When members of the Navy’s elite SEAL Team 6 stormed Osama bin Laden’s compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, a year ago and took out the leader of Al Qaeda with two precision shots, they ended an unprecedented decade-long manhunt for the terrorist.
That manhunt is the subject of Peter L Bergen’s latest, and fourth, book about Bin Laden and Al Qaeda. His first, Holy War, Inc, was published only weeks after 9/11 and drew upon his experiences interviewing Laden, as part of a CNN team, in 1997. His 2011 book, The Longest War: The Enduring Conflict Between America and Al-Qaeda provided a wide-angle overview of the war on terror, retracing the events of September 11 and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and their consequences for the US and West Asia.
Manhunt: The Ten-Year Search for Bin Laden From 9/11 to Abbottabad is a more focused repurposing of that material, along with new information gathered from interviews with members of the National Security Council, intelligence and counterterrorism officials and former Special Operations officers.
Parts of Mr Bergen’s narrative about the road to Abbottabad – including President Obama’s decision-making process – lean heavily on other journalistic reports, most notably the History Channel documentary Targeting Bin Laden, which featured interviews with the president and his top counterterrorism and national security advisers. The book’s account of the SEAL raid relies on Nicholas Schmidle’s ticktock piece “Getting Bin Laden” (The New Yorker) though Mr Bergen adds details gathered from US intelligence and Department of Defence officials and a Pakistani intelligence official familiar with the interrogation of Bin Laden’s wives.
Mr Bergen, CNN’s national security analyst, argues that the Bin Laden hunters narrowed down his whereabouts by process of elimination. They concluded that it was unlikely that he had left his old stomping grounds in Afghanistan and Pakistan for a country like Yemen, because he was “so recognisable that the trip would have been too dangerous”. By 2006, they’d also rejected the “popular notion that he was living in a cave”. By 2009, they had become increasingly certain that he was living in some kind of urban setting, and from their reading of Bin Laden biographies, which underscored how devoted he was to his wives and children, they also suspected that it was possible that he was living with them, perhaps in a “sizable compound”.
Using intelligence gathered from captured Qaeda members, the CIA began to focus on the courier Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti, who turns out to have been transporting letters and computer thumb drives from Bin Laden. After the Kuwaiti received a call from a friend in the Persian Gulf who was being monitored by US intelligence, a CIA asset was able to locate him and track him to the Abbottabad site.
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On March 14, 2011, several possible courses of action were presented to Mr Obama, including a B-2 bombing run (which would incur civilian casualties and wipe out any proof of Bin Laden’s death), a drone strike and the SEAL raid, which the president eventually embraced.
The author quotes Mr Obama’s top military adviser at the time, Adm Mike Mullen, who strongly advocated the plan, as saying that it was the president who insisted on additional backup for the SEALs — a prescient call, given that one of the two primary Black Hawk helicopters crash landed, and another Chinook had to be called in to help extract the team.
Laden’s last words, according to Mr Bergen, were to his youngest wife, Amal: “Don’t turn on the light.” It was a pointless admonition, Mr Bergen adds, since “someone – it is still not clear exactly who – had taken the sensible precaution of turning off the electricity feeding the neighbourhood, thus giving the SEALs a large advantage on that moonless night.”
The Qaeda leader “just waited in the dark in silence for about 15 minutes, seemingly mentally paralysed as the Americans stormed his last refuge”; when he opened a metal gate blocking access to his room and poked his head out to see what the commotion was downstairs, he “made the fatal error of not locking this gate behind him” when he retreated, allowing the SEALs to run past it and into his bedroom.
Mr Bergen depicts Laden’s life there as a depressing retirement. The terrorist leader spent most of his time on the third floor with Amal in a low-ceilinged bedroom; the bathroom next door, where he regularly applied Just for Men dye to his hair and beard, had a “rudimentary toilet that was no more than a hole in the ground” and an untiled floor.
Bin Laden, who fancied himself something of a poet, once wrote grandly of himself, “Let my grave be an eagle’s belly, its resting place in the sky’s atmosphere amongst perched eagles.”
But instead of martyrdom in the mountains among the eagles, Mr Bergen says, “Bin Laden died surrounded by his wives in a squalid suburban compound awash in broken glass and scattered children’s toys and medicine bottles — testament to the ferocity of the SEALs’ assault on his final hiding place.”
MANHUNT
The Ten-Year Search for Bin Laden From 9/11 to Abbottabad
Peter L Bergen
Crown Publishers; 359 pages; $26
©2012 The New York Times News Service