Tora Bora Revisited: How We Failed To Get Bin Laden And Why It Matters Today
A Report To Members Of The Committee On Foreign Relations United States Senate
John F. Kerry, Chairman
ONE HUNDRED ELEVENTH CONGRESS
FIRST SESSION
NOVEMBER 30, 2009
1. Flight to Tora Bora
Whether Osama bin Laden was at Tora Bora in late 2001 has been the topic of heated debate since he escaped Afghanistan to the tribal belt of Pakistan. The evidence is convincing that the Al Qaeda leader was in the mountains of eastern Afghanistan in that critical period. The information comes from U.S. military officers at Tora Bora, from detainees who were in the camps with bin Laden, from the senior CIA officer in Afghanistan at the time, and from the official history of the special operations forces. Based on that evidence, it is clear that the Al Qaeda leader was within reach of U.S. troops three months after the attacks on New York and Washington.
In the middle of August 2001, two Pakistani nuclear scientists sat down in a mud-walled compound on the outskirts of Kandahar in southern Afghanistan, the spiritual and tactical headquarters of Taliban fundamentalists who controlled most of the country. Seated with them were bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri, the Egyptian surgeon who was his chief deputy and strategist. The four men spent two days discussing Al Qaeda’s determination to obtain nuclear weapons before bin Laden and Zawahiri abruptly excused themselves and left the compound. Before departing, bin Laden promised the Pakistanis that something momentous was going to happen soon.
American intelligence had already picked up indications that something momentous was coming. George Tenet, who was director of central intelligence at the time, later testified before the 9/11 Commission that the “system was blinking red” from July 2001 until the actual attacks. The first reports of possible attacks on the United States had been picked up in June and the warnings increased steadily from then on. On July 12, Tenet went to Capitol Hill to provide a top-secret briefing for senators about the rising threat of an imminent attack. Only a handful of senators turned up in S-407, the secure conference room in the Capitol, to hear the CIA director warn that he was extremely worried that bin Laden and Al Qaeda were preparing an attack on U.S. soil. Tenet told them the attack was not a question of if, but when.
Less than a month later, on August 6, President Bush’s daily briefing repeated the warning under the ominous headline “Bin Ladin Determined To Strike in US.” The text described previous plots carried out by Al Qaeda against American targets overseas and said the FBI had uncovered “patterns of suspicious activity in this country consistent with preparations for hijackings or other types of attacks, including recent surveillance of federal buildings in New York.” At the time, President Bush later told the 9/11 Commission that he regarded the warning as historical in nature. The commission’s voluminous report said its investigators “found no indication of any further discussion before September 11 among the president and his top advisers of the possibility of a threat of an Al Qaeda attack in the United States.”
Bin Laden’s movements in the days surrounding September 11 remain sketchy. Some facts have emerged from reputable journalists, U.S. military and intelligence sources and Afghans who said they saw the Al Qaeda leader at various points along his path to Tora Bora. He was spotted in Khost in eastern Afghanistan around September 11. On November 8, he and Zawahiri met in Kabul with Hamid Mir, a respected Pakistani journalist. By then, U.S. special operations forces and Northern Alliance troops were closing in on the Afghan capital. The Al Qaeda leaders had risked the trip to attend a memorial service honoring the Uzbek militant leader Juma Khan Namangani, who had been killed in a U.S. airstrike. Before Kabul fell, bin Laden and Zawahiri traveled five hours east to the ancient trading center of Jalalabad. From there, by all reliable accounts, they went to ground at Tora Bora, one of bin Laden’s old haunts from the days of fighting the Soviets in the 1980s.
Tora Bora is a district about 30 miles southeast of Jalalabad. Rather than a single place, the name covers a fortress-like section of the White Mountains that stretches about six miles long and six miles wide across a collection of narrow valleys, snow-covered ridgelines and jagged peaks reaching 14,000 feet. During the 1980s, when he was fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan, bin Laden turned the site into a formidable stronghold. He built a rough road from Jalalabad and brought in heavy equipment to fortify the natural caves and dig new ones. He supervised the excavation of connecting tunnels so fighters could move unseen between locations in the fights against Soviet troops.
After the defeat of the Soviet Union in 1989, bin Laden left Afghanistan and eventually set up the operations of his fledgling terrorist organization in the northeastern African nation of Sudan. After pressure from the United States, Sudan expelled bin Laden in 1996 and he flew with his wives and children to Jalalabad on a chartered jet. Upon his return to Afghanistan, bin Laden began expanding the fortress at Tora Bora, building base camps at higher elevations for himself, his wives and numerous children, and other senior Al Qaeda figures. Some rooms were reported to be concealed 350 feet inside the granite peaks. The mountainsides leading to those upper reaches were steep and pitted with well-built bunkers cloaked in camouflage. In the years that followed, Bin Laden got to know the surrounding geography well from spending hours on long hikes with his children. His familiarity with the worn trails used over the centuries by traders and smugglers to traverse the few miles into Pakistan would serve him well.
The United States rightly anticipated that bin Laden would make his last stand at Tora Bora. The precise dates of his arrival and departure are hard to pin down, but it’s clear that U.S. intelligence picked up his trail well before he got there. The CIA had evidence that bin Laden was headed for the mountain redoubt by early November, according to Tenet, the former CIA director. Outside experts like Peter Bergen, the last American to interview bin Laden, estimate that he arrived by the end of November, along with 1,000 to 1,500 hardened fighters and bodyguards. In a television interview on November 29, 2001, Vice President Cheney said he believed the Al Qaeda leader was in the general area of Tora Bora. “He’s got a large number of fighters with him probably, a fairly secure personal security force that he has some degree of confidence in, and he’ll have to try to leave, that is, he may depart for other territory, but that’s not quite as easy as it would have been a few months ago,” Cheney said.
|
NEWSLETTER
|
| Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list |
|
|
|
