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
Other Voices, Same Conclusion
Fury was not alone in his conviction. In some cases, confirmation that bin Laden was at Tora Bora has come from detainees at Guantanamo Bay. A “summary of evidence” prepared by the Pentagon for the trial of an unnamed detainee says flatly that the man “assisted in the escape of Osama bin Laden from Tora Bora.” The detainee was described as one of bin Laden’s commanders in the fight against the Soviets. The document, which was released to the Associated Press in 2005 through a Freedom of Information request, was the first definitive statement by the Pentagon that the mastermind of 9/11 was at Tora Bora during the American bombing before slipping away into Pakistan.
Another confirmation came from the senior CIA paramilitary commander in Afghanistan at the time. Gary Berntsen was working at the CIA’s counterterrorist center in October 2001 when his boss summoned him to the front office and told him, “Gary, I want you killing the enemy immediately.” Berntsen left the next day for Afghanistan, where he assumed leadership of the CIA’s paramilitary operation against the Taliban and Al Qaeda. His primary target was bin Laden and he was confident that the Al Qaeda leader would make his last stand at Tora Bora. His suspicions were confirmed when he learned bin Laden’s voice had been intercepted there.
From the outset, Berntsen says he was skeptical about relying on Afghan militias “cobbled together at the last minute” to capture or kill the man who ordered the 9/11 attacks. “I’d made it clear in my reports that our Afghan allies were hardly anxious to get at al Qaeda in Tora Bora,” he wrote in his own book, Jawbreaker, which was published in late 2005. He also knew that the special operations troops and CIA operatives on the scene were not enough to stop bin Laden from escaping across the mountain passes. In the book, Berntsen uses exclamation points to vent his fears that the most wanted man in the world was about to slip out of our grasp.
”We needed U.S. soldiers on the ground!” he wrote. ”I’d sent my request for 800 U.S. Army Rangers and was still waiting for a response. I repeated to anyone at headquarters who would listen: We need Rangers now! The opportunity to get bin Laden and his men is slipping away!!”
At one point, Berntsen recalled an argument at a CIA guesthouse in Kabul with Maj. Gen. Dell Dailey, the commander of U.S. special operations forces in Afghanistan at the time. Berntsen said he renewed his demand that American troops be dispatched to Tora Bora immediately. Following orders from Franks at U.S. Central Command (CentCom) headquarters at MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa, Florida, Dailey refused to deploy U.S. troops, explaining that he feared alienating Afghan allies.
”I don’t give a damn about offending our allies!” Berntsen shouted. ”I only care about eliminating al Qaeda and delivering bin Laden’s head in a box!”
Dailey said the military’s position was firm and Berntsen replied, ”Screw that!”
For those like Franks, who later maintained that bin Laden might not have been at Tora Bora, Berntsen is respectfully scornful. ”We could have ended it all there,” he said in an interview.
Berntsen’s views were generally shared by Gary Schroen, another senior CIA operative in Afghanistan. Schroen, who had spent years cultivating ties to Afghanistan’s opposition elements, bemoaned the reliance on local tribal leaders to go after bin Laden and guard escape routes. ”Unfortunately, many of those people proved to be loyal to bin Laden and sympathizers with the Taliban and they allowed the key guys to escape,” Schroen, who retired from the CIA, said in a television interview in May 2005. He added that he had no doubt that bin Laden was at Tora Bora.
Franks’ second-in-command during the war, General DeLong, was convinced that bin Laden was at Tora Bora. In his memoir, Inside CentCom, DeLong described the massive, three-week bombing campaign aimed at killing Al Qaeda fighters in their caves at Tora Bora. ”We were hot on Osama bin Laden’s trail,” he wrote. ”He was definitely there when we hit the caves. Every day during the bombing, Rumsfeld asked me, ‘Did we get him? Did we get him?’ I would have to answer that we didn’t know.” The retired general said that intelligence suggested bin Laden had been wounded during the bombings before he escaped to Pakistan, a conclusion reached by numerous journalists, too.
DeLong argued that large numbers of U.S. troops could not be dispatched because the area surrounding Tora Bora was controlled by tribes hostile to the United States and other outsiders. But he recognized that the Pakistani Frontier Corps, asked to block any escape attempt by bin Laden, was ill-equipped for the job. ”To make matters worse, this tribal area was sympathetic to bin Laden,” he wrote. ”He was the richest man in the area, and he had funded these people for years.”
The book was published in September 2004, a year after DeLong retired from the Army. That fall, the failure to capture or kill bin Laden had become an issue in the presidential campaign. Franks had retired from the Army in 2003 and he often defended the events at Tora Bora. On October 19, 2004, he wrote an opinion article in The New York Times saying that intelligence on the Al Qaeda leader’s location had been inconclusive. ”We don’t know to this day whether Mr. bin Laden was at Tora Bora in December 2001,” he wrote. ”Some intelligence sources said he was; others indicated he was in Pakistan at the time; still others suggested he was in Kashmir. Tora Bora was teeming with Taliban and Qaeda operatives, many of whom were killed or captured, but Mr. bin Laden was never within our grasp.”
Two weeks after the Franks article was published and barely two months after publication of his own book, DeLong reversed the conclusion from his autobiography and echoed his former boss in an opinion article on November 1 in The Wall Street Journal. After defending the decision to rely heavily on local militia and the Pakistani Frontier Corps, DeLong wrote: ”Finally, most people fail to realize that it is quite possible that bin Laden was never in Tora Bora to begin with. There exists no concrete intel to prove that he was there at the time.”
DeLong said in an interview with Committee staff that the contradiction between his book and the opinion article was the result of murky intelligence. ”What I put in the book was what the intel said at the time,” he said. ”The intel is not always right. I read it that he was there. We even heard that he was injured. Later intel was that he may or may not have been there. Did anybody have eyeballs on him? No. The intel stated that he was there at the time, but we got shot in the face by bad intel many times.”
DeLong amplified the reasons for not sending American troops after bin Laden. ”The real reason we didn’t go in with U.S. troops was that we hadn’t had the election yet,” he said in the staff interview, a reference to the installation of Hamid Karzai as the interim leader of Afghanistan. ”We didn’t want to have U.S. forces fighting before Karzai was in power. We wanted to create a stable country and that was more important than going after bin Laden at the time.”
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