Manhunt (eBook)

CASE STUDY 1:

The Greatest Manhunt in History – Finding Bin Laden:

Part 1

It was the greatest terrorist crime in history and its mastermind – Osama bin Laden – became the most wanted and the most hunted man in history.

On 11 September 2001, Islamic terrorists, some of them trained as commercial airline pilots, hijacked four US airliners on routine flights. Two were crashed into the twin towers of the World Trade Center, one into the Pentagon and one crashed in a field. The brave men and women of the New York rescue services and police went into the twin towers to attempt to control the blaze and rescue survivors. Due to the calamitous impact of the aircraft upon the structure of the buildings, however, 343 firefighters and 23 policemen themselves died as they collapsed.

It did not take long for the US Government to identify the perpetrators of this attack, and Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda were equally quick to claim credit. The United Nations Security Council passed Resolution 1368 (2001) in which it called on ‘all States to work together urgently to bring to justice the perpetrators, organizers and sponsors of these terrorist attacks’ and also stressed ‘that those responsible for aiding, supporting or harbouring the perpetrators, organizers and sponsors of these acts will be held accountable’.

The die was cast. Now it was just a question of finding Osama bin Laden and his allies.

Terrorist Lair

Al-Qaeda, which translated from Arabic means ‘The Base’, was founded by Osama bin Laden in the late 1980s. The roots of the terrorist organization lay in the insurgency against Soviet forces that had occupied Afghanistan between 1979 and 1989. The Taliban regime took control in Afghanistan from about 1996 and imposed their ultra-fundamentalist policies, which included the exclusion of women from public life. The fact that they harboured al-Qaeda and refused to extradite Osama bin Laden after 9/11 meant that their days were now numbered.

These are the routes of the four ill-fated airliners that were hijacked on 11 September 2001.

‘Enduring Freedom’

Although a manhunt was now on to get Osama bin Laden, it was part of a wider ‘War on Terror’ that involved initially an attack on the Taliban regime in Afghanistan.The United States had learned something from history and, instead of rolling in large conventional forces, it initially conducted a Special Forces insertion spearheaded by 5th Special Forces Group (Airborne), part of Joint Special Operations Task Force North, or Task Force Dagger. They were supported by 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment. At about the same time, elements of the British SAS were also deployed into Afghanistan with the clear aim of finding Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda.

Islamic terrorists broke into the aircraft cockpits and took control of the planes.

To search for one individual in an area as large and as inaccessible as the mountains and passes of Afghanistan was never going to be easy. To make matters more complicated, a complex network of tunnels had been created, partly funded by the US CIA during the Soviet occupation, to allow anyone escape from one cave to another.

Tora Bora

Despite the immense geographical difficulties, Allied forces managed to narrow down the likely hiding place of Osama bin Laden to a region known as Tora Bora. Tora Bora is a network of caves located in eastern Afghanistan, near to the Khyber Pass. Intelligence suggested that the network of caves here constituted a veritable underground city, which included living quarters with electric power as well as a vast cache of ammunition and missiles.

Tora Bora

Tora Bora was a cave complex where it was thought Osama bin Laden was hiding. He is believed to have escaped while Allied forces attacked the complex.

US and British Special Forces were both in the area, providing reconnaissance and guiding in air strikes, but there was also a ground combat element that included Afghan militia. This was a controversial part of the operation. As the al-Qaeda fighters retreated, and were clearly on the back foot, they negotiated a ceasefire with a local Afghan militia commander. Many believe that it was at this point that Osama bin Laden and his close companions managed to slip away from Tora Bora and towards the Pakistan border.

After Tora Bora, the manhunt continued. The intelligence operation was partly based on information gathered from the interrogation of al-Qaeda captives and on intercepts, such as a letter in late 2005 from a senior member of al-Qaeda to a commander of a camp for terrorist recruits, which moved bin Laden’s possible locations from Waziristan to the Chitral District in northern Pakistan. What these regions had in common was that they were mountainous and controlled by unruly local warlords. Patrols that were sent there not surprisingly returned empty-handed.

Interrogation

One of the most controversial aspects of this information-gathering was interrogation, or rather the methods employed in the process of interrogation.

One of the al-Qaeda detainees said to have given up essential information under duress was Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. While he did not give full details of other al-Qaeda members, he did provide a list of nicknames, one of which was ‘al-Kuwaiti’. In a manhunt a nickname is just a nickname until it pops up again in another context. When Hassan Ghul, another high-ranking member of al-Qaeda, was arrested in Iraq, he confirmed that ‘al-Kuwaiti’ was not only important but also closely associated with none other than al-Qaeda’s director of operations, Abu Faraj al-Libi.

Ramzi bin al-Shibh

The post-9/11 manhunt was of course not focused exclusively on Osama bin Laden, although he remained the big catch. The US National Security Agency (NSA), based at Fort Meade in Maryland, was given information that Ramzi bin al-Shibh was in the area, possibly along with Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. Ramzi bin al-Shibh had been central to the planning of the 9/11 attacks and acted as an intermediary.

Once the NSA received the tip-off, it concentrated massive electronic resources on the area, including a network of geosynchronous satellites. The fact that bin al-Shibh was unwise enough to use a satphone made things easier for the NSA. Not only did they have the ability to listen in to the calls, their SIGINT satellites were designed to move in orbit in such a way as to make it possible to pinpoint the geographical location of the satphone. The Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) Agency was alerted and on 11 September 2002, with the aid of the CIA’s Special Activities Division, they intercepted bin al-Shibh and captured him after a gun battle.

The ability to intercept cell-phone calls also led US agents to Abu Faraj al-Libi. He was arrested by Pakistani Special Forces and the CIA Special Activities Division. Al-Libi was riding on the back of a motorcycle near Mardan in Pakistan when he was intercepted on 2 May 2005. When al-Libi was interrogated, he gave away information that he had been promoted after the capture of Khalid and that he had received the message from a courier. As he was a very senior member of al-Qaeda, intelligence operatives construed that the courier must have brought a message straight from Osama bin Laden himself. In which case, identifying and following this courier would lead them to bin Laden.

Identifying the courier required a great deal of cross-referencing of intelligence material as well as new intelligence research, including material gathered from interrogations at the detention centre at Guantanamo Bay. By 2007, however, US intelligence had zeroed in on one man – Sheikh abu Ahmed, one of Osama bin Laden’s most trusted lieutenants. Abu Ahmed has been close to Khalid and had been involved in the 9/11 attacks. A phone tap of another al-Qaeda operative provided a vital clue that they were...