supercomputers, with software capable of recognizing the “signature” of a specific target—say, a red pickup truck with a dent on its right rear fender—and you had the ability to track a target night and day.
By 2010, fleets of UAVs—which today include Predators, Reapers, Global Hawks, and a growing variety of others—were part of a worldwide integrated network that enabled remote operators at bases in the United States to fly missions almost anywhere in the world, funneling imagery and sensory data for analysis back to computers at Beale Air Force Base in California and CIA headquarters in Langley. The number of drones was well into the thousands, enough to sustain as many as sixty-five caps at once. For a selected target, the unblinking eye could establish things as simple as: How many people live in a compound? When do they wake up in the morning? When do they go to bed at night? What kind of weapons do they have? The air force was now using drones in teams, producing a system it called Gorgon Stare, that could cover an area four kilometers square—an area the size of Fairfax, Virginia. The image would not have to be monitored continually by human beings; it could be monitored by computers, which never get bored or distracted and are serenely undaunted by complexity. If, say, a vehicle belonging to a suspected terrorist was recognized by the computer—because it had some distinguishing feature that enabled the computer to track it—then the movements of that vehicle could be followed over a small city for months, or even years, permitting a detailed map of the suspect’s travels. Combine that map with cell phone tracking, with human intelligence, and you can begin to assemble a detailed and accurate chart of your target’s connections, or his network. Improvements in optics had enabled such observations from a great distance, so that the UAVs themselves would not have to be directly over a target. They could “stand off,” well outside the restricted airspace over a country such as, say… Pakistan.
The trail to Abbottabad that seemed so clear in retrospect represented a triumph of dot connecting. In this case, it began with a name. It was not even a real name, and the reference was to someone reported, falsely, to be dead.
The name Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti was first mentioned to authorities in Mauritania by an al Qaeda operative, Mohamedou Ould Slahi, who went by the nom de guerre “Abu Musab.” Slahi was a veteran
In telling the story of his travels and battles with the
The same pseudonym, and person, would be fleshed out in more detail more than a year later by a true believer named Mohammed al-Qahtani, a baby-faced young Saudi who had pledged himself to al Qaeda and had planned to join the 9/11 hijackers as “muscle”—one of the enforcers trained to seize the plane and keep the passengers under control on the way to impact. He had arrived in Orlando about a month before the attacks— Mohammed Atta was waiting there to pick him up—but was turned away by an immigration officer, whose suspicions, even in that relatively unwary time, were aroused by the fact that Qahtani had a one-way ticket and could not speak English. When Qahtani grew indignant, he earned himself a return flight to Afghanistan. Denied martyrdom, he rejoined bin Laden and fought in the battle of Tora Bora. Fleeing that encounter, he was arrested crossing the border into Pakistan with other
Qahtani was interrogated relentlessly at Guantanamo from early November of 2002 until January of 2003. A daily log of his ordeal reveals a grinding effort to break down the young man’s resistance. He displayed heroic defiance. There were repeated hunger strikes and attacks on his guards and interrogators—he frequently spat at them, head-butted one, and threw himself bodily at others. When doctors tried to administer IV fluids he tore out the needle, and when his hands were strapped to his chair he got the IV line in his mouth and bit it in two.
The Obama administration has claimed that torture played no role in tracking down bin Laden, but here, in the first two important steps down the trail, that claim crumbles. At best it demands a very narrow definition of the word. Slahi’s prosecutor refused to pursue charges against him before a military commission because he found they were based on statements made under torture. And in Qahtani’s case the coercive methods employed are clearly documented and public, and would be described as torture by any disinterested person. Indeed, it was his case that prompted the Department of Defense to draw up guidelines to curb interrogation excesses.
In time Qahtani succumbed to this pressure, however it is defined, and dropped his falconry story and began describing his work with al Qaeda in detail. One of the many names he mentioned as part of bin Laden’s inner circle was this same Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti. He did not know the man’s real name, but said he was not only alive and well but had worked closely with Khalid Sheik Mohammed, al Qaeda’s Number Three, and had given Qahtani some preliminary computer instruction at an Internet cafe in Karachi, showing him how to communicate with the group’s leaders once he was in America. As Peter Bergen reported in his excellent account,
So now the name had come up twice, from two different men in two different countries, separated by more than a year. No one was yet paying attention to it. Many of the early detainee interrogations were not widely distributed, even within the agency—the importance of the single, enormous database would rise only when the software to exploit it appeared in a few years. In the early years of the hunt, even with dozens of analysts working full time, even with President Bush’s list in the drawer of his desk in the Oval Office and his constant prods of “How are we doing?,” and even with the help of the computers, it was nearly impossible to keep up with the flood of tips and “Elvis sightings.” There was a $25 million reward offered by the State Department for information leading to bin Laden, and an additional $2 million put up by an airline trade association and the pilots union, so passing along a tip was like buying a lottery ticket: you can’t win if you don’t play. Tall, slender, olive-skinned Arab men were seen on every continent. The analysts did not have high expectations for any of these leads, but given the national priority assigned to the task, every single one had to be taken seriously. It was a powerful time suck.
In that context, a detail offered up under duress by Qahtani, one that would later prove key, was years away from being recognized as significant. Qahtani himself was not that big a deal. He was a foot soldier, one of thousands rounded up in Afghanistan as they fled across the border. All of them were questioned, and their answers were all swept into the growing database. Qahtani merited more attention than most, though. He was an Arab fighter, after all, and, unlike most detainees, he had been a member of al Qaeda. He had fought at Tora Bora and had tried to enter the United States shortly before the attacks, and if he had not been turned away he might have played a role in them himself. But he was still just muscle, a foot soldier. There was no reason to believe he could point out the location of Osama bin Laden. His mention of this Ahmed the Kuwaiti was noted. The supposed “courier” had helped prepare Qahtani for the 9/11 mission and apparently had worked closely with Khalid Sheik Mohammed, so he was potentially significant. But it was still just a fake name. Whoever the Kuwaiti was, by 2003 his pseudonym remained just another drop of intel in what was fast becoming an ocean of data.
Then Khalid Sheik Mohammed himself was arrested in Pakistan just a few months after Qahtani started talking. This dark, burly, hairy man was easily the most important al Qaeda figure ever apprehended—the terror group’s Number Three, its operations director and the primary architect of 9/11. His arrest stirred a great deal of excitement. Here was someone who could provide a map of the entire organization, possibly cough up the hideouts
