Author: Associated Press
Publication: NDTV.com
Date: May 5, 2011
URL: http://www.ndtv.com/article/world/why-the-us-had-it-wrong-about-osamas-hideout-103602?from=NDTV
The dramatic raid on Osama bin Laden's compound in a Pakistani suburb this
week capped a decade-long manhunt, but it also revealed just how wrong the
U.S. had been about where the world's most wanted terrorist was hiding.
Time and again, the nation's top national
security officials told each other and the world that their best intelligence
suggested that bin Laden was living along the mountainous, ungoverned border
of Pakistan and Afghanistan.
"I have an excellent idea of where he
is," CIA Director Porter Goss said in 2005.
"I believe he is in the tribal region
of Pakistan," Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell said in
July 2007.
"This is a man on the run from a cave,"
White House homeland security adviser Frances Townsend said two months later.
"All I can tell you is that it's in the
tribal areas. That's all we know, that he's located in that vicinity. The
terrain is very difficult. He obviously has tremendous security around him,"
CIA Director Leon Panetta said in June 2010.
In reality, bin Laden was living comfortably
in the bustling town of Abbottabad, known for its good schools and relative
affluence. He was living in a walled compound in a military town, hundreds
of miles from the mountainous, lawless tribal regions. There were no heavily
armed security guards, as some intelligence officials assumed there would
be. Thanks to a satellite dish, which officials believe was for television
reception only, bin Laden would have been able watch American security forces
chase him
around the wrong part of the country.
"I was surprised that Osama bin Laden
was found in what is essentially a suburb of Islamabad," former national
security adviser and former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said Tuesday
as news of the daring pre-dawn helicopter raid dominated the news.
America's belief that bin Laden was hiding
on the Pakistani frontier was based on two assumptions, former intelligence
officials said. The first was that bin Laden would stay close to his devotees
for protection, and al-Qaida has thrived in the tribal areas of North and
South Waziristan. The second was that if bin Laden had ventured into more
civilized areas, his presence would be noticeable, first by locals and then
by Pakistani and U.S. intelligence services.
But bin Laden realized that there are two
primary ways the U.S. catches terrorists: from electronic surveillance and
spies. And for years, he managed to distance himself from both.
He kept phone and Internet lines out of his
house. Rather than employ legions of armed guards whose patrols could be noticed
by satellites, he surrounded himself with high walls and only his most trusted
aides. The U.S. could interrogate his foot soldiers and managers all it wanted.
He'd still be safe.
Soon, the idea of bin Laden hiding in a cave
become part of his mythology. And with so little intelligence coming in, the
CIA's best analysts continued to say bin Laden was probably in the tribal
regions. Occasionally there were indications to the contrary, but they were
never anything solid.
In 2007, for instance, when bin Laden issued
a video, some in the CIA's Counterterrorism Center believed his face did not
show the strain of someone who had endured years of airstrikes, moving furtively
across rough terrain, former senior intelligence officials said, speaking
on condition of anonymity to discuss secret intelligence.
In hindsight, they were right. By then, bin Laden had likely been living in
Abbottabad for roughly two years, with easy access to groceries and medicine.
But at the time, that hunch didn't prove anything.
Bin Laden would be well fed, protected and cared for, even along the hostile
border with Afghanistan, the analysts concluded. With no reliable informants
and no electronic surveillance, there was simply not enough to change the
prevailing wisdom. Some in the Counterterrorism Center believed bin Laden
was hiding in Dir, a far-flung town on Pakistan's northern border.
"There were many of us who felt increasingly
that the Waziristan leads were drying up rapidly," said Rob Dannenberg,
the Counterterrorism Center's former chief of operations. "As our technical
and human coverage increased in that part of the world, as challenging as
it might have been, I think a lot us of felt that it wasn't feasible that
he was going to be able hide in that type of environment."
Goss said he was always confident that bin
Laden was in northern Pakistan but never had any indication he was in a densely
populated area so far to the east.
"It was not the circumstance I thought was the likely one. It was further
down the list," Goss said in a telephone interview Wednesday. "That
fact, to me, needs more explanation."
U.S. officials have raised questions about
whether their Pakistani counterparts knew, or should have known, that bin
Laden was hiding in a town that's home to the country's military academy.
Pakistan officials have flatly denied that and say they, too, were caught
by surprise.
"It is shockingly embarrassing,"
former Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf told MSNBC on Wednesday.
While the CIA was wrong about the location
of bin Laden's hideout, it was absolutely right about how the U.S. would someday
get the terrorist mastermind. CIA officers believed for years that bin Laden's
vulnerability was his reliance on couriers. In fact, sometime in 2006 or 2007,
the agency all but stopped chasing reported bin Laden sightings, which had
always been dead ends, and made the couriers the primary focus of their hunt,
a former senior intelligence official said.
It was around that time that the CIA had learned
the true identity of a trusted courier known by the nom de guerre Abu Ahmed
al-Kuwaiti. Piecing together intelligence gathered from captured terrorists
over the course of several years, the agency was confident that if it found
al-Kuwaiti, it could be the best shot at finding bin Laden.
Finally, in the middle of last year, al-Kuwaiti
was caught on a wiretap. He was far from bin Laden's compound, but it was
enough to put the CIA on his tail. Last fall, he unwittingly led the agency
to bin Laden's doorstep.
When President Barack Obama announced bin
Laden's death, former officials said the years of fruitless searches were
wiped away.
"People in the agency aren't used to
seeing their work in a favorable light on Page One," former CIA Director
Michael Hayden said Wednesday. "After this kind of work, this painstaking
attention to detail, it's really heartening for them to see the reward for
it on the battlefield, and the reward in the minds and heart of the countrymen."
Goss said he got a courtesy call on Sunday,
cryptically telling him to watch the news that night. He said it was clear
what was about to be announced.
"My feeling was it was certainly worth
the wait," he said.
