The Finish: The Killing of Osama bin Laden

5. “Please Make Sure to Keep the Children and All of the Families Away from the Areas That Are Being Photographed and Bombed”

Fall, 2010

Nine years after his most spectacular success, things were not going as Osama bin Laden had foreseen. He was cut off from his followers, frustrated, and his organization was fraying. The 9/11 attacks had been both his greatest achievement and his undoing. Toppling the World Trade Center towers and crashing a commercial jet into the Pentagon had not, as he supposed, sent the United States into a spiral of fear, retreat, and ruin. It had instead set al Qaeda and himself on the run from a patient, determined, and deadly pursuer. The movement had been fragmented physically and conceptually. It had become less his organization than a franchise, a banner waved by men who did not share his precise, divine insight, and who sullied its name with acts that killed, maimed, and alienated those he sought to defend and convert. The holy cause had gone off the rails. In isolation, he could no longer steer it himself. But the Sheik had not given up. The divinely inspired don’t.

So he wrote letters, windy letters that filled many pages, a steady stream of them that were passed along a chain of couriers to the men he recognized as his deputies. Despite the oppressive reality, his letters offered consistently hopeful assessments of al Qaeda’s opportunities. They contained detailed instructions promoting men to positions made vacant by virtue of an arrest or drone attack, bestowed or withheld his official blessing on start-up organizations in other countries, requested more detailed updates and information, mourned the dead, and critiqued, guided, and motivated his increasingly far-flung troops. He himself had little else to do. He would either tap away on the keyboard with his long, delicate fingers or dictate to one of his wives. He paced.

“In the name of God most merciful,” he began one letter in October, 2010 to “Sheik Mahmoud” Atiyah Abd al-Rahman, one of his most faithful, long-serving soldiers, “may God protect him. I hope that this letter finds you and your family are in good health. I offer my condolences to you for the death of our beloved brothers. May God have mercy on their souls and consider them among the martyrs.”

A Libyan, al-Rahman had sought out the Sheik in Afghanistan more than twenty years earlier, when he was a teenager determined to fight the great Soviet military machine. Even today he had a youthful, permanently unkempt look, with pale skin and a beard so sparse that it grew only in wisps on his jaws before thickening under his chin. Until recently, al-Rahman had been living in relative safety in Iran, serving as bin Laden’s emissary to that country’s mullahs, with whom bin Laden had an uneasy relationship. One of the Sheik’s three wives and some of his twenty-two living children had been in Iran for years, either imprisoned or living under “protective custody.” It was a matter of interpretation. Al-Rahman had helped broker their release, and was now back in the tribal regions of western Pakistan, somewhere in North or South Waziristan, ready to assume an operational role.

As it happened, there was an opening. The Sheik must have been grateful to have al-Rahman back. Drone attacks on al Qaeda forces in Waziristan had so thinned its ranks that the group was finding it hard to retain anyone in the critical Number Three position —operations commander, beneath only the Sheik himself and al-Zawahiri. Anyone pledged to al Qaeda was now a marked man, but this was especially true for its Number Three. The job required suicidal commitment. Unlike the organization’s most infamous leaders, the operations commander had to be in constant touch with the group’s rank and file, plotting actions, moving money, and training recruits, and the more active you were the more likely it was that the American satellites, drones, or raiders would find you. Number Threes did not last long. There had been 9/11 planner Khalid Sheik Mohammed, who was found and arrested in Pakistan in 2003. His successor, Abu Faraj al-Libi, was arrested in 2005, and al-Libi’s successor, Hamza Rabia, was killed later that year by a drone strike. Next up, Sheik Saeed al-Masri, had been killed in May of 2010. The Americans were getting better. The rain of death was accelerating. Al-Rahman, stepping in for the late al-Masri, would die within the year, less than a month before his successor, Abu Hafs al Shahri, would likewise be killed in a Predator strike. And his successor, Abu Yahya al-Libi, would be killed in June 2012.

By now, every letter the Sheik composed from his cramped third-floor office in Abbottabad began with prayers for the martyrs and lists of condolences.

“This is the path of jihad,” he intoned stoically in another letter to Atiyah Abd al-Rahman, his new Number Three. “God said, ‘You will sacrifice your money and yourself for His sake.’ They strike us and we will strike them back.”

The limitations of this movement were more apparent. And while bin Laden politely asked his followers to launch more attacks on the United States, there was no longer any way for al Qaeda to make such ambitious arrangements. The 9/11 attacks had taken years to prepare, and had involved substantial international travel, long months of training, money, and close coordination. When the plan had been set in motion, the group was a peripheral concern for the United States and the Western world. Michael Sheehan, the U.S. ambassador for counterterrorism in the waning years of the Clinton administration, had felt like he was butting his head against a wall trying to get people to take bin Laden and his group seriously in the late 1990s. Michael Scheuer and “the Manson Family” of analysts at ALEC Station were regarded as alarmist, and wore themselves out with frustration.

This was no longer the case. America had spread an invisible web of surveillance that registered seemingly everything that stirred. Death rained continually. It was dangerous for the organization’s leaders to move from one house to another, much less put another international plot in motion. And yet here was the Sheik still dreaming his big dream. His own men, even those who shared his vision, were discovering that their revered leader lived in a fantasy. He was still urging them to “hunch forth and stain the blade of lances red.” Bin Laden had become the crazy officer waving his sword and rallying depleted troops to run headlong into withering fire—before him, mind you, not behind him. He sent them broad strategic analyses and called for specific missions that were wildly unrealistic, even screwy.

“I asked Sheik Sa’id, Allah have mercy on his soul, to task brother Ilyas to prepare two groups—one in Pakistan and the other in the Bagram area of Afghanistan—with the mission of anticipating and spotting the visits of Obama or Petraeus to Afghanistan or Pakistan to target the aircraft of either one of them,” he wrote. “They are not to target visits by U.S. Vice President Biden, Secretary of Defense [Robert] Gates, Joint Chiefs of Staff (Chairman) [Michael] Mullen, or the Special Envoy to Pakistan and Afghanistan [Richard] Holbrooke. The groups will remain on the lookout for Obama or Petraeus. The reason for concentrating on them is that Obama is the head of infidelity and killing him will automatically make Biden take over the presidency for the remainder of the term, as it is the norm over there. Biden is totally unprepared for that post, which will lead the United States into a crisis. As for Petraeus, he is the man of the hour in this last year of the war, and killing him would alter the war’s path. So please ask brother Ilyas to send to me the steps he has taken into that work.”

Bin Laden diagnosed their primary problem not as the deadly American pursuit, which it was primarily, but their own lack of focus. And he had become a scold.

“After the war expanded and the mujahidin spread out into many regions, some of the brothers became totally absorbed in fighting our local enemies, and more mistakes have been made due to miscalculations by the brothers planning the operations.”

Too many operations against Americans had inadvertently killed Muslims. He criticized two specific efforts, both by local jihadists affiliated with al Qaeda: the first being the unsuccessful attempt on the life of Afghanistan regional commander General Abdul Rashid Dostum in January 2005. The suicide bomber in that case had blown himself up outside the Ghocha Park mosque in Dostum’s hometown of Sheberghan, where the general and his retinue had been praying during the annual Eid al-Adha festival. About twenty people had been injured. The other was an attempt to kill Pakistani General Muhammad Yusef Khan, in June 2004, again setting off a bomb at a mosque. Both had killed many Muslims, and both, bin Laden wrote, “bear extreme negative impact on the partisans of the jihad… It is extremely sad for an individual to fall into the same mistake more than once.”

The campaign of terror led by al Qaeda’s franchise in Iraq had killed eight times more Muslims than non-Muslims, according to a 2009 study. Bin Laden saw this kind of information reported on satellite TV. The bloodshed was thought to have caused many Sunni groups opposed to the U.S. invasion to turn on al Qaeda. This had been a clear tactical error, and a moral one. The rule was that one did not kill Muslims unless there was no other way to get at legitimate targets.

“[This] has resulted in the killing of Muslims (we ask God to have mercy on them and forgive them, and compensate their families).”

Bin Laden was now not so sure that the rule allowing even this exception to killing brother Muslims was valid. He wanted such rationales “revisited based on the modern-day context, and clear boundaries established for all the brothers, so that no Muslims fall victim except when it is absolutely essential… Here is an important issue that we should pay attention to: carrying out several attacks without exercising caution, which impacted the sympathy of the Nation’s crowds toward the mujahidin. It would lead us to winning several battles while losing the war at the end. It requires an accurate criterion for the ramifications of any attack prior to carrying it out; also weighing the advantages and disadvantages, to then determine what would be the best attack to carry out.”

Even successes troubled him. During a siege in Khobar, Saudi Arabia, in May 2004, a large group of terrorists took hostages from two oil company installations and killed nineteen foreigners. The attackers were part of the “al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula” branch, based in Yemen. They had asked each of the hostages if they were Muslims, and slit the throats of those who were not. Most of the attackers were killed in a rescue operation, and the incident helped provoke a brutal Saudi crackdown on extremists.

The Sheik now cautioned against mounting attacks like these and others inside Arab countries.

“The regime shall have a huge reaction toward the mujahidin; this would lead to defending themselves and avenging the regime,” he wrote. “The brothers and the regime would then engage in a war that we did not begin against it, because the power of the brothers is not ready for it.” The right strategy was to defer conflict with local Arab states, such as Yemen and Iraq and Saudi Arabia, “to avoid wasting our energy with these regimes at this stage [and]… losing the sympathy of the Muslims toward us… We are the ones defending the Muslims and fighting their biggest enemy, the Crusader-Zionist alliance.”

It was now enough that the “general public” considered the victims Muslims, even if bin Laden, with his purer standards, did not. Killing those who fell into this category, while morally defensible, was a strategic error. Better that future attacks should come in places far removed from the Middle or Near East, he said. He mentioned South Korea in particular.

“Among the opportunities to be exploited in targeting the Americans is the state of security laxity found in countries where we have not carried out any attacks.”

The Sheik often lectured in these letters, trying to steer his organization back to its central goals. He worried not only that local al Qaeda franchises had drifted away from his guidance, but that its mission was being diluted on targets and concerns he regarded as peripheral.

“By God’s grace, jihad is under way on several fronts [Iraq and Afghanistan and, to some extent, Pakistan], and these are sufficient, by His will and His glory, as well as by the steadfastness of the mujahidin there, to perform the functions of bleeding the head of the infidels, America, such that it is defeated, God willing. Then the Islamic Nation will be able to expel that which has stricken it with weakness, servility, and degradation. The plague that exists in the nations of Muslims has two causes: the first is the presence of American hegemony and the second is the presence of rulers who have abandoned Islamic law and who identify with the hegemony, serving its interests in exchange for securing their own interests. The only way for us to establish the religion and alleviate the plague… is to remove the hegemony… . After this phase comes the phase in which the second cause—rulers who have abandoned Islamic law—are toppled, and this will be the phase in which God’s religion is established and Islamic law rules.”

Proceeding too hastily in local regions like Yemen undermined the movement’s long-term goals, he argued. He saw the Taliban as a cautionary tale in this regard.

“A man might measure the results of establishing a Muslim state before toppling its enemies against the… fall of the Islamic emirate in Afghanistan, which we pray to God does not happen again.”

In this October letter to al-Rahman, and in several others composed around the same time, the Sheik offered a sweeping assessment of the cause, his organization, and the world. He remained stubbornly optimistic, despite his circumstances. If America was the greater enemy, he considered Pakistan the one closer at hand, and he saw the natural disasters and political strife that year as a hopeful sign.

“As for the local enemy, as you know, they are in big trouble and the government is in danger of falling, especially after the floods [of the previous July] and the increase of the numbers of those who are suffering from the financial crisis.” The floods, he wrote, were “God’s punishment” on Pakistan for “its sins,” but he urged al-Rahman that no one from al Qaeda should say this publicly, “because of the case of the Jewish man with the sick child, whom the Prophet invited to Islam, but did not tell him that his son was sick because he was not a believer.” Best not to insult Pakistan.

He relished the conflicts between his two enemies: Pakistan and the American-led NATO coalition in Afghanistan. In recent months Pakistan had closed the border to Afghanistan, shutting down main supply lines for American forces there.

“Through the generosity of God, the situation is moving in the direction of the mujahidin. You should be patient and strong and God will reward us.”

Given the persistent American pounding, it was time for all but the most disciplined “brothers” to leave Waziristan. He recommended that the others begin moving back into Afghanistan, urging al-Rahman to instruct them to leave their cars behind, because the Americans might otherwise start targeting houses, and that would “increase casualties among women and children.” Bin Laden was very particular about protecting the lives of innocent Muslims. He urged his followers to move on “cloudy days, so that their flight would not be readily detected from above.” He sent instructions concerning his grown children, the ones who were not in hiding with him, detailing precautions they should take when traveling, and where he wanted them to go. He had lost two of his elder sons, Saad and Mohammed, to the cause already. The Sheik considered himself an expert on security, especially on avoiding overhead surveillance, advising that travelers be moved from car to car inside tunnels, and that the brothers plant large trees around their bases of operation to provide cover from overhead cameras. He warned that tracking and eavesdropping devices might be “so small that they can be put inside a medical syringe.”

Gone from these letters, full of condolences and the need for vigilant security, is the bravado of his younger years. Now and then the Sheik would digress for a moment to fondly recall that glory. He reminisced to al-Rahman, his current Number Three, about that moment in their shared story.

“[The attacks] filled Muslims with sympathy toward their fellow mujahidin, as it became perfectly clear that they are in the vanguard and are the standard-bearers of the Islamic community in fighting the Crusader-Zionist alliance that has caused the people to endure various forms of pain and degradation. One indication of that is the wide-scale spread of jihadist ideology, especially on the Internet, and the tremendous number of young people who frequent the jihadist Web sites—a major achievement for jihad, through the grace of God, despite our enemies and their efforts.”

But those enemies and those efforts had kept him on the run or in hiding. He had been disowned by his large extended family. Most of his closest associates were either dead or in prison. He had been certain that America would not dare to directly confront him and the Taliban in Afghanistan. He had boasted to a Pakistani journalist, “I want the Americans to proceed toward Afghanistan, where all of their misconceptions and illusions will be removed. I am sure, however, that the Americans will not come, because they are cowards. They attack only the unarmed and weaker people.”

The United States did come to Afghanistan, and they had defeated the Taliban. Despite the costs they were still coming. In addition, the United States had done something the Sheik could never have imagined. They had elected a black man president, a man with the name Barack Hussein Obama. It sounded like a Muslim name. And for almost two years now, Obama’s words and policies had helped weaken the anti-Americanism that fueled al Qaeda’s cause, while his drones killed off its membership.

Worse still, the indiscriminate brutal tactics of al Qaeda and its self-anointed affiliates had alienated millions of Muslims, those bin Laden meant when he referred to “the people” or “the Nation.” This was the hardest thing for him to swallow. All this had happened, he believed, because he had lost control. His isolation had made it impossible for him to shape the group’s image and message, and because al Qaeda had failed to make further dramatic strikes inside America, its significance waned. The attacks he had rejoiced over, that had seemed the start of something glorious, had instead set him back further than he had been when he had started. His world now consisted of two upstairs floors of a house in Pakistan that he and his family never dared to leave.

The house stood inside a large triangular-shaped compound at the end of a dirt road about a half hour drive north of Islamabad, the capital of Pakistan, in a neighborhood called Bilal Town. Abbottabad was in a basin surrounded on all sides by the rugged Sarban Hills. The drive from the capital was uphill, and Abbottabad’s relatively cool air made it an escape for well-to-do residents of the big city during the brutally hot summer months. There were several golf courses nearby. One mile away was Pakistan’s large military academy at Kakul.

The compound was new, and even though Bilal Town was an affluent neighborhood, at thirty-eight thousand square feet it was many times larger than any of the surrounding ones. Its walls were built of cinder block that had been plastered in the front. They were as high as eighteen feet in some spots, topped with barbed wire. The main house was a large white three-layer box, with a third floor that appeared to have been an afterthought, which was only two-thirds as tall as the first and second. This truncated floor was odd. It had windows on only the north wall: a large one at the center filled with glass coated with an opaque reflective material, and four small rectangular ones just under the overhanging roof, similarly coated. Most of the house was painted white, and the windows on the second story were shaded with simple white awnings. The Sheik and his large family lived on the upper floors. Bin Laden himself was rarely seen even by the other two families who shared the compound and who ostensibly owned it—the brothers who called themselves Arshad and Tareq Khan.

Locked away and losing control, bin Laden had not given up, nor had he retreated from life. Two of his first four wives were still with him, and he had taken one more. His most recent, Amal, a Yemeni a quarter century younger than him, shared a mattress with him on the cramped third floor. The two older ones—Khairiah and Siham—waited their turns with him downstairs. There was not, as later events would show, perfect harmony in these domestic arrangements. There was a container of Avena syrup on his kitchen shelf, an oat-based folk remedy that promised arousal to the sexually depleted male. It might even have done him some good, because the cramped hallways of his upstairs cloister were crowded with twelve children, the youngest, Hussein, just two years old. The Sheik’s own father had taken twenty-two wives, so by comparison the son was a restrained polygamist who, by most accounts, labored to meet his responsibilities to each wife, even to those who had left him. He had acquiesced in the desires of Najwa and Khadijah to divorce him. He knew the difficulties of his chosen path and did not push it on them or his children. But he personally never wavered in his commitment to the cause. He was soft-spoken, but hardly an easy person to live with. Marriage was no equal partnership for the Sheik. His faith stressed strict patriarchy, and bin Laden was its obedient servant. He ruled his family. He not only made all the decisions, he liked to instruct, and like most men who possess the ultimate truth he liked to hold forth. He gave frequent in-house lectures to his wives about the correct way to raise and discipline children. And there was a daily religious homily.

There was no stoop yet to his tall, lean frame, and daily pacing sessions behind the high walls of his compound gave him at least a modicum of exercise. He walked beneath a tarp suspended over the compound’s vegetable garden that deflected direct sunlight and shielded him from prying eyes. The Sheik had been athletic in his youth, playing soccer and volleyball. He was vain about his appearance. The whitening of his hair and beard bothered him. The most wanted man in the world worried less about being recognized than not being recognized. On TV, that is. He had been in such deep hiding that few outside his immediate family had seen him in person for years. But his self-made videos and the periodic pronouncements smuggled out by couriers were seen everywhere. It would not do for him to appear old. Given fundamentalist Islam’s ban on depicting the human form, there were only a few images of the Prophet Muhammad, but no one better appreciated the power of pictures than the Sheik, and those of the Prophet that did exist generally showed him young and virile, with flowing robes and a dark beard. He had mimicked those images all his life. So now he dyed his hair and beard black for his taping sessions, with results that were predictably amateurish. The color was too uniform and dark. He looked like a caricature of himself: Osama bin Laden with a cheap dye job.

He had plenty of time to think. He could picture what must be done but could no longer make it happen. Al Qaeda’s name had been so usurped and muddied by younger, less careful warriors in Iraq, Yemen, and elsewhere—men less constrained, as he was, by the strict dictates of faith—that bin Laden apparently thought of changing his group’s name. Among his papers were long lists of possible alternatives, most of them amusingly clumsy in their English translation, but all attempted to identify the group closer to his religious ambitions. Increasingly, affiliates were fighting local wars over local problems, and ignoring the Sheik’s overarching vision. This was no small matter. The path he saw was immutable, and perfect, and straying from it meant nothing less than failure. He weighed al Qaeda’s every act and public comment with mounting dismay.

Take the case of Faisal Shahzad, the young man coached by bin Laden’s followers in Waziristan to explode a car bomb in Times Square. No doubt Shahzad’s attempt was an example of bin Laden’s men trying to follow his instructions—he repeatedly urged renewed attacks in the United States at iconic, well-populated locations. Times Square fit the prescription perfectly, as did Shahzad. He was the son of a wealthy and prominent Pakistani air force officer. He had been raised in luxury and given the best of international educations. After marrying an American woman of Pakistani descent, settling in Connecticut, and fathering two children, he applied for and completed a program to become an American citizen. Then he’d traveled to Pakistan and received training on how to set off the bomb. A young volunteer with an American passport must have seemed a godsend to the besieged plotters in Waziristan. But alert Times Square sidewalk vendors had thwarted Shahzad’s mission and the would-be bomber was arrested. Just before he was sentenced to life in prison, a judge had asked Shahzad about the oath of allegiance he had sworn to the United States when he was made a citizen.

“I sweared,” he said, “but I didn’t mean it.”

This bin Laden found offensive, despite the fact that years earlier he had taken the opposite viewpoint about breaking an oath in an argument with his mentor Abdullah Azzam, who had opposed bin Laden’s plan to bomb a bus full of tourists in Pakistan.

“[Shahzad] was asked about the oath that he took when he obtained American citizenship,” he wrote to al-Rahman. “And he responded by saying that he lied. You should know that it is not permissible in Islam to betray trust and break a covenant. Perhaps the brother was not aware of this. Please ask the brothers in Taliban Pakistan to explain this point to their members. In one of the pictures, brother Faisal Shahzad was with commander Mehsud [Hakimullah Mehsud, who would be killed by a drone strike in 2012]; please find out if Mehsud knows that getting the American citizenship requires taking an oath to not harm America. This is a very important matter because we do not want mujahidin to be accused of breaking a covenant.”

The Sheik seemed to have little appreciation for the murderous pressure on his followers in the field. He wanted more attacks on America, but he had no new ideas. Instead, with quaint courtesy and diligent thrift, he pushed for a duplication of the 2001 attacks. He wrote: “It would be nice if you would pick a number of the brothers, not to exceed ten, and send them to their countries individually, without any of them knowing the others, to study aviation. It would be better if they are from the Gulf states, as study there is at the government’s expense. They have to be picked with the utmost care and with very accurate specifications, one of which is that they are willing to conduct suicide actions and are prepared to do daring, important, and precise missions that we may ask of them in the future. So please pay top attention to this matter due to its utmost importance. Establish a mechanism to monitor and follow up on the brothers going to study aviation so that we reduce the chances of them slackening from conducting jihad… . It would be nice if you would ask the brothers in all regions if they have a brother distinguished by good manners, integrity, courage, and secretiveness, who can operate in the United States. He should be able to live there, or it should be easy for him to travel there. They should tell us this without taking any action and also tell us whether or not he is willing to conduct a suicide operation.”

He concluded his letter of October 21 to Rahman by inquiring after the growing lists of “widows and orphans.”

“Please make sure to keep the children and all of the families away from the areas that are being photographed and bombed. I pray to God Almighty to protect you and all the brothers around you. May He grant you success. May God’s peace, mercy, and blessings be upon you.”

He signed with an old nickname, “Your brother Zamray.”

At the time he was writing this, after all those years in hiding, after his rigorous routines of self-protection had become rote, after not a whisper of suspicion that anyone outside his inner circle knew of his whereabouts, the Sheik had every reason to feel secure.

Except he wasn’t.