of bin Laden and al-Zawahiri, or at least lead them closer, and perhaps reveal ongoing plots before they matured into new incidents of mass murder. Khalid Sheik Mohammed got the full treatment. He was interrogated aggressively by both Pakistani and American forces. In between 183 waterboardings at a secret CIA interrogation center in Poland, he was asked about many, many names. One among the many was Ahmed the Kuwaiti. And in addition to the volumes of information Khalid Sheik Mohammed provided—some of it true, some of it false—he acknowledged that such a character existed, but said the man was unimportant and had retired from al Qaeda years earlier.
So it was not as if the teams of analysts at the CIA were now, in 2003, looking at this fellow called “the Kuwaiti” as an important lead. But having been thrice acknowledged, albeit thrice acknowledged under torture, the prospect of his being fiction—someone made up by a detainee spinning stories—became less likely. He existed, or had existed. He may have been dead but was probably still alive. He may even have been, or might be, a member of bin Laden’s inner circle—perhaps even a courier. Even so, the name wasn’t a real name, and it was one of a multitude. It was not yet a lead, because to know so little doesn’t lead or point anywhere.
The teams looking into the matter were smart, dedicated, and possessed the agency’s studied, nondescript style. They were members of a kind of university of analysis, working under the direction of Michael Morell. When the effort settled into a routine, there were more than twenty analysts, men and women. There were more women than usual for this kind of job, partly because the CIA had undertaken to achieve a better balance of gender, but also partly because women were considered especially good at this kind of patient detail work and had a reputation for being sensitive to subtleties that eluded many men—the same insight that had guided Scheuer’s staffing of ALEC Station. The teams tended to be on the youthful side of middle age, and the analysts had the look of people who commute to a job in a cubicle and spend long working hours before a computer screen or in meetings. They got a chuckle out of the depiction of CIA agents in books and movies—jumping from airplanes, leaping from rooftops, speeding through European capitals in sports cars under fire. They were mostly bookish sorts, but seemed less like academics than like accountants or junior business executives. Indeed, that’s probably what they would tell you they did for a living if you asked. Ego and eccentricity were suppressed, sublimated by the clandestine nature of the job.
The Elvis sightings had slowed and then pretty much stopped by 2004. Bin Laden seemed lost. The teams turned more attention to sorting through the accumulated data—sorting it, devising ways to improve how they attacked it. There was his family, his huge family, with a dizzying number of kin and in-laws, any one of whom might become a conduit for a message to his mother (bin Laden had always been very close to her, a point of potential weakness). As the head of al Qaeda, he was known to be sending and receiving messages constantly. People were supplying him with food, medicine, and information… what methods did he use? And those video and audio statements? Who in his inner circle was known to make such recordings? The recordings were scrutinized with great care. What kind of wallpaper is that behind him? What sort of plants are in the room? What is he wearing? Analysts were far more interested in the trappings of bin Laden’s statements than in anything he had to say. Why, if he was living in a cave in the wilds, were his robes so clean? There was a “media” team that focused on clues like that. And who delivered these offerings to Al Jazeera and other outlets? That was the job of the courier team. The agency got to where it could track the chain of couriers back to Number Three—it was Khalid Sheik Mohammed and then his replacement, a Libyan, Mustafa al-’Uzayti, who went by the nickname Abu Faraj al- Libi—but there the trail always went cold.
In January 2004, Kurdish police arrested Hassan Ghul, a known al Qaeda figure, trying to enter Iraq with money and bomb-making schematics. He was carrying a letter from bin Laden to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the murderous leader of al Qaeda in Iraq, the local franchise that was just beginning its bloody campaign against Americans and the Iraqi citizenry. During Ghul’s interrogation the name Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti surfaced once more; Ghul described him as an important courier, one of the Sheik’s most trusted aides. There were now four mentions of this mystery man, who was looking more and more real. But who was he? What sort of person would he be? The most valuable sort in such a role, if bin Laden were hiding in Pakistan, would be someone fluent in both Pashto and Arabic. Did the Kuwaiti fit that profile? If so, how do you track a nickname?
The public line offered during the remainder of the Bush years was that bin Laden was probably living in a cave somewhere in Waziristan. The CIA teams had stopped believing that in 2002. There were no sightings or even rumors of his presence in the northwest Pakistani territories—not a single report. There were also many stories suggesting that he had a serious kidney disease, and these, too, were discounted early on—these were the stories bin Laden himself had attempted to disprove by feasting before the Pakistani journalist Mir. The CIA rejected them because the logistics of dialysis would have been too difficult to sustain, and the Sheik appeared hardy enough in his videos.
When the analysts weren’t slugging away on their computers, they were in meetings, proposing theories and arguing about theories. Detailed profiles were worked up. How would bin Laden be living? Who was likely with him? How big was his household? Where would it be? What might it look like?
The four most promising avenues seemed to be family, organization, finances, and couriers. The agency had committees focusing on each. And each of these avenues was generating its own collection of data—names, numbers, photos, interviews, etc… . all of it swelling the database, the great pool of potential leads. The work ground on, day after day, week after week, year after year. And nothing seemed especially promising.
The arrest of Abu Faraj al-Libi in May 2005, in Pakistan, raised hopes once again for a breakthrough. The second al Qaeda Number Three to be captured, it was known that he had been in direct communication with bin Laden in the years since the 9/11 attacks. But while he provided a lot of information after his capture, he offered nothing that directly helped the bin Laden teams. He did,
So among the various avenues still being explored intensely, the Kuwaiti became more important. Again, the name was just one of many and was just an alias. It would be five years before they managed to connect it with a real person. In 2007, the agency learned that the Kuwaiti’s real name was Ibrahim Saeed Ahmed. It will not say how the connection was made. It might have been as simple as an informant, perhaps someone detained and being interrogated in another country, or it might have emerged from the wizardry of its supercomputers—from the Terrorism Information Awareness database—after some conversation on a cell phone somewhere in the world triggered the right connection. One senior official said that the information came from a “third country.” Morell would tell me later, “You could write a book about how we figured it out.” It is a book he is not ready to see written.
However the connection was made, by 2007, in light of the increasing usefulness of human intel networks and the enormous TIA database, a real name was a huge step forward. A real man had a history. Ahmed came from a large Pakistani family that had moved to Kuwait. He and his brothers had grown up speaking Pashto and Arabic. One of his brothers had been killed fighting against the Soviets in Afghanistan. A man with a large family had relatives who had telephones and mail delivery and computers with Internet connections. A man like Ahmed had a network that could be mapped and monitored. With the ability to pore rapidly over every scrap of data and find links in terabytes of intel, one might, say, notice a suspicious cell phone number that made calls home to Kuwait from Pakistan, and then locate the cell towers where the signal originated and comb through the reams of numbers that pinged that tower, looking for telltale patterns of usage. You could also begin routinely recording the conversations on that cell phone, although there is no evidence that anyone was interested enough to listen in just yet.
