were able to turn al-Qaeda operative Mohamed Babar the previous year.
Operation Overt was aimed against Abdullah Ahmed Ali, who planned to rival the scale of the 9/11 attacks using suicide bombers inside multiple aircraft departing from Heathrow. He and his co-conspirators were arrested in August 2006, shortly before they became operational; the way they intended to explode the devices is the reason why security measures regarding liquids being taken on board aircraft were tightened up immensely that summer. The nine members of a plot to create havoc at Christmas 2010, with targets including the Stock Exchange, Big Ben, Westminster Abbey, the Palace of Westminster and the London Eye, were arrested four days before they planned to set off their first device. On 1 July 2012, a plot by al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula to explode a bomb during the London Olympics was foiled; a few days later, a suspected al-Qaeda terrorist was arrested after visiting the Olympics site in East London five times in one day, in contravention of the control order he was under.
As Eliza Manningham-Buller pointed out in a TV documentary about the war on terror, there never is just one plot being investigated. At any one time, dozens are under investigation.
Probably the highest-profile intelligence operation of the past few years has been the hunt for, and eventual assassination of al-Qaeda’s leader Osama bin Laden. While Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM) may have been in charge of the details of the 9/11 plot, it was bin Laden who was its instigator and mastermind, making him the ultimate target of all the American intelligence activities in the decade following the destruction of the Twin Towers in New York.
US Navy Seal Team Six entered the compound at Abbottabad, Pakistan, and carried out the mission that eliminated bin Laden in May 2011, but they weren’t alone — members of the US Army’s 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment (Airborne) and the CIA were there beside them. Surprising as it may seem, even on the day that President Barack Obama gave the authorization for the mission to proceed, no one had ever captured a photograph of bin Laden at the compound or been able to get a recording of the mysterious male figure who occupied the building’s top two floors.
Billions of dollars were expended by the US during the first decade of the twenty-first century on electronic surveillance. But it was through information gained through old-fashioned means — interrogating prisoners — that bin Laden was finally tracked down. The key to finding him turned out to be his trusted courier, Abu Ahmed al- Kuwaiti, aka Ibrahim Saeed Ahmed. Numerous leads had been followed up since bin Laden disappeared from Tora Bora in 2002, following the American invasion. All had turned out to be dead ends. Many of the al-Qaeda hierarchy had been tracked down and eliminated, as the CIA struck with Predator and Reaper drones, but not bin Laden himself. Every aspect of the tapes that he issued was analysed, whether it was the shape of the rocks in the background or the birdsong briefly audible. Large rewards were offered for information, but bin Laden’s almost messianic position as the perceived saviour of true Islam meant that there were no takers.
Al-Kuwaiti’s name was one of those mentioned by Mohammed al-Qahtani, an al-Qaeda operative who was originally groomed as a twentieth hijacker for the 9/11 attacks. Captured by the Pakistanis in December 2001, he was interrogated at the American base at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba, where he admitted, after weeks of abuse, that KSM had introduced him to al-Kuwaiti, who had given him instructions in secret communications. When KSM himself was captured, he told his Pakistani interrogators that al-Kuwaiti had helped bin Laden to escape from Tora Bora, although he later told his American questioners that al-Kuwaiti was retired. This information was divulged after his extreme interrogations, and seems to have been a deliberate attempt to put the Americans off al- Kuwaiti’s scent; his act of defiance is often quoted by those opposed to the extreme methods as proof that such means do not always work.
However, another al-Qaeda courier, Hassan Ghul, said otherwise. Al-Kuwaiti was a trusted part of bin Laden’s inner circle, and was working with Abu Faraj al-Libi, KSM’s successor. When al-Libi was captured in May 2005, he also tried to divert attention away from al-Kuwaiti, making up the name of a courier whom he said was the key player. Attention was focused on the courier network, but leads were in short supply.
When he took power in January 2009, President Obama made the capture of bin Laden one of the CIA’s priorities, and on 2 June 2009 he ordered his new D/CIA Leon Panetta to ‘provide me within 30 days a detailed operation plan for locating and bringing [bin Laden] to justice’. Hopes were pinned on an apparent defector from al-Qaeda, Jordanian doctor Humam al-Balawi, but hope turned to tragedy when al-Balawi blew himself and seven CIA operatives up on 30 December 2009. Al-Qaeda continued operations, even as the CIA turned up the heat against them further — an attempt to down a commercial jet was foiled, and Faisal Shahzad, an American of Pakistani descent trained by the Taliban, tried to blow up his SUV in Times Square on 1 May 2010.
Surveillance on al-Qaeda operatives around the world paid dividends in the summer of 2010 when one of them contacted al-Kuwaiti, who revealed that he was ‘back with the people I was with before’. This was taken to mean that he was back in bin Laden’s inner circle. Human intelligence came to the fore now, as a Pakistani agent, working for the CIA, tracked al-Kuwaiti to Peshawar in Pakistan, then followed him back to the town of Abbottabad, two hours to the east. Al-Kuwaiti was living in a compound that struck the CIA as odd, since it had neither phone nor internet services.
When Panetta heard of this ‘fortress’ he ordered the Agency to investigate every avenue for getting inside the compound. It was clear that there was a chance that this was bin Laden’s location, but after the Curveball fiasco over WMDs seven years earlier, they were determined to ensure that any intelligence used to launch a mission was absolutely certain. The number of families in the compound seemed odd, as did the Pakistani intelligence service’s complete lack of knowledge about it. As deputy director Michael Morell pointed out at one stage, ‘The circumstantial case of Iraq having WMD was actually stronger than the circumstantial case that bin Laden is living in the Abbottabad compound.’
The CIA set up a safe house in Abbottabad, and deduced from the various movements to and from the compound, as well as observation of the amount of laundry left to dry, that there were three families within the compound rather than the two which there would appear to be at first glance. The composition of the third seemed to match bin Laden’s immediate family. It did seem as if the hunt might be over.
The relationship between the Americans and the Pakistanis took a knock early in 2011 when a CIA contractor, Raymond Davis, killed two Pakistani citizens in Lahore. There was already little trust between the two countries and their respective intelligence agencies: the Times Square bomber wasn’t the only anti-American terrorist who had come from Pakistan, and there was a feeling that the Pakistan intelligence agency might not be playing it straight with the CIA. Consequently, the Pakistanis were not informed of the CIA suspicions over the Abbottabad compound.
As plans were drawn up, the information the CIA had painstakingly gained was subjected to a ‘Red Team’ inquiry once more, this time by experts outside the Agency. This meant that every piece of evidence was checked to see if there was an alternate explanation that provided as likely an explanation as the one ascribed by the CIA. The week before the raid went ahead, the Red Team concluded that none of the alternate hypotheses was as likely as the theory that bin Laden was there.
Obama’s DNI, James Clapper, was one of those who felt that it was ‘the most compelling case we’ve had in ten years’ of hunting for bin Laden. Leon Panetta felt that they were ‘probably at the point where we have got the best intelligence we can get’. Both Vice-President Joe Biden and Secretary of Defence (and former CIA DCI) Robert Gates were against a raid; Foreign Secretary Hillary Clinton was in favour. So, after considering everything, was the president.
The raid went ahead on 1 May and at 11.35 p.m. President Obama informed the American people that ‘the United States has conducted an operation that killed Osama bin Laden, the leader of al-Qaeda, and a terrorist who’s responsible for the murder of thousands of innocent men, women and children.’
Leon Panetta remembered one of the most unusual events of that night. As he drove from the White House, he heard chants from Lafayette Park. ‘CIA! CIA! CIA!’ Maybe some of the failures of the past were now forgiven.
15
A NEW COLD WAR?
