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Authors: Tom Shroder
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attacks.
“If he’s a big fish, it’s because it’s a much smaller pond,” Bruce Hoffman, a terrorism expert at the Rand Corp., a nonprofit research organization, said at the time. “He has advanced through the ranks because of attrition in al-Qaeda. It shows how this movement has a knack for replacing serious operatives — a deep bench.”
A deep bench on a team that still had its captain. The CIA continued its efforts to get inside the thinking that had kept bin Laden safe for so long. They scoured sources from academic tomes to interrogation transcripts. Even popular books such as “Growing Up Bin Laden,” by the terrorist’s wife Najwa and son Omar, were mined for insights. In the book, Omar said his father kept safe houses in Kabul because he believed the Americans would never bomb a big city for fear of killing innocent civilians. That got analysts thinking about urban hideouts.
But the slow, painstaking work of analyzing data met with impatience at the White House, where “a little fatigue had set in,” said a former Bush White House official. “We weren’t about to find him anytime soon. Publicly, we maintained a sense of urgency: ‘We’re looking as hard as we can.’ But the energy had gone out of the hunt. It had settled to no more than a second-tier issue. After all, those were the worst days of Iraq.”
The troubled war in Iraq, mounting concern about Iran’s nuclear program, and the increasingly unstable situation in North Korea stole attention from the bin Laden hunt, said White House and CIA officials.
The search for bin Laden, once the clarion cry of a nation bent on striking back, morphed into a topic Bush and his top staffers sought to avoid.
Tracking a Courier
Through the next few years, leaders of the hunt hoped that the drones surveying the tribal areas would generate new leads, “but it was just a hope,” said Juan Zarate, Bush’s deputy national security adviser for counterterrorism in the middle years of the search. “It was a very dark period.”
In the Bush White House, the lack of credible leads led to public statements designed to play down the individual and focus attention on the broader threat.
The idea was “not to overly aggrandize the man even as we tried to find him,” Zarate said. Outside the HV Unit, the landscape looked grim: “I can’t remember any single piece of intelligence that got us especially excited,” Zarate said.
Even as the hunt became a political liability, the road to bin Laden’s house in Abbottabad was being built, not “brick by brick,” said former CIA director Michael V. Hayden, but “pebble by pebble.”
In retrospect, momentum against al-Qaeda began to build because of two key factors: a major escalation in the campaign of attacks by armed Predator and Reaper drones, and an expanding network of informants that the CIA had managed to assemble from stations inside Afghanistan along the Pakistan border.
Indeed, officials said the two components became mutually reinforcing. Drone strikes not only killed militants associated with al-Qaeda but also sent ripples of anxiety through the network and forced operatives to take substantial risks as they searched for cover.
At the same time, the toll of the drone strikes eroded morale among militant networks, contributing to the agency’s effort to assemble a network of informants independent of Pakistan’s intelligence services. As the network grew, it fed new intelligence into an elaborate operation used to identify new drone targets.
But in the end, success in the hunt for bin Laden hinged almost entirely on identifying a single man: a courier operating out of Pakistan who had been trusted by bin Laden for years during which he had remained in control of al-Qaeda’s central command, even as his whereabouts were carefully concealed. Through messages carried by courier, bin Laden weighed in on major management decisions, although less frequently than he had before 2001 for fear of
“If he’s a big fish, it’s because it’s a much smaller pond,” Bruce Hoffman, a terrorism expert at the Rand Corp., a nonprofit research organization, said at the time. “He has advanced through the ranks because of attrition in al-Qaeda. It shows how this movement has a knack for replacing serious operatives — a deep bench.”
A deep bench on a team that still had its captain. The CIA continued its efforts to get inside the thinking that had kept bin Laden safe for so long. They scoured sources from academic tomes to interrogation transcripts. Even popular books such as “Growing Up Bin Laden,” by the terrorist’s wife Najwa and son Omar, were mined for insights. In the book, Omar said his father kept safe houses in Kabul because he believed the Americans would never bomb a big city for fear of killing innocent civilians. That got analysts thinking about urban hideouts.
But the slow, painstaking work of analyzing data met with impatience at the White House, where “a little fatigue had set in,” said a former Bush White House official. “We weren’t about to find him anytime soon. Publicly, we maintained a sense of urgency: ‘We’re looking as hard as we can.’ But the energy had gone out of the hunt. It had settled to no more than a second-tier issue. After all, those were the worst days of Iraq.”
The troubled war in Iraq, mounting concern about Iran’s nuclear program, and the increasingly unstable situation in North Korea stole attention from the bin Laden hunt, said White House and CIA officials.
The search for bin Laden, once the clarion cry of a nation bent on striking back, morphed into a topic Bush and his top staffers sought to avoid.
Tracking a Courier
Through the next few years, leaders of the hunt hoped that the drones surveying the tribal areas would generate new leads, “but it was just a hope,” said Juan Zarate, Bush’s deputy national security adviser for counterterrorism in the middle years of the search. “It was a very dark period.”
In the Bush White House, the lack of credible leads led to public statements designed to play down the individual and focus attention on the broader threat.
The idea was “not to overly aggrandize the man even as we tried to find him,” Zarate said. Outside the HV Unit, the landscape looked grim: “I can’t remember any single piece of intelligence that got us especially excited,” Zarate said.
Even as the hunt became a political liability, the road to bin Laden’s house in Abbottabad was being built, not “brick by brick,” said former CIA director Michael V. Hayden, but “pebble by pebble.”
In retrospect, momentum against al-Qaeda began to build because of two key factors: a major escalation in the campaign of attacks by armed Predator and Reaper drones, and an expanding network of informants that the CIA had managed to assemble from stations inside Afghanistan along the Pakistan border.
Indeed, officials said the two components became mutually reinforcing. Drone strikes not only killed militants associated with al-Qaeda but also sent ripples of anxiety through the network and forced operatives to take substantial risks as they searched for cover.
At the same time, the toll of the drone strikes eroded morale among militant networks, contributing to the agency’s effort to assemble a network of informants independent of Pakistan’s intelligence services. As the network grew, it fed new intelligence into an elaborate operation used to identify new drone targets.
But in the end, success in the hunt for bin Laden hinged almost entirely on identifying a single man: a courier operating out of Pakistan who had been trusted by bin Laden for years during which he had remained in control of al-Qaeda’s central command, even as his whereabouts were carefully concealed. Through messages carried by courier, bin Laden weighed in on major management decisions, although less frequently than he had before 2001 for fear of
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