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Authors: Tom Shroder
Tags: Current Events
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giving away his position. By design, he remained inaccessible for long periods.
But the Americans knew only the courier’s assumed name. Using information from detainees in U.S. custody, analysts and operatives spent years trying to learn the courier’s identity, concluding that he was a former protege of Mohammed, the Sept. 11 mastermind who was still detained at Guantanamo Bay.
The courier “had our constant attention,” according to an official involved in the hunt. Detainees “identified this man as one of the few al-Qaeda couriers trusted by bin Laden, indicated he might be living with or protecting bin Laden,” the official said.
Turning vague references to a courier into a verified name took upwards of four years, but that opened the door to discovering how the courier operated and the locations he frequented. Two years ago, U.S. officials narrowed down the region in Pakistan where the courier was working and then managed to intercept a phone call, one that seemed at first nothing more than an innocuous, catch-up phone conversation. Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti, the pseudonym for bin Laden’s courrier, was talking to an old friend.
Where have you been, inquired the friend. We’ve missed you. What’s going on in your life? And what are you doing now?
Kuwaiti’s response was vague but heavy with portent: “I’m back with the people I was with before.”
There was a pause, as if the friend knew that Kuwaiti’s words meant he had returned to bin Laden’s inner circle and was perhaps at the side of the al-Qaeda leader himself.
The friend replied, “May God facilitate.”
Using the cellphone number and a vast number of human and technical sources, by August of 2010 U.S. officials had tracked Kuwaiti to a very unusual compound in a very unexpected location: the Pakistani military garrison city of Abbottabad.
Bin Laden’s New Hideout
Abbottabad was far from being the almost lawless frontier where bin Laden was long thought to be hiding. It was a fairly cosmopolitan city, just two hours north of Islamabad by car. Home to the Pakistan Military Academy and two regimental compounds, with suburbs occupied by military families, the city was, by Pakistani standards, relatively welcoming to outsiders, including Pakistanis on vacation, military families being transferred to bases there and even U.S. soldiers who have at times been sent to Abbottabad to train Pakistani troops. It was not the sort of place where Islamic extremists tended to go.
The compound itself was even more surprising. It was a homely place with thick 12- to 18-foot security walls, multiple interior walls dividing the property and massive privacy walls blocking even a third-story balcony. Despite being valued at $1 million, the property had no Internet or phone service.
“When we saw the compound . . . we were shocked by what we saw,” an intelligence official told reporters, describing it as “an extraordinarily unique compound” built perhaps in 2005. “Everything we saw . . . was perfectly consistent with what our experts expected bin Laden’s hideout to look like.”
The main three-story building was impenetrable to eavesdropping technology deployed by the NSA.
Realizing the potential significance of the find, the CIA took advantage of the relatively open atmosphere in Abbottabad to send a small team of case officers into the city undetected to set up a safe house and recruit informants.
The spy team conducted extensive surveillance on the compound over a period of months, relying on their informants and other sources to help assemble a “pattern of life” portrait of the occupants of the compound.They worked with extraordinary caution because of the fear that the man in the compound and those sheltering him might vanish if spooked.
The work involved virtually every category of collection in the U.S. arsenal, ranging from satellite imagery to eavesdropping efforts aimed at recording voices inside the compound. The effort was so
But the Americans knew only the courier’s assumed name. Using information from detainees in U.S. custody, analysts and operatives spent years trying to learn the courier’s identity, concluding that he was a former protege of Mohammed, the Sept. 11 mastermind who was still detained at Guantanamo Bay.
The courier “had our constant attention,” according to an official involved in the hunt. Detainees “identified this man as one of the few al-Qaeda couriers trusted by bin Laden, indicated he might be living with or protecting bin Laden,” the official said.
Turning vague references to a courier into a verified name took upwards of four years, but that opened the door to discovering how the courier operated and the locations he frequented. Two years ago, U.S. officials narrowed down the region in Pakistan where the courier was working and then managed to intercept a phone call, one that seemed at first nothing more than an innocuous, catch-up phone conversation. Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti, the pseudonym for bin Laden’s courrier, was talking to an old friend.
Where have you been, inquired the friend. We’ve missed you. What’s going on in your life? And what are you doing now?
Kuwaiti’s response was vague but heavy with portent: “I’m back with the people I was with before.”
There was a pause, as if the friend knew that Kuwaiti’s words meant he had returned to bin Laden’s inner circle and was perhaps at the side of the al-Qaeda leader himself.
The friend replied, “May God facilitate.”
Using the cellphone number and a vast number of human and technical sources, by August of 2010 U.S. officials had tracked Kuwaiti to a very unusual compound in a very unexpected location: the Pakistani military garrison city of Abbottabad.
Bin Laden’s New Hideout
Abbottabad was far from being the almost lawless frontier where bin Laden was long thought to be hiding. It was a fairly cosmopolitan city, just two hours north of Islamabad by car. Home to the Pakistan Military Academy and two regimental compounds, with suburbs occupied by military families, the city was, by Pakistani standards, relatively welcoming to outsiders, including Pakistanis on vacation, military families being transferred to bases there and even U.S. soldiers who have at times been sent to Abbottabad to train Pakistani troops. It was not the sort of place where Islamic extremists tended to go.
The compound itself was even more surprising. It was a homely place with thick 12- to 18-foot security walls, multiple interior walls dividing the property and massive privacy walls blocking even a third-story balcony. Despite being valued at $1 million, the property had no Internet or phone service.
“When we saw the compound . . . we were shocked by what we saw,” an intelligence official told reporters, describing it as “an extraordinarily unique compound” built perhaps in 2005. “Everything we saw . . . was perfectly consistent with what our experts expected bin Laden’s hideout to look like.”
The main three-story building was impenetrable to eavesdropping technology deployed by the NSA.
Realizing the potential significance of the find, the CIA took advantage of the relatively open atmosphere in Abbottabad to send a small team of case officers into the city undetected to set up a safe house and recruit informants.
The spy team conducted extensive surveillance on the compound over a period of months, relying on their informants and other sources to help assemble a “pattern of life” portrait of the occupants of the compound.They worked with extraordinary caution because of the fear that the man in the compound and those sheltering him might vanish if spooked.
The work involved virtually every category of collection in the U.S. arsenal, ranging from satellite imagery to eavesdropping efforts aimed at recording voices inside the compound. The effort was so
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