dangerous new course. The missile strike on August 5 had created a temporary leadership vacuum and touched off several bloody rounds of street fighting among Mehsud’s would-be successors, but now Baitullah’s charismatic cousin, the recklessly ambitious Hakimullah Mehsud, was firmly in charge. While Baitullah Mehsud had contented himself with waging attacks against Pakistani soldiers and police, his cousin was more virulently anti-American and also more willing to commit his forces into alliances with al-Qaeda and other militant groups attacking American troops in Afghanistan. Greater numbers of Mehsud fighters were signing up with al-Qaeda’s Shadow Army, a paramilitary force led by a Libyan commander, Abdullah Said al Libi, that wore its own distinctive uniform and carried out lightning raids on military targets on both sides of the border. These were al-Qaeda’s new shock troops, and they were drawing funds and recruits from as far away as Saudi Arabia and Kashmir.
This was Panetta’s dilemma. The CIA’s missiles were finding their marks, but it wasn’t enough. Slain commanders were being quickly replaced, often with younger leaders with more extreme views and international ambitions. Al-Qaeda was adapting, commanding a widening network of committed followers from the region’s patchwork of militant tribal groups. Meanwhile the terrorist group’s most senior leaders, including Osama bin Laden and his operational commander, Ayman al-Zawahiri, were coordinating strategy from secure hiding places. Something more was needed to flush them out.
In the late summer and early fall Panetta and his team finalized the detailed plan the director would present to the president and his National Security Council, which was in the middle of a months-long review of its Afghanistan strategy. Panetta had a long wish list, but the lead item was the most critical one: more robot planes —lots of them. Not just Predators, but the newer, more powerful Reaper aircraft, along with operators and hardware to support them. Panetta wanted to dramatically increase the pressure on al-Qaeda, not only with increased firepower but also with blanket surveillance, enough human and mechanical eyes watching the tribal region around the clock to detect the movement of even small groups of fighters. It would be “the most aggressive operation in the agency’s history,” Panetta later said, and its chief aim would be to find and destroy the graybeards who were the root cause of all the trouble.
“The leadership of al-Qaeda—from bin Laden down to the top twenty—these guys are located in a place that is our primary target,” Panetta said. “And we’re the point of the spear.”
When it was time to make his case, Panetta made the trip to the White House to deliver his pitch to President Obama in person.
“Mr. President,” he began, “in order to really accomplish our mission, these are the things I need.” He proceeded to describe al-Qaeda’s resilience in the tribal region and his plan for ratcheting up the pressure, denying the terrorists even the smallest space to hide or regroup.
Obama looked at Panetta thoughtfully for a moment and turned to his aides.
“We’re going to do what Leon wants,” he said.
The discussion was over.
It would take months to deploy the new orbits, as the systems of unmanned aircraft and operators were called, but the agency proceeded immediately to put pieces of the new plan into place. CIA targeters would be needed not only in Langley but also nearer to the front line, to coordinate a highly specific search for senior al- Qaeda leaders.
The limits of the new strategy were understood. The Predator was an impressive machine, but air power and advanced robotics could accomplish only so much against a widely dispersed enemy that hid among the local population in Pakistan’s tribal region. The same kinds of technology had helped turn the tide against Iraq’s insurgents, but there was an important distinction: In U.S.-occupied Iraq, U.S. Special Forces commandos had free rein to go anywhere in the country. They worked in tandem with the drones and could rapidly act on new intelligence during any time of day or night, inserting small teams on the ground to kill or capture. No such possibilities existed in Pakistan.
There was yet another problem. To eliminate al-Qaeda’s generals, the CIA first had to find them. Nine years after Osama bin Laden’s terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, U.S. intelligence officials had no idea where he was.
It was even worse than the public knew. In the years since September 11, several U.S. officials suggested in interviews that the CIA knew roughly where Osama bin Laden was hiding. Those claims had been wishful thinking, at best. The last credible report of a bin Laden sighting came in 2002, shortly after the Saudi terrorist fled from his Tora Bora stronghold on the Afghanistan border into Pakistan. Since then there had been nothing: no near misses, no tangible leads, not even a single substantive tip. Defense Secretary Robert Gates, in a moment of candor, acknowledged in a 2009 television interview that “it has been years” since the bin Laden case had been active.
“We don’t know for a fact where Osama bin Laden is,” Gates said. “If we did, we’d go get him.”
Occasionally, leads emerged that would revive interest in the hunt. One of the most promising involved an al-Qaeda courier reputed to deliver messages between the terrorist group’s operational commanders and bin Laden, who studiously avoided telephones and electronic messages. Nearly all the CIA’s targeters, including Jennifer Matthews and Elizabeth Hanson, had been caught up in the search for the courier in some way. After two years of hard work and lucky breaks, the agency finally deduced the man’s name in 2007; yet two years later, it had no idea where to find him, or whether he was even alive.
The failure to find bin Laden was the fly in the ointment, the big black asterisk that overshadowed what had been the greatest tactical success in the CIA’s history: the 2001 overthrow of the Taliban and the routing of al- Qaeda in Afghanistan. Even as New York’s twin towers still smoldered, the agency had led an offensive so overwhelming that only a few hundred foot soldiers and a handful of senior leaders managed to slip away, leaving thousands of others dead or in prison camps.
The Taliban’s defeat had been engineered by a small group of CIA officers who had been spoiling for a chance to go after bin Laden since long before he dispatched his teams of hijackers to crash airliners into buildings in New York and Washington. With their input, within hours of the September 11, 2001, attacks, the CIA director George Tenet had a plan on President Bush’s desk that would allow the White House to immediately go on the attack against al-Qaeda in Afghanistan, rather than wait for the Pentagon to organize a conventional military campaign. In a meeting with the president on September 13, J. Cofer Black, then the director of the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center, described how a force of CIA-led commando teams and friendly Afghan Northern Alliance fighters could defeat the planners of the September 11 attacks in a matter of weeks.
“When we’re through with them they will have flies walking across their eyeballs,” Black famously said.
Bush approved, and Operation Jawbreaker was launched. Just three months later, in December 2001, the Taliban government toppled, and the remnants of the Taliban army were being pursued through southern and eastern Afghanistan. Osama bin Laden and a rump force of a few hundred loyalists attempted a last stand in the mountain fortress of Tora Bora on the Pakistani border.
Then, as Pentagon officials debated whether to send in American troops to finish the job, the terrorist leader escaped, reportedly after paying bribes to an Afghan warlord. He slipped through the lines of pro-U.S. Afghan fighters and sought refuge in Jalalabad and in villages in the eastern provinces of Kunar and Khost. He stayed briefly as a guest of Jalaluddin Haqqani, an Afghan warlord and former comrade from the civil war against the Soviets, before eventually disappearing again in the Pakistani hills.
Al-Qaeda’s No. 2 leader fled on horseback into Pakistan along a different route. In the coming years, occasional sightings of Ayman al-Zawahiri sparked furious activity and a failed attempt to capture or kill him. Bin Laden appeared only on video, his beard longer and grayer and his usual camouflage fatigues replaced by robes and an Arab-style kaffiyeh. Officially, the search for him continued, but in reality there were no clues or leads to chase.
The CIA’s Alec Station, which had been established initially to search for bin Laden, gradually lost its targeters to other units that were hunting for lesser al-Qaeda figures and Taliban warlords. In 2005 it was shut down for good.
Panetta’s new Predators would not arrive in Afghanistan until nearly the end of the year. In the meantime, the agency would send scores of new officers to the Kabul station, including some of its best targeters. One of them was Elizabeth Hanson.
The thirty-year-old chief targeter was coming off an extraordinary run, having worked on more than a dozen high-profile cases that ended in Hellfire explosions in Pakistan’s tribal belt. She had helped the CIA locate some of the biggest players in the jihadist world, from Osama al-Kini to Baitullah Mehsud. Now she was being dispatched to Afghanistan as part of a renewed push to find the biggest names of all.
