violent campaign aimed at Western interests.

Afghanistan was a considered choice for bin Laden’s new base. The CIA had no station or base in Afghanistan, and it had no paid agents in the country at the time, other than those hunting for Kasi near Kandahar and a few loose contacts working on drug trafficking and recovering Stinger shoulder-fired missiles, according to Tom Simons, then the U.S. ambassador to Pakistan, whose account is supported by several other U.S. officials familiar with the CIA’s Afghan agent roster.

CIA Surveillance Intensifies

Back at Langley, the bin Laden unit, using classified channels, regularly transmitted reports to policymakers about threats bin Laden issued against American targets via faxed leaflets, television interviews and underground pamphlets. The CIA’s analysts described bin Laden at the time as an active, dangerous financier of Islamic extremism, but they considered him more a money source than a terrorist operator.

To senior career officers in the CIA’s Counterterrorist Center, the TRODPINT tribal team now beckoned as a way to watch bin Laden in Afghanistan. The paid Afghan agents could monitor or harass the Saudi up close under CIA control — and perhaps capture him for trial if the White House approved such an operation. Operators and analysts in the bin Laden unit argued passionately for more active measures against him. Jeff O’Connell, then-director of the Counterterrorist Center, and his deputy, Paul Pillar, agreed in the summer of 1997 to hand them control of the TRODPINT agent team, complete with its weapons and spy gear.

As bin Laden’s bloodcurdling televised threats against Americans increased in number and menace during 1997, the CIA — with the approval of the Clinton White House — turned from just watching bin Laden toward making plans to capture him.

Working with lawyers at Langley in late 1997 and early 1998, the TRODPINT agents’ CIA controllers modified the original Kasi capture plan, with its secret airstrip for extraction flights, so it could be used to seize bin Laden and prosecute him, or kill him if he violently resisted arrest.

A long and frustrating hunt for bin Laden had formally begun.

During the three years before the Sept. 11 attacks, the hunt would eventually involve several dozen local paid CIA agents in Afghanistan and Pakistan, a secret commando team drawn from Uzbek special forces, another drawn from retired Pakistani special forces, and a deepening intelligence alliance with the legendary Tajik guerrilla leader from Afghanistan’s north, Ahmed Shah Massoud, a man with a long and mutually frustrating history with the CIA. But despite these varied efforts, bin Laden continually eluded their grasp.

Years later, those involved in the secret campaign against bin Laden still disagree about why it failed — and who is to blame.

On the front lines in Pakistan and Central Asia, working-level CIA officers felt they had a rare, urgent sense of the menace bin Laden posed before Sept. 11. Yet a number of controversial proposals to attack bin Laden were turned down by superiors at Langley or the White House, who feared that the plans were poorly developed, wouldn’t work or would embroil the United States in Afghanistan’s then-obscure civil war. At other times, plans to track or attack bin Laden were delayed or watered down after stalemated debates inside Clinton’s national security team.

At Langley, CIA officers sometimes saw the Clinton Cabinet as overly cautious, obsessed with legalities, and unwilling to take political risks in Afghanistan by arming bin Laden’s Afghan enemies and directly confronting the radical Taliban Islamic militia. But at the Clinton White House, senior policymakers and counterterrorism analysts sometimes saw the CIA’s efforts in Afghanistan as timid, naive, self-protecting and ineffective.

Some of the agency’s efforts involved collecting intelligence about bin Laden’s whereabouts; others grew into covert actions designed to capture or kill leaders of his al- Qaeda network. Both tracks were carried out in deep secrecy mainly by career clandestine service officers in the CIA’s Counterterrorist Center and the Near East Division of the agency’s Directorate of Operations.

A Plan to Grab bin Laden

As the TRODPINT team began its work on bin Laden early in 1998, a federal grand jury in New York opened a secret investigation into the Saudi’s terrorist-financing activity. The probe had been prompted by a defector from bin Laden’s inner circle, financial evidence from terrorist attacks in Egypt and elsewhere, and old files from earlier terrorist cases in New York. No one outside the Justice Department was supposed to know about the grand jury’s work, but it began to leak to officials involved with the CIA’s planning.

CIA officers working from Islamabad, led by station chief Gary Schroen, assumed in early 1998 that if their agents captured bin Laden in southern Afghanistan, a U.S. grand jury would quickly indict him. If not, the CIA or the Clinton White House would ask Egypt or Saudi Arabia to take custody of bin Laden for trial. Schroen kept asking the Counterterrorist Center at Langley, “Do we have an indictment?” The answers, according to several officials involved, were cryptic: Bin Laden was “indictable,” the Islamabad station was told.

The TRODPINT team developed a detailed plan to hold bin Laden in a cave in southern Afghanistan for 30 days before U.S. Special Forces flew in secretly to take him away. The agents located a cave where they could hide out comfortably. They assured their CIA handlers that they had stored enough food and water there to keep bin Laden healthy.

By imprisoning bin Laden in the cave, the agents hoped to ease his extraction. If enough time passed after his capture, al-Qaeda’s agitated lieutenants would be less alert when the Americans flew in to bundle him off. Also, the detention would allow time to persuade a U.S. attorney or a foreign government to hand down criminal charges.

If CIA officers and their paid agents detained bin Laden for an eventual trial in the United States, they would be operating under the authority of Executive Order 12333, which allowed the CIA to aid the pursuit of international fugitives. The measure was signed by President Ronald Reagan in 1981 and renewed by successive presidents. A thick archive of Justice Department memorandums and court opinions upheld the right of American agents to abduct fugitives overseas and return them to U.S. courts in many instances.

At the same time, Executive Order 12333 banned assassination by the CIA or its agents. CIA officers met with their TRODPINT agents in Pakistan to emphasize that their plan to capture bin Laden and hold him in the Afghan cave could not turn into an assassination. “I want to reinforce this with you,” one officer told the Afghans in a meeting later described in cables to Langley and Washington. “You are to capture him alive.”

As they refined their kidnapping plans in the spring of 1998, the bin Laden unit at the Counterterrorist Center looked with rising interest at Tarnak Farm. This was a compound of perhaps 100 acres that lay isolated on a stretch of desert about three miles from the Kandahar airport. On some nights, bin Laden slept at Tarnak with one of his wives. He chatted on his satellite phone and lived fairly openly, protected by bodyguards. The question arose: Could the CIA’s tribal agents be equipped to raid bin Laden’s home and take him from his bed?

Tarnak’s main compound was encircled by a mud-brick wall about 10 feet high. Inside were about 80 modest one-story and two-story structures. Flat plains of sand and sagebrush extended for miles. Kandahar’s crowded bazaars were a half-hour drive away.

CIA officers based in Islamabad spent long hours with the TRODPINT team’s leaders to devise a plan to attack Tarnak in the middle of the night. The Afghans had scouted and mapped Tarnak up close; the CIA had photographed it from satellites.

The agents organized an attack party of about 30 fighters. They identified a staging point where they would assemble their vehicles. They would drive to a secondary rallying point a few miles from Tarnak.

About 2 a.m., the main raiding party would walk across the desert. They had scouted a path that avoided minefields and had deep gullies to mask their approach. They would breach the outer wall by crawling through a drainage ditch on the airport side.

A second group planned to roll quietly toward the front gate in two vehicles. They would carry silenced pistols to take out two guards at the entrance. Meanwhile, the other attackers would have burst into the several small huts where bin Laden’s wives slept. When they found the tall, bearded Saudi, they would cuff him, drag him toward the gate and load him into a Land Cruiser. Other vehicles back at the rally point would approach in sequence, and together they would go to the provisioned cave about 30 miles away.

Satellite photography and reports from the ground indicated that there were dozens of women and children living at Tarnak. Langley asked members of the tribal team to explain in detail how they planned to minimize harm to bystanders during their assault.

The CIA officers involved thought their agents were serious, semiprofessional fighters who were trying to cooperate as best they could. Yet “if you understood the Afghan mind-set and the context,” recalled an officer involved, it was clear that in any raid the Afghans would probably fire indiscriminately at some point.

In Washington, Richard Clarke, the White House counterterrorism coordinator, drove out to Langley to meet with his CIA counterpart, O’Connell, who briefed him on the details of the Tarnak attack plan and how much it would cost. O’Connell also outlined the political risks, including the potential problem of civilian casualties.

Members of the White House counterterrorism team reacted skeptically. Their sense was that the TRODPINT agents were old anti-Soviet mujaheddin who had long since passed their peak fighting years and were probably milking the CIA for money while minimizing the risks they took on the ground. If they did go through with a Tarnak raid, women and children would die and bin Laden would probably escape, some White House officials feared. Such a massacre would undermine U.S. interests in the Muslim world and beyond.

The CIA’s top leaders reviewed the proposed raid in June 1998. The discussion revealed similar doubts among senior officers in the Directorate of Operations. In the end, as CIA Director George J. Tenet described it to colleagues years later, the CIA’s relevant chain of command — Jack Downing, then chief of the Directorate of Operations; his deputy James Pavitt; O’Connell and Pillar — all recommended against going forward with the Tarnak raid.

By then, there was no enthusiasm for the plan in the Clinton White House, either. “Am I missing something? Aren’t these people going to be mowed down on their way to the wall?” Clarke asked his White House and CIA colleagues sarcastically, one official recalled.

Tenet never formally presented the raid plan for Clinton’s approval, according to several officials involved.

The decision was cabled to Islamabad. The tribal team’s plans should be set aside, perhaps to be revived later. Meanwhile, the agents were encouraged to continue to look for opportunities to catch bin Laden away from Tarnak, where, among other things, an ambush attempt would carry relatively little risk of civilian deaths.

Some of the working-level CIA officers involved in the planning reacted bitterly to the decision. They believed that the kidnapping plan could succeed.

Less than two months later, on Aug. 7, 1998, two teams of al-Qaeda suicide bombers launched synchronized attacks against two U.S. embassies in Africa. In Nairobi, 213 people died and 4,000 were injured. In Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, the toll was 11 dead and 85 wounded. Within months, the New York federal grand jury previously investigating bin Laden delivered an indictment of the Saudi for directing the strikes, among other alleged crimes.

At Langley’s Counterterrorist Center, some CIA analysts and officers were devastated and angry as they watched the televised images of death and rescue in Africa. One of the bin Laden unit’s analysts confronted Tenet. “You are responsible for those deaths,” she said, “because you didn’t act on the information we had when we could have gotten him” through the Tarnak raid, one official involved recalled. The woman was “crying and sobbing, and it was a very rough scene,” the official said.

Tenet stood there and took it. He was a boisterous, emotional man, and he did not shrink from honest confrontation, some of his CIA colleagues felt. After the Africa attacks, Tenet redoubled his pressure on the bin Laden unit’s covert campaign to find their target.

By then, however, bin Laden had dramatically increased his security. He discarded his traceable satellite phone and moved much more stealthily around Afghanistan.

For those who had worked on the plan for the Tarnak raid, the question lingered. Why had the CIA’s leaders turned the idea down?

‘What Are They Waiting For?’

Down in the trenches of a bureaucracy enveloped in secrecy, the resentments festered, amplified by rumors, office grievances and the intensity of the daily grind.

On Aug. 20, acting on intelligence reports of a scheduled meeting of bin Laden and other al-Qaeda leaders, Clinton ordered 75 cruise missiles launched from a submarine in the Arabian Sea against a network of jihadist training camps in eastern Afghanistan. The attack killed at least 21 Pakistani volunteers but missed bin Laden.

By mid-1999, the sense at the White House and in Tenet’s seventh-floor suite at CIA headquarters in Langley was that the Counterterrorist Center had grown too dependent on the TRODPINT tribal agents. One of Tenet’s aides referred to them derisively as “weekend warriors,” middle-aged and now prosperous Afghan fighters with a few Kalashnikovs in their closets.

At the White House, among the few national security officials who knew of the agents’ existence, the attitude evolved from “hopeful skepticism to outright mockery,” as one official recalled.

At one point, the agents moved north to Kabul’s outskirts and rented a farm as a base. They moved in and out of the Afghan capital to scout homes where bin Laden occasionally stayed. They developed a new set of plans: They would strike a Kabul house where bin Laden slept, snatch the Saudi from his bed and retreat from the city in light trucks. The CIA supplied explosives to the agents because their plan called for them to blow up small bridges as they made their escape.

The agents never acted. Their rented farm was a working vineyard. William B. Milam, the U.S. ambassador to Pakistan at the time who was briefed on the operation, asked his CIA colleagues sarcastically, “So what are they waiting for — the wine to ferment?”

To shake up the hunt, Tenet appointed a fast-track executive assistant from the seventh floor, known to his colleagues as Rich, to take charge of the bin Laden unit. Tenet also named Cofer Black, a longtime case officer in Africa who had tracked bin Laden in Sudan, as the Counterterrorist Center’s new director. The bin Laden unit and its chief reported directly to Black; over the next two years, they would work closely together.

When Black took over, the bin Laden unit had about 25 professionals. Most of them were women, and two-thirds had backgrounds as analysts. They called themselves “the Manson Family,” after the crazed convicted murderer Charles Manson, because they had acquired a reputation within the CIA for wild alarmism about the rising al-Qaeda threat.

Their reports described over and over bin Laden’s specific, open threats to inflict mass casualties against Americans. They could not understand why no one else seemed to take the threat as seriously as they did. They pleaded with colleagues that bin Laden was not like the old leftist, theatrical terrorists of the 1970s and ’80s who wanted, in terrorism expert Brian Jenkins’s famous maxim, “a lot of people watching, not a lot of people dead.” Bin Laden wanted many American civilians to die, they warned. They could be dismissive of colleagues who did not share their sense of urgency.

“The rest of the CIA and the intelligence community looked on our efforts as eccentric and at times fanatic,” recalled a former chief of the bin Laden unit. “It was a cult,” agreed a U.S. official who dealt with them. “Jonestown,” said another person involved when asked to sum up the unit’s atmosphere. “I outlawed Kool-Aid.”

Working with the Islamabad station, the bin Laden unit pushed for the recruitment of agents who could operate or travel in Afghanistan.

Some of those were informal sources, helping the CIA because of their political opposition to the Taliban. Others were recruited onto the CIA’s payroll. Case officers working the Afghan borderlands began to recruit a few Taliban military leaders, including a brigade-level commander in eastern Afghanistan. One young case officer operating from Islamabad recruited six or seven Taliban commanders operating in the eastern region. Yet none of the recruited agents was close to bin Laden. The CIA could not recruit a single agent inside the core al-Qaeda terrorist leadership.

Black knew that the CIA was in trouble “without penetrations” of bin Laden’s organization, as a classified Counterterrorist Center briefing to Clinton’s national security aides put it late in 1999. “While we need to disrupt [terrorist] operations . . . we need also to recruit sources,” even though “recruiting terrorist sources is difficult.”

Building an Alliance

The CIA had the best agent coverage around Kandahar. Even so, its classified tracking reports from multiple sources always seemed a day or two behind bin Laden’s movements. The lack of a source in al-Qaeda’s inner circle made forecasting the Saudi’s hour-to-hour itinerary impossible. Moreover, Kandahar was the Taliban’s military stronghold. The Taliban had provided safe haven to bin Laden in Afghanistan in exchange for money and al-Qaeda’s troops. Even if the CIA pinpointed bin Laden downtown, there was no easy way to organize a capture operation; the attacking force would face strong opposition from Taliban units.

In the summer of 1999, a truck bomb detonated outside the Kandahar house of Taliban leader Mohammad Omar. Afterward, bin Laden used his wealth to build new compounds for the Taliban leader. In Omar’s home province of Uruzgan, bin Laden built a new training complex for foreign al-Qaeda volunteers.

The CIA ordered satellite imagery and agent reports to document this camp. Officers hoped bin Laden might wander in for an inspection. One night, a team of four or five Afghan agents from the original TRODPINT group approached the camp. Al-Qaeda guards opened fire and wounded one of them, they reported.

Kabul was a relatively easy place to spy. The Afghan capital was a sprawling and ethnically diverse city, a place of strangers and travelers. At one point, the CIA believed that bin Laden had two wives in Kabul. He would visit their houses periodically. The Islamabad station recruited an Afghan who worked as a security guard at one of the Kabul houses bin Laden used. But the agent was so far down the al-Qaeda information chain that he never knew when bin Laden was going to turn up. He was summoned to duty just as the Saudi’s vehicles rolled in.

Bin Laden’s travels within Afghanistan followed a somewhat predictable path. He would often ride west on the Ring Road from Kandahar, then loop north and east through Ghowr province. The CIA mapped guesthouses in obscure Ghowr, one of Afghanistan’s most isolated and impoverished regions. From there, the Saudi usually moved east to Kabul and then sometimes on to Jalalabad before turning south again toward Kandahar.

Americans who studied this track called it “the circuit.” At the White House, Richard Clarke, the counterterrorism coordinator, tried to develop logarithmic formulas that attempted to predict where bin Laden was likely to move next at any given point.

The CIA’s bin Laden unit sought to trap bin Laden out of “KKJ,” an insider’s abbreviation for the densely populated cities of Kabul, Kandahar and Jalalabad. They hoped to catch him in lightly populated rural areas. Yet they struggled to find a convincing plan.

They knew that on the ground in Afghanistan by the summer of 1999, Massoud, the only experienced, proven guerrilla leader waging war and collecting intelligence day in and day out against the Taliban, bin Laden and their radical Islamic allies, was their only real asset.

From 1997 onward, Massoud’s Northern Alliance militia forces waged a brutal, existential war against the Taliban north of Kabul, often battling directly against bin Laden’s Arab, Chechen and Pakistani volunteers. They knew bin Laden not only as a preacher, financier and terrorist planner, but also as a military field commander who wandered near their battle lines.

There were serious doubts inside Clinton’s Cabinet about the history of drug trafficking and human-rights violations among Massoud’s Northern Alliance forces. But at the CIA’s Counterterrorist Center, analysts and officers in the bin Laden unit knew one thing for certain: Massoud was the enemy of their enemy.

A deeper, more active, more lethal alliance with Massoud, these CIA officers argued, offered by far the best chance to capture or kill bin Laden before he struck again.

Massoud and His Militiamen

In October 1999, a team of CIA operators from the agency’s Counterterrorist Center flew to Dushanbe, Tajikistan. Code-named JAWBREAKER-5, the group was led by the chief of the center’s bin Laden unit, the man known as Rich, a veteran of CIA postings in Algiers and elsewhere in the developing world.

They went to a secluded airfield, boarded an old Soviet-made Mi-17 transport helicopter and swooped toward the jagged, snow-draped peaks of northern Afghanistan.

Their aim was to revive secret intelligence and combat operations against bin Laden in partnership with Massoud and his ragged coalition of Afghan fighters, many of them veterans of the war against the Soviets. Massoud’s hardened militiamen clung to their positions in the stark Panjshir Valley.

“We have a common enemy,” the CIA team leader told Massoud, according to participants, referring to bin Laden. “Let’s work together.”

Massoud remained Afghanistan’s most formidable military commander. A sinewy man with penetrating dark eyes, he had become a charismatic, popular leader, especially in northeastern Afghanistan. There he had fought and negotiated with equal imagination during the 1980s, punishing and frustrating Soviet occupation forces. He was an impressive tactician and an attentive student of Mao and other guerrilla leaders.

He was, above all, an independent man. He surrounded himself with books. He prayed piously, read Persian poetry and studied Islamic theology. But during the mid-1990s, his militia forces had at times engaged in horrendous massacres. American and British drug-enforcement officials continued to accuse his men of smuggling opium and heroin.

By 1999, Massoud was seen by some at the Pentagon and inside the Clinton Cabinet as a spent force commanding bands of thugs. An inner circle of the Cabinet with access to the most closely guarded secrets was sharply divided over whether the United States should deepen its partnership with him. Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Henry H. Shelton — reflecting the views of professional analysts in their departments — argued that Massoud’s alliance was tainted and in decline.

But at the CIA, especially inside the Counterterrorist Center, career officers passionately described Massoud by 1999 as the United States’ last, best hope to capture or kill bin Laden in Afghanistan before his al-Qaeda network claimed more American lives. Massoud might be a flawed ally, they declared, but bin Laden was by far the greater danger.

Frightened by swelling intelligence reports warning that al-Qaeda planned new terrorist strikes, Richard Clarke and Clinton’s national security adviser, Samuel R. “Sandy” Berger, approved the JAWBREAKER-5 mission. They were uneasy about Massoud but said they were ready to try anything within reason that might lead to bin Laden’s capture or death.

Massoud was at war across northern Afghanistan against the Taliban, whose puritan mullahs had allied themselves with bin Laden’s al-Qaeda fighters in a drive to control all Afghan territory and destroy Massoud’s coalition. Massoud’s men often maneuvered in battle against bin Laden’s brigade of Arab volunteers, as well as al-Qaeda-sponsored Pakistani volunteers and Chechen fighters. Ultimately, Cofer Black, heading the CIA’s Counterterrorist Center, hoped Massoud would capture bin Laden during one of these engagements and kill him or hand him over for trial.

In dimly lit Panjshir Valley safe houses in October 1999, Massoud told the JAWBREAKER-5 team that he was willing to deepen his partnership with the CIA, but he was explicit about his limitations. Bin Laden spent most of his time near the southern city of Kandahar, in the eastern Afghan mountains, far from where Massoud’s forces operated. Occasionally, bin Laden visited Jalalabad or Kabul, closer to the Northern Alliance’s lines. In these areas, Massoud’s intelligence service had active agents, and perhaps they could develop more sources.

Massoud also told the CIA delegation that U.S. policy toward bin Laden and Afghanistan was doomed to fail. The Americans directed all of their efforts against bin Laden and a handful of his senior aides, but they failed to see the larger context in which al-Qaeda thrived. What about the Taliban? What about the Taliban’s supporters in Pakistani intelligence? What about its financiers in Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates?

“Even if we succeed in what you are asking for,” Massoud told the CIA delegation, his aide and interpreter Abdullah recalled, “that will not solve the bigger problem that is growing.”

The CIA officers told Massoud that they agreed with his critique, but they had their orders. The U.S. government rejected a military confrontation with the Taliban or direct support for any armed factions in the broader Afghan war. Instead, U.S. policy focused on capturing bin Laden and his lieutenants for criminal trial or killing them in the course of an arrest attempt. If Massoud helped with this narrow mission, the CIA officers argued, perhaps it would lead to wider political support or development aid in the future.

“What was irritating was that in this whole tragedy, in this whole chaotic situation,” recalled one of Massoud’s intelligence aides who worked closely with the CIA during this period, “they were talking about this very small piece of it: bin Laden. And if you were on our side, it would have been very difficult for you to accept that this was the problem. For us, it was an element of the problem but not the problem.”

Still, Massoud and his aides agreed that they had nothing to lose by helping the CIA. “First of all, it was an effort against a common enemy,” recalled Abdullah. “Second, we had the hope that it would get the U.S. to know better about the situation in Afghanistan.”

Doubts About Massoud

Massoud had a long, checkered history with the CIA. Among those with the proper security clearances, the accusations and stories of perfidy had become legend.

The CIA first sent Massoud aid in 1984. But their relations were undermined by the CIA’s heavy dependence on Pakistan during the war against the Soviets. The Pakistani intelligence service despised Massoud because he had waged a long and brutal campaign against Pakistan’s main Islamic radical client, the warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. As the war against the Soviets ended, Pakistani intelligence sought to exclude Massoud from the victory, and the CIA mainly went along. But under pressure from the State Department and members of Congress, the agency eventually reopened its private channels to Massoud.

In 1990, the CIA’s secret relationship with Massoud soured because of a dispute over a $500,000 payment. Schroen, the CIA officer who was working from Islamabad, had delivered the cash to Massoud’s brother in exchange for assurances that Massoud would attack Afghan communist forces along a key artery, the Salang Highway. But Massoud’s forces never moved, as far as the CIA could tell. Schroen and other officers believed that they had been ripped off for half a million dollars.

Schroen renewed contact with Massoud during a solo visit to Kabul in September 1996. By then, bin Laden had found sanctuary in Afghanistan, and the CIA sought allies to watch and disrupt al-Qaeda. Schroen and Massoud settled their old dispute. (Massoud claimed he had never received the $500,000.) The guerrilla leader agreed to cooperate on a secret CIA program to repurchase Stinger antiaircraft missiles. He sold the agency eight missiles he still had and began to talk sporadically with Langley about intelligence operations against bin Laden.

Schroen met Massoud again in the spring of 1997 at his new headquarters in Taloqan, in Afghanistan’s far north. By then, the Taliban had stormed into Kabul and seized the capital as Massoud withdrew. Looking to win American favor for his prolonged war against the Taliban and its foreign Islamic militant allies, Massoud began to buy up Stingers across the north for the CIA. He also agreed to notify the agency if he got a line on bin Laden’s whereabouts.

A series of clandestine CIA teams carrying electronic intercept equipment and relatively small amounts of cash — up to $250,000 per visit — began to visit Massoud in the Panjshir Valley. The first formal group, code-named NALT-1, flew on one of Massoud’s helicopters from Dushanbe to the Panjshir Valley late in 1997.

Three other teams had gone in by the summer of 1999. The electronic intercept equipment they delivered allowed Massoud to monitor Taliban battlefield radio transmissions. In exchange, the CIA officers asked Massoud to let them know immediately if his men ever heard accounts on the Taliban radios indicating that bin Laden or his top lieutenants were on the move in a particular sector.

Given the doubts about Massoud inside the Clinton administration, the CIA’s push to deepen its partnership with him faced close scrutiny at the White House. The National Security Council’s intelligence policy and legal offices drafted formal, binding guidance.

Massoud was at war with the Taliban. The United States had declared a policy of official neutrality toward that war as a co-sponsor of all-party peace talks, which dragged on inconclusively. Clinton enacted economic sanctions against the Taliban but was unwilling to fund or arm Massoud. The White House sought to ensure that the CIA’s counterterrorism mission in the Panjshir Valley concentrated only on bin Laden. The administration did not want the CIA to use its intelligence-collection and counterterrorism partnership with Massoud for a secret, undeclared war against the Taliban.

Clinton told his top national security aides that he was prepared to work with Massoud on intelligence operations, despite what he saw as a record of brutality, but he was not ready to arm the Northern Alliance, participants recalled. The Pentagon and the intelligence community both provided secret analysis to Clinton arguing that Massoud had all the weapons he needed from other suppliers, the president recounted later to colleagues. In any event, Clinton recalled, Massoud would never be able to defeat the Taliban or govern Afghanistan from Kabul.

At the White House, some national security aides briefed on the CIA’s missions feared that, as with the Salang Highway operation in 1990, Massoud would just take the CIA’s cash and sit on his hands.

In the end, the National Security Council approved written guidance to authorize intelligence cooperation with Massoud. But the highly classified documents made clear that the CIA could provide no equipment or assistance that would, as several officials recalled its thrust, “fundamentally alter the Afghan battlefield.”

A few months after the JAWBREAKER-5 team choppered out, the CIA’s Counterterrorist Center picked up intelligence that bin Laden had arrived in Derunta Camp, in a jagged valley near the eastern Afghan city of Jalalabad.

It was a typical bin Laden facility: crude, mainly dirt and rocks, with a few modest buildings protected by ridges. Massoud’s sources reported that no Afghans were permitted in Derunta, only Arabs. Testimony from al-Qaeda defectors and interrogation of Arab jihadists showed that Derunta was a graduate school for elite recruits. The Defense Intelligence Agency had relayed reports that bin Laden’s aides might be developing chemical weapons or poisons there. The White House’s Counterterrorism Security Group routed satellites above the camps for surveillance.

The CIA recruited Afghan agents who traveled or lived in the region, an area of heavy smuggling and trade and relatively weak Taliban control. Through their liaison in the Panjshir, CIA officers pushed intelligence-collection equipment to Massoud’s southern lines, near Jalalabad. Besides radio intercepts, the technology included an optical device, derived from technology used by offshore spy planes, that could produce photographic images from more than 10 miles away. Massoud’s men, with help from CIA officers, set up an overlook above Derunta and tried to watch the place.

The Counterterrorist Center’s bin Laden unit relayed a report to Massoud that bin Laden had arrived in Derunta. Massoud ordered a mission. He rounded up “a bunch of mules,” as a U.S. official who was involved later put it, and loaded them up with Soviet-designed Katyusha rockets. He dispatched this small commando team toward the hills above Derunta.

After the team was on its way, Massoud reported his plan to Langley: He was going to batter bin Laden’s camp with rocket fire.

The CIA’s lawyers convulsed in alarm. The White House’s legal rules for liaison with Massoud had not addressed such pure military operations against bin Laden. The Massoud partnership was supposed to be about intelligence collection. Now the CIA had, in effect, provided intelligence for a rocket attack on Derunta. The CIA was legally complicit in Massoud’s operation, the lawyers feared, and the agency had no authority to be involved.

The bin Laden unit shot a message to the Panjshir: You’ve got to recall the mission.

Massoud’s aides replied, in effect, as a U.S. official involved recalled it: “What do you think this is, the 82nd Airborne? We’re on mules. They’re gone.” Massoud’s team had no radios. They were walking to the launch site. They would fire their rockets, turn around and walk back.

Langley’s officers waited nervously. Some of them muttered sarcastically about the absurd intersections of U.S. law and a secret war they were expected to manage. Massoud’s aides eventually reported back that they had, in fact, shelled Derunta. But the CIA could pick up no independent confirmation of the attack or its consequences. The lawyers relaxed and the incident passed, unpublicized.

During 2000, Massoud planned an expanding military campaign against the Taliban and al-Qaeda. His strategy was to recruit allies such as the guerrilla leaders Ismail Khan and Gen. Abdurrashid Dostum and seed them as pockets of rebellion against Taliban rule in northern and western Afghanistan, where the Taliban was weakest. As these rebel pockets emerged and stabilized, Massoud explained, he would drive toward them with his more formal armored militia, trying to link up on roadways, choking off Taliban-ruled cities and towns.

Once he had more solid footing in the north, Massoud planned to pursue the same strategy in the Taliban heartland in the south. He hoped to aid ethnic Pashtun rebels such as Hamid Karzai, a former Afghan deputy foreign minister from a prominent royal tribal family who had been forced into exile in Pakistan. By 1999, Karzai had turned against the Taliban and wanted to lead a rebellion against the militia in its southern homeland around Kandahar. Massoud dispatched aides to meet with Karzai and develop these ideas.

The Panjshir Missions

To pursue his plans in a serious way, Massoud needed helicopters, trucks and other vehicles. Some CIA officers working with Massoud wanted to help him by supplying the mobile equipment, cash, training and weapons he would need to expand his war against the Taliban and al-Qaeda. Yet as 2000 passed, the CIA struggled to maintain the basics of its intelligence liaison with Massoud.

It was difficult and risky for the agency’s officers to reach the Panjshir Valley. The only practical route was through Tajikistan. From there, CIA teams usually took one of the few rusting, patched-together Mi-17 transport helicopters the Northern Alliance managed to keep in the air. On one trip, the Taliban scrambled MiG-21 jets in an effort to shoot down Massoud’s helicopter. If successful, the militia would have discovered American corpses in the wreckage.

Even on the best days, the choppers would shake and rattle, and the cabin would fill with the smell of fuel. The overland routes were no better. When a CIA team drove in from Dushanbe, one of its vehicles flipped over and a veteran officer dislocated his shoulder.

These reports accumulated on the desk of Pavitt, the deputy director of operations who had overall responsibility for CIA espionage. Pavitt was a blue-eyed, white-haired former case officer and station chief who had served in Europe during the Cold War. Like Tenet, who had appointed him, he was a spy manager with a feel for politics. Pavitt began to ask why CIA officers were taking such huge physical risks to work with Massoud. Were they getting enough to justify the possibility of death or injury?

Those opposed to the Panjshir missions argued, as one official recalled it, “You’re sending people to their deaths.”

The agency sent out a team of mechanics knowledgeable about Russian helicopters. When Massoud’s men opened up one of the Mi-17s, the mechanics were stunned: An engine originally made for a Hind attack helicopter had been patched into the bay of the Mi-17 transport. It was a flying miracle.

Afterward, Tenet signed off on a compromise: The CIA would secretly buy its own airworthy Mi-17 helicopter, maintain it properly in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, and use CIA pilots to fly clandestine teams into the Panjshir.

But the helicopter issue was a symptom of a larger problem. By the late summer of 2000, the CIA’s liaison with Massoud was fraying on both sides.

Frustrated by daunting geography and unable to win support for Massoud in Cabinet debates, the CIA’s officers felt stifled. For their part, Massoud’s aides had hoped their work with the agency would lead to clearer recognition of Afghanistan’s plight in Washington and perhaps covert military aid. They could see no evidence that this was happening.

Instead they were badgered repeatedly about mounting a “Hollywood operation,” as one of Massoud’s intelligence aides put it, to capture bin Laden alive. The aide likened the mission urged on them by the CIA to a game of chess, in which they would have to capture the king without touching any other piece on the board.

Massoud’s men asked their CIA counterparts, as this intelligence aide recalled it: “Is there any policy in the government of the American states to help Afghanistan if the people of Afghanistan help you get rid of your most-wanted man?”

After the terrorist bombing of the USS Cole in October 2000, in which 17 sailors were killed at Aden, Yemen, the CIA’s Panjshir teams tried to revive their plan to supply Massoud with more extensive and more lethal aid. CIA officers sat down in November at Langley and drew up a specific list of what Massoud needed. In addition to more cash — to bribe commanders and to counteract a Taliban treasury swollen with Arab money — Massoud needed trucks, helicopters, light arms, ammunition, uniforms, food, and maybe some mortars and artillery. He did not need combat aircraft. Tanks were not a priority.

The list of covert supplies proposed for Massoud would cost between $50 million and $150 million, depending on how aggressive the White House wanted to be.

Under the plan, the CIA would establish a permanent base with Massoud in the Panjshir Valley. Rich, the bin Laden unit chief, argued that the agency’s officers had to constantly be down around the campfire with Massoud’s men.

The CIA wanted to overcome the confusion and mutual mistrust that had developed with Massoud over operations designed to capture or kill bin Laden. The plan envisioned that CIA officers would go directly into action alongside the Northern Alliance if they developed strong intelligence about bin Laden’s whereabouts. There would be no more embarrassments like the mission against Derunta.

In the late autumn, Clarke sent a memo outlining the CIA’s proposal to Berger, Clinton’s national security adviser. But they were worse than lame ducks now at the White House. The November presidential election had deadlocked; White House aides were enduring the strangest post-election transition in a century just as the CIA’s paper landed on their desks.

The word went back to the Counterterrorist Center: There would be no new covert-action program for Massoud.

Covert War in Jeopardy

As the Bush administration took office early in 2001, Massoud retained a Washington lobbyist. He wrote a letter to Vice President Cheney urging the new administration to reexamine U.S. policy toward Afghanistan. He told his advisers that he knew he could not defeat the Taliban on the battlefield as long as the ruling militia was funded by bin Laden and reinforced from Pakistan. He sought to build up a new political and military coalition within Afghanistan to squeeze the Taliban and break its grip on ordinary Afghans. For this, sooner or later, he told visitors, he would require the support of the United States.

His CIA liaison had slackened, but his intelligence aides still spoke and exchanged messages frequently with Langley. That spring, they passed word that Massoud had been invited to France to address the European Parliament.

Schroen, the CIA officer from Islamabad, and Rich flew to Paris to meet with Massoud. They wanted to reassure him that even though the pace of their visits had slowed because of the policy gridlock in Washington, the CIA still intended to keep up its regular installment payments of several hundred thousand dollars as part of their intelligence-sharing arrangements. They also wanted to know how Massoud felt about his military position.

Massoud told them that he thought he could defend his lines in the northeast of Afghanistan but that was about all. The United States had to do something, Massoud told the CIA officers quietly, or eventually he was going to crumble.

“If President Bush doesn’t help us,” Massoud told reporters in Strasbourg a few days later, “then these terrorists will damage the United States and Europe very soon — and it will be too late.”

Early in September 2001, Massoud’s intelligence service transmitted a routine classified report to the CIA’s Counterterrorist Center about two Arab television journalists who had crossed Northern Alliance lines from Kabul.

The intelligence-sharing between Massoud and the CIA concentrated mainly on Arabs and foreigners in Afghanistan. In this case, officers in the bin Laden unit at the Counterterrorist Center took note of the movement of the two journalists. It did not seem of exceptional interest.

Members of the Bush’s Cabinet met Sept. 4 at the White House. Before them was a draft copy of a National Security Presidential Directive, a classified memo outlining a new U.S. policy toward al-Qaeda, Afghanistan and Massoud.

It had been many months in the drafting. The Bush administration’s senior national security team had not begun to focus on al-Qaeda until April, about three months after taking office. They did not forge a policy approach until July. Then they took additional weeks to schedule a meeting to ratify their plans.

Among other things, the draft document revived almost in its entirety the CIA plan to aid Massoud that had been forwarded to the lame-duck Clinton White House — and rejected — nine months earlier. The stated goal of the draft was to eliminate bin Laden and his organization. The plan called for the CIA to supply Massoud with a large but undetermined sum for covert action to support his war against the Taliban, as well as trucks, uniforms, ammunition, mortars, helicopters and other equipment. The Bush Cabinet approved this part of the draft document.

Other aspects of the Bush administration’s al-Qaeda policy, such as its approach to the use of armed Predator surveillance drones for the hunt, remained unresolved after the Sept. 4 debate. But concerning Massoud, the CIA was told that it could at least start the paperwork for a new covert policy — the first in a decade that sought to influence the course of the Afghan war.

In the Panjshir Valley, Massoud — unaware of these developments — read Persian poetry in his bungalow in the early hours of Sept. 9. Later that morning, he finally decided to grant an interview to the two Arab journalists from Kabul.

As one of them set up a television camera, the other read aloud a list of questions he intended to ask. About half of them concerned bin Laden.

A bomb secretly packed in the television equipment ripped the cameraman’s body apart. It shattered the room’s windows, seared the walls in flame and tore Massoud’s chest with shrapnel.

Hours later, after Massoud had been evacuated to Tajikistan, his intelligence aide Amrullah Saleh called the CIA’s Counterterrorist Center. He spoke to Rich, the bin Laden unit chief. Saleh was sobbing and heaving between sentences as he explained what had happened.

“Where’s Massoud?” the CIA officer asked.

“He’s in the refrigerator,” said Saleh, searching for the English word for morgue.

Massoud was dead, but members of his inner circle had barely absorbed the news. They were all in shock. They were also trying to strategize in a hurry. They had already put out a false story claiming that Massoud had only been wounded. Meanwhile, Saleh told the Counterterrorist Center, the suddenly leaderless Northern Alliance needed the CIA’s help as it prepared to confront al-Qaeda and the Taliban.

On the morning of Sept. 10, the CIA’s daily classified briefings to Bush, his Cabinet and other policymakers reported on Massoud’s death and analyzed the consequences for the United States’ covert war against al-Qaeda.

Officers in the Counterterrorist Center, still hopeful that they could maintain a foothold in northern Afghanistan to attack bin Laden, called frantically around Washington to find a way to aid the rump Northern Alliance before it was eliminated.

Massoud’s advisers and lobbyists, playing for time, tried to promote speculation that Massoud might still be alive. But as Sept. 10 wore on, privately and phone call by phone call many of the Afghans closest to the commander began to learn that he was gone.

Karzai, who was in Pakistan when his brother reached him, had spoken to Massoud a few days earlier. He was considering a plan to fly into Massoud’s territory, work his way south and open an armed rebellion against the Taliban — with or without U.S. support.

Karzai’s brother said it was confirmed: Ahmed Shah Massoud was dead.

Karzai reacted in a single, brief sentence, as his brother recalled it: “What an unlucky country.”

Al-Qaeda’s Murderous Strike

Within 24 hours, it would be the United States that proved to be an unlucky country.

On the morning of Sept. 11, 19 al-Qaeda operatives, some of whom had been living and working in America for years, hijacked four commercial airliners, flying two of them into the World Trade Center twin towers within minutes of each other. A third plane struck the Pentagon, and on a fourth, passengers who had heard the news of the attacks on New York and Washington sacrificed their lives to foil the terrorists’ plans to hit the Capitol or the White House. They stormed the plane’s cockpit, overpowered the hijackers and drove the plane down nose-first into a Pennsylvania field. In all, nearly 3,000 people died in the attacks, and the world’s sole superpower was shaken to its foundations.

As the planes streaked toward their targets, bin Laden was in his Kandahar stronghold attempting to get a TV signal. According to a former bodyguard, bin Laden had asked his media chief to try to set up a satellite dish, but the mountainous terrain prevented that. On a videotape discovered in Afghanistan after the attacks, bin Laden said he was at dinner when he heard that the towers had collapsed. He toasted the victory, then expressed surprise that the strike had brought the buildings down.

Still basking in the glow of his success, bin Laden declared that he and his followers were engaged in a preordained war that would continue until the climax of Earthly time, a war that was not a means to a political end but rather an expression of God’s will and as such could offer no peace to the enemies of God’s true religion.

Intelligence analysts would later learn, mainly through interrogations of al-Qaeda operatives held at CIA “black sites” overseas and at the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, that after the attacks, bin Laden went on the run in a hectic tour of Afghanistan.

But in the immediate aftermath of Sept. 11, the Americans had no idea that bin Laden and his chief deputy, an Egyptian doctor named Ayman al-Zawahiri, were on the move, traveling by car, meeting frequently with followers and Taliban leaders. According to classified U.S. military documents based on interviews with detainees and obtained by the anti-secrecy group WikiLeaks, bin Laden held court at a secret guesthouse in or near Kabul.

Acting like an exiled head of state, he received terrorist operatives from Afghanistan, Malaysia and elsewhere and met with such leaders as the Taliban’s Jalaluddin Haqqani. He issued instructions for campaigns against Western targets, lectured on Islam and history, and sent out a video boasting about how pleasantly surprised he was that the attacks had claimed so many American lives.

On October 7, less than a month after the Sept. 11 attacks, U.S. bombers began hitting Afghanistan, hoping to bring down the Taliban government for giving al-Qaeda sanctuary. On the ground, the hunt for bin Laden was also underway. A few dozen U.S. paramilitary troops, dressed as Afghans in beards and loose robes and accompanied by hired Afghan fighters, took up the chase. The American presence in the manhunt at first was thin, and expertise was scarce. The CIA team that had been tracking bin Laden from back home at Langley since 1996 scrambled to find officers who knew Afghanistan and could deploy immediately. Only about a dozen agency people were working in the country on Sept. 11, according to a former senior intelligence official who helped set up agency outposts there.

The first job was to identify tribal leaders and meet with them, always bringing gifts. “The message was ,‘We’re your friends,’” said the senior intelligence official. “We’re everyone’s friends. But whoever hosts us is in line to get American money.”

‘I Want bin Laden’s Head’

Langley’s choice to head up the bin Laden hunt in Afghanistan was an operative named Gary Berntsen. Berntsen was known at CIA headquarters as an aggressive field operative, the type inclined to act first and ask permission later. But he possessed the right combination of brawn and brains for tough missions. When summoned to the front office in the Counterterrorist Center in October 2001, Berntsen recalls, his boss’s orders were simple: “Gary, I want you killing the enemy immediately.”

It might have been more specific and more colorful than that. In a memoir published by Schroen, who preceded Berntsen into the battle, he recounted the instructions he received from Black, director of the CIA Counterterrorist Center: “I want bin Laden’s head shipped back in a box filled with dry ice. I want to be able to show bin Laden’s head to the president.”

In any case, Berntsen got the message. He left for Afghanistan the next day, determined to eliminate one man in particular.

Berntsen worked out of a Kabul guesthouse, fueling the hunt with several million dollars in cash that he kept stowed in a Rubbermaid tub. From that makeshift bank, he distributed payoffs in the thousands of dollars to informants in tribal villages where bin Laden sightings had been reported.

“I must have gotten eight reports at the time, saying he’s in this village here or that village there,” said Berntsen, who had investigated al-Qaeda’s 1998 bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. “He was stopping and giving speeches.”

In early October, Yunus Khalis, an elderly Afghan warrior who controlled a swath of territory in the country’s east, including the regional capital of Jalalabad and the nearby cave complex at Tora Bora, sent a message to bin Laden offering him sanctuary .

Bin Laden had friends and followers all along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. Even before al-Qaeda’s founding in 1988, bin Laden had spent years in the area, developing relationships with tribal and religious leaders, having worked with side by side with many of them in the Afghan mujaheddin’s 1980s battles against the Soviet Union.

Khalis and bin Laden had known each other since those days, when Khalis, one of the most prominent leaders of the anti-Soviet resistance, had received tens of millions of dollars in guns and money from the CIA. He later introduced bin Laden to Mohammad Omar, the Taliban leader. After the United States began to bomb Afghanistan, Khalis, then 82, called for jihad against the Americans.

Taking advantage of Khalis’s hospitality, bin Laden arrived in Jalalabad in November and immediately began to spread cash among local tribes, either directly or through trusted intermediaries.

When the bombing around Jalalabad intensified, bin Laden fled into the fortified caves of Tora Bora, about 35 miles south of the regional capital. Bin Laden knew the territory: As a young man, he had driven bulldozers there as Afghan resistance fighters excavated miles of tunnels.

In late November, probably within days after bin Laden had arrived in the area, Berntsen’s team tracked him to a mountainous redoubt called Milawa, just below the peaks of Tora Bora.

Berntsen says he knew exactly where the 1,000-man jihadist force had fallen back. An Arabic-speaking JAWBREAKER team member reported hearing bin Laden speaking on a radio taken from a dead al-Qaeda fighter.
The airstrikes called in by Berntsen’s men were fierce: a barrage from B-52s, F-15s and plenty more that lasted nearly 60 hours.

“Our guys were exhausted. They had been hammering Osama for days,” Berntsen said. “Finally, bin Laden fled deeper into the mountains.”
Berntsen, who was back in Kabul, summoned several members of his team to tell him what they would need to take down bin Laden now that they thought they knew where he was. The response: “We need 800 Army Rangers between bin Laden and the border.”

By Berntsen’s estimate, there were just 40 Special Operations soldiers and a dozen other Special Forces on hand to head off bin Laden’s potential flight “across hundreds of miles of caves and mountain passes.”

In his own memoir, Berntsen recalls shouting at an Army general in Kabul who had made it clear that ground troops would not be coming, for “fear of alienating our Afghan allies.”

“Screw that!” Berntsen says he retorted.

In Berntsen’s view, the Afghan militia was “unreliable” and “cobbled together at the last minute” — certainly not the army to trust with nabbing the man who had ordered the 9/11 attacks. “I’d made it clear in my reports that our Afghan allies were hardly anxious to get at al-Qaeda in Tora Bora,” he writes. But his superiors at Langley told him it wasn’t the CIA’s call to make.

Berntsen begged, but his pleas went unanswered, according to a Senate Foreign Relations Committee report on Tora Bora. Without more manpower, Berntsen couldn’t risk a ground assault.

Still, the Americans tried to stay close to bin Laden. Berntsen’s deputy, a CIA paramilitary officer, recruited an Afghan to trek into the mountains and offer bin Laden and his followers food and water, then report back on the terrorist’s location.

“The guy saw bin Laden and his son,” Berntsen said. “When you’re desperate, you’re desperate. And when you don’t have food and water, you’ll take it.”

As the United States carpet-bombed the cave complex, bin Laden and al-Zawahiri urged their fighters to carry on against the Americans. In the bitter cold of the caves, bin Laden sipped mint tea. He heard pleas from his fighters for medicine and, with ever-greater urgency, escape routes.

A videotape later obtained by the CIA shows bin Laden during that time , teaching followers how to dig holes where they could spend the night without being seen by U.S. spy planes. As bin Laden speaks, a U.S. bomb explodes in the background. Bin Laden casually notes, “We were there last night.”

The terrorist leader exhorts his followers to keep fighting and at one point apologizes “for getting them trapped . . . and pounded by American airstrikes.”

Despite the success of the air campaign, U.S. officials remained reluctant to send in ground troops to flush out bin Laden. They told officers on the ground in Afghanistan that Pakistani troops would help them, cutting off bin Laden if he tried to cross into their country.

But in early December, over lunch at his palace in Islamabad, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, Pakistan’s president, made it clear to U.S. officials that he didn’t want to commit troops unless the Americans would help transport them to the border by air. According to Wendy Chamberlin, who was U.S. ambassador to Pakistan, Musharraf told her and Army Gen. Tommy R. Franks, commander of U.S. Central Command: “I’d put the troops in trucks, but that’ll take weeks. Could you give me air support?”

According to Chamberlin, Franks was noncommittal. Only later did she learn that the general was already “planning for Iraq,” she said. “Even if he could have helped out, he was already starting to have to reshuffle.” Without the air support, the Pakistanis would agree to send only a small force, too small to secure the border.

Back at Tora Bora, a team from Delta Force — the military’s secretive, elite Special Operations unit — planned to sneak up on bin Laden from behind, crossing into the terrorist’s suspected lair from Pakistan through an undefended back door. That would have required using supplemental oxygen to scale a 14,000-foot peak, but according to the leader of the Delta Force team, who later wrote a book under the pseudonym Dalton Fury, the plan had a better chance of succeeding than any frontal assault that relied on help from Afghan fighters.

Fury, the assault troop commander who retired from the Army as a major, said in an e-mail interview that even the reduced number of Pakistani forces who were supposed to seal the border “never made it there.” He said his superiors told him to skip the border-side assault and instead “align our mission with the Afghan mujaheddin to put an Afghan face on killing” bin Laden.

Fury didn’t trust the Afghans any more than Berntsen. “The mujaheddin were not very skilled or motivated fighters,” he said. But following orders, the Delta Force team stayed on the Afghan side of the border.

Tora Bora and the Big Bomb

On Dec. 10, Fury’s team got another tip from a source who claimed to know bin Laden’s general location in the Tora Bora area. Thirty members of the team launched a hasty assault, but when some of his men were abandoned by their Afghan allies behind enemy lines, the team halted its advance and spent two hours rescuing their mates. Fury aborted the mission.

Finally, after weeks of searching the caves and mountains of Tora Bora for signs of bin Laden, Berntsen believed that his men had a good peg on the terrorist. Berntsen called in the big bomb — the BLU-82, a 15,000-pound device the size of a car.

The bomb was pushed out of the back of a C-130 transport plane. It struck with such force that it vaporized men deep inside caves. The devastation spread across an area as big as five football fields, killing numerous al-Qaeda fighters — including, Berntsen believed, bin Laden.

It was three months after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and Berntsen thought, “I’ve got him now.”

Six days later, two of Berntsen’s men were listening to a radio they had picked up from a dead al-Qaeda fighter. They heard bin Laden addressing his troops in Arabic.

It was only later, during the questioning of a prisoner seized at Tora Bora, that intelligence officials discovered what went wrong. The prisoner, Abdallah Tabarak, a Moroccan who had been one of bin Laden’s longtime bodyguards, told his interrogators that as the bombs fell, he took possession of the al-Qaeda leader’s satellite phone on the assumption that U.S. intelligence agencies were monitoring it to get a fix on their position.

Tabarak moved away from bin Laden and his entourage as they fled; he continued to use the phone in an effort to divert the Americans and allow bin Laden to escape. Tabarak was captured at Tora Bora in possession of the phone, officials said.

“He agreed to be captured or die,” a Moroccan official said of Tabarak. “That’s the level of his fanaticism for bin Laden. It wasn’t a lot of time, but it was enough. “

After Tora Bora, the Americans would never again feel certain that they knew where bin Laden was. The trail had gone cold, but Berntsen’s team stayed on the hunt.

Tora Bora taught both sides important lessons. The Americans learned, as a top intelligence official said, “that it was a bad idea to ‘outsource’ something as important as capturing or killing bin Laden.” Mutual mistrust kept the Pakistani military and Afghan fighters from embracing the Americans’ search for bin Laden.

After Tora Bora, the Americans knew that “when the time came to move, we would do it ourselves,” said the official, who was involved in the search for years.

A Man on the Run

Bin Laden, who took the U.S. bombing seriously enough to have written his will in mid-December of 2001, learned that he had lost his safe haven and was now a fugitive. “Hiding and isolation from operatives and recruits transformed him from a hands-on leader into an almost mythical figure within al-Qaeda,” the intelligence official said. That new mystique lent additional import to each video or audio transmission that bin Laden managed to smuggle out, but it also dampened al-Qaeda’s fundraising and recruiting capacity.

The popular version of bin Laden’s escape from Tora Bora – the version American intelligence analysts initially believed — was dramatic enough. Somehow, a hunted man made it over the mountains, south to the tribal areas of Pakistan.

But U.S. interrogators later learned from Guantanamo detainees that bin Laden had actually taken a more daring route: to the north toward Jalalabad, right past the approaching U.S. and British special forces and their Afghan allies. After resting there, he proceeded on horseback for several days into Konar province, in Afghanistan’s far northeast.

“It’s still unclear who bribed who and who talked to who,” a U.S. intelligence official said, but “bin Laden got out. Knowing the land, knowing the people who could direct you, he was able to get out to Konar” into valleys “that no one has subdued … places the Soviets never pacified.”

Bin Laden and al-Zawahiri next moved on to an “unknown location,” according to military documents. Some detainees reported that the two had stayed in Konar for up to 10 months. Even bin Laden’s closest followers didn’t know where he had gone, according to U.S. analysts who mined the interrogations of al-Qaeda operatives.

“It became clear that he was not meeting with them face to face,” said an intelligence official. “People we would capture had not seen him.”

U.S. forces believed that at Tora Bora they had come within perhaps 2,000 yards of bin Laden. Yet he managed to slip away, vanishing so completely that several years went by without a single tip, surveillance photo or monitored transmission of any value. On the ground, American operatives continued to try to pry intelligence from “locals willing to talk for some pocket change,” Fury said. “The CIA did a lot of this fishing. Mind-numbing. A million dead ends.”

A few months after Tora Bora, as part of the preparation for war in Iraq, the Bush administration pulled out many of the Special Operations and CIA forces that had been searching for bin Laden in Afghanistan, according to several U.S. officials who served at the time. Even the drones U.S. forces depended on to track movements of suspicious characters in the Afghan mountain passes were redeployed to be available for the Iraq war, Army Lt. Gen. John Vines told The Washington Post in 2006. Once, when Vines’s troops believed they were within half an hour of catching up to bin Laden, the general asked for drones to cover three possible escape routes. But only one drone was available — others had been moved to Iraq. The target got away.

Back home, frustration over the long search led to a debate between critics of the Bush administration’s global war on terrorism, who argued that the cause of security would be better served by focusing on targeted strikes against bin Laden and al-Qaeda, and defenders of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, who said the best way to contain terrorism was to take the fight to where the enemy lived.

But even as the invasion of Iraq loomed, the Americans — very quietly and clandestinely — pursued the chase. Since early 2002, a small number of personnel from the NSA and the CIA had been stationed where analysts believed bin Laden may have been hiding, embedded with counterterrorism units of the Pakistan army’s elite Special Services Group.

The NSA and other specialists collected imagery and electronic intercepts that their CIA counterparts then shared with the Pakistani units in the tribal areas.

But even with sophisticated technology, the local geography presented formidable obstacles. In a land of dead-end valleys, high peaks and winding ridge lines, it was easy to hide within the miles of caves and deep ravines or to live unnoticed in mud-walled compounds barely distinguishable from the surrounding terrain.

The Afghan-Pakistan border is about 1,500 miles. Pakistan’s army had never even entered the area until October 2001, more than a half century after Pakistan’s founding.

A Muslim country where many considered bin Laden a hero, Pakistan grew increasingly reluctant to help the U.S. search. The army lost its best source of intelligence in 2004, after it began raids inside the tribal areas. Scouts with blood ties to the tribes ceased sharing information for fear of retaliation.

They had good reason. At least 23 senior anti-Taliban tribesmen were assassinated in South and North Waziristan in 2005 and 2006. “Al-Qaeda footprints were found everywhere,” Pakistan’s Interior Minister Aftab Khan Sherpao said. “They kidnapped and chopped off heads of at least seven of these pro-government tribesmen.”

Pakistan all but stopped looking for bin Laden. “The dirty little secret is they have nothing, no operations, without the Paks,” one former counterterrorism officer said.

CIA Shifts Its Strategy

As the hunt flagged, analysts in the CIA’s HV Unit — dedicated to hunting for high-value targets (bin Laden was known in the agency as “HVT-1”) — began to envision the search in a new way.

“The story of hunting bin Laden is a story of increased sophistication in thinking,” said an intelligence official. Maybe bin Laden was in the mountains; maybe not. But that was the wrong question.

Even al-Qaeda’s top guns didn’t know where bin Laden was, yet they still managed to get instructions from him. So the most important question wasn’t “Where is bin Laden?” but rather “How does he communicate?”

From interrogations of captured terrorists, analysts determined that bin Laden got his orders out only once a month, by courier, and that led them to decide that, as the intelligence official said, “you have to know the network, the couriers and how that leads to the location.”

At the White House, under pressure from mounting public skepticism about the hunt, Bush moved on a different track. He ordered up Operation Cannonball, directing the CIA to “flood the zone,” beefing up the number of officers on the hunt in Pakistan and Afghanistan. The CIA sharply increased the number of intelligence officers and assets devoted to the pursuit of bin Laden. The intelligence officers teamed with the military’s secretive Joint Special Operations Command and with more resources from the NSA and other intelligence agencies.

The problem was that no one was certain where the “zone” was.

“Here you’ve got a guy who’s gone off the net and is hiding in some of the most formidable terrain in one of the most remote parts of the world surrounded by people he trusts implicitly,” T. McCreary, spokesman for the National Counterterrorism Center, said at the time. “And he stays off the net and is probably not mobile. That’s an extremely difficult problem.”

Intelligence officials still believed that bin Laden was hiding in the northern reaches of the autonomous tribal region along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. That calculation was based largely on a lack of activity elsewhere and on other intelligence, including a videotape, obtained by the CIA, that analysts believed showed bin Laden walking on a trail toward Pakistan at the end of the battle of Tora Bora.

But uncertainty about bin Laden’s location was just one of many problems his hunters faced: the CIA’s inability to access people close to al-Qaeda’s inner circle; Pakistan’s unwillingness to pursue him; the reemergence of the Taliban and al-Qaeda in Afghanistan; the strength of the Iraqi insurgency, which was depleting U.S. military and intelligence resources; and the U.S. government’s own disorganization.

And the underlying reality was that finding one person in hiding is difficult under any circumstances. Eric Rudolph, the confessed Olympic Park and abortion clinic bomber evaded authorities for five years, only to be captured miles from where he was last seen in North Carolina.

It had been so long since there had been anything like a genuinely hot lead that some operatives had given bin Laden a nickname: “Elvis,” for all the wishful-thinking sightings that have substituted for anything real.

But all involved, not to mention the American public, kept hoping. Berntsen, the former CIA officer who led the Tora Bora hunt for bin Laden, said, “This could all end tomorrow.” One unsolicited walk-in. One tribesman seeking to collect the $25 million reward. One courier who would rather his kids grow up in the United States. One dealmaker “and this could all change.”

The break, when it eventually came, would be less dramatic, but in a way more impressive than that.

Missile Raids Miss Zawahiri

Analysts at the HV Unit were learning more about how al-Qaeda worked, and that led them to think about networks in which information doesn’t get passed up through a hierarchy but rather is shared across all ranks.

The network idea was catching on in the military as well. In 2006, Army Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal launched raids against al-Qaeda leaders in Iraq as well as in Yemen and Afghanistan, said a former White House official. To make those raids happen, McChrystal needed information to move in new ways, and he adopted a networked structure modeled on what he called al-Qaeda’s “alarming” ability to grow quickly and shore up weak spots.

“To defeat a networked enemy,” McChrystal wrote in Foreign Policy, “we had to become a network ourselves.”

That meant instantly sharing intelligence with people throughout the battlefield rather than sending it up the chain of command. Video from drones was now delivered not just to analysts who controlled the unmanned flying cameras but also to combat teams on the ground. The result was a dramatic increase in the number of raids and their success rate.

But there were drawbacks. In January 2006, the CIA ordered a missile strike against a house in the village of Damadola, about 120 miles northwest of Islamabad, where Pakistani and American officials thought Zawahiri to be hiding based on information from interrogations.

The missile killed 13 civilians and several suspected terrorists. But Zawahiri was not among them. The strike “could have changed the destiny of the war on terror. Zawahiri was 100 percent sure to visit Damadola . . . but he disappeared at the last moment,” one Pakistani intelligence official said at the time.

Tens of thousands of Pakistanis staged an angry anti-American demonstration near Damadola, shouting, “Death to America!”

“Once again, we have lost track of Ayman al-Zawahiri,” the Pakistani intelligence official said. “He keeps popping on television screens. It’s miserable, but we don’t know where he or his boss are hiding.”

Within days, a videotape emerged of Zawahiri. He called Bush the “butcher of Washington” and “a curse” on the United States in a speech that was broadcast in excerpts on the satellite television channel al-Jazeera. Zawahiri called U.S. policy in Iraq a failure and warned of more bloodshed.

In his speech, Zawahiri referred directly to comments made by bin Laden in an audiotape broadcast on al-Jazeera on Jan. 19, as well as to the attempt on his own life in a Pakistani border village Jan. 13.

“Bush, do you know where I am?” asked a taunting Zawahiri, dressed entirely in white and speaking in front of a pitch-black background. “I am among the Muslim masses.”

Analysts noted the professional production quality of the tape. “This was not done in some cave,” one senior administration official said.

The survival of al-Qaeda’s top leadership by no means meant the organization was unscathed. An al-Qaeda operative described by U.S. intelligence sources as the third-ranking figure in the terrorist organization was captured in Pakistan’s North-West Frontier Province. Officials said he had plotted two assassination attempts against Pakistan’s president.

Abu Faraj al-Libi, a Libyan, was seized with three other men after a shootout in the town of Mardan, about 40 miles northeast of the city of Peshawar, a major strike against the group’s latest generation of leaders. Although al-Libi had been unknown at the time of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the officials said, he took a principal role in al-Qaeda operations in Pakistan after the March 2003 arrest of his mentor, Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the architect of the Sept. 11 attacks.

“If he’s a big fish, it’s because it’s a much smaller pond,” Bruce Hoffman, a terrorism expert at the Rand Corp., a nonprofit research organization, said at the time. “He has advanced through the ranks because of attrition in al-Qaeda. It shows how this movement has a knack for replacing serious operatives — a deep bench.”

A deep bench on a team that still had its captain. The CIA continued its efforts to get inside the thinking that had kept bin Laden safe for so long. They scoured sources from academic tomes to interrogation transcripts. Even popular books such as “Growing Up Bin Laden,” by the terrorist’s wife Najwa and son Omar, were mined for insights. In the book, Omar said his father kept safe houses in Kabul because he believed the Americans would never bomb a big city for fear of killing innocent civilians. That got analysts thinking about urban hideouts.

But the slow, painstaking work of analyzing data met with impatience at the White House, where “a little fatigue had set in,” said a former Bush White House official. “We weren’t about to find him anytime soon. Publicly, we maintained a sense of urgency: ‘We’re looking as hard as we can.’ But the energy had gone out of the hunt. It had settled to no more than a second-tier issue. After all, those were the worst days of Iraq.”

The troubled war in Iraq, mounting concern about Iran’s nuclear program, and the increasingly unstable situation in North Korea stole attention from the bin Laden hunt, said White House and CIA officials.

The search for bin Laden, once the clarion cry of a nation bent on striking back, morphed into a topic Bush and his top staffers sought to avoid.

Tracking a Courier

Through the next few years, leaders of the hunt hoped that the drones surveying the tribal areas would generate new leads, “but it was just a hope,” said Juan Zarate, Bush’s deputy national security adviser for counterterrorism in the middle years of the search. “It was a very dark period.”

In the Bush White House, the lack of credible leads led to public statements designed to play down the individual and focus attention on the broader threat.

The idea was “not to overly aggrandize the man even as we tried to find him,” Zarate said. Outside the HV Unit, the landscape looked grim: “I can’t remember any single piece of intelligence that got us especially excited,” Zarate said.

Even as the hunt became a political liability, the road to bin Laden’s house in Abbottabad was being built, not “brick by brick,” said former CIA director Michael V. Hayden, but “pebble by pebble.”

In retrospect, momentum against al-Qaeda began to build because of two key factors: a major escalation in the campaign of attacks by armed Predator and Reaper drones, and an expanding network of informants that the CIA had managed to assemble from stations inside Afghanistan along the Pakistan border.

Indeed, officials said the two components became mutually reinforcing. Drone strikes not only killed militants associated with al-Qaeda but also sent ripples of anxiety through the network and forced operatives to take substantial risks as they searched for cover.

At the same time, the toll of the drone strikes eroded morale among militant networks, contributing to the agency’s effort to assemble a network of informants independent of Pakistan’s intelligence services. As the network grew, it fed new intelligence into an elaborate operation used to identify new drone targets.

But in the end, success in the hunt for bin Laden hinged almost entirely on identifying a single man: a courier operating out of Pakistan who had been trusted by bin Laden for years during which he had remained in control of al-Qaeda’s central command, even as his whereabouts were carefully concealed. Through messages carried by courier, bin Laden weighed in on major management decisions, although less frequently than he had before 2001 for fear of giving away his position. By design, he remained inaccessible for long periods.

But the Americans knew only the courier’s assumed name. Using information from detainees in U.S. custody, analysts and operatives spent years trying to learn the courier’s identity, concluding that he was a former protege of Mohammed, the Sept. 11 mastermind who was still detained at Guantanamo Bay.

The courier “had our constant attention,” according to an official involved in the hunt. Detainees “identified this man as one of the few al-Qaeda couriers trusted by bin Laden, indicated he might be living with or protecting bin Laden,” the official said.

Turning vague references to a courier into a verified name took upwards of four years, but that opened the door to discovering how the courier operated and the locations he frequented. Two years ago, U.S. officials narrowed down the region in Pakistan where the courier was working and then managed to intercept a phone call, one that seemed at first nothing more than an innocuous, catch-up phone conversation. Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti, the pseudonym for bin Laden’s courrier, was talking to an old friend.

Where have you been, inquired the friend. We’ve missed you. What’s going on in your life? And what are you doing now?

Kuwaiti’s response was vague but heavy with portent: “I’m back with the people I was with before.”

There was a pause, as if the friend knew that Kuwaiti’s words meant he had returned to bin Laden’s inner circle and was perhaps at the side of the al-Qaeda leader himself.

The friend replied, “May God facilitate.”

Using the cellphone number and a vast number of human and technical sources, by August of 2010 U.S. officials had tracked Kuwaiti to a very unusual compound in a very unexpected location: the Pakistani military garrison city of Abbottabad.

bin Laden’s New Hideout

Abbottabad was far from being the almost lawless frontier where bin Laden was long thought to be hiding. It was a fairly cosmopolitan city, just two hours north of Islamabad by car. Home to the Pakistan Military Academy and two regimental compounds, with suburbs occupied by military families, the city was, by Pakistani standards, relatively welcoming to outsiders, including Pakistanis on vacation, military families being transferred to bases there and even U.S. soldiers who have at times been sent to Abbottabad to train Pakistani troops. It was not the sort of place where Islamic extremists tended to go.

The compound itself was even more surprising. It was a homely place with thick 12- to 18-foot security walls, multiple interior walls dividing the property and massive privacy walls blocking even a third-story balcony. Despite being valued at $1 million, the property had no Internet or phone service.

“When we saw the compound . . . we were shocked by what we saw,” an intelligence official told reporters, describing it as “an extraordinarily unique compound” built perhaps in 2005. “Everything we saw . . . was perfectly consistent with what our experts expected bin Laden’s hideout to look like.”

The main three-story building was impenetrable to eavesdropping technology deployed by the NSA.

Realizing the potential significance of the find, the CIA took advantage of the relatively open atmosphere in Abbottabad to send a small team of case officers into the city undetected to set up a safe house and recruit informants.

The spy team conducted extensive surveillance on the compound over a period of months, relying on their informants and other sources to help assemble a “pattern of life” portrait of the occupants of the compound.They worked with extraordinary caution because of the fear that the man in the compound and those sheltering him might vanish if spooked.

The work involved virtually every category of collection in the U.S. arsenal, ranging from satellite imagery to eavesdropping efforts aimed at recording voices inside the compound. The effort was so extensive and costly that the CIA went to Congress in December to secure authority to reallocate tens of millions of dollars within assorted agency budgets to fund it, U.S. officials said.

Those watching the compound were stunned to realize that whenever Kuwaiti or others left it to make a call, they drove about 90 minutes away before even placing a battery in a cellphone. Turning on the phone made it susceptible to the kind of electronic surveillance residents of the compound clearly wished to avoid.

As intelligence officials scrutinized images of the compound, they saw that a man emerged most days to stroll the grounds of the courtyard for an hour or two. The man walked back and forth, day after day, and soon analysts began calling him “the pacer.” The imagery never provided a clear view of his face.

Intelligence officials were reluctant to bring in other means of technical or human surveillance that might offer a positive identification but would risk detection by those in the compound. The pacer never left the compound. His routine suggested he was not just a shut-in but almost a prisoner.

Was the pacer bin Laden? A decoy? A hoax? A setup?

Bin Laden was at least 6-foot-4, and the pacer seemed to have the gait of a tall man. The White House asked the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, which provides and analyzes satellite imagery, to determine the pacer’s height, but the best it could do was place the man’s height somewhere between 5-foot-8 and 6-foot-8, according to one official.

The problem was a lack of information about the size of the building’s windows or the thickness of the compound’s walls, which could have served as reference points. No U.S. spy agency was ever able to capture a photograph of bin Laden at the compound before the raid or a recording of the voice of the mysterious male figure whose family occupied the structure’s top two floors.

‘If You See It, Shoot It’

By the middle of February, President Obama determined that there was a sound intelligence basis for developing courses of action in case the hunch that the mysterious pacer was bin Laden proved correct.

In the ensuing months, Obama took charge of monitoring the operation at the White House, chairing five meetings of his National Security Council for updates, senior administration officials said. U.S. officials did not share any details about the operation in advance with any foreign governments, including Pakistan’s, whose leaders would be informed only afterward. A “very small number” of people within the U.S. government knew about it, a senior official said.

In one White House meeting, CIA Director Leon Panetta told Obama and other top national security officials that although those tracking the compound were seeing the pacer nearly every day, they could not conclude with certainty that it was bin Laden, officials said. Panetta noted that there was no signals intelligence — cell or sat-phone intercepts, sound recordings, video — available and contended that it was too risky to send in a human spy or move any closer with electronic devices.

Obama and his advisers debated the options, officials said. One option was to fire a missile from a Predator or Reaper aerial drone. It would be low-risk, but if the result was a direct hit, the pacer might be vaporized and officials would never be certain if they had killed bin Laden. If the drone attack missed, as had happened in some other attacks on high-value targets, bin Laden or whoever was living in the compound would flee and the United States would have to start the hunt from scratch.

Panetta designated Navy Vice Adm. William H. McRaven, who had headed the Joint Special Operations Command for nearly three years, to devise a boots-on-the ground plan for the special forces that became known as “the McRaven Option.”
McRaven had increased the intensity of Special Operations raids, especially in Afghanistan. During his first two years as head of JSOC, the “jackpot rate” — strikes hitting their intended target — jumped from 35 percent to more than 80 percent.

His decision to assign the operation to the Navy SEALs, a Special Operations unit with extensive experience in raids on high-value targets, was critical. SEALs have a tradition of moving in and out fast, often killing everyone they encounter at a target site. Most members of the SEAL team in the bin Laden raid had been deployed to war zones a dozen or more times.

The “pattern of life” study of the compound had shown that about a dozen women and children periodically frequented it. Specific orders were issued to the SEALs not to shoot the women or children unless they were clearly threatening or had weapons. Bin Laden was to be captured, one official said, if he “conspicuously surrendered.”

The longer such raids take, the greater the risk to the SEALs. One senior official said the general philosophy of the SEALs is: “If you see it, shoot it. It is a house full of bad guys.”

Several assessments concluded that there was a 60 to 80 percent chance bin Laden was in the compound. Michael E. Leiter, head of the National Counterterrorism Center, was much more conservative. During one White House meeting, he put the probability at about 40 percent.

When a participant suggested that was a low chance of success, Leiter said, “Yes, but what we’ve got is 38 percent better than we have ever had before.”

Obama himself put the odds of success at barely better-than-even.

He knew he had only circumstantial evidence, and he worried that the Navy SEALs would find only a “prince from Dubai” instead of the world’s most-wanted terrorist leader. He knew that f it turned out to be the former, the country — and his administration — would face serious consequences.
But ultimately, Obama would say after the raid: “I concluded it was worth it. We have devoted enormous blood and treasure in fighting back against al-Qaeda, ever since 2001. And I said to myself that if we have a good chance of not completely defeating but badly disabling al-Qaeda, then it was worth both the political risks as well as the risks to our men, after a pursuit that cost billions of dollars and stretched for nearly a decade.”

At 8:20 a.m. Friday, April 29, the president approved the raid.
That Sunday night (Monday in Pakistan), the president and his national security team gathered in the White House Situation Room to watch the operation unfold on a soundless video feed. During the assault, one of the Black Hawk helicopters stalled, but the pilot was able to land safely. The hard landing disabled the helicopter, forcing the SEALs to abandon a plan to have one team rope down from a Black Hawk and come into the main building from the roof. Instead, both teams assaulted the compound from the ground.

Members of the assault team blew their way through some doors and walls to enter. They opened one door only to find a cement wall behind it.
As they entered, one of bin Laden’s couriers was the only enemy to open fire, officials said. The SEALs encountered no other armed opposition as they ascended to the top floor, where bin Laden was found in the doorway to his room. He turned back into the room before being shot twice — in the head and in the chest. U.S. commandos later found an AK-47 and a pistol in the room.

“He was retreating,” a move that was regarded as resistance, a U.S. official briefed on the operation said. “You don’t know why he’s retreating, what he’s doing when he goes back in there. Is he getting a weapon? Does he have a [suicide] vest?”

SEALs scooped up dozens of computer thumb drives and several hard drives that analysts rushed to examine for information about al-Qaeda, especially an address, location or cellphone number for Zawahiri.

The early analysis of the materials would show that bin Laden was preoccupied with attacking the United States over all other targets, a fixation that led to friction with followers. In handwritten journals and long-winded compositions saved on hard drives, officials said, bin Laden always seemed to be searching for a way to replicate the impact of al-Qaeda’s most devastating strike.

In the words of one official, he exhorted followers to explore ways to recruit non-Muslims “who are oppressed in the United States” — particularly African Americans and Latinos — and to assemble a plot in time for the 10th anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks.

Even while sealed inside his cement compound, bin Laden functioned like a crime boss pulling strings from a prison cell, regularly sending messages to his most trusted lieutenants and strategic advice to far-flung franchises, including al-Qaeda’s affiliate in Yemen. Some followers pledged their fealty to him, but others chafed at his warnings to remain focused on U.S. targets instead of mounting less-risky operations in places such as Yemen, Somalia and Algeria.

When bin Laden’s corpse was laid out, one of the Navy SEALs was asked to stretch out next to it to compare heights. The SEAL was 6 feet tall. The body was several inches taller.

After the information was relayed to Obama, he turned to his advisers and said: “We donated a $60 million helicopter to this operation. Could we not afford to buy a tape measure?”

Bin Laden’s body was flown to the USS Carl Vinson, where U.S. officials performed the rituals of Islamic burial, including wrapping it in a white shroud, before tipping it into the Arabian Sea. Officials said the decision was made to comply with the Islamic mandate to bury a body within 24 hours after death. A burial at sea also ensured that bin Laden would have no grave site for his followers to use as a shrine.

U.S. officials said DNA tests confirmed with 99.9 percent certainty that the body removed from the one-acre compound was indeed that of bin Laden.

Around the world, many leaders expressed a sober satisfaction with the raid. In addition to bin Laden, the firefight killed his son Khalid, a woman and two men who were harboring the 54-year-old Saudi national within the high walls of the compound. .

There were conflicting reports about whether bin Laden used one of his wives as a shield. While John Brennan, Obama’s top counterterrorism adviser, suggested at one point that he had, he later allowed that it was not clear “whether or not bin Laden or the son or whatever put her there or she put herself there.”

Press secretary Jay Carney later offered yet another version of that account, saying that bin Laden’s wife had “rushed the U.S. assaulter and was shot in the leg but not killed. Bin Laden was then shot and killed. He was not armed.”

Carney and others defended the administration’s assertion that the team of 25 U.S. Navy SEALs and other operatives was prepared to take bin Laden alive. “He resisted the U.S. personnel,” Carney said. When pressed on how he did so without a weapon, Carney said that “resistance does not require a firearm.”

Panetta said that the rules of engagement would have required U.S. forces to take bin Laden into custody if he had “thrown up his hands, surrendered and didn’t appear to be representing any kind of threat.”
But, he said, “I don’t think he had a lot of time to say anything,” adding that when the lead Navy SEAL reached the third-floor unit where bin Laden was located, “there were some threatening moves that were made . . . and that’s the reason they fired.”

A U.S. official briefed on the raid said the first SEAL to confront bin Laden perceived a hostile intent. “He was not lying on the floor or trying to surrender,” the official said.

Bin Laden’s wife, who identified the al-Qaeda leader’s body after the raid, was treated for her injuries and placed in the custody of Pakistan’s intelligence service. A U.S. official said she told Pakistani authorities that bin Laden had lived in the complex, at least part of the time, since 2005, when it was built.

U.S. officials think that at least two of the women who lived in the compound were bin Laden’s wives and that he had fathered several of the children (he is believed to have fathered at least 11).

In 2006, bin Laden had sworn “not to die but a free man.” He once told a bodyguard to shoot him if he were about to be captured. But bin Laden died a prisoner in a jail of his own making, a man without a nation, living apart even from those who shared his belief that mass murder was the path to power.

In his final months, bin Laden could only watch as a wholly opposite force channeled the frustrations and aspirations of the Muslims for whom he claimed to act — a peaceful exercise of people power on the streets of cities across Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen and throughout the Middle East and North Africa, a stirring and decisive uprising by those who yearned for change yet turned their backs on the ways and means of Osama bin Laden.

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