The tactics took over the strategy.
—Noman Benotman, one of the leaders of the Afghan Arabs, when asked to explain 9/11
Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.
—Mike Tyson
On the morning of Tuesday, September 11, 2001, the oppressive heat of the Washington summer was finally beginning to dissipate; the sky was a cloudless, azure blue and the air crystalline clear. Gina Bennett and her friend Cindy Storer, both of whom had been on the bin Laden “account” for as long as anyone at the CIA, were carpooling to the agency’s headquarters in McLean, Virginia, which is tucked away behind a screen of trees in a leafy neighborhood of well-appointed mansions.
The whole ride Bennett and Storer were discussing the assassination two days earlier of Ahmad Shah Massoud, the leader of the anti-Taliban resistance in Afghanistan. They debated whether this was a gift from bin Laden to the Taliban’s leader, Mullah Omar, and they kept probing the question: Why go to the trouble of assassinating Massoud, if not for some larger reason?
Bennett, who was three months pregnant with her fourth child and was occasionally vomiting due to morning sickness, was at her desk at the CIA’s Counterterrorist Center when she heard a plane had flown into the World Trade Center. She and her colleagues turned on a television and watched the coverage. They saw the second plane fly into the other of the towers at 9:03 a.m. The attacks from bin Laden they had warned about were upon them.
CIA managers told everyone to evacuate the agency’s headquarters building, but those in the Counterterrorist Center were told they had to remain at their desks; after all, they knew more about al-Qaeda than anyone else in the government. The Counterterrorist Center team split up, with some officials trying to find the passenger manifests of the hijacked planes. Bennett and her team members tried to work out what the next target of the terrorists could be. They were keenly aware that a cell of militants led by Khalid Sheikh Mohammed had developed a plan six years earlier to fly a plane into CIA headquarters. And there was a hijacked passenger jet hurtling toward Washington, DC.
Michael Scheuer, who had pushed repeatedly to capture or kill bin Laden, was working in a vault at the CIA. Scheuer watched the images of the second plane plowing into the Trade Center. He volunteered to remain in the headquarters building.
As Air Force One flew over the United States it went through zones where the passengers could sometimes view the images of 9/11 on the TV monitors on the plane. The most powerless President Bush ever felt was when he saw the images of people jumping to their deaths from the windows of the Trade Center. There was nothing he could do about it.
Officials at the Counterterrorist Center soon proved that it was indeed al-Qaeda. Within a couple of hours of the attacks, an analyst obtained the passenger manifest for the plane that crashed into the Pentagon at 9:37 a.m. and found that two members of al-Qaeda, Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Mihdhar, were on the flight. These were the two terrorists the CIA had been tracking since they had attended a meeting of militants in Malaysia in early 2000. They had then both traveled to the U.S. The news was conveyed to CIA director George Tenet and other senior CIA officials who had evacuated from the agency’s headquarters building and were now positioned some distance away at the CIA’s printing plant.
John Rizzo, a top CIA lawyer who was still in the headquarters, began scribbling out the language for what he knew would surely come next. The CIA would need a legal finding that updated the ambiguous Memorandum of Notification by the Clinton administration about capturing or killing bin Laden. This new memorandum authorized lethal action against members of al-Qaeda and affiliated groups. President Bush soon signed a new highly classified Memorandum of Notification against bin Laden and his followers. This authorization effectively turned the CIA into a paramilitary organization focused on capturing or killing members of al-Qaeda.
FBI special agent Daniel Coleman had spent the past half-decade of his life working intensively to prevent al-Qaeda from killing Americans. On the morning of 9/11 Coleman was at the FBI’s office a block away from the World Trade Center. Bin Laden had succeeded in pulling off an attack that was far worse than even Coleman had imagined. As he was rushing to the Trade Center, Coleman saw a cyclone of dense debris and paper hurtling up the street toward him, accompanied by the loudest noise he had ever heard. This was the South Tower of the Trade Center collapsing at 9:59 a.m. The debris cloud smothered Coleman in ash.
Later that day Coleman was given an important piece of evidence. A Saudi passport had fallen to the street shortly after the first hijacked plane had crashed into the Trade Center, and it was turned in to the FBI. The passport was partially burned and it smelled strongly of kerosene. It belonged to Satam al-Suqami, one of the hijackers.
Coleman’s former boss, John O’Neill, who ran the FBI’s counterterrorism office in New York City and who played a key role in investigating bin Laden, had recently retired and on August 23, 2001, had taken a new job as head of security at the World Trade Center. O’Neill was killed on the morning of 9/11 at the Trade Center by bin Laden’s men, in an attack that he had spent years trying to head off. His body was found in the debris of the collapsed South Tower.
Mary Galligan, who was the FBI’s on-scene commander in Yemen during the investigation of the USS Cole bombing, was in Oklahoma City on the morning of September 11. Galligan was there to answer lingering questions about the FBI’s handling of the bombing of the Oklahoma City Federal Building in 1995, in which 168 people had been killed by far-right domestic terrorists. It had been thus far the most lethal terrorist attack in American history.
Galligan was told to get back to New York City immediately to help run the investigation into the attacks. She hitched a ride on an Air Force C-130 that was transporting pallets of blood to New York for any victims trapped under the wreckage of the Trade Center buildings. Galligan arrived in New York as night fell. On the drive into Manhattan she saw signs on the road announcing, “New York City Is Closed.” Galligan had grown up on Long Island and had gone to Fordham University in the Bronx. New York City never closed.
The FBI’s main office in Manhattan, just a block from the Trade Center, was unusable, so the bureau had improvised a command center at an FBI garage on 26th Street near the West Side Highway with long wooden tables and a tangled forest of phone lines hanging from the ceiling.
Galligan was put in charge of the investigation of the 9/11 attacks, which was known in FBI parlance as the PENTTBOM case. PENTTBOM would grow into the largest criminal investigation in history. John O’Neill had mentored and promoted Galligan at a time when the FBI was a boys’ club. Now Galligan was leading the investigation of the most lethal mass murder in American history, among the victims of which was her former boss. For many years Galligan would carry the mass card from O’Neill’s funeral service together with her FBI credentials.
The PENTTBOM case generated half a million leads. Many were not helpful, but one that proved to be key was a tip that came in immediately after 9/11 that a suspicious package was found at JFK Airport addressed to someone in the United Arab Emirates. Inside the package Galligan discovered that $10,000 that had been sent by one of the hijackers to Mustafa al-Hawsawi, al-Qaeda’s paymaster for the 9/11 plot.
Galligan’s team also immediately focused on a phone number in Yemen, which they knew from previous investigations had been used by some of the Cole bombers to talk to al-Qaeda’s leaders in Afghanistan. This phone number provided a road map to several of the 9/11 conspirators, including the two hijackers who were on the jet that crashed into the Pentagon whom the CIA had been tracking for more than a year.
The first meeting at the White House to discuss how to respond to the 9/11 attacks started at 9:30 p.m. on September 11 in the Presidential Emergency Operations Center, a cramped, unadorned space in the White House bunker. Cabinet members were guided by Secret Service officers past thick blast doors and down a long underground tunnel under the East Wing, where the bunker was located. The meeting was short and focused on the damage.
The National Security Council met again on the morning of September 12. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and his top deputy Paul Wolfowitz immediately pushed to go to war with Saddam Hussein, having already raised the issue the night before. Bush said, “Wait a minute, I didn’t hear a word said about him being responsible for the attack.”
Richard Clarke realized with almost a sharp physical pain that Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld were going to try and take advantage of the 9/11 catastrophe to push for the overthrow of Saddam.
That same morning, Jamal Ismail, a correspondent for Abu Dhabi television based in Pakistan who had known bin Laden since the era of the anti-Soviet jihad, received a messenger from al-Qaeda who told him, “Jamal, I came last night in a hurry from Afghanistan.”
The messenger read out a statement from bin Laden: “We believe what happened in Washington and elsewhere against Americans was punishment from Almighty Allah. They were good people who have done this. We agree with them.” Ismail read the statement over the phone to Abu Dhabi television. Ismail knew that his old acquaintance bin Laden never praised non-Muslims, and he concluded that bin Laden knew the men who had carried out the attacks.
Bin Laden was surprised by how lethal the 9/11 attacks were. He and other al-Qaeda leaders did not calculate that both towers of the Trade Center would collapse. Bin Laden, who had worked for years in his family’s construction business, was the most optimistic among them that the attacks would result in mass casualties, but he thought that the twin towers would collapse only above the points of impact of the two passenger jets.
Two days after the 9/11 attacks, Cofer Black, who ran the CIA’s Counterterrorist Center, called together his team of analysts and operators. Black was a big guy who had spent much of his career executing high-risk operations in Africa. When he was the CIA station chief in Khartoum during the mid-1990s Black had helped to capture Carlos the Jackal, then the world’s most notorious terrorist. Black had a penchant for the dramatic and gave a speech to Counterterrorist Center officials: “It really pains me to tell you this, but by the time this is all over, we will not all be here. If you remember one thing from this, I’d like it to be, we’re the good guys and we’re going to win.” Black believed that dozens of CIA officers could die in the oncoming war. Black’s speech was greeted with silence by the staff, some of whom wept.
CIA officers understood that the mind-set of the agency was going to have to change dramatically, from meeting sources in smoky coffee shops in Vienna to sitting with the leaders of tribal militias on hilltops in Afghanistan.
On Saturday, September 15, Bush’s war cabinet met at the presidential retreat at Camp David in Maryland. Rumsfeld wanted to attack more countries other than Afghanistan. If this was to be a truly “global war on terror,” why not also attack state sponsors of terrorism such as Iraq, but also Libya and Sudan? Over the next few days Rumsfeld even suggested striking the enemy in some unexpected place “like South America or Southeast Asia.”
Rumsfeld’s deputy Paul Wolfowitz said there was no way that bin Laden could have pulled off the 9/11 attacks without the support of a state such as Iraq. According to Wolfowitz, Saddam Hussein was at the center of global terrorism and was “the head of the snake.” This was a striking locution since it was exactly what bin Laden had started calling the United States after President Bush’s father, George H. W. Bush, had deployed U.S. troops to Somalia nine year earlier.
Cofer Black pushed back on Wolfowitz, saying that the 9/11 attacks were carried out by bin Laden’s men and Saddam had nothing to do with them. Wolfowitz countered that bin Laden had met with Iraqi officials when he was living in Sudan. Black pointed out that he was the CIA station chief in Khartoum at the time and while Iraqi officials had indeed met with bin Laden in Sudan in 1995 they wanted al-Qaeda’s leader to subordinate himself to Saddam. Bin Laden had no plans to be controlled by a secular dictator like Saddam.
Bush settled the matter saying, “We’ll leave Iraq for later,” and the subject was dropped, for a time.
The chairman of the Joint Chiefs, General Hugh Shelton, presented two military options to attack bin Laden: cruise missile strikes against targets in Afghanistan, or cruise missile attacks supplemented by manned bombers. There wasn’t much enthusiasm for either of these plans, since they seemed like a rehash of what the Clinton administration had already tried against al-Qaeda, to little effect.
Bush said, “We’re not going to just pound sand.”
Bin Laden and his top deputy, Abu Hafs, had concluded that the likely American response would indeed be another round of cruise missile strikes and perhaps some manned bomber raids. They had conveyed this analysis to Ahmad Zaidan of Al Jazeera, whom bin Laden had known since the late 1980s when Zaidan was covering the anticommunist jihad. Eleven months before the 9/11 attacks, at an al-Qaeda safe house in Kabul, Abu Hafs told Zaidan that he and bin Laden thought that any future U.S. military action against their group would be similar to the air war that the Americans had fought against Serbian forces in Kosovo two years earlier, during which there were no American boots on the ground and no U.S. casualties.
Abu Hafs, a former Egyptian policeman who also had served in the Egyptian military, struck Zaidan as very bright. At six-foot-two, Abu Hafs was almost as tall as bin Laden. Abu Hafs’s white hair and full beard was dyed with henna, and he was wearing Taliban-style clothing with a turban. Abu Hafs told Zaidan that any manned bomber raids by the United States against targets in Afghanistan would likely come from bases in neighboring Central Asian countries such as Uzbekistan or Tajikistan, and possibly Pakistan.
A common mistake is to start believing your own bluster and by then both bin Laden and Abu Hafs—who seven years earlier had trained Somalis to fight American soldiers in Somalia—firmly believed that the United States really was a paper tiger. As a result bin Laden gravely underestimated the likely American response to the 9/11 attacks, which was based on his misreading of the U.S. pull-out of troops from Yemen in 1992 and, a year later, the withdrawal of American soldiers from Somalia. The United States had no real interests in either country, so pulling its troops did not represent the strategic setbacks that bin Laden interpreted them to be. Bin Laden’s misjudgment of the U.S. response was amplified by the ineffectual U.S. cruise missile attacks aimed at him and his followers in 1998 and the complete lack of American response to the USS Cole bombing two years later.
At Camp David, CIA director Tenet handed out thick packets of briefing materials, which outlined a far more impressive war plan than what the Pentagon had put forward. The plan involved sending in a small group of CIA officers, some of whom knew Afghanistan, and have them link up with the leaders of the twenty-thousand-man anti-Taliban militia known as the Northern Alliance. They would then advance on the Taliban and al-Qaeda while calling in massive U.S. air strikes. Tenet also proposed using armed drones to hunt for bin Laden.
On Monday, September 17, at the White House, Bush told his war cabinet, “I want the CIA to get in there first. I buy the idea of you going in first and preparing a way for the military. And the military: I want you to develop a plan to dovetail with what CIA will be doing once it gets in, and develop a plan for more robust military action down the road.”
At a briefing for reporters the same day, Bush said of bin Laden, “There’s an old saying out West. As I recall, that said ‘Wanted: Dead or Alive.’ ”
Three days later, before a joint session of Congress, Bush delivered an ultimatum to the Taliban: “Deliver to United States authorities all the leaders of al-Qaeda who hide in your land.… These demands are not open to negotiation or discussion. The Taliban must act and act immediately. They will hand over the terrorists, or they will share in their fate.”
As Bush was delivering this speech to Congress, Mullah Omar convened seven hundred clerics in Kabul to rule on bin Laden’s fate. Mullah Omar did not attend in person, but sent a message that if the United States had evidence of bin Laden’s guilt in the 9/11 attacks, it should be handed over to the Taliban and his future would then be decided by a group of Afghan religious scholars. After meetings that lasted for two days, the clerics called on bin Laden to leave Afghanistan voluntarily so that war could be avoided. Bin Laden simply ignored this request.
On September 21, 2001, the Voice of America radio network interviewed Mullah Omar, who said he had no intention of giving up bin Laden: “If we did, it means we are not Muslims; that Islam is finished. If we were afraid of attack, we could have surrendered him the last time we were threatened and attacked.”
Similarly, Mullah Omar told leading Pakistani journalist Rahimullah Yusufzai, “I don’t want to go down in history as someone who betrayed his guest. I am willing to give my life, my regime; since we have given him refuge, I cannot throw him out now.”
Like many devout Muslims, Mullah Omar was a great believer in the significance of dreams. The Commander of the Faithful asked Yusufzai, “Have you been to the White House?”
Yusufzai told him, “Yes, I was there once.”
Mullah Omar said, “My brother had a dream that there was a White House in flames. I don’t know how to interpret this.”
Like bin Laden, Mullah Omar naively believed that the threats coming from Washington were bluster.
Mullah Omar was also discreetly hedging his bets. He authorized his number two, Mullah Osmani, who had long despised bin Laden, to go and meet with Robert Grenier, the CIA station chief in Pakistan. Grenier hoped to use this opportunity to open communication with the Taliban leadership about what to do with bin Laden.
Four days after the 9/11 attacks, Mullah Osmani and Grenier met at a quiet hotel in Quetta, the capital of the remote, vast Pakistani desert province of Balochistan, over the border from the Taliban’s Kandahar stronghold in southern Afghanistan. Grenier was greatly encouraged when Mullah Osmani said, “Bin Laden has created a great problem for us. I’m speaking now for the Taliban leadership. We don’t particularly like this man. We’re concerned about the reaction of you Americans. I will go back and I will discuss this with Mullah Omar.”
Meanwhile, bin Laden was publicly issuing blanket denials of any role in the 9/11 attacks. In late September, he told a Pakistani newspaper, “As a Muslim, I try my best to avoid telling a lie. I had no knowledge of these attacks.” Bin Laden even absurdly suggested that the attacks might have been carried out by “American Jews who are annoyed with President Bush ever since the elections in Florida and want to take revenge on him.”
Grenier met with Mullah Osmani again in Quetta on October 2 and pitched him on the idea of fomenting a coup against Mullah Omar, with the quid pro quo that bin Laden be handed over after the removal of the Taliban leader.
Mullah Osmani mulled over the idea. The cleric suddenly leapt out of his chair and wrapped his arms around Grenier exclaiming, “I’ll do it!”
Mullah Osmani was elated and sat down for a hearty meal of mutton and rice with Grenier. In the end, though, the mullah didn’t go through with the coup. Grenier thought that perhaps Mullah Osmani just could not conceive of himself replacing the Commander of the Faithful.
While Grenier was trying to fragment the Taliban leadership about what to do about bin Laden, his predecessor as CIA station chief in Pakistan, Gary Schroen, prepared to lead the first CIA team into Afghanistan to foment an anti-Taliban uprising. On 9/11 Schroen, aged fifty-nine, was going through the months-long process of retiring from the agency, having hit mandatory retirement age. Two days after the 9/11 attacks, Cofer Black called Schroen and asked him to be “first in” into Afghanistan.
On September 19, Schroen met with Black to receive his orders. Black told him that he wanted bin Laden and his top deputies killed, saying, “I want to see photos of their heads on pikes. I want bin Laden’s head shipped back in a box filled with dry ice. I want to be able to show bin Laden’s head to the president.”
It was the first time in his three-and-a-half-decade career at the CIA that Schroen had been ordered to kill anyone. Schroen replied, “I don’t know where we’ll find dry ice in Afghanistan, but I think we can certainly manufacture pikes in the field.”
A week later, on September 26, Schroen landed in the Panjshir Valley, in northeastern Afghanistan, at the headquarters of the Northern Alliance, leading a seven-man team code-named JAWBREAKER. They were the first Americans on the ground hunting for bin Laden and his men.
For the second time in two decades the CIA was leading the charge to overthrow a regime in Afghanistan.
At the White House there were intense concerns about the possibility of a “second wave” of attacks. This was amplified by the news on October 5 that a photo editor at the National Enquirer in Florida had died after opening an anthrax-laced letter.
Similar anthrax-laced letters eventually killed five people. They all contained the message “DEATH TO AMERICA. DEATH TO ISRAEL. ALLAH IS GREAT.” The anthrax attacks had an enormous impact on President Bush’s mind-set, as they seemed to be part of a new wave of assaults by terrorists armed with weapons of mass destruction. (The FBI would eventually identify the man behind the anthrax attacks as an American government scientist.)
That same month, on October 23, Bush told his war cabinet that bin Laden “may have a nuclear device.” Vice President Dick Cheney said, “We have to intensify the hunt for bin Laden.”
Two weeks later bin Laden added to the concerns at the White House when he gave an interview claiming he had access to nuclear weapons. On November 8, the Pakistani journalist Hamid Mir interviewed bin Laden at a house in Kabul. Bin Laden was in a jovial mood and he took Mir to task for a recent appearance he had made on CNN, telling him, “I was watching you on the Larry King show a few days ago and you told Larry King that when Osama bin Laden talks on religion he is not convincing, but when he talks on politics he is very much convincing, so today I will convince you on some religious issues.”
Mir said, “You watch the Larry King show?”
Bin Laden replied, “Yes, I am fighting a big war and I have to monitor the activities of my enemy through these TV channels.”
Then Mir asked bin Laden to comment on reports he had tried to acquire nuclear and chemical weapons. Al-Qaeda’s leader claimed, “We have the weapons as deterrent.”
Mir asked, “Where did you get these weapons from?” Bin Laden dismissed the question, responding, “Go to the next question.”
After the interview was finished, Mir followed up with Ayman al-Zawahiri, who was sitting with bin Laden. Mir said, “It is difficult to believe that you have nuclear weapons.”
Zawahiri said, “It is not difficult. If you have thirty million dollars, you can have these kind of nuclear suitcase bombs from the black market of Central Asia.”
In fact, the black market in “nuclear suitcase bombs” was a myth, and while al-Qaeda had acquired radioactive materials, they were not suitable for making any kind of nuclear weapon.
Nine months earlier, Abu Hafs had made similar claims to the Al Jazeera reporter Ahmad Zaidan, telling him that the region surrounding Afghanistan was rife with countries that possessed nuclear weapons or fissile materials, such as the former Soviet Central Asian republics, as well as Iran and Pakistan. Abu Hafs said, “Therefore it is not too difficult for us to acquire these types of weapons.”
Abu Hafs knew that his men were trying to acquire chemical weapons from Uzbekistan and to recruit Uzbek military veterans who were “experienced in this sphere.” Al-Qaeda’s chemical weapons researchers were ordered to “procure necessary face masks, protective clothing and protective footwear” six months before the 9/11 attacks.
Abu Hafs also knew that bin Laden had recently met with Dr. Sultan Bashiruddin Mahmood, a fanatically pro-Taliban nuclear scientist who had helped develop the Pakistani facility that produced enriched fuel for nuclear weapons. In 1999 Pakistani authorities had pushed Mahmood out of the nuclear program because of his extreme religiosity. So, when Mahmood met with bin Laden in Kandahar at a dinner in late 2000, he informed the al-Qaeda leader about what it would take to build a nuclear bomb.
One of bin Laden’s men even showed the Pakistani nuclear scientist “fissile material” that al-Qaeda had acquired and hoped to use in a nuclear device. Mahmood quickly recognized that this was only some formerly radioactive waste from a medical facility.
Several weeks after the 9/11 attacks, veteran CIA officer Charles “Sam” Faddis was dispatched from Washington to Islamabad to investigate what exactly had taken place between bin Laden and Mahmood. After an intensive investigation of Mahmood, Faddis concluded that bin Laden had no atomic bomb under construction and Mahmood didn’t have the necessary expertise to build such a weapon. Faddis was, however, concerned that someone with Mahmood’s connections could have assembled a team of militant Islamist scientists to work with bin Laden.
Privately, bin Laden was more ambivalent about the use of chemical, biological, or nuclear weapons than others in his inner circle. His military commander, Abu Hafs the Egyptian, was a hawk about the issue and sought to press forward with al-Qaeda’s amateur research into these weapons. Zawahiri agreed with Abu Hafs. While al-Qaeda’s leader believed a nuclear weapon should be used only as a last resort if his group was facing total annihilation, Zawahiri didn’t have qualms about the use of such weapons. In any event, the entire discussion was fruitless, as al-Qaeda was never able to acquire fissile material or viable biological weapons. In short, al-Qaeda’s research into weapons of mass destruction was limited to crude experiments involving the use of chemical weapons on dogs.
As it became clear that the United States was likely to respond militarily to the 9/11 attacks, bin Laden wrote a letter to Mullah Omar on October 3 to stiffen his resolve, telling the Commander of the Faithful that the United States was on the verge of imploding. Bin Laden claimed that “a recent survey showed that seven out of every ten Americans suffered psychological problems following the attacks on New York and Washington.” Al-Qaeda’s leader also asserted that any “U.S. campaign against Afghanistan will cause great long-term economic burdens” to the United States, which would follow the Soviet Union’s pattern of “withdrawal from Afghanistan, disintegration, and contraction.”
Faraj Ismail, a journalist working for a Saudi magazine, interviewed Mullah Omar on October 7 in Kandahar. Mullah Omar said he didn’t believe that bin Laden was behind the 9/11 attacks, saying, “I have control over Afghanistan. I’m sure he didn’t do it. I believe the perpetrators were from inside the United States itself.”
Asked who these perpetrators might be, Mullah Omar spouted an absurd conspiracy theory, asserting that “the investigation has not considered the absence on the day of the incident of four thousand Jews who worked at the World Trade Center.”
That same day bin Laden made a surprise appearance on TV networks around the globe; the first time he was seen since the 9/11 attacks. Dressed in a camouflage jacket with a gun propped at his side, bin Laden said that the attacks were revenge for the long-standing Western humiliation of the Muslim world. “There is America, full of fear from its north to its south, from its west to its east. Thank God for that. What America tastes now, is something insignificant compared to what we have tasted for scores of years. Our nation [the Islamic world] has tasted this humiliation and this degradation for more than eighty years.”
To preserve his protection by the Taliban, bin Laden took some public ownership of the 9/11 attacks, while still avoiding taking any direct responsibility for them. He emphasized the “humiliation” that Muslims had suffered since the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire after World War I, which was followed by the British and the French carving up much of the Middle East between them.
That night the war began. A CIA-operated armed drone flying over Kandahar fired at Mullah Omar but missed. Mullah Omar was now forced to move constantly, and he made decisions based on the interpretations of his dreams. He told his commanders to keep fighting because the United States would soon be destroyed.
Once the U.S. air raids started, bin Laden left Kandahar for Kabul, calculating it would be safer there as there were fewer Taliban leadership targets and a larger civilian population. Bin Laden sat down with Tayseer Allouni of Al Jazeera for a lengthy interview on October 21. For reasons that Al Jazeera never convincingly explained, the network did not air the interview. Three months later CNN broadcast it without Al Jazeera’s permission.
During the interview, bin Laden for the first time explicitly linked himself to the 9/11 attacks. Allouni asked him, “America claims that it has proof that you are behind what happened in New York and Washington. What’s your answer?” Bin Laden replied, “If inciting people to do that is terrorism, and if killing those who are killing our sons is terrorism, then let history be our judge that we are terrorists.”
Bin Laden gloated as he recounted to the Al Jazeera correspondent the large economic consequences of the attacks. In bin Laden’s accounting, Wall Street stocks lost 16 percent of their value, airlines and air freight companies laid off 170,000 employees, and the hotel chain Intercontinental fired 20,000 workers.
Bin Laden reveled in the attention that the 9/11 attacks had given his cause around the world, observing that the hijackers “said in deeds, in New York and Washington, speeches that overshadowed all other speeches made everywhere else in the world. The speeches are understood by both Arabs and non-Arabs; even by the Chinese.” Bin Laden understood that the 9/11 attacks were one of the most watched events in human history.
On November 12 a tip about an al-Qaeda convoy passing through Kabul bearing a possible “high-value target” was passed up the chain to CIA headquarters. A CIA-operated drone followed the convoy to a house in the upscale Kabul neighborhood of Wazir Akbar Khan. An air strike was called in that killed Abu Hafs the Egyptian. It was a real loss for bin Laden, who had relied on Abu Hafs to oversee the group’s personnel and terrorist operations. Together they had founded al-Qaeda fourteen years earlier and in recent months they had bound their families together in marriage, when Abu Hafs’s daughter had married bin Laden’s son Mohammed. Al-Qaeda members were shaken by Abu Hafs’s death because he was considered bin Laden’s likely successor.
That same day Kabul fell to the U.S.-backed forces of the Northern Alliance. Peter Jouvenal, the British cameraman who had covered Afghanistan extensively since 1980 and had filmed the CNN interview with bin Laden, was the first Westerner to set foot in Kabul as it fell. The residents of Kabul were overjoyed the Taliban were gone. Jouvenal observed, “The problem about the Taliban was they were a lot of ignorant, uneducated people. They became more and more brutal, so people were really fed up.”
Ahead of the Northern Alliance’s capture of Kabul, bin Laden and his followers fled down the steep, winding road to the eastern Afghan city of Jalalabad.