The Exile: The Stunning Inside Story of Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda in Flight

646 Pages·2017·4.88 MB·English

by  Catherine Scott-Clark, Adrian Levy

More Praise for The Exile

“Where did Osama bin Laden, his family, and Al Qaeda disappear to for a
decade after 9/11 and Tora Bora? In The Exile, Cathy Scott-Clark and Adrian
Levy reveal a staggering amount of fresh information as to how Osama bin
Laden survived and give us a picture of the ‘missing years.’ This is a remarkable
book that readers will not be able to put down.”

—Ahmed Rashid, author of Taliban, Descent into Chaos, and Pakistan on the

Brink

“The West spends far too little time trying to understand those who attacked on
9/11, and if we do not understand them, we will never combat their ideology.
The Exile fills the gap in a very thorough and readable way.”

—Clive Stafford Smith, director of Reprieve and legal representative of more

than one hundred Guantánamo detainees

“The Exile combines a reporter’s meticulous research with the skill of a thriller
writer. This is a must-read for those interested in understanding the dynamics of
global jihad.”

—Husain Haqqani, former Pakistan ambassador to the United States and author

of Magnificent Delusions: Pakistan, the United States, and an Epic History of

Misunderstanding

“A fascinating, dynamic, and detailed account—based on considerable research
—of how the ideas and people of Al Qaeda survived and revived after 9/11.
Informative and highly readable.”

—Richard Barrett, former head of counterterrorism for MI5 and MI6

The Exile

For GG

BY THE SAME AUTHORS

The Stone of Heaven: Unearthing the Secret History of Imperial Green Jade

Nuclear Deception: The Dangerous Relationship between the United States and

Pakistan The Meadow: Kashmir 1995—Where the Terror Began The Amber
Room: The Fate of the World’s Greatest Lost Treasure The Siege: 68 Hours

inside the Taj Hotel

Contents

Map
Preface

One.
“Shit. I think we bit off more than we could chew.”

Two.
“Terrorism is a duty and assassination is a Sunnah.”

Three.
“These Arabs … they have killed Afghans. They have trained their
guns on Afghan lives … We want them out.”

Four.
“Poor ones, this is not how revenge is, or will be.”

Five.
“The banging was so strong that I felt at some point that my skull was
in pieces.”

Six.
“If you bid us plunge into the ocean, we would follow you.”

Seven.
“The reprisals of the mujahideen shall come like lightning bolts.”

Eight.
“We will get you, CIA team, inshallah, we will bring you down.”

Nine.
“I’m back with the people I was with before.”

Ten.
“We go to a house, we fuck with some people, and we leave. This is
just a longer flight.”

Eleven.
“What really happened doesn’t matter if there is an official story

behind it that 99.999% of the world would believe.”

Twelve.
“It is going to be worse when my father dies. The world is going to be
very, very nasty … it will be a disaster.”

Thirteen. “It will be just the end of the beginning rather than the beginning of

the end.”

Acknowledgments
Brief Biographies of Major Characters
Bibliography
Notes

Index
Note on the Authors

Preface

Eighteen years into an epoch of Islamist terror that began with horrific attacks on
U.S. embassies in East Africa in 1998, few books have told the story of Al
Qaeda from the inside.

Part of this is due to difficulty. Getting into any volatile, paranoiac outfit, one

that executes outsiders as spies or lures reporters to meetings that become
kidnappings—is hair-raising. Instead, we have had gripping tales of those in the
West and the Gulf states who have hunted Al Qaeda. The prism through which
we see this bloody era has become a police procedural—pathological killers
triangulated by deep-in-the-weeds analysts using sources procured by
intelligence officers out in the field, parrying with American special agents for
interrogation rights.

However, there is another reason why apart from the great volumes that chart

the road to 9/11 there has been no history of these times told by the other side,
and that is an extraordinary act of control by Western governments. To find an
equivalent, one would have to go all the way back to the 1980s and the actions
of the British government in its dealings with the Irish Republican Army, when
jury trials were suspended, Catholics were interned, and the voice of Sinn Féin
leader Gerry Adams was banned on TV and replaced with that of an actor (while
secretly Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s emissary negotiated with the IRA).

After 9/11, the Bush administration incarcerated, en masse, as many as 779

suspected enemy combatants in Guantánamo military prison in Cuba. Even now
that the number has been whittled down to 41 at the time of press, the prison still
costs half a billion dollars a year to run. Only five men accused of being directly
involved in the planning or execution of 9/11 have been put on trial, and their
hearings drag on at a snail’s pace.

In August 2016, Abu Zubaydah, who the Bush administration claimed was

Number Three in Al Qaeda but who the Obama administration concluded had

never been a formal member of the outfit, appeared before a Guantánamo review
board, the first time he had been seen publicly in almost fifteen years. He had
been rendered to Thailand in 2002; waterboarded eighty-three times; confined in
a coffin-shaped box and a smaller one resembling a dog kennel; kept awake for
days, frozen, naked, shackled, and beaten; and spirited away to several more
CIA black sites before landing in Guantánamo in 2006. Even now, observers of
the review board hearing were not allowed to listen to his voice. Instead, a
Pentagon-appointed “personal representative”—Gitmo-speak for a uniformed
U.S. soldier—read out his words.

Of the other prisoners who remain in Cuba, we have heard little or nothing.

Meanwhile, on the outside, Al Qaeda leaders are mostly dead, in hiding, or
compelled to be silent by the Arab, Asian, and African governments that took
them in.

What we do have, courtesy of the U.S. government, is a cherry-picked

history. In 2012, a sample of Al Qaeda’s letters and communiqués was released
to academics from the Combating Terrorism Center at the U.S. Military
Academy at West Point. They were previewed in a powerful Washington Post
opinion piece by David Ignatius, “Osama bin Laden, a Lion in Winter,” and
suggested that fractious Al Qaeda was as finished as its newly dead emir. Also
put into the public domain were well-chosen images showing Osama, graying
and diminished, watching his TV set or fudging his words in outtakes from
videoed speeches. Unnamed Defense officials claimed that he had become
delusional and impotent, and that his organization was defunct. To further
undercut Al Qaeda’s well-crafted image of a pious Sheikh who saw himself as a
ghazi, or holy warrior, rumors were started about his alleged pornography
collection.

The same year, the Obama administration backed Zero Dark Thirty—an overt

wedding of the White House to Hollywood, where the CIA, Pentagon, and West
Wing facilitated a thrilling cinematic account of the sleuthing that led to the raid
on Abbottabad. The impact of the photographs, documents, and this film was to
suggest that a president, Obama, canvassing for his second term in the White
House, had beaten an old enemy, Al Qaeda, that was so pathological that U.S.
interrogators had been required to deploy pitiless means to crack it. The killing
of Osama bin Laden was a major factor in Obama’s reelection.

But Zero Dark Thirty, nominated for five Academy Awards, was materially

wrong in many ways, perhaps none more important than its claim that torture
unearthed vital knowledge leading to Osama’s capture. In truth, the real trail had

been pieced together through dogged detective work, good luck, and well-crafted
interrogations conducted well before the beatings and mock executions.

While falsehoods were advanced, behind the scenes the Pentagon and White

House aggressively pursued those who broke real stories. In August 2016, as
Abu Zubaydah rose in silence from his cell in Guantánamo, former U.S. Navy
SEAL Matthew Bissonnette, who wrote a no-holds-barred account of the real
Abbottabad raid called No Easy Day, was compelled by a Federal Court to pay
back $6.8 million in royalties and speaking fees. He was also made to apologize
for failing to clear his disclosures with the Pentagon, even as the Senate
Intelligence Committee lashed out at Zero Dark Thirty for being “grossly
inaccurate and misleading.”

There were three more selective releases of documents by the Defense

Department, in 2015, 2016, and 2017, as well as a list of books that Osama was
reading. The declassified paperwork represented about 1 percent of the million-
plus-document trove recovered from Abbottabad, but its appearance came as
another large cache of enemy documents, including records of Saddam
Hussein’s high command in Iraq and Al Qaeda material from Afghanistan,
vanished. The Conflict Records Research Center at the National Defense
University in Washington, D.C.—that was, according to the New York Times, a
resource like no other to “provide insights about inner workings of United States
foes”—was being shuttered. The Pentagon, whose budget request for 2016 was
$600 billion, could not afford the $1 million needed to keep it open.

All of which made it more essential than ever to get behind the history that

was being told. We need more detail and not less. We require more nuance and
understanding if we are to ever tamp down a bloody conflict that threatens the
globe. And it is from this place—a desire for a contemporary, complex, untidy,
knotted, verbal history, where no one is regular or consistent, and where allies
are murderously betraying their friends, in which good men make poor choices,
and switch sides, and wives become double agents—that this book begins.

The idea began to coalesce after a last-minute meeting on a dark Islamabad

night in February 2012 with Zakariya al-Sadeh, a Yemeni student, pro-
democracy campaigner, and brother of Amal bin Laden, Osama’s youngest wife.
At the time Zakariya was trying to free his sister from the legal limbo that
Pakistan’s intelligence service, the ISI, had slung her into, having captured her at
Abbottabad after U.S. SEAL Team Six flew off with her dead husband’s body
and his letters.

At that meeting, everyone was nervous. Zakariya was frightened of

worsening his sister’s predicament by being caught with Western journalists, and
we were worried about being glimpsed with him, as we were in the middle of
complex negotiations with the Pakistan Army on another delicate project. The
memory of the Abbottabad raid was still raw and remained incredibly sensitive
in-country. But that tense discussion with Zakariya led to nervy conversations
with many others that resulted eventually (after trust being won) in meetings
with Osama’s family, friends, mentors, companions, factotums, security chiefs,
and religious and media advisers.

We traveled to wherever a meeting could be brokered—from Mauritania to

Yemen, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, the Emirates, Kuwait, the United States, Pakistan,
Afghanistan, and back home to London. Gradually, something unique came into
focus—a story told about Al Qaeda by Al Qaeda men and women with nothing
more to lose but lots to prove. They, too, had letters, e-mails, text messages and
chat transcripts, videos and photo albums that corroborated their claims.

Al Qaeda shura (leadership council) members revealed the schism that

opened up when 9/11 was first plotted, describing how they rejected the plan
while Osama and Khalid Shaikh Mohammad (who was not in Al Qaeda) pressed
on in secret. They described how they had all been astonished on the day the
Twin Towers fell, excited at Al Qaeda having achieved something so
staggeringly shocking, as well as being a little panicked by the knowledge that
they had no choice but to back the operation.

These fighters, religious thinkers, friends, and family members recalled how

as war came to Afghanistan, they rumbled along the desert plains of Jalalabad
with Osama’s terrified family, and watched tracer fire light up the night sky from
a redoubt they called the Star Wars camp. As the United States struck back, they
feared capture and were daunted by the way in which they had been condemned
to a life on the run, their lives subordinated into a mission most of them had
never chosen. But there was no way back.

Some sources took us along the rat runs to the Afghanistan-Pakistan border as

Osama’s family, friends, and advisers fled and Kandahar and Kabul fell,
eviscerating the Taliban dream of an Islamic homeland. Talking to homecoming
British forces stationed in Helmand Province, we heard firsthand the impact of a
close-quarter campaign: veterans shattered and broken, mentally and physically.
The same happened with Al Qaeda’s force, bombed into the dust while those
who did escape told how and why they were guided and nourished by Pakistan-
based jihad fronts. Gradually they coalesced again in new locations—Pakistan
and Iran—and began plotting new attacks.

Daniel Pearl’s killing and the Bali bombings of 2002, the Riyadh compound

bombings of 2003, the Madrid train bombings of 2004, the London public
transport attacks of July 2005, and the Amman hotel bombing in 2005, the list
goes on—exploding tankers, suicide bombers in mosques, nightclubs, and
universities in Pakistan, Syria, Turkey, and Iraq, schools strafed with automatic
fire—individual acts of cruelty have become all-too familiar. But here they were
described from the other side, the plotter and bomber who fueled a war that
could not be stopped, as well as the victims—men and women who also saw the
aerial war from the ground up, the sound of drones swarming like wasps.

They detailed the secret cease-fire deals fielded by the masters of espionage

in Pakistan, spies who shielded Al Qaeda leaders as they became greedy for U.S.
reward money. And all the while, Osama’s closest family was battered by the
ebb and flow of war. Here came news of one son’s death, Saad bin Laden, a boy
groomed by Osama and killed accidentally. Then the revelation of a parallel
world in distant Iran known as the Tourist Complex, where many bin Laden
family members, much of Al Qaeda’s original military leadership and most of its
shura had become caught up in a nerve-jangling real-life game of Risk. But in
Washington, where politics required wars to be endless, the Bush administration
stepped away from making a deal that might have lanced the boil.

One of Osama’s long-lost wives would materialize, even as those keeping

watch in Abbottabad succumbed to chronic depression and battled cancer. The
bin Laden family could not stop growing, and eventually eroded the generosity
of its guardians, who slapped the world’s most wanted man with an eviction
notice. Requiring a new hideout, fearing betrayal by his most beloved spouse—
who might be a double agent or a dupe, with her dental fillings swapped out for
Iranian tracking devices—and only weeks away from SEAL Team Six storming
Abbottabad, Osama cut what he regarded as a great deal. He renegotiated an
agreement to stay put in Abbottabad, rather than having to seek a new bolt-hole
elsewhere.

Outside, the Black Hawks were coming and another of Osama’s sons,

Hamzah, the real heir apparent to Al Qaeda, arrived, only to be shooed away by
his fearful father. Inside, Osama fired off letters and paced, directing family and
friends, frantically plotting, exhorting his outfit to work until it burst, like the
chief mechanic in the engine room of the Titanic.

The Exile dives deep inside this world, recounting for the first time the stories

of Al Qaeda’s leaders, gunmen, planners, and their spiritual guides, fighters
made outlaws by their brutal acts. Through them, we meet their wives and