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
The Sheikh Arrives
Bin Laden’s presence was more than conjecture. A major with the Army’s Delta Force, who is now retired and uses the pen name Dalton Fury, was the senior U.S. military officer at Tora Bora, commanding about 90 special operations troops and support personnel. He and his fellow commandos from the elite and secretive Delta Force arrived in early December, setting up headquarters in a former schoolhouse near the mountains alongside a handful of CIA operatives who were already there. The Americans were there to direct airstrikes on Tora Bora and work with Afghan militias assembled by two local warlords who had been paid by the CIA to help flush out bin Laden and the Al Qaeda contingent. The Delta Force soldiers were disguised to blend in with the Afghan militia, wearing local clothing, growing bushy beards and sometimes carrying the same types of weapons.
Fury recounted his experiences in a book, Kill Bin Laden, which was published in 2008. He expanded on them in interviews with Committee staff. Both the book and the interviews left no doubt that Fury’s team knew bin Laden was holed up at Tora Bora and that he was eager to go get him. In the interviews, he explained that Al Qaeda fighters arrayed in the mountains used unsecure radios, which meant their communications were easily intercepted by his team and by a sophisticated listening post a few miles from the mountain. As a result, the Delta Force and CIA operatives had real-time eavesdropping capabilities on Al Qaeda almost from their arrival, allowing them to track movements and gauge the effectiveness of the bombing. Even more valuable, a few days after arriving, one of the CIA operatives picked up a radio from a dead Al Qaeda fighter. The radio gave the Americans a clear channel into the group’s communications on the mountain. Bin Laden’s voice was often picked up, along with frequent comments about the presence of the man referred to by his followers as “the sheikh.”
Fury, who still uses his pen name to protect his identity, said there was no doubt the voice on the radios was bin Laden. “The CIA had a guy with them called Jalal and he was the foremost expert on bin Laden’s voice,” he said. “He worked on bin Laden’s voice for seven years and he knew him better than anyone else in the West. To him, it was very clear that bin Laden was there on the mountain.”
Another special operations expert who speaks fluent Arabic and heard the intercepted communications in real time in Afghanistan told the Committee staff that it was clearly bin Laden’s voice. He had studied the Al Qaeda leader’s speech pattern and word choices before the war and he said he considered the communications a perfect match.
Afghan villagers who were providing food and other supplies for the Al Qaeda fighters at Tora Bora also confirmed bin Laden’s presence. Fury said some of the villagers were paid by the CIA for information about precise locations of clusters of fighters that could be targeted for bombing runs. The locals also provided fragmentary information on bin Laden’s movements within the Al Qaeda compound, though the outsiders never got near the sheikh. The cooperating villagers were given rudimentary global positioning devices and told to push a button at any spot where they saw significant numbers of fighters or arms caches. When the locals turned in the devices to collect their payments, the GPS coordinates recorded by pushing the buttons were immediately passed along to targeting officers, who programmed the coordinates into bombing runs.
For several days in early December, Fury’s special ops troops moved up the mountains in pairs with fighters from the Afghan militias. The Americans used GPS devices and laser range finders to pinpoint caves and pockets of enemy fighters for the bombers. The Delta Force units were unable to hold any high ground because the Afghans insisted on retreating to their base at the bottom of the mountains each night, leaving the Americans alone inside Al Qaeda territory. Still, it was clear from what they could see and what they were hearing in the intercepted conversations that relentless bombing was taking its toll.
On December 9, a C-130 cargo plane dropped a 15,000-pound bomb, known as a Daisy Cutter, on the Tora Bora complex. The weapon had not been used since Vietnam and there were early fears that its impact had not been as great as expected. But later
reports confirmed that the bomb struck with massive force. A captured Al Qaeda fighter who was there later told American interrogators that men deep in caves had been vaporized in what he called “a hideous explosion.” That day and others, Fury described intercepting radio communications in which Al Qaeda fighters called for the “red truck to move wounded” and frantic pleas from a fighter to his commander, saying “cave too hot, can’t reach others.”
At one point, the Americans listened on the radio as bin Laden exhorted his men to keep fighting, though he apologized “for getting them trapped . and pounded by American airstrikes.” On December 11, Fury said bin Laden was heard on the radio telling his men that he had let them down and it was okay to surrender. Fury hoped the battle was over, but he would soon determine that it was part of an elaborate ruse to allow Al Qaeda fighters to slip out of Tora Bora for Pakistan.
Fury is adamant that bin Laden was at Tora Bora until mid-December. “There is no doubt that bin Laden was in Tora Bora during the fighting,” he wrote in Kill Bin Laden. “From alleged sightings to the radio intercepts to news reports from various countries, it was repeatedly confirmed that he was there.”
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